The heat wave and nightlife poetics

Prostitutes, St. Denis, Marvin Newman

The heat wave here is broken. I got up this morning, went to the boulangerie on Rambuteau, and on the way back whistled, “We’re having a heat wave”:

“The temperature's rising, it isn't surprising,

She certainly can can-can”

Yesterday it got so hot in Paris that our local library closed. It got so hot that even my cleverness with our ventilator couldn’t hold the beast away from the penetralia of our apartment – and that, with the apartment having a uniquely shady location on a little sidepocket ruelle, with the trees blocking full sunlight and a terrace with plants. In other places, it was even hotter.

Of course, from the Austin, Texas point of view, it was a minor incident of cooling from the usual monthlong spate of 100+ days. But Austin Texas has a big natural pool in the center of it and many an a/c, central or units, to grind up the wattage and cool down the living space. Paris doesn’t.

But as I say, today I’m whistling “We’re having a heat wave”, which connects heat measured in centigrade or Fahrenheit with heat measured in booty and sexual desire. And that gets us to one of the great Parisian heat waves, in August 1983, which featured a bit of a prostitution riot.

“The frontiers of sex. The heat way has elevated the temperature of Parisians. Shootings, fist fights, heatstroke. Rue Saint-Denis, the prostitutes are on the warpath, with impunity… » - Le Monde, August 1, 1983.

Back in 1983, the Saint-Denis district was still the great streetwalker district. It was estimated that around 2000 prostitutes worked the area. There’s little left of that now: a few x rated video shops, a few extravagantly made up sex workers lounging outside them. Back then, though, it was a whole different story. In the U.S. too, there were urban areas, like the famous Combat Zone in Boston, that were officially or semi-officially recognized as red-light districts.

In Paris, the sex trade had a longer, semi-official history, which was marked, after WWII, by the closing up of the maisons closes, the brothels, which had until this point been licensed.

Of course, they did not disappear, nor did the sex workers. The same old mafia-networks with the same old tactics took over. Plus, of course, the seventies and eighties were a time of sexual activity on a scale that took in suburban households as well as avant-garde swingers, much to Norman Mailer’s disgust – see his review of Last Tango in Paris for the details.

All of which contextualizes the battle of “Babylone”, a club on Rue Marie-Stuart that was frequented by nightbirds: ... journalists, transvestites, partiers. It happened that the club held a sort of disco contest, in which its employees participated. This contest spawned a rumor that a sort of team of Brazilian prostitutes were entertaining there. And this aroused the women of St-Denis, who saw these Brazilians as, basically, scabs.

What happened was a classic urban fronde, something out of one of Robert Darnton’s histories. From Le Monde:

"This is what seems to have happened with the prostitutes of rue Saint-Denis on Sunday, July 17. The first time at 4 o’clock in the morning, dozens of them formed a troop on rue Saint-Denis for marching on rue Marie-Stuart in order to give a good lesson to the “Brazillian queers” who wanted to “scab us out.”

Last evening, same scenario. The hunt for the « Brazilians » began again. The anger of the prostitutes swelled again. Monday, almost two hundred of them, with their « protectors » and gorillas, armed with clubs, bicycle chains and iron bars again came up « Babylone » street, to the cries of : Death to the queers, death to the trannies. Anger gave way to hysteria. It felt like a lynch mob. One of the mob explained to a Babylone client that “one of the trannies had been trespassing on her territory” and that they were “looking for her to give her a correction”.

Of course, the cops, many of whom had been regularly paid off by the prostitutes, intervened “softly”. In the end, the trespasser wasn’t found, but the joint was wrecked enough to leave a message. And the heat wave eventually broke.

All of which is urban trivia of the type that is quickly submerged beneath the “important” events of the day.

However, for the psychogeographer and the gnostic historian, the battle of Babylone is as important as any other, since it marks the confluence of everyday routines and rituals, the streetwise, sub-historical passage of time. Daniel Tiffany, in Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance has argued that nightlife – in all its funk and dubious glamor – is connected to a poetic that branches off from the canonical and goes through Villon through Biggie Smalls, with its own set of hells and heavens. They are not Dante’s.

“Tavern talk thus captures in words the orphic subculture of nightlife. A public place providing cover for illicit and sometimes illegal activities, for the mingling of otherwise- stratified classes of persons (rich and poor, lawful and unlawful), the reality of the tavern, like its ragged speech, is fundamentally dissolute. Indeed, the actual existence of the tavern is called into question by the obscurity of its material conditions: its derelict address and graveyard hours; its nameless (or nicknamed) and promiscuous society. In this respect, the nightspot, like the figure of Anon, appears in the world under erasure, its disappearance betrayed by its own apparition. Nightlife, in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, may be understood as “the appearance of lost inwardness.””

Tiffany could, here, be talking about Babylone’s fate. After its appearance in Le Monde as the center of a battle in the center of a tropical heatwave, it disappears from history. Even closegrained accounts of the 70s and 80s in the Les Halles and St. Denis area, which pop up on invaluable websites on the Web, filled with the reminiscing of the old boys and girls of past Eldorados, do not commemorate it. Babylone is no more. And we have not even sat down by the waters and wept its transient moment of fame and shame.

Gee, gee! Her anatomy makes the mercury rise to 93!

Having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave, the way that she moves,

That thermometer proves that she certainly can...

(What's your name honey? Pablo).Certainly can..

where did capitalism come from?

From our Willettsmag essay: where did capitalism come from? See the mag for the full essay.

Mainstream economics is proud of its methodological individualism, but it doesn’t believe it. The individual, as the economists understand, does not spontaneously produce his acts. The man in an office, or behind a plow, or behind a gun, did not find his places by inventing his scene. The idea that the individual invents society is, evidently, an act that has never attributed to any individual. So the mainstream economist has come up with a wonderful concept saver: the individual, in their terms, is essentially a chooser. Goethe’s Faust cried out that in the beginning was the act – but the economist’s homo economicus counters that in the beginning was the choice. The cosmology of the preference wraps the societal world in a mystery – for one never seems to come to acts, only to choices. Every blade of wheat, every board of wood, every drop of ink, is not what it seems to be, but is instead an agglomeration of atomic choices. By some inexplicable accident, these choices also seem to be matter, and have weight and chemistry. The only thing that isn’t chosen is choice itself.

This is a rich cosmology, but not necessarily a believable one. So it is reinforced by the time honored method of scolding. If we don’t hold to individualism, all responsibility is lost, and anarchy and concentration camps are loosed upon the world. 

The origin of this cosmology is surely to be found in the period between around 1650 and 1789. And it did not arise among the peasant masses, yearning to profit maximize, but among a varied assortment of clerks and policymakers. Intellectuals in Edinburgh universities and ministers at Louis XVI’s court, as well as slave traders and sugar merchants were all starting to put it together. 

By the late twentieth century, the capitalist operation had become so dominant – at least among intellectuals – that historians could not believe the cosmos had ever been different. Thus, in the spirit of conquest, the historians went back to pre-capitalist societies and attempted to rescue them for capitalism. Thus, theorems of market equilibrium, or of public choice, are imposed as the real language of rationality that the peasants were, as it were, articulating in mime. 

My own sense is that the peasant economies were not irrational, nor are the rational capitalist economies non-peasant – the rational economic institutions are colonized by non-equilibrium, non-growth, non-maximizing kinds of behavior – or perhaps one should say that the latter kinds of behavior are colonized and exploited by extractive capitalism, suitably institutionalized –  and peasant economies surely involved calculations to some end, profit maximization and other capitalist traits. The question isn’t whether these traits existed, but how they became distributed and then became norms. When thinking through these grand categorical changes in the social economy, it is important to turn to contemporaries of the character shift and the vocabulary that it discovered and see how they interpreted what was going on.

whose posterity is it?

My new article at Willetts

There’s a popular literary game, which consists of predicting which writers will “endure”. Whenever the waters of clickbait grow still and old, some webzine site will stir it up by playing this old game, asking what names among today’s writers will be counted in a hundred years. Heated arguments will break out: the question of whether the works of Stephan King will be recognized one hundred years from now as the greatest American fiction of our time will elicit heated comments, and there will surely be much knocking of the elites.

Nobody seems to predict that a writer that they don’t like will be recognized in one hundred years. Nor does anybody ask about the institutions that preserve for posterity the reputation of a writer. Instead, these predictions rely on a sort of amorphous popular will, with powers beyond any dreamt up by Rousseau. The general will will judge the quick and the dead. That’s the sense.

There are two issues here, actually. One is that the posterity of a work is a form of credentialling – that time awards a good quality seal to the lucky genius. Auden, beautifully, captures this, in my opinion, specious idea:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Auden, In Memory of W.B.Yeats

Auden wrote that in 1939, and part of him knew that time and the Nazis were definitely not pardoning those who lived by language, but condemning them: hence the aborted careers of scores of poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists and the lot. Time may well condemn to very long, or even perpetual, obscurity those writings that have not stuck, in some way, to the usual institutions, or that emanated from condemned ethnicities or genders.

The other issue is projecting one’s own taste and time on the future. Here, we do have historical evidence, although it is never used by any of those who play the game. It is as if posterity hasn’t been there before us. But it has.

So, how should one go about making predictions about the endurance of written work?

Over the long term, my feeling is that the chance of a prediction being fulfilled, at least for the reasons one says it will be fulfilled, is vanishingly small. Remember, for the medievals, the important Latin poet after Virgil was Statius. Statius. Who even recognizes the name? Ovid, Lucretius, or Catullus just weren’t in the running. Lucretius did not have a very great posterity in the Roman world, and only came into European culture, really, when a manuscript of the Nature of Things was discovered in 1417 in Florence, according to Stephan Greenblatt. So over time, posterity is swallowed up in such unexpected events that we can’t guess. We need a more manageable time sequence to answer the question – we need relatively short term posterity. There needs to be at least certain structures that are generally continuous, as, for instance, an economic structure that is generally the same over time, and a structure of religious belief that is also coherent over time. Even so, there are unpredictable contingencies. The Library of Alexandria burned; Franz Kafka’s manuscripts didn’t, despite his dying request. So it goes. Statius, when all is said and done, had a good run – as good as Shakespeare’s. He’s gone now: even the Loeb Classical library is not all that enthusiastic about The Thebiad.

Given these conditions, we can still see patterns in, say, the last three hundred years. Starting in the 18th century, the literary nexus of publishers, the writers, and the audience started to take a modern shape. Writers could come from anywhere, but readers, and publishers, came mostly from the middle class. There was certainly room for the working class and the upper class, but writers that appealed to a working class audience had to eventually appeal to a middle class audience to endure. Aleida Assmann wrote an essay about this for Representations in 1996: Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory . She points out that the mythology of glory, which Burckhardt traces to Dante, and the city state culture of Italy in the fourteenth century, was, for the writer, shaped by the idea of a group who would preserve it, and upon this group was projected contemporary attitudes: true posterity would consist of people like the friends of the poet, gentle people, highborn, with swift minds. It was an almost tactile sense of posterity, posterity with a face. The posterity of the poem was the posterity of the people who read and understood the poem, the educated audience. But in the eighteenth century, the semantic markers shifted. Assman quotes Swift’s preface to the Tale of the Tub to show that the circle was replaced by the seller — the face by the invisible hand, to be slightly anachronistic about it.

One new factor in the manufacture of posterity, in the twentieth century, has been the rise of educational institutions as transmitters of literature in the vulgar tongue. One has to take that into account, as well as the relatively rapid changes that tend to traverse the academy, which is very much a product of capitalism and has been, for the most part, absorbed in the mechanism of vocationalisation. That mechanism, of course, makes sense once we factor in the costs of higher education. In the Anglophone world, the bright Ph.D in English or Comparative Lit might owe as much as 100,000 dollars in student debt, and faces an absolutely pitiless job market. It is no exaggeration to say that the humanities in the U.S. were assassinated by the regime of tuition hikes and the withdrawal of public financing. Education for its own sake, culture for its own sake, it is fair to say, is no longer the major part of the academic mission, and when it is, its teachers feel a nagging guilt. This is because they are betraying their best students – and they know it.

Read the rest here!

Capitalism, Socialism and the ethos of integrity

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, one stumbles upon the lefthand heirs of Burke – Red Tories, as Orwell called them. Orwell’s instincts, at least, were close to theirs: Orwell, after all, wanted a law to make 20 mph the top speed limit in England, a pretty typical Red Tory gesture, gallantly futile. In England, the term would include Ruskin and Chesterton, and the spirit at least of William Morris. In France, you have Charles Peguy and Jacques Ellul. In German speaking countries, there are many more names to choose from – to mention four, Thomas Mann up to the late 20s, Karl Kraus, Georg Simmel and Max Weber.

The Red Tories, by inclination and conviction, were never systematizers. When Burke, in the Reflections, denounces “theorists and economists”, all the progressive planners, he spoke for the tribe. They form something more like a family resemblance than a party. They, too, are in revolt against capitalism, but not because it wounds their sense of equality – on the contrary, what it wounds is their sense of the just order, or the organic society. This comes out in their protest, all the way along the line, in honor something I’m going to call “integrity”. Against integrity, the sense of purposiveness and vocation in life, they saw arrayed two forces: capitalism, with its generation of alienation, its calculations that eat into the integrity of labor, seeing it only as another inter-substitutable commodity, and socialism. Socialism, from their perspective, is merely the bourgeois attitude for workers. The socialists basically want the workers to make more money – they don’t put in doubt the system of production that the workers are engaged in. Socialists are pro-industry.

From the economists viewpoint, whether a person works as a carpenter or sells bubble gum over the counter is a matter of indifference, the product of a labor “market”. Economists do recognize “human capital”, but like any capital, it is invested indifferently, and must be to be efficient. Maximizing profit on all fronts, such is the letter of the law for economists.

The Red Tories saw, as well as Marx, that this social maxim was in deathly struggle with the ethos of integrity.  Integrity, the desire to do the best job possible because of the thing itself, its value in the doing, no doubt stems, as an ethical value, from the artisan class in the early modern period. Or even before, in the ancient urbs. It is significant that the first socialist organizations in France and Britain were composed of a largely artisanal membership – because these people instinctively felt that they were being symbolically degraded under capital. It is also significant that Marx decided, early on, that these were definitely not the people who would lead the advance guard against capitalism. Thus, the complex struggles against anarchists and other non-scientific socialists.

A good and almost programmatic example of the Red Tory exaltation of integrity is found in Charles Peguy’s Money (1913) Peguy never has had much of a following in the Anglophone world. He was an often disagreeable Catholic. Notoriously, his feud with Jaures resulted in some disciple of Peguy’s assassinating the great socialist leader. Peguy was all in for the war against Germany. He volunteered, even at his absurdly advanced age, and was ground up like so many others.

Read the rest at Willetts.

Public opinion- a brief, gnostic history

P.S. is a 42-year-old man who has been affected by paranoid schizophrenia since the age of 20. At the onset of his psychosis, he was trying in various ways to compensate for his difficulties in getting in touch with other people. He had no secure ground to interpret the others’ intentions. He lacked the structure of the rules of social life and systematically set about searching for a well-grounded and natural style of behavior. For instance, he was busy with an ethological study of the “biological” (i.e., not artificial) foundation of others’ behaviors through a double observation of animal and human habits. The former was done through television documentaries, the latter via analyses of human interactions in public parks. An atrophy in his knowledge of the “rules of the game” led him to engage in intellectual investigations and to establish his own “know-how” for social interactions in a reflective way. – Giovanni Stranghellini, At issue: vulnerability to schizophrenia and lack of common sense (2000)

1.

Consensus omnium, common sense and public opinion all exist as separate tracks through the intellectual history of the West – and each trail can be superimposed upon the other.

Early on, in Klaus Oehler’s definitive essay, Der Consensus Ominium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie (1963), there is a quotation from Hesiod. The line quoted comes from the section of the poem devoted to “Days”, with its sometimes obscure reference to work, luck, gods and the days of the seasons.  The line, 760, goes: … and avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but it is hard to undo it. Talk is never completely lost, which has been in the mouths of the many. For talk is itself a God.” Talk, here, is not logos, but pheme – which, as Jenny Strauss Clay points out in Hesiod’s Cosmos, is the antithesis of kleos, that is to say, fame: “kleos is to be heard about, pheme is to be talked about.” This enduring couple still presides, in all their debased divinity, over the newspaper and the news and entertainment channels. They are structured by what is likely, or plausible. Only scandal breaks the dome of plausibility – it lets in air, it lets in horror, it lets in real life, that is, the margin that always escapes generalization.

The plausible as a category (whether epistemic or, what, ontic? From belief to the believable?) concerns the heart of Oehler’s theme. As he points out, Plato’s antipathetic stance regarding opinion – endoxe – is countered by Aristotle’s respect for it. “The positive value of general opinion is, as well, the ground for Aristotle’s preference for commonplaces [Stichwoerter]. It is said that in the peripatetic school, under his direction, a wideranging collection of commonplaces was made.” Furthermore: “… This preference of Aristotle … rested on the matter of fact that in commonplaces the infinitely rich experience of many races was documented in a unique way in brief and trenchant formulas, which is the way the Consensus omnium expressed itself.” [106]

One of the sources of Oehler’s interpretation of Aristotle comes from a fragment, preserved by a latter philosopher, Synesius of Cyrene, in a work boasting the comic title, “In praise of baldness”: “But how could it [common places] not be a [form of wisdom] concerning those things about which Aristotle says that when ancient philosophy was destroyed in the greatest cataclysms of men, the things left behind were preserved because of their conciseness and cleverness.” The mark of fire on the commonplace, the proverb – this is a rich image indeed, and has been the best friend of novelists since Don Quixote. In Bruegel’s painting, Flemish Proverbs, the metaphors contained in sayings are given literal pictorial space. The blind in Bruegel do lead the blind into a ditch. The painting is also known by another title: The World Reversed. The contrast between those two titles already speaks of an alienation from the common place – here we have the seed of what will later become critique in “modernity”.

If Aristotle’s notion of past cataclysms, in which the only fragments of science that survive are common places, is taken modally, that is, is taken to mean that the possibility exists that even the present order, or any order, can be destroyed in the same way, we have the steps leading to the Stoic notion of the eternal return of the same, and a strong tie between that idea and the proverb, or adage: the word in the mouth of all, which returns again and again.  The humanists of the Renaissance, with whom Bruegel associated, felt a strong kinship with the Stoics, in whom they saw the brilliant reflection of ancient wisdom and a certain dovetailing with Christian theology. The Stoics were, as well, an escape from the Aristotle of the schools – from which the humanists were in flight.  In Christian teaching, the apocalypse only happens once and for all: but that apocalypse is trailed by a history of fallen kingdoms, as given in the Old Testament.

Bakhtin, in  Rabelais and His World, borrows (although not literally – Bruegel is curiously unmentioned in Bakhtin’s work)  the Inverted World of Bruegel as a clue to what happens when a novelistic intelligence – one that can hear the Other in the speech of the other, endlessly and even in one’s own speech – comes into contact with the linguistic correlative of the carnivalesque: the coinages of the people in the marketplace, their proverbs, insults and swear words, where the Other in the speech of the other has become stony, bonelike – too explicative. In this regard, there is something metaphysically opportune about Aristotle’s view of the broken wisdom of the people emerging in a tract “in praise of baldness”. As Bakhtin points out, the carnival attaches to physiognomies, to noses, chins, Falstaffian bodies, big ears, etc. In the world of jokes, baldness has a definite place of honor.

It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – during the Baroque – that slang emerged in the books, became the tool of writers. Cant words and latin tags were part of the trove carried about by poor, lusting priests and perpetual students. This was the other side of the fragmented wisdom that had escaped the cataclysm. Daniel Tiffany has pointed out, in his marvelous book, Infidel Poetics: riddles nightlife substance, that slang and slum etymologically are themselves product of slang – slum entered into the language as a slang word denoting slang. Tiffany’s term, nightlife, points to the urban locale in which this culture was born. Peasant speech was simply, to the urban intellectual, unintelligible. Moliere’s Don Juan  made great fun of peasant French. Shakespeare’s clowns – from colonnus, to cultivate the soil – are distinguished by their speech patterns too, although Shakespeare was not into dialect humor like Moliere was, or Rabelais. When Dostoevsky was deported to Siberia for revolutionary activities, he began a notebook in his labor camp in which he wrote down the songs, catchphrases and proverbs of the other prisoners. Later, he used this material in his semi-fictious memoir, Notes from the House of the Dead.  Even Solzhenitsyn, no romantic admirer of thief culture, devoted some pages of the Gulag Archipelago to the poetics of thief’s cant. How could he not? It was Pushkin himself, the supreme instance for every Russian writer until recently, who used thieve’s cant in The Captain’s Daughter, thus creating another site, this one in language itself, of struggle between the legitimate and the illegitimate, between the authentic and the pretender, the real and the fake.

Cant is the ruses of reason elevated to a sub-language, caught in the mouths of rogues and meant to be obscure to all outside a certain sub-society. Yet in fulfilling the function of allowing members to communicate and obscuring communication with others, cant is only one of a species of jargons. There’s a parallel between thief’s cant and the jargon we are familiar with from academics, politicians, and all makers of “public opinion” – phrases that automatically pop up wherever dinner tables become arenas of political discussion – or even the discussion of entertainment.

But where does this conventional wisdom, with its language and conceptual limits, come from? Like rumor, popular opinion appears to be a mysterious social phenomenon, an epidemic of beliefs. Unlike rumor, though, public opinion  started out not as an oral phenomenon, not as what was being said in the supposed crowd, but as a written one. It grew into a semi-institution in correspondence with the growth of the bourgeoisie. Materially, that correspondence was about newspapers: not only what was written in newspapers, or pamphlets, but in the connection between the accelerated power of the printing press – the use of steam power, for instance, exponentially raising the ability of a newspaper press to produce sheets – and the written, the need to ride those blank sheets of paper, to fill them with words and pictures.   

Structurally, our thesis looks like this: the pair pheme/kleos presides over the objects of the news, the commonplace presides over the form. It is the style of the cliché, the proverb, the wisdom of mankind – the conventional wisdom of the moment. The duality of fame and infamy, expressed in cliché, is precisely the form of ‘betise’ that a certain school of modernist writers – Flaubert, Bloy, Peguy, Kraus, Tucholsky, Mencken, Orwell – took as their ultimate enemy, as the cataclysm under which wisdom, some essential relation to truth, was buried. In this way, public opinion became the weapon not of the slave uprising, but the slave catcher. For the latter, too, has his sayings. And he relies on the idea that consensus is better than truth – a substitute for it that allows for a slant that is rarely straightforward lying, but rather a means of clouding any method for finding out what the larger facts of the matter are, the air of the factual in which facts “live”.

See the rest of this article here: Willetts