I smell a rat

 

Tocqueville, like Flaubert and Kafka, had a bad case of imposter syndrome – or at least that is how I interpret the writer’s complex. He was always setting out, as a young man, on precisely defined projects in foreign countries – America, Ireland, England - and finding in the midst of them that the definition was too limiting, uninteresting, and just not for him.

Over him towered the example of Chateaubriand, to whom he was related: Tocqueville’s aunt married Chateaubriand’s brother, and as that couple perished in the Revolution, their children were brought up by Tocqueville’s parents. Thus, he very naturally became part of the salon around the Grand Old Man. So he knew how the writer’s role was at the intersection of politics and knowledge, in the broad sense – a kind of science, a kind of art.

There’s a charming letter that Tocqueville wrote to the Comtesse de Grancey (his cousin, another descendent of a family whose members died in some quantity beneath the guillotine) from Ireland in 1835. He explains that he is in Kilkenny – for what purpose, he is rather vague. It all has to do with what an anthropologist would call field work. For Tocqueville, this meant attending trials and talking to judges and lawyers, among others.

“ I came here attracted by the assizes. Not being able, myself, to judge or condemn anyone, I wanted to have the pleasure of seeing how these things are done by others.

Doesn’t this remind you of the fable of the cat who was metamorphosed into a woman, and who was surprised running after rats? For a philosopher like me, there is nothing, besides, more curious than the assizes.”

Tocqueville’s mind was well stocked with the fables of La Fontaine and the stories of Perrault. In this little sentence, something shines out: you are what you hunt. An especially wise maxim for a writer, a tribe known for self-delusion. What you hunt and how you hunt it is all out there, if you know how to look.

2.

In the recent NYRB, there’s a review by Linda Hunt the book on Robespierre by Marcel Gauchet, an author who rather fancies himself a republican in the vein of Tocqueville. Hunt is rather merciful with a book that, as she writes, seems wilfully ignorant of any new scholarship about Robespierre, or maybe any scholarship at all. Gauchet’s thesis is the conservative one: modernism, by which a jumble of events from the French revolution to the rise of the bourgeoisie, was consequent upon the “de-christianization”. Hunt begins the review in the tried and true manner of the Cold War liberals – whose style lingers on:

“Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin), there was Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the French Revolution during the period in 1793–1794 known as the Terror.”

Imagine writing: “Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin) there was Thomas Jefferson…” Or, William Pitt, or Toussaint L’ouverture, etc. In Jefferson’s case, the affinities with Hitler – an entire world view shaped by racism and the need for Lebensraum, to the point of supporting ethno-cide – is pretty clear. But the stupidity of the list is really marked by the parentheses “(and Putin)”, elevating Putin to the heady company of the great murderers, when in actuality he is still well below George Bush in murderous effect. It is by such means that Cold War liberalism became the undertaker of its own principles, since if Robespierre (and Putin) equal Stalin and Hitler, the crimes of Stalin and Hitler are normalized, diminished, and whitewashed.

In any case, Hunt’s review gets better after its first sentence. And she coops Gauchet’s most sweeping thesis in a useful paragraph:

“Modern democracies, he maintains, emerged as the religious foundations of collective existence crumbled; religion did not disappear, of course, but it no longer provided the crucial legitimation for the political and social order. Modern democracies therefore face the challenge of explaining to the citizenry what holds society together in the absence of any transcendental justification.”

This strikes me as a pretty shaky thesis, although it is pretty commonplace. It depends on a sort of collective, qualitative erosion: the religious foundations “crumble” – somewhere. In the minds of the intellectuals? Of the educated class, the governors? In the ordinary life of the people? And this, too, assumes something called the “religious foundations.” While it is true that in France, in contrast to Britain (which emerged from the Puritan revolution with a closer tie to religious institutions in the ordinary life of the masses), de-Christianization as marked by the increasing disuse of Christian rituals has been closely traced by historians like Michel Voyelle, who used testaments, which classically contained a “spiritual” passage, to track the decline of Christian authority in the 18th century, it is a bit too facile to take this decline as a proof of some great skepticism concerning “transcendental justification”; it could as well be the parallel to a legitimation crisis striking the idea that certain families were proxies for and entitled to rule the state, or region, etc. Herzen, in the 19th century, derided the Russian royal family for believing that Russia was defined by a family – the family of the czar. These families – in England with Henry VIII, in France with Louis XIV, in Russia with Peter the Great – succeeded in throwing off supposedly rooted forms of religious practice in favor of others – which to my mind points to the practical foundation of what holds society together, which is the power of some established elite.

I’m not sure that many people need a transcendental justification for what holds society together. However, I am sure that some do. And this might have something to do with the story of the French Revolution. I’ve been reading Michon’s novel, The Eleven, recently. The novel centers on a painting of the Commission of Public Safety – Robespierre, St. Just, Barrere, etc. – painted by Corentin. There is no real painting named The Eleven, and no real painter named Corentin: like Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot, Michon is using a fake vita as the form in which to put his story – and his quasi thesis, which is that the French Revolutionary leadership contained an awful lot of would be authors. Literature, as his narrator puts it, was taking the place of religion. Religion, here, is much more expressly the kind of thing that happens when people pay tithes, go to church, and are preached to and directed by minions of the church, priests and such. Michon is most concerned with literature as we informally know it – but for me, literature is an effect of media, and it is media that is truly working as the underground mole against the ancien regime. In France in 1789, in other places like Russia in 1917… As Thomas Mann once put it, the ancien regime ended in 1914, not 1789. It was not a transcendental justification, but the formation of the time zone of the contemporaneous – a “we” in time – that, to my mind, defines society among its members.

Which gets us back to the cat, the woman and the rat – for doesn’t this demonstrate how what you hunt and how you hunt it defines who you are – what woman you are – under appearances? To me, the rat is not the transcendental justification of the social at all. And when somebody else’s rat is put in those terms…

I smell a rat.

is #metoo still the deal?

 Supposedly, #metoo is dead, and so is lean-in.

Supposedly, the Depp-Heard trial shows how dead #metoo is. And Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Facebook helps us measure the shelf-life of a book about breaking the glass ceiling, or something.
Lean-in was always a prop to patriarchy. I don’t think this has to be the case with #metoo, which was not about celebrities and CEOs, but rather started among the obscure depths of the media and publishing – among an educated class that has long been proletarianized, but in the nicest freelancy kind of way, with the college debt to prove it.

I myself am still an ardent intersectionalist, and from that perspective, #metoo is not dead. #Metoo is, properly, the preliminary to a strike. It is interesting that the same level in the media in which #metoo was generated is a hotbed, at the moment, of unionbuilding. These are connected phenomena. In the movie and tv industry, the #metoo spotlight was more on famous women being raped, bullied and sexually abused by famous men. I have heard less about unionization in an industry in which company unions, guilds, still have great power, and in which the star system warps our usual notions of work and exploitation. However, as the halfassed “reforms” to the system in response to #metoo refuse to touch on the systematic subordination of women in the industry, I think there is a future for #metoo – a future that will last as long as the abusive system is in place.

The Depp-Heard trial is a satyr play, of course, following the end of Roe; sexism, racism, and the war against the working class all hand in hand, chanting their usual reddit ditties. But don’t believe the hype, the early surrenderers. They have their deal, but it is not mine, nor necessarily yours.

to make the stone stony

 

“The lizards told me that there was a legend among the stones that God wanted once to become a stone, in order to save them from their rigidity. An old lizard opined, however, that this stony incarnation would only happen after God had incarnated himself in all the species of animals and plants and redeemed them. Only a few stones have feelings, and they only breathe out in moonlight. But these few stones who have a feeling for their circumstances are horribly miserable. The trees are much better, they can cry. The animals, though, are the best of all, because they can speak, each after its own kind, and human beings are the best at it. Once when the whole world is saved, all other created things will be able to speak, as in the primitive times that the poets sing.”

Heinrich Heine’s legend of the stones, as recounted by the lizards, comes in his travel book about the city of Lucca in Italy. It rather violates the convention of those travel books that concentrate on the sights, as evidently it begins with the lizards of the Apennines. I wonder if this legend of the stones was on Skhlovsky’s mind when, in Art as Technique, he famously wrote: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

Skhlovsky’s sentence, if it obliquely refers to Heine’s text, would not be the first time that Art was the substitute of God. This has proven to be one of the enduring themes in the era of art outside the system of patronage – the system that broke down in the eighteenth century, under the coming of steam driven printing presses that allowed for the mass circulation of newspapers, which changed the whole consciousness of the literate class.

I am very fond of Heine. I find it important – an intersignes – that as Baudelaire was crumbling in his latter, syphilis wracked years, he wrote a scathing article about an attack made by a French journalist, Jules Janin, on Heine’s poetry. Baudelaire still had a fine sense of who was illuminated and who was in darkness as far as art went. I don’t know if Baudelaire was aware of Heine’s Lucca book. But I do think he would have recognized the style of Heine’s thought, flickering rather like a lizard’s tongue flickers, out and in, testing the air. Heine was also of course Marx’s friend, and they both liked the fine ironic style of the 1820s and 30s, which combined Hegel and the extravagances of the Grimm’s tales.

I’m feeling a little tree-like myself lately. Even stony. On this day after the ascension.

 

 

 

Power to the powerless?

 I read something by Sherrilyn Ifill - who I respect -in which she emphasizes that those who say we can do nothing are wrong, and that we have the power to mobilize. Meaning, to vote.

I respect the idea, but I want to ask about that power. I want to ask: what power? I think we had that power after Red Lake, we had that power after Sandy Hook, we had that power after Newtown, we had that power after Virginia Tech... so why was the power massively unused? These statements about "our" power become, after a while, disincentives, if all that supposed "power" ends up in the hands of representatives of our will who really do nothing, except ask every election year for donations and votes. The power that Dr. King had, which had to be exercized for a decade, was not in votes, but in civil disobedience and organizing to defy the powers that be. We have definitely lost that - what, after all, would happen to our credit rating? We are powerlessly powerful. The most powerful are so isolated from the rest of us that they view "doing something" as a sort of charity case, breadcrumbs for the peasants. Power doesn't come out of saying that we have power. It comes, perhaps, when we recognize our powerlessness and question the conditions that have caused it.

it's a perfect day (you're going to reap just what you sow)

 

Is the small the image of the large? Is time the image of eternity? Or are we talking about separate domains, here? I woke up this morning feeling like stretching. The rain yesterday had driven away, briefly, the pre-summer heat that was much remarked by the papers. I thought that this morning would be perfect. I thought my life was perfect.  I would make coffee. We would have croissants and coffee. A. would write, Adam would sleep,  and I would read Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning for its perfect first five lines:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

I should say that the last line, which operates as a showrunner for the poem, is not exactly perfectly matched to the complacencies of the peignoir, but then again, an image needs a jar, and we can’t live in complacencies for too long – the small extended becomes not the image of the perfect but the distortion of the perfect, an isolation from the real influxes of labor, time and others that made the peignoir, set the table, grew the coffee beans and oranges, built and named the calendar, and can be unfolded ad infinitum from the smallest social atomie.

Of course, the self, one could argue, the ultra contemporary self, is half papier maché, or half computer screen now that paper’s obsolete, and half sensuality. A tweet, a video, and then it is not simply gone, but its chance is wasted.

But isn’t that the whole American disease? The idea that life is ‘opportunity’. Opportunity, that old devil, which makes us tally up the small as a series of hits and misses. Opportunity costs – what a satanic phrase!

But at least it gets us out of bed.

 

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

 

 

  

Narcissistic Christianity

 Somewhere, in my head, I am kicking around a thesis about American Christianity - and notably, the way Christianity takes a narcissistic turn in America. Jesus, except as a figurehead, no longer counts - and this devaluation of Jesus, not only as a teacher, but as a person in general, is a very narcissistic gesture. Narcissism as the foundation of the relationship with God - a relationship put explicitly in terms of being a white American in relation to God - creates a certain bizarre cultural formation. How the narcissistic turn came about in Cold War and post-Cold War America, particularly in evangelical circles (accompanied by a certain rightwing Catholic group) is a problem for the historian of religion. Of course, it is a problem for us all, in as much as one of the great war crimes, that of spending trillions on the military, has resulted in a narcissicist Christian nation having thousands of nuclear warheads, billions of gallons of napalm, and so on.

the man who went out to find fear

 

In the 00s, that time of Bush and theory blogs, I saw a lot of mentions of weirdness and Thomas Ligotti and Lovecraft and the like, and I paid no attention. I’ve never been a horror movie buff, and though I like Georges Bataille as much as your average American working stiff, I took abjection to be a much more hoity toity thing than Friday the 13^th IV or whatever. Give me a meditation on the big toe or give me death! As the old motto goes.  As a kid, I read some weird tales, or so I vaguely remember, but not Lovecraft. And as an older beast, I have pretty much the same reaction to Lovecraft’s prose as Edmund Wilson did, who dissed him in the New Yorker in the1940s for being the kind of writer who imagines the words instead of the thing. In fact, who doesn’t? It is just that some writers imagine, hmm, better words.

 

However, back in the 00s, I little imagined I would have a boy. I especially didn’t imagine that my boy would adore horror and, at the tender age of nine, become a big Stephen King fan. So I have been trying to backfill, as it were, this tendency with the classics. And here Lovecraft does loom large.

 

This is the reason I, at an age when, if I was an oak, I’d be about 60 feet high with a great ant and bark culture going on in my middle limbs … even I … am starting to read Lovecraft stories. They aren’t terrible, but they certainly aren’t Poe. They lack, to my mind, a certain glee, the switchknife glee which Poe borrowed from De Quincey and the folklore of American humor, the kind of glee that gets into medical school pranks, but which seems to be utterly foreign to Lovecraft. He is a great man for piling up the blurb words – horrid, ghastly, shocking – in front of nouns, which seems a little defusing to me.

 

It is, in a way, funny that Lovecraft, for me, is impenetrable, because I know something of his inspirations – for instance, Arthur Machen – and I have a strong appreciation for that strain in German literature that goes out from E.T.A. Hoffman – to Kubin, Meyrink and in a very different strain, Kafka.

 

What I like in all of these writers is that flicker of gleeful abandonment that one finds, as well, in De Quincey’s Murder as one of the Fine Arts. It is a moment when a certain monological control over the tale, over the listener’s expectations, is violated. We jump across a divide, suddenly. And that moment, so far as I have been able to get through Lovecraft, is banned from the beginning. The typical Lovecraftian device is to make the story posterior to the inauguration of the tale. To me, this is a way of exorcising the liberating, gleeful moment, when the tale, as it were, turns on the teller, and on the listeners.

 

Lisa Downing, in an interesting essay on the notion of “nightmare” in early nineteenth century France, writes of the way a notion derived, in part, from the medieval supposition that a nightmare is an incubus, a demonic bed partner, was medicalized with certain of the same characteristics – notably breathlessness. The nightmare bed partner literally squeezed the breath out of the dreamer: sex and strangulation intersect. Downing suggests that in Gautier’s fantastic tales, the “points de suspension” operate as a mechanism to suspend breathing. Terror is the squeeze of the incubus.

 

‘Terror”. “Horror.” That is the crux of my problem with Lovecraft, who is never very terrifying. Movies and cable tv, with their visual obtrusiveness, are better at creating terror – but rarely create glee. The gleeful serial killer or monster – Joker, the Riddler – are of course meant to be gleeful, they pay homage to glee, and sometimes (“why so serious?”) succeed, but mostly the characters are below that necessary level. One exception is Patrick Bateman in Mary Herron’s American Psycho, whose gleeful abandon gives the tone to the whole movie, and – to me – justifies the horror trope of ending the story on that cliche ambiguity: nightmare or reality? Which neatly closes the circle of the horrid or weird, bringing it back to the sensation of being suffocated in one’s sleep.