Hollow and Full of Garbage

Je ne puis avoir que de la compassion pour ceux qui gémissent sincerement dans ce doute, qui le regardent comme le dernier des malheurs, & qui n'épargnant rien pour en sortir font de cette recherche leur principale & leur plus serieuse occupation. Mais pour ceux qui passent leur vie sans penser à cette derniere fin de la vie, & qui par cette seule raison, qu'ils ne trouvent pas en eux-mesme des lumieres qui les persuadent, negligent d'en chercher ailleurs, & d'examiner à fond si cette opinion est de celles que le peuple reçoit par une simplicité credule, ou de celles qui quoyqu'obscures d'elles-mesmes ont neanmoins un fondement tres solide, je les considere d'une maniere toute differente. Cette negligence en une affaire où il s'agit d'eux-mesmes, de leur éternité, de leur tout, m'irrite plus qu'elle ne m'attendrit ; elle m'étonne & m'épouvante ; c'est un monstre pour moy. Je ne dis pas cecy par le zele pieux d'une devotion spirituelle. Je prétens au contraire que l'amour propre, que l'interest humain, que la plus simple lumiere de la raison nous doit donner ces sentimens. Il ne faut voir pour cela que ce que voyent les personnes les moins éclairées.
- Pascal, Pensées

The atheist who does not care whether God exists, who wraps his indifference in existentialist truisms and platitudes about living for today--c'est moi. Reading Pascal is thus a particularly trying experience; it is difficult to bear that a vibrant and beautiful mind for which I have so much respect has absolutely none for the likes of me. I twist and turn to escape his geometric and precise condemnations; it is no use. I am compelled to accept his wager, ineffectually to refuse his conclusions.

Yet my first response is always to not take him seriously. He is, after all, a corpse these three hundred and fifty years, safely consigned to the dustbin of the Great Classics, which we read with the condescending indulgence reserved for centagenarians, foreigners, child prodigies. That is the real crime of the Canon: not the exclusion of various fashionable minority groups, not its supposed cultural elitism, but the utter exsanguination of its great authors. The cynical smirk of Hobbes, the revolutionary fervor of Hugo--and, yes, the righteous and lofty piety of Pascal--lose all their power, grow tepid, a row of brownish and identical portraits of indistinguishable white men. When Pascal declares his contempt for us, we smile superciliously and nod.

Equally dangerous (as Nietzsche warned in the Untimely Meditations) is the historian's reflex: to take a step back, to refuse to judge the moral commitments of a past, and presumably less enlightened, epoch. Nothing is gained, of course, from serving as some grand jury over the figures of the past--from presenting solemn indictments for racism, bigotry, nationalism. But that "objective" refusal to judge can also be an act of cowardice. We are indifferent atheists, but if we distance ourselves enough from Pascal's time we no longer have to answer for ourselves; we can stand unmoved in all the smugness of our historical triumph.

But it is with Pascal precisely that our disengagement breaks down. One of his early observations on style declares:

Certains auteurs, parlant de leurs ouvrages, disent: «Mon livre, mon commentaire, mon histoire, etc.» Ils sentent leurs bourgeois qui ont pignon sur rue, et toujours un «chez moi» à la bouche. Ils feraient mieux de dire: «Notre livre, notre commentaire, notre histoire, etc.» vu que d'ordinaire, il y a plus en cela du bien d'autrui que du leur.

There is much to be said about this beautiful fragment. The text does not belong to its author; it belongs to the whole congress of others who have created it. One of these others is the reader herself. Thus, she bears equal responsibility for its interpretation. In the context of the Pensées, this means something very specific: the book is not at all an integral work. It is not even, like the Brothers Karamazov, an integral dialogue. It is one half of a conversation, incomplete and pointless without the other half, supplied by the impious and indifferent reader.

Hence we cannot separate ourselves from Pascal with the protective zoo cage of the intervening centuries. The act of reading the Pensées already implicates us, forces us to reply, whether or not we choose to acknowledge the existence of the conversation. We will have been forced to take a stance with moral implications for us. That is why most of the contemptuous and contemptible "refutations" of Pascal's Wager miss the mark: they assume that one is free to take or not to take the bet, that the wager is an object of contemplation rather than active, forced engagement. Pascal has no truck with this; he forces us explicitly to bet on one outcome or the other. And if we cannot make a decision with regards to the Pensées, then when we read Kierkegaard's Either/Or we are just as ill-equipped to confront it. Surrounded by the fuzzy inspirational glow of pop-existentialism, we imagine that our enlightened remove no longer requires us to choose one or the other, that we can find a way to do both. This weakness makes cowards of us all.

Sleep and Lost Innocence

Soon as the force of that fallacious Fruit,
That with exhilerating vapour bland
About thir spirits had plaid, and inmost powers
Made erre, was now exhal'd, and grosser sleep
Bred of unkindly fumes, with conscious dreams
Encumberd, now had left them, up they rose
As from unrest, and each the other viewing,
Soon found thir Eyes how op'nd, and thir minds
How dark'nd; innocence, that as a veile
Had shadow'd them from knowing ill, was gon.
- Milton, Paradise Lost

Seul, oisif, et toujours voisin du danger, l'homme sauvage doit aimer à dormir, et avoir le sommeil léger comme les animaux, qui, pensant peu, dorment, pour ainsi dire, tout le temps qu'ils ne pensent point. Sa propre conservation faisant presque son unique soin, ses facultés les plus exercées doivent être celles qui ont pour objet principal l'attaque et la défense, soit pour subjuguer sa proie, soit pour se garantir d'être celle d'un autre animal: au contraire, les organes qui ne se perfectionnent que par la mollesse et la sensualité doivent rester dans un état de grossièreté, qui exclut en lui toute espèce de délicatesse; et ses sens se trouvant partagés sur ce point, il aura le toucher et le goût d'une rudesse extrême; la vue, l'ouïe et l'odorat de la plus grande subtilité.
- Rousseau, Discours sur les origines de l'inegalité

Now know I well what people sought formerly above all else when they sought teachers of virtue. Good sleep they sought for themselves, and poppy-head virtues to promote it! To all those belauded sages of the academic chairs, wisdom was sleep without dreams: they knew no higher significance of life. Even at present, to be sure, there are some like this preacher of virtue, and not always so honorable: but their time is past. And not much longer do they stand: there they already lie.
- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The passage from innocence to experience is at the same time a renunciation of the light and dreamless sleep of the pure. The feeling of sleep as a gross burden reflects the ever-increasing weight of concern that preoccupies the civilized man after the Fall; the innocent sleep lightly because they have nothing to worry about, no future to predict with dreams.

But the advocacy of this light sleep undermines the fundamental moralism of Milton, and, to a lesser extent, Rousseau. Their goal is always to show that the physical manifestations of the state of innocence, of noble savagery, are reflections of an underlying moral virtue: the savage isn't just different because he does not seek for civilized entertainment, but better because more virtuous. The use of the sleep image serves to push this argument in the reverse direction: the advantage of morality and virtue is that it permits an easier and lighter sleep.

This process of reversal is, of course, what Nietzsche has in mind. The "chairs of virtue" are occupied by those who pretend to speak for or represent morality but really only represent a lighter sleep and an easier digestion; the ridiculousness of the particular prophet in this chapter is only the ridiculousness of the others made manifest. The problem of the reversal is more serious for Rousseau than for Milton, however, though the latter may represent Christianity. For Rousseau elsewhere preaches the Spartan renunciation of bodily comfort, condemning luxury in part as a constant and never-ending pursuit of physical gratification. Yet, when he describes the noble savage as one who sleeps lightly and easily, what is he advertising if not the sensual advantages of the state of nature? The argument from physical pleasure cannot but conflict with the argument from virtue.

Ultimately, too, the sleep without dreams represents something darker and less pleasant to contemplate: the renunciation of the intellect, which for Rousseau (and sometimes for Nietzsche) is always an explicit goal, but for Milton more often a threat. The commentaries underneath my copy of Paradise Lost suggest the ultimate "moral import" of the Fall to be the defeat of reason in favor of sensuality. But can a creature whose sleep is dreamless like an animal's (and who has no knowledge of good and evil) even be said to possess that capacity to refuse its immediate desires?

Reason is something that only comes with Blake's second birth. And the twice-born is cursed to look back on the naivety of the first and sentimentalize it. Thus the innocent one cannot know the advantages of his strong digestion and light sleep; that comes only later. This is, in a sense, ironic. The argument from the physical, which asks us to give up the dreams of the second birth, becomes immediately incomprehensible once it is followed through to its conclusion. This argument is as much of a parasite on the knowledge of good and evil as any of its more intellectualized counterparts.

How to Become a Revolutionary Subject

It is impossible fully to describe the agitated State of the Town [New York] since last Sunday, when the News first arrived of the Skirmish between Concord & Boston – At all corners People inquisitive for News – Tales of all Kinds invented believed, denied, discredited. Sunday in the afternoon Services 2 Sloops laden by Watts for Boston with Provisions unladen. In that Night the City Armory open the Powder taken out of the Powder House – The Taverns filed with Publicans at Night – Little Business done in the Day – few Jurors and Witnesses attend the Courts. Armed Parties summon the Town publicly to come & take Arms & learn the Manual Exercise – They are publicly delivered out and armed Individuals shew themselves at all Hours in the Streets ... Chandler sent up his Letters last Night & they past thro' P[eter] V[an] B[rugh] L[ivingston] to Parson Achrmurty & Inglis who I find by Wallace & Col. Maunsel were active this Morning – Cooper now flew to the Man of War & Wilkin[s] & Parson Seabury disappear – Their Wifes betake themselves to Mrs. Morris's at Morrisana as I learn from Richd & Gouverneur Morris.
- William Smith, Jr., Historical Memoirs, Saturday, April 29, 1775

You are walking down the street, and a man yells, "Hey, you!" You turn around. This, in Althusser's classic formulation, is how you come to be interpellated as a subject--specifically, the subject of ideology. Althusser insists that the interpellation of subjects by ideology is an "always-already" process: ideology creates subjects but is also constituted by them, so there is no going back to the pre-subject era, no turning around once more. In other words, although he insists on interpellation being a "very precise operation," he in fact denigrates the real nature of the interpellating act in favor of a broader point about the existence of ideology (which is then said to guarantee in itself the interpellation of the individual as subject).

We might disagree. Althusser's little theatrical set-pieces, which aim to illustrate the meaning of interpellation, evince a quality which then becomes thoroughly erased as the argument advances: the communicative nature of interpellation. One becomes a subject by means of a communicative act. But can this fact ever have any significance, if we are told that we are always-already constituted as subjects by ideology? The communication would have to have already happened, before we were even conceived.

It is possible, I think, to pay more attention to the communicative question, but only if we focus not on the subject of state or ruling class ideology--which is certainly "always-already"--but on a different kind: the subject of revolution. (We may, I hope, speak of a revolutionary subject without getting bogged down in vague Sixties fantasies or media-driven valorizations of Che Guevara.) The revolutionary subject is by definition not always-already. While the revolutionary ideology (not, alas, an oxymoron) to which she subscribes may subsist in an organic relationship of one kind or another with the incumbent or reactionary ideology, her self-recognition as a revolutionary subject is necessarily a distinct Event.

What we see in New York Chief Justice William Smith, Jr.'s diary entry, announcing unconsciously the beginning of the American Revolution, is the spontaneous interpellation of the people of New York City as revolutionary subjects. Of course, riots and protests had already been taking place by the time actual war arrived, and independence would not be declared for another year. But the arrival of the news from Concord in New York on April 23 clearly set off an unprecedented process.

From an ideological point of view, if we believe Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, these individuals who filled New York's taverns had subsisted for a long time in a state of potential subjectivity--republican ideology implied that at the crucial moment where the collapse of virtue was on the line, the only virtuous act was to take up arms and resist. The communicative act that interpellated them as subjects (the arrival of the news) drew them out of the state of potential revolution towards actual revolt. In short, ideology was realized rather than brought into being--a distinction Althusser leaves unexamined. This in turn allows us to advance beyond his analysis: there can be an infinite number of potential ideologies, waiting for the moment of realization to structure and reproduce their means of production. It also gives us good reason to restore priority to the interpellating Event.

Two unanswered questions remain. First: what role does the public sphere of "print republicanism," and its regulation of communicative activity, play in the interpellation of revolutionary subjects? In some sense the entire republic of letters as it existed in the late colonial period was designed specifically to transmit this exact interpellating act. Surveillance, the republican press' policing of political authority, could function only as a passive guarantee of virtue; the system depended on generating practical virtuous action as well, and so produced a series of false alarms intended to serve an interpellating purpose. This time, for some reason, it succeeded better than the rest. Why?

The other question is provoked by the second half of Smith's statement. The arrival of the news, it seems, did not simply create revolutionary subjects. It also separated the sheep from the goats: the Loyalists (the men mentioned here) from the Patriots. Does that mean that interpellation also has a negative side to it--that an act which for one person is an interpellating "Hey, you!" can foreclose for another the possibility of becoming constituted as a subject? What are the rules, ideological and otherwise, that govern this experience?

The Blank Book of Knowledge

Thus with the Year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine;
But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful wayes of men
Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Nature's works to mee expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
- Milton, Paradise Lost

The Saturnian once more took up the little mites, and Micromegas addressed them again with great kindness, though he was a little disgusted in the bottom of his heart at seeing such infinitely insignificant atoms so puffed up with pride. He promised to give them a rare book of philosophy, written in minute characters, for their special use, telling all that can be known of the ultimate essence of things, and he actually gave them the volume ere his departure. It was carried to Paris and laid before the Academy of Sciences; but when the old secretary came to open it, the pages were blank.

"Ah!" said he. "Just as I expected."
- Voltaire, Micromegas

The opening of the Book of Nature in the seventeenth century is one of the oldest historiographical stories ever told. The early scientists, it says, could preserve a sense of compatibility between theological/philosophical inquiries and their own natural philosophy by presenting their work as a reading of God's other book--the Book of Nature rather than the Bible. There are problems with this story, of course, but it seems indubitable that establishing such a compatibility was a real issue for Galileo, Bacon, and the other early scientific revolutionaries. (assuming there was even a Revolution to begin with).

But what of the blank book? We find in Milton Satan's feigned (?) anguish at being deprived of the reading of the "Book of Universal Knowledge"--at being presented with a blank, erased, substitute. And in Voltaire the book of eternal truths turns out to have been blank. The two authors use the image for different reasons: Milton, to show the darkness and ignorance that descends upon him who is deprived of the light of God, and Voltaire perhaps to make fun of philosophers and theologians (with their "Vain Wisdom," also a target of Milton's). In short, it's not the same book.

The image itself, however, plays the same role: it is fundamentally a statement of a kind of methodological skepticism or relativism. The premise of the Book of Nature is that it can be read reliably--that

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Like the Scripture, the Book of Nature is fixed and infallible, and thus provides a guarantee of epistemic certainty to the scientist/reader. And likewise, a book handed down from on high and purported to contain all the eternal verities would in itself be a guarantee of those verities, the long-lost source for absolute truth.

The blankness of the book exposes its unreliability. If some sleight of hand can substitute blank, erased pages for the genuine article, the Book of Nature can no longer be trusted--absent a direct divine intervention, the epistemological gaze is permanently occluded. And just as the existence of the book of eternal verities guarantees them, its blankness (of course) means no such verities exist. The erasure of the book of knowledge is a dramatization of the disappearance or at least the elusiveness of the object of study.

Thus the implications of this image could have opened up a fruitful debate in the eighteenth century--a connection between the continuing project of science and the increasingly sophisticated literary formalisms being worked out and debated at the time. It could have spawned a study of hermeneutics well before its twentieth-century revival. But the gradual disappearance of any real use of the Book of Nature as a grounding justification for science, after its rivals ceased to matter, precluded any serious discussion of the rhetorical roots of the scientific enterprise. Already in Milton's time the Book of Nature had the faintly musty smell of old leather bindings.

Yves Bonnefoy: The Naming of the Dead

Quel est le lieu des morts,
Ont-ils droit comme nous à des chemins,
Parlent-ils, plus réels étant leurs mots,
Sont-ils l’esprit des feuillages ou des feuillages plus hauts ?

Phénix a-t’il construit pour eux un château,
Dressé pour eux une table ?
Le cri de quelque oiseau dans le feu de quelque arbre
Est-il l’espace où ils se pressent tous ?

Peut-être gisent-ils dans la feuille du lierre,
Leur parole défaite
Etant le port de la déchirure des feuilles, où la nuit vient.
- Yves Bonnefoy, "Le lieu des morts"

What are we to make of Yves Bonnefoy's poems? I have maybe perceived nothing at all of his meaning, with my meager French skills. But even the most careful reading brings little clarity: the poems seem to assemble a series of juxtapositions, of broken gestures and an eternally absent Toi. (Perhaps it is the same "you" to whom I always seem to address my own doggerel.) It is not difficult to detect a concern with speaking, with the appearance and disappearance of a voice, and with the unreachably distant but unimaginably powerful word. Bonnefoy might be to Derrida what Kafka was to Foucault.

His 1965 Pierre écrite is thus particularly interesting. My conjecture is that it is a kind of homage to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology: a travelogue to the places of the dead, where written stones, tombstones, announce each its own unenviable and incomprehensible fate. But Bonnefoy's approach marks a definite departure. For Masters, the name is a vital index to the person; the degraded tissue of Spoon River's communal life is woven out of references to names, each tomb/poem serving as the unimpeachable guarantee of its occupant's existence and right to a voice. Together, these links between name and identity allow the poet's world to exist.

For Bonnefoy, there are no names. Of all the words he uses to denote aspects of language (langage, parole, voix...), nom is the one he treats with the most care. We can see this especially in his first book, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve:

Je nommerai désert ce château due tu fus,
Nuit cette voix, absence ton visage,
Et quand tu tomberas dans la terre stérile
Je nommerai néant l’éclair qui t’a porté ...

Je te nommerai guerre et je prendrai
Sur toi les libertés de la guerre ...
- "Vrai nom"

And when the name is said with emphasis, it carries a special kind of seriousness:

A chaque instant je te vois naitre, Douve.

A chaque instant mourir.
- "Theatre," IV

In Pierre écrite, Bonnefoy names no names, except the distant and disappeared Jean et Jeanne--the name of a house, even, not a person. One of his nameless stones describes a voyage--towards death?:

Au centre de la lumière, j'abolis
D'abord ma tête crevassée par le gaz
Mon nom ensuite avec tous pays,
Mes maines seules droites persistent.

En tète du cortège je suis tombé
Sans dieu, sans voix audible, sans péché,
Bête trinitaire criante.

Death is an abolition of the name, just as it is a renunciation of the audible voice. The stones are nameless, maybe, because they no longer have the right to a name, or the right to name. They are dead, fixed versions of the "Une voix" that appears throughout Bonnefoy's poetry. Is it his own voice? It never seems to speak from the same point of view; sometimes it is almost Proustian, as at the end of Pierre écrite, sometimes it is impassioned and bursting with vocatives. It seems always to be just coming into being, the text having caught it at the cusp of apparition. The stones have lost this quality, they always look back to death, they only speak in the many past tenses of the French language. Pierre écrite, the written stone: is it not also, in some sense, a petrified or petrifying voice turned into writing ("always already," in the now-tacky idiom)?

Both "Lieu des morts" and the concluding narration of the voice emphasize one word: "feuille," or "feuillage." Leaf or foliage, yes; but also sheets of paper. The dead, with their "parole défaite," are condemned to rest upon the fallen leaves of writing. Bonnefoy always paints trees in his poems, almost as protagonists, and thus he must perceive the destiny of the doomed voice. It gets older, more petrified, inevitably. But was there ever a moment when it had yet not fallen? Would it ever even gain its name?

The Layers of the Onion

That was how Howard Cordle viewed the situation. He was a pleasant man who was forever being pushed around by Fuller Brush men, fund solicitors, headwaiters, and other imposing figures of authority. Cordle hated it. He suffered in silence the countless numbers of manic-aggressives who shoved their way to the heads of lines, took taxis he had hailed first and sneeringly steered away girls to whom he was talking at parties.

What made it worse was that these people seemed to welcome provocation, to go looking for it, all for the sake of causing discomfort to others.

Cordle couldn't understand why this should be, until one midsummer's day, when he was driving through the northern regions of Spain while stoned out of his mind, the god Thoth-Hermes granted him original enlightenment by murmuring, "Uh, look, I groove with the problem, baby, but dig, we gotta put carrots in or it ain't no stew."

- Robert Sheckley, "Cordle to Onion to Carrot"

Can an onion become a carrot? Sheckley says yes. Timshel! You are not bound to your personality type; your individuality cannot be restricted by metaphysical (or culinary) categories. You have the ability, maybe even the obligation, to reshape yourself. But is that really possible? What might denying this ability mean for us?

One attempt at a counter-argument can be found in John Le Carré's under-appreciated novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover (unknown probably because there aren't any spies involved). Briefly, the plot concerns a middle-aged Babbitt-type businessman who encounters a wild Byron/Shelley figure--a Romantic poet aesthete with an odd taste in dress and an immodest but attractive female companion (the occasion for some fairly unpleasant "hippie chicks are all sluts"-style stereotyping). The businessman stays with the couple for a long time, experiences rising action, climax, and falling action, ultimately hoping to tear himself away from his comfortable bourgeois mindset and lifestyle--but by the end of the book finds himself unable to do so. No matter how hard he tries, he remains safe, self-protective, bourgeois. Portnoy's Complaint.

The parallelism between onions and bourgeois, or carrots and aesthetes, is hardly perfect. One particularly relevant difference: Sheckley's story shows that, Thoth-Hermes's lysergic rhetoric notwithstanding, carrothood and oniondom are not categories of subjects. They're categories of behavior. Le Carré's novel, on the other hand, paints bourgeois and aesthetes as identities indispensable to his characters' subjectivity--identities so stable as to be unaffected by behavior. In other words, Cordle may remain an onion at heart despite his ability to change himself at will; who but an onion would want to escape his natural vegetable status?

But of course it's not so simple. Behavior isn't just an epiphenomenon of subjectivity: it also interacts with it. In fact, what is happening for Cordle is that his behavior, liberated by his stoned enlightenment, is coming into conflict with his inner onion. He has not one identity, but two or more conflicting ones, and he does not experience this as a problem. For Le Carré, on the other hand, the conflict of identity--the impossibility of resolving the dispute between inner bourgeois and outer aesthete harmoniously--is treated as a wound, as a primal trauma curable by no treatment other than the renunciation of self-transforming agency entirely.

Neither author in fact gets it quite right. Sheckley neglects the real pain, the psychological dark night of the soul that accompanies the schiz between subjectivity and behavior (in another version, public and private identity). But Le Carré's error goes deeper. In depicting the protagonist's failure and return to bourgeois identity, Le Carré posits that return as a place where all conflict between subjectivity and behavior is swept away, successfully healed. The memories and desires of the aesthetic life still crop up, but the fundamental conflict is no longer a problem.

That resolution is misguided. There is always a conflict between subjectivity and behavior; the two can never quite act in tandem because they are very different things at the core. If no transformation of the subjectivity is possible, the only way to enable a transformation of behavior (and thus of one aspect of identity) is by changing the way one looks at this conflict. Self-betrayal may be perpetual and inevitable; let us at least make sure it is productive.