There Is a World Beyond What You Know
This entry begins my journal cataloging my re-read, or more accurately first read with comprehension, of Melville’s The Confidence-Man. I am confident, only 1/3 of the way through, that this book is the key, or one of the keys, to understanding this roiling sea of lagan and derelict we call America. This is the cool Melville to like, I think. Whereas Moby Dick uncovers American greed, lust, and anger- tools with which to plunder and plumb the lands and seas of oil-we pay our tolls with blood- The Confidence-Man is subtler, rhetorical violence. The confidence-man assures you, “there is a world beyond what you know.” In this world you do not know, you are less of a chump, you are more successful, richer, more popular.
What follows are several riffs on Chapters 1-5, all page numbers refer to the Penguin Classics edition.
A Gnostic Subway Ad
Riff 1
The plot is simple: On a riverboat heading down the Mississippi, various allegorical post- Civil War personages are tricked by several confidence-men, or one man in several costumes. Sometimes the trickster wants several hundreds of dollars, and sometimes only a few, and sometimes nothing at all. In chapter 6 the one-legged man rebukes two young clergymen: “ You two greenhorns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?” (42) They are arguing over a black beggar from the first chapter, who collected alms before departing the ship. Is this a refutation, arguing that yes he did scam them for money, because it is the most base and sinful thing in the world, or, did he scam them for the pleasure and fun of it?
I think of Danny Devito in David Mamet’s Heist, yelling “Everybody needs money! That’s why they call it money!” Into the phone. Money is money because it is money, you need it. The word looks like something you could eat, or take home in your pocket. It’s a tautology, because as Wittgenstein says all propositions of logic are tautologies. Money is itself and comes forward to be needed. Love is Love, because of a grammatical error. Love is a verb used as a noun, becoming a thing. So outside of loving there is Love. Outside of moneying, to great horror, is money, lurking. In money there is no love. In love, there is no money, but labour. Love’s Labour is Lost, in the labour of producing itself- and at the end of time, maybe, we will finally get Love’s Labour Won.
Riff 2
In the introduction to Sianne Nagai’s Theory of the Gimmick, she defines the gimmick as:
Like all aesthetic judgments, it is an outward-facing act of address, a perlocutionary speech act, and an improvisatory performance. It is also an invitation to playful sociality around an object of suspicion; a displacement of belief in an illusion that in this very displacement acknowledges its social effectivity and reality; and a transvaluative judgment of other judgments. What we ultimately judge in our spontaneous encounters with its flagrantly unworthy form is the erroneous appraisal of value in general—and through this, an entire system of relations based on the mismeasurement of wealth.
The gimmick is a calculated attempt to foster incorrect judgements related to value disguised by its casualness. The goal of the gimmick is to lower defenses to allow something else, usually far more perfidious, to sneak by. Nagai’s primary example in the intro is Google Glass- a goofy and unnecessary product since discontinued, which was widely mocked as misplaced futurism. Now, however, analogous products are used to provide real-time information to factory floor managers and workers, and presumably, to track workflow.
The Confidence-Man opens with a mysterious mute in cream colors gathering a crowd aboard the steamer Fidelé. He brandishes a slate on which he writes, erasing every word except for charity: "Charity thinketh no evil…Charity suffereth long, and is kind…Charity endureth all things…Charity believeth all things…Charity never faileth." The man in the cream suit, which must be the Confidence-Man’s overture, attempts to lull the passengers into submission with his message of charity. His gimmick, summarily, is Christianity, or the American derivation of it. The passengers grow angry, pushing and shoving the deaf beggar, who receives no alms, until he escapes to curl into a “lamb-figure” in a quiet section of the deck. To call someone to charity is to remind them of their previous lack of charitability. The section closes with the curmudgeonly barber emerging from his shop, grumbling, to hang to a hand-made wooden sign that reads “No Trust.”
Riff 3
In the next chapter, the passengers erupt into a Babel. The gimmick, as Nagai writes, is misdirection- in calling attention to itself it seeks to tear down the defenses of the mark in some ways but causes defenses to rise up elsewhere. One thinks of Kafka’s swimming parable, as quoted in Daniel Heller- Roazens’s Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language:
I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory [ein besseres Gedächtnis] than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim [literally,"the former being-able-not-to-swim," das einstige Nicht-schwimmen-können]. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.
In the state of being duped, the mark both remembers the state of not being duped, and of being duped previously. But mostly, the state of not being duped, and giving confidence. The present temporality of being duped an outlier to be ignored, and the outlier that proves the rule that one is generally not being duped. However, if one believes that one is generally not being duped, one is generally often being duped but retains the nostalgic memory of trust and confidence.