the credentializing society

I like Lorrie Moore’s short stories. That is, I like them enough to read them when they come out in the New Yorker. I admit, I am not one of the world’s big readers of short stories.  If they are not funny, like George Saunders when he was funny, I have a tendency to begin with high hopes and invisible pats on the back (here I am, fulfilling my cultural duty) followed by a tendency to peak ahead at other articles, which engross me in I don’t know, some profile of a forgettable pop singer, some crime story until I shake myself temporarily free of a text that I know, rationally, holds a content as trivial at least as the short story incident I have abandoned and return to characters that I have, in that brief interval, forgotten to the extent that I have to begin over. What I am saying here is that I am unfair to short stories.

But Lorrie Moore’s stories have such an easy flow that they hold me, like a story about some celebrity will hold me – I am bonded to the text by the lesser boredom of the text in contrast with the greater boredom outside the text of other things to read or even, horrors, to do. It is in the balance of boredoms that this little superannuated smartass, this me, shares the Zeitgeist with all other readers of newspapers and magazines. Especially as that balance of boredoms, now, is dispersed among the moronic inferno of the internet, the twenty four seven access to the perpetually trivialized world in which the sensational never really reaches the sensations at all. The consumerist death of the nerve endings, y’all.

Anyway, to resume, so I picked up Lorrie Moore’s novel, A Gate at the Stairs. I am not so far very happy with it. But I notice that Moore sometimes needs to stumble around a bit at the beginning, so perhaps I will persevere. What I want to write about here, though, is the narrator’s curious habit of writing things like this:

“I had come from Dellacrosse Central High, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy, “the Athens of the Midwest,” as if from a cave, like the priest-child of a Colombian tribe I’d read about in Cultural Anthropology…”

Perhaps curious habit is the wrong way to get at what I find curious about this sentence, which is the way that a learned, or least a bit learned allusion has to be credentialed in American writing. You can’t just introduce a metaphor taken from an anthropological text in a novel, apparently, in America without immediately tracking it to its source in a classroom. For on no account are we to think that there are characters out there in the American hinterlands so bold and savage as to read “Cultural Anthropology” on their own, say in one of the public libraries that every urb in America is equipped with.

If this allusion had been to say the Sopranos, there would be no credential tracking required. American characters are permitted to know about car types, sports figures and tv shows without exculpatory information being provided as to just how they know about these things. But of course, the American character doesn’t come equipped, from birth, with knowledge of V-8 engines, the Dallas cowboys, and Kim Kardashian. I think Moore’s gesture here – a gesture I fully recognize, one I see made in numerous American novels – points us to the weather in our ‘meritocracy’. The era of culture has long been liquidated in favor of the era of credentials. There are the odd warriors out there who don’t accept this: for instance, Oprah Winfrey, bless her heart, thought that one could simply pick up a Faulkner novel and read it. Or at least read it in a book club (which mix, rather shamefacedly, the classroom and the card club).

However, the reader of Moore’s novel – Moore evidently thought – is not going to accept the narrator throwing out allusions to Columbian peasants without some explanation – otherwise, she wouldn’t be “real”. That is, she wouldn’t be credentialed as real. In fact, she would be very real – you can go into, say, the Austin library and look at Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, which does indeed contain information about Colombian peasants, and you will surely find out that it has been checked out by people who are not taking courses in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Texas.

I am not taking the piss out of Lorrie Moore here, who only reflects the kind of defensiveness that grows in a credentializing culture about “knowing” high cultural things. What a relief to turn to entertainment, to drop the name Michael Jackson or to crack wise about Metallica instead of, say, Thomas Mann! The relentless tyranny of credentializing there takes the more perverse form of fandom, with all of the secret contempt one has for the obsessive, the attendee of sci fi or comic book cons, those who know all the lines from The Big Lebowski, etc.

Still, I’ve always been more on Ralph Ellison’s side, on the side of the Little Man at Chehaw Station:

“All right,” she said, “ you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there will always be a little man behind the stove.

“A what?|

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradtion, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform.”

Now, we blast a thousand holes through the little man’s heart, we stuff his throat with SATs and grade point averages, we tell him that we got an A in the class, we try to dance on his grave – but that little man behind the stove is, I think, unkillable. Of course, I’m a romantic.

Loafing

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loafe and invite my soul,

  I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

“Loafe” is one of the great verbs, I think. Partly, this stems from the homonym “loaf”, as in a bar of something – bread, for instance. The loaf of bread is not something that can loafe – alas, it exists either on a plate for you to eat, recently made or at least shot up with enough preservatives to seem recently made, or it starts to look greenish and ready for the penicillin factory, at which point it is given the unceremonious heave ho into the waste can. Of course, when bread was much more precious and famine was a real possibility in the hinterlands and urbs of Europe, you would not be so cavalier with a loaf of bread.  Hans Christian Andersen begins one of his characteristic fairy tales (which mix sentimentality and a truly satanic sense of punishment) with the sentence: “There was once a girl who trod on a loaf to avoid soiling her shoes, and the misfortunes that happened to her in consequence are well known.” The backstory here is that Inge, product of a poor family but gifted with such beauty that she was adopted by a rich family, much to her satisfaction and pride, was given a loaf of bread to carry to her poor family and tossed it, instead, in a mud puddle so she could walk across it. Ah, the simple but symbolic actions that bring immediate grief in Andersen’s universe! “… the loaf began to sink under her, lower and lower, till she disappeared altogether, and only a few bubbles on the surface of the muddy pool remained to show where she had sunk. And this is the story.
But where did Inge go? She sank into the ground, and went down to the Marsh Woman, who is always brewing there.” As in The Red Shoes, it is Inge’s footwear that spells her doom: once she is underground, the loaf of bread is stuck like a lead weight to her foot, bringing her, of course, to the gates of hell. A very fine tale to tell children – what child would not like to see the Inges of the world get their comeuppance! But this loaf has made itself, in a sense, the very opposite of the loafing and inviting one’s soul among the tall grass that Whitman has in mind. The OED gives a rather unbelievable etymology of loaf – it is a “back formation” from loafer, which comes from Landlaeufer, a tramp. The earliest use of loafer according to the Oxford boys is in 1830. Henley and Farmer, in their 1927 slang dictionary, derive it from the French, louper.
From ranging about like a beast to tramping with one’s hands in one’s pocket, this was the image of the loafer in the mouth of the street, from which Whitman took his verb. But in so taking it, he strips it of its desperation – rather, he discovers a tramp Zen in the word. Unlike poor burdened Inge, Whitman loafing among the grass is unburdened and more than unburdened.
I am thinking of these matters of loaf because Adam is, supremely, a loafer – but not a walker, or tramper. He loafs and enjoys his soul not in the grassblades, but in the highly domestic foam bed or the bouncy bouncy or the pousette. Lately, he often tries to force himself up from the chest up – making a stab at the whole homo erectus thing. Poor guy, little does he know the griefs he is bringing on himself by coming out of the loaf and into the rat race. But such is history. Still, as he loafs, lolls, and lounges, I have slowed my own pace somewhat to his. Loafing and being at my ease is no simple thing anymore – magically, a screen or a book appears, and you are no longer inviting your soul but shooing it away. However, prisoner of the entertainment-security complex like all the rest of us, I am getting a small lesson in loafing from Adam. Who, in turn, is moved more and more often to burble a commentary about certain of the things in his line of sight, and certain of the sensations of what seems to be this  thing, this loaf, that has legs and feet and arms and hands and is, well, him.

Mr. Spooky

When we put the “body” and the pajamas on Adam, we chose favorites. The blue! The one with the dogs! However, Adam doesn’t care. It isn’t that he is indifferent so much as all of them are much the same to him. He cries or sleeps in his foam bed. He recognizes our faces and touches. But as far as objects go, outside of the flow of milk, the eyes and glasses that peer down on him, the softness or roughness, dryness or wetness of the textiles he comes into contact with, he has a bond with only one object. One bond that goes beyond the sensual. Once bond that is, perhaps, his first experience of fascination.

This is with Mr. Spooky.

Mr. Spooky is a milky white globe with bluisn circles for its eyes and mouth, and bluish ears. Plug it in and press the top of it and it turns on, emitting a bluish light that changes to green and back. The intensity of the glow changes too. I don’t know who brought us Mr. Spooky, but it has illuminated our darkest nights since the second day in the hospital, and Adam’s second day on earth.

At night, as Adam digests his milk or formula at night and ponders the world, at some point he always begins to stare at Mr. Spooky, wherever we have perched him, wherever he casts his colored light. He may be looking at a blanket, a pillow or a wall, but eventually he will shift and then he will remain rapt in Mr. Spooky’s aura, drinking in Spookylight, in long pulls, just as he sometimes drinks up formula.

I am not sure what Adam sees in Mr. Spooky. But I vaguely recognize the reflex. I’ve been after Mr. Spooky substitutes my whole life – fascinating objects, ideas, scenes, people that are beyond my mere round of comforts and irritations, and that form an attraction that I can only explain through a cracked, obsure poetry. That is because, in the end, these objects are lit still in a pre-verbal night for me, back before the duty to match world to word set me on an endless, exhausting chase. I like to watch Adam staring at Mr. Spooky, it even makes me a little jealous. And it breaks my heart a bit to think of all the Mr. Spookies yet to come for my Adam.

from the will to control

In the early nineteenth century, there was a great romantic fashion for the  “will” in the moral, or ideological sphere. The will seemed like a way out of the dry materialism and sensualism of the 18^th century philosophes.Conveniently, it also had a hero – Napoleon.

However, a curious thing happened as the century went by.  In the sphere of psychology, the will gradually lost any status it had as a psychological object. In the old rational psychology, it was one of the faculties of the intellect. But as psychologists began to measure things, experiment, and consider psychology as an adjunct of the entire biological system, it became clear that the will was a superfluous entity. I raise my arm, and by no train of introspection, and by no degree on  any measuring device, is there an intermediate moment where I will to raise my arm.

At the end of the century, two philosophers – Nietzsche and William James – both took these findings at face value. Nietzsche took the absence of any psychological entity called the will to mock the notion of both those who argued for the free will and those who argued for determinism, in as much as the latter still used this archaic psychological devise. James, with his own sly Yankee wit, also went through the introspective stages that make us see that the will is a conjuring trick.

Yet these two philosophers are associated with the will – the will to power and the will to belief. How did they reconcile these moral insights with their psychological ones? Well, in Nietzsche’s case, the will moved outside the psyche. The psyche, in fact, becomes a manifestation of a will that is unanchored to a self at all. James, on the other hand, creeps close to the admission that the will, being a good thing to believe in, is acceptable at least in moral terms.  In other words, both take the will as a supreme fiction.

In the twentieth century, in the psychological sphere, the will was replaced by a cybernetic model of the psyche, one that emphasized control and coordination. The old questions surrounding the will were simply no longer relevant. This image not only provides psychology with its paradigm – it penetrated, to an extent, into the public consciousness. Into, that is, our moral speech. It is impossible to imagine Jane Austin characters speaking about being out of control or in control. They wouldn’t say it, and they wouldn’t understand it if it was said to them. But this has become a reliable part of ordinary speech for those in the twentieth and twenty first century.

However, it is a part of speech that is not entirely coherent with the will ideology, which still exists, and which still influences the way we speak of ourselves and of the polis. It is easy to see why. We all have the experience of doing things we don’t want to do. I have work to do and it is late, but instead of going to bed, I do the work. And the moment of doing something that is not immediately desirable – over something that is immediately desireable – gives me the impression that I will myself to do this over my circumstances. It is easy to think of a computer – say Hal in 2001 – doing what it “wants” to do. But it is much more difficult thinking of it in a will situation – doing what it doesn’t want to do.

This concept in the moral sphere is, I think, slowly changing. It isn’t rare for a driver, or a computer user, to speak of a machine ‘not wanting’ to do something. Being ‘coaxed” into doing something. Of course, at the bottom of this are the lines of routine that one imagines define the machine – are the machine in the machine, so to speak. There’s no ghost in there.  All I’m saying is that the dialectic between the moral image and the cognitive image might well produce an inflection decisively away from the will.

But I can’t think in that future language. I do think in terms of control and coordination, and am marveling at its unfolding in Adam – I watched him, last night, as he tried to get his fingers together and do something  with them on his cheek, under his eye. Perhaps to rub an itchy spot. The tiny fingers did not, as with me, coordinate, so that the index finger could be used to lightly rub across the spot on the face while the rest of the tribe of fingers kept their places. And the arm has not learned the steadiness and aim required for itching a scratch. If, that is, this is what Adam was doing. In other areas, however, he is already learning to ‘practice’ – for instance, in making sucking motions with his lips. Instinct is already merging, here, with poetry – as it will when the fingers don’t all bunch together, and the arm learns lessons about distance and steadiness. All in due time, ma petit.  

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