Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Lost

A French schoolmaster and statistician, Louis Maggiolo, proposed, in the 1870s, to track the rise of literacy in France using, as an index, the signature on marriage documents. Signatures by the married couple or by their representatives were required from the 1670s, when Colbert, under Louis XIV, reformed the state administration of civil affairs – births, marriages, deaths. Now, there are many problems, as various historians have acknowledged, with using the signature as an index of literacy. For instance, we are projecting schooling that joins together reading and writing onto a period in which it wasn’t necessarily the case that they were taught in conjunction – it was for instance not uncommon for women to know how to read, but not how to write. And a signature can also be learned as a gesture, or a drawing, without the performer knowing how the letter signs really connect up. However, the very requirement tells us something about the changing relation between the state and its subjects. Literacy, on one level, was imposed by the state as an instrument of order and control. I’m less concerned about the rich uncles of the marriage certificate – the poem, the novel, the essay – than I am about the gradual awakening of the third life – the life of media, of reading, of visual, aural and print culture. Not as a rarity, but as an intrusion into both the private and public spheres (if we can use those terms to designate spaces in semi-literate societies).

I’m thinking of the everyday encounter with signs that label parts of the world. Imagine: once, the world for the vast majority of Europeans was criss-crossed by songlines; gradually, that world becomes shadowed by real signs, images, arrows, text.

I think about this a lot in Atlanta. I drive a lot in Atlanta. And as I just got married in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the presence of fifty witnesses, I have done a load of driving and a load of getting lost – the two have sort of merged in my experience – and I want to purge this storm of roads and directions and misdirections, to drain it from my blood.

Metro Atlanta is folded, spindled and mutilated among hillsides, obscure creeks, and mucho forestry. From the side of Stone Mountain, the bald granite peak that juts up a thousand or so feet in Dekalb county, you can see Atlanta skyscrapers rise apparently from a jungle on the horizon, so deep and extensive is the arboreal cover. But the trees cover the houses, shopping centers, roads, and business of a couple million people. The sheer mass of the people is a key to Atlanta’s chief business, which, for a long time, was growth itself – selling cheap houses to in-coming, and developing subdivisions out of farm and wasteland. And when you develop farm and wasteland, you have to have roads, plenty of roads. Because the in-comers have to incomes, which means they have to drive to work, such is the tear-bent nature of things in this part of the world, and they have to drive home. And because they have to drive, they have cars, and because they have cars, stores, pawn shops, Army-Navy stores, Chinese restaurants and a million Waffle houses spring up about five to ten miles from wherever you sit yourself down.

Literacy and transportation go hand in hand. For the roads, which are dumped on the landscape like God’s own spoiled spaghetti, clumping here and there and everywhere among the sea of trees, must be labeled somehow.

The first labels honored the developers, the only honor they would ever experience in their fishy lives, and various real or imagined flora, fauna, or sites. Then the old name streets are broken up by new developments that want to gloss off the old names and thus produce variations on them – here a Rockbridge Road, NE, there a Rockbridge Drive, NE, there a N. Rockbridge road, NE, there a S, Rockbridge Road, NE, ad infinitum. Then the state comes in and dubs certain of these roads parts of the greater Georgia Highway system, giving them numbers. Then the locals persist in hanging names on streets that have long shucked those names and assumed other ones. And finally, in the age of the GPS, the nautical grid of directions, all the southeasts and northwests, become ever more important in driving and hence in the way directions are disseminated, while left and right as cues become subordinate or quaint.

Into this soup there came a man – me – fresh from the streets and signage of Paris. Signage that was set up to lead a million tourists to a thousand monuments. Signage that forms its own dense culture, signage that sings of obscure histories, what with a plaque on every other building. This man, faced with a dark night in Lawrenceville, lost all sense of whether he was traveling east or west, north or south. On some days, he would miss every turn, and spend a good fifteen minutes going back and forth on a road, looking for the key to get into some parking lot.

Plus, I had the songline of my family – a family who has existed in this part of the world for a long time, now, and done many deeds, and had many adventures –singing in his consciousness, and sometimes on the phone, when I called up my brothers or sister and asked for directions. My friend Dave thought this was funny, and then he thought it was exasperating – to hear me, utterly lost, take a cell phone (a cell phone! So much have I become embourgeoisified since landing in the New World!) in hand and call my brother and hear him sing me across the private monuments of Stone Mountain to the arthritic flow of traffic on I 20.

But surely the impulse to sing the lines of family force across the landscape is merely buried under maps and GPS-es. And under those family lines, there is the great dying, and the Conquista, and our history – that is, the things that have exploded like big joke cigars in the face of humanity – as a planetary culture.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

narcissism of the learned

The narcissism of humankind

In his Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud noted:

‘Mankind had to endure two injuries to its self love brought about by science in the course of time. The first was when it learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, but a tiny little corner in an unimaginably vast universe. This is attached to the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian science had already expressed something similar. Then came the second, when biological research denied man’s supposed creaturely privilege, showing that he was descended from the animal kingdom and was ineradicably of an animal nature. This transvaluation occurred in our time under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their successors, but not without the strongest resistance of contemporaries. The third and most sensible wound to the human quest for grandeur has been experienced through today’s psychological research, which shows the ego that it is not even the master in its own house, but merely depends on messages from what occurs in unconsciously in the mental life.”

Freud recurs in other passages in his work to this historical insight, which, by a ruse that he understood well, posits a monumental injury to the narcissism of mankind whiles at the same time aggrandizing the narcissism of the scientist, and especially, in this case, of that ‘psychological’ investigator named Freud. The gesture that both maims and names is, in fact, always monumental: narcissism is an affair of compromised erections of just this sort.

The trope, it must be said, is certainly not original with Freud. In fact, it was already part of the repertory of early modern natural philosophy. Pascal’s thinking reed has been bent by the wind that blows from the infinite spaces upon this all too cornerpocket world; and in Fontenelle’s Dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, the moral derived from both Copernicus and Colombus’s discovery of whole worlds unknown to Europeans (for Freud’s “mankind” is eminently European) is neatly presented to Fontenelle’s student, the Marquise – who at first rejects it with the charming hauteur (more charming, perhaps, in a dialogue such as this than when she ordered about the servants, as Marguerite de la Mésangêre no doubt did) of one who lives in full possession of her ancien regime rank and privileges.

On the fifth evening, however, infinity enters the drama, for it is on this evening that Fontenelle explains the system of vortices that are grossly presented by solar systems without measure, and planets and hypothetically inhabitants of planets without measure, until the Marquise feels the world shrinking under her, under the pleasant night sky of Normandy. The dialogue at this point does something interesting. “But, she took it up again, here we have made the universe so large that I lose myself in it, I don’t know where I am, I am no longer anything. What! Everything is divided into vortices, thrown confusedly one among the other? Each star would be the center of a vortices perhaps as great as that where we are?” As the Marquise expresses it, Fontenelle’s vision gives her a ‘perspective’ that is ‘so long that vision cannot make out the end of it”. Such a vision of infinity reduces all her ambitions and sense of herself, while providing her with an excellent excuse to be lazy: “I imagine that my laziness will profit from my new lights, and when someone reproaches my indolence, I will respond, oh, but if you only knew about the fixed stars!”

Fontenelle, however, sees this infinitely as freeing:

“As for me, I said, all this puts me at my ease. When the heaven was only this blue vault, where the stars were nailed, the universe seemed to me to be small and narrow. I felt something like an oppression. Now that we have given infinitely more extension and depth to that vault, in dividing it up among thousand and thousands of vortices, it seems to me that I breath with more liberty, and that I am entered into a more extensive atmosphere; and assuredly the universe has a completely other magnificence.”

And yet, what does this freedom amount to? To the Marquise’s jest, Fontenelle replies that the problem isn’t about human glory: rather, “for myself, … I am frustrated that I can’t derive any use from the knowledge that I have.”

There is a music here – a counterpoint between the meditation on vanity that runs through the moralist tradition and the new idea of utility that is beginning to run through the Enlightened order as people like Fontenelle conceived it. We can here, under the banter in Fontenelle’s dialogue, the rustle of a whole new, but as yet unborn, system. That order requires the abasement of the ego of the old order. Sooner or later the Marquise must be stripped of her superstitions in order to be clothed with the cold glory of philosophy – which, in Fontenelle’s sense, applies both to the method of discovery and the development of the instruments that make it possible. This is more than the displacement of the ancients – by making the world small and the mind large, a certain social perspective opens up: one in which science, commerce and politics will emerge as the inevitable institutions of ordinary life.

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