Slawkenbergius's Tales

Bis später

2012-01-31T22:51:00.000-05:00

Harvard is after Henry, and that's not new,

"I'll see you later" cried the crippled soul

one destination behind.

Soul upon soul, in the high Andes, blue

but blind for turns. And this is where the mind

stops. Death is a box.

- John Berryman

Paid by the Word

2011-12-22T00:59:00.000-05:00

For St. Augustines pure liar it is, on the contrary, a reason in favor of making it. For the bullshitter it is in itself neither a reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person's normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.
- Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

So I've just finished my first semester of teaching. It isn't much at all, as far as experience is concerned: I only had 11 students. But when I set this brief episode against two decades in which I was always on the other side of the classroom, the difference is surprisingly stark. Suddenly, I'm remembering moments in which I thought I was being an ideal student as having been in reality an embarrassing nuisance for the professor. The empathy that I so rarely felt for my classmates is now beginning belatedly to appear. If I were shown this point of view, Christmas Carol-style, when I was in high school, I am not sure it would have changed much except making me somewhat more tolerable to teach and learn next to. Ah well.

When I was a student, I had a finely worked-out hierarchy of paper-writing tricks--mainly ones designed to make the paper seem longer than it actually was. At the bottom were the especially stupid ones, never to be resorted to: cheap plagiarism, widening the margin, increasing the font size. (Why do the others think they're getting away with it?) Then came more subtle ones: invisibly increasing the size of each period, expanding the heading, using a slightly different font. I never used these except in moments of extreme duress. Around the summit, an even more refined and well-worn toolbox: making the paper longer by writing more characters. A "representation" used instead of an "image" could, in the right cases, net you a whole new line break, and several could make your seven pages look more like a respectable seven and a half. An extra adjective could do the same. Finally, the apex and cornerstone of my strategy was writing whole sentences to beef up points already made, conclusions already reached. At times I could work up hundreds of words of bullshit that fit so organically into my writing that I no longer remembered which sentences were which. My writing style, as you've probably observed, has become a permanent and unrecoverable casualty of these staple tactics.

Now, looking back on the final papers I've graded, what strikes me the most is how little the length, especially the page count, really matters. An already weak paper may have seemed especially weak because it wasn't long enough, but obvious attempts to lengthen a too-short weak paper--and they were all obvious, no matter where on my beloved pyramid they were--were an even bigger black mark. In fact, the most important thing I noticed and remembered about all the essays I graded was whether they had a real argument or not, and if so, how thoroughly they pursued it. Why did none of us students ever apply as much diligence and creativity to composing arguments as we did trying to satisfy an almost wholly imaginary word count god?

The best explanation I can come up with, though it may seem too cynical by half, is that for students producing papers is primarily an exercise in bullshit. I don't disagree with Harry Frankfurt, but he should have noted that in the collegiate context--where most of us are drilled most thoroughly in producing bullshit--its most salient feature is that it is measured by volume. When students talk and think about papers, they do it in terms of page count, because the content usually means so little to them. If a sweaty, panting New Historicist arrives and tells them that their reading of The Merchant of Venice is totally off-base in the play's context of reception, they will shrug their shoulders and pretend he does not exist. In most papers nothing is at stake, which is one reason plagiarism is so common.

I found it especially excruciating when teachers or professors responded to this kind of thinking by saying the paper "should be as long as it needs to be," as if the image of flowers in Shakespeare were a topic divinely ordained by some universal constant not to take up any more or less than ten double-spaced pages of twelve-point Times New Roman. The instinct was noble, the response fallacious. An assignment does not become meaningful and bullshit does not cease to be bullshit just because the volume requirement is obfuscated. My (mental) response to this was an angry (unspoken) accusation: "You and I both know that this is an elaborate game. I produce volume for you and you give me an A, I do a rote close-reading and you get to pretend I am learning to think critically. Why not cut the crap?"

I'm not sure I disagree with my jaded pimply teenage self even now. But what I have realized, as a beginning teacher, is that while I may recognize that something like this is right and possibly more right than the platitudes we are forced to absorb in our graduate "teaching practicum," that doesn't get me very far. I am not only not allowed to teach, assign, or grade on the assumption that the whole exercise is an elaborate piece of meta-bullshit, I can't even use that kind of thinking as an escape route. For one thing, I'd inevitably be letting down the students who do think they're doing something worthwhile, though it's hard for me to reliably tell how many of them there are. (One danger of being a cynic is that it encourages large-scale projection.) For another, I don't think I could stand to be in a classroom if I were as thoroughly convinced of the pointlessness of the exercise as I sometimes think I am, even with the justification that I'm getting paid. Moreover, as long as I'm not totally despicable I should see it as some kind of goal to transcend the bullshit, to create meaningful learning even in the context of a meaningless game.

But how? Is there a magical assignment that will overcome the will-to-bullshit of the whole system of mass education? I thought in terms of volume even when I was writing good papers for classes I passionately adored. Is hitting a page count just one of those creatively-constricting elements of writing, like the syllable count in haiku? I don't think so. This, like so many other things, is calibrated mainly for the convenience of the instructor. (Just how much of class design is based on this is another thing I've just begun learning.) There's nothing inherently good about a 10-12 page paper except that it takes a decent amount of work on the student's part and is relatively easy for the instructor to grade. What if I threw open the gates completely, letting them write one-page blurbs or three-hundred-page novels as they like? That won't work--the educational equity issues alone make my head hurt.

Bullshit is a problem I've never been able to solve. The only halfway-acceptable alternative is having students contribute to projects that will eventually, somehow, be useful to someone--like a wiki or an online exhibit. But students often hate those. And, however grudgingly, I do admit that I would be nowhere today if it wasn't for the bullshit I've been producing for the last two decades. Is this just something I have to live with?

Yet Another '90s Fad

2011-11-28T18:23:00.001-05:00

Today, friends and foes of globalization debate 'its' effects. Both assume the reality of such a process, which can either be praised or lamented, encouraged or combated. Are we asking the best questions about issues of contemporary importance when we debate globalization? Instead of assuming the centrality of a powerful juggernaut, might we do better to define more precisely what it is we are debating, to assess the resources which institutions in different locations within patterns of interaction possess, to look towards traditions of transcontinental mobilization with considerable time-depth?

Globalization is clearly a significant 'native's category' for anyone studying contemporary politics. Anyone wishing to know why particular ideological and discursive patterns appear in today's conjuncture needs to examine how it is used. But is it also a useful analytical category? My argument here is that it is not. Scholars who use it analytically risk being trapped in the very discursive structures they wish to analyze. Most important in the term's current popularity in academic circles is how much it reveals about the poverty of contemporary social science faced with processes that are large-scale, but not universal, and with the fact of crucial linkages that cut across state borders and lines of cultural difference but which nonetheless are based on specific mechanisms within certain boundaries. That global should be contrasted with local, even if the point is to analyze their mutual constitution, only underscores the inadequacy of current analytical tools to analyze anything in between.
- Frederick Cooper, "What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 100 (2001), 189-213.

Globalization and various species of "international turn" have been on a lot of people's minds for decades now--and this has not abated in the ten years since Fred Cooper's article appeared. It seems almost impossible to write about any kind of phenomenon, historical or contemporary, without taking into account its international context. At the very least, scholars and commentators who confine their work to a single country or locality are increasingly doing so as a conscious and deliberate choice rather than as a default--and if they do not, audiences are increasingly starting to call them on it. A decade ago, with Japan moribund and China still very much a developing country, it was possible for politicians to talk about the American economy in ways that were largely isolated from the outside world. ("Jobs going abroad" and the accompanying rhetoric are not necessarily a complete counterexample, since the conversation could often be framed in terms that turned it into an internal problem with external dimensions rather than as a fundamentally international issue.) Today, a politician who discusses the economy without mentioning Europe (for instance) would be regarded as a tyro. This kind of shift has only become more apparent since the heyday of globalization discussions in the 1990s.

In academia (and even long-form journalism or, as we see with Teju Cole's Open City, fiction), the result has been a surge of works whose claims can be summarized as "This phenomenon has international consequences or roots that must be understood." We are now seeing that there are very few things in the world of which that is not true, which guarantees such works a readership and fanbase. That's not to be dismissive: often, depending on the nature of the subject, a claim like that is really a revelation. (Cole's book, if read devotedly or doggedly enough, can tell you much about what traditional literary fiction chooses to compartmentalize or ignore.) In history and associated disciplines, though, making an argument like this leaves room for serious confusion. This is because "X has international consequences or roots" is really two claims: "We do not do enough to learn about or take into account the international roots and consequences of X" and "The international roots and consequences of X are important." In many cases, the two may coincide: the French Revolution had international roots and consequences that have been neglected and yet are highly important. In other cases, they do not: I don't think the international roots of, say, early computing are as important as they've sometimes been made out to be, even if they are very interesting and we don't know enough about them.

All this seems like small potatoes at first glance, but it's striking to consider the effect the relentlessness of these kinds of conversations has on history and any discipline that deals with historical questions. Everyone roundly condemns histories that focus on unilinear upward progress, yet what we've been learning recently is that everything is international, the significance of the international grows greater over time, and, as a result, the world is always getting more globalized and interconnected. Like paint colors eventually mixing into brown, the sophisticated elegance of these histories produces a remarkably bland picture when seen as a whole. In fact, some kind of triumph-of-globalization story is likely to be the only take-away lesson learned by somebody foolhardily attempting to summarize the recent work. (C.A. Bayly's Birth of the Modern World, the best attempt to do that so far, is either impossibly confusing or bland in just this way, depending on how you look at it.)

So how do we work against this effect? I don't just mean my traditional "we as historians" first person plural here. I think this is something that concerns anyone who finds herself caught up in internationalized writing. The first step, it seems to me, ought to be an effort to focus on the failure of international connections or roots. When faced with nationalistic or local-particularist movements or ideas, writers used to the international narrative often treat them with a kind of studied condescension, as if people who followed them were ipso facto ignorant about how immersed they really are in the world. Sometimes this argument looks like "because nineteenth-century nationalism or twentieth-century fascism was an international movement, it was inherently self-contradictory." Sometimes it's more blunt: "But what about the Angles/Saxons/Pilgrims, why aren't you considering them dangerously foreign?" In the most sophisticated version, it's rather more nuanced, though the whiff of condescension certainly remains: "The problems in this situation resulted from a mix of international and local factors, and the poor benighted locals chose to defend their native culture from encroaching modernity by scapegoating foreign influence." (This kind of line is commonly encountered, for instance, in accounts of the Boxer Rebellion.)

Left-leaning writers tend to be more sympathetic to appeals to concepts like "cultural appropriation," even though there is precious little that separates this kind of talk from the essentializing identity-discourse of nationalists and fascists. What interests me here, though, is that moves against cultural appropriation form part of a chain of resistances to globalization (especially cultural or intellectual globalization) stretching back hundreds of years. This makes it possible to see a whole web of cases in which international links have not been constantly and unilinearly growing and spreading. Not all of these are simple fascism, nationalism, nativism, or localism. Sometimes it is by sheer accident that global connections decline. The Jesuits in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth century were at the forefront of European science and brought cutting-edge research to the Chinese court. (Matteo Ricci studied under Clavius, who played a leading role in developing the Gregorian calendar.) By the eighteenth century, they were fringe marginals who barely had any contact with metropolitan Europe at all. Thus China went from being enthusiastically "Westernizing" under the Kangxi emperor to being viewed as hopelessly arrogant and set in its ways when the English arrived less than a hundred years later.

We lack a language for talking about these issues except as the reverse of the globalization medal. But I think there is every indication that as the clichés of globalization recede, we will arrive at some better idea of how the failures or gaps in internationalization narratives can be exploited to make sense both of the past and the present. It is becoming utterly obvious that we are not facing a Star Trek-style future in which national boundaries are erased and political units are planetary in scale. How did this happen? Or, rather, how did so many smart people come to believe that this was inevitable? How does the agreeable simplicity of the international story confuse and betray insufficiently critical observers? These are questions people are beginning to answer, and I'm hoping academics will not be the ones to do it. Despite what many people believe, academics follow broader cultural trends far more often than the reverse, and when such a thing happens it is impossible to convince people that they are not being utterly faithful to the facts.

I think we'll end up arriving at the middle of the twenty-first century more confused than we were at the beginning. Social complexity will continue to grow, probably, which will mean many more people will find themselves affected by obscure developments in faraway places than were before. But "globalization" and "integration" will not be enough to explain these trends. We'll see that clearly enough. After all, we'll still be living in a fragmented, national world that has continually made gestures toward Star Trek but has never quite arrived there. I might eat my words eventually--but I really don't think so.

Claudius the Historian

2011-10-31T22:46:00.002-04:00

And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis' dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my father and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Guards battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if ever I became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It won't be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of Romans. My History of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure they'll enjoy it.

That was what I was thinking. I was thinking too, what opportunities I should have, as Emperor, for consulting the secret archives and finding out just what happened on this occasion or on that. How many twisted stories still remained to be straightened out. What a miraculous fate for a historian! And as you will have seen, I took full advantage of my opportunities. Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all.
- Robert Graves, I, Claudius

Historians in fiction are usually a pretty predictable bunch. Sometimes they've unearthed some dark secret and are committed to risking their lives and fortunes for the sake of getting it out (most historians I know, including myself, wouldn't know a dark secret if it jumped out of the file and bit them on the ass, and even fewer would sacrifice anything more than copying fees for it). More often, fictional historians are dour pedants who bury themselves in dusty books at the expense of the real world; in the more nuanced/psychological version, they deliberately choose the dead past as a refuge from the unsatisfactory present. While convenient, these images aren't especially reflective of historians in real life. Portrayals of academics typically exaggerate the professional side of their lives, perhaps because most often they are the work either of grad students who have no other side of their lives or of undergraduates who know professors only as "that guy who teaches HIST 1115." (If anything, philosophers have it worse, while natural scientists tend to get more well-rounded characters. Take that, "liberal arts"!)

For me, and probably not just for me, being hopelessly unworldly is actually something of a romantic dream. One of these days I won't have to go to department stores or drop off dry cleaning or have awkward first dates, I'll just lock myself up with my Loeb Classical Library and that's the last this cruel world will see of me! This is linked, in my head, with a fantasy of detachment. It's true that being "objective" is no longer considered a viable possibility for historians, even if the more recondite among us still consider it a worthwhile ideal. But no matter how politically-engaged (and hence avowedly unobjective) a historian gets, detachment as an ideal never quite disappears. This is a rather different kind of detachment from the one we are normally encouraged to pursue. It's not about remaining unswayed by partisanship or treating historical subjects with fairness and dignity.

No, our kind of detachment is more of an abiding sense of professional superiority over effectively anyone who has opinions about things. This comes at least in part from the fact that it is now very difficult, if not impossible, to publish a book about (say) abolitionists that strides confidently to a conclusion that the abolitionists were stand-up dudes and were right about stuff. Even an audience composed entirely of leftists would jeer at this kind of presentation. No, we've moved on from the '60s, and all our books have to show how the agents were trapped by cultural structure n and achieved icky unintended consequences x, y, z. It's hard not to feel superior to everyone if you watch the news knowing firmly that fifteen years on someone's gonna publish an article about how the heroic freedom fighters on the screen were really the apostles of some fresh hell. You're not detached because of some conscious choice; you're detached because irony is your most important professional habit.

I, Claudius, in its tragicomic final third, is a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of this way of viewing the world. Graves surely had more than a casual acquaintance with historians and their occupational illnesses--or, at any rate, knew enough about the classical historians to discern the similarities. Graves's Claudius imagines himself as a classic unworldly recluse, engaging with the court around him only to the extent that he needs materials for his history-writing. In practice, of course, this is far from being the case: the narrative makes it plain that he is in fact far from obscure, and although his physical defects marginalize him, he is still on the minds of many of the people who are carrying on their intrigues. In the final third of the novel, with the last years of Tiberius and the reign of Caligula, this narrative pushes towards its absurd denouement. Rome is falling apart, and while Claudius constantly makes outraged noises, it is obvious that he is relishing the opportunity to ironize over the unenviable careers of people foolish enough to have played a part in the world of politics and rank. This conceit breaks down when Caligula makes Claudius a court jester. As he struggles to save his own skin, Claudius turns into the most obsequious of courtiers. He is, it turns out, no more dignified and aloof than anyone else at court. Meanwhile, Caligula's reign only heightens his tendency to ironize. What is supposed to be a popular tragedy is described as a sequence of comic interludes in which Caligula doesn't even come off that badly. Crazy? Sure, but what a clever guy!

So it is with us. Ironic detachment helps us, modern historians, deal with the unpleasantness of living in a ridiculous world, but when it's needed most it becomes more and more of a figleaf. I won't belabor the point: it's not hard to see how academics these days are structurally servile, whether your starting point is Marx or Nietzsche or someone else. To a certain extent, the narrowing of horizons that comes from being able to see yourself from history's point of view is adaptive. If you're mostly helpless to do anything about student loan delinquency rates or bloodthirsty state legislatures, you may as well sigh and be the jester for a bit. What the gesture doesn't carry with it--as in Claudius's case--is the luxury of distance. I don't know if it's only my generation of graduate students that seems ready on command to adopt the melancholy-ironic pose and then to relinquish it, but it's a good time to develop that kind of skill, as long as you're not entertaining too many illusions. But then someone has to end up writing those histories.

Fatal Flaws

2011-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Unattractive in his political life, Maximilian was equally unattractive in his personal characteristics. Fate had unkindly bestowed upon him a singularly unimpressive presence; he was lanky, lean and small with mouse-colored hair and a pasty complexion, his speech and features much affected by adenoids. His manners were polished and his conversation blunt and well-informed, but the shrill pitch of his voice startled those who were not prepared for it. In honor of his wife, a princess of Lorraine, he affected the French fashion, whose elegant elaborations can hardly have concealed the shortcomings of nature.

Abler and more politically effective than John George, Maximilian had not that dogged honesty which was the saving grace of the Elector of Saxony. Cautious to a fault, he would never commit himself and thereby raised delusive hopes in all who courted him. Like John George he was sincere in striving for the common good of Germany, but unlike John George he had a clear sense of policy and an accurate judgment. His excuse was the less when, like John George, he allowed his individual advantages to take precedence. In this respect both the Elector of Saxony and the Duke of Bavaria failed their country, but Maximilian always with the more shameless egoism. Never was man more anxious that others should sacrifice their gains for the general good; never did man stand more jealously, more fatally by his own.
- C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938)

C. V. Wedgwood does not believe in the so-called "Great Man" theory of history. If anything, her vision is the opposite: what shapes history is the weakness of people in power, their inability to prevent their flaws from coming to the surface and annihilating anything that might have been achieved by the better angels of their nature. That is what gives her work its fine--and baffling--literary quality. How can a book that's mostly about moving troops from someplace and putting them somewhere else, in which descriptions of looting and rapine maintain a static consistency from chapter to chapter and whose biographical fragments amount to a kind of elaborate twisting of the knife, be so wonderfully captivating, magical, and irresistible to read? I say this as someone who has not found the energy to read for pleasure in months (which is why I haven't been blogging) and who bought the book fully expecting to let it mature on the shelf like a fine wine. Somehow this did not happen.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, any notion Wedgwood might have of historical causality is not really reducible to the categories in which we're accustomed to thinking. Disbelief in "great-manism" has been universal among bien pensants for about a hundred fifty years now, which is truly astonishing, considering how many times every other foundation of our thought has been overturned since then. We all nod our bored heads along with Tolstoy when he inveighs against Napoleonocentrism. What do we think causes historical events to happen? Well, that does change: sometimes we call it "social forces," sometimes "culture," sometimes something already fully circular like "patterns" or "trajectories." As Carlyle's influence has waned further and further, the people who think about this kind of thing have gradually come to believe that any theory that places individual human beings front and center in the historical process (not just in a positive or transformational kind of way) is actually subsumable under great-manism.

That's a funny paradox. I'm not sure if this is a malady specific to historians, but we're somehow always being encouraged to "leave room for agency," an admonition that is current only as long as that agency involves otherwise powerless brown people. People who are not oppressed cannot have agency. Actually, no, maybe that's too post-'60s revisionist. What I mean to say is: in the contemporary view, people have agency, and that agency is important, as long as nobody is actually accomplishing anything. It would be absurd if someone got up at the AHA and demanded that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria be assigned his due measure of agency. I think it would be short-sighted to blame this kind of thing solely on the '60s hangover that continues to dominate in The Profession. No doubt that's part of it, but mostly it's symptomatic of a near-universal unwillingness among historians to discuss causality in any kind of serious way because no one actually has clear and defensible views on the matter. (I've talked about this kind of thing lots of times before.)

It's a bit like Jackson Pollock. There must be people out there who think Jackson Pollock is a good artist for excellent reasons. I suspect, however, that there are more people like me: people who secretly have no idea why anyone thinks Jackson Pollock is a good artist but, for social and cultural-capital kinds of reasons, don't want to discuss their qualms with anyone. (What does it say about me that I only felt the weight lift once I read this piece?)

What is particularly odd is that the bien-pensant position is, in its bastardized current form, obviously absurd. Everyone agrees that people who wield power can, usually, do lots of different stuff with it; everyone agrees that individual biographies can be decisive when those individuals become entangled in social movements (for instance); everyone operates in their daily lives under the assumption that personality is an important part of how people react to events and do things. But put those pieces together and all of a sudden you need to mount defensive rearguard actions and use words like "social forces" (what are they?), "structure" (where is it?), and "contingency" (as if the historical role of individuals were not the ultimate source of contingency).

In Wedgwood's hands, all these hifalutin methodological questions fall away. I don't know how contemporary early modern Germanists think about her work; three quarters of a century is usually enough time for the pendulum of revisionism to swing around two or three times. Judged on its own terms, however, the history she tells is utterly convincing. The weaknesses of statesmen reinforce and direct the flow of a process that has its own dynamic. Without, say, the selfishness of Maximilian or the arrogance of Wallenstein the war would have been allowed to exhaust itself, but the tragic flaws of otherwise reasonably normal and competent people ensured that it could not come to an end. In contrast with Wedgwood, any more "structural" or economic explanation in the Marxist style looks utterly ad hoc, and anything more contemporary far too causally flabby. (One of the effects of the decline of interest in causality among historians has been a dramatic rise in histories that largely ignore causality in favor of relatively static internal accounts of various phenomena. Whether or not this is a good thing is a subject for a different post.)

I have to confess a large part of my sympathy for Wedgwood's approach comes from the fact that I love her style, although strictly speaking this is of course totally irrelevant. Is it that her account of the war actually is more convincing, or is she just more successful at making it look that way? I'm not sure. When I start thinking about how, exactly, style and content can be so cleanly separated my head starts to hurt, which isn't quite the same thing as being willing to assert that the two are one and the same. On some level, isn't a successfully-told story one that also proposes an internally consistent and propulsive narrative, even if we're talking about fiction? But this stacks the deck against approaches that lend themselves less easily to narrative...

At any rate, one of the reasons I feel so enthusiastic about the current resurgence of good, well-researched academic narrative history is that it promises to recreate some of Wedgwood's charm. As narrative, it must inevitably deal with both character and causes, and pry into the links between the two. As history, it ought to feel a sense of responsibility not only to the sources but also to the state of the field, meaning it cannot simply impose a character-centered framework on material that it assumes to be its own. If we're to start revising the bien-pensant view, we ought not to do it without thinking deeply about how it can be replaced.

Ugly Swans

2011-09-21T21:57:00.000-04:00

You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history. You are too paralyzed by boredom to understand what on earth he is talking about, but you hear the names of big guns: Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Proudhon, Plato, Herodotus, Ibn Khaldoun, Toynbee, Spengler, Michelet, Carr, Bloch, Fukuyama, Schmukuyama, Trukuyama. He seems deep and knowledgeable, making sure that no attention lapse will make you forget that his approach is "post-Marxist," "postdialectical," or post-something, whatever that means. Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.

It is so easy to avoid looking at the cemetery while concocting historical theories. But this is not just a problem with history. It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there. By bias I mean a systematic error consistently showing a more positive, or negative, effect from the phenomenon, like a scale that unfailingly shows you a few pounds heavier or lighter than your true weight, or a video camera that adds a few sizes to your waistline. This bias has been rediscovered here and there throughout the past century across disciplines, often to be rapidly forgotten (like Cicero's insight). As drowned worshippers do not write histories of their experiences (it is better to be alive for that), so it is with the losers in history, whether people or ideas. Remarkably, historians and other scholars in the humanities who need to understand silent evidence the most do not seem to have a name for it (and I looked hard). As for journalists, fuhgedaboudit! They are industrial producers of the distortion.
- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2008)

I wish there were some less snotty way of saying this, but The Black Swan is remarkably erudite and provocative for an airport bestseller. Taleb is a Europeanized intellectual writing for somewhat pretentious Amherst-educated Wall Street traders, and it shows: there's a lot of chrome in the form of references to Umberto Eco and assorted Respectable Humanistic Thinkers You May Have Heard Of. Yet there is a great deal of genuine learning, too, and Taleb seems utterly sincere in his admiration of Sextus Empiricus, a thinker who receives more time in the spotlight here than he has for probably three hundred years. There is none of that stereotyped pop-non-fiction air of authority that comes from ventriloquizing a cherry-picked study or a dubious expert.

There is still, however, an air of authority that permeates the whole book: Taleb's claim to superior insight based on being both very well-read and a former successful Wall Street trader. This is not a modest book. Taleb includes chunks of very thinly-disguised autobiography and plenty of anecdotes in which he is invariably the smartest guy in the room. No doubt they were at least partially motivated by the need to cater to that particular school of business-think that assumes that people who don't self-advertise have nothing to say. Most of them are not wholly implausible, either, even accounting for the distortions introduced by selective memory and the lack of the other side of the story. Above all, they help you identify with the guy--after all, don't we all know plenty of academic stuffed shirts?

The problem with this is that Taleb is telling you that everyone else is wrong, that their fields are based on flawed premises, that almost all forms of recognition based on successful predictions are misguided and delusional. I like to think of myself as a Pyrrhonian. I get off on reading things like that. But even I recognize that dismissing whole areas of inquiry based on the say-so (or even the admittedly plausible argumentation) of a self-interested guru is dangerous. I don't think Taleb even has the insight into economics he thinks he has, much less philosophy or history. The Black Swan is great for pseuds--or, to put it more nicely, snotty autodidacts--because it indulges their tendency to reduce their workload by giving themselves an intellectual escape clause. (I only recognized this tendency in myself fairly recently, and it's been quite a revelation.)

Passages like the one I've quoted above give me the most pause. Does Taleb not realize that the scenario he is depicting is, on its own terms, absurd? The history professor who is teaching you about this posse of dead historical theorists cannot possibly be making the point that history moves in a stable and predictable pattern, because all of these Big Names are mutually exclusive. It would be like arguing that a single currency is a good thing and we should therefore adopt twelve of them. And this is leaving aside the more minor absurdities, such as the idea that someone who describes himself as "post-dialectical" would be throwing Toynbee and Spengler in your face rather than, I dunno, Badiou or something. (Not to mention that historical determinism of any sort is laughably out of fashion these days.)

Actually, I think Taleb has a point in this passage, he just doesn't really know what it is. Part of the problem associated with this moment in the life of The Profession is that no one who is on the cutting edge is really thinking all that hard about causality as an epistemological or methodological problem for historians. This is because picking away too hard at causality will reveal the necessity of taking one of two positions: either causality is some specific thing, which you then have to commit to like some mustachioed bell-bottom-wearing old social historian, or it's just a vague intuitive sense we have of stuff that happens in some sort of order, which doesn't really leave much room for reflection. (I prefer the second view because I am utterly bewildered by the concept of causality itself, but that may be fodder for another post.) Taleb's critique, if it were actually specific and well-motivated rather than hectoring and unfocused, would be an excellent way of opening up this discussion.

It's too bad. The Black Swan is the clearest and freshest defense of a thoughtful, humane skepticism that I've encountered in a long time. If it weren't so overstructured, so self-aggrandizing, and so packed with pretensions to universality, it wouldn't make for a bad Enchiridion as far as these things go. But who needs one, really? All you have to do is imitate a pig on a ship.

(When the Natalie Portman movie came out last winter, I was thinking it was an adaptation of this book. Boy was I surprised fifteen minutes in when I realized no funky randomness would be forthcoming. Frankly, I would have preferred the adaptation.)

One More from the Archives

2011-09-01T00:11:00.000-04:00

I met with the Jesuits [who are already known to you]; they are quite industrious and ready to perform whatever is required of them to the best of their ability. One of them seems to me very efficient. As far as I know [the one who?] meant something to you died recently; news from China always came to them making a large circle around Europe; not knowing why they were summoned here, they do not have any letters concerning China with them, nor do they have any names to whom they might write, and therefore they wish to be released to Polotsk, where they can examine their papers at their leisure.
There does not seem to be any inconvenience, to my knowledge, of releasing them to Polotsk, provided we determine in advance how we are to use them.

If they are to travel to Kiakhta, then they can, after gathering their papers, go there from Polotsk. In which case, Petr Bogdanovich Passek should be ordered to recommend them himself to the acting Governor-General in Irkutsk, or even better, to give them an order from his own office in Irkutsk so they can go straight from Polotsk to [Pil'?].

This I believe [should be done] in case it turns out to be absolutely necessary to send them to Kiakhta, from which they would be able to respond with friendly letters to their colleagues in Peking ...

... 1st. They should talk at length about the patronage their order benefits from in Russia due to the magnanimity of Her Imperial Majesty, making a greeting here to the Chinese [Jesuits], that for all the persecutions [their order has suffered] in other places in Europe, they at least have the solace of living in serenity and flourishing in the two greatest empires, i.e. the Russian and Chinese, that this patronage gives their order a means of pursuing and seeking pleasure and solace in their love for the sciences.

... They might add in this letter of theirs something about their Order, of its present condition, and also something of the sciences, whatever they themselves find appropriate, and it does not seem ill-advised to expand this portion, so that the matter concerning the English would not appear to be the principal subject of the letter, but contrariwise would appear to mention it in passing.

If the Chinese Jesuits send a response to this letter of [the Polotsk Jesuits], and in it put forth the possibility of their colleagues' traveling to Peking, the latter should be given orders in writing that their residence in Peking should have as its principal object creating obstacles to the arrival of an English embassy.

In such a case, that is, if our Jesuits are allowed the opportunity to travel to Peking, they should be dispatched from Kiakhta with various presents, including furs of various kinds, items of fashionable clothing, and rarities, as well as astronomical instruments...
- A. R. Vorontsov to A. A. Bezborodko, June 3, 17[80s-early -'90s?]

I consider this letter to be the greatest find of my entire summer, although my enthusiasm has been tempered a bit now that I have looked more closely at it (while I was translating for this post) and determined that it could almost certainly not date from 1778, as the archival file says (this is where I curse my poor notetaking skills for not having recorded any other numbers on the document). Unfortunately, it's only in draft form, and it's barely legible besides In any event, let's discuss the document, which in itself is almost as captivating as a Patrick O'Brian novel. Analysis here is premature and almost superfluous.

A. R. Vorontsov, who was most likely President of the College of Commerce at the time the letter was written, is writing to A. A. Bezborodko, who was either the empress's personal secretary or the Grand Chancellor of the Empire (most likely the former). These are the very senior levels of the state hierarchy, and Vorontsov in particular is a representative of an especially wealthy and influential noble clan. Vorontsov has interviewed a group of Jesuits from Polotsk, one of the territories acquired by Russia during the Partitions of Poland.

The significance of these Jesuits (as well as other Jesuits in formerly Polish lands) is that they are the only Jesuits technically remaining on Earth at this time, and certainly the only Jesuits possessed of an institutional support structure and a novitiate. This is because the Jesuit order was officially disbanded by the Pope in 1773. In a strange historical twist, the Orthodox Empress Catherine, who happened to acquire Belarussian lands the year before, saw here a great opportunity to win a powerful, educated, and culturally-influential body of clergymen to her side. She forbade the bull dissolving the order from being promulgated anywhere in the Russian empire, and when the local archbishop was given extraordinary authority by the Pope in an attempt to push through the dissolution regardless, she forced him to let the Jesuits open a novitiate (to train new members) instead. Thus the Russian Empire has become the sole official patron and protector of the Jesuit Order, whose members had been, before 1773, officially forbidden from setting foot on Russian soil. (In his 1719 expulsion decree, Peter the Great had laconically observed that "they engage in correspondence during church services").

Vorontsov has a grand project in mind. He aims to ship these Jesuits all the way across the Russian Empire, to the tiny but bustling town of Kiakhta, near Lake Baikal, which serves as (effectively) the only authorized site of direct Russo-Chinese trade. There, these Jesuits are to compose a letter in Latin to their colleagues in China, ostensibly of their own accord, in an attempt to convince them that helping Russia is in their best interests--in large part because Russia is in a position to support their scientific work. Vorontsov's letter delineates precisely, in point-by-point fashion, what this letter is to contain; the goal is to convince both the Jesuits and, especially, the Chinese, that no Russian government authority and certainly no central government authority had anything to do with the missive. (The letter is also to broach the possibility of a visit or residence in Beijing, which would give the Russians a whole new set of levers.)

The aim of this Russo-Chinese Jesuit alliance is to manipulate the situation at the court of the Chinese emperor Qianlong in order to prevent a planned English embassy from being received; this ties in with a persistent (and, it turns out, correct) Russian anxiety that the English are the only power capable of stealing away their Chinese trade. The embassy would eventually materialize as the Macartney Embassy in 1792-4, which concluded with the famous Chinese announcement that they had no need for European goods, leading directly to the Opium Wars in the next century. Of course, the Chinese had failed to mention that they had been buying Russian goods in large quantities--sufficient to despoil Siberia of a large portion of its fur-bearing mammals--for a hundred years. So, for the time being at least, the Russians ended up the geopolitical winners.

More important to me, however, is how Vorontsov is telling the Jesuits to write. He is telling them to include astronomical and scientific details, but for reasons that are explicitly and utterly instrumental: they are just filler intended to conceal the real geopolitical and commercial purpose of the contact. I'm not as widely read as I should be, but I have never come across any historical document that is quite so brazenly frank about using scientific discourse for narrowly political ends. Vorontsov literally doesn't care what the "substantive" portion of the letter says, as long as it looks more important than the mention of the English.

The question this raises for me is: if I were to come across this supposed letter--I have no idea whether it ever ended up being written, although I have some suspicions--would I even be able to tell? As historians, we are trained to be suspicious of excessive suspicion; we tend to regard it as the mark of amateur conspiracy theorists, a kind of fetishization of the primary source that treats it as if it were normally capable of being a totally transparent and objective reflection of the underlying reality. And it's hard to argue with that, at least for me. But it does mean that we almost always assume our sources to have been written in good faith: a political pamphlet, even a mendacious or a satirical one, is almost always treated at least as the result of an attempt to write a political pamphlet.

I would undoubtedly treat a letter filled with astronomical minutiae as the result of an attempt to communicate astronomical results; after all, I have plenty of similar Jesuit letters already transcribed. Does this mean that any of them could actually have been about something entirely different? Given Vorontsov's direct proof of such a communicative practice, shouldn't I be feeling more insecure about my sources? What does it say about my epistemological assumptions that I don't?

Down and Out in Solikamsk

2011-08-20T18:37:00.002-04:00

(by popular demand; don't say I didn't warn you!)

To Her Imperial Majesty's Supreme Cabinet
All-obedient report. [vsepoddaneishee donoshenie]

By an order of Her Imperial Majesty given to me from the Siberian Department [prikaz] on the 16th of January last, under the authority of personal all-merciful decrees signed by Her Imperial Majesty's own hand, I departed from Moscow for the Chinese Empire with the State China Caravan on this January 19th, of which I reported all-obediently to the Supreme Cabinet the same, and with the travel-papers [podorozhnye; see below] for thirty-two cart and horse sets [podvody] that were given to me for my travel from Moscow to Tobolsk with my whole team, I made my way to Sol' Kamskaia [i.e. Solikamsk, roughly two-thirds of the way there] with all possible haste, and with these travel-papers my podvody departed everywhere without delay, and upon arrival in the town of Khlynov I sent the sworn agent [tselovalnik] Aleksei Diakonov with caravan servants ahead to the Tobolsk Provincial Chancery, so as to prepare for the reception of the caravan treasury of twenty five thousand rubles, as ordained by order of Her Imperial Majesty's Siberian Department, so as not to waste time with the reception of the treasury upon arrival in Tobolsk[. Diakonov,] upon arriving in Solikamsk on February 10th, announced his travel-papers which were for five podvody to the chancery there, but because the chancery refused to give him podvody, this Diakonov was forced to remain there until my arrival, and I arrived on the 12th and announced my travel-papers to this chancery, and demanded that I be issued the podvody indicated on the travel-papers, and a signature was made and the chancery promised to send the podvody[. But] then, verbally, the Solikamsk governor [voevoda] Prince Konstantin Kropotkin announced that with these travel-papers no podvody can be issued without a special decree from the Revenue College, at which I was forced to lose no time and demand the podvody from that Solikamsk chancery with a memorandum [promemoriia] explaining where and under whose orders I was traveling and with what rapidity I needed to reach the border, except this memorandum was answered on the 14th with a memorandum to the same effect, that without a specific decree from the Governing Senate, from the Comptroller of the Senate, or from the Revenue College (which I did not obtain due to my rapid departure from Moscow, not having seen under what authority my papers were issued and not having received a decree from anywhere or an announcement from the Siberian Department), this chancery would be unable to issue podvody, and the same day I demanded, in a second memorandum, that the aforementioned chancery would command podvody to be issued at least at double the usual price [(rate); progony], to which I received no response[. Then,] seeing that this halt and delay was pointless, I was forced to hire podvody from Sol' Kamskaia to Verkhotur'e, which also took no small amount of time, and according to the agreement four rubles twelve kopecks were paid for every podvoda, hence for thirty-two podvody I paid extra, over and above the travel money I was issued, ninety nine rubles eighty four kopecks and because of the aforementioned obstacles I was unable to depart Sol' Kamskaia on the podvody I hired earlier than the 19th[. Meanwhile,] people that happened to be passing through on travel-papers of their own [and joined up with us]--specifically, Ivan Oskolkov, sworn agent for the last caravan, and Vasilii Bulavoshnikov and Vasilii Krasheninnikov, overseers for the Evreinovs--and others, were all sent along without delay from Sol' Kamskaia[. And therefore,] I hereby all-obediently report to Her Imperial Majesty's Supreme Cabinet about the time lost through the caravan's aforementioned delay at Sol' Kamskaia, and also during this last winter travel and my arrival in Irkutsk, as well as the expenditure of excess money over and above travel funds for the hire of podvody, and I ask that this not be counted as any kind of lack of ability or poor effort on my part[. As] for the fact that I had no specific decree beyond my travel-papers from the Revenue College, as I explained above, this was because of my rapid departure from Moscow, and the Siberian Department and all other towns except Sol' Kamskaia issued me podvody without delay[. With] this, I hereby report to Her Imperial Majesty's Supreme Cabinet that I arrived in Tobolsk the 28th of February last and departed it this 6th of March.

Of this all-obediently reports Erofei Firsov, general director of the Chinese caravan and [collegiate] assessor, 7 March 1740.

N. Erofei Firsov
No. 782, submitted 10 April 1740
- RGADA, fond 248, kniga 1102, l. 1025-1026

First, a few remarks about the document itself. It is contained in a book labeled "Affairs of the Governing Senate from the former Cabinet, 1732-1742," although this is one of many books similarly labeled. This entire book deals with issues relating to trade with China and Far Eastern affairs in general. It is 1572 folio sheets long--that is, three thousand huge pages of thick eighteenth-century paper. The book looks more like an accordion, since the spine is approximately three or four times the width of the covers, making it quite difficult to use. In the original Russian, the text is one long sentence, with pairs of adjacent words generally run together, as was standard at the time ("Поуказу Ея Императорского величества данному мне изсибирского приказа минувшаго генваря 16 дня посиле имянныхъ заподписаниемъ Ея Императорского величества собственныя руки всемилостивейшихъ указов отправился я измосквы згосударственным китайским караваном вкитайское гдрство сего генваря 19 дня..."). Firsov's report is one of hundreds of such documents, many of them much more interesting, contained in this book. Nonetheless, the constellation of forces you can see at work here is not without interest either, if you happen to be interested in that kind of thing. (If you are eagle-eyed and curious, I have no idea what makes the 16th of January "last" and the 19th of January "this"--it is implausible that Firsov would have waited a year after receiving his orders.)

Here's a brief outline of the administrative structure this entire text depends on. I've patched this together from primary and secondary sources--I'm sure there are multiple definitive studies in Russian but I haven't gotten to them yet--and I am eagerly awaiting John Randolph's next book, which should do it much more clearly. "Podvody" are fixed units of transportation usually composed of a cart, two horses, and a iamshchik to drive them (the word can also refer to the cart alone, but my sense is that the typical usage treated this as a metonymy). Typically, travelers around Russia, especially Siberia, did not rely on their own private transportation. Instead, they were issued with travel-papers authorizing them to command, in each town along their itinerary, a certain number of podvody, depending on the party's size, importance, and baggage, which would get them between administrative centers. Podvody were controlled by local administrative bodies--usually the chancery--and employed peasants, for whom "freight duty" was one of the oldest and most-resented obligations. The whole network of administrative centers was woven together with more-or-less standardized books containing official itineraries between various cities, which contained all the intermediate stops and the distances between them. In other words, traveling in 18th century Russia was a lot more complicated than just finding the shortest road and driving down it: a traveler, especially one with state business, was constantly forced to interact with local institutional interests who could either hold him back or help him. This could be a bad thing--as it seems to be here--but it could also be very good, because travelers could generally be sure of finding adequate transportation resources in even the most remote administrative centers in Siberia. By and large, it seems that the transportation system in Russia worked quite efficiently: after all, even with the delay, Firsov and his enormous caravan made it from Moscow to Tobolsk (a distance of over a thousand miles) in just over a month.

So why was Firsov delayed here and not, apparently, anywhere else? There could be a number of explanations, but the one that I'm tentatively considering is that Solikamsk was one of the centers of activity for the powerful Demidov family, who controlled industrial production in the Urals. Accordingly, they seem to have put a lot of pressure on local government; in Britain or the American colonies this would have taken the form of controlling local elections, but centrally-appointed voevodas could still be dealt with, though perhaps more indirectly. If this was the Demidovs' doing, it was probably simply an attempt to demonstrate to the central agencies that carrying out dubiously profitable Moscow or Petersburg orders was not a priority here.

The broader implications are more interesting. The Chinese trade caravan was, despite its striking lack of commercial success, one of the most important foreign- and trade-policy priorities of the early-18th century Russian Empire. The broad discretion assigned to its administrator and the extraordinary care devoted to protecting the silver it brought back from China testify to this. Yet once the orders were issued, the central government was helpless to expedite its way to China, since anything that required its intervention would add additional weeks as couriers carried messages back and forth to and from the center.

This meant that caravan administrators had to be resourceful and willing to overstep their nominal authority in order to get to where they were going within the narrow time limits imposed by seasonal weather patterns, and it also meant that in practical terms local government was often far more important to their livelihood than the center was. It is possible--though the possibility is easy to forget--that this entire story was concocted by Firsov in collaboration with someone at Solikamsk in order to scam an extra hundred rubles out of the Siberian department. Here, this is unlikely: there were much less risky ways of making a few extra bucks, though more brazen attempts got several of Firsov's predecessors in hot water. Disturbances in the transportation network were peculiarly difficult for the center to respond to, since its own couriers had no choice but to use that very same network.

I have a probably bullshit pet theory that this is all somehow fundamentally similar to the Halting Problem in computer science. My layman's understanding of the problem is that it is impossible to develop a universally-applicable method to predict in advance whether a given program will terminate or not given a certain input. If I simulate the execution of code through an interpreter, and my program never terminates, then my simulator will never terminate either. Likewise, when the communication system was functioning, knowledge and correspondence could travel more or less efficiently back to the center--but when it was not, there was often no way to tell. Is the courier or agent reliable? You'll have to take his word for it, or find another agent to watch the watchmen.

I think I and many other historians who deal in one way or another with issues of travel over great distances often operate unconsciously using the sort of model of transmission in which one can pick up the phone and say "The check is in the mail." In other words, our latent assumption is that data or content were always separable from metadata, that a letter or a message traveled faster than a bale of goods, that if one channel of communication failed there was always some other channel. What I'm constantly seeing here is how tenuous the separation often was. Letters frequently did travel faster, but only if they were carried by couriers that could be dispatched independently from the caravan itself. When a blockage happened, the furs that were going to China stopped just as solidly as the correspondence describing the blockage.

This is not only tremendously interesting for me to try to wrap my head around (harder than it sounds, which is why I'm less coherent than I could be about this issue), it also says something about the difficulties of ascribing the features of contemporary bureaucratic surveillance to earlier social systems. Since the emergence of the telegraph, information-gathering has largely ceased to require travel, and the amount of travel required is still constantly shrinking. In the eighteenth century, travel was integrated into every form of administration, which meant that dysfunctions in travel could disrupt information-gathering completely. Even if a Russian empress had had a mind to collect an exhaustive assemblage of cold, hard administrative facts, she could still never have gotten a letter or a shred of quantitative data from Irkutsk to St. Petersburg without two dozen local agencies and two dozen iamshchiki guiding, expediting, and delaying its passage through the realm. Information, in many ways, is simpler today than it ever was then.

(I lied about the politics of reputation bit, sorry. Another time!)

The Four-Year Itch: An Appeal

2011-08-10T07:49:00.001-04:00

[Hey! If you read this, whether you're a regular reader or not--whether or not you even like this blog--would you please leave a comment? Thanks!]

I've been posting to this blog less and less over the past year, and I think it's only partially a matter of not having enough time due to studying for general exams, doing archive work, and (in a few weeks) teaching. I'm also just having trouble motivating myself to sit down and write about things. I'm not sure, though, that the best solution is to accept it and "go on hiatus" (which, like "taking a break" in a relationship, is almost always code for "it's over, I just don't want to admit it"). So I'm turning to you, the readers Google Analytics tells me I still have.

When I first started Slawkenbergius's Tales just over four years ago, I established a few fairly arbitrary ground rules for myself: each post would be an attempt to flesh out some interesting minor idea, usually found in the depths of some canonical text; each post would at least be long enough to sketch the idea out in a rudimentary fashion; no book or author could be featured twice. (I've broken that one a couple of times.) This happened to work well with the kind of reading I was doing as a 20-year-old baby intellectual, but I'm not sure it's working quite as well for me as a 24-year-old PhD candidate.

First, the reading I'm doing now tends to be rather specialized and frankly very boring to anyone who isn't an academic historian (and frequently even to those who are). After reading twenty variations on Terror, Power, and Revolution: One Social Group and Another Social Group in Some Boring Russian Province in the 1930s or The Discourse of Enlightenment: Five Randomly-Selected Eighteenth-Century French Authors Shelved Next to Each Other at Bodleian, I'm not usually particularly excited to go through them in search of the merest crumb of something mildly compelling to a lay audience. And then, when I want to take a break, I'm sure as hell not turning to the volume of Vico that has been silently guilt-tripping me from my shelf for the past year and half. I read fantasy, and I don't read it for the ideas.

The result, inevitably, is that I don't have much to bring back to y'all, and I feel guilty about all the interesting canonical and classic works I should be reading and writing about as I tear through another saga about a strong-yet-graceful-and-clever swordsman-musician-scholar-ninja-wizard and his buxom red-haired entourage. Part of me feels like this is a natural evolution: I've shifted from a kind of unguided semi-autodidacticism to a more focused and in-depth style of scholarly work, the kind of style that is ideally going to help me finish my dissertation before some brainy CS major figures out how to do it without human intervention. Another part of me wants to resist overspecialization and recoils in horror at the idea that one day I, too, will be writing tedious Enlightenment books of use to nobody except the people who make money from pulping remainders, and thinks keeping up a blog like this is a way to keep those outward-turning muscles toned.

If I go with the first idea, I'm going to be honest with myself and shutter this blog, because even I don't want to write six posts a month about how the Russian trade caravan was delayed by local officials in Solikamsk in 1735 and what that means for the politics of reputation in the republic of letters. Ugh. If I go with the second idea, I would in theory finally read that Vico and those thousands of other Great Books and energetically write new and thought-provoking things about them, but in practice would probably spend more time feeling guilty and stressed out that I'm not doing that (which is more or less what is happening now).

Rather than make an unappealing choice between these two alternatives, I want to ask you: what kind of content would you like to see on this blog? Longer, shorter, more inside baseball about Russia, less inside baseball about Russia? Do you even care? Is asking these kinds of questions inherently narcissistic? Should I just accept that all things must come to an end? Any kind of input would be nice.

Seeing like a State

2011-07-17T09:38:00.002-04:00

To Cossack Captain Shchukin, being sent with the Ecclesiastical Mission to Peking.
On your way to Peking and back--and during your stay in towns, overnight; in a word, during your entire residence in Chinese lands you are to conduct yourself in the best manner: be meek, quiet, and respectful to your superiors; solicitous for your duties and prompt, and more than anything you should distance yourself from quarrels with the Chinese, even if one of you was insulted by them. In such a case, leaving in silence without insults or complaint, you are to quietly report to the secretary [pristav], and not to repay quarrels with quarrels, on pain of severe punishment, and not to engage not only in fighting but even minor quarreling amongst yourselves. This rule applies to all of you, and should be said to all.
But since you have some skill, although not much, in painting; but have discernment when it comes to paints; you are hereby commanded:
1st. Whenever you find an occasion, especially in Peking, where you will be staying longer, you must locate good Chinese paints to buy.
2nd. If you happen to see the work of Chinese painters (which you must not be searching for insistently, but subtly, and inconspicuously for them), you must note, how do they compose their paints? How do they dilute them? And how do they place them on paper, or on paintings and canvas? Do they dry their images, or do they let them dry of their own accord? And note all the rest, that relates to painting, whenever you find an occasion, but so carefully that they should not be able to tell that you are a painter.
3rd. If you happen to find excellently-worked and skillfully painted paintings, you must report to the secretary, that these paintings are deserving of being purchased.
4th. Whatever you place on paper, do so carefully, so that there is never a Chinese servant around when you do so; for I have told you personally, what kind of care you ought to have. You yourself have told me, that you can with your mind's eye [v umozritel'nosti] place objects on paper which you have seen; so in this case here is a rule for you: when you have sketched something, examine the object that you are painting repeatedly, so that it is accurately and correctly depicted.
5th. Whichever dry paints you note as worthy of being had here, by no means buy them yourself, but report to the secretary so that he may have them obtained by purchase, by this careful expedient your knowledge and skill in painting will be kept from the Chinese; and for this purpose you must in all things conceal this, and represent yourself as a simple Cossack, as if of no consequence; and
6th. Since it is improper for the secretary himself to walk around the city often, and you will be doing this, report on whatever is rare or unusual that you observe, but also note in shops whatever commodity products [tovarnoe izdelie] you find.
September 17, 1807.
- from a package of secret instructions to the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking, preserved among the papers of Iakinf Bichurin at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg

This text is one of several archival finds I've dug up over the past two months that are making me pay closer and closer attention to something that somehow rarely gets mentioned in our literature: espionage. It's a little strange, since espionage is an undeniably sexy topic--but somehow people associate it so firmly with the twentieth century that there seems to be something a little bizarre about mentioning it in the context of the eighteenth. It's ridiculous to think of bewigged and waistcoated gentlemen sneaking peeks at private correspondence through cleverly concealed lorgnettes or leading heart-pounding coach-and-four chases on the king's highway.

But there's no reason to think this didn't happen, and in fact spying, secrecy, and privileged information were major topics of discussion in every European country in the period. That's not to say that James Bond's world can be transplanted back two hundred years and still make sense: there were important differences. For one thing, there was never a well-defined and specially-trained group of people known as "spies" or "secret agents" and organized into special agencies; secret chancelleries were typically responsible for internal policing, foreign intelligence being largely the domain of the diplomatic corps. Secrecy also had a somewhat different meaning, since the people to whom secret reports were usually directed typically had a broad range of other state responsibilities as well, and their bureaus were never designed with openness in mind.

As a result, (long-)eighteenth-century espionage was a much broader and more nebulous phenomenon than it is today, especially in the Russo-Chinese context. It included not only diplomatic but also industrial espionage, as well as the collection of what we would now consider basic almanac data such as the imports and exports of particular territories. Generally, there were two basic principles:

Find out everything about everything.
Don't let anyone else know that you're interested.

Hence, in the document above, the constant exhortations to the painter to let the Chinese keep thinking of him as an inconsequential Cossack. In another document in this file, there's an even more interesting depiction of how to hold a conversation:

Recognizing an acquaintance with the Jesuits as necessary for all such information, it is opportune to remind you that they once had great influence in the Peking Ministry and confidence at court; and therefore it can doubtless be concluded that the English have not failed to cultivate a close friendship with them as longtime residents in Peking, which they have probably reinforced with kindness and bribery; therefore great care is needed in your conversations with them, and at your first meeting nothing regarding the subject you are curious about can be said; if, however, they themselves say something about the English trade, in that case you must pretend that you have no pressing need of information about it; but do not allow the conversation they start to terminate early by an outright denial. Cool, collected attentiveness can be displayed externally by turning your eyes to the side and not listening in a riveted way [nepriviazannym slushaniem]. If, then, with the passage of time, they continue their conversations about this, then while observing external coolness you can subtly extract the necessary information from them, and even then not in any order and not all of a sudden, so that you do not give them an inkling that you need it.

The mustache-twirling deviousness of this instruction actually just conceals the fact that the Russian Foreign Ministry has no idea how influential the Jesuits are or how much credit they retain at court. (Actually, as far as I've been able to tell, the Qing court had rescinded its toleration for the Jesuit presence in Peking around 1805, and in fact the Society of Jesus had ceased to exist in a legal sense decades earlier. The few Jesuits or ex-Jesuits who remained at court at the turn of the nineteenth century were hardly in a position to do much for the English cause.) The expensive and elaborate work devoted to espionage coexisted with some pretty dramatic lapses in organization: for instance, the Foreign Ministry's single Chinese and Manchu translator had died in 1786 and was, as far as I can tell, not replaced for something like two decades.

In other words, long-eighteenth-century espionage was not just a sexier and more sophisticated version of regular information-gathering. It could also function as a second-rate substitute for more systematic, scholarly, and public modes of inquiry. In this mode it was essentially analogous to the strategy of exploring the New World by conquistador or conducting naval warfare by privateer: dump a crucial area of state responsibility on a more-or-less disposable individual actor, hoping that the probably meager payoff will slightly outweigh the marginal expense. After all, the Russian aristocracy didn't think much of the discipline and ability of Cossack captains, and as the paternalistic injunction against brawling and quarreling suggests, the painterly Shchukin was no exception. (I've found no trace of him anywhere else; his contemporary, the romantic Shchukin, was certainly never a Cossack captain.)

I've now found secret documents, either the results of espionage (on various levels) or instructions on how to conduct it, for practically the entirety of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It doesn't seem to have been particularly effective: nothing suggests the College or Ministry of Foreign Affairs ever learned to conduct espionage using any method other than the above, and their instructions very rarely reflect the work of any previous investigation. As in so many other things, the imperial state had a great appetite for information, but much less of a clue about how to use it.

The Conveyance of Messages

2011-06-24T11:09:00.001-04:00

I am writing this letter to you by way of Russia; I've written to my lord the Count Kirill Razumovskii, president of the Imperial Academy of Petersburg, and asked him to have this letter sent to you, I hope he'll do me this pleasure. He is one of the greatest lords of the Russian Court, he has done us the honor of sending us all very obliging letters in good French, and he has given our three churches in Peking gifts: the Russian Empress's portrait, maps of the vast Empire of her Crown, and the journal of the Academy, one for each of our three houses in Peking. This lord has written two letters especially to me. The Russian caravan arrived here January 3, it will go back in 20 or 25 days, it is made up of 170 or 175 persons, and it has done considerable trading here.

The Court of Peking has great esteem for that of Russia, it admires its power and the vast extent of its States and it pays due honor to the great talent of the Sovereign who governs such a large empire with so much wisdom. The two courts of Russia and of China have many times had quarrels [des affaires à terminer?] over their frontiers in Tartary: the Court of Peking, so proud, sees itself a bit humbled to see the power of Muscovy extend itself throughout Europe all the way to America, and to see that if Russia sees fit it can send ships to China not only by the ocean [that surrounds] Europe, Africa, and Asia, but also from the vast land of Kamchatka in the east, from which same place it can send ships to the northern coast of California in America and from there to the Southern Seas, while by land it can send troops from Europe to the frontiers of Tartary, Chinese, Western, and Eastern, and far beyond that to the east. This great Russian power is giving the Court of Peking much to think about, and fills it with esteem for Russia, and, if you like, inspires a certain degree of jealousy and fear.
- Père Antoine Gaubil, French Jesuit missionary in Peking, to his nephew Jacques in Montpellier, April 21, 1755

I'm stumped. I found this letter, along with several others of a very similar kind by the same author, shoved away in the middle of a folder of miscellaneous Jesuit correspondence at the Academy of Sciences archive in St. Petersburg. Of course, it's a great find, since it's essentially a smoking gun for the kind of argument I am making about intellectual exchange in the eighteenth century: that, on the level of transmission and circulation, it was tightly intertwined with geopolitical, commercial, and diplomatic questions. Gaubil, whose letters from Peking (but not these ones!) have been published in a thousand-page volume, is a great source in general, and it's great tо find more stuff dealing with Russia specifically.

Here's the problem. If we were to treat this letter like the fine folks at the Mapping the Republic of Letters project do theirs, everything looks really simple: sender in Peking, recipient in Montpellier, date, content: a nice, even straight line. But of course there's at least another vertex between Peking and Montpellier, as Gaubil himself says and as the letter's archival provenance suggests: the St. Petersburg Academy. The fact that the letter did not travel directly to Western Europe--that it didn't take the more traditional route south to Canton, by ship to Lisbon, and presumably overland from there--is significant for how we're supposed to read it. But how significant? And what are the relevant facts?

Specifically, the question revolves around the genuineness of Gaubil's attitude to Russia. Gaubil praises the Empire to the skies, painting it as a juggernaut that's making the Chinese quake in their boots. This is not generally the assessment contemporary historians have of Russia in 1755, when not only the great Catherinian victories but also its serviceable performance in the Seven Years' War were still to come. It was and is regarded as a backwater in the throes of a painful and not wholly successful Westernization. As a highly educated French savant, and a Catholic missionary, Gaubil would have had every reason to subscribe to this view.

On this reading, we are forced to conclude that his encomium in the letter's first two paragraphs is entirely disingenuous, meant to reassure the Russians that passing the letter on to its addressee (rather than shoving it in the back of a drawer) is a good idea for reasons other than honor or politesse. The interpretive problem here is whether Gaubil would have expected the letter to be read by the people passing the information on. Since the document preserved in the Academy archives is an eighteenth-century copy, it's clear that it was, in fact, opened and read; but would that have been a reasonable expectation? Did the original letter have a seal, which ought to have prevented opening by at least some gentlemanly standard? Moreover, if Gaubil didn't like the Russians, did he think little enough of them to expect them not to abide by genteel standards of privacy?

My worry about this view, which may or may not be decisive, is that the rest of the letter doesn't seem to justify this extraordinary game of smoke and mirrors. Gaubil reports on the status of some Christian prisoners, on progress in the construction of a little new observatory (which, curiously enough, is apparently still standing and functioning as a museum in Beijing), deals with some minutiae regarding future exchanges of correspondence. He was never a particularly worldly man, as far as I can tell, so thinking of this as some kind of elaborate spy code is a little implausible, and, after all, this letter was to his nephew in the provinces. The same pattern--glowing news of Russia and a smaller block of news about Peking--recurs throughout these unpublished letters. Why would he go to so much trouble? Moreover, he was already an old man, and within less than four years of this burst of writing he would be dead. A successful stratagem of this kind would gain him nothing, as far as I can tell, and failure would block one of the few remaining routes of communication. (Letters took about a year to travel from Peking in one direction, under relatively ideal conditions, so getting everything important down on paper was at a premium.)

I haven't been able to figure it out, and, given the difficulties involved in divining the internal mental states of people who have been dead for two hundred fifty years, it's unlikely I'll find a definitive answer. Whichever it is, it's an interesting twist for my dissertation, since it bolsters my case either way. But this particular interpretive puzzle is a nice little capsule illustration of the way that studying the nitty-gritty mechanics of how texts travel can change the way we read them. If only people paid more attention.

Archives, Antiquarianism, and the Digital Age

2011-06-12T09:07:00.206-04:00

One day, they find (in the old papers from the mill) the draft of a letter from Vaucorbeil to the Prefect.
The prefect has asked whether Bouvard and Pécuchet are dangerously insane. The doctor's letter is a confidential report explaining that they are just two harmless imbeciles. They recapitulate their actions and thoughts, which for the reader should be a critique of the novel.
"What shall we do with this?"--No time for reflection! Let's copy! The page must be filled, the "monument" completed. All things are equal: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, insignificant and characteristic. There is no truth in phenomena.
End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying.
- Gustave Flaubert, notes for the last chapter of Bouvard and Pécuchet [reprise from 3 years ago]

When you use an archive or a manuscript department in Russia, every dusty old file you work with comes with a little sheet of paper in the front with rows of dates and names. This is a list of everyone--often back to the 1940s--who's ever looked at this file before you, and, ideally, what they used it for. Adding your name to the list, as the archivists insist you do, is a little thrill: you feel like you're joining a whole tradition of anonymous scholarly scribblers who've tried to puzzle out the quirks in your manuscript. (Of course, when you find a blank sheet, or one on which the last entry is from 1953, it's an entirely different kind of satisfaction.)

Signing dozens of these things in the past few weeks has made me perplexed and even a little obsessed about the question of what it all means. Or, more specifically: what makes me different from them? If I see the same name recurring through all the folio miscellanies I've been reading, am I, in effect, just copying someone else's work, despite never having heard of them before? What am I even contributing here? These are not, I hasten to add, the kinds of texts that newish techniques of interpretation borrowed from anthropology or literary studies can really contribute to unpacking, at least not at this stage of the process. The relevant questions are much more basic. Who was the author of, say, this 18th-century list of forms of Sino-Russian diplomatic address tucked in the back of a 1787 collection of Russian-language sources on China? Why is the paper noticeably different from the rest of the book? For that matter, who made the book and why, who read it, who sold it and bought it, how did it end up in the Imperial Public Library? With manuscript books these problems are omnipresent, because they're all unique and heterogeneous texts in a much more profound way than any pomo novel. We know so little about the contents that even a discovery of authorship or the succesful attribution of an ex-libris counts as a major revelation.

This is not a category of sources I'm used to using. As an eighteenth-century historian, paradoxically enough, I do almost all my primary-source work in the confines of Google Books in between posting on Facebook and reading rage comics written by anonymous nineteen-year-olds somewhere in Ohio. Even when the books I'm working with are relatively unknown, they're provided with title pages and call numbers and keyword classifications and even decodings of pseudonymous authorship and other esoteric bibliographica. In the reassuring high-contrast black-and-white of print, there is clearly a text: something firm and concrete and page-numbered that can be interpreted with the help of all the field-specific apparatus I've accumulated. With manuscript books, half the time I'm not even sure if the text has an end or not, and how many pages it might be missing.

There's one thing that the older historians who'd inscribed their names above mine definitely had over me. They still knew how to read handwriting. I don't think I've written anything by hand longer than a couple of paragraphs in years, and even beautiful modern handwriting can be a struggle to get through. Eighteenth-century Russian script, in which about a good chunk of the letters are set off in a modified form above the line but look for all the world like indistinguishable squiggles, is just painful, especially if you're trying to transcribe it at any length:

And then, too, they were the beneficiaries of a tradition of scholarship that emphasized precise and rigorous technical training and source-mastery. In fact, really, that's the heart of the issue. Historians spent so long castigating their more strictly-trained predecessors for their obsession with antiquarian drudgery and their lack of imagination that they left us, their students, totally helpless in philological matters. Reading Soviet-era catalog descriptions is an especially humiliating experience, since the catalog's author inevitably manages to pry more information out of the text than you can even dream of doing. I can barely figure out what a watermark is supposed to depict half the time; they've not only decoded it but found the precise year and date the paper was manufactured.

It would be tempting to just take my helplessness as a given and give up on the thing entirely; there must still be some intellectual historians out there who can make a whole career without seeing the inside of an archive. But this is actually where things get interesting. As a historian of the digital generation, I am far better equipped than any of my predecessors, for all their tedious training, with the kinds of technical information that was their hallmark. This is, essentially, the result of three pieces of technology which are monumental in themselves but which can now be taken essentially for granted:

Scanning and ClearScan OCR, courtesy of Adobe Acrobat;
Google Books;
PDF and document indexing at the level of the operating system, whether in OS X or in Windows 7.

The confluence of these technologies means that I can type in any proper noun that seems to be important in a given text and have it produce results across a wide range of scanned reference materials and other scholarly guides that I keep on my computer (in addition to notes, papers, and so on that I've produced myself). Google Books is key for this, because Google Books now preserves virtually anything ever cranked out by a nineteenth-century antiquarian. Where in the past, even discovering the existence of a reference publication or collection of published documents--even one that made it into print in a run of several hundred--would often have required physically traveling to the library where the book is kept, I can now draw instantly on dozens of painstakingly assembled technical references covering virtually every aspect of my subject matter.

The delicious irony of this is that this is anything but a natural Whiggish consequence of the evolution of technology. In fact, the whole thing is built on a central and highly contingent cultural factor that never seems to get mentioned: the existence of a period, whose end mostly corresponded with the last decades (1900-1920 or so) from which sources made it into the public domain, in which a substantial fraction of the scholarly world thought it was worthwhile to contribute tiny bricks to the edifice of human knowledge. We today mostly think those people were naive; to assert that the notion of an edifice was incoherent in the first place is basically conventional wisdom. But if the historiographical enlightenment that eventually led to the demise of positivism had emerged in the 1890s instead of the 1930s, then Google Books wouldn't be nearly as useful for us today. In a way, it turned out that those antiquarians were more right than they could have possibly imagined: with enormous book databases, indexing, and OCR, their bricks really did become part of an edifice that is looking more and more coherent every day.

My broader point here is that there's a lot less that separates the new, trendy digital knowledge from the old, musty book knowledge than we like to think, despite unenlightening commentary from both sides of the aisle. After all, check out the Wikipedia article on, say, Ultramontanism, and what do you find? Two citations at the bottom from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia and the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, it's fairly obvious that the Wikipedian who produced the entry did not physically go to the library and purposely locate the oldest Catholic reference source he could find. Instead, he (or she, or more likely whatever bot was doing the actual work) went straight to the public-domain sources and took as much text as he could from there. Because of the extent to which the Catholic Encyclopedia and other similar texts are used throughout the Wikipedia world, the site has now become possibly one of the finest sources on obscure dogmatic questions anywhere. Modern nerds obsessively catalogue characters from One Piece; old nerds did the same for the Jansenist controversy-- and the insults hurled at both groups are surprisingly similar. Turns out they're the winners in the end.

Coming to America

2011-05-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

If you want to get to know our neighborhood, stand next to the office-supplies store. It's on the intersection of 108th and 64th. Come as early as you can.
Here are our taxi drivers, just starting to make their rounds: Leva Baranov, Pertsovich, Eselevskii. They're all stocky, gloomy, decisive.

Leva Baranov is past sixty. He's a former Molotov-artist. At the beginning of his career he painted Molotov exclusively. His work was exhibited in countless property-management offices, clinics, local committees. Even on the walls of former churches.

Baranov had studied all the subtleties in the features of this minister with a skilled worker's face. On a bet, he could draw Molotov in ten seconds. Blindfolded, too. Then Molotov was removed. Leva tried to draw Khrushchev, but to no avail. His prosperous peasant's features turned out to be beyond his ken.

The same thing happened with Brezhnev. Leva couldn't tackle his opera-singer face. And then, out of sheer grief, Leva became an abstract painter. He started painting colored spots, lines, and curls. Plus he got into drinking and debauchery.

His neighbors complained to the local beat militiaman about Leva: "He drinks, sleeps around, he's into some kind of abstract cynicism..."

In the end Leva emigrated, got behind the wheel, and calmed down. In moments of leisure he does impressions of Reagan on a horse.
- Sergei Dovlatov, Inostranka (The Foreign Woman)

I'm not very familiar with the diasporas of other countries, but I'm pretty sure Russians are the only people who call theirs, sneeringly, "the emigration." The term has something contemptuous embedded in it, as if what defined the transnational community of Russian or ex-Soviet people were not their common cultural heritage or sense of history but the fact that they couldn't cut it back home. Unlike Russians, French or British expats (or even émigrés) are not treated as traitors when they come home to visit, except in the kind of political sense that is totally foreign to most Russian people. It doesn't even matter why they emigrated, since the manifest differences between the ultraconservative White Russians, the pro-Western liberal dissidents, and even the left-leaning Jews are washed out in the language of "emigration." The reasons behind the sneer are complicated, but they certainly include a fair amount of tall-poppy syndrome and a latent or expressed anti-Westernism. Most vividly they are dramatized in the finale of the early post-Soviet film Window to Paris, in which a bunch of Russian zhloby [boors] end up magically transported to a chic Parisian neighborhood. Among the Russians there is a class of schoolchildren who, at the end of the movie, is faced with the choice of remaining in Paris or returning to Russia; the protagonist makes an impassioned plea for them to return and help fix their miserable, broken country, and they end up agreeing. But the point here is not American-style civic can-doism--it's that only sharing in the misery makes you authentically Russian.

Window to Paris also contains one of the classic Russian portrayals of the émigré: the fugitive who makes it good in his adopted country but spends his time complaining about the dullness and materialism of his new countrymen and pining for the intimate kitchen discussions and pickles of his homeland. (Of course, when he's offered the chance to return, he hates Russia even more than France.) This stereotype isn't entirely made up; I've met a few of these people myself. What it points to, though, is the way in which the essentialized contrast between the authenticity of Russia and the inauthenticity of the West become internalized even among the émigré Russians who are the principal targets of this style of thinking. (Incidentally, this style even predates Russian nationalism properly speaking, which is convincingly demonstrated in Hans Rogger's brilliant and unpretentious 1960 book National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia.) A distrust of the West is one of the weightiest pieces of cultural baggage an emigrant carries with her, and the largest faultlines in the Russian immigrant community in the States are traced out by the ability or inability to get rid of it.

One of the consequences of all this is that members of the emigration, saturated as they are with the national ideology, have a very uneasy or sometimes outright antagonistic attitude to other émigrés. (I'm one of them, look at me being contemptuous right in this post!) For some reason, Russians rarely seem to develop the kinds of instinctive ties of affinity to one another that members of other immigrant communities enjoy. When I hear Russian being spoken on public transportation, I don't feel pleased or experience any urge to strike up a conversation. Instead, I feel vaguely embarrassed, as if the presence of other Russians were somehow a reflection on my own imperfect assimilation. Brighton Beach, the epicenter and symbol of the Russian community in America, feels cobbled together from fear and desperation rather than a positive sense of communal identity. Even the weirdly anglicized Russian grammar and pronunciation used there strike me as somehow whiny and demanding, despite there being nothing objectively wrong with them at all.

This is why Dovlatov's Inostranka is both one of the best novels of "the emigration" and a profoundly flawed book. It presents émigré life in all its strangely skeevy social complexity, unlike some intellectualized books that seem to treat it as a purely individual matter of tortured conscience and private betrayal, and it has a healthy skeptical attitude about all the sociopolitical rejects that make up The Russians in America. On the other hand, Dovlatov is (of course) himself an émigré, and even a character in his own novel, but he never takes the opportunity to reflect on the sources of his satirical bitterness. To be really profound and thoughtful, an emigration novel needs to figure out why Russians are so disengaged from one another, why you can't feel like a self-confident member of the melting pot without pretending everyone else on your boat just washed up on shore by accident. Something about the emigration seems to work if you look at it hard enough. The more integrated émigrés get into American life (I don't know about other countries), the more comfortable they seem with the Russian community, as if viewing it from from the reassuring distance of full Americanness makes it look more satisfying and cohesive than it can ever be seen from the inside. Dovlatov's style, which works brilliantly in the Soviet context because of the way it skates just at the surface of things and thereby reveals their absurdity, doesn't really untangle the contradictions of the emigration. Here, the absurdity is obvious and the coherence is hidden.

I've dreamed for a long time about writing a history of the emigration that resists the narrative of trauma and dysfunction without ignoring it. But to whom would such a book be addressed? Among Americans it would be of interest maybe to a few literary Russophiles. Among Russians the audience would be made up of the same émigrés and domestic intelligentsia that's been having these discussions for centuries--in other words, the book would be yet another fruitless extension of a debate that's been rendered useless by its own involution. The paradox is that the intelligentsia can't get over its complexes until it starts talking to outsiders about other things, and we can't start talking about other things until we've gotten over our complexes. (Is "complexes," roughly meaning "hang-ups," usable in English in this form at all? I've just realized I've been using it as a calque from Russian my whole life.) Maybe Keith Gessen's essay on Brodsky, targeted, it seems, at a broadly literary reader and generally unencumbered with neurosis, is a good start. We'll just have to wait and see what happens. (It's discussed at Hat's here.)

Once More, With Feeling

2011-05-19T00:31:00.188-04:00

And the boss drunkenly babbles of Stalin,
And grabs the wheel with his hands..
And then, of course, the paramedics
Took us into the triage room.
They took my pants off and my leather jacket,
Threw all my stuff in a bag,
And sent round Marusia the nurse
To give me the powder of life.
And I kept saying that I'm healthy,
And if...whatever else..
Then in this best of all possible worlds,
I still don't give a damn.
It's all the same, it's long been all
The same damn thing to me!
- Aleksandr Galich, "Больничная цыганочка" ("The hospital gypsy-girl")

(More substantively, see this Nezavisimaia Gazeta roundtable on the current issues.) (Google Translate)

There is a widely-held opinion that the current regime in Russia is obsessed with rehabilitating Stalin and Stalinism. The reasoning--which generally proceeds by innuendo rather than argument--goes something like this: Stalinist Russia is just like Putinist Russia because they are both illiberal, and all illiberal regimes are alike; if you get the people used to accepting the legitimacy of one illiberal regime they'll be more likely to accept another; therefore it is in the interests of Putin to deny the Great Terror, squelch the complaints of Stalin's victims, and bring back the cult of personality. A lot of things are wrong with this picture. First, of course, Stalinism and Putinism are very different forms of governance, though it may well be true that both are illiberal (for one thing, Stalin's authority rested on his ability to mobilize the population, whereas Putin's depends on the population remaining as quiescent as possible). Second, far from being a vital ideological prop for a similar regime, the memory of the Stalin period is in fact a volatile and potentially toxic phenomenon: the perception of Stalin as someone who was victorious over petty bosses at home and enemies abroad is likely to invite--and does in fact already invite--invidious comparisons to the pervasive corruption and impotence that characterize the current situation. Third, as a result of all this, official gestures in the direction of re-Stalinization have been at best lukewarm even in the more confident and increasingly distant era of High Putinism.

Now we're faced with an even stranger situation. The Medvedev government's civil-society advisory body has overwhelmingly approved a proposal that would push Russia in the direction of explicit and legislatively-backed de-Stalinization. The public's response has been, to say the least, unenthusiastic, although the polling is controversial. The traditional outcry among the Communists and nationalists--the rather ill-considered view that de-Stalinization means capitulating to the Western narrative of the Cold War--has been joined by a mass wave of boredom and frustration among ordinary people, who'd rather the authorities solve some real problems and leave them to their nostalgia. If the government persists, it will end up in the paradoxical position of having to impose de-Stalinization from above.

Paradoxical though it may be, this position is by now a familiar one. Neither the Khrushchev-era Soviet public nor the Gorbachev-era public of perestroika proved appreciative of the authorities' attempts to drag them kicking and screaming into the post-totalitarian enlightenment. (After the gulags were closed, the wave of freed prisoners caused such a jump in the crime rate that before long massive numbers of people were demanding they be reopened.) It's doubtful that Medvedev and his liberals have the clout or political will to push through a single-minded program of this kind, but stranger things have happened. There is, of course, calculation involved: not only will convincing people of the need for de-Stalinization (if they can manage it) be a major political victory, it would also be a boost for relations with liberals abroad, who are convinced that Stalinism is an immediate political concern in Russia.

But if we consider de-Stalinization outside of its narrow political context, the justifications become much murkier. Is it really true that some kind of explicit collective penance for the 1930s is a morally laudable goal from an abstract point of view? What is it meant to achieve? Facile arguments along the lines of "those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it" lose much of their appeal when confronted with the messiness of real history, which is increasingly unable to render an unambiguous verdict on the Stalin era. If forced into having a real and serious discussion, as opposed to a rigidly moralist "de-Stalinizing" one, Russians may well conclude (and in fact already have) that there was much to admire about Stalinism, even if this admiration is generally based on specious grounds like Stalin's supposed military genius and preservation of public order.

Within the parameters of the liberal interpretation of Russian politics such a conclusion would be immediately dismissed. (Witness the fiasco with the online poll that almost managed to declare Stalin the "Name of Russia." Insinuations that the Kremlin was rigging the vote in Koba's favor appeared almost right away and continue to be cited in support of the "Putinism-as-Stalinism" thesis.) The heavily policed nature of the spaces of public discussion in Russia has led to a tendency to dismiss any manifestation of views inconvenient to any particular ideology as the manipulation of the other side. Since the "homo sovieticus" position is now considered politically incorrect, the default assumption has reverted to the demonstrably false one that a liberal and anti-Stalinist society exists in Russia and needs only to be released from Putin's clutches. It seems to be impossible to refute this with any kind of evidence, since all the evidence is suspect by definition.

That may be putting it too strongly, but the point remains that there is no possibility for a de-Stalinization process that would be both "real" (i.e. society-wide and public rather than top-down) and satisfying to each of the sides involved. The stark moral categories of the totalitarian interpretation of 20th century dictatorship cannot be satisfied with anything except complete and enthusiastic self-purification as in postwar Germany, an outcome which is manifestly unlikely in the Russian case no matter how many would-be reformists take up the banner. In the end, Russians will have to be satisfied with the murky and ambiguous history that all other beneficiaries of history's great crimes have to live with. Unlike de-Stalinizationist utopianism, such an outcome at least leaves some room to think.

The Empire and the Barbarians

2011-05-09T00:03:00.000-04:00

5. The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian) idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects the idea of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal versions of capitalism and democracy present themselves as an inevitability, a destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this ideology of the future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future.

7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus—a floating figure who stares intently at something he’s moving away from—the angel of history faces backward. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” writes Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” What we call progress, Benjamin calls “the storm.”
- Tom McCarthy, "Declaration on the Notion of 'The Future'," The Believer, November/December 2010

I'll begin this post by announcing, rather arrogantly, that I've never read any of Tom McCarthy's novels and have no near-future plans to do so; there're still a lot of Iain Banks books on my Kindle to get through. I'm not very au courant with the literary world, so I only found out about McCarthy's apparently revolutionary intervention into the discourse of realism by reading the long N+1 review of his latest book. I've only subscribed to the magazine recently, and I've found it makes good breakfast reading: I'm at my most charitable when I can feel myself gradually returning to consciousness and good humor. So reading about McCarthy at breakfast might have been a mistake. The reviewer--Yale professor Amanda Claybaugh--was just sardonic enough that the outline of the man behind the curtain came off as shabby and ridiculous, but she left enough to the imagination that I could feel my rejection of McCarthy's posturing to be a well-deserved piece of morning enlightenment.

I've glanced around McCarthy's various manifestoes, though, and they haven't done much to disabuse me of my smug sense of second-hand competence. Just like the review promised, they were full of vaguely radical language and appeals to the French-theory classics. The International Necronautical Society would look much more like the cleverly tongue-in-cheek takeoff on the Situationist International it's clearly meant to evoke if it didn't look so much like a warmed-over ripoff. Is anything, at this point, more staid and traditional than quoting Benjamin's pithy take on Angelus Novus? I remember feeling like a majestic prophet when I read that bit aloud to my Drum-smoking bohemian buddies, but in my defense I was eighteen years old at the time and had no understanding of just how banal it was. (A Google Books exact-phrase search for the quoted part of the paragraph yields 762 results, with no false positives as far as I can tell. 762! And that doesn't include periodicals or works using other translations.) What's McCarthy's excuse?

OK, but mockery only gets us so far. The much more interesting question is this: why have "French theory" and its allies retained the aura of radicalism, nonconformity, and edginess that their intellectual contemporaries have now totally lost? After all, the '60s and '70s were full of proposals for world-changing intellectual shifts, and only later did many of them die off or become colonized by Theory. It is astounding to think that authors are still being described as "trendy" or "fashionable" when most of them have long since died of old age. But that can be chalked up to the poor communication between the world of academia and the world of popular intellectual debate. It seems far more relevant that actual people who are trying to be trendy and fashionable--and, as far as experimental literature goes, apparently succeeding--are still using Derrida and Blanchot as points of reference.

The most plausible explanation for this that I can come up with is that the various thinkers and schools of thought that have been characterized as belonging to Theory (and, in popular discourse, assigned to the even less meaningful category of "postmodernism") in fact represented the last stage in what still looked to be a coherent intellectual history of the West. There is a great irony in the fact that an array of thinkers who mostly tried to break down idealist genealogies and resisted the impulse to render the history of ideas monolithic and univocal ended up as the more-or-less indistinguishable last chapter in that history. At the same time, it's hard not to see the result as a predictable one. Of course whoever has the last word is going to be the person who insists on incoherence, since after her there exist only local possibilities for further development. (Maybe that's a little overdrawn.) (It's also worth pointing out somewhere that the characterization of Theory as the always-already latest fad to hit the ivory tower is very useful for people who dislike the academic humanities and wish they'd go away so funds can be spent somewhere else. Naturally such people cannot be expected to keep up with the latest special issue of PMLA.)

Things haven't ossified around Derrida, of course. Individual fields and specializations still have their own conversations, turns are constantly taking place, new kinds of approaches and subject matter are being proposed. Yet all of the candidates for a broad-front interdisciplinary turn--evo-psych, speculative realism, maybe even digital humanities to the extent that this exists as an idea--have resoundingly failed to catch on except as yet another intervention narrowly bounded in a discipline. Even within disciplines, individual subfields are rarely in sync with one another, and one subfield's methodological revolution is often the stodgy antiquarianism of the next. In the broader world of art and letters, as far as I can tell, newly-discovered epochal shifts are rarely tied to contemporary developments in academia.

Still, when Tom McCarthy wants a flag to wave, he reaches out for the flag of Theory. There must be something more to this than a radically misguided sense of what the latest trends are. Even the Onion, after all, was making jokes about deconstruction in the late '90s, and what could be more middlebrow than that? No, it seems like the answer lies somewhere else.

My sense is that, despite all his revolutionary sloganeering, McCarthy is actually operating from a deep-seated sense of nostalgia. The resurrection of the radicalism of Theory is in reality just a wistful recollection of the days when the liberal arts could be glanced at, dismissed, or revolutionized as a coherent whole. Benjamin, here, isn't playing the role of the unjustly forgotten critical savior. He's actually more like Longfellow, Stephen Crane, or Fenimore Cooper--authors who could once be cited as the bearers of a great and unified national tradition, before its fragmentation into warring subcultural cliques. The necrophiliac necronauts are rather more conservative than they think.

A Few Fine Men

2011-04-23T18:50:00.000-04:00

I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, "This summer, instead of going to a different place, I'll go to a different field."
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

This book--in case you've somehow missed it in your journey through Internet culture--is a compendium of anecdotes from the life of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and idol to nerds everywhere. I've been neglecting it for years, mainly because, up until quite recently, I was a militant partisan of the humanities side of the two-culture war. I was expecting to hear all about how empty and pointless literary scholarship is and how evolutionary explanations account for everything and so on. These days, I wouldn't have minded so much--but thankfully, that's not what the book is about. Unfortunately, it's not really about physics either. The book consists mostly of Feynman blundering into other people's scholarly or other fields, demonstrating to his own satisfaction how much smarter and better he is than they are, and blundering back out. Magically, it turns out that Feynman is a better biologist than biologists, a better safecracker than safecrackers, a better philosopher than philosophers, a better pick-up-artist than pick-up-artists, and a better samba musician than Brazilians! It never seems to occur to him that his own personal standards for judging his success in a field might not be the ones used by others, nor does he ever seem to register criticism and take it under advisement.

The question, then, is: what do we do with this information? Is Feynman a bad role model for intellectuals? Should his book be taken as a monument to hubris and forgotten? (Nevermind that there's little chance of that.) The implicit alternative is that scholars should stick to their fields, should be terrified of treading on other people's turf, should keep their grubby hands off such things as art, music, and sleazy pick-up artistry (well, maybe it's hard to argue with that last one). This position is rarely articulated openly, but there are many things about the contemporary academic world that push, consciously or not, in that direction. There is now so much literature on so many different topics that a scholar inevitably seems a bit amateurish even when she ventures only slightly outside of her field. My knee-jerk reaction against Feynman's uninhibited interdisciplinarity comes at least in part form this sense that he hasn't been trained properly! The alternatives, as I've described them, are perhaps drawn a bit too starkly, but in practice the extremes seem a lot more common than the middle ground.

It wasn't always thus. We don't begrudge Kant the fact that he dabbled in astronomy, and we certainly don't think any less of Benjamin Franklin for being self-conscious polymath. Even in the twentieth century there were still prodigies who mastered multiple fields even if they were only well-known in one. What's wrong with Feynman is not his curiosity and willingness to engage with other scholars, it's his conviction that the things that made him a great physicist--inventiveness, a willingness to work through problems, a healthy spirit of competition, plus a great deal of inborn mathematical skill--were also the things that would make him qualified to lord it over mere biologists or philosophers. In fact, his view of the problem of polymathy seems to have foundered on his superficial view of mastery. The way he tells it, what matters is the flashy entrance, the instant solution, the clever trick--in short, things that make good stories but poor scholarship.

The closest living analogue to Feynman is probably Malcolm Gladwell, who never had a home field of expertise at all. Like many other academics, I've railed against Gladwell's glibness and fondness for pat conclusions. But I'm beginning to recognize some of the value of Gladwell's approach, and more importantly, I've begun to understand its causes. Hyperspecialization and superficial polymathy are not mutually exclusive: the former leads directly to the latter. The only person capable of building bridges between disciplines today is someone wholly uninvested in the specialized scholarly reverberations of his attempts to generalize. Gladwell and Feynman continue to appeal because they offer the promise of participating in scholarship without being torn apart by its involution.

I am nothing like Feynman; I move my sights a couple thousand miles or a few decades and immediately start thinking of myself as a dabbler. I would, however, like to see a working model for generalists that doesn't make specialists cry and keeps the audience somehow involved in the outcome of the scholarly process. The only way to do that, I suspect, is to encourage more generalists, and encourage them in such a way that the worst excesses of the Feynman approach remain limited. If we have competing generalizing theories and approaches, ones that even non-specialists can have a stake in, then finally the arguments of specialists will begin to make some sense. The collapse of broad-goal-oriented scholarship (certainly in the humanities and perhaps in the sciences as well) since the 1970s, while by and large a positive development methodologically, has not produced the kind of positive rethinking that looks increasingly necessary. We just keep doing the same thing we did before and pretend that it all somehow makes sense. So let a thousand general flowers bloom, or something.

The Genre Machine

2011-04-15T14:13:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about genre recently. Anyone who works with non-canonical old texts on a regular basis has most likely noticed that they tend to sift themselves into loose, yet definite generic groupings that are only loosely captured by terms such as "didactic literature," "travel narratives," "palace memorials," and so on. Thus, European literature has a long tradition of texts that imitate the Socratic, ordered question-answer structure of a catechism. Anything from libertine parodies to political pamphlets and treatises on accounting could be wedged into this framework, primarily because it was instantly familiar to everyone who received a religious education that utilized actual catechisms--i.e. practically any literate person.

The Internet age is remarkable for the speed and singlemindedness with which it produces new genres. There are, of course, the obvious innovations such as "blog posting" and "email" (which are roughly the equivalent of the traditional "novel," "Spectator-style journal," and so on). These rarely attract interest as such because they seem so familiar and so close to the old genres they're derived from; because of this, they're also not especially interesting, since their formal coherence is outstripped by the wide variations in style and content that they accommodate. I am more interested in a metagenre which the Internet did not invent but totally transformed: the image macro. Variations on the image macro have formed the backbone of the vast majority of Internet memes. (Memes, incidentally, are a classic instance of Foucault's argument about disciplines creating the thing they're supposed to be investigating: the rather homely conceptual apparatus of Dawkins' "memetics" has totally failed to catch on in the world of intellectual history, where its weaknesses are obvious, but it did manage to create and shape our vocabulary for thinking about the specificities of Internet fads. "Meme" could become a meme only on the Internet.)

Obviously image macros, defined at the most basic level as a combination of text and image in which both are equal in status and comment on each other in some ironic way, have existed for a long time. When the definition is modified to include their viral distribution and anonymous creation using electronic media, however, certain things become clear. For one thing, individual genres of image macros remain remarkably internally consistent even as they get further and further away from the original on which they were supposedly an ironic comment. Thus, the venerable Demotivational Poster meme was once based on a parody of an actual genre of posters containing blandly reassuring corporate vomitus printed in white text underneath kitschy photographs of sunsets. The vast majority of the meme's producers and consumers have never seen a motivational poster in their lives, and if some parodic intent remains, it's completely undetectable in almost all of its instantiations.

On the other hand, the consistency of the internal language of an image macro enables it to be incredibly flexible in what it can express. I am thinking in particular of two genres that have reached large-scale prominence over the past year and a half or so: "rage comics" and "Advice Animals." (Although these are now being generated at enormous rates all over the Internet, the most convenient place to find decent examples is red dit.) It's hard to argue that these works are meaningfully artistic or even participate in a "folk art" tradition: the whole point is that the very slight variation in themes and content erases the distinction between creation and imitation. What they are, though, is a sophisticated language for expressing daily experience, a kind of pop phenomenology. For instance, this image, one of the many semantically-distinct stock faces (even this list is incomplete) that compose a rage comic, with or without accompanying text, means "experiencing a vaguely shameful or illicit pleasure":

Although the subtle differences between faces can be totally inaccesible to an untrained observer, to someone who regularly reads and produces rage comics they are transparent. As a result each rage comic is a sentence written in a constantly evolving but still mutually-comprehensible language. In that sense, they can be compared to emoticons, although the scope of emotional nuance and expression they permit is much broader.

Advice Animals are similar, although they usually consist of a single semantic unit in which the image dictates the coloring and interpretations. The best Advice Animals are either well-realized jokes, such as Business Cat:

Or expressions of submerged, universal, yet also shameful facets of human experience:

(That's "Foul Bachelor Frog" and "Socially Awkward Penguin.")

My point here is not to do a '90s-style critical reading of a pop-culture text. What I'm interested in is how this emerging regime of artistic production connects to broader cultural trends. Its salient features, as far as I can tell, are its anonymity and its laserlike focus on the line between public and private. Many of the themes taken up in rage comics and Advice Animals, in the hands of a traditional literary writer, could form the crux of a story that would rely for its impact on just this kind of disclosure of intimate emotional terrain. In the hands of anonymous rage-comic makers, these disclosures seem utterly banal and even democratic in their assumption that secret anxieties are really communal. Anonymity, in this case, is not the bogeyman that destroys thoughtful discourse (as some tedious critics would have it), nor is it the heroic facelessness of the resistance fighter (as some tedious advocates claim). It is the auto-psychoanalysis of a collective subconscious that is insistent on excavating and exposing all of its hidden traumas.

4chan may or may not have been the origin of these memes, but it does showcase the meaning of this anonymity. Rage comics and Advice Animals coexist there with all kinds of original and copypasta'd personal stories, typically those to which it would be impossible to admit in public. (Anti-Semitism, by and large successfully exiled from the public sphere over the past fifty years, is a common theme.) Once created and popularized, varieties of the new genres of Internet art sanitize the autotherapeutic discourse of the anonymous subconscious and "resell" it for consumption to equally anonymous Internet readers. Ultimately, the result is an erosion of privacy from the other side: not a forcible corporate-funded assault on private space, but an expansion in the things legitimately to be considered public. So if we want to talk about Facebook and the future of privacy today, we have to look at how we've begun to make art.

Engineers and Human Souls

2011-04-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

He thought about Vaatzes; studying him so intensely for so long, finally meeting him in the empty streets of Civitas Vadanis. To the best of his knowledge, Psellus had never been in love; but if he had to imagine what love must be like, his nearest reference would be how he felt about Ziani Vaatzes, the supreme enemy. Which was strange, and more than a little disturbing, since Vaatzes was to blame for everything. He'd brought the war here, like a man carrying the plague--infected, a victim and also a predator, a weapon, an enemy. Under other circumstances, Psellus liked to believe, they'd have been friends, good friends (which was, of course, absurd, since a ranking Guild official would never condescend to mix with manual workers, outside of circumstances that in themselves precluded any possibility of friendship). Perhaps it's because I'm so isolated from ordinary people that the only one I ever bothered to try and understand fascinates me so. In which case, I'm even more pathetic than I ever imagined.
Be that as it may; the clock told him it was a few minutes to noon, at which time he was due to meet with the Strategy and Tactics Committee to discuss the progress of the war...
-KJ Parker, The Escapement (2007)

When people hear about how Empedocles built a whole physico-eschatological system based on the basic forces of Love and Strife, they tend to jump to the immediately-obvious hippy-dippy conclusion that Love is the good force of creation and Strife is the evil force of destruction. (Of course, they're in balance, blah blah blah, but we all know who we're rooting for in the playoffs.) Actually, it's the other way around. By forcing apart, Strife differentiates; what was once a glob of undistinguishable matter becomes, under the influence of Strife, a planet with people and things. Love, naturally, is the opposite: by collapsing what was once distinct, it acts as a potent force of destruction.

All this was running through my head as I was reading through K. J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy (Devices and Desires; Evil for Evil; The Escapement). Normally fantasy is a guilty pleasure for me, or at best a guilty pleasure with unexpected rewards. Parker's books are just as serious and thoughtful as any of the litrahchah I'd normally be reading, and, unlike the litrahchah, are interesting enough to keep me hooked for thousands of pages. A fantasy trilogy centered around lovingly erotic depictions of archaic machinery is unique enough in itself--but the fact that all the characters have Byzantine names and character traits makes it irresistible (and the absence of magic, monsters, and gods doesn't hurt). Parker is trying to tell a story about a theme as well as about people; unlike most of her colleagues in the business (who are all great in their own ways!) she doesn't regard placeholder themes like "loyalty" and "friendship" to be satisfactory. A work of science fiction, as brilliantly explained by Sherry Turkle, creates rules and then follows them. Parker's machines enable her to write about the rules.

Here's what I mean. The protagonist of our story, Ziani Vaatzes, is an engineer. The books follow the twists and turns of a big machine he creates, in full Deleuzian fashion, out of two dukedoms, a republic, and a tribal confederation, along with lots of cogs and gears in the form of supporting actors. The comparison between plots and machines is drawn repeatedly and insistently, and the problem of manipulating people in this engineer-like fashion is a permanent fixture of plot-significant conversations. Even if allegorical sci-fi were still in vogue, it would be much too difficult for a science-fiction writer to use machines in this way, since machines have understandably become so naturalized in the genre that it would take a ton of cumbersome work to extract them again. Steampunk aside, it is rare enough to see machines front-and-center in fantasy that their presence in Parker's work actually looks meaningful.

The plot-as-machine analogy also has a subtler, more ironic function in the books. It is clearly meant to satirize, on some level, the mechanics of a particular kind of fantasy literature: the Machiavellian intrigue-novel. There are lots of versions, and this ideal type is manifested in fragmentary form in almost every major fantasy series worth its salt, but when I think of intrigue-novels I think A Song of Ice and Fire, Feist's Daughter of the Empire, and a few others. The whole point of these books, which are probably my favorite thing about the genre, is that they evolve as a series of wheels-within-wheels: international politics, dynastic maneuvering, and personal attachments all interlock in a dense, but ultimately satisfyingly easy to untangle, webwork of scheming. In these novels, some kind of unexpected twist, a source of indeterminacy not preplanted in the minds of the conspirators, invariably becomes required--and the handiest go-to for novelists is love. Love, as a hangover from the chivalric-romance paradigm that still informs much of fantasy, generally requires no explanation or analysis at all. It's the perfect deus ex machina.

Parker, unlike her colleagues, thematizes love explicitly as the root of all apparent evil (appealingly, though not quite persuasively) and the initial point of departure for the mechanical manipulation of human beings. In other words, she confronts the traditional sentimental mode of fantasy-writing, in which warm and spontaneous love contrasts with cold and methodical intrigue, with a powerful counterargument: the total love that ignores all reason and proclaims itself the supreme justification is in fact the point of departure for the cold scheming that subjugates the entire world to love's will. The characters in the books are lovers, depicted as sympathetically as they would be in any other fantasy novel, but in practice they are monsters. An argument as unsparing as this one is hard to pull off in a fantasy setting without resorting, as GRRM and others often do, to what Russians call chernukha: bleakness for bleakness' sake, sentimentality turned on its head without being meaningfully improved. Parker's books are no chernukha. They're a hell of a trilogy.

The Politics of Leaking

2011-03-21T23:34:00.000-04:00

Of course, this was an elite market, but it was a market nonetheless, accommodating a larger public than Sanudo’s retrieval of copies through acquaintances did at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Moreover, the step to print was short. In the decades between 1589 and 1618, several printed collections appeared, most (but not all) outside the Venetian state or under the cover of false imprints, and without the names of the relazioni’s authors. They were appropriately titled ‘Tesori Politici’, containing ‘relazioni, instructions, treatises and speeches of various ambassadors, apt to the perfect knowledge and intelligence of the states, interests and dependencies of the world’s greatest princes’. Such and later collections, generally in small formats so as to ensure greater diffusion, consistently boasted their authenticity—for example, ‘on the basis of an Italian Manuscript which had never seen the light before’. Some relazioni also appeared shortly after being delivered. And such was the demand for relazioni that forgeries appeared too. The movement between manuscript and print went both ways. For example, the Donà collection, as we have already seen, included several reports about France transcribed from the Thesori. Finally, many published historical works summarized or excerpted entire passages of relazioni, which became veritable classics by the eighteenth century, regarded as ‘one of the most solid foundations of historians’, as the erudite historian and future doge Marco Foscarini put it. As already implied by a nineteenth-century expert of Venice’s archives such as Rawdon Brown, Ranke walked in well-trodden steps.

To speak of publication in general must not make us forget that we are talking of people, each with their different motivation for seeking, disclosing, or mediating the circulation of, relazioni. Some were minor nobles, real or self-styled. Cavalier Giulio Cesare Muzio repeatedly sold relazioni which he drew from his high-placed connections.¹⁰³ Secretaries and servants of patricians also acted as moles. A copy of ambassador Girolamo Lando’s report on England bears the signature of Lando’s maestro di camera, who obviously prepared the copy (with or without his master’s approval). Francesco Paisio, who had served as a secretary for the patriarch as well as for the governor of the fortress at Palma, was accused of having ‘disseminated many relazioni of ambassadors from England, France, Spain and elsewhere, descriptions of the Arsenal, expenditures and income of the Republic and every business of land and sea, including a description of all the fortresses of this state, indicating the number of soldiers on land and sea.’

Even more than supply, it was demand that drove this market. The Inquisitors’ informers tell us above all about ambassadors—the people they were interested in. The Spanish ambassador, for example, was reported to be on the look out for any relazione; most of all, he desired those concerning Spain and in 1612 was prepared to pay dear (una buona mano di cechini) for the most recent one. But beyond ambassadors, relazioni appealed to many other people. Like renghe, relazioni had a recognized educational value inside the ruling class. Outside, they were known as repositories of information and political maxims. As Gabriel Naudé’s celebrated bibliography of political texts shows, Venetian relazioni were an irrenounceable item in the personal libraries of the politically informed throughout Europe, collectors, antiquarians, and travellers. People whose birth excluded them from direct involvement in Venetian politics, but who constructed their status over the intelligence which they offered to their more powerful contemporaries, all sought relazioni.
- Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (2007)

Now that the initial furore over Wikileaks has passed, its longer-term implications and effects are becoming a little clearer. On the one hand, the sensationalist-muckraking aspect of the projects has, it turns out, not panned out. Information by itself, no matter how outrageous or incriminating, has not been enough to mobilize politicians and other actors; without sustained access to confidential sources the material is basically no more useful for potential activists than tabloid innuendo. (The Tunisia scenario is more complicated, and it will likely not serve as a blueprint for future leak-related events.) On the other hand, the reactionary view that Wikileaks revealed nothing that we didn't already know has not been borne out either, and it's clear that in certain cases American diplomacy has been seriously embarrassed. Meanwhile, both Assange and the United States have moved away from the initial mise en place: Assange's organization has apparently given up on publishing anything, while his American opponents have suddenly turned bizarrely excessive and nearsighted in their treatment of Bradley Manning. In any event, the most significant outcome of the Cablegate memos will likely be the stimulus they have given to other leaking projects around the world, which look to have become a permanent feature of the media-political landscape. (Of course, it's too soon to tell for sure.)

What I have noticed about the Wikileaks discussion is how quickly the frame of reference seems to shift from "a new and uniquely dangerous sort of leak" to "a new and uniquely dangerous problem the government has to deal with." There has been little effort to make clear that leaks are nothing new in great-power politics. The only point of comparison that seems to be available to most of the participants is the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and there the argument is always the same: Assange is not like previous leakers because he is not a courageous muckraking journalist, or Assange is just like them because he wants to take down the system. This, of course, is wrong. If anything, it's Ellsberg who, as a "leaker of conscience," is a historical aberration. As we can see from Filippo de Vivo's book, leaking in early modern Venice was a pervasive practice guided by all kinds of calculations: vanity, greed, scrambling for political advantage, treason, and even simple inertia.

Ellsberg was a historical aberration not because of his distinctive personal qualities, but because his antagonist was a historical aberration too. The hermetically sealed national-security state, not immune to espionage but largely protected from public disclosure of information, is a profoundly novel historical development. Eighteenth-century rulers could expect the most sordid sex scandal and corruption rumor to end up in the press within a few days. (So much was written about ragioni di stato and other forms of privileged state information in this period precisely because information security was so fleeting.) Even in periods when formal protection of journalistic or other speech was weak, leaking seems to have been more pervasive than today. In part, this is a question of culture, but there are more material explanations too, first among them being the dramatic growth in specialized bureaucratic knowledge that makes juicy documents so much more difficult to identify and disclose. The Cablegate memos, though, are about as close to de Vivo's relazioni as any document can get.

I bring up this historical parallel because there's a dangerous tendency emerging both among Assange's defenders (where it can be called wishful thinking) and his detractors (where it can be called paranoia). This tendency consists of turning Assange into the bearer of a new kind of politics driven by exteriority. His old theoretical reflections on the subject are illuminating: by destroying their monopoly on information, we are making them self-destruct. No wonder he ends up looking so much like a V-for-Vendetta figure. Conversely, of course, from the other side's point of view he looks not only dangerous and foreign but incomprehensible.

In order to make sense of Assange, this veil of mystery should be examined more critically. He's not in any serious danger of forcing real changes to "the system." In his more conciliatory moments, he has said that all he really wants is more openness within existing regimes. For all the overreactions of both sides, this in fact boils down to a rejiggering of the balance between privileged and electronically-protected bureaucratic national-security-state information and publicly accessible "free speech" information. In Venetian terms, this would be equivalent to the relazioni-buying chattering classes encouraging a looser archival policy. While the people on whose behalf Assange speaks are and remain excluded from politics itself (as those Venetians were and as people in contemporary liberal democracies are), they are supposed to form an indispensable part of the legitimation apparatus through which state decisions are understood and vetted. To put it briefly: Past regimes accepted some degree of peeking behind the curtain as inevitable and adjusted their tacts accordingly. Contemporary liberal democracies pretend there is a wall behind the curtain and get outraged when there turns out to be a dungeon there. Whether Assange knows it or not, he's acting to return us to the former model. This is probably better on the whole, but as with the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell.

Sketchwork

2011-03-15T16:42:00.000-04:00

I have been here but two days, so will not be hasty in my decisions. Such letters as I write to Fipsihi in Moscow, I beg you'll endeavour to forward with all diligence; I shall send them open in order that you may take copies or translations, as you are equally versed in the Dutch and Chinese languages.

... Letter III.
From Lien Chi Altangi, to the care of Fipsihi, resident in Moscow; to be forwarded by the Russian caravan to Fum Hoam, First President in the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin, in China...
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (1760)

I think I've talked about my potential dissertation topic several times on this blog already, and each time it keeps changing. (Not a bad thing, yet.) Now, though, I think I've finally begun to outline something coherent, so I wanted to record it here--after all, it will likely shape at least the next five years of my life.

What do we know about China and Europe in the eighteenth century, assuming we have some minimal level of interest in the period? Well, we know about chinoiserie, the continent-wide fashion for Chinese porcelain, furnishings, philosophy, and culture that most people place somewhere in the first half of the century. We know that Europeans were having trouble getting the Chinese to take them seriously. If we're a little bit more into it than that, we know about the Jesuits and their pioneering role in publicizing information about China; a little bit more, and we know about the Rites Controversy and the previous century's attempt to use Chinese as a prototype for a universal language. But there, in all but a handful of cases, our knowledge stops. Somehow the professional discipline of Sinology appears out of nowhere in the nineteenth century and the Jesuits disappear entirely (sometime around the time of their order's dissolution in 1773). Generally speaking, we don't think to inquire about how the knowledge got from China to Europe in the first place. We think, perhaps, about ships launching from Canton and landing in Le Havre. But what about that big European country that happened so conveniently to be located directly in the middle?

A handful of people have, in fact, recognized that Sinology existed as a discipline in eighteenth-century Russia. These, unfortunately, are not generally people with any interest in intellectual history. Russia is interesting to them because it was Westernizing, modernizing, becoming enlightened--and the assumption is inevitably that the direction of knowledge-transfer could only go one way. One of the most learned and sensitive scholars of Russo-Chinese relations dismisses the issue in two sentences: "Whenever Montesquieu or Voltaire, or Jesuit letters, had something to say on China it would be infinitely more interesting to the salons of St. Petersburg than anything Ilarion Rossokhin could ever expect to write. Indeed, their national energies were so wholly absorbed in the process of "Westernization" that Russians were unable to focus attention on their own experience in China."

Now, the problem here is not that the statement is wrong: it's true that Russian Sinologists usually found little favor in their own country. It's that it's wrongly conceived. Someone interested in how Russia used its "national energies" will find little of interest in this peripheral disciplinary history, since all the action was clearly in annexing territory, whupping the Turks and Swedes, and writing mannered neoclassical poems. It's even more of an obstacle when literally all the available studies treat the Russo-Chinese relationship as something that takes place between two masses labeled "Russia" and "China," like a game of Civilization. When you are writing diplomatic history, this works--but step into the realm of ideas and it turns out that your basic principles are incoherent. Ideas are not like "research points" you accumulate by moving the "national energies" slider.

In fact, if there was ever a historical conjuncture that demanded a truly international treatment, it was eighteenth-century "Russian" Sinology. Thus, Russia's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ambassadors to China (and earliest writers on the subject) included a Moldavian who spent much of his career in the Ottoman Empire; a Dane; a Slovak who began his career in Venice; and the adoptive son, of uncertain Scandinavian nationality, of a Scottish doctor turned Russian official. Two of the people most actively involved with the Sinological world--the Prussian Gottlieb (Theophilus) Bayer and the Frenchman J. N. Delisle--were barely even Russian subjects and certainly were not Russian culturally. Moreover, Russo-Chinese contacts would be impossible without the Jesuits, who were themselves an international bunch. (No wonder, then, that treaties between the two countries were invariably signed in Latin first.)

Those Jesuits, whom we so strongly associate with the early history of Sinology, were in fact tightly linked to the Russians by ties of mutual dependence. Our traditional story holds that the Chinese were so enthralled by nifty Jesuit inventions and science that they permitted them to spread the Good Word as long as they provided technical assistance. By the eighteenth century, this was no longer true: although Kangxi seems to have appreciated the Jesuits as people, he no longer had much use for their skills. As the Jesuits frankly admitted, they were needed principally for one purpose: to facilitate communication with Russia. The Russians, in turn, relied on them for secret information (passed on illicitly on the basis of a feeling of shared Europeanness) as well as communication. Accordingly, something like three-quarters of the letters of the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil (which fill a thousand-page volume) were sent to or from Russian correspondents.

It's hard to tell why this is never mentioned except as an afterthought. Presumably, like in so many other cases, the Russian connection is peremptorily dismissed because Russia can be seen only as a passive recipient of Western beneficence. On the other hand, nationalist Russian scholars resist digging too deeply into the issue because it turns out that the lines between "Russian" and "foreign" are much blurrier than they'd like. A hardy backwoods boy like Lomonosov is a much more reassuring culture-hero than Bayer, who probably couldn't make himself understood in Russian at all.

But there are more substantive reasons too. Only a handful of Russian translations of Chinese texts were published in Europe, though the fact that they were suggests someone was reading them. Meanwhile, the academic structure within which the works of Russian Sinologists were published meant that dozens of them were turned out to the broad indifference of the aristocratic "general reader": it mattered little to Aleksei Leontiev, one of the leading figures in the field, whether anyone was buying them or not, since he was getting paid either way. It is therefore hard to estimate the influence of Russian Sinologists in Europe in the second half of the century, but it seems to have been unimpressive. (I plan to look at more specialized and state-centered discourses, such as geography, military science, and industrial R&D, to see how the situation was different there.)

In the early nineteenth century, Sinology reemerges out of the taiga, a development associated most closely with the name of Julius Klaproth. As far as I can tell, Klaproth did not like Russia and, later in life, tried to disassociate himself from it as much as possible--but in actuality it was only by working in the Russian service, with manuscripts in Russian libraries, and with scholars who benefited from Romanov-Qing diplomacy that he could get his start as a Sinologist. Meanwhile, Iakinf Bichurin, among the leading Sinologists of the century, got his start by catastrophically mismanaging the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing. As a fervent patriot, it is likely that he exerted as much strength in pulling Russian Sinology away from Europe as Klaproth did--but he produced so much enduring work that the Russian contribution could no longer be doubted. I suspect that the eighteenth-century experience was revised largely under the influence of narratives peddled by Bichurin and Klaproth to their respective home audiences.

None of the above should be treated as established fact yet. I have a lot of reading to do before I even grasp the outline of the relevant events. Nonetheless, I hope the global and Russified prehistory of modern Sinology makes for a good story--or, failing that, "fills a hole in the research." Comments would be appreciated.

Open World

2011-02-28T18:35:00.000-05:00

Professor Saito shook his head, and I could see that he had enjoyed the story, that its strange and unhappy contours had amused him (and troubled him) in the same way they had me. People choose, he said, people choose, and they choose on behalf of others. And what about outside your work, what are you reading? Mostly medical journals, I said, and then many other interesting things that I begin and am somehow unable to finish. No sooner do I buy a new book that it reproaches me for leaving it unread. I don't read much either, he said, with the state my eyes are in; but I have enough tucked away up here. He motioned to his head. In fact, I'm full. We laughed, and just then Mary brought in the persimmons, in a porcelain saucer. I ate half of one; it was a little oversweet. I ate the other half, and thanked him.
- Teju Cole, Open City (2011)

I'll start by saying that this is not a review, since you won't get much out of it if you haven't read the book. Open City is great, and it's selling for a pittance, so you should go get a copy regardless of what I say here. Teju Cole has one of the most sensitive and thoughtful voices I've encountered in modern fiction, and unlike most of our most celebrated writers he doesn't resort to wearisome and easy satire or psychologized, claustrophobic narcissism. Open City is thought-provoking in the truest sense of the word: it inspires genuine thought in an original way without beating you over the head with its pretensions to profundity. (It's astonishing to think how many books that are typically considered intellectual touchstones are just haphazardly assembled piles of Deep Thoughts woven together with sly winks and innuendo.)

To a great extent, I suspect that the reason I like the book is that the narrative style is so close to what I imagine my own interior monologue would be, were I smarter and more contemplative and so on. (Musil, though a classic example of the Deep Thoughts school, scratches the same itch.) Yet there is more to it than that. As several reviewers have already noticed, the real heart of the book is its strange anxiety about globalization, and it is this that sets it apart. Julius, our half-German, half-Nigerian protagonist, never lets us forget that we are living in a globalized world: he constantly encounters people who, just like himself, awkwardly straddle the boundaries between states and continents. Rough crossings of whatever kind are constantly on his mind.

That, in itself, is not very new. The Dilemma of Globalized Modern Man, in various forms, has been a literary staple since the eighteenth century, and in its peculiarly tormented form since the first half of the twentieth. Open City, paradoxically, is new precisely in the indifference of its portrayal. Its most "global" characters are not exoticized or meant to stand in for the particular troubles of their faraway ethnic group. They aren't hawking beads in the big multicultural world-music bazaar that '90s books so often ended up describing. Travel, immigration, and the Internet have made everyone in the book so familiar, in other words, that their "globalness" no longer functions as a substitute for characterization. This rings far truer to me as a depiction of the global world than any of the "encountering the Other" business that emerged several decades ago.

Cole. in short, globalizes the banal and banalizes the global. He is thereby left free to explore his real theme, which is self-justification. Almost every character in this book talks as if arguing before a hostile jury. There's always something in their past that they're uneasy about, and the neat and convenient stories they tell only emphasize this anxiety. (The book itself is, in fact, an exercise in self-justification.) What globalization allows them to do is displace the feelings of guilt, to embroider away their sense of responsibility. Not unexpectedly, Open City takes for granted the standard liberal depiction of the global world order as fundamentally grounded in guilt: about slavery, economic inequality, genocide, racism, war. This inborn corruption becomes a fertile ground for self-justifying narratives which are only rendered more troubling by their plausibility.

We can, if we like, call Open City the first post-global novel. (At any rate, it's the first one I've read to which this tag could be adequately applied.) Cole is clearly trying to start a conversation with the reader, but the question he is asking is no longer "How is the global world changing us?" It's "How do we live with the global as a permanent part of our background?" I've long felt that the latter was much more interesting, and this is an admirable attempt at answering it.

States and Societies, II

2011-02-25T13:56:00.002-05:00

Hometownsmen liked money as much as anybody else, and maybe more than most, but their circumstances and their neighbors kept them from getting very much, and they fiercely resented anybody who did get very much. Guilds were conscious and recognized institutions for maintaining a satisfactory degree of equality, by penalizing or excluding the pushy whether rich or poor, and by the mutual agreements among the membership that restrained expansion and that promised security. The civic constitutions and the rights of membership they embodied were instruments of a democracy among members no less fraudulent than those which many polities with more democratic affectations have had. But hometown equality and hometown democracy meant the subjugation of everybody in the community to everybody, to limits set by the whole community. Hometownsmen were neither political theorists nor ideologues, and for the equality and democracy that existed among them the motives were no doubt a shared jealousy of the stronger and richer and a shared contempt for the weaker and poorer. Their communities—guilds, constitutions, and all—were the kind of polities such motives sustained; and very strong and stable polities they were. An important source of their coherence may have been the suppression within the community of anxiety about standing and place that modern ideas of equality and democracy, which leave the stability out and do not have the hometownsmen's walls, are sometimes thought to have created: hometownsmen directed that against outsiders. Where community sanctions prevailed there was little reason for that kind of uncertainty becaue there could be little change one way or another. Membership resided securely there. If modern class and racial hostility have developed, underground so to speak, as ways of asserting status and location in legally open and egalitarian societies, then such phenomena were unlikely to appear where status and location were immediately recognizable by familiarity or law; inside the community, that is, while the alien was outside. While each community's walls held, such resentments and anxieties were directed against people who did not belong, and so strengthened rather than dividing the society where membership was primarily located. Even rules on what clothing who might wear did not actively assert rank and place so much as accept their existence and inhibit the race after status by the display of wealth. "Presumption in clothing not only causes waste," wrote Christian Wolff, "it also arouses the jealousy of others, from which hatred and enmity follow." Presumption can mean either pretending to belong when you don't, or pretending not to belong when you do. Hometown egalitarianism and democracy punished both kinds of presumption.

- Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871

I've been an anarchist for probably as long as I've been thinking about politics in any coherent way. I like to think I'm past the point of "growing out" of it (can any phrase be more condescending?), in the sense that the problems with the other available alternatives continue to seem insurmountable even when looked at as objectively as possible. Lately, however, I've been coming to the realization that anarchism is not something I've successfully been able to defend to myself either; rather, it seems increasingly like a final shoal on the route to complete indifference. Like so many other strands of critical thought, in other words, it works well as a via negativa but offers little in return.

Part of the problem is that political discussions that involve anarchists are rarely tilted in the direction of subtlety. The debate is invariably predicated on some kind of consensus that out there is a big, malevolent System with a monopoly on violence and a will to crush good communitarian values. Discussions of coercion inevitably circle back to the consensus bad guys, and when the issue of power within noncoercive communities comes up, it is waved away with bland assurances that everything will be all right as long as we work together. (The David Graeber approach seems to substitute "we'll put in safeguards that make our societies harder to coopt" for "let's all work together," but this curiously liberal twist is not really any more convincing.)

But at least "the tyranny of structurelessness" is an acknowledged phenomenon. Much more difficult to deal with is the idea that power in state-dominated societies stretches beyond the limits of sovereignty, political economy, or institutions. (My point here is distinct from the more typical arguments that the state interpenetrates with society or Foucauldian variations on the same.) In other words, we are far too eager to assume that any observable injustice is in some way traceable to an institution or a state-legitimated form of oppression, and will accordingly disappear once the revolution comes. It does not help that opponents of anarchism rely so heavily on specious evo-psych or other arguments about "human nature."

Reading Mack Walker's excellent book German Home Towns really brought home to me the limitations of such an approach. Walker constantly counterposes the localist and blinkered worldview of these little cities to the rationalizing productivism of the eighteenth-century state. At first, this was irritating: after all, these are states too, and they represent organized violence as well as any Prussian regiment! As I read further, however, it became clear to me that the forms of power at work in these communities were not in any significant degree dependent on a formal monopoly on violence. These towns, in fact, were more or less what you would expect an anarchist community to look like after a few centuries of contented stability. Formal restrictions may have existed on paper, but power was exercised through personal authority and communal respect. More importantly, the social order was rendered almost entirely consensual and egalitarian through the strategic redefinition of the parties to the consensus.

Walker makes it hard to see this as anything but a nightmare. The fetishization of continuity, the tribalist xenophobia, and the narrow horizons open to the towns' residents all make state domination look like an appealing alternative. It would be possible for an anarchist to object, of course: the presence of organized violence itself has a corrupting effect even if it is not extensively relied upon; people in real anarchist communities will have a more productive set of shared values; xenophobia would prove maladaptive for a civilization which depends on multilateral horizontal cooperation.

All true enough, and it may well be that if the magical anarchist utopia finally strikes it will have a much greater preponderance of truly open and pleasant communities. It is a reasonable assumption, however, that some significant number will follow the hometown model. But what is a citizen of a hometown-style community empowered to do if he finds it too constricting? After all, he cannot claim to represent the will of a majority; he has no coherent institutions to oppose; he has no model of power relations to substitute for the informal Gemeinschaft, since Gemeinschaft would seem to be at the heart of the anarchist value system.

Even in a scenario in which it is victorious, then, anarchism does not give us enough of a language of opposition to cover even a predictable scenario such as this one. In that way it resembles the inchoate liberalism of the pre-French Revolution period. Perhaps the only way to get around this issue is to assume such a language will be worked out in practice, as it inevitably must. But isn't that the coward's way out?

States and Societies, I

2011-02-18T17:31:00.000-05:00

The local reforms of the 1780s multiplied the number of posts, subdividing—perhaps unwittingly—the civilian apparatus between appointed members engaged in collecting funds and keeping accounts on the one hand and those elected to take charge of police and justice on the other. A survey of several provinces in 1822 reveals that the internal structure of the army had been transplanted into the provincial administration, with marshals, judges, captains, and sheriffs representing the "line" (stroi), the civilian treasurers and accountants, the noncombatants (nestroevoi). The importance of military training and values thus remained very great among those who policed and punished the dependent population and demanded from it the obedience to which army life had accustomed them.

The rigidity and severity of this command structure, however, were mitigated by the pervasive influence of patronage networks. These networks are characteristic of political systems in the process of state formation; in eighteenth-century Russia it was still impossible to speak of a Russian state in the sense of a complex of abstractions representing interests extending beyond those of the Romanov house and the ruling class. They provided the only access to career mobility until the imposition, and above all the observance, of formal criteria of selection and promotion divorced from the candidates' social origins.

... The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and "regularity." It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws. The consolidation of the political infrastructure during the reign of Catherine also marked the completion of this national network and its transformation into an imperial one. This achievement went a long way in explaining the success of Catherine's policies and guaranteed the legitimacy of the autocracy for another century.

- John LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825

Whenever John LeDonne shows up to one of our historians' workshops, he makes the same point: "What exactly do you mean by 'the state'?" Although this is often among the most insightful questions that get asked at these events, it says much more about us as historians than it does about LeDonne. Why are we so enamored of "the state"? I can think of a few reasons, but they aren't very good ones. First, we're still trapped in the pseudo-critical post-'60s moment in which passing yourself off as a radical is something of a badge of legitimacy-and thus we end up in a weird situation in which almost nobody is an actual anarchist but almost everybody is prepared at any given moment to rattle off the ways in which the state colonizes and invidiously rationalizes its hapless population. The second explanation is a mirror of the first. For all our critical fantasies, we are still heirs of a nineteenth-century disciplinary tradition that saw the nation-state as the fount of all goods and the apex of all explanations—and so is it any wonder that a reified state emerges to fill in the gaps in other stories?

More than likely, of course, the reality is a mixture of the two. We work in state-funded archives using state-centered methodologies, and so when we look for sexy topics (vaguely critical, bizarrely enough, can still count as sexy) the state emerges as an obvious candidate for study. All around us, we see powerful and many-tentacled state apparatuses and people who want to find out how they got that way. Since most archives are set up to make it easier to study the state than anything else, we're in a position to answer their questions (even if in practice we rarely do). And, as I've constantly complained on this blog, this is a problem that affects marginal fields much more than central ones.

What LeDonne's work helps us do is disentangle the various meanings of the word "state," which are often most confused precisely when the state is most central to the narrative. To begin with, there is "the state" as a collection of ideologically-neutral institutions supported in one way or another by coercion; then there is "the state" as an ideologized body bent on asserting its claims at the expense of other corporate groupings such as localities and churches (it is usually this kind of state that is referred to in "state formation"); and finally—and crucially-there is the state as a rhetorical and ideological entity.

It is indeed impossible, as LeDonne says, to speak of a state in Russia—and it is especially impossible in this third sense: there wasn't a large enough constituency willing to trot out the ideological panoply of statism in the pursuit of its goals. For LeDonne, the elements of this panoply are essentially the core beliefs of Prussian bureaucrats: meritocracy, professional equality, impersonal norms, legality, and so on. Naturally, these values are in fact closely linked to the more material sides of the state-formation phenomenon, since a state that doesn't claim to have anything to offer is not a viable player in political contestation.

So if we persist in seeing the state as a pregiven historical phenomenon constantly on the verge of bursting free from its feudal coccoon, we're actually confusing a number of related but distinct issues. It is strange that the state is often the only entity left untouched by the parade of recent studies that claim to demonstrate the contingency and arbitrariness of historical phenomena. Its triumph may well have been foretold—but the circumstances under which ideology, rhetoric, and institutions become molded into a coherent force called "statism" are a lot murkier, especially in Russia, than we like to assume. For LeDonne, the most powerful demonstration are the institutions of eighteenth-century Russia. Perhaps never in the history of the region had there been such a flowering of institutions accompanied by such a lack of confidence in the state. No wonder it's so hard for historians to understand.

Double Standards

2011-02-09T18:36:00.001-05:00

Underlying this book has been a different assumption, and hence a different kind of history. It is time, therefore, to confront one of the more radical implications of the historicist view of technology I have been developing: the possibility that a technology (even a technology accounted "superior") can be rejected, discontinued, and forgotten. In Tokugawa Japan, it should be remembered, all knowledge of firearms was systematically exorcised. Similarly, the ideal of interchangeable parts production pioneered in late-eighteenth-century France was repudiated in the nineteenth century. That repudiation was sufficiently thorough that today we know this method of production as the "American system of manufactures." Disbelief and ridicule greeted those manufacturers who tried to interest the French state in interchangeable gun manufacture in the 1850s. At a time when the British were importing an entire panoply of American machine tools to outfit their Enfield arsenal, the French only half-heartedly integrated a few more machines into their existing armories. Only late in the nineteenth century did the French arms industry become the nexus of an indigenous machine-tool trade (as had been the case in America for several decades). This chronology of discovery and its subsequent fifty-year erasure violates several of our most basic assumptions about the "natural" history of technology--at least as it is supposed to have unfolded in the heroic age of the industrializing West. Why was interchangeable parts manufacturing, with its promise of efficiency and gain, repudiated in France? What can explain this strange "technological amnesia"?
- Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

Engineering the Revolution is a fascinating book, not because it overturns our assumptions about the American origins of interchangeable parts (I honestly don't care all that much) but because of what it says about interactions between technical elites and other kinds of interest groups. In brief, Alder's argument is that ancien regime France possessed a very recognizable elite of engineers in the form of professional artillerists. In the decades immediately preceding the Revolution, a faction of these engineers attempted to institute standardization and objective standards in arms manufacturing, a project which failed in the face of opposition from the private gunsmiths who were actually responsible for producing muskets. Although an experimental attempt at a interchangeable-parts-based gun workshop proved resoundingly successful, during the Napoleonic era it was abandoned as a failure because of competition from other factions in the artillery.

All this is fairly uninteresting to anyone not specifically involved with the French Revolution or the history of technology. But Alder makes a key point (adapting a line of reasoning from Ted Porter) in the course of developing his argument, and it is one that needs to be taken seriously as an analytical principle: objective standards, in particular those which are measured using concrete physical objects like gauges and calipers, do not come about naturally in the course of nebulous developments such as "rationalization" or "technological progress." Rather, they are the outcome of failed negotiations over trust, authority, and verification.

Alder's most prominent example are go and no-go gauges. A go gauge, in its simplest form, would be something like a metal circle of determinate size through which a cannonball must fit in order to be judged "standards-compliant," while a no-go gauge establishes a similar lower bound for size (the cannonball must not be able to fit through it). These seem like elementary improvements to the production process: what ordnance-maker wouldn't want to have some way of verifying the quality of his finished product?

In fact things are rather less simple. The adoption of a gauge system totally reconfigures the power relationship between the various players involved in arms manufacturing. The craftsman who makes the balls no longer has the authority to judge his product, while the engineer entrusted with developing and deploying the gauges suddenly has a bird's eye view of the production process. The state stops being a customer and starts being an overseer; suddenly the implicit tolerances and instinctive calculations involved in production need to be made explicit and accessible to outside management.

Obviously lots of different stories can be told about these sorts of situations: we can call them "scientific management" or we can call them "dehumanization." But what happens to the gauge in all this? After it's introduced to the context of contestation, we forget about it completely, as if the decision to create a standard and decide on a tolerance were totally separate from that context. It becomes a unit of measurement, safe from any epistemological challenge precisely because of its arbitrariness.

Phrasing this point explicitly seems in itself to suggest that all standards are false or suspect or something. That isn't what it means at all. Since standards derive their authority from some form of mutual consent, they by definition cannot be "false." But they do, like Marx's famous table-shaking commodity, concretize and thereby conceal a whole web of individual desires and goals. For any historically-minded person, this unlocks a whole way of thinking about the world. All around us are the material and solid records of any number of battles won or lost; we've just never heard of most of them. These gauges, it turned out, was part of a losing system.

Sudden Changes of Method

2011-01-31T20:16:00.000-05:00

THE GREAT SCHOOLS
The Egyptians, Essenes, Gnostics, Manicheans, Cabbalists, Neo-Platonists, Primitive Christians and Christian Mystics, Hermetics, Alchemists, Paracelsians and others, and lastly the Rosicrucians, all secret organizations with methods of teaching and training. A few of these continue to exist, observing all the "Ancient Landmarks," remaining true to their original intent and purpose. Many members of thse authentic organizations have advanced far in the attainment of higher powers and spiritual insight, leading toward the goal which is Initiation, an attainment recognized by many as Soul Illumination.

The Secret Schools had their beginning long before there was a written history of the activities of men. In all ages the leaders and members of these Schools were ready to serve the best interests of the people by teaching, leading, and guiding them so that they might receive the greatest possible benefits from life with the least possible sorrow and suffering. History records that only a limited few have been willing to accept the "truth which makes men free." The majority, natively selfish, saw fit to live their lives in ignorance, sometimes in great luxury for a few years; then sorrow, suffering, and the final departure into the "limbo of forgotten things."

The fundamental teachings of the Secret Schools, beginning with the early Egyptian Coptics and pre-Christian Gnostics, have never changed. Each age, however, has demanded a new interpretation and a fresh application of the Law to the needs of individuals and nations, and, at times, sudden changes of method.
- R. Swinburne Clymer, The Rosicrucians and their Teachings (1941)

My (sadly metaphorical) travels with Robert Dodsley's Oeconomy of Human Life--the book I alluded to in my last post—-introduced me to another unexpected group of people: the American Rosicrucians. Now, like many people, I have read Illuminatus! and was not entirely unprepared for the alphabet soup and bizarre genealogies that awaited me as I dug into this little world. What I didn't expect just how accurate Illuminatus! was about them.

The story, of course, starts with Freemasonry. Marxists like to argue that Freemasons represented the rising bourgeoisie's attempt to manufacture a legitimizing narrative for itself that would be analogous to a noble's genealogy, and they may well have been right (though noble genealogies were generally fabrications anyway). But the problem with Masonry is that it was fundamentally the product of a simple faith in the ability of an egalitarian circle of the elect to solve society's problems in an Enlightened manner. The degrees and rituals were just window-dressing to ensure that the elect were the right people, and of course to add the spice of the forbidden to the gatherings. (The eighteenth century was legendary for its pseudo-occult drinking clubs.) But, it turned out, solving society's problems was far less interesting than working one's way up through the degrees, a kind of early-modern version of WoW. Freemasonry, with its puny three degrees leading to the unassuming title of "Master Mason," just wasn't occult or mystical enough.

The result was a series of superstructures built on top of traditional Masonry, each of which claimed to be both older and purer than the last. (Eventually, some lodges claimed to recognize upwards of thirty different degrees.) Rosicrucianism, in its contemporary incarnation, was one of these. Unlike most Freemasons, Rosicrucians emphasized mysticism and spirituality and attacked rationalism. The degrees of normal Masonry, Rosicrucians claimed, were just an initiation; only the truly elect could transcend them and become Rosicrucians, which meant getting into alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone and astrology and Paracelsus.

Many lodges and other societies that participated in this esoteric explosion, including Rosicrucianism, made their way to the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In many cases, they retained the organizational structure and nomenclature but lost the mythology almost completely—hence the weird titles used by people in the Ku Klux Klan, a typical nineteenth-century secret society. Lodges with elaborate mystical hierarchies became popular even among marginal groups like free blacks, who wove their "reconstructed" tradition together with mythologies of pan-Egyptian and "Asiatic" commonality.

It was in this context that the first indigenous American Rosicrucian organization was founded: Paschal Beverly Randolph's 1860s "Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, American Section." Randolph was a mixed-race freeman abolitionist whose primary interest was in sex magic (he was an important influence on Aleister Crowley). Although the air of decadence in the term is unmistakable, Randolph presented sex magic as usable only by properly married couples. He confessed that the Rosicrucian background of the Fraternitas was mostly a product of his imagination, but that has not stopped the group—which still exists and operates in Quakertown, PA—from devoting much of its time to proving its authenticity. (Sex magic, alas, has fallen by the wayside.)

In 1915, finally, a competitor was founded: H. Spencer Lewis's Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. Following the traditional principle of occult societies, Lewis one-upped Randolph by claiming descent, not from the sixteenth-century occultists, but from the notoriously monotheistic ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. The FRC and the AMORC have spent the ensuing hundred years publishing enormous volumes of highly "well-documented" accusations that the other society is engaging in Satanism and has connections to Crowley (who is now the bad guy, as it turns out).

But Lewis could outdo Randolph in one thing: as an ad executive from suburban New Jersey, he knew how to run a business. As a result, unlike the rather feeble FRC, AMORC now controls a large Egyptoid museum and complex in San Jose and has spread out to dozens of countries, including post-independence Nigeria, where it has become a major social force. Lewis's society sold the familiar panoply of occultist manuals, but the anchor of it all was his magazine, the Rosicrucian Digest.

Reading the Rosicrucian Digest is delicious. It is as if the protagonists of Foucault's Pendulum were modern American self-help gurus instead of European pseudo-intellectuals. Although there are plenty of spooky insignia and allusions to occult knowledge, the magazine references historical Rosicrucianism quite rarely. Instead, readers are fed the same basic message that underlies all of American occultism, whether cult-driven or popular: that they are powerful, that in comparison to their potential the world is insubstantial, that right thinking and right knowledge can unlock their hidden powers. (In fact, random people on the Internet claim to have found lots of direct connections between American "Rosicrucian" ideas and The Secret.)

I'm always tempted to deal with this bunch in a demystifying kind of way, but that just feels like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course it's all a fraud; of course the supposed documentary evidence was manufactured; of course it's mostly about making money and always has been. What's interesting is the sheer amount of work the Rosicrucians had to put in to buttress their obviously ridiculous claims. Among the many books published by FRC Grand Master R. Swinburne Clymer is a two-volume set of folios, weighing in at a couple thousand pages, leather-bound and printed on thick paper with gorgeous hand-colored plates—and almost its entire text is a rambling and incoherent attempt to demonstrate the evilness of AMORC. (A page from the AMORC response is below.) If we believe the book, it required a substantial amount of European travel—and even if we assume it all to be a forgery, the amount of labor involved in inventing all these endless interconnecting societies and manifestos must have been wearying.

The best explanation I can come up with is that occultism in fact has little to do with history or religion or even sociability. In fact, it is an art form. The historical parameters within which post-Mason secret organizations are supposed to function, even if they are largely fictive or imperfectly understood, provide the imaginative occultist with a vocabulary of terms, forms, and ideas that can be recombined in endlessly satisfying ways, much like a fantasy writer designs a world. This is what has made Illuminatus! and Foucault's Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code so popular. The line separating Umberto Eco from his characters is probably narrower than he might like to think (although this is in fact a theme of the book).

The extension to political conspiracy theory is obvious. What distinguishes conspiracy theory as a genre of explanation from other such genres, after all, is that it not only resists Occamian parsimony but actively works to subvert it. Most conspiracy theorists make the leap from the Bilderberg Group to the Illuminati eventually, sealing the circle. (In eighteenth-century Russia, the Rosicrucians were apparently actually involved in a plot to make Paul I an initiate of their lodge, dethrone Catherine, and hand the country over to the Prussian puppetmasters who were pulling the "Rosicrucian" strings.)

Rosicrucianism and its allied figments rest on an appeal to two unimaginable sublimes: mystical power as achieved through occult self-transcendence and its double, control over others as manifested in the Illuminati world government. Perhaps less obvious is that they come into being together as superficially opposed entities. Nineteenth-century conservative anti-Masonry, which held the Masons to be a conspiracy which had organized the French Revolution and was even now plotting the subversion of republican institutions, was every bit as detailed and imaginative as the occult literature of the groups it had fingered as culprits.

What binds them together is a common artistic language, in which the names of texts and organizations repeat with remarkable consistency (though with utterly fluid meaning) from one composition to another. This is, of necessity, a deeply conservative vocabulary, since it can reproduce itself only by copying its antecedents—even if new terms can sometimes arise on the margins. Its continued existence and flourishing alongside and within modernity—despite its often explicit or implicit anti-modern tone—is monumentally impressive.

The Demon-Haunted World

2011-01-27T19:30:00.000-05:00

Joseph Peace Hazard (1807-1892) was born in Burlington, New Jersey, the son of Rowland Hazard I and Mary (Peace) Hazard ...

Like his brother Thomas, Joseph was a dedicated spiritualist, and wrote an article titled "Dignified Versus Undignified" for the March 14 1857 issue of the Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph and British Harmonial Advocate. In this article, he asserted that "spirits appear to be quite as anxious to communicate, as we are to hear."

... This collection is divided into three series: personal correspondence; subject files; and memorandum books. The correspondence files are quite incomplete, with the bulk relating to various land disputes from the final years of Hazard's life. The subject files cover most aspects of his life, but especially spiritualism, genealogy and his property in South Kingstown.

The memorandum books contain mostly a daily log of Hazard's expenses, but may contain virtually anything else. The later books, especially from 1885 and 1886, are primarily concerned with daily reports on Hazard's pocket watch, which he apparently believed was a medium for spirit communications. Typical is the October 28 1885 entry: "On retiring to bed last night at about 9:30 I laid my watch under my ear, and was mentally speaking to the watch (that was ticking entirely normally) and had been so doing some minutes when it suddenly gave two or three consecutive ticks that rang like a bell, as was its old wont. I think this ringing may have been an accident on part of my spirit friend who was then attending me."
- from the "Historical Note" to the Joseph Peace Hazard Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society

(The last few posts for this month—coming, alas, very belatedly—will be based on tidbits I've gathered while doing research for an interesting project involving the republication of an eighteenth-century moral text by American and Russian occultists and enlighteners.)

I stumbled on this set of papers, which I've yet to physically examine, almost at random—Hazard happened to publish an ediiton of the book I was studying. The Note itself, and the material on and by Hazard that I've been able to locate online, is fascinating. Why would this strange man, who built a turreted "castle" in his town as an apparent attempt to attract summer resort patrons, believe that his watch was a medium for spiritual communications?

As far as I can tell, the better question would be: why wouldn't he? Nineteenth-century America (and Europe) was, it seems, chock-full of people with spiritualist beliefs, and many of them went beyond the traditional table-séances. Many of them were religious, but many were not; some embraced all the kookiest occult paraphernalia, others (like, perhaps, Hazard) led apparently ordinary lives. Some even prefigured the '50s and '60s in their attempts to seek out and repackage Asian mysticism for mass consumption—the late nineteenth century was the point of origin for commodified yoga, which, as it turns out, was more "invented" than "discovered." The craze could even include respected, serious men of science like the ornithologist Elliott Coues.

What's striking is that although we—not historians, but ordinary people—have a pretty good mental image of the nineteenth century in our minds, it rarely includes this world to any substantial extent. We imagine robber barons, frontier capitalists, dour and unphotogenic Midwestern farm families, Civil War soldiers, but the idea that these people could be regularly taking notes on the activities of their pocket watches or contributing to spiritualist publications seems radically alien to us. Mysticism is supposed to be socially marginal, because the mystic's authority is supposed to come from isolation. Even if we don't believe this particular version of spirituality, we still assume that cults and sects come into the public eye only by accident. The mainstream was always soberly Methodist.

The more you look, however, the more this appears to be wrong. It's not just that lots and lots of normal-looking people were involved in various ways in the spiritualist phenomenon. It's also that the most arcane and esoteric trappings of spiritualism were also its most saleable commodities. It didn't even matter whether they were founded on genuine hidden knowledge; as soon as it became apparent that they fit the basic structures and expectations of spiritualism (self-empowerment being a major theme), any secrecy they possessed was instantly brought to market. The spiritualist manual was a creature of the mass reading public. In my research, I came across this blockbuster book:

And then this delightful comment from the New York Times, 1912:

The central paradox of American spiritualism, then, is that it both claimed to be a body of secret knowledge and would not have been able to survive outside of the mass culture that created it. This meant that any response to the phenomenon would have involved one of two elitist, exclusionary, diametrically opposed standards of taste: the spiritualist versus the mundane, on the one hand, and the arbiter of taste versus the vulgar consumer, on the other. (A similar dynamic is, of course, at work with similar contemporary phenomena such as The Secret.) That is why, I think, it's still so hard to see spiritualism as normal. The very terms of the debate it sets up make it difficult.

Cyberpunk's Future

2011-01-14T20:40:00.002-05:00

He leaned closer. "But that's not all of it. I'm not innocent enough to let chaos alone. I stink of the Net, Laura. Of power and planning and data, and the Western method, and the pure inability to let anything alone. Ever. Even if it destroys my own freedom. The Net lost Africa once, blew it so badly that it went bad and wild, but the Net will get it back, someday. Green and pleasant and controlled, and just like everywhere else. "
"So I win, and you lose-is. that what you're telling me? That we're enemies? Maybe we are enemies, in some abstract way that's all in your head. But as people, we're friends, aren't we? And I'd never hurt you if I could help it."
"You can't help it. You were hurting me even before I knew you existed." He leaned back. "Maybe my abstractions aren't your abstractions, so I'll give you some of your own. How do you think I financed all this? Grenada. They were my biggest backers. Winston Stubbs . . . now there was a man with vision. We didn't always see eye to eye, but we were allies. It hurt a lot to lose him."
She was shocked. "I remember.... They said he gave money to terrorist groups."
"I haven't been picky. I can't afford to be--this project of mine, it's all Net stuff, money, and money's corruption is in the very heart of it. The Tuaregs have nothing to sell, they're Saharan nomads, destitute. They don't have anything the Net wants--so I beg and scrape. A few rich Arabs, nostalgic for the desert while they tool around in their limousines.... Arms dealers, not many of those left. I even took money from FACT, back in the old days, before the Countess went batshit. "
- Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (1989)

Reading old cyberpunk is a peculiarly weird experience. On the one hand, the whole genre is envisioned as a plausible reconstruction of an imminent and threatening future, so its inconsistencies with the realities of the future-as-lived are especially noticeable, while the endless thought experiments of the Golden Age era are somehow better-preserved. (It's true, though, that the strangely ambivalent sense of living in the future that I feel on a daily basis seems to align with cyberpunk more than any other sf subgenre.) On the other hand, because it's a characteristic product of the late '80s, cyberpunk also constitutes a temporally-grounded aesthetic; it's as difficult today to imagine Gibson's Case in flannel and vintage Converse as it was back then to imagine the disappearance of payphones. Steampunk, which has stripped away the aspects of cyberpunk that made claims on reality, doesn't have this problem: we don't care that the brass goggles and difference engines are unrealistic because they were never supposed to be real. So cyberpunk is strange because it sees the future as a radicalized present, and its overarching focus on the tendency of technology to aggravate the tensions of exploitation rather than mitigating them marks it even more as a product of the disillusioned late Cold War moment.

Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net, in that context, performs surprisingly well. Although he failed, like everyone else, to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, he correctly foresaw an end to the Cold War and the Eastern Bloc's turn to rapacious consumerism. In general, what is most attractive and compelling in Sterling's approach to futurology (and he has now become much weightier as a modern Nostradamus than as a novelist) is that he resists the narrativizing tendency of most predictive sf. In other words, he doesn't follow the traditional path of taking a single trend and extrapolating its momentous consequences. Instead, he identifies a complex of mentalities, social processes, technological developments, and climates of opinion which coalesce and cross—fertilize to produce a loosely coherent world. This happens to be how history actually takes place, so it's unsurprising that it makes for good history of the future.

In the world of Islands in the Net, the Abolition of nuclear weapons (the grand achievement of the Baby Boomers, as he tells it—hah!) has led to the creation of a quasi-world government and a worldwide complex of corporate and other institutions grouped together as "the Net," which is both a vaguely-described technological entity corresponding to the Internet and a sociopolitical one corresponding to what Hardt and Negri would call Empire. The plot revolves around the struggle between this entity and a variety of outlaw communities that both prey on the Net (as information brokers, for instance) and resist its homogenizing attempts to incorporate them. Sure, there are a few lazy archetypes here and there (what the hell is it with cyberpunk and Rastafarians, anyway? That deserves a post of its own), but by and large the picture is a convincing one.

Probably the most profound insight in the book is the way that the insurgents oppose the Net. Of course, they reject its founding liberal-democratic-technocratic principles, but they are not Luddites or (as most cyberpunk writers envision it) bricoleur-hackers who use scruffy, beat-up technology to defend themselves against bigger and shinier machines. Rather, the very fact of insurgency depends on the existence of the system. The "islands" are as much a product of the Net as the larger structures that oppose them. It is difficult not to recognize this as a prescient vision of contemporary Islamic insurgencies (which are heavily dependent on online forums and sites like kavkaz.ru) or, more charitably, the Zapatistas and other like groups. The rather frightening, or perhaps sublime in the eighteenth-century sense, lesson—that the Net abides whether one likes it or not—will almost certainly end up being cyberpunk's most lasting cultural legacy.

I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that cyberpunk as a genre is now dead. It was killed off by a variety of things, including William Gibson's acknowledgement that the world he was writing about had now arrived and thus near-future sf was increasingly irrelevant. The touchstone moment of its death, though, was the release of the The Matrix. I won't deny that the film is slick, that it is probably the first non-textual cyberpunk work to give it all the style and atmosphere it deserves (but see also the really odd and awesome '90s computer game BloodNet)—but that's precisely the problem. By abstracting away the historical, cultural, and geopolitical aspects of cyberpunk's central question, and replacing it with a bunch of tedious Philosophy 101 Cartesian bullshit, the Wachowski brothers effectively reduced the genre to a pure aesthetic, a point driven painfully home by the sequels. Although the problems cyberpunk once posed are especially relevant in the Wikileaks age, the genre's resurgence is an increasingly distant prospect.

This Was Milwaukee

2010-12-30T18:55:00.000-05:00

The same year that the mixed blessing of the telephone reached Milwaukee, the city decided to encourage reading. The taxpayers took over the Young Men's Association library and in 1890 the aldermen decided to spend $630,000 for what became the largest Milwaukee duplex ever built. This was a building completed in 1898 to house the main library in one wing and a natural history museum in the other. Combining these two somewhat unlikely neighbors under one roof was done to save money and no doubt did, but it sometimes caused problems. Among their other functions, libraries are designed by nature to serve as a haven for respectable but broke gentlemen who have had a little too much to drink, but not so much to drink that they are apt to start throwing encyclopedias or trying to organize a quartette to sing sentimental ballads. During the years when Milwaukee's main library and its museum shared the stone duplex on the avenue, a number of these customers zigged when they should have zagged and instead of winding up in a comfortable chair in a reading room discovered themselves lost among displays of dead bison, dinosaur bones, stuffed birds, and other artifacts no drunk should be forced to look upon until he's sober. There are no statistics available on what percentage of these lost Milwaukeeans survived to reach the library. Perhaps all of them did, sooner or later, although the mummy displayed in the Egyptian exhibit looked much like a fellow who used to sit on the third stool from the end in Stash and Irma's Tap until he disappeared one wintry afternoon and was never seen again.
- Robert Wells, This Is Milwaukee (1970)

Whenever I get sick of reading academic history—and this is often—I turn to other types of historical writing. As a snob, though, I have to tread carefully: anything published by a trade press in the last twenty years or so is automatically suspect, as is anything advertised by the History Book Club. I end up with a dwindling stock of random pop-historical works which were probably rejected by similar snobs in their day: Barbara Tuchman, Richard Sennett, Lynn Montross (who is obscure, but whose War Through the Ages drew me, as a child, into a historical career).

Even with this formidable set of prejudices, I have no idea what to make of Wells's book. It's a popular history, sure, but it's a remarkably detailed one. There are, moreover, few legitimate histories to counterpose it to: before the publication of John Gurda's The Making of Milwaukee in 1999, Milwaukee history was either fragmentary or problematic. In other words, as a complete history of the city from its founding to the date of publication, This Is Milwaukee could well have vied for the dubious prestige of being the city's definitive academic history. Its refusal was clearly deliberate. The whole book is written in this comic style, and with much greater success than such attempts tend to have. I haven't laughed out loud so much in a long time. (Well, Eric Widmer's history of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing, which I mentioned a month or so ago, is also a good contender.)

What allows Wells's book to be so funny is its wink-nudge attitude to its reader. Wells expects him (definitely him) to be familiar with the geography of Milwaukee, to share the same devotion to drinking, Gemuetlichkeit, and mild anti-Chicago xenophobia, to identify with its German-Polish immigrant heritage and Socialist municipal politics. I know very few people in Milwaukee who would even recognize these as the constituent elements of some sort of coherent "Milwaukee identity," much less embrace them uncritically. To really get Wells's humor, therefore, the reader needs to play a kind of dress-up. He needs to pretend that these values are his own and, to some extent, become emotionally invested in their survival throughout Milwaukee's history (which, if the book has a real narrative at all, is its central axis).

It's clear that this cannot move very far beyond dress-up, for reasons that are actually pretty profound. The clear and distinct regional identities that American cities used to have are rapidly eroding under the pressure of such phenomena as creative-class gentrification and the abandonment of cradle-to-grave corporate employment. It is difficult today to appreciate the extent to which urban identities like Wells's were once widely shared and grounded in stable social structures and reliable processes of integration. (Both Good Will Hunting and The Town are really paeans to the loss of this identity in Boston.) Only New York (and perhaps Los Angeles and Las Vegas) has retained something of this stability, but this is really the exception that proves the rule: "Being a New Yorker" is today more like a collective hallucination of common ground than anything else.
Of course, not only cities but states and nations have undergone similar changes, if to a lesser extent (and this is visible in Europe much more than in the US). The nationalist historiography of Stephen Ambrose, who is already something of an epigone of nineteenth-century historians like Francis Parkman, is read mainly by retirees; younger people either prefer Howard Zinn or Jared Diamond or have no interest in history at all. I'm not complaining: I don't think we're any better or worse off for the lack of concrete national historical narratives, but they are something we have to recognize is missing. (Not to single out the Republicans, but nineteenth-century American nationalists would be revolted at the lack of elementary factual knowledge of the American Revolution and the Early Republic era displayed by right-wing talking heads.)

Much as I would like to conclude this post with a rousing call to write more Wells-style history, I can't do it. You can already see the spirit of consensus and shared values breaking down when Wells discusses the Milwaukee race riots of the late 1960s. He endorses the police crackdown on them, and, characteristically, ventriloquizes the average Milwaukeean, who of course agrees with him too. But it's an uneasy sort of agreement. Wells clearly cannot quite bring himself to think that cops and National Guardsmen kettling black rioters is quite the same thing as the good old night watchman bopping red-haired heads in the Bloody Third Ward. The Milwaukee that he so unqualifiedly offers the reader is one that is already in the process of disappearing.

Escape From Freedom

2010-12-21T03:09:00.000-05:00

The reader of just that first chapter, however, would be wrong about Freedom. The novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale—at least that's one way to interpret the many references to War and Peace in it—and Franzen has indeed absorbed some of Tolstoy's astonishing capacity for empathy. Gentrification and the fetishizing of parenthood occupy the foreground of Franzen's panoramic canvas but have not been reduced to caricature, except in that curious first chapter, which I'll get to later. Rather, they are made to seem like aspects of an urge to nurture that has run amok, two of the many ironies of life under late capitalism chronicled by this exuberant but keenly critical novel.

... Patty has carefully constructed her life to be as unlike as possible that of her artsy Westchester family, which is distantly implicated in corrupt New York State Democratic politics. Her parents never took any interest in her career as a basketball star, though they fulsomely overpraised their other children's minor successes in theater and painting. So, to her mother's dismay, Patty chose the University of Minnesota and a Title Nine basketball scholarship over a fancy private school. Moving to the nonironic Midwest also gave her the means to escape the family tone set by her father, a snarky East Coast wit; all she had to do was become relentlessly pleasant, like everyone around her. Walter, a mild-mannered lawyer, has been equally deliberate in his effort to become an intensely nice person, a dialectical refutation of his father, an alcoholic roadside-motel owner who favors his lazier, dumber sons over Walter.

There's an oedipal theory of history, and of America, at work in The Corrections and Freedom. Characters believe they can throw out the past and create a new reality, as if that reality won't prove as restricting as the previous one and as if the next generation won't turn around and do the same thing. Walter's legal career is thwarted by his ferocious politeness, his way of choking everything down. So is his marriage. "Walter's beautiful rage going wasted," Patty laments, about Walter's inability to end a good spat with rough sex. Patty's and his life together unravels when their son, Joey, rejects it, leaving their house even before he finishes high school and moving in with the daughter of Patty's least-loved neighbor, a working-class woman whose redneck boyfriend has unacceptable redneck tastes.
- Judith Schulevitz, "The Tolstoy of the Internet Era"

I've raved about Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies here before, but it was reading this novel that really brought home to me its value as an interpretive paradigm. Illouz's argument, in brief, is that postwar capitalism has made psychological self-investigation a fundamental part of its functioning. '60s style "self-actualization" psychology, Oprah, and the demand for narratives about the self characteristic of online dating are all part of this epochal shift. Oprah, for her, is an especially important figure. In order to succeed at the kind of therapeutic practice perfected on daytime talk shows, the individual needs to reconstruct a story of her life around a core underlying trauma: she can't sustain relationships with men because she wasn't loved enough as a child. The point, for the audience as well as the people on stage, is that the pathological state is normal, and that self-actualization demands requires constant psychological self-analysis.

In the glowing reviews—as well as, interestingly enough, the denunciations—of Franzen's new novel, we are constantly told that we are looking at the Great Novel of Our Times (or The Overhyped Novel That Encapsulates Everything Wrong With Our Times). Invariably, the reviewers cite the subject matter, the political tone, the Internet-enabledness of Franzen's style. (B.R. Myers is predictably bilious.) In the process, they miss what's really important about Freedom: its total and unquestioning immersion in the vocabulary and mindset of contemporary emotional capitalism. This book may not be the best example, but I haven't yet found one better.

We can already see this element emerging in The Corrections. The family drama here, of course, resolves into four separate psychological narratives, and the plot is driven by the interwoven resolutions of each character's therapeutic process. What keeps the earlier book traditional, however, is the way in which the author designs and presents his sets. They don't pretend to be anything more than boxes in which self-analysis takes place, which is why they are generally sketched out so schematically. (When the narrative shifts briefly to Lithuania, they collapse into absurdity, which clearly suggests the tenuousness of the link between the world of The Corrections and reality.)

Freedom, by contrast, is a resolutely post-9/11 novel. America has been rudely awakened from the cozy involution of the Clinton years, and the reigning opinion is clearly that "after 9/11, to write a non-politically-sensitive novel is barbaric." Franzen's follow-up, accordingly, includes more politics than anyone could reasonably have hoped for. We're meant to sniff at the NPR liberals, recoil in horror from the sinister Jewish PNACniks, cheer along with the environmentalists. The characters get involved in great events, meet stand-ins for prominent political figures, and endlessly position themselves in relation to the political identities of their neighbors. Franzen is clearly making a determined effort to bring the real world into his family drama.

His failure is dramatic and striking. We never get the sense that anything happening here intersects meaningfully with the lives of anyone outside the narrow cast of characters we're introduced to at the beginning. Politics, political opinions, national events—these things only seem real in Freedom. In fact, we've only gone from the wooden set of the Midwestern house to the painted backdrop of the Capitol in the distance. Everything here is about one thing and one thing only: the drama of therapy, self-analysis, and the excavation of the pathological self. (It's no mere stylistic error that the confessional tone of the sections told from Patty's perspective looks so similar to the style of the rest of the book. They're all, in fact, written with a therapist in mind.)

In this sense, Freedom really is a Novel of Our Times. We don't recognize the oddity of this mysterious melding of James and Zola because we've been so thoroughly conditioned by literary fiction to expect characters to be "psychologically complex." Once upon a time, this term referred simply to the need to create characters framed in shades of gray, with nuanced sets of motivations and inner conflicts. For Franzen, it has come to mean accepting and luxuriating in the kind of psychological thinking characteristic of Illouz's emotional capitalism. Compare Franzen with Flannery O'Connor: it's hard to deny that the latter's characters are psychologically complex in the older sense, but it is equally hard to imagine them talking about themselves in the way Franzen's protagonists do.

It is thus both supremely fitting and ironic that the defining feature of Franzen's career so far has been his spat with Oprah. Oprah clearly knew what she was doing when she picked The Corrections for her book club, and Franzen's rejection of her overture was a fantastic example of the kind of denial members of the intellectual class fall into when confronting the emotional-capitalist world. (Illouz insists that the '60s counterculture was as responsible as any corporation for the emergence of this new world.) And as it turns out, Oprah doesn't hold a grudge: she's now picked Freedom for her book club and mended fences with Franzen. Obviously, she knows who her real friends are.

The Specter of Civil Society

2010-12-14T13:48:00.000-05:00

Thinking people look around and choose themselves. Individualism has become the religion of the past decade. Recently I interviewed the songwriter Sergei Shnurov, whose point of view is fairly typical. He sincerely believes that any civic protest is bunkum: when there are elections coming any outfit will be closed down, so why waste your time? When I asked what the course of action should be for an Akakiy Akakievich i.e. a little man with no rights surrounded by coppers and bandits, the musician answered in his typically colourful language “If you make any Akakiy Akakievich a policemen for a week he’ll be so pleased, he’ll wet himself. Give him a baton and a “No Entry” sign and he’s got a f**** life. When he experiences a twinge of jealously for those black Mercs and their flashing lights – well, offer to put him in one and he certainly won’t refuse. No one would. It’s easy to say things when you don’t have a choice.” ...

The world, thank heavens, is better than it seems through the tinted glass of armed Mercs. Our main cause for optimism is for the moment in the virtual space of the blogosphere. Comscore Agency recently established that Russian internet users are the most active bloggers in the world. We spend on average twice as much time on social networks as our Western counterparts. Nothing surprising in that. The internet has long since become a parallel reality that has everything so lacking in ordinary life: freedom of expression, lack of window dressing or propaganda, the possibility of civic engagement. For the moment it’s more often a banal cross-post, which acts like psychotherapy. In the smoking areas of the Japanese Panasonic factories there used to be little figures of the bosses. During the smoking breaks the workers would beat up the rag figures of the exploiter with all their might and main. The figure would squeak pathetically in response. Having let off some of the steam of their class hatred, the workers would then go back to work. That’s how it is with us: we read of the latest lawlessness, put up a link and feel a bit better. But it’s not worth regarding the cross-post as purely palliative. It’s just the first stage of civic engagement. Internet man is no longer indifferent. He’s taken the first step, broken ranks and started his own battle. The energy of his discontent builds up to become a real force, which is capable of knocking a breach in the rusty carcass of the state. There have already been several examples of the lethal force of the internet.
- Andrei Loshak, "Parallel worlds: how connected Russians now live without the state" (November 22, 2010)

This is a fascinating article, even if it's somewhat overexuberant and starry-eyed--and it's even more interesting when considered in the context of Loshak's previous article, which is considerably more depressing. What are we to make of it, though? Is the claim that the Internet in general and Livejournal in particular are making new forms of civic engagement possible something that we should take seriously?

The question is more complicated than it looks. Loshak, in this as well as the previous article, is very much the bien pensant. Russians, as I've observed many times on this blog, love nothing more than a good jeremiad about how eternally and epically fucked the country is and how it can never be "normal." At the same time, the world of Russian Livejournal is, like many other online communities, a colossal echo chamber which overstates its own significance simply by virtue of the fact that the people involved spend so much time reading it and talking to one another. (This is something akin to the nation-building effect of daily newspapers Benedict Anderson observed a while ago.) It can safely be said that for the vast majority of Russian people television comedy shows are much more relevant than anything posted by drugoi. And, of course, much of the Russian speaking ZhZh-osphere consists of emigrants and expats of various kinds, who generally reside in the US or Israel and are therefore thoroughly saturated with the ideology of civic activism and civil society.
In other words, Loshak's argument to a large extent represents a claim made by Internet civil society about itself. This does not mean it is false. It's quite possible that Russians really are the world's most active users of social networks, and it seems certain that the kind of activism that has come into fashion on Russian Livejournal is of a qualitatively different kind from the politics of "awareness" that dominate English-language Facebook. The most salient point of comparison here probably ought to be the Internet in China, whose memes often have more political edge simply because the territory is considered something of a borderland compared to the mainstream media.

But Loshak is a journalist, and as such he is perhaps overinvested in civil society as an intellectual category. In fact—in China as in Russia—the Internet just as often becomes a venue for nationalist mobilization, whether of the state-sponsored or genuinely grassroots kind. Around the edges, this looks like fascism, but the majority of it is simply inchoate nostalgia and dissatisfaction. The comments on this sad little video of Brezhnev are priceless: "thank you, dear Il'ich! all of a sudden I'm somehow saddened that there are no more people like you, that there are no rulers that would stand with all their strength for our country. today blood is spilling not in the corners of the planet, but in our country. the country is being robbed and destroyed by nations. how little one needs for happiness, if only this recording was played as usual during the New Year's celebrations..." This about a guy who was so decrepit that he drooled on himself on television!

My point here is not that the Internet isn't fueling the kinds of activism Loshak cites. It may well be doing so more and more every year. Rather, it's that technological explanations alone can't get us very far. The Internet isn't unlocking and excavating the civil society that lies dormant among the atomized and passive Russian masses—the idea itself is preposterous. For every leader of an anti-migalki protest there are two schlubs who are happy to believe that the intelligence services of the Main Enemy are funding and controlling the opposition.

My hypothesis, instead, is this. The Soviet Union was a deeply archaic state in many respects, but one thing it did excel at was science (and especially science education). Towards the end of the regime, it began to pay attention to computers as well. The result, in the 1990s, was an enormous community of computer-literate people with no access to legitimate employment. It's no accident that Russian "hackers" are behind so many spam botnets and malware infections: they are the product of connections forged between "kompiutershchiki" and organized crime during that chaotic period.

Being a business professional in the tech industry is easier now than it ever was back then, which means that this community has begun to acquire status and legitimacy. With Livejournal's help, it has also set the tone for Runet. The new fascination with online activism, I suspect, has a lot to do with the self-consciousness of this highly technological middle-class elite and its desire to take part in the functioning of society. As Loshak's article suggests, in the absence of other viable candidates, it has been allowed to claim the mantle of civil society for itself (much like the bourgeois public, if we believe Habermas).

The tl;dr here is that we should not be seeing these developments as a sociopolitical process—on a par with "institution-building," "civic mindedness," and so on—but as a socioeconomic one. The growth or stagnation of the computerized middle class (currently about a fifth of the population) will ultimately determine its meaning for political life. Even if this proves to be enormous, however, it won't move the oountry away from the privatized-state system of governance, because nothing in the program is in contradiction with it. You've got to take what you can get.

The Trouble With Cynicism

2010-12-06T03:33:00.000-05:00

Furthermore, there is growing consensus among analysts that even if the power elite wants to tackle corruption, the economic crisis has exacerbated tendencies towards unmanageability of corruption within the power vertical. XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, told us that the GOR may have waited too long. XXXXXXXXXXXX said that a few years ago, when only millions had been "stolen" from the Russian people (as opposed to today's billions), the GOR could have acted and not sparked public outrage. XXXXXXXXXXXX said that the crisis had made the GOR's task more difficult and the scope of corruption has become unmanageable. As the crisis reduced the size of the pot and the anti-corruption rhetoric increased, some Russians felt that they had best grab as much as they could while the going was good. XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, noted that the tendency of corruption to evade control by the GOR was not new. In 2006 -- at the height of Putin's control in a booming economy -- it was rumored within the Presidential Administration that as many as 60 percent of his orders were not being followed.

XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, said that only a "revolution" could change Russia's current trajectory. He argued that the system had become too sclerotic and too beneficial for too many to allow for change. XXXXXXXXXXXX noted that corruption had even become a positive factor for a substantial portion of society. By taking merit out of the equation for success, it was simply easier to pay for entrance to a university, for a contract, etc. XXXXXXXXXXXX, who has made a fortune in Russia's casino business, told us forthrightly that the "levels of corruption in business were worse than we could imagine" and that, after working here for over 15 years and witnessing first-hand the behavior of GOR officials at all levels, he could not imagine the system changing.

Corruption in Russia remains pervasive and deep-rooted. While Medvedev's anti-corruption rhetoric is a step in the right direction, we have yet to see significant implementation of new measures. Russians appear to accept current levels of corruption and seem inclined to pay up or emigrate, rather than protest. Neither have Russians reacted to the sight of the connected few continuing to indulge in luxurious lifestyles as the economic recession continues to leave most Russians worse off than they were two to three years ago. Nonetheless, the commentary on the GOR's increasing inability to manage the scope of corruption bodes ill for its stated effort to enhance corporate governance and investor confidence.
- Wikileaks cable 09MOSCOW2823, November 2009

I've been surprisingly troubled by the reaction to my post this summer about Western reporting on Russia. On the one hand, I didn't really expect anything different: people who I expected would be receptive were receptive and most other people disliked it intensely. (It's hard not to forget sometimes that words like "democracy" and "rule of law" actually mean things to people outside of my discursive community, and those people are liable to get upset if I throw them around thoughtlessly like references to an inside joke.) On the other hand, the nature of the pushback suggests to me that my presentation was too tendentious and facetious when it should have been judicious and thoughtful.

In particular, one comment ran like this: "I'm not sure which resonates stronger here...your naivety, or that you're a pretend academic." As it came from an anonymous poster and was unaccompanied by elaboration or argument, it's hard to tell what the intention here was. The crucial word for me, though, is "naivety." I was writing in a demystifying mode, which implies accusing everyone else of naivety. Could I have been naive too? I can't see how, though of course the nature of the problem is such that I wouldn't recognize it. Could it be that the poster was trying to say that I was naive if I didn't recognize the dead hand of the totalitarian state in some of the situations I alluded to? That seems likely, but from my point of view that interpretation looks naive too.
But I've decided to give this commenter the benefit of the doubt, so I've been thinking about ways by which my interpretation of the subject could be made more incisive. Finally, thanks to conversations with friends and an obsessive reading of the relevant Wikileaks cables, I think I've figured out what I was missing.

My reading of Western reporting on Russia was fundamentally based on the notion that Westerners see only the State in Russia and therefore end up blaming it for all sorts of imagined and real misdeeds, domestic and foreign. To this I implicitly (and quite unreflectively) counterposed a model in which Russia is basically a normal country with an unusually wicked Society, making Society (which includes nationalist extremists as well as oligarchs) the root of most evil and the State a kind of hapless scapegoat.

This, I now see, is both wrong and naive. If it's true that nothing like "The Russian State" was responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, it's also true that Berezovsky can't be blamed in any simplistic way. It seems clear that a representative of state power was involved in some form, and this needs to be accounted for. What's less clear is the motive: the typical argument that Litvinenko was a critic of Putin isn't very convincing, because he was known far more widely in the West (which obviously would not be impressed by his murder using one of the most obviously traceable substances possible).

My new frame of mind on this subject is, alas, not of much use to people who care about the facts of the case, but it does help me arrive at explanations of this and many similar events in contemporary Russia. Basically, there is no State and Society that can be meaningfully distinguished in the contemporary Russian context. This is something historians have long believed about previous periods in the country's history, but the development of democratic forms led people to think a firm distinction would finally develop. What seems to have happened instead is a lot more interesting. Unlike previous periods, where the State carefully nurtured, mobilized, and constructed Society under its wing, in today's Russia Society has been allowed to create its own state.

This means that every politician, from the prime minister on down, is involved with private power blocs, whether financial, criminal, or of some other type. This also means that less unity of action can be attributed to state bodies in Russia today than in any previous period: the murder of an activist is first and foremost resolved politically as a struggle between institutional power bases (such as the Procuracy and the FSB). These are entangled in non-state webs of dependence and conflict that may give the event a totally different significance. (It seems likely, for instance, that business disputes, and not anything as straightforward as great-power politics, were ultimately responsible for the death of Litvinenko and the poisoning of Iushchenko.) Any explanation that stops at the state-interests stage of the analysis should thus be regarded as deeply incomplete, as should any explanation that leaves out the ways that the interests of "civil society" are reflected and find resonance in the power politics of state institutions.

Using this kind of analysis has been much more satisfying than the uncoordinated lashing-out I was doing before, and it has helped me see that even if American officials doubletalk in public it does not mean they're being spoonfed bullshit around the clock. It has also given me some perspective on the problems of cynicism as an interpretive lens for political questions. Because cynicism is always demystifying, it always has to make special claims to insight: you're too dumb to see that the state did it or that the media are lying to you. This has the side effect of removing any possibility of nuance or discussion, since the closet always has to contain exactly one parsimoniously-described skeleton (for instance, "it's the oil, stupid," or "it's American imperialism, stupid," or "it's totalitarianism, stupid"). It's no surprise Noam Chomsky's essential ideas haven't changed in decades—the man is immune to being out-cynicized.

Last Generations

2010-11-26T22:25:00.000-05:00

One of the motivations for writing this book is to question certain problematic assumptions about Soviet socialism, which are implicitly and explicitly reproduced in much academic and journalistic writing today. These common assumptions include the following: socialism was "bad" and "immoral" or had been experienced as such by Soviet people before the changes of perestroika, and further, the collapse of Soviet socialism was predicated on this badness and immorality. These assumptions are manifest today in the terminology used to describe that system—for example, in the widespread use of phrases such as "the Soviet regume," with the myriad assumptions often packed into it—and in the use of binary categories to describe Soviet reality such as oppression and resistance, repression and freedom, the state and the people, official economy and second economy, official culture and counterculture, totalitatian language and counterlanguage, public self and private self, truth and lie, reality and dissimulation, morality and corruption, and so on. These terminologies have occupied a dominant position in the accounts of Soviet socialism produced in the West and, since the end of socialism, in the former Soviet Union as well ...

Furthermore, the term stagnation (zastoi), which figures prominently as a tag for the period of Brezhnev's rule, also emerged only in retrospect, during the time of Gorbachev's reforms, after Brezhnev's period had ended and the socialist system was undergoing its rapid transformation. In fact, the very conceptualization of the late 1960s and 1970s, when Brezhnev was the party's general secretary, as a certain "period" with concrete historical features, also emerged retrospectively during perestroika ... The perestroika critixal discourse which exposed many unknown facts about the Soviet past and critically articulated many realities that had been implicity known but unarticulated until then, also contributed to the creation of certain myths about it that were colored by the newly emergent revoutionary ideas and political agendas of the late 1980s. Many binary categories in the accounts of the vanishing system gained their prominence within that revolutionary context.
- Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until It Was No More

Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is one of the few truly great contemporary books on the post-Stalin era. It's true that the author frequently descends into pomo namedropping, which perhaps bespeaks an excessive devotion to coursework in his '90s anthropology graduate-school days; it's also true that from a historian's point of view the 1970s and '80s as presented by Yurchak look curiously emptied of events and context. At the same time, the interviews and personal materials that provide much of the meat of the book are incredibly interesting, and even if some good historian had gotten around to discussing the Brezhnev period, she would have been unlikely to find a better source of data kicking around in the much-vaunted Party archives.

One of Yurchak's main objectives as a chronicler of the period is getting around the binary distinctions that unfortunately still dominate most discussions of Soviet history: oppression/resistance, state/society, reformism/conservatism, and so on. His success in that regard is incomplete, but he does better at it than most people. Western observers are generally so obsessed with Aksenov and Amalrik that they lack the ability to appreciate official or mass culture at all. Russians, meanwhile, are engaged in a massive collective attempt to drive late socialism into oblivion; they're no fans of most of the dissidents, but they're just as fixated on Vysotsky and the perennially suffering cultural intelligentsia.

This last problem is the most serious from a scholarly point of view, because it means that our most valuable sources for the late socialist period are now largely corrupt. Practically everyone who survived it has now retrospectively reclassified himself as an opponent of Soviet power or at least as a profound cynic about it. (This is a common phenomenon. Most Americans who were asked about their opinion of the Iraq war in 2003 were in support; several years later, asked what their position had been at the time, many more of them turned out to have been against the war all along. Humans don't like to be wrong.) That means we can't rely on interviews or memoirs to give us an accurate picture of the mental climate of a Brezhnev-era Homo sovieticus (and of course things are even worse with cold hard facts). Since contemporary sources were obviously not much more reliable, we're left on very shaky historiographical ground.

Yurchak is quite aware of the problem and makes every possible attempt to compensate for the distortion. There still turn out to have been a lot more cynics than one would normally expect, although Yurchak's conclusion—-that large swathes of the Soviet population had basically checked out of public life entirely by taking advantage of state-promoted venues for pursuing private interests—-is not especially congenial to them. I remain unconvinced that this kind of compensation is a really effective strategy from a methodological point of view. What's needed is a way of reading sources, not, as in the standard formulation, "against the grain" (since that only turns us into the banal demystifiers of a mystification everyone has long since abandoned), but rather with it.

I would certainly be the last person to suggest that this can lead us down to the hard kernel of inarguable historical facts about the Brezhnev period. I do, however, think it would give us more of a sense of its variety and richness. Despite Yurchak's constant insistence on interpreting it in its own terms, there's still a certain monotony about it, as if the only people living in Russia at the time were apolitical artists, rock 'n' roll fans in the Komsomol, and legal scholars working in furnace-rooms. To a large extent I suspect this is produced by the corrective lens he applies to his material. If we don't follow suit, we might be able to tell the stories of soldiers in the Far North, collective farmers in the Urals, and cotton barons in Uzbekistan, all of which could be much more interesting.

Chinese Dreams

2010-11-17T21:37:00.000-05:00

The simultaneous appearance then of translated French and Western European works on China, along with the original Russian discussions of first-hand contacts with the Chinese, as well as writings translated by Russians directly from Chinese and Manchu is not remarkable. When Leibniz wrote to Peter the Great in 1716 about Russia's unique opportunity, because of her geographical position, to absorb wisdom from both Western Europe and China, he was referring to the acquisition of many types of knowledge, not, of course, merely to insights about Russia's eastern neighbor herself; and he was suggesting that Russia should facilitate an East-West exchange of ideas. But his starting point that Russia's location permitted her to observe widely differing cultural patterns and institutions, and 'to draw from Europe on the one side and from China on the other' was well taken.

The merging of these varied sources of information on China brought a number of conflicting elements into contact with each other, creating in Russia's picture of the Middle Kingdom an ambiguity that became one of its most intriguing characteristics. This feature, strangely enough, was seldom commented upon in eighteenth-century Russian publications. Russian travellers to China occasionally compared their own observations with the literary impressions of Western Europeans, but apart from this there were few contemporary articles, editorials, or reviews which pointed out national differences in the attitudes of various writers toward the Middle Kingdom.

- Barbara Widenor Maggs, Russia and 'le rêve chinois': China in eighteenth-century Russian literature (1984)

I've decided more or less firmly at this point what my dissertation topic will be: something like "Eighteenth-Century Russian Sinology in an International Context" (which sounds, of course, pretty generic). This has a number of problems, not least among them the fact that I have to learn two difficult languages (Manchu and Chinese) and drastically improve a third (Latin). Even worse, I have no idea what I can say about the topic that had not already been said in two obscure books--this one and Eric Widmer's brilliant and unexpectedly hilarious monograph The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking in the Eighteenth Century. But that's not surprising, since I've barely even glanced at the available sources. In short, we'll have to see.

There is one thing, however, that seems to be in immediate need of reformation. There was a point maybe two decades ago when nearly every book on European-non-European intellectual relationships ended up being actually about the "image" of one country in the eyes of another. (Somewhere in France there's a research institute specifically dedicated to this kind of stuff.) Even when this was not just a thinly-veiled excuse for pseudo-Saidian "post-colonial" hectoring, it was never a particularly productive exercise. Why not? Because there's no such thing as an "image." Yes, I have certain images about, say, Iraq that come into my head--but these images are not coherent or traceable to a definite source. Chance references in a minor source may be just as important in shaping them as books dedicated specifically to the issue. And the fact that I may have read more than one book on the issue, and that those books contradicted themselves, certainly does not make my "image" of Iraq "contradictory" (which, in the historiography, always ends up being the conclusion).

This is the problem with Maggs's book: it assumes that an "image" is something out there in the world that can be reconstructed by concatenating all of the possible literary inputs that could have produced it. Of course, as with colors of paint, the venture ends up being absurd, because the result is predetermined to resolve into the muddy-brown tones of "ambiguity" (and such a claim has zero informational content anyway, despite its frequent appearance in historical books). It becomes even more absurd when we consider that the "image" is supposed to live in the head of the "Russian reader," who is supposed to be somehow representative of the general mass of eighteenth-century Russians. In fact, the most reliable quantitative estimate I've seen is that there were no more than 13,000 active readers in all of Russia by the end of the eighteenth century. By contrast, around the same time there were more than 100,000 skoptsy--members of a radical schismatic sect of self-castrators. Claims about "Russia" based on the Russian reader in the period are, in short, inherently dubious.

So why this obsession with "image," given the relative uselessness of the concept for any kind of serious historical reconstruction? My best guess is that the notion survives primarily because of its convenience for scholars who would otherwise have no way of making claims based on their sources at all. References to China in some isolated eighteenth-century Russian text are just that. They don't offer hints about the psychology of governing elites (not having been written by them) or lower-class masses (never having been read by them). In fact, since most of them are contained in translated foreign literature, it's generally impossible to assess their significance at all. Yet as scholars we are now always supposed to try to make a case for the significance of our sources. Anything else is now broadly and dismissively condemned as antiquarianism (even as more and more scholars are using Google Books to rediscover the suddenly valuable works of nineteenth-century antiquarians).

This is, in many ways, unfortunate. I would have liked to see some lone genius assemble a detailed catalogue of China-related eighteenth-century Russian literature unencumbered by the demands of narrative or argument. How much effort is wasted on providing an academic framework for material that is of no broad interest with or without it! These are my thoughts in more cynical moments. At other times I remember that, as a historian, my primary obligation ought to be to the imaginary group around the tribal campfire that has assembled to hear my stories; and then, too, that form gives creative thrust and impetus to historical work, that it keeps the historian from being the irrelevant and invisible compiler of equally irrelevant material and forces him to be something of a creative writer in his own right. Surely there must be some way to have one's cake and eat it too.

History and the Intentional Community

2010-11-09T09:58:00.000-05:00

Duberman's achievements and failures stand in stark contrast. The book abounds in scholarly rigor. He scrupulously seeks the exact truth about events at Black Mountain. Beyond the external story, he tries to unearth the motives and even the feelings of the people who wanted to turn Black Mountain into a fulfilling community and is quite aware that in such biographical areas evidence is at best only suggestive. As few writers, Duberman has psychological gifts--a keen sensitivity to personality and an unusual awareness of sexual nuances. He identifies with Black Mountain and comes close to evoking the actual experience of an intensive, tormented, often "sick" community. He will not let the reader forget the difficult challenges, the compelling dreams, the rare moments of joy and fulfillment, the many occasions of self-revelation that relieved its petty quarrels, vaporous enthusiasms, and depressing educational failures.

Duberman writes well. The first, well-organized, tightly-written chapters reveal his potential. But beyond that he rarely composes. The book degenerates into something as artless, as unfocused, as sentimental and self-indulgent as Black Mountain at its worst. Sections of the book are mere compilations of research materials (up to five pages of quotation). With increasing personal involvement, Duberman seems to lose perspective and the ability to select or discriminate. Black Mountain pulls him into its own chaos. He flounders, unable to order it all into a history.

More disruptive still, Duberman increasingly detours into autobiography. The book becomes a confession. He reveals his taste in people, parades his near anarchic and imprecise views on education, throws in clever but naive and ill-informed views about historical method (his practice far exceeds his grasp of theory), bares his own sexual preferences, devotes pages to random notes he compiled on a seminar he taught at Princeton, and even inserts himself as a participant in a transcript of educational debates that took place at Black Mountain. The book becomes embarrassing, pretentious, the very epitome of bad taste. One might feel more sympathetic if Duberman's self-revelation revealed any matured wisdom or compelling brilliance. Instead, it reveals intellectual confusion and a lack of judgment. Duberman erroneously promotes such self-intrusion as a new type of history. Most historians, in preface or conclusion, reveal their own tastes. They do not parade them. This is not, as Duberman suggests, a matter of feigned detachment or intellectual cowardice, but rather a product of simple humility.

- from a review of Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Experiment in Community, 1973

I wasn't really reading this book out of academic curiosity. For once, I actually had a practical purpose in mind: the question of what makes intentional communities collapse, beyond the obvious. This I did not find here. Not everyone doing their share of work, disagreements about the relationship between ideology and practice, interpersonal squabbles disguised as policy problems--these are all familiar tropes in the history of intentional communities of all sorts, and, as it turns out, Black Mountain was no exception. These phrases communicate little of how depressing it actually is to read through this stuff, which Duberman describes with enough scrupulous exactness that I was drawn in to the college's blood feuds despite my total indifference to the issues at stake (and the fact that the college closed a half-century ago).

Like this reviewer, I had less use for Duberman's narcissistic, angsty ruminations on What It Means to Be A Historian and The Usefulness of Group Therapy in a Class Setting. Mostly, it seemed as of-its-time as the project itself. I suppose one can hardly blame Duberman, who presents himself as a young radical historian forced out of Princeton for his rad educational innovations (a martyr! with a Distinguished Service Professorship at Lehman College!), for floundering around in the soup of confused ideas about community and human interaction that ended up being the primary product of the 1960s. There were many historians at the time who were much more tasteful, undoubtedly, and confessionalism never completed the transition from tacky to mainstream. (The sole recent example of a relatively successful "first-person-plus" history monograph that I can think of is Kate Brown's A Biography of No Place.) But if Duberman can be faulted for tastelessness, he should also be respected for his honesty: rarely do I find a history book that manipulates me so successfully while explaining the process every step of the way.

Clearly, the mode of writing is in this case linked tightly with its subject matter. Like most intentional communities, Black Mountain College struggled ceaselessly to find a suitable balance between intimate intersubjective exploration and the austerity and isolation of creative labor. Its record on this front, it seems, was quite mixed. As soon as questions of power began to assert themselves openly in the network of human relationships that made up the school, intimacy became a weapon and a liability rather than a source of social goodwill. (This familiar process is strikingly described in Sennett's classic The Fall of Public Man.) Duberman never quite seems to realize that what he is nostalgic for in Black Mountain was integral to its collapse.

But suppose we reversed the process. Rather than a toxic stew of excessive intimacy creating the justification for the historian's oversharing, we can imagine tasteful history-writing providing a kind of guide for the shaping of an intentional community. What do I mean by this? Here are a few characteristics without which tasteful history-writing is, I think, impossible:
1. The historian must always have interests in mind, but interests cannot precede or preexist individuals; real people frequently have desires and motivations that can charitably be described as centripetal or even downright antisocial, and a story that assumes they do not cannot provide a rhetorically satisfying explanation of anything.
2. Methodological questions and questions bearing on the historian's personal activities must be acknowledged but restricted to a well-defined, limited space.
3. Interesting arguments take a lot of work.

We see here the framework for a community in which intimacy is a secondary, not a primary, feature of common life. Its solution for the problems that brought down Black Mountain lies in its resistance to making everything a question of "the sense of the meeting" and the exteriorization of private belief. Rather, it assumes that people are willing to follow rules in order to overcome or police the conflicting elements in their natures, that they need opportunities to compartmentalize their interior lives and ideological principles in order to keep them in check. Moreover, this model builds interior life on a foundation of chores and labor, not in opposition to them, the assumption being that whatever interesting intersubjective development actually takes place in the context of a community can only happen when people can work together efficiently. As it happens, I think this would be a good way of running a community even without the historiographical connection--but it took a reading of Duberman's work before I could see the link.

To the Happy Few

2010-11-02T09:30:00.001-04:00

Still he has been reading the Odyssey enough for a straw poll of Circle Line opinion on the subject of small children & Greek.

Amazing: 7

Far too young: 10

Only pretending to read it: 6

Excellent idea as etymology so helpful for spelling: 19

Excellent idea as inflected languages so helpful for computer programming: 8

Excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding of English literature: 7

Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope: 3

Terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society: 5

Terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness of Britain: 10

Stupid idea as he should be playing football: 1

Stupid idea as he should be studying Hebrew & learning about his Jewish heritage: 1

Marvellous idea as spelling and grammar not taught in schools: 24

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

I was not expecting to be ambivalent about this book. It was recommended by people whose judgment on these matters I consider unimpeachable, and it's certainly not the kind of mass-market literary-fiction sensation that tends to drive me into reflexive contrarianism. Also, it's got languages, and they're written about in an utterly non-tedious bite-size form! It's been a long time since I've seen a novel as genuinely and endearingly geeky without the turgidity and relentless fanservice of Neal Stephenson.

And in many ways the novel's really great. Some reviews I read called the narrative style artificial and contrived, which is par for the course for any novel that is even mildly experimental (and yet DFW remains popular, go figure). Actually, I don't think I've ever seen an experimental-fiction book that was more stylistically natural, fluid, and uncontrived than this one. The style feels genuinely liberating, as if it were unlocking the restrictions on the narrative rather than imposing new ones. If it is occasionally confusing, that is not a bad thing: confusion, like strangeness and disorientation, is a legitimate and useful device as long as it is deployed in a conscious fashion, and here it unquestionably is. I admit to getting only one of the gnomic puns ("Funeral Games"="Ludi funebres"!), and even that only half-way,

It is hard not to sympathize, too, with the book's depiction of the "life of the mind." We don't have too many serious, single-minded obsessives here, and despite what it looks like The Last Samurai is not about a superhuman prodigy with magical skills. Learning wears its true colors: sure, it may involve lots of careful study--which is consistently demystified as a process that involves patience more than smarts--but there's an equal amount of apparently pointless dawdling and the "filler" reading that is vital to the cultivation of taste. Ludo is only a little too precious of a prodigy, and the decision to make him that way is understandable. (All disclaimers about elitism aside, Sibylla's accounts of the trivialities people come up with while discussing language study on public transit are hilariously on-target.)

The less successful part of The Last Samurai, for me, is the story. It's not that I don't find it "believable"--what could be believable about a book like this? It's that DeWitt doesn't seem to care about any of her characters enough to put them in a living narrative context. The seven fathers with their progressively zanier backstories march onto the canvas in stately and majestic fashion, but they fail to generate the slightest emotional or intellectual interest. There's no interaction or meaningful dramatic push-and-pull between them. By the time Ludo finds his third father, the ploy has grown and tedious and we are already expecting four more iterations of the same thing. (It's this numerical predestination that kills the suspense more than anything else. One wishes DeWitt had used the space to include more of what makes her book interesting, like the grarmmar of exotic languages.) Occasionally the pressure to manufacture these walking set-pieces seems to have led her to turn to platitudes and clichés as a substitute for character development, which is even more disappointing.

That format also corrupts the work in another way: it creates the pressure to draw a conclusion at the end. The conclusions of Big Intellectual Books tend to come in two flavors--either something appropriately vague but mystical-sounding, so as not to piss off readers who disagree, or something quite specific, if the author's favorite axe needs a bit of a grind. DeWitt's choice is closer to the latter, which is fair enough, but for my taste it lacks the edge of self-critical open-endedness that make such an ending appealing. It would be only mildly uncharitable to read it as a blatant play to the sensibilities of her readers, who are perhaps more likely than other people to pride themselves on their cultivation of obscure interests. The l'art pour l'art aspect of it, moreover, seems like a remarkably straightforward consequence of the rest of her narrative. What the story lacks, in short, is the subtlety that suffuses much of the rest of the book.

Sources of Tedium

2010-10-26T17:03:00.001-04:00

In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn't seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for the. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it's high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever--by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn't give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet's kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of "words, words, words," of "Denmark's a prison."
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

I was reminded of Humboldt's Gift by languagehat's post and decided to finally read it. I had picked it up for the first time at some tender young age when I thought reading every book mentioned in some other book was a good way to improve myself (in this case, naturally, I got bored after ten pages and quit). Surprisingly enough, the passing of a decade has not made the book less boring, although I can now follow Humboldt's financial misadventures with a sick kind of fascination.

But boredom isn't the issue. Lots of great books are boring, lots of bad ones utterly captivating. In this case, the always satisfying and occasionally marvelous lucidity of Bellow's prose style largely makes up for the tedium. The real problem with Humboldt's Gift is that it is immensely frustrating in a way only a novel of its time and place can be. The book hits every single one of the clichés of 1960s New York Jewish intellectual literature, whose most enduring representative ended up being Woody Allen. The protagonist is, naturally enough, a Jewish intellectual with big ideas and a deep investment in some fad movement or other; he is unable to suppress his learned wisecracking even as he's slumming it with the Mob; he's got a boyhood home back in the unimaginably distant wilds of Coney Island, of which he is perpetually vaguely embarrassed and proud; he's got an ex-wife who is described in no uncertain terms as a shrewish, money-grubbing bitch who's out to get him; he's got a roving, lecherous eye for women half his age. (The book is no less an example of New York Jewish literature for taking place mainly in Chicago.)

It is hard to believe the seriousness with which this book takes all of these aspects of Charlie Citrine's character, as if they were the author's profoundly original invention. Worst of all, however, are the aspects of the book that deal with his relationships with women. Bellow's female characters are all manipulative sluts or conniving Lucrezia Borgias or risible old maids or pert-assed pretend academics--in short, anything but people with real personalities and emotions beyond Citrine's drooling gaze. Bellow appears to expect us to be very interested in the details of Citrine's relationship with his ex-wife, despite the fact that there is nothing whatsoever even mildly interesting or redeeming about the entire plotline involving her. In fact, there is only a single female character that is passably dynamic or complex (Kathleen), and she gets little screen time. The big arc of the end of the book, Citrine's travels with Renata, is a kind of bizarre fever dream apparently dreamt up by someone who has never had a conversation with a woman outside of a brothel. Could it be that that's the whole point, that Citrine's problems come from his narcissism and his inability to treat people as ends rather than means? Maybe, but if so the book never quite breaks Citrine out of his obliviousness. Trying to divine authorial intent in such a case is not an especially useful project; as a reader, I can't help feeling irritated regardless. (Worse yet, the novel was published in 1973, which makes it hard to make allowances for the prejudices of a less enlightened time.)

At the same time, the book is filled with brilliant passages and quips about the failures of intellectuals, about boredom, about what it would mean to live an authentic intellectual life. They're worked in subtly: sometimes they begin in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes they take up several pages at a time. It is these remarks that keep the reader slogging through the book, and the way they seem to be worked into the larger narrative redeems it at least a little. For the inability to be a real intellectual occupying a privileged space of incorruptible isolation is really the main theme of the book, as far as I can tell, and the point is made convincingly. It's hard for me to believe that Saul Bellow takes anthroposophy as seriously as his protagonist takes it, and the inevitable ironic distance that results makes Citrine even more pathetic (and bathetic) and darkly comical than he seems at first. His phenomenological musings feed into his narcissism, and his narcissism leads him to obsess even more about his transcendent, sovereign soul. When all this is placed unsympathetically in the context of Citrine's endless financial and interpersonal problems, the book begins to look positively Nietzschean in the way it discredits his "groping towards redemption" (as the back cover blandly puts it).

Humboldt's Gift is not a book that is likely to change anyone's life in 2010. The Suck Fairy and her assistant, the Sexism Fairy, have done their work well, and many of Bellow's witticisms have aged particularly poorly. (Paul Goodman, alas, is no longer a name anyone would recognize off-hand.) But the experience still seems worthwhile, if only because of the reflections on boredom it encourages us to entertain, both as readers and as bored people. It's just too bad that this goal carries so much dross with it.

Usable Auras

2010-10-18T03:15:00.000-04:00

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography ... Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Why is this essay so frequently referenced today? One explanation is the durable and wide-ranging cachet Benjamin has long possessed among humanities scholars. He was a far more tragic and enigmatic figure than any of his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, with neither the Mandarin self-assurance of Adorno nor the strict social-scientism of Pollock. His interests were engagingly obscure, and his forays into Jewish mysticism contributed to the still noticeable mystique that surrounded his scholarly persona. His aphoristic style often made him seem like more of an esoteric sovereign Nietzschean than he really was. Is it all that surprising, then, that this essay--so responsive to contemporary anxieties about media, and yet so unmistakably Benjaminian--has benefited from his, well, aura?

And yet the essay itself is not especially well-argued, something that is easily missed when one focuses on Benjamin's hypnotically erudite style. Why should 1900 be chosen as a cut-off point for the disappearance of the aura, when Benjamin himself presents many other candidates for this role? What makes the form of alienation Benjamin sees as peculiar to film all that different from, say, the various theatrical experiments that became popular in the 1700s? (An eighteenth-century audience certainly had no qualms about playing the critic during a performance, and whatever cultic value their plays possessed would quickly dissipate under the barrage of theater-criticism that accompanied every new play.) Why should we accept his premise that art would necessarily retain its magical significance after humanity emerged from the Stone Age? In fact, why isn't there any attention to context in his formulation at all?

These are serious problems, and they are especially unfortunate because of the coloring they have given to our contemporary debates about the transformative power of media. Supporters and opponents of digitization alike have taken for granted that what is at stake is the survival of some kind of aura, usually metonymized as "the smell of old books." It is especially interesting to observe what has happened to Benjamin's argument as it has been adapted to the present context: the printed book, one of the paradigmatic instances of mechanical reproduction, has been retroactively awarded an aura in order to juxtapose it to the supposedly interchangeable digital text. (Vinyl records, which Benjamin would no doubt consider equally reproducible, have experienced a similar rehabilitation.)

I don't think this retroactive aura constitutes decisive evidence that all Benjaminian approaches to media are wrong, but I do think it points us to a possible revision of his approach. The aura isn't something that lives in a work of art created in a particular way, nor is it something that disappears when creation is mediated by technology. Rather, the aura is a rhetorical function, an attribute that attaches to an art-object when the authenticity of its form becomes a matter of debate. It can emerge when a newer form confronts an older one--in the case of print or Plato on writing, for instance---but also in other configurations. (The contemporary mass-market paperback is only a little older than the e-text, although it has been vastly more popular.) And this is not "mere rhetoric": as vinyl records show, the aura as a rhetorical function can in fact be decisive for determining the fate of a media technology.

If we apply this to "Work of Art" itself, we can see exactly this process at work. Benjamin isn't merely recognizing the existence (or non-existence) of the aura; he's embedding it within a broader argument about the political implications of media technologies. (Like most Frankfurt School texts, his essay is not about what it's about so much as it's about the political dimensions of mass culture.) As a rhetorical function, the aura is dependent on its strategic context of use, so much so that it would lose all meaning if it were removed from it. In other words, we've been reading the piece wrong for ages. We should've been reading the epilogue first.

Khrushchev and the Art of the Possible

2010-10-11T02:14:00.000-04:00

We have so little practice at this, thought Academician Nemchinov, watching from the back of the seminar room with his eyes lidded, his arms folded comfortably over his belly. Soviet scientists had learned to be good at telling when the party line in their subject was about to change, like birds who deduce from a particular subtle vibration that the firm earth is firm no longer, and take flight just before the earthquake. But until recently they had not often had to exercise the skill of deciding for themselves whether it was time for a change of mind. A peculiar tension was in the room now, the tension of ambiguity in what had been one of the most warily docile of the sciences. It was not clear, yet, who was going to win the present argument; therefore, not clear where the party of safety was going to be.

The people he had brought together were a mixture: technologists intoxicated by the new power of electronic computers, cyberneticians gripped by the fashionable vision of the planned economy as a complex control system, economists tired of their subject resembling theology more than it did science. Leonid Vitalevich's specific mathematical ideas would not be what mattered most to them. What they had in common, or rather what they ought to have in common, if they could persuade themselves it was possible, was the need for the plug of dead thought to be removed that was preventing all their various projects alike from developing. He himself had a nice practical plan: he wanted to get software written, in the next four or five years, which would run the economy better than the blundering, improvising, suboptimal decisions of human planners.
- Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

It's clear why retrofuturism is so popular on the Internet nowadays. Sitting in front of our brightly glowing rectangles, we feel, more than any previous generation, that we are the fulfillment of the past's aspirations for the future. How justified this is is difficult to tell. With every advance toward complete and seamless global interconnectedness, it seems, we give up another of our past dreams: flying cars flitted away long ago, and we are only now beginning to realize that manned space travel and interplanetary colonization are doomed projects. Historians have been obsessed with the history of history for a long time--but what is coming into focus today is the urgent need to write histories of the future. Retrofuturism, far from being a quirky BoingBoing-driven fad, contains the seeds of a major intellectual project. (Steampunk, I suspect, does too, but that is a subject for another post.)

If I am right about this project's potential, then Francis Spufford's Red Plenty will almost certainly be part of its canon. The book is a strange one, in more ways than one: it is a history that's not quite a history, a historical novel that's not quite a novel, an original and penetrating book about Soviet history written by a man who has no archival experience or knowledge of Russian. Its goal, simply stated, is to excavate the element of computerized utopianism at the heart of the post-Stalinist reform project. "Excavate" has become a coin that has lost its imprinting through overuse by lazy historians, but in this case the metaphor is especially apt. Soviet history has had so much garbage poured on it over the decades by all the participants in its writing--garbage about totalitarianism, about dissidents, about stagnation, about perestroika, about socialism--that it takes an excavator to dig down to its meaning.

In particular, we have become so accustomed to seeing the Soviet economy as irrepressibly stagnant, incapable of reform, and riddled with corruption that we miss its successes, most notably the detail that anchors Spufford's narrative: the fact that even by pessimistic post-Soviet estimates it was growing faster than any other economy in the world (except, possibly, Japan) at the beginning of Khrushchev's reign. At roughly the same time, the proportion of Soviets working in scientific fields substantially exceeded that of any other country. By 1967 there were 3 million scientists and scientific workers in the USSR, a figure that had more than doubled in five years. Small wonder, then, that it was possible for Soviet writers to claim with a straight face that the "scientistic civilization" characteristic of socialist countries would eventually require the entire population to engage in scientific work!

Of course, a country growing so rapidly in economic and intellectual self-confidence could not but prove a breeding ground for utopias. Science fiction enjoyed an unparalleled degree of popularity, and the wacky, megalomaniacal projects typical of Soviet administrative practice steadily took on a science-fictional aspect. Spufford focuses on the central element of the reforms of the '50s and '60s: the cyberneticization of the planned economy and its transformation into an ideal machine for the manufacture of human happiness. It is clear from the bibliography that, despite not knowing the language, he has done his homework thoroughly; the list represents more or less the state of the field in 2010, and a grad student who used it as a field reading list would not be behind his peers. This means that Spufford's story, as he tells it, is both eminently plausible and eminently sensitive to the nuances of Soviet life. His few excursions into tired evil-bureaucrats-poor-oppressed-geneticists territory do not detract from the rest of the text--and the vignette about the modus operandi of a Soviet tolkach is, as far as I know, unequalled in any popular book about the Soviet Union.

The reform, of course, did not succeed, and Spufford does full justice to the banal but still heartwrenching sadness of that failure. It should have been obvious, in the perfect vision of hindsight, that the termites were already in the wood, that the growth rates could not be sustained and there would never be enough money for the science. But failed dreams are the very stuff of retrofuturism, and in this context it is the failure that makes them interesting. The death of Soviet economic reforms was not just a failure for the Soviet Union; it was a defeat for the whole idea that the economy was a mathematically-accessible system that could be tuned to help humans rather than crippling them. (We felt a bitter and equally sobering reverberation of that defeat two years ago, when the even more computerized models worked out by Wall Street whiz-kids suffered a similar fate.) By the 1970s, even Brezhnev was more or less encouraging his people to supplement their income by informal means, which in the context of the Soviet economic system was an official endorsement of theft. The economy was no longer a productive machine.

Retrofuturism, especially if it's pursued with the same thoroughness that Spufford gives to it here, has the potential to revitalize the reading of history. We're finding it increasingly difficult to look back to the past in search of models or parallels; even routine appeals to the fall of the Roman Empire are beginning to look strained. If history has anything to offer us at this point, it's a perspective on how to look forward, how to sift apart different flavors of the impossible and make the future coherent. The Soviet experience ought to teach us the value of that kind of practice.

The Stalin Problem

2010-09-30T12:02:00.000-04:00

Lenin of course had started to take into the Party, or to make sympathetic to the Party, many specialists, doctors, professional men in general, the fact is that many people with low qualifications went up to chairs of faculties or departments, in the institute that were being created right and left. They needed people to fill the vacant posts that were created by these institutes. Part of the old professionals had emigrated or part had been repressed. Some people who had no qualifications or almost no qualifications received very high positions. It must be said that very few of the old intellectuals went over to the Soviets or Communists because of ideology. It is very difficult, just impossible to say exactly what a man actually feels in his heart. You can judge a man only by his actions, what he does and how he does it. Therefore almost all believed that many of these people did not like the Soviets. Actually they behavedlike Soviets or Communists and therefore climbed up very rapidly. In 1930 the six points of Stalin were a turning point and it was decided by the Party to create their new Soviet cadres. There had been purge of cadres in 1924, and in 193o a second purge followed. Both purges, as to the loyalty of these people were under the supervision of the party. The loyalty of these people could be challenged by either one or a combination of the three following agencies: The GPU, or through complaints which could be mailed to the party, or complaints which could be dropped into a special complaints box, or at the assembly where these persons were discussed. Someone could get up and accuse somebody of not being a good Soviet citizen and this person would then be accused of being harmful.
- Harvard Refugee Interview Project, Schedule B, Vol. 21, Case 40

The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System is a uniquely fascinating body of documents, although, strangely enough, it is virtually unknown outside of a shrinking group of specialists. On the most basic level, the project consisted of a large-scale attempt to interview hundreds of Soviet citizens who had either fled the USSR during or after the war or had been left behind by the retreating wave of German occupation. The result was not the litany of misfortunes borne and evils suffered that one might expect from a Cold War research effort. Instead, it was a pile of conflicting and contradictory human stories that--while certainly leaving the reader with no pleasant impression of the Soviet Union--revealed a much more comprehensible and complex society than the Western reader would have had any reason to expect. The Russians, it turned out, not only "loved their children too" but also hated their better-paid neighbors--and that with as much vigor as any American suburbanite.

Most readers, of course, never saw the interviews. What they saw was a respectable-sized monograph crammed full of tables and entitled The Soviet Citizen. From a contemporary vantage point, this text has value mostly as a curiosity. Its Parsonian assumptions and preoccupations render it quite boring even for the academic reader. Of course, it's hard to deny the value of this kind of research, even when it has little historical staying power. But what makes it problematic is the way it concealed the rich substance of the narrative sources underneath. Despite the deliberate history-blindness of the interviewers and the questions, we can certainly poke and prod at the texts they produced to figure out the mindsets that drove their subjects as representatives of the Stalin era--it's just that we still haven't tried very hard.

One overriding quality distinguishes these transcripts from the prodigious Jewish personal literature that was popularized in the United States in the wake of the Holocaust. Where Anne Frank and Primo Levi are very much aware that they are the subjects (or, rather, objects) of a campaign of extermination, this seemingly obvious fact escapes the Russians completely. They feel themselves victimized as peasants, as workers, or as Party members, but they never make the intellectual leap to a total notion of state terror orchestrated by Stalin against something called "the Soviet people"--or even, for that matter, the Ukrainians. It is important that this inability or unwillingness to conceptualize oneself in this way did not come from a overly-limited sense of historical perspective or myopia. As recent work on the Soviet Union has shown, even non-intellectuals living under Stalin displayed an exceptional sense of the grandeur and historical significance of the events they were experiencing. The Great October Revolution, with all the appropriate capital letters, was comprehensible to them; the Great Stalinist Terror was not.

The endless debate over who was worse, Hitler or Stalin, will probably always be with us. It's hard to resolve it in a satisfying way: neither Zizek's nostalgic socialism nor the body-count approach of most liberal thinkers is at all appealing. (Why shouldn't we consider how many people were born as well?) These interviews, though they of course discuss much more than that, help us see one way out of the dilemma. The Holocaust was, on its own terms, one thing; the Stalinist terror was a whole complex of things, none of which could be judged unambiguously. From the peasants' perspective, what happened to the Party members in 1937 was either well-deserved or unworthy of notice in comparison to their own plight from 1929 onwards. From the perspective of many Party members, the peasants, while undoubtedly oppressed and put-upon, were a recalcitrant, reactionary mass that largely deserved its fate.

It is in this sense that the events of the Stalin period were, and remain, much more challenging to received ideas than the Holocaust was. The evil of the Holocaust is a matter of consensus for the victims and, nowadays, even the perpetrators. (The success of Holocaust denial within the larger ecosystem of extreme-right thought is symptomatic of this development.) By contrast, few things frustrate liberal critics of Russia more than the country's apparent refusal to repudiate or even to distance itself emotionally from the heritage of the Stalin era. For contemporary as well as past Russians, there is no need or even possibility of using sophisticated theoretical arguments to prove the link between modernity and mass terror. The two are intertwined so thoroughly that the ability to judge them as a whole disappears--and the link no longer functions as the decisive evidence for a postmodern case against modernity. History, in this case, has fragmented the exhibits of the case beyond recognition.

[I'm going to be posting four times a month, as opposed to six, from now on. Grad school is finally taking its toll. Also, here are a few newish translations of Mayakovsky.]

Dunces

2010-09-23T03:46:00.000-04:00

To be honest, I wept not for my father but for the children. On the way home, we passed by a corner of Bolshoi Prospekt, where last winter I'd had a little breakdown for the stupidest of reasons. I had seen a dozen kindergarten pupils trying to cross the boulevard, each bundled in a jaunty collection of misshapen coats, their shapkas falling off their tiny heads, their feet encased in monstrous hand-me-down galoshes. A boy and a girl, one at the front and one in the back, held aloft giant red flags to warn motorists they were deigning to cross. A young, pretty teacher was on hand to help them ambulate in the right direction. Who knows why--primordial memory, a sudden reprise of my stunted conscience, a big man's evolutionary compassion for anything small--but I wept for the children that day.

Diminutive, cherubic, Slavic, they stood by the teeming Bolshoi Prospekt with those idiotic red flags, their puffy faces producing small steam clouds that looked like little child-thoughts struggling in the monumental cold. The cars kept passing them, the rich man's Audi and the poor man's Lada. No one would pause to let them past. As we waited for the light to change, I opened my window and leaned out, blinking like a great Northern turtle in the chill, trying to read their faces. Were those smiles I saw? Delicate new teeth, wisps of blond hair peering out from the fortress of their hats, and grateful, unmistakable grins accompanied by disciplined Petersburg children's laughter. Only the schoolteacher--silent, straight, proud in the way only a Russian woman who makes US$30 a month could be--seemed cognizant of the collective future that awaited her charges.
-Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

I have an unhealthy relationship with contemporary fiction. Normally I avoid it, although I pretend to have read the books in conversation and somehow feel free to make fun of them anyway. I clutch my boring old classics to myself like a shield whenever some well-intentioned person recommends me something by Lethem or McCarthy. When I find a contemporary-fiction book in a used bookstore, though, I have to buy it. I grab it in my greasy little hands and devour it the same day, relishing simultaneously the fact that it's not as good as I was afraid it would be and the fact that it's so much more fun to read than whatever I claim to like. I'm not proud.

In this case, though, I barely got any relishing in before I was overcome by nausea. When I'd slogged through Bykov's ZhD earlier this summer, I diverted myself with a reverie about how a book so virulently hateful and ridiculous could never be published in a "normal country." ("Normal country" appears to be a purely Russian phrase that means something like "whatever one imagines the civilized world beyond the Russian border to be like." Russia can never be a "normal country," which should be obvious given the definition but produces wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever it's brought up in public.) Americans are sensitive, and American Jews especially so--surely nothing edgier than Woody Allen could fly with that crowd.

I was wrong. As it turns out, Absurdistan is the ZhD for the American market, except instead of Bykov the cardboard Jewish fascist it's written by Shteyngart the giggling Jewish minstrel. This plotless piece of authorial self-indulgence consists entirely of a parade of stereotype-jokes about Russians, Central Asians, and Jews, half of which are so obvious as to be offensive in a profound Kantian kind of way and the other half of which make no sense whatsoever and have zero relationship to reality. Shteyngart appears to believe that the fact that he is a Russian Jewish immigrant makes him an automatic expert on all three cultures and a sublime comic satirist to boot. But he is not so much Woody Allen--hell, not so much Yakov Smirnoff--as he is Carlos Mencia. Like Mencia, the distinguishing feature of his jokes is that they could have easily been written by a bleary-eyed white scriptwriter with a racist streak. At no point do the scattered moments of schmaltz and fake "genuine emotion" redeem the sorry spectacle, and Shteyngart's annoying insistence on bringing in the self-mocking author-proxy "Jerry Shteynfarb" just makes the whole thing look desperate.

Worst of all, the story is constructed, in some perverse way, as an allusion to A Confederacy of Dunces: the soon-to-be-redeemed protagonist is a fat, ugly guy with a bad personality and off-putting sexual habits. But Shteyngart seems to have misunderstood the point of Ignatius J. Reilly entirely. Reilly was such a powerful character because he was simultaneously repulsive, pitiful, and sublimely majestic; Shteyngart tries to go for the repulsive by putting in plenty of Russian-transliterated dick jokes, but evidently has too little talent for the other two components. Misha is more annoying than pitiful, and majestic isn't anywhere on this book's radar.

Absurdistan, for better or for worse, seems to represent the logical endpoint of "immigrant lit" as a genre. Cutesy morals about the importance of culture and family, in fiction as in college admission essays, no longer satisfy the market; neither do narcissistic ruminations on the theme of Where Do I Belong. What we're left with is minstrelsy. The author dresses up in his national costume and hops around on stage for the benefit of a public that doesn't get his inside jokes or care about the people under the makeup. As a designated representative of his assigned minority group, he is their passport to a world of edgy jokes that none of them would ever repeat in public but that they are more than happy to laugh at. Should we criticize this? After all, taking the whole thing too seriously is an equally annoying affectation. I can only propose that we avoid it when it leads to books that are as bad as this.

Gentlemen and Scholars

2010-09-15T19:35:00.004-04:00

It was from this tradition that Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description emerged in 1949. Bowers's great book was a creative synthesis, consolidating what had gone before and adding to it. Every statement in the book presupposes the value of descriptive bibliography as a branch of historical scholarship and affirms the importance, for the study of the past, of placing on record the details that characterize the various objects called books. As Bowers says at the outset, a descriptive bibliography treats a series of books "so that the relations of their texts are clarified and the method of publication of all forms of each individual volume is determined" (p. 16, in italics); a bibliography aims "to present all the evidence about a book which can be determined by analytical bibliography applied to a material object" (p. 34). His book provides a model both for thinking about the subject at large and for handling the multitude of individual situations that can arise: it is the central document of its field, and not likely to be supplanted.

Its arrival on the scene was not greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm, however, and the misgivings it aroused in some people are profoundly significant for understanding the peculiarly divided history of the field. The key illustration is perhaps offered by the March 1953 meeting of the Bibliographical Society in London, where Geoffrey Keynes delivered an address, "Religio Bibliographici," summing up his "aims and beliefs as an amateur." One might have expected Keynes, as the author (at that time) of eight acclaimed bibliographies and the president of the society that had fostered the growth of scholarly bibliography, to welcome Bowers's book; instead, he held it responsible for a "shadow which seems in recent years to have descended over our amiable bibliographical discipline." The publication of the Principles, he said, "brought home to our consciousness the fact that what we had thought in our innocence was a pleasant, if sometimes exacting, pastime, was in fact a prime example of 'pure scholarship,' to be pursued with the mind of a detective, the spiritual temperature of an iceberg, and the precision of a machine" (p. 374). Although Keynes did wish to contribute to "the sum of knowledge" (p. 391), he did not, strangely enough, seem to understand that any bibliographer, amateur or professional, with such an aim must strive to work at the highest level of precision and rigorous thinking -- nor did he see that this approach does not exclude humanity from the work.
- G. Thomas Tanselle, "A Description of Descriptive Bibliography"

Over the past year I have become increasingly interested in the history of the book--a relatively young academic discipline which focuses on books and other printed (and manuscript!) materials from the point of view of their production, manufacturing, distribution, and so on, ignoring their content as much as possible. The work being done in this area is so remarkably fresh and interesting that it is almost enough to overcome my typical cynicism about my field. Where else can you talk to experts on Ottoman miscellanies and nineteenth-century academic databases and still have productive discussions about method and interpretation? Even better, the field has increasingly positioned itself as, for lack of a better phrase, "after theory," and thus it has evaded much of the boring jibberjabber that has surrounded Big Theory and its demise. The genetic code of book history includes many more stuffy old bibliographers, librarians, and paleographers than German philosophers, and that makes it somehow comforting.

One of the things I like most about the field is the resolute way in which it avoids book fetishism. For book historians, the book is not a symbol of all that's good and literary in the world, it is a shifting and historically-contingent form whose development has always been accompanied by complaints and crises. As a result, they do not hesitate to ask serious questions about the potential of the Internet and electronic books--and they don't automatically assume that the book is headed for an apocalyptic Wall-E-esque demise. Like any other medium, the electronic book can be manipulated, played with, marked up, invested with emotional significance; what matters is how it does this.

The divide within bibliography Tanselle hints at above--between gentleman-amateurs and scientifically-minded professionals--is currently being replicated, it seems to me, within the culture of book readers as a whole. Primarily the debate is about electronic media and digitization. It's not that this is a question of seriousness per se: people who fetishize printed books are often very serious readers and scholars, and the objections that have been raised about the archival survivability of digital media cannot be ignored. The difference seems to be of another kind: book-fetishists and digital-media enthusiasts belong to two distinct intellectual traditions. The former are linked to the gentleman-bibliographers, to seventeenth-century virtuosi, and to Walter Benjamin's obsessive-compulsive book collector; the latter can trace their genealogies to John Milton, John Adams, and Marshall McLuhan.

If I had to summarize the distinction, I would put it this way. The first group treats the book as an icon, a sacred object whose function and meaning is its representational connection to some kind of abstract notion of "culture." The second treats it as a metonymy for an entire imagined network of circulation of ideas and information. When the second group starts talking about abandoning the book as a form or dissecting it with scientific detachment, the first responds with incredulity and incomprehension, because it cannot imagine another type of object substituting for their icon. The second group is equally unable to understand the first, because for them, the book has no meaning in itself--since it can only be conceptualized in the context of a network of exchange, any attempt to treat it as being valuable on its own terms would negate its fundamental essence. The two sides are unable to understand each other, and this seems to be why most Internet debates about this subject are unable to escape descending into senseless blabber.

Book history, at least in theory, has the potential to help us overcome this divide. Naturally a scientific or scientistic approach to the history of the book cannot be sufficient, because book culture (a fundamental focus of the field), even the microhistory of individual books and volumes, includes intellectual and affective dimensions that it will not capture. But because book history is already so familiar with the boundaries between media, and with the ways they can be challenged and blurred, it is particularly well-placed to demonstrate to us that the book as a form is not a coherent concept that can easily be encircled by wagons. Both sides are wrong, as often happens--and the future of the humanities will depend on who realizes it first.

Malory and After

2010-09-08T22:59:00.001-04:00

The jousting went all day and into the dusk, the hooves of the great warhorses pounding down the lists until the field was a ragged wasteland of torn earth. A dozen times Jeyne and Sansa cried out in unison as riders crashed together, lances exploding into splinters while the commons screamed for their favorites. Jeyne covered her eyes whenever a man fell, like a frightened little girl, but Sansa was made of sterner stuff. A great lady knew how to behave at tournaments. Even Septa Mordane noted her composure and nodded in approval.

The Kingslayer rode brilliantly. He overthrew Ser Andar Royce and the Marcher Bryce Caron as easily as if he were riding at rings, and then took a hard-fought match from white-haired Barristan Selmy, who had won his first two tilts against men thirty and forty years his junior.

Sandor Clegane and his immense brother, Ser Gregor the Mountain, seemed unstoppable as well, riding down one foe after the next in ferocious style. The most terrifying moment of the day came during Ser Gregor's second joust, when his lance rode up and struck a young knight from the Vale under the gorget with such force that it drove through his throat, killing him instantly. The youth fell not ten feet from where Sansa was seated. The point of Ser Gregor's lance had snapped off in his neck, and his life's blood flowed out in slow pulses, each weaker than the one before. His armor was shiny new, a bright streak of fire ran down his outstretched arm, as the steel caught the light. Then the sun went behind a cloud, and it was gone. His cloak was blue, the color of the sky on a clear summer's day, trimmed with a border of crescent moons, but as his blood seeped into it, the cloth darkened and the moons turned red, one by one.

- George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

If Glen Cook's Black Company series aimed to rearrange the content of fantasy, George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire aims to rearrange its form. Both are, in their own ways, technically excellent productions, although we will have to see if the second half of Martin's series ends up sliding into marasmus. In any case, Martin's work deserves to be taken seriously by students of literature, and not simply as a standout example of "genre."

I want to develop and argue for this claim, but I should clarify that I don't mean it as a judgment of quality. Song is a captivating series, but I have trouble figuring out if it is a good one--and of course it's too early to tell. What I mean is that Martin's work shares a set of fundamental concerns with postwar literature (including what has come to be called "literary fiction"), and addresses them in a novel and serious way.

Let's, however, begin with Cervantes. Don Quixote is frequently called the first postmodern novel, not entirely in jest. This is not simply because Cervantes plays around with metatextual interventions and formalist tricks; to a large extent it is because the novel is usually read as providing a "postmodern" answer to its central question, which is the relationship between narrative and identity. In this reading, the narrator's skepticism about Don Quixote is treated as a transparent smokescreen for the book's sympathy for him. He's a hero because he does not hesitate to embrace a narrative convention as a framework for his identity, which highlights the arbitrariness of subjectivity and so on.

This view was embraced in the literature of the '60s because of the freedom it seemed to offer. The most classic example is the second chapter of John Barth's The End of the Road, in which the hero (rescued from a bout of apathetic paralysis) is encouraged to embrace "mythotherapy" as a cure. This involves embracing arbitrariness as an identity-shaping practice, of which the central element is the adoption of a narrative cliche (the Hero, the Wise Man, etc.) as a foundation for subjectivity. Form, for Barth and most other "postmodern" writers, is a gateway to liberation.

But Don Quixote can also be read differently: the narrator insists over and over that we are to take it as a warning against taking narrative and form too seriously. This is the path taken by Martin, who has written a modern-day Don Quixote without any ambiguity about its position in this debate. The central problem in A Song of Ice and Fire is the corruption worked by myths of chivalry and knightly valor in the real world. Even the fantasy setting is an echo of his Spanish predecessor's: instead of wise kings and damsels in distress, Martin's Westeros is defined by child rape, wanton butchery, and class oppression. Even if his characters escape their trials with some notion of honor intact--and not all do--it is a kind of honor that is pragmatic enough to recognize its own imminent failure. But most of the time, the characters that try their hardest to be knights-errant end up artfully murdered, subverted, or broken.

The result is a group of characters who are far more complex than Tolkien's, and, in fact, than most of the protagonists of contemporary literary fiction. That is not what's interesting, however. The real virtue of Martin's work is its ability to produce an interpretive community (found, for instance, in the series's online forums) that is intensely focused on the phenomenological experience of reading formalist fantasy. Anyone who reads Martin with any degree of attention and experience with standard fantasy immediately becomes aware of a split personality: one reader-self wants to take the book as a standard fantasy novel, to sympathize with the obvious protagonists and root against the bad guys, and the other works against the grain, identifying and thinking through the ways the typical fantasy tropes are subverted. It is like reading a Don Quixote in which the windmills are really giants, but the Man of La Mancha is a deluded fool regardless. Martin's fans spend much of their time puzzling out the confrontations between these selves.

As the book's fanbase proves, one need not be a Yale Deconstructionist to participate in this style of reading, and that has helped to contribute to an entire avalanche of online textual criticsm (crystallizing around Martin and other fantasy writers, but also, say, the TV shows of Joss Whedon), which has produced such monuments of Internet culture as TVTropes.org. Academic critics may dismiss it, occasionally even for valid reasons--but it is no less an heir to Shklovsky for all that. And this, in short, is why I think Martin deserves to be studied: he has not only recovered the psychologism of the Jamesian modern novel in a remarkably hostile genre ghetto, but he has also helped point the way forward for interpretation. The genre ghetto of literary fiction, I suspect, has a dimmer future.

Before and After the Two Cultures

2010-08-31T23:03:00.084-04:00

Schiller's mountaintop view of history and nature is, like Humboldt's, a source of encouragement, restoration, and consolation, both an escape from the world of human will and action, and a reconfirmation of the viewer's place in that world ... Humboldt offers his readers just the same mountaintop experience of nature in his view of Chimborazo: the same tranquility and consolation, a vision of the inner realm of law, are being vouchsafed them in these measured visions of the tropics. He speaks with Schiller's voice to invite his readers into this space, but rather than finding there Homer's sun, the nature preserved in poetry, we find Gay-Lussac's atmosphere, preserved in eudiometers. The same power to transport, translate, and console that Schiller invests directly in language Humboldt invests in nature, as represented in the Physical Portrait of the Tropics; susceptibility to this power depends in each case on a degree of "aesthetic education," a cultivated sensibility to the infinite contained in the finite form. In the engraving to the Physical Portrait and in the Views of Nature, the reader is educated by the tables and scales framing and backgrounding the explicitly aesthetic domain--without these, and the tension between the two spaces, Humboldt's nature loses the particular aspect of Ruhe, calm and order, that derives from the overcoming of conflict, the reconciliation of strife, the "cooperation of forces." The question is, how is this order produced? how do the spaces of measurement define both the analysis and the synthesis, the strife and reconciliation of physical forces, and thus construct this "organic" vision for the reader?

- Michael Dettelbach, "Global physics and aesthetic empire: Humboldt's physical portrait of the tropics" (1996)

Similar points are being made all across the spectrum of history of science scholarship. I can't help being inspired, but also, somehow, angry. How is it that so many young intellectuals are shackled so early to the notion that the kinds of things science is interested in can't possibly be the things that concern the humanities? And how is it that this particular disciplinary demarcation blinds us so effectively to the past and potential future complexities of this relationship? We think we know what belongs in the "science" box, just as much as the "humanities" box, but we are unable to imagine a world in which the two boxes are really two proximately-positioned streams--or, indeed, take on any configuration other than the complete victory of one side.

And, of course, once the "fiziki/liriki," "left brained/right brained" divide has been set up, each of these quintessential imagined communities sets about carefully enlarging its own turf. Computers colonize history and literary analysis; science studies chips away at Newton and Galileo. People who are ordinarily comfortable with ambiguity and relativism turn into snarling partisans who use the language of politics because it justifies their emotional investment. (This was, obviously, the dynamic that underlay the whole Alan Sokal episode all those years ago.) I became interested in "theory" originally because I felt the pull of this debate so strongly, and I never even considered the possibility that the emotions I was putting into the argument could be explained by something far less exalted than the need to smash the Dialectic of Enlightenment or whatever it was. I no longer think any of this pathos had any value, either for "scholarship" broadly defined or for history in particular. Evo-psych lit-crit is looking more and more like the transparent cash-in it is, while Popper and Kuhn have roundly trounced Latour and Feyerabend in the eyes of the public and the general academic community. What we have is a stalemate weighed somewhat heavily towards the ~~scientists~~. (Let's use the word under erasure for now.)

What is interesting is that all this newfound awareness of the historical consilience of the humanities and the sciences, the aesthetic and the precise, the quantitative and the qualitative, was produced originally in the old turf-war context. If you can show that science never achieved the ability to disentangle itself from its surrounding disciplines, the thinking went, you can successful attack its claim to be epistemologically special. It does not seem that anyone was convinced, and for good reasons: scientists do not consider themselves liable for the sins of their fathers. Instead, what we are beginning to realize is that even the presence of some notional distinction between the sciences and the humanities is not a sure indication that one is standing on divided turf. David Hume's essay "On the Populousness of Ancient Nations" is a splendid monument of humanities scholarship despite the fact that its methods and content look, to us, as examples of a crude kind of "science." Hooke's Micrographia inspired the aesthetic sensibilities of an entire age.

This is one of those rare or not-so-rare cases when a positive intellectual advance has produced more rather than less confusion. I, for one, am no longer able to distinguish a "physicist" from a "lyricist" in any consistent or satisfying way, especially if I look outside the second half of the twentieth century. It still seems possible to recognize genres of rhetoric or appeals to particular audiences--but the actual disciplinary place of such appeals is no longer clearly defined. Once one gets rid of the delusion that rigor, precision, structure, and quantity can be invoked only by philistines with no interest in culture, or that relativity, vagueness, ambiguity, and historical embeddedness are the watchwords of degenerate ivory-tower unemployables, this landscape becomes cloudy and treacherous indeed. I can't help but welcome this development, since I'm already finding it hard to imagine sympathizing with either side ever again. The blurring of this particular line is one of the things that will make the future exciting.

Fantasy Lands

2010-08-31T15:31:00.001-04:00

My maps called it Troko Tallios. Locally they called it Trogo Taglios, though those who lived here used the shorter Taglios, mostly. As Swan said, the Trogo part refers to an older city that had been enveloped by the younger, more energetic Taglios.

It was the biggest city I had ever seen, a vast sprawl without a protective wall, still growing rapidly, horizontally instead of vertically. Northern cities grow upward because no one wants to build outside the wall.

Taglios lay on the southeast bank of the great river, actually inland a little, straddling a tributary that snakes between a half-dozen low hills. We debarked in a place that was really a satellite of the greater city, a riverport town called Maheranga. Soon Maheranga would share the fate of Trogo.

Trogo retained its identity only because it was the seat of the lords of the greater principate, its governmental and religious center.

The Taglian people seemed friendly, peaceable, and overly god-ridden, much as Swan and Mather had described in brief exchanges during our journey.
- Glen Cook, Shadow Games

I am not ashamed to admit that I love epic fantasy. In some ways, this is an even more suspect interest than science fiction, which, despite being "genre" and hence inherently lowbrow, has accumulated a vast number of undeniably talented writers who have succeeded in making it a legitimate object of intellectual and even academic curiosity. Fantasy, except for Tolkien, has rarely enjoyed that kind of recognition--and even Tolkien looks rather stereotyped and simplistic when viewed alongside the innumerable lesser writers who have copied him. (Of course, that is in no way his fault.)

What the Robert Jordan/David Eddings tradition has succeeded in doing is creating a marketable, engaging formula for the creation of fantasy sagas. This has come with its own obvious disadvantages. Prime among them is their reliance on interchangeable heroes who navigate their way through a world populated by crudely essentialized raced and cultures. (The troglodytic sexism generally transparently obvious in their design is even harder to bear.) When done well, however, epic fantasy can transcend these limitations by redirecting all of its energy towards the development of its plot. A fantasy series written in this style doesn't need ethnographic subtlety or complex characterization: it succeeds when it can deliver page-turning intrigue that keeps the reader from questioning its world too deeply. The best science fiction relies on the question "How does this particular universe operate?"; epic fantasy must usually ignore this question at all costs.

As a Wheel of Time survivor, I can attest that this strategy does work. It is always haunted, however, by the awkward relationship between the worlds it creates and the historical and mythological past of our own world. Most novels in this vein can be picked apart endlessly for similarities to the real world: why do barbarian tribes always resemble the Celts? Why are the institutional and social patterns of High Medieval Western Europe always the ones at play? It is interesting in particular that cultures patterned on non-European ones are always somehow "the other" in fantasy worlds too, except in the rare cases where what is being referenced is an appropriated notion of something like Tokugawa-era Japanese culture. I think the explanation for this phenomenon lies primarily in the roots of the fantasy genre--the chivalric tales and Arthurian legends that formed the foundation for Tolkien's work as well. The relentless exploitation of this tradition has thus shackled fantasy writers to a fixed ethnography which becomes more and more ossified the more its tropes are recycled. When the non-white protagonist of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series was rendered as white in the film adaptations, it was not really the personal fault of the producers: at work was a deep-seated set of expectations about the ideological structure of fantasy writing that Le Guin managed only partially to overcome.

What I like about Glen Cook's Black Company books is the way they shatter this structure without undermining their focus on plot. There are lots of iconoclastic gestures made in these books (notably a near-complete absence of fantasy sexism with its vapid "romantic interests"), but this one is probably the most successful. Of the eight books in the series, four take place largely in a region patterned, not on France or Germany, but on India. What's more, the protagonists, who begin as the standard fantasy-neutral Western Europeans, are gradually replaced by Indians and Vietnamese, and the exoticism that ought necessarily to accompany any fantasy depiction of South and Southeast Asia slowly dissipates as the series draws to its close. Cook clearly cared about this problem--so much so that the generational shifts that accompany this southward geographical movement are actually a major theme in the novels.

To my mind, this can only make fantasy stronger at producing effective intrigue. I don't hold out much hope for a genre-wide reform, but it is hard to see why writers have been so slow to appreciate the interest-generating possibilities of a rejection of the Arthurian idiom. Not only does it produce more convincing and more diverse worlds, it also widens the potential audience for a genre that has long been tightly linked to pasty white nerds. Perhaps what is needed is a little more, well, fantasy.

Trivia

2010-08-23T19:11:00.002-04:00

Unless like Guy de Maupassant one had taken to crawling about on a floor and eating one's own excrement, say.
God, poor Maupassant.
Well, but poor Friedrich Nietzsche, too, actually.
If not to mention poor Vivaldi while I am at it also, since I now remember that he died in an almshouse.
And for that matter poor Bach's widow Anna Magdalena, who was allowed to do the same thing.
Bach's widow. And with all of those children. Some of whom were actually even more successful in music at the time than Bach himself had been.
Well, but then poor Robert Schumann as well, in a lunatic asylum and fleeing from demons. One of whom was even Franz Schubert's ghost.
For that matter poor Franz Schubert's ghost.
Poor Tchaikovsky, who once visited America and spent his first night in a hotel room weeping, because he was homesick.
Even if his head at least did not come off.
Poor James Joyce, who was somebody else who crawled under furniture when it thundered.
Poor Beethoven, who never learned to do simple child's multiplication.
- David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress

I am astonished at how universal the praise for this novel is. Everyone seems to appreciate the author's wit and tenderness and sensitivity. Literary-fiction types who would normally dismiss anything experimental right out of the gate fall all over each other in talking it up. The disturbingly smug afterword waves the book's 52 rejections in the air as if the book's quality were now so unquestionable that this total is another mark of its greatness. David Foster Wallace is moved, not uncharacteristically, to flaunt his philosophy BA and laud the novel as "a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism" (although this description seems to me a rather superficial non-sequitur).

I will not say that the emperor has no clothes--disputanding about gustibus is kind of a lost cause anyway--but I will admit to feeling some puzzlement about this critical reception. To put it plainly, I don't think Wittgenstein's Mistress is especially sensitive or tender (certainly it is less so than many works of the Oulipo school, or even those of my own experimental-fiction-writing friends), or even especially philosophical or intellectual. It is true that the novel's constraints, unlike many similar works, are not sufficiently constricting as to seem wholly artificial, and that may explain its cross-genre appeal. For the rest, I am unconvinced that there's a there there.

What many critics have taken for tenderness, I think, is the inherent poignancy of the novel's premise. "Last person on Earth" is a subject--like cancer or drug addiction--that generates emotional response of its own accord. Beyond that, there is little to say. Yes, the narrator avoids sensitive topics by retreating into trivia, but when the trick is sustained over two hundred-odd pages it begins to look less like keen psychological observation and more like arbitrary authorial convenience. This is not, to be clear, a failure of realism: that is not the author's objective and it is unclear what a realistic depiction of this world would even look like. It is a failure of commitment to the world one has created, and especially to its sole inhabitant.

The intellectual "wittiness" and Wittgensteinian references are, I think, even less successful. The former amounts mostly to a collection of rather inbred winks designed to appeal to people who pride themselves on their knowledge of high-culture trivia. It is true, and in fact quite excellent, that the novel puts the ultimate value and meaning of this trivia into question--yet by the end we still have no motion towards or evidence of any interesting conclusions about the subject. Perhaps I am a dirty lowbrow mouth-breather, but two hundred pages of boring stream-of-consciousness punctuated with random proper nouns is not evidence of education or wit so much as pedantry. Talking to Markson's narrator at a party would be a nightmare.

Wittgenstein is there, of course, but this does not seem to help. The sheer strain with which Markson jams the reader's nose into his intertextuality is a sign that what we are dealing with is yet another system of winks that lead nowhere and produce nothing. The novel might use Wittgensteinian language and make Wittgensteinian jokes, but as a confrontation with Wittgenstein's ideas it is a dismal failure. (She has a painting of her house and talks about a lot! Get it? Ha ha ha!). One reason Wallace's "logical atomism" comment misses the mark is that the novel isn't really about those ideas at all: he might provide the excuse, and perhaps the structure, but his presence neither creates dramatic tension in the book nor resolves it. This suggests pretension rather than insight.

Wittgenstein's Mistress is not horrendously bad, and it is certainly not irredeemable. It could work, in fact, quite well, on a single condition: that it be written in the form of a sci-fi short story by Ted Chiang. Here's a guy who has turned his genre into a vehicle for serious ideas and serious emotion--and has never, unlike Markson, been tempted to write more than necessary. (See, for instance, Exhalation, a similar and I think superior exploration of the same theme.) As for the rest--well, wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber müss man schweigen.

In Praise of Sausages

2010-08-13T21:00:00.002-04:00

The behind-the-scenes processes by which things get made — laws, journalism, sausages — are usually said to be so chaotically unhygienic that seeing them in action will put you off the thing itself for good. There are exceptions, though, and in the last few days, mathematics has earned a spot on that second list, at least as far as uninitiated lay people are concerned.

Last week, a young mathematician at HP Labs, Vinay Deolalikar, began circulating a paper that claimed to solve what’s known as the P=NP problem. This is one of the biggest unsettled issues in math and computer science; in fact, the terms “P” and “NP” appear in the titles of computer science research papers more than just about any others. While proposed solutions to P=NP have been common over the years, they are typically offered by amateurs and crackpots. To have a credentialed researcher at a top-flight institution step forward and claim the laurel is rare indeed. In some circles, Deolalikar quickly became even better known than his former boss, Mark Hurd, who was forced out as HP CEO last week after a bizarre non-sex non-scandal.

...In a post yesterday about the Deolalikar paper, I remarked on how civil the online discussion about it seemed, certainly in contrast to most other Internet debates. One correspondent chided me for being too naïve, and reminded me that mathematicians are as capable of catty bitchfests as anyone. A prominent example involves the issue of credit for another math problem, the Poincare conjecture. The controversy was written up in the New Yorker by the author of “A Beautiful Mind.”

I plead guilty to being a slavish math fanboy. But at least I am not alone. As another blog commenter put said about the current discussion
This member of the community at large can’t understand a word you say, but is nevertheless fascinated by every new post and comment. Seeing the review process unfold in public has rekindled my long-dormant interest in mathematics…Thank you.
- Lee Gomes, "A Beautiful Sausage"

Like Gomes, I know nothing about the mathematical details behind this recent attempt at a P!=NP proof. I fled precalculus with extreme abandon in eleventh grade, and since then I have had no exposure to any mathematical concept more complicated than the middle-school-level problems on the GRE. When I read even layman's terms summaries of such concepts, my mind instantly abandons any attempt at coherent reasoning and starts thinking about dinner instead. Does this make me a bad historian of science/technology/mathematics? On a certain level, yes--to the extent that we, even more than scientists themselves, are expected to render the development and evolution of concepts from the hard sciences intelligible to people from other fields. I don't think I'll ever be able to do that well without relying on handwaves that camouflage my own ignorance.

Of course, the fact that I don't understand something is not much of a topic for a blog post. I am interested in something more, well, interesting: the contrast between the mathematical sociability captured in Gomes's post and the scientific mode of self-presentation I described last month. Here's the paradox. By and large, the general public, even the public of educated people, is just as ignorant of mathematics as I am (despite probably having gotten to calculus). So why is there so much interest in the big stories that have shaken the mathematics world recently--Deolalikar's attempt to prove P!=NP and Grigory Perelman's apparently successful proof of the Poincaré Conjecture? These stories are not blips, either: consider the popularity of Pi and A Beautiful Mind and that one documentary about Andrew Wiles. The New Yorker-reading section of the public, it is safe to say, loves math drama.

Contrast this with the reception of similar developments in the hard sciences. Although almost everyone knows something about science, we are generally neither exposed to nor allowed to glimpse the catty infighting and intrigue that surrounds them. The best we generally get is a bare "Scientists have found," whose content, from the point of view of public access to the scientific process, is only slightly above that of an ancient report on the entrails of the latest sacrificial goat. As a result, the public focuses on the findings--which may be interesting and even awe-inspiring--but learns little about their context or significance, and gains little trust in scientists themselves. Science journalism is reviled, and reviled deservedly, because it remains wedded to this model of publication. (Where would science journalists be without press releases?)

The other paradox, which is perhaps even more significant, is that this kind of access to mathematical drama has not lowered the prestige and intellectual authority of mathematicians. Quite the contrary: I would say that not since Albert Einstein have mathematicians inspired so much unmixed admiration. I suspect that the explanation is not too distant from the one I suggested a month ago. When you demonstrate to people that you are not a conspiratorial gang of power addicts and control freaks in league to manipulate the public--and even when you expose, as Grigory Perlman did, the petty plagiarism and priority squabbles that characterize your profession--it instantly becomes easier to comprehend what you are trying to accomplish. Mathematicians have been locked in a self-enclosed world for so long that they have not made serious or visible efforts to construct a public face for their profession; this has left them, paradoxically, better placed than scientists to take advantage of the great reserves of sympathy and interest that characterize our new economy of attention. Let's hope the lesson is heeded.

Literary Offenses

2010-08-09T22:11:00.002-04:00

Consequently, the only dog I have in this fight is a philosophical one. I agree with D’Vorkin that any writer who puts pen to paper for money is self-evidently turning out “product.” But that isn’t all he’s doing. Deep down inside, most writers, even the most cynical grub-street hacks, flatter themselves that they’re Speaking Truth to Power or, hell, spinning a good yarn, at least.

The mark of a real writer is that she cares deeply about literary joinery, about keeping the lines of her prose plumb. That’s what makes writers writers: to them, prose isn’t just some Platonic vessel for serving up content; they care about words. Any chief product officer who says “quality online does not equal craftsmanship” is channeling the utilitarian gospel of the managerial class, an instrumentalist vision of journalism that presumes writing, online, is just a turkey baster for injecting content into the user’s brain. Undeniably, that sort of writing is everywhere, online, from here to eHow.com, an algal bloom of brain-cloggingly awful prose. It results in reader die-off, in the long run, because bloggers posting in a workplace culture that dismisses the importance of craft will tend, unsurprisingly, to turn out stories that aren’t well-crafted, and what isn’t well-crafted isn’t well-read.

At True/Slant, D’Vorkin told Observer reporter Zeke Turner, “We let the reporter self-publish—boom! We’re working through that at Forbes: How do you create a less layered process at the magazine?” From a managerial perspective, lowering overhead by doing away with the Middlemen Formerly Known as Editors makes spreadsheet sense. But who minds the store? Self-editing and self-publishing are fine if you’re Matt Taibbi or Susannah Breslin, reporters who roll over in their sleep and snore out perfectly parsed sentences and triple-sourced statements of fact. But what about the guy in the next cubicle, quietly sculpting the equivalent, in obsessive prose, of Richard Dreyfuss’s scale model of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming? Who’s watching him?
- Mark Dery, "Goodbye to All This: On Leaving True/Slant"

I read this piece when it was posted to MetaFilter, and then I read it again when the author showed up and made a nasty, sneering ass of himself in an accompanying thread. The whole business did not help me feel any less conflicted about the article's message. On the one hand, I am tempted to take it seriously, because the aesthetic observations it makes are difficult to refute: the corporate Twitter as a genre has not, as far as I can tell, produced any Fénéons, and the enormous universe of recipe sites is still short on MFK Fishers. On the other hand, it's not as if Dery's article is in any meaningful sense an example or an evocation of the old, pre-eHow journalism. Bathetic laments for lost cultures of reading and writing are by now well-established on the Internet, and their proliferation, like Rousseau's printed complaint about the trash-preserving qualities of print, is a sign of the medium's inescapability. One cannot have Dery without Wikipedia prose.

There are a lot of things that ought to make me sympathetic to Dery. When I first started this blog, I made some half-hearted, semi-conscious attempts at writing "high style" prose, and told myself that if it looked bad it was because Internet philistines were incapable of appreciating anything that did not read like the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition Player's Handbook. I go through cycles of favorite, obsessive targets, and at that particular point my most fervently imagined opponents were libertarian atheist anime fans with EE/CS double majors (apparently Dery has not yet graduated from this particular antipathy). I would show them that I, as a Highly Cultured and Literate Individual, was better than them, because I could produce something "craftsmanlike."

Actually, as any look into the archives will attest, what I wrote was mostly just bad prose: prose that relished its own bathos, that drew attention to itself, that alluded unnecessarily and left all its wires exposed. (I like to think I've gotten better, but I suspect the improvement is not really that substantial.) I don't think the problem lay simply in the fact that I was or am a bad writer; I was, after all, still capable of producing perfectly readable and unadventurous pieces of academic prose. The problem was that I was trying to achieve or imitate the journalistic style of a nineteenth-century writer without either the education or the ecosystem to do so convincingly.

I suspect I am not alone. Dery's economic explanations, which see the dead hand of content-farm kulaks wringing all the life out of Internet prose, do not satisfy, if only because the idea of writing colorless prose for money is as old as writing itself. Even the first wire service must have seemed corporate and faceless to the reporters it threatened. No. What's missing on the Internet are simply the traditions and social influences that had once preserved a simulacrum of classically-educated prose on the pages of printed newspapers. In reality, very few people even in long-form journalism can approach the elegance of a Carl Becker today, but thanks to editorial tradition and imitative habit, many produced a semblance. On the Internet, all of that is gone. One searches for antecedents and finds Wikipedia or Reddit, and in that ecosystem the only legitimate-looking style is the plain-spoken idiom that writers on these sites adopt almost instinctively.

Is that bad? I don't think so. I have seen this idiom succeed at expressing things the genteel old greats would never dream of protraying. It deals well with changes of register; it instantly exposes falseness and pretention; it forces no educational litmus tests upon its readers. Mark Dery's prose, by contrast, is unapologetically purple, and to compete with plain-spoken content-farm yokels it always needs to convince itself that their way is culturally more harmful: they're nerds, they're scientists, they all have Asperger's. The problem is somehow never that the prose is ill-adapted to the time or to the medium, that it often looks artificial even to sympathetic literary readers, that it smells from a long way off of ressentiment. (Just look at how he gloats about making his readers go to the dictionary!) In short, Dery's alternative is not the Grand Old Writerly Style he wishes and pretends it to be. If anything, it's unsightly growth on what is basically, despite all his protestations, a sound and vigorous literary trunk.

A Translation Quandary

2010-08-05T23:16:00.003-04:00

Мне хочется домой, в огромность
Квартиры, наводящей грусть.
Войду, сниму пальто, опомнюсь,
Огнями улиц озарюсь.

Перегородок тонкоребрость
Пройду насквозь, пройду, как свет,
Пройду, как образ входит в образ
И как предмет сечет предмет.

Пускай пожизненность задачи,
Врастающей в заветы дней,
Зовется жизнию сидячей,-
И по такой, грущу по ней.

Опять знакомостью напева
Пахнут деревья и дома.
Опять направо и налево
Пойдет хозяйничать зима.

Опять к обеду на прогулке
Наступит темень, просто страсть.
Опять научит переулки
Охулки на руки не класть.

Опять повалят с неба взятки,
Опять укроет к утру вихрь
Осин подследственных десятки
Сукном сугробов снеговых.

Опять опавшей сердца мышцей
Услышу и вложу в слова,
Как ты ползешь и как дымишься,
Встаешь и строишься, Москва.

И я приму тебя, как упряжь,
Тех ради будущих безумств,
Что ты, как стих, меня зазубришь,
Как быль, запомнишь наизусть.
- from Boris Pasternak, "The Waves" (1931)

I've translated this wonderful fragment of a poem, not very well, before. It was, I won't lie, a slog: the poem in general, and this fragment in particular, hangs together loosely enough that puzzling out the interrelationships between the lines--a must for a decent translation--seems like an impossible task. But one decision I made that I felt confident about at the time, and to some extent still do, was translating the final verse as "And I will take you up, a harness,/For those insanities to come,/That you will learn me, like a poem,/Like you know histories, by heart." See how it doesn't make sense? That "that" juts out of the third line without doing any noticeable work--and without mending the chasm between the two halves of the verse. I put it there because it is an exact parallel to the Russian "что," which occupies the same place in the original and serves an equally opaque end.

The verse has bugged me for a long time, so much so that I was eventually driven to consult my philologically-inclined family about its meaning. We held a council of sorts. My grandmother, who knew the poet way back in the day, suggested that the "что" was a standard poetic replacement for "которое" ("which"), typical in this case of Pasternak's frequently sloppy grammar. (It's hard to explain the difference in normal usage between the two words, but this was clearly a strange and marginal case) In other words, the sense of the verse was that future insanities were learning Pasternak by heart.

This still did not make sense to me. My theory, admittedly an unsatisfactory one, was that the verse was simply deliberately nonsensical, the "that" left in there deliberately like a false street on a jealous geographer's map. (I was thinking about the "avec" (line 10) in Mallarmé's "Tombeau d'Edgar Poe.") But I, too, was forced to yield: my stepmother pointed out that in that case the first two lines of the verse would have no meaning or purpose at all, which was a much more serious issue. At last, my father declared that "что" could be used in a poetic context to replace not only the singular "которoе," but also the plural "которые" and even the instrumental-case plural "которыми." I had never encountered such a usage before, but I deferred. The line was thus to be understood as follows: "I will take you up, a harness, for the sake of those insanities by which (or through which) you will learn me, et cetera." (The "you" here is still Moscow, of course.) At last, an interpretation which makes sense!

It is this moment that reveals my inadequacies as a translator and reader of poetry. For, even if I wholeheartedly accede to my father's reading, I still have no goddamn idea how to fit it into the context of this fragment. Sure, apocalyptic and historical themes appear elsewhere in the poem, but here we are supposed to be dealing with something different! The vagueness and uncertainty of my original "that" (which I had been unconsciously interpreting as an analogue to "que" in the sense of "may") not only papered over the difficulty in the interpretation of the original text, but also created a kind of meaning for the poem that it seems not to have had at all. I had been reading Pasternak as hesitantly expressing a hope that Moscow would memorize him like a poem or a story; if my father's reading is correct, he is in fact implying that Moscow will memorize him whether it likes it or not.

This creates a new difficulty for me. What do I do with the translation? It would not be hard to change "that you will learn me" to "with which you'll learn me." But with that move, the charm and beauty of the lines, which had originally inspired me to translate the fragment in the first place, disappears entirely: desperate and touching hope is replaced by unexplained posturing. Which of the text's claims should govern my choice of reading? The most correct interpretation, although it is dubious here even on the most basic level? Aesthetic appeal, although it is horribly presumptuous to substitute myself for the poet (and yet this is something that I, as a translator, am forced to do all the time)? Or simply the euphony and coherence of the translation? I still have not been able to make a decision, and so the poem remains as I once read it. Maybe it's for the best.

Snot Libels

2010-07-31T10:13:00.000-04:00

After the Kahanate, he no longer had any doubts about what kind of Russia the ZhD would build in place of the old. Willingly or unwillingly, they would end up becoming the oppressors, then reproducing the same old model. Although--it's not the ninth century anymore, after all--maybe they wouldn't try for total annihilation?! But Volokhov was precisely not convinced that they wouldn't try for it. Several times they had already come close to victory--and their decisiveness really frightened him. Actually, if everything could be limited to culture--Volokhov, reluctantly, would have agreed to yield the country; no one was about to ask him anything, but he carried on an unending internal dialogue with an imaginary ZhD opponent. Yes, he said, yes, I would yield it. Take it. In the end, the people, quite possibly, would be better off without it--and more importantly, I'm sure it would recreate it all from nothing, and better. After all, all of our so-called literature, all our Tolstoys and Dostoyevskys, and our diagnosist-agnostic Chekhovs--they're all nothing but the result of the conqueror's sense of guilt towards the conquered, and that is why even their best pages are so wearisome, why it is impossible in Russian prose to breathe in the air after the rain, or to look upon an evening landscape, or to eat a ripe, sun-warmed strawberry, without being tormented by guilt. Let it be. Perhaps the liberated people will write a new poetry on liberated land, the kind that your Pasternak and Mandelstam had barely started writing ... After all, you had almost had your government structure here, you almost renounced the idea of the Kahanate! And what do you start doing first? What our poor Shmelev, whose son was killed by order of your Countrywoman, said in The Sun of the Dead: no, this is no Russian wrath, no Russian method! You could have oppressed, but that would have left the deed half done--there are different kinds of oppression, there is, after all, such a thing as beneficial colonization and acculturation--but you would do something quite different, do not make me, O, do not make me say it out loud! Somehow I just know that oppression would not be enough for you. You will want to rupture the circle, because you have grown tired of always changing places. You will not come to enslave us. You will come so that we would no longer exist at all...
- Dmitrii Bykov, ZhD

Key: ZhD = yids; Kahanate = Israel

Similarly antisemitic rants occupy about a quarter of this massive and noisy novel, which won several awards in Russia in 2006 and made a substantial splash in its (rather inbred) literary world. Unfortunately, even if we do not take this feature of the narrative into consideration, the book is not very good. It is not even halfway decent. Bykov, astonishingly for such a picky critic, is almost entirely deprived of a sense of literary taste: dick jokes, folky stylizations, and hermetically isolated bits of faux-edgy cultural satire crowd all the plot out of the novel, so that we do not really know what happens to the characters even if we somehow, by some miracle, are persuaded to care. In short, ZhD is a monumentally pretentious failure by any reasonable standard.

But what of its antisemitism? (You probably have never heard of the book and don't care about how good it is, but must surely be surprised that a novel which levels anti-Jewish accusations only slightly below the blood-libel level can garner so much praise and attention.) ZhD is centered on the idea that two occupying forces are struggling for Russian territory, and have been for a thousand years, to the detriment of the meek and impotent "native population." The first are the Varangians, who stand in for "siloviki," fascism, authoritarianism, and everything the West associates with Stalinist Russia; the second are the Khazars, i.e. Jews, who stand for liberalism, moral corruption, possessive individualism, and everything the Russians once associated with the decaying capitalist West. (This dichotomy is by now so elderly and tired that it has itself become a subject of satire. Witness Pelevin's latest novel, T: "Some said that Fedor Kuzmich was a simple man of the people, a mouzhik. Others believed that he was once the two-headed Emperor Peter-Paul, but later, after the great spiritual war, he chopped off one head and became a hermit--although which head he had chopped off, the liberal one or the authoritarian one, was kept hidden so as not to tempt the people. The elder taught that Russia was a chunk of ice floating to heaven, on which the yids would light fires and stamp their feet, so the ice would crack and the people would drown while the yids waited alongside in their boats.")

The dubious symmetry involved in this binary conception of Russian history seems to provide Bykov with a get-out-of-jail-free card for the extremism of his views; after all, he can point to an equally caricatured portrayal of Russian authoritarianism and antisemitism for every such instance of his own. Unfortunately for him, the novel does not sustain this strategy. Bykov's fascists are made of the thinnest possible straw, so that not even dyed-in-the-wool Kremlin apologists could possibly recognize themselves in them; the Jews, on the other hand, though much more incoherent, are also more lifelike. Bykov goes so far as to give them the (slightly altered) names of people he doesn't like. (To be fair, one of the fascists has a real-life analogue too.)

The kicker, of course, is that Bykov is himself a Jew, as he once declared on national television. What does this change? As a fairly skeptical-bordering-on-self-hating Jew myself, I can understand the impulse to pick away at the clannishness and whininess of one's own people--but in fact Bykov's work does not do even that particularly well, and it certainly never reaches the bar set by Mandelstam or Woody Allen. Like much literary antisemitism, it is bad literature, not because it is bad politics, but because it is bad satire. (This is why I like Céline despite his career as a Nazi propagandist.) The idea that the Jews are, or have at any historical moment been, the oppressors of Russians--even through such indirect methods as capitalism, revolution, and moral degradation, not to mention outright massacre--is so ludicrous and so pointless, as satire, that it serves no useful literary purpose.

Bykov tries very hard to catch potential objectors on the hook of "political correctness" (even the cover declares the book to be the most politically incorrect novel of the year), and it is hard for a critic that calls him an antisemite not to look like a po-faced try-hard in that light. The moral case against his book is ambiguous enough that it holds little rhetorical value. No; my objection to the garbage that fills this novel is that it is bad writing, and only secondarily that it is ethically suspect. It is hard to say this, but even a book full of screeching yentas and greasy landlords would have been truer to life.

Climate Politics Interlude

2010-07-26T15:59:00.002-04:00

Comments on blogs and in the media about the contents of a large number of private emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, have questioned both the validity of the key findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and the integrity of its authors. IPCC WGI condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.

The key finding of IPCC AR4, “The warming in the climate system is unequivocal [...] “, is based on measurements made by many independent institutions worldwide that demonstrate significant changes on land, in the atmosphere, the ocean and in the ice-covered areas of the Earth. Through further, independent scientific work involving statistical methods and a range of different climate models, these changes have been detected as significant deviations from natural climate variability and have been attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases.

The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide. The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges, many of whom have dedicated their time and effort to develop these findings in teams of Lead Authors within the production of the series of IPCC Assessment Reports during the past 20 years.
- from the IPCC Working Group I Statement on the Stolen East Anglia Climate Emails

Now that the furore over these emails has largely boiled over--taking with it any possibility of a US cap-and-trade bill--it is time to think about what this scandal meant on a deeper level. The emails were, unquestionably, important: they provided climate-change skeptics with apparent evidence of the conspiracy that they had always contended was behind global warming research. The fact that the vast majority of the correspondence appears to be clearly innocent is immaterial. The very circumstances of their release--their "theft" or "leaking," characterizations that have tremendous political implications in our information age--provided the frame that was necessary for their content to be interpreted as sensational.

In other words, the email scandal was first and foremost a problem of media and communication: communication between scientists, between scientists and the public, between the public and influential organs of opinion on both sides. That is why the reaction of the skeptics' opponents has been so disappointing and ineffective--and why I'd like to consider it on this blog. Almost all of the various statements and rebuttals to "Climategate," however qualified their author, have centered on two basic claims: a) stealing the emails was immoral and b) you people don't understand the scientific process; this is how science works, and discussions of data presentation and comments on submitted articles sound arbitrary and conspiratorial because they are in reality comprehensible only by insiders.

Claim a), of course, amounts to little more than spitting into the wind. Practically any scandal that forms as a result of the leakage or exposure of private or classified material gets much of its power and media appeal from the voyeuristic, vaguely transgressive opportunity it provides to look at the private lives of other people or organizations. This private life inevitably proves to be really quite ordinary--but this only makes the need to manufacture the scandal more pressing. It's the hiddenness, not the scandalousness, that attracts media attention; condemning this as immoral is therefore bound to be counterproductive.

But the problems with claim b) are even more serious, because they reveal an unwillingness or inability to understand the roots of climate change skepticism (along with many other phenomena, such as anti-vaccination activism). They are founded in a deep-seated feeling that science is an expertise-driven, inaccessible domain which produces truth only on its own terms and is categorically unwilling to examine or admit to bias and error. Though the skeptics are probably wrong, this view is not too far from the truth. Responses like claim b), of course, only strengthen opposition founded on such beliefs: any appeal that rests on the internal standards of the scientific community is, to the skeptic, an argument against the infallibility of scientific knowledge.

As a aspiring historian of science--I mean this in a self-deprecating kind of way--I would have recommended a diametrically opposite tack. The email leaks do not need to be defended against or indignantly condemned. Rather, they present the general public with a glimpse into how science is really made, by living people with problems that need to be solved, with communication mishaps and professional aspirations. A university department, these emails show, is not so different from any other workplace. The results it produces should be looked at in the same way. If the mythos of the expert community is destroyed, it is that much harder for the rhetorical stance of the skeptics to gain ground. But first, of course, the problem must be seen as a rhetorical one. As long as "anti-skeptics" cling to their obsession with scientific consensus and consensually-generated facts, scandals like Climategate will continue to cripple their political advocacy.

Chaadaev's Revenge

2010-07-22T07:15:00.003-04:00

"No, of course, you're a beautiful flower in politics, really a unique one," said Leva, and Sasha winced at the "flowers," though, of course, without taking much offense. "But what do you want? You know, I'm willing to admit that I was on your side for a long time, as long as you were equally distant from the 'left' and the 'right,' from the patriots and from the liberals. It seemed to me that you has come in order to create a new soil to replace the old, which had lost its fertility, which had lost everything."
"Except the graves," said Sasha.
"Yes, yes, except the graves," Leva agreed, and kept going further, chasing his train of thought. "But lately it has seemed to me that you are slipping...well, let's say, into fascism [черносотенство]. No? I'm not talking about Riga, of course--those pigs [полицаи] won't settle down, they needed to be put in their place a long time ago. And of course, I'm not saying that you're going to start 'killing the kikes'--there's no reason, thank God, to expect that from you. But you give off this sense that you can't crawl out of the dogmas of these ancient, worthless ideologies, which have floated over the country for all of Russian history, starting from... well, from Basil III or Ivan the Terrible--and right down to the Bolsheviks--bringing nothing but blood and chaos in their wake."
"So where did this country come from, if.... blood and chaos...?" "Chaos" whistled through Sasha's tooth.
"It is molded from this blood and this chaos, that is clear, Sasha, and history repeats itself every hundred years, it goes in circles, first there is a bloody frost, then a snotty spring thaw, then chaos, then a bloody frost... And so on..."
"Well, let it be, I don't care," Sasha admitted candidly.
"What do you mean, you don't care?" Leva was sincerely astonished. "What are you all for, then? What are you doing? You want another bloody frost? You personally--can you formulate your own idea?"
Sasha shrugged his shoulders.
"You see," Leva kept at it, "I want to see futuristic anthropology in the 'Soiuzniki', and you just keep talking about some boring old 'national future.'"
- Zakhar Prilepin, San'kia (2008)

San'kia is one of the most successful recent examples of that traditional Russian genre, the political novel of ideas. It concerns a young member of a political party called the "Union of Creators," which is based on the real-life National Bolsheviks--who, despite the name, are neither especially communist nor especially fascist. All of the standard elements of the genre are present: terrorism, hesitations about terrorism, long and heated discussions of Russia's historical past and its destiny. Whether the parallels are intentional or not, the book reads like a modern-day Petersburg or The Possessed--and the reader could not be faulted for expecting even the plot structure to be similar.

What makes the novel stand out is that it is, in fact, not similar. In contrast to the relatively coherent protagonists of other political novels, Sasha does not win his verbal battles or even make a passable effort at doing so. Over and over again, the novel pits him against educated opponents who make nuanced arguments and take his ideas seriously; over and over again, their arguments reduce him to incoherence. Even stranger is the fact that Sasha is a sympathetic protagonist, not a satirical strawman or a comic figure of fun. So why does Prilepin force his hero to undergo so much rhetorical humiliation?

It is my sense that the gesture is a deliberate one, and Prilepin's attempt to revisit this old genre is itself an argument about the power of politics in the new Russia. In contrast to almost all of the best-known examples of this kind of book, San'kia ends with an honest-to-god, guns-and-government-buildings attempt at a revolution. Direct action without ideas, within the limits of the novel, leads to something being done; ideas, especially nuanced ones, lead to irrelevance or accommodation. It would still be wrong, however, to see him as an advocate of the former approach: the book's ending gives us a sense of profound uneasiness and nothing even resembling hope.

"A pox on both your houses" is not an uncommon message in this kind of book, but it almost always carries with it the implication that some other approach holds the key to the contradiction: Dostoyevskian Slavophilia, perhaps, or single-mindedly efficient labor for the good à la Turgenev. Prilepin offers nothing of the kind. The efforts of his main character and his various antagonists are presented as both bleakly pointless and inevitable. Prilepin's world--the world of late-'00s Russia, where the intelligentsia has disappeared and the regime is as cruel and stupid as its enemies--is a place of such profound exhaustion that even renewed vigor seems senseless.

Prilepin, strangely enough, is himself a National Bolshevik and an advocate for the same liberal free-press parliamentary-democratic values that seem to have so little effect in his novel. His inability to make a case for his beliefs in his own novel suggests that the exhaustion is deeper than this one book--that if he had tried any other approach, it would have seemed out of step with the times. Ideas are out of favor; events can get no lasting grip; the authorities wear the crown uneasily but remain as stable as ever. What space will there be in any foreseeable future for another of those political novels? What can be written when nothing happens and nothing is thought?

Genre Be Damned

2010-07-16T14:29:00.002-04:00

It was already getting dark when Ostasha blew out his piece of splinter in front of the tabernacle, left, and closed the crooked door of the chapel behind him. He sailed past the Rocks of St. George toward the isthmus of the peninsula on which Utkinsk Town stood. At the Utkinsk government harbor there was always a milling crowd of foreign and ignorant people, and so Ostasha was wary of simply leaving the boat ashore and walking to the church. He dragged the boat to an inn, where coachmen were already going to sleep under their carts, made arrangements with the owner and lifted the boat onto the hayloft. He saw the men poke their straw-covered heads out from under their carts, following the fine, light boat with their eyes, and gave the watchman another groat. Then he headed for the church.

The church stood on a former serf homestead. Once upon a time, the church in Utkinsk Town had belonged to the Old Believers, but a group of townsmen, led by the runaway strelets and choir singer Fedka Inozemtsev, took the baptism of fire inside of it. The state authorities built a new temple on the ruined site, in the Nikonian heresy, so the townspeople wouldn't immolate themselves anymore. And the fortress in the Town was built a long time ago, under the Stroganovs, to defend against Bashkirs and Tatars. Today, all that was left of the fortress were two squat and craggy crooked towers, with leaky roofs and collapsed crowns. The towers were linked by a belt of rotten stockade, which had come apart like splayed fingers, leaning over the shallow and muddy ditch of the former moat. Ostasha regarded the ruins with curiosity, comparing them to the factory fortresses, which were built very differently: with sconces and bastions, with fleches and rows of fachines along the tops of the walls, without any towers at all. The town ruins smelled like must, untrodden forests, Ermak in his eagled chainmail fit for a Tsar; the factory fortresses--like fresh iron, switches, and soldiers.
- Aleksei Ivanov, The Gold of the Rebellion, or Down the River of Narrows (2007)

It is difficult to figure out just what one ought to expect from a 700-page historical novel about late-eighteenth-century river drivers in the Urals. The first possibility, probably the worst, is that it will turn out be a Zolaesque exposé of state oppression, evil landlords, and heroically independent mountain folk. The second, not too far distant, is that it will turn out to be some kind of à-clef allegory of something political or other. The third, at least marginally tolerable, is that it will be a Forrest-Gump-style novel-as-theme-park, in which the main character meets all the important people and sees all the important events of his age.

Thankfully, and puzzlingly, Ivanov's The Gold of the Rebellion is none of these things. It features no politics, and state actors of any kind are so marginal to the story that they seem totally powerless. No oppressions are harped upon, no scores settled, no lectures read. The main character never leaves the Urals, and, but for the constant haunting presence of the dead Emelian Pugachev, exists completely out of time. I do not think the year is even mentioned. In short, this historical novel takes its genre so seriously that it ignores all of its treacherous conventions--and leaves even the historian helpless. It is even more impressive that Ivanov's historical and field-specific vocabulary is so vast and precise as to make him seem almost like a refugee from his own book.

The plot meanders along the river Chusovaia, where historically independent Old Believer river-drivers captain huge barges that carry iron from mountain mines to the west. The protagonist is a young man who wants to clear his dead father's name of the charge of stealing the hidden treasury of Emelian Pugachev, who had been executed several years before. A fairly banal premise--but the ensuing story is so tightly wound and yet so broad and organic that it barely resembles a novel at all. When ghosts and ghouls of various setting-appropriate kinds begin to appear in the narrative, it feels like a matter of course--which is astounding, since for a historical novel lapsing into fantasy is usually the greatest sin. (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn't count.)

Yet for all that--and it should be clear that I consider The Gold of the Rebellion a masterpiece--the book is not all that interesting to read. The author has attempted, and achieved, a strange sort of marriage between a rickety off-the-shelf historical-novel narrative structure and a boisterous, living historical world which threatens to extend far beyond the limits of the text. The result is that neither spouse is adequate to the other: the structure is too thin to hold the world together, and the world is too well-developed to make the structure look useful. It is difficult to escape the feeling that the author knew how unsatisfactory the thing was and didn't care: the book could survive on its own terms. And, by and large, he was right. What is interestingness, really, when you have entire chapters devoted to Vogul ritual practices? The book willy-nilly ends up making its own genre.

Isn't This Life?

2010-07-07T09:15:00.007-04:00

"What do you need? A handkerchief, maybe. Come on, wouldn't you like to live like this?" Oblomov asked, "Well? Isn't this life?"
"And you would want to live like this your whole life?" Stolz asked.
"Until I'm old and gray, until I die. This is life!"
"No, this isn't life!"
"What do you mean, it isn't? What's missing? Just think, you wouldn't see a single pale, suffering face, no worries, no questions about the Senate, about the stock market, about shares, about reports, about ministerial receptions, about ranks, about per diem raises. And all conversations would be to your taste! You'd never need to move from your apartments--that alone should count for something! How is that not life?"
That isn't life!" Stolz repeated stubbornly.
"Well, what is it, then?"
"It's..." (Stolz reflected for a while, searching for the right word to call it.) "Some kind of... Oblomovism," he said at last.
"O-blo-movism," said Iliia Iliich slowly, surprised by this strange word and pronouncing it syllable by syllable. "Ob-lo-mov-ism!" He regarded Stolz strangely and closely. "What is the ideal of life for you, then? What is not Oblomovism?" he said shyly, without conviction. "Isn't everyone trying to achieve the same thing? Spare me!" he added more energetically, "Isn't the goal of all your running around, your passions, wars, trade, and politics the cultivation of serenity, the striving for that ideal lost paradise?"
"Even your utopia is Oblomovist," Stolz objected.
- Goncharov, Oblomov

I've spent the last week or two unintentionally avoiding writing, stuffing myself full of shashlik and beer, and decomposing in the Moscow heat. It has been a good time to think about Oblomov and Oblomovism. After all, the trick to Oblomovism is not that one has to have precisely the same kinds of food, sleep, and social relationships as he did--that would make the project impossible--but rather that anything one does should be oriented toward the achievement of complete satiety and stasis. For whatever reason, the Oblomovist Imperative takes hold of me on a pretty regular basis, so I can see in advance just what kind of stasis it's going to be.

Oblomov, on the face of it, is unkind to the Oblomovist. We are told repeatedly how the protagonist is wasting his life, we see his relationships and ambitions fall apart, we see him taken advantage of by unscrupulous associates. It seems almost as if every time he begins to enjoy life, and says as much to somebody else, the narrative must hasten to cut him off from pleasure and fulfillment. Oblomov's friend, the industrious Stolz, receives no comparable treatment. Goncharov seems to derive almost physical satisfaction from describing just how good Stolz is at everything--and how bad Oblomov is at the same things.

It is not hard to see the other possibility, that the seeming preeminence of Stolz is a kind of Cervantesian wink designed to conceal the author's true opinions. Everything works out well for Oblomov. He achieves stasis and satiety (although he, of course, eventually dies from it.) Oblomov's meals are mouthwatering, despite their lack of intellectually-redeeming value. What's more, all the running around, career-making, service-pursuing, and networking that everyone else in the novel does is painted consistently as unpleasant and annoying.

The lesson seems to be that if you're not as good at life as Stolz is, then you might as well be a good Oblomov. He may be useless, but at least he has a kind and generous soul, which cannot be said for most of the characters in the novel. That's a pretty predictable message, but it gets Goncharov into trouble--for his novel is not so much intended as a morality tale (at least if we take the author at his word) as a rallying cry for Russians to shed the protective shelter of Oblomovism and become capable men like Stolz. Paradoxically, then, the most obvious against-the-grain reading of the novel ends up endorsing a more sentimental and uncritical position than the narrator's explicit statements in the text.

Through my beer and shashlik-befuddled eyes, I can arrive at only one compelling interpretation of the novel: that Oblomov's death was a good thing, because Oblomovism is a science of life whose natural telos is death. A successful Oblomovist would erase the feeling of change and time (which is founded, on the novel's terms, upon a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the present) completely, thus shortening the space between death and the present to a pinpoint. The novel's shortest section comes between Oblomov's complete loss of dissatisfaction and his death--and yet the time it covers seems to be longer than any other. The implication is a bleak one. Few can aspire to be Stolzes, but everyone can dream of being an Oblomov; what then?

Burton II: Secret Writing

2010-06-30T14:30:00.000-04:00

Semiramis equo, Pasiphae tauro, Aristo Ephesius asinae se commiscuit, Fulvius equae, alii canibus, capris, &c., unde monstra nascuntur aliquando, Centauri, Sylvani, et ad terrorem hominum prodigiosa spectra: Nec cum brutis, sed ipsis hominibus rem habent, quod peccatum Sodomiae vulgo dicitur; et frequens olim vitium apud Orientalis illos fuit, Graecos nimirum, Italos, Afros, Asianos: Hercules Hylam habuit, Polycletum, Dionem, Perithoonta, Abderum et Phryga; alii et Euristium ab Hercule amatum tradunt. Socrates pulchrorum Adolescentum causa frequens Gymnasium adibat, flagitiosque spectaculo pascebat oculos, quod et Philebus et Phaedon, Rivales, Charmides et reliqui Platonis Dialogi, satis superque testatum faciunt: quod vero Alcibiades de eodem Socrate loquatur, lubens conticesco, sed et abhorreo; tantum incitamentum praebet libidini. At hunc perstrinxit Theodoretus lib. de curat. graec. affect. cap. ultimo. Quin et ipse Plato suum demiratur Agathonem, Xenophon, Cliniam, Virgilius Alexin, Anacreon Bathyllum: Quod autem de Nerone, Claudio, caeterorumque portentosa libidine memoriae proditum, mallem a Petronio, Suetonio, caeterisque petatis, quando omnem fidem excedat, quam a me expectetis; sed vetera querimur. Apud Asianos, Turcas, Italos, nunquam frequentius hoc quam hodierno die vitium; Diana Romanorum Sodomia; officinae horum alicubi apud Turcas,—qui saxis semina mandant—arenas arantes; et frequentes querelae, etiam inter ipsos conjuges hac de re, quae virorum concubitum illicitum calceo in oppositam partem verso magistratui indicant; nullum apud Italos familiare magis peccatum, qui et post Lucianum et Tatium, scriptis voluminibis defendunt. Johannes de la Casa, Beventinus Episcopus, divinum opus vocat, suave scelus, adeoque jactat, se non alia, usum Venere. Nihil usitatius apud monachos, Cardinales, sacrificulos, etiam furor hic ad mortem, ad insaniam. Angelus Politianus, ob pueri amorem, violentas sibi inanus injecit. Et horrendum sane dictu, quantum apud nos patrum memoria, scelus detestandum hoc saevierit! Quum enim Anno 1538. prudentissimus Rex Henricus Octavus cucullatorum coenobia, et sacrificorum collegia, votariorum, per venerabiles legum Doctores Thomam Leum, Richardum Laytonum visitari fecerat, &c., tanto numero reperti sunt apud eos scortatores, cinaedi, ganeones, paedicones, puerarii, paederastae, Sodomitae, (Balei verbis utor) Ganimedes, &c. ut in unoquoque eorum novam credideris Gomorrham. Sed vide si lubet eorundem Catalogum apud eundem Balcum; Puellae(inquit) in lectis dormire non poterant ob fratres necromanticos. Haec si apud votarios, monachos, sanctos scilicet homunciones, quid in foro, quid in aula factum suspiceris? quid apud nobiles, quid inter fornices, quam non foeditatem, quam non spurcitiem? Sileo interim turpes illas, et ne nominandas quidem monachorum mastrupationes, masturbatores.
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3.ii.1

When I was younger--gosh, only a few short years ago--I went through a stage of fascination and love for the work of Leo Strauss. (It is preserved, perhaps unfortunately, in the archives of this blog.) It's not that I was interested in the Noble Lie or sympathetic to the goals of his supposed neoconservative intellectual descendants; I just happened to find the theory of texts and apocalyptic pathos of works like Persecution and the Art of Writing and the "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero" uniquely appealing, especially when spiced up with a vaguely illicit aura. Strauss's writings seemed to open the door to a vision of scholarly work far more mystical and Borgesian than anything the contemporary academy had to offer.

I will readily admit today that Strauss's work is deeply flawed, and, worse yet, that its surface impression of profundity and insight becomes flimsier and flimsier as it is examined more closely. In fact, this passage from Burton, which I have avoided translating in part deliberately and in part because my Latin sucks, is a good example of just how difficult it is for the Straussian method to cope with precisely the thing it seeks to discover.

In brief, Persecution and the Art of Writing offered a programmatic proposal and a very sketchy methodology for distinguishing between the exoteric and the esoteric components of a text. The idea was that pre-Hobbesian philosophers (but only Great Philosophers, according to Strauss's rather odd definition) lived under such a constant threat of persecution for their ideas that they developed a practice of transmitting secret knowledge through their texts to students who were capable of recognizing them. Through an analysis of the text's omissions and mistakes (which are always taken in this method to be deliberate), one could discover the philosopher's real ideas, which were often diametrically opposed to the exoteric statements presented in his work.

Burton is not a great philosopher, but here we have as blatant an example of a technique for esoteric writing as could be imagined. Lengthy passages which he did not want read by those unworthy of seeing them he wrote in Latin--and the criterion of worthiness was, conveniently, knowledge of Latin itself (related metonymically, of course, to the capacity for scholarship in general). The NYRB paperback edition, which is the one I read, only translates the first of these long passages. It seems that the esotericity of the more sexually-charged sections--evidently preserved with some care by whatever old Oxford fuddy-duddy provided NYRB's English text--has been able to survive until the present with only minimal difficulty.

The existence of such a clear, well-defined esoteric-writing technique, paradoxically, poses serious difficulties for Straussians. If something like this was available to nearly every philosopher working around Burton's time, and it certainly was, why would philosophers have to rely on the unstable language of omissions and mistakes? How come we see no argument for one and against the other? In what circumstances could two such techniques coexist, even tacitly? Straussians are by definition unable to answer these questions because their sole and ultimate authority is their private hermeneutic; with the apparition of something far more solid and concrete, its interpretive appeal disappears.

And finally, Burton's secret writing is more real than the Straussian one. A secret writing of sexuality is just more believable, more historically alive, than the mysterious political wisdom the Straussians inevitably pretend to discover. And that makes it so much less scary.