corny Joyce

 

Yes, yes, yes I too have bought the lemon soap at Sweeny’s.

Bloomsday is corny – it is a corniness laid at the foot of the monument, Ulysses. I can say it: this is my "favorite" novel. In a consumerist gesture we’ve learn to do automatically, we make lists of favorites: favorite songs, favorite books, favorite tv shows. But within my soul, to get all gaudy about it, there’s a complaint: the favorite position pretends that consumption is possible. I have, on occasion, an inverse desire: to become the |favorite of." For instance, to become the favorite reader of Ulysses. A trickier thing altogether.

Corniness is one of the many aesthetic zones traversed in Ulysses, which is unashamed about the way potboiler novels try to get the reader hot and bothered. Fuck books, or at least wank lit. Paul de Kock figures as largely in the novel as Shakespeare. The officially censored Dublin of 1904 could allow de Kock, under the counter, with illustrations - which is, to a reader of 2021, almost quaint. Like the fetishized covers of paperbacks from the fifties that certain blogs specialize in. Dublin's was definitely not, as Joyce knew, a place with room for a subculture of Sade, for instance, as you found in Paris from Baudelaire onward. This was the pre-pornofied world, the world of multiple brothels and decorum in the parent's bedroom. But even Leopold and Molly Bloom knew that their dirty reading was also corny.

“Corny” – the word pops up in Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick as she considers Henry James’ late style, which bears the marks of its delivered orality – its dictation – in a sort of turn to standup. Although, Ngai points out, this standup is delivered to an employee, who writes the thing down, or types it. Ngai is famous for considering aesthetic categories like cuteness, but I don’t believe she has more than brushed up against corniness.

According to the slang trackers, corny surfaced in the theater world – as so much slang does. It descended from ‘corn-fed”, another term for country bumpkin. We see, in this term, that old division between country and city: between a regime of sublimation which represses the “dirty” and elevates the sentimental, and a regime that represses the “sentimental” and elevates the ironic. Of course, the country/city division – which was once a demographic description – got muddied as the peasants came to the ville. And their descendants moved to the suburbs. In Dublin, in 1904, the emigration has not been to the Irish city, but to the English and American ones – as a sociological fact. But the players, here, are, if not natives to Dublin, anchored at least in city belief. Leopold and Molly Bloom are well aware of the theatrical contact zone – Molly, as it is often noted, displays her charms – her physique – and her voice in many a small Irish burg. And of course Bloom is a rootless cosmopolitan, to use the standard anti-Jewish platitude. Joyce brilliantly converges the Greek myth and modernity, given the way in which Odyssey deals with the outer areas. Thus, the cattle, the hoof and mouth, and ... corn.

Corn is not associated with Corny Kelleher – Corny as a nickname was common at that time, by the way – but with Shakespeare, who Stephen says is a “cornjobber” who horded corn in famine times. Corn, here, is not maize – but simply the majority grain, wheat or oats. However, even if corn doesn’t figure majorly in the book, corniness pervades the fantasies, the sentiment, the songs. Even Stephen Dedalus, trying desperately to break the grip of provincial Dublin, finds himself in the corniest story – the bankrupt, drunken father, the mother dying in rags, the brothers and sisters fighting to survive, and he himself unable to gain a distance that would, ideally, make these things images or epiphanies or anything but the tawdry and impossible call on his existence of flesh and his blood, indeed. Every family story is a vampire family story.

I love it that Joyce understood and used the corny in Ulysses, as well as every other device he could think of. Compound of sentiment and sentimentality, of country and city, suburban and sophisticate, the great and the little tradition – such is myself as candidate for favorite reader. But even if I am not, I will never get far from Ulysses, no matter where I run to. I make a point of reading it every five years or so, and each time I fall in love with it again.

remote control

 

The channel changer was put on the market by Zenith in 1950 under the label “Lazybones” – an oddly moralizing kind of brand name. In the fifties, as home technology reshaped the house, the house became a refuge of laziness against the ideal of the grime and stress of the working life. That the cleaning of the home was itself labor was lost, as it has always been lost, under this advertising driven thematic. The union ticket worker never had it so good. The eight hour day was solid. The pay a little per month credit structure was solid. You could lounge in your lounger, you didn’t have to take the steps to the tv to change the channel. Such was the idea.

Remote control was in its infancy. It really found its legs when it changed from a sonic device to one using infrared technology, which was marketed in the eighties at the same time that cable tv started to make inroads on network tv.

Myself, I owned my last television set under the ancien regime in 1980. After that, I lost interest in TV. I skipped the 80s and the 90s. It wasn’t until around 2004 that I had another tv, by which time the entire infrastructure of tv had changed. And now I see tv shows on my computer, and we don’t have a tv proper.  

I have not been interested in network tv, or tv news of any sort, since 1980. But I loved the channel changer. When I stayed with my brothers, in Atlanta, I drove them crazy when I managed to get my hands on the channel changer, because the drift from one channel to another would fill me with a strange auteurist joy. There’s a funny story by James Thurber about an avant garde poet who found inspiration in breaking light bulbs, which made him a trying party guest. Similarly, I was a trying remote controller, which introduced the mashup, the American form of montage, to the public at large. I connect this time – the time when Reagan was in the house and MTV was spreading its brand of whiteness to the suburbs – with the high tide of French theory, where the mashup principle achieved philosophical dignity. From the white mythology to the rhizome, it was in tune with the second Cold War vibe. Theory has dispersed and gone off in different channels since then, as the mashup is now being done by Neo-lib nudgers, nudging us towards Weather death. Meanwhile, remote control is now everywhere in the parking lot, it has crawled into the HVAC and the computer and is a lot less fun for me. When we go to a hotel or rent a house through Airbnb and discover a television, the channel changing is less a flow of cuts that makes a crazy zigzag through the nights narrative and more a long slog as the channels never stop, and never get more interesting. Remote editing, for some reason, has never been on the boards for the masses, but surely that is a function that we would all like, and not just this here peapod descendent of the situationists.

children of the homunculus

 

 John Maynard Keynes famously remarked that Newton was the last of the magicians. He was referring to Newton’s fascination with alchemy and the book of Revelations. Keynes was, of course, wrong – there were certainly magicians after Newton. But he was right in the most important respect, which was that the Whiggish history of science, in which Newton figured as a hero of positivism, was founded on a fiction. And it was not an unimportant glossing over of minor Newtonian penchants – according to Dobbs in The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought, one of the great books in the science wars, Newton took his notion of force from the alchemists. In fact, although the positivists still seem not to recognize this, the father of positivistic physics, quite purged of alchemical crap, is Descartes. The only problem with Descartes notion of vortices is that they are, mathematically, crap, as Newton proved. In place of the vortices – which at least adhere to the old materialist image of one thing causing another by means of contact – we have the mathematically proven magic of attraction at a distance.

When Goethe started reading the alchemists in the 1770s, preparting to write Faust, alchemy was good and dead – but only in the sense that psychoanalysis is good and dead. While alchemy seemed, especially to the 19th century positivists, to have been overthrown as a rational task by scientist, in reality its concepts became part of the background of natural philosophy, aka science.

Which brings us to the homunculus. Goethe’s critics claim that Goethe first read about the artificial manniken in a dialogue written by a Dr. Johannes Praetorius, a prolific seventeenth century popularizer of wonders, against Paracelsus. Gerhild Williams, in his book on Praetorius, summarizes it as a very curious dialogue, in that Paracelsus never claimed to have made a homunculus. Like Praetorius, Paracelsus believed in the elemental spirits literally. Praetorius, however, claims he instructed his disciples in how to create chymische Menschen – literally, “chemical people”. You needed wine, yeast, sperm, blood and horse dung to do the deed. ‘When he is done, you have to watch him very diligently. Though no one will have taught him, he will be among the wisest of men; he will know all the occult arts because he has been created with the greatest of skill.”

In one way, we are the children of the homunculus. We are certainly chemical people. Our environments consist of synthetics absolutely unknown in this solar system before we began to produce them – and now, of course, they wrap about us, a giant oil-n-corn slick, and we rarely touch dirt, or unprocessed wood. If by some magic I waved a wand and wished away all the synthesized chemical products in my nearest neighborhood, the stools on the sidewalks outside of the cafes would collapse, the cars would vanish, the plants would wither (fertilizers gone), the food in the grocery store, what was left of it, would immediately start to grow rapidly stale.

None of which were things foreseen by Goethe, Newton’s fiercest enemy, in 1769.

poison and writing

“- When do you write?

- Not all the time.

- So you aren’t a writer?

-I am a writer just as a venomous beast stings at some time or another, when it is provoked, when it is stepped on, when it is attracted. The venom can be an erotic juice.”

This note, in Hervé Guibert’s  journal, The mausoleum of lovers, seems to me an antidote to the Stendhalian model of the mirror. As is usual with Guibert, it puts a premium on the body as an endless source of secretion and excretion – among which we can count writing, writing in the animal life.

Socrates compares himself with a gadfly or horsefly in the Apology: his sting is to arouse the listener from his torpor. And yet, in the Meno, the sting does other work: there, Meno compares Socrates to the narke, a fish with the power to diffuse the water around it with a charge, so that in its neighborhood, or even touching it, a person is shocked and numbed.

“And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me.”

I imagine that Socrates was too Athenian to play with the idea of being stepped on – that is a bit slavish. Yet it is surprising how Guibert’s notion of the writer as the poisonous animal lines up with the Socratic notion of the philosopher as horsefly. To compare oneself to a horsefly is an odd thing – it seems an especially degrading image, not an image to preen over. At the same time, Hera, who was divine, sent a humble gadfly to torment Io, that much beset cow, the former lover of Zeus.

To compare oneself to a venomous beast, or one with a stinger, is definitely part of the field of analogies for a kind of art, if philosophy comes under that compass. Socrates, in reply to Meno, says that he is as torpified as anybody he supposedly torpifies – but in the Apology he tells the truth – perhaps – and comes out from behind the curtain with his stinger. One that does not torpify, but hurts like hell. It wakes you out of the torpid condition.

Guibert had a relationship with Foucault – the unknown philosopher. It isn't unlikely that they may have discussed Socrates Apology, as this was during the last stage of Foucault's career, when he returned to Classical Greek society for material about self care and the ethos of sexuality. Foucault's death, it could be said,  had something to do with suc amoureux, at least in Guibert’s view.  The horsefly, as the Greeks knew, was found around the horse’s eyes – and rear end.

In Greek Love Magic, Christopher Faraone writes that oistros “ranges in meaning from the  gadfly that infests bovines or “goad” to “madness or frenzy, often of desire” and eventually the “mating madness” of female mammals in heat...” Socrates actually uses muops – horsefly - to describe himself, but Plato’s texts include oistros according to Nass and Bell in Plato’s Animals, and the terms were basically interchangeable.

(Although there is discussion among scholars on this topic. Did Socrates in the Apology mean to say he stung, or that he “stirred” the horse of state? And how would a horsefly stir a horse, save by stinging it?)

There’s a story at the very beginning of Guibert’sMausoleum. It concerns M.F. – an easy to see through initials. Here poison and desire, the experience-limit, come together in an anecdote:

“Saturday night around 9 p.m. the doorbell rang at M.F.’s, he was alone. He thought it was me, or T., a ‘familiar’. Two boys entered, their faces hidden, pushing him inside they slapped him, knocking off his glasses, with a blow they opened his nose, he fell to the ground, they pummeled him with kicks, he lost consciousness. They didn’t ransack the apartment, they didn’t pull out the telephone cord. When they left, he got up, blood pissing abundantly from his nostrils. Several days earlier someone had told him the story of a man who had died within eight days of a cerebral hemorrhage provoked by an emotion, a disagreement with his wife. Seeing the blood run abundantly like this from his nostrils, he thinks: “I, too, am having a brain hemorrhage, I’m going to die in the night.” He doesn’t think to call someone, not the police, not a friend, no one. He cleans up, puts everything away: he wipes the blood stains from the floor, he puts the books back into piles, he changes his shirt, and he goes to bed. He didn’t leave a note, nothing. In the morning, he wakes up with black crusts on his nose and skull, a bump on his cheek, astonished to be alive.”

 

Philosophy departments everywhere: sociopathology isn't destiny

 There is an article in the Philosophers Mag that made me laugh outloud. It is a survey essay by Helen Beebee entitled Women in Philosophy: What’s changed? Beebee lists the things that have pushed back the men’s club atmosphere in Philosophy departments, including less tolerance for sexual harrassment and greater opportunities for women to publish. This is the paragraph, though, that I particularly liked:

“One final change I do want to highlight, though, is the atmosphere in philosophy research seminars. Some things that used to happen relatively frequently: questions asked in an incredibly aggressive manner. (I’ve seen people in a state of near apoplexy, so insulted were they by the speaker’s outrageous suggestion that metaphysical realism is false, or that maybe knowledge is justified true belief after all. I mean, what is wrong with the speaker? Is he or she an idiot?) Someone hogging an enormous slab of the Q&A time by asking repeated follow-up questions. (Because their question must just be so much more important than the questions the other members of the audience want to ask.) Or failing to shut up despite the fact that the seminar was supposed to end ten minutes ago and the chair is very clearly starting to look desperate.”

The instances gave me an instant (non)nostalgia for my own days as a grad student in the University of Texas Philosophy Department. Both the intelligence policing – the idea that you had to be smart, which I at first thought was a joke and then realized was taken very seriously – and the outsized, testosterone swollen passion attaching to abstract positions, usually backed up by this or that hoary “analytic” philosopher – were a huge burden to someone like me, who just wanted to talk about Nietzsche, Derrida and Georges Bataille. This desire, not an unusual thing in 80s humanities, marked me down as a nihilist or something. And so I had that experience of presenting arguments that insulted all of humanity, plus the shade of Bertrand Russell, bless his hairy hide. After a while, it was just not funny any more. I remember taking a class with one of the names on the faculty rouster in which discussions that involved me often ended up in “throught experiments”about what I would say if someone was pointing a gun at my head. From my own brief experience of being mugged, I thought that it would be a very rare thing indeed if the mugger was after my response to questions concerning the correspondence theory of truth. A pistol, in my opinion, is a powerful coherence-maker.

If decades on philosophy departments are starting to understand the sociopathic nature of intelligence policing, and doing something about it, it will be almost entirely because of women in philosophy departments, and the entrance of feminism (in another two or three decades, who knows? Even people of color!) have disrupted the thing, the our thing, the male philosopher’s cosa nostra.

Excellent news for the people in that small, small world.

Little France syndrome

 The Little France syndrome

Well, at last the NYT emerges from its Macron daze to notice the sheer cretinism of the Macron cultural politics, driven by its far right allies, all swimming happily in their own shit and screaming about Islamo-gauchisme.

Meanwhile, the old retired fossils in academe, who made their bones in the 80s and 90s – those decades Francois Cusset labels the great nightmare, due to the proliferation of Nouvelle Philosophes and their wannabe companions, all using leftwing rhetoric to promote right wing economic and foreign policy – are also on the attack against the “Americanization” of the cultural agenda. This movement is in synch with Trump’s 1776 commission and Boris Johnson’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities which last month reported that, hooray, Britain has none, and never did anyway, except during a brief window in May of 1679 when somebody financed somebody else’s slaveboat which we think musta been Dutch – a total anomaly!

All of these can be called “Little” positions – Little America, Little Britain, and now Little France. The attacks on American “wokeness” are congealed in a rhetoric that is difficult to cope with. It seems so ridiculous that French academics, any of them, in this day and age would claim that France represents “universal values”, but of course – in spite of the past five hundred years of history, in spite of the evident and outrageous income and wealth inequalities between people of color and white French people, in spite of what you see the cops doing every day – there we are. It is a country in which, on the one hand, feminist groups graffiti walls with condemnations of femicide, and in which, on the other hand, tve-genic academics who have built careers on subpar academic work bemoan intersectionality – we have come to this, debates with the midgets all descending from Action Francaise.

The laughter that wells up in me is the contrast between this small French attitude – in favor the “universal” – and the subrosa massive support for the Americanization of the French economy – a process that has been going on since the “lefties” of the 80s quietly abandoned the defining left tradition while clinging fiercely to the title. It was so eighties – the leveraged buyout era. The entire vocabular of the regime of the president of the rich consists of banalities from American business schools, from “entrepreneurship” – restored to the French vocabulary! – to competitiveness, to the “burden” of the state on the dynamic private sector. It is a made in America circus. But nobody is talking about the droite-onclesamists. Nor, frankly, is anyone in the Little France corner really attacking Islamicists. The largest and most totalitarian Islamicist state – Saudi Arabia – is France’s friend, and more importantly, France’s weapons industry’s friend. So nobody is going so far as to say that we should boycott the Saudis, or block their gas pipelines, like with evil Putin. This is because Saudi Arabia is reformin’, plus they’ve been waging un mignon génocide in Yemen, and nobody wants to interrupt the cash flow there. Rather, the focus is on how Daech’s leadership is no doubt absorbing Judy Butler’s tomes, one after the other.

Georges Bernanos in Les Grands Cimetieres sous le lune wrote: La colère des imbéciles m'a toujours rempli de tristesse, mais aujourd'hui elle m'épouvanterait plutôt. You and me, Georges my brother.

Barthes freudian slip

 

“The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus.29 They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.” – Plutarch, the Life of Theseus

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. – Otto Neurath

There’s a curious error in Barthes by Barthes – something that is like a parapraxis, a Freudian slip. Like the classic instance of the Freudian slip outlined in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life,  this one, too, has to do with a classical allusion.

It is contained in the entry entitled, The Argo.

“ A frequent image: that of the ship, the Argo (bright and white), which the Argonauts replaced piece by piece, little by little, so that in the end they had an entirely new vessel, without having to change either its name or its form.”

This image seems to be a conflation of two classical instances of the ship image in philosophy. One is the vessel of Theseus, which is first mentioned by Plutarch in the Life of Theseus. In the early modern period, Plutarch’s instance was taken up by Hobbes and Leibniz, each of who commented on the paradox of identity that the ship names. The second is Neurath’s ship. As Thomas Uebel has shown, Neurath often turned to the image of the rebuilt but continuous ship in his writing. He especially used the image against the Carnapian ideal of a meta-language – a dream language in which syntax and semanticity would merge, so that we would know from the very construction of a sentence whether it was true or not.  This, Neurath thought, fundamentally misunderstands language. Hence, the image of a ship which is constantly being repaired from flotsam at sea by sailors who cannot simply go into port and take the ship apart from the bottom.  In Hans Blumenberg’s exploration of ship metaphors in philosophy, he quotes an instance where Neurath claims that the imprecise clusters are “always somehow part of the ship.”

Out of these two separate images, Barthes chose to attach the perpetually reconstructed ship to the Argo, which carried Jason and his crew – the Argonauts – to Colchis. In constrast with Theseus’s ship, which – being on display – is, as it were, a museum piece, the Argo is an object of practical life. But there is another difference with Theseus’s ship, one that should block Barthes’ appropriation. As Apollonius of Rhodes put it in the Argonautica: ‘For a divine timber had been fixed in her: Athene had taken it from the oak of Dodona and fitted it in the center of the prow.”

The wood of Dodona had the power of human speech – a power that was given to the Argo. So, in fact, the Argo is the one instance of a ship in which there is something irreplaceable.  Which goes against Barthes point: ‘This vessel, the Argo, is very useful. It furnishes us with the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest acts (which cannot be grasped by the mystique of creation): substitution (one piece drives out the other, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is not at all tied to the stability of the pieces) by means of combining in the interior of the same name, nothing is left of the origin. The Argo is an object without any other cause than its name, without any other identity than its form.”

As in any parapraxis, we are given an utterance that is like a wound, allowing us, if we have the tools, to trace the trauma. The trauma here is seems to be in the form of a forgetting – forgetting the magical/religious instance. That forgetting marks the enlightenment heritage of structuralism – in fact, Barthes mistake might be taken as emblematic of the fact that structuralism was the purest outcome of the enlightenment, its endpoint. Structuralism assumes, finally, that the world is saturated with substitutes, is a system of substitutes – in a sense, the world is capitalism. And in this world, action at a distance, magic, origin, Athene are chased away by a universal forgetting . Under the guidance of the name – in the name of – the system of substitutions can act on its own, automatically, without a genius.

In Barthes telling, these two acts just happen to coincide in this one image. They are, however, historically bound together. In practical terms, the crew of the Argo is simply trying to survive and stay afloat, which is why all oak planks – whether from Dodona or from sea wrack – are replaceable. From the point of view of nomination, however, whether the Argo is registered as the Argo or not is of ultimate political importance. If the name doesn’t hold, then the Argo becomes a pirate ship, an illicit ship. And at this point the schema of substitutions feeds into a different destination for the ship.

The forgetting of the story of the Argo – the supervenience of two other stories of ships and identity – is all the more freighted as Barthes himself is in the midst of changing, as he wrote Barthes by Barthes, from the disenchanted mapper of myths to the softer and more vulnerable utopian of desire. He was, in a sense, letting one piece of Barthes drive out another.  Right after presenting the image of the Argo, he personalizes it by contrasting his office in Paris with his office in the country, which, though differently located, is identical in function.  He ends this passage by writing of the Argo as the ideal structural object, in which the “system prevails over particular beings.” But using an image which is structured to deny that the system prevails over Athena – using an image of the one boat that can talk – Barthes seems to be undermining his point – just as he is trying to shed his structuralist past.