Black history month reading: Zora Neale Hurston

For Black History month, I decided it was time to read a lot of Zora Neale Hurston. Good choice! I'm reading her non-fiction - especially Tell My Horse and Mules and Men - before reading Their Eyes were Watching God. Although it may seem an odd comparison, or no, it is an odd comparison, Hurston keeps making me think of two apparently different writers: D.H. Lawrence and Pasolini. Both had a strong sense for the massive change overtaking "pre-modern" society - which was really the majority of society in all countries. One has to remember that the working population of the US, in 1900, was more than half agricultural. In Italy, of coure, it was even more. While Britain was a vanguard country, which had shrunk its agricultural sector in the nineteenth century - while never overcoming a nostalgia for its forms, or a class system still rooted in the prestige of landholding. Hurston was famously a political conservative, a supporter of Taft and Smathers, a sniffer out of communists. But this was a surface politics, for I think her intellectual committment, like Lawrence's and Pasolini's, was to a resistance to the disembodying of culture, the uprooting of the organic ties of culture. Like Lawrence and Pasolini, the erotic element in Hurston is incredibly charged with a total existential stance. By the way, how did Hurston get away with such things as an elaborate description of the ceremony of sexually preparing a Jamaican bride - in Tell My Horse - by masturbating her? I mean, this is the kind of stuff I thought they censored in the 1930s. Perhaps she was "protected" by being a black woman, and thus, invisible to white readers. I don't know. I do know she was a very bold woman.

decay of catholic conservatism

Fillonistes have fallen into sentimental rhythms about their fallen hero. In Causeur, for instance, there’s an article about the "lynching" of Fillon.This follows the tone of aggrieved persecution found elsewhere.
It was written by a Catholic conservative, Emmanuel Dubois de Prisque, of the Thomas More institute. Poor Saint Thomas Moore, to have a polemicist of such low water adorning himself with your name!

Evidently, the old exercise, recommended by all the martyred saints, of imagining the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ has become desuete. In its place has arisen a verbal inflation that has less to do with the piety and long meditations of the Saints and more to do with the spiritual non-exercise of celebrity loudmouths on news shows.

Lynching takes its name from a practice widespread in the racist US.
First, the skin was beaten, and bones were broken in abundance. Then of course came the castration, with rusty knives. Then the hanging, with the crowd often setting the lynched man on fire. Sometimes this was varied by pouring hot tar over the victim, which inflicted, in his last hour, the pain of 3rd degree burns without relief.
So, let us test the appropriateness of the lynching image. Has Fillon been beaten or kicked or clubbed? No. Have his bones been broken? No. Has a hot tar been poured over his head and torso? No. Has a rope squeezed closed his respiration, and has he been hung so that the vertebra of his neck broke? No.
He’s been asked embarrasing questions about the million Euros earned by his wife for doing nothing. Questions that are especially pertinent seeing that Fillon is running on a platform proposing firing 500,000 public servants who do things. Not intangible things, either.
His explanations have been consistent with the ridiculous image of lynching conjured up by the soi disant Catholic de Prisque – evasions and bluff, larded by resentment that a person of his power could even be asked these questions.
Someone like Georges Bernanos, a true Catholic polemicist from the past, would surely have held up the Causeur article for universal ridicule and seen in its microcosmic rhetorical corruption the vaster moral corruption of which it is a symptom. As the ideal of equality has been given the boot, a new caste-like ideal of inequality has inserted itself into our practices of justice and our system of ethics. We are encouraged to be, ninety nine percent of us, bootlickers and asskissers, while admiring the stratospheric antics of the celebrated and the wealthy.
I can predict with some confidence that Fillon will continue to live the most protected of lives and will die in a clean bed. A lynched man on the other hand in 99 percent of cases has lived a hard life and become the object of the bigoted wrath of a crowd not because of the privileges he has amassed but because of the prejudices and inequality to which he has been, forever, a victim.
Catholic conservatism is in trouble.

the vocabulary that is busy being born a little political philology

He who is not busy being born is busy dying

Historically, the Democratic party in the 20th century put a premium on coalition politics, the party's response to American urbanization. Half of all Americans still worked in agriculture in 1900. This changed, at variable speeds by region, until by 1950 it was 12 percent. It changed the most on the Northern east coast, and the least in the interior South and Midwest.

Because, in 1900, the Republicans were still the party of small and large traders, which had successfully fought against slaveholding power, the party was receptive to change by its progressive end. The progressives combined anti-corruption advocates and genuine critics of speculative capitalism. Meanwhile, the Dems were tacitly pro-corruption, in as much as corruption was a sort of tax on the wealthy that distributed, in a highly inefficient way, wealth to the immigrant and the farmer. The big city machines naturally tended Democratic.

After that progressive turning, the Republican business class turned against the critique of speculative capitalism (while retaining an anti-corruption ethos, which basically targeted ethnics, from Italians to Mexicans). Dems combined northern urban liberals, ethnic enclaves and the working class with Southern white farmers. In order to pull this off, certain groups had to delay, modify or abandon their demands. The Dems worked this by  putting unity above other values. They would govern. In governing, silently but surely, the needs of coalition partners would be met.

But this strategy began to collapse in the sixties. The underlying tensions eventually and predictably destroyed the coalition, but, as a relic of the earlier era, the Democratic leadership mindset still insisted on unity – the unity of the nation – as its foremost value.

Obama's emphasis on working together was, perhaps, last hurray of 20th century liberalism. Not accidentally, the making of bipartisanship a value in itself proved to be a disaster for the Dems.Their sinking in the 10s was comparable to the sinking of the old American corporations, like GM or Sears, which tried to be all things to all people.

The odd intensity of the liberal group that dislikes all things PC & takes identity politics to be some horrible aberration stems from the old conditions in which American liberalism was formed. On the other hand, Trump’s narrowcasting shows where we're really at.

It is significant that the nostalgia for non PC times, on part of contemporary Jonathan Chait like liberals, has quietly dropped the term that used to be thought of as the way to channel diversity into unity. That word is ‘integration’. When was the last time a politician used the word integration positively?

“Integration” has met the same fate as other progressive shibboleths that embarrass liberals. Like the term  "watered stock",  which used to be a flashpoint for talking about limiting speculation in the market.

However much, from the point of view of all fairy tales and Biblical narratives, one wants an asshole like Trump shown up and shamed by God Almighty, his way of narrowcasting politics will bring his demographic to the polls. Dems will have to learn from this. Or we are in for a long age of Trumpism.

Of course, my history is a little too intellectual in as much as it doesn’t quite present the material inducements that keep the Democratic leadership holding onto a pattern of politics that is outmoded. The unity & compromise default of Dem elites rewards them richly in the K street world of DC and in the back and forth between Wall street and political power. Ex Sen. Daschle is like a poster boy for the new form of Democratic corruption that no longer taxes wealth, no longer works for the oppressed outsiders, but has become a weapon of wealth for insiders.  

The conflict at elite level of the Democratic party is driven partly by anxiety of Democratic makers and shakers that they won't get to lick gravy from table.

But remember: every greed & desire evolves a form rationalizing it. And every new turn in history stumbles over a vocabulary that is busy being born and trying to match the reality that it clearly perceives, beyond the grid of dead phrases. 

a sententious post

“Which life should one live – the life one likes. I like writing. I like change. I like to toss my mind up and see where it goes.” – Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 1934

Most of us – me for one – toss our minds up very rarely. What we like at 18, we bear on our shoulders at 68. Partly this is because we don’t lead the life we like. Virginia Woolf was no exception to this rule. She was subject to neurological assaults on her sanity, sexual assault by a step brother when she was young, and (more positively) the comforts of her circle and place. Her likes, and thus the life she liked, were hugely conditioned, imperially conditioned, and this she knew well. The question of our likes after 18 comes so often too late for us to recognize – instead, the crucial questions are what we can tolerate, what we need to do tomorrow, how we can negotiate with the bill collector, the colleague, the family member That internal oracle falls silent, as the path to it is overgrown with weeds. Our likes are trivialized, and instead of the lifescale likes, we like a tv series, we like the restaurant recommended in a magazine. It is not the love that passeth understanding that guides us, but the understanding – of small gains and losses, of the claims on us of tasks we won’t remember in a week, to which we have chained the day, of the entire world of cops and plutocrats at the door – into which that love is sucked up and thinned out.

Yet of course the entire story is not a grimly deterministic novel of social realism and misery. There’s the mind toss still. That beanbag made up of will and whim.

What’s the good of it? To my mind, this question is foregrounded in a barely disguised servility, emanates from a world in which the mind is simply a coin, a world in which the coin has bested the spirit. A ridiculous world. Questions have motives, and this one, in particular, is thrown out by the devil of banality, well versed in turning grammatical forms against liberation. What’s the good of living in, or collaborating in, a world in which tossing up your mind becomes a trivial thing, even to the tosser? Where it seems too tiresome or too frightening?

Hmm. Well, enough with this hortatory tone today. Tomorrow, this could all be wrong.

Thoughts on post-colonialism: the Night of Ideas in LA

The Night of Ideas event here was a big success, and applause for all those who made it so – the people at the French Consulate here in L.A.

One of the panels I attended was about colonialism, post-colonialism, and identity, a discussion with Achille Mbembe, Nicolas Bancel, Kaoutar Harchi, Alain Mabanckou & Dominic Thomas. The discussion ranged over identity, Francophone literature, and France as a world language. It was fascinating, but … I resisted the opposition that dominated the proceedings, or so I thought.

That opposition aligns, on one side, France and the European nations, and on the other side, post colonial third world nations, as participants in a history in which the Europeans, representing an identity en bloc, colonize other peoples, who then have to find a path to their identity by overthrowing the European pesence, so to speak.

I understand how this image of Europe seems plausible from the side of those who live in post-colonial domains. Nevertheless, the idea of an eternally fused European identity is a miscarriage of history.

My problem with this story. then, is on the European side. Far from it being the case that the European nations have always existed as such, they are a relatively recent phenomenon. For instance, the majority of French people did not always speak French, nor identify from their first sentences with France/ The way it came about that France is now relatively homogenously French is a recent and incomplete phenomenon. The model for colonialism was formed in the heart of Europe as various peoples – the Irish, Scots and others in Great Britain, the Gascon, Provencal, Breton and others in France, etc. were subjected to the same combination of direct violence and institutional cultural violence to get them to be “British” or “French” or “Italian” or “German”. In other words, as Spanish, French, Portugese and English colonists were imposing themselves upon the people outside of Europe, inside of Europe the same forces were at work on the great peasant masses.

A turning point, or, perhaps, a point of collective clarification, came in the French revolution, when the revolutionaries took surveys of the countryside to find out how many French citizens actually spoke French. Abbe Gregoire, head of the research committee, “concluded rather hopefully that three quarters of the people of France knew some French. On the other hand, he admitted that only a portion of these could actually sustain a conversation in it, and he estiated that only about 3 million could speak it properly.” (Eugen Weber) This, out of a population of about 28 million. In other words, the France we know today is historically anamolous – although the Right yammers on about “strangers” in the midst of France, actually, the number of people who can converse in French properly living in France only became a majority in the late 19th century, and this, after a vast organizational effort. We don’t think of the school as creating the nation-state, but that is precisely what happens all over Europe. The great media inventions of the 19th century, the press, the novel, the theater, were all embedded in the effort to make the French french, the Germans German, the British English.

This is more important that just my peculiar historical caveat. It brings together the violent history of Europe and the violent history of European colonialization. Too often, the former is considered as happening in some separate, advanced time zone than the latter. The civilizing mission of France was the label for creating France, creating a nation state, with the creators, the governing class, being a minority in their own “countries”.

This 18th and 19th century history is not dead. Rather, the buckling of the Europe we have known since 1945, or, in Eastern Europe, since 1989, shows evidence that the fissures and buried resentments exist just under the crust. Identities that were, four generations ago, defeats are clung to now fiercely, evidence of the success of what Foucault called the disciplinary society. This is what the discipline is about.

Notes for a future essay on Chamfort

Chamfort was not his real last name. In fact, it is still not certain whether his name was really Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, son of a Clermont grocer, or whether he was the bastard child of a Clermont canon. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, like many another Enlightenment demi-sage, came up through the ranks from a seemingly engulfing provincial obscurity by inventing himself in a different milieu.

His success as a writer falls in the period of the 1770s. He earned money from a hit play; he wrote for enlightened journals; he found an aristocratic patron. And he enjoyed eating, drinking, talking and fucking. He mingled with some of the big names, wrote a catty little verse about Candide, received a letter of praise from Rousseau. His life, although he didn’t know it then, was falling into a pattern of anecdotes. For instance, on the subject of making love, his biographer Pellison recounts that a woman told him, once, “this curious thing. I don’t love smart men in love – they are watching themselves parade on by.” [impossible to capture the phrase, ils se regardent passer- ‘they are people watching themselves’ might be a better translation].   A remark that sticks with Chamfort, and that he records, later.

He was a good looking young man. Another biographer, Arnaud, records that he was the lover of an actress, Mlle. Guimard, “famous for the perfection of her bosom and who did her makeup each day before the portrait that Fragonard had painted of her.” [xiii]

But already, at twenty five, Chamfort’s life had changed much for the worse. Famously. As Remy Gormount wrote: “Chamfort’s secret, why use periphrases that don’t trick anybody, is in the syphilis that tormented him for a period of thirty years, during the time first of his greatest genital activity, and the second, and then in the third, the more discrete but more conscientious and refined period.” His looks fell away. He recovered, but with a disfigured face. Much like Mirabeau – to whom he has a strange, doppelganger relationship – Chamfort had experienced the down side of the libertine moeurs in his body, and he didn’t like it. An anecdote – how they trail our man, how they dog him like devils – from Abbé Morellet, a habitue of the Madam Helvetius’ salon, where Chamfort was a faithful attendee:

“I saw him, he said, in the society of Saurin and Mme Helvetius… this happened to me twenty times at Auteuil that, after having heard him for two hours in the morning recounting anecdote after anecdote and making epigram after epigram with an inexhaustible talent, I would leave with my soul as saddened as if I was leaving the spectacle of an execution. And Mme. Helvetius, who had much more indulgence than I do for that kind of wit, after having amused herself for hours listening to his malignity, after having smiled at each ‘hit’, told me, after he had parted: Father, have you ever seen anything as tiring as the conversation of Chamfort? Do you know that it makes me blue for the entire day? And this is true.”

For between 1780 and 1788 – the decade in which Herder, a writer with a similarly confused relationship to the enlightenment, is inspired by his discovery of Nemesis and history – Chamfort ‘retires’ from the circles of the intellectuals and the long stays as a house guest at the estates of the nobility. He was in his forties. It is now that he leaves behind poetry and the theater and begins writing down his epigrams and anecdotes.  He has a sense that this will make a book, and calls the project – in one of those flashes of mordant wit that depressed Mme Helvetius – Produits de la civilisation perfectionnée.

This is one of Chamfort’s maxims:

“Hope is only a charlatan who ceaselessly tricks us. And, for me, only after I’ve lost it does happiness begin. I would gladly place over the gate of paradise the verse that Dante put over that of hell: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

…

Well, Chamfort threw himself, body and soul, into the revolution. He impoverished himself, he wrote speeches for Mirabeau and Tallyrand, he, it is said, suggested the title for Sieyes critical pamphlet (Qu' est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien) which neatly summarizes what, actually, all modern political revolutions are about – the struggle between what is really All – the working class – and its false political position – what does it have? Nothing.

A title that is echoed in one of Chamfort’s maxims:

“Me, all; the rest, none: thus it is with despotism, aristocracy, and their partisans. Me, this is an other; an other, this is me: thus it is with the popular regime and its partisans. After this, decide yourself.”

That Chamfort the pessimist, Chamfort the executioner of the Enlightenment smile of reason, was also Chamfort the revolutionary, Chamfort the anti-monarchist, was a paradox that the lineage of reactionary writers in the 19^th century, up to and including Nietzsche, tried to find ways of explaining. Chamfort’s sotie, his double, was a reactionary, Antoine de Rivarol, who, before the revolution, ran in the same circles as Chamfort, wrote for the same journals, cultivated the same charming cynicism. Afterwards, in exile, he became Chamfort’s most bitter critic. But he was not the only one: Chamfort seemed to especially burn the anti-revolutionary crowd. Unlike Tallyrand, whose motives seemed transparent – greed – Chamfort seemed to have reached his conclusions coherently; he seemed to have thought they unfolded from his dethronement of God and his corrosive view of man. There was, in the reactionary view, a pit even under cynicism, and Chamfort was its guardian devil. Thus, among the conspiracy minded among them (and the exiles from the French revolution were massively inclined to theories of conspiracy – De Quincey rightly compared their visions to that of an opium smokers) Chamfort must be accounted for as a kind of intellectual criminal master mind. After all, it was Chamfort who came up with the slogan that smelled of blood and jacquerie: War on the castles! Peace to the huts! (Guerre aux chateaux! Paix aux chaumieres!) under which, in effect, the countryside of France seemed to be reorganized. In 1810, Marmontel, an old litterateur, publishes his memoirs and includes an anecdote about Chamfort – long dead, of course, by 1810, another victim of the Terror. I’ll quote from Pellison’s biography:

‘The passage is curious – we have to cite it. When Marmontel objected to Chamfort’s reform projects, [saying] that the better part of the nation will not let any attack be carried through on the laws of the country and the fundamental principles of monarchy, he (Chamfort) agreed that, in its antechambers, in its counting houses, in its workshops, a good part of the stay at home citizens would find perhaps that the projects bold enough to trouble their repose and their enjoyments. But, if they disapprove, that will not, he said, be but timidly and quietly, and one has to impose upon them that determined class which has nothing to lose in the change and believes it sees much to gain. In order to organize them into a mob, one has the most powerful motives, famine, hunger, money, alarms and terrors, and the delirium to blaze a path and the rage by which one will strike upon all minds. You have not heard among the bourgeois but the eloquent speakers. Know that all your tribune orators are nothing in comparison with Demosthenes  at a quid per head who, in the cabarets, in the public places, on the quais announce the ravages, the arsons, the sacked villages, flooded with blood, the plots to starve Paris. I call those gentlement the eloquent ones. Money principally and the hope of pillage are omnipotent among the people. We are going to make a test of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And you won’t believe how little it costs the Duc D’Orleans [The rival of King Louis XVI] to have the manufactury  of honest Reveillon sacked, which was the living of one hundred families. Mirabeau has gaily upheld the idea that with a thousand Louis D’or one can create quite a pretty insurrection.”

Thus spake Chamfort, the Goldfinger of his time. Evil keeps a book, and ticks off in it just what he will do: destroy the living of a hundred innocents, spread rumors, dethrone culture. Did Chamfort really put the fear of God into Marmontel? The conversation is recorded years after one of the major participants committed a very bloody suicide, so we don’t know what Chamfort did. We don’t know whether this was mockery. The note about the Duc D’Orleans sounds significantly false. But the falsity at the bottom of this is that those who “came from the people”, the intellectuals, and adhered to the aristocracy couldn’t imagine someone going back to the people, except on behalf of some powerful figure. As Chamfort wrote: 

“All who emerge from the class of the people are armed against it to oppress it, from the militia man, the mercant become the secretary to the king, the preacher who comes from a village to preach submission to arbitrary authority, the historian son of a bourgeois, etc.  These are Cadmus’ soldiers: the first armed turn against their brother and jump on them.”

Chamfort is one of Cadmus’s soldiers who, to the surprise of all, turns not against his brother, but strikes at Cadmus the King. To a certain extent, to an extent that the pessimistic line that came after Chamfort could not believe he could accept, he did accept the bitterest consequences of the revolution:

“In the moment that God created the world, the movement of chaos must have made one find the chaos more disorganized than when he rested in the midst of it in its peaceful state.  Likewise, among us, the the embarrasment of a society reorganizing itself having to appear as an excess of disorder.”

This is what makes Chamfort stand apart – his notion of the irrevocable is not a nostalgia for what is lost, but is instead a  hope, expressed in a language that goes back to the Bible, that it is truly lost.

…

“… writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in a beyond of language, it develops like a seed and not like a line, it manifests an essence and threatens with a secret, it is a counter-communication, it intimidates. We will find in all writing the ambiguity of an object which is at the same time language and coercitation: there is, at the bottom of writing, a “circumstance”  that is foreign to language, there is something like the glance of an intention that is already no longer that of langauge. This glance can very well be a passion for language, as in literary writing; it can also be the threat of a penality, as in political writing: writing is then charged to join in a single dash the reality of acts and the ideality of ends.” – Barthes, The Degree Zero of Writing

(…l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne, elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une contre-communication, elle intimide. On trouvera donc dans toute écriture l'ambiguïté d'un objet qui est à la fois langage et coercition : il y a, au fond de l'écriture, une « circonstance » étrangère au langage, il y a comme le regard d'une intention qui n'est déjà plus celle du langage. Ce regard peut très bien être une passion du langage, comme dans l'écriture littéraire; il peut être aussi la menace d'une pénalité, comme dans les écritures politiques : l'écriture est alors chargée de joindre d'un seul trait la réalité des actes et l'idéalité des fins)

The common approach to Chamfort’s ‘maxims’ and “anecdotes” has been to consider them as a philosophy – and to eventually dismiss them as a philosophy. Pellison, his nineteenth century biographer, remarks on the similarity of temperaments that seems to exist between Chamfort and Schopenhauer. But Chamfort was, Pellison concedes, not a systematic thinker.

The notion that a philosopher must work within a ‘system’, which figured largely in the 19^th century, still has an influence on the definition of philosophy – in fact, the teaching of philosophy often comes down to a puppetshow of conflicting systems – if you claim x, you are a critical realist, and if you claim y, you are a nominalist. Etc.

Barthes was concerned with another system – the system of ecriture. This has a lot more relevance to Chamfort. Chamfort wrote his “Products” out of a reaction to, a consciousness of, the writerly function. That function – which, as with all middleman positions, has a relation to the basic one of pandering – is both under attack in the Maxims – from the beginning, the very idea of the maxim is ridiculed as the idea of a mediocre mind – and, inevitably, chosen as Chamfort’s instrument. What other instrument is there? But the notion of maxim, of a rule, if only a rule of thumb in the Repulic of Thumbs, puts us on the track of Chamfort’s sense that his writing was  political. It is to this that the reflection tends; political scandal is the whole point of the anecdotes he carefully amassed. When his listeners at Mme Helvetius came away from his conversation with the sad sense of being present at an execution, it was no accident.

So, what was this politics?

Because Chamfort was intentionally freeing up his writing from the literary – and thus the systematic – it is easy to quote him, but hard to point to one passage or another that would provide the key to him. It is this very freedom that “intimidates”, to use Barthes term. But to threaten politically implies an order that can be violated, a standard from which one can judge. And there are many passages from the Maxims that hint at this order – that, as it were, give us the mythic foundation for the series of sacrifices, of  executions, that space themselves in both the Maxims and the Anecdotes.

This passage from the first section of the Maxims, for instance.

‘I have often noticed in my reading that the first movement of those who have performed some heroic action, who have surrendered to some generous impression, who have saved the unfortunate, run some great risk and procured some great advantage – be it for the public or for some particulars – I have, I say, noted that the first movement has been to refuse the compensation one offered them. This sentiment is discovered in the heart of the most vile men and the last class of people. What is this moral instinct that teaches men without education that the compensation for these actions is in the heart of he who has done them? It seems that in paying them we take from them. [Il semble qu’en nous les payant on nous les ote]” OC 1812,  2:28

The insistence of the writen, here, is caught in that repetition of “I have often remarked” – its way of pointing to the superfluity of the oral, the way, in the economy of speaking, repetition serves to organize a series that is continually disappearing, going beyond the attention of the listener, which is strictly not needed in writing (for after all, the reader has merely to glance back) and that appears there nevertheless to ‘glance beyond’ the written object, to connote the theater of conversation. But the major economic instance, here, is of course the gift – or the sacrifice.  The gift – the heroic act, the generous impulse - initiates an internal circuit in which the outward gift (the true gift) is compensated by an inward gift (which is marked, already, as a compensation). But it is a circuit that takes away when it pays – which is the deficit at the very heart of payment, the free lunch that is the despised, impossible other in the crackerbarrel wisdom of capitalism.  

This is, of course, a very Rousseau-like stance. However, it joins Rousseau to a moralist theme – of self satisfaction. Or at least of self compensation. As in Rousseau, nature is identified with a primary process – with spontaneity. The secondary process is that of payment. Chamfort does not, here, reflect on the connecting link of compensation – that there must be compensation of some kind is assumed.

The executioner’s melancholy arises from the perception that the rupture between the regimes of compensation has corrupted us in such a way that there is no going back. It is an irrevocable movement.  

“Society is not, as is commonly believed, the development of nature, but rather its decomposition and entire remaking. It is a second edifice, built with the ruins of the first. We rediscover the debris with a pleasure mixed with surprise. It is this which occasions the naïve expression of a natural sentiment which escapes in society. It even happens that it pleases more, if the person from whom it escapes is a rank more elevated, that is to say, farther from nature. It charms in a king, because a king is in the opposed extremity. It is a fragment of ancient doric or corinthian architecture in a crude and modern edifice.”

The motive behind the post-truth hoax

The first thing to be said about our post-truth moment is that it is complete bullshit that we are having a post-truth moment. The idea that somehow, uniquely in the last year, American politicians and propagandists have started lying systematically, ignores the entirety of American history. The idea of ‘post-truth’ is generated from a completely scewball, neo-liberal view of American history – and, indeed, of world history – in which America was not the country that declared its independence because the British weren’t killing enough Indians, and that incorporated slavery in the constitution. It is not the nation of Jim Crow, the Sand River massacre, the long war between labor and capital in which unions were attacked by national guards as a regular thing. It is not the America that dropped two atom bombs and proceeded to test nuclear weapons above ground for more than a decade, with the official scientific community, colluding with the executive branch, lying through its teeth about the mortal dangers of fallout – which a scientific committee in 2006, hobbled by the congressional requirement that it only consider Iodine isotopes, decided was probably the cause of at least 200000 thyroid cancers. It is not the America of bogus drug laws, enforced with exemplary racism, that took back many of the promises of the Civil Rights era.

Instead, it is disneyland, where a perpetually cool tinkerbell, who knows the latest euphemisms, is a little burst of rainbow. In other words, post-truth analysis is based on a lie. The lie is called American exceptionalism, or various phrases of that type.   Once you begin with a view of American history that can only be held by a member of the upper class (a class that is overwhelmingly white), who has distinct views about helping the “poor” (a sociological category that has its roots in charity) while despising the working class (which is a sociological category that has its roots in socio-economic struggle), you will quickly miss and misinterpret the American grain.

The post-truth meme was created in order to be scolded, and provide a soapbox for editorial lecturing. In reality, the lies of Trump are simply easier to spot. Trump has not bothered to find collaborators in the mainstream press, those willing volunteers who like to weave glamor around our monarchs – hence the awe evoked by so piddling a figue as George Bush.  This is, I think, a huge mistake. But it isn’t some troubling new facet of our society. There is no post-truthiness, and its hour has not struck. I don’t want to use the occasion of clueless sex offender Trump to tell liberal seeming white lies about our country.  That would be missing the moment.