Euphemism leftism in the neoliberal era

 

For some time, a group has been waging a graffiti campaign against femicide and other violence against women in France. I saw some graffitis in Montpellier this summer. I think, however, that the largest wing of the campaign is taking place in Paris. This morning, there was a slogan on our building: “I am not free until all women are free.” A supposed quote from a famous writer.

This bugged me. I’ve thought most of the grafittis were good – some of them were long narratives, some were stats, some were cries of rage. But this graffiti struck me as, forgive me, typical neoliberal leftism.

Let’s take it for a moment that the slogan is true. If so, one has to ask what “not being free” has actually meant to this famous writer. Is she in chains? Is she out of work? Is she beaten every night? Or does she appear at conferences? Are her words printed in mainstream journals and newspapers? Does she have an academic position, a good retirement lined up, and investments?

If the latter is the case – and I would bet it is – her state of “not-freedom” would be envied by most women in the world. All of which puts into question the valaue of "freedom" - what is it worth? What does it mean? To my ear, the slogan really devalues freedom, putting it in the category of inspirational, as opposed to existential, goods. .

But is the slogan false, then? I don’t think it is false, either. There is a sense in which freedom is systematic. There is a sense that the richest bastard in the world is actually morally and existentially injured by the misery of women who are beaten, raped and killed.

Instead, I would call this an exercise in false consciousness.

To get to this conclusion, let’s use substitution to measure the soundness of such slogans. What does it mean when I substitute, in a situation in which I am a woman who does not happen to have been beaten by a partner last night, or the night before, or maybe ever, the slogan. “I am beaten as long as women are beaten.” Or, even, if I, as a man, make that statement? What it does conjoin a truth– there are women who are beaten – with a lie (I am not being beaten, I do not have a domestic situation in which I am beaten, and all the beaten women of the world do no make me, X, beaten). Instead of showing solidarity, it falsifies solidarity. It leads to purely verbal action – a kind of euphemistic liberalism that substitutes, in the cruelest way, theatrical gesture for real social action.

One of the results of the vast breakup of organized labor as a force and a culture is that solidarity increasingly means: slogans and the maintenance of the order as it is, with platforms given to those who criticize it – even violently - without ever really doing anything to change it. To this extent, the criticism of cancel culture or “wokeness” has a point. Unfortunately, that criticism is not usually aimed at overturning the system either – it is rather sticking the tongue out at those who sense that the order is rotten and unjust. Social life is complex, and there is a struggle on the plane of history, of attitude, of what is said, all of which is imbricated in the social struggles of ordinary life – those struggles that would result in justice for beaten and murdered women, and structures that would make women safe – safe on the most primitive level.

I think, even, that there is a connection between the false bottom of the slogan and the con artistry of that Jewish woman from Kansas city, who claimed to be Afro-Rican.

What the anti-femicide group is doing is, I think, a nation-wide charivari. Eugen Weber has pointed out, in Peasants into Frenchmen, that the charivari, a ritualized riot, was a form of social control in peasant societies that controlled, to an extent, violence against women, in as much as it often targeted men who beat their wives. Of course, 19th century peasant societies were not exactly friendly to women, but social control was exerted at those whose violence went beyond the conditions that the village could tolerate. The anti-femicide charivari doesn’t need neoliberal inspirational slogans (although I understand well that inspirational slogans are part and parcel of what the people want. It is a dark, harsh world, and we want some light).

 

poem

 

In the pool at Aquaboulevard

the swimmers bob in the denatured wave

for five minutes every hour.

 

I check the affiche for the slides

which grades them for difficulty and age.

Adam wants to do them all.

 

Here’s the mangrove hot tub!

Here’s the 20 person jacuzzi!

The naiads are all dead.

 

Poor dears, they lived fearful lives

singing the blues under crystalline rivulets.

I do not think they will sing for us.

 

We invented fun

in the headlong 20^th century

grading our sensations accordingly.

 

Screaming down the intestinal turns

of the Aquaraft

I forgot my connection to the greater whole.

Martin Buber and the tree 1

 

Freud once famously said thaat sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. In fact, the Freud who said this might well be the folklore Freud. Still, the Apocrypha counts. Derrida famously tried to show that an example is never just an example, although as far as I know, he never approached Freud’s cigar ( he confined himself to Baudelaire’s tobacco use).

I’m with Derrida on this. The cigar example is a good example of an example that goes a bit far, part of the identikit of Freud with the masculine-marked brown tube in his mouth. What is interesting about the fake saying is that it is supposed to be an example of something that isn’t an example, that will stubbornly remain the thing that it is, just the thing that it is. And in making it exemplarily non-exemplary, the fake Freud is offering us a counterfeit, something  parasitic on a systems of markers of value that isn’t, as it happens, what it seems to be. How was the cigar chosen to be this exemplary non-example – that is the question.

I don’t want to ask that question of the cigar, though. I want to take up the logic of self-identification and its melodrama as it applies to the tree.

I ran into the tree while reading, for the first time, Martin Buber’s I and You (I and thou in the English translation, although the “thou” is a bit too muschmouthed for the plain old German “du”). I have never read this book because Buber has a vague reputation, one I can’t quite pin down, as one of the middle class prophets, the wise men who talk about the “crisis of man”, to borrow the title of Mark Greif’s book. And just as Humbert Humbert is (unjustly) snobby about Charlotte Haze’s “Great Books”, I, too, have been unjustly snobby about the American wisemen of the fifties – the Niebuhrs, the Herschels, et al. – and the Europeans that were published under their aegis – a gallery that definitely included “I and Thou”, published by Simon and Schuster, and licked by the PR department ever since. The term “dialogue”, which had quite the history at the height of American liberalism in the 1960s, owes a debt to Buber.

Snobbishness is the counterfeit of good taste. I’ve laid it down and laid it down as I’ve gotten old and gray. And I occasionally remember that what I know about intellectual history is based, ultimately, on the Will and Ariel Durant books that I read in the seventh and eighth grade – still a good place to get an education, albeit a Eurocentricl one.

To summarize a bit: Buber starts out contrasting the I-you and the I-it relations. He elides the third person, at first, altogether. There’s an anecdote in a wonderful essay on Buber by Avishai Margalit for the NYRB, November 4, 1993, that backgrounds the he/she/they aversion:

“Buber describes an encounter he had in Berlin with the aged, influential pastor Wilhelm Hechler. After several hours of conversation Hechler was suspicious of Buber and before they parted asked him directly, “Do you believe in God?” Buber tried to reassure Hechler that he did, but the answer he thought he ought to have given him, the answer he spent his whole life trying to articulate, came to him on the way home: “If belief in God means speaking about Him in the third person, then I don’t believe in God. But if belief means being able to speak to Him in the second person, then I do believe.’”

For Buber, the I-you relationship creates the possibility for there being a moral and religious domain – or I should perhaps put this in reverse: that there is a moral and religious domain points to the possibility of there being an I-you relationship. Although, unlike Kierkegaard, Buber does not want us to clearly distinguish the moral from the religious. This is an important point: Buber’s supposed existentialism differs in significant ways from other existentialists.

Post-Shoah Jewish philosophers, strongly influenced by Levinas, begin the moral and religious realm with the face. The human face.

Buber, however, begins not with the human face, but with a tree.

A tree.

  “I and You” was published in 1923. Like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it reflects both the pre-war sense of an old world coming apart and the catastrophe that occurred when the old world committed suicide by trench. There are textual commonalities: although we now look at the Tractatus as a philosophy text, in comparison with philosophy treatises both then and now. It doesn’t reference other arguments, or rarely, it is all about stating (The world is all the case is), and of course at the end of the book it pulls the ladder up and reveals that the book, in as much as it has been philosophical, has been nonsensical .  Wittgenstein once remarked that he wondered if philosophy could be written as a joke book – forgetting that he’d already done that with the Tractatus.

Buber had different teachers – notably George Simmel – and was evidently influenced by the Expressionists, who were evidently influenced by Zarathustra. I and You looks like a philosophical poem, just as Simmel’s sociology often looks like Baudelaire’s poems in prose.

Like Simmel, Buber was fascinated by links, connections, relations. For him, these are primary. In this, he’s following not only Simmel, but a Kabbalistic thematic. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, in Lire aux eclats (1993), writes of the dialogue between the masters of the Midrash or Talmud (the mahloquet) ax proceeding in a space of between that reflects on and in the interval.

“Thought is the thought of the interval, of the entre-deux. Rather than a distinct and certain point of view, each perspective represents a crossing of threads knotted interiorly, an infinitely complicated network, always turning and always subject to turn.”

Ouaknin is a rabbi, while Buber was a non-practicing Jew. As a Rabbi, Ouaknin resists the absolute overturning of hierarchies and oppositions that would destructure, for instance, man/animal (for instance) (that is quite an instance( (an overdetermined instance that turns and is subject to turn).

Buber was not so sure.

I lie to power

 

I lie to power – I never tell the truth.

Power comes in through the wiring and  mail

and from sharp instruments they keep in the booth

of the GP’s office, tap tap; any frail

 

who thinks she’ll win first place for speaking

out her version to the proper guys,

 will find soon enough that her life is leaking

out in big bad droplets down her thighs.

 

Power loves the truth – as long as you’re telling it

they’ll jot it down and file it with your pass.  

Lie to the authorities, whisper when you’re yelling it

- never let them know  when you’re showing them your ass.

A voice, a vice

Give unto God what is God’s

and to the mudwrestlers what are the mudwrestlers’.

The girls work for tips, gents - the girls work for tips.

  

(Don’t we all, darling!)

The kingdom of bog is within me.

One forever morning ago

 

the Georgia red clay stuck its dog tongue

down my throat, and since

I’ve tried scrubbing it out and scraping it out

 

(gents, the ladies work for tips)

but it doesn’t go. The tinge remains

- shaming me, shaming me - on my flow.

- Karen Chamisso

Peter Baker - perhaps the worst reporter of his generation!

 I have a special affection for Peter Baker. He is, perhaps, the worst reporter of his generation. It is a much coveted title, and so many others have struggled for the fool's gold, but Baker always carries it away by his delightful blend of sycophancy and an inability to analyse that would make a brick proud. His portrait of Trump, in the NYT, is full of Bakerisms, too many to count! It starts out with promise, and just gets better: "For a man on the edge of history, President Trump sounded calm and relaxed." This is a lesson to all reporters - you begin portentiously, and proceed to produce, oh, the prose equivalent of earwax. The edge of history? Well, it is a wonder someone on the edge of history sounds calm and relaxed - not just calm, and not just relaxed, but a twofer! and that's your lead. The lead could have been - for a man with a nineinch dick (as has been the case of all our great presidents!), President Trump has the most awesome voice, and I shivered to hear it over the phone talking to little me! Sure, Baker considered it, fact checked it on Google (do all preznits has 9 incher?) but then - cause he's a reporter and a writer - he scratched it out. It might seem too intimate. How about the edge of history? Ah, that's the spirit!

The wonders of Bakery are here for the fans. For instance, this paragraph, after the one where Baker asks: how have you changed? A question his teacher gave him points for in the eighth grade - and which he has treasured ever since. The man on the edge of history, calmly and relaxedly, replied:

“I think I really am a little bit more circumspect.”

Which brings about this incredibly amazing analysis (which his eighth grade teacher might have frowned about - how to encourage Pete while discouraging, uh, his tendency to truism?)

"By that he seemed to mean that he had hardened after the many investigations and political attacks that have characterized his presidency. But he is not one for introspection. How would he be different in a second term? Really not much at all. “I think I’d be similar,” he said. Which is exactly what his supporters want and his opponents fear."

You can write this way forever! And get the big bucks from the NYT, which is nice. Especially as the man on the edge of history has been nice to people in Pete and Susan's income bracket.

Quiet history

 

The municipal libretto weaves together all kinds of speeches and rhythms, from the American east coast tourist to the Tunisian proprietor of the kebab shop. Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese – when I go out in the Marais, this is what I expect to pick up.

Covid has marked a change. A change that has not been marked, or at least I have not read about it yet - a moment in Paris’s phonic history. This spring and summer, the tourists are gone. I walk down Vielle de Temple, I walk down Rue de Bretagne, and from the cafes arise: only French. Paris has not been this French, I think, in a long time. Maybe since the Commune. Like an American chiropteroid, my ears are keen for American, and since I’ve lived here – going back to 2010 - I’ve felt how in the great Paris opera there is a strong American current. Paris is as much the New Yorker as it is Le Monde. I don’t have the figures, but I’d guess that perhaps 100,000 Americans live in the greater Paris area. Plus a considerable portion of the annual 30 million who pass through Paris, tourists or dealers, students or bankers, etc.

I wonder if French ears have picked up on the subtle difference in the soundscape. In the 20s, when American literature shifted to Paris, the Americans lived in their own bubble, and the French in their’s. There’s a wonderful book by the Canadian writer Paul Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, about the Americans - and Canadians. It was a tribe concerned with art, sex, and drinking, and the vague perception that the French were either experts at all these things, unlike the Puritanical Americans, or at least took a laissez faire attitude. It was a great exculpatory myth for a lot of bad behavior. It goes back from before the twenties - it is in Hnery James’ The Ambassadors, and Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. It has lasted to this day: check out NYT bestsellers, where there is, standardly, once a year at least some little book about French eating, seduction, etc.

I think of Nietzsche, who hung out in backwaters of Italy – although he showed the good taste to prefer Turin – and who had an ear:

“What comes out worst in translating from one language to another is the tempo of its style: which has its footing in the character of the race, physiologically speaking, in the average tempo of its “metabolism”. There are honorably meant translations that are almost falsifications, inadvertent vulgarisations of the original, simply because its pleasing tempo and bravura cannot be translated, the property which leap over and helps us to escape all the menace of things.”