Then-ism now, then-ism forever

These are the times that try one’s sense of “then”.

Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens. 

Thenism is an unfashionable ideology to intrude into the Establishment narrative of virtue at home and humanitarianism abroad. In foreign policy in particular, doing something now is a very sweet proposition, especially when it involves dropping a bomb, while the “then” part of the equation doesn’t get any looksee whatsoever. I used to attribute this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciting action while the hero goes through all types of obstacles to reach the bomb and defuse it. 

The disjunction between the one minute and the five minute perfectly defines political ideology in America. Thus, the favorite campfire tale for your American suburbanite is that we need to shrink guvamint. We need that small guvamint. And why do we need it small? So we can have our wonderful private enterprise system work the magic of the marketplace. And why is the marketplace magic? Because every person works as hard as he can to produce his own advantage. And how then, are we gonna get that small government? Why, by electing people who completely forsake their own advantage as peeps in government to get the government off our backs. Of course! It is like we need to elect selfless self-interest saints. A perfect “then” moment.

The comedian on the Democratic side, right now, proclaiming how right we are to bomb Syria, is Anne-Marie Slaughter – which sorta messes up my idea that the loss of the “then” structure was a wholly testosterone poisoning event. Slaughter, in a tweet the encapsulates the entire sick mentality of the foreign policy establishment, the one that pretends it is out there leading the 700 billion dollar a year military to ever finer moral points, wrote:

“I believe that the US, UK, & France did the right thing by striking Syria over chemical weapons. It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors. It is illegal under international law. But it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.”

Enough to violating international law! We are going to violate international law just to show you how much we respect it!

It is an interesting thing that using chemical weapons on children is considered a crime, but the U.S. bombing a country with which it is not at war – which we started doing under Slaughter’s boss, Obama – is considered a great thing, a mark of toughness. No pictures of the resulting carnage will be shown on the front pages of the newspapers of the US, UK and France. Nor will there be any discussion of the fact that according to Syria’s Observatory for Human Rights – an anti-Assad group – these airstrikes have so far killed 11,000 people.

But those people did not die in vain. They were sacrificed to the cause of saying enough with killing Syrian people!

The Syrian war rhetoric shows, perpetually, that we are in the Bush era. We have learned nothing about “then” from the  whole bloody story of Iraq. That story is about the triumph of the “then” over the action movie idealism of D.C. think tankers. That the invasion being sold in 2003 was obviously fucked, that the versions of how it was going to be paid for, how long the occupation was going to take, and what the point of it was were all in a narrative muddle unquestioned by the (at that time) Democrat dominated Senate, or the journalistic slant of the media, are the symptoms of the serious decay of narrative intelligence in America.  Then in Iraq meant, if you were going to invade, you’d have to have some kind of draft, you’d have to bear casualties in the Vietnam war range, and you’d have to put the country on a real war footing – or, you could go in half assed, accrue tens of thousands of wounded and dead soldiers, leave behind around a million victims and two million refugees, and go out again as more Middle East wars raged.

Well, we chose what we chose. We never discredited the stupid people who put us into Iraq. We never even discussed – say, in France – a very obvious thing about Syria: Syria under Assad, during the Iraq war, prevented Islamicist fighters from going to Europe. This isn’t some huge deduction on my part, it was said by Chirac’s own defense minister. When the neo-cons triumphed under Hollande’s Fabius, guess what? Assad was not there to capture those islamicists. If you take down Assad in favor of a patchwork of islamcist groups, you will get blowback. But Hollande’s foreign policy people just looked away from the consequences of what they were doing, and were ultra surprised that France got attacked.

Then-ism. The “then” is in our throats, and we are going to choke on it.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF WISEASSERY

Pissing in a river, watching it rise 

Tattoo fingers shy away from me 

Long ago, in a universe far away, Hilary Clinton appeared on a talk show and was asked about Donald Trump’s race for president in the GOP primary. Clinton burst out laughing.

I imagine that the scolds scolded her even at the time. Alas, the only times Clinton was likeable were the times that her advisors told her mistake! Ixnay on the laughnay. And her cult said, unfortunately, you aren’t allowed, cause-a sexism – terrible advice all the way around that made her into a stiff personality who seemed, even in her spontaneous moments, to be taking the advice of her spontaneous coach (oh God, please, let this not be true!).

But the point here is not to knock Clinton, but to praise her. For even today, even when we know what a disaster the short-fingered vulgarian is, even as we watch him go from racism to sexism to tax cuts like a mad triple, even now – he is genuinely funny. This is a man who tweets about the TPP and I think, Butthead-style, dude, he said PP! 

Because that is who he is.

Those who think comedy is some light dessert don’t understand how something on this scale of cruelty could possibly be funny. I mean, the Guardian is reporting that in twenty years, the top 1 percent worldwide will own 2/3 of our planet. The North Pole is now warmer than Albany, New York in the winter. There is war everywhere, and we live in a society where grave white men debate other grave white men about how dumb, genetically, blacks are – and the grave white men who maintain this, like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, like to pretend that they are just being scientific.

So basically, what I’m saying is, we are fucked, and as the Good Ship Lollypop sinks, we are going to be harried by the dumbest people and their dumb fans so that even our dying bow will be laced with caricature and slapstick.

Yet, and yet – in all this darkness, I descry a silver lining. For isn’t this, friends, the golden age of the smart ass?

Smart assery has been my curse, my muse, my daimon, since I was a pup. I can’t help myself. Or no… lately, say for the past decade, I have toned down the sarcasm. Or sourcasm, as my brothers call it. But deep in my interior cathedral, the gothic lookin doctor and his monster are both rolling around on the lab floor every time another atrocity comes through the internets.

The reason for this is… romanticism! Modernism! Etc!

Ever since De Quincey showed how funny murder is, considered as one of the fine arts – ever since Poe – ever since Jarry’s Ubu Roi – the avant garde has known that the distance between tragedy and farce has lessened, or even collapsed. Marx thought the first time around was tragedy, the second time around was farce; Nietzsche thought that the first time around and the second and the third time and the nth time are identical; and Jacqueline Susan thought that once was not enough. Mix all of that up, and you get today’s wiseassery.

So I cry and I laugh about the state of the world, from Trump to Macron, but mostly I try to think of some appropriate jokes. Although every day, the newspaper comes up with jokes I could only dream of.

Candide's Revenge

It is a difficult thing to satirize Christianity today, as Voltaire once did. That is because the Christianity that Voltaire knew is dead. That is, the ideology of the clerks – the ideology of what James Scott calls the Great tradition – has moved on. It is no longer about glory and redemption. It is about commerce and science. 

Religion, in the Great Tradition culture, is now something to oratorically affirm on set occasions. Meanwhile, in the little tradition, in the daily life of the masses, belief has gone back to the wild. Thoughts are free – meaning it is all syncretic, a little astrology here, a little pop science there, a little Jesus, a little Oprah, a little politics. In these circumstances, the great biting ferocity of the old Candide tradition is simply out of place. Of course, there are fundamentalists, but they, too, are for the most part more moved by politics and commerce than anything like Christianity. 

My own stance on fundamentalists is that they are misnamed, since any literal reading of the Bible will tell you it is definitely as fierce as the Communist Manifesto. It makes a number of things crystal clear: that wealth is evil, that princes and nations are misguided, that primitive communism is the way to go, that thoughts aren’t free. The prophets are invariably – without exception – traitors. The messiah in the Gospels is serious that the first are last and the last are first in the kingdom of heaven. He is also serious about taking up your cross. 

I think the Candide genre died in The Master and the Margarita. Perhaps I should say, the death is explained in The Master and the Margarita. At the beginning of the book, there is a conversation between a poet and an editor. The latter, Berlioz, commissioned the poet, Ivan Ponyrev – or “Homeless” – to write an anti-Christian poem, but as he explains to Homeless, he is not satisfied with the result. The poem attributes dark motives and actions to Jesus – but the point, Berlioz says, is to bring out the fact that Jesus is a myth. He never existed. Now, Bulgakov is having some fun here, because as both are soon to find out, the Devil not only exists but has come to Moscow for an event. Berlioz’s rational world is swept away before the first chapter is over, in fact. But his theory about Jesus as a myth is a pretty good way of getting at why Candide is dead. In fact, in the current culture, whether Jesus existed or not doesn’t matter. Our liberal sentiments are offended by Candide style satire not because the belief in Jesus is belief in a myth, but because of the belief that we should be tolerant of the belief in Jesus. 

Both sides, of course, discard what we know about Jesus, whether man, God or myth: that he said and acted in certain ways, as recorded in four books and some so called Gnostic gospels. Nobody can swallow all of it, especially given the industrial-capitalist forms of our society today, which it totally did not predict, foresee, or experience.  Nobody wants to operate as though the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand anymore – which is the most absolute way of making sure that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t ever at hand. Fundamentalists have clung on to the one book in the Bible that is the most doubtful, and certainly the most anti-semitic and anti-Jesus: Revelations. Revelations is the L. Ron Hubbard book, the one that attracts the wankers.  The Fundy high priests would gladly trade the entire Good news of love for the idea that their enemies will be left to the pitiless tortures of the demons. And they have.

A religion based on Revelations won’t last. The evangelicals and fundamentalists are working, slowly and steadily, to create a broad revulsion with Christianity in all its shapes and forms. You can already see it happening. Call it: Candide’s revenge.

Pablum politics

Looking for ‘politically viable’ solutions to our current problems is like looking for an anti-biotic that won’t kill microbes. The latter is called a pablum. Unfortunately, the American political class consists of people who deal in little else.

fun among the fungus! politics and science in the 19th century

It isn’t known as well as it should be that both Georg F Hegel and Beatrice Potter were players in the study of the biology of the lichen, which in turn revolutionized the study of natural selection. Or at least I didn’t know. I do now thanks to Jan Sapp’s Evolution by Association: a history of symbiosis. A book I’d heartily recommend.

Hegel came first. Technically, Hegel didn’t know a lichen from a snowy owl. But he did put forward a view of the master-slave relationship in the Phenomenology of Spirit which must have influenced Simon Schwendener, a Swiss biologist who looked at lichens through the microscope and was startled by the fact, as he saw it, that lichens were not plants or organisms like the oak and the tiger. Rather, he claimed, they were composites.

“Lichens, he argued, represented a master-slave relationship. The master was a fungus of the order scomycetes, "a parasite which is accustomed to live upon the work of others; its slaves are green algals, which it has sought out or indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service." He went on to describe how the fungus surrounds the alga, "as a spider does its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow meshes, which is gradually converted into an impenetrable covering. While, however, the spider sucks its prey and leaves it lying dead, the fungus incites the algae taken in its web to more rapid activity, nay, to more vigorous increase."7

This view, which Schwendener released to the world in 1868 (when, in America, they were putting in place the 13^th and 14^th amendments), was immediately controversial. Some thought this messed up the whole Linnean schema, and thus it couldn’t be true – another instance of classification influencing the classified. But Beatrice Potter in the 1890s also looked at lichens, and saw that Schwendener was right, at least about lichens being composite. But the paper she wrote about it had to be given to the Linnean society by her uncle, since the society didn’t allow women – even in the audience. And she couldn’t proceed with her studies as the British Museum because she was a woman who had made a stink. So she said to hell with it and turned to writing classic children’s tales. I don’t know if any enterprising critic has seen a lichenous theme in the Tale of Peter Rabbit, but I’d bet there is one somewhere.

Of course, in the 1860s and in the 1890s, the real intellectuals thought everything was competition. Surely! Superior races succeeding inferior ones, and all that. Nature bloody in tooth and claw. So the idea that all might actually be something else – cooperation – that was an offense to the Zeitgeist. If this was true, anarchy would rule the world!

These political views were not separate from the science. The positivist view that science floats on a cloud of theory above objective facts gives us a poor sense of what science does, since in the end theory is always about interpreting and organizing facts – and showing which ones are pertinent and which aren’t, showing what explains exceptions, etc. Just as the political economics of Malthus run through Darwin – which is not a criticism of Darwin, but an explanation of how science reaches out for models – so to the beginning of the discovery of symbiosis was couched, plainly, in terms of political power.  Its rejection, too – a rejection of any model that can’t be reduced to competition – is plainly political. Which isn’t to say it is wrong; rather, the controversies it arouses depend very much on organizing our vision of things.

It was out of this kind of controversy that symbiosis, as distinct from parasitism, was born:

“Some came to see in the lichen the possibility of a

more general phenomenon: associations between phylogenetically distinct organism

that ranged from the loosest to the most intimate and essential, and

from the most antagonistic and one-sided to the most beneficial for the wellbeing

of both associates. A neutral term was required that did not prejudge

such relationships as parasitic. Therefore, in 1877, Albert Bernhard Frank

(1839-1900) at Leipzig coined the word Symbiotismus: "We must bring all the

cases where two different species live on or in one another under a comprehensive

concept which does not consider the role which the two individuals play

but is based on the mere coexistence and for which the term Symbiosis

{Symbiotismus} is to be recommended.”

Interestingly, the other term in contention at that time was “mutualism”. This, naturally, was abhorrently sentimental to biologists who unthinkingly adopted the term “competition”, as if this was not rooted in a very heteronormative sentimentality that sits in an EZ chair, waves a pennant and roots for the home team.

the social costs of individualizing voice

I am sure that there is a relation between the ideology of the voice and the hegemonic situating of the story situation in the classroom. It is a deconstructive hunch. It is worth trying to suss it out, I think, because it would say something about politics of literature in the U.S. and perhaps the Anglophone world at the moment.

The ideology of the voice is entailed by what Derrida called logocentricity – the view that writing is always secondary to speaking, always dependent on speaking. In order to be coherent, this view first has to segregate its unities – speaking and writing – in such a way that they don’t, at least ideally, overlap. This separation has to be effected so that both categories retain their essential natures. If speaking, for instance, can’t be conceived without certain traits that belong to writing, then the whole hierarchy and its claims would become unbalanced.

I won’t go through the meticulous Derridian detective work that was applied to this thesis. I want to take up an ideological entailment of the mythical separation of the two in the Anglosphere – and in general in advanced capitalism – which I’d call the “individualism” myth. Just as voice, in the White Mythology, is one thing, spontaneous and natural, so, too, in the U.S. context, a voice is an individuating property. You “own” your voice. It is as unique to you, in this view, as your fingerprints.

Of course, the deconstructive response is to point out that the voice isn’t something you ever constructed. It is an organ that is almost uniquely sensitive to history. Within “my” voice there is a whole history of parents, of social groups, of geographies, of culture. Instead of being a unique unity, my voice is a composite, a nest more than an atom. There is a lot of fascinating research about people whose accents suffer major change after brain trauma – what is often found is that the new accent will often represent circumstances from some early portion of the patient’s life. Roth, Fink and Cherney published an interesting paper in 1997 about a patient who “sustained a left parietal hemorrhagic stroke” and began to speak again, after a period of aphasia, with a Dutch accent. This patient had been born in Holland, but he’d left Holland at five years of age. What he carried in his voice was a history of decisions, or perhaps one should say of unconscious choices, that were cruelly stripped away by the stroke. There are, that is to say, negative spaces in our voices.

If the voice, then, which can be recognized by a machine represents only the surface of that crowd phenomenon, the voice that came about and is still coming about through the twists and turns of a history that is neither spontaneous nor under one’s control, than the individualizing of the voice should be thought of not as a liberating project, but as a form of discipline and control. In the theme of “finding your voice”, the finder finds a fake voice, a unity, something that represents “him” the way a politician represents “him” – as an infinite compromise in a system of exploitation, a frustration that no hedonic headlock will resolve.

Which gets me to the classroom as the story site.

Mark McGurl’s book, The Program Era, is the most comprehensive history and meditation I know of the post-war blooming of creative writing as a college discipline. It does not treat this as a disaster, nor is it nostalgic for some era of organic intellectuals. But it does pay attention to the price of this moment. One of the great prices is the forgetting that “creative writers” are specializing in a part of human action that is being performed, day in and day out, by almost every person. The story situation occurs in restaurants, on street corners, in offices, around tables – it is an incontournable aspect of human socializing before it is anything else. This aspect of writing – the skaz – seems, to me, remarkably undervalued in the current literary market. 

This, I think, may be because the skaz defies the ownership program of “creative writing” – it exists outside the classroom taboo of plagiarism, and beyond the idea of ranking. Not that ranking of a kind doesn’t exist: “tell the story about x” is a part of friendship and love – as is, frankly, “you told that boring story about x again.” These stories also change, and are often added to – the story of “x”, reminding somebody of “y”, will often change in its next retelling to echo bits of y. Just as microbes in the environment of an antibiotic will pass around resistant genes, the rhythms, types of plot, and attitude of stories will change according to what has been, so to speak, in the room.

Well, there is much more to say about the individualization of voice and and the disappearance of skaz in our literature, but that will have to do for today.

fuck reform

I've read my share of stories about "reform". For instance, privatization is a "reform." The prince of Saudi Arabia imprisoning other princes and billionaires and extorting money from them is a "reform". Austerity is a "reform." The press loves the word reform so much that if, tomorrow, the GOP in Congress passed a bill re-legalizing slavery, the headline in the NYT would read: "Labor reform voted."

Fuck reform.