Anna Burns' Milkman and the Role of Proper names in all histories, sacred or profane

Burns begins her novel with an utter spoiler of a sentence that pretty much states the case:

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. 

Fleshed out, this means that the novel follows a parallel between the events that befall the narrator as she is sexually stalked by a reputed IRA honcho and the events that have befallen Belfast itself in the years of the “troubles”, especially in her Ardoyne neighborhood in Belfast, which is Catholic and working class.  But here I run into a wee problem, because even if I could sum up the book like this, I would have to admit the fact that nowhere does the book mention Belfast or Northern Ireland or the British or  the IRA. All those names are blocked, all those names are not here. Somebody McSomebody is here, but his name is not here. The milkman is here, but his name, at least so far as the narrator knows at this point, is not here. As we will soon discover, the narrator’s name is not here either. This is not a minor detail, this is not something we can read over, if we want to read. So our first order of business to ask the question: why have the names fallen off the map of the territory covered in this novel? Why does Burns give herself the difficult task of creating a story out of a seeming  bonfire of proper names?

 

To answer this question in part, back up for a moment – consider  the role of the proper name in all histories, sacred or profane. The proper name seems to be unique to human communication, although who knows what goes on among dolphins. Presumably at some point they were invented, just as making fire was invented. One could even say the human comes about with the proper name. Tarzan, even, seems to have a sense of proper names – because if he didn’t, the whole me Tarzan – you Jane schtick wouldn’t make sense. You might be able to train your dog to respond to the sound of its name, but your dog is never going to use or mention your name, or even in the cells of its poochy consciousness think of you with relation to your proper name. All of which makes proper names fascinating to the philosopher, because what is going on here? Why do we need names?

Anna Burns narrator is called variously “middle sister”, “maybe-girlfriend,” “daughter”, etc. Her friends and relatives are similarly dubbed by what Bertrand Russell called “denoting phrases” – and even those with proper names, we quickly learn, don’t bear real proper names, but names denoting the fact that they seem like the type of person who might bear a particular kind of proper name – for example, something very English sounding. Except that, to continue with this and show what semantic quicksand lies within the story of Burns’s novel so that the reader, as well as the characters within the novel, never know whether the next step is going to completely suck them down, Britain and England are not dubbed with their proper names either – they are invariably “over the water” or “the state”. And even Ireland or Northern Ireland or Belfast is not dubbed with its proper name, so that it becomes a linguistic shift – a “here”, a “there”, a “this side of the street”, a “region”, an “our community” and “their community”, gaining its semantic sense from the speakers position within a semantic web (which is technically known in linguistics as a shifter). So for instance when we read that a couple who lives near the narrator’s “maybe-boyfriend” is named Nigel and Jason, we are not to think that they are “really” named Nigel and Jason. The reason that they are named Nigel and Jason is that they have been collecting, for anthropological reasons, names that were “banned” in the “community” – itself unnamed, but obviously the Catholic side of Northern Ireland – which is such a peculiar thing to do that it seems like the kind of thing people over the water might do, and over the water, as is well known, Nigel and Jason are common first names.  Maybe-girlfriend raps out a list of illegitimate names:

The banned names were: Nigel, Jason, Jasper, Lance, Percival, Wilbur, Wilfred, Peregrine, Norman, Alf, Reginald, Cedric, Ernest, George, Harvey, Arnold, Wilberine, Tristram, Clive, Eustace, Auberon, Felix, Peverill, Winston, Godfrey, Hector, with Hubert, a cousin of Hector, also not allowed. Nor was Lambert or Lawrence or Howard or the other Laurence or Lionel or Randolph because Randolph was like Cyril which was like Lamont which was like Meredith, Harold, Algernon and Beverley. Myles too, was not allowed. Nor was Evelyn, or Ivor, or Mortimer, or Keith, or Rodney or Roger or Earl of Rupert or Willard or Simon or Sir Mary or Zebedee or Quentin, though maybe now Quentin owing to the filmmaker making good in America that time. Or Albert. Or Troy. Or Barclay. Or Eric. Or Marcus. Or Sefton. Or Marmaduke. Or Greville. Or Edgar because all those names were not allowed. Clifford was another name not allowed. Lesley wasn’t either. Peverill was banned twice.

Names, as one can see, that are all male: over and above the politics of the right name and the wrong name are the politics that decrees that women’s names don’t or at least shouldn’t have such power because women themselves shouldn’t have such power, that is, political power.

“The banned names were understood to have become infused with the energy, the power of history, the age-old conflict, enjoinments and resisted impositions as laid down long ago in this county by that country, with the original nationality of the name not now in the running at all.”

We are only really beginning with the politics of the name, however, when we enumerate which names are and are not allowed, and which gender’s names are politically charged and which one’s are not, for the levels of non-naming are multifold and the the quicksand is deep. It is not simply in the “community” that the name has become a fatal object of conflict: even in the narrator’s own family, names have been stripped off, torn out, left unvocalized. The process was started, paradoxically, by the paterfamilias, the usual legal guardian and carrier of the name, the male namer whose family name is carried by the son and the daughter, who in this case – as in so many in his domestic life – flips the role, becoming the unnamer even as he is, himself, unnamed, abandoning our primogenitor Adam’s perogative in the name business. Which is the point at which we hit our own family unnames, such as Mom and Dad, which are the ultimate psychoanalytically charged shifters since my correct use of “Mom”, for instance, is directed towards a woman who bears another, legal name, and can’t be arbitrarily transferred to other women who have not either borne me or exist as my step-mother.  Except in cases where for one reason or another a woman has become a “Mom” to people outside of the legal and/or biological relationship of motherhood, which is an exception that proves the rule that the rules all have exceptions in a language, as language is, among other things, a huge swap meet.

But to return to middle sister’s Da:

He saw me though, even if unsure which daughter I was. That, of course, could have had nothing to do with dying, because da, when he’d lived, always had been in a state of distraction, spending overlong hours reading papers, watching the news, ears to radios, out in the street, taking in, then talking out, the latest political strife with likeminded neighbours. He was that type, the type who let nothing in except it had to be the political problems. If not the political problems – then any war, anywhere, any predator, any victim. He’d spend lots of time too, with these neighbours who were of the exact fixation and boxed-off aberration as him. As for the names of us offspring, never could he remember them, not without running through a chronological list in his head. While doing this, he’d include his sons’ names even if searching for the name of a daughter. And vice versa. Sooner or later, by running through, he’d hit on the correct one at last. Even that though, became too much and so, after a bit, he dropped the mental catalogue, opting instead for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ which was easier. And he was right. It was easier which was how the rest of us came to substitute ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and so on ourselves.

This primal scene of unnaming, this negation of the mythic impulse (an impulse that depends so crucially on naming that one mythographic theory in ancient times was that myths were created to explain names), gives us our orienting disorienting points to make it across a narrative that expands in all directions like some crazy banyan tree. So if, instead of substituting names for denoting phrases as if I knew, beforehand, where all this was happening and who it was happening to, the story in its own terms would go something like this:

Middle sister, who seems to be 18, comes from a functionally dysfunctional family in an unnamed community where the social forces in conflict consist broadly of the renouncers of the state and their forces versus the defenders of the state and their forces, with the defenders of the state coming from outside the community – the paramilitaries from the other side of the street – or over the water – the soldiers and spies and hit squads – plus the police, and the renouncers consisting of paramilitaries, gangsters, the community opinion at large, and the spies and killers and rapists which may or may not be operating on their own or in connection with others. Being functionally dysfunctional in this neighborhood means taking a certain number of casualties – a renouncer son shot and killed, another disappeared, a daughter who the renouncers have threatened to kill if she ever comes back to the community (sister’s crime is to have married an enemy). Middle sister’s survival technique consists of keeping her head down, or in a book – she reads nineteenth century novels while walking to work.  Keeping a book up as a shield allows her, she thinks, to disappear, instead of being thought bananas or in some way so marginalized that she became a matter of unease for those in the community. As well, she has a maybe-boyfriend in another region that she has not told her mother about, or her sisters or brothers-in-law. So this is the state of play of Middle Sister’s life in the community and way of keeping alive and unmolested in the community with its overt downgrading of women and frank thrusting of second class citizenship, if that, upon women when the Milkman, driving a large white van (from which, it is Middle Sister’s theory, his nickname Milkman came from) stops and offers her a ride. In offering her a ride and making a few remarks that show that he knows where she lives, he knows her habits, he knows her routes, he makes it obvious that he has been stalking her and, by the very fact of stalking, claiming her, which reflects on his position in the community as both a respected paramilitary boss and a gangster like figure who seizes what he wants.  That simple, sinister offer starts off a general rumor and unraveling of Middle Sister’s life. On the one hand, it is obvious that the sinister Milkman is pursuing her for sexual reasons, even grooming her to become his whore, in spite of the fact that he is married, older, and a paramilitary of high and mighty violence; and on the other hand, the rumor mill starts that she has indeed accepted his offer and become his whore, as though the offer itself was irresistible,  a conclusion that is agreed to by the rumor that  her mother, her mother’s friends, and even the girl gang girlfriends of other paramilitaries have decided to believe about middle sister. To fight this rumor means, however, expressing to other people the facts of the rumor, which might have sinister consequences for, if not middle sister, then maybe-boyfriend, since making it too clear that she is refusing the Milkman would make all too clear what she suspects about the Milkman and his kind, an opinion that is both bound to bring down sexist contempt as well as the suspicion that middle sister is, like her first sister, the one who has fled, an enemy of the community. The social rules here are as complex, and take as much tact, as the rules in a Henry James novel, with the difference that if the community’s way of doing things had been applied by Milly Theale in Wings of the Dove, she would have simply blasted Kate Croy and Merton Densher in the face with a throw-away .38 snub-nose before the end of it.  

The forward flow of the action here is marked, then, by the meetings with the Milkman, meetings that eerily never flesh out the Milkman, who is very fleshly while remaining very shadowy. He does nothing in the book that is more overtly violent than to show up, open his van door, and invite Middle Sister in. Show up again and again in the narrator’s path. Show up again and again in the community’s judgement that she is involved with the Milkman, that she is having sex with the Milkman, that she is the girlfriend of the Milkman, that she is the whore of the Milkman, that she is so connected to the Milkman that it might be dangerous for people to be in line before her at, say, a chip shop, or dangerous to take her money for food, which puts her in situations she so resents that sometimes she wishes she were really the girlfriend of the Milkman and that he would kill these people who think she is the girlfriend of the Milkman. It is enough that somehow, because of his desire for her, she is marked as his in the community’s mind, with all the bad mojo that this transfers to her and her every act. No denial on her part lifts the spell that is never spelled out by anyone, since to actually talk about the killings committed by a presumed renouncer boss in the community is to betray, on some obscure level, the community, and thus bring down on oneself the wrath of the renouncers in their various degrees and forms, who are semi-legitimately defending the community from the murderous soldiers and the murderous friends of the soldiers and the State.   Around each event in going forward in this terrible progress through the somewhat impalpable medium of a community perception that transforms as nothing else does the narrator’s subjective being into a symbolic object determined by others, there arise explanations and side stories that go backwards and forwards in time, all of which abut in or spring forward from various forms of grotesque violence.

READ THE REST HERE AT WILLETTS!

The heat wave and nightlife poetics

Prostitutes, St. Denis, Marvin Newman

The heat wave here is broken. I got up this morning, went to the boulangerie on Rambuteau, and on the way back whistled, “We’re having a heat wave”:

“The temperature's rising, it isn't surprising,

She certainly can can-can”

Yesterday it got so hot in Paris that our local library closed. It got so hot that even my cleverness with our ventilator couldn’t hold the beast away from the penetralia of our apartment – and that, with the apartment having a uniquely shady location on a little sidepocket ruelle, with the trees blocking full sunlight and a terrace with plants. In other places, it was even hotter.

Of course, from the Austin, Texas point of view, it was a minor incident of cooling from the usual monthlong spate of 100+ days. But Austin Texas has a big natural pool in the center of it and many an a/c, central or units, to grind up the wattage and cool down the living space. Paris doesn’t.

But as I say, today I’m whistling “We’re having a heat wave”, which connects heat measured in centigrade or Fahrenheit with heat measured in booty and sexual desire. And that gets us to one of the great Parisian heat waves, in August 1983, which featured a bit of a prostitution riot.

“The frontiers of sex. The heat way has elevated the temperature of Parisians. Shootings, fist fights, heatstroke. Rue Saint-Denis, the prostitutes are on the warpath, with impunity… » - Le Monde, August 1, 1983.

Back in 1983, the Saint-Denis district was still the great streetwalker district. It was estimated that around 2000 prostitutes worked the area. There’s little left of that now: a few x rated video shops, a few extravagantly made up sex workers lounging outside them. Back then, though, it was a whole different story. In the U.S. too, there were urban areas, like the famous Combat Zone in Boston, that were officially or semi-officially recognized as red-light districts.

In Paris, the sex trade had a longer, semi-official history, which was marked, after WWII, by the closing up of the maisons closes, the brothels, which had until this point been licensed.

Of course, they did not disappear, nor did the sex workers. The same old mafia-networks with the same old tactics took over. Plus, of course, the seventies and eighties were a time of sexual activity on a scale that took in suburban households as well as avant-garde swingers, much to Norman Mailer’s disgust – see his review of Last Tango in Paris for the details.

All of which contextualizes the battle of “Babylone”, a club on Rue Marie-Stuart that was frequented by nightbirds: ... journalists, transvestites, partiers. It happened that the club held a sort of disco contest, in which its employees participated. This contest spawned a rumor that a sort of team of Brazilian prostitutes were entertaining there. And this aroused the women of St-Denis, who saw these Brazilians as, basically, scabs.

What happened was a classic urban fronde, something out of one of Robert Darnton’s histories. From Le Monde:

"This is what seems to have happened with the prostitutes of rue Saint-Denis on Sunday, July 17. The first time at 4 o’clock in the morning, dozens of them formed a troop on rue Saint-Denis for marching on rue Marie-Stuart in order to give a good lesson to the “Brazillian queers” who wanted to “scab us out.”

Last evening, same scenario. The hunt for the « Brazilians » began again. The anger of the prostitutes swelled again. Monday, almost two hundred of them, with their « protectors » and gorillas, armed with clubs, bicycle chains and iron bars again came up « Babylone » street, to the cries of : Death to the queers, death to the trannies. Anger gave way to hysteria. It felt like a lynch mob. One of the mob explained to a Babylone client that “one of the trannies had been trespassing on her territory” and that they were “looking for her to give her a correction”.

Of course, the cops, many of whom had been regularly paid off by the prostitutes, intervened “softly”. In the end, the trespasser wasn’t found, but the joint was wrecked enough to leave a message. And the heat wave eventually broke.

All of which is urban trivia of the type that is quickly submerged beneath the “important” events of the day.

However, for the psychogeographer and the gnostic historian, the battle of Babylone is as important as any other, since it marks the confluence of everyday routines and rituals, the streetwise, sub-historical passage of time. Daniel Tiffany, in Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance has argued that nightlife – in all its funk and dubious glamor – is connected to a poetic that branches off from the canonical and goes through Villon through Biggie Smalls, with its own set of hells and heavens. They are not Dante’s.

“Tavern talk thus captures in words the orphic subculture of nightlife. A public place providing cover for illicit and sometimes illegal activities, for the mingling of otherwise- stratified classes of persons (rich and poor, lawful and unlawful), the reality of the tavern, like its ragged speech, is fundamentally dissolute. Indeed, the actual existence of the tavern is called into question by the obscurity of its material conditions: its derelict address and graveyard hours; its nameless (or nicknamed) and promiscuous society. In this respect, the nightspot, like the figure of Anon, appears in the world under erasure, its disappearance betrayed by its own apparition. Nightlife, in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, may be understood as “the appearance of lost inwardness.””

Tiffany could, here, be talking about Babylone’s fate. After its appearance in Le Monde as the center of a battle in the center of a tropical heatwave, it disappears from history. Even closegrained accounts of the 70s and 80s in the Les Halles and St. Denis area, which pop up on invaluable websites on the Web, filled with the reminiscing of the old boys and girls of past Eldorados, do not commemorate it. Babylone is no more. And we have not even sat down by the waters and wept its transient moment of fame and shame.

Gee, gee! Her anatomy makes the mercury rise to 93!

Having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave, the way that she moves,

That thermometer proves that she certainly can...

(What's your name honey? Pablo).Certainly can..

where did capitalism come from?

From our Willettsmag essay: where did capitalism come from? See the mag for the full essay.

Mainstream economics is proud of its methodological individualism, but it doesn’t believe it. The individual, as the economists understand, does not spontaneously produce his acts. The man in an office, or behind a plow, or behind a gun, did not find his places by inventing his scene. The idea that the individual invents society is, evidently, an act that has never attributed to any individual. So the mainstream economist has come up with a wonderful concept saver: the individual, in their terms, is essentially a chooser. Goethe’s Faust cried out that in the beginning was the act – but the economist’s homo economicus counters that in the beginning was the choice. The cosmology of the preference wraps the societal world in a mystery – for one never seems to come to acts, only to choices. Every blade of wheat, every board of wood, every drop of ink, is not what it seems to be, but is instead an agglomeration of atomic choices. By some inexplicable accident, these choices also seem to be matter, and have weight and chemistry. The only thing that isn’t chosen is choice itself.

This is a rich cosmology, but not necessarily a believable one. So it is reinforced by the time honored method of scolding. If we don’t hold to individualism, all responsibility is lost, and anarchy and concentration camps are loosed upon the world. 

The origin of this cosmology is surely to be found in the period between around 1650 and 1789. And it did not arise among the peasant masses, yearning to profit maximize, but among a varied assortment of clerks and policymakers. Intellectuals in Edinburgh universities and ministers at Louis XVI’s court, as well as slave traders and sugar merchants were all starting to put it together. 

By the late twentieth century, the capitalist operation had become so dominant – at least among intellectuals – that historians could not believe the cosmos had ever been different. Thus, in the spirit of conquest, the historians went back to pre-capitalist societies and attempted to rescue them for capitalism. Thus, theorems of market equilibrium, or of public choice, are imposed as the real language of rationality that the peasants were, as it were, articulating in mime. 

My own sense is that the peasant economies were not irrational, nor are the rational capitalist economies non-peasant – the rational economic institutions are colonized by non-equilibrium, non-growth, non-maximizing kinds of behavior – or perhaps one should say that the latter kinds of behavior are colonized and exploited by extractive capitalism, suitably institutionalized –  and peasant economies surely involved calculations to some end, profit maximization and other capitalist traits. The question isn’t whether these traits existed, but how they became distributed and then became norms. When thinking through these grand categorical changes in the social economy, it is important to turn to contemporaries of the character shift and the vocabulary that it discovered and see how they interpreted what was going on.

whose posterity is it?

My new article at Willetts

There’s a popular literary game, which consists of predicting which writers will “endure”. Whenever the waters of clickbait grow still and old, some webzine site will stir it up by playing this old game, asking what names among today’s writers will be counted in a hundred years. Heated arguments will break out: the question of whether the works of Stephan King will be recognized one hundred years from now as the greatest American fiction of our time will elicit heated comments, and there will surely be much knocking of the elites.

Nobody seems to predict that a writer that they don’t like will be recognized in one hundred years. Nor does anybody ask about the institutions that preserve for posterity the reputation of a writer. Instead, these predictions rely on a sort of amorphous popular will, with powers beyond any dreamt up by Rousseau. The general will will judge the quick and the dead. That’s the sense.

There are two issues here, actually. One is that the posterity of a work is a form of credentialling – that time awards a good quality seal to the lucky genius. Auden, beautifully, captures this, in my opinion, specious idea:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Auden, In Memory of W.B.Yeats

Auden wrote that in 1939, and part of him knew that time and the Nazis were definitely not pardoning those who lived by language, but condemning them: hence the aborted careers of scores of poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists and the lot. Time may well condemn to very long, or even perpetual, obscurity those writings that have not stuck, in some way, to the usual institutions, or that emanated from condemned ethnicities or genders.

The other issue is projecting one’s own taste and time on the future. Here, we do have historical evidence, although it is never used by any of those who play the game. It is as if posterity hasn’t been there before us. But it has.

So, how should one go about making predictions about the endurance of written work?

Over the long term, my feeling is that the chance of a prediction being fulfilled, at least for the reasons one says it will be fulfilled, is vanishingly small. Remember, for the medievals, the important Latin poet after Virgil was Statius. Statius. Who even recognizes the name? Ovid, Lucretius, or Catullus just weren’t in the running. Lucretius did not have a very great posterity in the Roman world, and only came into European culture, really, when a manuscript of the Nature of Things was discovered in 1417 in Florence, according to Stephan Greenblatt. So over time, posterity is swallowed up in such unexpected events that we can’t guess. We need a more manageable time sequence to answer the question – we need relatively short term posterity. There needs to be at least certain structures that are generally continuous, as, for instance, an economic structure that is generally the same over time, and a structure of religious belief that is also coherent over time. Even so, there are unpredictable contingencies. The Library of Alexandria burned; Franz Kafka’s manuscripts didn’t, despite his dying request. So it goes. Statius, when all is said and done, had a good run – as good as Shakespeare’s. He’s gone now: even the Loeb Classical library is not all that enthusiastic about The Thebiad.

Given these conditions, we can still see patterns in, say, the last three hundred years. Starting in the 18th century, the literary nexus of publishers, the writers, and the audience started to take a modern shape. Writers could come from anywhere, but readers, and publishers, came mostly from the middle class. There was certainly room for the working class and the upper class, but writers that appealed to a working class audience had to eventually appeal to a middle class audience to endure. Aleida Assmann wrote an essay about this for Representations in 1996: Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory . She points out that the mythology of glory, which Burckhardt traces to Dante, and the city state culture of Italy in the fourteenth century, was, for the writer, shaped by the idea of a group who would preserve it, and upon this group was projected contemporary attitudes: true posterity would consist of people like the friends of the poet, gentle people, highborn, with swift minds. It was an almost tactile sense of posterity, posterity with a face. The posterity of the poem was the posterity of the people who read and understood the poem, the educated audience. But in the eighteenth century, the semantic markers shifted. Assman quotes Swift’s preface to the Tale of the Tub to show that the circle was replaced by the seller — the face by the invisible hand, to be slightly anachronistic about it.

One new factor in the manufacture of posterity, in the twentieth century, has been the rise of educational institutions as transmitters of literature in the vulgar tongue. One has to take that into account, as well as the relatively rapid changes that tend to traverse the academy, which is very much a product of capitalism and has been, for the most part, absorbed in the mechanism of vocationalisation. That mechanism, of course, makes sense once we factor in the costs of higher education. In the Anglophone world, the bright Ph.D in English or Comparative Lit might owe as much as 100,000 dollars in student debt, and faces an absolutely pitiless job market. It is no exaggeration to say that the humanities in the U.S. were assassinated by the regime of tuition hikes and the withdrawal of public financing. Education for its own sake, culture for its own sake, it is fair to say, is no longer the major part of the academic mission, and when it is, its teachers feel a nagging guilt. This is because they are betraying their best students – and they know it.

Read the rest here!

Capitalism, Socialism and the ethos of integrity

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, one stumbles upon the lefthand heirs of Burke – Red Tories, as Orwell called them. Orwell’s instincts, at least, were close to theirs: Orwell, after all, wanted a law to make 20 mph the top speed limit in England, a pretty typical Red Tory gesture, gallantly futile. In England, the term would include Ruskin and Chesterton, and the spirit at least of William Morris. In France, you have Charles Peguy and Jacques Ellul. In German speaking countries, there are many more names to choose from – to mention four, Thomas Mann up to the late 20s, Karl Kraus, Georg Simmel and Max Weber.

The Red Tories, by inclination and conviction, were never systematizers. When Burke, in the Reflections, denounces “theorists and economists”, all the progressive planners, he spoke for the tribe. They form something more like a family resemblance than a party. They, too, are in revolt against capitalism, but not because it wounds their sense of equality – on the contrary, what it wounds is their sense of the just order, or the organic society. This comes out in their protest, all the way along the line, in honor something I’m going to call “integrity”. Against integrity, the sense of purposiveness and vocation in life, they saw arrayed two forces: capitalism, with its generation of alienation, its calculations that eat into the integrity of labor, seeing it only as another inter-substitutable commodity, and socialism. Socialism, from their perspective, is merely the bourgeois attitude for workers. The socialists basically want the workers to make more money – they don’t put in doubt the system of production that the workers are engaged in. Socialists are pro-industry.

From the economists viewpoint, whether a person works as a carpenter or sells bubble gum over the counter is a matter of indifference, the product of a labor “market”. Economists do recognize “human capital”, but like any capital, it is invested indifferently, and must be to be efficient. Maximizing profit on all fronts, such is the letter of the law for economists.

The Red Tories saw, as well as Marx, that this social maxim was in deathly struggle with the ethos of integrity.  Integrity, the desire to do the best job possible because of the thing itself, its value in the doing, no doubt stems, as an ethical value, from the artisan class in the early modern period. Or even before, in the ancient urbs. It is significant that the first socialist organizations in France and Britain were composed of a largely artisanal membership – because these people instinctively felt that they were being symbolically degraded under capital. It is also significant that Marx decided, early on, that these were definitely not the people who would lead the advance guard against capitalism. Thus, the complex struggles against anarchists and other non-scientific socialists.

A good and almost programmatic example of the Red Tory exaltation of integrity is found in Charles Peguy’s Money (1913) Peguy never has had much of a following in the Anglophone world. He was an often disagreeable Catholic. Notoriously, his feud with Jaures resulted in some disciple of Peguy’s assassinating the great socialist leader. Peguy was all in for the war against Germany. He volunteered, even at his absurdly advanced age, and was ground up like so many others.

Read the rest at Willetts.

Public opinion- a brief, gnostic history

P.S. is a 42-year-old man who has been affected by paranoid schizophrenia since the age of 20. At the onset of his psychosis, he was trying in various ways to compensate for his difficulties in getting in touch with other people. He had no secure ground to interpret the others’ intentions. He lacked the structure of the rules of social life and systematically set about searching for a well-grounded and natural style of behavior. For instance, he was busy with an ethological study of the “biological” (i.e., not artificial) foundation of others’ behaviors through a double observation of animal and human habits. The former was done through television documentaries, the latter via analyses of human interactions in public parks. An atrophy in his knowledge of the “rules of the game” led him to engage in intellectual investigations and to establish his own “know-how” for social interactions in a reflective way. – Giovanni Stranghellini, At issue: vulnerability to schizophrenia and lack of common sense (2000)

1.

Consensus omnium, common sense and public opinion all exist as separate tracks through the intellectual history of the West – and each trail can be superimposed upon the other.

Early on, in Klaus Oehler’s definitive essay, Der Consensus Ominium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie (1963), there is a quotation from Hesiod. The line quoted comes from the section of the poem devoted to “Days”, with its sometimes obscure reference to work, luck, gods and the days of the seasons.  The line, 760, goes: … and avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but it is hard to undo it. Talk is never completely lost, which has been in the mouths of the many. For talk is itself a God.” Talk, here, is not logos, but pheme – which, as Jenny Strauss Clay points out in Hesiod’s Cosmos, is the antithesis of kleos, that is to say, fame: “kleos is to be heard about, pheme is to be talked about.” This enduring couple still presides, in all their debased divinity, over the newspaper and the news and entertainment channels. They are structured by what is likely, or plausible. Only scandal breaks the dome of plausibility – it lets in air, it lets in horror, it lets in real life, that is, the margin that always escapes generalization.

The plausible as a category (whether epistemic or, what, ontic? From belief to the believable?) concerns the heart of Oehler’s theme. As he points out, Plato’s antipathetic stance regarding opinion – endoxe – is countered by Aristotle’s respect for it. “The positive value of general opinion is, as well, the ground for Aristotle’s preference for commonplaces [Stichwoerter]. It is said that in the peripatetic school, under his direction, a wideranging collection of commonplaces was made.” Furthermore: “… This preference of Aristotle … rested on the matter of fact that in commonplaces the infinitely rich experience of many races was documented in a unique way in brief and trenchant formulas, which is the way the Consensus omnium expressed itself.” [106]

One of the sources of Oehler’s interpretation of Aristotle comes from a fragment, preserved by a latter philosopher, Synesius of Cyrene, in a work boasting the comic title, “In praise of baldness”: “But how could it [common places] not be a [form of wisdom] concerning those things about which Aristotle says that when ancient philosophy was destroyed in the greatest cataclysms of men, the things left behind were preserved because of their conciseness and cleverness.” The mark of fire on the commonplace, the proverb – this is a rich image indeed, and has been the best friend of novelists since Don Quixote. In Bruegel’s painting, Flemish Proverbs, the metaphors contained in sayings are given literal pictorial space. The blind in Bruegel do lead the blind into a ditch. The painting is also known by another title: The World Reversed. The contrast between those two titles already speaks of an alienation from the common place – here we have the seed of what will later become critique in “modernity”.

If Aristotle’s notion of past cataclysms, in which the only fragments of science that survive are common places, is taken modally, that is, is taken to mean that the possibility exists that even the present order, or any order, can be destroyed in the same way, we have the steps leading to the Stoic notion of the eternal return of the same, and a strong tie between that idea and the proverb, or adage: the word in the mouth of all, which returns again and again.  The humanists of the Renaissance, with whom Bruegel associated, felt a strong kinship with the Stoics, in whom they saw the brilliant reflection of ancient wisdom and a certain dovetailing with Christian theology. The Stoics were, as well, an escape from the Aristotle of the schools – from which the humanists were in flight.  In Christian teaching, the apocalypse only happens once and for all: but that apocalypse is trailed by a history of fallen kingdoms, as given in the Old Testament.

Bakhtin, in  Rabelais and His World, borrows (although not literally – Bruegel is curiously unmentioned in Bakhtin’s work)  the Inverted World of Bruegel as a clue to what happens when a novelistic intelligence – one that can hear the Other in the speech of the other, endlessly and even in one’s own speech – comes into contact with the linguistic correlative of the carnivalesque: the coinages of the people in the marketplace, their proverbs, insults and swear words, where the Other in the speech of the other has become stony, bonelike – too explicative. In this regard, there is something metaphysically opportune about Aristotle’s view of the broken wisdom of the people emerging in a tract “in praise of baldness”. As Bakhtin points out, the carnival attaches to physiognomies, to noses, chins, Falstaffian bodies, big ears, etc. In the world of jokes, baldness has a definite place of honor.

It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – during the Baroque – that slang emerged in the books, became the tool of writers. Cant words and latin tags were part of the trove carried about by poor, lusting priests and perpetual students. This was the other side of the fragmented wisdom that had escaped the cataclysm. Daniel Tiffany has pointed out, in his marvelous book, Infidel Poetics: riddles nightlife substance, that slang and slum etymologically are themselves product of slang – slum entered into the language as a slang word denoting slang. Tiffany’s term, nightlife, points to the urban locale in which this culture was born. Peasant speech was simply, to the urban intellectual, unintelligible. Moliere’s Don Juan  made great fun of peasant French. Shakespeare’s clowns – from colonnus, to cultivate the soil – are distinguished by their speech patterns too, although Shakespeare was not into dialect humor like Moliere was, or Rabelais. When Dostoevsky was deported to Siberia for revolutionary activities, he began a notebook in his labor camp in which he wrote down the songs, catchphrases and proverbs of the other prisoners. Later, he used this material in his semi-fictious memoir, Notes from the House of the Dead.  Even Solzhenitsyn, no romantic admirer of thief culture, devoted some pages of the Gulag Archipelago to the poetics of thief’s cant. How could he not? It was Pushkin himself, the supreme instance for every Russian writer until recently, who used thieve’s cant in The Captain’s Daughter, thus creating another site, this one in language itself, of struggle between the legitimate and the illegitimate, between the authentic and the pretender, the real and the fake.

Cant is the ruses of reason elevated to a sub-language, caught in the mouths of rogues and meant to be obscure to all outside a certain sub-society. Yet in fulfilling the function of allowing members to communicate and obscuring communication with others, cant is only one of a species of jargons. There’s a parallel between thief’s cant and the jargon we are familiar with from academics, politicians, and all makers of “public opinion” – phrases that automatically pop up wherever dinner tables become arenas of political discussion – or even the discussion of entertainment.

But where does this conventional wisdom, with its language and conceptual limits, come from? Like rumor, popular opinion appears to be a mysterious social phenomenon, an epidemic of beliefs. Unlike rumor, though, public opinion  started out not as an oral phenomenon, not as what was being said in the supposed crowd, but as a written one. It grew into a semi-institution in correspondence with the growth of the bourgeoisie. Materially, that correspondence was about newspapers: not only what was written in newspapers, or pamphlets, but in the connection between the accelerated power of the printing press – the use of steam power, for instance, exponentially raising the ability of a newspaper press to produce sheets – and the written, the need to ride those blank sheets of paper, to fill them with words and pictures.   

Structurally, our thesis looks like this: the pair pheme/kleos presides over the objects of the news, the commonplace presides over the form. It is the style of the cliché, the proverb, the wisdom of mankind – the conventional wisdom of the moment. The duality of fame and infamy, expressed in cliché, is precisely the form of ‘betise’ that a certain school of modernist writers – Flaubert, Bloy, Peguy, Kraus, Tucholsky, Mencken, Orwell – took as their ultimate enemy, as the cataclysm under which wisdom, some essential relation to truth, was buried. In this way, public opinion became the weapon not of the slave uprising, but the slave catcher. For the latter, too, has his sayings. And he relies on the idea that consensus is better than truth – a substitute for it that allows for a slant that is rarely straightforward lying, but rather a means of clouding any method for finding out what the larger facts of the matter are, the air of the factual in which facts “live”.

See the rest of this article here: Willetts