the individual, the solitary, the stone

 

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties.

Yet there are a number of paradoxes here.

In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech.

The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Following Bos, we would see the moraliste writers of the seventeenth century as filling a space between literature and sociology – a space later filled by the novel and the lyric poem, on one end, and the newspaper pundit on the other.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’m a bit of an individualism sceptic. The usual gesture, in neoclassical economics, and in philosophy, etc., is that the individual is the basic level. We reduce collectives and find individuals, just as we reduce metals and gases and liquids to molecules, and then to atoms.

I find this a curious fiction. We evidently start out as embryos, and we are evidently the result of coitus. All of our affordances depend on others. To take chemistry as a model for understanding society is so evidently mad that it registers as an anthropological clue. Something has happened to make modern societies not only accept this model, but try to enforce it. Imagine a society in which the economists all believed in astrology, and developed models of business cycles based on the zodiac. It could, of course, work. Foundations, even fictional foundations, have a certain causal neutrality – the model of the individual as the final unit doesn’t “cause” individualism.

Spinoza’s riff on freedom is well known. It is found in his correspondence. The passage goes:

“For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone's motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions, inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess …”

Spinoza’s stone is, to all intents and purposes, homo oeconomicus. The sovereign consumer.

We are not stones, but under the impress of individualism, we think we are. Spinoza’s gloss on the stone is that it is traveling under an illusion. But his gloss undermines, of course, his point. For a stone that could imagine it was free is different from any stone we know of. 

How we came to be the creatures who imagine they are stones imagining they are free is one way to put the anthropological question.

Achilles in Mississippi

I wonder if classical scholars crosspollinate their reading with scholarship about American ballads from Dixie? There’s a wonderful little essay by Eric McHenry on the origins of Mississippi John Hurt’s murder ballad that goes through fragments and traditions to get to the story of Louis Collins, subject of Hurt’s ballad with the refrain: “angels laid him away.” It is a songline where poetry, fact and misprision intermingle, and isn't this how how the Trojan war became a subject of the two enduring Greek epics? And American epics seem drawn to the Mississippi?

I think the Cohn brothers, with their knowledge of folk song, saw this: which is why O Brother where art thou is far more successful than any peplum flick at getting the Homeric impulse down. Same counts of course for James Joyce, who understood something about how to graft the Irish crooner lyric onto the Odyssey.

What is an epic, after all, than a murder ballad writ large?

The McHenry essay, The Bully in the Ballad, is here.

Never too vile

The Andrew Tate – Greta Thurnberg exchange was all the richer for me in that I had never heard of Andrew Tate, and got to read all about his clammy influencer gig. That hundreds of rightwing dickheads came out in support of Tate made me think that the NYT, though I make fun of it, may not be totally incorrect that Trump marked a new moment on the right.

Trump, after all, had cameo roles in a softcore Playboy movie of the type that the conservatives were once all about banning. No longer, of course. The media, sunk in the type of sexism that would require a barrel of dynamite to blast them out of, never headlined or even noticed Trump’s cameo role in Playboy Video Centerfold 2000, although I’d be my bottom dollar that if Hilary Clinton had a cameo role in Playboy Video Centerfold 2000, we woulda, um, read all about it.

Now, I am all for sex workers. But that is an opinion that used to make the evangelical right and rightthinking righties stand on their hind legs and howl. But that is so yesterday.

In as much as both evangelical and Patriot Boy loved Trump’s shock jock side, the line was crossed. Country Club Republican met Aryan Nation Convict, and since then, the rightwing style is all about: never too vile. The defense of Andrew Tate, who makes his living inducing barely legal girls to do sex cam videos, and who is probably making money on the pimping side, is the latest thing.

Some obscure Brit turd named Julia Hartley-Brewer, who apparently interviews people on tv shown on that sinking island, wrote: I'd choose Andrew Tate's life *every single time* over the life of a half-educated, doom-mongering eco-cultist. And the only car I own is a diesel Tiguan.” As was pointed out on various tweets, this woman is the mother of a sixteen year old girl, so she is presumably down with pimping her out when she is eighteen.

The evangelical right has long perverted the Good News into the Bad News, a cult of rich people where the first are first and get to shit on the last, who are losers anyway. However I never thought they would be down with a sexual revolution led by the Aryan Nation. I’m wrong! Never vile enough is the motto, and choosing the life of a sex trafficker rather than that of an ecologist who “believes” in climate change (and that the world is round and that the planets revolve around the sun) is what they are all about.

Mencius on water

 When I was toiling away, learning philosophy back in Grad school, I pretty much focused on Western philosophy. That’s a vast amount of material there, bucko, and I figured that if – by the time I was doddering on the lip of the grave – I understood some of it, that would be enough of an achievement.

But such projects belong to the long ago of academia. I’ve become more of a pirate intellectual since then – or, less boldly, a dilettante eclecticist. I take my prizes from where I find them.
Which brings me to Mencius’ marvelous question, which is quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the making of pets: “Mencius asked, “Is it right to force water to leap up?” He was taking the position that human nature is inclined to act in certain ways and not others, using the movement of water as an analogy. “Water,” he said, “will flow indifferently to east or west, but it will not flow indifferently up and down.” Now of course, he added, “by striking water you can make it leap up over your forehead and by damming and leading it you may force it up a hill, but do such movements accord with the nature of water?”
It is one index of the fundamental disposition of modernity, over the last three hundred years, that this question simply has no discursive space in which it can be uttered. The discovery of the nature of water is a project we can all recognize, as part of science. But the idea of respecting the nature of water thus discovered forms no part of the world of ideas and actions we inhabit. Mencius’ question is simply weird. We have so little sense that there might be a nature to be respected, there, that we can only view the question as an analogy for the one nature we do respect, human nature. Which, to be fair, is where Mencius goes with it too.
But even if the question exists in a weird and unrecognizable conceptual zone, it does seem more and more relevant to a world in which we have ignored the nature of water, and imposed on it our second nature. We’ve made a lot of water leap over our forehead by damming it. We’ve melted a lot of water by colonizing the atmosphere with our emissions and shit. And we’ve never asked water what it thinks about this. Water doesn’t speak!
But if water doesn’t speak, it has its own nature. Mencius is right about that. We are, I think, gonna have to carve out a conceptual space where water can speak. Or we are going to be in big trouble.

Remembering three foot seven

 

We measure our growth via shoes, clothes, the visits to the doctors office, the photographs (our first grade class, our high school senior class): but though man is the measure of all things, who among these men and women remember growth from the inside? We, after all, were there, in the growing body. I was once a twenty pound thing. I was once a first grader, about a yard and seven inches tall.  That was the summit from which I surveyed the world.  But how I got to that height and beyond it – this is like the mystery of the holy ghost. The track of my track – if I am the measurer, why is it that these inches and feet seem to have come to me from the outside?

Or at least this is my experience. It is a confusing experience. I can describe, for instance, something that happened to me when I was six. I was with other kids, and we were taunting some kid who had moved into the house catty corner from us. This I can remember, but I remember it in an odd space, bi-located – surely I saw it as I was then, at that height, but I remember it vaguely as an onlooker, outside myself. That X, or I, marks the spot. But when memory digs in that X, the I it recovers is handed to the I that recovered it, and neither of them are quite satisfied with this finders keepers arrangement.

spoonwork

 I was talking with a friend about memory work the other day. She said she really didn't remember a lot about the past and I said that when I was in my forties, I did serious memory work. That is, I'd take an object - in my account of this, for this is not the first time I've talked about memory work, the object I select always seems to be a spoon. Thus, a spoon. I'd take that object and I would dream about past iterations of the spoon as it passed through my life. I mean, how many spoons have I held between my thumb and forefinger? But I'd dive down through the river of spoons and try to alight on my first spoons, baby spoons, which in my case meant that the handle of the spoon - when I have a memory-dim lit image of this, it seems the spoon is pewter gray - was shaped like a cartoon figure. Was it Pop-eye? And then I remember the grapefruit spoons, which are associated with living in Atlanta, in the house Dad and Mom bought in Clarkston. The grapefruit spoons seemed to me to be a secret signal of middle-classness. First you afford spoons, tea spoons, soup spoons - blue collar spoons - and then you are a Yankee immigrant in the booming sunbelt and you acquire grapefruit spoons, which are more fragile looking, thinner, than the other spoons, but have a serrated edge. Teeth, in short, on a spoon! Looking in my mind at the grapefruit spoon calls up visions of grapefruit, boxes of it delivered at the door, because my Dad liked grapefruit. And my Dad liked to have boxes of stuff delivered to the door. Two great thins in one!

From grapefruit spoon I can jump to plastic coffee spoons, which I associate with being a college student. I liked to do reading or writing in diners, restaurants, at the counter of Krispy Kreme shops. The white, shiny, mass produced, disposable coffee spoon, and the cardboard cup, which I know are called ripple cups, designed for hot drinks. This image is, to me, as bucolic as any garden Marvell sat in. In the mix of coffee odors and the odors of fried flour and lard, and of course cigarettes - I didn't smoke, but I was a college student in an age in which smoker-non-smoker segregation had not even started. I could probably trip from one plastic white coffee cup to another and retrace the odyssey of my college days - from Tulane to Emory to Centenary College in Shreveport to the University of Texas in Austin. With a stop in France at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier. Although in Montpellier, I believe, the white plastic spoon did not have the prominence it now has. More actual metal spoonwork, there. My life among plastic cutlery - a pretty typical late twentieth century American life, in that respect. Instead of a trail of breadcrumbs, we leave behind the plastic fork, knife and spoon, from the great mass of fast food joints, convenience food stores, diners, etc. -all of them hand to mouth to trash, and thence on the great journey to the ocean, joinging the great plastic islands, or to land dumps. Each of us fleas on Gaia's capacious hide.
No man - or plastic spoon - is an island.

Eduard Sievers coulda been a contender

 

Eduard Sievers coulda been a contender.

Sievers was a German philologist of the early twentieth century. In a series of papers he made a plea for what he called a philology of the ear. A beautiful phrase, that floats there in a gray zone, waiting for a meaning. Sievers, though, thought it had a meaning.
Sievers was active at the same time the imagists in American and England, and the symbolists and futurists in Russia were trying to deliver a massive shock to the poetry of their cultures – a poetry that seemed to have been permanently passed by by prose. There were various paths to the new poetry (for, of course, the new person), and one of those was by looking back and trying to grasp that moment in the past where poetry had gone wrong. For Sievers, similarly, philology was born of the era of silent reading, and thus had forgotten the moment when reading was vital – i.e. part of the living stream. That was the long era of reading out loud.

Sievers thought that sound of the written flowed underground, under the strata of silent reading. And, being a Wilhelmine German professor, naturally turned to the newest tools in the lab – the lab in this case being Wilhelm Wundt, with his instruments to observe and measure sensation. “All spoken human talk possessescircumstantially a certain rhythmic melodic character.” 

This was the principle from which he departed in his most famous book of essays, Rhythmic-Melodic studies.

The question that he pursued, given this point of departure, is whether one can find norms. And the way to do that, he decided, was to find a norm. And to find a norm, what better method than to have different people read the same passage in a book, say, and discover if the sound generally tended towards some notable melody?

There’s a wonderful essay about Sievers by Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus: The Promise of a Philology of theEar: Eduard Sievers and Sound Analysis. It is the story of a false promise – Sievers was increasingly driven to bend sound data he developed to his thesis. And at some point he took the esoteric route, like many of his contemporaries – Klages, for instance, with graphology:

“In the end, he even introduced visual signals, inspired by the spiritualists’ pendulums: metal shapes to which the speaker was to react sensorimotorically in order to find the correct voice and melodization while reading aloud.”

Such madness springs from the search for a norm!
Sievers, then, failed to have that much influence on linguistics or sound studies. But his influence was elsewhere: on Russian poetry. In 1918, in the dawn of the revolution – and the dark preface to the years of starvation – the Institute of the Living Word was founded in Leningrad, by Bely, Blok and Boris Eikenbaum, under the inspiration of Sievers philology of the ear. The Institute had a phonograph recorder named Sergei Bernshtein, and though, like all the best things, it was shut down by the Stalinists (in 1930), Bernshtein’s recording of the poets, including Mandelstam, was preserved. So we know some of their voices!
The age of sound recording, which is around 150 years old, is the golden age of voice ghosts. Our videos, our telephones, are voice activated recorders, preserve for us the voices of the dead – something you realize more as you move into the age where people around you die. In my family, we have pictures of my Mom, but no recording of her voice – a huge loss to us, I think.
From Sievers notion that sound runs under our print culture, the Russian formalists, like Eikenbaum, began to attend to the aural engineering of poetry. Interestingly, Sievers thought that this sound engineering was not only there, but provided us with criteria we could disengage: “This subjective interpretation of written signs by the reader can be either “correct” or “false”, according to whether it matches with the melody imagined by the writer or not.” As someone who has written quite a bit – a graphomaniac of the purest type – I can attest that hearing someone read what I have written does have a melodic component. And I can also attest to the fact that the curious academic custom of reading papers is, often, an exercise in tone-deafness, in as much as the melodic substructure of the text is completely neglected. This isn’t to suggest that mandarin prose is tone-deaf – on the contrary, Henry James’ late style, as all Jamesians know, is much more oral than his earlier style, since he dictated it. Rather, it is to point to the way that papers edited for the eye often sound eyeballed rather than tongued when they come out at the podium.
This year, I will work on licking my sentences into place.