traps

There’s an essay by Louis Marin, the French critic, which begins with him discovering a 16th century Venetian book with the marvelous title, Of traps, of their composition and use, which, in the fashion of the humanist epoch, took the metaphorical sense of trap as an argument to organize an investigation not only of those devises by which we catch mice and rabbits, among other varmints, but also by which we catch men, in courtrooms and in power plays, in art and in the street. 
However, I don’t think this book included the first and greatest of all traps: clothing. Just as we don’t really see ourselves as apes, which are an animal whose habitat is behind bars, or in front of a National Geographic film crew, contentedly shrieking and scratching their hairy hides, we don’t see our clothing as a way of trapping our ape’s bodies. Surely, however, they are. When I unbutton Adam to change him (showing a delight in the fact, if it happens, that this time, there is caca, that I would not have believed in myself a year ago – one so fears the mysteries of infant digestion!) and then diaper him up again and encase him in a thin undergarment, and then in his usual pjs, I notice, and he notices, that each snap is the closure of a trap – first his little legs, then the arms, then snap snap snap the stomach and chest. Depending on whether Saturn is in Virgo, or he’s hungry, or he’s not hungry, or he’s bothered by the light, he will kick against this indignity, the way a dog will try to escape from the grasp of a child determined to dress it up in human clothes. If the child is seen by an adult, he or she is scolded – dogs don’t wear clothes! But we, of course, do.
Snap snap. From the adult perspective, the trappiness of infant clothing really comes out in those pjs, which are all too common, which require snapping in the back. Sometimes these are the cutest clothes, but they require that you turn your child around, and this is not welcomed by any infant. So you pick him up, and you wrestle with the snaps as the protests get louder and the neighbors begin to wonder about your parenting skills. Oh well, let them. In fact, fuck them. And you briefly rehearse all the noxious noises that they have produced over time. This is displacing your frustration in a classically neurotic manner, yes, but you don’t care. 
Finally, though, I have all the snaps that I can reach snapped, and my little lapin is trapped, and sometimes we both have to acknowledge that that was, in a way, fun – fun the way a roller coaster is fun. The tears, the screams, the snaps are forgotten, and we are ready once again to live like human beings – the animal that traps itself.

the user illusion

When I stick the biberon in poor Adam’s mouth, quieting his protests (at having to face another day scanning this strange planet, perhaps) and getting him into the rhythm of sucking down formula (yes, Le Leche league – we are incorrigible half and halfers. Wanna make something of it?), I have a long time – or at least a couple hundred gulps of time – to study his face.

It is interesting how many people like to tell you that the expressions mean nothing – just a galvanic movement, a tropism. While we all recognize the cry and even grant it some symbolic status – cry equals pain – the smile, or the laugh, are definitely secondary properties, or so the common wisdom goes. Pain is fundamental, humor – which requires a minimal capacity to compare and contrast – is second stage, and if you live long enough, it will be jettisoned and there you’ll be, back to crying and peeing in your bed in some old folks home. Yes, we orbit around pain, our black sun, and smile first as a trick of synaptic firings, and then as a control mechanism that mediates pain.

I’m reminded of the “user illusion” that the computer designers talk about. We sit down and look at the screen and see files and docs, and we think of files as being cardboard, and docs as being paper, and writing as being the application of an instrument to a surface. But this surface appearance is a delusion – it is algorithms all the way down, schmuck. Similarly, we glance about us, we are bright, we are alert, we think we get things, but the bytes of info we deal with are a pitiful remnant, an insanely edited fragment, of the bytes that bombard us. We not only can’t bear too much reality – try as we will, we will never even be able to see it.

And so yes, I too go along with the common wisdom here. I project. My subconscious gets an A in “existing as Roger”, while my consciousness gets, at most, a D+.

But I have to ponder the illusion, too. Last night, Adam was just barely asleep, and I had turned away to read, when he made a sound that made me turn back to him. He was, apparently, laughing in his sleep. Or simulating laughter.

This made me laugh. My laugh is real – his is not. But…

In a famous essay, Can a horse laugh, Robert Musil reports on seeing a horse laugh when it was tickled – although he says that this was ‘before the war’, and maybe since the war horses have ceased to laugh. Musil describes how he watched a groom with a curry comb make a horse laugh by tickling it on its sensitive spot, its shoulder blades. The horse acted “exactly like a peasant girl” who you would try to tickle – this was, remember, the ancien regime, which still existed pre-1914 – by moving out of the way and swatting with his muzzle at the comb. When that didn’t work:

“But the boy took the advantage. And when his curry comb got near the shoulder, the horse couldn’t stand it anymore. It turned around on its legs, its whole body shook, and it pulled its lips back from its teeth, as far as it could. For a second, it behaved exaclty like a person who has been  tickled so much that he can’t laugh anymore. The learned skeptic will object that it couldn’t have laughed in the first place. I’d respond to him that this is correct insofar as the groom was the one of the two who neighed the most from laughter every time. This does seem in fact to be a unique hjuman capacity, that is, to be able to neigh from laughter.”

And I haven’t even gotten to how Adam balls up his little fists when he sleeps and melts my heart.

Bringing up baby

Already I am dealing with it, the tug between convenience and integrity, between Satan and taking up, in a manner of speaking, your cross. Yesterday, we finally concluded that, evidently, Adam had grown beyond being palliated by a finger. When he wanted to suck, he no longer could be palmed off with a cuticled succadeneum. So I came up with the idea of a sucette - pacifier, which on the best child

rearing authority (i.e, The Simpsons) has a tonic and calming effect on the wee one. Thus, I sortied out in the dusk last night, and visited several pharmacies until I found one for the 0-3 months set, as the package helpfully advised. Coming back, I was eager to plug it into Adam’s mouth, figuring child rearing would now be a snap, what with the enormous docility that would flow from the thing.

The thing. Indeed, in the plain light of day, a pacifier is a rather disgusting thing. A pulpy plastic nipple that looks as appetizing as wet newspaper, attached to a band of plastic shaped in the form of mouth, except bigger, with a plastic ring – reminiscent of the ring in the snout of a pig – attached to the other side, so I suppose you can unplug the child. In my haste to apply the patented Simpsons treatment, I didn’t notice that the entire mechanism depends on the baby’s will. If the baby doesn’t apply the inward sucking, the pacifier will, evidently, fall out of its mouth. I was thinking more in terms of the cork on a wine bottle, but applying the thing, I saw that my vague image of how this thing would work forgot the perfect lack of will characteristic of most wine bottles (at least until after the fifth glass, at which point the bottle will start to blur itself and budge itself just out of reach of your hand).

Adam, sensible baby, tentatively took the plastic nipple in his mouth, sloshed it about a bit on his tongue, and discovered that plastic tastes much like Mitt Romney’s breath after one of his talks to his fund raisers – a stale mixture of commerce and chemicals rendering the whole inedible and unfit for buccal manipulation.

Watching him scrunch up his face and reject the pacifier, I was, a., proud of my boy for rejecting the entire Dow chemical fiasco that has acidified the ocean and is destroying the atmosphere, and b., disappointed that there was, after all, no pablum for the harried parent.

I imagine that I will apply the pacifier again. Infants and the children they grow into are eventually ground down by parental insistence when it comes to the artificial ingredients of life. Besides, too much rejecting of plastic by Adam will worry me – I have a fear of him growing into one of those seventeen year olds with the whispy goatee, the hemp clothes, and the bongo drum, such as roam around Austin in the summer and camp at Barton Springs. But … well, fuck me and my tastes. In any case, the pacifier was a bit of a lesson.

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.