Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Hamburger Lady at the Tanning Salon

Sometime around 1988 my mother had a client, in some matter of divorce or custody, who could not, as often happened, afford to pay her legal bill. This client was the proprietor of a tanning salon in a strip mall at the heart of the mostly Filipino community of Natomas, a labyrinth of strip malls and housing developments that had sprung up over the course of my childhood on a flood plain just north of downtown Sacramento.

The tanning salon was called, and I'm quite serious about this, 'Tan-Fastic'. As part of the deal for the non-payment of her bill, this client, whose name was, let us say, Corazon, agreed to offer me a part-time job welcoming clients and preparing Tan-Fastic's glowing beds, removing the sebum-traced outlines of human figures that were left on the glass after each session. I was a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout, and if I was to have any future at all, it was just as likely to be in the artificial-tan industry as anywhere else.

Now you might have guessed already that the Filipinos were not the greatest consumers of tanning-bed kilowatts, but there was no shortage of white people willing to make the drive over from the nearby gated communities in order to find that special combination of tanning, nail care, and massage --three industries that had been cornered by distinct California Asian communities-- all in the same strip mall.

As with most jobs I took in that period, I don't recall ever being remunerated by Corazon. But pay was the least of things. I took this job like I took everything else in that period, which is to say principally as an occasion to play the DJ. I am quite certain that Tan-Fastic featured the best mix tapes of any tanning salon in the entire Sacramento Valley.

Now I had never been in a tanning bed myself, but I liked to imagine that the experience would be something like that of William S. Burroughs's dream machine. Accordingly I selected mostly ambient, droning electronic music that I thought would enhance the ecstatic effect of the ultraviolet radiation. I imagined it would be particularly fitting to listen to 'Hamburger Lady' from Throbbing Gristle's Grief, at high volume, while being irradiated. 

It will come as no surprise that most of my customers did not share the same sensibilities. I don't know whether you've ever seen an enraged bourgeoise trying to slither out of a tanning bed mid-session, but I've seen more than a few. One in particular has stuck in my mind, a woman who must have been in her early thirties, and was the only customer ever to avail herself of Tan-Fastic's in-store safe, where she stored her fat diamond ring and other decorations as she lay motionless and unaware in her glowing chamber.

I remember her storming out, only ten minutes or so into the session, wrapped in a towel, her face a perfect mix of leather brown and lobster red. "I told you I didn't want any of that weird stuff this time!" she shouted. "You think it's funny to put on your freaky music when I'm trapped in there. Well you know what? It isn't. Now put on something calming and nice or I'm going to have a word with Corazon."

What did she mean by 'calming and nice'? Like that song about children being the future? Or the one where it sounds like the guy is saying 'after all the hooey we've been through, I will make it up to you'? I honestly didn't know what she was after. Then I remembered I had a Cure tape in my bag. Girls like that. My girlfriend liked that. I put it on. Madame finished her session and left without a word. I was fired the next day.

This incident came back to me recently as I found myself having to endure The Cure's 'Close to Me' while sitting in a dentist's chair. The radio was tuned to Montreal's station for 'the greatest hits of the '70s, '80s, and '90s'. And who did I have to complain to about this travesty? Where was my Corazon, who would listen sympathetically as I explained that I was once fired from a job for playing exactly the same music that now soothes root-canal patients? Who would care to know that, from my perspective, the mix of music offered up by that radio station was an impossibility, a garbled code, Borges's Chinese encyclopedia. 'Close to Me' cannot, in any natural system, be preceded by 'I Will Survive' and followed by 'Dude Looks Like a Lady'.

I bring this up because the overwhelming response to my recent post against eighties music was that I should quit worrying and just 'listen to what I like'. It would take a naïveté I can barely imagine to believe that this is what one is doing when one listens to music. Music is music, but it is also (and this is especially true of pop music) a sort of totemic cosmology: an imposition of order on the world through distinctions of value. The place of a totem in the overall order can change from one generation to the next, as the incomprehensible jumble on Montreal FM radio suggests. But this is only a reordering, and not a dissolution of order that would leave only pure aesthesis in its place.

Against Eighties Music

(See follow-up post here.)

There is a bind in which not every generation has found itself, though the one I know best certainly has: one is, in respect of music, caught between the Scylla of trying too hard to stay with it, and the Charybdis of ridiculous nostalgia for that period of life when one did not have to try at all.

How much longer will we have to listen to the cries of melancholy longing of those now pushing 40: a longing for a more authentic time, in which something we now call 'eighties music' held us all together, forged us, made us better than the current crop of manipulated stooges with their ephemeral junk? The problem with this way of remembering things is that it wasn't 'eighties music' at the time, and it didn't hold us together. It was mostly garbage, just like today; and just like today it had, seen from the inside, internal contours and divisions that made it entirely impossible to think of it all as belonging to the same decadal genus.

That is a first point: that you are simply misremembering when you hear The Cure in some public place, perhaps on a Lite FM station while waiting at the dentist's office, and you announce: I love '80s music! A second point is that no one cares, and, worse, you're embarrassing yourself. To say 'I love '80s music' might have a different semantics than 'I'm pushing 40', but out of your mouth, dear coeval, it is pragmatically exactly the same. 

What is the alternative? Well, you can try to stay au courant. You can do the 2010 equivalent of what Houellebecq's protagonist did in Le plateforme, just seven or eight years ago, when he stretched a Radiohead t-shirt, having never listened to Radiohead, over his 40-year-old gut. Hell, if you are really unconcerned with maintaining credibility you can just try it with a Radiohead shirt today and see what happens. You can try to get tips from your younger coworkers or from your students about local bands or about obscure imports. As if anything had to be 'imported' anymore! You can try your best to overlook the fact that you will always remain rooted in a now defunct system, in which music was an object that could be collected, owned, and traded, rather than something whose tokens might be gleaned as desired out of the universal storehouse of the Internet.

Until about 2002 or 2003, I remained intent on keeping abreast of things. I knew that such-and-such record label was based in Berlin, such-and-such other somewhere else. I knew that such-and-such subgenre of techno had spawned such-and-such subsubgenres. I read a print magazine (!) called Wire or The Wire, not to be confused with similarly titled tech magazine, band, or TV show, which served as a sort of cheat-sheet for the memorization of in-group shibboleths. What I took at that time for a sudden, rapid increase in connoisseurship was in fact only a death throe: a final, desperate, farcical attempt to remain with it.

Don't tell me you haven't had a similar moment, observing either yourself or your aging friends, when you stop and you think to yourself: this can't go on. I remember getting into the car of a somewhat older German friend, circa 1995. He put in a cassette of the Stereo MCs: you remember, that English bald guy and his entourage who proposed to 'take you higher'. I thought: well, this is fine, fitting music for a car trip. I visited him again, five years later. We got into his car and he asked: "Do you know the Stereo MCs?" as he, to his mind smoothly, popped in exactly the same cassette (the year was now 2000!). I saw him again in 2003, and again the same thing. We have not seen each other since (as I am learning, the neural and/or hormonal need for enduring friendship dulls right along with the one for musical discovery), but I suspect that he is either still lazily putting on the Stereo MCs to entertain the occasional visitor, or that he is dead. His was a particularly severe case of the general syndrome I am discussing, even if his symptoms were in some sense the opposite of mine: the aging music listener who is simply too uninspired to make any new discoveries, and so places a particular moment, associated in his imagination with his early twenties, on perpetual repeat.

So I can neither freeze a moment in time and cling to it, nor can I move along with the flow of time. What then is left? There is only one thing to do, and that is to go back in time. You cannot accuse me of clinging to my past if I listen to a compilation of Appalachian jug-and-washboard music from the 1920s. I'm clinging to the past in general, and it's a past that belongs just as much to someone born in 1990 as it does to someone born in 1970, even if the junior heir is not yet aware of this. When he becomes aware, I will know vastly more than he does, and I will, if supplicated, consent to initiate him.

There is something slightly pathetic and awkward about this strategy, too: something misanthropic and cranky in an R. Crumb sort of way. Something that, just like the other two options, no doubt is going to make the young people cringe. One is by definition out of step with one's era in caring about the past at all: this much I know all too well from my interest, in my professional life, in things people said and cared about in the 17th century.

Recording technology stretches back only to the late 19th century, so here there is an absolute limit to how far back one can go in one's depersonalized encyclopedic approach to music connoisseurship. Towards this limit is where I choose to linger, seeking out popular music set down by recording technology between 1895 and 1972, and the older the better. As an aesthetic, this is a sort of primitivism: what is prized is low-fidelity, zero production value, recordings of people who do not know they are being recorded, or who don't really understand what recording is.

Following upon one of my recent, categorical denunciations of sports, some readers got the idea that, if I am not a sports fan, the only other possibility is that I am in every respect a snob, which, they believed, must include a passion for classical music. They could not be more mistaken. Other than Lieder, which already straddle the boundary, I am entirely on the side of what some German sociologist helpfully called U-Kultur, that is, Unterhaltungskultur or 'entertainment culture', in contrast with E-Kultur, Ernstkultur or 'real culture'. What this distinction misses however is the fundamental difference between the encyclopedist's or the archaeologist's approach to the totality of U-Kultur's past, on the one hand, and the idolater's approach to some tiny sliver of this past on the other, a sliver that happens to coincide with his or her adolescence, and which he or she ignorantly takes to be a singular moment of greatness in a past that is otherwise unworthy of attention.

I maintain that only an encyclopedic-archaeological turn can save an aging person's attachment to popular culture from descending into ridiculousness. Though far better, of course, would be to simply not age at all, and to continue to be able to listen to music with immediacy.

Tuesday Image #8

Early color photography from Imperial Russia: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944).

Chakva, Georgia, c. 1905-1915

[Cпасибо Анне]

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

It is not hard to understand why, when Fortune magazine sent James Agee to rural Alabama to document the lives of poor white tenant farmers in 1936, this is not exactly the sort of reportage the editors were expecting:

A man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children:

First they are mouths, then they become auxiliary instruments of labor: later they are drawn away, and become the fathers and mothers of children, who shall become the fathers and mothers of children:

Their father and their mother before them were, in their time, the children each of different parents, who in their time were each children of parents:

This has been happening for a long while: its beginning was before stars:

It will continue for a long while: no one knows where it will end:

While they are still drawn together within one shelter around the center of their parents, these children and their parents together compose a family:

This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself:

Such a family lasts, for a while: the children are held to a magnetic center:

Then in time the magnetism weakens, both of itself in its tiredness of aging and sorrow, and against the strength of the growth of each child, and against the strength of pulls from outside, and one by one the children are drawn away:

Of those that are drawn away, each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:

Moreover, these flexions are taking place every where, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

Each is intimately connected with the bottom and extremest reach of time:

Each is composed of substances identical with the substance of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe:

So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship.

*

I have been meaning to write something about Agee's work, which, as with many things that are great and American, I have only belatedly discovered. But as a preliminary exercise I wanted simply to transcribe this astounding passage, this effusion of pseudophilosophical grandiosity, in order to see whether, by channeling it through my own eyes and fingers, I might better understand what springs of inspiration this ingenious, cocky writer (and terrible journalist) is drawing upon. But anyway, more to follow shortly.

Progress Report

Here is what I have managed to accomplish since I arrived in Europe on May 3.

I submitted a new book proposal to Princeton University Press. I submitted the final revised proofs of my Leibniz book to the same press. I put the finishing touches on, and sent off, at least three articles. I co-organized one conference, participated in one other, attended two others, and gave a colloquium-series paper. For these purposes, I travelled to Cambridge, Lyon, Helsinki, and Budapest. I made some, but not much, progress on the translation of G. E. Stahl's Negotium otiosum. In preparation for the essay-review I am expected to write, I read someone else's book on Leibniz (thumbs up). I wrote a long essay for the print edition of n+1. I dealt with the fall-out of a book review I wrote for the electronic edition. I worked through chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Robert Goldman's Devavanipraveśika: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language. I read Jack Goody's The Theft of History as well as his Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Surendrenath Dasgupta's A History of Indian Philosophy, and substantial portions of Valerie Allen's On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (a very serious and learned work). I finished reading Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Rabelais' Gargantua, and began reading Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I made 17 posts to this website, not including the present one. I attempted to go running 7 times, and each time was frustrated by the condition of either my own body or of the environment in which I sought to run. In Marseille I bought special 'support socks' to help me run better, but they had no perceptible effect. I drank alcohol on only 2 occasions, which is for me a 17-year record low. I reduced my pants-size by 4 inches, surviving on a diet of mostly fruits and raw vegetables. I made at least two new friends.

Here is what I did not do:

I did not make any progress on the satirical novel I claim to be writing, and for which I had initially envisioned this sojourn as a writing retreat, during which I would take a break from all academic output, as well as from the production of minor occasional pieces. I did not go to Russia. I did not make any progress in my spoken Romanian. I did not begin flossing. I did not watch the World Cup, though the arc of its development from the initial matches to the final served as a sort of background framing device for my summer's activity. I did not discover any good new music, or see any films. I did not begin, as I had intended, to contribute to a charitable organization of my choice.

How many more summers will there be like this one? --Twenty? Thirty?-- Summers of cranking shit out and taking shit in, always feeling like I'm not really doing that thing that, were I to do it, I could stop and say: There. I've done it.

Same-Sex Marriage and Balkan Tradition: A Few Clarifications

There were a few things about which I might have been clearer in my post of a few days ago on Martha Nussbaum's work in defense of marriage equality. There are also a few things that commenters have brought up to me that have caused me to wish to retract or at least amend some of what I said.

First, to be clear: I support marriage equality, and I believe that people who oppose it in the political arena are stone-age thugs and opportunists. That said, I am not convinced that the arguments generally deployed in favor of marriage equality are as good as they might be, and I like to think that the movement is strong enough to withstand, and maybe even to benefit from, a bit of internal critique.

Some of the feedback I have received, however, has suggested to me that the best approach, should one wish to say something subtle about such a hot-button issue in the American culture wars, is to suppress that desire. This suggestion comes across just as loudly from the 'progressive' camp as from the thugs who are often portrayed as the exclusive opponents of free and open reflection. To my mind, the existence of slogans such as "If you're against same-sex marriage, then shut the fuck up and don't have one" reveals a disgraceful anti-intellectual evasion, where what is needed is serious engagement.

In particular, while we rightly denounce as bigots the politicians and the professional moralists who fight against marriage equality, it is simply a mistake to suppose that the great numbers of people in the world who assume that marriage is, as they say, 'between a man and a woman', are making this assumption out of bigotry. For the vastly greater part of human history in the vast majority of cultural settings, this  has indeed functioned as a perfectly serviceable definition for what marriage has been.

For this reason, if I had to characterize in two words the respect in which I disagree with the prevailing arguments of the marriage-equality movement, I would say that I am for a constructive approach, whereas what prevails is a corrective approach. That is, on the prevailing assumption, marriage has been a fundamentally unjust institution to the extent that it has been based on rules grounded in gender dimorphism. On this approach, it is generally assumed that marriage is an institution that ought to exist --or perhaps that simply does exist, by nature-- even if it is one that requires an additional adjustment in order to exist in the right way.

On the constructive approach, by contrast, marriage --monogamous pair-bonding made fast by solemn promises-- need not exist at all; it could just as well give way to polygyny, polyandry, or, as is apparently the case among the Na of China, it could give way to wanton promiscuity (see Cai Hua's fascinating book, Une société sans père ni mère. Les Na de Chine, PUF, 1997). Same-sex marriage cannot be natural or universally right, since monogamous pair-bonding isn't natural or universally right, and the latter includes the former. Once this much is admitted, it is impossible to think of the opening up of marriage to allow for same-sex unions as a final emendation, a final making good, of an institution that exists by right or by nature. Instead, it is a transformation of an institution that exists because we want it to, and in a way that makes it conform better to our sensibilities and preferences.

Reading Nussbaum in the Balkans

I still have fantasies about being an anthropologist, but I have to admit I would be terrible at it.  I don't mind being an observer, but to be a participant-observer, that's a bit too much to ask of me. Forget about living for years among rainforest-dwelling, insectivorous hunter-gatherers: I have trouble passing a single week in a provincial Romanian town, surviving on nothing but traditional home cooking (even though it's cooked with love). I prefer my meals meatless, largely uncooked, heavily based on imported and exotic fruits, grains, and pulses. Now that I am back in Bucharest, whenever I see a restaurant that advertises food that is 'just like home', I think to myself: Well in that case nevermind.

But still, the questions that anthropologists ask, if not the field investigations they undertake, attract me more than ever. This much was driven home to me after a leisurely morning of reading recently, during which I alternated between the eminent moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum's recent work in defense of same-sex marriage, and the eminent anthropologist Jack Goody's The Theft of History, a learned tirade against the remnants of Eurocentrism in the writing of world history. The contrast was stark: in the latter case, there was a thinker at work, surveying the range of possible ways human beings do in fact organize societies and attempting to draw general conclusions from these data about the nature of human social existence as such. In the former case, there was a thinker at work, surveying the prevailing opinions of her small community (educated, liberal Westerners), and then attempting to come up with a priori arguments in defense of them. 

I know which approach I prefer, and why I prefer it. A comparative, anthropological view of one's own society cannot but reveal the contingency of what we deem acceptable. To give but a very partial list, there simply is no good reason to believe that abortion, cremation, pork, same-sex marriage, incarceration, and public breastfeeding should be permitted, but not infanticide, ceremonial cannibalism, dog-meat, first-cousin marriage, polygamy, corporal punishment, and public urination. The first list contains some things that are widely accepted in our society and that those in the educated elite tolerate, and still other things that are not yet widely accepted but that those in the educated elite advocate. The second list contains, I believe, things that would not be tolerated either by the educated elite or by the broader society. Yet a comparative ethnographer could give you examples of perfectly well-functioning, healthy societies that practice at least some of the things in the second list, while abhorring everything in the first list. 

I am saying nothing here, of course, about my own views regarding any particular practice. What I am saying is that it would be a remarkable coincidence if the real moral order of the world just happened to match up with that list of things for which a person must express support in order to be admitted into Western educated liberal circles. In moral philosophy there seems to be a strong tendency to mistake the shibboleths of group identity for timeless truths. The problem with this is not just that it's provincial --a community that liked polygamy and obligatory euthanasia for the elderly but disliked abortion and same-sex marriage would be no less provincial-- but that it is unscientific: it is uninterested in real data on the range of ways human societies organize themselves. In the absence of these data, it is unable to adequately account for the deep-seated reasons for society's inflexibility in the face of its supposedly compelling moral arguments.

This inflexibility might have something to do with the moral shortcoming of the people one is hoping to persuade with one's arguments (thus Nussbaum's theory of 'projective disgust', recently misunderstood by the indefatigable Mike Huckabee). But it might be worth considering whether it is instead rooted in the sort of structures studied by anthropologists. Let's consider an imaginary example. If you were to suggest to me, say, that it should be legal and accepted for people to adopt as their own children other people who are older than they are, thus radically altering many people's previous conception of what adoption must be, I would not want to hear your moral arguments as to why such adoption is just and right. Instead I would want to know: has there ever been a society that practiced adoption in this way? How did it work? What were the other distinguishing features of this society? And so on. I would want to know whether the institution of adoption is in fact flexible enough to allow for this sort of variety. 

 

August Sander's "Bohemians" (1925)

Don't tell me, reader, that you don't recognize these two:

They are, as the caption tells us, 'Bohemians'. I've dwelled upon the origins of this term elsewhere: 'Bohemia' designates a region roughly overlapping with the present-day Czech Republic; this region was once associated in the minds of its neighbors with the Roma people; the Roma were associated with a free and open way of life, with music and dancing and drinking; at some point --and I really do not know when, but evidently by the time of the Weimar Republic-- the term was appropriated to describe non-Roma Europeans who had adopted a supposedly similar lifestyle. 

But note: these two look nothing like Roma. I do not mean that they are fairer of face; I mean that their way of sitting (especially the one on your right, reader), their way of smoking, their way of being, all send a message of refusal: we don't want to fight in your stupid wars, get married in your conventional weddings, watch your pointless athletic spectacles, and so on. They want to live for beauty, and will, if lucky, die young. The 'you' whose wars, weddings, and games they reject, however, is in fact no more other than their parents, and the way they are sitting is a choice, an affectation even. 

Not so, in general, with the Roma, whom I do not mean to romanticize as Naturkinder when I note that their way of holding themselves is one that is transmitted from one generation to the next, and does not have to be worked out anew with each coming-of-age. Peter Gay would probably say that it is the process of bourgeoisification that makes the difference, that requires the urban Bohemians to find their own way to sit, while leaving the peasant and migrant Bohemians after whom they were named free to sit like their parents before them. 

I spent much of my early life trying to learn to sit like the youths in the photo (I was never very good at it: too chubby), and without any knowledge whatsoever of the historical rootedness of this posture. I knew vaguely that the names of bands like 'Cabaret Voltaire' and 'Bauhaus' referred back to the early-20th-century European avant garde, but to me there was a sort of absolute boundary somewhere around 1976 (!), which separated everything before it off as mere pre-history, incapable of telling us anything about, so to speak, the present state of the unfolding of Spirit. 

Now, when I see this photo (which I only discovered, along with its taker, a few weeks ago at the Tate Modern in London), I can't help but wonder just how deeply rooted in history this posture is, and whether it antedates photography itself. One supposes that young Werther might have sat like this, though it's hard to imagine the posture much further back than that. In the 17th century, anyway, it would have been simply unthinkable. 

Many of the figures Sander photographed ('Rural Bride', 'Cretin', 'National Socialist') are no longer all that familiar. Bohemians are not a natural kind, they could just as well not exist, and someday no doubt will go extinct. But for the moment these two stand as clear evidence of a continuity between the Weimar era and the present one.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: A Kropotkinite Perspective

For some years now, fear of being asked a certain snide question has held me back in my desire to come forth as an anarchist: "So what, then, you don't like roads?" But I've finally come up with an answer: No, as a matter of fact I don't. I think they are evil. Trails are alright, paths just fine, but the corridors of asphalt that cut through ecosystems and that play host to hundreds of thousands of bloody human deaths every year, those I definitely do not like. 

There is a certain fallacy, which I'm sure has by now been given a name by someone else, according to which some human invention is good if it satisfies some human need, even if that human need was a human invention to begin with, rather than a basic condition of our existence. There was a time when no one felt the need for highways (or for commuting by airplane), and there are countless inventions that have not yet been brought forth, whose non-existence does not cause us to feel any concrete lack, even if we do feel wonder at the possibilities of the future. 

Remarkably, modern history since the 16th century seems to have consisted largely in the creation of new needs: needs for plants and goods that do not occur naturally in Europe, needs that make us forget entirely that Europe did just fine without them for millennia. The democratization of the automobile in the 1920s led directly to the need for workers to commute, and it is this need, much more than the facilitation of the 'freedom' to travel, that necessitated the building of a massive system of asphalt roads throughout the developed world. This need, it seems to me, is part of the same continuous development that earlier made the world dependent on sugar and tobacco. 

The fallacy I've described is on most vivid display in attitudes toward air travel. Now it could have happened that features of the atmosphere had brought it about that aviation should never get off the ground: if, say, clouds harbored giant hail balls that brought down every tenth plane. It is a contingent fact about the world that air travel is --just barely-- possible. Occasionally, it really does become impossible, as when Europe is covered by clouds of volcanic ash, and then the people cry: I have to be in Paris in twelve hours! But who ever guaranteed that intercontinental travel should take place in a matter of hours? Nature certainly never guaranteed it. Profit-driven companies did, and shortsightedly. The airline industry is forced to uphold the illusion that the system it makes possible --in which people depart from one continent in order to attend meetings a few hours later on another-- is the natural and normal order of things, when in fact it is an extreme and precarious order. 

It is an order I hope to see collapse, and to see replaced by the early 19th-century technologies of the steamship and the railway. Currently, rail travel in Europe is being destroyed by those vulgar upstart companies, the so-called low-cost airlines, that have in just a few years brought us to the point where it is now seen as quirky to prefer to take the train between, say, Budapest and Bucharest. I have just done precisely this, and very much enjoyed looking out the window of my private, first-class sleeping compartment. The whole thing cost me just a little more than a ticket on Bloo Air or Fizz Air or whatever the hell they're called. It left just a fraction of the carbon trace that the plane journey would have emitted, and it took roughly six times as long. I'll leave it to you to do the cost-benefit calculations; my concern is more moral, even cosmological, than it is pragmatic. My concern is with the recalibration of needs so that they suit our individual temperaments, in contrast with the general expectation of our society that we adopt the needs that have been created for us by others in search of profit. Such autonomy is, I take it, a core element of anarchism. 

My train journey took me twelve hours, but it did not at all feel as though it was taking too long, since it never occurred to me to compare it with the airplanes that take only two, any more than air-travellers feel that they are moving too slowly in comparison with instantaneous teletransportation. Now of course some might detect a certain arbitrariness in drawing the line between trains and airplanes; after all, railways are just as much a product of that noxious mix of state control and profit-seeking as are airlines. A few comments are in order. First, I would have been just as happy to have travelled by carriage (if, that is, I were convinced that the horses were happy to pull me), and indeed just as happy to have been born into a world where no one could reasonably expect of me that I make appearances in a dozen or so countries over the course of a year. But I have a career to pursue, and conferences are simply part of the regle du jeu. 

Second, I sincerely believe that flying is wrong in a way that train travel is not. Rolling along a flat surface on wheels, even at relatively great speeds, is more or less continuous with what we as bipedal primates have been doing all along: the wheel came along to supplement our bipedalism roughly 10,000 years ago, and quickly diffused from the Pontic steppe (not so far from the place of my recent train journey) after that. It was one of the great motors, along with pastoralism, agriculture, and writing, of the rapid complexification of human society that would ultimately issue in air travel; yet it was, if I may speak with Marx and Engels for a second, qualitatively different from its latter-day descendant. One thing that often strikes me when I am in an airplane is how many precision operations have to be carried out in order for me to walk safely away from the circumstances I am in. A runway has to be found, which then has to be approached at just the right speed and angle, and so on. In order to walk away from a moving train, one need only cut the power that is causing it to move. This is an arrangement I think any higher primate could understand and consent to, and it could not be more different from flying. 

Naturally I admire the aviation pioneers, the death-defying astronauts and cosmonauts who have pushed the limits of what it is a human body can go through. But again, what I can't stand is when pioneering gives way to blind, unquestioning dependency. 

In a subsequent post, I will address some of the possible points of criticism --which I can already hear buzzing in your head, dear reader-- having to do with the numerous performative contradictions of which I stand guilty: the careerism that is so incompatible with the true anarchist spirit; the blogging that depends upon a technology first developed for purposes of war; the elitism implicit in the contempt for low-cost airlines; and so on.  But for now I have to go to the well to pump some water, as the municipal government in this provincial post-communist town has bungled things again, and the bathroom tap runs dry. 

--Bârlad, Romania