How many licks: another effort at explaining Bataille

How many licks does it take till you get to the center of the
-Kimberly Jones


While it's true that LI enjoys the infradig like a boorish moviegoer enjoys an obnoxious ringtone, perhaps we should have been a bit more explicative vis a vis Georges Bataille in our last post. It might just be the case that not all readers of LI have immersed themselves in Bataille’s O.C. So we looked around yesterday for Bataille’s 1933 essay, The Psychological Structure of Fascism. Surprisingly, it is not to be found, in French or English, on the web. Somebody is holding tight to that copyright!

Boris Souvarine published Bataille’s essay in La Critique sociale. Souvarine moulders in the memory hole, now, but in the thirties he and a few likeminded souls – including the surrealists, one should remember (I forgive Breton a lot for punching out Ilya Ehrenburg in 1935, God damn it) – created the cold war anti-communist left. Of course, it took the cold war itself to make this political variety viable, but when the language flew at innumerable international conferences in the fifties, it would sound much like the language Souvarine used in his bio of Stalin. Souvarine’s group, the Cercle communiste democratique, included Simone Weil – which is perhaps how Bataille met her. Bataille used Weil for the character ‘Lazare’ in The Blue of Noon. (Sky Blue) It is funny to think of Weil, who has been the object of an intense Catholic cult for decades, and Bataille together. But a woman who practiced putting pins under her fingernails in Barcelona in 1934 (the year of a worker’s revolt), so that she could bear up under torture when the reactionaries captured her, was sure to get Bataille’s attention. For the CS, he wrote three articles that Francois Furet justly calls among the “most interesting ever written on political thought”: La Notion de Depense, La probleme de l’Etat, and finally La Structure Psychologique du Fascisme.

The Psychological Structure of Fascism was translated in 1979 by John Brenkman for New German Critique – it took that long to travel to America. But it was known to Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre and, in the sixties, became one of the classic texts in France, a reference point for Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, the Lacanians, the whole Family. So it has been a busy pollinator.

I’ll use the rest of this post to describe and quote from it, then I’ll go on and on and on about it in some other post. In LI’s campaign against happiness triumphant, Bataille’s concepts, percolated through our wary experience, do play a big part.

Bataille sets the terms of this essay by dividing the socius into two parts, or rather ideal tendencies – one is the ideal tendency to homogeneity, the other to heterogeneity. Homogeneity encompasses the classic economist (and Marxist) sense of the system of production:

“Production is the basis of social homogeneity. Homogeneous society is productive society, namely useful society. Every useless element is excluded, not from all society, but from its homogeneous part. In this part, each element must be useful to another without the homogeneous activity ever being able to attain the form of activity valid in itself. A useful activity has a common measure with another useful activity, but not with activity for itself.”

The common measure, in this situation, takes on a more than metric force. The common measure is money, of course. And the homogeneous tendency is embodied in the homogeneous individual, which is the homo oeconomicus of the classical school, set loose upon the landscape and marrying and giving in marriage and, in all things, tending to the middle. “In industrial civilization, the producer is distinguished from the owner of the means of production, and it is the latter who appropriates the products for himself; consequently, it is he who, in modern society, is the function of the products; it is he – and not the producer – who founds social homogeneity.” So far Bataille will go with the classic Marxist model, but he is already substituting another form of socialization – social homogeneity – for the classical Marxist notion of exploitation. This seemingly small shift determines the larger theme in the essay, which portrays the violence at the center of the socius not as a struggle between classes, but a struggle between asymmetrical functions – on the one hand, the homogenizing function, on the other, the heterogeneous function, the useless. The proletariat, in this picture, is placed on the side of the heterogeneous merely as a temporary ally – there is no intrinsic reason that a better rearrangement of the distribution of the social product – Keynesian economic policy, for instance - won’t bring him over to the side of social homogeneity.

Here Bataille makes his first thrust at Marxism, although the swordplay is muffled enough that only those who have the ears to hear it – who are familiar with the dreary 30s idea that Marxism is “scientific socialism” – will catch what is happening:

“Thus, the heterogeneous elements excluded from the latter [the homogeneous field] are excluded as well from the field of scientific consideration: as a rule, science cannot know heterogeneous elements as incompatible with its own homogeneity as are, for example, born criminals with the social order – science finds itself deprived of any functional satisfaction (exploited in the same manner as a laborer in a capitalist factory, used without sharing in the profits.) Indeed, science is not an abstract entity: it is constantly reducible to a group of men living the aspirations inherent to the scientific process.”

Bataille’s second move is to fill in the dynamic of exclusion. Here, I think, Bataille foreshadows what I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability that formed the global culture of the Cold War era, and that remains with us in a more farcical form, as the War on Terror.

“As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization but must constantly be protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production, or not enough to suit them, or simply, that cannot tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest. In such conditions, the protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements which are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.

The state is not itself one of these imperative elements; it is distinct from kinds, heads of the army, or of nations, but it is the result of the modifications undergone by a part of homogeneous society as it comes into contact with such elements.”

The state, in Bataille’s schema, doesn’t exist as a homogeneous constant, but as a variable that functions to enforce homogeneity, either through command and control authority – in the despotic form – or by coordinating with the ‘spontaneous’ enforcement of homogeneous norms in democracy. But here’s the thing for Bataille – in 1933 – in an era in which democracy seemed to be failing some essential test of social experience: the state can be captured by heterogeneous factions. Before fascism exists as a fact, it exists as a possibility inherent in the state:

“Even in difficult circumstances, the State is able to neutralize those heterogeneous forces that will yield only to its constraints. But it can succumb to the internal dissociation of that segment of society of which it is but the constrictive form.”

Oh oh. I can see that I am going into post nova – I could go on like this for pages, thus destroying the patience of the blog reader, accustomed to reading short, spiffy paragraphs, usually about Paris Hilton, pro or con. Oops. Well, I will continue this later.

the decline of degradation, or abjection kitsch

The real showstopper, though, is in Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales.” As an exotic dancer — introduced as the “scariest, sexiest, most dangerous girl in the world” — she storms a strip-club stage, pet Rottweiler in tow, and proceeds to entwine tongues with the slobbering dog. – NYT

“Having already provoked parents, women’s groups and the ratings board with explicit ads for the coming torture movie “Captivity,” Mr. Solomon and his After Dark Films now intend to introduce the film, set for release July 13, with a party that may set a new standard for the politically incorrect.

For starters, Mr. Solomon has ordered up what he calls the three “most outlandish” SuicideGirls available from the punk porn service, even if they’re as frisky as the ones he is told once set a Portland, Ore., restaurant on fire. Some lucky fans will get to take the women as dates for party night, July 10, on two conditions: “People take the date at their own risk, and everybody on the Internet gets to watch.”

Cage fighting too is likely. Mr. Solomon’s planners are angling for Kimbo Slice, the bare-knuckle bruiser whose vicious backyard brawls are a Web favorite and who made his Mixed Martial Arts debut on Saturday.”

I was pleased to see that IT’s KinoFist group (or here) is going to be showing Dušan Makavejev’s WR – Mysteries of the Organism, since, by an amazing coincidence, I just watched WR myself. It is impossible to take against a film in which a glacial female voice in something that sounds like Serbo-Croatian encourages all Comrades to take full advantage of the 4,000 orgasms we experience, on average, over a lifetime, as a sepia iconostasis of revolutionary fucking flickers encouragingly before us.

The film’s protagonist chief actress and protagonist – if it is possible to be the protagonist of a scrap book – Milena, seeks that moment in which the convergence of revolution and transgression produce… well, not the zipless fuck that Americans in the 70s were so bent on procuring, but a moment of bliss that would knock down the sedimented oppression of old, exploitative economic and patriarchal ties. Fucking, here, is the revolution’s sympathetic magic – by relieving the productive norms that weigh like nightmares on the fuckers, we will relieve the productive norms that weigh like nightmares on our industrial system, wedded, as it has been since Hitler’s eureka moment, to war. New War is not an accident that happens to the system, a snafu, but a positive element of the economy, a central value. The looting associated with old war is replaced with an inherently mobile, never to be realized goal legitimating all waste. Not that looting becomes obsolete, of course, but it is put on a business basis. Is it possible that this is simply a neurotic disposition writ large? Can we fuck our way to rationality?

A good question - but let's admit there is a bit of an antique glaze about the film. It was made at a time when transgression was undergoing a sea change. Where transgression had been the great weapon of the outlaw up until the sixties, it was becoming the marketer and coolhunter's great weapon in the sixties. Transgression, in other words, was being annexed by the ethos of Happiness Triumphant.

A small personal interlude. I was sitting in the University library at Montpellier in the early eighties. I had the first volume of Georges Bataille’s OC in my hand. I was reading the Story of the Eye. I’d never heard of either Bataille or the Story of the Eye before. For those who don’t know the book, The Story of the Eye involves a series of improbable events, linked together by a claustrophobic erotic urgency, in which the narrator and his lover Simone, who are in their teens, perform a number of sexual and sexually metaphoric acts, insinuate the shy Marcelle into their activities and basically turn her into a catatonic, and then flee their parents’ houses and join up with an English lord. At one point, the group arrives at a church. They lure the priest of the church from the confessional. Simone seduces him, and then the priest dies of a strangulation/ejaculation combo – at which point Sir Edmond kindly cuts the priest’s eye out and gives it to Simone. She playfully stuffs it up her cunt. The narrator says:

“Now I stood up and, while Simone lay on her side, I drew her thighs apart, and found myself facing something I imagine I had been waiting for in the same way that a guillotine waits for a neck to slice. I even felt as if my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror; in Simone’s hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine. Streaks of come in the steaming hair helped give that dreamy vision a disastrous sadness. I held the thighs open while Simone was convulsed by the urinary spasm, and the burning urine streamed out from under the eye down to the thighs below.”

Unfortunately, I don’t have the book with me, so I am quoting from the English translation. It is hard, in English, to convey the … the elegance of Bataille’s prose. If I were to translate that passage, I would probably write “guillotine waits for a neck”, not a neck to slice – sometimes, you have to bow to English bluntness to convey the more abbreviated sense of the French. In any case, I remember the total shock I felt, reading Bataille. The book reached out and pulled my nose, stroked my cock, and bit me on the ass, all at the same time.

After all, I’d come to Montpellier from Shreveport, Louisiana. I wasn't used to this kind of thing.

So in the early eighties, Bataille’s notion of transgression was truly important to me. However, looking back, I can see how retarded I was – I never paid any attention to what was happening in popular culture back then. Not only did I not own a tv in the eighties, I rarely even glanced at one. I just didn't care. I didn't give a fuck about Reagan kultur. Thus, I had no clue that transgression had become a sitcom norm – it was a farting, nosepicking, let’s stuff body parts up my asshole world out there, and transgression had settled in to become just a b movie plot, before one moved on to action movies and the like. The Surmale quickly became the everymale, and the everymale immediately sought out his own. While, on the one end, political correctness sent up a fog to disguise the reality of the Gated Community, on the other end, it was endless tits and ass, not, of course, as fuckable matter, but as platform for incredible business opportunities in aesthetic surgery. The time was right for rubber, for pod happiness, for a Burroughs routine that swallowed all other routines:

“But the warren of live torture rooms is a must. As Mr. Solomon envisions it, individuals in torture gear will wander through the West Hollywood club Privilege grabbing partygoers. All of which is a prelude to an undisclosed main event that, he warned last week over slices of pizza a few doors from his company’s new offices on the Sunset Strip, is “probably not legal.”

“The women’s groups definitely will love it,” Mr. Solomon hinted. “I call it my personal little tribute to them.”

Mr. Solomon, a fast-talking 35-year-old, and his genre-film company were barely noticed until outrage at the “Captivity” billboards — which chronicled a young woman’s torment, with frames titled “Abduction,” “Confinement,” “Torture,” “Termination” — led to a rare censure by the Motion Picture Association of America this spring.”

The Motion Picture Association of America finally put its foot down about torture … for pleasure. Torture, as the MPAA knows, should only be seen, enjoyed, and distributed for the sake of duty. Hence, 24. But never masturbate after you torture Moslems. We do have some codes left in this country, after all!

That abjection has become kitsch does make me laugh. Behind Bataille’s elegance, perhaps, there always lurked the gag. In Norman Klein’s Marx-y reading of 1930s cartoons, Seven Minutes, the golden age of cartoons – the age that produced the ageless diva, the Simone of cartoonland, Betty Boop - is discussed in relation to the transposition of the gag – a vaudeville routine – to the machina versatilis that produces the elastic cartoon body. The dreamlike liberation of objects from their objecthood is one way of viewing the goal of Bataille’s via negativa – one sinks as far as one can into becoming a big toe, a dislocated eye weeping urine in a teenage cunt, and at that moment one becomes … a cartoon, much like Porky Pig or Paris Hilton. For a moment, toonville characters think they can escape...

And who am I to say they can't? I was going to give this post a nice dying fall, a little pessimistic sendoff, a little hint that the system is total, we are doomed, no exit, all that shit, but really, I'm not going to take the bait, get into the outrage orgy, care... care in the least about the fast talking thirty five year old Mr. Solomon. I'm just going to collect him here, in this post, and then forget all about him.

UM is coming - Michael Erard's new book

A book is coming out from a friend and supporter of this site, Michael Erard. The book, UM, is about, among other things, the mysteries of that sublime linguistic object, 'um' - or erm, as the Brits put it, or hein, as it appears in French, to the bewilderment of all students of French, forever and forever. Here's the site for the book. I can testify that Michael does not look like the solemn guy whose phiz graces that page - but bookjacket pictures are always a fucker, an uncertain compromise between the dyspeptic seriousness of a man whose been locked in a closet and chuckleheaded foolishness of a man who should be secured in a straight jacket. They eternally grate against an author's vanity, which is why, when an author shot, by some miracle, comes out right, the author has a tendency to use it book after book, giving the book jacket a slightly Dorian Gray feeling. Beryl Bainbridge's novels are a perfect example - novels that you know were written by a 50 to 60 year old woman are graced by a picture of a thirty year old woman, at the most.

Now, go to the UM page, PEOPLE!

Yahweh, Marx and LI: a group discussion

Sleep. LI actually got 8 hours of z-s last night. Or almost. We’ve been suffering a massive insomnia attack, which is much like a denial of service attack, except that instead of being mounted by angry hackers, it is mounted by angry brain cells. There is nothing like going through the day on the dimmest wattage – ghosting your own self.
…

So, we have not been pouring out the deathless prose re: Heine’s Gods in Exile essay, like we promised last week. The tears of our readers have, no doubt, been shed copiously in consequence.

But dry those eyes! Getting back to that post, you might want to ask – we asked, actually, this morning, trying to figure out what the fuck we were talking about – why we jumped up and down about the fact that the great mythical systems actually encode their own dissolution. There are two aspects that cause our heart palpitations. One is this: to our mind, the moment the myth tells about the downfall of the mythical system – projects a Götterdämmerung – is the moment that history becomes possible. It is the recognition of the system within the system, and, at the same time, the recognition of the system’s contingency, which gives history both an object and elbow room.

And that’s pretty cool. The second aspect that interests us is tied up with what we have called the logic of figuration – all this poetry we’ve been pouring out about sages and buffoons. What God is is not just a question that interests us in itself – rather, it extends to what a woman, a man, a child, a sage, a slave, a manager, a president, etc., etc. is. It is an archetype - from the beginning, it has always been a question of the split between the god and his image. The Yahweh that flees from his graven image is the Yahweh that tries to solve this question by main force. Plato, living in a very different society, captures the issue and its secularization pretty well in this passage in the Laws, spoken by the Athenian stranger:

“There are ancient customs about the Gods which are universal, and they are of two kinds: some of the Gods we see with our eyes and we honour them, of others we honour the images, raising statues of them which we adore; and though they are lifeless, yet we imagine that the living Gods have a good will and gratitude to us on this account. Now, if a man has a father or mother, or their fathers or mothers treasured up in his house stricken in years, let him consider that no statue can be more potent to grant his requests than they are, who are sitting at his hearth if only he knows how to show true service to them.
…
Oedipus, as tradition says, when dishonoured by his sons, invoked on them curses which every one declares to have been heard and ratified by the Gods, and Amyntor in his wrath invoked curses on his son Phoenix, and Theseus upon Hippolytus, and innumerable others have also called down wrath upon their children, whence it is clear that the Gods listen to the imprecations of parents; for the curses of parents are, as they ought to be, mighty against their children as no others are. And shall we suppose that the prayers of a father or mother who is specially dishonoured by his or her children, are heard by the Gods in accordance with nature; and that if a parent is honoured by them, and in the gladness of his heart earnestly entreats the Gods in his prayers to do them good, he is not equally heard, and that they do not minister to his request? … May we not think, as I was saying just now, that we can possess no image which is more honoured by the Gods, than that of a father or grandfather, or of a mother stricken in years? “

The parallel in the relation between the ‘unliving cult statues’ of the Gods and the Gods, and the parents and the Gods, is a way of underscoring the double role of ‘parent’. Social roles and functions, in other words, function in a double register, at once social and celestial/chthonic. Marxism, reproducing the gesture of Yahweh, seeks to compress the doubleness, making it derive from one material fact: the division of labor. Myself, I am with Plato and the poets – there is a destiny of the figures outside of the system of production.

Okay, enough, enough! Basta. Time to move on to Heine’s essay.

another day, another opportunity to send Dick Cheney to jail

"How high do you want me to jump?"


Since beginning this blog, LI has been giving friendly little heads ups to the governing class, that oh so cute but sometimes sorta ditzy elite. It is the Paris Hilton among governing classes: soulless, talentless, and smug. Alas, there are so many fronts to cover, fuck ups to point to, clockwork grinding busily bloodwards to worry about. Sometime LI falls behind!

And then there is Cheney. Lately, LI’s attitude towards Cheney is much like Police Inspector Dreyfus’ to Detective Clouseau. We get a physical twitch when the name comes up. Herbert Lom got a twitch in the eye. Us, we get an unbearably stiff neck. The stiff neck seized us, for instance, last night, when we read the first of what the Washington Post promises to be a series of articles about Cheney. We recommend reading it with two caveats.

One is that the whole this is, as always, sugared by the kissass establishment fear of ever stumbling upon a truth – so that, for instance, before telling us that Bush is basically following a program laid out by his odious fruitcake of a V.P., Barton Gellman lays on this bullshit:

“Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore. Bush has set his own course, not always in directions Cheney preferred. The president seized the helm when his No. 2 steered toward trouble, as Bush did, in time, on military commissions. Their one-on-one relationship is opaque, a vital unknown in assessing Cheney's impact on events. The two men speak of it seldom, if ever, with others. But officials who see them together often, not all of them admirers of the vice president, detect a strong sense of mutual confidence that Cheney is serving Bush's aims.”

The choice of words in that paragraph – for instance, of Bush ‘seizing the helm’ – signals, well enough, what the message is to insiders (whose assessments we are magically supposed to listen to – never has a paper been so awestruck, so much about insiders as the Washington Post – it is the Teen People of Insiderville). It signals that we are coming close to a time when it is alright to actually say, hey, we are are ruled by a living embodiment of attention deficit disorder who is a cutout moved around by competing court circles, one of which is headed by a man of meager intelligence and no scruples, the ever thuggish Cheney. But respect before all things for our monarch!

Two is that, of course, as in all ‘news’ reporting, the series comes five years too late. The job of the newspapers, over the course of the reign of the Junta, is to report the truth only when it is too late to do anything about it. In the meantime, sedulously copying and diffusing the bullshit is the no. 1 aim of rags like the Post – hence, their nonsensical effort to insert propaganda about Iran in every story reporting American deaths in Iraq – the IED deaths will inevitably be followed by the accusation that they came from Iran. That there’s no proof for this, that Iran supplying Sunni insurgents with IEDs is about the stupidest lie that the White House and the D.C. clique has ever tried to broadcast, doesn’t matter. Nor will these reports ever include the phrase, financed by the Saudis. That’s an independent truth, it floats around without a sponsor, and unsponsored truths are poison to the papers – until, say, six years have passed.

The Cheney series comes on the heels of the brief headlining of a story that has been out there for years, namely, the Vice President’s illegal shielding of information from an obscure department designed to account and audit classified information. The Vice President has refused to disclose even that information that it has an obligation to, such as who works in the office of the Vice President and who visits that office. Disobeying the executive order, Cheney’s office made the unique defense that it was not part of the executive branch. This has caused much laughing and goofawing in the press, which saves its indignation for important things, like interviews with OJ Simpson. And then there is the soi-disant opposition…

Ah, that opposition. On the Crooks and Liars site I came across this youtube video of Senator Durbin’s reaction to the news that Cheney has claimed not to be part of the executive branch of government. It is as fine a piece of centrist performance art as you will ever see. Durbin summons up all the gravitas and eloquence of a wet hen finding out about Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time. Warning to adults and children: watching this video can cause twitches, aches, and the longing to live in some other country far, far away. Durbin swales a perfectly easy case – Cheney has committed a crime and should be called to account for it – in such loads of fatty tissue pomposity, such unfocused verbiage, such a stump show of obsolete gestures, that you cannot watch it without knowing, immediately, that Cheney will get away with anything he damn well pleases. It reminds me of the old T.S. Eliot line, ‘this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper.’

JT Leroy loses

JT Leroy’s saga was quite enjoyable while it unfolded last year. One thing it wasn’t was a conspiracy to defraud Antidote International Films. LI was bummed that the jury returned a verdict against Laura Albert.

The authors of novelized versions of victimization are a dime a dozen, but the carriers out of literary hoaxes as successful as the creation of JT Leroy are extremely rare – we are lucky to get one in a generation. That AIF sued Albert for damages is surprising. Do they not really see that she sold them a property even more valuable now? JT Leroy is no longer an incestuous Hollywood-SF cult, but both a tribute and a mockery to the incestuous Hollywood-SF axis.

The age demanded a freak. Why not? The newspapers and tv are created by freaks, about freaks, commented upon by freaks – the difference being that the establishment freaks are much smugger about their incorrigible perversities, their taste for proxy blood, their laughable notion of ‘value added”, their contempt for the planet, their fetishism of the lines of the acceptable, drawn in their own baby shit, by which they sort out the acceptable from the unacceptable, the nightmare they have bequeathed to us outside the gated community, the Pandaemonium suburb to their city on the hill. Chic has contrived that each now wants his own freak. What the glitter set wanted was a freak from the furthest corner of the known world – West Virginia. So Laura Albert, who wasn’t exotic enough, in herself, gave them their fucking artificial nigger, wrapped it in an unplaceable southern accent and whispered it over the phone.

Alas, she was finally exposed as just your plain hold neighborhood freak. Institutionalized as a teen – her mother testified that for her 14th birthday, she dropped her daughter off at a psychiatric hospital, a birthday present from hell – and pathologically shy, Albert became a master of the phone call.

“Life at home, meanwhile, was bad enough. Ms. Albert ran away. She landed in the punk scene, in the East Village, with the hustlers and the addicts. This was around the time of her initial trip to a psychiatric ward. She was still in her early teens.

Eventually, she said, her parents sent her to a group home, where she lived as a ward of the state. (She considered Mayor Koch to be her father.) The stories of the girls she met were incorporated later into fiction, not unlike the stories of the punks from Tompkins Square.

Then, in 1989, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a maid and a baby sitter and sold her blood in order to survive. She also worked as a phone sex operator and perfected a sultry Southern accent she would later put to use in interviews as JT Leroy, including one, played in court, with Terry Gross, the NPR host.

It was in San Francisco, she said, that she started calling suicide hot lines from a pay phone on the street. Incapable of speaking as herself, she adopted the personas of various teenage boys.”

LI isn’t going to shed too many tears for Albert just yet. The age will reward her now for having done a freak dance by putting her on for the Barbie and Ken freaks to interview, on all their fucking morning news show, thus adding another small metastasizing cell to our collective groupie cancer. There will be another contract, surely. Oh, don’t ask why. Oh, don’t ask why.

Single male god seeking single female goddess...

“...everything … isn’t dead that is buried” – Heinrich Heine, Elemental spirits

In Psalm 95 we read: “For the LORD is a great God,/and a great King above all gods”. Justin, an early and influential father of the church, translated elohim, the word for gods, into daimonion, and from there on out it had a merry career – if you translate “above all gods” as “the gods of the heathens are demons”, you have a nice little program to interpret the stubbornly polytheistic world. Notice, however, that the program does not go so far as to say that the gods of the heathens don’t exist. The saying in Psalm 95 and the admonitions of the early church fathers were a powerful input into the demonization of the pagan gods. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, is merely pressing an old, old historical key when he writes: “For the wedding of the Frankish king Sigebert and the Visigothic princess Brunhild (566) Fortunatus composed an epithalamium (VI, 1), in which Venus and Cupid bless the marriage. But in his metrical Vita s. Maritini (written 573-4) the same writer reports that the saint threatened the demons by calling them by their names; he said that Mercury was an especially evil enemy but that Jupiter was a stupid lout. Christianity did not allow the antique gods to die in peace. It had to degrade them into demons – because they lived on in the subconscious.”

Indeed, the myths of the Greeks actually encoded a myth of the overthrow of the gods. As did the myths of the Norse. A Götterdämmerung. Zeus and his siblings gained power only by killing the old God, Chronos, their father. And the threat that Zeus would be overthrown in turn is the basis of the Prometheus myth, which the romantics took up.

LI is interested in this cycle within the structure of myth because we take myths to be fundamental to roles and figures. Alan, commenting on LI’s happiness post the other day, justly criticized us for being rather vague about the place of the figure in our claim that figures “symbolize a human life through time." They both mediate between the social whole and the individual and operate as trans-individual myths. If you are looking around for them, look in the ad sections of newspapers – the help wanted sections and the personals ads, together, give you a sense of some of the mythical creatures that roam our America. The beautician, the banker, the administrative assistant, the SWM seeking SWF, the sexy middle aged man wants younger woman, here they are, demi-fabulous. One of my aims, in leveling an impossible, Quixote like lance against happiness, is to understand how these figures have changed over time.

Which is why I am going to do my next post about Heine’s funny little essay, the Gods in Exile.

But let’s put in a foreground note:

Paul Veyne wrote a fascinating book, Did the Greeks believe in their Myths, in which he contrasts the modern functionalist view of myth, which he dates back to Fontenelle in the late 17th century, with the Ancient philosophical view of myth, which saw them as stories arising, originally, from the acts of some heroic individual, and accruing legends over time. This was the Euhemerist idea, although as Veyne points out it, too, accepted the Greek division between the gods and the heroes.

“The Greeks distinguished between two domains; gods and heroes. For they did not understand myth or the mythmaking function in a general way but evaluated myths according to content. Criticism of the heroic generations consisted in transforming heroes into simple men and giving them a past that matched tht of what were called the human generations, that is, history since the Trojan war. The first step of this criticism was to remove the visible intervention of the gods from history. Not that the very existence of these gods was doubted in the least. But in our day the gods most often remain invisible to men. That was already the case even before the Trojan War, and the whole of the Homeric supernatural is nothing but invention and credulity. Criticism of religious beliefs indeed existed, but it was very different. Some thinkers purely and simply denied either the existence of a particular god or, perhaps, the existence of any of the gods in which the people believed. On the other hand, the immense majority of philosophers, as well as educated people, did not so much criticize the gods as seek an idea worthy of divine majesty.”

It is majesty – dignity, status, position – with which we are dealing here. When Justin and the early Christian fathers degraded the pagan gods, they were also making a comment on the whole of pagan culture. The nature of the gods was tied up with the decline or increase of a culture not just by the Psalmists or the Christian apologists, but also by pagan theologians. When Plutarch writes an essay about why the oracles have ceased to speak, he sets it in a conversation between, among others, Cleombrotus of Sparta, a traveler who has come back from Egypt, and one of his favorite interlocutors, Ammonius, a Pythagorean. First, Plutarch piously warns us away from a too iconoclastic view of myth:

“The story is told, my dear Terentius Priscus, that certain eagles or swans, flying from the uttermost parts of the earth towards its centre, met in Delphi at the omphalus, as it is called; fand at a later time Epimenides of Phaestus put the story to test by referring it to the god and upon receiving a vague and ambiguous oracle said,
Now do we know that there is no mid-centre of earth or of ocean;
Yet if there be, it is known to the gods, but is hidden from mortals
Now very likely the god repulsed him from his attempt to investigate an ancient myth as though it were a painting to be tested by the touch.”

Then he allows Cleombrotus to bring up a rather ridiculous theory of the degeneracy of the times – to wit, that the very year is decaying.

“He had recently been at the shrine of Ammon, and it was plain that he was not particularly impressed by most of the things there, but in regard to the ever-burning lamp he related a story told by the priests which deserves special consideration; it is that the lamp consumes less and less oil each year, and they hold that this is a proof of a disparity in the years, which all the time is making one year shorter in duration than its predecessor; for it is reasonable that in less duration of time the amount consumed should be less.”

Ammonius in particular shows that the explanation of the priests is ridiculous through use of an argument from plausibility – Occam’s razor before Occam was around – but the lamp story sets the stage for the discussion of why the oracles no longer speak. For the most likely explanation is that humanity has decayed. It is an explanation that is consistent with the notion that the heroic age is divided from the present age. But in the course of the conversation, Plutarch has Cleombrotus expound the notion of the daemons – the kind of spirits who became very popular in Meditteranean cultures around this time. That these words are put in Cleombrotus’ mouth might mean that Plutarch is not entirely committed to them. Still, this is a crucial passage in our mythical history.


"You are right," said Cleombrotus; "but since it is hard to apprehend and to define in what way and to what extent Providence should be brought in as an agent, those who make the god responsible for nothing at all and those make him responsible for all things alike go wide of moderation and propriety. They put the case well who say that Plato, by his discovery of the element underlying all created qualities, which is now called 'Matter' and 'Nature,' has relieved philosophers of many great perplexities; but, as it seems to me, those persons have resolved more and greater perplexities who have set the race of demigods [Demons – LI] midway between gods and men, and have discovered a force to draw together, in a way, and to unite our common fellowship — whether this doctrine comes from the wise men of the cult of Zoroaster, or whether it is Thracian and harks back to Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian, as we may infer from observing that many things connected with death and mourning in the rites of both lands are combined in the ceremonies so fervently celebrated there. Among the Greeks, Homer, moreover, appears to use both names in common band sometimes to speak of the gods as demigods; but Hesiod was the first to set forth clearly and distinctly four classes of rational beings: gods, demigods, heroes, in this order, and, last of all, men; and as a sequence to this, apparently, he postulates his transmutation, the golden race passing selectively into many good divinities, and the demigods into heroes.

"Others postulate a transmutation for bodies and souls alike; in the same manner in which water is seen to be generated from earth, air from water, and fire from air, as their substance is borne upward, even so from men into heroes and from heroes into demigods the better souls obtain their transmutation. But from the demigods ca few souls still, in the long reach of time, because of supreme excellence, come, after being purified, to share completely in divine qualities. But with some of these souls it comes to pass that they do not maintain control over themselves, but yield to temptation and are again clothed with mortal bodies and have a dim and darkened life, like mist or vapour.”