The death of the ass: the equilibrium point and you

 Buridan’s ass would doubtless have hated the internet. The same old blues, he’d think, multiplied infinitely. Or perhaps, and this is the bet every Internet marketer and Google stockholder makes, he would have loved it, as craving becomes an addiction to choice. We begin by looking for the cheapest price, and we end by spending hours looking at Airbnb pictures and commenting on how they could possibly thought that photographing a corner of the bathroom was of any interest to the curious renter.

This is, at least, my experience. I become more asslike as I realize that possible worlds are unfolding before me in cosmic vistas, that one of my childhood dreams – invisibly entering a house – is being realized on a frightening scale, and I have merely to put the cursor on another link to send another shot to whatever part of my brain that is dedicated to invidious comparisons. However, there’s a point, a sad point, in which the whole expedition upon which I have embarked – to find, say, a cheap Airbnb in X – begins to lose its purpose, in which the best price, or the best looking rental, or the best location, or the best references, loses its practical side, because nothing, it turns out, is exactly, every jot and tittle, what I want, even if, before I began the expedition, my desires were of a vagueness… It becomes, instead, an indicator of more – of the “there must be more” that so often besets the poor commoditized consumer, in fatal foreplay with his own want-y self.

John Buridan, like any medieval worth his tomes, left behind a considerable amount of text. However, there is no textual anchor in that corpus for the ass story, although there are plenty other paradoxes. The story goes like this: an ass is driven to stand between two exactly similar bales of hay. If we suppose that the ass simply acts on a calculation that serves to maximize his desire, he would find no reason to prefer one to the other. Thus, he would continually stand there, calculating, until he starved to death.

Buridan apparently used this parable orally, when teaching his students, and it was passed down after he died so that it was known to Spinoza, who is one of the first to mention the story.

Crucially, the ass is between two parity products. Two bales of hay that are composed of just the kind of saliva inducing stuff that donkey’s crave. The donkey has found a strange spot in the human universe, an equilibrium spot, where there is no more reason to chose bale “a” then to chose “b”. Being a mule calculator, an asinus economicus, the mule has obviously read up on ranked preferences and is way ahead of Kenneth Arrow on the impossibility of the three candidate rank ordering, at least if we are to satisfy certain classical criteria, such as Pareto optimality.

Buridan’s ass has spawned, as such things do, a whole subliterature in philosophy. Many return to Spinoza’s analysis in Ethics II, 49:

“I am quite ready to admit, that a man placed in the equilibrium described (namely, as perceiving nothing but hunger and thirst, a certain food and a certain drink, each equally distant from him) would die of hunger and thirst. If I am asked, whether such an one should not rather be considered an ass than a man; I answer, that I do not know, neither do I know how a man should be considered, who hangs himself, or how we should consider children, fools, madmen, etc.”

Spinoza’s suggestion that the equilibrium state is kin to such extra-rational states as childhood or madness could be seen as a throwing up of his hands – a narrowing of the anthropological interest, of the human all too human. But I take it as something other than a philosophical defeat; to me, this signals a moment in the history of philosophy:  a transformation of what used to the whole goal and morality of the sage’s exercise in refusing to want, in ascesis.

Spinoza and the tradition after him has tended to treat Buridan’s paradox as a problem to be solved, rather than a counterfactual about the natural history of reason. In fact, no ass has starved to death in front of two exactly similar hay bales. No human being has died of thirt confronted with two bottles of coke. There are no corpses at the equilibrium point. So the question, to my mind, should be about the reasons that reason does not lock up here. The lack of corpses at the equilibrium point suggests that calculative reason has a broader sense of its place in the world than we, who want to have division of cognitive labor first, recognize as philosophers. It is a point Vico later makes against what he calls the geometrical method in philosophy, which ignores natural history and the fact that understanding and conceptual analysis are, in fact, accompanied by the imagination, which is not controlled by, but rather precedes, calculation.

So much for the philosophical point. The broader point, here, is cultural: The older image of the sage, whose wisdom – a practical wisdom, since it was a method that applied to the way the sage lived – was about doing with less, diminishing the harsh claims of desire. This image of ascesis emerged in a world where the Malthusian constraints were harsh and inelastic. This was a world that was overwhelmingly agricultural, where the peasant was the vastly greater portion of the population. Spinoza’s text is an prefigures the lifting of those limits – the end, in the broad sense, of the ancien regime.

With the lifting of those limits (which we call modernization, even though the population of Europe and the U.S. was, until the beginning of the 20th century, still largely taken up with agriculture), with the era of the mass production of goods, the terms of choice changed. Never again such hay-bale innocence! In the new superstores, in Sears or in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, the question of choice was radically, quantitatively changed – and with that change came an inalterable shift in the meaning and construction of the equilibrium point. The new Buridan question was about calculating over seemingly endless goods, such as had never been considered by ass nor human. These choices seemed, to the economist of the twentieth century, to signal a great change in the class-defined social structure – from Capital versus Labor we move smoothly to consumers, one and all. Of course, we who are on the ground floor, out there in the Dollar Store, know better. We can see the 75,000 dollar sports car in all its glory on TV, but we buy the used Honda. More than that – to fill our idle hours, we are flooded with oceans of tat, and with a deluge of images that makes attention itself a resource.

Which gets us to the internet, where all purchases seem, at a click, possible, and where the old foraging habit dies a squalid death in front of the omnipresent screen. It is in these new terms that the old equilibrium point has been transformed into something like a trance point. This is not just a matter of the internet – there’s an old phrase from the fifties, highway hypnosis (now known as Driving without Attention Mode, or DWAM), in which a certain automatism creeps over the subject as the subject racks up miles on a highway that has been designed to maximize uniformity. Oddly enough, the same result comes about from maximized non-uniformity – from the variety to which every internet site, every ad, strives. For there lurks, behind them, the same parity products, the same routine. And so the internet voyager of the cable tv mook becomes, at some point, immured in an equilibrium point that is as powerful as that mythically affecting Buridan’s ass. And so it is that the Walmart forager, the Amazon shopper, the Fandango moviegoer, the Youtuber, man and ass, feel, as they go through the routine, vaguely life-drained, exhausted from choices and yet somehow unable to resist looking for the next choice. On and on it goes, years and years it goes on. We have to stop, but we can’t stop.

Hee-haw.

“How would I know?”

 

“How would I know?”

This is the question at the crossroads of method and scepticism. To treat it as a question with the stress on the word “how” generates one story; but stressing the whole phrase – putting in doubt its ordinary function as a question – generates another story.

If we actually take that latter choice as the choice of scepticism, the philosophical thing to do is to ignore its tone and attend simply to its substance – the challenge to certainty. And all respect to that!

Yet to ignore its tone is to abandon too much that is philosophically pertinent to simple “literature”, as though this were all a naturally different field than philosophy, poetry and not proposition. Poetry, too, is proposition. Obliquely, by hide and seek.  Because this is a challenge that takes the guise of a jeer. And that jeering tone is, I’d say, the glory and the downfall of scepticism. 

In the Oxford English dictionary, the etymology of the word jeer is called uncertain, although there is a notion that it might come from gieren, to bray, to shout. That is slender evidence to connect the jeer to the donkey, but I am nothing if not a bold jumper.

The ass has long had a place in the philosopher’s gallery of figures. Apuleius’s ass – the man transformed into a donkey; Bruno’s ass; Nietzsche’s ass. An honorable dishonorable procession. The donkey’s bray is an emblematic characteristic, and on the down low, the male donkey’s penis is supposed to be an extraordinary instrument. The jeering tone of “how would I know” leads us to an interesting down-low form of scepticism, in which the assertion of knowledge is seen through as an assertion – that is, a performance of privilege and authority. When Descartes saves the world by building on one certainty, the sceptical donkey laughs at the idea of “saving” the world, and the self-amplifying presupposition that the world is a thing that one can save. And yet, there is a scepticism that goes farther and says: why not?

2.

The buffoon and the ass keep turning up together, as though the deck of achetypes that lies, face down, under our electric prestidigitator’s fingers were a crooked pack.

According to Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Apuleius, the author of the Golden Ass (that book of transmutations through which the transcendentally ludicrous is finally given shape and form by Psyche’s quest for Cupid) was, by the fourth century A.D., credited with the translation of the corpus of Hermes Trismegistus. These were the books that were supposedly written before Moses was a pup, and they were wildly popular in the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici hired Ficino to translate the Greek Corpus Hermeticum in 1462, as the manuscript containing it had turned up by way of a traveling monk, Leonardo da Pistoia - instructing him to interrupt the Plato translation project, as the Corpus Hermeticum was urgent. Cosimo wanted to read the thing before he died. Such was its prestige, such is the greed for ‘secret’ knowledge. By the time of Bruno, a century later, the C.H. had lost something of its allure, vis a vis the regular scholarly world, but had continued to be central to the system of Renaissance magic, which operated in the hidey holes, intersecting, as secret knowledge always seems to, with intelligence agencies and diplomacy.

Bruno, of course, was interested in magic, as were members of Raleigh’s School of Night that he made the acquaintance of in his London sojourn. In the group picture of the founding fathers of the modern era, all lined up like Dutch masters, we usually have Bacon, Galileo and Descartes – Bruno is left out. And the reason that he is left out is that he was just too damned interested in that f-fuckin magic. Yet in reality – that promiscuous bitch, my darling - Bruno can’t be left out. In that grave company, Bruno was a buffoon – a necessary joker, the philosopher-buffoon who keeps returning, in some dark orbit according to some dark cycle of its own, to put into disarray the white magic of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. To play Rameau’s nephew to Diderot, to play the neurotic bachelor Kierkegaard to Hegel’s monument to the state to come.  To throw a few boomerangs around, liven the joint up, and raise, if possible, everybody’s level of anxiety and hope, the two intricately counter-weighted against each other.

In Dorothy Waley Singer’s life of Bruno there’s an anecdote about Bruno’s childhood that reads as though some bit of Pyrrho’s life in Diogenes Laertes had waited until the era of Rebirth to show itself again:

Bruno gives in his greatest Latin work, the De immenso, [4] a description of an episode in childhood, which made a deep impression on him. His home was in a hamlet just outside Nola, on the lower slopes of Cicada, a foot-hill of the Appenines some twenty miles east of Naples. [5] He tells with affectionate detail of the beauty and fertility of the land around, overlooked from afar by the seemingly stern bare steeps of Vesuvius. One day a suspicion of the deceptiveness of appearances dawned on the boy. Mount Cicada, he tells us, assured him that "brother Vesuvius" was no less beautiful and fertile. So, girding his loins, he climbed the opposite mountain. "Look now," said Brother Vesuvius, "look at Brother Cicada, dark and drear against the sky." The boy assured Vesuvius that such also was his appearance viewed from Cicada. "Thus did his parents [the two mountains] first teach the lad to doubt, and revealed to him how distance changes the face of things." So in after-life he interprets the experience and continues: "In whatever region of the globe I may be, I shall realize that both time and place are similarly distant from me."

From how would I know to how would I know, we’ve rounded the stresses, here, in this devotion without a real beginning or end.

Two sacks

 

Chekhov’s story, Gusev, gives us an account of the people in the hold of a steamship heading from the Pacific Northeast of Russia home to, most likely, the Black Sea. The people in the hold are very sick. The hold is a stifling place, and they are coughing and lying around and playing cards and dying. Gusev is one of them. Formerly an orderly for an officer, he is going back to, optimally, rest and recuperate in his village.

But this happens to him:

“He dozed, and murmured in his sleep, and, worn out with nightmares, his cough, and the stifling heat, towards morning he fell into a sound sleep. He dreamed that they were just taking the bread out of the oven in the barracks and he climbed into the stove and had a steam bath in it, lashing himself with a bunch of birch twigs. He slept for two days, and at midday on the third two sailors came down and carried him out.”

Normally in a story there are two forms of reporting. There is the report from the outside of what happens, or there is the report from some personality, some point of view, about what happens. In the former case the hint of subjectivity can stem from what Pasolini, following the linguists, called Free Indirect Discourse, where one feels that the objective report is actually correspondent to some ruling subjectivity. But in Gusev, what happens, in that sentence, is a sort of sweep between the two modes of reporting. An astonishing shift.  In that shift, the story lights up the impossibility of using our ordinary dualism to account for the real. The real is something other than both. The totality of our experience must include the things we must have experienced and yet don’t experience. These include birth and sleeping and death. And even dreams – for what and who is experiencing the dream? We spill out.

And eventually we are carried out. Whether that is done by orderlies in a hospital, sailors on a ship, or emaciated slaves in a concentration camp, we are carried out. There’s always a crime scene and always a crime – our deaths. Though death might be the law, it is also the crime.

To me, the death of Gusev seems more frightening in its matter of factness than the death of Ivan Ilyich. Gusev was written in 1890, and Tolstoy’s novella was published in 1888. In the novella, the death itself begins like this:

“For all three days, in the course of which there was no time for him, he was thrashing about in that black sack into which an invisible, invincible force was pushing him.”

And here’s the end:

"So that's it!" he suddenly said aloud. "What joy!" For him all this happened in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed. For those present, his agony went on for . two more hours. Something- gurgled in his chest; his emaciated body kept twitching. Then the gurgling and wheezing gradually subsided. "It's finished!" someone said over him. He heard those words and repeated them in his soul. "Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more." He drew in air, stopped at midbreath, stretched out, and died.”

There is a sack in Chekhov’s story too.

“He was sewn up in sailcloth and to make him heavier they put with him two iron weights. Sewn up in the sailcloth he looked like a carrot or a radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet.”

The story of the story is that Chekhov, on the ship back from Sakhalin Island, had seen some sailors buried at sea. He wrote about that in a letter – Chekhov is one of the great letter writers – and thus the details of the burial were, as it were, at hand. Yet something else happens to Gusev, in as much as we identify the corpse with Gusev. Tossed with iron weights into the sea, the package sinks. Until this happens.

“Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots. Seeing the dark body the fish stopped as though petrified, and suddenly turned round and disappeared. In less than a minute they flew back swift as an arrow to Gusev, and began zig-zagging round him in the water.

After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.”

It seems to be a cliché in Chekhov criticism that Chekhov’s long story, A Dreary Story, was written as a sort of response to The Death of Ivan Ilyich. But one cat can leap on a ball of yarn in a number of ways – and a writer can bang on a motif and make a different sound with each thump.

Myself, I am interested in the difference between the two sacks. I think it is noteworthy. Ivan Ilyich has, during his life, surely seen sacks. But given his position, these were surely sacks toted by servants and peasants He is not of the sack toting class.

The sailor’s sheet in which Gusev is wrapped, on the other hand, would have seemed familiar to the experience of Gusev alive, who as a lowly soldier would have toted many sacks. There was labor in the sack Gusev ends up in. The black sack into which Ivan Ilyich is being pushed, in contrast, was not something that responded to his muscle memory.

The sailor’s sheet into which Gusev is sewn has all the fragility of the products of hasty human labor. The shark rips it effortlessly, and the iron weights inside go vainly plunging down into the depths. It was not simply invisible forces that had stuck Gusev in that sack, it was two sailors, and it is not invisible forces that release him, but a hungry shark. Yet the sack, however misshapen and mistreated, is ultimately the product of a symbolic social process. Although the emaciated corpse of Gusev could have simply been tossed overboard, it got, instead, a proper funeral. Not a glorious one, but at least the effort was made. The sack, due to this, has a certain pathos.

Pathos is what is aimed for in Tolstoy’s phrase: “For him all this happens in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed.”

I am not trying to hold up Chekhov as a better artist to criticize Tolstoy. I merely want to point out that in the move from the mindforged black sack of Tolstoy to the sailors sheet into which Gusev’s remains were entrusted, we are moving between two distinct visions of mortality. The sacred, in the end, was always an aspiration and an abstraction of Tolstoy, while for Chekhov, there is an irreducible aura around the detail. And that is a form of the sacred that I am much more inclined to trust.

 

the catastrophe of the American party system

 Obama once said, “my policies are so mainstream that if I said them in the 1980s, I’d be considered a moderate Republican.”

Obama knew what he was saying.

The oddity of American political history is that the Republican party lost, entirely, its moderate wing. Without a home, those moderates attached themselves to the Democratic party. And naturally tried to dominate it.

This is a damn shame. Many Democrats today should be in the Republican party, fighting for the soul of the party that once included Teddy Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie. Governor Newsom, for instance, that California deep fake of a Democrat, is planning on running, apparently, for the Democratic Party nomination when, really, he should be running for the Republican Party nomination. Democrats like to say, as Pelosi has said, we need a “strong” Republican Party. Indeed, those are Democrats who should have long ago jumped ship and made a play for the Republican Party.

One of the unremarked and very dire consequences of Nixon’s Southern Strategy is that the Republican party got stacked with ex-Democrats who were Dixiecrats – the most racist and anti-communist people in the country. Yet the South, up until the seventies, had its share of very moderate Ds. These people did not jump ship. Hence, the battle in many solid South states are now between the ultra right and the ultra ultra right in the Republican party, with the Dems siphoning off the moderate votes that could, actually, have gone to winning rightleaning Republican candidates of the type that used to be common when the South was solidly Democratic. The George Bush/Bo Calloway type.

I am envisioning, here, a counter-factual history in which the Republican party did not go the way of Goldwater. But in fact the Teddy Roosevelt tradition was entirely eviscerated from the way the Republican Party evolved from Nixon to Ford to Reagan – and this in turn has effected the way the Democratic Party has evolved. There is no reason that a Republican voter, whose issues are less taxes and a smaller government, should end up having as his candidate either a shithead racist misogynist or a extreme shithead racist misogynist. After all, Roe came about through conservative, Nixon appointed justices.

But history is what happens in spite of reason, contra Mr. Hegel.

Progressives, who used to be at the center of the Democratic party, are now far, far from any kind of power there. At best, we have to make do with “mainstream politics” of the “moderate Republican” type. And thus the popular dissatisfaction, which now stretches over decades, with Congress and with the parties. The low rating of the Democratic party, even as Trump achieves his usual level of minority approval, is not surprising. Who among us feels that the Democrats would make our lives better if they get into office? The hope is that they will slow the getting-worse. Dem millionaires, for whom Dem voters vote, clearly prefer their own kind, and have developed a politics of devising, cleverly, with much nudgery, a politics of giving us the scraps. This has recently been anointed as “abundance” by the products of the nepo generation – and of course it is total shit.

Meanwhile, on the whacky GOP side, racism goes shoulder to shoulder with a surprisingly aggressive attitude of government’s relationship to business. Trump telling Walmart to “eat” his taxes has been passed around by the good neo-liberals as worth a giggle. Actually, though this warning comes more from the balance of gastric juices in our Duce minor’s belly, it is a reminder that in the great post-Covid inflation, the Dems entirely ignored the power vested in the government to control prices and wages. If ever there was a time to revisit the post-WWII policy of price control, 2021 was that time. And that time passed without this option ever being even discussed. Because, apparently, we now have technocrats in the machinery who, with a point added to the interest rate here and a clever tax provision there, can keep everything going. It is a lovely machine, except for those in the bottom 80 percent. As proof, we can look at our oligarchs, whose wealth during the Biden years became an oligarchic Disneyland of no limits. The wealth of the oligarchy, the 1 percent, hit 44 trillion dollars in 2024, according to the U.S. Fed. Applause, Applause! We know that this will have absoooolutely no effect on our politics, our justice system, our environment, etc.

That is, if we are neo-libs. If we are normally people, we know the 1 percent with 44 trillion dollars will shit all over the rest of us, endlessly. This happened under a supposedly “liberal” president who his flacks liked to say was the most “progressive” since FDR. That is, the FDR who loved the 1 percent gaining thirty four percent of the wealth of the U.S. That FDR. Funny, he looks a lot like Ronald Reagan.

The party system is one of those mutant evolutions that accompanied the move to universal suffrage, and which has never really been theorized in a satisfactory way. And that party system, a weak and ridiculous contraption, is taking us all down. Bad news for our kids, and their kids. And this, they will ask, is the best we could do?

Racism, The integration of the armed forces, and reaction

 Since Trump stood up at the podium in West Point and made a racist speech that went against about 80 years of American history, and since the NYT, our major newspaper, decided to report it in tones that made it seem like a dignified presidential “shift” of emphasis, then I figure we should publish or disseminate stories about the history of African-Americans in the military, and in the country that they served, and their fates in the Jim Crow America, which has been forthrightly proclaimed by Trump as the America he wants to bring back while being covered and camouflaged by a media that is alternately scared of the monetary opportunities he can block for their mega-corporation owners and stiffened and starched by decades of gushing decorous language that has been slopped day after day over the doings of the powerful. In other words, in the face of a media that takes its task to be making what is happening before our eyes unrecognizable, lets poke holes in it, lets look through it, lets make it recognizable.

My story for today, for instance, to put Trump’s sub-par standup rant in perspective, is to recall this news story from Feb. 12, 1946. This was the day the police arrested a veteran named Sgt. Isaac Woodard, who had committed the awful crime of taking a bus from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, to his home in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Woodard’s problem was that he wanted to take a leak. A leak. An easy thing for a white man to do, traveling from Augusta, Georgia to Winnsboro, South Carolina, but difficult for a black man to do who does not want to be lynched for using the white man’s bathroom.

Woodard was a black man.

Bathrooms in America and who gets to use them have long been a hot spot. If we create a sadistic system of oppression, one of the enjoyments of the system is denying a person the right and privilege of peeing in a bathroom if it is the wrong bathroom. In this game, if the person pees in the wrong bathroom, we get to string them up. Blacks yesterday, Trans today, it is all good conservative fun.

In Batesburg, South Carolina, Sgt Woodard asked for a bathroom break – and this was allowed by the very rules of the bus. But the bus driver said he could not – referring to the bathroom system that had been set up to torment people like Sgt Woodard – and said bus driver called the police. The police chief named Lynwood Shull and another officer arrived on the scene and hauled Woodard out of the bus, and down to the jail, administering a thorough beating. It was a beating with nightsticks. Woodard made the mistake of taking one of the nightsticks from the beater’s hands. Oh Oh.

As he put it in his affidavit – in a report in the Baltimore Afro-American:

“When we got to the door of the police station, he struck me again and knocked me unconscious. After I commenced to come to myself, he hollered ‘get up’ When I started to get up, he started punching me in my eyes with the end of his billy.”

Now this bit of policing might have produced no stir, save that black newspaper got hold it. And they kept on publishing it, which eventually came to the attention of Harry Truman. It was Truman’s pressure on the FBI that produced an investigation. Lynwood Shull was put on trial. This is what Shull said:

“Although he admitted using a blackjack, which “might have landed in his eye or eyes,”, Shull insisted, “I was no harsher than is necessary to complete the arrest.”

Guess who was acquitted by an all white jury?

A question for the ages.

And this is where diversity, aka integration, comes into the story. As after WWI, there were assaults on black soldiers all over the country after WWII. Truman, however, thought that this was not right. And so Truman began to institute the first significant blow against segregation since the reconstruction. He ordered the Armed Forces to be integrated.

This, of course, is a backstory that the media gives a shit about as we get the reincarnation of Lynwood Shull as President, blathering on at West Point.

Lets not pretend, here, that the ultimate victims of Trumpism are country-clubbers from Harvard. The ultimate goal is to make beatings like that suffered by Woodard exemplary. Every time an organisation dissolves its “DEI” initiative, it is raising that nightstick and giving Woodard another blow in the eyes. Don’t kid yourself that this is not happening.

Education as conversation, conversation as entertainment

 There is a French phrase that has no anglophone equivalent: avoir de la conversation. To have conversation means something important in French culture – whether of the left or of the right. In the Anglophone world, in contrast, there is a blank here. A strange blank.

To my mind, education is all about having conversation. It is not just reading, it is not just acquiring the tools for a profession, it is not even producing in oneself an inner life – although of course these are all aspects and fields of education. It is having the spirit of conversation, the ability to both be interested in and interesting in the 'said' in all its splendour and sorrow. Yet, something in that facility iis counter to some prejudice in the English soul. Hence, the traditional suspicion of the Irish as fancy speakers, in love with the sound of their own voices, etc. The word blarney is a compound of this prejudice.

One hears, often enough in France, the criticism that this or that person “doesn’t have conversation.” I often think of this when I watch sitcoms with my boy – it is a nightly ritual. The characters in American sitcoms usually don’t have conversation. They have wisecracks. And nobody remarks about conversation.

This does not mean having a wide range of literary reference. It could be any kind of reference, pop cultural, or gossip, the news of the world or the news of the office. The spirit of conversation is not a matter of the matter, but a matter of enjoying the transformations of the matter. The storyteller, the joker, the sage, the gossiper – having conversation runs through these types. But the vividness that is essential to conversation is like the carbonation in soda, if it becomes flat it changes the whole taste of the experience. And often it runs flat because conversation is not considered a necessity – at best, it enters the American mindframe as a value added.

The lack of a consciousness of conversation enters into literature and the study of literature by way of the secondness, the subordination accorded to a kind of text: the letter, the personal essay, the tabletalk. The latter was, for a long time, one of the fruits of humanism – Martin Luther’s Table Talk, John Seldon’s, the dialogues of Erasmus or of Diderot, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Goethe’s Conversations with Eckerman – but, confronting the novel and the newspaper, this kind of thing disappeared. Or – and in this genres are like certain rivers – it went underground. In the twentieth century, it went into Musil’s essayism and Joyce’s enormous parody and reincarnation of every kind of literary device. It produced a strange, broken kind of fiction feuilleton. Ludwig Hohl’s Notizen, Calasso’s odd series of speculative essays, from the Ruin of Kasch, Gerald Mace’s Colportage works, and Pascal Quignard’s series Dernier Royaume. In this world I place, as well, Sebald’s “novels”, which have had a large impact in American contemporary writing, I think. It is a genre based on “having conversation”.

Even in the debased world brought to us by the neoliberal notion that the individual is just a transactor – whose endless endpoint we live through again and again in politics – having conversation has more salience than its neglect as a cultivatable virtue might imply.

He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it

 T.S. Eliot’s essay on Henry James for the Little Review in 1918 has some of the great qualities of Eliot as a critic as well as the baffling inconsistencies and Harvard grad tone that puts off a reader who is not eager to be inducted into some Ivy League Dining society frat. He tells us, absurdly, that Henry James was no literary critic – and thus makes us think that he never did read those prefaces to the novels and stories in the collected edition – and then tells us that he is a highly creative critic, who puts his criticism into his fiction. And then he makes his famous crack:

“James’ critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas: a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

The phrase has the fascinating obliqueness of a line in some modernist poem: a line that short-circuits the functionality of sense, and gives us, instead, clues. For instance, the clue given by writing idea with a capital I. In another, later essay, Eliot briefly contrasts James with Dostoevsky – the latter being, supremely, a novelist of ideas. This might be a clue to this earlier essay, and it would make things simple. The idea is that vision outside the character which the character, in some ways, creates and guides itself by. A projection of a kind.

Or (another way of going about the clue) the idea is a principle. The principle operates as a rule for the personality. In this sense, what Eliot is saying is that principles are distinctly absent from James’ fictions.

In that sense, one could say that James is applying the pragmatic notion of the test to experience. I think this is a notion that revolted Eliot, who felt that this is a test for which he was so constituted as to always fail. In a sense, Eliot’s poetry flows from the failure of any kind of test to give us a point of view from which we can judge experience.

2.

I have been thinking about Eliot’s phrase because of a book by Francois Jullien, the great French Sinologist, which is entitled: the Sage is without any Ideas. The sage, in Jullien’s account, is very much like the Master as Eliot conceives him.

“’Without ideas’ signifies that he guards himself against putting one idea before the others – to the detriment of the others. He has no idea that he put at the head of the line, posed as a principle, serving as a foundation or simply a beginning, from which he can deduce or, at least, deploy his thought. Principle, arché: at the same time what begins and what commands, that by which thought can debut. A thing which, posited, the rest follows. But, in fact, that there is the trap, the sage fears the taking of this direction and the hegemony that it will assert. … The sage fears the ordinating power of the first [idea]. Thus, with these ideas, he is on watch to keep them on the same plane – and that is his wisdom: to continue to hold them equally possible, equally accessible, without letting any of them get before the others, hide the others, cast its shadow on the other ones – in brief, without privileging any.”

Interestingly, the contrast between James and Dostoevsky, in this light, is not that Dostoevsky has a critical principle for writing fiction that differs from James – rather, it is that Dostoevsky’s pluralism does make way for a certain principled order in the world that he strongly prefers, and that he strongly makes felt is an order from which the world is deviating. Whereas James lacks that sense of the modern as a deviation, a lack, a de-racination, in his fiction. Even as he allows some Henry Adam-ish hints to inflect his book of American travels, The American Scene, the famous complexity of his periods refine and reduce that complaint to something that is not a point of view at all, but rather a discomfort, an acknowledged nostalgia. Like Dostoevsky, James suffers, in the American Scene, from the anti-semitic sentiment that beset the end of the 19th century; but for James, unlike Dostoevsky, this is not an obsession. In giving the nod to W.E.B. Dubois in that book, James even comes out as a sort of Theodore Roosevelt Republican, something at the opposite pole from Henry Adams.

The sage as fiction writer is, to my mind, a highly attractive impossibility. Just as, for T.S. Eliot, it was a highly attractive impossibility that allowed his poetry of failure, one failure after another, to flow, redeemingly, out. It was Eliot’s tragedy that while he failed as a poet, and thus became a great poet, he succeeded as a critic, and thus became a minor critic.

And that’s my wisecrack for the day.