Mark de Silva - Square Wave

He stood and just as quickly sank face first onto the bed a short yard from the desk. Penerin had emailed him a link to this same piece by Kames, but he’d had the magazine itself handy. Probably it could only be published under Kames’s name, and in the Wintry’s own monthly, Lebenswelt , it was so loose, so oddly voiced and full of circling repetitions.

Kames’s intellectual pedigree was irreproachable, though. His doctorate in political theory, begun at Princeton and finished at Chicago, won him a fellowship year and then a tenure-track post at Berkeley. But rather than revise his dissertation, Paradoxes in Voting , into a book, he shelved it, along with the formal apparatus he’d developed that put a new complexion on decision theory.

He turned instead to composing a commentary on The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy , by the notorious and brilliant Weimar (and then Nazi) legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt had written of the possibility of democratic dictatorship, and Kames was trying to see what he could do with the idea, stretch it, break it even if that’s what it took to see oneself through to a viable state. He was also seeking a fresh conception of demos , and like Leo Strauss, he was reaching back to the Greeks, to Athens, to find it.

The result of his labors, fully intelligible only to a few Schmitt scholars, was as keen in its critique of liberal democracy as it was troubling in its positive proposals. The essence of it was simple. Kames thought there might be ways of bolstering democracy — or salvaging it, it was not always clear — that traded on a notion already of great currency. Selves, it was almost common sense now, were something formed, acquired, not natively endowed, even if certain endowments might form preconditions on selfhood. But if that is what identity simpliciter was, it was only custom, and probably cowardice, that made an exception of political identity. One’s political significance, like any other, was a matter of what one did, the forms of life one participated in, the know-how one acquired and deployed, the moral and political character one developed. It wasn’t merely what one was, as a brute biological matter: a creature falling under a certain genus and species.

Political selfhood was a kind of second nature; unlike first nature, it was necessarily always up for grabs, accessible to, and losable by, all. It was an achievement. Which meant, among other things, that it was perfectly possible to exist biologically and not politically. At most, Kames thought, biology guaranteed only the most rudimentary form of political citizenship, nothing like an equal hand in steering the ship that was society.

He married this to the thought that commerce could abrade character, that in some cases it could make one unsuitable for politics. Stagg felt closest to Kames on this point: A contractual approach to politics had catastrophic social and cultural consequences. Some read this as a dangerously reactionary stance. But it felt natural to them both, and seemed now to them, at this point in history, like a new kind of progressivism.

In any case, it was with this proto-position in hand, and a growing frustration with the limits of the seminar room and his colleagues walking in lockstep, that he founded his research center, naming it after the fount of wealth necessary to do so, his great grandfather, Franklin Wintry, the British zinc baron whose sons would settle in the New World.

Kames couldn’t stand to hear it called a think tank. The phrase smacked of something shallow, intellectually second class, and depth was at the core of the project, though it was inflected in a new way. It had brought him notoriety, as he and his colleagues injected ideas, like this essay, at once incisive and ambiguous, into settings where they might make contact with ripe circumstances.

With help from friends like Leo Eldern, Kames had transformed the Institute into a national force. At this point, he had to be heard. So publishers obliged, pushing aside their normal concerns, sometimes of clarity, always of length. But this piece was unusual, even for him. It seemed more of an artful jotting, a pretty ramble, fit more for a good blog. It might have been pride alone that prevented Kames from publishing it that way, what made it necessary that it appear in the print issue.

But then it might also be that the note was not a note at all, with its suggestion of incompleteness and approximation, but the finished version of a form Stagg failed to recognize as such. The essay’s apparent imprecisions might actually be a set of carefully inscribed double- and triple-entendres and, indeed, occasionally, red herrings. And why not? These days, if you were to flourish or even survive, everyday life seemed to demand the most subtle exegesis. Why then shouldn’t actual texts? Which meant, Stagg thought, that Kames’s article might well be as perfect for what it was, and what it was meant to be, as Madame Bovary was a novel, what its author had hoped for it, and for her, Emma.

This struck Stagg as more likely, knowing the value Kames placed on rigor. Anyway it had been a while now since one worried about a prestige gap between print and digital. Even Kames, in his mid-60s now, was not so antiquated. In some ways, he was seeming as modern as could be. Probably more than Stagg himself, who seemed more interested in the past than the future.

Stagg slept with the lights on, in his clothes. It was cold and the heat was unpredictable, so this was not only easy but practical. He left the thinking for the morning, when there would be two of them, he and Penerin.

The same essay, printed out on paper that had been wet at some point and had dried wrinkled and stiff, was sitting on the desk when Stagg came into the office. A Venn diagram of coffee rings marked it along the margin, and it was turned around, as if he should read it. He picked it up. There were only a couple of underlines, most of which seemed not to correspond to anything of outstanding importance: “museum,” “plain clothes,” “a fine speaker.” They must have been stray markings as Penerin followed along with his pen. But then they seemed too definite for that; they showed through on the reverse side of the pages.

“Strange, right?” Penerin said from the doorway. His voice was soft, as if he were standing farther away than he was.

Stagg nodded and set the sheets down. Without looking at him, his boss walked around to the desk and sat slowly in the mesh swivel chair.

“I can’t see what this does , or what it’s about… really about,” Penerin said in almost philosophical tones. “Can you?”

The question sharpened his voice, and his eyes, which finally fixed on Stagg, held a new intensity.

“It’s definitely—”

“It’s accusations, it’s camaraderie, directed at this same guy, Celano,” Penerin interrupted. “And Jenko too. Then there’s the insinuations about us, but just fuzzy enough for him to deny. And then the academic jargon that I don’t know what.” His voice was sharper still.

The fluorescent loop overhead, veiled by frosted glass, crackled faintly and continuously. Stagg waited a few beats to see if Penerin was done.

“Ravan spoke with him,” Stagg said.

“About the museum, right. He collected the facts — a strange bunch of them.”

“Strange events.”

“No, but what he put down, what Kames gave him, the emphasis is all wrong. It’s more about the wine than the bombs. It’s bizarre.”

“Is that Ravan or is that Kames, though.”

“Jesus fuck, Carl, this isn’t about distortion, you have to see that.” He paused, calmed himself. “What about this essay then? These are Kames’s words, right? He chose them. So whatever is odd here , there’s no excuse, no messenger, we know it’s him. And it is weirder than anything Ravan reported. For one, why is he talking about the assaults on the hookers like this? Of all the things he could have chosen, why was this his example of something you could just as well accuse him of?”