Long Sunday

techniques of the reading body

As befits a man who wrote one novel eschewing the letter "e," and another (slimmer) one that did without "a," "i," "o," and "u," Georges Perec thought a lot about the materiality of language: its physical incarnation as marks on a page, marks that could be arranged and rearranged to reveal orders other than the merely semantic. Perec loved palindromes, for instance. Famously, in 1969 he composed a palindrome over 5,000 letters long (that's 1240 words, in each direction). It begins "Trace l'inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule." It ends "Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l'écart."

So no wonder he should have much to say about how to arrange one's books, and about the "socio-physiology" of reading.

A Parapraxis and a Half

Your author is thankfully not going to follow the latest ‘meme’ (why do I dislike that word so much?) and list how many books he owns. He could list all the books whose price he has ‘self-lowered’ (as the Autonomist euphemism goes). But no, instead he is going to tell you about what he has been reading in the library, and following Thomas Mann’s perceptive comment, display “that childish impulse to force upon the reader verbatim all that the writer has read and drawn his consolation from, instead of allowing it to form the silent and reassuring background of his message.”

Robinson Crusoe Stories

It has been said that the much of the truth or falsehood of a political theory lies in its axioms. Think of Hobbes’ brutish ‘naturall condition of mankind’ as the axiom from which follows the corollary of a strong sovereign power to secure human contracts. Think (at another extreme) of the New Right libertarianism of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, a perfectly consistent treatise, but one which perhaps stands or falls with the validity of its very first sentence, “People have rights and there is nothing anyone can do to violate them.”

Something of this dependence of political theory upon axioms struck me recently when reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, not strictly speaking a work of political theory, but one of political science which rests on a certain political theory. Key to the argument Putnam sets out about the waning of political participation in America and his proposals for its revival is the concept of ‘social capital’. Herein, I believe, lies an axiom, and a revealing one at that. ‘Social capital’ is, according to Putnam, that which has been lost over the past half century of US history, it is the real civic substance that has withered with the decline in American political participation.

Old Etonians

Whilst the Young Turks are reading Žižek, the Young Hegelian is reading an Old Etonian, Henry Hobhouse, and his wonderful book Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind. A book for those who suspect that man’s material needs and the reproduction of his means of subsistence have played a not inconsiderable part in human history. Those five plants, in case you were wondering, are: quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, and the potato (spelled without an 'e', Dan).

A couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

“[Sugar] was, and is, in absolute terms, a not especially cheap source of human energy. In the eighteenth century it was much more expensive in real terms than cereals. Before the sixteenth century the whole of the European world had managed with miniscule quantities of sugar, a mere pinch per head for the whole of history. The glories of the Renaissance were created on the basis of a teaspoonful per head of sugar every year. Sugar is unnecessary to any endeavour, but it is addictive. In the years 1690-1790 Europe imported 12 million tons, which cost, in all, about the same number of lives. Today, Europe’s consumption is well over 12 million tons a year, a hundred times as much. There are no slaves except consumers.”

And of the slave ships in the sugar trade:

“Zeal was needed. Losses at sea were now higher, and ships were faster. Slavers were prizes, even in peacetime, so that every man’s hand would be against them, and the slave ships therefore avoided contact with other vessels by using tortuous routes. Disease was rampant. One slave ship was found by the Royal Navy, floating inert, its entire complement, black and white, slave and crew, blinded with opthalmia, and only able to grope about the vessel. Not unnaturally, they were starving in the midst of plenty.”

The only thing that lets down this (library) edition is an embarrassing recommendation on the back by (probably) another Old Etonian, Sir William Rees-Mogg. It would have immediately put me off if I hadn’t known the content of the book:

“Marx didn’t invent the dialectic – Freud did not invent the subconscious – Mr Hobhouse has not invented vegetable history. But he has seen its significance. Why was President Kennedy an American? Because of the potato. Why was Martin Luther King an American? Because of cotton. The vegetable kingdom is one of the great long-term causes of human history. This is the most exciting book I have read for years, and I believe it will be one of the most influential.”

Public? No, thanks.

What are people calling for when they call for a public space in which X can be uttered, critiqued, debated? Generally speaking, they are not making a claim about media insofar as the 'calling for' takes place within a medium, that is, in the pages of a book, in an article in a magazine or journal, or on a blog, television, or the radio. Yet, the statement is not apart from media or unrelated to a call for a different kind of media. That is, it may express a longing for a medium of one's own, for something like a blog or a community of blogs. For the most part, though, when one laments the loss of the public or expresses dismay over the fact that certain statements or criticisms cannot be made in public, one seems to be expressing a longing for a different kind of politics.

Perhaps a better rendering of this call for a public is in terms of a desire for, say, a different kind of Senate, for one where there are discussions, exchanges. It could be a desire for a politics, then, which functions according to the terms in which one thinks, according to the procedures and principles one already endores, over the issues one finds vitally important. But, such a space would be neither public nor political. To this extent, the call for some kind of public space or discussion (again, as if the discussions one values were not already taking place, as if one were not already occupying a place in a discussion in calling for a public) becomes a critical statement about the conditions in which one finds oneself, conditions one wants to change. And changes would then involve a different matrix of inclusion and exclusion, but not, it seems, something as open as 'public.'

Yet, the call for a public sphere, space, square, or forum is not merely a remnant of 18th century aspirations to reasoned debate among an enlightened citizenry (how elite, how privileged). It can also be read to express a dismay over the terms of a discourse that structures critique so as to position those who might utter it within its terms as inconsistent, as within a kind of trap or double bind. And presumably this trap is more than the trap of language, of entry into the Symbolic, but a trap specific to a discursive or ideological formation that establishes what counts as reasonable (simple, clear, and already known to its audience), moral (accepted by a very specific reading of traditional values), civilized (on our side, as if this our were solid, certain, immaleable). In this context, then, perhaps a call for a public, to a public, expresses a desire for a different kind of commons, a different mode of being and speaking together wherein we could speak without being constrained by these particular rules and contradictions.