an ancient jug

In 1918, Ernst Bloch published his first edition of the Spirit of Utopia, beginning it with an observation on an ancient jug – Krug. The pitcher had been dug up from some place in the Franconia region. Bloch tells us that it brings a strangeness with it – Fremd fuehrt er hinein. It isn’t exceptionally beautiful – in fact, one could doubt it was beautiful at all, compared to other jugs from ancient times. Yet he likes it. There is something about it that has an Italian mood – perhaps it is roman. Yet its décor shows a very northern thing, a wilderness thing – from the Urwalde. It shows a bearded, savage man holding an uprooted pine sapling. He can imagine Tenier like peasants with big noses holding it and similar pitchers in their fists and drinking wine from it, “until they with the others had to disappear, as all good grounded handwork – bodenstandige Handarbeit - disappears.” He sees the wild man on the front of it descend, in the land, to the escutcheons of the nobility and the signs on taverns – a mysterious descent of the race of the savage in the heart of the Rhine country.

“Yet here, on our jug, the bearded man gazes immediately out of the shadows of the woods, the moist and dark wilderness of the oldest times approach all around, quite near, the head of the giant troll distributes his faunal, amulet-like, alchemical gaze. The speak out of a time, the old jugs, when the floppy ear and the fiery man could be seen in the evening fields in the Frranconia region, and havc kept the old man – das Alte - without allegory, literally, in peasant guise.”

1918, of course, saw the entire collapse of the Wilhelmine order. And this context is important enough that I am aware, even as I bracket it, that I cannot bracket it. But I bring up this ancient jug of Bloch’s because of the connection – the thread, as he puts it – between the savage, the troll, the peasant, and the Roman, the South. The pitcher is a pioneer, came north to the wilderness where one could still see the wood people in the evening fields. Tacitus mocked the Germans for being so barbaric that they didn’t know about agriculture – they were complete meateaters.

The question of frontiers, and of time, was one that kept coming up, in 1783, for a certain Leipzig merchant, Jean Phillip Moeller. He was traveling through Italy without any servants. Noticing that in certain Italian towns his German boots were attracting attention, he changed to shoes and socks – evidently trying to fit in with the people. He spoke Italian. He toured the great sites, or some of them – he only spent a few hours in Florence. Later he wrote that his course, which took him from Dresden across the Brenner pass to Venice, and then to Rome, seemed like an “underground” journey. In Rome, he met his friend, an artist, who reported that certain artists had spread the rumor that the merchant was really Goethe. This was shot down by a man who said that he knew Goethe, and Moeller looked nothing like him. This made Moeller laugh.

Because, indeed, he was Goethe. If Italy were an already ‘discovered’ country – Goethe’s father had made the grand tour of it – one way to remake it a frontier, one way to make it something new, was to make oneself an undiscovered person, an incognito. Goethe, on his trip to Italy, is not just escaping from his situation with Charlotte von Stein, with whom he was in a frustratingly chaste relationship, and the whole of Weimar’s claustrophobia, but he was escaping the very bonds of the eighteenth century. In a sense, in his person, Goethe was doing what Kant, at the same time, was doing – starting from the very ground of possibility and working on up. Like Kant, Goethe did not want his understanding to get in the way of what was there.

white mythology in the white magic

We get someplace, and then we wonder why we came here. And we look back and can’t remember our path. And our goal is just to get to the Castle. The Castle is just up the hill. It seems so simple. The parts of our plan are falling into place. But then we look around. Why does everybody look suspicious? Why do we feel like we have to keep talking? What do we want? What office do we hold? Who invited us here?

Why am I talking about myth and folklore in the context of happiness?

In an essay on the early enlightenment critique of myth first translated as To Bring Myth to an End in New German Critique, Hans Blumenberg poses the question of why the Enlightenment, defining itself in part as the war against superstition, did not bring myth to an end. Literally, why did the Greek myths survive as narratives that poets, artists, and even psychologists and historians are drawn to? Blumenberg cites Fontenelle, one of the key moderns in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns that erupted over Perrault’s essay in 1688, because Fontenelle was so explicit in his attack on myth. He was puzzled by the continuing vitality of Greek myth in literature. Why were the poets still using Theseus, Ariadne, Orestes, Oedipus? Why did the circus never end?

“In his discussion of myth Fontenelle expressed the Enlightenment's amazement at the fact that the myths of the Greeks had still not disappeared from the world. Religion and reason had, it is true, weaned people from them, but poetry and painting had given them the means by which to survive. They had been able to make themselves indispensable to these arts. This statement is meant as a contribution to the history of human errors. Part of the program of the Cartesian school was to remove this category too, together with the totality of prejudices, from people's minds. The vigor of the myths must have seemed all the harder to understand since the explanation of the tenacity of prejudices which described them as keeping themselves alive by flattering man about his nature and his place in the universe, against all his better knowledge, did not fit the case of myth. Not only did Fontenelle see a relationship of exclusion between the new science of nature and the ancient myths; he also leaned toward the assumption that given an appropriate presentation, science could fill the vacancy that had arisen, in the system of needs, as a result of criticism of the myths. No doubt he considered something along the lines of his Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes as the compensation for all the lost beauties of the tradition, in the destruction of which he had participated so suc- cessfully, in the year in which the conversations on the plurality of worlds appeared, with the Histoire des oracles (1686). The basic idea of 'reoccupation' had motivated Fontenelle's invention of the literary genre of the didactic conversation, for the Enlightenment - which did not consistently keep in view the ulterior purpose that he had meant the genre to serve.”

‘Re-occupation’ – a startling word. A military word, of course, one that immediately casts the other side – the side of myth – as the enemy of reason, occupying territory that reason must again advance into a seize – although the very notion of occupation makes it difficult to know if there was ever an original possessor of the land. We were this land’s before the land was ours – and we are trying as hard as possible to forget this fact. Or rather, myth.

As I’ve pointed out in a series of posts last year, the image of antiquity held during the 18th century was changing from that held previously, on back to 15th century Florence. If, among the constellation of humanist European intellectuals, there arose a sort of rule of thumb morality, secretly other-than-Christian, which could aptly be called neo-Stoicism, in the 18th century this belief lost its default position among the intelligentsia. Via Shaftesbury, Stoicism became a tool of ever deeper de-familiarization; and, as a serious set of propositions about pain and pleasure, became the object of La Mettrie’s mockery, the last laugh from the libertine culture.

But the downfall of a certain classical attitude coincided with the rise of a new interest in, a new attitude towards the classics. Antiquity became the site of a transaction that was happening on a worldwide scale, marked by the Encounter – with the savages of North America, the savages of Africa, the savages of Central Asia. The Encounter not only altered synchronically the terms in which the subject – the philosopher’s favorite costume to wear to the world wide party – understood itself, it altered the past. For what, after all kept the European from being a savage but a religion and a science that came from the deep Mediterranean past, Jerusalem and Athens? And yet, the Greek part of that past – with its nudity, its ferocious myths, its rituals – seemed, the more one looked at it, less like civilization and more like savagery. At this moment, myth began to lose its ornamental stature. Far from science taking the place of myth, myth began to appear as something more than the sum of the errors of which it was made.

I seem to be finding that the cutwork for the creation of ‘resistance’ to the great tradition – to the turn it takes as it embraces happiness as the emotional heuristic by which to understand the normal human personality and as the hinge that connects the governors and the governed – comes back to a series of trips. Trips, flights, the assumption of peripheral positions, holings up, going underground. And then there are those who want to be, who make themselves be central – like Goethe. And yet who find themselves irresistibly drawn to the erotically marginal. I like to think of Goethe traveling to Italy in 1783, planning it as an escape, telling no one, even – especially – his heavy handed muse, Diotima, Charlotte von Stein, to whom he addresses his notes on Italy (as though he had to allot her a place in his head even as he was escaping from her person), while – perhaps mythically – Potocki is traveling too – around the Ottoman empire.

As without, so within – and within the white magic, what are we going to find if not the White Mythology? Within the idea that backwards is equal to forwards, that the path up and the path down are one and the same – the Heraclitean compromise position on ontology, it is here that we find the altered antiquity of the moderns, myth for the modern man. But antiquity, classicism, myth, folklore also open up a space in which to contest the modern. That’s the double aspect of it.

Which is why I am presently following/reading – Sneaky pete, the amateur historian – in the heels of Goethe in Italy at the moment.

narrative induction

Charlotte Linde is a rather brilliant ethnographer broadly within the symbolic interaction school – although not participating in that schools downhill slide into the irrelevance of infinitely coding conversations to make the smallest of small bore points. Rather, she has taken Labov’s idea that a story is a distinguishable discursive unit and researched Life Stories – she wrote the standard book on the subject.

In 2000, she wrote an article that I just read, and that I’m going to use in my book project. But I’ll use it over at News from the Zona as well, so I think I'll cross post it. By the way, I'd love to be able to signal, on this site, that I have a post up at NFZ - could one of my kind readers refer me to some widget for that?

The article is a study of an insurance firm with the truly great title, “The acquisition of a speaker by a story: how history becomes memory and identity.” Identity, with its columnally Latinate Id seemingly standing for noun in general, has during the course of my lifetime been dipped in the acid of the verbal form, and now little leagurers talk of identifying with their team – their grandparents would, of course, used identify to talk not of a subjective process of belonging, but an objective process of witnessing, as in, can you identify the man who you saw shoot mr x in this courtroom? Conservative hearts break as the columnar Id falls to the ground, but that’s life, kiddo.

Linde’s article introduces a marvelous phrase: narrative induction. “I define narrative induction as the process by which people come to take on an existing set of stories as their own story…” (2000:608)My editor’s eye was pleased and did a little dance all over my face to see that this was the second sentence in the article – getting people to forthrightly state their topic is, surprisingly, one of the hardest things about editing academic papers. Most graduate students have concluded, from experience, that the best way to make a point is to hide it somewhere, perhaps on page 5, and hope that their advisor doesn’t see it for fear of being attacked. The rough and tumble of intellectual debate is the Ur-traumatic experience of the classroom – funny that this hasn’t been investigated, rather than mindlessly celebrated. But alors, avancez, boys and girls!

Narrative induction properly locates story as part of a process of initiation (which, being a “native” thing, or occult, failed to qualify for the verbal place held by identify with). Linde, in this paper, is obviously moving from her concern with stories people tell about themselves – the point of which is to say something significant about the self, and not the world – to stories people tell about the world. Those stories often are about experiences not one’s own. They are non-participant narratives.

Linde divides the NPN process– as she calls it – into three bits: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others; and how that story is heard by others as an instance of a normative pattern.

There is an area, as Linde points out, where work on this has been done: in religious studies. Specifically, the study of metanoia, conversion stories. But there’s metanoia and then there’s metanoia. There’s St. Paul on the way to Damascas, and there’s Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, on the way to the relative wealth of a Toyota Car Dealership, owned by his father-in-law. Linde, not having access to St. Paul, opted to study the trainees of a major American insurance company in the Midwest. Like Labov, Linde is interested in class issues. In particular, stories of occupational choice. In her Life Stories book, she presented some evidence that professionals present their occupational choice stories in terms of some vocation or calling, while working class speakers present it, more often, in terms of accident or need for money. Philosophy professors rarely will say, for instance, well, I needed a steady paycheck, looked at the job security of tenure, loved the idea of travel and vacation time, so I went into philosophy. They will give a story rooted in their view of themselves as emotional/cognitive critters. Labov’s work was done in the seventies, and my guess is that there has been some shift. The NYT recently published an article about “quants” in finance, many of whom came from physics, and their stories were all without a moral/personal dimension – they were all about money, not interest in finance. Interestingly, as a sort of saving face gesture, they all talked about how there are “deep problems” in finance.

ps - I cut this off a bit too abruptly. The notion that it is all chance for the blue collar worker, all vocation for the white collar, actually tallies well with the political economists notion that abstract labor is a thing like clay, to mold as you want to: we will train workers over here in the steel producing sector, and take off some here who are growing tomatoes. They won't mind - human products are infinitely re-trainable, and have no feelings about what they do.

That this story has become, in a positive version, the story parents and teachers tell their children - you can make a lot of money doing "x" - led to the cultural conditions against which The Human Limit turns its stony face.

On the other end - the financial strata is read out of the upper class in a wonderful op ed piece by Judith Warner in the NYT this morning. Warner is what I want my bourgeoisie to be like: neurotic, protective, literate, and forever in thrall to a college experience in the Ivies, as my friend M. calls them. She is the kind of liberal who cried at Obama's inauguration speech - and I am another.

Anyway, I find it interesting that the NYT is belatedly sounding like LI from, say, 2005:

"When was it, exactly, that the titans of Wall Street, among their many other perks and privileges, got to be crowned with the title of “best and brightest”?

Certainly not in the early 19th century, when Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his love poem “The Invitation,” called, “Best and brightest, come away!” Nor in the early 20th century, when “The Education of Henry Adams” featured a sad, exalted tribute to the geologist Clarence King as the “best and brightest man of his generation.”

The ability to make big bucks wasn’t the chief characteristic of the “best and brightest,” “each new man more brilliant than the last,” whom David Halberstam described in the 1972 book that brought the phrase into our common parlance. His “best and brightest” were ultimately no better than ours; their “arrogance and hubris” led us into the debacle of Vietnam. But they did at least embody a different order of aspiration. They “wrote books and won prizes (even the president had won a Pulitzer prize), climbed mountains to clear their minds. Many of them read poetry and some were said to be able to quote it.”

And this image of best and brightness — however ironic, however laced with foreshadowing of deserved downfall — was, says Susan Jacoby, the author, most recently, of “The Age of American Unreason,” a best-selling account of contemporary anti-intellectualism, the sense that endured behind the phrase for decades. Until this last boom cycle — that irrational bubble-world of the late 1990s and beyond — stamped its values upon every aspect of our world, right down to the language we use to talk about it."

shadows

Le monde est créé de telle sorte que le mouvement y est plus fort que l’immobilité, la dynamique plus forte que la statique : toutes les princesses endormies se réveillent - D. Merezhovsky

I meant to write about myth here, and plot, and conspiracy, and folklore - I meant to discuss Christina Wolf’s essay on Karoline von Günderode - Karoline, who was famous in the nineteenth century – Karoline, heroine and fiction of Bettina von Arnim’s book, Günderode, in which Karoline’s letters weere re-written, her life defended, her ghost drained of what was left of her living reality - Karoline, whose novelized biography was translated by Margaret Fuller and no doubt read by the heroine of the Bostonians, if not by her author. I meant to take the story of her suicide as the last act of a persistant mythomania, and use it as an intro to Creuzer’s book on symbolism - and use that to pose questions about how the great tradition encoded the little tradition, the encyclopedia encoded the labyrinth, the longing for monsters rose in the depths of philology. Georg Creuzer, an ugly, stumpy man – or so Bettina thought, and Creuzer himself thought he was bad looking – was the proximate cause of Karoline’s death. Although, as Wolf points out, that may be an unjust claim. In any case, the cause was literal – or letter-al The letters from Karoline to Creuzer that have survived the flames – ironically, in the letters saved by his wife, Sophie, a woman fifteen years older than him, the widow of his adviser at the university no less, around whom the two lovers developed their elaborate and at first exciting game of peekaboo adultery, fantasies of escape, divorce, the third who was always with them - show a woman who is advancing to the dissolution of the most radical impediment to the union of two hearts, individuality itself. Life. She was, like Kleist, in love with suicide as apotheosis. When it came, it came in the form of a letter, and that letter in the form of a crooked path that is reminiscent of both the letter of Bellerophon and the Purloined Letter of Poe. Creuzer resolved to break with Karoline once and for all, and wrote a letter to a mutual correspondent, Daub, to give to her. Daub, frightened of that responsibility, sent the letter to another mutual friend and go between, Susanna von Haiden. Susanna did not want to hand Karoline the letter, or go to where she was staying with her friends, Pauline and Lotte Serviere, so she enclosed both letters in another letter, and then faked the handwriting of the address – apparently to Pauline - and the seal. Karoline, however, was burning, burning in the Serviere house, burning to be a ghost or a bride - and so in this invisible flame, the net around her, Ananke, Indra, all the nets, the chains, we image our emotions to each other as ties, links, bonds, she saw the postman, got the letters, saw the faked address, opened it, went into her room, and emerged an hour later, seemingly in a very good mood. She announced she was taking a walk. Who knows if she procured the knife then, from the kitchen, or had it in waiting. She went to the bank of the Rhine and stabbed herself in the heart, falling into the shallows.

In a letter to Karoline, Creuzer had written of his Symbolik book that he wanted “to apply the best fruit of my manly intellectual power to a work that, insofar as it strives to reveal the center of pious, holy antiquity, would not be unworthy to be brought as a sacrifice to poetry.” But in the end, it was poetry made the sacrifice.

Philology extinguishes all flames. Rohde edited Creuzer's letters. A philologist, classicist himself, friend of Overbeck and Nietzsche.

These letters have cursed me. They’ve stopped up my thought process. Which is why I am countering, here, with the conditional, with what I might have written.
Creuzer saved his letters to Caroline, except, I believe, that last one. He burnt her letters to him – except for those stolen by his wife, Sophie. All fevers spent, he went on to become quite a successful academic, a point of transfer of German scholarship into France through his friendship with Quinet and Michelet.

The surgeon who did the autopsy on Karoline’s corpse suggested that her spinal column showed, unmistakeably, that she was the suicidal type.

What do we know about people?

Here is my translation of one of her poems.

Can I endure the hot wishes in my heart?
See the blooming crown of life
And uncrowned pass it by,
And not sadly lose all hope in myself?

Shall I criminally renounce the dearest wish
Bravely go to the kingdom of shadows
To beg for other delights, other gods
Ask the dead for new delusions?

Indeed, I climbed down into Pluto’s realm
In the bosom of the nights burned the glow of love
Longingly shadows there leaned on shadows.

He is lost whom love does not favor.
Even if he climbs down into the stygian depths
He will remain an exile from heaven’s light.

Kann ich im Herzen heiße Wünsche tragen?
Dabei des Lebens Blütenkränze sehn,
Und unbekränzt daran vorübergehn,
Und muß ich trauernd nicht in mir verzagen?

Soll frevelnd ich dem liebsten Wunsch entsagen?
Soll mutig ich zum Schattenreiche gehn?
Um andre Freuden, andre Götter flehn,
Nach neuen Wonnen bei den Toten fragen?

Ich stieg hinab, doch auch in Plutons Reichen,
Im Schoß der Nächte, brennt der Liebe Glut,
Daß sehnend Schatten sich zu Schatten neigen.

Verloren ist, wen Liebe nicht beglücket,
Und stieg er auch hinab zur styg'schen Flut,
Im Glanz der Himmel blieb er unentzücket.

ps. I asked Aimie if I could put her last comment in this post - as a sort of converstational partner. A reply ... although the word reply so quickly takes us to the legal perspective on dialogue, in which the utterance becomes a list of point, to be rebutted or defended. However, I think of this reply as a mashup, a teasing out of the whole complex of sounds and references.

A: LI, I do not quite know how to write a post on Hölderlin or offer advice on doing so, but I do hope you do! Not to put you on the spot or something, it's just that this post has been haunting me. I had previously read that Karoline von Günderrode admired Hölderlin, but I did not know about the garden of the Cronstett Sisterhood abutting the garden of the Gontard family! Hölderlin was no longer there and as far as one knows Karoline never met Susette, but who is to say she wasn't brushed by the shadows of those two, forever there, in that adjoining garden. Hölderlin wrote to Neuffer in a letter: "dear friend, there is a being in this world on whom my spirit can and will dwell for millennia..."

Shadows and letters. A hand pursuing a shadow across a blank page, and not just the shadow of one's own hand writing.

Karoline also admired Schelling. Identity philosophy which you mention in the latest post! Which makes me think of the other Caroline you have mentioned in your posts. You're right , Schiller hated her, called her Madame Lucifer. Hegel didn't much care for her either. After her death, Hegel wrote to Immanuel Niethammer that many " have enunciated the hypothesis that the Devil had fetched her." But Mr.Hegel, it would seem, was never at ease with women who, you know, had spirit. Such devils!

But let us go through the letters and the shadows to June 1800 and read a letter from Caroline's daughter Auguste to Schelling. "I tell her [Caroline] how much he [Schelling] loves you and she gets all soft; the first time I told her, she wanted to know how much you loved her. Since that was out of my ken, I quickly responded more than anything. She was satisfied, and I hope you will be as well." At this time, though Caroline and Schelling are lovers, she is still married to August Schlegel. On 12 July, Auguste who is barely 15 dies. Caroline writes to her friend Louise Gotter: "I am only half alive and wander like a shadow over the earth."
Ah, how shadows and letters gather. Caroline had already known scandal and stories on her heels after Mainz. Now, the stories say that Auguste was to be married to Schelling, or that Schelling interfered with her treatment by the doctor, or that Caroline had her killed to have Schelling for herself, or that they were practicing Schelling's "nature philosophy" for her cure. Dorothea,for one, makes no bones about it in her letters, referring to Auguste as the "sacrificial lamb". Frederich Schlegel turned against her too. The shadows grew beyond private letters and tea-parlour gossip. They made the pages of the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung in Jena. Amazingly enough it is August Schlegel who publicly came to the support of Caroline and Schelling.
I want to quote another letter - from Caroline to Schelling in March 1801. It is when the latter is hard pressed on all sides in his philosophy. It is really all I wanted to quote in this comment which is getting insanely long.

"It occurs to me that for his [Fichte's] incomparable power of thought, his powerful mode of drawing conclusions, his clarity, exactness, his direct intuition of the I and the inspiration of the discoverer, that he is yet limited....When you have broken through a barrier that he has not yet overcome, then I have to believe that you have accomplished this, not so much as a philosopher - if I'm using the term incorrectly , don't scold me - but because you have poetry and he has none. It leads you directly to production, while the sharpness of his perception leads him to consciousness. he has light in its most bright brightness, but you also have warmth; the former can on only enlighten, while the latter is productive....In my opinion, Spinoza must have had far more poetry than Fichte - if thought isn't tinctured with it, doesn't something lifeless remain therein?"

OK, I'll admit that I love this letter. Now this is advice indeed, and quite different to the tepid whatever that Goethe and Schiller handed out to Hölderlin about philosophy, poetry and "human interests".
Caroline and Schelling will marry in June 1803. Which would be the last meeting between the old friends - Schelling and Hölderlin. Almost exactly a year ago, Hölderlin had returned from his voyage on foot to the South of France, to Bordeaux where he wrote a friend in a letter that "he had been touched by the fire of Apollo." Returned to receive a letter that Susette had died on June 22nd, 1802.
Schelling will write to Hegel about his "distress" at how gone Hölderlin seemed, and ask for his help. After all, Hölderlin was Hegel's best friend wasn't he. Hegel would demur, say that he didn't see how being in Jena could possibly help Hölderlin. "Where are my friends?", is a repeated phrase in Hölderlin's poems.

Caroline Schelling died in 1809. Shortly after her death, Schelling would write in a letter: "I now need friends who are not strangers to the real seriousness of pain..." And he had this inscribed on her tombstone:

Gott hat sie mir gegeben
Der Tod kann sie mir nicht rauben.
.....

claim, harm, interest, the modern

According to the OED, the etymology of the word ‘interest’ is mysterious. Until the sixteenth century, interest was spelled interess in English. It seems to have come from inter-esse, between being. It meant a claim on, a share in – what you give is what you take, potlatch rules. But the old French was interet, and it meant loss, or damage. Somehow, the “t” made its perilous way across the channel and stuck itself to interess. Which of course still meant share, claim, and contained economic meanings that would pacify Shylock – but it also broadened out to mean being curious about. Is curiosity a harm? Does the evil eye drill a hole in your soul? Or is the object or person or event claiming you? Or you, it?

Kant in the Critique of Judgement cut bait and decided that the aesthetic, at least, could not be reduced to the useful. The beautiful is without interest – although, with Kant, that moment of disinterestedness gives a satisfaction.Friedrich Schlegel, in his study of Greek Poetry, has his own sense of Kant’s beauty – beauty is not, to read Schlegel one way, for the moderns, precisely because it does not damage, it does not claim. It is an ancient ideal. The modern ideal is the interesting. Schlegel was 22 at the time he wrote his essay. He was in Dresden. It was the year of retraction – 1794-1795 in France.

I will take this up in another post.

Is there a Minotaur in Eden?

Ah, how often she watched a cow with spite in her face and said, “why does that one please my lord? Look how she frisks before him in the delicate grass; no doubt the fool thinks it suits her!” – Ovid, Amores

The Greeks had a golden age, but no Garden of Eden. No initial shock at nakedness. Although there were, of course, the prohibitions. Artemis, bathing, is seen by Acteon, who is punished for his vision. But here it is the goddess who is naked, not the human.

No Eden, then, but a labyrinth.

Pliny, in the Natural History, claims that labyrinths are “the most stupendous works, perhaps, on which mankind has expended its labors; and not for chimerical purposes, merely, as might possibly be supposed.” The Egyptians, in Pliny’s account, got there first. Daedalus was a copier. The Nome of Heracleopolites was the first.

“…that Daedalus took this for the model of the Labyrinth which he constructed in Crete is beyond doubt; though he only reproduced the 100th part of it, that portion, namely, which encloses circuitous paths, windings, and inextricable galleries which lead to and fro. We must not, comparing this last to what we see delineated on our mosaic pavements, or to the mazes formed in the fields for the amusement of children, suppose it to be a narrow promenade along which we may walk for many miles together; but we must picture to ourselves a building filled with numerous doors, and galleries which continually mislead the visitor, bringing him back, after all his wanderings, to the spot from whence he set out.” [340]


Detienne, in his essay, the Labyrinth and the Crane, claims that the matter of labyrinth consisted, at first, of corporal gestures – a dance. The dance was an imitation of the waggle of the cranes, holy birds who, in the Mediterranean world, were recognized for their long flights. Detienne quotes a Greek manuscript that explains how the crane navigated:

“In zoological reports, the crane is a marvelously skilled navigator and so bold that its migration leads it from the coldest parts of the world, the plains of Scythia, to the hottest, Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. According to a formula in the History of Animals by Aristotle, the crane flies from one extreme of the world to the other, it ties together the two parts of the world. To this performance, the geranos adds the memorable expedient of a preparative that became proverbial. On departing for its flight, each of the cranes in their prudence would carry a pebble, a little stone that would permit them to mark, according to the noise that it made in falling, if the flight was going over the sea or the air. This trick was destined to render credible the fact that the migratory bird oriented itself in actuality in the immensity of the sky. The highflying cranes were thus a given that navigators parting for the open waters search for in the marks and signs above their heads in the middle of the night, when it was necessary to conjecture according to the stars, as the greek sailors said. It is pertinent that the poverb, the cranes pick up their pebbles, was said of those who act with prudence.These great birds possessed in an exemplary fashion the capacity to foresee to the point that they seemed to know intuitively the nature of the airs, the changing of the seasons and, so to speak, the map of the world.”

Detienne moves in his essay from the cranes, the world travelers, to the bulls, which figure so much in the myth of the labyrinth. In the quote from Ovid above, Pasiphae is being figured. Pasiphae could never have given birth to the Minotaur, half man, half beast, if it weren’t for technology – the artisan, Daedelus’ marvelous bull fucking machine. One must remember that the couple Minos/Pasiphae was both cursed in their sexual being – for disobeying Poseidon, Minos could only ejaculate scorpions. Pasiphae, similarly cursed, fell in love with Poseidon’s bull (as always, dynasty is the key to counter-generality – the Cretan royal house stems, after all, from Zeus’s rape of Europa, in which Zeus was the bull).

… and his maneuvers [Poseidon’s] betrayed Pasiphae to unlimited desires which a foreign artisan named Daedalus had the ingenuity to know how to satisfy. Sheathed in wood and bridled in leather, which the whole assemblage giving her the appearance of a virgin cow in heat, the queen coupled with the bull to reproduce, in an inversion of the role of the partners that produced the union which gave birth to Minos himself. By the violence of desire that Poseidon had rise up from the depths of her being, Pasiphae, ensavaged, gave herself up to loves that were as bestial as the embraces of Europa and Zeus were divine, when the god borrowed the guise of the bull in its nature as lover.”

Labyrinths come in many materials, but they all hide some central fact or object. Where there is a secret, there is a labyrinth. And of course there is a clue, a thread, something that binds the secret to the world. The flight of the cranes and the net of Ananke, here, are about that unity binding the two extremes of the earth. Encyclopedias, on the other hand, have as many passages as labyrinths, exhibit as many dead ends and links, but have no middle nor secret. This is their secret. Diderot went to prison for having no secret at all. The Encyclopedia is the labyrinth turned inside out. Seemingly it is all outlets, here, and no middle – except itself. For it is in the encyclopedia that the human limit is erased. It is no longer cranes that bind the world in their flight, nor the dances of the crane, nor perverse desires – which are themselves the object of encyclopedists – but the encyclopedia itself. Man, not Minotaur. If anything, in the encyclopedia, labyrinth sits in the middle of labyrinth.

If we took a mythical approach to the enlightenment, we could, allegorically, imagine the three Critiques as the seraphim around the encyclopedia – and so translate the labyrinth into an Eden. This isn’t far from the allegorical impulse of the great Romantics: remember Novalis’ encyclopedia. If there is a public transcript of the great tradition, it is surely the encyclopedia. According to Scott’s schema, only the little tradition possesses a hidden transcript, uninstitutionalized, jokey, tricky. The wisdom of the buffoon, of Sancho Panza. But is this so? In fact, the modern is full of attempts to show that the powerful also have a hidden transcript. How many Ariadne’s and their threads have been touted for their knowledge of the center of the encyclopedia?

Transgression as innocence

Having tried to get into Paradise through the back door, we have found, instead, a curious gap in the reading of Sade: the fact that Sade’s libertines use a very un-libertine ethnography. Far from extending his hand, so to speak, to his predecessors like Foigny and Lahontan, Sade picks up on the most extreme descriptions of cruelty amassed by the biased witness of priests intent on subduing the savage. Is this irony? Or is this a necessity generated by Sade’s game – the rules of which, as Klossowski points out, depend on a perpetually renewed outrage. In the Sadeian system, the notion of universal perversion – counter-generality – comes into conflict with the ludic necessity for outrage.

In a sense, then, Sade’s system of transgression cancels itself out. It turns out to be the path of pins going forward to the wolf in grandma’s clothing. Counter-generality dissolves in the submission to the iron law that forwards is equal to backwards – the paths are the same. So saith the white magic. Whereas for the black magician…

We are dealing with what James C. Scott, in a series of articles in the seventies, called the conflict between the Great tradition and the little tradition. He took those phrases from Robert Redfield, a University of Chicago anthropologist who studied Mexican villages – like his friend, George Foster, the man who wrote the paper on the image of the limited good. Scott, in the seventies, was mulling over his field work in Southeast Asia. At the time, there was, of course, a lot of interest in peasant revolts – one of them seemed to have blown away the American behemoth in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the material shadows, the Green revolution was eating away the very substance and fiber of those peasant communities. Scott, in Indonesia, had a chance to see the part world (to borrow Kroeber’s phrase, which had been borrowed by Redfield) of the peasant. Bateson, Geerz, Scott, Danzinger – Indonesia was obviously one of those cold war peripheries in which the metropolitan culture experimented.

Scott’s theory in the early seventies, before he codified it in the book on hidden transcripts and resistance, was that peasant culture exhibited a double structure. On the one hand, it was on the peasant’s ability to supply food that the urban elite culture of the Great Tradition depended. On the other hand, it was on the Great Tradition, implanted by numerous avatars in the part world – the priest, the teacher, the commissar – that the Little Tradition of the peasant depended. But that Little Tradition was not a transcription of the Great Tradition, it was a variation of it, substituting concrete objects for abstractions, and local cults for Great cults. The part world lacked the institutional means to reproduce itself, which is why it reproduced itself, as it were, inside the Great Tradition.

“The very particularism of the little tradition has two important implications. First it means that, by itself, the village lacks the institutional means for a direct confrontation with a vastly more powerful great tradition. The peasantry constitutes a local society or, at best, a county society, while elites are linked together at the provincial and national level. While confrontations may nevertheless be im- posed, the historic strength of the little tradition has resided in dissimulation, foot-dragging, and passive non-compliance. One might even call this kind of Brechtian tenacity the normal pattern of class struggle for the peasantry.139 Second, it means that the peasantry is, by itself, ill-equipped, in terms of both knowledge and interest, to sustain a national struggle for broad goals. Thus, most peasant movements or armies are coalitions of local groups which, like Zapata's forces, operate locally, champion local issues, and are relatively indifferent to national issues except as they affect the fortunes of the local struggle.”

That dissimulation is immediately recognizable in the greatest allegory of the great/little tradition, Don Quixote, although Scott doesn’t mention it. This is where the modern begins. We’ve been circling around transgression because it is central to a form of resistance to the happiness culture that traverses, in effect, our three traditions of alienation (liberal, radical, reactionary). In the doubles which we keep coming across, the sage and the fool, Dom Juan and Sganarelle, Diderot and Rameau’s nephew, we see embodied the versus of the Great/Little tradition. The savage is certainly one of the figures in this constellation. Adario, who, shockingly, speaks in the tones of the Great Tradition – the infallible mark of his ficticity, to Lahontan’s many, many critics – is defending the golden age that the Little tradition dreams of. This is the innocence that forms another modality of transgression.

“In fact there is good reason to believe that within every great tradition rebellion with mass support there is also a little tradition revolt that threatens to usurp that rebellion for its parochial ends. This "revolution in the revolution" is typically denounced by radical elites as adventurism, deviation, or anarchy. Just as often, of course, it is the radical elite which attempts to usurp a rebellion begun by peasants and to put it to ends which its supporters do not recognize and, indeed, might disavow. One may even detect an additive, temporal dimension to these "layers" of rebellion akin to syncretism in religion. That is, the goals of purely little tradition rebellions have something of an ahistorical, permanent quality to them, like animism. When self-consciously revolutionary elites emerge to link up with these older patterns, they tend to add a new dimension to the revolt but not to eliminate the parochial forms in the process.”

We are going to turn to the science of myth, next.