on jokes

When I was in my twenties, I often found myself in the midst of a joketelling orgy – that is, I found myself among joke tellers. I’d tell some jokes myself, but I did not have the rhythm of the great joke teller. I was equipped with one advantage, however: I was a great laugher. I could laugh until, literally, I ran out of breath. Not only that, but I laughed not only at the punch line – for the punch line, for the great joke teller, is only the final touch on the whole artistic edifice, the last gargoyle, so to speak, on the cathedral of shit – but I would laugh even more at the absurdities that the joke piled up, especially if it was an obscene joke.

Obscenity requires a concatenation of circumstances that remove us more and more from social reality, and each step is funnier. In a sense, I was a strange audience for a joker, who is used to the laugh coming last. But the talented joker would realize that this was a set with a heavy infusion of improv and would get into using the rhythm my laughter threatened to interrupt.

I was also among a literary set, and some of them – notably my friend Stefan – were very aware of the joke as an artform. Stefan was a very good joke teller, but he was not a great joke teller because he was too aware of the art. Sometimes, though, when he just let his natural flow take him there, he was a great one. Joke telling, back then, had a setting: it was in a bar, or a coffee shop. It was close to a college or university. At least, for the joketellers I knew. And this closeness made jokes something like an anti-classroom. In a classroom, you read, or you talked about texts - and were talked to about texts, and were generally educated in the complexities of reflection, the necessity of critique, and the never-ending task of imagining the good life arising out of the crimes of history. The joke climbed joyously back into the crimes of history and wallowed. In the great jokes – which were almost always dirty, misogynist, homophobic, racist, etc. – liberal society, indeed any social ideal, was turned upside down, its pockets were picked, and its underwear observed – and its underwear was always dirty.

I’ve been freelance now for almost twenty years, and I never find myself in joke telling orgies anymore. Is it that the age for them – my twenties and thirties – has passed? Or is the joke itself falling prey to its internet counterparts – the tweet, the Instagram caricature, etc.?

There’s an essay by Andrei Sinyavsky, the Soviet dissident, entitled The Joke in the Joke. It is a very good essay, one of the best on jokes. Written in the early eighties, it is also rather sexist. Conservatives often complain that the use of sexism and racism as interpretive categories distorts the past. This isn’t true - they help one see more of the past. Benjamin’s dictum that every monument of civilization is also a monument of barbarism finds its practical application here.

The core of the essay – which contains some silly and some truly disgusting jokes, and ends with a misogynistic rape joke – is that jokes are philologically important, and are the popular art form, just as folktales were in the past.

“In a closed society of the Soviet type, where the parameters of self-interested and complete existence are marked by all sorts of prohibitions (especially verbal ones), the joke is the only emotional outlet. More than that, it has actually developed into a model for living and serves the function of macrocosm inside the microcosm. As such, it becomes a kind of monad of the world order. The joke is in the air, but not in the form of dust. Like a spore, which contains everything that the soul needs in embryonic form, it is capable of reproducing the organism whole at the first opportune moment. Hence its readiness to provide universal formulas, explicating the epoch, history or the nation.”

Much emphasis is put, here, on the closed society of the Soviet type. But as all wee peas in the cogs of American capitalism can testify, the prohibitions here are cruelly marked out in dollars and sense, in time devoured, in exhaustions never to be redeemed; in cross-purposes between races, classes, and “discourses” that seem to have become zones of lies entirely. Here, the joke’s redemptive purpose, its “monad-hood”, seems lost to the onrush of ever more comic catastrophes. Of that which take your breath away, you physically cannot speak. And as I am removed, now, from the culture of oral jokes, I can’t really testify as to its health. But thrust into the pseudo-society of social networks, I can testify that everything begins to look, in a ghastly but undeniable way, like a joke. So much so that it has become a joke that one can’t joke, that irony needs an emoticon to explain itself.

There’s another wonderful bit in the Sinyavsky essay that is worth digging out. Here it is:

“If it weren’t for one more characteristic feature of the joke, perhaps the most important one, we could end our story here. I am referring to the joke’s philosophical relation to the world, to things, to the old and the new, when the new is a variation on the old but is nevertheless a new variant. We can imagine the joke in the form of an endless chain which connects just about all possible human situations. It can be likened to Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, which has empty spaces for new valences as if for new jokes. The heading for this chart consisting of humorous parables would read something like “Human Existence” or “Human Reality”.

We laugh, so we don't cry. And then we discover that we laugh cause we can't cry. And then we cry with laughter.

visit to the Museum of the Wall - Berlin

The communist world is fallin' apart
The capitalists are just breakin' hearts
Money is the reason to be
It makes me just want to sing Louie Louie

And the state 
Was on the other side

Our Rough Guide to Berlin says this about the Wall Museum: “Overall, though, the huge collection is
somewhat jumbled and rambling, and not quite the harrowing experience that some visitors expect.”

About which, more must be said – at least by this visitor, who landed in Berlin on Tuesday.

A little nostalgic hits of the 80s music please, Maestro. Let’s get into it.
When the Berlin Wall fell, I was living in Austin. My source of income was precarious. A little of this, a little of that. Mostly working as a carpenter’s helper. But also teaching one class at ACC: a class in philosophy, about ethics. For which I had a text book that I threw out, and just photocopied a buncha the great texts and handed them out – The Gorgias, Nicodemean Ethics, Prolegomena to a future metaphysics of morals, Geneology of Morals, bits bits bits. Good bits.

I’d spent 4 years in Austin by that time. I came there to study philosophy, to get a Ph.D., and gave up that idea after two years, because the emotional climate of the department and the emotional climate of Roger Gathmann just didn’t mix. So I was thinking about my next move: garbage man? Secretary? Also, I wanted to right high fiction following in the footsteps of the masters. In the meantime, I talked at various tables, in various coffee shops. A leftist, of course.

When the Wall fell, I didn’t experience it from TV. Surely I saw the images somewhere, but for me, it was all text – after all, I was following in the footsteps of the masters. It was the newspapers. It was in my head from newspapers and photos in news magazines.

I was excited. I’d lived under the threat of nuclear war my whole life, and that was bad, ridiculous, ignoble, etc. Also, it had long been obvious that the paradise of “really existing socialism” was run by a bunch of geriatric prison guards who tossed their critics into prisons, and were incapable of running the system with any efficiency. The industrial system was filthy, a black hole of social costs (what else was Chernobyl), negative externalities out the butthole. It was all very nice for the Soviets to align themselves with the anti-colonial struggle, but by 1968 at the latest it was obvious that the jig was up. Andrei Amalrik, now forgotten, got it right in his 1970 book, Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? While the schtick of the Soviet establishment was to make its rule seem eternal – which is the schtick of the American establishment, circa 2018 – the energy spent on the image was weakening the thing itself.

In 1989, I considered myself a Marxist, but one of those critical kind. Of course, I was aware that there was some bad faith mixed in with that characterization, but we all gotta live. Anyway, point is that I was brimming with the historical moment, and even had a forum, my philosophy class, to brim away in. My poor kids, though, didn’t see it like this. In fact, every class I taught in philosophy in the eighties would make a mockery of the assumptions of 19th century philosophers, who would vaunt freedom as our greatest good. These kids didn’t think about freedom, or freedom of thought, at all. And though, in their very lifetimes, the U.S. had spent a good twelve trillion dollars on the military, ostensibly because Americans felt that the freeing up of the Russian and Eastern European masses was of a much higher priority than, say, national healthcare – the good news that our expenditures were bearing fruit did not seem to brighten the eye or your average 18 year old.

Looking back, over thirty years, it is obvious that they were right and I was wrong. The removal of the Soviet threat unleashed the kind of capitalist shit that so undid the world in the first half of the 20th century. I’ve become a convert to the Misfit version of history. The Misfit, in Flannery O’Connor’s story, A good man is hard to find. You’ll remember the end of the story, when the Misfit shoots the Grandmother dead. Then one of his boys says something about her, and the Misfit says, “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Which is rather how I now think of the U.S. and, in general, the West. Without the Soviet threat, I doubt that the Great Depression and the War would have been followed by the greatest rise in working class wealth in history. I doubt that the wealth inequality of the Western nations would have gone down. I doubt that health care would have become a human right in the civilized places. What we have seen in the thirty years is that pigs will be pigs.

But that’s another story, children. This is just to present the background for our visit to Checkpoint Charlie, the place where the American soldiers in Berlin kept watch on their Soviet counterparts. Next to which, on Friedrichstrasse 45, you find the Wall Museum.

Yes, I was expecting an anti-communist fiesta. But I was not expecting a museum with such a revisionist theory of history. In the Museum’s history, the Nazis came from, apparently, outer space. First we get World War II. What happened in World War II? Why, the brave Germans tried to resist terrible Hitler (whose picture is oddly muted among the pictures of all the world leaders on the walls) under Stauffenberg. After that, it is on to Soviet atrocities, like the German soldiers kept in Soviet concentration camps after the war. No mention, of course, is made here of Dachau, Matthausen, or the 3.5 million Russian soldiers who died in the p.o.w. camps. Once you wipe these things out, it is much easier to speak of the moral equivalence, the coin toss, between Hitler and Stalin.

That equivalence was the burden of the song of the rightwing German historians in the 1970s, who were fighting against Willy Brandt socialism and radicalized youth. And nobody spread this idea more than Axel Springer. So I suppose, in retrospect, that his portrait hanging in one of the Museum halls, combined with an elogious explanatory plaque, was not surprising, any more than the portrait of Reagan and the plaque explaining he was an American hero. American horror is more like it.

Springer doesn’t push many American tourist buttons. It is hard to explain his influence or his politics. He was Rupert Murdoch crossed with Berlusconi. He was a sign, a terrible sign, of the future. His publishing empire combined a staff in which a considerable number of ex-Nazi bigwigs held positions of power; but, in a twist, Springer media was always wholeheartedly for Israel. Long before American evangelicals traded in their old hatred of the Jews as Christ-killers for their new love of Israel as a great place for most of the Jews to be decimated and the rest converted (as per Revelations), Springer was there, making a strategic change to Israelophilia in a European rightwing tradition that was default anti-Semitic.

Thus, as we toured the hot, hot building – Berlin is hot, the world is hot, and the major polluters are doubling down on destroying the Holocene, I kept thinking in the dusty heat – I noticed, like the Rough Guide writer,  that the exhibits were oddly off-track. What was a whole room devoted to Guernica doing here? But looking at it as a whole, that makes sense. If you are not going to include Auschwitz on your itinerary, Guernica is a very nice, portable atrocity. It reduces the scale of atrocities to put the crescendo on a German bombing that took place in Spain, before the war. Everybody can be against Guernica, we can pull out the reproduction of Picasso’s painting, and we don’t have to ask any difficult questions. And it avoids making atrocity the core principle of the state.

Springer – for us literary types – is remembered, as well, through Heinrich Boll’s novel, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum. Another prophetic work! Boll saw that rightwing media operated through systematically stripping people of their dignity – punching down hard. Katherina Blum has a one night stand with a man who joins a leftwing terrorist group, and her life is destroyed by the press, who depict her as a whore, a terrorist, scum, etc., etc. Finally she agrees to meet the journalist who is on the anti-Blum crusade for an interview, and shoots him dead. I believe, I haven’t read the book in years. It famously upset Springer, who threatened to sue. Boll included this disclaimer at the front of the novel.

„Persons and incidents of this story are invented. If the description of certain journalist practices bear a similarity with the practices of the Bild-Newspaper, these similarities are neither intended nor accidental – but unavoidable.”

Why is it that I suspect Murdoch has a picture of Axel Springer up in his office? He should if he doesn’t. He owes much to the man.

Mourn the victims of the Wall, but, for their sake: don’t go to the Wall Museum. Advice from a friend.

the end of dignity: Trump as a name

I have always associated dignity with the reactionary values, and so I am inclined to piss on it.  There is a longstanding strain of revolutionary thought that lies behind this idea. One of the great pamphleteers of the French Revolution, J-R. Hèbert, published a newspaper of astonishing obscenity, Le Père Duchesne, which dedicated itself to stripping the dignity from the French aristocracy. The paper was subtitled, Je suis le veritable Pere Duschene, foutre – which can be roughly be translated as No shit, I’m the real Father Duchene. Hèbert was one of the great purveyors of an obscene distortion of Marie-Antoinette, making her a prostitute, an incestous mother, practically a cannibal. He also was one of her prosecutors at the Trial, which Marie Antoinette dominated. If you think HRC’s farcical persecution for Benghazi was a disgrace, read about Marie Antoinette’s trial, and weep. Chantal Thomas wrote a striking and important book about the “reine scelerat” in the 80s, which dismantled the combination of misogyny and psychopathology that went into this image.

Of course, values do not simply line up as reactionary and revolutionary. They are symptoms of more complex states of social confrontation. While nothing makes me bray like a donkey more than the language of the monarchial court commonly employed by journalists who write about politicians, I am realizing, under Trump, how the stripping of dignity can work to promote the worst kind of reaction, the kind that shocks a liberal political structure in which reaction – in terms of the radical increase in the power of capital  – has already been undermining.

This has made me re-consider the value and place of dignity and the place of stripping the dignity from a person. This is not just a ritual adjunct to real power – it is how power operates at the critical instant.

Cicero once wrote that “the goal at which statesmen like himself and his correspondent ought to aim in the conduct of affairs of State was cum dignitate otium”. (Wirzubinski, 1954). This phrase was taken up by the humanists, and puzzled over by the classicists. What was dignitas, and what was otium? The usual idea was that the statesman would be ‘respected’ and he would employ that respect to insure the ‘tranquility’ of his subjects.  Respect was also construed as keeping “one’s good name”.

But what if the person in power has no good name? Has, in other words, no dignity at all? This, it turns out, creates a curious sense of powerlessness. In Gothic literature, there is a subtheme of the clown torturer, the man usually with no name, or an assumed one. Whose goal is to wound, irreparably, the name of the other – the other’s good name with him or herself.

The horror this aroused doesn’t have, at its disposal, in-dignation. Which has long been an important limit on power. Such is the flattening power of the president with the name – and no good one. The Bush era was, by many measures, much worse than the present one; even so, it did not have this dreamy layer of horror. Bush was not only aware of his good name, he rode to power on his name. But Trump? The man lived for scandal. And now he is at the center, scandal in power, and he evidently loves it.

I want my indignation back.

drowning in dribble: flashback to the cotton days of Dem neo-liberalism

We have not heard from one of the older themes of neo-liberalism in a while – so much so that we are in danger of forgetting it. But we shouldn’t, because surely it will come back, bad penny that it is. This is the theme that, as a New York Times story put it in 1992, the accusation that politicians “tell people what they want to hear”.

In 1992, this was a strong theme in the Democratic party. All the young wonks had driven out the bad New Deal relics, and they were ready to tell people what they didn’t want to hear: we couldn’t afford any of that new deal garbage any more!

What we needed to do was freeze the minimum wage, help the “poor” by expanding the earned income tax credit, and wean the middle class from their addiction to “special interest” stuff. All that porkbarrel stuff. All that stuff that the government did – which, tragically, denied the private sector of its opportunity to go in and do a better job of, say, piling up debts so that people ended up serfs off the credit card companies to maintain their lifestyle.

In the context of 1992, the fear that he was "telling people what they wanted to hear" made candidate Bill Clinton jettison his early promise to lower income tax for the middle class, pleasing a now semi-forgotten dweeb named Tsongas, a neo-lib hero who went about telling people not to look at the massive inequality that had resulted in a historic jump in the amount of concentrated wealth at the top – but to look at their own lousy lives, lousy habits, and their freeloading tendencies, and allow politicians to punish them good and proper.

Cause of, uh, the deficit.

That terrrribble deficit.

This fell like music on the ears of the New Democratic wonks. When candidate Clinton was elected president, he even appointed an economist to advise him from the “Progressive Institute”, a dude name Robert Schapiro, whose claim to fame was to dismiss minimum wage raises as old hat. New hate was the kind of negative income tax stuff advocated, in the sixties, by Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman.

Here’s a coda to this little story of idiocy. In 1994, the economy started picking up again. Very respectable growth. 3 percent. Per capita income was up 1.8. But, economists admitted, “puzzled”, median household income actually fell Gee, how did that happen? Most of the benefits “flowed to the wealthiest Americans.” Everyone, according to the Times, was puzzled. Peace. Prosperity. “The numbers may help explain voter discontent that threatens to turn next month’s elections into a nationwide rebellion, despite an expanding economy and relative international peace.”

The election of 1994 sealed the deal, as the GOP romped, with their contract for America, while the Dems went down, holding the line on not "telling people what they wanted". The Clintonites decided in the aftermath to double down – helping the “poor” and preaching the doctrine that the middle class would be best helped by the private sector. The inequality of 1993 exploded. But for a while, the business cycle lifted the working class - the median income set.

Ah, the "poor". How did the "poor" figure into all this.

This concern for the poor sounds morally astute. But in fact it is sociologically dumb. It is no coincidence that the neo-libs went on about the poor even as the plutocrats cleaned up. Because this moral crusade is sociologically dumb: the “poor” are not a class in the usual sense. People who are middle class go into and out of poverty. And the poor aren’t the beggars on corners, but the part time workers at Amazon. Poor doesn't describe a position in the system of production of the capitalist economy, because that would, uh, reminds us that the workers make the wealth. The rhetoric around the “poor” is used, consistently, by neo-libs to bash socialist policies like free tuition at public colleges and universities. This, we are told, only helps the “middle class”. By such dribble the supposed parties of the “left” have been drowned.

The recent article by Joe Lieberman, of all rotten people, is a reminder of what that politics was about. For Lieberman, Ocasio-Cortez is a great threat to our republic, a politician who just “tells people what they want to hear.” And we can’t have that!

It does look like there is a blue wave coming. I fear, however, that it will dissipate in the kind of puddles of dribble that Dem honchos have favored since the 90s. I fear there will be more talk about the deficit than about inequality. Let's hope that the old fossile neo-libs don't crawl over Dem politicos, cause if they do, we really are doomed. 

I've seen the future and its murder

You know who interfered in our elections? The Supreme Court interfered in our elections. Striking down the 1965 Civil Rights provision that supervised the election process in the South allowed, for instance, Trump to win in N.C. That there were 65,000 less black votes in 2016 than in 2012 - instead of about a 120 thousand more - is the direct result of Republican actions. By not expanding the Civil rights act to Wisconsin, which under its Shitty governor has pressed the id card voter thing - see here and here:- the Supreme court was defintely putting its thumb on the scales for the GOP. Expect more of that. Russian trolls on fb did not win for Trump. John Roberts did. And the House of Unrepresentatives and the cockeyed Senate are going to keep that happening. The attack on American democracy is coming from the structures put in place during the 170 years of unchallenged white supremacy. As we head further into the century of bringing down the Holocene, we are going to have an American ruled by, among other things, a senate in which 50 members will come from 30 percent of the population, if current trends hold. And guess what? That 30 percent of the population is from places like Idaho and Utah, the white white white areas. The whole structure of the American republic is on a collision course with the brief liberal interlude that lasted from the 30s to the beginning of the eighties. 

Don't bet on this ending pretty.

I've seen the future brother

and its murder.

cut it out, liberals.

The Russophobia passing through the liberal sphere in the U.S. is comic, if not rather sinister. The discovery that Putin is Dr. Evil is a little belated, and heralded with the usual U.S. amnesia. Hmm, what country was it, long ago and far away, that supported Putin's patron, Yeltsin, an incompetent drunkard, as he ran for president of Russia? Ah, yes, that was the Americans under Clinton. They were quite proud of using the media, which was pretty much under oligarchic diktat, to wage the kind of one sided campaign that makes for the election of world historical bandits. Did the Clinton administration think twice about, say, helping a government that was waging a dirty war in Chechnya? No. As a reminder of how Russia went from Yeltsin to Putin, a good amnesia lifter is this article by Tony Wood in the LRB.

The mania of the Russophobe contingent has drawn in remarkably unsavory characters, who first made their mark flogging Islamophobia, or promoting ever more American intervention and war. Trump no doubt has a secret with Russia - which seems to me to be flouting U.S. sanctions on Russia, a common enough business crime. Because it is a business crime, CEOs are rarely treated to prison for it - like, say, truly horrendous things, like being late on paying for your parking tickets in Ferguson, MO. Instead, they do the trial, sign the agreement that they weren't guilty, pay the fine, take the tax deduction, and hire the Justice department flunky after a suitable time interval at a grossly bloated salary. This isn't called bribery, but meritocracy. Trump, being extraordinarily stupid, hasn't gone this route.

There are literally hundreds of ways the American dream has failed the majority of Americans. There is, actually, one successful way for the Dems to campaign: promise that their voters will be richer. Which is a thing the government can easily jumpstart. The reason wages were high in the 60s and 70s and lag now to the point that we are looking like the 1910s is that neither party cares. The GOP maliciously doesn't care, while the Dems don't care in the nicest, concern trolling way. Well, cut that out Dems. And don't expect Russophobia to bring you to the promised land. Cause that is just stupid.

Fred and Velma explain

Adam is going on a Scooby Doo trip. Every day, he watches that cartoon, which I have never loved. Or liked. But it occurred to me, as the pattern of the show fell rigidly into place, episode after episode, that the part at the end where Fred and Velma explain everything in the smarmiest way possible must be the model for today's journalists. Vox, for instance, could just rename itself: Fred and Velma explain. Which would explain a lot!

Trump - a name that gets harder to say with each passing day.

Well, my prediction predictably came true. 

On July 10 I wrote on facebook, "Given that Trump jerks off at the thought of betraying a friend, a supporter, or a woman - especially a woman - I think he will interrupt the schedule of his UK tour to see Boris Johnson and give him support. Or, if that proves impossible, express his support at a press conference or, best, in some joint meeting with May. It is pretty easy to see how the sadistic tension would build up in this depraved man until he could not resist it."

Even a peanut such as myself could see that 55 years of unblemished misogyny and a delight in betrayal were in the cards for this visit. That May didn't see this astonishes me. Politicians are so stupid. 
Today, the Sun is publishing an interview in which he says Johnson would make a "great prime minister," warned that if it isn't hard Brexit the special trade deal with the UK - upon which May was fixing delusive hopes, at least in public - is off, attacked the Mayor of London for being the wrong color, and encouraged ethnic cleansing in Europe before it is too late, what with all the migrants and such. What a vile man! I've had hemorrhoids with more ethics. May was an idiot to invite him for a state visit. Up side is, Melania got to wear a gown and see the queen. That's it for her. Now she can disappear again for a month. I dont really care. Do U?

Poetry and the ordinary: the politics of the lyric

Ferdinand Kürnberger has achieved a paltry kind of fame in the English speaking world for a phrase that Wittgenstein chose as the motto of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “...whatever we know, and have not simply heard among the rumbles and the roars, can be said in three words.”  In Austria, it is a bit different: Kürnberger claimed to have invented the feuilleton in Vienna, and he wasn’t lying. He was one of the revolutionaries in 1848, was arrested in Germany in 1849, spent years then in exile, coming back to Vienna and becoming a popular writer of essays in the 1860s, opposing both the liberal left and the monarchist right. Out of his pocket, so to speak, sprang the whole lineage of Vienna wits – from Altenberg to Friedell to Polgar to Kraus to, in part, Musil and Wittgenstein. Certain of these names are known, others are the joy of specialists. All of them traded in names and references that grow dimmer and more obscure the further one moves from Schulerstrasse, the Viennese street where many of the great newspapers were located. The wit, with its characteristic trick of catching the stupidity of some cliche in midflight, its joy in citing and glossing, its half-swallowed Viennese German, its tag-ends of poetry, loses its impact, its  color, further afield, like flowers that doesn’t transplant.

The reason I’m mentioning him is that he wrote an essay on Poetry and Freedom in 1848 that has something to say today.
The issue, for Kürnberger, was that no poet in recent times could be called the “poet of freedom.” Such poets were, of course, common in the Romantic era. Byron, Shelley, Herder, Schiller, all were lauded in terms of a vision of liberty that ran like a fever under the skin of their poems.

Kürnberger is interested, though, in the fact that this freedom was not a present condition for these poets. They were not singing of liberty that they had, but rather, of liberty that they dreamed of. His question is: can there be a poetry of freedom?

He starts by pointing out the general poetic nullity of the current generation, and asks whether there is something about the generation that has caused it. “How could an entire generation, a, shall we say, forceful, clever generation be suddenly cut off from all poetic means? Believe that who will – I won’t. But if I don’t doubt the ability of persons, then I must necessarily doubt the ability of the thing. And thus arises, on these grounds, my sacrilegious question: Can freedom be the object of poetry, or not?”

This is a question that had occured of course to the intellectual right. De Maistre, of course, would say that freedom – as the liberals see it – divorced man from God, and collapsed the very possibility of poetry. Tocqueville, less to the right, would say that poetry requires hierarchy. But on the left, and I would put Kürnberger on the left, the only person who was really asking this question of the 1848 generation was Herzen, in Russia. Indeed, for Herzen, it put poetry itself in question.
Kürnberger makes his argument with this sense of the politics of the question in mind:

“To pose this question is perhaps the most original part of the act, while to answer with no! requires something less. Then the deduction is simple enough. What is the stuff of poetry? The affect, the passion, the pathos. But is this stuff in Freedom? No, for we shouldn’t delude ourselves as we have clearly long enough done. Freedom is totally and simply nothing positive.”

This is a conclusion that definitely seems to put Kürnberger on the side of the liberal tradition – on the side, for instance, of John Stuart Mill, who also worried about the flatness of a world that was free. These are the intellectual predecessors of Isaiah Berlin’s famous Cold War thesis.

Kürnberger then makes another deduction: that the romantic idea that poetry and freedom are connected derived not from something in Freedom, but in the condition of not being free. The blues can’t be sung, authentically, by a man with a nice cushion in his savings account. Similarly, when poetry yearns for Freedom, the yearning arises from the pain of slavery.

This leads to a passage that is quite interesting about the objects of poetry – remember, of course, this is 1848, and we are on the cusp of Baudelaire’s revolution in poetic practice - or Whitman's.

“Slavery is a sickness, freedom is health. Sickness awakens sounds in the deepest part of the breast, nature itself helps out with cries of pain, dread, complaints, sighs and groans... Health is something indifferent, and so is freedom, a thing, that is self-explanatory – only its loss is felt, but not its existence. Laocoon and his sons, martyred by the snakes, are in a setting of Pathos, are stuff for poetry; free them from this circumstance and they become three quite ordinary guys.”

This, it strikes me, is a rather flat response to Laocoon – they are after all figures in a myth, in a world of possibilities where the gods can strike them down. The ordinary, here, does too much work – as does the analogy with health. Freedom is the health of the ordinary – the metaphors click click, but they lead us away from what freedom is: the possibility of leading an ordinary life. Which is not a negative thing, but a positive description, albeit one that shifts the conceptual work from freedom to “the ordinary”.

This shift is, I think, essential to the shift in a romantic poetry of freedom to a modern poetry of freedom.

“The case for the truth, that the common goods of life cannot be the object of poetry, has been made by nobody more strongly than the singers of freedom; I can call on their own words, but turn them around against them. Was it in the young political school of poetry in Germany not discreditable to sing the moonlight, the murmuring stream, the fluting nightingale, the fields and woods and meadows? Those meadows, yes. As Heine put it, a German can sing for a span of thirty years or more the little plat behind the house of his birth, where his mother dried his undershirts. Momentarily these things utilitarian decorations of life become poetic again when an imprisoned Duke behind thick iron bars yearns for a piece of sky blue, or a flower from the fields, or in all seriousness pairses the meadow where his mother dried her washing. Already we would find it a bit more doubtful if he lamented the loss of his gold and silver, his expensive banquets or his game of cards; what is most valuable can have for the prisoner now no value, for, on the contrary, what is most royal is what was, to him, earlier, most ordinary. Now I ask the political poet whether they were right when they sang the song of freedom under the censorship? Without doubt they would answer yes, as I myself would answer. But it follows that they would not be in their poetic right when they sang the song of freedom under the realm of freedom. There are only two cases to this dilemma. Either freedom is something inordinately costly, which means its loss would not be sung, just as an elegy to a lost diamong would be a prosaic thing; or freedom is something totally simple, nakedly human, generally necessary, and then its possession will not be sung by poetry either, for a hymn to a piece of bread is a prosaic thing.”

I find this a rather fascinating text, to read against the narrative logic of various notions: that of poetry and prose, that of the ordinary, that of the meaning of freedom, that of the possibility of freedom’s loss as lending a suspicious pathos to freedom’s song. The diamond or the bread is, of course, taken up extensively in prose. But our daily bread was also taken up, throughout the Christian tradition, in a poem that all knew: the Lord’s prayer. To match the ordinary became the task of the poet under the liberal order – which led a poet like Baudelaire one way, and a poet like Whitman another way. Meanwhile, the prose of the world was rolled out – literally, by the industrialized printing press – where it found its way to the ordinary as an adventure.

Of course, it is under the loss of freedom, the absolute loss of the ordinary, that Mandelstam did write about diamonds: the Mandelstam who even protested the execution without trial of bankers, not confining himself, like a good little intellectual, to worrying about the right to dissent of writers in the writer’s union. This is a good place to stop.

Toast
I drink to military asters, to all that they've scolded me for,
To a noble fur coat, to asthma, to a bilious Petersburg day,
To the music of Savoy pine trees, to benzine in the Champs Elysee
To roses in the Rolls Royce, to oil paintings in Paris’s painted alleys

I drink to the waves of the Biscay, to cream in Alpine jugs
To the ruddy arrogance of British girls, and quinine from the colonies
I drink, but I haven’t decided... what will I choose?
Sparkling Asti-Spumante, or Chateauneuf-de-Pape?

what to do tomorrow? and the next day? Male anguish

The larger effects of sexism appear in curious places.

Take the inexorable eight hour day.

In the nineties, an historian, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, interviewed workers – mostly retired workers – who had participated in a famous experiment in shorter work time. The Kellogg cereal company in 1930 adopted the six hour day as the standard, raising the wages of the workers to compensate. Hunnicutt’s research resulted in a book: Kellogg’s Six Hour Day. Interesting material there.

The plant was unionized in 1940, and the workers were polled. Most of them voted to keep the six hour day, although some departments voted for the eight hour day. After schedules were scrambled during the war years, Kellogg’s returned to the six hour day.

“In mid-1946, employees reaffirmed their commitment to the short workday, with 87 percent of women and 71 percent of men voting for six hours.” Yet in ten years, the vote had totally shifted. A majority of men voted to bring back the eight hour day; only departments in which women were the majority retained the six hour day.

Why?

Hunnicutt’s interviews suggested that the change came about due to two factors. One was a change in the way management administered the work force, with the decline of the line boss as yeller and coercer and the rise of the “coach” model of management. In conjunction with this was the use of the suggestion, floated by the management and agreed to by the male work force, that there was something feminine, or sissy, about the six hour day. As Roger Whaples summarizes the argument in his review:

 Management began to denigrate and “feminize” shorter hours. National union officials were very willing to trade shorter hours for offers of hourly wage increases. But most importantly many workers,especially male employees, seem to have changed their tastes. They became embarrassed by the short hours that they were working–shorterthan the shifts worked by men at other local jobs. They changed their rhetoric, down-playing the freedom that leisure gave, and asserting that they were “unable to afford” a six-hour shift, that longer hours were needed to “‘keep the wolf from the door,’ ‘feed the family,’ and ‘put bread on the table'” (p.140). …  Ultimately, most men during the 1950s needed little convincing that eight-hours and higher pay were preferable. Six-hour workdays wouldn’t let them keep up with the Joneses and many men did not receive much enjoyment from their marginal leisure hours. “Like management, senior male workers were concerned about the loss of status and control.”

It is interesting that these factors were not in question, or were not as disturbing to men, in the 30s. Why?

I think this minor incident points to larger changes in male, specifically American white male, attitudes in the Cold War period. What has happened now, in America’s Rotten Age, is not the result of one presidential election. These currents were set in motion a long time ago. On the one hand, the U.S. has long had a stronger feminist tradition than its European co-evals, with attitudes going back to the post-Civil War period of Daisy Miller. On the other hand, a reactionary male imago has been the constant cohort of this liberatory tendency. It is a cohort made up of feed-backs, such as the lack of any respect for the humanities, which feeds back into an entertainment industry that has long ago exhausted the limits of shock (either of violent death or of industrialized fucking), which feeds back into a sort of loss in the nature/technology interface, etc.

I’ve been spending my whole life thinking that the reactionary male imago was on its last legs, but it looks like it will long, long outlast my last legs.  

the backwards angel !

Lately I have been thinking of perhaps the most famous passage in Walter Benjamin’s work, the 9^th section of his theses on history.

“There is a picture by Klee entitled “Angelus Novus”. It shows an angel who looks like he is trying to escape something that he stares at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth too, and his wings are spread out. The angel is history must look like this. He has his face turned to the past. Where, to us, there is something like a chain of incidents, he sees a single catastrophe, the is untiringly piling up ruin on ruin, and throwing them at his feet. He would like to pause, to waken the dead and to conciliate the injured. But a storm blows out of paradise, that is caught in his wings and is so strong, that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him helplessly into the future, to which he has turned his back, as the ruins before him pile sky-high. That thing we call “progress” is this storm.”

This is a beautiful passage, a gorgeousness tinged with atrocity – especially for readers who know that Benjamin is soon to hide his work, flee Paris as the Germans defeat France, and commit suicide in a small Spanish town trying to get away from the certainty of death in a concentration camp. But this thesis is also a huge puzzle. How is the storm “progress”. And what is paradise doing here? And why is it all ruin? And why can’t the dead be re-awakened, if history truly has an angel?

Myself, I have long pondered on these things. Of course, for a real answer, one would have to plunge into Benjamin’s work at length. There’s an industry that does this. The angel has, in particular, been philologically reconstructed from Klee, the Talmud, and perhaps the mythology of modern German poetry (Rilke’s angels, which show up – as does Benjamin – in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, a film that provides a coda to the whole experience of modernism). I have been thinking about something that is, perhaps, more minor, more off the point:  the backwardness of the angel.

I feel a sort of weird vibe coming from this figure who blown backwards by progress – this figure behind whose back, literally, the future is happening. It is an interesting challenge: to trace with a fine Auerbachian hand the motif of backwards progress in European literature in the broadest sense.   Everything depends upon the angel facing the past, and not the present: the angel could fold his wings if he could turn

around – for presumably there is no wind coming from the future. The backwards motion is imposed on the angel – physically. The meaning of which for the spectator is that an old assumption is reversed, for the future is not ‘ahead’ of us here. That inversion of our metaphoric assumptions has a deeply disorienting effect. It stabs at our way of making time accord to space, and our orientation in space.

Tracking a motif in the wilderness of books is a little like trying to catch one drop in a rain storm with a pair of pliers. But as this motif is especially rich to me, I think I’ll make some suggestions, cast a broad net, see how this works out, and see, especially, why it so moves me. Cause it does, this angel being blown from the past into a future it doesn’t face. This reverse motion reminds me of something, there’s some kind of anamnesis at the base of it, some form in which memory stirs. Along the way, probably I'll touch on the rebus, the transmission of motifs, entropy, slavery, and the disorientation of all the senses.

The backward image, I think, can more concretely be traced in part to film, to the perceptual changes brought about in the nineteenth and twentieth century to transportation, which are traced in Schivelbusch’s great book, The Railroad Journey, and finally to a metaphor going through Montaigne back to Plutarch. That is how I will do this. First I’ll think about film.

The royal Flabellifer

When Walter Gropius built a little house for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, he included a screened in porch to (as his friend, Siegfried Giedion, puts it) “catch eastern and western breezes during the hot and humid summers.” Gropius built his house in 1938. Giedion gave his lectures, Space, Time and Architecture, about the same year. Giedion later expanded his lectures into a book,which went into three editions – but even in the fifties edition, he mentions “air conditioning” only once, with a reference to a building by Le Corbusier that “attempts a very simplified type of airconditioning”, with a footnote referencing Frank Lloyd Wright’s claim to have built the first air conditioned office building in Buffalo, New York.

The lack of concern for air conditioning is, in a sense, inscribed in the grandiose title of the book – Space and Time are monumental, while seasons, with their fits of hot and cold, are the very stuff of what Giedion might call “transient facts” – they are seasonal.

From the American p.o.v., Europe is painfully underserved by the air conditioning industry. From the European point of view, all of America’s gaudy wastefulness is epitomized by the enormous effort spent in blowing hot air into hot rooms in the summer. That effort has an effect beyond ductwork: for instance, it advantages the sealed window. Opening a window or a windowed door (such as the one I am sitting next to as I type this) has a pretty interesting psychological effect. One can see it, for instance, in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which looks at a New York City in which private life, in the summer, is conducted half outdoors, on fire escapes and porches.  Rear Window is so theatrical because real life was so theatrical; apartments weren’t castles, and the suburban house was not a monad set down on a plat seeded with antiseptic grasses, even if Mr. Blanding’s dream house was something like this.

I am the son of an HVAC man, so my mind naturally strays to climate control in the summer. We just went down to Montpellier, which was hot. Not that hot, not as hot as it gets in August, but somewhat hot. The mornings, though, were amazingly pleasant, the bird life was hopping, and the inducements to slow down and lie prone on some chaise lounge were not unpleasant, especially when the reality was accompanied by a cold beer. So men and my bourgeois softened hide couldn’t really complain. Still, the lack of air conditioning does provide a sort of control experiment – an experiment in climate control – that is interesting.

In Ancient Egypt, the equivalent of your friendly Air Conditioning man was the royal Flabellifer – the fan bearer. In those times, the artificial breeze was a product of an ostrich feather fan, and the royal nose was pleased by bouquets of flowers that were waved about at the same time. The royal fanbearer, apparently, was an enormously important post, perhaps because nobody knows more about the pharaoh than the primitive climate control guy sitting two feet behind him all day. There were no folding fans in Egypt – in the fan literature, this innovation is attributed to the Japanese of a much later date. The fan is, in a sense, a poetic continuation of two things: the leaves of trees and the wings of birds. Both leaves and feathers play a big role in the decoration of fans. It must have been a big kick for ancient homo sapiens to pluck a palm leaf and agitate it, thus becoming a mini-wind maker. The cosmos in our hand – the ancient dream! Who knew that from such primitive fashionings we would, in a remarkably short time, get our grubby hands on the atmosphere and stratosphere of the whole planet!