Grossly Ignorant and Rude

Mr. Brush being in the Chair, the House, according to the Order of the Day, proceeded to the Consideration of the Bill, for dividing Orange County, whereupon J---n D N----s, Esq; delivered himself as follows.
"Mr. Chairman,
If any Weight is to be given to de Number of Petitioners, I beg dot dese may be added--and den I shall say a few Words to de Committee. Gentlemen--dis Bill is not a new Matter, but it has been a great while in Agitation--Dis five Year ago,--ever since I had de Honor to be a Member of dis Ouse, I moved for dis Bill because I taught it would be for de Advantage of my Constituents, and--indeed for de County in general. Wen I first moved for dis Bill, dere was a Petition for a Coppee of dot Bill--and it was granted dem. Now for de Use dot has been made of dot Bill to get People to sign Petitions against it, I am sure it was a Mistake in dot Bill--because I know it was my Opinion, and I believe de Sentiments dis Ouse, dot a West Line would split de Mountains; for I am sure dot Bill was to split de Mountains--and we taught it would split de Mountains.--But dere was a Mistake, for now a Sou West Line will do better in the Course of dem Mountains; and dis Copy of de Bill was made Use of to get People to sign dem Petitions--and dat was a very artful Petition too--because dey made de People believe dat dis Line would cut off a great many Poor, and some oder Folks. I come here as de Representative of dot County, for de Good of de Pooblic. For my Part I have no Business to run about wid Petitions to get People to sign about a Ting dot is for de Pooblic-if it was a private Matter, den indeed it would be anoder Ting. But, however---I can assure dis Ouse, or dis Committee, upon my Onor, dot de People of de Countee do desier to have it deevided. For in dot Countee de Representatives have been sent one on de Nort Side, and one on de Sout Side of de Mountains, by Prescription in a Manner, if a Boddee may be allow'd to speak by Comparison--For indeed, I don't know weder Prescription will apply to dis Cuntree; not yet however;--but den it hos been de constant Usage. For de Sout Side was settled first, and was a Countee long before de Nort Side was ennee Countee at all--Indeed de Countee was dere, but den 'tis all de same Ting, dere was no People in it.

...This Effort of genuine attic Eloquence, being performed with that great Vehemence, Energy, and Propriety of Voice and Action, peculiar to himself, and for which he hath obtained so much Reputation and Regard, from those who have Judgment and Spirit to perceive and espouse the true Interest of the Colony.
- from a satirical broadside entitled "Debates on Dividing Orange County" (New York, 1772)

A few months ago, Languagehat linked to an interesting paper by Martin Langeveld about (among other things) the remarkable persistence of the Dutch language in the New York area. Langeveld attributes its survival principally to the fact that it was both deliberately taught to children and used in various social contexts. It is not difficult to agree with this explanation, but it is a curiously non-specific one, and raises the chicken-and-egg question of how a language can be preserved to the point of being usable in the first place. In fact, Langeveld (excusably) misses a crucial dimension of the problem: the socieconomic role and location of the Dutch community in New York.

It has become common to associate any effort at cultural homogenization in America with post-independence nationalism, but in the case of the Dutch this stereotype is incorrect. New York administrations in the early 1700s actually attempted a mild form of cultural genocide against their Dutch subjects, including an effort to restrict the teaching of the Dutch language. (The last chapter of Joyce Goodfriend's Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730 is a fantastic resource on Langeveld's question.) That such a course of action was perceived to be necessary reflects the political significance of ethnicity in colonial New York, which is a complicated and well-studied problem in its own right. What is relevant here, though, is that the Dutch as an ethnocultural grouping became linked to the Dutch as a political and an economic category.

Which brings me to the pamphlet posted above. The specific controversy about the division of Orange County is an uninteresting piece of historical minutia; suffice to say that J---n D N---s is John De Noyellis, member for the county, and that his "speech" in the New York Assembly is given in what is meant to be a Dutch accent. Even if this transcription is fictional, similar forensic masterpieces could not have been uncommon in the Assembly. As Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden wrote in one of his oft-quoted letters,

People think it a fine thing to be a governor. A governor by ---- a Tom Turdman's is a better office than to rake in the dunghill of these peoples vile affections. You know that the assemblies in North America consist generally of a low rank of people who have no generous principles. But it was much worse at that time Several of the assembly were dutch boors grossly ignorant and rude who could neither write or read nor speak English.

(Spelling, punctuation, and bile all sic.)

As the documents make clear, the Dutch were viewed as the NASCAR-loving rednecks of eighteenth-century New York. Despite the fact that many of the province's richest merchants and public figures--for instance, the Rensselaers--were Dutch or of Dutch origin, one hardly ever encounters an English account of the Dutch that doesn't hinge on their rudeness and ignorance. Sir William Johnson, normally a model of intercultural openness, wrote in a 1770 letter to Goldsbrow Banyar that the Dutch "or Men who think themselves such" were too partial and unqualified to sit as judges, "which I think it is high time to remedy, by bringing in, or adding to the Number such English-Men as are best qualified..."

New York's Englishmen were obsessed with the destabilizing potential of ethnic identity. The web of suspicion cast by the alleged black slave conspiracy to burn down the city in 1741 soon expanded to cover the Spanish, as Jill Lepore's wonderful book on the subject details; at various times (principally in the early part of the century) the Indians made an equally threatening appearance. These groups could be so immensely threatening because they were simultaneously outside mainstream white English Protestant society and subversively inside it. The Dutch were another matter. They were distinct, but not menacing. Their economic position made them easy to mock but not to fear--and they helped the educated English population to construct its own self-identity as the opposite of Dutch rudeness and ignorance. Thus the New York political system was, in a sense, invested in the perpetuation of Dutch separateness. Where black or Catholic ethnic self-consciousness had to be eradicated, Dutch self-consciousness was too integral to the structure of the polity to disappear entirely. To an eighteenth-century ear, De Noyellis's claim of speaking for "de Pooblic" would have had a particularly comic ring, since the legitimate voice of the public could have spoken only in educated English.

I would suggest, then, a revision of Langeveld's answer. The persistence of the Dutch in New York was not simply a matter of healthy cultural practices within that community; it was also a curious artifact of the state's early history, which established and perpetuated the Dutch-English opposition as a basic fact of political life. Ethnic cohesion was by no means a given, for the Cortlandts and the Rensselaers show that it was possible to abandon Dutchness almost completely. That not everyone did so suggests that exogenous forces played their part as well.

Smoke and Mirrors

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side--of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process--of lawsuits, treaties, moralists' denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401 said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because "they do not count beside the perverse men."

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fate of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
- Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

This book is renowned, justly, less for its value as a stockpile of quantifiable facts than as a masterpiece of historical storytelling. Lawrence Stone gushes in the blurb that "What Mrs. Tuchman does superbly is tell how it was ... No one has ever done this better." As a historical autodidact and a remarkably felicitious writer, Tuchman has an intuitive grasp on narrative pace and structure; the payoff is that this large book is not only readable but utterly captivating. All this is obvious and not at all insightful, but it leads us to a question which is potentially more interesting: what kind of storyteller is Tuchman, anyway?

A reader who encounters Tuchman's Law in the Foreword would be justified in expecting quite a different book than she is actually presented with. The deeper one gets into the narrative, the more clear it becomes that Tuchman is something of a student of Céline. Instead of the familiar recurrent escalation of conflict, climax, and triumphant resolution, the book relies on an unending pileup of miseries and defeats, the vain efforts of the knightly protagonists generally bringing death and ruin rather than reconstruction. Plagues and futile battles are painted in lovingly lurid colors, every decapitation and plague boil serving as another notch marking the fourteenth century's descent into Hell. Not that this is a bad thing: we have enough boring histories of well-governed states already. In fact, Tuchman's very relentlessness is what brings the age most vividly to life.

Still, no historian who formulates a Law like Tuchman's can avoid confronting such a glaring performative contradiction. With her, the confrontation takes place on the level of character. Although she announces at the outset that Enguerrand VII, Baron of Coucy, is her central hero, in reality there are two. The other is the poet Eustache Deschamps, an untiring scourge of chivalric pretensions and an exposer of public calamities. It is Deschamps who speaks from Tuchman's own position. He invariably turns up at embarrassing moments for the French aristocracy and offers his--and Tuchman's--reader a caustic epigram or an outraged verse. Though his biography remains static, he can be relied on as a stable source of cynical self-criticism for the medieval world.

Coucy is his foil. Here Tuchman might be accused of being excessively partial towards her subject; he is always wise when everyone else is foolish, businesslike when others are frivolous, firm when the rest are flighty. It is clear why it must be thus. Where Deschamps represents the late-medieval world as it was, Coucy is what it could have been: prudent, well-managed, less pompously chivalrous and more tolerant and pragmatic. The conclusion of his life's arc, sad demise in the aftermath of a fruitless holy war, reads like a damning indictment of the inability of that world to reform itself. Deschamps doesn't need to be developed as a character, because his position remains as true as ever; Coucy must be brought down to show how unreformable the age really was.

Some might object to this literary stylization, intentional or not, of someone who was doubtless a complicated and multifaceted person. In Tuchman's book, however, this device serves as a counterbalance against a much more pernicious tendency. Especially towards the end, she emphasizes the redemptive potential of the emerging early modern--Protestantism, centralization, nationalism. These words, which nominally represent real phenomena, are just as much characters brought in for purposes of narrative convenience as "hard facts." Because they have the allure of the abstract noun about them, however, they automatically inspire more trust. They tell us that we're dealing with Real History, not mere storytelling. Thanks to Enguerrand's immanent presence, the story remains a story--and no less Real History for all that.

Historians and People

It is easy to trace the spread of Franklin's fame--it followed his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751). Initially brief, the essays went through five English editions from 1751 to 1774. Each included the primary electrical writings but then gathered more and more of Franklin's letters and essays. (Increasingly, they would address nonmeteorological and nonelectrical topics.)

Franklin used these successive editions to craft his image as a philosopher. It would have made sense for Franklin to open the Experiments and Observations with his initial letter of 1747 to Collinson, thanking his patron for the electric "Tube" and breathlessly relating his first use of it. Instead, he wrote a stiff note to Collinson in 1750, thanking him and Penn for the tube and apparatus. It was almost as if someone had told Franklin he had to write the letter and he reluctantly did--a bit late in the course of the experiments and a mere year before he published his findings. And then he buried the letter within the other essays. Indeed, Franklin's slowness to thank patrons matched his determination to ignore critics--why shift focus away from himself? Moreover, the electrical experiments themselves, done collaboratively, were published under his name alone. Carefully, relentlessly, he had worked his way to center stage. He intended to stay there.

...Franklin may have been American, but his initial fame as a natural philosopher was not--it depended entirely on European approbation. He was absolutely right to look to Europe for validation. Anglo-America could not yet support the elaborate culture of learnng necessary for natural philosophy. No American printer thought that an edition of Franklin's essays would sell; any colonist who bought the Experiments and Observations was probably used to ordering such things from London. And London had been essential to Franklin's philosophical success. The metropolis had given him a patron (Collinson), equipment (the electric tube), and published validation (the 1751 edition of his essays). That he was a colonial client clearly irked Franklin, hence his muffled thanks to Collinson and Penn in early versions of the story of his success. But colonial client Franklin was, and only by the meticulous cultivation of friends and patrons in the republic of letters had he been able to claim a place in the cosmopolitan realm.
- Joyce Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin: The First Scientific American (2006)

Ben Franklin, as a historical figure, is fascinating. Not because he was brilliant and witty or because he gave earnest advice, but because he seems to take on new contours depending on how our fascinations evolve through time. For the Rousseau-addled French, Franklin's beaver hat was the mark of a truly noble savage. The self-helping nineteenth century devoured reprints of his autobiography and his almanac by the cartload, looking for the archetypal American self-made man. The civic-minded liberals who revisited this legacy after World War II saw a reflection of their own concerns, Franklin having been a successful businessman who dedicated the majority of his productive life to public service. Today, we probably identify with Franklin more than with any of the other Founding Fathers. Unlike dour old Adams or sparklingly-heroic Washington or racially-tainted Jefferson, Franklin really comes off as the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. (Not only was he a success with women, but who else could be thought to have a death ray?).

It is the penultimate Franklin I'm interested in here. The transition between the nineteenth-century mythology surrounding him and the more recent consensus, that he was a man of his time and considered profit merely a means to an end, was accompanied by a certain noticeable triumphalism. This can probably be chalked up to two factors: the sense of release one always feels after being disburdened of someone else's illusions, and the academy's long-established distaste for capitalist self-justification. Now, we are encouraged not to think of Franklin as an exemplar of conduct, since, after all, that would just be imposing our presentist concerns on an age that had different priorities. This line of argument points to the eighteenth century's rhetoric of public spirit and presents it as a mark of the time's distance and difference from our own lives.

This can sometimes go too far, and Chaplin's book is a useful corrective. What emerges from her narrative is neither a tycoon Franklin nor a Kiwanis Franklin. In the figure of Franklin the scientist, self-help and public service are tightly interlinked. Franklin changes the world with his experiments on electricity, but he is not shy about taking the credit. He's on American business in Europe, but his country's call doesn't prevent him from having a good time and even making a bit of money on the side. In short, he was a normal human being, and the centuries between us cannot erase the features we have in common with him.

The lesson is that selfishness, public spirit, vanity, and so on are not historicized qualities that are blown about willy-nilly depending on where the cultural wind takes them. People can be selfish in any period. What culture provides is a set of conditions for making sense of character. In a 1729 article in the New-York Gazette (one of the first bits of original journalistic material to be published in the city), the anonymous author cannily observes:

Every Passion and every View that Men have, is selfish in some Degree; But when it does Good to the Publick in its Operation & Consequence, it may be justly called disinterested in the usual Meaning of that Word, so that when we call any Man disinterested, we should intend no more by it than that the Turn of his Mind is towards the Publick ... to serve his country is his private Pleasure, the Welfare of Mankind is his Mistress and he does good to them by gratifying himself. Disinterestedness in any other Sense than this, there is none. ...When the Passions of Men do good to others, it is called Virtue & Publick Spirit; and when they do hurt to others, it is called Selfishness...

We're all egoists--but we can acquire public spirit retroactively, thus making it a pragmatic function of behavior rather than an inborn personality trait. As long as we see Franklin's historical role (or his self-presentation) as a definitive index to his character, we'll unable to see him for the human being he was: a frequently grasping and frequently selfish man who made very sure that his egotistical impulses were directed along fruitful channels. Someone we can relate to after all.

Ecce Homo?

...The second demand is this, that the introduction be read before the book itself, although it is not contained in the book, but appeared five years earlier under the title, "Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde: eine philosophische Abhandlung" (On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason: a philosophical essay). Without an acquaintance with this introduction and propadeutic it is absolutely impossible to understand the present work properly, and the content of that essay will always be presupposed in this work just as if it were given with it. Besides, even if it had not preceded this book by several years, it would not properly have been placed before it as an introduction, but would have been incorporated in the first book. As it is, the first book does not contain what was said in the earlier essay, and it therefore exhibits a certain incompleteness on account of these deficiencies, which must always be supplied by reference to it. However, my disinclination was so great either to quote myself or laboriously to state again in other words what I had already said once in an adequate manner, that I preferred this course, notwithstanding the fact that I might now be able to give the content of that essay a somewhat better expression ... The same disinclination to repeat myself word for word, or to say the same thing a second time in other and worse words, after I have deprived myself of the better, has occasioned another defect in the first book of this work. For I have omitted all that is said in the first chapter of my essay "On Sight and Colour," which would otherwise have found its place here, word for word. Therefore the knowledge of this short, earlier work is also presupposed.

...How can I venture to present a book to the public under conditions and demands, the first two of which are presumptuous and altogether immodest[?] ... How is one ever to come to the end, asks the indignant reader, if one must set to work upon a book in such a fashion? As I have absolutely nothing to advance against these reproaches, I only hope for some small thanks from such readers for having warned them in time, so that they may not lose an hour over a book which it would be useless to read without complying with the demands that have been made ... The reader who has got as far as the preface and been stopped by it, has bought the book for cash, and asks how he is to be indemnified. My last refuge is now to remind him that he knows how to make use of a book in several ways, without exactly reading it. It may fill a gap in his library as well as many another, where, neatly bound, it will certainly look well. Or he can lay it on the toilet-table or the tea-table of some learned lady friend. Or, finally, what certainly is best of all, and I specially advise it, he can review it.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, preface to the First Edition

The supplements to this fourth book would be very considerable if it were not that two of its principal subjects which stand specially in need of being supplemented--the freedom of the will and the foundation of morality--have been fully worked out by me in the form of a monograph, which was laid before the public in the year 1841 under the title, "The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics," on the occasion of prize questions being set by two Scandinavian Academies. Accordingly I assume an acquaintance on the part of my readers with the work which has just been mentioned, just as unconditionally as in the supplements to the second book I have assumed it with regard to the work "On the Will in Nature." In general I make the demand that whoever wishes to make himself acquainted with my philosophy shall read every line of me. For I am no voluminous writer, no fabricator of compendiums, no earner of pecuniary rewards, not one whose writings aim at the approbation of a minister; in a word, not one whose pen is under the influence of personal ends. I strive after nothing but the truth, and write as the ancients wrote, with the sole intention of preserving my thoughts, so that they may be for the benefit of those who understand how to meditate upon them and prize them. Therefore I have written little, but that little with reflection and at long intervals, and accordingly I have also confined within the smallest possible limits those repetitions which in philosophical works are some times unavoidable on account of the connection, and from which no single philosopher is free; so that by far the most of what I have to say is only to be found in one place. On this account, then, whoever wishes to learn from me and understand me must leave nothing unread that I have written. Yet one can judge me and criticise me without this, as experience has shown; and to this also I further wish much pleasure.

- from Volume II, chapter XL

At the very beginning of this book, Schopenhauer announces that he only has a single idea to relate to his readers--but it is an idea that requires a whole book to explain. (He would no doubt be more comfortable than most of his colleagues with Bergson's suggestion that one idea is all any philosopher ever has). Yet on the formal level, the book's central problem is its own insufficiency. The text resists the restraints of its own covers; it constantly demands that it be read together with other books, or after them. When Schopenhauer breaks down and admits that his reader "must leave nothing unread that I have written," he is not joking or engaging in hyperbole. The World as Will and Representation is for him an arbitrarily delimited slice of his life's work, and any pretensions it makes to self-sufficiency are persistently undermined by his reminders to read this or that essay first.

Even the book's internal structure is uncertain. What does it even mean for a book to be published without its introduction? I haven't read any of the other "mandatory prerequisites," except for the essay on Kant, but within The World itself the lack of an introduction means the initial sections must awkwardly do double-duty. And while the naive reader might assume that Volume II is supposed to follow sequentially after Volume I, here things are not that simple. The second volume consists of supplements to each part of the first--so logically, one should read each portion of the second after its corresponding portion in the first. Indeed, Schopenhauer says, that is how one ought to read them; but the first time around you should read them in sequence anyway, to better trace the chronological development of his thought.

This isn't quite a Barthesian "text with many entrances and exits"--if anything, it's like something out of M. C. Escher. What is most odd, though, is that beneath the encrusted supplements and introductions and appendices there is an elegantly structured, almost musical argument. Point-counterpoint: representation-will. Point-counterpoint: representation in relation to will-will in relation to representation. The road from Kant to Buddha as a fugue. Schopenhauer, in short, is a liar. The other essays are not only unnecessary; they are a distraction from what is ultimately a single, clear, and lucid idea. The whole second volume contributes essentially nothing, aside from a mildly amusing collection of nineteenth-century anecdotes about the natural world.

Why did Schopenhauer insist on burying his needle in this haystack? There are two interpretations which seem most appealing. The first is that he was trying to teach us a lesson. The ultimate purpose of art, he says, is twofold: it is supposed to both disentangle the intellect from the will and undermine our sense of individuality. And philosophy is related to art "as wine to grapes." Thus The World as Will and Representation becomes a formalist experiment in ethics. As the individuality of the text breaks down under the pressure of its supplements and dissolves into Schopenhauer's total oeuvre, we begin to question our own integrity as individuals. For what assumption is more basic to the reader of philosophical texts than that a book should somehow be allowed to stand on its own? And what assumption is more basic to humans than the principium individuationis itself?

The other view is less charitable. Here, Schopenhauer's inability to separate himself from even a single part of his body of work becomes a pathological hedge against the dissolution promised by death. If Nietzsche's autobiography is a book about the books he had written, Schopenhauer's whole life is entombed in his accumulating pages, in a vain attempt to escape death through his legacy. Far from being a perfect Buddhist or even a perfect pessimist, he is in fact a hypocrite--and when he writes that "it appears just as perverse to desire the continuance of an individuality which will be replaced by other individuals as to desire the permanence of matter which will be replaced by other matter," he is only attempting to convince himself. In becoming his book, he cannot help betraying it.

And Universal Darkness Buries All

We shall next declare the occasion and the cause which moved our poet to this particular work. He lived in those days, when (after Providence had permitted the invention of Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and Printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors covered the land: whereby not only the peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily molested, but unmerciful demands were made of his applause, yea of his money, by such as would neither earn the one, nor deserve the other. At the same time, the licence of the press was such, that it grew dangerous to refuse them either: for they would forthwith publish slanders unpunished, the authors being anonymous, and skulking under the wings of Publishers, a set of men who never scrupled to vend either calumny or blasphemy, as long as the Town would call for it.

Now our author, living in those times, did conceive it an endeavor well worthy an honest satyrist, to dissuade the dull, and punish the wicked, the only way that was left. In that public-spirited view he laid the plan of this poem, as the greatest service he was capable (without much hurt, or being slain) to render his dear country. First taking things from their original, he considereth the causes creative of such Authors, namely Dulness and Poverty, the one born with them, the other contracted by neglect of their proper talents, through self-conceit of greater abilities. This truth he wrappeth in an Allegory (as the construction of Epic poesy requireth), and feigns that one of these Goddesses had taken up her abode with the other, and that they jointly inspired all such writers and such works. He proceedeth to shew the qualities they bestow on these authors, and the effects they produce; then the materials, or stock, with which they furnish them; and (above all) that self-opinion, which causeth it to seem to themselves vastly greater than it is, and it the prime motive of their setting up in this sad and sorry merchandise. The great power of these Goddesses acting in alliance (whereof as the one is the mother of Industry, so is the other of Plodding) was to be exemplified in some one, great and remarkable action. And none could be more so than that which our poet hath chosen, viz. the restoration of the reign of Chaos and Night, by the ministry of Dulness their daughter, in the removal of her imperial seat from the City to the polite World; as the action of the Aeneid is the restoration of the empire of Troy, by the removal of the race from thence to Latium. But as Homer singing only the wrath of Achilles, yet includes in his poem the whole history of the Trojan War; in like manner our author hath drawn into this single action the whole history of Dulness and her children.

- Pope, Dunciad

Why was the publication of a satirical mock-epic "the only way that was left" to punish bad authors? On the face of it, the idea seems questionable. The Dunciad provides less of a mirror for poets than a bludgeon for specific people Pope happens to dislike, which is no doubt what gives it its special zing. While entertaining, the description of the court of Dulness is largely an indictment of literary society, not bad poetry as such. What bothers Pope most of all is the market-structure and social arrangement of the literary world, which not only perpetuates poetastery but also serves itself above all else, parasitically expanding to cover the entirety of English culture.

By the end of Book III, it is clear that the corrupt world of Dulness and the literary world itself are completely coextensive--Pope and Swift are consigned to obscurity, apparently because bad poems drive out good. In fact, the printing-and-publishing apparatus is more implicated in this corruption than anything else. (This radically opposes traditional eighteenth-century representations of the relationship between print and corruption--here, print can no longer effectively exercise its power of surveillance.) There's no space outside the system from which an attack on Dulness can be launched directly; this means that not even decent poetry can counteract it.

Enter satire. For Pope, satire functions as a kind of immanent critique: since he takes pains to make only glancing reference to the actual values he defends, the focus is entirely on the internal rottenness of Dulness's works. Satire is "the only way that was left" because the other alternatives--gentle advice and pressure from outside the literary world--had become impossible. It is the only thing that can effectively avoid the problem of using a medium to critique itself. Satire's bite, after all, comes not from its intent, but from its maximally "realistic" depiction of the corrupt world--the more impartial the satirist, the more effective the satire. (This should probably be distinguished from parody, which relies on wilful distortion; although formally the Dunciad is parodic, it is nonetheless a satire at heart.)

But Pope is not bullish about satire's practical prospects. As depicted in the poem, Dulness's reign marches triumphantly onward until its climactic yawn--and the poet more or less renounces his own agency:

But sober History restrain'd her rage,
And promised vengeance on a barbarous age.
There sunk Thalia, nerveless, cold, and dead,
Had not her sister Satire held her head...

The purpose of Satire here is to give succor to the dying muse of comedy, but it is History that is expected to overthrow Dulness in the end. The satirist's principal accomplishment, it seems, is keeping the spirit of good criticism alive until everything finally disappears in the vortex of Dulness.

The Dunciad, then, if we take it in utmost seriousness, is a tactics of survival rather than one of thorough critique or reform. Once the literary world has reached Dunciadic levels of corruption, it can no longer be stopped--only held at arm's length by the satirist. For the poet with integrity, writing any other kind of poem appears inadvisable.

The Revenge of the Commodity

There is something new here. The Internet structures the search for a partner as a market, or, more exactly, formalizes the search for a partner in the form of an economic transaction: it transforms the self into a packaged product competing with others on an open-ended market regulated by the law of supply and demand; it makes the encounter the outcome of a more or less stable set of preferences; it makes the process of search constrained by the problem of efficiency; it structures encounters as market niches; it attaches a (more or less) fixed economic value to profiles (that is, persons) and makes people anxious about their value in such a structured market and eager to improve their position in that market. Finally, it makes people highly aware of the cost-benefit aspects of their search, both in terms of time, and in the sense that they want to maximize the attributes of the person found. These characteristics of the search are clearly felt, even if obscurely, by my respondents. Indeed, you will not have failed to notice that the interviews I have quoted so far contain a combination of tiredness and cynicism, a cynicism which was often the dominant tone of many other interviews as well. To follow up a suggestion offered by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, I would say that tone is matter of great importance, because it points to the overall emotional organization of experience. This cynicism marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism and is an effect of the routinization produced by the sheer volume of encounters and by the market structure and culture which pervades Internet dating sites. Cynicism is a particular structure of feeling which emerges from a property of consciousness and action particularly at work in late capitalist societies. I think that such cynicism is what Adorno had in mind when he suggested that in contemporary culture, consumers feel compelled to buy and use advertising products even though, and at the very moment, they see through them. Seeing through and obeying, Adorno tells us, is precisely the dominant mode of using consumer products in late capitalist societies. Cynicism is the tone one is likely to use when one sees through and yet feels compelled to do the same thing over and over again. This compulsion to "do" even though one "sees through" points to the fact that, to borrow a phrase from Zizek, "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what people are doing."
- Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007)

There is a lot I could say about this brilliant little book. Its best quality, I think, is that it manages to do demystification without the hectoring that usually accompanies it. The project is appropriate, since the book is based on a series of Adorno Lectures--and yet Illouz avoids the latter's compulsive lip-curling. The overarching theme here is the constant intersection between vocabularies of personal and emotional authenticity and relationship dynamics that are frankly and thoroughly capitalist in nature. Dating sites, naturally, are a particularly good example, since they encourage their users to think of themselves as quirky snowflakes while maximizing their commodification. (I'm reluctant to say "reducing them to commodities.") The users, by and large, are no chumps: they know what's going on behind the scenes even as they willingly employ phraseology that would make Oprah proud.

The book somewhat predates the overwhelming hegemony of Facebook, but it's easy to see how its analysis of "romantic webs" could be expanded to the more nebulous realm of Internet "friendship." (Everyone who uses Facebook has an intuitive sense of the boundaries of intimacy that run through the nominally flat list of friends.) We might even go further--for instance, to the discussion of ideas on sites like MetaFilter. Here, almost every participant is aware that information networks promote certain kinds of vested interests, so the content of every article or comment is evaluated simultaneously with its context. Specifically, it is scrutinized to determine its place in a gigantic but tacit Internet economy of influence. In this economy, various products--ideological, aesthetic, and so on--compete for the attention span of readers. These products may be well-defined, like the complex of ideas denoted by the name "Ron Paul," or loose, like "geek," "hipster," and so on. Commenters are as likely as not to zero in on the product a particular posting represents rather than its individual identity.

This does not equate to "cynicism" as it is traditionally defined--in other words, an attitude in which one's awareness of total commodification displaces her ability to participate. Contrary to many cranky editorials (which are themselves a product derisively referenced with the phrase "get off my lawn"), sophisticated Internet users are not married to an attitude of poisonous detachment. Rather, they are able to keep both the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity in mind simultaneously, so that it no longer seems possible to ignore either one. But this is not a McLuhanite medium/message distinction, nor does it map neatly onto the form/content divide; both of these are in some way subsumed under the general heading of use vs. exchange value. (I should say that I don't think the Marxist point of view is necessarily the best one here, even though it is the one Illouz uses; "memetics" and evolutionary pop-psychology are just another way of talking about exactly the same effect.)

How did this quasi-cynicism develop in the first place? On one level, it is the natural result of a hundred years of "hermeneutics of suspicion" being absorbed osmotically through the cultural fabric. Another level is the generational one: the people who first inhabited and defined the Internet as a social space were stereotypically detached and ironic Gen-Xers. ("Gen-Y" might be less detached, but our supposed earnestness coexists happily with some pretty radical cynicism.) Just as significant, I think, is the complete bankruptcy of official ideology throughout the last decade. Whether or not Bush and Blair's claims were believable, one never got the sense--especially after 2005 or so--that they really swallowed their own bullshit. The refrain "Surely this" emerged as a sign that there could be no more surprises.

The more important question is what this new mode of social practice implies. The most significant effect, I think, is the radical reevaluation of the (dramatically shrunken) role of the critical intellectual as social conscience. In the past, revelations of the "real" counterpart to ideological "lies" could reliably generate a significant level of outrage and opposition. Chomsky, for one, has banked on this effect throughout his career. The intellectual's function, then, was to "see through" deception and predictably call for its end. But in a world where everyone "sees through" to the underlying commodity-nature of every idea and social relationship, this is clearly not enough. The underwhelming market success of the product known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" is due precisely to this. It's not that people are unwilling to acknowledge, at the very least, that George W. Bush knew about the attacks in advance; it's that understanding the other level of official ideology no longer means very much.

If the intellectual is unable to act as an ambassador from the authentic, he must himself become primarily the purveyor of some kind of product--or at least recognize that he already is. The spread of opinion through blogs indicates that this is already happening. (I guess I'm the equivalent of a hot-dog vendor.) But if this happens, the meaning of "criticism" changes too. It becomes more and more a question of style and posture rather than anything deeper. And as we come to recognize this, the differentiation of the intellectual's identity into an increasingly broader array of market niches becomes inevitable. Professors of marketing will come to occupy Adorno's lectern.