collision versus shock

The afterlife of Robert Whytt is a comparatively muted thing. In James Buchan’s recent history of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, for instance, he is mentioned only in passing as the Professor of the Theory of Physic at Edinburgh’s University. Whytt does figure in more  specialized histories – for instance, Kurt Danziger devotes quite a bit of space to him in an article on the “pre-history’ of the notion of stimulated motion in animals. This is because Whytt branched off from the physiology that was dominated by Descartes’ idea of dualism, without adhering to the 18^th century school of materialism. Danziger has corrected the notion, floated in the nineteenth century by T.H. Huxley, that the behavioralist school of psychology owes its rise to reducing Descartes two forms of behavior – one actuated by reason, the other by sheer mechanics – to the latter alone. Whytt, according to Danziger, did not want to make the rational soul responsible for what Descartes had called mechanical motions, but he did not want to return to Descartes’ simple dualism. Rather, Whytt wanted to carve out a third kind of thing – a living thing:

“The necessity which, for Whytt, governed the operation of the sentient principle, involved the preservation of the life and organic unity of the animal body. It was impossible to predict the effects of stimuli on organic response for mechanical, or for that matter, chemical considerations, becauseinterposed between the stimulus and the response was the sentient principle which ensured that the response was such as to preserve the integrity of the living system. The old dualism had recognized only two kinds of actions in the world: voluntary action, governed by reason, and physical action, governed by mechanism. Whytt now argued for the existence of a third kind, fundamentally distinct, type of actions represented by “motion from a stimulus”. To the rational and the mechanical determinants of action there was now added a third  set of determinants derived from the self-regulation of the living body.” (1983)

           

Philosophers, who are never happier than when working the aisles of the dictionary, may be tempted to call this vitalism. It is a large question in the philosophy of sciences whether, in fact, the third set of determinants in Whytt’s schema can be reduced to the second set. As well as whether the first set is not, really, an articulation of the third set.

            The problematic concerns me mainly because it gives us a sense of the confusions that will haunt the interpretation of “shock” as the three determinants lour in the background, sometimes merging, sometimes distinguished one from the other. Most commonly, collision and shock are often taken to refer exactly to the same thing, even as, in the entangled tale of shock, the total discourse in which the later category plays its role makes it impossible to identify shock and collision strictly. Shock as a thing felt, a human thing, operates as a category that traverses sociology, aesthetics and psychology, and is implicated in the two great psychological schools of the twentieth century – psychoanalysis and behavioralism. Both schools, of course, have lost their sway as psychology was annexed by the pharmaceutical companies, but both beat, still, within not only the folk psychology they so permeated, but also within a psychological literature that refuses to die, finding its place in pockets in academy, or outside the great neo-liberal sphere.

           

   

on the election of Hollande, 1

Nietzsche took a satiric pleasure in quoting one of the Church fathers, Tertullian, whose idea of the cosmos built by the God of Love included box seats in heaven for the saints to look down and savor the screams and tortures of the damned in hell. However, Tertullian had a point: as he might well have replied to Nietzsche, who can resist so holy a temptation?

The pale inheritors of the cosmos planned for love are surely the socialists. As a sometimes member of the flock of the left, I, like Tertullian, take delight in the screams of the vanquished when I can. Those screams have shifted venues from the abode of eternal darkness to the comments columns under news stories and opinion pieces. You can tell a pleasure that is corrupted by temptation from one that isn’t by the fact that the former is never pure: yes, you go to hear the screams of the vanquished partisans of the right, and before you know it you are getting angry, scandalized, and not at all in the mood of savoring a triumph . Because just as the damned are still damned, the rightwinger is still a rightwinger in defeat. I know this, but such is the folly of fallen human nature that I still went, this morning, to the comments section under the Guardians comment piece – What do you Think of the French Election?

At the moment, the abiding Rightwing yelp seems to be that socialism is for cretins. Real men know that reality is about realism, and realism is about European populations realizing they can’t borrow any more. They owe so much! So the only thing to do is to retire later in life, for less of a pension, while working for less. And of course giving up healthcare and education, or paying immensely more for it.

This is a curious kind of realism. It is a sort of gluesniffing realism. It consists of thinking that the height of unrealism is paying a factory worker more than 10 euros per hour, or paying a hedgefund manager less than a thousand euros per hour. It is the realism of fools – to parody a famous phrase.

Realism begins by looking at what is real in the world and asking how it got there and how it can continue. When one looks at a shadow financial system that has accumulated a nominal 400 trillion dollars in derivatives and options, one sees an affair that can’t continue. When one looks at an investing class that was literally flooded with money by world governments for two years, through loans that were pure gifts as well as pure gifts (worldwide, the amount is well over 16 trillion dollars), you see a structure that was righted at great cost, to benefit the few – which also can’t continue. And when you see a wealth hierarchy in which those who contribute, socially, little (upper management) in response to those who contribute, socially, nothing (investors), engross almost all, while those who contribute nearly all (workers) are rudely asked to live much worse lives – because they ‘owe’ the people the state broke its back bailing out – you are looking at one of those power machines that are doomed by a very simple reality that keeps emerging again and again in the last two hundred years. It is this: a majority can only be lead to denude itself of its stuff, its privileges, its rights, when it is tricked into thinking that some enemy lies in wait, victory over which requires that sacrifice.

Otherwise, to pluck the 99 percent, you need a con, you need the old three card monte.  That was the trick of the neo-liberal order – substitute expanded credit limits for expanded pay packages, and plug the assets of the wage class into investment modalities, thus weakening their sense of self interest. It was a good trick, but it has turned rotten.

The realism of the right at the moment is the old boy’s club realism. The natives may be restless, but give em a good drubbing and they will calm down. It wouldn’t be realistic to predict the date of the end of the old boy’s club. But it would be less realistic still to predict that it won’t end, sooner or later.  

wanker moment 6: superfuckmeovereconomics

Out of my usual 00 motives – disgust with all mankind, disgust with myself, and just a teaspoonful of disgust for the 10 trillion living creatures on the ten billion planets throughout the cosmos – I wrote a parody on my site, Limited Inc (LI) February 19 2006 about profitmaking solutions to global warming. It went like this:

"money makin' ideas for the AEI to consider

Being broke at the moment, LI has been in search of a surefire source of revenue. And then it occurred to us: what kind of pro-active, pro-business response to global warming would warm the hearts of rightwing moneybags and bring in the checks?

Surely the thing to do is controlled volcanic management! We keep our cars, SUVs and coal generated plants going along at full carbon tilt, toss in a few atom bombs into the crater of some isolated volcano every year or so, and get the wonderfully cooling effect of pumping “sufficient amounts of ash into the air.” This package has everything: major manipulation of nature, atom bomb use, and a pro-carbon agenda. We are writing to the Scaife foundation for a grant right away! Happy days are here again!

From the Washington Post Q and A with Eugene Linden, author of Winds of Change:

Q: “As I've followed the global warming/climate change discussion, three historically based questions have always interested me. First, the drop in temperatures from the 1940s to the 1970s seems to contradict the correlation between human generated greenhouse gases and warming. Has this been adequately explained? Second, there was a significant warming period during the middle ages during which an agricultural colony was established in Greenland, but there was little or no human generated greenhouse gases at the time. Does this indicate that other factors besides human activity are the predominant causes of warming? Finally, proxies for temperature measures (i.e. ice cores, tree rings) have indicated that current temperatures are below long-term millennial temperature averages, and these long term trends track very closely to trends in solar activity. Does this indicate that current levels of solar activity are a more likely cause of current warming than greenhouse gases? Thank you for your consideration of my questions.

Eugene Linden: Since human greenhouse gas emissions only truly ramped up in the last century or so, it should be obvious that past warmings were the result of natural cycles (although one scholar argues that humans have had an impact through deforestation and agricultural going back thousands of years). Moreover, periodic coolings don't contradict the connection between GHG emissions and warming. For instance, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the early 90s put sufficient amounts of ash into the air to cool the planet the following year. Climate is one of the most complex systems on the planet, responding at any given time to countless pushes and pulls, but, on relatively short time frames, CO2 has tracked temperature as far back as we can reliably measure. It's one big variable that we can affect, and since we've upped it by 50%, temperatures have responded much the way climate scientists have expected. There will never be 100% certainty that the recent warming represents a response to human inputs, but the consensus is strikingly strong that it does. Moreover, it's the one thing we can do something about.

Finally, even if the current warming was entirely natural, it would still represent something that we should take very seriously. Natural climate change did in past civilizations, and we've seen the destructive potential of extreme weather just recently on the Gulf Coast.”

But then I thought:

Ah, fuck the think tank peanuts. LI is now thinking of the plot for the latest Michael Crichton novel – you know, our Rebel in Chief’s favorite expert on so called climate change. In this plot, St. Exxon (the first corporation ever to be beatified by the Vatican), trying, as usual, to save humanity, comes up with the volcano management idea. Evil environmentalists – the Osama bin Laden league for Deep Ecology – try, of course, to stop them. In the exciting last scene, Jesus Christ, played by Mel Gibson, machine guns the Laden-ites just as they are about to mess up St. Exxon’s scheme. Beautiful fadeout as Jesus turns to the CEO of Exxon – played by St. Peter – and says, in a choked up voice, “I just want my country… to love me… like I love it,” copping the finale to Rambo II – but also a wink and a nod to the idea, gaining increasing currency in the Red States, that Sly’s movie now has official gospel status.

A subplot involving St. Exxon falling deeply in M & A love with Chevron (who is pursued by a lustful, deceptive Chinee company, backed by some evil liability chasin’ lawyers) is, of course, de rigeur, since we need some nude accounting scenes – or at least nude flowsheet scenes. Hey, and to be all comme il faut and shit, how about a stand-in for you know who, toting a pellet gun loaded for bear, who tattoes cartoon images of the prophet on the buttocks of the aforementioned liability lawyers? We gotta think outside the box here, boys. Outside of the Hollywood mindset. Family values and like that. I’m going to pitch this plot to Seth."

Well, looking at this proposal, now, with an eagle eye, I can see a major flaw in it. It does have explosions. It would please the ever apoplectic male population, all pumped up on their Limbaugh brand Viagra and shit. But... it really needs to pump federal money into the South. This is, after all, pretty much the reason the U.S. exists any more -- find some reason to send another couple billion to a Peckerhead War Industry firm. I concede that, feeding the Dixie monkey wise, my simple proposal might not go over. But wait! What if we chose to explode volcanos in countries that aren't free? Couldn't we liberate them first? Which is invasion, which is moola-moola for those greasy kentucky fried fingers. And a lot of brown bodies, all torn to bits, occasionally flashed on the tv screen. Wow. A lyncherooni of an idea.

I'm seeing if Tom Delay is available for board membership of this thing.”

Little did I know that the geoengineering idea would pop up as the centerpiece of the ur piece of 00 trash, Freakonomics. Freakonomics was to the 00s what social Darwinism was to the Gilded Age – a piece of cuddly scientism cut out for the oligarch set and their multitudinous brownnosers in the press – an American press in which the economics section is invariably labeled “Business”, not “Labor”. On the principle of, who gives a fuck about labor? Freakonomics was, before anything else, boyish – in that aging boyish way that became the stylistic dominant of an era presided by an aging boy, a man whose greatest accomplishments had been cheerleading and owning a part of a baseball team. It was dreamt up by Steven Levitt, your typical freshwater motormouth, and a journalist, Stephen Dubner, who apparently turned the genius models of Levitt into a popular vernacular that could be licked up by middle managers. Freakonomics was an immediate hit in the intellectual blogosphere –in 2005, the book was the subject of a big fest at Crooked Timber, which the Crooked Timberites now look back on regretfully. It is easy to see why they liked it though – here’s a book that takes the principles of neo-classical economics seriously enough to use them as the magic key to understanding everything about life under capitalism – while assuming that capitalism is life. The idea that capitalism is life is, of course, bullshit. Capitalism is a certain distinct economic system, which has existed for a small moment in the course of human natural and written history. There are many, many matrixes of exchange that make up life, and to translate them all into terms that have to do with the artifices of mainstream economics is like translating Beethoven’s fifth into seal calls. I imagine a DJ could actually arrange bull seal snorts into something that roughly traced the melody of Beethoven’s fifth, but it would be a bold conman indeed who claimed that Beethoven’s fifth is, at bottom, about the mating habit of seals.

The Freaknomics team mounted a blog, which was represented for a while on the NYT site. The blog was a vast wreck of conservative ideology masquerading as hard economic fact. Well, this is what one would expect from a U. of Chi economist,  right? Still, sometimes the wankery went beyond the usual call of duty (less taxes! Freedom, freedom freedom!). There was, for instance, the promotion that inequality measures in America were neglecting the fact that you could buy cheaper tat at Wallmart now than ever before! There was the ongoing sexism, which crossed with the comic book nerd ethos to produce an unnerving obsession with prostitutes and porn stars. In their second book, for instance, the adorably cute authors ask the question, why aren’t more women prostitutes, because the adorably cute authors think that pussy is one of the world’s great commodities, which should be traded among those (men) who have money by women (non-nagging) who have the pussy. I think I’ve heard this conversation before, somewhere. Levitt’s humor has that 13 year old boy sexism to it that is, well, sad. I am sad that I have read it. This is a typical freakonomics post by Levitt in this vein:

“Of all the reasons anyone has ever had for getting breast implants, I’m guessing that no one ever thought of this one.
A body was recently found — a brutal murder in which the killer cut off the fingers of the victim and removed all her teeth in order to make identifying the body more difficult. One thing he hadn’t taken into account was that her breast implants would have serial numbers that would allow her to be positively identified.”

The very idea of breast implants is just a killer for our economist. Such is life, such is pathology, and such was the reactionary 00s.

Wankery on this level would, by itself, elevate Steven Levitt  and Stephen Dubner high into the wankery stratosphere. But it was their wink wink relationship with climate denialism, and their solution to global warming, as outlined in their second book and with monomaniacal fervor, on their blog, which earned them their true wankomoment. Unbelievably, what they offered up, after reiterating a few of the ripe tropes about global warming (scientists once thought that we had global cooling in the 70s! alarmists in the past worried about horse manure! Global warming is a leftist trifecta, since all the bad guys -  cars, the petro companies, suburbs – are also lefty bugabears!), this: an 18 mile high pipe to shoot sulphur into the atmosphere – basically, my manmade volcano recipe, minus the bombs.

The controversy about the Superfreakonomics books was marked a moment of change in mood, in the tone of the 00s. Contrarianism – the intellectual accompaniment to the evisceration of the middle class which provided the glee club noise – began to seem, well, not too much different from any other adventure of the right. Freakonomics had danced just close enough to the right left line that your Clintonoid liberal could hee haw along with our authors while thinking that they were engaged in serious but entertaining work – work that showed up certain liberal shibboleths. And who wouldn’t want to do that?  But in their book and subsequent posts, they showed that they weren’t only in tune with the Bushian Weltgeist, but were also willing to use Bushian logic, distort sources, and use the look over there strategy that was perfected, long ago, by the scientific krewe that developed the defense of the tobacco industry in the 50s and 60s.

   

the shock in shock: 3

The turn from one understanding electricity to another, from the classical and medieval emphasis on numbness and cold to the modern emphasis on suddenness and fire marks the moment of shock in the history of shock.

            Marshall McLuhan, in an article he wrote with an engineer, Barrington Nevitt, in 1973, introduced an interesting term of art from rhetoric into the philosophy of technology: “Today, metamorphosis by chiasmus – the reversal-of-process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size – is visible everywhere for everyone to see. The chiasmus of speedup is slowdown. Perhaps first noted by the ancient Chinese sages in I Ching or The Book of Changes, the history of chiastic patterns is traced through classical Greek and Hebrew literature by Nils W. Lund in Chiasmus in the New Testament. Computer programmers have also learned that “information overload leads to pattern recognition” as breakdown becomes breakthrough.” The passage ends, in typical McLuhan fashion, with a cornpone soundbyte – but the suggestion of going by chiasmus is nevertheless solid.

            In the literature about modernism, Walter Benjamin may have developed the most illuminating notion of where shock, as a social motif, came from and why it proved so useful. Susan Buck-Morss, one of Benjamin’s interpreters, suggests that Benjamin connected Freud’s thought about war trauma – trauma related to shock – with the trauma of the factory regime,  as denounced by Marx. If the former was shock in the modern sense, the latter was a long fatigue, a numbness. Both, however, had a defining relationship to repetition. The repetition of the anxiety of the traumatized soldier was psychological – a feeling of overwhelming danger that possessed him, waking and sleeping, again and again, as if his whole body were repeatedly trying to grip some moment that kept slipping away. The repetition of the factory worker was routine – a matter of a designed work flow that forced him to do the same thing over and over, to a mechanical standard.

 In the modern social experience, shock can’t be separated from the numbness out of which it came – they are bound together in a persistent chiasmus :

            “Under conditions of modern technology, the aesthetic system undergoes a dialectical reversal. The human sensorium changes from a mode of being "in touch" with reality into a means of blocking out reality. Aesthetics sensory perception becomes anaesthetics, a numbing of the senses' cognitive capacity that destroys the human organism's power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake. Someone who is "past experiencing," writes Benjamin, is "no longer capable of telling . . . proven friend . . . from mortal enemy." (Buck-Morss, 104)

the politics of self pity

Interesting to observe the anger of the right, as they sense that Sarkozy has led them to defeat. Part of me thinks that the cries of anguish are such that they should arouse my compassion, and part of my thinks they are hilariously funny. The best expression of Sarkozyism in decline was penned by Didier Barbelivien, Sarko's singer friend, in Le Monde yesterday. There are, as it were, two sides to the Sarko mindset: smug entitlement and self-pity. It was the self-pity note that D.B. played. The media elites did the great man in! He gave so much to France! He gave France later retirement! He gave France a glorious battle with the unnameable Khadafi! He gave France as much unemployment as it could stand! etc. Never let it be said that dignity has ever stood in Sarko's way, or those of his friends. Let this be inscribed on his political tombstone:

"A l'aube, il ne sera distancé de son principal adversaire que d'un point et demi. Alors, dès le lendemain, il repart en campagne sur ces routes de France qu'il aime tant et il en appelle au peuple "inoxydable". Il fustige les médias, la pensée unique, les mensonges éhontés de son adversaire, il ose s'adresser aux électeurs du Front national, aux centristes, à tous les autres et mêmes aux abstentionnistes, mais où se croit-il ? Dans une élection présidentielle ? Après tant d'éditoriaux contre lui, d'insultes de bas étage, de sous-entendus ignobles, on est même allé jusqu'à exhumer les fantômes de Pétain et de Laval pour l'enterrer tout à fait. Et il est toujours debout ! "

Tears roll down my face, reading this. Tears of laughter. Sarkozy is one of those politicians, like George Bush, who put a lot into developing the image of a tough guy. Of course, nobody in such soft circs is a tough guy. It is tough to be a soldier, but ordering soldiers to fly over some village and bomb it -nothing is easier, flabbier, less 'tough". But like all tough wannabes, at heart, Sarkozyism is all about crying in a bar over your own misunderstood virtues. Let's hope the sondage are right. The orgy of self-pity unleashed by the right in France this last week is killin' me.

shock 2 - excursus on analytic philosophy and history

shock 2
    So far, I have followed a favorite method of mine: what you might call Bertrand Russell’s accidental contribution to historical science. Russell was as an ardent devotee of the cult of substitution. From the point of view of ideologiekritik, substitution is where philosophy in the 20th century absorbed the wisdom of the bourgeois political economists of the late  19th century - substitution taking over the function that was once held, by the classical economists, by a more naive form of competition and utility.  By invoking the substitution of goods, economists were able to incorporate the price system and technology without going back to the old classical economist's labor theory. And by invoking substitution, Russell could logicize mathematics without worrying about any nasty semantic residues.  What could be substituted could be equated: what couldn’t posed philosophical and logical questions that will shape our formal solutions (for instance, the introduction of type-token hierarchies). The idea of substitution is so powerful that it remains, generally, out of the spotlight - no Being and Substitution treatise exists, as far as I know, in the philosophical canon. Substitution is our zero.

In the canonical instance of the author of waverly, King George IV (the face card is drawn from the mental pack, bringing us back, by a Tory reflex, to England) may believe that the Author of Waverly wrote Ivanhoe without believing that Walter Scott wrote Ivanhoe – since King George IV did not know that the anonymous author of Waverly was Walter Scott. We, however, do.  Our intellectual historical horizon can be defined, at least roughly, by the substitutions of descriptions that we can make, as much as our location in technology space is described by the substitutions we can make between tools.  
    To expand this beyond the propositional attitude: in the history of shock, we see a distinct difference between the ancient notion of numbing and coldness, and the modern moment of the blow and fire. The latter is hard to substitute for the former. And yet, the experience of Greek fisherman with the tornado puts us, looking back, in the position of saying that the Greeks were talking about shock; that is,if our own idea of shock is coherent.
    Etymologically, the numb is the secret sharer of shock.
    In a letter to Benjamin Franklin published in the Philosophical Transactions (1775), a John Walsh communicates an experiment made with the torpedo that proves that the fish does direct  its electric shocks – although without sparks. “Indeed, all our trials have been upon very feeble subjects, whose shock was seldom sensible beyond the touching finger.” What I want to point out here is that these are “shocks” – not a poison, or a numbing fluid. Although it is still not totally clear what a shock is, or at least how it is caused. The shocks and jolts tpo which insentient things are subject are merely rather sensational collisions, but the shock that the human body is subject to seems more mysterious and compelling. For what is true about the torpedo is true about us – we too have nerves. This is where the shocked present was bound to dwell.  

Industrial experience: zero hour, 1

What school of philosophy worthy of its name has not warred against the present? The present, the now, has been demystified and shown up in a hundred different ways. It is the vanishing point, the scapegoat, the zero of metaphysics.  It sticks in the throat the way zero, too, once stuck in the throat. And zero, too, is a hallmark of modernity. The ancients did not have zero. The Babylonians had a placeholder that allowed them to represent zero, but it was only a placeholder. It was analogous to the decimal point, which is not itself a number. Zero was a gift from the East – George Ifrah, in his book on numbers, dates the birth of zero to 458 in the Lokavibhaga. From there  it traveled to China and Southeast Asia, and to Central Asia. In Baghdad, Al Khwarizmi (780-850), who founded algebra – or at least picked up the stray pieces of mathematical knowledge and put them in a book - used Hindu numbers. According to Michel Soutif, “Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa wrote a treatise of arithmetic, the Liber Abacci, in 1202. This work, which would play a driving role during the XIIIth century, describes the

« Novem figurae Indorum” with the 0 sign that the arabs call “zephyrum”. The long adventure of zero in the West can be said to conclude in 1898, when Peano substituted zero for one in his list of the five primitive notions in mathematics, about which he said: “All systems which satisfy the five primitive propositions are in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers”.  Of course, long before 1898, it was realized that nothing comes of nothing, which is precisely the use of nothing, and every schoolboy knew how to draw the zero, multiply with it, add with it, etc. And every engineer as well. We had already begun to build the artificial paradise on the foundation of the zero.

We can call zero a notion or an idea, or we can call it a devise. A devise is a thing, but it is also the affordances of a thing – it is not only what the French call a truc, but it is also what  Americans call a “deal”, or a “trick” (“the trick of the x is that it does such a such”). The deal and the trick follow in the enchanted train of the trope, the turn. The ancients  didn’t have a notion of zero as a natural number, but they did know all about shapeshifters, magicians, and how the dead can be brought back to life – from beyond the zero, as Pynchon puts it in Gravity’s Rainbow, where the trick is that extinguished reflexes live again when they are whispered to by the unearthly elements, the synthetics, the witch’s brew, the chemistry of zero.

From this point of view, a history of devises – a history of technology – would be a history of tricks. David Edgerton, one of the leading historians of technology, has criticized the field for identifying technology with innovation, or invention, when, he claims, technology is about use. To emphasize this clain, he gave one of his books the title, “The Shock of the Old”. In it, he turns the readers attention to the utterly mixed nature of modern technology, in which, contrary to those historians that saw one technology after another inaugurate speeded up ages (of steam, of petroleum, of biotech, of information, etc.), old tech and new tech coexist. The age of the auto in the twentieth century was also the age of the greatest use of horses in any war, in the Nazi invasion of Europe, where the Germans alone employed 2 million horses. The age of the internet in the 21^st century saw Osama bin Laden escape on a pony (or a stallion) from Tora Bora, and U.S. GIs relearn horseback riding whilst carrying telecommunications that allowed precision aerial bombing.

Edgerton’s title takes its wit from the word “shock”, which has come to be canonically associated with modernism and the new, and was used by Robert Hughes as the title of his book (The Shock of the New).  Shock is modernism’s trick, its deal, its now, where the zero comes into play. It is worth examining the notion of the shock, then, for it forms a kind of model whose elements come into play in the industrial experience of the accident and – significantly – alienation in all its distressing wonders.

In Stanley Finger and Marco Piccolino’s The Shocking History of Electrical Fishes (notice, again, that shock is charged, here, with a certain irony – as though its metamorphosis through the popular press, which hung shock on crime,  or on truth, or on any sensation, had created a certain self-refective numbness), there is a quotation from Galen about the torpedo, a fish that seemed to fascinate the Greeks

Some [physicians] even believe that, through the action of their power (dunamei), some matters could alter nearby bodies by simple contact. Such a nature is encountered in the sea torpedoes. They have a power so that that, through the trident of the fishermen, the alteration is transmitted to the hand, which soon gets numbed (narkison).”  

That numbness has already been recorded in the Meno, where Socrates is compared to the torpedo, which numbs those who come in contact with it. Similarly, Meno says that he is ‘benumbed in my soul and my mouth…”

These instances of numbing, however, seem to elide the moment of the simple contact, or moment of shock. In Finger and Piccolini’s account, they helpfully comment on the numbing sensation that is referenced over and over with the term shock – but the term in play, up through the medieval period, is always some variant of numbing, or stupefying. It wasn’t until the end of the 17^th century, as various electrical devises, such as the Leyden Jar, ‘condensed’ electricity to the point that people could control electric shock to an extent that numbness began to be replaced by the more naked word shock. In Samuel Johnson’s poem for the death of Stephen Grey, the “electrician” – one of the scientists most interested in the qualities of the electric fluid – shock has replaced numbness and become a sort of cosmological element:

“No more shall Art thy dexterous hand require,
To break the sleep of elemental fire;
To rouse the power that actuates Nature's frame,
The momentaneous shock, the electric flame;
The flame which first, weak pupil to thy lore,
I saw, condemn'd, alas! to see no more.”

Johnson was the last person on earth who wanted to break the sleep of elemental fire if it meant overturning the design of the classical universe presided over by a loving deity, and pervaded by the forces discovered by the Greeks and refined upon by the moderns. But his images betray him. They carry us irresistibly to Blake, Shelley, and romantic science: “the dextrous hand”, “Nature’s frame” and most particularly, the “momentaneous shock”.