Huddling

 

Whenever the wealthy and the powerful conspire together, the newspapers speak of “huddling”.

Conspire, of course, has a sinister sound. Meet might be more neutral, but newspapers which have some pepper in their bloodstream like verbs that will pique the reader’s interest. There is nothing more uninteresting than meeting. Meetings are things that emails are sent out for, reminding recipients that it is mandatory, setting the day and the hour, nailing a piece of the collective flesh to this or that room.

In the spectrum of meeting types, the “huddle” enjoys a long career of being what happens when moguls, politicos, and the offensive line of a football team rub shoulders. As in this Sunday NYT article that begins:

“This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.”

The huddling here was about global climate change. Yadda Yadda Yadda went on. If your idea about changing our industrial structure to save the holocene includes representatives of Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, you may well be a centrist Democrat. Congratulations!

According to Skeat’s etymological dictionary, to huddle is genetically related to “hide”. To hide closely together, even. To hide in a crowd, or to be a crowd of hiders, presents us with a bit of a paradox, as crowds are mostly imagined as public and showy – a crowd or a mob or a demonstration makes a definite presence on the street. A hidden crowd, however, implies some disastrous social breakdown. The crowd of hiders in Saramago’s novel, Blindness, are suffering a peculiarly horrible fate, in that they have all contracted the epidemic blindness and that they are all collected and put away in a closely guarded reservation as a quarantine measure to stop the blindness from spreading. The crowd of the blind cannot, of course, see itself, although one of the characters is pretending blindness in order to stay with her husband, and can actually see the whole crowd – even as she is “hidden”, by counterfeiting being blind, from the crowd.

This notion of a hidden crowd is overlaid, in America, by the one instance of huddle that is known by all: “the huddled masses, yearning to be free”. Here the huddling has been done by tyrants overseas – from which said masses, en masse, are yearning to be free, and putting in action this yearning by getting third class tickets on boats and making the crossing in the holds of said boats to America. Once in America, of course, every manjack of them becomes an individual in his or her own right. And if they peddle, invest, sweat and save successfully, their descendants can one day hope to huddle, richly, with representatives of other rich people.

Perhaps, even, in a huddle room.

In the midst of the techmania of the year 2000, a Corey Kilgannon wrote a story for the Times about Ernst and Young, the accounting agency. Fearing that it was not cool enough, Ernst and Young set about arranging to be as cool as Boo.com – or any other dotcom startups.

“A smiling 20-something receptionist wears a name tag identifying him as Elvis Presley, and a blast of Bob Marley music accompanies an employee leaving a conference room. Actually, they are called “huddle rooms” and have plush easy chairs and white walls on which employees can write. The “college rooms” nearby have dormitory-style couches where workers on marathon shifts can take naps.”

I wonder if huddle rooms still survive in the Corporate archipelago? I have an idea that the “huddle room” in which Bill Gates huddled has more up-scale accoutrements than were ever dreamt of by Elvis Presley of Ernst and Young.

Somehow, I still prefer conspire.

Reviewing, a retrospective

 I’ve done my time as a book reviewer. I’ve lived in the foxhole, or the book-reviewer’s equivalent: an efficiency apartment overflowing with reviewer copies of books, books in every corner, books on the desk, the table, the bed, books like a madness or some fungus.

Thus, even after saying a happy goodbye to the whole ill-paid business,

I do think about reviewing. I think about how my time, in the 00s, was a pretty bad time for the business as a whole: newspapers that used to host book reviews as a natural function, just as they’d host obituaries and wedding announcements, were in the midst of the great change that would destroy most of them. Part of that change was the weird idea that reviewing anything but reading material – in a forum that depended on people, well, reading – would make papers ‘relevant”. The video game, cable tv, social media – great things in themselves, but competitors for the attention space – became the obsession of newspapers (the latest iteration of this being AI – a sort of imbecilic end to the newspaper obsession with a world in which newspapers are marginal or extinct. A Darwinist business historian would have a name for this fatal tendency. I lieu of which, I'll name it: the Sears Roebuck complex. How to fuck up a good thing, from the top).

On the other hand, newspapers had been on the skids for years, as the variety of papers in market after market thinned to a monopolistic one. And book reviews, in such an environment, were never going to make it.

I at the time had regular freelance gigs with the Chicago Sun, the Austin Chronicle and the Austin Statesman, and found a niche, here and there, with some odd characters: The National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Examiner, even the Wall Street Journal (which in the old days had a book review section edited by a man whose name I can’t remember, but who was, I do remember, politically inclined to socialism – in the pre-Murdoch days, the WSJ, always far to the right, still did things like hiring Alexander Cockburn to write a regular column). So I was in touch with the sickness of the whole reviewing world in North America.

Thus – I am a big man for a thus, and though I seem to be throwing out random reminiscence, there is a point, goddamn it! – the awful NYT review of Gabriel’s Moon, which seems to be an awful book by the British novelist William Boyd, has been weighing on my mind. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/books/review/gabriels-moon-william-boyd.html

The review that calls the main character a "turd", after calling him a "meatloaf". A hatchet job in which the hatchet man does not know how to swing a hatchet.

My mind goes back, reviewerishly, to the figure of John Leonard.

John Leonard is a name that rings a chime, most likely, only for older writers. Leonard reviewed TV. Leonard wrote novels (one of which Hugh Kenner called the “anti-V”, which is the only time, I believe, Kenner ever referred to Pynchon), Leonard wrote a column full of musings about society, but mostly, Leonard reviewed books.

In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick launched a famous salvo against the sheer mediocrity of the book review section of the Times. Looking back at that time through the archives, one finds that every new thing written in the U.S. was dissed by reviewers who seemed to be closer to the Edwardian age than their own. For them, Naked Lunch was tedious pornography. So was Lolita. And so on. On the other hand, one is also surprised that, well into the sixties, the section kept tabs on the literary scene in disparate foreign parts – Marc Slonim, for instance, wrote a regular column on what was happening in Italian, French, German and Eastern European literature. There is a reason that the NYT of that period becomes practically a Greek chorus in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries.

The slough of the review was, however, sloughlike for a decade after Hardwick’s attack. And then, for a period of about five years, John Leonard somehow, through some synaptic blackout of the managing editor, was given charge of the book page.

As a result, the Edwardian age was swept away. Exhibit one in what a book review section could be like: November 9, 1975. The NYT Book section features two reviews on its front page (in the book reviewing world, the front page of the NYT is, or was, the most valuable property in the fame – it is Park Place with four hotels): one is of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, and the other is of William Gaddis’s JR. The latter is a particularly sweet victory, of sorts, for art. Notoriously, Gaddis’s The Recognitions was subject to a completely uncomprehending review by Granville Hicks, of blessed memory, probably playing his harp in the heaven of the middle brow that must exist if God is just somewhere in our universe, back in the fifties, that had the effect of submerging Gaddis for almost two decades. It is a famous case.

In the collection of Leonard pieces, Reading for my Life, Leonard tells a story:

“In 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Tokyo to look at the bombed temple and the burned-out plain of the Asakusa. The twenty-three-year-old American, in U.S. Army PX jacket, was the critic Donald Richie. The forty-eight-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was the novelist Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English; Richie, no Japanese, and their interpreter stayed home, sick in bed with a cold. And so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, “André Gide.” Kawabata thought about it, then replied, “Thomas Mann.” They both grinned. And they’d go on grinning the rest of the afternoon, trading names like Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stefan Zweig; Colette and Proust.

It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if they were signal flags or semaphores… I take it personally. It seems to me that my whole life I’ve been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue.”

Leave it to Leonard to find a parable for book reviewers. That dying breed.

private lives, impersonal authors

 

When the New Criticism was at its height in the postwar period, a lotta intellectual energy was devoted to dispelling belles lettres and its tiresome construction of the author as the constant reference point for the work. In choosing between life and the work, the New Criticism robustly chose the work, and purged fantasies of authorial intention as much as they could. The Eliotic impersonality of the author was the ideal. What did the text say? That was the question. Not: what did the author want?

Yet, concurrently with the feverish coldness of the cult of impersonality, outside of academia, celebrity culture was moving in precisely the opposite direction. Just as the actor in a movie overshadowed the character he or she is playing (so that we often speak of Humphrey Bogart in x movie or Marilyn Monroe in y movie with little regard for the names of the characters in x or y movie), so, too, the publicity machine was rolling out countless personal facts and quirks about authors.

Joseph Roth, in 1929, was already writing about this. In an essay entitled “The Private Life”, Roth wrote: “For some years I have struggled, vainly, not to know about the private life of contemporary authors.”

For Roth, the fortress of privacy around the individual was being dissolved in the twentieth century by the medias in which we all bathe. He spots, in the discussion of authors, the kind of stereotypical motifs that introduce us to the lives of actors or politicians:

“Thus, for example, the important author Döblin, whose public influence is without doubt interesting enough, almost never introduced in regards to his books without the assertion that begins: he is a neurologist and practices in the North of Berlin. The repulsive and childish arrogance of the intrusive writing, who is so “well informed”, is everywhere unconstrained. The writer has to announce it – and even, at each occasion, with a foolish, joyful cry: aha! I knew it! A worker’s doctor in the North – thus diminishing the meaning of the author just as much as he devalues his necessary distance from the public. Compared to this barbarism, the mockable efforts of an eager Germanist to uncover superfluous trivialities out of the private life of his object of study are gestures of an aristocratic delicatesse.”

We could bookend the literary culture of modernism by putting, on one side, the impersonal artist of the New Critics, and on the other side, the Life magazine adoring portraits of authors. The Hemingways and Scott Fitzgeralds, who, in the American context, are the celebrity authors par excellence, stars in the Hollywood mold. They played themselves and they wrote. But what they wrote was only who they were.

Roth was of course concerned about literature, but not just literature. His notion was that the private life, with all its splendours and miseries, was being de-formed by being subject to the thousandfold pokings of the media, businesses, and the state. The harm in this for literature, to Roth, was self-evident: “for it has already become customary to view the writer a such a priori in terms of his private life.”

Live by the buzz, die by the buzz.

In this period, the late twenties and early thirties, Roth was withdrawing from his earlier fellow traveling sentiments and trying to find a politics to stand on against the Nazis and the Stalinists. This was his vector. Out of the loss of the private life, Roth foresaw the loss of the meaning of life entirely.;

“Nothing makes an author hotter than his quality as an “eyewitness” of the events that he is treating. Since some time, book reviewers have loved to give particular praise to those books which aren’t books – meaning: the lack of a literary quality qualifies as a plus. Then they pull out the slogan: This book is more than a novel! It is a piece of life!

What does that mean? More than a novel?

Within literature a piece of life only receives value when it has been given a worthy form. An unformed “piece of life” is not more than a novel, but less: it is nothing, it doesn’t even come into the picture. Or one begins to publish the written correspondence of paramilitary murders… They are so neat, round, juicy pieces of life! And literature has ceased to exist.”

Leo (Tolstoy) and Luigi (Mangeone)

 

Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil… - Anton Chekhov

Assassination is a fact of political history.

For instance: on Sunday, June 29th, 1900, King Umberto of Italy visited Monza, a little town near Milan where he had a residence, and attended mass, there. In the afternoon, he distributed prizes at a local sporting event. He awarded the gold medal, and got into his carriage. There his body received the brunt of four bullets from a 9-millimeter Harrington & Richardson pistol wielded by Gaetano Bresci, who had come from America precisely to do that. Umberto died almost immediately.

From the NYT: “The 30-year-old Bresci had emigrated from Milan two years before. He was a silk weaver at the Hamil & Booth Mill on Spruce Street in Paterson, where he was regarded by his boss as "a good worker who never caused trouble." He had married an American woman from Chicago, Sophie Neil, and had a baby daughter. His wife later described him as "a loving husband and father."

Among his other acts, King Umberto had approved of a police action that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of revolting factory workers in Mila: known as the  Bava Beccaris massacre, after the General that had ordered it. King Umberto gave the general a medal.

Bresci belonged to a small anarchist group in Patterson, New Jersey. He looked around him and saw that the “deed” – the assassination of those who assassinated the workers – was an ongoing happening. Inspired, he purchased his pistol and a ticket for Italy.

Tolstoy wrote an article about King “Humbert’s” murder, entitled: Thou shalt not kill. The article is included in Recollections and Essays, translated by Maude Aylmer.  With that title, one expects the usual liberal denunciation of murder. But it doesn’t take that route. Today, if a comparable article was written about the killing of Brian Thompson, it would certainly get him as roundly denounced today – for his moral relativism and moral equivalences, his objective support for terrorism. One can imagine the quacking of a thousand ducks, and the op ed space accorded to them. It definitely got him denounced by the establishment back in 1900. It’s bold premise is that we should not be shocked that we sow what we reap. The connection between our previous acts and our present circumstances – the tie of social karma – is always gripped tightly by Tolstoy. Thou Shalt Not Kill begins like this:

“When Kings are executed after trial, as in the case of Charles L, Louis XVI., and Maximilian of Mexico; or when they are killed in Court conspiracies, like. Peter Ill., Paul, and various Sultans, Shahs, and Khans-little is said about it; but when they are killed without a trial and without a Court conspiracy- as in the case of Henry IV. of France, Alexander ll., the Empress of Austria, the late Shah of Persia, and, recently, Humbert- such murders excite the greatest surprise and indignation among Kings and Emperors and their adherents, just as if they themselves never took part in murders, nor profited by them, nor instigated them. But, in fact, the mildest of the murdered Kings (Alexander 11. or Humbert, for instance), not to speak of executions in their own countries, were instigators of, and accomplices and partakers in, the murder of tens of thousands of men who perished on the field of battle ; while more cruel Kings and Emperors have been guilty of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of murders.”

Tolstoy pursues his theme without any preliminaries. Shaw once wrote that Tolstoy, seeing that pre-war European society was, as it were, sitting in a room into which poisonous gas was seeping, applied the remedies you’d apply in cases of gas poisoning – seizing the victim by the scruff of the neck and marching him around and around over his vociferous protests. Here’s the way Tolstoy seizes the victim:

“The teaching of Christ repeals the law, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but those who have always clung to that law, and still cling to it, and who apply it to a terrible degree-not only claiming an eye for an eye,' but without provocation decreeing the slaughter of thousands, as they do when they declare war- have no right to be indignant at the application of that same law to themselves in so small and insignificant a degree that hardly one King or Emperor is killed for each hundred thousand, or perhaps even for each million, who are killed by the order and with the consent of Kings and Emperors.”

Tolstoy’s point is that choosing to apply a barbaric law thrusts you into a barbaric world. Barbarism starts at the top. You, the establishment,  have dug your own grave. If a Civilization rests on top of thousands or millions of such graves, what is it worth? And Tolstoy is not one who is going to dicker with the thin membrane, spun of a thousand casuistries, that separates war from murder. His description of the army and of Mission Accomplishing heads of states is still effective:

“The crowd are so hypnotized that they see what is going on before their eyes, but do not understand its meaning. They see what constant care Kings, Emperors, and Presidents devote to their disciplined armies; they see the reviews, parades, and manaeuvres the rulers hold, about which they boast to one another; and the people crowd to see their own brothers, brightly dressed up in fools' clothes, turned into machines to the sound of drum and trumpet, all, at the shout of one man, making one and the same movement at one and the same moment-but they do not understand what it all means. Yet the meaning of this drilling is very clear and simple: it is nothing but a preparation for killing.

It is stupefying men in order to make them fit instruments for murder. And those who do this, who chiefly direct this and are proud of it, are the Kings, Emperors and Presidents. And it is just these men- who are specially occupied in organizing murder and who have made murder their profession, who wear military uniforms and carry murderous weapons (swords) at their sides-that are horrified and indignant when one of themselves is murdered.”

In his polemical work, Tolstoy often uses words depicting some form of altered consciousness – hypnotized, stupefied, drunk. The formalist critic, Victor Skhlovsky, in a famous essay in 1919, Art as Technique, used Tolstoy as an example of an artist who can make an object, act or gesture strange by rearranging the way we see it. The essay begins, beautifully, with some generalizations about automatism that apply not just to Tolstoy’s moral vocabulary, but to the connection between Tolstoy’s art and the sense of shock that runs through his polemical essays – that ties them, in ways that Tolstoy might not have admitted or understood, to his most aesthetic works:

“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. [1]

This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article[2]) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”

‘We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack.” Surely Skhlovsky must have been thinking of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, who feels a sack closing about himself as he dies. The sack connects automatism to death – and it is a desperate struggle to get out of the sack, to get out of this life of sacks, that I see in Tolstoy – a struggle that constitutes the whole of his moral eminence.

We all must struggle to get out of the sack. It is the political cause of our time.

calasso on the singular book

 Roberto Calasso is a writer who has had too much influence on me: I like knowledge, book reading, broken into a wilderness of mirrors and re-assembled. Many of his books have a little too much gaseous material – and politically, as well, I have always considered him one of those “New Philosopher” types who rejected Marx because of Pol Pot or something – which struck me as showing a very thin knowledge of Marx.

Caveats to the side, though, in certain books – Ka, for instance, and the Ruins of Karsch – he creates a unique sound, a beat.

In his book about being an editor and founder of Adelphi, the Art of the Publisher, a more personal Calasso breaks the surface. Someone who has, evidently, a fund of gossip about the entirety of Europe’s intellectual class from the sixties through the 21st century.

The gem of the book is the chapter entitled, The Singular Book. Simon During has been “unpacking his library” on Facebook for years, a sort of installation piece: I find this chapter a sort of coordinate effort, from the side of the production of books. The history of Adelphi is the history of a particular page setup, matched to a certain constellation of authors (the authors of Mitteleuropa, translated into Italian, for instance), and to a very meditated process of finding the right cover illustration. The Adelphi layout for Thomas Bernhardt’s books so impressed Bernhardt that his last book, published after he died by his Austrian publisher, Residenz, looked, Calasso claims, like a Adelphi book, and not the usual Residenz issue.

“The front cover was not on glossy paper—like that of every other Residenz book—but matte, of the kind we used. The page layout was exactly the same as that of Adelphi’s Narrativa Contempora-nea series in which the first volumes of the Bernhard autobiography had appeared. I telephoned Residenz and asked for an explanation of this change, which made it quite unlike all the publisher’s other books. They told me it had been Bernhard’s express wish. Indeed, he had made it a condition that the book should be pre-sented in this way. I took it as a farewell gesture.”

It wouldn’t be a Calasso essay if he didn’t mix into it various interesting marginal observations. Joseph Roth was introduced into Italy by way of Adelphi and an editor, Luciano Foa. Foa made the observation, which I made myself when I bought the Radetzky March for a friend who loved the Charterhouse of Parma, that Roth was the spiritual heir of Stendhal. This is what Calasso sez about the translation of Roth’s Flight without End, which features a man who fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War :

“And to our amazement we realized that, at a time when literature had become a dirty word, the novel was being covertly adopted by youth of the far Left. I remember some members of the Lotta Continua extremist party saying that it was the only story with which they could identify—or at least, with which they would have liked to identify, in that moment of turmoil. It would have been good if they had pursued Roth even further.”

I hear all too often that tone (“when literature had become a dirty word”) as if there were some golden past when everyone read literature, instead of the real past when illiteracy and a stunted educational system kept literature in the hands of a minority. Literature is an institution, true, but it is also a large part of the mental furniture of even those who aren’t continuously reading the “great books”. I connect Calasso’s comment about the political radicals in the years of lead to Ralph Ellison’s essay, The little man at the Chehaw station, which begins:

“IT was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove. At the time I was a trumpeter majoring in music, and had aspirations of becoming a classical composer. As such, shortly before the little man came to my attention, I had outraged the faculty members who judged my monthly student’s recital by substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion that was demanded in performing the music assigned to me. Afterward, still dressed in my hired tuxedo, my ears burning from the harsh negatives of their criticism, I had sought solace in the basement studio of Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher. Miss Harrison had been one of Ferruccio Busoni’s prize pupils, had lived (until the rise of Hitler had driven her back to a U.S.A. that was not yet ready to recognize her talents) in Busoni’s home in Berlin, and was a friend of such masters as Egon Petri, Percy Grainger and Sergei Prokofiev…

“Yes,” she said, “but there’s more to it than you’re usually told. Of course you’ve always been taught to do your best, look your best, be your best. You’ve been told such things all your life. But now you’re becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there’s something more involved..”

“All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”

“A what?”

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”

This is to my mind a simple statement of the case. And I suppose my faith in the little man at the Chehaw station is what ultimately separates me from Calasso, who, in spite of the excellent sales of many of the singular books he published, often writes as though all of them went down the drain.

Not to end on a down note: those interested in the how of book publishing should read, if they haven’t read, this book.

Our terrorist/our hero: Luigi Magione

 

1.
On January 5, 1943, the Paris papers all agreed: another act of terrorism
As reported by Le Cri de Peuple, Madame Claire Vioix, a concierge, 7 rue Neuve Popincourt, received a visit from two men. The were let in by her boy. She went with them into the courtyard.
“It was then that her young boy heard a shot…”
According to the Emancipation Nationale, the cowardly murder happened on Sunday, at 7 p.m. The daughter of Madame Vioix, according to the same paper, was a member of the Jeunesse Populaire Francaise. They opened a register, a sign- up sheet where citizens could inscribe their name and their indignant sentiments. Madame Vioix was an activist in the PPF, the Petit Parisien noted, and the mother of four children.
L'oeuvre noted that she had received several threatening letters.
The funeral cortege was graced with officials from her party, the government, and the police.
Reading the account of the terrorist murder in Le Cri de Peuple, one discovers that Madame Claire Vioix was a 'patriot', a true citizen of the occupation:
“A P.P.F. activist, Mme Vioix never hid her opinions. Thus, she never missed an occasion to call to order, in the waiting lines, the Jews, who were not conforming to the regulations.”
Exemplary woman, as we can see.
Reading the officially allowed French newspapers during the occupation is a good exercise. It helps you, in a sense, see how a term like terrorist is picked up and used. It helps you see that “normal” things like the regulations allow one to remind the Jews of them – Jews that one sees, with some satisfaction, rounded up from the streets – although in the eleventh she would not have seen the “rafle” she would have seen in the Marais.
Le Cri de Peuple last mentioned the fallen heroine, Vioix, in June of 1944, when the PPF had a cortege to pay homage to the martyrs of “Jewish capitalism”. No mention is made of reprisal. Apparently, the terrorists – who were also labelled communists – had escaped retribution.
Although surely the price on their head was high enough, nobody snitched on them.
As though moved by the spirit of the assassinated Vioix, the Cris de la Peuple reported in May 20, 1943, the following: “Jews were forbidden to go to the official state pawn shop, the Hotel des Ventes. “Thus there should be an end to the scandalous black market trade of Jewish second hand goods dealers who corrupt the price regulations. However, for some time, we have seen reappear on Rue Douot some disquieting figures, individuals who do not wear the star and use borrowed names for signing the checks that they use to pay for their purchases.
This must be put a stop to.”
Now, neither Vioix nor, say, health insurance executives, nor the newspaper participated in the murder of anyone specifically, although condoning it generally. And the two “communist” terrorists did murder someone specific, who was condoning a general massacre. The latter action is not the kind of action we should need in an order that was fair, solidaire, and just. But, as Dickens or Lloyd Garrison might have put it, there are higher courts than the courts of law, and those two French terrorists – or resistors – were its instruments.
So: of what is, or was, a CEO of a mega Health Insurance Company the instrument?
2.
In the 60s, it was popular to say that "society" was to blame for crime. This has fallen out of fashion. Yet in the case of the assassination of Brian Thompson, this seems close to the truth. It is American society, its politics, economics, and media that allowed a man like Brian Thompson in a company like United Healthcare unparalleled power over the life and death of millions of people. They abused that power as much as they could, and we watched, and knew. We knew about the algorithms, we knew about the medical bankruptcies, we knew about the pain, pointless misery, and the barbarous second guessing of doctors by people with a high school knowledge of biology. We knew about the trail of death that leads directly to the offices of United Healthcare. We knew and did nothing and Luigi M. did something.

To put it another way: if Brian Thompson, in the streets of NYC, had smashed himself down repeatedly onto the body of Luigi Mangioni, damaging his spine for life, he would have been arrested and jailed. But instead, phone callers from Thompson's division of United Healthcare just denied and delayed back pain care, so it is all good. Well, it isn't good. If you like your healthcare insurance, as President Smooth put it, you can keep your healthcare insurance. He didn't add: as they kill and maim other clients. That's the unspoken part.

There are few cases where America, as it is now, is directly on trial. But this is definitely one of them.

"The natural outlawry of women"

 

In a famous passage in Marx’s Grundrisse, Marx wrote about the character form introduced by money: “The exchangeability of all products, services, relationships against a third, material one, which can without exception be exchanged – thus the development of exchange value (and the money relationship) is identical with general venality, corruption. General prostitution appears as a necessary phase of the development of the social character of personal resources, faculties, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relationships of exploitation and need.”

The Grundrisse was published by the Marx Engels institute, after its discovery among the manuscripts, in the 1930s. Long after the publication of Emmy Hennings Branded (or Stigma – Der Brandmal). This journal of a prostitute is easily assimilated into Emmy Hennings own life, but it is written as and conceived as a novel. The protagonist is, like Hennings, an actress and dancer, who is “guided” to prostitution by a man who provides her with the money to live. When we first meet her, she is on the verge of starvation – and nobody is going to feed her for free. Her use value at this point seems to be nill. The man who buys her food, however, sees a use and exchange value in her. And the narrator – without using the word prostitution – soon “has” money.

In a very brilliant bit (the book, written in the high style of the expressionists, is full of brilliant bits), the narrator has a sort of revery in which she becomes money – the coin or paper bill in her hand or pocket. And the money that she is, is everywhere, throughout the town. She is as available, as widespread, as common, as money.

“I would really like to know if money is the only visible sign of my “fallen state” (Verwarhlosung). Money in my pocket appears, to me at least, questionable. More and more suspicious. Money is disgrace, the most overt sign of scandal. I clean my money with a pocket tissue before I put it in harmless hands; thus, it is at least externally clean. The money is always false, but even so, it works capitally as exchange. There is no real (echtes) money, I tell myself. It would be only by chance that such a thing could be called real. What one exchanges is always something other. I can not, however, so subjectively make these value judgments. I have ordered a roll and a cup of coffee, and for this I put down my insane ten mark piece on the marble table. For this ten mark piece I will lay myself on the table, I will pay with myself Thus I lay a ringing gold coin on the table. And am I just this? Can one compare oneself with a gold piece? Me? Still I have something glimmering in me.”

To be identical to one’s pocket money – and at the same time, not to be identified with it, as it is purely exchangeable. Hennings’ prostitute experiences, due to her position, the impossible identity of the capitalist subject, who is what she earns. Prostitutes exist in the pores of the system – especially back in prewar Europe, half ancien regime, half industrial treadmill of production. In those pores, consumer culture is being transformed, and that transformation is the landscape of bars and restaurants and rent for the hour rooms, the places where eating, drinking and fucking is going on, the place of the transitory, where the narrator (we find that she is named Dagney, or at least uses that name, a third of the way into the book, when she records a conversation) is most at home, and most homeless. “I or the money? What a phantasmagoric, licenced swindle (Schwindel – also, vertigo).” Licenced, pantentierte – as in the licence to be a freelance prostitute.

In a sense, I read this book, or encounter it, with too much knowledge, since I know that this is a chapter not only from Dagny’s life, but Emmy Hennings. Though I might be clever enough to think that no piece of money is really authentic, I can be dull enough, as many a reviewer has been, to think that the woman who writes the journal in the novel is actually Hennings. Memoir, and not fiction. Hennings, however, was a writer with high talents, and if this journal is Dagney’s, I think we can assume that, at least for the author, Dagney’s life is not merely her shadow. Role-playing, who would know better? This is, in a sense, the way expressionist fiction often crossed the boundary between life and art, but not so that we can so directly privilege the former without losing a crucial nuance. The former only gains its value – its desperation is earned – only if it can be poured into the latter. Hamsun, Hennings contemporary, also put his adventures in Copenhagen in Hunger, yet that is read as a novel, and I think it is on that model that Hennings was working. The intensity of a life, the “glimmer” that is not in the gold piece, provides an illumination within the novel, which is a fictive in its gestures, its specifics, its self-reflection. Prison, another of Hennings novels, is bound up with Branded: the former novel also lifts a chapter, or chapters, from her real life. Hennings had short stays in prison, once for “stealing” – apparently, some client didn’t want to pay, so she took her pay and the client went to the police. She wrote Prison in 1918, and her partner, Hugo Ball, read it: “I now live as quietly as though in a cell. Your book, my dear, lies in my arms and legs. It entered my blood like a poison. I am a by no means contemptible public; it will have a wide effect.”

I don’t know if Grisélidis Réal, the Swiss prostitute and poet who militated for sex workers rights in the seventies, read Hennings Branded. And I’m almost sure that Colette, Hennings contemporary, never read her work, and may never have heard of her. All three, however, share an outlook, which is novelistically summoned by Christina Stead in her portrait of Henny Pollit, the wife and sworn enemy of Sam Pollit in The Man who loved Children: “the natural outlawry of womankind.” If law is founded in the will of the people, this outlawry is simply a fact: women have been denied full citizenship for millenia. Under the boot of the law, but never of the law. This chthonic postulate is hard to reconcile with feminism, with a feminism that has been so much about the law, within the law. It does inject a certain scepticism, not so much of nature but of history, into any feminist dogma. It is no accident that Hennings novels (Branded, Prison) are so concerned with the justice and the injustice of the law. And reflect her curious Catholic anarchism.

Hennings reflections on money might well have been influenced by reading Bakunin. Hugo Ball notes he was reading Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the idea of the state in 1915, when he and Hennings were starting the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

From Ball’s letter to a friend: ’Socialism, life with and in the people – at the moment Emmy Hennings and I are playing in a small suburban Variete. We have snake charmers, fire-eaters and ropewalker, everything one could wish for. One looks deeply into life here. One is poor, and yet very enriched.”