Prospero's country: race and political journalism

 

The term “white privilege” has never been my favorite. It seems like teacher’s pet or something – some mild insult. It is a coinage that purifies a violent history of racism. But I have learned not to kick against the lingo du jour too hard. In the case of political reporting, it gives us a useful tool.

It is the contention of the polls that Trump is the favored candidate of the white majority in this country. How favored? I’d take Pew’s poll, done in August, as a benchmark, which puts the support at 54 percent.

It is through this mirror we must go in order to understand the peculiar liberal reporting about Trump. We have to remember that the media, while full of diversity hires, God bless em, is strongly moved by the white community. The Neiman lab recently studied seven surveys of newspapers, and reported:

“About three-quarters of newsroom employees are non-Hispanic white, compared with about two-thirds of all U.S. workers, according to a 2018 analysis from the Pew Research Center. About half of newsroom staff are white men, compared with about a third of the overall workforce. Newsroom diversity remains far below the goal the American Society of News Editors set in 1978 “of minority employment by the year 2000 equivalent to the percentage of minority persons within the national population.”

 

According to the Columbia Press Review, in the category of “newspaper leadership”, only 13% is non-white.

The political news, going all the way back to the mythical founding, is immersed, saturated with, redolent of, rolling in, drowned dead in, digested by, lock and stock, for better or worse, for richer or poorer white privilege on steroids. In the Trump era, this has led to any number of news phenom. My favorite is the “my parents have been driven crazy by Fox News” sub-genre. This has become one of the knickknacks of the Trump era, up there with the MAGA hat. And just as the Maga hat rarely sits on the head of a person of color, the my Trumpist parents meme is rarely if ever penned by a person of color.

This is where I think things get interesting. There’s a story in the NYT that disputes the mere “poll”results, showing that Biden is heavily favored in Pennsylvania, with one reporter’s experience that the Trumpists seem triumphant in his Pennsylvania.

“Polls show Mr. Biden leading by five to 13 points, but I grew up around here and am dubious. This place — the land of hoagies and Bradley Cooper and Rocky Balboa worship and Tina Fey’s “Cousin Karen” accent — has transmogrified into Trumplandia.”

In timehonored NYT fashion, in order to show that there is a lot of support for Trump in the Philadelphia suburbs, our intrepid reporter goes to a Trump store, selling Trump memorabilia, and interviews people there to get their view of things. This has been going  on since 2016 – white quasi liberal reporters going and interviewing white ‘working class’ people and asking them whether Trump isn’t icky, and whether the high school president shouldn’t be a candidate from the debate club with a high SAT score. Laughs abound.

“Isn’t she bothered by the president’s loud mouth and tetchy Twitter fingers? “There’s a shock factor, for sure,” Ms. Girard said, “but I think we know what to expect now.” She added, “He’s not a politician, and that’s why he works for us.”

What about his flirtation with white supremacists? “I’m sick of people coming to me and telling me I’m a racist because I’m Republican,” Ms. Girard said. “My son is half Puerto Rican. I don’t understand where that comes from.”

Granted, these women were voluntarily at the Trump Store, but there seemed to be nothing about the past four years that gave them pause.”

 

That is an intro clause for the books. Gee, volunteers at the Trump store, weirdly enough, are for Trump!

 

I don’t remember this kind of reporting about Bush. Was there ever a NYT reporter who interviewed a Bush supporter in 2004 and asked, well, what about Bush’s flippant negligence of intelligence about Al Qaeda that led directly to the WTC attack? Cause that kind of question wouldn’t be nice. We were all – that is, all us white people – in this together, in the Great Moderation!

 

White privilege has to be treated dialectically to be a tool of analysis. That means not treating “white” as a homogeneous term. In fact, the divide between a white minority that has adopted liberal social views while benefitting from the neoliberal era and a white majority that has kept its views from 1968 or 1972 and benefitted either enormously or not at all – that familiar far right coalition of the pissed off proles and the pissed off plutocrats – has upended political reporting. The earthquake of 2016 was exactly about this: the confidence of the white minority, which infuses the culture of the media, was shaken in two ways: first, the discovery of the white other in their midst, and second, the falsification of all the big data tech that they had confidently assembled to ‘predict’ the election.

 

First it was the Great Moderation, where we could predict downturns and let the private sphere deal with them with prods here and there, de-regulating merrily, betrayed us. And now our polling had gone awry!

 

Myself, I am going with the polls than with the reporter who finds, shockingly, that people working at a Trump store support Trump. OTOH, I am not invested in predicting the winners in an American election. I think other predictable events are much more important: the prediction, for instance, that the effects of climate change is going to be getting much much worse; the prediction that the American political system is helpless to nudge, budge or blow up the plutocratic grip on American society; the prediction that, for most people, college tuition loans and medical costs are going to contour lives more and more; the prediction that the hollowing out of American manufacturing, and the nationwide bet on the speculative economy in non-productive products, is going to produce ever more violence – these are predictions I’m going with vis a vis America.

 

Prospero’s country.

 

 

 

 

Eliot

 

I don’t remember from what library I first checked out T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, 1909-1962. It could have been the Decatur Georgia library, which I absolutely loved to bike to. Or it could have been the Clarkston High School library, which was well stocked – I mean, it had Ulysses, a pretty bold item for a Georgia High School library in 1974. This was the result of the massive spending on schools in Dekalb County under superintendent Jim Cherry, of blessed memory. No doubt the funny flowed to white schools, but Clarkston was integrated when I was there.

I was in the 9^th grade, and desperate for a larger life, a cosmopolitan life with cafes, which I was clearly not going to get in Clarkston Georgia, a bedroom suburb of Atlanta. Eliot, it turned out, was my good luck. We clicked immediately. Prufrock’s mermaids seemed much more relevant to my psychosexual life than, say, the hit of 1975 in my class, Aerosmith’s “walk this way”:

 

Singin' hey diddle diddle
With your kitty in the middle of the swing like you didn't care
So I took a big chance at the high school dance
With a missy who was ready to play
Wasn't me she was foolin' 'cause she knew what she was doin'
And she told me how to walk this way

 

Eliot’s poems sank into my ordinary life. I remember reciting bits of the Wasteland to the cross country team (sue me, I was a snobbish little teen!). And though the poems are not on my official favorite list of favorite poetry, I’d be kidding myself to deny they are fundamental. Also, unlike other poets I discovered – Pound, Wallace Stevens, poor old Allen Tate – they were imminently recitable – you could DIY recite them. A lot of poets, you have to figure out the sound system.

 

Later, in college, I witnessed the buttend of the Eliotic dominance in English departments. Slowly, Old Possum’s favorite books and dislikes were no longer being considered the canon. Eliot was enormously important for the postwar English department, combining an accessible modernism with a high falutin’ conservatism. He was an institutional dream. But this was all going on the block. And that conservatism was never a good fit even for his own best poetry. Or the U.S. Seriously, you can’t use Charles Maurras to guide yourself around St. Louis, MO, babycakes.

I have seen Eliots come and go since. There was the phase of the anti-semitic Eliot. There was the phase where Vivian was touted as the next candidate for Zeldahood. And really, there is a case to be made that Eliot was something like the character Gatsby in Zelda’s husband’s book, except the boy from St.Louis knew better than to crib knockoffs of Spengler when he could read Spengler in the original, by God.

I met the guy from the Midwest in Paul Keegan’s recent review of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale. How pleasant to meet this Mr. Eliot! The one lodging a class complaint about Virginia Woolf, for instance:

 

‘Virginia’s Room of One’s Own irritates me; and I have wanted to tell her that I have never had £500 a year of private (unearned) income or anything like it, and that I have never had a room of my own except a bedroom at a Lausanne pension for a month where I wrote most of The Waste Land.’ 

This Eliot is more recognizably one of the clerks of literature, like Pessoa, Kafka or Melville, or innumerable fiction personnages. He’s more approachable. He’s less magisterial. This is the guy who did a lot for me, a nobody from a Georgia suburb.

Read the review. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n20/paul-keegan/emily-of-fire-violence

Cancel culture and the uncancellable

 First published in the now defunct Willettsmag

Cancel culture was born on October 18, 1924, when a pamphlet was thrust upon the world entitled: A Cadaver. The subject of the pamphlet was Anatole France, a Nobel prize winning author whose death, on October 12, 1924, was announced on the front page of the New York Times under the headline: Anatole France Great Author dies … Author of “Thais” and “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” Classed as Leader of Modern Stylists”. The writers of The Cadaver (Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, etc.) were having none of this. The Cadaver was a surrealist action of the most violent and definitive kind. Breton classed Anatole France with the “cops”, and wrote: “With Anatole France, a little human servility goes out the door.” Eluard, under the heading, An old man Like the Others,  wrote mockingly to France: “The harmony, ah, the harmony, the knot of your tie, my dear corpse, your brain on the side, everything arranged beautifully in the coffin and the tears that are so sweet, aren’t they?” But it was Louis Aragon who really ripped poor Anatole France’s corpse another asshole. Under the heading: “Have you ever slapped a dead man?” Aragon attacked the whole idea, the stink and the shallowness of “beautiful writing”, and wrote: “I declare that every admirer of Anatole France is a degraded being.” It is polemic in the highest ranting style:

What flatters you in him, what makes him sacred, please leave me in peace, is not even the talent, which is arguable, but the vileness, which permits the first louse that comes along to exclaim : How is it that I never thought of this before !

And, the peroration:

“Today I am in the center of that mildew, Paris, where the sun is pale, where the wind entrusts its horror and its inertia to the smokestacks. All around me I see a dirty, poor busy-ness, the movement of the universe where all greatness becomes an object of derision. The breath of my interlocutor is poisoned by ignorance. In France, they say, everything ends up as a song. Let he who dies in the heart of the general beatitude go up in smoke in his turn! There is little that remains of a man. It is even more revolting to imagine that one, who was, in any case, a man. On certain days, I dream of an eraser that could wipe out all of this human stain.”

This is how you do cancellation, my droogs.

In this case, the surrealists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. By 1930, literary lights like Blaise Cendrars were claiming that France was “boring,” and Andre Gide put in the boot by saying that his oeuvre was “not considerable”. Yet when he was alive, Anatole France held a position in the overlapping worlds of literature, culture and politics that was similar to that held by, for instance, Saul Bellow in the U.S. It is hard to imagine Saul Bellow being spit on to this enormous extent when he died…

Except that Bellow did, in a sense, imagine it. Bellow sampled his own heckling by students in 1968 by working up a similar scene in Mr. Sammler’s planet:

“A man in Levi's, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.

"Hey! Old Man!"

In the silence, Mr. Sammler drew down his tinted spectacles, seeing this person with his effective eye.

"Old Man! You quoted Orwell before."

"Yes?"

"You quoted him to say that British radicals were all protected by the Royal Navy? Did Orwell say that British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy?"

"Yes, I believe he did say that."

"That's a lot of shit."

Sammler could not speak.

"Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It's good he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit." Turning to the audience, extending violent arms and raising his palms like a Greek dancer, he said, "Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He's dead. He can't come."

At the time Mr. Sammler’s Planet came out, George Orwell had already assumed a rank at the top of the pantheon of brave “truth-tellers”, so the cancellation of Sammler and of Orwell together in one kick was loaded with voltage. Of course, Bellow’s characters are always haunted by a ghost at the heel, taunting them with the idea that they are only ham actors, all of their beautiful thoughts only occasions for various big wig louses to say, how had I never thought of that before! Charley Citrine has Von Humboldt Fleisher, and Herzog of course is in flight from Valentine Gersbach. But Sammler is special, since his cancellation moment is so entirely public. 

Twitter has become, for the media establishment, what the heavily bearded young man was for Artur Sammler – an emblem of the end of the world in sheer barbarism and blasphemy. Of course, in the media establishment, it is very hard to get canceled. Noam Chomsky managed to do it by criticizing American foreign policy after the Vietnam war, when the wound was healed and all bien-pensant American “thought leaders” agreed that America had the most adorable and charming plans for the rest of the world (and was only being misunderstood as it spent trillions on the military and put these plans into effect by invading Panama City here, helping the stray Salvadorean death squad there, droning (accidentally!) some Yemeni wedding over in the corner, and so on). Otherwise, you will never find the deck chairs changing very much on the opinion pages of the great dailies, nor will you find Meet the Press or that ilk of tv inviting on anybody ‘foreign” or really anybody except its usual quota of great white male politicos and pundits. Even when a figure, like Mark Halperin, is discovered to be a serial groper and goes down, his media friends have a hard, hard time letting him go – as do his friends in both party establishments – and they keep campaigning to uncancel that pitiful mook.

Of course, the media establishment does not extend this courtesy to the rest of toiling humanity. The NYT business page looks on with equanimity when a corporation, stuffed to the gills with cash, decides a mass layoff is just what they need. You will never hear the words “cancel culture” applied in such cases. Rather, it is a matter of cash flow. When Uber recently “downsized” its work force, this is how the New York Times reported it:

“In response, Mr. Khosrowshahi has shaken up Uber’s top ranks and tried to cut costs. After cutting jobs in the marketing team in July, he instituted a monthlong hiring freeze and instructed executives to re-evaluate the size of their teams. In addition, he pushed out top executives, including his chief operating officer and chief marketing officer. Uber’s board has also undergone some turnover.”

When, on the other hand, a twitter user made a joke about Bret Stephens being a bedbug, the NYT not only permitted Stephens to write a whole column about it in which the great Stephens compared himself to all those who suffered at Auschwitz, but various member of the media, who gathered around Bari Weiss at her recent coming out party, sniffed loudly about the de-platformin’, generally wrong-headed youth, spiritual descendants of Louis Aragon, louts all:

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who has frequently hosted Weiss on her morning show, deplored “cancel culture.” “On a regular basis,” she said, “people say to me, ‘I wouldn’t say that in public.’ As soon as people start to retreat and not share their views, it’s bad for society and culture.” – from Boris Kachka, New York magazine http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/bari-weiss-book-party.html

Times, admittedly, have changed since an Anatole France could be celebrated as a master “stylist” on the front pages of great American newspapers. Bourgeois society’s need for intellectual legitimation – for a certain protective, brainy smugness – is now supplied by a legion of pop scientists, mostly white, male, and willing to consider the tough questions: such as, why does nature shower white males (such as me) with such genius and brilliance and money? And the answer they come up with is – it must be the genes! The function, though, is the same. Anatole France, it must be said, was not as much of a smug idiot as our current iterations of Steven Pinker. His reputation went into a tailspin, but one has to say that a man who could attract kudos from such various sources as Edmund Wilson, who devoted a chapter of Axel’s Castle to him, Ford Maddox Ford, who named Conrad, James and France as the great novelists of his younger days, and Kenneth Burke, was not a total loser. Proust took certain elements from France’s life and made him into the character Bergotte, which is, sadly (for France, at least), how he is best remembered in the Anglophone world. 

Still: hooray for the surrealists! And hurray for the twitter mob! There is something so, well, right about Stephanie Ruhle’s friends whispering their sweet little bigotries in her ear and then admitting that they are afraid to say them in public. Not, of course, that they won’t – to the chauffeur, to the maid, to the clerk at the store, or to any unfortunate who serves them at a restaurant, over and over again.

The hallmark of cancel culture is the fact that the firing, the layoff, so admired in America – Trump is, literally, president because he starred in a reality show that was all about firing people – has now been seized by the fired. They are, as it were, firing back. Louis Aragon, at least the Louis Aragon who, as a mere cricket, shit on all the literary bigwigs, would be pleased.

 

 

The Land of Nod by Karen Chamisso

 The Land of Nod

Sleep is the main from which we drift

each waking day, bubbling with principium individuationis.

What was the dream about? Some rift

we fell down. You were in the dark, groping to piss

And found yourself suddenly lighted, watched

By a viewing audience dim of feature?

Even the physicist is patched

And pickled in sleeptime’s thralling curvature.

“The mode of dealing with the atoms to restore motivity

is essentially a process of assortment”

- all demons slip off their positivity

and join as one oceanic neural deportment:

in that bath of ESP

I am you and you are me.

Almost a true story

 This summer, doing research for another project (which concerned illegal arms dealing) I stumbled across the story of X. X was a businessman who was murdered in 1983. His body bobbed up in a lake in a New York State park. The fascination, here, was the more that I followed the story in the newspapers of the time, the more it became clear that the authorities had a pretty good idea of who murdered X. But they never acted on that knowledge. X became a cold case from the Cold War.

So I wrote a long piece about him. 

Here's the link to Medium

Here's the beginning of the story.

-Imagine a wealthy executive. Retired from GM. His neighbors in the tony suburb of Aurora, Ohio, described him as a super patriot, a John Wayne with a Czech accent. Imagine him in 1983.

- Imagine his career, with its wonderous lacunae. Starting with birth. Our man is born to American parents in Prague in 1919. Of all times, of all places. Prague was, finally, a capital city again. In that strange merger of Bohemian nationalism and Wilsonian racism, a nation was born, another of the many that jumped out of the pocket of the Versailles treaty. Wilson, the American president, had well known white supremacist views, identifying America with a certain vision of the white race. That view inserted itself into the post WWI world, where nation and race were increasingly taken to be synonymous concepts. It was Wilson, it was the inheritance of a certain nationalist romanticism gone sour. The logic of this equation made those in the nation who were not part of the favored race maroons within their own nation. The old legitimating tie to a family, a dynasty, was torn. Who, exactly, was a Czechoslovakian?

Kafka or "the secret society"

 

Jean Ferry was a pataphysician, a script writer, and a general poet. Like many French writers who swam in the miasma around surrealism, he had fantastic contacts in the French literary world and lived an adventurous life, all of which was perfectly unnoticed in the Anglosphere. He wrote scenarios for Georges Clouzet and dialogue for the famous soft-core vampire flick, Daughters of Darkness, that starred  Delphine Seyrig, which is as close as he got to English language attention.  

As far as I know, he is generally untranslated. In English. So I decided to translate this little story, or prose poem,  from the collection The Mechanic, published by Finitude in 2010 – but I believe it was first published in The Secret Society (1946).

 

Kafka  or “the secret society”

When Joseph K… was around twenty, he discovered the existence of a secret, very secret, society. Truly, it didn’t resemble any other society of that type. It was very difficult for certain people to become admitted as members. Many, who ardently wanted to, never succeeded. Others, by contrast, become members without even knowing it. One was never, besides, never totally sure of being a member. There were many who believed they belonged to it and weren’t, really, part of it at all. However much they had been initiated, they were still less part of the secret society than many who didn’t have the slightest knowledge of the existence of the society. In fact, they had undergone the tests of a false initiation, destined to put off the scent all of those who were unworthy of being initiated for real. But even to the most authentic members, those who had reached the most elevated place in the hierarchy of this secret society, even to them it was never revealed if their initiations were valid or not. It could happen that a member attained, due to a number of authentic initiations, a real rank, and consequently, without being advised of the fact, they went and undertook false initiations. Among the members it was an object of interminable discussions whether it was better to be admitted to a smaller but real level in the hierarchy or to occupy an exalted, but illusory, one. In any case, no one was sure of the solidity of their position.

 

In fact, the situation was even more complicated, for certain postulants were admitted to the highest levels without undertaking any tests at all, and others without even being told. And to be frank, there was no need to be a postulant:  there were after all people who had received very elevated initiations without knowing even that the secret society existed.  

The powers of the superior members were unlimited; they carried in themselves a powerful emanation of the secret society. For instance, their presence alone was enough, even if they didn’t make it manifest, to transform an anodyne gathering, like a concert or a birthday party, into a meeting of the secret society. These members were held to establish secret links in every gathering in which they participated, which were taken from other members of the same rank; there is thus between the members a perpetual exchange of relationships, which permitted the supreme authorities of the secret society to keep a firm hold on the situation.

However high and far the initiations go, they never are high enough to reveal to the initiate the purpose pursued by the secret society. For there are always traitors, and for a long time now, it has been no mystery for anyone that the goal is to keep the goal secret.

Joseph K… was horrified to learn that this secret society was so powerful and had so many branched that it might have been the case that he, without being aware of it, had shook the hand of the most powerful members. As bad luck would have it, one morning, after having woken up from a restless sleep, he lost his first class ticket in the metro. This accident was the first link in a chain of confusing and conflicting circumstances that put him in contact with the secret society. Later, needing to simply defend himself, he had to do what was needed in order to become a member of this fearful organization. That was a long time ago, and he still did not know where he stood in the process.       

Happiness, 2020

 

I’ve been thinking about a long ago abandoned project lately.

In 2007, I was suddenly struck with a vision – or a trifecta of visions. The first vision was that happiness, in Western culture, was a total social fact – the name Marcel Mauss gave to concepts that pervade social relations and social representation in a given culture. Happiness, like mana(the primal power spoken of by Polynesian people, which served as the object of Mauss’s study in The Gift) was located in three conceptual places: as an immediate feeling – I am happy about some x; as a judgement about a whole life or collective institution – for example, in survey questions about whether the respondent is “happy”, which elicits a life judgement – and finally as a social goal against which social systems should be judged – the well-being promised, for instance, by market-oriented economists. This threefold set made me wonder how it was all connected – for these were not simply different definitional aspects of happiness, but truly ontic differences that were, at the same time, understandably linked.

Vision number two was that the happiness culture was built in the early modern era. This was accompanied, or quasi caused, by the beginning of the idea of economic growth – in contradistinction from the older, Malthusian restrained, society of the image of the limited good, and by a change in fundamental family patterns in which, increasingly, males and females married and started their own households, instead of remaining in the paternal house. The destruction of the society of the limited good – the idea that your goods, or luck, take from a restricted common pot -  was, as well, the destruction of a larger worldview in which nemesis, or God’s judgment, played a predominant part.  The old notion of fortune’s wheel was laid aside in the name of a new notion in which economic activity actually intertwined beneficently – the vices of the rich were the profits of the jeweler and hatmaker, etc. and equilibrium was disconnected from non-growth.  The second phenomena, which was first postulated by an obscure scholar named John Hajnal, who proposed, in 1965, that that, in essence, starting with the end of the 16th century, you could draw a line from Trieste to St. Petersburgh and allot two different household formations to each side. On the West, you have what Hajnal came to call the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family. This, to me, was a fascinating fact – even if later scholars messed about a bit with the neatness of Hajnal’s theory. What this meant was that a window in biographical time opened up between independence and marriage. For both males and females, that window was something new – it was youth. As it shifted down in the twentieth century, it became adolescence and young adulthood. The effects of this were enormous.

Vision number three was of the effect of combining the treadmill of production, accelerated by technology and the revamping of the social structure, and the happiness culture. That effect was, essentially, to remove the limits on the human. The human limit, once rigidly defined by the gods or necessity, and the scarcity of luck, now expanded to include the world. The world became the instrument for making humans happy. It had no more “rights” than any other instrument.

Well, I added to my fundamental thesis for a number of years, and then I sorta took on other projects. But I’ve been reading my notes and blog posts back then, and I do think I was onto something. I was especially thrown back on this material by Ruth Leyes’ The Ascent of Affect, which gives a genealogy to the affect theory that has grown up over the last sixty or seventy years, since WWII.  I also delved into certain areas – such as deconstructing Paul Ekman’s emotional universals – which Leyes also does, with a heavier scholarship, but less concern, I think, for the amazing anthropology of affect that has helped us re-view our sense of, for instance, the European and Anglophone schema.

So I am thinking about working out, 12 years after thinking this through, some pieces of the happiness culture puzzle.

Blues

 Blues

On a bleak day I lay in the bleak sheets

Eight stories above the puddles in the streets

Where the rain jumped, and the cars were ill:

Everybody in Paris swallowed some kind of pill

In the hope that what the doctor said was just because

He was a sort of negative Santa Claus.

Our anxiety, our numerous internal disasters

Would surely be repaired by duly applied plasters.

And chemistry – for wasn’t this the age of belief

In time released, targeted relief?

I peered out the window, I stretched my eyes to see

Something that didn’t strike me as old or filthy

(sometimes it is like that. A girl’s education

In cleaning up extends at times to the whole nation).

Another party girl, I thought, goes down the drain

-I’d feel oh so much better if it wasn’t for this rain!

Karen Chamisso

The Machine Stops

 

Michael Kammen’s 1980s book about the Constitution in American culture had one of those great titles, the kind of thing that Bob Dylan might appropriate for a song lyric: The Machine that would go of itself. Kammen took the title from a lecture given in the 1880s by James Russell Lowell:

“After our Constitution got fairly into working order it really seemed as if we had invented a machine that would go of itself, and this begot a faith in our luck which even the civil war itself but momentarily disturbed.”

Oh these machines! Russell’s phrase gives us that shock of recognition which is something akin to  deja-vu – it is one of those phrases that seem already to have been written or spoken somewhere, to be on the tip of the collective tongue.. A machine that would go of itself is what the classical liberal and the neo-liberal dream of the social is all about – a machine for governance, a market machine, a rational choice machine in the consumer’s head, etc. They are not “turned on” but mystically take their charge from equilibrium itself.

The dream is that the market is our collective intelligent servant and master, knowing everything by its very structure. The state is as small as possible, vis a vis the market, which is controlled by the trade and traffic in private hands (never mind that the company is anything but a private entity). However, the state is as large as it needs to be in order to control the non-virtuous citizens. All citizens, though, are given their turn to vote for a preselected range of “representatives”, from president to city council member.

Lowell continued his speech: “And this confidence in our luck with absorbation in material interests, generated by unparalleled opportunity, has in some respects made us neglectful of our political duties.”

What Lowell sees as a fault, hearkening back to an earlier era of republican virtue, is seen, by the neoliberal, as a virtue: the political economy is de-politicized. The end of history is the end of politics, at least on what Nietzsche called the “Grand scale” – a scale that would attempt, massively, to annul the exploitation and alienation that are not so much byproducts of the machine as its very fuel. The scheme was to drain politics into smaller venues, fights over TV shows and small scale scandals among the disposables in the political class. The feeling of powerlessness that the machines inevitably cause in the populace could be compensated by other forms of power – like the power of choosing to buy one object over another, fruit loops over raison bran, the minimansion over the fixer upper suburban ranch house, ad infinitum. Nobody would notice that their lives were slipping by. And if they did, there were now a number of opioids and anti-depressants that would do just the trick.

That was then. This is now. Now is more the era of Fosters’s The Machine Stops. We’ve discovered that the machines keep not going of themselves. We’ve discovered that the marvelous private enterprise machine, for instance, keeps going up in flames and exploding, and is only reconstructed by the government machine forking out trillions of dollars to bankers and their friends. We’ve discovered the environmental machine is falling apart, quickly. We’ve discovered that consumer choice among the pharmaceuticals hasn’t rid us of our despair, but has dispatched a good many of us via the O.D. And all of this is happening in synch.

In other words, politics on the grand scale is back. It is getting more likely every year that the next time one of the machines explodes in flames, there will be such resistance to putting it back together again that all the machines will have to be … reconstructed.

Lord Rochester

“Such sweet, dear, tempting devils women are”

- of which your hands were by phantoms fathom’s full

Who cursed cunts for coyness but couldn’t dull

your blade to live in any way but as the harmful ham

without ‘em. What is it in your natural history

that makes misogyny the answer to the mystery?

As though drownded dead in some punk’s bawdry curse

You ended, as they all do, dangling and disgorged

Your proud sword all (ha ha,) unforged.

“Bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?”

Peerless peers, your society is hella boring

Going to the devil, fucking and snoring.

Lord Rochester, highchurch atheist, didn’t you see

That Bunyan had you in his slough of despond

And God was all the cunt where you were lost and found.

- Karen Chamisso

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Dis-identification politics

 

To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders, etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison that emphasizes why I am not like liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Trump or Sanders or whoever. At least I am not like X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the fundamental situation of the self versus the enemy is in combat, and there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and there’s a different fundamental situation that models it:  being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by woke types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, dittoheads. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is the great insight of the classical English comic writers. In French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – since the French have a genius for enmity.  In English and to a certain extent the anglophone culture,   those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens had a gift for showing the dis-identifying gesture, and his most famous autobiographical image, of David Copperfield in the blacking factory, combines the sense of being surrounded, the sense of being in the wrong crowd, and the crisis of identification with the intensity of some Anglo myth of origins.

 

Canetti, in Crowds and Power, investigates the powerful theme of the sudden, unwanted contact – in relation to the morphology of the crowd. Dis-indentification is related to the most primal form of politics, that which comes out of a stick or a club.

 

A branch which broke off in the hand was the origin of the stick. Enemies could be feded off with a stick and space made for the primitive creature who perhaps no more than resembled man. Seen from a tree, the stick was the weapon which lay nearest to hand. Man put his trust in it and has never abandoned it. It was a cudgel; sharpened it became a spear; bend and the ends tied together, a bow; skillfully cut, it made arrows. But through all these transformations it remained what it had been originally: an instrument to create distance, something which kept away from the touch and the grasp that they feared. In the same way that the upright human stance still retains a measure of grandeur, so, through all its transformations the stick has never wholly lost its magical quality; as scepter and sorcerer’s wand it has remained the attribute of two important forms of power.

 

 

 

A day in the life in Paris

 

My brain is a “who’s who of the forgotten” – to cop a phrase used by the critic Alexandre Geffen to describe Nerval’s Les Illuminés. Nerval’s book was devoted to various of the neglected fanatics of literature. The idea of lives as being, as it were, volumes in the Library of Babel is a metaphor for the brain – and has been used by neurologists and biologists themselves. There is a sense in which it is libraries all the way down, from the neurons in our head to the chromosomes in that mysterious thing called the gene. There’s a case to be made that the library is the most important invention of culture after fire and agriculture, for the framework around the text – the clay tablet with the tax list in Sumer, the voter’s shard in Athens, as well as the papyrus texts that we recognize as books, etc. ­– gave us a sense that information can be organized, that disparate objects can be collected, arranged and consulted, forming a larger whole than the parts.

My who’s who would include my classmates throughout elementary and high school, most of whom I can’t recall. Yet their names and faces exist, or did exist, in my brain, and I have had experience that many things I think are forgotten pop out, suddenly, in my memory. “Memory” – we have a penchant for attributing positive affordances to the brain, and not negative ones: thus, no neurologist studies the “forgettery”. Forgetting is instead to be linked to memory as a failure, or a glitch.

Certainly as I have continued in existence (I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled) I know more things, and thus have more disparate objects to put in my memory, and forget more things. Vast amounts of things. The proportion between my memory and my forgettery leans heavily to the latter – for instance, almost all the childhood years. A disparity that is embodied in the parents’ memory – we raise and love a child at one, two, three, four, five, knowing vaguely that, like us, that child’s memory dump will later include most of those years. We don’t think about it, though -it is almost constitutionally repulsive to think about it. Yet, still, everyone at one time or another has a theory about forgetting.

My theories are heavily influenced by Freud. Freud after all came up with a systematic way to look at forgetting, via the mechanism of repression operationalized by the unconscious. Although to say that the unconscious operationalizes lends it an agency that is surely itself in question. Hmm. In any case, Freud’s theory has been endlessly debated. I think that the debate should be grounded in a less absolute sense of repression – that is, forgetting is determined by many factors, and the operationalization of forgetting, the particular forgetting styles, respond to one or another way these factors dominate. There is a case to be made that with all the sense data we take in – and this we is broad enough to encompass all the mammals and probably the fishes in the sea as well – much of it has to be shunted to the “wastebasket”. Again, this mechanism is a bit unclear – the intentionality is written into the instructions, yet I’m not sure how that is supposed to work. It is as if underneath the neurological image of the brain there is, indeed, a forgettery – which has, to be all Lacanian about it, a topological resemblance to Freud’s unconscious.

I was pondering the who’s who of the forgotten yesterday as I went out to buy a poulet roti at the butcher’s shop on Rue de Bretagne. As I came up Rue Charlot, I had one of those moments that the surrealists lived for: metaphors jumping to life in the city streets. There, on the sidewalk, in front of a photo shop, was a thousand or more snapshots, old family snapshots, in a box. You could take a handful if you wanted. Surely the box was meant for the garbage man. I looked through the snapshots, and they were absolutely dull: a baby in a crib, probably from the nineteen sixties, a wedding, a vacation. The dullness was all in the fact that these were not my memories, this was not my who’s who. Yet they were somebody’s. They were dead to me, and someday I will be dead in the same way, my who’s who all shut up. I didn’t take any of the pics, but continued on my way, with the vague feeling I’d been an intruder, there.