Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Venereal Gadfly: More Notes towards a History of Orgasm

I've observed before that until at least the early 19th century, 'orgasm' did not mean what it does for us today. In La philosophie zoologique of 1809, for example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck uses the term to describe something like the vital principle in an animal, which in various other iterations has been called élan vital, archaeus, soul, etc. He defines 'orgasme' as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive."

At some point after Lamarck, I imagine, the orgasm comes instead to be seen as a sort of culmination or maximal expression of this force, as the moment in which we are living our bodily life to its fullest. I suppose. I'll try to chart the development of this new meaning some other time, but what interests me here is the matter of how, if not by the term 'orgasm', did authors up to Lamarck's era describe this physiological event?

In my reading of Latin texts on animal generation I've often come across a curious phrase, the true meaning of which escaped my attention until yesterday, when I found it in Tobias Andreae's Brevis explicatio corporis humani prout anima vegetativa pollet of 1669:

Oestro igitur venereo animalia perfectiora irritata, spiritum seminalem tam subtilem emittunt, ut licet (observante Harveo) visibile semen penetralia uteri non intret, hic tamen pervadens spiritus.

The more perfect animals, therefore, agitated by the venereal gadfly, emit a seminal spirit that is so subtle that (as Harvey observes) it does not enter into the innermost reaches of the uterus, but nevertheless the spirit pervades there.

Oestrus venereus, obviously, is a fixed expression for 'orgasm'. But oestrus, in turn, without its venereal modifier, originally had a much broader scope. Thus in Liddell and Scott's dictionary of classical Greek we find:

ΟΙΣΤΡΟΣ. the gadfly, breese... an insect which infests cattle... II. metaph. a sting, anything that drives mad, Eur. : absol. the smart of pain, agony, Soph. 2. mad desire, insane passion, Hdt., Eur., etc. : --generally, madness, frenzy, Soph., Eur.

So oestrus, or oistros, means in the first instance 'gadfly', 'pest', and secondarily, 'irritation'. One striking thing about this term in its later transformations in scientific Latin is its strong association with female physiology: thus 'estrogen' is, etymologically, the hormone productive of sexual irritation in women, while non-human female primates spend a period of each month, 'estrus', that is, in visible sexual agitation.

But why is the sexual itch marked as feminine? One thing that comes as a surprise to people with little historical memory is that it was not until very recently that sexual insatiability came to be associated with men. In the early modern period, these were classic female attributes, and if a man were to exhibit them he would be thought to have lapsed into effeminacy. The idea that men are naturally and essentially the lustful ones, and the pseudoevolutionary explanations that are offered for this idea, are really nothing more than apologetics for our own current set of prejudices. I have never come across a single early modern male author who owns up to his own libidinousness. They write about themselves as if sexuality were not a defining factor of their existence.

But when did the shift of prejudice occur? I suspect that it happened roughly in tandem with the shift in the meaning of 'orgasm', which in turn was a reflection of a much broader shift in the conception of the place of sexuality in an individual person's identity. The culmination of the sexual act came to be described not as the relief of an itch, as a physiological release comparable to sneezing, but rather as the culmination of the vital force of the body, again, as the supreme expression of one's bodily life. And naturally, it was men and not women who came to be seen as charged with this vital force.

This lexical shift, away from an association of sexual climax with feminine 'estrus' (in the Euripidean and Sophoclean sense) and towards an association with masculine 'orgasm' (in the Lamarckian sense), leads me to think that the idea that female orgasm remained largely unknown to men until the sexual revolution is really a symptom of our own era's lack of historical depth, of our tendency to begin our histories in the Victorian period. Female orgasm was well known long before 'orgasm' came to mean what it does today, but it was conceptualized as a physiological disorder to be dissipated, an irritation, and not as a 'positive' force.

I had hoped that something could be said also of Plato's description of Socrates in the Apology as a 'gadfly', which, along with the familiar leitmotif of the Socratic dialogues, according to which the philosopher functions as a 'midwife' for the birthing of ideas, would have perhaps provided some more fuel for the idea that there lies, at the origins of the philosophical tradition, what in some circles might be called a 'genderfuck'. But it turns out that the word Plato used for this sort of gadfly was μύωψ, while the extension of oistros or oestrus to sexual irritation, and the addition of the modifier 'venereal' seems to be an invention of early modern or Renaissance Latin medical writing. Still, I take the shift in our conception of sexual climax, from estrus to orgasm, and at the same time also from female to male, to be no less remarkable a genderfuck, and, if I'm right, to offer a powerful piece of evidence in favor of a revisionist account of the history of sexuality since the beginning of the modern period.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

This novel is an important contribution to Icelandic literature. It channels the past millennium's experience of nature and history in that peculiar place, but does not aspire to mere peculiarity. For this reason, it is a great shame that the book has been packaged for foreigners as a sort of offshoot of Björkian quirkiness.

Sjón has long been part of the creative circle that includes Iceland's most marketable pop icon, as are many of the currently dominant generation of Iceland's cultural, and even political, elite. I had thought, when I bought the novel on may way out of Reykjavik yesterday, that I would be mildly amused by the literary effort of a graduate of the '80s punk scene. I also worried that it might not be worth my trouble at all, that this would be another case, comparable to Sven Regener's forgettable novels, which he started writing when the physiognomy of middle age set in and he could no longer front the Berlin band Element of Crime with any dignity. But this is not one of those cases. Sjón is a writer of literature, who happens to have been present at some Sugarcubes shows (and, perhaps revealingly, joined them on stage to play, of all things, the air guitar).

The novel is called Rökkurbýsnir or 'Marvels of Twilight' in the original Icelandic, has for no apparent good reason (other than a disconnected if intriguing flourish in the final few paragraphs) been called The Mouth of the Whale in English. This too must have something to do with marketing. The perennial appeal of Moby-Dick maybe? Of course it is an admirable thing to produce even a faint echo of Melville, but that is not at all what Sjón aims to do. His is prose that frequently lapses into poetry as if by inward inclination. The mood of it is rapturous, at times almost reminiscent of Saint John the Divine's coda to the New Testament.

It tells us the story of a certain Jónas Palmasson 'the Learned', an early-17th-century Icelandic natural philosopher, runic scholar, and healer. He is self-taught, and syncretistic in his commitment to Christian faith and to Icelandic folk-beliefs. He is a devout follower of Paracelsus, and is something like what the Swiss physician and occultist might have ended up being if he had been born, liks Jónas, into what was essentially an Iron Age society, with few books and only a fairly barren natural landscape from which to learn.

Part of the narrative (though this is not a very narrative novel) concerns Jónas's voyage to Copenhagen, at the request of Ole Worm, the actually existing historical character who founded the Museum Wormianum, one of the largest cabinets of curiosities in early modern Europe. Worm has heard of Jónas's learnedness, and hopes that he can help him to decipher runic writing, something Worm in fact attempted in his Runir, seu Danica literatura antiquissima [Runes, Or, the Most Ancient Danish Literature] of 1638. Jónas is hesitant to aid Worm, since he has been persecuted in his home country for sorcery, and is in Denmark in part to clear his name. But he is happy to clarify for Worm the true origin of a purported unicorn skull. It comes from a narwhal: Icelandic traders had for centuries been duping Europeans who were willing to pay enormous sums of money for remedies made from a powder of the marine mammal's tusk, on the presumption that this came from the mythical terrestrial mammal. The build-up to the revelation of the skull's true origin is somewhat tedious for those of us who have read the 1628 treatise De Unicornu by Caspar Bartholin (Worm's brother-in-law), and it all starts to feel a bit too Eco-esque. Not surprisingly, this sequence is the one that is marketed most aggressively in the publisher's packaging of the novel. (Unicorns appeal, I gather, in roughly the same way Björk does.)

When I say that this is an important contribution to Icelandic literature I mean in part that the author channels a tradition that stretches back to a time when literature was meant to do something other than what it has been doing since the 19th century or so. Jónas has few books to read, does not know Latin, but is loyal to the idea that nature can be read, and that books, ideally, are epitomes of nature. Nature in turn is Divine Creation, and learning is the project of mastering the order behind this creation. One of the most touching sequences concerns Jónas's recollection of his first encounters with his future wife, Sigga:

Our courtship was one uninterrupted conversation about the origin of the stars, the nature of land and sea, the behaviour of beasts great and small, and although it was not conducted in Hebrew or in the angleic tongue as it was with Adam and Eve, it was nevertheless our hymn to Creation. We sat together into the early hours, investigating the delightful puzzles of light and shadow, such as what happens to the shadow of your hand when the shadow of mine falls upon it? Have they become one? Or has yours disappeared temporarily? And if so, where to?

In her youth Sigga correctly predicted an eclipse through astronomical calculation. Her kinfolk ran around like it was the end of the world, but she was calm. She and Jónas both embody an approach to learning that is 'scientific', in that it seeks to get things right, but also one step away from sorcery, in that it probes where one really isn't supposed to go (as a boy Jónas specializes in laying his hands upon the bellies of old crones, and diagnosing their 'female illnesses'). This shared disposition unites Jónas and Sigga erotically: science as a hymn to creation, as the basis of erotic love, and finally as a highly charged danger zone that borders on the magical. Sjón reconstructs with sympathy the world in which this all made sense.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

Notes from Iceland

I am in Iceland for the first time in many years, for no better reason than that Icelandair offers extended stopovers on transatlantic flights at no additional cost. I cross the Atlantic as casually as one might take the subway from borough to borough, but now that I am here, again, in Reykjavik, it seems to me that, if we have to fly at all, stopovers in Iceland should not just be possible, but mandatory. They make it all make sense.

This basalt island, really only a side-effect of the volcanic eruptions of just one segment of the vast Mid-Atlantic Range (which also includes something called the 'Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone', where by contrast I hope never to find myself): this island, I say, is not all that far from the Faroes, which are in turn a short hop to the Hebrides, and from there another shorter one to mainland Scotland. In the other direction, there is really only a channel, and not open ocean, separating Iceland from Greenland, and again a smaller one separating Greenland from Baffin, and Baffin from Labrador.

A series of small hops then, brings one from Europe to North America, and even in the absence of archaeological evidence it is not hard to understand why, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in the 1530s, local Iroquois ran out to greet the ship with furs in hand, ready, to all appearances, to resume a well established trade. The Basques and the Norse are the likely first-comers in those parts. Of the latter, an early-medieval settlement in Newfoundland is now considered a certainty, while their colony in southwestern Greenland, well documented both archaeologically and textually, is know to have endured for several generations.

The Norse were preceded in Greenland by Skrælingjar, which is to say Inuit, but only if we consider that massive island as a whole. When the Norse established their settlement in the 10th century, the Inuit were confined to the northern part of the island. Norse and Inuit coexisted in the same region from the 13th century, and by the 15th century the Norse had been entirely driven out. As far as we can tell, Scandinavians were also preceded in Iceland by an indigenous people, of sorts, even if they do not meet our ordinary criteria for counting as such: the so-called Papar are thought to have been Irish hermits, probably monks, who drifted up on rafts by mistake, and hunted and gathered for bare subsistence. (Their presence as well remains unconfirmed by archaeology, and is based entirely on textual sources, as well as on toponymy: in particular, the Vestmannaeyjar are islands off the south coast of Iceland, thought to have been settled by the 'Westmen', a Norse designation for the Irish.)

The Skrælings and the Papar together should cause us to reconsider our ordinary understanding of indigenousness: the Inuit came after the Vikings to southern Greenland, and drove the Vikings out thanks to their superior adaptation to the environmental demands of the region; the Irish came first to Iceland, were vastly more primitive than the Vikings who arrived after them, and were exterminated or assimilated. (I would argue, in fact, that there are many good reasons for seeing the Celtic nations of Europe as aboriginal within Europe proper, and not only on a distant satellite of Europe, but that's another topic.) The matter gets even more counterintuitive when we consider that at the moment of first contact the indigenous hunter-gatherers were Christians, while the invading Europeans were pagans.

As is well known, this point of difference would not remain an issue for long, not only because the Celtic element would soon be entirely erased, but also because Iceland would be converted to Christianity, en masse, just before the dawn of the 2nd millennium. 999 CE is extremely early for such a distant extremity of the West. Lithuania and neighboring Baltic regions, by contrast, squarely on the mainland and practically absorbed into the Prussian sphere of influence by the high middle ages, would nonetheless hold out against conversion until the 15th and 16th centuries. Nonetheless, as might be expected in such a case of mass conversion, the majority of the converted likely had little idea --and some, out on their homesteads, under the glacier, at first surely had no idea-- of what was going on. Even those who did know that they were now to call themselves 'Christian', we may assume, probably brought with this new name a universe of connotations that would have been quite foreign to the Romans who believed they had won a whole island, all at once, to the true faith.

To return to the ethnographic data from a neighboring island, we know from the early-20th-century explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen that Inuit conversion was in fact a movement within one and the same universe of signification. Rasmussen reports that Greenlandic Inuit shamans would take their 'first communion' by ceremonially devouring those organs of the walrus that had hitherto been prohibited to men of their status. The body of Christ as tabooed walrus meat: that is the essence of conversion. Should we suppose that the case of the pagan Icelanders was much different? They were 'white' and originally European, but so what? These categories didn't mean anything at all at the time.

And so we find the well-known survival of pagan preoccupations well after 999. Unlike the case of Britain, where charlatan neopagans began in the 19th century to construct a wholly imaginary romantic past of high priests and priestesses, in Iceland the enduring power of animistic explanations for natural phenomena, complete with personified forces inhabiting every ditch and spring, is well attested by both indigenous and outside sources. The 16th-century Swedish author Olaus Magnus gives us a lengthy account in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus [History of the Northern Peoples] of the enduring folk-beliefs, including all the spells and incantations, of the Icelanders, and some decades later the German scientist and astrologer Johannes Kepler claims in his Somnium (at least if we take the protagonist as a stand-in for the author) that his own mother was Icelandic, that her name was Fiolxhilda, and that she was (therefore) a witch. (Kepler took Iceland to be the ideal spot from which to teletransport to the moon.)

So paganism lived on, and the conversion was an ambiguous affair. One of the pièces de résistance of the stunning, and stunningly empty, National Museum of Iceland is a small figurine, in bronze, dated to around the beginning of the 11th century, depicting either Thor or Jesus Christ. He is holding an object that is either a Valhallan war hammer, or a crucifix. Who knows? The people who have spent their lives studying the matter don't. It's possible no one ever did.

And yet, there is another sense in which Iceland has been at the vanguard of developments in the Christian West, and not at all on the periphery (in contrast with, e.g., the eastern front of the Christianization of the North, particularly the Finnic lands): and that is in its early embrace of literacy, and its consequent, immense contribution to world literature. In a sense its contribution can be seen as an early anticipation of the Renaissance explosion, on the mainland, of interest in secular themes, and in the importance of the individual. In this sense, it is literature that comes from a world still holding on to pre-Christian preoccupations with faeries and mountain spirits, and it is simultaneously a foreshadowing of the emergence, centuries later, of a post-Christian secular sphere.

But its individualism, immanentism, and dedication to the everyman does not at all come, as far as I can tell, from the cultural heritage of Norse paganism. It comes instead from an original, sub-literary function of writing, one that has parallels in the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian cases as well. Writing begins as tedious cataloguing, as a listing of who is where, who traded what with whom, and so on. In the Icelandic case, the most important thing to register was the correspondence between a given family name and a given plot of land. This project eventually issued in the famous Landnámabók or Book of Settlements, an early-11th-century text outlining the claims of the original settler families to their parcels of land.

But lists of names, at least potentially, are the tables-of-contents of stories about the people behind the names, and in the case of Iceland there seems to have been a sort of gradual evolution of these stories out of the original list: an inheritance feud among the descendants of Egill Skalagrímmson; Gunar Hámundarson attends the Alþing; etc. In a sense, Icelandic history continues to be perceived by Icelanders, or at least packaged by them for outsiders, as a sort of continual unfolding from these registries of settlements. The in-seat screens on Icelandair will tell you that every Icelander can trace his or her roots back to the original settlers. This claim is of course complicated by the fact that there is a single-digit but non-negligible population of immigrant minorities in Iceland, who are expected to become culturally Icelandic, even as they are, by definition, cut off from the possibility of being truly, essentially Icelandic in virtue of their recent arrival. Until the 1990s immigrants were required to take Icelandic names. The Catalonian painter Baltasar Samper responded to this demand with the ultimate act of subversion-through-overidentification: he asked to be called 'Egill Skalagrímmson', just like the hero of the Sagas. The authorities responded that they wanted him to be Icelandic, but that that was just a bit too Icelandic.

There are in effect three genres of writing in Iceland's early history: the official sacred, which is to say translations of the Christian Bible and associated texts; the mundane-registerial-cum-literary, of which we've just spoken; and, finally, the practical-magical. It should not be surprising to find that these can only be disentangled from one another with difficulty. We know today that the runic alphabet is only a transformation of the Latin: we don't know when or how exactly the Latin diffused to the pagan Norse, but we know that they started writing because of some sort of contact, direct or indirect, with the Latin world. This finding is a tremendous disappointment to romantic neopaganists, but the diffusionist explanation of runes does not deprive them of all possible magical utility.

In fact, when one considers the ordinary uses of runic inscription, one easily starts to wonder what exactly ought to count as magical, and what as merely 'ordinary' writing. A wooden spade from the 10th century, on display at the National Museum, is decorated with the following runic text: boalliatmik inkialtr kaerþi [Páll had me (made); Ingjaldur made (me)]. This is a plain statement of fact, but it also charges the tool with immaterial qualities it might otherwise not be noticed to have. Many runes were straightforward boasts, boiling down to something like: Know that I was here, and I was mighty. Many were also charms, inscriptions on artifacts that were intended to preserve good luck.

Both boasts and charms, I should not have to point out, have their echoes in the Christian and the post-Christian periods. A blog, in the end, is really not so different from an inscription on a bone: I was here, it declares to no one in particular. Don't forget that.

I recall seeing Etruscan mummies with inscriptions on the gauze in which they were wrapped. But they had to be unwrapped in order for the text to be seen, as it had been written on the inside. Text intended for no particular audience, for some unknown, hypothesized audience on the other side, or out in the internets, might easily be seen by an outside observer as fulfilling a magical function. Someone pointed out to me recently that the British in 18th-century Polynesia were wrong to make fun of the natives who believed that, in their letters, the British had mastered a form of magic: when the Polynesians became literate, and themselves wrote letters back to London requesting things like sailing vessels, often, with some delay, the things appeared. Magic! 

 Iceland is interesting from the point of view of the history of literature, I think, to the extent that it combines three registers of writing --sacred, bureaucratic, and 'magical' (hell, the scare quotes should really be around all three of these)-- and turns them into something we recognize, unambiguously, as literature. I also think, by the way, that Halldór Laxness well understood this, and that this is what makes his own modern literature so compelling, and so much a synthesis and culmination of the Icelandic literary tradition. And also, finally, this is what makes me happy to be his unworthy, but totemically ever so well positioned, namesake.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

Against the Infantilization of the Natural History Museum

It has often struck me that no greater misfortune can befall a natural history museum than for it to come into enough money for renovations. These typically take the form of interactive screens displaying 'fun facts' directed at eight-year-olds, and they require the removal of anything that reeks of the past, which is to say also the removal of the very idea of natural history, in favor of some eternally present, unceasingly entertaining, Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade.

Just think about it: what kind of adult goes to a nature museum these days? I mean an adult who does not have some child in tow: a child, it is presumed, in need of perpetual edification? I mean a proper, auto-edifying, end-in-him-or-herself adult. These days, museums that are not about art are about nature, nature is about science, science is about education, and education, as we know, is for the kids, insofar as they, finally, are the future.

Art for the grown-ups, then; nature for the kids. But education must be fun, so out with the rancid body parts in formaldehyde with calligraphic labels in Latin; in with the touch screens that tell you, as if you did not already know this since the age of two or so, that dinosaurs are birds, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, in case you forgot this for a fraction of a second, that learning is fun. But all this thoroughly and disgustingly ideological rebranding requires money, which, as I've already suggested, the best museums of natural history do not have.

Or which, perhaps, in the case of the stunning, sublimely unreconstructed Galérie d'Anatomie Comparée at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, they scorn, because they understand why this stuff matters, why it's worth looking at even, or perhaps especially, if you are not a kid, and no longer strictly speaking need to be educated, and certainly no longer need your education to come sugar-coated in fun. The adult seeks it out, I maintain (and I believe Buffon, Cuvier, et al. well understood this), because it is philosophical, it is an aide to philosophy: it triggers reflection upon the diversitas unitate compensata that is nature; upon the predicament of mortal corporeal substances such as, but not only, ourselves; and upon what still remains in a certain sense the utter implausibility of there ever being such a person, to speak with Kant, as a 'Newton for the blade of grass'. The natural history museum is in this respect unscientific if not anti-scientific. It works like art. Hell, why not just come out and say it? It's infinitely better than art.

Except that, well, it is art, too. This is something that Damien Hirst well understood with his shark and stuff; the only fault is with the spectator, who did not realize that natural history museums had already been delivering substantially the same spectacle for several centuries. In the case of the Parisian gallery, the art in question is 18th- and 19th-century European art, and its medium is bones, skin, organs, and tissues. The remains on display are both the things themselves, and at the same time representations of the things: representations according to the vision of nature of the naturalists who collected and displayed the things (and who did not at all share in today's reigning ideology of 'science', its importance for the kids' future, etc.). And this is what is thrown away when natural history museums are renovated: a window onto nature through keen-sighted naturalists, who also brought with them a now-unfashionable aesthetic and philosophical sensibility about nature that is worth preserving as much as the things themselves are.

The project of exhaustively collecting and describing the basic kinds of large animal, and analyzing and displaying these animals' bodily parts and systems, is a project that gained momentum in the late Renaissance and that was largely completed by the end of the 19th century. Like, say, realist painting in the Western tradition, it is a project that has a bounded history (indeed the two histories fairly closely overlap one another). This means that an alpaca intestine displayed in formaldehyde is a sample of a part of a South American camelid; but it is also an artefact of a modern European knowledge project. In this respect a proper natural history museum, that is to say an unreconstructed adult natural history museum, is really two museums at once: it is a museum of nature, but also a museum of the history of a very singular attempt to know nature quite literally inside-out.

This is probably more than a child is ready to appreciate. Fine. Take your kid to some inane exploratorium. Or just get it over with and head straight for Chuck E. Cheese. I'll be at the Galérie, sans enfants, quietly meditating on nature's incomprehensible prolificness, and upon the noble effort of a few great men and women to come to know it in full.

A Plea for Folk-Philosophy

There is a well-known division between two camps of academic philosophy, often called 'analytic' and 'continental', with each side more or less convinced that what the other side is doing is not really philosophy at all. This is a provincial and mandarin dispute, and I do not wish to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider those expressions of interest in fundamental questions that one might find in monasteries, madrasas, tea houses, yurts, around campfires, late at night as the seal blubber burns. Can such interest count, I want to know, as philosophy?

Once I took part in a conference in a mid-sized provincial city in Transylvania. As part of the opening ceremony, the local Orthodox bishop was invited to hold forth on the value of philosophy. He seized the opportunity to denounce Marxism, existentialism, and even rap music, and praised all in attendance for guarding the flame of spirituality in a corrupt and materialistic world. His éloge dragged on. The most distinguished member of our delegation could be heard snoring. I passed the time looking over the paper I was going to present, which as it happens was on 18th-century materialism.

The bishop had heard there were some philosophers coming to town, and he assumed he shared a common language with us. I can only guess as to his exact background, but I imagine this man had spent time in a seminary, and that he read there at least some of the authors academic philosophers would recognize as constituting the Western philosophical tradition: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, probably Augustine, maybe even the pagan Plato. This man had probably incorporated what he learned about these authors into his understanding of questions such as, What is the fate of a person after death? Am I essentially or only contingently associated with a physical body? What is infinity?

Now on most reckonings those are philosophical questions, yet the reaction of the visiting party (myself included) was to dismiss the bishop as something of a yokel. I suspect this would be the reaction of the vast majority of professional academic philosophers in the West, and a fortiori if it were not a Transylvanian bishop, but rather, say, a Mongolian shaman, who deigned to hold forth on the questions on which we take ourselves to be experts. While at the time I went along with this prevailing sentiment, it now seems to me that this encounter was in fact nothing other than a clash of provincialisms.

The problem might simply be that the term 'philosophy' is used in two very different senses: one to describe a well-defined tradition of systematic and methodical inquiry, which appears to have developed independently in human history only in China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean; the other, which might be called 'folk-philosophy' or 'ethnophilosophy', on the model of ethnoastronomy, ethnotaxonomy, etc., to describe the set of cultural variations on a range of beliefs about nature, the self, etc., which humans qua human cannot help but have. But one way of moving beyond provincialism might be to consider the possibility that all philosophy is in a sense ethnophilosophy.

After all, the minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are exactly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine. The difference is that the pastoral people's minds have different prostheses and institutions to support and to mirror their thoughts. A revealing parallel case is law: does law begin with Hammurabi, and receive its first mature expression in the Roman period? Or were these milestones simply the explicitization of something that was already there, that cannot not be there wherever there is a society that is organized in some way or other according to a set of --perhaps unspoken-- rules and prohibitions? Is a written legal code the coming-into-being of a new way of thinking, or is it the transfer of a familiar way of thinking into a different, external storage medium? If we are prepared to accept the latter possibility, we are thereby enabled to think about, say, Roman law, in fruitful comparison to, say, Hausa law (generally called Hausa 'custom'). And similarly with philosophy.

Philosophy in our narrower sense might be more rigorous than folk-belief, yet still indebted to folk-belief in ways that it ought to be part of the philosophical project to uncover. An analogous uncovering has been undertaken in recent decades in the cognitive-scientific study of folk-taxonomy. It has become clear, in particular,  that the modern system of Linnean biological classification, while more exact and rigorous than pre-scientific and pre-literate systems throughout the world, is not for that so much a rejection of the earlier systems as it is an outgrowth of them. This discovery tells us something not just about the history of science, but also about the way that science at present continues its project of carving up the world.

The distinguishing feature of Indian, Chinese, or European philosophy, on this approach, would turn out to be not some greater clarity or depth of thinking. Instead, it would be a by-product of the way certain, principally Asian, technologies, above all writing and the reproduction of written texts, are incorporated into a society. The presuppositions and aims of inquiry might be different for, say, an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, and the technologies and institutions for pursuing these aims are certainly different. But there are still human minds there puzzling out the nature of reality and of humanity's place in it. This activity ought to be of interest to philosophers not out of some naïve celebration of cultural diversity, but rather for the hard-headed scientific reason that it gives us a real measure of the full scope and range of humanity's responses to the questions we call 'philosophical'. Taking this measure is one way of deepening our understanding of these questions.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

It's Time to Stop Saying 'Caucasian'

I don't know why all these racists are worried about Caucasians being reduced to a minority in Georgia as a result of demographic shifts. In fact it's logically certain that Caucasians will always be the majority in Georgia: if one is Georgian, ipso facto one is Caucasian.

Oh wait. I thought we were talking about that other Georgia. Because when I say 'Caucasian', I intend it as an adjective that refers to the land and peoples between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The origins of the use of this adjective as an umbrella term for so-called white people are rooted, it seems, in the Ottoman slave trade. Thus in 1684 François Bernier reports having been to a slave market in Constantinople. He is spellbound by the ivory beauty of a Circassian (presumably Georgian) slave girl. He notes that women from the Caucasus region have been praised since antiquity as the palest and most beautiful slave girls in all the world, and he regrets not having enough money to buy her.

Phenotypically, the girl Bernier desired was most likely very similar to, say, the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov: blonde-haired, blue-eyed, yet for all that something altogether different from what, say, an Atlanta Republican maven has in mind when she imagines of herself that she is a 'Caucasian'.

A century later, Christoph Meiners would attempt to transform the designation into a natural kind: now Caucasians constituted, alongside 'Mongolians' and 'Negroes', one of the basic subtypes of humanity. The mountain region and its peoples came to stand in metonymically for a third or so of humanity. Who makes the cut has been a matter of much dispute over the centuries. For Blumenbach, Slavs were Mongolian, while Tatars (presumably because of their long presence in the extensive Caucasus region) were included as Caucasians.

The designation long served, as one of its principal raisons d'être, to ensure that Jews remained excluded from the fold, and any self-described member of the Caucasian race, if projected from the early 20th century to the early 21st and shown, say, an online dating profile that reads 'Race: Caucasian; Religion: Jewish', would take this as a straightforward contradiction. They would have been dead wrong, but that does not make us dead right. The sad fact is that the term, to the extent that it refers to anything other than the noble people of Georgia, Chechnya, and so on, functions simply as a way of dividing us off from them. For now, the us includes Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews but not, generally, Arabs and (most) Latin Americans. It is, in other words, as racist as the day it was coined. Though it excludes different groups in different eras, it exists for the sole purpose of exclusion.

Most Americans who describe themselves as Caucasians would likely be reluctant to include Kadyrov as one of their own, even if they were to learn that, on strictly technical grounds, he must count as Caucasian if anyone does. He is a Muslim, after all; he is bearded, wears a fez-like hat, is usually seen draped in ammunition, and would appear entirely out of place at your local Bed, Bath, & Beyond. But the original association of whiteness with the Caucasus appears to have been a sort of pre-racial Orientalism, which valued the beauty of the Caucasian slave girl in view of its exoticness. In other words, its object was a white person, but it was objectifying in exactly the same way the later fascination with, e.g., the Hottentot Venus would be.

So when the know-nothing North Carolina State Senator's wife, Jodie Brunstetter, says that gay marriage should be prohibited as a measure against the eventual elimination of the 'Caucasian' race, she should not just be condemned for homophobia, for the logical fallaciousness of supposing that if they weren't getting married gay people would be reproducing, and for the retrograde idea that races in themselves are anything worth conserving, as one might conserve Sumatran rhinoceroses. She should also be condemned for supposing that there is such a thing as the Caucasian race. There is not, and never has been.

Yet the reaction from progressive circles is to denounce Brunstetter for her homophobia and her sentimental attachment to the white race, while letting pass without notice, and even with explicit support, her identification of whiteness with Caucasianness. Or, alternatively, we find what appears to be utter confusion about the meaning of the latter term. Thus Erin Gloria Ryan asks in a post in Jezebel: "Does Jodie Brunstetter know that 'Caucasian' isn't synonymous with 'white people'?" And thus far I found myself thinking: yes! But then came the disappointment of reading on: "Caucasians," Ryan writes, "live in India, on the horn of Africa, the Middle East, and in South America. They're brown and white and black. What Mrs. Brunstetter means is 'Aryan'. You know, like what Hitler meant, but in America."

Here I confess I just don't know what Ryan means by 'Caucasian' (a complaint that cannot be made, at least, about what Brunstetter means). I suppose there might be some scattered Chechens and the like in the Horn of Africa, and they might show a variety of complexions. But if the term is not taken to refer to someone from that mountain region, then I really don't know what it could be referring to except to that folk-category often described, alternatively, as 'white people'.

Invoking that other sinister and so-flexible-as-to-be-meaningless category of 'Aryans' only confuses matters; it too was once a non-racial category, referring to a certain caste in a certain region that we don't think of today as having much to do with whiteness, which became racialized principally in Germany as a result of certain rather ungrounded philological and linguistic speculations (by contrast with the physical-anthropological speculations of Blumenbach et al. in which the parallel notion of 'Caucasians' developed).

Neither 'Aryan' (except in the case of ancient North India) nor 'Caucasian' (except in the case of the southern Urals) ever had any serious application to human biological or social reality, yet Ryan happily goes along with Brunstetter in speaking as if there really are such things. It's time to scrap this bit of 18th-century racial mythology.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

On the Quebec Student Strike

I wrote this last week for a US publication, but it ended up falling through the cracks there, so I'll just post it here.

On April 23, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilian Radovac aptly described the past few months of upheaval across Quebec as "the biggest student uprising you've never heard of." This movement, which began building from early February of this year, has at its peak involved over 300,000 students across the province. A demonstration on March 22 attracted over 200,000 participants to the streets of Montreal. There have been scores of arrests.

The official reason for the movement is student opposition to the announcement from the government of provincial prime minister Jean Charest of its intention to raise university tuition around 75% over the next five years, to a little under $4000 per year. At the end of this period, Quebec tuition will still be the lowest of all Canadian universities, which are in turn much less expensive than all American public universities.

In spite of what many outside of the province consider a deal too good to complain about, one frequent demand of the demonstrators is for something even better than what Quebec students had before the hikes: free university education for all. This is of course a tall order, and that it can be made at all has much to do with the unique place of Quebec in North American society, and with the sense of many in this province that it is a society based on a different set of values, and a different set of choices, than those of the rest of the continent. As Sameer Zuberi wrote recently in the Huffington Post, "Quebecers have made a societal choice to keep education accessible to all, regardless of income."

One question right now is whether Quebec will in fact be able to hold out against the consumer model of education that is sweeping the world around it. While it may be that the global economic forces behind these changes are too powerful to be resisted, many Quebec students believe that theirs is a special pocket of the world, one where there remains some hope that things can be done differently. This belief is utopian and traditionalist at once: in addition to insisting on a future for the university that any business model of this institution would deem unrealistic, it also insists on holding to a conception of the university that the business model supposes to be of no value in today's world.

The attitude of the government, and of university administrations, is stubbornly 'realistic', a realism that manifests itself in consistent unwillingness to engage in dialogue with the student demonstrators. Instead, university administrations have largely preferred to let the police, and in some cases private security firms, do their speaking for them, in the language of force. This is surprising, particularly after a pepper-spray incident at McGill University last Fall seemed to most in the Quebec university community to drive home the point that universities are better off handling their own affairs, even when these involve tremendous discord, rather than calling in outside force to do so.

Whether Quebec can hold out against broader regional and global changes or not, it is not difficult to see that there are larger social factors behind the discontent, of which the hikes are only one symptom, concerning the value of education and the future of the university. Many of the most engaged students, and many of the most vocal defenders of the strike among faculty members, are based in philosophy departments. It is difficult not to notice that it is the vision of the university that philosophers tend to hold --as a sanctuary for disinterested inquiry, and as a place where one begins a life-long process of cultivating wisdom and character-- that is currently under threat, and that this threat is part of the broader set of reasons that have brought the student movement into being.

To put this last point a bit more pessimistically: it is growing ever harder to study, to teach, and to do philosophy in North American universities. One has the sense, in fact, that from a high administrator's point of view, the humanities in general must appear as a sort of vestigial organ upon the university, something it hasn't yet lost fully through the process of evolution, yet something that no longer contributes to the central mission of the university. That mission is, increasingly, to 'partner' with the private sector. Among other things, this partnering requires that academics learn to speak, or to imitate, the language of the men and women of business. And this in turn requires that the short-term pay-off of inquiry be immediately evident, even, or especially, to those who are not participating in the inquiry.

Until recently the slogan of my own university was 'Real Education for the Real World'. That always rubbed me the wrong way, for a great part of philosophy is dedicated to the systematic investigation of the problem of the real world: of whether it exists, of how we can know whether it does, and, if it does exist, of its nature and ultimate causes. Philosophers can't assume at the outset that they know what sort of world one ought to be preparing for, and in this respect any philosophy that pretends to be preparing students for some pre-given, clearly defined 'real world' is fake philosophy.

Of course, by 'real world' what is implicitly meant is 'business world'. Late in March, Guillaume Charette, a law student at the Université de Montréal requested an injunction against the strikers on the grounds --often rehearsed by Quebec university administrations-- that students are not unionized workers and so it is literally impossible for them to strike; they are in fact consumers, who are only 'boycotting' a particular sort of service (and one for which they have already paid). Carl Bouchard, a history professor at the Université de Montréal, noted in response that on this narrow definition, we would also have to redescribe hunger-strikers as 'food-boycotters'. But the bigger problem with Charette's argument is that it misconstrues education as something that can be consumed, something that can be purchased, rather than as a process of self-cultivation, with which the university and its faculty are much better able to assist when the students do not take us to be serving them in the same way flight attendants or Starbucks employees do.

Ostensibly in the name of 'better service', universities are cutting corners and streamlining in a way that is jarringly similar to the recent upheavals in, say, the airline industry. Like almost every industry in recent years, more and more of the university experience is moving online. One often hears that the fate of the newspaper industry is the best guide to what will happen, with perhaps a decade's delay, to the university. I recently learned that my own university will soon be offering students the choice of submitting course evaluations (that is, assessments of my ability in introducing them to philosophy) by mobile phone. The student evaluation, once a necessary counterweight to the sometimes arbitrary authority of faculty members, is now reduced to a convenient iPhone app, a streamlining of the educational product that directly parallels the appearance of mobile-phone-based boarding passes. Both the educational and the travel technologies are meant to be used with equal casualness and insouciance.

One way to understand the current movement would be to suppose that there is a dawning awareness that being given handy new apps for submission of course evaluations is not at all the same thing as being listened to. At every turn, the Quebec government has reacted to the students' requests to open up lines of communication with something approaching contempt. The government's line has been that there is nothing to discuss, since the budget is already a fait accompli. But what this misses are the broader concerns about the fate of education. It also misses the value of the students' sincere effort to think about radically different --and, yes, unrealistic-- models of the fate of universities in an era in which the consumer model threatens to infect nearly all varieties of human social interaction.

--

Follow me on Facebook.

Divination, Sacrifice, Art

An excerpt from my essay in Heide Hatry's new book, Not a Rose. To learn more about the book, or to buy it, go here.

There is a certain variety of pulp erotic novel that tries to entice you into purchasing it by displaying the curve of a woman’s hips, or the suggestion of what is properly called the ‘intergluteal cleft’ on its cover. Some of these covers play on a sort of visual metaphor, and show you an image of a piece of fruit that might at first glance be mistaken for the female anatomy. Peaches and cherries work particularly well towards this effect.

Now suppose the graphic-design department of a publishing house decided to use the haunches of a goat,or a piece of gristle from the dinner plate, to bring about the same trompe-l’oeil. Pause a moment on the difference between these two sorts of illusion. When we learn that what we are seeing is a cherry, and not a woman’s derrière, we feel amusement, and perhaps even more desire than we would have felt had it been, so to speak, the real thing.

But if the same tromperie is carried out by a blob of fat, not a cherry, we feel we have been truly and unfairly trumped; any desire we had will now be thoroughly squelched, and off we go in search of the latest Churchill biography or some equally unsexy thing. In truth the eye is soothed and seduced by the fruit. It takes being trumped by meat for such representations to register as an offense. Cherries and peaches are the staples of erotic poetry, while ‘meat’ signifies we have crossed from the erotic into the pornographic.

Heide Hatry does not propose to substitute woman with fruit or meat, but rather to put meat in the place of the fruit, the carnal – the truly carnal, one might even go so far as to say a revelatory carnal.

In ancient Rome the haruspex was the man who divined the future by reading the internal organs of sacrificed animals (mostly lambs). Divination is by definition aleatoric: it lets the world, and time, and chance decide the outcome of a given trial, and the result is taken as a statement of the truth quite apart from the question of whether it is a thing of beauty or not. Divination wants answers; art (at least as it’s often understood) wants pleasure.

Now I know none of this is on Hatry’s mind when she is creating her art, and no doubt that’s for the better. I come to her work simply as a philosopher interested, first of all, in the history of reflection in the West on the ontological differences between inanimate objects, plants, animals, and humans; and, second of all, interested in the history of reflection on the nature of objects of art. I think of this latter category, as it has been conceived until very recently, in the broadest sense of whatever it is that is produced by human artifice.

To the extent that art is to be something more precise than this, it is going to converge with the sort of semiotically dense business that has long been familiar to us from things like ritual sacrifice and other elements of what is now called ‘religion’. Heide confounds our sense of etiquette, to begin with; but beyond that she confounds our grasp of the order of nature, and at least brings back into view, the reversion of ‘art’ to the more profound category of offering.

Portrait of the Author as a Nematode

A Miracle in Colonel Sanders' Colon (The PTL Club, 1979)

What an amazing historical document. I had not intended to watch the whole thing, but I did, with rapt attention. It recalls deep, vague, long-forgotten memories in me. Perhaps I saw this very episode in 1979, when I was seven; perhaps it is just that Col. Sanders speaks exactly like the elderly people in my American childhood used to speak. I knew Americans from the 19th century, worshipful Americans with their very own pastors who spoke with regional accents uncorrupted by mass media. It's hard to believe now, but I did.

 

There is so much here! Jim Bakker's sidekick's awful doggerel in praise of the Colonel (19'38''); the delightful finale with the giddy KFC regional managers distributing chicken to the PTL crowd, as the Colonel himself enjoys a wing; the squirm-inducing story of the polyp in Col. Sanders' colon and the 'plunk' sound he heard in the commode after his post-op enema (8'40''); Col. Sanders's own creepy pastor who denounces the 'Jewish attorney' (sic) who performed the operation on the Colonel and failed, in his Jewishness, to realize that God himself had already begun his own operation on the chicken-magnate's colon (9'47'').

What is most stunning, of course, is the way this epitomizes so vividly the conspiracy of religion and entrepreneurship in American history. Col. Sanders is 'saved' not nearly so much when his pastor first prays for him, as when the Colonel forks over his first tithe. The simple-minded money-maker and the crafty man of God make a perfect pair. The whole history of the place is a history of duplicity, unctuousness, and unremitting hustling. I miss it.

The Two Bobs: A Note on Cults of Personality

Once a year or so I permit myself to be alarmed by the maneuverings of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States. Some years ago I was invited onto the radio show of one of Avakian's principal porte-parole, whose name escapes me now, but who is a well-known fixture at the lower end of the radio dial.

The subject was some uncontroversial thing, the indefensibility of the US invasion of Iraq or the like. At some point, when it came to discussing the propaganda operation leading up to this invasion, I invoked the name of Stalin, which stopped my host cold, and triggered a spontaneous defense of the Ossetian caudillo, who, I was told, might have had to take some extreme measures, but was sure nonetheless to end up 'on the right side of history'.

This got me Googling the radio program I had innocently agreed to be on, which landed me after a few clicks on the website of the RCP-USA, learning all about the elusive Chairman Bob. A veteran of the '60s student movement in Berkeley, Avakian is now the leading Maoist figure in the US. Fine. that's his thing, and surely there's a place for it. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the historical legacy of the great leap forward. I am a pacifist, and I think that it was not worth it; I understand however the arguments of those who draw to our attention the fact that, through the bloody violence of it, China really did effect a great leap forward, and that therefore I should be interrogating myself about the ways in which my own flaccid pacifism helps maintain the interests of the imperialist lackeys, the paper tigers, etc.

That's all exciting stuff to debate. But what I can't go along with is the conscious cultivation by Avakian and his enablers of a cult of personality around this rather unexceptional Californian. It's remarkable to see them working at it (Avakian has even said, in response to the criticism that there is such a cult: "I certainly hope so— we’ve been working very hard to create one."). This does at least help me to put Maoism in perspective. When I've read Mao, and been utterly put off by the cultic aspect of it, I have sometimes tried to tell myself that this must be something deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and that cannot but come across as odd when translated into English and presented as a universalizable revolutionary doctrine. Why, after all, even if I ultimately judge that the great leap forward was worth it, should I give the slightest shit about Mao the guy? Why should I care about that stupid face of his? It must have something to do, I've often told myself, with ancestor worship, with cultural legacies I simply can't understand, just like I can't understand pangolin worship or couvade.

But the RCP has managed to duplicate precisely the tone of the unbelievably deadpan party-line correctness we know from the Little Red Book, yet transplanted into familiar American situations. Consider this testimonial about Chairman Avakian from a certain Carl Dix, entitled "Traveling with Chairman Avakian: A Determined Revolutionary Leader, and a Fired Man, for Decades." Dix was a member of the Black Workers' Congress from Baltimore, who was hosted by Avakian during a visit to New York. They had a discussion about some minor points of doctrinal difference between the BWC and Avakian's own group, after which, so Dix testifies, the "discussion I had with Bob Avakian was a very important turning point in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that because of it I was able to stay on the revolutionary path." Dix goes on:

The carrying forward of this line struggle is a testament to the correctness of the line that Bob Avakian has led the RCP in forging from the months leading to its formation down to the present. And it is a testament to the importance of us all learning from the approach and method he has brought to the revolutionary struggle for all of the more than three decades that I've known him.

Avakian keeps out of sight these days, and we are not told by Dix when this meeting took place, so we are left with the impression of a mythical encounter, of something fable-like that takes place outside of history but that serves as a seed for the beginning of history: like the Buddha's first witnessing of poverty. Notwithstanding his reclusion, the RCP website assures us that Avakian has an "irrepressible sense of humor" (just the other day I was irked by the assurance from Jobbik, the extreme right-wing Hungarian political party, that their leader Gábor Vona "is perhaps most notable for his disarming sense of humour, which frequently causes members of the audience at Jobbik public forums to be doubled-up with laughter." Why do political leaders who advance themselves through the threat of violence always feel the need to explicitly insist upon their own good humor?)

And now the RCP has a campaign underway that they're calling 'BA Everywhere', which is "aimed at raising big money to project Bob Avakian’s voice and works throughout society—to make BA a household word." It's being supported by something they're calling "The BAsics bus tour" (sic). Sunsara Taylor participated in one of these tours, and explained its importance as follows:

[T]he more that we are promoting Bob Avakian as who he actually is and what he is actually indispensible to (revolution aimed at the emancipation of all of humanity), the more we will be drawing forward and engaging the biggest questions of this revolution and bringing growing numbers into it.

In short, hail Bob.

Some of us of a certain age and from a certain part of the world will have trouble suppressing the memory of a different Bob, the fictional idol of the satirical Church of the SubGenius. Here the name 'Bob' was evidently chosen precisely for its uramerikanisch sonority, for its quintessential regular-guy sort of American anonymity. Bob is himself completely non-descript; he is to be worshipped not because he is exceptional, but precisely because he is a cipher. 

Now the Church of the SubGenius was described by at least one of its prominent members as a 'very serious joke'. This is an approach to life that makes sense to me, which explains my at least tangential affiliation with the SubGenius crowd at an earlier stage of my development.

A serious joke is still a joke, and it is for exactly this reason that I would still contend that anyone loyal to this latter Bob, who does not exist, is leagues more sophisticated intellectually (and, I would argue, politically) than a follower of the Bob with whom we began. The Church of the SubGenius is trying to penetrate to the essence of mass movements, is exploring, through irony, what it means to line up behind some image of a head. Here there could be no real talk of 'correctness', and the literal mind that knows only correctness and incorrectness can only fear and hate the mind that works at another level. I have no doubt that Avakian would send the frivolous pranksters behind the SubGenius to the fields if he ever gained power.

Of course, the thing is, he most certainly won't, and it's in this connection that the intentional cultivation of a cult of personality seems so ridiculous to me. In order for such a cult to work, there it has to have the power of coercion behind it. Show me a single example, anywhere in world history, of a cult of personality that is not backed up by threat of force. It's a straightforward contradiction. Without such a threat, Chairman Bob is literally just a chairman, like the chairman of a school board, or of a Future Farmers of America milking competition. Even if the RCP were to seize power, its coercion could really only be exercised after the shit's already gone down. In the meantime there is simply no way that Chairman Bob could reasonably hope his dimly glowing personality might have sufficient purchase on (say) my attention to be able to bring about the cult he desires. How could it, when I've got the other Bob to amuse me?

Bob Avakian could become an important figure in my life, when, after the revolution, he sends his thugs to arrest me for this here display of gross incorrectness. I guess that's a chance I'm willing to take. Until then, as the other Bob says, give me slack.

Probably the Best Visual Pun on an Ancient Sanskrit Grammarian and a Light Italian Repast Ever

A Note on 'Academic Passing'

There has been some interesting discussion at the NewAPPS blog, about the idea of 'academic passing', initiated by a thoughtful guest post from Kristie Dotson. It has been unclear to me throughout this discussion, since Dotson's initial post, whether what is being proposed is an expansion of approaches in philosophy to include sources, from whomsoever they might come, of philosophical insight that are usually not considered legitimate, such as non-Western philosophical traditions and popular and oral traditions (Western or non-Western); or whether, by contrast, what is being proposed is that philosophers ought to be more free to bring their individual background motivations, stemming from their autobiographies and the complex ways in which their identities took shape, to bear in their philosophical work. One thing that is clear is that by implication, if it is the latter aim, it is those philosophers who have backgrounds that are underrepresented in the discipline whose personal narratives are hoped to bring the most benefit.

As I've said to one NewAPPS contributor in another venue, I think these two possible proposals must be separated. By background I, for example, appear, like it or not, to be a chip off the old hegemon, and many would suppose that for me to incorporate personal narrative into my philosophical work would just be heaping on more of the same (though here I take it one of the great fruits of disability studies has been to drive home the point that many of us are marginal in ways that may not be evident on first meeting us, or perhaps even after knowing us for quite a while).

But whether or not I am to the manner born, it is a fact about my philosophical temperament and inclinations that I love to seek out unusual, broadly unrecognized, and easily dismissed sources of philosophical insight, including but not limited to poetry, mythology, oral traditions, folk culture, ethnotaxonomy, premodern and non-Western applied sciences, etc. In this respect, I too have found myself struggling to 'pass', e.g., when I conceal the fact that it was a book I read about the folk beliefs of a certain New Guinean highland tribe concerning the sociocosmic meaning of various bodily fluids that first got me interested in the metaphysics of generation in 17th-century European philosophy.

I tend to read Descartes, Malebranche, et al., ethnographically. For example, I see their views on the formation of the fetus as heavily inflected by commonplaces of contemporaneous European midwifery, and I see these commonplaces as bearing interesting parallels to folk beliefs around the world. Moreover, this fact is not for me a count against Descartes and Malebranche; it is rather in large part what makes them interesting to me. So my own work on the representatives par excellence of the dead-white-male tradition is not, for me anyway, a reinforcement of this tradition's hegemonic status, but rather an attempt to place these dead white males in a larger community, indeed the largest community possible: that of human beings who come up with sundry ways of accounting for the nature and origins of humanity and for humanity's place in nature.

I often suppress these background interests for the sake of what I have long thought of as academic passing (though less often, as my status becomes more secure). For many fellow philosophers, it's bad enough that I am principally concerned with ideas in history, let alone with ideas about soft and squishy things like the problem of animal generation, and let alone, again, in a way that conceives these ideas as investigable in the same way that we might investigate Papuan folk beliefs about menstrual blood. But now I am told that my academic passing can't really pass as passing, since my public identity as a white male ensures that my marginal interests can be preserved intact all the way through the tenure process, whereas if my identity were different I would find the systematic exclusion of the questions I value more prohibitive to my continued pursuit of academic philosophy. If this is what is at issue, however, then it seems we aren't talking about academic passing at all, but simple old-fashioned passing, where it is not beliefs and philosophical inclinations that have to be suppressed, but identities. It is a very serious issue that such suppression occurs, but it is a different issue from the one I at times thought Dotson was discussing.

My philosophical approach does not flow in any easy or obvious way from my background or my identity, but it is not clear to me whether Dotson's intervention can be read as an incitement to me (for example) to continue to pursue it anyway. In any case I find very worrisome the suggestion that only or primarily those people with (recognized) marks of identity difference should be charged with the task of diversifying and broadening the range of acceptable sources of philosophical insight. But again I think I may still be confused about which of the two points is being put forward, or perhaps this is a confusion that remains for Dotson to work out herself. But either way the two must, I think, remain separate.

Pussies vs. Dicks in Putin's Russia

Amateur neo-Kremlinologists will by now have heard of Pussy Riot, a league of masked anarchist feminist punks who, until recently, could be spotted around Moscow performing their music, uninvited, in public spaces. Their career was cut short when two of their members were detained by Putin's security forces. Here is a clip of what appear to be various performances, to the tune of their best-known song, "Kropotkin-Vodka":

 

As far as I know, no one has yet attempted to translate the lyrics into English, so let me give it a try:

Occupy the city with a frying pan
Go out with a vacuum cleaner, reach orgasm;
Seduce the battalions of police virgins.
The naked cops rejoice at the new reforms.

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

Kropotkin-Vodka floats in their stomachs
You're doing fine, and the Kremlin bastards
Are having a rebellion of the johns, poisoning is fatal
Blinkers won't help, meet Kennedy.

Cunt to the fucking cop stooges.

I must have slept, the day again is for oppression,
Brass knuckles in my pocket: feminism, that is,
Carry your soup to eastern Siberia,
So that [Pussy] Riot can be sufficiently vulgar.

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

If I were to attempt an analysis, I would point out that on one level it appears that something is getting lost in the translation of a certain species of Western anarchist feminism into the Eastern European context. The formula here seems to be the assertion of a radical political stance through straightforward, in-your-face vulgarity-- something that I think is rather foreign to Western feminism. But I also think it's a mistake to try to interpret this as a borrowing or a derivation from the West: in fact it connects up with a long history of political dissent in Russia, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, through the public assertion of sexuality, most of which has not traditionally been overtly feminist. Most recently, we had the case of Voïna (War), an artists' collective that was brutally supressed by the KGB, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, after painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises right next to the security forces' headquarters in Moscow. Banksy rushed to their support, though one suspects that he would have considered graffiti like this rather less interesting if it were to appear in London or Los Angeles.

More distantly, we have the pornographic novel-cum-memoir It's Me, Eddie, written in the 1970s by Eduard Limonov during his sojourn as an impostor Refusenik in New York City, long before he became a mercenary in Serbia and, finally, returned to Russia to found the so-called 'National Bolshevik Party': a bizarre mix of hateful fascist ideology with subversive street theater and clever manipulation of 20th-century political iconography. (To the right is a photo of me speaking, but not agreeing, with said fascist pornographer, circa 1996). More distantly still, we find the work of the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev in the late 1960s and early '70s, who, like the Russian examples cited, seems to have been excited by the idea, which can be traced back to the 'Freudo-Marxism' of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s --before Stalin's imposition of socialist realism as the only legitimate form of aesthetic expression--, that true political liberation can only come with sexual liberation, or as Wilhelm Reich put it, and as Makavejev aggressively reminded us in his film about the apostate German psychoanalyst and communist: 'Fuck freely, comrades!' 

So Pussy Riot, I mean to say, joins a distinguished lineage. But one thing is different this time around: the oppressive state against which the avant-garde is recalcitrating has grown more sophisticated, adaptable. In the West, this adaptability takes the form of 'greenwashing'; in China (as that one Slovenian guy is always mentioning), the state has figured out that it is better off not suppressing Buddhism altogether, but rather putting forth its very own, party-approved Dalai Lama to undermine the authority of that Western media darling in exile in India. The Putin regime, in turn, has responded to the Pussy Riot problem not only by brutal suppression (though that too), but also by propping up its very own aggressively sexual, masked, subversive, avant-garde-ish answer to Pussy Riot. As reported recently at Snob.ru (I haven't quite figured out what Snob is all about; all I know is that it is a consistently interesting source of news and information coming out of Russia, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, its servers are currently down), and as confirmed by a simple YouTube search, there is now a character going by the name of 'Dick Riot', roving around Moscow, making an ass of himself.

He claims to be an independent journalist who happens to support Putin, and protests rather loudly when he is asked whether his stunt is being supported directly by the Putin regime. To be honest I can't really figure out what he is on about in the YouTube clips of him, but he seems like a rather unpleasant person. Anyway what is of interest about him is that in today's Russia such a man as Dick Riot could be one of the derivative products formed in reaction to the hybrid of Eastern European sexual-political subversion with Western feminism that is Pussy Riot.

Putin is no Stalin, and the fact that he has been able to consolidate power in the era of YouTube is in part a result of his ability to coopt the forces of would-be subversion, forces that to which a tyrant like Stalin could respond only through utter suppression. Usually, this cooptation is simple Berlusconi-style media manipulation; surely the most vulgar example of this was the 'Tear Something Up for Putin' campaign, in which nubile young women could win their very own iPad2 by submitting a video of themselves sexily tearing something up that, it was understood, represented Putin's cowardly enemies. One of the most favored submissions featured a Playboy-ready young woman tearing up a pile of US dollars.

But the reaction to Pussy Riot, perhaps, shows a new sort of cooptative sophistication. It responds to the avant-garde not with more, louder, sillier, glossier air-brushed nonsense, sustained by the hope of a new iPad, but rather with a figure that supposedly emerges from the fringes himself, bearing a mask, pulling stunts, playing the merry prankster. Of course, there is nothing at all avant-garde about Dick Riot, and in fact the substitution of 'dick' for 'pussy' is deeply, literally, illustratively reactionary, exactly like the disgruntled proposals we often hear in the United States for the creation of a 'National Association for the Advancement of White People'. The very first lesson of feminism, learned by pretty much all non-australopithecines in the West a long time ago, is that feminist and 'masculinist' perspectives on one and the same thing are not, so to speak, enantiomorphs of one another. They are different because the feminine is always the marked category; everything is a dick unless otherwise specified.

So in that respect Dick Riot is not just reactionary but also redundant. That the Putin regime would be able (directly or indirectly) to produce such a creature, as its pseudo-avant-garde response to a genuinely subversive phenomenon, makes sense when we recall what a dick Putin himself is. I sat at a desk across from that morose little man in 1990, when he was consigned by the Gorbachev regime to a sinecure watching over foreign students at Leningrad State University. I swear I'm not making it up when I say this: I remember thinking, this guy's got a problem. But he's managed to do a lot with his problem, and again I think much of his success has to do with his adaptability. Stalin squelched the avant-garde. A tyrant with any hope of sticking around in the age of YouTube will take a different, more supple approach.

--

Follow me on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Anton Wilhelm Amo: A Ghanaian Philosopher in 18th-Century Germany

Anton Wilhelm Amo was the first African philosopher active in Europe in the modern period (there were plenty in antiquity, but this was before 'Africa' and 'Europe' meant what they do today). He was a member of the Nzema people, born in 1703, and kidnapped into slavery around 1706. He came into the service of Herzog Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel shortly thereafter as a Kammermohr, a 'chamber Moor'.

His trajectory seems very similar to that of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who was taken from Africa (long thought to be Ethiopian, more recent evidence traces him to Cameroon), sold at a slave market in Constantinople to Peter the Great, educated and raised as the Tsar's own son, eventually to pursue a distinguished career in engineering, military science, and diplomacy (he was also Aleksandr Pushkin's great-grandfather, and the subject of the author's unfinished novel, Peter the Great's Moor, of which I've translated an excerpt here).

Gannibal is quite a bit better known than Amo, though his distinctions as a general and as an engineer are rather less interesting to me, anyway, than Amo's career as a philosopher. I don't know all that much about the role of the Kammermohr in the Enlightenment, but one certainly gets the whiff of a perhaps well-intentioned paternalism, if not a more straightforward racism, in the project of taking non-Europeans and 'training them up' in European manners (and sometimes sciences and letters too). The virulent racist Voltaire, for example, was not prevented by his racism from searching for l'étoile noire des Lumières (he thought he had found it in Gannibal). But this doesn't negate the fact that in some cases the result of these experiments was the cultivation of interesting people who accomplished interesting things. 

Amo is fascinating to me for a lot of reasons, and right now I am resisting the temptation to run the idea of writing a biography of him past my editors. He is of particular interest to me as a philosopher though, because he was working in Halle in the decades immediately following the death of Leibniz (whom he probably met in Wolfenbüttel when he was a small boy and Leibniz was an old man), in a context where Leibnizianism was hotly contested, with the Wolffians speaking in his defense, and Georg Ernst Stahl and his Pietist cohort working against the influence of Leibniz's philosophy. From what little analysis I've been able to find of the philosophical import of Amo's 1734 dissertation, De humanae mentis apatheia, there seems to have been no recognition so far that his central thesis, that the soul is not the locus of sensory experience, could be a parti pris against the Stahlian view that the soul is directly implicated in the workings of the body. I have yet to work through the dissertation in any detail, but I suspect it could be a somewhat shrouded defense of Leibniz (whose name is mentioned only once in passing in the entire work).

The work as a whole is rather dull and scholastic (with a small 's'), the sort of thing Kant had in mind when he spoke of the dogmatic slumbers of German philosophy in the century preceding his own critical turn. But there may be more of interest in Amo's work than others of the same tradition. For example, in a subsection of a lengthy enumeration of varieties of irregular syllogism, Amo mentions a type of argument he calls 'crocodilitis', "a sort of captious questioning," in which "the person who asks intends to demonstrate two contrary propositions by means of fictitious reasons... affirming the one by negation, and denying the other by affirmation."

I haven't been able to find any reference to crocodilitis anywhere else, and I'm inclined to suspect that Amo was inserting a bit of levity into this tedious exercise of taxonomizing syllogisms by playing on perceptions of his own exoticness; coming from a land stereotyped since antiquity by its strange animals (see, e.g., Aristotle's Historia animalium), Amo inserts a joke into his dissertation by naming a type of syllogism after a notoriously dangerous African beast.

The 'captious questioning' deployed in crocodilitis, moreover, is rather sinister; it suggests betrayal and uncertainty about who one's real friends are. No doubt I'm reading too much into it, but until someone can show me another author using the term 'crocodilitis', I'm going to suppose Amo is somehow trying to insert an autobiographical allusion here.

I've translated his account of it here. If anyone knows of an established meaning for this term in the history of logic and rhetoric, I would be very interested to know.

§8. Crocodilitis

Crocodilitis is not, strictly speaking, a sort of argument, but rather a sort of captious questioning. In this question, the interrogator intends to demonstrate two contrary proporsitions by means of fictitious reasons, yet in anticipation of the response that is to come: he affirms the one by means of negation, and he denies the other by means of affirmation; he does so in alleging, in both cases, premeditated fictitious examples.

Example: Mental Propositions

I. I am not your friend.

II. I am not your enemy

Question

Do you believe I am your friend? If the interlocutor responds in the affirmative, the other thus reacts immediately: Whence do you have this conviction? And he continues: If I were in fact already your friend, I would already have given you, long ago, the favors of friendship, and I would not have burdened you with this question.

If by contrast the interlocutor responds in the negative, the other promptly reacts: Whence do you have the evidence that I am your enemy? If I were already in fact your enemy I would not have asked the question: I would have been intent on harming you without saying a word. You can thus see that I am not your enemy.

*

Amo returned to Ghana in 1747 after a conservative shift in German politics made his career as a university professor impossible. Having arrived as a slave, and then against all odds managing to thoroughly insert himself into a German form of life, he eventually found himself squeezed out of the place to which he was initially brought by force. It's as if the Germans caught him in a long, drawn-out game of crocodilitis.

Soon I'm going to translate the various bits of front matter in the De humanae mentis, such as the multiple dedicatory letters, that deal with Amo's identity as a 'son of Africa' who has been initiated into European philosophy.

The Hinternet

Having grown tired of my own shtick, of the endless me-centricity of this here project at www.jehsmith.com, I got it into my head that perhaps I should instead be channeling my energy into a more collaborative effort. To that end I decided to create a group blog.

The first thing I did was to register a new domain name: www.thehinternet.com (some time ago I had registered www.clinamen.net, but I forgot to pay my annual fee, and the address was taken back by ICANN or whomever; and in any case neo-Lucretianism had just grown too fashionable for me to want to associate myself with that old idea of 'the swerve').

I learned after registering the name that the term 'hinternet' is already in use, evidently mostly among conspiracy-mongering off-the-grid types who worry about 'the government' 'shutting down' the Internet, to describe some anarchic assemblage of ham radios they've put together to simulate the workings of the Internet. I thought when I first learned this that we would do better to change our name. I decided to stick with it, though. Let 'hinternet' be polysemous. Let us see what the primary meaning of the term will be a decade from now.

The Hinternet is going to be developed into a group blog, one that will be like a great many other such blogs before it, with this one noteworthy difference, that it will not be stultifyingly boring. It will draw on the interests of the artists, academics, critics, and scientists who contribute to it, but there will be absolutely zero shop talk: no moaning about performance reviews, the tedium of grading, parental leave, &c. Just ideas, discussed with elegance and conviction. I am envisioning something like Cabinet Magazine, transported into the format of, say, The Daily Beast.

I am not yet sure this will even be possible. Certainly, there is not much else on the Internet that aspires to this end. That's why it's called 'The Hinternet': we're going behind and around the established conventions in this venue, acknowledging that we've moved into a post-paper world, but seeking nonetheless to preserve something of the non-evanescence, the feeling of relative permanence, that one used to get from ideas discussed in print. We will also differ from existing blogs in that we will try to be self-contained, also somewhat like an old-fashioned magazine. A post that provides a link to a post somewhere else with a sentence or two of commentary will not cut it here.

It will take a while yet before we begin with our regular stream of posts. For now, we would like to ask you to help us out by spreading the word about The Hinternet. 'Like' us on Facebook, for example, and encourage your friends to do the same. The more readers we have, the greater the incentive will be to write good stuff, which will get us more readers, and so on, in an unending virtuous circle.

We already have most of our bases covered, with excellent writers ready to hold forth regularly on architecture, cognitive science, the history of science, linguistics, literature, &c. We would be interested in hearing from an aspiring music critic interested in gaining some exposure. Someone who lives it and loves it, and who knows how to write.

But what, you are no doubt asking, will come of jehsmith.com? Don't worry, I'm only branching out, and you can continue to expect regular doses of variously pessimistic, haughty, underground-man-like meditations; out-of-place Gallicisms, obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with language, and hints of religious fervor shrouded by over-loud protestations of non-belief here in my regular space. But I've grown a bit tired of these various personae, et j'ai le goût de faire autre chose. I think it will do me good to blend into a collective effort (of which I am the supreme controller, of course).

--

Follow The Hinternet on Facebook, or on Twitter.

From the Mailbag

I don't mean to boast, but there's also no reason to hide from the fact that I am read by some very important people. Since I began this blog in 2005, I have been contacted by dozens of editors, producers, and other movers and shakers in the entertainment and literary worlds. Take this, for example:

Dear Justin Smith,

With your permission, I would very much like to reprint your article [on mushrooms and literature] in the newsletter of the Long Island Mycological Club, the LI Sporeprint, of which I am editor. Full authorial credit would be given, and you would be furnished with both hard copy and pdf. The article may have to be  shortened somewhat due to space restraints, and if so, your approval would be sought, if you so desired.

Thanks for any consideration you can give this request.

Best,

H.

For a long time I thought it could not get any better than this, but just the other day I was proven wrong, when I received a message with the subject heading: 'Animal Planet Show'. Though I had long been of interest principally to literary types, it looked like I was finally going to make the move into television! I opened the e-mail without delay, stars shimmering before my eyes. "Hello Mister Smith," it read,

I apologize immediately for contacting you out of the blue for something you might find silly and mundane.  However, I have to ask (as it is my job), and I'm hoping you might have some insight. 

I work on a show for Animal Planet called "Bad Dog" and my job is to find "cute" and "funny" animal clips to license and air on our show.  I came across a video where a 'Dove Annoys A House Cat' (you can see it on Youtube) and the owner of the clip is named "Shlarl".  Or, it's his handle.

Either way, I've been trying to track down this "Shlarl" (so far with no luck).  I know he has commented on your articles (which I have read briefly, and find interesting).  I am wondering if you know this person and/or have any way to contact him.  I just want to ask if he would be interested in talking to me about licensing the clip.  I believe he's French Canadian, and unfortunately I only understand half of his commentary.

Again, I hope I am not disturbing you.  If you wouldn't mind letting me know your thoughts, I would greatly appreciate it.

I hope to hear from you.  And thank you for your time and your blogging insights.

K.

K.'s message filled me with questions. Like, how on earth could there be a show on the air, in 2012, such as this 'Bad Dog'? Isn't this precisely the sort of thing the Internet has obviated? What was America's Funniest Home Videos, after all, but a YouTube avant la lettre, like a shadow play, circa 1890, just before the dawn of cinema? What is the point of 'licensing' a video and showing it once on television, when you can just 'share' the video on your website and show it as many times as your audience wishes to see it?

But these were trivial matters. The important thing was that I was going to be on TV! Or at least that, as a result of my behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, a video of a dove annoying a cat was going to be on TV! Maybe I could cut a deal with this 'Shlarl' and we could co-license the video, or whatever it is people do to derive money and fame from the cultural effluvia they cast off. This was going to be the start of something big.

But then I started to have second thoughts. Maybe I should just accept my fate as a blogger and share the dove-annoying-a-cat video here, for you to watch, for free and at your leisure. It really is delightful, by the way. See for yourself:

 

[P.S. I would like to extend a sincere thanks to K. at 'Bad Dog', a consummate professional who gamely agreed to allow me to cite our correspondence here. May his career in television, or whatever replaces it, go far.]

Why I'm Back on Facebook

I announced recently with much self-certain finality that I was leaving Facebook. I succeeded in doing so for almost a month, after which I reopened my account with the status update: "Alright, I'm back. I can't leave you guys. Forgive me for trying." This update got 57 likes. I was delighted.

But how could I so blatantly fail to live up to my intention? The short answer is that I literally had to go back; I had too much information stored in various parts of my account --in my message box, in my photos, and even in my timeline-- to which I needed access. It was impractical for me to have to revive the account each time, particularly since after a certain number of deactivations, Facebook starts imposing a 24-hour delay on each new reactivation. As a very serious philosopher wrote in response to my homecoming update: "Zuckerberg has us by the short and curlies."

Many of my friends said, or implied, that I ought to be ashamed of myself for caving, but moreso for having announced such a bold intention in the first place. Some compared me to a lapsed AA enthusiast who has rediscovered his old familiar barstool. But I will say right out in the open: I am, in every aspect of my life, and not just the digital one, prone to wild swings between excess and renunciation. Some people don't know what this is like: some are naturally ascetic, some perfectly comfortable with a life of constant excess, and some are simply so constituted as to always consume only the right amount of everything. The last sort are a foreign species to me; I have no idea what it would be like to be one of them, and I am contemptuous of their facile recommendation to just do whatever one is inclined to do in moderation. As if we, the overeaters, overdrinkers, overworkers, hadn't thought of that already!

I understand in my soul the slogan of the recovering alcoholics, according to which one drink is too much, because ten drinks are not enough. In this respect, perhaps, I am more 'American' than 'European', the latter of whom insist that it is a distinctly New World problem to not be able to enjoy vices maturely, to live our lives as though vices are something to renounce rather than master. Those who know me know that I have peculiar eating habits; there is a whole gamut of foods I simply will not eat, and I hate being told that I should just learn to enjoy them in moderation. I could do so, I suppose, if I were differently constituted, but I've lived with myself long enough to know fairly precisely where the boundaries of my capacity to change lie. 

I have to confess, though I move in Europhile circles where it is just taken for granted that mature Epicurean indulgence is the only way to live, I am 100% American in this regard. I hate balance, and if I can't be consistently at either the extreme of asceticism or of debauche, I still prefer wild pendularity over smug self-mastery.

So this explains, I hope, why I made that bold declaration, and then failed to live up to it. But I hope, moreover, that in that declaration my strong ambivalence was clear. I certainly did not say that I think Facebook is entirely sinister. What I in fact said was that Internet-mediated social networks are a more important development in human history than the printing press, and they can no more be said to be good or bad than books can be.

A few years ago I liked to say that part of Facebook's power is that it is a true equalizer of personal identity, in that it forces me to present myself in the same way to everyone in my list of friends: former mentors, students, parents, high-school friends, editors, literally everyone. I was often told in response that this was not in fact so, that I had the freedom to block certain people, to control the flow of information so that not everyone heard the same thing. I insisted that this went against my principles.

But I have now adopted the habit of blocking and list-making that I used to argue against. I have permanently removed from view the updates of everyone who carries on overmuch about their children, everyone who is in the habit of sharing frivolous memes; I've eliminated all the whooping and hollering about sports;  I no longer see the updates of academics I barely know who have nothing to talk about but how much they resent grading papers, or how busy they are, or the quality of the airport they're at, or how they are 'addicted' to espresso. Come to think of it, most of my recent wall-grooming has really been a filtering out of my academic peers.

I expect others will do the same to me; perhaps they'll unfriend me altogether. So be it. This is a new era, and I no longer have the old principled commitment to unfettered sharing that I used to have. Now, instead, the digital social world is starting to look a good deal more like that other social world always has, where we select our smaller social groups based on elective affinities, and where we exclude people with whom we really don't have such affinities. Anyhow when I look at my wall these days, it is considerably less depressing than it had become.

In the month or so I spent away, I finished a book proposal, made significant progress on an article on medieval Indian logic, got through 200 more pages of Proust's masterpiece, and read a lot, but I mean a very lot, of Wikipedia. I finally got straight on the difference between Ranters, Levellers, Diggers, Fuggers, and Junckers; if the article in French on the Mediterranean winds (Sirocco, etc.) seemed inadequate, I would consult the ones in Italian, Corsican, Sicilian, Occitan. On February 17, my browser history indicates that within the space of an hour I read the entries on Goodluck Jonathan, Günther Kaufmann, the Neolithic Cultures of China, and Little House on the Prairie.

I don't know what exactly it is I'm doing when I'm doing this, but I definitely began to do more of it when I didn't have my Facebook wall to scan. The one was clearly functioning as a replacement drug for the other. Like Facebook to the Republic of Letters, Wikipedia makes Diderot's Encyclopédie look like a pathetic joke. And in both cases, this new thing that has overrun the old thing seems as corrosive as it is edifying. I absorb the world through it in a way that I could not have done before, but it's as if I'm absorbing it up my nose, or into my veins. This is potent shit, and it's clear that every one of us is going to have to learn to place it under some regime of control. This is a particular challenge for those of us who are not naturally inclined to moderation, and who know the difference between having a second espresso and having an addiction.

--

Follow me on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Product Packaging and Nationhood

I enjoy spending time in those countries that are not big enough or important enough to have their own product packaging, and instead must share surface space with information in the sundry native tongues of neighboring countries. I remember standing in front of a microwave in Sarajevo, waiting for some ramen noodles to warm up, and thinking: Wow! I can study 20 languages at once, just skimming the ingredients of this so humble repast.

These noodles, in fact, were meant to be cast far and wide across a great swath of Eurasia, the entire part of it, in fact, that cannot be said to be truly either Europe or Asia, roughly from Albania in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. The languages one finds in between, marked out on the package by a little oval containing the official one- or two-letter country abbreviation ('H', 'RO', 'BH', 'KZ', etc.)  are mostly Slavic and Turkic, with some representatives of Eastern Romance (Romanian, Moldovan), Caucasian (Georgian), Ural-Altaic (Hungarian), and a few true isolates such as Albanian --the native word for which is 'shqip' and which evidently evolved as the only surviving descendant of ancient Illyrian--, thrown into the mix. And, except in those few cases where the alphabet is unknown to me, I can learn how to say 'sodium carbonate' in all of these! ('Sodyum karbonat', 'natrij-karbonat', 'carbonat de sodiu', 'nátrium-karbonát', etc.)

These noodles are not fit for consumption in Europe proper, where packaging, other than in the so-called 'ethnic' stores, is meant to mirror national identity, which since 1789 has been wrapped up in the modern collective imagination with language: no nation, in fact, without linguistic uniformity. Western Europe cannot let itself descend into Balkanic lawlessness! Why, the unpoliced linguistic macédoine of the products they allow to circulate there: is this not a testimony of past violence and a portent of more to come?

Of course, there are some complications. For one thing, there is at least one multinational state in Europe (Belgium), and it shares languages with three of its neighbors (most significantly, France and the Netherlands, but also Germany). This means that if you are eating corn flakes in Lille or Nancy, it is not entirely unusual to be told (at least in writing, which is for me a sort of telling) that these are not flocons de maïs at all, but rather maisvlokken. Now in Belgium one learns to live with this, if bitterly: I once had a Walloon girlfriend who proclaimed that she was 'assaulted' every time her eyes landed on the Flemish side of the cereal box. ('Walloon', by the way, like 'Welsh' and 'Vlach' and a number of other European demonyms, comes from an Old Brythonic word that meant, simply, 'foreign'; and foreign she was.) But when these bilingual boxes spill over from that queer kingdom into the glorious republic to the south, the reaction could very well be not indignation, but simply confusion. The French revolutionaries had to wage a brutal campaign against regional otherness to rid the new republic of Occitan and Provençal and Breton, and here we are more than two centuries later confronted with these obscene Germanic consonant clusters on our cereal boxes! This is not the sort of fraternité we had in mind!

The idea of a binational state, as product packaging reveals to us, is inherently strange. In fact, I feel like saying that product packaging in binational states itself serves as a testament to the fragility of the arrangement. If we may move from the Old World context to one with which I am slightly more familiar, I would like to hold forth a bit on the utter bizarreness of Canadian conventions in the labelling and marketing of commercial goods.

Anyone who comes to Canada and who cares about the richness of either English or French will quickly notice that both of these cultural-linguistic treasuries are, in the public display of them, anyway, greatly reduced. In order to be sure of saying exactly the same thing in both languages, Canadian product packaging invariably ends up saying nothing, or next to nothing, or something that really would have been better left unsaid. Thus for example we are told, and expected to passively agree, that 'Fancy Spinach' is 'Épinards de Fantaisie'. Of course, 'fancy' is etymologically a contraction of 'fantasy', which did come into English through French. But 'fancy' and 'fantasy' mean two different things today, and it is absurd to think that anyone has any 'fantasies' at all about frozen spinach. The high percentage of shared lexical items means that Anglo-French bilingualism is fundamentally different from, say, the Anglo-Chinese bilingualism of Hong Kong, or even the Franco-Netherlandic bilingualism of the earlier example, as it enables product packagers to squeeze two languages' worth of labelling into a seemingly continuous phrase, with the two languages' adjectives flanking a shared noun in the middle. This is supposed to save space, as well as the reader's mental energy, but it makes me furious. When I am told that I am eating 'Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates', I feel like like saying: Well of course I am! You already told me that!

It has been said of the Francophone and Anglophone communities in Canada that they are 'two solitudes', and some have pessimistically averred that this is the most we can hope for wherever two or more ethnies are crammed together into a single state (the worst, of course, is Sarajevo, where we started out). The two-solitude détente is perhaps most evident in what is often called 'generic' packaging (a strange designation, when we think about this term's origin in the taxonomical notion of genus). I do not want to dwell for too long on the strangeness of this species of packaging (for it is not a genus). That would bring us too far afield from our principal concern, which is, if I may put it this way, product packaging and nationhood. But I will just say that generics perform a striking counter-movement against the prevailing purpose of packaging in the capitalist world: while ordinarily packaging strives to the extent possible to conceal what is really contained within it, and to present it as not just the sum of its ingredients, but as something with what Walter Benjamin might have called an 'aura', generic packaging by contrast has as its sole aim the blunt declaration of the true nature of the thing or things it contains.

And it is here that bilingualism seems, momentarily, to do what it is officially supposed to be doing: communicating to us exactly the same thing in two different, non-overlapping word-worlds: peas & carrots / pois & carottes. It all seems so simple.

But even here, even when the aim is pure generic explicitness, the idiosyncrasy of what the Spanish rightly call 'idioms' (for to the extent that we are separated off in our own linguistic worlds, we are indeed idiots) shows itself soon enough. Next to the cans of peas and carrots, we find some mixed vegetables, which, curiously enough, are in French not légumes mixtes, but rather they are a macédoine de légumes. A veritable Macedonia of vegetables! They are the culinary equivalent of that demographic powder keg in Southeastern Europe, with pea next to chopped carrot next to diced potato, just as you might find an Albanian village next to a Serbian enclave that abuts an Aromanian district. The French and the English cannot be made to say exactly the same thing, not even in the blunt, literal language of generics. And this unharmonizability, one fears, is but the exact linguistic reflection of the irreducible discreteness of the can's various contents (this is not a mash, but a mix), which in turn is but the alimentary mirror of unending human conflict.

--

Previously published in Kiosk Magazine.

Follow me on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Keeping Up with the Republican Primaries

I got all teary-eyed around November, 2008, just like every other non-australopithecine American. But unlike most of my co-evolved concitoyens I was not a sucker. I was delighted that we would now have a rational and evidently morally decent person, rather than a cretinous one, volunteering to take on a role that is for structural reasons morally compromising. But I did not think for a second that this was the dawning of some sort of new era. That would be to misunderstand what a president is.

We have what in places like Turkey is lucidly described as a 'deep state' (though in Turkey it's principally the army that is had in mind, while for us it's a more composite beast). The deep state  limits drastically what elected officals can do. It is the permanent structure that endures behind the constant electoral spectacle, and it ought to be the only thing of interest to political analysts. Do I blame Obama for the continuation of the Iraq War, the non-closure of Guantánamo, etc.? Just a little bit more than I blame his tailor. For Obama is, as they say, a suit, and many, many people conspire to maintain him as the presentable image of American power. I am incapable of conjuring any commiseration with the conventional liberals who believe disappointment in Obama the person is an appropriate reaction to his record as president.

However little Obama interests me, the current clamoring of the Republican candidates is of an altogether different order of uninterestingness. The constant din they are permitted to sustain for so many months ought, as someone put it, to be of no more concern to us than the gossip on Jersey Shore. And doesn't the decision to tune in or not to any one of the endless 'debates' feel exactly like the rest of your television viewing habits: passive, recreational, irrelevant, kind of fun?

But I was never a big TV fan, and I feel a bit betrayed by the Internet in recent years for having sneakily transformed into something so TV-like. It could have been a rejection of everything TV tells us to care about. Instead the blogs and the pundits work in perfect tandem, encouraging us for example to take an interest in the details of Mitt Romney's tax returns. Mitt Romney is a classic plutocrat; of course he's getting away with as much as he can. The problem is not this or that indiscretion in any given year's filing. The problem is that one has to be a plutocrat in order to stand any chance of being elected.

Nor do I care about the dog on the roof of Romney's car, or the miscarried child the Santorums brought home and fondled for a few days. Hell, if it helped them get through it, why not? Stranger rituals have been documented in the rich variety of human experience.

Still less do I care about Newt Gingrich's infidelities. I have heard the argument that it is not Gingrich's personal life itself that interests progressives, but only his hypocrisy: the fact that he dogged Bill Clinton in the 1990s for his extramarital affairs, and now turns out to be no better. But we can still be better: we can hold ourselves to a higher standard, and agree that an aspiring politician's sex life is wholly irrelevant to our assessment of his capacity to govern.

As a good rule of thumb, I don't care about anything, really, that Maureen Dowd cares about. She cares a great deal about Newt Gingrich's sexual prowess, for example, and about Callista Gingrich's fashion sensibilities, whereas I don't. Dowd is a fawning courtisane who satisfies an evidently widespread middle-brow craving for page-six gossip by wrapping it up in faux-feminist indignation and moderately witty word play.

Oh, and Jon Stewart is a sanctimonious boob.

And still less do I care about the simple existence of Ron Paul. I myself have splashed around in the swamps out of which creatures like Paul congeal. They are my extended family. They are the cranks on the call-in AM radio shows that were always on when I was a child (KFBK AM 1530, to be precise). They are the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who nevertheless, for some reason, still don't add up to WASPs. They feel cast off, left out, and the world-view they conjure up as a defense reaction is so muddled that for brief moments it can look as though it's motivated by genuine concern about the betterment of the world. But it never is. 

I will not vote for any of them, not Obama, not the others. This is, I insist, itself a legitimate use of my right to vote: it is a refusal to get sucked into the spectacle.

Alright, next post: back to Rilke, and to things that are beautiful and that matter.

--

Follow me on Facebook, or on Twitter.