instinctive manicheanism

One is always having to remind oneself, in trying to do intellectual history, that the enunciative situation of a writer, from whence flow the texts one is continually pursuing, analyzing, using as evidence, is no mere scene dressing which easily melts in the background as we get down to the nitty gritty. It is nitty gritty all the way through. The enunciative situation is a nexus of institutionalized and non-institutionalized spaces that one forgets at one’s peril.

But even if we do try to be good historical materialists, there awaits the peril inhering in assuming a few Manichean categories to explain it all: public/private, or state sphere/private sphere, etc. I want to introduce categories as character, adventure, the total social fact, the encircling institution, the circulation agent, the writer as clerk, to snatch the real – or perhaps I should say, the everyday - from out of our instinctive Manicheanism.

dogs all the way down

Who let the dogs out?

Reading this post from Andrew Gelman, I was reminded of certain of Chamfort’s anecdotes about ancien regime society in France. For instance, this one:

“Do you know why, M. said to me, one has more integrity in France in one’s youth and just up to thirty years than past that age? It is because, after that age with us, one is undeceived – for with us one must be the hammer or the anvil; one sees clearly that the vices under which the nation trembles are irremediable. Up to then, one resembled a dog which defends the dinner of its master from the other dogs; after that age, one is like that same dog, who takes his part with the others.”

This has the stamp of the cynicism characteristic of the end of the regime. But at the end of our regime, the old democracies, giving way rapidly to plutocracies of the vilest type, one has to amend the fable, for the guard dogs in the American republic, incredibly enough, simply switch from defending the master to defending the pack of dog thieves. Their reward is to think that they are somehow, by being dogs, like the dog thieves.

Of course, they are encouraged in this belief by a rather rotten, financial unstable, but still necessary print propaganda machine. Time Magazine, through thick and thin, has assured us that the pack of dogs are the finest fellows in the world, all sprung from log cabins and making their millions by the sweat of their brows. Thus, as Gelman quotes a story in Time assuring us credulous outsider dogs who hold the mag in our earnest little paws that the top layer is made up of smarties and the most industrious:

“[Sam] Lessin is the poster boy for today's Times story on Facebook "talent acquisitions." Facebook spent several million dollars to buy Lessin's drop.io, only to shut it down and put Lessin to work on internal projects. To the Times, Lessin is an example of how "the best talent" fetches tons of money these days. "Engineers are worth half a million to one million," a Facebook executive told the paper.”

Gelman provides this gentle little corrective:

We'll let you in on a few things the Times left out: Lessin is not an engineer, but a Harvard social studies major and a former Bain consultant. His file-sharing startup drop.io was an also-ran competitor to the much more popular Dropbox, and was funded by a chum from Lessin's very rich childhood. Lessin's wealthy investment banker dad provided Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crucial access to venture capitalists in Facebook's early days. And Lessin had made a habit of wining and dining with Facebook executives for years before he finally scored a deal, including at a famous party he threw at his father's vacation home in Cyprus with girlfriend and Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro. (Lessin is well connected in media, too.) . .
It is almost Horatio Alger time in Bush-Obama America – you too can rise from the bottom if you only manage to get the keys to your dad’s vacation home in Cyprus!
However, as in ancien regime France, where Chamfort felt the undercurrents and eventually transformed himself from a disabused observer of the nobility to a very fine revolutionary writer proposing their at least collective decapitation, in ancien regime America one feels that the currents underneath are gathering against the plutocratic orgy at the top. There was a remarkable Gallup poll released a couple of weeks ago and touted by the right that showed that only 47 percent of the American people supported heavy taxation of the rich to produce an unspecified ‘redistribution’ of the wealth. I was astonished – almost half the country would support the most radical measure I can think of. Specify that ‘redistribution’ – say, instead, heavy taxes for ‘deficit reduction’ – and the numbers go way up. Pew shows that more than 40 percent of the Republicans support that. In spite of the money poured into position management (the news networks, the think tanks, the media in general), the screws are shaking loose of the machine.
Such moments are unpredictable. In 2008, the electorate thought that they were voting for change from one or the other candidate. Instead, they were voting for the continuity of Bush’s policies, with a little Romneycare thrown in for good measure – a policy that is in many ways less helpful than Bush’s much more expensive pill bill. A Republican treasury secretary and a Republican Defense secretary have been the pillars of our ‘bi-partisan’ policy. A Republican Fed chief can look back with satisfaction on a policy of loaning over 6 trillion dollars to the wealthiest Americans at 0.025 percent interest (a fact I enjoy pondering so much that I would like to include it in everything I write to the day I die) and leveraging a stock boom and a commodity futures greedorama. Which act was disguised behind TARP, so that comparatively few Americans realize how TARP was dwarfed by the free money policy. And those who do realize it are assured, in infinitely patronizing tones, that the Fed and the Obama administration only took the painful course of making the rich much, much richer because it was good for all of us – otherwise, it is laissez faire all the way!
The dogs, with their Cyprus summer homes and their Harvard pedigrees, will fight for the gigantic scraps of an economy that is still a world historical wonder for a while, while the middle class squabbles because some among them, after working twenty to forty years as public employees, actually get the pensions they were promised twenty to forty years ago. Unfair! It is squabbling dogs all the way down. But I’m thinking some of the dogs are suspecting there is no master at the table, and that the top dogs are, well, weaker than they look. Oh, let that moment come!

morning reflections on Gwinnett County

There are cities that are written into life – I was just living in one of the most extraordinary of them, Paris. Natalia Ginzburg once remarked that Turin and Pavese were one – that walking in the city that always smelled of soot and train stations was, in a sense, walking in Pavese’s state of mind.



In Atlanta, they are celebrating the 75th year of Gone with the Wind, but it is impossible to think of Margaret Mitchell when strolling through downtown Atlanta – although it is a different story perhaps with Buckhead, with its fad for white columns. In Gwinnett County, where I write this, there is no organizing principle. Forget a novelist or poet – this expanse of land lacks even a defining mapmaker. Housing developments, shopping centers and roads that name themselves after already existing roads and under false premises wander impudently into necks of the cut down woods are the norm, here. So are churches. Chaos, it turns out, is imminently Christian. Gwinnett County is the kind of place that counters the “Jimmy Carter” bestowed as an honorific on this or that piece of Georgia roadway (for the logical reason that Carter is Georgia’s one and only president) with a Ronald Reagan Highway, which then generates a plethora of Presidential shopping centers. To write Gwinnett county, the poet requires a large magic marker, and a tank full of gas in his Cherokee.



There is something odd about all this, or so I am thinking this morning. When the New World was new to the old World settler, that settler brought not only his pair of eyes but his names and promptly set to work – first with his “New”, then with the names he thought he heard coming out of the mouths of the people who were already here. But it is difficult to learn a man’s language as you are shoving him forward with blows from a blunderbuss, so the Indian words were hit or miss, a very distant approximation of the songlines that once ran in the wilderness. Gwinnett, that odd looking word, came not from some Welsh savage but from Button Gwinnett, Georgia’s signer of the Declaration. According to his biographer, William Montgomery, Button Gwinnett’s name was a fake. Button was probably Bolton, and we have simply misread his signature. As for Gwinnett, his assiduous researches – at least in 1913 – turned up no Gwinnett in England. Interestingly, it turned up a character named Gwinnett, who figures in a text by Richard Steele. As for where he hailed from – it was certainly not the territory I can see out my window. As Montgomery found, Button Gwinnett’s property is as shaky as his name – did he first appear in Charleston as a merchant in the 1770s? Or was it Savannah? Did he own property on St. Catherine’s island? The man came out of the mist. The man came out of the Transatlantic mangle, he came out of pirates and imposters, he came out of the Age of Reason and was the second signer of the Declaration of Independence, but with his ridiculous paucity of credentials, he would never have been issued a license by the Georgia Department of Drivers Services in Gwinnett County, and his signature would surely never have graced a single legal document in our age of infinitely backed up legal documents. The lady at the counter in Lawrenceville would have told him, firmly, that he had to go over his checklist and find at least a paystub. And to top it all off, Gwinnett found a way to die of a gunshot wound in the Revolution without firing a shot at the British – he died in a duel with another Georgia politcian.



I find this lost soul, by one of the iron laws of cartographic poetry, the perfectly appropriate symbol of this county.

From the files of the autocracy: the philosopher behind the curtain

We have an account of La Bruyère from a contemporary enemy named Vigneul-Marville. V-M took the term “characters” as an apposite plural for La Bruyère’s, who he portrays as having several. The transition from singular to plural, here, is the transition from the morally sound (or the comically obsessed) to the imposter – for it is at this point that the incision of character, its stamp on the body or the psyche, is, as it were, lifted off the counter, and becomes a mask. There is something contagious about the character mask – for instance, even as Vigneul-Marville wrote acidly about La Bruyère’s, he was writing under a pseudonym – his real name was Noël Argonne. In his Melanges, Vigneul-Marville compares La Bruyère to a succession of the great characters of the classical age – to Don Quixote, Socrates, and the Misanthrope. Each is considered from the comic point of view – that is, each is considered an imposture, a usurpation of tone. However, even among these attacks we come upon an anecdote in the Melange that has a certain clarifying Daoist simplicity, one that gives us a clue about La Bruyère and the way that the clerks have always betrayed the Great Tradition of which they are the ornament and reference – for surely La Bruyère must count among the clerks of literature who form a secret Daoist strain in the West. The features of this oppositional, skeptical character form in the absolutist bureaucracies, and of course suffer a great change within the bureaucracies of capitalist circulation, but the knowing listener can hear a distinct note – the kind of pitch struck by Josephine, the Singer of the Mouse Folk – even back in 1680.

This is Vigneul-Marville’s anecdote. At one point in his life, La Bruyère lived in a cramped apartment facing the Ile St. Louis, on the left bank. , as an evidence for, indeed, the manners of the century.
“Nothing is prettier than this character [that of the philosopher], but it must be admitted that without the interposition of an antichamber or cabinet, it was pretty easy to introduce oneself to M. de la Bruyere, before he had an apartment at the Hotel de …. There was only one door to open, and a room close to the sky, separated into two parts by a light curtain. The wind, always a good servant to Philosophers, which ran before of those who entered and returned with the movement of the door, delicately lifted the curtain and let one see the Philosopher, the laughing visage well content to have occasion to distill the elixer of his meditations in the minds and heart of his unexpected guest.”

For Vigneul-Marville, this is the scene of a mock oracle: the lifted curtain, the laughing visage of the philosopher, the gawking admirer. And of course he was writing in the era when, as Fontenelle had explained, the oracles were dead.

But it is a mistake to cut that anecdote out and impose it on the blank counter of our narrative as though it had a face value. For the man behind the curtain was more than the imposter of his enemy’s venom. He was, for instance, a functionary. The son of a Parisian bourgeois, La Bruyère, by education, was destined for the law. Apparently, however, he preferred not to. Instead, inheriting a tidy sum from a deceased bachelor uncle, he purchased into the corrupt system that had developed under Colbert, buying, for 18,000 francs, the sinecure of ‘trésorier de France au bureau des finances de Caen.” This was one of the rotten posts that the Rouen merchant Boisguilbert, in one of the earliest treatises in political economics to distinguish use and exchange value, railed against as a system of robbery. The post was another of the endless rentseeking positions through which money was siphoned from the merchants, peasant and middle landholders to the French court. The treasurer was a sort of money-lender [J. Marchand] who loaned out money at interest to his subordinates, who then sponged the money from the productive class and transferred it up the line, taking out their cut. This was a position that allowed plenty of leisure time to the functionary who had no vocational sense of his function – and La Bruyère had even less sense than most: he made one trip to Caen and then retired to Paris forever, getting his remit in the mail from the Normand bureaucrats who seemed to have objected at first to this obvious malfeasance, and then accepted it to the point that they were surprised, when La Bruyère finally sold the post to somebody else, to have to encounter a real human being who actually moved to Caen in the course of their tax business. (Magne, 1913)

the will to powerlessness - a note

A number of forms of knowing crystallize around the notion of character in the early modern era. It is no exaggeration to say that character is at the base of the era’s human ‘sciences’ – Van Delft has called the moraliste discourse ‘the anthropology of the classic age’, and character was at the center of that discourse – but as the human sciences were not institutionalized as such, character traversed what we now separate, as for instance romance and political economy. Thomas Mann, in Magic Mountain, writes with regard to his character, Hans Castorp:

Man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, also that of his epoch and his contemporaries, and even if he may observe the general and impersonal basis of his existence as unconditionally given and self-evident, and be very distant from the idea of criticizing it, as in reality the good Hans Castorp was, yet it is truly possible, that he feels his moral comfort vaguely impaired by its lack.” [My translation, p.58] In fact, Hans Castorp is inheriting the burden of the orator as he was characterized in Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, which was written at some point before 100 A.D. Quintilian experienced in his own life the downfall of the first lineage of emperors – James Murphy, one of his commentators, claims he returned from Spain to Rome just in time to see the bloody transactions that put an end to the Julian emperors and started the new line, from Vespasien. He flattered Domitian, who instituted a cruel secret police state. And yet, he dreamed in his book of oratory of the civic man: “We are to form, then, the perfect orator, who cannot exist unless as a good man, and we require in him, therefore, not only consummate ability in speaking, but every excellence of mind. 10. For I cannot admit that the principles of moral and honorable conduct are, as some have thought, to be left to the philosophers; since the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an orator. 11. Although I acknowledge, therefore, that I shall adopt some precepts which are contained in the writings of the philosophers, yet I shall maintain, with justice and truth, that they belong to my subject and have a peculiar relation to the art of oratory.” [Watson translation] The orator is, indeed, the contemporary – it is as a contemporary that he absorbs the traditions and moves onto the upper management jobs that run the state.

Yet, the contemporary in Quintilian’s day as well as Hans Castorp’s had to practice the critique of society from a rather precarious position. Already, in the Institutes, the critique is ossified. On the one hand, one forms a man whose opinions should count in the way society is run, and, on the other hand, society is being run on a system that will not stop to consult the good man. His will to power is continually undermined by his will to powerlessness – his tactic of never quite confronting the man, of which an extensive record is left in Western literature and philosophy, even beyond Nietzsche “Great Politics”,(perhaps the most ironic expression in modernity of the will to powerlessness).

La Bruyere's field research - a cautionary note

Van Delft is, I think, right to speak of the moraliste tradition as a sort of classical anthropology. I’m going to use this and other suggestions about Van Delft, but I’d like to note that, as is so often the case with historians of literature, one feels a lack of the feeling for the institutional location of such things as “anthropology” or ‘natural philosophy.” We are used to looking at the texts of the past and thinking that here we have an ‘epistemological field,” or a ‘tradition”, without thinking of the fact that it is a modern institutional characteristic to have combined such ‘research programs’ and education in locatable institutions. La Bruyere, acting as the historiographer of Louis XIV, engaged in one sort of research h activity, and as the writer of the Characters, engaged in another. In the latter, there was a sense – one feels it in the introduction to the characters – that the time for making maxims is passing. And yet of course there is no social science methodology readily available – outside of astrology, and the university courses that lead to the creation of the “civic man”.

But we should try to remember certain facts about education in the 17th century. For one thing, it was not an encircling institution – the government, for one thing, did not control it – rather, it was mostly a matter of the church – and for another thing, it was not connected with the vast capillary system that fell into place during the latter part of the 19th century in France and England, and that has always distinguished the United States as an enlightenment state – the states from the beginning took responsibility for education. For instance, in 1792, in Paris, a city with a population of 600,000 people, there were only 163 “regent” doctors, doctors who had gone through a full course of training, in the city. (Coury, 136) When La Bruyere went to school, he went ‘naturally”, as his biographer Etienne Allaire puts it, to a religious school, because ‘there was no other.” And just as naturally, he attached himself to a noble house – first, the Condé. Intellectual historians have a habit of speaking of, say, the rise of a ‘culture of sociability” by quoting people like La Bruyere or Addison or Lessing without pausing to ask how we are to analyse their claims – without even thinking about the kind of ‘field research’ they did. Partly this is because the very notion of ‘field research’ simply didn’t exist. In speaking of his book, La Bruyere gropes towards the authority that resides in the claims of the moraliste, but he never, of course, even considers statistics as applied to populations and the like – it wasn’t just that the sciences were not there, even the concept of populations wasn’t there. The forms weren’t there. Instead, the forms came out of a humanistic schooling that was prescribed for any educated person – doctors were trained in rhetoric as an essential element in their professional makeup. The remnants of this vast, blasted system lie across the landscape of academia today, for – as is my contention throughout – there is not and never will be a total ‘modernisation’ or a society of ‘rational’ institutions.

(I need to develop this more in The Tears of Homo Economicus)

the roots of ethology revised

Between 1840 and 1900, the character of economic man, or homo economicus, was formulated not so much as a sociological type observed empirically, but rather as a theoretical necessity arrived at deductively. In the model of the market economy as a sort of variant of the electromagnetic field of Maxwell’s, there was need for some molecule upon which market forces could work, and economic man was elected for the task. But, admittedly, this molecule had a backstory, one that was smoothed out no doubt to make him the infinitely rational calculator of myth, and yet still one that imposed a certain historic weight. John Stuart Mill, in the System of Logic (1843), suggested that there should be, at the center of the social sciences, one that was devoted to character itself – ethology. In the twentieth century, ethology was hijacked to describe the study of animal behavior, while the science that Mill suggested died in its cradle. Its object, too, has lead a marginal existence in sociology and economics – far better to speak of the self, the subject, the agent, the actor, than of character. Economists evoke the latter mainly when they turn away from the day’s business and turn to the slightly sickly rhetoric of uplift to raise morale among the newspaper readers and businessmen.

In picking up on character as my thematic to lead me through the transformations wrought by capitalism (or the Great Transformation, or modernization – names that attach to the great sweep that has lead to the artificial paradise we know in the developed economies today, with their great chemical alterations of the environment, their predominantly non-agricultural populations, their electricity, their eight hour a day lifestyle rhythms – a historical epoch that could be said to have been founded by the industrial revolution, or the trans-Atlantic revolutions, or the scientific revolution, and that I think took its start when Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519), I am making use of a category that bears a slightly dented aura. Even in the humanities, where characters still populate novels and films, the study of the unity and peculiarity of character is démodé. My impression is that character has little standing in the social sciences as well. And yet character more than self, subject, agent, personality, actor, traverses much more naturally the three spheres of human existence – the sphere of waking life, the sphere of dreams, and the sphere of third life – of media.

Character was the general study of the moralistes of the 17th and 18th century. When Marx uses the term “character mask” in Capital I, he is pressing on a trope that had a long circulation in moralist literature. La Bruyere wrote, in his Characters: “The difference between a man who puts on an alien character and who he is in the privacy of himself is that of a mask to a face.” [1692, 461] This contrast between an aspect that is not fixed, that can be put on, and that adheres to another, fixed aspect without mimicking it in every detail is a very old trope, suggested by the theater of masks.

A. Körte (1929) traces the word character back to the Greek verb for inscribing and wounding. The verb took on two technical meanings – inscribing in stone or wood, and the second was for the impressing of coins. It was nominalized first to designate the instrument that stamped the coin, and then for the stamp upon the coin. Thus, by a nice etymological coincidence, we find that the transformation of the meaning of character, in the ancient world, already brings us to the subject of money and standardization.

Körte points to the relative paucity of the word in the texts we have up until Aristotle. However, even then the metaphor was working that would link the stamp on the coin to the stamp on the soul. Although, Körte points out, the intermediate link is the stamp of the body:

“The image of the stamp, of the impress, was applied rather early to people, but not to the designation of their spiritual impress, the ineradicable individual type, as we mostly use the word ‘character’ today. It went rather with the bodily appearance, as in Herodutus in the scene of the recognition of the young Cyrus by Astyages: “While the boy thus spoke, there came upon Astyages a sense of recognition of him and the lineaments of his face [karaktes tou prosoepon] seemed to him to resemble his own, and his answer appeared to be somewhat over free for his station, while the time of the laying forth seemed to agree with the age of the boy.”

According to Körte, the final step towards the psychological meaning of character was taken by Aristotle, who liked the idea of using the idea of a wrought appearance – the lineament that is inscribed in a material – to speak of the stamp of habits upon the soul.

James Diggle, in his edition of Theophrastus, claims that the work should be translated as something like Behavioral Types or Distinctive Marks of Character. The metaphor, still working on a flat surface, was a drawing, or the portrait. But the drawing was of a general type – generated from Aristotle’s vices, as well as the vices of other moralists of antiquity. It was immediately seen that these characters had something comic about them, and they were transferred to the comedies of the stage. The comic was, perhaps, a stiffness in the stamp – an obsessiveness which rubs against reality, and which makes the character vulnerable to the stratagems of those he encounters.

At the same time, certain of the moralists took seriously the virtues of character. “The Stoic Posidonius (fr. 176 Edelstein-Kidd ap. Sen. Ep. 95.65–7) proclaims the utility of ethologia, his term for charakterismos: to display a model of virtue is to invite its imitation.” [Diggle, 11] The chain of meanings that lead us from the instrument that scratches on a surface to the surface that invites emulation is a trope that is taken up in Roman culture, especially by the stoics, and again in the early modern era.

At this point, the question of the relation between the mask and character takes a certain turn – and it is one we know well. It is a turn that resembles all the beginnings of a split, a branching off of the natural, a doubling – all the conjectural histories that, taking off from Rousseau in his two great essays on the social contract and inequality, saw the doubling as something suddenly sprung on the human animal… who was of course a Greek. The Greek, back in the days when the world was whole, would don the mask and become the mask, be possessed by it just as the devotee of vaudau would be possessed by a deity. French classicist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, in an essay, A Scandal in Athens: doing the comos without a mask, presents this viewpoint well. Her point of departure is an Demosthenes’s accusation that his the brother in law of his enemy, Eschines, went through the comos, the nocturnal procession or charivari, with dancing, singing and apparently indecent pantomime and the like, in honor of Dionysos. In the essay, Frontisi-Ducroux uses this accusation to understand the use of the mask in classic Athenian culture:

What is the import of this infraction? The question returns us to our interrogation concerning the significance of the mask, in Dionysian rituals, of course, but also generally in the practices and representations of the Greeks. Thus the values which permit us to disengage the term prosopon and its uses does not absolutely go towards the sense of incognito. Recall that the Greek language only possesses a single term to designate mask and visage, and that the two notions, far from opposing one another as in our cultures, are apprehended similarly in terms of faces, since the prosopon is “what is offered to the gaze”. The visage is what each one presents of itself to the eyes of others, and which, in a culture of exteriority, coincides with its authentic being. Thus the prosopon will designate the personage, then the grammatical person, before being applied, in the Christian epoch to the psychological and moral person. In such a context, in order to remain incognito, it is necessary to hide one’s visage, as Ulysses did in Alcinoos’s palace, during the song of Demodocus. But to put on a mask refers to putting on a new personality, which temporarily abolishes the first, which no longer matters. The prosopon that the actor dons is not a mask, in the sense that we understand it, but a new visage which presents its wearer to the eyes of others with other traits, under another aspect and a new identity.”

Frontisi-Ducroux’s difficulty in finding the words to express the person is part of the history she is telling – “personage:, “person”, “personality,” and “identity” are all words devised under the semantic regime of doubleness, of the artificial man. The natural man, of course, does not know his naturalness, and the moment he does know it, that naturalness slips into the retrospective view, never to be inhabited again. This is a variant of the story of the Other, codified in the 18th and 19th century grapple with ’man’ as an object of study and the subject of history. And it is thus – if we accept this story – that the mask and the character, which may seem like a natural couple, are somewhat at odds. To return to our history of metaphors, if the stamp on the coin is to work as the mark of authenticity, it cannot be lifted off – although in actuality coins can be pounded back into blank counters and restamped. But the mask can be lifted off and put on – it is the nature of the mask. It is also in the nature of the convention of masking that the mask represents another face than that borne by the masker. Still, the possibility of the mask hovers over the chain linking the character on the coin to the character stamped on the psyche. And so the mask does couple with the character in one tradition, which leads to the comic character, and eventually the cynical one – the man whose character in public is a strategic mask, an incognito through which he proceeds secretly to his ends. Whereas, in another tradition, the character is that which remains under the mask, that which is the very cast of the moral self.