Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Keeping Up with the Republican Primaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and Jon Stewart is a sanctimonious boob.

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

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

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

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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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On Marriage

[From my forthcoming essay in Lapham's Quarterly]

...The rebranding of couples as “partners” is the sad culmination of the modern transformation of couples into work-love units. Heterosexual couples began calling one another “partners” at some point in the late 1980s or early '90s out of a sense of solidarity with their gay friends who could not yet be spouses. Believing themselves to be friends of sexual otherness, they were at the same time abetting the ongoing transformation of marriage into a variety of modern capitalist work. And it is at precisely this moment in the history of marriage that it became feasible for the institution to subsume same-sex couples: the moment at which the hard work of individuals had fully replaced exchange between families as the basic model of what a marriage ought to be.

When marriage was a matter of exchange, the gender of the units of exchange was a non-negligible factor in the determination of who should be exchanged with whom. When marriage comes to be seen as a line of work, by contrast, and when individuals are seen as free to choose their own vocation, then it correspondingly transforms into a gender-neutral institution. It is thus exactly the historical moment when marriage becomes a variety of work rather than of exchange that the genders of its members cease to matter. Marriage was always an economic matter, but members of marriages were not always its employees, and this is what the awful new talk of “partnership” is really about...

[To read more, look for the 'Family' issue of LQ, coming out in December.]

Bisexuality and the Linnean Fallacy

[This is a piece I wrote for the Opinionator series in the New York Times to which I occasionally contribute. Somehow it fell through the cracks, and by now the news item to which it is responding is fairly old (in news terms), so I'll just post it here.]

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A New York Times article of August 22 announced with appropriate irony the results of a recent study by researchers at Northwestern University: "No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist." This study followed another, completed in 2005, which had concluded that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.” The question of human male bisexuality is starting to look like that of the healthfulness of eggs: we are just going to have to get used to periodic about-faces on the part of the scientists. Or at least the questions would look alike, if sexual orientation were not so much more difficult a concept to get a scientific handle on than that of health.

Both studies on bisexuality used the questionable method of penile plethysmography, in which the flow of blood to the test subject's genitals is measured, as images showing various combinations of men and women engaged in sexual activity are shown. Now I do not wish to question this method here, though I will note in passing that there is good reason to wonder whether a bisexual orientation is something that may be measured by degrees of genital arousal. I will also not discuss the inherent problems in selecting subjects for such a study; the recent one is said to have made improvements over the one conducted in 2005, yet plainly, to the extent that such a study must rely on volunteers, there is always a danger that what is being measured is a disposition of people with the sex-study-volunteering orientation, rather than, so to speak, a naturally occurring one.

I want to focus instead on the a priori commitments that would lead a scientist to go in search of such a creature as a bisexual in the first place. I believe that to do so is no less ridiculous --and will look no less ridiculous some generations from now-- than an early-20th-century attempt to, say, distinguish a quadroon from an octoroon, to draw an example from the history of American racial pseudoscience, looks to us today.

In both the case of race and of sexual orientation, we are witnessing a conflation of social and natural kinds. Complex social and historical factors bring it about that it should make sense to speak of a certain kind of person in a certain place and time (a shaman, a serf, a hysteric, to cite a few examples). Today, these factors in turn cause science to set about looking to establish the real existence of such social kinds in nature, as if society and history had no role in our having come to speak of the kind in the first place.

This point was anticipated by Michel Foucault in his powerfully argued History of Sexuality. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, partly inspired by Foucault, would make the case for what he calls 'historical ontology': the process by which historical change brings into being kinds that did not, and need not, always exist. Once such kinds come into existence, however, they appear as if necessary; it becomes difficult to conceptualize the world without them.

It is a grave mistake of science, however, to fall prey to this difficulty, and to neglect the historical conditioning of the kinds of things we go out looking for in nature. This mistake results largely from the lack of communication between psychologists (in this case, the ones specializing in what people once felt comfortable calling 'sexology'), on the one hand, and historians and anthropologists on the other.

I see the history of 'racial science' as involving an overextension of the classificatory project, initiated in the early 18th century by Carl Linnaeus, beyond the real (or relatively real, though certainly not permanent) boundaries between biological species and down to supposed human subtypes, which are in fact only the artefacts of political and ideological preoccupations and have no biological significance whatsoever. The creation of sexual subtypes, I take it (as kinds of person, rather than as different behavioral propensities of people), is a continuation of this misplaced naturalization, of this Linnean overreaching. It shows science at its most historically oblivious.

Yet the most surprising aspect of the scientific 'discovery' of social kinds is the willingness of self-identified sexual minorities to mimic science's naturalistic language and to express something approaching gratitude at having been discovered. In this respect, the Times headline conveys an admirable if misplaced irony. It reminded me when I read it of Thomas Laqueur's riff in Making Sex on Realdus Columbus's discovery in 1559 of the human female clitoris, and of how this in turn echoed that other Columbus's discovery some decades earlier of something exactly half the world already knew about.

But there is a difference in the case of bisexuality. The existence of bisexuality in men might be something with which the men who experience it are familiar without science having to tell them about it. But unlike knowledge of female anatomy or of New World civilization, these men might protest upon being discovered that they are not an entity in nature, like some new species of butterfly. They are not some special variety of men, but rather they are men simpliciter, with a certain range of interests within a domain of life that, for complicated reasons extensively analyzed by Foucault, we take to be overly definitive of who we as human beings are.

But the politics of science being what it is, human beings who fit the profile of the sort of person characterized by a scientific study are much more likely to take their 'discovery' as an affirmation, one that potentially affords them political leverage, than they are to demand not to be treated as a natural kind. And in this way they perpetuate what we might call the 'Linnean fallacy': the extension of the classificatory project that is well-suited for the identification of biological kinds into human social reality, to which it is most poorly suited.

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Avertissement

I apologize, dear readers, but I have absolutely nothing to say. I really do not know what has come over me, but since late September not a single thought or trace of a thought has flashed thorough my head that I have considered worthy of sharing. Perhaps they never were intrinsically worth sharing, and it was only a conceit that made them seem so. Perhaps there is nothing to apologize for. In any case, this is an unexpected crisis for me. I am like a gourmand who wakes up one morning without appetite, like a Lothario who suddenly finds he no longer has it in him to seduce. This may be temporary, or I may be entering into another stage, a stage that must be preceded by retreat and hiatus. I am really not sure. All I know for now is that I have not one more word to share.

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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The Blog as Mask and Gravestone

(I was asked to write another piece on the Internet, on the virtue of blogging, &c. It is forthcoming, in a venue I won't yet identify. True to form, I itch to post it here and be done with it. But that is not permitted, so I will just post some snippets that I believe stand on their own, and direct you to the published version when it is available.)

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In a fine introduction to a recent edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), William Gass writes that what he admires most about Robert Burton's life-work is “the width of the world that can be seen from one college window…; what a love of all can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair.” Burton’s Anatomy, indeed, often gives the impression that its author set out to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art whose aim was nothing less than to reproduce the world.

As with the Internet, the result is clumsy and chaotic, and Burton recognizes as much; and yet, in this way, both haphazard and cloistered, he manages to create, over the course of a life, a thousand-page mirror of the world:

I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of cosmography… A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.

Burton loved the world, though he knew it almost entirely through the books he kept in his cell. While at nearly the same moment in European history, Burton’s contemporaries, such as René Descartes, were denouncing ‘book learning’ as inauthentic, as an impediment to true knowledge, Burton reminds us, as Gass so well understands of his predecessor, that whether out in the world or locked in our cell, it is the human mind that is doing most of the work of experience anyway; a rich, full life may be led with only the most two-dimensional of stimuli to carry it along. The Anatomy of Melancholy is proof of this.

Today, too, the Internet can seem an impediment to many of what are thought to be our more authentic experiences. But it may also be facilitating the sort of experience we have always had, qua human beings, experience based in love, which can be had just as intensely in virtual form (letters from friends, books about nature, the Internet), as in ‘reality’ (seeing friends face-to-face, going camping). Sometimes I imagine I am feeling a love of the world as strong as Burton’s when I click, say, on a link from the Wikipedia entry on the Finno-Ugric languages to the entry on the Samoyed people of the Russian Arctic, and from there to the entry, written in Samoyed, on reindeer. There is so much out there, and it’s all in here!

True enough, in here, in this hyperlinked, screen-shaped reproduction of the world, what we find for the most part is a great mess “of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, wihout art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry.” But this is nothing new, and as Burton shows, it is the variety stacked upon variety, and the detail squeezed between details, the inexhaustible proliferation of adjectives, that makes this whole mess a mirror of human ingenium.

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The French anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss identified the category of ‘the person’ (la personne) with that of ‘the self’ (le moi). He maintained, like Taylor and many others after him, that this category is a recent development, emerging contemporaneously with modernity, which also witnessed the rise of bourgeois individualism, new concepts of authorship, property, individual rights, and so on. Mauss contrasts this conception of self with several other, premodern forms. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwestern United States, for example, do indeed conceive their clans as “being made up of a certain number of persons,” yet, on the other hand, “the role of all of them is really to act out… the prefigured totality of the life of the clan.”

It is well known that the Latin term ‘persona’ has its origin in theater and is associated first and foremost with the mask. So a ‘person’ in the most original sense is a role taken up or assumed, and it is only in the modern period that personhood becomes, Mauss maintains, something stable and enduring, something rigidly attached to the individual over the course of a life; or, better, something by reference to which the notion of a single life with a single and unified course can make sense in the first place Mauss attributes to the philosopher J. G. Fichte, as late as the early 19^th century, the final responsibility for consolidating personhood as “the condition of consciousness and of science.” But we have no need for such precision here. In fact, the sort of personhood that interests us most is the one that may be put on or taken off as a mask, for it is this sort that, as we will see, helps us to identify certain emerging practices that transpire on the Internet --performances, you might say-- in a light that is continuous with the pre-digital, indeed pre-modern, human past.

Persons were in premodernity attached to particular social roles, Mauss wants to say, rather than being seen as irreducible metaphysical subjects. But this could not mean for him that in premodernity there was no conception of enduring individuals; indeed, heroes and kings and other exceptional figures could endure beyond death and achieve immortality. Burial monuments are generally monuments to such exceptional figures, with great stone pyramids being a limit-case of this sort of monumental expression of a hope for endurance. Being king or emperor or pharaoh is not a role that is taken on in passing, it is not a fleeting persona, but rather a permanent status that endures beyond the grave.

We may in this connection think of the proliferation of funeral parlors in the modern period, with the ideal of a shining marble monument for every mortal, as a corollary of the general individualizing trend of modernity that has transformed us all (at least in our imaginations) into little kings and queens. In this respect, what Mauss describes as the emergence of our conception of person as a stable, enduring self might better be thought of as a democratization of personhood. These days, we all merit memorialization.

This process has not occurred everywhere in the same way, though the rapid globalization of Western practices rightly causes us to fear that it will sooner or later. Among the Kaulong of Papua New Guinea, there are terms for both what might be translated as ‘self’ (enu), as well as for ‘human’ (potunus). As Jane Goodale explains, the status of potunus is one that must be achieved, that is not given at the outset, but rather accrues through the proper dealings with what Goodale has identified as “the key symbols of Kaulong humanity: pigs, teeth, bones, fire, sex, and song.” Consider her description of what matters most to a Kaulong man as he approaches the end of his life:

Men’s fear that they will die without anyone to bury them is a fear that they will not be replaced in the hamlet. If not replaced, there will be no song and the fire will die, the forest will overtake the abandoned place, and the man’s name will be forgotten. Burial and replacement ensure a degree of immortality since pigs will be sacrificed and their blood will wash over a man’s bones and he will be remembered by name.

Such a fear does not meet Mauss’s count as fear for one’s self, or for one’s person in the distinctly modern sense, to the extent that the Kaulong man wishes only for immortality through the memory of his name; whereas modern self-hood is said to involve a belief in a metaphysical core of one’s individual being, which is unchanging through all the transformations of the life-cycle, and presumably also imperishable (whether it is remembered by friends and family or not).

But the more we consider the richness of the ethnographic record, the more implausible the Maussian distinction between the modern self and the ‘primitive’ self comes to seem. Do we really want our own handsome gravestones because of a prior theory of our individual enduring selfhood? Or do we want them because, in some limited way, we are able to imagine people being prompted, in seeing our names engraved in marble, to recall us fondly? The details of the commemoration are different in different cultural contexts –ours involve no pig’s blood— but the anxiety the commemmoration is expected to resolve (whether it in fact does so or not) seems to be based on a  sort of universal human conception of selfhood, a conception that causes all of us to be preoccupied with our own death, and not just with the death of kings.

Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.

This shift could be more significant than it first appears. As I’ve said, the Internet is absorbing everything (in fact I used the word ‘destroying’, but we may permit a bit of softening at this point): books, music, telephony, etc. With respect to what has interested us in the previous section, it is worth conjecturing that the Internet will also, similarly, absorb both personae as well as their commemmoration, both masks and gravestones.

Perhaps I should clarify this last point. Philosophers have debated whether death is a suitable preoccupation for human beings at all. The Stoics famously thought it could not be, since insofar as I am dead, I am not; and insofar as I am, I am not dead. More recently Thomas Nagel has argued that death can indeed be plausibly construed as a misfortune, since, whether there is an afterlife or not, quite evidently death deprives us of the things we value in this life.

I often find that the idea of my own death is simply too hard to grasp. It may be that I am more Stoic than Nagelian: what concern is the world of mine, if the world will no longer have me? I expect my loved ones will absorb the loss; I have no large estate that will need worrying about, no mythology of transmitting my legacy through a healthy son weighing upon me; I am more than content to transfer my teaching load to someone else; and so on. I think I can even imagine my own body decaying in its coffin without being too troubled (I shiver a bit, but this is more a titillation arising from a taste for the macabre than it is a horror). But here is the thought that makes death formidable again: it is the moment after which I will never post to my blog again, after which I will never write another Facebook status update, I will never again tweet. My soul cries out: “But I can’t live without doing these things!” And death answers back: “No. But you can die.”

This is to say that my life is wrapped up with an activity from which I will have to leave off at death. But it is also the activity, I am increasingly coming to think, of actively constructing my self, and this activity, when it leaves off in death, will leave an accurate and vivid trace of a life. My online activity is, as I already put it, both mask and gravestone at once.

This may not be an entirely different experience than the one Robert Burton had when he brought out the fourth and fifth and sixth editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy. But the immediacy of blogging, and its lack of finality, make it much more like life itself than a book ever could be, with the backlogged publishers who promise it and the slow-churning presses that produce it. There is no publisher to blame if my blog is not sufficiently far along in its perfection at the moment of my death, no editorial wrangling or grinding production process. There is only me, and what I hope might be a mirror of me, diffused then through the Web of my culture by means I don’t understand: a mirror of me mirroring the world by sitting in a chair and looking at a screen and, every now and again, out the window.

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Introducing Clinamen

I do not own a great many things in this world. But I have managed to register a few prime domain names, including strictosensu.org, nolens-volens.org, and even the Latin version of Facebook: libervultuum.com. I've also registered the URL www.clinamen.net. This latter site is named of course for the hypothetical 'swerve' that the ancient atomists believed their fundamental particles must from time to time undergo, lest all of the atoms clump together at one corner of the cosmos, or simply come grinding to a halt.

Over the years people have sent me fragments of their écrits in the hopes that I will post them here at www.jehsmith.com. When I do answer, I remind them politely that this site is called 'Justin Erik Halldór Smith', and that this fact alone already places severe constraints on what may count as suitable content. Most importantly, whatever appears here must be directly connected to the life of the eponymous author. 

At the same time, I've been thinking for a while that I would like to branch out, and to start promoting more collaborative forms of online literacy. This both because I would truly like to help give voice to much of the very interesting writing I've been sent, but also because, in spite of the infinite expanses of the Internet, there is a disappointing dearth of compelling reading, or at least of sites that specialize entirely in compelling reading. It is hard to believe there is such a gap, but there is, and I intend to go some way towards filling it.

Within the next year, I intend to make Clinamen into a primary destination for those people the French still refer to --archaically yet endearingly-- as 'internauts': explorers in search of writing that is as good as the writing we used to see on densely printed paper, but which we now no longer have the patience to seek out at the newsstands.

Clinamen will not be an aggregator site, but will consist entirely in new writing, on the usual topics that matter to me and by extension to anyone who would want to write for a site with me lurking behind it: philosophy, arts, culture, history, science, language, animals, natural history, &c. We will be aware of currents in the academic and the art worlds, but will remain militantly aloof from both of these.

Many of the contributors will be academics, but there will be none of the usual academic talk of dental benefits, daycare, and all that careerist humor that always ends up looking like Gary Larson on a bad day. Nor will we be running a blog, exactly, in that there will be none of this 'As so-and-so said over at Daily Kos this morning...' or 'OMG Jon Stewart totally rocked last night!!!' The sentences strung together here, I mean to say, will be strung together for the longue durée.

My rolodex is large, I tell you, and packed with talented writers, so I expect Clinamen will make an impact. This is not, for the moment, a call for submissions, but only a sort of forecast as to where my web-based endeavors are moving. There will not in fact be such a call, at any point, but only discrete arrangements made on an informal basis with potential collaborators who seem to share in the spirit of the project. 

Clinamen is already 'up and running', as my tech people would say, but only in the most skeletal way, with a few placeholder articles dutifully standing guard.

I expect an official Clinamen launch date at some point around the beginning of the New Year. In the meantime, if you believe you may be able to contribute in some way, please do be in touch with me. Otherwise, expect occasional updates over the next months, and expect to have your reading routine altered for the better in 2012.

--Justin E. H. Smith

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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Ars longa, vita brevis

"Wide ass, white briefs." Years ago I might have offered up just such a translation of the Hippocratic motto that serves as our title and as our lesson. It would have been a wild guess, based on faint homophony. It would have been me bullshitting, as was my principal occupation for most of my early life.

Against all real evidence, I spent my adolescence so convinced of my own genius that I figured all I had to do was just ride along and watch a great life --my own-- unfold. From the third-person perspective, this would have appeared as laziness, and I suppose it was that, among other things. But it was also rooted in a peculiar perception of time, in particular of the relationship of the present to the future. The present, namely, seemed eternal, and therefore the future seemed wholly fictional. Art was long, but I had an eternal present in which to dally in anticipation of someday getting around to mastering it.

The first time I succesfully derived the conclusion to the syllogism that says all men are mortal, and moreover that I am a man --the first time it hit me, that is, what the real implication of putting that major and that minor premise together is--, my relationship to the future changed fundamentally. I can't isolate the moment, but at some point it all shifted, from dalliance to urgency, to getting it all into my head before the syllogism was carried through once and for all.

Yet astoundingly, even after I figured out I was mortal, the bullshitting continued. I continued to make great claims for myself, to assert expertise on whatever the subject at hand happened to be. I tried to keep a stock of two or three things to roll out for any topic whatsoever that might come up (two or three sufficed for the appearance of infinitude). If my limitations were ever found out, I could point beyond the topic at hand and insist that my expertise was somewhat elsewhere.

In some ways I can't help but feel that blogging is a continuation of this bad habit: I'm entirely in charge; I hit 'post' when I'm good and ready; before that I can consult Google to fill in any gaps. Like a mosquito that grows bright red and swollen by sucking the blood from a beast it could never fathom, I can now get my omniscience parasitically by sucking a drop here and there from that truly omniscient beast, the Internet.

I'm a mortal whose time is running out, who always imagined he'd be omniscient, and only belatedly realized he did not have an eternity in which to get there. I am a being torn between an impulse to real mastery born of fear of death (I have, after all, managed to learn a few things fairly well), and a tendency, born of early illusion, to rest content with vagary, approximation, and bullshit. Blogging came along at just the wrong time, and attempted to throw the fight in favor of that old bullshitting hooligan, whom it sees as its kind of fighter.

(Let me add at this point that the Internet, it has been commented, like Shiva, is both destroyer and giver at once. I don't doubt that great works of art will be, and may even now be in the process of being, launched from Typepad, and critics of the future will praise the brave young visionaries on whom tradition did not weigh, who felt no loyalty to the centuries of book-learning that for far too long defined what it is to be learned, eloquent, and profound. But I was built on the old model. There's nothing to be done about that now.)

As some readers will know I've recently begun a semester-long membership at a research institute in the United States, with a perfect library and seemingly boundless resources for the facilitation of intellectual advancement. This transplantation --the first extended period of time I will have spent in my native country since I moved to Canada in 2003-- has brought about in me an intense reflection on what I ought to be doing with myself, how I ought to be filling up my limited time, to what ends, and why. If life has been at various moments and in various combinations devoted to pleasure, posturing, and projects, it is as if of late it has streamlined itself into only the last of these: life as pure project.

Having projects suited to a finite creature means, in part, giving up omniscience as an end. That can be left to the omniscience-prosthesis, without resentment, and without a jealous desire to masquerade as it, to pull off a pointless imitation of the mechanical repository of all knowledge. But there still are bodies of knowledge to master: Sanskrit, something of the history of astronomy, more of the cognitive-science literature, the theoretical treatment of abductive inference, for example. (I've got what experts in the art of back-handed compliments like to call an 'ambitious' book that I'm writing; and I will write it.) This is what I am proposing to myself to do, in a very earnest way, for the next little while.

This will involve something of a separation from the electronic media that have so taken over my experience of daily life (just today I was invited to participate, apparently as an expert, in a psychiatrists' conference on addiction and the Internet! More details on this soon). I will not promise to abandon jehsmith.com altogether, but you can at least expect to see fewer posts here from now until midsummer, and the posts you do see here will be more clearly anchored, I hope, as fragments of a long-term project, in the subjects --besides that old fallback subject, the self-- in which I like to claim expertise.

I remember years ago --perhaps right around the time I learned that fatal syllogism-- meeting older scholars who spoke earnestly of just wanting to finish this or that study of this or that obscure philosopher before the inevitable recrudescence of the tumor for which they'd just been treated. I thought: My God. So this is what a life comes to. And it is, and the most famous among mortals adjust themselves to that fate while there's still time.

Learning from the Ngram

Table 1. 'Shit' and 'Fuck' in English, 1600-2008

Here is what I have discovered so far using Google's powerful new culturometric tool, the Ngram:

In books published in Russian from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Gorbachev era, references to Marx far outnumbered references to Freud and Wittgenstein, who both appear, other than a brief moment in the 1920s, more or less equal. (In the graph, Marx is blue, Freud red, and Wittgenstein green.)

In books published in Russian from 1917 to 2008, there is a spike in occurrences of the capitalized form of 'God' around the time of the fall of communism. (In the graph, 'God' is blue and 'god' is red.)

In books published in English over the past 100 years, interest in terrorists has increased sharply over the course of the most recent decade.

In books published in German in the 20th century, the preoccupation with 'authenticity' only got worse after the war. 

While Suzanne Somers' career would continue to stagnate following her departure from Three's Company, over the course of the 1990s Osama bin Laden's own star was beginning to rise.

Over the course of the 20th century, there was a steady decline in interest in heaven, but this decline has been abruptly reversed since the beginning of the present century.

Hell steadily gained ground on heaven in the 20th century, but heaven has made a strong comeback in the past decade.

Hell still enjoys a safe lead over heck, as does damn over dang, while shoot continues to make an impressive showing against shit.

The early moderns preferred fuck to shit, while the postmoderns have had it the other way 'round. In the Age of Revolution (roughly 1789 to the 1960s), both lapsed into near total desuetude.

For the first time since 1925, love is leading death by a nose!

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