Goodbye, Mr. Nudge

Ah, it seems like Mr. Nudge is leaving the Obamaadministration.

 

This is probably sad news for the president. If Larry Summers was the brains of the Obama response to the Zona – the Great Recession – the very spirit of Obamaism is Cass Sunstein.  Obama’s general policy of compromise with all men (as long as they were rich, and to the right)  is embodied in a man whose major policy idea is government by “nudging”. Instead of the bad old liberal days, where the government corrupted men’s souls by guaranteeing them healthcare and the like, the new new liberal eschaton was to be brought on by a government that simply, quietly poked a finger in the back of the citizenry.

Sunnstein was the head of a corporate hogwallow called the OIRA – the office of regulatory affairs – about which we have these glorious stats, from a previous article by David Dayen at FDL:

“While the rest of the public might not know about OIRA, lobbyists have the office on speed dial. Industry groups visit OIRA largely for one purpose: to reduce regulation. Steinzor’s analysis found that industry representatives outnumber public health and safety advocates by almost 4 to 1 at OIRA meetings.

Jim Tozzi helped create OIRA and worked on regulations under five presidents. He says the tilt toward industry is to be expected.

Regulations, he says, “increase the cost of industry. So they have more direct skin in the game.” In contrast, he says, environmental groups’ members “don’t have skin in the game, because they just say ‘they’ll cough their lungs out’ or something like that.”

I’m staggering from that comment, but let’s get to the data. The Center for Progressive Reform studied the records of 1,080 OIRA meetings over two Administrations. They found that OIRA changed 84% of all environmental regulations, and 65% of others, under the Obama Administration. This is an increase over the Bush Administration.”

So many people despair at the radical lefty flank that doesn’t appreciate the greatest president ever as he matches off against  the man from Glad. These defeatists are regularly scolded in the pages of American Prospect and other stalwart liberal mags. And how right they are, for just think – if Obama has trumped the Bush administration by turning even further right on the environment, just think how bad Romney will be! On the other hand, not much has happened environmental-wise on Obama’s beat – just the attempted murder of the Gulf of Mexico by BP and the advent of the heat death planet. I mean, we hardly have any skin in this game, and if the heatdeath planet keeps spiraling out of control, the lack of skin will be oh so literal. Which is why, as Obama puts it,  Cass Sunstein “years of exceptional service” have been so important. The only question, I guess, is who the service has been for, exactly.

Sunstein is retiring to a Harvard post, where he will manufacture more fabulous  ideological pudding for the next generation of fabulous centrist Democrats. Democrats who won’t be mislead by the rather minor damage of “coughing your lungs out”, but will, of course, troll some concern about all the expectorated bronchi during the election, thus making electing them the most important thing anybody has ever done or ever will do!

For more info on the ‘most influential liberal legal theorist” of his generation, Mr. Sunstein his own self, here’s a NYT Magazineprofile: 

The profile is in that special, brownnosing mode that just makes the reader go quivery inside with the sense that one is touching greatness. Here’s a graf:

“Sunstein, who is 55, has an almost childlike excitement — his e-mail messages end in long strings of exclamation points, and when other academics talk about his mind, they do so in the way people talk about the ballet, as something precious that ought to be preserved.”

Uh, yeah, I know! Everybody I know was talking about ballet and preserving it just yesterday, at the Quickburger.

“Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was…”

Parmenides and Red Riding Hood

An old post I've redone for clarity's sake

Marc Soriano on his book, Les contes de Perrault, culture savante et tradition populaire: “Ai-je mené mon enquête, ou mon enquête m'a-t-elle mené?”[Have I led my research, or has my research led me?]

Which  brings me to a familiar story. A man tells this tale in a poem: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.

Philosophers, enraptured by what is and what is not, have neglected the question that some more naïve inhabitant of roads, ways, trails, streets, pistes, sentiers, Wege, some vagabond, some pour lost soul, might ask – say a girl wearing a red hood, entering a forest and coming to two trails to her grandmother’s house. That question is – how is being, or non being, like a road? Or, if inquiry and being are so related as the chariot wheel is to the track – how is inquiry a road? Why this image?

Who leads the inquiry? I imagine this question coming from the girl, as she strips off the hood and throws it into the fire, and strips off her socks and throws them into the fire, and strips off her chemise and throws it into the fire, a magic fire that consumes instantly and ashlessly, and all the undergarments, strip he tells her, and her staring at the being on the bed of whom she has always had a presentiment. The being who wants to see all of her and never will, there will never be enough seeing, just as she has remarked on enough of him, seen him – his teeth, his ears, his hairiness. This couple, made of girl and wolf, sex and hunger. Both know trails, tracks, paths. One will return, one will not. Both know the pins and needles. One is the route of what is, one is the route of what is not and cannot be. Beware of the second route.

Not that this couple would have been in any position to read the fragments of Parmenides, which were first gathered together again – all the extant verses - in the West by G.G. Fuelleborn in 1795. [Nestor Luis Cordero, 10]

He was not a gentle wolf. Perrault wrenches this story from the forest and the tracks first laid down by man back to the court:
Mais hélas ! qui ne sait que ces Loups doucereux,
De tous les Loups sont les plus dangereux.

But the maidens that accompany our hero to the portals of night and day – the girl might have recognized them. Saintyvres, in a folkloric interpretation of Perrault, associates the chaperon rouge with the headdresses of the May queen: On the isle of Lesbos, on the eve of May day, the young girls gather flowers in the countryside and on returning home make crowns that they suspend over doors, and crown themselves: red flowers are mixed with wheat stalks, nettles and garlic. The garlic protects against the evil eye, the nettles prick the enemy who wants to enter into the house, the wheat attract riches and the red engenders gaiety.”

Of this couple, I am made. Of this route, I am puzzled. These routes, what leads, what follows. I have been thinking of addiction as a road, a path – of one among a type of path, in what is called path dependence. Here the path, forgotten by the philosophers, turns upon them – that so submissive thing, hardly a thing at all, on which angels, devils, beasts and mankind walk up and down. With the confidence that the way back is along the same path as the way forward. The goddess at the portal of day and night might seem, to the man honored by her instruction, to have made this point clear. Don’t worry about the quantification of the road. Of the route of the search, what counts is the search – not the route. You can go back anytime you want to.

Except in the poem, that ability to return is attributed by the goddess to herself. Slyly – she may be a gentle wolf: “Behold within your mind’s own deepening frame/those presences steadfastly fixed, yet all/removed from obviousnessn; for never shall/these beings dissolve their ineluctable hold/on Being, whether scattered manifold/across the cosmic all, or packed into/a rounded ball; for, where I start, thereto/shall I again return self-same.” I may assume that the “I” here is a shifter, and that I is I. But in the converse of mortals and gods, as we are reminded again and again in the ancient texts, it is the god’s great favor to use mortal words – and the gods have names for things in their own language.

To see the world in a grain of epsom salt...

To see a world in a grain of sand is, admittedly, a grand thing; to see it in a grain of Epsom salt is perhaps more to the purpose when seeking to understand the capillary relations between imperial trading companies, print culture, and the revamping of the notion of property that occurred in the 18^th century as a mental prelude to the industrial revolution in the sphere of production.

The story of the first patented pharmaceutical method is crisply told in Adrian Johns’ history of intellectual property wars. Briefly, Nehemiah Grew, the secretary of the Royal Society, developed a process for extracting a mineral salt from the spring near Epsom. Formerly, the water there had been bottled for resale; this, however, was an unsatisfactory mode of distributing the health-giving waters, because the water spoiled quickly, primo, and secundo, the druggist was not averse to adding regular water to the bottle, adulterating the product. Grew, with the help of a “trusted operator” named  Thomas Tramel to extract the mineral salt, which could then be added to whatever liquid one wanted. The process differed from that of simple distillation – as it had to in order to preserve the healing power of the salt.

However, Grew’s attempt to exploit his scientific discovery came to nought. This was due to the enterprise of another pair of druggists, Francis and George Moult, who acted, in Johns’ terms, as pirates. Investigating Grew’s method, they decided that they could reproduce it. Soon they were producing more salt than Grew. They also had a firmer sense of the print culture than sheltered Grew. Instead of appealing to lumberous worthies from the Royal Society, they advertised and found local worthies in various towns to vouch for their product. They even sponsored a cherrypicked translation of Grew’s Latin treatise on the the salts. Grew took out a patent, but the Moults, undeterred, spread rumors about Grew’s originality. Grew then tried to sell them the patent, but they didn’t need it – the Moults, it appeared, didn’t spend money when they could simply eliminate the middleman – and so Grew sold the patent to one Josiah Peter, who wrote a book against the “counterfeit salt”. Johns rescues Peter’s book from oblivion, observing that it presents four arguments for medical patents that have since become classic: from invention, from public benefit, from public confidence – which increased the use of a product – and finally from national trade.

These arguments continue to be in play today. It is the first argument that interests me the most: the argument that invention must be conceived broadly.

“Peter conceded that virtually all inventions were “grounded upon some precedent Invention.”

Yet he insisted that in some cases the new device gave rise to whole new fields of knowledge or endeavor, and in such cases one could indeed speak of real creation. He cited as an example a proposition in Euclid’s Elements that had become the basis for land surveying; this proposition had certainly  rested on its predecessors, but that hardly invalidated its status as an invention with respect to the new discipline.”

Peter’s argument in the book concerning invention is rooted not in truth or fact alone- rather, it is truth governed by use. The field of knowledge is in this sense still a commons; what Peter claims, rather, is that a combination of novelty and utility underlies the broader sense of invention – to the point that Peter employs what seems, to the modern reader, to be a pleonasm: the term “new invention”.

Invention, in Peter’s terms, is not some product that comes ex nihilo from the inventor’s brain, but is part of a process of improvement – is, in a sense, the transmutation of an affordance, to use the lingo of modern design:

“There is hardly any Invention,of the greatest use, but what is grounded on some precedent Invention.The 41 proposition of the 1^st of Euclid, which is the chief Rule for surveying of Lands,is but a Button shewed upon the Coat made up of several precedent Propositions. Which Propositions, are yet of no use at all in the measuring of Lands but this only. And this is an Invention of that great use, as it hath given the Name of Geometry, to the whole Science so called.

So Microscopes and Telescope, may be said to be Improvements grounded on a pair of Spectacles: yet allowed to betwo Inventions, as much more noble; as the discovery of new Heavens and a new Earth, is above the being enabled, to read a small lettered Book.” [Peter 19]

Which, indeed, does take us up to the cosmic peaks of the Blakean grain of sand. Blake, of course, wagered his grain against the whole Newtonian cosmodamonium. Grew, and Peter, were on the other side. I was about to say the winning side, but in retrospect who won is unclear – for Blake represents a disquiet in the artificial paradise that at the same time assumes it – Blake is revolutionary, not nostalgic. Meanwhile, in 1709, the  Great Chain of Being is visibly  passing  away in Peter’s text, and another chain, the chain of Utility, is being forged – but out of materials from the old chain, the old hierarchy.

tolstoy and pussy riot

The Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church issued a ruling in February, 1901, that read in part:

“In our days, God has permitted a false teacher to appear: Count Leo Tolstoy. A writer well known to the world, Russian by birth,and Orthodox by baptismand education, Count Tolstoy has been seduced by his intellectual pride; has insolently risen both against the Lord and his Christ and against his holy hermitage; and has publically, in the sight of all humankind, repudiated the Orthodox Mother Church which reared and educated him.” This was the Church’s notice that Tolstoy, for writing The Kingdom of God is within you, Resurrection and supporting a radical pacifism, was no longer a member of the Church.

In Resurrection, Tolstoy had parodied Pobedonostsev, the head of the Church in Moscow. After the novel came out, “Pobedonostsev personally visited TsarNikolai II to acquire his approval, which he obtained.” [A history of Russian Christianity, 202]

In 2010, the Church confirmed the excommunication:

“Leo Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 can’t be overturned because the writer never publicly renounced his “tragic spiritual aberrations” a church official said.
“The decision of the Most Holy Governing Synod merely stated an accomplished fact,” said Archimandrate Tikhon Shevkunov, executive secretary of Patriarch Kirill’s council on culture. “Count Tolstoy excommunicated himself from the church, he broke with it entirely. He not only didn’t deny this, but emphasized it vigorously at every opportunity.”
Shevkunov was responding to an open letter to the patriarch from Sergei Stepashin, a former prime minister, on the occasion of the centenary of Tolstoy’s death on Nov. 20. Stepashin, as head of the Russian Book Union, asked the patriarch to explain the church’s position on Tolstoy and to make a “public display of compassion in some form.” – Bloomberg
Let’s remember, for a second, that this is a church that regards Czar Nicholas II – the man who ordered the anti-semitic pogroms of 1905, and who was responsible for the slaughter of millions during World War I – as a saintly martyr.

Tolstoy replied to the publication of the excommunication with a letter in which he displayed more art. Tolstoy’s genius for the direct comes out in his list of faults with the decree, among which is this:

… it is arbitrary, for it accuses only me of disbelief in all the points enumerated in the Edict ; whereas many, in fact almost all educated people, share that disbelief and have constantly expressed and still express it both in conversations, in lectures, in pamphlets and in books.
It is unfounded because it gives as a chief cause of its publication the great circulation of the false teaching wherewith I pervert the people — whereas I am well assured that hardly a hundred people can be found who share my views, and the circulation of my writings on religion, thanlcs to the Censor, is so insignificant that the majority of those who have read the Synod's Edict have not the least notion of what I may have written about religion — as is shown by the letters I have received.
It contains an obvious falsehood, for it says that efforts have been made by the Church to show me my errors, but that these efforts have been unsuccessful. Nothing of the kind ever took place.
It constitutes what in legal terminology is called a libel, for it contains assertions known to be false and tending to my hurt.
It is, finally, an incentive to evil feelings and deeds, for, as was to be expected, it evoked, in unenlightened and unreasoning people, anger and hatred against me, culminating in threats of murder expressed in letters I received. One writes : ^ Now thou hast been anathe- matized, and after death wilt go to everlasting torments, and wilt perish like a dog . . . anathema upon thee, old devil ... be damned.' Another blames the Government for not having, as yet, shut me up in a monastery, and fills his letter with abuse. A third writes : ' If the Government does not get rid of you, we will ourselves make you shut your mouth,' and the letter ends with curses. ' May you be destroyed — you blackguard !' writes a fourth ; ' I shall find means to do it . . . and then follows indecent abuse.”
Tolstoy wanted to destroy the superstitions with which he felt the relationship between God and man had become encrusted. He went to any lengths to make clear that this relationship was, pre-eminently, one of clearsightedness. Some of this most powerful writings are simply enumerations of uncomfortable facts: for instance, in his pamphlet on the assassination of King Umberto by an anarchist, he went out of his way to condemn killers – including King Umberto, whose army in Ethiopia was engaged precisely in killing. These are the kinds of things that make for social discomfort. To say, for instance, that George Bush is a much bigger killer than Osama bin Laden is simply a statistical truth. But to say, we can guarantee a controversy – as if truth had to be imbued with the proper apologetic before it can make its way to the surface, to the text or the tip of the tongue. Tolstoy spent his life trying to drain the apologetic from his speech. Alas, even this notion has been colonized and commercialized under the slogan of speaking “truth to power” – a phrase that banalizes the process down to a bumper sticker, and makes it a lie – a lie that the truth is somehow outside of power, and is being used for the most ideal of purposes by the blameless, or the victim.
All of which brings us to the Pussy Riot trial. I went with some friends to the Triannale at the Palais de Tokio the other day, and they were showing the video of the performance at the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow for which the Pussy Riot women are now on trial. It was a fascinating performance, in the best punk tradition. It called out the Orthodox hierarchy for their wretched subservience to the Putin regime. And it used the words God and shit together, although my friend Masha, who watched it, said that the translation is inaccurate – the word shit is something more like excrement, the thing expulsed.
Tolstoy, with his 19^th century sexism, would probably not have approved, and with his19th century positivism, he would have found invocations of the Virgin to be superstition and false. However, he would have recognized the spirit of Vera Zasulich, the woman who tried to assassinate the governor general of St. Petersburg in the 1870s – as well as the sublimation of that violence.
The Pussy Riot trial is, of course, a farce that is humiliating the Putin regime more than the supposed “criminals”. I think Putin has recognized this. But it is fascinating to see the old cogs still in motion, the old torture device of rigged trials and false piety still being used, as though it had never been put in the museum at all.
Destroy the machine!  

copyright, occupation, colonization

In the Latin roots of occupation, two meanings apply. One has to do with holding a position – or employment – while the other has to do with capturing or holding a possession. For anyone who lived consciously through the 00s, occupation has an eerie pertinence, from the war in Iraq that colored the decade to the movement against Wall Street that ended it. Occupation was at the root of the moment – with all that it implies of violence sublimated by law.

Occupation, as it happens, colors one of the conceptual moments in the evolution of intellectual property law in the 18^th century – laws that have grown ever more powerful in the great global fuckfest of capital.  For in trying to understand and incorporate intellectual property into the general law on property, occupation was considered, for a while, as a touchstone that would help transform the author or machinist’s claim to a monopoly privilege into an affair dignified by law. There was a moment in the 18^th century in which mental products could be considered to be property to the extent that they were occupied by their creator: 

As  Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries, title to property could arise by Descent, Purchase, Escheat, Occupancy, Prescription, Forfeiture and Alienation.38 Echoing the Institutes of Justinian, it was also agreed that the primary way in which a person could acquire title to objects res nullius ( things which did not have or had never had an owner) was via `occupatio' or occupancy; that is, simply by taking possession or occupying them.39 Given this understanding of property, it is unsurprising

that the question of the way in which title to literary property could be acquired, if at all, initially turned on the issue of whether the Roman law doctrine of occupancy, which was said to underlie the foundation of title to property, could be applied to the production of books. (Sherman and Bentley, 21)

This moment in the codification of the copyright makes one dream a little. It attaches the original colonist’s claim of right to the oldest notion of literary creation, which is in-spiration – being possessed, or occupied, by a spirit. The term is all the stranger the more I turn it around in my mind – for just as the colonist “discovers” new land, so too must the writer or artist be considered not the creator so much as the discoverer of something that already exists – even if that existence is on level of Plato’s heaven, where the ideas exist by themselves alone. The colonist and the author squat, and by squatting have the right to trade.

To occupy a sentence, a poem, a story, leads logically and legally back to the sense, strongly testified to at various times by poets, that the verbal object as they put it on paper is a copy of something that isn’t on the paper, something prefigured. It is as though, in this moment of the history of intellectual property, we are taking the written as it seems to have been felt at the very beginning – as a magical entity – in order to give it the form of a rational commodity, one that can join the circuit of other commodities.

According to Sherman and Bentley, the uncanniness of the claim was recognized by the pamphleteers of the 18^th century themselves, which is why occupancy eventually lost out as the foundation of intellectual property. But the argument is still interesting, with all its connotations in the world as the 18^th century English establishment saw it – with its colonies, its slaves, its guilds, its incipient industrialization and mass wage labor:

In particular, the proponents of literary property suggested that `occupancy in the proper sense of the word, includes the principal source of literary property. The title by occupancy commences by the taking possession of a vacant subject; and the labour employed in the cultivation of it, confirms the title. Literary property falls precisely within this idea of occupancy'.43 While Francis Hargrave, barrister for Thomas Becket in the early stages of his litigation against Donaldson and author of the Influential  Argument in Defence of Literary Property, went so far as to assert that the author's title was stronger than simple occupancy would suggest, in the face of the incorporeal nature of mental labour these arguments were difficult to sustain. In particular, they offered no acceptable response to the retort: how could you occupy something which had no physical existence?

The lack of physical existence of the idea of the book, poem, sentence is, indeed, troubling in an economy of things, inserting a moment of an eventually intolerable ontological ambiguity. And thus, the argument shifted:

“The second response elicited by the Stationers and their supporters to the argument that ideas of the mind could not be seen as a species of property because they could not be occupied was to attempt to shift the basis of the argument. They did this by suggesting that occupancy was

not the only means by which title to property could be acquired.”

This shift was not one that entirely embraced novelty as a category coming under property; rather, the argument shifted to the Lockian one in which mental labor was the same kind of property as physical labor – we have, as it were, property in ourselves beyond our occupation of ourselves. And yet this property has certain peculiar distinctions: we can’t, under the Lockian reading, sell ourselves; we can only sell our labor. Our property also owns us.

There are a number of problems with applying these distinctions to intellectual property. While abstract physical labor is a property that can be sold through wages, abstract mental labor is not a matter of the time clock, but instead a matter of the product of mental labor. No worker on the assembly line claims his property in the car, but the author does claim his property in the book. In this sense, the laws of intellectual property go back to certain basic binaries in the culture of early modern capitalism: binaries that are overdetermined by logic and magic, the slur of whose infinite unraveling is traced in the law books and court cases. Invention and discovery, inspiration and occupation, possession and alienation,  these fierce abstractions come down to earth like gods in disguise and change the course of people’s lives. They can be met with at any crossroads.

And indeed, the law is a product of  the crossroads as much any other instituted and armed norm. The turn to a Lockian solution to the problem of commodifying inspiration was consistent with another and, I’d claim, related problem: the problem of imperialism. There is good reason that the metaphor of the discoverer of a new land was so often applied to the  author or projector of a new invention or entertainment. The problem facing the colonizers  in America, which was a problem that was never quite solved, even by the revolution, came down to the idea of a claim based on discovery. All titles tend towards this root act; and  yet, inconveniently, the discovered land always turned out to be populated already. The naturals were in the corner of the discoverer’s eye even as he planted the flag. The Lockian solution was the post facto eradication of them, which made for a blank slate landscape and a retrospectively designed history that transcended the outlier facts.  Similarly, the naturals are always there to bother author and inventor – there’s an ineradicable intertextuality within text or machine that haunts the originality justifying the claim to property.

Pierre Menard and Thomas Hancock

The metaphysics of paper is not only the metaphysics of writing. It is the metaphysics that grounds 'intellectual property". 

The problem of intellectual property is linked to the problem of definition by the fact that both invention and definition float in an ocean of anonymous uses, practices, discoveries and performances – a commons of what everybody knows, somehow. Intellectual property lays claim to something in that ocean, and some value added claimed for the individual as engineer, organizer, and genius. Definition lays claim to an insight into how bits of the ocean of language are organized and meant. Invention is personal; definition is impersonal. At the intersection of the two, we get intellectual property law.

Although we live in the era of the resurgence of piracy against monopoly – the latter in the form of IP claims – we don’t entirely realize what the modern enclosure movement is all about, or how tangled is its history. 

Intellectual property was recognized, as  every history recounts, first in Venice in the 15^th century. But the more interesting arguments about intellectual property begin in the 18^th century. It was at this time that we see two different trends: one trend was towards breaking up guilds and destroying the power of “craft secrets” –and the other was towards rewarding authors rights on the products of their “mental labor.”

England, which made the leap into industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century, has gained the most attention from historians of intellectual property. However, France also had laws pertaining to licensing invention. These notions culminated in

Le Chapelier's  report to the Convention in 1791 urging a law to assure the right in property of an author to his work. This property was not just another property, like a horse, a slave in Santo Domingo, or a house: the “fruit of the thought of a writer”  was “the most sacred, the most legitimate, the most unattackable, and if one may say so, the most personal of all properties.” These accolades are heavy as the marble laurel wreath crowns on the head of a bust. They seem strange. How can the most personal of properties even exist as a property – that is, as an exchange value?

Le Chapelier's report was preceded by a long line of enquiry among the philosophes.  In particular, by Diderot.

 

Diderot,  was one of the first great advocates of the author’s property in his work in France. But, as Liliane Hilaire-Perez (2002), who works on intellectual property history, has pointed out, Diderot distinguished between the very personal property of the author from what he took to be the craft secrets of mechanical invention – the latter of which were dubious properties. In his History and Secret of Wax Painting, an extended case study of a contemporary invention, Diderot wrote:

“Nothing is  more contrary to intellectual progress than mystery. We would still be at trying to understand the simplest and most important arts if those who discovered them made them secret. Far from us, thus, that spirit of interest or pride which seems to conspire with the natural imbecility of man and the briefness of his life to perpetuate his ignorance…”

Mystery, here, really means mystification.

 “The main issue for Diderot was to explain that technical invention relied on a method, an ‘art’, which was not actually the case in artistic creativity; the crucial point was the understanding of the concepts of cumulation and imitation in the process of invention.” (2002)

Diderot wrote his history of wax painting against the background of the French monarchy’s practice of encouraging invention by awarding brevet to those inventions thought worthy by the state. This entailed some kind of state reward and a right to demand compensation from users of the invention. The point of the system, which was devised under Colbert, was to encourage  the arts. This, in fact, was also used as a  justification for the monopoly system of patenting in the Anglosphere. In a sense, both justifications were responding to Diderot’s distinction between, as Hilaire-Perez puts it, genius and method.

This distinction may seem rather self-interested: Diderot as a writer is, in a sense, part of the guild. On the other hand, it does make some conceptual sense, within the conceptual scheme that brings together definition, property, invention and discovery. Tumblers in - I will boldly say - all the locks of the modern.

We can think of this distinction through the lens of one of Borges’ most famous stories, Pierre Menard: the author of Don Quixote. In this story, Pierre Menard, a French symbolist, decides to write the Don Quixote as a new work. He doesn’t mean by this that he will borrow Cervantes’ stories, or characters: he means by this that he will reinvent Don Quixote word for word, and thus make is a twentieth century work. Obviously, Pierre Menard’s word for word ‘writing’ of Don Quixote is, on one level, simply copying the text. But Borges’ narrator emphasizes that Menard did not simply copy – he also wrote drafts leading up to his copy, just as though he were writing the book himself. And, in a final turn of the modernist screw, he destroyed those drafts, because he wanted the work to be pure of the author’s presence – which was also part of writing the Don Quixote as a modernist text, one that shows the influence of the Flaubertian aesthetic of impersonality.

That, eventually, at some point, in order to write the Don Quixote in the twentieth century, Menard had to copy Cervante’s text, is part of the Borges’ joke. There would be no paradox, however, if we turned from writing a novel to, for instance, inventing the process for vulcanizing rubber. In fact, in 1852, Charles Goodyear took Horace Day to court on patent infringement because Day was using vulcanized rubber. Goodyear’s case was argued by Daniel Webster. Goodyear hadn’t made much on his rubber, and it was reported that he wanted a seven year extension on his patent, which was running out – so he may have intentionally been looking around for a case.  Choate, Day’s lawyer, “marshaled  convincing testimony from rubber factory employees that vulcanization was in common use in the early 1840s” (Handbook of American Business History). In fact, Goodyear had already paid Nathaniel Hayward for the idea – or rather, the patent rights - of adding sulfur to rubber. But it was, according to Goodyear, not method but accident that made the difference in the vulcanizing process. Goodyear mixed sulfur with rubber and accidentally dropped the rubber on a hot pan. He took the rubber out of the pan and left it to cool, and found that it became much more durable – just what he was looking for.

However, there is another part of this famous story that is not usually included in canonical American accounts: Goodyear’s patent included lead as an ingredient in the vulcanization process. This proved to be a point against him in England.

There, Goodyear came up against Thomas Hancock, who had already ‘invented’ impermeable clothing – waterproof cloth. Hancock got a sample of vulcanized rubber. He was able to analyse it and reproduce the process – and subsequently patented it himself. In a report of a “jury” of scientists in England for the Great Exhibition of 185 – the Crystal Palace – which  examined the dispute between Hancock and Goodyear, both parties were credited with working out the vulcanization process. While the jury conceded that Goodyear had produced vulcanized rubber before Hancock, it also noted that Hancock knew nothing of Goodyear’s process. Rather, he discovered for himself the crucial determinant of heating the rubber. More than that, unlike Goodyear, Hancock understood what he was doing: that is, he understood what caused vulcanization. “Whatever may be the share of merit assigned to Mr. Goodyear and to Mr. Hancock in this important invention, the latter has not the less exclusive merit of having discovered that sulphur was the sole  cause of the vulcanization process. On seeing Mr. Charles Goodyear introducing the different salts of lead into the specification of the patent that he subsequently took out, it is felt that he regarded their intervention as  indispensable, while it is now demonstrated that sulphur alone is sufficient.”

Between Thomas Hancock and Pierre Menard there is a superficial similarity: both reproduced a product of invention. But Pierre Menard’s story is a paradox precisely because the invention of the Don Quixote by Cervantes is not just of the ideas, or the process, of making Don Quixote, but of the entire work – a work which wears its process, so to speak, on its face. Whereas the vulcanization of rubber is not an invention of Goodyear’s imagination. It is, rather, the encounter of different materials pre-existing in nature. Hancock’s work was comparatively simple – a matter of chemical analysis – whereas Menard’s work is impossible – he cannot so analyse Don Quixote so as to repeat it. He can only, eventually, in spite of everything, copy it.

bit of life

I'm a fierce partisan of Paris. Yet, there is something funny about Paris in the heat. In Montpellier, where we just spent around two weeks, the heat was familiar, southern, and its grammar was full of the commas and semi-colons of breeze. The light on Montpellier buildings highlighted something clear about them, something that made you think that the builder's intended the shadows to fall just so. In Paris, the heat is more cluttered, more dirtying. Yesterday, I was drinking a beer in a cafe near Jussieu and there was a little heat-driven contretemps between the waiter - who was a boy of around 20 - and one of those middle aged men with the kind of slinky beachtan that makes them irresistably untrustable. The man walked out without paying - the boy came after him - and the man turned to the owner of the place, who was sitting outside, and said he was a regular, and he was going to his car to find his wallet to pay. And then he called the boy a cretin. Which is when I decided a large tip was due. The owner was wonderfully monsieuring, but he got down to brass tacks in the end - you mean, he said, that you came into the place knowing that you didn't have your wallet? I think the cafe lost this regular, but I think the owner enjoyed the loss. So did I. So did the waiter.

literature's brooder

In the lexicon of cognitive states, brooding has a distinctly low ranking. We meditate or reflect to achieve illumination; brooding, however, is the prelude to a tantrum. To think means trying to see the object of thought whole – but the brooder is peculiarly averse to letting go of the object of thought, and thus condemns himself to repetition and compulsion. Argument is meant to persuade us to let the personal go, to, in effect, accept the autonomy of discourse. In Socrates’ dialogues, the argument is often treated as though it were some live thing, a spirit, a genius that must be respected. As such, the argument is extra-personal. From this perspective, brooding is a failed, or at the very least, a pariah cognitive act.

Yet, the brooder does have one fierce insight on his side, for the ideology of cognition obscures the moment of surrender, or sacrifice, in the release of the object of thought to the drift of discourse – to “what everybody knows”. The brooder understands that argument’s aspiration to universality is founded on blooding the personal, and that universality operates under the rule of polemos, or war. To surrender a thought is, among other things, to surrender.

Cioran is one of the great brooders. His longer essays can seem wearying because his sentences are so highly worked that they seem not to be building an argument, but to be resisting one. The readerly flow of the essay is impeded by the brilliances of its individual moments. Cioran sometimes seems like one of those  brilliant conversationalists who never, actually, converse – in as much as conversation is marked by listening, while the brilliance of the conversationalist seems impervious to hearing. It bears the mark of a certain deafness. And so it is, sometimes, with Cioran, especially in his first texts.

Cioran’s development of a reader is a long, painful abdication of the harangue and the monologue. To hear the other means, in a sense, letting your style – the verbal front Cioran is so careful to maintain – allow itself a certain vulnerability. Cioran begins to be readable, for just this reason, in The Temptation to Exist. It is here that he actually goes the distance, rather than contenting himself with the pure jab of the phrase.

It is here, too, that he takes as one of his objects of thought brooding itself – although he doesn’t label the negative space he opposes to reflection “brooding” as such. What he does is turn upon reflection, in its institutional forms (literature and philosophy) his suspicion that underneath the mask of liberality lurks the spirit of resentment, the eternal return of a grievance. This notion has a long history, and we know its avatars: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in particular. It is the reactionary road to enlightenment.

In Letter on some roadblocks (Lettre sur quelques impasses), Cioran uses a trick that he employs, as well, in later texts to detach himself from the brooder’s solipsism: the essay as a message to some correspondent. To write a letter is not the same as engaging in a  conversation, because letters are not subject to the vital element in conversation – interruption. While conversations go by “turns”, the violent can bear them away simply by interrupting, and there is nothing in the rules that forbids this. But letters are, briefly, a space the producer controls. At the same time, the letter must, however grudgingly, acknowledge the addressee.

The impasses or roadblocks here collect around the hated figure of the writer. On the pretence that Cioran is warning his friend against publishing a book, he launches into an invective against the mere writer – the littérateur – which, of course, produces a performative “impass”  - since Cioran is very much a writer. This allots him a paradoxical place in his argument. Cioran accepts the cynicism of the paradox – he even exploits it. It is as though he were not so much a writer as an anthropologist carrying out fieldwork on people like Cioran – other writers. And in this guise, he is reporting on their rituals.

What is it that Cioran hates about the  writer? It is, I think, the writer’s tendency to be a moral entrepreneur – to wave about his sensitivity to right and wrong as though it were a superiority, a talent. Underneath the moral entrepreneur, Cioran spots the vacuity of the rhetorician:

‘Voltaire was the first litterateur to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method. Before him the writer, happy enough to be next to events, was more modest: doing his job in a limited sector, he followed his path and stuck to it. No journalist, he was most interested in the anecdotal  aspect of certain solitudes: his indiscretion was inefficacious.

With our know it all (hableur) things changed. None of the subjects which intrigued his times escaped his sarcasm, his demi-science, his need for noise, his universal vulgarity.Everything was impure with him, except his style…”

Note a key term for Cioran: impurity. Impurity, for Cioran, is a hallmark of liberal enlightenment. To understand this, one has to understand Cioran’s dallying with fascism of the most violent sort in the 30s, and his brief stance as an admirer of Hitler.  This, actually, is the center of what Cioran brooded upon his whole life long – his error, here, and his retraction. In the 30s, Cioran was very explicit about his hatred of the Jews, his desire for war, his faith in great and therapeutic violence that would stamp some hierarchy on the people for one thousand years.

Later, in the late thirties in France, he began to change his mind. He did not, as far as I am aware of, collaborate in the forties. Rather, he went over and over the logic of his position, starting from the idea that liberal Europe had suffocated itself under its own dead skin, exiled from the sources of life itself. And yet, he retreated to the liberal side and renounced violence: he renounced life-affirming war, and opted for death-affirming peace. Violence, in Cioran’s view, makes us gigantic, larger than life, and we renounce it at our peril. In History and Utopia he wrote:

“We employ our clearest vigils in taking apart our enemies limb from limb, pulling out their eyes and guts, popping and emptying their veins,  crushing and pounding underfoot each of their organs, and leaving them, for charity’s sake, merely the enjoyment of their skeletons.” But, clearly, these are visions that Cioran now does not want to see realized on the streets of the cities (where, as he remarked somewhere else, he is always mildly astonished that everyone is not killing everyone else). However, that renunciation has a price. The price is paid in purity: “Not to venge oneself is to be enchained in the idea of forgiveness, it is to sink into it, get stuck in it, it is to render oneself impure by the hatred one strangles in oneself.”

Thus, the hidden dialectic between, on the one hand, the universal vulgarisers of liberal society, and, on the other hand, the stocking up of resentment and weakness. What distinguished the Fascist principle for Cioran was its recognition of the logic of purity: it advocated violence not for the sake of peace, but because violence was beautiful; bombing was beautiful because it smashed and hurt our enemies down to the last generation; mass murder was beautiful because you could see your true self in the pooled blood of the victims. Cioran, at last, recognized this to be madness, but he did not renounce the logic of purity – rather, he sought a catharsis through rehearsing extreme statements in the paradoxical mode. After getting off to a false start in life, he made false starts a hallmark of his style. And so brooding, in his work, takes the place of reflection, and reflects, pallidly, the dangerous fires that he had longed to light himself – and that then ran so out of control that he was condemned to live in a world that was singed by the destruction they wrought.  

on definition

Law and mathematics both developed under the steely eye of the definition. History and literature developed behind definition’s back, which is why both have a ludicrous bent. To understand the power and essence of definition, one must free oneself from its seeming inevitability – one must slip out from literature and history, rather than approach it from law and mathematics.

Of course, once upon a time, definition was not such a power. The idea that norms or numbers form a system, and that the system is coherent and consistent, and that coherence and consistency are systematic – these ideas, granted, were in the air, but they weren’t taken for granted. This is not to tell the familiar story of the dreamtime of the folk – it is, rather, that what a definition is, and why it should have such power, had not yet been systematically developed. Which is to say that the system as a concept had, itself, not been systematically developed. There was the moon, stars, tides and the sun – that is, there was the cosmos – and there were the demons, heroes, gods, and spirits – there was theology – and, retrospectively, we can see these as systems. But – to put it in Hegelspeech – the system hadn’t thought of itself yet.

Once upon a time is the pre-historical category of historical time, and might be defined by… its lack of definition. Once upon a time does, however, emerge in history. Although it has the curious property of only being recognized retroactively – it is like the landscape that is revealed through the backwindow of a moving car, which, however much we know that it is equal to the landscape revealed through the frontwindow of the car just a moment ago, bears the total impression of being behind us – a gestalt-switched twin.

To take a random instance, take IP rights. IP rights bet everything on definition. But this, up until very recently, wasn’t so. Take  this from Sherman and Bentley’s The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: the British Experience, 1760-1911:

“One of the most important points of contrast between modern and pre-modern law is in terms of the way the law is organised. While today the shape of the law is almost universally taken as a given ± the general category of intellectual property law being divided into subsidiary categories of patents, designs, trade marks, copyright and related rights ± under pre-modern law there was no clear consensus as to how the law ought to be arranged: no one way of thinking had yet come to dominate as the mode of organisation. Rather, there was a range of competing and, to our modern eyes, alien forms of organisation. It is also clear that, at least up until the 1850s, there was no law of copyright, patents, designs or trade marks, and certainly no intellectual property law. At best there was agreement that the law recognised and granted property rights in mental labour, although the nature of this legal category itself was uncertain.” 

Mental labor, Sherman and Bentley claim, were treated in modern law the way the old behavioralists treated ideas and mental events: as irritants and illusions, having nothing to do with the case. Clearing your mind of mental labor, you go forward from once upon a time and into the clear light of definitions that are appropriate for corporate enterprises, or the modern laboratory, or the studio, or private public collaborations, etc. – all the heavy tinsel of business and policy speak.

I mention this to underline the fact that though it may seem quaint to want to actually examine the philosophical validity of definitions, quaintness can give way to urgency if the police are at your door and you are accused of providing links to pirates. It is at that moment that the average schmuck gets a full glimpse of the armed power of the definition.

And yet – still, I ask you, what is it? A genre? Is a definition like a poem or an aphorism or a novel? A piece of language thinking of itself, a piece of floating meta bumping into our everyday routines? Even asking what it is seems to bring it up (its shadow swelling ominously) behind me. Is it a god, a demon, or … after all … a human being?    

metaphysics of paper4: fallen leaves

The waste books (there’s a Russian word for this, the “fallen leaves’ genre,  - Opavshelistika -- seem to leave behind some anachronistic, animal trail in the modern system of literature. That system connects the media and the university in a total environment of writing that conditions the very notion of the “writer”: he’s a journalist, a pundit, a poet, a novelist. In the twentieth century, the writer’s most important work is to produce texts that can be taken up by the cinema, or by television. The writer in the press produces opinions. Literature informs the conversation in the press and the classroom, and prefers its readers to be in the classroom or as members of a bookclub. It prefers, above all, to see literature as a social function – from this point of view, solitude is unmasked as bourgeois mystification, or as a psychological aberration.

This system has a place for the aliens of literature who write the Opavshelistika, but it is in the nature of the system that taking them seriously means metamorphosing them, curing them of the solitude in which they are bathed. It is the cure  that the waste book writers fear, or devise means to avoid. These aliens take marginality and solitude as the conditions of the vocation of writing – and insofar as these are the byproducts of failure (a failure to market, to circulate, and to achieve the regard that comes with good business), the waste book writers tend to will failure, to desire it as a sacred thing, valuable in itself. It is by the crack in the golden bowl, the phrase that doesn’t reach its end – it is by indirection, evocation, and the proper appreciation of fortuna in the very production of writing that one reverses the system’s  unbearably invasive presence.

It is from the point of view of the will to failure that Vasilli Rozanov, in Fallen Leaves, issues his condemnation of writing: “In my opinion, the essence of literature is false: I don’t mean that the litterateurs or, again, the ‘present times’ are bad, but instead the entire domain of their action, and that “all the way to the root.” [my translation from the French]

Rozanov takes up a theme that feeds into the literary guerilla’s rejection of the system, and its paradoxes. It is a theme that is tonally always on a foray; however, these forays have a certain midnight air. It is a theme that lends itself to incendiary grafitti. Yet, its producer, in the morning, wakes up to the fact that he or she is still a writer. The waste book, the marginal note, the rejection of literature, is also published, also circulates, also provides us with a domain of study and of reference. Its communicative content, however true, is falsified by its communicative form, its necessary alliance with the system it rejects.

Rozanov sees,  clearly enough, that writing is an ethical – or, rather, cosmological act.

“ ‘–I am buckling down to write, but is everybody going to read me?”

Why this “I” and why this ‘they’ll read me”? It really means “I am more intelligent than the others”, “the others are worth less  than me.” It is a sin.”

In one of his letters, Van Gogh expresses the thought that Jesus did not mean for his words to be written down, and would have been horrified at the tradition of Christian literature. In a sense, the Gospel is founded on a radical lack of faith – the writing signals that the apocalypse is indefinitely deferred. The charismatic moment is lost as soon as it is finds a medium – this is its melancholy, this is the contradiction that charisma sublimates.  Rozanov was of course attracted to the apocalyptic moment, and he toyed with the vatic function of the writer, all the way to the point of marrying his first wife, Appollinaria Suslova, apparently on the strength of the fact that she had been involved in that sado-masochistic relationship with Dostoevsky that the latter transposed to the Gambler. His own vatic denunciations – of Jews, of Communists, finally of Christ – are violent and, at the same time, never definite, never part of a set code.

Interestingly, Rozanov was well aware that it was the, as it were, material conditions of the written that defined the cultural system of writing that he detested:

“What is new [ Rozanov is writing about his text, Solitaria] is the tone, once again that of pre-Gutenberg manuscripts. In the Middle Ages, one didn’t write for the public because, reasonably enough, the printing press didn’t exist. And the literature of the middle ages are under many aspects beautiful, strong, touching and deeply beneficent in its discretion. The new literature has been up to a certain point victim  of its excessive manifestation: after the invention of the printing press, no one in general was capable of that, and no one, moreover, had the courage to defeat Gutenberg.”

Rozanov himself, according to George Nivat, issued his books in limited numbers, and he tried very much, in the Fallen leaves, to press the occasion against the written – where it was written, what needed to be erased, etc. At the same time, he wrote for the press – he wrote enormously for the press. And from this perspective it is not so much Gutenberg but the great yoking together of the press and the steam engine that his writing set out to defeat, a cosmological struggle against the monologing super-ego.

“My real isolation, almost mysterious, made me capable of doing it [defeating Gutenberg]. Strakhov said to me “Have the reader always present in your mind, and write in such a way that everything be clear for him.” But however much I try to imagine him, I never succeed. I could never represent to myself the face of a reader, the approbation of a brain, and I always wrote alone, essentially for myself. Even when I wrote to please, it was as if I was throwing something over a precipice, making “a great laugh flash out of the depths”, when there was nobody around me. I always liked to write my “editorials” in the waiting room of journals, in the midst of visitors, their discussions with the writers, in the coming and going, the noise, and me planted there hatching an article “a propos of the last speech in the Duma”. Or even in the hall of the editorial  board. One time I had to say to my collaborators, sirs, a little quiet please, I’m writing a reactionary article (gestures, laughs, commentaries). The hilarity was at its peak. Understanding nothing, just as before.” 

Arles - travelogue - don't bet your life on posterity

He didn’t know that it was a Santa Fe sky, say the sky of June 3, 1993, same lowslung clouds, same flat earth, same encircling hills, same high blue sky above the clouds, that he was seeing in that summer of 1888, when he was bothered by the mistral and the rent and the need to suppress his sexual instincts – the year he lived on half cooked chickpeas and cheap alcohol – because Van Gogh never set eyes on New Mexico. I however recognized it instantly, hanging there in the distance outside the bus window as we swept by the acres of sun flowers and made the turn into Arles from Tarascon, where we’d go off the train.

Arles it turns out was not the tourist mecca A. and I feared it might be – seems they had all oiled off to the festival in Avignon – and we settled in for our jaunt nicely after a small blowup at our hotel -- they tried to palm off a room to us that was deficient in the usual room things – handles on doors, lampshades, and size, with the bathroom competing with the bedroom in volume, which was not doing a favor to either party. We achieved a more brilliant room, then we hied it to the Place de Forum for lunch. I suggested to A, a little shamefacedly, that we eat at the restaurant that claims to be the restaurant Van Gogh painted at night (supposedly ornamenting his huge Cargmanole peasant hat with little candles so he could see his canvas). Replete with poulpe and nicoise salade, we then commenced a tour of Arles medievale, and the river. Arles, like Santa Fe, hosts a lotta art in the summer – everybody’s favorite stalker, Sophie Calle, had just been in town for an expo – and it made a nice contrast between the old town’s winding, narrow street, which crooked along like a map of the blind leading the blind, and the affiches for past or present attractions which were glued up all over the pressing walls. The weather was perfect Provence, the kind that brings in flocks of retired British couples. They’d sneak up behind us as we would read the carte outside of restaurants: Mum, ‘ere it says they serve hommelette and frites! I wanted to try the taureau – Arles is right proud of the running of its bulls, and has run them through its cuisine as well, with local sauces and cuts. I liked it, but, such is my feebleness and American decadence, I liked A.’s entrecote de boeuf even more. The next day we used the ticket we’d bought to gain entrance to all the sights on the ancien stuff – starting with Allychamps, Champs Elysees, the street of sarcophagi, then on to the Arene and the Thermes. A. said Arles was practically Italian. Bought a book at Actes Sud, the bookstore/publisher, which has set up a general emporium of culture (coffeehouse, exhibition place, cinema). Then we lounged fashionably in a few squares, consuming beer, Perrier, some green syrupy thing, a mystery novel, emails, and time – until we had to move it to the railroad station and take the express train back to Montpellier. We were sunburned, well fed, and pretty happy about our one day jaunt/anniversary celebration.
Van Gogh, of course, left Arles under less happy circumstances. After the unfortunate ear act and the shutting up in the hospital, fifty Arles citizens signed a petition to the mayor to have him expelled, which depressed him a lot. Reading his letters, it is easy to see what an impossible man he was, messianic in that D.H. Lawrence manner – but I have a huge weakness for the wrestlers with the chthonic soul, the underground men, those who fizz like some malfactured cherry bomb, refusing either to explode or sputter out, and thus dangerous to approach. If only, for his sake, he had sold a few paintings in his lifetime! If only, for our sake, he had sold a few less paintings, or at least for less money, in his afterlife! Those guys at the fin de siecle counted a lot on the Nachwelt – on the future. They staked their work on posthumous fame. But, as Karl Kraus once wrote, do we, the living, really deserve to be a posterity? Kraus doubted we were up to the task. I do too.

metaphysics of paper 3

Viele Werke der Alten sind Fragmente geworden. Viele Werke der Neuern sind es gleich bei der Entstehung. - Schlegel

There’s a story in Strabo that runs like this: “Neleus succeeded to the possession of the library of Theophrastus, which included that of Aristotle; for Aristotle gave his library, and left his school, [379] to Theophrastus. Aristotle was the first person with whom we are acquainted who made a collection of books, and suggested to the kings of Egypt the formation of a library. Theophrastus left his library to Neleus, who carried it to Scepsis, and bequeathed it to some ignorant persons who kept the books locked up, lying in disorder. When the Scepsians understood that the Attalic kings, on whom the city was dependent, were in eager search for books, with which they intended to furnish the library at Pergamus, they hid theirs in an excavation under-ground; at length, but not before they had been injured by damp and worms, the descendants of Neleus sold the books of Aristotle and Theophrastus for a large sum of money to Apellicon of Teos. Apellicon was rather a lover of books than a philosopher; when therefore he attempted to restore the parts which had been eaten and corroded by worms, he made alterations in the original text and introduced them into new copies; he moreover supplied the defective parts unskilfully, and published the books full of errors. It was the misfortune of the ancient Peripatetics, those after Theophrastus, that being wholly unprovided with the books of Aristotle, with the exception of a few only, and those chiefly of the exoteric kind, they were unable to philosophize according [380] to the principles of the system, and merely occupied themselves in elaborate discussions on common places. Their successors however, from the time that these books were published, philosophized, and propounded the doctrine of Aristotle more successfully than their predecessors, but were under the necessity of advancing a great deal as probable only, on account of the multitude of errors contained in the copies.”

Strabo’s story has been criticized as inconsistent with the evidence we have about the distribution and reading of Aristotle’s works in the Hellenic world, notably in an essay by Jonathan Barnes. But I am fascinated by its mythic suggestion, not so much its empirical validity. One notices the myth right away in the activity of the Scepsians, who bury Aristotle’s manuscripts underground. Underground is the place of treasure. It is the opposite of heaven, as Jesus, that folk prophet, saw: “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal”. The transformation of texts into treasures, and the subsequent influence of rot upon the transmission of those texts – which are retrieved and patched together – is a small revenge extracted by the little tradition, of the folk, on the great tradition, where abstraction joins with power.

When matter emerges clumsily and definitively in the world of letters, it does so through certain favored modes and occasions: the fragment, the ruin, the lost. These expose the word’s entanglement in matter, the limit to its flights, the impossibility of the heaven of pure sense. The gnostic attitude begins with a deep appreciation of these seemingly accidental events. It is a revelation, one never to be gotten over by the prepared soul, that the text can be lost or patched, the copyist can mistake  or the copy be blotted, the letter lost, the word abandoned or interrupted. These events, in the great tradition, the mainstream, are waved away as contingencies, but the gnostic draws a different metaphysical conclusion, which is that these events are inherent to the pact between sound and sense, paper and text, and that the entanglement between matter and letter, or the code and the message,  ruins all the tower of Babel schemes for the one true metalanguage. This metaphysical conclusion, in modernity, strengthens the margins against the center, or the mainstream. The gnostic attitude flows into Marx’s dialectical materialism, which exploits the power of the negation of the negation, and into like enterprises that bet on the return of the repressed. It connects Marx with Michelet’s witch, who, in the dark night of the feudal claim to have represented the totality of the order of creation in the social order, registers her protest by reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, in following the  “grand principe satanique que tout doit se faire à rebours, exactement à l’envers de ce que fait le monde sacré” – “great satanic principle that everthing must be done backwards, exactly the reverse of what the sacred world does.”  More commonly, the gnostic appears, in modernity, in the guise of the clerk, bureaucrat, functionary who becomes aware, to a greater or lesser degree, of his non-productive function in the sphere of circulation. He becomes a metaphysical whistle-blower – a Kafka, a Pessoa, a Bartleby.

On the hedgehog

In a famous essay, the Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin creates a taxonomy of thinkers based on a line from Archilochus:  ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The thinkers who know one thing are, in Berlin’s view, systematic thinkers. All thought tends to the center, among them, the one big thing that explains the world. The Foxes are anti-systematic. They are essayists, explorers of the intersections of thought and experience, from the scope of which they take it no principle can absorb experience without something stubborn and unabsorbed remaining from that experience – what Thomas Nagel calls the quality of “what it is to be like”…

Now evidently, Berlin is using the hedgehog image as a way into talking about the mindset of certain writers, and in particular, of Tolstoy. Tolstoy has to an extreme degree the fox’s virtue, which is to understand the difference made by experience, by what it is to be like – and he has to an extreme degree the hedgehog’s vice, which is a thirst for the god’s eye view that will not rest until everything has been settled according to some central principle.

However, what gets a little lost here is why Archilochus chose the hedgehog, of all creatures, to represent the systematic viewpoint – if Berlin’s interpretation is right.

There is, perhaps, another way of looking at the hedgehog’s emblematic meaning. In Schlegel’s Fragments – which is, among other thing, a defense of the Fragment as a genre of philosophical knowledge -  the hedgehog, Igel in German, reappears – perhaps in some reference to Archilochus’s line:

“A fragment must be like a tiny artwork, wholly sundered from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog.”

What Schlegel’s image proposes is not that the one great thing the hedgehog knows absorbs the world – rather, it separates a tiny, particular experience from the world and completes it. The paradoxical stress, here, is between the fragment and perfect or complete closure [in sich selbst vollendet sein]. While Berlin’s does not begin his essay by asking about what it is, in the hedgehog, that leads to the “one big thing’ he knows, Schlegel – whether consciously referencing Archilochus or not – returns to the ethological, or  perhaps I should say ethnological, base of the comparison. [After I wrote this,  I discovered that Anthony Grafton had been here before me – noticing this echo, too, in an essay on fragments in the classical tradition]

Stephen Gould, writing about Archilochus’s image, quotes Erasmus’s latin translation, which preserved the image in the humanist curicculum:  multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. Gould also, rightly, goes to Pliny for some sense of what the hedgehog meant to the ancients. However, Pliny deserves to be quoted at length, for it is in Pliny that we get a sense of the hedgehog figuring in a certain kind of game or work – that of hunting. This aspect is neglected in Gould’s essay.

“When they perceive one hunting of them, they draw their mouths & feet close togither, with all their belly part, where the skin hath a thin down: & no pricks at all to do harme, and so roll themselves as round as a foot-ball, that neither dog nor man can come by any thing but their sharpe-pointed prickles. So soon as they see themselves past all hope to escape, they let their water go and pisse upon themselves. Now this urine of theirs hath a poisonous qualitie to rot their skin and prickles, for which they know well enough that they be chased and taken. And therefore it is a secret and a special pollicie, not to hunt them before they have let their urine go; and then their skin is verie good, for which chiefly they are hunted: otherwise it is naught ever after and so rotten, that it will not hang togither, but fall in peeces: all the pricks shed off, as being putrified, yea although they should escape away from the dogs and live still: and this is the cause that they never bepisse and drench themselves with this pestilent excrement, but in extremitie and utter despaire: for they cannot abide themselves their own urine, of so venimous a qualitie it is, and so hurtfull to their owne bodie; and doe what they can to spare themselves, attending the utmost time of extremitie, insomuch as they are ready to be taken before they do it.”

This habit of the hedgehog – or at least this trait attributed to the hedgehog – puts us closer to the particular knowledge possessed by the hedgehog, in Archilochus’s verse. It is knowledge in a field – the field of hunting – and the hedgehog, far from being the systematic master, is the victim, the object of the chase.  The domain of hunting seems to be behind the fables that Archilochus uses as his references – fables now obscure to us, although we still know the stock of them labeled with the name of their supposed author, Aesop.

One of the reasons Berlin poses the question of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and how seriously we are to take it is that he is concerned, as one of the premier Cold War intellectuals, with Marx’s philosophy of history. What he wants to know is whether it is possible to get the hedgehog’s view of history outside of the reification of history – that is, outside of an explanation of causes (attributed to “history’’) that is merely an affirmation of effects. The nineteenth century in which he places Tolstoy was hypnotized by the verb, ‘determine’. That x ‘determines’ y seemed to say something more profound about y’s connection to x than to say x causes y. Determine – in German, Bestimmung – announces a power relationship that quickly slides into myth – the myth of the relation between creator, who shapes, and the creature, who lives within the creator’s lines, the creator’s survey plat.

“History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why

what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here?What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyatye voprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy’s mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly.”

Berlin is moving his pieces forward in the essay in broad, easy gestures, which has the advantage of making his essay accessible and interesting, and the disadvantage that comes from refusing to nitpick: that is, gliding over certain philosophically important issues. In particular, the junction of empirical and positivist does a lot of work for Berlin in the essay, even as one has to question its self-evidence. Positivism was not simply about the empirical – it was about progress. It was about a pattern in history that is above the empirical, the scatter of facts. Similarly,  the romantic protest against  the great anti-metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century was not, as Berlin actually knew, simply a rejection of science. Schlegel was not rejecting science so much as questioning its universal application – the fragment, in Schlegel’s view, presents a sort of monadic block to the statistical method of science. It doesn’t transcend the empirical – far from it. It dwells in the empirical, it weighs down experience with all its force, it presents its ‘bristles’ to the world like a hedgehog. And it does so in the consciousness that it is being hunted. For science, here, is no neutral social mechanism – it is used with definite aims.

One of those aims, as Berlin sees, is to prop up egotism. Tolstoy is a great deflator of egotism, and in this is the heir of the moralistes – of, especially, Pascal. But Pascal does retain the ego, the hateable “I” – and Tolstoy has his doubts. Perhaps in fact egotism precedes the ego: we have a theory of the I that precedes the I. Schlegel’s fragment and Tolstoy’s rage against the illusions on which are propped further illusions – egotism propping the ego – keep company with each other, in as much as the fragment is about its opposite – a perfect self-enclosure, a perfect completion – and the critique of egotism is about the nourishment of this thing that does not exist, the ego. And yet, and yet … something, something is stuffed into that great dark bag that is Ivan Ivanovich’s last terrifying experience on earth…