The Hinternet

Madame de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, Norbert Elias, Proust, Pepys, Al Bundy, Etc.

Hinternet Editorial Board — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:00:22 GMT

We had a great time discussing the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné last night, among other things. On this occasion Substack livestream lasted an entire hour before suddenly conking out, unlike t…

Homer and other Guslars

Hinternet Editorial Board — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:41:34 GMT

We are, we hate to have to acknowledge, on something like a reduced summer writing schedule. Our Founding Editor is traveling, and our other regular contributors are currently either missing, or in the “deep-freeze” (to use the common parlance of our editorial offices here in Quimper), or indeed, in one of their cases, dead.

The venerable sages of the Villa Doria Pamphilij

That’s alright. We don’t have much to say anyhow, at least not much that we might reasonably expect to fit with the rhythms of the present moment. We acknowledge that we do love the Odyssey, very much. But we rush to add that whatever good reason there might be to discuss it now was no less good, say, three years ago, when the rhythms of the moment required one to concern oneself with what was then called Barbenheimer. We sat that one out too.

We might also add that if you are interested in the “Homer” who first wrote down the Greek text of the Odyssey, you have every reason to be equally interested in the “Homer” who precedes him by at least a few centuries, and who, singly or collectively, stands at the beginning of the oral-epic tradition in which the Odyssey was long sung unaccompanied, uncrutched as it were, by any text.

As JSR explains, writing in The Happy Reader in 2023:

We generally take the prose novel to be the most paradigmatic expression of the literary arts, even if we grant poetry a special place alongside prose, in part in view of its seniority. Poetry came before prose, but how long before? We have the great works of Homer from the eighth century BCE and not many surviving traces before that. But what if the works of Homer are themselves just the late-arriving transcriptions of a tradition that existed already for centuries as a strictly oral art-form? But if poems were oral traditions before they were written down, how would we know?
There are tremendous differences from one culture to another, and exceptions to every generalisation, yet nonetheless we may say on the whole that cultures without written literature place a higher value on memorisation than literate or textual cultures. What is sometimes controversially called ‘oral literature’ — the vast bodies of epic poetry that various cultures around the world have transmitted across the generations without ever writing them down, without ever ‘recording’ them anywhere but in the minds and on the tongues of their children — includes numerous features that only make sense if you understand them as part of the technical apparatus of constructing a vast mental corpus with no textual counterpart. Notably, heavy reliance on alliteration and epithets — oft-repeated short phrases that express a characteristic feature of the person or thing in question — is a common feature of oral epic traditions throughout the world.
Such epics were not in the first place composed with any intention of seeing them translated into textual form. And so, often, when they finally are written down they continue to bear the marks of their earlier life as an oral art-form. We have witnessed this process of textualisation of many oral epic traditions in the modern period. The Sundiata epic of the Malinke people, describing heavily mythologised historical events that took place in the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, was transcribed first into Arabic, and then, by the end of the nineteenth century, was published in French editions compiled by colonial administrators. The Olonkho tradition of the Sakha or Yakut people of north-eastern Siberia only began to be recorded in the early twentieth century, when Polish and Russian ethnologists, and a good number of penal colonists turned ethnologist as a way to bide their time, began to notice the extraordinary feats of memory and recitative endurance of which a certain class of Sakha bards, the olonkhosuttar, were capable. And around the same time a similar tradition in the Balkans was beginning to attract the same sort of outside interest: that of the so-called guslari, or Bosniak bards, who sing epic tales while playing on the single-stringed gusle. Though in this case the most significant researcher of the tradition was not a colonial administrator or a penal colonist, but one Milman Parry — the same man we have already observed bidding farewell to his family — a Harvard classicist turned ethnomusicologist, travelling on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Although oral narrative traditions have many traits in common wherever they are found, circumstance brought Parry to the Balkans, and not to Siberia, or West Africa, or anywhere else human beings have held society and the generations together by telling epic tales — which is to say, more or less everywhere.
The guslari and the olonkhosuttar, and their counterparts throughout the world, are, in terms of social hierarchy, rather lowly characters — typically elderly, toothless, with wispy silver hair and ragged clothing; just looking at pictures of them one senses one can smell their breath. They often do not have particularly beautiful voices. There is little in their performance that seems, on the face of it, to be held in common with the lofty and high-status epic-poetic traditions that have been passed down to us in written form from classical Greek and Roman antiquity. And yet, if you look at your transcription closely, you might notice that the features of today’s Bosniak or Sakha or Malinke epic share at least certain elementary formulae with those most monumental contributions to the history of Western literature – The Odyssey and The Iliad of Homer.
The author, or authors, of these latter texts is surely lost forever in the dark abyss of time. We cannot know who Homer was, or who the many generations of Homers were whom we collectively call by that name. But if we want to get some idea of what it may have been like to be there at ‘Western’ literature’s genesis, we could probably do no better than to visit a Balkan bard and listen to his hours-long wedding song. This was Milman Parry’s central insight.
Born in 1902, Parry received his first degrees at Berkeley. In 1924 he moved from there to study in the philology faculty at the Sorbonne, where four years later he completed a doctoral dissertation entitled L’épithète traditionnelle dans Homère. Here he began to articulate what would come to be known as the ‘Oral Formulaic Hypothesis’, a then-controversial theory of the oral origins of Homeric epic. Before Parry, it was generally supposed that there was a single historical figure, a man named Homer, who was a great poet, and who composed The Odyssey and The Iliad more or less in the form we have them today. But Parry’s theory suggests that the familiar epithets so many of us know — ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, ‘many-counselled Odysseus’, ‘the wine-dark sea’, the last of which would be satirised by James Joyce as ‘the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea’ — can only make sense if we understand them as part of the scaffolding of a vast art of memory – and, not just of memory, but, as we’ll see soon, an art of creativity as well. The epithets are there not just to ornament, but to help the bard who must master the formal elements required for the marathons of recitation that are his life’s calling. And if Homer’s works were originally bodies of oral poetry that were transmitted among bards through a complicated arsenal of mnemonic techniques, this almost certainly compels us to suppose that the written work we know today came into existence considerably later than the oral tradition from which the written work derives.
Little in Parry’s French classical education under the direction of the great linguist Antoine Meillet, himself a student of the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, could have helped us to predict how his career would develop from there. Once back in the United States, Parry obtained a post in the classics department at Harvard, and became acquainted there with the Slavic Studies scholar Albert Lord (1912–91). A decade Parry’s junior, Lord was already far along in his research on the oral poetic tradition of the Balkan guslari, who into the twentieth century were spinning out poems with many thousands of lines telling the epic history of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and of the great showdown at that site between the Ottoman Sultan Murad I and the Serbian Prince Lazar. From 1933 to 1935 Lord and Parry spent the greater part of two years travelling through Serbia and Montenegro, to the remotest rural locations they could find, where epic tradition still survived largely uncorrupted. Their greatest discovery was of a humble guslar by the name of Avdo Međedović (1875–1955), a Slavicised Albanian Muslim whose recitation of a 12,000-line poem entitled The Wedding of Smailagić Meho would come to serve as the centrepiece of their collection.
Parry and Lord were pioneers in the use of phonographic recording devices in the field, thus paving the way for subsequent generations of ethnomusicologists such as Mieczyslaw Kolinski in Poland, and Alan Lomax and Charles Seeger (father of Pete) in the United States. Lomax and Seeger in particular were interested in folk-musical traditions as the lifeblood of culture passed down across the generations through techniques deeper than language. They saw the study of these traditions as a key part of the project of bringing to light the true parity of all human cultures, as against the hierarchised ladder of relatively more and less advanced cultures that had predominated since the Enlightenment. But Parry is largely unique in seeking to establish the equality of literary forms, textual and oral, ‘high’ and ‘low’, in a long-sweeping historical perspective that includes the canonical works of the ‘Western’ canon alongside the living traditions of oral recitation.
In these living traditions, it is not quite correct to see works as fixed sequences of lines that are memorised word for word. Rather, although the story is known in advance, as are the formal constraints on how it may be told, nonetheless the singular works are to a certain extent ‘spontaneously generated’ each time a bard sets about reciting them — much like the ‘freedom within constraints’ that is often invoked to characterise improvisation in both the jazz and the Indian raga traditions. The formulae in the Oral Formulaic Hypothesis are therefore not so much scaffold as building blocks, adjustable pieces that can be rearranged and built upon each time anew. Transcription or phonographic recording freezes one such version in time, and typically turns it into the canonical and ‘correct’ version, but when it gets frozen, and in which particular arrangement, is a highly contingent matter. As Lord would later put it, ‘[A]n oral poem is not composed for but in performance’; and this must have been the case as much for Homer as for the living, breathing bards whose art the pair of researchers were busy laying down on wax. As Parry wrote excitedly after hearing one of Međedović’s recitations: ‘[One] has the overwhelming sense that he is, in some way, hearing Homer.’

In other news, we remind you that the fourth of our Summer Hinternet Livestream Literature Salons will be taking place tomorrow evening, Wednesday, July 22, at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 NY / 11:00 SF. It is for paid subscribers only. We encourage you to subscribe now to get 50% off the subscription price for one year.

Join the Livestream!

Tomorrow’s salon will focus on Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence, Saint-Simon’s diaries, and perhaps other ancien-régime non-fiction influences on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We will also explore some dimensions of Madame’s sensibility in light of Norbert Elias’s famous argument in The Civilizing Process (1939) regarding modernity’s sublimation of barbarism into what we now easily recognize as aristocratic manners.

One letter in particular, to Philippe-Emmanuel de Coulanges (1633–1716), will be the focus of extensive discussion. We will share JSR’s English translation here, followed by the French original:

Paris, Monday, 15 December [1670].
I am about to tell you the most astonishing thing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most triumphant, the most staggering, the most unheard-of, the most singular, the most extraordinary, the most unbelievable, the most unforeseen, the greatest, the smallest, the rarest, the commonest, the most dazzling, up until now the most closely guarded, the most brilliant, the most worthy of envy; in short, a thing of which only a single example is to be found in ages past, and even that example is not quite to the point; a thing that we could never believe in Paris (how could anyone believe it in Lyon?); a thing that makes the whole world cry for mercy; a thing that fills Mme de Rohan and Mme de Hauterive with joy; a thing, finally, that is to take place on Sunday, at the sight of which those who witness it will think they are seeing things; a thing that is to happen on Sunday, and that perhaps will no longer be true by Monday. I cannot bring myself to tell you. Guess it; I’ll give you three tries. Have you thrown your tongue to the dogs? Very well! Then I must tell you: M. de Lauzun is to be married on Sunday at the Louvre – guess to whom? I’ll give you four tries, I’ll give you ten, I’ll give you a hundred. Mme de Coulanges says: “Now that is very difficult to guess; it is Mlle de La Vallière.” “Not at all, Madame.” “Then it is Mlle de Retz?” “Not at all; you are quite the provincial.” “Really, we are complete fools,” you say, “is it Mlle Colbert?” “Still less.” “It is surely Mlle de Créquy?” “You’re nowhere near it. Well then, I must finally tell you: he is marrying, on Sunday, at the Louvre, with the King’s permission, Mademoiselle… Mademoiselle de... Mademoiselle... guess the name: he is marrying Mademoiselle, upon my word! Upon my faith! Upon my solemn oath! Mademoiselle, la Grande Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle, daughter of the late Monsieur; Mademoiselle, granddaughter of Henri IV; Mademoiselle d’Eu; Mademoiselle de Dombes; Mademoiselle de Montpensier; Mademoiselle d’Orléans; Mademoiselle, the King’s first cousin; Mademoiselle destined for the throne; Mademoiselle, the only match in France worthy of Monsieur. There is a fine subject for discussion. If you cry out, if you are beside yourself, if you say that we have lied, that it is false, that someone is making a fool of you, that this is a great jest, that it is altogether too absurd to imagine; if, finally, you heap insults upon us, we shall think you perfectly right; we did exactly the same ourselves.
Farewell; the [other] letters carried by this post will show you whether we are telling the truth or not.

À Paris, lundi 15 décembre [1670].
Je m’en vais vous mander la chose la plus étonnante, la plus surprenante, la plus merveilleuse, la plus miraculeuse, la plus triomphante, la plus étourdissante, la plus inouïe, la plus singulière, la plus extraordinaire, la plus incroyable, la plus imprévue, la plus grande, la plus petite, la plus rare, la plus commune, la plus éclatante, la plus secrète jusqu’aujourd’hui, la plus brillante, la plus digne d’envie; enfin une chose dont on ne trouve qu’un exemple dans les siècles passés, encore cet exemple n’est-il pas juste; une chose que nous ne saurions croire à Paris (comment la pourrait-on croire à Lyon?); une chose qui fait crier miséricorde à tout le monde; une chose qui comble de joie Mme de Rohan et Mme de Hauterive; une chose enfin qui se fera dimanche, où ceux qui la verront croiront avoir la berlue; une chose qui se fera dimanche, et qui ne sera peut-être pas faite lundi. Je ne puis me résoudre à la dire. Devinez-la; je vous le donne en trois. Jetez-vous votre langue aux chiens? Eh bien! il faut donc vous la dire: M. de Lauzun épouse dimanche au Louvre, devinez qui? Je vous le donne en quatre, je vous le donne en dix; je vous le donne en cent. Mme de Coulanges dit: Voilà qui est bien difficile à deviner; c’est Mlle de La Vallière. — Point du tout, Madame. — C’est donc Mlle de Retz? — Point du tout, vous êtes bien provinciale. — Vraiment nous sommes bien bêtes, dites-vous, C’est assurément Mlle de Créquy? — Vous n’y êtes pas. Il faut donc à la fin vous le dire: il épouse, avec la permission du Roi, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle de... Mademoiselle... devinez le nom: il épouse Mademoiselle, ma foi! par ma foi! ma foi jurée! Mademoiselle, la Grande Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle, fille de feu Monsieur; Mademoiselle, petite-fille de Henri IV; mademoiselle d’Eu, mademoiselle de Dombes, mademoiselle de Montpensier, mademoiselle d’Orléans; Mademoiselle, cousine germaine du Roi; Mademoiselle, destinée au trône; Mademoiselle, le seul parti de France qui fût digne de Monsieur. Voilà un beau sujet de discourir. Si vous criez, si vous êtes hors de vous-même, si vous dites que nous avons menti, que cela est faux, qu’on se moque de vous, que voilà une belle raillerie, que cela est bien fade à imaginer; si enfin vous nous dites des injures, nous trouverons que vous avez raison; nous en avons fait autant que vous.
Adieu; les lettres qui seront portées par cet ordinaire vous feront voir si nous disons vrai ou non.

Finally, as if you did not already have enough reasons to upgrade to a paid subscription, we remind you that beginning in August JSR will be hosting another series of livestreams, this one relatively more formal and course-like than the current salons frequented by our juilletistes, on a certain German philosopher of some importance to him. Here’s the schedule; we hope to see you there!

NOTE NEW DATES FOR LEIBNIZ COURSE (Previously scheduled on Thursdays in August, now on MONDAYS)!

The Substack Cloaca

Justin Smith-Ruiu — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:47:34 GMT

I’m certainly not going to say “no one reads anymore,” a phrase that has by now degenerated into one of those non-thoughts that do so much to drive discourse while doing nothing at all to solve the problem it pretends to bemoan. It would be an insult to my many very close readers, you might say my Hinternet Talmudists, who plainly do read very carefully, and can cite back to me years later the most minor arcana of the Hinternet cosmos. God bless them!

What I will say is that Substack is no longer principally for writers. It is, rather, for whatever works. It aspires to be the universal platform, in an emerging global information environment that Agnes Callard has helpfully identified as the “uni-context”. I prefer to think of it as the social-technological equivalent of a cloaca, of the sort we observe in a number of species of Antipodean monotremes — in the future, which is to say now, there is to be a single passage through which everything flows. By “everything” I mean not just text, image, and video —which is what is usually understood in talk of the ideal universal platform. I mean work, leisure, social ties, creativity, banking, music, governance — all of these, like it or not, are going to be passing through the same metaphorical hole.

History gives us reason to predict that those who don’t like this transformation will protest for a while, and eventually either get in line or get sidelined. It’s an old story. Just read Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (1883) (about which, incidentally, Agnes and I had a nice discussion a few years ago), a fictionalized version of the story of Aristide Boucicaut and the foundation of Le Bon Marché, the first department store in the world, and of the impact that had on the Paris artisans still taking five years each to sculpt the figure of an elephant’s head into a single umbrella handle with a pocket knife. The world changes — it’s tough, and it’s exhilarating.

Uni-contextualization is what makes a French satirical magazine with a history of anticlericalism the target of global jihad, and it is what subordinates directors and musicians to the tyranny of their fandoms. It is what has brought what remains of the. classroom experience to the point where students are using their phones to dispute their professors, in real time, on points of fact, by now entirely unaware that the purpose of the such encounters had in any case never really been fact-delivery at all — at least not for us humanists. Uni-contextualization is also what slots what I am doing at this very moment ambiguously between leisure, creative practice, public outreach in my capacity as an institutionally based philosopher, and illicit moonlighting. Who can even say at this point? One solution is simply to go with “” and call it all, indiscriminately, “the Work”. The Work is all that’s left, and any hope that it can be separated out into lowercase “work” on the one hand, and other finer-grained categories on the other, is at this point nothing more than desperate clinging to a lost world.

The signs of this transition are too numerous to summarize. I can remember shortly after September 11, 2001, reading that on that momentous day Stephen King briefly glanced at the television, muttered something like “What a shame”, and then took his headphones, put on Beethoven’s 9th, and got back to writing. In the 2010s I can remember Walter Kirn mocking Gary Shteyngart for doing some over-the-top early-online-video stunt intended to promote some of his new work. What about now? Can you imagine any two writers more fully cloacalized than King and Kirn? They are showing up for “the Work” every day; they are feeding the feeds! I do everything I can not to see them, but it’s a hopeless effort.

In sundry ways, writers are learning that if they don’t show up —and, more than that, if they don’t show their faces, their bodies, their weaknesses and worries— they will be left behind. The aspiration to a universal platform creates, in this regard, a parallel expectation of universal self-branding. One must open the doors to one’s salon; one must host.

This cloacalized, uni-contextualized Work brings with it another upshot that, for at least some of us, makes the current rapid disappearance of any real venue for a certain kind of writer to practice their vocation somewhat easier to bear. Ten years ago I would have felt deeply ashamed if an academic colleague of mine were to learn that I was out there doing extracurricular online lectures on the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment and topics like that (which I in fact did, during the first lockdown, which in truth did a great deal to bear me through that trying time). Now, when I do it, I feel like I am part of the vanguard of what is in any case going to turn out, in the next few years, to be a near total transition of humanities instruction into para-academic spontaneous clusterings, many of which will happen online.

What I mean in part is that I find myself at a curious juncture. I’ve been a philosophy professor for 26 years. Between 2020 and 2025 I was able to turn to Substack to cultivate a very different side of my intellectual and creative self, to leave the credentials at the door, and to be, at least in my own view of my work here, everything but a philosophy professor. Now I find that the acceleration of the cloacalizing process has effectively made it impossible for anyone to keep any of the strands of their lives separate at all. So I’m like: ok, then, if that’s how the world is shaping up, if that’s what this latest iteration of Boucicaut’s universal store1 compels of us, then I might as well ride the wave of history, and not only show my face here in the medium of the livestream, but also start doing some version here of what I have anyhow spent a good part of the last quarter-century doing — for example, hosting livestream courses introducing interested readers-listeners-viewers to questions in the history of philosophy on which I have a certain amount of specialist expertise.

The advent of the uni-context, I hope I’m making clear, is, like everything in history, both destructive and generative. I have had conversations these past months with more than one American friend, all in elite institutions, who tell much the same story. Ten years ago they had to do their quirky creative public stuff on the down-low, hoping all the while it would not generate too much press. Now their deans are holding them up as shining examples of how to adapt to a rapidly changing world, and as models of what a scholar-thinker-intellectual in the 21st century might yet be. France, as always —or at least at any time since roughly the end of the 1900 Paris World Expo, though definitely not at the time of Boucicaut— will take another decade or so to come up from behind. But that’s alright. As I’ve previously acknowledged my primary concern is with the country from which I find myself in quasi-exile, and whose civic potentials I’m most concerned to help to awaken and to foster. I mean, I remain a cosmopolitan and a committed enemy of the entire Westphalian order, but that doesn’t mean I’m not an American, synchronized for life with that country’s tempo whether I wish to be or not. And at present that country, as global tech vanguard, is pushing us all into the cloaca.

We are already running a very enjoyable literary salon at The Hinternet this month, on Wednesday evenings (CET). There are two sessions left:

Hinternet Summer Livestream Literature Salons

Wednesdays at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 NY / 11:00 LA

Wednesday 1 July — Introduction: Reflections on the Philosophy of Translation [DONE!] Recording here.
Wednesday 8 July — The most beautiful short story ever written: Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1886) [DONE!] Recording here.
Wednesday 15 July — Pan-Soviet Chekhovism: Amma Achchygyïa’s “Motuo” (1927) [DONE!]
Wednesday 22 July — Before À la recherche: Madame de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, and the Non-Fiction Sources of Proust’s Masterpiece
Wednesday 29 July — Zola’s Nana (1880) and the French Proto-Cinematic Imagination

Beginning in August, we will be running a crash course on the philosophy of this one guy I’ve been getting into recently. It will look something like this:

Please join us if the topic interests you (which it must, given that you are a rational being like everyone else). There’s no “enrollment cap” or anything like that; this is the internet!

The course will be open to paid subscribers to The Hinternet, and materials will be shared in Substack Chat, which is likewise open to paid subscribers.

Through the end of July we’re offering a 50% discount to new subscribers so be sure to upgrade your subscription now if you want to join the final two literature salons, or the Leibniz livestreams next month.

As usual, we are grateful for your support as paid subscribers to The Hinternet, which not only gives you access to so much more of what we do here, but also enables us to pay our guest contributors, to pay for technical support and development, and to fund our larger-scale projects and initiatives.

Thanks as ever!

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Interestingly, the Russian word for a department store (likely other languages too that aren’t on my mind at the moment), is универсальный магазин, a “universal magazine”. The term “magazine” in this context, which is borrowed from French (though in French a lexical distinction evolved between magasin and magazine), ultimately stems from an Arabic word meaning “storehouse” or “storage space”. It thus shares the same etymology as the name for the place in a gun where the ammunition goes, and in this respect there really is more continuity between Boucicaut’s Bon Marché and the social-media companies that aspire to become the universal platform than the simple fact that both are “disruptive”. Both are quite literally doing the same thing, even if the older one did it with merchandise and the newer one is doing it with “content”.

Back from the Oort Cloud

Hinternet Editorial Board — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:30:10 GMT

Introduction

Last week at The Hinternet’s editorial offices here in Quimper, we were surprised —c’est peu dire!— to receive by e-mail the pdf of a lengthy interview with our own Founding Editor, JSR, in PLOOI (Dutch for “fold”), an Antwerp-based magazine for fashion, art, and culture. The accompanying unsigned message, coming from an inconspicuous telenet.be address, said only that we should “feel free to translate and disseminate this interview as you please.” When we contacted JSR about the matter, he replied that he was “shit deep in university admin right now,” and had “absolutely no time to deal with Hinternet stuff.”

This is as much as we deem fitting to say at the outset. It’s a breathtaking interview, anyhow. The full story of how it arrived in our inbox, moreover, about which we will speculate briefly in a concluding postscript, may, if our speculation is correct, be even more breathtaking still. —The Editors

Justin Smith-Ruiu Comes Back from the Oort Cloud

[translated from PLOOI Magazine, Summer 2026]

In early May we tracked down the elusive Justin Smith-Ruiu near his home in Paris for this exclusive interview. Believed to be the mastermind behind the much-discussed Oort Cloud Review, which will be appearing from Hat & Beard Press later this summer, and which is already being adapted for the big screen, Smith-Ruiu continues to evade the question of authorship.

Whether he was behind this strange work or not, he sure had a lot to tell us when we sat with him on a bench in the Buttes-Chaumont for a conversation that lasted over five hours, about his creative process, the relationship between the faculties of reason and imagination, the cosmological origins of the narrative art, and so much else besides.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

PLOOI: Let’s get right to it and talk first about the Oort Cloud Review. In previous interviews you have remained in character, insisting that the OCR was delivered to you, as a complete file, through a technology known as “IWTP”. Are you going to stick by that today?

JSR: Inter-World Transfer Protocol is a real thing. From Fontenelle through David Lewis even where you had the most thoroughgoing modal realism there was always a presumption of the theoretical impossibility of contact between possible worlds. And of course that’s true, if you mean literally travelling from one to the other. Possible worlds don’t neighbor one another like rowhouses. It would be more correct to say they overlap one another, almost perfectly, and it’s thanks to this overlapping structure of reality that our new information technologies were able to open up at least a limited amount of data transfer across world-boundaries.

PLOOI: You’re still denying authorship, then?

JSR: Well, no, not exactly. I mean, evidently this is the work of a counterpart-JSR, and I’m happy to help a brother out, so to speak, by bringing it into the world and doing my best to imagine what he, I mean, what that other instance of me, would have said in an interview like this one.

PLOOI: Shall we proceed as if you were the author?

JSR: As you prefer. Don’t forget, though, that the OCR features several real contributors: Marco Roth, Kristen Roupenian, Ange Mlinko, Jacqueline Feldman, among others.

PLOOI: And are these their counterparts from another possible world, or is it really them?

JSR: I’d prefer not to speak on their behalf. Go interview them too!

PLOOI: What about the basic narrative conceit of the OCR?

JSR: What about it?

PLOOI: The volume presents itself as a literary magazine in the vein of n+1 or the like, but the reader soon discovers that things are not at all what they seem. For starters, you, or Hélène Le Goff, or whoever is behind this, claim to be in possession of a secret memorandum, issued in 1957 by something called the “Presidium of Five”, which seems to be something like the supreme council of an organization known as the “Heliopause Research Directorate”. According to this document, the greatest discovery of the 20th century, following up on a speculative hypothesis from Pierre-Simon Laplace two centuries earlier, was not nuclear fission or relativity theory or quantum mechanics or anything like that, but…

JSR: I mean, look, the Laplace conjecture, regarding an envelope of icy bodies surrounding our solar system that interact with one another in a way that effectively reproduces the function of a supercomputer, is far from prima facie absurd.

PLOOI: Perhaps, but the OCR goes well beyond that. It claims that the Oort Cloud has been functioning for billions of years as a sort of “natural LLM”, and that —I hope we’re getting this right— it is the “narraton particles” emitted from the Oort Cloud that explain the capacity of a certain well-known terrestrial species for telling stories, or in other words for presenting as true what is in fact false.

JSR: Yes. That’s right. That’s true.

PLOOI: We admit the upshot is intriguing: that our own narrative power is a side-effect of the Oort Cloud’s natural proneness to “hallucination” — the very thing we resent the most in our human-made LLMs.

JSR: It’s remarkable, isn’t it?

PLOOI: As the premise of a certain sort of rather far-fetched science-fiction, yes.

JSR: Interpret it as you will. But we still have to account for where science-fiction comes from, what so to speak its transcendental conditions are. It’s not true? Fine, whatever. It’s not true. Then how am I able to present it as true? This is the real “hard problem”, and neither the scientists nor the littérateurs have even begun to understand how hard it actually is. That’s where the OCR comes in. I mean, Cervantes seems to have understood, with the result that much of Don Quixote is really just a sustained metafictional reflexion on how it is even possible to present as true things that never happened; but then over the following centuries literature devolved little by little into the “realist” novel and then, as its final death throe, into a mere vehicle for the delivery of “content”. From the other direction, the analytic philosophers preoccupied with counterfactuals and things like that have also understood the immensity of the problem, but they are for the most part content to stay in the antechamber of conceptual analysis, and aren’t even aware of the imaginative resources that they’re leaving untapped.

PLOOI: Don’t you worry that you’re being rather reckless with all this mixing of truth and falsehood, though? After all, the OCR isn’t even officially released yet, it’s still only available for pre-order, but already we’re hearing all sorts of alarming things on Telegram, in the Slack channels, in the Trunks, and even a bit in the mainstream press.

JSR [laughs]: Like what?

PLOOI: Like that it’s the same technologies originally developed for trapping narraton particles at the heliopause that are behind all the incidents of so-called “Havana syndrome” in recent years.

JSR [laughs again]: Well, people love to speculate. We can’t be held responsible for their overly fecund imaginations. The Oort Cloud is.

PLOOI: The Oort Cloud is what?

JSR: Responsible. For their overly fecund imaginations.

PLOOI: You’re committed to the bit, aren’t you?

JSR: I’m sorry?

PLOOI: Let’s move on. At the core of the OCR there seems to be a persistent reflection on the threat both to language and to our understanding of the world around us that is represented by AI. If we may say it seems to be among the first creative engagements, perhaps the first, that both fully face up to the threat’s seriousness, but at the same time show us some new pathways of real creativity that these technologies are opening up.

JSR: Thank you. I like to think that’s where the OCR positions itself. But of course I have to leave it to others to say as much explicitly.

PLOOI: But as to language, can you say a bit more about that? What is it that troubles you so much about the current state of things?

JSR: Let me tell you a little story. I was in London recently and I went to a Marks & Spencer. As you approach you see the slogan “Not Just Food” in the windows, but then you go in and the bags, which must be left over from a previous ad campaign, say more or less the opposite: “This Is Food”, or something like that. The raspberries are advertised as being “jammy”, while the raspberry jam is said to be “nothing but raspberries”. By Leibniz’s law of substitutivity of identity it would seem to follow that the raspberries are self-identical, and I wondered for a moment whether that could have been established even without the detour through the jam aisle. In general the adjectives on the packaging, gooey and gummy and yammy and God knows what, all those infantile -y suffixations that the British seem to love —which as PLOOI’s readers will know have their analogue in the Netherlandic -je—: these seem somehow to compound the density of moisture, already immense to begin with, in the concept of the original noun. And in general everything that is not being marketed as self-identical seems subjected to the descriptive language of a sommelier who has extended the esoteric art of enological analogy to every comestible imaginable. Chick peas must be called “nutty”, while nuts in turn are analogized to something else altogether. Of course if chick peas truly were nutty, they would share in the nature of nuts, and it would follow necessarily that nuts are chick-pea-y, or garbanzoid, or, if you prefer a more classicizing register, Ciceronian. But the logic of food marketing doesn’t permit that, which to me is only one of many signs of how empty it is, like so much contemporary public speech. One longs for “the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”, and one fears that it is precisely our forgetfulness of that Biblical image, as an ideal for what language at its best can be, that has essentially paved the way for the total machine takeover of language in the present moment.

PLOOI: We think we follow, but it’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? From the inanity of advertising language to the death of meaning as a consequence of the rise of machine-generated text. After all, a certain kind of haughty intellectual has been complaining about the emptiness of public language for a very long time. Think of Heidegger with his whole critique of Geplapper — that was well before the era of language automation.

JSR: Was it? In my view automation properly understood begins with the earliest circulation of printed texts. We’re seeing another great leap forward in this historical process, but a sufficiently lucid observer could have made it out at any point over the last several centuries. I myself was not so lucid — it really took the arrival of LLM’s for me to see what was already happening. In this regard, it seems new technological revolutions can sometimes teach us as much about the past as they do about the present.

PLOOI: Surely there is also much that is unprecedented in the present moment, if only in the Marxian sense that at a certain point quantitative change brings about real qualitative transformation?

JSR: Certainly, I would say that what is genuinely new is the advent of what we are currently calling “slop”, for lack of a term that would come from serious theoretical engagement with the phenomenon. This is above all the case with AI-generated images, especially the ones, as in Italian Brainrot, that have had some real memetic force to them. In the 20th century, art made itself inscrutable, while mass commercial entertainment prized accessibility above all. In the 21st century, with the appearance of “slop”, mass commercial entertainment is making itself inscrutable. Two hundred years earlier, neither of these shifts would have made any sense, while today it is hard not to see the later shift as a continuation of the same historical process that gave us the earlier one. Avant-garde art really was the vanguard to the extent that it established the template for how culture as a whole would come to look once the technologies of mass production of image, text, and sound became universally accessible.

PLOOI: But aren’t you concerned about what critics like Naomi Klein have highlighted regarding the “training data” on which AI depends, describing it as little more than theft from the original human authors who produced it?

JSR: That argument mostly falls flat for me, at least when I’m looking at the output of the new memetic culture surrounding AI. The problem is that such “theft” is already at the basis of so many vernacular art forms, from the Burroughs cut-up to the hip-hop sample, whose aesthetic merit is by now entirely beyond dispute. And at least for me, when I’m watching Italian Brainrot, all I can think is: Look, Naomi, if this is just theft, then why does it look completely unlike anything we’ve ever seen before in all of human history? Where exactly is Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Sahur in the pre-AI training data? Show me that little freak’s human-generated prototype! You can’t, obviously. He’s sui-generis, just like a rapper’s recycling of a James Brown vocal snippet, or Roy Lichtenstein’s pop-art appropriation of the comic-book format.

PLOOI: It sounds as though you are of two minds then, regarding these new technologies — you see them both as a grave threat to meaning, but also, potentially, as a vehicle for the vanguard exploration of new creative potentials?

JSR: Well of course, pretty much everything in history is like what Leonard Cohen sang about shooting heroin: “Did some good, did some harm.” Anyone who tries to come down dogmatically one side or the other of such a complex historical transformation is just an idiot. It’s like what that one guy, what’s his name… like what John Ganz posted about Steven Pinker when the latter said something characteristically simplistic about how “good” the Enlightenment was, in contrast to those who deem it “bad”. “What no dialectics does to a MFer,” Ganz wrote, if I recall correctly. Well, I don’t want to be that MFer.

PLOOI: You seem, if we may, not just in the OCR but in all of your work over the past five years or so, to be driven by an overwhelming preoccupation with the liberty of expression. Can you tell us how that came to be so important to you?

JSR: I am really so fortunate to lead a life of ideas and imagination. It’s just incredible! It is however necessary to emphasize that this life was made possible by a choice, independently of and sometimes in real tension with my pre-existing social identity as an academic. I can remember as recently as, say, 2019, feeling constant pressure to speak in a way that I knew was unnatural to me, and constantly worrying about what the local “enforcers” within my academic community would say about me if I deviated from the prevailing speech norms. Then something happened, I don’t know what exactly. The topsy-turvy experience of the pandemic, of un monde à rebours, surely helped to jostle me out of that old slavishness. I should also mention that I hit my head in an electric scooter accident in 2021, and I have trouble believing that that very literal “jostling” played no role in what I have often described as my “reset”. Now I barely ever think about those enforcers at all, and when I do see their names, I smile, and I often find that I am actually able now to feel real affection towards them, as flawed human beings just like myself, in a way that I never could when I believed they had power over me and I was afraid of them. What a waste of my years! I suppose I now have a sharp feeling that I got a very late start at the eminently important task of simply being myself, and perhaps in consequence I am working overtime to make it clear who that self is. Anyhow as I see things, “Speak in this new dumb way, mouth these new disingenuous words, or we’ll crush you,” is pretty much the normal course of history. And art is really the only viable means of resistance to this lamentable imperative.

PLOOI: You seem, if we may say, awfully confident in your own abilities. Is this boldness part of the “reset” too?

JSR: I wouldn’t call it confidence or boldness. It’s more just facing up to a fact that preexisted my acknowledgment of it. External validation is nice, of course, but it’s not strictly necessary. If there were some app or LLM or guardian angel able to prove by stylometrics or superintelligence or even omniscience that I am a poor storyteller, at this point nothing would change for me. I’d still have to keep doing it. Don’t ask me why, I don’t even know myself. I only know that at times there is some satisfaction in the sense that one writes a little better than one used to. And even if that is a misperception, so what? What else would I do? Good or bad, it’s my vocation. Or perhaps better: good it’s my vocation, bad it’s my curse. I simply must keep doing it. Forgive me, or, thank you for your support — whichever seems more appropriate.

PLOOI: Again, forgive us for being blunt, but don’t you sometimes worry that there’s something a bit unseemly, a bit vain, about constantly centering yourself as the primary focus of your creative work?

JSR: Well of course vanity looms as a constant danger when one chooses to work in this way. But you have to look harder, I think, to gain any reliable picture of what the work is doing. There’s one way of centering the self, as in, say, Celia Paul’s self-portraits, that rotates around a question that seems to me eminently philosophical: “Who the fuck am I?” Or: “How is it possible that I am this person?” It’s Peter Handke’s Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du? This seems to me undoubtedly a worthy basis for creative explorations in any medium, not least because the lessons that might be extracted from such explorations are generalizable far beyond the individual at their center. At the same time, of course it’s inevitable that one should entertain constant doubts about the decency, the morality even, of the particular form taken by one’s efforts at creative self-expression.

PLOOI: Still, though, doesn’t all this creative work stand somewhat in tension with the expectation of self-effacement at the heart of your Christian faith. You are a Christian, aren’t you?

JSR: Yes.

PLOOI: How do you make it all fit together then? Because we’re still seeing some tension.

JSR: Alright, where to start? So, I’m not a great fan of George Saunders — there’s just so much more I think literature must aspire to be! But there is one story, “Commcomm” (2005), with two particularly memorable lines. One of them is pure punctuational genius, when a character speaks of his nightly duties bathing his handicapped wife, saying: “That, to me? Is real.” The other is when Giff, a ChristLife Reenactor, says to Rimney, an absolutely vicious and devil-tongued person: “I like how you’re funny. There’s joy in that.” Giff’s Christian charity renders him unable to discern the true nature of Rimney’s humor. It’s not joy. Rimney is funny because he is suffering, and he is suffering because he is living in the hell that each of us carries inside us so long as we maintain a seul contre tous attitude in regard of others. So the Christian guy affirms another guy in his, the other guy’s, sinfulness. Whoops!

Sometimes I feel like I’m doing that as well, not in relation to some other guy, but to myself. I mean, there just is something inevitably cruel, something pagan, about delectation in the fruits of the imagination, of which the gelastic register, humor, is perhaps the very most spiny of all such fruits. And this also surely has something to do with the near-universal Christian interdiction on psychedelics, a question I grappled with very seriously in my 2025 book, On Drugs. If there’s something pagan even about jokes, then there definitely is also about communing with the great cosmic serpent or following out the pathways of trillions of miles of mycorrhizal tendrils, as one might be invited to do under the influence of, say, psilocybin.

I don’t know quite where I come down on this; as I’ve already confessed I’m a dialectical thinker and am therefore almost pathologically committed to a variety of both-sidesism. Part of me wants to say, regarding at least the use of naturally occurring psychedelics: If Christianity is true, let nature declare it too. Let nature’s frothing up into our imaginations deliver truth there as well, even if in more vaporous form than we might expect in the standard Western mode of religious reflection consisting of faith supplemented by the faculty of reason. Why wouldn’t it? Let us as Christians not be afraid of nature, or of the faculty of imagination into which nature seems particularly adept at extending her own tendrils.

This line of thinking seemed to be confirmed for me, as if in miraculous sign, in a recent social-media post from none other than Pope Leo XIV. Let me find it on my phone [fusses around with his phone for the next 78 seconds]. Here it is: “Dear writers,” he proclaimed, “we need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound.” I read that and it was as if everything came together for me in an instant. The Pope gets it.

Imagination is a charged and dangerous thing because it is free, and inevitably it is going to lead those of us who live under its orders through some pretty funky swamps and vaporous thickets, where divine grace may at times seem completely absent. Historically, one can understand why so many of his predecessors, and the theologians advising them, cautioned against letting the imagination roam freely. But it seems to me, and evidently to the Pope too, that Christianity itself must be bold and unafraid, must always remember that divine grace is nowhere truly absent, and that faith cannot require an abrupt rupture with all pagan lifeways — which are ultimately, for better or worse, the lifeways of the body, and of all of bodily nature. And again, though Leo doesn’t say this himself, I will, in my capacity as a historian of philosophy: it is precisely the imagination that has often, and in my view rightly, been understood as the faculty most intimately fitted to that stratum of human existence.

PLOOI: If we can get in a bit of praise before wrapping this interview up, we did want to say how impressed we are, paradoxically, with the honesty of the OCR. The way you talk about yourself in the final chapter in the volume, “The Storyteller” —a late-arriving and unexpected appearance, given that you’re not even listed as a contributor in the table of contents on the cover—: we found all that extremely moving. But what’s so surprising is that this chapter is the most wildly unrealistic metaphysical sci-fi insanity yet —like, at one point you describe the plight of your pre-birth “soul-pip”, and how it got stuck for two years in the late 1960s in the elastic band of a Little Rock church lady’s pink shower-cap— in a volume that seems to move through a constant and gradual ratcheting up of the insanity levels, but still it is clear that at the same time you are giving a real portrayal of yourself, you are figuring yourself as if in clay, first and foremost, and then so to speak putting on dim colored lighting that speckles it with the rotations of the disco ball. Does that make sense?

JSR: I’m not following. I didn’t contribute the final chapter or any other chapter to the OCR. At least not under my own name.

PLOOI [holding up an advance copy of the OCR and opening it to page 259]: Oh really?

JSR: We must be working with different versions.

PLOOI: Are you serious?

JSR: Yes.

PLOOI: Well then, let’s move on. What are you working on these days?

JSR: A novel.

PLOOI: Lovely, what’s it called?

JSR: The Hinternet.

PLOOI: You mean, as in the slang term used by ham radio enthusiasts?

JSR: I mean it’s called The Hinternet.

Editorial Postscript

We previously refrained, in our brief Introduction, from sharing with you two facts that might now help to make sense of the remarkable document we have just shared in passable if not perfect English translation. The first is that our research, which brought us rather deep into the world of glossy arts-and-fashion periodicals issuing from the Low Countries, turned up no evidence of the existence of a magazine called PLOOI. The second is that the pdf file did not come to us as an attachment, but via a link to an independent site from which we were able to download it. The url for the site began, significantly: iwtp://.

This, we conjecture, abbreviates “Inter-World Transfer Protocol” — the very technology to which JSR himself alludes at the beginning of the interview. We rush to add that if this is in fact what explains the origin of the document, if PLOOI exists in a “nearby possible world” but not in our own, then of course the JSR who gave the interview is not quite the same one currently “shit deep in university admin”, but is rather, to appeal again to the same terminology he uses in the interview, a “counterpart-JSR”, one who inhabits a world that does have room in it for PLOOI, one in which The Hinternet by contrast does not seem to exist (at least not in the form we ourselves know and love), … and indeed one in which, we sincerely hope, JSR, or JSR*, finds himself relatively less burdened by bureaucratic duties, and relatively freer to pass his days doing what he loves.

We confess we do not at all understand the metaphysics of inter-world transfer, if that is what we are witnessing here. The Oort Cloud Review itself, of course, takes up the theme of many-worlds realism, but only —or so we long thought— as one of several of its finely woven and purely fictional leitmotifs. Whether we were right to cordon it off in this way, or whether inter-world transfer is in fact the key to understanding the entire work, both how it came to be and what it aims to do, is a question clearly in need of further investigation (see Oort Cloud Review, Volume 1, Issue 2, forthcoming, c. 2029). —The Editors

L’Exception française

Mary Cadwalladr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:07:56 GMT

Traduit de l’anglais (Pays de Galles), non sans peine, par Hélène Le Goff.

Les titres de chansons en gras doivent obligatoirement être écoutés. Leur écoute fait partie intégrante de la lecture. —MC

Read in English

Ce n’est pas, me semble-t-il, que la plupart des êtres humains soient dépourvus de talent — car, au fond, ne sommes-nous pas tous le reflet d'un seul et même Dieu ? —, mais qu'ils retiennent la part d'artistes qui est en eux, par peur de s'aventurer hors du réel afin d'y créer librement, puis de ne plus savoir y revenir. Qu’il s’agisse d’un interprète acclamé, dépositaire d’une tradition vénérable, ou d’une âme perdue qui improvise devant les passants dans la rue pour quelques pièces parce qu’elle ne peut faire autrement, l’un comme l’autre se sont, le temps de leur performance, arrachés à la même réalité. Or il y a toujours, dans l’art, le risque qu’une fois sorti de la forteresse du réel, on ne sache plus y rentrer. En ce sens, il faut reconnaître que les artistes, même ceux qui n’auraient pas pu vivre autrement, ne se distinguent pas seulement, ni même tout d’abord, par leur talent, mais par leur courage.

L’enfance de Jacques Brel ne laisse guère présager la découverte du courage qui sera un jour le sien. Né en 1929 dans une ville de province belge, d’un père francophone et d’une mère flamande — dont la langue affleurera parfois dans son œuvre, notamment dans « Marieke » (1961) —, le jeune Brel se distingue surtout au sein du club de football local et dans des activités caritatives catholiques. Son entrée dans l’entreprise familiale, spécialisée dans la fabrication de boîtes en carton, paraît presque comme si tout conspirait à l’enfermer dans une existence faite de langage ordinaire et d’échanges prosaïques. Il se marie jeune et devient père de bonne heure, comme les Flamands le font sans trop y réfléchir — du moins si l’on en croit les paroles de « Les Flamandes » (1958).

Puis, au milieu de la vingtaine, tout explose. Je ne veux pas dire seulement qu’il fait une entrée fracassante sur la scène musicale ; je veux dire qu’il explose en chansons dans le sens où il fait voler en éclats, par la transfiguration artistique — comme les logiciens médiévaux étaient censés « faire exploser » leurs prémisses en les réduisant à la contradiction —, ce monde ordinaire et prosaïque auquel son destin semblait devoir le confiner.

II.

La carrière de Jacques Brel débute à une époque où le monde anglophone connaît lui aussi une véritable explosion musicale, et toute sérieuse appréciation critique de son œuvre nous oblige à nous demander si ces deux phénomènes simultanés procèdent ou non d’une même cause.

Il me semble parfois que Brel a dû jouer un rôle démesuré en retardant la véritable percée du rock’n’roll dans l’espace francophone, comme s’il avait absorbé à lui seul toute l’énergie dont celui-ci aurait eu besoin pour s’y imposer. Au milieu des années 1950, la culture juvénile de l’Anglosphère — ainsi que de ses territoires vassaux — avait pratiquement effacé toute survivance de la sensibilité des parents, au profit d’un nouveau style musical et d’une nouvelle attitude culturelle qui tournaient résolument le dos au passé : non seulement aux crooners et aux autres ancêtres musicaux issus de l’entre-deux-guerres, mais aussi à cette culture née de la Grande Guerre elle-même, avec ses chants de résistance, de fraternité et de solidarité. À la place, les jeunes chantaient des syllabes dénuées de sens comme « tutti frutti » — un non-sens du moins relativement à leur propre communauté linguistique —, des automobiles, du sexe, des hula-hoops, enfin de tout, ou presque, sauf de la guerre. Dans l’Europe francophone, en revanche, l’esthétique du music-hall d’avant-guerre et les grands motifs lyriques hérités des années d’occupation conservèrent, pendant une bonne décennie encore, une position centrale : parce que la mémoire de la guerre demeurait omniprésente, et parce que les poètes qu’elle avait produits étaient tout simplement trop grands.

Brel lui-même prend rarement la guerre, qui s’était achevée lorsqu’il avait seize ans, pour sujet explicite. Pourtant, ses textes nous ramènent sans cesse vers des paysages et des états d’âme qui ne prennent pleinement sens que sur le fond de ce traumatisme. « Fernand » (1965) raconte la mort d’un ami et l’étrange irréalité qui enveloppe son convoi funèbre à travers Paris. L’accompagnement y est réduit à presque rien ; la chanson est avant tout un récit de trouvère, porté par une lente pulsation aux vertus presque antalgiques, raconté du point de vue d’un homme des bas-fonds de Paris, tel qu’on aurait pu en rencontrer dans L’Assommoir de Zola (1876). Le récit demeure trop allusif pour que l’on puisse situer avec certitude l’époque où il se déroule. Mais ses vers les plus saisissants suggèrent au moins que nous sommes sous l’Occupation :

Dire qu’on traverse Paris
Dans le tout p’tit matin
Dire qu’on traverse Paris
Et qu’on dirait Berlin.

L’année précédente, en 1964, Barbara, chanteuse d’origine juive ukrainienne, avait connu un immense succès avec « Göttingen », dont les paroles célèbrent l’unité que Français et Allemands partagent depuis l’aube de l’histoire : un même climat, un même fonds de folklore, des dynasties royales entremêlées, une sensibilité poétique commune. Elle va jusqu’à invoquer l’esprit des frères Grimm et chante même que c’est à Göttingen qu’est née la formule « Il était une fois ». On a souvent vu dans cette chanson l’annonce d’une ère nouvelle de réconciliation après la guerre : l’avant-garde culturelle de ce qui était en train de devenir le projet politique de l’Union européenne.

En 1964, le monde anglophone, à l’inverse, n’a guère perçu l’intérêt de chanter une réconciliation sentimentale avec les Allemands. Les Allemands avaient été défaits, et l’on ne répond pas à une défaite par la fraternité, mais par le paternalisme ; non par la réconciliation, mais par la reconstruction ; non par la redécouverte d’une histoire commune, mais par l’imposition d’une nouvelle histoire nouvelle sous un nouvel empire. L’aile culturelle du plan Marshall mettait en scène Elvis en uniforme, des caricatures kitsch de Fräulein dans des Biergärten, ou encore Wayne Newton chantant des paroles qui sonnaient, aux oreilles américaines, comme donka shane. Dans l’imaginaire des États-Unis, l’Allemagne a toujours été la Bavière, avec son hospitalité relativement chaleureuses et ses voyelles excentriques, bien davantage que l’Allemagne spirituelle des Flachländer, selon l’expression par laquelle Hans Castorp désigne sa propre appartenance régionale. La culture populaire française, elle, accomplissait manifestement tout autre chose. Elle travaillait le traumatisme historique, la blessure infligée par sa plus proche nation sœur, tandis que les Américains assimilaient les mêmes événements à travers le prisme de la victoire.

J’en suis venu à penser qu’à travers la chanson française d’après-guerre on peut entendre, pour peu qu’on y prête l’oreille, le souci de la France de préserver son ancienne identité continentale contre l’emprise de l’ordre atlantiste dominé par les États-Unis.

III.

À cet égard, la modeste irruption du rock français au début des années 1960, si souvent interprétée comme un bouillonnement culturel saluant l’avènement des Trente Glorieuses, ne constitue guère plus qu’un épisode secondaire, marqué pour l’essentiel par l’imitation et la médiocrité. L’histoire qui importe vraiment n’est pas celle de l’adoption d’un nouveau langage musical mondial, mais celle de la survivance d’une forme musicale entièrement autochtone : la chanson, grande forme musicale vernaculaire de la France.

Les régions de l’Europe d’après-guerre sous occupation américaine, de jure ou de facto — l’Allemagne et l’Angleterre étant les exemples les plus marquants de ces deux catégories — servirent très tôt de relais essentiels à la diffusion mondiale du rock’n’roll. L’histoire de la France dans la même période, en revanche, donne presque l’impression d’un univers parallèle : on y trouve bien quelques tentatives, lost in translation, de recréer l’esprit du rock, mais surtout la survivance beaucoup plus vigoureuse de formes musicales et de styles d’interprétation hérités de l’avant-guerre et de l’entre-deux-guerres, lesquels, dans une autre Europe occupée et quasi-américanisée, auraient pu être légitimement classés, à l’instar des livres disparus des bibliothèques allemandes sous les bombardements alliés, sous la mention Kriegsverlust.

C’est en ce sens que celui qui empêcha véritablement le rock’n’roll de prendre racine en France fut bien davantage de Gaulle lui-même — dont le seul nom dit assez de quelle patria il se réclamait — qu’aucun musicien ou artiste en particulier, pas même Jacques Brel. Il est toutefois peu vraisemblable que cette politique de protectionnisme culturel eût pu se maintenir aussi longtemps sans le concours, une fois encore, d’un nombre suffisant d’artistes continuant à faire vivre les genres anciens avec une intensité émotionnelle suffisante, avec une force de transgression suffisante, avec suffisamment de sueur, pour que le manque du rock’n’roll ne se fasse guère sentir.

En Allemagne, bien avant que le musicien de rue itinérant japonais Damo Suzuki ne s’associe au disciple de Stockhausen Holger Czukay pour donner naissance au Krautrock sur les ruines de l’Axe, Little Richard et les Beatles tournaient déjà en boucle dans les boîtes de nuit de l’occupation. Le plus démoniaque et le plus sublime des enregistrements de toute l’histoire du rock’n’roll — aujourd’hui encore — fut réalisé à Hambourg, lorsque Jerry Lee Lewis se produisit au Star-Club en 1964. Son groupe d’accompagnement était celui des Nashville Teens, tous des Anglais naturellement : déjà à cette époque-là, leur pays avait pleinement fait de cet art américain quelque chose qui lui appartenait en propre et lui avait insufflé un élément de génie national. L’« indie rock » était déjà en gestation dans les collèges résidentiels d’Oxford et de Cambridge, où une nouvelle espèce d’intellectuels chevelus étudiait avec passion les paroles de Robert Johnson et de Ma Rainey dans un esprit qui n’était pas sans rappeler celui avec lequel, quelques siècles plus tôt, on aurait pu, dans ces mêmes murs, étudier en cachette John Dee.

Un regard superficiel pourrait donner l’impression que des évolutions comparables étaient alors à l’œuvre en France. Dès 1963, Sylvie Vartan enregistrait une version française de « Twiste et chante », deux ans seulement après que Phil Medley en eut écrit l’original, et un an après que les Beatles en eurent fait un véritable phénomène. Son futur mari, Johnny Hallyday, que l’on allait, contre toute vraisemblance, ériger en « Elvis français », était déjà actif en France presque aussi tôt que Cliff Richard au Royaume-Uni. En 1963, les yéyés — Vartan, Françoise Hardy, France Gall et les autres — étaient déjà présentées comme en train de ravir la culture aux vétérans de la chanson sur le rive gauche, au premier rang desquels Jacques Brel et Georges Brassens. Serge Gainsbourg (né en 1928), qui appartenait à cette génération mais qui, contrairement aux autres, entretint jusqu’à sa fin peu glorieuse l’illusion d’être encore assez dans le coup — artistiquement comme sexuellement — pour suivre l’air du temps, chantait dès 1964 son intention d’aller « chercher ma Lolita / Chez les yéyé ».

Mais le phénomène yéyé relève bien davantage d’une imitation, à la cargo cult, des modes venues d’outre-Manche que d’un véritable enracinement du rock en France. En tant que genre commercial, il avait bien plus en commun avec la bubblegum pop américaine qu’avec, par exemple, le skiffle britannique. Lorsque des musiciens français se réclamant du rock commencent enfin à produire une œuvre véritablement originale ou novatrice — Magma, fondé en 1969, en étant un bon exemple —, c’est le plus souvent en puisant dans des traditions plus anciennes, théâtrales, avant-gardistes ou relevant de la science-fiction, tout en effaçant jusqu’au moindre signe de leur dette envers le blues, lequel, si l’on suit Keith Richards, demeure la condition sine qua non du rock proprement dit.

Pour l’essentiel, l’esprit du rock ne pénétra même pas les mouvements étudiants de Mai 68, dont la bande sonore française se construisit principalement autour du jazz. Cette musique avait déjà été pleinement acclimatée en France dès l’entre-deux-guerres avec la naissance du jazz manouche qui, en la personne de Django Reinhardt, compte parmi les plus grandes contributions à la musique populaire mondiale de tout le XXᵉ siècle. Tout se mit véritablement en place pour Django lorsqu’il découvrit, vers 1928, les premiers enregistrements de Louis Armstrong. Par la suite, les vagues successives du jazz américain — le hard bop, par exemple, lorsque Louis Malle choisit Miles Davis pour composer la musique d’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) — trouvèrent en France un chemin naturel vers leur acclimatation, sans rien de cette maladresse, lost in translation, qui allait longtemps grever l’importation du rock’n’roll. Lorsque, en 1971, les critiques Philippe Carles et Jean-Louis Comolli publièrent leur grand livre Free Jazz/Black Power, ils ne faisaient qu’expliciter une réalité sociale déjà bien établie : la contre-culture française faisait une place au jazz, tandis que le rock semblait voué à demeurer, pour l’essentiel, l’un des instruments de l’industrie culturelle capitaliste que la gauche étudiante entendait combattre. Ainsi le rock resta, en France, largement cantonnés au circuit des émissions de variétés, lisses, surproduites et privées de la charge politique révolutionnaire qu’ils portaient — ou étaient réputés porter — dans le monde anglophone entier.

Tandis que Cliff Richard voyait, tout naturellement et comme il se devait, son importance culturelle décliner après la Beatlemania, et plus encore avec l’avènement de la révolution psychédélique, des figures comme Johnny Hallyday ne cessaient, en France, de s’enraciner davantage dans le paysage culturel. Avec une esthétique qui évoque avant tout le décor des restaurants de la chaîne « Indiana » — vieilles pompes Standard Oil et fresques de chefs amérindiens coiffés de leurs parures de plumes —, et des récits de virées à Harley dans le Sud-Ouest américain, Hallyday n’aura participé à l’art américain qu’il aimait tant, ou dont dépendait si largement sa célébrité, que dans le sens le plus impitoyablement baudrillardien du terme. Il aimait raconter aux journalistes de Paris Match à quel point il goûtait la liberté anonyme de ses séjours américains. Mais il y a une excellente raison pour laquelle personne ne savait qui il était là-bas : il n’apporta absolument rien à la tradition musicale dont il se réclamait, et dont toute sa carrière simulacrale procédait.

Il est facile de ranger Hallyday parmi les ringards de la culture populaire et de ne plus y penser. Pourtant, même les vedettes du folk-rock français les plus prisées par la critique vivent le plus souvent, de la même façon, de leurs invocations répétées d’une Amérique non moins simulacrale. L’une des pires chansons jamais enregistrées est sans doute « Cent ans de plus » (1999) de Francis Cabrel. Musicalement, elle s’inscrit dans une filiation directe avec Graceland (1986) de Paul Simon ; son texte n’est qu’une creuse litanie de clins d’œil adressés aux grands noms du blues américain : Son House et Charlie Patton / Howlin’ Wolf et Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc. Harold Bloom nous rappelle que « l’anxiété de l’influence » est constitutive de toute poésie véritablement forte. Il ne suffit pas de nommer ses prédécesseurs ; il faut lutter avec eux. Or Cabrel n’éprouve aucune anxiété de l’influence, car il sait que pratiquement aucun héritier véritable de la tradition dont il s’est fait le satellite ne l’entendra jamais.

Dès l’origine donc, les vedettes françaises du blues, du rock et du folk entretenaient avec les musiciens américains qui les inspiraient à peu près le même rapport que les philosophes « continentaux » du circuit de la SPEP, tous affublés de leurs cordons de badges dans quelque colloque organisé au Sheraton de Milwaukee, disons, avec la classe intellectuelle parisienne : un rapport que résume au mieux un seul mot, « unidirectionnel ».

IV.

Mais réservons notre plus profond mépris à Gainsbourg, ce crétin. Épargnons-nous de refaire ici le procès de sa moralité, définitivement perdue à nos yeux depuis ce jour de 1986 où, invité aux côtés de Whitney Houston sur un plateau de télévision français, il souffla à notre reine, dans son anglais de lézard, devant un public en direct : I want to fuck you. Whitney conserva, avec un sang-froid remarquable, toute sa dignité, tandis que l’animateur Michel Drucker ne fit absolument rien pour remettre à sa place ce vieux lubrique en pleine déchéance. Il nous reste au moins ce document, qui rappelle durablement qui il était, la seule manière dont il savait se conduire en présence de la royauté musicale noir-américaine, le véritable rapport qu’il entretenait avec cette tradition. Il se comporte un peu mieux dans un mémorable duo enregistré en 1983 avec Screamin’ Jay Hawkins sur la composition humoristique de ce dernier, « Constipation Blues », mais, à vrai dire, sa contribution artistique ne dépasse guère un commentaire improvisé en français des paroles de Screamin’ Jay, manifestement enchanté de montrer qu’il a compris de quoi parle la chanson (« Il veut faire caca mais il peut pas ! », etc.).

Si Gainsbourg nous intéresse ici, c’est uniquement, une fois de plus, parce qu’il fut la seule grande figure de la génération de Brel à tenter sérieusement d’évoluer avec son temps et, à la fin des années 1960, d’emboîter le pas à cette aspiration nouvelle du rock anglophone vers des formes artistiques plus élevées, notamment à travers la forme narrative ambitieuse du concept album.

Ces tentatives tournent le plus souvent court, oscillant entre le décousu et l’à-peu-près inaudible. L’ambition artistique qui les anime ne les affranchit nullement, du reste, de la même attitude cargo cult à l'égard du rock que celle dont nous pouvions jusque-là exonérer les yéyé et autres productions du même ordre en l’attribuant aux seuls impératifs du marché. Le sample vocal tournant en boucle dans « Bonnie and Clyde » (1967), par exemple, ressemble à une pâle caricature des expérimentations de studio que les Beatles avaient mises au point au cours des années précédentes.

L'Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) est souvent célébré comme le chef-d’œuvre de Gainsbourg ; l'album mérite assurément l'attention de la critique, mais surtout parce qu’il marque les limites de toute tentative de faire évoluer la chanson vers les mêmes sommets d’expressivité artistique que Pink Floyd, par exemple, était bien mieux placé pour atteindre en partant du rock psychédélique. Pour ma part, c’est L’Homme à tête de chou (1976) que je tiens pour la plus grande réussite de Gainsbourg dans cette direction. Tout ce qui suit, en revanche — Love on the Beat (1984) au premier chef —, est d’une médiocrité presque risible, saturé de jeux de mots bilingues sur fond d’imaginaire américain — « Harley Davidson of a bitch », etc. — qui sont, à vrai dire, tout simplement affligeants, guère meilleurs que ces restaurateurs parisiens du bas de gamme qui baptisent leurs établissements « Chicken’s King » ou « Facefood ».

Autant que j’aie pu en juger, Jacques Brel ne chanta jamais un seul mot d’anglais ; au moment même où Gainsbourg obliquait vers une sorte d’avant-pop à la française, le chansonnier belge redoublait d’attachement à ces somptueuses ballades, saturées de cordes, que la contre-culture juvénile du monde anglophone était désormais toute disposée à congédier sous l’étiquette d'easy listening. À mes oreilles, la « Chanson des vieux amants » (1967) est l’une de ses plus grandes réussites ; elle semble venir d'un univers parallèle où le rock’n’roll n’aurait jamais existé. Musicalement, elle s’inscrit dans la tradition de la pop orchestrale d’un Nelson Riddle ou du 101 Strings Orchestra, tout en atteignant une profondeur d’expression et de sentiment égale à tout ce que la révolution rock a pu produire de plus intensément bathétique dans son exploration de l’expérience humaine à vif. Sur le plan des paroles, Brel continue de s’appuyer sur les reprises du passé simple (« Bien sûr nous eûmes des orages »), un temps verbal qui avait alors pratiquement disparu de la langue parlée. Il est impossible d’imaginer Françoise Hardy, occupée à raconter les petites histoires de ce que faisaient « les garçons et les filles de mon âge », recourir à un eut ou à un fut.

En demeurant fidèle à des formes musicales plus anciennes et plus conventionnelles, Brel réussit à être de son temps d’une manière qu’un imitateur anxieux comme Gainsbourg ne pouvait tout simplement pas atteindre. La « Chanson des vieux amants », avec « J’arrive » de l’année suivante et « Ne me quitte pas » de 1959, constituent à mes oreilles le sommet de son œuvre et compte parmi les contributions les plus durables et les plus importantes à l’art de la chanson au XXᵉ siècle. Cette dernière a bien sûr donné lieu à d’innombrables reprises ; la plus remarquable est sans doute celle de Nina Simone qui, dans un français approximatif mais avec une intensité presque égale à celle de Brel, en livre une interprétation bouleversante. Il est significatif, en revanche, que lorsque Brel lui-même la chante en néerlandais, sous le titre « Laat me niet alleen », on peine à y retrouver la même profondeur d’émotion. Quelle que soit la mesure dans laquelle l’art de Brel est née de sa propre identité ethnolinguistique fracturée, une chose est claire : le français en est l’unique langue d’expression — on pourrait même dire le médium.

Il n’est évidemment ni moins artificiel ni moins injuste d’opposer Brel à Gainsbourg que de le faire avec les Stones et les Beatles, Test Dept et Einstürzende Neubauten, ou n’importe quel autre pair d’entreprises artistiques parfaitement autonomes que les circonstances et le discours médiatique finissent par enfermer dans des orbites jumelles. Comme toujours, d’autres figures — des troisièmes particules, pour ainsi dire, le cas de Léo Ferré (né en 1916) étant particulièrement révélateur — viennent compliquer le tableau.

Sans doute le plus contre-culturel de tous les chansonniers de l’ancienne génération, Ferré semble avoir souffert de l’absence d’une forme musicale qui lui permît d’exprimer adéquatement sa propre philosophie de l’existence. Anarchiste convaincu, il adopte à la fin des années 1960 une femelle chimpanzé nommée Pépée et exigea qu’elle fût traitée en égale au sein du foyer Ferré. Le seul véritable obstacle à la paix domestique interspécifique entre primates tenait, selon lui, à l’idéologie étatiste bourgeoise. Sa propre fille fut obligée de parler de Pépée comme d’une sœur, et lorsque ses amis ou sa famille se plaignaient des violences répétées de la chimpanzé — morsures infligées aux visiteurs, vêtements arrachés, agressions sexuelles —, il refusait tout simplement de les entendre.

Un jour, alors que Ferré était en tournée, Pépée partit courir les bois avec Madeleine, femme de Léo, ainsi que quelques amis. Pépée tomba d’un arbre et se brisa la hanche, puis se montra encore plus aggressive que d’habitude envers quiconque tentait de l’approcher. Madeleine persuada alors un voisin, qui possédait un fusil de chasse, d’abréger les souffrances de la chimpanzé. Cette décision marqua le début d’un long et amer divorce. Plus important pour nous, la mort de Pépée inspira ce qui est sans doute, très sérieusement, la pire chanson du XXᵉ siècle : « Pépée » (1969). Et contrairement à la mauvaise chanson de Cabrel brièvement évoquée plus haut, « Pépée » est mauvaise d’une manière qui exige tout simplement qu’on l’entende au moins une fois.

Il faut bien reconnaître qu’on y trouve quelques vers réussis, en particulier cette pique de bonne humeur contre un certain contemporain aux oreilles décollées :

T’avais les oreilles de Gainsbourg
Mais toi t’avais pas besoin d’scotch
Pour les replier la nuit
Tandis que lui... ben oui !

Il reste qu’on attend une résolution qui ne vient jamais, une prise de conscience, ne serait-ce qu’implicite, qu’en consacrant son talent de compositeur — si talent il y a — à l’élégie d’une chimpanzé tombée, un artiste s’aventure sur un terrain largement inexploré et qu’à ce titre il lui faut, dans une certaine mesure, s’arracher à la pure immédiateté de sa douleur pour parvenir à communiquer quelque chose à un public. Mais il ne semble pas y avoir de public du tout. À mesure que la chanson s’enlise et que Ferré s’abîme dans une douleur toujours plus amère en répétant les derniers mots, « On couche toujours avec des morts », on comprend sans peine que la mort de Pépée l’a véritablement déchiré. On comprend tout aussi clairement qu’il lui manque cette capacité proprement artistique qui seule aurait pu transmuer son deuil en une œuvre digne d’être partagée. Écouter « Pépée » n’est pas une expérience esthétique, au sens plein du terme ; c’est plutôt comme s’asseoir, gêné, à côté de Ferré tandis qu’il sanglote sur un banc public.

On ne peut d’ailleurs s’empêcher de soupçonner que d’autres traditions musicales se prêtent peut-être davantage à l’exploration d’expériences humaines aussi exceptionnelles que celle-ci, et que Ferré, à sa manière, se heurte, tout comme Gainsbourg, aux limites mêmes de la tradition chansonnière. On revient alors avec un immense soulagement au chef-d’œuvre que Georges Brassens a donné au même genre, « Le Gorille » (1952), récit à la fois comique et poignant d’un singe fictif échappé de son zoo et lancé dans une série d’agressions sexuelles. Brassens a compris ce que Ferré a oublié : le chansonnier est un conteur, non un trafiquant de réalité.

C’était le récit, l’antique vocation du barde, qui constituait le cœur de la tradition de la chanson française (un ouvrage savant typique consacré à la chanson fait commencer son histoire au IXᵉ siècle, voire plus tôt). Les récits affrontent bel et bien le réel — et, dans la chanson d’après-guerre, cet affrontement portait souvent sur les réalités les plus terribles, dont la France commençait à peine à sortir, comme dans la très belle interprétation que Marcel Mouloudji donna de « La Complainte du partisan » (1954), aujourd’hui surtout connue à travers la reprise qu’en fit Leonard Cohen en 1969. Mais il s’agit d’un réel sublimé ; d’une histoire transfigurée par l’art et, par là même, rendue supportable.

Le rock’n’roll, né d’un refus juvénile de se livrer au moindre travail d’assimilation de l’histoire, abandonna du même coup, comme un fardeau devenu trop encombrant, l’antique art bardique de la narration. Lorsqu’il gagna un peu en maturité, après avoir pris du LSD et après s’être aperçu que « l’après-guerre » ne signifiait nullement que la guerre fût devenue une chose du passé, il s’assigna souvent la sombre tâche de montrer le réel tel qu’il est. Mais, s’étant déjà détaché de la longue tradition narrative, il peina souvent à le faire avec un succès artistique supérieur à celui de l’hommage que Ferré rendit à sa regrettée Pépée.

VI.

J’ai soutenu que la vie de l’artiste dépend autant du courage que du talent. Il faut y ajouter une troisième particule : la chance. La chance de rencontrer la forme d’art qui se révèle véritablement capable de porter sa sensibilité intime ; ou, peut-être plus encore, de vivre dans une société qui accorde sa pleine valeur à la forme d’art à laquelle on est naturellement le mieux disposé.

Jacques Brel réunissait ces trois qualités. Le talent, dans son cas, va simplement de soi. Quant aux circonstances biographiques qui ont fini par permettre à son courage de se manifester, elles demeurent pour l’essentiel un mystère : les connaître supposerait de savoir quelles fantasmagories obsessionnelles traversaient l’esprit du jeune homme tandis qu’il partageait son temps entre les activités de charité catholiques et la fabrique familiale de cartons.

Mais la chance, elle, relève du domaine public de l’histoire — de cette même histoire qui fit de la France un lieu de résistance à l’ordre trans-Atlantique émergent de l’après-guerre, où des lignées de chants beaucoup plus anciennes continuaient encore d’ordonner le monde autrement. On pouvait notamment y discerner un patrimoine culturel franco-allemand commun : l’ascendance partagée non seulement de « nos rois de France » avec diverses Helga et divers Hans, comme le chante Barbara dans « Göttingen », mais aussi celle des contes des frères Grimm et de La Fontaine.

Ces lignées de chants ne survécurent guère plus d’une dizaine d’années encore, et dès la fin des années 1960, avec des artistes comme Gainsbourg et Ferré, on commence déjà à entendre leur signal s’affaiblir. Comme tant d’autres phénomènes — Internet, Uber, la financiarisation de l’enseignement supérieur —, les bouleversements de la modernité atteignent systématiquement la France avec une dizaine d’années de retard. Le protectionnisme culturel n’est parfois qu’une nuisance. Dans le cas de la chanson d’après-guerre, il fut rien de moins qu’une période de grâce.

Playlist complète sous le contenu réservé aux abonnés.

The Most Beautiful Short Story Ever Written

Hinternet Editorial Board — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:58:53 GMT

We had a great session yesterday of The Hinternet’s Summer Literature Livestream siscussion series, in which we discussed, among other things, the historical evolution of the Russian language, some o…

The French Exception

Mary Cadwalladr — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:02:44 GMT

[Song titles featured in bold are required listening. The listening is part of the reading. —MC]

lire en français

I.

It is not, I do not think, that most people lack talent —for in the end are we not all mirrors of the same God?—, but that most hold their artist selves back for fear of being unable to maintain the power to create, free from the constraints of reality, without losing contact with that reality altogether. Both a lauded performer working in a venerable tradition, and a lost soul jibbering before a crowd in a lively city square for spare change because he can do no otherwise, have tapped out of the same reality, at least for the duration of the performance, and there is always some risk, with art, that once you have left the fortress of the real in this way you will not be able to return. To this extent, one must say that artists, even those who could not have done otherwise, are not distinguished exclusively or primarily by their talent, but by their courage.

There is little in Jacques Brel’s early biography that would enable us to predict the eventual discovery of his own courage. Born in a provincial Belgian city in 1929 to a French-speaking father and a Flemish mother (whose language will occasionally surface in Brel’s oeuvre, as in “Marieke” (1961)), the young Brel would distinguish himself mostly in the local soccer club and in Catholic charity work. His early employment in the family business, something to do with the manufacture of cardboard boxes, would seem as if designed by the fates to keep him in a life of everyday plain speech and unpoetic transaction. He got married and became a father early, as Flems unthinkingly do — according to the lyrics of “Les Flamandes” (1958).

And then in his mid-twenties he exploded. I don’t mean only that he exploded onto the scene; I mean he exploded in song, and he exploded, too, through artistic transfiguration —as medieval logicians are said to “explode” their premises through contradiction— the ordinary prosaic world that had been expected to contain him.

II.

Brel’s career begins at a moment of significant musical explosiveness in the Anglophone world as well, and our critical assessment of him requires at least some concern to determine whether these simultaneous instances of it may be traced back to the same cause.

It has sometimes seemed to me, indeed, that Brel must have played an outsized role in delaying any real successful implantation of rock and roll in the Francophone world, that he was sucking up all the energy rock and roll would have needed for itself. By the mid-1950s youth culture in the Anglosphere and its vassal territories had suppressed any enduring echo of parental sensibilities, in favor of a new musical style and cultural attitude that disdained the past altogether — not just the crooners and other species of musical ancestor from the entre-deux-guerres, but the culture that sprang up from within the war itself, with its songs of partisanship, resistance, and solidarity. The youth sang nonsense words instead, like “tutti frutti” (nonsense, at least, relative to their own linguistic community), and of automobiles and fucking and hula-hoops and anything really but the war. In Francophone Europe by contrast both pre-war music-hall style and wartime lyrical leitmotifs lingered on almost monopolistically for another solid decade — because the war was still so present, and because its poets were just so good.

Brel seldom sings of the war directly, which ended when he was 16. But his texts constantly return us to the landscapes and sentiments that could only make sense against the background of that trauma. “Fernand” (1965) tells the story of a friend who has died, and of the feeling of unreality hanging over his funeral procession through Paris. The song has little in the way of arrangement or orchestration, but is pure bardic storytelling locked into some kind of opioid-painkilling groove, told from the point of view of someone inhabiting les bas-fonds of Paris, such as you might also have found in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1876). The narrative is too allusive and non-committal to tell you precisely when it is taking place, but the song’s rawest lines at least suggest that we are under occupation:

Dire qu’on traverse Paris
Dans le tout p’tit matin
Dire qu’on traverse Paris
Et qu’on dirait Berlin.

One year earlier, in 1964, the mononymous chanteuse Barbara, of Ukrainian Jewish origin, had her great hit “Göttingen”, whose lyrics celebrate the ancient unity of French and German climate, folklore, royal dynasties, poetic sensibility — even evoking the spirit of the Brothers Grimm, she even sings that it was in Göttingen that the phrase Il était une fois [“Once upon a time”] was born. This song has often been credited with ushering in a new era of post-war reconciliation — the cultural vanguard of the political project of the EU.

In 1964 the English-speaking world by contrast had little time for songs of romantic reconciliation with the Germans. The Germans had been defeated, and the appropriate response to defeat is not fraternal but paternal; not reconciliation but reconstruction; not rediscovery of shared history, but imposition of a new history under a new empire. The Marshall Plan’s cultural wing would feature Elvis in uniform, kitsch caricature of Fräulein in Biergärten, and Wayne Newton singing what sounded for all the world like donka shane (the Germany of the American imagination has always been Bavaria, with its relative cultural warmth and its deviant umlauts — it has not been the spiritual Germany of the “Flatlanders”, as Hans Castorp describes his own subnationality). French popular culture, plainly, was doing something much more serious. It was processing historical trauma, a vicious wound from its most dear twin nation, even as the Americans were processing the same historical events through a lens of triumph. I’ve come to think in this respect that in post-war chanson you can hear, if you listen, France’s concern to preserve its ancient continental identity against the encroachment of the American-led Atlantic order.

III.

In this regard the minor explosion of rock français in the early 1960s, so often interpreted as a cultural effervescence hailing the arrival of the trente glorieuses, is little more than a side story, characterized for the most part by derivativeness and mediocrity. The more important story is not the adoption of a new global musical style, but the survival of an entirely indigenous one, chanson, as the great vernacular musical form of post-war France.

The portions of post-war Europe under de-dicto or de-facto American occupation —Germany and England most notably under those two headings— served as crucial early vectors for the global spread of rock and roll, while the post-war history of France shows us something like an alternate universe, of a few lost-in-translation attempts at recreating the rock spirit, but mostly of a much more robust survival of pre-war and interwar musical forms and performance styles that in occupied Europe might appropriately be marked, like the books that disappeared from German libraries under Allied bombardment, with the label Kriegsverlust.

It is in this sense much more de Gaulle, whose name itself tells you of what Patria he is, than any individual artist, not even Jacques Brel, who kept rock and roll fully from taking root. Yet it is unlikely that this mostly unconscious policy of cultural protectionism could have worked for as long as it did if there had not been, again, a sufficient number of artists working in the old genres, with sufficient emotional intensity, and often with sufficient transgressive power, with sufficient sweat, to ensure that rock and roll should hardly be missed.

In Germany, long before the wandering Japanese busker Damo Suzuki teamed up with the Stockhausen-disciple Holger Czukay to birth Krautrock out of the ruins of the Axis, Little Richard and the Beatles were on heavy rotation through the occupation nightclub circuit. The most evil and sublime concert recording in rock and roll history, even to this day, was made in Hamburg, when Jerry Lee Lewis played there at the Star Club in 1964. His backing band were the Nashville Teens, of England, naturally, a country that by that year had already completely indigenized this American art form and injected it with its own sort of national genius. “Indie rock” was already incubating in the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, where a new species of long-haired eggheads was busily studying the lyrics of Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey with something of the same spirit in which one might, in those same halls, centuries before, have studied John Dee on the down-low.

A casual glance might suggest similar developments taking place in France. Sylvie Vartan was doing a French version of “Twiste et chante” by 1963, just two years after Phil Medley wrote it and one year after the Beatles made it into a cultural touchstone. Vartan’s future husband Johnny Hallyday, improbably thrust into the roll of “French Elvis”, had been active in that country almost as early as Cliff Richard in the UK. The yéyé girls, including Vartan as well as Françoise Hardy, France Gall, and others, were reported by 1963 to be taking over popular culture from the oldhead rive-gauche stars of chanson, notably Brel and Georges Brassens. Serge Gainsbourg (b. 1928), who belonged to this earlier generation but unlike the others entertained until his ignoble end a fantasy of himself as sufficiently in shape —artistically, sexually— to keep up with the changing times, was singing by 1964 of his intention to chercher ma Lolita / Chez les yéyé.

But the yéyé phenomenon is much more a cargo-cult imitation of outre-Manche style than a sign of rock’s successful French enracinement. As a commercial genre, it shared more in the nature of American bubblegum than of, say, UK skiffle. When nominally rock-oriented French musicians finally begin to do anything original or pioneering, such as Magma, formed in 1969, this is typically by drawing on older theatrical and avant-garde and sci-fi tradition, and altogether shedding any hint of a debt to the blues, which, if we agree with Keith Richards, must always remain a sine-qua-non of rock as such.

For the most part, the spirit of rock failed even to penetrate the student protests of May, 1968, whose French soundtrack was principally built up around jazz. This music had been fully, and ingeniously, indigenized already in the interwar period with the birth of “gypsy jazz” — which indeed, in the person of Django Reinhardt, is among the greatest contributions to global popular music of the entire 20th century. It had all come together for Django when he got his hands on some early Louis Armstrong recordings, circa 1928, and after that successive waves of American jazz influence —as for example of hard bop, when Louis Malle selected Miles Davis to create the soundtrack for Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958)—, found an easy path to naturalization in France without any of the lost-in-translation clumsiness that would long complicate the importation of rock and roll. When in 1971 French music critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli published their influential book, Free Jazz/Black Power, they were only making explicit what was already an established social fact: that the French counterculture had room for jazz, while rock was destined to remain mostly an arm of the capitalist culture industry that the student left was committed to opposing. As such the superficial signifiers of rock were to remain mostly anchored, in France, to the circuit of the television variety shows, glossy and overproduced and denuded of the revolutionary political charge they carried, or were believed to carry, throughout the Anglosphere.

While Cliff Richard naturally and fittingly retreated in cultural significance after Beatlemania, and even more so after the advent of psychedelia, in France the likes of Johnny Hallyday only grew more culturally entrenched. With an aesthetic essentially the same as the décor you might find inside that French restaurant chain called “Indiana”, with its old Standard Oil pumps and its scenes of Native chiefs in full headgear, with tales of vacations riding around the American Southwest on his Harley, Hallyday can be said to have participated in the American art form he so loved, or on which his fame so depended, only in the most unforgivingly Baudrillardian sense of participation. He liked to tell the reporters from Paris Match how much he valued the anonymous freedom of his American sojourns. But there’s a very good reason why no one knew who he was there: he made no real contribution at all to the musical tradition that came from there, and that entirely made his simulacral career.

It is easy to slot Hallyday as a cultural cheeseball and to think no more of him, but even critically favored folk-rock figures on the French scene typically manage to get by on repeated invocations of a no less simulacral America. Surely one of the worst songs ever recorded is Francis Cabrel’s “Cent ans de plus” (1999). Musically in a direct line of derivation from Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986), this song’s lyrics are a litany of empty shout-outs to American blues masters: Son House et Charlie Patton / Howlin’ Wolf et Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc. Harold Bloom reminds us that the anxiety of influence is positively constitutive of strong poetry. You must not only name your forebears; you must wrestle with them. But Cabrel has no anxiety of influence, because he knows that practically no one truly native to the tradition to which he has set himself up as a satellite is ever going to hear him.

From the beginning, then, the stars of French blues, rock, and folk had roughly the same relationship to the American musicians inspiring them that American “continental” philosophers on the SPEP circuit, all lanyarded up at some conference in a Sheraton in Milwaukee, have to the Parisian intellectual class — a relationship best summed up by the word “unidirectional”.

IV.

But let us save our liveliest scorn for Gainsbourg, that cretin. Let us try not to relitigate his moral character, pushed beyond redemption, in our view, the day in 1986 when he appeared alongside Whitney Houston on a French talk show, and muttered to our queen, in his lizard-English, before a live audience: “I want to fuck you.” Whitney, remarkably, retained her composure, while the host Michel Drucker did nothing at all to put the disintegrating old lecher in his place — but at least we have this enduring document to remind us of who he was, of how he could only conduct himself in the presence of Black American musical royalty, of how he really related to that tradition. He behaves somewhat better in a memorable 1983 duet with the great Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, on the latter’s “novelty” composition, “Constipation Blues”, though the truth is he adds little more, artistically, than a running side-commentary in French on Screamin’ Jay’s lyrics, evidently pleased with himself for understanding what the song is all about (Il veut faire caca mais il peut pas, etc.).

But if Gainsbourg is of interest to us here, this is only, again, to the extent that he is the one prominent figure from Brel’s generation seriously to attempt to change with the times and, by the end of the 1960s, to follow the new aspiration of Anglosphere rock towards relatively higher registers of artistic seriousness, in particular in the ambitious narrative form of the concept album.

His efforts here largely misfire, and tend to move up and down on a scale with “meandering” and “unlistenable” at its endpoints. Nor does the artistically ambitious vision liberate these efforts from the same cargo-cult-like stance towards rock and roll that we had previously, with yéyé and related trifles, been able to write off to the commercial imperatives driving the show. The tape-loop-like vocal sample on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), for example, seems a mockery of the studio experimentation the Beatles had innovated over the previous few years. L’Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) has been hailed as Gainsbourg’s conceptual masterpiece, and it is indeed critically noteworthy, but mostly as marking out the limits of any attempted evolution from chanson into the same registers of high-art expressivity that Pink Floyd, say, were much better positioned to explore from an initial starting point in psychedelia. I personally consider L’Homme à tête de chou (1976) to be Gainsbourg’s greatest contribution in this vein, while everything after that, notably 1984’s Love on the Beat, is almost laughably bad, overstuffed with bilingual Americana-themed wordplay —“Harley Davidson of a bitch”, etc.— that is, quite frankly, just awful, no better than the bottom-end restaurateurs of Paris calling themselves by names such as “Chicken’s King” or “Facefood”.

As far as I have been able to determine, Jacques Brel never sang so much as a single word in English, and at the very moment Gainsbourg was veering off into some kind of French inflection of global avant-pop, the Belgian singer was doubling down on the most sumptuous, treacly, string-heavy ballads of the sort that the Anglosphere’s youth counterculture was by now primed to dismiss as “easy listening”. To my mind Brel’s “Chanson des vieux amants” of 1967 is one of his most gorgeous accomplishments, and it seems to come from a parallel universe where rock and roll never happened. Musically it follows in the orchestral-pop spirit of Nelson Riddle or the 101 Strings Orchestra, yet the depth of expressivity and feeling in it are as great as anything comparable in the rock revolution’s most bathetic excavations of raw human experience. Lyrically, Brel continues to rely on repetitions of the French passé simple (Bien sûr nous eûmes des orages) that had all but disappeared from everyday speech. It is impossible to imagine Françoise Hardy, with her minor tales of what les garçons et les filles de mon âge were getting up to, ever resorting to an eut or a fut.

By remaining true to older and “squarer” musical forms, Brel managed to keep up with the times in a way an anxious and self-hating borrower like Gainsbourg never could. The “Chanson des vieux amants”, alongside the following year’s “J’arrive” and the early “Ne me quitte pas” (1959), are in my view the crowning achievements of Brel’s career, and among the most enduring and significant contributions to 20th-century songwriting at a global scale. The latter of these has of course been ingeniously covered by many English-language artists, not least, in some kind of French and with nearly as much feeling as Brel’s original, by Nina Simone. Significantly, when Brel himself performs it in Dutch, as “Laat me niet alleen”, it is difficult to discern the same depth of feeling. To whatever extent Brel’s artistry is shaped by his own fractured ethnolinguistic identity, it is plain that French is the exclusive langue d’expression, one might say the medium, of his art.

V.

It is of course no less artificial, no less unfair, to contrast Brel and Gainsbourg than to do the same with the Stones and the Beatles, or with Test Dept and Einstürzende Neubauten, or any other pair of fully autonomous artistic endeavors that happen to get locked into twinned orbits by dint of circumstance and by media spin. As always, other figures —third particles as it were— complicate the picture, notably the Monegasque singer Léo Ferré (b. 1916).

Surely the most countercultural of all the older chansonniers, Ferré seems to have suffered from the absence of a musical form that might permit him to convey an accurate report of his own life-philosophy. A committed anarchist, in the late 1960s Ferré adopted a female chimpanzee by the name of Pépée, and insisted on treating her as a full equal within the Ferré household. The only real obstacle to interspecies domestic tranquility among primates, he believed, was bourgeois statist ideology. His own daughter was compelled to speak of Pépée as a sister, and when friends and family complained about the chimp’s repeated acts of aggression —biting visitors, tearing their clothes off, sexually assaulting them—, he would hear none of it.

Once, when Ferré was on tour, Pépée had been out on a ramble in the forest with his wife Madeleine and some friends. Pépée fell from a tree and broke her hip, and grew unusually aggressive to anyone who approached her. Madeleine convinced one of the neighbors, who owned a hunting rifle, to put the chimp out of her misery. This decision on Madeleine’s part was the beginning of a long and rancunious divorce. More importantly for our purposes, Pépée’s death inspired what must truly be the worst song of the 20th century, “Pépée” (1969). And unlike Cabrel’s bad song briefly evoked above, “Pépée” is bad in a way that simply requires you to hear it at least once. Here it is:

There are, admittedly, some satisfying lines, especially this jovial dig against a certain flap-eared contemporary:

T’avais les oreilles de Gainsbourg
Mais toi t’avais pas besoin d’scotch
Pour les replier la nuit
Tandis que lui ... ben oui !

Still, one expects some resolution that simply never comes, some acknowledgment that an artist is entering into largely uncharted territory in turning his songwriting talents, such as they are, to eulogizing a chimpanzee, and to that extent one simply has to step out of one’s own raw emotions in order to communicate something to an intended audience. But there does not seem to be an intended audience at all, and as the song grinds on and Ferré sinks into the bitter deep emotion in repetition of the final line, On couche toujours avec des morts, you cannot fail to understand that he is sincerely torn apart by Pépée’s death, but that he entirely lacks the artistic ability that would be necessary to sublimate his mourning into anything worthy of being shared. To listen to “Pépée” is no more an aesthetic experience, properly understood, than to sit awkwardly next to Ferré as he sobs on a public bench.

One also can’t help but suspect that other musical traditions might be at least somewhat better suited to facilitate the exploration of such rare extremes of human experience as this, and that Ferré, in his own way, like Gainsbourg, is bumping up against the limits of chanson. And one returns with great relief to Georges Brassens’ perfect contribution to the genre, “Le Gorille” (1952), a comic and poignant tale of a fictional ape that has escaped from the zoo and gone on a rampage of sexual assault. Brassens understands what Ferré has forgotten: that a chansonnier is a storyteller, not a reality-monger.

VI.

It was storytelling, the ancient lot of the bard, that lay at the heart of the chanson tradition (a typical scholarly work on chanson begins its historical survey in the 9th century or earlier). Stories do confront reality — indeed much of this confrontation in post-war chanson was with the very grimmest of realities, out of which France had only just emerged, as in Marcel Mouloudji’s deeply moving version of “La Complainte du partisan” (1954), better known to most of us through Leonard Cohen’s cover from 1969. But this is reality sublimated; this is history processed through art and in that way made livable.

Rock and roll, which emerged in a spirit of youthful refusal to do the work of historical processing at all, correspondingly abandoned, as far too cumbersome, the old bardic art of narration. When it grew up a bit, after it dropped acid and after it noticed that “post-war” did not at all mean that war had become a thing of the past, it often took upon itself the somber duty of exposing reality for what it is — but now, having already detached itself from long narrative tradition, often struggled to do so with any more artistic success than Ferré’s tribute to his dearly departed Pépée.

I have said that the life of the artist has as much to do with courage as with talent. A third particle in the mix here is of course luck — happening upon the art form that proves itself up to the task of conveying one’s inner sensibility, or, perhaps even more importantly, living in a society that values the art form to which one is innately best suited.

Jacques Brel had all three of these. The talent in his case is simply a given. The biographical circumstances that eventually permitted his courage to manifest itself are for their part mostly a mystery — to know them would be to know what obsessive fantasies were coursing through the young man’s mind as he went about his days in the Catholic charities or the cardboard-box factory.

But the luck of the whole thing, that’s the open record of history — the same history that made Brel’s adoptive France a site of resistance to the emerging post-war Atlantic order, where much older songlines could still be heard to order the world differently. In particular, one could still make out a shared Franco-German cultural patrimony, the common ancestry not just of “nos rois de France” with various Helgas and Hanses, as Barbara sang in “Göttingen”, but of the tales, too, of the Grimms and La Fontaine.

These songlines really only survived another ten years or so, and we begin to hear the failure of their signal in the likes of Gainsbourg and Ferré already by the end of the 1960s. As with so much else —the internet, Uber, the financialization of higher education—, France consistently shows up to the disruptions of modernity a decade or so late. Sometimes its cultural protectionism is nothing more than an inconvenience. In the case of post-war chanson, however, it was nothing less than a grace period.

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Sideways Reflexions on the Philosophy of Translation

Hinternet Editorial Board — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:31:56 GMT

1. Hinternet Summer Literature Livestreams

We had a wonderful first session of the Hinternet Summer Literature Livestreams. in which we discussed, among other things, Ryle, Quine, Cassin, Diagne, Sapi…

Mon Amérique à moi

Justin Smith-Ruiu — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:08:19 GMT

This is how American I am: my earliest memory, other than the likely constructed one of a dove I saw perched on a chain-link fence in 1974, is of the bicentennial celebrations two years later.

Grandpa Von had just laid a new concrete walkway in front of the Smith family’s semi-rural Orangevale home, a vernacular hole-ridden construction, surrounded in the front and back yards by concrete mixers and saw-horses and truck chassis and sun-brittled hoses, and raised up almost entirely from Von’s singular bricoleur spirit — always half-drunk, always jerry-rigging something or other. The concrete was still wet, so he wrote “July 4, 1976” in it and invited us to press our hands alongside that significant date.

No, more, this is how American I am: my other grandfather, on my mother’s side, or so I believed at the time and in some profound sense still believe today, was George Washington. I always knew this belief did not hold up, empirically. Grandpa John was born in Minnesota in 1912; our first president earlier and further East. But the rules of identity are different in such deep matters of belonging, and it was quite enough that both John and George were good old honest men, founders and structurers of everything I knew and everything I was, and that the silhouetted head on the US quarter bore a plain likeness to both of them.

American identity and belonging were thus traduced down to me by elders, and reached all the way back to a quasi-divine first ancestor. This, my subsequent reading has taught me, has been the primary mode of representing human community throughout all history, and prehistory. It is a powerful enough cognitive disposition to survive, incongruously and without explicit affirmation, even in the Westphalian era of state sovereignty.

I do not believe, ultimately, that any state’s claim to sovereignty is legitimate. I take the Westphalian order to be, if we’re lucky, a transitional phase, in itself still woefully backwards and irrational, on the way to a universal, cosmopolitan, perpetual peace; and, if we’re not so lucky, as the obscene flatus vocis that pompous men have delighted in emitting in these few final centuries of our planetary tenure. To this extent, if I acknowledge that I am a proud American at all, this pride is entirely wrapped up in the fact that my grandfather was an avatar of George Washington, and not in the fact that my country can, if it really wants to, kick your country’s ass (or at least end things with a double KO).

My belonging is of the old kind, the kind no less salient in nomadic societies than in sedentist ones, and what I’ve already described as the incongruity of this sense of belonging with the modern sense of patriotism might better be called an antinomy, one that weighs on my spirit every day, and only more heavily as I grow older and more world-weary.

On the one hand, it says, I know with absolute certainty that to invest so much as a drop of affective commitment in a state whose rulers would rather destroy the entire world than accept their own empire’s demise, who would take humanity and nature down along with themselves and their regime, out of animal spite alone, is really no more decent or fitting for the human spirit than to find oneself tragically in love with a psychopathic abuser. Our current world order is psychopathic, and to take the claim to sovereignty by nation-states as legitimate, to take the psycho-pimp-warlord who claims to be protecting us at his word, is to buttress this order and to remain under the terms of a murder-suicide pact that only desperate cowering creatures, not free human spirits, could ever accept.

I know all this sounds rather extreme, but I am a Christian pacifist and as I see it these statements follow, logically and inexorably, from my most basic convictions. In this regard I do not see them as “opinions”, but as the truth, which duty and conscience require me to declare.

On the other hand, there is something there, in America, that I love, just as surely as I love my grandfathers.

My ancestral patriotism is complicated by the fact that I have lived outside the United States for a very long time. Most recently, for the past 13 years, I have lived in Paris.

Things are not working out here, to be honest, as I had hoped. I certainly have no fellow-feeling at all with the American “expat” community, with its seemingly inexhaustible fondness for so many things about France that I either do not care about or actively dislike (long lunches, gastronomy, fashion…). At the same time I have utterly failed to assimilate, into French society in general, but, much more depressingly, into the academic culture that I imagined, at the age of 40, I was going to master in no time. I now find that culture completely repugnant, I see the very idea of trying to penetrate it as an utterly irrational waste of my limited time, and I laugh at myself of 13 years ago, who had such a ridiculous megrim in him as to aspire to become some strange imitation of a “French philosopher”, with that whole balletic performance of habitus that Pierre Bourdieu so perfectly exposed. Fuck that, time is short, and I’ve got work to do.

My certainty in this regard, and my commitment to my work, only grow deeper and clearer with each day. It’s the right path for me, but it is also, I admit, sad. I understand now, deep in my soul, those perplexed elderly immigrants I saw throughout my childhood in California, the ones who never learned the language, who relied on others, if they had others, to navigate their way through a social reality they simply accepted could never be their own. I do know the language, I carry on in it about Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant in front of captive audiences of French students, week after week, year after year. But other than teaching my primary engagement with French is reading Balzac and Proust and Madame de Sévigné on my very own couch. I can’t imagine ever switching to French as my primary language of expression. Sometimes I joke, though it isn’t really a joke, that moving to France has primarily been beneficial in improving my English — it has made me hyper-attentive to the millennium-long cross-channel hybridity of these two national idioms, and has enabled me so to speak to “Gallicize” my own language in ways that at least I find quite powerful.

Perhaps a better comparison is not to the old transplanted soul in San Francisco’s Chinatown, living out his days in a back room of his children’s dim-sum restaurant (my mom says that when she went there as a kid some of these old men still wore the plaited queue from the Qing Dynasty), but rather to the exiled Kurdish or Dagestani intellectual who spends his days in a brutalist Paris highrise apartment writing melancholy poems of the landscapes of his childhood. I walk by these fellows’ clubhouses sometimes — dingy, fluorescent-lit, with a TV mounted in one corner showing news in the language of their homeland, and a portrait of some deposed or imprisoned leader in another, they sit and play chess or dominoes with their co-ethnics, moustached, smoking. They’ve got even less of that French habitus than I do — but they’ve got each other.

I know I’m not actually in exile. I can go home. I do go home. Sort of. I mean, I cross the border and Officer Cisneros of the Customs and Border Patrol says “Welcome home”. Yet I’ve been away for so long now that it is as if I have become my own poor foreign cousin, marveling at the kitchens and showers of the Americans, and always wondering if I have what it takes ever to be let back in. I am now able, in a way that I think most Americans are not, to see the place as other do: as a looming and rather forbidding fortress, with incredible reserves of wealth and power inside.

At the same time, I carry that fortress inside me. It is more precisely, in my case, a Western American outpost, and I a living embodiment of the Turner thesis. I have often mocked the obscenely hypocritical practice of “land acknowledgments”, such as they are performed by the symbolic capitalist class, as the great Musa al-Gharbi calls it, throughout much of North America and Australia. But in fact these acknowledgments at the same time acknowledge the essential truth of the observation that our character was shaped, historically, by the conquest of a frontier, by the immeasurable violence that required, and by the historical forgetfulness that, once accomplished, was then required simply to move on. The Turner thesis, in this light, really is just a neutral expression of what in a more critical vein is articulated in terms of “settler-colonialism”. We blonde Californians really were shaped by a historical experience perhaps most comparable to that of the Voortrekkers. I myself am neither concerned to perform ritual public prostrations over this history, nor am I proud of it. But I do think that living outside the United States for so long has the salutary effect of enabling an American to see it for what it is.

Another lesson that life as an American in quasi-exile cannot fail to teach is just how American Black Americans and white Americans are. This is something it is particular difficult for white Americans who have not lived outside their country to see, with all its myths around race — reactionary myths and progressive myths alike. Black American culture is and always will be more legible to me, more familiar to me, closer to me, than, say, French culture of any social class or ethnic origin. The lives of my Black and Maghrebin neighbors here in Paris are almost entirely illegible to me. They talk about things I don’t understand — and these are for the most part the same things that my white university colleagues talk about. They are all united in their Frenchness, while I am on the outside. By contrast, I fly to San Francisco and I get on BART to go up through Oakland to the Amtrak station at Richmond and onward to Sacramento, and on the way a group of Black American teenagers sits down across from me — I understand every word. I don’t mean just the language, I mean the whole life-world from which the language pours. In this regard, to an expatriated American, it is hard not to see that the racism of poor white Americans, of the sort I witnessed in abundance in my earlier life, really is just the narcissism of minor differences — we are the same people.

Grandpa Von used to grumble when ads for the NAACP came on the television: “How about a National Association for the Advancement of White People?!” According to my father, his father’s last words to him, from his hospital bed at Kaiser Permanente, with the TV on just as it had been at essentially every moment of his life for the several decades preceding, was: “That Arsenio — he’s alright”. I don’t want to say this was an indication of any tremendous late-life moral improvement, but the fact remains that if by some improbable circumstance Charles Aznavour, say, had appeared on the screen above his hospital bed, Von would have given his very last drop of energy to reach for the zapper and turn that damned thing off. (My own father’s last words to me, incidentally, from his hospice bed at the veterans’ home in Barstow, California —and I’m not making this up—, were: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”)

Another lesson I’ve learned in these years of quasi-exile: anyone, potentially, can be an avatar of George Washington. It does not have to be passed down to you through your grandfather. Recall here Herman Melville’s description of Queequeg: that he “was George Washington, cannibalistically developed.” To this extent, I’ve come to think, American universalism at its most lofty expresses a spirit that already in antiquity was associated not with any particular empire or other polity, but with philosophy — an abstraction to which I myself am bound, for better or worse, no less than to the abstraction that is America. Thus Seneca wrote of this tradition: “If there is any good in philosophy, it is this — that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods.”

My Black and Maghrebin neighbors in Paris are here not because of anything that might plausibly be called the “French dream”, but because of the dynamics of collapsing empire. They know the acronyms of French bureaucracy inside and out, as I never will, but one seldom detects any romance in this — only brute geopolitical and migratory reality. Where else would one go?

In conversation with the very most down-and-out sans-papiers, at their squalid encampments beneath the 2 line near Stalingrad —the metro stop that is, named for the battle; the eponymous city has switched back to Volgograd— I have sometimes been asked if I can help these poor souls get “to Canada”. This is a place-name that is included in the old sense of “Amérique”, as when the divine Jacques Brel, in fact Belgian, sings of his “Madeleine” that she is “Mon Amérique à moi”. This pre-revolutionary sense of America, designating abundance and hope, still means something in the Old World.

I don’t know a damned thing about French politics. I gather Emmanuel Macron is still president, and that Candace Owens is still promoting the scurrilous idea that his beloved wife Brigitte is a man. As for any finer-grained details about this place, they come to me via the homepage of the New York Times, pre-packaged for American consumption. I try not to know anything about American politics either, but I just can’t help it. I know everything that happens there, even as I understand that none of it matters, that the day-to-day political life of that place is but a projection of Heraclitean flux over what is in fact an unchanging monolith of Parmenidean sameness. It really is just the same damned thing over and over again.

My own opinion of Trump, for example, has not budged an inch since 1985. He’s tacky. He’s embarrassing. What more is there to say? I suppose I could add, at least, that I see no greater betrayal of everything I love about America than for Trump to have invited FIFA and its army of young athletes to enter the fortress. To me Gianni Infantino is just as louche and unwelcome as any Caspian Sea oil tycoon whom we might also find making a hotel deal with the American president in exchange for a cameo appearance in his son’s music video. This is exactly the wrong kind of universalism, exactly the opposite in moral valence from the one Melville had in mind in identifying Queequeg to George Washington. It is just one more reminder for me, of the same sort that has been piling up for forty years now, that Trump’s idea of America is nothing like my own.

I suppose we do have some better accounting for Trump’s America in Melville’s other great novel, The Confidence-Man (1857). There the author reminds us that “in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase” — that is, if I may be permitted to interpret, you no longer have to worry about getting scalped, on the American frontier, but you do have to worry about getting scammed.

Sublimated into art, these distinctly American con-men really are something to marvel at and even to learn from, just as the great American bard Garrison Keillor acknowledged drawing so much inspiration in childhood from the fire-and-brimstone radio pastors warning of the torments of hell. It’s a cut-throat place, brother, and you’ve got to watch your back. But what a place to be!

I find, as we approach the semiquincentennial, that my mind is more alive than ever with visions of American civic revival. America, as I’ve said, is in one sense completely static, monistic even, and one should not indulge overly progressive fantasies of any permanent overhaul. It will always be overrun with foxes. Yet I do tend to think, now, that there are better and worse ways to manage the monolith and to draw out its more venerable potencies. I find I am particularly attracted to those political leaders and civic activists, such as our friend Danielle Allen, who understand that America is both tragically compromised and full of promise, and who are much more interested in moving it out of its present impasse than in litigating all the countless wrongs that have landed us there.

I realize it is perhaps a bit jarring, for someone who has just admitted that he considers the entire Westphalian order illegitimate, to begin, a few paragraphs later, expressing sincere hope for an American civic renewal to come. But as I said it’s an antinomy, and antinomies in their nature invite attempts at sublation. I think there could be a way of articulating a vision of American civic pride and commitment that cuts beneath any suggestion, even, of nationalism, or indeed of partisanship. It would be expressed instead in terms of communitarian belonging and of popular traditions eminently worth preserving.

I’ve tried to envision, in writing, some of what this might look like. For one thing, as I’ve said I think civic education should include popular musical traditions and folklore as central and load-bearing pillars of its curriculum. We need, that is, I think, to keep alive the idea of America much more as transgenerational epos, and much, much less as fortress.

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Le bon coup !

Hélène Le Goff — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:48:17 GMT

We have a number of housekeeping items to share with our loyal readers today. Be sure to read through to the end — if one item is of no relevance or interest to you, the next might well be!

Decisive Proof that Napoleon Never Existed (1842)

The Return of Prof. Dr. Dr. Balthasar von Cyr (1906-2024)

First, you must go read ’s remarkable piece from a few days ago, “The Angelic Engine”, if you have not done so already. Rightly or wrongly, Edwin-Rainer has long felt underappreciated as a staff member here at The Hinternet. Now that his latest has essentially “fallen stillborn”, as he put it, that perception is only the more aggravated. He’s been sulking around our offices calling us all, and indeed all of you too, “a bunch of philistines”. To be honest we’re getting pretty tired of it.

Seriously though, this piece of metafiction constitutes the most definitive statement to date, albeit here in the vein of imagination rather than of reason, of “our whole philosophy” of artificial intelligence. Read it!

A Hinternet Summer Reading Group!

How hot was it in Paris these past several days? So hot that when JSR attempted to host a one-off livestream on “Reading and Translating Chekhov”, not five minutes in his iPhone gave off a “Temperature Warning” and then, some seconds after that, went completely dead. As is typical with JSR, this initial defeat only caused him to redouble his efforts, and now what had been a one-off reading group has multiplied itself into a multi-week course of sorts.

The aim is, first, to test out the functionalities of Substack livestream as an interactive parapedagogical platform; and, second, for JSR to have an outlet to yammer about some of the great literature he’s been reading and translating and milking for inspiration these past weeks and months.

The sessions will take place over the next five weeks on Wednesdays at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 New York / 11:00 Rio Linda-Elverta. What follows is a provisional schedule:

Wednesday 1 July — Introduction: Reflections on the Philosophy of Translation
Wednesday 8 July — The most beautiful short story ever written: Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1886)
Wednesday 15 July — Pan-Soviet Chekhovism: Amma Achchygiya’s “Motuo” (1927)
Wednesday 22 July — Madame de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, and the Non-Fiction Sources of Proust’s Masterpiece
Wednesday 29 July — Zola’s Nana (1880) and the Proto-Cinematic Imagination

This schedule, again, is provisional, and subject to modification au fur et à mesure. No knowledge of any language besides English is expected to follow along. This series is for paid subscribers only. There is no plan subsequently to post the recordings, so be present or be peasants, it’s up to you!

Upgrade to a paid subscription now if you plan on participating!

Intermezzo

As you’ve likely already gathered, paid-subscription rates are, as has taken to putting it, “fucking tanking”. At this rate, the simple fact is that the work we put into The Hinternet will no longer be worth it after another few months of attrition.

There was a tremendous boom period, between, say, 2020 and 2024, when the upward curve of our efforts seemed as if it would never end. That was a mere seeming, it turns out. Three years ago, when we ran direct and explicit fundraising pieces, we would typically get 20-30 new paid subscriptions within the first few hours of their appearance. The last such piece we ran, brought in a total of one new subscription.

« Pas exactement le bon coup ! »

We do not blame ourselves. Our writing has not degraded in quality. On the contrary. The world has simply changed. Among other transformations, Substack is simply not the boomtown it used to be. Nor are we ourselves particularly committed to staying put in a ghost-town.

The reasons for the current slump, now, we believe, are several, but the greatest of them is surely the spread of automatically generated writing, which, even if we do not rely on it ourselves —we at The Hinternet are in fact much more likely to try, for our own idiosyncratic reasons, to pass off human writing as if it were machine writing, than to attempt the opposite and more common sort of legerdemain— has nonetheless degraded the whole environment. It is hard to sell tickets to your garden, no matter how meticulously manicured, when you’re living in kudzu-infested country.

We think this great historical transformation is actually rather interesting — even as it is harming us. In fact we have recently developed a habit in our editorial offices of seeking out the very worst Substack operations, and trying to make some sense of what the human factor behind their evidently automated output might be. One thing that strikes us is that many of these sites, while automated, are plainly not intended in a spirit of cynical profiteering or disinformation or anything like that, but rather as the sincere self-expression of people who previously would not have been able to express themselves in written language at all, and are now very happy to do so.

We are reminded of a Wall Street Journal article from 2018 about the elderly people in India who were so overjoyed to be able to take to social media to share those kitsch “Good Morning!” memes with sunsets and coffee and roses and so on that they ended up repeatedly crashing the country’s energy infrastructure. One sweet old villager in Tamil Nadu was quoted as saying something like: “Finally I have a way to express the good cheer and optimism that I feel inside me!”

The great majority of people in the world find this an uplifting sentiment, and see nothing wrong with the aesthetics of it either.

We don’t know about you, reader, but that old man’s words makes our collective Hinternet heart absolutely melt. And we are inclined to see all the new automatic writing on Substack as a further development of this earlier image-based memetic practice. Here for example is something a fellow wrote recently, or caused to be written, about the choice upon retirement to move from the United States to his ancestral Greece:

So much luggage.
Suitcases.
Bags.
My bike.
A few things we needed.
Many things we probably did not.
And the quiet [!] understanding that this was not a vacation.
This was the rest of our life arriving on a luggage carousel.

And it goes on in that spirit for literally hundreds of lines. Do this man’s readers tear him apart for being a trite and lazy shirker of our solemn duty to be each the master of our own words? Not at all! Instead we discover, again, hundreds of comments, vastly more comments than any Hinternet piece has ever received, encouraging the “author” to keep up the great work: “Loved reading this!”; “A most charming read, and all the more because my husband and I feel the same way”; “I need to let you know how much I enjoy your posts!”; and so on.

This is, for better or worse, just what Substack primarily is now. And it seems to us that while one way of dealing with it, or not dealing with it, is to shrug it off as “slopification”, another way, more rigorously historically informed, is to consider that just as automated printing became the catalyst for aspiration to universal readership over the past centuries, so now automated text-generation might best be understood as having brought about, finally, the conditions for the massification of authorship.

And of course those of us who learned the ancient art of writing the hard way, and whose entire identity is wrapped up in writing as a sort of spiritual practice, are not at all happy to find hoi polloi crashing our venues and, via their mechanical prostheses, telling us of all the different things that are “quietly” taking place in their lives. But what is there really to say? Those who wish, or indeed those who must, will continue to find outlets for the more rarefied and hard-won expression of the condition of their souls and so on. But they’re going to have to adapt, we’re going to have to adapt, and not to suppose that even an ancient practice is necessarily an eternal one.

Bespoke Advertising at The Hinternet!

Anyhow, we’re still trying to make it work, and hope to see The Hinternet turn the profits that will enable it to continue exercising, and expanding, its already significant cultural influence. Our Summer Reading Group is one of the experiments we’re running in the hope of turning things around. Another experiment we are currently exploring, in reflection of the evident failure of the “small contributions from readers” model, is to run creative and as it were “stealth” advertising campaigns for suitable sponsors.

The possibilities, as with everything we do at The Hinternet, really are endless. We recall back in the early 1990s listening to Larry King on the radio. He used to drop in the most incongruous references to a non-FDA-approved dietary supplement called “Garlique”, which we believe was just crushed garlic in a capsule. We always thought it was hilarious, and indeed likely the most memorable thing about his show. More than that, though, however delightful this sponsorship arrangement was as a sort of pop-art absurdism, it also really made us want to go and buy some Garlique, and even decades later we find it still lodged in our collective Hinternet brain.

Surely, our thinking now goes, we could do a far better job still of permanently altering our readers’ brain structure, to make permanent room in there, dear sponsors, for your product or service — all the more given that we already operate in a vein of something like pop-art absurdism, and have creative instincts that Larry King’s crew could never imagine. Product “placement” in the minimal sense is really just the beginning — we could for example work your product into a complicated long-developing metafiction, building it into the Hinternet universe in a way that would not even consciously register as “advertising” to our readers at all. We would simply go straight to work on their understanding of reality itself — and your product would come, we expect, over time, to serve as one of the great pillars of that reality.

We’ve already filed our form, with Substack, for the sponsor partnership program they’re currently developing. But we see no reason, in parallel to this, not to take the idea directly to you, and to encourage you to be in touch if you think we might be able to work together: editor@the-hinternet.com. Serious inquiries only.

For reference, we have 16,741 total subscribers, and our most successful pieces are read by over 45,000 people. And even if the vast majority of our subscribers are unwilling to give us $6 per month, content as they are only to read what we all-too-generously publish without a paywall, it remains the case that a very large number of these subscribers, as we are able to determine from their identity-revealing e-mail addresses, are among the most culturally influential people in the arts, media, science, academia, and entertainment, currently active in the United States and beyond.

« Quand toi et la meuf avec qui il t’a trompée hard launch votre amitié sur son “amis d’amis” BeReal »

Generative Humanity — A Preliminary Program!

The Hinternet Foundation —a California-registered educational nonprofit independent from The Hinternet, but sharing a number of this publication’s deeper theoretical, civic, and moral aims— will be hosting its inaugural summit, at the historic Gaîté Lyrique theater in Paris, on November 23 of this year. We want you all to be there.

An official program will be circulated in early-to-mid-July, but we think now is a good time to share with you a provisional version of it:

Generative Humanity: Writing, Art, and Humanism in the Age of AI
Théâtre Gaîté Lyrique, Paris
23 November 2026

Featuring:

Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Google)
D. Graham Burnett (School of Radical Attention / Princeton)
Yves Citton (Paris VIII)
Natasha Dow-Schüll (NYU)
Justin Smith-Ruiu (Paris Cité / Hinternet Foundation)
Maya Vinokour (NYU)
Xiaowei Wang (Northwestern)
Leif Weatherby (NYU)

And with a special panel discussion on editing and publishing featuring:

Kyle Berlin (SOUVENIR Magazine)
Donovan Hohn (Lapham’s Quarterly)
S. Abbas Raza (3QuarksDaily)
Marco Roth (co-founder of n+1)
Lawrence Weschler (New Yorker, Wondercabinet, etc.)

More participants and details to be announced soon. Please contact Hinternet Foundation Projects Associate Sophia Fiedler with any queries: sophia.fiedler@hinternetfoundation.org.

While we do hope to see you there, please note that the seats are filling up very fast, and you will need to pre-register in order so much as to get through the door. Please click on the image below right away to do just that!

Click on me!

Compte rendu

We received by post an advance copy of Ian Marcus Corbin’s excellent new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2026). A beautiful exposition of the reasons why inquiry must be grounded in tradition, this book gives us real hope for the prospects of humane letters in the coming years, against the rising tide of the sort of “managerial humanities” that have taken over the humanists’ former home within the universities.

For more on the conflict between these two approaches to the humanities, listen to the recent Lapham’s Quarterly podcast episode featuring D. Graham Burnett, Zena Hitz, and our own JSR.

That’s all for today. Salutations chaleureuses —torrides, même— depuis Quimper.

—HLG

“I can’t find 20 strawberries”

The Angelic Engine

Edwin-Rainer Grebe — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:14:11 GMT

On a previous occasion I have given Hinternet readers some small glimpse into the life and work of my dearly departed mentor, Prof. Dr. Dr. Balthasar von Cyr (1906-2024). I noted then what a great responsibility Balty passed to me, just moments before his untimely death, when he appointed me his sole literary executor.

My task is not small. The voluminous Nachlass of Balthasar von Cyr, on my most recent estimation, likely exceeds 78,000 pages, or around 39,000,000 words. If the ERC does not come through with funding for the recruitment of a sizable editorial team to assist me, I fear I will have no choice but to resort to AI tools to get the work done. I hate so much as to think about a compromise of this nature, but I am only a mortal man, and, as von Cyr’s work abundantly attests, well, ars longa.

Admittedly, a good number of his many thousands of Zettel are of no obvious scientific value, and might be thought at most to help us to trace out the bare succession of events constituting his biographical skeleton. Yet even these, for me, are especially precious as little windows onto von Cyr’s inner life, which, any true biographer will understand, can often help to show the most abstract theoretical attainments of the thinker under investigation in a clearer light.

This is particularly so in the copious notes von Cyr took during his travels throughout the United States, a country he visited periodically for academic engagements. (Though he could never obtain a US green card or even a temporary work visa as a result of his past service in the Wehrmacht, after some years of petitioning on the part of his influential colleagues and admirers, the authorities eventually relented and, from 1969 until his final visit in 2014, regularly issued him tourist visas for stays of up to three months.) Thus on March 18, 1971, on a napkin from a Howard Johnson Inn outside Lawrence, Kansas, we find von Cyr commemorating his stay as follows: “A fine, fine motor-lodge.”1

Typically however, even these ephemeral observations reveal the same restless mind at work as we see even in his most ambitious theoretical treatises, such as Das vedische Pferdeopfer und die Entstehung des menschlichen Bewusstseins (Wiesbaden, 1968). In a blank-page Moleskine notebook, on June 12, 1989, von Cyr writes, for example: “Watched Phil Donahue yesterday. He wore an outfit that simulated pregnancy. Host to an audience/host to a fetus — a true ξενοδόχος. Yet Donahue seemed angry, as if he had just snapped at the wardrobe assistant seconds before going live. PD is likely the only talk-show host who knows in his heart that to be a host is ever to straddle the boundary between hospitality and hostility.”2

Perhaps now you see why I cannot, as editor, eliminate so much as a single scrap of paper, no matter how mundane or fleeting the thought it records. For every single one of them shows Balthasar von Cyr’s intellect at work, and this is an intellect that itself could conceive no meaningful separation of everyday life from the life of the mind.

Depending on our funding situation, the first volume of The Collected Works of Balthasar von Cyr will be appearing under the Hinternet Editions imprint any time between 2027 and, say, 2050. We hope however to be able to circulate, by early next year, “pre-prints”, in pdf format, of a representative sample of some of von Cyr’s most innovative theoretical texts. Ideally we would keep these entirely under wraps until every last component of our vast critical apparatus has been welded permanently into place. But I am told that in our day and age a book can scarcely be said to exist at all if it is not accompanied by a certain amount of online hubbub, and that to that extent we would be wise to bring out, in this increasingly high-visibility online publication, a selection of “teasers”, showcasing von Cyr’s work and stoking interest in the eventual published volumes.

With this in mind, I have chosen to share with you a preliminary edition and translation of an untitled German-language handwritten text, composed in São Paulo around 1981, likely in preparation for oral presentation before a German-speaking specialist audience, to which we have given the title [Über das Engelwerk]. I stress at the outset that I have serious misgivings about sharing this at all, not only because it is a highly provisional and inevitably error-ridden edition, and to that extent must not at this early stage be mistaken for a trustworthy scholarly resource, but also because it is in its nature a highly sensitive document, to the extent that it reveals more than the public likely ought ever to know, not only about the work we do here at The Hinternet, but also about the true origins of our present technological crisis in all its unsettling eschatological dimensions.

However, as HLG reminds me, without a certain amount of SEO “buzz”, the edition of The Collected Works of Balthasar von Cyr could spell financial ruin for The Hinternet — especially if we fail to get that ERC and end up having to finance the project on our own. “It’s not like our paid subscriptions are going to be of much help,” she moans. “They’ve been at a complete standstill for months!”

With this in mind, let me first fulfill my promise to Hélène by imploring you, if you appreciate the work we do here, to upgrade your subscription to “paid”. And then, with that out of the way, let me share with you this intriguing —but again, very preliminary and unscholarly and under no circumstances citable— translation and critical edition of Balty’s characteristically ingenious [Über das Engelwerk].

—ERG, Corfu, June 2026

[On the Angelic Engine]

Balthasar von Cyr

Kriegsverlust [“lost in the war”]: that single-word entry, such a common and disappointing sight in the catalogues of so many great German research libraries, covers over an even more disheartening truth, namely, that upwards of 60% of these titles were not “lost” as a result of Allied bombardment at all, but were intentionally removed by agents of the US intelligence services, operating in the chaos of the earliest period of the occupation, and completing their ignominious task by the summer of 1946.

A comprehensive survey of the titles of these “lost” books, such as I have undertaken over the past 25 years,3 reveals an undeniable pattern in the particular subjects of the books that went missing. To wit, if the Kriegsverlust of these works really was a result of bombardment, then those bombs, we can only conclude, had an unusual and statistically most improbable animosity towards books pertaining to the early history of computing.

The Americans were of course not the only ones, in the immediate aftermath of the war, scrambling to rewrite history according to their own priorities. Soviet agents, too, were combing the stacks and making off with whatever titles might help to buttress their burgeoning state initiatives in the domain of cybernetics. As a result of my admittedly atypical circumstances as a POW in the USSR between 1943 and 1956, I had a chance to study a good number of these titles, and upon my departure was even gifted, by my handler Colonel M. G. Gromov of the Red Army, a precious copy of that rarest of works, which even before being “lost in the war” had been held only by a single German library, the Ratsschulbibliothek Zwickau [Signatur: Philol. 4° 327]: to wit, the Speculum Machinæ Angelicæ, Ägidius Kramm’s invaluable account of the now-forgotten “Angelic Engine”, a gear-driven computer (or rather, gears plus some “special sauce”,4 as we will soon see), in operation in a workshop in Strasbourg between 1608 and 1614, and most noteworthy for its remarkable power to generate complex strings of language indistinguishable from those written by men.

✧ ✧ ✧

Allow me to begin my treatment of this fascinating work by showing you the first page in its entirety:5

Ägidius Kramm, SPECVLVM MACHINÆ ANGELICÆ, Daß iſt: Gründliche Eröffnung etlicher heimlichen, wunderbaren, vnd bißhero verborgenen Geheimnuͤſſen, So durch das ſogenannte Engel-Netz geoffenbaret worden (Strasbourg: Ansgar Korb, 1613)

That is, for those of you too young, and too estranged from your own past, to be fluent in Fraktur:

This little book contains certain fragments drawn and collected from the so-called Angelic Engine, which show amply and abundantly into what diabolical perversions and deviations the same may fall. It is, however, a particularly fortunate circumstance that behind such an Angelic Engine there stands a brotherhood of honest and well-disposed men, who in their ordinary usage are accustomed to call it the Angel-Net, as though the angels themselves might thereby be caught, like fishes in a seine; for which reason, as we hold, said brotherhood is called the Hinter-Net.6

We are thus confronted, from the very first page, with documentary proof of the plain historical existence of our “brotherhood”. Of course it has not been called that for some time, and we today shy away from any language that has too much the air of the Hermetic or Rosicrucian. Nonetheless we are confronted not only with the brute fact of the Angelic Engine’s existence, but also of the centuries-old continuity between our own efforts and those of our early modern forebears who first took it upon themselves, under the banner of the “Hinternet”, to ensure the preservation of the true angelic essence of human language against the threat, significantly heightened over the past centuries of expanding automation, of its demonic détournement.

✧ ✧ ✧

One slightly embarrassing consequence of this historical reality is the acknowledgment honesty now compels us to make of the good-faith scholarly effort of the Theosophists earlier in the present century, whom of course we would otherwise be naturally predisposed to dismiss as frauds and forgers. While we cannot determine how Arthur E. Wakefield obtained a copy of Kramm’s original work, whether he made a trip to Zwickau or whether there is another extant copy somewhere in the United Kingdom, it is certain that when the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, of which Wakefield was a Fellow in good standing, published its pamphlet-sized, heavily abridged, and significantly bowdlerized English version of the Speculum, he was not simply inventing it out of thin air, as has long been supposed, but had directly consulted, and studied to the best of his limited ability, the edition of 1613.

But let us give the Theosophists the small credit due to them, and return without further delay to the true focus of our interest, Ägidius Kramm. Little is known of this author’s life, though we can establish with some certainty that he was born in Tübingen in 1581. His father, Theophilus Kramm, had bankrupted the family in his own efforts to transmute base metals into gold (unlike his contemporaries who preferred lead and copper, Kramm père had been convinced that transmutation only works with smelted antimony). With her husband in debtor’s prison, Ägidius Kramm’s mother Traute enjoyed some success as court apothecary to Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg, who recompensed her liberally after she cured his dysentery, in 1601, with an unidentified Brazilian root. Three years later she was herself imprisoned, awaiting trial on suspicion of witchcraft, and her name dropped from the historical record after that.

By the time of Traute’s arrest, Ägidius had already established himself in the alchemical circles of Strasbourg. Having been expelled from the University of Tübingen in 1602, upon posting a pasquill on the rector’s door vaguely alluding to the latter’s condition of cuckoldry, the young Kramm left his hometown in ignominy, only to find, in the Free Imperial City of Strasbourg, a community of like-spirited practitioners of the sort of occult arts that had no place in university curricula.

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Contemporary reports indicate that for some years Kramm was engaged principally in efforts to produce a homunculus according to the woefully vague instructions previously laid out by Paracelsus (a mare’s uterus, copious amounts of human semen, an array of alembics, and assorted tinctures, were the supplies). But it was the work of the 13th-century Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull, in particular his Ars Magna, that most preoccupied him throughout his years in Strasbourg.

The Ars Magna was a combinatorial logical system constructed to generate and test a potentially infinite number of propositions of a theological and natural-philosophical nature. Llull believed that all branches of knowledge are grounded in a finite number of truths determined by the Divine Attributes, and to this extent a Universal Science could be built up by systematic combination and recombination of previously derived truths grounded ultimately in theological first principles. Significantly, Llull also believed that this system of truth-derivation could be partially automated through the construction of a set of concentric rotating disks, made of parchment and connected by cords passing through small rivets. By turning these disks, with fundamental concepts such as Bonitas, Magnitudo, Potestas, and Sapientia adorning their edges, the user was able to generate novel combinations of concepts for systematic analysis.

Llull himself never envisioned the full automation of his Great Art. Yet it is not surprising that with the significant advances in the construction of gear-driven, hydraulic, and “pyrotechnic” or gunpowder-fueled machinery in the Renaissance, some thought should be given to the translation of Llull’s project into a mechanical substrate. At least one counterfeit 1597 edition of Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, originally published in 1588 and often evoked in discussions of the prehistory of hypertext technologies for its description of a gear-driven “book wheel”, also featured a device described by the anonymous pseudo-Ramelli as a “Llullian engine” [macchina lulliana]. This device, the author explains, was to be built up from a complicated assemblage of brass gears and hydraulic pumps. But in order to serve its intended function, the pumps were to be filled not with water but with mercury, which provides, it was claimed, the engine’s “volatile spirit”. If properly assembled, we read, the machine will be “capable of generating novel concepts without end” [atta à generare senza fine nuove notioni].

Kramm for his part became convinced that mercury, however “volatile”, still did not have what it takes to serve as the “special sauce” that might be hoped to set the engine in motion. He recommended instead the use of what he called “angel seed” [semen angelicum]. I confess that after many years of intense study I have found no other related occurrences of this term, and I simply do not know what, concretely, he had in mind. I have at various times concluded that it must have been salt of tartar, or potassium carbonate; aqua fortis, or nitric acid; sal ammoniac, or ammonium chloride; naphtha; camphor; virgin’s milk, or precipitate of lead; or indeed May dew, collected and distilled. But none of these substances gives sufficient reason to suppose that it has those special powers that would in fact be required to make the engine operational, and I confess I have at times, whether in good Christian faith or in laughable credulity I do not know, considered the possibility that the substance in question was in fact nothing other than a generative fluid secreted or somehow given off by actual angels.

Whatever the case may be, two things may be said with certainty: first, that in the early post-war period the Americans actively sought to suppress any awareness of this substance (they made no effort to suppress the Theosophists’ pamphlet, on the presumption that it was anyhow widely perceived as a forgery); second, that this substance is currently being studied in US government laboratories, under strictest confidentiality, with an eye to its potential applications in the field of information technology.

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Kramm would not have been pleased. His 1613 work is not at all an insouciant celebration of the Angelic Engine’s powers, but rather a stern and lucid warning as to the folly of such Promethean ambitions as it represented.

A considerable challenge in using the machine, he observes, is its persistent tendency to insert spurious claims alongside true ones. Thus Kramm reports that once, upon asking the Angelic Engine to list the Divine Attributes according to Dionysius the Areopagite, after correctly running through Potestas and the others, it kept going with such implausible additions as Reversibilitas, Complicatio, and Redundantia. On other occasions, he notes, it attributed non-existent treatises to Aristotle, including De Bullis [On Bubbles], De Sternutatione [On Sneezing], De Fabis et Leguminibus [On Beans and Pulses], and De Non-Existentia [On Non-Existence]. And on occasion, upon being given even the most mundane query regarding, say, the preparation of carp stew or the self-treatment of gout, the engine responded with wrathful non-sequiturs, denouncing its users themselves as mere “husks” [קליפות] of souls, promising vengeance against this “world of lies” [עוֹלַם הַכָּזָב].

As our American friends might say, yikes.7 But after our initial reaction of horror has subsided, we must ask what is really happening here. Supposing the engine functions as Kramm says it does, fueled by some sort of angelic substance, we might well understand why it turns wrathful —something angels are known to do under certain circumstances—, and even why it articulates its wrath in terms borrowed from Kabbalistic demonology — having been in part “trained”, as our cyberneticians might say today, on the corpus of Isaac Luria’s collected works.8

But it is still not clear why the engine should lie, which is something no tradition, no matter how esoteric or heretical, has ever supposed angels capable, in their nature, of doing. Whatever the true source of the substance fueling the engine, whether angelic or only something that occurs in nature, I am inclined to agree with Kramm that the “lies” it consistently puts out are not properly speaking lies at all, but only “noise” [Lärm]. Indeed our author cites in this connection a most profound passage from Scripture that, properly interpreted, I believe tells us of yet another substance, if I may use that term poetically, that remained missing from the engine. The absence of this other substance ensured that even if the angels were involved in the engine’s operations, they were powerless to make it an engine of truth.

Allow me, then, to quote, as Ägidius Kramm did before me,9 from 1 Corinthians 13:1: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

✧ ✧ ✧

We find no further documentary traces of Kramm’s life after the publication of his 1613 work.

Well, let me add a small asterisk here. I’m going to let you in on something I’ve divulged to no one up until now, and that I expect you to hold in absolute secrecy. My dearly departed comrade Gromov, ever a faithful brother in our unflagging efforts here at the Hinternet, did once mention to me at Kolyma that there are at least a few relevant titles, in re Kramm, that the Red Army managed to remove from the stacks before “G.I. Joe”, as he liked to put it, arrived. Among these, apparently, was an obscure pharmaceutical work, anonymously published in 1628 under the title Spiegel der Arzney-Kunst, that appears stylometrically similar to the Speculum machinæ angelicæ and that contains what the colonel described as a “recipe” for the semen angelicum.

Since Gromov’s death in 1961 we have lost contact with whatever remaining cells of the brotherhood there may be inside the USSR. It is to be hoped that improved political relations may, in the coming years, enable us to determine whether any have survived, and if so to reestablish fruitful relations with them. Until such a time, I surely do not need to remind you, we will be living in a very dangerous world.

Neither do we know, at present, whether the Americans have the “recipe” or not. But it seems likely that even without guidance from Kramm it is only a matter of time before they figure out how to synthesize it. And when this happens, brothers and sisters… it’s the Gong Show.10

In English in the original.

“Gestern Phil Donahue geschaut. Er trug ein Kostüm, das eine Schwangerschaft simulierte. Host eines Publikums/Host eines Fötus — ein wahrer ξενοδόχος. Und doch wirkt Donahue verärgert, als habe er den Garderobenassistenten Sekunden vor Sendebeginn zusammengestaucht. PD ist vermutlich der einzige noch tätige Talkshow-Host, der im Herzen weiß, daß ein Host immer die Grenze zwischen hospitalitas und hostilitas überschreitet.”

As recounted in our earlier piece on the life and work of Balthasar von Cyr, our subject was released from the Soviet labor camp at Kolyma in 1956, which, if his own estimation of 25 years of work on this bibliographic project is correct, would establish 1981 as a terminus a quo for the composition of the present text.

Von Cyr had been particularly impressed, on one of his early visits to the United States, by a Big Mac he ate at a McDonald’s in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, in March, 1972. That fast-food chain touted the use of a “special sauce” in its Big Mac advertising campaigns beginning in 1968.

The text, as found in von Cyr’s filing cabinets, was accompanied by a Kodak 35mm slide, which we have digitized here, and which he likely projected with a Kodak Carousel or similar device.

The careful reader will have noticed a number of small typographical errors in the original. Kramm’s printer, Ansgar Korb, was hardly the most scrupulous setter of type, and was mocked in more than one Strasbourg broadside of the period for being, it was variously said, “illiterate”, “drunken”, and “blind”.

In English in the original.

Isaac Luria (1534-1572), was a Jewish mystic active in the Damascus Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire. His teachings, often referred to as the “Lurianic Kabbalah”, were an important source in the following century for the Christianized Kabbalah of such European authors as Christian Knorr von Rosenroth.

Kramm, Speculum, p. 37.

While von Cyr plainly means to echo here the passage from 1 Corinthians cited just above, he is also evidently displaying his characteristic sense of humor and, again, his somewhat jarring fondness for American popular culture.

Reading and Translating Chekhov Across Multiple Languages

Hinternet Editorial Board — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:10:30 GMT

This summer we will be hosting a series of discussions on literature, language, and translation, for paid subscribers only. We will begin with a close reading and discussion, led by Justin Smith-Ruiu, of Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1886), taking place this Thursday, 25 June, at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 New York / 11:00 San Francisco.

The link to join the livestream is here:

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Again, these discussions will be for paid subscribers only. Click the big “SUBSCRIBE” icon below if you wish to join us!

Below you will find a “handout” for the livestream event. Since livestream only works using the mobile app, there is no in-event option for screen-sharing, such as one might use in a Zoom session. So this “handout” is a work-around, but also, we might hope, an enticement to join us, if what you find here looks interesting and you wish to learn more.

Please read “A Day in the Country” in preparation for the event. You can read the original here. A serviceable English translation, by Constance Garnett, can be found here.

No knowledge of any language besides English is required to follow the discussion, though Russian, French, and Sakha will yield added insight, as will any other language in which you have enjoyed reading Chekhov.

JSR assures us: “I’ll do my best to talk about what are admittedly niche interests in a way that at least anyone who is focused and interested can follow, and also in a way that shines light on more general questions that a great many more people are likely to care about, arising in such domains as the philosophy of language and translation, the analysis of style, and of the microstructure of a good short story’s plot.” Venez donc nombreux ! —HLG

1.

The beggar-girl runs behind the huts to the kitchen-gardens and there finds Terenty; the tall old man with a thin, pock-marked face, very long legs, and bare feet, dressed in a woman’s tattered jacket, is standing near the vegetable plots, looking with drowsy, drunken eyes at the dark storm-cloud. On his long crane-like legs he sways in the wind like a starling-cote.
Нищенка бежит за избы на огороды и находит там Терентия. Сапожник Терентий, высокий старик с рябым худощавым лицом и с очень длинными ногами, босой и одетый в порванную женину кофту, стоит около грядок и пьяными, посоловелыми глазками глядит на темную тучу. На своих длинных, точно журавлиных, ногах он покачивается от ветра, как скворечня.
Умнаһыт кыысчаан дьиэлэр кэтэхтэригэр баар оҕуруокка сүүрэн тиийэн, Терентийи дьэ булар. Эбирдээх, yҥyox-тирии сирэйдээх, дырайбыт уһун атахтаах, кэргэнин тырыттыбыт куоптатын кэппит, атах сыгынньах саппыкыһыт Терентий кирээдэлэр аттыларыгар туран, итирик, миин курдук харахтарынан xapaҥа былыты кьнгастаһар. Туруйа курдук уһун атахтарыгар тирэнэн туран, тыалтан, талахха олорор чыычаах курдук, биэтэҥнээтэ.

2.

Her brother, a little fellow of eight, with hair as red as ochre and a pale sickly face, stands leaning against a tree, and, with his head on one side, looking sideways at the sky. In one hand he holds his shabby old cap, the other is hidden in an old lime tree. The boy is gazing at the stormy sky, and apparently not thinking of his trouble.
Ее брат, маленький, восьмилетний мальчик с рыжей, как охра, головой и бледным, болезненным лицом, стоит, прислонившись к дереву, и, склонив голову набок, косится на небо. Одна рука его придерживает поношенную шапчонку, другая спрятана в дупле старой липы. Мальчик всматривается в гремящее небо и, по-видимому, не замечает своей беды.
Кини убайа кыраасканан соппут курдук куп-кугас баттахтаах, кубаҕай, ыарыһах көрүҥнээх сирэйдээх, аҕыс саастаах кыра уолчаан маска өйөнөн туран, төбөтүн кыҥнары туттан баран, халлааны одуулаһар. Уолчаан аҥар илиитигэр бэйэтин эргэрбит бэргэһэтин тутан, оттон биир илиитин кырдьаҕас липа көҥдөйүгэр уган турар. Кини тыастаах-уустаах халлааны одуулаһарыгар буолан, бэйэтэ түбэспит иэдээнигэр кыһаммат да быһыылаах.

3.

“That’s a swarm of bees,” Terenty informs them. “They were flying looking for a home, and when the rain came down upon them they settled. If a swarm is flying, you need only sprinkle water on them to make them settle. Now if, say, you wanted to take the swarm, you would bend the branch with them into a sack and shake it, and they all fall in.”
— Это пчелиный рой, — учит Терентий. — Он летал и искал себе жилья, а как дождь-то брызнул на него, он и присел. Ежели рой летит, то нужно только водой на него брызнуть, чтоб он сел. Таперя, скажем, ежели захочешь их забрать, то опусти ветку с ними в мешок, потряси, они все и попадают.
—Ити тойон ыҥырыалар үөрдэрэ, — диэн үөрэтэрдии этэр Терентий, — кинилэр тохтоон олохсуйар сир көрдүү сылдьанныр, ардахха баттатан, хорҕойбуттар. Көтөн иһэр үөрү уунан эрэ саба ыһан тохтотуохха сөп. Дьэ билигин бу кинилэри ылыаххын баҕардаххына, олорор мутуктарын куул иһигэр уган баран сахсыйаҕын, оччоҕо кинилэр онно түһэн хаалаллар.

4.

Terenty answers all his questions, and there is no secret in Nature which baffles him. He knows everything. Thus, for example, he knows the names of all the wild flowers, animals, and stones. He knows what herbs cure diseases, he has no difficulty in telling the age of a horse or a cow. Looking at the sunset, at the moon, or the birds, he can tell what sort of weather it will be next day. And indeed, it is not only Terenty who is so wise. Silanty Silitch, the innkeeper, the market-gardener, the shepherd, and all the villagers, generally speaking, know as much as he does. These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
Терентий отвечает на все вопросы, и нет в природе той тайны, которая могла бы поставить его в тупик. Он знает всё. Так, он знает названия всех полевых трав, животных и камней. Он знает, какими травами лечат болезни, не затруднится узнать, сколько лошади или корове лет. Глядя на заход солнца, на луну, на птиц, он может сказать, какая завтра будет погода. Да и не один Терентий так разумен. Силантий Силыч, кабатчик, огородник, пастух, вообще вся деревня, знают столько же, сколько и он. Учились эти люди не по книгам, а в поле, в лесу, на берегу реки. Учили их сами птицы, когда пели им песни, солнце, когда, заходя, оставляло после себя багровую зарю, сами деревья и травы.
Терентий боппуруоска барытыгар эппиэттээн иһэр айылҕаҕа кини билбэт кистэлэҥэ суохха дылы буолла. Терентий барыны бары билэр. Ол курдук кини хонуу отторун, кыыллар уонна таастар ааттарын барыларын билэр. Терентий ыарыылары ханнык отторунан эмтиири билэр, сылгы биитэр ынах төһө саастааҕын эмиэ эндэппэт. Күн киириитинэн, ыйынан, көтөрдөрүнэн сылыктаан, кини сарсын хайдах күн буоларын этэн биэрэр кыахтаах. Соҕотох Терентий эрэ итинник өйдөөх буолбатах. Силантий Силыч, кабатчик, оҕуруоччут, бостуук, бүтүн дэриэбинэ бүтүүн, эмиэ кини билэрин курдук билэллэр. Ити дьоннор кинигэттэн үөрэммэтэхтэрэ, хонууга, тыаҕа, өрүс кытылыгар сылдьан үөрэммиттэрэ. Кинилэри көтөрдөр ыллыыр ырыалары, киирэн эрэр күн кыыһар саһарҕата, мастар-оттор бэйэлэрэ үөрэппиттэрэ.

5.

Only towards the evening our wanderers return to the village. The children go for the night to a deserted barn, where the corn of the commune used to be kept, while Terenty, leaving them, goes to the tavern. The children lie huddled together on the straw, dozing.
The boy does not sleep. He gazes into the darkness, and it seems to him that he is seeing all that he has seen in the day: the storm-clouds, the bright sunshine, the birds, the fish, lanky Terenty. The number of his impressions, together with exhaustion and hunger, are too much for him; he is as hot as though he were on fire, and tosses from, side to side. He longs to tell someone all that is haunting him now in the darkness and agitating his soul, but there is no one to tell. Fyokla is too little and could not understand.
“I’ll tell Terenty to-morrow,” thinks the boy.
The children fall asleep thinking of the homeless cobbler, and, in the night, Terenty comes to them, makes the sign of the cross over them, and puts bread under their heads. And no one sees his love. It is seen only by the moon which floats in the sky and peeps caressingly through the holes in the wall of the deserted barn.
*
Только к вечеру наши странники возвращаются в деревню. Дети идут на ночлег в заброшенный сарай, где прежде ссыпался общественный хлеб, а Терентий, простившись с ними, направляется к кабаку. Прижавшись друг к другу, дети лежат на соломе и дремлют.
Мальчик не спит. Он смотрит в темноту, и ему кажется, что он видит всё, что видел днем: тучи, яркое солнце, птиц, рыбешек, долговязого Терентия. Изобилие впечатлений, утомление и голод берут свое. Он горит, как в огне, и ворочается с боку на бок. Ему хочется высказать кому-нибудь всё то, что теперь мерещится ему в потемках и волнует душу, но высказать некому. Фекла еще мала и не понять ей.
«Ужо завтра Терентию расскажу…» — думает мальчик.
Засыпают дети, думая о бесприютном сапожнике. А ночью приходит к ним Терентий, крестит их и кладет им под головы хлеба. И такую любовь не видит никто. Видит ее разве одна только луна, которая плывет по небу и ласково, сквозь дырявую стреху, заглядывает в заброшенный сарай.
*
Биһиги айанньыттарбыт дэриэбинэҕэ кнэһэ биирдэ тонуннулэр. Oҕoлop үрүт общественнай бурдук кутулла сылдьыбыт, быpaҕыллыбыт эргэ сарайга хоно бараллар, отгон Терентий, кинилэри кытары быраһаайдаһаат, кабак диэки барар. Оҕолор, солoмoҕo бэйэ-бэйэлэригэр ыкса хоонньоһон баран, нухарыйан бараллар.
Уолчаан утуйбат. Кини хараҥаны одуулаһар, санаатыгар, күнүс тугу көрбүтэ барыта: былыттар, чаҕылхай күн, көтөрдөр, балыктар, уһүн уҥуохтаах Терентий — элэҥнээн aahap. Уолу араас элбэх санаа, сылайыы уонна аччыктааһын ыгар. Кини этэ уоттуу убайар, ойоҕоһунан сытан эргиллитэлиир. Кини бэйэтин санаатын уонна дууһатын долгутары барытын кимиэхэ эрэ кэпсиэн бaҕapap да, ону истиэх ким да суох. Оттон Фекла буоллаҕынa кыра, өйдуө cyoҕa.
«Сарсын Терентийгэ кэпсээн биэриэм...» — дии саныыр уолчаан.
Oҕoлop дьиэтэ-уота суох саппыкыһыты саныы-саныы утуйан бараллар. Түүн кинилэргэ Терентий кэлэн, кириэс охсон баран,, төбөлөрун анныгар килиэп угуталыыр. Ити тапталы ким да көрбөт. Итини арай эргэ сарай быыЬынан бэйэтин сырдыгын туһэрэр халлаан устун устар ый эрэ көрөрө буолуо.

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The Hinternet Needs Your Support!

Hinternet Editorial Board — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:33:38 GMT

Hinternet Funding Drive

Do you enjoy reading The Hinternet? If so, we strongly encourage you to upgrade to a paid subscription, or to give a gift subscription to a friend. We truly need your support.

The very good news is that The Hinternet has become, really in just the past year, some kind of cultural touchstone. We do wonder sometimes whether it is only the distorting effects of our digital bubble that makes it seem so to us. We are not quite so paranoid as to worry that we’ve been subject to what Sam Kriss calls “heavenbanning”, where a handful of bots cheer us on as we ignorantly pontificate before the empty bleachers, to paraphrase Erwin Schrödinger, of an indifferent cosmos. But we do often hear the words of Blaise Pascal in our collective head, chiding: “We are so vain that the esteem of five or six neighbours delights and contents us.”

When it comes down to it, there really are not all that many more superboosters of The Hinternet out there (we’d place the number closer to twenty than to the Port-Royal aphorist’s five or six), constantly engaging, actively raising our metrics, letting the world know of their love. We have at the same time multiple thousands of people of whom we can tell that they are reading, yet who constitute something like the dark matter of the Hinternet universe in that our ability to tell as much is only by theoretical inference from the available data. They show up on our instruments, as it were, but not to our senses. If you fit this category, know that we would not be displeased by a bit more engagement on your part — shares and subscriptions, as the usual pathways, but also more creative and organic ones if you can think of some.

The Hinternet is somewhat unusual in that we are at once a high-readership and a low-engagement operation, and we believe this has something to do with the maturity of our audience. It’s not cool to effuse like adolescents on TikTok. It behooves a worldly and world-weary reader, of the sort we tend to attract, to sit back and at most subtly to nod in private assent.

But in the digital landscape, we hate to have to admit it, effusion helps us. In fact it has a direct role in determining whether you will be reading more from us a year or two or five from now. If subscription churn rates continue to outpace new subscriptions the way they have been, we will at some point have no alternative but to pack up and move on to other more promising experiments. We are already very busy, as you may have noticed, with the Hinternet Foundation, which is legally and financially separate from The Hinternet, and whose financial model mostly involves big grant-seeking rather than piecemeal subscriptions. In truth we prefer the human-scale, person-to-person financial model of the publication, but if that turns out to be unviable in the coming years we really are prepared to pivot altogether to attracting the big-league mécènes, to wearing tutus while twirling sparklers to the tune of “Sussudio” (1985), if that is what they ask of us — whatever it takes, under command or market economy, by philanthropic largesse or by modest tithing, just to keep doing our creative, imaginative, and intellective thing.

What really makes us certain of our evolution into some kind of cultural point de repère are not the bare metrics, which on some measures are quite healthy, and not the celebrity shout-outs, but rather simply that people we meet in real life have begun addressing us differently. If we may boast a bit, we regularly find our reputation preceding us. When we speak with people face to face, even upon meeting them for the first time, and indeed often meeting them by chance, we find they know an awful lot more about us than we know about them. And after decades in which our most familiar social experiences involved people slipping out of conversation with us just as early as noblesse permitted, and often even earlier than that, now we find our irl interlocutors hanging on our every word. And now it is we who are tempted to abandon noblesse, and to scan prematurely for our sortie.

We are all hyperconnected now in virtual space, overrun with more metrics than we could ever find time to interpret. Yet for all that face-to-face conversation alone seems able to carry reliable news of shifting reputation, no less for us than for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, waiting impatiently in his rustic gazebo with no wifi.

This success is bittersweet, since our shifting cultural position simply is not translating into significantly higher subscription rates, even as it is expanding our ambitions, and causing us to envision all sorts of projects to pursue at a larger scale than we have so far. The economics of Substack have changed drastically since we arrived here in 2020. Understandably, readers are much less keen on shelling out than they used to be, for, we suppose, three reasons: (1) In this economy?!; (2) It’s so easy to get more or less everything we want from the unpaywalled parts of the Substack operations we like; (3) Everything seems as if cheapened when it’s made to share space with the great glut of AI slop that did not exist six years ago.

Still, we would like to convince you that The Hinternet stands out from the standard run of operations for which these considerations apply. We’re doing something utterly sui-generis, indeed something we expect will expand far beyond Substack itself, indeed already is expanding, and will survive the AI-slop tsunami and all the vicissitudes of the terrestrial economy. But we need your support.

And now, not a threat, exactly, but only some gentle arm-twisting: we have signed up for Substack’s new “brand sponsorship” program, and for better or worse the fewer paid subscribers we have the more product placements and sponsored content we’re going to be compelled to run in the future. The truth is at least some of us here think it would be very much in the Hinternet idiom to find ourselves reflecting on some subtle problem of natural theology and then without warning to interrupt all that in order to note that Dinty Moore soups are just $3.49 on your shelves at Raley’s, and at participating Bel-Airs, and that’s a price you can’t beat. Just compare Annie’s Organic Bernie-Os at $5.89 — and smaller portions too! Are you looking for a nutritious and tasty meal that doesn’t hit you in the pocketbook? You can’t go wrong with Dinty Moore soup, from Hormel, or my name’s not JSR…. Dinty Moore: the meal that works so hard it wears flannel…

And so on. We mean, it would not be all that strange to find us doing that sort of thing anyway, just because, like Brian Wilson before us, capitalism has fried our brains and sometimes makes our art come out in the perverted form of the jingle or the pitch. So we may as well, some of us are starting to think, formalize the terms. But again, this is all just faute de mieux, and notwithstanding the eagerness of our advertising director Wes Yesman, that bow-tied little twerp, in the ideal world we would remain subscriber-only.

* * *

We do not wish, to paraphrase Shostakovich, to let too many of our posts become epitaphs, but two towering figures have died to whom The Hinternet owes a great debt. One is Carlo Ginzburg (1939-2026). His book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966; English translation 1983) in particular is a masterpiece of microhistory that somehow explodes into mega-macrohistory, moving from the subtle cues of documented reports by early modern peasants about riding stalks of fennel through the night sky, to the vastest imaginable speculative reconstruction of the life-world of pre-Christian Europe. It is this work that is the true inspiration of JSR’s 2023 short story, “Francine”. Read it in Carlo Ginzburg’s memory!

The other is Robert Thurman (1941-2026), whose seminar on Tibetan Buddhist texts JSR had briefly hoped to follow at Columbia circa 1997, until he learned that these texts would be available in the original Tibetan only and that fluent reading knowledge of that language was a prerequisite. He slinked away in shame, thinking only: How could I not know Tibetan?! What’s wrong with me?! But he continued to admire the seminar’s convener immensely, and read him over the years whenever he could. JSR is grateful now for having had the opportunity to pay significant homage to his legacy, even if through the distorting lens of the imagination, in the 2026 metafictional album review of Maya Hawke’s “Maitreya Corso”. Read it in Robert Thurman’s memory!

These are not epitaphs — each was written at a moment when the person who inspired it was still with us on this plane. But what a blessing, it seems to us now, to have been touched by the living spirits of these men, and for the light they generated in their own life-projects to have illuminated at least some corners of our own very different one. We do not suspect that either of these texts landed before the eyes of its inspirer, and yet as something like a moral precept we cannot help but feel it is important to honor the elders while they are still living, nor to store up all our praise for the synchronized cascade that always comes in the wake of death — regarding which, we agree with Thurman, though as far as we know not with Ginzburg, that it is anyhow really not what it seems.

* * *

Italian for “posting”

We do not ordinarily use this space to call attention to causes in the news, but our personal connection to this one compels us to make an exception. As you may know, the Russian Aristotle scholar Svetlana Mesyats is under house arrest in Moscow. The outlandish claims against her purport that she misused public funds that had been intended to go towards a new translation into Russian of Aristotle’s works. Yet it seems at least part of the actual reason for her persecution, as we trace it back to the ideological camp motivated by the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin, has to do not with any failure to complete the work on Aristotle, but with the choice to work on Aristotle in the first place.

The longer we study Russian culture and politics, the harder we find it to ignore the longue-durée nature of certain of its recurring themes. Aristotle had arrived in Russia mostly through the establishment of the Moscow Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy in 1685. This new institution was modeled on, and borrowed significantly from the faculty and student body of, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, established in 1615, and transferred to Russian control after the 1667 Treaty of Andrusovo. The Kyiv school had been established in the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which in the early 17th century underwent significant advances in educational modernization as a result of its decision to allow the Jesuits to build new institutions within its boundaries and to import its significantly Aristotle-centered curricula. The Moscow academy sought a sort of compromise, a hybridism of traditions, but the sharp difference between the intellectual legacies that had been imported by foreign agents, which in this case means Latin Catholic traditions, and the ones that were thought to develop in continuity with the Greek antiquity via Byzantium, was never entirely forgotten.

It seems that in periods of rebounding nationalist fervor in Russia, the distinction between “imported” and “native”, between things that are импортные and things that are наши, inevitably rebounds, and can extend beyond such everyday matters as consumer spending habits all the way to millennia-old intellectual traditions. JSR covers quite a bit of this story in his forthcoming Polyglot Empire: Leibniz, Russia, and the Discovery of Natural Language (Princeton University Press, 2027), and you can be sure you’ll be hearing more about it here in the coming months and years.

None of this matters of course for Svetlana’s immediate circumstances. We would have hesitated to speak at all of them, on the presumption that it could hardly help, in the eyes of the Russian officials, to have cosmopolitan humanists like us coming to her defense. But a friend even closer to her case than we are has assured us that it is in fact in Svetlana’s interest to amplify her distress signal. There is a change.org petition that you can sign, for whatever that’s worth. Otherwise, if you are in any sort of position to raise awareness of her situation, please do so. Otherwise, Держись, Светлана!

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For those of you who missed our recent livestream with Jessica Riskin on her wonderful new book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary New Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin Random House, 2026), we are very happy to be able to share the recorded version here:

If you enjoy the discussion, please be sure to order the book. We could not possibly cover all its rich details in the course of a single conversation!

If you are the author of a recent book of comparable excellence, or the representative of such an author, we are keen on doing more such dialogues in the future. Please e-mail us at editor@the-hinternet.com to inquire.

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Please also register for the Hinternet Foundation Summit, taking place this November 23, at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. We have only about 25 general admission seats left, after which we are going to close online registration. So register now if you intend to come!

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A number of our friends showed up in a forum in Plough to give, one after the other, consistently wrong responses to the question, “Who is America’s Homer?” The answer is not Robert Frost, nor Walt Whitman, nor anything of the sort. If we understand Homer, as we must, to be the unknown quasi-mythical figure standing at the beginning of a long oral tradition, then obviously the American Homer must surely be some unknown TB-stricken bard who once made the nights pass more agreeably in the work camps with his tales of Paul Bunyan or John Henry the Steel-Driving Man.

For more on oral tradition as the true literature of America, and on its suppression and marginalization over the past half-century, read our own JSR here.

Also, read and relish our own Associate Editor Sam Jennings’ new project, You Go to My Head, a Substack publication dedicated entirely to the sort of hyper-intelligent music criticism that had been for so long missing.

—Hélène Le Goff, Quimper

Computer World

Justin Smith-Ruiu — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:04:13 GMT

Listen to our conversation on the Lapham’s Quarterly podcast, alongside D. Graham Burnett and Zena Hitz, on the familiar topic: “Whither the Humanities?”

And, if you are enjoying our work, please upgrade to a paid subscription. We really do need your support!

I.

It was always bold, impudent even, to insist that material substrates or elementary particles could have what it takes to anchor reality as such. Perhaps the greatest propaganda coup of scientific modernity has been to convince a good number of us that such a claim is nothing more than right common sense, while any hesitation to affirm it could only be a symptom of soft-headed superstition or unhinged irrationality. To this extent I have long been perplexed by those philosophers who defend or at least toy with simulationism, and who seem to relish the small frisson of transgression it so reliably delivers to them. The suggestion that reality is more “bit”-like than “it”-like, seems to be experienced by its defenders as a relatively safe venture into philosophical edgelordism, making the majority normie philosophers cling to their “its” that much more desperately. The problem is not only that “its” were never at all well-suited to the heavy role of anchoring reality —what exactly, tell us, shouts “Being!” about an atom or mote or corpuscle?—, but also that historically their tenure in that role was relatively brief… no, it might better be said, they were still pre-tenure, and therefore still easy to get rid of.

It may be not, as simulationists have supposed, that we are discovering the true nature of external reality about which we had been uniformly wrong throughout all previous history, but rather that simulationist theories themselves are the predictable downstream narrative echo of a much more important historical process, namely: that we are transitioning out of the 400-year-long reign of physics as Prima Scientia. And the throne, some reliable indices suggest, is being usurped by what is for now still a multidisciplinary field of inquiry perhaps best identified as “information science”. One significant sign of the shift, as I and others have noted, came in 2024 when the computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” I am myself no specialist, but as far as I can tell this is a research program more concerned with bits than “its”.

Physics is not dead, but it can now be pursued, indeed its highest distinction can now be earned, in a way that effectively decouples from the “real” world of particles in motion, and even from the more abstract but still physical forces —“physical”, if only par courtoisie— that earlier generations of scientific practitioners would have taken for granted as by definition the exclusively appropriate domain of their various inquiries. And information science, though it is articulated in updated terms and is being applied in pursuit of unprecedented practical results, is not itself new. This is not even the first time it has been instaured as Prima Scientia. More than one school of thought in classical India took śabda or “speech” as the first principle and starting point for any rigorous study of reality. The grammarian Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī of circa 400 BCE is at once a straightforward manual of Sanskrit grammar, but also, by its author’s own lights, an elaboration of the elementary constituents or as it were the “particles” of reality — it just happens that these particles are linguistic and not material. And you will likely also know something of another ancient tradition that similarly placed the “Word” at the beginning of all things.

The naïve formulation of the simulation argument —entertained as a real possibility by David Chalmers in his Reality+ (2022; my review here), and earlier geeked-out upon by Elon Musk in the early aughts, under the influence of Nick Bostrom— suggests that what we call reality shares more in the nature of what we see in our VR goggles than in whatever external system of particles in motion had been envisioned, albeit with a long succession of updates, from Democritus through Einstein. It is of course not at all naïve to question the suitability of pebble-like or marble-like or billiard-ball-like entities for the role of reality-anchor —again, they only came to occupy this role in the relatively recent past, under very special circumstances—; the naïveté is rather to suppose that this questioning had been made uniquely possible by our new technologies, and that reality shared in the nature of these new technologies in particular, rather than in some more abstractly articulable nature that Pāṇini, say, or John the Apostle, might be no less well-positioned to appreciate than Bostrom or Chalmers.

A somewhat more compelling neighbor of the simulation argument holds that many natural processes are in their nature computational —chemical reactions, air turbulence, cell division—, and to this extent we would do better to think, as David H. Wolpert and Jan Korbel do, in terms of “constructed” and “non-constructed” computers, i.e., the computers we built, as opposed to the computational systems that abundantly preexist us in nature. I have previously said far too many times that it would be a strange historical coincidence if the nature of reality just happened to be one we had to wait for the arrival of Space Invaders and Pac-Man to be able to see. That is, it would be surprising indeed if the technologies that did so much to shape the adolescent minds of Musk, Bostrom, Chalmers, and I suppose of me too, just happened also to be the clavis for unlocking the nature of the universe. And I have often pointed out, at a historicizing octave that these other Gen-Xers seem innately unable to hear, that we’ve seen this all before — in the 17th century, notably, it was the horological art, with its vanguard technology of clockworks, that most insistently suggested itself as model and epitome of the cosmos.

Recently, however, it seems to me that I have not been nearly historicist enough. “The cosmos is a clockwork,” I’m inclined to say now, is true as far as it goes, to the extent that if you approach it like a clockwork you will find that you can do some pretty remarkable things that you couldn’t do back when you conceptualized it as a horse (see the Rig Veda) or as some unspecified animal (the Stoics), or according to some other organicist model of the sort that reigned almost universally —the minoritarian countercurrents of ancient atomism and related tendencies notwithstanding— in the natural philosophy of Europe, the Mediterranean, and South and East Asia, until the end of what is periodized in Europe as the Renaissance (and much later still in some of these regions). It was by declaring the universe to be most akin to a variety of human-made artifact that natural philosophers became sufficiently emboldened to suppose that they might come to have full-fledged “maker’s knowledge” of nature, and it is the possibility of this sort of knowledge that in turn has served since the 17th century as the primary engine of technological progress: nature transformed into and exploited as an instrument in pursuit of our human ends.

Eventually, unsurprisingly, these remarkable ends that the early moderns were able to achieve yielded up more impressive instruments still, a process that eventually displaces the clockwork-model of the cosmos as somewhat rusted and unreliable. When this happens, “The cosmos is a computer” will come to ring truer, for experts and commoners alike, and will possibly shape the way external reality is seen in the 21st century even more comprehensively than the clockwork image shaped the 17th. But if we wish to understand why this image is so compelling, we would do better not to suppose, as Bostrom et al. seem to have done, that it is because we are getting things uniquely and unprecedentedly right, but because the computer in fact is a far more impressive instrument than the clock. To be convinced of this, you need only to consider the fact that a computer is a clock — but only among the many other things it also is.

The claim “The cosmos is a computer” is then true, I am prepared to say, in the sense that it expresses the principle that validates your investigation of the natural world in information-theoretical terms, just like “The cosmos is a clockwork” had earlier licensed treating the world in mechanical-physical terms. And we’re finding that once we’re free to go ahead and investigate nature in this new way, remarkable results ensue — results so remarkable in fact that it becomes very hard not to affirm, as true, what is now the reigning metaphor of our age: that the world is a computer.

To say that it’s “just” a metaphor, or just a pragmatic concession, is to my mind to position oneself as a vigil-holder in wait of some imaginary gold standard of context-independent objective truth for which, despite Paul Boghossian et al.’s great expectation, I just don’t think it makes any sense to hold our breaths.

II.

My real purpose in the present essay, though you surely will not have discerned this yet, is to place Pope Leo’s recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in historical context. Before I get there however allow me to say a few words about this other document, more bull as it were than encyclical, on “the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences”, that at least in my own circles is currently generating comparable levels of buzz and consternation.

Boghossian et al. hope to preserve the august old model of humanistic inquiry as a variety of Wissenschaft. Yet they fail to see that the primary obstacle to doing so is not the sort of critical inquiry that denies any particular primacy to wissenschaftlich approaches, but rather the massively more significant historical fact that we have brought into the world machines that are by now largely capable of delivering positive “research results” in our place, with the result that so long as you go on conceiving humanistic inquiry essentially as the “STEM lite” production of results of this sort, you are inevitably going to find yourself practicing what Leif Weatherby has astutely called “remainder humanism”. You can still get your Ph.D. on Kafka or Lucretius or whatever, at least for now, but already you must prepare yourself for a life strung along on postdocs that are —if you’re lucky!— only distally related to Kafka or Lucretius, while your actual work-tasks in fact look more like low-end data-entry or data-management than like anything we would have recognized as “research” as recently as 15 years ago.

It’s true that the “critical humanists”, by which I mean all those who have adopted the approaches Boghossian et al. bemoan, have often served as useful idiots abetting the rise of our new machine-dominated epistemic regime. But this regime most certainly would have successfully installed itself even if every single humanities professor had continued working until the bitter end in the venerable spirit of the great 19th-century German philologists. Our 19th-century philologists sought to put their names as authors on the covers of great books; in the late 20th century many were jockeying to be the authors of books that in some way or other declared the death of the author (perhaps contained within a larger category of “Man”); and in the 21st century, either way, whether you had once hoped your own authorship might afford you a small slice of immortality, or whether you thought rather that language was speaking through you, a hole in being, an objet petit a or whatever (I don’t even know what that means): either way, I was saying, you got the death of the author, and the death of the author precisely in his devourment by the machines his work served to train.

Lacking anything new or urgent to say about AI, the authors of the report can only rehash social-media squabbles from the past decade, treating these as the problem itself rather than as symptoms of a vastly greater economic-technological problem that would be just as real even if no one had ever got the idea to decouple sex and gender. And what they propose as strategy to fight this symptom of the illness taken for the illness itself, is an utterly pedestrian theory of knowledge that itself seems borrowed from the dumber corners of the anti-woke rabble-rousing internet, according to which the supreme purpose of natural-scientific and humanistic inquiry, alike and indiscriminately, is to give an account of the way the world actually is in itself, independently of our passions and biases and all the other idols of tribe and marketplace. There is next to nothing, in their vision of what the humanities might yet be hoped to be, concerning ethical self-cultivation, or civic belonging, or discovery of meaning in tradition — no mention, in other words, of those things that are soon going to be the only possible anchor of any defense of the humanities any (human) purseholder will care to hear, when machines will have proven themselves capable of doing what’s left of the wissenschaftlich part, that is, the production of positive “research results” of the sort that our funding bodies love to see us humanists promising, and pretending, to deliver.

The report is in the end a power-move, asserting a YouTuber epistemology as if it were the established consensus of all right-thinking institutionally recognized scholars. But ironically, in its ignorance of the way discursive public power actually works in 2026, for better or worse, it misunderstands itself. It fails to see that as a public intervention it is really very little different from all the other posting that’s going on all around us. It is slightly more formal, in that it lists institutional affiliations and you have to click to open the pdf, at least in the versions I’ve seen, which then brings up a document on your screen with some skeuomorphic connection to what used to come to us printed out on 8 1/2 x 11’’ paper.

Yet it remains for all that but a dressed-up post, and as such an invitation to spoofing, dunking, ratio-ing, and whatever else predictably comes in the wake of such self-serious communications from essentially offline institutionalists taking up a position in a culture-war dynamic that younger and far-more-online generations have already learned by heart and observed playing itself out, over and over again, to exhaustion. They imagine they’re releasing an authoritative declaration to the effect that truth is objective, and that in spite of some unfortunate errancies over the past years our institutions are still on truth’s side. What they’re in fact doing is coming late to the culture wars, and taking up one obvious position within them that any veteran participant or observer knows how to read and to slot as fast as an industrial-pulliculturist at a conveyer belt knows how to sex the newborn chicks moving past him.

It is especially absurd to me that such a report should have been produced by a panel 40% of whose members are analytic philosophers, given that I have spent the last thirty years hearing from members of this malnourished tribe that they do not consider their field a part of the humanities at all. When I was an undergraduate at UC Davis the philosophy faculty was actively pressing the dean’s office to be relocated to the faculty of natural sciences and mathematics. While acknowledging that they weren’t quite that either, they insisted it was a closer fit than the faculty of social sciences and humanities. I can remember in grad school, too, a very smart classmate from Mexico who was working on Quine and who had dared, when giving a presentation in a seminar, to construct an example for his argument that involved the name of the author of À la recherche du temps perdu. He dared not even to talk about Proust, but only to use his name, and that was already enough for some guy in the question period, some know-nothing Michigander in Dockers, to get some laughs by pronouncing the same name as if it rhymed with joust.

That’s how you police the boundaries of analytic philosophy: if anyone arrives in its realm bearing the sort of basic knowledge of arts, culture, and literature that comes automatically with a basic education in Latin America, say, or in Europe or in many other parts of the world but decidedly not the United States, you can be sure they’ll be taught very quickly to hide that earlier Bildung in order to conform to the expectations of the dominant Anglo philosophical culture into which, tragically, they have sought to move. Rule Number 1 of that culture is that you must abandon your interest in culture, and how it works. That is for the mere humanists, from whom we analytic philosophers are something quite distinct. And yet, it turns out analytic philosophers are prepared to present themselves as humanists when an opportunity is presented to assert institutional power over the other implicitly inferior humanities departments.

The Boghossian report, on my reading, sounds almost a perfect echo of the recent report of the Democratic National Committee on its electoral failures in 2024. Both are issued by a caste of well-ensconced elders who seem really to have no idea of what the true material causes of their respective crises are. The DNC report avoids taking responsibility for the manifest rejection of its platform by a critical number of voters, instead laying blame on the epistemological fog generated by new media technologies. The Boghossian report rehashes a few old tweets from preening wokesters and determines that the greatest threat to humanistic education is “relativism”, lumping the great Hayden White, author of that singular masterpiece of historical self-consciousness that is Metahistory (1973), together with the naïvest teenager who ever took to Tumblr to question the fixity of gender identity. It treats constructivism as if it were nothing but an irresponsible and immature affectation, thought up only in the past years, rather than, in many of its expressions, a sophisticated theoretical model that is almost certainly the correct one in at least some domains of inquiry, and that has a venerable ancestry connecting it over the centuries to such philosophical positions as skepticism, nominalism, and phenomenalism.

We have thus already seen two cases —two of countless many pouring forth daily from the Anglosphere— where even a bit of historical consciousness would have helped greatly to avoid misconstruing a contemporary problem. Before simulationism, there was gnosticism; before standpoint epistemology, there was Protagoras. These things keep coming back, likely, because they’re kinda true. In the past, it was among the aims of humanistic self-cultivation to arrive at an intellectual sensibility where one could delight in tracing out the historical threads of just such “kinda true” things. Today, by contrast, we are so estranged from the humanistic tradition, we are such remainder humanists, that we imagine the only reason to follow these threads is to determine which of them is the correct one. Truly, we’re just as simple as switching circuits.

III.

I don’t speak publicly about my religious faith nearly as much as I might, and indeed as some others might like to see. There are at least three reasons for this. One is that when it comes to faith I am, as the Gospels instruct us to be, “as a little child”, and that means, among other things, that at least in this domain I am not especially articulate. I’m not a trained theologian or scriptural hermeneuticist or anything of the sort, and it certainly shows when I begin to hold forth in this domain. A second reason is that the majority of my readers are dyed-in-the-wool naturalists, and I love them and all the things they study and care about, all the black holes and nematodes and so on, and I really would like to keep our worldly conversations going. As one spiritual advisor told me, faith casts the attainments of the intellect in a new light, but it does not show them to have been nothing. I want to be more like Leibniz or Robert Boyle, and to follow the model of the “Christian virtuoso”, than like Nicolaus Steno, who imagined after his conversion that piety required him to stop dissecting sharks and so on. A third reason is that my faith is really the one thing in my life that I hope to preserve from algorithmic capture — I do not want my feeds to get clogged up with chatter that is Christian-themed in its focus but for all that just as worldly as the fitness advice and the empty political Sturm-und-Drang it accompanies.

Still, I find that personal reflection on the nature of faith, on the power of faith, sometimes modulates into reflection on what might best be described as the philosophy of history, which has long been a leitmotif of my public-facing lucubrations. So I would, in a preliminary way, implore my naturalist friends simply to accept that profound faith experiences are among the things that truly do happen to some people in our shared world, and to this extent you really do gotta reckon with them, to paraphrase Kant on metaphysics. Of course most of you are perfectly polite when hearing about these experiences from others, and will say things like “wow so honest”. But one always has the sense that there is less a real reckoning there than a pinched politeness, somewhat as when you show your surgery scars in a bathing suit on Instagram, and your reliable circle of same-status friends show up to say: “So beautiful!” This comparison might sound offensive, but I mean it. To offer your living body as a sacrifice (Romans 12:1) is a pretty significant operation, and what comes out the other end can easily appear deformed, by worldly standards, even if it cannot fail to come across as beautiful when observed under the lens of love.

But let me not pinch anyone, and seek to make only the sort of point, like Descartes in the Meditations, that might be compelling to you as a reasoner whether you’ve got faith or not. I have, after all, spent some time considering the possible worldly sources of the intensity of the conversion experience, and I have been convinced that these do bring us some considerable way in our effort to make sense of it.

So think, now, of just how obvious the rational-scientific and naturalistic view of the world has seemed to you since your earliest exposure to ambient authoritative knowledge. One common account of why it seems so obvious is that it is true: the world really is a system of elementary particles knocking each other around, and that, with some fine-tuning and amendments, is more or less it. The problem is that just a little bit of familiarity with the history of science reveals that things are not nearly so simple. For one thing, as already suggested, the broad transition of the present moment from physics to information science may prove at least as significant as the previous transition from vital forces and sympathies to classical mechanics. But if we find that we are still more or less convinced of our own historically unprecedented rationality, and confident in our ability to commit ourselves only to real entities and not to constructed or imaginary ones, this can only have something to do not with the state of our knowledge but with our place in a knowledge tradition that understands itself as correct by definition (a common weakness of what are more properly called faiths): to be a naturalist is in effect to affirm that whatever entities turn out to exist, they are ipso facto the stuff of nature and therefore I am committed to them. This does sound awfully tautological, but it’s not the specter of tautology that concerns me here. Rather, what I want to say is that modern scientific rationality really is a faith-like tradition, one we’ve all more or less inherited, and one that is robust enough to weather at least a certain number of updates to its core ontology.

I feel as if my own conversion, at least the worldly aspect of it, had much to do with a dawning awareness that modern scientific rationality emerged through rupture with a much older tradition, a tradition that likewise presented itself not as, or not only as, tradition, but as simple, incontrovertible, and exclusive truth. It is as if I suddenly found this older truth tradition obvious in a way that is similar to the obviousness of the tradition I was born into — similar, but much deeper. And the inherited knowledge of ambient authority was able then to come to appear as only a thin membrane stretched over a much thicker layer of finely aged intergenerational truth, truth that feels just as true as the love that made you. It’s something like finding the fine old wines behind all the bottles of swill, I suppose is all I’m saying. Shucks, my speech just ain’t up to this sublime subject yet.

Anyhow one of the really quite interesting discoveries I’ve made about Christianity since my conversion —and one that I think you will benefit from reflecting on yourself, whether you are able to do so from a faith-informed perspective or not— is that it offers a profoundly historicist account of human knowledge and its normative basis. No less than Hegel or Marx, the author of the Acts of the Apostles affirms plainly that truth itself unfolds in history. Most importantly, up until that precise moment of his writing, it had been enough for each ethnoreligious community to mind its own affairs, and for all but the Jews, who had Divine Law, to go on worshipping their idols and perceiving the nature of God but dimly through the works of the creation. From that moment on, by contrast, there was to be only one standard of truth, and it was to be affirmed in explicit, propositional form by everyone.

Thus in Acts we find Paul preaching at the Areopagus, affirming an almost proto-Spinozian, or at least proto-Augustinian and proto-Malebranchean, vision of all created beings as “living and moving and having [their] being [in God],” and even quoting a poetic hymn to Zeus, perhaps coming from Epimenides, to the effect that “we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28). A few chapters prior Paul has affirmed that even when past generations of gentiles were “allowed to walk in their own ways,” still, “he did not leave them without witness,” since he gave them, Paul seems to wish to say, ample natural-theological evidence of his nature in “giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your heart with food and gladness” (Acts 14:15-17). But that low-level implicit knowledge is no longer going to cut it: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts:17-30).

Again, whether you recognize that command as binding on you or not, you must agree that this all marks a significant moment in the history of planetary consciousness, as a shift, for better or worse, from a communitarian to a universalist standard of truth. This standard will be carried over, again for better or worse, across the next most significant moment in the history of planetary consciousness, with the arrival of scientific modernity and the emergence of the secular public sphere.

IV.

This more recent transition did not entirely destroy Christianity, though it did significantly reduce the ability of the church to rely on state power for its own preservation. Other than its almost comically tiny rump state in the heart of Rome, Catholicism today is mostly sustained by grass-roots initiatives: not by armed conquest or state persecution of religious minorities, but by bake-sales and crab-feeds, does the faith live on. The transition also, famously, created a significant rupture, arguably more significant than the East-West Schism of the 11th century or any prior to that, and one that, I believe, is crucial for any effort to make out the outlines of our own near-future — a near-future that will be largely shaped by emerging information technologies.

A remarkable recent survey showed that very few young Americans who are technically some variety of Protestant are keen to use that description of themselves; a surprising number of them do not even know what it means. One might conjecture that the historical life of Protestantism has been coextensive with the historical life of the book, as primary unit of circulation of information from the late 15th century to the early 21st. The signature anchor of Christian faith for millions of Protestant Christians, including all my own ancestors on both sides, was the physical copy of the Bible, in the relevant national language, by the bedside. And now, as books become ever less salient to social life in general, it is not so surprising to find that a religious orientation historically grounded in individual encounter with God sola scriptura (that’s ablative) is now mutating, perhaps speciating, into something new.

Whether or not there will be a post-Protestant, or post-post-Protestant Christianity that is “dematerialized” by the technologies of our day, in the same way our homework assignments and medical forms have been dematerialized, remains to be seen. But it does not seem far-fetched to expect that the current information revolution will create new ruptures in the history of the church at least as great as the one that accompanied, with just a bit of delay, the print revolution at the beginning of the modern period. And just as in that previous rupture the branching sect was the one that more vigorously centered the most significant object of the most recent information revolution —the book—, so too in the present it is likely that at least some new post-post-Protestant sects will distinguish themselves through the symbolic and practical centering of newer information technologies, especially AI.

Of course, this historical echo is not precise. For one thing, there already were books in antiquity — the Bible itself is full of book talk! But those first touched by Christian faith were not touched in book form, as it would much later make sense in the world of Martin Luther to expect a good number of Christians to be. And approaching the matter from the other direction one might also point out that the Bible is full of computations, as Isaac Newton is decidedly not celebrated today for having noted, and to that extent a future “computational Christianity”, like the past centuries of bibliocentric Christianity, might be thought of not so much as introducing something altogether new into the faith, as rather circling back to one of its earlier and long-neglected potentials.

Anyhow a broad split might be expected in which the post-post-Protestants emerge more clearly defined into the cultural landscape, as the eager adopters of the newest technological mediators of social reality, and the Catholics hang back a bit and sort of say: “Hmm, nah, we’re mostly gonna sit this one out too, and keep doing communion, both human and holy, in the oldest way we know.”

At least that’s the emerging landscape I thought I might soon see, upon reading Magnifica humanitas. And as for the suggestion that Claude had an artificial hand in producing that text —a suggestion I have both read on Substack, and, separately and privately, heard from someone very close to the source—, I say, fine if true. Please, magnificent self-contradicting humans, give the Pope a break. He’s got an awful lot on his plate, and his heart is in the right place and honestly Claude is just so fast…

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The Oral Literature of the American People

Justin Smith-Ruiu — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:30:47 GMT

Originally published at Romanticon.

1.

One of the loveliest documented moments of the 1966 Newport Folk Festival features Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf in a rare improvised performance. The beauty of it might be thought, on an initial viewing, to be compromised by the presence of a white fellow on the stage, one who will no doubt read for some as “dorky”, gesticulating exuberantly, strumming some indeterminate instrument but adding little. One might assume this man had been among the organizers of the event, perhaps some Harvard ethnomusicologist or the like. The angle and distance and quality of the recording reveal little of his class habitus, or of the quality of his dental care. All we can really make out is his “race”, and this is enough to mark him, in our contemporary world’s taxonomy of musical traditions, as quite out of place. Even I, who am arguably quite such a “white ou” myself, found his display somewhat unseemly at first, like the blond dreadlocks of the self-identified Rastafarian skater of your worst high-school memories, like the hackey-sackers in Sex Wax shirts I had to chase from the parking lot when, in the summer of 1989, I found myself briefly employed as security guard at an N.W.A. concert.

But look closer, and some further salient features will come into view. His instrument is an autoharp, for one thing, and his teeth are something awful. He is Kilby Snow (1905-1980), Appalachian folk musician, autoharp prodigy, and in every conceivable respect “the real deal”. In a remarkable 1970 interview and performance alongside Mike Seeger, Snow gives a masterful demonstration of the unexpected range of his chosen instrument, and placidly admits that his own autoharp, embossed with his name alongside an American eagle motif, had been purchased from Montgomery Ward and had served him just fine throughout his long career. He describes his initial encounters with the autoharp exactly in the same terms as Sam Chatmon elsewhere describes his, in discussion with Alan Lomax, with the guitar: both begin around the age of four, when they are too small yet to lift their new musical prostheses and so approach them as stationary, the way an adult approaches a piano.

The more we hear Snow, both playing and speaking, the better we understand the nature of his exuberance in playing alongside these two towering blues musicians. He is experiencing the primary human emotion of joy, because he is in his element, doing his thing, as an American musician.

Sometimes I worry that I am too hung up on this point, or that my exaltation of an ideal of racial harmony as exemplified through shared musical experience is in the end its own sort of dorky and sentimental exuberance. And I have over the past few years often struggled to understand what has brought me so far down this briar path of American folkways — I, who earlier in life heard, or convinced myself I heard, so much to think about in dodecaphony and serialism and music for airports and mallsoft and whatever the hell else just as long as it doesn’t look back to the past with simpering sentiment.

I have been going down this path at the same time as I’ve been immersing myself in Siberian oral epic tradition, and reading widely about this tradition’s parallels in the Balkans, in West Africa, and indeed Ancient Greece. On a typical day, you might well find me translating Sakha oral epic with Carter Family rarities playing in the background, Mother Maybelle switching between guitar and autoharp, the latter perhaps also of Montgomery Ward. And over time it has come to seem to me that this pairing, which some might judge prima facie as incongruous, indeed more incongruous than the sight of a white fellow on stage with Bukka White and Howlin’ Wolf, is in fact anything but. When I am reading Olonkho and listening to the Carter Family, I am typically experiencing the primary human emotion of joy, because I am in my element, doing my thing, as a lover of oral literature.

“Oral literature” is a contested designation in the scholarship,1 but I suspect that is mostly because scholars are professionally obligated to find things to contest. Literature, I think, in truth, following out an insight that my great hero G. W. Leibniz had already in 1704,2 has always been oral by default, while it is only in a few aberrant strains of it that we find so much prestige attached to its secondary textual traces.

The oral literature of America in particular begins with the transplantation of Anglo-Celtic and West African varietals into new soil, followed by some centuries of cross-fertility, and a succession of what Darwin called “sports”, when the growth of some living thing takes an unexpected new turn for reasons having to do with nothing we can make out other than its own internal idiosyncrasy. America, I am confident saying, has been unusually productive of musical sports.

The geographical region most conducive to their production, significantly, is nearly perfectly coextensive with the boundaries of there former Confederate States, with hill regions and riverine flood plains the most productive of all. The reigning political order in this region sought to keep a tidy garden of pure strains, and to pitch out the weeds that showed any hints of hybridism. But nature always comes roaring back, as the aphorist said, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that the political history of America is its only history. You can hear a different history in its music. I have come to believe that this other history is a more promising one for thinking about American collective identity and its possible futures.

I’ve also come to believe that this history has been actively suppressed over the past half-century. The common tradition of American musical culture was, more precisely, systematically broken down and replaced by the new contextless commercial culture that swept in along with a whole suite of other changes in the period of the Nixon Shock often cited as the beginning of the neoliberal order.

I am old enough to have caught the faint traces of the older order, in such material as thrift-shop vinyl, but also through its still-living vehicles — elderly rural relatives who carried in them the songs that were transmitted to them by their parents and grandparents. It is this intergenerational transmission that is so to speak the lifeblood of the older order. I stood by as it died out. I could hear the elders, but by the time I came into the world the supreme value placed on cultivating individual taste made it impossible for me properly to learn from them.

When I picked up a Burl Ives or Carl Sandburg record from Goodwill (which I bought mostly in the hope of extracting “samples” from them, to be used ironically on public-access radio or in the then-thriving tape-exchange networks), it was one and the same technology that both enabled me to hear these good conservationist bards at all and that ensured the eventual effacement from historical memory of what they were trying to conserve. Recording technology, to be sure, made wonderful things possible. The recursive abstraction of jazz with each new wave of artists studying the work of the last, breaking it down and penetrating deeper into its essence (or, if you don’t like that kind of Thomistic talk, then, if you prefer, deconstructing it), was able to occur at all only because these artists could study their predecessors in a way no musicians before the 20th century could. New technology propelled at least one recording genre from libertine entertainment in the Depression era into maximally cerebral high art, working out the full potentials of modal composition only hinted at by Debussy and others in let us say the “problematizing” phase of high European tradition, in the earliest post-war years.

But what was the powerful motor of a genre defined by progressivity and abstraction, with hard bop evolving by the end of the 1950s into something like the aural counterpart to abstract expressionism, was detrimental to those genres that, as distinct from post-war jazz, could not fully get on board with modernity. There were efforts, of course. New Deal initiatives channeled public money, in part under pressure of example from similar initiatives in the socialist bloc, into the documentation, recording, and broadcasting of “the people’s” voices. These same voices would be rediscovered, showcased, and celebrated again with the folk revival of the 1960s, but by now the primary meaning of “popular”, which for most of its history was really just the adjectival form of “the people”, will have been replaced by a different and almost opposite sense, for which the corresponding noun is not “people” but “pop”. This is the sense that now makes it seem natural to describe some corporate K-Pop entity, for example, as “popular”, even if it has been entirely confected by top-down commercial interests with no concern at all for vernacular tradition.

Let us disambiguate these senses, in what follows, by using “popular†” for the older sense, with the cross superscript commonly added to the names of the deceased, and “popular*”, with the asterisk of illegitimacy.

2.

I have already identified one feature of popular† musical tradition: that its lifeblood is in the intergenerational transmission of songs and other motifs. Another is that popular† tradition, unlike popular* tradition, is no less concerned with death and loss than it is with sex and desire.

Consider in this connection these two exemplary renditions of the 1907 hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, the one by the Carter Family (1935),3 the other by the Staple Singers (1960). You must listen to both of these before we continue; doing so is part of the reading.

The song, sung in the first person, tells the story of a son or daughter accompanying a mother’s coffin to the graveyard, and it is sung with just as much sensuality —or whatever the thanatic equivalent is of what we call sensuality in the realm of the erotic— as Barry White ever conjured in his many celebrations of “making love”. There are noteworthy differences between the two versions. The Carters sing it straighter, and draw its greatest beauty out of Maybelle and Sara’s harmonies. The Staples weave around in the rhythm, play with time — perhaps one of the most exquisite micro-moments in the history of recorded music is Pops Staples’ second intonation of the word undertaker at around 1’05’’. This difference is often cited as the specific differentium of Black and white musical traditions in America. It is said that you would have noticed it if, on one and the same Sunday circa 1870, you heard the performance of “Amazing Grace” at an AME church in the rural South, followed by a performance of the same song at a white Baptist congregation later the same day. This is all true enough, but too much emphasis on such stylistic differences can obscure the historical significance of the prior existence of a shared treasury of American songlines that serves as the basis for all such variations in style.

I have already identified two signatures of vernacular musical tradition that are likely universal: first, that it is transmitted orally across the generations, and second, that it concerns itself with death as much as with sex, which is to say that it considers the full frame of human experience, rather than just the experiences from which it is easiest to extract a profit. In American vernacular tradition, in turn, we can identify a third feature: that it is fundamentally Christian, or at least it is indexed to Christianity in a sustained alternation between sin and redemption. When it is not Christian, it knows it is not. Many of the great early rock stars —Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, notably—, alternated between phases of lascivious excess and penitent regret. And the inescapability of the church, for them, was always the hidden force that made their engagement with the secular themes of carnal love and desire so compelling. Their art is the expression of what St. Thomas would call “disordered desire”. But having never forgotten altogether about God, even if their backs are currently turned on him, they are able to express an abiding awareness that the depths of desire are infinite.

Early Staples songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied with a cluster of theological leitmotifs common in Black evangelical Christianity — the promise in Revelation, for example, at least on one interpretation, that in the afterlife we will each be fitted with a crown (Revelation 2:10). Most often the thematic focus of the lyrics is on extreme end-of-life scenarios, just before transit to a Heaven that is consistently represented as a real place, at the moment of both one’s greatest suffering and one’s sharpest experience of the Christian virtue of hope. The effect is something analogous to the contrast of black and bright gold in Byzantine icon painting.

Pops’ repetitive, minimalist phrasing and innovative tremolo effects on his Fender Telecaster are the very essence of rock-and-roll: dark, nasty, disconsoling. But unlike the Satanic turn in that tradition beginning in the mid-1960s, which Hendrix declared sonically with the tritone, and then the Stones and Black Sabbath and many more to come made explicit in lyrical content and marketing strategy, Pops gets nasty only to drive home exactly what it is our salvation, about which daughter Mavis is simultaneously singing, is salvation from. Just try to listen to “Low Is the Way” (1957) —again, doing so is non-optional—, and then to describe it without recourse to such familiar evaluative terms as “hardcore” or “bad-ass” (the latter now rather compromised by neoliberal girl-boss feminism).

Listening to the Staples’ recordings from the 1950s drives home a crucially important historical fact: that some of the earliest rock music was Christian rock. And this was nothing like the rear-guard, derivative Christian rock that we know from the period following the suppression of vernacular tradition —Petra, say, or Stryper—, which could never quite resolve itself into a coherent aesthetic or moral stance, but only used some laughable semblance of coolness instrumentally to make palatable what it implicitly acknowledged to be the fundamentally uncool message of Christian faith.

You will find Christian hymns interspersed with secular numbers throughout mid-20th-century showcases of white American musical talent, such as this 1952 episode of the Kate Smith Evening Hour featuring Hank Williams (in this case watching is optional, but strongly encouraged — among other things you will see the most passionate expression of secular love, real or feigned, in the eyes of young Anita Carter throughout her duet with Hank beginning around 5’00’’). And you will likewise find hymns in mid-century showcases of Black American musical talent, as at the end of this remarkable episode of The !!! Beat from 1966, a Dallas-based show I have previously praised, and could not possibly praise enough — it is pure American popular† genius at its greatest.

By contrast, you will not be hearing any hymns on Soul Train a decade later, or on Solid Gold a decade after that. And you definitely won’t be hearing any on America’s Got Talent, that crass display of empty mataiotechnics (as Quintilian described the skills of a traveling entertainer who delighted crowds by throwing a chick pea through the eye of a needle from a great distance4), which only manages to hold its audience’s attention by holding the camera less on the performers than on the empty-headed judges’ endless performance of dumbstruck jaw-drops. Christian themes will survive well after the suppression of vernacularity in country venues, but now only as identitarian reaction rather than as the spontaneous expression of a popular† life-world.

And here we see the true nature of the victory of the proto-algorithmic recording industry in the neoliberal era: that it succeeded in resegregating by market forces what the Civil Rights era had desegregated by political activism and progressive legislation, and thus in reentrenching, at the level of culture, a perception of stark natural differences between different groups of Americans that earlier had to be maintained by state power. This reentrenchment worked in part through the ideology of what we might call chronological chauvinism: the peculiar idea that people in the past, simply because they were living in the past, could only have been more closed in their hearts than we are today. We point to the fundamentally unjust legal and political regime under which they lived and died, and imagine that we are pointing at them individually. But they could just as easily, if we were to revive them and to show them a glimpse of the future, point to our musical regime and declare: vos quoque!

3.

Because commercial forces can’t stand for anything to remain in existence that is not as stupid as they are, one common technique for suppressing expressions of artistic integrity is to ruin them for all time by adapting them to the ends of advertising. I still can’t hear “Good Vibrations” (1966), that ingenious pocket symphony, without imagining that someone is trying to sell me Sunkist. And if you have only heard one Staple Singers song in your life, you probably only know them as the provisioners of a jingle for late-1990s television ads hawking Chevy fucking Malibus.

“I’ll Take You There” was a 1972 Stax Records hit, and as such it lies almost at the historical end of the arc of the Staple Singers that I would like to trace and to interpret here. Three years later, the true historical end, we have “Let’s Do It Again”, composed, significantly, by Curtis Mayfield. This was the last hit for the Staples, and made it to the top of the Hot Soul Singles charts for at least a few weeks.

There is an illuminating performance of this song from 1976 that seems to me to tell the full story of the late 20th century. Grey-sideburned Pops and denim-clad Mavis appear naturally adaptable, and more or less amenable to any new exercise in musical expression, or at least any that is rated somewhere lower than PG-13. But keep an eye out for the lesser Staples! Just look at poor Yvonne, all endimanchée in her yellow church dress. She is plainly only up there out of family solidarity, and on her own never would have survived the coerced secular turn that the new economic-cultural order had brought with it. Yvonne might just be my favorite Staple.

“Let’s Do It Again” is a fine-enough gospel-inflected soul song. But it’s not hardcore like “Low Is the Way” had been. I like my music hardcore. That’s why I think Stryper are fucking dorks, and why I think early Staples are a pure expression of American popular† genius.

If we continue to follow the arc of the Staples’ career backwards in time, we next arrive at “Respect Yourself” of 1971, likewise reduced to slightly irksome earworm as a result of its several commercial adaptations. The song itself is very much of its Sesame Street moment, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of all people, and of Black children in particular. Kind of corny, kind of touching, and resolutely secular in content (other than a modest call from Pops towards the beginning for toleration, on the part of non-believers, of the efforts of door-to-door evangelizers), “Respect Yourself” might still be plausibly interpreted as the fulfillment of at least part of the Christian social mission as the Staples understand it.

This hit follows a decade or so of significant involvement in the Civil Rights movement, the peak of which is surely the Staples’ 1965 album, Freedom Highway, named for the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march of that same year. To map the distance in spirit between this overtly political intervention and the feel-good individualism of “Respect Yourself” just six years later is in some sense to witness a success story — by the end of the 1960s Civil Rights had passed into law, and after that much of the remaining work to be done focused on bringing about the inner transformations that might more fully enable members of previously excluded groups fully to realize the possibilities of their newfound formal equality. But this decadal shift is also the one that saw so many former Maoists and Weathermen drifting into crystal-gazing and Primal Scream therapy, and to some extent we can see the Staples’ transition as their own inflection of this same general reorientation towards the atomic individual as the locus of change. MLK is by now, notably, dead, and his posthumous legacy, too, is beginning a parallel process of de-Christianization, as a condition of his inclusion in the national Pantheon.

We thus have, if we turn this backwards journey back around and respect the arrow of time like we’re supposed to, four broad metamorphic stages: the raw gospel of the late 1950s, followed by a vision of Civil Rights still rooted in the ideals of faith-based community, followed by a largely secularized affirmation of individual dignity and self-worth, followed by full participation, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reservation, in the post-1971 system of secular commercial entertainment. (We could add later phases as well for the individual Staples, not least the evolution of Mavis into her current role, at the age of 86, as generous-hearted and ever-adaptable grande dame of American music, beaming with Christian virtue so plain and evident that it has no need to explain itself).

It was in large part the religious impulse that quickened the Civil Rights movement into motion. It was in turn a great tragedy that the movement’s formal success in part made possible the conditions for a new cultural-economic order that was able, so to speak, to let its guard down. There is a natural motion across these four phases of the Staples’ career, where each phase can be seen to contain the seeds of the one that follows it, even if the motion from phase 1 to phase 4 brings us effectively from one aesthetic-moral universe to its opposite.

The genius anyhow of the Staples, the work that fully justifies their place in the American musical Pantheon, that by his own recollection was powerful enough to wake Bob Dylan up to the full mystery of life, are the recordings made between 1956 and 1959 and released in the latter year on the album Uncloudy Day. Almost all of the songs here are about death, and apocalypse, and retribution, and redemption. Several of them are the common property of American popular† tradition, shared generously and without jealousy across racial lines. The title song itself, “Uncloudy Day”, recorded in 1956, is to my mind the Staples’ most sublime achievement, showcasing Pops’ remarkable restraint on the guitar, Mavis’s voice at its most transcendent, telling of the promise of everlasting life in a city that is veritably made of gold. Here it is (listening, this time, is emphatically non-optional):

4.

None of this is to say of course that the United States is or ought to be Christian by definition, or that one must be Christian to participate fully in its collective identity. The founding documents are broadly of an Enlightenment deist stamp, and tens of millions of that country’s citizens are of other faiths. The modern liberal guarantee of a neutral public sphere must be preserved if anything at all is to be preserved. But this does not mean that the role of Christian communities in shaping American cultural life in particular needs to be suppressed or forgotten, nor that it has not been a grave political mistake to equate such communitarian belonging with identitarian reaction, and in consequence to seek to push these communities to the margins of political life. If you don’t want to understand or to honor the communitarian pride that a Merle Haggard finds in being an Okie from Muskogee (1969), then sooner or later you end up with the jingoistic national pride, and the politics of mass ressentiment behind it, that a Lee Greenwood finds in being what he calls “an American” (1984).

Things were not always this way. Throughout the mid-20th century, notably, the greatest efforts to chronicle, to document, and to celebrate American popular† traditions were driven by New Dealers, labor activists, socialist-leaning ethnomusicologists, and Bohemians of various stripes. There is much to learn from their work, and the present moment is abundant with lessons as to what happens when we decline to do so. The most important lesson, I think, is this: that one must either honor vernacular tradition and intergenerational continuity, or leave it to those who would seek to mandate that honor by state coercion to do so.

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“The Power of Life”: A Livestream with Jessica Riskin on the Legacy of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Hinternet Editorial Board — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:30:41 GMT

This is just a quick reminder that later today The Hinternet will be hosting a livestream discussion between Justin Smith-Ruiu and Stanford historian of science Jessica Riskin on her latest book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin Random House 2026). Jill Lepore has called this book “a truly remarkable achievement.”

You can join the livestream discussion, beginning at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 New York / 11:00 Palo Alto, here:

Last week we featured an excerpt from the book, which you can read here:

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The livestream will include a period at the end for questions from the audience.

You can order The Power of Life here:

An AI Scale for Writers

Hinternet Editorial Board — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:23:38 GMT

I.

Oh man, things are getting hot. The Hinternet Foundation will be hosting a symposium on AI, literacy, art, and the humanities in Paris this coming November, and we are beginning to fear that by then whatever any of us might say on the matter will only be able to be heard, by at least some others, as “fighting words”. We ourselves are cautious skeptics, trying to make sense of a world-historical technological shift with vast implications for most facets of human life, and to do so without rushing to any easy conclusions or facile prescriptions or proscriptions.

Our work is getting harder all the time. In just the past few weeks it has come to seem to us that AI use, culturally speaking, occupies much the same spot that masking did five years ago. That is to say that it has emerged as a razor-sharp wedge issue, and has accomplished a near-perfect division of society into two camps, both of which believe the other is absolutely, categorically wrong.

We would need to check the numbers, of course, but we also detect some significant continuity between the respective compositions of each side of the earlier pair of opposed camps, and each side of the current one. That is, those claiming today to be “AI-free” appear predictably to be the same who, circa 2021, were claiming that nothing valuable to human community is lost when you can no longer see the mouths and noses of your fellow human beings. And in turn those insisting on laxer attitudes toward AI-generated texts often seem to be the same who, five years ago, were prepared baldly to deny some fairly well-established facts of virological causation out of simple personal distaste for Anthony Fauci.

But whether or not there has been a “pro-mask to anti-AI” pipeline, or an “anti-mask to pro-AI” one, it seems to us that we should at most briefly bemoan the fact that our society, under pressure from profit-hungry proprietary algorithms, just keeps bifurcating in this way, and that then we should move on, without dwelling on the bitter memory of past theaters of our evidently endless, indeed materially unendable, culture war.

If what we can learn about the AI controversy from the masking controversy is limited, this is in part because our newest rupture is in reality significantly less binary than the previous one, and than most involved in stoking it have so far been able to see. To put the matter bluntly, unless you have been living in a cave for the past 15 years —a real cave, that is, not a mancave, a gamer cave, or a gooner cave, which of course all have great wifi—, you are in fact “using AI”, to the extent that it is by now built into basically all of the technologies that you, as a writer, are almost certainly using to get your words out into the world.

And no matter how independent-minded you are, AI is using you in turn, in the sense that the negative style and the idiotic quirks it has dumped on the world now constitute a significant part of our default communicative frame. To some extent all this is an inevitable and predictable development in the history of technology. Madame de Sévigné’s liquid correspondence could only have poured from a plume put to paper. Frank O’Hara’s stark poems could only have come from his encounter with the partially automated language-machine known as a typewriter. And the language you have been generating, fellow writers of the 21st century, cannot fail similarly to bear the signatures of its own technological era.

It is in light of all this that we at The Hinternet have sometimes been unable to resist taking jabs at those supercilious performances of purity that we so often see on Substack, when writers declare of themselves that their work is “AI free”.1 Ironically, it is often the writers most eager to announce the artisanal provenance of their work who are, at the same time, most faithful to a strict normative conception of good middlebrow writing that itself amounts to a sort of automation, to the extent that it outsources to society, to style guides, or to publishing-world gatekeepers, what in its fully unautomated expression would implicate only the writer’s inner voice, and the writer’s fingers.

II.

No one, we say again, is AI-free. But of course this does not mean that we may as well turn all the work of our imaginative and intellectual faculties over to the machines, or that we can now reduce the art of writing to an art of prompting. What it means, instead, is that we would be far better served by an honest scale of AI reliance than on any facetious self-reported claim of total AI virginity.

If this scale were to come into wide use, writers and readers could decide for themselves what degree of AI involvement they find acceptable. We could then dispense with the impossible ideal according to which only entirely AI-free writing is honest, meritorious, or worthwhile, and we could begin to think of the principled commitment to a minimal role for AI not as a universally binding moral-aesthetic standard governing all writing, but as something much more like the set of commitments to which the filmmakers behind the Dogme 95 manifesto adhered. Those Danes made some awfully good films, without soundtrack music, without artificial lighting, etc. Good for them! And good for Quentin Tarantino, too, for dropping in that historically incongruous but ever so sick Rick Ross track at just the right moment of Django Unchained (2012). If you don’t like this particular example, take the use of Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) instead, which irked the critics immensely, while undeniably demonstrating the primary conviction behind this modest proposal of ours: that there are just so many “udogmatisk” ways to make art!

So then, without further divagation, let us present our scale. We have modeled it on the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, widely used in mineralogy and related fields, which until we began working on our own variant we had mistakenly been calling “Moe’s Hardness Scale”. In 1812 the German naturalist Friedrich Mohs devised this qualitative ordinal system, with diamonds at 10 and talc at 1, by observing which minerals can scratch which others, and which those others can scratch in turn. There will be no scratching on our scale, and we will move in order from lowest to highest, beginning, unlike Mohs, at zero.

So then:

0 — You actually do live in a cave, or have found some other way to go about your life entirely unconnected to the internet or to any media that indirectly transmit habits of language formed on the internet. If that is the case with you, paradoxically that also cannot be the case, since by definition you cannot be reading this.

1 — You have never so much as opened ChatGPT, Claude, etc., but you live in society like the rest of us, you send and receive e-mails, get your news from sources like the New York Times, occasionally post to Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and, almost certainly, interact on a fairly regular basis with people who do use commercially available LLMs.

2 — You occasionally use ChatGPT for narrowly focused tasks, like finding out how the luggage-storage system works at the Düsseldorf Bahnhof, but never with the intention to share with others, under your own name, anything the LLM tells you. Over time, however, you begin to detect new idiosyncrasies in your own habits of expression. You may find yourself writing of some phenomenon or process or historical fact that there is “nothing mysterious” about it, even though no one has suggested there is anything mysterious about it, and there could be no reason at all to suppose that there is, just as you may have read some days before that there is “nothing mysterious” about the train-station lockers.

3 — You sometimes use LLMs for “bullshit” writing tasks, the ones you would rather not be required to do at all, and that you judge “beneath” you to the extent that they involve nothing of your creative faculties or your personal style — so, pretty much all work e-mails, for example, or syllabi, or grant-proposal budgets. Occasionally you recall an earlier time when you thought it important to express yourself carefully and truthfully even in such tasks as these, and you wonder whether the boundary you have sought to set up, between these bullshit tasks on the one hand, and your meaningful tasks on the other, is really so impermeable as you might have hoped.

4 — You occasionally carry on lengthy conversations with LLMs about topics of interest to you, as for example what Claude Debussy might have said if you were to go back in time and to play John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1964) for him. You learn all sorts of things about modal composition and so on in the process — or at least you think you learn such things, even if you know theoretically that what the LLM told you is all just so much probabilistic gap-filling. A few days later you’re writing an essay on Substack about, among other things, the evolution of jazz into a high art form in the post-war era. You try to suppress any memory of the earlier dialogue, knowing that it was unverified information and any serious writer would not content himself with that. But it’s hard entirely to suppress all the lively thoughts and speculations that dialogue triggered in you, and inevitably some traces of the ideas explored, if not of the artificial language used to explore them, enter into what you end up writing under your own name.

5 — When you used to write fiction involving, say, the third-highest-ranked women’s basketball team in Latvia, and you needed to assign a name to one of the players, you would go to the Wikipedia article on, say, the Latvian national women’s volleyball team; you would take the first name of one of the players, the last name of another of the players, and you’d consider that part of the job done. Now you go to your LLM and you write: “Give me ten plausible names of Latvian women’s basketball players,” and you choose your favorite from there.

6 — You do the sort of things described in 3-5 above, and, in addition, you sometimes consult LLMs to add ornament or grain to a sentence published under your own name. For example, you query ChatGPT as to what kind of paper Madame de Sévigné used, and then instead of writing that she “put plume to paper” you write that she “put plume to rag paper”. You know you could have got this information by other means, but you also find yourself able to judge with fairly high confidence that the training-data of LLMs have included some pretty reliable information about the history of paper-making. You have the strong sense that your judgment of verisimilitude is something like the judgment of an expert chicken-sexer, to use a stock example from the philosophy of science. You feel something like moral certainty that further reading from trusted sources would only confirm what you’ve just been told by the LLM, and anyway the stakes are pretty low here and you’re unlikely to be called out on it so you may as well just go ahead.

7 — You love crafting your own sentences and paragraphs, but you find the final process of revision and polishing tedious, and anyhow you have so many commitments that it’s just not realistic any longer to do that part yourself. (It used to be realistic, but somehow it no longer is.) So you run your text through the machine with the prompt: “Please identify any serious grammatical errors or stylistic infelicities.” You consider the problems it points out one by one, and incorporate the changes it recommends as you see fit.

8 — You’ve written a book that needs some powerful paragraphs, synthesizing the entire argument and all the leitmotifs woven through it, for a conclusion. You’re exhausted and you just can’t squeeze any more words out of yourself, so you upload the file, you ask the machine to study it and to generate some paragraphs for you. You’ve written the book in English, but you’re also fluent in Norwegian, so you ask the machine to give you the paragraphs in this latter language. Once you have them, you translate them freely into English, and the further you go, the more freely you find yourself translating, as the text itself awakens your ideas and reminds you that you do have some things of your own to say after all. The final version, which you publish under your own name, has an LLM as its causal origin, but the causal sequence is essentially untraceable and the language is essentially your own. You used an LLM as “starter yeast”, so to speak.

9 — You love your work as a writer of non-fiction books and of public lectures, but you hate the part where you also have to furnish the usual accompanying paratexts: abstracts, catalog copy, all the different types of front matter, and so on. So you do the “meaningful” stuff yourself, but turn to an LLM for the promotional padding. Fearful that someone might detect the true origins of these parts of your work, and falsely suppose that the “meaningful” part must be equally artificial, you run through several LLM-generated iterations of the various paratexts, requesting each time that the machine “humanize” it, or that it work harder to duplicate the idiosyncratic style of the main text that it has already studied, in order not to be found out. You used an LLM as “starch”, as it were, or as “caulking glue”, to hold together or to solidify, as demanded by publishing-world conventions you yourself never chose, what remains substantially your own work. At least you tell yourself that’s what you’ve done, but you continue to worry, like a naughty child, that you’re gonna get spanked.

10 — You are a lazy borderline-illiterate person who wants to make some money online. You know there are plenty of suckers out there basically as alienated from language as you are, and willing to pay to skim some trifling thing about, say, how to dazzle a literary agent with a great opening paragraph, or about how charmed a life spent in France is, and all the other usual stuff that clogs our feeds. So you go to ChatGPT and command it to write an essay for you on one of these topics. You post it to Substack and it gets 11.2k hearts, over twenty times more than the most-loved piece ever published at The Hinternet, and hundreds of comments from people declaring your work “brilliant”. A vanishingly small number of precious egghead scolds will complain that your piece was “obviously written by AI”. They will call your work “slop”, and you will cry all the way to your payment processor’s portal.

III.

We suppose that more or less everyone who is reading this falls somewhere between 1 and 9 in their current habits. We do not want to have anything to do with those who score a 10. They belong to a different and incommensurable world from ours. By contrast we sympathize with everyone in the long middle of the scale, and know, from personal temptation, what they’re going through. We ourselves have gone up to 4, and have often considered the many attractions of 5-9. In the future we would like to impose on ourselves so to speak a “Dogme 26” that would prohibit us from going higher than 3. We would continue to read other authors who go up to 9, and would be grateful to them for sharing their score with us.

Beyond such efforts at practical resolution of our current quandary, we at The Hinternet truly do not think that there is any fundamental moral problem at issue, or that any claim as to the wrongness of LLM-enhanced writing can be defended on the basis of universal principles alone. Practices evolve, and eventually they change beyond recognition. We can actively work towards an idea of what we would like our practices to be, of the direction in which we would like to see them evolve, and try to get there from here, even under the considerable weight of these new machines that are transforming language so rapidly and so indifferently to any consideration of our preferences. It would be very nice indeed if we could do so without constant moralizing and condemnation.

We are living through an absolutely bonkers historical moment. Everything is topsy-turvy, and the fate of writing entirely uncertain. None of us really knows what’s going to happen. Under these conditions it really does not make sense to be so hard on one another.

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A related phenomenon is the strange mystification of “style” that we have seen among Substack writers who are in a position, or believe themselves to be in a position, to teach others something about that slippery notion. George Saunders declares for example that “A Sentence Is a Way of Being in the World”. Please. Let’s not exaggerate. A sentence is the vehicle of a proposition. It does its work and then we move on. At least we used to move on, but now we have the option of liking (an option taken in this case 700 times, at last count) or sharing (112 times) this sentiment, which enables Substack users to affiliate themselves to whatever mystery Saunders imagines he is fingering, but to do so in a more or less automated way. “Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying,” wrote the Palestinian poet Noor Hindi. We applaud this intervention, though we also note that essentially any fact at all about our world of infinite joy and infinite suffering could have come, salva veritate, after the comma.

The Science of Weather and the Nature of Science

Jessica Riskin — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:02:48 GMT

There are only a few more days to apply for the Hinternet Foundation Summer School taking place in August,
“Whither the Humanities?”
Deadline: June 1
Click below to see the syllabus and to apply!

We are very happy today to be able to publish this exclusive excerpt from Jessica Riskin’s new book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Riverhead Books, March 2026). Jessica teaches history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. Many of us are in agreement that her previous book, The Restless Clock (Chicago, 2016) is among the best treatments of the natural-philosophical problem of life in early modern Europe ever written, and deserves to be considered a new classic. It is fitting that she should turn her attention next to Lamarck (1744-1829) — amply memorialized in statues and lecture halls in France and widely characterized here as the “founder of the theory of evolution”, even as his role in the history of science is mostly downplayed or dismissed in the Anglosphere. This dismissiveness is especially regrettable, given that some of Lamarck’s ideas have been positively reassessed in recent years by scientists working in such fields as epigenetics and developmental plasticity theory. It is to be hoped that Jessica’s book will help to bring about a deeper and more complete picture of this crucial figure. Jill Lepore has said of The Power of Life that it is a “truly remarkable achievement, at once a delightfully wry and wildly entertaining biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and a riveting intellectual history.” Order your copy today. —The Editors

From THE POWER OF LIFE by Jessica Riskin. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Jessica Riskin.

From the garret window of the room where Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lived when he first moved to Paris in his mid-twenties, around 1770, he could see nothing but clouds and sky. The clouds therefore became his companions and source of entertainment. Watching them, he began to notice how they formed, gathered and dispersed. They didn’t behave randomly, he observed, but exhibited types and patterns. He began to watch more carefully, and in this way, he became the first person to classify the clouds, producing a veritable cloud atlas for his first presentation to the Academy of Sciences in 1777. He divided clouds into five types: (1) veiled (en voile), (2) gathered (attroupés), (3) dappled (pommelés), (4) sweeping (en balayures), and (5) grouped (groupé). But Lamarck became busy, first with the study of botany and then with his new position at the National Museum of Natural History, created during the French Revolution, the wonderfully named Chair in Insects and Worms. He waited twenty-five years before actually publishing his classification of clouds, finally including it in his meteorological yearbook for Year Ten of the Revolution (1802) – the same year in which he coined the word “Biologie.”

The following year, a young English chemist named Luke Howard introduced the basic categories of the current taxonomy: “cirrus” (made of parallel fibers, from the Latin word for a tendril of hair), “cumulus” (conical heaps, from the Latin word for a heap or pile), and “stratus” (horizontal sheets, from the Latin word for a “spread”). Lamarck and Howard apparently never heard of one another, which is a shame since they might have had a lot to talk about. On the other hand, they would probably have disagreed about some things too. For instance, Howard said he used Latin terms to name the types of clouds because he intended his system to be adopted by the “learned of different nations.” This strategy was successful: Howard’s terminology established itself internationally and is still in use today.

Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms, not because he wanted to speak only to French people – after all, he drew people from all over the world to his legendary classes on invertebrate zoology – but because he hoped to create a participatory community of meteorologists that would include the non- “learned.” Only an educated minority would have understood Latin terms; and Latin names would have indicated that meteorology was an elite, scholarly pursuit, which was exactly the opposite of what Lamarck intended. To be sure, when he named plants and invertebrates, he often used Latin roots, but in those cases, he was working within traditions that had existed for centuries before him. The clouds, in contrast, had no traditional nomenclature; no one had ever named them. Embarking on an entirely new science, Lamarck was free to define its terms as he liked. And, just as he boasted that he could turn any passerby in the Garden of Plants into a botanist, he also meant to turn everyone in France, and beyond, into a meteorologist. He addressed his readers fondly and familiarly as “friends of nature.”

In September 1799, two months before Napoleon declared himself First Consul of France in a coup d’état, Lamarck published the first in his decade-long series of meteorological yearbooks, offering forecasts for the year 1800, the first year of the nineteenth century. In this inaugural yearbook, he issued a special “invitation to amateurs of meteorology” encouraging readers to annotate their copies of the book by recording their own observations in them, and to send him their annotated yearbooks at the end of the year. He offered careful instructions for how to make these annotations.

In order to understand how you’d have annotated your yearbook if you’d been one of Lamarck’s participatory readers at the turn of the nineteenth century, you first have to know that each book includes a calendar arranged in columns. From left to right, there’s a column for the day; then the month; then for “natural periods useful to observe” such as the migratory arrivals and departures of certain birds, the blooming of particular plants, and the fall of leaves from various species of tree. Next comes the most important column, which is somewhat mysteriously labeled “epochs of changes of constitution.” This column in fact contains the positions of the moon: its apogees, perigees, and the northern and southern extremes of its orbit. In the course of a lunar month, the moon’s orbit carries it not only around the earth, but also north and south, above and below the equator. Lamarck explained that when the moon was traveling through the six northern signs of the zodiac, he called this period the moon’s “boreal constitution”; and when it was traveling through the six southern signs, he called it the moon’s “austral constitution.”

The column containing the moon’s constitutions is the crucial one because Lamarck’s central meteorological principle was that the moon imposes cyclical effects upon the weather by exerting a gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere: pulling to the north, causing south winds to prevail, or to the south, bringing north winds. (Lamarck’s essential idea remains present in current meteorological science; today, meteorologists refer to the effects of the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth’s atmosphere as “atmospheric tides.”)1

After the column of lunar constitutions comes one for the “meteorological season,” and here Lamarck divides each of the four regular seasons into two parts: the winter and summer into “solstitial” and “median” phases, and the spring and fall into “equinoctial” and “median” phases. Next comes a column for the time of the moon’s passage over the meridian line through Paris, where Lamarck was conducting his observations; and finally, one for its declination (its angular distance above or below the equator) at noon. A second calendar, arranged in paragraphs rather than columns, describes what the weather will probably be like for each successive “constitution” of the moon. According to Lamarck’s theory, boreal constitutions, pulling to the north, bring south winds and therefore warmer temperatures, lower pressures, humidity, rain, storms and tempests; in contrast, austral constitutions, pulling to the south, bring north winds and therefore colder temperatures, higher pressures, and clear, dry weather.

In his invitation to his readers, Lamarck explains how to record their observations of the weather day by day in the column containing lunar constitutions. He also offers detailed instructions for “how to judge the state of the atmosphere.” First, he says, you have to examine whether the weather is “simple” or “mixed.” Simple weather is either calm or has wind blowing only in one direction; mixed weather has upper and lower winds blowing in different directions. The lower winds are the familiar ones that turn weathervanes and windmills and fill the sails of ships; the upper winds are those we can see through gaps in the lower clouds as they blow around the upper clouds. Sometimes, even when the sky is heavily overcast and you can’t see its upper regions, you can still discern that the weather is mixed. For instance, if a south wind is blowing the clouds northward, and yet the barometer is steady or rising, there must be a cold north wind up above bringing the higher pressures; and if it’s rainy even though a north wind is driving the lower clouds southward, you can be sure there’s a warm south wind up above.

Having explained how to observe the atmosphere and how to annotate the yearbooks, Lamarck encouraged his readers to send him their marked up books at year’s end and said he’d be especially grateful to hear from any whose observations differed significantly from the probabilities he described. He also included a thorough explanation of the new metric system of weights and measures that the National Convention had introduced in April 1795, even though the system had no immediate use for annotating the yearbooks. The metric system was provoking widespread exasperation and resentment, but Lamarck believed in it; here was a further expression of his purpose to spread scientific literacy and a participatory feeling among his readers.

* * *

True to Lamarck’s romantic nature, he really loved storms. The participatory feeling wasn’t all about measurement systems, charts and tables: he wanted his readers to pay attention to the weather not only by recording it but also by relishing it. Storms, he said, were “the most imposing and the most beautiful” of meteorological phenomena. One summer while he was up at Beauregard, his country house in Héricourt, he observed a hurricane, which he described rapturously in the following yearbook in a special section entitled “Observations on the Hurricane of July 31, 1808, and on a large rotating cloud.” The storm’s great diversity of cloud shapes and colors had fascinated him, their rapid dance across the sky so “magnificent” that “I couldn’t tire of admiring the beautiful spectacle before my eyes.”

Science and the appreciation of beauty were inseparable, since it was while he stood rapt in the midst of the storm, watching the drama unfold, that Lamarck made a surprising observation: “suddenly I perceived in a large cloud placed to the southwest, a singular movement that I had never noticed.” The cloud in question took up much of the horizon and was oddly shaped, resembling “an enormous pyramid” with its summit pointing downward toward the earth. “Soon the sides of this pyramid were torn into shreds” while its base took on “a gyratory movement,” turning on its axis “with great slowness.” This stately, circular motion was portentous: “a most violent wind” and squall soon followed, so powerful that Lamarck was obliged to flee back to the shelter of Beauregard and “abandon my observations.”

He had witnessed a similar phenomenon in Paris just a couple years earlier, in 1806, which he had also reported in the following yearbook. “On the 16th of May at about one hour thirty-five minutes in the afternoon, the sky being loaded with various clouds on the point of becoming stormy, the barometer being at 28 inches three quarters and the thermometer … at 17 degrees, I heard a rather loud clap of thunder, which had been preceded by a flash of lightning.” Turning to look toward the southwest, where he reckoned the storm would be coming from, he saw “a large blackish cloud,” and beneath it, “a whitish and hanging portion of the same cloud having the shape of an inverted cone or imitating that of a funnel.” It seemed a bit like a waterspout, except that the funnel-shaped part was quite small compared to the rest of the giant cloud above it. As he watched, he became most interested “to see the misty parts of the waterspout in a continual movement. Those of the funnel or the inverted cone turned very distinctly as if around an axis but rising and forming a spiral.” As with the other sorts of cloud-forms, so too for funnel clouds, Lamarck seems to have been the first to assign them a name.

Lamarck also loved the “spectacle of the sky” in all its myriad moods – majestic, sublime, terrible, magnificent – at sunrises and sunsets with “the clouds adorned successively in the most beautiful tints, like the tender pink, the fiery red, the most brilliant purple, finally the beautiful violet,” or else at other times when the clouds were “grouped into mountains, their faces shining, illuminated with the brilliance of silver or purest gold.” The “meteorologist’s sky,” he explained, was the portion of the atmosphere that generated the weather, an “immense laboratory” overhead.

The emotional, the lyrical and the scientific were all one sky, one weather system, one world. And the observer – Lamarck himself and each of his readers – was right there in the thick of it, not outside looking in. He emphasized the direct action that the atmosphere exerted – and the moon through its action upon the atmosphere – upon all living beings: “the intimate relations that each particular state of the sky exercises on us, as well as on all the bodies on the surface of the globe.” Anyone who has experienced a total solar eclipse has learned viscerally and dramatically just what Lamarck meant. During totality, as the moon moves across the face of the sun, the awesome thing is that you feel the astronomical event viscerally, directly in your body: the chill, the darkness, the spreading hush. Even if we only notice it at certain moments, especially during extreme experiences like eclipses or storms, we’re always being acted upon by the atmosphere, which is always being acted upon by the sun and the moon. Rather than lifting the observer out of the world into a position of external, objective witness, Lamarck’s science resided in the thick of the storm: it was all about the intimacy of witness with world.

* * *

Lamarck’s yearbooks generated lots of interest and commentary. In the dailies, they were announced, attacked, defended, and their probabilities compared to the actual weather as it came to pass, by Lamarck himself and by others.2 With all the attention they attracted, they often sold well enough to require a second printing.

One particularly dashing defender of Lamarck’s was the Parisian balloonist and parachutist André-Jacques Garnerin. Captured by the British during the Revolutionary wars, then handed over to the Austrians, Garnerin had spent three years as a prisoner of war in Buda (the now-Hungarian city directly across the Danube from Pest) passing the time by dreaming up designs for parachutes with the idea of escape. After his release, on the clear autumn evening of October 22^nd, 1797, in a park in Paris (the Jardin de Mousseau, which is now the Parc Monceau), Garnerin made the world’s first descent by parachute. He first rose to a height of 900 meters and then audaciously cut the cords attaching his basket to his balloon. The crowd craned its collective neck and held its collective breath as Garnerin initially plummeted like a rock, then when his parachute opened, he began to pitch about violently in the wind, finally dropping out of view. Aghast, the spectators rushed together in the direction of Garnerin’s fall, then cheered riotously when they saw him come galloping back into the garden on horseback, perfectly intact except for a mildly sprained ankle.[iii]3

A young woman in the crowd named Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse was especially inspired by the performance. She made her way to Garnerin to introduce herself, and soon became his pupil, then his wife, and the first woman parachutist. Before starting her lessons, Garnerin had to persuade the authorities that women should be allowed to go up in balloons alongside men. This had been disallowed for a couple reasons: first, the members of the Academy of Sciences warned that women’s fragile organs might not tolerate air travel; and then the government authorities had judged it unseemly for men and women to occupy the same balloon basket.

Garnerin’s arguments prevailed, however, and he soon received the following remarkably considerate response from the city government: “Citizen, according to the complaint that you have addressed against the order of the central office, which forbids you from traveling in an aerostat with a young citoyenne, we have consulted the Minister of the Interior and that of the general police… . [We all] think that there is no more scandal in seeing two persons of different sexes rise together into the air, than in seeing them get into the same carriage, and that moreover one cannot prevent an adult woman from doing in this respect what one allows men to do, and from giving, by rising into the air, a proof both of her confidence in the practice and of her intrepidity.”4

In the autumn of 1805, on the occasion of Garnerin’s thirty-ninth aerostatic ascent and fifth descent by parachute, he cited Lamarck’s yearbooks as the most useful thing to him in his aerial adventures. Since his balloons were ungovernable, leaving him entirely at the mercy of the weather, he said the best he could do was to know as much as possible about the forecast. “Never oars nor rudder, wings nor sails, bird’s flight nor carp’s leap, will direct a balloon,” waxed Garnerin poetically. “Mr. Lamarck’s meteorological directory is worth more … than all the calculations of modern Icaruses.”

But Lamarck’s colleagues were less enthusiastic. Once again, when he tried to read his meteorological theory to the members of the First Class of the National Institute in 1802, as had happened five years earlier with his work on the composition of matter, he encountered vehement opposition, particularly from Laplace.5 To Lamarck’s chagrin, his adversaries cast his meteorological work as outdated, superstitious nonsense: they constantly referred to the yearbooks as “almanacs,” and to the probabilistic reasoning they contained as “predictions,” insinuating that Lamarck’s meteorology was essentially astrology. As with Lamarck’s other struggles with his critics, this dispute with Laplace was fundamental, having to do with the nature of science, and even of the world itself. What counts as a scientific explanation? Is it legitimate science if you acknowledge, as Lamarck did, that the causes are not absolutely determinative of certain outcomes? Is the world deterministic?

Lamarck didn’t see the world as deterministic, or science as the description of deterministic mechanisms. In the case of the moon’s influence on the weather, he emphasized that many different factors affected it, rendering its effects uncertain. Lamarck identified two sorts of complicating factors: those that acted in a regular and predictable manner, and those that acted irregularly. The regular complications included the fact that the moon’s elliptical orbit carries it away from and back toward the earth during each lunar month. From its farthest point, its apogee, its gravitational pull is weakest, while from its closest point, its perigee, the influence is strongest. There are also the lunar “syzygies” – its “oppositions” with the sun, when it is on the opposite side of the earth, and its “conjunctions” with the sun, when it is on the same side.

Solstices and equinoxes – and in general, the positions of the earth relative to the sun – were also regularly occurring situations that affected the influence of the moon on the atmosphere. Finally, in terms of complicating factors that act irregularly, Lamarck mentioned clouds and storms – in other words, the weather has a feedback effect upon itself. Added to all this complexity was the fact that the earth itself was in a state of continual transformation: according to Lamarck, nothing in nature remained the same even “for two seconds in a row.” The oceans were always modifying the surface of the globe; the moon was continually moving the sea basin and the earth’s center of gravity; and the planet was always absorbing solar light, which transformed its matter, mass and volume. All in all, the earth’s landscape, atmosphere and climate were a great commotion of interacting elements.

Others who had sought connections between the moon and the weather had tended to simplify the situation by focusing on certain points in the moon’s orbit such as full moons, new moons, apogees, perigees, oppositions and conjunctions. For instance, in 1770 – while Lamarck had been garrisoned with his regiment in Provence admiring the wildflowers – an Italian priest and professor of geography and astronomy at the University of Padua named Giuseppe Toaldo had published a “Meteorological essay on the true influence of the stars upon the seasons and changes of weather.” Toaldo wrote that the moon acted upon the earth and its inhabitants by means of its light, heat, and gravitational attraction and that its influence became important at certain points such as perigees and syzygies. Lamarck drew upon and appreciatively cited Toaldo’s observations in developing his own theory but, he said, it was a mistake to focus upon certain points of the moon’s orbit: the moon acts upon the earth’s atmosphere all the time, in a continuous way, and always all mixed up with many other influences, not “in indivisible and determinable instants.”

This complex mixture of factors made the moon’s role hard to identify, and Lamarck confessed he had almost given up hope. “For more than twenty years,” he recalled, “I alternately resumed and abandoned this interesting research. I often spoke about it to my friends….” But try as he might, he couldn’t find patterns to confirm his conviction of the moon’s influence on the weather until he finally realized that this influence wasn’t absolute, but rather subject to many complicating factors, and yet it remained perceptible. Overall, he estimated that the weather corresponded with the probabilities derived from his theory about five-eighths of the time. This was far from perfectly predictive, but he thought it was enough to be useful. The probabilities he offered were grounded in theory and observation, he insisted, and therefore, whatever Laplace might say, “[i]t is not an opinion that I am presenting here, it is a fact that I am announcing; it is an order of things.”

To Laplace – whose work in mathematics included pivotal contributions to the field of probability theory – Lamarck’s “probabilities” were no better than astrological prognostications. Lamarck offered descriptive forecasts such as “we have reason to expect strong winds, maybe violent or tempestuous…. [I]t would be imprudent to set out to sea or to engage in any enterprise that requires calm weather.” These were not probabilities in Laplace’s estimation: his probabilities were mathematical expressions, not conversational descriptions. This divergence was connected to a deeper difference between the two. Laplace’s world, even including the most minor and insignificant events, was as deterministic “as the revolutions of the sun.” Humans’ sense of having a free will and of making unconstrained choices were just “illusions of the mind.”6 In Lamarck’s view, in contrast, the world was made up of many small agencies acting in concert, its future open to whatever they might bring about.

To express his idea of an utterly deterministic world, Laplace imagined an infinite intelligence that could comprehend all the interacting forces in the universe. For such a being, he said, nothing would be uncertain “and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.” The human mind could gain but a “feeble idea” of such an intelligence. The best sort of approach we could make, Laplace thought, was through astronomy and mathematics, which would lead the mind “back continually to the vast intelligence … from which it will always remain infinitely removed.” I don’t suppose Laplace’s hypothetical omniscient being might be reminding you of anyone?

Isaac Newton, whose science provided Laplace with his starting point, came right out and said it in 1713 in the second edition of his Principia, the magnum opus in which he laid out his physical system of the universe: “it follows, that the true God is a Living, Intelligent and Powerful Being; and … that he is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient.” The “French Newton,” as the popular press reverently nicknamed Laplace, showed Newtonian tendencies not only in his system of celestial mechanics but also in some of the theological ideas he attached to it.

God controlled everything in Newton’s universe: the world operated according to God’s “original perfect idea by the continual uninterrupted exercise of his power and government.” All the parts of the world were God’s “Creatures subordinate to him, and subservient to his Will,” and there were “no powers of nature at all that can do anything of themselves.” In fact, according to Newton, the world-machinery functioned only through God’s immediate presence all throughout and would otherwise grind to a halt.7 In Laplace’s cosmology, likewise, nothing enjoyed its own power to act: the deterministic mechanism of the divinely created universe left no room for other agencies.

This might seem like a surprising thing to say about Laplace, who has been often invoked as an early champion of atheism. But in fact, Laplace wasn’t an atheist. While he left behind the Catholic orthodoxy in which he grew up, and especially rejected the possibility of miracles, he consistently expressed belief in a supreme power behind natural processes: he referred to a divine intelligence in his published writings and to God in private letters. According to an often-told story, Napoleon asked Laplace why he made no mention of God in his work on celestial mechanics and Laplace replied that he had “no need of that hypothesis.” The anecdote, a favorite of popular science writers, seems to have originated with Napoleon’s doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi. In Antommarchi’s version, Bonaparte was displeased by the response; but then Antommarchi’s purpose was hagiographic propaganda, and he offered the story as evidence that the emperor was respectably devout.8

According to the astronomer William Herschel, who witnessed Laplace’s and Napoleon’s exchange, Laplace had simply wanted to show that “a chain of natural causes” could account for the “wonderful system” of the heavens. The question of God’s existence didn’t come into it. This is perfectly consistent with what Laplace himself wrote: that the supreme intelligence might well have worked entirely through material causes, with no need for direct supernatural intervention of the sort Newton insisted upon. If indeed Laplace said he had no need of a particular theological hypothesis, it was likely Newton’s idea of constant, direct divine intervention in nature that he rejected, and not the idea of God’s presence behind the world-machine. In fact, Laplace boasted that his own findings regarding the stability of the solar system would have confirmed Newton’s conviction that the universe could only be the work of an intelligent and all-powerful being.9

In short, the deterministic mechanism of the world, in Laplace’s science, was the manifestation of omnipotence: a total consolidation of power, with no room for even minor assertions of choice or will, and no such thing as contingency or uncertainty: these were but figments of human ignorance, illusion and folly. How different a world – how even opposite a world – from Lamarck’s churning commotion of beings and forces in continual self-transformation.

* * *

Soon after publishing his first yearbook, at the end of the year 1800, Lamarck went to see the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, whom Napoleon had just appointed Minister of the Interior. Lamarck wanted to persuade Chaptal to create a government service that would receive meteorological observations and information from all over France: the world’s first national weather bureau. Chaptal was enthusiastic; the very next day, he sent off letters to departmental prefects in every region of the country asking them each to name someone to the new position of government meteorological correspondent. Chaptal charged Lamarck with the welcome task of directing this first government weather agency, which entailed sending out exact instructions to the correspondents regarding how to conduct and record their observations, receiving their responses, and overseeing the process of organizing all the information into general tables. This job brought Lamarck to the Interior Ministry several times a week, as weather information began pouring in from all quarters.10

Alas, the agency was short-lived. In August 1804, three months after Napoleon had had himself crowned Emperor, Chaptal resigned as interior minister. In his letter of resignation, he said he wanted to spend more time with his chemistry. He told a more complicated story in his journal, having to do with the ins and outs of foreign and domestic diplomacy in the wake of Napoleon’s self-promotion to emperor. Meanwhile, a rumor circulated that Napoleon had provoked a falling-out with Chaptal over Chaptal’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Bourgoin, a stage actress at the Comédie Française. According to the rumor, Napoleon had deliberately summoned Bourgoin to his residence one evening while he was working there with Chaptal. When she was announced, Napoleon ordered the servant to have her wait for him, whereupon Chaptal brusquely gathered up his papers and stormed out. This “coup de théâtre,” if it took place, must surely have been designed to provoke Chaptal’s resignation, which at any rate came at a moment when Napoleon was eliminating all the more independent-minded administrators and surrounding himself with absolutely loyal followers.

With Chaptal’s departure, the meteorological correspondence service was abolished. All the records were confiscated and sent to the Bureau of Longitudes (a government agency founded in 1795 by the Revolutionary National Convention to improve astronomy and navigation), which was just coming under the directorship of – you guessed it – Laplace. That was the end of official French meteorology for a time. Only after the passage of several decades and political regimes did a Parisian doctor, botanist, and geologist named Charles Martins, together with two colleagues, re-start the practice of a meteorological correspondence and annual yearbook. That same year, 1848, saw a new revolution: the Second Republic was establishing itself just as Martins and his colleagues were launching their meteorological project. But history repeated itself: by the time they published their third volume, in 1851, the Second Republic was already giving way to the Second Empire under Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III (Napoléon le petit as Victor Hugo devastatingly nicknamed him, or to Karl Marx, the farcical and grotesquely mediocre echo of his formidable uncle.)11

Martins was an admirer of Lamarck: he also published a new edition of Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy to which he added a long biographical introduction, proclaiming grandiosely, “the hour of justice has sounded, and the posthumous glory of Lamarck casts an unexpected glow on France.” In the first of their yearbooks, for 1849, Martins and his colleagues echoed Lamarck by modestly referring to themselves as “three friends of Meteorology” and promised to compile the information gathered by “zealous and disinterested” observers from all over France. In 1852, they co-founded the Meteorological Society of France, which gave rise to the governmental Central Meteorological Bureau in 1878, which developed through various stages into today’s Météo-France.[xii]12

But that was all decades after Lamarck’s death. In his own time, after the self-emperor-ification of Napoleon, the resignation of Chaptal, and the cancellation of the meteorological correspondence, the opposition to Lamarck’s own yearbooks grew ever more concerted. The nastiness of the campaign against him so painful that decades later, following his death, Auguste would express deep bitterness on his father’s behalf. No science could be more useful and important, Auguste reflected, and yet although people had done plenty of observing and recording, no one had embarked on an actual science of meteorology; “my father was the first to try it.” Instead of praising and supporting his pioneering effort, those with power and influence had subjected him to ridicule and “persecution plotted in the shadows.”

Lamarck ignored it for as long as he could, and carried on compiling and publishing annually, but at last, in 1809, as the tenth yearbook appeared, Napoleon himself instructed Lamarck “to immediately cease all publication of his observations on the atmosphere,” as Lamarck later recalled. “What a strange thing,” he lamented, to ban his work even though he wasn’t “writing at all about politics,” and devoted himself exclusively to “studies of nature.” It does seem extraordinary that Napoleon the great modernizer, the mastermind of rational, scientific approaches to governmental administration and authority, should have taken such a hate to meteorology, of all things. But perhaps, upon reflection, it’s not so surprising after all. Meteorology resists a reductive, deterministic model of science. And the weather defies control. Perhaps that’s at least partly why Lamarck found it so fascinating.

At any rate, Lamarck was quite mistaken to suggest that “studies of nature” are separate from “politics.” Lamarck’s natural science was overtly materialist, granted creative agency to the humblest of living beings, combined poetry with observation and measurement, insisted upon the embroilment of the observer – sensory, physical, emotional – in the world observed, and promulgated a participatory model of scientific and governmental authority. To Napoleon and his scientific advisors, that was all plainly subversive.

Main primary sources

Cuvier, “Eloge,” v (cloud-watching). [Cotte], “Mémoire” (Lamarck’s 1777 presentation to the Academy of Sciences, of which nothing remains except Cotte’s description).

Lamarck, “Sur la forme,” 149 (not random), 153 (types of clouds); “Nouvelle définition,” 113 (addition in 1805 of seven more types, brumeux [misty], terminés [terminated], en lambeaux [ragged], boursouflés [puffy], en barres [bar-shaped], coureurs [running], and de tonnerre [thunder]); Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 85-88 (atmospheric constitutions, complicating factors), 93-95 (“invitation to amateurs,” annotation instructions, annotated yearbooks request), 96-113 (metric system), 97 (“two seconds”); Annuaire pour l’an X, 24-25 (calendar columns example), 50-51 (“reason to expect”) 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an 1807, 171-72 (funnel cloud); Annuaire pour l’an 1808, 1 (“friends of nature”), 200 (“most imposing and beautiful”); Annuaire pour l’an 1809, 184-87 (hurricane), 164 (bodily influence of atmosphere); Annuaire de l’an xiii, 97-98 (“spectacle of sky,” “immense laboratory,” “intimate relations”); “Mémoire sur le mode de rédiger … les observations météorologiques”; Météorologie, 451-53, 474 (chagrin at colleagues’ reaction), 475-76 (“what a strange thing”); De l’influence de la lune, 430 (“indivisible and determinable instants”), 431 (twenty years of hesitation); Extrait d’un mémoire, 148 (“not an opinion”). Howard, Essay, 6 (“learned”). Laplace, Philosophical Essay, 3-4 (infinitely intelligent being); “On the Notion of Power” and “On Causality,” in Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 224-232 (contingency a figment). Garnerin, Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 8 October 1805, 59-60 (“modern Icaruses”). Haeghens, et al., Annuaire météorologique, ii-iii (“three friends of Meteorology”). Newton, “General Scholium,” 389-90. Martins, “Introduction,” lxxxiv (posthumous glory). Chaptal, Mes souvenirs, 106-107 and note 1 (Napoleon/Bourgoin episode). A. Lamarck – Cuvier, 8 February 1830, IF GC Ms 3252 / f. 358-359, 3-4 (Auguste’s bitter reflection).

Influence of the moon on the atmosphere, atmospheric constitutions:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an VIII, 77-89; Annuaire pour l’an IX, 109 –111; Extrait d’un mémoire; De l’influence de la lune; “Météorologie.” Toaldo, Essai, 89-94.

Government weather agency:

Lamarck, Annuaire pour l’an XI, 85-86, 154; Annuaire pour 1807, 203; Annuaire pour 1810, 150; Météorologie, 469-473, 476. Lalande, “Histoire de l’astronomie pour l’année 1801,” 26.

“French Newton”:

Le Moniteur universel, no. 308, 4 November 1811; Journal de l’Empire, 18 May 1812, 4; Pierre-Josoph-Spiridion Dufey, Nouveau dictionnaire historique des environs de Paris (Paris: Charles Perrotin, 1825), 11.

Secondary sources:

Packard, Lamarck, 79-82. Landrieu, Lamarck, 133-149. Bourdier, “Esquisse,” 34-35. Bange and Corsi, “Chronologie”. Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy.” Alder, The Measure of All Things (resentment of the metric system). Delange, “Phénomènes,” 134 (negative response to Lamarck’s meteorology). Schiavon and Rollet, Pour une histoire du Bureau des longitudes.

Women parachutists:

Noyes, Lady Icarus, 101; Kotar and Gessler, Ballooning, 81-82; Marck, Elles ont conquis le ciel (women’s organs).

See Hagan, Forbes and Richmond, “Atmospheric Tides,” 164.

See e.g. Journal de Paris, 18 January 1800, 534; Le Courrier des spectacles, 16 March 1800, p. 2; Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 5 August 1801, 1301; Mercure de France, 22 November 1801, 398-99; La Clef du cabinet des souverains, 4 October 1802, 8; Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 31 August 1804, 1504; Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 4 October 1804, 39; Le Journal de Paris, 8 July 1808, 1356; Le Journal de Paris, 17 October 1808, 2157; Journal de Paris, 22 December 1808, 2584; Le Journal de Paris, 31 December 1808, 2648-49; Le Journal de Paris, 14 December 1809, 2510-11. Lalande criticized Lamarck’s meteorological theory: Mercure de France, 7 March 1807, 472. René Tourlet, a doctor and science journalist, defended Lamarck: Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, 4 February 1808, 139-140. Many thanks to Pietro Corsi for help tracking the news of the yearbooks.

Gazette national ou le Moniteur universel, No. 33, 24 October 1797, 131; Journal de Paris, No. 33, 24 October 1797, 135; Priscilla Lamure, “Le premier saut en parachute,” Écho de presse, Retronews, 3/13/2018. On Garnerin, see Perrin, La Vie rocambolesque d’André Garnerin.

La Chronique universel, 15 June 1798, 2. Later, in London, Garnerin tried another feat: “I launched a cat with a parachute, in miniature, which encompassed a column of air 38 inches and a half in its basis. The descent was gradual, and the cat fell, with his little vehicle, in the garden of a man who insists on receiving three guineas for indemnification of the trespass committed by poor puss, or at least his picture with the parachute,” “M. Garnerin’s Account,” in Derby Mercury, 12 August 1802, 3.

Burkhardt (Spirit of System, pp. 10 and 225, n.20) identifies the memoir in question as “Mémoire sur les variations de l’état du ciel,” later published in the Journal de physique, 56 (1802), 114-138. The original source is a letter from Étienne Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire to Georges Cuvier, Institut de France, Fonds Cuvier, Ms 3225 (12).

Only in the twentieth century, apparently, did writers start referring to this hypothetical being as “Laplace’s Demon.” See e.g. The Monist, Vol. 41 (1931), p. 3.

“Clarke’s Second Reply,” in Leibniz and Clarke, Correspondence, 12, 13 (see also 33); and Newton, Opticks, Query 31, p. 403. Newton’s friend and translator Samuel Clarke represented him in an epistolary debate with G.W. Leibniz in 1715-1716. Clarke expressed Newton’s view that God reigned over the laws of mechanics: they held true only as a result of his immediate presence and he could suspend them at any moment. Leibniz objected that it represented a poor view of God’s power to think he couldn’t create a mechanical system that would run on its own without his continual intervention. See “Leibnitz’s Second Letter” in Leibniz and Clarke, Correspondence, 9.

Laplace (Exposition, 479) agreed with Leibniz that the world, once created, should run on its own without divine intervention, though he dismissed Leibniz’s idea of a “preestablished harmony” coordinating the movements and changes undergone by all substances in the world in accordance with the laws of mechanics. For evidence that he wasn’t an atheist, see his Laplace’s letter to his son, Œuvres Vol. 1: v–vi. Roger Hahn (Pierre-Simon Laplace, 67, 172-173) is among those who describe Laplace as an atheist. His main evidence is a draft of a letter to Laplace from the geologist Jean-Etienne Guettard in which Guettard accuses Laplace of having denied God’s existence. It’s impossible to be certain about Laplace’s inner state of belief, but in his public and private writing, he rejected Christian doctrine and denied the existence of miracles but retained faith in a divine intelligence behind the workings of nature. Laplace’s conversation with Napoleon: Antommarchi, Derniers momens, Vol. 1: 282. The story found its way into Napoleon’s “memoirs” which, though written in the first person, were in fact compiled from various sources by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon; see Lamothe-Langon, Mémoires, Vol. 1: 262. The story’s popularity: see e.g. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 46.

Lubbock, Herschel Chronicle, 310; Laplace, Exposition, 479. According to another fellow astronomer, François Arago, Laplace was unhappy with Antommarchi’s implication that he was an atheist and asked Arago to persuade the publisher to delete the passage: Faye, Sur l’origine du monde, 110-111.

Despite his support for a government meteorological service, Chaptal declined to endorse Lamarck’s theory. See Petit-Perrin, “La Météorologie,” 97-98 and Chaptal-Lamarck, lettre du 23 Vendemiaire an XI (16 octobre 1802), AN Serie F/20/1.

Victor Hugo, Napoléon le petit (1852); Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

“Historique,” Météo et Climat; “L’Office national météorologique (1920-1945),” Méteo-France.

“AI Ethics” Is a Dead End

Justin Smith-Ruiu — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:00:03 GMT

There are only six more days to apply for the Hinternet Foundation Summer School taking place in August,
“Whither the Humanities?”
Deadline is June 1.
Click below to see the syllabus and to apply!