Penny-ante neoliberal coups: the story of Honduras and Prospera

 I got around to the highly ill-making article about Prospera in the August 27 NYT Magazine.

I recommend reading it. And then reading the petition of the Progressive economists, here.

Prospera is one of those libertarian-fascist off shore wet dreams, birthed by the usual suspects: corrupt far right politicos and ethically deficient Nobel Prize winning “economists”. It is located on the Honduran coast, within Honduran territory – but of course, does not obey Honduran law.

The story of its making begins, of course, with a military coup. Nothing as grandiose as Pinochet – rather, more neo-liberal feel-good skulduggery of the pack the court and pop the president variety. The Honduran military, in 2009, with a little assistance from the Pentagon’s Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies [see this story] ousted the leftist president of Honduras and installed a creature named Porfirio Lobo (hark at the name: Porfirio!). As a far right president, Lobo had, of course, some alert little Harvard biz school-niks on his staff, and one of them had seen a lecture by Paul Romer. Romer gave a corporate shill TED talk all about helping the third world through corporations – much like Shell helping helping helping Nigeria.

Romer is, of course, a perfect corpo-tool, which is sort of required for getting the Nobel prize in Economics. Like the first getter of that prize, Fred Hayek, he came running when called by some rightwing generalissimo to help bury socialism. Between 2009 to 2013, Romer helped the Honduran government hammer out the terms of the laughably named Economic Development Zone – ZEDE – law. It was hurried along even after the Honduran Supreme court ruled against it – merely a matter of restocking the court.

Well, the Prospero corp, the starter fund for which was – via the magical laws of poetic injustice- put together by, Patri Friedman, Milton’s grandchild – started buying a chunk of Honduras’s coast and planning their slave plantation/utopia.

Everything was running as smoothly as a crypto-currency fraud when, suddenly, the rightwing government fell. Hernandez, Lobo’s successor, lost to the wife of the former leftwing president. Hernandez went on to a few other probs – he is under a 45 year sentence in the US for drugdealing – but he had, during his reign, done his best to insure the legal standing of Prospera.

This came to an end under the new Honduran government, which has pulled the plug on Romer’s ZEDEs. Naturally, the libertarians turned to one of those offshore legal entities foisted upon the global south by the inglorious Norrth: the World Bank’s International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes – a “court” which is as far as the mock Florida courts set up in the 2009s to railroad homeowners unfortunate enough to have bank mortgages, and banks fortunate enough to have courts overlook such technicalities as a paper trail, proper documents, and the like.

Honduras has withdrawn from the ICSID. But Prospera is persevering. If the sentence comes down, as it probs will, that Honduras owes them 11 billion dollars, everything will depend on the powers that be – basically the U.S. – treating this as a legitimate outcome.

We know how that will go under Trump. Don’t think that the Harris regime will do anything radically different. Unless they are forced to by public outcry.

Interesting sidenote: Prospera can sue Honduras. But can the Honduran government sue the U.S. for the help it gave to the generals who performed the military coup? Oh child, what earth are you living on! That is never going to happen.

TWO VIEWS OF THE MURDER ON BOULEVARD POISSONNIERE, 1929

 

It all started when Andrée Maryse and her partner came back from her tour of the Orient. in 1929

Maryse, whose real name was Marthe Lebrun, formerly of the  Folies Bergère, had formed an act with an ex-boxer named Young Francis, whose real name was Francis Gaillard, which seemed to consist, from the newspaper accounts, of both of them showing their splendid physiques in various acrobatic poses.

Young Francis dropped his wife and his child for Maryse; however, he was a brute, or at least that was what came out at the trial. Jealous, violent, a hitter.  Still, they worked together, toured the Orient, and apparently agreed to find a third splendid and acrobatic physique for their act, which they did: a former dancer at the Opera and an ex-boxer named Jean Torrini, whose real name was Alfred Jean-Jacques Bouisseren. As one newspaper said, Young Francis was male vigor, Jean Torrini was male grace.

Their relations were somewhat aggravated by a fact stated by Torrini at the trial:

“Each time we rehearsed in the theatre at Rue de Douai, nude, both of us, he wanted to throw his mistress out of the window.”

The nudity was of interest to the papers, the reading public, and the jury, who surveyed the photographs of their rehearsals with attention.

Andrée Maryse (“blonde and gracious in her black and white tailored suit”) decided in the end that Young Francis must go. But she was still fond of Torrini. They may or may not have been a romantic couple. In any case, it was as a couple that they went out to eat with another couple, M. and Madame Souque, at a table at the Café Brebant on Blv. Poissonniere on May 4, 1929.

At around seven o’clock, Young Francis turned up at Café Brebant. He made with the rough stuff, or threatened to. Maryse fled the establishment, followed by Young Francis, followed by Torrini. Young Francis apparently threw himself in front of a taxi, a suicidal gesture. The taxi braked. Torrini took out a revolver. He fired at the ex-boxer. Six shots, according to some newspapers.

Young Francis was hit. He was mortally wounded. The crowd in the street that witnessed this was near panic, when the cops arrived.

A faits divers, this.

In the crowd that saw the last moments in the life of Young Francis was the recent editor of the NRF, Jean Paulhan. He, like many of the NRF crew – notably Gide – was fascinated by the form of the faits divers. In fact, Gide’s column for the NRF was titled “Faits divers” and was precisely about that – the scandals, crimes, adulteries, gangland doings, and various low-life events that came into the papers and the courts and formed one of the great subtexts of the twenties. Paulhan mentioned the event in “Treatise on metaphysics for the New Year, 1930”.

Paulhan’s metaphysics was semi-Kantian, and semi-esoteric.  The Kantianism was based on Paulhan’s notion that the subject, when human instead of some abstract substance in an abstract retort, was subject to illusions about the real that effected us on the individual and collective level.

Paulhan in 1929 was still under the impress of his friend, André Breton, and Breton’s idea that the fantastic was abroad, in the streets of Paris – one had merely to tear off the bourgeois conventions on not seeing and look, look hard. In the Treatise (a mock-heroic name for an article of four printed pages), In the interval between the object looked at and the looker, Paulhan was impressed by our tendency, our hopeless tendency, to convention. In that tendency, Paulhan saw the flaw of the surrealist program. A test case was the Torrini shooting.

In the Treatise, Paulhan states that he was in the crowd on Blvd. Poissonniere “by chance”. I wonder. He does not say he was going to Café Brebant himself. I wonder about that, too. At this time, Paulhan was living with Germaine Pascal in a suburb of Paris, Le Plessis-Robinson. When he was in Paris, he camped at his office on Rue Madame, on the Left Bank. One supposes, then, that he was walking in the in the quarter of the Grands Boulevards on the evening of May 4, 1929, for some reason. Perhaps he was walking to café de la Nouvelle France, 92, rue La Fayette, which was one of Breton’s hangouts.

I like to think he might have been out to enjoy Café Brebant. At one time, at the end of the Second Empire, Café Brebant was a literary center. Founded in 1805, it had been a favorite of Heine’s in the 1850s – and was also a hangout for Georges Sand (who wrote letters to the owner, requesting, for instance, a box of her favorite cigarettes) – and of the incorrigibly bitchy Brother Goncourt. Monet used to drop by for a drink, and no doubt nursed it sitting on one of the famous red sofas.

Time passes. The Café Brebant was hopelessly outmoded in 1929. The sofas were spongy, the service was so so, the food nothing to get excited about. It was on the way out – its doors closed in June, 1930, which evoked a number of nostalgic obituaries in the Parisian press.

So, Paulhan, who witnesses the killing: “Torrini pursued Francis into the road across a traffic jame and killed him with two shots from a revolver. We learned afterwards that Francis, desperate, tried, in that moment, to commit suicide by throwing himself under a taxi.”

How would Paulhan have learned this if not from the papers?  The rustle of language was already there in the street, reality was being reshaped even as it shaped itself.

Paulhan’s sympathy for the brutal boxer might have something to do with his own situation that night. His legal wife was battling him in the divorce courts. He wanted to marry his lover, Germaine, but his wife, for her own reasons, wanted to prevent that.

In 1945, when Paulhan published his Entretien sur des faits divers, he did not mention the Torrini case. The 1945 book is a curious text: in exploring “cognitive illusions” (illusions de l’esprit), one feels that there is a politics underneath this, tugging at the reader.

The illusion that concerned Paulhan the most was anachronism: the projection into some past moment of facts, circumstances and motives that “we” only know looking back on that past – which have been accrued in the interval. The example he uses is the classic robbery. A woman is killed by a robber, who only gains 20 francs in the business. Thus, the headline: Robber kills woman for twenty francs. But at the time of the robbery and the killing, it was not necessarily known to the robber or even the woman that she had only 20 francs on her. The excitements of the moment were of a different order.

Anachronism makes it hard to base an ethics of responsibility on our acts of the moment, given our lack of any total knowledge of any moment. Paulhan is responding as much to the cultural politics of the end of the war as he is advancing his metaphysics of morals. The great purge of collaborators caught  many of Paulhan’s friends and collegues, and even Paulhan had articles published in suspect journals. That fact definitely has some sway over his larger argument, resisting the "responsibility" ethos of the existentialists. 

In 1929 the Occupation was a future nobody was reckoning on. Tugging at Paulhan in this moment was what he would later called “terrorism” – the idea that literature could somehow cleanse us of our illusions – elect us, remove us from the bourgeois chain.

In 1929, in Breton’s Second Manifesto, he had famously written that the first surrealist act would be to fire a gun into a crowd. Paulhan had witnessed a revolver being fired in a crowd, although not exactly at random. If the newspaper account that claimed that six shots were fired, then in fact it was, to an extent, at random. Did Breton read the papers on May 5, 1929, when the Young Francis shooting was on the front page? Did he hear about it from Paulhan?

In the Treatise, this is Paulhan’s account: “My first sentiment was to have been witness to a sort of stunt, or crime. Of course, I had never before seen something that had the nature of being, outside of myself, evil or criminal: this was only to apply to these indifferent events the shape of the idea I had of evil or good. If I thought of assassination as an art, I would have been struck, on the other hand,  by either the beauty of Torrini’s gestures, or even by their ugliness. Thus, what did I receive here? Just the sentiment that Torrini was on top, that he won over Francis – even though by an irregular means – which held to a certain opinion I had about life. If I thought, as many a person has thought, that life is not worth the pain of being lived, was a dupe’s game and a torture, I would have seen Francis winning over Torrini. The whole scene would have unrolled as a slow triumph towards death, cleverly spreading itself out through the suicide to the murder of Young Francis.”

The twenties motif, according to Sartre, was “Letting go”. “Let go, drop out, leave the orders, coordinates, find yourself naked and alone, strange to yourself, like Philoctetes when he gave up his bow, like Dmitri Karamazov in prison, like an addict who takes drugs for fun, like a young man who abandons his class, his family, his house, to put himself alone and naked into the hands of the Party.” Paulhan was a twenties personality, in the Sartrean sense. The first Surrealist act is not, in the manifesto, called a positive good – to shoot at random in a crowd is simply to shatter the reality the individuals in the crowd have assumed will be, somehow, always there to protect them.

In the event, the trial of Torrini went well. A waiter testified that Young Francis screamed at Maryse that night that he was going to kill her.  Andrée Maryse herself, gracious and supple, as one reporter put it, testified that she had gone to Young Francis’s funeral because she owed him that, but that he was a threat to both her life and Torrini’s. M. Robert Lazurik, Torrini’s lawyer, was much lauded: while the judge was evidently hostile to Torrini, Lazurik transformed the atmosphere in the courtroom to one sympathetic to the man who shot Young Francis.

Torrini was acquitted by reason of self-defense.

“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.” – Andre Breton.

 

 

 

Routines, rituals and the post-identity moment

 

The early twentieth century was the heyday of both colonialism and the anthropological obsession  with ritual, with observations of “native peoples” flooding into the metropoles. Rituals seemed both omnipresent and irrational; thus, they provided a tempting form and object for the modernist author.

But what was a ritual? And how was it different from any other step by step organization of activity? Marcel Mauss, in an essay on prayer, puts the onus on the organizing irrationality of the ritual:

“It isn’t after the nature of acts and their real effects that it is possible to distinguish the two orders of fact. From this point of view, all that it is possible to say about rituals is that they cannot produce the results one attributes to them. According to this way of judging, one can’t distinguish rituals from erroneous practices. One knows, however, that an erroneous practice is not a ritual. Thus, it is not in considering the efficacity in itself, but the manner in which the efficacity is conceived that we can discover the specific difference. Thus, in the case of technique, the effect produced is supposed to arise entirely from the effective mechanical labor. And this besides has right on its side (a bon droit), for the effort of civilization has precisely consisted in reserving to industrial techniques and the science on which they repose that useful value that one attributed in the past to rituals and religious notions. On the contrary, in the case of a ritual practice, other causes completely are supposed to intervene, to which is wholly imputed the expected result. Between the movements that constitute the sacrifice and those that solidly construct the house that the former is supposed to insure, there is not even from the point of view of the sacrificer any mechanical link. The efficacity lent to the ritual has nothing in common with the efficacity proper to the acts which are materially accomplished. It is represented mentally as completely sui generis, for one consideres that it comes entirely from special forces that the ritual has the property of putting in play. Thus even if the effect actually produced would result in fact in executed movements, there would be a ritual if the believer attributed it to other causes. Thus the absorption of toxic substances produces physiologically a state of ecstasy, and yet it is a ritual for those who impute this state not to its true causes, but to special influences.”

The notion of efficiency, here, silently displaces an older notion of necessity – of the play of necessity and chance. The efficiency of the mechanical acts (if we can, for a moment, separate out the mechanical from the efficient) consists in the fact that the first step in the routine is necessary for and necessitates the second step. The measure of its efficiency is in the narrowing or the elimination of alternatives and options for the second step, and so on. Putting together the pieces that make an Ikea table, we follow instructions that spatialize the temporal arrangement and unroll it as a series of attachments and adjustments of the various (but sorted) bits and parts. Even so, it is not uncommon to find the term ritual attached to certain routines, as for instance in sales, or in driving, or making a meal. What this shows, to the anthropologist trying to make sense of ritual, is that it can attach itself, parasitically, to the technical acts that produce a given commodity or service.

Victor Turner, in Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, returns to the ritual as it was conceived by the turn of the century anthropologists – and in particular, Van Genep’s notion of a rite de passage:

“Van Gennep demonstrated that many types of rituals, notably initiation rites, have three distinguishable stages, of varying relative duration within and among cultures, which he described as (1) separation, (2) margin or limen, and (3) reaggregation. Sometimes he simply called these: “preliminal,” “liminal,” and “postliminal.” He had noticed that rituals are often performed, in societies at all levels of social complexity, when individuals or groups are culturally defined as undergoing a change of state or status.”

Is this three stage process a sort of routine within the ritual? Or is it that within every routine, from the assembly line to the salesman’s coffee break, the subject, that sensitive object, tends towards ritual? Tends, that is, as something earlier, something primitive.

Did I mention the colonial shadow that falls over this discussion?

Turner’s first interest, as a college student, was literature. He changed to anthropology, and did field work with his wife, Edith, in Africa, and observed ritual there – then began to theorize about comparative symbology during the Cold War period of the fifties and sixties, when ritualism as a universal dissolvent was past its fad expiration date. What Turner got from Genep was a way of talking about the symbolic structure of ritual without grounding it in some appeal to our lost pieties – the reactionary move of a certain group of modernists. That use of ritual was timely – it was absorbed into the fascination with identity that came out of the civil rights movements.  It carried into identity remnants of a rhetoric that was once about the sacred.

We are entering, I think, in what I would call, ludicrously and awkwardly, a post-identity moment. I wonder how ritual and routine will be reconfigured within those parameters.

 

 

The ambiguities of Patriotism

 There is a note in the OED appended to the etymology of “patriot” that sez: “Ancient Greek πατριώτης is used of barbarians, who had a common πατρίς (as opposed to Greeks who were called πολῖται, having a common πόλις); in this sense it derives from πάτριος. It is also used of members of a clan, in which case it derives from πατριά.”

Ah, poisonous binary! Patriot, which like patriarchy is derived from the father, or family, as opposed to polis, or community. In the liberal tradition, the social form of the clan, the family, must be subordinate to the state. Banditism and all the barbarian customs so adhering go back to the clan; the mafia goes back to the clan; and the state goes back to the city, the capital, the court.

Of course, this binary structure founds and is unfounded. The wealthy, for instance, go back to the family, or clan; the corporation goes back, often, to the clan, the family trust, the investors, inherited wealth. While the community, or state, tends fatally to the clan as well – the monarch, the political family.

In its connotative sweep, patriotism has inherited the uneasiness of the city dweller before the barbarian, the metropolitan before the “clown” (colonnus, dweller in the fields). As a city dweller myself, I have an ambiguous relationship to the Patria. I want to be “for” the Barbaric Yawp, but is the barbarian mouth open to issue the purest stream of poetry – or to eat me?

FRAGMENT - Karen Chamisso

 

Cressida, I thought of you
wasting away in Margaritaville
as the hour came on to that gray and blue
moment -click - when it is time for a girl to chill.
Do foxes not have holes? I at least have one
on Rue Quincampoix, where I’m a known quality
where I’ve come to have my fun
where I’ve drunk my quantity.
In the glint of the lounge light there
I set up with a gin and tonic
a notebook opened on the sputtering flair
of a word – the chatter here is trans-Atlantic
the gals are Cally, the guy is German
and the French sociopetally clustered in the corner
eye contact is made by a man determined
to ask me what I’m writing – if he could have the honor
-well he can’t – I’m sorry – as you know
Cress, I too dive into the wreck
- and so many wrecks from long ago
- and so many from last week
- playing phrase and fable solitaire
to find and wind my lash fine thread
through dead men’s eyes and dead men’s stares
the old old slag, the old old dread
- in particular, tonight: tart. A sweet, a pie
all the endless jar between honey and vinegar
I go to the OED, cause it don’t lie
I go to the Online, for the war
“Everyone wants a piece of the attention pie”
first came the sweet then came the bitter.
Adored the adored, but where incense upward flies
better be careful of the hitter
beneath the embrace. Cherchez la femme fatale
because she materializes suddenly,
Cress, you with the bored
drawl, cig in hand, like Lauren Bacall
that tall drink look - “will you walk in my lord”
and in a rush I see a visionary Gita
from Barbara Stanwyck to Gloria Graham
from Cressida to Nana, from Lana to Rita
from Hollywood Blv. to Iliam...

The price of scorn

 I am fascinated by a phenomenon that is a variant of the Freudian slip. Call it error infection. Anytime I truly get on my high horse and go on about an error someone has made – a journalist, a politician, a critic, etc. – my commentary will inevitably be undermined by an error I make in the scolding. My contempt for a mathematical mistake, a boggled reference, an illogical deduction, a false analogy, will spawn, in my own writing, a mathematical mistake, a boggled reference, and blah blah blah.

The unconscious is a little devil – a little printer’s devil. I have noticed this again and again, not just with myself but with others. Demystifiers and contrarians leave a fine track of misreadings and falsities behind them. This does not mean that takedowns are useless, of course. The takedown is the base of civilization, peeps! But it does mean that mercy is no superfluous virtue – it is literally the soul of wit.

Three Urns

 

1. In the preface to Urne Burial, which was published in 1658, Browne remarks largely on the “sad pitchers” lately disinterred in Norfolk. Presumably pitchers containing the ashes of Romans. Romans, as conquerors of  Britain,were technically enemies, but Browne is never stinting in his humanism, and quotes Horace: We mercifully preserve their bones, and pisse not upon their ashes.”

Pissing is not a mere random word, here, for in the burial urn Browne saw the whole anatomy of man, clothed and unclothed in all of his biological regalia, from birth, digestion and excretion to death and cremation.

The occasion of Browne’s essay is simply stated: “In a Field of old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes.” Browne’s recent biographer, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, had the notion that he would, as it were, walk Browne’s life – go to places which Browne mentions in his works, and see things in those places that Browne might have seen, relics indeed from the 17th century. A sort of psychogeography of a life, in the manner of Iain Sinclair, but without the style.  Mostly, of course, the landscape of Sir Thomas Browne is gone: as are the Walsingham urnes. But Adersey-Williams, undeterred, went to another site that Browne went to years after the Walsingham discovery. As in some the voice-over to some reality tv show contest, A-W gives us the mood music: “The first challenge is to locate the site. Browne describes the field as ‘lying between Buxton and Brampton, but belonging unto Brampton’; that is to say within the parish of Brampton.” And he is off on the treasure hunt.

I am not sure walking Browne’s life really gets us into Browne’s life: as the biographer does not subdue himself to the biographical subject, we begin to suspect that we are going to find out more about the treasure hunting biographer than about the biographer’s subject, with whom he seems oddly out of tune. For instance, at one point he calls the Urne Burial maudlin – which seems to be his description of melancholia. Adersey-Williams is evidently not a blues fan. 

I am, though.

In a passage of  seventeenth century metaphysical splendour, Browne saw the urn as both the habitat of the dead and the figure of birth itself:

“While many have handles, ears, and long necks, but most imitate a circular figure, in a sphericall and round composure; whether from any mystery, best duration or capacity, were but a conjecture. But the common form with necks was a proper figure, making our last bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity, while we lay in the nether part of the Earth,3 and inward vault of our Microcosme.”

This is the kind of prose that will find an odd revival in the American twentieth century. Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Cormac McCarthy all, in their own ways, go back to the syntactical branchings of the seventeenth century masters – partly because there is something very oral about them, closer to speech than the more rational rhetoric ofthe 19th century.

2. The spring of 1819 was a great season for Keats’ poetry. Something in that season worked on Shelley and Byron too, the romantic crewe which drew such condescension from the New Criticism in the 20th century, under Eliot’s distaste for disturbances in a tradition he was making up as a bulwark against social democracy and all its fruits. For the New Critics, evidently Shelley’s great sonnet, England in 1819, showed the immaturity that was sloughed  off by “mature” poets. To me, of course, it shows Shelley had a keen eye for the idiocy of British tradition and politics.

3. Keats was living in Hampstead, in a “semi-detached villa” that he rented with a friend, Charles Armitage Brown. Fanny Brawne and her mother lived in another semi-detached villa in the same subdivision, which gave Keats and Brawne a lot of opportunities to walk and talk and kiss and not tell, I suppose.

4. More importantly for our second urn, the Grecian urn of Keats’ poem, Benjamin Robert Haydon, the impecunious painter, also lived nearby. According to Keats’ biographer, William Rossetti (Rossetti felt he was infinitely more educated and classy than the poet, and makes that known in every sentence of his book), Keats would walk with Haydon in the nearby Kilbourn meadows and “chaunt” his poems, including the Ode to the Grecian Urn.  Haydon, after all, knew something about Greek Urns. What he told Keats in Kilburn meadows would be, as Sir Thomas Browne might put it, an interesting topic for speculation, up there with the songs the Sirens sung: unknowables.

5. In an article entitled The Shield and the Urn: the search for the source of Keat’s Grecian Urn, I.B. Cauthen ponders the suggestion that there was really one urn that inspired Keats. However, he thinks this is unlikely, and that the urn was all in Keats’ fancy, an identi-kit of Grecian urns: “there has been a host of suggestions concerning the original urn. The Townley Vase in the British Museum, the Holland House Vase, the Sosibios Vase, illustrated in a four-volume collection of engravings of art works that Napoleon extorted from Italy, the Borghese Vase in Piranesi's drawings of vases and candela” all have their devotees – yet all were merely contributaries, as it were, to the one unravishable urn that Keats describes in the poem:

6. There exists a drawing of a Grecian urn attributed to Keats – which looks like the Sosibios Vase. It is as possible, even probable, that Haydon took Keats to see the catalogues of antiquities. As important as these models, I think, was the anti-model presented by the bourgeois notion of beauty of Keats friend, or ex-friend, Leigh Hunt. In a letter from 1818 to his his brother George, Keats wrote:

“Hunt does one harm by making fine things pretty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts – many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing. This distorts one’s mind – makes one’s thoughts bizarre – Perplexes one in the standards of Beauty.”

The negative image, the glorious thing made nothing, is negated itself in the Ode. Against Hunt’s knowingness, Keats does not posit an argument, but a series of questions that have a supra-argumentative force:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

   What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

7.  Our final urn is a pot. It appears, weirdly, in that prose poem of philosophy, the Spirit of Utopia, by Ernst Bloch – composed during WWI, against which Bloch, to his eternal credit, protested. He had migrated to Switzerland, and looked back at the German intellectuals, and especially his mentor, Simmel, with a puzzled horror.

Simmel is important to Bloch’s pot. Simmel had  established the style that combined the feuilleton and the monograph, a style that finds its way through Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and onward – the voice, as it were, of the Weimar era. Simmel, however, was no Marxist: he supported the German war effort and made no bones about it – like Thomas Mann. This made him an unacknowledgable ancestor, unlike Karl Kraus. Kraus was conservative too, but he hated the war and, as a great hater, aligned it with his other great hatred – the feuilleton. The poisonous posterity, as he saw it, of Heine.

Simmel, as Adorno notes in his essay on Bloch, had written an essay on the handle. Turning to this article, which was published in Philosophical Culture (a very Simmel-esque title) in 1919, we find the characteristics of Simmel’s analytic framework. Simmel begins by distinguishing the space of the painting – figurative painting is meant – from the space of everyday life. A distinct mark of the latter is its tactility. We can touch a painting, but to suppose that a painting is for touching would be a mistake – a teaching mistake, really. We are meant to regard the painting, and in so doing, we see the space that the painting, by its science of perspective, wants us to look at. The space of a painting of a pot, for instance, is never the space in which  the pot is handled.

“As a piece of metal that is tangible, weighable, and incorporated into the ways and means of the surrounding world, a vase is a segment of reality. At the same time, its artistic form leads an existence completely detached and self-contained, for which the material reality of the metal is merely the vehicle. A vessel, however, unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of everyday life. Thus the vessel is in two worlds at one and the same time.” [translation found here https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/60/simmel.php]

Bloch’s preface to the Spirit of Utopia is almost a direct response to Simmel’s essay – in fact, knowing that this essay existed was my way of seeing what in the blazes Bloch was doing.

Bloch’s jug – Krug in the German -  is, for one thing, definitely earthy. Clay is the matter in question, not Simmel’s metal. That earthiness is intended – the example is not simply an example, a trait that distinguishes “continental” philosophy from “analytic”. Its earthiness, its humbleness, in a sense, aligns Bloch’s jug with the “sad pitchers” dug up in English fields in Browne’s meditation. But even as this jug comes out of the past, a very Germanic past, it presents itself in the present to the writer, or to anyone who comes into its space. Space, here, cannot be stripped of location and time. And, even, of its location in the space of the text – under the more general heading, Self-encounter. Its oddness as the beginning of a philosophical text is made even odder by being the beginning of self-encounter. Instead of going down the path of introspection, we are thrust into the path of exteriority, as though the self we were going to encounter was outside of us.

“It has often been imitated. That is harmless, but there are also more expensive antique exemplars, still holding their sheen, narrownecked, consciously molded, with many flutes, a beautifully curly head on the neck and a shield on the belly, and these throw the simple jug in the shadows. Yet for one who loves it, who sees the superficiality of the expensive jugs, prefers to its brothers the brown, uncouth implement, which almost lacks a neck, with a wild man’s face and a meaningful snail insignia on the swell of its belly, sunlight signs.”

Perhaps in this return to the European peasant, to the “Nordic vulgarisation” of the Italian variant, Bloch is touching on an aesthetic that could and would go either way in the post World War I world. An aesthetic that found less and less room for “what wild ecstasy?”, substituting an irony that knows a little bit too much – that ignores, in its knowing, Keats question marks; or an aesthetic of reactionary nostalgia that forced us all to drink and drink the black milk of morning.