Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm - a great city novel

 

I’ve finished Gabriele Tergit’s unfortunately named Berlin novel, Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm. She looked back on it – after the flight from Berlin to Prague, just before the SS came to her door, and the flight to Palestine, and the flight to London, and the bombs  falling and the destruction that decisively ended the moment of time caught in her novel and that no nostalgia, no tv serial or movie FX, will ever really disinter – and admitted that the title was one reason Hans Fallada or Erich Kästner is who we think about when we think about the Neue Sachlichkeit novel, the novel that is all sharp edges and jumpcuts.

Indeed, Tergit, because she is a woman, is read another way, with the common complaint being that she does not fill her characters with empathetic stuff that we can attach to and root for. This was definitely not her purpose in KCK -her purpose was to write a city novel, a novel that would plug into the various worlds that were changing Berlin and Germany – the media, entertainment, financing and above all construction. The novel is, because of this I think, much more gripping. And what operates like fate, here, what supplies our desire for Nemesis, is the complicated financial structure that underlay a largescale real estate project on Kurfurstendamm, which one knows is going to fail.

It does fail, and the bankruptcies at the end have an incredible symbolic power. It is as if these various rentier households, with their money invested in what turns out to be an incredibly risky bank, were bombed. Though written, of course, a decade before Berlin was bombed, Tergit’s account of these households with their old bourgeois treasures withering under the touch of the drastic mark-down that indifferent buyers and auctioneers place on these goods and chattels in essence rips them out of their histories, just as a bomb rips open a household and spills all its goods into the street..

I was all the more moved in the chapter where Doctor Kohler realizes that she has lost all her savings and must start selling her possessions because earlier this year, when we decided to remodel our apartment, we also put most of our things on the block. It is a near death experience. The sofa you think is worth 500 dollars? Throw it away. The table you have eaten at for years, that fine maplewood table - throw it away. Your son's bed? Throw it away. The markdown is not just economic, it is existential. You put your life, unconsciously, into your things. And bang bang bang, they are gone.

Tergit herself was, in the late twenties, one of Germany’s premier trial reporters – she reported on the various scandalous trials for the  Berliner Tageblatt. In the novel, a similar paper plays a decisive role, bringing together all of the characters. That paper, as well, is taken over and destroyed by some moneybags who install an odious character named Fraechter as the head of the paper. Sound familiar?

I am torn, here, by the urge to quote some of the amazing passages in the book and the urge to simply recommend this rather great novel for your summer time reading. I think I’ll leave it like this.

Could a philosophy exist without definitions? Or vice versa?

Both of these are hard questions. They point to the fact that definition, by itself, has not been a great object in philosophy. Aristotle wrote of categories, Frege wrote of Sinn and Bedeutung, but only lesser lights have devoted themselves to the mysteries of the definition. People like the 19th century mathematician Joseph Diez Gergonne, whose Essai sur la théorie des définitions was published in the Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées (a journal he edited) in 1818.

Gergonne was a savant who absorbed certain of the lessons of the materialists before the revolution and the ideologues of the Napoleonic parenthesis – old clanky names like Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, whose work so influenced Stendhal. He is hailed, by Pierre Rosanvallon, for having written a prescient essay on the foundation of parties in a republic in which elections determine the governors, which Gergonne took as a partly mathematical problem: what divisions (territorial, or class, or whatever) exist in the republican set? In his essay on Political Arithmetic, Roanvallon claims, Gergonne sketched out a system whose legitimacy is enacted in our politics today:

“It is already a a vision of the democracy of parties which is sketched out in Gergonne. He was even the first to perceive the forms. “I only, he wrote in an extraordinarily anticipative fashion, “regularize the system of scissions that was in vogue under the Directorate with the difference that each fraction of the electoral college exercises here an effective right, proportioned to its mass; while at the time of the Directorate, each faction claimed for itself alone the deputies of each department.” In understanding that there is a modern and positive usage of factions and in sustaining that they did not only a deviant of pathological functioning of politics, Gergonne fully drew out the conclusions of his new reflection on politics.”

In other words, Gergonne is much more modern and up to date than the usual OPEDer in the NYT, bemoaning the lack of “consensus” nowadays – not like the old days, when every country clubber who paid his dues was basically of the same opinion!

So: Gergonne, born in 1777, before Stendhal, and outliving Stendhal by about 12 years, has a rather Stendhalian sense of the world, a sense that I would call liberal relativism. This, I think, comes out in his essay on definition. Definition, for Gergonne as a mathematician, was not simply a topic for philosophy, but a topic that allows us to advance, mathematically, in as much as it deals with systems of formalization and can, theoretically, be itself formalized as an operation. Or can it? In particular, at this time Gergonne was rather heretically advancing the idea that Descartes conjunction of algebra and geometry could be improved upon, or even, perhaps, reformulated.

The essay pokes at the different philosophical approaches to the definition, mainly as it proves something about thought itself – either the divinity of thought, its perfect tone, when it defines – as per Plato – or the fall of man written into the imperfection of this definitional capacity – as per Pascal.

Gergonne starts out defining definition on a perfectly classical note, dividing words – the things to be defined – between those that apply to one thing and those that apply to a set of things – Charlemagne being one thing, and Emperor being applicable to many things, or having many instances. This seems to be the predefinitional situation.

But of course, Charlemagne as a name of one thing implies a certain knowledge about Charlemagne – that is, a socius, or culture.

« It would be difficult to decide if individual names are less numerous than collective names. But one can remark that in as much as there is only a small portion of individual names that are used in each locality, common names, on the contrary, are used by everyone. Thus, for example, the names of the streets and places in a town, those of the individual by which it is peopled, maybe be ordinarily familiar to those who have inhabited it for a long time, but are unknown by almost everyone who does not live there, the names man, bird, fish, etc. are equally and ceaselessly in the mothers of everybody.”

The image of a language as a town, or city, in which the street names, knicknames and signifying events are unknown to the traveller is a charming one. This is 1818, and cities are, of course, getting much more interesting – a whole line of writers, from Balzac and Baudelaire to Wordsworth and Dickens are finding this out.

Interestingly, just as the city presented its horror to the writer in figural terms as a crowd – the classic man in a crowd trope that one finds in Hoffmann and Poe – the crowd also gets into the problematic of definition for Gergonne. He bumps into the possibility of the crowd nightmare in terms of this contrast between individual definitions – proper names – and collective definitions – common names – given the need, on the one hand, for terms that are more specific and complex, and on the other hand, for rooting those words in the language of ordinary uses.

All of these ways of using and inventing terms have a dimension in the passions – in “I know not what repulsion” felt in the presence of new terms. Of course, academia is a veritable factory for producing new terms – and for expressing repulsion about new terms, and a suspicion that underneath the new term there is vacancy or worse.

What interests me in Gergonne most particularly is the mention of what I’d call the Funes problem: the problem we solve, every day, by having categories and species to work with. But what if, on a deeper level, we get rid of these in some grand nominalist purge?

« Thus, even though individual names are extremely numerous, they are, in relation to each of us, as though they were a small quality, seeing that each of us, for our own use, need only a limited number. And this is how, in language, one uses incomparably more common nouns than proper one, although it could have been the case that the latter were more numerous than the former. However the case might be, one senses that there will always exist an uncountable number of objects with without proper names; and that it is as difficult to name everything as it is to know everything. And that one would be as little inclined to make them names than as might be to a real advantage. Thus, while the stars in the sky, at least those we perceive, have all received names, it is very probable that the trees in our forests and the animals that inhabit them will never be honoured with a parallel distinction.

Ah, the vertigo of the countless – or to trespass a bit on a mathematically exact term, the infinite – is always in our lives, an unconscious fear that haunts our personal cosmologies, every one of us. It is out of this that, in a stroke of genius, Borges created Funes the memorious.

‘With a glance, we perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, though, perceives all the shoots, clusters and grapes that compose a trellis. He know all the forms of the austral clouds on the dawn of April 30 1882 and could compare them to the memory of the marbling design of the page of a book he had seen one time and the lines in the foam raised by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of Quebracho. These memories were not simple; each visual image was tied to muscular and thermal sensations, etc.”

With names we begin the arduous process of simplifying the world, and making it our magi, our image. Science builds on the magic, but don’t think it provides any foundation. Because that is not the work of science, after all.

I have to use words when I talk to you.

All reactions:

2Chris Hudson and Fred Wise

The statue population

 

Besides the insanity of the reaction to a feast of Bacchus featured in the Olympic opening, it has made me think of how a city educates you.

In American cities, the urbanscape educates you in the beloved symbols of fast food, in soaring buildings, and in statuary that is generally clothed, generally figurative, and generally about some general or president.

Even the statue of liberty is heavily draped.

If you grow up in an Anglosphere city, these things are normal. If you grow up in Paris, or Montpellier, or Genua, or Rome, these things aren’t. In these cities, your parents stroll you in the baby carriage, when you are a baby, amidst a wilderness of buttocks, breasts, and penises. The statue with all its human parts showing is part of the landscape. This is one of the enduring effects of the Renaissance “rediscovery” of paganism.

However, even the fact that there is a goodly proportion of bronze and marble statues showing off their privates would not make Continental culture that much different, if the urbanscape in Paris, Rome, Montpellier etc. was not so heavily oriented towards mass transit and walking. New York is, in this respect, a very European city. In most American cities, however, the bus using population is mostly working class. If you are driving your SUV, or Tesla, or pickup truck from your home in Alpharetta to your law office on Peachtree in downtown Atlanta, you are probably not going to be looking out of the window at any sculpture on the way. In fact, in the Atlanta metro area, the common popular experience of sculpture is the side of Stone Mountain, depicting a buncha slaveowners riding horsies.

Perhaps the most be-statued city in the United States is Washington D.C. I can’t imagine living in D.C. and not having some statue friends. Yet, scan the Wiki page of D.C. outdoor sculpture and you will find that there is not an undressed mook among the whole lot. Well, save for some of them in the Hirschhorn statue garden.

Here, by contrast, is a page devoted to the “male appendages” of Paris statues. Asking the perennial question, why are they so small? Which doesn’t puzzle me, since I know, as a man, what it would mean to stand out in my altogether on a cold day in a Paris park.

By these standards, the Bacchanal at the Olympic opening was most notable for its modesty. From Henry V to the bals musettes of Jazz Age Paris, there was mucho display of the human body. Although in the late sixties and early seventies there was a fad for prancing around nude on stage, that – shall I use the old wanker’s word, Rabelaisian? – that carnival culture has faded.

It is an interesting contrast with the deluge of porno in which we live, globally. Which is centered in the United States. I’m not sure of the cultural meaning, of what to make of this stark divide.

Western man and Chernobyl

 

There’s a complex, a Western man’s complex: it happens when Western M. touches the Soviet Union.

In that moment, the Soviet Union becomes evil. And, on the rebound, the West becomes good.

That moment is a royal intellectual screwing that has a number of effects. For instance, it screwed up the tv series, Chernobyl.

I did not see this series when it came out. For one thing, Masha Gessen’s scathing review made it clear that many of the choices of the director, or scriptwriter, were wrong. Although Gessen concedes that the people who put together the choreography, the look of the scenery, were astonishingly good. Russians who saw the show and had lived in the Soviet Union in the 1980s recognized the wall paper, the dresses, the haircuts, the halls – everything. Still, she was scathing about what the producers did not know about homo sovieticus in the 1980s, the children of the Soviet Baby boomers or the Soviet greatest generation.

Finally I decided to watch it. And I found it quite horrifying – a horror docudrama. I have been converted, by my son, into a horror film fan, and rode that dimension through the true stitching together of jumpscares, and even spotted a final girl – the pregnant wife of one of the firefighters. This I loved.

However, the series loops the horror show around the Soviet Union, as though the one unique experience of horrendous design and execution of nuclear power and its materials were a Soviet matter.

At the same time that the series was first aired, the Virginia Quarterly Review, not the kind of print press one expects journalism from, published an excellent article, Cold War Hot Mess, by Lois Parshly, about the “cleanup” so called of the Hanford Plutonium plant. One finds, there, the same combination of secrecy, cover-up, stupidity and the refusal to inform victims of radiation that they have been laced with a carcinogenic destiny.

The Chernobyl accident, as Kate Brown has shown in Manuel for the Future: a Chernobyl guide for the future, had wideranging results that were covered up not just by the Soviets, but by the “West” and the UN, which had many vital interests in keeping the lid on the casualty count. For instance, France, the UK and the US, for twenty years, sponsored above the ground nuke tests that put 30 times more curies into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. This in itself is a measure of how bad Chernobyl was – but it is also a measure of how unmeasured the effect of those tests remain.

In David Thompson’s book, “In Nevada: The Land, The People, God, and Chance," there’s a movie anecdote – which you would expect, since Thompson is a movie critic and the one man author of a movie encyclopedia – about The Conqueror, a John Wayne flick financed by Howard Hughes and shot in St. George, Utah in 1955. St. George happened to be in the alley through which mucho radioactivity from those above ground tests passed. Hughes had soil dug up form the site to be used later for in studio productionAnd the crew, cast, director and others were thus exposed to the substances unleashed by the department of War and blessed by the scientists hired by the department of war, who have, since the dropping of Big Boy, spent seventy years downplaying the dangers of radiation. Thompson points out that, out of the 221 people working on the film, 91 got cancer. This isn’t that surprising. In St. George, deformed babies became known as sacrifice babies – sacrificed to national defense. The leukemia rate was 2.5 times higher than the national average – but cancers were only one of the kind of low grade, life sucking maladies that afflicted the community, and that atomic energy scientists are quick to label psychosomatic – as in the notoriously sloppy WHO/AEIC report on Chernobyl.

To read Kate Brown on the WHO's method for deciding on the biological casualty rate at Chernobyl is to see a falsehood gain traction. The era of "post-truth" is rooted in the era of Cold War truthiness - an incremental approach to the truth, under the TOP SECRET label. If you continue to lie to a population about things that affect them vitally, at a certain point people will begin to disbelieve the authorities about other vital things - hence, the COVID vaciine phenomenon.

During a period from the late 40s to the late 70s, the War Department’s scientific community was both experimenting with weapons designed to kill millions and denying that the weapons produced anything that would harm Americans living around the places where those weapons were exploded. Sometimes, just to check, populations were exposed to radiation on purpose – the Defense Department in 1991 admitted that it had done about 4,000 experiments exposing humans to radioactivity between 1944 to 1974, according to Eduardo Goncalves article on the ‘secret nuclear war’ in the Ecologist in 2001. Carole Gallagher, in her photo book about the victims of the bomb tests, quotes a great AEC memo about communities in the path of fallout – they were labeled the “low use segment of the population.” The Conqueror was the more unfortunate in that it mixed low use people with valuable people, including John Wayne – who of course died of cancer. As any scientist would be quick to point out, John Wayne smoked. In any population in the fifties, there are going to be people who die of cancer anyway, statistically. It isn’t science to hide behind that fact, it is politics. But the War Department’s scientists hid behind that fact for fifty years. In Goncalves article, he quotes an Army medic, Van Brandon, who said that the army routinely kept two sets of records of radioactive readings in the fallout paths, one set to show that nobody received an elevated level of radiation, the other set to show how high that elevated level actually was. “That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning.”

In the 50s, to be fair, not a lot was known about chronic illness. It certainly wasn’t known that one could be infected with a disease that would only appear thirty years later. Now it is fifty years later, and there is a lot of information that is not going to be showing up in any newspaper headlines any time soon – after all, the congressional investigations about the nuclear testing ‘accidents’ were concluded in the 80s. News and disease have a different time frame. So we haven’t seen a lot of publicity given to this report by Steven L. Simon, Andre Bouville and Charles E. Land in this January’s American Scientist, "Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks." Yet there should be, not only for what it says but for what it doesn't say. The report goes the partial hang-out route, to quote Nixon, diminishing by segregating -- for instance, by concentrating on cancer, the authors can ignore the immune system breakdowns associated with radioactivity, and never ask if there is any meshing between these two results of radiation poisoning. It bases its statistics on reports of radioactive readings after the tests without even a note to say that some of those readings are, to say the least, disputed – and that we know the Department of War has changed its story about certain of the most notorious tests -- for instance the one on July 5, 1957, in which, in the immediate aftermath of the test, some 2,000 soldiers were ordered into ground zero – while the becqueral count was off the Geiger counter - and this was after these soldiers were exposed, as was standard practice, by being put in trenches some mile from the explosion. Afterwards, soldiers reported that they could do things you only see in horror movies – like pull their teeth from their mouth. All of which reports would get them trundled into the psych wards are VA hospitals. And none of which is reflected in the notes in the American Scientist, which are enlivened by some maps I'd like to figure out how to post.

This is from the article:

"The cancer risks are, of course, the most publicized of the spectrum of ills resulting from scientific carelessness about exploding big dangerous toys to see what would happen. The less publicized of those ills is immune deficiencies of various kinds.

“In 1997, NCI conducted a detailed evaluation of dose to the thyroid glands of U,S, residents from 1-131 in fallout from tests in Nevada. In a related activity, we evaluated the risks of thyroid cancer from that exposure and estimated that about 49,000 fallout-related cases might occur in the United States,

almost all of them among persons who were under age 20 at some time during the period 1951-57, with 95-percent uncertainty limits of 11,300 and 212,000. The estimated risk may be compared with some 400,000 lifetime thyroid cancers expected in the same population in the absence of any fallout exposure.

Accounting for thyroid exposure from global fallout, which was distributed fairly uniformly over the entire United States, might increase the estimated excess by 10 percent, from 49,000 to 54,000. Fallout-related risks for thyroid cancer are likely to exceed those for any other cancer simply because those risks are predominantly ascribable to the thyroid dose from internal radiatition, which is unmatched in other organs.”

Congress authorized the study of the iodine isotope – but limited it to the iodine isotope. Strontium-90, another fallout factor, has never been studied.

Western man – give up your delusion that in facing evil, you are good! And look at the x-rays in your hand, dude. They tell a tale.

elegy for the record: on the nature of things

 

Elegy for the record: on the nature of things

“Look”, he would say, drawing an imaginary line with his finger., “it’s like this. I start here with the intention of reaching here – in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I have arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon and it leads me off in another direction and develops into a phonograph.” -Edison

 

Was there song before there was song

in the universal throat,

all unwrought dark intensity

all systems ungo,

ungo

ungo?

 

“The very thing of itself declares”

in the needle’s track left on

the deaf man’s thumb.

Hearing is touching is scratching

 

hums in the ear unheard

or unheard light crackling sounds

sinking away in the retired depth

of the abandoned laboratory dark.

 

Lucrèce writes, in his native French:

“Les formes d'un seul choc seraient anéanties.

Mais, de ses éléments variant les accords,

La matière demeure éternelle, et les corps

Durent, cohésions rebelles au divorce,

Jusqu'à ce que l'attaque ait dépassé leur force.

Ainsi, rien ne retourne au néant;

While the headline sez:

 

“A talking machine made by Professor Edison”.

Song before song, throb before throb

Where in the universal throat a single shock

Sings the unsung folded around a needle

 

 Lifting angelic choirs out of available material.

“I took the night job which most oprs

didn’t like, but which I preferred

as it gave me more time to experiment.”

 

I saw it all end, Thomas Edison.

Prophets wearing earpods.

«Oprs» listening to satellite radio

Driving to the night shift on the I-5.

 

But end? End only in this spoonful

Of the universal time-space.

Song there will be unsung and sung

At the end, as at the beginning. Song.

Surrounded!

 

There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy that has no common name or phrase. I call it dis-identification.  It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of competition. To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with, even if it is not clear what the contest is all about or what the rules are. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of Donald Trump,  etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison with liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Donald Trump, etc. At least I am not X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the origin of the enemy is in combat,  which is the contest absolutely realized; there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and the horror that it wishes to avoid most is: being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by liberal types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, centrist reactionaries. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is where English comic writers come in. In French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – which is on account of the fact that the French have a genius for enmity. In English writers, those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens, of course, is the first writer who comes to mind.

But Dickens rather ends a certain line of humor than opens up the kind of humor, the kind of odd frivolity, that imbued English comic writing in the 20^th century. Evelyn Waugh, whose character Tony Last is, famously, captured by a maniac and forced to read Dickens to him, is not only dis-identifying with Dickens but mocking, snobbishly, Dickens appeal to the vulgar masses -even as those masses include jungle explorers. Frivolity, as Fintan O’Toole pointed out in his book on Brexit, Heroic Failure, is the mask assumed by English nationalism.  While celebrating loudly the struggle of good and evil, the battle of civilizations, and English yeoman values, the celebrants are all such scoundrels and trust fund brats that it is hard not to suspect they are on to themselves – that they too have been dosed with English comic writing, from Wodehouse to Amis.

I’d like to make generalizations about the American version of dis-identification, but this subject requires way too much coffee for me to make it this morning. This will have to do.

 

On Careers

What do you do?

I’ve been asked that a lot in my life. As I child and teen, I was asked, what do you want to do? But that question dies on the tongue of the speaker after you reach a certain age. What do you want to do becomes a more localized question – to be asked, say, on vacation. It is not a request for a mission statement. Because, presumably, at some point in the twenties, your mission was set.

This presumption indicates a whole anthropology. The anthropology of the career.

In the Oxford English dictionary, published in 1913, the word “career” for the course of a professional life is a “modern usage”. Career, up until the early nineteenth century, was more normally used for horses – horses careering, or galloping. The late latin root, here, is a word for cart. Or a word designating the road a cart takes. A way, in other words. A way and a race. The Occidental variant on the Dao.

In fact, the Hollywoodish way of talking about a career at the moment is a “journey”. My journey. And not, say, my rat race – we don’t even want to smell a rat race when we talk of our journey. But careers, in as much as they are races, are defined by rivalries. This sets the career apart from, say, Being in as it is figured in an ancient Greek poem, where a man tells this tale: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.

The two choices in Parmenides are pretty stark, and they do seem to subtend the question: what do you do? If you leave the beaten track of men, if this is your “search”, you might look back on your path, the race you raced, and wonder: where is everybody?

I wonder that all the time.