Veronique Nahoum-Grappe and existential vertigo

 

Véronique Nahoum-Grappe is almost unknown in the anglosphere.

More’s the pity.

She is the daughter of Edgar Morin and the associate of Felix Guattari – she’s spent her career in the circuit between Morin’s communication principle and Guattari’s schizanalysis. It is a bit unfortunate to haul in the two patriarch’s to locate Nahoum-Grappe, however.  It shows, in me, a certain lack of imagination.

She is that rare thing, a real philosophical anthropologist.

She has written a column in Esprit, and she was a strong voice pointing out the massacres in Bosnia in the 1990s. She’s a good old fashioned French intellectual of the type coined in the early Cold War period.

Her notion of good old Anthropos does not see it in terms of cogito. Or rather, not in terms of calculation. Or rather, to rather this up, in terms of a successful calculation, although there are calculations on the path. Instead of I think, she begins with “I am dizzy”.  The ontological meaning of dizziness fascinates her, in as much as dizziness is played with, chosen.  Vertige is at the bottom of it all. Which is why Nahoum-Grappe writes so much about violence, drunkenness, and the sublime. To use a term  I am borrowing from Caillois’s book on games, we begin with ilynx:

“The attempt to redefine human nature as capable or not of an extreme exploit can only be given in a radical alternative décor, at the antipodes of the average framework of life, situated in the imagination at the end of the civilized world, where nature is extreme. Down there, one attains, one touches the limits of the possible, of the thinkable, of the envisageable. Human nature that produces the performative extreme distances itself from the social and fixes itself in relation to a natural abyss, or rather, nature as an abyss. The idea of extreme natures implies a distance from society, the world of the “milieu’.” – From the Siesta and the Adventure.

Nahoum-Grappe’s work on dizziness – on, so to speak, existential vertigo – was developed in a number of essays from the 90s, published for the most part in Communications, the journal co-founded by Roland Barthes and Edgar Morin. To my mind, her richest essay in this series, and one that remains curiously isolated so far as I can see in literature, is “L'ingouvernable gratuité : les conduites de vertige” – The ungovernable gratuity: vertigo lines.

Nahoum-Grappe consciously organized this essay to be an extension and transformation of certain themes in Bataile – especially Bataille’s exploration of extremes (of sexual desire, of violence, of power).

It is remarkable that Nahoum-Grappe’s coordinates, in this and the essays that group around it – her essay on beauty, her essays on intoxication – are so close to those in Aristotle’s Poetics, where we have a fourfold space, with the vertical axis being the high and the low, and the horizontal axis described by the ugly and the beautiful.

These poles are both preserved and violated in laughter – that is, as it relates to the absolute comic. Bataille wrote of the laugh in terms of the mouth and the lips – as a rictus, mimicking astonishment or frear. For Nahoum-Grappe, the relationship between high and low, in terms of dizziness, is the relationship between the extreme moment of suspense and the plunge. The moment of suspense traverses a number of behaviors – just think, for instance, of sexual arousal. Why should it be the case that being aroused – being hard, being wet – is so often accompanied by a distinct light feeling in the stomach? Is so often enfolded in drinking? Is so often merely the breadth of a slip away from dizziness, a disorder in the thoughts – a disorder that is classically present in 18th century novels, where women, under the influence of seduction, are always described, or describe themselves, as thinking in a confused fashion. Order, here, the moral order, certainly preserves the Aristotelian grid that separates the high from the low. Interestingly, there’s a certain coordination between the plunge that is the parameter of suspense and a certain movement between ugliness and beauty. N-G relates this to speed – both acceleration and slowing down in what she calls “vertiginous sequences”.
Nahoum-Grappe’s method, like Bataille’s, is to take the phrases that are ordinarily overlooked from diverse everyday routines, and see that they have a functional seriousness:
“It is rare that an attempted suicide will explain himself with the phrase, “I am a more than 50 year old male, a transient agricultural worker and excessive consumer of alcohol” – the kind of thing we extract from the all too felicitous appropriations of statistical data. Instead, there will be phrases like – “everything seemed pointless,” “everything was going wrong”, “nothing worked”, “why live?” which risk being unheard prior to the silence preceding the fatal act: phrases which have in common the vertiginous closure of time (never again, always) and space (the world is just a pile of shit”). The addicted toxicomaniac who tries to give an account of his ‘relapse’, the excessive drinker who closes his eyes and accelerates his speed taking a hairpin curve in the night. Even the lover shutting the door in an access of chagrin, ordinary heroes in the field of social suffering, have recourse to these vertiginious closures…
This ‘nothing more is possible’ consists, on the plane of an invisible topic, to put oneself above an emptiness: a functional sociology will tend to evacuate that manner of seeing as a subjective point of view of the social actor, whereas the poet will make it a song and the psychologist will dig out its implications. But here, that attitude of ‘suspended above everything’ is taken as an objective segment of signification, as an effective intellectual posture, as a kind of belief effect the totality of behaviors. It is rendered possible by a corporal competence: that of the vertiginous perception.”
May I suggest that the idea that “French theory” is over has a very superficial view of what the period of French theory, in France, generated. And more substantially, that Nahoum-Grappe’s work on existential vertigo deserves some belated Anglophone echo.

 

“The domain of ordinary aethetics also offers tottering occasions : to follow intently with your eyes or in thought the extreme slowing down of an enigmatic moment (that of a leaf moving in a very light breeze, that of a poetic phrase of which the sense remains in suspense) changes our manner of being physically present, as if all imperceptible variation puts us in a light trance, as if absolute delicacy makes us slightly crazy. Besides the vertigo of acceleration there is also the vertigo of slowing down, the rhyme of imperceptible mobility of a baby’s hand when it is asleep.”

 

Suspense, to go further with N-G’s theme here, incorporates both rhythms. The implausibility of slo-mo in the movies, used for fight scenes, is made, perhaps, unconsciously acceptable by our own quotidien experiences of times that are both speeded up and slowed down. My dad once described to me being in passenger seat of a car being driven by a man who, coming around a curve on a mountainside, confronted a truck coming towards him in the same lane. Dad said everything seemed to slow down. There are a lot of accounts of such slowing down – battlefield accounts especially, when physical danger is immanently present.

 

Round two: Jean Moulin's revenge!

 We beat the miserable bastards. 

France is not brown. Jamais. 

Call it: Jean Moulin's Revenge

Petain wins, round one

 Among the orignal founders of the Front National, currently going around under a ridiculous moniker,  Rassemblement national, was Pierre Bousquet. In 1945, as a Rottenfuehrer for the French Waffen SS, he fought for the Nazis in Berlin. Victor Barthélémy, another founder, formed the LWF, a group of armed volunteers to help the Nazis on the Eastern Front. André Dufraisse, another founder, also fought with the Nazis.

Since those happy days when the Front National let its pro-Nazi flag fly proudly, the party has, as it were, Mussolini-ized. It has, under Maine Le Pen, pretended that all the nazi regalia in the party attic is actually very cute fascist regalia, a la Meloni.

This is the party that has spread its brown over the map of France. This is not just due to some sudden influx of racism. This is due to the absolute horror that we see, each day, ruling France under the technocrats, CEOs and think tankers which are the collective establishment in France. This is due to a Left that, under Hollande, and really, under Mitterand too, cut its ties with the working class, except when they were convenient. A left that is a bunch of warring fiefdoms. 

Here we are. Wait for it: the first street to be named after Bousquet will certainly entail the kind of ceremony that the President, wanting to be all centrist and unity oriented, will make a fine speech at.

Debate remarks - the obsolete versus the superannuated, round 1

 I'm not going to watch a debate between Trump and Biden. 

I'd rather spend an hour with someone raking their fingernails across a blackboard. 

But from what I have read, it is the expected disaster. An 82 year old man showed he was 82. Up too late, and apparently with a cold. 

The Democratic party has a "moderate" police force in the DNC, and that force hates primaries. It hates the idea that the incumbent be primaried. So gross! So 1968! 

The DNC doesn't understand so many things. Among them, the way elections work.

Elections, among other things, are a form of training. If a candidate doesn't train - especially an 82 year old whose last debate experience was four years ago - that candidate will suck in debate. Debate itself is, it must be said, always and forever stupid. It is set up as no debate should be, with superstar tv emptyheads shooting out questions of no complexity to superstar candidate emptyheads answering with the soundbyte provided by the overpaid campaign "consultant". One of Trump's undoubted advantages is that he doesn't care. Because the superstars in the media are often close friends with the campaign consultant honchos, this is always marked down as a weakness. It isn't. 

Campaign consultants have never starred in TV shows. 

Biden, I have long thought, will pull this out. I mean, Trump will be campaigning as a felon.

But maybe not. Besides abetting in the mass murder of Gazans, Biden blocked the Dems from nominating some younger sprite - some spring chicken 60some - to take on Trump. The results are turning out to be exactly what you might have expected. 

Now, roll the Godard credits. Except instead of fin du cinema - it is fin du monde.

Obsequy for the Freak

 

When I was a high school boy, in the seventies, the term “nerd” had not gained the universal currency it now has. I was called a brain, or a bookworm, or an egghead – most likely. Only my Pops called me an egghead. In general, that I stuck my nose in a book a lot was, of course, seen, but it was simply one of my things; as, say, a tendency to a runny nose and nosepicking might be one of the things of some other boy.

However, there was one term that stood out in my highschool: freak.

The seventies was, in some ways, the era of the freak. A TV series I watched with Adam about that time, Freaks and Geeks, got the title right.

That I ended up, in 1981, dancing a lot at the Florentine in Shreveport to Rick James’s Such a Freaky Girl was, looking back, a suitable cap, or rather an underlining, of that strange era as we entered the colder world of the attack on social democracy.  That the Florentine, a gay club, existed in Shreveport was itself a freak – it was a large Victorianish mansion, which had once been a supper club. At the time, it was dedicated to the cult of Donna Summer, Goddess: “The last dance” was ritually played at the end of the night, rhyming of course with the last dance.

Ah, the American Freak. The pure products of America, contra WCW, go freakish.

According to the OED of 1913 – one of the treasures of the Internet is the digitalizing of this massive language glacier – “Not found before 16^th c; possibly introduced from dialects, and cognate with OE frician (Matt. Xi.17) to dance.” However, I feel that as the word crossed the Atlantic to America, it gained its real vulgate hold. In England, freak was a term one associates with whim, or with chance. In the OED listing of definitions, I would draw your attention to no. 4,b: “More fully freak of nature – lusus naturaeP: a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; in recent use (esp. U.S.) a living curiosity exhibited in a show.”

The carny culture, the vaudeville routine, the moving picture – an odour of buttered popcorn surrounded the word. And its counterpart, geek. Yet the two went different paths, as the geek becomes an exhibition less for his individuality itself than for doing some unusual thing, such as biting off the head of chickens.

The Freak, though, is at a dead end of the individualistic creed. The freak is a kind of genius.

As Rick James notes, it is the kind of genius that goes into sex, a lot of sex. Or into drugs, a lot of drugs. The freak culture of the seventies, in the Metro Atlanta area, developed a twist on the Southern drawl and a goodly number of paraphernalia shops that were, unfortunately, shut down by the cops after laws were passed against them. The freak is always a scandal to the puritan.

I have a feeling – a feeling that is, perhaps, due to my living in France and having no contact with high school beyond the offerings of shows on Netflix that Adam insists on seeing – that the freak is at a low point in the culture. The nerd and the geek, or the alpha male and proud boy, seem more of this time.

I pity a time without freaks.

The synthetic progressive

I have been searching for a term to encompass one of the great features of capitalism – the non-necessary synthesis. I guess I will call it the synthetic synthesis.

A synthetic synthesis is the repeated putting together of two sets of concepts that are not necessarily joined together, creating a “discursive” necessity – or what I would call a mock necessity.

The third way, that ghostly nineties thing, corresponds very well to the synthetic synthesis model. A certain neo-classical economics is retrieved from the conservative opposition to social democracy, and is synthesized with an ideology that came out of the class struggles that brought about social democracy: that is, the struggle for civil rights of oppressed subjects in a liberal nation-state. So, for instance, the type of economic policies that favours a great increase in economic inequality, with its deregulation, its guarantees of support for the financial sector, its lower tax rate for the wealthy (in all its parts, including the blind eye turned to offshore money and the whole system of tax avoidance for the wealthy) is joined to an increasing concern with the legal equality of the oppressed subjects.

In the synthetic synthesis, the former left assumption – that class struggle is the shaping force of capitalist modernity – is simply dropped out.

Synthetic synthesis produces a certain type of managerial self. In corporations, in academia, in politics, in journalism this self is encountered over and over again. It is a self that is rhetorically virtuous, but anchored in every way in an economics of exploitation. The synthetic progressive.

That these syntheses are not grounded in necessity – that is, in any approximation of a total view of society – means that these managerial selves can easily adopt attitudes that go violently against the civil rights ideology that legitimates them.

In France, right now, we are seeing in real time how this works, as Macron – an almost ideal managerial self – and the  National Front (the RN, but I’m going to refuse to call them their new audience friendly name) are tentatively reaching out to each other. Last year, Le Pen’s party joined the left in its criticism of Macron’s reactionary attacks on Social Democratic institutions, symbolized by the fight over retirement. Symbolized, I should say, by the theft, by the political establishment, of years of the life of the employed classes, from clerks to mid-level managers to every employee of every public service. The last named have long been the target of Macronist contempt, contempt at the deepest level.

On the way to assuming power, the National Front, much like some Marxist caricature of fascism, erased its dispute with Macron over economics. And, indeed, in the turning of these wheels, the fragility of the synthetic synthesis comes into full view: why not attack social democracy and promote racism? It is as necessary, or non-necessary, as its opposite.

One of the great terms that has arisen in the social media is “gaslighting” – and gaslighting is symptomatic in late neoliberalism of the grinding sound at the base, as the money that flowed into the plutocracy due to neoliberal policies starts flowing to the reactionaries and fascists. The billionaire philanthropists, it turns out, are billionaires first, and philanthropists only as it gains them power and tax breaks.

It is hard to get one’s mind around a society that has so amply and fully adopted to synthetic syntheses – as it makes the life-world seem, ultimately, a sort of petty game, where nothing is serious if you don’t have serious money. Democracy can be cast aside because it empowers “non-serious” people. The serious buy their seriousness with serious money.

I should amplify this with six hundred pages of note on Adorno’s negative dialectics. But that is for later.

olivier blanchard and the free lunch: a comedy of errors

 The neolib economist Oliver Blanchard tweeted a very funny comedy bit, in which he played the part of “social democrat”. And he wrote:

“As a social democrat, I believe in equalizing chances, in improving education, in redistributing income from rich to poor. As an economist and someone sometimes involved in policy design, I also know there is a delicate balance between reducing inequality and maintaining strong growth. The NFP program simply ignores this balance, and can only, like many of its predecessors, lead to an economic catastrophe.”

Now, it takes some gall for Oliver Blanchard, one of the poohbahs of the worldwide collapse of 2008-2009, to instruct anybody about economic catastrophe. But the illness goes deep – for instance, that bit about redistributing income from rich to poor. It is a “butter is not I repeat not melting in my mouth” neolib phrase. In fact, what happens is that the original “re-distribution” is from the working class to the rich. To capital. But if you include this in your hip hop ecomix, peeps begin to wonder – what is that re-distribution about and does the state know about this?

In social democracy, the state knows about this. Among the neo-libs who cosplay social democrats, they don’t.

So, by popular demand – a little economics ditty I call:

On free Lunches Written first for Willetts Magazine. And still relevant!

I want to cull this from page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

“You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.”

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them – this is the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – appears here. If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs.

The first and most important of those decisions is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Or to put this another way, they are fully symmetrical variables. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone.

And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the very same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch? What if the x paying is, say, Mom, and the y eating is, say, baby?

Of course, the neo-c’s have dealt in some vague way with this by calling it all “investment”. So when x is the parent and y is the child, the x is really not giving y a free lunch, but preparing for the distant future when y has to decide whether to pay for the medical bills of x or let x die in the street.

This, it seems to me, however clever it seems to Gary Becker and his followers, is humanly as dumb as possible. Spell it out this way and there will only be a few of the 18 year olds who will nod sagely. These we can safely assign to the libertarian camp.

However, we are certainly not done with the free lunch model. For there are, of course, less benign examples of the free lunch relationship. One could say – if one was a classical, rather than a neo-classical, economist – that the most obvious one comes in the ability of Capital (that devourer of free lunches) to get its free lunches from the performance of Labor (that provider of profit) through exploitation. And if we grant this model, then free lunches abound, and one of their systematic forms is called Capitalism.

It is here that the ideological decision to treat x and y and variables on either side of the free lunch situation shows its genius, and demonstrates the dialectical position of “individualism” in Capitalism. For both y and x, in this model, are individuals – and nothing else. Their individuality is without content, which is all the better for founding a society based on individualism. Because content actually creates solidarity. Content would actually point to differences of all kinds between x and y. If x is the laborer and y is the corporation, for instance – but the corporation, per the Supreme Court, treated as a “person” – than we can ignore all power imbalances, and regard individuals as “earning their worth”, each and every one of them, as they cleverly engage in tradeoffs – for instance, allowing the free lunch set to fire all the surplus value giving workers and relocate the factory to some other pool of x-s, because in the end that means the corporation can produce goods cheaper, and won’t all x-s be happy with the endpoint: a world of cheap tat to which they will now have access? And put in these terms, hmm, it is almost as if it were the laborers living off the free lunches!

Which is why Oliver Blanchard is careful to put his redistribution model not in terms of labor, but in terms of “rich” and “poor” – two theological categories.

But the idea that not only does the “entrepreneur” earn all his billions, but that his ungrateful serfs are demanding free lunches, is an idea that has boldly occurred to many a neo-classical economist. Because while the billionaire – which, remember, in the humanly truer model of the world are living massively off free lunches piled one on top of the other until we can’t see the summit – is working and working, day and night, his little head full of inspirations that awe all the boys at the University of Chicago, labor is inclined, sadly, to laze around, and will only be encouraged if we tax the billionaire to build a system of social insurance for the labourer. It is so sad, the rough ride given the “rich”. During the Great downturn, in the years between 2009-2011, the NYT gave a column to a University of Chicago economist, Casey Mulligan, who invariably sounded this note. The worry expended by Casey Mulligan over some worker, somewhere, slacking because he or she didn’t need to worry about paying the monthly vig to the insurance company to get the terrible $10,000 deductible all fault health insurance policy was enough to make the angels on high weep – with laughter.

To wind this up: the free lunch is what civilization is built on, for good or ill. Limiting the free lunches of Capital is an excellent way to ensure better free lunches for the kids.