False friends

 

Every student of French or German is familiar with the phrase “false friends.” False friends are those words one comes across that look enough like some English word that the unwise student will assume that they mean the same thing. For instance, the French verb, blesser, which means wound, and the English verb bless, which means to wish something good.

The idea that false friends operate only across language lines, however, strikes me as a limitation on a very useful concept. I think that false friends operate within different subgroups with different jargons within one language. Look at how the word “woke” or the term “cancel culture” has shifted between subgroups.  When you see a “debate” between the right and the left in America, it is often like hearing one group of people using “bless[er]” to mean injure and another group meaning to wish a benediction on. Of course, often – and this is a common rightwing tactic – the use of the term will be intentionally mangled, so that the debate (a puzzlingly idolized idea on the right, ever since the right was all about “debating” the Iraq invasion back in the early 00s, which involved debaters who spoke no Arabic and had the thinnest of notions about what Iraq actually was) is poisoned at the root. This is, of course, one of the diseases to which conversation will always be heir. False friends show up in every sphere. We live in an era that especially relies on false friends to make social media happen, and to create both anger and passivity among the masses. An angry passivity – is this what we want?

The romantic nations: state versus culture

 I have a theory about the “romantic nations”. Those were nations that were first imagined into existence by the poets and philosophers of the 19th century. Italy and Germany are examples, as if Hungary and Poland. The nation-states that formed in the period between the 16th and 19th century – the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the United States, among others – were formed not on the principle of privileging a certain ethos, but rather on principles in which monarchy, reason and religion were the operative notions. Germany,Italy, and Hungary. on the other hand, were dreamed into existence by philosophers and writers (Fichte for instance; Leopardi; Kossuth), and the long struggle for nationhood was promoted by the idea of a certain people and language having primacy, creating a home. The late romantic nations like Ireland and, finally, Israel, were shaped by the same forces.

In all these cases, you can detect a cycle: the nation exists as a culture before it exists as a nation; as a nation, it increasingly legitimates itself by an appeal to the superiority of its people; and in the final phase, the nation as an entity actually attacks its culture and what it stood for.
Israel was the result of the amazing flowering of Jewish culture in 19th and early 20th century Europe. You cannot think of any aspect of modernity that was not touched by that culture. Zionism was, originally, infused with the idea that this culture – liberal, erudite, tolerant – could found a nation.
But the seeds for the destruction, or at least the wholesale attack, on that culture are laid by the success of the nation project. We know what fascism meant in Italy and Germany. In Israel, that 19th century Jewish culture, and its ideals, are despised by the leaders in power, who find much more kinship with the violently and vilely anti-semitic rulers of Saudi Arabia than with, say, the great Jewish tradition that it otherwise calls on when, for example, the National Library in Israel claims Kafka’s papers as part of the “heritage” of Israel.

Netanyahu embodies the rabid nationalism that, by its very logic, must attack the culture of the enlightenment - the culture that enfranchised Jews throughout Europe and the States. This is the connection between Netanyahu and the anti-semitic ultra right. It will only get stronger. And the alienation that liberal Jewish culture is and will experience will have a strong flavor of deja-vu. We have seen this assortment of forces before. In Europe, it is fascism. In the U.S., we can call it the neo-Confederacy, or, if you like, Calhoun-ism.

The principle of the nation state was, up until the 1840s, I’d say, almost never identified with some ethnic group, rather than with a royal family, or a religion. The Atlantic revolutions identified something different, what Rousseau called the popular will. But that will was not identical to being, say, White male and protestant – even though the U.S. was, of course, founded by White Males who were predominantly protestant and often slave owners.

The romantic state, as I’d call it, changed this formula by up-fronting ethnic identity. Germans for Germany, Italians for Italy, etc. Yet this formula was by no means unproblematic. First, there were definitely Germans outside of Germany – the state Bismark made – and there were definitely Germans who weren’t ethnically German inside of Germany. Secondly, the same wave that resulted in the founding of these states resulted in some quasi-democratic form of governance – a Reichstag or Parliament – which gave non-ethnics certain rights to political expression and pathways to governance.

We know how the story went in Europe.

In the U.S., the person who did the most to amplify and internationalize the “self-determination” talk was Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, Wilsonian language is still used when the claim is that Jews – or Palestinians, or Hutus, or Japanese, etc. – have a “right” to self-determination. Although the fact that Wilson was a racist president, which was repressed by the old, liberal mainstream view of American history is now out in the open, we don’t see how that racism permeated his internatlonal outlook. But the man who thought Birth of a Nation was a historically accurate film was the same man who thought ethnicities had special rights. Through the Wilsonian lens, the founding of the U.S. was especially a matter of White Christians. The Pat Buchanan/Trump view of American history is a direct descendent of the Wilsonian ideology.

The romantic nation-state seems to follow an inexhorable logic, in which the very liberatory culture that accompanied the founding of the state is sooner or later alienated from the power establishment that runs the state. That power establishment, in turn, begins to attack that liberatory culture as anti-German, or anti-Italian, or anti-American – or anti-Jewish, or anti-Palestinian. Not to get all Hegelian here, but the history of the last two centuries does seem to show that there is a logic here, or at least, that the structuration leads to similar results.

This all seems obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t obvious to everybody. I don’t know.

On Humming

 

Oliver Sacks’ The man who mistook his wife for a hat is, I think, one of the best short story collections of the 1980s – a decade that dove into short stories. These stories are diagnostically true, as far as that goes, but they are mostly true as  stories. The ancestors of these stories of neurological and other disorders are to be found not only in, say, the case histories of Charcot, but as well in the short stories of Chekhov.

The first story has haunted me since I read it way back when the book came out. It is about a musician who has a curious impairment of vision in which big gaps in his responses to visual stimuli open up, while at the same time he is able to get about his daily life.

“When the examination was over, Mrs. P. called us to the table, where there was coffee and a delicious spread of little cakes. Hungrily, hummingly, Dr. P. started ont eh cakes. Swiftly, fluently, unthinkingly, melodiously, he pulled the plates towards him and took this and that, in a great gurgling stream, an edible song of food, until, suddenly, there cam an interruption: a loud, peremptory rat-tat-tat at the door.”

It is this moment that gives us the diagnostic clue of Dr. P’s curious behavior. Sacks asks the musician’s wife about this, and she tells him that Dr. P. “does everything singing to himself.” He moves, it seems, in an aural or musical landscape that closely maps the visual world in which he finds himself – but the world must be organized so that the music can guide him to where things are and what to do with them.

I have been thinking of Dr. P. this week for a simple reason. Lately, for no reason I can think of, I find myself humming.

Now, I am a man who sings to himself. I’ve been doing that forever. When I ride a bike, I will sing long Dylan or Leonard Cohen songs to myself. When I cook in the kitchen, I sing along, often wandering off the lyrics, to the Black Angels or Nick Cave. I have a pretty good songbook in my head.

But I am not a man who hums to himself. I associate that man with my grandfather, my father’s father, who seemed to hum bits of some grand symphony of hum, one that spanned decades. His humming was part of his resting, his watching of tv, his trying to do home repairs when he was 88 or so, etc. There was a humming aura around Granddaddy, and though I loved the guy, I received the strong impression, when I was a kid, that I did not want to grow into being Granddaddy – that I wanted anything but.

So, the idea that I am suddenly humming alarms me. And it alarms me even more that I am humming hums – there’s no tune, no song nor etude, in this humming. It feeds on its own buzz.

In the story of Dr. P., there’s a wonderful moment. Dr. P. had been a painter in his youth, and on the walls of his house there were hung paintings he’d done from that period onto his late maturity. They began as realistic depictions. “Finally, in the last paintings, the canvasses became nonsense, or nonsense to me – mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint.”  For Sacks, the paintings “was a tragic pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art.”

Sacks, of course, knows that art belongs to neurology – it is our home, it is the earth we will never escape from, disregarding the longtermist, transhumanist dream that our plutocrat overlords will become digital androids, half man, half silicon chip. My humming and my non-humming both belong to neurology. But I hope not pathological neurology.

It is too early for me to become a hummer, Lord!

Doors windows beginnings endings

It is after we get a little bit bigger and stop playing with LEGOS and building blocks that we accept as a fact that you can’t build a house out of doors and windows. Such a house is an absurdity! Even the least little hovel, even a tent with a mere flap for a door, should have an enclosed space beyond that flap; the whole point of the flap or door is to lead into the enclosed space. The whole point of a window is to break the monotonous grip of a room, its fist around you. But the room doesn’t exist for the window! That would be carrying the revolution too far.
 
And yet, even though this is the wisdom we absorb as surely as the hair starts to sprout on various parts of our bodies after we are children, still, when we start building an article, a story, a poem, a thesis, a dissertation, a novel, etc., how often do we find that the rule of doors and houses is damn difficult to follow. Indeed, there is a certain type of critic since Aristotle which likes to judge the house exclusively by the back door – does it open out onto good fortune and a marriage? Or does it open onto suicide, the daughter hanging by the rope in the tomb, the self-blinded, exiled king? Yes, that back door, the gentlemen of the press – and the producers in Hollywood – tend to hang around it.
Peguy, that maddest of all reactionaries, Deleuze’s nominee for the Catholic Kierkegaard, wrote a long essay, Clio, in which Clio herself, the muse of history, speaks. She speaks, of course, in riddles and repetitions. The repetitions in Peguy’s prose make you rub your eyes. You wonder if some mishap in the editing synapse, some editing epilepsy, is going on, as sentences and phrases keep repeating themselves. But you eventually get it that this is intended to some end, that this glossolalia is bound for glory. Anyway, after recounting the sins of her father Zeus, that ur-absent father, busy fucking, raping and raging out there in the wilds, she adds that his one truly virtuous attribute is to the god of doors – that whereever there is a door, there is the godhead.

“All that he has, my poor father, and he never perhaps suspect it, was not his force, of which he was so proud; it was not that power that he considered with so much pride; he didn’t suspect it perhaps that his single saving grace, my friend, was that he was the God of doors and the threshold of doors, that there was not a shipwrecked wretch on the sea, stretch out supplicating hands, towards some distant trireme, glanced in the fall of the waves, it is that a shipwrecked write on the earth does not stretch out his supplicating hands, it is that not a sailing bark does not sink unprotected, not a fugitive, not an outloaw, not an exile, not a phugas, not an exsul, not a miserable wretch, not a blind person, Homer, Oedipus, and Priam at the feet of Achilles, and Ulysses at the knees of Nausicaa, not a shipwrecked wretch knocking at the threshold of a door…[imagine here a page full of similar improbable instances encompassing more and more territory and time] that not a door opens to a stranger without him being there to preside, that not a door closes without his majesty, by a sacrilege, is wounded.”

This is a high elevation, indeed, of doors. A plea for doors, and, continuing my homology between doors and the beginnings and ends of texts, a plea for the divinity of those threshholds. Myself, though, I think inviting the stranger in – which of course must be done by every storyteller and constructor of Lego creations – does not mean ignoring the devils that also preside at front and back doors, and judge the whole encounter, the hospitality to the stranger, the stranger’s havoc and woe, on whether someone comes out the back door in the end, with her problems resolved.
Sometimes, in fact I would say most times, the house collapses. What I like is the structured collapse. I just by boobytrap standards, not Aristotle’s.

The heart has its reasons

 
I recently read Wiliam Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, after seeing an article in the London Review that made a case for it. I can see the case: the writing is exciting for the most part, until it is dragged into that dread sink of genre fiction, the need for a resolution of a problem. I’m down with solutions, I’m a great fan of pacing out London under the shadow of Sherlock Holmes and finding the criminal, but I’m also a fan of things blowing up in your face. And a little too little blew up in the face of Gibson’s coolhunter heroine, Cayce Pollard. I admired her as an occasion for transvestism – the property Angela Carter rather patronized in D.H. Lawrence, all those stockings and dresses – but as an occasion for detection, her advance to the resolution of the problem became increasingly like an exercise in algebra: “solve the problem with a proof as to how you arrived at the solution.”

In solving her problem, Cayce comes into contact with one of those gross “entrepreneurs” of the early OOs, when the book was written. The heyday of the cult of Davos and the invasion of Iraq! Ah, it hurts, it hurts. The tycoon, with the horrid name Hubertus Bigend, is not only a money maker but fancies himself, as tycoon’s do, a philosopher. This means he has read the popular science books we all have read, but has “seriously” absorbed its lessons.  The dialogue between the tycoon and the coolhunter, then, becomes a moment in zeitgeistery of the highest order.

It is from this moment in their dialogue that I received a certain jolt. Here’s the bit:

“It doesn’t feel so much like a leap of faith as something I know in my heart.” Strange to hear herself say this, but it’s the truth.
“The heart is a muscle,” Bigend corrects. “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of the instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it all as consciousness.”

When Pattern Recognition was published in 2003, the useful term mansplaining had not yet been coined – but here, in Bigend’s “correction”, is the thing itself.

The jolt I received, though, was about language. Although Bigend here is trying to explain the ‘mind’ – a thing that has to have airquotes even in the explanation – his explanation turns out to be more mythic and less actionable than the word “heart”. The ‘reptilian’ limbic system is, of course, an old chestnut in the popular science vein. It is ‘reptilian’ instead of just a limbic system because it somehow demystifies the heart, or intuition, or mind – but relies, nonetheless, for its semantic effect on the old hierarchy between the animal and the human. One could as well call it the “higher mammal limbic system.’” 

But lizard brain image has impressed itself on the newspaper reading world. A Washington Post story from May 29, 1969 announced the discovery, by neuphysiologists at Queens University in Canada, of the “holdover from our reptilian ancestors”:

 “This evolutionary cranial inhabitant determs the human herd instinct, man’s stereotyped, obsessive instincts. It plays the primary role in instinctively establishing territory, finding shelter, hunting, homing, mating, breeding, imprinting, forming social orders, determining leadership, and other ancestral traits.”

If this sounds rather weird as a gecko shadow self, it sounds all too familiar as colonialist discourse – with that “determining leadership” being an especially attractive property for the tycoon whose wealth depends on extracting surplus labor value.
“This would make it sort of subprimitive, though it is capable of overriding man’s scientifically acknowledged two brains, a primitive one and the civilized one.”
The geopolitics of brain structure – in one small announcement, the Washington Post in 1969 was explaining why we were in Vietnam – to bring the Vietnamese out of the limbic dark ages!
I am very interested in the vocabularies of the emotions. I think that the decline of the older temperament theory of the body-feeling synthesis, which is something that marks early modernism, has left a hole in our passion-speak. The “heart”, which is an orphan of that earlier way of conceptualizing emotions, has still not been replaced by the “reptilian limbic brain” – though the Bigends of the world correct us sagely on the whole topic. Reminding us that an explanation of an underlying substrate is not an explanation of what that substrate supports, any more than a map is an explanation of the territory.

The Breakfast Cereal Box: our place in the chain

 

 Breakfast cereal is an emblem of the industrialized food system. If the system had a totem, surely the faces of Captain Crunch, Tony the Tiger, and Snap, Crackle and Pop would be displayed on it. The cereal box I opened this morning to feed my boy, Kellog’s Smacks – which features a froglike creature with big eyes, an open mouth, a startlingly human tongue, and human like hands, splashing about in milk and wheat stalks and larva shaped honey smacks, against a vivid red background – tells me that it provides me with “50 % Vit. D. Daily Needs”. I’m never sure if I should believe this kind of thing, or even really what it means – one bowl? The whole box? On the back it provides me with a printout of “ingredients” and”nutritional facts”. That the words are in English and Arabic points to the global system – this Kellogg’s cereal box has been somewhat vaguely routed or controlled by the Kellogg’s office in Casablanca.

This box is a marvel as well as, given the ecological tragedy of agribusiness, a horror. Marvels and horrors are the familiars of my ordinary life – and no doubt yours, reader. We flip between them with every app and every birdless sky.

The world of commerce, the system of global production and circulation which brought that box to my kitchen, seems, sometimes, to fill the world. It depends, however, on the act of giving. I give the cereal to my boy. My wife gave her time, labor and money to go out and get the box and bring it back home. My definition of neoliberalism is that cultural regime which attempts to completely embed the social in the economic (defined narrowly as capitalism, a market based system of goods and services controlled by capital); however, it is always limited by the fact that it depends, fundamentally, on what Georges Bataille called the “general economy” – the economy of unexchanged energy, generosity, and giftgiving. The further neoliberalism digs into the general economy, the more it undermines itself. In this contradiction, myth is generated.

At least this is one way to locate myth. I am writing under the spell of Roland Barthes mythologies, essays on the quotidien that attempt to decode certain bourgeois patterns of recognition, styles of representation, in order to reveal their mythic dynamic. Barthes  wrote them in the fifties, when he was still using an impressionistic technique. He didn’t quite have together what he meant by myth. His latter essay on myth is confusing, I think, because he retrospectively tries to cast what he was doing in the armature of a more fully developed semiotics. Still, each of those essays has an exhilarating air, as though he were an alien among these ads, sports events, strip shows and automobiles.

Myself, I can sit pretty, given such predecessors as Barthes and a thousand others. Yet I still don’t have the categories to quite understand, for instance, the glue, or – I suspect – starch based adhesive that gives the box its use and mystery. The top of the cereal box is a familiar rectangle divided into two rough triangles traced out by impressed creases. One of the triangles slots under the other. However, to get to that organized state – which we will call the OPENED cereal box – I have to make it so – because the box is eminently closed this morning. It comes closed. It is closed when it finishes its transit of the assembly line. The box is lightly sealed because the contents of the box have to be protected from spills and damage. The cereal, in other words, is very much conditioned not just by the fact that its end use is to be digested, but also by its circulation – its storage, transportation, and distribution on top of shelves in a store. Due to the necessity imposed by the truck, the store manager, and the stock person, I am confronted by a sealed box top. The potentially separable triangles that make up that box top are glued to two interior cardboard flaps. In the face of this, I, an American bred and born in the 20^th century, know just what to do: I must deflower this box top. But from long experience I also know that I can make a mess of it. Too much pressure and you tear the thing, destroying the ideal symmetry that would insert the slot snugly under the mouth of the other triangle. If I exert the right pressure, I can break the adhesive bond and the box top will tent perfectly over the contents, which are, as well, protected by being stored in a little wax paper embryo inside. That wax paper, too, I will have to force open – and for that, scissors is your best friend. That is, if they are at hand. On the other hand, if I am too violent, the box top triangles will rip, and instead of tenting the contents, they will raise up, irregularly torn, revealing the grayish paper under the beautiful red die. Every time, then, I open the cabinet and take out the cereal box, its ruinous state will reproach me. This reproach will attach, like fine starch adhesive, to my thoughts about the cereal – I will be inclined to want to hurry up its consumption, and might well toss the box before it is completely void of honey smack pleasure, in the way one hides things one is ashamed of.

This is doubly bad, since not only will the box and the wax paper embryo eventually be tossed into the garbage can, from when they will go to further litter the earth and foul the water, but at the same time I will be wasting food, organic matter, which is even worse.

Thus, much depends on my successfully applying a degree of force: my shame, my eco-citizenship, and my sense of being a good housekeeper.

The need to seal and break a seal – that is, to have adhesives that both adhere and break apart proportionate to the human force brought upon them – is an old old story, going back to myths of seals of wax that lock away vital messages – as for instance in the case of Bellerophon, who was entrusted with a message that, under its seal, instructed the receiver to kill the messenger. That is one mythic facet – the other facet is that of the trap. The cereal box is, among other things, a trap – a devise that closes on an animal and allows the trapper to open it and capture the animal. Traps are part of a technology that goes far back in human pre-history, like fire and writing.

So much depends on that starch based adhesive.

This morning, I successfully applied just enough, but not too much, force and opened the box. Then I poured the cereal into the bowl. As the box is narrow and rectangular, I do this in a rather eccentric way, out of the side of the box. According to Scott Bruce’s Cerealizing America, the box type in which my honey Smacks are stored is called a billboard box. I am utterly at home with this kind of box – it is part of the syntax of boxes that I have dealt with all my life.

Habit makes the habitus. The cereal box is a monument, among other things, to packaging waste. I know this. Yet it is also a nostalgia object, deeply embedded in my childhood and the childhoods of all the kids I knew, the ones who survived into adulthood, the ones who as parents, inevitably, took on the burden of feeding their kids in the morning.  This is why when I, on rare occasion, buy cereal for myself – for instance, oatmeal flakes – and I buy it in bulk, which makes more sense, I find the bag that I use to store it and carry it with me relatively joyless. The bag disenchants the whole cereal box experience. There is no froglike anthropomorph jumping around in the bag – it is simply brown. It is better. It is rational. It is faceless. It is pure. 

And so the carnival is over.

The psychology of experiment: Kierkegaard

 

There are, in the notes for Kierkegaard’s  Repetition, a number of variations around the subtitle, which Howard and Edna Hong translate as “A venture in Experimenting Psychology”. Kierkegaard also tried “Experimenting Philosophy” and “Experimental-Philosophy”.
This is a suggestive subtitle for a book about – or at least entitled – repetition, since experiment itself is a form of human activity that, ideally, verifies the theories that it is meant to test by creating a situation that can ideally always be repeated by any competent operator. In the dialectical sense in which Constantine Constantius (who may be the experimentor of the book – or may be the subject of the book’s experiment), in a sense the experiment is already repeated even in its very first instance, since it is intended from the beginning to be repeatable – it is designed along the lines of repetition.
But there is another sense in which just the opposite is the case. In Hans Christian Ørsted and the romantic legacy in science, Robert M. Brain points to the Danish scientist Ørsted’s  distrust, perhaps via Goethe or Schelling, of the Newtonian kind of experimentum cruces on the grounds that what the experiment shows may well very with the angle of observation: “It is inherent in the infinitude of Nature that no observer can discover all that is implied by an experiment.” Ørsted is not a negligible figure.  This account from Physics World gives the abbreviated version:
:”While giving a lecture on electricity, electrochemistry and magnetism in the spring of 1820, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted noticed something remarkable: the magnetic needle he was using for one of his demonstrations was deflected by an electric current in a nearby wire. The discovery of this (at first sight) simple and feeble phenomenon came as a great surprise to the scientific community. According to established beliefs among leading scientists in Paris (then the centre of physics and chemistry research), an interaction between electricity and magnetism was not to be expected. Therefore, nobody in Paris was looking for such a connection. But as soon as its existence was realized, electromagnetism sparked a new and extremely fruitful area of physics research. Its discovery was a key step towards understanding the unification of the forces of nature, and it is hard to imagine what life would look like today were it not for the countless telecommunication inventions based on electromagnetism.”
Brain argues that the Romantic fascination with the fragment served as an image for the experiment – which, instead of presenting itself as a designed repetition, becomes, instead, an insight into some particular in the infinite stream of nature. Schlegel’s aphorism goes:
“A fragment must be like a little artwork taken totally away from the surrounding world and perfect in itself, like a hedgehog.”
From this point of view, the design of an experiment, and its performance, was as singular as a poem or painting, requiring the high ingenuity of a … well, Dr. Frankenstein or Faust, to name the avatars.
2.
The experiment in psychology calls to its mirror image, or negative: the psychology of the experiment. Which, I believe, is a rather neglected subject. If we take repetition to be at the heart of the experiment, the Freudian hypothesis that repetition is connected to the death drive – a hypothesis that Freudian normalizers in the U.S. considered an embarrassment – then we have at least one entrance to the experimental framework: it must be cruel.
The notion of the experiment as an exercise in cruelty played a major role in Kierkegaard’s battle with the Corsair, when Moller, his opponent, rightly picked up on the cruelty involved in using an ‘experimental’ method on people, or putting a girl in the “experimental rack.” The point of view on cruelty shifts in relation to the terms in which the discourse is expressed – what is cruelty from the ethical point of view is not so from the aesthetic – and from the religious point of view, as Kierkegaard writes in the Edifying Discourse, “… the cruelty consists in the fact that the Christian has to live in this world and express in the environment of this world what it is to be a Christian.”
There is, at this point, a two-fold question: the first is, what kind of ‘experimenter’ is Constantin Constantinus, the pseudonymn-author of Repetition? And the second is, what does it mean to write a text under the sign of the ‘experiment”? How is a text, formally, an experiment at all?
The first question returns us to the romantic view of the experiment. The romantic physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, as Brain notices in his essay on the Experiment as Fragment, actually classified physics and poetry as similar kinds of fields, and wrote an essay entitled Physics as Art. Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic seems, similarly, to extend to the observation and construction of science as well as poetry. What may seem to be temptation, in the religious sphere, is here a kind of trial and error procedure.
In Repetition, C.C. refers to a story by Justinus Kerner. Kerner, as it happens, wrote the official biography of Mesmer – and it was certainly in Mesmer’s circle that the first ‘psychological experiments’ were carried out. As it happened, many of the ‘subjects’ who became most famous for being easy to induce into trances were women. The Marquis de Puységur left a note about a conversation he had with one of his sonambules, a woman named Genieve. I can’t say that Kierkegaard read these memoirs – I can say that there is an intersigne between Repetition – in which, at one point, C.C. describes himself chasing flies with a fly swatter – and Puységur’s note:
One day I questioned a woman in the magnetic state about the extension of the empire I could exercise upon her. I had without even telling her forced her, as a joke, to give me some blows with a fly swatter that she held in her hand. Well, I said, since you are obliged to hit me, who are only doing you good, I bet that I could, if I absolutely wanted to, make you do anything I wanted; for instance, I could make you take off your clothes, for instance, etc… No, monsieur, she said to me, it isn’t the same; what I am doing doesn’t seem good, and I resisted doing it a long time, but in the end it is only a joke so I yielded, since you absolutely wanted it; but as to what you just said, you could never force me to take off my last garments – my shoes, my bonnet, as much as you please, but after that you will obtain nothing.”
The relation that C.C. establishes with the young man is, one could say, designed as an experiment in suggestion; with the woman he is in love with, one could say, C.C. views her as a side effect – the strong homoerotic band is with the young man; and finally there is C.C.’s own experiment of a return to Berlin. Yet one view of the book is that it is itself – in its totality, including its authorship – an experiment performed by Kierkegaard.
Of course, there are other psychological experiments in Kierkegaard’s works – which seem, at certain points, to merge with the idea of seduction.
3.
It is the links here, always the links:  chains, connections, intersignes, in which an eighteenth century scene of experiment/seduction is played out on a woman - Puysegur’s patient - who resists him, in the end, allowing him the fetish objects - shoe or bonnet - but nothing more. And the odd commonality of the fly swatter to stand out - passed from the patient's hand to C.C.'s, chasing after the revolutionary flies of Berlin.
Under the pressure of the observer's gaze, we watch the experiment as a situation under the control of the pseudonym slip out of his hands, and see it appear in Kierkegaard’s hands, where instead of an experiment applied by C.C. to his 'subjects', it is applied to the text itself - the text is an experiment about experiments. And so we have outlined the first problem, the problem of the first page, the problem of the title.
The problem – psychological? Textual? Scientific? then – such is the way of this slippery signifier – seems to slip at this moment, while we are adjusting our glasses, looking at the screen - where we read the text - out of Kierkegaard’s hands too - or out of his control. For what kind of control does our author behind the author have? Why is it that experiment and seduction, experiment and the female, keep finding each other? And not according to the protocols of the manipulated chance in which the experimenter excels, but according to the protocols of nemesis, of fate, of obsession, of luck, it seems. And the experimenter – who is he, and what are his standards? What are his ‘controls”? What is his institutional background?
The institutional background – science, art, religion – is not just a matter of existential stages. Constantine Constantinus, after all, appears so unattached to economic activity, and so, consequently, at leisure to collect cases, a situation that – perhaps – is the reason the young man in Repetition finds him odd – and later on, decides that he is mad.  If madness is lack of labor – or if madness is labor that is not socially recognized… And if madness creates situations that are, to the madman’s gaze, experiments, although not so recognized by any others in the social order...
Of course, it is true that this has also happened, in the twentieth century, within institutional psychology. The famous Milgram experiment, for instance, about which one can also ask about its double form – for the participants thought they were in one experiment when they were really in another. They thought they were seeing how much pain a subject could take, when they were really subjects testing how much they would obey an order.
The Milgram experiment is, in a strong sense, a gloss on the psychology of the experiment. It is in a line going back to Kierkegaard. And going forward to another figure, a fictional one, who also lacks a socially recognized labor profile.
Who  appeared in 1841, in a story in a magazine published  on the other side of the Atlantic:  Dupin.
“A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;'—he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;'—he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,'—what, in its last analysis, is it?"
"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."
"It is," said Dupin; "and, upon inquiring, of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."
These trans-Atlantic figures and their experiments. We still live in their shadows.