A drinking song by Karen Chamisso

 A drinking song

In the thirst we inherit from Eden’s milk and water

there’s another thirst under

while the one holds us to the dry steady

the other surveilles each eddy

to lead us, counter-agently

through the counter-stream to a headache laden shore

this thirst, ticked out in a frogman’s sinister togs

dries out eye, brain and liver like so many bogs.

- Karen Chamisso

The woodlanders of Dekalb Country, Georgia, circa 1970

 

In one of Thomas Hardy’s early and rather rough hewn novel, The Woodlanders, the central intrigue is driven by the fact that John South’s life lease upon his cottage ends when his life ends. South, at fifty-five, has made his career of chopping up wood – and now a fear has entered his mind that he is about to die, in a moment of karma, with the tree in front of his cottage being the executioner sent to bring him down:
 
“The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood, which stood at a distance of two-thirds its own height from the front of South’s dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked, naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and sound of its sighs had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in the woodman’s mind that it would descend and kill him. Thus he would sit all day, in spite of persuasion, watching its every sway, and listening to the melancholy Gregorian melodies which the air wrung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away the health of John South.”
 
Although I am awfully fond of Hardy’s novels, The Woodlanders is a sort of sketchbook in which we find the later Hardy’s strong sense of fate tied to a melodramatic form imperfectly translated from George Sand’s country novels – in another instance of Sand’s international influence, which, it could be argued, rivaled Walter Scott’s in the European literature of the time.

I am reminded of John South’s obsession with treefall on this visit to the Atlanta suburbs where I grew up. Atlanta, as any visitor by plane could testify, is arbor-ific. Trees everywhere, fall leaves everwhere, pines and oaks and poplars mixed and every variant of fruit tree brought in by two generations of real estate developers.  I was, at one point in my youth, part of a landscape crew in Atlanta. I planted trees and got rid of kudzu and manned with my teen manhood a blower.  My Dad, on his suburban smallholding in Clarkston Georgia, was an ardent planter of trees, all imports. My friend Mark Criminger, whose news I long ago lost contact with, lived on a corner property marked by a huge oak tree that still lives in my treeclimbing dreams. The woods were not yet cleared in the acres behind the Gentry family house when I was a kid, and we’d make forays there, look for gold, tell each other stories of children who stepped on ground bee nests and were stung to death – the best stories, always, being children killed in macabre circumstances.

Now I’m on the verge of being an old man – sixty-sixy – and I think with a sort of communal jolt that the trees I see on my visits, the trees I recognize, are, many of them, my age or younger. Pines that tower over houses that were only built in the seventies were saplings or less when I was ten. Amazing! There’s a tie of sap that is as strong as the tie of blood within me. A shared time, and a sense of immense but slow woody effort both in the pine and my own boned and muscled bipedal-dom. Their injuries, their broken  branches and evidences of lightning strike, are paralleled by the neural fall from my aging neural network, which every day invents new ventures in forgetfulness.

“As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with abject obedience. “Ah, when it was quite a small tree,” he said, “and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn’t. And at last it got too big, and now ’tis my enemy, and will be the death o’ me.”

South is one of the fool figures Hardy borrowed from Shakespeare: his madness is omen-laden. My trees, though, even if they prefigure my death, are not enemies – they are family.

The air loom gang and our present emergency

 

 

 Mike Jay is an interesting writer. He gets ahold of fascinating topics, but sometimes this means he gets ahold of a drawerful of research notes and throws them in the public’s face, like in his last book on Mescaline. Excellent topic, excellent intro, and then a march through historical particulars as arid as spray on deodorant.

My favorite of his books is a more Shandian venture, illustrated beautifully, about a lunatic assassin, one James Tilley Matthews. Jay goes into the nitty gritty of this story from the 18^th century – 1796, to be precise, with a story that goes on into the early 19^th century – with a much more able touch. The book is entitled The Air Loom Gang, for it is this gang that had entranced and imprisoned the mind and body of James Tilley Matthews, with an intricate demonology worthy of one of  Blake’s longer poems. Matthews went mad, it seems, in the Paris of the Terror, where he was confined to his apartment and suspected of being an English spy. What he was really doing in Paris, and whether he was, indeed, a secret envoy from the British government, is one of those questions that were solved in one of those Sherlock Holmes cases that Watson was always going to publish, but never got around to.

 Matthews’ lunatick ideas was that of an airloom machine, by which a 'magnetic gang', working in the bowels of London, was able to exert control over the thoughts of the powerful. Matthews lunacy was, in its way, epic, peopled by such as the Glove Woman and Billy the King, all endowed with what we would now, after a century of comic books, call “superpowers”.

Matthews was arrested in the House of Commons for making a scene. He’d screamed “treason” at the Prime Minister and seemed to be in a state of agitation – he was of unsound mind. He was condemned to be treated in Bedlam. There he was treated by John Haslam, published a full account of Matthews case, including illustrations of the Air Loom gang, thus enshrining Matthews in the Pantheon of the Schizophrenic, then Psychotic, the Paranoid – up there with Schreber and the Wolf Boy.

Jay contends that Matthews stories about being a spy were true. But he is not enshrined in the Pantheon of spies. What he came up with was a vision of a machine that emanated rays, waves of air – as well as odors – that controlled his mind, and that of others.  well, was possibly a spy.  Haslam ‘s account is the first detailed one we have of a motif that crops up over and over again.  Mind control machines – ‘Beeinflussungsapparates’, as Victor Tausk called them – appear as a standard delusion among the paranoid schizophrenic.

Tausk found this out in WWI, when he worked in clinics in Slovakia. In his most famous paper, “On the origin of the influencing machine in Schizophrenia”, in 1919, he discusses the pattern and its meaning. He introduces a very famous case to the literature in this passage:

“In machine dreams, the sleeper awakens, more often than not, with her hand on her genitalia, after having dreamed of manipulating the machine. It may, therefore, be assumed that the influencing apparatus is a representation of the patient’s genitalia projected to the outer world, analogous in origin to dreams….

… The patient is Miss Natalija A., thirty-one years old, formerly a student of philosophy. She has been completely deaf for a number of years, due to an ulcer of the ear, and can make herself understood only by means of writing. She declares that for six and a half years she has been under the influence of a machine made in Berlin, though this machine’s use is prohibited by the police. It has the form of a human body, indeed, the patient’s own form, though not in all details… The trunk (torso) has the shape of a lid, resembling the lid of a coffin, and is lined with silk or velvet.”

Matthew’s fits came almost ten years after Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, but I think we can already discern something like Matthews notion of an underground Airloom in that wonderful work. The Rights of Man begins with a full court assault on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The first issue that Paine takes up is Burke’s insistence that, in England, the right to revolution had been signed away in 1688:

“…That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

The method which Mr. Burke takes to prove that the people of England have no such rights, and that such rights do not now exist in the nation, either in whole or in part, or anywhere at all, is of the same marvellous and monstrous kind with what he has already said; for his arguments are that the persons, or the generation of persons, in whom they did exist, are dead, and with them the right is dead also. To prove this, he quotes a declaration made by Parliament about a hundred years ago, to William and Mary, in these words: "The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people aforesaid" (meaning the people of England then living) "most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for EVER." He quotes a clause of another Act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which he says, "bind us" (meaning the people of their day), "our heirs and our posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time."

Mr. Burke conceives his point sufficiently established by producing those clauses, which he enforces by saying that they exclude the right of the nation for ever. And not yet content with making such declarations, repeated over and over again, he farther says, "that if the people of England possessed such a right before the Revolution" (which he acknowledges to have been the case, not only in England, but throughout Europe, at an early period), "yet that the English Nation did, at the time of the Revolution, most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, for ever."”

This is a mind control machine indeed. And I believe, from a psychoanalytic perspective, that it is very much present in conservative thought. That a document – square pieces of paper in a book – could bind future generations for ever is, of course, a commonplace not only in the discourse of evangelical literalism, but in its twin, judicial strict construction. Here is an object that takes over the mind and the subject. Here is an objectification of all our sexual anxieties, and the solution to same.

In a peculiar way, Paine sees in Burke’s logic something like Natalia A.’s coffin double: this is a coffin double of England, constructed by the dead to control the living.  To us, this notion of the claims of the living and the need to ward off the dead casts an ethical shadow insofar as, from the aspect of the imagination, the living, now, are potentially the dead of the next generation. Thus, out of Paine’s idea, we can see an ethics that addresses the question of our limits, as the living – notably, our limits on using up the resources of this planet, or damaging it in some way. That this ethical issue should, on the shadow side, be a struggle against paranoid schizophrenia is … well, something we are seeing enacted before our eyes as the body of women are nailed shut by a supreme court in thrall to the most paranoid reach of Burkean conservatism.

Negative twenty questions modernism

Negative twenty questions modernism

There’s a party game called twenty questions. One person goes out of the room, and the people in the room then discuss among themselves and choose an object in the room. Then the person is recalled, and he asks the people in the room up to twenty questions – classically, of the kind : is it bigger than a breadbox – in order to guess the object. John Wheeler, the physicist, spun off another game that he claimed was closer to the quantum world, or what at least it meant to investigate the quantum world. The structure of sending a person outside of the room remains constant. What this person doesn’t know, however, is that in this version of the game, all the people in the room pick their objects and don’t speak to each other. When the questioner is called in and asks the questions – for instance, is it bigger than a breadbox – the person who answers changes the object, in as much as his reply makes the other people in the room silently repick their object. So say x has chosen a matchbox and y has chosen a sofa, if the questioner asks x if it is bigger than a breadbox (to which x says no), then y has to quickly chose some other object (which may be the matchbox or may be a match, etc) in order to remain consistent with the line of questioning.

There is something rather eerie about Wheeler’s game of negative twenty questions. It produces a community that is founded not on addresses and maps, but on being lost – on a continual re-matching of addresses and maps, a battlefield in which inconsistency is the rule and consistency is continually catching up. The game brings into focus a certain modernist other – a modernist fantastic, stretching from Balzac’s Le peau de chagrin to Freud’s Der Unheimlich. This is the modernism in which the rules of reason overcome and mug reason, which becomes, simply, a way of having rules. And that way of having rules obeys a rule that makes the outcome of rule following radically uncertain. None of the players can predict it.

Freud, eventually, found his way out of the red light district in Rome he kept compulsively finding himself in. In Balzac’s tale, a curse and power is written on an onyx’s skin.  The Wild Ass’s Tale, written when Balzac was coming out of his apprenticeship in pulp novels, is considered the first novel in the vast Human Comedy universe. Here is the premise of the book, unrolled at the very beginning, when we follow Raphaël de Valentin, a poor student, as he walks about in a fever, waiting for night to come so he can throw himself off a bridge. In the course of his wandering, he comes upon a shop full of odds and ends, and in it he finds a mysterious talisman made of onyx hide. The talisman is inscribed with a phrase in Arabic. Balzac, that master of cod learning, reproduces it and allows Raphael the knowledge to read the “Sanskrit”, as the owner of the odd shop calls it. promises to make the wishes of the person who uses it come true. “If you possess me, you will possess all. But your life belongs to me. God wills it. Desire, and your desires will be realized. But regulate your wishes according to your life. It is there. For every wish, I will shrink, like your days. Do you want me? Take me. God grants it to you. So be it!” And so the desire for fortune, the want realized, is paid for in kind – by a counter-gift of the days of one’s life. The talisman is the very image of one way of looking at the almost magical supply of goods and services that already, in 1830, could be felt on the horizons. The culture of growth never shakes off Nemesis, who balances and casts an evil eye on the “too much”. The balance between desire and lifespan, here, is encoded in an object whose material existence is the very correspondent of the material existence of its user. This isn’t exactly addiction. It is more like the guessing in Wheeler’s game, where the object keeps changing as the guesses multiply. In Raphaël’s case, of course, there’s a romance – a mystery beauty named Foedora, whose allure is heightened, in that Balzacian way, by her wealth, which is exactly measured – somehow, everybody knows she her networth is 80,000 francs.

Foedora - what a name! A perfect name for a silent movie star. One imagines her slinking expressionistically into some crooked room in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Wheeler’s game was supposed to get to some scientific truth about quantum theory – a way of making us understand the role of measurement. The hole in the game is, of course, that it is unclear what it would mean to win it, and how winning could be agreed upon by a community that is so radically atomized that its objects are private.

An image for political philosophers, surely -  but one only a novelist could love.  

Nega

The (gasp!) twitter horror! a janitorial response to Patricia Lockwood's No one is talking about this

 

When I was eighteen, I took an early graduation route from High School, which allowed me to have the mornings by myself. The afternoon and evening was taken up with my job at another high school – I had stuck my thumb into the great bureaucratic pie of the Dekalb County School system and come up with a plum job as night janitor. I worked at a school near Chamblee – it is now, I believe, a charter school, alas. Back then, I was in a self-educating mood and thought of myself as a distant follower of Tolstoy. Physical labor and soulful preparation, that was the ticket.
My mistakes in life stem from eventually quitting that job and going on to college. But destiny is fate – and not fat. If destiny was fat, I’d have become head janitor and retired at fifty four with a belly like the boss janitor.
I learned a lot from that job – in terms of cleaning supplies, for instance – and I’d take the great books to read on the break. I read Montaigne’s Essays in the break room, much to the amusement of one of the other janitors. Although the spotlight on my weirdness was dimmed a bit, as the janitor who cleaned the downstairs – the gym, the locker rooms, etc. – spent his time on break playing a flute. He was, in my memory, a pretty aethereal guy. Which goes with flute.
Anyway, I learned something from the job that decades later came in handy – which is that underneath our writing and reading culture, there is another writing and reading culture. Long before kids were sexting each other, they were writing notes, on paper, sexting each other, and I would come across these notes every day as I swept up. As well, in the boy’s and girl’s bathroom, there was a constant message – denigration barrage of graffiti going on.
Thus, when I find so many people up there in the ranks “shocked” at Internet culture, twitter, Instagram, tik tok, what have you, I am amused. These were the kids who, evidently, never passed notes or graffittied on the walls of the toilet stall.  They absorbed the lesson of the first level of reading and writing culture – that this is where the power is. But they took that to mean: this is where all the reading and writing is. Sure, there’s the pulp crap out there, the wankbooks, the romances, the lunkhead sci fi, but this was all like animal sedative business. The internet, it turned out, was not the bringer of the singularity, that idiotmeme from the 90s, but the bringer of school note culture writ large.
I find this pretty undisturbing. Or, perhaps I should say, I find it great. I still have a bit of the Tolstoyan belief in the peasants and their wisdom. Or the janitors and theirs. Any janitor who paid attention could have predicted twitter.
These thoughts are brought on by reading Patricia Lockwood’s No one is talking about this. Or the interviews and reviews of that book. Every interviewer and reviewer is very careful to deplore twitter, the internet, social media, et and et and et cetera. I find that extremely funny, since in many ways it is exactly the outrage of white homeowners in the 60s discovering that the laws forbidding discrimination in housing mean that ‘THEY” get to move in.
 

In the self help section - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Unfriended ape, in my lines

You’ll find plenty of gam room

And who knows how much horse-power

Is under this beauty’s hood?

Between the driving and the clambering up

The golden bough or Highway 61

You are caught in a tailless cunning

All your ownsome.

- Karen Chamisso

Nagelian democracy: what is it like to be a voter?

I am, stripped of a few eccentricities, a standard issue Keynsian liberal in Marxist clothing - partly because there is no real Marxist movement or party to attach to, and I have long decided that politics without a movement or a party is an exercise in futility and depression. However, I think liberalism's attempt to shake the existential edge off politics is futile and ultimately damaging. The left, when it is healthy, and the right, when it is not, both know that politics is all about dread and ecstasy.

That politics might be an existentialist errand is very much part of what I take to be the salient characteristic of contemporary election-based democracies.

That politics might be an existentialist errand is very much part of what I take to be the salient characteristic of contemporary election-based democracies. If election based democracy is simply about input from those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, the Rousseauian impulse, which is non-cognitive in the technical sense that the will is non-cognitive, would seem fatally flawed. However, I don’t think election based democracy is about those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In our opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back is voting? I propose that we look for the answer to that question using Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat?

Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cognitive sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”

What it is like questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:

“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”

I find this passage inspiring as it applies to political philosophy.

The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated. Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of intentionality.

The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.

I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and are called the hysterical fits of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.

The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. We think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.

This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, in the last election, the Swift boat veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy. After all, we are voting for someone who is going to have mud thrown at them constantly. The people who believed the mud were likely not going to vote for Kerry anyway. But the people who were persuaded by that ploy were not persuaded so much by the idea that Kerry was, I don’t know, a coward or a traitor – it wasn’t the ideational content, in other words, that moved them – as much as they were moved by the response. This isn't to say the better man was elected. It is to say that politics is about electing politicians, not better men. And that the system's success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.

Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course, millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And I have enormous sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. Or about lies. Etc. Of course, the latter is a good instance of the situatedness of a political slant.

Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer living in Paris, etc., etc.

So, in my example above, I am not as indignant about lies per se, due to my being well informed, as I am indignant because I am the type of person who gets indignant about certain lies at certain times, and that is finally due to my total situation. Now, if I am right about this, it still begs the question of the social nature of that tacit knowledge. Votes are additive, whereas tacit knowledge is emergent. That's a perhaps inevitable discrepancy in social action. But I will reserve pondering that question for another time.

I will round this off with a final comment: Nagel’s essay can potentially give us a defense of democracy that differs from the Lockean notion. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary parts and their combinations. And, above all, to avoid the non-discursive. For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the decision to suspend a voter’s right to vote, or the decision to impeach the person voted for or in some other way suspend his voted upon term, has to be done with the utmost caution, since it injures the experiential core of democracy.