the waters of life and of death

In his sad last book, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Henry Fielding begins his account proper by sketching out the measures he took, while suffering from the ills brought on by the miasmas of London, his course of life, his workload, and his forced encounter with numerous stinking criminals, beggars, whores and the whole lot, to rid London of a gang of murderers and robbers. Having succeeded in the year 1753 in actually suppressing murder for a whole season in London (a city by this time of around 650,000 people), he then retired from his magistrates position to devote himself to restoring his health. For, as he writes, “I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders.” These included gout and dropsy.

“After having stood the terrible six weeks which succeeded last Christmas, and put a lucky end, if they had known their own interests, to such numbers of aged and infirm valetudinarians, who might have gasped through two or three mild winters more, I returned to town in February, in a condition less despaired of by myself than by any of my friends. I now became the patient of Dr. Ward, who wished I had taken his advice earlier. By his advice I was tapped, and fourteen quarts of water drawn from my belly. The sudden relaxation which this caused, added to my enervate, emaciated habit of body, so weakened me that within two days I was thought to be falling into the agonies of death.”

Fielding’s body is dragged across the pages of his journal like some hideous object, of which he – a magistrate - is the victim, much as a criminal might be the victim of some instrument of torture. When he finally does decide, for the sake of his health, to seek the warmth of Lisbon, Fielding has to be taken on a litter to the dock, and then, sitted in a sedan chair, hoisted aboard the boat. At which point, sitting in his cabin, he makes the following reflection:

This latter fatigue [of the journey] was, perhaps, somewhat heightened by an indignation which I could not prevent arising in my mind. I think, upon my entrance into the boat, I presented a spectacle of the highest horror. The total loss of limbs was apparent to all who saw me, and my face contained marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself. Indeed, so ghastly was my countenance, that timorous women with child had abstained from my house, for fear of the ill consequences of looking at me. In this condition I ran the gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it)
through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed of paying their compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery. No man who knew me will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts. It may be said that this barbarous custom is peculiar to the English, and of them only to the lowest degree; that it is an excrescence of an uncontrolled licentiousness mistaken for liberty, and never shows itself in men who are polished and refined in such manner as human nature requires to produce that perfection of which it is susceptible, and to purge away that malevolence of disposition of which, at our birth, we partake in common with the savage creation. This may be said, and this is all that can be said; and it is, I am afraid, but little satisfactory to account for the inhumanity of those who, while they boast of being made after God's own image, seem to bear in their minds a resemblance of the vilest species of brutes; or rather, indeed, of our idea of devils; for I don't know that any brutes can be taxed with such malevolence.”

This passage (which I consider extremely wonderful and frightening) could stand as a totem, as something to think with, as one reads Fielding’s Enquiry into the Late increase in Robbers. That Enquiry is all about a distemper in the constitution of England – and Fielding means, by that, something like a social body, on the lines of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Fielding, in the above passage, goes from himself, body and face, as a horror not to be gawked at (which is in contrast to the horrors that were gawked at – the hanged at Tyburn, for instance) to those who insulted him, the sailors, men of low degree, to the notion that, as with the dropsy, our original constitution needs purging, a taking off of those liquors of original sin in which we swim, to a moment of satiric ascension not unlike Swift’s in Gulliver’s travels, in which God’s own image is conjoined the vilest of brutes. The most celebrated effect of Fielding’s Enquiry, according to Jessica Warner in her book Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason, was to supply ammunition for the last Gin Reform act. The correlate for the waters of death, the anti-baptism that exchanges God’s image for that of a yahoo, was precisely gin – which, as Warner points out, was the first serious drug craze in the West.

I'll stop here for today, with a quote from the Enquiry:

"..for the intoxicating Draught itself disqualifies them from using honest Means to acquire it at the same that it removes all Sense of Fear and Shame, and emboldens them to commit wicked and desperate Enterprize Many Instances of this I see daily; Wretches often brought before me charged with Theft and Robbery, whom I am forced to confine before they are in a Condition to be examined; and when they have afterwards become sober, I have plainly perceived from the State of the Case, that the Gin alone was the Cause of the Transgression and have been sometimes sorry that I was obliged commit them to Prison.”

Fielding is on deck

My ass festival post may have been more enigmatic than I quite wanted it to be. Sometimes, I want the haze of connotation to rise up from my prose – there’s no reason to live without a little mist. But I don’t want the mist to eat up the prose.

Anyway, this is a busy week for me, but I am going to write my next post about a rarely read text of Henry Fielding’s, An Enquiry into the causes of the late Increase in Robbers. We will see if I can do this.

an ass festival to start things off

Oh – if only I had the wings of angels, which are made of gold and good for purchases in most shopping centers and stores! But I have human limbs, and flesh is worth shit, so I bend over texts and correct them. I make suggestions. I must slave and bugger my own imagination, and fall behind every 8 ball that I set up. I would like to be the blogger equivalent of Babe Ruth, pointing to the stands, waiting for the next pitch. But this is not going to happen. I am, rather, the equivalent of some Pinter vaudevillian, full of bile and tags.

Still, I am a Sagittarian, and thus stubborn as a mule – or a jackass. I do want to keep going in this thread. And jackasses are, as a matter of fact, the subject of this post.

I have already written about asinine philosophy. The thread I am aching to pursue – the growth of police forces in the nineteenth century – should start, I think, with the story of a jackass.

The year is 1793. In Lyon, the forces of counterrevolution briefly seized the city. French soldiers loyal to the Convention have brought that freshet of the ancien regime down. During the brief period of white rule, some of Lyon’s most prominent Jacobins were cut down. The Convention sends two representatives to oversee the punishment of the town – Joseph Fouché and Collot d’Herbois, who take the post together to Lyon on November 7, 1793 (17 Brumaire).

Who were these two? Although Fouché had cast his lot with the Jacobin, he was not an enragé. In Nantes, where he grew up, he was trained in theology – which meant, in 1789, that he believe in precisely nothing. His real passion was balloons – but the revolution was at the door in Nantes. As Louis Madelin notes, he first thrust himself into prominence by communicating with Brissot – who, as we observed in last week, was almost certainly, at one time in his life, a police informer. But Brissot was now, of course, a power – forming a clique, with Condercet and Paine, among others. Brissot had particularly come out against slavery:

“The president of the club of the friends of the Constitution believed he was able to felicitate Brissot in the name of the society. Great movements in the city, where the trade in blacks constituted for many of the merchant marine a lucrative commerce; where – on the other side, more than one bourgeois – including Fouché – had plantations in Saint-Domingue, or counted friends there among the colonists that emancipation ruined. Before the general emotion, Fouche didn‘t hesitate: he retracted…”

And so Fouché, with the soul of Julien Sorel, advanced in the network of the Jacobins. Collot d’Herbois was different. Fouché’s biographer is suitably scathing about this character:

"An old actor, Collot had retained that character of noisy vanity, yet earth to earth, applied to little things, capable of a sensibility ceaselessly shocked by things, those manifestations of violent sentiments, often false, but sometimes so tragic, that he ended up, like a good ham, imposing on his own self, no longer discerning in himself the true from the false and the mask from nature. For the rest, a histrion as much as a tragedian, he passed from tears to laughter, amusing himself by terrifying the Jacobins by his indignant arias and turning about and making everybody laugh with his routines in bad taste. In the end, a middling ham, thrust into too vast a scene with a role in which they left him to figure out for himself his miserable improvisations. Add to this that he drank and ate, amused himself vulgarly, always drunk, quickly becoming an alcoholic, entertaining himself, as a stylish amateur of the backscene, with gourmet meals after playing the great scenes, and mixing with the drunks from capital wines the applause of the common seats.”

The French revolution, like all true revolutions, effortlessly created myths. -Or no, not effortlessly - but the effort is hidden behind the libidinal tugging on events, as in an animated cartoon in which, from an inkwell, there emerges a potent drop, that shakes itself into a figure, who takes up a pen and draws in all the parts of himself that he needs after fining his hand. As we have been emphasizing, the zone of adventure - not defined or captured by the grid of vocations or classes - exists as the reservoir of the modern, even as the modern devotes an increasing amount of time trying to repress that zone. And so these two, like Hermes and Dionysos, came to Lyon. The secret policeman and the actor – a couple that has had such a long, long career in our very lives! Haven’t they masturbated and betrayed us until we hardly exist any more?

But I wanted to get to the jackass. The government in Paris had made a few helpful suggestions about razing Lyon to the ground – but the secret policeman was certainly not going to do that. Fouché was the first in a long line of modern secret policemen who preserve, behind a career of crime, certain scruples. Beria, according to legend, finally pulled the plug on Stalin. And what better tool to do down a tyrant than his secret agent? That is, from the point of view of Nemesis. What eventually happened, as we know, was a horror. At a certain point, they simply lined up Lyonnais, in chains, and plowed them down with cannonshot – because there were too many to exterminate via firing squad.

Fouché’s biographer insists that, at first, Fouché thought he had devised a middle way.

"Before the ceremony, prelude ordered by the ex-oratarien [Fouché], one saw the two proconsuls go through the town, followed by a group armed with axes and picks, attack.. the crosses and statues, to disinfect the churches one by one, chasing out the constituional clergy and pillaging the altars. The old cult abolished with its relics and signs, one saw it emerge once again. The bust of Chalier [a murdered Jacobin], a savior god, appeared carried on a tricolor palanquin, flanked by an urn in which, by a pious illusion, one pretended to carry his ashes. The group stumbled along surrounded by a cohort that shouted to all of terrified Lyon, down with the aristos! Up with the republic! Up with the guillotine! Patriots followed carrying urns and chalices rifled from altars, and an ass covered with a cape and crowned with a mitre. Tied to his tail was a crucifix, a bible and the gospel. The three representatives of the republic were there, Collot, Laporte and Fouché, giving an official air to this irreligious ceremony. They went through the devastated religious city, and came to the place de Terraux. There they knelt before the bust of Chalier, then they spoke. Collot, swollen and solemn, mewed out a honorable amends, of which the originality was disputable. Savior God, see at your feet the nation lying on its face, asking for your pardon for the impious assassination of the best of men…. Manes of Chalier, be venged!… Fouché wept, you are no longer here, Chalier… [Laporte] was not used to either the stage or the podium, hesitated, and then said, death to the aristos. After this debauch of eloquence, a brazier was lit, a crucifix and a gospel was burnt, and the ass drank out of the calice extended to him.”

After this, the ass festival in Zarathustra is the height of sanity.

Marx and Malthus

The two people who have taught me the most about reading Marx over the last couple of years are a., Amie, whose essay on the German Ideology graced this blog (with a bonus pic of Bliss!), and b., N Pepperell at Rough Theory, whose blogposts are such excellent guides to reading Capital that they make fish sing and cats bark. And she is back, with this post about Marx and Malthus.

paper dolls

Fly, informer, spy, confidential agent, double agent, rat, louse, Schlamasse, squeak, squeeler. In 19th century England, it was the universal opinion that the French invented the spy system. We know that, at least for Europe, Napoleon invented the police system. Stendhal and Hazlitt’s Napoleon, the bringer of light, was perhaps the single most important figure in the modern history of European policing, since in the territories France conquered, and those governments which it controlled, Napoleon insisted on a modern police force. He himself had re-organized the urban gendarmerie under Fouche, and instituted a tighter police force in the countryside – and these innovations he pressed upon Saxony, Bavaria, the various Italian principalities. Under Napoleon, it is true, the gendarmerie were more militarized than they came to be by mid-century – that is, where they remained. But Prussia, that excellent copier of a state, soon was instituting its own urban and rural police forces.

“… who is there that disputes that intelligence respecting plots against the State in nine cases out often must arrive through polluted channels It can only be obtained from repentant traitors from accomplices or from informers Though there may be those whose minds are so philosophically turned that they wish all discoveries to be providential rather than employ such agents still I confess I must hold it prudent to employ human means to maintain human institutions.” – George Canning.

The period between the fall of Napoleon and the first reformist Whig government, in England – from 1815 to 1830, about – saw the reaction swallowed up by the new system. Stendhal, of course, saw this and recorded it in the Red and the Black – the spirit of Julien Sorel, who hides his reading of Napoleon and assumes a piety that nobody believes and everybody expects, brooded over Europe. As Napoleon’s police had, originally, mixed politics and security against crimes of property and person, so, too, did the successor police organizations. Vidocq is, famously, a sort of police god, a sort of Hermes of detectives, who crosses quite easily from criminal to cop and back.

“In what way of business were you your connection began or your began with Mr Thistlewood and Mr Watson and the other prisoners? I was in the figure making way. What do you mean by the figure making way? Such as figures for children what they call paper dolls which I took up myself? Where did you live At No 5 Newton street Holborn? That was your actual employment when your acquaintance with the prisoners began? It was. Did you not state to some of the prisoners that you were in great distress when your acquaintance began with them first? Yes I did. Were you in great distress? Yes I was. Were you ever in commitment before this time? No. Never. Upon no charge whatever? Commitment do you say? Í.. Yes I was. Were you ever at such a place as Guildford in the county of Surrey? Yes. How many times have you been in commitment or in custody before the present occasion? Twice." – Testimony of John Castle, police spy, in the Spa Fields Riot trial of James Watson.

Paper dolls. This, to borrow a term from Barthes, is the punctum, the extra reality of the surrealists, the fingerprint of Nemesis – the detail that both calls for and resists symbolization. A clue that is more than a link in the chain of causes, and less than a proof of anything. The material of history that resists the great suck and binding of universal history. What the gods do not know - our mortality. Something in it won’t give itself to meaning, to the police or the judges. And yet, of course, the judges and the police continue, they go on. John Castle, in this trial, was exposed as a government provocateur, who most likely got money from Lord Sidmouth’s minions, or some extra-governmental group formed by the government, spent it to make himself popular, and urged on the riot that ensued at Spa Fields. With the riot in hand, the government could pick up and prosecute the radicals it had targeted and hang them.

“But Adrastea holds a scale before even the true romantic character: she draws and line and speaks, saying: no further! Hermes was sent before the divine Achilles that he not misuse the slain body of his enemy, who was now only a man, a son and a brother. Every romantically happy person feels the rule in himself: not over the Rubicon! Here is the border. It is well when he recognizes or has a sentiment of this feeling in himself. We never love a hero more than when he knows how to measure himself in his fortune [Glueck] and uses it well. Then we, with him, feel that intensity of fortune; the Nemesis in us prophesies his happy future. To the eventurer [Ebenthuer] who doesn’t know this, to the Alcibiades who shortens the tails of all the dogs and overturns all the statues to Hermes so that all of Athens will speak of him, as with so many other of the Pucks of history who ride here and there in midday, without seeing that their fairy hour is long gone, to them we can’t even say farewell – for they vanish.” - Herder, Adrastea

And what happened to those against whom Castle testified?

The movies deceive us. The noose is knotted, the drop is sprung, the hanged man dies. But no, this is not how the hanged man dies. In Gatrell’s the Hanging Tree, he tells of the end of those another radical against whom a government spy testified in the Cato Street conspiracy case. Ings told the hangman “Now old gentleman, finish me tidily: pull the rope tighter, it may slip.” But:

“These precautions did little good, however. There was a common pattern in what ensued. As an early nineteenth century broadside representatively decalred, the noose of one man’s halter “having slipped to the back part of the neck, it was full ten minutes before he was dead.’So too at the very last Tyburn hanging in 1783: ‘the noose of the halter having slipped to the back part of the neck, it was longer than usual before he was dead… Ings struggled on the end of his rope for five minutes before he was still.”

Five minutes, ten minutes. Governor Wall, another spy spotted radical, fifteen minutes. Let the camera linger on that. Let five minutes go by as a man or woman is strangled by a slippery rope, hands tied behind him or her. The uterus bled, the oons of a man, his urine and shit, were expelled. And such shame was mixed with fortune, such Rubicons were crossed, as the culture of happiness was founded on the tombs of the adventurers.

The tree of death

Flies.

Les mouches, from les Mouchards.

“In defense of Brissot, it should be remembered that "spying" for the police could take the form of reporting on the mood of certain sections or milieux of the city rather than betraying friends. Spies, often called mouches (a term apparently derived from the name of the no- torious sixteenth-century agent Antoine Mouchy), buzzed like flies around the cafes and public places where gossip was to be gathered.”

In Robert Darnton’s essay about whether Brissot was, as his Jacobin enemies claimed, a police spy, Darnton weighs the evidence and concludes that probably he was. In that parenthesis he affirms a doubtful etymology. It is an interesting case study, this etymology. Voltaire spread the idea that Mouchy, who was not an agent, but a theologian/inquisitor, gave birth to the many maggoted mouchards, or spies – mouches being the word for fly – that buzzed around and gathered information for the police. Abbe Coblet, in the nineteenth century, should have put a stop to this etymological myth. He showed that the mouchard and the mouche were pure Picardy inventions, coming from the found of the French language. Even those who’d doubted the Mouchy etymology had claimed that in Latin, the word musca, fly, was used for police spies. But as Coblet points out, there is a world of difference between those who trap the words you speak and those who trap you. The musca was a gossip, the mouche was a spy whose delicate task it was not only to report the news to the police, but often to “encourage” the news.

Mouchy lived in the sixteenth century, when the religious wars started a whole new era in the secret history, or history of secrets, that exist under our history. It is a sewer of betrayal and tears, and it feeds the tree of death – the gibbet or the guillotine.

Nemesis lives in the sewers.

The other side of the happiness culture is the culture of fear. We cannot dispense with or minimize fear and its production when trying to get a sense of the human limit.

According to V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree, some 30,000 people were condemned to death in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830. 7,000, he estimates, were actually executed. This compares favorably with the estimated 73,000 executed between 1530 and 1630 – the secret religious war – but very badly with the number hung between 1701 and 1750. In the 1820s, Gatrell says, the hanged break down like this: two thirds were hung for property crimes, a fifth for murder, a twentieth for attempted murder, and the same percent for rape and sodomy. By the strange fruit of the tree shall ye know them. As Gatrell points out, while capital punishment was becoming extremely rare in Prussia, Russia, Scotland and Ireland, in England and Wales, it was enjoying a golden age.

Let’s end this post with a quote from George Cruikshank:

“At that time I resided in Dorset Street Salisbury Square Fleet Street and had occasion to go early one morning to a house near the Bank of England and in returning home between eight and nine o clock down Ludgate Hill and seeing a number of persons looking up the Old Bailey I looked that way myself and saw several human beings hanging on the gibbet opposite Newgate prison and to my horror two of these were women and upon inquiring what these women had been hung for was informed that it was for passing forged one pound notes The fact that a poor woman could be put to death for such a minor offence had a great effect upon me and I at that moment determined if possible to put a stop to this shocking destruction of life for merely obtaining a few shillings by fraud and well knowing the habits of the low class of society in London I felt quite sure that in very many cases the rascals who forged the notes induced these poor ignorant women to go into the gin shops to get something to drink and thus pass the notes and hand them the change.”

a traveller in a wood

Both Gilles Deleuze and Stephen Gould had trouble with structures that were perfectly tree-like. The central trunk of a theme, and then subsidiary branches, diminishing towards the top. Gould objected to the old tree of evolution, which put man on the very top of the tree (although his superiority consisted in coming down from the tree altogether – and yet, in dreams, yes, he wants to be at the top). Deleuze objected to universal history erecting its tree on every shore of every ocean, Europe, or the West, on top, encouraging the other branches to follow – and in the meantime, boosting their fruit. Such were the problematic trees.

Of course, both wrote in the shadow of the flaming Christmas trees, Yggdrasil, of the great echt deutsch Christmases remembered by Sebald, ah the advent calendars with the pictures of ss men, ah the chocolate swastiksa, the address by Rudolf Hoess with the family gathered around the tree, all hope and purity upon which were hung, as ornaments, the fates of the peoples, Jews, Gypsies, Ukranians, Serbs, burning away until Goethe’s death cry rang out – more light! – and so it was, so it was, trees of flame lighting up all the cities, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, all must celebrate Christmas and the tree, all must be part of the communal ash, all must sacrifice. Gunter Grass knew what he was doing when he made Santa the Gasman in the Tin Drum.

Still – the human limit is arboreal. Two trees stand in this wood – the tree of happiness and the tree of this world. Branch enjambs with branch. By 1815, the planting is dome. Comes the growing.

And me, the chronicler of this two tree forest that grows over the face of the world – I’ve gone from trunk to branch and root to twig, tree drunk, sap blessed. As the artificial paradise is laid down (and what is paradise without the tree?), those in the branches experience the most curious feeling of ilinx – as though the world were not under the trees at all, but somewhere in a crook of the branches. This is the effect of the artificial paradise, and it is compared by all who resist it – from Marx to Tolstoy to G.B. Shaw, among so many others – to intoxication, vertigo, opium poisoning.

I have a long way to go. The branches are so thickly clustered that I can’t see the stars.