From Herzen to Lenin and beyond: national self-determination (or how to think about Ukraine)

 

In 1914, there was a dispute between Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin about the proper revolutionary view of the right to self-determination. Luxemburg dismissed the aspiration for independent statehood as a mask or strategy for maintaining bourgeois domination against the working class. She deduced from this that nothing was gained if, for instance, Poland became independent of Russia and regained its autonomy. Nationalism, for Luxemburg, was a trap and a bauble.

Looking back, Luxemburg’s position must have arisen not just because of her theoretical take on internationalism as the necessary precedent of a communist revolution, but also because of her experience in a Germany that had only recently unified and that was filled with an excessive nationalism, an emotional attachment to German power (as embodied in the military) that was dangerous and antithetical to the Socialist Democracy ideal.

Lenin, on the other hand, had a strong sense of Russia’s imperialist role in subordinating the regions by violence. When we read, say, Tolstoy’s Hajid Murad now, we don’t think of the ethnic cleansing of the Caucasus that was the basis of the wars and raids Tolstoy was writing about. But that ethnic cleansing was the preferred strategy of the Czarist state. Lenin was not shy about following a progressive line that had gotten Herzen in trouble: opposition to Great Russian nationalism, and support for a commonwealth of nations in the Russian sphere. The Polish rebellion of 1863 had sparked an ultranationalist reaction in Russia and a closing down not only of progressive dissent, but – surprisingly – dissent even from Dostoevsky’s journals, Vremia, which was closed down by the Czar. Herzen wrote:

“The situation of poor Poland is painful, but it will not perish. Europe is too divided in this moment and it is on this disaccord in general that Petersburg grounds all its hopes. However, the Polish question is already pushed so far that for the European powers is it as dangerous to do nothing for it as it is difficult to come to Poland’s aid. I think that after the second refusal [to desist] by the Saint-Petersburg chancellory, France, England and Austria will recognize Poland as a “belligerent party”. I hope Poland can last out this winter with the aid of arms and other aid which will openly arrive to them from Galicia.”

This is the background for Lenin’s great defence of a justified nationalism in the context of a militant worker’s internationalism.  You can read all about it in the thicket of Lenin’s collected works, volume 20 – which can be found in any well stocked used book store in Europe, where the fall of the Berlin Wall caused a great wave of book trades from former leftists: the collected works of Mao, of Enver Hoxa, of Stalin, of Lenin, of even our heroes Marx and Engels, all in dull colors, coffins of past revolutions.

The heart of Lenin’s notion of the nation-state is found in the polemic with Rosenburg entitled “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, written in 1914 before the fatal August.

 

In the leaps which all nations have made in the period

of bourgeois revolutions, clashes and struggles over the

right to a national state are possible and probable. We

proletarians declare in advance that we are opposed to Great-

Russian privileges, and this is what guides our entire propaganda

and agitation.

In her quest for “practicality” Rosa Luxemburg has lost

sight of the principal practical task both of the Great-Russian

proletariat and of the proletariat of other nationalities:

that of day-by-day agitation and propaganda against all

state and national privileges, and for the right, the equal

right of all nations, to their national state. This (at present)

is our principal task in the national question, for only in

this way can we defend the interests of democracy and

the alliance of all proletarians of all nations on an equal

footing.

Lenin is no philosopher, but here his notion of dialectic serves him well, helping him avoid the idea that internationalism and the national question are on opposite sides. In the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the emergence of Great-Russian nationalism – first under Yeltsin in Chechnya, then under Putin in all the guises of aggression he has promoted – is solidly anti-Leninist. In fact, it seems that Putin’s aggrieved sense of Great Russian history puts Lenin in the devil’s role, once again – a version of history that should be familiar to the American intelligence services and State Department, since they hired beaucoup anti-communists to broadcast just that message via Radio Free Europe for about forty years.

Lenin consistently supported the principle of secession. And he did so particularly for regions like Ukraine:

The position of the “bureaucracy” (we beg pardon for

this inaccurate term) and of the feudal landlords of our

united-nobility type is well known. They definitely reject

both the equality of nationalities and the right to selfdetermination.

Theirs is the old motto of the days of serfdom:

autocracy, orthodoxy, and the national essence—the

last term applying only to the Great-Russian nation. Even

the Ukrainians are declared to be an “alien” people and

their very language is being suppressed.

For “bureaucracy” here one can substitute secret police or simply police. Putin is, above all else, the product of a subculture of policing. His version of history is the narrow Russian  cops version of history – and, given the variables, an almost universal cop view of history. From the president of Russia to the mayor of New York City, the variables are filled in by different objects, but the system is the same. In 1919, fighting for the principle of self-determination against Bolshevist cirtics, Lenin put this cop view more pithily: “Scratch any communist…and you find a Great Russian Chauvinist. He sits in many of us and we must fight him.”

The Cold War slant on Lenin’s dialectical position was that it was all a trick. Underneath that groovyness about self-determination was the ruthless Machievellian accruing Soviet, ie Great Russian power. And indeed, Lenin’s successors did manage their program in that way. Still, the strain from Herzen to Lenin never died on the Left. Until, of course, the Left itself died and was buried in the Universities of the world.

Monica's juvenalia (or do I mean juvenilia?)

 

- by Karen Chamisso

1

Cherchez the bitch! Cherchez the bitch!

And all the elders go tsk tsk tsk.

2.

Monica Lewinski, I think of you!

I’m just such another dixiecup ingenue

And have loved to bask in some Nero’s eye

Who never stuck a finger in my pie

Ending up saying, ”it depends on what sex is”

-their mothers all raised them to be little Elvis.

Cherchez the bitch! Cherchez the bitch !

3.

Were transcribed in the Elders report

“oh (sigh). Oh (sigh). Oh.”

Swinging his dick like a pirate in port

Waiting for a shipload of cargo

While all the Neros chase around all their desks

The immanently gropeable, babes babes babes

You were the witch, the problem, the dress

And your friends are all FBI slaves.

4.

Ces murs mêmes, seigneur, peuvent avoir des yeux ;

Et jamais l’empereur n’est absent de ces lieux.

Put that down in your debutante’s daybook.

And never let them in to look.

Cherchez the bitch! Cherchez the bitch !

And all the elders go tsk tsk tsk.

Notes on the Gnostic historian

There is a certain kind of skepticism that nests like an ominous crow in the branches of cultural relativism. It is aimed at all the myths and motifs that are used in the hegemonic strata of Western intellectual life – or, taking the nuts and bolts out of my mouth, by orthodoxy, by everything that cultural relativism, since Herder, has sought to take down – Western superiority, a narrow sense of reason, a vulgar notion of progress, all of it. Thus, in the sixties and seventies, when cultural relativism was particularly strong, there were a number of claims that such diverse social phenomena as the practice of cannibalism or the Mafia or European witchcraft were myths. They didn’t exist. There are powerful reasons to take this point of view, as almost always, the existence of the phenomena in question legitimate various forms of repression by established power.

Those reasons, for those who lived in the twentieth century, fell out of the sky, and sent the trains to the barbed wire camps, all as ‘defensive measures’ against an all powerful, and as we know, mythical enemy. Given this disastrous history, given these non-existent enemy others who were glued to the bodies of millions and incinerated in the furnaces, certain historians – notably Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millenium is one of the great books in my life – looked back and traced the pattern of fake conspiracies and fictitious entities in Western life back to the Roman era. In a sense, this was a sort of anti-gnostic history.

The insight here is that the powers that be create magic narratives of danger and threat, that they have magic mirrors on the wall, behind which they operate the switches and buttons, also goes back a long way – back to Machiavelli at least, or perhaps to Gyges. In King Lear, the disabused, perfect Machiavellian, Edmund, a bastard and thus by birth an outlaw, confects, out of little hints, Edgar’s plan to take his father Gloucester’s life. His lucidity – which dissolves all traditional bonds (such as the difference between legitimacy and bastardy) and superstitions, such as the connection of the earth to the stars, is the background against which we see him commit his treacheries with the comic glee of one of Shakespeare’s minor hitmen, those spawn of fairground puppet devils:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit

of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star! My

father compounded with my mother under the

dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa

major; so that it follows, I am rough and

lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,

had the maidenliest star in the firmament

twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--

Enter EDGAR

And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old

comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a

sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. “

This view of power as manipulated by an absolutely skeptical consciousness that has, as a preliminary to its move, dissolved all pacts with the stars, all differences of birth, has leveled the world to its bare bones and yet – the inexplicable last undissolved illusion – wants to rule over those bones is itself the kind of thing that should prompt our skepticism. Granting that moral panics can be generated in much the way that a movie director can generate a windy scene – using machines that the camera never films – we imagine that those who claim that these fictitious conspiracies and organizations – the Jew, the Witch, the Trotskyite – exist, and work their subterranean evil everywhere, are totally aware of the off-camera machinery. Surely the potter knows his pots. This view, however, is mystifying in its own way. We can find real equivalents for the theatrical cynicism of an Edmund in our history – we can cull statements from Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini, etc, and take them as sudden illuminations of the arcana imperii – but in doing so, we mirror the tendency we are fighting against, we endow our creatures with a consciousness that has no unconscious, that is impervious to its own mythmaking, that is all machine and no ghost.

I find this interesting because I have come to think that there is a subset of the historic method that I’d like to call Gnostic history – a history of secrets, connections, surface patterns that we have no one viewpoint to see and track . However, this label itself is a bit suspect, in as much as the current literature on the Gnostics tends – as is the case for the literature on the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution, etc. – at the moment to dissolve the very category. Just as there was no Renaissance and no Industrial Revolution, there is no Gnosticism. Karen King, in What is Gnosticism, my guide to the current scholarship, comes dangerously close to endorsing this kind of demolition job. The historiography that ends up here is understandable in some ways. When you read the exegetes, busy dissolving the texts of the Gnostic corpus, it is a wonder and an astonishment. Some postulate a complexity to the making of the texts at Nag Hammadi that would make a a particle physicist proud. Often, the assumptions seem a little, well, non-empirical. I’ve read some of the scholarship about the Gospel of Thomas which takes the fact that it contains ‘doublets”, or passages that repeat each other, as proof that it must have been compiled by many writers. Obviously, these scholars should ask an editor – such as moi – since it is rare that I edit a lengthy manuscript that doesn’t contain doublets.

King does one very good thing, and attempts to disentangle gnosticism from heresy. As the Gnostics were mainly known from the denunciation of them by various hepped up church fathers, it is hard not to think of them through that lens – a lens that takes all their writings as a reaction formation to orthodoxy. This lends the Gnostic culture the satisfying heroism of “resistance” – a good word that, by being grossly exaggerated and emulsified, denied any pragmatic measure but that of virtue signaling, has become resistance kitsch. In fact, when we go back early enough, there is no reason to think that orthodoxy is a very good description for what is going on in the spread of the Jesus cult – and its taking into itself other floating notions about salvation – changing one’s life – in the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, what did the Gnostics think, anyhow? One persistent motif has to do with a certain dualism vis-à-vis creation. The world, in this framework, was created by a lesser god, the child of Sophia. Not necessarily an evil one – but certainly lesser, and certainly not all knowing. He doesn’t quite know what he is doing. Lovely Eve discovers this when the helpful serpent suggests eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was not a sin – but the first revelation. This gives us the Gnostic historian’s equipment – a suspicion about the framework of matter or appearance, the notion that the fundamental elements are the hidden and the plain, the secret and the truth, sides – in other words, the jagged sense that the world isn’t finished and the glorious delusion that what will finish the world is one’s history of it. The demiurge, for the cool Gnostic, is authority itself in all its helplessness – weaving violence out of its vulnerability. The Gnostic historian proceeds with a film noir sense of the world, in which the femme fatale is actually Sophia’s embodiment here on earth.

Stevan Davies, in an article about the Gospel of Thomas (1983), made a case for it as a fifth gospel. It is a striking text, in that it takes the important thing about Jesus to be what he said. This way of understanding Jesus has, of course, been displaced – it seems to us that there is no contradiction between the Church being a defender of the family and the son of God that this church worships, even though Jesus is much more scathingly anti-family than, say, Rimbaud – there is no giving and receiving of wives and husbands in the Kingdom, and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.” This contempt for the family exhibited in Jesus’ every recorded gesture is simply not considered important. It was, however, before the cult erased the person, and the Gospel of Thomas, while lacking any real sense that the important thing about Jesus was that he was resurrected, is full of the sense that the new life begins by breaking utterly with the old rules.

How to think about these things?

“Thomas preserves at least two parables which almost certainly come from Jesus but which exist in a kind of pre-church purity. They allow one, in all likelihood, to hear Jesus without the whispers of centuries encouraging particular interpretations. Here is 97:

Jesus said, the Kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman who was carrying a jar which was full of meal. While she was walking on a distant road, the handle of the jar broke, the meal spilled out behind her onto the road. She did not know; she was not aware of the accident. After she came to her house, she put the jar down; she found it empty.”

The jar – which she didn’t notice – the crumbs in the road – the empty container. The Gnostic historian is like that woman whose things have slowly trickled away from her, every step she takes, leaving a trail behind her for the birds of the air to eat – all of this without her knowing it. Lose everything.

on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

 or - Hysteresis sez the man with the plan....

 I just finished re-reading Vineland. That is the final panel, one might say, in Thomas Pynchon’s go at the Cold War world – the set consisting of  V, Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland.

Pynchon was the center of James Wood’s punchup of “hysterical realism” in the 00s, stirring up a bit of sluggish controversy in that ice . Looking back at that verbiage, what stands out, to me, was the astonishing absence of the politics  that should surely figure in the mix. Wood was writing for the New Republic in its final, Marty Peretz driven phase of shredded liberalism. The politics of its book review pages had long been clear. You would not find a word of praise for anything “communistic”, anything that leaned towards Palestine, and in general anything that was happening on the “loony left”. The politics of the writers on Wood’s black list, Pynchon, Delillo, and their supposed acolytes, like Zadie Smith, was very much in contrast with the politics of the one American writer Wood championed: Saul Bellow. This isn’t to make a judgment about the variety of political stances, it is simply to note an old Cold War theme, in which a certain formalism substitutes for politics, in keeping with the odd idea that politics is somehow suspect in art – turning it into propaganda.

The problem Pynchon poses for that old theme is that he does not seem to write, as per the Old Left,  anything resembling socialist realism. Like Saul Bellow, in fact, Pynchon seems very unintimidated by the formalist notion that the essay and fiction are to be separated under pain of aesthetic failure. In a passage from an excellent essay on Vineland by Peter Coviello,The Novel and the Secret Police,  Coviello nails the politics of the book, an outlier for the end of history 90s:

“From where we sit, though, it may be better even than this. The matter is not just that Vineland is a sweetly companionable sort of book, heartsick and humane. I mean rather that it is hard, here in the somehow-not-yet-done-with-us summer of 2020, to avoid feeling that it is also unnervingly prescient, and that it is so not least in how it stitches into coherence scenes of street-fighting militancy, brutal state reaction, and the ramping up of a rabidly privatizing economic order we have since taken to calling, a little gauzily, “neoliberalism.” There are stark and distressing clarities on offer even in slapstick, messy Vineland—about economy and security, about the bringing of militarized counterinsurgency back to the metropole, and above all about what the novel unblinkingly calls “the true nature of the police.” And these, with each new day, seem a little more vivid, a little more goddamn realist, and a little less the stuff of stoned counterfactual invention.”

Realism – how many sins have been committed in your name! I sorta want to patter. From the cracked mirror of a servant girl, to use Stephen Daedalus’s phrase, there are certain legatees who have inherited the crack. From that cracked perspective, the world that ordinarily appears as it is defined by the class who creates public opinion appears differently. It is shrouded in apocalypse and slapstick. It is, indeed, the world of hysteros, the womb, but as well it is the world of hysteresis, out of joint with the contemporary, the synchronic world in which we are all on the same page – good guys over here, bad guys over there, and thus it shall ever be.  Pynchon’s tendency to find the bad guys running the American imperium is just the kind of idea that the New Republic, in its glory days,  took on the task of squashing.

Coviello speaks of the book as “unloved”. The first time I read it, which happened in some never-never – in New Haven? In Atlanta? I don’t know – I do recall feeling that this is not the rush I expected after Gravity’s Rainbow. The latter dogs all of Pynchon’s afternovels – there are moments – there are even hundreds of pages in novels like Against the Day, where that magic touch and text comes alive once again, but these novels are distinctly different. Re-reading Vineland, I can see that difference now as a virtue – the intentional immersion in TV trivia, much different than immersion in the polytides of chemistry because we are all experts here, is a deliberate blow against the cult of expertise, against the insider knowing, that can lead a Pynchon reader into a certain fatal fandom. A fandom that is, among other things, all too politically easy – and leads to the kind of relaxed authoritarianism that makes American power so dangerous. Vineland, set not so accidentally in 1984, touches on all the topics of the non-serious, para-political left, like the archipelago of secret police, informers, and violent interventions that run through the recent history of the U.S.  Unlike  that left, which is premised on a certain notion of American innocence being hijacked by bad guy conspirators, Pynchon’s book is all about various stages and stooges of collaboration. Pynchon is the last person to make a cult of, say, JFK, who figures in Gravity’s Rainbow in contrast with Malcolm X, in a language become bubblegum and goofy. Innocence just isn’t in it – fall comes after fall. In this sense, it stages, decades before this became the issue de jour, the project of giving a critical history of the U.S. And just as the 1619 project became a cause among the remnant of Cold War liberals who want to rescue America as a good guy against the America founded as a slaveowning republic, so, too, Pynchon’s work is inherently rebarbative to the liberal humanist notion of what the novel should be.

 

 

Guns don't kill people -desperation kills people

 Sadly, the NRA mantra is right: guns don't kill people, people kill people. That doesn't mean we should not have gun control; it means that in a country with weak social insurance - no universal medicalcare, low wages, massive poverty, no national childcare program, continual threats of more cuts, etc. - and a floating island of guns, the mass of gun violence - the greater portion of which is suicides - will continue. When we compare other nations with gun control, what we leave out of the comparison is the stronger social insurance in these countries. The stronger emphasis, for instance, on equality. We have only to look at the shocking, enormous addiction and opiate overdose death rate to see how broken something large is in America. The mass killings are an extreme psychotic symptom of a deep problem we are not confronting, because we have entered a day by day lifestyle of not being able to do what needs to be done (because it is enormous)

So those who are rah rahing gun control and refuse to support medicare for all are, I think, being as hypocritical as the prayers and thoughts crowd.
Make America less desperate.

on not liking the term "postmodern"

 

I’ve never liked the term “postmodern”. Or, in fact, all its children and cousins – the posties. Post-truth, post-stucturalism, etc. It is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight in my book. Yet, I like Lyotard’s postmodern writing, even if I do not understand the slippery conceptual tegument that allows Lyotard to say: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.”

Why postmodern rather than, say, modern-less? If what is modern is outdated, indeed archaic – an affinity between which is, in Kenner’s The Pound Era, insisted upon – I’d suggest that the break, if there is one, is between the progressive idea of modernity and the contemporary, in which an engulfing simultaneity elevates accident and chance as the deities that watch over us. Nemesis has return to watch on the city walls, or at least in numerous Netflix series. The contemporary is not some sort of debasement and chaos – it can well engulf the past, much to the puzzling distress of those who are both 100 percent against moral relativism and 100 percent against “judging the past by our current standards”. 

I’d even posit that there is a history of the contemporary that goes from rumor to the printing press, the industrial basis for the newspaper and the “news”.

The hero cult in academia

 

I am fascinated to an unhealthy degree by academic gossip and the subtweeting of all those nesting high fliers. Since the appearance of the letter in support of Comaroff, signed by the Harvard stars, and the appearance of the oopsy letter of retraction signed by the same Harvard stars making clear that their only mistake was idealism and their belief in the higher things mind you, (rather than endorsing a sex pest and the system that protects him, cause that would be a too literal reading of their literal words), there’s been abundant spillover and a joyous run on vows to non-cite the likes of Jill Lepore and Henry Gates and Paul Farmer and other “heroes”. This was followed by Paula Chakravartty’s account of academic bullying by one of Comaroff’s supporters, Arjun Appadurai, which lends so much veracity to my prejudices against academic highfliers that it is almost a nightmare come true – really, these people are, in their lives, Profiles in Pecking Order Pecksniffery. I’ve known this from forever – I remember talking to a man who was leading a search committee at U.T. in the 1980s who told me that he simply tossed applications that were not from people from the big four universities, thus conveniently narrowing everything down.

Narrowing down – with “no alternative”, these are the slogans that ride mankind.

Anyway, in the hubbub, there is a certain charismatic gleam that is of interest to me. For there is a strong streak, in academia as in Hollywood, of looking for “heroes”. The citation of Appadurai or of x, y, or z is often not a monument to Weberian rationality, but a monument to Weberian charisma: the citation is a temple to a local hero.

The hero is a character type that has been on the upswing for some time. Its nemesis, the anti-hero, came out of the closet in the sixties and seventies, and seemed for a while to harsh everybody’s mellow. I have a very strong sense, from having experienced this a bit, that Derrida was so shocking to the old timers in the eighties by seeming to want to dispense with heroism all together – which of course turned out not to be the case, as Derrida was made into a hero himself, and so on and so forth. We know the terms of the contract.

The hero figure is inseparable from the roots of modernity - it is hard to see how the work of Enlightenment can be done without it. Which is why, contemplating this storm in a teacup among the whole pyramid of teacups and blood that lords it over us all, I’m thinking of Balasar Gracian.

Gracian’s first book to acquire a European reputation was The Hero. It was translated into English in the seventeenth century, and into French in the early 18th century by a translator who remarked on Gracian’s resemblance to La Bruyere. A book with such a title, one might expect, is an essay on heroes that one finds in history or literature. But this isn’t so – the book is in a sense a how to book about how to become a hero, or great man. Gracian worked in the field of worldly wisdom – his distant heirs now retail banalities about “leadership science”.

The heirs are writing for an audience of essentially uneducated businessmen, and are often as lacking in education themselves, and make up for this last point by being ardent collectors of the inspirational sayings of the famous. Context, of course, isn’t the point – leadership disdains context, which is full of obstacles and other people’s objections, and marches proudly into war, or a higher ROI, with the conviction that the long term will simply be taken up with collecting various sayings of the leadership that did it, to inspire others, and will pay no attention to the blood and guts on the field, the fired help, the long term disasters born out of intoxicating short term gains.

Leadership, in other words, is a royal screwing.

But we can’t blame Gracian for this sad state of affairs, since he was evidently intent on giving advice on how to become a universal man (suitably Catholicized). One of the properties of the hero that Gracian promoted was what his English 17th century translator called “gusto” – evidently, taste had not yet grown out of its vulgar accountrements of tongue and appetite at this point:

“Every great capacitie is ever hard to be pleased: The Gusto must as well be improv'd as the wit. Both rais'd and improv'd are like Twinns begotten by capacity and coheirs of excellency: Never sublime wit yet bred a flat or abject Gusto. There are perfections like the sun, others like light. The Eagle makes love to the sun. The poor frozen fly destroyes her self in the flames of a Candle. The height of a Capacity is best taken by the elevation of a Gusto.”

Gracian’s Gusto operates though the logic of praise and dispraise. The taste of the hero is perfect in as much as its praise and its scorn are appropriate to the object – and there’s the rub. There’s a crooked line under the skin of the culture that leads from Gusto to fandom, or from the universal man to the fan. The world of like and dislike – our ultimate buttons – have simplified and rationalized Gusto until it works for anything. Until, I think, it gets in front of everything.

The poor frozen fly, in contrast to the hero, “destroyes herself” – o that gendered fly – by having, as Chakravartty points out, the wrong pedigree. Or by existing as a “her” – in a higher education system that is much like the Democratic party, dominated at the top by old white men and women who depend on and despise the intersectional oppressed that vote for them. When the poor flies, however, start to give up the hero cult: then things get interesting.

 

 

 

a Karen Chamisso poem

 Nearer my God to thee

„An Bord der »Titanic« befanden sich fünfundzwanzig Millionäre, die zusammen mehr als 100 Millionen Pfund repräsentieren.“

I liked to look and not look

in Dad’s book at the picture

Of the iceberg that rammed the Titanic

A telltale smear of paint on its flank

- I had nightmares about that ship going down

My birthday cake with the candles lit

Enormously drowning In the dark North Atlantic

A liner’s hold scrawled over the blood freezing tide.

My friend John recently took me

To Rue des Ecoles to point out the crossing

Where the absent minded mythographer

was run down by a laundry truck

Nearer my God to me I sang out

Mixing up the chords and dischords of time

Born for collision and some final knackery

Iceberg, laundry truck or drowning colder

(“Le Cœur est un organe femelle » )

than the North Atlantic’s spasms

stripping away

our itty monkey manners.

- Karen Chamisso

on Kristin Stewart's Diana

 I saw Spencer last night, and a miracle happened: my heart opened up and I had a little sympathy, a trickle of blood or some other humour, for Diana.

I have a strong sense that the reactionary culture of the eighties began with the marriage of Charles and Diana. It was like rock n roll heaven for reactionaries. Of course, I am more of the school that the royals and the aristocrats are spongers who sit on piles of blood money exacted from the skins of millions of peasants by their horrific ancestors. So I am not exactly unbiased. I have more sympathy for Ulrike Meinhof than for Diana.

Until I saw Kristin Stewart's performance, and realized that Ulrike and Diana were closely akin.

Of course, being plunged into the Windsor family must have been like being thrust nightmarishly into one of those Goya portraits of the Bourbon family in Spain: all the awful faces, all the inbred attitude. I've read the reviews: of course, the movie takes reality on a joyride, and there are some - such as the once enjoyable and now completely petrified Anthony Lane, the review for the New Yorker - who are a bit upset that more isn't made of Queen Elizabeth's bountiful philanthropy. The usual plea for billionaires. However, the film definitely resists using philanthropy as a prop to celebrate gaudy and unaccountable wealth. Thank God. The dialogue is all Pinter laced with underlings out of Shakespeare.

I'd love to see Steward do Ulrike Meinhof next. About ten years ago, the Austrian writer wrote a play that collaged Meinhof to Schiller's version of Mary Queen of Scots. A collaging of Diana to Meinhof would work much better. Politics, so often, is temperament. As it should be, perhaps.

oh brother

 

If you look up the literature on jokes – which ranges from Bergson to Freud to analyses of the Gricean implicature of jokes, and so on – you will notice that the joke is always connected to laughter. Without laughter, it would seem, there is no joke. Even the feeblest joke is defined as such because it fails to provoke laughter.

Myself, I think jokes are often about laughter. But jokes are sometimes not about laughter at all. This seems to be a paradox from the mainstream point of view, but from ordinary converse it is obvious – at least to me, and I believe to almost everybody – that jokes are sometimes not meant to provoke laughter at all. There are many intentions packed into a joke. Sometimes they are meant to bother. Sometimes they are intentionally meant to waste time – to delay. Sometimes they are tics, like cracking your knuckles or stripping the cuticle from the side of your fingernails (a particularly bad habit in my opinion). You could say here that the laughter function is perverted, or diverted. Or you could say that negation and affirmation in the world of affects responds to a different logic than it does in the world of syllogisms. That the negation of laughter could be the motive of a joke is, from the world of affect, a logical result of the particularly enunciative situation of the joke.

Freud recognizes that there are different types of laughter – and that there is a pleasure in laughter that is sadistic. Sadism, however, throws the stage lights on too brightly to describe all kinds of jokes that are disattached from laughter. It is, however, true that laughter is, at some point, related to biting. In fact, satire is often described in terms of biting. Biting and sucking are, of course, some of our earliest intentional actions. The mouth is centered as an important organ for the newborn, who learns to use it to make sounds and then words and then when he is all grown up and a Dad, Dad jokes.

Lately, when I make a humoristic comment – something that is as related to a joke as an undershirt is related to a shirt – Adam tends to say ha ha. It is the typography of a laugh, or another way of not laughing at all. When he started doing this, it reminded me of something. A couple of days ago I remembered it: oh brother.

When I was about Adam’s age – nine – I started replying to jokes or things that were meant to be funny, offered by classmates and adults, with the phrase: oh brother. I must have used that phrase a lot, because at some point in the sixth grade I was dubbed “brother Gathmann”, and I retained that nickname for a long time. I’m not sure what I felt about it. When playing, it was shorted to Brother, so, say, in basketball it would be, “pass it to me, brother”, etc. etc.

Hearing this, I wonder if adults thought it had to do with religion (the Christian evangelical thing of sisters or brothers) or with white kids pretending to be black (brother, in the white mind, being what black men called each other – at least on tv). The one thing that wouldn’t occur is that the name derived from a conditioned refusal to laugh, or to enter the circuit of the joke.

I had not thought about that nickname for a long long time, until Adam started with the ha ha. And now I am curious how, unconsciously, I pass things down to my son. Or maybe he makes them up for himself. And maybe that is a role in the schoolyard – the oh brother role.

 

 

Nobody likes political correctness

 Nobody likes political correctness. Which puts us in the position that it isn’t correct to defend political correctness. It is like picking your nose or flashing in a park – not the kind of thing you want to be associated with.

I think the phrase – and its villainizing character – goes back to a Cold War liberal discourse, in which the Communist figures as an authoritarian personality and the Western liberal figures as a groovy dialoguer. However, it occurs in a few places before World War II. Arnold Bennett submitted a novel of his to Lord Beaverbrook, who looked it over for “political correctness” – as Bennett’s diary puts it. However, I think this simply meant that it was realistic with regards to the political processes and political characters that it described.

Political correctness jumped majorly into the major outlets of the media with the civil rights movements and the New Left. The media, which had subserviently gone through the anti-Communist 50s with nary an op ed by a communist or a reflection on the merger of American foreign and domestic policy with anti-communism was jolted by the New Left attack on that monolithic ideology. It was an attack that, as was quickly seen, had a weak spot: for how about the “line” that the New Lefties themselves followed? The inner attitudinal policing – which, as all groovy liberals knew, was all to reminiscent of Big Brother and Communism itself. This made political correctness a great and bountiful phrase. All good things could be reaped from it.

One of the good things is humor. The groovy liberal was ever liable to laugh and joke, while the political correct policeman only knew how to sulk and snarl. This is put well by Erica Jong (who, author’s note, I adore) in an interview in Cosmo in 1978, explaining the lesbian scenes in her novel, How to Save Your Own Life.

“The chapter is the broadest parody- a humous takeoff on that whole period in the women’s movement when everyone I knew felt compelled to have an affai rwith a woman because it was chic… And, as a satirist of my society (which I assuredly am), I have the right (possibly even the duty) to spoof the fads of my day. That doesn’t mean I’m antilesbian or antiwoman or that I don’t support the very legitimate demands of gay activists for equal rights. But as a writer and humorist, I refuse to toe a party line and to inhibit my satire because certain humorless, sullen people think political “correctness” is more important than laughter. The fact is, even if a writer wanted to be politically correct, she couldn’t be. What pleases one group alienates another. So a writer really has no choice but to write books to please herself… Laughter and poetry may, perhaps, transcend their time. Politics never do.”

I think that Erica Jong’s comment about political correctness hits all the buttons – it is encyclopedic and at the same time brief. It idealizes the writer’s desire – what she wants – as an expression of freedom that she is compelled to – since any expression will alienate some group. It is a defense of humor – which is given a transcendent cast (along with poetry) – against the political part of political correctness – we don’t, in other words, read the Divine Comedy to get our bearings on the Guelphs, and Swift’s sticking it to the Whigs is, as any Professor of English Lit in the 1950s could tell you, representative of questions about human nature itself and the perennial questions thereunto. And political correctness is attributed to a power that is based in public opinion in America, but that is merely a click away from becoming a totalitarian bureaucracy – of the left, of course.

It is the latter supposition that is curious. Feminists in the 1970s, like antifascists today, were a protesting minority. The majority and the vested power of the Establishment – the makers of laws, the runners of corporations, the judges and cops – were not enforcing politically correct rules about feminism, but were busy being almost all male and all white. Their allergy to being attacked for being all male and all white was to say that the attackers were authoritarians who, by some astonishing accident, had almost no power at all, and who were showing what they would do if they had power with their attitudinal policing, which makes it a good thing that power rest in the hands that hold it.

This is one way of looking at the picture. Another way is to see in, say, movement feminists a possible future – a political one. In fact, for the “everybody” that Jong knew, that future turned out to be bright. Upper middle class women have gone from triumph to triumph since 1978. They have broken glass ceilings – an interesting goal, not exactly aimed at by those leftist feminists who combined feminism with some Marx-y notion of working class power. Perhaps those were the very feminists who were most humorless. Humor among those who see a bright future is, perhaps, a different thing from humor among those who feel, with every instinct, that they are going into the garbage.

Parties

 

The part about parties

The party existed in the 19th century. Go to, say, the Chicago Tribune society page and read this, from 28 January 1877:

“A social event which will long be remembered by those who were so fortunate as to participate occurred Frida evening at the residence of Mrs. Whitman, no. 1777 Wabash avenue. The compliments and best wishes of the party were tendered to Mr. and Mrs. Ed Sturtevant, whose appreciation of the “surprise” was made manifest during an entire evening of unmingled entertainment.”

These social events were often “functions” based around some purpose, but as the Whitmans and the Sturtevants could testify, they often involved unexpected visitors, drinking and fiddle playing. As the gilded age got ever more gilded, among the New York millionaire set parties became essential monuments of conspicuous consumption, running rampant through show girls and ice sculptures.

But I would contend that it was technology – notably the phonograph and the radio – that really goosed the twentieth century party into existence. Its democratization, its youth, adventurousness, dancing,music and hip flasks really came together in the twenties, les années folles, any account of which must be an account, in part, of parties. The novels of the twenties bear ample witness: Tender is the Night, Vile Bodies, the Unpossessed, Party-Going, Mrs. Dalloway, and even Women in Love – set in the boho set that was all proto-twenties – require parties as organizing plot elements. They are as it were correlates of the plot itself. In Proust or Musil, on the other hand, the freewheeling party element is subordinate to the banquet or function principle. Here, conversation in the clubbish sense tracks the event. They lack the pot-luck aura of the Anglo-American scene. Once never has the sense that the Guermantes are ever going to jump up and jitterbug.

The other great party decade, I think, is the sixties, that cousin to the twenties. One of the social events of the decade was Truman Capote’s masked ball, an appropriately camp event that Delillo shrewdly used as an important symbol of Cold War culture – and its coming apart – in Underworld. Of course, Delillo had long been a party writer – parties are key to, say, Running Dog, at the center of which is a film of a mythical party/orgy in Hitler’s bunker – an apocalypse party.

Looking over the party-strewn sweep of my own existence in the 20th and 21st centuries, the patter is predictably middle class. Between the 20s up to the late 30s, parties were “adventures” in Georg Simmel’s sense, intersections between the real life and the dream life. – or nightmare life, depending on the depth of disaster into which the party descended. The parties I went to or, more rarely, gave were about dancing, drinking and taking drugs. Conversation was very un-Musil like, shouted over the music into ears. The development of a thought, in the party, was always in the service of a joke, a come-on, or a personal argument. These parties were often heralded by invites, but the invites were labored over to make them seem like parodies of invites. This was because the party mocked the ritual of a party, of the type that is so organized that people are invited to it. Most of the best parties definitely attracted a number of non-invitees, which, in certain of the most out of control ones, were people in trouble. These parties built up their multi-cellular, mutant structure without any center. Breakups and hookups were party phenomena. After the thirties, in my muddle passage, parties are no longer adventures, and are no longer meant to be. The Covid age has definitely been a giant blow to parties, and I have a vague sense of depressed youth around me – although I expect parties to become much wilder for the youth in the next coupla years. Out of self-defense, we have gone out to few parties lately. The ones we have gone to for the past several years are almost always adult afterparties of children’s parties or wedding receptions. The soundtrack of the former is all chatter – no music plays, even in the background. The latter are the last remnant of a vast archipelago, in my life, of dancing. I loved to dance when I was a younger man – it was an important part of growing up, emotionally, for me – but I am less tolerant, I suppose, of looking ridiculous. Apparently in the States, the 20 something bourgeoisie can no longer get married without first boarding a party bus in Nashville and leaving behind a trail of to-go cups with a little vodka in the bottom of them, in which a few cigarette butts float. I don’t know if this is a happy or sad thing, really.

The party novel has recently reappeared – to good examples are Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Rachel Kushner’s Flamethrowers, although in Kushner the parties are nostalgic curiosa from the 70s art scene. In my case, my parties have miniaturized themselveves into scattered bits of prose, full of cod-learning, such as one might hear from a bore at a party, shouted into your ear.

“‘Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.’

(. . . Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity. . . . Those vile bodies . . .)”

Flirting and modernity

 

In the 18^thcentury, English essayists expressed a lotta anxiety about female reading.  The “new” genre of the romance fiction already created its problems for the classically trained, who rightly suspected that the prevalence of literacy was having a massive, unpredictable effect.  

As Samuel Johnson wrote:

“In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with himself.

But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.”

When the adventurer is a bit of a scoundrel or a woman, the hypnotic effect upon the female displaced another bit of the hierarchy – which is why it was necessary to supervise female reading especially. There was a copious literature about just that necessity, which has been culled by many feminist literary historians.

But that scene of literacy and reading in Britain looked a bit differently to intellectuals from less developed lands. Georg Lichtenberg, an anglophile whose visit to England was, perhaps, the most dramatic adventure of his life, was one of them. For him, a woman reading a newspaper was the very image of civilization. And, he suspected, it was a scene lodged in the superstructure, underneath which there was a material infrastructure that was dissolving the old separation between private and public, a structure that held women prisoners of the household. Although you would never know it from today’s “war of civilization” Western press, in which the Moslem world’s veiling of women is a throwback to the stone age, in Europe up through the 19^th century there were very strict rules that applied to women in public. They were not supposed to be there. The flaneur might be an outlier – the flaneuse was an outlaw. We imagine city streets in the nineteenth century in the image of 21^st century costume dramas, but in reality, the streets were for men. The women who appeared on the street was subject to an initiation that had much to do with the assumption of her sexual availability. To be appropriately covered was a norm for women that was extremely hazardous to broach.

A French novelist, Pierre Senges, has recently written a novel that proposes to view Lichtenberg’s Suedelbucher – Waste books – as fragments of a novel. Lichtenberg himself was a reader of novels and a thinker about the genre. He wrote in a sort of proto-Kittler style about the connection between the novel, modernization, and women, using the English cityscape and mode of transportation as motives to novel-writing – taking up the challenge of the “levelling of adventure” that made the (female) reader a potential heroine and seeing in it a freedom from the old ways.  

Lichtenberg tutored English students in Gottingen, and first visited England in 1770. Those features that worried the Tory moralist as well as Whig feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft wanted education and emancipation, but was not happy about thrusting women (the bourgeois female subject) into the public sphere:

“Females are not educated to become public speakers or players; though many young ladies are now led by fashion to exhibit their persons on a stage, sacrificing to mere vanity that diffidence and reserve which characterizes youth, and is the most graceful ornament of the sex. 

But if it be allowed to be a breach of modesty for a woman to obtrude her person or talents on the public when necessity does not justify and spur her on, yet to be able to read with propriety is certainly a very desirable attainment: to facilitate this task, and exercise the voice, many dialogues have been selected; but not always the most beautiful with respect to composition, as the taste should very gradually be formed.”

Lichtenberg, however, saw female publicness as the inevitable accompaniment of modernization. He observed in England that the house scheme was such as to individualize the residents, the family members. While in Germany children and adolescents doubled up in their rooms, and the communal air of the household extended to watchfulness about the comings and goings of all the members, especially the girls, in England the house plan allowed for individuals to “own” their rooms, and the houses were situated so as to give multiple access to the outside. In 1965, a demographer named John Hajnal proposed that the early modern period saw a splitting up of European marriage patterns, with the “West” – notably England and some of France – adhering to a new pattern of family residence.  He  called the Western pattern 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.

East and West, here, name Cold War entities that don’t fit Hajnal’s data. Spain and Italy south of Tuscany is “Eastern”, and Bohemia is Western. Nevertheless, if Hajnal’s theory is right, it says very important things about Early modernity – namely, that the discovery of youth – the extended time before marriage – and of “individualism” are entangled.

Lichtenberg definitely had something like that entaglement in line with his notion that novel reading was connected to such things as the greater chance for eye to eye contact between men and women that came about in a modernized carriage system – to which he attributed enormous adventurous, and thus novelistic, importance. The comparison with the “virtuous” German system of uncomfortable coaches, potholed roads, and subpar defence against the elements against the English system brushes back the moralist’s scolding tone: “Furthermore, the seed of episodes are laid in the all too good society of comfortable Post carriages in England, that are always full of well clothed women and where, a situation that Parliament shouldn’t tolerate, the passengers sit so that they look at each other face to face, from which can arise a dangerous confusion of eyes, and even more a highly scandalous confusion of legs, which leads to laughter and after that sometimes an indissoluble confusion of souls and thoughts, so that many an honorable young man traveling from London to Oxford will often be traveling to the devil. Something like this is, thank heaven, not possible with our Post Carriages…”

The mark of modernization: flirting. What Lichtenberg describes humorously and with sympathy is found to be slightly wrong even by such authorities, 120 years later, as Freud, who in some text decries American “flirtation”, which takes the seriousness out of the erotic.