A cat must have three different names: Eliot as a young critic

 

Cynthia Ozick wrote a famous reckoning with  T.S. Eliot – and his problem with the Jews – for the New Yorker in  1989. The beginning of the essay is marred by the “impression journalism”that identifies Ozick with the proto-cultural warriors, always on the lookout, then, for the decline in Western Civ. Ozick claims, without any references whatsoever, that Eliot is no longer taught in the colleges and the universities, and that he is only remembered for Prufrock. This, at the end of a decade in which the longest running musical on Broadway was called Cats. Ozick, like her soulmates on  the conservative cultural magazine of that decade, the New Criterion, dispenses with providing evidence as though that, itself, were some persnickety politically correct trick. Thus,  there is no grubby looking through actual college catalogues to prove her point, or looking at Anthologies to see if Eliot has so palpably dwindled. In this kind of journalism,  impression quickly reduces to fact and one can move on to nostalgic evocations of better times. While Ozick did not  debase herself by going to actual anthologies, I did.  The 2003 Norton Anthology includes The Wasteland, Prufrock, and one of the Four Quartets. I am almost positive the edition in the 80s included the same material.

Cultural warrior stuff always turns out to be a dinner table impression among emeritus professors viewing the youth with the usual bitter eye.

However, Ozick, while ticking off the cultural warrior boxes – the decline of high art, the substitution of “equal opportunity for minorities” rather than canonical reading lists that include Shakespeare and Jane Austin, etc. – does see two things about Eliot: the anti-semitism and the Prufrock-ery of the “impersonality” urged on the poet – the latter a canonical motif among the New Critics. For coming out foursquare against Christian nationalism, Ozick probably earned some demerits from her rightwing comrades.

Good for her.

It is true, though, that English departments in the fifties and the sixties were crammed with people who thought “real” literary criticism began with Eliot’s collection, The Sacred Wood, 1920. However, the young bucks in the English departments in the seventies had access to and enthusiasm for a whole buncha translated material – and here I don’t just mean the French theory tribe. Bakhtin and Benjamin opened people’s eyes to the 20s. Bold spirits, who went on to found October Magazine, also discovered the Russian formalists and futurists. In the light of, say, Skhlovsky’s Art as Technique from 1917, T.S. Eliot’s once admired The Perfect Critic from 1920  looks positively provincial.

Partly, this is a matter of style. The great essayists of the 1920s, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, all brought a voice to the essay. From Montaigne’s essays on down, the voice has made its uneasy truce with history (personal and suprapersonal) in the essay. Musil, at the time Eliot was writing, was brooding on how the essay was working its way into the novel.

Eliot brought into the essay his prestige as a great poet and his vocational uncertainty – or rather, the uncertainty of where, outside of poetry, he fit. He was not a teacher, but he adopted the teacher’s tics in the essay. Thus, there is a rumble of great names, often for effect; there are adages that would make good witticisms, but are poor proofs; there is Eliot’s conflicted sense of the modern, and his resolve to close down all those uncertainties with doctrine.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot. Indeed.

The Perfect Critic begins with a quotation from one of Eliot and Pound’s enthusiasms of the time: Remy de Gourmont.  de Gourmont’s heavy fan, Pound, made large claims for him that have no corresponding echo in France, or elsewhere. Eliot, like Pound, seems entirely oblivious of Mallarme. Gourmont was a member of the Mercure clique, until he fell out with Rachilde, the wife of the editor. Still, he was a considerable figure in the symbolist circle around the Mercure. The Mercure, In October, 1935, devoted most of an issue to Gourmont, while acknowledging that after World War I, he was not a much quoted man. “Remy de Gourmont, who had enchanted the friends of letters by the openness of his mind and because he joined boldness to clairvoyance and the sense of ideas to that of language, was soon cast aside. His name is not forgotten, but when young litterateurs cite him, they distance themselves from him with a summary judgment that shows that they know neither his work nor him.”

If I had world and time, perhaps I would know Remy de Gourmont and his work – but I know enough of it to know that Eliot’s yoking of Aristotle and Gourmont in his essay was, to say the least, ill-judged. Although since Eliot takes Aristotle on such general terms, perhaps it was the best he could do for Gourmont. Nothing, to me, is more embarrassing in Eliot’s essays of this time than his presentation of major “Western” figures in a sort of powerpoint way, evoking their greatness but forgetting to explain their pertinence. The pertinence of Aristotle to Eliot’s own sense of criticism seems to consist of the fact that Aristotle analysed tragedy. And you can too!

Such is the spirit.

Eliot was very concerned to exhibit his disaffection with the modern era, that age of disintegration, but his essays in the twenties bear the mark of the twenties. For instance, the decade’s appetite for record making: most homeruns hit, fastest Transatlantic plane time, etc. In that spirit, Eliot likes to begin by giving you the recordholders.

“Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the

last. After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold – I think it will

be conceded – was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic, a popularizer

rather than a creator of ideas.”

The paltering “perhaps”, the “I think it will be conceded” – no wonder Eliot “overlooks” Hazlitt, or Ruskin, or the romantic critics – de Quincey, the Keats of the letters, Shelley – who would put down ‘Coleridge was the greatest” if they felt it was, and would dare to be damned assertively. “I think it will be conceded” is the kind of pleading one leaves to the family soliciter, fudging the will.

What Eliot is pleading for, in this essay, is a criticism that takes its objects “objectively” and without “emotion.” Now, it is true that the emotion of a geologist finding an unusual rock compound must be separated from the compound itself, though it may be a clue to its rarity or the surprise of its being where it is. But there is little reason to think cultural products are best viewed in that same light – or even that they can be viewed in that same light. The argument that even texts with which one violently disagrees can be understood formally is true. But we distinguish criticism from a lesson in grammar by something other – which is what I would call voice. Eliot knew his voices – the Wasteland is full of them – but he didn’t know what voice to do literary criticism in. Woolf inherited her right to literature, and Lawrence fought for his. Eliot, on the other hand, writes as though he were turning it in for a grade.

Which is unkind. Eliot, like any other freelancer, had to make his way around a literary scene in England that was either avant-garde and run on the trust funds of some rich heirs – and made by Wyndham Lewis types who were cadging drinks and dwelling places and counting their pence, without any retirement plan. Eliot, one feels (oh, I am doing it!) always had a retirement plan.

Eventually, of course, Eliot gave up the notion that criticism must, done right, be done without any passion and plumped for the “sensibility”, a word that can encompass instinct and intellection without too much question.

Whenever I think I am being too harsh on the T.S.E I love as a poet, I return to his essays and find things like the following, the first paragraph in an essay on Hamlet:

“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem,

and Hamlet the character only secondary.  And Hamlet the character

has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the

critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which

through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism

instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their

own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a

Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and

probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that

his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that

Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading

kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical

insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the

substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative

gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention

on this play.”

That last line sticks its thumb in the whole massive buttocks of this opening. Poor Coleridge and Goethe, to be condescended to by such a prick! However, perhaps this made them laugh at the high table – and Eliot so thirsted and hungered for the high table. Later, in the high Cold War, when Eliot men were nestled in their English departments, probably somebody who also wanted his seat at the high table made heavy weather of this Hamlet, Coleridge and Goethe business.

Eliot himself, to give him a bit of credit, latter cut his Hamlet article for an American edition of his essays, pronouncing it callow.

Callow, the fidgety flitigy filtering cat.

 

 

  

 

 

 

defining hatred, deflating hatred

 

Yeats is the great poet of defining hatred – the hatred that makes the self definite to itself.  He is the great poet of the moods of this hatred: he understood, as well, what sacrifice it coerces from the heart, what a burden it is to perpetually carry around an enemy’s list. Of course, being a Tory of the ultra kind, he saw hatred as being a property of the Left. Being a poet, though, he suspected it was a property of being Yeats.

In the Prayer for his Daughter, there’s a marvelous, a legendary account of this:

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Of course, we know Yeats’s circus animals, and this loveliest woman born has a name and a habitation and a place in the revolt against the British and the Anglo-Irish elite. But it is Yeats’s grudging and not fully uttered sense that his love of a “sort of beauty” has become an excuse for a free-ranging hatred, a justification for failure and bitterness – the failure, indeed, to avoid the bitterness of age.

I’m of an age, myself, when many of my hatreds, at least in the realm of the beautiful and the ugly, are disappearing. Disappearing not through my conscious effort, but because…. Partly this is having a young son whose gothic tastes are so different from mine that I long ago gave up arguing, and partly this is because the nursing of hatred is a thing that goes counter to my bent. Or rather, if I hate, I want to do it enthusiastically. My hatreds are political and existential and pop out of me in that way. But as for aesthetic hatreds…

I remember, when I was in my twenties, that my Dad once said something about how he liked Dylan. This shocked me to my soul. My teens were devoted to Dylan’s music, partly out of love, and partly because my parents hated it. How can you like the music your parents like? That at least was the era of teenhood in which I grew up. Admittedly, helicopter parenting was unknown in the  suburbs of Atlanta at that time. The kids scattered and played and came home from the streets and the little bits of wood that the developers hadn’t gotten around to bulldozing, and the parents never kept a close tab on it all. An unimaginable laxity, from the p.o.v. of the 21^st century.

As part of that teenworld, you expected complaints from your parents about the music you played. Those complaints helped define you.

I wonder if this happens anymore?

So, I was naturally shocked by my old man’s comment. How could such things be? Had it been a game?

Well, of course it was a game. Now I’m older than my Dad was then. And I surprise myself. When I was a teen, I had distinct and fierce hatreds, especially for the faddish music of my high school peers. Elton John? Are you kidding me? Z.Z. Top? Southern rock in general? Myself, I found this stuff hugely offensive to who I wanted to be. And yet, decades later, I am watching a movie, Almost Famous, about that seventies teen-rock scene, and the sound of some Elton John song slithers out on the soundtrack, and I have only, only … recognition. What a strange thing that is.

The teen I was is caught in the parent I am. And all I can say to the acned glare of that distant pup is: An intellectual hatred is the worst. And so they go, into the dark…

Wasted

 

I am oddly proud of the fact that I lived about a bicycle ride away from ground zero of the start of the second Drug War.

That war started in a birthday party in Decatur, Georgia. in his book about the drug wars of the Reagan era – which stretched into the Clinton era, until the pharmaceutical companies got seriously into getting Americans wasted -  Dan Baum makes the claim that it all started with  Ashley Schuchard, the thirteen year old daughter of an English prof at Emory, whose invitees to her birthday party in 1976 all got stoned, shocking her mother:: “During Ashley’s birthday party, Schuchard was amazed to see twelve and thirteen year olds stumbling around red-eyed, giggling, and obviously stoned. She saw the flicker of matches in dark corners of the back yard. She could smell burning reefer.”

Carter was elected president that year. As Baum puts it, drug enforcement was a low priority for the Carter administration. In general, the middle class, or the upper middle class that controls the discourse in the U.S., was generally unconcerned about marijuana and much more concerned about sex – watching it, getting it, reading about it, and undergoing a great long bubble of divorce that often involved it. Xavier Hollander, a D.C. madam, was the celebrity of the season.

Sex went with drugs. In 1976, for instance, when I was a freshman at Tulane, my entire dorm room floor was either stoned on weed, high on acid, or kicking back with cocaine. The speeches my roommate would make to me when he was snorting cocaine! Fortunately, I have forgotten them all.  I have a vague sense that they were about fucking while running on coke. Wasted and fucking. His suggestion for all mankind.

Schuchard went on to found a parents organization that lobbied politicians to do something about the spectacle of 12 and 13 year olds getting wasted, but for a while it looked like decriminalization of marijuana and a general relaxation about cocaine was in the works. This, as it happened, didn’t happen. Schuchard and other parents across the country began to organise against drug tolerance. This was picked up by the right – Reagan, among other things, had no tolerance for any libertarianism about marijuana or cocaine. Although, of course, once in office the country was flooded with cocaine, and a bit of the profit was siphoned off to the Contras. U.S. intelligence agencies have long carved out their own domain in the global commerce in drugs, for their own purposes.

They torture, they profit from drugsales, they overthrow governments. We don’t what they do, we don’t know what they did in Korea in 1951 or what they are doing now. American democracy, man.

In my high school, I was a pretty good buddy of the local “pusher” – although he was less of a pusher than a pothead who chose selling pot and cocaine – which was beginning to get popular, especially with the football team -  over a newspaper route, as he could never afford the amount of pot smoke he lived in  via working the latter.

The name for his usual condition, and the name for the condition every boy in my class aspired to at least on certain weekends, was wasted.

The term wasted existed long before the riotously funny ad, put out by the Just say no groups under Nancy Reagan, showed “your brain on drugs”.  It is a measure of the distance between the establishment (in its charity mood) and the rest that a play on the term wasted went right over their heads. Wasted was considered an honorable estate, an all around excuse, a modest brag. Man, I was wasted, was not the confession of a boy ashamed of the chemical injuries to which he had submitted his brain. There was no shame in wasted.

It did play the role of an excuse, though. Being too wasted meant that you could not be responsible for whatever shit you did.

I myself was never wasted. I never touched marijuana until I was almost nineteen. I went through high school a virgin.

But, as per my friendship with the school drug supplier, I was ever ready to extend my tolerance – or perhaps it was just an early display of my gift for enabling. Enabling, tolerance, two sides of the same coin? Always a big question.

Waste, etymologically, is part of a network of words having to do with devastation and spoiling. Words that have a menacingly military aspect. To lay waste. To be wasted and to kill – waste – someone track together in the common American tongue. To waste a village, such was the war in Vietnam, where being wasted and wasting were joined at the hip.

The time of “wasted” might be passed. The kids today might say trashed. Wasted has acquired a certain retro aura. At the same time, wasted is a pretty good macromood word for neolib culture, as it ends in heatwaves and fascism.

We were all wasted.

 

 

 

The Romantic agony in a cocktail lounge lady’s room

 

 

I searched my heart, the street, my ex-‘s habits, my family

I searched them all for opportune  neuroses

That I could jot down for my poetry

And calm my nerves and hide the focus

 

Five fathoms deep in  something posy sounding.

For after all, don’t I claim to be

Some seashell bard, some grounding

Mama, some prophet of the salty sea

 

Minus the albatross around my neck

(come to tell you all)?

-          No?  I’m here to sample wreck

I’m here to smear the large and small

 

Until disproportion proposes

That we go for a little walk, you and I,

A little walk with pretty poses.

A little truism, a little lie,

 

Logos burning a hole  in my pocket

“Like her fair eyes, dude,  the day was fair”  

I was going up like a rocket

A perfect movement in the down and dirty  air

 

And heard myself gibbering like a bat

while the air grew ever more blind

and thick with those who  flew, shrieked and shat

panting for the breath we’d left behind

 

 

until at last I found the perfect  line,  filled with blood

and sucked it all dry and fell and understood.

-Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's next? A nostalgic look at 2007 bullshit, and where we are now (in the ongoing catastrophe)

 

In 2007, Prospect Magazine, always looking for hits, did a survey of big thinkers. Here’s the way they phrased their question:

“We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”

 

Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question.

Well 16 years on, the answers seem all too predicably concentrated on what the 00s held to be the most important issue since some peasant invented bread: terrorism.

Nobody, oddly, questioned the premise. Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British  surely provided  models for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it.

The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization – which happened at speed in the early 20^th century - created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. When we think back on that 9/11, which we do less and less, it  was so critical, in part, because it was a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t.

Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.

The intersection between the treadmill of production and the war culture shaped the 20th century. The division between the right and the left were epiphenomena of that dynamic. It is, of course, impossible to predict the next five years … but in a sense it is probably easier to predict the next 100, since prediction here isn’t about particulars but long, long trends. H.G. Wells was so great because he had a novelist’s instinct for the life of those trends. LI doesn’t – in 1985, when we entered Grad school, we would never have predicted the cultural triumph of Reaganism, for instance. It would have seemed utterly implausible that the combination of endebtedness, meanness, and libertarian logic that flew in the face of reality would ever survive the end of the Gipper. From our inability to see what was in front of our nose, we took a lesson: never underestimate the Death Wish of a culture. It struck us in the 00S  as, frankly, insane to frame the next hundred years in terms of terrorism or the “battle of civilizations” between Islam and the west. For one thing, among threatening issues, terrorism ranks way below, I don’t know, highway safety as a real issue. And definitely, in America, below mass shootings. The instinct to make mass shootings terrorism – the terrorism of rebels without a cause – aligns them, I think, with a mission that provides a last second justification for what is really an act of despair. I’d align them with the rise in suicides and overdoses, and take the apotheosis of the gun, in American culture, as a gesture that points to the dead end of the treadmill of production – we can produce everything but a reason to live. And if you have no reason to live, others either don’t or, more enragingly, do.

The early 00s were a time where, in the States, there was a felt  need to feed the war culture; terrorism is an invention that has no enemies – it is a win win for all participants, giving an excuse to the war culture’s governors to continue doing what they want to continue doing anyway, and thus guaranteeing that a little place will always be set aside for terrorists – sort of like in the movie Network, where the tv network discovers the audience pull of terrorism, and puts the unorganized groups of guerillas on a business basis. As for Islam, again, the use value of Islam is not in Islam per se, but the way it operates as a wonderful two-fer – dark skins that aren’t Christian! Is there a more perfect enemy? Really, Milosovic should be hailed as a prophet – his ideology has now become standard on the Right, and will no doubt be more and more embedded in the policy of the American state as we drift from disaster to disaster.  

Yet the argument that wasn’t had in the 00s was decisively won by those who think America should spend in all around 800 billion a year on the military. For those who want to trace the consequences of that, look at Biden’s foreign policy – or in general the foreign policy of the US since the golden days of Bush.

Nobody, in 2007, had discovered that delightful distraction, AI, which is now the hottest thing ever to argue about as the climate goes seriously crazy. And as the inequality in wealth has become institutionalized to an extent that talk about democracy almost anywhere is absolutely hollow.

Never have the nabobs of the opinion racket been as bad at their business as they are today. As for me, I have taken stern measures not to believe what seems to be happening right before our eyes as a matter of spiritual health.I can’t believe the NYT is so bad, I can’t believe Twitter still exists, I can’t believe that, after all the bullshit, we are watching the rights of women to corporal sovereignty just go down the toilet, I can’t believe that peeps outside of France don’t understand that you don’t let the government destroy the more than half century legacy of social democracy because otherwise, you are heading towards serfdom.

Willed belief. I try to live like I’m reading a novel – instead of being in one.

 

Critical criticism after my dejeuner

 

1.

There is a famous passage in Marx and Engel’s Germany Ideology, which was written in 1846, set aside, and published in 1932. It reads:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. “

There are two schools of interpretation about this passage. One reads it as a genuine attempt to imagine a society in which the bonds of the division of labor are lifted. The other reads it as satire.

Myself, being Mr. Split the difference, I read it as a comic bit with a serious nub. In other words, I view this as a typical example of Marx’s romantic humor – a post-Hegelian humor which he shares with other disillusioned romantics of the 1840s, like Kierkegaard and his future enemy, Herzen.

This humor is, above all, gleeful. It exaggerates. Exaggeration holds within itself a truth, or a fact – and in this it is opposed to the lie. The lie, to be successful, conforms to the informal rules of plausibility – while an exaggeration, to be successful, flouts those rules. In particular, it takes a fact out of the plausible and subjects it to a field in which we have lost our grip on proportion. Proportion, which we tend to assume, is of course only as good as the other assumptions with which it is bound. Although we all know now, from pop science books, that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause untold changes in the universe – one of those “truths” of complexity theory – this knowledge can’t really be felt, even by those who are at the extreme end of the paranoid spectrum. In this sense, the credo of the new atheist/rationalist crowd – that facts don’t care about your feelings – gets things completely backwards. Without feelings, a whole spectrum of them, facts would not make any sense – they’d be unavailable to you.

Glee, which was taken up by romantics like De Quincy – or even pre-romantics, like De Sade – is thematized as “agony” in Mario Praz’s famous book, The Romantic Agony – which is still worth reading, although I’d bet my De Quincey that it is not on the curriculum for most grad students in literary studies.  Anyway, Marx was fully conversant with that form of humor – like Heine, or like the Russians, Gogol and the early Dostoevsky.

There are complex truths stuck in Marx’s squib. One of the lesser ones is that criticizing is on the same plane as hunting or harvesting. It is one of the structures of a liberal, developed economy – although it is far more important in an underdeveloped, backwards economy like Germany’s in the 1840s than it is in a fully developed one. Still, in a fully developed economy, on its way to a social democracy that allows a certain equality of the quality of life – measured exactly by its freedom from the slavery of the division of labor – there is and must be room for speculation.

Or to sum this up in a good, 1950-ish way: Man is the speculative animal.

2.

I’m a fundamentally bad lego man. I always put my weightiest bits on the top of the column, and the lightest underneath.

So, sue me.

Anyway, I take criticism and literature as important functions in a “developed economy” – which may well be simply a self-justifying gesture that helps me think, well, I am doing my bit. Perhaps my bit is meant to be spent organizing demonstrations, etc.  After all, I am living in the slops of the twentieth century, in a society that seemingly hasn’t budged since the 1980s. The social neurosis is killing us.

However, it is at just such times – times much like the 1840s – that glee becomes charged with lightning. One has to have a strong streak of gleefulness to read today’s newspapers or social media, turning hatereading into exaltation, and one’s enemies into involuntary dance partners. Repulsion, to the gleefully morbid mind, is half of attraction.

This is, I think, where Marx as a dialectician sometimes outsmarted himself. As a publicist and writer, though, he knew his strengths – which is why he ultimately shoved the German Ideology project aside and went on to other projects. The importance of the German Ideology, to me, is that it presents a sort of stylistic key to Marx. Like all the 1840s romantics, glee and dialectics remained his rock n roll, but he was careful with them. He knew that they might open up the world – de-proportion the proportions – but that they were only steps to get back into the world as a struggle.

So I like to think that, through social media, we might, if we overthrow those social conditions that are handily summed up in the term “neoliberalism” – we just might – might – criticize after dinner. Or, as I am doing now, here, after lunch.

Institutional malingering: something is rotten in the States

 

In the British Medical Journal, September 13, 1913, John Collie, M.D., J.P., authored  a note on “Malingering”, which he connected, like any sensible English utilitarian, with the recent debate about the costs of some sort of National Insurance – just the kind of taxpayer fund that the working class would target with all their illnesses:

“The question of feigning or exaggerating illnesses has of late attraced considerable attention in this country, but it is a mistake to suppose that the condition is of recent origin. Those who have to advise insurance companies know that exaggerated and fraudulent claims are, at any rate, as old as the accident laws.”

Malingering became one of those twentieth century occasions to battle it out about what, exactly, we are to do with diseases of the soul, once we have painlessly and scientifically proven that the soul doesn’t exist. Tricky, that.

I think the twenty first century problem is not the malingering of individual patients: it is the malingering of institutions. In particular, the Democratic party in the U.S. seems to have come down with a nasty case of it. If feigned illness could lead to real death, the Democratic party would be dead by now. It isn't: it is merely zombified. Symptomatically, the party is now presenting its loyal voters with the cute notion that a senile Senator, in a state of health where her best option is to prepare her soul and stay in contact with her loved ones, has no special reason to resign her seat, even if she will never again be able to fill it properly or do her duty. Now, we must preserve her place in the committee that votes on judicial nominations because we don't know what else to do. Otherwise, we would have to work, which would mean appointing a bunch of judges which would destroy the millionaire order that has richly benefitted us all! Besides, really, is it that important, judges  – those petty things that can, for instance, decree the criminalization of the abortion pill. Which we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about!

Institutional malingering should be of as much interest to social psychologists as malingering has been to psychology in general. How is it that the twenty first century consists of chickenshit parties ruling over decayed republics and unable to do any useful thing to avert the catastrophes that are eating up the young and creating suicidal conditions for the old? How is it that the U.S.A., from which I sprang, that country which, while deathdealing on a global scale, also produced a culture within which civil rights movements actually produced change – that unevenly democracy-tending place – how is it that malingering and malice have become its face to the world? From the legalized lynching of the homeless to the tyranny of lunatic judges on the dumbest Supreme Court ever assembled from the hayseeds that invest our law schools, all we see is bad shit.  The political structure is crap, and everybody knows it. The energy to fix it seems to go, instead, into an infinitely self-satisfied establishmentarianism that is all about why we can’t fix it.

Things go bad in small ways at first, and then in large ways, and then all at once. Fortunes collapse, nations go rotten. And we go around with the taste of the institutional malingers in our mouths. This is not how life is meant to be lived.