SECOND-WEEKER. We were given a case that afternoon, in the heat of mid-April. The sun was shining and the second-weekers were everywhere. It was the morning of possible options, possible routes, and I was exploring the limits of the map on my phone. There was the sun, and its representation on my home-screen. There was the blue line and the blue dot and the red dot and that was you. This is the language of our time, an old-new kind of technical vocabulary. You were the one sitting early at the desk, thick-rimmed and bluetoothed; the neat one slouched lengthways on the deep couch; you were handing over papers and passports, scared a little for what they might mean or set in motion. I was the dead-end blue dot and you had all arrived. You were upstanding, smiling and making friends for the next five minutes.

The language of the courthouse is gold-leaf and plain oak, a plastic-laminate notice reading: PLEASE DO NOT MOVE THE FURNITURE. This is the texture of the briefing, of the space in which it happens – chandeliers with the wiring exposed – a moody kind of material decline. We speak of long-term and short-term and how both are in evidence, in a room like this. We speak of a ‘wipe clean mindset.’

There was a path from the station to the court, and then there were alternative paths, some of which led nowhere. And in my in-between time I decided I would test them: to cross-examine the blossom of the streets behind the hospital, the vintage cars parked up outside the council estates, the queues of late commuters lining the delis and coffee shops. This is the kind of blue sky thinking made available by time outside of work and waiting; a freedom of – and from – judgement.

This is the first-day outlook, anyway. The woman in the room – the one who is not us – shouting: “YOU’RE WHAT WE CALL FIRST-WEEKERS”; and me thinking it is nice to have a name and a measurable sense of progress. Our responsibilities are to sit patiently, take on new cases, arrive early to court and file reimbursement forms on our second day of service. There would be papers distributed, information-films screened, and tannoy-systems calling names we do not yet recognise.

We are taught the codewords we’d later rely on – the commands for a corridor line-up, the left-right-down journey to the courtroom itself, the four-digit pin for the jury waiting area. And all the way through her briefing the second-weekers would creak the door open, and the woman would say: “I’M TELLING YOU NOW, THAT’LL BE YOU NEXT WEEK.” Our mistakes play out in front of us, ahead of us, and we are reproved in advance.

The second-weekers are the other plainclothes people, the ones who wear Fred Perry and Levis, comfortable footwear and tote-bags, but who – importantly – are not us. They are not us in a different way than the general public, who wear dark grey dresses and puffy-red eyes. They are us, quite simply, a week from now.

I would walk via the market, via the hospital and the park, via the river and the bookshop. I would turn my phone off and idle, I would see things differently without it. There is pollen in the air and in the stuff of the waiting room. The second-weekers would sneeze and bless one another by name. I would edge closer and feel myself fall out of place, out of phase – an old-new kind of self in the works. There is a risk inherent in any experiment, I suppose. An inevitable kind of risk.

There are signs in the rooms that tell us not to discuss what is heard, what is seen, until the time is right, until the second week.

We would learn of the defendant, the defence, the prosecution, the witnesses and ushers, judges and magistrates and us, the jury. Of how the room compartmentalises these terms on our behalf: the dock, the bench, the stand, the box. A separation of concerns. I would sit on a chair with a number, in a room with a number, and there would be labels attached to documents that are numbered as well. And we would be invited to think of their language as impartial, a subset of English which ensures our safety. Of language itself as a safe of sorts.

*

Towards the end of the c10th the King of England, Æthelred II (otherwise known as Æthelred the Unready), issued the Wantage Code, a document which aimed to clarify legal procedures and the management of disputes within the ‘Danelaw’ (now the East Midlands). The code’s issuance came at a time of conflict, where renewed Danish incursions into the ‘Five Boroughs’ – Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, and Stamford – threatened a tentative peace with the descendants of earlier viking settlers. In this document Æthelred outlined what is commonly thought to be the earliest extant evidence of an English jury system:

§1. And a court shall be held in every wapentake, and the twelve leading thegns along with the reeve shall go out and swear on the relics which are given into their hands, that they will not accuse any innocent man or shield any guilty one.¹

What is being described here is a ‘jury of presentment’, where twelve ‘thegns’ – or local landholders – would investigate crimes on the basis of local knowledge and community consensus. Rather than hearing cases based on formal witness testimony, officials would play an active role in ‘presenting’ accusations.

These noblemen would walk the streets looking for clues, gathering rumors, relying on their familiarity with local affairs to determine who might be responsible for a given crime. This approach marked a departure from the more reactive and compensation-focused legal traditions of earlier Anglo-Saxon law – it introduced a more investigative and communal mode of justice, one that would later evolve into the formalized jury systems of medieval and modern England.

*

[For Marx and Engels], one function of the prison in capitalist society is to stabilize commerce. More broadly, of course, prison was one part of the overall bourgeois legal system of punishment based upon a false guise of liberty.

For instance, commenting on a case in which several leaders of a Workers’ Association in Cologne were on trial, it is noted, first, they were imprisoned and treated like low level criminals. Secondly, they could not expect a fair trial because, “we regard the jury system as at present organized as anything but a guarantee. The register qualification gives a definite class the privilege of choosing the jury from its midst”. Jury members generally came from privileged class positions and, [as Marx and Engels write], “the ‘conscience’ of the privileged is precisely a privileged conscience”.²

*

The letter arrives in the post and asks that you participate. It is small and brown and bears a coat of arms unlike those you have received from other government departments. The weather is grey and cool, and there it is on the mat. It bears the word: SUMMONS.

Now you’re in the room and you’re examining circumstantial evidence. Evidence that must itself be interrogated, and from which inferences must be drawn. A verdict. There are papers spread across tables, images and films stored on thumb-drives. There are the notes you have taken alongside the notes of others. These are the materials in question; the things which are not yet facts. The space is small and hot and you remain unconvinced. There is a sense that the room is moving in a direction of which you are uncertain.

You have been walking through evidence for two days. Two days of leafing, eating, talking, pissing, note-taking, gesturing, sneezing, in synchronisation with eleven others. There are habits you have developed. Community knowledge. There is the coffee at one-o’clock. There is the request for a smoke-break. There is the air-conditioner and the dehumidifier, both too loud to speak over. There are disclosures – names spoken, claims to reputability, risks taken.

You have walked every path here by now. You have taken this work seriously: the blue sky counting, the noting, walking, memorisation of every face lining the streets, the coffee orders and timings of lights, trains, buses. These are the things over which you have control – the path to the building, to the blue-dot. It is a privilege to walk the streets, is it not?

There are the things you cannot say beyond the room, and the things you can. There are the words you have had to learn and become comfortable with. Words which enter and change you in ways that are surprising, even to those who have known you for such a short time. To those who you have known for only two weeks.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. Charlotte Neff . Scandinavian elements in the Wantage code of Æthelred II. The Journal of Legal History (1989) ↩

2. James Parisot. Marx and Engels on Prisons and Capitalism. Journal of Classical Sociology (2024) ↩

FEAR was once the name for an event. It is the 27th of June, 1974 and there is a room in Moscow turning a gentle yellow, cigarette sunrise. It is the hour of mobility and blind coordination, of children scoot-swerving parents, teachers zebra-crossing streams of exhaust rush. Andrei is writing and smoking and men are swearing sweet nothings into their dashboards. It has been two weeks since the letter from the State Councillor of Justice – M. Samayev – on the matter of filmmaker Sergey Paradzhanov. Andrei’s letter, co-signed with Viktor Shklovsky, had been sent on the 21st of April, closing with the lines: “Artistically, there are few people in the entire world who could replace Paradzhanov. He is guilty—guilty in his solitude. We are guilty of not thinking of him daily and of failing to discover the significance of a master.” The Kiev State Councillor had replied: “There are no grounds for appeal.” All this was two weeks ago. Five years’ loss of freedom.

Andrei is up and scribbling 27 June, Moscow. Beads of ink and sweat bleed lengthways on the page and he thinks of the things that heat brings out in men. There is swearing and skipping and smoke-rising outside. He listens and writes: “Last night I dreamt that I had died. But I could see, or rather feel, what was going on around me.” Larisa – Lara – is still soaked in sleep, Andriosha – little Andrei – in the cot beside her; moon faces glistening a primeval concern. A question? “When you feel compassion for yourself in that way, it is as if your pain were someone else's, and you are looking at it from outside, weighing it up, and you are beyond the bounds of what used to be your life. It was as if my past life was a child's life, without experience, unprotected. Time ceases to exist, and fear. An awareness of immortality.”

There are no bells in Moscow, and if there were you could not hear them anyway. There are sirens and engines and comrades shaking hands, greeting the sun, sweeping grit and soot and softly speaking to one another the names of American movie stars. “And then I came back to life, and no one was surprised. They all went off to the public baths, and I wasn't allowed in because I didn't have a ticket. I pretended I was the bath attendant, but I couldn't produce any proof of identity.” Andrei is writing and thinking быт (byt) – the deep time of everyday life – in the afterglow of Lara and the white-blinding sound of the street, in the afterburn of a dream in which fear has decentred the subject. Anything but Kiev and Paradzhanov and the five years ahead. Anything but Brezhnev’s Nine Year Plan.

“But all that was just a dream, and I knew it was a dream. It's the second time I have had a dream about death. And each time I have felt an extraordinary sense of freedom, of not needing any kind of protection. What can it mean?” Andriosha coos from his cot and maybe that is a bell he can hear after all, not in the room but elsewhere. A golden yellow thrum which threads the morning heat, the beaded sweat. And Andrei writes: “The interview with Bergman where he says I am the best contemporary director is in Playboy.”¹

*

Andrei Tarkovsky released his final film – The Sacrifice – in 1986 and died in December of that year. The narrative follows Alexander, a former actor and intellectual who, upon learning of an imminent nuclear exchange, promises God he will sacrifice everything – his home and his speech – if the catastrophe is averted. When he wakes to find the world seemingly restored, he methodically fulfills his vow by setting fire to his house, and is taken away to an asylum. The film ends with this scene and the dedication: “to my son Andriosha – with hope and confidence.”

In Old English fær was the word for a sudden and terrible event; a peril. In Beowulf one reads of the fær-gryrum (sudden horror) of the enemy:

“...hwæt swiðferhðum selest wære / wið færgryrum to gefremmanne.” “Plotting how best the bold defenders / Might resist and beat off sudden attacks”

This is a word like so many others which has turned inwards over time, a word propped up like a house of cards. By the Middle English of the C12th, according to the OED, it had taken on the sense with which we use it today – the uneasiness caused by a feeling of impending danger, something akin to dread.

Tarkovsky’s cinematic oeuvre as a whole – and The Sacrifice in particular – is heavily influenced by the work of Ingmar Bergman, director of The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). In The Seventh Seal, set during the Black Death of 1346, the mediaeval protagonist – a disillusioned knight Antonius Block – meditates on the concept of fear, in a discussion with Death:

“We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God”²

In his writing on the Lives of Saints in the late C10th, Benedictine monk Ælfric (Abbot of Eynsham) discusses the father of the Virgin Mary, Joachim. In Old English he writes:

“Se wæs heorda his sceapa and he wæs godfyrht man on bylewitnysse and on fremsumnysse, and he næfde nænige ōðre gymene buton his eowde. Of þam eowde he fedde ealle þa ðe him drihten ondredon…” “He was a shepherd of his sheep and he was a God-fearing man in innocence and in kindness, and he had no other concern except his flock. From that flock he fed all those who feared the Lord…”

The ‘godfyrht man’ – the god-fearing – belongs to a kind of club, a flock. The flock fears and farms and is fed on that basis. One makes an idol of their fear and calls that idol God. In Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern (1987), the director writes that as a child, a favourite ‘quote’ of his was that “fear would create what is feared.” That, as a child, he “had a talent for being frightened and acquiring a guilty conscience”. He writes:

“My parents lived in an exhausting, permanent state of crisis with neither beginning nor end. They fulfilled their duties, they made huge efforts, appealing to God for mercy, their beliefs, values and traditions of no help to them. Nothing helped. Our drama was acted out before everyone's eyes on the brightly lit stage of the parsonage. Fear created what was feared.”

What Bergman calls the “the mechanics of fear”, Paul Virilio might describe as its administration. For Virilio – writing in The Administration of Fear (2012) – fear is today synchronised through media, through films, through the internet, through ‘the bomb’. The ‘ecological bomb’, the ‘information bomb’ and, of course, the ‘nuclear bomb’. But perhaps this idea of ‘the event’ and its aftermath, its afterglow or afterimage, its collapse, has always been integral to the concept’s construction? The God Bomb. The Love Bomb. Bergman writes:

“There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one's own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.”³

*

“Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can’t bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species.” ⁴

You used to be distracted in particulars, inequalities, news stories, events, things which had happened in your life and the lives of others and how they stitched themselves into a bigger picture, into a way of knowing the world. Concerns that could be counted, that felt productive and scary in a way that spoke of an outside. Now you find yourself distracted in general – by a slowing of your thoughts, by an inward turn of the processes which make up a day-to-day difference.

You don’t dream so much these days, and when you do it is of the bomb. This is a throwback fear, this is a fear learned from movies and test footage, from video games and books, media in which you have played both willing and unwilling participant. This is the kind of fear with a name – a fear with a capital F – which can be catalogued and indexed and maybe even medicated. Nucleomitophobia, the fear of bombs. Theophobia, the fear of gods. Chronophobia, the fear of time.

It’s time for bed or maybe it’s morning. The bomb is the kind of big dream which obviously means something else. It’s morning in an abstract way, morning for others, for those who work shifts in the dark meat of the night, all buckets and mops and pistols and knives. It’s the big dream in which nothing else has changed, just the edge of the bed, the moon through the curtain, and a secret you’d like to reveal to yourself.

The important thing about dreams is that they always mean something else, isn’t it? Don’t they?

You think of the drills you never did, of the times you never lived through, and the children scared shitless beneath their tiny wooden desks. The bomb dream is big and important, it’s a rehearsal. It must be. The bomb dream is the standing and the moon-flash, the nose-itch crunch of a light which comes from within. It’s a kind of wishful X-Ray where you get to see the bone, where you get to see inside yourself and know – just for one second – what it meant all along.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. The quoted sections are taken from Tarkovsky’s Time Within Time, The Diaries, 1970-1986 (1989), p.95–96 ↩

2. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4dxaf4 ↩

3. Ingmar Bergman. The Magic Lantern (1987) ↩

4. Don DeLilo, White Noise (1985), p.289 ↩

1. IT IS CLASSIFIED AS…? Every word contains a question. To an etymologist this is obvious, it is the question of origin: When was the word first thought? First spoken? First written? It is the question of ‘firsts’. There are only a handful of words in the English language for which we have no satisfactory answer to these questions: ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘dog’, ‘bird’, ‘big’... each of these appear fully-formed upon arrival in the Middle English period (c12–15th), with no obvious Germanic or Latinate root.

All other words have ‘origins’, just as they have ‘meanings’ – modes of organisation and categorisation that are mutually influencing, at once historic, geographic, political, material and semantic. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) claims that the word ‘origin’ (as ‘origyne’) emerged in the mid-15th century, evidenced in the ‘Ashmole’ manuscripts as part of an ‘alliterative romance’ on the Wars of Alexander.¹ In the section of the text that constitutes such evidence, the (nameless) author describes Alexander’s enemies as:

Fełł feȝtand folke ⋅ þat Faire we całł,
be Arrabiens & all þa ⋅ [of] þat origyne;
Bernys out of Batary ⋅ batails arayed,
And oþire out of þe orient ⋅ many od hundrethe.

…fierce and steadfast folk whom we call the Arabs, and all those from that origin, with armor from battle, and others from the East, many in the hundreds.

In defining the 15th-century meaning of the word ‘origyne’ the 2004 edition of the OED gives synonyms such as ‘parentage’, ‘ancestry’, or ‘extraction’; the ‘Glossorial Index’ of the Early English Text Society’s (EETS) 1886 edition of the Wars of Alexander gives a single word: ‘race’.

What might it mean that the ‘origin’ of ‘origin’ is another word for ‘race’? At least when viewed through the lens of a 19th century reproduction of a 15th century transcription of a story by then already a millennium old?

What I am imagining is a machine. It is that machine – that lens – which can collapse the 21st century into the 19th, the 19th into the 15th, and so on. It is a machine that provides a certain way of seeing.

The first sentence of the first essay of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing tells us that “seeing comes before words”:

“It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”

I want a way of seeing that can speak to the question of ‘origyne’ and the questions which follow from it: to the question – implied by Berger – of a desire to ‘escape’ the world through words, perhaps by means of capture and immobilisation² or duplication and magnification; to the question, raised by Donna Haraway, of the ‘god trick’ – of objectivity understood as impartiality, a “view from above, from nowhere” – of universality and ‘the West’; to the question, raised by Frederic Jameson, of an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’, through which one might ‘represent’ the truth of an age in which experience “no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place.”³

The ‘obligation’ or ‘compulsion’ at the centre of Berger’s work is this ‘experience of displacement’.⁴ This is what he told Jeremy Isaacs in 1995, over 20 years after publishing Ways of Seeing. When asked ‘where’ he writes, Berger responded:

“...it seems to me that the whole question of where one is when writing has to do with this; that phrase, by the photographer Robert Capa who said something like: “When the picture is not good enough, go closer.” And it seems to me that what I’ve tried to do, perhaps in all the books I’ve written, is to get in very close. And then to try to bring something back from a starting point ‘outside’.”⁵

How might one ‘classify’ a machine capable of providing such an image? Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ gifted with a paparazzi lens? Let us imagine the machine as something physical – a tool – like an old Microfilm reader or the Hubble telescope. Let us imagine ourselves cleaning it after hours, wearing bright white jumpsuits and waxing its uncountable mirrors.

The 20Q machine – first produced in 1988 – is a toy which claims to know everything. It is small and round, and made of a translucent coloured plastic. It is based on the parlor game ‘twenty questions’ in which players take turns asking yes or no questions to identify a mystery person, place, or thing. On the 20Q website, it is described as:

...an object, a website, a company, and a phenomenon. It first gained popularity as an online game (20Q.net) where users log onto the website and play against an artificial intelligence (A.I.) foe. Players think of an animal, vegetable, mineral, or other object and 20Q guesses what the player is thinking in twenty questions or less. And, the more people play, the more the game “learns.”

Think of an onion, a horse, a ruby. Think of the desert. Think of the machine that we cannot yet describe. This is knowledge production (disjunctive synthesis) as competition, as collaboration with the enemy, with the ‘outside’. Kafka, in his short story ‘Jackals and Arabs’, describes a fraught relationship between the dogs of the desert and its nomadic people, outlining a plot in which the jackals’ seek to employ the European narrator – their messiah – to murder his Arab guide. This is an event, the jackals say, for which they have been waiting an infinity: “My mother waited, and her mother, and all her mothers, right back to the mother of all jackals.” But in the end the pack of jackals forget their plot, the guide bringing them a camel which has died in the night, closing the story with these lines:

“We’ll leave them to their calling. Besides, it’s time to break camp. You’ve seen them. Wonderful creatures, aren’t they? And how they hate us!”

Yes, every word contains a question; and these questions multiply. What might it mean to say that ‘origin’ contains the ‘orient’? That the word ‘origin’, through its Latin root ‘orior’ – meaning ‘to rise’ – is etymologically linked to the word ‘orient’? The sun rises in the East, in the land of Alexander’s enemies, of ‘Jackals and Arabs’. Can every word contain an answer? Can a word answer itself?

For Hegel, the Weltgeist (‘world spirit’) begins in the Orient, ‘shackled’ to tradition; the Weltgeist defines a process of philosophical liberation through self-awareness (i.e. ‘reason’) which ends with the realisation of the European enlightenment. Weltgeist is a way of seeing what history wants; of understanding the inevitability of world-historical development in the necessary unity of a ‘rational self-consciousness’. This is a theory of ‘universal history’ as a dialectical system, whereby “rationality is not imposed from the outside onto history, but is itself historical, since reason emerges from within and through history.”⁶

Throughout their writing, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Hegel’s universal history is compromised by its own contingency: the contingent necessity of ‘reason’, “the totalizing re-interpretation of all history from the perspective of reason.”⁷ For them ‘universal history’ can only be understood from a materialist or Marxist perspective, as the way in which capitalism retrospectively fabricates its own origins, becoming an ‘immanent cause’ of itself. As Craig Lundy writes:

“Capitalism’s ability to continually meet and overcome its own limits illuminates a key aspect of the capitalist machine: there are no sacred axioms in capitalism. Capitalism exhibits a profound heterogeneity, a willingness if not need to incessantly change what it ‘is’. This is why Deleuze and Guattari claim that capitalism is not a homogenizing force, contrary to common interpretations, but at best isomorphic: the capitalist machine does not make everything the same in kind, but rather trades in all kinds.”

This is one way of seeing how history may be ‘non-linear’ – how history “remains continually coexistent with the present”⁸ – how the origin of a word might bifurcate into a thousand folk-etymologies, etymologies that might retrospectively become true. As Deleuze and Guattari write ‘universal history’ is a discontinuous thing of ‘ruptures and limits’, “the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity.”:

In a word, universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical.⁹

The machine I am imagining sees all of this – it sees periscopically, from the periphery, peripherally¹⁰ – and makes of these counterfactuals and counternarratives a map of the ‘social totality’ by way of performance, by way of an “experimentation in contact with the real.” Perhaps the machine is a warren – a subterranean Library of Babel – a space, a studio? William Kentridge, in his lecture on the concept of ‘peripheral thinking’, writes:

Circling the studio there is a persistent peripheral vision of the images on the walls of the studio. You can stop walking and study them, but they can also float at the edges of vision as you pass. Reminders of that which you are not focused on. And parallel to this peripheral vision there is a peripheral thinking. Ideas pushed aside by thoughts, connected to, but not central to them.

Or, as Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus:

We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.

So perhaps I am not so much imagining a machine as a process; something ‘machinic’? For Deleuze and Guattari, the term 'machinic' describes how different things work together by connecting, interrupting, and channeling flows of desire and production, much like their concept of ‘universal history’ itself. The story of Alexander the Great – the word Alexander – is such a machine, or a component of it. What was his desire? And what can we make of the desire for him? To make in him the beginning of the European project through which one might acquire Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, English. The ‘Urstaat’ and its enemies, its languages, the origins of origin?

Here the machine produces desire, it produces identity. Derrida echoes these questions in his book on the ‘prosthesis of origin’. How is he, a Jewish Algerian subject, owned and disowned by the French state, to relate to the French language? He writes, famously:

“I have only one language; it is not mine.”

For Derrida, language is not something natural or originary but rather a ‘prosthetic’ that retrospectively creates the illusion of an origin. One inherits language from outside oneself, and yet it becomes the means through which we construct our sense of self, our sense of ‘originality’. Perhaps the machine I am imagining is this very prosthetic? This process? A limb which is given? A means of transportation?¹¹

Perhaps the machine I am thinking of is a ship? In 2009 Edouard Glissant travelled to America on the transatlantic ship the Queen Mary II. Pistons, buoys and buoyancy; yet another way of ‘seeing the world’. While on board he produced a film on his philosophical outlook – ‘One World in Relation’ – above the bones of slaves dropped into the Atlantic ocean. In it he says:

Jazz didn’t come from a book, but from a leak of painful memories. That’s why jazz is valid for everybody, not just for black people, because it’s a reconstruction of a distraught memory of something that had disappeared and we are bringing back. [...] I think that a person is in a state of perpetual change. And what I call creolization is the very sign of that change. In creolization, you can change, you can be with the Other, you can exchange with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.¹²

You cannot use police investigative methods to search for your roots. It’s not possible. You can only search for your roots through poetry or knowledge. Right? But not with investigation… what does it mean, investigation of DNA? Do you realize what it means? It means that I am going to go to somebody and say, “You, you are of my family, because the DNA says so.” It’s totally absurd. I believe that we are in the same family when we share the same reactions to and intuitions of the world. You are of the same family when you have these same manners.

Every word contains a question; and lastly there is the question of ‘worldliness’, of ‘erudition’, of a total perspective: of The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (c.625); of Denis Diderot and the original Encyclopédistes (1765); of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927); of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades (c.1940); of Jean Cocteau’s ‘Address to the Year 2000’ (1962); of Buckminster Fuller’s film ‘Everything I Know’ (1975); the Eames’ Powers of Ten (1977); of Deleuze’s ‘L'Abécédaire’ (1996); of Glissants ‘One World in Relation’ (2009). What to make of all these men and their desire to ‘pass something on’?

Every word contains a question. What we need are different questions – beyond the question of origin – and therefore we need different words. Maybe the machine is a machine that simply asks questions. Perhaps this is the purpose of what I might tentatively call The Encycloscope?

The machine asks the questions. The machine asks: “It is classified as…?” And offers the options: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other, Unknown.

Other.

2. Can it fit in an envelope? No.

3. Can you buy it at a store? No.

4. Is it worth a lot of money? Maybe.

5. Does it make sound? Sometimes.

6. Does it process data? Yes.

7. Does it have writing on it? Yes.

8. Is it bright? Sometimes.

9. Could it be found in a classroom? Sometimes.

10. Do you open and close it? Yes.

11. Do you use it at work? Sometimes.

12. Can it affect you (cause an effect to you)? Maybe.

13. Do you use it in your home? Doubtful.

14. Is it commonly used? No.

15. Can you use it with your friends? Depends.

16. Does it contain a liquid? No.

17. I guessed that it was a time machine? Close.

18. Does it move? Rarely.

19. I guessed it was an electron microscope? Wrong.

20. I guessed that it was an incubator? Wrong.

21. Does it bring joy to people? Doubtful.

22. Is it pleasurable? Sometimes.

23. Can you find it in a church? Doubtful.

24. Would you use it in the dark?

Footnotes

1. "zare be now zapely or ȝild vp bi rewme; Artaxenses is at hand & has ane ost reryd, And resyn vp with all his rewme • to ride vs agayñ; [...] be perseyns & a pupiłł pat parthy is callid, Men of Mesepotayme & of Mede bathe, Of Syre & of Sychim a selle nounbre, Of Capidos & Caldeckene men of armes, Felt feztand folke pat Faire we cał, be Arrabiens & all pa Bernys out of Batary [of] pat origyne;, batails arayed, And obire out of be orient many od hundrethe." https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044019877273&seq=37&q1=origyne&start=1 ↩

2. as Derrida writes in Paper Machines, the Greek tithenai (‘to put’) present in biblioteke points not only to the act of ‘depositing’ but also ‘immobilizing’ p.7 ↩

3. Jameson: https://www.rainer-rilling.de/gs-villa07-Dateien/JamesonF86a_CognitiveMapping.pdf ↩

4. Berger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg ↩

5. Berger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg ↩

6. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf p.58 ↩

7. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf p.74-75 ↩

8. https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf p.71 ↩

9. https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf p.140 ↩

10. Kentridge ↩

11. What is the connect between the prosthetic and the prophetic? ↩

12. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C5075211#/embed/object ↩

TELLTALE.¹ I should begin by noting—if all too briefly—a few key aspects of the late Ms. Ménard’s career that are of great importance but no direct relevance to the following, particularly sordid chapter of her life. Firstly, her little-known, yet life-long fundraising efforts for the Toronto Public Library Foundation; secondly, her ground-breaking if bittersweet translation of The Book of the Knight of Latour-Landry; and lastly, of course, her works of fiction (too short in supply) which, with her passing, must now speak to us beyond a veil which preoccupied so much of her later writing and, one suspects, her final thoughts. This last I can attest owing to a brief—but nevertheless illuminating—run of correspondence that led up to her death.

If one were familiar with these achievements alone they may reckon Ms. Ménard’s a life without significant disagreement or disappointment. She was well-known and well-liked by the circles drawn around her, from childhood friends to colleagues and ex-lovers. However, one ordeal—the one I feel it my duty to recount—left two of her once-closest intimates abnormally estranged.

Ms. Ménard attended a small yet prestigious doctoral school in the South East of England, her thesis dealing with historic translations of vernacular European literature written in the wake of the Black Death (an unusual interest for a young North American). Such interests led her to the door of Professor L. Watts—himself an estranged relative of the c19th British symbolist—whose reputation as a classicist and philologist was, at that time, renowned. From him she learned of the various mistranslations of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Scogan and Gower which developed across the Georgian and Victorian periods; chiefly, the manner in which Charles Cowden Clarke, Francis Newman and their contemporaries, erected a specious pseudo-medievalism in their so-called ‘modernisations’ of those English writers and the Ancient Greeks before them.

In so doing both Watts and Ménard underwent something of a transformation. From each of their cloistered temperaments sprang a newfound confidence. Together they composed poetry. They invented arcane puzzles—which the pair termed ‘anachrostics’— whereby certain letters of a translated poem would reveal, when studied, an erroneous (often euphemistic) anachronism. They wrote (and acted) in a play dramatizing the 1860 debates between Newman and critic Matthew Arnold: On Translating Homer. Should translators try to make readers aware of historical distance through artificial archaisms (Newman's approach), or should they try to capture the essential clarity and directness of Homer or Chaucer in modern English (Arnold's approach)? Yes, together they spoke a language all their own. All this would be brief.

By virtue of this relationship both Watts and Ménard would divulge many secrets to one another. And so came the day for Watts to reveal to his student a most prized possession: a small piece of paper on which was written an address. This, he told her, was the home of a woman to whom he owed his career: Mme. S. Simonne.

Ménard was—understandably—in disbelief at this revelation, being both aware of Simonne’s pioneering work and the date of her first published translation some eighty years prior. If, for Ms. Ménard, there were such things as heroes, Mme. Simonne surely numbered among them. Paper in hand, it appeared there was no time to waste; the address was near and so she made plans to leave the very next morning. And while Watts emphasised caution in his young apprentice’s approach, her mind was resolved, her travels renewed.

It must be said Ménard had never looked more beautiful than on this journey; through her shone a radiance which rivalled that of the chalk downlands, which peeled off over the marshes like silver ribbons, arranged in a series of glittering smiles. On foot she made the distance alone, until her arrival at a quiet hamlet on the outskirts of Ramsgate, itself untouched by age. The magpies sang of her approach, if only they could have warned her.

Mme. Simonne, at this time, was herself a quite incredible sight: her pinstripe hair streaked with white, her silver jewellery singing discordant songs, her accent that of a time displaced. “Pray, you must be dear Laurence’s progeny?” Yes, she was quite full of life; and as with Professor Watts such energy was redoubled upon the young Ménard’s arrival. For three weeks they rambled in the low tides of autumn, and with each ebb it seemed Ménard was transfigured anew. By day they would converse their way up the coast—in some cases as far as Broadstairs or Bleak House—buoyed by the politics of Dickens, the Wife of Bath, the plight of the Huguenots, the arc of a gull’s flight; and by night they would work, crystallizing these experiences by means of translation. It was here that Ménard learned how to affix in writing the winds which gather beneath the cliffs of Dover, the lamentations of pilgrims spoken a half-millennium before, the anthems of housemartins and the subtle gestures of ancient Flemish courts; it was here that she discovered Mme. Simonne as a fraud.

Late one evening, during Ménard’s attempts to modernise a quite troubling passage of Le livre du chevalier de La Tour Landry, she heard a voice. A meek voice, scratching through the dim as would a mouse at the wall. Of course, there were many sounds in a house so old, one was always tasting the sea air through the boards. But why the peculiar cold on this night? Why had she not heard it before? Ménard crept through the house in mime, investigating the origin of the sound until she came upon the door to Mme. Simonne’s study. Why slink about a house once so full of open debate? Why peer through those cracks in that door, just so wide as for the waxing moon to gild silver with light?

And framed by that moon, on the windowsill of her study, the panes of which had opened wide into ink, stood a crow—or perhaps a magpie, a dove?—rasping into Mme. Simonne’s outstretched ear. And as Ménard watched—over what seemed hours, perhaps days—Mme. Simonne’s hand dutifully scribed, such that the crow’s voice appeared to grow more confident, more terribly clear, more modern, more beautiful. And with each page—or perhaps each tale—complete, Simonne would open the drawer of her bureau and therein extract a white feather, fastening it to the animal’s wing, turning crow to magpie, and that magpie somehow leucistic, cloud-like against the lunar haze.

Needless to say, the next morning was a series of polite excuses, a pleasant stay of course but Ménard simply must leave: “I simply must”. Her journey home was tortured by crows, whose erratic flight seemed to taunt the young woman, whose shadows mocked even the marshes with monochrome jeers.

Upon arrival ‘home,’ what then to make of Professor Watts’ response? Her confidant? The sole reason she had not already abandoned her studies to the tempests of Dover? What of the man who would ‘set things straight’? Whose reputation was indeed built upon Mme. Simonne’s? Who himself would ask whether the young woman should not think sensibly—‘pragmatically’—about all this? Perhaps her mind was not so ‘sharp’ as he had once thought; consumed by Ovid, Chaucer and the excitement of the Madame herself? Had she considered that this ‘magpie’ may well have been a trick of the light? That such thoughts are those of a little girl, and not a budding researcher? Yes, if there is but one betrayal more intolerable to academics than plagiarism, certainly it must be youth!

So that was to become Ms. Ménard’s lot; simply to grow unburnished, unyouthful – as she had been instructed. To forget the secrets of housemartins, the gestures of foreign kings, even the prose of Chaucer. To forget the questions from which her life had grown, having been replaced by that bitter series proffered by Watts. And in her fiction to rewrite that same story time and again, the Manciple's Tale, that of Phoebus and the Crow, that of the ‘tell-tale-tit’.

And what, in turn, should be my fate in recounting this tale? Beyond sorrow? Beyond that ceremonial county, the Garden of England? In times past perhaps my feathers would have been plucked, my beak cut and fed to dogs. But I pray this time to have learned my lesson, to have accepted my nature, to have taken flight. Now I pray only to hear the clouds, to count among them my number and—at last—to quietly make in them my nest.

---

My sone, be war, and be noon auctour newe
Of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe.
Whereso thou come, amonges hye or lowe,
Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.

Footnotes

1. \ ↩

RESOLUTION. At 8 o’clock or thereabouts the light begins to stream into the kitchen. This is what life looks like at the year's end: the sun thawing the night off the counter-top, bathing the dirty plates and cutlery in silver and gold. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a year that didn’t end like that. Where I haven’t left everything in to soak overnight. Where my breath didn’t step out in front of me each morning. This is what I remember from my childhood: the light in my voice, in the hazy bowl of the weald, in the steam of the cows and cars across the road.

Every year I forget that the light changes with the clocks. I know that’s why we switch them, we call it ‘daylight savings’ for just that reason. What I mean is that the light changes shape, that it sits lower and lower on the horizon each day. This is how it gets into the kitchen, all over the forks and the little flecks of broccoli. And when it’s gone a candle is lit, earlier and earlier, until it becomes a kind of pilot light. A glowing, golden wax sat among the knives and forks of another meal, waiting their turn to greet the sun.

What can one see by a light so low? One that sits down beside us at the turn of each tide, each tablecloth? A wrinkle flickering by the flame. A fox passing the window. Who turns those tablecloths? Who folds them into the night? You’re a teenager again and you’re cycling through the dark, the bright white light of your torch grating through the mist. There are pots which need washing at the hotel, under halogen bulbs for minimum wage. There’s a woman on the bus in a uniform, her face lit by the cool glow of her phone. There are certainly things to discuss after dark.

*

For Oscar Wilde a ‘sentimentalist’ is “one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” He wrote that in 1897, while serving a prison sentence for ‘gross indecency’ (homosexuality), as part of a 50,000-word letter to his lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, publishing it upon his release under the title De Profundis (Latin: ‘from the depths’). For Wilde, a “sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart”, incapable of confronting the complex realities or consequences – the ‘costs’ – that accompany genuine emotional entanglement. From his prison cell such stakes were clearly defined, but elsewhere – in literature as much as life – it can be difficult to articulate what precisely constitutes the ‘emotional excess’ an accusation of ‘sentimentality’ implies.

Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) typifies what has come to be known as the ‘sentimental novel’ – a genre, popular in the c18th, guided by the emotional narratives and gestures of its characters and audience. In the story, the narrator Reverend Yorick – a thinly-veiled alter ego for Sterne himself – travels through Europe, across France and Italy. During one scene in Paris – following a quarrel with his hotel’s conceited maître d' – Yorick resolves not to purchase laces from a poor ‘grisette’ working for the establishment, however changes his mind after her emotive appeals, commenting:

“If there is not a fund of honest gullibility in man, so much the worse;—my heart relented, and I gave up my second resolution as quietly as the first.—Why should I chastise one for the trespass of another?”

What might Wilde make of this? Perhaps we could say that Yorick’s self-congratulatory reflections – his justification for ‘giving up his resolution’ – reveal a reluctance to grapple with the broader ‘costs’ of his situation, of the girls poverty, and a liberal tendency to sentimentalise (and commercialise) suffering rather than confront it. More generally it reveals a relation between sentimentality and agency, how emotional frameworks shape not just what we feel, but how we act—and whether we act at all—in the face of change. This is, in a way, the linguistic link to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘ressentiment’ – a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority or failing onto an external agent, a scapegoat.

It is also in this way that ‘sentimentality’ becomes bound to temporality, often through a reactionary nostalgia for the past. As F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920):

“No, I’m romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. Sentiment is emotional…”

What makes a future possible? A future where things might be radically different to how they are now? The etymological root of resolution lies in the Latin resolutio, which means both ‘to loosen’ and ‘to solve’ – to ‘unwind’ or ‘settle’ a problem. In the Latin epic the Aeneid – written by Virgil in C1st BCE – one reads of Daedalus’ exploits in unravelling the mysteries of the Cretan labyrinth for the hero Theseus:

“...magnum reginae sed enim miseratus amorem Daedalus ipse dolos tecti ambagesque resolvit, caeca regens filo vestigia.” [“...yet Daedalus himself, pitying the noble princess Ariadne’s love, unravelled the deceptive tangle of corridors, guiding Theseus’s blind footsteps with the clue of thread.”]

Yes, perhaps the sentimentalist and the romantic are a naive Apollo and Dionysus – the excesses in each of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ – two means of ‘unwinding’ the journey ahead?

*

In some strange way I feel fortunate to have lived in a world before high-definition television (HDTV). I can remember the warm fuzz of the cathode-ray tube, the blurry edges of Marge Simpson’s electric blue hair, the way the box would hum a picture into my dreams… I also feel fortunate to remember the excitement of the change to HDTV. I can picture the shiny labels, and the walls of flatscreens beaming daytime shows into consumer-electronics warehouses. I remember heated debates over the eye-watering prices and a fear that ‘the switch’ might go awry.

The first HD program broadcast in the UK was Planet Earth, which premiered on BBC HD on May 27th, 2006. This inaugural episode dealt with the ‘Great Plains’ – the African savannah, Asian steppe, Arctic tundra and North American prairie – exploring the wildlife that survives in these supposedly ‘empty’ landscapes. However, as David Attenborough is quick to point out, any impression of emptiness is an illusion – that, “at the heart of all that happens here is a single living thing. Grass.” What follows is then a slew of crystalline footage – reminiscent, in some way, of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten – with the camera zooming from the macro to the micro, from a vast undulating landscape to the ears of wheat which sustain it.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20; and this moment, or perhaps this movement – as the camera pans across the ‘distant reaches of outer mongolia’ – is, in some way, the pinnacle of a world-view which collapsed along with the financial crash. If resolution is about seeing things clearly, either as the ‘effect of an optical instrument’ (c.1860) or through a ‘steadfastness of purpose’ (c.1580), what was it precisely that we were getting ‘HD READY’ to see?

*

This was the year I read autofiction: Annie Ernaux’s The Years & A Woman’s Story; W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants; M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here; Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts & Bluets; Habib W. Kherbek’s Fail Worse. Perhaps, to quote Kherbek, this was even the year I wrote autofiction.

McKenzie Wark, writing in 2023 on the recent surge in autofiction and ‘autotheory’, comments:

“Selfhood itself is a fiction, and the writing is an account of how the fiction of a self is produced.”¹

Autofiction is, in this sense, a kind of resolution; a way of both seeing and making oneself. Of (dis)entangling the problem of the self, of one’s future, of the future as a whole.

In the past ‘New Years resolutions’ (first attested in the 1780s) were pious affairs, a means of reaffirming one's relation to the church and its teachings. However, it seems even these were designed to be broken… on January 1st 1813 an issue of a Boston newspaper ran a short article titled “The Friday Lecture” in which was written:

“And yet, I believe there are multitudes of people, accustomed to receive injunctions of new year resolutions, who will sin all the month of December, with a serious determination of beginning the new year with new resolutions and new behaviour, and with the full belief that they shall thus expiate and wipe away all their former faults.”

Perhaps such a view is sentimental? An idea of one’s future in which nothing will change, nothing will go wrong? In which one can possibly live up to the ideals one has set for oneself? The resolutions of a new year are autofictions, yes, and as anyone who has read autofiction knows, the self is an idea which is always unravelling. If the word resolution implies that ‘to loosen’ is ‘to solve’, perhaps this should be our resolution as well? To unwind in one way or another? Or perhaps I am simply a romantic.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

---

Footnotes

1. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/140/572300/critical-auto-theory/ ↩

An excerpt from the essay Public Pleasure: Notes on the Privatisation of Peace, Pleasure & Politics in the Public Realm written with Ruth Pilston for How to Sleep Faster #15. Published in 2024 by Arcadia Missa Publications.

---

For several summers now—both before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns—large sections of London’s parks have vanished behind hoardings. These otherwise ‘public’ spaces have been closed off for weeks at a time as festivals like All Points East and Brockwell Live take over, damaging green areas and restricting free access during the summer holidays, a time when these spaces are needed most. Writing for The Guardian in May 2024, poet Rebecca Tamás highlights the issue in her local Brockwell Park: “Urban parks are our community’s lungs, where children and teenagers can explore, be with their friends, and connect with nature in some of the last free, shared spaces that exist in neoliberal Britain.” Yet, Tamás observes, these parks “are being privatised, with access to their spaces sold to promoters in what amounts to a new form of enclosure—as all over the UK, huge areas of parks are cordoned off for music festivals.”¹

Indeed, discussions of a “new enclosure” abound in debates over public spaces in both London and the UK as a whole. As Brett Christophers writes in The New Enclosure, since 1979, around 2 million hectares of public land – about half of all land in public ownership when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took office² – have been systematically sold off. Under Thatcher, public space became just another utility to be privatised, in a period that also saw the denationalisation of water, energy production, British steel manufacturing, and the early dismantling of public mail services.

Why it is that public land has been thought appropriate for sale differs across historic periods and geographic contexts. Between 1750 and 1830, some 5000 “acts of enclosure” privatised approximately 21% of England – primarily common farmland – transforming the agricultural landscape to benefit landowners at the expense of the rural poor; “reducing farmworkers to waged labourers with little or no access to their own land or common rights.”³ For Thatcher, schemes such as denationalisation and ‘right to buy’ transferred communal property into private hands through a similar logic of ‘liberalisation’ – seeking to shift people away from so-called ‘state dependency’, encouraging homeownership and reducing the influence of local authorities.

In each case, schemes of enclosure operate as ‘biopolitical technologies’,⁴ producing new forms of subjectivity that align with emergent modes of governance. The 18th century enclosures didn't just transform land ownership – they recast the rural poor as disciplined wage labourers whose bodies and time could be more efficiently marshalled for agricultural production. Similarly, Thatcher's privatisation policies weren't simply economic reforms, but interventions aimed at producing self-governing property-owners, whose aspirations would be shaped more by mortgage repayments than collective utility provision. This foreclosure of certain types of people, certain possibilities or ‘futures’ – a cultural hallmark of Thatcherite policy making – was grounded in the enclosure of collective space. Enclosure is, in this way, a psychogeographic act – one that reconstructs not just physical landscapes but the ways in which populations understand themselves and their relationship to power.

It is also – as in the case of All Points East and Brockwell Live – a means of transforming a population’s relationship to fun, to joy and to pleasure in the broadest sense. Literary historians Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explore similar dynamics in their book Politics and Poetics of Transgression, describing “literally thousands of acts of legislation” that aimed to eliminate or reshape carnival and public festivities across Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.⁵ They argue that this “demonization of the carnivalesque” was spurred by a rising bourgeois culture, whose “practices and languages” cast carnival in a “negative, individualist framework,” reframing it as something chaotic or even threatening.⁶

Footnotes

1. Rebecca Tamás, Britain’s public parks are a green lifeline (2024), The Guardian ↩

2. Estimated to be worth at least £400 billion. Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure (2018) ↩

3. Past Tense, Stealing the Commons (2016), p.4 ↩

4. Biopolitics, a concept developed by Michel Foucault, describes how modern power operates by managing populations through interventions in collective life. Such power works not through force, but by shaping how populations understand and govern themselves. ↩

5. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p.176 ↩

6. ibid. p.176 ↩

NORTH & SOUTH. It is an astonishing fact of history that no one successfully travelled to either the North or South Pole before the twentieth century; that less than sixty years separated Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s expedition to Antarctica from astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. In his 1971 essay Fictions of Every Kind, the author J.G. Ballard wrote:

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

Indeed, there is a well-documented sense that, at some point over the course of the twentieth century, fiction ‘overtook’ reality; a phenomenon Baudrillard referred to as the hyperreal.

In his 1987 text The Evil Demon of Images, Baudrillard wrote that, to the extent that there is a “dialectical relation between reality and images” (by which he means those ‘technical images’ of which ‘science fiction’ could be considered a member) it is one in which “the image has taken over and imposed its own immanent, ephemeral logic…”, one without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity – a ‘collusion’ between screen and daily life: a “short circuit”.

The photographer Wolfgang Tillmans – arch-image technician – deals with this short-circuiting in his research project: Truth Study Center, first shown at Maureen Paley in 2005. The series combines photographs taken by the artist with found ephemera, newspaper clippings and typeset phrases. In a 2010 interview on the project Tillmans said: “it is not claiming to be delivering truth, but rather looking at all these different, opposed truths.”¹ For example, on the dispute over WMDs in Iraq, he comments: “the whole war came about from a single question: is this true or not?”

The question of war is never far from the question of truth. Indeed, the phrase: “Truth is the first casualty of war”, has been attributed to C20th US Senator Hiram Johnson, C18th poet & playwright Samuel Johnson and Greek dramatist Aeschylus of the C6th BC, alike. Ballard developed much of his oeuvre from his formative experiences as a child in a WWII Japanese internment camp; Baudrillard, his theories of hypermedia out of representations of the war in Vietnam; and Tillmans’ Truth Study Center, in the context of the so-called ‘War on Terror’. For Baudrillard, the ‘hyperreal’ – produced, in part, from this ‘overflow of technology’ of which both war and media are co-conspirators – is a state in which the ‘referent’ (the ‘thing’ a symbol refers to) has quite simply disappeared; a reversal in which reality becomes an “effect of the sign” itself.

The effect of this hyperreal ‘structure of feeling’ (as Raymond Williams might call it) is, of course, one of profound disorientation; in Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard writes, “[the] territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it...” How to find one’s way at a time without time, in a world neither real nor imaginary? On visiting Tillmans retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2017 I came across an appropriately disorienting sheet of A4 paper, placed under a glass display, on which was written:

“1969 was 24 years away from 1945. 24 years back from now is 1992.”

Yes, the moon landing haunts all these discussions – Ballard once described it as the only meaningful event of the twentieth century, Baudrillard as a hyperreal event par excellence – all these men and their histories, their lost certainties! What are we to do with these boys and their toys? What to do when even this sense of fragmented reality falls apart? How are we to find ‘a way’ through this undisciplined form of reality?

*

“A handful of small white stones hit the windscreen, making me jump. It was so long since I had experienced winter in the north that I failed to recognize the phenomenon. The hail soon turned to snow, diminishing visibility and making driving more difficult. It was bitterly cold, and I became aware of a connexion between this fact and my increasing uneasiness…”²

In Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice, a male narrator pursues a young woman (both nameless) north. As the plot develops we learn that a nuclear war has set an apocalyptic ice shelf into motion, and the man is determined to find and ‘save’ the girl who is travelling – under mysterious pretexts – into a maelstrom of catastrophes, both natural and political.

Much is made, in reviews of Ice, of the comparison between Kavan and Ballard (whose testimonial adorns the back cover of my Penguin edition). Ice, like Ballard's Crash, is commonly interpreted as a “distillation of its creators' distinctive world view [...] animated by a corruption of sexual desire” – both seek to explore the chauvinist fetishization of modernity itself, its capacity for exploitation, ruthlessness and apocalypticism; both begin and end in cars.

As with Ballard's Empire of the Sun, Kavan's lifestory encourages a particularly didactic reading of Ice, the role of ‘the girl’ – abused, pathologised, (self-)identified only as a victim – is, of course, a prism through which is reflected the author's real-life experiences: her father's suicide, her heroin addiction, her own mental illness, her time spent at sanatoriums, her death. However these ‘authors’ – as Foucault reminds us, echoing both Barthes and Baudrillard – are not so much the arbiters of a ‘true’ reading of their works as protagonists within a more general literary discourse. In The Death of the Author Barthes writes that “[to] give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

In a hyperreal world, what Crash – and much of Ballards writing – has in common with Ice is then a reflexive concern with the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. In his break from ‘rigid’ science fiction, Ballard once said that he was rejecting “outer space” (i.e. aliens and moon-landings) for “inner space” (i.e. the psyche and its discontents), and in Ice we likewise see the narrator slip unwillingly between alternate narratives, media spin, real-and-unreal versions of the same apocalyptic story, perhaps even autobiography and fiction. The journey north, the journey into the ice shelf consuming the world, is then a paranoiac response to another dissolution of the real, a desire to ‘hold on’ and ‘save’ that which might ground the narrator in some kind of reality:

“It was hard to believe the place was really in use; that anything really functioned. I was aware of an uncertainty of the real, in my surroundings and in myself. [...] Big tears fell from her eyes like icicles, like diamonds, but I was unmoved. They did not seem to me like real tears. She herself did not seem quite real.”

Ballard, on the other hand, sends his protagonists south. South, in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, to the retirement paradises of ‘Estrella de Mar’ and ‘Eden-Olympia’; and south, above all, in his dystopian science fiction The Drowned World:

“Caging the compass, he swung it around towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness became focused on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept 'South', with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outwards from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.” ³

In The Drowned World, first published in 1962, protagonist Dr Robert Kerans is sent to explore a tropical C22nd London. Like in Ice, global radiation – here caused by solar storms – has drastically altered the climate, warming the equator to uninhabitable temperatures and forcing widespread migration to the north and south poles. Over the course of the novel Kerans contends with the pirates and military authorities of London’s lagoons as he tries to catalogue the flora and fauna growing within them, slowly losing his sense of reality from an output on ‘the beach at the Ritz.’

Throughout his time in London, Kerans’ colleague Dr Hardman is somehow ‘drawn’ south – a schizophrenic sensibility which begins to also infect Kerans. At a pivotal moment, Colonel Riggs, their shared commander, asks why Hardman is travelling into the tropical wasteland:

Looking out across the water again, Kerans replied in a flat voice: "Colonel, there isn't any other direction."

*

In Old English the words norð and sūð occurred predominantly as adverbs. The words ‘north’ and ‘south’ were not, in themselves, thought of as locations as we might imagine them today, but rather directions or orientations relative to movement or spatial relationships. For example, in The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, a major work of Old English, produced during the C9th reign of King Alfred, one reads:

“Þa wæs he swa feor norþ swa þa hwælhuntan firrest faraþ.”⁴ > [Then he was as far north as the whale-hunters travel farthest]

In Baudrillard’s view, hyperreality is a space where everything is connected, constantly shifting, and mediated by signs which precede an underlying referent, a ‘real’ state of affairs to which one might return. The whale-hunters may move further north still. The ‘enchanted’ world of Old English fables – once replaced by a ‘disenchanted’ form of industrial capitalism (as outlined by Weber) – is enchanted once more, albeit now by an overabundance of irrational simulations, signs and responses:

...in the world which I evoke, the one where illusion or magic thought plays a key role, the signs evolve, they concatenate and produce themselves, always one upon the other…

Deleuze and Guattari, in their major work Capitalism & Schizophrenia (completed in 1980) outline what might be considered two poles through which to interpret responses to this state of affairs – what Eugene Holland calls the ‘fundamental organizing principles and dynamics of capitalist society’ – they write:

“The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. [...] They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia.” ⁵

One might add North or South? Kavan and Ballard provide a re-articulation of these two poles, directions or ‘intensities’ – forms of rationality remade for times undone by runaway processes of technological accumulation, climate collapse and hypermediatised signification. If, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘paranoia’ represents what is archaic in capitalism (as Holland describes, “the resuscitation of obsolete, or traditional, belief-centered modes of social organization”) Kavan’s protagonist follows this ‘way out’ in his desperate attempts to hold on to an increasingly fragile reality, the despotic figure of the ‘warden’ and their shared abuse of ‘the girl’. Likewise, if ‘schizophrenia’ signifies a state of ‘permanent revolution’, or dissolution through a form of limitless sign production (elsewhere they write of the ‘and…’ inherent to this mode of thought), Ballard’s protagonist similarly ‘gets out’ through his integration with the “outside”... the final etymology of ‘south’ being the Proto-Germanic ‘sunþraz’, sunward!

How far we have strayed from even the question of truth – perhaps that is the only ‘direction’ in which we are moving. Indeed, these poles – these ‘tendencies’ – sit at the heart of contemporary ‘accelerationist’ discourses (rejuvenated by artist Joshua Citarella’s recent work) through which one might attempt to ‘exit’ the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, either by way of Kavan or Ballard, North or South. As Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus, on the schizophrenic irrationalism of capital:

“...more capitalist than the capitalist and more proletarian than the proletariat. This tendency is being carried further and further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatch itself straight to the moon: we really haven't seen anything yet!”

How the moon landing haunts us!

*

If everything is relative, all one can learn from these journeys is of where one began, of one’s expectations, one’s ‘inner space’. At the geographic South Pole a large wooden sign has been erected with a map of the Antarctic, and a compass at its centre. On it are written two quotes, the first by Roald Amundsen and a second from British Royal Navy officer Robert F. Scott, who travelled to the pole on the 17th of January 1912. His account goes:

“The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances than those expected.”

Footnotes

1. https://selfselector.co.uk/2010/11/15/interview-with-wolfgang-tillmans/ ↩

2. Ice, p.3 ↩

3. ↩

4. Account Voy. Ohthere & Wulfstan in translation of Orosius, History ↩

5. https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf p.260 ↩

EYE. It’s a clear day on top of the South Downs and we are playing ‘I spy.’ As we walk along, trying to find a good view, white scraps of rock gleam up at us, smiling through the yellowing grass. There’s been no rain along the coast for a good few days so the ground is bone-dry. They say there won’t be rain for another week at least.

I read somewhere that the land artist Andy Goldsworthy, who grew up in the north of England, once said: “Dig a hole up North and it’s black and stony and earthy. So to dig a hole in Sussex and find chalk, so absolutely pristine [...] was like finding the sky in the ground.” He has an artwork along this path, a series of big chalk stones, and I guess he said that when he was making them. Children like to climb those stones, and I often like to think about that one just past the farm, even when I’m not here myself, even when I’m in the city. That’s one thing art can do, I guess. It’s true, the sky really is all around you up here.

So I say, “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… I!” And you say, “Aye aye.” I start to laugh, and you begin to look. In looking, you see all around us, of course—the usual right, left, and up, like we have at home—but since we’re already ‘up,’ there’s also a ‘down’ to see. A new way to play the game. Beneath us, birds of prey trace the currents of warm air. We’re still walking, though slower now, because you’re watching the birds and trying to think of ones whose names begin with an ‘I.’ Yes, the skylarks are flying beneath us, and you’re watching them from above, from your own bird’s-eye view.

No, there’s no ‘Ibis’ along the South Downs. Guess again. So, past the birds, even further down, you spy fields of limp wildflowers clambering their way across the slopes. You see buttercups, cowslips, yellow rattle, ragwort, knapweed, blue speedwell, and the occasional pink pyramidal orchid—all keeled over, all facing the beaming ground. Every few years, there’s a huge spray of poppies that come up over Titch Hill, and in those years, you never hear of anything but The War. Yes, the poppies mean boys in Spitfires and Hurricanes, and if you want them to mean something else, you can forget it. There’s a memorial to a Polish fighter at the foot of the Downs, and when I think of this place, and the poppies, I think of him and it. We know his name: Bolesław Własnowolski. He was twenty-three when he died. When I was young, the TV wanted you to hate Polish people, but I couldn’t and I think it was because of him. When I was that age, twenty-three seemed a long way off.

But there are no poppies today, so all of this may as well have never happened. That’s the problem with a day of remembrance, an hour at the cenotaph, a minute of silence. People forget. Walter Benjamin wrote that the ‘historical materialist’ “cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition”, that history-writing means locating a zero-hour, a Stillstellung, a ‘standstill’:

For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the ‘eternal’ picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone.

Benjamin wrote that in 1940, the same year he committed suicide in the north of Spain, exactly 1 day before the authorities reversed their decision to deport refugees like him, and 36 days before Własnowolski was shot down. We’re making a minute of our own up here… perhaps we can make the poppies mean something else as well?

We’ve stopped walking now. None of these flowers start with the letter ‘I’ so you’ve crouched to take a closer look, leafing through the grass as one might a dictionary. In the past people called the daisy, ‘the days-eye’ – in Old English this was ‘dæges-eage’ and in Welsh, ‘llygad y dydd’ – ‘the eye of day’. They named it this because the flower opens with the sun and mimics its movements across the sky. In The Harley Lyrics, written in the mid c14th one can read:

Lenten ys come wiþ loue to toue wiþ blosmen & wiþ briddes roune þat al þis blisse bryngeþ dayeseȝes in þis dales notes suete of nyhtegales.

["Lent has come with love to town, with blossoms and with birds' song, that brings all this joy, daisies in these valleys, sweet notes of nightingales.]¹

Spring somehow feels far away now, further even than the fourteenth century. At the foot of a slope just north of here, you’ll find a church dedicated to St Andrew, also known as ‘the shepherds’ church’. On the small pamphlets they keep there you’ll read that the building was constructed in the c13th, that the dark oak pew-ends are original c15th features, and the stone font is from a church even older still, thought to be Saxon in origin. The British photographer Paul Nash, who began taking pictures at the age of 41 (in 1930) took a picture of this church, and the lane leading up to it, sometime before his death in 1946.² The photograph shows the church in a state of disrepair, ears of long grass brushing the tops of lopsided gravestones, ivy creeping along the cornices, up to the bell at the small west turret.

‘Ivy’ would be a good guess, but you don’t think of it. No, you’re much more drawn to the colourful flowers, to bruised pinks and blood reds, to orchids, poppies and pheasant’s-eye. In the c19th, pheasant’s-eye – a red petalled flower with yellow anthers – was so common that it was gathered and sent to London to be sold as ‘Red Morocco.’ Today it is endangered, a casualty of intensive agricultural practices. The c18th Carl Linnaeus, ‘father of modern taxonomy’, who formalised the modern system of naming organisms, called this plant Adonis annua after the Greek myth of Adonis, Aphrodite and Persephone. The legend goes that the blood of Adonis, mortal lover to both goddesses, in being mixed with Aphrodite’s tears upon his death, bled into the soil to produce the flower. It is poisonous, generally given as a symbol of remembrance and lost love.

At last you say “Iris”, a little hopelessly. You’re in the soil too now, kneeling in the dirt. All these names have piled up on top of you, like so many of Goldworthy’s stones, like runes. There are indeed irises – ‘unguicularis’, ‘pseudacorus’ – which grow across the downs, but not here, not today. “Sadly not”, I say.

The ‘iris’ is, of course, also the name for the pigmented part of one’s eye – named after the Greek term for ‘rainbow’ and the messenger god Iris who was its representation. This part of the eye controls the amount of light which can enter the pupil, constricting and dilating as necessary, its colour of no obvious biological purpose. The term, or rather the sound, ‘eye’ – meaning the organ of sight – is much older than any possible conception of English or England. It is so old as to ridicule the concept of etymology itself. One of the oldest uses of the term can be found in the Laws of Ine, the first surviving laws of Wessex – written between 688 and 695AD – describing the value of bovine anatomy:

Oxan tægl bið scillinges weorð, cus bið fifa; oxan eage bið V pæninga weorð, cus bið scillinges weorþ.

[An ox’s tail is worth a shilling, a cow’s is worth five; an ox’s eye is worth 5 pennies, a cow’s is worth a shilling.]

The South Downs were a part of Wessex, and now I’m picturing the shepherds travelling these hills, trading eyes in the scattered market towns; big juicy eyes for tiny silver coins. You’re lying on the ground now, on the side of the hill they may-or-may-not have walked on. Perhaps this is an experience with history? The phrase 'frog's-eye view’ is given to describe a perspective ‘from the ground’ or from ‘inside a system’. It is attributed to Gyorgy Kepes (and his 1944 book Language of Vision), but has most likely been influenced by the cybernetician Jerome Lettvin and his 1959 paper What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain; one of the first studies to reveal how specific neural structures in the eye process and filter sensory information before it even reaches the brain. What to make of this system of vision itself? One which can deceive us, make decisions on our behalf?

The door of a church yawns in the distance; a black hole set into an ageing tapestry. A wind has picked up. I lie down next to you, sheltering myself, having forgotten the word which starts with ‘I’. Of course, none of this is happening – we were never on the hill, there never was a word, a wind, a daisy, a skylark, a stone. So, we may as well lay here together on the hill for as long as we feel like it. The sun sets but the ground stays warm beneath us, the soft chalk glowing white with heat.

In the summer of 2016 the South Downs National Park became an International Dark Sky Reserve, the second in England and one of only 16 in the world. Can you imagine a world in which the sky needs to be preserved? A world bursting out of its atmosphere? The earth expands beneath us, pushing us into the stars, into outer space! Andy Goldsworthy, eat your heart out! The farthest thing the naked-eye can see is the Triangulum Galaxy, about 3 million light years from Earth, which is to say 3 million years into the past. Needless to say, I’m headed straight there.

Footnotes

1. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/HarLyr?rgn=main;view=fulltext ↩

2. I saw the picture in a show alongside Andy Goldsworthy’s work ↩

PURE numbers in mathematics are those which can be spoken of without reference to physical units, otherwise known as ‘dimensionless quantities’. Alcohol by Volume (ABV) is, for example, a pure number, expressed as a percentage which represents the ratio of ethanol (measured in ml) within a total volume of liquid (also measured in ml). In this case the units cancel eachother out, and there you have it: pure alcohol – 100% ABV – a pure number.

For c20th French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras, writing means solitude, and solitude means alcohol: “it means whiskey.” In her book Writing, Duras suggests that had she not been a writer she would have become an “incurable alcoholic.” At times, during her long – years long – bouts of drinking, it seemed she could perhaps function as both… but no, “no one has ever written in two voices. One can sing in two voices, and make music, and play tennis; but write? No, never.” Paradoxically, this might be what is pure in both writing and alcoholism, the solitude of which each are cause and effect.

To be pure is to be sober: to be ‘free from admixture or adulteration’, ‘free from contamination or physical impurity’; or otherwise ‘free from moral corruption’ (OED). In her book Practicalities Duras writes that: “When a woman drinks, it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. [...] It's a slur on the divine in our nature.”¹ Purity and Impurity are categories ‘distributed’ like all others, which is to say unevenly.

The Proto-Indo-European root *pewH- from which the Latin pūrus is derived gives a sense of ‘cleansing’, or ‘purification’. The divine phrase ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ gives us the formula: sacrality means purity, and to be pure is to be clean. Physically, morally, symbolically, sexually. The alcohol in the hand-gel grants absolution. Baptismal. Pure, upon its arrival into English during the c13th, displaces the Old English hlūtor – which also contains this pure/clean relation – a term present (in the form ‘hluttrum’) in abbot Ælfric of Eynsham’s c9th Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church:

Se Hælend ða het þa ðenig-men afyllan six stænene fatu mid hluttrum wætere, and he mid his bletsunge þæt wæter to æðelum wine awende.²

Perhaps sobriety is less important than it seems? The ritual act of drinking Christ’s blood – the eucharistic, sacramental wine – is one of salvation, cleansing, purification. Foucault, in his Lectures on the Will to Know, writes that to wash oneself – as a blood-soaked Achilles might after battle – is today viewed as a ‘ritual act intended to remove a stain’: of dust or blood, of a battle or murder. However – as he argues against this interpretation – in the Homeric period through which the tradition was recorded, to ‘ablute’ (to ‘wash’) was simply to pass from ‘daily’ to ‘ritualistic’ activity: the “rite of ablution looks just as much towards what will take place as towards what has just taken place”.

Ablution may occur after a battle, yes, but it always occurs before the ‘moment of sacrifice’, the ‘descent to Hades’, or the acceptance of a stranger into the home.³ Impurity and purity were not distributed (or arbitrated) in accordance with activities held on either side of this boundary – even murderers, such as Theoclymenus, can be welcomed if they wash! – but instead by observance of the threshold itself. As Julia Kristeva writes (in 1996), after British anthropologist Mary Douglas: the ‘first rule’ of the impure is ‘that which does not respect boundaries’. For the Homeric world, purity is ritualistic rather than an inherent moral status of an action or person, and these rituals seek to keep heterogeneous regions of existence separate from one another (i.e. that of the Earth, and that of the Gods).

But the Christian sacraments – and their antecedents in Ancient Greece – represent a reversal of this logic, or rather its institutionalisation through the church. During the c7th–6th BC, Foucault writes, movements such as Orphism sought to codify (through, for example, the transformation of ‘family cults’ into ‘city religions’) the observance of rituals of purification as ‘a religious quality of the individual’, allowing for an integration of such ‘qualities’ into a legal system of the State: “Pure and impure [would] now be distributed by the State, or at any rate, be based on State regulation.”

In this way concepts of ‘innocence’ and ‘criminality’ become bound up with discourses of the ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ (as well as the ‘true’ and the ‘false’). Once a “juridical definition of the individual” has been established through the institutions of the church and the city, questions of who has committed a crime (of murder, of blasphemy, etc), to what extent and which end, become increasingly important for the body politic as a whole. Purification is no longer a ritual which establishes a transition or separation between states of being, but rather a specific rite which brings back together or ‘rectifies’ what defilement (the crime) had forced to separate.⁴ Boundaries are redrawn in the image of a unitary state, itself a model of purity which must be continually maintained. The possibility of isolation or exclusion – from the community, the city, the state – on this basis (of impurity)⁵ emerges as one constitutive factor in the Western formation of the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’ as such.

What it means to be pure has, therefore, changed over time. Pure is not, as Duras writes in her essay The Pure Number, itself “the ‘purest’ of all words…” although it is – in this account at least – “a word of solitude” in the deepest possible sense.⁶ Elsewhere Duras adds, in Writing, that the “great readings of my life, the ones for me alone, are things written by men.” What does it take to read a woman’s work? To hear her speak across the centuries as might Jules Michlet or Stendhal?

Julian of Norwich was a c14th ‘anchoress’, someone who pledged an ascetic, solitary existence for the purpose of intense prayer, and whose consecration into the role best-resembled a funeral rite. The work for which she is best known, based on visions experienced during her hermetic worship—Revelations of Divine Love—is the earliest surviving example of a book written in the English language known to have been produced by a woman. The role of the ‘anchorite’ or ‘anchoress’ was an early form of Christian monasticism, and exemplifies the manner in which the Christian faith repurposed concepts of purity from ancient times. In the introduction to her 1901 re-edition of Julian’s Revelations, Grace Warrack notes that:

“...in the Mediæval story, the highest Mystical Vision, the sight of the Holy Grail, comes only to him that is pure from self, and looks on the bleeding wound that sin has left in man, and is compassionate, and gives himself to service and healing.—Can ye drink of the Cup I drank of?—Love's Cup that is Death and Life.”

‘Pure from self’ is a revealing turn of phrase. One which makes plain the manner in which purity – and therefore ‘innocence’ or ‘truth’ – has turned further inward, enclosing both itself and the individuals who aspire toward such supposed virtues. Not only is ‘sin’ now an innate quality for the whole of ‘mankind’, which must be absolved by its acceptance of Christ and his sacrifice (the boundary of the ‘social’), but the mechanisms through which such absolution takes place assumes an increasingly ‘solitary’ character (the boundary of the ‘individual’). As anthropologist Joseph Hewlett-Hall notes (after Daniel Weiss & Holger Zellentin), the development of a Christian society in Europe, particularly after the first millennium, fostered the belief that “...impurity is not brought about by the actions of one’s body, but by the actions of one’s mind”. Best then to do away with the question of the self altogether, of the body—“lusts of the flesh” as is written in the Ormulum—to remain ‘anchored’ and inactive… as the model of Julian the ‘anchoress’ shows! A “pure and clean heart” is all that is required.

What emerges then—through the Reformation, the Puritans(!!) and the increasing so-called ‘secularisation’ of Western societies—is a ‘ritual-avoidance-of-ritual’, particularly those associated with cleansing, cleaning, purification, water, etc. Even acts as hallowed as the sacrament are consigned to history, evidence of ‘magical’ thinking with no basis in the ‘natural world’ which itself reveals all that is needed of God’s plan on Earth. Purity, still far from free of its moralistic character, is now at liberty to be re-discovered in nature, in gender, in ‘race’, in psychology, in genetics, in number. A boundary erected at each revelation.

Purity is itself a poison. 100% of anything is poison. Its history is that of both essentialism and dismemberment, of individualism, of the disenchantment of our world, of the politics of death. Duras writes, in remembrance of WWII, that in Germany “this word should be publicly burned, assassinated. [...] And this would still not be enough. Perhaps we will never know what would have been enough for this German past to stop evolving in our lives.” Yes, purity—indeed, the word pure—should be given exactly what it wants, it should be left quite alone.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.

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Footnotes

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/13/alcoholic-female-women-writers-marguerite-duras-jean-rhys ↩

2. Jesus then bade the serving men fill six stone vessels with pure water, and he with his blessing turned the water to noble wine. ↩

3. “Far from delimiting a site, an already fully constituted core of defilement, in order to isolate it, we should say rather that rites of ablution mark the discontinuities of a complex, heterogeneous socio-religious space and time; and that there is defilement when two heterogeneous regions are voluntarily or involuntarily brought into contact with each other.” ↩

4. “...this is no longer the purification that separates and isolates the heterogeneous regions of existence and in relation to which defilement is always possible. It is a matter of a purification which erases a prior defilement identified with the crime itself and makes it possible to bring back together what defilement had forced to separate.” (Foucault, Will to Know, p.178) ↩

5. Itself a concept which is barely articulated ↩

6. Duras, Writing, p.101 ↩

SIGNS. Ciao appiccicosine, da Venezia!¹ I am writing to you from a square in Venice – let’s say the Campo Santo Stefano near Accademia – which this year hosts its 60th International Art Exhibition titled: ‘Foreigners Everywhere.’ Ha! or should I say, Ma! Where haven’t I been?

In this last week I have visited: the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Santo Stefano, San Barnaba, San Polo, Santa Margherita, de l’Arsenal, the maze of Calli and Rii leading in their characteristically Baroque fashion to the Canali and Ponti which criss-cross the Lagoon; and then, of course, the Giardini della Biennale (with its toy-town Padiglioni) and the Arsenale itself, the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, myriad Chiese, Basiliche and Duomoi (the mosaici and affreschi of these unmatched); followed by – where else? – the beaches of Lido di Venezia (from which our London pools get their name), the cemetery island of San Michele (resting place of Ezra Pound and Igor Stravinsky, the graves of whom are plagued by mosquitos), and the islands of Murano (home to what appears to be mille fabbriche di vetro, a thousand factories of glass). Each a foreign land to me, the amateur etymologist, in name and in carne e ossa! Which is to say, ‘in the flesh’.

And beyond these landmarks – in the pavilions and pop-ups – I have borne witness to the conceptual avant-garde of Croatia, Japan, Nigeria, Australia and South-Africa; the indigenous practices and lands of Hãhãwpuá (Brazil), Lusanga (a Congolese plantation formerly owned by Unilever), Aotearoa (New Zealand); the battle-grounds of Palestine, Ukraine… yes appiccicosine, in a short week I have travelled the world.

Easy, of course, as a British passport-holder, an anglophone for whom the press releases and subtitles are written, for whom the e-Gates of Heathrow and Marco Polo airport open, as if by magic. For whom the conceptual framework of art’s supposed autonomy and ‘national pavilions’ has been erected. For whom the timetables are duplicated, osteria menus re-written, classes prepared, taught and examined, all for the purpose of, in this moment, asking: “Excuse me, would you like anything else?” Sadly not, as it is time to leave Campo Santo Stefano, to pay however many Euros it was for our caffè and ‘shakerato’ and walk – circuitously I suspect – to some other square, in some other part of the city, as it has passed midday and is now time for a Spritz. “Bwon jor-narta, grrat-see”!

No, I haven’t forgotten that I am writing to you, miei amici appiccicosi, or that this is in fact a column about words – but right now I am looking for a way to the Ponte di Rialto. What a labyrinth! Even the salt climbs the walls looking for a way out, washed in along the current of a thick hazy air. I think about the paintings of Selwyn Wilson and the sculptures of Fred Graham in the Biennale. In the last week I’ve learned that the Māori haka is not about Rugby or War – is that what I’d thought? – but is instead quite simply a celebration of life; that the haka of Tāne-rore (son of the sun god Tama-nui-te-rā, and his wife Hine-raumati) and the wiri (its trembling hand gesture) is a personification of the quivering air on a hot, still day. I imagine Tāne-rore and the sale di Venezia dancing together, while I look for a sign.

Or maybe that was it? In the 13th century the Republic of Venice began to develop a monopoly on the production and distribution of salt. The Magistrato al Sal administered an ordo salis (salt rule or tax) obligating exporting merchants to also import salt, which was then sold by the republic at a profit. In the mid-C15th around 15% of the income of the Venetian state was derived from its control over the salt market of the Mediterranean. But now the city is being eaten by this salt, the cycle of evaporation, concentration, dissolution and crystallisation – exacerbated by a warming planet – is eroding its foundations. Today, one can find up to 80kg of so-called ‘white gold’ in a cubic metre of Venetian wall.²

Now the mind is wandering too. And why shouldn’t it? All these signs point in both directions. The vandalism of local businesses displeased with the ‘official route’ seems to have taken me off-piste. Perhaps they know something I don’t?

What would it mean to follow that ‘official’ route? To say that the word sign ‘emerged’ in Middle English along with the ordo salis, during the C12-13th? That it is derived from both French (signe) and Latin (signum) and has held in each the meaning ‘miracle’ and ‘password’? What does knowing this do? The phrase ‘signe of þe croiz’ (sign of the cross) has been in use in Britain from the C13th onward and the performance (in Latin, signum crucis) attested, in writing, from the C7th. The phrase ‘sign of the times’ was not used until 1525, in William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible:

“Can ye not discerne the sygnes of the tymes?”

It’s well past midday miei compagni vischiosetto, and I am writing to you now from a fondamenta even I do not know the name of – but at last we have a spritz! Today one calls the act of ‘discerning signs’ semiotics, that is: ‘the study of signs and their use or interpretation.’ The Italian scholar Uberto Eco writes to us from the Milano of 1974 to explain the term:

“Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.”

For instance the word ‘spritz’ stands for the concept of a spritz on the table in front of me – or, it would if not for the fact that, as Eco adds:

“This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.”

Perhaps there never was a spritz, the make-shift sign ‘PER RIALTO’ another dead-end? Or maybe there was? Maybe I sat down in a wicker chair beside the water and nervously parroted ‘spritz’ to the attentive waiter, who proceeded to bring me a drink much darker, much more bitter than I had been expecting. Ah yes, how could I forget? ‘Select’ is the Venetian aperitivo, their answer to the Paduan ‘Aperol’... One of Eco’s chief insights was that “every act of communication to or between human beings [...] presupposes a signification system as its necessary condition” which he called a ‘code’. Evidently, the codes of London, Padua and Venice are not the same.

Out over the water I see people looking lost, wearing tote-bags which read ‘STRANIERI OVUNQUE’ or FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE. I’m lost too. What is this a sign of? The title refers to the biennale of course, the contemporary discourse – or ‘codes’ – of inclusion within the arts and beyond; the water level – 35cm higher than in 1897 – refers to the climate crisis. Eco agrees that nature can signify – that it is ‘a universe of signs’ in its own right. This is not news to Tāne-rore, of course, who whirls imperturbably on the horizon.

Semiotics eats its signs the way salt eats this city – each the vampiric legacy of an imperial process: classification and capitalisation. Eco is mindful of this ‘imperialist’ legacy, arguing that culture (the object of semiotics) should be understood – semiotically – in its multiplicity, as a “system of systems of signification”. An ecology of epistemologies, perhaps? Adriano Pedrosa, the first-ever Latin American curator of the biennale, similarly wrestles with the imperial legacy of the ‘Biennale model’ throughout the 60th exhibition. How to ‘decolonise’ Venice, the heart of colonial Europe, whose national pavilions are its signature? This question is itself, you might say, a sign of the times.

Honestly appiccicosine, I’m trying to be less cynical. It’s summer after all, and I don’t want to begin another academic year burnt-out from the start. ‘Pedrosa did a good job.’ There, I said it! In their theory of language Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari encourage us to think not about the signification(s) of language, but instead its function(s) – what does a word, a phrase, a slogan do? Through their concept of ‘International Art English’ (IAE) Alix Rule and David Levine contextualise this idea within the art world: in a press release, for example, “[...what a word like] ‘dialectic’ actually denotes is negligible. What matters is the authority it establishes.” I guess cynicism is hard to shake without sounding like self-help.

I’m writing to you from a vaporetto (a water bus) as it cuts into the choppy lagoon. The salt leaps out of the water at me, clinging to my clothes as a souvenir. What does etymology do? What could it do? It’s obvious that something needs to change. I’m at an airport now – it doesn’t matter which – it’s one full of signs in various international languages, my travel documents are working their magic. “Signs make subjects”, I think, the ink drying on the picture of the plane stamped into my passport. We’re far from the route now. I’m writing to you from inside the stamp, from my seat in the plane, from the sky!

This is what a sign could be, what it could mean, what it could do. From up here I can’t help but think the words don’t matter. I’m writing to you as a speck in the clouds – the one you can see right now if you look – only it’s not me anymore, not really.

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Footnotes

1. Appiccicoso = sticky, -’ino’ is diminutive = Appiccicosino, ‘ines’ is plural ↩

2. This is how Venice will fall, Mario Piana, 29 October 2021 ↩

1. Speculatively derived from the reconstructed:
   1. Proto-Indo-European *leys- meaning ‘trace’ or ‘track’ (for example, lāst in Old English gives ‘footprint’) and;
   2. Proto-Germanic līstǭ meaning ‘edge’, ‘strip’ or ‘band’ (weavers read ‘selvage’).
2. In the Middle Ages these roots give līste and listre in Old English and Old French respectively, as well as lista in Medieval or ‘vulgar’ Latin, with definitions similar to the Proto-Germanic – ‘hem’, ‘border’, ‘band’, ‘strip of fabric’ or paper.
3. Cognate with the Proto-Germanic listiz – meaning ‘art’ or ‘craft’ – formed from *lizaną (itself formed from *leys) meaning to ‘know’ or ‘understand’. In the Old English poem Christ III – found in the Exeter Book – one reads:
   1. Ne þæt ænig mæg oþrum gesecgan
      mid hu micle elne æghwylc wille
      þurh ealle list lifes tiligan.¹
   2. [No one can speak to another how with great vigor anyone would strive after life and spirit by every art ]²
4. Perhaps the idea of ‘understanding’ cannot be separated from the material substrate – the strip of paper – which evidences it? That knowledge has forever been bordered, de- and re-territorialized, according to property?
5. In Middle English (c1430) we find a translation of French Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine (in English, The pilgrimage of the lyf of the manhode) which describes the accomplished verb – to ‘list’ – along the edges of a green bag:
   1. The scrippe was of greene selk and heeng bi a greene tissu
      Lysted it was wel queynteliche with xij. belles of siluer
   2. [The bag was of green silk and hung by a green ribbon. It was neatly edged with twelve silver bells.]
6. A sentiment which finds itself easily applied to a whole host of military contexts, as in The romance of Guy of Warwick – a part of the Matter of England³ – and the gilding of a knight’s shield:
   1. Girt he was wiþ a gode brond
      Wele kerueand, bi-forn his hond
      A targe listed wiþ gold
   2. He was girded with a good sword,
      Very sharp, before his hand,
      A shield edged with gold
7. A confluence of borderings.
8. Elsewhere, in Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, we hear of another list – the list of ‘listening’ – present in Old English and somewhat archaic already by his time.
   1. 'Tis a brave army,
      And full of purpose.
      Music of the hautboys as under the stage
   2. Peace! What noise?
   3. List, _list!_
   4. Hark!
   5. Music i' the air.
   6. Under the earth.
   7. It signs well, does it not?
   8. No.
9. And again – in the late C14th – the ‘list’ of desire (perhaps formed out of lust) in, for example, Sir Gaiwan and The Green Knight:
   1. Þenne lyst þe lady to loke on þe knyȝt,
      Þenne com ho of hir closet with mony cler burdez
      Ho watz þe fayrest in felle, of flesche and of lyre,
      And of compas and colour and costes, of alle oþer,
   2. [Then 't was the lady's will to see that knight with eye,
      With many a maiden fair she cometh from her place,
      Fairest was she in skin, in figure, and in face,
      Of height and colour too, in every way so fair.]
10. So that now we might have ‘the list-less’ – the ‘slothful’ or ‘idle’ – those without desire or direction, defined as such from the C15th onward but expertly so in the Huguenot Abel Boyer’s fascinating – if morally conservative – The English Theophrastus: Or The Manners of the Age written in 1702:
    1. Religion does improve the Underſtandings of Men, by ſubduing their Luſts, and moderating their Paſſions, which ſully and darken their Minds, even by a natural Influence. Intemperance and Senſuality, and Fleſhly Luſts, do debaſe Mens Minds, and clog their Spirits, make them groſs and foul, liſtleſs and unactive.⁴
11. Obviously to be ‘listless’ in this way implies an idea of ‘listfullness’ – a peculiarly Protestant (or indeed Huguenot) conception of productivity – but no such word exists. Instead, perhaps, one may demonstrate such productivity in the act of list-taking and -making itself – a sense of the word developed during this time period, from the 1600’s on; and perfectly demonstrated in Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan’s Silex scintillans (or Sacred poems and priuate eiaculations) written in 1650:
    1. When night comes, list thy deeds; make plain the way
       'Twixt Heaven, and thee; block it not with delays,
       But perfect all before thou sleep'st; Then say
       Ther's one Sun more strung on my Bead of days.
12. And now, following Vaughan’s guidance, the moral character of such productive list-makers must be brought into sharp relief. As the administration of daily life in an increasingly colonised world became more-and-more complex, the production of all kinds of lists became a matter of utmost importance (and betray, to a contemporary audience, the crimes of their authors). In William Waller Hening’s C19th reproduction of the Statutes at Large: Collection Laws of Virginia (themselves compiled in 1658) we read of a list compiled under the section heading ‘What Persons are Tithable’:
    1. Tithable persons, who: All important male servants of whatever age. All negroes imported and Indian servants, male or female, 16 years old. Native christians and free persons imported under 16, excepted. Lists to be presented to clerk of county court, and there recorded.⁵
13. On the Zong Massacre of 1781 (in which 130 enslaved African people were murdered for insurance money) historian Ian Baucom articulates the surreal success of this ‘monetarizing anatomization of the body’ and of the logs of such ships, he writes:
    1. “...what we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of become a ‘type’: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money. [... The log of the Ranger…] is a long and repetitive list, one whose reiterative predictably both requests the eye not so much to read as to skim and one whose flattened pathos solicits the reader’s indulgence for horror banalized, horror catalogued”
14. Lists are truly modern. Lists are what make the modern, modern? What make it awful?
15. In the 1962 Glossary of Terms for Automatic Data Processing, compiled by the British Standards Institution, list is defined as such:
    1. …to print every relevant item of input data on the general basis of one line of print per card.
16. Georges Perec – a novelist and member of the Oulipo collective – was obsessed with lists. His 1978 novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) was partially constructed using a series of 42 x 10 elements lists, from which themes, plot points and actions were prompted. In the book itself he writes:
    1. Which is the odd item in the following list:
       French, short, polysyllabic, written, visible, printed, masculine, word, singular, American, odd?
17. The Wikipedia page a ‘List of lists of lists’ begins:
    1. "List of lists" redirects here. For a non-comprehensive list of Wikipedia lists, see Wikipedia:Contents/Lists. For all lists on Wikipedia, see Category:Lists. "LoLoL" redirects here. For the Chilean town, see Lolol. For the internet slang, see LOL. This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

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Footnotes

1. https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a03_01.htm (1315) ↩

2. https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/christ-iii/ ↩

3. A loose corpus of Medieval literature that in general deals with the locations, characters and themes concerning England, English history, or English cultural mores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of_England ↩

4. https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-english-theophrastus_1708/page/10/mode/2up ↩

5. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036018417&seq=484&q1=negroes ↩

SOLSTICE, I had always thought, was in some way related to the word solace – linguistically one imagines their sol-’s to be the same, both words orbiting the same solar root. Like so much amateur etymology my intuition in this case has been informed by nothing more than a kind-of apophenic mysticism – an image (if not an experience) of the sense of assurance which arrives with a regular solar event, brought about by some basic pattern recognition (for example, the two words sound the same). However, like so much amateur or ‘folk-etymology’, this connection is a misconception, paronomasic. It transpires – etymologically speaking – that solstice and solace have nothing to do with one another: the latter derived from the hypothesised PIE root *selh, giving the Latin sōlor, meaning ‘to console’ or ‘to sooth’; and the former, from the Proto-Italic *s(u)wōl, giving sōl or ‘sun’. In other words: two systems, not one.

To further my amateurish credentials, it appears such intuition could not, in fact, have been further from the truth. For, in what appears to be a rather brief moment during the 1600’s (one which resonates with the interplanetary discoveries of Kepler and Galileo), solstice came to signify not so much a caesura (a pause) as a ‘turning point’, a ‘furthest limit’; indeed, a ‘crisis’. In his 1638 book, The Discovery of a New World, the bishop and natural philosopher John Wilkins argues: ‘tis probable there may be another habitable World in the Moone’, part of a broader treatise supporting the Copernican work of Johann Kepler and Galileo Galilei. In doing so – as part of his proposition that there may be some ‘means of conveyance’ to this world – he writes:

…if we do but Conſider by what Steps and Leaſure all Arts do uſually riſe to their Growth; we ſhall have no cauſe to Doubt why this alſo may not hereafter be found out amongſt other Secrets. [...] Time, who hath always been the Father of new Truths, and hath revealed unto us many things which our Anceſtors were Ignorant of, will alſo Manifeſt to our Poſterity, that which we now deſire, but cannot know. [...] Time will come, when the Indeavours of after Ages ſhall bring ſuch things to Light as now lie hid in Obſcurity. Arts are not yet come to their Solſtice.

Here we see the commingling of two teleologies – that of the Bishop and the astronaut – presaging the enlightened manner in which Truths are understood to reveal themselves not so much through God as Time itself. Arts here does not, of course, mean just the ‘fine arts’ but also those of astronomy, telescopy, rocketry, philosophy, &c – and their ‘Solſtice’ a kind of culmination, a climax. 1969. The moon!

In more standard uses however, solstice has always meant the midway between the two equinoxes, the point at which the sun – in summer at least – appears to stand still in the sky. Derived from the aforementioned sōl we therefore have the Latin sōlstitium, where sōl = sun, and sistō= ‘to stand’. And from this we see solstice in Old French (a ‘learned borrowing’ from Latin) and later Middle English (sometimes styled as solsticium). One of the earliest recorded uses of the term in Middle English can be found in The Middle English Genesis and Exodus, an anonymous English vernacular poem written around 1250 in Norfolk, in which we read:

ðe mones ligt is moneð met, ðor-after iſ ðe ſunne ſet; In geuelengðhe worn it mad, In Reke-fille, on ſunder ſhad; Two geuelengðhes timen her, And two ſolſtices in ðe ger.

[The moon's light is measured in a month, After which the sun sets; At the equinoxes it is made warm, In the constellation Aries, on a separate shadow; Two equinoxes occur here, And two solstices in the year.]

However, through some kind of (cosmic?) happenstance sōlstitium also mimics very closely the Old English (OE) word for solstice, in its case being sunnstede – made up from sunne (the OE word for ‘sun’) and stede (meaning ‘place’). Here we see uses emerge from the work of Byrhtferth a priest and monk who lived at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire at the turn of first millennium:

On xii kalendas Iulius byð sunstede, þæt ys on Lyden solstitium and on Englisc midsumor. On 20 June is the sunstead, which in Latin is called solstice and in English midsummer.

And yet, maybe neither of these words are needed to – or possibly could – capture the full spectacle of the event itself. Here we read another famous Anglo-saxon poem, The Menologium, also known as the Old English Metrical Calendar, composed in the late 10th-century:

Þænne monað bringð ymb twa and feower tiida lange ærra Liða us to tune, Iunius on geard, on þam gim astihð on heofenas up hyhst on geare, tungla torhtust, and of tille agrynt, to sete sigeð. Wyle syððan leng grund behealdan and gangan lator ofer foldan wang fægerust leohta, woruldgesceafta. Þænne wuldres þegn ymb þreotyne, þeodnes dyrling, Iohannes in geardagan wearð acenned, tyn nihtum eac; we þa tiid healdað on midne sumor mycles on æþelum.

Which tranlsates into Modern English roughly:

Then after two and four long days the month brings ærra Liða to town for us, June into the dwellings, in which the jewel climbs up highest in the year into the heavens, brightest of stars, and descends from its place, sinking to its setting. It likes then to gaze longer upon the earth, the fairest of lights to move more slowly across the fields of the world, the created globe. Then after thirteen and ten nights the thegn of glory, the Prince's darling, John, was born in days of old; we keep that feast at Midsummer, with great honour.

… and I suppose I can at least take some solace in that.

AMBITION is – in the twenty-first century – something of a lost concept, superseded by its hustle-culture hashtag derivatives: Are you harnessing the #grindset? Are you hustling to build a mission-driven empire? When you get up at 9am, I’m starting my second shift – it’s called the rise-and-grind. If your circle doesn’t discuss stocks and real estate it’s time to elevate. So goes the advice of cultural leaders like @thewealthdad at least.¹

Ambition (whether directed or not) has become what psychologists call a ‘condition of worth’ – an implicit expectation or standard an individual must meet to gain acceptance in broader society. Ambition is socially determined; while its lack spells pity or isolation, to be overambitious is to risk ostracisation, the boundaries of each a source of constant debate. In Annie Ernaux’s 1988 book A Woman’s Story (originally titled Une Femme), the author recounts the drives at the root of her mother’s life in the early 1900s:

“She was an energetic worker, and a difficult person to get on with. Reading serials was her only relaxation. She had a gift for writing and came top in her canton when she passed her primary certificate. She could have become a schoolmistress but her parents wouldn't let her leave the village. Parting with one's family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, 'ambition' refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.) To understand this story - which ended when she turned eleven - one must remember all those sentences beginning with 'in the old days': In the old days, one didn't go to school like today, one listened to one's parents, and so on.”²

However seductive it might be for an amateur etymologist, the idea that ambition refers to the trauma of separation is one that I have not been able to corroborate; but the reality of leaving one's family as a sign of misfortune, of overambition, shows just how malleable the concept’s borders are – perhaps she too needed simply to ‘elevate’?

In its roots ambition is a spatial concept, derived from the Latin ambio meaning to ‘go around’ or ‘encircle’. In Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, written in the 8th year of the common era, we see a related term ambītae in use to identify the billowing winds encompassing the earth:

Tum freta diffundī rapidīsque tumēscere ventīs iussit et ambītae circumdare lītora terrae; [Then poured He forth the deeps and gave command that they should billow in the rapid winds, that they should compass every shore of earth.]

In more practical, military terms the C1st Lucan used the similarly related ambīrī to denote the tactics of Roman generals in Caesar’s civil war against the Roman Senate:

Mox iubet et tōtam pavidīs ā cīvibus urbem ambīrī [He soon orders the whole city by the terrified citizens to be marched around]

On the other hand, in times of peace within the Republic, ambio and its derivative ambiuntur took on a much more specific meaning: to ‘solicit for votes’, to ‘campaign’, or to ‘canvass’. Perhaps we might say today, to act on ambitions of political office. In Cicero’s De re publica, also composed in C1st, he writes:

Ferunt enim suffrāgia, mandant imperia, magistrātūs, ambiuntur… [For they hold suffrages, mandate orders, magistracies, are campaigned…]

It is worth noting that these uses of ambio define the term as a verb – ‘encircling’, ‘marching’ and ‘campaigning’ – and none give the contemporary sense of ‘striving’ in the abstract. The Latin noun ambitio (or ambitiōnem) however, introduces precisely this idea, as in the Roman poet Horace’s writing also of the C1st:

…ab avaritiā aut miserā ambitione laborat [...he suffers from avarice or miserable ambition]

And it is this formulation that is first borrowed into Old French and then Middle English. Here the term (now styled in the C14th as ambicioun) inherits an inflection perhaps evident in Horace’s usage alongside ‘avarice’ and ‘misery’ – the idea of ambition as in some way evil, a sin. In one of its first recorded uses in English ‘ambicion’ appears in a fascinating translation of the French confessional Somme le Roi, written by Kentish scribe Dan Michelis of Northgate who titled it Ayenbite of Inwyt (‘again-biting of inner wit’) as a ‘common English’ parsing of the title ‘Remorse of Conscience’. In the C14th text Michelis writes:

Þe uerþe boȝ of prede is fole wylninge. þet me clepeþ ine clergie : ambicion. þet is kuead wilninge heȝe to cliue. Þis zenne is þe dyeules panne of helle. huerinne he makeþ his sriinges. [The fourth branch of pride is foolish desire, which in clergy is called ambition. That is, an evil desire to climb high. This sin is the devil's pan of hell, wherein he makes his fryings.]

Quite unambiguous then is the moral character of the term! For Michelis – and, one presumes, the god-fearing population of England – ambition is disavowed, a ‘drive’ to be militant against, a term to be used primarily in the pejorative sense.

However, as with the Roman poets of the C1st who first elaborated the term, in discussions of ambition the figure (or rather the ghost?) of Julius Caesar cannot be fought off for long. In his C16th tragedy Julius Caesar Shakespeare meditates on the concept through the words of Brutus, as the character plots his assassination:

“[...] But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But, when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.”

Is Brutus right to judge Caesar for turning his back on such humble beginnings? To murder him for his ‘avarice’ and ‘miserable ambition’? Here a question is introduced into what had, perhaps, been a relatively straightforward moral framework; one which, as the C17th Age of Enlightenment emerges, men of letters like those writers of the Spectator – Joseph Addison and Richard Steele – tackle head-on. For example, on Thursday the 24th of May, 1711, Joseph Addison writes:

It is observed by Cicero, — that men [and by this he actually meant women] of the greatest and the most shining Parts are the most actuated by Ambition…³

Not so much a re-writing of history as a re-evaluation, a new moral framework. And by way of his reply, on Tuesday the 14th of August, Richard Steele shows a whole literature devoted to this outlook, citing the work of Sir Thomas Burnet and his Philosophick Pity of Human Life in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (written in 1719):

For what is this Life but a Circulation of little mean Actions? We lie down and rise again, dress and undress, feed and wax hungry, work or play, and are weary, and then we lie down again, and the Circle returns. [...] Our Reason lies asleep by us, and we are for the Time as arrant Brutes as those that sleep in the Stalls or in the Field. Are not the Capacities of Man higher than these? And ought not his Ambition and Expectations to be greater?

Why not aim higher? Seek out more? In 1882 American minister and abolitionist William Rounseville Alger, in his book The solitudes of nature and of man, answers:

It is not aspiration but ambition that is the mother of misery in man. Aspiration is a pure upward desire for excellence, without side-references; ambition is an inflamed desire to surpass others.

And so we return, crash-landing, from the ‘Enlightened’ premises of world-historical ambition to the ‘base’ social relativism of Ernaux’s stymied mother. Rarely now does ambition, even in its most ‘naked’ and positive light surpass this ‘inflamed desire to surpass others’, to move beyond the neoliberal fantasies of work and family (which Melinda Cooper has identified so-well in Family Values). In today’s hyper-capitalist society, in which all aspects of oneself are subject to constant reinvention and improvement we have been forced to make our peace with ambition. As reporter Jeff Gammage wrote in the Washington Post in 2001, in the context of yet another financial crisis:

“Rarely has our ambition ever been more, well, naked, or more useful.” ⁴

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Footnotes

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2085558-if-youre-20-30-and-your-main-circle-isnt-discussing ↩

2. p.19 in the Fitzcarraldo edition. In the orignal French: En normand, « ambition » signifie la douleur d'étre séparé, un chien peut mourir d'ambition. (p.25) ↩

3. No. 73, Thursday, May 24, 1711, Addison ↩

4. Interviewed in 2001, Jensen said: "I'm definitely ambitious," Jensen says during an interview at the company headquarters in Paulsboro, N.J. "Particularly in two areas. One is a selfish ambition for my family, but as important to me as that is the success of the organization and the people here." Washington Post ↩

UNREST is quickly becoming the hallmark of our contemporary era. Unrest is everywhere, from the widespread rise of fatigue, burnout and exhaustion to the political disaffection and civil unrest taking increasingly material forms across the world. Unrest is at once a personal and a political phenomenon, with an etymology which may help us chart many of the changes in both language and life that have taken place across the historical record.

Unrest, in a first for this column, is formed through the use of a negative prefix (un-), and as such is construed and conceptualised in strong relation to its base word – rest. Rest, like unrest, can be interpreted as both a verb (to rest) and noun (a good rest) with senses which relate to repose or a break from activity; unlike unrest, it can also be thought of as a physical object (the thing on which something else rests), or the noun to which we assign the remaining part of something (the rest the family, or the rest of my life), among other senses (an inn, a caesura, a pause in music notation, etc). For our purposes we shall focus on the former, common meanings, which also happen to be the oldest, with evidence of their use in Old English as far back as the C8th – namely in the Vespasian Psalter, the oldest extant English translation of any portion of the Bible – and a strong relation to other Indo-European languages.

Indeed, variations of rest can be found in Sanskrit (रमते or rámate), the extinct East Germanic Gothic (𐍂𐌹𐌼𐌹𐍃 or rimis), Ancient Greek (ἐρωή or erōḗ), Welsh (araf), German (Ruhe or Rast), Swedish (rast), Dutch (rust), and more. The Proto-Germanic *rastō (interval, or period of rest) and *rōwō (quiet, rest) contribute to many of these, and certainly the Old English ræst and rō. Ro, a word no longer in use, was until the c17th often paired as a doublet with rest with a similar sense of repose or peace (think peace & quiet, rest & ro). This is evidenced in the c12th Ormulum, a work of biblical exegesis in early Middle English verse, in discussions of Christ’s resste & ro:

Forr Cristess resste & Cristess ro & Cristess swete slæpess Sinndenn, þatt witt tu wel forr soþ, I gode menness herrtess ¹

Likewise, in a passage of the Ormulum on the days of Easter and Resurrection Sunday we read:

Þe seffnde daȝȝ iss Resstedaȝȝ, [...] & tacneþþ all þatt resste & ro ²

Interesting here, of course, is the relationship between "Resstedaȝȝ" (Resurrection Day) and the idea of rest itself, the inscription of a ‘day of rest’ into a whole culture and way of life. In a similar meditation on the story of Christ’s resurrection – in a c15th Middle English poem – one reads of the promise of everlasting rest in the afterlife:

And al þe fest of þe sununday In-to þe fyrst our of monday, In reuerens þat ȝe here-fore ham pray, Þai schal haue rou and rest perpetualy. ³

And in another, the c14th Cursor Mundi, of the concept of paradise as a land of peace and rest:

Tel me man yeit wit þi lare, Quat land es paradis, and ware? Blethli sire i sal þe tell. [...] land o liue, o ro, and rest, ⁴

This latter passage begins to offer an entry point into the terms negative doublet, unrest – or unrē̆st(e in Middle English – which from the beginning (c14th) takes on a more expressly political connotation, alongside general senses of discomfort and emotional distress. For example, in John Lydgate’s C15th Siege of Thebes (itself a response to Chaucer's C14th The Canterbury Tales), we hear of the terrible Greek Eteocles:

The Theban kyng, felle Ethyocles, Rote of vnreste and causer of vnpes ⁵

Unrest here begins to take on the sense for which it has become most commonly used – as the OED have it: ‘a disturbance or turmoil resulting from dissatisfaction or anger within a society or community, typically taking the form of public demonstrations or disorder’. In Shakespeare’s C16th Richard III, for example, in a supposedly-rousing oration to his army on the battlefield shortly before his death (and the famous line ‘...my kingdom for a horse!’), King Richard cries out in opposition to the Tudor forces:

You sleeping safe, they bring to you unrest; You having lands, and bless'd with beauteous wives, They would restrain the one, distain the other. [...] Fight, gentlemen of England! Fight, bold yeomen!

And elsewhere, in John Dryden’s epic c17th translation of the work of Lucretius, we read:

O, if the foolish Race of Man, who find A weight of Cares still pressing on their mind, Cou'd find as well the Cause of this Unrest, And all this Burden lodg'd within the Breast,

Interesting in uses of unrest throughout the historical record is an ambivalence or interrelation between inner (emotional, embodied) and outer (political, social) states of disquiet. Unrest, as a word, intuits the often inarticulable way (the ‘vibe’) in which ‘burdens of the breast’ or ‘cares of the mind’ manifest as a wider form of social upheaval – perhaps akin to what the author J.G. Ballard described as the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space, a theme explored throughout his psycho-sociological narratives.

As we move from the middle ages into the modern era – from the c16th into the c20th – we see a litany of specific unrests arise, most notably in Russia in the worker unrest (and subsequent revolutions) between 1892 and 1917. Here, in English reporting on (and translations of) the developing revolution, we read of labour, civil, and even student unrest, as in this 1901 headline in the Times of India:

Student unrest in Russia. Many exiled to the east.

And these stories would repeat across the c20th in various guises, as in reports of the American worker’s strikes of the 1910’s – here in Frederick Emory Haynes’ Social Politics:

Labor unrest, illustrated vividly by the coal and steel strikes of 1919, spread rapidly.

Or otherwise – as financial markets develop across the c20th – in reports of price movements, as in this 1946 headline from the New York Times:

Price unrest slows market's activities.

And again, in an article for the Financial Times – an insight into attitudes towards apartheid South Africa – a report on civil unrest in Johannesburg:

Damned nuisance, these civil unrests. A colleague has just arrived in Johannesburg to cover the elections.

At one time – in the 1960s–70s, and particularly in the context of higher education – such unrest was viewed as a necessary condition for social and political progress, for example in a 1970 edition of the journal Art Education we read:

The 20th century has brought about many changes, the greatest of which has occurred in the student's role in education. The unrests, protests, revolts, marches, and sit-ins are all segments of today's scene.

Today, however – in a highly-integrated neoliberal world, which spins almost exclusively on the strength of the word ‘stability’ – unrest is viewed with far more suspicion, inflected perhaps with a more explicit threat of physical violence than ever before. For example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Social Unrest Index or the consulting firm Maplecroft’s Civil Unrest Index seek to quantitatively render what at one time may have been the subject of a popular debate.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. For Christ's rest and Christ's peace / And Christ's sweet sleep, / They may know, that indeed, / in good men's hearts. ↩

2. The seventh day is Resurrection Day, [...] And signifies all that rest and peace ↩

3. And all the feast of the Sunday / Into the first hour of Monday, / In reverence that you pray for them, / They shall have peace and rest perpetually. ↩

4. Tell me, man, yet with your lore, / What land is Paradise, and where? Gladly, sir, I shall tell you. [...] / a land of life, of peace, and rest, ↩

5. The Theban king, fierce Eteocles, / Root of unrest and causer of unhappiness ↩

KISS or rather, The Kiss (Der Kuss) – an artwork produced in 1908 by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt – was derided upon its unveiling as “pornographic”, further evidence of Klimt’s popular perception as an artist of “perverted excess”. Today such prudish reactions would, one hopes, appear far more shocking than the content of the painting itself which – for those few who have not seen it – depicts a couple, clad in a mosaic of gold, embraced against a field of glittering wildflowers. (Indeed, a more virtuous display of affection is hard to imagine!) So prevalent is this supposedly ‘pornographic’ kiss today, that the plot of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The Freshman, S4E1) – in which vampire’s collect posters of The Kiss stolen from the dorm-rooms of unfortunate students – can reliably revolve around it. Needless to say then, attitudes towards, and conceptualisations of, the humble kiss have shifted over the course of the 20th century and this is a story which continues the changes inherent within the terms broader historic development.

*

Somewhat remarkably, the composition of the word kiss has changed very little in its journey from Old English and Proto-Germanic languages. Kussijaną or *kussaz – from the hypothesised Proto-Germanic – appears very similar in form to almost all its contemporary descendents: küssen (German), kussen (Dutch), kyssa (Icelandic and Swedish), kysse (Danish), këssen (Luxembourgish) and, of course, kiss (English). In Latin, on the other hand, it appears that both kisses (noun) and kissing (verb) took on a variety of terms for the various contexts in which they were used: most notably bāsium which denotes a kiss of the hand; suāvium, a kiss or a sweetheart; and, ōsculum, perhaps the most neutral kiss of the three. Somewhat unusually these Latin terms seem not to have influenced the English a great deal: while baiser – the French term for kiss, derived from bāsium – has produced the English buss (first attested in 1567), this is now rarely used; and likewise the term osculum, which appears from 1706 in some English texts, is most frequently reserved for specialised technical, scientific or liturgical contexts.

So kiss, it seems, is what we must make do with, or rather at this stage the ​​cosse (noun) and cyssan (verb) which enters Britain through Old English. These terms are evidenced in writing from around the turn of the first millennium (c1000 A.D.) within the Ælfric Homilies, as in this scene of maternal reunification in which Jesus is said to have resurrected a widow’s child:

Heo ða mid micelre blisse hit awrehte, and wepende cossode. Þa befrán heo þæt cild, betwux ðam cossum, hú hit macode on eallum ðam fyrste þæs geares ymbrynes? [She then with great joy awakened it, and weeping kissed it. Then she asked the child, between the kisses, how it had fared in all the time of the year's course?]

And elsewhere the relationship between Christ and coss is similarly well established. As in, for example, the ancient traditional Christian greeting known as the kiss of peace or pax (derived from the Latin term) which was common throughout English-speaking christendom up to the c16th Reformation. In Chaucer’s Parson's Tale – one of his Canterbury Tales, written in the late c14th – we can read of kissing the pax, in a discussion on the sin of Pride:

And yet is ther a privee spece of Pride, that waiteth first to be salewed er he wole salewe, [...] or kisse pax, [...] peraventure, but that he hath his herte and his entente in swich a proud desir to be magnified and honoured biforn the peple. [And yet is there a private species of Pride that waits first to be greeted before he will greet, [...] or kiss the pax, [...] indeed, but that he has his heart and his intent in such a proud desire to be made much of and honored before the people.]

Indeed, the kisses of mediaeval Europe were often quite formal or even political affairs, a sign of veneration, reconciliation or shifting dynamics of power. Alongside kissing the pax one might, for instance, kiss the ground – both as a ‘token of homage’ but also, in a figurative sense, to signify one's own undoing. We can see evidence of this treacherous double-meaning in the Returne of Pasquill, written in 1589:

…at the next pushe, Martin and his companions, might ouerthrow the state, and make the Emperiall crowne of her Maiestie kisse the ground.

And then further, as a sign of the utmost humiliation, one may be forced to kiss the rod (presumably that same rod which will be used to beat the humiliated party) as submissive acceptance of chastisement or ‘correction’. This phrase, likewise attested in the 1580’s, appears first in Sir Phillip Sydney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia:

…though he knew this discourse was to entertain him from a more straight parley, yet he durst not but kiss his rod…

In like manner, and at a similar time (in the late c16th), one may have been asked to kiss the stocks, the clink or the counter, as a part of their imprisonment – as in William Stevenson’s comedy Gammer Gurtons Needle of 1575:

Cal me the knave hether, he shall sure kisse the stockes. I shall teach him a lesson for filching hens or cocks.

And so it is, somewhat surprisingly, that far from the symbol of passionate intent exemplified by Klimt’s oeuvre, the kisses of the c15–17th were as much a tool of humiliation as anything else (kissing the book, cup, dust, ground, post, rod or clink) – all perhaps, a precursor to today’s treasured rejoinder: ‘kiss my ass.’ This phrase attested from 1705, and used to expert effect in Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones (1749):

Allusions to this part are likewise often made for the sake of the jest. And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a— for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.

Yet there is, of course, a whole history of the term which is obscured here – Klimt’s kiss – the kiss of friends or lovers. While this expression of romance is not nearly as universal as we are wont to believe (less than a half of the cultures across the world exhibit it), its use in the history of the English language is nonetheless profound and, to a certain extent, unchanging. The c14th Middle English love poem When the Nightingale Sings, for example, may as well have been written by a forlorn romantic of the c21st!

Suete lemmon, Y preye thee, Of love one speche; Whil Y lyve in world so wyde, Other nulle Y seche. With thy love, my suete leof, My blis thou mihtes eche; A suete cos of thy mouth, Mihte be my leche.

[Sweet loved-one, I pray thee,

For one loving speech; While I live in this wide world None other will I seek. With thy love, my sweet beloved, My bliss though mightest increase; A sweet kiss of thy mouth Might be my cure.]

Yes, some things never change – how tragic!

*

So, fortunately it appears we have left the ignominious kisses of the middle ages behind, and alongside these, the prudish sentiments of the Victorians towards public displays of affection. Far from those kisses through which religions and empires were made, we are now left with the minor laments of unrequited lovers and the everyday kisses of texting teens:

Why’d she leave? Why’d she return? Send me all the deets. And who am I? That’s the secret I’ll never tell. The only one. —X O X O. Gossip Girl.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

PAIN is an integral part of life, and as such has become an integral part of language. Words for pain abound over histories, dialects, accents, body-parts and bodily-functions. Words in themselves can be pain’s cause, and its effects expressed in the boundary between their sense and nonsense. The sharp smart of an ach! Or the guttural lament of a groan, a wail. The word pain is an abstraction of these paralinguistic transcriptions – ach! agh! ouch! – an ‘umbrella term’ prototypical of our medicalisation of experience. Descriptions of pain produce some of the most basic translations between the body and conscious experience. What is it specifically that hurts? How much? And if I press here? Such a dilemma appears to have grown into a common concern across the years. In his C18th Enquiry into the Sublime & Beautiful the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote:

Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.

And likewise, in her 1925 essay On Being Ill – written shortly after experiencing a ‘nervous breakdown’ – Virginia Woolf opined:

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.

However, pain as both a word and a concept is invested with a much richer history than these difficulties in translation may suggest – a history which may well provide an account for these issues (and perhaps some others besides).

Etymologically, pain and punishment are intricately bound. The Ancient Greek noun ποινή (or poinḗ) from which pain is derived meant blood money or wergeld, the compensation paid for a life, a murder or injury. This sense passed through into the Latin poena which translates most literally as penalty, hardship or – in some figurative cases – execution. The Latin idiom, ‘poenas dare’ roughly translates into today’s ‘to pay the price’ or more literally ‘to suffer punishment.’ So to experience pain – or peine in the Old French derived from poena — is to suffer, but suffering was, in this sense, often the intention.

According to the OED, in its journey from Latin through Old French into Anglo-Norman and Old English peine (or paine) retained this sense of a ‘legal’ (albeit physical) punishment from Roman law and added to it a Christian inflection as ‘suffering thought to be endured by souls in hell’. This emerges in the Old English of the C11th and C12th – as the effects of the Christian faith begin to filter out into Germanic and Celtic languages – through the word pine (a strange midpoint between pain and fine). In a C13th manuscript written by an anonymous scribe (subsequently collected in the C19th by Ferdinand Holthausen under the title Vices and Virtues) we can read this sentiment clearly:

Ne mai ic þenchen, ne mid muðe seggen, ne on boke write, alle ðo pinen of helle. [I may not think, nor say with mouth, nor write in book, all the pains of hell.]

Such an ecclesiastical sense unsurprisingly found its way into the earliest definitions of the Middle and Modern English term pain – for example, in a phrase attributed to Saint Mary Magdalen (written at the beginning of the C14th), we read of such a distinction between pain (hell) and heaven:

God us schilde fram peyne and to heouene us bringue! [God shield us from pain and bring us to heaven!]

The more established legalistic senses also found their way into the earliest uses of pain – for example, in the South English Legendary manuscript (from which the quote above is also taken), we read of a King commanding an audience ‘under penalty’ at his Clarendon Palace estate:

Þare-fore ich hote ov euerechone: þat ȝe beon þat ilke dai At mi maner at Clarindone: with-outen ani de-lai, For-to confermi þis lawes: ope peyne þat i schal ou sette [Therefore, I command each one of you: that you be on that same day at my manor at Clarendon: without any delay, to confirm these laws: under the penalty that I shall impose upon you]

Such use is also apparent in the slightly later styling of the term through the phrase ‘on pain of…’ evidenced, for example, in John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh’s Secrets of the Old Philosophers:

Afftir his lawes / his statutys to Obeye. Peyne of deth / no wyght be Contrarye, What he Comaundeth / his byddyng to with-seye;

However, it was not long before these specific legal and liturgical senses subdued and more general ideas of pain as any bodily or mental distress displaced previous Old English terms such as ece (ache) and sār (sore).¹ Indeed, the phrase ‘aches and pains’ may be understood as a hangover from this doubling between Germanic and Latin roots. In Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale (an excerpt of his C14th Canterbury Tales), for instance, we read of specific, invisible, intolerable bodily pains:

God for his manace hym so soore smoot With invisible wounde, ay incurable, That in his guttes carf it so and boot That his peynes weren importable And certeinly the wreche was resonable, For many a mannes guttes dide he peyne.

[God because of his threatening so sorely smote him With invisible wound, ever incurable, That in his guts it carved so and bit That his pains were intolerable And certainly the punishment was reasonable, For many a man's gut did he pain.]²

What is most evident in this excerpt from Chaucer, and in this general narrative of pain’s entry into the English language, is a latent moralism attached to the term. Pain, in its relation to fines and penalties, often appears as some form of retribution or sacrifice, the consequence of some fault or heroic effort, whether the pained know it or not. Much of this again is informed by the Christian faith (which may, in turn be informed by this etymology) and, as we move into the C16th and C17th, a newly-formed Puritanism. In his book The Conquest of Pain, Peter Fairley asks:

Throughout the Middle Ages, the great monasteries built all over Britain became the sole centres of medicine, from which herbal remedies, along with philosophy and reminders about morality, were obtainable. One of these reminders was that Christ had suffered on the cross. Was it not right, therefore, that all men should experience suffering to some degree?

In the 1980s Jane Fonda replied, popularising the phrase “No Pain, No Gain” in her aerobics workout videos, simplifying this narrative considerably. Two decades later in 2005 professor David B. Morris, author of The Culture of Pain, summarised this neo-puritan attitude:

'No pain, no gain' is an American modern mini-narrative: it compresses the story of a protagonist who understands that the road to achievement runs only through hardship.

Within this mini-narrative pain approaches something of a virtue, to be courted and desired, an inevitable aspect – if not in fact a shortcut – to success. In her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes:

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.

Is such an attitude naive? To in some way covet pain whether in practice or representation? Burke, in his Enquiry of 1757 noted that there “is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” The question of ‘desensitisation’ is certainly not new, it is in many ways a foundation of modernity as a whole.

Perhaps it is tempting to try and do away with pain altogether – not as a fact of life (although many have tried), but its indeterminacy. In Old English each pain-point had a specific word attached to it: bānwærc (bone-ache), heortece (heartache), mūþsār (mouth-sore), endwerc (ass-pain), the list goes on… It is seductive to imagine such an itinerary extending to infinity, an empirical scale of thresholds on which one might plot their aches and sores against those of others, to rationalise impersonally and act accordingly.

Pain’s etymology highlights its relation to injustice, its continued conceptualisation within systems of jurisprudence. Within this context one may feel it particularly unjust to describe as ‘painful’ an awkward encounter the same way one does a war. But maybe it is precisely this term's inadequacy, its inherent injustice, that can provide a space for thinking pain differently? The hypocrisy of the anglophone world in its linguistic and material construction? The question of whose pain is labelled as such and whose isn't?³

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.

This article was read at the Sticky Fingers 5th Birthday Party and subsequently broadcast on Repeater Radio (at 29:00 below).

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Footnotes

1. Interestingly (and somewhat speculatively), the Old English noun ece from which we get the contemporary ache – commonly understood today as a more long-term ailment – may be compared or related to the adverb éce, meaning eternally or perpetually. ↩

2. https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/monks-prologue-and-tale ↩

3. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine— be linked to their suffering [...] is a task for which [pain’s history supplies] only an initial spark. ↩

LIB is a strange and powerful word. To be labelled as such today is, for many, taken as a serious insult; excised from its party-political foundations, a Lib has simply come to mean a hypocrite, someone notionally–although not exclusively–left-leaning and quick-tempered or, perhaps, easily ‘triggered’. In common parlance, the ‘libs’ sit within a menagerie of terminally online political personas, alongside ‘snowflakes’, the ‘wokerati’, ‘cuckservatives’ and more. To “own the libs” as Republican politicians are wont to do, is to exploit this disposition, to humiliate their perceived opposition (and in the process, often, themselves). However, the word lib has a much richer past than its contemporary use would suggest.

Reconstructing lib’s journey through the Proto-Indo European (PIE) and Proto-Germanic languages one finds two key threads. The first comes from the PIE term *lewb, a verb which itself has two seemingly contradictory senses, meaning both to covet and desire (later contributing to the words ‘libido’ and ‘love’) as well as to cleave or cut off(giving ‘leave’ or ‘left’ today). From this latter sense of *lewb as a kind of damage is formed the Proto-Germanic lubją meaning, on the one hand, ‘wort’ or ‘herb’ and on the other ‘potion’ or ‘poison’. (Interestingly, in many languages, these two senses – of desire and damage – seem to combine in the concept of a love potion.) The second–and perhaps more straightforward–strand derives from the PIE word *h₁lewdʰ which denotes ‘people’ or perhaps, more specifically, ‘free men’. It is from this latter *h₁lewdʰ, for example, that the term louðeros is derived in Proto-Italic (meaning simply ‘free’) as well as libertus in Latin, later giving ‘liberty’ in various forms throughout the European dialects.

When this complex knot of senses enters the English language it does so, as one might expect, in many different ways and at many historical moments. The first is in the Old English lybb, which takes up the Proto-Germanic *lubją as a noun used to denote drugs or medicine, as well as poison and charms. As is typical in Old English, ‘lybb’ formed the basis for a number of compound terms such as ‘lyb-cræft’ (witch-craft) and lyblace (black magic). For example, in Richard Morris’ Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, one may read:

Hió him sealdon áttor drincan ðæt mid myclen lybcræfte wæs geblanden [They gave him a poison drink that was mixed with great skill]

Or, in the opening line of the Æcerbot – a well-known Anglo-Saxon (C11th) metrical charm which sought to remedy poorly yielding fields – one might learn:

Her ys seo bot, hu ðu meaht þine æceras betan gif hi nellaþ wel wexan oþþe þær hwilc ungedefe þing on gedon bið on dry oððe on lyblace. [Here is the remedy, how you may better your land, if it will not grow well, or if some harmful thing has been done to it by a sorcerer or by a poisoner.]

Here, as philologist Dr Ciaran Arthur notes, the term ‘lyblace’ denotes a source of evil in the earth, indicating that the Aecerbot itself is a kind of ‘counter-charm’, recruiting a superior power against the evil in the land – expelling it “through words of divine power…” (Such a sense is retained in the contemporary term ‘libation’). And yet more senses of the term ‘lybb’ or ‘lib’ emerge in Old English, in one configuration – no less mystic – referring to the concept of ‘life’ itself. This sense of lib as life is expressed in another passage of the C10th Blicking Homilies, in which:

Æðelwald..hæfde ealle þa geatu forworht in to him & sæde þæt he wolde oðer oððe þær libban oððe þær licgan. [Æðelwald...had all the gates closed to him and said that he would either live there or lie there.]

Strangely, one can identify a connection in this sense through the Proto-Germanic *lubją (and, by extension, PIE *lewb) once again, as to ‘live’ or ‘continue living’ was viewed – much more so at the time, perhaps – as having been ‘left behind’. In any case, libban (to live) – alongside lybb – formed a crucial part of the Old and Middle English vocabularies, and was in use as late as the C13th. For example, in the Middle English dialogue Vices and Virtues, compiled in c.1200:

'Becweð þine cwide,' he sade, 'for ðan þu scalt bien dead, and naht ne scalt tu libben.' Ðe king warð sari, alswa richeise is lad to laten, and swiðe lef to libben. [Speak your words,' he said, 'for you shall be dead, and nothing shall you live.' The king became sorrowful, just as riches are slow to acquire and very dear to live by.]

However, it was not long after the Norman invasion of 1066 that these terms, and perhaps the concepts with which they were associated, fell out of use. With William the Conqueror came lib’s second thread, from *h₁lewdʰ –which had been on it’s own journey through Latin and French – arriving, finally, in English, in the form of liberty (of all things)!

According to the OED, the earliest example of liberty’s use in print can be found in Wycliffite’s 1384 translation of the Bible – for example, in Corinthians:

Forsoth where is the spirit of God, there is liberte.

Here, liberty means something quite specific – opposed to contemporary uses – and should be understood, most accurately, as a theological term articulating freedom ‘from the bondage or dominating influence of sin’. Liberty, in this original sense, is a specifically Christian freedom, as articulated in minister Samuel Hieron’s 1604 manuscript The Preachers Plea:

This libertie, which Christians haue, is a spirituall libertie, a heauenly liberty, a liberty of the soule..which setteth the soule at liberty from destruction.

While this theological conception of liberty continues to be used today, at the start of the C15th more secular senses were beginning to develop. In 1484, for example, William Caxton – in his translation of Subtyl Historyes & Fables of Esope – writes of an almost prototypical form of civil liberty:

And he sayd to them the kynge whiche ye haue demaunded shalle be your mayster For whan men haue that which men oughte to haue they ought to be ioyeful and glad And he that hath lyberte ought to kepe hit wel For nothyng is better than lyberte For lyberte shold not be wel sold for alle the gold and syluer of all the world

The word liberal emerged throughout this period as well – much as in today’s use, as an adjective describing someone generous or ‘free in giving’ – and took on the secular undercurrents already at work in liberty. In Shakespeare’s 1600 play The Merchant of Venice, for example, a conniving Portia opines:

I see, sir, you are liberal in offers. You taught me first to beg, and now methinks. You teach me how a beggar should be answered.

Over the course of the C17th ‘liberal’ morphed from adjective to noun a number of times, first as a denoting a generous or bountiful person, as in John Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education:

Let them find by experience, that the most liberal has always most plenty.

And later – in a somewhat contradictory sense – through criminals' slang, as a prominent member of a criminal gang (as evidenced in William Melvin’s translation of Sonne of Rogue):

Over all these a kinde of Theeves bearesway, called among us Liberalls,..

And then, as the French Revolution of the late C18th commenced, both liberty, liberal, liberation and a whole host of associated terms took on newfound, explicitly political meanings. Here the concept of a Liberal which we hold today took form, first seen in print around 1814 (as in a report for the Leeds Mercury), already the subject of derision:

He has nominated a commission to try the Members of the Cortes, called in derision, the Liberals, (for liberal sentiments are a crime in his eyes) now in prison.

And at last, in C19th Britain, as the reformation of the Whigs and Radicals produced a new Liberal Party to oppose the Tories, Punch – the satirical magazine – offered up the first use of Lib (as an off-the-cuff shorthand for Liberal) in 1885:

"Tory-demmycrat" sounds nice and harmless, but if it means simply cold scran / From the Rad's broken-wittel bag, drat it! far better the Libs' Grand Old Man!

Here we see the coining of a phrase which will come, undoubtedly, to condition much of the – increasingly polarised – debates held over this year of anglophone elections. However, as we head into them, it is important to remember, as with *lewb, lybb and the Æcerbot, the magical, and indeed poisonous, properties of language.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

TRADITION! cries the fictitious shtetl of Anatevka in answer to every question posed of their immiserated livelihood. Why, Yente, does the matchmaker arrange the marriages? Tradition! Why, Golde, must the women run the home? Tradition! Why, Tevye, is there a fiddler on that roof? Tradition! To every question a simple, singular answer. Such traditions are – in Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics at least – the ways in which we as societies “keep balance” (and for oneself to know what “God expects him to do”). Indeed, the success of Fiddler on the Roof – and in particular its opening number – was attributed by its first director Hal Prince to the universalism of traditions themselves.¹ However the song Tradition forebodes their imminent upheaval – for both Anatevka at the turn of the c20th and us here in the 21st – as new concepts, new tools, and renewed prejudices move, over the course of history, from East to West and back again.

In its deepest etymological roots tradition is derived from the Latin noun trāditiō and verb trādō. Unsurprisingly, both terms designate a fuzzy set of senses related to the contemporary idea of trade (trādō likely influencing the Old English trada through its inflection trādēre),however trāditiō places a particular emphasis on this act of giving or handing over as a kind of surrender. In fact, trāditor, to which trāditiō is strongly related, translates into English quite directly as traitor, used in Tacitus’ c1st Historiae through the phrase ‘interfecto traditore’ (the betrayer slayed). More surprising than this, however, is the fact that along with this sense of betrayal, trāditor also translates into teacher, and trāditiō into instruction or teaching.

In Ecclesiastical Latin this second concept is particularly pronounced, as in the phrase ‘traditio seniorum’ meaning the ‘tradition or handing down of the elders’. In Saint Bede’s unusually detailed preface to his Ecclesiastical History of the English People – compiled in the c8th – this phrase recurs in discussions of his research methodology. For example, Bede writes of how he turned to Abbot Albinus of Canterbury when sourcing those liturgical traditions of old Southern England, and how Albinus knew of these by way of written records, or the traditions of his predecessors:

uel seniors traditione cognouera

While this sense of traditione appears somewhat uncomplicated by the terms more ‘traitorous’ roots, these begin to resurface with the emergence of Middle English and its new trā̆diciǒun. In Wycliffite’s Bible of 1384, Colossians epistle reads:

Se ȝe that no man disseyue ȝou by philosofye and veyn fallace, or gilouse falshede, vp the tradicioun of men. [Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.]

Here – in the c14th and c15th – references to the ‘vain’ or ‘deceitful’ traditions of men were often made in critical discussions of Jewish history and practices. So much so that an early definition of the Middle English trā̆diciǒun is given as a ‘system of beliefs’ based on a ‘rabbinical exposition’ of the Mosaic law, ² as can be seen in a c15th translation of Higden’s Polychronicon:

The firste men were callede Pharisei..thei were diuidede in conuersacion..from the rite and consuetude of other peple..makenge a determinacion of the tradicion of Moyses in theire statutes. [The first men were called Pharisees. They were distinguished in their way of life from the right and custom of other people, making a determination of the tradition of Moses in their statutes.]

This anti-Judaic connotation – which upheld a particularly insidious concept of the traitor within tradition – morphed, during the reformation, into an anti-Catholic one. In Lancelot Ridley’s Commentary of 1540, for example, the clergyman advocated for an ‘unlearning of tongues’ related to ‘the olde Catholyke Doctours of the Churche’, arguing that their heretical doctrines sought to:

make mānes traditions lawes or ceremonies inuented of man equall with goddes lawe

Insofar as the Protestant Reformation resembled a ‘return to scripture’, it did so in opposition to the concept of tradition – understood as a set of practices handed down over generations – as such. Instead tradition became an exegetical exercise, seeking explicit instructions from holy scripture. Interesting here is a specific sense of tradition given by the oed only for the period between 1450–1565 – the height of the reformation – as an instruction or an ordinance. This last point is best evidenced in Thomas Stapleton’s translation of the German theologian Friedrich Staphylus’ Apologie, which speaks very pragmatically of replacing the eyesore tradition with these newer terms:

In like maner bicause traditions are a great eye sore to all newe ghospellers, they putt out of S. Paule the worde Traditions, and put in his place sometime Ordinaunces sometime Institutions, as ofte as S. Paule biddeth thē to be kept. In other places, when the traditions of the Jewes are reprehended, then they kepe the worde gladly.

Nevertheless, in spite – or perhaps by virtue – of its lacking popularity, the term tradition began to soften as the reformation itself morphed into a new kind of secular ‘enlightenment’. From 1600 one could reasonably speak of a tradition as any practice or custom that had been accepted by some kind of social group and which, in some way, was handed down from generation to generation. In Shakespeare’s Richard II we can perhaps see the effect of this loosening, with the King himself, in a moment of defeat, imploring his audience to throw tradition away altogether:

With solemn reverence. Throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king?

And so uses of the word tradition, now unmoored and relativistic, stood in for all manner of vague activities. To the parliament of 1651 Peter Chamberlain wrote, for example:

That you have made the Earth to shake, and the Seas to tremble under you: (even Earthly men, and Seas of their Traditions)...

In 1705, prefacing his poem The Oculist, William Read wrote of the fallible traditions within the newly-formed sciences:

For considering the infinite Variety of Tempers and Constitutions attended by so many various Incidences, Causes and Circumstances in corporal Infirmities, even the best recorded Golden Rule of Art, may prove but a fallible Tradition, if Book-work Knowledge were the Physicians only Guide.³

And in 1818 – in her Passages from Autobiography – Sydney Lady Morgan writes of the waning traditions of post-revolutionary France:

The duke is a tradition of the grands seigneurs of the courtly times of France, a tradition fast wearing out; but he is a good patriot and an honest, unswerving politician.

While each of these cases speak of traditions across a wide range of fields and activities, what unifies them is precisely the idea that each is at risk of, as Lady Morgan writes, ‘fast wearing out’. Over the course of the 1800’s this challenge to traditions of all stripes gave rise to a set of new political philosophies in the UK, broadly captured in the binary between conservative ‘Traditionalists’ (such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and John Henry Newman) and modernising ‘Progressivists’ (such as Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham or the Chartists). Those who upheld the practices of their forebears and those who sought to betray them!

Today, questions of tradition are no less fraught, and follow much the same ‘Trad’ versus ‘Prog’ opposition. If anything, these debates have intensified in recent years, with the emergence of newly minted Internet slang denoting various traditionalist positions and characters: the Tradwife of Instagram and TikTok, the Trad Girl of 4Chan and the TradCath of Twitter and Reddit. When viewed in the long arc of the term's etymology, these recent calls to ‘embrace’ the ‘traditions’ of the 1950s read as particularly ironic, harking back to a political and cultural conjuncture that the original Traditionalists would have, in many ways, fought against.

Of course there are many subtler uses of the word which have emerged over the c20th and c21st as well. From 1900 on, for example, the term has come to be used as a stand-in for a given artistic method or style, as in the ‘tradition of Oscar Wilde’ or, perhaps, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. In our post-postmodern period these traditions are truly unmoored anew, and span from the most profound practices of Intangible Cultural Heritage to the half-hearted resolutions of a new year.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwjYU5VXqdQ ↩

2. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED46675 ↩

3. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Oculist_a_Poem_Address_d_to_Sir_W_Re/kC1gZMU37UkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Even+the+best+recorded+Golden+Rule+of+Art,+may+prove+but+a+fallible+Tradition,+if+Book-work+Knowledge+were+the+Physicians+only+Guide.&pg=PA5&printsec=frontcover ↩

RIVERS are, to typographers, a blight of miniscule proportions – tiny streams of white space that wend their way through paragraphs of text, coincidences of gestalt psychology which serve to distract the reader, splitting one's attention from content by-way of form. For the rest of us, rivers divide not-so-much attention but landscapes, carrying water from higher areas to lower ground, feeding reservoirs, lakes, oceans and seas. However, over the course of the term’s history, such a common, everyday sense of a river as a physical, natural artefact — whether the River Nile or the River Ravensbourne – is, it appears, somewhat less central than this abstract, unifying concept of division itself.

To begin in the speculative reconstructions of the Proto-Indo European language *h₁reyp- — which is given as the earliest antecedent to river — means to tear, similar in sound and sense to the modern English rip. From this is formed both the Latin rīpa and rīpārius (meaning riverbank) as well as the Proto-Germanic *rīfaną or Old Norse rífa (meaning to rend or tear apart). Somewhat serendipitously both senses feed into the Middle English term rive — attested as early as the C13th — in the Latin case, as a noun, via the Middle French riviere and in the Norse, as a verb, perhaps via the Danish or Norwegian rift.

Rive or riue in this former sense – as a riverbank or shore — appears to have been used only regionally, towards the south of England, as in the C13th romance Sir Tristrem:

Now bringeþ me atte riue Schip and oþir þing. [Now bring me that river ship and other thing…]

Much more successful was the active, Scandinavian sense of rive as an act of tearing, rending, pulling, or in its most extreme cases, destroying — as demonstrated in this violent passage from the C14th history or ‘Runner’ of the World, the Cursor Mundi:

His kyrtil sal we riue and rend, And blody til his fader seind, [His tunic shall we rive and rend,

And bloody until his father send,]

Indeed, a river in this sense denoted a person who splits or tears something, a lacerator. Of course, the relative success of rive made way for the distinct—yet connected—term river during the same Middle English period. And in this word was invested not just the designation of natural waterways (which emerged as early as the C14th), but also figurative senses of unceasing or relentless movement, of timelessness and permanence. In its earliest figurative uses this concept of a river as something ‘timeless’ is taken on predominantly in spiritual contexts, as in Samuel Rutherford’s C17th text The Trial and Triumph of Faith, in which Christ is described as:

“...a mass, a sea and boundless river of visible, living, and breathing grace, swelling up to the highest banks [...] to over-water men and artels.”

However, during the later years of the 1600’s these spiritual senses were beginning to turn to more secular ends – as in Sir John Vanbrugh’s play, The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger in which a young widow Berinthia muses, by way of analogy, on the ‘torrents of Love’ at work in the ‘Lovers in this Age’:

They have so: But 'tis like the Rivers of a Modern Philosopher (whose Works, tho' a Woman, I have read) it sets out with a violent Stream, splits in a thousand Branches, and is all lost in the Sands.¹

And before this even, in Shakespeare’s playwriting, figurative senses of river take on astonishingly sinister tones, as in the infamous speech of Titus Andronicus (written c.1593) in which the titular character’s brother Marcus, upon finding the young Lavina with her tongue cut, observes:

As half thy love? Why dost not speak to me? Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy ros'd lips, Coming and going with thy honey breath.

The phrase (and image) of a ‘river of blood’ – certainly present beforehand but used to such shocking effect in Titus Andronicus – in some way speaks to the mixed origins of division and destruction present in this otherwise naturalistic term. And ‘rivers of blood’ would then go on to appear from the C18th onward, not in fiction, but in the very real revolutions of both France and America. For example, in a letter to John Adams (written in September of 1823), Thomas Jefferson argues that to achieve self-government in America:

“...to attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over.”

Here the ‘timelessness’ of spiritual concerns is replaced by the ‘relentless movement’ of a newfound progress – perhaps, in the figurative transformations of river, one finds the truest expression of the bloodlust contained within the European project. And there is, perhaps, no better ‘modern’ example of how this specific history is invocated than in the ignominious speech, given by Enoch Powell in 1968, to which the phrase lends its name. In his incendiary response to the introduction of the Race Relations Act in the UK – a progressive piece of legislation which rendered the refusal of housing, employment, or public services on the basis of ethnicity or nationality illegal – Powell said:

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.”

If only there were some other slogan – perhaps also formed in the 1960’s – that could provide some counter-phrase, some image of another world? A river determined not by this fractious etymology of rifts and rives, by the colonialism of the European enlightenment, but instead by reunifications, tributaries which do not so much divide as enjoin? A river derived not from blood, but from freedom?

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. And to which Amanda replies: But do you think this River of Love runs all its course without doing any Mischief? Do you think it overflows nothing. ↩

HAUNT is, it seems to me, a suitably sticky word for October, undoubtedly the spookiest of months. As the nights draw in they do so charged with the anticipation of All Hallows Eve – a holy day that, much like the study of etymology itself, invites a return to all manner of pasts… remainders empowered by a whole cast of spirits, ghosts, spells and incantations.

However – long before such occult associations – to haunt is thought to have taken prevenient form in the Proto-Germanic *haimatjaną, meaning to house or bring home (itself speculatively derived from *haimaz, meaning village or home) and to hāmettenne, in Old English, meaning to provide a home or bring something back to it. Perhaps giving early indication of its unsavoury connotations, an example of this term’s use emerges from Æthelstan’s Grately Code, a C10th document concerning thievery and treachery to lords, in which is written:

“Ond we cwædon be þam hlafordleasan mannum, ðe man nan ryht ætbegytan ne mæg, þæt man beode ðære mægþe, ðæt hi hine to folcryhte gehamette, him hlaford finden on folcgemote. gif hi hine ðonne begytan nyllen, oððe ne mægen to þam andagan, ðonne beo he syþþan flyma, hine lecge for ðeof se þe him tocume…”

“And we spoke concerning the lordless men, from whom one cannot obtain justice, that one should bid their family, so that they bring him home [gehamette] to face justice, and find him a lord in the public assembly. And if they then will not, or cannot, bring him on the appointed day, then he will afterwards be an outlaw, and he who comes upon him may kill him as a thief…”

So from the first, to be lordless – and therefore in need of a home, of hāmettende – was one step from thiefdom, as good as undead! Such criminal or subhuman connotations continued into Middle English, in which the more familiar form of haunten came to identify – as a noun – the resting places of animals, such as birds and fowls; as in John Trevisa’s C14th translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum:

“Many briddes and foules haunten þat place, and þere-fore þer ben many foulers þat liggen and setten nettes” [Many birds and fowls haunt that place, and therefore there are many fowlers that cast and set nets.]

And so from this point, as is common of English words – and particularly of those coined via translation from Old French – this verb-noun pair ‘haunt’ catalysed all sorts of meanings and connotations; at once the habit or practice of doing something, as well as the habitat, the place to which one returns. For example, Henry Lovelich, in his C15th translation of the The History of the Holy Grail, develops ‘haunts’ hellish undercurrents:

That dirk blak hows signefyeth helle, To wheche place Al Miscreaunt Atte the day of dom schal ben here haunt.

And elsewhere, in a C15th translation of the Secretum Secretorum the ‘Secret of Secrets’ attributed to Aristotle (but more-likely written in C10th Arabic) one reads – licentiously – of the best medicine for ‘dronkenesse’ in the haunt of women:

“...and how that syknesse grewys on hym þat abstenys hym fro surfaytes of mete and drynke, and fro haunte of women & greet trauaill.

Indeed, sex and old haunts are intimately bound (so to speak). For example, in a C15th edition of “Arthour and Merlin”, the young wizard’s mysterious conception entails the enchantment and seduction of three unwed sisters:

Of whom y spac tofor ȝou alle - Þo he nam lickenisse of man & com him to an old wiman & bihete hir ȝiftes & grete fe To wende to þis sostren þre & þe heldest to bichaunte ȝong mannes loue for to haunte.

And tempting as well are the connections between haunte and bichaunte (or rather, enchaunten), a word which calls up the power of language, from its Old French roots in enchanter or chant. At the turn of the C16th, Shakespeare, in A Lover’s Complaint, develops these senses, writing of the bewitching qualities of a similar ‘ȝong mannes’:

That he did in the general bosom reign Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted, To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain In personal duty, following where he haunted. Consents bewitched, ere he desire, have granted, And dialogued for him what he would say, Asked their own wills, and made their wills obey.

To haunt (or be haunted), and to visit a haunt was then, by the C17th, either explicitly or associatively dangerous for both soul and body alike. Again, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, we hear of the haunting danger of beauty, of – as the OED have it – ‘unseen or immaterial visitants’:

Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep To undertake the death of all the world

And in The Faerie Queene – written in 1590 by Edmund Spenser – of spectral, wild monsters:

That yonder in that faithfull wilderneſſe Huge monſters haunt, and many dangers dwell

Already here we can see the loose edges of ‘haunt’ being ironed out, and it is over the course of the Georgian and Victorian eras that we see the contemporary image of the term being more fully developed. Hannah Brand’s Adelina of 1789, for example, reads like some kind of spooky bingo sheet:

That Cousin of mine is as plagueful as a Ghost in a haunted house.

What, pray tell, is more frightening than one's own relations!

But really, in truth, who can surpass the haunted hyperbole of Marx? The man who, in some strange way, brought the term back to its political, economic, juridical roots? Who brought the whole Dickensian lexicon of the undead into the driest of economic analyses? Who took the word and made it a slogan? A cheer:

A spectre is haunting…!

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

JOB begins, in its most ancient formation, as a Biblical Hebrew name (Iyóv or אִיּוֹב) of unclear origins. Etymologists speculate that the term may be derived somewhere within the oldest Semitic dialects, between the word for father (ʾôb or אב) and enemy (oyév or אויב) – perhaps it is through these senses that the meaning of the name Job is often given as a question: “Where is the father?” Others however, have found the meaning of Job not as an enemy – the absentee parent – but rather as the Persecuted or the object of enmity, a sentiment borne out in its most famous namesake The Book of Job.

Within the Hebrew Tanakh Job appears as one of the oldest Biblical figures – a supposedly blameless, righteous man whose health and livelihood is taken by God in a test of faith. Throughout his trials Job reflects on the will of God and retains his faith, an interpretation echoed in a related Arabic noun أَوَّابً (Awwab) meaning the Returner or ‘he who turns to God’. Indeed, in the Qur’an Job (Ayyūb or أيّوب) is similarly held to be a prophet, renowned and rewarded for his patience and endurance. And in its adoption of the Old Testament, the Christian faith – through which the Latin form of Iob or Job becomes prevalent – Job is held in similar stead, as a man whose patience in suffering demonstrates a virtue from which we all might learn. In Wycliffe’s C14th translation of the Bible we read:

“Ȝe herden the suffring or pacience of Job”

And so, the ‘patience of Job’ in particular becomes a key phrase throughout Middle English, seen in all forms of literature. In Chaucer’s C14th collection The Canterbury Tales, the Wyf of Bathe laments:

Ye sholden be al pacient and meke And han a swete spyced conscience Sith ye so preche of Iobes pacience.

In monk and poet John Lydgate’s Fabula Duorum Mercatorum (The Tale of Two Merchants) composed in the mid C15th, we read of the misfortunes and miseries of a trader cast in the image of a ‘newe Job’:

This newe Job, icast in indigence, He weepith, wayleth, soleyn and solitarye, Allone he drouh hym, fleeyng al presence, And evir his lif he gan to curse and warye.

So popular is the figure and the phrase that, by 1571, the Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel can rhetorically ask:

Who hath not heard of the patience of Iob?

Who indeed? However, this is not the common sense in which we use the word today, even if one's own job evokes a similar sense of misfortune and misery. The idea of a job as a piece of work emerges, it has been suggested, from an obsolete use of the term as a unit of measurement – a jobble or jobbet – a cartload for transportation. This somewhat less illustrious use is attested in the accounts of churchwardens from the mid C16th on:

For faching a Jobbe of thorns and mending the hedges aboute the churche howsse

To begin then, a job was not the whole of one’s work but rather a small task or piece within it – a ‘job of work’ or ‘Iobbe of woorke’. And often, it seems, particularly as the noun job transforms into the verb to job, and adjective jobbing – as in a jobbing job jobbed – to do said task poorly, opportunistically and without commitment. It may be that this depreciative sense derives from a contemporaneous understanding of the term Jobber or stock-jobber, a term which defined the middlemen of the burgeoning stock-exchange in C17–18th England. Daniel Defoe in particular detested such jobbers and in his use of the term perhaps coloured it within this disdain, as in his poem for the Duke of Marlborough, The Double Welcome:

…a starving Mercenary Priest, A Jobbing, Hackney, Vicious Pulpit Jest

Indeed, a distrust of jobs, jobbing and jobbers was not unwarranted, as the term quickly enlisted itself into criminal slang. For example, in William B. Rhodes 1810 burlesque opera, Bombastes Furioso, we hear of the titular character’s criminal exploits:

I knock'd him down, then snatched it from his fob; “Watch, watch,” he cried, when I had done the job

However this criminal, or otherwise distrustful view of jobs and jobbers softened over the C19th, presumably as such piece-work or odd jobs (a phrase first evidenced in 1704) became more commonplace and as such jobs themselves lengthened into longer-term employment.

Returning, perhaps, to its holier origins, the idea of a job morphed slowly into an enduring and regular form of paid employment – a post, an occupation or a profession. In the early C20th a whole swathe of job-related terms emerged as enormous firms like Ford and General Electric created a new economy which reconfigured the language of work. By way of illustration, the 20 years between 1910 and 1930 saw the introduction of: job application, job hunting, job market, job description, job discrimination, job hunt, job opportunity, office job, job security… the list goes on.

Job is a self-evidently elastic term (we’ve not even started on the hand-jobs of the C20th). Contained within it we find the rectitude of Job’s patience reconfigured as capitalist accumulation; Max Weber’s ‘Protestant work ethic’ sat alongside what Samuel Johnson labelled the ‘piddling work’ of piecemeal labour and criminal insiders. History accumulates itself, and today the moral compass rotates continuously, the idea of a good job at once a necessity and a fantasy – patience, how! We are all now Job – or jobseekers at least – although it is not God that tests our patience, but capital. Perhaps what the great resignation of the 2020’s shows is that our endurance is waning – as they say on TikTok:

“Darling, I’ve told you several times before, I have no dream job — I do not dream of labour.”

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

POLLUTION is, by all accounts, a scandal. Its Latin origin pollūtiō, composed of por + luō translates roughly into pro + mud, with luō related to lutum meaning soil, mire, mud, loam or clay (long-time readers may remember the loam of lime-fingers). While, for some, this may give a happy image of mud-dwellers living their life, the connotation of pollūtiō is in fact less than ideal, meaning either a literal soiling or a figurative contamination, in particular desecration. This negative sense may become clearer through luō’s relation with luēs which, from Latin, translates to plague, pestilence and epidemic (in the Neo-Latin of renaissance Europe, luēs was the term used for syphilis); or, it’s relation to the Ancient Greek λῦμᾰ (lûma) meaning washwater, dirt and, again figuratively, defilement.

All these senses muddy pollution’s origins, including its adoption into Middle English from Old French around C14th. In Wycliffe’s 1382 Bible – the first full translation of the text into English – the book of Judith recounts the fears of Israel during the threat of war, wherein the people ‘cried to the Lord’:

…lest weren ȝyuen … þe holi thingis of hem in to pollucioun [...lest were given … the holy things of them into pollution]

Here pollution takes on the sense of a desecration of that which is sacred – as in the destruction of a church or holy artefact – to be brought into a state of pollution is to be rendered profane. However, during this same period, pollution also takes on a second, more particular sense in pollutio nocturna described by C17th Dutch anatomist Steven Blankaart as an “involuntary Pollution in the Night, caused by lecherous Dreams” (or, less euphemistically, as the OED have it, an “ejaculation of semen without sexual intercourse”). An early C14th example of this use appears in the work of English hermit, mystic, and religious writer Richard Rolle, particularly his Notabill Tretys off the ten Comandementys:

The sexte cowmandement es: »thow sail be na lichoure.« [...] Alswa here es forbodene all maner of wilfull pollusyone…

The issues of nocturnal pollution and their relation to the sin of masturbation, along with broader questions of piety and even human agency, were challenging for religious scholars throughout the development of the Christian faith. In his essay The Battle for Chastity, Foucault recounts the concerns of monk and mystic John Cassian, born c. 360:

...through this battle against the spirit of fornication and for chastity, the sole fundamental problem is that of pollution- whether as something that is subservient to the will and a possible form of self-indulgence, or as something happening spontaneously and involuntarily in sleep or dreams. So important is it that Cassian makes the absence of erotic dreams and nocturnal pollution a sign that one has reached the pinnacle of chastity.

This sentiment is clearly expressed in Francis Bacon’s utopian tract New Atlantis, written over a millennium later in the C17th, through descriptions of his ideal nation of Bensalem:

You shall understand that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem; nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world.

Here, however, the concept of pollution is shifting from specific senses of desecration or pollutio nocturna into more general descriptions of ‘spiritual or moral impurity or corruption’. As with many other words in the English language, the diverse set of spiritual and philosophical senses gradually gave way to increasingly secular and scientific properties in the period leading up to the C18th and the industrial revolution. This is remarkably pronounced in the case of pollution as it swiftly becomes a watchword of resistance against anthropogenic environmental contamination. This shift is demonstrated in diarist John Evelyn’s short treatise Fumifugium – written in 1661 – which sought to address The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London, and recounts the proposal of sailing onions down the Thames to remove the plague:

There goes a pleasant Tale of a certain Sir Politick, that in the last great Plague projected, how by a Vessel freight with peel’d Onions, which should passe along the Thames by the City, when the Wind sate in a favourable quarter, to attract the pollution of the Aer, and sail away with the Infection to the Sea…

By the early C19th, the Thames itself was the object of concern, with reports from newspapers and new scientific journals increasingly detailing the effects of pollution on wildlife and drinking water:

We submit to the disgrace of drinking the water of that very river, in a state of pollution, and hesitate to move up to a purer source.

By the mid-C20th this (now anthropocenic) sense of pollution eclipsed those which came before. In 1970 use of the term reached such a fever pitch that a British government agency established in 1863 to monitor pollution issued a statement, reported by the Guardian:

Mr Ireland complains that, since ‘pollution’ became linked with that other fashionable word ‘environment,’ pressure groups and campaigns have sprung up, and he is wasting valuable time answering calls from an alarmed public.¹

Use of pollution today is similarly fraught with both material and moral dimensions and yet, despite the urgency of the climate crisis, the word has appeared to decline in popular usage from its late-C20th zenith. Perhaps the ecological complexities of the anthropocene position pollution as too-simple a cause and concept; or perhaps the ‘deindustrialisation’ of Anglophone economies has created a false sense of security (in China, a new term for smog, 雾霾/wumai, had to be invented in the C21st).² To revive pollution (and therefore our critique of its effects) perhaps we must shake the last vestiges of religious piety from the word, the sense of individual responsibility or chastity which leads to claims of self-indulgence from protestors and polluters alike; or otherwise we might be wise to revive in full the sublime terror of desecration.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/26/protest-over-too-much-fuss-about-pollution-1970 ↩

2. https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/studies/voices-middle-east-asia/voices-from-east-asia/the-changing-concepts-of-smog-in-modern-china.html ↩

DILETTANTE, and it’s more common synonym, amateur both take root in words for passion & love – delect or delight in the former, amant (literally lover) in the latter. Unsurprisingly, each of these roots have grown within the romance languages – Italian and French, in turn – and were adopted during the Middle and Modern English periods.

Delight, which is our true concern here, is recorded as early as C13th and features a number of times in William Langland’s C14th poem Piers Plowman, perhaps most prominently in his account of the story of Lot:

Dilytede him in drinke · as þe deuel wolde, [He delighted in drink · as the Devil wished]

Clearly, ‘dilyte’ or delight captures a feeling of pleasure or enjoyment, perhaps also, as in the case of Lot, with a sense of moral caution. The Latin delicere– from which delight derives – is itself built from the devilish Latin laciō meaning lure or deceive. To delight is then no straightforwardly innocent activity, as is similarly evident in Chaucer’s early use of the term in his C14th poems Troilus & Criseyde and the lesser-known Anelida & Arcite – each, in their own ways, tragic stories of unrequited love. For poor Anelida we read:

The kynde of mannes herte is to delyte In thing that straunge is, also God me save! For what he may not gete, that wolde he have.

It would appear that the nature of ‘mannes’ – or at least Arcite’s – heart is then to delight in that which is held back, to desire what one may not have.

For the amateur or dilettante – the one who loves someone or something – that which is held back from their affections is professional status, particularly within the context of the arts. As both words enter the English language during the first half of the C18th they do so in a context of rapid economic growth and proto-professionalisation. A need emerges therefore to make stronger distinctions between those who are and aren’t paid for their labour, whether one is pursuing their art (writing, painting, acting, &c.) for enjoyment or remuneration. In a late C19th report in the Pall Mall Gazette, a day’s court proceedings makes this question explicit:

The judge: Was this an amateur company?—Yes; they took money out of it.—The judge: Oh, then, I don't call that amateur.

Again, dilettante is used in similar cases, however with less explicitly commercial connotations; in the same C19th period John Ruskin – the much famed writer, art-critic and protean socialist philosopher – wrote of the work of poet (and banker), Samuel Rogers:

Rogers was a mere dilettante, who felt no difference between landing where Tell leaped ashore, or standing where ‘St. Preux has stood’.

The story of these ‘mere’ dilettantes is, however, more complex than the originary ‘deceit’ concealed in the word’s etymology. Somewhat unusually, the history of the term begins definitively and intentionally, with the founding, in London, of the The Society of Dilettanti – as the group wrote in a 1769 preface to a book on Ionian Antiquities:

In the year 1734 some gentlemen who had travelled in Italy, desirous of encouraging at home a taste for those objects which had contributed to their entertainment abroad, formed themselves into a society under the name of the Dilettanti.

The purpose of this aristocratic society – and the rationale for its naming – was derived from the etymology described above: to delight in the antiquities their travels to Italy had exposed them to, their motto – 'seria ludo' – encouraging the members to treat serious matters in a playful spirit. It is clear how this spirit would irk those whose approach to such studies bent staid and consequently build a reputation of amateurism – as Horace Walpole wrote in 1743:

...a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk…

Drunk or not, members of the group were nevertheless central in the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts and – while undoubtedly patrician – presented a mode of artistic intellectual development that differed (or would eventually help distinguish) from bourgeois ‘professional’ values. In his review of Tim Hilton’s 1985 biography of Ruskin, Raymond Williams writes:

Thus the gentleman amateur, the dilettante patron – and among these some very original writers and artists – were at a pivotal moment in English culture: launched and supported by bourgeois trade but not yet flattened into professional and business routines and conformities. There is irony in the fact that Ruskin – like Morris, the son of a wealthy bourgeois – should become a central figure in the rejection of mainline bourgeois values. But this was not, as it sometimes was later, a matter of revolt against parents: it was, by what is only an apparent paradox, what their bourgeois parents had in some ways prepared them for…

Perhaps, then we owe the dilettante a second chance – not only as marker of a sensibility which might serve to instruct us against the increasingly destructive professionalisation of the arts (and its surrounding discourse); but also as a more radical, paradoxical antecedent to the idea of a society (a whole society) free from alienated labour tout court.

HULKS are today thought of in popular culture as large, green, angry people. The Incredible Hulk, famously conceptualised by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1962 for Marvel Comics, took its name from The Heap, an earlier swamp or ‘muck-monster’ which itself first appeared in an Airboy comic from 1942. The ‘true’ etymology of this word hulk has, therefore, little relation with being green – whether through radiation or swamp-based life – but much, in fact, to do with being large, unwieldy and, as we will see, if not angry, then angering.

The origin of the noun ‘hulk’ can be drawn via a number of speculative sources; an early example emerging from the Ancient Greek ὁλκάς (holkás), meaning a cargo ship, or any ship used for trading. Through this sense we see a diffusion of terms spread within Western European languages: holcho (transport ship, barge) in Old High German, hulke in Old Dutch, holk or hylke (wooden barrel) in dialectal Norwegian and hulc (light, fast ship) in Old English. A secondary sense is developed as a variation of the Middle English word holk meaning to dig up, excavate or hollow out (leading to a hulk as the resulting hole); and a third, perhaps cognate between these, from the Old English hulc, meaning a hut or hovel. This last sense can be read (as hulce) in the Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, prepared around the turn of the first millennium by Ælfric of Eynsham:

"… cwæđ đæt he wolde genealæcan his hulce gif he mihte." "… [the leper] said that he wished to reach his hut, if he could"

However, it is the initial sense of a hulc as a fast, light ship which, in Middle English swells into hulke, meaning a large ship of burden, that becomes most prevalent over the course of the 2nd millennium. As evidence of this growing size we can read how – far from its humble C11th Latin translation as liburna (meaning a kind of light boat) – in 1480, william caxton, in his Cronycles of Englond writes:

"And than the kyng heryng of many eemyes vpon the see, that is to say, grete hulkes, galeyes and shippes, that weren come to destroye his nauye…"

And, following this, a century later – in 1589 – richard hakluyt, in his Principall Navigations... of the English Nation:

"Two Hulkes of Dantzick, the one..a shippe of 400. tunnes."

These hulks appear then to grow five-fold over the course of the next century. In 1670 guillaume girard writes in his History of... the Duke of Espernon:

"One might..have call'd these prodigious Hulks (which were each of them of two thousand Tun) floating Cities, rather than Ships."

Expanding not only in size, but also in uses, during the C17th we see figurative senses of hulk develop, transferring the now bulky & unwieldy characteristics of a ‘floating city’ onto other objects and, indeed, people. In 1660, through the posthumous writing of bishop, satirist and moralist joseph hall, we can see how:

"…the hulck of a tall Brabanter, behinde whom I stood in a corner of the Street shadowed me from notice."

Similarly, during this period, alongside these vague metaphoric uses, we also see more specific nautical terms arise. For example, in the early 1630’s we can read of reference to the hulke of a ship (rather than a hulk as a ship), which means to specify the vessel’s hull; and, in a more common framing, the body of a dismantled ship – it’s husk perhaps – as its hulk. For example, sir francis drake’s galleon – which was moored as a kind of public exhibition for around 70 years – became a common sight for Londoners such as charles cotton, who in 1681 wrote:

"Of which a noble Monument we find, His Royal Chariot left, it seems, behind; Whose wheels and body moor'd up with a Chain, Like Drake's old Hulk at Deptford, still remain."

Such hulks, moor’d on the Thames and elsewhere, were used not only as monuments however, but also store-vessels, and, eventually, prisons. Along with the expansion of the British Empire throughout the C18th came the development of penal colonies and the common practice of deportation as a form of punishment. Hulks were therefore used as waiting areas for convicts before deportation to the Americas.

In 1776 however, as the American Revolution made transportation of prisoners to the colonies and plantations impossible, parliament passed the Criminal Law Act (known colloquially as the Hulks Act) which formalised such defunct ships as semi-permanent prison houses. Back to their Old English roots, the hulks became hovels once again, home to a swelling criminal population, and, despite much contestation (and such legislation being introduced on a temporary basis), were in use for 80 years after the passing of the bill. Reflecting on this period in 1887, a columnist at the Times writes:

"Prison life..was very unlike what it now is; ..the hulks were sinks of iniquity."

Indeed, both tales and realities of death, disease and despair plagued the hulks and their inhabitants – convicts who were forced into dredging the Thames during the day and shackled among rats at night.

These prisoners were considered ‘civilly dead’ – having often been sentenced to death – and were described by then-home-secretary robert peel as having “no legal rights whatever”. Today, one hears echoes of this period in the words of our present home secretary suella braverman, who in 2023 spoke of asylum seekers and migrants entering the country via ‘illegal’ crossings as possessing “heightened levels of criminality”. It follows then that she would be the one to oversee the reintroduction of disused cruise-ships, barges, and other hulks as offshore detention centres.

When faced with such Dickensian policies, where better to look for petitions than the accounts of C19th convicts? James Hardy Vaux, a prisoner aboard the Retribution in 1810 wrote of the guards who maintained these conditions as:

"…wretches devoid of feeling; ignorant in the extreme, brutal by nature, and rendered tyrannical and cruel by the consciousness of the power they posses."

One might say the same for our ministers.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

Towards a Minor Etymology: Counter-mapping the Immaterial Violence of Financialization – an essay for the Masters module Counter-mapping the Politics of Space supervised by Dr David L Martin

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0. Introduction

In this essay I will ask two interrelated questions: What is at stake in the production of language? and What is at stake in the language of production?

The first question seeks to identify a framework for identifying and discussing the ways in which language acts as a political and perhaps even a material force in the world. Production here is meant in two senses, both the singular act of speech (the production of a word or phrase) and also the production of a shared communicative, or non-communicative, system which changes over time (such as the English language). To do this I will examine the work of key 20th Century philosophers such as Saussure, Chomsky, Deleuze & Guattari, and Foucault, as well as exploring their particular influence on the linguist Jean-Jacques Lecercle.

The second question seeks to mobilise this understanding of language within a specific domain: finance. In this question ‘production’ takes on an economic sense, with a focus on how language is enlisted in processes of financialisation. Exploring a ‘minor,’ ‘rhizomatic’ history of the term currency, I hope to demonstrate both: how etymology can be used as a methodology for creating counternarratives or countermaps of historical and contemporary political issues; and, more specifically, how processes of financialisation serve to further instrumentalise the role of language in social, political and economic life.

1. What is at stake in the production of language?

a. order-words, rhizomes & major languages

For post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari “[language] is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (1987, p. 88). Language is not so much a direct means of transmitting information or facilitating communication (which a conventional linguistic understanding might articulate), as an indirect mode of creating order and exerting force. In their pragmatic theory of linguistics – building on work from J. L. Austin (1962) and William Labov – Deleuze & Guattari conceive the order-word ¹ as the ‘elementary unit’ of this kind of language (1987, p. 88). In simple terms, “... for a pragmatics of the order-word, what is said is subordinate in importance to, and entirely dependent on, what is being done in saying it” (McClure, 2001, p. 95). In Austin we might think of this as correlative to the illocutionary act, “i.e. [the] performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something” (Austin, 1962, p. 99). Think of the phrases ‘I do’ or ‘You are sentenced…’ For Deleuze & Guattari order-words define this immanent relation between statements and acts – otherwise called implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions ² – in particular, acts that are linked to statements by social obligation (1987, p. 91). In this way order-words take form not only in commands but also questions, promises and even the structure of grammar itself, they write: “[a] rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker” (1987, p. 88).³

This approach differs from the structural linguistics of Saussure and the scientific linguistics of Chomsky, against whom Deleuze in particular is opposed. These linguistic approaches focus not so much on the material effects of speech as the syntactic rationalisation or structuration of a fixed langue (in Saussure) or competence (in Chomsky) – such models are established so as to render language a properly scientific object of study which can then be used to make claims on the ‘constant, ideal truth’ of language or, perhaps more provocatively, the mind (Grisham, 1991).⁴ In contrast Deleuze & Guattari are less interested in the question of what language is than in what cases, where, when and how language functions (Grisham, 1991, p. 44) – their criticism of such linguistic models lies in a failure to “[connect] a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field” (1987, p. 6). It is in this sense that theirs is a pragmatic understanding of language – a term usually reserved for that which resides outside linguistic study – their interest lies in the position of language in a relation of power rather than a system of representation or signification; in what precedes the linguists work or remains once they are done (Lecercle, 1990; Grisham, 1991). ⁵

Insofar as Deleuze & Guattari define language at all, they do so as “a map, not a tracing” (1987, p. 89). For them, the concept of a map relates to “performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’...” a term, again, borrowed from Chomskyan linguistics (1987, p. 12). In line with their critique of structural or scientific linguistics outlined above, the tracing is a tool which seeks to organise, stabilise, and neutralise radical potentialities (or multiplicities) along axes of significance and subjectification, (1987, p. 13) most often through the arborescent image of the root or tree [fig.1]. We can think of this as concomitant with Foucault’s concept of the order of discourse, ⁶ through which every society seeks to control, select, organise and redistribute the production of discourse in order to “ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality” (1971, p. 52).

Figure 1. A tree diagram for Chomsky's 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously'.

Figure 2. A diagram of a rhizomatic root structure

The performativity of the map is, unsurprisingly, counterposed to the fixity of the tracing. In line with the ‘formidable materiality’ of discourse, this language-map is “entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (1987, p. 12) and it forms this contact through the image of the rhizome (as opposed to the root of the tracing) [fig 2.]. The rhizome) is an important image of thought in Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, and provides a dynamic (if somewhat abstract) structure for understanding the nonlinear and networked nature of language and its ongoing formation within both micro- and macro-political structures of power.

A fundamental characteristic of the rhizome as an organisational principle – and of the map which it produces – is its openness and generativity, the multiple, proliferating entryways through which one can both enter and take flight. In this way, the map of language(s) supersedes the tracing(s) of linguistics; the latter being always only a subset of the former, a way of blocking certain entryways and producing specific impasses.⁷ And yet, it is these tracings that constitute the dominant orders of discourse, that codify the order-words of a major language – the acceptable or proper language of scientific reason, of linguistics, of the judiciary, the academy, the psychoanalyst's couch or the economy.

b. subjectification, violence & the remainder

It is through these blockages, in its major or reterritorializing mode that “language is involved in producing subjectifications” (Grisham, 1991, p. 51). In the same way that the tracing produces a fixed image of the map, practices of subjectification produce fixed subjectivities within the ‘rhizome of the unconscious’. Useful within this understanding is Foucault’s concept of power, construed not as the direct application of force, but instead as the force of indirect action – power which “acts upon an action” (Foucault, 1982, p. 789) – which has the ability to transform individuals into subjects.⁸ This form of power permeates daily life, it is the ‘conduct of conduct’ that determines one’s position within society, one’s discipline, one’s language and, ultimately, one’s obedience to that which one is subject (the state apparatuses of Althusser (1970), for example).

It is precisely this form of power that is invested in the order-word – “the word or phrase that arranges social bodies and demands obedience” (Grisham, 1991, p. 46). The phrasal order-word, ‘I sentence you…’ is an extreme example of the incorporeal transformations that are afforded by such linguistic power; in this case no-one need move, nor anything else happen, for the body of the accused to morph into the body of the convict (Grisham, 1991, p. 45). However, this force of language is inscribed into even the most banal conversations, as Lecercle makes clear in his writing on the subject: “I fight with words in order to compel my opponent to recognize me and to adopt the image of myself I wish to impose on him. [...] One becomes a subject by acquiring a linguistic place and imposing it on others” (1990, pp. 252–257).

Lecercle understands this mechanism within language as part of his broader ‘rag-bag’ theory of the remainder. The remainder is a useful term as it brings much of what we have already outlined together under a single conceptual framework; coined from its aim to bring that which remains left out of modern linguistic theory into an account of language, it positions itself as a rhizomatic ‘frontier’ between language and the world (1990, p. 229). The remainder therefore works to account for forms of subjectification enabled by language, for the violence, functionality and materiality of language, in a way that structural or scientific linguistics cannot.

Within the framework of the remainder, if language can be rendered an object of study at all, it is only as an essentially ‘historical object’⁹ (1990, p. 110) – the remainder is a rhizome, a map which constitutes past social contradictions and struggles within language and anticipates future ones; it is, as Lecercle says, “the part of language which conserves the past” (1990, pp. 182–183). What it means to construe a ‘linguistic place’ (or to have one constructed on one’s behalf) is then also a sociohistorical activity, and one which is therefore necessarily collective or pre-individual.¹⁰

Here we find a redetermination of the phrase, attributed to Lacan, that ‘language speaks the subject’, that “...when the subject speaks, it is always also, or always-already, language that speaks” (Lecercle, 1990, p. 103). It is in this sense that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the order-word is characterised partly by its redundancy; “the manner in which language is repeated throughout the social field, such that it is without origin in individual minds” (Bryant, 2011; 1987, p. 97). Lecercle takes this idea up within the remainder, most clearly in his analysis of how processes of linguistic change necessarily mythologize and anonymize those who coin terms or phrases (1990, p. 70). Taken to its extreme it is such processes of repetition and anonymisation that begin, for Deleuze and Guattari at least, to undo the subject entirely (1983, p. 18, 1987, p. 151).¹¹ Instead we are left with collective assemblages of enunciation¹² (the shared, pragmatic language of order-words) which command machinic assemblages of bodies (such as that of the accused-convict).

While we do not necessarily need to go so far in our claims, this intervention is useful in highlighting the instability of language's role in processes of subjectification: as a historical process enacted and contested in the present, both synchronic and diachronic; at once individual and collective; ‘immaterially material’. As evidenced in both the case of the accused-convict and the anonymous-coiner, the processes which establish one's name may just as easily render one anonymous.

c. minor languages, pass-words & levelution

This may seem a pessimistic account of language, but it hinges on a profound ambivalence already present in Deleuze and Guattari’s initial account of the order-word (McClure, 2001, p. 129). As we have seen, when used in the service of a major language (that is to say, a collective assemblage of enunciation geared towards standardisation, significance and subjectification) order-words become a means of effecting incorporeal transformations as a kind of ‘little death sentence’ or judgement, an impasse.¹³ However, major languages imply a minor to which they are counterpart; such minor languages are not an opposed category of language, but rather the same language perceived from a different point of view – not via the universalising gaze of the grammarian but rather from within the experimental social contexts that gives rise to a language’s continuous variation (McClure, 2001, p. 191). Together they constitute a ‘continuum of dialects’, co-located by the relations of force held between them (Lecercle, 1990, p. 186).

It is from within such minor contexts that order-words may become pass-words; a means of passage, of flight, from the imposed tracing of a major language into the vaster rhizome of the remainder. For Deleuze and Guattari the capacities of all words are therefore twofold – on the one hand a composition of order, on the other a component of passage (1987, p. 128). The force of the former is derived from its desire for striation, subjectification or reterritorialization (as outlined above) whereas that of the latter is formed in its desire for corruption, the “inclusive disjunction of contrary instances and impulses” (McClure, 2001, p. 128).

Lecercle speaks at length about corruption, adopting this technical linguistic term into his writing on the remainder. It is this fact of corruption which reveals the essentially historical character of language, the ‘clash’ between synchronic and diachronic accounts of language renders the remainder that “part of language [which] conserves the past, witnesses to its struggles, and carries them on in the present”¹⁴ (Lecercle, 1990, pp. 182–183). Here repressive processes of signification and subjectification can be disrupted, corrupted and disobeyed (Virno, 2004, pp. 70–71); new forms of autonomy and metamorphosis emerge, and possibilities of resistance within language appear: “...the password breaks open both words and things, by being both word and thing, function and matter, itself…” (McClure, 2001, p. 207). Not a repetition of the same, but a repetition of difference. (Deleuze, 1968)

It is in this sense that slogans perform their material role. Lecercle makes an example of the C19th Luddite slogan: ‘Long live the levelution!’¹⁵ as a punning corruption of ‘revolution’ that – in addition to its alliterative memorability – “enables the militant Luddite to interpret new political ideas of the French revolution in terms of the older native tradition of the Levellers [incorporating] the two into a new political construct” (1990, p. 82). Both features, it should be said – paronomasia and etymology – remain unintelligible to the quasi-scientific linguistics of a major language.

Etymology then, as the “mirror-image” of coinages such as ‘levelution’ (Lecercle, 1990, p. 91), may therefore be suggested as a methodology for building resistance – counter-maps and counter-narratives – to forms of subjugation found within a major language. A kind of anticipatory exercise which captures the historicity of language as a way of “reappropriating, on behalf of the oppressed, the pristine meanings the oppressors are concealing from them” (Lecercle, 1990, p. 198).

However, the etymology of the remainder is specific in its recognition that “...the essential characteristic of words is not their truth, but their force.” (Lecercle, 1990, p. 199) A rhizomatic approach to etymological analysis would therefore be one that incorporates scientific or ‘major’ narratives as one among many, seeking also the minor contexts, myths, misnomers and mondegreens that serve to multiply and corrupt as inclusive disjunctions. Lecercle highlights how etymologies and terminological origin stories tend to proliferate over time: why ask which is true when we can look for the truth in each, even if it is that most unscientific truth, the truth of desire? (Lecercle, 1990, p. 261) A minor etymology would therefore be one concerned “not [with] the endless analysis of words, but knowledge of the world, as inscribed in words” (Lecercle, 1990, p. 192); in the order-words which make the world, and the pass-words to which they correspond and may be found to remake it.

In their essay on minor literatures Deleuze and Guattari criticise the desire of literary movements (even very small ones) “to fill a major language function, to offer their services as the language of the state, the official tongue” (1983, p. 27). They call on us to instead fashion the opposite dream, ‘to create a becoming-minor’, to politicise and collectivise, to stay with the rhizome and extend it.

I therefore propose an etymology not of the tracing, but of the map, the rhizome, the remainder – a counter-etymology (or etymology as counter-narrative) situated on the frontier of language as it reaches towards the extra-linguistic, and mixes with the external world (Lecercle, 1990, p. 200): a minor etymology.

d. stakes, minor etymology & resistance

Through this first question I hope to have outlined the stakes involved in any production of language – whether an individual utterance, or the legalese of state governance – on the micro- or macro-political level. Far from the received ideas of structural or scientific linguistics, we have found language to be an intensely political and historical object, not just in its use, but in its ontological composition. Language is, to use Lecercle’s turn-of-phrase, violent:

“If there is such a thing as violence in language, the term must be taken literally – not the violence of symbol, but the violence of intervention, of an event the immateriality of which does not prevent it from having material effects, effects not of metaphor but of metamorphosis.” (Lecercle, 1990, p. 227)

To arrive at such an understanding we first conceptualised language not as a communicative medium to be reconstructed scientifically, but rather a power-relation that performs rhizomatically. This power is derived from forms of overcoding or subjectification that are enacted through the major languages of scientific, cultural, economic and political institutions. However, this process of subjectification is unstable, anonymising and historically contingent, opening up the possibility for minor languages which can serve as forces of corruption and resistance. These minor languages make use of processes that sit outside of traditional understandings of linguistics – what Lecercle calls the remainder or remainder-work – such as paronomasia, sloganeering, multiple analysis and folk etymology. The concept of a minor etymology has therefore been proposed as a means of furthering this form of resistance; using the productive, historicizing methods of amateur or ‘folk-etymology’ – with its divergent, generative tendencies – as a means of corrupting major social and linguistic formations in an explicitly political project of counter-mapping and counter-narrativization.

For Foucault, it is from within the immaterial materiality of life – “as a historical production, within the very meshes of power” – that resistance is possible (Revel, 2008, p. 33). A minor etymology may therefore be used as a methodology for both understanding and reifying this immanent potentiality; for, as Deleuze and Guattari write, building the conditions to “set the oppressed character of this tongue against its oppressive character…” (1983, p. 27).

2. What is at stake in the language of production?

a. Mercurius, truth-in-language & currency

In the introduction to his famous Dictionary of the English Language, compiled in 1755, Samuel Johnson writes: “Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, corrupts the language…” (1755). In this next section I wish to show how finance intuits, and is, in a certain sense, constitutive of the theory of language outlined above – a claim which I hope to begin outlining through the minor etymology of a common, yet complex, term: currency.

In his writing on the remainder Lecercle praises The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville – a hugely influential book, written in the early 7th Century – for its ‘folk-etymological’ character. The Etymologies show Isidore’s desire not for “the endless analysis of words, but knowledge of the world, as inscribed in words.” (1990, p. 192) For Lecercle this is characterised above all by dual origins, etymologies which tend to proliferate (1990, p. 193). As such we will make it our point of departure, both a methodological guide and an etymological resource.

In his passage on Gods of the Heathens, Isidore makes an early connection between commercial activity and the faculty of speech when describing the etymological origins of the god Mercury:

“45. Mercury (Mercurius) is translated as “speech,” for Mercury is said to be named as if the word were medius currens (“go-between”), because speech is the go-between for people. [...] 46. He is also said to preside over commerce (merx, gen.mercis), because the medium between dealers and buyers is speech.” (Barney et al., 2010, p. VIII.xi.45-xi.46)

So it is, for Isidore, that the term Mercurius derives from both ‘medius + currens’, translated into English as middle + running, giving us a sense of speech as ‘go-between’;¹⁶ and also its relationship to commerce, from association with the Latin merx meaning merchandise.

Merx is, in its own right, an illuminating term in the etymological history of currency and its connection to language, as it is the relationship between merx (merchandise) and merces (remuneration) that demonstrates both a direct etymological connection to the term commercium as well as the sociohistorical introduction of monetary exchange for services (such as the ‘trading of influence’). The novelty of this development is articulated in Benveniste’s Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society: “The term [merces] denotes quite a new notion, the introduction of money into the relations between men to buy services just as one buys a commodity” (Benveniste, 2016, p. 131).¹⁷

Contemporary philologists have determined that the ‘true’ etymological origin of Mercurius is most likely this latter derivation from merx (Vaan, 2018, p. 376), which for Isidore enters primarily as a point of sociohistorical contextualisation. Such a dual origin is nevertheless doubly crucial for our purposes, as it demonstrates that the false- or folk-etymology (medius + currens) has indeed become, through Isidore, a way of reinforcing an opaque sociohistorical connection, a truth-in-language; and one, in particular, between money and speech: that ‘the medium between dealers and buyers is speech.’¹⁸ It is through such ‘truth’ that we find inscribed a path from Proto-Italic *merk-,¹⁹ via Latin merx, merces and Mercurius to currens and on to current.

The English term current is of Middle English origin, entering the language alongside a litany of Old French words after the Norman conquest of 1066. Cognate with Isidore’s medius currens (go-between), current is first recorded in the 14th Century as an adjective describing a sense of running or flowing (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023) which, by at least the mid 1600’s, morphs into currence from which we get currency.

b. private mints, creditworthiness & instrumentalism

This word currency (sometimes styled currancy) retains this sense of running, flowing and circulation, but also begins to recover the more explicit monetary and financialised contexts embedded in its history. In a 17th Century exchange of letters with the Lord Bishop of Worcester, John Locke articulates this relationship in a passage describing the process of coining words through the metaphor of the Mint:

“When the dazling Metaphor of the Mint and new mill'd Words, &c. (which mightily, as it seems, delighted your Lordship when you were writing that Paragraph) will give you leave to consider this matter plainly as it is, you will find, that the Coining of Mony in publickly authoriz'd Mints, affords no manner of Argument against private Mens medling in the introducing new, or changing the signification of old Words; every one of which alterations always has its rise from some private Mint. The Case in short is this, Mony by vertue of the Stamp, received in the publick Mint, which vouches its intrinsick Worth, has authority to pass. This use of the publick Stamp would be lost, if private Men were suffer'd to offer Mony stamp'd by themselves: On the contrary, Words are offer'd to the Publick by every private Man, Coined in his private Mint, as he pleases; but 'tis the receiving of them by others, their very passing, that gives them their Authority and Currancy, and not the Mint they come out of.” (Locke, 1699, pp. 129–130)

For Locke, words (and particularly new words), both like and unlike money, derive their authority and currency from their ‘very passing’, from their sociopolitical qualities within the public sphere, rather than their relationship to an authoritative source.²⁰ However, as Lecercle might be keen to point out, the Mint is not an innocent metaphor in this passage, but instead a kind (or force) of metamorphosis.

In 1645, a contemporary of Locke – John Evelyn – provides an early example of a confluence or metamorphosis between currency as, on the one hand, ‘circulation’ or ‘esteem’, and on the other, a ‘paper stamped and passing for money’ (Johnson, 1755) with the introduction of the term ‘letter of credit’ (1901, p. 183).²¹ Credit, for the century prior to 1645, meant primarily ‘to believe’ and a ‘letter of credit’ in turn a ‘credential’, or ‘character reference’. (Hughes, 1988, p. 81) In the materialisation of a ‘letter of credit’ – which, in Evelyn’s case, guarantees international payments and withdrawals as a kind of loan – we can see how ‘private men’ are in fact ‘suffer'd to offer money stamped by themselves’, staked on their reputation.

This new instrument or currency of globalised (and globalising) trade exemplifies the manner in which processes of subjectification become bound up with processes of financialisation within language; both the discursive language of reputations and the technical, material language of promissory notes. To use Deleuze & Guattari’s terminology, we might say the order-word becomes increasingly embedded in currency – materially and functionally – especially as that currency becomes increasingly abstract.

In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, completed in 1755, we see, perhaps for the first time in writing, a definition of currency which fits into this picture: “The papers stamped in the English colonies by authority, and passing for money.” This point is concretised by Ian Baucom, in his book Spectres of the Atlantic, who argues that during this time the ‘decoupling of public personhood’ from both inherited, landed communities of obligation and the ‘republican practice of virtue’ leads to an “...[increasing attachment] not to the defence of local interests (and the interests of the locale) but to the speculative rise and fall of the value of paper monies…” (Baucom, 2005, p. 56). He shows how – in 18th Century Liverpool in particular – even those without a direct stake in the transatlantic slave trade or ship-building industry, ‘profited amply’ through a secondary market of bills of exchange (2005, pp. 56–62) similar in nature to Evelyn’s letter of credit.

Figure 3. South-Sea Annuities certificate. (Bill of Exchange, 2023)

However, through the expansion of this exchange, “as bills travelled from one hand to another, each succeeding possessor cancelling the name of the previous holder…” he notes that a ‘double economy’ emerges: “an economy of monetary value and an economy of trust whose foundation was credibility…” (2005, p. 64). Just as Walter Benjamin shows how commodity culture is a practical expression of a particular phenomenology of things; Baucom shows how the speculative culture of finance capitalism demands more than a set of accounting protocols, but rather a practice of ‘social reading’ and ‘intersubjective analysis’, a “phenomenology of transactions, promises, character, credibility” (2005, p. 64).

In this account, the primary violence of financialisation can therefore be seen to function isomorphically to the violence of (a major) language; in the re-stratification of social (or, indeed, bare) life through the incorporeal transformations enacted and enunciated by a freshly minted, creditworthy subject. This process takes on its most extreme form in the figure of the slave, the trading of whom underwrites the process which Baucom describes – the violence of “becoming a ‘type’”, a type of nonperson, property or currency (Baucom, 2005, p. 10). By degrees such transformations then extend to the creation of wage-labourers who, as David Graeber points out, primarily “[worked] for those who had access to these higher forms of credit” such as government and mercantile debts which also “circulated as currency” (Graeber, 2011, p. 339). And so, ‘overwriting’ this system from the top, financiers then work to wield this currency of language, or rather, language as currency, among and against one another.

This last point is exemplified in the craze of the South Sea Bubble of 1720 in which traders, buoyed by the coffee-houses supplied by transatlantic winds, capitalised on this new practice of ‘social reading’ to inflate the stock price of the South Sea Company (after being granted a monopoly contract to supply the Spanish Caribbean with slaves) (Graeber, 2011, pp. 346–347) [fig.3]. In capturing the imagination of the creditworthy public the South Sea Company’s stock rose from £170 to £950 only to crash back within the span of seven months, bankrupting thousands and threatening the national economy, despite no significant changes being made in the commercial dealings of the company (Baucom, 2005, p. 92).

In each case we see the anonymising function of the major language of finance actualised through a duplicitous form or force of currency, encountered at the intersection of exchange and esteem. Returning to Locke’s original intervention, we see the distinction between public and private mints, money and words, collapse through such processes of financialisation – even those in such primordial forms.

c. inkhornisms, elocution & countermarks

Returning momentarily to a linguistic perspective, the context for this discussion is relevant as, in the years leading up to Locke’s intervention, the infamous ‘inkhorn’ debate gave rise to various attempts at rationalising the language. Between the 16th – 17th centuries, thousands of neologisms, loan-words and ‘inkhornisms’ were introduced into English [fig.4] as: more rapid forms of printing and distribution gave rise to new translations of classic works; words became ‘borrowed’ into European dialects from colonial encounters; and developments in the ‘new’ sciences gave rise to the need for more specific technical vocabularies. (Hughes, 1988, p. 101)

Figure 4. The growth of vocabulary and related publications 1500–1800 (Hughes, 1988)

As we have seen above, and as De Certeau articulates well, it is during this period that “mastery of language guarantees and isolates a new power, a 'bourgeois' power [...] which can make language (whether rhetorical or mathematical) its instrument of production” (1984, p. 139). Obviously, such an extensive influx of new words threatens to disrupt this power, with new words opening up opportunities of social mobility and struggle for those outside this rapidly ossifying class.

To counter this, participants in the Inkhorn Controversy – men of letters such as Sir John Cheke, Ralph Lever and Edmund Spenser – proposed various measures to purify and simplify the language in its transition from Middle to Modern English. (Hughes, 1988, p. 103) As a consequence of this effort we see an explosion in the production of dictionaries, books of grammar and handbooks of rhetoric in the 18th Century [fig.3], many of these serving to define not only the language, but also “the code governing socioeconomic promotion [which] dominates, regulates, or selects according to its norms all those who do not possess this [particular] mastery of language.” (De Certeau, 1984, p. 139) It is in this sense that Johnson writes of commerce’s ‘corruption’ of the language, as it introduces new words and variability which cannot be contained. However, as can be expected, it is in the ‘minor’ end of such debate that we find resistance to this very explicit project of establishing a currency on which reputation can be traded – the establishment of a ‘major language’ – from two 18th Century contemporaries, the actor Thomas Sheridan and the radical Thomas Spence.

In a characteristically pithy critique of Locke’s account of language, the Irish stage actor and educator, Thomas Sheridan, wrote in 1762 he had “not a little contributed to the confined view which we have of language, in considering it, as made up wholly of words.” (Ulman, 1994, p. 155) What, for Sheridan, Locke and others following him missed out from their account of language were the embodied aspects of speech; emotion and elocution. Prefiguring, in some ways, Lecercle’s claims for the remainder, Sheridan continues, “…the nobler branch of language, which consists of the signs of internal emotions, was untouched by him as foreign to his purpose.” (Ulman, 1994, p. 155)

Inspired by Sheridan’s critique, and the extraordinary popularity of his lectures on elocution (Mahon, 2001; Beal and Gupta, 2023), Thomas Spence created his own dictionary in 1775; the first in English to include a phonetic transcription [fig.5] which was intended to make it easier for the illiterate to learn to read and write (Thomas Spence, 2023). Far from debates of Latin roots and increasingly problematic nationalist arguments over the King’s English (Hughes, 1988, p. 104), Spence focused proactively on harnessing this newly invested power within language, and mobilising it in the interest of the most immiserated members of an increasingly ‘enclosed’ society.

Figure 5. Excerpt from Thomas Spence’s Grand Repository of the English Language (Beal and Gupta, 2023)

Within this etymology however, the radical edge of Spence’s philosophy is captured most strikingly not in his dictionary but in his countermarks [fig.6–9] – in his direct interventions onto the surface of the currency to which he was opposed, and, in turn, the creation of his own. Here again, as with ‘levelution’ we see the force of the slogan materialised – SPENCE’S PLAN AND FULL BELLIES YOU ROGUES – and a collapsing or corruption of the distinctions between meanings within the word currency.

Here, we begin to see how currency catalyses its immanent, minor multiplicities: “SPENCE’S PLAN” becomes a pass-word, not only the catch-phrase for a utopian society predicated on common ownership, but one distributed via a reappropriation of the languages and material cultures such a society seeks to resist.

Figure 6. SPENCE’S PLAN / AND FULL BELLIES YOU ROGUES (Beal and Gupta, 2023)

Figure 7. SMALL FARMS / AND LIBERTY (Beal and Gupta, 2023)

Figure 7. STARVATION / PLENTY (Beal and Gupta, 2023)

Figure 8. OURS / OURS (Beal and Gupta, 2023)

d. conclusion

Above all, through this question, I hope to have begun showing how the work of a ‘minor etymology’ might proceed.

Taking currency as our starting point we have shown how multiple analysis, or folk-etymology, might be used productively to uncover historic truths embedded in language; in this case uncovering not only the historic connection between speech and exchange, but also the nature of that exchange extending beyond commodities into social forms of labour. Proceeding ‘rhizomatically’, we examined the way in which metaphors of ‘coining’ words through either public or private mints prefigured material changes in processes of subjectification at the dawn of modern capitalism. Moving incrementally back and forth in time, we have shown the inclusive disjunctions which constitute currency, and how, in establishing finance as a major language, the violence of language becomes co-constitutive with the violence of financialisation. Lastly, we sought to contextualise this becoming-major of finance through the inkhorn controversy, and identify areas of development within this notion of currency that serve as forms of resistance to finance. This last point shows how minor etymology may need to move away from more-or-less strict linguistic analysis entirely, into analyses of material cultures as well. The guiding thread, the ‘line of flight,’ however, between these vignettes is a focus not so much on the communicative elements of currency (and language more broadly), but instead its socio-political force.

Secondly, I hope to have shown how repressive processes of subjectification facilitated by and within language are worsened through the continued development of financialization. While the counter-narrative presented above has extended only so far as the late 18th Century, these problems have continued unabated into the 21st. In his book A Grammar of the Multitude, Paulo Virno highlights the effects of a growing importance of language in contemporary work and life, writing that “contemporary production becomes ‘virtuosic’ (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such” (2004, p. 56); that, today, capitalist production increasingly integrates the “exploitation of the very faculty of language” (2004, p. 68) which contributes to an ever-greater part of the productive process. The task of the minor etymology has thus become more important than ever, to fashion ‘the opposite dream’, ‘to create a becoming-minor’, to politicise and collectivise, to stay with the rhizome and extend it.

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Footnotes

1. In the original French Deleuze & Guattari use Mot d’ordre, which can also be translated as slogan or password (in a similar sense to the English militaristic watchword)which we will see later. ↩

2. “‘I sentence you to…’ For Deleuze and Guattari, this is a speech act; as a performative statement, it accomplishes the act by speaking. But it does not do so because it refers to other statements or external acts; it does so because it is socially and politically empowered by them. It is empowered by what Oswald Ducrot has called ‘implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions,’ in this case, those relating to a whole juridical apparatus that distributes subjectifications, meeting in the figure of the judge.” (Grisham, 1991, p. 45) ↩

3. Here we might think of the moralization of status words in Middle English, as discussed by Geoffrey Hughes; where terms of address or rank such as noble, gentle, frank, free and liberal or conversely, villain, knave or churl become terms of moral conduct. (Hughes, 1988, pp. 44–45) ↩

4. See also the Will to Truth in Foucault (1971) ↩

5. The effect of this change in emphasis is no more evident than in discussions on the field of linguistics itself. As Deleuze & Guattari write, the “scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language…” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 117); "linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal pragmatics involving its own factors.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 106) ↩

6. As we will see later, orders of discourse are achieved through the use of order-words – the enunciation of performative statements that indirectly codify the proper terms of reference (i.e. in the academy, or the economy), or standard forms of language (i.e. Standard English). ↩

7. As Lecercle says: “...the rules of grammar are to be thought of not in terms of the laws of the physical universe, but rather in terms of frontiers.” (1990, p. 18) ↩

8. Here Foucault is playing on the dual sense of the word ‘subject’ – employing at once the idea of subjectivity (one's conscience, identity or ‘self-knowledge’) and subjugation (to be subject to someone else) – emphasising the constitutive relation between these two meanings. (1982, p. 781) ↩

9. This sense of pre-individuality is well articulated also by Paolo Virno: “Language, however, unlike sensory perception, is a pre-individual sphere within which is rooted the process of individuation [... when] the prevailing relation of production is pre-individual [...] we face also a pre-individual reality which is essentially historical.” (Virno, 2004, p. 77) ↩

10. It is perhaps in this spirit that Deleuze and Guattari open A Thousand Plateaus with the famous lines: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” (1987, p. 1) ↩

11. For a less radical variation see Paolo Virno on Simondon in A Grammar of the Multitude: “The subject is, rather, a composite: ‘I,’ but also ‘one,’ unrepeatable uniqueness, but also anonymous universality.” (2004, p. 78) For a more radical one, see Andrew Culp on the concept of ‘Un-becoming’ (2016, pp. 26–28) ↩

12. Or, in Lecercle’s translation, a collective arrangement of utterance. ↩

13. “Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 89) ↩

14. For Lecercle, borrowing again from Deleuze and Guattari, this reveals the a-synchronic temporality of language – the inextricable mix of variation and continuation that constitutes language. (Lecercle, 1990, p. 186) ↩

15. The ‘violence of language’ goes both ways; see also, in ​​The Making of the English Working Class: “The Levelution is begun, / So I'll go home and get my gun, / And shoot the Duke of Wellington.” Belper street-song (Thompson, 1963) ↩

16. This interpretation is strengthened in Isidore’s original text by a false-etymology between the Greek Ἑρμῆς (for the Greek god Hermes, to whom Mercury is a Roman counterpart) and ἑρμηνεία (meaning interpretation) not quoted above. (Barney et al., 2010, p. VIII.xi.45-xi.46) ↩

17. Benviniste, who originates this connection, provides some similarly relevant ideas of what such services may have been: “What merces remunerates is not the result as such of a working man’s labor, but the sweat of his brow, the soldier’s service in war, the skill of a lawyer and furthermore, in public life, the intervention of a politician, what one would call a trading of influence.” (Benveniste, 2016, p. 130) ↩

18. It seems likely to me that Isidore takes this understanding from book VII of St Augustine’s ‘City of God’ – written in the 5th Century – which bears a strikingly similar resemblance: “But perhaps speech itself is called ‘Mercury,’ as the explanation of his name seems to show. For he is said to have been named Mercury as being a middle courier (medius currens), because speech runs like a courier between men. Hence he is called Hermes in Greek, since speech, or interpretation, which certainly belongs to speech, is called hermeneia. Hence also he is in charge of trade, since between sellers and buyers speech occurs as a medium. The wings on his head and feet mean that speech flies through the air like a bird. He is called a messenger, since language is the messenger that proclaims our thoughts. If therefore Mercury is speech itself, by their own admission he is no god.” (Augustine, 1963, p. 412) ↩

19. Proto-Italic. *merk- 'trade, exchange'. All derived from a stem *merk- also found in Faliscan and Oscan. The god Mercurius was probably the god of exchange. (Vaan, 2018, p. 376) ↩

20. Here we see, in miniature, a debate which continues to play out within economics between metallist and chartalist accounts of monetary value. ↩

21. “We went hence from Leghorn, by coach, where I took up ninety crowns for the rest of my journey, with letters of credit for Venice, after I had sufficiently complained of my defeat of correspondence at Rome.” ↩

LIME-FINGERED as a phrase, is committed to print in C16th England – already suspicious enough by today’s standards it is defined in the oed as given to pilfering or thievish propensities. However, before this, in the Old English of the C8th, lime, lim, lyme, or lym was a neutral term used for any adhesive substance such as cement, glue or paste. In Ælfric's Grammar, the oldest surviving textbook written in English, we have:

"Swaswa lim gefæstnað fel to sumum …" "[So that lime fastens many to some …]"

This use of the word may well be a generalisation of a cognate term loam, which – although archaic now – was a common Old English word for clay or earth. As an aside, it is through this term that we often read of clay as the base material of the human body – such as in shakespeare’s Richard II:

"And I resign my gage. My dear dear lord, The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation; that away, Men are but gilded loam or painted clay."

Shakespeare, given to archaisms, was however also aware of the more current lime, meaning to cement, as is present (albeit here with bloud) in his History of Henrie the Fourth of 1594:

"I will not ruinate my fathers house, Who gaue his bloud to lime the stones togither."

Whence then comes the theivish propensities of such lime and its anthropomorphisation in lime-fingered? It is perhaps interesting to speculate that the supposed sticky, base-material of anthropos (a miraculous birth present in many faiths and cultures) lends one to a deceitful or pilfering nature – but, in reality, the connection most likely arises from the practice of birdliming.

Birdlime – in a noun-verb formulation typical of English – is used to birdlime, it is at once an adhesive material made variously of Holly bark or Mistletoe berries and the practice of trapping birds using this sticky substance. An ancient material practice common across the world, it has been passed down most often by word-of-mouth; in writing we see the term emerge in the C15th – common enough to be used as a metaphor – as in gilbertus anglicus’ Pharmaceutical Writings:

"Þe watir þat flowiþ on nyȝtis-tyme fro þe yȝen is viscouse as bridlym."

In recent years, legislators – particularly in the eu – have sought to ban this practice. In 2021 the ecj deemed birdliming illegal in the eu, despite a 2020 ruling in France which saw chasse à la glu as compatible with the eu Birds Directive. A surprise for anglophones perhaps, as Annex ix of the directive – which is, in fact, the oldest piece of eu environmental legislation (written in 1979) – specifically prohibits ‘snares, limes and hooks’ as a means for “the large-scale or non-selective capture or killing of birds...”

Throughout even its historic use birdliming appears to have taken on unsavoury connotations, in his 1934 book Biology for Everyman Scottish naturalist john a. thomson disparaged such viscid glue in the strongest possible terms:

"The drying remains of the viscid glue (used in making that atrocity called ‘bird-lime’) draw the [mistletoe] seed close to the bark."

Working backwards, such negative readings are strengthened in the cockney-rhyming slang of Victorian London, in which Bird Lime translates to Time – as in to do time in prison – as identified by ducange anglicus in his Vulgar Tongue of 1857. This sense was in fact so widespread that it shortened simply to do bird, adding to the criminal aviary of jailbirds, dicky-birds, skipper-birds, &c.

Earlier than this still – again in the Middle English of the C15th – figurative uses of the term give the powerful sense of an ability to ensnare without chance of escape, such as that most terrifying force of fleshly love:

"Ho so wille not be snacled with such bridlyme of flesshly loues, lete him lif in fredom of chastite."

These unfavourably sticky senses, materials and practices then coalesce to give us the bizarre phrase ‘to have fingers made of lime-twigs’ – presumably a consequence of liming – present in writing from 1590 at least but well articulated in elizabeth cellier's Malice Defeated of 1680:

"Before he was Seven years of age, his Fingers were such Lime-twigs, that he could not enter into any House but something would stick to them."

So then at last, to our point of departure: we can see clearly how thievish propensities make for lime-fingers. Such a concise configuration is evident in a fascinating C17th sermon given by Deane of Worcester

Joseph Hall, absolving lime-fingred servants of their troublemaking under the chastising rule of a too strict master:

"Let the question bee who is the great make-bate of the world; begin with the family: Who troubles the house? [...] Not carelesse, sloathfull, false, lime-fingred seruants, but the strict master, that obserues and rates, and chastises them; would he hold his hands, and tongue, there would bee peace."

Indeed Mr. Hall! And in similar spirit time appears to have forgiven or at least forgotten the lime-fingered (as is so often the case for words of a supposedly criminal class).

In their stead we are left to make do with either the light-fingers of pickpockets or those more direct inheritors... the sticky-fingers of children, thieves and publishers.

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

INTERCOURSE begins, as is so often the case, as a form of currency. Promiscuous from the start, -course takes on multiple origins: with currĕre from Latin and cors or curs from Middle French, all relating to concepts of running, flow & movement (giving also current or currency today). The prefix inter- adds to this movement a sense of being between, among, amid, or in the midst, borrowed into English via the French entre-. The earliest examples of intercourse in Middle English are then styled -- somewhat obscenely -- as entercourse, to mean communication (particularly of commerce) between countries or locales. In the C16th New Chronicles..., we can see such productive intercourse at play in both language and bysynesse, albeit exclusively with Henry VII's southern neighbours:

"And thys yere was great bysynesse for the entercourse bytwene England and Flaunders. And this yere the kynge of Scottes made sharp warre vppon the marches."¹

This specific, transactional sense of entercourse softens with time, in the C17th coming to refer to any social communication between people or interconnection between things:

"For what needed any such remote Plantations be, as long as they had room enough to live one neer another, and so enjoy that civill entercourse, and mutuall society which the nature of Mankind doth most delight in?" ²

We see this sense also broadening in Milton's Paradise Lost published in 1667, when describing the nourishing exchanges of looks and smiles:

"Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd
Labour, as to debarr us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life."

During this time a second current develops within the term, specifying a communion not betwixt people or things, but rather with the spiritual or unseen. The prolific author Daniel Defoe speculates on this connection in An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions in 1727:

"BUT it does not follow from thence that therefore there are no such Things in Nature; that there is no Intercourse or Communication between the World of Spirits, and the World we live in..."³

Such a 'sweet' and somewhat varied view of intercourse is however soured in the intervening years.

In 1753 An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage is introduced into parliament which legislates proto-Malthusian ideas of population management into law. For the burgeoning and increasingly industrious discipline of political economy the connection between the 'right' kind of marriage, a productive population and its concomitant national wealth is becoming evermore apparent.⁴ The act sought to reduce the incidence of so-called "rash" marriage, to eliminate the "frequency of polygamy" and restrict sex to marriage -- most contentiously by removing legal protections from women in the event of 'fornication'.⁵ From this we arrive at a sense of intercourse not as communion, communing or communication but as a fixed, illicit and indeed illegal activity. Malthus himself introduces this arrangement in his infamous Essay on the Principle of Population in 1803:

"An illicit intercourse between the sexes."

The common framing of intercourse as a sexual act thereafter seeks to moralise the term as variously illicit, promiscuous, and extra-marital. Sexual intercourse, a phrase which also comes into use in the late C18th pairs well with this new-found disfavour, specifying the otherwise 'neutral' or perhaps scientific union between the sexes -- whether they be human or otherwise -- exemplified in this 1753 musing from a (not-insignificantly titled) Essay on Celibacy:

"Man might have been made hermaphroditical, like some of the less perfect animals, as snails and worms, which however have sexual intercourse with one another."⁶

The development of such moralistic and scientific connotations reflect broader changes in the social life of the C19th towards increasingly biopolitical forms of governance. This is not to say that discussion of intercourse becomes 'repressed' (as is often said of the Victorians) -- rather sexuality emerges as the object of a newly revived medical, juridical and governmental interdiscourse. Such professionalised contexts and connotations are retained today in the often quasi-anthropological framing of the term, as in Fisher's 1973 tome Understanding the Female Orgasm:

"Some of the decline in intercourse frequency and responsiveness... may be caused by the... physiological decline of their husbands."⁷

During the late C20th Foucault (whose influence should be felt in this account) notes the irony of the sexual-liberation movement -- arguing that to free oneself from one set of norms means only adopting a different set in their stead, that there is no authentic or natural sexuality to liberate.

Perhaps we are then simply free to choose our influence, or in any case pick our poison. Which form of intercourse to have today -- the narrow or the expansive, scientia sexualis or ars erotica --  that of celibacy and science or that of speech, sex, spirits and smiles?

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This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. 1516-1533 New Cronycles Eng. & Fraunce, p.686 https://archive.org/details/newchroniclesofe00fabyuoft/page/686/mode/2up ↩

2. Peter Heylyn, 1652, COSMOGRAPHIE in foure Bookes Contayning the CHOROGRAPHIE & HISTORIE of the whole WORLD, and all the Principall Kingdomes, Provinces, Seas, and Isles, Thereof. p.9 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A43514.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext ↩

3. Defoe, 1727, p.2 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004843878.0001.000?rgn=main;view=fulltext ↩

4. Bannet, Eve Tavor. "The Marriage Act of 1753: 'A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 3 (1997): 233--54 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30054245?seq=3 ↩

5. ibid. ↩

6. 1753, An essay on celibacy ↩

7. Seymour Fisher, 1973, Understanding the female orgasm ↩

[JOHN REARDON reads]

APOLOGIES are formal notices from people who are unable to attend a meeting. They are noted at the beginning of a meeting and included in what are called ‘Minutes’.

Jack has put this short apology together to help orient himself within the group during his absence over the first few weeks of this class. Jack thinks this is funny, because it is a stereotype of the British to introduce themselves by apologizing.

Jack can’t be here due to work commitments at Camberwell College of Arts, where he teaches as a lecturer in the Design department. He’s been doing this job for a year but has been teaching off-and-on for six.

Despite being his 9–5 job Jack is interested in teaching and the histories of teaching. In particular, the ‘failed’ radical histories within pedagogic practice such as the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College (with their different approaches to interdisciplinary experimentation) as well as the Copenhagen Free University and the Anti-University in London (with their roots in 60’s Situationism and the Anti-Psychiatry movement).

For a few years following 2016 Jack was a member of a group called Evening Class, which he imagines has a similar sensibility to this class here. An alumnus of ‘Designing Politics’, Chris Lacy, was also a member of Evening Class… it’s a small world!

For Jack, Evening Class was an attempt to give himself a collaborative, self-organised postgraduate education along the lines of the ‘radical pedagogies’ he’d read about from the past. During his time there he helped organise public workshops, talks and debates, reading groups, radio broadcasting, performances, walks, and publishing projects. He’s hoping we can do some of this, this term.

A quote from a co-founder of the Anti-university – American psychiatrist Dr Joseph Berke – that has stuck with him is:

“In the process of making an institution we deinstitutionalised ourselves”.¹

This is really his experience of the concept of the Group Project, which this class – now ‘Designing Politics’ – used to be called, and which Evening Class is an example of.

[Pause, see if people are following]

More recently Jack has turned to publishing projects which express different research interests. The two books I have here…

[Holds up books]

…he gave to us yesterday to share with you. One of them is a Lexicon, called the Geofinancial Lexicon. This book is a kind of thought experiment around what his collaborator, Sami Hammana, calls the ‘literary convergence of earth- and financial-systems’. It takes its cue from the surprising number of financial terms that reference the natural world. For example, protagonists such as ‘Bulls’, ‘Bears’, ‘Doves’, and ‘Hawks’, and phenomena such as the ‘iceberg order’, ‘dead cat bounce’ and ‘vampire squid’. The idea is to think about the relationship between finance and the climate-crisis or Anthropocene through these terms. This is a general interest of Jack’s, and he would be keen to explore it in the group.

When I first saw this book yesterday, I mentioned to Jack that I personally liked the idea of reading these definitions performatively, for example…

[JOHN reads from the book, perhaps the entries for ‘DEAD CAT BOUNCE’ & ‘BEAR’]

Jack is also interested more generally in the process of archiving, curating, and categorizing technical knowledge(s) like this, and publishing it as a kind of tool people can go on to use themselves…

[Pause, some exasperation]

What’s happening here is Jack is trying to be clever and draw attention to the politics of the teaching space in his absence… he thinks that’s part of what this class is about. He thinks it’s interesting that I, JOHN, am teaching the class but am also being used as a stooge, reading an apology on behalf of a student, and giving over this ‘power’ to him despite his absence.

[To MICHAEL]

He’s thinking about The Ignorant Schoolmaster Michael, which you mentioned at the induction last week… it’s a bit heavy handed I’ll admit.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 20th Century Rancière blends his own voice with that of 18th Cenury educator Joseph Jacotot. In many cases throughout the book it’s not really clear who is talking. Rancière writes the book in this way as part of a general rejection of explication, a kind of pedagogic practice which assumes an inequality between the writer and reader, or the teacher and the student.

Playing with language – and the politics of language – is something that Jack is obviously interested in, in his work.

[Holds up ENTROPIA VOLUME 2 (the smaller one)]

For this second, grey book he has produced an artificially intelligent text generator that has been trained on the art criticism of another collaborator Habib William Kherbek based between London and Berlin. The writing it generates mimics the styles and concerns of Kherbek through a potentially infinite series of ‘fake’ art reviews. These reviews are often absurd, but Jack thinks it’s interesting to examine the way we can give meaning to what is ultimately a set of words stylistically or statistically arranged.

For example, we can read a review about a fictional Serpentine Pavilion…

[JOHN reads ‘THE SERPENTINE PAVILLION’, p.79]

…and reading this, we can think again about who is speaking. Is it Kherbek as an author? Is it Jack as a designer or programmer? The program or A.I. itself? Is it me – JOHN – in this room? Or is it an art world which enforces this kind of language – what some have called International Art English – as a standard for discussion? Similarly to the lexicon, this project becomes a way of exploring the technical language and infrastructure of a global system.

[Pause]

In any case, Jack can make books and websites and is interested in group experiences like ‘Designing Politics’. In what we can do together! And in this, what interests him is not necessarily transitory, ‘local’ or ‘folk’ political situations and problems (all of these words imperfect), but rather what the researcher Gabrielle Hecht has called ‘interscalar vehicles’: “Objects and modes of analysis that permit scholars and their subjects to move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space.”

That sounds very grand, but he thinks it can be a good starting point for a conversation. One he unfortunately cannot attend but to which he sends his apologies.

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An apology sent to students of the Masters module Designing Politics supervised by John Reardon and Michael Dutton.

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Footnotes

1. This quote is taken from Jakob Jakobsen's wonderful research project Antihistory exploring the Anti-University. ↩

An essay for the Masters module Political Economy of the Anthropocene supervised by Dr Nick Taylor. It asks: How might ‘tokenisation’ strategies within voluntary carbon and ecosystem services markets provide insights into the financialisation of solutions to climate breakdown?

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In 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an assessment report (AR5) which found that ‘anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions’ (GHGs) have reached concentrations “unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years.” The report found that such GHGs are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century, which is itself, they write, “unprecedented over decades to millennia”, contributing to widespread impact on human and natural systems. (IPCC, 2014) Informed by this report, and the political pressure that others like it provoked, in December 2015 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The treaty set a series of goals for this party of nation states, the most central of which being to limit global warming to below 2°C (preferably 1.5°C) compared to pre-industrial levels through ‘low greenhouse gas emissions’ and ‘climate-resilient’ development. Importantly, in its headline summary of objectives, the UNFCCC notes that it will aim to achieve this by “making finance flows consistent” with such a developmental pathway – mobilizing ‘climate finance’ to support adaptation to, and mitigation against, the adverse effects of climate change. (UNFCCC, 2015)

Versions of this story, centring on the Paris Agreement and a ‘goal’ of 1.5 to 2°C warming, appear as a preface to – or justification of – almost every discussion or proposal on the mitigation of climate change. One such example – which will be the starting point of my investigation here – appeared in late 2020, when the ‘Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets’ (TSVCM) was initiated by former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. The taskforce describes itself as a way of ‘scaling’ what they describe as “an effective and efficient voluntary carbon market to help meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.” (TSVCM, 2020).

However, in adopting this narrativization of climate breakdown such responses also inherit a collection of scientific, political, and even philosophical discourses which centre around ideas of ‘green growth’ and the ‘marketisation’ or ‘financialisation of nature’ (evident already in the UNFCCC’s somewhat ambiguous concepts of ‘climate-resilient development’ and ‘climate finance’). For the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ‘green growth’ is understood as a practice of “fostering economic growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies” (Jacobs, 2013, p. 198). This definition in-turn relies upon an understanding of nature which, as Sian Sullivan writes, “humanity can do business with”; primarily through the metaphorical fabrication of ‘natural capital’ or the ‘natural capital asset’. (Sullivan, 2018; Levidow, 2020).

In effect, the concept of ‘natural capital’ attempts to “reduce the environment to standard measures of resource accounting” as in the practice of ‘natural capital accounting’ (NCA) (Levidow, 2020). At a more fundamental level however, borrowing from Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), we might say it also seeks to construe the ‘enactments’ of nature and of economy as commensurable _within a relational network of human and non-human actors (Sullivan, 2018; Asdal, 2008). ANT’s philosophical perspective seeks to problematise an understanding of ‘nature’ as distinct from ‘society’ (Latour, 2005) and describes the economic life of its human and non-human actors as a set of mutually-determined performances (as opposed to containing inherent characteristics) which are framed by ‘economics at large’ (_i.e., the study of economy as well practices of accounting and marketing) (MacKenzie, 2009). ANT then attempts to tackle, at least in part, what Jason Moore has described as the ‘epistemic rift’ introduced by capitalism and its ‘ontological praxis’: “a rift in our understanding about how human organizations are embedded in nature.” (Moore, 2017)

The introduction of a concept of ‘natural capital’ is then one such way of rendering the performative actions of natural processes – understood as ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ (ES) – as legible and therefore calculable and investable _within a pre-existing capitalist economy, as is implied in the OECD’s definition of green growth and desired by the UNFCCC’s ‘climate-resilient’ development. As Jessica Dempsey writes on this ‘desire’ propelling natural capital and ecosystem services, such economistic valuations of nature aim to create “a kind of commensurability that all people – from bureaucrats to finance ministers to farmers to you and me – can recognize.” (Dempsey, 2016) In the language of those finance ministers in particular – who take a favourable view of the ability of markets to deliver positive environmental outcomes – the issue then becomes one of _pricing: “internalizing the externalities of environmental pollution that producers are currently able to pass on to society.” (Jacobs, 2013)

There are, of course, many critiques that can be made of ‘green growth’, ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’, as well as their conceptions of the natural environment informed by this particular reading of ANT. Sullivan, for example, writes on the ‘cultural’ and ‘critical poverty’ of a worldview which imagines nature simply as a ‘service-provider’ and resorts to money or pricing as the “mediator of our relationships with the non-human world” (Sullivan, 2009). Viewed as a technique of ‘monetary valuation’ such concepts can be said to prefigure commodification as a reasonable response to climate breakdown, framing the society-nature relationship as one of ‘utility and exchange’, and facilitating new forms of enclosure, privatisation, deregulation, accumulation, and marketization (Kallis, et al., 2013).

From this perspective such concepts may serve to outline, or indeed justify, what many have come to describe as a process of ‘neoliberalizing’ nature. In addition to a focus on ‘pricing nature’, critics of ‘neoliberal natures’ highlight environmental governance strategies that centre on the depoliticization of “mutual dependencies, societal conflicts, and power inequalities around natural resources” (Levidow, 2020) as well as the “off-loading [of] responsibilities to the private sector and/or civil society groups” (Castree, 2008). A response to the climate crisis which generates ‘climate-finance’ through voluntary payments for the ecosystem services (PES) provided to human-systems by so-called natural capital assets might then be understood as one such example of a ‘depoliticized’ or ‘privatized’ approach.

However, there are others who take a more ambivalent or ‘promiscuous’ view of these concepts and their ostensibly neoliberal underpinnings. (Bakker, 2010; Dempsey, 2016; Lane, 2012) Following ANT’s understanding of political-economy, Donald MacKenzie notes that if the characteristics of ‘capitalism’ are similarly extrinsic, then it may be altered by ‘changing the calculative mechanisms that constitute it.’ In this case MacKenzie is discussing carbon markets; specifically, how the capacity to price the negative externalities of GHGs constitutes “an attempt to change the construction of capitalism’s central economic metric: profit and loss” and is, as such, an intentional ‘politics of market design’. (MacKenzie, 2009) This political dimension of environmental(ist) market design is extended by Dempsey in her view of ecosystem services as a kind of ‘interest-producing machine.’ For her, the concept of ecosystem services can be productively viewed as a kind of political‐scientific strategy, _one _which has the capacity to bring ecosystems to the political table through the production of an _‘interest’_ in them; interests which can recognize the ‘multiple rationalities and logics at play.’ (Dempsey, 2016)

Returning to Carney, it is within this strongly contested ‘politics of market design’ that the recently-founded TSVCM has been set up. In briefly detailing the literature surrounding actor-network theory, natural capital assets, ecosystem-services (and payments for ecosystem-services) – as well as critical positions taken within these concepts – I hope to have outlined at least one core understanding or ‘version’ of nature that this taskforce and other similar interventions believe they can do business with and within.

The founding of this taskforce is useful as a starting point because it signals the anticipated direction of travel for ‘institutional environmentalism’ within these debates. The TSVCM estimates that the voluntary carbon market sector – which facilitates the voluntary offsetting of ‘unavoidable’ GHGs, often through PES schemes – will need to grow at least ‘15-fold’ by 2030, with McKinsey projecting a market size of between $5 billion and $30 billion (Blaufelder, et al., 2021). Regardless therefore of whether one accepts the tenets of such an approach, it is crucial to seriously examine proposals that emerge within this rapidly growing field. The stakes for doing so are at once empirical and scientific, concerning the viability and sustainability of both human and natural ecosystems; as well as epistemic and socio-political, concerning the ‘society-nature relationship’ outlined above, along with the equitability of responses to climate change which emerge from it. As Morgan Robertson writes: “To the extent that the carbon cycle becomes an arena for capital accumulation in carbon markets, we are participants simply by taking a breath, and without the felling of a single tree.” (Robertson, 2012)

What follows will then explore this burgeoning voluntary carbon market (VCM) and specifically the most recent strategies of ‘financialisation’ within it – namely ‘tokenisation’ – through the literatures charted above. I will focus on two case studies which sit within what Max Ritts & Karen Bakker have called the ‘Anthropocene Festival’ and “which collectively model novel forms of environmental governance” (Ritts & Bakker, 2022) through such ‘tokenisation’ technologies. These are the start-up, Single.Earth founded in 2019 and the art-research project terra0 begun in 2016. In doing so I hope to evaluate (1) whether VCMs prioritise financial logics or values over ecological value; (2) what particular interests are being ‘produced’ and served by tokenised carbon markets; (3) how nature is represented and produced in tokenised VCMs; and finally, more provocatively, (4) whether tokenisation schemes can subvert financialised logics and neoliberal solutions to climate change.

Voluntary Carbon Markets & Decentralised Finance

Carbon markets and emissions trading systems (ETSs) have a long and complex history, stretching back to the late 20th Century. Commonly upheld by their supporters as the most efficient way of governing or ‘disincentivising’ polluting activities, ETSs are often cast in opposition to so-called ‘command-and-control’ (CAC) forms of regulation. While CAC seeks to prescribe rules and standards on potential polluters, using sanctions to enforce compliance (European Environment Agency, 2022), ETSs seek to influence behaviour through market-based incentives such as charges, taxes, permits and risk disclosures. (Lane, 2012; Christophers, 2017) That this latter form of regulation is more efficient than CAC has – particularly since the 1980s – become a universal ‘article of faith’ among economists, legal scholars, and policy makers involved in environmental governance. (Cole & Grossman, 1999; Lane, 2012)

As Richard Lane writes, the importance of the economic concept of efficiency has, in recent years, been elevated to a ‘law’ of the social world, one which is taken “to shape, to frame, to determine the viability of environmental regulation” (partly as a consequence of this clash between ETS and CAC approaches). (Lane, 2012) This self-enforced contextualisation of regulatory responses to climate breakdown via the lens of ‘efficiency’ is contested by Lane and others, however such a discussion is outside the scope of this essay. For us this insight helps to contextualise the surprising dominance of ETSs such as VCMs within contemporary responses to climate breakdown and begin to outline the latter’s unique characteristics.

According to the TSVCM, voluntary carbon markets enable organizations to compensate or neutralize emissions ‘not yet eliminated’ from their own operations by purchasing carbon credits which can help finance the avoidance of emissions from other sources, or the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The purchase of such credits is defined as voluntary on the basis that it is not _motivated by juridical obligations within regulated carbon market schemes (i.e., compliance with regulation), but rather self-imposed targets, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Projects which produce voluntary carbon credits, and therefore receive financing from their distribution, have their own independent standards and focus either on GHG _reduction: through, for example, renewable energy production or avoided deforestation; or GHG _removal: _through sequestration projects such as reforestation. (TSVCM, 2021)

This approach to environmental regulation fits neatly into the ambivalent narrative outlined in the introduction above. An explicit project of ‘market design’, VCMs seek to facilitate payments for ecosystem services (such as carbon sequestration) through the commodification of GHG removal and reduction. The carbon credit market therefore operates as a means of pricing, accounting for – or ‘making legible’ – the negative externalities of GHG emissions in the present and the future. Through this form of accounting and investment, writes the TSVCM, “private sector actors [can] take ambitious steps toward compensating for their contribution to climate risk through the purchase and retirement of carbon credits as offsets.” (TSVCM, 2021) In this last statement we can see that a crucial factor in assessing the value, and indeed, the necessity, of these carbon credits is the ability of ‘private sector actors’ to determine the cost of what is referred to here as climate risk.¹ Why else would they purchase _voluntary _carbon credits?

As Brett Christophers writes, climate risk pricing is not just a ‘theoretical concept’ but a “lived, daily, market reality” produced through what are known as ‘climate-related financial disclosures’. In his re-telling of current policies addressing climate risk and financial stability he writes that “the assumption is that effective disclosure of risk in and through financial markets will see investors price that risk in such a (rational) way as to facilitate a smooth and orderly transition of the financial system to a globally warmed world.” (Christophers, 2017)

Throughout his article on the subject Christophers criticizes the emergence of ‘risk disclosure’ and particularly ‘market discipline’ as an appropriate response to climate change and financial instability. In doing so he joins the critics of neoliberal forms of environmental governance discussed above – taking aim at the assumption of a ‘rational’ economic actor disciplined by a market made efficient by ever-more accurate* information*. In his research he has in fact found empirical evidence that – in the specific case of adjusting prices based on climate risk – market actors effectively _ignore _such externalities (Christophers, 2017), a fact which does not bode well for any future VCMs!

This latter point puts into question the_ effectiveness of Dempsey’s construction of ecosystem services _qua political-scientific ‘interest-producing machines’. (Dempsey, 2016) While such strategies may theoretically have the capacity to recognise and produce alternative ‘interests’ through the inclusion of ‘multiple rationalities’, existing market power strongly impacts the capacity for such rationalities to impose market discipline _and therefore alter price adjustments or (market) behaviour _even within _a financialised, neoliberal framework. _As Christophers highlights in the case of climate risk disclosures, the market is not a ‘perfectly competitive domain inhabited by anonymous price-takers’, but rather populated by ‘all-too-real institutional, big-bank or big-investor power’: “It is therefore not a case of the market disciplining; it is a case of market actors with power disciplining those without it…” (Christophers, 2017)

Nevertheless, for financial regulators such as Mark Carney – who sits on both the task force on climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD) and TSVCM – “the fact that market discipline foregrounds financial stability is taken as sufficiently given or axiomatic that it does not even need to be stated.” (Christophers, 2017) Therefore, in his eyes at least, we must assume that problems of ‘market-design’ – such as an asymmetry in market power, or a lack of financial stability – should be resolved by the facilitation of more and better disclosures of information, rather than more interventionist (i.e. CAC) forms of regulation. To return to my first point of evaluation – as to whether VCMs prioritise financial logics over ecological value – it is telling that the TCFDs framing here emphasizes the risks of climate change to financial stability, rather than the risk posed to the climate by finance itself.

By their own admission, the TSVCM and other VCM-advocates acknowledge several challenges within their own approaches to environmental governance, as well as those embedded in the PES projects they seek to fund. Following on from Christophers’ analysis these are, as expected, predominately procedural considerations concerning accurate and efficient information production and management; including double-counting, quality control, liquidity (price signals), transaction costs, and transparency, to name a few. (Kawabata & Acharya, 2020; TSVCM, 2020; Butcher, 2021; UK Voluntary Carbon Markets Forum, 2021)In addition to these technical points there are also concerns around governance; the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) write that many of the challenges in the management of natural resources and maintenance of ecosystem services arise “because of a lack of trust and confidence in the rules governing exchange and possession.” In other words, “can companies’ claims of reduced environmental impact be verified and trusted?” (Sève, et al., 2018)

Digital tokens which utilise decentralised ledger or decentralised finance (DeFi) technologies – such as blockchains, cryptocurrencies or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – represent a self-assuredly ‘innovative’ approach to traditional carbon offset markets claiming to resolve many, if not all, of these challenges. The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Foresight Brief on blockchain technology and environmental sustainability describes a ‘blockchain’ as a shared ledger system resistant to tampering or fraud, one which can provide a trusted and transparent record of transactions. In their view, this allows any form of value – whether that is money, land titles, or even votes – to be stored and transferred in a secure manner: “It is the digital medium for value as the internet was the first digital medium for information.” (Kawabata & Acharya, 2020)

From this perspective, issues of information quality, accounting and transparency are resolved by translating value directly into an open-source digital currency, token or ‘intangible’ asset, the provenance of which is made accessible via a public registry. For those confident in the capacities of crypto-economics this ‘decentralised’ market-design also resolves many issues surrounding governance strategies, as such ‘permissionless platforms’ have no centre of control: “No single entity or government can bring the network down and participants must be incentivised (through tokens) to run and trust the network.” (Sève, et al., 2018) A phrase common to the ‘crypto-community which encapsulates this mindset reads “don’t trust, verify.” (Summers, 2022)

In this way DeFi and tokenisation schemes may be said to counter problems within ETSs (such as VCMs) within a neoliberal frame of reference and, perhaps, as an extension past it into more explicitly libertarian modes of organisation. On the one hand, decentralised systems of governance may (at least notionally) limit the capacity for market power to accrue unevenly; on the other, it seeks to achieve this by incentivizing a certain kind of disclosure via transparent ledgers. In either case, it is clear that such an approach heightens logics of _financialisation _within responses to climate breakdown – not only through the production (or ‘mobilization’) of ‘climate-finance’ but also by increasing opportunities for assetization, ‘rentierification’ and speculation within it. As the ODI note, for example, a key driver in the purchase of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has been speculation, and this has carried over into token issuances for environmental projects as a “quick and largely unregulated way to raise capital for blockchain projects.” (Sève, et al., 2018)

In sketching out a brief history of voluntary carbon markets along with the problems they face – as understood both inside and outside of the sector – I hope to have contextualised the emergence of tokenisation strategies within them. In an institutional frame of reference dominated by neoliberal ways of thinking, we have seen that faults in governance or ‘market design’ are put down to imperfect forms of information or its management. The effect of this, we might say, is to flatten material responses to climate breakdown into _procedural _questions of pricing and information management, for which information technology solutions, such as blockchains and tokenisation, provide obvious solutions. To continue then, we should turn to examples of such a ‘solution’ in use.

Single Earth

One recent start-up that exemplifies both the possibilities and problematics of DeFi technologies within VCMs and PESs – and therefore the response to climate breakdown as a whole – is Single.Earth.

As alluded to in my introduction, Single.Earth’s stated aims are to contribute towards: (1) limiting global temperatures to 2°C, in line with the Paris Agreement; (2) enhancing ecosystem integrity by valuing nature conservation; (3) facilitating the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) 1, 13 and 15 (ending poverty, climate action, ‘life on land’); and (4) closing the biodiversity financing gap, which they estimate will reach between $598–824 billion per year by 2030. (Single.Earth, 2022)

To this end, in July of 2021, the Tallinn-based start-up secured $7.9 million in funding to, in their own words, “tokenise nature”. (Butcher, 2021) Their plan is to create a ‘nature-backed economy’ with its own cryptocurrency, linking carbon and biodiversity credits to so-called ‘MERIT’ tokens each representing 100kg of CO2e captured in ‘biodiverse nature’. MERITs are issued to landowners “against maintaining and increasing the ecological value and carbon capture of their land” (primarily via carbon sequestration) who may then choose to trade or hold the digital asset. Such credit issuances are verified by “satellite data, big data analysis, and machine learning” which, in their usage and development, contribute towards a ‘digital twin of Earth.’ (Single.Earth, 2022)

In the Single.Earth model, consumers who cannot engage in the generation of MERITs – because they do not own viable land – are encouraged to participate by instead exchanging traditional fiat money for these tokens. Those who perform such an exchange are then issued a MERIT payment card with which they can ‘seamlessly pay’ for goods and services. For each MERIT payment, a fraction of the currency is taken out of circulation (akin to retiring traditional carbon credits) and is described as ‘an irreversible contribution to nature’. In addition to facilitating these ‘contributions’ through participation in the currency, consumers contribute towards the liquidity of the MERIT payments system, creating demand for more tokens and, therefore, additional CO2e offsets – as Single.Earth say: “Every person who switches to MERITs helps to save the world.” (Single.Earth, 2022)

In line with the remit of the TSVCM, this approach is heralded by its founders and investors for its purported scalability, _which is a central focus of Single.Earth’s founders Merit Valdsalu and Andrus Aaslaid. (Butcher, 2021) For example, the automated technologies deployed by the project – such as satellite data collection and machine learning – are, they say, deemed necessary to achieve the “the _scalability required to pipe the finance to nature-based solutions.” (Single.Earth, 2022)

In summary then, spurred on by the TSVCM and legitimated by the same ‘Paris agreement’ narrative we set out from, this project seeks to resolve issues of _governance _(market discipline)_ _through _information production _and _incentivisation _within VCM-schemes through the tokenisation of PES. Simply put, Single.Earth uses “the tools of science, technology, and finance to automatically assess the biodiverse nature [sic] and give it a digital value.” (Single.Earth, 2022)

From this last statement in particular, we might begin to contextualise Single.Earth through Jesse Goldstein’s concept of a ‘non-disruptive disruption’; a set of so-called solutions for ‘planetary improvement’ which, in his view, fail to change the causes of underlying problems (in this case, climate breakdown). (Goldstein, 2018) As he writes, such non-disruptive disruptions are focused only on what is commercially viable and rapidly scalable – two key points of explicit focus within the Single.Earth project – and which only make use of “technologies that fit into the everyday status quo of society, extended perpetually into a future incrementally improved, but never fundamentally transformed.” (Goldstein, 2018)

This critical sentiment is perhaps inadvertently summarised in a Forbes article covering the Single.Earth project (and which is quoted on their website) saying: “Everyone wants to get paid for doing nothing. Novel venture capital group Single Earth has found just the right way for property owners to do exactly that.” (Koetsier, 2021) From this perspective, as the writer Patricia Reed has noted, such an approach “reinforces the Silicon Valley doctrine of what Evgeny Morozov termed ‘solutionism’, wherein problems can be remedied through techno-scientifc innovations alone.” (Reed, 2018)

To loop this critical examination of the project back into our ongoing discussion, let us then ask, in line with Jessica Dempsey, what particular ‘interests’ are being ‘produced’ and served by this specific tokenised carbon market. In a number of ways, it is clear to see how the Single.Earth initiative perfectly aligns with the concept of ‘neoliberal nature’ developed above and, in some cases perhaps extends past it.

Firstly, we can see a clear desire to contextualise the issue of climate change within a mechanism of market discipline and consumer spending. No moral or political case is made against those who may be causing the GHGs requiring offsets via sequestration – as with all voluntary carbon-credits, the assumption here is that these are emissions which could ‘only be eliminated at a prohibitive expense’ within existing decarbonisation efforts, or that are derived from sources which cannot be eliminated at all. (TSVCM, 2021) This understanding echoes the claim from Christophers that, for these institutional actors, “disciplining is strictly financial, not moral” (Christophers, 2017) and contributes towards the depoliticization of responses to climate breakdown. (Levidow, 2020)

However, by expanding their reach into consumer markets via the MERIT currency and payment card, Single.Earth also extend this form of ‘depoliticization by economization’ (Madra & Adaman, 2013) from institutions to individuals. As Reed writes, highlighting the ramifications of Morozov’s ‘solutionism’, such an approach "transforms socio-structural and ideological problems into private, behavioral ones that can be surmounted on one’s own (more discipline!)” (Reed, 2018) In doing so such projects bolster the emphasis of personal responsibility and self-governance required to sustain neoliberal ideology at both institutional and interpersonal levels. As demonstrated by Christophers this is not just a political question of ‘values’, but also an empirical problem of effective responses to climate risk, for which this ‘disclose and discipline’ approach does not have a good record.

Following questions of discipline, depoliticization and individualisation, we might go on to ask whose interests are (re)produced through these political-scientific strategies? Throughout the literature surrounding Single.Earth there is an emphasis on ‘supporting’ landowners and forest owners in the protection of their land and ‘biodiverse nature’ – as one of their taglines reads: “Let’s give forest owners a way for nature protection.” (Single.Earth, 2022) This can be read both as a form of incentivisation and as a ‘solutionist’ technological fix, one which, in addition to financing a certain kind of ‘nature protection’, facilitates new forms of assetization and enclosure, both material and digital.

This idea of enclosure returns us to a more fundamental discourse on representations and ‘productions’ of nature outlined in the introduction above. As Les Levidow has noted, it was not until the ‘enclosure of the commons’ that nature was “recast through metaphors of a mechanism and market.” (Levidow, 2020) Before the 18th century, in western Europe at least, the natural world was understood through shifting organismic representations, developed by communities who maintained common areas of land to which they had fair access. After its enclosure – and the ‘epistemic rift’ which followed – however, “land was turned into an asset for capital accumulation.” (Levidow, 2020; Moore, 2017)

This socio-ecological form of capital accumulation then became the driving force behind European imperial projects on a global scale. As Katz-Rosene & Paterson write, the justification for colonial expansion and control was that it enabled a socio-ecological transformation of land use in line with “European systems of enclosure, private property and agricultural development.” (Katz-Rosene & Paterson, 2020) For many PES projects, particularly those built on forestry conservation and carbon sequestration (highlighted by Single.Earth), this colonial logic remains very much intact, expanding the scope for so-called “green-grabbing” principally in the global South. (Levidow, 2020) Here, land grabs are justified as forms of resource protection (Fairhead, et al., 2012) which can, through the cyclical processes of information-production and financialisation exemplified here, provide modes of accumulation for ‘landowners’ principally in the global north.

The ‘view’ of nature here is then one without_ _people (except for perhaps consumers and landowners), while it may be argued that ecosystems are construed as performative ‘actors’ within a relational network – and, as such, may then hold a seat at the political table – this does nothing to prevent the exclusion of communities who have existing relationships with(in) specific areas of land. This is made no more evident than in the use of satellite imaging techniques that occlude “people, livelihoods and social-ecological relationships from view, rendering lands open to new ‘green’ market uses.” (Fairhead, et al., 2012)

This problem of ‘detachment’ from the biophysical situation that ‘environmental intangibles’ – such as MERITs – aim to care for has been highlighted by Chiapello & Engels. They write that while such detachment serves as a precondition for the commodification, marketability, and flexibility of such environmental assets, it is in fact attachment that ‘guarantees their relevance for the environment’ – that “the greatest flexibility for economic actors comes with a greater detachment, and that this weakens its environmental effectiveness.“ (Chiapello & Engels, 2021)

terra0: An alternate view?

Following on from this question of ‘detachment’, Sian Sullivan writes that a key issue with such schemes is that “payments for the environmental services produced by nature’s labour do not go to the environment itself, but to whoever is able to capture this newly priced value.” (Sullivan, 2009) What, then, if we were to try and conceptualise a more ‘integrated’ scheme, one which allowed an environment – in this case a forest – to profit from, or financialise, itself?

terra0 is an ongoing art project initiated by a “a group of developers, theorists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere.” (terra0, 2022) In their 2016 white paper, Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling and Max Hampshire asked precisely this question: “Can an augmented forest own and utilise itself?” (Seidler, et al., 2016) Their proposal seeks to augment a forest such that it can accumulate capital autonomously, selling licences to log trees through ‘automated processes, smart contracts and Blockchain technology’ as an ‘autonomous decentralized agent.’

Here we come to the final point of evaluation – whether tokenisation schemes can subvert the financialised logics and neoliberal solutions to climate change critically interpreted thus far, in which, as Fairhead et al. write: “[c]onceptualisations of ecological and human-ecological relationships, and of interconnectedness in systems, give way to the notion that their components, facets and attributes can be separated as ecosystem ‘services’ and so sold”. (Fairhead, et al., 2012) Does an autonomous decentralized agent constitute a challenge to ‘neoliberal natures’? Is nature constructed any differently through this approach?

In many ways the terra0 proposal conforms to the ideas and projects outlined above – the authors evoke a language of ecosystem services identifying the forest’s role as both a source of raw material and ‘service contractor’. However, in doing so, they hold on to the central tenets of actor-network theory much more effectively than Single.Earth and other ‘tokenisation’ schemes, writing: “If culture is understood as the counterpart to nature, by which one recognises nature's 'otherness', then nature must be conceptualised not as being spatially separated from humans, […] but instead as immanent within culture.” (Seidler, et al., 2016) Elsewhere they go further, writing that, on this basis, “there is no good case to believe that nature […] still exists.” (Seidler, et al., 2016) As Ritts & Bakker write in their summarisation of the project: “Terra0 generates a governance space reflexively understood as never fully being within the human order, but as component of a socio/techno/natural assemblage.” (Ritts & Bakker, 2022)

Such an understanding of nature is formalised in their criteria of an autonomous decentralized agent – that “[w]hen interacting with humans the agent does so as a peer, not as a tool.” (Seidler, et al., 2016) An approach to PES which removes ‘forest owners’ (as mediators between tokens-as-tools and opportunities for capital accumulation) might then push this fintech framework beyond Goldstein’s category of ‘nondisruptive-disruptions’ into a speculatively ‘subversive’ space. Not only would this fundamentally alter the ‘calculative mechanisms that constitute’ capitalist practice (MacKenzie, 2009), but might also offer opportunities for reconfiguring colonial practices and knowledges wherever the forest spreads. (Parry, 2020)

While I feel it is productive to view terra0 within the lineage of more ‘legitimate’ or ‘institutional’ proposals, that is not this project’s ‘natural’ home. To return to Ritts & Bakker’s concept of the Anthropocene Festival, this ‘novel form of environmental governance’ emerges through a tension between the worlds of art and environmental policy – a kind of ‘creative digression.’ (Ritts & Bakker, 2022) If strategies of tokenisation in the context of VCMs and PES can provide any productive contributions towards an equitably financialised response to climate breakdown (if those are indeed the parameters we are forced to operate within), it seems most likely, given the journey charted here, that these will not emerge from within traditional policy taskforces or even ‘bleeding-edge’ technological developments; but rather, a re-examination of “the imperatives, interests, and intentions built into its networked models of sociality” (Ritts & Bakker, 2022) that I hope to have contributed to here.

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Footnotes

1. Climate risk is defined by the IPCC as the “potential for adverse consequences for human or ecological systems”, either as a result of climate change or human responses to it. (Reisinger, et al., 2020) ↩

How do we use external services or automated tools to facilitate & outsource our research and production?

“Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses. Contemporary perception is machinic to large degrees. The spectrum of human vision only covers a tiny part of it. Electric charges, radio waves, light pulses encoded by machines for machines are zipping by at slightly subluminal speed. Seeing is superseded by calculating probabilities. Vision loses importance and is replaced by filtering, decrypting, and pattern recognition...”¹

“What becomes legible to human viewers are the visual traces of the ideology the algorithms work to reproduce — the reality they try to impose on and through the data sets they work on.” ²

In this project we explored 'synthetic imaginaries' (apophenia) as a research methodology and 'synthetic imagery' as a process.

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Footnotes

1. Hito Steyerl, A Sea of Data ↩

2. Rob Horning, Plausible Disavowal ↩

The task is simple: find the shortest route between two data points, two vertices on the mesh. In the world of computer science, problems like this have well-defined monikers; in this instance one might think of the Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) or a variant thereof.¹ For travelling salespeople, the problem is how one might get from vertex A to vertex Z (potentially passing through vertices B through Y en route) and back again using the optimal path – put simply, this is a problem concerning an economy of motion. Clearly, for both the salesperson and – more importantly – their employer, travelling along this route should be as quick as a flash; time is money, after all.

So, let us consider the surface to be travelled upon, what I’ve called here the ‘mesh’. The problem of the travelling salesperson has been applied to fields as diverse as genome sequencing, microchip architecture and logistics. The mesh is a DNA strand; the mesh is a PCB; the mesh is the ocean, the highway or the Earth; but for the travelling salesperson such distinctions do not really matter, these surfaces are one and the same. As we will see in a moment, the material substrate is subordinate to the logic of the route and the economy of motion.

How do you get from Chicago to New York and back again using the optimal path? A committed salesperson, perhaps in a truck, drives around the Allegheny Mountains as fast as they can. A truly innovative salesperson simply drills straight through them. Why optimize the route when you can optimize the mesh?

In the early 2010’s, the high-frequency trader Daniel Spivey secured $300 million in funding from venture capitalist James Barksdale to tackle this kind of optimization problem. However, the salesperson in this equation was not a truck-driver but instead a beam of light, a data-package, and in their briefcase one can find messages, commands and contracts for consumption on U.S. equities markets. Before Spivey’s intervention the journey from Chicago to New York takes this data-package around 8 milliseconds – for Spivey and his business partners, we can assume, it is self-evident that in this economy of time such a journey is too long, too expensive.

In order to rectify this situation Spivey used the $300 million to put together a team which could create a new fibre-optic cable, a new route, which would run through the landscape (the mesh) as directly as possible. As Donald MacKenzie writes in his article ‘Drilling Through the Allegheny Mountains’: “To speed construction, 125 teams worked in parallel, in places even creating what are essentially little tunnels through the rock of the Allegheny Mountains.”² The resultant route or ‘dark fibre’ cable shaved 1.3 milliseconds from the journey, an undoubtedly attractive differential for traders looking to reduce their latency into the U.S. markets. After all is said and done, the costs – whether financial or ecological – of drilling through the mountain are negligible when considering the profits that can be gained through this kind of optimization.

Here we can see inscribed in the sandstone of the Allegheny Mountains, Marx’s observation that: “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier...” ³ regardless of whether that barrier is an ancient, geological formation or the boundaries of the speed of light. What we today tend to call the Anthropocene could very well be characterised as precisely this reversal of the problem of the travelling salesperson – a reversal in which the material ‘surface’ or ‘mesh’ to be traversed is manipulated, distorted and retooled to fit the employer’s idealised route.

Yet, if this picture is indicative of the anthropocene, where can we see the anthropos in the frame? The human element seems noticeably absent from such a brave new landscape. Indeed, in this strange mutation of the TSP, the salesperson has morphed from a truck-driver into a beam of light; and similarly, the customer converted into microprocessors executing automated programs thousands of times a second. As Alberto Toscano notes in his essay ‘Gaming the Plumbing’: “The fastest trading chip executes a transaction in 740 nanoseconds (or 0.00074 milliseconds) while human reaction time to a visual stimulus is around 190 milliseconds.”⁴ In the time it takes the human component of the system to register whether a single message has been sent from Chicago to New York, over 20 more such messages have made the trip.

Toscano’s observation that such algorithmic activity takes place well below the perceptual threshold of the human agent leads him into a general meditation on the ‘social life of algorithms.’ He writes: “The bodily space of the [trading] pit leaves its marks even in the most impersonal of rules. A market algorithm isn't simply an automated rule, it is also a 'social space', a device that is both conditioned and conditioning. Mechanisation is not a uniform process, but the outcome of a contest of knowledges and strategies.”⁵

The somewhat speculative capacity for sociality (or at least the facilitation of social activity) within these hyper-digital market systems beyond ‘our’ perception might therefore suggest a form of agency (or indeed, life) at play which deviates from that which is strictly human. From this perspective at the very least, we might then want to revise the label of our new epoch from the rather short-sighted Anthropocene to something more in-tune with all of the agents exhibiting a geo-historical force.

In his often collaborative work on this topic Jason Moore, along with others such as Raj Patel and Donna Haraway, describes the Capitalocene as a kind of ‘provocative periodization’ which encourages us to understand capitalism “not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.”⁶ In a twin gesture, they highlight that the logic which undergirds the Capitalocene also serves as the legitimating force for such a distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’ at all. In an article for The Journal of Peasant Studies, he writes: “The whole thrust of capitalist civilization develops the premise that [‘we’] inhabit something called Society, and act upon something called Nature.”⁷ Except in our reading, through the examples provided by Toscano and others, this Society (this ‘social life’) no longer even comprises the human element but has been further abstracted into a playground of bits and bytes.

This is, to use another phrase of Toscano’s, a ‘real abstraction’⁸ – as Moore writes: “Humanity/Nature is consequently not only violently but practically abstract. These are real abstractions…”⁹ Our travelling salesperson is rendered out as an actually existing force (or agent) on the Earth through the Capitalocene’s wanton incapacity to view Society/Nature as a historically contingent construction, with all of the financial and ecological violence that such a title suggests. As Jean-Francois Lyotard summarised in a characteristically pithy statement: “Capital does not govern the knowledge of reality, but it gives reality to knowledge.”¹⁰

And indeed, for some theorists, such as Lyotard, this concept extends beyond the simple accumulation of capital and stretches out into a metaphysical order. In his 1991 book, The Inhuman, Lyotard addresses a similar set of issues – albeit, of course, in an entirely different lexicon. For him this drive towards negentropy, complexity or ‘complexification’ through the proliferation of ‘real abstractions’ is simply called Development. In The Inhuman he explains: “‘Development’ is the ideology of the present time, it realizes the essential of metaphysics, which was a thinking pertaining to forces much more than to the subject.”¹¹

For Lyotard, “the ‘ultimate’ motor of this movement is not essentially of the order of human desire”; and this observation displaces the received wisdom that an economic system which behaves on the scale described here is guided simply by a “thirst for profit”. Instead, he proposes that the real abstraction, the agency or the force at work consists rather “in the process of negentropy which appears to ‘work’ the cosmic area inhabited by the human race.” Moving even further, he describes this force almost as a kind of virus, suggesting that “one could go so far as to say that the desire for profit is no doubt no other than this process itself, working upon the nervous centres of the human brain and experienced directly by the human body.”¹²

The purpose of drilling through the Allegheny Mountains then, is not to reap the profits of a diminished latency time, not to optimize the route for our travelling salesperson, but rather to generate the resources to simply do more drilling. The social life of the algorithm operates on an expansionist logic seeking to extend, it would seem, all the way into the Earth and out the other side, to punch a hole into orbit. As the contemporaries of Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari noted in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus: “This [schizophrenic] tendency is being carried further and further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatch itself straight to the moon: we really haven't seen anything yet!”¹³

In the end, as Lyotard writes, there is only a single limit posed to this ideology of Development, and that is the ‘life of the sun’. He writes: “The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development. The natural selection of systems is thus no longer of a biological but of a cosmic order.” ¹⁴

At this point, then, we seem (finally) to have reached a limit. A moment to pause, to break from this infectious, circuitous, inhuman logic and reflect on the ‘simple’ task we set out from; i.e. the shortest route between two paths. The logic of this journey, from New York to Chicago, or from the TSP to the heat-death of the Earth seems perfectly encapsulated in the maddening intervention of the High-Frequency traders at the Allegheny Mountains – in the ‘optimization’ of the mesh qua mountain as a contribution towards the development of the real abstraction of the Capitalocene.

However it is only by understanding the scale of this thought as it stands that we can begin to reframe the question. The actual task, for us, as artists, activists, animals and anthropos is to problematize this form of problematization without moving into a reactionary space which rejects such technology tout-court. Perhaps the question then becomes how we might ‘optimize’ the Earth (the ‘mesh’) not for the necromantic service of Capital but rather for the Earth itself? Not for an abstract language of trade-routes and salesmen, but for a really real world of migrations, both human and nonhuman?

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This essay was written for the publication Energy Systems accompanying Well Projects' 2020 programme of the same name. Energy Systems sought to find ways of replacing ‘network’ orientated capital accumulation and socio environmental exploitation with ‘metabolisms’ which are orientated toward reciprocal models of coexistence.

It was reworked as a paper and presented alongside Eva Sajovic's Plantscapes exhibition during a symposium at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning.

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Footnotes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem ↩

2. Donald MacKenzie , Daniel Beunza , Yuval Millo & Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (2012) DRILLING THROUGH THE ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5:3, p. 287 MacKenzie ↩

3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm ↩

4. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/gaming-plumbing-high-frequency-trading-and-spaces-capital ↩

5. ibid. ↩

6. https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/ ↩

7. Jason W. Moore (2017): The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies. p.7 ↩

8. Alberto Toscano (2008) The Open Secret of Real Abstraction, Rethinking Marxism, 20:2, 273-287 ↩

9. Jason W. Moore (2017): The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies. p.8 ↩

10. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.71 ↩

11. Emphasis my own. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.6–7 ↩

12. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.71 ↩

13. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari (1972): Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. (https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf) p.34 ↩

14. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.7 ↩

Zines have always been a form of critical intervention, especially for minority or marginalized groups and voices. This quote:_ “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”_ was written by an American journalist – a writer for the New Yorker – A.J.Liebling in 1960 and summarizes very neatly the importance of publishing, whether it be independent or not. The ‘right’ to say what one thinks – under, for example the laws of a free media – is not necessarily the same as the ‘ability’ to do so.

Freedom of the press is, in this way, a double-edged sword – while it allows for an endless number of voices to be heard in theory, in practice it gives the printer or publisher exclusive control over what gets published, including the right to refuse to print anything for any reason. This capacity for refusal is ultimately why so many in the past have turned to self-publishing, especially those whose words have rallied against mainstream culture, its values and its ideals.

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Blast! From Morris to Modernism

Who here is familiar with the work of William Morris? Morris was a designer, artist and writer operating in the UK (mostly London) during the late 1800’s. He is well known for his pattern design and his association with the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris & Co, which some of you may be familiar with, began as a furnisher for churches around the UK and later evolved into a more general commercial enterprise selling patterned fabrics, wallpapers and carpets. It is also well known for its desire to bring art and design closer together – in conception, production and reception as well.

However, later in his life – after his days at Morris & Co – William Morris turned to publishing. In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott press through which he published thousands of books until his death in 1896. This is our first publication, a spread from one of the last books he ever printed, in 1895, reflecting on the aims of the Kelmscott. It is useful to read as it is indicative of Morris’ critical intentions more broadly:

“I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its place.”

While a socialist and a political progressive for his time, Morris’ aesthetic sensibility was very much rooted in ancient, medieval and gothic traditions. For example, in almost all of his work he chose to use the ancient technique of hand woodblock printing over the then new method of roller printing – a technique which had almost completely replaced woodblock printing for commercial purposes. As a side note: If we think back to the Leibling quote I started out from, Morris was only able to use the press ‘freely’ in this way, because he owned one.

So, this somewhat backward-looking sensibility is indicative of the Arts and Crafts movement more generally – it was conceived as a reaction against a perceived decline in standards (standards of quality, beauty, integrity, etc) which had resulted from mass production, factory manufacturing and new machinery. In this way it was an aesthetically and culturally mediated critique of the conditions of production in the late 1800’s. However, instead of looking forward for inspiration, Morris and his colleagues chose to look back at the past, into history for inspiration.

In this way we might say that Morris was the very last of the pre-modern artists and designers. His solution for the grievances he felt and experienced in his work was to look more deeply into the history of Europe and reject the new modes of production and consumption springing up around the tumultuous industrial revolution of Victorian England. We might say that this kind of critical nostalgia was, in the context of our unit, Morris’ ‘critical perspective.’

While perhaps the most well known today Morris & Co was not the only Bloomsbury based furnishers dealing with these issues of a new aesthetic sensibility and a new hyper-mechanized world. The Omega Workshops opened in 1913 led by the designer Roger Fry. Here we can see an invitation to a private view at their workshops produced in 1913. In the design we can see a similar sensibility to Morris’ designs – the recognizable, figurative image of the person dividing the sections, the old-fashioned gothic calligraphy and in the text itself, the emphasis on ‘hand-dying’. However something has changed, the drawing is much looser, the colours are fewer and less refined. This is an image which we could argue displays a kind of transition from that ‘pre-modern’ sensibility to a more ‘modern’ approach.

I think it’s worth noting here that Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ was produced in 1907, 6 years before The Omega Workshops opened and only 10 years after Morris’ death. So, things were rapidly changing in the aesthetics of cultural production at this moment in the run up to the First World war. What was emerging was a critical perspective that I’m sure everyone here is familiar with: the ‘Modernist’ perspective.

However, while everyone is familiar with it, Modernism is a tricky thing to define – who can give me some characteristics of modernism, as an approach or as a style?

Well, instead of writing one myself, I turned to the Tate for assistance, they’re definition is as follows:

“A rejection of history and conservative values (such as realistic depiction of subjects); innovation and experimentation with form (the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work) with a tendency to abstraction; and an emphasis on materials, techniques and processes. Modernism has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.”

Modernism encompassed many different artistic styles and sensibilities, including the cubism of Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles…’, Russian constructivism, Dutch ‘De Stijl’, a more amorphously constructed ‘Dada’ and Italian ‘Futurism’. However, as I said before, The Omega Workshops perhaps represent a more transitory moment – a slower progression from the pre-modern, traditional sensibilities of the past, to this brave new world – not such a ‘clean break’ as the Tate’s description suggests.

And this pace of change was not enough for one member of the workshop more committed to the then contemporary, yet still somewhat unfashionable modernist ideals. Wyndham Lewis a painter, writer and critic, inspired by the Italian futurist paintings which visited London in 1910, grew increasingly frustrated with the pace of change in his work at The Omega Workshops. He split from the workshop taking a number of artists with him, forming the breakaway group called ‘the Rebel Art Centre’ where a new Modernist style, Vorticism was developed.

While futurism set out to make Italy modern by attacking its traditions – to, 'free Italy from her innumerable museums, which cover her like countless cemeteries' – Vorticism attacked traditional British culture. Futurist imagery celebrated the power, force and speed of the machine. Futurists glorified war because they saw potential for freedom in its power to destroy. They admired the militarism, modernity and patriotism of Italian Fascism which, according to Marinetti, was the natural extension of Futurism.

The Vorticists were clearly influenced by Futurism but they also insisted on their differences: while Futurists celebrated the motion and speed of the modern machine, the Vorticists focused on the pure potential of its energy. Wyndham Lewis saw the 'great English vortex' as the centre of a whirlpool or the eye of a storm, a sense of which you can get from this painting of his produced between 1914 and 1915.

Here we have our second publication – the Vorticist journal Blast was published only twice; BLAST appeared in July 1914 and BLAST: War Number in July 1915. The first issue was a vehicle for the Vorticist manifesto and a long list of things to BLAST (the mild, domesticated and provincial) or BLESS (distinctly unromantic ships, English ports and bridges).

Here we can see very clearly the modernist sensibility, the modernist ‘critical perspective’ coming through. As we can see, “these were often utopian” visions, here of a Britain untethered from its provincial past. This belief in progress is expressed at the expense of everything else.

In this spread we can also see how far the graphic design has moved on from Morris’ ornate layouts. Nevertheless, it is clear that the design is still heavily considered, the typographic layout works in tandem with the writing itself – both in its critical perspective and practice there is a break with the old forms here. And this is also a useful moment to pause and reflect on this idea of a ‘critical perspective’ at all – often we can fall into a tendency to describe any ‘critical perspective’ as in some way inherently ‘good’. However, here we have a perspective rooted in the outgrowth of the Italian Fascist movement – a fact that in my reading of this history noticeably gets scrubbed over. It is important to remain critical of the critical perspectives we are dealing with and also not to gloss over facts that may be inconvenient for a certain narrative.

However, back to our story, in spite of it’s politically skewed beliefs – this journal, this self-published magazine is a symptomatic, if not a slightly extreme example, of the naïve, modernist ideal. And we can see a similar thought process going on in other publications following on from Blast, such as the design of the Dada bulletins. This mixture of new typographic styles, facilitated by increasingly advanced technology, seeking a radical new visual language that completely breaks the old, established modes of thinking and making...

So hopefully now everyone has a slightly more nuanced understanding of European and specifically British modernism and self-publishing in this transitory moment from the late 1800’s through to the 1920’s. But why is this important for the cultural, contextual history of the zine? And for critical theory in institutions such as this one?

––––

Counterblast! From Pulp fiction to Punk theory

Taking a trip across the Atlantic for a moment we come to a publication that might be familiar to a few of you. I showed this to you in my initial, very brief introduction to zines around 6 weeks ago now. ‘The Comet’ was the first ever ‘fanzine’ or simply ‘zine’ to be produced, published by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago, in 1930.

The context for the emergence of these publications comes from the period during and succeeding the Great Depression, so... from 1929 through until the late 1930s. The editors of "pulp" science fiction magazines such as ‘Amazing Stories’ – which were a much larger operation – became increasingly frustrated with letters detailing the impossibilities of their science fiction tales. Over time they began to publish these scrutinizing letters, complete with their return addresses, somewhat accidentally generating a community of critical readers and writers. As I said at the start, zines have always been a form of critical intervention – whether that intervention is based in political unrest or sci-fi fantasy. Often it is the case that it will be both.

This tradition of sci-fi fanzines continued in full force for decades after its inception in the 1930’s. For example, in 1967’s Spockanalia, the first Star Trek fan-fiction ever produced. The author Joanna Russ who was involved in the culture at the time, later wrote an analysis of the subculture in an essay entitled ‘Concerning K/S’ (Kirk/Spock) detailing that there were 500 core fans and that the group was 100% female.

“K/S not only speaks to my condition. It is written in Female. I don't mean that literally, of course. What I mean is that I can read it without translating it from the consensual, public world, which is sexist, and unconcerned with women per se, and managing to make it make sense to me and my condition.”

Here we see the potential for the critical perspectives exercised through these self-publishing efforts (such as the fanzines) not only to carve out new conceptual territories, but also physical communities in which marginalized people can congregate, share grievances and develop ideas.

And as these zines were developing, so too were the interests of those making them. In the 1960’s the rock n’ roll movement began picking up steam and with it came a whole new iteration of zine development. Many people already involved in the sci-fi fanzine subcultures of both the US and the UK started up self-published zines in order to review, interview and explore these new musical genres. One of the earliest examples comes from the zine ‘Crawdaddy’ which, according to The New York Times, was "the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously."

Also, in these covers we can see some of the earlier visual language of the Dada bulletins and Blast coming back into play. This is no accident and the designers of these zines took direct inspiration from those earlier modernist publications, especially the experimental typographic layouts along with the cut-and-stick, collaged imagery. However, as we will see, in a more general context we might describe this as closer to appropriation than inspiration.

This was only further developed when, in 1970, the Canadian cultural theorist and media critic Marshall McLuhan published Counterblast, a zine which positioned itself in direct response to Wyndham Lewis’ ‘Blast’. In the introduction to the book McLuhan writes:

“The term counterblast does not imply any attempt to erode or explode Blast. Rather it indicates the need for a counter-environment as a means of perceiving the dominant one. Today we live invested with an electric information environment that is quite imperceptible to us as water is to fish. At the beginning of this work, Pavlov found that the condition of his dogs depended on a previous condition. He placed one environement within another one. Such is Counterblast.”

Here we can see, in almost perfect symmetry, another shift in critical perspective. A shift away from the modernist ideals developed in the early 1900’s into a different frame of reference, a different cultural sensibility. In this writing McLuhan encourages a suspicion of ‘dominant environments’ of grand collective projects, idealized by the modernist tradition – he suggests the need for a counter-environment that can provide ‘critical-distance’ from the mainstream culture.

Maybe some people can sense what I am building up towards. Just as Wyndham Lewis’ ‘Blast’ signified a significant shift from a pre-modern era into a modernist one – McLuhans ‘Counterblast’ signifies another shift, this time from a modernist to a post-modernist one.

Turning to the Tate for a definition once again:

“While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.

Anti-authoritarian by nature, postmodernism refused to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life. Because postmodernism broke the established rules about style, it introduced a new era of freedom and a sense that ‘anything goes’. Often funny, tongue-in-cheek or ludicrous; it can be confrontational and controversial, challenging the boundaries of taste; but most crucially, it reflects a self-awareness of style itself. Often mixing different artistic and popular styles and media, postmodernist art can also consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles from the past.”

This shift towards ‘deconstruction’, ‘irony’ and ‘remixing’ or ‘appropriation’ as critical methodologies are very clear even in this simple example of McLuhan's work. McLuhan takes the work of Wyndham Lewis’ and twists it into a new context through these tongue-in-cheek interventions, in doing so he exemplifies so much of the postmodern approach to critical thinking and practice. Similarly, taking the arrangement and design of the publication as a cue we can see Mcluhan borrowing self-consciously from a range of styles that have come before – cherry picking the ones that allow him to make a point or, perhaps, make a joke.

More generally Marshall McLuhan was inspired by the counter-cultural movement of the early postmodern period of the 1960’s and 70’s – the women’s liberation movement, suffrage, the hippy movement, etc. He wrote about these shifts in his now infamous book ‘The Medium is the Massage’( – who’s seen this book?) – which was a play on the well known saying: ‘The Medium is the Message.”

It was a time where two countervailing tendencies began to emerge. On the one hand you have these new networks of action radically rethinking social norms and the structures of society, especially in America; and, on the other, you have newly developed, digital mass communication devices such as television and radio which have, from McLuhan’s perspective, taken over the world and developed a previously unthinkable ‘mainstream culture.’ The link between the two is what McLuhan seeks to explore both – culture and counterculture – in the ‘Medium is the Massage’ and ‘Counterblast’.

Hopefully here you are beginning to notice some more recognisable aspects of how we tend to use critical theory here and now. How we are encouraging you to approach your topics and case studies. A technical definition of Postmodern critical theory is that it seeks to politicize social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings." At this stage it’s my hope that this kind of thinking is no longer alien to any of you – and now you can see a rough version of _where, how _and _why _this kind of thinking emerged.

So, moving on from Counterblast, how was this kind of thinking developed further or manifested through zine production and culture? We have not yet reached the ‘punk theory’ that I promised or the kinds of zines that you most likely experienced down in the library’s archive.

The German media theorist Florian Cramer, in his 2013 book ‘Anti-Media’ describes the cultural function of the zine as a self-published medium during this particular period in great detail. Jumping off from McLuhan’s earlier work, he writes:

“While the World Wide Web was a DIY publishing medium in the 1990s, digital DIY has become difficult in a medium defined by only four corporate players (Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook) just like [mainstream] TV was defined by a few networks in the past. The publishing of self-made books and zines thus becomes a form of social networking that is not controlled … by those companies”

The medium, the theory and the social function of zines all work together to create this alternative space for an early, DIY form of postmodern critique. Especially in the post-punk zines of the 1970’s and 80’s, they acted as a forum in which artists and musicians fulfilled the modernist tradition of rejecting all that was traditional, hegemonic or by remixing material from _those earlier periods. Here you can see, with the designer and artists Jamie Reids’ work for the Sex Pistols a _reworking of the dada aesthetics developed during the Modernist period, parodying these styles and mixing them in with the new technologies of the day (photocopiers, letraset, etc). This process (of referencing, remixing, ripping up, defining a mood and an argument), this ‘self conscious assemblage’ is, in essence, what we are asking you to perform here in the academy as an approach to the development of your theories, ideas and arguments in the context of your essay or ‘literature review'.

This workshop will explore freedom of speech in both historical and contemporary contexts through an exploration of the politics and ethics of technology and language. Over the course of four days we will produce an interactive response to Alan Turing’s proposition that intelligence is evidenced through language (known as ‘The Turing Test’) with an aim to update, undermine and disrupt contemporary markers of ‘who counts’. Who (or what) gets to speak, and for whom? In the contemporary hyper-technological context do we need to rethink our understanding of both freedom and speech within liberal (and illiberal) democracies?

“I love how millennials are associated with avocado toast and selfies instead of the fact that we all constantly joke about wanting to die.”¹

*

It has been clear to archaeologists, ever since unearthing the Necropolis late into the 16th Century, that those who did not flee the city of Pompeii in 79AD perished in an event of seismic proportions. However, as excavators worked over the centuries to uncover human remains, they noticed that the skeletons were surrounded by voids in the compacted ash – in the mid 1800’s this realisation lead excavators to discover that by carefully pouring plaster into these spaces, the final poses, clothing, and faces of the last residents of Pompeii can, as reports tend to put it, ‘come to life.’

Dr. Pliny, an Italian psychogeologist specialising in poromechanics, has been working with these material witnesses² since excavations resumed in early 2018. After a new batch of funding was dug out from the coffers of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Dr. Pliny and a small team of researchers from the International Therolingustics Association (ITA)³ have begun to execute a new, experimental procedure of psychographic material analysis. Their work on site begins from the basic premise that:

“For every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency.”⁴

In their new method of analysis, the plot of land (or plaster) that Dr. Pliny and his team have been given to work on and the plot of Pompeii as a narrativized psychosocial event cannot be separated – in both domains they are simply looking for inconsistencies, or plot holes.

“...the main plot is the map or the concentration blueprint of plot holes (the other plots). Every hole is a footprint left by at least one more plot, prowling underneath.”⁵

Since beginning this process of excavation Dr. Pliny and his colleagues have realised that their previous issues were simply deficiencies in resolution. When excavation commenced in 1748, the resolution of the blueprint that Carlo di Borbone had operated within lay at around 1km2 – at this resolution, plot features such as the town structure were not even yet visible. However, over the last 200 years, the available resolution has steadily increased with the help of improved technology and, most recently, cybergothic methods of excavation and analysis. Now, Dr. Pliny is able to worm his way into the pores and secretory cavities of victims buried millennia ago, making observations of the cast reliefs directly at a fidelity of 17µm2.

This increased resolution is invaluable in Pliny’s work, as he is psychoanalysing the inorganic matter of the unconscious itself. In recent interviews he has attributed the inspiration for this groundbreaking approach to the late Mark Fisher*: *

“There is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death, but a drive of death. The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie: there is an agency at work in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be.”⁶

By exploring this understanding of Thanatos and elaborating an approach with the assistance of the geolinguists at the ITA – Pliny has been able to divine fragments of unconscious material from the plaster casts and have these geolinguists verbalise or translate them. The fragmented results are shocking (albeit, under the circumstances, somewhat unsurprising) – between unspeakable groans and inhuman chattering the team managed to map together a few unconjugated scraps and even a whole sentence:

“Qui me calcas, calcaberis, et tu, id cogita et ora pro me.”⁷

*

“Now and then, as in the case of the helicopter, with its unstable, insect-like obsessiveness, we can see clearly the deep hostility of the mineral world. We are lucky that the organic realm reached the foot of the evolutionary ladder before the inorganic.” ⁸

When a market becomes more competitive, product life-spans tend to increase. When Japanese vehicles with longer lifespans entered the American market in the 1960s and 1970s, American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products.⁹ Coincidentally – or perhaps accordingly – the British author J.G. Ballard was also investigating such a symphorophilic relationship between automobiles and life-spans during the 1970’s; a research project culminating in the publication of his now infamous experimental fiction The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and the equally controversial Crash (1973).

In a brief introduction to The Atrocity Exhibition, William Burroughs observes:

“The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments: "In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child . . ." The human body becomes landscape…”¹⁰

In the demise of pre-modern Pompeii one can see a precursing of this conceptual image of ‘the body as landscape’ – the figures, faces, expressions and desires of a city compressed, decomposed and unwillingly etched into an impersonal terrain. Here, the barriers between inner and outer – organic and inorganic – become gradated, disinhibited, compounded and muddied. For Burroughs and Ballard in the ‘industrial age’ however, such apocalyptic imagery arrives instead through the lurid figures of hyper-capitalist space – ass-cheeks printed the size of tower-blocks, used car-lots stretching into a receding horizon, the nauseating sexualisation of political, economic and cultural chieftains, the glut of trivialised images depicting murder and destruction.

In this oracular reading, the waste-lot of the Anthropocene is rendered visible at the sunbleached intersection between Thanatos, Capital and the Earth. If the apocalyptic annihilation of Pompeii arrived from the inorganic ‘without’, the fate of our industrial-capitalist age is proactively produced from the inorganic drive ‘within’¹¹ – “[t]he death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part.”¹² Here, the cybernetic features of an ostensibly free market come into play – agencies of all kinds (human, inhuman; corporate, natural) descend on the asphalt plot – “...the hint of death is present in every biological circuit.”¹³ Feedback loops – such as the supposed tendency for competitive markets to produce longer product life-spans – begin to operate and proliferate without the need for human intervention, in fact they actively preclude it: increasingly competitive labour markets result in shorter life-spans as workers are progressively locked out of the means of survival.

Moving away from the automobiles – into a distinctly post-fordist space of production and precarity – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi picks up on this thread:

“When the production of goods is turned into information, and the network becomes the sphere of recombination of productive actions which take place in distant spaces and moments of time – the capitalist’s need to buy the whole of the worker’s lifetime ends – he just needs fragments of time. The networked machine ceaselessly picks up and recombines fragments of info-time from the ocean of social life and intelligence. Thus, precariousness invades every space of social life, and permeates the expectations and the emotions of individuals, whose time is fragmented, fractalized, cellularized.” ¹⁴

Problems of agency (economic, political, educational; human, nonhuman) become problems of time. Whether fascist: Make America Great Again! neoliberal: Keep Calm and Carry On! or anarchistic: No Future! these slogans all represent a kind of ‘time-crisis’. A crisis, the symptom of which manifests itself in an abstract desire for time in a system under which a sense of futurity has collapsed – a direct result of the technological apparatus that Berardi outlines, the ‘networked machine’. A time-machine built to facilitate and construct ‘productive’ compulsions in lieu of meaningful communications: the impersonal death drive, the ‘electro-libidinal parasite’,¹⁵ the ‘eerie pilot of everything’ virtually renders itself in (cyber)space – in spite of Ballard’s prophetic warning – the inorganic leaps to the apex of the evolutionary ladder.

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”¹⁶

Through this understanding it is clear that the human is complicit in – and a catalyst of – its own obsolescence. The spirit of entrepreneurialism so revered in neoliberal discourse serves to accelerate a process of anthropocentric discontinuation – if “capital is a social suicide machine, it is because it is compelled to advantage its assassins”¹⁷ – time is running amok, shorting, spiraling inward.

*

Foetal: denoting a posture characteristic of a fetus, with the back curved forwards and the limbs folded in front of the body.

Rosie Grace Ward’s work is, in a similar sense, a time-machine – not in the sense that one could jump in and ‘travel’ to Ancient Rome – but in the sense that it ‘machines’ time; the work works with time, enters into a machinic relationship with time itself, treating it as raw material. In short, it functions via an explicitly “cybergothic methodology – disinterring the present in the relics of the Deep Past…” ¹⁸

Ward’s work manifests itself in a particular kind of ‘time-space’ and arrives there via this peculiar methodology, one in which time has been collapsed back in on itself – huddled in a corner muttering maddening incantations over and over – spiralling, folding inward it has assumed a primaeval, foetal posture (in death, in life and the madness in-between).

The figure of the voided corpse, crouched in a foetal pose and set in plaster of Paris 1000+ years after its initial demise becomes emblematic of the work itself: ancient, idyllic agricultural landscapes are cut with the blades of future warlords; clinically bureaucratic office-spaces become involuntarily spliced with a body of coagulated blood, spilt on an altar to some anonymous, violent logotype. This is an archaeology – an exhumation or conjuration – of every temporal axis, excavating artefacts that break down any notion of an internal/external division (“You can lean against us, we’re quite real”).¹⁹ The dreams, desires and nightmares of agents spread across millenia coalesce in the gallery space. Here again we encounter the haunting image of Ballard’s atrocious, unchaste capitalist landscapes – however, instead of the hyper-erotic images aroused from a recent sexual revolution, Ward’s time-spaces garner the brands of a decaying planet, stratifying them through the infrastructure of an impersonal, insane, neoliberal cityscape.

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”²⁰

Berardi’s ‘networked (time-)machine’, at once an agent and a hallucination,²¹ seeps out into the ‘real world’ – infecting the various plots (both earthly and narrative) entangled throughout space-time with its own logic of productivity and accumulation. Here, the woeful obsolescence, the foetal impotence of the human appears clearer than ever.

However, for such an inhuman, impersonal area of investigation Ward seems intent on staying with the human, for better or for worse, in life or in death, use or disuse – both as inorganic artefact and organic ally. A belief in the potential capacities of the human (and it’s kind) is evident in the excessively ritualistic artefacts and situations that Ward’s work seeks to map out: agricultural tools ornamented with sacrificial offerings of pearls and blood; massive, looming graveyards at once haunting in their morbidity and humane in their injunction to remembrance.

At once diagrammatic and pragmatic, Ward’s time-spaces seek not only to represent, reproduce or exhibit the plot-holes they uncover, but also dilate, distend and corrupt them – plot-holes which worm their way through the established narratives of neoliberalism, capitalism, cyberspace and civilisation more broadly. The paradoxical realisation that “the only future we have comes when we stop reproducing the conditions of the present”²² is inescapably materialised in Ward’s work. However, it is, of course, materialised through the structures, images and figures of the capitalist present – leveraging corporate-cultural branding, climate destruction and consumer culture against itself.

These spaces of a collapsed time – compounded by a hallucinatory moment in which the affective background of ‘legislated nostalgia’²³ reigns supreme – make use of the cybergothic tendencies already present in contemporary culture. While Ward’s work often manifests itself in explicitly violent, negative figures, hers is in fact a project of empowerment and emancipation – a method of positive temporal infection and a recuperation of the death drive we began with. It is only through these encounters that we can stop romanticizing life as it stubbornly exists (across all temporal modes) and instead “wish a happy death” on the calcified political forms and no-good solutions of contemporary capital.²⁴

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Footnotes

1. Leah Williams, https://twitter.com/mymonsterischic/status/1022950001947885568 ↩

2. Schuppli, Material Witness, http://susanschuppli.com/research/materialwitness/ ↩

3. Le Guin, The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics (in Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Plume, 1974),167 ↩

4. Negarestani, Cyclonopedia (re.press, 2008), 53 ↩

5. Ibid., 61 ↩

6. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016), 85 ↩

7. Roughly translated: He who treads on me, will be trodden. You, think and pray for me. ↩

8. Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition (Fourth Estate, 2014), 38 ↩

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence ↩

10. Burroughs in Ballard, Atrocity Exhibition, ix ↩

11. “And what is this death that always rises from within, but that must arrive from without – and that, in the case of capitalism, rises with all the more power as one still fails to see exactly what this outside is that will cause it to arrive?” Deleuze & Guattari, Anti Oedipus (Bloomsbury, 2013), 301 ↩

12. Land, Making it with Death (in Fanged Noumena, Urbanomic, 2012), 266 – for further reading on Land – and the problems with his more recent work – listen to Mark Fisher’s, Anti-Vital, http://www.openschooleast.org/the-bad-vibes-club-presents-mark-fisher-anti-vital/ ↩

13. Bateson in Plant, Zeros + Ones (Fourth Estate, 1998), 162 ↩

14. Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso, 2015), 203 – [emphasis my own] ↩

15. http://www.virtualfutures.co.uk/discover/no-time/ ↩

16. Ballard, Fictions of Every Kind (Books and Bookmen 1971) ↩

17. “Capital produces the first sociality in which the _pouvoir _(political power) of dominance is perpetually submitted to the hazard of experimental puissance (physical strength).” Land, Making it with Death, 265 ↩

18. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 89 ↩

19. Ballard, Unlimited Dream Company (1979) ↩

20. Gibson, Neuromancer (Voyager, 1995), 67 ↩

21. Behavior-altering parasites are known for their infection of the hosts central nervous system. ↩

22. Edelman in Culp, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota, 2016), 13 ↩

23. Definition: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess. Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) ↩

24. Culp, Dark Deleuze, 13 ↩

So in this talk I’m going to attempt to draw a clear map of nonhuman publishing as it already exists today (because it certainly exists already!) and how we might think about the subject going into the future. Through some 4 or 5 examples I’m hoping to show that the human no longer holds the exclusive rights to ‘publishing’ as a practice... both in the narrow sense of books, articles, essays, etc... and in the broader sense that has been developed and hinted at in more recent conversations around social media, contemporary performance, post-internet art, and so on.

Therefore, with that in mind, I’d like to start with a quote from a prolific but little known editor...

About me: I am written using the PyWikiBot (core) framework. Most of my work centers on moving and deleting categories and updating listified pages of categories. I am an admin bot, so don't make me get all SkyNet on you.

I currently have around 5.1 million edits!

Here's a list of listified categories I update regularly (or as on-wiki changes necessitate):

— Speedy deletion candidates — Current proposed deletions — Old proposed deletions — Requests for help — Requests for unblocking (and) — Categories up for deletion

•••

This is an entry taken from the profile page of the wikipedia user and contributor Cydebot. Interestingly, as we can see, on the Wikipedia platform there is nothing much built into the userpages of these bots that would indicate they are nonhuman – especially when the bot’s developer chooses to write their biography in the first-person (as is the case for CydeBot). Occasionally a programmer will add a ‘big red button’ titled with some variant of ‘EMERGENCY BOT SHUTOFF BUTTON’ to a bot’s userpage… but for Cydebot this most definitely is not an option. In fact, the onus is on you to behave or else suffer at the hands of Cyde turning, as they write, ‘all SkyNet’.¹

Wikipedia bots were introduced onto the platform in 2002, just one year after the encyclopedias founding. Over the last decade-and-a-half bots have performed various general tasks, from deleting vandalism and updating links, to much more specific functions. For example, one of Cydebot’s co-workers, ClueBot II, showcases the versatility of these users – ClueBot II not only rifles through the platform for potential vandals but has also uploaded thousands of tiny articles about asteroids using data collected by NASA – a role which has won ClueBot a whole host of prestigious awards and made him one of the most prolific publishers on the platform.²

As sweet as they may appear, these bots are, however, prone to arguing. A paper released by researchers at the University of Oxford last year showed that “although Wikipedia bots are intended to support the encyclopedia, they often undo each other’s edits... [leading to] 'fights' [which can] continue for years” or, in some instances, even decades.³ To illustrate what this means it might be useful to turn to an example given by Wired magazine: here, one bot makes an edit to redirect the page or search query ‘Ricotta al forno’ to ‘Ricotta cheese’ where previously another bot had linked it simply to ‘Ricotta’. After this edit the initial bot reverts it back, at which point the second editor, preferring their own naming convention, makes the change again… and so on, ad infinitum. In fact, the two bots involved in this example – Scepbot and Russbot – have, across 1800 different articles, collectively reverted one-anothers edits just under 2000 times over a three year period.⁴

So, in the context of what we are discussing here today – publishing and distribution – these bot-to-bot editorial processes, or what we might call ‘nonhuman’ arguments start to create a few problems.

While much of what we speak of in the ‘publishing industry’ concerns strictly anthropogenic relations, intra- and inter-social and cultural interactions – or in other words, humans ‘making things public’ for other humans – it would appear that nonhuman actors have begun to make some quite complex foray’s into this same territory...

...one’s that start to complicate our received notions of what it means to be, or to function as, an editor or a publisher (and also what publishing is and does in the first place). To start with a simple task then, we might say: smart wikibot’s now play a very significant part in the editing process of a platform that is read by millions of humans every single day – and the implications of this needs to be understood now, not, as has been the case for some time, imagined away into a netflix series or some silicon-inspired science fiction.

However, as dramatic as this sounds, it would be very easy to overstate the importance of these algorithms. After all, these are quite simply scripts, and as much as I or their developers might like to anthropomorphize them – their influence on the world, or what we might call their ‘reach’, remains pretty limited. There are, however, operations which are much wider reaching in their scope.

Wordsmith, for example, is a piece of software generated by Automated Insights (AI). In their own words, Wordsmith is “a natural language generation (NLG) platform that turns data into insightful narratives.”⁵ It takes data from a spreadsheet and outputs an article, a story, a report, whatever you want... and, beyond that, through some sophisticated ‘configuration’ Automated Insights can even stylise the voice of the Wordsmith, making it sound like a basketball team, a vineyard, or in one slightly bizarre case, a bodybuilder.

One of Automated Insights' more prestigious clients however, and the one which is most relevant for our conversation today, is the Associated Press (AP). In the AP’s case, they needed a way of automating their Quarterly Earning Reports (QEP’s) for US public companies… before working with AI, the AP could only produce 300 stories per quarter, each one meticulously hand written and edited by a financial journalist. However, after implementing a customised version of Wordsmith in 2014, the AP were able to output 4,400 quarterly reports – in other words, the algorithm was able to produce 12 times the number of stories than the AP’s previous, strictly human efforts.⁶

In 2016, two years after this initial implementation, the AP insights team published a study which found that a result of automating (and massively increasing) the output of QEP’s had a material effect on the amount of trading that took place within the US financial market.⁷ The researchers suggested “that automated coverage increases firms’ trading and liquidity around their earnings announcements.” In non-financial jargon, smaller companies that were getting left out from the AP’s earning reports managed to make the news and therefore received some interest they might otherwise have missed. So, here, beyond the wikibots rapid re-directions we can see a very material influence that these bot-human publishing relations have.

However, things get even more interesting if we being to speculate even a little.

Staying within this financial context for a moment, it might be wise to turn our attention to the ‘flash crash’ that took place in 2016, a few months after the Brexit vote. Overnight the British pound dropped by 6% and, at the time, no one really knew why or how to fix it. However, shortly after, the BBC published a compelling story linking the mini-freefall to algorithmic traders... or ‘algo’s’ as the human-traders call them. Kathleen Brooks, a research director at the financial broker City Index, wrote:

“These days some algos trade on the back of news sites, and even what is trending on social media sites such as Twitter … Apparently it was a rogue algorithm that triggered [this] selloff after it picked up comments made by the French President Francois Hollande, who said if Theresa May and co. want hard Brexit, they will get hard Brexit.”⁸

So an 'algo' somewhere got the idea from a headline or a tweet – or a tweet of a headline – that a hard brexit was on the way, and started selling off sterling as fast as it could. This in turn lead all of the algo’s associates to reconsider their own sterling policies and the value of the pound suddenly tanked. Considering our previous revelations about the Associated Press then, it would not be stretching our imagination too far to picture a scenario in which an algorithm had written this (somewhat sensationalist) story in the first place. Here we can wind our way back through a common thread, and return to the story and fate of our wikibots… perhaps it would be wise to reconsider who their intended audience is in the first place, and what the effects of such infighting, such relationships might actually and eventually be.

Here we can see a much stricter form – even if it remains, to a certain degree, speculative – of bot-bot relations. These nonhuman actors are entangled not only in messy relationships with us (as we see not only here but in more general discussions around Facebook and elections worldwide) but also with one-another. In the Wikibot case even… while, at the end of the day, the intended audience of the whole article is eventually a human reader – when we consider this issue at the level of the individual, specific disagreement that these bots engage in – the person, or agency, that they are trying to satisfy is not a human, but in fact the other, adversarial bot. To be slightly provocative about it we could say that the human is left out of the picture entirely... in this context at least, human input is not really that important or required. Similarly, we can extrapolate this out to our speculative example of an algorithmic reporter generating stories for algorithmic traders – all of which being technology that currently exists and in which the human plays an increasingly minor part.

However, in our diagram there is one obvious connection missing – human-bot relations, humans publishing for a nonhuman audience. Here, I can produce only one very short connection by way of a brief example (but I imagine it’s only going to get more important as time goes on)… and this takes the form of the content that we produce on social media platforms. While we often think – and Mark Zuckerberg literally testifies to the fact – that the revenue model of these sharing platforms is predominantly provided via advertising and the selling of data, a small (but increasingly significant) part of their current revenue streams will come from the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence. One way in which AI’s are being trained right now (through machine learning for example), are against the huge datasets published by humans online. The pictures, texts, videos, audio-files… pretty much everything that we, as humans, post online can and is being read by bots, algorithms or what we might call nonhuman actors so that they might educate (or maybe even entertain!) themselves much in the same way as we might read each-others publications.

Here we can see what might – for some – seem like a somewhat unsettling fourth connection. But as disturbing as it may be… I think – in this sense of distribution and publishing – this now complete diagrammatic understanding encourages us (or in some ways shocks us) into taking a unique position – a non-anthropocentric (what some might call, non-correlationist) position. It also encourages us to understand this phenomena of nonhuman publishing as contemporary… while very much incomplete, these stories are already unfolding, already becoming real – this tangled web of relations is, in many ways, already in place.

So, now we have our map of the situation – one which displaces the human from the centre of public or published relations – I’d like to use it to plot a proposition (or, perhaps, depending on the time, a couple of propositions) and finally a caveat…

Firstly, I’d like to reframe a fifth, slightly different connection, on this diagram. Not so much a publisher-audience, or writer-reader, relationship as a collaborative editor-editor one…

At present we speak about the issue of technology, algorithms and bots as if they are ‘tools’ in need of re-working, reprogramming or ‘fixing’. Especially, when it produces unexpected or problematic results – as is the case with issues around data-privacy, biased-algorithms, and the rest… Indeed, while there is a usefulness in this way of speaking – trying to work out how can we find leverage in a situation that is problematic or troublesome – perhaps we would do better to talk about working with these tools…

To a certain degree this is already the case (a la ‘clippy’) albeit we don’t think of it this way, with Siri or Alexa and the other digital assistants. Perhaps it was truer for clippy than it is for Siri or Alexa, when working with Clippy it felt much more like a collaboration (or true assistance) rather than creepy data-mining or domestic snooping. This might be an interesting and useful way for any UX designers in the room to think about the ‘design’ of present and future ‘digital assistants’...

Secondly, and this is a related point… in the acknowledgements of her most recent book ‘Staying with the Trouble’ Donna Haraway writes: that this is a “book [...] full of human and nonhuman critters to think and feel with” – perhaps this is the best articulation of what I am trying to say.

This formulation – human and non-human ‘critters’ – might also be more useful than ‘bots’ and serves to create a new-terrain where our understanding can take hold. It needs its own vocabulary.

Lastly, the caveat... I think it’s important to state that – while this non-human publishing is all very new, flashy and exciting – it would be all too easy to overlook an inherent problem when considering the ‘non-human’ at all… this is a point made much more articulately than me by Helen Hester in a piece she wrote last year entitled ‘Towards a Theory of Thing Women’. In this section of the article I am about to quote she is examining Ian Bogosts similar project to understand the relations of non-human objects, (the question of – in the internet of things, what it is like to be a thing) in this case the questions comes from a wider philosophical program of Object Oriented Ontology, some of you may be familiar with it – so...

“When Bogost asks, with tender curiosity and a genuine will to understand, what it is that a microprocessor or a ribbon cable experiences, it is hard not to instinctively bristle on behalf of all the abjected human things who are not subject to the same curiosity – whose inner lives most philosophical and artistic discourses have no time to ponder. The project of object-oriented ontology insists that that “Nothing is overlooked, … nothing given priority”. As such, it might be best encapsulated by the slogan “All Things Matter.” As that slogan implies, it actually demands a fair amount of social immunity or entitlement to prioritise nothing at all over anything else, as well as a certain lack of concern with the treatment, affairs, and survival of animate beings, including other humans.” ⁹

While it might, for some, be important, interesting or exciting to acknowledge the importance of non-human critters, objects or actors (especially in the sense of bots, microprocessors and the rest) – it is also important to consider all the very real, human actors whose ‘published relations’ go unacknowledged on a daily basis... and, for that matter, have gone unacknowledged throughout history. This, for me, is one of the trickiest issues concerning this relatively new field of theory and understanding and perhaps it is something we can talk about in the Q&A.

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Adapted from a talk given at the DISTRIBUTED symposium organised by David Blamey (Open Editions), Joshua Trees (Books From The Future) & the Royal College of Art

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Footnotes

1. Incidentally, it is worth adding, that CydeBot is the most active bot – and by that measure user – on Wikipedia as a whole. ↩

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_Commons/Awards ↩

3. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171774 ↩

4. https://www.wired.com/2017/03/internet-bots-fight-theyre-human/ ↩

5. https://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith ↩

6. https://automatedinsights.com/case-studies/associated-press ↩

7. https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/study-news-automation-by-ap-increases-trading-in-financial-markets ↩

8. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37582150 ↩

9. http://www.litfmag.com/issue-4/towards-a-theory-of-thing-women/ ↩

CONVERSAS CAMBERWELL was a fortnightly series of open-talks formed as an experiment in flattening hierachies between speaker and listener, organised with Marcie Mintrose. During the event, three Conversadores (those who talk at Conversas) brought something to share with the gathered group for thirty minutes each. As the title suggests itself, Conversas (Conversations in Portuguese) aims at an honest setup from which everyone can benefit. Across the dozen events we ran, we invited the likes of:

• David Cross, Reader in Fine Art at the University of the Arts
• The artist Luke Turner of LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner
• The self-organised education group Evening Class
• Representatives of Antiuniversity, an experiment to challenge institutionalised education
• Nick Wrack, a local barrister and socialist campaigner
• Students from Camberwell College of Arts

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Context

Conversas Camberwell sat within a larger project initiated in Lisbon by Constança Saraiva and Mafalda Fernandes, in 2012. Nowadays, it is a project of many people and cities.

I first became involved in the project when I was invited to speak about my research for the four hour academy at Conversa #24 in Rotterdam, organised by Constança at Upominki.

I was later invited back to speak at Conversa #41 held in Publication Studio Rotterdam.