The insulted and the injured or, the politics of the insult

 

William Cobbett hangs on like a ghost in that ghostly gallery, the Penguin paperback classics. He is known now for Rural Rides. In his time, though, the early part of the 19^thcentury in Britain,  he was a great self-constituted political and moral brass band, producing a weekly paper that  is of a vastness such that few who dive in there swim very far – in short, a man tied body and soul to his time. William Hazlitt, who shared many of his political opinions, is always being rediscovered – Cobbett, not so much.

Hazlitt’s essay on Cobbett begins by comparing him to a boxer, and goes on to foreswear comparison at all:

“One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle.'3 He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; 'lays waste' a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English. He might be said to have the clearness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville; if all such comparisons were not impertinent. A really great and original writer is like nobody but himself. In one sense, Sterne was not a wit, nor Shakespear a poet. It is easy to describe second-rate talents, because they fall into a class and enlist under a standard; but first-rate powers defy calculation or comparison, and can be defined only by themselves. They are sui generis, and make the class to which they belong. I have tried half a dozen times to describe Burke's style without ever succeeding, -- its severe extravagance; its literal boldness; its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its running away with a subject, and from it at the same time, -- but there is no making it out, for there is no example of the same thing anywhere else. We have no common measure to refer to; and his qualities contradict even themselves.”

One thing, though, Hazlitt picks out in Cobbett – his ability to abuse. He was an artist of the insult, the nickname: “If anything is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is an excellent hand at invention in that way, and has 'damnable iteration' in him.” In other words, once he fastens on an insult, he sticks to it.

Although American politics in the last six or seven years has turned, very much, on insults – Trump being both insulter in chief and the target of insults of every variety – it is odd that we have no genealogy of the political insult, or even the broader category of insult in America. The recent Oscar dust-up came about when a comedian insulted one of the members of the audience. Normally, a glittering throng would be up in arms against a random insulter, but this was a patronized and paid insulter, the type that often, when given to preening, compares his or herself to the jester who tells the truth. Of course, that is bullshit – the fool in King Lear was no millionaire celebrity, and our pardoned and cossetted insulters are in it for the cheap laughs and the usual micro-aggression.

The root of “insult” is found in the Latin saltere, to leap – the word contains a gesture. Leaping upon is a form of attack not reserved for cats – monkey and humanoids do it too. The verbal leaping upon of the insult has something hungry about it. The best insults leave the victim feeling chewed, or eaten. As well, the victim begins to eat him or herself, since the response to an insult – other than to insult back – is unclear. I have read many a post or tweet about how Will Smith should have calmly challenged his insulter to a debate, or given a sort of opening speech appealing to the better angels of our nature, etc., etc. Typical euphemism liberalism, I think, which dances around old social facts in order not to confront them. Leaping into ratiocination is no kinda leap.

Of course, the insulter does have the advantage of leaping first. Trump, for one, has damnable iteration in him: after  he has called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas once, it evidently engraved itself in his mind to the extent that I wonder, in that syphilis haunted wilderness, if he even remembers her real name. In any case, the taunt is maddening for those who think politics should be “above” childish insults. The problem with that position is that it is out of joint with historic reality. American history is a parade of one insult after another, and a historian could map a rather accurate map of who was who and what was what just by looking at the insults heaped on presidents and the insults presidents – as candidates – heaped back. We could also map who is marginalized: the taunt “Pocahontas” reverberates with both Disney and ethnocide, the lyncher’s version of the American story out of which we have all, with our various properties, crawled.

It is interesting, to me, that out of the culture of insult comedy that has become a cable standard, a man who was a reality star on a show where he played a sort of insult comedian boss has become the leading figure in American politics today. It is the honor culture turned toxic, as there is no honor there. Perhaps this is why it leaves behind such a bitter aftertaste.

will smith and the male fugue

 

“And I would like to say”, Julian said to himself, “that I thought it was about time someone shut him up.”

This is a key line in John O’Hara’s first and tightest novel, Appointment in Samarra. Julien English is a man who is going down in the little bourgeois court society of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. The act that precipitates and quickens the fall happens in the country club, as he stands there listening to an ascending boss figure named Harry Reilly, who owns a good chunk of Julian English’s car lot. Reilly is telling a dirty story in a fake Irish accent and is surrounded by suckups who say things like, Harry, I don’t know how you remember all them stories! A Ring Lardner scene, Lardner would have dispatched the entire book in 15 pages, but O’hara is not a humorist, nor does he favor going short on material like this.

The American novel – even one in which the characters are all white burgomeister types with Caddies and country club memberships – does a wonderful job of tracing the male fugue within the precincts of an ethos of success that has begun to fatigue its a regulars, even as they fail to imagine any other ethos. Winner or loser, that is not only how the game ends, it defines the game’s purpose.

Will Smith slapping a comedian whose line is that ur-American trope, the roast, is very much the Julian English figure. My sympathies are with Smith – whose slap musta hurt and, in some metaphysical accounting, must have equaled or topped the little bit of shit the comedian wanted Smith to swallow before he got his award. However, the country club has rules, and will ring them down swiftly like the grating over a jewelry store display window.  

Losing the plot

 

In Adam’s school, some enterprising publisher has given away a bunch of new kid’s books and the teacher has assigned the task of reviewing them to the kids. To help the kids figure out what “review” means, they have a helpful sheet that asks questions about the plot, the pictures, and even what the parents think of the book – clever, that one.

These are all fictional books. The question about the plot is: in a few sentences, describe the story  in the book – Resume l’histoire dans quelques lignes. The story – here  l’histoire – is, I take it, a proxy for plot. In the very convenient Dictionary of Untranslateables, the section on plot is under the entry “erzaehlen”.  The entry, like all of the entries, goes muchly into the etymology and philology of key words, and sorts out the diegesis from narration:

“If diegesis is the recounted world as it appears in a fiction, narration is the universe in which one recounts, that is, the set of acts and narrative procedures that give rise to and govern this fictive universe. This distinction, analytic in nature, requires that we do not confuse the different instances and levels of a narrative fiction…”

This quietly imposes a set theoretical imprint on the analysis of composition, and is handy, although, as the entry emphasizes, language dependent – and dependent on the historical epoch. The Greeks, the standard philological reference, have many words related to telling a story, but lack the set theoretical bias: “In addition, récitis one of the possible translations of a certain number of Greek words, in particular muthos [μῦθος], which, when distinguished from logos [λόγος] ( rational language ), can also be rendered in French by mythe; when distinguished from ergon [ἔϱγον] ( act ), by parole; when distinguished from diêgêsis [διήγησις] ( simple narration ), by récit dialogué; when distinguished from êthos [ἦθος] ( character ), by fable; when distinguished from historia [ἱστοϱία] ( narrativeof facts ), by fiction.”

Now that we have made things clear as mud, these are, in effect, the concepts set in motion when you ask a child – or anybody else – to give in shortened form an account of a story. Myself, I had to do this often when I wrote small reviews for Publishers Weekly (the rule was make the review between 260 and 300 words, as I remember it – with 300 being discouraged. In that space we were supposed to give an account of the muthos, the logos, the diegesis, the ethos, and tell the reader if it was thumbs up or down). I had difficulty with all those elements, partly because it is hard to cover all the twists and turns in most novels or short story collections, partly because thumbs up or down doesn’t really cut it – I could dislike a book that I thought was good, for instance.

In 1980, Penelope Fitzgerald, who knew more about writing for a living than most people, wrote an essay, “Following the plot” for the London Review of Books. It is a fascinating essay, beginning with a recit about her trip to Mexico – a trip that has puzzled her biographers (Lucy Scholes wrote a nice piece about this for Granta: https://granta.com/peripatetic-penelope-fitzgerald/). At the end of this fascinating digression (etymologically, a stepping away from the path – which is precisely not “following”), Fitzgerald reflects on the reason that she did not use this material for a story: “I take it that the novel proceeds from truth and re-creates truth, but my story, even at this stage, gives me the impression of turning fiction into fiction. Is it the legacy, or the silver, or the Latin American background, testing ground of so many 20th-century writers? I know that in any case I could never make it respectable (by which I mean probable) enough to be believed as a novel. Reality has proved treacherous. ‘Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated.’

Reality, here, has quietly parted company with belief, respectability and the probable. Who is the believer here who turns atheist at this potential novel?

Fitzgerald, who fell through the class system like a stone, and bounced back because she was not a stone, knew very well that what is probable for one set is improbable for another – for instance, the set that actually lives and writes in Mexico, as opposed to London. The treacherousness of reality cannot be sieved out of the novel, but it can be domesticated.

The last paragraph of Fitzgerald’s essay is, I believe, a brilliant piece of English prose that wraps up the problem of the plot in terms of family class and money – which is always what it is about.

“In the novel’s domain, plots were the earliest and the poorest relations to arrive. For the last two hundred years there have been repeated attempts to get them to leave, or, at least, to confine themselves to satire, fantasy and dream. Picaresque novels, however, both Old and new, are a kind of gesture towards them, acknowledging that although you can easily spend your whole life wandering about, you can’t do so in a book without recurrent coincidences and, after all, a return. And the readers of books like plots. That, too, is worth consideration.”

The placebo routine

 In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book:

“Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious
disease caused by a specific micro-organism. The same sounds in  a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to confirm tuberculosis. But there is an important difference between our diagnosis of tuberculosis and Laennec’s diagnosis of phthisis: we can cure tuberculosis (most of the time), while his patients died of phthisis––he died of it himself. Until 1865 (when
Lister introduced antiseptic surgery) virtually all medical progress was of this sort. It enabled doctors to get better and better at prognosis, at predicting who would die, but it made no difference at all to
therapeutics. It was a progress in science but not in technology.”     
The gap between the ability to diagnose and the ability to cure, or even to understand the cause of a disease, or its etiology, is easy to forget. I often edit articles about medicine, or public health, in the pre-twentieth century period. Some of these articles concern the medical culture of native peoples. And even with the best anti-colonialist will in the world, often the authors simply assume that there is a contrast between a rational and curative Western medicine and a ritualistic and non-curative folk medicine. In fact, folk medicine was medicine up into the twentieth century, and often continues to be today. Western medicine as therapy was largely either fraudulent or depended on the placebo effect. The latter is a real effect, of course.
“But the fact that there was no progress––far too little to have any systematic impact on life expectancy––and the fact that medical intervention did more harm than good, does not mean that doctors
did not cure patients. Modern studies of the placebo effect show that it is a mistake to think that there are some therapies that are effective and others which though ineffective work on those who respond
to the placebo effect. Even effective medicine works partly by mobilizing the body’s own resources, by invoking the placebo effect: one estimate is that a third of the good done by modern medicine is
attributable to the placebo effect.
When patients believe that a therapy will work, their belief is capable of rendering it surprisingly efficacious; when doctors believe a therapy will work their confidence is consistently transferred
to the patient. There are all sorts of studies that show this in practice. Thus if a new and better drug comes out, the drug it replaces begins to perform consistently less well in tests, merely
because doctors have lost confidence in it.”
Ah, transference! Surely this is a fact about human nature that goes beyond pharmacopeia.  

sacrificing the baby for the sculpture: on a modern theme

 

In his 1910 tome, The Individual and Human Existence, Josef Popper-Lynkeus asks a question:

“If for example we were in Paris in the Louvre and a great fire broke out while the gallery was full of visitors, who would we try to save? The art collection or the people, to the very last one of them? It would not occur to the firemen or the volunteer helpers to save the pictures by Raphael, Leonardo, the Venus de Milo and other such irreplaceable artworks before all the human existences were secured. And if someone tried to do otherwise, he would be greeted with universal condemnation and even punishment.”

Josef Popper’s way of stating the problem of the value of art in terms of the value of people is part of a tradition in modernism, bringing together the “irreplaceable” art work and the irreplaceable human individual. This tradition exists in some uneasy relationship with the justification of war, or the sacrifice of irreplaceable human existences to the protection of the state – or the ideals of the state, such as freedom.

Popper, unlike his nephew, Karl Popper, is not a much quoted man anymore. He was an engineer and an inventor as much as a philosopher and ideologue, and his book has a certain engineer’s way of looking at problems in terms of affordances – how to design a gimmick to achieve a certain objective or function within an overarching structure or machine. And for an engineer, Popper’s thesis produces an interesting social design. Not art, not anything is equal to the value of an individual human life. If that part is the most intrinsically important thing in the social machine, how should the machine be designed to make sure that the part is protected?

His question, in a different form – substituting medieval Italy for the Louvre -  was answered by Harold Nicholson, who, in 1944, said he was prepared to sacrifice his own self – to be shot against a wall – to save a Giotto fresco. Perhaps the British upper class, coming from a line of very cold blooded collectors, have made the calculation. Bertrand Russell once said that if he were given the choice between saving a Ming Vase and a Chinese man (I am not sure what the ethnicity has to do with this, except I am pretty sure what the ethnicity has to do with this), he did not know what he would do.

Nicholson’s statement of the case has entered into the literature on the protection of cultural heritage, an aspect of international law that, like so much other elements in the architecture, arose from the Nuremberg Trials. Alfred Rosenberg was hung for, among other things, looting cultural treasures – “irreplaceable” objects of art. The Allied armies, as historians have noted in an aside, showed a rather spotty adherence themselves to irreplaceable cultural treasures In the casuistic literature of international law, questions are posed like: say the Chartres cathedral was occupied by a hostile force taking potshots at the American army. Would the American army be within its rights to call in a strike and obliterate the thing?  Popper would no doubt not have approved of the whole attitude of these questions, in which individual lives are divided up in value according to sides, after which you get to using your own cultural heritage, ie bombs, bombers, drones and the lot.  The notion that one would never sacrifice a human life for an art object must have seemed a bit archaic to Popper himself in the decade after he posed his question, for, as is well known, between 1914 and 1918 twenty million people were sacrificed to make sure the Austrians didn’t invade the territory of the Serbians after a crown prince was assassinated in Sarajevo.  After World War II, where the free peoples of the world and their counterparts, the nasty totalitarian communists, had agreed to raise the stakes to nuclear annihilation, it would seem that the problem of who to sacrifice at the Louvre, or on a trolley track, should take back seat to the question of why our systems were based, literally, on sacrificing everybody. The latter is a problem that is still unsorted out, hence the voices in D.C. calling for a nuclear exchange who are also bitching that gas has gone up by 50 cents a gallon. The apocalypse will be trivial.

Another way of asking the question is: if the Athenians and the Spartans had had forty thousand nuclear bombs between them, should they have let go to defend their various principles, and would we, looking back, decide nothing in human history was as important as their dispute?

But this is an unprofitable discussion, since the people who control the bombs will do what they do. Don’t we all gag at gnats and swallow camels, to quote the savior? And the value of an art piece has always posed a certain conundrum. In 1910, Popper could depend on his readers thinking that art works are invaluable, meaning unexchangeable – being unique -  in some idealistic sense. Now, our sense of the artmarket has long trumped our sense of art. If Russell was asked if he’d save 85 million dollars – the price of a Van Gogh, say – or a baby, it would make for an easier answer, philosophically, even if every bank robbery movie tells you that some people’s answer would be unphilosophical, and those people draw an audience. However, even if the price put on the art work destroys, or at least erodes, the idea of the irreplaceability of the art work, so that the higher the price, the higher the triviality – there are still those – even me I’d say – who believe in that woozy superiority and irreplaceability of the Louvre’s treasures. I leave the artmarket and its monkey shines behind,  since the one thing we know about those prices is that they are not paid by expert art lovers, but by sad sack billionaires. The Bill Gates, the Elon Musk – they have the trustworthy art judgment of your average clerk in the adult video place. Or I should say, their judgment will probably be below the clerk’s. No, the human scale that counts here is still, I’d like to say, the scale Popper started out with.

The motif of the value of the artwork versus that of the human being, though dented by the general discredit that accompanies trading the sacred aura of the artwork for a price tag, is still a topic … among those, mostly, who care about art. In my favourite of John Banville’s novels, The Book of Evidence, the narrator does kill a person for a painting. Freddie Montgomery steals the painting for a gang that has his wife more or less hostage. But the killing – of a servant girl with a hammer – is not a matter of sacrificing a person for a Vermeer.  Rather, it is the final event in a life that has spun out of control – Montgomery’s – and his crime is an ethical carelessness that extends to all parts of his life. I read that novel at a time when I was feeling that I had been living a life of extreme ethical negligence in the deepest sense, and it hit me hard. One of the paradoxes of selfishness is that it blinds the self, since the self, in us social monkeys, is rooted from the beginning in others. To disconnect is to float in another medium, one that dissolves the self in its selfishness. The bloat is fatal.

Perhaps Banville inherits his plot not from Beckett, the model he often holds up, but from Yeats, whose lifelong pondering of the sacrifice of life for the work keeps coming back again and again, especially in the late poems. Life, for Yeats, is a fire of long duration in the Louvre, threatening to destroy everything, as it destroyed Byzantium, and his solution is to harness that fire to the work – but it is a solution he could never be happy with.

 

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Musings on the bunny

First, there was the dread. An invasion loomed on the horizon. We were absolutely disarmed, and went grimly to our fate. Or at least we figured it was our turn to keep the bunny.

In Adam’s class, there is a class pet, a bunny named Bonnie. Each weekend, it is the privilege of some volunteer to keep the little cuniculus domesticus, meaning find a place for its cage, feed it, let it hop out and cause whatever unimaginable chaos in our neat little apartment.

So Friday we were given our orders and paraphernalia: a bunny carrying case, a cage, and a bag with oats or roughage of some kind, snacks – pellets – and litter. And we set course bravely for home. The bunny was upon us. It was not for us to underrate the gravity of the task which lay before us or the temerity of the ordeal, to which we hoped not be found unequal.

Basically we hoped that we would not be the parents to kill the bunny.

We are not, much to Adam’s disappointment, a pet keeping household. It is not that I have any problem with pets, as long as they are the pets of others. I, in fact, just dogsat for a diabetic dog for two weeks, giving her shots, so I like to think I have some cred in the “keeping mammals” department. But the only pet rabbits I have known were fierce, huge things in hutches that ferociously gobbled up their carrots and stared at their guards with POW glares.

So, we got Bonnie home, and put her cage down in Adam’s room. I had previously laid down paper all over the room, and once the cage was down, we unleashed the beast.

Bonnie, it turned out, was smaller than the average cat, and softer then one, and more docile than one. It was a very respectful guest, not at all the menace we had imagined. She immediately captured Adam’s heart, even as, in classic bunny fashion, she hopped around the room, leaving a trail of rabbit pellets behind her.

The weekend passed quite pleasantly. I don’t know what Bonnie wrote about it on her Instagram – doesn’t everybody have an Instagram nowadays? And surely Bonnie is a bunny influencer. But from my end, the bunny neither darted out onto the terrace and jumped to her death – our crazy fear before we picked her up – nor did she bite us or gnaw some electric cord to bits or any of that. She liked carrots – I had laid in a stock – but Adam kept me from giving her too much, invoking the holy authority of the Internet, which said that carrots had mucho sugars which could cause a little five to ten pound critter problems in the long run. The long run, I said to Adam. She’s here for a weekend, I said. As Keynes once said, in the long run we are all dead.

Adam, however, is not a child to be bullied by Keynes.

This morning, we brought her back. The kids crowded round, and we had our moment of minor celebrity. The last I saw of Bonnies carrying case, it was being taken off Adam by an adult.

techniques of the body: a kiss is not just a kiss

 In Marcel Mauss’s Techniques of the Body, he begins his discourse with a few references and a few anecdotes. This is one of the anecdotes:

 

"A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris ; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema.”

 

We are familiar with the idea that tv and movie violence provokes violence in the general mob. The more subtle notion that many of our basic traits have been folded, spindled and mutilated by various dream factories – this is something more, a surplus.

 

INn Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, Daniel Harris made the surprising argument – or rather, exhibited the  surprising implication – that the Production Code, the Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded a device that pornographers now generally use, and that also may have moved from the reel to the real.

 

“During the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors' mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels, raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws, full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the winds, abandoned her shallow pretense of enraged resistance, and succumbed wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. And then, after the ten fleeting seconds allotted by the Legion of Decency had passed, the inopportune entrance of another character often sent them dashing to opposite corners of the room where, their clothing rumpled, their hair a mess, their faces infused with fear and suspicion, they fiddled with tchotchkes on the mantel or stared pensively at spots in the carpet, retreating into the solipsistic isolation of their guilty consciences. The stiff choreography of this asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by indiscreet maids.”

 

I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” But there is something to Harris’s vision in the kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband, which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit longings indeed.

 

Even if I don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration of a kiss.

“Hollywood kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretense of solitude, of barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of penetration alone.”

 

Ah, the cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Plus, of course, for pornographers, too, the ravishing kiss was more of an interfering preface than a moment of… ravishment.  Bataille’s insight, which was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the perversions it spends its times blotting out.

 

Disappointingly, after this promising start, Harris anchors his insight in a realistic ideology that has no historical basis whatsoever:

 

“The exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking, morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional representations are drifting further apart.” In fact, of course, this account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated animal – with their “daily experiences” is entirely bogus. It was the aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties – that encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused of being childish and non-productive, with being, basically, wankers. Curling up with the book and curling within the womb – same story. The confessional is a really a bow to the puritanical edict that art must teach us something, that dedication to the aesthetic in itself was frivolous, not to say vicious.  Nor is the dip into daily experience something that was encouraged by realism in the classical sense, which was, contra Harris, a matter of showing that daily experiences are always drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand. Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for existence – accumulation.

 

That ideology blights Harris’s essay, but I like to think about the way the cut and edit of the kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema accidentally gave birth to the loops of porno films, which, although seemingly all about unending coupling are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss.  Once one begins mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance, Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on.

 

How this influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question that, unfortunately, Mauss did not answer. I think though that kissing was definitely impacted by the movies. In spite of the code, it was part of the general enlightenment brought to the population, in which the lineaments of gratified desire are the endpoint of the revolution.

 

Which, given these years of gloomier endpoints, is an endpoint I’m positive about.

death of a political animal

 

… il avait tué la marionette. – Paul Valery

So often in the past twenty years – the bla bla era – I imagine myself, a political animal, in the figure of a fly dying at the base of a window. The fly keeps bumping against that congealed air that 350 million years of evolution had never warned him against. The fly’s experience of the world, which is, as is well known, a place divided into 360 spaces, each space radiating a certain glow, and the edge of each space grading into the edge of the next space save when the edges parted to make a passage just exactly equal in width to the width of a fly’s body, seems, for magical reasons, no longer to work. In addition, something seems to be happening in the back behind the eyes, the load, as the fly would name it, that it always carries about and that sometimes gets sexually excited. Something seems to be squeezing the load. Normally, a pressure like this would prompt the fly to escape, but lately the 360 spaces seem to be liquefying to such a degree that they no longer scatter to the fly’s wingbeats. This is not good news. And, as the fly falls over, there flashes through its mind, absurdly, the first line of an old joke: “waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

I am not dying of pesticide intoxication, exactly, but of that subset called “news intoxication”. And as the dying fly figured out, there’s no Cold Turkey option.  

November 12, 1859: at the Cirque Napoléon - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Léotard “qui tenait le spectateur

sous l’empire d’un Plaisir

indefinissible »

 

did not die on the flying trapeze

in some circus tragedy.

He died of smallpox

 

after inventing a new thrill altogether

at the same time Baudelaire changed the weather

of the modern.

 

Baudelaire doesn’t mention him at all

-          while his “memoirs”, an illiterate scrawl

bring out a snide remark from the Goncourts.

 

“… la hardiesse des sauts périlleux

L’imprévu des case-cou”

-an alexandrine arrested in mid-motion

 

a caesura crossed, from one bar to the other.

His suit, which showed the effortless bother

of the muscular ripple of his too mortal flesh

 

was named for him. In the brief spasm

of his flip and grab, orgasm

washed across the faces of the gaslit crowd.

 

Did Emma B. in outtake carry home some sense

of the sex in this suspense

a syncopation lost?

Baudelaire

 « Today,  23 January 1862, wrote  Baudelaire in his notebook, I was subject to a singular premonition, I felt pass over me the breez of the wing of imbecility. »

“ In 1863, the Figaro inserted an extract from a violent attack by Pontmartin against Baudelaire. In 1864, Figaro condescended to publish a series of the poems in prose. Only, after two publications  (7 et 14 February), Villemessant [the editor] ended this fantasy and here is the reason he gave to the author, to explain this measure : : « « Your poems bore everyone. »

- La Vie doloureuse de Baudelaire, by Francois Porche

I recently re-read one of my favorite books of the nineties, James Buchan’s Frozen Desire, an essay on money that gives as much weight to paintings of Judas, the life of Baudelaire, and Raskolnikov (the final dire dialectical figure at the end of laissez faire) as it does to Adam Smith, Keynes and Simmel – and of course it ignores the horrid Milton Friedman, God rest his soul.

About Baudelaire, Buchan quotes Proust’s phrase that Baudelaire sympathized with the poor as a form of anticipation – which is so wholly lovely that it is almost spoiled by going on (which, after all, is what determines, more than voice or rule, the way a line of poetry runs – it is only over when it is over for good – when nothing on that same line could be added that wouldn’t stain or destroy it – and thus the blank is part of the poem - and thus we fall down the poem as we fall down a ladder, rung by rung). Buchan adds that in the end, as Baudelaire was reduced to rags (but never dirty underwear, according to his biographer Porche), he compiled lists in his last journals. He listed all his friends. They were all prostitutes.

“Here the epoch has arrived of that long haired, graying Baudelaire, his neck enveloped – as per his hypochondria – with a violet scarf; the Baudelaire that was see walking like a shadow, a huge notebook under his arm, in company with the old Guys, at Musard’s, at a casino on the rue Cadet, at Valentino’s. To Monselet who, one evening, in one of those low dives where workers danced, asked him what he was doing there, he replied: I’m watching the death’s heads pass by (« Je regarde passer des têtes de mort. »).”

In these circumstances, when the old bird has almost molted its last feathers and the street reaches out its arms at night to take back its own, there is a moment of collapse and flight. This is when Baudelaire made his journey to Belgium. A complete disaster. And it is when he encountered an article by Jules Janin about Heine, in which Janin, praising Heine, still reproached him for being unreasonably melancholic at times – a point that Janin extended to all of contemporary literature. Where was the gaiety, the song? Where was that lie that eventually became La Traviata? Let’s have a little happy art, for a change. And of course, lets have no unexplained irony – irony is always being chased out of the city, fed hemlock, and in general fucked in the ass and thrown in the gutter – it is the dread of the Janins of the past, just as it is the dread of the Janins of the present.  Baudelaire wrote Janin a letter – which he never sent him. It is a fantastic document, one of those texts in which something blazes out that … it is unfair to call prophetic, as though it were high praise that someone in the past anticipated our moo cow and nukes culture. What blazes out, just as what blazes out of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is the world within the world of the sibyls of modernism …

It is difficult to translate because it is as dependent on sound as one of Baudelaire’s prose poems. Here’s a bit:

 

Quant à toutes les citations de petites polissonneries françaises comparées à la poésie d’Henri Heine, de Byron et de Shakspeare, cela fait l’effet d’une serinette ou d’une épinette comparée à un puissant orchestre. Il n’est pas un seul des fragments d’Henri Heine que vous citez qui ne soit infiniment supérieur à toutes les bergerades ou berquinades que vous admirez. Ainsi, l’auteur de l’Ane mort et la Femme guillotinée ne veut plus entendre l’ironie ; il ne veut pas qu’on parle de la mort, de la douleur, de la brièveté des sentiments humains

2.

Yesterday, I visited the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was an impromptu visit – I was going to a nearby library to return some books. I saw and photographed Sartre and Beauvoir’s tombstone, which was pleasingly strewn with old metro tickets, cheap flowers, and an old paperback copy, bizarrely enough, of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I noticed on a marker that this was where the cenotaph of Baudelaire was, so I also took a look at it – it was, unfortunately, the kind of structure that no bum could leave a metro ticket on. More’s the pity.

 

“Also, I have to admit that, for the last two or three months, I’ve let my character go, I’ve taken a particular joy in wounding, in showing myself impertinent, a talent in which I excel when I want to. But here that isn’t enough: one has to be gross in order to be understood.”- letter, October 13, 1864

It is odd that – at least as I remember it – Sebald, in his last novel, Austerlitz, part of which is set in Belgium, never mentions Baudelaire. Could I be forgetting something? The 1887 edition of the Oeuvres Posthumes contains a biographical introduction by Eugène Crépet that explains the peculiar horror that overcame Baudelaire in 1864 as he familiarized himself with Belgium – it was another piece of his habitual bad luck that he chose to flee from France to, of all places, Belgium. It was the kind of place, as he explains in a letter, where the only thing that could possibly move the people to revolt would be raising the cost of beer. He was tortured by the stink of Brussels – Crépet explains that Baudelaire had an extremely developed olfactory sensibility – and the ugliness of the people and the yawning lack of conversation.

By March, 1866, the devil that had tracked Baudelaire through his life, condemned all his books to failure for various reasons – here a press goes bankrupt, there the critics condemn him, and of course there is that most comic of volumes, Fleurs de Mal, a bunch of filth that can’t compare with the beautiful and healthful lyrics of a Musset – began to pursue its endgame. Baudelaire started suffering more and more visibly from some mental derangement. On a train going to Brussels, Baudelaire asked for the door to the compartment to be opened. It was open. He meant to ask for it to be closed, but he couldn’t find the words for that phrase. They came out backwards. In an article in the Figaro, 22 April, 1866, a journalist noted that Baudelaire’s symptoms were “so bizarre that the doctors hesitated to give a name to this sickness. In the middle of his sufferings, Baudelaire felt a certain satisfaction in being attainted with an extraordinary illness, one which escaped analysis. This was still an originality.” His mother took him to Paris, where he was confined to an asylum. By this time he couldn’t speak, except to say non, cré nom, non. He tried to write on a small chalkboard, but he couldn’t shape the letters. He could, however, gesture, and did.

At his death, a few journals noted, with satisfaction, the death of a degenerate who would now no longer bother the public with his childish pornography. The kind of things you’d expect in, say, the NYT today. Same complete nullity, the same numbskull public intelligence, that combination scold and lecher that is the voice of a million articles, with the point being to erect a wall, a protective blankness, to keep at bay any doubt the consuming animal might form about the system in which it moves and breathes.

The Treadmill of Production

When the Nobel committee in economics gave Nordhaus – a man of infinite environmental ignorance, - their little prize, they put their seal on a neoliberal agenda that is steering the planet into disaster. The committee no longer has an opportunity to right its wrong – to award its prize to an economist/sociologist who has actually written well about the environment: Allan Schnaiberg, who taught at Northwestern until his death in 2009.

In the early eighties, he published an influential book in the field of environmental economics – The Environment from Surplus to Scarcity. It was a book that introduced the concept with which he is most identified: the treadmill of production.

The big controversy in environmental economics is about ecological modernization. Briefly: the Manhattan institute’s all around publicist for “junk science” (otherwise known as science inconvenient to corporations), Peter Huber, proposed that the offloading of costs onto the environment during the twentieth century was caused by the State. If we just took the state out of the equation, private enterprise would develop ways of being greener. The thought was – greener is more efficient. Here’s a link to Huber’s career as a shill. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peter_W._Huber

Schnaiberg’s thesis was different. He coined the phrase, the treadmill of production, to talk about the network effects of industrialization – whereever the ultimate control over industry lay. In a recent essay, The treadmill of production and the environmental state, he revisits his thesis.

“From a conceptual perspective, we might characterize an "environmental state" as encompassing the following feature: whenever it engaged in economic decision-making, considerations of ecological impacts would have equal weight with any considerations of private sector profits and state sector taxes. Put this way, most industrialized nation-states fall far short of this standard. Indeed, it is increasingly true that any environmental policy-making is subject to more intensive economic scrutiny, while economic policies are subject to less and less environmental assessment (Daynes 1999; Soden and Steel

1999).”

Schnaiberg’s paper includes a case study of the recycling industry in Chicago, the study of which was at the origin of his work. It is a study about the structural changes that came about in that industry as it was turned into a regular private sector industry, with the goal of making a profit. I found this interesting as a case just because we remember the old recycling movement in the seventies and eighties. My brothers worked, at that time, heading up maintenance for some apartment complexes. They were both enthusiastic about recycling. They sponsored a cleanup of litter, for instance, along a highway leading into Stone Mountain Georgia. They got their complexes in touch with recycling services. For a couple of years, they devised a mass pick up of Christmas trees – the trees were, I think, going to be used by fish hatcheries or something. My brothers are enthusiasts, and they turned out the family, including my mother, my father, and me – in the Christmas tree deal – to do the various recycling projects.

However, as recycling became simply profit based, the air went out of volunteering. And as they became profit based, instead of applying the private sector efficiency in taking care of the whole spectrum of waste, the spectrum was cherry picked.

Schnaiberg writes:

“First, treadmill organizations [those in the treadmill of increasing consumer demand and cutting production cost by leveraging part of that cost onto the commons, or other people’s property] generally resist environmental regulation with all the substantial means at their disposal. For example, prior to the advent of recycling regulations and programs, container firms fought all forms of

"bottle bills", spending perhaps US$50 million opposing such bills, and succeeding in about 2/3 of the states. Yet even these bottle bills were only indirectly constraining firms. Legislation did not directly mandate a refillable container, but only the imposition of a deposit on all containers. Even in this limited regulation, the refunding mechanisms for the deposit put some cost burdens on non-refillable container manufacturers and/or users. Thus, in recent years in New York state, bottlers have refused to repurchase stockpiled

refunded containers. They have let these accumulate at brokers and large retailers, seeking thereby to mobilize opposition to the bottle bill system. For the remaining 2/3 of states, container manufacturers and bottlers have simply encouraged recycling, and have kept feedstock prices low, and avoided paying labor costs for refilling containers.

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes

infeasible, under pressures from environmental NGOs, firms first dilute the legislation to minimize its impacts on their operations. Then they wait for opportunities to further lighten their regulatory load, whenever the political climate shifts and/or NGOs are elsewhere engaged. In the recycling arena, this has been commonplace. Affected industries have continuously shifted their campaigns to avoid mandatory direct controls on their production and distribution activities. All U.S. government regulations have avoided mandating firms with a "life cycle" responsibility for their own generation of post-consumer wastes, as has

occurred in some European states. Instead, governments had introduced fairly weak mandates for firms, requiring higher "recycled content" of their production. Firms have responded by including post-production waste recycling (a standard economic practice for decades) as part of post-consumption recycling.”

The treadmill aim of weakening the impetus for even voluntary environmental action seems odd, at first, until you take into account what the companies take into account – such behavior leads to an enlarged sense of the interaction between the economy and the environment. It is not just to make more money that the great energy monsters sponsor all their think tanks and pay off all their politicians. When the Great Cheney convention of energy chiefs, in 2001, agreed to put the keebosh on conservation, it was chiefly, when the short term cost benefit is discounted, for ideological reasons: conservation countervails an insane consumerist ethos. If people are allowed, for a second, to fall in love with the planet to the extent of wanting to spare that tree or ice floe, the virus will spread. Questions about the justice of exhausting our resources will emerge. Fundamental questions about ownership and its limits. In fact, people will begin to think that politics doesn’t begin or end with what dumb party you vote for or the latest outrage that we must rush to have opinions on – is CNN more bought and sold than Fox News? Did somebody say something on Twitter? Rather, we will think about why, if Americans (for instance) are so happy, they are so indebted, so unable to stop buying the stupidest things, so unwilling to look at, say, the environmental horrors that are coming home to roost, like something out of St. John of Patmos’s paranoid vision, in fire, flood and plague.

When you have no control over your mind or attention span, you are fucking owned. And that is the resource they are extracting with every hot air soundbyte and fake crisis. The treadmill of production begins in your mind.