funny capitalism

There is a funny little op ed piece in the Guardian by Dominic Rushe on the ratings agencies. Moodys, Standard and Poor and Fitch have all threatened not to rate European economies if they are held liable for faulty ratings.

Supposedly, this will be a disaster. Who, after all, will loan to Greece if Moodys isn’t the angel at the lender’s ear, whispering the point spreads based on – well, it is hard to say what it is based on. It could be based on the national debt, and the ‘lack of political will’ to cut back on deficits. But during a downturn, deficits are in fact the weapon of choice for managing an economy that is under capacity until biz cycle magic strikes and the private sector (that much misnamed mishmash of corporations and small businesses) comes roaring back. Roaring, by the way, is a finance journalism word, meant to evoke lions and such, turning the pinheads in pinstripes into masters of the universe. Of course, they are really simply rentseekers who have found nothing better to do with their lives than extracting points from capital flows, which makes them externally rich and internally null. But that is as may be.

I wonder if the EU will – poked by Merkel’s need to appeal to the German electorate – bring down the hammer. It should. Ratings agencies are jokes, and the EU could easily set up a rating agency itself. The very idea of a rating agency is antithetical to the market – it creates a non-market price, against which the market prices are then pegged. This is of course an incitement to dysfunction and corruption, and its only justification is that, without the ratings agencies, investors would put their money in overpriced assets. For instance, they would, worldwide, put trillions of dollars into mortgage backed securities that would all collapse in synch. … oops!

It is a funny world, this new capitalism. Banks become customers of rating agencies, who oblige banks by adjusting their ratings for crap investments so that banks can unload these crap investments in a game of swap. Then the game stops, the banks go bankrupt, and the governments plug the gap by supporting the banks. For instance, through the Federal Reserve, the government in the U.S. supported the banks to the tune of 9 trillion dollars in loans at below 1 percent interest. Banks, being run by geniuses, figure out how to make money on 9 trillion at 1 percent interest, but in the meantime economies slump. The rating agencies then oblige the banks who are buying bonds – that is loans to governments – by downgrading governments, so banks can collect a bigger vig. Why does this happen? After all, governments don’t need a private bond market at all – they could easily establish a collective interstate supported loaning agency that would provide all loans to states. But the banks would not like that. What we have, then, is a world in which the rich: benefit from their de-regulated investments; receive free insurance in the form of state supports; receive below par loans that they can loan out at above par rates; and possess a tool, the rating agencies, to pare back government transfers to the less wealthy. It is almost like democracy has turned into an oligarchy that rewards the richest and the political class that is close to them, regardless of party. Hmm, perhaps that Egyptian democracy movement needs to spread.

style, nihilism, substitution

Notes:
Three lines of thought.



a. The first is the need for style. In the 18th century, the 17th century battles over style were, seemingly, at an end. The principles of good writing, or the plain style, seemed as clear as the principles that governed reason. Enlightened self-interest and enlightened communication were of the same metal. But the vogue for sensibility and the Romantic movement at the end of the 18th century turned the ideal of enlightened communication on its head. Rather, communication under the sign of sensibility was a search for style.

b. One of the key moments in Jacobi’s letter to Fichte is an exercise in style – a willed confusion, instead of the accidental confusion of the willed clarity that motivated transcendental philosophy. The latter, for all its clauses and pauses, was accumulative. But Jacobi’s style is anything but accumulative. Nor is it critical in the normal way – that is, taking apart the conclusions and analysis of Fichte. Rather, it is ludicrous.

“Since outside of the mechanism of nature I meet nothing but miracles, secrets and signs, and since I have a terrible repulsion in the face of nothingness, the absolutely indeterminate, the thorough void (these three are one: the platonic infinite!) especially as the object of philosophy or the purpose of wisdom; yet, as I seek to ground the mechanism, as well the nature of the I as of the Not-I, I arrive at a mere nothingness-in-itself, and in my transcendental nature (personally, so to speak) am in this form inducted into, gripped by and taken up by it; just in order to empty out the infinite, I have to want to fill it up, as an infinite nothingness, a purely-wholly-and-completely-in-and-for-itself, if it were only not impossible!! – since that is the way it is with me, I say, and the Science of the True; or more precisely, of which the true science is composed; I don’t know why I should as a question of taste prefer my philosophy of not knowing to the philosophical knowing of nothing, if only in fugam vacui. I have nothing against me than Nothing; and even chimeras could measure themselves against that.

Truly, my dear Fichte, it will not bother me if you, or whoever, want to call this Chimerism, which is what I maintain against Idealism, which I chide as Nihilism.”

c. What kind of nothingness is it that has found its moment and lept, here, on Fichte’s page, crystallized in nihilism? Nothing seems, of all things, the clearest – it is nothing, and there is nothing to say about it. Yet in the 19th and 20th century, nihilism – the faction of nothing – has appeared on opposite sides of the conceptual ledger, now pointing to the destruction of the economic, social and moral system – a la Netchaev and his kind, terrorists who strike in the name of the negative (as Belinsky said, Negation is my God, although he immediately jumps to the positive by naming dissidents like Luther, Voltaire, and Byron’s Cain – not, in the end, the party of nothing). And yet there was another tradition which, though identified as nihilists themselves, saw that the party of nothing was in the dark heart of the system, the patchwork order of bourgeois norms that had, supposedly, replaced the old order. “Replaced”, however, is a big, big word. In reality, as long as the nineteenth century order was agricultural – and up until the end of the century in every country except Britain, the majority of the population was still rural – the old order was still alive. Or perhaps it is best to say that the energies in the struggle between the orders were in flux, shifting slowly towards a bourgeois order that was shaped by the struggle. Marx was prescient in announcing the industrialization of agriculture, but he was a century early.

And finally, we should look more closely at the repulsion, the Abscheu, that Jacobi felt at the particular nothingness of the endlessly indeterminate. Isn’t the money economy, isn’t the capitalist genius for finding substitutes for every commodity and service, a form of endless indetermination?

Jacobi's sock

There is a philological dispute about whether Jacobi was the first to use the word nihilism; but there is no dispute that Jacobi was the first to introduce the word into modern philosophy, in his letter to Fichte renouncing the identity of the I and Not-I that, he thought, was the result towards which Fichte was taking transcendental philosophy.

Jacobi’s letter to Fichte is full of images that have long careers ahead of them. When Jacobi points to the the fearful essence of transcendental idealism – that totalitarianism of thought that, as Jacobi puts it, has the chemical quality of eating through everything - which is its leveling quality. It launches the equations that level the I and the not-I as the two categories that divide up the world as a sort of philosophical side show encoding the dream of a fully humanized earth, one wholly grasped by universal history. That history is, of course, the global market place.

How does one ward off the universal solvent? Here, too, Jacobi is prescient: one wards it off with style. Style is the archangelic foe of the equation. If Fichte’s philosophy is deficient, in Jacobi’s mind, it is in the failure to doubt the equation. To doubt its metaphysical sufficiency. In order to make this point, Jacobi compares the Fichtean procedure to a stocking:

In a malicious [muthwilligen] moment last winter in Hamburg, I looked for a comparison for the result of Fichtean Idealism. I chose a knitted stocking.

In order to make another than the usual empirical idea of the emerging and persisting of a stocking, we need only to untie the end of the web, and let it flow out from the threads of the identity of this object-subject. We will then see clearly how this individual is simply the back and forth movement of the threads, that is, it takes on reality through an unceasing limitation of its movement, and hindering of its striving towards the infinite -- without empirical addition, or other mixtures of additions.

To this my knitted stocking I give stripes, flowers, suns, moon and stars, all possible figures, and know: that all of this is nothing other than a product of the productive imagination of the fingers shuttling to and fro between the I of the thread and the Not-I of the stitch.All of thiese figures together with the essence of the sock are, viewed from the standpoint of the truth, the solitary naked thread. There is nothing stuffed into it neither out of the stitches, nor from the fingers: it alone and purely is this all, and there is in this all nothing outside itself. It alone is all this, and it is wholly and completely only with its movement of reflection on the stitching, that it has preserved in its advance, and thus become this specific individual.”

Jacobi’s knitted stocking begins a rich line of descent of the abject-object in philosophy and literature. I include, here, Gogol’s Nose and Bataille’s big toe – and the phantasmagoria in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The sock puts us, as it were, rightside up – we begin with the feet. And not just the feet, but with the covering of the foot. Blake, at the same time, is finding infinity in a grain of sand – an infinity that is brought to us via the wonders of the microscope, a vehicle of the same Newtonian science whose influence, in other respects, Blake deplores. Marx, too, will take up the head and foot thematic – of the body divided the underground krewe sings.

Similarly, the malicious moment in which the Jacobi found, in a knitted sock, a simile for the raveled philosophy of Fichte – this is surely a predecessor of the spite on which the Underground man insists in Dostoevsky.

On whose behalf was Jacobi protesting against the acidic creep of transcendental philosophy? Here, it is time to look at who Jacobi was. He was the son of a rich merchant from Dusseldorf, who considered the boy – as he later told his friend Roth – of limited talents and intelligence, especially compared to his brother. He had a panic attack at eight, being visited by a frightening vision of the ‘infinite’. I remember having the same kind of fright at that age – and playing with it. As Roger Caillois has pointed out, there is a whole category of games involving dizziness and vertigo, which he calls games of ilinx. These games have a frightening aspect – and surely Jacobi’s memory of ‘meditating’ on the infinite when he was eight touch on the panic face of the swingset, the twirl, the sense of reversals when one gazes on one’s back at the sky and ‘falls’ into it. Similar panic attacks visited him throughout his life. When Jacobi grew up, he retained a certain submissiveness and humor that Goethe, at least, found feminine – he compared him to certain of the women in Ruben’s paintings.

There’s no need to sketch Jacobi’s life, here, save to mention that he was acquainted with Enlightened governance, being himself a Hofkammer; that he read Adam Smith; and that he sought out vertiginous intellectual experiences and was, at the same time, panicked by them.

The panic, here, outside of its psychological form, was the panic of respectability. The norms of respectability changed in some important aspects from the 18th to the 19th century, but the form of the whole was similar. In one important respect, however, Jacobi was not respectable. Goethe’s rather malicious comparison to one of Ruben’s women shows how Goethe could feel this – Goethe, who had a serpent expertise in putting on the skin of respectability and shedding it again.

For Jacobi, the panic attack in his philosophical life occurred twice: once, when he realized that Lessing was a Spinozist, and once, when he broke with Transcendental Philosophy. Both times, the respectable retraction – breaking the sense of falling into a total system – was such that it threatened –maliciously – the stitching of respectability itself. The rebels – Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche – were all divided between an almost laughable respectability (there is a story that Dostoevsky set a trap for the stenographer he made his second wife: he cunningly set out cigarettes for her on a table to see if she would take one. She didn’t! Dostoevsky was ever so pleased that the woman didn’t smoke) and their fidelity to their own malicious moments. It was the malice that taught them. It was the malice that dug, dug in the underground within them.

combining the last two posts

Note: I combined the last two posts here. It makes for a prettier read.

In the introduction to his story, A Gentle Creature, that Dostoevsky produced for his column, A Writer’s Diary, he traced the story back to a fait divers about a seamstress who committed suicide with an icon in her hands. Dostoevsky scholars have found other routes to the story – Dostoevsky brooded over a similar plot quite a bit before the newspaper story precipitated the narrative as a whole in his mind, with the picture it gave him of the husband, a pawn broker, telling the tale as his wife lies stretched out dead on a table in their apartment. Unlike Henry James, whose introductions are quite consciously framing work, existing outside the work in tone and vision and highly enjoyable in themselves, although eminently dispensable except to the stories they preface (except in so far as the artist wants his critical word, too), Dostoevsky does not separate the preface from the story: quite otherwise, he, in a sense, invites his readership to understand the story from its first crude working up. It is as though the story and the introduction are bound by an umbilical cord that Dostoevsky does not cut – although his translators do. The story is not reprinted with the preface in, for instance, in the Oxford World Classics edition. This is too bad, since he manages to tell us something vital to understanding his method – a method that is as important for understanding the content of the tale as Sherlock Holmes’ method is for understanding the unfolding of the solution of a crime – in his own way, just as does the more recondite James tells us in his way:

“If there had been a stenographer to listen to him and note it [the narrator’s monologue] down, the result would doubtless be more staccato, more unformed than that I am presenting to the reader, but, or so it seems to me, the psychological order would remain the same.” [Translated from the French]

I have connected the underground as one of the loci – a metaphorical and metaphysical locus – in which was formed, in the nineteenth century, the oppositional character under capitalism. And I have also noted the relationship to the agent of circulation – to, in fact, the growing cultural dominance of what Mill called the Middle Class, the ancestor of what C. Wright Mill called the White Collar class.

For Dostoevsky, as it happens, the stenographer is not a neutral figure. He met the woman who became his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, when he hired her as a secretary – a stenographer. In Joseph Frank’s biography, we read:

Dostoevsky, who had agreed to try working with a stenographer only with great reluctance and as a last resort, was nervous and distraught, obviously at a loss on how to treat this newly intrusive presence. To break the ice, he began to question Anna about her study of stenography, then a relatively new method of transcribing speech… Anna informed him that her class had begun with more than a hundred students, but only twenty-five were left at the end; many, thinking that stenography could be mastered in a few days, had dropped out when this supposition proved false.” (156)


In fact, the image of the couple – of the teller and the scribe, or the stenographer – seems to arrive in Dostoevsky’s work after he has already used this method extensively. It is the method of the Night section of The Demons, and, similarly, of Notes from the Underground. It is important that in the notes leading up to A Gentle Creature, Dostoevsky imagines a pawn broker who is “misanthropic… with an underground’. [Ludmilla Koehler, Five minutes too late…] In both the Notes and The Devils, the problem of epistemological access, that is, the question of who knows the story, or the events that become the story, and how they interpret them, and how their interpretation is woven into the events themselves – that problem which bedeviled and enchanted James – is cut with one, clumsy (at least from the standard of the novel as James conceived it) blow. Testimony and confession, here, converge. “Who is that other who is always besides you…”

The stenographer is not a mirror, is not epistemologically neutral, but creates an epistemological situation, one in which the teller can be ‘caught out’ – can ‘slip up.’ Ultimately, the stenographer is an ambassador of police power. It is the invisible stenographer that creates, in these stories, the sense of a thing happening that will be reiterated in a police interrogation room or in court.

It is surely important, too, that the narrator of A Gentle Creature is a pawnbroker who quotes Goethe’s Faust. The pawnbroker or money lender was the shadow side of the financial power that is embodied in bank, one of the major hubs of circulation. The pawnbroker, in one of his first conversations with the woman – or, actually, girl - whose suicide hangs over the story compares himself to Mephistopheles. The pawnshop is, for Dostoevsky, the place that the money economy loses all its pretences, and shows itself, at last, as the ultimate exploiter of human despair. Dostoevsky, like Marx, was, much to his disgust, personally acquainted with pawnbrokers. Both lived and worked under the gun. Under their various manias, their undergrounds.

…
Until the eighteenth century in Catholic countries, the predominant notion of confession was pre-eminently that of a sacrament. In the legal sense – that is, the sense ended up on trial, either in a ecclesiastical or secular court – the sacramental sense existed as a sort of sanctioning halo around the most direct witness to a crime – the witness of the perpetrator himself. The sacramental sense of confession lent itself to the justification of torture, that strange moment in the juridical process in which pain – usually associated with the punishment merited by the guilty – is used to give a proof of guilt. Punishment first, the sentence afterward – torture is by its nature an inversion of the course of justice, or at least its institutional logic. Torture can, of course, exist after the sentence – torture then merges with all the other punishments, and it loses its sacramental associations. Its diminishment becomes a purely humanitarian matter. It is through a connotation of sacrament that the torturer did not wholly undo the foundation of the law, its sanction, which, although making full use of fear, transcends fear in fairness, in proportion. The great cynics – for instance, De Sade – discerned in torture the true motive behind the law, the disorder of the libertine grin behind the solemn mask of the judge. The law, here, is wholly conformable to a certain desire in the hands of those who have the power to realize their desires, and who, in the process, take pleasure from their hypocritical pretense that they don’t.

In the Protestant countries, the sacramental sense of confession was outlawed, or at least banned in the Protestant church, and so it was taken out of the domain of the sacred into the domain of the autobiographical, the novelistic, the psychological, the criminal. Torture, then, is stripped of anything but utility. Still, even as confession is transferred from the sacramental to the secular domain, it is never fully disassociated from purgation and purification. The secular world may be one of different shames and rewards, but the old semiotic devils, the purges and purifications of the cult, retain a trailing, epiphenomenal insistence, like the shadow of a demon projected on the wall by a trick of the gesture of a hand.

It is in the form of confession that a truth other than the truth of experiment and scientific theory still holds on in a world of total utility. And yet, it is shoulder to shoulder with the world of total utility, just as the underground man is shoulder to shoulder with the stenographer – whose function is to be absolutely transparent. To be as if she isn’t there at all.

And yet of course she is. If the underground man hides, confession is his weapon, but it is not a weapon that he can employ without imagining the stenographer, the official representative of the desk, the typewriter, the office, the report. This should give us an idea of how odd it is to make confession a weapon. For it means the stripping away of the intervening structures that keep us – society, the state – from seeing the confessor, whose express desire is to find a mousehole. Or, like Rousseau, to retire to a remote and safe harbor. It is as if the motive that has produced so many underground labyrinths to confuse the seekers behind one, around one, is, in a gesture, vetoed. And yet, it is not hard to see the philosophical unity between this contradiction between the underground and the compulsion to exhibition. The pawnbroker in The Gentle Creature calls it pride, but what is that pride in? It is the pride of the non-identical.

some hasty thoughts about confession

Until the eighteenth century in Catholic countries, the predominant notion of confession was pre-eminently that of a sacrament. In the legal sense – that is, the sense ended up on trial, either in a ecclesiastical or secular court – the sacramental sense existed as a sort of sanctioning halo around the most direct witness to a crime – the witness of the perpetrator himself. The sacramental sense of confession lent itself to the justification of torture, that strange moment in the juridical process in which pain – usually associated with the punishment merited by the guilty – is used to give a proof of guilt. Punishment first, the sentence afterward – torture is by its nature an inversion of the course of justice, or at least its institutional logic. Torture can, of course, exist after the sentence – torture then merges with all the other punishments, and it loses its sacramental associations. Its diminishment becomes a purely humanitarian matter. It is through a connotation of sacrament that the torturer did not wholly undo the foundation of the law, its sanction, which, although making full use of fear, transcends fear in fairness, in proportion. The great cynics – for instance, De Sade – discerned in torture the true motive behind the law, the disorder of the libertine grin behind the solemn mask of the judge. The law, here, is wholly conformable to a certain desire in the hands of those who have the power to realize their desires, and who, in the process, take pleasure from their hypocritical pretense that they don’t.

In the Protestant countries, the sacramental sense of confession was outlawed, or at least banned in the Protestant church, and so it was taken out of the domain of the sacred into the domain of the autobiographical, the novelistic, the psychological, the criminal. Torture, then, is stripped of anything but utility. Still, even as confession is transferred from the sacramental to the secular domain, it is never fully disassociated from purgation and purification. The secular world may be one of different shames and rewards, but the old semiotic devils, the purges and purifications of the cult, retain a trailing, epiphenomenal insistence, like the shadow of a demon projected on the wall by a trick of the gesture of a hand.

It is in the form of confession that a truth other than the truth of experiment and scientific theory still holds on in a world of total utility. And yet, it is shoulder to shoulder with the world of total utility, just as the underground man is shoulder to shoulder with the stenographer – whose function is to be absolutely transparent. To be as if she isn’t there at all.

And yet of course she is. If the underground man hides, confession is his weapon, but it is not a weapon that he can employ without imagining the stenographer, the official representative of the desk, the typewriter, the office, the report. This should give us an idea of how odd it is to make confession a weapon. For it means the stripping away of the intervening structures that keep us – society, the state – from seeing the confessor, whose express desire is to find a mousehole. Or, like Rousseau, to retire to a remote and safe harbor. It is as if the motive that has produced so many underground labyrinths to confuse the seekers behind one, around one, is, in a gesture, vetoed. And yet, it is not hard to see the philosophical unity between this contradiction between the underground and the compulsion to exhibition. The pawnbroker in The Gentle Creature calls it pride, but what is that pride in? It is the pride of the non-identical.

He comes with his underground: the stenographer

In the introduction to his story, A Gentle Creature, that Dostoevsky produced for his column, A Writer’s Diary, he traced the story back to a fait divers about a seamstress who committed suicide with an icon in her hands. Dostoevsky scholars have found other routes to the story – Dostoevsky brooded over a similar plot long before the newspaper story precipitated the narrative as a whole in his mind. Unlike Henry James, whose introductions are quite consciously framing work, existing outside the work itself and eminently dispensable to those who want to get the thing itself, Dostoevsky does not quite cut the umbilical cord so elegantly. The intro is shot through with the same eye gleaming urgency as the narrative – it seems to be of a piece with the monologue of the pawn broker through whose consciousness the story unfolds. This is what Dostoevsky says about his method, here:

“If there had been a stenographer to listen to him and note it [the narrator’s monologue] down, the result would doubtless be more staccato, more unformed than that I am presenting to the reader, but, or so it seems to me, the psychological order would remain the same.” [Translated from the French]

I have connected the underground as one of the loci – a metaphorical and metaphysical locus – in which was formed, in the nineteenth century, the oppositional character under capitalism. And I have also noted the relationship to the agent of circulation – to, in fact, the growing cultural dominance of what Mill called the Middle Class, the ancestor of what C. Wright Mill called the White Collar class.

For Dostoevsky, as it happens, the stenographer is not a neutral figure. He met the woman who became his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, when he hired her as a secretary – a stenographer. In Joseph Frank’s biography, we read:

Dostoevsky, who had agreed to try working with a stenographer only with great reluctance and as a last resort, was nervous and distraught, obviously at a loss on how to treat this newly intrusive presence. To break the ice, he began to question Anna about her study of stenography, then a relatively new method of transcribing speech… Anna informed him that her class had begun with more than a hundred students, but only twenty-five were left at the end; many, thinking that stenography could be mastered in a few days, had dropped out when this supposition proved false.” (156)


In fact, the image of the couple – of the teller and the scribe, or the stenographer – seems to arrive in Dostoevsky’s work after he has already used this method extensively. It is the method of the Night section of The Demons, and, similarly, of Notes from the Underground. It is important that in the notes leading up to A Gentle Creature, Dostoevsky imagines a pawn broker who is “misanthropic… with an underground’. [Ludmilla Koehler, Five minutes too late…] In both the Notes and The Devils, the problem of epistemological access, that is, the question of who knows the story, or the events that become the story, and how they interpret them, and how their interpretation is woven into the events themselves – that problem which bedeviled and enchanted James – is cut with one, clumsy (at least from the standard of the novel as James conceived it) blow. Testimony and confession, here, converge. “Who is that other who is always besides you…”

The stenographer is not a mirror, is not epistemologically neutral, but creates an epistemological situation, one in which the teller can be ‘caught out’ – can ‘slip up.’ Ultimately, the stenographer is an ambassador of police power. It is the invisible stenographer that creates, in these stories, the sense of a thing happening that will be reiterated in a police interrogation room or in court.

It is surely important, too, that the narrator of A Gentle Creature is a pawnbroker who quotes Goethe’s Faust. The pawnbroker or money lender was the shadow side of the financial power that is embodied in bank, one of the major hubs of circulation. The pawnbroker, in one of his first conversations with the woman – or, actually, girl - whose suicide hangs over the story compares himself to Mephistopheles. The pawnshop is, for Dostoevsky, the place that the money economy loses all its pretences, and shows itself, at last, as the ultimate exploiter of human despair. Dostoevsky, like Marx, was, much to his disgust, personally acquainted with pawnbrokers. Both lived and worked under the gun. Under their various manias, their undergrounds.

(edited) Underground 2: the man without a character

Two questions help us classify undergrounds: who lives in it? And where is it?

At first glance, the latter question seems to pick at a mere tautology. The underground should surely be under the ground. This, however, is not the case: undergrounds are not simply underground, but are portable, made out of a habitat, a milieu, a political choice, a crime. How these things become underground depends on the metaphoric filter that connects a symbolically charged place with the modern. Or even pre-modern. There is, for instance, an underground in the brain in as much as a memory is perceived as hidden – it sinks into a ‘hole’ in the brain. When Augustine evokes memory in the Confessions, he evokes the underground:

“All these things, each one of which came into memory in its own particular way, are stored up separately and under the general categories of understanding. For example, light and all colors and forms of bodies came in through the eyes; sounds of all kinds by the ears; all smells by the passages of the nostrils; all flavors by the gate of the mouth; by the sensation of the whole body, there is brought in what is hard or soft, hot or cold, smooth or rough, heavy or light, whether external or internal to the body. The vast cave of memory, with its numerous and mysterious recesses, receives all these things and stores them up, to be recalled and brought forth when required.”

Memory, in this image, is a sort of drain as much as a cavern. Drainage is what sewers are about, and sewers are what modern cities are about. The image of memory as that into which the senses drain, the underground of the soul, is one that will re-emerge in Freud.

Sewage was the main target of what Alain Corbin calls the ‘strategy of de-odorization” recounted in his book, The Miasma and the Jonquil. “To disinfect – and thus deodorize – participates, besides, in a utopian project: that which aims to seal off the witnesses of organic time, to repress all the irrefutable markers of duration, those prophecies of death which are excrement, the product of menstruation, the decay of the corpse and the stink of the cadaver.” (134)

‘I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”

Such is the beginning of the most famous account of the underground: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The title to which has been a famous translator’s quandary. Notes from under the floorboards? Notes from a Mouse Hole?

Joseph Frank, in his biography of Dostoevsky, records this attack on Dostoevsky, mounted in two articles the Russian Messenger: [they] accused him of being ‘immoral’ and of fixing “the reader in the stinking atmosphere of the underground, [which] little by little, against the intentions of the author and perhaps in spite of them, blunts his sense of smell and accustoms him to this stinking underground.”

Dostoevsky, in his notes to The Raw Youth (which he was writing at the time, in 1875), responded: “I am proud to have exposed for the first time, the real image of the Russian majority… its misshapen and tragic aspects. The tragic lies in one’s awareness of being misshapen.” And he continued concerning “the tragedy of the underground, which consists of suffering, self-laceration, an awareness of a better life coupled with the impossibility of attaining it… What can sustain those who do try to improve themselves? A reward, faith? Nobody is offering any reward, and in whom could one have faith? Another step from this position, and you have extreme depravity, crime (murder). A mystery.”

Smells and stinks are certainly one of the physical features that the Underground Man notices. He imagines himself in a hole, as an insect, a mouse, and notes that his cleaning lady, an old peasant, “ill natured from stupidity, and moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her,” while in the next sentence he remarks about the unhealthy effects of the St. Petersburg climate – which is clearly based on the theory of the miasma. In fact, the narrative is traversed by a metaphoric in which nasty thoughts and nasty smells are interchanged, especially when the underground man is considering himself in the aspect of a verminous beast:

“Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.”

At the time that Dostoevsky was writing the Notes from the Underground, the Paris sewage system was being overhauled by Haussmann. Interestingly, “Haussmann was reluctant to allow any human faeces to enter the magnificent collecting channels of the new sewer system, and only did so under intense pressure from the city's municipal authorities. The desire to separate 'clean' storm water from 'dirty' human waste was integral to Haussmann's conception of an orderly flow of water through urban space.” (Matthew Gandy, 1999) At this time, the inspector of the sewage system, Eugene Belgrand, had the inspired idea of hiring Nadar to photograph the underground spaces. (Gandy)

…

We’ve been following the clerk, the pre-eminent circulation agent in a system presided over by infinite metamorphoses and a gnawing lack of production. The media as we know it – that system of signs and images that has begun, in the eighteenth century, to break free of one bureaucracy of clerks – the church – and is branching out of the purely circulation segment in the total system of commodity circulation under capitalism – is the natural locus for both the alienation of the clerk and the work of the journalist.

I want to note the connection with the clerk, the middleman, the creator of metamorphoses. The Underground Man makes a special point of being a government bureaucrat – a broker of documents in a chain that stretches from the “underground advokatura” (see William Pomeratz’s 1993 article) to the high state functionary. This, I think, is not a coincidence, but an intersigne.

The underground, here, mirrors the middle – a stream of waste reflects the stream of paper.

The underground, as we have said, comes in two ‘types”. The underground in which a man or woman hides is the product of a couple: the hider and the seeker. One of the determinants of the underground in which a person hides is the nature of that from which the person hides. The Great Seeker, here, is usually taken to be the State. The underground city is not just a mirror of the above ground city, but it is a potential repository of the above ground city’s perversities – robbery instead of legal exchange, perverse sexuality instead of marriage, the violent overthrow of the state instead of court or legislative politics. But the couple can also be otherwise: the hider can be coupled with the more amorphous seeker, society. In the nineteenth century, the state increasingly casts itself as the representative of society – but they operate along different axes from the point of view of the underground man.

Alain Roger, in the Breviare de la betise, astutely, exhaustively follows the ‘logic of tautology’ that is the form of one of the underground man’s great obsessions – betise, or stupidity. Roger distinguishes the banal, a simple accumulation of identity statements, A is A, man is man, from the tautologies that give life to stupidity: Man is always man. More, woman is always woman. More, a Jew is always a Jew. The temporal index of the “always” is the beast’s, or rather, the brute’s mark. In the 19th century, French writers from Balzac through Flaubert and Baudelaire to, finally, Bloy seized on the second form of tautology and, by citing it obsessively, by collecting it, by daydreaming over it, sought to shame it by mirroring, repeating, overhearing, echoing it – by trumping tautology with its own sound, look, smell, characteristic gait, household, habits, bank account, and all the stuffings. The attack on stupidity was an attack on the bourgeoisie – always the middle class. In England, as Alexander Herzen pointed out at the time, this attack was mounted with more restraint by John Stuart Mill in his essay on Liberty. Herzen sympathizes with Mill, but at the same time mocks him, for it is Herzen’s idea that Mills attack on conformity is superficial: conformity, Herzen thinks, is the natural product of a historical process, and Mill is caught up in the contradiction between defending that historical process – which, for our purposes, we will call the society of the market economy – and decrying its product. “But this deterioration of individuality, this want of temper, arre only pathological facts, and admitting them is a very important step towards the way out; but it is not the way out. Mill upbraids the sick man and points to his sound ancestors: an odd sort of treatment, and hardly a magnanimous one.

“Come: are we not to begin to reproach the lizard with the antediluvian ichthyosaurus? Is it the fault of one thaqt it is little and the other was big? Mill, frightened by the moral worthlessness, the spiritual mediocrity of this environment, cried out passionately and sorrowfully, like the champions in our old tales: “Is there a man alive in the field?” (Herzen, 460)

Herzen is an almost unique intelligence in that his viewpoint mixed a Russian experience with a thoroughly European education. 19th century Russia witnessed a different relation between society and the state than did France. In Czarist Russia, the two are so imbricated, and at the same time so amorphous, that the difference highlighted by Roger between the tautologies of banality and stupidity doesn’t function. Gogol – and Dostoevsky after him – collapses the stupid into the banal, and makes the banal the starting point for the fantastic. The banal, as Gogol once wrote, was his speciality. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, in his great essay on Gogol, gives us a sense of the writer’s realism that has not been taken up by the literary critics who are so fascinated by the topic, from Belinski to Lukac. Gogol’s starting point is the infinity of the divine. If the devil is the opposite of the divine, he is the opposite of the infinite. “The Devil is the noumenal median of being, the denial of all heights and depths – eternal planarity (ploskost’), eternal banality (poshlost’). The sole subject of Gogol’s art is the Devil in just this sense, that is, the Devil as the manifestation of “man’s immortal banality,” as seen beneath the specifics of place and time – historical, national, governmental, social; the manifestation of absolute, eternal, universal evil – banality sub specie aeternitatis.” (57-58)

This banality is something we will come back to again and again. It is, certainly, more lurid, more comic, more real than simply the logic of identity against which Alain Roger pits the truly stupid. In a serf society – or a slave society, like the United States – that banality constitutes that ‘quiet desperation’, that gravitational field that brings all things down to one level for the American underground man – Thoreau and Melville in the 19th century – and which follows Huck to the Territories and beyond.

Alain Roger, however, largely neglects the banal in favor of stupidity. In an interesting analysis of Barthes Mythologies, he detects a certain … complaisance in Barthes for the proverb, for the prole and the peasant. The ‘happiness of identity’ given by tautology is all shoved onto the petit bourgeois. It is at the center of the middle class cult of good sense: “Good sense is like the watchdog of petit-bourgeois equations: it stops up all the dialectical exits and defines a homogenous world.” Stupidity, in this form, is aggressive, according to Barthes. Roger disagrees: “It seems to me essentially sufficient. It is there that its force resides, which is inertia.” (68-69)