Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Why I Quit Facebook

I joined Facebook in September, 2007. My 'timeline', when I studied it for the last time yesterday evening, indicated very little activity until around April, 2008, at which point I, apparently, began posting frivolous status updates about my personal life, my tribulations and thoughts, roughly once a week. A style began to emerge over the coming months, one that was hardly original, but, I believe, still above average in the craft and care put into it.

I alternated between displays of grand, bullshitting erudition --one early update was a variation on a Latin motto from Leibniz, transformed for the social-networking age: Qui me non nisi renovationibus status mei in Libro Vultuum novit, non novit ('Whoever knows me only through my Facebook status updates, does not know me')-- and the confessional mode, which I had the presumption to call 'Montaignean'.

I received my first 'like' in February, 2009. I did not understand what it was, or how it got there. I was in Australia, and it was from someone I had known in high school in California.

I'll skip over some history. By 2010 I had an iPhone, and I had taken to checking for likes every minute or so while walking down the street; I learned even to check for them, surreptitiously, while teaching.

The New York Times put up a firewall, and rather than pay the 99 cents per month required to get around it, I preferred to rely on links posted by my friends: I had 640 of them after all, and collectively they surely made up a reliable team of journalists (I'd estimate 30 to 40 of them were in fact professional journalists; another 200 or so were amateur journalists).

A few weeks ago I decided to get back to the four volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu that remained after I miraculously got through the first three a decade or so ago. But when one attempts to divide one's attention between (i) page 801 of the Gallimard edition of Proust's chef d'oeuvre, and (ii) one's ever-refreshing newsfeed: which do you imagine wins? It is cognitively impossible, I believe, not to prefer the newsfeed. It is glowing and changing, and it doses out what it has to give in easily swallowed, sweet little bits.

That was rock-bottom. I had to cut it off, and set about rewiring my brain, to get it back to the way I know it used to be.

I hasten to add that Facebook is among the most remarkable innovations in human history. In the sweep of centuries it, and the variations that emerge from it, will prove to be more important than books. Books were never themselves fundamental to human learning; in fact their massive proliferation in the Renaissance and early modern periods was at the same time an usurpation and a destruction of established and wonderful technologies of learning-- in particular, practices of memorization that would put Julien Sorel to shame.

So it is not that I am sticking with what is true and right, against what is vulgar and corrupted, but only that there are certain projects that I came to value given the precise historical moment of my birth and earliest education, and these projects had come under serious threat as a result of this mighty usurper.

There are other reasons, too, which I would like to list here, from the more personal ones, unique to my own case, to the more general. Some of these have to do with what Facebook had done to me as a user; others with what I see as the troubling failure of Facebook to live up to its real potential. 

I am by nature a melancholic person, and for a long time I asked myself whether Facebook alleviated or exacerbated this condition. I finally determined it was the latter. I like to write and to share what I write, and I like it when what I write receives acclaim. But when this cycle of expression-and-gratification is reduced to a few hundred characters followed by a dozen or so 'likes', it becomes a parody of the creative process, and impedes any real engagement in that process. It calls to mind this painful indictment from Pascal's Pensées, written just as if he could foresee the invention of the 'like' button:

We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.

Typically what I have to say takes about 1500-3000 words; anything short of that is a compromise. I would never have dreamt of sinking into the swamp of Twitter-speak, where one is required by some arbitrary rule to substitute 'u r' for 'you are', and to indulge in other such adolescent vulgarities. But Facebook only partially enables its user to steer clear of texting code. Again, it is not that I do not want to receive gratification from what I have to say, but only that the formal constraints of the status update do not permit me to say it.

Not only for my ability to read, but for my ability to write as well, I began to fear that Facebook was draining away much of the thinking that could have gone into real essays, articles, books. I work in two distinct modes, both academic/scholarly and essayistic/belle-lettristic, and I came to fear that both of them were more stagnant than they might be if I could just pull myself away from the endless exchange of sweet little bits in my social network. But I emphasize that I am really not certain about my final determination that Facebook was an impediment, any more than I am certain that it exacerbated my melancholy: for quite often I had the experience of writing a status update that would then get some thoughts percolating, that would then transform into a blog post, that would ultimately issue in a book review or even, on at least one occasion, a successful book proposal. It's really hard to say whether on balance it was harmful or helpful. I suppose I just need, now, to test the alternative mode of working, and to see what happens when that all-too familiar, all-too inviting salon is no longer open to me.

Another source of frustration, about which I am much more ambivalent, has to do with the nature of the community one forges on Facebook. A few deep and genuine friendships have emerged out of my years there; some genuinely inspiring intellectual encounters have happened there; some rather mundane but necessary networking has taken place there. It would be dishonest for me to deny the good that has come of it, yet recently it dawned on me that I have a number of important connections with people who are not on Facebook, both intellectual and emotional connections, and in no sense do I feel like they are missing something of me, or I of them. Often, when someone I knew on Facebook wanted to discuss something important with me, they would send me an e-mail instead of a Facebook chat message, as if to signify the importance of the communication by moving into this other forum. I expect this sort of communication will continue.

I've said before that I don't think there's anything more 'real' about so-called real-world friendships. Those, too, come and go, and the truth is I have little interest in finding drinking buddies, or coevals to pursue hobbies with. That's not my concern, not my existential mode. All I really want to do is exchange ideas with people; Facebook was often fairly useful for this, but as I've said I began to fear that the ideas were reduced by the medium, and the nature of their exchange, based as it was in the perpetual ejaculation of short witty insights, often made a mockery of the sort of exchange that was held out as an ideal.

(Am I just getting too serious? In my updates I aspired to be funny. But what is funny in this here eulogy?) 

I was comfortable all along with the equivocity of the concept of friend: I had 640 of them, call them what you will, and some of them were in truth my friends. Some others fulfilled other functions, and some did nothing at all but contribute to my tally. Fine. But again, it strikes me now that it was all somewhat like attending a very long summer camp: people come and go, and if anything worth preserving and cultivating should come about, then this will continue once the summer has drawn to a close.

I have mentioned that some of my reasons for leaving Facebook have to do with my own personal concerns, my projects and the way Facebook perhaps fails to facilitate them. I also mentioned that in my view Facebook is failing to live up to its potential. Recently, when I looked at my wall, it was as if 'Family Circus', 'Marmaduke', Penny Saver and Reader's Digest were spilling right off of Gutenberg's own press: such a wonderful and promising technology, descended into pure idiocy just after its first appearance in the world.

I have in mind in particular this new innovation, whereby whatever trashy meme some friend (in a highly equivocal sense) deems worthy of liking, ends up in my own newsfeed with the purported explanation that such-and-such friend has just deemed it like-worthy. Thus, after having fought so hard to banish Farmville and Cityville and shit like that from my wall, I was now being bombarded with misspelled slogans insisting that Marilyn Monroe's curves are in fact more beautiful than Lindsay Lohan's skin-and-bones, or that Obama is alright because he fist-bumps janitors, while Romney by contrast likes to get shoeshines on airport tarmacs (something I truly doubt, by the way). And most recently George Takei, likeable enough in himself, has entirely drowned out, with his good-spirited and sassy mash-ups, any possibility of using that social network for that higher aim for which it briefly held some promise: the exchange of well-thought-out ideas.

All the way back in 2007 there was something about this endeavor that rubbed me the wrong way: it was born of the dormitories, and to some extent it draws us all back into them. Or perhaps I should not say 'back': I was a commuter, to a state school, and I lived with my mother. I never lived in a dorm, and I never showed up in a yearbook, to be judged for my hotness or my plainness. The culture that produced Facebook is one that I never knew, and do not like. An image of that culture invaded, and invades, my mind every single time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg's venture, and every time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg.

I still believe Internet-mediated social networks will prove to be more important in human history than printing presses. But my social network will not be Facebook.

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David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years

Reviewed at Bookforum. To read the whole review, go here.

... Graeber argues that the expansionist wars of the Axial period were motivated largely by the need to find new sources of precious metals to plunder; a development that came at around the same time as the innovation of coinage systems and the rise of a new professionalized soldier class. All this spurred a new sort of debt: the kind that could be abstracted from goods. This, in turn, motivated reflection on humanity's place in the world, and gave rise to what we know today as the great Axial Age religious and philosophical traditions: particularly Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Greek philosophical rationalism. Underpinning all this was the question of how debt should be paid, or whether it can be paid at all.

The guiding principle of Graeber's sweeping global history is that debt must not remain the exclusive property of economic historians, and moreover, that anthropologists are better equipped to take on the issue. The foundational myth on which economics rests, and which Graeber relishes debunking, is the "touchingly utopian" idea that money emerged directly out of primitive barter systems and had only to do with interest-maximizing exchange. Arguing against this from an anthropological perspective, Graeber claims that debt is the basis of society, and as such is inherently ineliminable. He illustrates this point through the example of debt to one's parents: to seek to cancel that debt would be impossible. Graeber describes a system of gift-giving in traditional societies that takes place over time, and involves gifts of slightly more or less value than the ones that preceded them, thus ensuring that everyone is always slightly in debt or in credit to everyone else. This sort of debt, he says, is nothing less than the continual creation of society. It is not so much that we owe something to society, but that society "just is our debts."

Our Animals, Ourselves

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 27, 2011. To read the entire essay, go here.

When I was very small I lived on a defunct chicken farm. There was a house with a yard, and these together took up half an acre. To the north there was a long, thin chicken coop, empty of chickens, and behind it lay the back pasture, which occupied one acre. Perpendicular to this, to the west, there was the side pasture. Steers dwelled in the back pasture, ate hay, shat, sculpted odd forms on the salt lick (until we had them shot and butchered). As far as I know, these were actually existing steers. But the side pasture was inhabited, I imagined for a long time, by a fox. When I went there by day, I felt I was entering upon its territory; and when I lay in bed at night, I was certain it was out there, in its burrow, dwelling. It lived there like a human in a home, and was as real as any neighbor—except that I had myself brought it into existence, likely by projecting it out of a picture in a book.

The fox did not need to exist in order to function in my imagined community, one which must be judged no more or less real than that of, say, Indonesians, or of humanity. It was enough that there be foxes at all, or creatures that fit that description, in order for me to conjure community with the imaginary fox in the side pasture. And it was no mere puerile phantasm that caused me to imagine this community, either. It was rather my thinking upon my own humanity, a condition which until very recently remained, over the course of an entire human life, embedded within a larger community of beings.

These days, we are expected to grow out of that sort of thinking well before puberty. Our adult humanity consists in cutting off ties of community with animals, ceasing, as Lévi-Strauss put it, to think with them. When on occasion adults begin again to think about animals, if not with them, it is to assess whether animals deserve the status of rights-bearers. Animal rights, should there be such things, are now thought to flow from neurophysiological features and behavioral aptitudes: recognizing oneself in the mirror, running through mazes, stacking blocks to reach a banana.

But what is forgotten here is that the animals are being tested for re-admission to a community from which they were previously expelled, and not because they were judged to lack the minimum requirements for the granting of rights. They were expelled because they are hairy brutes, and we learned to be ashamed of thinking of them as our kin. This shame only increased when Darwin confirmed our kinship, thus telling us something Paleolithic hunters already knew full well. Morality doubled up its effort to preserve a distinction that seemed to be slipping away. Since the 19th century, science has colluded with morality, always allowing some trivial marker of human uniqueness or other to function as a token for entry into the privileged moral universe of human beings. "They don't have syntax, so we can eat them," is how Richard Sorabji brilliantly reduces this collusion to absurdity...

Money, Aging, and Facial Piercing

I'm currently writing a review of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (a magnificent book, an overwhelming anthropological takedown of the discipline of economics), and am straining to refrain from saying much about it now. But one of countless intriguing observations in the book connects up with something I've been thinking about a lot recently: adornment and its transformations throughout the human life cycle. It's come to seem to me, in particular, that one might best look at the facial piercings and the hair experiments of people aged roughly 12 to 30 almost literally as secondary sex characteristics: like the appearance of acne or the change of voice, these partially exosomatic features (they literally pierce the boundary between the body and the culture through which the body moves) now seem to me impossible to separate from the matter of, as Kierkegaard says, the stages of life's way.

When I was younger I took for granted that the hair experiments would come to an end at some point. But I could not quite understand, nor did I really think about, the question why they would end. Hair is peculiar in that it affords different possibilities at different stages of life; an adolescent male naturally has more freedom to experiment with androgyny, and to beautify himself, than a middle-aged male, in large part because there is more hair there, it can be worn long and full, it can hang down in the eyes, and so on.

I also assumed the piercings would fall away at some unspecified future moment, but never asked why. I suppose that unlike the hair, they could in principle be sustained into one's autumnal years. But the perception of them would be different; now it would be a matter of 'sticking it out', of insisting on keeping the outward signifiers of an inward hormonal activity that everyone knows to have slowed down long ago. So one gives up, and blends in, and no longer considers himself a player in the game of self-display.

Representing the other prominent gender, there are of course the grandes dames who never give up, who pile on the brooches and bracelets, and spend ever-increasing hours at the hairdresser, in exactly the same measure as their nubility wanes: they double up on the outward signifiers of beauty, but the actual social possibilities these signifiers afford necessarily contract.

But here is where Graeber's account of the origins of money has me intrigued. He writes:

Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful (145).

This account seems perfectibly plausible, yet it leaves me wondering: if this is the case, then why don't old, grey, bald men lose interest in money? To put this another way: I miss my nose ring less and less with each passing year (some who know me will have noticed that a hole remains, one that could easily accommodate a stud if I should ever choose to insert one), and simultaneously I grow ever more concerned about the meagreness of my retirement savings. The extension of adornments for use as money must therefore have involved a substantial transformation or expansion of the conceptual role these items played. Otherwise, the accumulation of money, like the display of facial piercings, would be simply an age-specific stage, an epiphenomenal expression of a temporary hormonal shift.

I suspect that the transformation has precisely to do with the shift from display to accumulation. Why put it in your nose when you can put it in the bank, and let it cause you to shine indirectly with an aura of importance, even at an age when you are now grizzled and coming apart, and any amount of direct adornment of the body would be of little use? I suspect also that this shift has much to do with the ongoing importance of the adornment of women: both of  young women, who can themselves serve, in exchange for jewelry and other gifts, as a sort of adornment of grizzled men (vestiges of what Graeber calls the 'human economy'); and of old women, who can see no brighter option than to keep participating in the human economy that absorbed them at an early age, even if they are forced to compensate for their ever-diminishing value on this perfidious market with ever-chunkier adornments.

I suspect finally that if men could just remain androgynous ephebes, with their thick bangs hanging down into their eyes, then it would be enough for them to adorn themselves with a piercing or two, or a whale tooth or two, or some red paste made from a camwood bar, spread on the body as a cosmetic (144); and it's only the process of aging that precipitates the shift to accumulation, one of the more irksome consequences of which is our patriarchy.

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Who Will Be the Erasmus of the Internet?

I've been writing significantly less in this space recently, and feeling no small amount of remorse about that. The reason is simple: I have undertaken to write some mid-length pieces (on gay marriage, eating disorders in the middle ages, animal rights, and debt) that will appear, with some delay, in various print media.

This is a strange process. I write; I send what I've written by e-mail (there is a convention at present --how long will it last?-- of signifying the importance of a written text sent electronically by rendering it as a Word or pdf attachment, when in fact it would be far simpler to send it in the body of the e-mail: except that then it would look like, well, an e-mail); I wait again; I get suggestions for revision; I oblige in some cases, hold out in some others; I send it back; and I wait. I wait and wait. By the time I see it on the smelly fresh paper, I have forgotten that I should ever have wanted to say such a thing.

Why do I bother? I confess the temptation is always very great to simply post what I've written here and be done with it. In the past I've even found myself happy to have a piece rejected from a print venue: this permitted me to do what I had wanted to do in the first place, again, to simply post and be done with it. But the most recent month that I spent in New York convinced me that print is not as dead as I have been declaring it to be for the past few years. It looked dead from here, from Quebec, because the titles that matter are generally not available, or not easily or affordably available, in print form, so one ends up extracting what one can from their online presence, and in time comes to take that presence for the real thing, rather than a representation of it. But print is not dead, even if its social role has been greatly transformed. It is no longer for the dissemination of information; there are more effective means of doing that. Its function is rather that of filtering and conferral of legitimacy.

Yet it is only a contingent institutional fact that print is still involved in this legitimation process: it need not be, and probably will not be in the near future. The fact that it is at present surely has something to do with the wealth and clout that became concentrated in the hands of select publishers over a vastly greater span of time than the Internet has been around (let alone the blog).

I suspect that in the history of technology there are a number of parallel examples of a device gradually moving from a strictly functional to a more ceremonial use, without in the process declining in importance. On the contrary, we may suppose that, for example, coats-of-arms increased in importance when, after the Crusades, they evolved from signs telling you which knight was behind which suit of armor into the emblems of family lineages. Today, one must ceremonially have one's name in print in order to be an author, even if one may post as much as one likes online in order to be simply read.

But still, the séjour in New York did not change everything, and the question lingers: what, in this particular historical moment, ought one to be doing? Should one continue to seek access to the waning clout of the Gutenberg era's last generation of rulers? Or should one deny any need of their imprimatur, and instead just keep writing in this strange, new, un-Gutenbergian way, in the hope and faith that history will vindicate this turn?

The problem with this latter approach is that, as yet, there is little sign that people are coming around to thinking of the blog as a legitimate medium for the expression of important ideas, or for the beautiful expression of ideas important or un-. No one, or almost no one, is expecting the blog to evolve and flourish in the way that the printed book had clearly begun to do by the beginning of the 16th century. No one, or almost no one, seriously expects an Erasmus of the bloggers to emerge (though significantly it was a grey eminence of the 20th-century New York magazine world who put this question into my head a few days ago). As far as new writing is concerned (the digitization of old writing is another matter), the Internet is still seen as best suited for ephemera: for the repulsive daily news cycle, and for even more repulsive celebrity gossip.

Yet there are clear respects in which the evolution of the Internet is already in fact echoing that of printing in the Renaissance: as someone pointed out (I think it was Peter Burke), circa 1440, at the earliest appearance of the press in Europe, it certainly appeared as though this innovation would consolidate the total dominance of Latin. As it turned out, however, within some decades the real effect of the press would in fact be to facilitate the spread of 'vulgar' learning in Italian, French, German, etc. Similarly, in 1997 (the first time I saw an html-designed webpage), it certainly seemed as though this technology was going to secure the continued hegemony of English in the world: our own era's Latin. Now the Internet seems rather to be facilitating the rise of a new variety of polyglotism (I myself now often read news articles in languages I've never, strictly speaking, studied), where English by no means enjoys exclusive favor. If the linguistic blossoming of the Internet is already echoing that of the printing press in the 16th century, perhaps this is some sign of the possibility of a similar flourishing of genres, including the still-seemingly contradictory belle-lettristic blog.

Not to sound overly McLuhanian (he never impressed me all that much), but while the medium might not be the message itself, at present the medium certainly has the surprising power to deflate whatever is said through it. It is impossible to say anything timeless or canonizable in blog form, but it remains to be seen whether this is an inherent feature of the medium, or only a stage of its youth. And again, it remains for the producer of words to decide whether he prefers to attach himself to a moribund yet august tradition of the past, or fling himself into the tradition-less technology of an uncertain future.

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Zora Neale Hurston and Counter-Enlightenment

Besides Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel for which she is certainly best known, Zora Neale Hurston made a tremendous contribution to the ethnography of the American South and the Caribbean. Her 1935 collection, Mules and Men, written in the problematic but captivating genre of literary anthropology, recounts the folktales she heard during her extensive fieldwork in the South.

Her insights are astounding, and her willingness to throw herself into the game of participant-observation is both courageous and, at times, morally dubious. I was horrified by her account of throwing a screeching black cat into a boiling cauldron as part of her initiation into the practice of hoodoo. She was made by the high priest to shut the lid, wait until the cat had been boiled down to mere bones, and then to pass each of the bones through her mouth; the one that had a bitter taste was to be carried as a talisman. I found myself hoping this was the literary-embellishment part.

Her teacher back at Barnard was Franz Boas, and while he did not have her killing cats he did encourage her Southern expeditions, and had this to say, in a short preface to Mules and Men, about her particular talent for portraying a cultural world from the inside: "She has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life." If this sounds essentializing, and thus, on today's reasoning, oppressive, it is partly because it supposes that the African-American has a particular sort of inner life, one that truly belongs to him, and that any one may stand in for any other as an embodiment of this form of life. This is both a presumption to which Hurston herself would likely not object, as well as a presumption that places Boas in a long tradition of thinking about culture that has not always been, or not always only been, oppressive.

I was struck by one small fragment of one of the many stories, the "big ole lies," that Hurston relates:

Jim Allen commented: "Well, you know what they say-- a man can cackerlate his life till he git mixed up wid a woman or git straddle of a cow."
Big Sweet turned visiously upon the old man. "Who you callin' a cow, fool? Ah know you ain't namin' my mama's daughter no cow."
"Now y'all heard what Ah said. Ah ain't called nobody no cow," Jim defended himself. "Dat's just an old time by-word 'bout no man kin tell what's gointer happen when he gits mixed up wid a woman or set straddle of a cow."
"I done heard my gran'paw say dem very words many and many a time," chimed in Larkins. "They's a whole heap of them kinda by-words. Like for instance: 'Ole coon for cunnin', young coon for runnin',' and 'Ah can't dance, but Ah know good moves.' They all got a hidden meanin', jus' like de Bible (124-5).

This reminded me not only of certain brilliant stand-up comedy routines that marked my childhood, but also of a passage from Leibniz's Nouveaux essais of 1704, where he, like Larkins, suggests that it is language that is the true repository of human knowledge, and thus that it stands equal to the sacred texts of antiquity:

And if there were no longer an ancient book to examine, languages would take the place of books, and they are the most ancient monuments of mankind. In all the languages of the world will be recorded and and placed in dictionaries and grammars, and compared together (Nouveaux Essais, Bk. III, ch. 9. G V 318).

Lest we suppose that Leibniz is not interested here in the sort of dialectal, everyday, popular language that Hurston sought to record, it's worth considering one of his many more particular ethnographic sketches (or better, perhaps, research proposals). In a 1697 letter "On the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania," Leibniz devotes particular attention to the ethnic German minority of that region, whose exact origins in the region were unknown and who spoke a dialect of German that was very different from any of the standard variants spoken in what are today Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Leibniz writes:

We understand the German language [of the Transylvanian Germans] poorly; ... many French, Italian, Spanish, English, Turkish, and Tartar words have been noted in their speech. [Thus] it would be most desirable to have a little dictionary of the language of the common people of German Transylvania, and to request that other examples as well be added, which would be genuine, rather than made to fit our own way of speaking (Dutens, Opera omnia, Tom. IV, Pars II, 206-8).

I take it that it is this pair of insights --that language is as valuable as texts as a bearer and mirror of culture, and that the way to understand a culture's language is to get inside it, rather than to make it fit our own-- would be two of the central commitments of Herder's 'soft' or 'organic' nationalism, which in large part may be traced back to Leibniz. And it was surely the Herderian tradition, through intermediaries such as Leopold von Ranke, that guided Boas's own anthropological method.

Hurston's unapologetic use of dialect, and the ambiguity of her stance towards the traditions and beliefs that could not but come across as irrational and backwards to educated Northerners, made her an embarrassment to other African-American writers such as Richard Wright. Her insistence on drudging up all the swampy stuff of culture appears to have been the principal cause of her eventual marginalization at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. She spent the last years of her life working as a maid.

I take Hurston to be a Herderian, while the values of the writers associated with the Civil Rights movement were squarely those of the Enlightenment with which Herder could not be at ease. I think it is this Herderianism that caused Hurston to denounce the desegregation of schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and shortly before her death. John McWhorter calls her a 'Black conservative' (thus claiming her as a forebear), but I don't think that properly captures the spirit of Herderian counter-Enlightenment.

I also think she is a deeply compelling writer, disclosing a world I wasn't supposed to see, whereas I could never get through more than a few pages of Native Son, which only reminds me of a world I already know is supposed to be.

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Note: I am writing this not at an airport, but in an actual airplane, 36,000 feet over Utah. I had intended to spend the whole journey reading Mules and Men, but instead found myself on my first-ever wireless-equipped plane. This is both good news and terrible news, for reasons I probably don't have to spell out. 

Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.

The Burton Diet: Notes on The Anatomy of Melancholy

Some day, perhaps, I will tell the full story of my life-long conflict with the alimentative aspect of my corporeal existence. For now I will only briefly mention one example of how difficult it is to lead a life, as one must, as an eater.

I came up under an anti-fat regime, when foods, or packaged food products, were rated according to their degree of 'fat-freeness', and it was taken for granted that to eat fat was immediately to become fat. This regime made natural sense to me; du bist was du ißt, and all that.

Imagine my surprise then, when, a decade or so ago, the entire value system was suddenly inverted as a sort of Protestant Reformation of the diet occurred, where suddenly it was not the fats but the carbohydrates that were on the index alimentorum prohibitorum. This was difficult to grasp since, as I had always understood, carbohydrates just are the default variety of foodstuff: you get a bit of fat here, and a bit of protein there, but for the most part to eat is just to eat carbs. For these to suddenly be prohibited, and in favor, at that, of at least a certain subvariety of lipid, was all really too much for this old diet-obsessed eater to comprehend. It was more than a Reformation. It was a revaluation of all values.

The anti-carb fever seems to have waned in the most recent years, and now other dietary components are being denounced as the real evil (gluten? Who the hell ever cared about gluten before?); and having lived long enough --having not yet been killed off by the things I eat-- to see dietary rules come and go, I feel emboldened in my reading of the historical record on such matters to conclude that, in general, there must always be some element of diet or other that is prohibited, and it does not matter so much which one it is. The anti-carb revolution was a vivid illustration of a sort of social instability, of a historical period in which competing theories of the proper diet could in a matter of years or even months squeeze out their competitors.

We are, I mean to say, no more advanced than Galenic humoral medicine, or than Ayurveda, in our ascription of values to various foodstuffs.

This came to me most vividly in my recent, and very belated, reading of Robert Burton's wonderful Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. In the section on diet, what strikes the contemporary reader is the evident arbitrariness of all the praising and damning, as well as the evident relishing of the lists of good or bad foods themselves. If the harmful foods cannot be enjoyed in excess, at least they can be written about in excess. Thus, for example:

All black wines, over-hot, compound, strong, thick drinks, as muscadine, malmsey, rumney, brown bastard, metheglin, and the like, of which they have thirty several kinds in Muscovy, all such made drinks are hurtful in this case, to such as are hot, or of a sanguine, choleric complexion, young, or inclined to head-melancholy (I 2, 223).

In general, Burton is most concerned about the artifice involved in the combination of ingredients. In a stunning passage, he effectively denounces all 'kitchen science' (scientia popinae) as so much alchemical transgression:

To the noxious simples we may reduce an infinite number of compound, artificial made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel. Such are puddings stuffed with blood, or otherwise composed; baked meats, soused indurate meats, fired and broiled, buttered meats, condite, powdered, and over-dried; all cakes, simnels, buns, cracknels made with butter, spice, etc., fritters, pancakes, pies, sausages, and those several sauces, sharp, or over-sweet, of which scientia popinae, as Seneca calls it, hath served those Apician tricks and perfumed dishes (I 2, 225).

Burton cites Avicenna and Fernel to confirm his view that the fundamental cause of all illness is overindulgence:

To feed on many dishes... 'tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours. Thence... come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradypepsia, sudden death, etc., and what not (I 2, 225-6).

But what is that pure core of recommendable foods, that list of simple and moderate dishes, that Burton thinks one can steadily eat while keeping the bodily humors in balance? We don't really seem to get an answer to this question, just as, today, no one can specify a particular food that is safely and unambiguously 'good for you'. Everything you eat is perceived as potentially harmful, and that is not because of any real, measurably physiological effect, but only because we will never be entirely at ease with the alimentary nature of our existence, with, to put it bluntly, the fact that in order to keep on going as creatures we must constantly devour other creatures. That is a charged activity, and one that is bound to give rise to endless disputations as to the right way of going about it.

So much for the history of diet. Now a word on the history of literature. As I've already suggested, it seems to me that Burton relishes listing those things he should not be eating. This is supposed to be non-fiction, but it seems to me that the list, and in particular the list of perverse, curious, unacceptable things, would come to be an essential element of the novel as well. We see it clearly in Sterne, and we see it, to my mind par excellence, in the 'cetology' chapter of Moby Dick, where Melville lists all the curious natural-historical knowledge he has managed to accumulate about whales. Is this a list of recipes? No, not technically, but zoology and cookery have never been all that far apart, and I think Melville sensed as much when he spelled out the properties of whales and the names of all their sundry subtypes, just as Burton spells out, and relishes spelling out, all the names of all the things you aren't supposed to eat.

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Reading The Pisan Cantos

I've only just begun, a few days ago, to work through Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos LXXIV-LXXXIV, after having attempted and failed at this same task a decade or so ago. There is still quite a bit I simply don't understand, and to resort to the explanatory notes whenever they are strictly speaking needed would result in a very different sort of reading than what we have in mind when we say we're reading poetry. Linguistically, the only completely inaccessible parts of the text are the Chinese characters, but the reason for slipping into Old French or German or Italian or Latin or Greek at any particular moment are often obscure to me. Anyway the results of this incomprehensible collage of quotations are, generally, consistently beautiful.

*

Often the Cantos read like what one imagines Glenn Beck's blackboards might yield if Beck had studied Homer and Dante and learned classical Chinese, instead of spending his early years hosting an FM-radio 'morning zoo' program. The same preoccupations are there --usury, the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the illegitimacy of elected officials-- but rendered in a way that places them in a direct lineage with the history of classical literature Pound had so wonderfully internalized, rather than being the outsider scrawling of a talk-show host.

But both Pound and Beck are  distinctly American in their worries about what goes on behind the scenes; and indeed Pound helps to give some kind of historical depth to what otherwise just sounds like incoherent chatter. It is false, and toxic, but it hasn't always just been promoted by subliterate boobies. In fact, Pound and Beck have only one degree of separation between them: a spot held by the rabid anti-Semite and classic American crank Eustace Mullins, who frequently visited the poet while he was convalescing in the post-war years at the St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in Washington DC, putting off his treason trial for as long as he could. In 2010 Beck would begin promoting Mullins's book, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, on his Fox Network program. 

That Pound was a Fascist does not in principle bother me-- and here I notice, without being prepared to offer a full defense of myself, a different standard for poets than for philosophers, even as I otherwise insist that the distance between them should not be exaggerated. Heidegger cannot be excused, because his continued vitality is wrapped up with 'using' him for this or that purpose, and so with using a system of thought that was in fact an apologia for National Socialism. I can't imagine any comparable expectation of usability of the Pisan Cantos, unless the deepening of the reader's engagement with language counts as 'use'.

In fact, in a certain respect I appreciate Pound the person, as he stands in relation to his art. I love to see the Soviets' nonplussed reaction that a confirmed psychotic and Fascist would win a prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1948; they were missing something --along with George Orwell, who insisted on the need for a conformity between aesthetic sensibility and common decency-- that the prize's jury understood about the nature of the project.

The open-air US military prison cage in which Pound scrawled out the Cantos' incipit, about Mussolini's lynching, look rather too much like Guantanamo, and the circumstances of Pound's creation rather too reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's mental regimen of daily verse composition while in the Gulag, not to wonder whether there is perhaps an entire variety of creation that is triggered by the unique combination of exposure and confinement characteristic of these instances of imprisonment. (I don't know whether any great new verses have been composed in the minds of the prisoners at Guantanamo, though I'm fairly confident in saying that old, familiar verses have been recited inwardly with greater concentration).

There has been some suggestion that the Pisan Cantos are a variety of 'schizopoetics' in the Deleuzian sense. I'm not really sure I've understood what that is, but I do not think that the firing of the poetic imagination as a result of the mental strain of imprisonment, accompanied by a diagnosis by WW II-era US military psychologists of incipient personality disorder, is quite enough to say that there is anything schizo about the poetry. Again, what jumps out to me, even through the crackpot stuff abut the Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, is the intense, rigorous embeddedness in litaerary tradition. I think the art brut of Glenn Beck's chalkboards gets somewhat closer to the sort of free-associative, historically rooted yet totally un-self-aware, deeply obsessive theory-of-everything projects that tend to be of interest as examples of the schizopoetic. Pound is not like that. His mental illness seems largely to have been exaggerated in order to avoid trial for treason; and his treasonous sympathy for Fascism was not in itself schizoid, but only toxic.

*

It's been noted that the proximity of African-American military prisoners in the camp at Pisa came to play an important role in the Cantos themselves; and was the only central theme of the work imported directly from the American experience (even if Pound's paranoia about global conspiraces itself has an American inflection). When I first began reading the Cantos, by mistake I had failed to turn off iTunes, and at some point the Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 album Enter the Wu-Tang came on. I managed to read and to listen together for about 10 minutes before I had to give up on the aural component of my aesthetic immersion. But one thing that struck me was that aesthetically the two works were not entirely from different universes; both were pastiches of junk and high ideas, thrown together at least in a way that yields up the impression of schizopoiesis (an impression that in Ol' Dirty Bastard's case would eventually be clinically confirmed); both involve invented mythologies pieced together from sundry cultural sources, including a peculiar Sinophilia in both cases; both involve bullshit theories of who's behind the scenes controlling what (in Wu-Tang's case, derivative and fringe spin-off doctrines of the Nation of Islam, already fringe enough on its own); both use the word 'nigger' a great deal, in a way that enhances the poetic force of each of the respective works while pushing them even further to the margins of (in Pound's case) canonizability, or (in Wu-Tang's case) establishment acclaim in places like Cleveland (the pop culture equivalent of high culture's canon).

It struck me during those ten minutes that Pound would have enjoyed Enter the Wu-Tang very much.  But that's just a stupid aside. Or kind of stupid: however condescending, Pound's attitude towards African-American folk culture is one of great admiration; and he even holds African-Americans responsible for the preservation of forms of diction in English that white Americans were, with their lack of concern for folk tradition, carelessly allowing to slip away. I therefore really would like to know what he would have thought about this album, which I consider explosively powerful, very much like the Cantos themselves.

*

I keep thinking about There Will Be Blood, a film I only saw once when it came out three or four years ago, but which sits with me and grows within me like few other films I've seen. It's gradually come to seem to me as nothing less than an allegory of the foundation of America: the ruthless, pragmatic, unbelieving entrepreneur; versus the hypocritical monster who takes the shape of a media evangelist. The entrepreneur ends up beating the preacher to death, but there will always be another one to take his place. What this juxtaposition leaves out (and we can't exactly call it a Manichean juxtaposition, since neither of the figures is much of a light-bearer), is the frontier individualist, who doesn't believe the preacher's bullshit, but also does not clamor for wealth and power. He feels something on the boundary between extreme freedom and total alienation. If he is of mediocre intelligence and ambition, he will join a militia within his native Idaho, say. If he is Ezra Pound, born in Idaho in 1885, he will decamp for Europe, and denounce the entire US as an insane asylum. He'll believe weird things, and maybe write some great stuff.

In any case, even if we add this third type to the allegory of America, there's still not much in the way of light-bearing, or, to put it differently, Enlightenment. And it remains a crazy country (and one where I hope to live again permanently someday).

*

One remarkable thing about Pound's life-course, which obviates the ridiculously high demand placed by Orwell, is that the poet himself understood, and more lucidly the older he grew, that his anti-Semitism was rooted in self-hatred. His end-of-life confession, that his bigotry resulted from the worst sort of 'suburban' and conventional laziness one can lapse into, to my mind allows us to say that Pound, in acknowledging his self-hating misery, can rest happy in death, in a way that stubborn Heidegger cannot.

Pound redeems himself, and distances himself from the crackpots because he is able to regret who he is. The greatest turn came late in life, when he became embarrassed by the the tremendous waste of time of his suburban dislike of Jews. But it's already there, in the Pisan Cantos, as I read them. At Canto 76. 246-49, for example:

                        J'ai eu pitié des autres

probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own convenience

        Le paradis, n'est pas artificiel,

                        L'enfer non plus.

And then again at 80.674-76, the remorse that comes with being broken by cruel imprisonment, the breaking down of the hard man that can't but redeem all the rest:

                Les larmes que j'ai créées m'inondent

Tard, très tard je t'ai connue, la Tristesse

I have been hard as youth sixty years.

On Orgasm and Irritability

I recently came across a website ridiculing undergraduates for turning in written work in which they had conflated the words 'organism' and 'orgasm'. But this might not have been so much the usual sign of subliteracy, nor even a Freudian slip (if ever such a thing existed); it might, just might, instead have been a sign of incredible erudition.

In Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's La Philosophie zoologique of 1809, the latter term appears to be taken as more or less synonymous with the former. Chapter 4 of the treatise, entitled 'Of Orgasm and Irritability', defines orgasm as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive." Further on he describes it as sensibilité latente, and thus as a notion that is complementary to irritabilité, which is the capacity of the body to sense and react to external stimuli.

'Orgasm' in today's sense is something like a reduction of what Lamarck meant to only its most extreme instance. Somewhere also I remember Leibniz saying earlier, in the 1670s, that the reproductive act in animals is the summum or culmination of its existence as a sensitive being, and a sensitive being is just what an animal is in its very essence. So the idea is that the sensation involved in reproduction is the ultimate expression of what it is that an animal does qua animal. So it is not at all hard to see how we slide from Lamarck's orgasme to our orgasm(s).

Interestingly, as I and others have argued in more scholarly spaces, a similar shift happens in the history of the term 'organism', which starts out describing an abstract state, like Leninism or Judaism, and ends up being a count noun that can easily be rendered in the plural. One might of course speak of 'multiple Leninisms', but one has to strain to do so, whereas multiple organisms or orgasms are easily tallied.

Anyhow, I don't know when the semantic shift occurs precisely, and would be pleased to learn some more details. I expect the occurrence of Lamarck's technical term in the title of this post will, given the way search engines work, garner more readers for it than I am used to having. But alas these will probably not be readers interested in helping me to fill in gaps in my knowledge of the history of science. 

Herodotus and the Naturkinder

In the 18th century, the figure of the Naturkind was the source of much speculation, the most well-known product of which is, perhaps, the tale of Kaspar Hauser. Philosophers supposed that if a child were to grow up without any exposure to human society, the resulting adult would be a living model of what it is a human being is most purely or naturally. One of the most pressing questions such a child would be able to answer, it was thought, was the matter concerning the origins of language: would it be able to speak at all? And, if so, what sort of words would it use?

Somewhat earlier --peaking as a topic, I think, in the mid-17th century-- there was an intense debate as to which language, if any, was the language spoken prior to the fall of the tower of Babel. The most common candidate was Hebrew, but Chinese, Egyptian, and others are also mentioned. Some argued that the Hebrew of which we have traces was not the real Hebrew, and that there is an earlier, 'Adamic' language that, if rediscovered, would disclose divine knowledge to humans.

Interestingly, in Herodotus, there is a sort of combination of these two varieties of speculation. In Book II of the Histories we are told of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who wishes to determine whether or not his nation is in fact the oldest on earth. He sets up the following experiment:

He gave a shepherd two new-born infants to rear, from ordinary families, and told him to bring them up among his flocks in such a way that no one ever spoke in their hearing; they were to lie in a remote hut by themselves, and he was to bring them she-goats from time to time, give them their fill of milk, and do whatever else needed doing. Psammetichus made these arrangements because he wanted to find out what the children's very first word would be, once they were past the age of meaningless whimpering. And so it happened. One day, when the shepherd had been carrying out this programme for two years, he opened the door and went into the hut, and both children rushed up to him, reaching out their hands, and said 'bekos' (II 2). 

It turns out, as Herodotus explains, that 'bekos' is the Phrygian word for 'bread', and that from this it may be concluded that it is the Phrygians, and not the Egyptians, who are the most ancient of all people. By this peculiar reasoning, the oldest language is the language that one would naturally speak if not pushed off course by another, newer language. No explanation is given of language change, but presumably Herodotus, or the person who told him this tale, would suppose that all non-Phrygian words for 'bread' are in fact deformations or corruptions of 'bekos'.

This does not seem to imply any special status among languages for Phrygian, or any indication of a need for a return to the natural way of saying things. In this respect, early modern speculation about the origins of language --both the language acquired by an individual over the course of a lifetime, as well as all the natural languages of the world and the relations between them-- could not have been more different. So far as I know, the search for the first language and the speculation about what a Naturkind would be like were never brought together into a single line of questioning.

This is because, unlike Psammetichus and Herodotus, the early moderns supposed that whatever language a Naturkind might end up using, it would not be the original, primordial language of humanity; when the debate as to what that primordial language was was at its peak, moreover, a century before Rousseau and other speculated about children of nature, it was universally assumed that this was not a 'natural' language, that it would not congeal spontaneously over the course of a childhood suckling at the udder of a she-goat. Instead, it had a divine source, and so all subsequent 'natural' languages, like Latin and French, were corruptions of it not in the way that Egyptian was a corruption of Phrygian, but in a way that implied a loss, or, to put it in more overtly theological terms, a Fall.  

The 'Catalog of Meats' vs. the Historia Animalium; Or, Why There Is No Sanskrit Zoology

Francis Zimmermann's 1982 work, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue [The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine] is a remarkable thing. Ostensibly, it is a study of Ayurvedic medicine by a student of the great ethnographer Louis Dumont, but it would be more correct to describe it as a contribution towards the anthropology of natural science, and in this respect to be an important precursor to works such as Scott Atran's Cognitive Foundations of Natural History of 1991.

While Atran focuses on an explicit comparison between folk-taxonomical systems, on the one hand, and on the other the Linnaean system at the foundation of scientific taxonomy, Zimmermann instead seeks to explain why there is nothing like zoological taxonomy in the Indian tradition. His answer is that zoology is effectively edged out by pharmacy, but that pharmacy, in turn, needs to be understood as implying both a cosmology and an epistemology based on 'qualities' (guṇa) and 'savors' (rasa). Understood this broadly, it is not surprising to find 'meats' among the things listed in the Indian pharmacopoeia, nor to find that it the 'cataloguing of meats' comes to play the role in the Indian tradition that the classification of animals would play for Aristotle.

There is, Zimmermann writes, an "exclusion of even the possibility of a botanical or zoological classification: the beings themselves are no longer of any interest, only their dietetic and therapeutic qualities" (130-31). This divergence is surprising, given the tremendous overlap between other aspects of Greek and Indian life science: "From a comparative point of view, in the domain of physiology the theory of vital breaths and the theory of the humors constitute remarkable points of convergence between Indian medicine and Grek medicine; nevertheless, a deep divergence separates the two when it comes to methods of classification. On the one hand, in the Greek tradition, natural history; on the other hand, in the Ayurvedic tradition, the inclusion of taxonomy in pharmacy and the subordination of pharmacy to a complex interplay of savors and curative properties, which envelops the inventory of the flora and fauna in a welter of synonyms, redundancies, enumerations, division, and cross-references" (132-33).

The richest catalog of meats given in the Sanskrit corpus is found in the Suśrutasamhitā, or Suśruta's corpus, which dates most likely from the 12th century of the present era. This text, Zimmermann writes, "represents a corpus of knowledge about... fauna, knowledge not set out as such bult slipped into the mold of discourse intended for the use of medical practitioners" (98). One particularly vivid passage of the corpus illustrates how, from an initial distinction that appears taxonomical in an Aristotelian sense (as between plants and animals), we are quickly diverted into a potentially infinite branching of sensible qualities (and insensible too, since in the Ayurvedic tradition a 'savor' need not be detected in order to exist; it is something closer to an 'essence' actually inhering in the world):

Food is seen as a single category from the point of view of its object, the category of what can be eaten; byt from the point of view of its sources, it is double since it is composed of both immobile and mobile beings; it is also double from the point of view of its action, if one makes a distinction between beneficent and harmful effects. It is quadruple with regard to its mode of employment since it can be drunk, chewed, crunched or sucked; sextuple with regard to its savors, since there are six savors; vigesimal with regard to the qualities which are, successively, heavy/light, cold/hot, unctuous/dry, sluggish/lively, solid/liquid, tender/hard, dessicant/lubrifying, smooth/rough, subtle/crude, viscous fluid. They are innumerable in respect of its varieties because there exist a multitude of possible combinations and preparations for all these substances.

A Query concerning the Language of the Hottentots

I just found a transcription, sent by Nicolaes Witsen to G. W. Leibniz in 1698, of the Lord's Prayer written 'in lingua hottentotica', with interlinear Dutch translations. It is sent along with translations in Samoyed, Mongol, and Circassian, which all make a great deal of sense, given that Witsen is returning from a diplomatic mission to Moscow, and Leibniz has requested of him that he acquire samples of as many languages of the Tsar's empire as he is able. How 'Hottentot' came to be a part of this is not clear to me.

I've spent a bit of time trying to track down a copy of the Lord's Prayer in San, but have not been able so far. If there are any specialists in Khoisan linguistics among my readers (as I trust there are), I would be thankful if you could help me to identify the language precisely. I'll copy out the prayer here, just as Witsen sent it:

Cita bô, t? homme ingá t'siha, t? sa di kamink ouna, hem kouqueent see, dani hinqua t'sa inhee K? chou ki, quiquo t? homm' ingá, maa cita heci cita kóua sequa bree, k? hom cita, cita hiahinghee quiquo cita k? hom, cita dóua kôuna, tire cita k? choá t? authummá -- k'hamta cita hi aquei hee k? dou auna, --- t? aats kouqueetta, hique t? aats diaha, hique occisa ha, nauwi.

I wonder in particular whether the question marks are meant to signal the famous, and no doubt overemphasized, Bushman 'clicks'? In any case the transliteration scheme will no doubt look very unfamiliar to anyone who is able to read Khoisan languages today. By comparison, here is Witsen's transliteration of Luke 21:25 from the 'Russica vulgaris':

I budut snaki wo solntse, i vo mesetsie i wo swiesdach, i na semlie Tugo, (tiesno) poganom ot cot tschajania, schuma, morskogo i wosmuschenia Kogda tschelovieki budut isdichati ot stracha i doschidania tiech weschtschei, kotorie budut bywati wosem suiete.

Now, modernizing the transliteration scheme while leaving the lexical archaisms intact, we would get something like this:

I budut znaki vo solntse, i vo mesiatse i vo zvezdakh, i na zemle tugo (tesno) poganom ot tsot chaianiia, shuma, morskogo i vozmushcheniia kogda cheloveki budut izdikhat' ot strakha i dozhidaniia tekh veshchei, kotorie budut byvat' vo vsem svete.

 I'd imagine that the 'Hottentot' text is even more deviant from current rules governing Khoisan literacy (Saul Bellow would not have liked that phrase).

The Internet, Tamed

Aw, shucks. Who was I trying to fool? I can't leave you guys. Especially not now. I am being housed on the grounds of an institute that lies at the edge of a small city; it is too far to walk anywhere, it gets dark at around 4:30 in the afternoon, it is snowing, and I don't have a car. I have just arrived, and scarcely know anyone. I have lunch appointments with people, but for the evenings I am left to my own devices. Today I marched through the snow in my sagging athletic shorts to go to the fitness center, down the road a few blocks in the insitute's apartment complex. I was the only person there. I ran on the treadmill, and would periodically be startled by the motion I thought I saw behind me. It was my own reflection in the mirror. (I was put in mind of a movie from New Zealand that I saw in the 1980s, about a man who wakes up to find that all other human beings have disappeared. Within no time, he's talking to himself, and soon after that he begins cross-dressing.)

In the evenings I read and write (more on that soon), but from time to time I also feel the need to communicate. There is an old device plugged into the wall, with numeric buttons on it and a dangling spiral cord: a telephone, I believe, but it's been years since I've used one of those things, and I'm sure if I wanted to give it a try I'd need to know some special dialing codes and other new techniques. So I come here, and I do with you, reader, exactly what I do in my so-called real-world interactions: I struggle to portray myself. Here, unlike there, I do not need to wait patiently as others take their turn at doing the same. They can do it in the comments basement, if they feel like it, but why anyone would willingly go in for such an asymmetric form of communication is beyond me. (That said, keep them coming!)

Now I've been mentioning recently that I am extremely anxious these days about making the best use of my time, and that I have come to resent the Internet for its role in preventing me from doing so. I have acknowledged a desire to return to a style of reading and thinking that has slipped away from me, little by little, over the course of the last decade. The truth is that I always had a predisposition for Internet addiction, even long before any such diagnosis had ever been made, at a time when Internet connections were limited to only the very most hardcore geeks. When I first lived alone in the early 1990s, upon returning home I would always rush to check the red light on the telephone answering machine. To see it flashing would cause a slight surge of euphoria in me: a neurochemical phenomenon that, I am quite sure, is identical to the one I am after when I hit my 'refresh' button today. Although I am a terrible correspondent myself, I get a small boost just to know that someone --anyone-- has tried to contact me; subsequently, the boost is variously enhanced or doused depending on who it turns out to be, but either way the initial experience of the flashing red light is the same.

And if there is no one there, then my Internet, unlike my old answering machine, has an infinity of Ersätze to help me bide the time between missives: Wikipedia, YouTube, lolcats, even jehsmith.com ('I feel like reading something... I better write it first!' is how my reading habits were recently described to me by an up-close observer). And then of course there is the most seductive of all these new Ersatzfreunde: Facebook. If the Internet is cocaine, Facebook is crack. While information is pulverized in a Google search, it is in turn crytallized by the 'news feed' into more potent nuggets, more potent because they are supposedly coming from 'friends'. Like crack, what they actually deliver is little more than a desire for further nuggets. I think this is what Richard Klein (describing cigarettes) claimed is characteristic of the experience of the sublime.

Facebook's potency resides in the personalized character of the stream of information, and in the sensation that it is being delivered directly to you as a result of real agency and even solicitude. But it cannot be fully personalized, and on reflection I note that I've spent a lot of time reading about and looking at things that are really of no interest to me whatsoever. I've figured out how to block Farmville and MafiaWars and obscene stuff like that, but there's no way to similarly keep at bay the barrage of images of other people's babies (a sensitive issue at this stage of the life-cycle), nor the whooping and hollering of sports fans (no less tedious in its written than in its audible form), nor all the bickering about having to grade papers among my academic peers, nor the predictable self-affirmations of the mainline liberals who make up the greater part of my cohort.

Certainly I do read a lot of things that interest me. The best updates are the ones that hew to a consistent theme (like the friend of mine who posts nothing but news of the latest film he has watched, and asks his friends to name films that share similar elements). But all in all, it is considerably less edifying than the books I've just checked out of the library. To extend my earlier analogy a bit further, I feel the need to go back to authentic Andean tradition, and to chew on raw coca leaves for a while-- that is, to start reading books again, from cover to cover. It is not that this is an inherently superior mode of learning; in fact I believe it is dying out. But it is how I first started learning, and recently I've begun to miss it.

My first experiences in the library in which I will be working for the next several months have been characterized by a sort of noetic ecstacy (neurochemically very different, I think, from the experience of the flashing red light). I am permitted to go in after hours, and to browse the stacks entirely by myself. In large part, perhaps, because the building is a stunning example of sleek, midcentury-modern architecture, I am easily put in mind of the supercomputers that were, around the same time and not so far away, being constructed by IBM. When I browse the stacks, it is as if I am somehow going inside the Internet, or the thing that would eventually be distilled into the Internet, but that used to be an expansive physical enviroment, filled with information in heavy chunks --books-- which one could grab, open, and read, rather than search, click, and skim. The information in these chunks remains of a vastly higher quality, for contingent reasons that may someday be overcome, than its ethereal, clickable descendants. There is also no danger in these chunks of pop-up ads for weight-loss pills, no straightforward incitements to fucking, no paeans to the strength and prowess of still-living athletes. It is like the Internet, but purer, and sleeker. And you can go inside of it.

For many years I was one of those insufferable people who would proclaim that he had no need of television. It only recently became clear to me why I have stopped doing this more recently: not because I have become more circumspect in the things I proclaim of myself, but because the Internet had served as a Trojan horse that let television, along with a host of other modern blights, into the daily lives of countless people who had earlier worked hard to carve out a space for themselves in the world that was free from such degradations. Most of us did not even notice, since we were able to tell ourselves that the funny animal vids we were watching on YouTube were a better use of our time than, say, America's Funniest Home Videos would have been two decades earlier. After all, we were 'curating' them ourselves. We learned to think of ourselves as master DJ's, which at the very same time was coming to be a public identity of sky-rocketing prestige. We could even curate for ourselves the opening credits to, say, The Love Boat, and tell ourselves that this was not the same thing as watching Captain Stubing, Gopher, Vicki, and the rest of the gang, since it was now a historical 'document', and we weren't watching it so much as studying it. I do not mean entirely to denigrate this curating and studying; in the end, I really do think it is a more valuable endeavor than what watching TV overwhelmingly was throughout the era of that device's horrible reign. Television brought no good at all; it was not a Shiva, destroying and giving at once. It was just Satan (not Milton's subtle Satan, but just your average pastor's wholly and unambiguously bad Satan), and it only began yielding up something valuable when we were at long last able to start picking it apart, mashing it up, and turning it inside out, on our own terms, with the help of the new media.

Anyway, I had thought about more radical forms of separation from you, dear reader, but in my life radical measures either never work, or they work far too well. So instead I intend for the next several months not to shut down any accounts, nor to Satanize a historical development that leaves me feeling for the most part very hopeful, but only to anchor my interventions here to that midcentury moment, when the information-processing machines were still big enough to crawl inside of them, and when books were one thing, TV another. I'll be devoting my attention to books, not TV, turning first, when I have a free moment, to The Laws of Manu, and Nietzsche's queer reading of them...

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On the Internet

The Internet, it seems, is destroying everything. In the aftermath of its Shiva-like arrival, the rest of the world now appears shabby, neglected, left over.

It has destroyed or is in the process of destroying long-familiar objects: TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, musical instruments, clocks, books. It is also destroying institutions: stores, universities, banks, happy hours, travel agencies. Teleconferencing is increasingly obviating the need for travel; Wikipedia is now vastly superior to anything Diderot could have imagined (and unlike the Encyclopédie, Jimmy Wales's creation is perpetually improvable). As a friend recently put it to me: to denounce Wikipedia is like denouncing the Enlightenment. Nay more: Wikipedia is the Enlightenment realized, for better or worse.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything. 

It is the nuclear option for human culture, unleashed, evidently, without any reflection upon its long-term consequences. I am one of its victims, caught in the initial blast wave. Nothing is the same anymore, not reading, not friendship, not thinking, not love. In my symptoms, however,  I resemble more the casualty of an opium war than of a nuclear war: I sit in my dark den and hit the 'refresh' button all day and night. When I go out, I take a portable dose in my pocket, in the form of a pocket-sized screen. You might see me hitting 'refresh' as I'm crossing the street. You might feel an urge to honk.

A few years ago I saw an image in a newspaper of a camp for South Korean teenagers, sent there by their parents in the hope of breaking them of their Internet addiction. It showed them in the middle of a soccer field, wearing helmets, looking terrified. I know exactly how they felt. Sometimes as I'm walking down the street hitting 'refresh', I am made abruptly aware of the intrusion of physical reality, of midsized physical objects in motion, and I wish my body were better protected from them. I wish they would go away. They belong to a sputtering, wheezing world of rusty old buggies and abandoned factories. They have no place in 2011.

Of course, their world is not the world, and it never was all that was meant by 'reality'. Theirs is only the human social world, the world we've built up by art and artifice, the world of nature transformed for our vain and largely illusory purposes. If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

Consider the institution of friendship. Every time I hear someone say that Facebook 'friendship' should be understood in scare quotes, or that Facebook interaction is not real social interaction, I feel like asking in reply: What makes you think real-world friendships are real? Have you not often felt some sort of amical rapport with a person with whom you interact face-to-face, only to find that in the long run it comes to nothing? How exactly was that fleeting sensation any more real than the discovery and exploration of shared interests and sensibilities with a 'friend' one knows only through the mediation of a social-networking site?

The world of face-to-face interaction is growing rusty, slipping into the past with the books and the clocks. But lo: there's something left over, something that can't be further virtualized by transferring it to the Internet because it was never virtual to begin with. I have in mind nature, now often described metonymically as 'meat', but in fact also including vegetables, water, air, rocks, and the celestial bodies. What is really falling away are only the artefacts: social reality is discarding its crutch-objects and its transitional institutions, leaving nothing but a void between meatspace and screenspace, between nature and what is left of the social. At least for now, however, there are still those artefactual jalopies coughing out fumes, blighting an otherwise pristine landscape of trees and air and rocks, ruining things for those of us meat-beings that would prefer to have it one way or the other: plainly natural, or wholly virtual.

Today the Internet is in fact doing what the most grandiose claims about the book maintained that that humble object could do: duplicate the world, provide a perfect reflection of the order of nature (which properly understood was itself a book). In this respect the Internet is not really a machine or engine, even if things that clearly are contribute to its genealogy. It is not like those things that transform nature by hydraulics and pyrotechnics and so on. It does not require you to wear a helmet. Its history may be traced back in part to Agostino Ramelli's book-wheel (pictured above), one of the 'diverse and artifactitious machines' described in his 1588 book of that name, but in order to understand its power (destructive and otherwise), one would be mistaken in concentrating on the mechanics of it. One would do better to trace it back far further, to holy scripture, to runes and oracle bones, to the discovery of the possibility of reproducing the world through manipulation of signs.

Whether, then, you see the world destroyed by the Internet as a world worth losing has much to do with whether you take the machine or the book as the epitome of human endeavor-- that is, whether you think humans are here to transform nature, or rather to comprehend and perhaps to appreciate it. I belong squarely in the latter camp, and while I may look now like a fiend and a victim, crouched in front of my screen, I can't help but think that what I am doing here is something fundamentally human, and even that it is the culmination of what humans have been striving imperfectly to do for a very long time.

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A Problem about Religious Faith

Consider the following inscription:

In case you need some help (I did), it says Weltliche Weisheit ohne Gott, ist die größte thorheit. Which, being Englished, means, roughly, Worldly wisdom without God is the height of foolishness.

I found this  written on the front page of Valentin Weigel's Philosophia Mystica of 1618 while doing research in the rare books collection of the University of Helsinki. The book had been owned by the Scottish-Russian alchemist, mystic, and statesman Jacob Bruce [aka Iakov Brius] (1669-1735), and we may assume that the sentence is written in his hand. 

Now, if you were to ask me whether I agree with the claim, I would reply: "I suppose, but I would greatly prefer that it be left in its nearly indecipherable state, that it be left untranslated, and that it be entertained as a possibility only when browsing through dusty old leather-bound books in Nordic summer light filtered through stained glass." Translated into English, typed out, and considered under circumstances far removed from its initial discovery, I find the force of it is already greatly diminished. If I were to hear it from, say, some Dockers-wearing sap at a Midwestern Bible fellowship, I would reject it categorically.

It is true, though: worldly wisdom without God is the height of foolishness. (It does not follow from this that there is a God; it is enough that all worldly wisdom be irredeemably foolish. Which it is.) It is true, but whether or not one is receptive to its truth is going to depend entirely on the cultural and aesthetic setting of the truth's delivery. I am finite, mortal, confused, and all my striving is in vain, but I can only hear this from words on old paper, preferably not in English, preferably hard to decipher. I cannot hear it from representatives of the present age, whom I dismiss out of hand as banal. And I cannot hear it from anyone I consider my social or intellectual inferior, even if it is true.

I think this says more about the nature of religious faith than about my hang-ups. Dawkins, Dennett, and the other  'new atheists' would have us believe that there is a problem about the truth claims of religion. It seems to me, rather, that religion is, in its essence, the coming-together of members of the same sociocultural stratum around a cluster of indisputable truths (such as the one I transcribed from Jacob Bruce), and that the real obstacle to accepting them is not their content, but rather the cultural distance of the people touting them. This was clearly the key factor in Dawkins' ridiculous tour of middle-American mega-churches. It was a factor, moreover, that he, in his sociologically tone-deaf English self-confidence, was wholly unwilling to take into consideration.

Dawkins and the mega-church pastors will all look foolish, in due time (Ted Haggard already does). Meanwhile the truth-revealing cachet of the dusty old books will continue to grow.

Ezekias Woodward, Christ-Mas Day (1656)

Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Early Modern Gothic Non-Fiction

Surveys of what is often called 'Gothic' literature (surely one of the most malleable labels in the history of style), generally begin with Coleridge and Byron in the early 19th century. I would argue that the Urtext of the genre, at least in its English expression, appeared two centuries earlier, and was not a work of literary fiction at all, but a straightforward scholarly treatise on the practical problems of dealing with and disposing of dead bodies, the variety of burial practices in different times and places, with especial attention to cremation.

I have in mind Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, urn-burial, or, A discours of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk together with the Garden of Cyrus, or, The quincuncial lozenge, or network of plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered (London, 1658 [repr. 1669]). As the title implies, it is also an archaeological treatise, impressed with "the Treasures of Time," which "lie high, in Urns, Coyns, and Monuments, scarce below the Roots of some Vegetables." It is a philosophical treatise, too, subtly chastising the authors of the more canonical works in this genre for focusing upon the wrong sort of question: "Many have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the Soul upon Dis-union, but men have been most phantastical in the singular contrivances of their Corporal dissolution."

The philosophical subtlety extends through Browne's vast ethnographic observations. One of his core preoccupations has to do with the difference between the barbarism and civilization. The barbarians, as represented par excellence by the Scythians of northern Asia, he notes, are legendary for the cruel sacrifices of slaves and horses that accompany the funerals of great men. The Chinese, by contrast, well-known in the early modern period for their civility, had managed to replace the sacrificial victims with textual representations: "And the Chinois," he writes, "without Cremation or urnal Interrment of their Bodies... burn great numbers of printed draughts of Slaves and Horses over it; civilly content with their companies in effigie, which barbarous Nationes exact unto reality." The purpose of the treatise is to defend cremation against the view that it is, in some absolute sense, morally abhorrent, and to do so by drawing on the vast diversity of the ethnographic record. In this respect, the treatise serves something of the same rhetorical purpose as Montaigne's famous essay from the previous century, 'On Cannibals'.

Cremation was remarkable to Browne in part for what it revealed about the human being qua corporeal entity, namely, that there is really not much there. "How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of Bones and Ashes," he writes, "may seem strange unto any who considers not its Constitution, and how slender a mass will remain, upon an open and urging Fire, of the carnal composition. Even Bones themselves reduced into Ashes do abate a notable proportion; and, consisting much of a volatile Salt, when that is fired out, make a light kinde of Cinders."

Not all bodies decay or burn in the same way, however. "Some Bones make best Skeletons, some Bodies quick and speediest Ashes." Bodies identified by Browne as 'hydropical', in particular, neither burn nor decay easily. Drawing on some pre-Socratic lore I have yet to decipher, he asks: "Who would expect a quick flame from Hydropical Heraclitus?" Surely the most vividly macabre passage of the treatise concerns the 'defiance to Corruption' in bodies of this sort:

Urnal Interrments and burnt Reliques lie not in fear of Worms, or to be an Heritage for Serpents: In carnal Sepulture Corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of Snakes out of the Spinal Marrow. But while we suppose common Worms in Graves, 'tis not easie to finde any [snakes] there; few in Church-yards above a foot deep, fewer or none in Churches... Teeth, Bones and Hair give the most lasting defiance to Corruption. In an Hydropical Body ten years buried in a Church-yard we met with a fat concretion, where the Nitre of the Earth and the salt and lixivious Liquour of the Body had coagulated large lumps of Fat into the consistence of the hardest Castle-soap; whereof part remaineth with use.

In passing, we also see what to my knowledge is the earliest occurrence of the sort of craniometric physical anthropology that would become familiar at the end of the 18th century with authors such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. "[H]andsome-formed Sculls," Browne writes, "give some Analogy of Flesh-resemblance; a critical view of Bones makes a good distinction of Sexes. Even Colour is not beyond conjecture; since it is hard to be deceived in the distinction of Negro's Sculls."

Very much as in his more famous work, the Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646, Browne offers a sequence of refutations of beliefs and practices so peculiar that it's hard to imagine he does not relish the very mention of them, even as he insists upon their abhorrence. He disapproves, for example, of the cultural practice whereby an "Archimime or Jester attend[s] the Funeral Train, and imitat[es] the speeches, gesture and manners of the deceased." He also wants to know, as if for him there could be any practical purpose in knowing, "[w]hether unto eight or ten Bodies of Men to adde one of a Woman, as being more inflammable, and unctuously constituted for the better pyrall Combustion, were any rational practice[?]"

But the Gothic quality of the work (and the same quality that ultimately makes all Gothic writing a variety of Christian devotional literature), lies in the contrast between the fate of the damned and the fate of the blessed, a contrast that always enjoys lingering in the sepulchral shadows and stench rather longer than do the hymns and parables, long enough to experience a proper charge of titillating horror. Browne invites us to "meet with Tombs enclosing Souls which denied their Immortalities," such as that of Epicurus and other heathen philosophers. And here we come back to that central philosophical problem: the fate of the soul after death. Browne complains that it is "the heaviest stone that Melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at then end of his Nature; or that there is no farther State to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain." But if the farther state is just a dank tomb, doesn't this still give some kind of comfort, if not as a glimmer of hope for our own souls, then at least as a source of dark fantasies that please the imagination even as they leave the supposedly more divine part of the soul unconsoled? Isn't that what the genre is really all about?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the Hydriotaphia that "it smells in every word of the sepulchre." It does that, even as it remains in conversation with Montaigne and Descartes, and even as it anticipates figures as far apart as Byron and Blumenbach. 

The French Strikes and the Zomian Highlands: Reading James C. Scott on Anarchism

There was something about the French strikes that, like so many things recently, had me feeling out of step with my peers. It was not the particular content of the strikers' demands, in the particular context in which these demands were made, that bothered me; in fact I strongly supported the strikers' effort, and was disappointed when it failed.

It was rather the assumptions behind most of the international (read: North American academic) support for the strikers that I could not entirely accept. How many times did we hear phrases to the effect that the strikers, in fighting to keep in place the relatively generous social welfare system that had been built up in France over the course of the 20th century, were doing nothing less than fighting to defend the 'minimum conditions for a just society'? This got me asking myself: do the highland peasants of Southeast Asia, who live outside of the scope of nation-state control, live in unjust societies? Is there any conception of justice on which the minimal conditions of its being present need not be met by states, but instead might be met by sub-state associations of people? Even if such associations are not up to the task of maintaining the minimum conditions of justice in today's France or the US, is this sufficient reason to neglect them altogether as possible models for the future?

For a while, I had a tenuous and unsatisfying relationship to anarchism: I contented myself with a sort of 'anarchism of the spirit', which conceded that the abolition of government is wholly impracticable, but still insisted that one may, individually, live one's life free of any externally imposed arche. This 'anarchism' was of course only poorly disguised cosmopolitanism (not that there's anything wrong with cosmopolitanism): it had to do with the cultivation of an individual life and the refusal to anchor it in loyalty to some nation-state, with which a person can only ever hope to be contingently associated, rather than with any real conception of the social good.

There were two considerations that kept me dithering in mere cosmopolitanism: I hate village life, and I am afraid of thugs. As to the first, I supposed that if nation-states were to be phased out as the providers of services, utilities, health care, and so on, this would require a radical scaling back to a form of social life that could not include many of the things I enjoy, such as moving easily between cultures across vast geographical regions, sampling from them, taking what I like and rejecting what I don't. As to the second, I supposed like many people that wherever nation-states fail to exercise their famous monopoly on violence, more craven and ancestral forms of it would move in to take their place.

Reading James C. Scott, particularly The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale, 2009), as well as Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998), has done much to end my dithering. On his treatment, non-state confederations are a sort of endangered species, like indigenous languages and polar megafauna; they are all being encroached upon by very much the same global process. In fact, Scott thinks that Zomia, a mountain region that extends across the borders of several states, including Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand, is perhaps the last non-state region in the world. (Similar subaltern accounts have been given of the relative vitality of the local economies of Sudanese villagers, a vitality World Bank functionaries for the most part do not even know how to measure.) This is the last remnant of a sort of sub-state or pre-state social organization that once extended as far as Europe with groups such as the Cossacks: groups consisting in people who were not by any viable measure worse off than the 'citizens' they would soon be forced to become.

With respect to my first concern, about the tedium of the sort of village life that can afford to do without state support (a concern which Scott does not share, and so does not address), it should first be admitted that whether or not I would feel comfortable living a certain kind of life says nothing about whether that life could be considered a good one. Second, upon reflection there is no reason in principle why --if the model of social organization presented by the Zomians were, by some miracle, to be adopted in places that currently have trouble conceptualizing a just society except as one whose upholding is the responsibility of the state-- innovations developed under state direction (the Internet being such a one par excellence) could not be retained and maintained collectively (it is a good deal more difficult to imagine the highway system and the aviation industry being maintained in this way, but I say good riddance), and thereby make possible an optique that extends beyond the Kinder, Kirche, Küche mantra that Marx, for example, thought was the inescapable frame of reference of village life.

With respect to my second concern, about the supposed natural tendency of anarchy towards thugocracy, one comes away from reading Scott (even if this is not his central argument) with a sharp sense of the implausibility of the popular belief that it is the state monopoly on violence that is keeping sub-state actors (my neighbor, the mob, a warlord) from doing me in or generally making my life miserable. For one thing, these parties have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of operating within states, frequently making comfortable arrangements with representatives of the state in order to carry on with their business. For another thing, the anthropology of violence simply makes it, like public copulation, unfeasible in most situations: it's not, or not primarily, law that keeps people from acting out, but custom, of which law is a recent accretion. Finally, it would be very difficult to make the case that sub-state aggressors, even if states do provide a genuine service in holding them back, could possibly do any more harm, if given carte blanche to rape and pillage and fill mass graves, than states themselves have done over the past century. Tribal warlords are nasty, but it is unlikely that villagers have had more reason to fear them than to fear the designs of generals with state-conferred authority.

I for one would not at all mind sitting at home, stateless, watching lolcat vids and reading Wikipedia articles about the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia. I would say hello to my neighbors every day, and if they ever got aggressive with me I would say: 'Shame on you'. If it continued, I'd get some local elders to shame them. I'd watch the seasons pass, and I'd get a lot of great writing done. If I were to get sick, there might be a local, natural remedy available, and if not, I might very well die at an earlier age than if there had been the sort of massive state- and corporate-sponsored medical industry most people think of as among the minimum conditions of 'justice'. That would indeed be too bad, but even with my world-renowned Canadian health benefits I note that I am far from immortal, and again, I refuse to admit that the vast majority of communities throughout human history were less just than the one I live in to the extent that they lacked these benefits.

In Marseille this past summer I recall seeing the posters put up by the Socialist Party: Pour nous la retraite, c'est 60 ans! I found myself thinking: wouldn't it be better to strive to bring about a world in which work is not so odious that one dreams of nothing more throughout one's working life than arriving at the age where one may be excused from it? I understand that I risk going off the utopian deep-end in having that sort of reaction to what is in the French context a perfectly laudable demand. But still, I can't help but think, and am very much emboldened by James C. Scott in thinking, that the lack of such a demand among the Zomians is a sign that they are somewhat closer to this utopia than Euro-Canadian democratic socialists are generally capable of seeing.

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'Intelligent Design' in the Human Sciences?

There has been much noble activism on the part of science educators over the past several years to combat the forces of darkness that would have public school children in the United States believe that bacterial flagella are 'irreducibly complex', that evolution is disproved by the fact that no 'missing links' have been found, and so on. A large part of the task of these educators is really elementary philosophy of science: to explain what a theory is, how it might be disproven, the difference between deduction and induction, and so on.

Keep up the good work, I say, but in the meantime might there also be room for a comparable campaign to elevate the sophistication of students' understanding of historical processes? I do not mean a campaign to ensure that students have adequately committed to memory a certain core set of historical facts (which facts belong in this core will always remain a subject of dispute). What I mean is that there should perhaps be a campaign to disabuse students, at some point in their teen years, of the childish view of history as a sequence of outcome-driven acts (to speak like an administrator) undertaken by exceptional individuals, where the ultimate outcome is the overall present state of the world.

The need for this becomes clear to me every year around Columbus Day, when the various factions gather, with law-like predictability, to either praise or denounce the legacy of this one man. As if there were anything there to take sides on! Columbus was a Genoan merchant, one of many, in an Asian-dominated world economy, and he managed to secure the funding for an expeditionary voyage that would open up new trade routes with the Far East. He came to some islands along the way, and met some people there, and said some things about them that would not go over well today, but were entirely in keeping with 15th-century Iberian anthropology (which was no more or less universalist than that of any contemporary empire in Asia or Mesoamerica). The misery of the reservation system, the Trail of Tears, and even the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés some decades later are simply not Columbus's doing.

Jack Forbes calls Columbus a 'cannibal', by which, it turns out, he means not a member of the Carib people (who really were anthropophagous and whom Columbus really did have reason to fear), nor yet a person who literally eats people at all. Instead, Forbes maintains that Columbus's legacy shows him (retrospectively?) to be a sort of Wetiko, a mythical creature of the Algonkian cultural sphere (as if this had anything to do with the Caribbean!) that falls from its originally human state, loses all contact with the human social world, and lives isolated in the forest, gnawing on human flesh and even on its own limbs and lips. One can appreciate the despondency that drives Forbes's work, but at the same time denounce the naïveté of the implied understanding of historical agency. One must, moreover, work to ensure that this understanding be un-learned, preferably as early as high school, but certainly by the end of an undergraduate education.

To put things in perspective: the Pacific islands were only settled around 1500 years ago. If you agree with the official line of the Chilean school system, the Polynesian seafarers eventually made it as far as the South American coast. Whether they did or not (and there is in fact no solid evidence that they did), it is reasonable to suppose that they easily could have, and that if they had made such an expedition in, say, 700 or 800 CE, this would not have been a categorically different development than the one that took place 7 or 8 centuries later. Columbus's expedition, I mean to say, needs to be understood as a very recent development in the 70,000 year history of human migration: the blind, ignorant scavenging of homo sapiens that brought them to displace homo erectus from Asia, that later brought the Austronesians to displace the indigenous Australoid peoples from most of Southeast Asia, and so on. This is what history looks like when you imagine it from a perspective in the distant past and then watch it unfold, rather than looking back just a few hundred years or so from the present, and imagining that everything that people did or had done to them in that sliver of time was always inexorably destined, like the frames of a movie, to bring us to the present moment.

Seeing things in this way extinguishes any sense of a need for a special holiday to honor Columbus, but it also enables us to break out of the false dichotomy as between boosterism and demonization. And this, in turn, is, I think, a minimum condition of the attainment of something that might be called 'historical literacy', on analogy to what groups like the National Center for Science Education hope to bring about for our society's general understanding of how science works.

In both cases, in fact, what is to be fought against is a variety of 'intelligent design'. In the case of interest to us, it is the attribution of such a design to Columbus himself: a plan for the New World, for which he carried the blueprint, and which he set on its course with everything that was to come in clear view. In both cases of intelligent design, the properly scientific account of things is resisted for the same reason: because its acceptance is supposed, consciously or unconsciously, to imply meaninglessness, 'randomness' (as the kids say), disorder. In the case of history, dropping ID would require the loss of myths that likely have an even stronger hold on our understanding of ourselves than the myth of supernatural creation. How much easier it is, after all, to call upon a few sinister actors in the course of human history as an explanation of why things have gone so wrong, than to acknowledge that ethnic cleansing is simply what our species does, that it is not the result of individual moral failures, and that the chapter of it for which Columbus stands by way of metonymy is nothing exceptional. But as I never tire of repeating, there are surely more effective means of prevention than to stand slack-jawed at every new atrocity and to exclaim how exceptional it is.