Oliver Sacks exciting adventure

As every New Yorker and London Review of Books subscriber knows, one begins by being utterly impressed by the sheer stuff that these mags offer, and one ends up like an inhabitant of Vicksburg in 1863, besieged and bewildered as the issues just keep zooming in: there’s another Paul Anderson 14 pager on Nehru! There’s the issue on the Olympics! There’s the short story by Michaelchabonzadiesmithalicemunroe!

Which is how the magazines have piled up in the office, and how I lag behind, reading them. Last night, I finally made my way through the issue in which Oliver Sacks recounts, with an astonishing lack of apology, his drug experiences  from the sixties. I especially like his description of getting the DTs from overdoing the chloral, and – after the initial shock of going home on a bus filled with insect-headed humanoids – resolving to experience the whole thing, rather than checking into a hospital. That’s the spirit! I remember once telling someone that I feared that if I took acid, I get flashbacks, and this person looked astonished: those are freebies, he explained.

It was nice that Sacks was resolutely not hiding those years from the kids. And I like it, too, that he connects being high on an overdose of amphetamines with his first real breakthrough in undertanding how he could write himself. So much for the moralistic idea that drugs and ‘real’ creativity are in two separate corners, and only an amateur would confuse them. Sacks has discovered a nineteenth century book by a man named Liveing on the Megrim, or Migraine:

 “As the intensity of the amphetamine took hold of me, stimulating my emotions and imagination, Liveing’s book seemed to increase in intensity and depth and beauty. I wanted nothing but to enter Liveing’s mind and imbibe the atmosphere of the time in which he worked. IN a sort of catatonic concentration so intense that in ten hours I scarcely moved a muscle or wet my lips, I read steadily through the five hundred pages of Megrim. As I did so, it seemed to me almost as if I were becoming Liveing himself, actually seeing the patients he described.”

That’s the Jekyll and Hyde prose I want my drug experiences to be fogged in!

Sacks, of course, is far from alone. In the 80s, when I had a few less intense drug experiences under my belt (mad coincidences via mushroom, and the unforgettable time I was surrounded by Valkyrie who were bare from the waist up, save for the Viking helmets, via the tab in New Orleans), I sometimes pondered the changes that must be wrought in the mass consciousness of America by the fact that literally tens of millions had taken some kind of mind altering drug. Surely there was a hallucinatory underground that would, by subliminal means, lead us through the doors of perception into the promised land.

Alas, Huxley was wrong – you can easily kick down the doors of perception on Saturday and remain the tv-drowned beancounter the rest of the weak. The bean counter who has tripped does not tread  more lightly in the world, aware that the fabric of reality is a bit fragile, a bit of a con job, a few filaments thrown over the gaping void – no, he’ll still cling to his day job and his day job mindset, he’ll still swallow every biz inspirational platitude you shoot his way.  The mystic/populist mix is a big bust, hosted by one of Blake’s turncoat devils.  

on the immortals

When Eric Auerbach enquires about the notion of “figure” and its broader use in rhetoric and literature, he begins by going back to Varro and the adaptation of Hellenic thinking by Roman writers in the 1^st century B.C. When I begin thinking about the notion of “mortal” and its use as a category term to denote human beings, I begin by going back to “Bewitched” and the cartoons featuring “Thor”, which I saw as a boy in (it seems to me, now) the living room in the house we lived in on Nielson Court in Clarkston, Georgia. I long for Auerbach’s scholarly depth, but depth must bow to the multitudinous experience that feeds it. Plankton, after all, sustains the whale.

It does seem to me, looking back, that the use of “mortal” for human being was a fact I accepted without thinking about it too much. It seemed that certain creatures – superheros, witches – would think that humans are mortals. But it didn’t seem to me that this meant humans were limited by death. Death, in those pj-ed, tv watching days, was not very clear to me. Certain people died. My mom’s father, for instance, died. But I had a foggy view of my grandfather, who I saw only when we went down to visit D.C., and in my mind, he shared more characteristics with the non-mortals than with the mortals – he seemed remote, powerful, a little scary at the dinner table.

Now I look back and wonder why the category of “mortal” crops up so naturally in American popular entertainment. “Mortal” has, in these shows, a sneer attached to it. Mortals are inferior to --- well, the other side is rarely called “immortal”. According to the Iliad, ““the breed of immortal gods and of men who walk the ground is in no way alike.” Classical scholars distinguish between deathless, athanatoi, and immortal, ambrotoi – the latter, according to Manu Leumann’s Homerische Wőrter (quoted in Seth Bernardete’s The Argument of Action), is related to the pair of words brotos, “gore”, and brotos, mortal. “The gods are called deathless (athanatoi) because they are bloodless (anaimones), for to be bloodless (ambrotoi) is to be immortal (ambrotoi).” Ambrosia is the English orphan born of these deep and forgotten currents. However, in the cartoon world there is a continuing fidelity to the tie between blood and mortality. We bleed, and thus we die. Whereas only ichor, a mysterious thing, flows in the arteries of the gods.

Of course, tv paganism is an odd thing, bursting out of the supposedly Puritan U.S. culture. TV paganism –and its Hollywood and comic book cohorts – does not come out of the addled brains of those who have been reading too much Pindar. So the problem of this cultural pattern, one that is entangled with literacy, is deeper than the toss off word, ‘influence” -  which also holds an effluent inside it – can explain.

If we can drain the blood from a chicken or a goat, we can drain it from a human being – such a thought surely crosses the mind of any pastoral people. Andrian Mihai, in an interesting article in Numen, crosses the notion of mortality and bloodlessness with the co-equal primitives of air and fire. Mihai quotes extensively from funeral monuments, plays and poems to show that the gulf between the immortals and the mortals is not the great abyss between the bloody and the bloodless. According to Mihai: “Etymologically, the root of aither is aithō, ‘to burn, blaze,’ suggesting the sense of ‘pure or clear air.’ It is not only a region of the skies that surrounds the world — the highest and the purest part of the atmosphere (as it was for the natural philosophers up to the nineteenth century), but it is also a certain condition of the sky, its brightness and translucence (Kahn 1994:145). Thus, aither is to be distinguished from aer, the misty or vaporous air, the lower part of the air extending from Earth and up to and including the clouds (Hesiod, Theogony 125).”

Here’s the thing: TV, following radio, is “on the air”. This phrase seems to accompany the earliest broadcasts, and has engrained itself into our imagery of audio/video technology. Nihai claims that the mortals imprison the radiance of the sky within the blood and flesh body. A familiar image. That the aether escapes, at death, is also a familiar image. Air wants to be free. And similarly, to be on the air speaks to another dreamlike escape. The immortals are naturally attracted to the ‘airwaves’.

Thus, a blind shoot of this old fourfold thematic, air/water/fire/earth, finds its way into our TV addled childhoods.

Montaigne and the witches

The witches

“Firstly, private error makes public error, which in turn, makes private error.” –On the lame, Montaigne

In the English speaking world, the credit for the idea that the witches persecuted in the witch hunts of Europe were actually members of an underground pagan cult, trapped like a bubble inside Christendom, goes to Margaret Murray, writing in 1921. But the idea was actually articulated long before Murray in 1862, in Jules Michelet’s book, The Witch. Michelet, familiar with the philologists, used the comparativist method that became a craze for desk bound anthropologists in Murray’s time, like J.G. Frazer. It did not escape Michelet that the ‘odious’ custom of brothers sleeping with their sisters in Basque country, an accusation relayed by Pierre de Lancre, the head of the witchhunting commission in Labourd (Southwest France)  in 1609, reproduces a custom of the mages of Persia.

De Lancre is a mysterious character, a footnote in not only the histories of witchcraft in Europe, but in Montaigne studies. He owes that latter to the fact that he married Jeanne, Montaigne’s great niece, in 1588. In the former, he has figured as a miserable inquisitor, responsible for the death of thousands – Rudolph Reuss’s evaluation in the 19^th century – to a faulty old gull, responsible for most probably a couple of executions, and certainly for the flight of two priests and a number of Basque common folk from the Lebourd territory – a twentieth century view. Reuss, who probably read about Lancre in Michelet, took Lancre’s estimate that there were as many as thirty thousand worshippers of Satan in Labourd at face value. Michelet took many other of Lancre’s comments, in his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, at face value as well. This may be because Lancre’s dark reading of the willingness of the women of Labourd to consort with the devil (including much detail about the size of the devil’s penis and his preference for fucking pretty women from the front and ugly women from behind, which Lancre presents – from the testimony of one of his 17 year old prisoners – as self-evident) was read in an inverted way by Michelet, who saw this as an obscure revolt against the bleak hegemony of the church and king.

Jan Machielson, in a fascinating essay entitled Thinking with Montaigne, contemplates Montaigne’s odd relation with two of the doctrinaire demonologists – Lancre and Lancre’s source for certain of his theological claims about the heresy of not believing in witches, Martin Delrio. Delrio was a Spanish Jesuit who, as Machielson points out, was not involved in using the persecution of witches as a cover for the persecution of skepticism, an idea that has persisted from the Enlightenment down to Richard Popkin. Rather, Delrio shows himself skeptical of one of Montaigne’s great reasons for adopting a skeptical attitude to the testimony of witches: the power of the imagination. In addition, Lancre’s writings are evidently, stylistically, influenced by Montaigne. In fact, Lancre honors Montaigne whenever he mentions him. Lancre was a lawyer from Bordeaux, where Montaigne was mayor, and he has an evident respect for him deriving perhaps from the lawyer’s humanism of those circles.

However, it is interesting that Montaigne’s great theme of inconstancy – his idea that, as he says over and over again, the I is the great natural monster, an ever changing Proteus at grips with an ever changing ocean of objects  – becomes, in Lancre’s hands, the reason that the Basques are so attracted to Satan. Instead of rooting themselves to the fields, the Basques in this region, which includes Bayonne, are great sailors and whalehunters. Lancre suspects that the sea, with its bottomlessness and storms, makes these people rootless. Not only that, but the men tend to leave the women alone for long periods of time. Hence, the devil comes in.

Montaigne, in the essay that is most concerned with witchcraft, On the Lame, presents a very interesting critique of the idea that to know is to know the cause of a fact. For Montaigne, this gets ahead of what one wants to know first: is there a fact? Montaigne is wary of the instinct for marvels. The marvel weaves around itself a story about its cause, and that story is then woven around in turn by a larger story, and so on. But what do we know about causes?

This is why Montaigne interrupts his meditations to continually tell the reader about himself. For his telling is telling from a cause, the self. And as the telling is broken, changeable, sometimes implausible, and full of holes – so our sense of causes in the world should be precarious and uncertain. At the same time, Montaigne does have an account of the spread of error, which we have quoted at the beginning of this post. This is one that, twisted in another direction,  has informed Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of the history of witches: that the narratives can be recoded by the inquisitors, played back to the population they are hunting through, and come gradually to be accepted by that portion of the population that is in continuity with the beliefs and practices the inquisitors have hunted. The benandanti first make sense of themselves as being on God’s side, and then, after the inquisitors insist for decades that they are on the devil’s side, they slowly change their mind: but they don’t change being benandanti. This, in fact, seems to be the story in Mexico, as well, with the way the Nahua magicians saw themselves during the 16^th century.  

For Clint

“The world is turning into vinegar.”

Thus spoke the gentleman who bought our desk, yesterday, when he came to pick it up. He was explaining that he and his wife, for “ideological” reasons, now attempt to get all their things second hand. “Things are in the saddle and they ride mankind,” Emerson said. This man’s opinion was that things were now riding all too roughly, and crushing not only mankind but the whole world, the lock stock and barrel of atmosphere, continents and ocean. This is a sentiment I’ve heard a lot of in Paris, lately.

I thought of this guy when I read the portrait of Justin Bieber’s manager, “Scooter,” in the New Yorker this morning [Note: Technically, this way of changing a top is known in rhetoric as the “spitball transition”, and it is illegal in league play. But it is good enough for Limited Inc!]. I learned a lot of things about Justin Bieber in the profile. I learned, for instance, that he was discovered by Scooter on Youtube. This warmed my heart with the infinite flame of love. I still like the Soviet avant-g. idea of the 20s that, as the tools of art are given to the people, the line separating the aesthetic domain from everyday life will be liquidated. Now, the problem turned out that you can’t wish away the sphere of circulation. You still can’t, but, in the classic manner of building the socialist future in the ruins of the capitalist present, Youtube is bringing the tools of circulation nearer the masses. Justin Bieber,  meet Dziga Vertov.

But back to the world turning to vinegar. There is a passage in the profile where Scooter displays his vehicles. Natch. Here’s the passage:

“Braun recently bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. It is a large, modern bachelor pad with double-height ceilings and a wall of windows overlooking the city. To get to the front door, you walk on slate stepping stones through a koi pond. In the foyer are shelves displaying meaningful tokens: a signed copy of the basketball coach John Wooden’s “Pyramid to Success”; a sketch of Braun’s sports car, a hundred-thousand-dollar electric vehicle called the Fisker Karma (“I got one for me and one for Justin,” he said. “It makes you help the environment, but you also don’t have to feel like a pussy”); a poster commemorating Bieber’s performance at the White House, signed by President Obama.”

I spied with my little eye a connection between Scooter Braun and our customer, yesterday: the DIY politics. We live in an era where, in France, the EU, China, the U.S., politics is no longer the art of the possible, but the stylization of the impotent. Government is doing shit, all over the world. As in no other period, we have the tools to Technicolor dream the disasters we are approaching. But it is as if we are in a magnetic sleep. Mock democracy, which is in the stage when the oligarchs pilfer as much as they can, is the new form of democracy. You can demonstrate against it. You can twitter against it. You can make fun of it from the sidelines. It doesn’t matter. Parties exist, now, so that party elites can massage messages, on the one hand, to get an American idolish favorable handcount, and, on the other hand, to amass enough favors for the plutocrats to open the doors for themselves and their families and friends.

Thus, the reaction among the masses of letting a thousand flowers bloom – from buying hundred thousand dollar electric vehicles to writing devastating, Zizek laced critiques of the latest HBO craze. As the world turns to vinegar, there is a mass sentiment that somebody needs to turn around the machine. Or even turn off the machine. But “somebody” is nobody.

Which brings me (spitball two!) to Clint Eastwood (to whom I have three magic words: Krapps Last Tape! Rarely have I ever seen a role and an actor come together with the inevitability of,  well, the historical necessity of overthrowing capitalism. Performance of a lifetime, I’m telling you!)  I watched the Jon Stewart show about the Republican convention, and thought Stewart made a very astute analysis of invisible Obama. But when I went and watched the speech, I noticed that the Comedy Show elided one key moment. It was the moment in which Eastwood said that there are twenty three million unemployed people in the U.S., and he found this disgusting.

I thought that was a beautiful moment; but it was clearly a DIY political moment. The GOP has no intention of finding any way, whatsoever, to hire those twenty three million unemployed people. And Obama’s administration has spent four years stoically never, ever speaking about them. Of course, in 2009, they could have all, every jack, been hired by the government. That would have cost a trillion dollars. But the Obama administration had another New Deal program in place, lending 16 trillion dollars at ultra low rates to Wall Street. That program worked. I’m pleased to say that the 1 percent, who suffered a major  asset hit, started to recover by 2011 and are now on track to continue engrossing more income as a percentage of the national income than they have since 1928. As for their incalculable wealth, well, did I mention the New Yorker profile with the guy buying 2 100,000 dollar electric cars?

Well, Clint was, as anybody could see, mostly off his rocker. And still, that it is only a man off his rocker who dares mention the number of unemployed people in the country shows how we have swallowed the premise of mock democracy hook, line and sinker.

“Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . . for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely--(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again)--great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality--(Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again)--unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire--(Krapp curses loader, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again)--my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.”   

montaigne: sketch and the portrait 2

VII. Montaigne

What was Montaigne’s point in writing his Essais? Although the essays include history, philosophical meditations, literary criticism and something like reportage, Montaigne disclaims any ambition to be a historian, philosopher or poet. He recurs, again and again, to the notion of the self-portrait. Like the painters whose works he saw in Paris when he traveled there, he would paint himself. But he did not take this to mean that he would write his autobiography. Rather, most often, he talks about following his “fantasies”. This movement is in correspondence with a larger theme: that life is continually in motion. This motion is in everything – and Montaigne often seems to want to find stylistic equivalents for it, shocks for his audience. Thus, along with the dignified image of a man painting his own portrait, Montaigne would also describe his work in much lower terms. This is what he writes at the beginning of “On Vanity”: 

“I cannot compose the register of my life by my actions, for fortune has put them too low. I compose it then of my fantasies. It is thus I have seen a gentleman who could only communicate his life by the operations of his stomach: You see him show in his home an order of basins, produced over seven or eight days: this was his study, his discourse. To him, any other kind of talk stank. Here, to put it a bit more civilly, are the excrements of an old spirit: now hard, now soft, and always undigested.”

This passage creates a difference, a moment in reading in which the reader is torn away from the intimacy of his act. A note in the Pleiade edition attributes the anecdote about the gentleman who displays his feces for his guests to a classical source. But the final comparison of the essays to an old man’s scat is Montaigne’s own. The high/low register, here, is, as it were, unfettered from its usual structuring difference: high and low interpenetrate one another, and the hierarchy in which the high has dominion is pronounced, metaphorically, by a shit. This delight in perspectival paradoxes, in making ambiguous the register of the discourse, is  not a unique stylistic discovery of Montaigne’s. The Baroque poets and Protestant ministers are already finding a rhetorical energy in the shocks of mortality, juxtapositions that are meant to induce a religious vertigo – a strong sense of the present as owed entirely to death, against an eternity that is ruled by a deity whose thoughts are entirely unknown. These shocks are all the more charged in that they could be turned to deliver blows  to hierarchy’s projection in the social – to republican, or at least frondeur uses.

It is not to this use of opposites, though, that I want to point us. It is, rather, to something else, something having to do with Montaigne’s intention to write within a rejection of genre,  even at the risk of presenting us with old man’s scat. Eric Auerbach pinpoints something important about the method of Montaigne’s Essays that relates to Montaigne’s sense of the perpetual flux of things:

“Every kind of specialization falsifies the moral picture; it presents us in but one of

our roles; it consciously leaves in darkness broad reaches of our lives and destinies. From a book on Greek grammar or international law the author's personal existence cannot be known, or at best only in those rare cases where his temperament is so strong and idiosyncratic that it breaks through in any manifestation of his life. Montaigne's social and economic circumstances made it easy for him to develop

and preserve his whole self. His needs were met halfway by his period, which had not yet fully developed for the upper classes of society the duty, the technique, and the ethos of specialized work, but on the contrary, under the influence of the oligarchic civilization of antiquity, strove for the most general and most human culture of the individual. Not one of his known contemporaries advanced in this direction so far as he did. Compared with him they are all specialists: theologians, philologists, philosophers, statesmen, physicians, poets, artists; they all present themselves to the world par quelque marque particuliere et estrangiere. Montaigne too, under the pressure of circumstances, was at times lawyer, soldier, politician; he was the mayor of Bordeaux for several years. But he did not give himself over to such activities; he

merely lent himself for a time and subject to recall, and he promised those who laid tasks upon him de resprendre en main, non pas au poulmon et au foye ( 3, 10, p. 438).”

Auerbach’s term, specialization, refers to a broader sweep of divisions of activity than employment. The sociologist Abram de Swan has written about the professionalization and proto-professionalization that affects “experts” and “lay people” as follows:  

The internal process of professionalization creates external effects among ever-widening circles of laymen, who adopt the basic stances and fundamental concepts of the profession as a means of orientation in everyday life: it is a process of proto-professionalizaiton, in which laymen learn to recognize some events as “a case for the lawyer’, others as a ‘suitable case for treatment”, and so on. 

Auerbach attributes a part of Montaigne systematic, though non-systematized distaste for the professional orientation towards life, whether we represent the professional as a poet or an academic, to the fact that this attitude was such that he could afford it -  he was, as he points out often, the heir of his father, a man who was good with “affairs”. Affairs is the word Montaigne uses to describe the household as an economic unit. He is not himself interested in expanding his economic reach, at least in his own account. That lack of desire to have more is etched deeply into the Essais, and is thematically germane to Montaigne’s contempt for ‘specialization’. Montaigne knew that his nobility was recent, and that his family history was populated with money-makers.  On his mother’s side, his ancestors were, in all probability, Spanish Jews, who originally specialized in the old clothes trade and branched out to other goods once they moved to France. Pierre D’Eyquem, his father, was a noble – he is so denominated in his marriage contract – because his grandfather, Ramon, had purchased the Chateau of Montaigne, which conferred a title of minor nobility. Before that purchase, the Eyquem family had been known primarily for merchandizing wine and dried fish.

So there is a sense in which Montaigne’s debt to his father could only be paid by managing affairs himself. That debt is unpaid. And the activity that would go to make up that debt is even viewed with scorn. This is a ‘fold’ not only in the text of the Essais, but in Montaigne’s own life. Walter Benjamin once wrote that the true dynamic in history is not a matter of cause, but a matter of “debt” – Schuld – meaning, as well, guilt. The past is always a guilty past, a past we owe a debt to. Montaigne’s liberation – what his fantasies have done for him – is to gradually transform his perception of the debt he owes his father into a perception of the debt he owes himself – the debt he owes through the fact that he exists and experiences. This, too, is the result, the physical result, of his parent’s action. It is in the face of these twin debts that Montaigne forms his attitude towards the professional orientation and its social coordinates – broadly, custom, which he saw as logically hostile to the broadness of life. Montaigne often comments that his Essays are attempts to paint himself, to think of himself, to find out what he is; the antithesis of this project is the professionalization of experience. One of the stylistic and thematic peculiarities of the essays is how often Montaigne seems to go out of his way to contradict one assertion with another, one citation with another, one anecdote with another. Montaigne employs the same mode of shock to his own ‘specialty’ – that is, the writing of the essays. The metaphor of painting oneself has an acceptable correlate among the arts – but the metaphor of excrements is a way of making the sense that we touch the author when we touch the book turn into something taboo.

role model liberalism and soap opera

As everyone knows, the best Danish tv program ever was Kingdom (Riget), the Lars van Trier weirdness. And in fact I’d go so far as to say that no other program featuring autistic, dwarfish dishwashers as a Greek chorus to the main events was as good as Lars van Trier’s version of an autistic, dwarfish pair of dishwashers acting as a Greek chorus to the main events in the show. My favorite character in Riget is, of course, the evil Swedish doctor, who comes to the Danish hospital trailing rumors of malpractice in his native Sweden. The show made his denunciations of Denmark a regular feature: as I recall, many episodes ended with him standing on the hospital roof, looking towards Sweden, and showering curses – like a Swedish Mephistopheles – down upon the incorrigibly backwards Danes. “Here is Denmark, excreted from limestone. There is Sweden, chiselled from granite. Danish scum!”  Here’s the Youtube link thatlines up all the curses.

However, Kingdom was a one shot deal. Lately, A. and I have been watching Borgen, another Danish tv series. This one is about a female prime minister – you can see it on Linktv, complete with English subtitles. It is an interesting study in Role Model Liberalism. The prime minister is elected as a moderate – which, in tv land (and in the media) – is the G spot of politics. The idea actually goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric –we take social temperaments or positions, we label them as extremes as one type or another, and we then have a mathematical grasp of them, so that we can find the middle. A young man is impetuous, an old man is scared of any change, and a middle aged man is sometimes impetuous, and sometimes scared of change – or prudent. This sociology of types has long been obsolete, but in the media world, it is applied religiously to politics: if the left wants x and the right wants z, why, y must be just what the world is waiting for! This method makes no sense, since it neither diagnoses the political problem nor the solution.  However, it has tremendous fans in the media, in which the people who are ‘opinionmakers’ or tv series directors are paid enormously and want to keep their class positions, but at the same time have identified themselves as representatives of a long tradition of progress. It is the same impulse that keeps geriatric rock n roll bands singing tunes full of old adolescent sneering. 

The show I boggled at was one involving a crisis –the show is set up around the old crisis/solution format – that occurs when the Prime Minister  daringly introduces a law that would force corporations to institute parity between men and women (50-50) on their corporate boards. This is introduced with the implication that here we have the latest in ultra-feminism. That the measure would simply affect say one hundred wealthy women in Denmark is never, quite, brought to the fore. The reason is that this is the feminism of role models, and obviously the writers and producers think that the triumph for some corporate dog is a triumph that can be shared by all women. Just as women could once look at movie stars  and dream a little dream, now they can look at the rich and sassy bread of  corporate heads and feel liberated deep inside.

Role model liberalism used to be called tokenism and other dirty names, in the radical sixties,  but it has gradually crept into the very texture and weave of the contemporary liberal or progressive ethos, and not only in America. Of course, the crisis in the show was averted when finally, the prime minister and the CEO of Denmark’s biggest corporation face off and she gets him to yield – cause he’s a very human curmudgeonly CEO. Of course – no caricatures of Mr. Moneybags in the era of  Role model liberalism!

Luckily, the show realizes that role model liberalism is incorrigibly dull –thus, the real juice   in it all tends to the standard soap opera themes that are our real role models for getting into and out of trouble in the prison  of ordinary life : will the p.m.’s husband adjust to her new fame? Will the spokesman have an affair with the Labour Minister? Role model  liberalism dissolves, at the crucial points, into the older appetites. I like the older appetites a great deal, but I feel like raining curses on Denmark whenever the moderate political solution raises its ugly head in the program.  

character: between representation and cause

Character, unlike the soul, or the person, or the self, has never settled its ontological accounts, so that it can be said to exist in the “world” or in the “representation of the world”.

Seventeenth century character books were written in the shadow of the ut pictura poesis – which gains its legitimacy not just in the tradition of the humors, but in the tradition of the portrait. Plutarch, at the beginning of his life of Alexander, makes the association between the picture and the character explicit:

“For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.  Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.” [B. Perrin, translation]

The association of the character with the sketch, the picture and the mask pulls the concept into the domain of representation, and it is here that “Alexander” can become a character in an anecdote or a life. The association of character with expression, with what is under the surface, with virtue and vice, pulls it into the domain of the self, the person, the soul – and, most importantly, of cause. It is here that character can impose itself in history, for it is not simply the character Alexander, but the character of Alexander, that is exposed in his Life. In the first association of character we can see the roots of the notion of alienation – an imprisonment in obsessions, routines, repetitions, humors. Self-representation, then, does have a causal status in as much as it causes  others to act in a certain way to the imprisoned character, and the prison grows more impenetrable as the character precedes to write itself into this script. In the second, character is something outside of the prison, something recognizing, something that stands, emblematically, before the good and the bad, the act and the habit. In its second guise, character can be ‘acted upon’, trained. Character, here, is linked to education – in the humanist tradition, in a text like Montaigne’s The ‘institution’ [education] of children’, character is the central object of all teaching.

It is the conceptual fate of character that it should have these two analytically distinct poles, and that historically, as they coalesce in the semantic space of “character”, they bleed into one another.

The way character has come to straddle these realms of being makes it hard to imagine (for an "us", a Westerner, a paleface, a member in good standing of the artificial paradise) a culture with a semantic table of fundamental elements that wouldn’t have a word for, or a notion of, character.