Month: March 2017

But nevertheless this was laid up in his memory by way of a cure in times to come.  And likewise the fact that, when he was still engaged in his studies at Carthage and attended my lectures, and while he wandered the forum at midday (as scholars often do) thinking over the speech he was going to make, you let him be seized as a thief by the watchmen of the forum – My lord, I don’t think you let this happen for any other reason than that a man who was going to attain the degree of power for which he was bound would begin to learn how cautiously, in hearing cases, a man should be condemned by another man with hasty credulity.  It happened that he was pacing before the tribunal with a tablet and stylus in his hands, when lo! a certain teenage student – a real thief, this one – entered, without Alypius realizing it and secreting an ax, onto the lead-railed ballustrades that look out over the Vicus Argentarius and started chopping off the lead.  When they heard the sound of the ax striking, the silversmiths below raised a clamor and sent people to lay hold of whomever they might find up there.  When he heard their voices, the thief ran off, leaving his tools behind, so as to avoid being taken with them in his hands.  But Alypius, who had not seen him entering, noticed him leaving and saw how he made himself scarce, and, wanting to know the reason, entered the place himself and found there the ax, which was puzzling over when those who had been sent up found him alone with that instrument by whose sound they had been stirred to action in the first place.  They took him, they dragged him off, they boasted before the whole neighborhood as though they had caught the thief red-handed; thence he was led off to be offered up to judgement.

But the lesson was to go thus far only.  At once, lord, you sent aid to an innocence whose only witness was you.  When he was being led off either to be jailed or to be executed, they ran across a certain master-builder whose greatest concern was the maintenance of public buildings.  They rejoiced that they had encountered him, whom they were used to come to when they suspected someone of having made off with some part of the forum buildings, as though he alone were able to judge who had done it.  But he had seen Alypius before, in the house of a certain senator to whom he frequently paid court, and as soon as he recognized him he took him by the hand and drew him apart from the mob and asked what the reason was for this great evil.  He heard the tale of what had happened and ordered all the people who were there, clamoring and raising noisy threats, to come with him.  And they came to the house of the teenager who had done the deed.  As it happened, there was a child in front of the door, and he was such a small lad that he could in no way report the whole truth out of fear of his master, for whom he was a lackey in the forum – thus Alypius, once he had worked it out, informed the master-builder.  But he showed the boy the ax, asking him whose it was.  “Ours,” said the boy straightaway; then, under interrogation, he revealed all the rest.  Thus the blame was shifted onto that house and the crowd confuted, which had already begun to crow in triumph over that man who was going to become the steward of your word and the investigator of many cases within your church – a man who left this affair both wiser and more experienced than he had been when he had entered into it.

 

(This is a passage that really ought to have featured in Auerbach’s wonderful essay on Marcellinus and Apuleius.  Like the texts he treats there, this one invests a late Roman urban space with a kind of intense physicality that’s situated or focalized within a particular observing subject – in this case, Augustine’s friend Alypius.  The carefully-established contrast between the speed of the action as a whole and the slowness of Alypius’ own thought creates a nice comic effect throughout, as when the aeditumi lay hold of while he “admirans considerabat” the ax that the actual criminal had ditched in his haste to flee.  Everyone acts, everyone even thinks much faster than Alypius does; but precisely that slowness of thought, it turns out, will become Alypius’ signal virtue as an examinator causarum later in his career.

Curiosity – pace the widely-held view that sees Augustine condemning it in every form – does have its uses.   Just the interest in things that got Alypius into trouble when he turned it toward the circus or gladiatorial shows turns out, in this episode and elsewhere in Augustine, to be what separates good judges from bad ones.  Alypius’ false arrest looks like an axial point between these two applications, and valuations, of curiosity.  If it really does function this way, that explains why Augustine displaces it from its natural place in the chronology of the Confessions, which would be close to the beginning of book 6, and chooses instead to remind us of this Carthaginian episode after Alypius has already moved to Milan.)

My favorite part of Lucretius’ theoretical apparatus in De rerum natura (but something I’ve had a hard time getting students interested in) is his theory of time.  Notoriously, Lucretius is a realist about the present time but not about the past and the future; he considers any historical statement to be about eventa, configurations of atoms which have passed away and no longer exist even though the atomic substrate on which they were formed is, of course, eternal.  This is cool, but the really puzzling thing about Lucretian time-theory is that he represents the passage of time as a falling-downward in space.  Everything that exists has been “falling down” forever, through an infinite void, and the various “presents” that have existed are conjunctions of atoms at particular points in this downward course.

The only way to parse this meaningfully, I think, is to understand Lucretius as identifying time, not with an independent fourth dimension, but which the dimension of verticality: his universe is three-, not four-dimensional.  I used to spend a lot of time worrying about how this would work.  Was it really a thinkable thought to treat time as identical with one of the three dimensions of space?  Mathematically, the conversion was possible – but only if one or more of the spatial dimensions were taken to be “granular,” which is to say discontinuous and measured on a number-line that had a cardinality no greater than aleph-0.  I’ll write out the argument someday, when I’ve figured out how to put mathy stuff into wordpress.

In any case, I couldn’t find any evidence in the DRN that Lucretius holds such a position.  He does of course hold something like it for material objects, of which the atoms are discrete chunks, but everything in the poem suggests he considers the void (or space) to be continuous.  Having just read an interesting article by D. L. Dusenbury (“New Light on Time,” forthcoming in Studia Patristica) which argues for a certain granularity in Augustine’s notion of time, in part on the basis of Lucretian parallels, and which shows that Augustine treated time in a spatial way, I wonder if I wasn’t onto something before.  If I was, though, then I think the relevant granularity has to inhere, not in Lucretian physics, but in the Latin language itself.

I posted here a few days ago about the absence of a specialized depth-dimension in some basic fields of Latin vocabulary.  If we suppose that the world does inescapably contain verticality, this raises a phenomenological question: how would a Latin-speaker have experienced this verticality without a fully-articulated three-dimensional language in which to think or express it?  One conceptual possibility, suggested by elementary phenomena like the sky and multi-story buildings (which go far back in Roman history if Livy is to be believed), is that they might have thought of the world as a layered stack of two-dimensional planes.  Latin does, after all, have plenty of words for height-ranking; perhaps these could have done duty in place of words for depth.

If that’s true, then the vertical dimension is exactly the one that’s discontinuous, and Lucretius’ transposition of time onto this dimension becomes thinkable (although not standard for Romans, who seem to have conceptualized time as a line on which the speaker stands, facing the past).  Moreover, my hypothesis can be falsified by looking at actual Latin texts – a project to which I’ll be returning here from time to time.

The thing that puzzled me most in the runup to last November’s election, and that still seems to me the strangest about that whole strange year, was how people could vote for Donald Trump.  Not because he’s a racist, a xenophobe, an obvious con-man – that’s just checking off boxes on the Republican bingo card.  What beggared belief was how anyone, anywhere, could want to vote for this particular man, regardless of what his policies were.  He was so evidently repulsive, physically and rhetorically, a buffoon with a fake tan, cartoon hair, and jowls that hung like plumb-bobs.  I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, either.  Commentators on the left made a regular and almost casual habit of pointing out how ridiculous Trump looked and acted.  For all of us, he had a kind of anti-charisma, which makes it all the stranger that millions of people not only voted for him but did so with a level of enthusiasm Americans usually reserve for teenage pop stars.

For them, he had charisma.  Were they seeing something we couldn’t see, or hearing something we couldn’t hear?  I don’t think that kind of magical thinking has much explanatory value, although, as you’ll see, I’ve come back around to it in part.

What made Trump’s “charisma” make sense to me was an argument I encountered near the end of James Scott’s Domination and the Art of Resistance, a book in which Scott summarizes and theorizes thirty years of anthropological work on the phenomenon of what he calls “the hidden transcript.”  Scott’s basic argument, in this book and elsewhere, is that – pace Althusser et al – downtrodden people don’t often internalize the ideologies produced by their oppressors to justify a state of affairs in which they’re oppressed.  Instead, the wretched of the Earth produce counter-ideologies of their own, which are uniquely shaped by two important factors that distinguish them from the hegemonic ideologies of the master class.  First, they spread without access to the systems of literate mass distribution that dominant ideologies employ; this means that they’re oral in form and, in detail at least, show a lot of variation from one instantiation to the next.  Second, they spread in secrecy so as to escape punitive repression by the dominant class; this means they’re veiled or cast in a language transparent to subalterns, but opaque to those in charge.  Scott’s theory is a powerful tool for interpreting mass attitudes, especially for those who, like me, study ancient materials which only give us access to such mass attitudes through the bewildered eyes and ears of the masters.

Out of all this, Scott produces a unique theory of charisma that does away with some of the hand-waving one encounters in Weberian accounts.  For Scott, “charisma” is just the enthusiastic loyalty that those who share a given “hidden transcript” will demonstrate for anyone who’s able to give voice to this transcript openly and in the face of elite opposition.  Pragmatically, a politician who speaks from the hidden transcript openly both puts himself at risk on behalf of and seems to identify himself with those whose ideological demands the hidden transcript expresses.  But it’s also a kind of vicarious release to watch someone say all the things you’ve been afraid to say, just to those people whom you were afraid to say them to.

Is that Trump?  But where’s the hidden transcript from which he’s reading?  After all, any objective observer would have to agree that those who responded most enthusiastically to Trump – older white men and women – far from being oppressed, are already in charge.

But Scott’s analysis applies to perceptions, not reality.  Sociologist Arlee Hochschild has powerfully outlined the ways in which white people can feel themselves to be oppressed in America, despite all contrary evidence: they see America as a line, and they feel that all sorts of strangers are jumping in line ahead of them.  Their hidden discourse is actually a hatred of these strangers, almost always expressed in racist, or islamophobic terms.  This transcript used to get transmitted in small-town bars and diners, but over the last two decades it’s metastasized across the internet.  Of course, contra Scott, the internet is itself a system of mass dissemination, powerful in the hands of those who wield it; but it’s not the same system of mass dissemination that proponents of what Trump voters see as an oppressive, dominant transcript enjoy.  Those are the newspapermen, the TV reporters: in short, “the media.”  It is again perception that matters, not facts.

Offline, Trump voters feel constrained to transmit their hidden transcript in coded terms – by making fun of Black Lives Matter protesters, say, or by complaining about Colin Kaepernick’s sense of entitlement.  For years now, Republican politicians have mirrored this tentative, fearful form of engagement by pressing a racist agenda only in coded terms.  Trump, on the other hand, presents their transcript openly.  It’s as though they themselves were speaking their minds.  That’s Trump’s charisma.

In one way I find this account very satisfying, but in another I don’t.  After all, though it does explain why some people might be enthusiastic about Trump, it doesn’t really say why those same people wouldn’t find him just as repulsive – physically, oratorically – as I do.  Where’s the disgust?

In answer to this question, I’d like to make what Scott would probably see as an illegitimate extension of his argument.  It seems to me that Trump gives voice to a hidden transcript not only through his explicit statements, but also through his very way of being.

The body first.  If Trump’s supporters adore him, its because they know that they themselves are, or someday will be, physically disgusting.  Rightly or wrongly, our culture assigns certain perquisites to the beautiful; it hurts to have lost these or never to have enjoyed them at all.  Trump, however, looks revolting and still enjoys every privilege a regular viewer of daytime television could ever imagine.  He has power, fame, and sex, or, if not that (and, indeed, I find it hard to believe that Trump can get it up anymore without murdering a dog vel sim), at least the license to abuse and manipulate members of the opposite sex.  In that respect, Trump’s ascent represents a revolt of the revolting.

Now, the words.  Everybody acknowledges that Trump can’t string more than two sentences together without a solecism or (obviously accidental, often sense-destroying) anakolouthon.  His most popular ideas – “Mexicans are bad hombres,” “Obamacare is a disaster” – are simple, predicative sentences; anything more complicated than that, and Trump gets lost.  I used to think that this was a new kind of dog-whistle, by which a candidate, by eschewing grammar, might cram a few dozen lexical items that scratched the pineal itches of his voters into the same space that a single idea, grammatically expressed, would have occupied.  Now, I think it’s just a question of capacity: Trump really isn’t capable of making sense out loud (to say nothing about whether he’s capable of making sense in his own head).

David Graeber once claimed, as a succinct explanation of why Middle America keeps voting for a Republican Party that screws them at every turn, that most Americans could more easily imagine their children becoming super rich than they could imagine those same children jumping through whatever hoops were required to join the liberal intelligentsia.  If there’s anything to that argument, then Trump represents its apotheosis.  People go to college, at minimum, to learn to do things with words; Trump, apparently, gets things done without words.  In this respect, too, he’s an imago of his own voters.  Their placing him in power is itself an overturning of the dominant transcript.

It would be foolish to deny that there really is some kind of dominant transcript in America, and that elements of it are purely ideological – the notion of meritocracy, for example.  Some elements of that transcript, though, may be basic to any kind of social compact.  I think that an insistence on some basic level of linguistic competency is one such element, since language is what lets us make laws, friendships, and, god forbid, deals.  Trump’s inability to “do” language in a way that would be effective for attaining any of those ends has so far prevented him from accomplishing anything substantial as president.  The failures (Muslim bans 1 and 2, the border wall, the AHCA) keep piling up, and we can take some comfort in this: that the very substance of Trump’s “charisma” makes him unable to write his worst ideas into law.  On the other hand, Trump’s more insubstantial accomplishments should worry us.  He’s succeeded in creating an atmosphere of terror for Muslims and undocumented immigrants and the transgendered.  That’s not nothing; it may be more important than passing laws, and it’s harder for us, as individuals, to fight against.  In each of these cases, Trump has successfully injected a little bit of himself into America as a whole.  He’s turning us from a society of equals into a place where wordless violence rules, and there are plenty of Americans who support him in this.  That’s the real black magic of Trump’s charisma.

Augustine: “I know that this remains to be untied by us, and I promised to explain it at the outset – but, because the matter is extremely subtle, and demands of the mind eyes quite different than those that human habit is accustomed to have in the affairs of everyday life,I warn you that you must go willingly along that path by which I think it necessary that you be led, and do no grow tired because of these necessary detours of mine so that you take it ill how long you need to get to where you want to go.  For first, I ask of you whether you think that there’s any body that does not, in its own fashion, have a certain length, width, and depth?”

Evodius: “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘depth.'”

A: “I mean that by which it comes about that the interiors of bodies may be thought, or, ever perceived – if they are transparent, like glass.  But if you take this property way from bodies, as far as my opinion goes, they cannot be perceived, nor indeed by correctly thought to be bodies at all.  Now I want you to tell me what you think about this.”

E: “Indeed I do not doubt that any body can lack these things.”

(Students of Latin will know that, where English has two sets of pronouns which distinguish between “surface” and “space” – on/in, over/through, etc. – Latin has only one.  In its lexicon, too, one encounters certain words that elide the distinction between two and three dimensions.  Orbis, for example, means either a circle or a sphere; sphaera, which indicates a sphere unambiguously, is a borrowing from Greek.

This is the first passage I’ve ever encountered that suggests this feature of Latin may actually have presented cognitive problems to speakers of the language.  To anyone who reads the text in English, it’s obvious what Augustine means by depth – the third dimension, the one that distinguishes between surface and space – and, conversely, the difficulties experienced by Evodius in understanding this usage seem incomprehensible.  A Latin speaker, however – especially one who, like Augustine and most of his circle at Cassiacum, does not know Greek – might have found this distinction less intuitive.)

When I started this series of posts, Trump’s presidency still seemed like no more than an outside possibility.  Things have changed a lot since then, of course, and what I thought of at the outset as a more or less antiquarian reflection has taken on, for me, an urgency and a contemporary reference.  Paradoxically, this urgency has been manifesting as a kind of blockage: the newfound relevance of the questions I’m asking has compelled me to spend more time and effort trying to get the answers right.

What would it mean to make truth a numinous power that attached to rule?  I had imagined this was an archaeological problem, a matter of recovering something substantive of the mode of thought that lay behind the Bisutun Inscription’s declaration that Darius’ rivals were “lying” in their claims to kingship – a mode of thought that was alien because it was ancient, as I had imagined.  Of the many things Trump’s presidency has told us about ourselves, the one that surprised me most is that at least a third of American voters understand this mode of thinking perfectly well.  When they voted for Trump, what they were voting for was exactly someone who could make their world-picture true by giving it the endorsement of the presidency.  Where the rest of us saw in their vision of American decline brought on by immigrants and minorities a racist-paranoid delusion that could never be made to correspond with reality, they saw a truth that was waiting to take its place in the seat of power.

Trump himself understands this.  It may be the only thing he understands.  His solution for every stumble, setback and scandal is to deny, by fiat, that any stumble, setback or scandal has taken place.  For the most part, the people who voted for him have been convinced by these denials – not, I think, because they think of Trump as especially honest or knowledgeable, but because they still believe that whatever he says ex cathedra as president is  true.  Twitter is Trump’s daily-updating version of the rock face at Bisutun.

So what started as an archaeological inquiry got transformed, somewhere along the line, into an essential problem of modern American politics.  I didn’t want it to be this way, of course because Trump’s election win is a disaster but also because I was hoping not to have to take sides between what Herodotus, I think, characterizes as Greek and Persian modes of working with truth.  It would have been nice just to map these onto the polycephalous world of the city-states and the monocephalous expanse of the Persian Empire, respectively, without having to choose between them.  For myself, though, I’d certainly opt to live in the former rather than the latter, and that, now, is a choice that all of us actually face.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie.  ‘We truthful ones’ – thus the ancient nobility of Greece referred to itself.” Nietzsche must be making this claim on the basis of Theognis, who was, after Homer, his favorite source as to the “ancient nobility of Greece.”  Did it never occur to him that the repeated protestations of Theognis as to the elemental honesty of the aristocrats could itself have been a lie?

However that may be, Niezsche was right to see this claim as part of the ongoing struggle between mass and elite for cultural dominance that characterized the Greek fifth century.  What Theognis and his fellows meant by it was at least, on the one hand – and as Nietzsche wants to read it – that honesty was a virtue belonging exclusively to people of high birth.  At the same time, there’s also surely a measure of self-reference at work: Theognis is also making a claim for the truth of his poetry and the judgments expressed in it, for the fundamental correctness of the standards by which he, and other aristocrats, make distinctions.

To see that claim exploded, again and again, is one of the real pleasures of reading Greek literature – even Plato, who at least in this respect also counts as a democrat.  Greek acuity of judgment in all concrete matters, the Greek sense for what a later writer, making the same discoveries, would call the “verità effetuale delle cose”: these are talents that develop in order to destroy a declining upper class’s metaphysical claim to truth by showing that this claim does nothing to save the phenomena.

Trump has already tried and will continue to try to frame his administration as the war of truth against the lie.  We, in the meantime, need to stand up against this distinction, not only by reversing it – although it surely does some good to point out that Trump’s version of “truth” has more structurally in common with falsehood than does the mostly accurate reporting he attacks – but also by keeping our eyes open.  More on this in future installments, under another heading.