Ekman addendum

“I did not know the Fore language, but with the help of a few boys who had learned Pidgin from a missionary school, I could go from English to Pidgin to Fore and back again.” – Paul Ekman

There was some ... strenuousity ... about LI’s big post yesterday. I re-wrote the damn thing several times to make it clearer My point is not that there are no emotional universals. I expect that there might be – although the universals might well be of form, the way emotions are assembled, rather than content. But one can be neutral about the universality of the emotions and still find the method by which these universals were ‘discovered’ in the 1960s a very curious, and yet very familiar, concoction. We have seen experts discovering ‘homosexuality’ in the face before. We have seen experts pondering the meaning of drawn or photographed faces before, too. In fact, there was a physiognomic literature in Babylon.

What is curious is that, in spite of using Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson as his (imaginary) interlocutors – his version of Descartes demon - Paul Ekman seems to have never questioned why the emotional universals were best expressed in Western languages and customs. He never seems, even, to have been puzzled by the fact that among scientists themselves, there have been and there continues to be strong disagreement about what emotions even are. If the rather small social cohort of psychologists are divided, even, on such basic questions as the origin of emotion – do emotions begin as a physiological stance and result in a feeling, or is the line of causation just the opposite? – then it would seem a very bold step indeed to simply ignore questions of affective sense making among the population one is taking photos of and questioning.

Anna Wierzbicka, in Emotions Across Languages and Cultures, makes a nice remark here:

“Until recently many scholars refused to believe that the categorization of ‘emotions’ can differ from language to language and insisted that at leas tsome ‘emotions’ must be linguistically recognized in all languages. There can no longer be any dobut, however, that this is not the case. Although much more is know about this diversity now then twenty or thirty years ago, the basic fact that in principle “emotion words” don’t match was known at that time too. Even an extreme ‘universalist” like Paul Ekman, who has claimed for decades that the same “basic emotions” (i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise, cf Ekman 1973 219-220; see also Ekman 1993, 1994a and b) are recognized in all cultures, acknowledged more than twenty years ago that the Dani people of the New Guinea Highlands, whose faces and “emotions” he had studied in the field, “don’t even have words for the six emotions” (Ekman 1975: 39)

There is a certain deep ... smugness about this whole enterprise. Why are we to think that the cut and fit of the English affective vocabulary turns out to exactly match universal emotions? What if it had had turned out that, say, the Ifaluk vocabulary was a better match for the emotional universals? That we would have to carve out, as our universal, a little bit of greed and a little bit of anger to express the universal emotion x, say. Or that a bit of anger, a bit of fear, a bit of surprise – something like awe – is the real universal emotion y. But no, English by a great stroke of luck has carved out exactly the universal emotions we as human beings are all equipped with. Congratulations, you Anglo Saxons and Norman invaders! Excellent job. We are all so proud.

One should note that surprise isn’t universally accepted among psychologists as an emotion at all. Jerome Kagan, for one, rejects it as an emotion. It is included by Ekman, however, because surprise does have a distinct facial expression. That facial expressions express emotion, for Ekman, means that emotion can be defined by way of facial expression – and thus, if there is a surprise face, there is a surprise emotion.

Well, I’m going to leave Ekman for a bit and return to physiognomy.

More Ekman: from facial expression to emotion

Paul Ekman’s account of his decision to go to New Guinea is related in his book, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication.

Ekman and Wally Friesen were working, at that time - in the late sixties - on the initial conceptualizing of a research project that could pick out universal emotions. To do this, Ekman decided he needed evidence of the passional life of some culture remote from Western society. He knew Carleton Gajdusek, “a neurologist who had been working for more than a decade in such isolated places in the highlands of Papua New Guinea...” And he knew Gajdusek had taken film of the Fore group. Gajdusek was working on kuru – a disease that literally creates holes in the brain. Gajdusek's work was crucial to the discovery of the prion, and he won a Nobel Prize for it after the same kind of disease - Mad Cow disease - turned up in the West.

“The films [the one hundred thousand feet of motion picture film shot by Gjdusek among New Guinea’s Stone age cultures – who, he realized, “would soon disappear” ] contained two very convincing proofs of the universality of facial expressions of emotion. First, we never saw an unfamiliar expression. If facial expressions are completely learned, then these isolated people should have shown novel expressions, ones we had never seen before. There were none.

It was still possible that these familiar expressions might be signals of very different emotions. But while the films didn’t always reveal what happened before or after an expression, when they did, they confirmed our interpretations. If expressions signal different emotions in each culture, then total outsiders, with no familiarity with the culture, should not have been able to interpret the expressions correctly.”

Ekman thus recognizes that there is a two fold task before him. However, at the very beginning of this project, we already see an omission in the way the research is constructed that hints at a system of omissions. We begin not, as in a psychological experiment of the classical type, with the person on whose face the emotion is imprinted. That person is not only absent, but their own self reports are not even under consideration. The first person aspect of emotion is, as it were, cut off in the same way that the face is cropped from the film, and the film crops the practices of everyday life. The images, cropped and then re-cropped, circulate not as commodities, but rather figure as curiosa - exotic objects that become the objects they are once they have entered into the domain of science. Thus, we begin this research on the universality of emotions by excluding the question of the feeling, the interpretation, of the person whose face is expressing the emotion. The question becomes: can I take the look on the face of this native as an objective cue that the native was experiencing this or that emotion. Having cut away the first person, who is at best the uncertain standard by whose testimony the classical psychological test goes forward, the two researchers then set themselves the task of translating the language of facial emotion as they see it in the film. The language of the face is already more than a metaphor, here. But it is a strange kind of non-verbal language, insofar as it is seems to precede the understanding of the "speaker" - the person across whose face expressions play. Yet, there is a deeper level of assumption here, which is that the viewers have the background knowledge simply to read this language. That such is their own self-positioning vis a vis the faces presented before them in the film seems to already presuppose that universality which they seek.

So: this research project has a twist. If Ekman and Friesen can read these cues successfully, they will prove that they are universal. And, as universal, that they are natural, innate, a language that the speaker can't help but speak. It is the helplessness of the speaker that allows us to omit the testimony of the person who is making the face. The facial expressions are not only almost a language, they are more than a language, they are a language in which intention is overriden. This isn't an exaggeration, but a precise description of the methodological assumptions followed by the two researchers.

Yet still, having made the necessary assumptions, how do the two researchers confirm their reading of the faces?

At this point, another move is made, and another omission emerges. One of the major issues in emotional ethnology is the evidence of the language on the ground – the vocabulary of emotions, and how they translate, or don’t, into English. By vocabulary, we are not simply speaking of a listing of words, but also of the affective schemas that organize the pathic words. Karl Heider uses the example of ‘love’ in English, which, he claims, is close to “happiness”, whereas the Indonesian ‘cinta’, which could be translated as love, is close to “sadness”. But it isn’t only location on the cognitive map – there is also the question of objectification. It is perfectly possible, in English, to say such things as: my life is happy. This utterance does not mean that my life has been a series of continuously happy feelings. it doesn't even imply that the speaker is is happy at the instance of the utterance. Rather, it assumes that there is an affective tone about a life, or about a long period of time, which makes sense in the affective vocabulary. That affective tone statement is distinct from the report of actual feeling, such as: I’m so happy. Thus, in English, the affective vocabulary can describe an actual mood, - it can describe an appraisal about how one ought to feel – and it can even, thus objectified, be detached from particular feelings to give a sense of a feeling tone over a long period of time. Why should we expect to find these particular conceptual practices in another culture? Or, perhaps more pertinently, how would we discover that this schema, or something different, is in operation? This is the kind of move one would especially expect in the sixties, the era of the linguistic turn. Yet instead of addressing the question of the native language that subtends the natural language of the face, Ekman avoids it. Instead, his next move is very peculiar:

It was still possible that these familiar expressions might be signals of very different emotions. But while the films didn’t always reveal what happened before or after an expression, when they did, they confirmed our interpretations. If expressions signal different emotions in each culture, then total outsiders, with no familiarity with the culture, should not have been able to interpret the expressions correctly.

I tried to think how Birdwhistell and Mead would dispute this claim. I imagined they would say, “It doesn’t matter that there aren’t any new expressions; the ones you did see really had different meanins. You got them right because you were tipped off by the social context in which they occurred. You never saw an expression removed from what was happening before, afterward, or at the same time. If you had, you wouldn’t have known what the expressions meant. To close this loophole, we brought Silvan from the East Coast to spend a week at my lab.

Before he came we edited the films so he could see only the expression itself, removed from its social context, just close up shots of a face. Silvan had no trouble at all. Every one of his interpretations fit the social context he hadn’t seen. What’s more, he knew exactly how he got the information. Wally and I could sense what emotional message was conveyed by each expression, but our judgments were intuitively based; we could usually not specify exactly what in the face carried the message unless it was a smile. Silvan walked up to the movie screen and pointed out exactly which specific muscular movements signaled the emotion.

We also asked him for his overall impression of these two cultures. One group he said seemed quite friendly. The other was explosive in their anger, highly suspicious if not paranoid in character, and homosexual. It was the Anga that he was describing. His account fit what we had been told by Gajdusek, who had worked with them. They had repeatedly attacked Australian officials who tried to maintain a government station there. They were known by their neighbors for their fierce suspiciousness . And the men led homosexual lives until the time of marriage.”

As I said, this is a peculiar move. Think of it. We have a film of facial expression. Assuming facial expression is universal, one could grant two observers, who have no contact with Fore culture, may correctly read the face. But notice how this is confirmed - by social cues. In other words, by scenes of Fore social life with which, admittedly, the two observers are not familiar. Thus, the confirmation of their facial readings is validated by the lesser certainties of their readings of the social context.

So, one wonders, what about that context?

Which brings us to the first tertiary person in this project: Gajdusek. When Ekman and Friesen talk about a "disappearing" people, the term, as they use it, seems to be projected onto Gajdusek. This is the reason he made his films. Now, of course, the notion that a people disappear, like magicians assistants or fairies, instead of being disappeared, like people who are slaughtered, have their land stolen, are cajoled by missionaries and sellers of alcohol, are force to assume habits and ways of living they don't want to, watch their children being kidnapped for education elsewhere, etc - is a not so fine piece of colonialist hypocrisy, very reminiscent of the old sixties days in Vietnam. My own assumption about what Gajdusek assumed, and what he told Ekman and Friesen, would have been that it was Gajdusek who told the researchers that the people were going to 'disappear' - but this assumption changed as I learned more about Gajdusek. The man not only won a Nobel prize, but he spent a year in jail for pederasty - being investigated originally for accounts that were published in professional journals of his diaries of the years among the Anga. Here’s the Guardian account of the case, from 1996. It is a couple of pages long. Sorry. But a long quote is necessary.

“A Nobel prizewinner is studying a faraway tribe. He describes how boys routinely and willingly have sex with their elders. He shares a bed with the children, then takes some home with him to continue his research. When he wins the Nobel, there they are, on the stage next to him. Has he committed a crime? QBY:Peter Martin
On 4 April last year, as Dr Daniel Gajdusek was flying back from a conference on BSE in Geneva, FBI agents were raiding both his office and his home in Maryland, USA. They took away files, disks, photographs, film, and notebooks. That same evening, when he drew into his driveway with a doctor colleague, a dozen FBI agents leapt from cover and arrested 72-year-old Gajdusek at gunpoint. Charged with paedophilia specifically, two counts of sexual assault on teenage minors, plus two counts of violating a Maryland law prohibiting oral sex then as now, he protests his innocence. He told the Washington Post that he was as much a paedophile `as Jesus Christ and Mother Teresa, who are also unmarried and love children'.
Scheduled to begin at 9am on Tuesday at the County Court House, Frederick City, Maryland, the trial is a considerable cause celebre for the FBI. Alleged paedophile cases are notoriously hard to prosecute and even harder to win, let alone get right. Remember Cleveland and Orkney? In America, too, most cases brought are either lost or abandoned. The McMartin `satanic abuse' debacle is still the US benchmark: ending in acquittals all round in l989, the case had taken five years and $15m to prepare and, at two and a half years, remains the longest trial in American history. Spearheaded by the FBI, the favoured strategy now is to go after individuals, and targets don't come much more high profile than Gajdusek: head of the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, and a Nobel prizewinner besides.
His closest colleagues, including the eminent Aids researcher, Robert Gallo, who stumped up part of his $350,000 bail, insist that Gajdusek is merely the latest victim of America's raging preoccupation with child abuse. Maryland state's attorney Scott Rolle, who'll be prosecuting come Tuesday, said he's not surprised at the denials and the disbelief. `It's a common reaction to paedophile charges. But most paedophiles aren't seedy-looking men in trench coats. If it's a disease, it can afflict anybody doctors, lawyers, even Nobel prize laureates.' Whatever the trial's outcome, Gajdusek has longed admitted to a love of children in particular, children from the Stone Age tribes of New Guinea and Micronesia where, back in the Fifties, he started his ground-breaking researches into rare diseases, including kuru, a variant of CJD. Since then, figuring he owed a debt to the communities he worked in, he has `adopted' no fewer than 56 such children, most-ly boys, and paid for their education in America. Typically, when he collected his Nobel prize, he took eight of `his' children on to the rostrum with him, and promised to use the $80,000 prize to send them to college. But that was 1976, a more liberal and, in some ways, a more naive time, and nobody thought much about it.
The sequence of events which led to Gajdusek's arrest last year tells a good deal about how the times and temper have changed. Because of his importance as a scientist, the NIH had been publishing his working journals at intervals since the mid-Sixties. Full of wild and woolly fieldwork surgery carried out in primitive up-country conditions, treatments, epidemiology, trading beads and salt (often with dedicated cannibals) for native corpses in order to carry out postmortems they're quite a ripping read. The journals also contain a number of passages describing the traditional homosexual practices of several of the tribes Gajdusek worked and lived with. According to the NIH, much of this material had been in the public domain for 30 years. But it wasn't until l995 that an outraged citizen alerted a member of a senate committee who, in turn, suggested that the FBI check out the journals as possible evidence of a paedophile tendency in their author.
Several entries concern tribes in New Guinea whose young boys achieved manhood through oral sex with older village men. Local belief has it that while females are born `complete', boys cannot grow to proper manliness without ingesting semen. Although Gajdusek is not the only scientist to have described such customs, the FBI was made suspicious by the undetached candour of his writings.
4 August, 1962: `The young boys do not hesitate, as a mark of affection, to indicate that they would like to suck one's penis, and in private they expect that this favour will be instantly accepted as a sign of their friendship... There is obviously a good deal of jesting and shaming associated with this sexuality when it is not carried out `just right'. Modesty and shame are evident in any public reference to it. What is `just right' involves knowledge of the `style' of the relationships.' 27 December, 1969: `Ekoro, Yewei, Mbondo, Awamu and Sengo and [blank space] slept with me last night and I find the children as gentle and kind and playful as at the start of my sojourn. I love them.' 9 November, 1971: `Whenever I respond to the overtures of one of the young boys by letting them cling to me, by hugging them or walking with them hand in hand, their adult relatives, often their fathers, knowingly smile and without ambiguity indicate that I should let the boys play sexually with me, and the suggestion is only made slightly more seriously and with but a bit more levity than would accompany a suggestion that one accept a gift of food.' For all the physical and emotional intimacy they express, the journals contain no evidence or description of Gajdusek engaging in sexual activity. So, next, the FBI set out to interview his adoptees, past and present. Although some were far flung, the FBI tracked down over 20 individuals and asked each of them: had Gajdusek ever done anything to them of a sexual nature? Most were reportedly horrified at the suggestion, but one man a 23-year-old Gajdusek was still putting through college in Maryland said yes: as a teenager, he'd suffered numerous assaults by his guardian. Through this witness, the FBI then located a 14-year-old who has made similar charges.
And then there's the tape. Prosecutor Scott Rolle says he's also in possession of a recorded phone conversation, taped by the FBI last March, between the 23-year-old student and Gajdusek. On it, he alleges, Gajdusek admits to the assaults on both boys, apologises, and begs him not to tell. At one point, Rolle says, the student asked, `Do you know what a paedophile is?' To which Gadjusek is alleged to have replied, `I am one'.
Nor is that all. Back in 1989, police in nearby Montgomery County investigated allegations of sexual abuse by Gajdusek made by two local youths, not adoptees. According to the police: `The investigation was suspended because we were unable to uncover any current victims.' On Tuesday, it is unlikely that the jurors of Frederick County will know what to make of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. The eccentric's eccentric, the odds of him finding a collar, tie and matching shoes to turn up in are not good. Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet an early mentor and a Nobel prizewinner himself once described his `exasperated fondness' for the young Gajdusek, adding that he had `an intelligence quotient in the 180s and the emotional maturity of a 15-year-old'.
Born in 1923 to poor first-generation immigrants from Slovakia, who'd settled in Yonkers, New York, the boy Daniel was precocious in the extreme. A keen entomologist while still in short trousers, he collected bugs of every sort and, to kill them, he synthesised a poison which later became the basis of a weedkiller patent. At his high school graduation, he was summoned to the stage 10 times to collect scholarships. `By the tenth one,' as his younger brother Robert recalled, `the audience was on its feet for a standing ovation.' Next, he took a biophysics degree at the University of Rochester, then finished Harvard Medical School in three years instead of four with a degree in pediatrics. Restless still, he moved to the California Institute of Technology, under the tutelage of Professor Linus `Vitamin C' Pauling, who would later win a brace of Nobels. Finally hooked by a passion for virology, Gajdusek then went in search of rare diseases and plagues in Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey: a bootstrap and backpack explorer-scientist out of the nineteenth century. In Australia, he worked for Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who wrote of him: `He apparently has no interest in women but an almost obsessional interest in children, none whatever in clothes or cleanliness; and he can live cheerfully in a slum or a grass hut.' But Gajdusek's career proper started in 1957, when he first fetched up in New Guinea. There, the local Australian medical officer, Vincent Zigas, told him of a strange, invariably fatal disease, called kuru, that was common among the tribes of the island's interior. As Zigas later wrote of Gajdusek's keenness to know more: `I was machine-gunned by his numerous questions. I had barely answered one when another would be asked.' Zigas showed him a few victims some with the shakes and a stumbling gait (ataxia), others in paralysis and nearer to death. To Gajdusek, it seemed to be a degenerative brain disease like CJD; but whereas CJD mostly struck the over-fifties, kuru could affect children as young as 13.
Machetes in hand, Gajdusek, Zigas and a few helpers set off for the interior, where they eventually located the Fore tribe. At first making no connection between the fact of their being cannibals and the high incidence of kuru among them, Gajdusek set about trying to treat and to investigate the disease there and then. A team of Australian scientists who'd planned to study kuru were elbowed out of the way, and within 10 months of clapping eyes on his first kuru case, Gajdusek announced the discovery of this hitherto unknown disease in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In the way of these things, a British scientist, William Hadlow, then suggested that kuru was very similar to sheep scrapie, which at that time was thought to be a viral disease. In turn, picking up on the idea that kuru might be viral, too, Gajdusek set about determining how it might be transmissible. Then it struck him: cannibalism: people eating kuru-infected corpses. It certainly fitted the local pattern: kuru mostly afflicted young women and children, and whenever the Fore set about ritually devouring a body, the brain the most infective part was usually left to the women and children. Proof of kuru's transmittability came when Gajdusek successfully infected some lab chimps with brain material taken from kuru victims. What won him the Nobel prize, however, was his conceptual leap about what he called `slow-acting' viruses, which anticipated Aids, and his work on brain degeneration, which radicalised the scientific approach to the likes of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. Since then, a whole other series of connections has opened up: linking scrapie-infected cattle feed, BSE and `new strain' CJD, which typically strikes young people. Another ghastly symmetry is that kuru, BSE and `new strain' CJD are just about identical short incubation, ataxic shakes and staggering, eventual loss of limb function, same area of the brain attacked. Which is not how Messrs Dorrell and Hogg have ever chosen to put it.
True, Gajdusek's assertion that spongiform diseases are viral has lately been overtaken by a new orthodoxy that the culprits are rogue proteins, called prions. But the matter remains moot: neither school has yet managed to isolate the actual disease agent. It turns out, too, that the Fore probably didn't get kuru simply by eating diseased brain. The thinking now, as for BSE, is that you need a blood-route lesion for the agent to get in: an ulcer, a cut, or open gums as when children loose their milk teeth. Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food consulted Gajdusek a few times about BSE and CJD but, as its actions before and since have demonstrated, Maff needed the connection to be impossible.
But let's rewind to the early Sixties, and Gajdusek's growing sense of debt towards the communities he was working with; that's in the journals, too. Prior to his arrival, the Fore believed that kuru was a consequence of sorcery, as practised by the hostile tribes that surrounded them, but Gajdusek convinced them that kuru was a disease. And since he cured other ailments dysentry, yaws and so on the Fore came to believe that he might cure kuru, too.
But he felt obliged to disabuse them a delicate thing to attempt, given the Fore's precipitate sense of betrayal and quickness to murderous violence. He also told them that the only hope of a cure was if they would allow him to continue to study them, including cutting up their corpses. The Fore agreed. They also apologised for their frequent angers with him, explaining that it was the kuru their dread of it, that they were dying, and that their village was getting smaller as the jungle reclaimed it which made them behave so badly. Gajdusek began `adopting' children from his research communities around 1963, bringing them to America, and paying for their education. Some were orphans, but most came with their parents' permission. Today, many are lawyers and civil servants in America and elsewhere, and a good number are pursuing successful careers back in their native countries. A few subsequently sent their own children, or their nieces and nephews, into Gajdusek's charge. According to neighbours, Gajdusek's was a rambunctious household, the kids often running quite wild when he was away on field trips. But it was also a stimulating household, with Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead among the regular visitors.
At the the time of Gajdusek's arrest, four children were living in his Maryland home, three boys and a girl, now all taken into state care. His journals suggest that Gajdusek has long been torn between America and his life on the tribal islands. `To be part of this is rewarding,' he once wrote. `To escape it and come back to it in small but intense doses is like cheating, and I know that, on both sides of my life, I can be accused of fraud and unfair involvement.' This neither-one-nor-the-other sense of undeservingness, coupled with a sexual ambiguity, is shot through his writings, as in this 1961 journal entry, made at the end of an arduous field trip on Falalap Island in the Ulithi Atoll: `The children trusted me without much hesitation, gave themselves to me, and many individuals gave me a personal share in their lives, their passions, their sensuality, their aspirations, which I but little deserved and for which I tried to give all of myself in gratitude.' From Tuesday, it will be for the jury to decide on Gajdusek's guilt or innocence, based on the testimony of two witnesses and the FBI's tape recording. As for content of his journals, who could say for sure? For the defence, attorney Mark Hulkower insists: `The journals add nothing to the case. They're reports of what Dr Gajdusek observed in foreign cultures, and contain no evidence of inappropriate behaviour on his part.' Prosecutor Scott Rolle insists that they're `nothing but the musings of a potential paedophile. It was something that he was obviously flirting with.' Back on 4 April last year, as Gajdusek was taken into jail, reporters asked him point blank if he was a paedophile. He replied, `No. Not in the way that you are using the term, so I say no.'

Hmm. One wonders what to make of the juxtaposition between Ekman’s original claim – “You got them right because you were tipped off by the social context in which they occurred” – and Gajdusek’s journal entry - `Whenever I respond to the overtures of one of the young boys by letting them cling to me, by hugging them or walking with them hand in hand, their adult relatives, often their fathers, knowingly smile and without ambiguity indicate that I should let the boys play sexually with me..” Was this one of those social contexts he guessed, from the film?

I don’t think so. I think Ekman’s notion that the social cueing he saw in the film was enough for him to infer the meaning of the facial expressions, and from those facial expressions accurately describe a phenomenon that is a compound of feeling and appraisal, the latter of which is couched in the language and the conceptual schemas of the Anga, seems methodologically unlikely.

I’m not, of course, finished Ekman piece, yet.

Isabel Marant, fall 2008

Thousands of people have been emailing LI, asking one and only one question: who are you looking at in fall fashion this year? We have, of course, been remiss in not linking to more fashion blogging, but to answer the questions that keep pouring in: keep you eye on Isabel Marant. If Santogold is Summer, 2008, Isabel Marant is fall, 2008. Now, people like to say that Isabel is not fashion forward, but is – watch for the patronizing tone! – wearable. Marant is anything but hieratic, having an intuitive feel for the accepting line, for the energy produced by the moving body. No, she isn’t loading the fashion system on the shoulders of her girls, or vying to produce some intergalactic silhouette a la Martin Margiela. There is a reason that this year, her show was in a big tent at the foot of the Eiffel Tower with a long long walk – acceptance is all about movement, as you can see here.
So, I hope that satisfies LI’s many, many many questioners.

Marx, Gramsci and Honour Penury

A curious thing happened to Jane Ellard in 1738. Ellard was walking in Grosvenor Square when – well, this is her account:

... two Women came up to me from the other Side of the Way, and told me I had a mighty pretty Gown on; - pray, says one of them, what did it cost a Yard? I informed them what I gave for it; Oh! 'tis a sweet pretty Thing they said, - pray which Way are you walking? I told them I was going to look after a Place; they said I should have the Refusal of two or three very good Places, and if I would tell them where I liv'd, they certainly would come and give me Directions about them. I told them that I should be very much obliged to them, and that I lodged at Mr. Pullen's, in George-Alley , by the Ditch Side. The next Day as the Bells rung Eleven, they came up Stairs; I am very positive to the Prisoner; the other Woman that was with her pass'd for the Prisoner's Mistress. I asked them about the Place they were to help me to, but they told me they were Apprentices to Sir Isaac Newton , at Turnham-Green, and that they must first calculate my Nativity; so out they pull'd a great Book with Heads and Hands in it; they told me a vast deal out of the Book with the Heads and Hands in it, and said I must bundle up all the Things I had, - Rings, Money, and Cloaths. I have but little Money, says I, and I don't Care to bundle up my Cloaths, that can relate nothing to my Fortune, - that's quite silly, and if any body should hear this Business besides our selves, they would laugh at us. Well, they argued with me a great while, and said it must be done, and began to be angry because I would not do it. Why, - says one of them, suppose you were Sick, and a Physician comes and prescribes Physick for you, - if you won't take it, what Good can he do you? 'Tis all the same Thing, we can't pretend to do you any Good, unless you'il do as you are ordered. At last I bundled up all my Cloaths, and they went away, but they returned again, and asked me if I had done as they bad me? I said I had, and that I had put them in my Trunk. Then now, says the Prisoner's Mistress, - with the Blessing of God take them out of your Trunk; I did so: Now, says she, with the Blessing of God, get a Ha'p'orth of Brown Paper. I did not care to go for the Paper, so she went herself, and did up all my Cloaths, telling me they must be done up very close, and not a Breath of Air must come upon them. When this was done they bid me down upon my Knees and say the Lord's Prayer; I refused at first, but by fair Means and foul they made me at last say the Lord s Prayer. Then they bid me turn about and open the Windows, which we had shut, for fear any body should see what we were about. I opened the Windows, and in the mean Time they chang'd the Bundle, and left this in the Room of it, - 'tis full of nothing but Hay and Straw; my Bundle was made up exactly like this Bundle, and they carry'd it quite off.”

I find that a fascinating account. In my post last week disputing the simple outline Marx gives of ideology, viz, that the dominant ideas of an era express the ideas of the dominant class, I wrote that, on the face of it, this notion gives us no idea of how, exactly, such a thing would happen. Ideas aren’t communicated via telepathy. Rather, they have to be materialized in symbols and distributed in some material way. Now, this interests me for the following reason: I, too, am dealing with hegemonic and subordinate ideas as I outline a theory about r how a shift in the passional norms in a society came about at the end of the early modern period. In particular, I think the shift towards happiness as a feeling/goal legitimating social and political action made its appearance in Europe in the eighteenth century not only in the writing of political economists, but across the board in the writings of novelists, poets, doctors, philosophers, naturalists, etc. Still, this is a writing culture, and the question is, how was this rooted in the everyday life of the masses?

This is a question that has long tormented historians. Gramsci, in the Prison notebooks, devoted long passages to the relationship between “intellectuals” [which he defined like this: “By intellectuals, one must understand not [only] those ranks commonly referred to by this term, but generally the whole social mass that exercises an organizational function in the broad sense, whether it be in the field of production, or culture, or political administration: they correspond to the noncommissioned and junior officers in the army (and also to some field officers excluding the general staff in the narrowest sense of the term) (133)] and the people. He tried to reshape the Marxist notion of ideology in more palatable sociological terms, find roles and social locations for intellectuals in this broader sense, although – as is apparent from the army comparison – he still toys with a vertical idea of the intellectual, who receives ideas coming on high and transmits them to people lower on the chain. However, Gramsci sets up the relationship so that one can infer, here, a horizontal plane as well. This would be the “psychological” attitude, as Gramsci puts it, to his class. But on the horizontal plane, there is also, necessarily, an interchange that is not simply the relay of ideas from on high. Rather, even the teacher who listens with contempt to some superstitious talk by his charges is absorbing information about attitudes. One of the effects of the social unconscious is just this: that one never quite knows what one has absorbed, or from who, or how it affects what one thinks. And if we remember that, instead of single chains of commands, in reality, in the field of production, culture, political administration, etc., there are struggles and rivalries between different groups on every level – then we have a sense of how ideas from the horizontal can influence ideas from the vertical.

This might seem pretty far afield from my last post, which was about Ekman. But before I go into Ekman’s theory, I thought I’d defend, a little bit, my assumption that the pattern revealed by that theory has a relation to various ‘programs’, as Derrida calls them, that have organized passion, temperament, and national and racial identity in the modern era. It isn’t true that the programs just work through intellectual texts – rather, they also work upon popular culture, whilst at the same time absorbing conceptual schemas from popular culture.

When Honour Penery and her associated decided to gull Jane Ellard, they claimed to be assistants to Isaac Newton. This claim is pretty extraordinary in that it implies knowledge of Isaac Newton in a social scene where one wouldn’t expect that name, in 1738, to have a lot of resonance. But it does. Elite cultural icons, here, substitute seamlessly for the icons of colportage – for Nostradamus, say. And that substitution is relatively quick – it isn’t spread, for instance, over the centuries by a church, the way the name Aristotle was so diffused through European culture by Catholic teaching that his name ended up as the author of a best selling, rather smutty book of pseudo-gynecology. Another oddity here is that, indeed, just as the Enlightnment was sanctifying Newton and conveniently forgetting the man who devoted years to astrology and numerology, his ‘assistants’ with their “great Book with Heads and Hands” accidentally – by a poetic chance – were closer to the spirit of the great man than many a French philosophes.

So if, in my next post, God willing, I make certain assumptions about the physiognomic roots of Ekman’s otherwise structuralist-age theories, I do so in the spirit of Honour Penury.

The 'language' of emotion

Paul Ekman, in an interview here, traces the path that led him to his famous tabulation of emotions articulated in a universal “language” of facial expressions. It was a path composed of two parts. One was Cold War circumstance: like many a human sciences researcher in the fifties and the sixties, Ekman was able to pretty easily squeeze money out of the Defense Department for his project, which was to go to “an isolated area of New Guinea” and film ‘stone age’ people. The point of the filming – and this is the intellectual path – was to settle a dispute between the Boasians – Margaret Meade and Gregory Bateson – and the Darwinians – which were represented by Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins claimed that emotional expression on the face was innate, so that smiling, for instance, meant the same thing across humankind. Tomkins theory was a bit more complicated than is allowed by the term “expression”, since, in a gesture to the James-Lange hypothesis, he believed that the face fedback emotion – smiling not only is a universal expression of happiness, but a happiness-maker. In Ekman’s essay on Sylvan Tomkins in Exploring Effect, he repeats the claim that, as far as he knew, Tomkins was unique in his empirical research about the face, although he concedes that other researchers had tried and failed in using photos of expression to evoke, in random, unconnected observers, responses that read the expression. What is odd, here, is that, of course, there was a whole science, or pseudo-science, that made very strong claims about the face: physiognomy.

Of course, there is a reason for that: physiognomy was associated, in the sixties, with racial science. With the measuring of noses, foreheads and ears by Nazi doctors. Although behind those Nazi doctors was the revival of physiognomy in the Weimar era – as the Sinngebung der Sinnlose, as Theodore Lessing put it – that was pursued not just on the right, but on the left as well. Lessing, like his friend Ludwig Klages, was fascinated by physiology, but unlike Klages, he leaned left, being a well known socialist and fellow traveler of the Marxists. Rudolf Kassner had his own philosophical mystical physiognomik. All were influenced by the romantics. But all differed in that they rid themselves of the demon of analogy that insisted on macrocosmic meanings in the microsphere. Physiognomy assumed an atomic emotional base, but its main goal was to read temperament from the face. How that temperament is imprinted on the face is the question.

It is worth reproducing Ekman’s list of the points the Tomkins facial theory, since my next post is going to be about Ekman:

· The face is central to emotion and has priority over visceral changes because of its speed, visibility and precision.
· The face informs the self, not just others. Feedback of the facial response is the experience of the affect.
· Emotion is guided by innate inherited programs.
· We learn the language of the face partly through correspondence between what a face looks like and what it feels like.
· Every face has a predominant expression which shines through poses and spontaneous expressions
· Individual differences in the interpretation of facial expression reflect the personality of the perceiver, which resulted in the idea of examining affect sensitivity contours.
· Particular emotions are commonly confused because of shared neurophysiology, shared situational contexts, response overlap and the likelihood of occurring together.”

We are gonna do a couple of posts about this.

amnesia day

On Memory Day, Americans of every creed and color try hard to forget the wars that have brought us to this moment. This year, amnesia is tough – but our politicians are tougher, and are doing a fuckin’ ace job of forgetting our men and women in uniform, and even more, the hundreds of thousands who have died in the past seven years in Afghanistan and Iraq. We appreciate this heap of victims who make our amnesia the strongest in the world. Other countries may have a hard time forgetting their casualties, but we Americans have been working at this day in and day out. This page, showing pictures of The Great Fly’s cabinet -is all about people who are on the frontlines, making no sacrifices and remembering no names or details. All will live comfortably, without an IED-ogenic brain injury or a noticeable lack of limbs, while having helped, in their own small way, to make so many American lives complete living hells. And let us not forget Congress as we enjoy the greatest Amnesia in the world this memory day. Bless their hearts, year after year, defying the will of the American people, Congress has gone along for the ride with a merry heart. Oh, there was a bump in 2006 when it looked like the majority Democratics would actually remember the war, its horror, bestiality, pointlessness, and even that it victims were selected almost exclusively of the children who live outside the great Gated Community that is the sum total of our oligarchy’s world. The world held its breath. And did the Dems remember why they had been elected? No, they immediately and resplendently forgot. They, too, can be folded into the great amnesiac embrace that we all remember to forget on Memorial Day.

And yet, memory does exist out there. In the NYT Magazine yesterday, memory seems to be haunting Gail Ulerie, the mother of Shurvon Phillips. Except haunting is not the word - it has a talon like grip on her whole life, which has come to one point and one point only:

Gail Ulerie, Shurvon’s mother, had already received his O.K. — a painstaking raising of his eyebrows — on a pair of jeans. Mostly, Shurvon can answer only yes-or-no questions. The slightly lifted brows, a gesture that stretches his eyes yet wider, signify yes. A slow lowering of his lids indicates no. Now, with tomorrow’s clothes decided, Gail, a Trinidadian-American, reclined Shurvon’s bed for the night. He wore a hospital gown and tube socks pulled up tightly on the twigs of his caramel-colored shins. The socks were immaculately white, as if Gail believed that if everything were properly and precisely attended to, right down to the cotton that sheathed his toes, her son’s brain could recover.

In Iraq’s Anbar Province, in May 2005, Shurvon, who joined the Marine reserves seven years earlier at 17, partly as a way to pay his community-college tuition, was riding back to his base after a patrol when an anti-tank mine exploded under his Humvee. The Humvee’s other soldiers were tossed in different directions and dealt an assortment of injuries: concussions, broken bones, herniated discs. Along with a broken jaw and a broken leg, Shurvon suffered one of the war’s signature wounds on the American side: though no shrapnel entered his head, the blast rattled his brain profoundly.

Far more effectively than in previous American wars, helmets and body armor are protecting the skulls and saving the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a joint Defense Department and V.A. organization, about 900 soldiers have come home with serious traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., which essentially means dire harm to their brains; it can be caused by explosions that deliver blunt injury to the helmeted skull or that send waves of compressed air to slam and snap the head ruinously even at a distance of hundreds of yards from the blast. (The 900 also include injuries caused by shrapnel or bullets that have managed to penetrate.) Some of these veterans have been left — for protracted periods and often permanently — unable to think or remember or plan clearly enough to cope with everyday life on their own; others, like Shurvon, have been left incapable of doing much at all for themselves. (A recent Rand Corporation report estimates that, additionally, 300,000 soldiers have suffered milder T.B.I., frequently including brief loss of consciousness, disorientation or cognitive lapses.)

Now, the question may be posed on this Memory day about who is worthy to remember Shurvon Phillips. Perhaps the amnesia and indolence, the spiritual laziness, the deep corruption that lines every American soul with a cankering rust as we, a supposed Democracy, lay down and let the power be taken from us, lay down and let the torture cells blossom across the face of the globe, lay down and let Shurvon Phillips be swept up in a paroxysm of violence that serves only to placate the vanity of our D.C. kleptocrats – perhaps all this strips us of our right to remember Shurvon Phillips. Or maybe we will skip ahead to the end – we aren’t going to remember him anyway. Not on Memory day. Not on the day dedicated to remembering to forget. Not on any day. This is who he was:

“Before his injury, Shurvon was, as his younger sister, Candace, recalled, “a big kid” who liked to come home from his job at Wal-Mart, stocking shelves and counting cash, and curl up with his older sister’s son to watch Spider-Man cartoons. Short and slender, he squirmed through every tunnel his nephew slithered into at Chuck E. Cheese. But he was “the brains of the family,” Candace said, and Gail added that, besides being something of a ladies’ man, he had a 3.4 G.P.A. at college and was on his way to an associate’s degree in computer science when he was called up.
Her round face framed by overlapping brown, cream and white headbands, Gail remembered the military doctors at the National Naval Medical Center stopping by her son’s bed in the weeks after his injury and commanding: “ ‘Sergeant Phillip! Sergeant Phillip! Give me a thumbs up!’ ” His hands remained still. “When I called his name,” she said, “sometimes he fluttered his eyelids a little bit.” And his eyes seemed to focus on her, at moments. Those were about the only signs of awareness. And even those may have been her imagination. Col. William O’Brien, then the director of the Severely Injured Marines and Sailors program in the Department of the Navy, visited Shurvon in the hospital during that time. “She was a true believer,” he said of Shurvon’s mother. O’Brien saw no purposeful fluttering of eyelids, no responsiveness whatsoever. He saw a man with a misshapen head, his mouth open, staring vacantly into space. But as Gail recounted to me, she would plead with her son, in a voice infinitely closer and quieter than those of the staff, “Shurvon, give me a thumbs up, please give me a thumbs up.” One day she saw the tiniest shift of his right thumb.”

How can we remember this scene and have any respect for ourselves? Americans will not shirk, then, from the hard decision to forget it utterly. For those interested, Shurvon Phillips was finally taken, after pleading from his mother and letters from the military lawyer she had hired, to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago run by Dr. Felise Zollman. There, some things changed for Shurvon Phillips:

For more than a year before his arrival at R.I.C., Shurvon was treated by the V.A. hospital in Cleveland, sometimes as an inpatient, when infections and a crisis with his feeding tube imperiled his very survival. And Zollman is careful not to critique the work of the Cleveland staff. But she suggests, as many doctors and advocates for wounded soldiers have argued, that the military medical system just wasn’t prepared for the prevalence of brain injuries among its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and that T.B.I. units like hers have gained a complex understanding of the brain’s capacity for healing through long concentration on civilian injuries. Traci Piero, a nurse practitioner at the Cleveland hospital and the coordinator of Shurvon’s care there, both before and after his time at R.I.C., told me that in the spring of last year, the Cleveland staff considered reducing Shurvon’s physical therapy to a maintenance level. This would have meant abandoning the attempt to help him toward some degree of autonomous movement and focusing simply on preventing bedsores and keeping the muscles in his inert limbs from tightening more than they already had. It was a consideration born of futility. Piero and Dr. Clay Kelly, the hospital’s chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation, explained that Shurvon had hardly progressed from when he first arrived at the Cleveland facility after five months at the V.A.’s Minneapolis polytrauma center; he remained in a nearly vegetative state and was seen as having, in the words of an evaluating neurologist at the Cleveland hospital, “little hope for improvement.”
But by a system of nostril-flaring mastered with his speech therapist at the Cleveland facility, Piero recounted, Shurvon became able, last spring, to respond reliably to yes-or-no questions; Piero said that this breakthrough dissuaded the team from diminishing his physical work. Commander Bailey, Shurvon’s advocate, told things differently. The decision against cutting back Shurvon’s physical therapy was made, he said, in response to desperate pleading from Gail and some urgent lobbying of Bailey’s own.
When Shurvon came under Zollman’s care, he was taking a narcotic painkiller, Fentanyl, prescribed for him by the Minneapolis center and by the Cleveland team. Fentanyl suppresses the function of the brain, Zollman said, and may stunt recovery in T.B.I. patients. Kelly, the Cleveland chief of rehabilitation, who is closely involved with Shurvon’s treatment now but didn’t work with him before his months at R.I.C., referred to case notes and told me that Shurvon’s grimacing (or what grimacing his frozen features allowed) had indicated pain and that the narcotic had been necessary to address it. He compared caring for someone as noncommunicative as Shurvon to a veterinarian’s guesswork. But Zollman managed to communicate with Shurvon well enough to determine that he could do without the Fentanyl and weaned him from it. She weaned him, as well, from the Valium he’d been given, partly for anxiety, by the teams in Minneapolis and Cleveland — Valium, too, dulls the workings of the brain. She prescribed a drug to enhance alertness and cognition. And she started to direct a program of therapy that, she hoped, would give him some fraction of a full life.”

Mainenance level. Some fraction of a full life. Veterinarian’s guesswork. Words to remember – to forget – as we celebrate our national capacity for oblivion today.

the demomaniac of agen

Joan DeJean, in her fascinating book, The Re-invention of Obscenity, points to a strange omission in the charges leveled against Théophile de Viau’s trial in his trial in 1623. Théophile’s arrest was, in part, part of a battle that he had nothing to do with. As the result of the proliferation of publications in the early 17th century, the government of Louis XIII to propose an office of censorship, which immediately aroused the indignation of the doctors of theology at the Sorbonne, who, traditionally, had the censor’s powers. Théophile was thus charged for an obscene poem, but the charges were translated into theological language – thus, the awe-inspiring line in which the poet contemplates fucking his lover Phylis in the ass was construed as a form of blasphemy. DeJean makes an interesting case for the threefold importance of the trial:

“Théophile’s trial makes three things clear. First, the modern obscene would not have taken shape as it did, and perhaps not at all, without the decisive role of print culture. Second, whereas all censors, civil and religious alike, claimed to be interested only in religious issues, they were really more concerned with trying to convict Théophile of sexual crimes. Third, their obsession with Théophile’s sexuality, in particular with what we would now term his sexual orientation, ultimately played a crucial role in giving obscenity its modern form.”

As DeJean explains the latter, before Théophile’s trial, bawdy literature was saturated with references to the male organ; after Théophile’s trial, the male organ is figleafed, and the vagina starts to get all the textual attention. Which is a shift that surely has to do with more than the trial – but the trial is the largest social marker of the shift.

But it is the second point that is of interest to me. If Théophile was truly to be charged with blasphemy, his sodomite sonnet was not the place to start. Indeed, there were plenty of other provocations scattered throughout Théophile’s writing, including a scene in Fragments d'une histoire comique in which the author – describes adventures ensuing from his banishment from Paris in 1619. Among those adventures are two with a religious cast - a visit to a possessed woman in Agen, and a riot that ensues when one of his companions, a fellow Protestant (and, more importantly, a “beautiful spirit”, as Théophile’s enemy, the Jesuit Garasse, describes them) refuses to kneel in the street while the consecrated host is being taken from one place to another.

Stuart Clark, pondering the mysteries of the belief systems of early modern Europe (about which a battle has been waged for a long time over the question of whether disbelief in the modern sense would even be intelligible to people in the societies of that time), set up a thought experiment type question in his book, Thinking with Demons: the idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. After showing the changes going on in the definition of the natural and the preternatural among writers in the sixteenth century, he writes:

One way to bring together this array of changes from a position of relative stability to one of confusion in the application of categories to phenomena might be to ask, simply, how hypothetically well-informed inhabitants of early moder urope were expected to make sense of some typically marvelous happenings. Faced by prodigious appearances in the skies, were they to interpret them as signs of divine anger, exhalations of vapours from the earth, or tricks played on the sight by the reflection of light? If they saw a dead person bleed freshly in the presence or at the touch of the suspected murderer, was this a miracle to sustain God’s justice, the effect of physical links between two bodies agitated by antipathy or connected by corpuscular effluxes, a crude deception designed to remove the need ofr harder evidence, or the result of distubing the corpse before the blood was fully coagulated. Was the visitation of an apparition a spiritual reality, a physical counterfeit, or merely a dream? Did a healer like the Restoration sensation Valentine Greatrakes cure by means of a heavenly dispensation, a natural quality in his own physiological make-up transmitted, again, by material effluvia, or by psychosomatic delusion?” (266)

The last question I have quoted rather sneakily. I have already posted about Robert Boyle and his strictures on the word ‘nature’ as having any explanatory force in natural philosophy. In fact, Boyle met Greatrakes, a man who had a chased away pains, like migraine headache, by stroking a person along lines felt to Greatrake’s fingers line the lines of flight of the pain, which he would lead to some outlet and free into the air – for instance, the opening of the ear. A Hobbesian physician, the radical Henry Stubbe, wrote a pamphlet about Greatrake. Stubbe was just the kind of materialist Boyle did not trust – he was forever turning the supernatural into the natural. Stubbe, interestingly enough, met Greatrake, who was raised in Ireland, in 1666, after Stubbe had been in Jamaica for three years. Early modern Europe didn’t really exist – who knows, after all, if Stubbe’s notion of the natural effluvia of the body came from his conversation with some African in Jamaica? The medical body was created out of a confluence of many belief systems. Stubbe’s naturalism, most commentators say, came from a distinctly English tradition, through Hobbes. Yet he is repeating Campanella’s notion of the natural power of certain bodies. Nature, we should remember, does not have a canonical semantic force such that we can look back at these writers and think that they are “humanizing” or disenchanting the world. On the other hand, the imperfect rise of volupte, I’d contend, thematically prefigures the humanization of the world. At least, in Theophile’s case, taking nature, whatever it includes, as all the case is. One has to always remember how the New World showed that it was very had to say what nature did include.

…

Typically, Théophile sets up the occasion for his visit with a joke. He is in a garden with his friend, Clitiphon. Clitiphon has touched a rose. The scent getting on his hand, Clitiphon turns pale and rushes to some other flowers to get rid of the smell. It turns out he has an aversion for roses.

“That flower,” I told him, “is the breath of your bad angel, the one that bewitched you and gave you the convulsions of a demomaniac: your eyes rolled up, you gritted your teeth and opened your lips with grimaces that were exactly like the obsessed girl that I visited yesterday. – I don’t have any other devil than that odor, said Clitiphon, but if you love me, tell me the story of that adventure, for they say it is pleasant; I didn’t dare enjoy it, for fear that it was false; and since you have the reputation for being exactly truthful in the least little things, instruct me in what happened, in order that I may dare to assure myself that I know the facts. – Here, I told him, is all there is to it. The noise of this accident had already alarmed all the countryside, and the most incredulous let themselves be convinced at second hand by the infinite number of people who believed to have truly seen effects far above those of the forces of nature in the person of this girl. I found myself on this occasion in the village, where already she had been playing her game for a long time. And since I have been held to be a person whose nature is such as to not easily believe impossibilities, two of my friends, in order to overcome the doubts I entertained about this, pressed me to go see her, with the promise to not believe themselves if, coming away from her, I didn’t find myself of their opinion. She was lodged near the walls of the village, in a mean little house where a priest came to exorcize her regularly two times a week. A very old woman and two small children were inseparably next to her, which gave me the first conjecture of some kind of trick. For, firstly, I see in her room that the feeble and most timid sex and the most aged lived quite securely near the devil, for which reason I supposed it wasn’t the worst of them. After having knocked loudly, an old man, who opened the door for us, told us that the patient had need of a little rest, because of the extraordinary work she’d been put to by the by the bad spirit a little before; but if we returned in two hours, we could content our curiosities. I knew that he had demanded this period to give him the leisure to prepare her ‘supernatural’ faces, and, without stopping for his speech, I promptly went into the chamber where the girl was with her old woman companion and the two children. Starring at her good and hard, I saw she was surprised and could easily see that she fixed her face [contraignoit son visage] and began to study her posture. At that feint, a little too obvious, I hardly held back a smile, which the old woman found to be very unpleasant, and told me that God would punish me for my mockery by the same punishment he inflicted on this poor body. I told her I was smiling because of something else, and that we weren’t people incapable of being converted in spite of our appearance, but that we asked for some visible witness which could make us believe in something so incredible. However the demomaniac began to agitate her body, to make herself look savage and to tell us, breathlessly, that she felt she was in the presence of non-believers and that this pained her. Insensibly, voila, here she was now in a rapture; she threw to the floor a distaff that she held and, passing by us into another room, she threw herself onto the floor, counterfeited the grimaces of a hanged man, the cries of a cat, the convulsions of an epileptic, crawled on her belly, rolled on the beds, jumped to the windows and made as if to jump out, except that the children intervened, before whom she stopped short and growled some words of badly pronounced latin. I spoke the most distinct latin to her that I could, but I saw no appearance that she understood it. I spoke to her in greek, English, Spanish and Italian, but the devil couldn’t articulate a word in response. As for gascon, she didn’t lack curses to throw at me, for she was of the country, and the priest coming by, his latin communicated to her. She understood his questions, and him, her responses. In a word, according to the terms of their dialogue, she would assume or relax her postures, to the fright of his assistants, who I couldn’t help but mock, saying that this devil was ignorant of languages and must not travel much – but since at each time the demomaniac had phrases to throw into my eyes, I didn’t wait for the end of her fit, knowing well that, at least if she didn’t transform herself into something stronger and more savage than a girl, no devil was going to get away with insulting me that easily. The easy resolve with which I witnessed an occurance that everybody thought was so dangerous was the reason that the abuse did not last hidden for long. For the justified suspicions that this event arose permitted many the curiosity to examine this mystery a little closer, and as minds were being slowly delivered of this superstitious credulity, there came a point when a testimony was produced that relieved any incertitude. For, after being treated by a good doctor, it was found that her problem was merely a little melancholy, and a lot of faking.”

The question in my mind, here, is why am I the first person to translate this? Or has there been another? This is amazing stuff.

Dr. Causabon scribbles a bit more in his notebook

J'devrais penser
à m'forger un moral en acier trempé
ne plus m'ronger
mon vernis bleu cyber nacré
m'sentir en sécurité
sous protection à indice élevé
traumatisée
faudrait pas stigmatiser
pas compliqué c'est pas compliqué
j'trouve pas ça tell'ment sorcier
bien décidée

mes idées se sont arrêtées –Ysa Ferrer


William Lilly, the astrologer and antiquary, left an autobiography. The beginning of his real life, outside of school (where he learned to speak Latin as well, he claims, as English) went like this:

My father had one Samuel Smatty for his Attorney, unto whom I went sundry times with letters, who perceiving I was a scholar, and that I lived miserably in the country, losing my time, nor any ways likely to do better, if I continued there; pitying my condition, he sent word for me to come and speak with him and told me that he had lately been at London, where there was a gentleman wanted a youth, to attend him and his wife, who could write, etc.

I acquainted my father with it, who was very willing to be rid of me, for I could not work, drive the plough, or endure any country labour; my father oft would say, I was good for nothing.”

These storms about Marx that have lately raged through LI have done me a world of good. I was reminded of the broad outline of elements at play in the construction of the happiness culture, one of which looms largely: the opening up of the positional economy. As I wrote, Marx’s suggestions about “mental products” were, unfortunately, off-tracked by his materialism, ending up giving us a very unsatisfactory picture of mental production. But if we dispense with the idea that there intellect somehow operates on top of a society, as an epiphenomena, a mist rising from the surface, unable in itself to do anything but operate as a distributor for the ideas of the ruling class, or – most pernicious of metaphors – a mirror reflecting ideas - and instead look at Marx’s much more radical analysis of labor as necessarily compounded of ideas and ‘matter’, than we can start to understand mental production as horizontal to other forms of production, which allows us to look at its scope and effects as taking many forms in the social: as a means of social ascent, or descent; as the creator of life styles; as a necessary factor in the creation of the techno-industrial structure, etc. The early modern era in Europe saw the opening up of the positional economy – or, in other words, the lessening of feudal barriers to social mobility – due, in great part, to print culture. Sad young men like Lilly, alien among the corn, were not uncommon in the seventeenth century. They became the ranters, secretaries, natural philosophers, lawyer’s clerks, astrologers, poets, actors, etc. that wove a certain narrative, the adventure narrative, in Europe itself, in tandem with the adventure narrative in the New utopias of the New World. This was the beginning of the third life as a distinct social entity. The techno-industrial structure central to capitalism simply could not have existed without this third life. Similarly, the reshaping of the passional norms was dependent on the effects of the third life – the breaches and cracks it made within the social hierarchy.

A note to the side, this. I still haven’t translated Theophile’s encounter with the possessed woman of Agen. I’m halfway through it, but… this has simply been a busy week. And here I am, Memorial Saturday (on this weekend that we forget the violence that has made America great and make great sacrifices of petroleum to the sky god), behind on my reviewing. Oh, LI is so sorry for himself!

Morons - tasty eatin'!

LI would advise readers to go to this superfinereview (heh heh) of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. Who is that reviewer, anyway? Give him a raise!

At the moment, I am using Bishop as my template for political prognostication.

Which gets us to the moron tax.

The moron tax is the increase in the price of commodities, particularly oil, which have reliably fever charted its way across the Great Fly’s America. One statistic that truly struck Bishop, and should strike any politically astute observer, is the correlation between party affiliation and population density. The lower the density, the more likely the area will be GOP leaning, and vice versa.

Now, it is easy to deduce from this handy factoid a few things: those exurbs were, in the naughties, some of the hottest construction sites around. Maricopa, Arizona is an exemplary GOP exurb: it is economically dependent on a larger metropole, it was constructed wholly on spec by drive by land speculators, it is an environmental horror, soaking up water at an astonishing rate in a desert environment, and it is built with total disregard for public investment – no parks, libraries, high schools, crappy roads, the whole nine yards. Paradise, in other words, for the GOP inclined. But ignorance, it turns out, isn’t bliss as the policies one advocates, all at a satisfying long distance, start biting your ass. Thus, this is the kind of patriotic population that could be led by the nose into supporting the war in Iraq, could easily be snookered by the fake war against Al Qaeda, and is no doubt twitching to get going on the bombing of Iran. All, of course, are actions laid down in the Bible, as the exurbanites would find out from the televangelically friendly churches they attend.

Well, of course, the housing speculation bubble collapsed; the crappy roads produce giant traffic jams; and the Bible Based foreign policy has produced the kind of meaty, beaty security action speculators just love. Every time Bush rattles his dick at Iran, the price of a barrel of oil goes up. Sweet – the moron leader has finally started taking huge, tasteful bites out of the moron ass. If you are going to milk the morons, though, you have to do more than sell them junk minimansions and crappy paradisial living conditions – you have to get that last drop of milk. Helpfully, the Fed has been loaning money at zero down and give me your junk for collateral rates to the financial community. 450 billion dollars, this quarter. Hey, that’s some nice money. Now, if you were an investment bank, where would you put that money? In fucking mortgages? No thank you. The moron gang bang is over. So you load up on equities – one bubble – and you look around to see what is hot. What is hot is commodities – it is as exciting as 2006 mortgage securities, and up is the only direction anybody knows. So, take another bite out of the moron ass and see how good it tastes! Like ham hocks!

Exciting times. One thing about the morons, though. After their own personal ass is chewed on for a while, they start screaming. Usually it is for war, but – who knows, given an argument that will have to break through the pressjam – even for peace if they find out that they can benefit from it.

Marxalot

Turn on the news, it looks like a movie
It just makes me want to sing Louie Louie

From looking at my stats, I see what the vast majority of LI’s readership wants: naked pictures of Lady Bitch Ray. Unfortunately, she hasn’t mailed me any lately. So I will revert to a few jottings about a subject so sexy and hot that surely, aficionados of LBR’s perfect derriere will not be totally unhappy. I’m speaking, of course, about Marx and the German Ideology.

Ho ho.

Northanger, at a certain late point in the comment stream on Phantoms of Ideology, asked me what it was that I found particularly stunning about Amie’s discussion of ideology in Marx. What I found stunning about it was that Amie took Marx’s notion apart, and showed how it worked and didn’t work. This is in the best tradition of what Victor Skhlovsky, the Russian critique, called “estrangement” – by examining a thing as a composite rather than as a immediate whole, one gains a certain intellectual and moral mastery over a seemingly opaque totality. In his great essay about the estrangement in Wooden Eyes, Carlo Ginzberg relates the technique to folk riddles and the Stoic moral training found in Marcus Aurelius. “First of all, we must pause and take stock. That which is dear to us must be broken down into its component parts.” This, one of the pre-eminent intellectual urges inherited by the early modern moralists from the revival of the Stoics (see La Bruyere’s passage about going into the kitchens of the rich and observing each (disgusting) stage in the preparation of their delicacies) flows into the ideologues proper of the Napoleonic era, and then into Marx’s own use of “ideology” in The German Ideology. As Amie points out, if we go back into the kitchen and see when and how Marx composed a book in 1846 that did not get published until 1932, we will experience a certain lessening of our sense of, well, our grasp on the text. That lessened grasp is important, especially in light of the fact that there is a central Marxist tradition that believe it “owns” the text. Chabert, whose reduction of Marx's use of ideology as three memorizable uses, seems to assume something opposite: we can simply pluck out the “concepts” that constitute the meaning of Marx's text and arrange them synchronically, like bulleted items in a power point presentation.

That is the traditional way of interpreting Marx.

Well, I wrote at mindboggling length in the comments about this in response to Chabert. However, I’d like to pull away from the duel and scratch out a few notes about the German Ideology that I will no doubt later use in my happiness book.

Anyone who tries to read the entirety of the German Ideology quickly finds that it is the gaudiest, oddest text in Marx’s canon. It goes on forever, contains gigantic, brilliant guesses and then ties them to a pitifully provincial controversy. It is crucial to remember that this text is written long before Marx had anything like a model of capitalism. In this, it is a sort of unique document in science – not only does Marx lack empirical evidence for his claims, he even lacks a model to generate that evidence. And yet, he advances with an amazing confidence, in the process creating a radically new social science.

The title is, of course, meant seriously. This book is Marx’s spirited entry in the contest to pull Germany – a nation that doesn’t even exist – into the sphere of the vanguard European nations. There is no doubt in Marx’s mind that the industrial system invented in Europe is the future. Unlike, say, Gandhi, who confronted a similarly backward economy in India, Marx does not think the industrial system is evidence of Western ‘vice’. His tone is all the more sarcastic as he is waging this polemic against a handful of former theology students who are rich in a sophisticated philosophical vocabulary, but poor in their sense of reality. If Germany does not become part of civilization, its destiny will be decided on the outside, without it. This intuition is perfectly correct – Marx doesn’t have any sympathy for concerns about Kultur, which, to him, is just the last mumblings of the feudal aristocracy. Marx is, to use an anachronistic vocabulary, completely Eurocentric. The European idea is not that Europe is mystically superior, but that the industrial system developed in Europe is globally applicable. This is the essence of the Western idea. Without it, there would be no universal working class for Marxism to work with. Marx wholeheartedly supported 'civilization'. In political terms, this meant support for the advances of bourgeois liberal democracy, which he vociferously supported in 1848. And good for him. But it also meant that the global phenomenon of the 19th and 20th century – the triumph of the West - was advanced both by Marxism and capitalism. Left and Right (those incredibly provincial terms, referencing a temporary assembly in Paris and projecting it onto the global conceptual space as if were a god given filter) fundamentally agree on their vision of the world – that is, on the necessity of the industrial system, which is the central term defining civilization. No communist party in the 20th century - neither Bose's in Bengal, Ho Chi Minh's in Hanoi, or Castro's in Havana - disagree with that. (Hmm, well, no, there are two exceptions - the Khmer Rouge and Mao, which, in their monstrosity, speak for themselves.) Whereever these two forces went, they left behind factories. Whether the management of that industrial system was market based or based on the enfranchised power of the laborer was the question, but the industrial system was never questioned.

In making his case against the German ideology, Marx begins the book with his biggest and most fruitful guess. Taking the conjectural history of progress that characterized the Edinburgh enlightenment and the French ideologues, i.e. folks like Smith, Ferguson and Condorcet, Marx reorganizes it under the sign of a brilliant insight: instead of freedom or the arts and sciences being the driver of progress, Marx redefines the historical dynamic in terms of systems of production. At a stroke, Marx gives us a sociology that does not appeal to some final, qualitative absolute.

This was brilliant. It was revolutionary. And it was also without any support from either a model or empirical data. At this point, Marx’s economic model is solely that created by the bourgeois economists.

Along with this insight, Marx makes a second move, one as important as the first. He discusses systems of production in terms of labor, and – at least partially – founds a social ontology that frees labor from both feudal hierarchical thought and the ‘ideologues” dualism. Consciousness is being. All production uses both thought and bodily power. Social being is founded on the life processes. This is an exciting moment in Marx. He has given himself the tools to discuss labor outside of the idealist model of his theological opponents, but he has provided grounds for discarding the dualism between ideas and matter. At this point, one would think he would discard all –isms.

Alas, he doesn’t. This is where the polemical nature of the book, which makes it fun to read, exacts its price from Marx’s theory. To admit that ideas are part of the life process would be, strategically, giving a hostage to fortune – and Marx is a take no prisoners kind of guy. Thus, he proclaims himself, absurdly enough, a materialist, and distorts his discovery to produce a whacky idea of ideas as these things that sort of float, effeminately, in the ether, while labor goes on, ever material. The hammerer and the hammer are one.

This theme muddies Marx’s clarity. It is also the first appearance of what becomes a truly vicious habit in Marxism, and on the left, where everything gets dubbed “material”. Materialism is the Semper Fi of Marxism, a meaningless slogan to excuse mean and disgusting actions. Moreover, by embracing a dualism he has just exploded, Marx burdens himself with an unnecessarily idealistic conception of ideas. He misses their materiality.

This confusion is compounded in Marx’s first definition of ideology. You can tell Marx is going backwards when he uses a metaphor that naturalizes a cultural phenomenon:

“The fact is thus this: particular [bestimmte] individuals who are productively active in particular ways, enter into particular social and political relationships. Empirical observation must in every individual case point to the empirical coordination of a social and political division with that of production and without any mystification and speculation. Social division and the state issue constantly out of the life process of particular individuals; but these individuals may not appear as they exist in their own or in other’s thought, but as they really are, meaning, as they operate, materially produce, thus as they are active under specific material limits, presuppositions and conditions, independent of their will.

The production of ideas, thoughts of the consciousness is firstly immediately imbricated in the material activity and the material intercourse of men, languages of real life. The thoughts, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men appear here still as the direct overflow of their material relations. [Das Vorstellen, Denken, der geistige Verkehr der Menschen erscheinen hier noch als direkter Ausfluß ihres materiellen Verhaltens] The same thing goes for the spiritual production, as they are represented in the language of politics, of laws, of morals, of religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. People are the producers of their thoughts, ideas, but real working people, as they are conditioned through a particular development of their productive forces and of the corresponding intercourse up to its broadest formation. Consciousness can never be something other than conscious being, and the being of men is their real process of living. If in the collective ideology of people, men and their relations appear, as in a camera obscura, standing on its head, so, too, this phenomenon is attributable to their historical living process, as the inversion of the object on the retina is to their immediate physical ones.”

Magnificent rhetoric, but one that puts Marx himself, as the writer of the German Ideology, in the uncomfortable position of writing from a practically supernatural viewpoint – after all, if the collective ideology of a people is as ingrained as the image is on the retina, one can only overcome that ideology by operating, in a metaphoric way, supernaturally. Such exaggeration is normal to Marx when he polemicizes – polemic operates both to get his best ideas on paper and then to contour them to the amazingly petty matters at hand. Thus, a quarrel in a backwards European state between journalists and junior academics has the result of dividing the whole world of human thought into the materialist or the idealist. Which leads Marx to soem fatally dismissive talk about ideas, as though they were somehow not material, as though they didn't arise and return to living processes, as though the brain were composed of ghost stuff.

Thus, it is this overabundance of the material that leads to those rather unfortunate passages in which Marx puts his ideological idea to work. I’ll quote from a passage that I’m not going to translate – I don’t have time! – but take from the often suspect International Press translation:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”

Again, what magnificent rhetoric! And surely right in parts, in that the material of ideas in a social reality are taken from that social reality. And yet, it is a generalization that depends on a mystified notion of “intellectual force,” which makes no sense outside of the mechanism where ‘ideas’ occur. Thus, somehow we are supposed to think that the idea of separation of powers proves (how?) to be the dominant idea – really? – and is expressed as ‘eternal law’ – seriously begging the question of where this cultural value comes from. This kind of simple, unmediated ideological critique makes for a nice journalistic shorthand, but as a description of social reality, it, of course, sucks. The royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are stripped of their historic specificity, here, the material means by which they actually existed in real life, and defined in the abstract terms of their interest in domination. Again, there is some truth to this, but these words mystify more than they explain, creating a tableau of ghostly forces struggling for ‘material’ and ever more material prizes – although, of course, after a certain level, the life process of the human being in the ruling class is tidily taken care of, if we take material literally. Power becomes, then, another “force”, another mystery. I like the way Derrida uses the term program for this kind of thing, which is preferable on every level – the idea in the head, the spoken word, the written text, they are all involved not in a mysterious expressive relationship to ‘dominant material relationships’ – matter being again the compulsive word – but are embedded in them, are on the same level as them. Court society wouldn’t exist without those ‘expressive’ relationships – in fact, no society would. Marx forgets his notion of living processes, here, he forgets that the brain is what thinks, and that throughout the career of a thought, it is never outside of its ‘material’ nexus.

This polemically obsessive turn to the material that, ironically, is copacetic with the most highly idealistic notion of thought, is part of the program that Marx has to revamp after 1848, per Amie. But the compulsive display of toughness, the superabundance of “materiality”, the misbegotten contempt for ideas, based on a misbegotten notion of their function and their social place, existed as part of one of the programs in Marx’s texts. And they were used, with various catastrophic results, in 20th century Marxism.

Which I’ll come back to, at some point, if I have time.

The britneyological report of the week

Again, a heavy schedule of editing is keeping LI from being the usual mad gabber. We have another post in the Marx and liberalism vein coming up, but a more urgent matter has loomed. As thousands of you have pointed out in outraged emails to me, LI has not taken a position on the all important Britney-Mel Gibson shocker. As a Britneyologist, I should have seen this coming. Mel, an aging rogue, is in a way a perfect protest pal. If she is going to be deathmarched by her Dad through terrible sitcoms and through court appearances involving chaste dresses with sensible shoes, why not chose the Leninist strategy of exacerbating the contradictions? This is my own take on what I can’t help but regard as a weakness, on Brit’s part, for manifest scoundrels. But luckily, reports are surfacing of one Felipe, who seems much better for Brit than the antisemitic drunk:

Britney Spears is clearly working hard on her sobriety, rebuilding her career (''How I Met Your Mother'') and, I've learned, spent serious time down at Mel Gibson's place in Costa Rica restudying Kabbalah teachings and doing serious yoga and pilates.

However, a few eyebrows were raised when the entertainer, uh, entertained a very brief fling with a beach boy -- who rents chairs, etc. -- only known as Felipe.

Screw it: cutting a sexual path through scoundrels is Brit's way of going down the path of needles - instead of the Kabbalah, I'd suggest Perrault. And I have a lot of confidence that in the final moment, as Britney confronts the wolf in his full penile glory, she will swing the axe like a fuckin’ archetype.

And, while I'm on the suggestion jag, may I offer another one to Britney’s people? You need to team her up with Ysa Ferrar! Watch this video , (which, for some reason, totally cracks me up - the insane hat, wig, dress and choreography) and tell me that these two wouldn’t make a great duo. That Ferrar is trying to literally become a manga figure puts the cherry on the deal, if you ask me. However, it is also possible the side job I have fact checking the captions of a fashion mag is starting to melt my brain.

amazing news from the relative impoverishment front!

You don't know me I am an introverted excavator...

Alas, LI is up to his keister (whose word is that, I wonder? my mom’s? My grammie’s? the words that come out of a person went into a person first, and that mild word for butt, ass, or – for my Americanismophobe, Mr. Lawrence – arse must have been put in me a long ago) with editing. There is nobody quite as demanding as a Ph.D. student with a week to turn in the final product. I think this is a truth universally recognized.

LI found the tussle of the comment thread that followed Amie’s post totally cool. For me, thinking about the the construction not only of a marketbased industrial system, but of a shift in emotional norms and in the legitimation of political action, there was a lot of good hints about paths to follow. We’d like to write a post about, say, Marx, ideology, liberalism. I’d like to write it today, and drop everything, but, ho ho ho, the spirits of the telephone bill and the electric bill will have something to say about that. They will say: no.

Today, the article to read is in the Financial Times. I was turned onto it by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. I should include more of the biz bloggers on my roll – Smith and Tanta at Calculated Risk are especially worth reading. The FT article is the result of a poll that shows that worldwide (drumroll please) most people don’t want to become relatively poorer. Astonishing! The poll asked people if income inequality had become too great. Read the results here.

Now, back to editing. At the moment, I take breaks by going to YouTube and watching vids of live performances of Santi White of Santogold, like this one, or this one.

Will Andrew Moonen be charged with Murder at Last?

Those of us who wonder if Andrew Moonen of Blackwater is ever going to be charged with the Murder of Raheem Khalif got some news, today – amazing news. The FBI is going to investigate! 15 months after the murder. Good job, you bloodhounds of justice! Now, if Andrew Moonen is actually charged, surely Margaret Scobey, the State Department officer who prepared Moonen’s flight and paid him a tidy sum, who administered the cleaning of State Department records concerning his crime, Margaret Scobey, his assistant, his help, his staff and his rod, Margaret Scobey of the State Department who is still employed, and is nominated as our Ambassador to Egypt, which will surely give Congress a chance to evade its duty and shame us still more deeply – oh, surely there is no way to avoid bringing her to justice unless justice stops at the powerful, unless the clique of kleptocrats that run us has changed the rules to make themselves not only invulnerable to charges of treason, to fraud, but even to murder. Surely the investigation should reach deep, oh very deep, into the bowels of the collaboration between the State Department and that criminal organization, Blackwater, uncovering every email, every message, every plotted coverup and stonewalling, until we have set before the world’s eyes at least a part of the shame of this past eight years, ripped it out from the womb of its monstrous mother, that stew of in-dealing drenched with the blood of Iraqi children.

Oh, that I could bring down the criminal regime of the Great Fly:

What glorious hand gave Samson his deaths wound?
Mess. Unwounded of his enemies he fell.
Man. Wearied with slaughter then or how? explain.
Mess. By his own hands.
Man. Self-violence? what cause
Brought him so soon at variance with himself
Among his foes?
Mess. Inevitable cause
At once both to destroy and be destroy'd;
The Edifice where all were met to see him
Upon thir heads and on his own he pull'd
1590
Man. O lastly over-strong against thy self!
A dreadful way thou took'st to thy revenge.
More than anough we know; but while things yet
Are in confusion, give us if thou canst,
Eye-witness of what first or last was done,
Relation more particular and distinct.
Mess. Occasions drew me early to this City,
And as the gates I enter'd with Sun-rise,
The morning Trumpets Festival proclaim'd
Through each high street: little I had dispatch't
1600
When all abroad was rumour'd that this day
Samson should be brought forth to shew the people
Proof of his mighty strength in feats and games;
I sorrow'd at his captive state, but minded
Not to be absent at that spectacle.
The building was a spacious Theatre
Half round on two main Pillars vaulted high,
With seats where all the Lords and each degree
Of sort, might sit in order to behold,
The other side was op'n, where the throng
1610
On banks and scaffolds under Skie might stand;
I among these aloof obscurely stood.
The Feast and noon grew high, and Sacrifice
Had fill'd thir hearts with mirth, high chear, & wine,
When to thir sports they turn'd. Immediately
Was Samson as a public servant brought,
In thir state Livery clad; before him Pipes
And Timbrels, on each side went armed guards,
Both horse and foot before him and behind
Archers, and Slingers, Cataphracts and Spears.
1620
At sight of him the people with a shout
Rifted the Air clamouring thir god with praise,
Who had made thir dreadful enemy thir thrall.
He patient but undaunted where they led him,
Came to the place, and what was set before him
Which without help of eye, might be assay'd,
To heave, pull, draw, or break, he still perform'd
All with incredible, stupendious force,
None daring to appear Antagonist.
At length for intermission sake they led him
1630
Between the pillars; he his guide requested
(For so from such as nearer stood we heard)
As over-tir'd to let him lean a while
With both his arms on those two massie Pillars
That to the arched roof gave main support.
He unsuspitious led him;-which when Samson
Felt in his arms, with head a while enclin'd,
And eyes fast fixt he stood, as one who pray'd,
Or some great matter in his mind revolv'd.
At last with head erect thus cryed aloud,
1640
Hitherto, Lords, what your commands impos'd
I have perform'd, as reason was, obeying,
Not without wonder or delight beheld.
Now of my own accord such other tryal
I mean to shew you of my strength, yet greater;
As with amaze shall strike all who behold.
This utter'd, straining all his nerves he bow'd,
As with the force of winds and waters pent,
When Mountains tremble, those two massie Pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro,
1650
He tugg'd, he shook, till down thy came and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder
Lords, Ladies, Captains, Councellors, or Priests,
Thir choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this but each Philistian City round
Met from all parts to solemnize this Feast.