Dred Scott returns, motherfuckers

 It is almost eerie how the abortion decision follows the old paradigm of the slave versus "free" states. There is a story in the NYT with this paragraph:

"A top anti-abortion lobbying group, the National Right to Life Committee, recently proposed model legislation for states that would make it a crime to pass along information “by telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication” that is used to terminate a pregnancy."

That follows, to the letter, the Southern slaveholder doctrine about abolitionist literature. There was an article in Lithub a few years ago about the way Southern states censored the abolitionists:
"South Carolina was one of four southern states that outlawed the abolitionist writings in their jurisdictions. Slaveholders tended to justify such reactions by appealing to patriotic service at the expense of law. Some accused the postal system of supporting abolitionist endeavors."
I suppose it is one of those dialectical hiccups that the slaveowner cause - in this case, making women the wards of the state - is led by a black justice, Clarence Thomas.
When one right is flushed down the toilet, others will follow. Make no mistake about that: unless the Supreme Court's executioner judges are impeached or disobeyed, freedom in the U.S. will soon decline to the level of all those "shithole" countries that Americans think they are superior to.

Back to Normal Fails

 

Back in 2018, the NYTand all right thinking campaign consultants were giggling and acting shockedabout the undignified doings of this character named Trump, who was president.Instead of doing what presidents are supposed to do – remaining solemnly in the Oval Office, trying to look like a stuffed goose who was all about war for freedom, he was acting like a huckster, going out to rally his troops up and down the country.

The campaign industry people were right in the short run: the legislative races on the national level went against Trump. But in the long run, what an excellent strategy! This was not only using tweaking the demonstration form, merging it with the campaign rally, but it was hooking up the party to a national populist movement.

Now, of course, we have a D majority in the Senate and House and a D president. And they sit there helplessly as the R SCOTUS takes away everything the Dems produced in the last fifty years. They sit there helpless and the campaign industry geniuses think, hey, great time to cash in, sending out millions of spam ads, and the usual talking heads say, vote like your life depended on it. All pretending like the car is gonna move when it don’t have no gas, Sally.

Biden is sorta hopeless. I don’t think he has the energy or temperament to be a barker. What we need, desperately, is a barker. We have several women, as a matter of fact, who could do it. But instead of coordinating with these women – instead of going out there and in Trumpian manner vilifying the six outlaws, the six demagogues on the court, sitting on the citizenry – instead of making this a real fireworks election – we are getting pallid emails to VOTE! As if this was a just discovered thing. As if VOTING as in restoring the Civil Rights act of 1965 had not been voted down unceremoniously in Congress, without much after effect by the Dem executive branch. On to UKRAINE!

Trump, being a buncombe artist, discovered how to merge the kind of street politics that go into demonstrations and the political machine that is party politics. The Dems are so entirely blind to this obvious phenomenon in the age of Reality TV that they have planned – as far as I can see – nothing to make this a national campaign. Nothing about inflation, nothing about Roe Rights, nothing about the striking down of concealed weapons carry, nothing about how to limit, nay, dissolve the unconstitutional and undemocratic power of, the Court. Nothing, as the Fool said in King Lear, will get you nothing.  

I don't love my country

 Love is the wrong feeling one should have for a political vehicle. Love, rather, the culture, the dissent, the revolt, the force that goes out and takes on established power. 

But the U.S.A. as a political entitty? From slavery to the new (reaffirmation) of the second class citizenship of women, the U.S. has done all the bad things. 

What makes me sad is the idea that there's no organized entity that will push back. The Dem party is as useless as a sewing club against a drone missile. We are on our own. But this is where the love goes - cause American culture, the people, are endlessly inventive. I want to live long enough to see them rise up and wipe out this elite. 

The best and the brightest and Google Home

 We were given a Google Home for Christmas. Adam has adopted it as his sister, his chorus, his friend, his advisor, and his conversation partner. Google Home is ill adapted for complex conversations: it can sing a few songs when you ask the right question, and it has a few programmed jokes – but what it never does (under the heavy obligation of never scaring off a customer) is give its judgments about the best and the worst: “what is the best horror movie?” “what is the best episode of The Office?” “what is the worst album ever made?” and so on.

Adam, like me when I was a boy, is an ardent ranker. Although he is only nine years old, he can give you the IMBD ratings for dozens of movies right off the top of his head. I’ve discovered a good way to tease him: by giving some movie he doesn’t like a high, made up IMDB number – or vice versa.

I am tempted to call ranking, and canon-making in general, instinctive. I can see the NYT Bestseller list title in my mind: The Canon-Instinct. But I am not sure what kind of instinct that is, besides one in which comparison and discovering what is more important in a given circumstance is elevated to some fundamental unified force.

As a man who does try, mostly unsuccessfully, to follow Jesus’s precept “judge not that ye be not judged”, I have relegated ranking to a lesser aesthetic activity. That I think James Joyce’s Ulysses is better than the Walking Dead video game doesn’t tell me much about either. Heinrich Heine – whose precepts, unlike Jesus’s, often sound like jokes – wrote a nice dismissal of this canon-making instinct in aesthetics: “Nothing is more foolish than the question, what poet [Dichter]  is greater than the others. A flame is a flame, and its weight isn’t determined by pounds and ounces. Only the flattest grocer’s sensibility comes around with an old cheese scale to weigh genius.”

Of course, Heine was not a physicist. Fire weighs, according to Google Home, about 0.3 kg per cubic meter. Still, what a nice image! One that tugs me back from my critic’s desire to tell you x is a great book and y is a terrible video game. I compromise: I do judge, but I try not to let that get too in the way of thinking. That’s the best I can do.

In praise of Gregoire Chayamou: macronism predicted!

 

Philosophy almost always follows the event. The French revolution and Napoleon come first: then Hegel.

In a rare inversion of this order, Gregoire Chamayou’s The Ungovernable Society: a genealogy of authoritarian liberalism came first, in 2014, and then Macron.

Chamayou is one of the rare philosophers to follow Foucault’s work and actually do research. In Chamayou’s case, the research is on one of the turning points of the seventies – the emergence, within enterprises, consulting firms and conservative think tanks, of a grand strategy to fight back against civil rights movement, unions, and the formation of counter or at least a-capitalistic organizations. Although Chamayou does not talk about nudgery – the special addition to the mix identified with the Obama era – his diagnosis of, say, dialogue as a strategy by established power to make itself seem open and to label its opponents as extremists is uncannily predictive of the Macron strategy that has come so undone this year in the legislatives.

One can read the book as a horror story, or as a cynical affirmation of all that we already know. A particularly vivid illustration of this is in the chapter on Nestle’s discovery of dialogue. Nestle, as people of a certain age – my age – will remember, was making tons of money from powder baby formula, marketing  in areas, like Southern India, Central Africa, etc., where water was generally polluted, sometimes enormously polluted – due of course to the marketing of products from another multinational, Monsanto, among others. When this issue was brought up, Nestle dismissed it - which aroused fury among certain groups, which launched a boycott. Of course, in Switzerland Nestle used the tried and true method – suing distributors of pamphlets urging the boycott – to try to censor this (not an instance of cancel culture – cancel culture would only be involved if boycotters said nasty things about celebrities huckstering Nestle products. We have to remember, cancel culture targets people who are un-fireable, thus giving them a victim status that results in NYT op eds and cocktail party chatter) The boycott, especially in the U.S., started catching on – or at least the rhetoric directed against Nestle. Chamayou went through the archives of the people who were hired to undo the damage. It is there he found many communications about the need for dialogue – not dialogue involving third world women giving their kids corrupted baby formula, of course, but dialogue with “respectable” leaders of the boycott, or at least names in the liberal humanitarian set, that would have the strategic effect of creating respectability for those willing to “compromise”, and thus making those who weren’t seem like extremists who had … refused dialogue! Things go swimmingly, dialogue becomes a value in itself, which is always a good thing, as it allowed Nestle to go on selling its products while giving it the seal of approval of dialogue partners.

Transpose this to 2019, when Macron went on a “listening” tour in response to the Gilets Jaunes, and one finds the same thing – the need for “dialogue”, the finding of venues in which the dialogue would be managed the right way, Macron’s creating an image of a leader who listens, etc.

Cynicism only goes so far, however. Here one must supplement Chamayou with the invaluable essay by Erwin Goffman. Cooling the Mark out, from 1952. The problem with the boycotters, dissidents, unemployed disgruntled and dirty masses is that they might feel used. And this, of course, is the problem with marks in a confidence game. Ideally, they will not see through the game, and thus the con men can take to the road, trusting that they will not be caught.

“Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators' point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team﷓mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.”

As we all know, the coolers of the mark have an institutional position: they are, collectively, the establishment press. And that is their main job – to cool out the marks who bear, in their wounded lives, the impress of the organized con game that is politics in the era of democracy’s decline. In Macron’s case, there was an impressive array of coolers – from Le Monde to Figaro, from BMTV to Le Causeur. But the problem, for Macronia, is that the coolers themselves have interests. It might be in their interest – as it is in the interest of the owner of BMTV – to crown Zemour king. It might be that they can’t persuade their journalists to keep going along. Liberation, for instance, has moved away from Serge July’s neo-liberalism by sheer self-interest – July’s generation isn’t going to buy the rag, and the journalists who write for it just can’t stomach the sheer idiocy anymore – unless of course they can secure rich gigs with Institut Montaigne.

So, France is going through the era of cooling the mark out, and the bumps are going to be wild.

conversion stories

 All we know is that there are feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to recrystalize about it.”

If an angel took off the roofs of our American minimansions and suburban 3br 2 ba houses, she would find a museum of relicts left by once hot ideas and now dead interests: the wok in the kitchen, the dusty musical instruments in the kids’ rooms, the old magazines in boxes in the garage, a stray paddle from the white water rafting phase, etc. Where, exactly, is the enduring center, around which life crystalizes?

This is the problem posed by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Conversion is the name of the central chapter in that book, for good reason. It was a problem handed down by the puritans. It was a basic American narrative. It is at the existential heart of liberalism, even if liberals don’t know it.

 
One of the great words among the chattering and political class is “adult”. The great unwashed, the demos, may be “children”, but the elite class – the class that, broadly, embodies liberalism, in its present neo-lib varieties – pictures themselves as adult, a term that allows them, as well, to credit themselves with a youth they have sloughed off.

The opponents or contraries of adults are, of course, kids, teens. And this is no accident. James is very struck by the work of an American sociologist named Starbuck (a truly Melvillian name) who studied teens and religion. From his data, James draws certain conclusions: “The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same, - a sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection and a sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter, distress over doubts and the like.”

For good reason, Jesus said: Verily, I say unto you, if you are not converted and become as little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
In the long liberal culture of adults, not entering into the kingdom of heaven, denying its existence, is part of the creed. Between a paradise that is essentially lost and a kingdom of heaven that is delusive, liberalism proposes an eternal in media res. At the same time, the society in which liberalism became possible was the same society that, through family household configurations, love marriages, and schooling created a youth culture – extruded from the world of work, but be-blinged with every consumer good. While age is affixed like a snitch jacket to the “adults”, all good things have shifted to the aura of youth. The culture of the aged – the sage – has been flushed down the toilet. The kingdom of heaven, now, is celebrity-hood – the fifteen minute kind, the courtroom kind, theInstagram influencer kind, and so on real world without end.

 
Among American conservatives, conversion is part of the everyday lingo – as it is not among the American liberals. The pathos of the American liberal is that he is always seeking the liberal under the conservative guise. What is your solution to poverty? What is your plan for health care? When of course under the conservative guise is a convert, who doesn’t think poverty is a problem but a judgment. Although certain conservatives, who tend to the libertarian side, speak of “solutions”, this is not the lingo of the brethren. Meanwhile, conservatives seek the conversion among the liberals. Surely they are secretly converted to something? Communism, pedophilia, something. The idea that, for liberals, conversion is a blank just doesn’t compute. And in fact liberals do, perhaps, worry about that blank themselves. To have no conversion moment, to regard existence as a perpetually in-between state of drift, is a curiously nihilistic attitude to found liberalism on.

 
This train of associations goes galumphing though my head every time I read a NYT article that analyses puzzles, like “why is the GOP audience not as shocked and moved by the Trump insurrection as we, who know the facts and are the adults, are?” Liberals seem incapable of turning such things into conversion moments – heavens, that would mean demagoguery and populism! Style, sometimes, is substance. Any convert knows this. 

Function dysfunction

 

In the 1920s, left-leaning writers in Germany became enamoured of questions like: what is the function of art? What is the function of poetry? What is the function of the novel? Und so weiter. These questions were echoed in the Cold War period, and you still see the phrase “the social function of the novel” or the like in criticism.

Which leads to the question, naturally, of the function of ‘function talk’.

When everything has a social function, the underlying image is of society as composed of parts, each of which is programmed to perform for some purpose. As in a machine, the parts have, ideally, one program and one purpose. The gears in a watch are programmed to turn in synch with each other, and not to do the cha cha cha. I just had a problem with my mouse, and I went, as per a helpful Internet site, to the task manager and solved that problem – because my mouse was performing badly: it was dysfunctional.

This view of function has received some dents, however, in the design philosophy that has grown up around affordances. “Affordance” entered the vocabulary of design psychology by way of James J. Gibson, and like so much about design and psychology, it all started in World War II. Gibson worked for the air force, which had numerous questions about pilot to environment interactions. Thus, he was provided with plenty of funding to experiment. For instance, he experimented with the notion that objects become smaller as they become more distant and then disappear. According to Gibson, this confuses “smaller” with “indefinite” – for estimates of the size of the object at increasing distance did not fall under the qualities of smaller or larger, but under the category of ground to figure.  Nice gestaltist terms.

Given what Gibson called the ecological view of perception, we require some ecological view of function. A key sentence in Gibson’s book, The Ecological approach to Visual Perception, rather shatters the mechanistic view of parts and functions: “ I suggest… that what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their qualities.” As Gibson writes, further on, the term “affordance” is one he made up to refer to everything that implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. That means that perception, rather than translating immediately into a physical language of qualities, is immediately relative to the animal itself.  The physical world is first what it affords, for the animal.

To get back to our topic: in the view of the world expressed by the functional vocabulary, the program of, say, the novel is set by a positivist technology in which we have the epic, the novel, the film, the tv series, etc., each one supplanting the other. This is how critics have sometimes maintained that tv series have taken over the function of the novel. In fact, this view of the novel, in the U.S., was deeply embedded in the self-identification of novelists in the 50s through the 90s, and even now. Mailer, or Updike, or even Jonathan Franzen, in this ideology, write novels to capture something about America.

But, as many technological historians have pointed out, the idea of artifices that have one function supplanting each other in sophistication only works for some artifices, not for others. The bicycle did not die out with the advent of the automobile – although the horse and carriage did. The bicycle, the motorcycle, even, now, the motorized scooter all flourish. Television, despite my conviction that the computer would replace it, simply incorporated computer features. Poetry, far from being a dying art, is – if we look at songs as poems, which we should – one of the most flourishing of all arts. In combination with the radio and the car, poetry to a leap to a new niche. Similarly, in combination with audio technology, novels are now being read, in recording, to millions of drivers – thus, oddly, regaining a certain oral affordance novels used to have in cigar factories, when a person with the position of reader, a lector, read novels to occupy the hearing of cigar rollers. Although cars don’t “ “contain” bicycles, they contain an equivalent to the chain and the gearing that make bicycles work. Similarly, though tv series and movies don’t “contain” novels, they contain scripts that often come from novels. Walter Benjamin, that endless searcher, found this bit in his essay on Eduard Fuchs which I hold close to my heart:

“When the 1848 Revolution came, Dumas published an appeal to the workers of Paris in which he presented himself to them as one of their own. In twenty years, he had made 400 novels and 35 plays: he had been the source of the daily bread of 8,160 people.”

Dumas, in the end, lost, but his accounting – which encompassed the newspapers in which his stories were serialized, the printing presses that published them, the venders that sold them, the bookbinders and etc – and could have included the operas and plays made of them – gives us the very air of art, which is squeezed to death in an inventory of social “functions” that picks out and individualizes the “aesthetic.”

Function, function, what’s your junction, indeed. I’d prefer, in ongoing discussions of the function of art, that the word be spelled with a “k” – the funk-tion of art – because however scientific and engineering like the word function sounds, it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of affordances that you find in any playground, office or apartment.

Rue Perdue

 

 

Pierre Michon is not well known as a writer in the Anglophone world, but in France he holds a position of high regard, in disproportion to the pages he has produced for publication – he favours the small enterprise.  His first book, Vies Miniscules, packs it in at 248 pages in the Folio edition. It is his longest book. His collected works would surely amount to around 500 pages. He’s been writing for forty years.

I’ve just finished Les Onze, a novel he wrote in 2009. The book presents itself as a cross between a biography and  an essay on François-Elie Corentin and his painting of the eleven member Committee on Public Safety from 1794, on the eve of Robespierre’s downfall. It is a painting that shocked Michelet with the brutality of the painter’s unmasking of its spectral crewe of terrorists, terrorists in a good cause, as they considered it; which is why he devoted 12 pages to it in his History of the French Revolution. The painting anoints a special room in the Louvre.

As those who have read around the book, or have searched in Michelet, or have gone to the Louvre know, Michon’s book is fiction as hoax. There is no Corentin, nor painting, nor passage about the painting in Michelet. These facts would be spoilers for another novel, but the quality of Michon’s novel does not rest on the prank of the fiction. It reminds me, a bit, of Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch – I detect in Michon an under-the-text dialogue with one of  Calasso’s leading themes, expressed by quotes taken by Calasso from Tallyrand’s memoirs: that the temper of the ancien regime was characterized by a sweetness that disappeared after the revolution. Calasso takes the lack of this sweetness to be of the sacrificial essence of the modern: “History after the French revolution is the history of progress devoid of the patina of douceur.”

Michon’s reply is to point out that douceur was labor – the labor of slaves. Literally, the sugar in the coffee cups and chocolate of the ancien regime nobility and upper bourgeoisie was the product of a slave regime that killed, by most accounts, something like 500,000 blacks in the making of the prosperity of Saint-Domingue – Haiti – and by consequence France  in the 18^th century.  Michon sees the servitude that went into making all good things, all the sweet things, that abounded before the Revolution. The terror of before and the terror of the Revolutionary moment are bound up with each other, under the patina of sweetness. Michon even chooses Tiepelo – a painter Calasso has written about – as his emblem of this sour sweetness:

« Thus when from Combleux to Orléans holding hands with his [Corentin’s] mother  they went to rejoin some small evening sponsored by a little literary salon, the young girl had before her eyes the emblem of desire and of her satisfaction, the canal with all the sky reflected in it ; and underneath, the invisible foundations, that is, two generations of earth moving laborers and masons from Limoges who had a kind of life before falling from the scaffolds or being sucked into the mud of the Loire and vanishing without remains, some kinds of joy in the form of quasi-vinaigre candies and of switchblades, a kind of wife that they saw two months of the year out of the twelve in Limousin, the two months of black winter, of whom, under their black shapeless robes they never saw the nude body, but only blindly in stinking common rooms where all the family slept very discretely in the full of night unpantsed, did their duties, and impregnated, and from this exploit  pulled out a kind of children destined in their turn to be the blacks of America ten months out of twelve (all of this, Sir, note it well, in the era of the sweetness of life, at the same hour that Tiepelo or another at the height of some scaffolding, at the summit even of what used to be called Man, painted the most beautiful and light things that have ever been painted – for nothing comes from nothing, and God is a dog).”

Michon’s use of a fictional painting from a fictional painter to illuminate, darkly, the French revolution is fascinating to me, concerned as I am with producing vitae of Cold War men. As well, I began thinking about the many, many portraits and paintings from the 18^th century that are displayed, beautifully, in the Carnavelet Museum – just a block from where I live. Which produced an idle search on my part, resulting in my discovery of the story of Zamor. A true story – if that is not an oxymoron.

2.

Zamor appears in a painting by Jean-Baptiste-André Gautier d’Agoty bringing a cup of chocolate to his “owner”, Madame or Comtesse du Barry. In the Carnavelet, there is an anonymous portrait of a young black man wearing a fantastic headress, a sort of reddish turban with a string of pearls running along the hem of it. This, it is speculated, is Zamor. The painter remains unknown.

In the Goncourt brothers’ book on Du Barry: “Nothing was lacking in the enchanted palace [that Louis XV gave Du Barry]. There was even, as in a fairy tale painted by Veronese, a little black boy [negrillon – you translate that one], something like a human chimera.”

So many chimeras! Zamor is painted as an African. And he is so named in various documents. But in fact, if there is a fact of the matter, Zamor was not born in Africa. He was born in Bengal. He was captured, young, by slavers and sold in a mart in Madagascar. Or so much is speculated. Speculation engulfs the whole backstory, not only of Zamor but of Madame du Barry, whose appearance at the court of Louis XV as a sort of bait to satisfy his satyriasis has many stories to explain it. In one, Louis’s mistress, Madame Pompidour, recruited the girl as a means of retaining her standing with the king.  In other versions, the enemies of Louis XV’s minister, Choiseul (the minister who exercised, in Michelet’s words, a tyranny over the King) found the girl in the famous brothel of Marguerite Gourdan and pimped her out to the King. This is the version reprinted often in scurrilous pamphlets of the time, funded, often, by the Choiseul clique, and picked up as the real right thing by the Goncourts in their apartment in Napoleon III’s Paris, a Paris in which the idea of a grande horizontale devouring the wealth of France was not at all implausible – see the ending of Zola’s Nana for details. The Goncourts had a nice eye for the emblematic anecdote, such as the one related by a source to  Horace Walpole, the man with the most malicious ears in the 18^th century, the author of that gothic sweet and sour, the Castle of Otranto:

“One day she [the Comtesse du Barry] drank from the punch bowl scoop, which she then replaced in the bowl, for which the King reproached her for “giving everyone her spit to drink”. She responded, “Well, I want everyone to drink my spit.””

That, from the revolutionary point of view, contains an image of the ancien regime that no patina of sweetness can save. The savour of Du Barry’s spit was, metaphorically,  distributed throughout France, a little bit in the daily gruel.

3.

These punchbowl occasions: surely Michon, doing his research for his novel, read the historians who closely fastened on the paintings and drawings of, for instance, the parties at Du Barry’s residence in Louveciennes. The nineteenth century historian Charles Vatel wrote a three volume work containing a rejoinder to the scandalous image of Du Barry exploited by the Goncourt brothers, working with the abundant material left behind by journalists doubling as police spies and police spies doubling as journalists which makes the late eighteenth century in France such an historically crowded space.  Correspondence is everywhere, everyone has some behind the scenes management to take care of.

In this mix, the little Negro,  Zamor, serves as a rococo ornament. Du Barry, disregarding any religion he may have had, in the same way she would have disregarded the religion passed down from some pedigree bitch to her puppies, if she had known about it, has him baptized – the certificate still exists that shows “this year 1772, on July 4, Louis-Benoit Zemor, negro attached to Mme le Comtesse du Barry, around ten years of age, was baptised under our signature…”

Vatel explains Zamor like this:

“Zamor was not a negro properly speaking. He was a man of color, born in India, in Bengal. Tradition holds that he was carried to France by an English captain. What makes this credible is that his name was pronounced in the English manner: Zemor. It is written like that in the oldest memoirs of Carlier, the dressmaker of madame du Barry, and this pronunciation is still that of the old inhabitants of Louveciennes, owners of the room when he lived near the castle. He’d been taken at four years old from his family.”

The slave trade was etched in the global economy of the time – and isn’t every era of globalization also an era of cheap flows of labor, free or unfree? How a Bengali boy became the “negro boy” attached to the mistress of the King of France, herself a product of a social mobility that depended on the flesh and the main chance, is in itself an anecdote that pulses with the dialectical image it could become. That, in a way, it does become, for the meeting of Comtesse du Barry and Louis-Benoit Zamor ends, at least for her side, on a note that seems like a sketch for a play by Genet, or a story from Kleist: a narrative about role reversal.

Vatel gives an abbreviated vita of Zamor in a paragraph concerning Zamor’s age that cuts grandly to the chase: “When Zamor appeared as a witness before the revolutionary tribunal in the trial of madame du Barry, 7 December, 1793, he declared that he was 31 years old and had been born in Bengal. Subtracting 31 from 1793, one finds 1762… When he died on 7 February 1829, the certificate of death put his age at 58 years. “ Zamor, in this chronology, goes from baptism to witness to nondescript just as he did in life. For Comtesse du Barry, in 1772, Zamor was undoubtedly just a doll.  In 1792, however, the Comtesse du Barry has lost all her value as a former mistress of a former King – a woman to be left with her palace and her jewelry by that King’s son, Louis XVI, and that son’s wife, Marie Antoinette, who did not much care for her. She had literally lost her fortune in jewels. Or, as the story is told, she had literally hired a thief to steal those jewels, and had made several trips to London to oversee her investments. One of her purchases, in one of her visits to London to visit her jewelry, was the French translation of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. One wonders what she made of it.

It was in 1793 that Zamor makes his reappearance in the record, in conjunction with a revolutionary adventurer named George Grieve. An Englishman, a self proclaimed friend of both Benjamin Franklin – Grieve had been across the Atlantic – and of Marat. Grieve called himself a “fractionist and anarchist of the first order, disorganizer of despotism in two hemispheres” in some pamphlet. This is not Tom Paine, this is not the age of Reason: it is a hint of that romantic glee which went into De Quincey’s Murder as one of the Fine Arts and the monologues of Poe’s murderers – a glee that also ran through Hebert’s obscenities in his newspaper, Le Père Duchesne, where the word “fuck” crawled out from the mauvaises livres of the Paris police list and became a shock tactic to devalue the aristocracy, to degrade it utterly as a form of human life; a good play in 1792-3, but a bad one in Germinal, 1794, when Hebert was himself guillotined.

When Grieve shows up in Louvenciennes, in 1793, he did so as a hunter. The private dick, the scandalmonger, the police spy who hunts for victims – this was the bubble in which Grieve moved. Madame du Barry must have noticed. When Grieve arrived in her territory, she was still in London. She had every reason not to return, but return she did. It was to a different Louvenciennes. Her house was sealed up.  Grieve had made acquaintances, gathered tips, compiled a dossier. Among his informants was Zamor.

It would suit the story, it would fulfil the logic of revolutionary glee, to tell it this way: Zamor, humiliated by his position in the household, by du Barry’s domination, turns the tables, tells Grieve and the Revolutionary Tribunal that citoyenne Barry is an out and out counter-revolutionary agent, and thus serves to send her to her death. But this inversion, it turns out, is too easy. Zamor is, for instance, himself imprisoned. His testimony is not about an aristocratic Nana sucking the lifeblood of France, but of a woman who refuses to listen to him when he cautions her not to be so openly contemptuous of the revolution. Vatel notices the nuance: “Observe that madame du Barry fingers Grieve as the author of the persecution of which she complains. She does not speak nominatively of Zamor. It is, however, the latter that the clamour of the public has designated up until this day as the denunciator of his benefactor. He had no doubt done wrong to join the chorus of her persecutors, to testify against her. But it is not true that he was the principle author of what Madame du Berry called her “sad case” before the tribunal.”

At the trial: “The witness Zamor declares that many times he had represented to the accused Dubarry that she welcomed aristocrats, representations to which she did not deign to respond.” Is the scenario one of the servant who feels his power in reproaching his mistress for her company, or one in which the servant advises his mistress that she is playing with fire? Certainly Zamor could have turned her in long before Grieve came on the scene. Zamor, however, was not going to lose his head for his Godmother.

 

4.

The sad case ended badly, as she must have known it would.

“On 18 frimaire of Year 2 of the French Republic, one and indivisible, the person named Jeanne Vaubernier, wife of du Barry, Jean-Bpatiste Vendenyver, Edmond-Jean-Baptiste, etc., and so imprisoned, was extracted from the house of justice, in virtue of the judgment rendered by the Revolutionary tribunal, dated yesterday, of which those named above where submitted to the pain of death on the place of the Revolution, in the presence of ourselves, court ushers of said Tribunal, undersigned: Deguaigne.”

And this is the account in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1793:

“In the evening she was conveyed in a cart to the place de la Revolution; her behavior was by no means firm. The executioner was under the neceissity of supporting her in his arms during the whole way. When she arrived at the front of the scaffold,d the two assistants of the executioner were obliged to lift her upon it. When they were on the point of fastening her to the plank, she exerted her strength and ran to the other side of the scaffold; she was soon brought back and died: her head was immediately struck off.”

Madame du Barry’s modern biographers are unworthy of her, and of the sublimity of that last gesture. They have woven a romance around her life, are always telling the reader about the “rougish” look in her eyes when she was a girl, and defending her against old scurrilities, and in general pimping her out in some Disney dream of whoring in the palace, a living paperback Harlequin cover. The royalists, whose internet sites abound, also make her out to be a romantic figure, but have much less use for her than her rival, the sainted Marie Antoinette. The inheritors of the revolutionary torch, back in the nineteenth century, took a harsher line. This is Louis Blanc, a little inexact, in his history of the Revolution: “The guillotine awaited a less noble victim: the 27 frimaire (17 December), madame du Barry expiated under the hands of the executioner the debasing splendors of her past fortune.”

Zamor survived his brush with 18, or was it 27 Frimaire, Year 2. Charles Vatel, who sought out the descendants of the owners of the house in the room he rented in Louveciennes so as to taste the pronunciation of his name, sought out, as well, the after-revolutionary life of the man who was in one narrative arc a good and faithful servant (“agent of the courtesan Dubarry”), or, in the other, the  bad and disloyal (or good patriotic citizen) betrayor. In Year 2, the Bengali was hustled through the prison system, first in Paris, then in Versailles, where the local Committee on Public Safety wrote a note, urging either his release – if there was no proof against him – or a prompt punishment, if there were. It was at this point that George Greive wrote a letter to the judge in Versailles, touching the right notes: Zamor was a “child of nature”, a true “student of the immortal Jean-Jacques”: “this interesting being who, torn from the arms of his family at the age of four and brought to Europe to serve as a toy for the vile mistress of a crapulous tyrant” had been subject to enough indignities. Was the revolution not made for such as him? Greive’s letter produces the strange impression that the citoyenne dubarry was the kind of monster who could see telescopically, from her perch in Louis XV’s infamous Parc-aux-Cerfs, all the way to Bengal, and spotted just the toy for slavers to bring her – a wicked witch indeed. By your cartoon you shall be judged.

Shall we attribute to Greive a moment of loyalty and fellow feeling? Or was this letter part of a machine to save himself – for after all, if Zamor was an agent of Dubarry, perhaps the black spot would fall on Greive himself. He’d seen similar things happen – he’d made similar things happen.

Whosoever diggeth a pit/shall fall in it, shall fall in it.

On 24 Pluviose Year II Zamor was set at liberty. Set at liberty, and delivered to rumor and oblivion. An oblivion that was officially interrupted on 7 February, 1820, when the Justice of the Peace was called to inventory the property of a single man who had died  at 9, Rue Perdue. Charles Vatel is proud of picking up this discovery, which he attributed to the genealogical  work of two compilers of official documents on Paris, Picque and Manigot. The single man was Louis-Benoit Zamor. Vatel went looking for any surviving witnesses to Zamor’s final years, but he immediately encountered the difficulty that Rue Perdue – literally Lost Street – had been, itself, lost in Haussman’s Paris, at least according to current maps. “The heart of a city changes, alas, more than the heart of a mortal” – as a poet of Vatel’s day once wrote. However, much like a detective, Vatel compared maps, old and new, until he found where Rue Perdue had been – and, it turned out, still was. Number 9 still existed, although now as number 13. Vatel went to find Zamor’s last abode. Paris is a city in which every address is at the intersection of antiquarianism and poetry – if you have the channeler's gift for conjuring spirits. Vatel was evidently of that kind. He was lucky enough to stumble upon an old dame, Madame LeJeune, born Poullain-Dubois, 82 years old on that spring day in 1875 when Vatel interviewed her – her and her sister, who was also an old woman – and in so doing catching an old, rare echo of the ancien regime and its overthrow.

Madame LeJeune was around 20 years old when Zamor rented an apartment from her parents – around, she estimated, 1815 or 1816. Her mother inquired about her renter from others in the neighborhood, where it turned out that the story of Madame du Barry's end was well known. She found out as well, according to her daughters, what happened after Zamor fell out of the records of the Committee of Safety in Versailles. After getting out of prison, Zamor apparently had money from some source, perhaps a thin trickle of the fabulous Dubarry wealth, to live on, but then he fell in love with a woman who owned a fabric shop. “He placed all he had in her hands, and she lost it.” Thus, Zamor was forced to live on his wits, as a private tutor. Madame LeJeune remembered that he was a bad one: too much the disciplinarian, too much slapping his students when the came out with the wrong answers, a habit that caused parents to cease patronizing him.

“He spoke little, especially little of the past. When he had to explain himself, he did so in bitter words against the great lords, against Madame du Barry; he said that, if she had hosted and educated him, it was to make him a toy, that she allowed him to be humiliated before her, that he was always the butt of jokes and insulting mockery by the people of the court. He conserved a sentiment of hatred against the ancient regime. He spoke the language of the men of the Revolution. He had images of them in his room, Robespierre, Marat and the others; it was chiefly Marat that he liked.”

It was to this room that the justice of the peace came, to sort through the papers, search for any cash – which would go to his debtors and the rest to the state – and to find someone who could be charged with his burial. But there was no-one: “He was carried directly to the cemetery without passing through the church.”

A man who spoke the language of the Revolution, in a quartier of Paris where the sentiment of the little people, the modest owners of boarding houses and small shops, was, if not reactionary, at least resigned to the prevailing mood of the Restoration. What is one to do, after all, with the bric-a-brac of Madame du Barry’s negro godson? His papers, the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, shored not so much against his ruin but in the hopes of some future ruin of the state?

 “The justice of the peace and the police commissioner left us the portraits of Robespierre, Marat and the others, but as they had no value and were forbidden, at that time, so my father burned them right away.”

“As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester -- and this is my last jest."

Tocqueville and Gobineau

 

Il y a un monde intellectuel entre votre doctrine et la mienne - Tocqueville to Gobineau

When I was a child in the suburb of Atlanta, I was effected in particular by two books. One was the Bible, and one was the Encyclopedia Britannica – the latter, in the 1911 edition, arriving at our house as a gift from the retired woman across the street, whose husband, a doctor, had bought it. From those two books I evolved a question. I remember it popping into my mind as I was bouncing a basketball on the driveway: why didn’t Jesus discover gravity?

A silly question, but as good a place as any to start understanding universal history.

Which brings me by a commodious vicus of recirculation, as the man says, to the correspondence between Arthur Gobineau and Alexis Tocqueville concerning the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, sent by the former to the latter. Tocqueville and Gobineau were friends long before Gobineau’s book was written; although the elder, Gobineau had been Tocqueville’s research assistant for the latter’s history of the ancien regime. Most of their correspondence was published 1907, although the editors deleted certain parts – for instance, Tocqueville’s confession that he was an agnostic. It is by the prudery of editors that posterity is shaped.

As to the question of Jesus Christ and Isaac Newton, translated into another register: Tocqueville quickly seized on the main thesis of Gobineau’s system, and presents it with admirable clarity:

“Thus, you speak endlessly of races regenerating or deteriorating, which take on or quit social capacities that they did not have by an infusion of different blood ; I believe that these are your own words. I must declare that this predestination appears to me a cousin of pure materialism. Believe me that if the crowd,  which follows the great paths blazed by reasoning, admitted your doctrine, they would go immediately from the race to the individual and from social faculties to all faculties whatsoever.  It makes little difference, from my point of view, which is that of the practical consequence of different philosophical doctrines, if, the fatality is directly implanted into certain organisations of matter or it is the will of God who wanted to make many species of humans in the human genus and then impose on certain humans the obligation, in virtue of the race to which they belong, not to have certain sentiments, certain thoughts, certain behaviors, certain qualities that they will know about without being able to acquire them. The two theories result in a great restriction, if not to say complete abolition of human liberty. Thus, I confess to you that after having read you this time, as well as before, I remain situation at the extreme opposite of these doctrines. I believe they are probably false and certainly very pernicious.”

I think Tocqueville is very smart to grasp the essence of the theory of racism, or the inequality of races: that it naturally poisons the relationship between different kinds of humans who are nevertheless grouped together as humans. Either it is true, and thus the superior individual owes everything to the race, and denies every part of the superiority to the inferior, while the inferior is aware, at every moment, of thoughts, sentiment and behaviors that she is materially denied – or it is untrue, and it introduces the most pernicious conflict and apology for conflict between “races”. Morally, both parts of this are bad. But, as Tocqueville says, as natural history this idea is founded on a myth of ancient purity that nothing shows us ever existed.

“When it is a question of human families which differ among each other in a deep and permanent manner by their exterior aspect, we could perhaps recognize different distinctive traits during the course of time and go back to a sort of different creation. The doctrine, in my opinion, would without being certain becomes at least less improbable and easier to establish. But when we put ourselves in the middle of one of those great families, say, that of the white race for instance, the thread of our reasoning disappears and escapes us a each step. What is more uncertain in the world whatever we do than the question of knowing by history or tradition when, how and in what proportions humans are mixed, who retain no visible trace of their origin?”

Indeed, Tocqueville’s curious conservative liberalism seems to prefigure the arguments made in a book that came out about four years before this correspondence was published by the Revue des Deux Mondes: The Souls of Black Folks.  

Tocqueville’s liberalism was founded not on some ideal picture of the human, some existential model, but on the fact that humans are always within some circumstance. He always brought philosophical doctrine down to the circumstances in which it was produced, and that it effected. In this way, Tocqueville’s thinking had a very pragmatic strain. Given the attention to circumstances, Tocqueville was anything but color-blind – rather, he was color-aware, he saw the circumstances that had made for the “white race” and its relation to all others. Du Bois observed that the white race was a discovery of the 18^th and 19^thcentury: I think Tocqueville would have agreed. That doesn’t make race any less a social fact. But it makes the social fact of race an object for historical observation.

He who touches this book touches me

 When I went to my freshman American literature class, the first thing I was taught was not to take bits of the author's biography and use them to interpret the text. That used to be the law and the prophets, a discourse full of "fallacies" that only the amateur stumbled into.

But that way of looking at literature was always a chancy construct. The obvious objection to the pure formalist’s notion that biography has nothing to do with the artist’s work is that, indeed, biography provides the unifying link that gives you one distinct level of your units of analysis. We don’t jumble together War and Peace and Sense and Sensibility, on this level, but put Sense and Sensibility in that unit called “Jane Austin’s work” and “War and Peace” in what we call Tolstoy’s work, and so on. To compare “Jane Austin” to “Leo Tolstoy” is to reference these unities.
When we don’t have those unities, in fact, we get worried. We want all of Plato’s works to be by Plato, and Shakespeare’s to be by Shakespeare, and since the mechanism of publication in Plato’s and Shakespeare’s epochs did not color within the lines and give us straightforward attributions, we have scholars mightily working on the sidelines to either purge the units comprising their works or add others to them. Not surprisingly, these scholars refer to … the agreed corpus of Shakespeare’s and Plato’s works to make their arguments.
But what the biography means after we have all agreed that these are the terms of the game is another matter. Some would say that the unity of an artist’s work is different from that of a philosopher or scientist. The unity of Einstein’s work, for instance, is secondary to the universe that it tries to account for. Shakespeare cannot be overthrown by the behavior of real Princes who happen to be in Hamlet’s position, but Einstein can be overthrown if we find evidence that the speed of light is not the fastest thing in the universe. If Einstein actually stole the proof from his wife, it would lower our opinion of Einstein (the stealer!) but not of the theory of general relativity.
Of course, we “find” our proves for science through science. We don’t have any direct oracle from nature. Unless, like Newton, we think that science makes no hypotheses, and the math is just that direct oracle from nature, more direct than any hearing or echolocation. In which case, there is a sense in which there are no authors in science, there are just figures.
But in the social sciences and in philosophy, we don’t have science in that sense. We have Marx, we have Keynes, we have Wittgenstein, we have Heidegger – we have a set of figures who seem, like Tolstoy or Austin, to have an authorial relation to their texts.
The next defense of the formalist is that at least here, we can forget the vices and virtues of the figures and speak of their arguments in the same way that we can speak of the formal characteristics and values that go into building a poem, play, or novel.
This, at least, is one way of building the argument.,

I smell a rat

 

Tocqueville, like Flaubert and Kafka, had a bad case of imposter syndrome – or at least that is how I interpret the writer’s complex. He was always setting out, as a young man, on precisely defined projects in foreign countries – America, Ireland, England - and finding in the midst of them that the definition was too limiting, uninteresting, and just not for him.

Over him towered the example of Chateaubriand, to whom he was related: Tocqueville’s aunt married Chateaubriand’s brother, and as that couple perished in the Revolution, their children were brought up by Tocqueville’s parents. Thus, he very naturally became part of the salon around the Grand Old Man. So he knew how the writer’s role was at the intersection of politics and knowledge, in the broad sense – a kind of science, a kind of art.

There’s a charming letter that Tocqueville wrote to the Comtesse de Grancey (his cousin, another descendent of a family whose members died in some quantity beneath the guillotine) from Ireland in 1835. He explains that he is in Kilkenny – for what purpose, he is rather vague. It all has to do with what an anthropologist would call field work. For Tocqueville, this meant attending trials and talking to judges and lawyers, among others.

“ I came here attracted by the assizes. Not being able, myself, to judge or condemn anyone, I wanted to have the pleasure of seeing how these things are done by others.

Doesn’t this remind you of the fable of the cat who was metamorphosed into a woman, and who was surprised running after rats? For a philosopher like me, there is nothing, besides, more curious than the assizes.”

Tocqueville’s mind was well stocked with the fables of La Fontaine and the stories of Perrault. In this little sentence, something shines out: you are what you hunt. An especially wise maxim for a writer, a tribe known for self-delusion. What you hunt and how you hunt it is all out there, if you know how to look.

2.

In the recent NYRB, there’s a review by Linda Hunt the book on Robespierre by Marcel Gauchet, an author who rather fancies himself a republican in the vein of Tocqueville. Hunt is rather merciful with a book that, as she writes, seems wilfully ignorant of any new scholarship about Robespierre, or maybe any scholarship at all. Gauchet’s thesis is the conservative one: modernism, by which a jumble of events from the French revolution to the rise of the bourgeoisie, was consequent upon the “de-christianization”. Hunt begins the review in the tried and true manner of the Cold War liberals – whose style lingers on:

“Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin), there was Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the French Revolution during the period in 1793–1794 known as the Terror.”

Imagine writing: “Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin) there was Thomas Jefferson…” Or, William Pitt, or Toussaint L’ouverture, etc. In Jefferson’s case, the affinities with Hitler – an entire world view shaped by racism and the need for Lebensraum, to the point of supporting ethno-cide – is pretty clear. But the stupidity of the list is really marked by the parentheses “(and Putin)”, elevating Putin to the heady company of the great murderers, when in actuality he is still well below George Bush in murderous effect. It is by such means that Cold War liberalism became the undertaker of its own principles, since if Robespierre (and Putin) equal Stalin and Hitler, the crimes of Stalin and Hitler are normalized, diminished, and whitewashed.

In any case, Hunt’s review gets better after its first sentence. And she coops Gauchet’s most sweeping thesis in a useful paragraph:

“Modern democracies, he maintains, emerged as the religious foundations of collective existence crumbled; religion did not disappear, of course, but it no longer provided the crucial legitimation for the political and social order. Modern democracies therefore face the challenge of explaining to the citizenry what holds society together in the absence of any transcendental justification.”

This strikes me as a pretty shaky thesis, although it is pretty commonplace. It depends on a sort of collective, qualitative erosion: the religious foundations “crumble” – somewhere. In the minds of the intellectuals? Of the educated class, the governors? In the ordinary life of the people? And this, too, assumes something called the “religious foundations.” While it is true that in France, in contrast to Britain (which emerged from the Puritan revolution with a closer tie to religious institutions in the ordinary life of the masses), de-Christianization as marked by the increasing disuse of Christian rituals has been closely traced by historians like Michel Voyelle, who used testaments, which classically contained a “spiritual” passage, to track the decline of Christian authority in the 18th century, it is a bit too facile to take this decline as a proof of some great skepticism concerning “transcendental justification”; it could as well be the parallel to a legitimation crisis striking the idea that certain families were proxies for and entitled to rule the state, or region, etc. Herzen, in the 19th century, derided the Russian royal family for believing that Russia was defined by a family – the family of the czar. These families – in England with Henry VIII, in France with Louis XIV, in Russia with Peter the Great – succeeded in throwing off supposedly rooted forms of religious practice in favor of others – which to my mind points to the practical foundation of what holds society together, which is the power of some established elite.

I’m not sure that many people need a transcendental justification for what holds society together. However, I am sure that some do. And this might have something to do with the story of the French Revolution. I’ve been reading Michon’s novel, The Eleven, recently. The novel centers on a painting of the Commission of Public Safety – Robespierre, St. Just, Barrere, etc. – painted by Corentin. There is no real painting named The Eleven, and no real painter named Corentin: like Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot, Michon is using a fake vita as the form in which to put his story – and his quasi thesis, which is that the French Revolutionary leadership contained an awful lot of would be authors. Literature, as his narrator puts it, was taking the place of religion. Religion, here, is much more expressly the kind of thing that happens when people pay tithes, go to church, and are preached to and directed by minions of the church, priests and such. Michon is most concerned with literature as we informally know it – but for me, literature is an effect of media, and it is media that is truly working as the underground mole against the ancien regime. In France in 1789, in other places like Russia in 1917… As Thomas Mann once put it, the ancien regime ended in 1914, not 1789. It was not a transcendental justification, but the formation of the time zone of the contemporaneous – a “we” in time – that, to my mind, defines society among its members.

Which gets us back to the cat, the woman and the rat – for doesn’t this demonstrate how what you hunt and how you hunt it defines who you are – what woman you are – under appearances? To me, the rat is not the transcendental justification of the social at all. And when somebody else’s rat is put in those terms…

I smell a rat.

is #metoo still the deal?

 Supposedly, #metoo is dead, and so is lean-in.

Supposedly, the Depp-Heard trial shows how dead #metoo is. And Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Facebook helps us measure the shelf-life of a book about breaking the glass ceiling, or something.
Lean-in was always a prop to patriarchy. I don’t think this has to be the case with #metoo, which was not about celebrities and CEOs, but rather started among the obscure depths of the media and publishing – among an educated class that has long been proletarianized, but in the nicest freelancy kind of way, with the college debt to prove it.

I myself am still an ardent intersectionalist, and from that perspective, #metoo is not dead. #Metoo is, properly, the preliminary to a strike. It is interesting that the same level in the media in which #metoo was generated is a hotbed, at the moment, of unionbuilding. These are connected phenomena. In the movie and tv industry, the #metoo spotlight was more on famous women being raped, bullied and sexually abused by famous men. I have heard less about unionization in an industry in which company unions, guilds, still have great power, and in which the star system warps our usual notions of work and exploitation. However, as the halfassed “reforms” to the system in response to #metoo refuse to touch on the systematic subordination of women in the industry, I think there is a future for #metoo – a future that will last as long as the abusive system is in place.

The Depp-Heard trial is a satyr play, of course, following the end of Roe; sexism, racism, and the war against the working class all hand in hand, chanting their usual reddit ditties. But don’t believe the hype, the early surrenderers. They have their deal, but it is not mine, nor necessarily yours.