Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Notes on The Thin Red Line

When Terrence Malick returned to film-making in 1999 after a twenty-year hiatus, I certainly didn't notice. I was holed up in some empty East Village broom-closet theater watching Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's marathon Unser Hitler, or perhaps Aleksandr Sokurov's impossible Mother and Son. I thought 'American' and 'avant-garde' were mutually exclusive, and I was dogmatically attached to the latter. Nothing that got a mention at the Academy awards could possibly have been of any interest to me.

These days I pretty much just watch whatever I come across on Netflix that seems half-way palatable. I enjoyed the latest installment in the Harold and Kumar franchise, for example.

Anyhow when I saw Malick's The New World, and more recently his Tree of Life, my complaint was certainly not that they were too challenging or 'cerebral' (a favorite Netflix adjective). Had I not sat through Stalker from start to finish? Malick's work strikes me, in fact, as pure Hollywood. He's that classic American man with a vision, who says: I want to make a big picture, really big. We're going to pull out all the stops. Now one might place that sort of vision in a line with, say, Wagner (surely a cinéaste avant la lettre if anyone in his century was); but it's first and foremost the big studio men of the Hollywood golden age who breathed life into this stereotype.

But still, there is a coherent and compelling philosophy that comes out in at least the three films I've mentioned that perhaps justifies the Netflix descriptor. At its core this philosophy is a meditation on the interpermeability of the realms of the living and the dead. As Rilke puts it in the first of the Duino Elegies:

-- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead.

Perhaps a corollary of this embeddedness of life in death is that of the historical in the mythical (Guadalcanal moves from 1942 to the eternal present of myth); another is that of the social in the natural (with the Melanesians, along with the bats and parrots and lizards with which they cohabit, representing the original unity of the two).

The Thin Red Line is also a Christian film. It contrasts the morality of the Iliad --which is announced by Lt. Col. Tall's invocation of the eos rhododaktylos on the dawn of the first day of battle-- with the morality of the Gospels. The good news is brought by two characters rather than one. The first is Captain Staros, who speaks a line of his native Greek to tell the soldiers under him that they are 'like his sons'. It seems implicit that here the modern Greek is meant to contrast with the Homeric Greek as if it were New Testament Greek, that is, the good news of love and redemption, contrasted with the perpetual sublime battle that had been the existential condition of the ancients. Staros's true paternal love is contrasted with the numerous false invocations of a family-like relationship by careerist officers, including Tall.

The other Christian figure is Private Witt, who is coupled and contrasted with Sergeant Edward Welsh in the same way Staros is with Tall. Witt has no paternal love to offer, but only saintly, agapic love that does not distinguish between family and stranger. He gives succor to wounded Japanese and to frightened American recruits alike. His love is contrasted not with pre-Christian, Homeric morality, but with Welsh's world-weary cynicism: a world-view that is understood to run parallel with, rather than to precede, the redemptive love that is known and offered by Witt.

Two-thirds of the way through Staros is relieved of his duty by Tall, and in the end Witt is killed by the Japanese. The relationship between Witt and Welsh is the only complex and interesting one that emerges over the course of three hours (I certainly could have done without the flashbacks to pretty girls in Texas). When Witt dies, Welsh is left with his cynical belief confirmed that 'there is only one world', and it does not care about us. It is understood however that Welsh's deepened conviction is not the 'lesson' of the film, since Witt's own conviction was never something that could be disconfirmed by death.

The most striking scenes in the film, to me, were those following the capture of the Japanese bunker, in which the two shell-shocked parties were mingling and waiting, variously, to die, to be sent off to a POW camp, or to be relieved by other troops. The Japanese appear from the American perspective, which of course does not make subtle distinctions. But even so they are shown to be entirely unique as individuals: some are angry, some have gone insane, some are sobbing, some are praying. Some of the Americans, in turn, are abusive, some are flippant, some are professional, and one, Witt, is full of love.

I respond well to Malick's vision of the world. But I wish he could get it across without the voiceovers, without the Rockwellian kitsch, and without the glossiness and unctuousness of the big-name, big-budget spectacle.    

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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Units and Unities

I dreamt last night that weight was bread. More precisely, I dreamt that a kilogram was a loaf of dark, rye-like, round bread, about the diameter of a steering wheel. I do not mean that the loaf represented the kilogram, or stood in for it conceptually, in the way that, say, an anatomical foot originally stood in for a unit of length. I mean that such a loaf is just what a kilogram was.

I was in some sort of shop, and the shopkeeper was trying to weigh something out for me on an old-fashioned scale. He kept having to remove whatever it was we were trying to weigh, and replace it with the loaves of bread. Since the loaves just were weight, only they could give any reading at all on a scale.

Plot-wise the dream was a bit thin, but it raised an important conceptual problem. It is as if the creation of a unit of measurement initiates a process of reification that, in its final stage, has us thinking about the unit as a definite, property-rich entity. I recall reading somewhere that some embarrassingly high number of Americans believe that calories exist in the same way marbles or eggs do: like little invisible pellets scattered in the food that makes people fat. And in turn the holy grail of the diet industry --a calorie-free fat substitute-- is conceptualized as fat with the little pellets removed.

This neo-corpuscularianism can perhaps be seen more charitably if we recall that thing-hood is already contained within the concept of unit, a word which in many languages is identical to unity (e.g., Einheit, unité, единство). As Leibniz for one well understood, being and unity are practically the same. A Leibnizian corollary would also have it that whatever is not a thing is not really a unit(y) either, and further anything that is arbitrarily constituted cannot qualify as a thing. Nothing is more arbitrarily constituted than a so-called unit of measurement: there is absolutely no reason why a foot should not be three inches longer or shorter, and moreover nothing at all prevents us from conceptualizing fractions of these units. 

So in effect we are being asked to conceptualize an impossible thing --units without unity-- when we are asked to think about kilograms and feet and calories, and it may be that I, in my dream of the loaves, or the ignorant Americans polled on their dietetical knowledge, are in our mistake simply correcting something that was conceptually garbled to begin with.

Or consider Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy:

 

Because there are three tons of joy, and we naturally conceptualize units as unities, we can suppose that each of the three singers is herself one ton of joy, rather than the alternative interpretation, on which we have Marie Adams, the lead singer, and then two additional 1.5-ton units of joy. But if each of the three is a ton of joy, this means that Marie Adams, herself, is something distinct from the ton of joy that is, presumably, her body, since otherwise she would be named twice in the group's moniker. What is she, then? Her voice? Her soul? Why is she not identical with her body, while her sidekicks are with theirs?

The considerations that went into this act's naming probably could not offer up answers to these questions. But the conceptual issue is important, and in truth its importance never really struck me until I had that dream about the loaves. And this made me think, once again, about dreams, and the unfortunate habit we have in our culture of dismissing what they tell us: as if taking an interest in dreams were already to descend into a magical world-view on which oneiromancy has the power to reveal the future or, even worse, on which dreams just are reality. What this does not leave room for is the recognition that dreaming is simply a variety of thinking ('cogitating', Descartes would say), and one that makes use of different mental faculties (and different regions of the brain) than the ordinary, waking thinking we consider more reliable. In the case of this particular dream, a situation that might on first consideration have been dismissed as absurdist, as 'so weird', turns out to highlight a real problem about the way we carve up and conceptualize the world in our waking life.

What's really curious to me about a dream about units of weight is that dreaming is generally the kind of thinking where reckoning and quantifying are suspended. It is perhaps not surprising that Heraclitus, the philosopher who promoted the idea, by no means original in him, that all is flux, and that you cannot take the measure of the flow of a river, since its flowing entails that there is no single river there at all, is also the philosopher to whom the belief was attributed that the world is sustained in existence by the dreams of sleeping people. I suspect in fact that there is a historical connection between the rise of external-world, thing-based ontology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the appearance of standardized weights and measures (this will remain just a suspicion for now; I think ultimately what is needed is something like a historical anthropology of idealism, which would position, through cross-cultural study, beliefs about the ontology of the external world within the entire web of a culture's beliefs, which in turn would be studied as anchored in a totality of practices and interactions with the environment, much in the same way Jack Goody has traced the appearance of logic to developments in the practices and technologies of writing. Anyhow, I'm working on it.).

But then if dreams are where flux reigns, why a dream where there are not only discrete units of measurement, but in which these units are reified as things? I'm not quite sure, but I note that it was not a pleasant dream: the mood of it was in fact not so far from a nightmare. I did not at all like seeing kilograms transformed into things, and crude lumps of dough at that.

 --

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Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

The First Elegy

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the order
of angels? and supposing one of them took
a sudden interest in me: I should wither from his
more powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing

but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed,
and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains

to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren call
of dark convulsion. O whom then are

we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, 

and the clever beasts note this well, 

that we are not so solidly at home
in the world as construed. There remains to us,

perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again
daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and

the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habit
t
hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go.
O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,
wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired,

gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for

the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?
Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.
Do you still not know it? Throw from your arms
into space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps
the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a star
expected you to sprint. A wave
raised itself up in the past, or,
so that you should drop by the open window,
a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.
But did you manage it? Were you not always
scattered in expectation, as a beloved heralded
it all to you? (Where will you hide her,
so that these great strange thoughts of yours
should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)
If you must sing of lovers, still is their
famed feeling by far not immortal enough.
You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you
found so much more loving than those who were appeased.
Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;
think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall
was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.
But exhausted nature takes the lovers back
into her, as if the strength to carry this off
could not come twice. Have you thought enough
then of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed up
by her beloved, on the aggravated example
of these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?
Should these oldest pains not at last become
more fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovingly
free ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,
as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launching
to be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else only
saints have heard: that they raised the great
call from the ground; but they knelt
again, impossible, and paid it no mind.
Thus did they listen. Not that you would bear
the voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,
the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence.
It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.
Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly
address you in the churches of Rome and Naples?
Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,
as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they want of me? Gently shall I
shrug off the semblance of injustice that the pure
motion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little.

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,
not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to give
to roses, and to other things that promise themselves,
the significance of a human future;
not to be what one was in infinitely
anxious hands, and to leave behind
even one's own name like a broken toy.
Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar,
to see everything fluttering that hung
so loosely in space. And being dead is laborious
and full of catching up, so that one gradually senses
a bit of eternity. -- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead.
The eternal current always pulls all the ages
along with it through both domains,
and drowns them out in both.

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed,
one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meekly
grows away from the mother's breast. But we who need
such large secrets, for whom blissful progress
so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them?
The story is in vain, that once in the lament for
Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in;
that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youth
suddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that
vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

Cette autre langue qui fait partie de moi

J'ai quelques remarques encore à ajouter à ce que j'ai écrit hier dans une sorte de extase d'affection inattendue pour une langue qui m'est dans un certain sens très proche, presque aussi proche que ma langue maternelle, et sans doute beaucoup plus proche que n'importe quelle autre langue étrangère; mais qui reste à la fois extrêmement étrange, et que je réserve d'habitude pour des buts assez circonscrits.

Je me demande presque chaque jour: qu'est-ce que c'est que cette langue française qui traîne dans ma tête? Qu'est-ce qu'elle fait là? Comment est-ce que ça m'est arrivé de la parler? Et surtout comment est-ce qu'elle peut m'être tellement intime, sans que je puisse la parler comme il faut?

Je dois avouer avant d'aller plus loin que pour moi le fait de parler français et le fait de résider au Québec sont deux choses très différentes. Je ne pense pas que mon français serait beaucoup plus pauvre qu'elle n'est en réalité si j'habitais à New York ou à Berlin. Et même si je ne dois pas le dire,  je soupçonne qu'elle serait plus qu'un peu plus riche si j'habitais à Paris.

Je suis à Montréal depuis plus de huit ans, et j'ai bien compris que mon opinion de la réalité sociolinguistique sur le terrain n'est pas exactement la bienvenue dans le discours publique. Bon, c'est pour ça que je blogue: je n'ai pas besoin ici d'être invité à dire ce que j'ai à dire. Donc voilà: il me semble que, en dépit de toute la rhétorique sur l'importance de franciser les immigrants, y compris les immigrants des pays anglophones, personne au Québec ne veut vraiment m'entendre parler français.

Je ne peux même pas dire combien de fois il m'est arrivé de devoir insister dans les magasins que j'ai le droit inalienable, grâce à la fameuse Charte de la langue française, d'être servi en français. C'est évidemment absurde. Ce n'est pas pour moi, un immigrant américain, qu'on a écrit la Loi 101, mais ça m'offense tout de même quand on refuse, au moment où l'on constate que je ne suis pas d'ici, de parler français avec moi, moi qui a fait un vrai effort, qui a fait ce qu'on m'a dit qu'il fallait faire, pour appartenir à cette société.

J'ai lu récemment un article dans l'un des journaux gratuits 'alternatifs' de Montréal, Le Miroir ou quelque chose de ce genre, dans lequel l'auteur se moquait des dames de Westmount qui travaillent comme bénévoles au Musée des Beaux Arts, et qui font semblant au travail de ne pas comprendre le français, tout en le parlant sans problème quand elles font leurs vacances à Paris. Mais peut être, je me disais, peut être ce n'est pas seulement ces bourgeoises, toujours faciles à ridiculiser, qui sont à blâmer pour ce monolinguisme contextuel. Peut être que c'est lié aussi avec des faits sociolinguistiques dont elles ne sont pas responsables et qui les précèdent. Moi aussi je trouve que c'est beaucoup plus facile, et beaucoup plus agréable, de parler français à Paris qu'à Montréal, et je refuse d'entendre que c'est entièrement de ma faute qu'une vie francophone montréalaise me reste hors d'atteinte.

Donc ce n'est pas le Québec qui m'a francisé. Mais ce n'est pas non plus Mme. Jones, l'institutrice à Mira Loma High School en Californie qui a été censée faire l'impossible: enseigner une langue étrangère à des adolescents américains. En dépit de cette tâche sisyphéenne elle était vraiment sympathique. J'imagine qu'elle était dans la trentaine, et je ne sais pas comment je le savais, mais je savais quand même qu'elle était célibataire. J'avais un peu pitié d'elle, mais ça ne m'empêchais pas de m'en ficher complètement de ce qu'elle avait à dire dans sa capacité de pédagogue. C'est comme ça en fait que j'ai passé tout mon temps à la high school: j'étais vaguement conscient du fait qu'il y avait un adulte qui parlait à l'autre côté de la salle de classe, mais sur quoi, pour quoi, dans quelle langue, avec quelles attentes: tout ça me restait tout à fait mystérieux. Ce n'est pas que je ne voulais pas apprendre, c'est juste que je ne voulais pas qu'on m'enseigne: une différence fondamentale dont je parlerai peut-être une autre fois.

Eventuellement j'ai été guéri de cette maladie infantile, et je suis vite devenu un étudiant exemplaire quand j'étais au premier cycle à l'université. Mais là c'était surtout les langues slaves qui me fascinaient, et ce n'était qu'au niveau doctoral, où je devais lire des textes philosophiques du 17e siècle, que je me suis donné la peine d'apprendre à lire le français. J'ai suivi un cours de 'français pour la recherche doctorale'. L'enseignant était un doctorant américain comme nous. Il s'amusait en se moquant de nous chaque fois que nous faisions des fautes. Il aimait prendre comme exemple des mots qui sont presque identiques dans les deux langues. 'Le chocolat' veut dire 'chocolate', il disait en ironisant. Quelle langue dificile. Ça va de soi que je n'ai pas appris grand-chose de lui, mais au moins à la fin de mes études doctorales j'étais capable de lire le français de Leibniz (qui écrit sa troisième langue, après l'allemand et le latin, dans un style assez basique, mais pour cette même raison assez lucide). 

Donc au moment où je me suis installé au Québec en 2003 le français restait pour moi surtout une langue pour la recherche, peu différent à cet égard du latin. Or, ce ne sera que deux ans après que je deviens l'époux d'une femme qui vient d'un pays quelque part en Europe qui n'est pas francophone, mais qui est fameux pour sa francophilie aussi bien que pour son polyglotisme. En toute franchise, 90% de ce que je suis capable de dire correctement, c'est grâce à elle, alors que les fautes que je continue à faire, c'est à cause du fait que je n'ai pas suivi son exemple irréprochable avec assez d'attention.

Je mentionne ce détail de ma vie intime, une vie que je préfère normalement garder à l'abri des regards des inconnus, seulement parce que c'est tout à fait pertinent à l'explication de mon expérience de la langue française. Le français est la langue officielle de la province où j'habite, mais elle est aussi la langue que je parlais dans ma vie domestique pendant six ans. Je la parlais très imparfaitement, mais c'était tout de même pris pour acquis que le français était en quelque sorte la langue officielle à la maison. Dans ce sens mon expérience domestique contrastait beaucoup avec la vie quotidienne dans le métro, dans les magasins, etc., où, comme je l'ai déjà décrit, je devais me battre sans cesse juste pour pouvoir parler la même langue que je parlais à la maison par défaut.

Tout ça pour dire que maintenant, quand je suis seul dans ma maison, quand je me promène seul en ville, je ne peux pas ne pas me demander: qu'est-ce que cette langue veut de moi? Pourquoi est-ce qu'elle pèse comme ça sur mon esprit? Et surtout, surtout, qu'est-ce que je dois faire avec elle maintenant?

Je commence à me dire récemment que peut être je dois, pour ainsi dire, écrire avec elle. L'écriture, c'est ce qui reste.

Comme vous le voyez bien, il y a plein de progrès à faire. Je suis sûr qu'un francophone qui tient sa langue à coeur trouverait mon petit propos absolument ridicule. Mais ce n'est pas pour lui que je le propose. C'est pour moi: pour me décharger de cette langue qui s'est accumulé dans mes vaisseaux comme un fluide.

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Pour ne plus faire semblant

Depuis trop longtemps je me dis que je dois commencer à bloguer en français. Ça devrait aller sans dire que je suis encore loin d'être un Samuel Beckett ou même une Nancy Huston. J'ai un français qui sert tout d'abord à me faire comprendre, parfois à l'écrit, mais le plus souvent à l'orale. Je n'ai jamais eu même la moindre pensée que le français pourrait devenir un jour ma langue d'expression préferée. Mais de plus en plus je constate qu'il n'y aura nul progrès, que je vais rester bloqué à ce niveau-ci pour le reste de ma vie, si je ne commence pas à faire des exercices de composition.

Bien sûr je pourrais commencer par écrire dans des cahiers privés, comme l'on aurait fait jadis. Mais pour l'une raison ou l'autre je trouve presque impossible d'écrire dans n'importe quelle langue des textes qui ne sont pas destinés à être partagés avec un grand public. Je ne sais pas. Peut être que je suis tout simplement trop vaniteux, trop asoiffé d'attention, mais il me semble triste et futile que de composer des lignes sans pouvoir les partager.

C'est un peu ça le principe même de ce blogue: j'écris pour écrire, mais je ne suis point capable d'écrire si je n'ai pas de lecteurs (que ce ne soit que des lecteurs potentiels, ça me suffirait). Ce qui est plus, ce blogue me sert depuis son lancement comme une sorte de repositoire d'idées sous-développées, d'arguments souvent mal conçus, et de souvenirs à moitié inventés. Tout ça est pleinement en evidence dans la série 'Etymology from Memory', par exemple, où l'idée est précisément de chercher à expliquer les origines de tel ou tel mot sans avoir recours à des dictionnaires qui pourraient très facilement confirmer ou, le cas échéant, réfuter mon hypothèse. C'est à  dire que faire des fautes sur ce blogue, c'est exactement ça la règle du jeu.

Je pense souvent à Edouard Limonov, l'écrivain (et fasciste, mais là c'est une autre histoire) russe, qui, ayant eu l'invitation à contribuer à un journal underground anglophone basé à Moscou, a accepté, mais seulement sous la condition qu'on lui promette de ne jamais corriger ses fautes, et qu'on le laisse s'exprimer dans son drôle d'anglais slavicisant. Moi, je n'ai pas d'éditeur ici, mais je partage la même vision que lui. Or, je vous promets, moi, de ne jamais regarder des dictionnaires, ni de googler des phrases dont j'ai des doutes, avant de publier ce que j'ai à dire.

J'aimerais bien pouvoir m'exprimer un jour dans un vrai français, un français soigné et élégant, un français dont je suis le maître. Pour le moment c'est clairement l'inverse: c'est la langue qui est la maîtresse, alors que moi, je ne peux qu'espérer de l'impressioner avec mes acrobaties maladroites, comme un chien en dressage. Ce qui me fait souffrir le plus, c'est l'incapacité d'être drôle en français, ou au moins l'incapacité de profiter des ambiguités dans la langue pour la subvertir, pour la faire faire autre chose que ce qu'elle est censée faire normalement. Pour moi c'est ça que parler une langue couramment veut dire. Tout le reste n'est que l'affaire des perroquets. 

On me dit souvent, depuis que j'ai appris le russe quand j'étais un adolescent, que j'ai 'un don pour les langues', alors que ce n'est pas du tout vrai. (Ici il faut ajouter que j'ai le grand avantage d'être américain, et donc d'une espèce qui est présumée être monolingue presque par définition.) En fait j'ai un intérêt pour les langues, ce qui n'est pas du tout la même chose. Quand on me demande combien de langues je 'connais', je ne sais vraiment pas quoi repondre. Je suis tenté de repondre que j'ai 'fait la connaissance' de plusieurs, mais je ne suis jamais devenu proche qu'avec 2 ou 3 d'entre elles. Je pense ici à Leszek Kolakowski, qui a repondu à la question d'un journaliste concernant le nombre de langues qu'il parle: Je fais semblant de parler plusieurs, mais je ne parle qu'une seule: le polonais.  C'est un peu ça dans mon cas aussi, mais ce que je me dis récemment c'est que peut être --et ça reste à voir-- je pourrai un jour ne pas seulement faire semblant de parler français, mais le parler pour de vrai.

Comme vous l'avez déjà remarqué, j'imagine, je n'ai écrit que quelques centaines de mots jusqu'à présent, et tout de même je commence déjà à m'appuyer sur les mêmes formules. L'oeuvre de Beckett contient beaucoup plus de mots que ça, et de ce que j'ai pu voir chez lui on ne trouve jamais ce genre de répétition, d'épuisement. Bon, ça viendra. Ou au moins avec le temps je m'approcherai à ça comme à un idéal. J'espère aussi que ce premier post (peut-on dire ça dans le nouveau jargon des blogueurs?) en français sera le seul à avoir ce caractère réfléxif, où j'écris en français et en même temps j'écris sur le fait, toujours étonnant pour moi, que j'écris en français. La prochaine fois il s'agira de Proust, peut être, auquel je suis enfin retourné après avoir fini trois volumes d'À la recherche du temps perdu il y a plus de dix ans. Ou peut être il s'agira de quelque chose qui n'a strictement rien à voir avec la langue française, comme par exemple l'idiotie da la campagne éléctorale américaine, ou l'évolution convergente des cerveaux des éléphants et des baleines. On verra. L'important est que j'écrive quelque chose...

This Year I Betrayed My Country...

From the n+1 2011 Year-in-Review. For other contributors' perspectives on that annus horribilis mirabilisque, please go here. 

This year I betrayed my country. Or at least that’s how it felt, even if, from what I’ve been able to learn, the US tolerates dual citizenship by means of something like a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There I was, after eight years of paperwork, of interrogations by the Délégation du Québec about my knowledge of that province’s charming folkways, of counting every day outside of Canada lest I go beyond my limit and find my permanent resident status revoked: there I was, I say, in July, in Montreal, before an immigration judge, some Mme. Robichaud or Tremblay, swearing, along with seventy-two other soon-to-be-Canadians from thirty-eight different countries, my allegiance to Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (a different person, by the way, than Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, even if the two persons inhabit the same physical body). This part was not so hard, as she looks like a kind old lady. But then came the line about “her successors,” and I thought about what it would mean to actually be loyal to that lad William, say, whose birth I remember as if it were yesterday, and I confess I began to mumble my lines. We did the recitation in English and French, and the French part was a good deal easier for me. Hell, I’ll swear anything in a language that resides only in my head and not in my heart. Behind me, by contrast, a man from somewhere in Francophone Africa bellowed out the French part directly from his heart. There were tears in his eyes and his voice quivered. I thought of the Ontario politician Garth Turner, who denounced the “Canadians of convenience,” that is, those who swoop through just long enough to get the passport before moving on. The African behind me was no Canadian of convenience, whereas I, I understood, might very well turn out to be one. In the end my principle motivation to become Canadian was that I might thereby be free to leave the place without having to count the days. I am now at liberty to abscond until 2040, if I feel like it, just in time for a bit of free palliative medicine in my final days. The man behind me believed in the idea of Canada, whereas I, whatever the current reality, cannot deny that it is the United States I believe in, that I carry in my heart, if I may be permitted to put it sentimentally, and that my association with the monarchy to the north will always remain rather more circumstantial. The US is a bloated and aggressive empire populated by snake-charming enemies of Enlightenment, Canada is a decent and sober social democracy, et cetera. But heavens, one is who one is, and in my shiny new Canadian passport, just after Lieu de naissance it says “Reno, USA”: surely the most significant bit of information in that document. It is a question of habitus, which is something so deep that the matter is already more or less settled even before we are begat. Mine in particular took shape in the late 18th century, and hates kings and queens, especially the ones no one believes in anyway. I am proud of my new status: I got 100 percent on the citizenship exam (what does A mari usque ad mare mean? Which province is the leading producer of wood pulp?), and I show off my passport like a fetish. But the taint of the betrayer is not going to go away. 

Things and Stuff

I will certainly not be the first to find it interesting that some languages do not allow for a distinction between things and stuff. In Latin for example there is only res, a word that abounds with ambiguities, though some more easily soluble than others: almost every semester I get a paper or two purporting to analyze Descartes' theory of (sic!) race extensa and how it differs from race cogitans.

There is some ground for supposing that if Descartes had written in English or, say, German, he would have rendered the res that is extended as 'extended stuff', and the res that thinks as '(a) thinking thing'. That is, a res cogitans is understood to be a countable, individuable entity, while res extensa is an arbitrarily delimitable quantum of extension.

Now in the Germanic languages 'thing' and 'stuff' are partially overlapping but still quite distinct concepts. Here I am working from memory, for that is my way when I blog, but I believe I am correct in saying that 'thing' (German Ding, Icelandic þing, etc.) initially did much the same work as res in the phrase res publica: it picked out a composite, yet not arbitrarily delimited, political entity. In fact, the Icelandic alþingi is composed in exactly the same way as res publica: it is the thing that is constituted by all (or at least all who matter; on this point the Icelanders were rather more democratic than the Romans). What is important here is that a 'thing', whether in the political sense or in some more basic ontological sense, is a unit: a discrete, countable whole.

'Stuff' by contrast, if I am not mistaken, was originally (and still is in the German Stoff) a term that designated a quantity, in the primary instance a quantity of fabric. One buys some stuff, in order to transform it into a shirt or jacket, and this transformation can be understood as a sort of imposition of form on undifferentiated matter.

The analogy of stuff to matter is particularly interesting when we consider that for Aristotle there can be no un-in-formed matter waiting to be given form. Matter is thus only an abstraction, a limit-case that we can posit with our minds but that we cannot find anywhere in the world.

Of course we can find fabric, and this means that the analogy between Stoff and matter is only an analogy. Why the analogy works, though, may have something to do with the similarity, noted by P. F. Strawson and others, between mass terms and abstract terms. B. K. Matilal observes, for example, that "abstract terms are also 'much-terms', that is, the grammar of abstract terms, such as prettiness and courage, is similar to the grammar of mass terms" (Matilal, The Character of Logic in India, 25).

The correctness of this observation is borne out by a consideration of the uses of the partitive genitive in languages that rely on it: thus in French one can say Il a du courage, and one can ask Est-ce qu'il y a du lait?, as if courage and milk were both just two great masses of stuff from which one might draw one's share. Matilal explains, in fact, that in the Indian Nyāya school of logic a concept such as 'water' is treated exactly the same as the concept 'ability to swim'. Thus the proposition 'The water in this glass is cold', is in Nyāya transformationally equivalent to:

Water, which is characterized by being locatable, where such locatability is conditioned by a location-hood resident in the glass, is coldness-possessing.

The proposition 'John's ability to swim is poor', in turn, may be understood as follows:

The ability to swim is characterized by being locatable, where such locatability is conditioned by a location-hood resident in John, has the quality of being poor.

So courage, water, milk, fabric, ability: all of these are so much stuff, of which one can take what one needs or desires. All of these differ, in turn, from the countable beings that take of them. Whether this distinction is one that captures a real difference in the world or not is another question altogether, but it certainly feels helpful to have a lexical choice between 'stuff' and 'thing'.

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Let's Merry? A Note on the Uses of Adjectives

Some Indo-European languages rely heavily on neuter singular adjectives to express abstraction, or something approaching what is conveyed by the English suffixes -ness or -hood. Significant work is done by this form of inflection in ancient Greek, where, as many have noted, the possibility of speaking of to kalon ('the beautiful'), for example, strongly suggests that beyond all the various beautiful things, there is a beautiful itself. The neuter singular adjective facilitates abstraction, it turns a word for a property of things into the concept of things themselves, and thus into the ultimate substantivized form, somehow leaping right over the intermediate quasi-substantial thing to which the property might attach.

This possibility is there in German as well (one of the features of German that caused Heidegger to believe it had some particular affinity with Greek), making it a challenge to capture all the subtlety of this otherwise very familiar language in English. Thus das Spannende has to be rendered as 'the exciting thing', and not 'the Exciting'; das Wichtige as 'the important thing' and not 'the Important', and so on.

Yet a new possibility has appeared in the American English of the most recent years, and while I would like to be able to say that this possibility is opening up to us the richness of the Helleno-Germanic thought-worlds, in fact I fear that it is a symptom of what appears to me, in my more pessimistic moments, to be the ongoing impoverishment of our expressive power. When I am visiting the more bourgeois wing of my family, and thus the wing most susceptible to channeling forms of speech they hear in trendy TV ads and other fragments of mass culture that subtly serve to instruct that class as to how to be, I have begun to notice  a troubling new habit. One person will say something like (and I have picked what is likely the most annoying adjective in the English language, just to drive the point home): 'Be careful, these sticky buns are really sticky', to which the other will reply: 'Oh good. I like sticky'.

Now this looks on the face of it like a substantivization of just the sort we see in German or Greek. But does the speaker mean to say that she likes, as it were, 'the Sticky'? I doubt it, and if I might speculate as to the metaphysics behind this bit of peculiar grammar, I would say that whoever says this is likely only capable of conceptualizing sundry sticky things, and has no idea of the Sticky itself beyond these. This is convergent grammatical evolution, then; it looks the same as the abstraction-facilitating device of other Indo-European languages, but, to the extent that it is really just a contraction for the expression of a desire to get one's hands on this or that bun, it is underlain by an entirely different ontology.

And it gets worse still. I have just been to a Starbucks in New Jersey, where I saw a new advertising slogan, something for the 'holiday season' (why, I ask, is this season always at the avant garde of musical, linguistic, and aesthetic awfulness?), that attempts to make an adjective into a fucking verb. Let's merry, it actually says. As in, let us be merry. Plainly, we are not getting any closer to the essence of merriment by letting the real verb drop out. We are just being compelled to thoughtlessly buy shit. The adjective is now degraded in the process of transformation from one part of speech to the other, whereas in Greek and German it had been lifted up and made to do even more conceptual work than the part of speech for which it stood in.

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For Václav Havel and Kim Jong Il

 

Jan Švankmajer, The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990)

Christopher Hitchens

I loved and revered Christopher Hitchens. And don't start in with that stuff about Iraq either: I loved him in large part because of his various idiocies, not in spite of them.

Beyond the politics there is also, perhaps, this reason for not loving him: he was aggressively middle-brow. He was wrapped up in the daily news cycle, but was careful to pepper his copy with just enough discussion of timeless literature, to appear on television with just the right sort of timeless Britishness, to drop in just the right number of foreignisms to appear classically learned (mot juste, nil nisi bonum, etc.), to come across as something more than a journalist.

But who am I kidding? That's exactly my level! Or at least it is a good deal of the time. I've often thought of Christopher Hitchens and Perry Anderson as representing the only two models of engaging with the world that are at all attractive to me: the one hot and pugnacious and in the thick of it, the other icy and above-it-all and somehow omniscient; the one more full of shit than the other but for that reason also more human; each occupying his own clearly marked-out spot on the social brow.  I'm sure Anderson thinks Hitchens was a boob, and will say nothing good, or nothing at all, about him now. Both are staunch enemies of the nil nisi bonum rule for speaking of the dead.

For several years the rhythm of my week was structured by Hitchens's Monday column in Slate. I was patient with the more aggressively neo-con pieces (though even here I think I've understood, if not approved, the internal logic of the path from Trotsky to Wolfowitz). His stuff on religion never interested me that much, other than for the insult comedy it afforded him. He seemed to me, here, simply blind to the value of the imaginative, anthropological perspective on belief, but this is by no means his shortcoming alone. I treasured the excoriations of Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and other professional fools, and often found myself reading them two or three times in the hope of reliving the pleasure of the first.

Things changed when he got sick. As if afraid of contagion, I stopped reading him. I wrote him off as already dead. I realize now this was a way of managing, however immaturely, the anticipated emotional blow of his death, the loss of that week-structuring dose of whatever it was he had to say. Occasionally I would stumble inadvertently on the articles chronicling his protracted demise, which he was now writing for Vanity Fair. I read these in pained awe. If he was only a journalist, he nonetheless managed to make journalism do what Socrates and Montaigne claimed philosophy, at its most excellent, does: he made it a preparation for death.

This morning I received a group e-mail from my friend Abbas Raza, whose website, 3 Quarks Daily, allows me regularly to dump many of my extra words. 3QD has often seemed to me a sort of electronic shrine to Christopher Hitchens, or to the ideal he represents. The site comes strongly endorsed by Richard Dawkins and the like, yet it has long been clear, I think, that a blurb from Hitchens would have been the real holy grail.

The subject of the e-mail was: 'Hitch, 3qd'. I imagined for a second that Abbas had succeeded in roping the dying man into some project or other: judging some contest, being at the center of some multi-author forum, or something. I am a fan of almost no one but for that second I felt something a bit like I imagine baseball fans do when they catch the home-run balls hit by their idols, or whatever: I thought I was going to come into some sort of contact with the only person to whom, in my adult life, I have written adulatory messages, 'fan letters', some might call them (two, no reply).

Abbas was of course asking for 3QD contributors to memorialize Hitchens, not to interact with him. I don't know, though. What is there to say? Would 'death not be not proud' serve as a mot juste here, as it did for him in his own tribute to Susan Sontag? I could also go on and on rehashing favorite bits from the oeuvre, but one in particular stands out right now. It was about some Virginia Tech administrator whom Hitchens had deemed dim, and who had declared some days after the 2007 massacre on that campus something like: It's OK to be happy again; it's a beautiful day and the birds are singing. The birds were singing during the shooting, too, Hitchens responded. So, anyway, the birds are singing.

David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years

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

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

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

Our Animals, Ourselves

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

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

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

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

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

The Turkey Pardon as Dark Parody

From the Stone series of the online edition of the New York Times, November 20, 2011.

In just a few days, we will once again endure the annual spectacle of the president of the United States  pardoning a turkey that would otherwise have been fated for the Thanksgiving table. This event is typically covered in the media as a light-hearted bit of fluff — and fluff is what it might well be, if there were not actual humans on death row awaiting similar intervention. In the current American context, however, the turkey pardon is a distasteful parody of the strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners. There is in it an implicit acknowledgment that the killing of these prisoners is a practice that bears real, non-jocular comparison to the ritual slaughter of birds for feasts.

I am not saying that this slaughter of birds for food is wrong ― not here anyway ― but only that the parallel the presidential ritual invites us to notice is revealing...

To continue reading, please go here.

I Too Am a Debt-Peon

In 1994 I was admitted to a few Ph.D. programs, but only two of them were not from my back-up list. One of these was UCLA, where I was admitted with full-funding for the doctoral program in Slavic linguistics, and the other was Columbia, where I was admitted to the doctoral program in philosophy, without funding. I chose Columbia, because at the time the area-studies approach to learning seemed to me too narrow, and I wrongly thought that philosophy represented an opposite tendency (I now understand, also, that being admitted to grad school without funding effectively means that one is not really seen as a promising student at all, but primarily as a source of revenue).

In spite of all the good reasons to go to LA, I simply didn't want to write a dissertation on the semantics of the verbal prefix vz- in Old Ruthenian or something like that. Now I think that would have been kind of cool. Also, I hated California, and thought New York represented the opposite of that. Here my convictions haven't really changed.

So anyhow I ended up taking about $45,000 in federal loans for my first year of graduate school, 1994-95. Fortunately, for all subsequent years, from 1995 to 2000, I had funding from some source or other, and so my debt is not nearly as large as it could have been. I began making monthly payments in 2001, and at present I still owe around $30,000, to both the US Department of Education's Direct Loans program, as well as to 'Sallie Mae', whatever the hell that stands for.

This debt puts me in a peculiar position: I am at once relatively high in the academic hierarchy (well, in fact, in this era of pauperized adjuncting as the new norm in university teaching, I am very high in the hierarchy), and at the same time I continue to struggle with this monthly payment. I know I will get little sympathy from all the adjunct part-timers out there, and I am not looking for any. I am simply noting that even when one has it good, there may well be compromises one had to make over the years to get there, compromises that make the good less than great.

Over the years there have been many occasions when I found it difficult to pay. There have been some occasions when I did not pay. I will not list here all the other financial commitments with which this one has been in competition; it is enough to say that at times all commitments could not be met together. In the United States, I have a likely permanently blemished credit record, which makes me very grateful for the new start Canada has provided for me. One of the implications of this commitment is that, in whatever country I happen to be, I cannot not work. Most likely until I am 55 or 60 I will have to continue to produce a minimum amount of money to give to the US government every month. 

Over the years, I have trained myself to not give into the temptation to verbally abuse employees of the USDE over the telephone. They are very clearly not well paid, and they are certainly not paid to understand the entity for which they work. They are also not expected to be aware of the existence of Canada, and I have struggled, literally for what now amounts to hours and hours, to communicate to them that I have a six-digit alphanumeric postal code, and not a five-digit numeric zip code. The field for the zip code on their computers only permits them to enter five characters, and they consistently short-circuit (the human beings I mean, not the computers) when I insist upon a sixth. I tell them I live in 'Montreal, Quebec', and they ask, 'What state is that in?'

This is just a small taste of the maddening nature of my interaction with them, all compounded, of course, by the fact that I am talking to them in the first place in order to arrange to give them my money.

My most recent conversation with the USDE occurred yesterday (you should have heard how they had to struggle with my new postal address, which is on a street called the 'chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine'). I had called to arrange a 'compromise pay-off', in which I offer them a lump sum, and we consider the debt acquitted. I had $15,000 to give them, which, if I had gone to UCLA, I could now be using for a modest down payment on a condo. The woman on the phone said told me the USDE abolished the 'compromise pay-off' program last year. I asked her why. She said: "They didn't tell us why. The USDE just told us they weren't offering that program anymore." "But you are the USDE," I said. "Shouldn't you know why?" "I only work for them. They do what they want."

I'm gonna keep my $15,000, then, I said, and perhaps my debt will be acquitted when the bubble bursts instead. She said she didn't know anything about that.

I don't know if it will burst or not, or whether there will be a massive revolt of debt-peons in the coming years. One thing that has shifted in me over the course of the past few months, though --clearly as a result of the Occupy movement and some of the arguments coming out of it (I wish I could say I'm lucid enough to grasp these arguments on my own, but the truth is that it required a major historical shift for me to get a clue)--, one thing that has shifted is that I regard this whole racket as being a good deal less legitimate than I used to. They're going to squeeze as much as they can out of me, and I'm going to resist as much as I can.

They forked over some money 17 years ago, and there might be some grounds for claiming that I am morally obligated to give it back. But I am finally starting to appreciate the force of the 'Education Is a Right' slogan, a slogan that used to seem questionable to me (to the extent that rights-talk in general seemed questionable); it now seems to me that I was simply availing myself of that right in 1994, and the expectation that I should spend the bulk of my life paying for this seems at least disproportionate. Moreover, it has come to seem to me that usurious interest on a loan, while advantageous to the creditor, frees the debtor up of any need to think about the debt in moral terms. They're doing something sleazy, trying to squeeze out what they can; I'll go ahead and be wily in response, and try to hold onto what I can.

But man, I hate having to work. I want to work because I want to work.

I once knew a woman from Warsaw, who came to visit me when I had an apartment in Pigalle for a summer. We went down to the Boulevard de Clichy to change money, and she commented on how fitting it was that the bureaux de change were squeezed between the many peep-shows and sex-toy shops. This is what money is really all about, she said.

She got some of it, and we went back to the apartment to make lunch. For some reason I put a stack of bills on the table while we were eating. She nearly spit out her food, and asked me, visibly disgusted, to remove them.

My friend was trying to maintain the illusion that life is not sustained by money, that life is not 'monetizable'. She was trying to maintain a beautiful life: a project that is at fundamental odds with the system of debt-peonage.

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Progressivism Isn't Funny

One theme to which I often return here is the ill fit between some of my sincere political commitments, on the one hand, and some of what I take to be the even deeper features of my personality on the other. I've had to deal over the years with a tremendous amount of psychological dissonance arising from the fact that, although in my actual earnest commitments I am a fairly standard-model progressive (the fat-cat bankers are bad, imperialist wars are bad, racial and class injustice of all sorts are bad), in my sense of humor I am an arch-conservative. While I do not want to endorse any general theory of the nature of humor, Hobbes's account --that humor is in its essence cruel-- seems to me to correctly describe at least a great deal of humor, and this is the kind of humor moreover that I prefer. It is scoffing, contemptuous, misanthropic... and it makes me laugh.

What passes for progressive humor, by contrast, seldom makes me laugh at all. I gather that here I am largely alone, that this is something people who share my political commitments do not generally experience as a problem. I see signs at demonstrations, or political memes making the rounds on Facebook, and they are supposed to be funny, and my progressive friends love them. But these memes seem to me to be doing exactly the opposite of what humor at its best does: they are serving to strengthen group solidarity, whereas the best humor, the purest humor, says fuck the group; fuck the lot of you, in fact.

Even the postmodern ironic strain of progressive humor that seems to be flourishing so much in the Internet age, such as Feminist Hulk, does not seem funny to me. If the Hulk were saying things even more awful than a giant, green, hypermacho, testosterone-engorged mutant male might ordinarily be expected to say: now that would be funny. But to subject him to a mash-up where he riffs on Judith Butler or something like that simply cannot have the same sort of comical effect. Take, by contrast, another familiar Internet mash-up: the Nietzsche Family Circus. Here we have a subversion of the innocent by the transgressive, and this cannot but be more successful than the Hulk-Judith Butler contrast, which takes us from the monstrous to the righteous. Righteousness isn't funny. In-group affirmation of shared righteousness is downright tedious.

If progressives tend, as conservatives often accuse, towards being snide, elite, and contemptuous, I suspect that this is because snide, contemptuous, and elitist humor is the only kind that progressives have available to them that is really funny. It is hilarious to watch some yokel Republican congressman making a fool of himself going on about his religious faith. Take this for example:

 

Now I have said that this sort of thing is good fodder for humor. But notice, it is Rep. Franks who is doing all the work here. He is making a proper fool of himself, and it is natural and fitting to take delight in that. But still, such delight cannot itself be called progressive humor, since in order to experience it a progressive has to suspend his or her ordinary political commitments, and move into this morally problematic aesthetic mode of perception that I have identified as my own most favorite, and that conservatives, perhaps rightly, see as a sign of 'liberal' hypocrisy.

Part of me wants to say that this deep dissonance is irrelevant, that any psychologically balanced, mature individual should be able to navigate a way between different social registers, at some of which delighting in other people's idiocy and, yes, suffering, is alright, and at others of which the only concern is to alleviate suffering and to challenge idiocy. Another part of me worries that this dissonance reveals that I am in fact an arch-conservative, and that everything else is relatively superficial, most likely a late-coming calque added on to help me fit in in the social circles in which I run. After all, never do I feel more myself than when I am laughing at something I think is truly funny, and contrary to the Scholastic philosophers I do not think that risibility is only a property quarto modo of human beings: I believe it pertains to the human essence.

Either way, I think there is an important philosophical question here about the way the political and the aesthetic (for gelastics is a branch of aesthetics) intersect. It's a question that seems to be of no interest at all to my progressive friends, whom I often hear earnestly hoping out loud that people will someday no longer say (or even think?) nasty, unfair, demeaning things about other people. I doubt this is even cognitively possible, but maybe there's just something wrong with the way my brain works.

Ordinarily I don't care much for the feedback I get here. But this time I am inviting it. I want to know whether anyone else has thought about this problem, and if so whether there are any suggestions as to how to resolve it.

Non-Western Philosophy, Part 2: the Ladder, the Museum, and the Web

[For the first installment in this series, go here.]

The idea that there is a hierarchy or ladder of world cultures, with European culture at the top (often promoted to the status of 'civilization'), was a cornerstone of most Enlightenment philosophy. It was rejected in the era by a handful of counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder, but it continued to reign in the burgeoning discipline of anthropology until the early-20th-century innovations of Franz Boas and others. It was only definitively displaced from anthropology in the decade or so after World War II. In philosophy today, by contrast, though everyone officially abjures the ladder model of human cultures, it continues to determine much of our reasoning about what counts as philosophy and what does not.

It is worth pointing out that all societies that have produced anything that we are able to easily recognize as philosophy are ladder societies. We might in fact argue, if not here, that philosophy as a discrete domain of activity in a society is itself a side-effect of inequality. The overwhelming authority of the church in medieval Europe, the caste system in ancient India, the control of intellectual life by the mandarin class in ancient China (meritocratically produced by the Confucian examination system, but still elite) present themselves as three compelling examples of the sort of social nexus that has left us with significant philosophical works. The fact that philosophy always comes from the top rungs of ladder societies could have something to do with the difficulty, in spite of our best intentions, of de-Eurocentrizing the current academic discipline of philosophy: New York, London, and the idyllic campuses that are an easy commute from these metropolises are the true locus of philosophy today, in just the same way that royal courts were in ancient India. It is as hard for us to think of the intellectual activity of, say, some village sage in postcolonial, third-worldified India as 'philosophy', as it would have been for a high-caste member of the literate elite to think of the folk beliefs of some forest-dwelling ādivāsī in this way.

When philosophers try to get away from the ladder, as most agree for political reasons it is necessary to do, what they usually end up with is the museum, or perhaps, with apologies to André Malraux, the imaginary museum of philosophical multiculturalism. As the Soviets once did with the traditional costumes of their empire's ethnic minorities, those who aim to promote non-Western philosophy usually end up putting the Chinese and the Indians, and sometimes a slapped-together group they dub 'Africans' as well, in entirely separate, non-overlapping display cases, as if their philosophical traditions were just so many traditional costumes or pieces of pottery.

It is not just that ideas are harder to display in this way than are costumes or pottery, but rather that the display of national traditions in any aspect of life, whether it be material or intellectual culture, in a way that would have the observer or reader believe that this aspect is sui generis and, so to speak, aboriginal with the culture itself, is already a gross caricature of ethnic or national identity. It is a reduction of Herderianism, the proposition that each culture is irreducibly unique, to a sort of kitsch: a display of the different peoples of the world holding hands. Such display is characteristic of ulterior-motive-laden Socialist Bloc iconography of old, as well as of commercials for Coca Cola and McDonald's, along with only slightly less explicitly commercial pageants such as the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. I suppose for those purposes we can all find something heart-warming in the stylized image of an Eskimo holding hands with a Masai tribesman and a Swiss milkmaid. But when it comes to scholarship, one wants something more sophisticated.

And yet, nothing more sophisticated is on offer in the way different national or regional intellectual traditions are presented alongside one another. What has taken shape as 'identity politics' in North America in the past several decades gives us a version of Herderianism even more vulgar than Soviet ethnography. This is the social force that has largely dismantled disciplines like anthropology and sociology and left us nothing but various 'studies' departments in their wake. I know of at least one university that has a 'Canadian Irish Studies' department. Now Irish immigration to Canada is a perfectly good thing to, say, write a Ph.D. thesis about. But how can you claim to have received a liberal education if from the outset you specialized in something as narrow as a single ethnic community in a single country? What's worse, it is not infrequent that the student who specializes in this way is a member of that very community, and the implicit --and sometimes even explicit-- purpose such a program serves is simply to reinforce the student's sense of belonging within that community.

Philosophy departments are increasingly seeking to reproduce at a smaller scale just this sort of zoological park. There is the worthy imperative to increase the representation of minority groups, a goal I entirely support at the level of proactive hiring policies that aim to attract members of historically disadvantaged communities. But where this imperative trails off in a direction I cannot follow is in the confused idea that this representation should also be effected through changes to the curriculum, and moreover that the addition of courses in non-Western philosophy is always a contribution to the recognition of minority groups. I myself was recently lauded for making such a contribution when I proposed to teach a course in ancient Indian philosophy.

But I was doing no such thing. Quite apart from the fact that the authors of the Upanishads were 'Aryans', and in the not-so-distant past have been seen as white par excellence, there is also this small hitch, that no one in ancient India cared in the slightest whether they were 'white' or not, or whether Europeans were imposing hegemonic discourses or not. There is nothing 'minority' about the Upanishads --other than that they were written by members of a privileged high-caste minority within ancient Indian society--, and it is a gross misrepresentation of the tradition these texts represent to pretend that the teaching of them is somehow advancing the representation of minorities in philosophy.

Imagine, for comparison, an archaeologist who has spent a career working on Bronze Age Scandinavia, and then switches to the Mayan or the Indus Valley civilization. Would anyone think to suggest that this scientist is moving from a myopic Eurocentrism to an appreciation for minority cultures and their achievements? Of course not! The archaeologist studies human material culture on the presumption that, within certain parameters, human beings may be found to do more or less the same sorts of thing wherever they reside and whatever phenotype they may have, and moreover that wherever they are found, human cultures have always been linked in complicated, constitutive ways to other cultures, so that in fact the process of 'globalization' is coeval with the earliest out-of-Africa migrations.

Certainly, archaeology has not been free of infection from national myth-making, from the desire to cast ancient remains found on this-or-that country's soil as having something to do with that country's current identity. And certainly, Eurocentrism in archaeology did for a long time occlude from view what has more recently become indisputable: that for a number of the innovations in symbolic material culture associated with what Colin Renfrew and others have called the 'Human Revolution' of roughly 60,000-50,000 years ago, we need to be looking to sub-Saharan Africa. But still, archaeology moved out of its infancy some time ago; it now understands humanity to be a global phenomenon with sundry local inflections. It seems to me that the progress of the study of the history of material culture might serve as a model for the study of the history of intellectual culture, which in certain times and places has been written down and distilled into what we are able to recognize as 'philosophy'.

And here we come to the third possible model for thinking about non-Western philosophy: beyond the ladder and the museum, there is the web. This is the same web that has always linked the material cultures of at least Eurasia to one another, whatever distinctive regional flavors might also be discerned. The possibility of approaching the history of intellectual culture in the same way seems particularly auspicious right now, given the recent, very promising results of the so-called cognitive turn in the study of material culture, that is, the turn to the study of cultural artifacts as traces of distributed or exosomatic cognition, as material and intentional at once. So material-cultural history already is intellectual history of a sort, even if it is not the kind that interests philosophers: there is a great gap between stone tools and, say, medieval logic treatises, and different skills are required for studying the one than for the other. But both are material traces of human intention, and both emerge out of particular kinds of societies only. To know them fully is to know what kind of societies are able to produce them.

When we accept this final point --surely the most heterodox, from the point of view of most philosophers-- we are for the first time in a position to study and to teach Indian, Chinese, European, and Arabic philosophy alongside one another in a serious and adequate way. When we accept, for example, that all of the great Axial Age civilizations, to use Karl Jaspers's helpful label, are the product of a single suite of broad historical changes that swept the Eurasian continent, and thus that Chinese, Indian, and Greek thought-worlds are not aboriginal in any meaningful sense (neither are Cree or Huron or Inuit, for that matter, but this can be dealt with another time), then all of a sudden it becomes possible to study, say, the Buddha and his followers not as an expression of some absolutely other Eastern 'wisdom', but instead as a local expression of global developments, or as a node in a web. 

I was recently wondering about the origins of the widespread folk figure of the antlered cuckold. It dawned on me that any scholarship I might find that really explains why men who have been betrayed by their wives are thought to sprout horns would probably be at least sixty years old. In more recent decades, a belief like this one might be mentioned in the course of some ideological critique or other, or it might come up in the description of the local and supposedly wholly particular beliefs of some ethnie or other whose lifeways are being paid tribute under the banner of scholarship. But what one will not find is a systematic treatment of the entire geographical space of a belief like this, a treatment of all its permutations and of the logic underlying these. There are some very notable exceptions, such as Carlo Ginzburg on folk beliefs about night-wandering from Friuli to the Baltic region. But Ginzburg's work stands out as exceptional in its scope, when, if one pauses to think for a moment, this really just is one of the things scholarship ought regularly to be seeking to do: making out the web behind the nodes.

What makes it so hard to see that this might be the proper approach to the study of the history of philosophy as a global phenomenon is that philosophy is not supposed to work in the same way as folk beliefs. It is supposed to be a pursuit of culture-independent truth. Yet this article of faith has had the awkward and unintended consequence of making the available defenses of the de-Eurocentrization of philosophy --something most in the field hold to be desirable for political reasons-- quaint at best and incoherent at worst. If philosophy is independent of culture, then we cannot go, so to speak, underneath the philosophy and examine the broader social dynamics that sustain it. But we need to look at these dynamics in order to see the connections between one tradition and another. There are, so to speak, tunnels in the basement between India and Greece, but we're afraid to go down there. And so the result is that we are not so much liberating philosophy from culture, as we are making each culture's philosophy irreducibly and incomparably its own, just as if it were a matter of displaying folk costumes in some Soviet ethnographic museum, or in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This is unscientific, unrigorous, and unacceptable in any other academic discipline.

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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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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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