At Least It's An Ethos

"As long as you're a reflector, a melancholiac," [Nezhdanov] whispered again [to himself], "What kind of a damn revolutionary do you think you are? Write your little poems, go sour, fuss around with your petty little thoughts and feelings, root around in your puny psychological subtilities and musings, but most importantly--don't take your sickly nervous caprices and annoyances for manly indignation, for the righteous wrath of a man with convictions! Oh, Hamlet, Hamlet, you Danish prince, how to come out from under your shadow? How to stop imitating you in everything, even in the shameful pleasure of self-flagellation?"

[...]

"Solomin!," Paklin exclaimed, "He's got it. He made out very well. Abandoned his old factory, took the best men with him. There was one guy there...good head on his shoulders, they say! Pavel was his name...he took him too. They say he's got his own factory now, a small one, somewhere in Perm', run on some kind of cooperative principles. This one won't abandon his task! He'll break through! He's got a subtle beak, and a strong one too. He's got it! The main thing: he's not an instant healer of societal ills. Because what kind of people are we, we Russians? We keep waiting, thinking that something or someone will show up all of a sudden and cure us in one moment, close our wounds, rip out our diseases like a sick tooth. Who's this conjurer going to be? Darwinism? Rural life? Arkhip Perepentyev? A foreign war? Whatever you like! Just rip out the tooth, man! This is all just laziness, listlessness, thoughtlessness. Solomin isn't like that! No, he doesn't pull teeth--he knows what he's doing!"
- Ivan Turgenev, Nov' (The New-Plowed Field)

Turgenev's brilliance is of a particularly Nietzschean kind: he makes the political personal. Even Dostoevsky often succumbed to the temptation to make his characters mere stand-ins for a particular philosophical or political position. At his best, he resists this tendency, but there are moments throughout his work when personal struggle turns bloodless and abstract. Turgenev's strategy is always the opposite: his characters want desperately to be taken as abstractions, as ideal revolutionaries or conservatives of one kind or another. He never lets them. Their personal weaknesses and conflicts always intervene, bringing out the flesh-and-blood pathos of the ridiculous. In the process, Turgenev makes clear one central fact--that the ideals and principles that guide his heroes are not pregiven forms disturbed in various ways by their foibles, but rather are themselves constructs, emergency fortifications thrown up against the onslaught of personal failure.

In particular, Turgenev's account of the revolutionaries in Nov' is a neat way of putting an end to the Badiouian debate about revolution. Here, the fact that it is an uncaused cause does not produce any theoretical advantage, however hazy; rather, the significance accorded to this transcendent moment is nothing but a massive collective projection, a way of avoiding confrontation with personal weakness. Nezhdanov is a particularly poignant figure, because he senses his failure all too acutely. Hamlet, of course, is the image of indecision--and the image of the revolution, however insubstantial, is the straw that enables Nezhdanov to avoid his fate. The revolution has no connection with real-life events, and the people in whose name it is being prepared are much more eager to embrace reaction; the pitiful revolutionaries in the novel constantly, feverishly search for a reason to act, but reality always defeats them. We may read this as the source of a Badiouian Truth. But Turgenev, like Nietzsche, won't let us. The will to revolutionary truth is only the expression of a cowering and slavish personality.

Bazarov, the antihero of Fathers and Sons, thus appears in an especially interesting light. Turgenev's radical contemporaries criticized him for having portrayed a crude "nihilist" caricature. In fact, he seems to have done precisely the opposite. Bazarov is a much stronger man than Nezhdanov, because he acknowledges no abstractions. There are dissected frogs, but there is no such thing as Science in itself. There is a kind of praxis, but there is no theory--no Liberalism, no Progress, no Revolution. In his stubborn need to take the world as it appears to him, without "romanticism," Bazarov avoids the projective confusions between personal and political that prove to be the undoing of the characters in Nov'. He is credible only because he believes in nothing.

But of course Bazarov cannot deny the authority of death. What does that make of his resistance to abstraction? On the one hand, it vindicates him: he faces death without cowardice or anxiety, as the ultimate concrete sensation. On the other, it seems to give abstraction free rein, for nothing else is left if Bazarov's freedom is ultimately unrealizable. In neither case, however, can the belief in revolution be seriously maintained. We can pretend to believe it--but only as a futile bulwark between ourselves and the ultimate nihilism of death.

Rousseauism as Tragedy

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase [of Chopin's] rose up in my memory. I simply couldn't get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution. Was that what travel meant? An exploration of the deserts of memory, rather than of those around me? One afternoon, when the overwhelming heat sent a hush of sleep over the encampment, I was squatting in my hammock, protected from the pests, as they are called over there, by the mosquito-net whose narrow weave made it even more difficult to breathe.Suddenly I realized that the problems which tormented me would make a good subject for a play. I imagined it as clearly as if it had already been written. The Indians had disappeared; for six days I wrote from morning till night on the backs of sheets covered with lists of words, and sketches, and genealogies. After which my inspiration left me in the very middle of my work. It has never returned, and when I reread what I had scribbled down I don't think it was much to be sorry about.

My play was called The Apotheosis of Augustus and was, in effect, a new version of Corneille's Cinna. In it I put on the stage two men who had been friends in childhood and re-met at a moment of crisis in both their very different careers. The one had opted, as he thought, against civilization, only to find that he was heading back towards it by a very complicated route and had destroyed, in so doing, the sense and the value of the alternative which he had supposed to be his concern. The other had been marked out from birth for the world and its honours, only to find that all his efforts had tended towards the abolition of that world and those honours. Each sought, therefore, to destroy the other, and in so doing to save, even at the price of his own death, the significance of what had gone before.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Tristes Tropiques is an extraordinary book, because it manages to produce both deep insight and equally profound disappointment. By the thirty-eighth chapter (of a different edition), when the anthropologist has finally begun to directly confront the sublime failure of his enterprise, the captivated reader is ready to surrender all of his other literary loyalties. By the fortieth, rapture has already become banality, never to be redeemed. These closing chapters, with their drastic shift in mise-en-scène, are filled with nothing but trite ejaculations about the brutishness of Muslims and our supposed duties to the economically oppressed; if it wasn't for the equally trite condemnation of our own rationalistic society as quasi-Muslim and therefore bad, the whole section would reek of 1860.

No, the really interesting bit is what comes through as Lévi-Strauss describes his doomed play. What he seems to have discovered is that, in heading off into the wild to look for the most authentic expressions of human society, he has driven himself imperceptibly back to the most inauthentic and trivial memories of civilization. Derrida's brilliance is in picking out the one or two spots where the surface of this text is thin enough that the logic of the supplement can emerge. But, in fact, that is only the beginning. In the thirty-eighth chapter, Lévi-Strauss justifies the book's project as follows: Rousseau never idealized the natural man or believed that such a one could actually exist. Rather, he believed that society was inevitable but also necessitated certain evils. His goal was to pare away the evils caused by society alone, so that society could answer to the many virtues of natural man. The goal--both Lévi-Strauss's and Rousseau's--then becomes discovering the outlines of the natural man within society.

This effort suffers from an obvious and gaping flaw--namely, that we would not be able to recognize the natural man if we saw him, because our very means for recognizing him are based on socially-constructed signifying systems. (For instance, it seems clear that nakedness means naturalness. But why? Is the natural man not to be permitted the use of his tool-making instinct?) By the time Lévi-Strauss is reduced to humming Chopin in the wilderness, it is clear that his project has been a failure. Everywhere social man obscures natural man; even among the Nambikwara the anthropologist's insistence on their primitivism belies the existence of a distinct and real culture. It is at this moment of crisis that Lévi-Strauss begins writing his play.

Notice, however, what the play actually suggests. Both main characters are within reach of pure nature; one of them has just left it, to follow a trajectory back to society, while the other is about to attain it. The moral anguish that descends upon them is, in broad outline, irrelevant. What Lévi-Strauss has really done is taken his actual dilemma (that he never managed to reach pure nature) and avoided it by writing a play (which assumes that pure nature is reachable and draws conclusions on that basis). His concluding ethical fulminations, in other words, are just a screen concealing a deeper and more insoluble problem.

But Lévi-Strauss is not alone here. Rousseau, his distant comrade and explicit forerunner, took the same way out. What happens in Emile when the natural logic of the pupil's maturation is not enough to sustain the moral narrative? There is only one solution: to write a play. When Emile (in the form of another pupil) refuses to be naturally obedient, Rousseau constructs an elaborate farce wherein the child is falsely made to believe he is exploring the world of his own accord. When the pupil is fat and unmotivated, Rousseau invents a game where he races to earn his cake--but Rousseau himself is pulling the strings the whole time. The story of the Savoyard vicar, as a setpiece literally inserted into the text, is simply a more complex version of the same technique. In other words, even as Rousseau preaches up the virtues of a natural, free, and authentic education, he is constantly substituting for it a system of artifices that alone permit the hollow ideal to be sustained.

On one level, this set of examples serves only to show in greater relief the fundamental bankruptcy of all philosophical oppositions of the type "authentic/inauthentic." But it can also help us see how integral self-deception seems to be to any presentation of a moral problematic. Here, it is rather explicit--but almost any other moral argument must also depend upon a question that remains unasked or concealed behind it, one that the writer himself is never quite able to contemplate.

Persistence

To make a long story short, the company broke up, and returned to the more important concerns of the election. Rip’s daughter took him home to live with her; she had a snug, well-furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for a husband, whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon his back. As to Rip’s son and heir, who was the ditto of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to anything else but his business.

Rip now resumed his old walks and habits; he soon found many of his former cronies, though all rather the worse for the wear and tear of time; and preferred making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor.

Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can do nothing with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench, at the inn door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times “before the war.” It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty, George III., he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government; happily, that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes; which might pass either for an expression of resignation to his fate, or joy at his deliverance.
- Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle"

The other night I watched Oblomok imperii (Fragment of the Empire) one of the best early Soviet movies I think I've ever seen. The plot, in broad outline, follows that of "Rip Van Winkle": a shellshocked soldier from the First World War suddenly comes to in 1928, having missed both revolutions and the first ten years of Soviet rule. Hilarity ensues as he gradually becomes acclimated to the new conditions and transforms into a zealous Communist activist (a notable departure from Irving). I disagree with Owen Hatherley's view, at the link, that this film is somehow not a straightforward piece of propaganda: one of the things a proper propaganda film should do is point out the work that needs to be done, and this one clearly singles out the workplace alcoholic and the petty-bourgeois bureaucrat as populations that must be liquidated.

At any rate, what is most interesting about Oblomok is the proximity of its context as well as its content to "Rip Van Winkle." Both works were set and created in the midst of a post-revolutionary era, when the excitement of the initial stages had given way to a deeper reflection about the changes that had taken place. By simply deleting the Revolution from the experience of the protagonist, they enable themselves to pose critical questions: what has happened? Is our new world substantially different from the old? Is the discontinuity of
experience somehow uniquely problematic when it encompasses this particular period?

In the case of "Rip Van Winkle," the answers to these questions are highly ambiguous. Certainly the symbolic tissue of social life has changed: the portrait of George III has been taken down, Federals and Democrats have replaced the old political factions. But for Rip himself, the only significant difference is the fact that his nagging wife is gone. He returns calmly to his old habits, and the villagers live their lives in much the same way as before. Irving's unstated conclusion is that the Revolution was a fundamentally superficial experience, powerless to transform the deeper dynamics of human nature. It is as if Rip had never really gone to sleep at all.

Oblomok, with its explicitly ideological orientation, must seemingly take the opposite tack. To be sure, the world is 1928 is a much "newer" one than that of the 1790s. Social institutions, and even the experience of urban life itself, have been irrevocably transformed. But in fact the film undermines its own message (perhaps intentionally). Village life, for instance, is much the same, so much so that it is only a glimpse of his wife in a passing train that permits the protagonist to recover consciousness. (Ironically, the film was released in the midst of the vast changes in Russian rural life attendant upon collectivization and de-kulakization.) But more importantly, even the urban landscape is littered with "fragments of the Empire" like the ruined former factory owner. The main antagonist, a bureaucratic crypto-bourgeois cultural official, is not much different from the Tsarist exploiters. As presented, the film is certainly propaganda, but nonetheless it almost manages to echo Irving: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

There is something about this "genre," then, that privileges the cyclical over the linear. The Revolution, it suggests, prevents us from seeing that the new world is nothing but a rebadged version of the old; this makes it, in a certain sense, anti-revolutionary. The crucial difference between "Rip Van Winkle" and Oblomok imperii is in their evaluative tone. Rip's life continues as before, and for Irving that is just as well. Tsarist power relations persist, and in Oblomok this translates into a kind of anxiety--a feverish desire to push the Revolution forward, to sweep away the remaining fragments of the Empire. With its propagandistic impulses, the film ignores the most potent question: can revolution ever keep its promises?

Lenin in April

I did not arrive in Petrograd until the night of April 3, and therefore at the meeting on April 4, I could, of course, deliver the report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat only on my own behalf, and with reservations as to insufficient preparation. The only thing I could do to make things easier for myself—and for honest opponents—was to prepare the theses in writing. I read them out, and gave the text to Comrade Tsereteli. I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. I publish these personal theses of mine with only the briefest explanatory notes, which were developed in far greater detail in the report ...

I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible. And the view is attributed to me that I am opposed to the speedy convocation of the Constituent Assembly! I would call this “raving”, had not decades of political struggle taught me to regard honesty in opponents as a rare exception. Mr. Plekhanov in his paper called my speech “raving”. Very good, Mr. Plekhanov! But look how awkward, uncouth and slow-witted you are in your polemics. If I delivered a raving speech for two hours, how is it that an audience of hundreds tolerated this “raving”? Further, why does your paper devote a whole column to an account of the “raving”? Inconsistent, highly inconsistent!
- Lenin, "April Theses"

About a month ago, I went to a lecture given by Alain Badiou in New York. It was just after Obama's election, and Badiou (who was preceded by a horrifyingly incomprehensible Lacanian yenta) made a point of insisting that this triumph of democratic ideology was merely a "fact," not an "Event." An Event is something like an uncaused cause: it disturbs the familiar sequence of political "facts" and generates its own Truth. Badiou is a sentimental and ineffectual Marxist in the finest French tradition. Thus it is the various revolutions that are for him the most exemplary forms of Event. And of these, the most prominent is October--which, unlike May, enjoyed at least some sort of success.

But was October really an uncaused cause? Did it really erupt unannounced and unpredicted in the midst of a "normal" politics? This question has acquired a theoretical importance far out of proportion to its historical meaning. Zizek, who wants us to carpe the democratic-liberal diem, thinks that it was--that Lenin exerted a kind of Schmittian willpower in breaking the Russian status quo. Althusser, in describing overdetermination, seems to hold the opposite position. The resolution of this problem is infinitely deferred, since it is clear that history has little to do with it; the whole debate is simply an expression of the cowardice of cringing Western Marxists, who want to be reassured that a new Big Daddy Lenin could singlehandedly revive the flagging hope for revolution in the West.

Naturally, any movement away from seeing revolution as determined and towards Badiouian Event-ism is inherently a departure from orthodox Marxism. It is an understandable departure, for the opposite would have meant the paralysis of the German Twenties: the belief that the historical process would take care of capitalism all by itself and no individual agency was really necessary. The conciliatory dialectical cop-out solution was to identify the agency of the Party with the historical process itself; this was doubtless what Marx had actually believed, but it was too elegant for its own good and never quite resolved the underlying issues. (In fact, the parameters of this debate very much resemble classical arguments over Stoic determinism--there, the unsatisfactory solution was to identify the agency of God with the agency of Man as an inalienable part of the divine.)

What Zizek, Badiou, and their undead brethren really want is a mystical, apocalyptic experience. Even outside the inhospitable climate of Marxism, this poses a peculiar dilemma: when did October really start to take place? It did not start in October, because October was intimately linked to the failed Bonapartist Kornilov coup in August; it did not start in August, because the July Days had already prefigured and made realistic the possiblity of an armed uprising; and it did not start in July, because July would not have happened without the April Theses. The April Theses, however, were anything but historically uncaused. They were rooted in Lenin's intractable desire for personal authority, his compulsion to impose a sectarian individual will on the Party hierarchy, and his need to reestablish his credibility after his suspect sealed-train return from Germany. By substituting a Leninist/anarchist voluntarism for an orthodox Marxist passivity, the Badiou crowd only replaces social agency with individual agency (even if there had been many individuals). This can resolve into nothing other than the fascist (Schmittian) aestheticization of politics.

There is nothing in itself objectionable about this. But it does entail the recognition that the values in whose name Badiou always speaks (the old French lie of "equality," for instance) can in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with their model of Event or revolution. If (a big If) October was really an uncaused cause, Lenin's rejection of the status quo must have been a supreme act of individual sovereignty, which used such values only as a thin and disposable screen. October, like the fascist coups, could only ignore the present.

Ъ: What's So Hard About the Hard Sign?

I love this, I'm charmed by this constant joy, even though I feel a chill in my heart, I love the resourcefulness of the word. In a society like this I never hide the fact that I'm a writer, just the opposite--I try to communicate this as soon as I can, to make myself part of the group, and I don't mind writing down the materials of life when I need to.

"What do you need those swamp boots for?"

"We live in a swamp," I reply, "and swamps are crossed in swamp boots."

"Hey, look at you, a writer, always with some kind of twist. Why don't you go write a complaint from the Russian people, about why they destroyed the three best-loved letters: the yatt, the phita, and the hard sign."

"What are they best-loved for?"

"They give liberty to the word: you can put the letter down, or not--the meaning is the same either way, but it's as if it's lighter and curlier ... Yeah, they abolished three light letters, and gave us three hard ones."

"Which hard ones?"

"The bad letters: G, P, U."
- from the diaries of M. M. Prishvin, 1923

On a recent post at the Varieties, I made an offhand comment about Russian spelling reform, where I noted that the Soviets had abolished the silent and meaningless "yer" (Ъ) and thereby saved countless trees. (Only to waste them again printing indictments in counterrevolution cases. What was the point?) But I don't think I was quite right. The Ъ--and I am speaking here of the pre-revolutionary terminal Ъ, which is now called the "hard sign" and used in a much smaller number of cases--is not meaningless, not anymore. It has transcended the realm of the linguistic and entered that of the political.

Originally, in the olden days, Ъ sounded roughly like a schwa, a usage which is preserved in modern Bulgarian. As modern Russian evolved, however, Ъ ceased to represent any sound at all, except for modifying vowel sounds between certain roots and prefixes. The terminal ъ, which belonged at the end of all words not ending in а vowel, а ь, or а й, remained as a parasite letter, signifying nothing, occupying millions of pages of space. Already in the nineteenth century reforms began to be suggested, but these made little headway. (Other, even more useless, letters were abolished in the second half of the century). It took the Revolution to excise this hanger-on from the language. In power for barely three months, the Soviets carried out a comprehensive spelling reform aimed at destroying useless letters and thus increasing mass access to reading and writing (since it took a high-quality education to be able to distinguish the rules for one useless letter from its identical counterpart).

It is here that the story gets interesting. As the spelling reform went underway, stubborn reactionary printers continued to use the terminal Ъ as a way of signaling protest against the regime. The Red Guards responded by forcibly seizing all existing stocks of the glyph; of course, that meant that even the meaningful non-terminal Ъ could not be printed, and for several years it was replaced by an apostrophe. (I am always tempted to read texts printed in this style as if they were written in some kind of Leninesque Jewish accent.) The Whites, naturally, continued to use the old orthography. In fact, it became a sort of banner for everything that had been good and true and pious about Imperial Russia, as if some eighteenth-century holdout in Victorian Britain had stubbornly kept using the long S.

So the hard sign isn't meaningless after all: it has a concrete and specific system of referents, and it is seen as a highly charged token of ideological politics. But in order to achieve this referentiality, the terminal Ъ had first to be abolished as a practical linguistic signifier. It thereby short-circuited Barthes' three-fold system of mythological signification (signifier, denotation, connotation); it could only acquire a connotation because it lacked a denotation. Once it acquired one, however, there was no going back. The Communist apostrophe, which denoted the same thing as the non-terminal Ъ, could not but connote the permanent and continually reinforced absence of the terminal. The Revolution did not destroy the Ъ. It gave
it self-transcendence and filled it with more meaning than it had had for hundreds of years.

In post-Soviet Russia, the terminal Ъ is likely to be seen only on the cover of the well-known business daily Коммерсантъ (which sees itself as the successor of an identically-titled pre-revolutionary paper). But there is also a group of people whose goal is to revive the old orthography, a standpoint obviously linked to all sorts of monarchist ideas about the nature of the social order. The political meaning of the Ъ spells the doom of this reformist project. What these reactionaries really want is a return to Tsarism, where all ideologies spoke the same language, where the Ъ was still meaningless. And that, of course, is no longer possible.

Truth and the Woman

Mr. De Speculo,

I little expected that a man of your character would censure the ladies unheard. Reflect on your 3rd number, and confess that you have deservedly drawn upon you the resentment of the fair sex. Your age may indeed exempt you from the immediate mischiefs of their charms, but remember that those charms can arm a number of heroes, who will bravely use the tongue or pen in our defense.

You accuse us of encouraging fops, and despising men of letters; but sure Sir, a little consideration might have convinced you that we were entirely blameless on that head. Our pride alone (to say nothing of our judgments) would induce us to prefer men of sense and education, to ignorant coxcombs, did men of sense and education divest themselves of those narrow opinions of our sex, that they contract by adopting the sentiments of musty authors, who without any acquaintance with women, detract from their charms, as debauchees do from the joys of heaven: because they can never hope to partake of them.--As the wit of a college consists in repeating the severities of scholastick authors, when your learned gentlemen throw off the gown, they come into the world disposed to laugh at every thing that differs from what they have been used to; if they have wit, they are such cross-grained blunt creatures, that one cannot speak to them with impunity; if not, they are such silent aukward bashful animals, or so ignorant of the most common occurrences and modes of expression, that they can afford no entertainment to those that are not acquainted with the sciences which they have made their particular study.

I remember my Papa got me once to take an airing with a young gentleman, who was in high repute at college. We rode a long time without speaking; at length the carriage passing over a bridge, he told me with an important face, and after hemming twice, that this was not the first bridge he had travelled over, but that he had safely passed the pons asinorum, (I think he called it) which he said was in English, the ass's bridge, tho' most of his class-mates fell thro'; I replied with a great deal of innocence, that I hoped none of them were drowned; on which he laughed at my ignorance, and began to talk of triangles, and other such things that I knew nothing about, till we returned home. Men of this cast, look upon politeness as deceit, and make no pains to please, how then can they expect that we should be pleased? The behaviour of those whom you call Fops, is just the reverse of this. Educated generally under the eye of a kind mama, their first study is to render themselves agreeable to a woman; they ever remember the respect that is due to our sex; they learn our tempers, flatter our passions, attend our call, wait at our coaches, and in short, do us every good office in their power. Gratitude obliges us to shew them some respect; for this I am sure no reasonable man will blame us ...
- from a letter signed "Laura," printed in the New-York Journal for January 4, 1768

"Laura" does an interesting thing here. At the very outset, she renounces her agency, her very right to a voice: the Journal's columnist should fear that he will offend men into writing on her behalf. But as the letter unfolds, it becomes clear that she is very well capable of speaking for herself. On one level, of course, her observations echo our contemporary experience of gender relations (the truism that women prefer promiscuous jerks to poor, mistreated sensitive intellectuals). But on another, Laura's response to this position is both coherent and compelling; it is, in fact, an approach worthy of being emulated even today.

The charge that women spurn intellectuals in favor of dissolute assholes is intimately linked to the imputation that women are superficial. That is to say, the downtrodden intello is assumed to have an unprepossessing exterior matched by a strong, caring, and morally upright soul. With the jerk or the fop, the case is just the supposedly just the opposite. Of course, in reality there is no necessary correlation between being smart or socially-inept and being in any way moral. As Laura suggests, with a Freudian smirk, there are as many docile and caring mama's boys among the fops as there are amoral seducers. She is almost a deconstructionist here: "De Speculo" accuses women of superficiality, but Laura points out that it is he who refuses to look beyond appearances--for lack of pretense is certainly another kind of appearance.

The strongest prong of her argument is the suggestion that whether intellos do or do not p0ssess great and wise souls is simply a meaningless question. At some point the intello must express himself, engage in some way with the external world. In the eighteenth century, the most accepted means of doing so was witty, sociable banter. And the intello does try to engage, failing miserably at it. Laura's judgment is thus as rigorous and searching as any logical refutation: what she is testing is simply the intello's ability to craft wit in an unfamiliar context. Judged and found wanting, the intellos arrogantly assert that they were evaluated on the wrong criteria. But they can never provide a reason or a basis for this position--as far as Laura is concerned, "external" behavior is much more relevant than any "internal" nobility!

I noticed an article in Slate today, about the tragic marriage of etiquette-diva Emily Post:

She had been stripped of the identity [of wife], but she was determined to keep playing the role.

And the flawless performance of roles is a pretty good definition of etiquette. Mrs. Post said over and over that "character" mattered far more than "trivialities of deportment" when it came to correct manners. Yet she kept faith with traditional social hierarchies as if her life depended on them, which it probably did. She was so companionable with her maid, for instance, that they used to go to the movies together, arm in arm, then out for ice cream. But at dinnertime, Hilda ate in the servants' quarters, and Mrs. Post sat at the dining table alone.

For the writer of this piece, and for most contemporary therapeutic discourse, Mrs. Post's flight into etiquette is a kind of cowardly sublimation pursued at the expense of facing up to her own demons. Surely this is nonsense. What would Emily Post have been if she had never embraced the external? Just another rich Chappaqua housewife, drowning her all-too-authentically-experienced sorrows in gin and vermouth? Etiquette, with its endlessly variegated play of symbols and façades, gave her a genuinely meaningful world.

The same cannot be said for the frustrated intello. He is, of course, Nietzsche's philosopher--endlessly chasing truth, hoping to get his grubby hands all over its soft white body, but always foiled by his own ineptitude. He can never achieve what he seeks--the perfect correspondence between outside and inside--without operating on the outside's terms. Laura's suitor becomes as superficial as he is ineffectual: to talk ponderously of the pons asinorum is nothing but an attempt to present the appearance of learning. Where's the true learning, and where the appearance? Who's superficial now? Both Laura and the intello? One of them? Neither? These questions can only be the product of a slightly dull and certainly sick mind.