Critical criticism after my dejeuner

 

1.

There is a famous passage in Marx and Engel’s Germany Ideology, which was written in 1846, set aside, and published in 1932. It reads:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. “

There are two schools of interpretation about this passage. One reads it as a genuine attempt to imagine a society in which the bonds of the division of labor are lifted. The other reads it as satire.

Myself, being Mr. Split the difference, I read it as a comic bit with a serious nub. In other words, I view this as a typical example of Marx’s romantic humor – a post-Hegelian humor which he shares with other disillusioned romantics of the 1840s, like Kierkegaard and his future enemy, Herzen.

This humor is, above all, gleeful. It exaggerates. Exaggeration holds within itself a truth, or a fact – and in this it is opposed to the lie. The lie, to be successful, conforms to the informal rules of plausibility – while an exaggeration, to be successful, flouts those rules. In particular, it takes a fact out of the plausible and subjects it to a field in which we have lost our grip on proportion. Proportion, which we tend to assume, is of course only as good as the other assumptions with which it is bound. Although we all know now, from pop science books, that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause untold changes in the universe – one of those “truths” of complexity theory – this knowledge can’t really be felt, even by those who are at the extreme end of the paranoid spectrum. In this sense, the credo of the new atheist/rationalist crowd – that facts don’t care about your feelings – gets things completely backwards. Without feelings, a whole spectrum of them, facts would not make any sense – they’d be unavailable to you.

Glee, which was taken up by romantics like De Quincy – or even pre-romantics, like De Sade – is thematized as “agony” in Mario Praz’s famous book, The Romantic Agony – which is still worth reading, although I’d bet my De Quincey that it is not on the curriculum for most grad students in literary studies.  Anyway, Marx was fully conversant with that form of humor – like Heine, or like the Russians, Gogol and the early Dostoevsky.

There are complex truths stuck in Marx’s squib. One of the lesser ones is that criticizing is on the same plane as hunting or harvesting. It is one of the structures of a liberal, developed economy – although it is far more important in an underdeveloped, backwards economy like Germany’s in the 1840s than it is in a fully developed one. Still, in a fully developed economy, on its way to a social democracy that allows a certain equality of the quality of life – measured exactly by its freedom from the slavery of the division of labor – there is and must be room for speculation.

Or to sum this up in a good, 1950-ish way: Man is the speculative animal.

2.

I’m a fundamentally bad lego man. I always put my weightiest bits on the top of the column, and the lightest underneath.

So, sue me.

Anyway, I take criticism and literature as important functions in a “developed economy” – which may well be simply a self-justifying gesture that helps me think, well, I am doing my bit. Perhaps my bit is meant to be spent organizing demonstrations, etc.  After all, I am living in the slops of the twentieth century, in a society that seemingly hasn’t budged since the 1980s. The social neurosis is killing us.

However, it is at just such times – times much like the 1840s – that glee becomes charged with lightning. One has to have a strong streak of gleefulness to read today’s newspapers or social media, turning hatereading into exaltation, and one’s enemies into involuntary dance partners. Repulsion, to the gleefully morbid mind, is half of attraction.

This is, I think, where Marx as a dialectician sometimes outsmarted himself. As a publicist and writer, though, he knew his strengths – which is why he ultimately shoved the German Ideology project aside and went on to other projects. The importance of the German Ideology, to me, is that it presents a sort of stylistic key to Marx. Like all the 1840s romantics, glee and dialectics remained his rock n roll, but he was careful with them. He knew that they might open up the world – de-proportion the proportions – but that they were only steps to get back into the world as a struggle.

So I like to think that, through social media, we might, if we overthrow those social conditions that are handily summed up in the term “neoliberalism” – we just might – might – criticize after dinner. Or, as I am doing now, here, after lunch.

Institutional malingering: something is rotten in the States

 

In the British Medical Journal, September 13, 1913, John Collie, M.D., J.P., authored  a note on “Malingering”, which he connected, like any sensible English utilitarian, with the recent debate about the costs of some sort of National Insurance – just the kind of taxpayer fund that the working class would target with all their illnesses:

“The question of feigning or exaggerating illnesses has of late attraced considerable attention in this country, but it is a mistake to suppose that the condition is of recent origin. Those who have to advise insurance companies know that exaggerated and fraudulent claims are, at any rate, as old as the accident laws.”

Malingering became one of those twentieth century occasions to battle it out about what, exactly, we are to do with diseases of the soul, once we have painlessly and scientifically proven that the soul doesn’t exist. Tricky, that.

I think the twenty first century problem is not the malingering of individual patients: it is the malingering of institutions. In particular, the Democratic party in the U.S. seems to have come down with a nasty case of it. If feigned illness could lead to real death, the Democratic party would be dead by now. It isn't: it is merely zombified. Symptomatically, the party is now presenting its loyal voters with the cute notion that a senile Senator, in a state of health where her best option is to prepare her soul and stay in contact with her loved ones, has no special reason to resign her seat, even if she will never again be able to fill it properly or do her duty. Now, we must preserve her place in the committee that votes on judicial nominations because we don't know what else to do. Otherwise, we would have to work, which would mean appointing a bunch of judges which would destroy the millionaire order that has richly benefitted us all! Besides, really, is it that important, judges  – those petty things that can, for instance, decree the criminalization of the abortion pill. Which we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about!

Institutional malingering should be of as much interest to social psychologists as malingering has been to psychology in general. How is it that the twenty first century consists of chickenshit parties ruling over decayed republics and unable to do any useful thing to avert the catastrophes that are eating up the young and creating suicidal conditions for the old? How is it that the U.S.A., from which I sprang, that country which, while deathdealing on a global scale, also produced a culture within which civil rights movements actually produced change – that unevenly democracy-tending place – how is it that malingering and malice have become its face to the world? From the legalized lynching of the homeless to the tyranny of lunatic judges on the dumbest Supreme Court ever assembled from the hayseeds that invest our law schools, all we see is bad shit.  The political structure is crap, and everybody knows it. The energy to fix it seems to go, instead, into an infinitely self-satisfied establishmentarianism that is all about why we can’t fix it.

Things go bad in small ways at first, and then in large ways, and then all at once. Fortunes collapse, nations go rotten. And we go around with the taste of the institutional malingers in our mouths. This is not how life is meant to be lived.

The gerontocratic spectacle

 

When Charles was on the brink of thirty, he made a speech to the Cambridge Union in which he said: My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is.’  The coronation, which I saw – to the length that any tv watcher could stand it – was in line with that statement.

I don’t think I have seen a tv spectacle that was at once so “spectacular” and so heart numbingly boring since the great OJ chase of the nineties, when television discovered that large numbers of people would watch hours of traffic as long as it was accompanied by commentary and celebrity. OJ, at least, in his prime, did experience beauty. Watching documentaries of his great time as a running back for the Buffalo Bills, even a non-fan of the game such as myself could see that here was twentieth century art, to put up against any ballet or modern dance. The OJ who was chased, the bloodstained golfer and future author of If I Did It, was the aftermath of that transcendence – a flat figure, a NPC.

Charles has brushed up against transcendence, but from his horrendous upbringing to his horrendous marriage to his crowning, at the age of fucking 300, he has always been a non-playing character. In Rosemary Hill’s LRB piece about Charles and Camilla, she notes that throughout his career, the word used about Charles is “sad”, or “terribly sad”. As she also notes, nobody pitied Charles as much as he pitied himself. In this, if in little else, he matched his first wife – a flat figure who was meant to race around with seedy Eurotrash trust funders, but ended up, much to her disgust and his, with a Euro-non-trash trust funder.

The ceremony we saw emphasized how very much we are run by a global gerontocracy. Their messenger boys – the Prime Minister of the U.K, the president of France – are greasy with the task of fucking us all over, which they engage in with business school discipline. From the doddering Archbishop of Canterbury (who, at one point, must kneel to pray some kind of prayer, creating the one drama of the whole tedious scene – would he manage to get up on his feet by himself?) to the closeups of Charles, peering seedily around him under those untrimmed eyebrows, this festival in the retirement home of Westminster Abby begged for some, any ironic counterpoint. Instead of getting what we should have had - a series of torch songs of increasing melancholy – we got a thousandth iteration of tween choral music. In order to retain the innocence of those angelic voices, one noticed that Prince Andrew was not present.

In the end, as much as I hate the monarchy and the spectacle of the monarchy, I ended up feeling sorry for Charles. What a waste of middle manager potential, this guy who, if he had not had a fascoid prince of a father and a mother who clearly didn’t like him and wouldn’t die, could have had a happy life as, say, the VP in charge of petrodollar accounts at some City bank! He’d be retired with Camilla in Spain by now, indulging himself with the local vintages and participating in the gentle art of tai chi!

The song that should have been performed, Ithink, is the cover of the Tears for Fears song from Donnie Darko. But it wouldhave spoiled Charles’ one happy day.

 

The silly and the soulful

When Adam was in maternal – kindergarten for those of you in the States - in Santa Monica,  the teachers keep a running file on his moods that included such things as angry, interested, lethargic, etc. One of the great categories was silly.
 
Now Adam is in the fifth grade, and, alas, the seriousness of life is settling in. Not for him or his classmates, not yet. But the teachers now are down on silly like a gardner is down on weeds. Say what you will of the dandelion, we don’t want it among the carrots.
 
And isn’t life just carrots?
 
Well, no.
 
I’ve been silly my whole life, if nothing else. But I recognize the powers that be.
 
The oxford english dictionary comes down pretty harshly on silly. Their primary definitions are “Ridiculously trivial”, “lack of common sense” – such is the voice of the scold, disguised as a lexicographer. But some of the first instances of “seely” means worthy or holy. In the fifteenth century, “sylyman prob. has the sense ‘goodman, husband’.In “late Middle English (in the sense 'deserving of pity or sympathy'): alteration of dialect seely 'happy', later 'innocent, feeble', from a West Germanic base meaning 'luck, happiness.' “ Seele is of course soul in German. Now, the tarot of accidental etymological encounters is no positive science, as the German philosophers say, but one of the forms of pataphysics. Still, I like this now dead meaning, which connects having a soul with having fun. Artificial intelligence, such as is displayed by the newspaper opinion writer and the middle manager, does not recognize this connection. But, to be all radical and silly about it, there is no intelligence without fun.
 
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it.
 
To have soul, in the colloquial sense, doesn’t mean being silly –or at least that is not one of the emphasized facets. However, anybody who has ever listened to Sun-Ra knows that there is a deep cousinship between silly and soul. There is a “deep silly”.
 
What does a man gain if he trades his silly for the world? Nothing. As Ralph Ellison once said, winner’s lose.

 

corruptions of empire - the case of Sean McElwee

 

In his essay, The New York Gold Conspiracy, about the exploits of those great American rogues, Jay Gould and Jim Fiske – the former likened to a spider, the latter a comic giant who never told the truth (so as to keep in practice with the lying), Adams has some Gibbonesque fun with the Erie Railroad, the corporate entity that those two swindlers controlled. It employed 15,000 people, and 773 miles of road in all. And it was bound to the direct control of its owners: “Over all this wealth and influence, greater than that directly swayed by any private citizen, greater than is absolutely and personally controlled by most kings, and far too great for the public safety either in a democracy or in any other form of society, the vicissitudes of a troubled time placed two men in irresponsible authority ; and both these men belonged to a low and degraded moral and social type. Such an elevation has been rarely seen in modem history. Even the most dramatic of modern authors, even Balzac himself, who so loved to deal with similar violent alternations of fortune, or Alexandre Dumas, with all his extravagance of imagination, never have reached a conception bolder or more melodramatic than this…”

Adams  insight – that the extent of the control of wealth by private agents has a direct bearing on both public safety and democracy – has long been lost in the liberal logrolling that allows vast fortunes free range while extolling the republics in which these matters go down as “democratic.”

Yet the liberal is right in being, at least, relativistic – there are degrees of anti-democracy. Adams was describing the start of the Gilded Era – gilding being fake gold, a counterfeit value, bling that is always too showy – hence, bling bling. As counterfeit value becomes the standard of value, corruption becomes less a marginal inroad on the law and more the structure around which law is built.

The American 21^st century is an amazingly resplendent blingheap of corruption, from a Supreme Court in which justices plea that they are not bribed when they receive bribes from the rich because they are congenital prostitutes for the wealthy anyway to war profiteers who are never punished for their mercenary crimes and use the money they make to buy media and politicos to crypto currency (pseudo currency) frauds who purchase key members of both parties to ram through legislation to legalize their systematic thievery. I recommend highly the Washington Post’sexcerpt of a book by Ben Terris, which concentrates on an operative named SeanMcElwee – a man who went from libertarian right to progressive radical to reactionarycentrist, a panoply of causes he would discard at will, in service ultimatelyto the one thing he cared about, gambling. This kid, for he has still not breeched his twenties, became, briefly, a powerful wheeler dealer among Dems in Biden’s first two years. Lord knows, he was a tyro of bad takes, which is powerfully attractive to the centrist mindset – but what set him apart is that he would take polls for his Dem clients and used them to make bets about the outcomes of elections. The latter was his passion. Perhaps in order to have more to gamble, he secretly set up a polling outfit for Sam Bankmen-Fried – and briefly went into the effective altruism cult. The polling outfit worked for a retired Republican senator.

The fun and games and mocking of legality here is all Sean McElwee’s business, but the opportunities were provided by the culture. America has as bad a political culture as you can have in a quasi-democracy. It is insanely dysfunctional, filled with passionate predators and egotists who race from think tank to cable news channel and generally try to make people unhappy and hateful. Unhappy and hateful people are great defences against doing anything about the malefactors of great wealth. That is what they are for. Corruption is not simply a perversion of a healthy system, it what the casino is built on.

situation comedy, the good, the bad, and the "allegedly" rapist

 All happy families are situation comedies. All unhappy families are situation comedies, too.

This is the wisdom of television, I have been impressed with this wisdom for about three, four years – which is when we started ending our nights with Adam by watching a television series. One series at a time. We started with the Office, the American version, and we have worked our way through Schitt’s Creek, Brooklyn 99, Fresh off the Boat, and Blackish. Each time we have completed the entire cycle – partly because Adam is, as he puts it, a completist.

I’ve been perfectly happy with our choices, even if we all have various complaints about this or that show, gag, character, etc.

But our last choice threw me: Scrubs. Right away the music made me grit my teeth – the bastard children of alternate radio’s obsession with the Hooty and the Blowfish sound, the bane of the nineties. But more, I was thrown by the racism and the sexism. The racism was pretty much in your face – it was white liberal racism, jokey and nervous. And the sexism was on all levels.

The show has a voice over by the chief protagonist. These shows tend to a form that combines skit and parable – the narrator ends the show, almost always, with some moralizing reflections. I find that format uncomfortable. Blackish, another show we saw, also took this form. The problem with the protagonist drawing the moral for the viewer is that the viewer has to trust the protagonist. If the protagonist is creepy, however – as was the father in Blackish and the doctor in Scrubs – the moralizing ending seems more self-congratulation and rationalizing than clever and witty.

Work comedy series, from what I have seen, impose the family image on the work environment, while family comedies often bring work into the family. In Scrubs, the hospital becomes both a hunting ground of romance and a “friends” network. The romance introduces an incestuous element into the family metaphor. The comedy of transgression is, of course, something comedians are enormously proud of, as if they all came out of Lenny Bruce’s thigh. Transgressive comedy coming from highly paid white dudes in America, however, is going to be … well, what highly paid white dudes in America conventionally think. It is convention in the offensive mode.

That is written all over the character development in this show. The characters are unrelievedly creepy. This began to puzzle me. Usually, these shows go through my mind like water through a sieve. A few laughs, Adam is entertained, then brushing of teeth, reading, lights out. But Scrubs seemed extraordinarily strange. Though, like the Office, it was about saying the unsaid, unlike the Office, which used formal devices to distance us from the characters, this show used devices to get us to identify with characters who were, well, creepy. In one typical show, a surgeon makes a sexist joke, operating on a teen, and slips up, thus somehow destroying the hand mobility of said teen, who is on a scholarship to Julliard. The show ends on the moralizing note, with the surgeon telling the teen that it was his fault there was the little blip in surgery – but not of course that he was telling a joke when he made his bad move. And the viewer is given a little morality about the surgeon taking responsibility.

I was like, What?

So we decided to switch to another show, although Adam still wants to watch the season through of Scrubs. And I looked up stuff about Scrubs to see if my reactions were shared. Which is how I stumbled on the story of the man who wrote Scrubs episodes and got fired for obscure reasons: Eric Weinberg. A man who went from sitcom writers room to sitcom writers room, while “allegedly” raping eighteen women. The story in Hollywood Reporter is fascinating and very depressing – a sort of look into how the sausage (joke) is made. The cultural products of America go crazy – cause they are made in just this way.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/.../eric-weinberg-kept.../

An excerpt:

Weinberg’s longevity raises questions about what kind of behavior was accepted not only by his agency but in certain writers rooms. Though it was a different time, legislation barring sexual harassment — including conduct that creates a hostile work environment — had long been on the books. The definition of harassment in a writers room, however, has never been clear. Entertainment is a creative business, and it is accepted that writers must have the freedom to express raunchy or off-color ideas — a principle reinforced by the dismissal of a 2004 sexual-harassment lawsuit filed by an assistant in the Friends writers room. Several women who worked with Weinberg after that decision say they believe that the ruling emboldened men who were inclined to harass women.

However murky the definition of harassment, Weinberg’s conduct was enough to get him fired from Scrubs more than a decade before reporting on Harvey Weinstein launched the #MeToo movement. When news broke of Weinberg’s arrest, many former colleagues expressed horror, but not surprise. One female writer says that of all the men she’s worked with, “he was the shittiest and he was the most brazen. When I found out, I was disgusted, and it explained so much.”

imaginary lives

 Marcel Schwob’s preface to his Vies imaginaires makes a plea for the vita as art, instead of history. History, Schwob writes, aims at the general, and puts the stress in the meaning of human lives in their connection with greater events. For history, “all individuals have value only because they have modified events or made them deviate.” Art, on the other hand, “doesn’t classify; it de-classifies.”

The preface carries out the argument, such as it is, with brio. But the imaginary lives do not all carry out that de-classifying imperative. The life of Herostratus, for instance, distinctly lacks a certain detail – or rather, Schwob lacks a certain wonder at this detail.

Herostratus was famous, or infamous, for having torched the temple of Artemis in Epheseus. Schwob does an interesting, proleptic thing about Herostratus by describing him from the beginning in terms of the tortures to which he was subjected after his act. This proleptic magic act is nice. I applaud it. But then, when we read the end of the life, we get this:

“The twelve cities of Ionia forbad, on penalty of death, the announcing of Herostratus name to future ages. But the murmur has come just as far as us. The night when Herostratus torched the temple of Epheseus, Alexander, kind of Macedonia, was born.”

For those of us more historian than artist – or who reject Schwob’s division – there is much lost in that “murmur.” How is it that, somehow, the agent of this particular fait divers was able to avoid a suppression that seems, given the time, the lack of news save by messenger and singer, and the penalty, to have more appropriately submerged that pyromaniac fameseeker?

How do secrets get passed along?

Pessoa wrote an essay on Erostratus in English, which was discovered, like much of Pessoa’s work, after his death. The English is a bit brushed up and too too British, but Pessoa makes a deep remark about Erostratus’s, so to speak, existential figuration.

“His act may be compared, in a way, to that terrible element of the initiation of the Templars, who, being first proven absolute believers in Christ – both as Christians, and in the general tradition of the Church, and as occult Gnostics and therefore in the great particular tradition of Christianity, had to spit upon the Crucifix in their initiation. The act may seem no more than humanly revolting from a modern standpoint, for we are not believers, and, when, since the romantics, we defy God and hell, defy things which for us are dead and thus send challenges to corpses. But no human courage, in any field or sea where men are brave with mere daring, can compare with the horror of that initiation. The God they spat upon was the holy substance of Redemption. They looked into hell when their mouths watered with the necessary blasphemy.”

Pessoa no doubt read Schwob. The Templar story was, of course, a legend transmitted by way of the trials of the Templars, who were overthrown in a power struggle that sought justification, as so many do, in a courtroom padded with lies and crooked lawyers. But secret calls to secret – the initiation of the Templars was a secret kept within the group, and yet it forced itself out – a necessary blasphemy – to future generations.

It is hard to keep a secret. And it is hard to say why it is hard to keep a secret.