sympathy for Marcel's Pa

Sympathy for Marcel’s father

We know the story, which is the story of why the story always shatters, never self-organizes, never closes on itself, never is the story. Marcel, an anxious child, can only truly calm his pacing heart and asthmatic and insomniac spasms by being kissed by Mama before bedtime. Of course, the real milk and honey would be Mama spending the whole night on a cot besides him as he sleeps. But the fly in the milk and honey is Papa, who operates as a ‘suppressor’, or so the Scientologists say (knowledge I have garnered from the tres disappointing sketch of Tom Cruise in last month’s Vanity Fair), and frowns at the codlings. Last night, advocating for the wee little pea to remain on his little foam wee little pea ship, instead of being borne by A. as we watched the first episode of Homeland that we had just downloaded, I had a flash of sympathy for Marcel’s pa. Surely he was thinking that Marcel would be much better off if he didn’t get milk and honey every time. And maybe Marcel would have toughened up – maybe, if his father had prevailed, he would have grown up to introduce the noir detective into France, writing sentences like: ‘And then I hit him with the butt end of the pistol. He seemed to want to protest, but with the scarf stuffed in his mouth, his words weren’t too clear to me.” --- instead of, well, choose your own favorite oceanic outpouring.

So it goes. Us father’s mean well.

King Test

When I was in elementary school, I liked tests. There I was, a little ace, with my little Guiness Book of Records, my Funk n Wagnels Encyclopedia, the entertaining smart boy on the street. In High School, I stopped liking tests – partly cause I no longer aced them. In fact, I sank to the norm or below. And perhaps because I was no longer so good at them, I took a more level view of them. The longer I looked, the more it seemed to me that tests had to be on their way out in the age of nuclear power and space flight. They were so primitive. They were as bad an instrument for measuring learning as a spoon is for eating spaghetti. What you learned, what you know, is imbricated with what others know –it is social to the very core. And yet, the test was individuated and individuating from the get go. The only people who really understood this fact about learning, it seemed to me, were the cheaters – who, at least, exchanged answers with each other. But of course cheating is ultimately parasitic upon testing. No, I felt, tests had to go.

Later on I began to think that the problem was that tests had been displaced from the plane of experience to the plane of cognition. In experience, the test is essential. The self must be put, or must put itself, in a thousand alien circumstances in order to know itself – in order to unfold itself. Ultimately, the self has a plastic, flexible capability, an imaginative potential, that comes out when it is really tested. Unfortunately, the rule of cognitive tests has made it harder and harder to afford experiential ones. In the richest society in history, the U.S., it is now imperative to cut short the Wanderjahre and find a job with insurance, so that you can pay back the student loan. Life has been visibly diminished.

In France, which is as exam-ocentric as ancient China, the test form is everywhere – especially in childrearing. Our little nouveau-ne, Adam, had to pass his numbers – on weight – before we could leave the hospital, and the sage femme that visits us has said rather menacing things whenever we told her that Adam didn’t seem to be eating as much as he should. Poor tyke is a finicky eater, like his Pa. So yesterday, when Antonia took him to the clinic and it turned out that he had been secretly gaining weight – indeed, he passed the weight test 30 grams to spare!- we wept with joy. At the same time, it felt like already we are  tracking him on the path that leads to the “bac” – and he hasn’t even gotten the visual apparatus in order, yet! Meanwhile, from the States, all I hear is parents complaining that their kids are underperforming the tests, which means that they won’t make the grade for the scholarships, which means that they will have to go to community college and then be stuck in some hamburger-flipping job at Mickey Dees the rest of their life.

The test regime is now a brainless monster, with tentacles in every heart. Yet, surely Rousseau was right in Emile – good childrearing is about using your hands, imagining, dawdling over the immediate data of nature (if you can find it).

two childrearing books

As every alert parent knows, there are two essential child rearing books – Doctor Spock, in the most revised edition, and Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du Sens. Jonie Mitchell’s lines come to mind: “papa gave me the sugar/ momma showed me the deeper meaning.” Such is the case here. We use Spock to gain ersatz certainty in response to various problems that pop up in the schedule of duties (eat sleep poop radiate an adorable aura that touches every heavenly orb) that have been impose on baby – and we use Deleuze to understand why, after a lifetime of ironies and distancing techniques, we find ourselves spontaneously cooing chou chou and petit lapin to our bundle of joy. It is a world of diminutives, a real microverse, and we are just realizing the extent of our contract with Wonderland – which is where the L.d.S comes in to describe its extent and limits.The Logique was presided over by the spirit of Lewis Carroll, while Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is governed by the harsher spirit of Artaud. Lewis Carroll gives us the sugar, Deleuze notes, while Artaud gives us the deeper meaning. In his asylum in Rodez, Artaud tried to translate Jabberwocky – and in that moment emerged something that was less a crossroads than a car crash. For though Carroll’s made up language and Artaud’s schizo talk, which had infected his poems since the breakdown of 1938, might seem similar, in fact they repulsed each other.

Artaud intensely disliked Jabberwocky. Deleuze explains why – and in so doing the Deleuze reader gets a sense of the fact that  the malentendu between Artaud and Carroll stnds at the center of Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze quotes Artaud’s letter about Jabberwocky, which for me, now, defines the difference between parenthood and the perpetual bachelorhood of philosophy:

“I don’t like either the languages of the surface, exuding happy leisure time and intellectual successes; the former rests on the anus, but without putting in the soul or the heart. The anus is always terror.”

The anus in the microverse of the diminutives is less terror than clockwork, a mechanism for measuring the new born’s absorption of milk, as well as a mess you clean up without really thinking too much about it after a while. You don’t change diapers in fear and trembling.

Myself, I’ve long been on the fear and trembling side, and now I’m on the other. It is a relief to change diapers for once. And it makes the petit lapin happy, too!

identification and self interest

Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy. “The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a. But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond space and time.” (GW VI 28)

Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains” without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense, Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.

As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a process of projection, and thus is the first to use  “identification” in the psychological sense that became part of the ordinary language of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the

position of him who suffers – a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man,

developed but weak in Civilized man – what would this idea matter to the truth

of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the

more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with

the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been

infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning.”

The issue of personal identity travels to France by way of Locke’s translators and readers – such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an identifying self is a definite marker, an intersigne on the way to understanding character under capitalism. That is, to understanding how character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate semantic segments to occupy a certain space of symbols and capacities in those societies that we name by using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition – modern – as if the modern had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new framework altogether. Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian principles of property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification that, as Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense, impossible. Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it working its way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the seemingly esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis.  Just as selfishness can become an acid that so dissolves the self that one is left with an absolute Berkeleyian idealism, personal identity inevitably begins to pose the problem of the maker of persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics of modernity, operating under the unconscious conviction that they live in the modern, face this bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place those schemas of identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though the pre-modern was some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather than the product of the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as something generated within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow and double, an emergent and undeniable force in the matrix. 

Suckers unite!

It occurred to me in the hour before cock crow – which in the 12^th arrondissement is around 4 a.m. – that the whole corrupt train of our present social arrangements can be summed up by the value placed on “suck” – viz., this sucks, he you or they suck, it sucks. As we all know, this means that “it” is a disaster, he she or it is a cretin, and that low quality is the name of this game, if you want to play it. But, as Adam placidly – or, sometimes, fiercely – sucked on my little finger, giving us a respite from his desire to try out his new lungs (in top shape! And what volume for a seven pound five ounce boy!), I realize that this is all wrong, backwards, and senseless. It sucks should me, it is heaven. Real communism, utopia, the singularity and nirvana can all be summed up by, it sucks. We long, we little monkeys, not for nothingness, but for the attaching interface of lips and tongue, ahold of something. And yet – sucking is not eating or breathing,  it is not processing something. Amateurs think that sucking has a physiological use  wholly satisfied by breastfeeding, but an hour or two or three with a newborn will show these folks the error of their ways – sucking is needed for breastfeeding, but it is desired in itself, and continues after breastfeeding palls. Sucking is pure superfluity, pure luxury, pure excess. It is beyond something, and it disdains nothing.

Of course, any sophisticated 12 year old can tell you it sucks alludes to something genital and nasty. However, like many of the malformed views of 12 year olds (cool is cool! you are either in the in crowd or you are nobody!), this isn’t really sophisticated at all. Alas, the views of sophisticated 12 year olds rock and rule our world, become our norms, and lead, as I said above,paragraph one, sentence one, I believe, to the catastrophic decline of our society. What the 12 year old is in flight from is the surge, the primitive surge of sucking in which we are all one, a common humanity of suckers. Having gone through housetraining, school and hierarchy, the fact that we come from sucking seems too dreamlike, too nightmarish a truth. And yet there it is. We come from sucking. We all share sucking.

And this lead me – perhaps unwisely, since I have spent much of the last 48 hours catching very little sleep in a chair designed by the Marquis de Sade in a hospital room – to my revelation. The society I want to fight for exists in the shadow of the slogan: I suck, and I want to suck even more! Or, to expand beyond the trivially egotistic: it sucks, and I have never heard a more glorious truth! Only a solidarity among suckers will change the momentum of our decline. I am of the sucker’s party, and proud of it!

Adam Daedalus Rigaud Gathmann, born October 21st, 12ieme arrondissement, Paris

from the Mundus Intellectualis to the pornographic sofa: Locke on personal Identity, 3

Character is the adventure of personal identity.

Here's a maxim I can stand on. And kick against. Because maybe it isn't. The problem with a maxim is that it locks its truth inside it and loses the combination. Or rather, that combination becomes the truth. It is as though a safe became the treasure for which it is designed to be the receptacle.

So to start over…

Locke’s chapter on Personal Identity was added to the Essay in 1694, the scholarship says, at the request of William Molyneux, the Dublin savant. Indeed, in the famous letter in which Molyneux propounded the problem that has been named after him – that of a man born blind who suddenly receives his sense of sight, and whether he would know shapes and colors – Molyneux also suggests that Locke expatiate a little more largely on the principium individuationus, the seed of the chapter on personal identity. Locke replied with some reference to Malebranche, and Molyneux in turn advised on engaging against the fantasies of Plato and Malebranche.

So much, then, for the intellectual history. We have philosophical topics and philosophical names, and it would seem, as we con Locke’s chapter, that we should remain within these bounds.

Yet the afterlife of this chapter on personal identity has certainly moved beyond those bounds. It is not for puzzling out the question of metempsychosis (or as Mrs. Bloom, another Dublin savant, puts it in Ulysses, met him pike hoses) that the chapter draws our attention, but instead, it is because we seem to touch, here, on a piece of code. The code for the new individualism. The code for a new secular perception of the self, bounded and founded in the consciousness, which is an odd physical thing – sometimes no bigger than the light snore of the dozer, sometimes a giant claim on cultural continuity going back millennia.

Consciousness, as Locke recognizes, is a precarious foundation for any kind of order. And one way of looking at the various perspectives on the continuity of the person that he unfolds is to think of how personal identity is about identifying persons. This, of course, is one of the great programs of the enlightenment, but in 1694, Locke surely could already see the need for it.

We have a fictional example in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders of this problem of identifying persons. Moll’s adventures have barely started – two husbands, two children left with their grandparents, one dead – when Moll decides to start over. Her second husband has fled to France; technically, she is still married to him, but she assumes their separation is for good. This means that her status in England is in suspense:

“Upon these Apprhensions, the first thing I did, was to go quite out of my Knowledge, and go by another Name: This I did effectually, for I went into the Mint, took lodgings in a very private Place, dresst me in the Habit of a Widow, and called myself Mrs. Flanders.” [  77]

And so it happens that the anonymous author of the Life of Moll Flanders, Defoe’s fictional figure, tells us that she is also an imposter. She assumes, as it were, another dimension of fictionality. Is it possible – such runs the idle ontological question – for a fiction to develop a fiction? The ontological question abuts in romanticism – where the fiction and the encyclopedia converge – and is mined throughout the twentieth century, where from Pirandello to Flann O’brien, fiction is an entrance to the infinity of bluff.

In the early 18^th century, however, Moll Flander’s renaming is the entrance to adventure. Locke of course was familiar with adventure under the guise of enterprise. According to Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, he invested in an adventurer’s company that proposed to settle the Bahamas –and by that investment became an “adventurer”.  Adventure befalls not only persons, but properties – for money has the peculiar quality of adventuring in the world. In the eighteenth century, this commodity fetishism generates a rich sub-literature of commodity erotica – sofas, pillows, coins and other baggage that recount histories of seductions and sexual adventures that occur in their proximity, or with their aid.

Locke, however, comes to a more puritan and less rococo conclusion:

“Let any one reflect upon himself, and conclude that he has in himself an immaterial spirit, which is that which thinks in him, and, in the constant change of his body keeps him the same: and is that which he calls himself: let him also suppose it to be the same soul that was in Nestor or Thersites, at the siege of Troy, (for souls being, as far as we know anything of them, in their nature indifferent to any parcel of matter, the supposition has no apparent absurdity in it), which it may have been, as well as it is now the soul of any other man: but he now having no consciousness of any of the actions either of Nestor or Thersites, does or can he conceive himself the same person with either of them? Can he be concerned in either of their actions? attribute them to himself, or think them his own, more than the actions of any other men that ever existed? So that this consciousness, not reaching to any of the actions of either of those men, he is no more one self with either of them than if the soul or immaterial spirit that now informs him had been created, and began to exist, when it began to inform his present body; though it were never so true, that the same spirit that informed Nestor's or Thersites' body were numerically the same that now informs his. For this would no more make him the same person with Nestor, than if some of the particles of matter that were once a part of Nestor were now a part of this man; the same immaterial substance, without the same consciousness, no more making the same person, by being united to any body, than the same particle of matter, without consciousness, united to any body, makes the same person. But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor.”