observations on observations of a non-political man

 

Thomas Mann, in his crazed Observations of a non-political man – one of the most percipient conservative texts of the 20^th century – coined a beautiful phrase to describe a vocational community: solidarity of conscience. Alas, an economic theory based on self-interest has little time for what any observer of ordinary life picks up: a sense of the integrity of work. That integrity, for Mann, was about writing as an art. But you see the same spirit of integrity among carpenters, lawyers, janitors, engineers, etc. The motivations, here, are trans-individual – hence the solidarity. There are audiences and peers with whom one feels – the agent, the writer, the janitor – feels some sympathetic correspondence. Even if the peer is an enemy – or especially if the peer is an enemy. This is where everything becomes tricky. In the passage where Mann introduces the notion of solidarity of conscience, he knows that he has been flailing – that he has been attributing the cruelest motives to his enemy, the liberal German, the advocates of democracy (and in particular his older brother, Heinrich) – and he knows that the flailing had to come out in order that it could call up a countering, although not logically countering, irony. The solidarity of conscience allows him to swerve towards the personal, towards the whole affective presence of the writer. Since the writer is writing as a “non-political man”, the swerve here, or the irony, is that the very presentation, beginning with the high minded commentary on Dostoevsky, has been on the level of demagogy – undermining, fatally, the idea of the non-political. That is fatal, a death blow that is more than just logical, to Mann’s conservative purpose, which is to preserve the non-political as the central cultural fact of the bourgeois “Germany” he wants to defend. In a further irony, after bitching his fill about “civilization” – France – and its imperialism, the non-political is destined to become a European cultural fact in Mann’s polemic.
He knows this. He feels, as wounds on his own skin, the contradictions of his position. There is something debilitating about these wounds – I am irresistibly reminded on the wounds on the body of Gregor Samsa after his transformation into a Ungezeifer – a vermin.

Mann’s dalliance with decadence, or with his homoerotic feelings, is also felt by Mann, in his texts, as a weakness, a draining away, an open wound. It is important to remember that the Observations preceded and overlapped with the work on The Magic Mountain, and that Mann resolved the problem of demagogy by endorsing, in the end, the Republic and its democratic foundations.
 

Patience and time

 I am continually finding out things about all humanity when I talk to Adam. Of course, all humanity laughs at me and keeps most of its secrets; I have to tip my hat to all humanity for that. But Adam, being nine, and myself, being sixty-four, make a dialogic partnership that is, although as absurd as any other parental relationship, full of meat for the moralist.

For instance, take the issue of patience.

For Adam, patience is simply the waiting room of boredom. Or rather, not the waiting room, but the very office, the execution of the painful business that is always done in offices, and the desire to be anywhere else that comes from being a patient. The patient as sufferer and patience as suffering, for him, are self-evidently linked. For myself, on the other hand, patience is a discipline that one must have to be, well, ethically and existentially right. Patience lies in that grey zone between affect and habit, between cognition and bodily resignation, and it is difficult to put one’s finger on what it is, exactly, that makes it so necessary to wisdom. Is wisdom simply for tired old men? Is it another name for nihilism, of the kindest and gentlest and most ravaging kind? Or is it the fine fruit of a cultivated attentiveness not only to oneself, but to others?

Impatience is, of course, the temporal mode of public life. Sheldon Wolin in a famous essay about the post-Cold War period, What Time Is it?, thought that democracy itself was dying under the onslaught of constant sensation – sensation administered by the socio-economic system of late capitalism:

“Starkly put, political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms, and pace governing economy and culture. Political time, especially in societies with pretensions to democracy, requires an element of leisure, not in the sense of a leisure class (which is the form in which the ancient writers conceived it), but in the sense, say, of a leisurely pace. This is owing to the needs of political action to be preceded by deliberation and deliberation, as its “deliberate” part suggests, takes time because, typically, it occurs in a setting of competing or conflicting but legitimate considerations. Political time is conditioned by the presence of differences and the attempt to negotiate them. The results of negotiations, whether successful or not, preserve time: consider the times preserved in the various failed attempts to deal with the secession crises prior to the Civil War. Thus time is “taken” in deliberation yet “saved.” That political time has a preservative function. is not surprising. Since time immemorial political authorities have been charged with preserving bodies, goods, souls, practices, and circumscribed ways of life.”

This is a curious defence of “leisure”, since its chief example is about the secession crises prior to the Civil War, where leisure was extracted from the labor of that most unleisured class, the slaves. Wolin has been criticized by Mario Feit for not recognizing the demotic and democratic virtue of impatience – Feit taking his template from the fundamental appeal to impatience in the great Civil Rights tradition in the U.S. And indeed, the whole dull tenor of deliberation does make patience seem like a committee meeting.

Patience is not, however, simply deliberation. I like to think patience has a certain generosity to it – it is not just the strategic crouching of one player waiting for another player to fuck up, but a larger sense of strategy and all performance as something to be enjoyed. In patience, the spectator and the actor are joined. Patience, as a cultivated virtue, is indissolubly linked to one’s ability to pop the bubble of one’s egotism. All persons are mortal – that exemplary premise at the beginning of the logic book is the ego-popper which releases us from the trap of strategic patience to the wilds – the bit of wilderness, of lost time, that is a human necessity.

On writing and obsession

 

As a writer, I have as little talent for staying on topic as a Mexican jumping bean. This rather subverts my essays in generalization. I get philosophical, I get argumentative, I get distracted, I head straight for the wrong goalposts.

However, as a writer, it must be said that there in one great thing about obsession: you don’t really have to worry too much about staying on topic – you will inevitably find your way back to the topics of your particular cancer. You will inevitably bump against the shore you are seeking, which will, unexpectedly, appear in Shakespeare, or a news story, or a burst of static on the radio. This is a good thing, until it becomes a very bad thing.

The OED claims that obsession derives from the latin for sit opposite (ob -session). It is interestingly different from possession, with the idea that some devil is within the self, taking control. Obsession is the devil sitting outside the self, but fronting the self, always there in one’s line of vision. In Freud’s vocabulary, obsession is paired with compulsion, compulsive thinking – Zwangsvorstellung. That pairs it, ultimately, with possession. Obsession, I’d contend, contains a space that possession abolishes. Which is why I think writers need not fear cultivating obsession, but should fear the devil’s leap from the other side into one’s self. Or is this some unalterable sequence in the structure of obsession? And isn’t there something about “sitting opposite” that reminds one of the caricature of the therapeutic situation?

Being obsessed with obsession today, I turned to psychoanalysis. This is from a recent paper on obsessional neuroses:

“Obsessive neurosis manifests itself through conjuration rites, obsessing symptoms, and permanent mental rumination, in which scruples and doubts interfere with action. It was the French psychiatrist Jules Falret (1824-1902) who used the term obsession to highlight the fact that the subject is affected by pathological ideas and a guilt that obsesses and persecutes him, to the point of being pejoratively compared to a living dead.” (Ronaldo Chicre Araujo, Welerson Silva Carneiro and Gabriel da Costa Duriguetto).

That doesn’t sound good. However, it does sound, to an extent, helpful: in as much as writing, here,  is a substitute act, a succedaneum for power – power being the act in full, outside the text. As if, my inner Derrida sneers. Figuratively attacking one’s enemies is a rather voodooish thing – sticking pins into figures.

I can’t imagine writing without obsession. Like any neurotic, I cling to my wrecks – don’t take them away from me! It does make me wonder if there is literature beyond obsession. My question of the day.

The spirit of the 1619 Project

 

The spirit of a historiography that kicked over the Cold War consensus about America (United States of)  was codified in the 1619 project, which is why the latter drew such fire from such members of the old guard as Sean Wilentz. Wilentz goes on at length with his problems with the post-liberal framework in his review of two new books on the American Revolution and the antebellum American state in the NYRB. The critique is deftly summed up here:

 

“Two ambitious new studies, Liberty Is Sweet by Woody Holton on the Revolution and American Republics by Alan Taylor on the decades that led to the Civil War, examine far more than the history of American slavery and racism. Both take up the array of political and social transformations that shaped the nation’s growth from an aspiring republic hugging the eastern seaboard to a boisterous, even bellicose capitalist democracy that spanned the North American continent. Yet both books advance claims in accord with interpretations of white supremacy as the driving force of American history. Holton and Taylor are serious scholars, and given the larger stakes involved, the reliability of their conclusions on these matters assumes importance in debates that go far beyond the academy.”

 

So much in this paragraph, and in Wilentz’s critique, depends upon the definitive article! Substitute ‘a’ for ‘the’ in the phrase “interpretations of white supremacy as the driving force of American history’ and you have the real stress of the 1619 project, which is about making a judgment call about the degree to which the white supremacist ideology, or assumption, was a driver of American history. The drivers should explain how a rigged up framework holding together thirteen British colonies actually functioned to expand its domain across the continent and assert itself as a nation. It should explain how the ethnic cleansing of the native nations contributed to this expansion; how slavery functioned to furnish the economic foundations of the nation; how Civil War and emancipation failed signally to dissolve white supremacy; and how these various compounding inequalities coexisted with a notion of the nation as the “leader of the Free World’ in the 20^th and 21^st century. Among other things…

 

Wilentz follows in the traces of a liberal centrist interpretation of American history that was strongly inflected by the Cold War and its Manichean anti-communism. In this version, America was uniquely freedom-striving – its Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, was uniquely moderate and led to no totalitarian monstrosity. This was the American Revolution as Hannah Arendt saw it, and was used for left-baiting purposes by a generation of French anti-communists, like  Francois Furet, both to attack the French Revolution (and by implication, the Russian one) and to legitimate the neo-liberal turn towards limiting government “intervention” in the economy.

 

I’m wholeheartedly for the spirit of the 1619 project, and look forward to its expansion to account for twentieth century American history. In particular, it is striking, to me, that here we can close the gap between  American foreign and domestic policy – a gap that has called into being a separation of intellectual labor that misses the big, syncretic picture.  For instance – to give an amateur’s pov – I’d like to see how white supremacy drove one of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive era programs: the idea of the right to “self-determination’ of a people, aka ethnic group, which Wilson successfully interjected into the negotiations at Versailles at the end of WWI.

 

Myself, I see every connection between that high “liberal” project and Wilson’s view of domestic American history, in which the essence of the United States was a white protestant elite. As we know from Wilson’s domestic policies, he was in full retreat from Theodore Roosevelt’s very moderate policy of civil rights for African Americans – in line with a Republican Party tradition -  symbolized by Roosevelt’s reception, in the White House, of  Booker T. Washington. Roosevelt himself was your standard Social Darwinist, convinced of Negro “inferiority’, but as so often with Roosevelt, his timidly radical gestures echoed much more loudly than his personal conservatism. With Wilson, the idea of African-American inferiority was infused much more emphatically in his policies – as in his purging the Civil Service rolls of black Americans. I think this background has been somewhat neglected in its effects on American foreign policy and, specifically, in its junction with a radical ethno-centric ideology in Europe that doomed such multi-ethnic entities as the Austro-Hungarian empire. The notions of self-determination and its shadow side, the notion of some superiority of the chosen ethnic group, was not Wilson’s creation – but the spread of the idea, its legitimacy as a basis for a new world order, owed a lot to Wilson. Wilsonian liberalism in the academic world – with Princeton as its capitol – still flourishes, and still lacks an overarching historical account.

 

I’m a piker in these matters, but I would love to read some such account.

a slow weirdo drives a car

  I’ve been recovering from jetlag that last few days. As well, I’ve been recovering from another, less named lag – which comes from having driven about in a car intensely for a month, and suddenly stopping.

I rather liked it, at first. We get to Georgia, we rent a car, I’m at the wheel, oh momma! But the day by day sitting in that seat and making with the acceleration and the braking and the lane changing and the lights, it began to wear on me. I felt like a much used pencil point – I leaked out my lead. Hmm, that sounds phallic, don’t it?

Anyway, I was going through some journal entries from years ago, in California, when I also drove a bit, and found this account of hobbling about in the aftermath of an operation I had on my leg. It puts together the world of the slow and the world of the speedy in terms that I can’t improve upon.

“One of my fave sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satantango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor. The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

Well, at the moment, I have fallen out of the speedy cohort. Get it now? I can barely keep up with the drunken doctor in the flick. My little monster wound, as I affectionately refer to it, keeps me limited to a stately, or if you like, arthritic pace. Of course, I’m supposed to sit around the house, or lie around, and mostly I’m obedient, but it drives me a bit nuts not to be able to go the four blocks up Wilshire to my usual coffee shop. Of course, I do go a bit – I pick up Adam from his school, a trip which, in all, is about eight blocks. And I go those blocks slowly.

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. I live in Santa Monica, which, as in all American cities, cars are the primary entities. Humans are down on the scale. I take a grim, slow person’s satisfaction, now, in crossing the street, holding back that anxious car driver who wants that three seconds – gotta have that three seconds! And is probably cursing me in his or her driver’s seat. Good. I’ve discovered that with slowness comes no spiritual insight, but a certain bitterness, a fuck you attitude. This is evidently not good from the point of view of the Mahatma and Jesus Christ. But let the Mahatma and Jesus Christ walk across the street while a black BMW inhabited by somehow who has never missed a lunch or not gotten what they wanted in their entire fucking life glowers at them. It is … trying.”

I read this now from the other side of the speed gap. Or at least from zooming down Lawrenceville Highway in the morning, with a slight impatience every time I notice a school bus in my lane up ahead. Damn, gotta slow down. Gotta take that needle from 55 to 30. As our civilization and its works goes down – and we are assured by every Netflix post apocalypse film that this is a matter of a few years – how will we remember these speeds? In fact, I’m guessing we won’t remember them – speed like this can be felt, navigated, and managed by the human being, but not really well imagined, and thus, not really well remembered. I imagine few people can remember the feeling of 60 mph when they are lying in their comfy beds – but we can well remember hobbling slowly. Our biology is not adapted to our quotidian. And aint that a bitch

American (U.S. of) impressions

 

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

 

To understand this human dimension of geography is to understand, at least on an initiatory level,  the lure of the traveler’s story. “Human dimension” – I used to be suspicious of all phrases that included “human” in them, since they struck me as engaged in the cloying project of smoothing out the vast spaces between different persons and communities. Now, I understand them more in terms of a kind of tuning, or registering, of the ghostly. The holy ghost has become the dimly lit, ever fleeting, universal subject. The human is just glamour.

 In the case of America – or to use that corporate cutout name, the United States – the traveler’s books preceded the founding and have continued on down to the present day. From John Smith to Jean Baudrillard, description of the curiously blank there, the x that marks the spot, is associated (by a logic that is more libidinal than syllogistic) with prophecy or prediction about that ‘there’ that’s not there. Its fixer-upper possibilities. Get rid of the natives (who will later be said to have “disappeared” – a true discovery, that word, which drifts from the Indian peoples to the Tumpameros and Montoneros of Uruguay and Argentina in the 1970s – drop em from airplanes, put them on reservations, starve them by killing the buffalos, that kind of thing. The there must be made ever more blank – away with the trees. Away with the African-American neighborhoods. Build highways and parking lots. Get the white settlers into the suburbs, away from the atomic bombs. Away then with the factories – we will all be richer, the cheap goods in Walmart, the LBO wealth – when we resite those manufacturers in Mexico or China or the Dominican Republic. The fixer-upper urge is our true inheritance from the original white settlers.

This is the puzzle that sticks in the craw of Henry James, whose American Scene is an excellent book to page through if, as it happens, one is a returning expatriate. Such as me, myself and I. Go, at random, to James’ chapter on Washington, D.C., and you see him, too, feeling that blankness that is barely submerged by settlement and business.

“… quite as the explosion of spring works, even to the near vision, in respect to the American scene at large — dressing it up as if for company, preparing it for social, for human intercourse, making it in fine publicly presentable, with an energy of renewal and an effect of redemption not often to be noted, I imagine, on other continents. Nowhere, truly, can summer have such work cut out for it as here — nowhere has it to take upon itself to repaint the picture so completely. In the "European" landscape, in general, some, at least, of the elements and objects remain upon the canvas ; here, on the other hand, one seems to see intending Nature, the great artist of the season, decline to touch that surface unless it be first ­swept clean — decline, at any rate, to deal with it save by ignoring all its perceived pretensions. Vernal Nature, in England, in France, in Italy, has still a use, often a charmed or amused indulgence, for the material in hand, the furniture of the foreground, the near and middle distances, the heterogeneous human features of the face of the land. She looks at her subject much as the portrait-painter looks at the personal properties, this or that household object, the official uniform, the badges and ornaments, the favourite dress, of his sitter — with an " Oh, yes, I can bring them in ; they're just what I want, and I see how they will help me out." But I try in vain to recall a case in which, either during the New England May and June, or during those of the Middle States (since these groups of weeks have in the two regions a differing identity and value), the genius in question struck me as adopting with any frankness, as doing more than passively, helplessly accept, the supplied paraphernalia, the signs of existing life. The business is clearly to get rid of them as far as may be, to cover and smother them ; dissimulating with the biggest, freest brush their impertinence and their ugliness.”

Nobody is as diffusively cutting as Henry James. Indeed, I think of him as, under all the heavy vestimentary rhetoric, the true American weirdo – not Poe, not Sylvia Plath, not Bobbie Dylan.

The last time I hit the States was, I think, 2018. That’s a long gap for me. The waves of the pandemic, combined with the political news, made me think of the U.S. as more than usually crazy. But when we bought the tickets in the summer, we thought the cray cray was, if not over, at least tempered and teased into a vaccinated state of health comparable to any other. Just our luck, and the luck of all travelers this Christmas season, that the covid mounted a return, a battle of the Bulge in which the good guys, this time, lost, and there we were in the midst of it. For this reason, we never made the leg of the journey to New York City – just visited my family in Atlanta.

 

My expectations were low. I figured we would be challenged on the street as masked liberals. This turned out to be a wild exaggeration. In fact, my impression from the first was of the large disconnect between the official story of the U.S., told by the media and public opinion – that game of three card monte, mounted by thumbsuckers – and the ordinary, banal life that flows through the streets, the houses, the schools, etc. Atlanta is an evidence that the world has landed, all unknown and unrecognized, in the American hinterland. Everywhere there are Korean churches, Indian fast food places, Asian restaurants managed by Jamaicans and Jamaican restaurants managed by Japanese, a wholesale integration that makes life so portlike. All the white blue collar class – according to the elite – are racist as fuck, but the elite are the least integrated class in the country, while the working class, white collar and blue, is incredibly mixed. I go into, say, the Brass Pro Shop at Sugarloaf Mills. Now here, if anywhere, the politics is plain. It is a vast hunting and fishing and outdoor outlet with a large pro-NRA insignia on the wall near the cash registers. Yet the customers I saw busily choosing their gifts – fishing rods for Grandma, a box of bullets for Uncle Lester, etc. – were an Atlanta metro crosssection of ethnic origins and friendly dispositions. I was there to buy some outdoor ornaments for some people on my Christmas list and I found them and nobody paid a lick of attention to the masks we were wearing. A third of that crowd was with us, in the mask wearing department. True, the ritual that I believe makes Paris a safer place – the requirement to show the vax pass before you go into a restaurant or public facility – was incredibly not in place. So we were careful. Not, though, too much more careful than we would have been in Europe.

It is, after all, a universal fuckup, and the spread and monthly renewal of the pandemic follows the trod and true byways of the neocolonial system. It is not just the States that drives the fuckup. One effect of visiting the U.S. is, actually, to have a better sense of proportion about the U.S. – which, in spite of the endless intrusion of its media, is just a country like any other.

I’ll have more to say when I think about how to say it.

Baja by Karen Chamisso

 

 

Wrapped in a digestive absence

the citizen of beachtowels opposes

a dead eye to the inanity

of the ocean’s endless flourishes,

 

as though, perpetual spectator

she already knew the myriad

of plots there - expecting no watery mouth

to pronounce the aggrandizing period.

 

As – so we are told – the gods to demons

the demons to neuroses are fled

belly down, on her territorial towel

she dreams of sex, food and money instead.