experiment 2: the mark of the flyswatter

In the last post we began to touch on the meaning of ‘experiment’ in Repetition. The notion of the experiment as an exercise in cruelty played a major role in Kierkegaard’s battle with the Corsair, when Moller, his opponent, rightly picked up on the cruelty involved in using an ‘experimental’ method on people, or putting a girl in the “experimental rack.” The point of view on cruelty shifts in relation to the terms in which the discourse is expressed – what is cruelty from the ethical point of view is not so from the aesthetic – and from the religious point of view, as Kierkegaard writes in the Edifying Discourse, “… the cruelty consists in the fact that the Christian has to live in this world and express in the environment of this world what it is to be a Christian.”

There is, at this point, a two-fold question: the first is, what kind of ‘experimenter’ is Constantin Constantinus, the pseudonymn-author of Repetition? And the second is, what does it mean to write a text under the sign of the ‘experiment”? How is a text, formally, an experiment at all?

The first question returns us to the romantic view of the experiment. The romantic physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, as Brain notices in his essay on the Experiment as Fragment, actually classified physics and poetry as similar kinds of fields, and wrote an essay entitled Physics as Art. Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic seems, similarly, to extend to the observation and construction of science as well as poetry. What may seem to be temptation, in the religious sphere, is here a kind of trial and error procedure.

In Repetition, C.C. refers to a story by Justinus Kerner. Kerner, as it happens, wrote the official biography of Mesmer – and it was certainly in Mesmer’s circle that the first ‘psychological experiments’ were carried out. As it happened, many of the ‘subjects’ who became most famous for being easy to induce into trances were women. The Marquis de Puységur left a note about a conversation he had with one of his sonambules, a woman named Genieve. I can’t say that Kierkegaard read these memoirs – I can say that there is an intersigne between Repetition – in which, at one point, C.C. describes himself chasing flies with a fly swatter – and Puységur’s note:

One day I questioned a woman in the magnetic state about the extension of the empire I could exercise upon her. I had without even telling her forced here, as a joke, to give me some blows with a fly swatter that she held in her hand. Well, I said, since you are obliged to hit me, who are only doing you good, I bet that I could, if I absolutely wanted to, make you do anything I wanted; for instanstance, I could make you take off your clothes, for instance, etc… No, monsieur, she said to me, it isn’t the same; what I am doing doesn’t seem good, and I resisted doing it a long time, but in the end it is only a joke so I yielded, since you absolutely wanted it; but as to what you just said, you could never force me to take off my last garments – my shoes, my bonnet, as much as you please, but after that you will obtain nothing.”

The relation that C.C. establishes with the young man is, one could say, designed as an experiment in suggestion; with the woman he is in love with, one could say, C.C. views her as a side effect – the strong homoerotic band is with the young man; and finally there is C.C.’s own experiment of a return to Berlin. Yet one view of the book is that it is itself – in its totality, including its authorship – an experiment performed by Kierkegaard.

Of course, there are other psychological experiments in Kierkegaard’s works – which seem, at certain points, to merge with the idea of seduction. For the next post.

a psychological experiment

There are, in the notes for Repetition, a number of variations around the subtitle, which Howard and Edna Hong translate as “A venture in Experimenting Psychology”. Kierkegaard also tried “Experimenting Philosophy” and “Experimental-Philosophy”.

This is a suggestive subtitle for a book about – or at least entitled – repetition, since experiment itself is a form of human activity that, ideally, verifies the theories that it is meant to test by creating a situation that can ideally always be repeated by any competent operator. In the dialectical sense in which Constantine Constantius (who may be the experimentor of the book – or may be the subject of the book’s experiment), in a sense the experiment is already repeated even in its very first instance, since it is intended from the beginning to be repeatable – it is designed along the lines of repetition.

But there is another sense in which just the opposite is the case. In Hans Christian Ørsted and the romantic legacy in science, Robert M. Brain points to Ørsted’s distrust, perhaps via Goethe or Schelling, of the Newtonian kind of experimentum cruces on the grounds that what the experiment shows may well very with the angle of observation: “It is inherent in the infinitude of Nature that no observer can discover all that is implied by an experiment.” Brain argues that the Romantic fascination with the fragment served as an image for the experiment – which, instead of presenting itself as a designed repetition, becomes, instead, an insight into some particular in the infinite stream of nature. Schlegel’s aphorism goes:

“A fragment must be like a little artwork taken totally away from the surrounding world and perfect in itself, like a hedgehog.”

From this point of view, the design of an experiment, and its performance, was as singular as a poem or painting, requiring the high ingenuity of a … well, Dr. Frankenstein or Faust, to name the avatars.

la retourne

As I said before I left for visions of the West, I am going to do a couple of weeks of posts about Kierkegaard – or at least broadly about Kierkegaard. I want to deal especially with Repetition and with The Concept of Anxiety. I want to look at these themes in Kierkegaard from the point of view of the critique of the happiness culture, in which alienation and the claims of the imagination can embody ways out of what is becoming dominant as the Great Transformation destroys the ancien regime and the human limit is dissolved – that is, some other justification for collective life, life in society, other than that justified by happiness.

I want to remember that Repetition is written at the same time that Marx is working out the critical, materialist idea of alienation – a name for certain broad tendencies within the capitalist system. I want to put this under the theme of the path of needles and the path of pins, Michelet’s dialectic of the witch – in which backwards is essentially different from, resistant to, forwards – in accordance with my private rule for Gnostic historians, who pick up on intersignes where others see simple coincidence and who understant that the path is no simple thing – neural paths, paths of breadcrumbs, path of needles, path of pins. The radical dissymmetry between backwards and forwards had made me, at least, a prisoner of the crossroads – that moment in non-identity with itself – where magic and positivism are our players. Or our sides. Or our side effects.

Card of retourne.

We are not surprised, then – that at the very beginning of Repetition, the movements pull apart. Or rather, we hide our surprise between the glacial mask of the master fucker, the Sadean libertine, the holder of the card of retourne:

“Say what you will, this problem is going to play an important role in modern philosophy because repetition is a decisive expression for what “recollection” was for the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowledge is “recollection”, thus will modern philosophy teach that life itself is a repetition. The only modern philosopher who has had the least intimation of this is Leibniz. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards. Repetition, if it si possible, thus makes a person happy, while recollection makes him unhappy, assuming of course that he actually gives himself the time to live and does not, immediately upon the hour of his birth hit upon an excuse, such as that he has forgotten something, to sneak back out of life again.”

Clinamen and a flush

Kant mentions, in his Anthropology, one of the favorite card games of the eighteenth century, pharaon. In Thomas Kavanagh’s essay, Libertine’s Bluff: Cards and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, Kavanagh contrasts pharaon with the century’s other favorite card game, brelan. Pharaon was, it appears, even banned in France for a time in the 18th century, but brelan was not. In his article on brelan in the Encyclopedie, Diderot wrote: "it is most enjoyable, that is, most ruinous when there are three or five players." In fact, the amounts won or lost by brelan were legendary. Kavanagh, however, wants to get past the anecdotal and point to the central social symbolism of card games for the French – and, in general, the ancien regime’s – aristocracy, and he wants to draw a contrast between pharaon, which was a game of chance, and brelan, which was a game of strategies that became part of the pool of metaphors that informed the libertine vocabulary of seduction. Is it right, in fact, to call these metaphors? The connection between brelan and seduction as a game was, on Kavanagh's account, pretty tight.

First, though, I will quote his description of brelan:

“The best three-card hand a player can hold is the "brelan" in the other sense of that word which French retains today: triplets, or three cards of the same value, such as three aces or three kings. If, as was most frequently the case, no player held a brelan, the winner was the player who, at the end of the hand, held the highest aggregate point count in a single suit. In making that count, aces were worth eleven points, all picture cards ten, and the other cards their face value. The most important feature of the game and the guarantee of real risk for all players was the fact that this count was made only after all players remaining in the game after the betting and raising had placed their cards face up on the table. At that point, those holding the highest card in each suit removed from their opponents' hands and added to their own all the lower cards in that same suit. Once this capture by the highest card in each suit was completed, some players held more than their original three cards and some fewer. The one additional feature of the game was that, after the betting and exposing of the three-card hands, one additional card, la retourne, was then turned face up by the dealer. That card could then be claimed either by the player holding three cards, a brelan, of the same value or, if there was no such three of a kind, by the player holding within her original three cards the highest card in that suit.10 In sum, brelan could be described as a simplified form of modern poker, a variant where only triplets and flushes count.”

La retourne. The dealer’s card, the author’s card, the philosopher’s card.

Here, by contrast, is pharaon:

“In pharaon, players have only one decision to make: the amount they will bet. Whether they win or lose has nothing to do with the cards held by the other players at the table or with the bets those others make. In pharaon each player receives a livret of thirteen cards and uses one or more of them to bet on the values from ace to king with suits being irrelevant. Once the bets are made, the banker staking the game begins to turn over one by one the cards from the shuffled deck he holds in his hand. The banker wins all bets made on cards matching the first card he turns and all other odd-numbered turns. The players win when they have bet on cards matching the second card the dealer turns up and all other even-numbered turns.”

Perhaps Kant’s description of the rational man at cards is so stripped of any strategy, and so fixed on the ‘turn’ of the cards, because it excludes the bluff and deception that, as Kavanagh points out, made brelan a school in lucretian strategy. Kavanagh connects the card game to the general philosophical atmosphere of libertinism:

“The libertine and the gambler share a fundamentally Epicurean vision of the world. The same Democritian atomism presides over their convictions as to the con- stant possibilities and unanticipated encounters provided by life in society and by the dealing of a deck of cards. This Epicureanism implied not only a privileging of plea- sure in all its forms, but the conviction that events, what took place and the way things turned out, were guided only by chance. Imagining life as following the model of atoms falling through space until their course is deflected by the random collisions of the Lucretian clinamen, the gambler and the libertine saw the same chance at work in the movement of cards being dealt from a deck and of men and women intersecting within the whirl of social life. Life and desire become a succession of random encoun- ters following one another with no more coherence and no more significance than dealing a jack after a queen from a well shuffled deck of cards.”

Kant and gambling, 2

I’m back from viewing wilderness and… well, from the deep reaches of love. About which you will hear not hear me make a sound, since love has a bower bird’s instinct for building the most elaborate nests to hide its secrets in. …

Instead, I’m going back to where I left off – that is, with boredom’s fit into the system of wants and ‘needs’. A fit that that comes, in Kant, with a scenario that seems to haunt not just the grand seigneurs, but all of art as well. To repeat the last graf of my last post:

“The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.”

Recognize, here, purposiveness without a purpose - wrenched from its place in aesthetics - and taking on another form in the world formed when the chief motivation is not need, but the lack of need – that is, escaping boredom’s mysterious pain. Thus, the gambler plays each hand to win, and plays ultimately to play. Kant was never such an example of cosmopolitanism as in the fact that he never traveled anywhere – like Deleuze’s nomad, he achieved a perfectly stationary position in which everywhere threw itself on the floor before him. Surely, then, he knew of the casinos of Venice and the mad English mania for betting on anything, and knew that many would disagree – many would claim that the whole point was to win a fortune.

But perhaps Kant caught the dry cough in the shuffle of the cards that announces the death instinct at its perpetual repetitions.

points west - fleeing all responsibilities

Bloggin' is going to be irregular - as I'm going on the road to points west tomorrow. To a secret destination - after passing through Marfa. I'd appreciate any suggestions for music, places to visit between Marfa and Santa Fe, etc. Desert music.
On the model of this: Buffalo Skinners.

kant on boredom and gambling

“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.” - Immanuel Kant's sämmtliche Werke: Th. Metaphysic der Sitten, in zwei Theilen, 405, my translation

Boredom in the Metaphysics of Ethics appears as a theme and a term (Langeweile) in the context of ‘play’ – and notably, playing cards.

In a more extended consideration of the sources of playing in the lectures collected in Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie, Kant connects up the notion of Edenic contexts, work, play, and boredom – for it turns out that, in circumstances where our needs are abundantly satisfied, boredom comes into play as the motive pushing us to work or to certain forms of play. It complicates an old equation that posits lack, or need, as the driver of work, or productivity – since boredom is not the same kind of lack as other lacks. What it is, however, is hard to say. “Boredom is the quintessence of unnamable pain.”[Langeweile ist der Inbegriff des unnenbaren Schmerzes.”]

Kant begins with a cultural universal that reaches all the way into the Canadian wilderness:

“The passion for play [zum Spielem – gambling is implied] is met with in every nation, even the Canadian savages like to play, while Chinese are given over to play to the point of mania, so that they bring their wives and children and even themselves into slavery through play. The interests [stakes] in play serve to enliven it and contain therefore such great charms that it constitutes the pastime for most of our society. The cause is that fear and hope continually change places in play…” [257]

The reasonable man, for Kant, then, plays with that alteration of fortunes in mind.

“A rational man, who sets down to play, can not have gain as his intent [Absicht], but he must believe, that he at least in the end must be paid for his stakes. Therefore his intention must be something else other than gain. During the play his intention is, of course, only to win, but he did not undertake participation in the game to do so. Here it is a purely a question of hope and fear, that are fundamentally vain; but one is distracted during these circumstances, and has distracted oneself from the one that one calls boredom. Such an evil, which is what boredom is, one commonly doesn’t know how to name, nor what countervailing means to apply to it. This evil of boredom springs out of the lack of activity.” [258]

The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.