the key to the myths has a small spot of blood on it

Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier (1664-1734) was Charles Perrault’s niece. According to the reliable Joan DeJean, she was one of a group of women writers in the late 17th century who were uncommonly common writers of the French fiction of the time – in a list of French novelists of the late 17th century published by Maurice Lever, women constitute about 33 percent of the names. They were, of course, attacked as women by such upholders of the standards as Boileau. The Journal de Scavans published an Eloge de Mademoiselle L'Héritier – a sort of obituary – from which LI culls these facts

- Her father was an “amateur of the sciences” and a ‘historiograph” at the court. Her father’s family was an ancient and noble one, from Normandy, while her mother was a Le Clerc, another connected family. She was educated by her father, developing a precocious interest in history and fable. Her father, meanwhile, was translating Grotius and aligning himself with Cardinal Mazarin, who gave him a pension. Surely he must have known Gabriel Naude, Mazarin’s secretary. When her father died, she started writing poetry – and she must have done some singing, too, as it is noted that her voice was beautiful. She wrote a defense of Madame Houlieres – about whom we wrote a post a while back. Houlieres was an epicurean, and had been attacked as a blue stocking in a satire to which L'Héritier indignantly replied.
- She gained the protection, at the court, of the Duchesse de Nemours. After her death, she edited her memoirs.
- Her lasting work is the Shadowy Tower, which contains the tale of Ricden-Ricdon. This work is supposedly translated from English – the English of King Richard the Lion Hearted.
- She gathered about her a small salon. Never married. A ‘malady’ is mentioned. Never complained.
Interesting, her obituary doesn’t mention Perrault. It does ring the chimes on her distinguished moral qualities, which are the flowers that fade first – no one would say the same thing about Ninon Lenclos. In fact, Perrault was close to the age’s premier transvestite, Francois Timoleon de Choisy, who was close to Louis’ brother, Monsieur, who was a royal sodomite not shy of asserting his royal perogatives, and duly noted in Saint Simon’s memoirs. In such a society, moral qualities have to be, at the very least, accomodating.

Some recent writers on the fairy tale have claimed that Perrault’s tales survived while his female fairy tale competitors, like L'Héritier, fell into oblivion through sheer sexism. LI thinks that this is a great underestimation of Perrault. It is easy to see why Perrault survived – he had a great sense for what can be cut. He explains – in his morals – what has happened, and the explanations are at such a lower level than the tale that they pose the question of whether Perrault understood his own stories – and that, of course, has led to the endless search for their real, oral sources. L'Héritier’s stories obviously influenced Perrault’s, but she liked her explanations – which, of course, are not for children. Children might ask questions about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but they are all questions about how dangerous he is, and whether he might be hiding under the bed, and whether Daddy could kill him. They do not ask about the lamentable events that may have impressed him with the wrong lessons about character and fate. L'Héritier is more interested in the latter.

Here’s a story about Perrault. He was, as my readers might not know, one of the designers of buildings and parks under Louis XIV. He adviced Colbert on public works. It is said that Colbert, at one point, had decided to close Tuileries to the public, after Lenotre had replanted the garden. Perrault proposed that they go for a stroll along the walks. While walking, Perrault observed: You wouldn’t believe, monsieur, the respect everyone has for this garden, down to the tiniest bourgeois – not only women and children never take it upon themselves to pluck any of the flowers, but even to touch them. They all walk about like reasonable people, as the gardeners can testify. It would be a public affliction not to be able to promenade here. – They are all slackers (faineants) who come here, brusquely interrupted the minister. – There comes here, Perrault began again, invalids who need to take a little air; one comes here to talk of business affairs, of marriages, of all kinds of things that are spoken of more agreeably in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary in the future to meet. I am firmly of the belief that royal gardens are so grand and so spacious only in order that all their children can walk there.” Colbert was struck by this last reflection, and went out of the Tuileries without ordering the gates to close, which remained open as before.”

That some things should be spoken of in gardens and others in churches is one of those ideas which, in our day, have been hammered into theoretical dullness via Habermas’ notion of the public conversational space. But Perrault’s consciousness of the coming and going of people and his “town” attitude carries over into his preservation of certain oral nuances in his tales that he wasn’t always fully in control of. In Barbe-bleu, the wife of Barbe-Bleu cannot wipe off the blood on the key that she has used to open the bloody chamber because, Perrault says, the key is fee - it is fairy, it is charmed. A charmed key is the key to the mythologies, no? The messages in Perrault’s tale are in a sense like the people in the garden – they are not, in their individuality, in their entrances, exits, thoughts, words, things planned by the gardener, and yet the plan of the garden accepts them as part of it. They pass through.

... Well, LI is way behind on all projects, and has not even advanced an iota on Adam Smith/Ricdin-Ricdon and the peculiarly nursery rhyme like construction of a pin. What can we say? We suck.

science of britney week

On Sundays, Doctor Watson would sit around and read the Times, while Holmes repressed slight shudders of craving for cocaine and prepared to have Watson read him some juicy police report upon which his mind, like a hungry spider, could feast. On Sundays, your faithful LI crewe, on the other hands, surveys the papers cyberspacically, on the q.v. for what happened this week in the exciting field of Britneyology.

This week saw major events. MTV, realizing that, without Britney, four people in a nursing home in Nome who were too disabled to get up and change the channel would be about the sum total watching their pissy awards show, threw out grandiose hints that they would allow... allow – La Brit to perform for them. Beg, MTV, is what we say. I want them down on their knees, weepin’. Meanwhile, the court, in its infinitely patriarchal wisdom, is tormenting Brit by entertaining her ex’s absurd contention that he should be the physical caretaker of the boys – or, in other words, the ex’s desire to be forever on the other end of the Spears’ money pipeline. Brit fired one lawyer and rehired another one, which is probably a good move. In my experience of divorce lawyers, the suck factor is high among even the best of them. In a gesture of magnanimity, the court allowed f... I’m not going to disgrace this blog by spelling out the name of Brit’s least favorite mistake ... to send the kids over via his bodyguards... via his bodyguards... so that they could stay with their much more interesting mother for a day. Via his bodyguards. The man doesn’t even have the guts to deliver the boys himself. Or perhaps he was too busy perfecting his paternal skills with his nose pressed up against a fine white powder line on some ass in the backroom of a Las Vegas club.

Well, this week, too, there was a thread at Crooked Timber about babysitting, playing off a post by Megan McArdle about babysitting, that explains a bit of the court’s attitude. On the one hand, parenting is so valued in this country of ours, where this little light of mine is gonna shine shine shine, that a mother is a radical haircut away from losing her kids forever – in the gated community, every hallmark moment in which an ass is wiped, an angel smiles. On the other hand, childcare itself is shit – it isn’t really work, it requires no skill, and the babysitters or bodyguards you have do it should be royally fucked in the ass as far as like compensation is concerned. In other words, schizophrenia reigns! As it has for the last five thousand years. Notice the high correlation between gender of commentors (male) and parties indignant that housework and childcare could ever, ever be considered work, on par with what these goobers do, day to day, to make the world a little more of a hellish sty to live in.

So, this week, we suggest that Brit’s best plan is to be rescued by Berbers, via this French faux group!

Fairy tales in the pin factory

This has been the spring for the Gothic strain of specters that Derrida stirred up in Marx in the bloggysphere; yet, so far, nobody has mentioned the name, Jack Zipes. Zipes is famous in the folklore field, or rather, literary folklore field, for applying a Marxist analysis to his study of the Grimm Brother’s Märchen. Zipes, who has also translated and written about Ernst Bloch, seems to have taken Bloch’s sympathy for grassroots peasant radicalism and applied it in a field where, usually, research tends towards a Freudian or Jungian end. Well, archetypes r us has a large American market – and perhaps I shouldn’t laugh. The softening of the American imago – stoic, a loner, a killer – owes a lot to an earnest search for a spirituality that isn’t so persistently shadowed by the cross – and don’t we all want a less wifebeater friendly, a less “God is a bullet” national culture? Sometimes, crawling in this mire of shit and sperm through the valley of the shadow of death that I laughingly call my life, I sure the fuck do. At the same time, let’s not pretend there aren’t losses, vast losses – of, for instance, that improvisational scrambling with which the escaping prisoner is supernaturally gifted. I take the escaping prisoner traversing the terrified countryside – Huck and Jim, before the hounds - to be as much an emblem of our psyche as the leatherstocking scouts that were the object of D.H. Lawrence’s remark.

Which gets us back to the violence and hope captured in fairy tales, à la Zipes. LI has been insinuating that as we entered a pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, which inaugurates the science of economics, we are entering a fairy tale haunted place. The path of pins leads to Grandmother’s house. But pins are also an integral part of the economy of spinning, as Zipes makes clear in his analysis of Rumpelstiltskin in Fairy Tale as Myth. As he also makes clear, the patriarchal readings of Rumpelstiltskin – a tale classified under the motif of Helper’s Name in the Aarne-Thompson index – are, to say the least, misleading. Helper is the wrong name for Rumpelstiltskin – “he is obviously a blackmailer and an oppressor,” according to Zipes. Well, “obviously” is a strong word to use about any character in a fairy tale: he could be seen, as obviously, as the accursed share, rejected by the ennobled Miller’s Daughter who is seeking, above all else, to elevate her child above the status she was raised in, all the while keeping that status system intact to gain the benefits of it. Much like the American CEO, usually the product of student loans and state funded colleges, seeking to ensure the radical diminishment of public investment so that others are much more burdened down by student loans in less funded universities competing with the Ivies where the CEOs send their own children.

Still, Zipes is right to draw attention to the woman in the story. The Grimm Brother’s version of the tale is something of a disappointment in comparison to the version published by Madame L’heritier in the Cabinet des fees, Ricdin-Ricdon, since the character of the Miller’s daughter is not very developed in the former, while this character, Rosanie, the daughter of a peasant in L’heritier, is an acute psychological portrait of upward social ambition.

Zipes claims that the spinning motif in the Grimm Brother’s tales is, in a sense, a valedictory to the enormous injury done to women in the 18th and 19th century as their cottage industry of spinning and weaving was wrested from them and centralized in male managed factories.

The very first literary form of Rumpelstiltskin, Mademoiselle L’Heritier’s Ricdin-Ricdon, demonstrates that spinning was cherished by the aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. The queen is most eager to employ Rosanie as a spinner and cherishes all the articles that Rosanie magically produces. We know that numerous French courts had constructed spinning rooms for women to produce much needed cloth, and there was a great demand for gifted spinners at the time that Mademoiselle L’heritier wrote her tale. Interestingly, her model spinner, Rosanie, takes possession of the devil’s magic want (i.e., phallus) to create an image that satisfies if not exceeds society’s expectations. She does not spin straw into gold but rather flax into yarn and thread. ...

(67)

I think Zipes is correct to front the spinning in this tale as at least equivalent to the story of the name of the “helper” – but to make this a tale of spinning as an affectionately perceived craft is a bit of a distortion. He writes: “Throughout the entire tale, spinning and female creativity remain the central concern and are upheld as societal values that need support, especially male support.” This is a reading that fails to capture the irony in Rosanie’s story – to say the least. In L’Héritier’s tale, Rosanie has one abiding characteristic: a total abhorrence of spinning. When she is first spotted by Prince Prud’homme (and surely these bourgeois names for the royals – Prud’homme and Queen Laborieuse – are meant to ironically), she is being dragged around the back yard by her evil hag of a mother, who demands that her daughter spin more. In a crafty move that reproduces the comic gesture from Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, when the hag is interrupted by Prince Prud’homme – who is taken by Rosanie’s looks and wants to know why she is being mistreated by the hag –she tells him a lie, a neat inversion of the truth – that she is punishing her daughter for spinning too much. Thus, under false pretences, Prince P. takes Rosanie back to the court, where his mother is delighted to receive a top flight spinner. Rosanie, horrified by what her mother has done but unable to face being expelled from the court if she confesses the truth, is going through the park to cast herself off a pavilion set on a cliff and end her life – so much does she hate spinning - when she meets the strange man – a big man, in the tale, with a dark face, but oddly amused face – to whom she tells her tale.

About which, more later.

eating the flesh that she herself has bred...

By the way – re the price of oil – as I wrote a week ago, the main driver of the oil price spike recently has been insecurity. The threats against Iran by Israel, and the futile campaign, led by the U.S., to stop the Iranians from engaging in the uranium enrichment program that they are entitled to at least as much as India (where the U.S. has loaned technically illegal support) and Pakistan, have a cost. The cost can be computed at about 50 cents to a dollar a gallon. Here, for further proof of a series of events that the press, in its neocon wisdom, has simply taken off the table for consideration, is a Financial Times article about the effect of the sanctions in slowing down the development of one of the prime oil fields in the world – in Iran. Of course, if this was Venezuala taking a field out of commission, there’d be the usual dyspeptic drumbeat. But stories like this about Iran aren’t meant for the morons or the children – they might start doubting the wisdom of our establishment! That would be so sad.



“As energy prices surge, the world is wondering where it will all end. Where will supplies come from in the future? Iran, sitting on the world’s second largest reserves of gas – in addition to huge quantities of oil – is tomorrow’s apparent answer.
Iran should in theory be a magnet for international oil companies, which are cash-rich and searching for ways to replenish their diminishing reserves. But the geopolitical environment, in which Iran is being marginalised because of a refusal to suspend work on its nuclear programme, means this is not the case.
South Pars, the world’s largest gas field, is shared between Iran and Qatar but development from the Iranian side has ground almost to a halt, thanks to the US-led crackdown on business links with Iran. This week the European Union ratcheted up the pressure, agreeing tougher financial measures against Tehran.

...
This delicate balancing act is exemplified by the decision of Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol last month to withdraw from the development of what is known as phase 13 of South Pars. The lack of new investment from the oil majors means Iran is left to deal with relatively inexperienced minnows that are desperate for the business – companies from the likes of Austria, Croatia and Poland.”

I will go out on a limb and make a prediction: this will not become an issue in the Presidential or even be mentioned by the NYT and the Washington Post. It would, after all, point to a small paradox: the U.S. is pursuing a foreign policy that has become immediately injurious to the economic power of the average American household. It is pursuing this policy solely from vanity and the interest of the defense industry-petro club to churn up wars and perpetual hostility. Those with memories - that brave band! - might recall that the newspapers touted Bush's European tour, which ended with increasing sanctions on Iran, as a triumph. At the same time, the business pages recorded another spike in the future's market for oil. It was like these stories had nothing to do with each other.

On the other hand - maybe we should laugh at all the morons dying on the gas grapevine. They wanted it. Now let them eat it to the last little morsel.

Poor and rich, laborer and boss - let them all eat their fill of the dainty pie, in which so many sweet and tender Iraqis have been well and truly baked.

Oh corrupt and heartless generation... you will eat your heart, several times over, before this is done.

precarious beasts

Well, Mr. Praxis, at least, liked yesterday’s post (sniff, sniff). (I've even lost North, who usually comes in to stronghand me when I emanate self-pity - and by the way, I hope you see that I am emanating self-pity about my self-pity! Trust LI to go Meta!)

To take up yesterday’s thread – we last watched the wolf, or werewolf, merrily hop down the path of pins, and end up, via a Loony Tunes loop traversing space, time and genre, at the pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations. Of course, the question is – what kind of pin factory is this? It seems to be one that physically exists, one that Smith, our genial author, has seen, according to his own written word. Yet no such factory visit seems to have been recorded elsewhere. Plus, textual cues seem to point to the factory being, in actuality, in France – in the pages of the entry on pin, épingle, in the Encyclopedie. And that pin factory seems to have been in L'aigle, in Normandy. About which we have information that is, oddly enough, never to my knowledge been compared to the account in the Wealth of Nations. Odd, because certainly the model of the pin factory was not just about the efficiency, the marvel, of dividing tasks among laborers, but had an underlying message about labor itself.

Wolves were things of the past in Scotland when Smith made his (non) outing to the pin factory. How far past is another affair wrapped up in some controversy. According to some accounts, the last wolf in Scotland was shot by a hunter named McQueen, who tracked the beast to his lair in Findhorn after the beast had attacked and eaten a woman and a child crossing a nearby moor. Shapeshifting, as would be expected by those who know something of the path of pins, has infected every part of this story. Did the wolf really attack the pair and eat them? The last wolf? What was the sex of it? The size? Or was the last wolf slain by Sir Ewen Cameron in 1680? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in 1904, devoted an article to the last wolf in Scotland. According to the writer, many Scottish districts lay claim to the be scene of the shooting of the last wolf. However, Blackwood’s goes with the shooting in the “wild valley of Findhorn” in 1743, since there are detailed accounts. The area was the home of the last wild pack. Here’s the Blackwood’s story:

“The most active carnach in their destruction was MacQueen of Pall a’ chrocain, an immense duine uasail who stood 6 feet 7 inches in his brogues. To this worthy, one winter day in 1743, came word from MacIntosh that a great black beast had come down to the low country and carried off a couple of children near Cawdor, and that a tainchel or hunting-drive was to meet a Figiuthas, where MacQeen was summoned to attend according to an act of Parliament.

Next morning in the cold dawn the hunters were assembled: but where was MacQueen? He was not wont to be ‘langsome’ on such an occasion, and his hounds, nto to mention himself, were almost indispensable to the chase. MacIntosh watied impatiently as the day wore on, and when at last MacQueen was seen coming liesurely along, the chief spoke sharply to him, rebuking him for wasting the best hours for hunting.

“Ciod e a’ chabhag?” (What’s the hurry?”) was the cool reply, which sent an indignant murmur through the shivering sportsmen. MacIntosh uttered an angry threat.

“Sin e dhiabh! (“There you are then!”) said MacQueen, and throwing back his plaid, flung the grey head of the wolf upon the heather. The company had lost thier sport, but they forgave Pall-a’-chrocain, whose renown stood higher than ever as a hunter, and Macintosh “gave him the land called Sean-achan for meat to his dogs.”



Surely LI is showing his own bent for irrelevance and the scaring of all rational like beasties, going so langsome into the thickets of Smith’s prose with a cock n bull hunting tale about a fairy wolf, for Jesus’ sake! Man, where’s your models, your references to the fine theorists, and all that train! But as the disappearance of the wolf seems, to us, magically connected with the appearance of the pin factory, we thought it might be a fine thing, worthy of a carnach from Cawdor (you remember the Thane of Cawdor?), to clear the area so that we could travel across it all safe and sound and snug. And in our search for pin factories, we might just find that, in spite of Smith’s celebration of the division of labor – upon which rock is built so much – that in fact, the celebrated pin factory in L’aigle, Normandy, from which – although it is murky – the encyclopedists might have drawn their information about the pin industry, was still governed by a mass of laws concerning master pinners, and who was allowed to work on pins, and problems with the weight of pins in each envelop of pins, so that the social function of pinmaker, and the needs of the state, and regulation from the state, might have had as much to do with the division of labor as the fabulous productivity of the pin factory, which can only be exampled by ... well, by Rapunzel of course, spinning straw into gold.

MacQueen told more of the story of the hunt than was reprised in Blackwoods. Here’s how he told the tale:

As I came through the slochk (i.e., ravine) I foregathered wi' the beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi' him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig (i.e., cut his throat), and brought awa' his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.

Very precarious creatures indeed.

and the wolf shall lead us...

Half a pound of heroin
half a pound of treacle
that's the way the story goes
out comes the evil...

LI has been contemplating one of the great lines of English verse over the course of the last couple of days, to wit, Rochester’s “And with my prick I'll govern all the land....” from the play, Sodom. But I’ve contemplated myself temporarily blind, vis a vis my Dom Juan thesis, so I’ll do Rochester at another time. Instead, today’s lesson from the book of LI (written by the archangels in seraphic blood) is about pins. As in how many economists dance upon the head of a pin? You know the answer – all of them.

Ho ho. In the 1760s, there was a controversy in Britain about a supposed Scots epic, Ossian, which had been “found” by a poet and published. Ossian was a forgery. Meanwhile, the real Scots epic was a-forging – that is, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith provided the Homeric theology to this thing we be callin’ capitalism. So, unsurprisingly, small academic industries have grown up around his famous images. The invisible hand is the most famous of these; a small group has worked on the famous pin factory.

The Wealth of Nations begins like this:

“The greatest improvement*17 in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is commonly supposed to be carried furthest in some very trifling ones; not perhaps that it really is carried further in them than in others of more importance: but in those trifling manufactures which are destined to supply the small wants of but a small number of people, the whole number of workmen must necessarily be small; and those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse. We can seldom see more, at one time, than those employed in one single branch. Though in such manufactures,*18 therefore, the work may really be divided into a much greater number of parts, than in those of a more trifling nature, the division is not near so obvious, and has accordingly been much less observed.

To take an example, therefore,*19 from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade),*20 nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.*21 I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.”

Few books give you the main course right away like this. Smith was rightly proud of the phrase, division of labor. In one stroke, it divided an old way of looking at labor as a particular social function from looking as labor as one abstract thing. It was the discovery of a universal, accompanying the universal-to-be of the capitalist system itself.

Such a vast discovery, such a trifling object. Smith taught rhetoric, and knew all the magic tricks. It is as if Columbus had set sail with the Owl and the Pussycat in a pea green boat. The pin! The very emblem of smallness, a sort of atom of social matter – associated, too, with frivolity. Jesus had already used the needle as a (miraculous) stick with which to beat the wealthy – and here the wealthy fire back with pins. Then of course there is Little Red Riding Hood – I’ve done a previous post on this, so let me quote here from Teasley and Chase:

“As the original tale opens, a dominant concern is the path to be chosen:
Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house.
Although Darnton usually investigated the meaning behind puzzling elements, he has dismissed the reference to the paths of the pins and the needles as nonsense. Yet, here is the first example of a symmetry that provides a clue to the tale's meaning.[6]
Each character's selection of one of the paths reveals a destiny. Red Riding Hood's choice of the path of the needles is synonymous with her decision to become a prostitute. The meaning of the line is revealed in an obscure nineteenth-century history that explains that among "women of doubtful virtue . . . bargains were struck on the basis of a package of bodkins or lace-needles, or aiguillettes, which they normally carried as a distinctive badge upon the shoulder, a custom surviving to Rabelais' day."[7]
The meaning of the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is found in the term bzou, which was used interchangeably with loup in the original French version. Although loup is the common French word for wolf, the definition of bzou is more obscure. Paul Delarue, the editor who has compiled thirty-five versions of the folktale, found that bzou was always used in the story for brou or garou, which in the Nivernais was loup-brou or loup-garou. All these are variations on the French word for werewolf, a supernatural being associated with witchcraft. Early modern Europeans held that Satan had the power to take the form of a wolf.[8]
Sixteenth-century French society believed that the presence of a devil's mark on a witch's body proved her allegiance to Satan. Since the mark was a blemish on the skin that was insensitive, the discovery of the mark through the use of pin pricks became a standard feature of witch hunting. Just as Red Riding Hood revealed her true identity through her selection of the path of the needles, so the wolf revealed his identity as a witch by choosing the path of the pins.”

Indeed, the shapeshifting wolf was knocking at the door in 1776.

Economists, however, get the shivers when fairy tales are mentioned, being the wolf’s dumbest children for the most part. A true disappointment to the Loup-Garou, that’s for sure. While the wind howls outside and the stormclouds gather, they soothe themselves with more technical and standard questions. Which are addressed by Jean Louis Peaucelle in an article in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought entitled, Adam Smith’s use of multiple references for his pin making example. I will post about that next.

...
Those interested in the Derrida/Marx controversies of late, hosted here and at the Colonel’s site, should check out the current post at Rough Theory.

Ysa Ferrer!

Sundays are the days when we in the LI office lounge around, order out for margaritas, and have long, intense conversations with Brit on our cellphone. For a Britneyphile, this has been a crammed week – but aren’t they all? The baby. The disturbing advice from Mel (if we’ve told her once, we’ve told her a million times – check anything he tells you in the Kabbalah first!). And of course her Mom’s book. This Sunday, though, we mainly chatted about the whether Tracy Feith’s rather busy print dresses were for her, although of course, such conversation is tres confidential.


Instead of our Britney Sunday, we will address another subject. Most people come to LI for one reason and one reason only: nude pics of Lady Bitch Ray! That there are no nude pics of Lady Bitch Ray on this site hasn’t seemed to discouraged the hordes of horny lemmings, who apparently can’t live another day without seeing LBR’s pussy.
Oh don’t ask why!
Oh, don’t ask why!

Now the singer we’d really like to promote in the States is Ysa Ferrer. It is a puzzle to me that To bi or not to bi is not playing from the grocery store sound systems near you (as I just heard Santogold’s LES Artistes). It is that inveterate American problem with languages other than English, perhaps. But I’ve been pleased to see Ysa’s fans in France now sing along with her when she gets into the song – or maybe pleased isn’t exactly the word. But it is sucha catchy jingle that LI has decided to help it along in the states by translating the lyrics, which in French go

Si je choisis je perds
La moitié de mes repères
Le sens de l'équilibre
L'impression d'être libre

C'est une partie de moi-même
Attirée par les extrêmes
Par ce monde invisible
Où tout semble possible

Laisse-moi vivre ma vie
Aimer qui j'ai envie
Je suis comme je suis
Libre de corps et d'esprit
To bi or not to bi
Pas besoin d'alibi
J'aimais Ken et Barbie
Je me sens aussi
Bien avec elle qu'avec lui
To bi or not to bi

Un peu d'il un peu d'elle
Enfin je me sens belle
Si l'amour est intense
Le sexe n'a plus d'importance

La meilleure façon de marcher
Ma tenue de soirée
Mon plus beau théorème
Pour te dire que je t'aime

Laisse moi vivre ma vie
Aimer qui j'ai envie
Je suis comme je suis
Libre de corps et d'esprit
To bi or not to bi
Pas besoin d'alibi
J'aimais Ken et Barbie
Je me sens aussi
Bien avec elle qu'avec lui
To bi or not to bi

Ysa has never claimed to be Georges Brassens, so this isn’t exactly what you’d call a deep song. But fuck it – for a woman who is half manga, it is deep enough. Anyway, here’s the translation:

If I chose I lose
half my M.O. goes
my equilibrium
and my freedom

Attracted by extremes
part of me it seems
by a world invisible
where everything is possible

Just let me live my way
I am I anyway
My body and my mind are free
To bi or not to bi
No need for alibis
I loved Ken and Barbie
Feeling good don’t you see
with him or her or her or me
To bi or not to bi

A little of he a little of she
At last I feel pretty [I changed the french to make sense of this line]
if the love is intense
sex has no importance

I’m walking like I know how
My clubbing dress it says wow
This is my best proof
to tell you that I love you


Etc. I sorta bent a few lines to get to the rhymes, or most of them, which will disturb you purists out there – that is, if anybody really, really feels intensely about Ysa Ferrer’s lyrics.

And – extra for the Lady Bitch Ray nude crowd – if you really comb Dailymotion, Ysa just made her own nude vid! Exciting, eh? But you will have to find it yourself. Ha ha ha.

What has caused the spike in the price of oil

LI has been immensely irritated with the thumbsucking pieces in the papers about the runup in the cost of oil. The conventional wisdom, in a gesture of blind self-protection, has so molded the issue so that its setpoints are: either the price reflects speculation, or it reflects demand. This is a very convenient way to ignore the drivers of the recent spike in oil prices. What are they? There are two of them. One was the infusion of credit into the financial institutions managed by the Fed for six months now – which, not coincidentally, is the period of the biggest spike in oil prices. Fed policy, as well, trashed the value of the dollar. So, as consumer credit tightened and the largest sector of the credit boom dried up - securitized mortgage instruments - money, understandably, sought a new outlet. Thus, the futures boom in the commodities. However, the underlying structural reason for the price rises has been security. It was due to the tight tie between oil production and security that LI concluded, in 2005, that the Bush regime, however criminal it was, was not going to attack Iran. So far we’ve been right. The reason is entirely due to oil prices.

However, there are two other variables at play: Israel’s increasingly threatening policy, and the U.S. strategy in Iraq that is directed, seemingly, at finding excuses to attack Iran and maintaining bases to make that threat a long term project.

The amazing Yves Smith, at nakedcapitalism, a site we’ve been going to daily, finally pierces the CW wall with a post about Iraq oil. We have been drumming on this drum in comments here and there across the web (since we decided to make LI a mostly non-political blog – it seems sorta silly to get on a soapbox when obviously we are never going to have an audience that numbers more than one hundred souls, and we do so now, as in this post, because sometimes our loquaciousness overwhelms our sense of futility), namely, that the underperformance of the Iraqi oil fields, to say the least, over the last five years effectively cut out the potentially third largest oil supplier out of the supply line even as demand was increasing exponentially. It is another cost of having invaded Iraq. If, in 2001, the U.S. had pursued a rational policy – dropped sanctions against Iran, recognized the government, poured aid money into Northern Iraq, thus creating conditions that would make the long range survival of Saddam’s regime impossible – oil’s price would now be around 60 to 80 dollars per barrel. The future’s market is a bet that, in the future, political forces – say, the bombing of Iran by Israel – will have an effect not only on Iran, but also on every oil producer in the region, since this would madden the populations of Saudi Arabia, Libya, etc. to a degree that the tyrants in charge could not afford to ignore. To say nothing of its effect in Iraq.

Yet, week after week, the thumbsuckers ignore this. Why? Because this chain of events casts into doubt the entirety of the establishment view of foreign policy. Not only is the foreign policy we are pursuing immoral, but – simply in terms of material benefit – it has been highly injurious to the average American. Conversely, it has been highly beneficial to the average petro company, defense company, or the huge host of government contractors – which, not coincidentally, are the circles in which the media punditocracy runs. It’s the oligarchy of the filthiest. And, to be a little more nuanced, the filthy circle does employ a huge number of people. This is the high end engineering sector. This is where the most money is poured into R and D (absurdly enough – the R and D devoted to green technologies, to energy efficiencies, to alternative power – it is comparatively non-existent). This is the heart of Bushdom, the real supporters. And they are determined to keep their talon like hold on the power of the American state. The result of which is the production of a discourse in which there is no egress to any of the issues that are, actually, shaping our current economic circumstances.

There are good signs, though, too. For instance, establishment media is taking tremendous economic hits as subscriptions go down and down – which I view as a sort of instinctive reaction by the public to being massively lied to. Even if, on the conscious level, that public wants “good news” and seemingly revels in great moronic fetes celebrating mendacity, torture, and short term greed, instinctively the animal inside stiffens and tugs when being pulled towards the abattoir. It is on the unconscious level that the populace knows that we are seriously fucked, while on the discursive level, the very words in their mouths have been carefully and systematically shit upon by the gatekeepers. It is that dying fecal taste in the mouth that has made the past seven years so unforgettable. Only in our dreams do we retain the language of freedom, words that smell of fresh bread, of sperm, of spring, of earth.

Trees dreaming: La Bruyère/Carpenter Shih

We looked at the oak tree in the Chuang Tzu (which was assembled from various parts around 100 A.D.) whose spirit preached the great sermon on uselessness in the dream of Carpenter Shih. There’s a quite different tree in La Bruyère’s Characters, which was published anonymously for the first time in 1687, undergoing, afterwards, numerous revisions which critics have read in the light of their idea of La Bruyère’s intention. It is in the section, Des biens de Fortune, which could be translated in various ways: On the good things of the rich, or, on the goods of fortune. Fortuna, here, is the foundation of wealth – which touches on the deep structure of La Bruyere’s Characters, the contrast between social sets – the Town and the Court, for instance. Men and Women.

“How many men resemble those trees, already strong and advanced in age, which one transplants into gardens, where they surprise the eyes of those who see them placed in the pretty spots where they had never seen them grow, and who know neither their commencements nor their progress.”

Barthes wrote that La Bruyère sketched a “cosmogony of classical society” – by which he meant that La Bruyère was after those rules that would allow him to classify types and social groupings. In a sense, Barthes was seeing his own image in La Bruyère – or at least the Barthes of Mythologies. The central sections of the Characters discuss the fortunate, or the rich, the Town and the Court. This is, as it happens, approximately the trajectory of La Bruyère’s own life. He was born in Paris to a member of the financial bourgeoisie, the controller of the rents of Paris; he became treasurer of Caen, which produced a comfortable sinecure without mandating that he would actually have to, well, live in Caen (the French system is still very lenient about where Government officials live, as opposed to the regions or towns that they are supposed to represent, since so many prefer to live in Paris). And then, by way of Bossuet, who introduced him to the Grande Condé, one of the most powerful of the French aristocrats, he took a position as tutor to the Duc de Bourbon, which is how it came about that he mingled with the crowd at Versailles.

The treasurer’s habits linger in The Characters – one has a sense of entries, of debits and credits. This is what Barthes says:

...the regions out of which La Bruyère composes his world are quite analogous to logical classes: every individual (in logic, we would say every x), i.e., every “character”, is defined first of all by a relation of membership in some class or other, the tulip fancier in the class Fashion, the coquette in the class Women, the absent-minded Ménalque in the class Men, etc.; but this is not enough, for the chacters must be distinguished among themselves within one and the same class; La Bruyère therefore performs certain operations of intersection from one class to the next; cross the class of Merit with that of Celibacy and you get a reflection on the stifling function of marriage (Du Merit, no. 25); join Tryphon’s former virtue and his present fortune” the simply coincidence of these two classes affords the image of a certain hypocrisyh (Des biens de fortune, no. 50). Thus the diversity of the regions, which are sometimes social, sometimes psychological, in no way testifies to a rich disorder: confronting the world, La Bruyère does not enumerate absolutely varied elements like the surveyor writers of the next century...”[224 – Howard’s translation]

Keeping Barthes reflection in mind – and it is easy to see this sort of pre-Linnean, Port Royal classicatory system in La Bruyère – one notices two things about La Bruyère’s tree. First, it is a piece of nature of a special type – trees being those things that transform the earth itself into the texture and growth of their being. And second, simply by being transplanted, it becomes a piece of artifice. Like the new man – one of La Bruyère’s coinages for the upstart, the man of fortune – literally, of the fortune of interest taking, of gambling, of marrying wealth – it is a new tree, since the spectator can remember neither its beginning nor its progress. Yet the new tree is not just any tree – it is striking, majestic, it has attained in its natural soil a certain respectable dimension. Like La Bruyère himself, transplanted to the soil of Versailles.

Of these new men like old trees, some could be called adventurers. In the section on the society of the Court, La Bruyère writes about a type that could be more aptly be compared to mushrooms:

Every once in a while there appears in the courts adventurous and bold men, of a free and familiar character, who produce themselves (se produisent eux-memes), protesting that they have in their art the talent that others lack, and who are taken at their word. Nevertheless, they profit from the public error, or the love men have for novelty – they pierce through the crowd and go forward all the way up to the ear of the prince, to whom courtiers see them talking, while the one talking is just happy to be so seen. They have this advantage for the grandees, that they can be suffered without consequence, and dismissed likewise. Thus they disappear simultaneously rich and discredited, while they world that they have just deceived is ready to be deceived by another.”

What is the crowd that the adventurer pierces? It is composed not just of individuals, but of customs – it is the whole coagulated weight of tradition, of old means of making fortunes, of family, of land. La Bruyère is, of course, as a moralist, opposed to these men of a free and familiar character. But the credit and the debit of them are hard to sum up. In his discourse before the Academy, La Bruyère made it clear that he belonged to the party of the ancients instead of the moderns – the latter being led by Perrault and Fontenelle. The adventurer is certainly a modern – his character embodies the modern in its lack of standing, its familiarity, the hazard in which it stands.

This is why the adventurer’s underground bond to the libertine is so strong. The transplanted tree is not an adventurer – La Bruyère’s description of the tree emphasizes its original majesty, and it is not the trees fault if it is transplanted, as it stayed still the whole time. It was a passenger. The adventurer, according to La Bruyère, does not stand still, but starts forward and doesn’t stop until he reaches the prince’s ear. However, we believe the allegorical qualities of the tree exceed La Bruyère’s meaning, especially if we consider that the adventurer might move and yet be immobile. And it is from that spot that the adventurer looks out and sees – that nature is not ancient. Nature is modern. It is the most modern of phenomena.

Here, of course, we are pushing the text. But let’s go with our thought. What is modern about nature? What is modern is that God is so hidden now that he might not exist. And that leaves nature as the only limit left on the human. That, briefly, was the modernity of the natural. It flares up, we think, in the libertine moment – and never as a wholly unified scheme, never as, finally, a hypercognizable passionate structure spread across the social structure – but as a set of hints. Collectively, this is what the “sweetness” of the ancien regime was about. It was the moment after God, but before Man. It failed finally to arrange itself with a social whole undergoing drastic and irremediable changes. Those changes, the great transformation of the market based industrial system, found their legitimacy in the notion that there was no human limit. This was the revolution of happiness. It was at this moment that nature lost its standing, and there commenced a competition for a certain metaphysical position of priority between God (who no longer represented a human limit, but rather a sacralized cosmic human all too human wish fulfillment) and Man. And thus, the human limit went down the amnesia hole.

So, our question is this: what would the spirit of Carpenter Shih useless oak tree converse about if it were dreamt by La Bruyère’s transplanted tree?

Good Texas posture

I’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t understand Texas – especially Yankees. That’s why I was so happy to run into this YouTube video, yesterday, showing a typical Texas rite de passage. As my friend, Mr. Lumpenprof, can tell you, this is the way we do things down here - and boy howdy, there’s no funner way to make sure kids grow up standing straight and tall – we do hate bad posture in the Lone Star State! This kind of thing happens all the time on these lazy summer days in my neighborhood – you hear kids giggling, their mothers crying for them to stand still, and occasionally howls of pain – I always smile and think, somebody wasn’t listening to Mom!

What Texans have a hard time understanding is that Yankees just don’t have these fun childhood games. I don’t know, but I think this is the reason Yankees are so weird!

Simmel's big adventure

Simmel’s essay on adventure begins by considering the “double-sidedness” of events in a life. On the one hand, events fall into a pattern in relationship to one another, so that one can talk of a life as a whole and mean a unified thing – on the other hand, events have their own center of gravity, and can be defined in terms of their own potential for pleasure or pain. To use an example not mentioned by Simmel, but getting at what he means: Famously, Kant had a regular habit of taking a certain stroll each day in Königsberg. It was famous as a regular habit – it was an example of some craving for order in Kant’s life, which some have read into his work. Now, one walk was, intentionally, much like the other – and yet, they all formed a distinct sub-system in Kant’s life of Kant’s walks.

In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. I fall in love, say, with a certain type of woman. For instance, I always find myself in relationships with brunettes who have issues with their father. How does my radar pick out these women? Why is it the same process? Here, things aren’t so obvious. Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our dicks and pussies. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again.

Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction:

“Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.”

Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life:

“When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that thise difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other.
And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.”

That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course:

While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, with this movement, back inot it, a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which yet is somehow bound up with the center.
The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb]

As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear.

Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on.

“The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.”

These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future.

To illustrate this, Simmel uses the example of Casanova. What he says should be put in relationship to Moliere’s Dom Juan, who, as I have pointed out, was always proposing marriage – to propose marriage was his compulsion, as he explains it to Sganarelle, just as Alexander the Great’s was conquest. A reading of the play, like Kierkegaard’s, that regards the marriage mania as a mask for the real seduction underneath takes the conjunction of marriage and seduction too easily.

This is Simmel on Casanova:

“An extremely characteristic testimony to this [the lack of a sense of the future] is what Casanova, as can be seen in his memoirs, so oftin in the course of his erotic adventurous life seriously aimed at – to marry the woman of the momen he loved.
By his disposition and way of life, there was nothing more contradictory, nothing more innerly and outerly unthinkable for Casanova.

Casanova was not only a notable knower of men, but was maifestly a rare knower of himself; and though he was obliged to say that he couldn’t have held out in a marriage more than fourteen days, and that the most miserable consequences would inevitably attend this step – the intoxication of the moment so caught him up (by which I mean to lay more emphasis on the moment than the intoxication) that it swallowed up the future perspective, so to speak, hide and hair.”

the adventurer

If you look up the sociology of adventure, you will soon find that there is little or none. Astonishingly, it seems to hold no interest, in itself, for the sociologist. With one exception – a classic essay by Simmel. When, otherwise, the subject comes up, the sociologist views adventure in the same spirit as the tourist agency: as a category in the leisure field, requiring a guide, hotel accomodations, showers at the end of it, cameras, and flights to and fro.

This is all the more astonishing in that adventurers certainly have existed. Adventurers brought down the Inca empire. Adventurers founded the Jamestown colony. Legitimists called Napoleon an adventurer for good reason – the same thing could be said for Garibaldi. So why the lack of interest? Perhaps it is because adventure, from the serious social science point of view, seems to have the irritating ability to turn the monumental into the ludicrous: it is continually shaking hands with the Commandantore. And, for the social scientist, there is a line: the truth must, in the end, be serious. It simply can’t be ludicrous. That would be an insult to all the founding positivist family.

The adventurer, the politician, the artist, the scholar/virtuoso – they are all types that appear in the Renaissance. They are related insofar as they all have complex and conflicting relationships with the system of patronage.

Of them all, the adventurer is the hardest, perhaps, to grasp, since it is difficult to say just what his object is. The politician aims at power, the artist at art, the virtuoso at knowledge, and the adventurer at experience – yet that seems much too vast and vague an object (although why it is vaster and vaguer than knowledge or power is a good question). Michael Nerlich, a literary critic, observes in The Ideology of Adventure that adventure is first used as an economic term: "Godfrey's selection of examples of aventure in his Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue francaise is, to be sure, one-sided, but it is of particular interest to us because his examples are almost exclusively of legal or economic meanings, with the first examples going all the way back to the late thirteenth century. Alongside the meaning of “output, earnings, income” ... the word aventure also occurs with the meaning of ‘catch, booty or harvest...” And later ... “Despite all the theories about ‘eventus, etc., I believe that this is the original meaning, sicne it is difficult to see why an ad-ventura would have had to be invented when eventus already covered the meaning.”

Nechlin gives us this meaning with the note that it is controversial, and seems to infuriate some medievalists, who do not like the idea that the adventure of the knight on his quest is a thing of booty. In the same way, Kierkegaard strenuously objects to Moliere’s Dom Juan being endebted – dealing with money is, to Kierkegaard, a fall from the infinite adventure of seduction.

In a future post, we are going to analyse Simmel’s essay on adventure, in which, we think, certain ... interesting choices are made in the contrast between normality – the real world, of labor – and the island world of adventure.

A Devil Speaks

We share our mothers' health
It is what we've been dealt
What's in it for me?


As much as I hate to admit it, the MSM (I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead) roaring triumphantly about the Great Fly’s last European tour, are absolutely correct. It is not just the lack of demonstrations, which is the a subsurface phenomenon (I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.) It is attributed to boredom with the Fly, but it is, instead, a monument to the decade’s tyranny, to the criminal oligarchies that have created, out of their unbelievable greed and lack of imagination, and their lock on the discourse, a veritable desert of democracy, systematically exhausting the more populous opposition that can never seem to elect a representative who will resist the bastards, who will put an end to their works, all those who thirst after bloodshed and more bloodshed: the writers of editorials, the funders of think tanks, the bad seed produced in the monstermaking laboratories of the corporation and the university, dumbing us down to the nub for seven glorious televised years (I know thy works).

Behold, what has happened in the EU this spring to the Great Fly’s fellow flies: the European financial sector proved that it was stupider and viler, even, than the Americans, losing even more money – and of course being immediately succored by emergency billions by all the governments involved, no questions asked (And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind); after eight years of non-action that have ingrained a habit of adopting to natural disasters, of resignation in the face of the refusal to change the most wasteful and destructive system of production ever foisted upon the planet (And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within), the first intimations of the second global change – the looming food crisis – appear on the horizon, to the non-action of committee’s resolved to “do something”; and, to top it off, as a direct result of the neo-colonialist adventure of the Fly in the Middle East, oil has skyrocketed in price (And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof) so that throughout Europe there is fear about inflation, strikes, and slowdowns. Normally such a situation would be an open opportunity for a political figure to come forward and say – enough! Such a figure would, traditionally, have come from the center-left. A program that would ease the inflation fears writes itself – how easy it would be to say, abolish all sanctions on Iran and let’s have normal relations with that country. Such a course would have the effect of immediately collapsing the speculative side of the oil run up – for that is a security premium. But it is as if an invisible hand had struck them all dumb (And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof). And so, the EU leadership can continue to pursue a vanity policy, a policy that is against peace and national self interest at once, a remarkable convergence, a policy in which, flies themselves, they can please the Great Fly. They can pat each other on the exoskeleton for a job well done.

For there is a blank on the political map of the EU as well as the U.S.A. At one time, that part of the map was occupied by the center-left. But it was rotten. It bred a rotten leadership. It fed itself on rotten and incestuous verbiage. It was full of chancers, and they saw their chance as consisting of monopolizing the left space while moving to a reactionary position, taking with it the century of the left’s apparatus, its tacit knowledge, its social capital. There’s a scene in Goodfellas where the Mafia take over a restaurant and systematically loot it until, with the building that is left, they lick up the last dime by torching it for the insurance money. That’s exactly the role played by the Blairs, the Jospins, the Schroeders (And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. 2 And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer).

Well – by a happy coincidence, I’m editing a book at the moment that has to do, partly, with Ibn Arabi, a Sufi master who wrote in the 12th century in Spain. He’s the subject of a famous book by Henry Corbin. According to Corbin, in the 12th century, Averroes rejected the very existence of the intermediate world. This was the world of angels, the world of inspirations. From this rejection, according to Corbin, stemmed the Grand Mal, the drying up of our notion of the world of scents and messages. I wonder.

I wonder if the angels have been loosed. They were never the rubbery water babies of Middle Class America’s Hallmark unconscious. They were never cuddly – they were never even bearable. And the angelic hosts now deal in oil. (And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.) And so they’ve begun the great work – oh drive it up! Oh drive that price up and crack the Great Fly’s shell! Oh to see a real justice dealt out, an eye for country, an eye for a surgical bombing, an eye for an occupation, an eye for the theft of a nation’s wealth, an eye for the exile of 2 million people, an eye for the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad! Strew the land with the abandoned metal integuments of the death dealing auto! Don’t spare the poor (I know thy works), don’t spare the greedy (I know thy works), don’t spare the rightthinking lefty mumbler (I know thy works). For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

... Hmm, such is the fantasy. Luckily, LI is not going to fall for the devil’s own hysterica passio. A saner voice cries: too many eyes have already paid for too many eyes, until a tower of them has mounted up to the sky – and it is the worst sight in the world.

Only, sometimes one must give vent to the devil’s voice, that mixes truth and lies.

keeping up with Brit

Sunday at LI is time to reflect on world historical events... as they effect Britney Spears. Spears, of course, is presently operating under a ruse that is as deep and brilliant as ever a mousketeer dreamed. In the early 90s, moral panic indicted every parent as an abuser, probably in thrall to Satan. Not a kindercare worker, for four bucks an hour, could make the rounds but that some California D.A. was preparing to put her on the stand for bestiality, coprophagy, and refusing to follow etiquette when taking down a U.S. flag. Our moral purge over – like all American purges, it left a satisfying ten thousand or so to rot in prison for no reason – we now can morally gorge again. Thus, the Kingdom of the Great Fly is now dotted with Purity Parties, a concept that perfectly marries gated community narcissism to the revanchist hatred of pussy that festers in the soul of the American hero – the hero who D.H. Lawrence recognized: “But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Brit, who, like St. Paul, is all things to all people, is satisfying the American urge for the 24/7 Dad – the Pharaonic Dad, the incestuous Dad – by allowing her father to operate as her duenna as she goes through the complex structures of the Party Girl Life. This item in the Dallas News provided a lot of reflection:

“Britney Spears' mom, Lynne, has book coming out
02:58 PM CDT on Friday, June 13, 2008
TMZ.com, FoxNews.com, People.com, news services

Two books involving Britney Spears are in the pipeline. Her mom Lynne Spears' tome, with the toothsome title Through the Storm: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, is set for a fall release from publisher Thomas Nelson. It was put on hold after her younger daughter, Jamie Lynn, got pregnant.
According to the New York Post, reporter Ian Halperin plans to pitch Stalking Britney: Under Siege With Britney Spears to publishers next week. It's expected to be a more lurid account of the troubled popster.

In other Britney info:

Brit is in Las Vegas for the Father's Day weekend with her dad, Jamie. Her ex, Kevin Federline, is there, too, to accept "father of the year" honors from the Privé nightclub.”

Father of the Fuckin’ Year!!! It is at times like these that the whole universe groans in travail, at the edge of an infinite moronic inferno.

In eldest time, e'er mortals writ or read,
E'er Pallas issued from the Thund'rer's head,
Dulness o'er all possess'd her antient right,
Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night: 10
Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave,
Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She rul'd, in native Anarchy, the mind.

Still her old empire to confirm, she tries, 15
For born a Goddess, Dulness never dies.

knots books savages you me

Pass this on

First things first this weekend. We have to congratulate North on that Mars landing. Excellent! A triumph for cosmonauts and psychonauts.

Second:
LI was rather proud, this week, of our application of the tunnel, Victor Turner’s symbol of the middle passage - the cunicula through which the acolyte passes – to reading. Alas, we seemed to awaken no responding echo! But never one to hesitate before the obscure connections of weird history, we’ve been thinking about books. There’s a great and obscure pattern connecting the adventure, the greater porousness of social hierarchies, and the quantitative increase in reading in the 17th century. These are the subsurface portents of the obscure pattern in which capitalism and the culture of happiness emerge in one another’s arms in the eighteenth century.

The question of the book was the question dividing the savage from the civilized. In Enrique Florescano’s National Narratives of Mexico, he shows how the histories of the Indian nations of Meso-America were interpreted by the Spanish, who alternated between claiming that the Indians lacked a writing system – and thus, a history – and describing Indian “books”. In the debate between las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda in 1550 over the justice of the conquest, Sepulveda made a point of the fact that the Indians did not know how to read or write. On the other hand, one of the first conquerors, Bernal Diaz, who wrote the most famous history of Cortez’s expedition, wrote that “We found houses of idols and sacrifices.. and many books in their paper, gathered in folds, like lengths of duffel.” Florescano quotes a Franciscan friar of the time who wrote that the Indians [on the coast of Veracruz] had five kinds of books: “The first speaks of years and times. The second of the days and festivals they had throughout the year. The third of the dreams... and omens they believed in. The fourth for baptisms and the names they gave their children. The fifth for rituals and ceremonies.” [71]

Two hundred years later, more or less, in 1747, Francoise de Grafigny published a European wide bestseller, Letters of a Peruvian lady. Some of the letters in Grafigny’s fiction-based-on-fact were, she claimed, composed in quipu – Inca knots. In 1751, the claim that the quipu formed a writing system was defended by one of those esoteric Enlightenment Italians, Naples’ Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, Grand Master of the Masons, and, according to rumor, a man who did fearful things in the course of his scientific researches – such as cutting up the living. Sansevero may have known of quipus sent to Naples by Garcilaso Inca, who wrote in his Commentaries on the Kingdom of Peru that quipus only represented numbers. However, some suspected Garcilaso of lying intentionally about the matter. Being a Mason, of course, Sansevero was sensible to the power of signs and intersignes. In his Apologetic letter on the matter, he compared the form of writing of the quipu to the mark of Cain – which is perhaps, indeed, the first writing, and God’s writing, too. The mark of Cain implies the ability to read signs – something that, until that point, had not appeared in the history of the world. In Sabine Hyland‘s life of Blas Valera, a Jesuit who took an interest in the writing system of the Incas, she writes:

Among the more unusual passages in the book is the description of a secret writing system once used, Sansevero claimed, by the ancient Peruvian bards (amauta”) in the Inca Empire. According to the prince, this writing system was depicted in a seventeenth century manuscript that he had purchased from a Jesuit priest, Fatehr Pedro de Illanes. In fact, a record of this purchase, dated to 1744, still exists in the Naples city archives (Domenici and Domenici 1996, 54). Unlike the common Inca quipus, Sansevero’s “royal” quipus consisted of woven images representing the syllables of Quechua. Therefore, the “royal” quipus formed a writing system capable of denoting any utterance in spoken Quechua. According to the text, the entire system was based on a Quechua syllabary represented by forty symbols. The prince emphasized that the existence of these “royal” quipus had been a closely guarded secret of the amauta, the most learned historians of the Inca Empire.” [135]

This is a fascinating argument. Especially as the particular rite de passage of learning to read had become the dividing line between those societies with rites de passages and those societies with ‘education’. Now, of course, reading itself had changed in the period I am talking about, especially as it was taught, still, as primarily a read out loud en masse experience. One has to remember that silent reading was such a novelty in the classical times that it called for special comment from Augustine when he saw Ambrose doing it. It was as peculiar to him as it would be for us to see a man sit at a piano, put his hands on the keys, and proceed to read the score in front of him without playing it. But the book in particular reinforced one kind of reading, and brought about the dominance of the cunicular reading type. Of course, in the comparison between the civilized and the savage, this is passed over, annulled. The attack on this front, this firm belief in reading as opposed to societies without history, is always noteworthy. By the eighteenth century, certain parts of the first encounter – the numerousness of the Indians, for instance, and their cultivation of the earth – were already being overwritten, becoming dreamlike, changed – retrospectively they re-assembled in the European mind, becoming, at best, handfuls of hunters and gatherers. The Aztecs and the Incas evidently formed a stumbling block to the great forgetting.

LI should end this with a few notes about Sansevero, who disputed with various irascible French scientists for, among other things, the honor of having invented an improved encaustic. In one experiment, he burned human skulls, and discovered that they were so slow to burn that he believed they might provide everlasting light. What he had discovered, really, in the ‘vapour’ he had captured, was phosphorus.

And, to round this off on a nice Poe-esque note: in 1765, a French traveler, J.J. de la Lande, wrote a book about what there was to see in Italy. In Naples, he visited the Sansevero chapel, with the statues of the Sansevero ancestors. He was struck by the statue of the Prince’s mother:

“One of the most singular statues is that of “Modesty”, as an attribute placed on the mausoleum of the mother of the last prince; she is represented enveloped in a veil from the head to the feet – one sees the figure as though through the veil, which does well in expressing the full nude: the grave of the physiognomy and the softness of the traits appear there as if one saw them naked. This work is the more singular in neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever undertook to veil the entire visage of their statues, and that the sculptor’s talent has rendered the effects with a verisimilitude that it is hard to suppose without having seen it.”

The Human Limit: Notes from Far Off

In the Human World, a chapter of the Chuang Tzu, there's a story upon which I've often reflected:

Carpenter Shih went to Ch'i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a fair, but the carpenter didn't even glance around and went on his way without stopping. His apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after Carpenter Shih and said, "Since I first took up my ax and followed you, Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don't even bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?"
"Forget it - say no more!" said the carpenter. "It's a worthless tree! Make boats out of it and they'd sink; make coffins and they'd rot in no time; make vessels and they'd break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It's not a timber tree - there's nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be that old!"

After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, "What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs - as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves - the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it's the same way with all other things.
"As for me, I've been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I've finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What's the point of this - things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die-how do you know I'm a worthless tree?"

When Carpenter Shih woke up, he reported his dream. His apprentice said, "If it's so intent on being of no use, what's it doing there at the village shrine?" 15

"Shhh! Say no more! It's only resting there. If we carp and criticize, it will merely conclude that we don't understand it. Even if it weren't at the shrine, do you suppose it would be cut down? It protects itself in a different way from ordinary people. If you try to judge it by conventional standards, you'll be way off!"

My weird history of happiness seems a very book driven enterprise. I seem to be unearthing a mass of texts and bookish instances and finding a pattern among them, a confabulation, which may or may not exist outside of my own head. Yet the reality is quite different. My point is to find a way of saying something that seems like nonsense to the people I know, and sometimes even to myself, which is that making the world wholly human is a bad project. This idea has grown in me outside of the world of reading. It has grown in me from traffic jams and suburban developments, from ordering burgers at the drive through window and going to grocery stores, from watching over the years the number and types of birds that come in spring dwindle. It has grown in me out of asphalt and insulation. It has grown in me out of jobs in roofing and jobs as a secretary. It has grown in me as, year after year, I find I have less to say to the people I meet, less small talk. And I have less to say to people I love, less rapture. And less love. It has grown in me because it turned out, astonishingly enough, that experience is a burden – while for years to me it was an imperative: experience more.

Thus, I am no anti-humanist because of some philosopher. I am not an anti-humanist because I believe in deep ecology, or environmentalism. It is because I bear in myself the impress of living in a society in which there is no human limit. The only human limit recognized, in my childhood, was that presented by the atom bomb. Here, indeed, was a limit, the destruction of the human race materialized in actual instruments built by humans. But even that was a perverse source of human pride, another form of the equation that would make human beings equal to the planet. Of course, I’ve spent my whole life in an artificial paradise, a built and overbuilt environment, and I’ve witnessed a thing that I have a hard time coming to terms with: this artificial paradise has made people genuinely happy. Happy, at least, in the general sense: that is, the sense that a kind of broad access to happiness is the net affect of their lifestyles. And those lifestyles, in the human world, are slowly but surely driving other emotions into extinction. The time of the species crash is also the time of the culling of emotional ranges.

All of these are effects of the creation of a totally human world, one which was prefigured, in flashes of insight and dreams, by “pre-modern” societies. What is pre-modern about these societies is not the lack of technology, or the lack of progress on some scale in which systems of production are lined up from the simple to the more complex. They are pre-modern because they recognize a human limit. Carpenter Chih dreamed about that limit. The great, useless oak tree in his dream spoke from that limit. What I want to produce is a sort of time lapse series showing the gradual disappearance of that limit. That disappearance is the full meaning of the triumph of happiness.

congratulations, Margaret Jull Costa

LI is a little late with this news. But going through the book blogs today, we were happy to see that Margaret Jull Costa won an award for her translation of the Maias – and Natasha Randall, who we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing, was on the short list for her fantastic translation of Zamyatin’s We. We are no expert on 19th century novels in Spain and Portugal, but we have managed to read a few. Eca de Queiroz’s The Maias takes a deep pleasure in just going on – describing the static rituals of the Portugese upper class, that contrast between a frivolous public politics and a deeply strategized private politics of love affairs. Queiroz has affinities with Zola, but he doesn’t have Zola’s love for the tabloid and tawdry. One can’t imagine Queiroz making up a list of words used in the working quarters of Lisbon for fucking. Costa is supposedly going to translate the bulk of Queiroz’s work. And what could be more important than that? Of course, Daedelus is having trouble coming up with the funding to allow this to happen, since we live in a world where the shadowy funding powers can’t distinguish good from bad projects. It might be that this dirty decade, this filthy time that leaves a light glaze of shit over ever person living in it, will be known more for a few translations than for anything else.

So remember the translators. And speaking of which - I’ve just had Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Bolano’s last novel delivered to my door, for future review. Envy me! is all I can say.

the point outside the painting

LI is like ‘poor Atabalipa’, the Inca emperor. When we open a book, we want to hear voices: hints, whispers, cries, the banjo opera, and every sigh, and every sudden silence. We want something to arise from the pages.

So, when we began this series of posts about 17th century figures, some of whom – Mothe de la Vayer, for instance – might not be today’s headliners, we went looking to one of our long time favorite books, Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, thinking that our theme – the failure of an ethos of volupté to move from the hypocognizable to the hypercognized – or, in plain English, the failure of a lifestyle oriented around volupté to accrue a fully ethical standing under capitalism – could settle, so to speak, within that text, find a niche there. Roberto Calasso, in The Ruins of Kasch, alludes to a marvelous word – intersigne – to refer to coincidences in the social world. Out of such coincidences, the paranoid weaves his dreams. Gravity’s Rainbow is, for instance, premised on the mad pursuit of intersigne. Well, LI originally thought that there was an intersigne between what we are doing and what Foucault did.

So far, however, this hasn’t proved to be the case.

In Les Mots et les Choses, one of Foucault’s games was to show how one could talk about “dominant ideas” within dominant forms of governance without using Marx’s notion of ideology. And, of course, Foucault’s notion of dominant ideas are ideas that explain, classify, describe – in a word, these ideas form an epistemological apparatus. In the famous preface, Foucault makes the tentative claim that the Classical era’s epistemological center is all in the play of representation. In the introduction, that long, lingering close up of Velasquez’s painting, Las Meninas, Foucault finds an objective correlate to make his point:

This center is symbolically sovereign in the anecdote, since it is occupied by King Philip IV and his wife. But principally, he is it by the triple function that he occupies in relation to the painting (tableau). In him there comes to be superposed exactly the gaze of the model in the moment in which he is painted, that of the spectator who contemplates the scene, and that of the painter at the moment he composes his tableau (not he who is represented, but he who is before us and of whom we speak). These three “looking” functions are confounded in a point exterior to the tableau – that is to say, ideal by relationship to what is represented, but perfectly real insofar as it is by way of it that representation becomes possible. And yet, this reality is projected into the interior of the tableau, projected and diffracted in three figures who correspond to the three functions of this ideal and real point. These are: to the left the painter with his palette in his hand (selfportrait of the author of the tableau); to the right the visitor, a foot on the step, ready to enter into the setting (la pièce); he takes in all the scene in reverse, but sees the front of the royal couple, which is the spectacle itself; at the center at last, the reflection of the king and the queen, decked out, immobile, in the attitude of patient models.”

Foucault has marvelously followed the arrow of sight, here, to diagram the intersection between power and knowledge – and the first stage of knowing is seeing, even though – the logic here is gone over and over again by Nagarjuna – one can’t see the seeing. But as we reduce the painting to relations between audience, painter, and the royal couple, we allow the ‘subject” here to become the total product of these gazes. Yet of course they aren’t. Foucault is evidently avoiding the attitudes implied by the Marxist formula that the dominant ideas of an epoque are the expression of the dominant class. Yet he has not emerged from the spell of that formula altogether. The paintings real structure, in terms of whose gaze counts, subtly excludes certain of the court retinue - namely, the dwarves, who take up as much facial space in this painting as anyone else. Of course, they are intruders on the royal scene – and yet they still exist within it, expressing another exteriority that isn’t counted by the gaze. The mechanism of hierarchy that is presumed here has, after all, to perform two functions, one of which is separation, and the other of which is connection - for the court could not exist for a second without its multitudinous contacts with the classes below it. These dwarves have wandered out of the enclosures that Foucault has so expertly described in Histoire de la Folie dans l’Age classique. Is it by accident that Foucault chose this painting to linger upon? Yet, the culminating point of the lesson of Las Meninas, for Foucault, brackets them. This makes me wonder if there is room in Les Mots et les Choses for the adventure and its social importance, as I am conceiving it. For, in other words, the traversing of social spaces. Surely those dwarves are intersignes: erudite and popular culture are separated by a gesture of erudite culture, and that gesture has generally been believed - but shouldn't one ask whether erudite culture can really judge itself that well? And whether its audience - which is erudite culture as well - is not just as prejudiced, or blind? In terms of emotional customs: is it true that mapping the epistemological machinery of a social space and time gives us the fundamental determinant of that space’s passional customs? Is it true that the epistemological machinery, during this era, successfully purges itself of rites de passage, substituting for it autonomous scientific methods, among which, Foucault claims, is pre-eminently, in the early modern period, the method of representation?

I think he noticed the gap between the life order of the passions and the epistemological machines himself, which is why, at the end of his life, he turned to the disciplines of the self.

But still – LI will not underestimate the possibilities that rise out of Foucault’s book.

a cunicular affair

Hannah Hoech - Denkmal 1

I am the passenger...

And now, the act you have all been waiting for, ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Victor Turner!

(A friend of LI’s once described going to a whorehouse in Nueva Laredo when he was a teen and watching a magic act, which consisted of an indifferent magician piercing himself and his assistant with a big needle, then making objects disappear, while the M.C. kept up a deadly chorus of applauso, applauso, applauso in an effort to rouse up the drunk Texas fratboys sitting at the tables, mulling over their choices of fuck. Sometimes, that image comes over LI as we think of this blog.)

I want to pull out a few of Turner’s concepts to make clearer what I mean by the adventurous turn.

In some famous papers in the sixties and seventies, Turner (who worked with his wife, Edith) constructed an elaborate anthropological theory around Arnold van Gennep’s notion of rites de passage. This is from the paper, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors:

“He [Arnold van Gennep] showed us that all rites de passages (rites of transition) are marked by three phases: separation, limen or margin, and aggregation. The first phase comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group, either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from a relatively stable set of cultural conditions (a cultural “state”); during the intervening liminal phase, the state of the ritual subject ( the “passenger” or “liminar”) becomes ambiguous, he passes through a dimension that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state, he is betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification; in the third phase the passage is consummated, and the subject returns to classified secular or mundane social life. The ritual subject, individual or corporate (groups, age-sets, and social categories can also undergo transition), is again in a stable state, has rights and obligations of a clearly defined structural type.” – Victor and Edith Turner.

The passenger is an adventurer. As I’ve pointed out, there are various ways of sitting still. Newton’s is one way – it is a stillness filled with waiting. Some of the libertine writers sat in another way – they were attached to various of the great houses. And then there was the circle that formed around Theophile de Viau, and, in the 1650s – after his death – still kept the memory of the esprit fort alive. Among those esprits forts were Theophile’s lovers, Chapelle and des Barreaux – who were friends of Moliere. Cyrano de Bergerac was also part of this group. The figure of Don Juan was extracted by Moliere from this group. He, too, is a passenger, but his form of sitting still was to engage in an eternally obsessive hunt that took him over the same trajectory again and again. He moved, but his movement returns him to the beginning. This is the significance of continually being on the threshhold of marriage - not simply looking for the next fuck. Don Juan is a marrying man, as Sganarelle says, who wants to marry the whole world - except that he never wants to go through the entire ceremony. He wants to eternally return from the point at which he is pledged to marry to the point at which he hunts for another woman to marry. This space, in terms of age, is youth. It is youth as the artificial paradise. As Kierkegaard points out, his desire is infinite, but it is an infinity of made up of repetitions of the same trajectory.

The adventure, that space ‘betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification’, became the modality through which hierarchized social structures could be experienced – moved through. The libertine ethos and adventure have an elective affinity one with the other. Remember that it is in two things that the libertine stands out: his absolute modernity, and, through that, his perception of nature. By being modern, one understands nature beyond any schema that involves the marvelous. What one understands is that nature is the collective effect of constant motion. One’s own nature is, in this schema, definitely part of the whole. It is here that passion plays a signal role, for passion arises as a form of pure motion within the self. It comes from the bottom up, so to speak. The adventurer as a passenger not only passes through landscapes and social strata, but he passes through passions. The libertine notion of character is subtly different than the classical notion insofar as the classical notion searches for an organic principle – self love – which gives rise to various molds of character, whereas the libertine conceives of character as something hardening at the extreme of the self. The libertine character is hectic – it retains the mark of the inconsistency and contradictions of the struggle of passions one with the other.

There is another aspect of the adventurer that can be brought out in Turner’s terms. Turner wrote that it might be more accurate to think of the limen – the middle period – in terms of the tunnel – the cunicula. We’ve been trying to connect the world of reading – the rise of the third life – to adventure, using Don Quixote as the connecting and symbolic figure. The tunnel is a very precise symbol of the reading experience. To read does create a tunnel – a cunicular space – between the page and the reader. The reader is in two places in that tunnel – at the one end, as the physical agent doing the reading, but – in his or her imagination – in the middle. Don Quixote issued out of that tunnel at the beginning of the period in which he would normally be settling into the habits of old age.