Donne and the women

 

In 1980, Sarah Wintle, in the London Review of Books, wrote:  “Any close criticism of Donne’s poetry has, it seems inevitably, to be an account of oppositions in action.” The phrase sweeps up the critical dictum under which Donne has been read at least since Johnson’s phrase about the yoking together of opposites, and Eliots reflection on the  discordia concors.

There is a lot to be said for Donne’s attraction to opposites – black and white, East and West, constant and inconstant, etc. And one of the things to be said is that such opposites, resting on essence terms, are vulnerable to the inverting of those essences – an inversion that remains within the essentialist camp in order to create the paradoxes that Donne’s mind played with.  Donne’s paradoxes are never advances towards relativism, because he needed the essences to make sense of the paradoxes he could make out of them.

I am a great fan of Donne’s prose. Flannery O’Connor said she read Henry James to tone up her own prose; I use Donne, sometimes, for the same reason, although the sermons can become a bit too plummy as one wades through the intricate (and I often think bogus) philology and etymology to get to the redemptive point. Which, I think in the greatest of paradoxes, is also the generative point, redemption being another mask of creation.  Donne’s earlier prose, the Devotions, the Biathanatos, the paradoxes, are not meant as trials of hermeneutical weightlifting in the service of the King, but are to an extent ludic exercises – although of course the devotions and the Christian pamphlets have a more serious purpose. They are essays, but tend towards deforming or parodying the essayist’s usual intent. To my mind the Paradoxes, which were in vogue in the Renaissance, should be included in the pre-history of prose poetry: they are a poetry of pure opposition, of opposites as being, in that space between rhetoric and ideation,  themselves poetic tropes.

What you can do with such play, in early 17^th century England, is to make the essences approved of in common and scholastic life dance to it.

I would not defend the value of all the paradoxes, but, unlike Helen Peters, who condemns certain of the paradoxes – most notably the defence of the inconstancy of women – to the shadow realm of the Dubia, although the evidence for making the judgment that Donne didn’t write it seems pretty shallow to me. I just don’t think Helen Peters liked it.

Donne often took on the role of railer against women and as a railer, he permitted himself the rhetoric of extremism that Christianity as he conceived it permitted him. Yet, in Donne’s afterlife in the twentieth century, one notices that it is the company of women, academics and poets, that have not only gathered his works together with extraordinary scholarship, but who as well are the great arguers for his poetry. The last biography of Donne, by Katherine Rundell, is the heir of the work of Helen Gardner, Evelyn Simpson, and Helen Peters, among others. In particular, certain Catholic writers, such as Dorothy Sayers, have made a cult of Donne.

Perhaps it is the way in which Donne seems so dashing. To dash is to break out, to draw a line through, to thow away, and it is also, since the 18^th century, about making a brilliant show. Both means seem to mark Donne’s persona – and no matter how often, in a classroom, one is assured that the poem’s I is not identical with the biographical person, the mental superposition of one over the other happens, and happens as part of the poetic process. The moreso in Donne, who sent his poems privately, and never collected them himself.

The Defence of Woman’s Inconstancy is the longest of the paradoxes, and seems the most thought out, as a piece of prose. It launches itself with the same kind of gymnastic tonguework as many of the love poems:

“For every thing as it is one better than another, ſo is it fuller of change; The Heavens themſelves continually turne, the Starres move, the Moone changeth; Fire whirleth, Ayre flyeth, Water ebbs and flowes, the face of the Earth altereth her lookes, time ſtayes not; the Colour that is moſt light, will take moſt dyes: so in Men, they that have the moſt reaſon are the moſt alterable in their deſignes, and the darkeſt or moſt ignorant, do ſeldomeſt change; therefore Women changing more than Men, have alſo more Reaſon. They cannot be immutable like ſtockes, like ſtones, like the Earths dull Center; Gold that lyeth ſtill, ruſteth; Water, corrupteth; Aire that moveth not, poyſoneth; then why should that which is the perfection of other things, be imputed to Women as greateſt imperfection?”

The brilliance of this requires a convention that still dominates the discussion of gender: a type, which is woman, and a type, which is man, pieces upon a chessboard. The token never runs away with the type, never ruins it. Rather, in this game, we only drive to logical paradox the attributes of the type. But what a glorious length of the universe is trailed behind the attributes of the type – the air, the stars, water, color, the inventory of the world. As in Donne’s poetry, where love becomes not just a matter of the attraction of the poet to the woman he loves, but rather a microcosm of the macrocosm, a proof and reflection of the largest order, the All. Even if Donne’s poet casts an evil eye, a certain violence:

But O, self traitor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all

And can convert manna to gall;

Transubstantiation is a powerful word in this place – and the spider love that inhabits the speaker has an anti-Christ’s cast. The spider, the flea, worms, all the little and somewhat disgusting beasts are always at Donne’s beck and call, which is part of the dash of the poetry and the poetic persona. Here there is no sparing of the excremental side of life, blood and piss and shit. In the 1920s, when Donne became faddish, there was a larger sense of the excremental side of life among the cultivated – who’d splashed through four years of it at the front.

One of the great things about Donne is that he has never been wholly accepted as canonical. The excremental life, the imbalance as it might be seen by those who require balance to block out crouched man, taking a dump – that is the other side of the dashing persona. In this respect, Donne could be considered in the terms Orwell uses about Ulysses:

“The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared – for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique – to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody’s nose.” The “America” under everybody’s nose – one feels a link to Donne’s numerous uses of America to speak of bodies, discoveries, intimate space. Most famously in his account of getting naked with his lover:

 

O my America, my new-found-land,

 

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

 

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

 

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

james joyce, Mr. Claud Sykes, and dissimulation

 

Mr. Claud Sykes wanders into James Joyce’s life, according to Richard Elman, in 1917 in Zurich, when he applied for a role in a movie that Joyce was supposedly making with a crook named Jules Martin. Martin’s idea was to set up a movie company, borrow money for expenses and such, and in some vague manner abscond with the cash.

Mr. Claud Sykes remained in Joyce’s life as a friend, and the typist of Ulysses, for some time.

Ellmann interviewed Sykes in the fifties. He conveys what Sykes told him. He doesn’t doubt the story that Sykes and his actress wife had somehow, in the midst of WWI, washed up in Zuric. In a bit of luck for Joyce, were hard up enough to do typing for the miserable fees he was able to pay them.

And it may well have unfolded like this.

Yet, there is another side to Claud Sykes.

Alan Burton of Brunel University has written an interesting essay on the anti-communist thrillers of the thirties, and narrows the scope to the anonymous writer, Vigilant, who wrote a number of such thrillers as well as the non-fiction book, Secrets of Modern Spying. According to book publishing records, Vigiland was  Claud Sykes. And Claud Sykes seems to have known, from experience, a few of the secrets of modern spying. For what other reason could he, really, have been in Zurich in 1917?

“An obvious suggestion is that, as an accomplished German speaker, he was in some way serving British Intelligence, perhaps one his roles being to keep an eye on the wayward Irishman Joyce who was suspect in some quarters. One is immediately put in mind of the writer Somerset Maugham who had been recruited to the wartime British Secret Service and based around French-speaking Lake Geneva only 280km distant. It could be that Sykes was yet another of those British writers of spy fiction who had served in intelligence. Maugham, of course, was a celebrated case in point, publishing the classic Ashenden in 1928, a set of stories based on his espionage activities in neutral Switzerland.”

The Sykes who was given 10 francs here and ten francs there to type chapters in Ulysses is the same Sykes who, apparently, was the son of a fairly well to do father and the grandchild of a millionaire. Peter Fishback, whose interests are in the Royal Irish Fusiliers and in James Joyce (an interesting overlap!) has written a much denser post about British intelligence in Switzerland during WWI and Sykes profile. He includes the review of Sykes Secrets of Modern Spying that appeared, in 1930, in the Illustrated London News, which featured this bit:

“In a chapter entitled "Humours of Spying," "Vigilant" shows that even Intelligence has its lighter side. One of the stories, which tells how the Germans continued to send money to a spy after he had been shot, money which English counter-spies used to buy a motor-car (they called it by the dead man's name), is a very grim joke. But nothing could be more diverting than the fate of the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce's novel, “Ulysses." This masterpiece of modern fiction was sent to the Censor, who thought it so obscure and baffling be could not believe it was a novel and despatched it to Room 40, the department in Scotland Yard where codes are deciphered. After much fruitless study, in which their best decoders failed to elicit the book's meaning, the officials decided that perhaps it was a novel after all. A man of letters was summoned, who pronounced that it "bore some faint resemblance to literature." Thus vouched for, the manuscript was set free.”

Joyce, like any writer, was always on the lookout, one might even say vigilant, for any mention of himself in the press. So he might have read this. Joyce and his wife, Fishback sez, visited Sykes and his wife in 1929. He had already received a copy of Sykes’ first “mystery”, The Nine Pointed Star – so I imagine that Secrets of Modern Spying came his way.  It must have given him some ideas – especially as there is no accounting for how the chapters of Ulysses were rerouted to the British intelligence boys in “Room 40”. As well, of course, was information about the burglaring of the Austrian consulate in Zurich. Joyce no doubt knew this consulate, from having been in contact with Austrian officials when he was in Trieste. Stories of burglary and misrouted letters certainly floated into  Finnegans Wake.

Joyce scholars have used Sykes mainly as the source of Joyce’s knowledge of the theory that Shakespeare was really the Duke of Rutland – a theory Sykes got from a book by a German named Bleibtreu, which Sykes loaned to Joyce and Joyce, in a moment of grace, gave back. Ah, loaning – a word that hangs around Joyce, a man who was continually waiting for funds and continually in need of a loan. The theory about Shakespeare ends up in Ulysses, in the section where Stephen Dedalus, a much loaned to man himself,  spins out his theory of Hamlet.

As well, Sykes and Joyce put on Oscar Wilde’s play,  The Importance of Being Earnest. Both the Shakespeare story and the Earnest story are about people who are not who they claim to be – who dissimulate. And of course Oscar Wilde was a famous and tragic dissimulator in his own life. In Syke’s case, as a British agent soaking up information for his higher ups, he really was not who he claimed to be, or at least he claimed to be not all of what he was, doubling merrily between typing on a French typewriter an Irishman’s English to reporting on any suspect Germanness among the bohemians in Zurich, one supposes. Joyce would be a suspect type in many ways, since he made up songs mocking the war and claimed himself to be a pacifist, or at least against blowing holes in the bodies of strangers with rifles and such. If Joyce read Secrets of Modern Spying in 1929 or 1930, surely this must have struck him with a certain suggestiveness.

In Joyce, suggestiveness was sucked into the great work, sooner or later. Notes were taken, conversations overheard, information gets shifted and refracted among voices that are sometimes in the ambilocative, the neither here nor there, and that are sometimes the voice of public or pubic opinion in the great scenes in FW.   

Mr. Sykes is in there somewhere.

2.

 

Joyce  loved the mix of high and low, of Thomas Acquinas and Paul de Kock. I imagine, I fantasize that Joyce, reading Sykes on counterspies, on invisible inks (and their failures) and rerouted letters, might have thought about the whole rich Catholic literature on dissimulation. That literature which touches on casuistry, on the black legend of the Jesuits. Wasn’t Stephan Dedalus called a Jesuit by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses? The subtle mind, subverting certainty, exploiting ambiguity for the sack of the good, or the church, or Art.

In the Ways of Lying: dissimulation, persecution and conformity in Early Modern Europe, Perez Zagorin traces a certain scar in Catholicism, a certain opposition, a blind argument, back to Augustine and Jerome.

In particular, their controversy circled around a passage in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, 2:11-14. In this passage, Paul explains why he rebuked Peter in Antioch. Peter, who had ceased to observe the dietary laws, pretended, in the company of Jewish Christians in Antioch, to have remained an observer. He withdrew from the Gentiles, he dissembled – or so Paul claimed: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?”

Jerome had a rather extraordinary interpretation of this passage: he took it as an instance of Paul’s own dissimulation.  “According to Jerome, Paul’s rebuke to Peter was merely feigned, having been pre-arranged between two apostles for the benefit of both Catholic and Jewish converts.”

The theatricality of this episode, the conspiracy of it. Christianity here becomes strategy, and strategy becomes sacred. Jerome supports his interpretation by pointing to instances in the Acts where Paul also asked Gentiles to live as Jews – asking a convert to be circumcised, for instance.

Augustine, reading Jerome, couldn’t believe his eyes. He not only wrote to Jerome, asking him if he was serious, but he published his own interpretation. Jerome, that translator, was not a systematic thinker, or at least not on Augustine’s level. Augustine wrote that it was extremely dangerous “to admit that anything in the sacred books should be a lie… If once we admit in that supreme authority even one helpful lie, nothing will be left of these books.

Jerome is not known for being a liberal thinker. He was very rigid, so to speak, on the subject of female virginity. But here, here, perhaps he did think as a translator.  He, after all, translated the Bible into Latin. From the translator’s point of view, dissimulation could be much like translation. The language of the original text is, as it were, hidden under the language of the translated text. The translation is a sort of lie, a dissimulation, a silent ascent to what it does not say.

Translation as a sort of invisible ink.

Now, I have no proof that Joyce ever made these connections. Yet in the Shem the Penman sections of Finnegans Wake, there is surely some attraction to pennings and inks and dissimulations going on, some eavesdropping and counterspying. In Sykeness and in health, by the hand that holds the crayon.

Ah, dissimulation – I must write about this again.

Dialectic of the Enlightenment: a drive by

 

Enlightenment does not begin with the question, “what is the truth?” It begins with a consideration of the interplay between two questions:

a. what is the truth?
b. and: what do we want the truth to be?

To understand Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, it is crucially important to keep this in mind.


The ‘excursus’ entitled “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” forged a conjunction between Sade and Kant that, while unheard of when the Dialectic was published in 1947, has become a standard trope in cultural studies. Partly it owes this fame to its shock value. While A and H diagnosed the fascist politics of shock, they were not immune to its allure. This is confusing for those who believe that distance and distinction is the hallmark of the relationship between criticism and its object. A and H, however, question the cost of maintaining that distance – a cost that is paid in granting to the object the seriousness of the untouchable. For A and H, the satyr play is part of the whole cycle – parody, mockery, quotation, and other forms of secret sharing can not only not be excluded from the philosopher’s repertoire, but gauge the philosopher’s willingness to confront the history of his categories.

So, in this chapter we have a seemingly puzzling reading of Kant. If we remember the interplay between the questions we began with – and if we don’t, peremptorily, treat them as opposites – we have a Leitfaden – a guiding thread – to what A and H are doing here.

Kant, for A and H, is the most systematically intelligent Enlightenment philosopher, which is why they take the critical philosophy to be a sort of canon of Enlightenment. For Kant, the scientific use of understanding – the posing of the question, what is true, without regard with what we want to be true – finds a systematic object: what Newton called “the system of the world.’ And what is the system of the world? Cause and effect, as far as the eye can see. Yet there is a problem. Insofar as the object of understanding is a total and materially determined system, the understanding itself, if part of this system, is itself determined. But insofar as the true is different from what we want to be true – insofar as that is the boast of the Enlightenment – we seem to be denying the understanding that freedom among alternatives that would make for a disinterested choice. If understanding does not have the freedom to choose its version of its object, the truth value of that object becomes suspect. Perhaps the understanding has been hypnotized, perhaps its trust in cause and effect is not understood but simply vouched for, perhaps perhaps. Such is the systematic place of freedom in Kant’s metaphysical project’ such is the problem of freedom. Notice what we require here: a primary instance of freedom to found a deterministic system. For Kant, this instance of freedom does find an embodiment in the “I” – but an I that has sacrificed all its object-hood. The transcendental I, as Kant says, is an accompanying “x” – a variable. In terms of Kant’s system, the transcendental I is coherent with the ethical instance of freedom, which also requires a sacrifice of object-hood. A and H point to this sacrifice, and point to the fact that it is elided – that its mediate nature, to use Hegelian terminology, remains hidden. The ethic of freedom demands, in fact, all of the personal characteristics of the I, for those characteristics hopelessly cling to object-hood. But can it be the case that the ethical demands that the I give away all its personal and embodied characteristics in order to be free, and thus subject to categorical imperatives? Sade’s answer is that, of course, the animal is the animal, and never more so than when eating, fucking, and dying. We are driven to do so, and we have developed delusions about what we want to be true in order to cover our tracks. What we want and what is true, in Sade as well as in Kant, are sorted into two different orders. But if Sade is right about our real wants and what they say to us, those orders are logically false – there’s only one order, of animal man.

So, in both the metaphysical and ethical realms, whether the imperative is to fuck or to not lie, we establish what is true only by such a total sacrifice of what we want to be true that we expel want itself – desire – from the system of human knowledge and morality.

To put it in terms of the Freudian return of the repressed – when human desire is expelled from the social, it returns as inhuman desire.

At which point we might ask: isn’t this a little facile? There are those who feel that Adorno and the whole of Critical theory relies on a sort of scam. On the one hand, Kant is a philosopher, and we use his corpus of works to talk about “Kant.” On the other hand, he seems to be one of the emanations of history, a sort of representative in some unarticulated Phenomenology of the Spirit. How, one might ask, is Kant ‘representative’ of the society of Enlightenment – which includes Ben Franklin and his neighbor and the members of Parliament and all of these figures. Can we do intellectual history by sampling without having some justification for our samples?

Conservatism from the margins

Conservative parties have long dominated the political scene in the top OECD countries, and dominate policy choices even when so called “social democratic” or progressive parties are elected. That degree of domination has not, so far, been matched with an intellectual history of the movement that does not merely move from head to head: from, say, St. Thomas Aquinas to Edmund Burke. I  am too much the left-bot, the Marx reader, to think that this is satisfactory. I take the conservative claim to monopolize or articulate “common sense” as a clue to understanding how the conservative effect emerged in the modern world. I’d maintain that the effect has two sources: one, rooted in the establishment – the alliance of landowners and Capital  – adopted a  strategy well summed up by the Prince in The Leopard with the famous phrase, “everything must change so that everything stays the same”. But Burke, I think, is an emblem of another kind of conservatism:  a conservatism from the margins. This kind of relationship is drawn to the organic notion of the social, identifying the organic with a form of lifestyle that is in the crosshairs of liberalism. The  marginal conservatives derive from various nostalgic pictures of an original society: the Catholic population of Ireland, the Bretons  in the French revolution, the Austrians (among others) in the Austro-Hungarian empire, etc. Their effect is to produce a double vision of conservatism as not only the natural ideology of the ruling class, but also, paradoxically, as the victims of the liberal order. This victimhood is systematically undervalued, if seen at all, by the liberal order – by those who generally have succeeded in Capitalism’s circulation sphere, per Marx – the emblematic winners in the world of non-productive labor.

Whose conspiracy theory?

 Happy is the country where conspiracy theory is a mere fantasy to amuse teenagers.

You could not write a history of Guatemala, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, etc. without including a heavy dose of conspiracy, mainly conspiracies hatched by a nation’s far right class and the United States intelligence services. Reading American liberals bemoan “Russia’s” interference in the elections in the U.S., citizens in these among other nations must think: payback’s a bitch.

Russia is, in fact, ruled by the direct result of the U.S. interfering majorly to re-elect Yeltsin in 1996. For the Clinton administration, it was a no-brainer – they were never going to allow the democratic election of a Communist president.

Payback’s a bitch, even if in the case of Trump, the Russian interference, if there was such, was in no way as decisive as, say, the American interference in the foreclosure of the administration of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, or even in Italy in the election of the first Christian government in 1948. One can draw a pretty straight line from the U.S. interference in 1948 to the triumph of the fascists under Meloni in 2022. Meloni is James Jesus Angleton's secret love child - if anybody is.
This is a history of “stopping communism” that was not only supported by the Cold War liberal community, but was planned by its most illustrious members, who staffed the intelligence agencies, the state department, and the Pentagon. When illustrious members of the American liberal community today dismiss conspiracy as a non-starter to explain political events – a bone to chew on for the rubes out there, but not sophisticates! – they are trying to bury the entire history of American foreign policy for the last eighty years. Which means they have no tools to understand how blowback can happen to even the most super of the super-powers.
I am less fascinated by conspiracy, myself – except as a very nifty narrative strategy – as I am in what Alan A. Block, in his book about corruption in the Bahamas, Masters of Paradise, calls “the serious crime community.” Block, in his preface, traces the discussion of the junction of Under and Upperworlds to Edwin M. Sutherland’s coinage of the term “white collar criminal” in 1939. It is a term that, as Block points out, has its uses:
“By bringing the “ ‘upper-world’ ” crimes of business and government into a field of study that traditionally focused on the crimes of the poor and the underprivileged “ ‘underworld,’ ” Sutherland creatively enlarged the breadth of his discipline.”
Block, however, sees the term as insufficiently sociological – undermined by its individualistic presuppositions:
“My quarrel with the term lies in its imprecision when differentiating white-collar crime and criminals from organized crime …”
Block means organized crime by people who exist in a community that they influence by going over the line from licit to illicit activity. In the case of Bahama, much of the history of the de-colonization of the Bahamas was interlocked with the corruption of the government in order to allow the islands to host vast money laundering and gambling operations.
Block’s book was published in 1998, but it does have a certain relevance today. The serious criminals that ran Bahaman casinos and produced corporate fronts like Resorts International, which came out of a crooked, Meyer Lansky connected company named Mary Carter Paint Company. After Resorts International, in conjunction with various grifters and outliers of the Mafia, had debauched the Bahamas, they turned their eyes to Vegas and to Atlantic City. Anyone who has seen Casino knows some part of the Vegas story. In Atlantic City, Resorts had trouble with the vast overruns involved in building the Taj Mahal casino; now, this was a Resorts special. Overruns were really operations for draining money from investors and putting it into the pocket of some core of gangsters, but in New Jersey the corporation really seemed to be drowning – so it was taken over in a bid by Donald Trump. Trump’s final destination – not D.C., but Mar-a-Lago – is an extension of the Bahamas story.
Block’s book is straight up sociology of crooked businesses in the Bahama setting. So he does not go into another, shadow side of the story very much, which is that the CIA used Bahama banks, too, as depots of laundered money that they could put to use, originally, in trying to overthrow Castro. Douglas Valentine, who examines the CIA in terms of organized crime (which is a surprisingly tight fit) presents some of the story of Florida. One remembers that Richard Nixon (who was a bit like Donald Trump with less libido and more brain) had a sort of home away from home in Coral Gables, staying with his best friend Bebe Rebozo, who had a hand in various shady banks in the Bahamas. In fact, CREEP, Nixon’s reelection committee, probably used shell banks to distribute money, which led to Watergate as much as anything else.
The Bahamas have played, I would say, a miniature, a tiny, a small small small role in the Big Books about American Foreign Policy, written from a perspective that excludes, a priori, the very idea that the American intelligence community and the community of serious criminals overlap.
Perhaps this is a mistake.

Thinking non-neurotically about the party system

I am so old that I remember the election of 2004. Remember, Kerry crushed by the man who presided over the 9/11 moment of absolute incompetence and rode it to a second term? Remember the Dems acting like toothless old guys afraid of the Boss, and shaping the election completely to Bush’s specs?

At the time, I was struck by the free rider paradox that seemed, to me, to explain the election. That is, a certain part of the American populace, when freed by a quasi-delusional sense of their economic security, will vote for their most libidinous prejudices. Because they believe such a vote has no cost.
I am not as sure about that argument in the 2024 election. To my mind, the terms are a bit different, what with Biden presiding over the biggest spike in inflation since the seventies and thinking, or his people thinking, that they could nudge it away and massage the “vibes”.
But that is the election. The current discussion about the party. And myself, I’m turning back to the Bush moment to revisit what I thought then and think now is the real issue: the difference between a movement and a party.
Between the thirties and the eighties, the left in the U.S. did a very interesting thing: it invented a number of movements. From labor movements in the 30s to the Gay rights movements in the seventies, these movements originated political change. They had a galvanizing effect on the Democratic party. In 1900, there was nothing particularly progressive about the Democratic party, that collection of urban party machines depending on ethnic politics and white people in the South, but in 1960, there was. However, the party itself didn’t originate progressive politics – it rather responded to an exterior pressure. Anybody who looks at how, say, the Kennedys dealt with the civil rights movement sees this. The gun was in the hand of the movements.
On the philosophical plane, the sixties philosophers who broadcast a distaste for representation (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) were, in some manner, reflecting the revolt against the party as a political unit. This was obviously inflected by the Communist party in France, that black hole of the French intellect since the liberation in 1944. But in the U.S., the same thing was happening on a less philosophical, more pragmatic plane. The Black Panther/Civil Rights duo, for instance, destroyed the remnants of Democratic party machines in Chicago, Detroit, and Newark. In general, the perspective at the time was that the party exists as a vehicle for the movement; that the relationship between party and movement is purely tactical. The party never represents the movement. It never represents anything but itself. It is a vehicle. You don't ask your car where it wants you to go. You simply drive it, or fix it, or junk it.
The counter-attack came in the eighties. Movements were relabeled ‘special interests” by party intelligentsia. The New Republic played its one historic card during this era by actually generating writers and a vocabulary to crush movement politics, and to reverse the power relationship between movements and party. However, what was really important was the absorption of movements into various D.C. centered institutions. and the dispersion of movement figures into various institutions, academic and political. In the eighties, the Democratic party came to monopolize opposition in America, with fatal results for the Opposition.
What this means, to LI, is that it is a mug’s game to beat up on the Democrats. The party is structurally in contradiction with itself – its leadership is from a different social niche – overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy – than its membership. That niche has used its position to discipline the membership – to crush the possibility of movement politics – and the answer to that is not to fight back by “saving” the party, but simply establishing a non-fetishistic relationship with it.
My story of parties comes from a lefty perspective, and has one gaping hole: the relation of parties to the right. Here, there’s an interesting parallel with the brief period when the Dems seemed, even to progressives, to be the next step up from movements. The Republican party in 2004, and now, and perhaps since Reagan, doesn’t have this movement problem: because the Republican party resembles a movement. The extra-party element – corporations and businesses and religious organizations – have a firm independent existence outside of the party. Thus, they can ignore that directive niche that occasionally tries to impose the same kind of discipline on movements as the Dem leadership does. The Lincoln project that calls out the far right part of the GOP for its lack of respectability simply get stomped. Whereas every Dem leader longs to display his racism in a sister soulja moment, to send the message that white rule is still at the heart of the Dem party.
So – who cares? The Dems leadership will never be young urbans like AOC, but always old deadheads like Biden. Use the Dems in some things, don’t use them in others, and never expect that they will protect your interests. Skip em, fuck em, and work on the movement rather than the party level, is the macro conclusion. The problem of course being that the old movement architecture has long been gutted, even as the new mediasphere actually allows it to grow again. In my view of things, it is more important for Trans peeps to win on Netflix than in the Dem party – a party that still honors rapey old Bill Clinton. And of course has never ever honored Jimmy Carter, who called the show in Israel apartheid decades ago.
The Dems are reverting to type right now. Centrist losers.

keys to our present predicament, my friend, ally, mother, father, lover ...

 

Among my keys for understanding our curious epistemological existential situation, I like those I can find in William James’ most out of there book, Essays in Radical Empiricism. The “radical” in the book is about expanding the timid empiricists notion of experience, which is still slotted into the subject and there pitched against an experienced object, to something more like the whole of what possibly is. Experience is the field, be it of quanta or the big bang. It is the material of the possible.

James first disposes of consciousness in the first chapter – a breathtaking demolition job – and set to work in the second chapter to build up this world of pure experience.

In James’ terms, one of  the great problems for philosophers (and lovers and voters and drivers of cars in traffic jams and thieves and cops) is this:

“My experiences and your experiences are “with each other in  various external ways, but mine pass into mine and yours pass into yours in a way in which your and mine never pass into one another” (in this prose I can hear the sounds of James’ great pupil, Gertrude Stein, who gets the tune, here).

To understand this routing problem – and in James, the method of the route, of going from one place to another, is always the metaphysical mother – James considers, in the tradition, the problem of knowing itself. James is a triadic man (just as Decartes is an either/or warrior, and Deleuze is a fourfold riddler), and he puts his problem like this: “Either the knower and the known are:

1.       The self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are

2.       Two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or,

3.       The known is possible experience either of that subject or another, to which said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged. “

The solution now stands out to me like a star, a malevolent star, casting its light on what, to my old eyes, looks like the world transformed by media: the word as entirely the product of the mediate. The world as fandom – always knowing all about, but never ‘knowing’. In the sense of know in the phrase “I know him” or “She knows me”. My acquaintance, my friend, my mother, my father, my sibling, my lover. Where the tacit dimension of the self is included in the mix.

James makes his first move in explaining type one by invoking the kind of knowledge he calls “knowledge of”.

Knowledge of is research knowledge. Or search knowledge. That browsers respond to whatever one puts in the box with “searches” seems to have become, or even was from the beginning, a sort of social instinct, an unquestioned us of the term that presupposes a certain intentional looking or journey. The intention in the journey is to find, to fill in, some implicative object, some correct answer on the fill in the choices test. The search, in Jamesian speak, reproduces the perceptive act. We see, we touch, we hear, we browse.

What this world does without is … the dream of transcendental union, the “immediate touch of one by the other.” James imagines his adversary dismayed that we have moved among “mere intermediaries” and have left no room, have squeezed out, the transcendental glory of “apprehension”, ‘ in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by lighting…” That image! James is, indeed, proposing a deflating, a de-sublimating image of the world as a compound of “mere intermediaries” – all ands, to what purpose we do not know, and as we get used to it, do not care. A world of only connect, no matter what the connection conveys.

I can imagine James’ adversary saying, producing that old cliché like the canniest poetry, that the map is not the territory. Routes are not the whole. But in fact that map and the territory are linked the way the shovel and the hole dug in the ground are linked, parts of an experience that extends beyond them. Maps change the territory, they reconfigure the territory. The charts that led Columbus to the New World, the chart which leads the ships through the supposedly eternal currents and predictable winds,  led to the decimation of the natives, the chopping down of the forests, the slave ships extracting human beings flavivirus and plasmodium falciparum from one continent to another, the extraction of oil and coal and the subsequent warming of the atmosphere and the oceans and the surprisingly quick shifts in the currents that Columbus encountered. It all happens in the blink of a geological eye. The map is not a description of the territory, but a symptom of the change that the territory will undergo, and us with it.

Keys. If they are keys.