on the Adam's Apple

 Although the “body” long ago became an intangible asset of academic study, certain body parts lag behind in the race for recognition Who, for instance, has written a definitive study of the Adam’s Apple? I went to Ebsco, naturally, for the latest gender scholarship, but was disappointed. Aside from an article in something called Pastoral Psychology, the Adam’s apple article that was the longest was, actually, about the apple in Eden that was depicted in Jan van Eyck’s painting of Adam and Eve.

Thomas Browne, in the Seventh book of Pseudodoxia epidemica, devotes a chapter to the inquiry into what fruit, exactly, hung from the tree of good and evil. He goes through the responses of scholars, and even inquires into why, in the Bible, sometime a detail is given, sometimes it is withdrawn – an inquiry pursued in different texts some four hundred years later by Roland Barthes. However, Browne is not a disturber of the critical peace, but bids us be content with outlines and the general moral : “Since thereafter after this fruit curiosity fruitlessely enquireth, and confidence blindly determineth, we shall surcease our Inquisition, rather troubled that it was tasted, then troubling our sevles in its decision; this only we observe, when things are left uncertain men will assure them by determination; which is not only verified concerning the fruit, but the Serpent that perswaded…”

This indetermination of the fruit is curiously suited to the Adam’s apple, in my memory. I don’t hear in memory’s ear my childish piping – at thirteen, I vaguely remember, the voice broke. An excellent word, broke. There are boys whose voices break and heal with amazing swiftness, so that the lower pitch is suddenly coming out of their mouths like it was always at home there. In my memory, one of the characteristic of bullies is that the deep voice comes naturally. Characteristic of victims is that the voice gets caught in the break, and chirps away, as though in a trap, in every sentence. Myself, I was in the middle range – my voice, a sort of whiny, nasal thing with Southern hints, grew in my mouth until it was what I called my voice. It should be noted, the idea of my voice, of one’s voice, is laughable – the voice is a family tree, a sponge that takes in geographical region, class subgroup, etc. The voice of the freak, for instance, in highschool in Atlanta in the seventies was a high school phenomenon – it was the very voice of reefer. These voices were, of course, owned, but as pets are owned – they are never thoroughly owned, always in a deep part of themselves wild.

The voice and the Adam’s apple are somehow paired in my mind. There were certain boys who, from the seventh grade on, had large Adam’s apples. And then there was the jock’s throat, which seemed to be a pure slab, a cut of meat.

Although mucho attention is paid to puberty’s netherworkers, the genitals, little is paid to the thyroid cartilage. It appears, to quote a dictionary of sexual differences, “as a secondary male sex characteristic … at puberty when the male larynx enlarges and the male voice cracks just about the time that penis development ends.” The coincidence of Adam’s apple, the voice cracking, and the “end of development” of that marvelous app and lifelong companion, the dick, is quite the whammy. As well, of course, hair starts appearing on the lower face, and you have to learn to shave with that Adam’s apple making for a slalom that you have to navigate with your razor.

It all, I remember, vaguely offended me. I was ready for adulthood at 13, but certainly not adolescence. Although I am reconciled with facial hair and my increasingly gravelly voice, and have no complaints about the marvelous app, the Adam’s apple still slightly perturbs me. In photographs, I try to slightly lower my chin and thus diminish the Adam’s apple’s place. It is, of course, going to accompany me to the end, so one would think that egotism would do its bit and blur my image of it so it doesn’t bug me, but the self imago drags it along. Georges Bataille wrote of the big toe, and its uncomfortable ugliness – which I interpret as a hesitation on his part, as the Adam’s apple would be much more on the inhuman/human spectrum. But it is true that the Adam’s apple has, to my knowledge, no fetishism attached to it. It has, at most, what Bataille called a “valeur burlesque”. However, I would have to insist, contra Bataille, that the Adam’s Apple is certainly “base”, that is, the opposite of the sublime or the high. The body, as one learns at thirteen, is not so easily interpreted by old categories, by the feet and the head, by the old symbols, as one was taught.

The Face at the window

 

I was reading to Adam from our Sherlock Holmes book a couple of nights ago. Adam is at an age that he still allows, and even likes, his Dad to read to him, and I am, of course, a ham actor from forever, so I love trying on accents and the whole dramatic reading shtick. The vaudeville in my soul gets little chance to act out, so I take it when it comes.

We were reading “The Creeping Man.” Adam didn’t see what was so scary about a creeping man, so I had him turn off the lights and I crept on my belly on the floor. He admitted that it could be the slightest bit scary. Then we read about the man looking in the window at his daughter in the middle of the night. Again, Adam objected to this as objectively non-scary. I was tempted to go outside to demonstrate this, but I didn’t. However, we did talk about the “face at the window”.

When I was around nine or ten, I slept in a room in the downstairs of our house on Nielson Court in Clarkston, Georgia. It could get very dark in the downstairs. One of my nightly duties – or perhaps it was simply the habit of the nervous boy I was – was to make sure the back door was locked. I always forgot to check on the back door until I was in my pyjamas and the lights were all turned off. I slept in the same bedroom as my brothers, and so I couldn’t just turn on a light, so I had to creep out of the bedroom, through the rec room to the door and check the lock. Looking back, I can of course see the neurosis in this routine – the forgetting of the task, the turning out the lights, the going to bed, the remembering and the creeping out to do it. Looking back, I think I needed, for one reason or another, to play a game in which I scared myself. At the time, though, my real dread was that there would be a face staring at me through the window on the door.

The image of the face at the window is related, on the one side, to the face behind a mask, and on the other side, to the face as pure, malevolent other. There’s a wonderful scene in The Turn of the Screw which, in a sense, sums up the whole scare of the plot. The governess had been going to church with the old nursemaid, Mrs. Grose, and had gone back inside the house to get something, when she saw a man’s face at the window, staring at her. She of course rushes out and tries to find the man.

“There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just my lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should be scared.”

 

The game of staring through the window – or the way it becomes a game when the governess imitates the man – is a pretty wonderful circuit, something that Lacan should have written about – although God knows, given the infinite number of Seminaires, maybe he did. Between the scariness of the face staring in and the Governess intentionally standing at the place of the man and staring in, something happens – a sort of exorcism that opens the world of the Governess to the possibility of exorcisms.

I didn’t think in this way when I was a brat, creeping out to check the door was locked and trying to avoid seeing the window in the door. But surely the routine of the face at the window had me in its spell. It was intersubjectively scary.

But Adam is nine, and perhaps he doesn’t want his Dad to go on about “intersubjectivity”. I save this for posting on facebook.

 

The city encyclopedia

  If it were possible to print every said in Paris about current affairs in the course of a single day, one would have to concede that it would make a very strange collection. What a pile of contradictions! The very idea is grotesque! – Sebastian Mercier.

The modern idea sometimes leans out at you from an old volume when you least expect it. This becomes a specialty of the modernist writer – Borges, for instance. I was leafing through the Tableau de Paris, Sebastian Mercier’s masterpiece of urban psychogeography, written in the 1780s and 90s, and I came upon this phrase, and I immediately thought of Ulysses, of Flaubert’s Bovard et Pecuchet, of Benjamin’s arcades.  Modernism is inseparable from modernization, and modernization is inseparable from the city. The city as laboratory and assembly line, the city as a hive of opinion and of the various media cultures – image, paper, entertainment and spectacle, etc. This is what James Scott calls the “Great Tradition” – in contrast with the countryside’s “Little Tradition”. Scott, from his ethnographic experience in Southeast Asia, saw how the Great Tradition sends its envoys into the country to destroy and utilize the Little Tradition. Of course, this is bubble gum like any binary: stretch it too much and it will pop right in front of your nose. Still, it has its conceptual uses.

As does that moment when the bubble bursts. Yuri Lotman, in his last book, Culture and Explosion, proposes “explosion” as a model of sudden cultural transition. In the introduction to the book, Peeter Torop, Lotman’s student,  makes an astute comment:

Those caught inside the processes are unable to escape from the space of the explosion, and as insiders are unable to notice all of the possible choices, all possibilities for the future. With the passage of

time, these choices will have been made, or then again left unmade through the suppression of the explosion, after which the post-explosive moment, that is the moment for describing the explosion, will be actualized. The chaos and diversity of communicative processes will become ordered in autocommunicative self-description.

 

I can’t resist thinking of the Cold War in these terms – that is, in terms of operators in the space of the explosion, which they could see but not, as it were, comprehend. To comprehend means having a grasp of the totality, which in the Cold War seemed to have fallen on the shoulders of geeks planning Mutually Assured Destruction. What kind of totality was that? The monumental aspect of it was all about targeting – targeting the cities and factories for planes and missiles, targeting “what is said” in the streets with movies, tv, newspapers and the many and various educational institutions. The novel was one of these institutions – it had its targets while serving, as well, as an instrument of registration. While the city was the necessary substrate of modernization, the system to which it gave rise was the literal destroyer of cities- which are all perched, now, on the edge of the abyss.

That conjunction of the abyss with the great encyclopedia of the city’s talk might have occurred to Mercier, in terms of the cult of ruins. Mercier was between the generation of Diderot (Mercier, too, was in attendance at an operation on a man born blind) and Volney – he was older than the latter by about 16 years. This, too, is a sort of prehension – modernity had its own antiquity, one further back than the Greeks and less classically finished, more savage.

I don't like Mondays

 

In 1969, Combat – a journal of the left – featured a commentary on the upcoming contest between Georges Pompidou. Alain Poher of the Democratic Center, and Jacques Duclos of the French Communist Party. Combat was unenthusiastic about all three candidates. In the event, Duclos took the greatest score ever achieved by a PCF candidate – 21 percent of the vote. And of course Pompidou won over Poher.

Combat, though, was against abstention, which was a choice discussed on the left. The commentary, by Jean Rous, extensively quotes Lenin, who wrote about the two views that must be taken by a communist in relation to elections in bourgeois republics. On the abstract level, Lenin wrote, the differences between two candidates such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in England are “denuded of all meaning” and derisory. But from the practical aspect, the view of the masses, these differences are of extreme importance. Thus, Lenin concluded, one should not abstain or boycott the vote unless all indications show one is on the eve of a revolution.

In 1969, the “sixth power”, revolution by the proletariat, was still an actual force. We are in a reactionary era where revolution has been reduced to a slogan for fashion design. This has made the communist view more and more abstract and less and less practical – as contact with the masses has thinned to the point of evanescence. Thus, communism – or Marxism, or eco-socialism, etc. – becomes a political fantasy, and as such can be indulged to the maximum without consultation with or consideration of the masses. This leads to the unexpected merger of dandyism and leftism.

I am so repulsed by Macron, in this election, that I figured I would abstain, no matter what Lenin had to say about the matter. But I’ve been persuaded that Le Pen is enough of a danger to make that option too risky. From the polls, I’d say Macron’s strategy – which has always been to have Le Pen as his opponent in the second round – has worked. It is a strategy that allows him to operate as if he has a mandate when, in fact, his politics is approved by a minority of the population – probably around the 28 percent he got in the first round. I expect Macron in the second part of his reign to be even shittier than he was as president for the last five years. His comic proposal that his swearing in coincide with a display of military might – a truly Jupiterian and Trumpian gesture – is exactly on tone.

From the practical point of view, we can hope for a large turnout in the legislatives to bridle the man. But the system is set up in such a way that he can proceed down the autocratic path he has set for himself – a sort of centrist Orban – and at the moment, I don’t see a lot of obstacles in his path.

I don't like Mondays..

On leveling the playing field, a metaphor in economics

"Only through the forgetting of this primitive metaphor-world, only through the hardening and rigidifying of the primitive capacities of human fantasy that flowed out originally in a hot stream of images, only through the unbeatable belief, this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in brief only through the fact that man forgets himself as a subject and really as an artfully creative subject, does he live with some rest, certainty and consequence. If he for one moment could escape out of the prison walls of this belief, immediately his self consciousness would be over and done with. Already it costs him some effort to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives a whole other world than humans, and that the question, which of both world perceptions is more correct is a completely senseless one, since here we have to measure with the standard of the correct perception, that is, a standard that is not at hand.” – Nietzsche.

The metaphor-world of economics is never more entangled in its antinomies – like a crippled spider in its own web – than when it comes up against the odd question of the distribution of wealth. The neo-classic mainstream exists, in fact, in a world that it only recognizes as an irritant on the way to the utopian moment when the market absorbs all its children in a heavenly rapture – but if it were entirely blind to the fact that the state, that enemy of the good honest corporation and firm, plays a major role in economics, it would face the danger of being merely comic. The liberal solution to the endless differing of market heaven is that the state exists to create a “level playing field”. Mark Thoma, who runs - or ran, as it is now defunct - the excellent blog, Economist’s View, wrote an article on income inequality that contains a canonical version of this notion:
“I’ve never favored redistributive policies, except to correct distortions in the distribution of income resulting from market failure, political power, bequests and other impediments to fair competition and equal opportunity. I’ve always believed that the best approach is to level the playing field so that everyone has an equal chance. If we can do that – an ideal we are far from presently – then we should accept the outcome as fair. Furthermore, under this approach, people are rewarded according to their contributions, and economic growth is likely to be highest.

But increasingly I am of the view that even if we could level the domestic playing field, it still won’t solve our wage stagnation and inequality problems. Redistribution of income appears to be the only answer.”

                                                                            2.

I've never understood the popularity of this belief in America. It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.
Thus, the whole "equality of opportunity" ideology has never made sense. If it succeeds, it will dissolve itself as those who succeed most make sure that we do not go back to zero, and that our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power.

To not understand the latter fact is to understand nothing about the incentive for acquiring wealth or power. It is as if economists truly believe that billionaires are searching for the next billion to spend it on candy, instead of seeing them as political players building a very traditional structure of status that will allow them the greatest possible scope for exercizing power, including helping their allies and family and injuring their enemies.

My objection here should spell out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is levied, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it wear, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over thought here. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.
As we have discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and so dissolve – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favor. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.
The anti-liberalism of the last thirty or forty years is rooted in this liberal blindspot. On the one hand, the liberal allows his rhetoric to be taken hostage by a pro-forma anti-statism – surely we don’t want the corrupt state to reward the lazy and unscrupulous! Thus, social welfare is presented with a wholly utilitarian justification – it exists solely to help the industrious and the respectable. So the liberal concedes that the protector state is a second best arrangement – and slides easily into bemoaning middle class ‘entitlements’, as if surely the middle class should stand on its own. On the other hand, the state engineered by the liberals does keep growing – it keeps growing because the middle class desperately needs it to maintain their life styles, and it keeps growing because the wealthy use it as a reliable annex to acquire various monopoly powers and as a cheap insurance plan.
What the liberal seemingly can’t acknowledge is that a democratic republic, can only afford the ‘board game’ of private enterprise if the state uses its powers not simply to redistribute or to produce, but to limit – that is, to hedge in and countervail the vested influence of the wealthiest. Thus, the democratic state taxes not only to provide income to the state, or to redistribute money to the less ‘worthy’ – it also does so to materially weaken the wealthiest. Otherwise, the wealthiest will rather quickly take over the state and make a mockery of democracy.
Taxation is the guillotine by other means. Joseph de Maistre once wrote that the compact between god and the state is sealed by the blood shed by the hangman. Wrong about god, de Maistre was certainly right that all social contracts are sealed in blood. No democracy can survive if it forgets this fact.

The ultra right and the politics of gesture

 

Walter Benjamin begins his 1931 essay on German fascism with a quote from one of his favorite reactionary writers:

“Léon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet and himself an important writer, as well as a leader of France’s Royalist party, once gave a report in his Action Française on the Salon d’Automobile – a report that concluded, in perhaps somewhat different words, with the equation: L’automobile, c’est la guerre.”

I’ve looked around for Daudet’s article. I haven’t found it. However, I understand why Benjamin, a collector of lines – of those moments in which thought seems to be utterly transformed into its primal element shock, as though an oracle had spoken – remembered Daudet’s report. It casts a prescient light over the system of which the automobile was as impressive a product as, say, some fossil by which a palaeontologist maps, in shorthand, a geological epoch. The creature that left that fossil was at the convergence of conditions both sheerly geological and evolutionary; the automobile was at the convergence of conditions of production, changes wrought by the industrial system in the habits of the citizens of developed economies, and the underlying, subdued violence that existed as the cost for these changes and these lifestyles. Contrast Daudet’s sentence with the lines in Apollinaire’s Zone, which begins:

“À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l'air d'être anciennes.”

(In the end you are tired of this ancient world
Shepherdess, o Eiffel Tower the troop of bridges bleats this morning
You are finished with living in greek and roman antiquity
Here even the automobiles have an ancient air).

Chasing the pessimistic/reactionary tradition through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century is a rather mixed experience. On the one hand, the reactionary writers are great deliverers of thunderbolts. On the other hand, when they actually make a case for themselves, the eternal return of the ancien regime would require, even in their own eyes, the same kind of massive upheaval of the social order which is exactly their constant accusation against liberalism. In Maistre’s case, the moment of the reactionary revolution is taken care of, in a bizarre way, by Napoleon. Maistre’s opinion that the Bourbons could not re-establish themselves is consistent with seeing Napoleon as fulfilling, unconsciously, the task of creating the social conditions in which the Bourbons can return. But of course, the return of the Bourbons, however sweet was the black terror of the reactionary years from 1815 to 1830, proved in the end to be a disappointment, the gravestone over the ancien regime rather than its glorious resurrection. Even in Maistre, the contrast between mealy mouthed piety and the continuous stream of contempt seems to be doing more than stylistic work – it seems to be a reflection of the politics of resentment, a politics that takes the failure of its goal for granted, and contents itself with an infinite hunt for scapegoats. Leon Daudet was, in a sense, the endpoint of this tradition – marked, more genially, by Chesterton and Belloc in Britain. Daudet’s most famous book, the Stupid Nineteenth Century, begins with a recounting of a quarrel Daudet had with his great friend, the antisemitic pamphleteer, Dumont, over a slap delivered by a rightwing parliamentarian to the head of the division, as Daudet puts it, of ‘sneaks’ during some session of the Chamber of Deputies. The face that received that slap was in its sixties, and Dumont disapproved – much to Daudet’s chagrin. Daudet was for slaps, for riots, for rallying rightwing collegians to storm surrealist openings and the like. In fact, the mixture of gesture and ink was, spiritually, close to the surrealists themselves, who did like a good riot or a resounding slap.

It is also close in spirit to the transformation of reactionary views into a kind of Punch and Judy show – it drains the politics from them in favor of the political gesture. The frustration of advocating for a total and unlikely change is relieved in a series of ever more violent tantrums. This direction of political action is typical of a reactionary program that existed in contradiction to the technoculture that it could only accept in terms of war. In terms, that is, of a systematic violence that would drain from politics anything but gesture, making politics into an endless series of heroic gestures – which is how the conservative revolutionaries gradually became fascists. It was a collusion of temperaments.

The turn to war counters the insistence, after the French Revolution, on the political goal of happiness, and it begins with Maistre. But why did the reactionary, pessimistic tradition turn to violence in the first place? The secret source of that turn is revealed by another French reactionary, Leon Bloy, who wrote an interesting section on the devil, in one of his baffling books, Le révélateur du globe: Christophe Colomb et sa béatification future. Bloy claims that Satan, the real Satan, doesn’t leer out at us from Dante, or from Faust:

“The notion of the devil is, of all modern things, the one that most lacks depth from having become literary. Certainly the demon of most poets wouldn’t even frighten children. I only know of one poetic Satan who is truly terrible. It is Baudelaire’s, precisely because he is sacrilege. All the others, including Dante’s, leave our souls tranquil and their threats make us shrug our shoulders, the slightly literary shoulders of the girls of the catechism of perseverance. But the true Satan which one know longer knows, the Satan of theology and of the mystic saints – the antagonist of the Woman and the tempter of Jesus – Christ – he is so monstrous that, if it were permitted to that monster to show himself as he is, in the supernatural nudity of non-love, the human race and animality entire would scream once and fall dead…

The greatest force of Satan is the Irrevocable. The word fatalism, invented by the pride of so-called philosophers among men, is only an obscure translation of this horrifying attribute of the Prince of the Wicked and the Emperor of the Captives. God gards for himself his Providence, his Justice, his Mercy, and above all, the Right of Grace which is like the seal where his omnipotent Sovereignty is imprinted. He thus keeps as well the Irrevocability of Joy and leaves to Satan the irrevocability of Despair.

What Bloy would have made of the Thatcherite, and now neoliberal motto: there is no alternative – is an exercise I leave to the reader.

 

Bloy a couple of pages later accords Satan such power over human history – particularly of the modern era – that the reader is forced to read that Irrevocability back into human history, particularly of the modern era. Unconsciously, the pessimists premises do homage to the scope and scale of the great transformation – the industrial system and the market society become, in this perspective, supernatural events. Or, to a non-Christian eye, natural events – events that have the force that natural things once had – the weather, the fertility of the land, the changes of season, those markers of peasant life, are all radically humanized in the industrial system, where the coordinates of time are defined in terms of business cycles, working days, and the brief ages of technological innovation – the age of steam, the age of the auto, etc.

 

Rhythm under oath: Python, the sage and the poet

 

I’ve always liked Alain, the French philosopher who published a chronicle of mini-essays, the Propos, ipn a Normandy journal. Apparently, as the publication of his diary showed, he was an anti-semite – which is surprising in as much as this was never part of his public record. Anti-semitism is the pornographic mag stash of the old French daddy intellectuals, alas. You discover it in their letters and journals, where they wank away at the subject.

 Still, his chronicles are full of apercu that I rather like. For instance, the distinctions he makes between the Pythie, or prophet, the sage, and the poet.

 The Pythie is a liminal figure, a beast-human, who says everything in the order of the instant – everything that comes through its head”

“… she forms a perfect receptor, expressing every instant, and far beyond our thing wisdom which always distinguishes and chooses. By a view of the same kind that we see in animals, and principally in birds, evidently carried here and there by the winds and the seasons. Instinct is always divine and divinatory. »

 The Sage is, on the opposite end, the emblem of choice and distinction.

 “The sage is completely other : he has sworn to be only what he wants to be. He chooses, which means he refuses. He refuses to be all, and to say all things at once. From whence such marvels as the pure succession of numbers, where the attentive person lets no event penetrate.”

 And finally, there is the middleman – the poet. If the Pythie howls and soughs and cheeps and says everything, while the sage says, I prefer not to, the poet attaches himself to an event – that of the body.

« Thus, here are the two extrêmes : and the poet is between them. He wants to be a universal receptor, but without losing his reason. This is why he rules himself, like the sage, and gives himself a law. But, inverting the savant, he rules himself in his own body. He gives himself a rhythm, of walking, of breathing, of the heart, in accord with the total moment: but it is a rhythm under oath.”

 

This, to me, is a rather beautiful way of putting figures on the chessboard. It is a passage comparable to Pessoa. Rhythm under oath! But of course, to take that oath – any oath, whether you are a pirate or an accountant - you must swear by some power outside of yourself.

The convention souvenir show

 The Convention souvenir show

- Karen Chamisso

Bubble cup hair style, wig wardrobe Midge

The nightclub seedy eyes of the fifties Barbie

Ratpack wasted in her fuck me night ware.

“Rare factory updo in debutante ball.”

Turn to model 4598 in the collector’s catalogue:

My Crystal Barbie, her platinum rush

Long relegated to attic storage:

as basket case body she awaits resurrection.

I was eight. Mom had that rich chestnut mane

(See Collector item 11782)

Barbie and I loved the album

Where we admired her debutante glow,

seventeen, by the lion cage at Audubon Zoo.

One night she unfolded that night’s récit

getting sloshed with her friend on the vodkas slushie combo.

Oh the prettiest Claiborne of 1968!

(Her cousin, more plain, has always resented it

-see the “extremely rare 1966 brunette Barbie

with side parted hair” and the mink coat –

from Sears and Roebuck for only $9.99! ).

The pawing Deke she went with – although Mom presented it

To me as though it was all class and station.

Her escort then – he’s long been gay

Her friend has moved from frustration to frustration

And de-toxes often – the family pays.

My coming out was nixed by me

I didn’t want to swan it

In some Junior League fantasy

Much to Mom’s disappointment, among many.

Leda’s paddler me, I could just see my rush.

Even diseased me would surely inherit

the crown, the gown, the buzzing hush

of my strong shouldered partner, my Ken

- Who would he be?

That zodiac of Barbies is now

Dead to me.

Is it my loss that no desire stirs

For the plastic windowed box

Where Super Teen Skipper waits

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The election in France and Marx's journalism

 The NYT coverage of the French election - entrusted to the shaky hands of that stalwart neo-lib, Roger Cohen - has been predictably awful. It has not reached, yet, the glorious bottom plumbed by the Times in the 00s, when its crack foreign correspondents in Iraq focused pretty much centrally on Chalabi in the election of 2005 - only to see Chalabi garner a big one percent of the vote total.

The journalism of the myopic and the upper class has a long long history. I wrote a bit about Marx's journalism in 2008 that I think reads well vis a vis the French election and its reporting yesterday. Here it is.

Marx’s journalism has suffered a shabby fate – it has not, to my knowledge, been fully collected. One of the nice things about the german site that hosts all of Marx and Engels work is that it is collected there. But in German, translated from the English. It should be collected in English. The man was the godfather of a certain kind of journalism, plus of course there is Marx’s wasplike gift of sting. Marx may have learned from Heine that a pun or an allusion to Shakespeare could leave a lasting burn on the skin of the Beast, but the way he worked this out, the way he would paste up a mosaic of facts and quotes from the newspapers of the time to display the full pattern and palimpset of the oppressor class foreshadowed all the great journalists of the twentieth century. Kraus may not have read him, but he employs the same techniques. So does Tucholsky.

In 1861, when Marx wrote “The American Question in England”, the British establishment, under the spell of “chivalry” as a chaser to imperial power and money, was engaged in the shabby business of support the Confederates on – of course – a strictly moral basis. This support had two aspects: one was the class aspect, and one was financial. As a class, the bourgeoisie, by this time, had gone beyond the old fights with the landholders, the old philanthropic enthusiasm for banning the slave trade. At this point, beyond its function as a wealthmaking potential colony, the South’s whole plantation system had already begun to exert a romantic vacationer’s allure.

Marx, of course, brings the buzz saw to the pleasure dome. What makes this particular article relevant is the way it shows the peekaboo structure of the establishment journalist’s ethos. As they do today, journalists then were happy to live on the surface and stenograph the conventional wisdom of the powerful; however, sometimes they seemed to display flashes of impressive analysis, as though they had up and resolved to dig deep and confront the old mole of history itself, in one of its moleways. Of course, those flashes – nowadays we would call this “contrarianism” – always seem to end up at the same place that the stenography work gets us to: as a bulwark of greed, lust for power, and apology for the politics of an inbred and narcissistic governing class.

Marx’s analysis of the dynamic between the North and the South, and the way it is treated in 1861 by the liberal (as in classically liberal) British press is an amazing work of compression and analysis. As Marx observes, the objections to the North’s hypocrisy and illegitimacy by the British press hide the true intentions of the press under the cover of a Pecksniffish display of moral authenticity. The article is occasioned by a pamphlet addressed to the British on the part of the Union by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The pamphlet was tossed around and given the kind of contrarian treatment by the British press in much the way, say, that the NYT, the Washington Post, and Slate treat Michael Moore’s work: as both wrong wrong wrong and tediously filled with things that are right right right – but the latter being things that we all knew, after all. We all knew them so well that we just didn’t bother to report them. They were known by everybody who counted in D.C., that is. Like: we all knew that the WMDs were just an excuse to invade a country the White House had decided from the very beginning that it was going to invade.

This elitist trifling, this overt intellectual corruption to which the knowing smirk stands in the same relation as the does the buboe to the black plague, has a long and dishonorable history. Marx and Henry Adams were both encountering it, in their different ways, in 1861. Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

We come nearer to the pith of the question by the following remark of The Examiner:

“Mrs. Stowe says: ‘The Slave party, finding they could no longer use the Union for their purposes, resolved to destroy it.’ There is here an admission that up to that time the Slave party had used the Union for their purposes, and it would have been well if Mrs. Stowe could have distinctly shown where it was that the North began to make its stand against Slavery.”

One might suppose that The Examiner and the other oracles of public opinion in England had made themselves sufficiently familiar with the contemporaneous history to not need Mrs. Stowe’s information on such all-important points. The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of the United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. Even at the times of the Missouri Compromise the contending forces were so evenly balanced that Jefferson, as we see from his memoirs, apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly antagonism. The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for the first time in the history of the United States, as Mr. Douglas himself confessed, every legal barrier to the diffusion of Slavery within the United States territories was broken down, when, afterward, a Northern candidate bought his Presidential nomination by pledging the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of dominion for the slaveholder; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision, diffusion of Slavery by the Federal power was proclaimed as the law of the American Constitution, and lastly, when the African slave-trade was de facto reopened on a larger scale than during the times of its legal existence. But, concurrently with this climax of Southern encroachments, carried by the connivance of the Northern Democratic party, there were unmistakable signs of Northern antagonistic agencies having gathered such strength as must soon turn the balance of power. The Kansas war, the formation of the Republican party, and the large vote cast for Mr. Frémont during the Presidential election of 1856, were so many palpable proofs that the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveowners’ pressure, had undergone, for half a century, and to make it return to the true principles of its development. Apart from those political phenomena, there was one broad statistical and economical fact indicating that the abuse of the Federal Union by the slave interest had approached the point from which it would have to recede forcibly… That fact was the growth of the North-West, the immense strides its population had made from 1850 to 1860, and the new and reinvigorating influence it could not but bear on the destinies of the United States.

Now, was all this a secret chapter of history? Was “the admission” of Mrs. Beecher Stowe wanted to reveal to The Examiner and the other political illuminati of the London press the carefully hidden truth that “up to that time the Slave party had used the Union for their purposes?” Is it the fault of the American North that the English pressmen were taken quite unawares by the violent clash of the antagonistic forces, the friction of which was the moving power of its history for half a century? Is it the fault of the Americans that the English press mistake for the fanciful crotchet hatched in a single day what was in reality the matured result of long years of struggle? The very fact that the formation and the progress of the Republican party in America have hardly been noticed by the London press, speaks volumes as to the hollowness of its Anti-Slavery tirades. Take, for instance, the two antipodes of the London press, The London Times and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the one the great organ of the respectable classes, and the other the only remaining organ of the working class. The former, not long before Mr. Buchanan’s career drew to an end, published an elaborate apology for his Administration and a defamatory libel against the Republican movement. Reynolds, on his part, was, during Mr. Buchanan’s stay at London, one of his minions, and since that time never missed an occasion to write him up and to write his adversaries down. How did it come to pass that the Republican party, whose platform was drawn up on the avowed antagonism to the encroachments of the Slaveocracy and the abuse of the Union by the slave interest, carried the day in the North? How, in the second instance, did it come to pass that the great bulk of the Northern Democratic party, flinging aside its old connexions with the leaders of Slaveocracy, setting at naught its traditions of half a century, sacrificing great commercial interests and greater political prejudices, rushed to the support of the present Republican Administration and offered it men and money with an unsparing hand?

Instead of answering these questions The Economist exclaims:

“Can we forget [...] that Abolitionists have habitually been as ferociously persecuted and maltreated in the North and West as in the South? Can it be denied that the testiness and half-heartedness, not to say insincerity, of the Government at Washington, have for years supplied the chief impediment which has thwarted our efforts for the effectual suppression of the slave trade on the coast of Africa; while a vast proportion of the clippers actually engaged in that trade have been built with Northern capital, owned by Northern merchants and manned by Northern seamen?”

This is, in fact, a masterly piece of logic. Anti-Slavery England cannot sympathize with the North breaking down the withering influence of slaveocracy, because she cannot forget that the North, while bound by that influence, supported the slave-trade, mobbed the Abolitionists, and had its Democratic institutions tainted by the slavedriver’s prejudices. She cannot sympathize with Mr. Lincoln’s Administration, because she had to find fault with Mr. Buchanan’s Administration. She must needs sullenly cavil at the present movement of the Northern resurrection, cheer up the Northern sympathizers with the slave-trade, branded in the Republican platform, and coquet with the Southern slaveocracy, setting up an empire of its own, because she cannot forget that the North of yesterday was not the North of to-day. The necessity of justifying its attitude by such pettifogging Old Bailey pleas proves more than anything else that the anti-Northern part of the English press is instigated by hidden motives, too mean and dastardly to be openly avowed.”

Pettifogging Old Bailey pleas have bloomed into a veritable system since Marx's day. We now have to put up with the apparatchiks of contrarianism, the misshaped avatars of inside information, working day after day to close off and erase any possibility of a serious discussion of the power elite, tirelessly in pursuit of the trivial, the apes of the Petro-Gun club. During elections is when you see these apes most at work..

macron: same old same old

 Same old, same old. Macron's little ruse - taking the air out of the election by not campaigning - worked. He got the opponent he wanted. So a man who is really disliked, personally and politically, has taken the presidency of France twice. One of the unexpected results of a second round election is it elevates minority candidates. Macron's first round result - 28 percent - is a real gauge of his popularity. It is now an election between a toxic dump and a nuclear reactor accident.

I've talked to a friend who thinks Macron has stabbed the French political pattern of demonstrating and pushing the government through the heart. Which would mean, given the french system, an absolutely autocratic president. My friend might be right. I don't see it, though. Macron is going to try to push through a generally disliked and absurdly wealthy friendly agenda. I think he is going to fail.

But I'm incurably optimistic.

Macron, too clever by half, and oh so dislikeable

 The garbage analyses of the French election in the Anglo press are predictable - and silly. Le Pen is the opponent Macron wants and needs - he himself is a much disliked man, with at best a 30-35 percent base. Le Pen is a candidate who is almost stamped loser - she is even more disliked than Macron. In this election, Macron has run by being above it all, to avoid the flops that happened in his first run, like the debate among the candidates where he was easily bested by Melanchon. 

So, how to get re-elected as a rather disagreeable individual peddling "reforms" that have polled, forever, to be against the desires of the electorate? The best chance is to campaign so as to let the next candidate, Le Pen, with her solid 20 percent, have plenty of room to top the list of runners up. Which is exactly what he has done. 

His aids and fans in the press - and one thing about Macron is, his most ardent fans, Macronie central, are in the press - have floated the story that, preoccupied by Ukraine, our man just didn't have time to run - he's busy saving the ship of state!

Macronie, that diverse spectrum - from stockbroker to arms dealer - perhaps buy this. But it does not gull the French electorate. They can smell the disdain. Which might be his undoing. A man who so visibly dislikes French workers in both the private and public sectors, with at little more for the latter, might have overstretched in his cleverness. Certainly I can't be the only one who plans to vote in the first round and, if my candidate, Melanchon, doesn't make it, abstain in the second round.I see no reason to vote for one of two public nuisances.

an allegory of politics

 

I am not a great fan of the left-right distinction. The reason is not that my “opinions” don’t fit within it – the reason is that its very grounding, in  opinion, and not in practice, is a right tending structure. As a right-tending structure, it finds the end of politics is in voting, and the end of ideology is in arguments over the dinner table. Far be it from me to diss arguments over the dinner table – I was raised among them! – but politics and one’s leftness or rightness is as much a matter of practices. Many of those practices are embedded in situations that severely limit one’s degree of freedom. If I administer a workforce or invest in a 401K or do any of the innumerable things that constitute living a middle class lifestyle, that style is going to chose my politics much more than I am going to chose it. Which means that saying whether I tend “left” or “right” is a matter of existential analysis, more than a survey question about who I think is a greater human being, Donald Trump or Batman. That analysis is both of one’s choices and of the structures in which one is embedded without them necessarily being responsive to one’s choices. To choose to use less plastic, for instance, is a nice healthy practice, personally, but is likely to have zero effect on the sum total of plastic in the world. A conservative engineer who discovers, purely for profit, a less ecologically intrusive substitute for plastic would be objectively a much greater environmentalist, in spite of everything he or she thinks.

The way such a substitute would spread out in the world would, of course, depend on other objective structures that are “left” or “right” – and so on.

Tomorrow I am going to vote for a leftis . This is a very very minor political act. As I grow older, I become much more pessimistic about the meaning of such things; in America, even when I have voted for winners, they turned out – as I should have known they would – into net losers in relation to my “opinions.”

Opinions are epiphenomenal. Spinoza wrote that a thrown stone, if it could think, would think it was arcing through the air of its own free will. That’s a political allegory.  

 

Mirror violence - from Bucha to Fallujah to Grozny

 In William Everdell’s the First Moderns,the author explores and extends the notion of the modern by exploring the “vortices” of modernization, the various conjunctions of theory and practice not only in the obvious places, the big metropoles, but on the periphery. And, indeed, even in the metropoles modernization was a negotiation between outliers and the establishment. One of the monuments of the modern, a triumph of modernist architecture with form totally following function Everdell claims, was invented by Weyler y Nicolau, the Spanish overseer of Cuba: the concentration camp. Or campos de reconcentraciòn, as he named them.

It is an interesting story. According to Everdell, Weyler y Nicolau, fighting against the Cuban insurgents in 1897, decided to experiment with an American invention, barbed wire. Why not string barbed wire around areas that were insurgent strongholds? Since insurgents weren’t formally organized, it seemed like a good way to contain them, a sort of cordon sanitaire. No sooner thought of then done. Soon camps sprang up, thousands of potential insurgents were surrounded by good, healthy barbed wire, and the dying started. The U.S. decided to protest the inhumanity, sending a note to Spain on June 24, 1897. The Spanish reply was interesting: the Spanish government noted that the cruelty of the camps was not different from the cruelty exercized by Sherman on his march to the Sea in 1864. Everdell digs up a clever conjunction of names, here:

“But Secretary Sherman [John Sherman, the man who had penned the American protest to Spain] probably knew better than any Spanish journalist how "cruel" Weyler's policies were, for he was the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, the general who had become famous by marching from Atlanta to the sea and becoming the first to treat civilians as combatants in a modern war. The Spanish knew it, too. With a fine sense of irony, Madrid replied to Secretary Sherman's protest against what Spain was doing in Cuba by calling attention to what the Secretary's brother had done in Georgia and Carolina thirty years before.

We don't know who in the Spanish foreign ministry put that reminiscence in the note, but the odds favor Weyler himself. At the time of the March to the Sea, the future Captain-General of Cuba had been twenty-five, serving as the Spanish military attaché in Washington, and writing home about how impressed he had been by General Sherman's remarkable new interpretation of the laws of war.”

We like Benjamin’s image of human history as a multiplying pile of ruins observed by an appalled but impotent angel, but in many cases history seems more like a frightened monkey making its way over the trapeze equipment hanging from the ceiling of some big top, a matter of hairy leaps and enormous swings.

Weyler’s invention soon caught the eye of the British, who tried it out in South Africa; soon that caught the eye of the Americans, who were fighting a pesky war against the Filipinos.

“As near as we can tell, the first American concentration camps were built for the Filipinos in that month of November 1900, which means that the British were just ahead of the Americans in adapting Weyler's invention. By December 20, when General Order Number 100 on the treatment of civilian "war rebels" was issued by General MacArthur (this was Arthur MacArthur, whose son Douglas was to follow in his and Weyler's footsteps as proconsul of the Philippines), the ''reconcentration camps" were there to receive them.”

And so one aspect of modernism was launched. An aspect that has been with us persistently ever since, although Americans don’t like to notice their own use of reconcentration camp – how much more comforting to read, for instance, about nasty Lenin and his proto-gulag than to contemplate the fact that William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were responsible for more deaths in a lager than Lenin ever was.

We see the same game of mirroring violence today, and we produce the same blindsided moral judgments. What happened in Bucha was the kind of war crime that happened in Grozny – as well as the same kind of war crime that happened in Fallujah, in 2004, as the Americans basically laid waste a town, scattered 200,000 refugees over the territory in midwinter with nary a soupkitchen or outdoor toilet to aid them, and kept the Red Cross at bay for a month until letting them into the city – and even then keeping them away from where heaps of bodies were piled up.

These mirror wars can only be stopped by smashing both mirrors. Unfortunately, who can do the smashing with justice? Not those who designed massacres in the past, and are quite capable, having the tools for it, of dropping the drones of the future. Which leaves it to those who are outside the circuit of power – that is, the weak.

 

Spirit enough to be bored — Whoever doesn’t have enough spirit to be able to find himself and his work boring is certainly not a spirit of the first rank, be it in the arts or sciences. A satirist who was, unusually, also a thinker, could add to this, taking a look at the world and history: God must not have had this spirit: he wanted to make and did make things, collectively, too interesting.” – Nietzsche, Human all too H.

I am unsure about the jab at God at the end of Nietzsche’s bit here,  but every writer knows the moment that comes upon him like negative inspiration, when he detaches and to find himself and his work boring. That’s the moment that Bely cuts his masterpiece, Petersburg, by a third; that may be the moment when Rimbaud said fuck it, although I am too little devil or angel to venture there into that affair. However, I’ve been pondering the economist’s version of happiness and their refusal to understand the intricate dance between repletion and boredom. Economists are so fucking weird because they combine the most sophisticated mathematical models with psychological insights that would shame a ten year old. It is all about not only licking a lollypop, but doing it forever and ever, and getting everybody’s lollypop to lick. It is a gross and unrealistic view of happiness that leaves out of the picture the mysteries of happiness  which supposedly found not only the normative aspect of the system, but the incentive structure inside it. I suspect economists are so enthusiastic about growth not so much because growth is a good in itself, but because it perpetually puts off the question: what is the system for? And, of course, even Marxist economists will edge out of the room once you start pondering the many dimensions of alienation. Economics is really not the dismal science, but the clubbish science – and in clubs, it doesn’t do to pose such questions. They are so easily answered by dinner, especially if dinner includes port.

Now, in my flaming youth, amongst me and my pals, boredom was our mark of Cain – it was the boredom generated by capitalism that we were against. We tended to be big supporters of the situationists, without really having a vast or even a tiny little knowledge of them more than they pissed people off, and the autonomen, because we loved the autonomen boldness, the kicking ass, the taking over of buildings people weren't using, the contempt for the Polizei. This sounded like the shit to us, even though we heard overtones of peasant hut nostalgia in some of the way these micro-utopias turned out, with the holding hands and weaving or something and nothing that actually, after a while, wasn’t… boring. We liked, instead, the via negativa, through pure abjection, following the downward path of Bataille. It was all  “we’re so pretty, oh so pretty” with a sneer.

However, although it was quite the enemy, boredom was never really an issue, an affair, an object of thought. It wasn’t until we began to take writing seriously, and tried to write fiction, that boredom became interesting as a test. Boredom, after all, is always there guarding the path of inquiry into meaning and purpose – it has sphinx like properties. I often feel that at the heart of bourgeois vacuity is all the ways that are constructed to avoid boredom’s riddle.