The Spoiled children of a spoiled class

Sociology without class analysis is like physics without calculus: it always entails a primitive regression to magical and occult forces. I’m thinking here of Elizabeth Kolbert’s article about spoiled American children inthe New Yorker, which has bits in it like: “The books [about disciplining children] are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how not to give in to your toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer.”

The last, of course, is the kicker – we are firmly in the territory of the top ten percent. The “you”, the “we”, these marks that seal the unsealable class divisions that now, more than ever, have appeared on the surface of every developed economy in the world – these interest me. This is not just the usual ideological brainwashing, the disguising of those divisions – this is a step further in magic thinking. The we is used to make those divisions disappear. The nudgery liberalism of the Obama era started out with the desire from bipartisanship that, in effect, was the objective correlative of the magic thinking of the upper class, which not only wants to change the lifestyles of the no doubt racist, sexist, homophobic proles, but also wants not to hear tiresome tales of increasing poverty, precariousness, and all the rest of what goes into what is really happening in the quicksand of everyday life for the vast majority of people.

Kolbert is not a stupid writer, and she has written some very good things about environmental issues, but she seems incorrigibly bound by her presumed you and we – identifying with the presumed readership of the New Yorker, who worry about what prep school to send the kids to. Her article contrasts the behavior of one six year old of the “Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon” with the children of thirty Los Angeles households being studied by another anthropologist, Elinor Ochs. In the maddening style of New Yorker’s premier purveyor of sociology-lite, Malcolm Gladwell, the data is given as though every fact was impenetrable to criticism and to history. Sociology-lite loves these atomic givens, upon which they immediately build a sort of theme of the moment. The theme of the moment – spoiled children – is a hotter issue now than ever before, given the royal fucking distributed to the children in the advanced economies at the moment – the fifty percent unemployment among the 17 to 30 crowd in the austerity ravaged lands of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus – and in the U.S., where Demos put out a report last year about the state of all those “beerdrinking” young college grads that “you” casually forked over 200 thou for:

“Young adults gained little ground in 2012.

Altogether, there are more than 5.6 million 18 to 34-year-olds who are willing and able to take a job and actively looking for work, but shut out of opportunities for employment. These young adults compose 45 percent of all unemployed Americans. An additional 4.7 million young people were underemployed—either working part time when they really wanted full-time positions or marginalized from the labor market altogether. Last year, the unemployment and underemployment rates for people under 25 were more than double those for workers over 35.

Young African American and Hispanic workers face higher unemployment and underemployment than white workers in their age groups.

Young adult Hispanic workers experience unemployment rates 25 percent higher than those of whites, while African Americans face rates approximately double. One in four African Americans between ages 18 and 24 is looking for a job but cannot find one, as are more than one in seven Hispanic young adults.”

I like the New Yorker, but I also use it as my little seismograph of sentiment among the liberal elite. Mostly, that sentiment is alarming – it tends towards the “punitive” liberalism of the Clinton era, where the answer was to lock up more poor kids and definitely take their freeloading mothers off the welfare rolls, which would allow us to… well, increase the Earned Income credit and make symbolic gestures towards environmentalism. Lately, the NY has been on a role, lecturing us for instance about having too much empathy (turns out there are people out there who don’t want the young, no doubt spoiled Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be put on death row. They even, gasp, have sympathy with him for being shot up, instead of enjoying each wound and hoping that perhaps we will find some horses and draw and quarter him like they used to do in the old days. New Yorker readers have responded to this with enthusiasm, as per this video.  I suppose the return of punitive liberalism was the inevitable next step in the sad mockery of progressive politics that we see all around us – but I’m always willing to kick against the pricks, or bang my head against a wall – a spoiled child’s gesture – and scream that this is bullshit. That a spoiled class produces spoiled children is not going to break my heart – drink your parents beer is what I’d advise that mythical college grad in Kolbert’s imagination.

a little note on rhyme

I listen to Adam’s burbles, his hiccups, gasps, moans, and something that is a sort of pure vibration of his vocal chords, and I think of these things as being creatures on the threshold of that great thing, language, peering into it, pondering the leap, although in the end all of this phonological hamming up will still be intact, in the interstices of sense, so to speak. These are elements in the Shakespearian sense – half atom, half fairy. Nobody is taught them. Who among us teaches his child to say um, to use my friend Michael Erard’s favorite example? Hein being, I suppose, the French equivalent. Nobody, that is who.

However, I’ve been thinking about phonemes and sense lately in terms of rhyme. In terms of the cognitive devise that rhyme is.

A few days ago, I was taking a picture and I said to my friends, who were composing themselves to be the foci of my field of vision – I said, throw your hands in the air like you just d

Since then, I’ve been thinking about Chubby Checker’s couplet. The meeting of air and car in – well, in what? The meeting is staged in a number of spaces – phonological, semantic, mental, musical. I’m not sure where these verbal cosmonauts actually dock. I do know that they pull with them the hands in the air, and the curious meaning of those hands. When your hands are thrown into the air, usually you care a lot. You are being robbed, or the police are training their guns on you, or you are catching a ball. You are, in other words, under stress. Thus, to be told to throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care puts you slightly off balance.  How do you do that?

There’s a tradition that sees in rhyme a memory technique. In one of the drawers of the memory palace, you pull out rhyme. And it is true that rhyme becomes memorable. In the revolt against rhyme, which for some critics, like Donald Wesling (In The Chances of Rhyme), is the parameter that signalsf modernity in literature (that is, the revolt against it – not unrhymed verse itself, but the way unrhymed verse attacks rhyme), the fundamental objection to rhyme is that it is not natural, or sincere. Wesling thinks modernity is the era haunted by authenticity as both norm and impossibility. But of course rhyme never went away. It did become something to be justified. Myself, the thing I like about rhyme is that that side of it that is a cognitive trouvaille – something we don’t expect, since we assume our semantics are going to lead us to the higher sense. That rhyme might – well, that is uncanny.

Now I am going to throw my hands in the air like I just don’t care.

Objectification and Sachs fifth avenue - from an old essay

If I get the sugar
would you get me

If we were to resurrect Acteon, that Greek hunter torn to bits by his own dog for gazing upon Diana bathing nude in a stream, he would find the equivalent of his divine thrill not in strip joint America, but rather in women’s clothing boutique America. While I would be the last person to deny the thrill that comes from watching a woman undressing, whether in a bedroom or to the booming of Gimme Gimme over the sound system, it is no longer the unguarded moment – it is no longer the secret of the goddess, it is no longer worth being torn apart by your dogs in the heart of the forest, the hunter hunted, the vig on the male gaze. No, the secret of the goddess has migrated to women dressing up, not taking off. Acteon would better look for his kicks in Sachs Fifth Avenue, in By George, in any number of upscale boutiques in the midsized to supersized urban playlands of America.

I was first taught this lesson by my friend M., back in New Haven. New Haven, in those days, was Yale University, a few streets of affluence, and neighborhood after neighborhood of mythical violence. In actuality, there wasn’t that much violence, just a severe class difference – on the one hand, the scions of America’s wealth, on the other hand, the victims of America’s wealth, all neatly folded into six square miles. At this time, in the nineties, there was – as M. told me over and over – a gross and heartless lack of women’s clothing stores. Nevertheless, she would sometimes, when bored, make the round of what was there – the Laura Ashley to Ann Taylor circuit – and I would tag behind her. This was my first real experience of watching a woman buy clothes – and it was exhilarating. Of course, the real thing was happening in NYC, and when M. and I went there, the first thing we would hit would be clothing stores.

A woman’s clothing store survives on the atmosphere it creates. It does this through a proliferation of huge posters of very pretty people engaged in celebrity moments – laughing sexily at each other; through a color scheme that tends to skin complementary pastels; through a staff that, if they know their business, will make the customer feel, on some level, the need to prove herself to them; and through the music, which will always be as though piped from some marvelous club. It is, in a word, a very dramatic place, although the drama here might seem, at first, no different than any other store. I think that if there were a totally nude culture – by which I mean a culture in which there was no body ornament at all – a culture such as, to my knowledge, nobody has ever encountered – that this culture would have no drama, no ritual. Drama begins with the tattoo, the mask, the feather, the earring. With the beginning of drama, we have, as well, the beginning of stage fright – that marginal anxiety that accumulates as, day by day, year by year, one is looked at. Looks accumulate inside a person as a sort of jury. In response to this, there’s a utopian dream of going beyond these things. This is expressed, in philosophy, by the perennial anxiety about the human as object. In this philosophical dream, nudity is a mark of purity. To the pure, all things are pure. Acteon, in this utopia, would have seen nothing but what there was to see. In fact, what he saw was that there was no exit – that even the goddess wears her nudity. There’s doubleness all the way down.

Given the choice, I imagine Acteon would have chosen to live in the world where he saw more than there was to see, even if it meant ending up in the mouths of dogs in the end. I’m with Acteon here. And certainly I’m with the women’s clothing boutique designers, who don’t need Greek mythology to go about their business. You are immersed in the gaze – in some kind of gaze – the minute you enter a boutique. If the male gaze is defined as an objectifying one, than one might say that here is the very workshop of objectification. Myself, I find this vocabulary to be so out of synch with what happens in a boutique that it is absolutely distorting. For objectification implies, of course, a cool mastery, an absence of effect, and this is just what the classical male gaze is not capable of. The male gaze wants a strip tease, not an x ray. At the heart of objectification is, as I said, drama – the drama of making the object. We are the objects that make the objects, including the object that we will be, with the clothes that we wear – it is the moment in which the body is ornamented that we become both body and the body that we are making, both master and slave, both object and subject, and there’s not a gaze sharp enough or thin enough to get between those two things. We’ll never be naked again. The theater of dressing up in a boutique, usually to the most affectless techno sound possible, is the recapitulation of the happy fall, the original sin, that moment of becoming our own double – with clumsy fig leaves or the first clothing, which was manufactured by the first fashion designer, the Elohim: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”

Likeable monsters

I changed my hairstyle so many times now

I don’t know what Ilook like

The New Yorker asked some novelists – Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, etc. – to comment on Claire Messud’s comments to an interviewer who asked her about the likeability of her protagonist in her new novel. Messud claimed the right to create unlikeable characters, citing the royal precedents of those novelists who did it before her – or, rather, more cleverly, simply referencing the characters. It was a nice spate of indignation, and made for a nice interview. The novelists, asked their opinion, all spoke up for characters who aren’t likeable. But I was a little disappointed that they all spoke up, so to speak, within the novel and its tradition itself. From the point of view of technique, the question is whether the character works, not whether the character is likeable. Humbert Humbert was cited by Messud, and is used as a sort of totem of unlikeability by these novelists.

However, I think this misses the response outside of the novel – the response that fully accounts for the novel’s strangeness, or function within novel cultures. For it is a good question: why would anybody want to read about the actions, thoughts and words of a person one dislikes? Why would you do this for fun?

The line in lit crit, which was cemented in mid twentieth century, was that the modernists invented the novel in which the anti-hero is the dark eminence, and true prince of our sensibilities. This, however, really isn’t the case. Greek myths, the Grimm’s fairytales, Daoist anecdotes are all ceded with mildly or strikingly dislikeable personages. Aristotle, in a sense, is asking a similar question in the Poetics about tragedy. We can admire Antigone, we can even admire Achilles, but we don’t – we are intended to – befriend them. For Aristotle, plausibility is a sort of meta-rule of narrative production. Plausibility is not reality, but rather, reality as seen by a certain credentialed set. It inscribes class into the very heart of aesthetics. Plausibility is not just continuity and logistics, but it gives us our sense of what typifies a character – what they would do in character. This is not a neutral judgment about norms – it is an imposition of a certain class’s norms upon narrative. And, always, the artist has squirmed under that imposition. The slave’s impulse – irony –counters the demands of plausibility even in fairy tales. When La Fontaine portrays the ant and the grasshopper, for instance, we know, from the point of view of plausibility, that the ant is right Mention, say, welfare at a dinner party in the suburbs and you will hear a chorus of ants. But La Fontaine surely makes the reader uncomfortable with this judgment. We see the cruelty of ants, and the beauty of the grasshoppers.

Plausibility and likeability get us to reflect on what these narratives do in the culture. And I think that this is what really happened with the novel in the 19^th century in a Europe that was still largely peasant and ancient regime: the novel was a tool for encountering the Other. The Other outside the bourgeois norms, as orphan or ax murderer, as adulteress or unhappy wife.  This is where the anti-hero collects within his unlikeability the collective unconsciousness, and opens up the dreamlike possibility that the plausibility-ruled reader is, perhaps, Other. The novel hymns what Foucault calls the experience-limit – the limit in which you test to see whether you are a human or a monster. How much of a monster can you be? And so far, in the sweep of the imperialist eras, the genocide, the famines, the wars, we find that often, dizzyingly, the likeable is the monstrous, liquidating the dislikeable in a systematic monstrosity that runs because we don’t want to look at it or claim our responsibility for it.  

heart vs. character

Lawrence Lipking is one of those few academic literary critics who one can read for enjoyment. I’ve been thinking lately about an essay he wrote a decade ago on literary criticism and chess. I commented upon it in LI at the time, and I just returned to it. It is still a well wrought thing.  Lipking writes a lot about chess, since he is a grand master as well as a surviving  member of what used to be the upper echelon of the lit crit establishment. The essay, Chess Minds and Critical Moves, mixes the field of literary criticism and chess, using Lipking’s own experience in playing William Wimsatt as an example.

“Nevertheless, a great gulf separated the two of us: he was a problemist, I was a player. The distinction between these habits of mind is so fundamental that, like yin and yang, it can be used to divide the whole intellectual world into contrary pairs -- for example, Plato the problemist and Aristotle the player, or Being and Becoming. The problemist seeks perfection of form and idea (or "theme"), and arranges the pieces artistically to realize that theme in the purest and most elegant way. The player seeks the excitement of a constantly shifting struggle against a recalcitrant foe, and subordinates considerations of beauty and style to the most efficient method of winning. A move is best, for the problemist, when most ingenious; for the player, when most advantageous. A problemist needs to be original; a player needs to be tough.  In practice, to be sure, the two habits of mind often mingle. Most problemists also play games, and most players sometimes solve problems. Yet Wimsatt was not at all a strong player, and difficult problems usually baffle me. “

For myself, this passage put a silver ball in motion. Bing bing bing, it touched all the lights. My early intellectual life, really up until around 35, was spent under the problemist spell. I actually considered myself a maker of formal structures, of interesting problems with multiple solutions. This attracted me to philosophy, even to the rather disastrous decision to spend years  in a graduate school in philosophy. Philosophy in the anglosphere is usually divided under the old Cold War categories of analytic and Continental, but Lipking’s division seems more pertinent. There were analytics and Continentals who looked for the ingenius move, and viewed the solution to a problem as an irritant, a sort of bell signaling the end of recess. And there were members of the same two groups that viewed the problems as pests, and were all about solutions. For the analytics, this ultimately meant computer science, and for the Continentals, it meant religion or politics.   

In my heart, I want to remain on the playground, but since the age of 35, I have slowly come to understand my character better – and my character is not an extension of my heart. My character is a limited thing, and it wants a limited number of moves to a certain end. My character is a player.

Still, I am not an unmixed player. Oh heart, oh problem seeking  heart, tied to me as cans to a dog’s tail  – to get all Yeatsian about it. The limits of the player’s world are not only defined by a strategic end but, at least in my case, by boredom. Boredom is the revenge of my repressed problem heart. It undermines my projects, to an extent.

Back to Lipking: “To speak for myself, the deep pleasure of chess can rival the spell of great music. In the best games there comes a moment - the one that Satan and his Watch Fiends cannot find - when the balance of tensions in a position reaches its climax and the mind is challenged to see through all the ramifications. This is a dangerous moment for a player like me, because time seems suspended while the analysis lasts, and the clock keeps ticking away. When I indulge this luxury too much, time pressure will finally ruin me. But the pleasure is usually worth it. Just as some critics gradually go to the heart of a poem, surrendering to the process for its own sake rather than any rewards that may follow, a chessplayer can savor a game whether winning or losing. Both as a player and critic, I prize these moments of incredibly focused attention. They do not last long in chess, unfortunately. Once the game is over, its aftereffects do not linger and spread as they sometimes do with poems and music. Chess draws on cognitive powers like those of the critic, but not on the other capacities that a critic requires, where all the senses and feelings come into play. Even a very good game does not tell us, like Rilke's Apollo, to change our lives. But subject to that limitation, the pleasure of chess is intense. Unlike Rilke's Apollo, it affirms unashamedly that the head is important. “