the great law gift-gift

“…étranges croisements d'idiomes comme ceux qui
traduisent « se donner la mort » par « to take one's life ». Cette
inversion relève de la grande loi du Gift — gift.” – Derrida, Donner le temps



“Fundamentally, there is nothing less interesting than the life a morphine addict. It is limited to the periods in which he takes the poison, and periods, in which society forces him to give up the stuff. All the reasons that people have discovered to excuse addiction may work on the literary and poetic level: concretely it is sheer filthiness, because you are ruining your life with it. “ – Friedrich Glauser, Morphine (my translation)

Glauser was a Swiss detective novelist. He was enormously influential in that genre. He was also a sad case, a juvenile delinquent in Vienna, a druggy in Basel. According to his account, parts of which are published at this excellent site , he ‘started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff’ – or, less poetically, he found WWI so unbearable that he could no longer get drunk enough to forget it was happening.

I came to morphine through a detour. During the war, the daily need to ignore reality, even in neutral countries, was very strong. Since I could take even large quantities of alcohol without any problem, I sought other means, and began with ether. But his is an unpleasant poison. Its smell is hard to get rid of and remains as a penetrating taste in the mouth all day long. Also, ether attacks the lungs. During one cold night, I suffered an attack of bronchial bleeding, and had to search out a doctor at midnight. This man gave me a morphine injection, and had me drink concentrated saltwater.

I still remember exact the effect of this injection. Suddenly I became quite weak. A curious, hard to describe feeling of happiness “took possession of me” (one can hardly express it otherwise). In spite of that fact that, materially, this things were going badly with me, everything was suddenly changed, misery lost its importance, it was no longer present (vorhanden), I held happiness in my hands: it was, to make a bad comparison, as if my entire body was a smile. And then I lay there, awake, until morning.”

In the twenties, Glauser mixed up some hopeless affairs (“And yet another effect of opium and related poisons: they repress sexuality. I came to morphine after a bad love affair. In the ‘unconscious’ I made a conclusion and saved myself by regressing to a childhood stage, a sage, in which the business of dealing with the sensations of my own body had handed in the prize of pleasure.”) with stays in prison or clinics for the mentally ill, where he would set fires. Having happiness in his hands once, he wanted it again; and so the pursuit of happiness led him to the marginal life of the main chance.

To be marginalized in the pursuit of happiness, which one has found, as de Quincey says, in pill form – this is an anthropologically important social fact.

And one that leads to the direction of the pursuit – either inwards or outwards. Or, by some impossibility, can the inward become the outward?

The dialectics of diddling

IT – and I will interrupt the continuity of this post in the very first sentence to say that I, at least, refuse to identify the semi-autonomous heteronym, Infinite Thought, with the semi-autonomous philosopher, Nina, so this is about IT – recently wrote a post that makes an oblique but telling point against the current fashion for returning to things as they are via some kind of speculative realist ontology. As she notes, this gesture seems to go along with a taste for a politics that is so catastrophic as to be an excuse for no politics.

“proliferating ontologies is simply not the point - further, what use is it if it simply becomes a race to the bottom to prove that every entity is as meaningless as every other (besides, the Atomists did it better). Confronting 'what is' has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial. Ontology is play-science for philosophers; I'm pretty much convinced when Badiou argues that mathematics has better ways of conceiving it than philosophy does and that, besides, ontology is not the point. What happens, or what does not happen, should be what concerns us: philosophers sometimes pride themselves on their ignorance of world affairs, again like watered-down Heideggarians, no matter how hostile they think they are to him, pretending that all that history and politics stuff is so, like, ontic, we're working on something much more important here.”


Being the Derridean type, I expect that any attempt to create another, better ontology will produce the kinds of double binds that Derrida so expertly fished out of phenomenology. There have been a lot of replies to I.T.'s post. I thought the most interesting one was by Speculative Heresy, because he makes it clear that Speculative Realism is a return to a distinction that was popular among the analytic philosophers in the 50s, where a value neutral view of philosophy as a technique supposedly precluded the relevance of any political conclusions from conceptual analysis, and at worst blocked the advance of philosophy as a science. Here, the part of the natural is played by the question, which apparently asks itself in the void:


“Which is to say that philosophy and politics are born of two different questions: ‘what is it?’ and ‘what to do?’ The latter, political, question need never concern itself with the former question.”

IT rightly sees this reverence for the question in itself, and its supposedly fortunate alignment with the disciplines we all know and love, with their different mailboxes in the university, as a very Heideggerian gesture. And, as an empirical fact of intellectual history, it is very curious to think that a discipline is “born” from a syntactical unit peculiar to certain languages. Again, we run into a very old thematic, in which the question giving "birth" is entangled in the parallel series of logos and the body, in which each becomes a privileged metaphor for the other. There's nothing more political than this.

Still, when IT refers to Badiou, I – as always – baulk. On the one hand, it seems that she is taking Badiou to be reprising Quine’s pythagorianism, and on the other hand – from what I have read of Badiou – I have never quite understood why set theory or Dedekind's cut gives us an ontology that is purified of its double binds, of its perennial failure to shuck its textuality.

It isn't that I am wholly unsympathetic. To return not to Descartes but to Newton - the Newton of the glorious letters on the theory of light and color, with his attack on the whole idea of hypotheses - strikes me as a valid project. In the letter to Pardies, Newton writes,in response to Pardies attribution of his theory to a hypothesis:

"Tis true, that from my Theory I argue the Corporeity of Light; but I do it without any absolute positiveness, as the word perhaps intimates; and make it at most but a very plausible consequence of the Doctrine, and not a fundamental Supposition, nor so much as any part of it; which was wholly comprehended in the precedent Propositions. And I somewhat wonder, how the Objector could imagine, that, when I had asserted the Theory with the greatest rigour, I should be so forgetful as afterwards to assert the fundamental supposition it self with no more than a perhaps. Had I intended any such Hypothesis, I should somewhere have explain'd it. But I knew, that the Properties, which I declar'd of Light, were in <5087> some measure capable of being explicated not only by that, but by many other Mechanical Hypotheses. And therefore I chose to decline them all, and to speak of Light in general terms, considering it abstractly, as something or other propagated every way in streight lines from luminous bodies, without determining, what that Thing is; whether a confused Mixture of difform qualities, or Modes of bodies, or of Bodies themselves, or of any Virtues, Powers, or Beings whatsoever. And for the same reason I chose to speak of Colours according to the information of our Senses, as if they were Qualities of Light without us."

That is a decisive blow struck for an ontology of the variable, which is a tittilating thought. But I think IT retreats, here, from her more interesting insight into politics by holding that an ontology taken "care of" by mathematics is not political.


While it may seem that we are rowing away from politics, we are really rowing towards it. After all, what is the ‘catastrophe’ of the moment but a prevision of the wreck of our models, the main effects of our side effects. It is, after all, the success of the model in physics that has been the motive force and prompt of the proliferation of the model in economics. And it is here that one would like to see speculative realism show some teeth. One would like it to encounter Stanford nominalism – the work of the pupils of Patrick Suppes (John Dupre, Ian Hacking, Peter Galison and Nancy Cartwright). This school does have a distinct political orientation – or at least Dupre, Hacking and Galison seem to me to be close to a Foucaultian left.

Finally, I am putting this post about IT’s post on Limited Inc., instead of my News From the Zona blog, because of this part of her post: “Confronting 'what is' has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial.” I am using psychoactive substances not only because, as Mintz has argued, sugar – and I think you could extend this to tobacco - was the commodity around which the factory structure first takes hold, but also because the built environments of modernity exist not only in the streets we walk in but form part of the very bloodstream of our bodies. Our mood alteration drugs begin, very early, to shape our moods altogether. When Baudelaire uses drugs – haschisch, opium – as the keys to the artificial paradises, he has stumbled on an essential structure of modern artifice.

whose side are the side effects on?

In this spot, place, lieu, here, before I lift my pen – for I write these posts before I type them, and then, in typing them, watch them shift their shapes and burdens – I feel a rush, a lunge of citations and themes, as though, in the first sentence, at the entrance of the thing, the establishing period, everything must come tumbling out (as in some dopey comedy skit in which some target character X, laugh a minute X, opens some target door Y, boobytrapped Y, and the things behind it avalanche upon him or her). For surely I’ve reached the point in this long long course of things at which (in which?) suddenly the happiness culture, more a blueprint or a Platonic form, suddenly extrudes itself into the psychoactive, chemical phantasmagoria we are all familiar with, dosed with, prescribed, stoned and high on, chained to, attuned to deep in the immune system, our biochemistry altered in its ticking and secretions by the water we drink and the incredible array of chemicals, such as were never before on earth and never before metabolized by any terrestrial organism, that we have so casually strewed about every sphere of the planet.

And this even before I lay my hand on De Quincey’s text, which, though entitled the Confessions of an Opium Eater, could be entitled, Confessions of a side effect. For by De Quincey’s account, his opium addiction came about through the use of a palliative for pain. In fact, this is how Wilberforce, the abolitionist, became a lifelong opium addict. And of course we now live in the age of side effects and are advancing rapidly into a world in which the climate has been the victim of one of the hugest side effects ever. Meanwhile, who doesn’t know from personal experience or from a friend’s tale of the side effects of mood altering drugs – for every mental ill – ranging from biliousness and water retention to a total, catastrophic loss of sexual desire – all side effects. Or, as they are known in the industry, ADRs – adverse drug reactions.

And in this way, the building of the artificial paradise puts the question of the human limit in a different form: whose sides are these side effects on?

artificial paradises

I know. Baudelaire’s essay speaks of Les paradis artificielles – artificial paradises. To every psychoactive agent, its own Eden. But I speak of one. The tree of knowledge in every artificial paradise in the happiness culture is the same tree. Universal history, with its Mordspiel and night ecstasies, is a history of universals in the making. And what are those universals, in this context, but commodities – of which this subsection, the drug, has a cultural privilege?

From sugar to imipolex G, the “aromatic heterocyclic polymer” in the nose of the V-2 rocket that gives Slothrop his premonitory erections, the building of the artificial paradise has been put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, covering the face of the earth. We – the uncertain spirits who try with all our might to arise from our little pieces and get one glimpse of the picture of the whole – have used whatever stash of artificial paradise we have on hand to go through our impossible tasks.

Baudelaire’s phrase comes from the work he did on Haschisch and Opium. The latter was a work of translation – oddly, De Quincey, who hated the French, became part of French literature through Baudelaire, whose translation of the Confessions of an Opium Eater truncated the 1821 edition as radically as De Quincey expanded it in the 1848 edit he made for his collected works. De Quincey’s expansion of it has generally been ignored, as it explores, at great and tedious length, De Quincey’s childhood, to which he had already devoted many long essays. The additions are distressing – meandering, garrulous, a sort of bibulous blather that detracts from the hectic sharpenss of the original. As, one feels, they were meant to – De Quincey felt, acutely, the damning effect of the text that made him famous.

I’m going to try to move from De Quincey to Baudelaire to Marx and then to Burroughs – my sci fi crew as I orbit the planet of Plato’s Pharmacy.

…
To begin in the beginning – one of the rare moments in literature in which the druggest, the bane of Flaubert and Ludwig Hohl, the village positivist who grinds the mystery of the world as he grinds his pills until all that is left are atoms of ego and matter and a bland eye staring from a pigstye – one of the rare moments in which he receives the highest poetic encomium:

… And my introduction to opium arose in the following way. From an early age I had been accustomed to wash my head in cold water at least once a day: being suddenly seized with toothache, I attributed it to some relaxation caused by an accidental intermission of that practice, jumped out of bed, plunged my head into a basin of cold water, and with hair thus wetted went to sleep. The next morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty days. On the twenty-first day I think it was, and on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets, rather to run away, if possible, from my torments, than with any distinct purpose. By accident I met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound was it at that time: what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the place and the time and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the Paradise of Opium-eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless: and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than
a rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near "the stately Pantheon" (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist--unconscious minister of celestial pleasures!--as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday; and when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as any other man might do, and furthermore, out of my shilling returned me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity, he has ever since existed in my mind as the beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. And it confirms me in this way of considering him, that when I next came up to London I sought him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not; and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one), he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford Street than to have removed in any bodily fashion. The reader may choose to think of him as possibly no more than a sublunary druggist; it may be so, but my faith is better—I believe him to have evanesced, {11} or evaporated. So unwillingly would I connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and creature, that first brought me acquainted with the celestial drug.

Your debutante just knows what you need. But I know what you want.

"Addiction is an illness of exposure. By and large, those who have access to junk become addicts." - William Burroughs, With William Burroughs: a report from the bunker [109]

In Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz tracks sugar from the cane plantations in Sicily and Egypt in the fourteenth century to the Canary and Azores islands (where the Spanish and Portugese developed the prototype of intensive sugar production with a mix of slave and free labor) to the Caribbean. Sugar cane was brought by Columbus, that divine, diabolical harbinger, to the Caribbean on his second voyage. The Spanish attempts to grow and process the sugar cane were not very successful, especially compared to what the Portugese did in Brazil. But the suggestion was, as it were, in the air; it was taken up by the Dutch and the English in the mid seventeenth century, long after the Caribs had vanished, the way blood, bones and skin massively vanishes – pushed into the vanishing act by the European magicians with their white magic.

It was after the mass cultivation of sugar cane on Barbados and Jamaica and – by the French – on St. Domingue that sugar became more than a medicine or a luxury good in Europe. As Mintz puts it, it became the first “exotic necessity” “… by 1750, the poorest English farm labourer’s wife took sugar in her tea,” as R.J. Davis wrote [quoted in Mintz, 45]

David Courtwright, in Forces of Habit, includes sugar with tea, tobacco, coffee and chocolate as the commodities that produced what he calls the ‘psychoactive revolution” of the eighteenth century. All operated, in one way or another, to alter moods. These exotics were intermingled with each other as well – as for instance, tea and chocolate with sugar. For Europeans, they produced, over a hundred and fifty year period, a radically altered physiological environment. Courtwright surveys the impressive statistics of sugar use in England, always the main consumer: “The demand for sugar was phenomenal. During the eighteenth century, the annual growth rate rose to 7 percent, and during the nineteenth century, when beet sugar roduction also became a factor, to 20 percent. The British possessed Europe’s sweetest tooth – and perhaps the continent’s worst teeth. Their per cappita consumption rose from 4 pounds in 1700 to 18 pounds in 1800 to about 90 pounds in the decade before 1900.” [28]

I like to think, here, about De Quincey. The incident that led De Quincey to opium was a tooth ache. He calls it a rheumatic tooth ache, which I think is De Quincey laying it on thick. But could it be the tooth ache of a boy of privilege, who, indeed, enjoyed that new environment of sugar products? De Quincey’s father was a merchant, and once, in a bout of virtue (for he seems to have been a good man), he forbade sugar at the table, in sympathy with the Evangelical crusade against slavery. This was in the 1780s – but man is as grass, as we all know, and bends with the wind, and the De Quincey’s did live in high style, and Thomas’s father did, after all, do a lot of trading with the West Indies.

Mintz, in his analysis of the double triangle of the trade in sweetness (slave labor to sugar to England back with goods sent back to Jamaica, and commodities from England to Africa for slaves to the West Indies for sugar production), argued that we should look to the sugar plantations, rather than to Europe, for the development of the first factories. This, of course, contradicts an old account, by the Marxists and Weberians, that free labor was a condition for the development of the factory. According to Mintz, the sugar plantations worked under extreme time constraints, and divided the labor into a sort of assembly line, with the slaves cutting the cane and other slaves assigned semi-skilled tasks boiling the cane and refining the sugar. This required a certain number of skilled supervisors. It was horrendously hard labor, and proved to be a man-eater: “From 1710 to 1810, Barbados, a mere 166 miles in area, received 252,000 African slaves. Jamaica, which in 1655 had been invaded by the British, followed the same pattern of ‘economic development’; in the same 109 years, it received 662,00 slaves.”

The plantation owners fretted about their kidnapped and abused stock, always dying on them. Unlike the less work intensive tobacco estates in the Southern U.S., this slave population never fully reproduced itself. It would fail to until the slaves were liberated, in fact. Thus the giant trade in human blood and flesh, those white lips and sharp fangs on Africa’s throat. As one model of work is developed for Europe, another model of transport and labor is developed for Africa – which will, in its time, be emplaced in Europe. Hypnogogy on the periphery, creeping in.

The sweetness, the drugs – oh, we don’t have to dig deep to find, under the surface of the artificial paradise, the piles of bones. But it is important to see that the paradise a-building in the sugar stats is not only what comes to surround us, but what we come to be. The Mordspiel is at work deep in the interior. And, as in a cartoon of a robber hiding in a cartoon cave, the cops are soon to follow. The commodities are now in motion. What only the Gods could once pluck is now cut, harvested, tapped, boiled and barged across the entire face of the godless globe.

Which only goes to show that hophead history is not merely a suburb of universal history. Hopheads have witnessed, with all the sorrows of young Werther and every suicidal lover, that their accept no substitutes passion was doomed in the accept all substitutes world.

New pains, new pleasures, new worlds, new cravings. The catchers of men are learning about the bodies of men. The artificial paradise.

Gods and drugs

This is how the story must go. This is how the story goes. There must be a god in the midst of the forest. There is a god in the midst of the forest. In the forest, too, the wisest of men is walking down a path. There is the wisest of men, and there is the path, and there is the forest around him. There there there. As if I had a finger to point to these things. As if you who read me saw the finger. Who must also be a simpleton. Who is a simpleton. Who must be hailed by the god, and shown a divine plant. Who is hailed by the god, and shown a divine plant.

Or – as the beginning is always a matter of bifurcation, paths of needles, paths of pins, other encounters, other forests - let us start this in another way:

“She’ll mix a potion for you: she’ll add drugs
Into that drink; but even with their force,
She can’t bewitch you; for the noble herb
I’ll give you now will baffle all her plots…

When that was said, he gave his herb to me;
He plucked it from the ground and showed what sort
Of plant it was. Its root was black; its flower
Was white as milk. Its moly for the gods;
For mortal men, the mandrake – very hard
To pluck; but nothing holds against the gods.”

This is Alan Mandelbaum’s translation of the passage in Book Ten of the Illiad. Circe, that nymph, makes a potion, a pharmaka, and feeds it to Odysseus’s men, turning them into swine. As so often, the animal is a kind of prison in the tale – just as later, Jesus will imprison demons in the Gandarene swine. One of Odysseus’ men escapes, however, and runs to tell him. Which is how our hero comes to be walking through the woods.

We note here, in passing, how clearly the human limit is expressed in Homer’s notion that the God’s names are not the names given by mortals. If I was to follow Nietzsche, I would camp at this boundaries, and I would cast an eye on the Cratylus, in which the divide is ever so stealthily overthrown and replaced by another, in which the God’s names become, suddenly, simply the clear definition of the things – they no longer hold any insurmountable difference.

Jenny Clay, in “The Planktai and Moly” (1972), claims that Planktai – the crashing rocks Odysseus has to go through - and moly are the only instance of Homeric doublenaming – dionumia - in which the mortal name for a thing isn’t given. This, for Clay, puts Hermes gesture of pulling up the plant in the linguistic position of the human name – because it is hard for the humans to pull up, they haven’t noticed it. If they had, they would have noticed its black roots. Mandelbaum’s decision that moly is mandrake is by no means the consensus among Homer’s exegetes. Theophrastus seems to indicate it is garlic.

As has often been noticed, this is the only time in Homer that the important word phusis is used – which Mandelbaum translates as “what sort of”. Gerard Naddaf, in The Greek Concept of Nature, closely reads this passage, with its contrast between the baneful drugs [pharmaka lugra] of Circe, and the effective drug [pharmakon esthlon] that Hermes hands Odysseus.

A question, then, in the woods, of two registers of names, and a register of drugs posing the good against the bad.

And yet, what we don’t have here is an explanation of the kind of thing a drug is. How moly goes from the sort of thing a plant is to the sort of thing a drug is – this is the wonder we are here in the woods to experience.

Shall I point out that nature, phusis, flashes into our range, here (and the term has miles to go before it sleeps) in an exchange of drugs?

the uncanny life of objects

“The petit bourgeois views [Rücksichten] disappear, Life charms us with all its temptations to enjoyment, and so everyone, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the pious and the worldly, steps quietly out of their relationships. The certainty with which this can happen on all sides has something uncanny [unheimlich], something horrible. It quietly and noiselessly dissolves the bonds without this being perceived from the outside. There is a dualism in this life, that naturally pulls after it the most universal demoralization.” [Berlin, Ernst Dronke]

The eye drifts to that moment of the unheimlich, here – although Dronke is writing a good sixty years before Freud. Freud, of course, also located his uncanny in two urban stories – one concerning the Sandman, in which, crucially, one of the characters looks out of his window and sees into another person’s window, and the second of which involves Freud wandering in the streets of Rome.

And yet one would think that the gothic tale is rooted in the countryside, or the forest.

Dronke, in Berlin, emphasizes an aspect of city privacy – the disconnect between oneself and one’s neighbors. There’s a matrix of themes here: privacy, solitude, the city, and the uncanny. And what is the uncanny? In one sense, it begins with a category mistake – mistaking the machine for the organic, the dead for the living. This category mistake is obviously historically conditioned and befalls those who live in a society in which the ‘projection’of life, consciousness, or power upon the inhuman is sanctioned.

When, then, this projection occurs – is it within the regime of something like the return of the repressed? I want to follow the Otherness of certain small things, commodities, like gin – or opium. Commodities which are caught up in a field of policing – or become targets of policing. For the economist, the commodity nexus is all about the disappearance of the particular characteristics of the thing in the face of the medium of exchange. For the police, however, commodity characteristics reappear. Or rather, for certain commodities they reappear. In an influential paper in the 80s, Igor Kopytoff, proposed that we can make cultural “biographies” of things.

“As Margaret Mead remarked, one way to understand a culture is to see what sort of biography it regards as embodying a successful social career. Clearly, what is seen as a well-lived live in an African society is different in outline form what would be pronounced as a well-lived life along the Ganges, or in Brittany, or among the Eskimos.

It seems to me that we can profitably ask the same range and kinds of cultural question to arrive at biographies of things. Early in this century, in an article entitled “The genealogical method of anthropological inquiry” (1910), W.H.R. Rivers offered what has since become a standard tool in ethnographic fieldwork. The thrust of the article – the aspect for which it is now mainly remembered – is to show how kinship terminology and relationships may be superimposed on a genealogical diagram and traced through the social-structure-in-time that the diagram mirrors. But Rivers also suggested something else: that, for example, when the anthropologist is in search of inheritance rules, he may compare the ideal statement of the rules with the actual movement of a particular object, such as a plot of land, through the genealogical diagram, noting concretely how it passes from hand to hand. What Rivers proposed was a kind of biography of things in terms of ownership.” [66, from the book, The Social life of things]

I’m going to move from gin to opium for a bit.

some notes for saturday

It is a point that is not often enough stressed that one of Marx and Engels co-editors on their newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, was a man named Ernst Dronke whose major claim to fame was as a chronicler of low-life and Polizei Geschichte. Marx’s well known affection for Balzac, whose police stories were one of great unifying threads in the Comedie Humaine, was matched in his real life, the period of his greatest political activity, by his own involvement in decrying the police tactics and the laws concerning certain “little things” – such as the laws against gathering wood for fuel in private forests passed by the Rheinische Landstag, against which Marx pointed his lance as early as 1842.

Without my expecting or planning it, it seems that the tree from the Chuangtze haunts the Human Limit.

I’ve been pondering in my off hours the way in which commodities – say in dead wood in the underbrush – not only get up and lead a secret life in the world of Capital, but, in so doing, evoke the organization of the police and the attempt to follow and control the most private of routines – for instance, the one that connects the cells in your brains to the distilled spirits in your stomach – which is, one might say, the political side of the secret life of commodities….

…

There’s been a recent controversy about happiness and militant dysphoria over at Ads Without Products to which I contributed my predictable pence. I liked it that the argument fingered the tropes I would have predicted in just the way I would have predicted, with everything centered around the inability to imagine that there could be any ideal but happiness, and at the same time leaving that massive signifier as blank as the eyes of any idol, any dug up statue, from any long sunk dynasty. One must infer the vision…
…

But to get back to the world of little things, especially the little things that get you drunk… or that in some way interfere with the state’s desire for the paradigm consciousness (which at that time was a nice cleared Lockean blank slate – land for the tilling, a property, and not common land debauched by vile liquids). Jessica Warner’s Craze is not only the history of that brief time in which gin was drunk in killing quantities, but of the attempt, by the state, to stop it. This involved using informers – not to betray a dissident religious or political sect, but to betray a consumer choice. While the state’s fight against smuggling had long used informers, I am going to tentatively claim that the act of 1736 which made it a crime to sell gin without an expensive license, intentionally available to few, introduced something new: a much more concentrated use of informers to control ordinary life. Here, indeed, was a contradiction in proto-capitalism: the elite – like Walpole – who depended on the money flowing in from the tax on spirits and the support of the great brewers were also confronted with a popular movement that lay outside of religion, politics, or ideology. Not of course that the movement didn’t develop an ad hoc ideology in its defense, one that caught hold of the theme of liberty. The gin acts, which go up to the 1750s, provoked riots. And they marked, Warner claims, a brief but telling victory of the urban obscure – artisans, maids, construction workers, etc – over the police powers of the establishment. She does not connect this with a revolt that happened later on, in America, sparked by, among other things, two of the little things, sugar and tea. However, as within, so without – the magic warrant for our inverted universal history seems to hold, here.

I am become death

There is a beautiful passage in Logique du sens – a book that tugs at me as I think about intoxicants and the Mordspiel. And not only intoxicants – the little things that loom large for Schloezer move eerily between addiction and normality. In the biography of Thomas Beddoes, the radical doctor friend of Coleridge and Humphrey Davy, we read these thoughts from the great man, circa 1800:

“The use of salt as a condiment to meagre diet as to potatoes only he condemns upon the authority of Dr Darwin as injurious. He considers it as having a great share in inducing glandular relaxation and tending to the production of scrophula. Could opium he enquires be used as a substitute in minute quantities? He hesitates in recommending it for fear of its leading to the adoption of bad habits. It is probable however, he adds, that some seasoning for poor food which did not increase the production of sensorial power and at the same time promote the expenditure of this power might be found. Between the oriental spices and the garlick of the French there is great choice. An obstacle to the introduction of that seasoning which may have the best title to supplant salt may be apprehended in the prejudices and habits of the people but is this a reason why we should not immediately set about to ascertain which that best seasoning is? It cannot be adopted before it is known The seeds of benefit to the human race have generally been sown for ages before any fruit became ripe for gathering.”


The meager diet of the poor and how to create the necessary illusion that it stretched to fit the exigencies of the rulers – that is the question.

Not only for the rulers, but for the universal historian. For whom I interpose my translation of the 15th series, of singularities, from Deleuze:

“The two moments of sense, impassibility and genesis, neutrality and productivity, are not such that one could pass for the appearance of the other. The neutrality, the impassibility of the event, its indifference to the determinations of interior and exterior, of individual and collective, of the particular and the general, etc. are very much a constant without which the event would not possess an eternal truth and wouldn’t be distinguishable from its temporal effectuations. If the battle is not one example of an event among others, but the event in its essence, this is without doubt because it is effectuated in many ways at the same time, and that each participant can grasp it on a level of a different effectuation in its variable present: hence for the comparisons that have become classic between Stendhal, Hugo, Tolstoy such that they “see” the battle and make their heroes see it. But it is principally because the battle “flies above” [survole] its proper field, neutral by relation to all its temporal effectuations, neutral and impassible by relation to the winners and the defeated, by relation to the cowards and the braves, and even more terrible because of all of that, never present, always already to come and already passed, only being able to be grasped by the will that it inspires itself to the anonymous, the will that must be called “indifference” in a soldier wounded mortally, keeping himself there where the event is, and thus participating in its terrible impassibility. Where is the battle? It is on this account that the soldier sees himself flee when he flees, and leap when he leaps, determined to consider each temporal effectuation from the very eternal height of the event incarnate in it and, alas, in his proper flesh. Still, it taks a long conquest for the soldier to arrive at this moment beyond courage and cowardliness to that of the pure grasp of the event by a “voluntary intuition”, that is to say, by the will that makes him the event, distinct from all the other empirical intuitions that correspond to these effectuations.”

To fly above – survoler – doesn’t this sound like dissociation? It is common, in the lumbering reports of the sexologist and the tendentious anecdotes of the psychologist, to encounter the trope of the out of body experience during sex. Women, for instance, who feel the braces of the body slide away and, loosened, float above the couple on the bed in their embraces. Is this vision from the ceiling a vision of the event? What else could it be, in Deleuze’s terms. Above the bed or the battlefield, soldier or lover, it is at this high point that the neurotic, the traumatized, and the universal historian meet and – to the latter’s respectable horror – join. One might call this the moment of perverted solitude – for solitude will not be downed or drowned in the mingling of bodies. Funny that Deleuze does’t mention either the Iliad or the Bhagavad-gita at this point. Oppenheimer, watching the atom bomb bloom in the New Mexico desert, recalled, famously: “A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line form the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” [In Atomic Fragments: a daughter’s questions, 235]

little things and the deathgame

World history, Ludwig Schlözer wrote in 1787, was synonymous with the history of “Erfindung” – a word that can mean either discovery or invention.
“Everything that makes for a noble progress or regress among mankind, every new important idea, every new kind of behavior, pregnant with consequences, which the rulers, priests, fashion or accident enduringly bring among a mass of men should be called by us, out of a lack of a more appropriate word, invention.” [67 Weltgeschichte]

Invention or discovery – this, Schlözer thought, was the secret hero of history. Not the discoverer, necessarily: “The inventors (alphzai) themselves are mostly unknown. Often they don’t deserve to be eternalized: than not seldom, simply accident lead a weak head to a discovery, that only later generations learned to use.”

It was also the secret of Europe’s dominance. For small Europe was the ground zero of discovery. Europe, not coincidentally, defined discovery – the verb preeminently described the European act or gaze. America, to use the most obvious instance, may have been seen by millions of its children, and yet it was only when it was seen by Europeans that it was discovered. Thus, like the meat in a nutshell, crack open the word discovery and you find universal history itself before you.

It is a curiously non-heroic heroic history. Schlözer, one of Germany’s truly Enlightened intellectuals, was ruthlessly mocking of an older, heroic history that placed kings merely because they were kings at the center of historical action.

“It goes back to the decadent taste for the deathgames (Mordspielen) of old and new man-murderers, named heros! Lets not rejoice any longer in the smoking war histories of conquerors (Eroberer), that is, over the passionate story of these evil doers who have lead nations by the nose! But for the present believe that the still musing of a genius and the soft virtue of a wise man has brought about greater revolutions than the storms of the greatest bloodthirsty tyrant; and that many happier sorites have ornamented the world more than the fists of millions of warriors have desolated it.”

Given this shift in the emphasis on what history – world history – is about, it isn’t surprising that Schlözer wants us to see the “little things” as the great ones: “… the discovery of fire and of glass, carefully recounted, and the advent of smallpox, of brandy, of potatoes in our part of the world, shouldn’t be left unremarked, and so one shouldn’t be ashamed to take more notice of the exchange of wool for linen in our clothing than to seriously and purposefully deal with the dynasties of Tze, Leang, and Tschin.”

Schlözer’s separation of the ‘little things that one shouldn’t be ashamed of noticing’ and the deathgames of the tyrants would not, of course, survive the scrutiny of a master of world history like Marx. He would notice that deathgames are ingrained in those little things, and those little things are engrained in the deathgames. We kidnap Africans to raise sugar cane to make rum to intoxicate the sailors who kidnap Africans. This circle of biota, human bodies, taste buds, brain cells, and money can be named circulation, lightly lifting up the name given by Harvey to the movement of blood in the body. Looked at, as Fielding did (whose Enquiry uses the word circulation to discuss London “life”), one sees that a creation story that separates the liquids and the solids won’t do. In a sense, the Fielding of the Journal to London, being eased of the deathgame at play in his body by being drained of his built up liquids, is an emblem of the monster-London he depicts in the Enquiry, where the solids – the solid division of the classes, recognized in the law statutes he cites that go back to Richard I – are melting under the “torrent” of currency, and the liquids – the circulation of traffic in the street – are solidifying under the ambush of robbers.