Digressions&Impressions

Caught between Being and Un-Being: The Secret Service, Political Legitimacy, and the Relative A Priori

We're a bit like the third-person narrator of a novel....He's the one who decides what will what will happen and the one who does the telling, but he can't be challenged or interrogating. Unlike a first-person narrator, he has no name and he's not a character, therefore we believe and trust him; we don't know why he knows what he knows and why he omits what he omits and keeps silent about what he keeps silent about and why it is that he can determine the fate of all his creatures, without once being called into question. It's clear that he both exists and doesn't exists, or that he exists but, at the same time, cannot be found, He's even undetectable. I'm speaking about the narrator, mind, not the author, who is stuck at home and is not responsible for anything his narrator says; even he can't explain why the narrator knows as much as he does. In other words, the omniscient third-person narrator is an accepted convention, and the average reader of novels doesn't usually stop to ask why the narrator takes the floor and doesn't relinquish it for hundreds of pages, droning on in that invisible man's voice, that autonomous external voice that comes from nowhere...Well, we're something similar, an accepted convention, just as one accepts and doesn't object to chance, as one accepts and doesn't dispute accidents or coincidences, illnesses, catastrophes, events fortunate and unfortunate. We can stop a disaster from happening, but rather as a sudden change in the wind direction can save a boat, or a fog can conceal the pursued from their pursuers, or a snowfall can erase the footprints of the former, disorienting the latter and their dogs, or as a black night can stop someone in their tracks and black their view. Or just as the sea parted to make way for the Israelites, then closed again on Pharaoh's army following behind them in order to destroy them. That's what we are, and we really don't represent anyone. Javier Marías Berta Isla (2018) translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2018), p. 119

Regular readers of Marías know (recall) that he has a perhaps excessive fondness for self-referentiality and intertextuality which used to be called postmodern. The settings are often Oxford and Madrid. He also often presents narrations in which spies and secrets play significant role. The passage is quoting a spy-recruiter/handler in the midst of the act of initial recruitment, if not entrapment; the quoted passage is expressed in a pub, The Eagle and Child, in Oxford. The listener (Nevinson) is a Madrid born student at Oxford.  So the quoted passage can be used as a key to interpret the novel, which -- I note -- shifts between different third and first person narrators.

Here I am interested in going in the other direction, and use it to reflect a bit on the nature of spies in liberal democracy. To be sure, the quoted passage makes no such restriction, and you, my dear reader, need not do so either if you so wish. Okay, with that out of the way, let's do some stage-setting. First, I take it that in the passage, "average reader of novels" stand in for the public in a democracy. Not any citizen (or non-citizen) -- because not everybody reads novels --, but those that read the papers, sign petitions, and may even call representatives from time to time.

Second, I take it that the author stands for the government. The government is often taken to be the author of the actions of spy agencies, but the whole point of having spies is to allow the government to deny, plausibly, responsibility for actions she does not want to be held accountable for. And, in fact, governments are, themselves, often, as we have been reminded during the last few years, on a need-to-know basis lest they accidentally or deliberately reveal state secrets (or valuable assets) or are infiltrated by other countries' spies. And, third, spooks are taken to be like third-person narrators. 

Now, the first crucial point to make is that the actions of spies are somehow authorized by the government, but that in so doing they do not represent the government. The functionality of this to government and spooks is pretty obvious so I won't belabor that. But in virtue of being nameless and characterless, the spy simply cannot play the metaphysical, moral, legal, and political role(s) of being a (institutional) person that can held be held accountable or represent. Without a name, there is no object or person to play such roles. 

There is not nothing, of course, because spies do produce (inter alia) intelligence. Strikingly, their epistemic authority does not rely on the methods or causal story that produces their utterances. All of that is black-boxed in the way that miraculous,  learning algorithms spit out stuff. (If you look inside the box all you see is a string of computer code.)* This is also the conceit of the novel, where the life of the spy is left mostly invisible and recounted strictly in terms of the effects on his family and love life. Neither his actions nor his inner life are disclosed.

This is, of course, profoundly unsettling for democratic legitimacy and accountable because it suggests that true, as opposed to ritual, oversight and accountability of intelligence agencies is not really possible (unless one has one's own spies, and then infinite regress looms). For, in a non-trivial sense there is no there, there. I think something similar is happening with oversight of central banks where what they do, and how they do it, and when they do it, has become illegible to parliaments and governments. All that's being tracked are effects, many of which not at all attributable to anything--these days even central bankers (who have a name and are held accountable in some sense, but who are primarily authorized to do stuff), admit they are clueless about the so-called transmission mechanisms (here's the ECB:  "The transmission mechanism is characterised by long, variable and uncertain time lags." Take a look at the accompanying chart.) Spies leave traces, but one can't tell if they are dummies or not.

This much is familiar enough. But, the sting in the passage is not the assumed paraconsistent ontology ("he both exists and doesn't exists"),** but the thought that the shapeless (viz., spies) is constitutive of political life and so while changeable (particular "conventions" are not eternal after all), indispensable to states in the way that any novel to count as a novel must have an implied narrator. 

As an aside, the mechanisms of such kind of constitutive devices are central to the aesthetics, and political theory, pursued by Stanley Cavell and his school. So, I don't mean to suggest the claim is novel to Marías. I also think there is an interesting question whether what is claimed in the quoted passage is really true of novels. It's not impossible that by now there is an avant-garde version of the novel that has dispensed entirely with the shapeless narrator (even as a mechanism to be denied or refuted or mocked), but that has not shaken our stereotype of the nature of the novel.

One may wonder why spy agencies are not a dispensable convention. Perhaps, it is mere self-interest or a useful consoling-to-spies-professional myth that they are indispensable the way numbers are to science? For, one may be tempted, if one has any liberal faith left, to think their existence is a by-product of the global order, which, while not perhaps a Hobbesian state of nature, is full of potential and real enemies. So, if this were right, sleuths are not intrinsic to states, but just a contingent fact of the absence of world-government or federation.

But if we stipulate a benevolent Kantian world federation on liberal principles with no enemies, it is still likely that spying follow naturally. For, the possibility, real or imagined, of anti/non liberal enemies of the state cannot be ruled out. Democratic theorists do often rule out illiberal citizenry by fiat, but we are not interested in them here. And such enemies, even if we stipulate that they are a minority, need not play by liberal rules. So, for the state to be possible over time it, it must have ways to protect itself against enemies who cannot be bought off and are, in principle, not persuadable. 

That is, while the category of the (domestic) enemy of the state lends itself to great abuse, to not acknowledge its possibility, is to put the state at great peril with no chance to correct. Once one has had that thought, a secret reserve/force becomes a live thought. The justification of having unaccountable, unrepresentative forces is to destroy enemies of the people (cf. Pharaoh, Israelites, etc.) Of course, in reality that may be worse than the problem it is purportedly solving. And if one is small, poor, and insignificant enough, one may well decide, reasonably, that one must make do without uncontrolled, invisible forces. 

That is to say, a state without enemies has no need for secret agents. But such a state would then deny the founding myths that secure its legitimacy. 

 

Spinozism, Venice-style

To say that Venice is an interior is a possible summation of everything I have said so far. It means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside itself and this same self-sufficiency is what creates that 'endless imaginary fragmentation': the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.--Javiar Marías Venice, An Interior, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa p. 49.

To be self-sufficient, without (external) need, and a source of endless imaginary fragmentation is to be a Spinozistic substance.  This Spinozism is marked by a few familiar tropes: the absence of chance (49), and the co-existence of homogeneity (31; 41) and fragmentation (42).  (I am not the first to note the Spinozistic resonances; see here.) The reader is prepared for such Spinozism a bit earlier in the text:

I have always had the sense that the threat of catastrophe, of irremediable calamity or total annihilation, was less a genuine fear among its inhabitants and more of a necessity. This deliberate feeling of dread -- artificially created, in my view -- immediately infects visitors too, probably even the most ephemeral ones, who have only to set foot on a bridge to feel that this could well be the city's final day.

Venice is the most protected and studied city in the world, the most closely monitored and watched. The universal desire is not only to preserve it, but to preserve it exactly as it is now. We know that it cannot cease to exist, that it cannot be lost. The terrible certainty that something we can actually see will always be there and will always remain the same, without the admixture of unease and uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises and communities, without the possibility of a new life or of an unprecedented rebirth, of growth or expansion, without the possibility, in short, of any surprise or change, means that the Venetians see life from the 'viewpoint of eternity'*...The viewpoint of eternity! The words froze my blood, while we were having supper together: I was eating sole, and he salmon. Can there be a more frightening, unbearable, less human point of view? (26-27)

Marías wouldn't be Marías if he didn't inject -- cf. knowing echoes to Aristophanes's hiccup -- some comic dissonance (sole vs he salmon) while engaging in the hyperborean flights of metaphysics.

What to make of all of this? Is Venice, An Interior more than the expression of a weird, kind of artistic, competitive emulation with Thomas Mann? [One may say that Mann:::Plato's Phaedrus :: Marías :: Spinoza's Ethics.] Mann's Death is explicitly mentioned, in a comically dismissive aside (12), about the inferiority of the beach at the Hotel des Bains to the beach at Hotel Excelsior (on The Lido).

As an autobiographical aside, the only time I was on the Lido, I stayed at the Excelsior with my dad. I do not recall the beach especially well. But I was rather sick -- I only recovered once we made it to the opera in Verona -- and shunned the sun. (I started wearing sun-glasses at a later date.) My most vivid memory of the Lido was being offered huge bowls of chamomile tea by the immaculately dressed, Excelsior's staff. Since then, whenever I smell chamomile, I remember these huge bowls.

I do not want to deny that Venice, An Interior is primarily a shameless attempt by a publisher to cash in on Marías's sudden commercial success in the English speaking world. (It's short and per word probably hugely overpriced.) Others have suggested that Venice, An Interior is a kind of extended metaphor for the writing life (creativity, imaginary fragmentation, etc.). I wouldn't deny it. But  this understates the story's ambition; Venice is treated as a metaphor for our age with its many threats of man-made catastrophes (produced by terrorists, ecological disaster, or bankers who rely on models of randomness that fail to grasp all genuine possibility, etc.). To say that the threat is manufactured, it does not follow it is not real. (I honestly believe it is possible that Donald Trump will accidentally blunder us into WWIII.)

And Marías puts his finger on the oddity of our hyper-connected times in which we all seem to get infected with a certain, pervasive dread; this dread entails that we have more confidence in the unfolding  of necessity than the more familiar, uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises. That is, we are all weak-willed Spinozists now, without the love of fate.

 

On Casuistry and Aesthetic Experience in the post-classical novel.

The moment to propose an open marriage was before the wedding, not thirty-five years later.--I. McEwan, The Children Act, 6.

This court is a court of law, not of morals, and our task has been to find, and our duty is then to apply, the relevant principles of law to the situation before us--a situation which is unique." The Children Act, (26).

In commenting on Stoner, I noted, inspired by some reflections by Adam Smith, that the classical age of the novel (exemplified by the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, etc.) ends with the alteration of the laws and norms governing marriage (in particular the ease of divorce) and which, thereby, alter the character of (bourgeois) love.* It does not follow, of course, that in our post-classical age, (marital) love plays no further role in the novel (witness the popularity of Stoner). But the novel cannot be wholly animated by it without (say) a touch of knowing comedy. We might say, then, that Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, is a taut homage to the classical age of the past.

Luckily for the contemporary novelist, even with no-fault divorce, moral dilemmas (and crimes) abound. Where the philosopher designs stylized, thought experiments in which we abstract away from nearly every lived detail in order to isolate a single moral variable (say, to test intuitions, or to explore the consequences of a principle, or to engage in casuistry, etc.), the artificial world of the novel can explore dilemmas in richer psychological, social, and political (etc.) detail (recall this post on Javier Marías The Infatuations); a skilled (post-classical!) novelist can maintain our interest as much in fine-grained scrutiny of the phenomenology of individual decisions as in (say) the nature of complicity in systemic injustice (exemplars are: Sophie's Choice; Elizabeth Costello, On Beauty, The Triple Mirror of the Self, etc.). While the rigorous thought experiment uses precision to banish uncertainty and ambiguity, the novel is no less precise in deploying uncertainty and ambiguity to enrich our moral possibilities (not to mention entertain and distract) by way of exploration of unique cases that are simultaneously, in one sense, also exemplary; as McEwan slyly notes (cf. 27 & 89) the novel shares this latter feature with the law, especially in circumstances that allow the application of the "doctrine of necessity" [or a Benjaminian "state of emergency" [recall]]. (In case you missed it McEwan reminds the reader of the role of "blind luck" (30) in shaping the preconditions for the practice of virtue.)

So much for taxonomy.

Without doubt McEwan is one of the most high profile post-classical novelists (e.g., Atonement, Amsterdam, Saturday, etc.) of recent years. The Children Act revolves around Fiona Maye, a celebrated, child-less family court judge, who we encounter in the middle of her first marital crisis to her "professor of ancient history" (who, fancies an affair with a statistician, Melanie). [I was relieved to learn it was not one of his students.] The scene is interrupted by an urgent call; she is confronted with an emergency case involving a family of Jehova Witnesses that refuses a potentially life-saving blood transfusion to a cancer patient (the seventeen year old boy, Adam). The unfolding moral circumstances of the case, and the Judge's relationship with Adam, sustains the reader's interest through the rest of the novel.

For, while Judge Maye claims in one of her opinions that having "at the centre of one's life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love" (15) as one the key "ingredients" of "welfare," her self-understanding suggests that in her private affairs, she is primarily focused on the "conventionally correct." (5) In fact, McEwan's focus is not really on dissecting late marital love; even the Judge sees the "stupidity and dishonesty of the exchange" (24) with her once "bohemian academic" (18)--this is not a classical novel. For, Maye is less worried about the loss of marital love than to become the "object of general pity...a form of social death" (57). We inhabit a world in which work, status, and the social role(s) of sympathy are taken more seriously than love.

As an aside, that the Judge is introduced as thinking that she has a "firm grip"  (5) on the conventionally correct, unsubtly forewarns experienced readers that the Judge will transgress at least one such convention. With a further nod to a "Shakespearean touch" -- Nor custom stale her infinite variety (17)--, we are left to ask if the Judge will share Cleopatra's tragic fate or if she will be more like the haunted Enobarbus. [I won't spoil the fun.]

Either way, McEwan reveals that memorizing the "speech of Enobarbus by heart" is not a recipe for practical wisdom as the Judge, an accomplished amateur musician, deals with intimacy, and the lack thereof, in marriage or, as the novel unfolds, in relating to the needs and desires of the people she judges and whose fates she helps shape. The inability of literature to offer moral education to those not quite prepared to receive it, it is by now a familiar trope in literature (although I know respectable philosophers that resist this position).

Indeed for all her exposure to, even immersion in the arts, Judge Maye's "self-pity" (43), even if recognized by her, is not an attractive spectacle. McEwan portrays her as more attractive and interesting as a Judge than as a wife. She becomes, in fact, more fully alive in her visit to Adam's hospital room, where in a scene of exquisite delicacy she sings (Britten's version of) 'Down by the Salley Gardens' while the precocious Adam accompanies her on the violin. The scene is comic and absurd, but McEwan pulls it off with panache and conveys the suggestion of unexpected intimacy between the young, dying Adam and the Judge.

But the novel falls apart on the final pages, and it is signaled by a bit of bad writing that, not coincidentally, involves another performance:

Her own playing looked after itself. As her fingers touched the keys [of the piano], she heard herself as though she were sitting at the back of the audience, as if all that was required of her was to be present. Together, she and Mark entered the horizonless hyperspace of music-making, beyond time and purpose. She was only faintly aware that something waited for her return, for it lay far below her, an alien speck on a familiar landscape. Perhaps it wasn't there, perhaps it wasn't true. (198-9)

The problem here not is the thought that is being conveyed -- experiencing the escapism of self and situation during/of (joint) performance, while registering a faint apprehension --, but rather the manner; I hope a reader can correct me, but nothing in the novel prepares us for that horizonless hyperspace. Neither Judge Maye (who is, perhaps, a bit enervated by some alcohol) nor the implicit narrator has expressed any interest in mathematics (or Star Trek, or the internet) and its connection to art, music, or aesthetics.

That's to say,  McEwan's inability to find the right words for conveying the what it's like of performance tells us something about the limitations of his aesthetics. Like the contemporary philosopher, the post-classical novelist is excellent at, and right at home with, casuistry (read the book, which lends itself to class room teaching), but words fail him when he has to describe the phenomenology of aesthetic experience.

 

On Marías and The Suspicion of Language

Anything is possible. (333)

I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though have  mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything  tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one. Anyone can relate an anecdote about something that happened, and the simple fact of saying it already distorts and twists it, language can't reproduce events and shouldn't attempt to, and that, I imagine, is why during some trials--the trials in movies, anyway, the  ones I know best--the implicated parties are asked to perform a material or physical reconstruction of what happened, repeating the gestures, the movements, the envenomed steps they took...The idea of testimony is also futile...(7-8)

Yet, in these pages I'm going to place myself on the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling what really happened or pretended to succeed in doing  so...Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking  upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative...because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)--not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence." (9)

The opening pages of Javier Marías (1988) Dark Back of Time (translated in 2001 by Esther Allen) present, in rough outline, two philosophical views on the relationship between language and world and, thereby, truth. On the first perspective, language is incapable of representing the truth (especially events). While these days such thoughts are often associated with post-modernism, the idea was once a common, suspicious perspective on language (recall). It is important to recognize that a suspicion-of-language view is (a) neither self-refuting (as a lot of my lazy friends often insist) (b) nor does it entail skepticism about truth as such (b') because other things -- entities, humans, objects etc. -- are -- as Marías  narrator recognizes at once -- capable of simulating truth to some degree. (In fact, (b') is not the only alternative; some once-famous metaphysicians (b'') locate truth in non-linguistic perfect ideas or perfect forms, etc.) As we learn from Part 3 of Gulliver's Travels, this (b' or, even, b'') is not a very fertile or efficient conception of truth if we wish to do science, or engineer to wage war. But despite much table-pounding, only if we thoughtlessly defer to the authority of science or war, is the suspicion-of-language view refuted.

As an aside, in the novel the human duty not to thoughtlessly defer to the authority of war is presented in a touching retelling of the Christmas truce as an extended meditation on Wilfrid Ewart's The Way of Revelation.

the war lost its control and was disobeyed, and he [Ewart] was there and saw it. To say that it was vanquished would be false and pretentious, but it was sidestepped and even mocked for a moment, and the mockery was maintained even after the hard reminder--or revenge--of all-out warfare (whose primary aim is to exclude and negate whatever it does not enclose or taint)...(156)

Of course, all-out-war is not the only social institution that by enclosing aims to exclude and negate (that vague something that is not enclosed): the institution of property and the practice of (ac)counting function in analogous ways.

Anyway, in addition to appeal to lived experience in which the distorting effects of language are so routine that we better not pay attention to these (if we want to be taken seriously, and other practical consequences), we may also note (with a nod to Deleuze) that it is awkward to insist (often repetitively) that a repetition (as a representing in language inevitably is) somehow is identical to what is represented in the right sort of way, namely, both the representation and that what is represented are stable and undistorted, etc. Even so, it is always a bit tacky, if not an instance of bad faith, to encounter a text that announces the suspicion-of-language-view. For, most texts (including the truly fictional novels) tacitly rely on the norms and conventions that demand from us a foregoing or bracketing of any such superstition.

On Sympathetic Engagement in Novels

It's very risky imagining yourself into somebody else's mind, it's sometimes hard to leave.--from Javier Marías The Infatuations.

The passage is quoted from the thoughts of en empathetic spectator, María Dolz (the narrator), who has moved from being a fairly passive witness to being a rather actively engaged participant. In context María has imagined what it's like to be a murder-victim (while visiting the victim's widowed wife).  María adds that this reason (it's hard to leave) is probably the reason why so few people do so. Let's stipulate that there is a double kernel of truth in this generalization: (i) people rarely really enter into another's point of view; and (ii) that their failure to do so is not, say, due to some residue solipsism or narcissism, but due to a genuine fear of remaining captured in the other's perspective. Even so, writers and readers of novels, biographies, and certain histories are systematic exceptions to the generalization. Some philosophers might get nervous about the idea that sympathetic engagement with really present people, fictional characters, and historcal agents are being equated, but let's stipulate that the same psychological mechanisms are involved.

Marías is reflexive about such matters because he repeatedly lets his characters in this novel comment on the nature of the novel. For example he writes:

It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.