The Federalist Persuasion: A Table of Contents

Here, in the spirit of free writing, is the table of contents for my thesis, as written on the back of a piece of paper while I was invigilating an accountancy exam in college a week and a half ago - fleshed out with some vague and folksy musings on the content of each chapter and the arc of the overall argument.

Introduction

What people usually talk about when they talk about Federalists, especially in the 1780s, is nationalism. That's obviously a complex thing, in a complex context. It has a relationship with parochialism and cosmopolitanism that goes both ways (sometimes Federalist nationalism means "let's drop state divisions and unite," but sometimes that really means "all the states should be like my state"). It's also about relationships with other "nations". But that thinking makes it easy to go down the road of lumping all Americans together, and forgetting the importance of the "struggle for rule at home." We need to think about where the lines of power really are.

1. Education and the National Character

So, start with national identity. What is that, and how is it made? Thinking about that means thinking about culture, and especially education. There was a significant body of discourse about education in the 1780s, and even more about American identity: that's what the first chapter will analyse. The most important question is, what is the purpose of identity and education? Of course Americans' attitudes were never completely clear. What kind of national community, and what kind of citizen, did they want to build? I'll argue that this discourse helped Federalists to develop their sense of obedience, legitimacy, and justice in citizenship. While not everyone agreed, more and more by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the purpose of national identity and education was about markets, transactions, and law. Obedience to God and the community was replaced by obedience to an apparently-scientific, and therefore apolitical and legitimate, set of rules about how to live. Being a citizen and an American was about understanding and following these rules.

2. Commerce, Interest, and Cohesion

The science of political economy underlying these ideas was all about interests, and their potential for harmonious interaction. There was a variety of thought about how that harmony could best be brought about. One aspect involved changing the way people think: that's education. Another involved changing the way government worked, giving it more power to effect harmonious, mutually beneficial schemes - or preventing it from getting in the way of the useful workings of self-interest. For some Federalists, the power of interest was the greatest discovery of recent times, and there were all sorts of things to be done with it. Others (more conservative) resisted this conclusion. But they were more often than not brought onside, when they looked at their own interests. The economy really was a force for bringing people together.

3. Property, Legitimacy, and Social Order

But that issue of interests and government did raise some questions about property and social hierarchy. It was one thing to think about how harmonious interest could make America richer as a whole, but what about the question of who got rich, and what everyone's relation would be to each other? Many Federalists (even more than those who resisted the power of interest) were concerned about maintaing existing social hierarchy - they called it order and justice; especially to the extent that it helped them. On the other hand, the revolution had of course raised all sorts of questions about equality and democracy. Luckily, the new laws of the market could be useful here, because they could legitimise inequality and wealth: it wasn't a creation of arbitrary monarchy, but of the simple, rational functioning of the market. At the same time, of course, it was important to make sure that those rules benefited the right people the nation.

4. The Use and Abuse of Government

In order to do that, the right governmental and legal structures had to be in place. Governments and legislatures that did bad things (the state legislatures) had to be restrained, while those that did good things (Congress, at least some of the time) had to be bolstered. Congress was very much less than perfect, however. It was also an international laughing-stock, and that put America in a bad position in the international commercial world. Just as individuals had to be educated (disciplined) into the status of good economic citizens, so too did America itself need to be reformed into a proper player in the world of economic states. That might also, of course, mean trying to change the international system, at least a little bit. But that could hardly be done if America had no international clout. You have to learn the rules before you can break them.

5. Conspiracy, Responsibility, and Rule

That notion of rules, and their corrolary responsibilities, was close to the heart of every Federalist, from the most traditionalist to the most radical, commercial, and modern. In fact, the indeterminacy of the line between old kinds of rules - the ones called by names like honour and virtue, but which extended to things like heredity and deference - and new ones - things like justice (fuliflling your contracts, paying your debts), politeness (separating commerce from morality in everyday proceedings), and order (obeying the [legitimate] laws!) - was vital to the cohesion of the Federalist coalition.

At the centre was not just economic self-interest; there was no conspiracy. Rather, Federalists saw themselves as plain, honest men with a set of responsibilities to themselves and their country. What's interesting isn't the moral character of Federalists, whether as individuals or group, but the way structures, discourses, and interests combined to shape those responsibilities, and the way Federalists fought with themselves, each other, and eventually their political opponents, trying to carry them out.

(Epilogue: the effects of all this stuff on Federalism and America for the next twenty, thirty, two-hundred years &c. &c.)

Methodology of Governmentality

"To analyze political power through the analytics of governmentality is not to start from the apparently obvious historical question: what happened and why? It is to start by asking what authorities of various sorts wanted to happen, in relation to problems defined how, in pursuit of what objectives, through what strategies and techniques?" p20

"[Studies of this kind] investigate the ways in which debates and strategies concerning the exercise of political power have delineated the proper relations between the activities of political rule and different zones, dimensions or aspects of this general firle of conduct of conduct... They concern themselves with the kinds of knowledge, the ideas and beliefs about economy, society, authority, morality and subjectivity that have engendered these problematizations and the strategies, tactics and programmes of government." p21

"These studies do not seek to describe a field of institutions, of structures, of functional patterns of whatever. They try to diagnose an array of lines of thought, of will, of invention, of programmes and failures, of acts and counter-acts. Far from unifying all under a general theory of government, studies undertaken from this perspective draw attention to the heterogeneity of authorities that have sought to govern conduct, the heterogeneity of strategies, devices, ends sought, the conflicts between them, and the ways in which our own present has been shaped by such conflicts." p21

- Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: reframing political thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Who Owns Ownership?

When Henry Knox reported the news of Shays' rebellion to George Washington in late 1786, he wrote with trepidation that the rebels even intended to abolish private property. In the same year, Washington was vacillating over a gift of shares in the Potomac Canal Company, granted to him by the Virginia legislature: could a statesman accept such gifts and remain virtuously disinterested? Some men made large fortunes while working for the patriot war effort. Others like Alexander Hamilton were "public fools" who separated his work done for money from work done for his country. America's founding generation had no answer to the question of how property related to government and to society. But they were deeply interested in the question.

Exegetes of liberal philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith have for some time been correcting the nineteenth-century understandings of their thought. They are no longer always seen as theorists of the private, "economic" man, who should be governed as little as possible, and whose own "life, liberty, and property" must be the state's chief - it's only - objective. Rather, property and its accumulation are good only inasmuch as they are good for society. The right of property is natural, but it is also instrumental: it is part of the function of society and government for alleviating poverty, and creating "the wealth of nations." Wealth and the ways of making it are as much public as private.

It was on these foundations that James Madison could argue that protecting the "different faculties" of men for acquiring property was the first principle of government; and that Hamilton could argue that the welfare of the richest men in the country - the creditors of the national bank - was the best support to the welfare of the state itself. On the other hand, to say only that would be to obscure the division between Madison and Hamilton at every phase of their relationship, and between many other Americans with different ideas.

The twin birth of capitalism and the modern state was messy and drawn out. It occurred in the midst of almost continual war, and the necessities and opportunities of warfare on a larger and larger scale were among the most pressing reasons for asking questions about property and society. These questions became still more important, in America, after the end of monarchy, around which an entire conception of property - and its relation to society - had once been constructed. Elements of such patriarchal thought of course remained, and played a role in the ongoing conversation; they were even bolstered by what many Americans saw as the excesses of the French revolution.

By examining the relationship between property and society in early liberal theory, historians of American political thought can further dissolve the conceptual boundary between liberal and republican schools - they can, in other words, think more like late-eighteenth-century Americans. And by focusing on the relationship between property and society, a relationship that is considerably more complex than laissez-faire neoclassicism implies, we can also see further into the development of categories that inform modernity: public and private, individual and community, and (in a different sense) positive and negative liberty.

Causation and Affinity

The "antislavery debate", as embodied in Thomas Bender's volume of that name, is similar to the debate over the US constitution from the early and mid-twentieth century. Here I'm going to discuss these debates a little bit in order to suggest a way they might supply a helpful way of thinking about early Federalists.

Both debates revolve around the question, what is the role of capitalism? But actually framing the question in that way seems to have damaged and distracted historians' arguments. In the antislavery debate it's particularly pronounced, because the central problem can be rendered (as Bender renders it): "is there anything to be made of the near simulateity of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of organized antislavery?" This for me is not an inherently interesting question. What is interesting is, rather, what caused the emergence of antislavery, and (a different question) what was the nature of capitalism and its rise?

The question "what is the role of capitalism" combines those in a somewhat awkward way, which in an important sense creates the argument around which the volume pivots. Thomas Haskell writes, "What, then, did capitalism contribute to the freeing of the slaves? Only a precondition..." So, although his argument is relevant to the specific question he asks, it is not very illuminating at all about the two questions I find interesting: what is (and why) antislavery, what is (and why) capitalism?

The reason the debate can move in this direction in the first place is that it begins from the work of David Brion Davis, who does find a strong link between the two (not "only a precondition"). For Davis, "free" but disciplined wage labour is essential to capitalism, and slavery is antithetical; antislave and humanitarian movements thus had an important role in creating the conditions necessary for capitalism to flourish. They represent the expansion of capitalist moral economy, from cores in e.g. the Quaker religion/network, towards (by the nineteenth-century) total ideological hegemony.

I find Davis' model highly plausible; Haskell does not. He is concerned with the moral qualities of antislavery and capitalism, and therefore with the problem of causation. Did capitalism cause antislavery? Were antislavery activists motivated by capitalism? Haskell thinks that the answer to both questions is no; but he imputes to Davis the position that the answer is yes, but unconsciously, through self-deception (i.e. activists really cared about capitalism, not slavery, but they deceived themselves into thinking otherwise). This is the model of "class interest" that Haskell constructs. It is in my view a straw man.

John Ashworth points towards (without elaborating on) a more robust conception, when he writes that "one can say a person is moved by certain ideals that have grown out of class interest... the individual may or may not be aware of the relationship between ideals and self-interest." Haskell rightly identifies the rhetorical slipperiness of the metaphor "grown out of," but I think Ashworth's point is still useful. Class interests privilege certain values and ideas, certain cultural structures, within which people then act, from their own limited knowledge and perspective.

It's not that values like "promise-keeping" (which Haskell himself emphasises), or to use Federalist parlance, "justice", are not good values. You don't have to be a hypocrite to privilege them. But prioritising certain values - say, "justice" over "equality" - does obviously serve class interests. People don't choose what values to privilege by consciously consulting their class interests. Or even unconsciously. They don't really "choose" at all: to a great extent, culture chooses for them. To explain how that works, we need to go back to Skinner and discourse theory; but it's easy to see, at least, how discourse limits and directs our choices about values.

The same problems are at play in the debate over the constitution. What we should call the "vulgar Beardian" (i.e. not what Beard actually wrote, but how he was read) approach imputes to the founders the motive of active class interest. This argument is frequently said to have been "demolished", and so it has; it was never Beard's argument to start with. But what Beard did show was that the values the constitution privileges (justice, contract, property, minority rights) are those that favour capitalism.

There is a complication here, over the constitution's defence of slavery - which is a defence of elite interests contrary to capitalism. It is the slavery provisions that display so-called "naked self-interest." But the (capitalist) values encoded in the document itself are the values of a discourse that achieved a certain intellectual, ideological hegemony in post-revolutionary America - in a way that slavery did not. This is, in fact, what necessitated the more "naked" promotion of self-interest (through bargaining at the convention) on the part of the defenders of slavery.

So far I have described capitalism as a system that privileges certain values, and  constitutionalism (and antislavery) as movements that are animated by those values. It's important to add, here, that these movements themselves serve to further entrench the values they embody. That is, in part, how discourse is shaped. Activists can trace their belief in "justice" or "humanitarianism" to the founding fathers of constitutionalism or antislavery - rather than to capitalism or class interest.

It is this final point, the question of "elective affinity" (to invoke Weber, as the antislavery debaters do), that may be useful to help understand the early Federalists. Those who affiliated with the Federalist vision or persuasion, and later the Federalist party, did not need to fundamentally share the same class interests, or the same complete sets of values. Rather, they might be Federalists if some of the values that they privilege are also privileged by Federalism.

Antislavery activists like John Jay could also be ardent constitutionalists, in spite of the pro-slavery provisions of the constitution. And proslavery advocates like Charles Pinckney could be constitutionalists too. They were both Federalists. These men hold, and represent, different class interests. Beard was wrong to try to find a core interest - personalty as opposed to realty - that united them; it's that part of his argument that failed. But they do share an elective affinity with certain values that animate the Federalist persuasion.

Federalism should be seen as a movement, not a party in the Marxist sense, where it would represent a single class interest. Its members, or affiliates, might quite often disagree with each other, even in fundamental ways; they share no single causal class interest. But, in the battle over the constitution, they did not need to trace their ideas back to these disagreeing interests. Instead, they worked together to achieve a victory on behalf of the values that they all shared.

Capitalism and/or Freedom

History isn't just history. When we try to understand the relationship between the past and now, a lot depends on what we think the 'now' is like, and what we'd like it to be like. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of capitalism in America, and the role of the revolution and the founders. Part of that is also the idea of modernity: in what sense is modernity defined by capitalism, and vice versa? And so in what ways did the revolution and founders help create the modern world?

Last year the newest volume of the Oxford History of the United States came out: Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: a history of the early republic, 1789-1815. So it's not unreasonable to say that Wood's position (still) represents the historiographical orthodoxy. What is that position? For him, the early republic is all about the triumph of Jeffersonianism, and moreover, Jeffersonianism means capitalism. He deals with the state-interventionist Jefferson, the Jefferson of the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, as a paradoxical contradiction to the true Jefferson, who represents the individual pursuit of happiness, through competitive commerce, without government interference. My review of the book is here.

The Federalists, in this picture, are aristocratic stick-in-the-muds dedicated to clawing back a hierarchical and deferential society from the teeth of revolution. This is a bit different from the story in Wood's earlier book, The Creation of the American Republic, when he gave the (Madisonian) Federalists the triumph: their constitution was 'the end of classical politics' and the beginning of modernity. In the 1980s, Wood's tune shifted subtly away from this constitutionalism towards a celebration of the market. I would suggest that he had two major influences in that shift: Joyce Appleby and Ronald Reagan.

Wood and many others see a pretty straightforward link: freedom, to laissez-faire, to market capitalism. It works forwards and backwards, each element standing in for the others. Since we have market capitalism, it seems to follow, then we have freedom; and since we have those things, the Jeffersonians won, and the Federalists lost.

But it doesn't work if we don't see capitalism in the same rosy way. What if we see it as, instead, a system of rules that protect and entrench certain priorities? Capitalism isn't a question of non-interference with the individual, it's not a question of autonomy. It is, just as much as any system of power, a continual series of interferences: it creates and enforces ownership, labour, and finance contracts, which ultimately rely on the power of law and the state. It has to be continually propped up, stimulated, and bailed out. They were doing those things in the 1790s just as much as they are now.

Historians like Wood and Janet Riesman, following E. James Ferguson, point out that while the Federalist opposed paper money emissions in the 1780s, now we take paper currency manipulation as the sine qua non of financial capitalism. But they miss the point that the Federalists themselves made: the market can't work when currencies are controlled democratically. Capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy. It runs on rules that can't be broken by popular majorities, because the majority are always losers under capitalism: they get left in the dust by the concentration of wealth.

If we see capitalism this way, it's the rule-making Federalists who matter more in the making of modernity. They were the real founding fathers of American capitalism - and, in that sense, of the modern world.

The Boredom of Reading History Books

Mainstream history books are too long, with too many facts, presented in a too-straightforward fashion... For all their facts, there is often no coherent or abiding "truth". And maybe I need a mixture of both, when reading about the past; a sort of stylised history, true and informative but not prosaic.

Darragh McManus' criticism of mainstream history (via Moby Lives) seems fair and right to me. He's talking about popular, Waterstones-friendly books (like The Court of the Red Tsar), but there's not as much of a gap between these books and many of their academic cousins as we might think. There's actually a reciprocal influence. After all, academics want to be popular too. But readers - the kind of people who buy history books in Waterstones - want to be, well, a little bit academic. Think Peep Show's Mark, with Rubicon on his desk and pick-up lines about Stalingrad. Am I being too snobby, or generalising too much, when I say these people think 'facts' and 'history' are basically cleverer than fiction, which is, commensurately, for girls?

And you know, I bet your Waterstones history readers read like academics too.* That is, they don't read a history book like you'd read a novel. They read pages here and there; they dip in where they think it might be interesting. They get what they want, then it's back on the shelf. So it's irrelevant if books "simply spool out information, doggedly and relentlessly – and often very samey information at that." That's even kind of the point. If the structure was more complex, if the presentation wasn't chronological, if the book spent time creating an atmosphere or a peculiar internal logic, you'd have to read it like a novel. And men don't like novels, remember?

The question for historians is, to resist or not? As with all publishing, there's a dialectic about bowing to or trying to shape public taste - or, in practical terms, you do what the publisher tells you. But if we're talking about what a history book should be, should it be more like a novel? Should it be, basically, less boring - less full of relentless information, more shaped by voice and atmosphere, more interestingly structured? And, behind that, the question: do those things actually help to create "abiding 'truth'"?


* To add another insult to the history-reading public, I'll question whether most of the books sold actually get read at all.

What is the law?

My thesis about Federalism is that the post-revolutionary project is about more than just the constitution, it's about reconstructing and settling social norms. As Federalist theorists (especially educationalists) pointed out, there's no use enshrining respect for property (say) in law if people aren't prepared to accept that as a value. So the problem of political culture, and the structures of social power, seem to be beyond and beneath the law. The law is, if anything, an expression of those hegemonic values - a superstructure, in vulgar Marxist terms.

But it also seems that that's a shallow and broad way of looking at the law. Political culture is an amorphous phenomenon - it's the outcome of hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) practice. But what kind of action is that practice itself? Well it's rhetoric, and it's force. Law is the hegemonic practice par excellence because it's a combination of both rhetoric and force. It's law that holds political culture together: through law, we negotiate and institute (and then renegotiate) all sorts of specific limits and structures that would otherwise be out of control.

Law fills in the gaps that ideology creates, and in that sense it's all about negotiations within hegemony. For example, ideology may say property is an absolute right; debts have to be paid - but it falters when there's a case of prioritising one debt over another (e.g. in the American post-revolutionary case, the problem of repaying credit notes to soldiers - pay at face or real value? Original or final holders?). Law enters that arena. In my example, politicians had to make the law to fit the case, but mostly the law is already there, pre-emptively, although always ready to be renegotiated.

In a sense, law is powerless against the larger claims of ideology within hegemony. Property is still king here. But in the war of position, law is a powerful tool. Precisely because it acts on tensions within the hegemonic structure, and because it shapes specific local practice only broadly governed by ideological norms, it can be a site for some level of resistance. Good laws can make things a bit better for the worse off. The guardians of law (a professional class that is in general beholden to hegemonic interests, but not always or necessarily so) could potentially, through winning many small battles, create significant change.

Absent-Minded Hegemony

My supervisor gets worried when I talk about things like hegemony and social control. When I say "Federalists wanted to adapt mechanisms of control that could function in the context of republican values." It makes it seem like there was a conspiracy. If they wanted to do these things, it makes it seem conscious, and calculated, and malicious.

Actually, that reaction seems very similar to the reaction to Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation. As much as he wanted to talk about forces, about class, ideology, and structure, his readers wanted conspiracy theories - which they could then shoot down. Sympathetic analysts of Beard point out the 'slips' where he does seem to be advocating a kind of conspiracy, and a kind of personal responsibility - and therefore a personal, moral failing - in the Federalists. But he always maintained that that wasn't the point.

The point is in one sense fundamentally structuralist, Marxist: that it's class, inequality, materiality, that really cause change, and not individuals. But you can think of it in a different way, as actually a really personal, individualist, humanist kind of approach: that is, nobody is really evil, or thinks they are. People in general want to be good and do the right thing. It's just hard to know what the right thing is, and there are lots of factors that constrain and influence - structure.

When I started postgraduate work I wanted to be a champion for the Federalists. I thought, 'these seem like good guys, and my book is going to defend them.' Now I see Federalism as part of a transition in power, the creation of the structure of the modern world, where certain concepts like rights and property define our choices, and where power is preoccupied with hiding, disguising, and legitimising itself. But it's not that Federalists set out to create liberal hegemony. They set out to do good.

The historical questions are, a) what determined their idea of good, and b) how did they act on those ideas. Then there's a question that is more than historical, it's also philosophical: c) what was the relationship between their idea of good, and the outcomes of their actions?

The Second Date

I’ve been on two real dates in my life, both of them in my freshman year of college, nearly a quarter century ago. The first, as it happens, was with the eldest daughter of Robert Ross, the founder of TACT. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. We went to “Burn This” on Broadway. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and (this hurts) that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us.

For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T.G.I. Friday’s, in a shopping center on Route 1 in New Jersey. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. We’ve been together for twenty-three years. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other.

 Nick Paumgarten, Looking for Someone (in The New Yorker)

The Poor We Will Have Always With Us

I was talking to my friend about charity and Giving What We Can. I was making an 'argument' that went like this: if you want to do good (and we should take that as given!) then isn't the most good to give to the worst off. And if everyone gives to the worst off, and when he's no longer the worst off, give to the new worst off, and so on, then eventually everyone will be equal. The rich will have given away all that made them rich and the poor will no longer be poor. That seems like the end-point of charity, and of the GWWC idea, to me.

But then she said, well, suppose everyone in the world, one day, has exactly £100. They're all equal. But by the end of the day, some of them have spent all their money, or even borrowed money and spent more - wasted it, say - and others have made money, sold things or whatever. Now at the end of theday, they're not equal any more. So what do you do about it? I sat there for longer than I should have done, thinking about this. I mean, ok, what is the answer? I don't know.

But that isn't the point, is it? It seems to me like an evasive sort of argument. Because the real people that charity helps are not poor through their own bad choices. They're poor because they were are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And we're rich because of the opposite. No matter how much we earned the money we have here (and my friend worked hard for what she has, which must make it so much harder to think like this), we really started off already so far ahead of the average, just by being born where we were.

Yes it makes some sense to think about what the outcome scenario is for all this charity. But how can we let it stop us working to get there in the meantime. Maybe all that's needed to say is that the one-day-after-equality-world is a hell of a lot more equal than the world is now. It's taken thousands of years to get here, so shouldn't we start reversing it? Because it's not really about reaching the end. I think that is what Jesus meant when he said, 'the poor you will always have with you.' Maybe we really can change the world eventually. But right now, the poor are with us, and they need our help, and it is right to help them.

Shyness, its History, Culture, and Politics

In a similar vein to my 'project' on irony - which resulted in this piece in the Oxonian Review - I'm starting something new: this time, about shyness. I guess I see it also in the vein of Adam Kotsko's Awkwardness, which I reviewed here. (And so this project is also a meta-project: is it possible to deliberately build an online, blog-based project which will be picked up by Zero Books?)

Shyness is obviously related to awkwardness, but is it the same thing? There's a lot that I don't know about shyness. It feels to me like it's essentially universal, that everyone must have feelings of shyness, even if they don't seem shy to me. But is that right, or are there structures in society and culture, or in the brain, that make it a phenomenon of specific people, times, or places? Have there always been shy people - were there shy cavemen? Is there something about our modern, liberal constructions of identity and society that establish the conditions for shyness - or perhaps something older, to do with our notions of family, love, community, and outsiders?

What does shyness mean now, for the people who 'suffer' from it, and for other people? Is the world deprived of creative, intelligent people who are too shy to put themselves out there? Are shy people actually self-deceiving narcissists who are too vain to countenance their own imperfection? How, when, and why do people become shy? Is shyness a personal trait, or a category of experience, a quality of certain moments or relationships, but not others? What does shyness mean for love, and for understanding between people? What does it mean for happiness, fun, creativity?

For me, it seems like shyness creates a paradoxical relationship towards others. I often feel like I don't like to be with other people; but I also long to give myself up totally to someone. Again, I feel like, surely everyone feels this way? For now, here are some lines of Dostoevsky that touch me, because they remind me of this feeling:

"Oh my dear, my dear, why don't you ever ask me anything?"
"Because you won't tell, that's why I don't ask."
"I shan't tell you. I shan't, I shan't; even if you kill me, I shan't tell you,' she said quickly. 'Burn me, if you like, but I shan't tell you. And however much I've suffered, I shan't tell anything. People will never know!"

- The Possessed

Music

Music uses similar mimetic effects to writing. Unlike painting and sculpture, but like writing (but even more than writing - you can't experience it 'at your own pace'), music is relentlessly temporal, but it expresses the kind of non-linear temporality that we really experience. The same things characterise my experience of music as characterise my experience of life: not only repetition (and no, nothing is completely a repetition, things are always different even when they're the same), but the sliding together and apart of different layers of experience, different registers, different pace, volume, effect. Sometimes change is gradual, sometimes sudden, overlapping, hanging, dropping. (Great rock pauses.) Sometimes it will surprise you in a way that straight away seems obvious, predictable, and perfect. That is the great moment of pleasure in music for me - and, maybe, in life.

Thoughts on The Trip

I know I'm a latecomer on this, but The Trip was really great. I tried to talk about it to my friend, who it turns out has never heard of Steve Coogan or Rob Bryden. It seemed to me that the show relies on some background knowledge about who they are - and obviously there are plenty of references to be got. But I wonder, what if you did watch it without that background. Perhaps it could be done, it would still work, with these characters (now presumed completely fictional) really expressing enough of themselves to make sense, and to be poignant and effective in the same way as it is for normal viewers.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say about The Trip was that it seemed to me to be mainly about acting. There's obviously the level on which it's about real people 'playing themselves', which must be a weird kind of acting but is definitely that (although not quite in the same way as, say, Extras was). Then there's the constant thread of competition between them, which centres on impressions but is really about acting, as a skill, an art. Coogan's mock funeral oration for Bryden may be the key moment, I think; because as much as we know Coogan's being an asshole, and Bryden is the good guy, the funnier and nicer guy throughout, actually what Coogan's saying - the hiding, the masking, the distraction that comedy and acting offer from basic misery - is the foundation of the programme.

Hell is other people, especially a dinner for two, with someone who wasn't your first choice to be there; it seems like they can only escape that hell by being other people, and still others, and others.

My Heart is My Own

13 March    The little indispositions of life are essential to happiness. Uninterrupted felicity never fails to cloy, indeed there is very little pleasure without preceding pain.

25 March    In the evening saw a multitude of pretty faces. But my heart is my own.

2 August    First ate Watermelons.

5 August    Finished reading Dr Blairs Lectures. Excellent Criticism!

12 August    Read a little Law and some poetry. If a man lays up a few ideas every day and arranges them, it is enough.

16 August    Mortified to find my eyes too weak to study. But if I cannot devote my time to books, I can to the Ladies.

16 October    My birthday. 26 years of my life are past. I have lived long enough to be good and of some importance.

25 October    Started the idea of dancing tomorrow.
26 October    Invited the Company, had a brilliant Assembly and an agreeable evening.
27 October    Much fatigued.

- From the diary of Noah Webster, 1784

Crisis of the Patriarchal Imagination

I have previously thought that what my thesis deals with is the impact of Federalism on American political thought and culture as a whole, and therefore on the 'main stream' of American history. I argue that Federalists in the 1780s developed the ideas and techniques that underpin liberal forms of social control in the modern world. This ascribes them an awful lot of influence, and perhaps creates a rather large burden of proof!

Yesterday my transferral of status interview and the fallout from that made me think again about my overall project. In fact, it made me remember some advice from another friend, who told me to make my thesis as narrow and sharply-defined as possible. I was blasé about it before, but I've been thinking about ways to do that; or to put it another way, I've been wondering if my very broad argument as outlined above is really right.

Perhaps it would be more correct to look at the emergence of Federalism as something that happens within a more constricted field of political thought - specifically the 'conservative' side of the revolutionary elite. If we see the revolution (the 'long revolution' if you like, including everything the 1760s) as the culmination of a general challenge to patriarchal thought, I think we can see the development of Federalism in the 1780s as an internal response: an effort to reconstitute patriarchal values in a new framework; a reform movement within elite thought rather than acted out publically. Even the ratification debates can be seen this way, as primarily arguments within and among a broadly-agreeing patriarchal elite.

We need not see Federalism as a coherent, unitary force gradually coming into view in the 1780s. Rather, it was a set of issues and debates about how elite control (order and hierarchy) could best be stabilised and perpetuated in the new republic. It was both a symptom of, and a response to, the revolutionary crisis of patriarchal imagination.

If You Are Reading This Gordon, Call Me

In a May 14 review of Gordon Wood's new (2011) book, James Ceasar writes,

Referring to Isaiah Berlin's famous classification of writers into the categories of the fox (one who knows many things) and the hedgehog (one who fixates on one subject), Mr. Wood describes himself as "a simple hedgehog."

 In my review of his book, Empire of Liberty (2010), published last summer, I wrote,

In Isaiah Berlin’s terms Wood is a hedgehog: he knows one big thing.

Notwithstanding the precision and economy of my language in comparison to Ceasar's, I am led to ask: has Gordon Wood read my review?! (Also, gee, aren't those Americans polite? Since when did we still refer to scholars as "Mr" so-and-so?)

Borders of the Public Sphere

Sitting in a seminar today on borders and non-state actors, one of many seminars with a similar focus over the last year, while Ian Tyrell has been Harmsworth Professor. Of course there's a lot of room for play with 'borders' as a metaphor. I guess it should be noted that 'borders' in the sense of edges of states are also metaphorical too. Borders are hard to define or pin down, which is kind of the point. But what if you're not interested in borders per se: what studying borders (or borderlands) could possibly do is help to delineate the thing inside them. Is that the point of border studies, or totally the opposite of the point? I don't know!

But anyway, my study of Federalism has developed a sort of theoretical framework around the idea of 'borders' of the public sphere. It started with my interest in "coming of age", the border (duh!) between childhood and adulthood, kind of a (or one of the) border(s) between being outside and inside civil society. My work on education is the descendent of that, and I want to combine that with various different angles on Americans entrance into civil society, the public sphere. This is a border that is permeable, movable, and policed, just like other borders.

Next year I want to work on retirement, considered as the process of leaving the public sphere - either temporarily or permanently, or in a variety of ways. What motives and processes are there for retirement, or for preventing retirement? If people take on responsibilities with coming of age, at what point or in what ways can they lay them down again? Do they in fact have a responsibility to quit, some time - so, when?

There's kind of an obvious bridging issue between these two projects, which is inheritance - that's something I want to look closely at too. But in the seminar, talking about the slave-ships and the contested nature of the sea as a gigantic borderland, I remembered (realised?) that there is another, less temporal, border of the public sphere, which is the points where certain groups or people are excluded from it. I think this is a field that has been ploughed many times in different ways (Roget Smith's Civic Ideals comes to mind, and Carol Smith-Rosenberg's This Violent Empire). Nonetheless, I think there may be interesting points to make, linking to the rest of my argument, about Federalist anti-slavery, as well as Federalist ideas about the poor, women, children, Indians, maybe also the insane, the disabled, and so on. If anything, it seems like an important rounding out of the thesis - and, not insignificantly, a criterion for publication and employment in the US history academy...

Rights, Animals, and Vampires

This comes from a conversation about True Blood and the Vampire Rights Amendment. Should vampires have rights, when they're not human? Do rights begin with laws, or do they exist before they are legislated - and if so, where?

It seems obvious enough to me that non-human animals should have rights. Not only human-like animals like vampires, obviously, but also all other complex animals (there is the question of line-drawing, with insects and things like that, but let's leave that aside for now). I also asserted that animals do have rights: the right not to be tortured or cruelly harmed. In other words, it's illegal for people to cause needless suffering to animals. Doesn't that constitute a right, for animals, to freedom from nedless suffering? Or do rights have to be framed as rights?

The US Bill of Rights is a complex example. Take the first clause of the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It's totally not phrased as a right for the people to the free exercise of religion. But it seems to be meant for that effect, and that's how it's generally interpreted; indeed, its presence in the Bill of Rights implies that we're dealing with a right here, despite the phrasing.

The idea of Bills of Rights, and rights law in general, seems to be to defend rights that already exist. But I'm not sure about that either.

The distinction between rights, which are attached the potential victim (i.e. your rights can be infringed), and prohibitions, attached to the potential act of infringement, seems to me a false distinction. We're really dealing with a structure of behaviour, where surely it's the outcome that matters most. So, if the outcome of a law is that I can freely practice my religion, then I have that right. I think you could characterise this position as pragmatist: it's a question of outcomes and structures, not of 'essential' or 'fundamental' truths.

It seems to me the question really worth asking here is not "what rights do we have," but "what laws should we have"?

Writing History

I've never been able to write creatively in my academic work. The essays I write now are an evolved version of what I wrote at school. To be fair, the key moment in the development of my academic writing was that very first tutorial in Roman history, where the tutor (can't remember her name right now) went through my essay and rewrote it with me, making it analytical rather than narrative.

Building on that, the thing I've always absolutely focused on has been putting the argument down. The way I plan an essay is something like, a) know the argument, b) work out all the elements needed to make the argument, and defend it against potential criticisms, and put it in scholarly context, c) arrange all those elements in a line, which ends in the conclusion of the argument.

It doesn't actually seem bad, right? Isn't this what an academic essay should be? But I've started to realise, I think, that there are all sorts of questions and problems relating to this.

It's related to thinking more about writing fiction: the thing there is, fiction shows that sometimes a straightforward argument isn't the best way to get something across. Especially, I suppose, if what you want to do isn't just make a point that you already think you understand, but to ask also ask something, investigate something, recognising that whatever answer you have will be incomplete. That's how fiction treats life; doesn't it apply just as much to history?

And maybe in a more dishonest way, I also think there might be something in using a less confrontational method; an oblique approach. If you put an argument straightforwardly and linearly, there's little for the reader to do but to agree or disagree with all or parts (and it's hard to read something like that and think, "I totally agree" - for one thing, if you want to contribute to a debate, disagreement is the most obvious way). But if you're not obviously doing that, if you appear to be mainly telling a story, or exploring a theme perhaps, then readers can take something else from it, can look at it in a different way - maybe you can have a different kind of conversation.

An Unlikely Project

I frequently have ideas for fun new plans, usually self-improving in some way. I'm currently (a) learning the accordion, and (b) learning French by writing to a pen-pal. I'm also just about to take up rowing (first outing soon). And I'm thinking I should do proper French lessons with the University language school next year, to take advantage of the opportunity, and maybe get to a decent level.

But French is such a standard language to learn. Of course I should learn it, if anything, for that reason: sometimes it seems like you can hardly even call yourself educated if you can't speak it. So many people I know do, and I have the opportunity to go there often, so it's stupid of me not to make the effort to learn. But there's a very different language-learning experience that some of my recent reading has exposed me to: the totally-obscure language, which lets you into a truly different world, and not just that, but makes you part of a much smaller club. Imagine how cool it would be to be one of the relatively few people in the world who could understand a particular language? Imagine what it's like to go to that country and show the people there that you want to take the time to learn it!

On the very slender basis indeed of having enjoyed Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole, and being piqued by the quotation from Laszlo Krasznahorkai's War and War in James Wood's lecture last Thursday, plus a general interest in Eastern Europe born out of factors I can't here discuss, I have decided that Hungarian (that is, Magyar) will be my obscure language.

So, briefly, here is my plan for this adventure. In the next academic year, I will put effort into French, including keeping up this correspondence with some regularity, and hopefully going to the language classes. This will give me a grounding in foreign language acquisition. Learn to crawl before you can walk, and all that. Meanwhile, I will also familiarise myself with Hungarian literature in translation. There's enough to last me a year, alongside all my other reading. I'm planning to start a new blog to record this, maybe.

When I am part way through these things, get in touch with some people who might help - Hungarian translators and expats, the British Council, or the embassy perhaps - to see if they can give me tips on how to learn, or, ideally, an opportunity to live, work, and learn in Hungary itself, for a few months. I have no idea if that's likely to get me anywhere, but it seems worth a try. The aim, really, is just to have an adventure, to experience something new and exciting. It's good to have plans.

Selfish/less

I've written before that shyness is a form of selfishness. Since shyness is sad (I mean, I feel worse when I feel shy), that seems to mean that selfishness leads to sadness.

But how about this. In a selfish mood, I think about how things and people add to my life. What do I get from all the things I do? That's a positive way of thinking, because it seems like everything adds something - or if it doesn't, you can just decide not to do it. And when I'm thinking 'selflessly', i.e. when I'm considering what other people think, or trying to think from their point of view, that's when things start to go wrong, and get sad, because I think "do they like me as much as I like them," or "what do they think of me, or of this thing I did?"

I suppose you could say there's a certain selfishness even in that supposed 'selfless' outlook - it's still directed towards 'I', just from a different perspective. Maybe the positive outlook I'm talking about really is exactly that, an outlook: it lives right inside the 'I', so it's actually directed outwards at everything else. Inside the tent pissing out. But it is still self-centred, sort of solipsistic even.

Maybe the upshot is that selfishness (and selflessness) just aren't good ways to think about the world, especially about relationships with other people. I guess that's something that I should already know (wasn't the dichotomy already deconstructed by the idea that 'pure altruism doesn't exist'?). But I've been used to thinking about things, often, in these kinds of terms. What will my thinking be like if I try to stop? What basis can I use instead to think about relationships and obligations and my happiness?

Could the solution be sort of 'utilitarian' - aim for the increase of the total sum of happiness, including both your own and others', indiscriminately? Trying to work out what makes others happy is so hard. But does that mean we should just fall back on making ourselves happy, and let others fend for themselves? Surely not, although I feel like I've heard that point made, in not so many words, before.

Does the satisfaction of love come from resolving this fundamental difficulty? Knowing what makes somebody else happy, and being able to fulfil that, and making yourself happy in doing so. Sounds like a good set-up. Except, I guess, it never quite works like that - or, not for long, anyway.

Inscrutable Blind Chance

I guess people prefer complaining to praising, and it is easier to criticise than to pick out what's good. Why is that, though?

What I'm especially thinking about is love (or, at least, relationships). What does it mean when your friend is always telling you negative things about his girlfriend? Not even just silly little things, but things that actually seem like kind of major character flaws. I think I have to accept the strange truth that it doesn't mean he doesn't love her. And even if you asked him to tell you, instead, all the wonderful and great things about his girlfriend, and he couldn't do it (or was just really vague, for example), it still doesn't mean he doesn't love her.

That's why you can't ever ask, "What does she have that I don't have?" You know it doesn't work like that. And I guess you don't even really want it to work like that. After all, there's always someone who "has" more than you "have". We need the inscrutable blind chance aspect of love. It is our saving grace. Yeah, it can work against us too, and that is very hard. But maybe we can take some sort of comfort - joy? - from seeing that blind chance working, even right then when it feels like our worst enemy, because we can still hope, then, that it will work in our favour in the end.

Think Happy Thoughts

It's a pretty classic question: is all the best music sad music? I was talking about this today with my friend Mike. Is it because you only [feel like you] need music when you're sad? Or maybe there really is good happy music? The best example Mike could think of was The Smiths' song "Ask". So we listened to that. But I think we both came out agreeing that of course it's not completely happy. Mike summed it up as hopeful, which is right.

How close to "happy" is "hopeful"? I think hope is the most interesting emotion, maybe. Things have to be bad to be hopeful. That is, you can't really be happy: you want something to happen, to change. But you think (but no, you don't think! You hope!) that change will come. So it's something like happiness, hope. You are more likely to smile when you're feeling hopeful, I think. That must be a good sign.

So but what's happiness? We wondered if it was the same as "contentment", but that doesn't seem enough. There's something banal and empty in contentment. Maybe that's just our prejudice. When you feel happy, though, you feel something; contentment seems like you would feel nothing (like nirvana I guess). Is happiness the feeling of achieving what you hoped for - is it just a momentary feeling, an adrenaline buzz that wears off quickly? It does seem like happiness is fleeting. But people talk about a "deeper happiness" - what's that about?

I've decided on a project. For the next 100 days, I will write down one thing that makes me happy. I thought of this when I was about to "tweet" something negative about my insecurity and sadness, and I thought: you know what, maybe the first step to not feeling these things is to not tweet them. Then I nearly tweeted that thought. Then I thought, it's one thing to try to cut out negative thoughts. But surely better to replace them with positive ones. So: this project.

People sometimes deride people for trying to be happy. Maybe they're right in a way - moments of happiness seem to be self-forgetting moments, which defies trying. But in the moments when we are not happy (most of the time), when we have not forgotten ourselves, it must be better to think about our happiness than to think about our sadness, right?

Student Lit Fest '011

Totally made-up speculative sample programme!

Sunday       6pm - Opening party at Blackwells; copies of festival programme distributed
Monday     2pm - Submitting Your Work, a workshop for poetry and short-fiction writers
                  7pm - Twenty-One Poets Under Twenty-One, sponsored by OUPS
Tuesday     5pm - English Faculty Prize-winners, past/present, introduced by the judges
                  8pm - Five Minute Novels, extracts from unpublished works, Albion Beatnik
Wednesday 10am-10pm - interactive exhibition of complete unpublished manuscripts
                  9pm - Mid-way party in the exhibition room
Thursday    2pm- 6pm - Journal/Magazine/Zine-Fair, student publications on show
                  8pm - Future of the Essay, winner of short non-fiction contest; discussion
Friday        7pm - Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, student success-stories talk/read
Saturday    10am - 5pm - Tea, Cake, and Stories, readings and refreshments all day
                  8pm - Closing party, somewhere swanky; after-party, afterwards

The Bliss of Academic Life

   "All hail, unvex'd with care and strife,
The bliss of Academic life;
Where kind repose protracts the span,
While Childhood ripens into man;
Where no hard parent's dreaded rage
Curbs the gay sports of youthful age;
Where no vile fear the Genius awes
With grim severity of laws..."

-  from a speech of Dick Hairbrain, in John Trumbull, The Progress of Dulness, 1773

A First Thought on Goon Squad

Of the whole book I still think it was the first chapter that moved me most. In it, Sasha (the novel's heroine, if it has one) meets and takes home Alex, who's new to New York. He's full of a sort of moral uprightness that Sasha thinks of as quaint; she herself is a guilt-ridden kleptomaniac. Finding herself alone with Alex's trousers while he's running a bath, Sasha goes through his wallet. She finds a small, faded note that says, "I believe in you," and steals it.

That touched me a lot, I think especially because somehow I felt for both the characters at once, in several different kinds of sadness. What is it that leads someone to carry around a note like that? We never learn. How would it feel to one day look inside your wallet for the note, and find it gone? Perhaps he had forgotten all about it, but I don't think so. And then, from Sasha's side, I think I can see why she would want to take - to have - such an item. It's both priceless and meaningless. But just like 'priceless' implies both that it has no value and all the value in the world, so 'meaningless' here means it has no meaning (we don't know its story) and all the meaning in the world (to him, and then, at one remove, to her).

In the last chapter of the book, we meet Alex again, later in life, when Sasha is a memory that niggles somewhere at the back of his mind. He is struggling with himself over his corruptibility: he's taken on a sordid job that he doesn't really believe in. He realises that although his wife sees him as incorruptible, and he once would have thought of himself that way, he no longer is. He doesn't remember the note, but we do. "I believe in you." Without the note, he has forgotten whatever it was he pledged of himself, whatever it was that made him upright and indignant in the first chapter, whatever it was that someone believed in, once.

Henry James on Unrequited Love

At last there was a silence, and it said so much more than either had said that it scarce needed his fial words. "I've written to you several times."
"Written to me? I've never had your letters."
"I never sent them. I burned them up."
"Ah," laughed Isabel, "it was better that you should do that than I!"
"I thought you wouldn't care for them," he went on with a simplicity that touched her. "It seemed to me that after all I had no right to trouble you with letters."
"I should have been very glad to have news of you. You know how I hoped that - that -" But she stopped; there would be such a flatness in the utterance of her thought.
"I know what you're going to say. You hoped we should always be friends." This formula, as Lord Warburton uttered it, was certainly flat enough; but then he was interested in making it appear so.

[...]

They had gradually stopped and they stood a moment face to face. "Poor Lord Warburton!" she said with a compassion intended to be good for both of them.
"Poor Lord Warburton indeed! But I'll be careful."
"You may be unhappy, but you shall not make me so. That I can't allow."
"If I believed I could make you unhappy I think I should try it."  At this she walked in advance and he also proceeded. "I'll never say a word to displease you."
"Very good. If you do, our friendship's at an end."
"Perhaps some day - after a while - you'll give me leave."
"Give you leave to make me unhappy?"
He hesitated. "To tell you again - " But he checked himself. "I'll keep it down. I'll keep it down always."

The Portrait of a Lady, Chapter XXVII

Writers and Fantasies

Writers must have moral obligations. If writing isn't a moral act, then is there even a point? Well, maybe that depends on your idea of morality and aesthetics. I'm currently reading The Portrait of a Lady (from my list!), and I think there's a passage there that can be read as a meta-fictional discussion of the rights and wrongs of writing about rich people. Or, rather, a justification of writing about rich people, which is what James does.

Ralph is convincing his father to leave a large part of his fortune to the heroine, Isabel. Here's what he says:

"I take a great interest in my cousn," he said, "but not the sort of interest you desire. I shall not live many years; but I hope I shall live long enough to see what she does with herself. She's entirely independent of me; I can exercise very little influence upon her life. But I should like to do something for her."
"What should you like to do?"
"I should like to put a little wind in her sails."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I should like to put it into her power to do some of the things she wants. She wants to see the world for instance. I should like to put money in her purse."

Now the point of the novel, at least so far (and to judge from the title), is the creation of this wonderful character, this perfect woman. When we make these people, wouldn't we all like to put some wind in their sails? We might even come to have little influence on our own characters - after all, can you have much influence on your own ideal woman? - but we can at least change the world around them, and see how they act in it.

"I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination. Isabel has a great deal of imagination." [...]
"Well, I don't know," Mr Touchett answered. "I don't think I enter into your spirit. It seems to me immoral."
"Immoral, dear daddy?"
"Well, I don't know that it's right to make everything so easy for a person."
"It surely depends upon the person. When the person's good, your making things easy is all to the credit of virtue. To facilitate the execution of good impulses, what can be a nobler act?"

Inheritance

Inheriting wealth seems politically wrong. It's literally the primary means of perpetuating unearned economic inequality, and inequality of opportunity as well. Surely nobody should be able to inherit money: there should be a 100% inheritance tax. Even if this means people giving their children more money while they're alive, that seems better for society than standard inheritance - and surely it's nicer to be able to enjoy your children's gratitude!

But people still want to say things like, "I earned that money, and I have a right to do what I want with it when I die. I have a right to pass it on to whom I like." Even people who otherwise hate the idea of unearned income (like the dole) say this. But why? Especially when they won't be around to care about it. But I think maybe that's the very reason. Thinking about your financial legacy is a way of thinking about the world after your death, and your continuing impact on that world. It is a weapon in the battle with mortality.

If we accept that when we die, all our wealth should revert to the common stock, perhaps it would feel too much like the truth - that we cease to exist. Perhaps we would find it more difficult to go on earning and accumulating, in the knowledge of that coming darkness. It's not the actual legacy/inheritance per se that matters, but the idea, as accepted by society, that we pass what's left of ourselves on to our heirs. That we have heirs. And therefore, do not really die.

Championship Point

Is there a better phrase in all sports jargon to sum up the collapse of time that happens in the moment before victory is finally won?

Championship: the all, everything, days of matches, not just the series of matches that has led you to this final, but all the matches that were playing simultaneously and which led nowhere for their players, like parallel universes that feature your untimely demise. Championship: your victory, your championship: being champion. Not just for one moment but as if for all time, at least until another such moment brings round your dispossession, at least one year off.

Point: dot, the line reduced to zero dimensions, to nothing. All meaning is consolidated in this moment. Like perspective, it all comes to this point. It is synechdoche: a match is made of many points, a tournament of many matches. But this point, this championship point, technically no different from any other (within the rules it could go on for ever). All hope, expectation, striving, all of human life is here, and all faded away, all nothing to your mind which is fixed on this point, this set of lines, this ball, dot, point. There is no reason why such points could not recur forever, infinite of such infinitesimals.

The sad but strong and true answer

Dear Needs Direction,

I have a lot of letters like yours. Most go on at length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same tiny question at its core: can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is no.

The sad but strong and true answer is the one you already told yourself: this man likes you, but not the way you like him. Which is to say, not enough.
So now you get to decide what you want to do about that. Are you able to be friends—or even occasional lovers—with this man who is less crazy about you than you are about him without feeling:

a)     bad about yourself
b)    resentful of him or
c)     like you’re always aching for more?

If the answer is not yes on all three counts, I suggest you give your friendship a rest, even if it’s just for the time it takes you to get over him. There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.

Yours,
Sugar

Greenwich Village

So I was totally in love with Midge, in Mad Men. It probably helped that I didn't know her name was Midge. Who needs to know people's names? When she returned in the fourth season I was so happy. Then it turned out she's addicted to heroin now. I actually cried.

It's her look (4:38). It's her mixture of freedom and... dependency? Carelessness and, maybe, insecurity. But most importantly the carelessness. She seemed to live. Maybe I just want to be bohemian.

Irony and Identity

There are two aspects of the problem of irony, its existence and prevalence creates two forms of confusion. One is confusion of reception. How do we know whether to experience or interpret things ironically, or to what extent? There are social consequences to this confusion: 'mis'-interpretation causes disconnection, dissonance; it exposes disparities between viewpoints that seem 'fundamental' because they usually go silently assumed, and it also exposes those viewpoints themselves, as held by others and ourselves.

If the confusion of reception creates some conditions for self-questioning in that way (what are my silent assumptions? Do they match those of others?), the second type of confusion is still more self-oriented. This is confusion of intention. We could call it just a type of confusion of reception: i.e. self-reception, our own understanding of ourselves. Irony-saturated culture habituates us to ironic modes of expression. But when we have the irony habit, it sometimes seems hard to know when even we ourselves are being literal.

I find myself saying things, and then being unsure if I meant them ironically or not. So not only am I isolated from others by the potential for confusion of reception, I am isolated from myself as well. I don't know any longer what I really mean, or what I really think, or what I really am. I am now radically uncertain. So where do I go from here?

Snippets

1.

[From a conversation with James Harding.] There are two types of neurotic person. People who walk quickly: they're constantly being held up by slow-walkers, tourists, etc., they can never go as fast as they like, they can never relax or be free. People who walk slowly: they're always being overtaken by fast-walkers, people whose lives seem to have an urgency and meaning that theirs don't, they're anxious about getting in the way. There is nobody who walks 'at an average speed'. Dialectics of neurotic walkers: it takes both types to make each other.

2.

There's pleasure in the gaps between things: making them line up, or closing them, although you never can. The pleasure of sport is about the gap between vision and its accomplishment. To be a good sportsman (I was thinking of tennis: "chess on the run") you have to know what you're trying to do, at tactical and strategic levels: you have to have vision - comprehension, prediction, imagination; but you also have to be able to do it, it's no good saying I want to hit it there if you can't. Some people are better at one than the other, but you have to do both (that's why chess is not a sport). The way I've described it seems Cartesian: mind + body. But it's really the opposite: sport needs the whole of you, the pleasure comes from making yourself whole.

Virtue and Social Control

This morning and early-afternoon I was reading a book that was egregious in many ways. But towards the end it led me to a mini-breakthrough. It's this:

I'm interested in how republicanism and liberalism relate to social control. I think they (especially liberalism) represent an alternative to patriarchalism where invisible, structural control takes the place of overt, active control. The concept of 'virtue' is central to this because it contains an implied structure of (invisible) social control: the virtuous man has 'self-control,' he willingly submits to 'legitimate' authority, sacrifices his 'immediate interests' and so on. The important source of my thought on this has actually been Robin Hanson's discussion of self-discipline.

But my realisation today was that there's a way of linking virtue to social control far more directly, using eighteenth-century thought itself. The Founders (as well as people like Adam Smith and David Hume) were believers in the 'spur of fame' - that men will find it in their 'interest' to do things that will make them look good to others and posterity. "The love of it [i.e. of fame, in this sense] is the love of virtue," said Smith. But acting in this way is really about acting according to social norms and structures (or acting in ways that aren't in your clear and present interest), doing what others expect and value: that's how you achieve 'fame'. Patriotism, self-sacrifice, obedience: virtue is social control.

Singularly Unuseful

Let's combine some recent themes. Here is David Foster Wallace on irony (via):

Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything it debunks. …The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” … Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. [from E Unibus Pluram]

Play Talking

Robin Hanson adds still more to my understanding of irony:

With a little indirection, however, even play talk can communicate on serious important topics. For example, while social rules might forbid directly propositioning others for sex, people often communicate an interest in sex by joking about it in the right way. As long as there are other plausible interpretations of their words and actions, it can be hard for others to accuse them of violating the social rules...

Humans thus developed sophisticated capacities for using play talk to indirectly communicate on serious topics. We became very adept at and fond of playfully talking on two levels at once, especially when the more hidden level talks about or embodies rule violations. We are so fond of this sort of activity and ability, in fact, that we often consider a surplus of it the main reason we like or love someone, and a deficit of it almost a definition of being inhuman. 

But I would add, the saturation and complexity of play talk in our culture is (necessarily) at the edge of our discernment. Sometimes we don't know if other people are play talking or just really talking. Sometimes we don't know if we're play talking.

Something Pathetic About It

When I was a little way into Infinite Jest I was thinking the interesting thing about it was that it didn't seem to be about love at all. And most of the books that I read and like really do seem to be about love. Or at least, I suppose, they have an easy way in for me to make it about love. Like for example, the novel I read before Infinite Jest was Dostoevsky's The Devils. Pretty much about love. You might say madness, or something about the nature of politics and revolution and utopia and hope (like, it's all mad), but for me it was mainly really about love (the maddest thing of all, eh?).

Then I got a bit further through Infinite Jest. In fact I was pretty near the end. I think I might even be able to pinpoint the moment when I had this sort of revelation. When Gateley's lying in hospital after the fracas with the Canadians and he's sort of immobile and thinking, and he's thinking about Joelle and fantasising about their maybe future love. Incidentally there are a few lines there that are appear almost word-for-word at the beginning of The Finkler Question - which makes you think, Gately and Treslove are such different characters, or maybe DFW and Jacobson such different authors, this must be real, here. Let me quote at length (it's all at length) from Infinite Jest:

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple of blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happy still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing midofied for Gately's mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other 'Mother' and 'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possible live without the other, is how bonded they've got through the years.

...Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating the romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful... Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his variou cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there. [pp862-864]*

That passage was really powerful for me when I read it, and I guess I felt a bit ashamed too, I guess I felt like Gately. Shall I do a trite line here? We're all "drug-addicts" really. We just have different drugs. And that's what I take DFW to be saying, one of the things he's saying in the book: life's big, and there are lots of drugs, lots of obsessions, and love's one of them. It's not something more special than that. Because all sorts of drugs are pretty special for different sorts of people. But it's just part of that bigger thing, it's part of this (which line I took to be the motto of the novel):

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. [p900]

That's- I don't know, that's hard for me.


* Here's the line from The Finkler Question:

When a woman of the sort Julian Treslove found beautiful crossed his path it wasn't his body that took the force but his mind. She shattered his calm... He no sooner saw the woman than the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light... only for every wrack of it... to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past. [p3]

And Yet I Speak But Little

New York, January 27th, 1788

My Dear Friend,

Mr Ingraham has furnished me with another conveyance to Boston, and I cannot neglect the opportunity of sending you a memento of the respect I have for your personal worth and the interest I feel in your happiness. Becca, I could speak of a thousand things which I cannot write, and yet I speak but little. I wish to see you every day, and yet I know not whether you would add to my happiness. I sometimes think of retiring from society and devoting myself to reading and contemplation, for I labor incessantly and reap very little fruit from my toils. I suspect I am not formed for society; and I wait only to be convinced that people wish to get rid of my company, and I would instantly leave them for better companions: the reflections of my own mind. Mankind generally form a just estimate of a man's character, and I am willing to think they do so with mine. And if I find that they think less favorable of me than I do myself, I submit to their opinion and consent to a separation.

You will see my the tenor of this letter that I am in the dumps a little and will require the reason. Why, Becca, I have been asked the question so often that it really displeases me. To satisfy such enquiries, it would be necessary to relate the history of my life, which you have heard before, and to enumerate a thousand things which ought to be forgotten.

I suspect that I have elevated my views too high, that I have mistaken my own character and ought to contract my wishes to a smaller compass. I am endeavoring to bring my mind to this state - a melancholy tale indeed! Well, I wish everybody were as good as James Greenleaf and his sister Becca. I should then be a much happier man, but as it is I will not be unhappy. I am as patient as possible, waiting for the sun to disperse the clouds that hang over the mind of your Cordial Friend and Admirer.

Noah Webster

Infinite What?

Top-of-my-head list of unresolved questions in Infinite Jest ranked in order of what seems to matter most to me.

1) What does Joelle really look like? [possibly resolved and I'm just in denial?]

2) How did Marathe [and to a lesser extent Steeply] get down the mountain?

3) What happened to Hal?

4) Did Marathe just give up on finding Joelle or what?

5) Was the Pakistani M.D / Ferocious Francis scene just Gately's hallucination?

6) What about the Whataburger?! And who took Pemulis' DMZ?

7) Wait... what happened at the fundraiser gala match between ETA and Quebec/ALF- the climactic final scene that never happens!

8) What happened to Stice's forehead? How did his bed really get up there?

The Federalist Persuasion 1782-1786

I want to recap and rehash some thoughts about the Federalist persuasion. You know, that thing I'm working on.

1) The transition to liberalism (whether or not "from republicanism") is still the most important and open question in the history of the early republic. Which is really also a question of, what is the nature of liberalism?

2) Intuitively (some sort of intuition that developed slowly, so is that really intuition?) I am saying that the transition to liberalism represented a shift from overt, explicit forms of social control to one of invisible or disguised forms. So not necessarily a shift from less freedom to more.

3) This shift became necessary (in America) when the ideology of revolution (republicanism, radical-Whiggism, whatever) made explicit social control - i.e. by the king - illegitimate and untenable. So it's the post-revolutionary moment when the real action happens: what form will the new, post-explicit-control society take?

4) Federalists were people who respected (and benefited from) social order. That is the meaning of values like "virtue" and especially "responsibility." Which is not to say they didn't sincerely and passionately hold those values. Both Enlightenment and religious impulses support those values.

5) Federalists were revolutionaries. In general they recognised and took part in the rise of 'liberty', i.e. the rejection of explicit, overt authority. However they remained committed to social order, i.e. 'rule' in some sense.

6) The Federalist achievment was therefore to construct a (constitutional) system that appeared to remove authority by granting it to 'the people' (and, perhaps, by locating it primarily in more distant central government*), while instituting new forms of hidden social control through institutions like the 'rule of law' (especially contract law and control of money powers) and election of representatives.

7) This achievement was not primarily a conscious swindling of the people or a counterrevolution, but a sincere attempt to square the circle of rejecting authority while maintaining social order. Federalist leaders felt this as their responsibility as revolutionaries.

8) Many of the disagreements within Federalist ranks were over the level of explicit authority embodied in the forms of American government - i.e. the same disagreements as embodied in the ratification debates. One form of disagreement was over what kind of social order was desired: Federalists differed among themselves here too just as much as they did with Antifederalists.

9) Nonetheless Federalists can be identified and divided from Antifederalists by their feelings of responsibility. Whereas the essence of Antifederalism was to defend the successful rejection of authority in the revolution, the essence of Federalism was to reestablish social order and control on new, legitimate grounds.

10) Federalists' concern with education and the form of Federalist educational proposals, as well as their ideas about retirement and the role of civic leaders, offer evidence for a Federalist understanding of responsibility and a way to characterise the Federalist persuasion as a (diverse) whole.

Stories and Feelings

So I had an 'epiphany' the other day. I wrote it on Twitter. Here:

Walking along Observatory St in the sun, thought I always seem to be moving between feelings. Seems obvious. But felt like 'epiphany'.

Thinking about it more, I think maybe this is something relevant to my writing. To write a novel or a story there has to be movement. I guess even if it's about a lack of movement, a going nowhere, that can presumably only be effective against a background, an expectation of movement. My 'stories' (or whatever) are very short, they seem mainly to express one feeling. Even if they have an implied plot, where other feelings and actions are remembered or foreshadowed (which they often do), that's not really the same as writing the movement of feelings in 'real time.' Somehow doing that seems like the step I need to make, in order to write longer things.

Earnest Nerds and Ironic Humour

Robin Hanson contributes to our ongoing investigation of irony:

So why are nerds, who at least have some strong skills, especially funny?

As I’ve hinted at before, and will elaborate more on later, I think the essence of humor is our sheer joy at playing homo hypocritus well. We just love to see the juxtaposition of two communication levels, an overt and a covert one, especially when this helps “us” take advantage of “them.”

Homo hypocritus pretends to mainly value overtly useful skills, while really greatly valuing covert conniving skills. Nerds tend to be much better at the former than the later, and are often unaware that the later skills exist. So the fact that nerds think well of themselves for their overt skills, but are largely unaware of how poor they are at covert conniving, is just hilarious.

Punchline

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

- Robert Creeley, "I Know a Man"

Only to inflame himself more

Monday, October 24, 1757

This day near Sunset Landon Carter came home.
I, with great mildness, asked him if he did not think that, as he was to go up to Bull Hall tomorrow, he ought to have staid at home to have taken my directions with regard to my affairs. And if he did not think this sauntering about from house to house, only to inflame himself more by visiting a woman that he knew I would never consent to his marrying, would not ruin him, - and was contrary to his duty?
He answered very calmly, No.
Then, Sir, be assured that - although you will shortly be of age - if you do not henceforward leave her, you must leave me.
His answer, Then, Sir, I will leave you.
On which I bid him be gone out of my house.
He took up his hat, and sayd so he would, as soon as he could get his horse; and went off immediately without showing the least concern, no not even to turn round.
This I write down the moment it passed that I might not through want of memory omit so singular an act of great fillial disobedience in a child that I have thought once my greatest happyness - but as a just father kept it concealed.

- the diary of Landon Carter,
quoted in Rhy Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom

On Reading and Aging and Not Reading

Sad snippets from Geoff Dyer:

I’m like Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, "torn, in a futile anguished fashion, between my disinterest in the landscape and my disinterest in the book which could conceivably distract me."

The opportunity cost of reading a given book is always too great. Some books, obviously, are a waste of one’s eyes. To feel this about airport blockbusters is perfectly normal, but I feel it is beneath me to read Jeanette Winterson, for example, or Hanif Kureishi.

This would be fine if I could transpose a reluctance to read James Hawes into a willingness to read Henry James, but I am unable to get beyond the first five paragraphs (i.e., four sentences) of The Golden Bowl.

But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty... now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

Reflecting on the way he had gradually lost interest in fiction, Gerald Early asked if "this is how one, by stages, loses the ability to read or the interest in reading altogether." This in turn, he thought, might be part of a process whereby one loses "slowly but inexorably the ability to feel deeply about anything."

* Or ageing, if you prefer.