Prizes and prophets: against all prizes in the arts and sciences

When I was in the second grade, a now dim tidelet of a memory, a weak link over the cholesterol and the neural network, the teacher gave us all a challenge. We were supposed to write down every book we read. At the end of the school year, the person with the most books on the list would get a prize. I can’t remember what the prize was – a pencil sharpener? A gold star? Whatever.

Well, at the end of the year I had the most books. So I won the prize. And was congratulated by my parents, too. But what I still remember was how sheepish I felt. Because many of the books I wrote on my list were only half read. I was being, in a word that I didn’t know back then, “aspirational”.

Perhaps it was that experience that soured me on the whole prize biz. Although perhaps it is because I am not a prize winner. I haven’t won a prize since second grade – it has been a prizeless life. And I have long been puzzled by the whole prize economy. Like, here’s my questions: what is a prize, how did it come lumbering into this here Western Culture, why do we want to “win” them, and particularly why have the arts and sciences centered prizes so much?

First off, lets start with some wild bourgeois speculation. I can, actually, understand how prize mania starts. Prizes are so part of the warp-n-woofery of childhood that it would be hard for American 21^st century parents to find a substitute if, through some magic wand, we abolished prize giving. Baby is always being given treats for good behavior. And as baby grows into pre-schooler and then schooler, the treats keep coming at a Pavlovian pace. When the child is bad, you can threaten to take away dessert, or something, thus making dessert a prize. And when you want your child to be good, you often promise a prize – go to the dentist with a minimum of screaming and afterwards you get the ice cream. At the same time, school work and prizes go together like that there ice cream goes with some chocolate sauce. Prizes produce the kind of emulation, or are supposed to, that we want to hatch in our hominids: compete, God damn it!

Competition and prizes go way back in this here Western Culture. Among the Greeks, the very gods competed. It was a beauty competition between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena, judged by Paris, that became the root cause of the Trojan war. The Greeks even marked time with Olympic competitions, where prizes were rewarded – and they rewarded prizes to poets, too. Poor Sappho committed suicide, prizeless and in love, according to legend, while Sophocles won the first place prize for his plays 24 times at the Dionysia, a festival that included play competitions. For the athletes, prizes were ritual objects, crowns, corona, of myrtle or olive. The Romans had a custom of awarding soldiers corona obsidionalis, made of wild flowers. These crowns signified a connection between the divine and the profane world, but one should beware of the Victorian view of the Romans and Greeks as gentlemen competing with no commercial reward – as Moehle points out, the Greek cities gave monetary rewards to victors, even if the judges strictly awarded crowns.  Ancient Greek has many words related to “geras” – the common term for honor. Emile Beneviste devotes a whole chapter to the semantic field of geras in Le Vocabulaire Des Institutions Indo-Europennes, showing that it covers the ground between a particular prize that is contended for an the spirit of honor of, say, a household.

I should note here that etymologists group together prize (or prix) with price and praise, deriving them from the Latin pretium, with further connotations of honor. We still retain that tie with honor in honorarium. The Greeks, however, could very well separate price or gain from prize or honor. Aristotle in the Nichomachaen Ethics writes:

“Now the greatest external good we should assume to be the thing which we offer as a tribute to the gods, and which is most coveted by men of high station, and is the prize awarded for the noblest deeds; and such a thing is honour, for honour is clearly the greatest of external goods.”

The strange economy of the prize is expressed in the strange logic of Aristotle’s sentence – that the thing that is offered to the gods is the same as the prize that is awarded for the noblest deeds. It is as if the nobleman diverts from the gods a certain sacrifice – not materially, but abstractly. It is an odd interception of currency, which is validated by being offered to the Gods – thus, a divine currency – and that consists of the greatest of external goods: honour. That it is external – that it requires an other to recognize it – and that it is given to the gods, but is somehow annexed by the men of the highest station, make it a strange kind of tribute, or currency.

Read the rest at Willetts. Here.

Nixon and Trump compared

As the Watergate scandal started to kick into high gear in the spring of 1973, the Village Voice published a story about Nixon on the run with his friend, Bebe Rebozo, in Miami during a vacation. They spent almost two days at Grand Key island, which was owned by Nixon friend Robert Alplanalp, the inventor of the aerosol valve – every time you spray something from a bottle, you can thank Nixon’s buddy.

The VV story by Craig Karpel speculated that “he is said … to have built some sort of orgone box on Grand Key, an accumulator which gathers the particularly rich geomagnetic energy of the zone which abuts the Gulf Stream and focuses it, like a laser beam, on him. It was word of the power of this concentrated geomagnetic flux, transmitted by the Lucayan and Arawak aboriginal inhabitants of the islands to those of Cuba, which reached Don Juan Ponce de Leon in garbled form as bruit of a “River Jordan”, immersion in which conferred eternal youth.”

Ah, the early seventies, when Hunter Thompson was considered a bit on the drag side for a journalist. Another Village Voice article about Watergate meditated on the spiritual reality of that name, viz the waters of life being locked up from the people, and the key to unlocking the gate promising to drown us all in Aquarius.

I’ve been thinking about Watergate and its drama in contrast with Trump and his reality show. Trump really does share certain personality traits with Nixon – certainly the overmastering ressentiment – but doesn’t have the dark glamour. There was something in Nixon’s depths, while Trump’s dad had his depths surgically removed when Trump was seven, along with the tonsils. Yet it is much easier to think of Trump spending time in an orgone box. He is definitely using the White House as an accumulator of rich geomagnetic energy, although since Trump is ever the materialist, he wants to see that energy monetized and he wants it now.

I was around 15 when Watergate became TV. I was brought up in a conservative Republican household and considered myself a very conservative little chirp, so much so that Nixon’s trip to China made me think he was a bad man – China was communist! I hadn’t yet shucked all of that bullshit, although by the end of my teen years I was a Marxist – so there you go. I was helped on the way, though, by Watergate. The President (back then, it was in Capitals that I thought of the mook) had so obviously and painfully lied, lied, lied – and I swallowed the press narrative that this was the worst crime a President could commit.

Later, however, I began to see that there was, to say the least, some disproportionality here. The lie that the president told that resulted in the secret bombing of Cambodia and the horrific spread of the war was skipped over nimbly by the press. The lean towards Pakistan that encouraged a genocidal civil war in which a million were killed in Bangladesh was also as nothing. It was the coverup of the break-in to the Dem headquarters (and not, say, the eternal spying and placing of agents provocateurs with the Socialist Workers Party, which, as Noam Chomsky pointed out back then, was simply considered normal and unscandalous by the press) that undid him. Undid him for months and months of wonderful worldtheater.

History, like all cold cases, depends a lot on trivia. As I grew into your average paranoid loser leftist, I began to get this. I also began to get that conspiracy theory might not be true, but it was a great vehicle for spotlighting the weirdness of ordinary life among the American elite – and even among the American lumpen. Whether Oswald was or was not a lone assassin is one thing – but the very social possibility that was inhabited by his friend, the hairless David Ferrie, was a more important other, at least as far as the American circus was concerned. The Watergate scandal was absolutely full of kooks and eccentrics and wheeler dealers. As well, it ultimately made no sense.

Just as, really, Trump shaking down Ukraine for info makes no sense. I mean, he really needs facts, suddenly, to jam up Biden with his vile son? Has Trump ever needed facts to do anything? Just make shit up. I thought that was the motto.

Nixon, who came to prominence as a conspiracy theory politician – getting Alger Hiss with papers improbably hidden in a pumpkin patch, and going on against the great Communist conspiracy for years and years – was himself a natural conspirator. Trump is too, but unlike Nixon, he isn’t a very good one.

What he is best at – what made him president – was firing people on a reality show. The psychopathologically cruel boss – his core group loves this. Because they want all the black people and the uppity bitches fired. The moment of firing gives them goosebumps. The American psyche can be divided neatly into two halves – the one half that longs to fire, and the other half that longs to quit. Nixon sprang from a more complex and deeper psychosis. He was an American Manichee. He might not have called upon our better angels, but his career was definitely in converse with the spirits, whether orgonally charged or not.

Trump on the other hand is just the kind of dismal loser/boss that the fire groupies love. His impeachment is turning out to be much simpler, but also, alas, much less fun.

The real in (and out of) realism

If things are in the saddle and ride mankind, as Emerson said, then let us imagine that things take a break every now and then and let words ride.  It is a 30 – 70 split, perhaps, is what I am getting at. This being so, it is foolish to argue with a word once it has established a claim on mankind.

In fact, this is just the kind of foolishness that philosophers – who at one time acknowledged themselves to be half-fool, although now they more often consider themselves to be half-scientist, a half and half creature that to me is still fool – like to engage in. Thus, I, in my half a fool robes, have always had a steady dislike for the word “real” and its court favorite, “realism”.

Here’s my reasoning. If real is meant to refer to the constitution of reality, then, in my opinion, it can’t go picking out some bits of reality and discarding others. It must be wholly promiscuous, rather than half chaste. It must include magic, dreams, mirages and perceptions as well as carpenters crowns, heaps and pi. In other words, I take real to make the widest of ontological claims. However, in actual use, real has been turned into an ontological grift, setting itself up as something ontologicallly direct as opposed to all those soft ontologically indirect objects. In this way, the real becomes a metaphysical con man, a dealer of three card monte.  The dream, the magic, the realist wants to say, are dependent on  a subjective privilege that takes us out of the real and into the ideal, or the fantastic, or the superstitious – they aren’t “validated” by Science, an institution that is suddenly thrust upon us as our commission of the real.

Here we spot everyday dualism, doing its silent work. And everyday dualism has its advantages, or it wouldn’t hang around. But those advantages, which prime it for everyday distinctions, don’t prime it for metaphysical argument. There, it forgets its place. It rubs up against its own original quantitative claim – that reality is all, whereas non-reality is nothing – and  can only help itself out of its dilemma by silently inserting assumption into the discussion that , indeed, must be discussed before we can have the discussion.

In my opinion, realism is only plausibility writ large: it is a view on what is possible and important that gains its justification from a certain class background. The real itself shouldn’t generate an ideology, an ism, any more than the toe does. Like the toe, the real is simply there, the very thereness of there. But this view of the real, which genuflects to its ontological capaciousness, doesn’t correspond to its social meaning – which is always pulled into the dualism between the human and everything else. Aristotle, in the Topics, speaks of endoxa – credible opinions – that are “accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise”. This is the filter through which reality becomes realism. The privileged point of view is given us by the class system in the regime in which that point of view is expressed. The reputable class bears various names, depending on the regime we are talking about, whether it is the middle class in America, or public opinion, or most scientists, or – more commonly – an implied everybody who counts that lurks behind a passive construction (“as is well known,” “as is generally agreed”, etc.). Realism’s affiliation with plausibility, rather than reality, is the secret of why the term seems so indeterminate, when you come to close quarters with it.

This is not simply a matter of aesthetics. It is a matter of ordinary problems. To say that insanity is “real” is one thing, to say that insane ideations are “real” is another thing. This is the whole pragmatics of real, as opposed to its semantic promise – which would leave distinctions of what is natural, plausible, objective, communally accessible, all that, to other words and phases of society and perspectives. The whole discipline of psychology is folded over this problem, with one side contending that “talk therapy” – however that is filled out – doesn’t treat mental problems as “real”, that is, based on the neurochemistry of the brain, which is supposed to be a realer real than talk about our relations, say, in families, in sex, etc. It is not clear why the family is less real than the neuron – the idea is, probably, that the mental problem would express itself in some person regardless of whether that person grew up in family x or y – although, confusingly, the same scientific ideology hold in high regard the gene, which brings us back to social realities that mediate any sex act. It is very hard to understand how a neurochemical problem in the human brain, which evolved in a social animal – as opposed to, say, an aardvark – would articulate itself at all without having strong social links, having ties to sensemaking as the natural activity of the human animal.

The same bend, but with other variables, is found in physics, with the realists versus the Copenhagen interpretation, and may the best physicist win (that is, get the contract to write a pop sci book agented by John Brockman).
The rest is at Willetts.

La Fontaine and the poetry of the hidden transcript

Literature we may say is what goes on all the time history is what goes on from time to time… Gertrude Stein

1.

The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation devotes a whole page to La Fontaine’s Fables. It covers a good part, but not all, of the gamut, from John Dennis’s first essay and assay in 1693 – two years before La Fontaine’s death, and a year before the 1694 edition, with Book XII in it, appeared – to the complete translations by Norman Schapiro in 1985.

Yet La Fontaine’s status in the Angophone world reflects a certain literary-political decision about fables: that they are always, in some way, infantile. Which in turn inflects, if unconsciously, his translators, with their tendency to didly-o language, in tonal contrast to La Fontaine’s highly adroit use of multiple idioms, his parodying, his lyricism.  Although fables and allegories as genres are popular in the curriculum of middle and high schools, they are not accorded the admiration that the critics give the higher works of art, from epic poetry to realistic novels. They don’t have the difficulty, they don’t resolve aesthetic problems, so the thinking goes, that, say, we can see and feel in one of Nabokov’s novels. They allow English high school teachers to talk easily about symbols and avoid the hard kernel of literature and its difference. The Fables seem to lack the referential difficulty of Pound’s Cantos, being, on the surface, so genial, and referentially domesticated: all that pagan mythology. When Paul Valéry wrote about La Fontaine, he chose Adonis – a great early poem. And not, say, The Pig, the Goat and the Sheep, from book 8 of the Fables.

In contrast to the English and American critics, critics and poets in France have remarked on the rise in  La Fontaine’s prestige, and in general his place in French culture, over the last 30 – 50 years. Partly this is due to the fact that one of the great scholars of the 17^th century, Marc Fumoreli, has made a strong case for La Fontaine being an essential counterbalance to the classical literature of the French court under Louis XIV. Fumaroli’s book, The Poet and the King, is constructed around the opposition between Parnassus – the dream of the republic of letters, where power is constructed out of friendship and poesis, presided over by an aristocracy of benign patrons – and Olympus, which represents the dread institutionalization of literature as the arm of the state – or in our age, the arm of the corporation, with its statist power. One immediately sees how useful this is, how it brings out a thematic that is buried in the contrast between the baroque and the classical. A great scissoring mind is necessary to cut up and put back together a work of art to show how it works, but that is only half the story. The other half is surrender – the sinking into the work, the inner touch, the tour, as it were, of the reserves of tacit knowledge it contains, to which one cannot be superior.  Empathy and the cutting edge – the conjunction of these two things is a rarity. Fumaroli has it, can make the old mandarin passes and still understand how the poem is more than a vehicle for tour-de-force verbal play – how the poem is passionate and plugged in. His way of seizing on and elevating the terms “Parnassas” and “Olympus”, which a lesser critic might dismiss as old and routine rhetorical devices, is, I must admit, brilliant.  There is a charge in them, a cultural politics hidden by them, which is tied not just to 17^th century rhetoric, but to a recurring situation: the opposition between the poet and the autocrat. From that opposition comes, ultimately, the fever dreams of modernism, when autocracy under many guises has a tendency to seize society and lead it to disaster.

Read the rest at Willettsmag.

Karen Chamisso poem
Panic Attack No. 5

… what was it I was saying?
I know my bill of rights, thank you very much.
I know the tape is running. I know the camera’s on.
I know the lord of dark corners and the third degree
Knows all my disappointments and my little fun

You say, we’re done here. We’re done.

The prowler is parked a block from the shattered glass
He’s here for the order, girls, forget about the law.
The always wrong the shadowless the sucker and the goof
Can forget about proving jack, he always has the proof
Of their little disappointments and their little fun

You say, we’re done here, we’re done.

No, the sentence before that one, what did I say?
I’ve always had the money not to have to see
I go to the opening nights, always have a place to pee.
In the cold dark corners they are lighting matches what the hell
My little disappointments… my little fun …

You say, we’re done here, we’re done.