The Poverty of Bohemian Life

C’était mon livre, le fils de ma souffrance, qui avait donné signe de vie devant le cercueil du bohème enseveli en grande pompe et glorifié au cimetière, après une vie sans bonheur et une agonie sans sérénité.

À l’œuvre donc ! et vous allez voir ce que j’ai dans le ventre, quand la famine n’y rôde pas, comme une main d’avorteuse qui, de ses ongles noirs, cherche à crever les ovaires !

Moi qui suis sauvé, je vais faire l’histoire de ceux qui ne le sont pas, des gueux qui n’ont pas trouvé leur écuelle.

C’est bien le diable si, avec ce bouquin-là, je ne sème pas la révolte sans qu’il y paraisse, sans que l’on se doute que sous les guenilles que je pendrai, comme à la Morgue, il y a une arme à empoigner, pour ceux qui ont gardé de la rage ou que n’a pas dégradés la misère.

Ils ont imaginé une bohème de lâches, – je vais leur en montrer une de désespérés et de menaçants !

- Jules Vallès, L'Insurgé

L'Insurgé is a workmanlike novel about 1870-1--though it does not perhaps inspire one to run into the street singing "La Commune n'est pas morte!", as a semi-autobiographical novel it does present a welcome first-hand view of the events. The sequel to two other books I haven't read, its only real character is the radical firebrand Jacques Vingtras, who spends the first third of the novel gleefully épate-ing the bourgeois and the rest playing minor roles in the events of the Commune. There's no love interest, no family drama, no archrival: the journalistic diary-style narrative makes it clear that this is a Political Novel pur et dur.

One of the most striking things about L'Insurgé is the absence of any sort of bird's-eye view perspective on this last French revolution. One would expect a dramatic reenactment of the fall of the Vendome column, or at least some sort of tableau of the anarchist, free-love society the Commune had supposedly embodied. But no: one hardly notices when we have passed from bourgeois petty intrigue, to revolutionary petty intrigue, to reactionary petty intrigue. For Vingtras (and perhaps for Vallès as well) the Commune seems to have involved nothing but constant recriminations and the occassional narcissistic grandstand. He talks incessantly of the wishes of the peuple, but they hardly appear except as vague abstractions.

I think the explanation for this tendency lies in the fact that L'Insurgé is something of a link between the nineteenth-century realist novel in the Zola vein and the early twentieth-century bohemian novel--one of the earliest examples of which would be Knut Hamsun's 1890 Hunger (and then followed, varying the template somewhat, by Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and the novels of Céline). The latter genre is almost defined by its unyielding focus on the details of its protagonist's poverty, which is presented as the necessary and fundamental prelude and accompaniment to artistic creation. To the extent that the creative act itself appears in these books, it is only an image, hardly ever a convincing one; politics as such disappear almost entirely. Hence we read the old situationist pamphlet "On the Poverty of Student Life" with a shock of recognition:

[The student's] acute economic poverty condemns him to a paltry form of survival. But, being a complacent creature, he parades his very ordinary indigence as if it were an original lifestyle: self-indulgently, he affects to be a Bohemian. The Bohemian solution is hardly viable at the best of times, and the notion that it could be achieved without a complete and final break with the university milieu is quite ludicrous. But the student Bohemian (and every student likes to pretend that he is a Bohemian at heart) clings to his false and degraded version of individual revolt.

Today, the exhaustion of this particular kind of writing is readily apparent (its popularity may be attributed to the same parochialism that churns out endless professor-protagonists in highbrow English and American fiction). But in 1886, when L'Insurgé appeared, it must have seemed new and fresh. Fifteen years after the failure of the Commune, was it even possible to write an overarching Hugo-esque novel about it? The pettiness of the individual life, its small triumphs dwarfed by the magnitude of the eventual failure, must have seemed to be the only satisfying way to approach the subject.

After many re-readings of "On the Poverty of Student Life," I could no longer take bohemian poverty seriously. After having read Vallès, the whole genre seems like an extended digression upon the first chapters of L'Insurgé. It offers a wholly untempting prospect: having begun in predictable pettiness, the poor bohemian is doomed to experience even the arrival of the long-awaited Great Event as a part of the same dogged rut.

The Airport as Heterotopia

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
- Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces"

Airports are the railroad stations of the twentieth century: they not only serve as intersections for people and things from all over the world, but also, of course, represent all the upward strivings of a civilization tethered to technology. Like railroad stations, they have an inherently ritualistic significance--the prescribed zones for introductions and goodbyes, the carefully non-denominational chapels, the identical bars which serve as the ultimate international neutral zone. An airport is within a country, but simultaneously outside it; who can claim, after a layover at Heathrow, to have visited England?

Hence the airport is almost a canonical heterotopia (though nearly any space can plausibly be proposed in that regard). Its most singular characteristic, though, has nothing to do with the anguish of Arrival or Departure. It is the fact that the airport concentrates within itself all the repressive technologies of our civilization. At the airport, one is expected to willingly surrender any claims to person or property and submit to an examination only nominally bound by applicable law. Nowhere else does the average citizen experience the weight of so much disciplinary apparatus--and yet hardly ever does anyone interrupt the proceedings.

For Foucault, the boat is a line of flight, the possibility of a tactical escape. It is perverse, but not surprising, that the airplane--once, along with the hot-air balloon, a symbol of so many dreams of flight!--has become for us nothing but an encounter with the raw power of repression. The airplane is just a boat that works in three dimensions, but there are no pirates here, no fortunes to be made. A shipwreck, for a Robinson Crusoe or a Gulliver, is the key to the possibility of escape; the emergency landing of a plane (well described, for instance, by Max Frisch in Homo Faber) provides no such solution. At the moment when our civilization achieves its greatest degree of physical freedom, we face the limits of that freedom more acutely than ever before.

We have squandered all the topoi of escape left to us by our ancestors. The hermit's cave is as distant as the pirate ship; even the Unabomber's cabin did not protect him from capture. Not even the church is a sanctuary. Is Foucault right, then, that a civilization without the boat or its analogues is doomed to an eternal spiral of repression? Only in a certain sense. In Marx, the decline of independent shopkeepers is as much a structural consequence of capitalism's development as it is a herald of its self-destruction. It is the same here. For us, the loss of the boat is only a symptom of the advancement of repression--but it may presage the bloody self-destruction of a civilization without an escape valve. Ought one to hope?

Dead Cities

Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down,
Threatening with deluge this devoted town.
To shops in crowds the daggled females fly,
Pretend to cheapen Goods, but nothing buy.
The Templar spruce, while every spout's a-broach,
Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach.
The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides,
While streams run down her oiled umbrella's sides.
Here various kinds by various fortunes led,
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed.
Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs,
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits,
While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits;
And ever and anon with frightful din
The leather sounds, he trembles from within.
So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed,
Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed,
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do,
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through.)
Laocoon struck the outside with his spear,
And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear.
- Jonathan Swift, "Description of a City Shower"

I use Swift's poem--though it describes London rather than Paris--because as far as I can remember there hasn't been a single three-day stretch during the past four months when it hasn't rained. Not the kind that stirs dull roots, either: it starts and stops, ruining walks and making days-old garbage putrefy in the street. Thankfully, though, the hostility of the outside environment has afforded me plenty of time to sit around and think. And what I've thought about most often has been the fact that Paris, far from being a nest of bohemians and scruffy radicals of various sorts, is much more a city of clean-shaven ex-radicals and economically successful former bohemians.

Now, it's true that I don't know any members of the species of Frenchmen that is traditionally supposed to smoke effeminately long cigarettes and write bad poetry. But outside looking in, I haven't observed anything radical, any outward hint of interesting or original underground culture. The art galleries are full of institutionalized postmodernism, the protests are as predictable as they are impotent, and the music is mostly the same inoffensive stuff you hear anywhere else except leavened with a dose of half-hearted imitation of Brassens. As far as I'm concerned, the ideal of Paris as the ultimate object of desire for every aspiring intellectual is more or less dead.

New York, of course, is the same way. The loose band I've cast my lot with in Brooklyn is composed of New York Poets or Brooklyn Writers only in the most abstract sense of the term--we have almost nothing in common with the dreary Jonathan Safran Foers who've become the public face of our fair borough, and besides, our membership is usually dispersed throughout the Northeast. I'm a bit more familiar with the bohemia of contemporary New York than with that of Paris, and it's safe to say that said bohemia has not benefited one iota from the rich history and unique heritage of underground City culture. (Were it a conscious rejection, that would be more tolerable, but it's not even that.) It seems not only that Paris and New York and St. Petersburg are dead, but that the entire model of spatialized, personal, local underground intellectual production--which has shaped the Grub Streets and Greenwich Villages of the world--is in the process of disappearing.

Replacing this traditional image is, unsurprisingly, the Internet. It presents, perhaps more than at any time since the eighteenth century, a self-consciously weblike and interconnected network of intellectuals divorced, ideally, from excessive attachments to nation and soil. (This is not to say that it is totally successful in this regard, nor that it doesn't breed a new provincialism akin to that of the self-proclaimed cosmopolite in the O. Henry story.) It makes the sharing of texts easier than ever before, and it allows any newcomer a soapbox (such as this one). But naturally, if you're already reading this, you don't need any more convincing.

What does concern me is that, with the loss of local intellectual communities nourished at the breast of a Paris or a Berlin, we also lose a crucial sense of the space and place of our work. New York, to be sure, has informed my thinking and writing. For someone like Henry Adams, on the other hand, a city was more than just a source of inspiration: it provided an entire intellectual universe, a mass of raw ideas as well as a hermeneutic to apply to them. (Quincy, Boston, London--each, for Adams, stood for an entirely different problematic.) This is not a phenomenon that can really be experienced alone. A city is characterized as much by its milieu, by its "scene," as by its surroundings--and our scenes are becoming irrelevant.

The history of ideas, considered from a bird's eye global point of view, has often been driven by the productive encounters between different cities. It is enough to think of the movement of Dadaism from Zurich to Paris and Berlin. These transformative meetings are the unintended byproduct of the fact that communication between milieus is not seamless, not informationally pure, because it always has to experience various kinds of translation. In that sense, the Internet poses a serious threat--not simply the attendant atrophy of our native abilities, as Conrad once suggested, but the smoothening out of all the barriers that once powered the engines of culture. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but then it's always easier to warn about the coming dark age than it is to prevent it.

Lines of Flight

Le dimanche soir! On ne met pas la table, on ne fait pas un vrai dîner. Chacun va tour à tour piocher au hasard de la cuisine un casse-croûte encore endimanche -- très bon le poulet froid dans un sandwich à la moutarde, très bon le petit verre de bordeaux bu sur le pouce, pour finir la bouteille. Les amis sont partis sur le coup de six heures. Il reste une longue lisière. On fait couler un bain. Un vrai bain de dimanche soir, avec beaucoup de mousse bleue, beaucoup de temps pour se laisser flotter entre deux riens ouatés, brumeux. Le miroir de la salle de bains devient opaque, et les pensées se ramollissent. Surtout ne pas panser à la semaine qui s'achève, encore moins à celle qui va commencer. Se laisser fasciner par ces petites vagues au bout des doigts fripés par la mouillure chaude. Et puis, quand tout est vide, s'extirper enfin. Prendre un bouquin ? Oui, tout à l'heure. À présent, une émission télévisée fera l'affaire. La plus idiote conviendra. Ah -- regarder pour regarder, sans alibi, sans désir, sans excuse ! C'est comme l'eau du bain : une hébétude qui vous engourdit d'un bien-être palpable. On se croit tout confortable jusqu'à la nuit, en pantoufles dans sa tête. Et c'est là qu'elle vient, la petite mélancolie. Le téléviseur peu à peu devient insupportable, et on l'éteint. On se retrouve ailleurs, parfois jusqu'à l'enfance, avec de vagues souvenirs de promenades à pas comptés, sur fond d'inquiétudes scolaires et d'amours inventées. On se sent traversé. C'est fort comme une pluie d'été, ce petit vague à l'âme qui s'invite, ce petit mal et bien qui revient, familier -- c'est le dimanche soir. Tous les dimanches soir sont là, dans cette fausse bulle ou rien n'est arrêté. Dans l'eau du bain les photos se révèlent.

- Philippe Delerm, La première gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules

I cannot bring myself to finish Delerm's book. Not because it's bad, or too long, or too difficult; at a measly 93 pages of clear and elegant French, it's none of these things. No--I can't finish it because I like it too much. Each chapter is in itself a minuscule pleasure, a chocolate from a box that never disappoints. I must admit I feel this way about few other books, maybe just the short story collections of Borges and of Robert Sheckley (these, though, I have been unable to resist).

My attitude is more surprising to me than it would seem at first. Delerm is heir to the French tradition of transmuting daily life and memory into the prima materia of philosophy, a fief that has been passed down through Bachelard and Proust and Rousseau and Montaigne. At its worst, this manner of thinking is self-indulgent, useless, arrogant--and Delerm has all the makings of a squanderer of the inheritance. How could I possibly relate to the little habits and neuroses that make up the life of some middle-aged French bobo? How dare he use the "on" instead of the "je"--to imply that his experiences, his gulps of beer and his Sunday evenings, could speak from a position of universality?

And yet he dares, and I relate. He manages to strike just the right chord. With his "on," he does something Proust himself would not do: convince us that although our human experience is infinitely deeper, more complex, and more subjective than the frigid empiricists admit, we nonetheless all have access to some common stratum of it, impermeable by science but readily, even viscerally, comprehensible. For all Proust's "on"-filled divagations, I never quite lose my suspicions about the universality of Marcel's claims--he is, after all, so feeble and human a narrator. Delerm abolishes the narrator and, with it, the suspicion. I can nod along to his stories about sipping port or shelling peas, though I've never felt these things like he does, because I can sense that he is inviting me to find my own entry point to that level of common experience--of pleasure, yes, but also of memory, and of desire, and of those pangs of almost-pleasant loneliness that accompany any such Sunday evening.

Maybe I shouldn't have named desire. For Delerm's is a work that resists the fish-wish imprecations of the latter-day Freudians, for whom desire is both totem and taboo (for Deleuze, perhaps, the former, for Lacan the latter). Desire, in this book, appears only as a distant memory, or an unrealized promise. Delerm seems to reject the ethics and politics of passionate encounter, of sexuality itself. His world is suffused with the comfortable feeling of favorite cats, freshly baked bread, having just a little extra money to spend. It evokes, not the innocence of childhood, but rather its independence from the dreary and predictable carnality of adulthood.

I find, by temperament, more in common with this than with Marcel's romantic self-flagellations. I'd wager that for someone with more zest Delerm's little enjoyments appear rather pathetic. But there's something to the book, nonetheless: in relation to the melange of romanticism and sentiment that's dominated Western fiction from the second half of the eighteenth century onward (with a few shining counterexamples), its muted passions and low stakes mark it as a true "minor literature."

On Reading

Les droits imprescriptibles du lecteur.

1. Le droit de ne pas lire.
2. Le droit de sauter des pages.
3. Le droit de ne pas finir un livre.
4. Le droit de relire.
5. Le droit de lire n'importe quoi.
6. Le droit au bovarysme (maladie textuellement transmissible).
7. Le droit de lire n'importe où.
8. Le droit de grappiller.
9. Le droit de lire à haute voix.
10. Le droit de nous taire.
- Daniel Pennac, Comme un roman

The novelist Daniel Pennac has been a crusader for education reform for years; Comme un roman is his attempt at rescuing reading from the clutches of boring and oppressive curricular requirements. To that end, he presents this (now fairly well-known) reader's bill of rights. If reading could lose all its connotations of mindless drudgery, he reasons, then the feckless adolescents of the contemporary era could turn to books rather than video games and other such mind-rot.

But he's not entirely successful, at least as far as I'm concerned--though it is true that I might not be his target audience. Even if I let this avuncular (not to mention extravagantly well-read) persona guide me into a more lax attitude towards reading, I still feel ashamed for skipping pages, for skimming, for reading trash. Like Conrad, I usually consider reading a chore, and would almost always prefer a nap. This has its advantages: when I do finally get through a book without skipping or skimming, whether it takes me an hour or four months (as happened with Being and Nothingness, one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life), I am rewarded with the warm afterglow of self-overcoming. A species of masochism as impoverished as it is meaningless.

Is it just this ersatz asceticism that makes me skeptical about Pennac's bill of rights? I think there's more to it than that. Books, it seems, have to impose an austerity regime that's totally alien to a living experience of the world--they arbitrarily restrict the Bergsonian play of time and duration, they create their own rules. Consider the various postmodernist puzzleboxes of the Serbian author Milorad Pavic. As a kind of Barthesian suicide, he exhorts his readers to read diagonally, to begin at a random point, to rearrange chapters and construct their own narratives. But it doesn't work. Most people read Dictionary of the Khazars missionary-style, from beginning to end; the ones that don't find a text not all that different from the rest. The book resists any attempt, however playful, to subvert its inherent totalitarian logic.

I would suggest, then, that the proper regard one should have for a book should take into account the fact that it's a strangely authoritarian object. It was likely not written in a spirit of playfulness or laxity, and if it was,it needs to be carefully approached before it reveals that fact. (The books I read tend either to be somber and serious or hysterical and melodramatic.) How can one properly enter into its spirit without partaking of its puritanical worldview? Pennac waxes lyrical about Proust; what kind of Recherche have you got, finally, if you've skipped pages and skimmed, reread, left it unfinished?

I agree with Conrad. Reading is, and ought to be, much more a discipline than a leisure activity, much more an apprenticeship than a hobby. And a victory over a book unenjoyed is a victory nonetheless--maybe an even sweeter one.

Democracy or Demography?

Lived reality is spectacularly fragmented and labeled in biological, sociological or other categories which, while being related to the communicable, never communicate anything but facts emptied of their authentically lived content. It is in this sense that hierarchical power, imprisoning everyone in the objective mechanism of private appropriation ... is also a dictatorship over subjectivity. It is as a dictator over subjectivity that it strives, with limited success, to force each individual subjectivity to become objectified, that is, to become an object it can manipulate ...

Within a fragment set up as a totality, each further fragment is itself totalitarian. Individualism treated sensitivity, desire, will, intelligence, good taste, the subconscious and all the categories of the ego as absolutes. Today sociology is enriching the categories of psychology, but the introduction of variety into the roles merely accentuates the monotony of the identification reflex. The freedom of the “survivor” will be to assume the abstract constituent to which he has “chosen” to reduce himself. Once any real fulfillment has been put out of the picture, all that remains is a psycho-sociological dramaturgy in which interiority functions as a safety valve to drain off the effects one has worn for the daily exhibition.

- Raoul Vaneigem, Basic Banalities

I am embarrassed to admit that I have been obsessively following the Democratic primary race this year. I imagine that this is what it's like to be a sports fan: complete absorption in media minutiae, elation with each new win, futile anger at each loss. Every new supposedly decisive twist and turn generates reverberations throughout the blogosphere, each of which must be assiduously read, followed, debated, for reasons no better than some kind of completionism or desire for some new bit of information. Does the mythical Michelle Obama video exist? Did Hillary really hint at assassination? What will the white women do when she loses?

Of course, as a 21-year-old with intellectual pretensions, I inevitably support Obama. And there's the rub. Hillary's comments about hard-working white people point to a deeper truth about this campaign: it is driven almost entirely by geography and demography, not issues, money, or events. That clashes with what I take to be my infallible subjective perceptions of the candidates--that Obama is son and heir to Saul Alinsky, rhetorically brilliant and strategically smart, while Hillary is represents the nauseating entitlement of the '90s. Do I believe these things because I possess some kind of privileged insight? Or just because that's what demography says I should believe?

The foundations of democracy rest on two pillars: the possibility of rational public deliberation and the abstraction known as "the people." Though "the people" is assembled from individuals, it is in principle indivisible, which means that within its ranks each stands as an equal microcosm of public reason (as Kant imagined). This vision is wholly false and corrupt, whether as ideal or as statement of fact. But it is not as false and corrupt as a democracy of the sociologists, by the sociologists, for the sociologists, in which the body politic is fragmented into competing swinish multitudes. If the appeal of the levelling spirit of Jefferson, Rousseau, or Andrew Jackson lay in their ability to forge a singular people from an amalgamation of structured hierarchies, how much of that remains when universal suffrage becomes a parliament of demographic blocs?

To be clear, this development cannot be blamed on the media or the candidates. It is just the logical conclusion of the alliance between the governing apparatus of democracy and the social apparatus of technocracy, which has been steadily perfected since before World War II. Participation in politics, which the democratic myth presents as an act of individual self-realization, has very rarely been more than the response of inert chunks of voting matter to the stimuli of technocratic manipulation. Today, this has become explicit--and because there are no longer serious alternatives to democracy, it generates as little shame and self-questioning as astonishment.

Obama, at least, pays proper lip-service to the abstraction of a united people. Still, as a skillful and pragmatic politician, he relies as heavily on demography as anyone else. To win the election, he knows he must become head sociologist.