Almost a true story

 This summer, doing research for another project (which concerned illegal arms dealing) I stumbled across the story of X. X was a businessman who was murdered in 1983. His body bobbed up in a lake in a New York State park. The fascination, here, was the more that I followed the story in the newspapers of the time, the more it became clear that the authorities had a pretty good idea of who murdered X. But they never acted on that knowledge. X became a cold case from the Cold War.

So I wrote a long piece about him. 

Here's the link to Medium

Here's the beginning of the story.

-Imagine a wealthy executive. Retired from GM. His neighbors in the tony suburb of Aurora, Ohio, described him as a super patriot, a John Wayne with a Czech accent. Imagine him in 1983.

- Imagine his career, with its wonderous lacunae. Starting with birth. Our man is born to American parents in Prague in 1919. Of all times, of all places. Prague was, finally, a capital city again. In that strange merger of Bohemian nationalism and Wilsonian racism, a nation was born, another of the many that jumped out of the pocket of the Versailles treaty. Wilson, the American president, had well known white supremacist views, identifying America with a certain vision of the white race. That view inserted itself into the post WWI world, where nation and race were increasingly taken to be synonymous concepts. It was Wilson, it was the inheritance of a certain nationalist romanticism gone sour. The logic of this equation made those in the nation who were not part of the favored race maroons within their own nation. The old legitimating tie to a family, a dynasty, was torn. Who, exactly, was a Czechoslovakian?

Kafka or "the secret society"

 

Jean Ferry was a pataphysician, a script writer, and a general poet. Like many French writers who swam in the miasma around surrealism, he had fantastic contacts in the French literary world and lived an adventurous life, all of which was perfectly unnoticed in the Anglosphere. He wrote scenarios for Georges Clouzet and dialogue for the famous soft-core vampire flick, Daughters of Darkness, that starred  Delphine Seyrig, which is as close as he got to English language attention.  

As far as I know, he is generally untranslated. In English. So I decided to translate this little story, or prose poem,  from the collection The Mechanic, published by Finitude in 2010 – but I believe it was first published in The Secret Society (1946).

 

Kafka  or “the secret society”

When Joseph K… was around twenty, he discovered the existence of a secret, very secret, society. Truly, it didn’t resemble any other society of that type. It was very difficult for certain people to become admitted as members. Many, who ardently wanted to, never succeeded. Others, by contrast, become members without even knowing it. One was never, besides, never totally sure of being a member. There were many who believed they belonged to it and weren’t, really, part of it at all. However much they had been initiated, they were still less part of the secret society than many who didn’t have the slightest knowledge of the existence of the society. In fact, they had undergone the tests of a false initiation, destined to put off the scent all of those who were unworthy of being initiated for real. But even to the most authentic members, those who had reached the most elevated place in the hierarchy of this secret society, even to them it was never revealed if their initiations were valid or not. It could happen that a member attained, due to a number of authentic initiations, a real rank, and consequently, without being advised of the fact, they went and undertook false initiations. Among the members it was an object of interminable discussions whether it was better to be admitted to a smaller but real level in the hierarchy or to occupy an exalted, but illusory, one. In any case, no one was sure of the solidity of their position.

 

In fact, the situation was even more complicated, for certain postulants were admitted to the highest levels without undertaking any tests at all, and others without even being told. And to be frank, there was no need to be a postulant:  there were after all people who had received very elevated initiations without knowing even that the secret society existed.  

The powers of the superior members were unlimited; they carried in themselves a powerful emanation of the secret society. For instance, their presence alone was enough, even if they didn’t make it manifest, to transform an anodyne gathering, like a concert or a birthday party, into a meeting of the secret society. These members were held to establish secret links in every gathering in which they participated, which were taken from other members of the same rank; there is thus between the members a perpetual exchange of relationships, which permitted the supreme authorities of the secret society to keep a firm hold on the situation.

However high and far the initiations go, they never are high enough to reveal to the initiate the purpose pursued by the secret society. For there are always traitors, and for a long time now, it has been no mystery for anyone that the goal is to keep the goal secret.

Joseph K… was horrified to learn that this secret society was so powerful and had so many branched that it might have been the case that he, without being aware of it, had shook the hand of the most powerful members. As bad luck would have it, one morning, after having woken up from a restless sleep, he lost his first class ticket in the metro. This accident was the first link in a chain of confusing and conflicting circumstances that put him in contact with the secret society. Later, needing to simply defend himself, he had to do what was needed in order to become a member of this fearful organization. That was a long time ago, and he still did not know where he stood in the process.       

Happiness, 2020

 

I’ve been thinking about a long ago abandoned project lately.

In 2007, I was suddenly struck with a vision – or a trifecta of visions. The first vision was that happiness, in Western culture, was a total social fact – the name Marcel Mauss gave to concepts that pervade social relations and social representation in a given culture. Happiness, like mana (the primal power spoken of by Polynesian people, which served as the object of Mauss’s study in The Gift) was located in three conceptual places: as an immediate feeling – I am happy about some x; as a judgement about a whole life or collective institution – for example, in survey questions about whether the respondent is “happy”, which elicits a life judgement – and finally as a social goal against which social systems should be judged – the well-being promised, for instance, by market-oriented economists. This threefold set made me wonder how it was all connected – for these were not simply different definitional aspects of happiness, but truly ontic differences that were, at the same time, understandably linked.

Vision number two was that the happiness culture was built in the early modern era. This was accompanied, or quasi caused, by the beginning of the idea of economic growth – in contradistinction from the older, Malthusian restrained, society of the image of the limited good, and by a change in fundamental family patterns in which, increasingly, males and females married and started their own households, instead of remaining in the paternal house. The destruction of the society of the limited good – the idea that your goods, or luck, take from a restricted common pot -  was, as well, the destruction of a larger worldview in which nemesis, or God’s judgment, played a predominant part.  The old notion of fortune’s wheel was laid aside in the name of a new notion in which economic activity actually intertwined beneficently – the vices of the rich were the profits of the jeweler and hatmaker, etc. and equilibrium was disconnected from non-growth.  The second phenomena, which was first postulated by an obscure scholar named John Hajnal, who proposed, in 1965, that that, in essence, starting with the end of the 16th century, you could draw a line from Trieste to St. Petersburgh and allot two different household formations to each side. On the West, you have what Hajnal came to call the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family. This, to me, was a fascinating fact – even if later scholars messed about a bit with the neatness of Hajnal’s theory. What this meant was that a window in biographical time opened up between independence and marriage. For both males and females, that window was something new – it was youth. As it shifted down in the twentieth century, it became adolescence and young adulthood. The effects of this were enormous.

Vision number three was of the effect of combining the treadmill of production, accelerated by technology and the revamping of the social structure, and the happiness culture. That effect was, essentially, to remove the limits on the human. The human limit, once rigidly defined by the gods or necessity, and the scarcity of luck, now expanded to include the world. The world became the instrument for making humans happy. It had no more “rights” than any other instrument.

Well, I added to my fundamental thesis for a number of years, and then I sorta took on other projects. But I’ve been reading my notes and blog posts back then, and I do think I was onto something. I was especially thrown back on this material by Ruth Leyes’ The Ascent of Affect, which gives a genealogy to the affect theory that has grown up over the last sixty or seventy years, since WWII.  I also delved into certain areas – such as deconstructing Paul Ekman’s emotional universals – which Leyes also does, with a heavier scholarship, but less concern, I think, for the amazing anthropology of affect that has helped us re-view our sense of, for instance, the European and Anglophone schema.

So I am thinking about working out, 12 years after thinking this through, some pieces of the happiness culture puzzle.

Blues

 Blues

On a bleak day I lay in the bleak sheets

Eight stories above the puddles in the streets

Where the rain jumped, and the cars were ill:

Everybody in Paris swallowed some kind of pill

In the hope that what the doctor said was just because

He was a sort of negative Santa Claus.

Our anxiety, our numerous internal disasters

Would surely be repaired by duly applied plasters.

And chemistry – for wasn’t this the age of belief

In time released, targeted relief?

I peered out the window, I stretched my eyes to see

Something that didn’t strike me as old or filthy

(sometimes it is like that. A girl’s education

In cleaning up extends at times to the whole nation).

Another party girl, I thought, goes down the drain

-I’d feel oh so much better if it wasn’t for this rain!

Karen Chamisso

The Machine Stops

 

Michael Kammen’s 1980s book about the Constitution in American culture had one of those great titles, the kind of thing that Bob Dylan might appropriate for a song lyric: The Machine that would go of itself. Kammen took the title from a lecture given in the 1880s by James Russell Lowell:

“After our Constitution got fairly into working order it really seemed as if we had invented a machine that would go of itself, and this begot a faith in our luck which even the civil war itself but momentarily disturbed.”

Oh these machines! Russell’s phrase gives us that shock of recognition which is something akin to  deja-vu – it is one of those phrases that seem already to have been written or spoken somewhere, to be on the tip of the collective tongue.. A machine that would go of itself is what the classical liberal and the neo-liberal dream of the social is all about – a machine for governance, a market machine, a rational choice machine in the consumer’s head, etc. They are not “turned on” but mystically take their charge from equilibrium itself.

The dream is that the market is our collective intelligent servant and master, knowing everything by its very structure. The state is as small as possible, vis a vis the market, which is controlled by the trade and traffic in private hands (never mind that the company is anything but a private entity). However, the state is as large as it needs to be in order to control the non-virtuous citizens. All citizens, though, are given their turn to vote for a preselected range of “representatives”, from president to city council member.

Lowell continued his speech: “And this confidence in our luck with absorbation in material interests, generated by unparalleled opportunity, has in some respects made us neglectful of our political duties.”

What Lowell sees as a fault, hearkening back to an earlier era of republican virtue, is seen, by the neoliberal, as a virtue: the political economy is de-politicized. The end of history is the end of politics, at least on what Nietzsche called the “Grand scale” – a scale that would attempt, massively, to annul the exploitation and alienation that are not so much byproducts of the machine as its very fuel. The scheme was to drain politics into smaller venues, fights over TV shows and small scale scandals among the disposables in the political class. The feeling of powerlessness that the machines inevitably cause in the populace could be compensated by other forms of power – like the power of choosing to buy one object over another, fruit loops over raison bran, the minimansion over the fixer upper suburban ranch house, ad infinitum. Nobody would notice that their lives were slipping by. And if they did, there were now a number of opioids and anti-depressants that would do just the trick.

That was then. This is now. Now is more the era of Fosters’s The Machine Stops. We’ve discovered that the machines keep not going of themselves. We’ve discovered that the marvelous private enterprise machine, for instance, keeps going up in flames and exploding, and is only reconstructed by the government machine forking out trillions of dollars to bankers and their friends. We’ve discovered the environmental machine is falling apart, quickly. We’ve discovered that consumer choice among the pharmaceuticals hasn’t rid us of our despair, but has dispatched a good many of us via the O.D. And all of this is happening in synch.

In other words, politics on the grand scale is back. It is getting more likely every year that the next time one of the machines explodes in flames, there will be such resistance to putting it back together again that all the machines will have to be … reconstructed.

Lord Rochester

“Such sweet, dear, tempting devils women are”

- of which your hands were by phantoms fathom’s full

Who cursed cunts for coyness but couldn’t dull

your blade to live in any way but as the harmful ham

without ‘em. What is it in your natural history

that makes misogyny the answer to the mystery?

As though drownded dead in some punk’s bawdry curse

You ended, as they all do, dangling and disgorged

Your proud sword all (ha ha,) unforged.

“Bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?”

Peerless peers, your society is hella boring

Going to the devil, fucking and snoring.

Lord Rochester, highchurch atheist, didn’t you see

That Bunyan had you in his slough of despond

And God was all the cunt where you were lost and found.

- Karen Chamisso

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Dis-identification politics

 

To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders, etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison that emphasizes why I am not like liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Trump or Sanders or whoever. At least I am not like X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the fundamental situation of the self versus the enemy is in combat, and there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and there’s a different fundamental situation that models it:  being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by woke types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, dittoheads. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is the great insight of the classical English comic writers. In French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – since the French have a genius for enmity.  In English and to a certain extent the anglophone culture,   those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens had a gift for showing the dis-identifying gesture, and his most famous autobiographical image, of David Copperfield in the blacking factory, combines the sense of being surrounded, the sense of being in the wrong crowd, and the crisis of identification with the intensity of some Anglo myth of origins.

 

Canetti, in Crowds and Power, investigates the powerful theme of the sudden, unwanted contact – in relation to the morphology of the crowd. Dis-indentification is related to the most primal form of politics, that which comes out of a stick or a club.

 

A branch which broke off in the hand was the origin of the stick. Enemies could be feded off with a stick and space made for the primitive creature who perhaps no more than resembled man. Seen from a tree, the stick was the weapon which lay nearest to hand. Man put his trust in it and has never abandoned it. It was a cudgel; sharpened it became a spear; bend and the ends tied together, a bow; skillfully cut, it made arrows. But through all these transformations it remained what it had been originally: an instrument to create distance, something which kept away from the touch and the grasp that they feared. In the same way that the upright human stance still retains a measure of grandeur, so, through all its transformations the stick has never wholly lost its magical quality; as scepter and sorcerer’s wand it has remained the attribute of two important forms of power.