The reactionary rictus: Macron's deformation of social insurance

 Paul Quinio's editorial in Liberation about the collapse of the debate on the "deform" of the social insurance system in France revolves around a reference to an apocryphal phrase of Churchill's: that democracy is the worst system of government, except any other. That quip has always been a conditional surrender of an essentially reactionary stance, according Capital and the established power the lion's share of the discursive wealth of the nation - as well as the real wealth - and calling it democracy. France has never submitted to this kind of thing. The strike, the demonstration, all are not dead in France.

Macron viewed his larger task one of "normalizing" France - a nice little Thatcherization with some euphemism liberalism thrown in, like "apologizing" for colonialsm (while of course keeping French troops in Africa whenever the cause arises). The "reform"/deform of the social insurance system was key to Macron's larger cause. Quinio is entirely right about Macron's ultimate responsibility for the further decline of "democracy":

"But we must observe that the Chief of State has forgotten that the French, in barring the route to the extreme right, have in the second round of the presidential shown proof of their political maturity. Since, Emmanuel Macron has made a show of having been elected "normally" on his program (the reform of the retirement system) or his person. To this political maturity he has only responded with contempt for a non-neglible part of his electorate. To turn his back on the spirit of his election (and the promises of his second round campaign) is all the more an error in that he doesn't have, politically, the means, sitting as he does on a relative majority. That he enfeebles his majority, that he enfeebles he himself isn't really the important thing. But that, by his choice, he has raised up the French against each other, at the risk of further fragilizing the machinery of democracy that permitted him to fill his place, is much more serious."

I don't think Macron gives a shit for democracy, and so I am not totally in accord with this editorial, that credits Macron and the majority with good faith. This rhetorical assumption of good faith, which journalists, washed in the neoliberal waters, bring to the powerful seems to fight the forces arrayed against democracy on the worst terrain possible. However, it is true that Macron has exacerbated a division, a fracture, in France that is symbolized by the very deformation of the system he is trying to put through - a deformation that will make the lives of the upper class that much more cossetted and the lives of the rest that more ugly. Financially, the reform is judged not by a market standard - by that standard, the interest on French bonds shows that there is no crisis - but on a fictional-symbolic standard - it is the crisis of tomorrow that requires this action now. Interestingly, other crises of tomorrow - for instance, a climate change that might well wipe out French agriculture, decimate the rivers, and destroy the lifestyles of the majority - are to be approached petit a petit, until, alas, we all have to adopt to the Sahara-fication of the world.

The crisis of the tomorrow is here today: an out of control oligarchy, a muffled health crisis due to despair, a disenfranchised (politically and economically) youth, and an establishment that considers rules are for others. Myself, I see no way that Macron's "reforms", which will most likely be voted in by the Senate, will last past Macron's tenure. The deformed system will be so swollen with exceptions it will be a joke. Although: it was always meant to be a joke. On the principle that he who laughs last laughs best. That is what reactionary culture and politics amounts to.

liberalism, neo-liberalism and the justice system

 

I was reading Madame de Stael’s Considerations on the principle Events of the French Revolution – as one does – and found this perfectly formed sentence that rang my chimes. De Stael is explaining the predominance of a Richelieu or a Mazarin, who though foreigners came to possess such absolute power in France, and she produces this perfectly balanced sentence:

« Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. »


« Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. »
Translation: The individuals of this nation are too lively to submit to the perseverance it takes to be a despot; but he who has that perseverance is very formidable in a land where, the law having never reigned, one judges only by the event."
De Stael’s Considerations, according to the introduction by Laurent Theis, made a large stir when they appeared in April, 1818, the year after her death.. Remusat wrote that it was an event on par with the appearance, in 1802, of Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity, De Stael had died in 1817, as the White Terror was abating, but while the Reaction to the Revolution was still strong.
By the time she died, she was a force apart, a real force in Europe. Having, through her father, the fabulously rich banker Jacques Necker, entry to all the great houses of the Ancien Regime before the start of the Revolution, and being a brilliant woman – a quick study who instinctively combined the culture of sensibility and the ideals of reason in her own bearing in the world – she had made herself almost singlehandedly (shout out here to Benjamin Constant, her sometimes lover) the transitional figure between 18th century revolutionary principles and 19th century liberalism.
It is from that perspective – a classical liberalism that was still magmatic, still unclassical – that she surveyed the Revolution.
This, to her, meant having a strong sense of the France of the Old Regime – a France with its multiple terrors and wars, and its striking inability to produce a governmental form that would legitimate the social hierarchy by which it was ostensibly ruled.
Liberalism, which gives scope to inequality of wealth and power as an inexpungable part of human society, and preferable to the attempt to abolish them -an attempt that is both violent and futile – has long had a hard time with justice. If justice before the law is, in theory, where all citizens are equal, the practical situation of justice forms not an exception to the rule of inequality but a reflection of it. How could it be otherwise? The third power of government is based on a theoretical miracle, even as liberalism's great charm as a political system is the acknowledgement that miracles don't happen.
“One judges only by the event” – by what the powerful do, not the rules to which they are theoretically bound. In this, I think we can see reflected not only French history, but American history too. In our late neo-liberal hour, it is characteristic, maybe diagnostic, that the breakdown of all parts of the justice system – from police enforcement to the almost comic marketplace in lawyers that gives the rich a headstart to the imbecility and political ambitons of the judges to the inhumanity of the jails – we are witnessing something like an Ancien Regime moment. De Stael’s idea of the outsider who gets inside and becomes a despot is a pretty prophetic description of the extreme right leader – Trump and Bolsanaro being the latest examples. These leaders thrive when the system of justice unwinds as completely as they have unwound in the U.S. Surely among the multiple reasons that Obama was succeeded by Trump is the Obama administration’s idea that punishing big businessmen and businesses was an economically bad idea – in essence, giving their seal to the oligarchy. The Chickenshit club of the Justice department – as Jesse Elsinger called it in his book – casts its shadow today. Who among us thinks that the scoundrels at the top, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, are going to receive the same treatment, the same punishments as some black 19 year old accused of selling an ounce of crack? Nobody. The very idea is laughable. The whole of the legal profession exists to make that a no-go. Les Miserables, dressed up in American popular culture, is going on every day in every city in America, and we all know it.
Events ride mankind, and always will. But rules soften events, make them easier riders. As the rules cease to apply, we all feel the spurs in our flanks, drawing blood. They will ride us to death.

Alchemists among us, blockhainin'

 

When Marx overlays the transformations of money into commodity and commodity into money with the parodic language of alchemy, he is following a theme that goes back not only to Faust, but to the beginning of the theory of the political economy. About which, Carl Wennerlind has written an essay entitled “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” Wennerlind’s essay  proposes that the 17th century natural philosophers took the alchemical proposal of creating wealth out of nothingness – or base metal – quite seriously. And, vice versa, "when the Bank of England showed in 1694 how credit-money could function, there was a rapid falloff in the patronage of alchemists…”

Curious phrase, credit-money. We would now simply say money, since it wouldn’t occur to any possessor of same to assume that the material ot of which the money was made was equal in value to the money. You won’t get much for a strip of green paper that doesn’t have the magical symbols of U.S. power on it now, will you? Of course not.

“Credit-money… served as a means of payment and had the capacity to circulate widely. These paper notes were wholly or partially convertible into assets or income streams designated as security. As such, they could fully complete a transaction and serve as a store of value…” In the system of political thinking that held at the time, this was as miraculous as the transmutation of metals promised by the Philosopher’s stone – or so our author claims. It is for this reason that the two things – the bank and the alchemist – were held in the same field, as substitutes one for the other. Or rather, the bank, by the alchemical feat of creating value out of de facto currency, drove out the alchemists, who’d been patronized by the Stuarts. ‘This transition from alchemy to credit was swift and complete, perhaps nowhere more dramatically evidenced than in the Duke of Orleans’s dismissal of his court alchemists in favor of John Law’s land-backed paper currency.”

That last event has an aura, doesn’t it? The court alchemists are always trying to get back in. The latest species of them mechandize pseudo-currencies, which have cleverly named themselves “crypto-currency”. A crypto currency is a contradiction in terms – currency itself is the most obvious thing, and has to be in order to operate. A crypto-currency, on the other hand, props itself on the subliminal idea that all that obviousness is simply the surface of some conspiracy, against which the little guy – the little guy who spends a lot of time fantasizing about internet poker and such – has to protect himself.

Carl Wennerlind wrote about this phenomenon in another article for the Berfois, an online magazine so erudite that few people have heard of it. https://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/carl-wennerlind-credit-alchemy/ Which might be the reason that Sam Bankman-Fried was invited to the big NYT Dealbook summit instead of Carl Wennerlind. More’s the pity, for while SBF is an Adderall addled son of privilege whose business career is a xray of our current state of corruption, including the indulgent justice and regulatory system that seems deadest on giving him the tenderests of pats on the hand for defrauding thousands of customers of billions of dollars. Wennerlind could have spoken about a genuine topic: the perennial search for absolute unearned wealth. A sort of zero in the general economy of sacrifice.

Here's a quote from the Berfois article.

“Despite many reports of successful transmutations [of base metals into gold], efforts to find the lever that would give mankind control over the money stock failed to materialize. At this point, the same social reformers who had pursued alchemical transmutations switched their attention to the promotion of a generally circulating credit currency, authoring some of the first proposals for such a currency. The similarity between alchemy and credit was far from lost on them, with one person suggesting that a well-functioning bank is:

 

Capable of multiplying the stock of the Nation, for as much as concernes trading in Infinitum: In breife, it is the Elixir or Philosophers Stone.

Casualties of Credit [Wennerlind’s book] argues that there was indeed a link between alchemy and credit, but one that goes deeper than credit money replacing alchemy as the solution to the scarcity of money problem. I suggest that the new political economy that laid the foundation for the Financial Revolution was greatly influenced by the Scientific Revolution, which included alchemical, as well as, Baconian and probabilistic thinking.”

Winnerlind’s article turns on a history that is overlooked by the usual historians of economics. Though you will see beaucoup titles and phrases about the “magic of the market” and the “alchemy of finance”, these things are taken as Disney metaphors, with no roots in the actual beliefs of businessmen and bankers. Winnerlind’s history is a reminder that no, actual businessmen and bankers do search for philosopher’s stones, which, at this present moment, is dressed up as encrypted blockchain technology – something that is as real and as futile as alchemical torts and the search for transforming lead into gold. The seventeenth century writers had already discovered that money is metaphor  - “Materia Prima, because, though it serves actually to no use almost, it serves potentially to all uses.”

We are still there, guys.

 

All of which had to do with England’s problem in the Early Modern Era – a shortage of specie. The solution proposed by some members of the Hartlib circle – the most advanced philosophers in England, including Boyle and William Petty – was to fund experiments to turn tin into gold.

the chuckle track and the obscure object of bourgeois desire

 

Adam doesn’t like the tv shows I watched when I was a kid, which are easy to find on the net. Especially the comedies. He can’t overlook or overhear the laugh track – an object that is also called a laughtrack and a laughtertrack. I’ve told him that some shows had live audiences – I have a dim memory that Norman Lear shows had live audiences – but Adam is a media wise child. He might be ten, but he’s a Parisian, no country bumpkin: “didn’t they put laugh and applause signs up for the audience”?

When I was Adam’s age, laughtracks were the rage. You couldn’t watch a comedy on network television without an accompanying laugh track. Watching them now, the laughtracks seem grotesque. They have aged badly. They make the exercise in nostalgia painful.

I’m not sure when the laugh tracks disappeared. After about 1980, I stopped watching network television. And even now, I watch network series, when I watch them, on Netflix. However, it would not surprise me if the laughtracks were junked around the time the Berlin wall fell, and throughout the world the old monopoly television companies were revamped, an event that had incalculable political consequences in so many places: Italy and the U.S., in particular.

The prehistory of orchestrated audience response reaches back to long before the Cold War – all the way back to the commencement of the entertainment industry in the 19^th century. In 1820, in the full swing of the reaction in France, a company was founded in Paris with the title: L’Assurance des Succès dramatiques. This agency, run by a former wigmaker named Porchon and his partner, a M. Sauton, would hire people to make a play or an opera a success. These claqueurs, as they were called,  would be sure to applaud, laugh loudly at the jokes, cry copiously at the sad parts, and in other ways make sure that a playwright’s opening night went well. Porchon would even loan money out to the writer – Alexander Dumas was one of his grateful clients.

Orchestrating audience response, before, had been an idiosyncratic matter of rivalry between aristocrats and the theeater troupes they patronized. Here, however, was a taste of capitalism – putting audience response on an industrial basis, the same kind of logic Marx and Engels celebrated in the Communist Manifesto:

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.”

And so it was with the entertainment industry.

We possess a ‘Memoir of a Claqueur” (1828) by one Louis Castel Robert. Robert’s story was of a reality that requires, for its full comprehension,  the intense cultivation of history – the history of France in the 1820s. Having inherited some money, and being of a tender, philosophical disposition, Robert, a young man in Paris, naturally pissed his funds away on drink, women, books and idleness. At the end of this process he confronted an unpleasantness that many of his type encountered, viz, debtors prison. In Sainte Pelagie, he had the good fortune to fall in with a man named Mouchival. Mouchival was a common looking fellow – yet Robert soon learned he was not so common after all. He was only in Sainte Pelagie due to a misunderstanding, practically - having co-signed on a loan for a friend – for Mouchival, like Porchon, was always a friend in deed – he found himself being charged with it. The man, however, was quite equal to the situation. As an entrepreneur in the claqueur field, he had simply written to a rich client who fancied himself a dramatist and expressed the need for some cash, for which he would, in the future, supply such services as may be required, yours truly. Thus, he was utterly confident of rescue. Rescue, in the form of francs, eventually did appear, but sent by an actress – through which he, in turn, rescued his promising young acquaintance, Robert. Which is how Robert found a place to fill in the world as a claqueur.

The claqueur was a character type in Paris, a figure out of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The yellow gloves of the claqueur were particularly distinctive, and became a nickname for the claque crowd. – les gants jaunes. Robert writes that Mouchival gave him ‘elementary instructions in the science of cabales, and treated, as an experienced master, all the articles of the tactics proper to making plays succeed or fail.” Robert learned the “circumstances in which it was necessary to applaud or whistle, cry or laugh, be silent or scream, yawn or blow your nose.”

As Mouchival soon teaches the young man he has inexplicably taken under his wing, the surface work of the claqueur is just one link in the chain of profit. A more noticeable link is in the work of selling tickets. A certain number of tickets are allotted, free, to the claqueur. He can sell the superfluity himself. But the claqueur is not the only one to scalp tickets. Indeed, a good part of the theater world, from the actor to the usher to the critic, supplements their income on such sales.

The ontogenesis of the media world is here: content is rarely the profit item. It is the advertising, the peripherals – from concert t-shirts to influencer endorsements – that keeps the wheels going.

Interestingly, in the seventies, there was a show where the laugh track became, for the writers and creators, a controversial issue: MASH. This was a comedy about the Korean War, with obvious reference to the late Southeast Asia war. The producer, Larry Gelbert, did not want a laugh track. The network did: “Gotta have a laugh track. Because they always had had laugh tracks. This was so people would distinguish it from a drama. That was what they kept saying.” Gene Reynolds, the producer I believe, folded, but put in “a very discrete laugh track.”

Alan Wagner, president of programming for CBS in those days, was a proponent of laugh tracks: “The laugh track is overused – and I’m guilty of that as much as anybody. I’ve overused it badly, with some pretty core pilots, trying to goose the audience’s response. And the guy who invented that machine, I don’t think he did a very good job. There are some pretty raucous sounds in there – its hard to make it subtle. Hard to get a chuckle track out of that.”

Among tv comedy insiders, according to Saul Austerlitz’s book on the sitcom, Seinfeld, a hit comedy of the 90s, was positively ancient in its format compared to the Larry Sanders show. The latter dispensed for the most part  with the laugh track. It was the future. Austerlitz singles out Friends as “the last of the hugely successful traditional sitcoms, laugh track and all”.  It is not that the laugh track totally disappeared in the era of the Global War on Terror, but it was broadcast to an audience that no longer recognized this mechanized form of claqueur.

Perhaps the post-laugh track era, like the post-truth, post-post, post-Twitter, post-Facebook, post-democracy, post-reactionary, post post post Roger era, is a symptom of something. But being no pundit, I can’t bullshit a generalization here. Although I do know that exploiting the exploiters, the revolutionary takeover of the orchestration of audience response, is not on the table. Capitalism will find a way.

 

Blues for the "we"

 

I’m a great believer in the impersonal “one”, and the editorial “we”. What the linguists call an agent defocuser. However, as an editor of academic papers, I have found that neither “one” nor the editorial “we” is in favour at the moment. It is the age of “I” or the passive verb. The former I often find intrusive, and the latter cowardly.

However, you can’t be American and to the manner born without knowing, in your bones, that “one” is a hopelessly upper class agent defocuser. To say: One doesn’t do such things, is to mark oneself as the type of person who either goes to the Yale Club or wants to go to the Yale Club.

I wonder why this class aura hangs around the “one”? And why it has so little oral usage – in the oral, one becomes, oh so fatally, you. In Benjamin’s essay, the Storyteller, the oral nature of the story, as opposed to the novel, has to do with the space of its performance. The storyteller in the village is face to face with the audience, within touching distance. And that touching distance shines out in the American “you”. There are novels written in the “you” form, and they seem somehow to be wearing the wrong clothes – for the “you” is a barroom bark, and perhaps should be paired with the “one” as bluecollar to blue blood. Myself, I like to think of myself as a blue collar upstart, an imposter of sorts, and perhaps this is the reason I am so fond of “one”. But I am also fond of “we” as an editorial gesture. But there is “we” and there is “we”.  The “we” that makes me cringe doesn’t reference the text that both writer and supposed reader are inhabiting, but a social space. In that bastard form of prose, the newspaper column, the we bleeds all over the place. The we goes to fancy restaurants, worries about sending the kids to prep school, and observes the other – which might even have its own “we”! – as going to diners, beating the kids, and voting for Trump.

I am going to lose the fight for the editorial “we”, a less snobby and more inclusive doll. One knows this. But one tries, nonetheless.

Roots of the paranoid republic

 

When Kurt Lewin came to America in 1929, he was already a famous figure in Berlin. Lewin had started out in social philosophy, the kind of thing practiced and theorized by Georg Simmel, but he had taken a turn into social psychology, and held a chair in Gestalt psychology at the Berlin university in the twenties. Having been trained in philosophy, he was fascinated by the underlying theory of the psychological experiment, criticizing the idea that the application of statistics and modelling the psychology laboratory on physics or the natural sciences was the best route for social psychology’s object: the mechanisms of human interaction.

These are the dry vocational aspects of Lewin’s life in 1929. However, you can’t explain Lewin’s influence simply by referring to his papers. Rather, there was something about the man himself, apparently. This is the story told in James Korn’s history of the use of deceit in social psychological experiments:

“A German-Jewish immigrant … radically changed the direction of American social psychology. Kurt Lewin already had a following in the United States as a result of an article

published by J. E Brown (1929) and an invited lecture at Yale University in 1929. The Yale lecture foreshadowed the nature of his impact because, although most of the audience could not understand what he said (he lectured in German), his obvious enthusiasm held the attention of his listeners.”

 

In my experience, Yale lectures are usually not to write home about: they are often detail distressed – too much or too little – and the speaker makes no attempt to put life into what he or she is saying. A professor at Yale told me a long, amusing anecdote about Lacan’s lecture there – which, much to the surprise of his hosts, was not only incomprehensible – it was Lacan, after all, and used the model of elephant sexuality to explain something – but was also in French. In the professor’s recounting, he had to restrain a colleague who was threatening to go on stage and clock Lacan in mid metaphor.

 

Perhaps Yale talks bring out the bizarre. In Lewin’s talk, he demonstrated his theories by showing a short film he made of his wife’s eighteen month old niece attempting to sit on a rock. The film was an expose of the way even an infant sequences a task without having a specific experience to guide her.

 

To give an entire talk, in 1929, in German was, let us say, a bold move: that it added to Lewin’s glamor rather than diminished it is pretty impressive.

 

Korn’s book is about the rise and relative fall of using deception – often employing confederates, as in a con game – to create a social psychology experiment; Korn claims that the origins of this kind of thing, or at least the impulse that led to experiments that are known to all, such as the Milgrim experiment, came originally from Lewin’s work and influence on his students – students who also included businessmen. In fact, Lewin was fascinated with organization, including business organizations, and it is no weirdness that his American biographer, Alfred J. Marrow, was an industrialist.

 

Lewin’s film clip – and his early advocacy of filming subjects – is not only about his underlying theory of what social psychology should be doing – discovering sequences, not behavioural pairs on the Pavlovian – Behaviouralist model – but also about his subjectivity as a product of the Weimar era. Marrow’s biography doesn’t mention it, but it is not hard to imagine that Lewin was a fan of Fritz Lang’s films. In particular M., the film of Lang and his scriptwriting wife, Thea von Harbou, that is in many ways exactly like a social psychology experiment, with secret observers, such as fake blind beggars, watching the streets for the child murderer and marking him so that others could find him. It is odd to think of how Lewin transposed the modernity of Weimar Berlin to mid America – exactly mid, as he spent his best years in America in Iowa, at the University of Iowa’s Child Welfare center.

 

However, his deception experiments were not played on children – but on the usual prey, college students. At Harvard he conducted an experiment on the “fear response” in groups that was a model of the deception experiment – it was structured around a supposed experiment that was really a lure for the real experiment. For instance, students or other volunteers would be told they have to solve problems. Then the psychology student would say that they had completed the experiment, and would they please stay in the room and write down their analysis of their experience. He would walk out the door and lock it. Then smoke would be directed through a grill in the door, and people in the ceiling above the room would watch to see how the group was affected by finding smoke, that is, evidence of fire, and a locked door.

 

Fun.

 

Or as Korn puts it: “In this study we see many of the deceptive elements that would be repeated later in social psychological research: a bogus task, misinformation from the experimenter, and hidden observers.”

 

It interests me that the controversy about these small scale deceptions has been about the ethical problem of how they might harm the participants, but not about the larger problem of infecting the public discourse with the scientific practice of deception, and the power-relationships this entails. What does this do to the “scientist”? What does it do to the larger public that becomes aware of it? How does this ease with deceptive elements work when they are annexed, say, by national intelligence agencies?  Although most of the controversy about the ”post-truth” era is an invitation to fake deepthink, there was, during the Cold War years and up until now, a comfort with deception on the part of the intelligentsia and the powerful that fundamentally undermined the trust needed to maintain a democracy. And I think these routinized deceits have never been given the historical prominence or consideration they deserve. The construction and use of  paranoid machinery is one of the discoveries of the twentieth century that is having a massive effect on the twenty-first century.

 

The citizen-paranoid seeks a society-paranoid – which is the very image of authoritarianism.

 

Yet, this picture of Lewin is not complete. He was, in truth, a New Dealer liberal, an advocate for less authoritarian ways of teaching – in a series of famous experiments, his group at Iowa showed how more democratic classrooms were actually less liable to arguments, tantrums and bickering. The authoritarian method of the Lewin liberal is interwoven with the liberal goal of a society of tolerance. We toil in this net.   

Looking back at the midlife crisis

 

 

In the middle of my life – a point that I crossed while sitting in a messy studio  apartment in Austin – I looked around, and then at the mirror – where else? – and thought about the pattern of failure in my life. Of course, this was that old thing,  the cardboard middlelife crisis and all that, but out of the stereotypes in which we are locked we sometimes achieve spiritual insight. We sometimes find a key, unlock  the stereotype, and step out.  

My answer, my key, to this failure I felt was: that I just could not take boredom. Boredom stuck in my craw.

Or perhaps I should say my inability to endure boredom for the sake of making money. In this, I am spiritually one with the street people, the addicts, the semi-professional criminals – with all of those who never quite grew up, whose immaturity is caught in their throat. The difference is that, among the decayed Peter Pan gang, there is – as you will find out very quickly if you talk to them - an astonishing nostalgia for the larva days – high school pranks, days of honey in the suburban hive. I hate that shit, which bored me at the time, and bores me in memory still.

Which made  me want to start over again and ask whether my failure, here, is not so much that I fly from boredom, as that I am bored at the wrong time and by the wrong things. Add to this another confusion: although sometimes I will say, like anybody else, that such and such a thing is boring – and mean, like anybody else, that it is contemptible, that I would like to step on it, shit on it, spit on it, expel it – at other times I despise this kind of language. Boredom, I think – at these other times – is a kind of test, an exercise. It has a necessity, especially in relation to the ecstatic, the sublime, the interesting. To fly boredom in these cases is to fly the depths. To be unable to be bored is to be unable to be. All of which ties me into knots.

If there is midlife crisis, there is literature. There is, for instance, Kierkegaard. A man to turn to when one is locked in a stereotype.

Our man, in the Concept of Dread (or Anguish), has a lot to say about boredom. In the fourth chapter, Kierkegaard asks what happened to the demons. Why do Christians no longer talk about the demons in 19th century Europe? Are they ashamed?

This is the starting point for Kierkegaard’s discussion of the demonic. He makes a two-fold approach to the demonic. One approach is to see it in terms of communication. Communication, for Kierkegaard, is ultimately about revelation, and revelation is ultimately about the divine. Every act of true revelation is divine. And revelation is at the heart of communication. Thus, every act of non-revelation is on the side of the devil, the ‘spirit of negation’. The demon is, ultimately, non-communicative – on the ethical level. He is closed, locked. The demon is the antithesis of the key – all the keys the demon holds out are skeleton keys, keys to nothing and everything.

 However, granting this two-sidedness, the communication that doesn’t communicate,  what is the positive content of revelation, or communication? What is affirmed? The affirmed is, ultimately, the continuous. Continuity itself. The devil’s share, then, is the sudden – the German term seems to me to contain the forked tail more audibly.  Plotzlich, that which puts itself in opposition to the continuous.

Here we have to engage in some dialectical shenanigans, because if the divinely continuous is really to be continuous, it must contain the sudden. The demon with the false key must be in the house, y’all.  Revelation, after all, has its own suddenness. This gets us to boredom. Boredom is, Kierkegaard maintains, incommunicable – it expresses nothing. This is because its content is the content-less. The content of boredom is no content.

This polarity between the sudden and the continuous explains the boring core of entertainment as we have come to know it. Boredom lifts, briefly, at the end of the horror movie or thriller, and it is in that lift that we retrospectively justify our scares and the fine ethical line we cross by watching, without any kind of mourning or sympathy, numerous killings. Or I should say, not only at the end, but the way in which the entertainment lays itself out as a series of ends. In the classic archetype of the horror movie, the monster always comes back after it has been, supposedly, killed. This is a way of playing with the end as a viewpoint from which to look at any cultural product. This is where killing takes our secular knowledge – death is really an end – and makes it ambiguous.

Myself, at the time of my midlife crisis, was  possessed by the l’wa of boredom, longed for a continuum of suddenness – for the ultimate miracle, for nothing to become something all of the time. Never want to work/always want to play.

Play, as opposed to playfulness, was just what is lacking in Kierkegaard – what pulls him to the right.  Still, what a writer to have at hand for us residents in a lost modernity, for which we have only the most comic of names!

Here’s a bit from K.

“Thus the demonic always is, and thus unfreedom becomes anxious, and thus its anxiety moves. Hence, the tendency of the demonic toward mime, not in the sense of the beautiful but in the sense of the sudden, the abrupt, which life itself often gives opportunity to observe.

The demonic is the contentless, the boring.

In the case of the sudden, I have called attention to the esthetic problem of how the demonic may be represented. To elucidate what already has been said, I shall again raise the same question. As soon as one wants to have a demoniac speak and to have him represented, the artist who is to solve this problem must be clear about the categories. He knows that the demonic is essentially mimical; the sudden, however, he cannot achieve, because it interferes with his lines. He will not cheat, as if he were able to bring about the true effect by blurting out the words etc. Therefore, he correctly chooses the very opposite, namely, the boring. The continuity that corresponds to the sudden is what might be called extinction. Boredom, extinction, is precisely a continuity in nothingness. Now the number in the legend can be understood somewhat differently [The legend here is one about the devil meditating for 3,000 years about how to destroy humanity] . The 3,000 years are not accentuated to emphasize the sudden; instead, the prodigious span of time evokes the notion of the dreadful emptiness and contentlessness of evil. Freedom is tranquil in continuity. Its opposite is the sudden, but also the quietness that comes to mind when one sees a man who looks as if he were long since dead and buried. An artist who understands this will see that in discovering how the demonic can be represented he has also found an expression for the comic. The comic effect can be produced in exactly the same way. When all ethical determinants of evil [IV 400] are excluded, and only metaphysical determinants of emptiness are used, the result is the trivial, which can easily have a comic aspect.”

Ah that dead and  buried person! This was my image of the quiet desperation that consists in  selling his or her boredom for money. And using that money to buy plenty of nothing – suddenness in all its multiple forms and varieties.

The me who dreamed in this way, years ago, is measurably different from the me with a certain ease, an achieved peace with the culture of the bored. Kierkegaard was a bachelor, and it shows, it shows. Or at least, this is how I register the change in myself.