active and passive revolution

The ideological hypothesis could be posed in the following terms: "The ideological hypothesis could be presented in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that -- through legislative intervention by the State and by means of the corporative organization -- relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country's economic structure in order to accentuate the 'plan of production' element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased, without however touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation of profit." –Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

There are few references or essays about Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco in English. He is known, by a small minority, for having originated the distinction between passive and active revolution that Gramsci took up in the twentieth century and used in a sense that, to an extent, seems to call out to Karl Polanyi’s hypothesis of the double movement – first the movement towards the free market, then the movement towards state intervention to preserve the private sphere from the stresses the profit taking activity had caused - within the Great Transformation to capitalism.

Cuoco (1770-1823) was the sort of figure who could easily have been cast by Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme. He was also the sort of figure that was easy to lose sight of, since the nuances he stood for were, in a sense, drowned in the blood of his epoch. In this sense, there is something of Benjamin Constant’s sense of the need to reintroduce Nemesis into politics, in the form of limits that would work against ‘usurpation’ and conquest. Constant’s pamphlets didn’t stop Napoleon, and Cuoco ended up, by all accounts, on the side of legitimacy after the great fading of collective energy in 1815.

He was not from Naples, but from the Molise region. By training he was another lawyer – or rather, his training as a lawyer was just part of a vaster training in the vaguer career of a philosophe, that career that is not, like that of law, institutionally recognized, and seems like no career at all to people who have short views of the amplitudes of the human soul.

He was, like all Italian philosophes, keenly aware of what was going on in Paris in the 1790s, and had, to frame his observations of these distant events, a fund of sources that included Vico. When the revolution came to Naples, his friends, like Pagano, participated in it and even tried to lead it. Cuoco took a discreter role, but even so fled the collapse and subsequent repression that put Pagano’s neck in a rope. In Milan, he published his essay on the rise and fall of the brief Parthenopeen Republic, under the guise of a philosophical history:

“In history, the custom of reporting names does more to flatter the vanity of those so named than it serves to instruct the reader. Few men know how to master events; the greatest number is its slave; he is what the time, the ideas, the moeurs and the events want him to be; when one has painted the first, what is the point of naming the others? I am firmly persuaded that if in the greatest part of history, one substituted for the proper names the letters of the alphabet, the instruction one would draw from it would be the same.”

In the event, the philosophic dislike for the personal was quickly disgarded in a history that was filled with personalities. And yet, in a sense, those personalities are as unreal in their reality as the characters of La Bruyere. Or they are real, rather, as calculators the combinations they are made of – which is to say, of that time, those moeurs, those events to which they reacted as though they had the choice to be outside of them.

The vital center and the sage

The longing for the center has been a desire in the collective political consciousness at least since the age of the Atlantic revolutions. It is a desire that, at last, we discover the missing ‘no’ in the political unconscious. Although the desire for revolution has been tracked and interpreted and over-interpreted in political philosophy, the desire for the center, for ‘moderation’, has not been considered in itself. Rather, it is, mostly, considered parasitic on other forces – reactionary or revolutionary forces, in which the face of desire is not masked, even if the face itself, we discover sooner or later, is indeed a mask – there is no face behind it. Moderation, on this reading, is simply the desire that we not go so far, so quick, and above all that we avoid pain, instead of welcoming it – admittedly, usually the welcoming has to do with imposing it on others. And as the hastiest reading of history will show, the center almost always ends up finding its own targets to impose pain upon, often, o so often, on a large scale. But the thing is to normalize that imposition of pain as quickly as possible so that we can “get on with it.” It is, of course, that long digestion called life. This, for the moderate, is the best political use of speed – to entrench our social relations so that they can work by themselves, surround us with their workings, provide that artificial paradise, that womb, that isle of Synthetica which is our true and only utopia.

This desire for the center – the vital center, as Arthur Schlesinger called it back in 1950, rallying liberalism against the communist threat – has a philosophical correlate in the desire for the golden mean, the juste milieu. In Un sage est sans idée, Francois Jullien discusses the juste milieu in terms of two histories – one of the philosopher, one of the sage. Except that the latter, he claims, has no real history. In that sense, the sage could be seen as just another escapee, like the quicksilver cogito.

However, I will bracket my criticism of that claim – what interests me is Jullien’s contrast between the juste milieu and the demi-mesure. The half and half notion of the center – which, in this second year of the great Recession, has become the desire of so many, and seems to be the structural principle to which that demi-sage in the White House, Obama, has given all his heart.

Jullien, in this chapter as well as the book as a whole, shuttles between two registers – Ancient China and Ancient Greece. He begins with a history of the reputation of the sage, through the lens of philosophy: “For philosophy matured [after Plato], it could well vaunt itself for having a history, while the other didn’t. In consequence, wisdom was treated to an inversion, no longer above, as super- but as sub-philosophy: it would thenceforward be a thought that dared not risk itself (to attain the absolute, the truth), or rather which had renounced it – a soft thought, boneless, dulled, tempered. Flat thought, to put it bluntly, and purely residual (the commonplace), stagnating far from the fascinating flight of ideas: it will be the thought of the aging of desire – but does it even think any more? – at best resigned thought.”

At the center of this image is the notion of the just mean, the golden mean – something like Schlesinger’s vital center. Here we will measure our actions like good shopkeepers, matching advantage to the trade offs. Here the passions are purified until only one is left – the passion for being in the middle. In the middle, we are not too high (with all the risks and the vast energy that it takes to get too high) nor on the level of the slave – abject.

Jullien traces the notion of the juste milieu from Aristotle to that common place in a brief passage:
But more is necessary for establishing virtue, it is necessary to have a definition. To which Aristotle applies himself in distinguishing the medium (moyen) in the thing and that relative to us: the virtue will be the ‘equal’, understood as the just milieu between excess and default (thus, at the half way point between fear and temerity is courage, of prodigality and parcimony is liberality, etc.) With Aristotle, this medium still possesses a theoretical status, tied as it is to the nature of the continuum, and by consequence divisible, and communicating structurally with the totality of his thought, the knots of reasoning in logic as well as the mixtures in physics. But, successively, with the vulgarization of aristotelianism, the notion looses its vigor and wilts, it flattens into a counsel of prudence rejoining the ‘not too much’ of common opinion. The juste milieu becomes the demi-measure. Witness the Horace of the Satires, est modus in rebus (there’s a middle in things), etc. Still, the subtle Horace did not reduce it to this timorous juste milieu, he had too much of an Epicurean in him. But the tradition that referenced him approvingly has never stopped praising that wisdom of the middle – the aurea mediocritas (the Latins having that concrete mindset…) fleeing the extreme, fearing excess. A medium fearful enough to nauseate – “wisdom” to throw off.”

This may well be the story of the liberalism of the vital center. The alliance with the working class, welded in the New Deal; the alliance with civil rights movements, welded in the sixties and seventies; and the alliance with the new class of academics and symbol workers, welded in the eighties, has entered the age of extremes with the desire to find half measures not because these half measures work – who thinks, for instance, that Obama’s preservation of the complex system of medical insurance company rents would work better than raw socialized medicine? But because the solutions are “politically real.” Politics, for the once vital center, is now a fearful domain, populated by extremist lunatics, and it is best to tranquilize them by demi-measures. We no longer end wars – for to end a war is to operate fully and decisively, it is extreme – but we let them sink softly under the headlines. In the same way, huge bankrupt banks don’t go bankrupt, nor do shadow financial sectors, chock full of bad bets, go to the window and expose their losing tickets.

Jullien opposes this notion of golden mediocracy with what he takes to be the original Confucian impulse of the sage in China.

“1. while, on the greek side, the medium proper to virtue is envisioned under the aegis of action (ergon), which is conceived in a technical manner and according to a model posed as an end (of the mathematical type: by divisibility, equality, proportion – it is one, error is multiple – in the background is the cosmos, as already in the Gorgias 504a), the Chinese conception is inscribed in a logic of unfolding (deroulement), the real being conceived according to the category of process: this medium is the medium because, being able to vary from one extreme to another, regulation is continuous; 2. Aristotle has very much the idea of a variable medium, which is not only arithmetic (like 6 between 2 and 10) but relative to each (for instance, the amount of food is a lot for one and not very much for another), and proceeds by circumstantial adaptation (at the moment it is necessary in the case and in regard to what is necessary, etc.), but he does not have the idea of a medium by variation from one extreme to another, equally possible, as in the Chinese idea of two mediums; [Jullien is referring here to the idea that there is a “milieu” relative to each pole, the ying and the yang] 3. the Aristotelian just milieu concerns only the ethical virtue (and still there is no just milieu of moderation), while the juste milieu in the Chinese case corresponds to the logic of every process(which, in as much as it is continuous, must be regulated). There is not, in the Chinese case, on one side the real, and on the other side the good. But that from whence proceeds the real, and which is the condition of its emergence, as the just milieu of regulation, is also the norm of the good. Or, rather, it is not a norm, but only a way, by which the real is liveable – the tao.”
Notice how this applies to the current political atmosphere, in which solutions are not related to the real, but to the ‘good’ – that is, to the norms of the opinion-makers. The looseness at the heart of the decaying American empire is all in this suspended animation, this reign of postponement. It is the exhaustion of a centrism that is sure that the real can be dickered with, smoothed over, or, if nothing works, postponed for another couple of years.

But in reality, America is like a man who has leaped from the top of a tower- it has run out of postponements.

the myth of the creator

According to Francois Jullian, the system of classical Chinese thought, in contrast to the Greeks and the Hebrews, did not concern itself with the creation of the world – did not answer the question, why does the world exist, with a story of divine making. “…it is rather the question of the “separation’ of the heaven and the earth: a putting in place that is a putting in order.”

‘The question posed in China would thus be a different kind. As the notion of Tao (dao) expresses it, it is that of the “Way”, which is to say, of the viability of things. In posing the question of how – how does reality ‘march’ [work] – Chinese thought hardly encounters the question of an original why. What I mean is, it didn’t need to regroup or put into form mythical elements that it found here and there, since at the bottom the question which carried it was not this one. Chinese thought sought to give an account of the march of the world, and it did so starting with the idea that the world always functions by polarity – yin and yang…

To sum up, from the moment where it is a question of the march of things that predominates, and that one accounts for starting with a polarity (and not one, but two instances), one no longer meets with the question of a first moment – nor of a last one besides.” (Francois Jullien, interview, Communication, 1997)

Vico, that opponent of the secularizing and mechanizing l’esprit geometrique as a distorter of the human portion (which is fated to exist, as a thing in its essence created, among probabilities, and never among certainties), shared with the moderns a certain conception of making – of the made – that is so embedded in modern culture – and perhaps that of the premodern era in what became the “West” – that the thought of some original polarity – a polarity that always defers the question of origin – is almost impossible to absorb. Zero points, ground zeros, the seed and the target, these are the symbols that swim in the dreamlife of the White Mythology. That the maker does not know the made from the inside – the terrifying discovery of Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Freud – is a side thought, a nightmare.

Our escapee, the cogito

Trip like I do...

Vico’s New Science seeks the route to universal history – path of needles, path of pins - through reconstituting the trajectory of thought from the era when men ‘thought humanly’ for the first time to the moment when there comes a time to man and nation that thought dims, declines. Vico’s famous corsi and recorsi, that fatal consort of the society of the limited good, cyclical time, ruled over by nemesis. To be replaced, of course, by happy time, the time of Jack’s beanstalk, always growing, growing up to the sky, and troubled only intermittently by business cycles – the general equilibrium being the last faint gasp of an older temporal framework.

Vico does not suppose – heady thought of his contemporary, George Berkeley - that thought was disembodied, a free range agent. On the contrary, in keeping with his dictum that the true is the made, he clings to the fact that “that this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.” But Vico is far from accepting that the world itself is made by men – not for him Descartes’ heroic cogito, the persevering captive of the genie malin, whose escape into the world out of the dark night of the logical soul proves that the world exists – for the whole logic of escape is escaping from something, n’est-ce pas? Vico, who in his previous discourses had pointed to the erroneous goal of certainty as the ruling purpose by which Cartesians and materialists thought they could grasp and advance philosophy and physics, is not averse to geometry himself – after all, like Spinoza, Vico seeds the New Science with axioms. Axiom enigmas. But these are not to serve us a models of deduction. Rather, in Vico’s eyes, the geometric method, properly applied, lends itself to the New Science as a model of construction. “Thus our Science proceeds exactly as docs geometry, which, while it constructs out of its elements or contemplates the world of quantity, itself creates it; but with a reality greater in proportion to that of the orders having to do with human affairs, in which there are neither points, lines, surfaces, nor figures. And this very fact is an argument, O reader, that these proofs are of a kind divine, and should give thee a divine pleasure, since in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.”

Here we strike upon a pleasure we are inclined to ignore – for in the culture of happiness, science is neither gay nor sad, but our neutral eye. Thus, we greet our proofs with the satisfaction felt by the escaping cogito – the satisfaction that attends opening and closing a door. But the divine pleasure of the New Science is, indeed, a cognitive pleasure of a different kind – it is Daedelian, the pleasure of an artisan or artist.

And in this, it too is rapt up with the ingenuity that Fontenelle, as well, astutely remarked as a hallmark of the modern. Subordinate to the escapee’s preference for the exterior – ever more exterior - that set the stage for the love affair between the positivist and the machine is the idea that the maker has a knowledge, a power over the made.

on belief and practice

In the History of Oracles, Fontenelle – with his native deadpan delivery, a style that had more in common with Defoe than with the salon - describes Cicero’s criticism of the theory of sacrifice propounded by some of the stoic philosophers: that in the moment of sacrifice, the oracular portion – the heart, the liver, etc. – was changed by the god, depending on the sanctity of the sacrificer, or the favor a particular priest had with the gods. Of course, this passage contains a muffled echo of Fontenelle’s own times – it is the choked laugh that makes for the deadest of deadpan styles. Fontenelle indirectly acknowledges the obvious parallel between the stoic theory and the theory of the transmutation of the host only by making a point about Cicero’s ability to get away with criticizing the terms of sacrifice without being regarded ‘with horror’ by the people. “There is reason to believe that, among the pagans, religion was only a practice, to which speculation was indifferent. Act like the others, and believe what you wish. This is a very extravagant principle, but the people, who did not recognize its impertinence, were happy with it, and the gens d’esprit submitted to it easily, because it barely restrained them.”

Oh the deadpan regard that marks the witticism. Fontenelle, France’s most ardent propagandist of the new science, was aware – was more aware than perhaps he wanted to be, as Nietzsche later astutely understood – that the spirit of enterprise and science for which he stood was slowly but surely diverging from the croyance in the tenets of religion. The instant of their separation had suddenly become a speck, a distinct speck, a very distant point, on the horizon.

Yet, more than a polemical irony can be extracted from under the impenetrable mask. Fontenelle is making a real historical point, in line with his ambition to read history as the philosopher would read the results of an experiment. When a social fact presents itself that does not elicit the social reaction that the presence of such a social fact would cause in the historian’s own society, one can trace a certain lack – as Sherlock Holmes would put it, the significant fact is that the dog did not bark. And that lack of an expected fact must, itself, be subject to the same causal inquisition – the non-lieu is an effect in its own right.

Of course, the presupposition here – the White Mythology – is that the historian’s own society is, as it were, full – it is the most ‘advanced’ society. It would be easy, though, to turn around the historian’s assumption and ask about the lacks in that advanced society.

The lack of a certain collective passion, then, one that led, in Christian Europe, to the burning of Bruno, allows us to retrospectively suppose a certain tolerance. The indifference of the people that he condemns might, actually, be something he works towards.

But such is the dead weight of the masked language that this has to remain speculation.

Still, it is easy to assimilate Fontenelle’s remark to the coming program of the Enlightenment without really looking at its paradoxical nature. Surely, the idea that a collective practice does not reflect a collective belief is a startling anthropological speculation. It might have been devised precisely to counter, or at least question, the passage about divination in Vico’s New Science.

From Fontenelle again: “Thus we can see that the entire pagan religion only asked for ceremonies, and no sentiments of the heart. The gods are irritated, all of their lightning bolts are about to fall: how will we appease them? Do we need to repent of the crimes that we have committed? Is it necessary to return to the paths of natural justice, which ought to be among all men? Not at all: we need only to take a calf of such and such a color, born in such a such a season, cut its throat with a knife, and this will disarm the gods. And still you are permitted to mock the sacrifice inside yourself, if you wish. It won’t make anything worse. Apparently, it was the same with the oracles; let he who wished to believe do so; but one does not give up consulting them. The custom had such force on people that it had no need to be supported by reason.” [Chapter 7, my translations]

superstition and its trace

“D.C. who, in his village in Romania, wrote his reminiscences of his childhood, having told his neighbor, a peasant named Coman, that he would not be forgotten in his book, the latter came to see him early the next day and said: “I know that I am not worth much, but even so I don’t think I have sunk so low as to be talked about in a book!”

The oral world, how superior it was to our own! Beings (I mean, the people) only lived in the true as long as they had a horror of writing. As soon as they caught the prejudice, they entered into the false, they lost their ancient superstitions in order to acquire a new one, worse than all the other ones combined.” - Cioran

LI has been madly pursuing a small point in Vico, from which we would like to grow a larger point about the belief system of the culture of the limited good. But we don’t ourselves quite understand our point, since it concerns a separation between the significance of ‘creation’ and that of ‘nature’ that may seem too thread subtle to make a real difference, or too idealistic to describe the real change in the routines of work and passion that lead us ever onward towards the Eldorado of all the young dudes, Synthetica.

Changes in the weave, changes in the sewing. We pick up our pins and needles from their allotted paths in the forest, we set to work.

In a 1971 article about the tense of popular belief by Nicole Belmont, The Function of Belief, Belmont remarks about a persistent connection in stories about popular belief between belief, practice, and the authority of the past. Often, when asked about the truth of this or that belief, the anthropologist is given a story about the past – either embodied in old people (the old people know about such and such a belief and its expression in practice) or in a story about some founding hero or god. It is in relation to this theme that Belmont cites a passage in Emile Beneveniste concerning superstition that I want to translate here, and comment upon in another post:

Beliefs are often given the pejorative name of superstitions which, curiously, leads etymologically to this question of projection (rejet) into the past. It has been studied by E. Benveniste, who sees in superstitio the abstract correspondent to superstes, “survivor”, and which thus signifies survival: “Superstitio indicated thus a ‘remnant’ of an old belief which, in the age in which is it envisioned, appears superfluous.” Benveniste sees there a historical countersense: we loan to the ancients an attitude taken from the modern mindset and the capacity to discern in religion the survivals of a distant epoch. But this is not a very credible objection: the ancient Romans could very well distinguish, in their religion, diverse strata of belief and ritual. The proof is in the existence of the terms religio and superstitio.

“Super” – Beneviste notes – “signifies not only above, but also beyond: superstare is to keep oneself beyond, subsist above… he who has gone through a danger, a test, a difficult period, who has survived it, is superstes. Another sense thus branches out: he who has subsisted beyond an event and become the witness of it.”

One thus sees clearly the double character attributed to popular beliefs: they are present, but in the guise of witnesses of a past. Why this ambivalence?”

a small displacement...

And so LI moved to Paris…

Lucretius might have been a hard taskmaster when it came to superstition, calling upon man to surpass the “flaming limits of the world” and not to piss himself before the vain phantom of the angry gods – but he did have a fearful appreciation of the power of love, with its invisible, hounding movement. “Hence into the heart distilled the drop/Of Venus’ sweetness, and numbing heartache followed./For if what you love is absent, none the less/ Its images are there, and the sweet name/Sounds in your ears.”

Amen to that! Lucretius, drawing an ascetic’s conclusion from the naturalist stance, taught us to resist the drop of Venus’ sweetness – or so some claim. LI, however, drew the opposite conclusion – we have had more than enough of numbing heartache in our life, and so we didn’t hesitate to follow A. to Paris, merrily throwing away clothes and books, giving away our paltry possessions, and in general reducing the hurly burly of our, shall we say, middle aged existence to the order of two packed suitcases, plus a laptop in a knapsack purchased from Target for thirty nine dollars.

And so the city I have imagined, the exemplum of the artificial paradise, Baudelaire’s cite des reves en plein jour, is a place I casually get ripped off in, purchasing meatballs from the Italian deli down the street.

It is here, I hope, that I will get much more done on the Human Limit, as well as making a superhuman effort to edit many many more papers and books – for the prices of Paris truly are beyond the flaming limits of the world.

On the other hand, what price could possibly be attached to biking, on a lovely autumn afternoon, with my love through the streets up to Paris-Bercy and the BN – observing the absurd names that are attached to things (Simone de Beauvoir’s passerelle, Josephine Baker’s piscine – heartbreakingly, some restaurant that calls itself Jules et Jim (o the exploitation!) in a complex of cinemas, MK2.

And so I have arrived...