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…

Not so happy fourth thoughts. But shoot your firecrackers, you guys and gals!

Fourth of July thoughts

Truly, this is shaping up to be one of the most depressing presidential elections since Harding vs. Cox. I thought the 00s were the worst decade I'd ever seen, but this one is already a complete washout and it isn't four years old. We have a drone em candidate, Obama, and the spend more on the military and cut taxes on the rich candidate, Romney. And we will once more have the insane conversation about 'executive' abilities. If such things really do exist, then we can all save much money by computerizing them, firing en masse the parasitic cadre of CEOs, and putting in their place expert programs. To tell the truth, I think this would work - most CEO 'magic' happens only when the market is rising, and some corporation ekes out a bit more on that rise, usually compensated for when the market is falling and the extra risk taken by the corp bites em in the ass and they lead in the loss column. CEOs have as much to do with job creation as the gargoyles on cathedrals have to do with holding the cathedrals up. It is to laugh...

Bains was a creature of de-regulation, a symptom of speculative rot - no worse than the Carlyle group, perhaps. A good candidate with a populist, anti-corporate program would attack Romney with promises of a real program to curb speculative power. Even some one hundred year suggestions from T. Roosevelt could start us off: a postal bank, capitalized by the Fed, which would operate for households and small businesses the same way the Fed operates for giant casino banks; a complete revamping of laws on incorporation, making it the case that any interstate corporation would have to register with the Commerce department and obey federal law, rather than spreading the law of inshore offshore states (like Delaware) like the measles through the land; a complete revamping of our military 'committments'; a strong state presence in developing new power sources; progressive taxation, starting not by taxing the 99 percent more, but - amazingly - by taxing them much less, and the rich much more; a complete revamping of the guild system in health care, shifting much of the work monopolized by doctors, expensively, to medical tech who could do the work much more cheaply; a new auction system for IP, ending the abuse of the notion of "fair profit", which has become untenable monopoly. If the Bain ads actually generalized to a discussion of the kinds of investment vehicles that the big money was allowed to invest in - the pension and mutual funds, etc. - that would at least be useful. Because the wisest course in reversing the entrenchment of wall street wealth over the rest of us is to dry up the source of that wealth, the huge capital flows that are allowed to land anywhere. We would find a pension fund that bet all its money on roulette tables in Vegas shocking, but we allow such money to get involved in CDO swaps and the most arcane derivative instruments, which is the same thing, except with larger downsides.
I expect to see nothing like this. Rather, the Bains ads will be personal. The thing is, the Bains rot is systemic. And Obama, who has spent his time in office trying to return us to 2006, is as committed to that rot as any bobo. So once again, we will have the equivalent of miserable weather, a presidential election which involves one politician or another peeing down our necks, while the organized media boobs cheer one or another of them on, said boobs being comfortable 1 percenters, every one. I don't expect that Romney would be that much worse than Obama, but still, he would be worse. On the other hand, maybe the system, sloping downhill, needs just the kind of kick that a person rotten enough to devise the Bains strategy would provide.

paper dualism

“It is more difficult to understand how they can write proper names, especially foreign ones, for these are things that they have never seen, nor could they have invented a picture for them. I tried to examine this when I was in Mexico with some Chinese, and I asked them to write this sentence, or something resembling it, in their language: “Jose de Acosta has come from Peru.” The Chinese gentleman thought about it for a long time and at last wrote, and then the others read what sas indeed the same sentence, athought there was some variation in the proper name; for they use the device of taking the proper name and finding something in their language that resembles that thing, and then they write down the picture of it.” – Natural and  Moral History of the Indies, Jose de Acosta (1590)

There was always something philosophically magic about the relationship between the figure and the thing inscribed. There was something entangled about the figure and the thing that held it, for how could the sign or picture exist without the surface upon which it fell? There was something non-entangled about the figure and the thing that held it, for how could one transpose the same figure – or a token of the same figure – onto another holder, another tablet, another scroll, another piece of paper, unless the characters could fly away? They could fly away by being read outloud, true – and here sound became the carrier of sense, and flocks of sounds would carry flocks of sense – but they could also fly away by being copied. So there was always the object written upon and the object of writing, and they were separate things, except the type of the one always came with the type of the other, and this type of thing was perplexing in the life of a person and it was perplexing when one tried to think about it seriously, as a sage.  
At the same time writing systems were ‘invented’ in Mesopotamia, seals and stamps were also being invented. But it took a long time for the technology of the stamp to be transposed to the technology of the writing system in the West – that is, it took a long time to invent the printing press. This puzzles historians of technology. When you have the technology to stamp coins, you have the basis for stamping manuscripts – for printing. Yet the leap was not made by the Greeks. In China, on the other hand, the technology of the stamp was already being transposed to the character in 200 B.C., and woodblocks were used on paper in 800 A.D. It was Pi Sheng, an “unlearned man of the people”, [Otto Fuhrman] who invented a moveable type made of earthware in 1045.
In the always wounded dualism of the scribal cultures,  the design, the character, the figure, the word, the discourse, and even the thought gets divided from the matter, the clay, the stamp, the dead letter, the clay tablet, the screen. The narrative of thought is of bound majesty – the prince among slaves, the spirit fallen into the machine. The nobility of the idea is that it really exists in the world of flight, the world of forms, and the ignobility of matter is proven by the fact that it sticks to the idea, the thought, the word, the symbol. Though it be as light as a leaf of paper, still it is of the world of heaviness and labor, this substratum. 

metaphysics of paper 2

...The heavy mouth, the portable clay – it is here that I want to plant land, survey, plant some stakes.
...
The first stake has to do with the various motions that are in play in inscribing the tablet. The first motion is that of the sign itself, which is entirely the act of a gesture. Of course, the very fact that the gesture is immobilized in the sign signals the potential divide between the sign and the gesture – once the trace is standardized, the gesture recedes before the tool itself: the printing press is prefigured in Enmerkar’s act. Perhaps it is a mark of that mechanical future that Enmerkar does not consult the gods before creating his magic object, if we think of the gods in opposition to tools. There are mythical hints of this in the Eastern Mediterranean myths concerning the human rebellions against the gods. Still, Enmerkar does not act in conscious rebellion against the goddess Inanna, his protector: he simply responds to a particular human incapacity, a heavy jaw.
That first motion is echoed in the second motion, which is the material in which the figure is written. The text is always inscribed on something – some substratum, some hyperkeimenon. This is the orginal sublimated object – it gives itself to its own substitution by existing, on that day, in the moment of inscription, as the inscribed thing. And its movement is subordinate to the figures that are inscribed upon it – they exist above it, so to speak. They fly, like cherubim and seraphim, like bugs and Gods, and land. The substratum travels, too, but dumbly, materially – its flight is to the flight of the figures as the flight  of a thrown pebble is to the flight of a bird. However, the doubleness of its mobility is essentially like that of the figures. As a standardized object, it is immobile enough to bear the inscription. But as a limited object in space,  it also can be sent. And it is here that it intervenes in the social logic of writing – it is here that its sublimation is, and always will be, imperfect. For if the written couldn’t be sent, then the object itself would have a heavy mouth. In limit cases – of heavy blocks – writing and the object slow down. In the imagination, this slowing down has to do with a superhuman memory, or a monument. The block, the marble or granite of the monument bears the fall of the figure into the imperial realm of “eternity”, outlasting the human generations just as the tablet can circulate outside of the community. The flight of the day is frozen into the date of the monument. 
The second stake is in the trick, or trope, the turn, the trope, the magical transformation of object to beast, sound to sense, mark to meaning. Why is this a trick or a trap, however? It will take civilizations of nostalgia to answer that question, but the question seems to be posed, or coiled at least, in the story. The transformation of sound – which can cause a mouth to get heavy – into sense is paralleled by the transformation of the mark into meaning, but going in this direction, we leave behind the hyperkeimenon, we forget it. In the story, the Lord of Aratta is tricked into surrendering by taking the tablet in his hand – it is the tablet itself that has the magical meaning. This trick  is reversed in a more common fairy tale, that of the fatal sealed letter. A prince or troublemaker is given a sealed message to carry to a king. The message states that the king should murder the messanger. Here, the trick is the script, and the matter it must be written on is the veil. Matter eclipses itself – one of its tricks.

metaphysics of paper 1

Every kind of paper is purchased by the "waste-men." One of these dealers said to me: "I've often in my time 'cleared out' a lawyer's office. I've bought old briefs, and other law papers, and 'forms' that weren't the regular forms then, and any d——d thing they had in my line. You'll excuse me, sir, but I couldn't help thinking what a lot of misery was caused, perhaps, by the cwts. of waste I've bought at such places. If my father hadn't got mixed up with law he wouldn't have been ruined, and his children wouldn't have had such a hard fight of it; so I hate law. All that happened when I was a child, and I never understood the rights or the wrongs of it, and don't like to think of people that's so foolish. I gave 1 1/2 d. a pound for all I bought at the lawyers, and done pretty well with it, but very likely that's the only good turn such paper ever did any one—unless it were the lawyers themselves." –Henry Mayhew, Of the street buyers of waste (paper), London Labour
Men no sooner discovered the discovered the admirable art of communicating their ideas by way of figures than it was necessary to chose the material for defining those characters. – Encyclopedie, entry under Papeterie
From the grammatological point of view, few sentences could sum up the logocentric ideology better than this one from Diderot’s  Encyclopedie. It is a history in two steps:  in one of which the “figures” are discovered, and in the other of which they find a substrate, a material upon which they could assume their secondary, visible existence. In this story, the material is already substituted –its existence is laid out under the sign of substitution - or of supplementation, or of sublimation. The true mark, the idea, exists before its fall into the world of paper – or papyrus, or clay tables, or vellum. 
In a Sumerian story, the invention of writing and the material for defining the characters are put in a closer narrative proximity – one in which that matter exists in a series of symbolically important materials that form the basis of what Jean Jacques Glassner calls a “duel”. The ur-form of the story is a competition between two magicians, one of whom transforms common objects into living beings, the other one of whom transforms common objects into superior living beings that eat the first magicians tricks – a stone becomes a snake, for instance, while the leaf of a tree becomes an eagle that eats the snake. A similar story of the duel of matter is told of Enmerkar, the ruler of a powerful state, and the Lord of Aratta, a distant state that Enmerkar wishes to gain tribute. Enmerkar sends messangers threatening Arrata. The first messenger threatens to have the goddess Inanna drown the city. The Lord of Aratta sent back a refusal, and a challenge: could Enmerkar send grain to the city in nets rather than sacks? Enmerkar does so, sending grains that sprout and provide a layer over the holes in the nets. The second time, Enmerkar sends his scepter, and the third time a garment. The forth time Enmerkar does something completely new, and without consulting the gods: he takes a lump of clay and he wrote upon it. The duel, here, comes to an end with the Lord of Aratta having to take hold of the clay tablet in order to read it. As in a children’s game, by touching the object, the Lord of Aratta signals his submission.

But this moment is less the conclusion of a magical  duel than the first unintended result of the letter – for Enmerkar was not originally intending to send a letter. Here’s how the passage is translated by Fabienne Huber Vulliet:
“His speech was substantial,and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired,was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under the sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the massage like a tablet. It was just like that.”
The message and the clay, here, come together in a narrative about tricky objects – about metamorphosis – that is enfolded in another narrative about imperial power. From the point of view of the author of the lord of Kulaba, the signs and the tablet are two sides of one dated event (Now, under the sun and on that day…). There is a triangle here between the figures, the tablet, and the time – for that day is, in a sense, signed and becomes that day, the object of an act of deixis.

Disaster in the zona: hard times a-comin'

How dumb are the economic policies our master’s have loaded on our back? This dumb:

“…the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has downwardly revised potential economic output for 2017 by 6.6 percent since the start of the recession. This may seem trivial, but for a $15 trillion economy, this dip reflects roughly $1.3 trillion in lost future income in a single year, on top of years of cumulative forgone income (already at roughly $3 trillion and counting). The level of potential output projected for 2017 before the recession is now expected to be reached between 2019 and 2020—representing roughly two-and-a-half years of forgone potential income.” – Andrew Fieldhouse

That forgone potential income will not be coming out of the pockets of the plutocrats. If  in the next four years we face another slump, the only group that will get bailed out will be the fat cats, just as the only group bailed out in 2008-2009 were the bankers, boiler room conmen, hedgefunders and offshore men who got the Fed’s Instaloan cure. So we have a rough estimate, at least, of the next step down by the American middle class. They can stare at it, or they can stare at the glassy screen of their tv and pretend that the instruments haven’t flashed the disaster sign.  I think of this as sort of the Dixiefication of the U.S. – every space will eventually look like S.C., with the rich in the stratosphere and the rest happy to get catfish.

The corner stone of the wealth of nations

Marx congratulated Malthus (whose work he otherwise disparaged) for understanding that Smith’s more sophisticated division between productive and unproductive labour was the foundation stone of The Wealth of Nations. The metaphor of the foundation stone is important, here – Say, as Marx knew, had claimed that it was the stone that the builders could reject – although Say did not frame it in that biblical way. Marx, who had a great pool of references whirling in his unconscious, probably fixed on this – he did like troping the biblical Zitat.

But why was it so essential, in Marx’s view? I think it is because the distinction allows one to see that capitalism generates, internally, a socially defined class structure that cannot be separated from its economically defined activity. It is a class structure that is different in kind from the status structures before it, even as the forms of distinction characterizing those status structures heralded the new system, one where the great binary, the spheres of production and circulation, allowed something that seemed impossible in the Malthusian world: untrammeled growth. And thus the great wheel of fortune would be broken. Like Prospero’s gear:

I'le breake my staffe,
Bury it certaine fadomes in the earth,
And deeper then did euer Plummet sound
Ile drowne my booke –

So too would the ancien regime bury itself.

But if the class system of capitalism has done with the former unproductive class, the aristocracy, and industrializes agriculture, thus chasing away the peasant and his moeurs, the dualism of class does not necessarily seem like a dualism. This is largely due to the fact that the sphere of circulation in which the circulation worker moves does not form a homogeneous opposition to production: the workers within it are not capitalists per se. 

In fact, the capitalist remove from nature and from production is accomplished under the cover of the circulation worker, who becomes, increasingly, the ideal character type of modernity.

reading the classics

Calvino begins his essay, Why read the Classics, by defining them in terms of a characteristic phrase: “I am re-reading x” The classics are haunted, as it were, by re-reading. We re-read in the classroom to answer questions (a site Calvino, I think mistakenly, throws out of consideration – an awful lot of reading is tied to the classroom, and it often seems that when we re-read on our own, the ghost of a classroom desk trails behind us, with its pencil groove and its slight, metallic smell – mixed in my case with the smell of a brown bag and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in wax paper ). We re-read outside of the classroom because, a, we are defensive about not having read,and want to make it known that we, too, have already read, and b, (the meat of Calvino’s theme), even when reading the first time, the classic imposes it scale on us, one that suggests an infinity of re-readings. When reading a classic, we cannot “escape” its design. In this sense, the classic is the opposite of escapist literature. We read that to get “lost”, by which we mean ‘lost’ from our everyday routines, our ordinary world, the one outside the book. It isn’t that we do not get lost in the classics – but it is a different kind of lost. It is all about disorientation and fate. Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, tells a story about getting lost in Rome, and finding that, over and over again, he has taken the wrong roads, which keep leading him back to a doubtful neighborhood. A neighborhood, we assume, that is a redlight district. Thus, in one sense, from the perspective of the super-ego Freud is lost, but, from another, more chthonic perspective, that of the libido, he is following the line of his fate.

This is the lostness experienced inside the classic. We are uncomfortably aware of some  exterior intentionality that we have somehow swallowed – we are possessed.

Of course, the classics of high modernism show an acute awareness of the other kind of lostness. Leopold Bloom is a great admirer of Paul de Kock, a nineteenth century author of lubricious fare. And the lostness in the popular novel that is a rush – we read it all at once –is mimicked in prose that gushes with consciousness – in Ulysses, in To the Lighthouse, in Sound and the Fury, among others. And yet that enactment of being lost, carried away, is highly stylized – it is in fact just the kind of thing you don’t find in a popular novel. These moments are, as well, re-readable – in fact, if there are degrees in the infinity of re-reading in which the classic lives, they are even more re-readable than more conventional prose. 

Oddly, Calvino misses a trick by confining the notion of re-reading to the classic text and not comparing it to oral ones – for there are stories that we tell about ourselves that we seem to tell over and over again. Years and years ago, I visited Monterray, Mexico, with a friend. I have found myself telling the story of that visit to dozens of people since. I’m not sure why that story has stuck with me so much, but as I tell the story, it becomes more and more devoid of living memory and more and more full of intentionality – of rhetorical memory, if you will. I have other stories like that as well. I think most people have a canon of stories they tell about themselves – their own classics. But in contrast to the re-telling that these stories seem to compel, there is a certain shyness about telling the same story twice. We are frankly embarrassed to be caught telling the same story twice. It is boring. Or it shows some fatal lack of memory – one should remember that X person has already heard the story.

And this gives us another clue to the nature of classics: they are eerily unembarrassed. They are not embarrassed about incest, about patricide and matricide, about dimemberment, and rape, about suicide – all the stories tumble out. They are even not embarrassed about boredom.

This is what sets the contemporary taste on edge about the classics. There is nothing more dismissive than the phrase, “that’s boring.” In a sense, the fear of boredom and the fear of age are connected in the ordinary norms of our everyday life. Youth sticks in the windpipe of the middle aged, they can’t cough it up or swallow it. And boredom is especially something to be fled. In both cases, the organic reality – that we age, and that there are large necessary patches of boredom in our lives if we actually do anything – are subject to a repression that expresses itself in the aesthetic sphere – a sphere that we tend both to diminish (it is only entertainment) and present in social situations to the exclusion of anything else. In the classics, boredom is intended. This seems utterly mad  to those of us weaned on the entertainment industry’s quest to never, ever bore. Of course, that quest is itself mad – it dulls, and it excludes re-reading, which runs counter to surprise and sensation.  The intentional boredom in the classic doesn’t entail that we will always re-read the boring patches and be bored – it does entail that the possibility not only exists, but is embraced. In the Library of Babel, there are an infinite number of boring texts, and texts that are even more boring, interpreting these boring texts. A classic that bored completely would not be re-read – one that interested completely would not be re-read either, for it would tend to impose the kind of lostness that is foreign to the classic.

unproductive labour and literature

In 1790, 75 percent of the working population of Austria was involved with agriculture (David Good); this was true of  73 percent of the population of the U.S. at the time, and  approximately the same percentage in Prussia as well (Cambridge Economic History). In Europe as a whole, at the time of the French Revolution, when we look not only at the population that directly labored in the fields, but include those who depended directly on them, we get even more elevated figures: 90 percent, for instance, for France. The exceptions are Britain and Holland, with the percentage being as low it is estimated as 40 percent in Britain. These were the first economies to enduringly get past what the growth economists call “Malthusian limits” – that is, an agricultural sector that shrinks in population size while growing in productivity such that it can support a much larger non-agricultural population. The post-Malthusian world is the world of the artificial paradise, in which I, and everybody I know, has lived all our lives – except when escaping in little pockets of fantasy, sleep, digestion, sex, the third life, and phobias.  It is hard to measure these pockets. But we can confidently say that in other places, the Malthusian world lingered on – in Galicia, or in Russia, or in China and India. And the breaking of the Malthusian limits was in many ways a huge trauma, involving starvation, the total breakdown of cultural constants, emigration, loneliness, and changes in the internal signaling structure of our bodies and emotions that we are still grappling with on a world wide scale.

In the post-Malthusian world, the productive and the unproductive took on different characteristics. It was no longer of a small merchant class, nobility, and an overwhelming peasantry. It was no longer Robin Hood’s world. Marx’s world was that of the nation on the forefront of industrialization – England – but even in Marx’s time, the elements that would subordinate the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation were in evidence.

As Murray Smith (1993) has pointed out, Marx’s comments about productive and unproductive labor in the second book of Capital don’t cohere, completely, with his comments in the Grundrisse. Smith usefully defines four forms of unproductive labor: Smith’s form, in which labor is paid for out of personal revenue, such as household labor; labor of the self-employed commodity producer; labor of the circulation worker; and what he calls “social-maintenance” labor.

Smith’s definitions are all derived from the social position of the laborer with regard to capital. Productive labor, then, is not about producing a material thing, but about producing surplus value. The salesman and the teacher can both be exploited, in this reading, when we look at their labor from the point of view of the total social product, but they are not exploited as productive labor is exploited. What is important is not to see these forms as fixed elements in the social picture, but rather as frontiers always susceptible to be changed in their location in the social whole. If we put the sphere of circulation at one end, as a constant parameter of non-productive labor, we cannot really make the same claim about other non-productive workers.

Edward Wolff puts it like this: “Unproductive activity affects the disposition of commodities

but creates neither use value nor exchange value. Productive labor creates surplus value; unproductive labor absorbs surplus value.” (1987)    

It is in the cruel intersection of these two sentences that I locate that lonely beast, the modern writer.