Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Phyllis Rides Aristotle

The apocryphal story of Phyllis and Aristotle is captivating for a number of reasons. For one thing, it recalls for us a period in the history of culture in which philosophy, and philosophers, were implicated not just in elite disputation, but also in popular lore and moral instruction. The tale of Phyllis and Aristotle is an exemplum, that is, a stock lesson telling you --and here, 'you' is not a subtle follower of philosophical arguments, but a simple fellow influenced by memorable stories accompanied by vivid images-- what you ought not to do. The fact that it was the greatest philosopher in Western history who provided the exemplum is worthy of pause, but we'll get back to that in a second.

Phyllis was the preferred consort, perhaps the wife, of Alexander the Great, who in turn was a disciple of the philosopher. This much is historical fact. A legend arose over the course of the late middle ages according to which Aristotle grew enamored of Alexander's favorite, who for her part consented to give the philosopher what he wanted, but only as his dominatrix. In particular, she wished to ride on the his back, with the peripatetic down on his hands and knees like a beast. 

An anonymous Latin text relates that Aristotle had initially instructed his disciple to abstain from amorous relations with his own wife, since this diverted him from the manly projects in which he was engaged (empire-building, philosophy, e.g.). Phyllis was therefore spurned, and to get revenge she decided to seduce not her own husband, but the old philosopher who had drawn her husband away from her. This proved not so difficult, and soon enough Aristotle began to solicit her carnally. To which solicitations Phyllis responded: 

This I will certainly not do, unless I see a sign of love, lest you be testing me. Therefore, come to my chamber crawling on hand and foot, in order to carry me like a horse. Then I'll know that you aren't deluding me. 

Hans Baldung's 1503 pen-and-ink drawing (to the right), as well as his 1513 woodcut (above), are some of the most vivid representations of the ensuing ride.  In 1512 Lucas van Leyden gives us a depiction of the same scene in which Aristotle is wearing unmistakably Moorish or Islamic gear (below). My favorite rendering of this subject is the 14th-century French bronze aquamanile that shows Phyllis plainly slapping Aristotle's rear, just like she might a horse, in full three-dimensional splendor (final image below). 

What exactly is going on here? It should be pointed out that there is a long tradition of associating Aristotle with the bawdy that, as far as I know, goes back to the mid-16th-century Latin translation, by Theodor Gaza, of the Greek author's biological works treating, most relevantly, the reproduction of animals, and therefore also the cosmic significance of sexual difference, copulation, etc. From this association there arose the countless editions of works bearing the title Aristotle's Masterpiece, which were essentially manuals of advice for midwives, plus a diverse selection of 'secrets' about the feminine sex. I have been told that in Australia one could receive late editions of the Masterpiece, in a plain brown wrapper and by mail order, into the 1930s. 

Even before the Gaza edition, Aristotle's name would have been loosely associated with the topic of animals via Albertus Magnus, the 13th-century teacher of Thomas Aquinas who wrote, among many other works, a treatise De animalibus. Though it might be hard for us to see today, to the extent that animals owe their very existence to copulation, from a certain medieval point of view there is already something bawdy in the very undertaking of zoology. 

I do not know to what extent these associations influenced the rise of the legend of Phyllis and Aristotle, and this present post is really more a query than a report. It seems to me quite likely that in addition to Aristotle the advisor of midwives, another aspect of his legacy that could be playing a role in this legend is that of Aristotle the happily married father and family man. We know in fact that Aristotle went to Macedonia as Alexander's tutor shortly after the death of his wife, Pythias, with whom he had had a daughter; he would later have another female lover who would bear him a son, Nicomachus, for whom he would eventually write one of his two major works on ethics. It is also likely that he had a male lover, but whether he did or not it remains the case that Aristotle was far more active in all that stuff that has to do with social reproduction through opposite-gender pairing than great philosophers have typically been held to be. Nietzsche famously noted that all the great philosophers have been unmarried and non-reproductive-- except for Socrates, who was however married to a shrew, as if to demonstrate precisely the lesson that philosophers ought not to marry. Strangely, Nietzsche does not even mention Aristotle in this connection, but if he had he would have had to acknowledge that the Stagirite is both an exception to the rule as well as an exception to Socrates's exception that supposedly proves the rule. 

The figure of Phyllis riding Aristotle begins to appear at the moment when Aristotle is beginning his slow decline as the preeminent representative of philosophy, as 'the Philosopher'. Several more centuries would follow in which celibacy would function as the norm and implicit ideal among philosophers. Against this background, it seems to me that much of the trouble philosophy as an academic discipline is currently having in the matter of gender equity has to do not just with its legacy of macho grandstanding, the old-boys'-club sense of entitlement that so many of its cocky male practitioners have, etc., but also, at least in part, with the fact that the discipline has its deep historical roots in something akin to monasticism, a commitment whose demise Nietzsche seems to be bemoaning, where the boys' club is constituted not on the basis of a shared commitment to prowling, lecherous domination of women, but rather to an ideal of separateness.

Aristotle betrayed philosophy, at least on a certain understanding, by allowing it to get mixed up with the sensual, corporeal realm. The exemplum thus works at two levels at once, for the initiates and the masses alike. Keep your wits by staying away from temptresses, it tells the masses, while to the philosophers, it says: maintain the standard of pure rationality by not getting mixed up with the natural world and its cycles of generation and corruption.

I don't mean to oversimplify, but my own take on the discipline's current wave of self-criticism is that its demographic problem flows directly and inescapably from the way philosophy continues to define itself as an intellectual project. This is not to say that reason is 'masculine' and the senses are 'feminine'; this is not at all what I think. But I do think that centuries-old associations have a way of insinuating themselves into the way we talk and act far more than most people, and certainly most non-historians, like to think. And I believe that within our supposedly intellectually grounded defense of philosophy as a largely a priori discipline separate from the natural and cultural worlds, there is an echo of that old exemplum, intended for simpletons, about staying pure and free of temptation. 

In Pittsburgh

An academic career has a peculiar arc to it. When one is young, and first begins travelling around to various cities for conferences, it is as if one is Axl Rose or something, on tour, in hotels, where ordinary morality does not apply. One feels larger than life, and worthy of a biography or two.

After some years of repetition, though, one comes to feel rather more like Willy Loman, on the road, hawking some cheap unnecessary wares. One notices that it was only a Days Inn all along, and not the Ritz-Carlton, and by now the greatest transgression one can muster is to leave the towels on the floor after the first day, signaling that they are ready to be washed yet again, and that one has more important things to think about than the environment.

And the cities start to repeat themselves: Cincinnati, Bloomington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. I never understood what Nietzsche meant by 'eternal return', but when I find myself waiting in exactly the same Super Shuttle queue I must have been in a year ago, and two years ago, and three years ago, standing behind the same overweight, be-Dockered dolt with a Bluetooth stuck in his damn ear, chattering away about the Steelers, or about how it's time to sell, or about how he's ready to take it to the next level with the company he's partnering with in Grand Rapids, I could swear I am stuck in something very much like the metaphysical loop our German soothsayer envisioned. 

And yet... There is something about coming to a new city, even an old new city, that makes me feel like saying: if only I lived here, I would not grow old; I would not be prone to fatal illness; the memories I hold dear, the memories that constitute me and give me my orientation in the world, would not constantly slip further into the irrelevant past. This is where I need to be, not that other place I just happened to end up. Pittsburgh. Not Montreal, not Paris, but Pittsburgh. I love its hills; its solid, steely monuments, the ruins of the golden age of Carnegian optimism; its Native American toponyms, especially 'Allegheny' and 'Monongahela', which themselves seem to be the very causes of the topographical features they pick out; I love that I can see my breath here, this November 1st, when I walk around and breathe. Why didn't I figure this out before? Why didn't I remember this from last time? And why can I already tell, in advance, just a few hours after arriving here, that in another week or so I will be having the same thoughts, mutatis mutandis, in San Diego? 

I suppose I'm at least glad I'm not a traveling salesman. As Arthur Miller understood, such a life warps all too imperceptibly into death. But the world of moving sidewalks, duty free, Super Shuttle, and complimentary toiletries is a world built for traveling salesmen, and it is hard, once the youthful delusion of a larger-than-life life has faded, not to feel oneself sucked into their orbit when one is obliged to travel on their circuit: sucked into their orbit and, one might say, into the same cosmic fate. 

But again, beyond the Lomanesque circuit of check-in desks and conference nametags, there are the cities themselves, the cities that always seem shining and eternal to me: the cities where everyone already was, before me, and without me, just living their lives, as I could have been. In Pittsburgh, for example. 

Rob Carter, Faith in a Seed

For more information about Rob Carter's 'Faith in a Seed', go here.

 

I was slow in noticing the wonder of plants, and in this I do not believe I was unusual. When one is young, it is the furry things with faces, the creatures that dart about looking for food, driven on by their appetitive souls, that attract attention. At this stage, the plants are only the stage-setting, the animals the protagonists.

But in my case the innatention to the vegetal order continued well past my first youth. I long took Aristotle's greatness as a philosopher, for example, relative to that of his disciple Theophrastus, to consist principally in this, that whereas the former wrote books on the generation, parts, motion, and history of animals, the latter only came up with a couple of books about plants. It strikes me now, however, that this lack of interest would better be described as a severe case of phytophobia: I insisted plants were uninteresting, but what I really meant is that they are positively threatening. 

"Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret," said Horace: you can drive nature out with apitchfork, but she always comes back. This does not mean what I long thought it meant, but let us proceed as though it did. The Roman poet intended to say that innate character (the 'nature' of an individual being) cannot be supressed, but what the dictum long said to me was rather more literal: that nature, or rather Nature, cannot be beaten back for long. In appealng to 'Nature' here, what naturally comes to mind is of course the world of plants. Animals can be contained, more or less (other than insects and other microanimals, which, modern taxonomy be damned, no one really thinks are animals anyway), but the order of plants, as Lord Shaftesbury already understood incontemplating an early modern English garden, is sublime. The stated goal of the Jardin Royal des Plantes in Paris, by contrast, to assert 'controle totale sur le monde végétal', cannot but appear as so much absolutist and unsustainable hubris.

My fear of plants is deep-rooted. When I was little, growing up in a depressed, post-agricultural exurb of California's Central Valley, I dreamt of perfect cities somewhere far away. When I first went to San Francisco, the nearest so-called city, I was disappointed to discover empty lots overrun with weeds, and grass pushing up even through the cracks in the sidewalk. Nature, I thought, by which I understood vegetal nature, would take this place back in no time if we were to let our guard down. I set my sights on New York, imagining that it was there (if anywhere, etc.) that plants had been succesfully shut out. I imagined a city consisting in nothing but World Trade Center-like highrises, stretching out in all directions as far as one could see, between which one might hop by jetpack, never even having to descend low enough to catch sight of some invasive blade of grass. Kant once said there would 'never be a Newton for the blade of grass', and I wanted only that part of the world for which there could be a Newton, the world described by mechanical physics, the world out of which our architectural accomplishments have been built up. Our cities are not, of course, as I imagined them. I've been to all the 'real' ones, and I can report that Berlin is scarcely more than a willow grove, and when I'm in London I'm never quite sure when I'm in the botanical gardens and when I'm outside of them. It's a plants' world, I mean to say (at least the terrestrial part of the world is; under the ocean, the relative proportions of animal and vegetable biomass are reversed, which is really just to say that under the sea, where everything is by definition à rebours, topsy-turvy, upside down, one of the surest signs of the reversal of cosmic order is the preeminence of animals).

Rob Carter's Faith in a Seed, reminds us of many basic truths about the balance between nature on the one hand and human settlements on the other, but for me it was impossible to apprehend these truths without reflecting upon my long history of phytophobia. It struck me, in particular, that the three men Carter selected as subjects for his work, each in his own way, wielded a pitchfork and sought to do with it what the ancient poet had insisted could not be done.

You are not supposed to say 'seminal' anymore, but that is only because the people who think it is sexist don't know that it is really just the adjective of 'seed'. Thus to say that the work of Lawes, Thoreau, and Darwin was 'seminal', is not at all to praise them, as men, for their intellectual cum-shots, but only to say that things grew from them. One could put this in more mechanical-physical terms and say they had an 'impact', but that might be missing something. They changed the way we understand fundamental aspects of humanity's place in nature.

Thoreau opened up a line of very influential questioning of the value of modernity, at precisely the moment when conventional opinion was converging on the view that there was no problem (disease, war, etc.) that modern industry and industriousness could not solve. Darwin, well, Darwin is generally given credit for reinscribing human beings into the order of nature, following upon a few millennia of separation, and doing so at more or less the same moment that Thoreau was questioning the automatic inscription of modern men and women into, so to speak, the order of cities. Whether Darwin really did what he is given credit for doing is not so important (there were of course Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles's own grandfather Erasmus, who were all saying things with fundamentally the same metaphysical import as that of The Origin of Species, even if the details about the mechanism of natural selection were still missing).

Lawes appears as something of an outlier, though in fact he left a far greater mark (or stain) on the world than the other two. In creating the first chemical fertilizers from superphosphate, more than any other single individual Lawes helped to advance the industrialization of agriculture. That is, he brought the human activity of cultivating and growing, a practice that had by then been well established for 10,000 years or so, under the purview of the men who were principally interested in building, automating, and controlling, a cluster of activities that had enjoyed tremendous advances across only the previous few centuries. Chemistry, the discipline in which Lawes primarily worked, may be seen as a sort of bridging science between mechanical physics (for which, again, there is a Newton) and what we now call 'biology'. Here, entities that are ordinarily seen as homogeneous masses, the clumps or lumps or heaps that nature produces in such abundance, are shown to be made up out of 'building blocks': a telling term, for it reveals how someone such as Lawes, in applying chemistry to nature, can take a clod of dirt and reconceptualize it in fundamentally architectural terms.  

Lawes's pitchfork is easily visible: he wanted to exercise controle total in the world of agriculture. Yet there is one important thing to note here. Superphosphates are part of nature's bounty too, and strictly speaking they are no more unnatural than, say, the techniques of crop rotation or irrigation that had long been in use. Agriculture is by definition a bending of nature to human will (it is on these grounds that some anarcho-primitivsts think, with some justice, that it is first with the Agricultural Revolution, and not with the Industrial Revolution or the demise of the welfare state or any such thing, that social inequality and all the other symptoms of demise really start to become apparent). Lawes only wanted to apply a new way of bending nature, not to go against nature. In older alchemical terms, the science of chemical fertilizers is a perfective art applied to nature; it is not contra naturam. And yet, here we are, with the earth now almost completely divided up into plots you can see from an airplane, producing mostly unhealthy food from seeds patented by multinational corporations, and if that's notcontra naturam, it's still rather hard to see it as perfective.

Darwin for his part was not bending nature, but only trying to make sense of it. One way of thinking about the sense he made is that he sought to replace the grid, favored by the older natural historians such as Linnaeus, with a tree or an arborescent model of the kinds of creature in nature. And yet he wanted this tree to be well-groomed, a sort of perfect, easily surveyable bansai. Botanists today will tell you that strictly speaking there is no such thing as a tree, that is, there is no significant biological boundary between the kind of plants with woody trunks, and the kind that appear more bush-like. The order of nature has itself proven rather more like a bush, where it's hard to see which ramification leads where, where new branchings are always ready to be followed out, where neighboring bushes appear to form one entity, but in fact do not, and so on. It turns out, moreover, that the bush of species has no permanent, stable parts. Rather, all of nature's kinds are always on their way to being something else, and species names turn out to be more like proper nouns, identifying an individual that comes into existence for a certain period of time before giving way to another. Yet Darwin wanted to hold onto species as real, enduring kinds. Unlike Lawes, Darwin did not want to impose more order than his predecessors had on the domain of nature that interested him. But to some extent he remained unable to anticipate just how disordered things were going to get, largely as a result of theseed he planted.

Thoreau, it is said, preferred not to relate, in his Walden, how frequently and easily he repaired to the general store of Concord when he was running low on supplies. As far as world-renunciation goes, other wise men in history have taken it quite a bit further (though Thoreau's case is probably an instance of a more general tendency among famous world-renouncers). Thoreau doesn't so much drive nature out with his pitchfork, as he drives out society. But that, too, comes creeping back, or rather, our lone transcendentalist goes creeping back to it, whenever he finds himself running low on grain or potatoes.

So here are these three peculiar men, each with a very special relationship to nature, and each strongly associated with a particular home, of which, to all appearances, each of them seems to have been very fond. Thoreau with his Walden cabin, Darwin at Down House, and Lawes at Rothamsted Manor: each edifice is now imagined as a monument to the ideas of the men who inhabited them, ideas that, again, involve a particular stance against nature (in the dual Latin sense of 'against',contra: either 'abutting' or 'opposing'). And now Carter proposes to miniaturize these edifices, and to have us watch as sprouts grow around them from seeds he has cultivated.

What exactly is going on here? I have said that each of these men was working, each in his own way, 'against nature'. Something that is against nature --and this by definition-- is art. Artists today will likely not want to hear it, but I'm sorry, that's just what the word 'art' means. Perhaps this point can be made clearer if we appeal to the notion of the 'artificial', an adjective that once would have been understood to contain our glorified noun. Art is what little human beings are able to come up with inresponse to the immeasurabilty, untameability, and indifference of infinite nature. Nature, if I may say, generally kicks art's ass.

From this admittedly premodern optic, the idea of turning the growth of plants into art is a puzzling one. Carter's art is not like the artificial disruption of vegetal growth that we see in bansais or in the Jardin Royale des Plantes. Instead, he plainly wants to show the plants doing what they do best, which is to say growing towards the sun unimpeded by human designs. And moreover, he shows these plants usurping human monuments of some significance to the development of the modern world's perspective on nature. So art, which is small, seizes upon nature to show the smallness of art. This is, if I may also say, a grand geste, and by it Carter wins one for art.

In the way I have been construing art, as artifice, as techne, there is nothing further from the semantic cluster that contains it than the cluster sprouting from that fine, archaic, Indo-European root,*gen, which gives us such diverse words as 'gene', 'genus', 'generation', the Greek and Persian words for 'woman' (gune, zan), the Russian word for 'wife' (zhena), 'gynecology', etc. It also gives us 'germ', and the Greek verb gignesthai, 'to become'. Germs become plants through generation, and in this they are fundamentally unlike the works of human artifice, which are made rather than generated. There is, again, a certain comfort in making. But in the end, at least on our planet, generation is the law of the land. Carter's art, to the extent that it reminds us of this law, while still not, by that, being diminished as art, is worthy of notice. Anyhow it forced me to confront my own lifelong phytophobia, and to see what I'd been sensing for some time already, but could not fully articulate without Carter as cultivator: that the plants are not the stage-setting, but the very protagonists of this dazzling show.

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Actually, Nazis Are Pro-Sikh

Update, August 8: As usual, a link to this post at The Daily Dish has unleashed the fury of the ALL-CAPS commenters, who seem to rove the Internet looking for points to misunderstand. So let me make my point here a bit more resistant to such treatment: of course, of course I do not wish that Page had simply targeted a community more suitable for Nazi hatred. Rather, I wanted to underline the particular way in which, in this case, as I put it, evil was abetted by ignorance. I presume that when one learns a little bit about how complex the world is, when one learns, for example, that the people to whom the term 'Aryan' has historically been applied are brown-skinned, it becomes much more difficult to make facile us-them distinctions, and one is effectively forced to reexamine one's prejudices. Of course, some people, such as Savitri Devi, are able to take what they learn and torture it into a confirmation of the prejudices they already had, but most people's prejudices are weakened by learning, and Page might have been one of these people, had he learned much of anything in his lifetime. I presume also that one must start out from precepts to which the learner is able to assent at the beginning of his or her course of learning. Thus, if Page were still alive, one might lead him to tolerance by steps such as the following: So, Page, you like Aryans, do you? Well, did you know that 'Aryan' is a term that originally designated a class of people in India? Did you know, further, that some people who identify, as you do, with Nazi ideology, admire these Indians? Did you know, also, that the brown-skinned Sikhs coming from the Punjab region have some historical claim to being the descendants of these 'Aryans'? Given this much, wouldn't you perhaps be willing, Page, to reconsider your understanding of pale-skinned people as 'us' and of brown-skinned people as 'them'? Might it rather be the case, Page, that groups of people are all mixed up with one another in all sorts of complex ways, which it would take a lifetime of study to figure out? And wouldn't it be better to keep learning, and make sure you've got it all right, before you go and shoot up a temple or a mosque or synagogue? 

Page's action, in short, was depraved and misguided even by Nazi standards. Those are some pretty low standards to live up to, and most readers seem to think it's offensive even to mention them. But again, I presume that you need to latch onto the commitments a person already has in order to reason with them, and I prefer not to assume at the outset that a person, unless he is floridly psychotic, cannot be reasoned with. Most violent racists are not floridly psychotic; they use reason, but badly. 

Now, a corollary point was about the way ethnic difference is treated in the United States. Mainstream Americans, like rank-and-file Nazis, are realists about race. They actually think that there is the brown race and the black race and the white race, in the same way that there are giraffes and rocks and helium (well, actually, even these are problematic, but we can leave that aside for now). This is 18th-century pseudoscience, and it perpetuates the pathologies of which outbursts like Page's are symptoms. If Page were still alive, I would attempt to convince him that there is no such thing as the white race or the brown race; that Indian Sikhs and, say, Iraqi Muslims, have no more in common, in spite of their perceived phenotypic similarities, than either of those groups have with, say, Americans of European descent. If I could have got this far with Page, I am convinced it would have stopped him in his tracks. Of course he might have re-oriented his hatred, along Savitri Devi's line, and come out a half-learned anti-Semite and Islamophobe. But he might also have simply said: holy shit, I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did. I better go learn some more. 

The mistaken belief that there is a brown race (this is a recent invention by the way, and was not found in the classic racial typologies of, e.g., Linnaeus or Blumenbach) has facilitated greater crimes than Page's. It is what made it so easy for Americans to conflate Iraq and Afghanistan as simply different regions of 'Brownland', and so to go along with an invasion that cost huge numbers of lives. What these two countries have in common was usually spoken of in terms of religion; but does anyone really think that Bush and Cheney could have convinced the US public to go along with a massive invasion of, say, Mali or Indonesia in the wake of September 11? 

Finally, I add that I am well aware that 'Aryan' is an antiquated and invalid term as applied in ethnographic description of the Indian subcontinent. But still, and again, it's a matter of speaking to someone like Page in terms he would already understand, and the point is that if you think there is a group of people called 'Aryans' worthy of esteem, then a better case can be made that those people come from a community that speaks an Indo-Aryan language such as Punjabi, than from an Anglophone community in Wisconsin. 

The American reaction to my basic point --that there's something exceptionally misguided about defending Aryans by shooting up a bunch of, uh, Aryans (again, allowing for all the respects in which this is no longer an accepted ethnographic classification, it does still linger as a linguistic classification, and, again, if it applies anywhere then that would sooner be Punjab than Wisconsin)-- is that I am belaboring an obscure and irrelevant point. As the Daily Dish dismissively puts it, I'm "reading up on history" (while other people, presumably, care about the here-and-now, the eternal present of American political chatter). I maintain that this reaction reveals a wish to maintain a level of ignorance in the US that goes a long way toward explaining how that country produces monsters like Page.  

And now, the original post: 

This is a very minor point to make, almost offensively minor, in the wake of Wade M. Page's senseless massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin a few days ago, but still: strictly speaking there is no basis in traditional Nazi ideology for hatred of Sikhs. Quite the contrary. Of course this doesn't mean Nazis are nice, and Sikhs should not have to care one way or the other what Nazis think of them, but it does help to put into very clear relief how Page's singular evil was abetted by his total ignorance.

Consider the case, fairly typical for the 1930s, of the Nazi ideologue Savitri Devi (née Maximiani Portas). In her Warning to the Hindus (Calcutta, 1939), she bemoans the Islamification of the Indian subcontinent, and calls for the 'Aryan' Hindus to stand up and expel the Muslims (a policy that has been actively pursued in pogroms, in recent years, supported by the BJP, India's own fascist party). Of course there is a great deal of scholarly and sectarian discussion about the syncretistic nature of Sikhism since it branched from Hinduism in the 15th century. But Devi is clear that for her the Sikhs represent a bulwark against the Muslims and a safeguard of 'Hindudom'. Thus she writes of demographic trends in various Indian provinces: "But what about Punjab, the cradle of Aryan culture in India? And what about Bengal, the home of Indian culture in the present day, if we except its western districts? Punjab, at least, has got the Sikhs who, in case of trouble, will stand like one man and fight for Hindudom. Bengal has no equivalent of the Sikhs yet, and its condition is worse" (63-64).

Devi also thought Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu. She was a frivolous and ridiculous person, and her Indophilia was intellectually baseless. To the extent that it was rooted in crass anti-Semitism --she saw Hinduism as preserving the spiritual energy of European paganism, which was lost with the Christianization, for her the same thing as Judaization--, it was also morally reprehensible. And yet, it's hard not to regret that the murderer in Wisconsin had not studied up a bit on the intellectual tradition, such as it is, of the ideology he claimed to support. And it's no less regrettable that the American mass media tend in general to be no more sophisticated than the Hammerskins themselves in their understanding of who the natural enemies of Nazis are. Both camps seem to agree that it is a simple matter of skin color, and that there are no more fine-grained distinctions to be made at the level of perceived civilizational or historical affinities and oppositions. 

Page seems not even to have understood that Sikhs are not Muslims. Of course he was no scholar, or even a pseudo-scholar like Savitri Devi, but if the general level of discourse about cultural difference were somewhat higher in our society, he might have had an opportunity to hear somewhere that, at least on a certain understanding, Sikhs are more 'Aryan' than the Aryan Nation. And if this had happened, six good people (and one rotten one) might still be alive. 

What It Means to Turn Forty

Before beginning in earnest, a preliminary point about birthdays: I am convinced that one of the crucial moments in the emergence of the modern world was the transition from the celebration of saint days to the fêting of our own anniversaries. We scoff at cultures that believe in reincarnation, but the acknowledgment of saint days that dominated until the 18th century or so (and that still rivals birthdays in parts of Eastern Europe), in fact amounted substantially to just this: to bear the name 'George' for example is to participate in the transmissible essence/soul of St. George, to be one of the iterations of George. It doesn't make much of a difference, either, whether the metaphysics behind the onomastics is grounded in saint worship or a supposedly more simple ancestor worship. When an Inuit grandmother dies, and a girl is born and given the same name as the deceased, she will be referred to by the nickname 'little mother'. It is not that the same individual grandmother, with the same life history, the same original birthdate, the same Canadian social-insurance number, etc., has been reborn, but only that the name-soul has been transmitted. One can expect to see similar character traits appear in the girl as in the grandmother, but if they don't this is not proof of non-identity, since the identity in question was one rooted in shared name-essence, and not in the sort that, say, John Locke or Derek Parfit is ready to examine.

I still conflate my grandfather, John Peterson, with George Washington. I cannot look at a US quarter without thinking that I am looking at a likeness of my mother's father, who was born in 1912 and who died in 1986. No matter how much I learn about the historical-biographical difference between the two persons, there is a sense in which I still believe, deep down, that they are identical, or again, that the one is an iteration of the other. The reason is simple: from an early age, I was presented with the figure of two grey, morally upright, much-praised male authority figures, and I placed them in the same part of my imagination. There are examples of much looser groupings that can only be explained by a private synaesthesia: e.g., October, Kentucky, Thursday, and the color brown all go together for me. The grandfather-George Washington cluster is not like these. It makes natural sense, in the same way, I think, that the system of saint names, and of their endless iterations, makes sense. As for the John/George difference, I believed early on (and in a deep sense still believe) that these are variations on the same name, much as I was expected to learn early on, but could not, in re President Kennedy (whom I never respected as a morally upright authority figure, but always considered a proper salop), that 'Jack' is interchangeable with 'John'.

It seems to me that this de facto system of reincarnation was effectively stamped out when the primary responsibility for registration of vital statistics transferred from the church to the state. In this transfer a new metaphysics of the individual was finally instaured, as the individual person came to be rigidly anchored to his or her bio-historical data, of which the birthdate is surely one of the most important. 

Under the reign of this metaphysics, today is a very important day for me: it is my fortieth birthday. The Department of Vital Statistics of Washoe County, Nevada, can confirm that I was born on July 30, 1972. Saint Justin had little to do with it.

Why is this marker so important? It is an artifact not just of a particular metaphysics, but also of a base-ten arithmetic: years constitute natural units, this much is determined by the passage of the earth around the sun; decades do not. But still, we work the natural meanings of aging into the artificial framework of time-measurement that we have, and whether or not something significant is happening today precisely, it is anyhow clear that something significant is happening. 

Adults, however much power they wield in the world, are really only the ghosts of children. Tomas Tranströmer describes life as a comet: with childhood the blazing head, and senescence the dim straggling tail. What causes childhood to blaze like this is surely, in the end, a neurochemical state: we do what we can to keep kids off drugs, but what this misses is that they are always on drugs, drugs that are being produced by their brains themselves. These drugs induce a constant, ecstatic effervescence, and a strong feeling of immortality. They start to wear off at different times for different people. In my case, their potency dropped off around the age of 27, when I had what might be called my Ivan Il'ich moment, and it finally dawned on me where this process of getting older was ultimately headed. 

Ex-jocks, who had their glory days in high school, complain of the comet's fizzling in terms of their declining hormone levels, their receding hairlines, and so on. And they are right to complain, for there is something of value that is in the course of being lost. But even if the body did not perceptibly decline, the arc of the comet would be no less certain, and aging would require no less readjustment of the thinking mortal in the face of his or her impending death. The way I experience aging (besides the trivial stuff of vanity, like obsessing over my hairline) is as a sort of growing pressure to facilitate a proper shift, to speak with Aristotle, from potentiality to actuality. That is, I experience the age I am now as an age at which I must ensure that I already am what I insist or believe I am going to be.

This is not a very pleasant situation to be in. I miss being able to ride on youthful potentiality, on the promise that I'm going to do something great someday. Few things in this life terrify me more than the prospect of transforming into an older man who has not successfully made the shift, who tires people out with his ever-unrealized plans, who has been able to create no audience for his big ideas, and who writes letters to editors of local newspapers that are destined at the outset for rejection (or anyhow this is how I used to conceive the man I did not want to become; these days he can circumvent the editor by posting incoherent blog comments).

The receding hairline and the rest are perceptible markers of the absurdity of certain forms of behavior. They are not themselves the problem, but only reminders that there is a problem: namely, that at a certain point one would do much better to start preparing for death, and that the time for big dreams is past. What I am saying of course goes entirely against the modern liberal understanding of youth and aging, according to which it is 'never too late', and which would have us believe that the best way to spend one's final years is in checking off items from some 'bucket list': things like skydiving, jet-skiing, and other pursuits positively designed for the passing thrill of the unwise. But this is the same understanding that euphemizes death itself beyond recognition, that focuses obsessively on health and 'wellness' as if the full attainment of these made the slightest dent in the indifferent panzer of mortality. This understanding is utterly wrong: people get old and die, and the best spent life is the one that conforms itself to this arc. 

Anyhow, I'm fairly at peace. I have not totally failed in making the shift from potentiality to actuality. One thing that weighs fairly heavily is that I have not done that other thing described by Aristotle so beautifully: I have not approximated to eternity by cycling back upon myself in kind (if not in number). To put this differently, I have not reproduced, and over the past ten years this has grown from a trivial and contingent fact into one that defines my very being. I am one of those childless adults. I try to weigh the real importance of this fact against the bourgeois chatter about how important it is (I also don't own a set of golf clubs, and thoroughly don't give a shit about that), and the truth is I find this hard to do. I am not terribly comforted by the reassurance so often heard, that I am a man and so have plenty of time, since I do not feel that I have plenty of time to do anything, and a fortiori not something, like raising children, that unfolds over so many years. 

But otherwise, you know, I write books and stuff. I give headbirths. I have hardly been able to keep secret that what I imagine myself to be doing in this world is, principally, writing, and not writing in my capacity as an academic either. I am an academic almost by mistake; I wanted all along to know a lot, and to write about what I know, but I always imagined this would be more in the direction of literary non-fiction than of heavily footnoted scholarship. In this respect, I have not shifted to actuality in quite the way I had intended, and this is the source of a great deal of regret and frustration for me. Part of the weightiness of a milestone like today's arises from the need that it seems to impose of rethinking this fundamental aspiration, of accepting the actuality (that I am a competent scholar and an occasional blogger) rather than continuing to bank on the potentiality (that I am a 'writer'). (I add that every year since 2009 I have made more money than the previous year from literary non-fiction contributions, and I expect this trend to continue. Last year the figure was around $5000. It will be a long time, at this rate, before I can quit my day job.)

In his generally execrable novel, Le Plateforme, Michel Houellebecq tells the story of a 40-year-old man who stretches a Radiohead t-shirt over his gut while on vacation in Southeast Asia, quickly realizes it's hopeless to try to keep looking youthful, and plunges to the depths of gross male abjectness, of the sort for which European men in Southeast Asia are well known. The initial gesture, it seems to me in retrospect, tells the whole story: cut the crap about having favorite bands and stuff. You're forty now, and therefore disgusting. From here on out, I'm thinking today, simply managing to not be disgusting becomes a sort of artform. To accept the diminishing ratio of one's becoming to one's being, to accept that the fates have already largely wrapped up their work with you, and that accordingly some ways of being that once made natural sense are now closed off, or at least can only be accessed if one does not mind appearing ridiculous: this is what it means to turn forty. 

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It's Time to Stop Saying 'Caucasian'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On the Quebec Student Strike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Two Bobs: A Note on Cults of Personality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, hail Bob.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pussies vs. Dicks in Putin's Russia

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

 

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

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

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

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

Cunt to the fucking cop stooges.

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

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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."

A Note on the Occupations

There must be a word, and probably one beloved of Bolsheviks, for what is occurring right now: there is a sort of apodicticity, an undeniability to it all, one that makes someone like me a bit ashamed to have not seen it earlier. Just two or three years ago my mind still drifted off to more beautiful distractions every time someone started to get indignant about bailing out bankers, or drew that tiresome, overwrought contrast between 'Wall Street' and 'Main Street'. I've always, to be honest, had a difficult relationship to political engagement. A vivid memory still lingers of a lie-in, circa 1988, somewhere in the suburbs of Sacramento, around the pumps at a Shell station. "Free South Africa, Boycott Shell!", we were meant to chant, as the zit-faced teenaged pump attendant looked on confusedly, no doubt thinking to himself: What's South Africa? The historical moment was just wrong, or I didn't have the wherewithal to stick it out through the lean years of activism, through the early post-Cold War period of optimistic triumphalism and end-of-history, end-of-ideology ideology. I just didn't have the right temperament for it. It's my shortcoming, not history's. I admit it.

But the thing about this moment that I am trying to get at is that one doesn't need the right temperament in order to be carried along with the mass upheaval. To say, I'm sorry, this just isn't really my thing, is really nothing other than to say, I am an asshole, a wretch. And furthermore, fuck you. To say that this is just not one's thing would be morally the same as that puerile gesture of the Chicago stock traders who announced with a sign in the window of their skyscraper, We Are the 1%. To not acknowledge that the various Occupations are good and right is to side with those cretins. There's really no other choice. 

This is a problem for me, a simple practical problem, in that I've constructed my life largely on the proposition that things that don't matter can be made to matter, and that there's a beauty in elevating them in this way. I've insisted on the beauty and dignity of arcane research projects, of finding universes in a grain of sand, as the saying goes; of retreating. But now I honestly don't know how to carry on in the same vein. I've largely gone silent in this space, for instance. More importantly, I'm finding it harder to justify my rather dogmatic research-for-research's sake approach to the mission of higher education and the humanities. I am still put off by those who would transform the university into a sort of activists' community center, and I still believe that in an important sense it is to unwittingly cede to neoliberal pressures to demand to see the pay-off, in terms of contemporary societal relevance, of the projects scholars and students take on. But still, I confess that in the current climate I am not insensitive to the accusation that to care overmuch about, say, 16th-century theories of fermentation, and to see these as a haven from one's own epoch, amounts to a sort of moral failure.

But what is it about this moment, as opposed to, say, 15 years ago, that makes this sort of failure particularly inexcusable? It has something to do with that word I'm looking for but can't find. Of course there were always people saying, If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And they were always right, but not to such an extent, I don't think, that living a life of retreat and willed irrelevance had, in virtue of their dictum's truth, anything unseemly about it.

What has changed is that things really have got much worse, even in the course of my own lifetime. In fact, I was born right around the moment of the great global lurch towards the worse, when the relatively stable capitalist order of the post-War era mutated into its hyper-capitalist descendant, an order that could only survive through rapacious growth and constant innovation of new methods of exploitation. I don't need to recite the details as if they were unavailable elsewhere (thanks, Google), but the tragic feature of recent turbo-capitalism, for me, is that with the socialization of risk, and the corrolary privatization of profit, every last corner of our lives, of our experience and our consciousness, has been financialized, has been taken over by considerations of cost, of market viability. Everything that's dear in the profound sense has become dear in the pecuniary sense: palpably, explicitly dear. 

And this is where I think anyone who cherishes those things that are thought rightly to be without a price, or that might have a price, but a price that doesn't really capture why they're dear, ought to come out in support of the Occupations. Anyone who wishes that life could be based on the proposition that there are things of value that nonetheless lie outside of the scope of this nebulous thing called 'the Market' ought to be pushing back now, if there is to be any hope for future thriving (which in my case means getting back to the history of the concept of fermentation). This is, I mean, a juncture at which even those who would really rather stay non-political have no choice but to take a side, and at which it is simply self-evident which side that is. I think the word I'm looking for is 'crisis': this is a crisis moment.

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When I went to Wall Street a week ago I was, I must acknowledge, put off by the lumpen element, by the 9-11 truthers and all the other frivolous conspiracy theorists: seething with ressentiment, imagining back rooms filled with certifiably evil string-pullers. This is a fantasy whose historical connection to anti-Semitism remains, I think, too evident for any decent person to tolerate it. The world is messed up, yes, but for structural reasons that can be entirely understood, and not as a result of hidden machinations. I found myself thinking: alright, I understand why this come-one-come-all approach is desirable, and I like the metaphor of the rhizome as much as anyone. But couldn't there at least be a minimal party line that would nip this movement's incipient goofballism in the bud? Many will say that we are big enough, and upstanding enough, to let these characters linger without any vitiation of the true message about economic injustice, but our reaction was certainly different a year or so ago when one or two yokels showed up at a Tea Party rally carrying signs that, say, reminded us of Obama's racial identity.

I don't know what exactly should be done to keep the message focused and (to go back to the original connotation of this term) 'correct'. But I do think that now more than ever before it is urgent to rally people behind the idea that they have the resources to understand what's wrong with the world, and to do so without invoking dark complots. Conspiracy theories make me want to vomit. I hate them like I hate the real misdeeds to which they are a reaction, and I think moreover that they abet these misdeeds rather than challenging them. I think, finally, that what is most noble and hopeful about the current movement is the impressively non-conspiratorial and deeply responsible approach of the majority of people involved, who are simply telling it like it is: conveying self-evident truths that you must be either a goofball or an asshole to reject.

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