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.