Month: July 2017

Old lady philosophy derides the gifts of fortune, not the least of which is wealth:

“Or does the brilliance of gems attract your eyes?  But if there’s anything outstanding in that splendor, it belongs to gems – which I marvel at how men marvel at – and not to men.  Of all that lacks the impulse and touch of a soul, what is there that could rightly seem to those possessed of rational souls?”

Since tokens of wealth are not alive, they have less value in the eyes of a philosopher than the most wretched beggar or even, say, a mouse.  The owner is always more valuable than what he owns to such a degree that what he owns adds nothing to his value.  Ancient philosophers were able to see and play with this enigma (cf Socrates’  encounter with a particularly well-dressed horse in Xenophon’s Economicus).  For us, the enigma is structural: the clear division between living owners and dead property plays a central role in capitalist accumulation.

Modern critical philosophers attack this distinction without necessarily being aware of its centrality, but artificial intelligence might actually undermine it in practice.  This is a way in which capitalism could dissolve without having been understood or overthrown.  Or, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro suggests, will the threat of these strange new animae force us to redefine “life” so as to focus on the body, which we share in common with animals, rather than the soul which we would share in common with machines?

Yesterday I mentioned in passing some counterpoints to Amitav Ghosh’s argument that modern bougie narrative can’t handle catastrophe.  Now I’d like to get into it a little more.  Ghosh acknowledges that catastrophism has its place in sci-fi and fantasy, so I’m going to stick to texts that most people would count as “literary” fiction.

First, there’s the earthquakes.  Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” and Wilder’s The Bridge Over San Luis Rey are both wonderful in their way.  Do they show that post-enlightenment fiction can handle catastrophe?  At a distance, sure.  Catastrophe is something that happens elsewhere – in fiction, anyhow.  Both writers are probably looking back to Voltaire’s account of the Lisbon Earthquake – a tremor that helped knock down the ancien regime.  But that’s the kind of thing that happens only in reality.  Novels and short stories are still, as Ghosh suggests, invested in preserving the fiction of a stable world at home.

The other thing is that both these texts are already meta-commentaries on the conventions of bougie novels.  For Kleist as for Wilder, the earthquake is a device for bringing together people from different places and classes in felicitous ways – in short, a source of coincidences.  Since coincidence is the bete noir of “literary” fiction, generally regarded by critics as a narrative shortcut for the lazy, the earthquakes in these stories represent a catastrophe not only for the characters they entrap but also for the form of the novel.  Catastrophe is (only) the occasion for expressions of literate self-awareness.

Coetzee is a more complicated case.  Someday, once I’ve reread it, I’ll post something that sets Waiting for the Barbarians side-by-side with Rutilius’ DRS.  I suspect the comparison would be fruitful – but these are social, not natural, catastrophes, and not exactly what Ghosh is talking about.

Someone that I forgot to mention last time is Colson Whitehead, whose zombie apocalypse Zone One got its claws in me last December.  It’s probably the least well-reviewed of Whitehead’s books, in my view undeservedly.  At the risk of giving away something about the ending that every reader probably suspects from the get-go, the narrator’s knack for outwitting and escaping zombie hordes turns out to reflect his experience as a black man in pre-apocalypse America.  Key and Peele played this conceit for laughs; Colson Whitehead does the other thing.

Post-Trump, it seems prophetic, and I don’t think anyone should now be writing off a novel in which your fellow citizens turn on you en masse as just “genre fiction.”  Whitehead writes social collapse as a natural disaster; it’s global warming in reverse.

I can’t help but think of Zone One in connection with Whitehead’s nonfiction book about poker.  Unlike most people who write about poker, Whitehead acknowledges that he’s a loser.  For him, playing the game is all about learning how to inhabit that role.

To keep on playing the game just so you know how it feels to lose – that must be what it’s like not to have a stake in stability.  The rules are against you, so who cares if they’re radically disrupted?  Things aren’t all that much worse for Zone One‘s narrator after the zombies come that they were before.

Winners write most of the novels that we have a chance to read.  They, and for the most part their characters, are seriously invested in the continued stability of the bourgeois background.  These people aren’t going to capture global warming on the page, but someone with the spirit of Colson Whitehead might.

 

I sometimes publish things about Rutilius Namatianus.  Since nobody knows who he is, I’ll just link to the wikipedia entry, which is a little out of date but basically fine.  As far as we know, he only wrote one thing, which is a long narrative poem about his trip from Rome to Gaul in 417.  The title, De reditu suo, is a little misleading, since Rutilius claims to be “returning” to a place he’s never been before.

My girlfriend edits these pieces and says they’re incredibly depressing.  I’d say that’s about the biggest emotional response anyone’s ever had to my scholarship.  Rutilius himself is about as chipper as they come, but if you dig a little bit – and it’s not just me who’s noticed this – you hit a rich vein of something else.  He knows a change is coming to the Roman world, and he’s kind of anxious to get out ahead of it (as I see it, by reinventing Rome as a network of rural aristocrats – descriptions of aristocrats and their estates take up more than half of DRS).  What makes this depressing is that he doesn’t seem to realize what deep shit the Empire is in.  His world republic of letters is going to get blown to pieces over the next sixty years.  Imagine monks in abbeys, not learned scholars in villas.

This is a retrospective view.  Still, the question everybody asks – what’s wrong with this guy? – is hard to avoid.  It seems like anyone who can claim, in 417 CE, that the Western Roman Empire has another thousand years ahead of it must be dense.

There’s an argument to be made that this isn’t so, since Rome hadn’t lost its major grain-producing territories in Africa yet and since it could still, even now, put larger armies into the field than anyone else.  Maybe Rutilius’ optimistic guess might have turned out right, if things had gone a little differently.

Well, whatever.  Writing in a non-academic vein, I still wonder why no fourth-century author – not Rutilius or anyone else – seems to have been able to imagine that the Roman Empire might just up and disappear.  Even Augustine, who tended to be deflationary about Roman power, wrote as though things were going to go on in pretty much the same way forever.  He was also deflationary about his parishioners’ apocalyptic expectations.

Now I’m reading this extremely excellent collection of essays by Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement.  The question that gets him going is why modern fiction hasn’t been able, for the most part, to respond to or incorporate climate change.  His brilliant answer, to simplify things a lot, is that the bourgeois novel has a stake in things staying the same as they’ve always been.  Novels represent the travails of normal individuals against a background of normalcy.  If what happens to or within the protagonist is going to matter, there can’t be too much going on in the background.

There are some obvious counterexamples – Coetzee, Stendhal, even (for god’s sake) Thornton Wilder – but for the most part Ghosh’s argument holds, especially when it comes to the kind of ultra-contemporary world-lit you see self-consciously educated people reading on airplanes.  It even holds for Ghosh’s novels.  I think it holds for DRS too, though for different reasons.

What are the conditions of possibility for writing a poem in Late Antiquity?  In Late Antiquity, what is a poet?  He’s a person who knows things, and the condition for his poetry is that the world needs to respect what he knows.  The DRS isn’t so much a tour of the coast of Italy as it is a rag-picking expedition through the attic of the Roman encyclopedia.  Rutilius knows (and tells us) something about everything he sees.  Salt-pans work by evaporation.  The hot-springs at Thermas were unleashed by a bull sticking his horn in the ground.  The city of Cosa was once depopulated by a plague of mice.

These are all basically Roman histories.  Without Rome, they don’t scan; only a Roman audience would recognize Rutilius’ tall tales as a form of knowledge.  For us, it’s basically impossible to take this poem as seriously as it was meant to be taken.  Without Rome, there’s no Roman audience.  Rutilius writes within a certain horizon of epochal stability and can’t see beyond it to Rome’s fall.

So that’s another way that a literary form can resist catastrophism.  I wonder if it too isn’t operative in the present, and beyond the genre of the novel.  You might even say that our everyday spoken discourse depends (though obviously to a much lesser extent than the DRS) on certain fixed forms of knowledge as its conditions of possibility.  To talk about certain catastrophes would be to talk about ourselves talking nonsense.  This characteristic of discourse might even render us incapable of speaking about catastrophes that have already come to pass.

As usual, I’m going to bring this back to politics.  After last year’s election, a friend of mine wrote that history wasn’t a moment towards progress but rather a “wheel of fire.”  True enough, but it’s usually a wheel that judders back and forth; only rarely does it really get to turning.  When it does, we, like Rutilius, probably won’t be able to recognize or at least to talk about what’s going on.  To do so would require us to abandon our very language, which would in a way also be an admission of defeat.

The likelier alternative, as I’m arguing in an article I’ve been working on for a few months now, is that we’re going to have our language taken from us.

Is there actually something interesting by Isocrates?  I’m as shocked as you.

It’s a show-piece.  Here’s the setup: Imagine you’re the king of Sparta (one of the kings, if you have to be finicky) and you’ve just been rolled by a Thebes-led coalition of people who hate you.  On top of everything else, they’re now demanding that you surrender Messene, which has been, like, your top source of peasant-slaves for the last four centuries.  They’d like to rebuild it as a polis, which is going to cause you all kinds of problems.

This is Isocrates’ jam.  For form’s  sake, he makes all the usual complaints about how Sparta totally has a just title to Messene (why?  Because the Spartans put its royal line back in power after the demos rose up five hundred years ago, and naturally the kings just gave the city to Sparta out of gratitude.  Funny how, in Spartan myth/history, people are constantly giving Sparta things) and how the Thebans are such hypocrites for wanting to resettle Messene after having ruined Plataea.  Obviously, it’s necessary for Isocrates to point out that the helots hate freedom and won’t even know what to do with it when they get it, so they’ll just end up asking Sparta to run their shit again anyhow.

None of this really gets to the point at issue, which is that Sparta has to choose between giving up Messene and getting destroyed by the rest of the Greeks.  That’s a practical problem that no amount of talking about justice is going to solve.  So here’s where Isocrates comes up with something so brilliantly wacky that you can’t help but think he might have been as smart as everyone in antiquity thought he was.  He says, hey!  Why don’t we just abandon the city, send all the wives and kids abroad, and go pillage the rest of Greece!  We’ll be eating their lunch every day, and since we won’t have a city to attack anymore (because we pillaged it ourselves) they won’t be able to do anything about it.  Fight us with an army of their own?  Come on, we’re Sparta – we’re basically invincible, never mind how Thebes just beat our ass down.

Obviously – Isocrates being an Athenian – this idea owes something to what Athens did when the Mede came down.  They sent their wives and children to the islands, then abandoned the city and spent most of the rest of the War on board their ships (or camped on the beach, if you’re particular).  Archidamus’ plan is pretty much just a Spartan version of that.

Still, it taps into this deep-seated (I think) Greek fantasy about being able to do without the polis.  Everyone loves being part of a political community, but the polis is kind of a hostage to fortune, just sitting there waiting to get sacked.  People worry about this, a lot.  At best, if someone sacks your city, everyone ends up a refugee; at worst, the adult males get killed and everyone else gets enslaved.  Escape in advance seems like an attractive alternative.  That’s why Herodotus, after calling the Scythians the most ignorant people in the world, says they’ve got one discovery which is most wise: they know how to live without walls and cities and all that, so it’s impossible to capture them.