Tahitian overture

LI has so far concentrated on Therese Heyne’s side of the Heyne-Forster-Meyer triangle. However, I've wanted to harken to Swedenborg's entrance, so embarrassing to those who like their intellectual history straight. Although not a perfect parallel, you could make a case that, just as Spinoza is the hidden enlightenment eminence, so,too, Swedenborg and Mesmer are hidden eminences in that covert history of the passions in the nineteenth century, an underground rumble among the network of enlightenment philosophes, and the prophet of free love afterwards, with with Henry James, Sr., becoming his chief expositor in the U.S. And if that certain mixture of the spiritual and the sex drive embarrasses your true enlightened public much more than open mechanistic libertinism ever did – there is another track leading into free love, a rational track. It is at this point that the wide world enters Gottingen with tortured look of Georg Foster's face, that survivor of scurvy. Georg Forster and his father, Johann Reinhold, sailed with Captain Cook on his second voyage in the South Seas as scientists. JR’s Observations and Georg’s Voyage around the World were much read and praised, the latter coming out first in English a few month’s before Cook’s own account.

Above all, the South Sea islands, for 18th century Europeans, meant the Isle of Cythera, the Eldorado of all the old boys, as Baudelaire would say in the nineteenth century – Tahiti. Here, it was possible to think of angelic sex, a perpetual spring of virginity and fucking, in which the latter never negates the other. Tahiti was the fashion in the literary public of the 1780s. Caroline Michaelis, that ever present woman, created a sensation in Gottingen, strolling about in the Tapa that had been brought back for her by Forster. Christian Williams in Erotische Paradies gives both Forsters credit for casting a critical eye on the imperialist dream of the South Seas as a kind of paradise. Although of course Georg and his father’s accounts are couched in the language of progress, by which, as the native’s powers and resources are stripped from him, his time is stolen as well. It appears he is living in European time, and thus is both a contemporary and an ancestor. This is what was meant by stealing souls.

Still, Forster’s version of progress had an interesting marker. Civilization in the South Seas was symbolized by the treatment of women. The better women were treated, the higher the civilization.

‘The more debased the situation of a nation is, and of course the more remote from civilization, the more harshly we found the women treated… and they are looked upon as being calculated for the mere satisfaction of brutal appetites, nor treated better than beasts of burden, without being allowed to have the least will of their own: which incontestably proves how much men, in a degenerated and savage state, are inclined to oppress the weaker party.” (Quoted 131)

The signs of debasement are not only shown by the mistreatment of women – children striking their mothers, for instance – but in the looks of the women. According to this schema, the Tahitians are eminently civilized – the women are beautiful and powerful – while the women on other South Sea Islands are ugly and oppressed. A sidelight on IT’s theory of ugly women, perhaps, in as much as the dichotomy between the ugly and the beautiful replays the war of civilizations. So of one Melanesian island, JR Forster writes: “The females are generally thin, a few only have tolerable features: the rest are ill-favored, though their shape and limbs are not without proportion. Their knees are equally enlarged with those of the men…”

But this ugliness and oppression have another side. In a prevision of Hegel’s master slave relationship, Forster observes that the situation of the women, just because ‘they have been early taught to suppress the flights of passion; cooler reflexion, gentleness and every method for obtaining approbation and for winning the good-will of others have taken their place” – makes them accessible to the “first dawnings of civilization”. What is lacking is the ruse and the rebellion.

Georg Forster took these experiences and ideas into his unfortunate marriage to Therese Heyne.

I Guess I'll Get Rid of the Maid

We have had decades in which to learn of the perils of planning. Everyone, from the radical Weberian to the repentant Marxist to the gleeful Milton Friedman-ite agrees that you can’t have central planning. And so we haven’t.

And now we need some. Badly.

The car company bailout is an excellent example of where we need, and are not going to get, central planning. Instead of seeing this in the real context of our transportation system – the massive government investment in roads, the petro-chemical system, and the manufacture of automobiles being all aspects of one system – we are discussing a massive bailout on the smallest scale. In essence, what is needed is to think in terms of steps towards a much better future with the automobile. LI is no fan of car culture – we’ve owned three cars in our entire life, and we don’t own one now. We bike or walk or bus. And nobody who bikes every day has any respect for cars – they are a constant danger. Ask the dik-dik about the lion.

But there is no way our transportation tastes are ever going to become a majority position in this Land of the Free Riders. At least not until the oil runs out.

A coordinated response to the car company crisis would see all the aspects of it. LI thinks that one of the principles that should be involved, here, is a step by step program to reduce oil use considerably. It would be nice to think that the electric engine is the deus ex machina for that. But the non-nice thought is that, at this time, that seems very unlikely. What does seem doable is reducing the amount of fuel used by switching, as they have in Europe, to diesel – using the refining technology that has made diesel basically odorless and lessened the emission problems associated with it. This is where coordination comes in – Detroit could not switch its lines to diesel if diesel is so expensive that consumers will baulk. The oil companies aren’t going to refine more if the cars aren’t going to use it. So it is up to the gov – to finance refining capacity. To coordinate between those industries. As it may be to coordinate the use of natural gas here. And as it may be to create the network that would allow recharging for an electric car battery. All of these measures would require a positive government response, going so far as to create government funded companies, in the absence of any private company to work with. This moment of economic collapse comes, actually, at a very fortunate time, since the collapse is in the exact center of the enormous political and environmental problems that the U.S. has put off thinking about. We can now actually do things about the insane CO2 menace, and the dysfunctions of America’s quasi imperialistic role in the Middle East.

If not now, when?

ps - Oh, and who can resist contrasting scenes from the Zona? First the workers of the Republic Windows and Doors factory:

“The scene inside a long, low-slung factory on this city’s North Side this weekend offered a glimpse at how the nation’s loss of more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs in a year of recession is boiling over.

Workers laid off Friday from Republic Windows and Doors, who for years assembled vinyl windows and sliding doors here, said they would not leave, even after company officials announced that the factory was closing.

Some of the plant’s 250 workers stayed all night, all weekend, in what they were calling an occupation of the factory. Their sharpest criticisms were aimed at their former bosses, who they said gave them only three days’ notice of the closing, and the company’s creditors. But their anger stretched broadly to the government’s costly corporate bailout plans, which, they argued, had forgotten about regular workers.”

And then – a maid dodges a bullet! From the Vanity Fair article that will make your heart bleed.

The new thriftiness takes a bit of getting used to. “I was at the Food Emporium in Bedford [in Westchester County] yesterday, using my Food Emporium discount card,” recounts one Greenwich woman. “The well-dressed wife of a Wall Street guy was standing behind me. She asked me how to get one. Then she said, ‘Have you ever used coupons?’ I said, ‘Sure, maybe not lately, but sure.’ She said, ‘It’s all the rage now—where do you get them?’”

One former Lehman executive in her 40s stood in her vast clothes closet not long ago, talking to her personal stylist. On shelves around her were at least 10 designer handbags that had cost her anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 each.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I guess I’ll have to get rid of the maid.”
Why not sell a few of those bags?, the stylist thought, but didn’t say so.
“Well,” the executive said after a moment, “I guess I’ll cut her from five days a week to four.”

Free Love II: on the delights of the angelic body

Wahl ist Qual – Choice is pain. Before I go on tracing the intricate maze danced (to the lascivious promptings of a lute) by Georg Forster and Sophie Huber, born Heyne, as they went through the attempt, in the Revolutionary epoch of the eighties, to find liberty in marriage and love in liberty, I want to take the long view. Free love is a phrase that is well and truly dead – dead of mockery, dead of the emotional exploitation of which it became the instrument, deniability raising the old ghost of guilt in the service of nubile bodies forever lined up at the porn shoot. Yet it had a long, long career, and it is still not so dead that the phoenix of some kind of program joining sex, liberty and utopia cannot leap from the ashes of lovers, factual and fictional, who took the principle of free love with deadly earnestness. As I’ve noted, my three ideal types of alienation – the reactionary, the liberal and the radical – all in one way or another turned from happiness to love as the foundation of society. Only, however, the liberal and the radical turned to free love – it was the contention of the reactionary that, in fact, happiness, carrying the sensualist inheritance of Enlightenment volupte, would invariably end in promiscuity – which is the only way that the reactionary could see free love. Love in the reactionary tradition is not about liberty, but about obedience – to the sovereign, whose love is emanated in rules and laws. Although at the center of the Christian tradition there was always the disturbing Pauline paradox that love transcends and destroys those laws and rules insofar as they are the marks of sin, that is, of a lack of love. Heretics hived off from the main body of the Church by taking that notion too seriously, of course – those small circles of Adamites and Levelers, those claimants to purity for whom all things are pure.

In fact, free love was not only a scandal to the church – certainly Marx, for instance, was unhappy about the association of socialism with free love. To be flip, Marx’s definition of scientific socialism sometimes seems to be socialism minus the free love nonsense.

The person who joined love and liberty together in the eighteenth century was Emmanuel Swedenborg. Even though Swedenborgians proper disclaimed the free love ideas that grew out of certain Swedenborgian factions in the nineteenth century, it is certainly true that Swedenborg was a great promoter of the notion that liberty is love. As his biographer puts it:

“We must guard, however, against supposing that the spiritual is not real and bodily; for everything inward has its last resort in substantive organization. The bodies of angels are as our’s in every part, but more expressive, plastic and perfect. Their conjugal union, which is true chastity and playful innocence, is bodily like our own; nay, far more intimate: its delights, immeasurably more blessed.”

And this, from Conjugal love:

“The Lord provides similitudes for those who desire love truly conjugal, and if they are not given in the earths, he provides them in the heavens. The Divine Providence of the Lord is most particular and most universal concerning marriages and in marriages, because all the enjoyments of heaven stream forth from the enjoyments of conjudgial love, as sweet waters from the stream of a fountain; and that on this account it is provided that conjugial pairs be born, and that these are continually educated, under the auspices of the Lord, for their several marriages, both the boy and the girl being ignorant of it; and after the completed time, then that marriageable virgin, and then that young man fit for nuptials meet somewhere as if by fate, and see each other; and that then, as from a certain instince, they know that they are partners, and, as if from a certain dictate within, think in themselves, the young man, that she is mine, and the virgin, that he is mine; and, after this has been seated for some time in the minds of both, they deliberately speak to each other, and betroth themselves.”

One notices that Swedenborg’s idea of virginity – as with the delights of the angels – is not orthodox. And the notion of an education through marriages seems to be something like education in volupte, or the radical libertine ideal as it came from Cyrano de Bergerac and others.

rogerology day!

We all have read our Nietzsche, and know that it is better not have been born. Who doesn’t feel pressing in, year after year, the serpent’s promise of death to Eve – that was the real temptation. The only way to escape from the life sentence of paradise. But in spite of the death drive, LI is still ticking away, with all the stupidity of a watch set to the wrong time. The watch cannot reach out and set itself straight – birthdays are a reminder that people can’t do that either, although of course the mechanism in some of us makes us repeat the vain gesture, over and over again.

It is my birthday today.

Here’s my song for today: Ponderosa

the origin of free love: I

We had felt that perhaps we were wrong inside, but we had never imagined it so bad – D.H Lawrence

These are some facts about Therese Huber between 19 and 25.

She was born in Gottingen, the daughter of a well known professor, Christian Gottlob Heyne, and Therese Heyne, born Weiss, in May, 1764. She was thus a little older than the revolutionary generation, those born in the 1770s.

According to Therese Huber’s correspondence, her first memories were of her mother – of her mother being ill. This was when she was three. “I was never my Mother’s favorite, certainly not, I was ugly, bulky and probably never brilliant. Until my thirteenth year, I don’t remember anybody ever tell me I had a mind or that I was droll.” Of her mother she says, further, that she was “no housewife, we were raised in filth and disorder.” Her earliest memories were of her stained clothing. Moreover, her mother had “a lover until she died, almost in her forty fifth year.” Her lover lived in the house. He was a music student by the name of Forkel.
Therese always had the fantasy that she had been adopted.

Therese Huber later wrote about her first husband, Georg Forster: “He had the fortune of unpretty men, that women had to come to meet him half way, which, with his very soft heart, always vouchsafed the joy of a very intense friendship.”

At eighteen, Therese was mad to get out of her house and the town of Gottingen. By this time, she had a stepmother. Georg Forster, her father’s friend, though much older than her, promised to get her out of the house. So she accepted his proposal for marriage in early 1784.. He promptly took off for Vilnius, where he’d been promised a position. He was gone for eighteen months.

Therese promptly set out for Gotha to care for a sick friend, Auguste Schneider, the mistress of the Baron of Gotha. In a letter, Therese wrote a friend that “people’s image of me as a coquette, the girl in a novel, had begun to disappear, and one sees only the girl of reason, whose lively foolishness is forgiveable on account of her good heart.” (41) But if she thought of herself, now, as calming down and assuming the dignity of the betrothed woman, she found, on her return to Gottingen, that things were difficult for a headstrong girl whose older, ugly fiance was in Vilnius. She was surrounded by admirers in her father’s house, while her father remained at his desk and her stepmother remained unconcerned – a situation that Henry James would have known what to do with. It was now that she encountered a man, FLM Meyer, who proved to be, as her biographer Geiger puts it, ‘fateful’ – misfortunate - to her. Later she wrote a friend that “Meyer led or ruled me, for he took my childish virginity in thought and deed.”

Meyer was a well known writer, enjoyed by Herder’s literary public . He was, according to Geiger, ‘shamelesslessly” egotistical. And he couldn’t do without women. He moved in that Enlightenment society under the motto that he couldn’t, ‘for the sake of one woman, be untrue to the whole sex.”
At the same time there was a friend. Henry James, too, would have given Therese the ambiguous friend. This friend was the most ambiguous of the Romantic divas, Therese’s “evil spirit”, according to her biographer, Ludwig Geiger, Karoline Michaelis. Geiger describes her as “sensuous and without morals already as a girl.” Over her lifetime, Karoline was married thrice, once to a man named Boehmer, then, when he died, to August Schlegel – this marriage was partly because she’d been banned for revolutionary activities in Gottingen when it was occupied by the French, and partly because she’d scandalized the town by having a child as the result of an affair with a French soldier - and then finally, in Jena, marrying Schelling. According to Geiger, this woman urged Therese to marry Forster, who she – Karoline – knew Therese didn’t love – out of jealousy. When Karoline and Schelling were living together in Jena, Hegel came to stay with them for a year. He knew the two well. When she died, he wrote a letter to a friend, expressing his relief and joy that she was gone. She had an effect on people.

In 1785, Forster came back from Vilnius. He then “committed out of weakness or goodness or blindness one of the unbelievable errors of his error strewn life: instead of standing apart from the third man [Meyer], coolly, peacefully, with the intention and the hope of driving the memory of his intruder gradually out of the heart of his bride … he entered into the intoxicated state of friendship, full of illusions, that filled both of them. Soon he was using the brotherly ‘du’ on the newcomer and the secret lover; Meyer became his “Assad”, he appeared as a member of the “trinity” in the letters to theological friends. “Forster was more enthusiastic than both of us,” Therese wrote 20 years later, “had us all swear eternal love, and never asked for a kiss from me that I should not also offer Meyer.” [44]

Mr. Summers, let me refer you to Chapter 13: the whiteness of the whale

In the election of 1910, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives. The economy still hadn’t recovered from the bust of 1907. The original impetus for the progressive legislation that had received support and scorn in equal measure from Teddy Roosevelt – America’s most bipolar president – had not died out, which is why President Taft couldn’t block the amendment to the Constitution instituting a federal income tax. Unfortunately, the move to force corporations to incorporate federally, instead of in the states, failed.

There was, back in those days, a burning issue that has flamed out so much since that the very word brings an eery blank to the mind: overcapitalization. The reason this figured so heavily as a scare word among the progressives is that the era from the turn of the century to the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1914 – which is generally taken to bookend the progressive moment – saw the instantiation of what Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, claims is the founding moment of modern American capitalism: the subjugation of industry to finance. This was a moment that expressed itself on several fronts – for instance, the Courts finally cleared up the confusion about how property law applied to corporations – creating a new form of property, defined by John Commons this way: [the old common law definition] … is Property, the other is Business. The one is property in the sense of Things owned, the other is property in the sense of exchange-value of things. One is physical objects, the other is marketable assets.” [quoted by Sklar, page 50]

One of the results of this legal change, or rather, one of the reasons it came about, was that the notion of a corporation as a body issuing stock was changing. And that change brought up the charge of overcapitalization – that a corporation, instead of finding its raison d’etre in using its assets to produce a good or service on which it made a profit, was now an entity wrapped up entirely in the market for its stocks.

In 1911, a bill was voted through the House of Representatives and narrowly turned down in the Senate that would have smashed this legal structure. S. 232 built on legislative ideas already crafted during Roosevelt’s term (remember, Roosevelt was in the wings in 1911, and would run in 1912, thus ruining Taft’s chance at a second term). S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more.

S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.” (137) In Sklar’s account of the Roosevelt era draft, ‘whenever the amount of outstanding stock should exceed the value of assets, the secretary would require the corporation to call in all staock and issue new stock in lieu thereof in an amount not exceeding the value of assets, and each stockholder would be required to surrender the old stock and receive the new issue in an amount proportionate to the old holdings.”

This may well be the most radical legislation every considered by Congress. Think of it – the stock market as we know it today simply wouldn’t exist. Instead of being a legal fiction, the stock holders would literally own the company, and their profits would be limited to the profits of the company. The price to earnings index would level out so that the stock price would only hover marginally above earnings.

Needless to say, America did not go down this path. In fact, this path of needles seems to have been so traumatic an adventure that it has been thoroughly forgotten. We accept the equities market as it is as an expression of American capitalism. It is really an expression of changes in the physiology of American capitalism that came about during this era – almost overnight, in Mitchell’s view.

The last couple of weeks have both deepened the desperate prospects for the economy and shortened the dimension of changes we are supposed to envision for that economy. Obama’s bright old things – the Geithner/Summers/Romer crewe – have every intellectual investment in how things used to be. Like, two years ago. Why not? They feel themselves to be at the very least master carpenters in the building of the Great Moderation. LI’s stand is that the system – the mangle of inequality – is collapsing, and our vision is that this collapse will be mortal – but this might just be the optimist in us, Jonah’s kindly side, looking forward to Ninevah’s conversion. We think that crewe would certainly resist the radical remedies of 1911. Roosevelt would now be considered somewhat left of Chomsky. However, we have to have broader vistas in order to think about what is happening here. This is one of the reasons that LI considers the strongest charge against Summers to be that he doesn’t read literary novels. He should be questioned on this. The whole board of Economic Advisors should stock up on the great novels – we’d suggest, among others, Moby Dick and J.R. It is the lack of imagination of the self-aggrandizer set that actually produced this mess. At the bottom of the deaths of so much over the last eight years – the death of Iraqis, the death of American money, etc. – is a mortal lack of poetry.

LI, doing our part, will end with another notice from Ludwig Hohl.

“The alteration of the object to be tested through the person, the appearance of the tester, is also very important in the investigation of human situations. One goes to visit the unhappy, the said, the lonely: the visit effects a change. The deepsea divers appears 900 meters below the surface of the sea with a lamp of a terrible intensity, in order to surprise life. But those that were there, flee the light, while those who weren’t there, come near to it. (In spite of all of which, here outer eyes have seen what is hardly given to inner eyes to see, dreams and fantasies).”

Britneyology day!

Ah, December 2 – Brit’s birthday! All the britneyologists in the house go hey! Go ho!

My last post on Britney Spears received a vitriolic response from Dejan, who doesn’t, it appears, like Britney. Well, some don’t. However, Dejan, as an aspiring artist, is all too easily captured by his own likes and dislikes, the charmed circle of his taste. Does no intuition whisper in his ear that this is the path invariably chosen by the minor talent? An early death sentence where the artist is thrown into the circle of the mooks and the haters, infinitely chasing each other in a circle, tearing at each other’s tails – otherwise known as the comments section of You Tube. I’d advise him to heed the wise words of this woman.

My brother, Dan, thinks that Britneyology is a goof. He suspects his older brother of hatching schemes in which he claims beliefs and tastes that he doesn’t have. And, in fact, Li has done such a thing once or twice – but Britneyology triumphs easily over sincere and justified beliefs by simply crushing them underfoot.

And finally, in this list of objectors, an ex Britney fan who had followed her from the mouseketeer days went right to the point: in the one song released from Circus, Britney doesn’t sing. Womanizer is so computer blended that what went in, the thin L.A. patois over a charming, atavistic North Louisiana slowness of vowel, comes out bizarrely British, with hints of Michael Jackson. Now, this seems right to me. The Rolling Stones’ reviewer of Circus said that the singing on Blackout seemed phoned in. Thus, cliché blocks insight, as indeed the use of the phone is sampled all over Blackout. It made Britney’s fans – or at least those hooked into the success of the record companies – nervous. Why? Research has not found a lot of difference between the face to face and the phone voice, except that there is a tendency not to allow a lot of dead air in the phone conversation. However, the phone voice is also a persona – it clears away the bric a brac of the face, that old Victorian technology. Of course, the telephone was the first step in doing things to the voice – in fact, telephones still achieve voice recognizability by editing the vibrations of the voice. This brings out the sort of impersonal/personal that dance is all about. Britney samples her phone voice in Gimme More for the same reason that Biggy samples his in Suicidal Thoughts – it cuts through the engineering by way of engineering. It creates something direct. In Britney’s case, direct was crazy.

However, on her birthday, it isn’t Britney’s voice I want to praise, but her somnambulist's talent for walking between fires. This is what makes her much rarer than you and me. I wanted to quote from H.L. Mencken’s obituary of Valentino, here, but unfortunately, I can’t find the thing on the internet, except on Google Books.

The obituary tells a story. Valentino wanted to meet Mencken in New York to discuss an article that had been published about him in Chicago. The article implied that Valentino was effeminate. According to Mencken, Valentino wanted to challenge the writer to a duel, but was laughed at – and was baffled by the laughter. Mencken went to see him and tried to explain honor in the U.S.:

“Unluckily, all this took place in the United States, where the word honor, save when it is applied to the structural integrity of women, has only a comic significance. When one hears of the honor of politicians, of bankers, of lawyers, of the United States itself, everyone naturally laughs.”

Mencken’s obituary is an important, maybe a founding moment in the literature on American celebrity. Because it oscillates between a contempt for Valentino’s fame, as though fame were some vice, and a perception of the all too human somewhere at the center of his dilemma. At the center, there is a helpless sense of being overshadowed and maddened by the public drama at the periphery. The moment Mencken sees this and writes it, a star trope is born. Central to the celeb profile becomes the trauma of celebrity itself. This, of course, only causes more laughter or contempt. Yet for the celeb, even the densest one, this sense of being obscurely victimized leads to an overwhelming riddle that no man can unriddle – for who, exactly, has selected the victim, who has persecuted him or her, and for what purpose, is forever without an answer.

The length of Britney’s career has now, I believed, surpassed Valentino’s. She’s well on her way to that special status accorded to those whom the gods can’t destroy with the poisoned gift of visuality. Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna. We know them. We don’t know them. Nobody knows them.

And now for a birthday song from another North Louisiana scion, come from that state in the nineties, just like Britney.

“Your father made fetuses with flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park

- Neutral Milk Hotel, oh comely