where I am now

I had a discouraging day yesterday, surveying the supposedly coordinate pieces of The Tears of Homo Economicus and asking myself, where’s the coordination? Jesus. My original idea was simply to carve a small book out of my Human Limit project, but over the last four months I’ve made certain small and major changes in the potential book, all of which are driven by my flinching the stylistic norms native to the humanities, in which thesis, argument and example unroll with the monological inflexibility of an alarm clock going off. I am not that kind of writer. The demon of the lateral is always at my ear.

In the preface to his dissertation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin compared the nineteenth century compulsion to write within the form of a system to the original energies of the tractate, which, developing at the same time as the mosaic in the West, shared with the mosaic and the stained glass window the same principle of representation: a number of pieces – which congealed, in the tractate’s case, around certain authoritative or sacred citations – were arranged so that their systematic unity only appeared in juxtaposition, which is to say that the unity is extruded onto some external observer. What this means is that the pieces, seen individually and from within, may seem to be little complete bubbles in themselves, little snow globes, but that they are really parts of a grander schema and their meanings are not self contained after all, but partial. The whole meaning supervenes only when the all of the parts are juxtaposed. And all of the parts are juxtaposed when the demon of the lateral ceases to whisper in your ear.

Although cultural historians conventionally ascribe an organic unity to the Middle Ages, in reality, this form of unity-in-pieces is completely mechanical. What I like about the tractate is that it comprehends the essay and the aphorism. It builds not towards the muted shock of the logical conclusion, but instead towards the naked shock of the ‘line’- that is, the quote, the citation, in which ‘proof’ (the prestige of which derives from the institutionalization of truth) is transformed into the beautiful gesture (the prestige of which derives from the anarchy of individual experience). This is the dream of all clerks, all those who sit at desks, all the white collar crowd, all the agents of circulation, whether they admit it, or rather, act on it, or not. It is their clerkly terror and glory.

So I talked to A. about this. She’d been telling me that I should talk to her about what was on my mind.
I said this, approximately. At first, when I was considering this book simply as a sort of mythography following the figure of homo economicus, it seemed simple. I would ask why the term appeared in the 1890s, and then relate it to the turn in economics that was coordinate with the beginning of the consumerist phase of capitalism – which I interpret as the beginning of the modernist distancing from production, on the same order as the distancing from nature. I would point to how this figure, which admittedly describes only a few of the characteristics of any real person, has been used to create policy, and thus imposed as a model on populations that are humanly resistant to it. I would then use the notion of matrixes of exchange to explore the continuing existence of ‘non’ rational forms of exchange, with the idea that these are not non-rational at all, and that the viability of capitalist society depends on the fact that there are a diversity of exchange systems.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something a little more fun. So my second version of this project was to emphasize character formation under capitalism. Returning to the thesis that modernization has occurred under the sign of two removes, I thought I’d use Marx’s notion of the agent of circulation – the clerk, the salesman, the lower white collar employee – as the social niche in which the figure of the homo economicus has the greatest impact and, at the same time, creates the greatest repulsion. The logic of circulation is the logic of demand – which is how the organs of the media originally branch off and become the productive shadow of this segment of the total circulation of commodities. Establishing this link between the agent of media and the agent of circulation is important, as the quantitative character-shaping force of economic man and his counterparts in capitalist society are a result of the quantitatively greater penetration of media into the private life.

Thus, the essays in The Tears of Homo Economicus will cover a great deal of literary and sociological material, bathed in my associations as a reader and dumbfounded citizen of my time, in the service of a relatively small number of theses. Somehow, this should be do-able.

Deviance and the Underground

The discussion of deviance, in the sociology of the Cold War period up to the eighties, was burdened by a vice squad rhetoric and tone, as if the sociologists in question were busy raiding an opium den and kicking the sleepers. Thus, the categories of the academics and the voice-overs in those admonitory films shown in school classrooms to warn young white people against the temptation of various and sundry lurking dangers of the real world, from accepting rides with strangers to sex and drugs, seem retrospectively built out of the same cultural assumptions, under the bulking presence of the same missile system.

Deviance as a sociological concept came out of the 19th century discussion of decadence. Durkheim proposed deviance as a contrast to norms; later, in the 1950s, it was usefully associated with linguistic rituals – both in the way Becker saw how the labeling process works to distinguish the deviant from the ‘non-deviants’ outside of, although not uninfluenced by, the institutional context; and in the rationalizations of the deviant, classified by Matza and Sykes; and it finally fell victim, as a subject in sociology,not only to changing moeurs, which would theoretically simply give us another set of the deviant and the non-deviant, but also to camp. The vocabulary the fieldworkers used to describe the teenage car thief or the marijuana smoker, with its Dragnet cadences, is irresistibly funny, now. It is hard to read, for instance, Howard Becker’s Outsiders, with its search for the one deviant act that begins the career of the deviant (o that fall from grace), without giggling. Even in its time this prose had a period piece flavor. When smoking pot went from an activity practiced by the low life foreigner or the Hollywood blackmailer in a Raymond Chandler novel to one practiced by your average high school kid on the weekend, the subjects captured by deviance – which were always a little ambiguous to begin with, since deviance seems to pulse between crime and weirdness – began their startlingly rapid career of normalization, upending the cops. The camp resonance of the rhetoric employed by the agents of control and their academic minions flowed into the work of writers like Burroughts, Pynchon, and Joe Orton, as well as into underground commix and the prancing beat of rock and the sneers of punk, and in the process part of its seriousness was sacrificed on the altar of stylization, and another part became the basis for a counter-attack, mounted by a left that had learned paranoia the hard way, for the missile wall that protected us had also produced the bomb test and the iodine in the collective thyroid gland. It was style killed the traditional FBI man, and if he still continues to be popular, it is not in the guise of giving the fifth degree to the drug dealer, but as the chaser of UFOs and exotic foreign terrorists, with the new character code demanding that it be his own straightness tht comes into question. Even if deviance retains its terminological privilege in criminology, it has been generally muffled in sociological discourse since the 1970s. Colin Sumner aptly summed up this history in the title of his 1994 book: The Sociology of Deviance: an obituary

However, if the collapse of the sociology of deviance was due to its one-sided blindness to the real social force of style, certain of the classic ideas of the sociology of deviance are still worth rescuing precisely because they predicted this fate – or could be jiggered so as to make it explicable.

I am intrigued myself, as I go after the underground man, by the Sykes and Matza thesis of neutralization. While they were writing about juvenile delinquents in Chicago, Pierre Klossowski was writing about Sade in Paris. The sociologists may seem to inhabit a different realm from the pornographer/philosopher, but in fact neutralization casts light on what Klossowski calls Sade’s philosophy of ‘counter-generalization’.

The Matza and Sykes paper begins by rejecting an idea that, in diffuse form, had gained some currency in the sociology of deviance:

“The basic characteristic of the delinquent subculture, it is argued, is a system of values that represents an inversion of the values held by respectable, law abiding society, the world of the delinquent is the world of the law-abiding turned upside-down and its norms constitute a countervailing force directed against the conforming social order. Cohen sees the process of enveloping a delinquent subculture as a matter of building, maintaining, and reinforcing a code for behaviour which exists by opposition, which stands in point by point contradiction to dominant values, particularly those of the middle class. Cohen’s portrayal of delinquency is executed with a good deal of sophistication, and he carefully avoids overly simple explanations such as those based on the principle of ‘follow the leader’ or easy generalizations about ‘emotional disturbances’. Furthermore, he does not accept the delinquent subculture as something given, but instead systematically examines the function of delinquent values as a viable solution to the lower-class, male child’s problems in the area of social status. Yet in spite of its virtues, this image of juvenile delinquency as a form of behaviour based on competing or countervailing values and norms appears to suffer from a number of serious defects.”

The defects in question stem from a simplifying logic of contradiction. If there is a ‘deviant subculture’, then its norms will be, according to this theory, deviant – they will be the negation of the norms of respectable society – the society of the ‘human product’.

It is here that Klossowski’s interpretation of Sade makes an interesting dialogic partner to this sociological groping around, for in a sense what the sociologists are looking for is what some of the more romantic interpreters of Sade take to be the Sadeian society, which raises the standard of a Satanic revolt against the powers that be. Klossowski, on the other hand, while understanding that romantic moment in Sade, holds fast to Sade’s core Enlightenment belief. It is not Satanism but atheism that drives the Sadeian society. In the Philosopher-Villain, his corrective essay that takes up certain of the errors as he now saw them that populate his earlier book, Sade, my neighbor, Klossowski introduces the useful notion of counter-generality:

“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…

With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible. These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity. Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty, is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality. Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 14-15]

Thus, we have two positions, at least, staked out about deviant or pervert sub-cultures: one in which the pervert sub-culture is in revolt against respectable culture and constructs its own norms while accusing the respectable culture of various hypocrisies and injustices; and one in which the task is to establish, from the supreme act of normative reason, Atheism, the reign of a total absence of norms.

Matza and Sykes take a third position, which is that the deviant sub-culture is held together by an ethos of ‘neutralization’. They reject the idea that the deviant has a consistent philosophy that he follows – rather, they point out that there are a number of respectable people that deviants often admire (they include in this number the ‘mother’ and the ‘priest’, which – for Matza and Sykes – might evoke the Warner brothers films of the thirties, but for me evokes the Sadeian mockery that is directed at just these two figures), and that deviants are not immune to guilt; furthermore, when you listen to what the deviant says when he is caught (that is, for a crime – for again, the deviant in these texts is always becoming a criminal. The idea that the criminal might become the norm, that the respectable might model itself on the deviant, is outside of the ken of the deviant theme), he does not rail against the norms, but rather against his bad luck.

However, man is a creature that needs reasons as much as he needs food. Matza and Sykes suggest that reasons – rationalizations – are needed to actually live as a deviant. But if the deviant is not to make the move of vulgar opposition, nor the Sadeian move of the removal of all norms except that of the death instinct, then he will need some buffer to silence his inner voice:

“Disapproval flowing from internalized norms and conforming others in the social environment is neutralized, turned back, or deflected in advance. Social controls that serve to check or inhibit deviant motivational patterns are rendered inoperative, and the individual is freed to engage in delinquency without serious damage to his self-image. In this sense, the delinquent both has his cake and eats it too, for he remains committed to the dominant normative system and yet so qualifies its imperatives that violations are ‘acceptable’ if not ‘right’.”

This is a fascinating paragraph, for – through the supposed value neutrality of the idea of norms – one receives the impression of a monolithic respectable society that has, indeed, got it right. A society that is so monolithically right that, for instance, there is nothing deviant about said society producing weapons with the power to destroy humanity if it is attacked. At the moment that Matza and Sykes suggest their very useful category scheme, they also produce a moment of neutralization – of style and value – in which one gets a flash of the technocrat working on the human product as the sociological imagination blinks off. Neutralization, I suggest, is not the domesticated genie they take it for, especially if the deviant is not the Other of respectable society, but is rather in a parasitic relationship to the community of human products.

The neutralizations are defined by five cardinal elements, a sociological liturgy:
1. The denial of responsibility In so far as the delinquent can define himself as lacking responsibility for his deviant actions, the disapproval of self or others is simply reduced in effectiveness as a restraining influence.
2. The denial of injury A second major technique of neutralization centres on the injury or harm involved in the delinquent act. The criminal law has long made a distinction between crimes which are mala in se and mala prohibita – that is between acts that are wrong in themselves and acts that are illegal but not immoral – and the delinquent can make the same kind of distinction in evaluating the wrongfulness of his behaviour.
3. The denial of the victim Even if the delinquent accepts the responsibility for his deviant actions and is willing to admit that his deviant actions involve an injury or hurt, the moral indignation of self and others may be neutralized by an insistence that the injury is not wrong in light of the circumstances. The injury, it may be claimed, is not really an injury; rather, it is a form of rightful retaliation or punishment.
4. The condemnation of the condemners A fourth technique of neutralization would appear to involve a condemnation of the condemners or, as McCorkle and Korn have phrased it, a rejection of the rejecters. The delinquent shifts the focus of attention from his own deviant acts to the motives of his violations. His condemners, he may claim, are hypocrites, deviants in disguise, or impelled by personal spite.
5. The appeal to higher loyalties Fifth, and last, internal and external social controls may be neutralized by sacrificing the demands of the larger society for the demands of the smaller social group to which the delinquent belongs such as the sibling pair, the gang, or the friendship clique. It is important to note that the delinquent does not necessarily repudiate the imperatives of the dominant normative system, despite his failure to follow them. Rather, the delinquent may see himself as caught up in a dilemma that must be resolved, unfortunately, at the cost of violating the law.

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.