Booty 2: that convenient sword, that neckline

I say, there are background assumptions that we operate with. I say, there are routines, there are moral sanctions that fade into the background. How does something “fade”? Here no doubt I could produce a story of use, or repetition, of the wearing away of novelty. Like the metaphors that become metaphysical concepts in one, materialist reduction of metaphysics, like the natural events that become Gods, in one early anthropological account of the gods, the everyday moral synthesis – say, operating on the binary naked/clothed to let us sort through the situations in which nakedness is allowed and the situations in which it is sanctioned – becomes a matter not of our election so much as of our imitation. It is the powerful weight of what other’s do that determines, for the most part, what we do. And how do the others decide? Well, we could tell a number of stories here.

This is the naïve sociological view. It is the view of, for instance, Hume, when he attributes to custom what he takes away from the metaphysical foundations of cause. And in fact we can find other customary treatments of cause, which would seem to lend some credence to Hume.

The problem with this story is that we can watch in our own lifetimes and see routines fade, and then intensify. We can, for instance, see that the binary of naked/clothed operates not just one unity upon the other, but each interpenetrates each. We measure, for instance, how much clothes show. We have a sense of what we are showing and what we aren’t. At the same time, we have a numbness or a sensitivity to what ornament negates the naked. A belly button ring, a tattoo are not on the side of the clothed – but aren’t on the side of the naked, either. A man or woman takes off a wedding ring and says, I feel naked, but they don’t quite mean completely unclothed.

And of course, the naked and the clothed are caught up in our collective erogenous zones. They are continually “coming alive” as differently disposed binaries, defined by different notions of modesty, for instance, different notions of officialness, different ways of looking at all the not quite paraphilia of the body, hair, fingernails, teeth. Within this semantic space – that in which the naked and the clothed operates – we find these potential differences that make us want to account for the different notions, want to give histories of what changes over time. Almost certainly, in the eighteenth century up to quite recently, the change from the naked to the clothed was interpreted as a clear progress. The biblical account of the fall, of course, implied that there was no clear progress in God’s eyes – there was a double meaning in the fact that Adam and Eve assumed clothing, since it was a reminder of sin, and it was a necessary condition for the social.

These then are the codes. These then are the breaks. And then there is a system of myth in which the need to explain the naked/clothed binary seemed missing. Or at least different.

In Peacock’s Crotchet Castle (1823), Mr. Crotchet, the Scots/Jewish businessman who, in his retirement, has provided himself with a big house and the enlightened company of people with all kinds of views –– reads in the paper that there was “an order that
no plaster-of-Paris Venus should appear in the streets without petticoats.”

“Mr. Crotchet, on reading this order in the eveningpaper, which, by the postman's early arrival, was always laid onhis breakfast-table, determined to fill his house with Venuses of all sizes and kinds. In pursuance of this resolution, came packages by water-carriage, containing an infinite variety of Venuses. There were the Medicean Venus, and the Bathing Venus; the Uranian Venus, and the Pandemian Venus; the Crouching Venus, and
the Sleeping Venus; the Venus rising from the sea, the Venus with the apple of Paris, and the Venus with the armour of Mars.” In the course of the book, the vicar, the Reverend Doctor Folliott, who is usually seen praising and quoting the Greeks to his baffled companions, is “much astonished at this unexpected display. Disposed, as he was, to hold, that whatever had been in Greece, was right; he was more than doubtful of the propriety of throwing open the classical adytum to the illiterate profane.” In consequence, the two engage in one of Peacock’s whimsical dialogues, in the course of which Crotchet, who is less classically educated than an old fashioned, eighteenth century type, tells the vicar the following:

“MR. CROTCHET. Sir, the Lacedaemonian virgins wrestled naked with
young men; and they grew up, as the wise Lycurgus had foreseen,
into the most modest of women, and the most exemplary of wives and
mothers.

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Very likely, sir; but the Athenian virgins did
no such thing, and they grew up into wives who stayed at home--
stayed at home, sir; and looked after their husbands' dinner--his
dinner, sir, you will please to observe.

MR. CROTCHET. And what was the consequence of that, sir? that they
were such very insipid persons that the husband would not go home
to eat his dinner, but preferred the company of some Aspasia, or
Lais.”

After Folliott’s objection, Crotchet goes so far as to blast modern cant:

“MR. CROTCHET. Well, sir, that was not the taste of the Athenians.
They preferred the society of women who would not have made any
scruple about sitting as models to Praxiteles; as you know, sir,
very modest women in Italy did to Canova; one of whom, an Italian
countess, being asked by an English lady, "how she could bear it?"
answered, "Very well; there was a good fire in the room."

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Sir, the English lady should have asked how the
Italian lady's husband could bear it. The phials of my wrath would
overflow if poor dear Mrs. Folliott -: sir, in return for your
story, I will tell you a story of my ancestor, Gilbert Folliott.
The devil haunted him, as he did Saint Francis, in the likeness of
a beautiful damsel; but all he could get from the exemplary Gilbert
was an admonition to wear a stomacher and longer petticoats.”

Mr. Crotchett, however, holds to his wrestling Lacedaemonian virgins

In 1823, however, this was definitely the losing side.
But in 1799?

“For David, the nude signified art because it signified antiquity. In his "Note on the Nudity of My Heroes," the painter described the nude as a greater artistic achievement than the clothed figure and offered a classical pedigree for the ideal form. He explicitly stated that his goal was to paint a work that the Greeks and Romans would not have found foreign to their customs. Significantly, the artist presumed that authenticity, even transparency, to the classical world would be valued in modern France. To speak to the ancients was to speak to Frenchmen, but the signs of that veracity (male nudity) required an exegesis, even a defense, ap- pended to the brochure that addressed his fellow country- men. David's goal, that the ancients would not find his painting foreign to their customs, admitted the possibility of disparate cultural boundaries, but his unexamined assump- tion that Frenchmen would respect and understand the language of the ancients refused to acknowledge such funda- mental difference. The painter's profound faith in the socio- political efficacy and relevance of classicism could not fully control the paradox between universalist and relativist models of culture. David would never know whether the ancients found his tableau foreign to their customs, but he certainly discovered that many of his countrymen considered it alien to their own.”

Mohawk Booty, Greek Booty, Your Booty

The only serious rival to the “glorious Greek” was the “noble savage,” preferably North American. And the genius of that Prince of Arrivistes, Benjamin West, was able to combine the two. When in 1760 he was shown the Apollo Belvedere he started back and exclaimed, “My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!” - Winckelmann and the Second Renascence, 1755-1955, by Gilbert Bagnani American Journal of Archaeology, 1955(115)

Darcy G. Grigsby’s Nudity a la grecque in 1799 focuses on David’s rehabilitation in that year (in a new society in which revolutionary associations in one’s past were considered damning) that took the form of his exhibition of his Sabines paintings. David wrote a brochure to hand out to visitors (of which there were perhaps fifty thousand in all) in defense of his work, and in particular in defense of the male nude. It was also a defense of the artist as entrepreneur: “Isn’t it an idea that is as fair as it is wise that those who procure for the arts the means of existing themselves sustain themselves by their proper resources, and enjoy the noble independence that is natural to genius (qui convient au genie) and without which the fire that he animates is soon extinguished? On the other side, what more dignified means to extract an honorable part of the fruit of his labor than to submit it to the judgment of the public, and to only expect recompense from the welcome that they wish to give it?” (Necklines, 325) Grigsby’s essay disputes those historians who view the painting, which he calls The Intervention of the Sabines (also known as the Sabine women, or the Combat of the Sabines and the Romans) as a success, at least in terms of the “welcome” the public wished to give it. Grigsby’s argument is this:

“David's text arguably attempted to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries seized his terms and continued to dispute both choices for years. I would argue that the controversies were interrelated and that the scandal of David's tableau resided in the ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of genders and classes that made David's epic painting such a provocation to the critics of Directory France.”

Nudity – the shock of the mingling of genders – the shock of the mingling of classes – haven’t we seen this before? As Benjamin West might have remarked, it all has a Mohawk sound. If we are to make universal history, blindly, one of our first steps is to unmingled the things that aren’t to be mingled. Lahontan’s fictional factional Huron, Adario, saw perfectly plainly that the Jesuits in New France were ardent stratifiers. The rediscovery of Greek art put into doubt this stratification – that was its force. Rediscovery in the strong sense – as Bagnani shows by enumerating the editions of Greek classics after the Renaissance, the period between the middle of the 17th century and Winckelmann had been one in which the study of Greek culture was almost arrested as a scholarly affair. The Greeks lost their prestige, while Latin, which any schoolboy could read, became, again, the grid through which the past was read.

To be continued…

Laocoon/Columbus

The savage and the civilized, that world historical couple, show up, conceptualizing ghosts, ghosts of concepts, transfigured outlines of the victim and the victim’s victim, in the oddest places. Consider the parallel between, on the one hand, the exhibited savage – Pocohantas at King James court, or the Venus Hottentot – and classical statuary. Not, perhaps, a couple you would expect. They do play a similar synecdochal role, parts – especially private parts – standing in for wholes; and – given that geographies for the eighteenth century European were cast as different levels of temporality upon that new measuring stick, progress – the Greeks and Romans were increasingly seen in savage terms themselves. Or rather, by the end of the 18th century, Laffitau’s famous remark that the customs of the Iroquois reminded him of the ancient Greeks was becoming a filter by which the ancient Greeks reminded the classicist of the Iroquois.

The Great Transformation was, among other things, a great forgetting - Heidegger is right. Except what was forgotten was not being but becoming - the machinery that produced the savage and the civilized, and how the outcome, at the end of the day's work, was always uncertain. Was today's product the savage or the civilized? the peasant or the frontiersman? A gnostic history does not ask: what was the secret of the West? It asks what was the West's secret sharer. It looks for doubles and incognitos. All of our histories are tangled with the history of the rise of the happy culture, the culture in which happiness becomes a norm, an ideal, the hinge that connects the govererned to the governors.

The background of Goethe’s trip, what traverses it, is that it is a trip away, on the one hand, from an emotional geography – the dark Cimmerian skies, as Goethe puts it, are exchanged for the bright skies under which the orange trees bloom – and on the other hand away from the modern. When we move away from the modern, we move into the epistemological net of “discovery”, our cognitive key.

Discovery, savages, colonies, exhibitions. These threads are wound around each other.



The decade after Columbus discovered America, in January 14, 1506, in a vineyard in Rome, an underground room was discovered in which had been sealed a statue. The statue was identified by a Florentine architect, working for Pope Julius, Giuliano da Sangallo. Amazingly, Sangallo saw right away that it was the Laocoon described by Pliny as one of the greatest statues of the Hellenic period. Sangallo’s friend, Michelangelo, might have been there that day, too. Recently, an art historian, Lynn Catterson, has claimed that Michelangelo actually forged the statue. The Laocoon is prone to claims about its provenance, since it seems to some to be a Roman copy of a Hellenic statue, and for others it might actually be a Hellenic statue. Pope Julius immediately purchased it and put it in the Cortile de Belvedere.

The metaphor of statuary, as well as accounts and thoughts about statues themselves, are scattered throughout Goethe’s Italian Journey. The reason for this is that Goethe became sensitized to Italy not only through his father’s own trip there, but also through the late Winckelmann, of whom Goethe will write a long biographical essay. Winckelmann is the tutelary guide to this Incognito. Winckelmann, that great man for marble, whose murder shocked the enlightened spirits of Europe.

The great debate between Winckelmann and Lessing about the Laocoon was, really, about the system of the arts – what are the powers of the third life and how are they exhibited, to phrase it in my own vocabulary. The debate – we are not straying, we are straying – was about pain and its representation.

Reading Winckelmann’s Considerations of imitations of Greek works in painting and sculpture and considering the equation, variously calculated, between Greeks and savages, we soon discover that statues figure here in terms of colonies – and indeed, that there is a geopolitics of colonization that subtends the system of the arts:

“Good taste, which has distributed itself more and more widely through the world, began to develop first under the Greek skies. All the discoveries of the foreign peoples came like the first seeds to Greece, and took on another nature and shape in that land, where it is said that Minerva preferred to live, before all lands that she had hitherto encountered, on account of its mild seasons, as a land which brought forth clever heads.”

Under the skies (Himmel) – like Montesquieu, like Adam Smith, Winckelmann sees a strong connection between geography and culture. We are, though, approaching a moment in which that connection inverts. In the nineteenth century, the geography of warmth and bright skies becomes that under which stagnation and laziness flourishes. Not yet, however. And that nineteenth century theme was always traversed by a doubt – the doubt implanted by the classicist tradition. Here, the flow of influences seem to go from warm skies to cold wildernesses. For Winckelmann, certainly, the North was a barbarian place colonized by the Greeks: “And one must confess that the reign of August the Great is the actually happy point in time in which the arts, as a foreign colony, were introduced into Saxony.”

But it is not simply a colonial irradiation. For the Greeks did not come as conquerors, even if their arts colonized the northern climes. However, what is certain here is that the arts are a colonizing force. There’s clearly a certain politics of the savage, a certain mission, in which good taste takes form. Just as Derrida points out in The White Mythology, there seems to be a pattern attractor which, again and again, brings together these skies, these forests, these savages, this good taste, this movement – from East to West, from South to North. But the movements are delicate, the patterns can be reverse, ilynx is always possible. The Greek is destined to become a savage as he becomes less rococo. There’s a distressing miss match between the colonizer and the civilized. On the one hand, a moment opens up in which the wilderness will make its claim. On the other hand, the fact that the colonized are the more civilized – the Greek slave is the teacher to the Roman master – opens up what Bloch would call a utopian element in art. It is an eternal monument of the greatness of this monarch, that in order to promote the development of good taste he brought out of Italy the greatest treasures, whatever was perfect in the painting of other lands, and exhibited it before the eyes of all the world.”

But I have gone too far here. I need to turn back. Because, under my own incognito, I want to contemplate this splendid passage, which has the sound of a destiny:

“Der einzige Weg für uns, groß, ja, wenn es möglich ist, unnachahmlich zu werden, ist die Nachahmung der Alten, und was jemand vom Homer gesagt, daß derjenige ihn bewundern lernt, der ihn wohl verstehen gelernt, gilt auch von den Kunstwerken der Alten, sonderlich der Griechen. Man muß mit ihnen, wie mit seinem Freunde, bekannt geworden sein, um den Laokoon ebenso unnachahmlich als den Homer zu finden.”

discovery and knowledge

And so Goethe leaves behind Weimar, where he has official responsibilities, and goes to Italy as his father had, as Winklemann had, as Herder had – the great trip. But he goes under an incognito – an unknown man in unknown territory. The function of being “unknown” is, of course, relative to a knower. To take on an incognito is the same as coming down with amnesia; but, in a curious way, it mimics amnesia. It projects a certain forgetting of oneself on others. It is, above all, a dramatic conceit. The Lord of Dark Corners, the King in Measure for Measure, for instance, pretends to go on a trip in order to return to his city, under an assumed name, and see that thing we all dream of seeing: what things are like when we aren’t there. But of course the dramatic conceit requires a secret third, an audience, for it to work dramatically. The comparative task is entrusted to the audience in this experiment in bi-location. Goethe takes the chance that he really will disappear – and there are murders on this trip, for sure. Winkelmann, after all, was murdered.

The incognito shapes this voyage of discovery. As I’ve pointed out, the divide between the North and the South takes on resonances of the within and the without, the European and the savage. You can’t have discovery without the savage, he must be somewhere. It is an odd that few people, that I know of, have remarked on one of the great flaws in Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses – the absence of any consideration of discovery. This was a crucial term in the episteme of the 17th and 18th century. Perhaps because it traverses the disciplines, it remains invisible to Foucault – there is no science of discovery – in contrast to the project of creating a science of knowing, the task to which a considerable part of philosophy, at that time and since, has devoted itself. Like “adventure”, “discovery” is diagonal to the grid of sciences, the order of words and things.

There is another reason, I suspect: Foucault’s stubborn refusal to open up the system of knowledge, centered in Europe, to the system of the world. As with the Annales school, with Braudel as our chief representative, here, one senses an active forgetting of the New World in Foucault.

But we amateurs of black magic find discovery everywhere. And its semiotic resonances. Goethe uses the term Entdeckungreise (Journey of discovery) to speak of a “friend” who went on one, presumably to Italy, and ended up eloping with the daughter of one of the natives “because he thought it was all part of the trip”. And, as we know from Pocahantas, he was right. The package deal includes taking the savage, or some piece of him or her, home. Goethe spends a lot of time thinking about collecting antiquities, making molds to send home to museums.

Collecting is in a field that is bounded by the savage, the ancient, and the rare. But it is also connected, by multiple connotations, to nemesis, to curses on the takers.

Leave that for another post. As an unknown – an incognito – Goethe effects a transformation on the things around him by removing the clutter of his own personality. Oddly, though he knows that he is Goethe, his incognito makes the things ‘forget’ he is Goethe. It clears a space between himself and them. Not only can he “see and read the things as they are” (212), but he has escaped the bonds of the character. He is not, here, the author of Werther. When Bertrand Russell considers the question of the author of Waverly from a logical point of view, he instinctively reaches for a royal example – the example of George IV identifying, or not, the author of Waverly with Walter Scott. Why a king? There’s no explanation given. I’d say, however, that the immediate reference to a king is a reference to the politics of the name, which is after all state business – the subject must be registered. Goethe is not just any incognito – he is the most famous author of his time. When he visited a place, he was celebrated. And if he had revealed who he was, he knew what the result would be. The reality was that if Goethe came to Rome as Goethe, he would have to visit certain dignitaries. It was part of his position in Weimar, and it would be a scandal if he didn’t follow through on this protocol. Goethe would insult them. By dispensing with his name, Goethe was suddenly put into a curious liminal position, and a slightly scandalous one.

He remarks: “My wonderful and perhaps whimsical half-incognito brings me advantages which I could not have imagined. Since everyone is used to ignoring who I am, and thus nobody has to talk to me about myself, nothing else remains than for people to talk about themselves or of objects that interest them, and through this I learn thoroughly what each is preoccupied with, or what curious things have happened and go on.”

Yet of course this is a half-incognito – some suspect the truth, and Goethe, behind the name, knows the truth. This desire to slip his social connections, to escape his subjectivity, can only half succeed – in the moment he writes, the escape disappears. He even calls this, at one point, my disappearance.

“Since I didn’t want my dear little incognito to be something like an ostrich [Strauss], who hides his head and thinks he is hidden, so I surrendered it at some points, observing my old thesis. I gladly greeted the Count von Liechtenstein, the brother of my dear friend, Baroness Harrach, and sometimes dined with him, and soon observed that my compliance here would lead me to other things, and so it proved.”

how otherwise was the living thing to the molded stone

Derrida begins the White Mythology with an excerpt from Anatole France’s Garden of Epicurus. In that essay, a dialogue takes place about metaphysics, in which one of the interlocutors, Polyphile, makes a suggestion that should sound familiar to those who’ve read the German ideology: the abstractions of metaphysics are all, in fact, images borrowed from images of matter. The soul, for instance, if we dig our way through the tangle of etymologies, can easily be seen to derive, linguistically, from the word for breath. By an easy inference, we go from the abstraction to the living thing, breath. As France’s interlocutor makes his translations, he remarks that Western texts of metaphysics resemble the Vedas. This is no accident – there is quite a history, by the time France is writing, that attempts to demonstrate that our Western concepts came from India. India to Greece – this was the direction urged by Georg Creuzer in his Symbolik. So we have two scenes play themselves out: one is that materialist deduction which leaves the idea – and idealists – by the side, as poets at best; and we have a history, a past that we can go back to through the language we use itself.

Derrida sets himself the task, in the White Mythology, to investigation this double scene. He asks about the eclipse of symbolization, that process that seems to use the matter, the images of common things, until it erases their materiality. And he asks about this course from the East to the West. There is one thing that proceeds from the East to the West and is eclipsed – the sun. Yet to find the sun, here, is to use France’s method of scratching through the abstract. It is part of Derrida’s argument that the way in which the arguments take sides, here, corresponds to a certain systematic impulse – one that he calls the White Mythology. When, in the seventies, James Scott talks about the Great Tradition of the urban elites, with their abstractions and the Little Tradition of the Peasants, with their materialist practices, he is (although doubtless he has not been influenced by Derrida) going in the same direction – or at least concentrating on the social processes that bring about the White Mythology.

Of course, Derrida’s interest is not those social processes so much as the system itself. I should remark that the American reception of Derrida often makes him out to be Polyphile, whose interlocutor leaves him unconvinced, because he has not “argued within the rules.” But Derrida is not Polyphile, far from it; his argument is founded on showing that the divisions between disciplines, between the idea and the thing, between metaphor and metaphysic, are not given naturally, but are treated as though they are given naturally, thus setting up a semantic “bank”, so to speak, that is always loaning from one account to another, on the supposition that somewhere there is an asset that is worth what it is – an idion, a thing that is properly itself. I risk the metaphor because, indeed, it is a question of economics, taken in several ways: as a science of pleasure, as a science of circulation and production, as any science having to do with value, as a system of household management. There is also the verb form of economize, meaning to spare one a long story – for instance, the story of symbolization which takes us from matter to abstraction. It is economized, shortened, bracketed, left out as irrelevant.

Derrida makes clear that this is not another metaphilosophy, nor a study of the rhetoric of philosophy. Rather, it is a grapple with those systematic concepts that have guided our notion of the metaphor and of metaphysics, which have determined the fields that would study them – rhetoric, or some impossible philosophy of philosophy.

I think of the White Philosophy as I think of what Goethe, in Italy, is trying to accomplish – for surely he is going through the stages of just that kind of estrangement from the system in which he can no longer live, the system of the proper in Weimar, and like Polyphile, he is using a method to scratch through the surface and get to the savage past. In Goethe’s case, the method is a planned alienation from the proper that he must know is right out the adventurers tool kit – the use of the Incognito. By shucking his name, Goethe hopes to slip the yoke and turn the joke – he hopes to see anew, afresh. To see “alone the things he had never hoped to see.” And that refreshment is a journey that not only reproduces a journey taken in the past by others, including his own father, but is a journey continually coming upon the past, from the stone age hovels of certain of the Italian peasants to the mode of transportation via mule cart – a bruising transport over the roads that, as Goethe notes, was replaced in the North centuries ago.

When Goethe gets to Rome, this doubled sense of himself and his object is projected in a classical metaphor:

“When Pygmalions Elise, whom he had formed wholly according to his wishes, and had given her as much truth and being as any artist could, finally came up to him and said, I am here [ich bin’s], how otherwise was the living thing to the molded stone.”

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.