philosopher buffoons

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates challenges Hippias, a vain sophist, over the matter of who is the better man: Achilles or Odysseus. Hippias holds that Achilles was the truest, strongest and best of the Greeks, while Odysseus was the wiliest – polytropos – or the falsest, the most cunning, the most deceptive. But Socrates, surprisingly enough, comes up with an argument to show that either both Achilles and Odysseus are mixtures of the good and the false, or that – if Achilles lies and deceptions come about involuntarily, whereas Odysseus voluntarily takes on the deceivers role, as Hippias maintains – that Odysseus must be the better man. This is the end of the dialogue:

Socrates: Is not justice either a sort of power or knowledge, or both ? Or must not justice inevitably be one or other of these ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Then injustice is a power of the soul, the more powerful soul is the more just, is it not ? For we found, my friend, that such a soul was better.

Hippias : Yes, we did.

Socrates : And what if it be knowledge ? Is not the wiser soul more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : And what if it be both ? Is not the soul which has both, power and knowledge, more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ? Is that not inevitably the case ?

Hippias : It appears to be.

Socrates : This more powerful and wiser soul, then, was found to be better and to have more power to do both good and disgraceful acts in every kind of action was it not ?

[376a] Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Whenever, then, it does disgraceful acts, it does them voluntarily, by reason of power and art ; and these, either one or both of them, are attributes of justice.

Hippias : So it seems.

Socrates : And doing injustice is doing evil acts, and not doing injustice is doing good acts.

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Will not, then, the more powerful and better soul, when it does injustice, do it voluntarily, and the bad soul involuntarily ?

Hippias : Apparently.

[376b] Socrates : Is not, then, a good man he who has a good soul, and a bad man he who has a bad one ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : It is, then, in the nature of the good man to do injustice voluntarily, and of the bad man to do it involuntarily, that is, if the good man has a good soul.

Hippias : But surely he has.

Socrates : Then he who voluntarily errs and does disgraceful and unjust acts, Hippias, if there be such a man, would be no other than the good man.”

Socrates pulls himself up short, here. How could he come to this conclusion? It is as if the Socratic method had revealed its daemonic side without, for once, the covering irony. But out of this little snatch of back and forth, in a dialogue that never receives very much attention, we see the outlines of the philosophe buffoon. The philospher buffoon stradles the line between the serious and the ludicrous. For him, the norm is vitiated by the normal, that dead even, never traveled thing – that opposite of polytropos, the word, applied to Odysseus, that sets the dialogue into motion. To never test one’s capacity for badness is not goodness, but sloth – the expression of the soul in a bad state. This is the social via negativa. Neither the right nor the left like it. School will not teach it. You have to learn it outside of school, if you want to learn it at all. It is at the root of many liberation movements. It clenched Frederick Douglass’ hand into a fist and made him beat his overseer, which was done as much to honour the bad man as the good man in Douglass’ soul – the whole man, not the candycane liberator, all fucking sweetness and light. In Dana Spiotta’s excellent novel, Eat the Document, which tracks a Weather style ‘terrorist’ named Caroline aka Mary up to the nineties in tandem with a nineties, Northwestern anti-globalist anarchist,  the anarchist actions are called ‘tests’. Caroline, in 1972, has the underground mantra down: Count on bad luck. In 1998, bad luck, for the children of America, is unimaginable.

Well, we are beginning to feel bad luck again, and perhaps on this circuit of the dialectic of the enlightenment we are also coming back to the anti-hero.

In the Tractate of Steppenwolf, that mysterious text magically popping up in the novel, the writer analyzes Harry Haller’s error in thinking that he is divided  between a man and a wolf – for even the wolf has more than two souls. We are, instead, knots of an indefinite number of selves, just like the Indian Gods in the Vedas.

“He would like to overcome the wolf in himself and become completely human, or renounce the human and at least live a unified, untorn life as a wolf. It is possible that he had never really precisely observed a wolf – because then he would have perhaps seen that even the animals have no unified souls, that even with them, behind the beautiful, austere form of the body lives a multitude of wants and circumstances, that even the wolf has its abysses in itself, that even the wolf suffers.” 

The Socrates of the Hippias Minor is closer to the Antisthenes’ Socrates than to Plato’s, closer to the figure who inspired cynicism than the figure who inspired Platonism. After all, the philosophical lineage runs not just from Socrates to Plato to all the history of philosophy that comes afterwards, but also from Socrates to Antisthenes to Diogenes up through many notable  anti-philosophical philosophers, the parasites, Bruno’s ass, Rameau’s nephew, and so on – a bunch of dangerous farceurs. But even the farceur suffers – although the true clown finds the tears of the clown a little too close to kitsch not to laugh at, afterwards.

annals of LA

Right after his daily bread, the human unit needs to feel superior to his coevals. Or some subgroup thereof. Those who lose this feeling are surely clinically depressed – such humility is pathological. Don’t look for it from saints – when God is your personal confidante, your edge is 24 carat. You can no more expect saints to be humble than you can expect the taste of a banana from a rutabaga.

The age old tale of the human unit from the sticks who comes to the big city falls, of course, under this generalization.  Although from Balzac to Franzen it is presented as a progress in civilization, the provincial from the provinces inevitably provincializes his city, or part of it, and proceeds to shoot spitball as the yokels from where he was at, or, in general, who are not counted among the elite of his quartier.

This is one of the reasons I love the NYT Styles section. It is hard wired to look down at the plebes, and it is written, surely, by former country mice, who have now wiggled into what they consider the cool set – aka heaven – and kick others who are striving towards that summit. Myself, like any other human unit, I’m all impressed. Plus of course I share certain of the prejudices.

This Sunday’s Styles section was particularly gratifying. As is often the case, many articles are devoted to looking down upon Los Angeles. When, in the old days – before we moved here in August – I read about L.A., I was basically ignorant of the geography, except of course for the four million hours of tv and film that I’d eyeballed, all set in LA. Now that I’ve gotten here, I’ve decided my schtick will be anti-LA. I’ll compare it invidiously to Paris. I’m confident the Styles staff would approve.  Thus I could revel in the snobbism on display in the story, “A Café where Los Angeles Goes to Wake Up.” The name of the sorry bistro is the Griddle Café, and it is lost somewhere on Sunset Strip. Apparently it is one of those breakfast joints thatevery American town boasts – joints with the bottomless cup coffee and the diabetes inducing pancakes, joints that smell of bacon. I’ve gone to these kind of places my whole life, which definitely shows a masochistic streak, as the experience is always the same. Once I’ve over-replenished myself, my inner teenage anorexic howls in my bowels the rest of the day.

Anyway, there are some great shots in the article. The pancakes of the Griddle are described in sickening detail, down to a truly disgusting gumbo called Mounds of Pleasure, “a stack of chocolate and coconut flapjacks buried in whipped cream, [which] should come with a straw.” Yum! Next to licking the  garbage disposal, I can think of nothing that I would less like to put in my mouth.  But the best shot is a quote from an expatriated New Yorker which, I think, will be my, my poetic summing up of LA:

“Another magazine editor, Janice Min of the Hollywood Reporter, offered this analysis, having moved to Los Angeles from Neew York three years ago: “There is no discovery in LA because  you’re always in a car heading for a specific destination. And because of that, people become very attached to the same few places, whether the food is edible or not, and it is usually not.”

Bada boom! I salute you, Janice Min! And I don’t envy your day at the office today after that crack…

psychiatry and vodka

Back when I was a teenage moron, I did what morons do: I took certain books, which must be understood from under the weight of some experience, and swallowed them whole, believing everything from the acknowledgements to the letter z in the index. One of those books was Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness. I was a high school debater. Debate in those days, and who knows, probably now, also has a speech division, and I decided I would compete in the persuasive speaking contest by presenting arguments that mental illness was a myth, relying upon Dr. Szasz. So, full of the piss and vinegar of my seventeen years, I stood at the podium and made this argument for the requisite amount of time. My audience consisted,  I remember, of the judge and I believe two other contestents. I don’t remember what they said, and I don’t remember what the judge looked like. I do remember, however, that I had an early premonition that I was not born to be one of life’s persuaders when the judge came to me, in his summing up of the way he accorded points. I was in last place, and the brief comment was, of course there is mental illness. Somehow I think he put this more pithily, like, son, I never heard such nonsense in all my life.

Words to live by – for someone else. I have gone merrily on my way, unafraid to spout nonsense at the drop of a hat. However, sometimes my nonsense changes. I did decide that madness was no myth.

On the other hand, I am not convinced we know more about its reality than we know about the ‘reality’ of normal mentation. Of course, there is a science we can turn to for informed comment on these things – psychiatry.But, but…

I have never been a great fan of psychiatry. My conviction that psychiatry is no great shakes as a science was strengthened by my recent reading of Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe, which is an entertaining, wildly biased report on the making of DSM-5.

Greenberg wastes no time in telling you where he is going with this book. The introduction is about the rise and fall of a mental “illness” called drapetomania. I t was discovered by a Southern doctor named Cartwright in the 1850s. Drapetomania, the Southern doctor learnedly opined, was a condition that befell Negros, who suddenly and irrationally wanted to shake off their shackles and escape form their god given estate as slaves in the South. Now, before we laugh at this ludicrous attempt to dress up racism as science, Greenberg writes, we should look at how the way Cartwright elaborated his diagnosis fits pretty well with the way the DSM-5 diagnoses, say, bereavement after the death of a loved one as an “illness”.

This isn’t to say that the constructs created by the psychiatrists aren’t useful. But equally useful is understanding how they came about and their limits.

Greenberg begins, as he must, with the money. The APA faced a crisis in 2009 – the year the project of making a new DSM was announced – because their stock of money was down. While DSM-4 was a steady moneymaker, the pharmaceutical companies that had been pouring money into the APA, facing shortfalls of their own, were reducing their stipends. Plus there were the scandals that arose from Congressional hearings concerning the Pharma-psychiatrist connection. The poster boy of unscrupulous was a Harvard shrink named Biederman who, in the late nineties, decided that there was a certain category of out of control children who were “pre-psychotic”. To make this diagnosis he had to jiggle the categories around, but once he’d done that and publicized the bi-polar syndrome in children, it was time to prescribe the anti-psychotics – which, as Congress found out, brought in the big bucks for Biederman. Well, not that big – they tracked down a nifty million eight he’d received – but psychiatrists aren’t hedge funders, after all. And who knows, Biederman’s heart may have been so constructed that the idea that “half a million children, twenty thousand of them under six years old” were now being treated to a regime formerly reserved for hard core psychotics in hospitals was a good thing.

But more on that in a moment. To turn back to Greenberg’s book: the reproach that had been already leveled at DSM-4, and that was leveled with a greater level of fury at DSM-5, is that both are attempts to medicalize all suffering – that is, to hitch all our moods to the great normalizing machine of psychiatry. And that machine is neither benign nor unprofitable. Big Pharma, that great ox of multinationals that has never, for instance, come up with a cheap way of fighting malaria, has struck gold in the American, and now global, moodset.  Psychiatrists are all too complicit in this gold rush – and all too indifferent to the side effects. Risperdal, the Johnson and Johnson anti-psychotic that was Biederman’s universal panacea, has among its side effect the tendency to cause obesity and thus promote childhood diabetes. And yet, this is considered worth the price.

How has this come about? Well, as Greenberg points out, a circular logic keeps surfacing in psychiatric practice. First, a “disease”is hypothesized on account of a ‘symptom” – some stray bit of sociopathy, some mania, some down mood, some unpleasant ideation. Then it is treated. The treatment consists of drugs that interfere in one way or another with the working of some part of the brain. We can engineer that now to the working on the molecular level. And the patient no longer has the symptom – thus, the disease must be cured. Thus, there must be a disease to be cured.

It strikes me that this, which many psychiatrists call science, many bartenders call happy hour. I kept thinking about those six year olds getting anti-psychotics and wondering: why not vodka? Seriously, it is cheaper, and it will stun the child just as much. A couple of shotglasses and you won’t have the temper tantrum. And the side effects are surely not as dire as the Risperdal.

Of course, Risperdal has a pedigree. It is made in a lab. It must be super-scientific. Whereas vodka is made from a potato by a peasant, or the descendent of one.  And, in fact, vodka and gin used to be prescribed to infants by doctors. Or given by wetnurses.

The point is that if mental illness isn’t a myth, it doesn’t mean we have a science to deal with it, at least in the sense that we have a science to deal with, say, building dams.  “Mood stabilizers” come out of the folk. In the nineteenth century, psychologists made a great effort to heave themselves out of the mire of beliefs that constituted “folk psychology”, as it was labeled by, I believe, Wundt. At the same time, world commerce had made everyday life for even the poor laboring man an experiment in the contact between psychoactive substances and the body: sugar, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, chocolate, cough medicine, etc. The body of knowledge that the folk bring to psychology has to do with vague but firm notions about the body, the brain, and feeling. The body of knowledge now brought to psychology by psychologists is informed by the knowledge of genetics, of neurology, and of the molecular structure of the neural pathways in the brain.  But though these are different levels of specificity, the objects explained by folk and scientific psychiatry are still ambiguous and, to use the five dollar word, only hermeneutically understood – mood, feeling, the blues, depression, enthusiasm, etc.

Unfortunately, the APA has turned any critique of its folkways and doings into some kind of anti-psychiatric agenda, probably secretly funded by scientologists. This is a foolishly aggressive strategy. We can leave Szasz aside, and still doubt that psychiatry has the key that will explain and help us “control” our moods and mental states. That, I feel pretty confident, is never going to happen.

Finishing

My private criteria for sorting the great works from the less great is that the less great are built to be finished. I just finished reading an Elmore Leonard novel that began, conversed, and tied up all its ends in a completely satisfying way. I can say, without compunction, that I finished it. I’ve never, on the other hand, finished any novel of Beckett’s. I’ve read, it is true, Ulysses maybe ten times in my life, but each reading has given me  different book. To finish Ulysses would be like finishing looking at Notre Dame. There are, of course, the small, fierce books that one can finish, but that take a lot of moves from the unfinishable works. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District here. Poems that I love are built on the unfinishable principle as well. Perhaps this is why I love waste literature – Lichtenberg’s scribble books, Rozanov’s fallen leaves, Ludwig Hohl, Wittgenstein. Waste is something thrown away and thus supposedly finished – but the waste book takes as its principle the idea that you can repress it, but it will return. It will return from the hind end and erode everything that is finished in a text, from the paragraph to the sentence to the punctuation.

I love that creeping corruption.

American anti-intellectualism

The United States, it is often said, is an anti-intellectual country.  Okay, I admit “often said” is a weasel phrase, which intends to exculpate the author from doing any research.  So doing a little research, one can go to, for instance, Richard Hofstader’s classic “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”. Hofstadter writes that he wrote the book in the 1950s, when it seemed that the Eisenhower presidency was all about actively knocking about “so called intellectuals going around showing how wrong everybody was who disagrees with them” – to quote Eisenhower himself.

Hofstadter does a thorough job of searching out American intellectuals, going back to the Puritan clergy. Of course, he has a more sociological sense of the intellectual, and through that lens can see that far from being an era of disrespect for the intellectual, the Eisenhower fifties enshrined the intellectual as “expert” with far more influence and money than, perhaps, at any time since the scribe-dominated days of Pharoanic Egypt.

However, Hofstadter does not wax very philosophical. I on the other hand am always applying philosophical wax to objects small and large. Nothing is cheaper than philosophical wax! I myself am willing to sell cartons of it for very reasonable prices – buy the perfect Christmas present! But, er, I digress. What I was going to say is that, in my opinion, American culture is not so much anti-intellectual as anti-dialectical.

Of course, the intellectual historian would adduce the American inheritance of a common sense philosophy from England as the reason, perhaps – but I think that is an all too intellectual explanation. Too much superstructural woo woo woo going on there, even for me, who generally find the whole superstructure/base thing bogus.

I, on the other hand, would go back to slavery.

I’d go back by this indirect route. At the beginning of Hrabel’s I served the King of England, the protagonist harks back to his first day working at the marvelous Golden Prague Hotel:

“When I started to work at the Golden Prague Hotel, the boss took hold of my left ear, pulled me up, and said, You’re a busboy here, so remember, you don’t see anything and you don’t hear anything. Repeat what I just said. So I said I wouldn’t see anything and I wouldn’t hear anything. Then the boss pulled me up by the right ear and said, But remember too that you’ve go to see everything and hear everything. Repeat it after me. I was taken aback, but I promised I would see everything and hear everything.”  

A prima facie analysis, grasping only the logic in this passage, would conclude that the boss was mad. After all, didn’t the message to the left ear contradict that with the right ear? And what is all this repetition about? I think, in fact, that is how the American think tanker would naturally read this passage.

However, as Nietzsche acutely saw, dialectics begins in servitude – in slavery – and the logic of both showing that one doesn’t hear or see anything but in actual fact observing and hearing everything is the slave’ s instrument of survival. It is a mark of the film 12 years a Slave – a film I sat through with total attention, a film I have wanted to see my whole life – that certain dialectical hints, on the order of this contradiction between the ears, are voiced.

It was not, of course, beyond Ralph Waldo Emerson to see and understand this contradiction, but it is absolutely characteristic of American culture that  Emerson’s reputation is as an inspirational thinker, a manufacturer of high minded Hallmark card slogans. By one of those great accidents that are fastened onto by the gnostic historian, always on the lookout for intersignes, a boy who was named for Emerson, Ralph Ellison, spent his whole career meticulously elaborating the contradiction between the ears –the contradiction that gives its title to one of his essays:  Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke. Ellison wrote the essay in reply to Stanley Edgar Hyman, who had analyzed “negro culture” from the point of view of the trickster. Ellison takes up the challenge of the trickster, the masked man, but he refuses to allow the white and the black to play roles in a segregated story, even if the story is changed from one in which the black is deserving of enslavement to one in which the black is perpetual victim:

“And it is this which makes me question Hyman’s designation of the “smart man playing dumb” role as primarily Negro, if he means by “conflict situations” those in which racial pressure is uppermost. Actually it is a role which Negroes share with other Americans, and it might be more “Yankee” than anything else. It is a strategy common to the culture, and it is reinforced by our anti-intellectualism, by our tendency toward conformity and by the related desire of the individual to be left alone; often simply by the desire to put more money in the bank. But basically the strategy grows out of our awareness of the joke at the center of the American identity. Said a very dark Southern friend of mine in laughing reply to a white businessman who complained of his recalcitrance in a bargaining situation, “I know, you thought I was colored, didn’t you.” It is across this joke that Negro and white Americans regard one another. The white American has charged the Negro American with being without past or tradition (something which strikes the white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once typical of European cultures, and the Negro knows that both were “mammy-made” right here at home. What’s more, each secretly believes that he alone knows what is valid in the American experience, and that the other knows he knows but will not admit it, and each suspects the other of being at bottom a phony.”

It is part of the dialectic that occurs between two ears to superimpose the serious on the ludicrous. It is part of the American anti-dialectical tradition to insist on separating the two, and to further insist that the two things are allergic to each other. I like Ellison’s way of substituting the “joke” for the “trick”, even if in the end I’m a trope-man, enamored of trick or treat – and actually thinking that the two are one. I am reminded of a man who visited the United States once - Ludwig Wittgenstein.   Norman Malcolm, the man he was visiting at the time of his American journey, wrote in his memoir of the LW: “Wittgenstein once said that a serious and philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”

geneology of the worse, the better - a rerun

Judas, De Quincey and Lenin: on the worse, the better

The famous phrase, “the worse the better”, is often attributed to Lenin. Supposedly, this is Lenin’s addition to the black book of political strategy, and no doubt in Hell he is discussing it over chess with Old Nick Machiavelli himself.

As far as I can tell, however, the phrase appears in Lenin’s works as a quotation from Plekhanov. In Three Crises, writing in 1917, Lenin sets himself the task of analyzing the revolution thus far – after the fall of the Czar. He remarks that so far, the demonstration, as a political form, has accrued a peculiar importance. And he backs away from the situation to analyze it:

The last, and perhaps the most instructive, conclusion to be drawn from considering the events in their interconnection is that all three crises manifested some form of demonstration that is new in the history of our revolution, a demonstration of a more complicated type in which the movement proceeds in waves, a sudden drop following a rapid rise, revolution and counter-revolution becoming more acute, and the middle elements being eliminated for a more or less extensive period.
In all three crises, the movement took the form of a demonstration. An anti-government demonstration — that would be the most exact, formal description of events. But the fact of the matter is that it was not an ordinary demonstration; it was something considerably more than a demonstration, but less than a revolution. It was an outburst of revolution and counter-revolution together, a sharp, sometimes almost sudden elimination of the middle elements, while the proletarian and bourgeois elements made a stormy appearance.

Contrary to the view that Lenin advocated a strategy of the worse, the better, Lenin was remarking that this strategy was being played out in the Russian revolution. It was a product of the natural history of the revolution, so to speak. The middle elements saw it, precisely, as a strategy because the middle elements did not understand the mechanism of class warfare. Thus, the middle was continually projecting intentions upon the Bolsheviks and the reactionaries, as though both were creating class warfare – when, to Lenin’s mind, the relationship was quite the reverse – class warfare was creating the Bolsheviks and the reactionaries.

Both we and the Cadets were blamed for the April 20-21 movement — for intransigence, extremes, and for aggravating the situation. The Bolsheviks were even accused (absurd as it may be) of the firing on Nevsky. When the movement was over, however, those same S.R.s and Mensheviks, in their joint, official organ, Izvestia, wrote that the "popular movement" had "swept away the imperialists, Milyukov, etc.", i.e., they praised the movement!! Isn’t that typical? Doesn’t it show very clearly that the petty bourgeoisie do not understand the workings, the meaning, of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie?
The objective situation is this. The vast majority of the country’s population is petty-bourgeois by its living conditions and more so by its ideas. But big capital rules the country, primarily through banks and syndicates. There is an urban proletariat in this country, mature enough to go its own way, but not yet able to draw at once the majority of the semi-proletarians to its side. From this fundamental, class fact follows the inevitability of such crises as the three we are now examining, as well as their forms.

Let me admit that I, like Lenin, find class warfare to be operating here before either side becomes conscious of itself; the sides come into existence to express the warfare. However, once they come into existence, they quickly develop a semi-autonomy in which, of course, they try to dominate the field of possible political routines. This is why, even though they come into existence as the expression of class warfare, they remain in existence as the expression of political warfare.

But my interest here is really in that caught middle. That middle of paranoid dreamers. For, whatever the truth about Lenin’s real thoughts, the idea that Leninism follows a strategy of the worse, the better is a very attractive reading of Leninism from the middle viewpoint. I’d claim that it is a reading that precedes the Russian revolution. In fact, I’d like to claim that we can see the seed of the idea in an essay De Quincey wrote about Judas Iscariot.

This essay is best known through a reference to it in Borges’ ficciones. Borges explains De Quincey’s point briefly before moving on to the beautiful heresy of a Swede named Runeberg, who, contemplating the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, came to the conclusion that Judas was, in reality, the true god-man:

“God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.”

Runeberg’s theory is, in one sense, the final chapter, the logical conclusion of the middle’s paranoid dream. It is a dream that finds a Judas under every rock.

De Quincey, one of the world’s great dreamers, dreams of a Judas who looks much like the Lenin imago of all the Old Cold War boys. His Judas is one of Burke’s “theorizers” – the treasurer of the disciples, the shrewdest among this naïve group, but upon whom “had not yet dawned the true grandeur of the Christian scheme.”

Believing therefore as Judas did and perhaps had reason to do that Christ contemplated the establishment of a temporal kingdom -- the restoration in fact of David's throne; believing also that all the conditions towards the realisation of such a scheme met and centred in the person of Christ, what was it that upon any solution intelligible to Judas neutralised so grand a scheme of promise? Simply and obviously to a man with the views of Judas, it was the character of Christ himself, sublimely over gifted for purposes of speculation, but like Shakspere's great creation of Prince Hamlet not correspondingly endowed for the business of action and the clamorous emergencies of life. Indecision and doubt, such was the interpretation of Judas, crept over the faculties of the Divine Man as often as he was summoned away from his own natural Sabbath of heavenly contemplation to the gross necessities of action. It became important therefore according to the views adopted by Judas that his master should be precipitated into action by a force from without and thrown into the centre of some popular movement such as, once beginning to revolve, could not afterwards be suspended or checked. Christ must be compromised before doubts could have time to form. It is by no means improbable that this may have been the theory of Judas.

This outline of Judas’s relation to Christ sounds remarkably like the relationship of Pyotr Verkhovensky to Stavrogin. It also sounds like the kind of conspiratorial dream that entranced De Quincey, whose own dreams, massive opiate structures, seemed like conspiracies themselves, to whose inward meanings De Quincey had no privileged access, always the small man just outside the glass.

But to return to Lenin’s point, we should ask: why would De Quincey represent a middle that was being crushed? Wasn’t he living in the golden summer of equipoise, the Victorian age?

De Quincey wrote his essay in the Victorian age, but his sensibility, by his own account, was formed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. Older than Hazlitt, he never gave himself to the revolutionary cause. He was a reactionary from the cradle – a romantic reactionary. It was not the Middle’s triumph that he saw, but the long twilight struggle with a growing, secretive mass of revolutionary societies that would do anything to undermine the middle. His politics were the precise correlate of his dreams, which were illuminated, from the inside, by symbols that seem to be stolen from the future.

contra, reluctantly, david foster wallace

Geoff Dyer recently wrote an essay about how one has an allergic reaction to certain writers. Dyer’s allergy is to David Foster Wallace. Now, Dyer is by no means my favorite essayist; and it makes sense that a writer as encyclopedic as Wallace could repulse an essayist who once wrote about his “reader’s block” – his struggle with reading new material, aka books, which had come upon him counted myself in middle age. Myself, I have very fine memories of reading Infinite Jest lying in bed in New Haven one winter. I wanted the book to go on and on – and in that sense it was, for a long book, not long enough.

However, perhaps something in my tastes has shifted. I recently checked out Consider the Lobster, DFW’s essay collection, to dip into essays that I remembered as being the most hilarious and clever things ever – and I felt something different about them this time. I felt, well, that they were lazy and not so good.

This surprised me.

It was the first essay in the collection, Big Red Son, which is about the Las vegas adult movie awards, that I was beset with doubts.  I was stopped by the sixth paragraph:

“Though the sub-line vagaries of entertainment accounting are

legendary, it is universally acknowledged that the US adult-film

industry, at $35—41 billion in annual sales, rentals, cable charges,

and video-masturbation-booth revenues, is an even larger and

more efficient moneymaking machine than legitimate mainstream

American cinema (the latter’s annual gross commonly estimated at $22.5 billion). The US adult industry is centered in LA’s San Fer-

nando Valley, just over the mountains from Hollywood.1 Some

insiders like to refer to the adult industry as Hollywood‘s Evil Twin,

others as the mainstream’s Big Red Son.”

I was rather dumbstruck that I didn’t remember this, because one thing sticks out a mile, here: this is complete and utter bullshit. I mean, just on the surface, it smelled of cop statistics – the fearmongering exaggeration that one expects from cops announcing the latest drugbust. The universal acknowledgement here was DFW’s way, in an essay in which he employed the famous style of multiple notes, not to note one thing that should be noted.

Granted, at the time Big Red Son was written, the internet was not the automatic equalizer it has since become, but still, just being conscious of what he was seeing, he should have doubted the whole idea that the industry was making 45 billion a year.

So I did a little elementary research myself, to track down these bogus figures. Luckily, someone had been there before me: Dan Ackman, in an article published in Forbes in 2001. Ackman traces the ridiculous exagerations in the size of the porn industry through an ill researched article by Frank Rich in the NYT that estimated it at 10 billion to 14 billion per year through AVN – the industry that sponsored the very awards ceremony that DFW was reporting on – which claimed, again with no source, that the adult video industry grossed 4 billion dollars annually.

As Ackman, acting like someone who understood what references are all about, soon discovers, there are estimates of the porn industry, or aspects of it – which, contra the ‘universality” of DFW’s claim, diminish radically the size of the industry. I am not being  just a factchecking dick here: the very name of the article signifies one of DFW’s major points about the place of porn in America. It was a point too important to research. But Ackman easily cut through the bullshit of what is “universally acknowledged”:

“The 1998 Forrester report pegs the online adult content market at $750 million to $1 billion, which was an increase from its initial estimate of $150 million. When a study admits that its initial result was off by at least 80%, it’s hard to be confident in the new result. In any event, Tom Rhinelander, a Forrester research director, says they have given up trying to put a price on porn–either on the Internet or otherwise.”

Ackman’s article is not a work of art, but it has its funny moments, which sort of squash the funny moments in Big red son:

“Its rival research outfit, Net Ratings , tracks the number of visitors to porn Web sites. It says that in April 2001, there were 22.9 million unique visitors to porn sites. This says nothing about how long each visitor stayed or whether they spent a dime. In any event, the number of visitors is less than the number who visited news sites (41.1 million), finance sites (34.2 million) or greeting card sites (25.5 million). When was the last time you heard anyone talk about how greeting card sites dominate the Net?”

The gullibility  DFW  displays in this, one of his premier essays, is symptomatic of a certain blinding conservatism in his work. It’s the acceptance of the cop side of things. I won’t mention the hero worshipping essay about McCain’s run for the presidency in 2000 – in 2000, all of America was temporarily hallucinating. Still, to make a hero of a man whose job was to bomb civilians in North Vietnam and who, even then, was transparent about his mad warmongering personality, is too depressing for me to contemplate.

I couldn’t finish the collection, which I once read with true delight. This saddened me. I haven’t developed an allergy to DFW, but something in me, something provoked by the last decade, has shifted.