From the caterpillar factory to the extinction of the glowworm

First things first - on MLK day, who'd you rather read than yours truly on the Dream speech? Okay, perhaps I am n. 45 million on that list, but if you want to, here I am in the statesman on Eric Sundquist's book.

Now, onto our show...

This is Pasolini, analyzing Italian history:

Since I am a writer and I write polemically or at least polemicise with other writers, let me give a poetico-literary definition of the phenomenon which occurred in Italy about ten years ago. This will help to clarify and sum up what I have to say (and perhaps make it more easily accessible). In the early 1960s, owing to the pollution of the atmosphere, and especially in the countryside because of the pollution of our waterways (the blue rivers and limpid springs), glow worms began to vanish. The phenomenon was sudden and devastating. In a couple of years there were no more glow-worms. (They are now a rather distressing relic of our past: an old man who recalls them can’t recognize in the boys of today the boy he was, can’t have the pleasant regrets he once would have had.)

Thus I shall call that phenomenon which occurred about ten years ago “the extinction of the glowworm.”

The Christian Democratic regime had two distinct phases that not only can’t be compared to each other – which would imply a certain continuity – but which have become historically incommensurable.

The first phase of this regime (as the radicals have always rightly insisted on calling it) goes from the end of the war to the extinction of the glow worm. The second goes from the extinction of the glow worm up to the present.” – Quoted in Leopoldo Sciascia’s The Moro Affair.

Forster’s human factories of caterpillars overseen by butterflies, as I said, signaled an inflection in the metaphor of the revolution, gave it a standing in natural history, while at the same time extending it to describe any order. In fact, Forster throws the term revolution back at the defenders of the old order, which is seen as a revolution that was affected to change the very nature of men; the old order was an intervention in their natural history, an inhibition of their natural capacity to perfect themselves. Although I don't want to press too much on Forster’s originality - these ideas were in the air of 1793 - it is from his pen, perhaps, that we get what was taken up by the first generation of Romantic philosophers - Schelling, Hegel - that mixture of natural and universal history. Although surely this is one of the lesser tributaries. Still, it is significant that both Herder and Forster were fellow travelers of the French Revolution, and both saw it in terms of universal history - a distancing device, in some ways, that justified the war and bloodshed. Or so one might think, in the reactionary era we live in. Another interpretation would, of course, remark on the war and bloodshed that stains every year of the ancien regime, which was right in the faces of these thinkers.

Marx, too, seizes upon the idea of this transformative moment - that is, the moment when natural history and the history of men merge, as it were. This is the importance of the remarks about universal history in the Grundrisse. Oddly, the remarks emerge in the context of his his meditation about the real nature of money. Roberto Calasso quotes from this section quite a bit in The Ruins of Karsch. Some of those quotations were so striking that I had to look them up myself - since I had never read the Grundrisse. I found that the section, even in Niclaus' translation, is compelling - alternately mindblowing and mindblowingly boring.

The notebook entry on Money contains an argument that seems to jump about, to embrace, for instance, a delirious sideview of the history of precious metals – whipped up contra Proudhon – while it tells a story with a motif Marx, like Dostoevsky, loved: the story of the double.

"Just as exchange value, in the form of money, takes its place as the general commodity alongside all particular commodities, so does exchange value as money therefore at the same time take its place as a particular commodity (since it has a particular existence) alongside all other commodities. An incongruency arises not only because money, which exists only in exchange, confronts the particular exchangeability of commodities as their general exchangeability, and directly extinguishes it, while, nevertheless, the two are supposed to be always convertible into one another; but also because money comes into contradiction with itself and with its characteristic by virtue of being itself a particular commodity (even if only a symbol) and of being subject, therefore, to particular conditions of exchange in its exchange with other commodities, conditions which contradict its general unconditional exchangeability. (Not to speak of money as fixed in the substance of a particular product, etc.) Besides its existence in the commodity, exchange value achieved an existence of its own in money, was separated from its substance exactly because the natural characteristic of this substance contradicted its general characteristic as exchange value. Every commodity is equal (and comparable) to every other as exchange value (qualitatively: each now merely represents a quantitative plus or minus of exchange value). For that reason, this equality, this unity of the commodity is distinct from its natural differentiation; and appears in money therefore as their common element as well as a third thing which confronts them both. But on one side, exchange value naturally remains at the same time an inherent quality of commodities while it simultaneously exists outside them; on the other side, when money no longer exists as a property of commodities, as a common element within them, but as an individual entity apart from them, then money itself becomes a particular commodity alongside the other commodities. (Determinable by demand and supply; splits into different kinds of money, etc.) It becomes a commodity like other commodities, and at the same time it is not a commodity like other commodities. Despite its general character it is one exchangeable entity among other exchangeable entities. It is not only the general exchange value, but at the same time a particular exchange value alongside other particular exchange values. Here a new source of contradictions which make themselves felt in practice. (The particular nature of money emerges again in the separation of the money business from commerce proper.)"

It is important, when reading Marx, to have a firm grasp of just why he uses the method he uses to talk about political economics. After all, it was available to him to employ the methodology of conjectural history created by the classical economists and their successors, who put these histories in the framework of mechanical systems – their own way of being scientific. Marx, however, uses Hegel’s dialectical method – freed from its idealistic tendencies, and set loose in the real world. The question has always been if this is good for the method, or if, like a household cat, setting it 'free' in the wild will lead to no good end. (although Marx insisted that what he was doing was conjoining materialism and dialectics, LI thinks the name "materialism" is a legacy of Marx's grad student days. Materialism seems to be little involved in what Marx is doing. LI calls it wild dialectics - what the hell). Paul Piccone makes the sensible remark that the primary thing for Marx is not value or production, but “people suffering and struggling to be human”. The point is to get out, to use Forster’s image, of the caterpillar factory. It seems to me that Marx’s decision to use the dialectical method to explain political economics was not a matter of applying the dying fashions of provincial German universities, but rather, emerged from the subject matter itself. The first thing that impressed him about the capitalist system was its contradictions. The contradiction, firstly, between the riches produced by the mechanical system of capitalism, and the poverty it produced among the producers. To grasp this as a contradiction in Hegel’s sense is to grasp it not as something to be explained mechanically – but rather, dynamically, functionally. One has to see not only that the system functions in such a way as to produce contradictions-in-use, but also that, as a human system, agents within it have to produce explanations for it. These agents like to explain the system as a vast dead machine. If the output of the machine is both greater wealth and greater poverty, such is the machine. Tampering with one of the outputs will screw up the other. Now, in the 20th century, the claim that capitalism indeed produced poverty among the producers has been roundly booed – since we are at a safe from the world of 1848. But the booing is misplaced. Gregory Clark in A farewell to Arms, certainly no friend to Marx, recently made the econometric argument that capitalism introduced a crash in the lifestyles of the populace when it first gained critical mass in the U.K., and that it still effects this crash when it is introduced into third world countries. I would argue that Marxism, anarchism, socialism and all the old causes introduced elements into the economic mix such that labor acquired an unparalleled bargaining power, which decisively effected the distribution of the system’s benefits – but that is an argument for another time. I’m more interested in taking one of those startling sentences in the Grundrisse and, like many another Marx-climber, putting a piton in it and making a scamper up one of the old man’s rocky faces – all to zigzag and weave together happiness and the human limit.

Biggie and Robert Burns

I’m working on a little review of a Robert Burns biography. And, by one of those coincidences that strolls over to you and puts its muzzle in your palm, looking for the sugar, Biggie’s biopic is out. Notorious. You say, where’s the coincidence? In your pants? I say, Burns is, with two centuries difference, so so recognizable in the rap star persona.

So let’s lay this down.

Burns is, for one thing, a big cocksman, and proud of it – although my biographer is, as they all are, too apologetic about it to look at it. Burns had perhaps six, seven bastards by various women, which on the one hand is a great curse on the women, and not excusable even back then – contraception was by no means unknown of. On the other hand, lets not pretend that in the cauld cauld age of patriarchy, there was an infinite difference in the treatment the married woman and the single mother could expect, or that the children who'd been routed into this world through the good and proper channel of a Calvinistic blind poke on the marriage bed were infinitely a different matter. Burns raised some of the children - or his poor wife Jean did – and some were raised by girlfriends who got married themselves.

Jean Armour, Robert Louis Stevenson thought, informed by some rumor, never loved Robert. This is probably not so. She definitely bore with him, and definitely lay with him right willingly. She had three of his children before they got married, and he did miss his “sweet armload” even when he was cavorting with a higher class of people. Most biographers have stumbled and been quite horrified about a letter he wrote to his friend Ainslie about her on the eve of her giving birth to twins – before he married her:

'Jean I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, destitute and friendless; all for the good old cause: I have reconciled her to her fate: I have reconciled her to her mother: I have taken her a room: I have taken her to my arms: I have given her a mahogany bed: I have given her a guinea; and I have f---d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But — as I always am on every occasion — I have been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree; I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl, and I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones. Oh, what a peacemaker is a guid, weel-willy pintle ! It is the mediator, the guarantee, the umpire, the bond of union, the solemn league and covenant, the plenipotentiary, the Aaron's rod, the Jacob's staff, the prophet Elisha's pot of oil, the Ahasuerus' Sceptre, the sword of mercy, the philosopher's stone, the Horn of Plenty, and Tree of Life between Man and Woman. »

Myself, I don’t take this as the literal truth of the matter. That Burns could get it up for two big fucks while Jean, nine months pregnant, was being electrified by his thundering scalade – I sense a joke, here. It wasn’t, however, a joke that Burnsians have appreciated – in Victorian times, this letter was heavily edited, and now, in our politically correct times, my biographer opines that maybe Jean was in pain from the application of the Aaron’s rod.

Burns was a great believer in fucking, and recommended it as the remedy against war in his political poems, as in:

“Some cry Constitution
Some cry Revolution
And Politics kick up a Row:
But Prince and Republic
Agree on the subject
No treason is in a good mowe”

(mowe is the Scots for fuck.)
–
Burns, in fact, was a lot more happy about cunt – or cunthappy - than Biggie, who was much more sentimental and responsible in many ways:

What do you do
When your bitch is untrue?


This wasn’t such a problem for Burns, who had a looser sense indeed about untrue and not. My biographer claims that there is some evidence of Burns corresponding with Mary Wollstonecraft – I do wonder, if this is true, what could have been in those letters? But unlike a cocksman like, say, Henry Miller, Burns loved to look through the eyes of the very women he ‘seduced’. As Raymond Bentman has pointed out in his edition of the Collected Poems, no male eighteenth century poet, and perhaps no other comparable English poet, wrote as many poems in the female voice. His poem, Wha’ll mow me now? Is about the predicament he left many in – for instance, Jenny Clow in Edinburgh, who he seemed to have fucked primarily because she was the maid of an upper class woman he was obsessed with (Burns always fucked maids and peasants of his own class, and was always falling in love with upper class women). In this case, the woman is a prostitute:

Wha’’ll mow me now, my joe
An wha’ll mow me now
A sodger with his bandeleers
Has banged my belly fu’.

Now I maun stole the scornfu’ sneer
O mony a saucy quine
When, curse upon her godly face!
Her cunt’s as merry’s mine.

Biggie, too, mixes sex and class:

“The rap slayer the hooker layer
Muthafucka say your prayers
(Hail Mary full of grace)
Smack the bitch in her face
Take her Gucci bag and the North Face off her back
Jab her if she act
Funny wit the money
Oh you got me mistakin honey
I don't wanna rape ya
I just want the paper”

It is an old story, now, among the tracers of music, that the Scots song mixed in the south with African song, especially Fon and Yoruba songs. There were similar clan systems, similar raiding cultures, similar codes of honor and ecstasy. That some of Robert Burns has made its stealthy way into Biggie Smalls music should be no surprise. Burns was, as well, Walt Whitman’s model – a poet of the people, a literal ploughman poet, with little Latin, no Greek – but an early training in the schools that his father, a tenant farmer, could send him to. Like Biggie, Robert Burns early on found flash his way out of a society he felt was too small for him. This is Robert Louis Stevenson’s shrewd appraisal:

“Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more consequence than himself:" with all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and remark. His father wrote the family name BURNES; Robert early adopted the orthography BURNESS from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to BURNS. It is plain that the last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom. Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation. To no other man's have we the same conclusive testimony from different sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk. Robertson the historian "scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour;" the Duchess of Gordon declared that he "carried her off her feet;" and, when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine by any means. He made himself feared in the village for his tongue. He would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps - for the statement of Sillar is not absolute--say cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back. At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses. These details stamp the man. He had no genteel timidities in the conduct of his life. He loved to force his personality upon the world. He would please himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing JEHAN for JEAN, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade.”

Just as Biggie was by no means conventionally handsome, neither was Burns – every observer says he was too “dark” to be handsome. No milk white skin enveloped our poet, and his seductions had to be conducted by boldness and a gifted, supremely gifted tongue. Nelly Miller, who was a Mauchline neighbor, recalled that he “na to ca a bonie man: dark and strong; but uncommon invitin’ in his speech – uncommon! Ye could na hae cracket wi him for ae minute, but ya wad hae studen four or five.”

Even more than his flash, though, what disturbed the Victorians was his politics. The letter that he sent Ainslie about fucking Jean was repressed by Burnsians – the poem, The Liberty Tree, was disavowed as something that certainly couldn’t be by the author of Auld Lang Syne! With its cracking verse:

King Loui’ thought to cut it down
When it was unco sma’, man
For this the watchman cracked his crown
Cut off his head and a man.

Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, who drew back from the excesses of the French Revolution, Burns, who knew men were hanged for theft and women were transported for prostitution (a trade that he had some kindness for, except when it came to Marie Antoinette), was not disturbed by the murder of the royalty. “What is there in delivering a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute to the hands of the hangman.” Given the fact that it was awful easy, in 1793, for a man to get thrown into the hulks for Burns’ sentiments, he was pretty open about what he thought. But by 1793 he had seven kids and debts and was working as a cop – the equivalent, I suppose, of working as a Drug Enforcement agent. He was an exciseman, policing the district of Dumfries and capturing smugglers. This was a job that he had serious doubts about – after all, Burns’ favorite literary character was Satan in Paradise Lost. To keep himself in his job, he wrote the occasional servile poem of loyalty – but in all of them he would put in sly jabs at the King.

Biggie’s songs about drugs have the outlaw flavor of Burns’ own sentiments about politics. Supposedly, from the proceeds of one of his snatches, Burns bought some cannons and had them shipped to the French revolutionaries in 1792 – a pretty outrageous gesture.

Well, I should sign this off with a link to my favorite Biggie song – I can’t ever get enough of this song:

“When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell
Cause Im a piece of shit, it aint hard to fuckin tell
It dont make sense, goin to heaven wit the goodie-goodies
Dressed in white, I like black tims and black hoodies
God will probably have me on some real strict shit
No sleepin all day, no gettin my dick licked
Hangin with the goodie-goodies loungin in paradise
Fuck that shit, I wanna tote guns and shoot dice
All my life I been considered as the worst
Lyin to my mother, even stealin out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin abortion
She dont even love me like she did when I was younger
Suckin on her chest just to stop my fuckin hunger
I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes?
Forgive me for my disrespect, forgive me for my lies”

The lying image of happiness

”We have here reached the fundamental question, which is no longer related to the point of departure. The general question would be this: Can the existing relations of production and the relations of distribution which correspond to them be revolutionized by a change in the instrument of circulation, in the organization of circulation? Further question: Can such a transformation of circulation be undertaken without touching the existing relations of production and the social relations which rest on them?” – Marx, Grundrisse

At the end of the essay on the relationship between the art of the state and happiness, Forster uses a rather strange metaphor. He surveys the “secret workshop” of history, that which is at the center of all the rises and falls of all the world empires – which is human nature. And within human nature, one thing remains the same: reason. Reason is the binding universal, in the end.



Which leads him to this paragraph:


We want to leave it to speculative philosophy to find out why sensuality [Sinnlichkeit] must always almost constantly so overbalance reason, that the liberated effect of the latter is almost unnoticeable, and the governance of the world [Weltregierung] wins the appearance of a chaos, whose elements no sooner organize themselves, than a mighter attraction pulls them apart again: a chaos, where the rise and destruction of shapes sweeps before our eyes. We don’t want to investigate here the ways in which so many thousand millions of men have been so burdened down that a sad state of slavery has almost completely cut them off from the development of their capacity for perfection, and what compensation there is, or even should be, for them. When the only species, however, whose nature is characterized by moral freedom has, up to this point, given scope in a mostly incomplete way to extremely few members to enjoy this privilege; or, to use a convenient likeness, among millions of caterpillars hardly one succeeds in bringing to completion its metamorphosis into the shape of a butterfly that can lightly wing its paths through the aether and unfettered enjoy both its existence and the world: can it, ought it then annoy a man that somewhere it can be plausibly shown that henceforth the examples of this glorious development will be more common?”

There’s a certain shock in the example of the caterpillar and the butterfly – a balance between a dystopia of worms and a utopia of freedom. The idea that, during the whole course of history, the great mass never succeeded in shedding their worm-like state brings us back to the facts of “world governance” – for who has created the nurseries full of perpetual caterpillars than the prince butterflies? Forster’s further point, here, is that happiness, as the bond between the governors and the governed, must be questioned. “Finally, my friend, it seems like the time has come for that lying image of happiness which has stood so long in the path of mankind, to fall from its pedestal, and the true signpost [Wegweiser – pointer of the way] of life, human worth, to be put in its place.”

What happens when the lying image of happiness is thrown from its pedestal? It would seem, from Forster’s thesis, that either the state would dissolve entirely, having lost its function, or that the revolutionary moment would illuminate the structure of human worth in such a way that we would see it as, ultimately, identical to true happiness.

In the next post, I’m going to leap more than half a century to Marx’s notion of the “universal subject” – one that is undergoing, apparently, a translation from the merely locally human to an all sided subjectivity as dramatic as the caterpillar’s metamorphosis into the butterfly – in the passages in the First Notebook of the Grundrisse noted by Calasso.

Universal history begins on the Moon

“America changed the moon forever…” (152) - Mary Campbell, Wonder and Science

At some time in the year 1648, there was a party in a house in Paris owned by M. de Cuigy le fils. The conversation turned to the full moon, which was particularly brilliant that night. Everyone expressed some opinion or joke about the moon – for instance, that it was really the sun, which was peaking at the earth from a hole in the heavens to see what was going on behind its back, so to speak. One man was standing by rather moodily, silent. This man, Cyrano de Bergerac, was finally asked what he thought:

“And me,” I told them, wishing to mix my enthusiasm with yours, I believe, without entertaining myself with the sharpended fantasies by which you are tickling time to make it go quicker, that the moon is a world like this one; to which our serves as its moon.” Some of my friends regaled me with a great howl of laughter. “And just like this,” I said, “they may be mocking now, on the Moon, at somebody who is maintaining that this globe here is a world.” But however much I alleged that many great men had been of this opinion, I only forced them to laugh all the more.

This thought, however, of which the boldness skewed my humor, hardened by contradiction, plunged so deeply into me that, all during my walk home, I was pregnant with a thousand definitions of the moon, of which I could not give birth: so much so that, by the force of supporting this burlesque belief by quasi-serious arguments, it almost came about that I already couldn’t get the idea out of my head, when the miracle or the accident, providence, fortune, or perhaps what one would name vision, fiction, chimera or madness, if you like, furnished me with the occasion to begin this discourse. Having arrived back home, I went up to my reading room where I discovered, lying on a table, an open book that I hadn’t put there. It was of Cardan, and though I had no plan just then to read, my eyes fell, as though forced, upon a story of the Philosopher who said, studying one night by candle, he perceived to enter his room, through closed doors, two large old men who, after being abundantly questioned, responded that they were the inhabitants of the Moon and at the same time vanished.”

This is, of course, the beginning of the Voyage to the Moon, Cyrano’s secret book. It may be an absurd way to begin a thread on the history of universal history – a thread that I has been prefigured in my posts on Forster, and that I want to wind through a passage in the Grundrisse and a bit of The anti-Oedipus – but I, too, like to support burlesque beliefs with quasi-serious arguments. One of the beliefs that goes back on this blog to the very beginning of my human limit thesis is that the Great Transformation couldn’t have occurred without the discovery of America. One of the great intellectual themes of the seventeenth century was a coming to terms with the New World – that is, with a world that looked unexpectedly, and in fact totally, different from what had once been supposed. It was not only the earth, of course, that had become a New World, but New Worlds were being found by the astronomers – by Kepler and Galileo, for instance – which Cyrano knew well. He had probably seen the map of the moon made by his friend Gassendi.

Cyrano’s burlesque remark is one of the ancestors of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and the Marxist method, said the up to now silent bystander. And look, look! See how the moment of similarity in which two antitheses mirror each other, becoming each for the other what the other is for each - the seed out of which they evolve a different course of development – out of similars, differences – is sealed or signed, as it were, by a magically opened page of Cardan, the alchemist and astrologer.

Spinoza takes a hit

I’m surprised that this sad, sad blow to Spinoza’s reputation hasn’t been spinning around the theory blogs. I’m talking, of course, of Sarkozy’s endorsement of Spinoza. This is from Le Monde’s (excellent) literary blog (written by Pierre Assouline), reporting on Sarkozy’s speech at Nimes:


le président veut encourager le tournage des films en Corse, et réhabiliter Spinoza aux dépens de Descartes. Si si, “le” Spinoza, non sans avoir précisé pour nous éclairer sur cette initiative ébouriffante :”l’intelligence humaine est avant tout le produit des émotions, et ce serait une très grave erreur de centrer les enseignements sur les disciplines cérébrales en marginalisant celles qui font appel à l’intelligence des émotions et à l’intelligence du corps“. Il n’y a pas à dire, la France est vraiment le pays de l’exception culturelle.

“… the president wants to encourage the making of films in Corsica, and to rehabilitate Spinoza against Descartes. Yes yes yes, ‘the’ Spinoza, not without having presented for our enjoyment enlightening details of this astonishing initiative: “human intelligence is before everything else the product of emotions, and it would be a grave error to center our pedagogy on cerebral disciplines in marginalizing those which make an appeal to the intelligence of the emotions and the body.” What can you say? France is truly the land of exceptional culture.”

The politics and anthropology of happiness

LI promised in a previous post to outline Forster’s little read essay, “The relation of the art of the state and the happiness of mankind”, written in Paris in 1793.

As we pointed out, Forster begins on a satiric note: he points to Russia’s justification of its recent conquest of Poland as motivated by concern for the “happiness” of the people, and remarks that all political arrangements seem, now, to base themselves on the happiness of the people. But what is happiness? And is there such a thing as the happiness of the people, or even happiness of mankind?

“But in what does the happiness consist which one wants so industriously to serve up to the human race? Common sense binds a concept with the word and I don’t know what general feeling transforms it into the object of the striving of all of those who are of one origin and similar education with us. Habituated from youth onward to regard the circumstance of comfort and the consciousness of pleasant impressions as basic, or with other words, to believe that an existence which can distinguish between enjoyment and pain could only be born for the first, we gradually develop an idea of that wished for way to be, in which the accumulation of pleasant impressions not only tops the accumulation of unpleasant ones, but also, through their changes and manifoldness, brings into our path continually new charms, and open up in us new sources of sentiment. Can we provisionally apply this definition? Then we may mention, for example, the happiness of the situation of the English tenant famer, and the misery of the Polish serf. Surely the prosperous man, who enjoys all the superfluity of his fat acres and meadows, is well clothed, and in a nice, clear house with handsome conveniences, at the same time in the prospect of his mind, of his feelings, of his principles, his meditations, his stock of knowledge, with a word, as a human, is the one with the widest advantages. He is easy in all his relationships, and in this comfortable situation he looks about himself, investigates who, from whom and to what end he is, gives thus the best part of himself, his reason, which elevates him over all of visible creation, its purposive development, and begins, to be conscious of his human value. The enervated slave of the sarmatian nobleman, on the contrary, in a decayed, smoky, naked hut, in dirty sheepskin, half eaten up by vermin, in his heavy as his lighter work, an his not completely unhealthy diet, knows simply animal affects, rests without a thought from his strivings, and dies without having tasted the higher enjoyment of the senses, without having enjoyed his mental powers or only knowing them in order to completely delude himself about the purpose of his existence. “

One notes that the question of happiness quickly moves from the psychological, in the above passage, to the anthropological. The psychological seems not to offer sufficient information to decide the question – after all, the question is not just about the greater number of pleasant as opposed to unpleasant sensations, but what, exactly, makes one sensation pleasant and another unpleasant – which is why Forster moves to scenes of happiness, as though comparing two prints. Of course, Forster has seen both the English tenent farmer and the Polish serf - the latter when teaching in Livonia. Within the classical vocabulary of the character, Forster shifts to the modern sociology of types – the English tenant farmer vs. the Polish serf – and then to their social environments. In good enlightenment fashion, what we seem to want to find, to answer the question of the happiness of the people, is a universal. But the different circumstances under which the free English farmer and the chained Polish agricultural worker exist make it hard to find a universal maker. Happiness, as a universal, seems to flatten out here – in which case the art of the state that creates the conditions in which the two types live will get no guidance from the principle of happiness.

Forster puzzles over this point. In a sense, he shifts the question of happiness, at this point, from the pleasant impression – the animal condition for happiness – to consciousness of human value. To make the point that happiness is bound up with the cultural conditions of mankind, he procedes to make a comparison between Europe and China. His notion is that, in one way or another, a state does create the conditions under which human beings strive for happiness. Make those conditions miserable enough and the striving for happiness will never reach the human level. Forster’s nightmare vision of China as a vast totalitarian kingdom of pain and poverty is drawn, then, as a systematic contrast to Europe. The system of government there seeks to anaesthetize forever the capacity for perfection (Vervollkommnungsfaehigkeit) in its subjects. To do this, they preach the unchangeability of all social relations, unconditioned obedience to the orders of the state, blind belief in every doctrine of the state. Thus, the Chinese government has pampered into existence unnatural things – Unarten – after millennia of despotism. (Perhaps this is a reference to the eunuchs of the palace).

“Perhaps one might ask: if in Europe a system of government like the Chinese one comes into power, would the consequences be the same? Our higher development, our deeply probing research of the truth, our speculations about the limits of our existence, our knowledge that has become so vast due to our trade and seafaring, our useful sciences, our arts elevated to the highest purposiveness, our taste, our manners, our bodily advantages – must they not blaze such a path, that all the advantages of the best alimentation of the human race are joined with the care for moral stability? Who can decide, what series of millennia, what eccentric movements, what pauses, in brief, what revolutions must have prepared the present mechanisms of the human race in east Asia?”

Using these cultural examples, Forster is developing a method for his anthropology, in which the condition of the people – for instance, the animal existences into which the Chinese peasantry are forced – mirrors the intentions of the state. Yet the state, in Forster’s scheme, doesn’t simply shape the people out of shapeless material. Accidents and nature count. Europeans, for instance, are more lively and inquisitive than the Chinese due to their racial type and their geography, evidenced by trade and seafaring. This is not, by the way, the view of China that had prevailed in enlightened circles. And it begins, or stands near the beginning, of a colonialist discourse that will revel in drawing the scene of Asiatic despotism to highlight European freedom.

If we put Forster’s claims in the perspective of the question of happiness, we see two things: one is that happiness is a more complex matter than we first thought. It is a form of perfecting the human, not just an accumulation of pleasant over unpleasant impressions. This movement away from the naïve hedonism of the dying libertine strain in the eighteenth century is not peculiar to Forster: one finds it everywhere (Smith’s sympathy, the fashion for the sentimental, etc., etc.). More interesting, perhaps, is the second thing: whereas Forster begins by asking, implicitly, if the “governors” [Regenten] can bring about human happiness, he shifts to making happiness the chief, or even the only bond between the government and the people. To speak of the happiness of the people isn’t just a fashion indulged in by eighteenth century princes: without happiness, the conjunction between the governed and the governors is wholly accidental. Without happiness, the governors are revealed as simply robbers. This, Forster insinuates, is what the French revolution has been about – the creation of a necessary bond between the governors and the people. In consequence, we must destroy a whole line of statecraft, a certain wisdom of Realpolitik that runs through the 17th and 18th century, summed up in a anecdote from Choiseul, Louis XV’s minister, who told a courtier once, “you are a good man, but you will never be a good statesman. You do not despise the people enough.”

For Forster, the government of contempt does positively act upon the happiness of the people:

“Unholy cruel contempt for humanity! It is this that eternalizes the sad phenomena of ignorance and slavery among the masses, when it first lifted the ambitious [Ehrgeizigen] over their equals. And now they dare, to call to witness their own handiwork? Over the current state of the species, the philosopher and the politician agree; but he feels either wise, about what men could or should be; he reveals the causes of their degradation, and seeks out the means that can help them approach once again their real definition.”

This, of course, is the key to the connection between happiness as the perfection of man and equality. In the politics of contempt, the people’s happiness is taken to be a different thing from the happiness of the ruler. The rulers are wise so that their subjects are ignorant, and strive for wealth so that their subjects can be content with little.

AND CONTINUING THIS:

The rest of Forster’s article is, in a sense, a sort of reply to Burke that takes another path than that of Paine. Where Paine’s objection is based in the universal rights of man, Forster agrees, tacitly, with Burke that the foundations of power require an order such tht the first task of the art of the state is to bring about that order. This is the terrible power of the French revolution – it puts into question the very order of the principalities of Europe. Forster presents a dilemma: either the governing class is telling the truth about governing for the happiness of the subjects or they are not. If they are telling the truth, what kind of order do they propose to make their subjects happy? And what image of happiness is mirrored in that order? And if they are not telling the truth, then how can the governing class of a particular time object to being dispossessed by other predators?

The effect making the ground of the legitimation of order the advancement of happiness is profound. In the instant that this is accepted, a light is cast on the bond between the princes and the people, and a question can be asked: is this bond necessary? Does it arise out of the people themselves? There is, in a sense, no Burkian escape route – the call upon tradition, upon the grace of life, doesn’t give us the necessary connection between the governed and the governors which would justify the governed having any loyalty to the governors. The people who break into your house and throw a party may be as gracious and beautiful as you like – but that doesn’t answer the question of what they are doing in your house.

In the disconnection of the upper class (hoheren Stande), in the impossibility of setting limits to their presumption, their power, their influence, lies the seed of destruction of the great kingdoms. So fell the Roman Empire in the East and the West, and so must every hegemonic power collapse, which isn’t based on the oriental mechanism of unchanging class and castes.”

Forster has before ascribed this state to a revolution. Now he drives the point home – only a revolution could freeze into place a state of affairs in which human reason, which really exists – in fact, exists universally – is, as it were, suspended or curtailed.

‘The politics of the European princes thus brings about the opposite of the harmony in which finally everything must be merged; far from providing the basis for the peace of the human race, they eternalize his revolutions; far from distributing the general happiness, they cannot guard the ruling dynasties themselves before the most self-centered changes of happiness. Great personal properties may make an exception here; yet how seldom these turn out to be nothing, and how fleeting is their appearance! How dangerous it has so often been to the boldly striving princes, this simple proposal to rule alone. How quickly in the end collapse these foundationless buildings under a weak successor, which were built up into towers by his greater predecessors all too quickly and grandly, more to serve his own phantasy than to last!’

Bernhard - attacked

The lovegermanbooks blog (yes, as in the niches for sexual tastes in Fourier’s utopia, in the world of blogging, every obsession and interest must eventually find its blogger) there was a reference to Maxim Biller’s review of Thomas Bernhard’s posthumously published book, My Prizes. In the U.S., from time to time, fights erupt about snark in reviews. The New Republic and the Atlantic both try to sneak a little gunpowder in their usual reviews of fiction – although in the Atlantic’s case, the hatchet man, B.R. Meyers, is so unbelievably tasteless that he is continually blowing himself up, and leaving his targets unscathed.

But Germany is undergoing something weird, lately. Call it the Lady Bitch Ray phenomena: insult, cacophony and obscenity have become a much larger part of the staid German scene.

This is the first paragraph of Biller’s review:

“The asshole Thomas Bernhard, and I say this, although I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, the asshole Bernhard has almost certainly only written one single good book. This book has just now appeared, although he wrote it already in 1980, and it shows, what kind of asshole he was, and perhaps he didn’t want that, for it appears, as long as he was still alive – and if I wanted to, I could go on in this sleep inducing, saying-everything-and-nothing Thomas Bernhard tone endlessly, because nothing is simpler than to write like this, I think, thoughtlessly adding one sentence to another, mere sentences, that are alike and yet always just a little bit different, then exactly like this is the way they appear in the head of the writer by writing, and if one is named, say, Isaac Babel or Junot Diaz, one finally seeks to chose out the best of these so very similar sentences, but that is naturally more work, as simply writing down all of these sentences, like Thomas Bernhard, buy which the reader can pick them out for himself.”

Who doesn’t revere Bernhard? But it is hard not to laugh at Biller’s parody. And of course Biller is here putting on the style of the gunslinger writer. He may be irritated, too, as he has had a hard time, himself, with the combination of asshole and literature, since a novel of his was banned by the court on behalf of a former lover and her mother, who, they charged, suffered from having their privacy invaded by Biller. Such a law would wipe out literature, but I believe it was a Southern German court, maybe Bavarian. And what can you expect?

Here’s the second paragraph. It makes sense, coming from a man who has been bruised by the court. Although there is something narrow about Biller’s idea that writing is a form of assault that should be judged on how severely it injures its target. But I do like a good rugby scramble:

And if one even like the great, dirty, provincial Austrian german Asshole Bernhard insults here a painter, politician, writer as a giant asshole and there a city as provincial and uncultured and Austrian or german, then one has so to speak the readers on one’s side, who believe that they themselves are not uncultured provincial Austrian or German assholes, thus all, thus even the Austrians, thus even the Germans and the most important thing is, not to underpin his hatred with arguments and to ground with grounds, as the blustery growly opportunistic coffee house loudmouth Thomas Bernhard cleverly also never did, then otherwise someone might have felt really hit by him and not simply literarily mentioned and flattered, and even correctly, and then the Superhypocrite Bernhard had never counted between Flensburg and Linz as a Superwriter, and as never happens to the editions of the German poets and thinkers, I guess, to fundamentally assemble their people and put their life-lies in question, etc. But I don’t care, and thus I will, a not so German poet and thinker, try to explain, why I can’t stand Thomas Bernhard, and do so on the occasion of what is certainly his only good book. And to succeed, I must first explain the reason that it is good.”

My prizes contain the story of the prizes that Bernhard received, and what he thought about the whole process – that it was shit. But, Biller says, the stories as Bernhard tells them are not high literary and Bernhardian, but resemble the stories of a schlemiel – he doesn’t say that last bit, but that is what it sounds like. And of course Bernhard is telling stories about himself – how, on a panel to award a prize, when he suggested Canetti, another judge said, well, he was a Jew – and Bernhard didn’t say anything. As Biller shows, he was a go-alonger, a mitlaufer, he never spoke up, he shook hands, he listened to idiot speeches, he gave idiot speeches. He needed the money. Biller is very scoriating about Bernhard’s sugar-momma – although Biller oversteps the persona he is building for himself by so doing, even though he compares Bernhard to Haider, who also had a sugarmomma, apparently. They also both had ten fingers and both had penises. The evidence couldn’t be more obvious! Let’s measure his neck for the rope. Etc.

Not convincing about Bernhard, but at least one is convinced that this is a man who knows what he hates in literature, and – unlike the dreary Meyer of the Atlantic, with his ninth grade English teacher style – knows how to create literature out of what he hates in literature. Sometimes, anarchist’s rule no. 1, you just gotta blow something the fuck up.