the geography of subjective experience

There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream.

the battle between the list and the dialogue

Pissing in the River

Watchin' it rise

There are two stories about Protagoras. In the hostile account of his life written by Diogenes Laertius, it is said that he was a porter, a relatively humble position, and that he invented a porter’s pad for carrying things. But in Philostratas’s Lives of the Sophists he is given a much grander birth, being the son of a wealthy citizen of Abdera who “amassed wealth beyond most men in Thrace”, and who entertained King Xerxes in his house. Philostratus claims that this Persian connection effected Protagoras’s thinking, since he became versed, to an extent, in the doctrines of the Persian magi. Whereas Diogenes Laertius (writing with all the snobbery of the ancient world at his back) attributes Protagorus’s education to Democritus, who was impressed by Protagoras’s invention of the porter’s pad. Somehow, this story rings with the implication of slander – it gives Protagoras’s cunning all too menial a cast. And yet Diogenes also casually attributes the invention of philosophy by dialogue, or the Socratic method, to Protagoras – a rather big invention, the invention of a form, which Diogenes, in his usual way, mentions and goes on. The  biographies of the Philosophers tumble and jumble off the page like some inventory landslide, leaving us frustrated, howling outside of the sacked walls for more.  

One thing that is agreed between Philostratus and Diogenes is that Protagorus, like Socrates, was accused in Athens of disbelief in the Gods. In Philostratus, his person was condemned, and he fled from place to place like a philosophical Flying Dutchman, seeking refuge, until he drowned in a shipwreck. Diogenes L, however, maintains merely that his book, On the Gods, was burned in Athens. He read this book, supposedly, at Euripides house. The scandalous import of the book comes out in Diogenes quotation: “As to the Gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.”

This quotation, of course, doesn’t tell us much about the argument that Protagoras develops about the gods; for after all, the argument might show that most probably, they exist, and that their existence is bound up in our not knowing. Or otherwise. Protagoras’s life – which is a bit undecidable itself – might have provided a good context in which to ponder undecidablity and the shortness of human life. Surely some echo of Protagoras’s phrase is contained in the story, in Acts, that Paul discovered an altar in Athens inscribed, to the unknown God.

I have always found Protagoras a sympathetic figure, whether or not he came from the working class. He has been demonized for millenia as the “founder” of relativism. One of Protagoras’s book, lost like all of them, has the nice, Nietzschian title of “Truth, or The Overthrower” - (Kataballontes Logoi). What we have from Protagoras (as though proving the shortness of man’s life has an imminent effect on what he can know) is fragments, the most famous of which, pondered wonderfully in the Theaetetus, is: ‘Of all things, the measure is man, of things which are, that they are, of things which are not, that they are not.’ What this means is elusive, of course. It is not that man is the inventor of all things – nor does it say that things do not exist outside of man. These are, of course, possible interpretations. But it puts man in the position of “measurer”, and in one sense that goes well with the Pythagorian viewpoint according to which number is at the ontological base of things. Yet in another sense, it displaces number with the measurer – begging the question of whether measure itself “depends” on man.

Myself, I think the measure fragment links up to what DL claims about Protagoras’s invention of the socratic dialogue for doing philosophy. DL writes that Protagoras was the first to say “that on everything (pragmatos) there are two accounts (logous) opposed each other.” This would seem to make  “man”  the measurer a more suspect unity; for if pragmatos is the kind of thing that is subject to exponential account making, it might be more reasonably said that of all things, the measureless is man. Plato of course saw this, but he nevertheless decided that “man” meant an aggregate of individuals, each person, instead of something like Dasein, or the collectivity of the human, divided within itself. If we are seeking the geneology of what Bakhtin calls “broadness” – the way many views, acts, desires and beliefs can be attributed to persons, without there being a core coherence – then we would have to start, I think, with Protagoras.

There is a story about Protagoras that is recounted in Plutarch’s life of Pericles that exemplifies this theme. Pericles bratty son published a “Daddy Dearest” book trying to mock Pericles for, among other things, hanging with the sophists. “For instance, a certain athlete had hit Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and Pericles, Xanthippus said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of the contests, that "in the strictest sense" ought to be held responsible for the disaster.” This was an entire waste of time for the son, Xanthippus; but it is a moment of radical recognition that stands out in legal history, with the sense that liability can be mediate as well as immediate. But what we see, in this discussion with Pericles, is an effect of there being two sides to each question, and two sides after that – two sides, indeed, to whether the right question is being asked.

The interesting question to ask of those who oppose relativism relates to this issue of measure and measurelessness, and it is the question of the disposability of form, whether it can be discarded once we get to substance, or whether it is, indeed, so tied to substance that our abstraction of one from the other is a distortion. To put it another way, by rejecting Protagoras, which happens in the Theaetetus, is Plato actually rejecting the socratic method? Is he rejecting Socrates? For if Socrates is taking up Protagoras’s technique, it would seem, from Plato’s non-relativist view, that Socrates made a mistake, gave too much to the enemy. For Protagoras’s invention would seem designed never to get us closer to what we want - the list of imperatives in the realms of knowledge, ontology, ethics and aesthetics that can tell us what is true and what is false, what is knowledge and what isn’t, what exists and what doesn’t, what is right and what isn’t, what is beautiful and what isn’t.

With Protagoras, don’t we begin, in earnest, the battle between the dialogue and the list?

shower tourism

Who among us is not aware of shower tourism? By this, I do not simply mean the always tentative exploration of hotel bathrooms, with their varying accommodation for the traveler, their little tubes of cheap shampoo and body gel, which one nevertheless pockets, their towels of varying thicknesses, and their surprisingly common problem with retaining water in the shower or shower/tub area – the latter being home to a curious penchant among hoteliers for what is called, in the industry, the “flexible curtain track”, which allows ample space to pull the curtain shut – but which always produces a sizeable puddle at the end of the lustration process. That puddle into which the showerer plunges his feet, with a light grimace, when removing himself from the shower – how well we know it. Unlike our bathroom, however, the puddle is a matter for someone else to clean up. Yes, the hotel bathroom deserves a whole chapter to itself, but at the moment, I am talking of another facet of this micro-world, which consists of using the showers of others – of friends or family with whom one is staying, or who are staying with one. Both aspects are noteworthy – tourism is, in this sense, a transitive property, since if you have guests staying with you, your quarters are, for the length of the stay, going to be somewhat alien to you. In other words, the tourist is a catalytic creature at whose touch the familiar becomes a tourist site. It is this logico-magical property that makes for the tragedy of tourism, as the tourist searches for an authenticity which his very presence destroys.

Myself, I have stayed with many a host. I have entered naked into many a tiled domain in apartment and house,  and, testing the water from the shower head or wand, surveyed the various unguents stored there. Sometimes, of course, I have entered carrying my own; sometimes, I confess, I have “borrowed” alien creams, soaps, shampoos and the like. This, you will say, is pretty un-guestly. It is a sort of vice. But it is also part of our everyday novel-writing – since we all engage in living through, or parasiting, other characters now and then. The grocery clerk surveys the line and sees Mrs. X and Mr. Y and that girl who always comes in and buys one item and the old woman who makes you go through endless rolls of curly edged coupons, the auto saleman guesses at the libido of the 20 year old guy, etc., etc. The self comes and goes, it doesn’t preceed self-interest so much as it follows it, becoming at worst a ghostly selfishness, and at best a moral worry.

So it is with conditioners. As we know from Kracauer and Benjamin, the houses and apartments we live in are potentially only repositories of clues for the classic detective. The doilies in the living room may be bought for decorative reasons, but ultimately they serve to soak up the blood from the murder victim,  along with the velvety pillow. The shower contains – like the computer and its files – a veritable history of the owner of the shower for those with the eyes to see. Are the hair products bought from the low end? Are they cheap and general? Or are they bought from the high end, and are they expensive and specialized? Is the language on them, by any chance, French? Or English? Do the shower gels refer to milk? To almonds? To glowing skin?

The shower process itself nourishes speculation. We stand under the fierce beating down of warm drops and we think. We ponder the day, the tasks. We make up verses. We make up grocery lists. There are, of course, people who simply shower to get clean. But as every tv ad for shampoo or soap makes clear, cleaning is secondary to the ecstasy of soaping and rinsing, to swinging, fresh hair, to sparkling eyes, to the smell that film is just on the edge of throwing at you if it could – the whole transcends its tawdry utilitarian purpose as much as advertisement’s speedy expensive car transcends that mere metal carapace stuck in traffic jams and hustled into parking lots. Advertisement has a way of changing the purposes of the acts of everyday life. In the case of the shower, it has cinematized our experience.

There is a reason that some sing in the shower.

a magisterial sigh

Ah, the great magisterial sighs of the 19^th century bigwigs! One way to explain the cultural critique in Nietzsche is his exasperation with the high culture of mandarin resignation. It is the side of Nietzsche that can be summed up by the theory of the eternal return (a theory that leads inevitably to parody, or even to parody as the very principle of worldmaking) or by a phrase that never occurs in the papers of that son of a Lutheran pastor: fuck you!

Jules Renan was a great magisterial sigher. He had the highest reputation in the 19^th century. Reviewing his “Reminiscences of Childhood and Youth”, Henry James wrote, Jamesianly: “It is not enough to say of him that he has the courage of his opinions: for that, after all, is a comparatively frequent virtue. He has the resignation; he has the indifference; he has, above all, the good humor.“

There is something to this. To be indifferent to your opinions is as comparatively rare as it is frequent to have the courage of them. One could even ask why one should form opinions at all if we are going to be indifferent to them.  Renan, being a classicist, might reply to that question by pointing to Parmenides poem about Being, a poem in which the great struggle between Night and Light is, as well, a non-struggle, in as much as they cannot mix at all, but only separate. This is not only the struggle between becoming and being, but the struggle between believing and knowing. The latter is a utopia, an aporia, given that the forms or ideas can never mix with that of which they are forms. Knowledge, then, requires a certain exhaustion. We are finally brought to the variable, which no content can fix. This can be viewed as an epistemological tragedy, or… a historical farce.

The back and forth of farce is what Renan opts for. Hence in the introduction to his Reminiscences, he basically signs the death warrant for the world as he has known it:

“The world is marching towards a kind of Americanism, which would all our refined ideas, but which, once the present crisis is over, could well be no worse than the old order for the only thing that counts, which is to say, the franchisement and progress of the human spirit. A society where personal distinction has little price, where talent and intelligence have no official recognition, where high function does not ennoble, where politics becomes the job of classless men and persons of the lowest order, where the rewards of life go, by preference, to the intrigue, vulgarity and charlatanism that cultivates the art of the advertisement, to the rascality of those who find ways to squeeze the Penal Code; such a society, I say, does not please us.”

But then, of course, comes the other hand, that hand that, as though driven by some neurological defect, comes up and slaps its owner’s face. For Renan reviews all the “old orders” he or his parents have lived in, and found them all to come up short, to be full of scurrility, vulgar powerbrokers, and heartbreaking obstacles to the enfranchised imagination. So don’t worry, old man. The worst is yet to come – but it is always yet to come. The worst is behind us – but it is also ahead of us. This is positivism inverted, and it has a certain odd comfort to it. But it is a high price to pay for indifference to one’s opinions.

James notices this too, and makes a reply to Renan that also has its place in some impossible dialogue between Parmenides and Protagoras (who, not by coincidence, name two of Plato’s dialogues): “He [Renan] makes the remark that in his opinion less importance will be attached to talent as the world goes on; what we shall care for will be simply truth. This declaration is singular in many ways, among others in this: that it appears to overlook the fact that one of the great uses of talent will aways be to discover truth and present it; and that, being an eminently personal thing, and therefore susceptible of great variety, it can hardly fail to be included in the estimate that the world will continue to make of persons.”

  

non-disclosure agreements: the trick the mafia missed

In Leopoldo Sciascia’s crime novels, there are always two solutions. One is the true solution, patiently assembled by the inspector or researcher (who either has too much integrity to be allowed to function after a certain point, or has too much naivete to realize that he is putting himself in mortal danger), and the other is the solution most convenient to the representatives of the State – the same State whose laws define the crime that is supposedly being punished.

Such was and is Italy, from the 60s to the 90s. The genius of American corruption is elsewhere. America is a country of laws, so corruption first operates by unmaking the law to suit the perpetrators. It allows such things as non-disclosure agreements, for instance. For a certain sum of money, the perpetrators can either not be tried at all or their trials can’t be accessed.

It would seem, at first glance, that such things are counter to any principle of the legal order. To allow a crime to be hidden by a non-disclosure agreement is logically equivalent to allowing a crime to be perpetrated outside of the law. If we protect a rapist from the disclosure of the rape, or we protect a pharmaceutical company from the consequences of malpractice so severe that thousands die of it every year and hundreds of thousands are addicted, we are doing nothing different from allowing people to be lynched for crimes they are merely accused of.  Interestingly, what ties the Weinstein accusations to the Sackler family exposes recently paraded in two magazines is that in both cases, the outlines of what happened are obscured by court order. The law itself is intent, here, on hiding the possibility of crime.

It is worth asking how a non-disclosure agreement, which might have a use in protecting Intellectual Property, became the go-to instrument for lawyers protecting monied criminals. That history leads us back to the eternal struggle between capital and labor. At the beginning of the twentieth century, progressive legislation made it necessary for employers to disclose to their laborers facts pertinent to the particular dangers to health faced by the laborer from the materials he or she dealt with. However, the courts saved capitalism by making that disclosure an agreement, such that the laborer couldn’t hold the employer liable. From this, it was a hop, skip, and a social cost to the establishment of Workers Insurance schemes mounted by the state (which, in this as through its entire history, was not the enemy but the collaborator of Capital). At the same time, it became apparent that the products of companies could be hazardous – accidentally or for a purpose – and a requirement to disclose those dangers was incorporated in the law as well. Upon this base of law was built – during the brief spring of democratization that swept the U.S. in the sixties and seventies – a whole movement for consumer rights. At that time, many ‘right to know” laws were passed. Where employees were formerly not told that, for instance, the asbestos they are mining will kill them horribly, or even where they were informed tardily, they could be sued. In fact, in any real history of the U.S., the suing of John Mandeville Asbestos should take a larger space than it is given, for that suit shocked the business establishment. The counter-revolution had many sources, but one of them was definitely the nightmarish idea that a company could make a fair profit while killing its employees with chronic diseases and then, then, the fuckers would take that profit back to pay for a lot of slacker hospital time. The very idea made officials in the Reagan whitehouse – and in neo-lib think tanks advising the Dems – feel so bad.

One of the landmarks in the counter-revolution against labor was an obscure court decision, Chrysler Corporation vs. Brown. The court held there that the “Trade Secrets Act” of 1905 trumped the FOIA laws that had been set up in the sixties. That a third party would have any access to government files concerning Chrysler’s discriminatory hiring practices from documents submitted by Chrysler was outrageous. An informed population is a population that is difficult to govern. And imagine the nightmare of everybody knowing Chrysler’s business?

The muffled roar of Chrysler vs. Brown was, of course, heard by those paid to hear such things: corporate lawyers. The charge was on.

How the non-disclosure agreement extended from trade secrets to secrets of life and death, of rape and pillage, is wrapped up with another strand of the story of the cold war. For it was the security state that innovated in using the NDA as a powerful tool to keep things out of court.

In 1984, for instance, the Reagan administration was forced to form a commission to investigate the murder of four nuns in El Salvador. The nuns were lefties, and their murder was planned and executed, it was suspected, by allies, to say the least, of the Americans. The study was completed, and turned into the State department, which promptly branded it top secret.

The families of the nuns protested. This protest was heard. The administration then took a compromise position. The family members could see the report, as long as they signed an NDA that pledged them to never disclose the information in the report under any circumstances as long as they shall live without the permission of the State Department.

Thus, at one neat stroke, a crime could be hidden beneath an agreement.

I say a crime. But what is a crime? The United States is a very nominalist culture. To attack racism, for instance, you attack racist labels. Once the labels are forbidden, voila, racism is solved. Similarly, rape or murder might be a crime. Or it might not! An NDA is a nice way of suspending that label forever. Like Schrodinger’s cat, it is concealed from the observer, and is therefore in a perpetual middle state, the state of Mu, to use the Zen term (no doubt incorrectly).

What the CIA and FBI get away with doing will soon be standard practice for the rich and famous – or simply the rich. Expanding the trade secret sphere was relatively easy in an age in which publicity had seamlessly merged into product production. Hence it becomes common that film companies have all workers sign a NDA to block release of information about, say, the behavior of the actors on the film. Creep creep creep, its mission creep for creeps, time. The NDA becomes an instrument of corruption that is all above board and tucked in. And so we get to our current epoch, where thousands die and the company that sold them their pills continues to not only profit, but ultimately block information about how they did it; where the Sackler name adorns multitudes of buildings, the result of donations that flowed from the money made by Oxycontin; where thousands of women are subject to sexual harassment up to and including rape, and the Weinsteins roam the landscape.

I wonder as I wander how long such things can go on. They have gone on almost my entire life. The man in the iron mask used to be an emblem of unaccountable power. Now, he’s your everyman. Let’s marvel that Rosie McGowan is so bound legally that she can be sued by Harvey Weinstein if she describes in any detail what he did to her in his hotel room in 1997, and the accuser of Bill O’Reilly is bound to anonymity forever as a result of her settlement. Marvel that Purdue Pharmaceuticals is at the moment claiming that the documents it was forced to release to Oregon when the state sued them for abusive oxycontin pill pushing are all a trade secret, and can’t be disclosed to anybody else. Marvel that with the far right justices who rule the court system, probably Purdue will win in the end. Marvel that the Mafia missed a big trick.

from Koestler to Weinstein: men behaving "badly"

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

read Elmore leonard or Leopoldo Sciascia, not the papers, to find out how things work

Trust the great crime writers. It was somewhere in one of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit novels, one set in the early eighties, that one crook complains to the other that now, legit businesses have taken up the Mafia style. Hardly make a dishonest living anymore.
In reality, we know that the line between mafias and establishments are thin, thin. I’m on vacation in Montpellier, and I’m rereading Scascia, my fave crime novelist, or political crime novelist, and cross referencing with Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which was written when Andreotti was on trial and there was a vivid sense of the overlap between the establishment and the mafias in Italy.
I’m also crossreferencing the spate of stories, in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-family-that-built-an-empire… and Esquire, about the Sackler family. Philanthropists, aesthetes, and the peeps responsible for about 17,000 oxycontin overdose deaths per annum. Although, like the mafia, the Sacklers learned early to put their name on other things besides their drugs. The Sacklers are post-mafia, representative of a whole new era in deregulation, when there are no rules, and no regulatory agencies that can’t be legally bribed. Bribery, you see, is a temporal thing. Give a regulatory hundreds of thousands before he makes a decision, and it is a crime. Give him a job with your organization two years after he made a decision in your favor, and everything is fine, fine fine.
These new rules took the place of the old rules, the New Deal – Great Society America, where the mafias were all about extorting and defrauding trade unions. The old Vegas times. There were actually consequences for corporate malfeasance. Not always, but often enough. Even in the early Bush era, there was the Enron moment, when they actually put some upper management people away. In the 80s that happened too. We remember Ivan Boesky, fondly.
But the general ethos from George W. to Obama to Trump is: there are no rules for the powerful.
No banker goes to jail nowadays. And putting in jail a man who pushed oxycontin to the point that rural America is a trail of oxy and heroin burnouts ignores the fact that he is a billionaire. So there is no chance whatsoever that he will be deprived of the merest tuppence. It’s America, Jake.
Still, the new world order of impunity can’t last forever. It can break, as it did in Italy – and lead to something worse.
Thus, I like reading Sciascia, who lived through this, and saw through this, and tried to keep his sanity. Although, as Robb points out, Sciascia was never pessimistic enough.
Pessimism is your friend.