a sententious post

“Which life should one live – the life one likes. I like writing. I like change. I like to toss my mind up and see where it goes.” – Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 1934

Most of us – me for one – toss our minds up very rarely. What we like at 18, we bear on our shoulders at 68. Partly this is because we don’t lead the life we like. Virginia Woolf was no exception to this rule. She was subject to neurological assaults on her sanity, sexual assault by a step brother when she was young, and (more positively) the comforts of her circle and place. Her likes, and thus the life she liked, were hugely conditioned, imperially conditioned, and this she knew well. The question of our likes after 18 comes so often too late for us to recognize – instead, the crucial questions are what we can tolerate, what we need to do tomorrow, how we can negotiate with the bill collector, the colleague, the family member That internal oracle falls silent, as the path to it is overgrown with weeds. Our likes are trivialized, and instead of the lifescale likes, we like a tv series, we like the restaurant recommended in a magazine. It is not the love that passeth understanding that guides us, but the understanding – of small gains and losses, of the claims on us of tasks we won’t remember in a week, to which we have chained the day, of the entire world of cops and plutocrats at the door – into which that love is sucked up and thinned out.

Yet of course the entire story is not a grimly deterministic novel of social realism and misery. There’s the mind toss still. That beanbag made up of will and whim.

What’s the good of it? To my mind, this question is foregrounded in a barely disguised servility, emanates from a world in which the mind is simply a coin, a world in which the coin has bested the spirit. A ridiculous world. Questions have motives, and this one, in particular, is thrown out by the devil of banality, well versed in turning grammatical forms against liberation. What’s the good of living in, or collaborating in, a world in which tossing up your mind becomes a trivial thing, even to the tosser? Where it seems too tiresome or too frightening?

Hmm. Well, enough with this hortatory tone today. Tomorrow, this could all be wrong.

Thoughts on post-colonialism: the Night of Ideas in LA

The Night of Ideas event here was a big success, and applause for all those who made it so – the people at the French Consulate here in L.A.

One of the panels I attended was about colonialism, post-colonialism, and identity, a discussion with Achille Mbembe, Nicolas Bancel, Kaoutar Harchi, Alain Mabanckou & Dominic Thomas. The discussion ranged over identity, Francophone literature, and France as a world language. It was fascinating, but … I resisted the opposition that dominated the proceedings, or so I thought.

That opposition aligns, on one side, France and the European nations, and on the other side, post colonial third world nations, as participants in a history in which the Europeans, representing an identity en bloc, colonize other peoples, who then have to find a path to their identity by overthrowing the European pesence, so to speak.

I understand how this image of Europe seems plausible from the side of those who live in post-colonial domains. Nevertheless, the idea of an eternally fused European identity is a miscarriage of history.

My problem with this story. then, is on the European side. Far from it being the case that the European nations have always existed as such, they are a relatively recent phenomenon. For instance, the majority of French people did not always speak French, nor identify from their first sentences with France/ The way it came about that France is now relatively homogenously French is a recent and incomplete phenomenon. The model for colonialism was formed in the heart of Europe as various peoples – the Irish, Scots and others in Great Britain, the Gascon, Provencal, Breton and others in France, etc. were subjected to the same combination of direct violence and institutional cultural violence to get them to be “British” or “French” or “Italian” or “German”. In other words, as Spanish, French, Portugese and English colonists were imposing themselves upon the people outside of Europe, inside of Europe the same forces were at work on the great peasant masses.

A turning point, or, perhaps, a point of collective clarification, came in the French revolution, when the revolutionaries took surveys of the countryside to find out how many French citizens actually spoke French. Abbe Gregoire, head of the research committee, “concluded rather hopefully that three quarters of the people of France knew some French. On the other hand, he admitted that only a portion of these could actually sustain a conversation in it, and he estiated that only about 3 million could speak it properly.” (Eugen Weber) This, out of a population of about 28 million. In other words, the France we know today is historically anamolous – although the Right yammers on about “strangers” in the midst of France, actually, the number of people who can converse in French properly living in France only became a majority in the late 19th century, and this, after a vast organizational effort. We don’t think of the school as creating the nation-state, but that is precisely what happens all over Europe. The great media inventions of the 19th century, the press, the novel, the theater, were all embedded in the effort to make the French french, the Germans German, the British English.

This is more important that just my peculiar historical caveat. It brings together the violent history of Europe and the violent history of European colonialization. Too often, the former is considered as happening in some separate, advanced time zone than the latter. The civilizing mission of France was the label for creating France, creating a nation state, with the creators, the governing class, being a minority in their own “countries”.

This 18th and 19th century history is not dead. Rather, the buckling of the Europe we have known since 1945, or, in Eastern Europe, since 1989, shows evidence that the fissures and buried resentments exist just under the crust. Identities that were, four generations ago, defeats are clung to now fiercely, evidence of the success of what Foucault called the disciplinary society. This is what the discipline is about.

Notes for a future essay on Chamfort

Chamfort was not his real last name. In fact, it is still not certain whether his name was really Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, son of a Clermont grocer, or whether he was the bastard child of a Clermont canon. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, like many another Enlightenment demi-sage, came up through the ranks from a seemingly engulfing provincial obscurity by inventing himself in a different milieu.

His success as a writer falls in the period of the 1770s. He earned money from a hit play; he wrote for enlightened journals; he found an aristocratic patron. And he enjoyed eating, drinking, talking and fucking. He mingled with some of the big names, wrote a catty little verse about Candide, received a letter of praise from Rousseau. His life, although he didn’t know it then, was falling into a pattern of anecdotes. For instance, on the subject of making love, his biographer Pellison recounts that a woman told him, once, “this curious thing. I don’t love smart men in love – they are watching themselves parade on by.” [impossible to capture the phrase, ils se regardent passer- ‘they are people watching themselves’ might be a better translation].   A remark that sticks with Chamfort, and that he records, later.

He was a good looking young man. Another biographer, Arnaud, records that he was the lover of an actress, Mlle. Guimard, “famous for the perfection of her bosom and who did her makeup each day before the portrait that Fragonard had painted of her.” [xiii]

But already, at twenty five, Chamfort’s life had changed much for the worse. Famously. As Remy Gormount wrote: “Chamfort’s secret, why use periphrases that don’t trick anybody, is in the syphilis that tormented him for a period of thirty years, during the time first of his greatest genital activity, and the second, and then in the third, the more discrete but more conscientious and refined period.” His looks fell away. He recovered, but with a disfigured face. Much like Mirabeau – to whom he has a strange, doppelganger relationship – Chamfort had experienced the down side of the libertine moeurs in his body, and he didn’t like it. An anecdote – how they trail our man, how they dog him like devils – from Abbé Morellet, a habitue of the Madam Helvetius’ salon, where Chamfort was a faithful attendee:

“I saw him, he said, in the society of Saurin and Mme Helvetius… this happened to me twenty times at Auteuil that, after having heard him for two hours in the morning recounting anecdote after anecdote and making epigram after epigram with an inexhaustible talent, I would leave with my soul as saddened as if I was leaving the spectacle of an execution. And Mme. Helvetius, who had much more indulgence than I do for that kind of wit, after having amused herself for hours listening to his malignity, after having smiled at each ‘hit’, told me, after he had parted: Father, have you ever seen anything as tiring as the conversation of Chamfort? Do you know that it makes me blue for the entire day? And this is true.”

For between 1780 and 1788 – the decade in which Herder, a writer with a similarly confused relationship to the enlightenment, is inspired by his discovery of Nemesis and history – Chamfort ‘retires’ from the circles of the intellectuals and the long stays as a house guest at the estates of the nobility. He was in his forties. It is now that he leaves behind poetry and the theater and begins writing down his epigrams and anecdotes.  He has a sense that this will make a book, and calls the project – in one of those flashes of mordant wit that depressed Mme Helvetius – Produits de la civilisation perfectionnée.

This is one of Chamfort’s maxims:

“Hope is only a charlatan who ceaselessly tricks us. And, for me, only after I’ve lost it does happiness begin. I would gladly place over the gate of paradise the verse that Dante put over that of hell: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

…

Well, Chamfort threw himself, body and soul, into the revolution. He impoverished himself, he wrote speeches for Mirabeau and Tallyrand, he, it is said, suggested the title for Sieyes critical pamphlet (Qu' est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien) which neatly summarizes what, actually, all modern political revolutions are about – the struggle between what is really All – the working class – and its false political position – what does it have? Nothing.

A title that is echoed in one of Chamfort’s maxims:

“Me, all; the rest, none: thus it is with despotism, aristocracy, and their partisans. Me, this is an other; an other, this is me: thus it is with the popular regime and its partisans. After this, decide yourself.”

That Chamfort the pessimist, Chamfort the executioner of the Enlightenment smile of reason, was also Chamfort the revolutionary, Chamfort the anti-monarchist, was a paradox that the lineage of reactionary writers in the 19^th century, up to and including Nietzsche, tried to find ways of explaining. Chamfort’s sotie, his double, was a reactionary, Antoine de Rivarol, who, before the revolution, ran in the same circles as Chamfort, wrote for the same journals, cultivated the same charming cynicism. Afterwards, in exile, he became Chamfort’s most bitter critic. But he was not the only one: Chamfort seemed to especially burn the anti-revolutionary crowd. Unlike Tallyrand, whose motives seemed transparent – greed – Chamfort seemed to have reached his conclusions coherently; he seemed to have thought they unfolded from his dethronement of God and his corrosive view of man. There was, in the reactionary view, a pit even under cynicism, and Chamfort was its guardian devil. Thus, among the conspiracy minded among them (and the exiles from the French revolution were massively inclined to theories of conspiracy – De Quincey rightly compared their visions to that of an opium smokers) Chamfort must be accounted for as a kind of intellectual criminal master mind. After all, it was Chamfort who came up with the slogan that smelled of blood and jacquerie: War on the castles! Peace to the huts! (Guerre aux chateaux! Paix aux chaumieres!) under which, in effect, the countryside of France seemed to be reorganized. In 1810, Marmontel, an old litterateur, publishes his memoirs and includes an anecdote about Chamfort – long dead, of course, by 1810, another victim of the Terror. I’ll quote from Pellison’s biography:

‘The passage is curious – we have to cite it. When Marmontel objected to Chamfort’s reform projects, [saying] that the better part of the nation will not let any attack be carried through on the laws of the country and the fundamental principles of monarchy, he (Chamfort) agreed that, in its antechambers, in its counting houses, in its workshops, a good part of the stay at home citizens would find perhaps that the projects bold enough to trouble their repose and their enjoyments. But, if they disapprove, that will not, he said, be but timidly and quietly, and one has to impose upon them that determined class which has nothing to lose in the change and believes it sees much to gain. In order to organize them into a mob, one has the most powerful motives, famine, hunger, money, alarms and terrors, and the delirium to blaze a path and the rage by which one will strike upon all minds. You have not heard among the bourgeois but the eloquent speakers. Know that all your tribune orators are nothing in comparison with Demosthenes  at a quid per head who, in the cabarets, in the public places, on the quais announce the ravages, the arsons, the sacked villages, flooded with blood, the plots to starve Paris. I call those gentlement the eloquent ones. Money principally and the hope of pillage are omnipotent among the people. We are going to make a test of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And you won’t believe how little it costs the Duc D’Orleans [The rival of King Louis XVI] to have the manufactury  of honest Reveillon sacked, which was the living of one hundred families. Mirabeau has gaily upheld the idea that with a thousand Louis D’or one can create quite a pretty insurrection.”

Thus spake Chamfort, the Goldfinger of his time. Evil keeps a book, and ticks off in it just what he will do: destroy the living of a hundred innocents, spread rumors, dethrone culture. Did Chamfort really put the fear of God into Marmontel? The conversation is recorded years after one of the major participants committed a very bloody suicide, so we don’t know what Chamfort did. We don’t know whether this was mockery. The note about the Duc D’Orleans sounds significantly false. But the falsity at the bottom of this is that those who “came from the people”, the intellectuals, and adhered to the aristocracy couldn’t imagine someone going back to the people, except on behalf of some powerful figure. As Chamfort wrote: 

“All who emerge from the class of the people are armed against it to oppress it, from the militia man, the mercant become the secretary to the king, the preacher who comes from a village to preach submission to arbitrary authority, the historian son of a bourgeois, etc.  These are Cadmus’ soldiers: the first armed turn against their brother and jump on them.”

Chamfort is one of Cadmus’s soldiers who, to the surprise of all, turns not against his brother, but strikes at Cadmus the King. To a certain extent, to an extent that the pessimistic line that came after Chamfort could not believe he could accept, he did accept the bitterest consequences of the revolution:

“In the moment that God created the world, the movement of chaos must have made one find the chaos more disorganized than when he rested in the midst of it in its peaceful state.  Likewise, among us, the the embarrasment of a society reorganizing itself having to appear as an excess of disorder.”

This is what makes Chamfort stand apart – his notion of the irrevocable is not a nostalgia for what is lost, but is instead a  hope, expressed in a language that goes back to the Bible, that it is truly lost.

…

“… writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in a beyond of language, it develops like a seed and not like a line, it manifests an essence and threatens with a secret, it is a counter-communication, it intimidates. We will find in all writing the ambiguity of an object which is at the same time language and coercitation: there is, at the bottom of writing, a “circumstance”  that is foreign to language, there is something like the glance of an intention that is already no longer that of langauge. This glance can very well be a passion for language, as in literary writing; it can also be the threat of a penality, as in political writing: writing is then charged to join in a single dash the reality of acts and the ideality of ends.” – Barthes, The Degree Zero of Writing

(…l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne, elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une contre-communication, elle intimide. On trouvera donc dans toute écriture l'ambiguïté d'un objet qui est à la fois langage et coercition : il y a, au fond de l'écriture, une « circonstance » étrangère au langage, il y a comme le regard d'une intention qui n'est déjà plus celle du langage. Ce regard peut très bien être une passion du langage, comme dans l'écriture littéraire; il peut être aussi la menace d'une pénalité, comme dans les écritures politiques : l'écriture est alors chargée de joindre d'un seul trait la réalité des actes et l'idéalité des fins)

The common approach to Chamfort’s ‘maxims’ and “anecdotes” has been to consider them as a philosophy – and to eventually dismiss them as a philosophy. Pellison, his nineteenth century biographer, remarks on the similarity of temperaments that seems to exist between Chamfort and Schopenhauer. But Chamfort was, Pellison concedes, not a systematic thinker.

The notion that a philosopher must work within a ‘system’, which figured largely in the 19^th century, still has an influence on the definition of philosophy – in fact, the teaching of philosophy often comes down to a puppetshow of conflicting systems – if you claim x, you are a critical realist, and if you claim y, you are a nominalist. Etc.

Barthes was concerned with another system – the system of ecriture. This has a lot more relevance to Chamfort. Chamfort wrote his “Products” out of a reaction to, a consciousness of, the writerly function. That function – which, as with all middleman positions, has a relation to the basic one of pandering – is both under attack in the Maxims – from the beginning, the very idea of the maxim is ridiculed as the idea of a mediocre mind – and, inevitably, chosen as Chamfort’s instrument. What other instrument is there? But the notion of maxim, of a rule, if only a rule of thumb in the Repulic of Thumbs, puts us on the track of Chamfort’s sense that his writing was  political. It is to this that the reflection tends; political scandal is the whole point of the anecdotes he carefully amassed. When his listeners at Mme Helvetius came away from his conversation with the sad sense of being present at an execution, it was no accident.

So, what was this politics?

Because Chamfort was intentionally freeing up his writing from the literary – and thus the systematic – it is easy to quote him, but hard to point to one passage or another that would provide the key to him. It is this very freedom that “intimidates”, to use Barthes term. But to threaten politically implies an order that can be violated, a standard from which one can judge. And there are many passages from the Maxims that hint at this order – that, as it were, give us the mythic foundation for the series of sacrifices, of  executions, that space themselves in both the Maxims and the Anecdotes.

This passage from the first section of the Maxims, for instance.

‘I have often noticed in my reading that the first movement of those who have performed some heroic action, who have surrendered to some generous impression, who have saved the unfortunate, run some great risk and procured some great advantage – be it for the public or for some particulars – I have, I say, noted that the first movement has been to refuse the compensation one offered them. This sentiment is discovered in the heart of the most vile men and the last class of people. What is this moral instinct that teaches men without education that the compensation for these actions is in the heart of he who has done them? It seems that in paying them we take from them. [Il semble qu’en nous les payant on nous les ote]” OC 1812,  2:28

The insistence of the writen, here, is caught in that repetition of “I have often remarked” – its way of pointing to the superfluity of the oral, the way, in the economy of speaking, repetition serves to organize a series that is continually disappearing, going beyond the attention of the listener, which is strictly not needed in writing (for after all, the reader has merely to glance back) and that appears there nevertheless to ‘glance beyond’ the written object, to connote the theater of conversation. But the major economic instance, here, is of course the gift – or the sacrifice.  The gift – the heroic act, the generous impulse - initiates an internal circuit in which the outward gift (the true gift) is compensated by an inward gift (which is marked, already, as a compensation). But it is a circuit that takes away when it pays – which is the deficit at the very heart of payment, the free lunch that is the despised, impossible other in the crackerbarrel wisdom of capitalism.  

This is, of course, a very Rousseau-like stance. However, it joins Rousseau to a moralist theme – of self satisfaction. Or at least of self compensation. As in Rousseau, nature is identified with a primary process – with spontaneity. The secondary process is that of payment. Chamfort does not, here, reflect on the connecting link of compensation – that there must be compensation of some kind is assumed.

The executioner’s melancholy arises from the perception that the rupture between the regimes of compensation has corrupted us in such a way that there is no going back. It is an irrevocable movement.  

“Society is not, as is commonly believed, the development of nature, but rather its decomposition and entire remaking. It is a second edifice, built with the ruins of the first. We rediscover the debris with a pleasure mixed with surprise. It is this which occasions the naïve expression of a natural sentiment which escapes in society. It even happens that it pleases more, if the person from whom it escapes is a rank more elevated, that is to say, farther from nature. It charms in a king, because a king is in the opposed extremity. It is a fragment of ancient doric or corinthian architecture in a crude and modern edifice.”

The motive behind the post-truth hoax

The first thing to be said about our post-truth moment is that it is complete bullshit that we are having a post-truth moment. The idea that somehow, uniquely in the last year, American politicians and propagandists have started lying systematically, ignores the entirety of American history. The idea of ‘post-truth’ is generated from a completely scewball, neo-liberal view of American history – and, indeed, of world history – in which America was not the country that declared its independence because the British weren’t killing enough Indians, and that incorporated slavery in the constitution. It is not the nation of Jim Crow, the Sand River massacre, the long war between labor and capital in which unions were attacked by national guards as a regular thing. It is not the America that dropped two atom bombs and proceeded to test nuclear weapons above ground for more than a decade, with the official scientific community, colluding with the executive branch, lying through its teeth about the mortal dangers of fallout – which a scientific committee in 2006, hobbled by the congressional requirement that it only consider Iodine isotopes, decided was probably the cause of at least 200000 thyroid cancers. It is not the America of bogus drug laws, enforced with exemplary racism, that took back many of the promises of the Civil Rights era.

Instead, it is disneyland, where a perpetually cool tinkerbell, who knows the latest euphemisms, is a little burst of rainbow. In other words, post-truth analysis is based on a lie. The lie is called American exceptionalism, or various phrases of that type.   Once you begin with a view of American history that can only be held by a member of the upper class (a class that is overwhelmingly white), who has distinct views about helping the “poor” (a sociological category that has its roots in charity) while despising the working class (which is a sociological category that has its roots in socio-economic struggle), you will quickly miss and misinterpret the American grain.

The post-truth meme was created in order to be scolded, and provide a soapbox for editorial lecturing. In reality, the lies of Trump are simply easier to spot. Trump has not bothered to find collaborators in the mainstream press, those willing volunteers who like to weave glamor around our monarchs – hence the awe evoked by so piddling a figue as George Bush.  This is, I think, a huge mistake. But it isn’t some troubling new facet of our society. There is no post-truthiness, and its hour has not struck. I don’t want to use the occasion of clueless sex offender Trump to tell liberal seeming white lies about our country.  That would be missing the moment. 

Between funny ha ha and funny peculiar: Trump and the incarnation of the american grotesque

In No Go The Bogeyman, Marina Warner takes, from the mouth of (very English) babes the distinction between “funny ha ha” and “funny peculiar”. It is an inherently unstable disjunction, having the structure of a booby trap or a slapstick routine. Between Punch the puppet and Gacy the clown serial killer, between “locker room talk” and sexual assault, there exists a subsurface resemblence, a vicious hilarity, to which we are both drawn and repelled. Warner’s book is about the large social region of the grotesque that is minimized by social scientists and made a footnote by literary critics, but that actually intrudes in our lives in a big way. The grotesque is generated by funny ha ha and funny peculiar, much as the two ends of funny pull at each othe.r

I’ve heard many people say that they can’t believe that the president we inaugurated today is really the president. That unbelievability is cousin to the grotesque, and haunts the seriousness of the ocassion. Downfalls are rarely so much like bad jokes. Rep. John Lewis called Trump an illegitimate president, which is a nice beginning, but hardly goes through the entire career. Trump is illegitimate as a public figure in every way: he’s a bogus businessman, a bogus playboy, a bogus politician, and a bogus reality tv star. He’s bogosity on a monstrous scale, sort of like some sexting Paul Bunyan, some underground comic marrying kitsch and obscenity. And in this he is an apt symbol of the American moment post – neoliberalism, post Iraq, post post –racism.  It is as if Robert Coover’s The Public Burning leaped off the page and realized fiction in cold fact. We are inaugurating a dirty joke, and we will all carry a little flake of that dirtiness with us as Americans. Between “make America great” and “America is already great”, we have chosen the compromise of making America a great horselaugh.  

That’s what the statue of bigotry says. Drop the mic.  

toy story 2 and the communist manifesto

Not having children in the 1990s, I looked down with complete disdain at kid’s movies. Or, actually, I didn’t look at them at all, but I’m sure I would have shown some sort of snickering adolescent attitude towards them, and covered it up with a buncha five dollar words.

Now, of course, I am immersed in children’s movies, videos, tv shows, and general Youtubealia. Which brought me with a bump of recognition to Toy Story 2. I promised Adam we’d watch it, and we did, Saturday.

It surprised me. Talk about a savage attack on capitalism!  For those who haven’t seen it, the toys are dream figures of the proletariat. On the one hand, for capital, represented in the movie as white kids and parents, toys are lifeless. Whenever the gaze of some parent or adult is present, the toys fall into a dead faint, in poses characteristic of toys that are scattered across the floor on a Saturday evening (insert here picture of our floor after Adam has finished with it). In reality, though, they have a separate life of their own, a life of precarious solidarity.  Yet that toy life is riven by the attitude towards Capital.

Interestingly, in the 90s, the upper administration decided that the work force needed the inspiration of new age therapies and Harvard business school lingo to “incentivize” them.  In the Working Life, Joanne Ciulla cits a study  which polled managers about the most efficient incentives for building employee commitment: "The researchers found that most senior managers believed that celebrations and ceremonies and non-cash recognition were the best incentives for non-managers... But for senior managers, they responded that the best incentive was cash rewards tied to quality performance." The heartbreaking thing about celebrations and ceremonies is that they substitute for an intangible yet evident cure for alienation that long frustrated Marxists in the 20^th century: employees really do become loyal to their companies.  As witness the phenomenon of 401ks, in which employees, given choices to invest across the spectrum, have a distinct preference for investing in the companies they work for – in touching contradistinction from their CEOs, who as often invest betting against their companies, if they aren’t loading them up with debt in order to LBO them. Similarly, the toys confess to each other that when they are selected by the kids, when they are “loved”, they feel alive. Of course, the only time they are alive is when they are with other toys. Such are the cultural contradictions of late capitalism.

Two sequences in particular have a startling realism. In one of them, Woody the cowboy toy is torn by his “owner” – in much the way say Monsanto carelessly poisoned its asbestos workers, then sold that division to haliburton. Woody’s owner is bummed about the torn arm: he drops Woody to the floor, and all sick at heart, leaves him behind as he goes to Cowboy camp. Which, it is easy to see, represents Davos. Woody, falling asleep, has a terrible dream in which his owner – Capital – tosses him in the garbage, along with all the other wounded toys, who drag him under as he is calling to his owner. Of course, here, in living color, is the whole reserve army of the unemployed,  demonized by Capital and viewed with loathing by the same workers who are simply a drop away – a profit loss away, or an “efficiency” away – from joining them.

The second sequence even gets a song. Here, the gender note is struck. Jessie the cowgirl lived in perfect love and harmony with her owner, Emily. Obviously, she thought of them as bound up forever, such is the burden of the song. But Emily turns out to be intent on cracking that glass ceiling. Yes! Instead of shaking up the patriarchal order, she’ll simply assume a higher function in it and pretend that this is equivalent to shaking up the patriarchal order. In order to make cruelly clear how this works, Emily doesn’t just throw Jessie away – she stores her in a box labelled “donations”. Of course, it is a good work, giving little Jessie to charity. One imagines Jessie will be one of the lucky “poor” people uplifted by our trade treaties so that she can go to a dangerous factory, work 16 hours a day for 18 cents an hour, and whip inflation now in these here states. This sequence is such a painfully accurate satire of Clintonism that I am surprised the film made it past Pixar’s censors.

When the film was over, Adam pronounced it his favorite movie. Mine too, for the moment.  

slaves of the map, arise!

I like my friend Seth Grossman's crusade to modify the electoral college - but my heart belongs to another vision of America in which we redraw the friggin' states. During the French revolution, districts that had a much more historically concrete identity as Duchies, former kingdoms, etc., were broken up and redrawn. I think the goal should be to enclose that comprise around 11 million people OR to enclose areas that comprise around 2 million people - to create many more districts or many fewer. But all of the districts should be about equal in terms of persons. This would, at one stroke, abolish the absurdity of a senate in which 2 members from California with forty million people meet on equal terms with 2 members from South Dakota, which has ten people and a goat. The problem with the electoral college is, of course, the same problem we have with the Senate. The senate has already been reformed once, when at the turn of the century we abolished the system of Senators being appointed by state legislatures and instituted direct elections. If we had, say, one hundred states with two hundred senators, or thirty states with sixty senators, or x states, all of about equal population, with x x 2 senators, that would all work fine. Even finer would be discarding the states as the basis for senator representation at all. We could continue with the states as they are, with their reps, their petty state capitals, and their corrupt state legislatures, and keep the House of Representatives as it is. The senate districts, then, could transcend state borders - basically, they would be imposed on the grid of the US to create equally populated districts. This last idea, which wrenches the federal government away from its captivity to states that are, mostly, platforms for the movements of different people within the US, would be the best.

read, digest, throw up

Trump's America will look like, unfortunately, what America has looked like for some time. This article, in which an ex drugdealer pins his hopes tenderly on Donald T. as he attempts to inject people with BMPEA through his supplements, looks both forward and backward . The ex drug dealer, Jared Wheat, the owner and CEO of Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, is confident that his expensive slander suit will discourage others from investigating him, even though he lost it. He told the FDA to just piss off when they told him to recall several products. True, Hi-Tech is a piker in the industrial effort to poison America. We all remember that Syngenta has outfaced studies about atrazine by presenting their own funded studies, and that nobody is too concerned, in DC. about a statistically abnormal excess of birth defects in Iowa, where atrazine is used to kill weeds in the cornfields. What's a birth defect compared to Syngenta's bottom line? Even pre-Trump, the old idea about American history that emphasized such milestones as progressive legislation against patent medicines and the like has to be changed: the trendline has reversed, and the courts and legislators could care less about the health of the less useful population of mere people.

Read, digest. throw up: the three stages of information processing in America

weird scenes in the update of Suetonius' history, American version

The reaction to Buzzfeed letting us ugly and obscure people read what the glitterati in DC are reading - Donald Trump's Smutty Vacation in Russia - has produced more of the same from the prep school journalism crowd. The writers for the waPost and the NYT. You know the guys. The ones who watched, during the election, as a tape was released showing Trump uncautiously talking about groping pussy - and who asked not one question relating to that at the press conference, as Trump lectured the assorted sycophants about how clever he is in avoiding being tape recorded or videoed surreptitiously. I guess said sycophants didn't want to get into locker room talk. It is so not serious! This from the corps of journalists who, at the NYT, held a symposium about Mariah Carey's woes after her New Years fuckup.

Well, these are the people who carried water for the CIA after the intelligant agency was accused, correctly, of covering for coke dealers in the illegal Nicaragua affair. Who bent over collectively for Goerge Bush and licked his little Texas asshole till it was nice and shiny. Those folks.

Weirdly, though, the poobahs have been joined by other people, professional placers of the turd in the punch bowl. People like the Intercept crowd.

Who've decided it is all the Deep State attacking la Donald.

My gut feeling is that this crowd was, correctly, suspicious of the neo-con Putin hate nights lately staged by Clintonites and McCainites, singing in perfect harmony. But not wanting the cold war to start shouldn't mean covering up for Putin, who is a monster on the George W. Bush order. Chechnya, the false flag Moscow bombings, the hatching from the rotten vulture's nest of Yeltsin's horrible clan - it is all true. It is also true that whoever hacked the DNC did a good thing. If Clinton wanted her fuckin speeches kept private, she shouldn't have run for the presidency. And if the DNC under the thumb of establishment Dems had decided not to put another heavy thumb on the scale for Clinton in the primaries, there wouldn't have been any scandal about their doings - such that Debra Wasserman Schulz had to resign. On the same Procropian principle that secret history is what the cops and judges cram up your asshole if you don't watch it, Buzzfeed did us a service releasing that dossier. Now we know much more about what it contains, who commissioned it, and how it was constructed than we do - well, about the FBI - CIA report about the hacking of the DNC.

As for its "bizarreness" - as one of my twitter opponents phrased it this morning, dissing Buzzfeed - are you kidding me? Did the sexual assault stories, the headlines about Trump for the last thirty years, his delight in birddogging and cheating, just slip the collective media mind? Given Trump's M,O. and his sense of safety in Moscow (where he's touting the Miss Universe pageant - hey, page up those reports from Miss Universe contestants about what the son of a bitch was doing), Trump orgying with prostitutes seems pretty plausible - much more plausible than Trump becoming president of this big balled up nation.

I'm pleased to see that there is some pushback pro Buzzfeed. Not enough though. And the press, which has a huge gender problem (hence their inability to even check and see whether Trump had bit parts in Playboy movies, when I am sure as shit that if Clinton had the smallest bit part in a Playboy movie it would even have interested the moribund NYT), is going into covering an administration in which Trump and his minions will continue to pretend they are in Hugh Hefner's mansion - and they bring to this scene the morals of a Victorian judge guarding the public decency. Gonna be interesting seeing them in full sycophant mode, pretending this isn't going on. And getting shocked when internet news sites, clickbaiting away, put this shit up for Mr and Mrs. America to swing to

No, voxers, exploitation is not a virtue

There's a well meaning but infuriating meme going around among liberals, which is that if Trump "expels" illegal immigrants, we won't have anybody to harvest our foods. It is well meaning in that it gestures towards immigrants as part of the community. It is infuriating because it replicates the usual neo-liberal gesture of turning exploitation into virtue. In fact, the harsh reality it gestures to is an industry that depends on underpaying its labor force and providing it with not benefits. When you read that, for instance, sugar cane growers "can't find" americans to harvest sugar cane, you should read: sugar cane growers are unwilling to either pay a living wage or ameliorate conditions of labor and provide healthcare insurance for their laborers, because they are sucking off the top in enormous profits for fat cats. Under the guise of "tolerance" what is being tolerated is 19th century working conditions. To hell with that! If Pres Fuckface tries to expell illegal immigrants en masse, oppose him on human rights grounds, and then remember that we need strong labor laws that abolish exploitative work practices both in the country and the city, on the farm and in the coffee shop.

The Middle spirits, wanking, and Trump

Between 1980 and 1990, one colossus bestrode the world like… like a verminous scarecrow over a dying field of corn. Or something like that. I’m talking, of course, about his senility, Ronald Reagan.  During those years, I protested against Reagan, and my friends uniformly found him to be a joke, a turd, and a fascist.

However, I do not think of Reagan when I think of those years. Not really. One reason may be that I did not own a television in that decade. Reagan, to me, was pre-eminently a beast of print.  In a sense, I did not have that false, trans-haptic sense of knowing him which one gets from watching tv or movies and seeing, constantly, the same faces and bodies. The stars.

I’ve never been within pissing distance of a single powerful figure in my life. I’ve never been at arms end – I’ve never seen the skins and smelled the smells of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama. 

Yet they move, definitely, as images through my life. In the eighties and the nineties, even, it was possible to keep them at arm’s length, so to speak – to coldly judge them without getting them up one’s nose. So I could pretty clearly say that I knew only the parade balloon that I saw photographed in newspapers and magazines, really, and the words that were written for them by other people. They were, in a sense, “middle spirits”. Itake the phrase from Empson, who uses it in a review of Francis Yates bookabout Renaissance Hermeticism:

“C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they surprisingly called ‘Platonism’: ‘the doctrine that the region between the earth and the moon is crowded with airy creatures who are capable of fertile union with our own species.’ Another reason for feeling at home with the spirits was the doctrine ‘that the invisible population of the universe includes a whole crowd of beings who might also be called theologically neutral’. That is, they die like the beasts, and never come before the Judgment Seat; they are ‘far from Heaven, and safe from Hell’. They are not morally neutral, being a mixture of good and bad like ourselves: but they are not angels or devils, permanently engaged in a Manichean battle, wearing the uniform either of God or Satan. Clearly, this makes them likely to be useful to us, perhaps even to tell the secrets of Nature, if we have something to offer in return. It is an important change. But Dame Frances will have none of it, and so she does not mention the names of Puck or Ariel.

Lewis used his dubious phrase about neutrality to introduce the idea, I think, because the full doctrine is seldom stated. It would be considered heretical, and would anyhow be shocking: but the feeling of it, or an approach to it, is widespread in the period. One of the chief reasons for wanting some kind of belief in Middle Spirits was the reverence felt for the newly recovered classics, together with the belief, often expressed, that it would be impudent to deny experiences which had once been generally attested. Apollo could not have been nothing, and it was very disagreeable to believe him a devil. It was clear that he had lasted a long time, say two thousand years, and pretty certain that he was now dead; to believe he had been a Middle Spirit fitted very well. It would be unfitting if he were summoned to the Day of Judgment, so the educated tended to assume that this would not happen.”

I would call such creatures ontologically neutral, and I would list in this category the stars and celebs who, while “capable of fertile union” with the likes of us, definitely carry with them the hint of the faery realm in which they are most engaged.  

The Middle Spirits have, I think, come crashing down because the audio-visual media of the twentieth century that supported them have crashed into the internet. In 1980, if someone sent personal letters to some other person, a Middle Spirit, a star, this act of fandom seemed a bit eccentric; after all, there was no way to ‘know’ the person on the other end. Now, of course, on facebook and twitter, and on blogs, we are in communication with people we don’t “know” all the time. One of the happier things about keeping up a blog for fourteen years is that I “know” a lot of the people who comment on it or send me emails.

In this transformation of the confederacy of Middle spirits, my feeling about politicians has changed. It has become much more personal. When George Bush was elected, I frankly didn’t care. Bush and Gore were, to me, much like two version of the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man in Ghostbusters: comically exaggerated dangerous monsters. But Bush’s coup came at the same time that my interaction with the computer intensified dramatically. I started a blog, a zine, and went around looking for writing jobs on the internet. 9/11 marked the beginning of my actual dislike of George Bush – and it was a change of dislikes. It was not distant, but very close. It was as if I knew the fuck up.

I knew that this was not a good thing for my mental health, but I also knew, and know, that it signaled a good thing in general. It used to be that this kind of knowing – a mook’s knowing, a sort of entrance into a faux-haptic space – was a reality for the elite alone. Now, they’ve been stripped of this perogative. The press still can’t get over that. HRC ran, curiously, as if this never happened – while Obama was hyperconscious of it. He was the candidate of these new circs. Trump, who has grabbed us by the pussy like untreatable case of clap, is, oddly, also aware of it. Probably this is due to pornography. Trump has always been a camp follower of soft-core, and probably hard-core, porn. Porn was, in the seventies and eighties, something like the parody zone of the Middle Spirits. It cashed out on faux-haptic knowing big time. Look but don’t touch turing into look but touch yourself – the cardinal rule, except for the big Mooks, like Trump. But porn, famously, made the jump to the internet and never looked back, even as the whole industry that had grown up in the seventies and eighties collapsed.  Trump, of course, has kept faith with the golden era porn creed, but as well, he followed the industry in its transmorgified form into the net.  We are supposed to think of Trump’s appeal to white nationalists as the core of his success. I think the appeal to the older wanker set was just as important.  There was a very good reason that the Republican primary consisted of a mudfight over the cock sizes of the candidates: because this was a real issue. It was the issue of knowing the candidate, and knowing where he’d put his organ. Into whose pixeled angelic hands.

I am going to have a harder time ignoring Trump than I had ignoring Reagan. But I think I can make it. I’ll blast his fuckedupness whenever I get a chance, but I am not letting him under my skin like I let Bush. I’m too tired and wary to go all the way with yesterday’s Wanker.  

Meryl Streep and President Fuckface

I have never had a lot of patience with celebrity culture, but after Meryl Streep's speech, and Prez fuckface's response, I suddenly see a use for it: bugging Trump! Every day for the next four years, some celeb should denounce Trump. In the Bush years, demonstrating did nothing. The press ignored it, the Dems rolled over for Bush, and Bush laughingly did his torture dance through Iraq. But apparently Meryl Streep can press Trump's buttons with the merest whisp of a speech. Trump's touchiness won him the presidency, but maybe it will lose him the efficiency he needs to put his monster dreams in motion. I don't know. But I do know celebs now have a duty in their interviews speeches and whatever. Make Trump mad. It is the least you can do for your country.

PS: speaking of actresses, Ray Davis at Pseudopodium riffs off of my post about HRC and Chicago to introduce his fave actress (and mine) Barbara Stanwyck as the excluded third in this discussion. https://www.pseudopodium.org/ 

shirley hazzard and the Lawrentian novel

In 2000, Gary Adelman, a D.H. Lawrence scholar, wrote an essay for Triquarterly about the strange death of D.H. Lawrence’s reputation in the academia and among readers at large. Adelman uses two sources for probing into the cultural discontent with Lawrence. One was the responses of the students to a course he taught on Lawrence; the other was the responses he gathered from  a letter he wrote to 110 novelists, asking about their own past and present reading of Lawrence. The students, Adelman writes, ended up hating Lawrence.  The writers gave a more mixed response. Some, like Doris Lessing, claimed that the idea that D. H. Lawrence is “not important” is purely ideological. Lessing claims that at least two of Lawrence’s novels (Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow) are among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Ursula LeGuin had a lot of sympathy with the antipathy expressed by the students, especially for the change in the character of Ursula from The Rainbow to Women in Love. Adelman notes, parenthetically, that even his students loved The Rainbow.  Only in the context of being fed all things Lawrence did they turn on it.

My own sense is that Lawrence suffers now fromm having been elevated by Leavis and similar critics in the 40s to the status of Great Britain’s great 20^th century novelist. At the same time, this crew beat down Virginia Woolf, whose pathologies they emphasized and whose styles they derided. Woolf looks to me like she has ridden out that storm, and that Lawrence, in comparison, has suffered from having his pathologies elevated and his style – for mostly, he had one style – derided.

But what Lawrence tried to do with the novel is, I think, very much alive. Lawrence liked to have a number of romances at the center of his novels in order to show, firstly, the greater social contract that pushed upon these supposedly private passions, and secondly, to show how the greater social contract was being catalyzed through these romances. It is the second function that lent these romances a mythic power, which Lawrence often translated into terms that are a bit misleading and inadequate: that is, the terms of “man” and “woman”. The inadequacy of any person representing these vast categories is at the heart of the critique of essentialism.  Nevertheless, essentialism is the grid through which most popular critics today operate, figuring out how, for instance, young women “are” through the characters in “Girls” or even “Broad City”, etc. Of the drawing of conclusions about the greater social contract, there is no end, even as what categories are highlighted and which ones are subdued is an historical variable. There’s little talk, for instance, about the class of characters on TV today. Class has become unfashionable. This has definitely had an effect on the reading of D.H. Lawrence, who grew up in class-ridden England and never for

got the enclosing, deadly nature of class  (although sometimes, when he was at his worst, he seemed to think you could fuck your way out of it).    

I’m thinking of Lawrence not because I am reading him, but because I am reading Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, which is built upon the Lawrentian dialectic of romance and the social contract. Shirley Hazzard is, I think, much more intelligent than Lawrence – she has the kind of intelligence that Lawrence so often rejected, the kind that analyzes as well as synthesizes. Hazzard died this past December. When I read of her death, I felt a pang not so much of grief but of guilt. I have long known I should read Shirley Hazzard, but for some reason I thought that it would be an effort. So I took up the novel that, it is generally agreed, is Hazzard’s masterpiece. And the effort – as in all great reading – is aided and then overwhelmed by the tidal flow of the thing.  It has, whether Hazzard thought in these terms or simply absorbed them,  the Lawrentian lineaments of a thing both monumental and living – of history tested by sensibility. I want to say something fuller about it in some future post. But the thing to say about it in this one is: read it.