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.