an allegory of politics

 

I am not a great fan of the left-right distinction. The reason is not that my “opinions” don’t fit within it – the reason is that its very grounding, in  opinion, and not in practice, is a right tending structure. As a right-tending structure, it finds the end of politics is in voting, and the end of ideology is in arguments over the dinner table. Far be it from me to diss arguments over the dinner table – I was raised among them! – but politics and one’s leftness or rightness is as much a matter of practices. Many of those practices are embedded in situations that severely limit one’s degree of freedom. If I administer a workforce or invest in a 401K or do any of the innumerable things that constitute living a middle class lifestyle, that style is going to chose my politics much more than I am going to chose it. Which means that saying whether I tend “left” or “right” is a matter of existential analysis, more than a survey question about who I think is a greater human being, Donald Trump or Batman. That analysis is both of one’s choices and of the structures in which one is embedded without them necessarily being responsive to one’s choices. To choose to use less plastic, for instance, is a nice healthy practice, personally, but is likely to have zero effect on the sum total of plastic in the world. A conservative engineer who discovers, purely for profit, a less ecologically intrusive substitute for plastic would be objectively a much greater environmentalist, in spite of everything he or she thinks.

The way such a substitute would spread out in the world would, of course, depend on other objective structures that are “left” or “right” – and so on.

Tomorrow I am going to vote for a leftis . This is a very very minor political act. As I grow older, I become much more pessimistic about the meaning of such things; in America, even when I have voted for winners, they turned out – as I should have known they would – into net losers in relation to my “opinions.”

Opinions are epiphenomenal. Spinoza wrote that a thrown stone, if it could think, would think it was arcing through the air of its own free will. That’s a political allegory.  

 

Mirror violence - from Bucha to Fallujah to Grozny

 In William Everdell’s the First Moderns,the author explores and extends the notion of the modern by exploring the “vortices” of modernization, the various conjunctions of theory and practice not only in the obvious places, the big metropoles, but on the periphery. And, indeed, even in the metropoles modernization was a negotiation between outliers and the establishment. One of the monuments of the modern, a triumph of modernist architecture with form totally following function Everdell claims, was invented by Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish overseer of Cuba: the concentration camp. Or campos de reconcentraciòn, as he named them.

It is an interesting story. According to Everdell, Weyler y Nicolau, fighting against the Cuban insurgents in 1897, decided to experiment with an American invention, barbed wire. Why not string barbed wire around areas that were insurgent strongholds? Since insurgents weren’t formally organized, it seemed like a good way to contain them, a sort of cordon sanitaire. No sooner thought of then done. Soon camps sprang up, thousands of potential insurgents were surrounded by good, healthy barbed wire, and the dying started. The U.S. decided to protest the inhumanity, sending a note to Spain on June 24, 1897. The Spanish reply was interesting: the Spanish government noted that the cruelty of the camps was not different from the cruelty exercized by Sherman on his march to the Sea in 1864. Everdell digs up a clever conjunction of names, here:

“But Secretary Sherman [John Sherman, the man who had penned the American protest to Spain] probably knew better than any Spanish journalist how "cruel" Weyler's policies were, for he was the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, the general who had become famous by marching from Atlanta to the sea and becoming the first to treat civilians as combatants in a modern war. The Spanish knew it, too. With a fine sense of irony, Madrid replied to Secretary Sherman's protest against what Spain was doing in Cuba by calling attention to what the Secretary's brother had done in Georgia and Carolina thirty years before.

We don't know who in the Spanish foreign ministry put that reminiscence in the note, but the odds favor Weyler himself. At the time of the March to the Sea, the future Captain-General of Cuba had been twenty-five, serving as the Spanish military attaché in Washington, and writing home about how impressed he had been by General Sherman's remarkable new interpretation of the laws of war.”

We like Benjamin’s image of human history as a multiplying pile of ruins observed by an appalled but impotent angel, but in many cases history seems more like a frightened monkey making its way over the trapeze equipment hanging from the ceiling of some big top, a matter of hairy leaps and enormous swings.

Weyler’s invention soon caught the eye of the British, who tried it out in South Africa; soon that caught the eye of the Americans, who were fighting a pesky war against the Filipinos.

“As near as we can tell, the first American concentration camps were built for the Filipinos in that month of November 1900, which means that the British were just ahead of the Americans in adapting Weyler's invention. By December 20, when General Order Number 100 on the treatment of civilian "war rebels" was issued by General MacArthur (this was Arthur MacArthur, whose son Douglas was to follow in his and Weyler's footsteps as proconsul of the Philippines), the ''reconcentration camps" were there to receive them.”

And so one aspect of modernism was launched. An aspect that has been with us persistently ever since, although Americans don’t like to notice their own use of reconcentration camp – how much more comforting to read, for instance, about nasty Lenin and his proto-gulag than to contemplate the fact that William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were responsible for more deaths in a lager than Lenin ever was.

We see the same game of mirroring violence today, and we produce the same blindsided moral judgments. What happened in Bucha was the kind of war crime that happened in Grozny – as well as the same kind of war crime that happened in Fallujah, in 2004, as the Americans basically laid waste a town, scattered 200,000 refugees over the territory in midwinter with nary a soupkitchen or outdoor toilet to aid them, and kept the Red Cross at bay for a month until letting them into the city – and even then keeping them away from where heaps of bodies were piled up.

These mirror wars can only be stopped by smashing both mirrors. Unfortunately, who can do the smashing with justice? Not those who designed massacres in the past, and are quite capable, having the tools for it, of dropping the drones of the future. Which leaves it to those who are outside the circuit of power – that is, the weak.

Bored

 

Spirit enough to be bored — Whoever doesn’t have enough spirit to be able to find himself and his work boring is certainly not a spirit of the first rank, be it in the arts or sciences. A satirist who was, unusually, also a thinker, could add to this, taking a look at the world and history: God must not have had this spirit: he wanted to make and did make things, collectively, too interesting.” – Nietzsche, Human all too H.

I am unsure about the jab at God at the end of Nietzsche’s bit here,  but every writer knows the moment that comes upon him like negative inspiration, when he detaches and to find himself and his work boring. That’s the moment that Bely cuts his masterpiece, Petersburg, by a third; that may be the moment when Rimbaud said fuck it, although I am too little devil or angel to venture there into that affair. However, I’ve been pondering the economist’s version of happiness and their refusal to understand the intricate dance between repletion and boredom. Economists are so fucking weird because they combine the most sophisticated mathematical models with psychological insights that would shame a ten year old. It is all about not only licking a lollypop, but doing it forever and ever, and getting everybody’s lollypop to lick. It is a gross and unrealistic view of happiness that leaves out of the picture the mysteries of happiness  which supposedly found not only the normative aspect of the system, but the incentive structure inside it. I suspect economists are so enthusiastic about growth not so much because growth is a good in itself, but because it perpetually puts off the question: what is the system for? And, of course, even Marxist economists will edge out of the room once you start pondering the many dimensions of alienation. Economics is really not the dismal science, but the clubbish science – and in clubs, it doesn’t do to pose such questions. They are so easily answered by dinner, especially if dinner includes port.

Now, in my flaming youth, amongst me and my pals, boredom was our mark of Cain – it was the boredom generated by capitalism that we were against. We tended to be big supporters of the situationists, without really having a vast or even a tiny little knowledge of them more than they pissed people off, and the autonomen, because we loved the autonomen boldness, the kicking ass, the taking over of buildings people weren't using, the contempt for the Polizei. This sounded like the shit to us, even though we heard overtones of peasant hut nostalgia in some of the way these micro-utopias turned out, with the holding hands and weaving or something and nothing that actually, after a while, wasn’t… boring. We liked, instead, the via negativa, through pure abjection, following the downward path of Bataille. It was all  “we’re so pretty, oh so pretty” with a sneer.

However, although it was quite the enemy, boredom was never really an issue, an affair, an object of thought. It wasn’t until we began to take writing seriously, and tried to write fiction, that boredom became interesting as a test. Boredom, after all, is always there guarding the path of inquiry into meaning and purpose – it has sphinx like properties. I often feel that at the heart of bourgeois vacuity is all the ways that are constructed to avoid boredom’s riddle.

The insulted and the injured or, the politics of the insult

 

William Cobbett hangs on like a ghost in that ghostly gallery, the Penguin paperback classics. He is known now for Rural Rides. In his time, though, the early part of the 19^th century in Britain,  he was a great self-constituted political and moral brass band, producing a weekly paper that  is of a vastness such that few who dive in there swim very far – in short, a man tied body and soul to his time. William Hazlitt, who shared many of his political opinions, is always being rediscovered – Cobbett, not so much.

Hazlitt’s essay on Cobbett begins by comparing him to a boxer, and goes on to foreswear comparison at all:

“One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle.'3 He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; 'lays waste' a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English. He might be said to have the clearness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville; if all such comparisons were not impertinent. A really great and original writer is like nobody but himself. In one sense, Sterne was not a wit, nor Shakespear a poet. It is easy to describe second-rate talents, because they fall into a class and enlist under a standard; but first-rate powers defy calculation or comparison, and can be defined only by themselves. They are sui generis, and make the class to which they belong. I have tried half a dozen times to describe Burke's style without ever succeeding, -- its severe extravagance; its literal boldness; its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its running away with a subject, and from it at the same time, -- but there is no making it out, for there is no example of the same thing anywhere else. We have no common measure to refer to; and his qualities contradict even themselves.”

One thing, though, Hazlitt picks out in Cobbett – his ability to abuse. He was an artist of the insult, the nickname: “If anything is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is an excellent hand at invention in that way, and has 'damnable iteration' in him.” In other words, once he fastens on an insult, he sticks to it.

Although American politics in the last six or seven years has turned, very much, on insults – Trump being both insulter in chief and the target of insults of every variety – it is odd that we have no genealogy of the political insult, or even the broader category of insult in America. The recent Oscar dust-up came about when a comedian insulted one of the members of the audience. Normally, a glittering throng would be up in arms against a random insulter, but this was a patronized and paid insulter, the type that often, when given to preening, compares his or herself to the jester who tells the truth. Of course, that is bullshit – the fool in King Lear was no millionaire celebrity, and our pardoned and cossetted insulters are in it for the cheap laughs and the usual micro-aggression.

The root of “insult” is found in the Latin saltere, to leap – the word contains a gesture. Leaping upon is a form of attack not reserved for cats – monkey and humanoids do it too. The verbal leaping upon of the insult has something hungry about it. The best insults leave the victim feeling chewed, or eaten. As well, the victim begins to eat him or herself, since the response to an insult – other than to insult back – is unclear. I have read many a post or tweet about how Will Smith should have calmly challenged his insulter to a debate, or given a sort of opening speech appealing to the better angels of our nature, etc., etc. Typical euphemism liberalism, I think, which dances around old social facts in order not to confront them. Leaping into ratiocination is no kinda leap.

Of course, the insulter does have the advantage of leaping first. Trump, for one, has damnable iteration in him: after  he has called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas once, it evidently engraved itself in his mind to the extent that I wonder, in that syphilis haunted wilderness, if he even remembers her real name. In any case, the taunt is maddening for those who think politics should be “above” childish insults. The problem with that position is that it is out of joint with historic reality. American history is a parade of one insult after another, and a historian could map a rather accurate map of who was who and what was what just by looking at the insults heaped on presidents and the insults presidents – as candidates – heaped back. We could also map who is marginalized: the taunt “Pocahontas” reverberates with both Disney and ethnocide, the lyncher’s version of the American story out of which we have all, with our various properties, crawled.

It is interesting, to me, that out of the culture of insult comedy that has become a cable standard, a man who was a reality star on a show where he played a sort of insult comedian boss has become the leading figure in American politics today. It is the honor culture turned toxic, as there is no honor there. Perhaps this is why it leaves behind such a bitter aftertaste.

will smith and the male fugue

 

“And I would like to say”, Julian said to himself, “that I thought it was about time someone shut him up.”

This is a key line in John O’Hara’s first and tightest novel, Appointment in Samarra. Julien English is a man who is going down in the little bourgeois court society of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. The act that precipitates and quickens the fall happens in the country club, as he stands there listening to an ascending boss figure named Harry Reilly, who owns a good chunk of Julian English’s car lot. Reilly is telling a dirty story in a fake Irish accent and is surrounded by suckups who say things like, Harry, I don’t know how you remember all them stories! A Ring Lardner scene, Lardner would have dispatched the entire book in 15 pages, but O’hara is not a humorist, nor does he favor going short on material like this.

The American novel – even one in which the characters are all white burgomeister types with Caddies and country club memberships – does a wonderful job of tracing the male fugue within the precincts of an ethos of success that has begun to fatigue its a regulars, even as they fail to imagine any other ethos. Winner or loser, that is not only how the game ends, it defines the game’s purpose.

Will Smith slapping a comedian whose line is that ur-American trope, the roast, is very much the Julian English figure. My sympathies are with Smith – whose slap musta hurt and, in some metaphysical accounting, must have equaled or topped the little bit of shit the comedian wanted Smith to swallow before he got his award. However, the country club has rules, and will ring them down swiftly like the grating over a jewelry store display window.  

Losing the plot

 

In Adam’s school, some enterprising publisher has given away a bunch of new kid’s books and the teacher has assigned the task of reviewing them to the kids. To help the kids figure out what “review” means, they have a helpful sheet that asks questions about the plot, the pictures, and even what the parents think of the book – clever, that one.

These are all fictional books. The question about the plot is: in a few sentences, describe the story  in the book – Resume l’histoire dans quelques lignes. The story – here  l’histoire – is, I take it, a proxy for plot. In the very convenient Dictionary of Untranslateables, the section on plot is under the entry “erzaehlen”.  The entry, like all of the entries, goes muchly into the etymology and philology of key words, and sorts out the diegesis from narration:

“If diegesis is the recounted world as it appears in a fiction, narration is the universe in which one recounts, that is, the set of acts and narrative procedures that give rise to and govern this fictive universe. This distinction, analytic in nature, requires that we do not confuse the different instances and levels of a narrative fiction…”

This quietly imposes a set theoretical imprint on the analysis of composition, and is handy, although, as the entry emphasizes, language dependent – and dependent on the historical epoch. The Greeks, the standard philological reference, have many words related to telling a story, but lack the set theoretical bias: “In addition, récit is one of the possible translations of a certain number of Greek words, in particular muthos [μῦθος], which, when distinguished from logos [λόγος] ( rational language ), can also be rendered in French by mythe; when distinguished from ergon [ἔϱγον] ( act ), by parole; when distinguished from diêgêsis [διήγησις] ( simple narration ), by récit dialogué; when distinguished from êthos [ἦθος] ( character ), by fable; when distinguished from historia [ἱστοϱία] ( narrativeof facts ), by fiction.”

Now that we have made things clear as mud, these are, in effect, the concepts set in motion when you ask a child – or anybody else – to give in shortened form an account of a story. Myself, I had to do this often when I wrote small reviews for Publishers Weekly (the rule was make the review between 260 and 300 words, as I remember it – with 300 being discouraged. In that space we were supposed to give an account of the muthos, the logos, the diegesis, the ethos, and tell the reader if it was thumbs up or down). I had difficulty with all those elements, partly because it is hard to cover all the twists and turns in most novels or short story collections, partly because thumbs up or down doesn’t really cut it – I could dislike a book that I thought was good, for instance.

In 1980, Penelope Fitzgerald, who knew more about writing for a living than most people, wrote an essay, “Following the plot” for the London Review of Books. It is a fascinating essay, beginning with a recit about her trip to Mexico – a trip that has puzzled her biographers (Lucy Scholes wrote a nice piece about this for Granta: https://granta.com/peripatetic-penelope-fitzgerald/). At the end of this fascinating digression (etymologically, a stepping away from the path – which is precisely not “following”), Fitzgerald reflects on the reason that she did not use this material for a story: “I take it that the novel proceeds from truth and re-creates truth, but my story, even at this stage, gives me the impression of turning fiction into fiction. Is it the legacy, or the silver, or the Latin American background, testing ground of so many 20th-century writers? I know that in any case I could never make it respectable (by which I mean probable) enough to be believed as a novel. Reality has proved treacherous. ‘Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.’

Reality, here, has quietly parted company with belief, respectability and the probable. Who is the believer here who turns atheist at this potential novel?

Fitzgerald, who fell through the class system like a stone, and bounced back because she was not a stone, knew very well that what is probable for one set is improbable for another – for instance, the set that actually lives and writes in Mexico, as opposed to London. The treacherousness of reality cannot be sieved out of the novel, but it can be domesticated.

The last paragraph of Fitzgerald’s essay is, I believe, a brilliant piece of English prose that wraps up the problem of the plot in terms of family class and money – which is always what it is about.

“In the novel’s domain, plots were the earliest and the poorest relations to arrive. For the last two hundred years there have been repeated attempts to get them to leave, or, at least, to confine themselves to satire, fantasy and dream. Picaresque novels, however, both Old and new, are a kind of gesture towards them, acknowledging that although you can easily spend your whole life wandering about, you can’t do so in a book without recurrent coincidences and, after all, a return. And the readers of books like plots. That, too, is worth consideration.”

The placebo routine

 In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book:

“Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious
disease caused by a specific micro-organism. The same sounds in  a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to confirm tuberculosis. But there is an important difference between our diagnosis of tuberculosis and Laennec’s diagnosis of phthisis: we can cure tuberculosis (most of the time), while his patients died of phthisis––he died of it himself. Until 1865 (when
Lister introduced antiseptic surgery) virtually all medical progress was of this sort. It enabled doctors to get better and better at prognosis, at predicting who would die, but it made no difference at all to
therapeutics. It was a progress in science but not in technology.”     
The gap between the ability to diagnose and the ability to cure, or even to understand the cause of a disease, or its etiology, is easy to forget. I often edit articles about medicine, or public health, in the pre-twentieth century period. Some of these articles concern the medical culture of native peoples. And even with the best anti-colonialist will in the world, often the authors simply assume that there is a contrast between a rational and curative Western medicine and a ritualistic and non-curative folk medicine. In fact, folk medicine was medicine up into the twentieth century, and often continues to be today. Western medicine as therapy was largely either fraudulent or depended on the placebo effect. The latter is a real effect, of course.
“But the fact that there was no progress––far too little to have any systematic impact on life expectancy––and the fact that medical intervention did more harm than good, does not mean that doctors
did not cure patients. Modern studies of the placebo effect show that it is a mistake to think that there are some therapies that are effective and others which though ineffective work on those who respond
to the placebo effect. Even effective medicine works partly by mobilizing the body’s own resources, by invoking the placebo effect: one estimate is that a third of the good done by modern medicine is
attributable to the placebo effect.
When patients believe that a therapy will work, their belief is capable of rendering it surprisingly efficacious; when doctors believe a therapy will work their confidence is consistently transferred
to the patient. There are all sorts of studies that show this in practice. Thus if a new and better drug comes out, the drug it replaces begins to perform consistently less well in tests, merely
because doctors have lost confidence in it.”
Ah, transference! Surely this is a fact about human nature that goes beyond pharmacopeia.