Joseph Roth and the dialectic of nationalism

 As Stephane Pensel has pointed out, Joseph Roth seems to be a writer absolutely opposite to W.G. Sebald. Sebald wound his writing around his reading – books came to life in his demi-fiction, much as lines came to life in Paul Klee’s painting. As Klee said, an active line”, a freely drawn line, goes out for a walk. Sebald’s fiction is about taking the author, with a universe in his head, out for a walk. Roth, by contrast, often spoke about the virtues of reading little: “Please understand”, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I don’t read. I hold with the good words of a man I otherwise don’t value, Karl Kraus, who wrote: A poet who reads is like a bartender who drinks.”

Yet there is a relation between Roth and Sebald that comes out in Sebald’s essay on the former. Sebald deals sympathetically with Roth’s notorious nostalgia for the Habsburg empire. I think Sebald, also an exile of a kind, understood the political gesture under that nostalgia. It was aimed at the onslaught of ethnic nationalism that came after the Empire’s breakup. Roth rejected both Naziism and Zionism for the same reason: the claim that the nation is founded on a privileged people. Ethnos taking the place of ethos was, to Roth, the great danger we face. Sebald gets this right, I think. Of Roth’s image of Austria – the Austro-Hungarian empire – Sebald writes:

It is an image of something that lacks any will to power, any imperialist drive, I think. This is the motive of Roth’s Austrian model, which was one of the clearly lost opportunities of history. Perhaps, as the old Herr von Maerker opines at the end of the Stummen Propheten, the opportunity had been really present in his time, “out of ... the Monarchy to make a home for all. It would have been the small prototype of a larger future world. The emphasis lies, here, not on the larger future world – for this Roth had long given up on – but rather on the „small prototype“, illuminated by the radiance of the past.”

Roth died about 85 years ago. He suffered, in his life and in his work, from the terrible virus of nationalism that was codified in Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacist doctrine of the “self-determination” of peoples, which was the guise under which the American liberal contested the American isolationist. We are presently at a dialectical inflection point in that long struggle – a president as racist as Wilson, and contrary to Wilson an advocate of autarcky, who is searching to resurrect an international of white states.

I think Roth would understand exactly how this moment, bookmarked between the mass murder in Gaza and the mass murder in Ukraine, became the station we have stopped at.

Lucky Charms

 I wrote an account of opening a cereal box – what is known, in the industry, as a billboard box – in 2022. Three years later, as the racist band of malcontents, led by Trump, Mr. Measles, and Mr. Bucket Shop, have decided to break America’s spirit and the world order, this account seems hopelessly nostalgic, a point to which we will only return in some phantasmal next stage of our neoliberal breakdown, our global shakes.

This is the account, a little edited by my grim future knowledge.

Breakfast cereal is an emblem of the industrialized food system. If the system had a totem, surely the faces of Captain Crunch, Tony the Tiger, and Snap, Crackle and Pop would be displayed on it. Or the Leprechaun on my son’s favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. Which, incidentally, you can’t find in Paris – or rather, you have to search for among those stores that sell American goods to the expat community, which have recently become fewer. The cereal box that lies open mouthed in our cupboard is precisely the Lucky Charms with a pitiful moraine of marshmellows and triangular shaped cereal bits at the bottom of it, less than a bowl of cereal. The picture on the front cover shows a Leprechaun with big eyes and a big smile, a green hat on his head and, of course, a green fourleafed shamrock stuck to the band, juggling a rainbow of marshmallow bits, which are helpfully color coded on the back of the box in English and Spanish. A veritable diversity initiative. The Leprechaun looks a bit crazier on the back cover, and his arms are stuck on him in a funny way at the side of the box, his mouth gaping in a smile that emphasizes his teeth, a uniform curve of white, no distinction between one and the other. Liena Tu Mundo De Magia, it says under him. The dietary information is printed on the side of the box – from which we learn that the cereal has “140 calories”. I imagine this refers to one serving or “cup”. In France, instead of Spanish, one often finds the printout of “ingredients” and ”nutritional facts” in English and Arabic. For instance, Honey Crisps are somewhat vaguely routed or controlled by the Kellogg’s office in Casablanca. Our Quaker Oats come to us via a Pepsi distributor hq-ed in France. And so on.

This box is a marvel as well as, given the ecological tragedy of agribusiness, a horror. Marvels and horrors are the familiars of my ordinary life – and no doubt yours, reader. We flip between them with every app and every birdless sky.

The world of commerce, the system of global production and circulation which brought that box to my kitchen (with a little help from my friend Tom, who actually brought it over from NYC) seems, sometimes, to fill the world. It depends, however, on the act of giving. I give the cereal to my boy. My friend gave his time and money to go out and get the box and put it in his bag and bring it to us across the Ocean.

Time and labor that are not registered in any Excel sheet. My definition of neoliberalism is that cultural regime which attempts to completely embed the social in the economic (defined narrowly as capitalism, a market based system of goods and services controlled by capital); however, it is always limited by the fact that it depends, fundamentally, on what Georges Bataille called the “general economy” – the economy of unexchanged energy, generosity, and giftgiving. The further neoliberalism digs into the general economy, the more it undermines itself. In this contradiction, myth is generated.

At least this is one way to locate myth. I cannot decoding a cereal box or an advertisement for cereal without falling, somewhat, under the spell of Roland Barthes mythologies, those essays on the quotidian that assemble various decodings of certain bourgeois patterns of recognition, or styles of representation, all themselves under the pulses of the mythic . Barthes wrote them in the fifties, when he was still using an impressionistic technique. He didn’t quite have together what he meant by myth. His latter essay on myth is confusing, I think, because he retrospectively tries to cast what he was doing in the armature of a more fully developed semiotics. Still, each of those essays has an exhilarating air, as though he were an alien among these ads, sports events, strip shows and automobiles.

Myself, I can sit pretty, given such predecessors as Barthes and a thousand others. Yet I still don’t have the categories to quite understand, for instance, the glue, or – I suspect – starch based adhesive that gives the box its use and mystery. The top of the cereal box is a familiar rectangle divided into two rough triangles traced out by impressed creases. One of the triangles slots under the other. However, to get to that organized state – which we will call the OPENED cereal box – I have to make it so – because the box is eminently closed this morning. It comes closed. It is closed when it finishes its transit of the assembly line. The box is lightly sealed because the contents of the box have to be protected from spills and damage. The cereal, in other words, is very much conditioned not just by the fact that its end use is to be digested, but also by its circulation – its storage, transportation, and distribution on top of shelves in a store. Due to the necessity imposed by the truck, the store manager, and the stock person, I am confronted by a sealed box top. A helpful site named “allpack china” provides a picture of the machine that does the box sealing, from which I quote:

“This is also known as a bag-in-box machine and it packs different pouches inside the box or cartons. This instrument is the first choice of manufacturer for boxed cereal packaging. It also packs cereals directly inside the boxes that are lined with plastic or paper liners. Top load and End load cartoners are used in cereal packaging.

Working Principle

First cardboard is placed in the bag magazine from where the grippers pick the cardboard, one piece at a time. Via gripper, it is transported to the folding and gluing area. At this station, the left and right edges of the carton are folded while the glue application applies adhesives at the bottom and sides of the carton to firmly close it. Then, this folded carton is covered with a liner, and cereal flakes are introduced inside the lined box. Finally, after a precise filling top seam is sealed using glue.”

I and millions of consumers am up against this machine at least one morning a week.

The potentially separable triangles that make up that box top are glued to two interior cardboard flaps. As an American bred and born in the 20th century, know just what to do: I must deflower this box top. But from long experience I also know that I can make a mess of it. Too much pressure and you tear the thing, destroying the ideal symmetry that would insert the slot snugly under the mouth of the other triangle. If I exert the right pressure, I can break the adhesive bond and the box top will tent perfectly over the contents, which are, as well, protected by being stored in a little wax paper embryo inside. That wax paper, too, I will have to force open – and for that, scissors is your best friend. That is, if they are at hand. Of course, scissors are all too often an afterthought, as I grip the two sides of the bag and pull on them to burst the seal. Comedy can ensue, has ensued, with too much pulling – cereal everywhere! The same elements conspire against me with the box top triangles, for my experience is that the sealant is a little too tight to make it easy to unseal, manually, these tabs. They will rip, and instead of tenting the contents, they will raise up, irregularly torn, revealing the grayish paper under the beautiful red die. Every time, then, I open the cabinet and take out the cereal box, its ruinous state will reproach me. This reproach will attach, like fine starch adhesive, to my thoughts about the cereal – I will be inclined to want to hurry up its consumption, and might well toss the box before it is completely void of honey smack pleasure, in the way one hides things one is ashamed of.

This is doubly bad, since not only will the box and the wax paper embryo eventually be tossed into the garbage can, from when they will go to further litter the earth and foul the water, but at the same time I will be wasting food, organic matter, which is even worse.

Thus, much depends on my successfully applying a degree of force: my shame, my eco-citizenship, and my sense of being a good housekeeper.

The need to seal and break a seal – that is, to have adhesives that both adhere and break apart proportionate to the human force brought upon them – is an old old story, going back to myths of seals of wax that lock away vital messages – as for instance in the case of Bellerophon, who was entrusted with a message that, under its seal, instructed the receiver to kill the messenger. That is one mythic facet – the other facet is that of the trap. The cereal box is, among other things, a trap – a devise that closes on an animal and allows the trapper to open it and capture the animal. Traps are part of a technology that goes far back in human pre-history, like fire and writing.

So much depends on that starch based adhesive.

My son opened the Lucky Charms about a week ago. He is already a breaker of seals, a bearer of messages. But living in France, he is not as utterly at home with this kind of box as I am, as I remember cabinets of cereal plenty when I was a kid with four brothers and sisters. Four cereals at least, one of which would almost always be Rice Krispies. A family favorite. Lucky Charms was always an eccentric cereal – one that, with those marshmallows, was not meant for everyday, everyweek, everymonth use. The kind of cereal that can become a favorite only as an unusual cake frosting – say strawberry – can become a favorite, in as much as it is the less frequent frosting or with Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch a less frequent cereal against the rice pops and cornflakes. This is the syntax of boxes that I have dealt with all my life.

Habit makes the habitus. The cereal box is a monument, among other things, to packaging waste. I know this. Yet it is also a nostalgia object, deeply embedded in my childhood and the childhoods of all the kids I knew, the ones who survived into adulthood, the ones who as parents, inevitably, took on the burden of feeding their kids in the morning. Our civilizing task.

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6Eleanor Courtemanche, Eduardo Gonzalez and 4 others

Does a market economy generate a market culture?

 

Does a market economy necessarily generate a market culture?  Frank Cunningham wrote an interesting article on this topic that appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy in 2005. Clearly, Cunningham was a student of Karl Polanyi He quotes a pertinent passage from one of Polanyi’s essays:

“This institutional gadget, which became the dominant force in the economy—now justly described as a market economy—then gave rise to yet another, even more extreme development, namely as a whole society embedded in the mechanism of its own economy—a market society.”


This may seem like an esoteric theme, but, in actuality, it is the central problem of our time. If the one always leads to the other, not only is liberalism sunk, but the ability to meet the enormous environmental challenges that are even now building in the oceans and the heavens is doomed to failure. That will then doom to failure whole swathes of the planet. For instance, the melting of the glacial system in the Himalayas will essential drain the source of water for around 400 to 500 million Indians and Chinese. Although the libertarians, Randians, Trumpians and other fine purveyors of superstition probably don’t know this, without water, people die. The Randians, et al., would probably answer that at least they would die in freedom, able to freely exchange their whole life savings for a couple of cups of water before expiring. And think of the enormous flexibility this would put into the labor market!

But these people are crazy. Unfortunately, at the moment they govern the planet, write the newspapers, and release the bombs. To use the word in the proper sense, they are the terrorist class.

This is my hook to Cunningham’s thesis.

Terror, or fear, is, according to Cunningham, one of the great connectors between a market economy and a market society. Cunningham makes the case that what is commonly viewed as greed – that insatiable avarice for more money driving the ideal type capitalist (he quotes John D. Rockefeller’s response to the question, how much do you need, by saying – “just a little more”) is actually driven by the fear that is promoted by one of the mechanisms of the market – its efficiency. That efficiency depends, in good old capitalist fashion, on removing ‘unnatural’ restraints to the pricing of commodities.

“Still, market economies are characterized by expansion of the market into all domains. Part of the explanation for this is greed for profits, but I suggest that at a more primordial level expansion derives from insecurity or, more precisely, fear.

Competition among producers and retailers promotes efficiency by prompting them to make and distribute things that people want and by keeping the costs of those things down—this is the key premise of free market economic theory. But at the same time, competitors must fear each other. Employment of wage labor with the omnipresent threat of dismissal keeps wages down, thus reducing this cost of production or distribution. Privatization of publicly needed goods provides captive markets. From the side of working people and consumers, market economies are also fearful places. Wage laborers must fear dismissal. Market transactions may signal consumer preferences, but they do not guarantee that goods produced in response to those preferences will be affordable.”


Cunningham’s point is that fear is what turns the relation of the economic and social around – in Polanyi’s terms, what makes it the case that, in capitalism, the economy is no longer embedded in social relationships, but social relationships are embedded in the economy.

And how we see how fear and panic are used to drive even the craziest and most marginal capitalist ideas.

To dispel fear itself – that is the center of Rooseveltian liberalism. We have to get back to that.

The 21st century "left"

 A little thought experiment-y thing occured to me as I walked to Le Progres, my little neighborhood cafe. If Churches were abolished, I thought, if there were no churches, neither Catholic nor Protestant, would there be Christians?

I think there would be. In my counterfactual, the wiping out of churches would occur after they had existed, and after Christianity had spread.

But the Christian who still existed would have apol dilemma, in that their identity would be only quasi-institutional. It would be an identity of belief without a corresponding instutional object in which to perform that belief.

This, I think, is how I think of the "Left". The fall of communism, everywhere, has left the Left with a belief system but no institutional object in which to perform its identity.

As a lefty myself, I often run up against the fact that my political performance is within an almost comically distorted image of the left, which is the moderate left parties. And those parties, everywhere in the world, are not only divorced from any organized global labor movement - the international - they are one and all opposed to such a thing. The thing that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, defined the "Left".

Shots in the Forest

 Western man, don't you come around... Ft

Item, from the Wiener Allgemeiner Forst- und Jagd Zeitung, February 25, 1927

The bestial murder of a forester

A horrible light was thrown a few days ago on the murder of Forester Popp in the Bohemian Forest of Untersteinbach, which happened seven years ago. A detective took lodgings in a hotel in a low part of town, presenting himself as an unemployed laborer. On his jobs he worked so badly that his comrades almost became suspicious. But finally the belief spread that he was a student on a frolic. He succeeded in establishing a stand in Sophienthal, where he sold beer and schnaps. There he found out what he wanted to know. In the night, he had his confederates surround Sophienthal and arrest 20 persons. Seventeen were released. Three rumored poachers, Hischmann, Muzer and Georgius, workers at a porcelain factory, were accused of the forester’s murder. The dutiful poacher had recognized the three louts as poachers. So Hirschman, who is said to be a fence, shot the forester with a pistol, and as he lay there, still alive, the others kicked and stomped on him, as he was shot again. But Popp was still not dead. So they buried him alive! With his hands the wounded forester tried to dig his way to the surface, as he wasn’t buried too deeply He broke his fingernails digging, and finally suffocated. The louts had even robbed the unhappy man! The grave, in a lonely part of a hunting reserve, was only discovered by accident, since the hands of the corpse stuck out of the ground.

2.

The sound of shots in the forest is taken as a hallmark of American literature – not least by D.H. Lawrence. It is the fifth chapter in Studies in Classic American literature that everyone remembers – the chapter on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstockings novels. Novels that, as Lawrence says, he loved from a very young age; and which are now absorbed into his curious cosmic vision, with its racism and snobbery and preternatural sensitivity to a certain kind of masculine culture to which he was, for the most part, an outsider. The gamekeeper’s point of view in Lady Chatterley, Lawrence’s own reply and replay of the Natty Bumppo myth. In an astute phrase, Lawrence divided the Cooper persona into two “actualities” – the striver for social recognition, whose writing was judged under the concept of being “good” or not – and the quester in the imagination, whose actuality was elsewhere:

“In another actuality he loved the tomahawking continent of America, and imagined himself Natty Bumppo. His actual desire was to be: Monsieur Fenimore Cooper, le grand écrivain américain. His innermost wish was to be: Natty Bumppo.”

Lawrence has his ESP out for the innermost wish; and we read him, or I read him, for those ESP moments. I think the America book falls in relation both to the Etruscan book and the Lady Chatterley book – in all of which there is a yearning for the indigenous, a yearning that is wrapped inside a mourning. The mourning is for the “inevitable” displacement, i.e. murder of the indigenous. For Lawrence, America is unimaginable without the murder of the “red man” – which is about as far as Lawrence gets with understanding the complexities of Amerindian societies. But if we give him his mocked up conceptual players, there is something to his sense of American violence:

“When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical.

Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.”

Interesting. In 1923, when this was written, the truly bloodsoaked soil was in Northern France, in Gallipoli, on the large Eastern Front, in the Ukraine and Poland. Lawrence saw the stone cold killer in the American soul. But was it that much different from the stone cold killers in Europe?

3.

While Natty Bumppo was hunting in Northern New York State, out in the fields and forests of Bohemia, the Vosge region in France and the Pyrenees, in East Prussia and Krain, that region of Austrian that now comprises Slovenia, in the Urals and by the Danube, the rise in forest offences was being recorded by magistrate and Imperial officer. The German novelist Theodore Fontaine was told a story about the feud between a poacher and a gamekeeper in the Silesian resort town of Krumhübbel (now called Karpacz, and located in Poland) in 1885. He made the feud and the murder of the gamekeeper into a novel, Quitt. Jean Giono, the French novelist, published in 1947 a novel, Le Rois sans divertissement, set in the 1840s in a village in the Southern Alps in France, which centers around a hunter of wolves, the enigmatic Langlois.

The frontier effect in the United States is well studied, but there were frontiers traversing Europe well into the twentieth century, borderlines that were drawn not by the state, but by the population on site. As DJV Jones puts it, about the British case:

“Even in the 1880s and I890s contemporaries were periodically shocked by the bitterness and violence which accompanied this particular criminal activity. A study of poaching, therefore, tells us a good deal about the secret world of the village and the labourer.”

The occlusion of that world is connected to a larger occlusion, I think, one which posits the composite “Western man” against the composite “Colonized subject,” in as much as the frontier in which posited the former against the indigenous latter can be drawn, as well, in places Lawrence lived in: Shropshire, Wales, Sicily, etc.

Putting this another way: I spy with my little eye a problem with the costume worn by “Western” man – which is that Western man mostly didn’t exist in the West until at least the twentieth century. Or to put this another way, parodying the old alchemist’s principle of “as above, so below”, the principle of universal history could be stated thus: “as without, so within”. That is, the European encounter with the savages and the barbarians catalyzed the consciousness among a set of the educated, the bourgeois and the aristocrats, of savages and barbarians within Europe itself. The savage evokes the peasant, the slave the serf. America led the European humanists, even in the 17th century, to the rather shocking view that their own past, the past of the revered ancients, were closer in their beliefs and practices to the Iroquois (according to the Jesuit accounts of the mission in Canada) than to the powdered entities in Versailles or the high churchmen in their schools. Universal history, which proceeds by experiments – the plantation, the factory, free trade, representative government, the reservation, the labor camp, etc. – is coded from the beginning to separate the without and the within, even as every discovery produces this two fold effect. The compromise solution was to posit a homunculus within. The ideal Western man, that big wax figure, manipulated from within by a little dwarf.

4.

We began with the sound of shots in the forest twilight. In a forest. In a forest near the border with Germany. The back and forth over backroads. Oaks, spruce, beech, firs, old names, old lumber. Underbrush, the ground a little wet, clear spots covered with brown leaffall, the day’s humidity, the morning shower, the shadows here cast even during the height of noon that send a shiver through you, looking up at the great crowns of the trees. Sounds in the thornbushes. Foxes, rabbits, field mice. Shouts. There are four of them, one in a sort of uniform, a khaki overcoat, leather boots. Bareheaded. His hat lies some yards off, canted, its little rosette touching dirt. Disarray. The forester wears his hat as the policeman wears his kepi. The other men in a circle around him. The one holding the pistol. The pistol firing. The forester buckling, falling. The other men like beaters coming at him with kicks and blows. Insults in the dialect. Large hands. Boots less well made than the forester’s, but useful. Muddy, the toes hard, the kicks breaking ribs. Another shot. The forester lying there balled up. Then the body relaxes, the tension out of it, like when you cut the fishing line which has been pulled taut as its hook got entangled with some sunk branch or log. All the men know that moment. And the men begin to talk among themselves, in the dialect. What to do now? Comrades in wood thievery, comrades in their job in the little factory. The one with the pistol leaning over the body. Hand running over the coat. Into the pockets. Some change. A cigarette case. They smoke the dead man’s cigarettes, then disperse: the one with the gun sitting on a boulder, the others looking for downed branches, which they use their large knives to scorp, sharpen the end. Digging with them. The man who shot getting off his boulder and helping. Shallow, then a bit deeper. Loosening up the soil with their knives, they will sharpen them latter back in the village. Until at last there is a depression and a pile of soil and they can toss the dead man in it. The man who seems dead. They are no pulsetakers. Dead now or dead later. What is the difference? They scoop up the dirt pile with their hands, kick the dirt, covering the body with the dirt to a certain level. Face, chest, legs disappear under the dirt. Tamp it down. One goes to a sack on the edge of this clearing, a big game sack. Pulls out a lamp, a gas lamp, lights the wick with a match. The light shoots out towards the congregated darkness of the forest now. And the startsabove them now. They know the paths, they know them even when a man can't see his hand before him in a mist, or at midnight. They are not afraid. Although they know there are ghosts. They leave in silence the impromptu grave behind.

Business journalism sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. Oh, and it sucks some more after that

 

In Matthew Josephson’s amusing history, The Robber Barons, there is a nice story about the young J.P. Morgan. After having done what any man on the move would do in 1861 – paying a substitute to fight for him in the Union army – Young Morgan looked about him for opportunities. One of the knocked on his door, in the person of Simon Stevens. Stevens had stumbled onto a deal, by which he could buy 5,000 Hall carbines and sell them to the Union Army of the West, with which he had a contract. The beauty of the deal was that the carbines had been rejected by the government in Washington on account of the fact that they were defective – when used, they tended to explode, taking the thumb of the shooting soldier with them. “The quartermaster at Washington sold them for $3.50 apiece. “The government had sold one day for $17,486 arms which it had agreed the day before to purchase for $109,912,” comments the historian Gustavus Myers. That young Morgan knew of this situation is plain from the fact that after repudiation of the consignment of guns by General Fremont’s division, he bluntly presented his claim not for the money he had advanced, but for all of $58,175, half of the shipment having been already paid for in good faith.”

Thus began the Morgan tradition of advancing money for products that tend to blow up in the users hands. Evolution and human kindness being what it is, the products are now called credit swaps or meme stocks. But the object is always the same: a quick buck, made with the poker face of propriety, and the compliance of a corrupt government.

Matthew Josephson and, for that matter, Gustavus Meyers, are dead. And so is critical business journalism. Journalism is always a limbo thing, half information, half huckstering. Writing is sales: even when God pitched in, writing on those tablets, he was selling his line: You shall have no other Gods before me. But in biz journalism, you reach the lowest of all sales methods, the bucket shop optimism that persuades the easily persuaded that they are geniuses. Thus you get the inevitable Cramer, popping up like a bad penny, extolling tariffs because they will “bring back small town America”, which I guess is his way of saying gee, Jim Crow was the best thing! And the avalanche is reported by a he said she said approach that is laughable, from suits who are all about how there’s a bright line for certain companies. Those companies, those wonderful domestic manufacturies and small town abattoir, have to sell their products. And guess what? In the domestic sphere, which has depended on cheap for the past fifty years, that demand side does not just magically shift to higher priced goods – it shifts, rather, into unemployment and peeps sleeping in their expensive used cars.

I have to laugh about this weeks rise and fall story: Newsmax. Newsmax is an emblem of the American upper crust in full decay mode. A purveyor of far right fairy tales for the geriatric and dyspeptic, it faces a billion dollar lawsuit from Dominion and the fact that it lost money, it lost fucking money last year. So it IPOs at ten, and in a day it is at 200 or something. A three day blast, and now I believe it is down to fifty and will continue to circle the toilet as it goes on losing money.

But business journalists don’t care. They are not trustworthy. They will not give you an analysis worth having – but will continue to spray their readers with Axe and bad breath until they both keel over. Unearned capital is sweet, but when it ceases to be sweet, it becomes a curse on the land.

Hunting scenes

 

1.

In the Carnavalet, the Museum in Paris dedicated to Paris, there is a room full of old enseignes – painted signs of wood or sheet metal which were put outside of wine shops, taverns, bakeries, butchers, etc. These painted signs were not only simply pictures of wine or bread or meat, or simple cutouts of medal, to signify what was being sold, but combined the indexical with the emblematic, or  totemic or whimsical. The Hotel du Grand Cerf shows a metal cutout of a great buck deer, but also a reclining, draped woman at the deer’s feet,  whom the deer looks about to kiss. Or a wooden bas-relief of a cat,  hung over a café named the Black Cat.

In the spirit of the enseigne, I’d like to hang over this little essay (if that is what this melody is) a painting from 1565.  Let’s not name it – you know it, and you know the artist. Alistair Fowlie provides a good description of it: in the foreground, “three hunters and a dozen dogs” trudge through the snow downhill to a village. To the left, there is a junky inn of some sort with a broken sign, and what looks like a fire, over which a pig or a bore is being cooked.

Fowlie names the dogs – using curious hunterly lingo: “three smooth-haired grayhounds (fast gazehounds for hare or deer or fox); one shaggy greyhound or lurcher (for hare or rabbit); four brown limers or bloodhounds with pendulous ears (one of them defecating); and several smaller dogs.”

Fowlie notices that none of the hunters are in livery. They are, in other words, probably not members of some noble’s house, not servants, but villagers.  This is the Low Countries, not France or Spain, and hunting is not a privilege, by law, of the aristocracy. Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Hunting, written in Lisbon in 1942, laments – with his conservative nostalgia, his distaste for the age of the masses – the decline of the privilege of hunting, which is “one of the characteristic privileges of the powerful”.  Ortega imagines that this privilege extends back to the Neolithic era. In modernity, the hunting privilege has aroused powerful envy: “ One of the causes of the French Revolution was the irritation the country people felt because they were not allowed to hunt, and consequently one of the first privileges which the nobles were obliged to abandon was this one. In all revolutions, the first thing that the “people” have done was to jump over the fences of the preserves or to tear them down…” Ortega may be on to something, at least as far as the painting we are looking at is concerned, since the hunters and the dogs only occupy the bottom third of the painting. Over the snowing hill and far away is a landscape with a frozen pond upon which people are skating, and houses with snow laden rooves within which one feels, instinctively, that people are gathered around the hearth. The world belongs to the season, and the season is not one for occupations. As Ortega points out, occupations, jobs, are painful, and the majority of mankind is immersed in them.

“So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing. It is moving and very sad to see how the two struggle in each individual. Work robs us of time to be happy, and pleasure gnaws away as much as possible at the time claimed by work. As soon as man discover a chink or crack in the mesh of his work he escapes through it to the exercise of more enjoyable activities.”

Though our hunters are burdened down with the prey they have caught, though the afternoon is falling and the snow is deep, one feels like they have had a happy expedition in the woods and fields. They have killed animals, and are taking them back to the village, while children play a form of hockey on the pond far below them.

2

A theory of hunting.

In the Celestial Hunter, Roberto Calasso considered hunting myths – starting with a close reading of  Jason and the Argonauts – to pull together the thematic structures in our ever increasing humanization (which, by dialectical cunning, pulls us ever closer to our total de-humanization), with at its center the idea and practice of sacrifice. Hunting is an essential moment in this continuum.

“For a long time, animals, perplexed, observed men. They perceived that something changed. Men were no longer animals among the numerous animals that predators took down and devoured, in the savanna and in the caves. Now, even men took down and devoured. But not with their naked hands. They always used an extra-human object : stones, spears, pikes. And they finished by using something even stranger : they struck at a distance, with obsidian points that penetrated the skin. They were the only animal that struck from afar. When men advanced, in the brush or in the forest, one sense a particular odor, something disagreeable and alarming. These were the hunters.”

For Calasso, this moment – the moment of killing from afar – was the crucial but unspoken event that transformed man the animal into man the human.  This was the pre-sacrificial moment in the background of all sacrificial moments.

“The detachment vis-avis the animal was the major event of history. Every other event refers to this. No story subsists of what took place. But the innumerable stories which have been transmitted presuppose this story which has not be transmitted down to us and which perhaps has never been told. Before even being a ritual, this was what preceded all rituals, and it is what all rituals allude to.”

Another Italian thinker, Carlo Ginzburg, has hypothesized that the hunter’s art preceded and influenced the art of writing. In his long, manifesto like essay, Clues, Ginzburg writes:

“Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a' forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers. This rich storehouse of knowledge has been passed down by hunters over the generations. In the absence of verbal documentation to supplement rock paintings and artifacts, we can turn to folklore, which transmits an echo, though dim and distorted, of the knowledge accumulated by those remote hunters.

An oriental fable that circulated among Kirghiz, Tartars, Jews, Turks, and others relates the story of three brothers who meet a man who has lost a camel or, in variant versions, a horse.U They describe it for him without hesitation: it is white, blinded in one eye, and carries two goat-skins on its back, one full of wine, the other of oil. Then they have seen it? No, they have not. So they are accused of stealing and brought to trial. For the brothers, this is a moment of triumph: they demonstrate in a flash how, by means of myriad small clues, they could reconstruct the appearance of an animal on which they have never laid eyes.”

There’s a relationship between Calasso’s notion of the animal that attacks from afar and Ginzburg of the invisible animal that is tracked by its traces – a venatic semiotics.

Perhaps the actual idea of narration (as distinct from charms, exorcisms, or invocation) may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks. This obviously undemonstrable hypothesis nevertheless seems to be reinforced by the fact that the rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction still rests today - the part in relation to the whole, the effect in relation to the cause - are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy, with the rigorous exclusion of metaphor.”

Ginzburg’s essay is an attempt to account for a change in historical and philosophical biases in modernity – or rather, in the post WWII period, with the decline into which the grand narrative has fallen – by pointing to the emergence of the clue not only in detective fiction and fact, but in the way historians have worked in excavating smaller scenes, micro-histories.

3.

A theory of the person

Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, has devoted his studies to the interface between the animal and the human. As an anthropologist, of course, he has to operate with angelic quotation marks invisibly dancing above his enabling categories, and I will too, endowing those two terms with a vague generality.

He is particularly interested in hunting, or in the way animals become subject to killing by humans. Mostly, these animals are four footed and give suck to their young – not for Dalla Bernadina the hecatombs of roaches that are the ordinary casualties on an exterminator’s daily work.

To that end, he’s done field work with hunters in Europe: hunters of chamois in the alps of Northern Italy, hunters of bore and foxes in Corsica and Spain. Etc.

There is a story about the interface between humans and animals. In the early modern era, the old kinship that was felt between man and beast gave way to the clockwork beast, the mere carrier of our goods and services. The cows in the factory, slaughtered on the assembly line, are the great image of the modern ethos.

However, dalla Bernardina has come to a curiously paradoxical conclusion about the interface between man and beast even in modern times, and even among modern hunters, which is that hunted animals are endowed by hunters (and some animals, dogs and cats for instance), with personhood by humans.

It would seem that personhood would endow animals with rights. However, that is a very theoretical point of view, a very liberal and cushioned point of view. In history up to this very moment, the personhood of persons has not ever prevented them from being killed by other humans. The wars, murders, execution and general mayhem which weaves a ghastly course through the human to human interface gives us, anthropologically, a different sense of personhood than this ghostly substance with a right to a lawyer and one call. The criminal, the traitor, the soldier enemy, or even the person in the way is violated by a symbolically rich interaction that founds personhood on responsibility and fault. We kill them, and in our eyes, to relieve, perhaps, our own guilt, we make them responsible for their own deaths. They did the wrong things, these killed: were born to the wrong people, fought on the wrong side, were in the wrong place, speeded and didn’t pull over and so on.

Responsibility is hung around your neck like the albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s.

God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!

 Why look'st thou so?'— 'With my crossbow

 I shot the Albatross.

In dalla Bernardina’s great essay, A person not altogether like the others: the animal and its status, Bernardina’s describes the mise-en-scene of the Ainu bear ceremony, taken from Arlette Leroi-Gourhan’s field work. Every year a small bear cub is captured. The whole village than treats this cub with extraordinary kindness and generosity, feeding it, petting it, pampering it like a child. The village “officially” treats it as a person, and even a privileged person.

Then comes the feast day. The bear is taken on a tour around the village, and everyone gently explains the festival, which is to be transmitted, spiritually, to the whole tribe of bears after his death. This is necessary so that the bears will be happy to come to the persons who have treated them so nicely, and not to be angry and destroy the huts of the village. So much the ethnologist Leroi-Gourhan understood. But then comes the puzzling part: “for a reason that we could not grasp, but which, perhaps, has the purpose, as in the corridas, to fatigue the animal, everyone begins to mistreat it, to anger it, pulling it on all sides, pricking it with branches and striking it with large leafy bamboo shoots. At last it is lead to the square of the village and attached to a stake. Everyone assembles. Then the chief of the ceremony takes his bow and shoots the first arrow. Officially, that is considered to kill it. Then all the men target it with their arrows. Nearby, they lay down two big logs on the ground. Then they lead the dying or dead bear to the logs and break its neck. A piece of wood is introduced into its mouth and the spoils are transported before the village’s palisade. The women clamor their indignation and hit the men for their cruelty, the older ones weep, but, soon, the young people begin to dance.”

Dalla Bernardina relates this ceremony to the testimony of contemporary hunters in Europe, who almost always eventually use “person” type words to describe the animals they hunt. The animals, it turns out, are “clever”, “malign”, “tricky” – they are, in the narratives of the hunters, responsible, in part, for their own killing. It is only when they are dead that they are wholly animal, wholly separate from the realm of beings to which they hunters themselves belong. There is, thus, an identification between the hunter and the prey that seems to be much different from what one would expect in a Cartesian culture, or a culture in which the animal was merely a machine, a clockwork extravagance, a rightless object.

Dalla Bernardina rightly contextualizes his theory with the class notion that the poor, the worker, the peasant are inherently cruel, and thus treat the animal cruelly. This notion traverses the entire Western discourse on cruelty to animals  - a discourse that has increased as the mechanization of slaughter has created a gap between the people who eat the meat of the killed animal and the people who raised the animal, shipped the animal to the abattoir, slaughtered the animal. From the perspective of those who, like me, get their bacon wrapped in plastic in a grocery store, the cruelty practiced on, say, pigs, which I know about from Charlotte’s Web and Wodehouse Blandings novels can be the subject both of my horror and of my indifference at the same time. Killing from afar is not only a structure, but a logic.

4.

The mice.

I was sitting on the sofa four months ago when my eye caught something. A certain shadow, a grayness. I look up and nothing is there, but I sensed something.

I remember years ago, before the apartment was remodeled, having the same feeling. Of something being there.

Of course, in a couple of days I saw it. The mouse. Rushing along the baseboard at a good clip. And always being able to escape almost magically by going through the crack between the floor and a storage drawer mounted just above the floor.

And so it began. The mouse droppings in the bathroom. Under the refrigerator. The sightings. Going to the bathroom at night and thinking, sleepily, of a mouse running over your toes.

At first I tried clove oil. Bought a sprayer with that dispensed a scent that was supposedly repulsive to rodents. And this would work for a day, or two, but then one of use would see it again.

Then the snap traps. Which I put under the sink, under the refrigerator. Which snapped on me as I set them up. Fuck!

And nothing. Never worked. I had the feeling that it wouldn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t work.

So the glue traps. The awful glue trap.

One evening, we were going out. To a dinner with some friends. We were talking, coordinating. I look over and where I set the glue trap, there it was. A mouse. Caught. On its side.

This was the first one. Now the glue traps folded over. When you opened them out, like a book, and spread them on the floor, the mouse would, theoretically, mostly be caught on one leaf or another. The reason for this was not just that you could close and store the traps without getting glue on yourself. The reason was what I now had to do. Because I was not going to leave the mouse, seemingly stunned, in the glue. So I put one leaf over the other and stomped, thus crushing the mouse.

A little mouse blood drop on the floor.

And so it happened. Three more times. I felt absolutely dirty the first time. I felt a little less the second. I still felt dirty, though. Fold over, stomp.

Poor mice. But I felt it was not my fault. I felt it was their fault. I felt that they were invading my space, and that I would have left them alone if we met “in nature”.

We closed up the egress from the outside, we tracked down where they were coming from. I think, at least. Have not seen one in a month. Nor felt one. Cause you begin to feel mice in a relatively small apartment.

It is not my fault.

 

Hunting scenes 2

Following

There’s a relationship between Calasso’s notion of the animal that attacks from afar and Carlo Ginzburg’s of the invisible animal that is tracked by its traces – a venatic semiotics.

So much depends upon that almost invisible concept of “following”. So much: metaphysics, history, writing…

Which  brings me to a familiar story. A man tells this tale in a poem: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

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

Philosophers, enraptured by what is and what is not, have neglected the question that some more naïve inhabitant of roads, ways, trails, streets, pistes, sentiers, Wege, some vagabond, some pour lost soul, might ask – say a girl wearing a red hood, entering a forest and coming to two trails to her grandmother’s house. That question is – how is being, or non being, like a road? Or, if inquiry and being are so related as the chariot wheel is to the track – how is inquiry a road? Why this image?

Who leads the inquiry? I imagine this question coming from the girl, as she strips off the hood and throws it into the fire, and strips off her socks and throws them into the fire, and strips off her chemise and throws it into the fire, a magic fire that consumes instantly and ashlessly, and all the undergarments, strip he tells her, and her staring at the being on the bed of whom she has always had a presentiment. The being who wants to see all of her and never will, there will never be enough seeing, just as she has remarked on enough of him, seen him – his teeth, his ears, his hairiness. This couple, made of girl and wolf, sex and hunger. Both know trails, tracks, paths. One will return, one will not. Both know the pins and needles. One is the route of what is, one is the route of what is not and cannot be. Beware of the second route.

Not that this couple would have been in any position to read the fragments of Parmenides, which were first gathered together again – all the extant verses - in the West by G.G. Fuelleborn in 1795.

In Calasso’s telling of the event/non-event of the arrow, the thrown spear, the first killing at a distance, he contrasts metonomy – the event described – and metaphor – the event modelled, analogized. For the arrow is the first human transcendent, opening up a world of thrown things, from light to vision itself. The world as projection.

“There are two original sins for Homo : separation and imitation. Separation takes place when Homo decides to oppose itself to the zoological continuum, in taking certain animals into its service and considering others as a material potentially useful for it own ends. Imitation is when Homo approximates, in his behavior, the predators. Once the passage to predation is accomplished, Homo does not know how to treat this new part of its nature. It chooses to circumscribe it in its literal signification and extend it as a metaphor. It invents hunting as a non-indispensable activity, a gratuitous one. It was the first art for the sake of art.”

To follow – this is rooted in the animal world of tracks, flights, lines of attack and retreat. Yet, for something so fundamental, it is also so hidden. It is about hiding and seeking, it is the business of the child, the girl going into the forest and choosing the trail to follow to grandma’s house. Or Hercules at the crossroads, that swollen boy at his twelve appointed tasks.

2.

Rane Willerslev’s did his field work among the Yukaghirs, a small tribe in Siberia whose social system relies upon hunting – hence the name of his book, Soul Hunting. Willerslev was a participant-observer – he joined the hunting parties and, according to his own account, became pretty good at it, good enough to find sedentary life, life in the village, tedious:

“Like most other hunters, I found the monotony of life in the village almost intolerable. In addition, the young village women, with their elegant leather boots and Russian-style clothes, seemed alien to me. When I was not interviewing teachers, administrators, and retired people, I killed time by hitting the bottle with the other hunters. It was only when Akulina and Gregory Shalugin, an elderly Yukaghir couple with whom I had developed a particularly warm friendship, dragged me along to the forest that my condition improved. From that point on, however, I avoided village life as much as I could and spent the rest of my time in the field with Spiridon’s group and other groups of hunters in the forest.”

Willerslev frames his notion of the Yukaghir sense of the world in terms of the mimetic agent: to follow a track is, in some sense, to mimic the being that made the track. Following here is a common but unspoken skill of both the hunter and the prey, for the prey that makes the track is also following some mimetic goal: escape, food, sleep, sex, birth, play.

In this sense, the hunter’s spirit lies over all writing, all incisions or marks on surfaces. To write is to follow. And the time of following is a double time, divided between going forward in the future and knowing that going forward is what constitutes the past – that past inhabited by beings that are going forward on one’s track, that are tracking one.