
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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

---

[^1]: [Charlotte Neff . Scandinavian elements in the Wantage code of Æthelred II. The Journal of Legal History (1989)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01440368908530969)
[^2]: [James Parisot. Marx and Engels on Prisons and Capitalism. Journal of Classical Sociology (2024)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468795X241308818)


Second-weeker

second-weeker


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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

---

[^1]: The quoted sections are taken from Tarkovsky’s [_Time Within Time, The Diaries, 1970-1986_](https://monoskop.org/images/d/dd/Tarkovsky_Andrey_Time_Within_Time_The_Diaries_1970-1986.pdf) (1989), p.95–96
[^2]: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4dxaf4](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4dxaf4)
[^3]: Ingmar Bergman. _The Magic Lantern_ (1987)
[^4]: Don DeLilo, _White Noise_ (1985), p.289


Fear

fear

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 immobilisation[^2] 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, peripherally[^10] – 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?

[^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](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](https://www.rainer-rilling.de/gs-villa07-Dateien/JamesonF86a_CognitiveMapping.pdf)

[^4]:  Berger: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg) 

[^5]:  Berger: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLwmv-1AZDg) 

[^6]:  [https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960\_Lundy.pdf](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](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](https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29475/1/PubSub6960_Lundy.pdf) p.71

[^9]: [https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf](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](https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C5075211#/embed/object) 


The Encycloscope

the-encycloscope


A prototyping workshop based on Keith Tyson’s _Artmachine_ project (1995). In designing proposals, we ask students to generate a framework for the production of prototypes, a set of ‘parameters’ from which to begin – this is a process that must be repeated many times for even a single project to take form.

[![/artmachine.jpg](/artmachine.jpg)](https://www.wright20.com/auctions/2022/03/cover-to-cover-artists-books-ephemera/277)

Tyson's _"Artmachine"_ project (1991–1999) was an exploration of how randomness and systems can generate art. Rather than creating works from personal inspiration, Tyson developed a conceptual tool — a combination of computer programs, flowcharts, and books — that produced random combinations of words and ideas. These outputs served as instructions for artworks, which Tyson then brought to life in different ways.

The Artmachine generated over 12,000 proposals, though only a fraction were realized. These _"Artmachine Iterations"_ included a 24-foot painting made from bathroom sealant and a hangman’s noose depicted using toothpaste and music CDs. By following the machine's directives — even when they clashed with his own tastes — Tyson aimed to remove personal bias from the creative process, challenging traditional notions of authorship and intention in art.

This innovative approach established Tyson's reputation in the art world, leading to international exhibitions and culminating in his receipt of the Turner Prize in 2002.

![/artmachine2.gif](/artmachine2.gif)

This workshop,

1. You must generate 10 ideas in the next 30 minutes
2. You have 5 minutes to remove 5 ideas
3. You have 10 minutes to develop these 5 ideas
4. You have 5 minutes to remove 2 ideas
5. You have 10 minutes to develop these 3 ideas present your ideas!

![/design-machine.gif](/design-machine.gif)


The Design Machine

the-design-machine


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.

---

[^1]: \

> 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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/About).


TELLTALE

telltale


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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/About)

---

[^1]: [https://www.e-flux.com/journal/140/572300/critical-auto-theory/](https://www.e-flux.com/journal/140/572300/critical-auto-theory/)


Resolution

resolution


An excerpt from the essay _Public Pleasure: Notes on the Privatisation of Peace, Pleasure & Politics in the Public Realm_ written with [Ruth Pilston](https://www.instagram.com/05rpilston) for [How to Sleep Faster #15](https://arcadiamissa.com/product/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 office[^2] – 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]

[^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


Public Pleasure

public-pleasure


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?”

![](/tilmans.gif)

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!

## \*

![south pole](/south-pole.gif)

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.”

[^1]: [https://selfselector.co.uk/2010/11/15/interview-with-wolfgang-tillmans/](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](https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf) p.260


North & South

north-south


Notes for the book [_Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion_](https://www.zonebooks.org/books/15-aby-warburg-and-the-image-in-motion) by [Philippe-Alain Michaud](https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/4554/philippe-alain-michaud) (translated by Sophie Hawkes) with a forward by [Georges Didi-Huberman](https://pact.egs.edu/biography/georges-didi-huberman/). Published (2004 [1998]), by Zone Books.

---

# Foreword

## (by Georges Didi-Huberman)

A key question motivates Didi-Huberman’s foreword (and, by extension, Michaud’s book): How to move Warburg out of the space to which he has been consigned – of “reference-reverence” – of secondary importance in ‘serious’ debates on art history? How to recognise Warburg as the originator of an ‘iconology’ formed through the ‘Germanic context of _Kulturwissenschaft_’ (over [Panofsky’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Panofsky) Anglo-Saxon ‘social history of art’)? (p.8)

Contemporary accounts of Warburg‘s life and work tend to centre his ‘erudition’ – his “use of textual sources and archives, his prosopography” – wheras this account, from Michaud, holds on instead to the idea of _movement:_ “...both as object and method, [...] a characteristic of works of art and a stake in a field of knowledge claiming to have something to say.” (p.9)

In this sense it is preoccupied – and periodizes Warburg’s pracice – with motion across three ‘journeys’:

1. The historical journey toward the _‘image of motion,’_ (e.g. the “‘survival’ of gestural expressions from Antiquity”) through historic forms of art.
2. The more wide-ranging _‘image-motion’_ (or ‘movement-image’ subsequently theorized by [Deleuze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_1:_The_Movement_Image)). Here, historical concerns become geo- and ethnographic, as in Warburg’s journey to New Mexico, and Antiquity in some way ‘comes alive’.
3. The journey to Hamburg, the establishing of his institute which seeks to reintepret art history as a _knowledge-movement_ of images: “a knowledge in extensions, in associative relationships, in ever renewed montages, and no longer knowledge in straight lines, in a confined corpus, in stabilized topologies.” This is typified by the [Mnemosyne atlas](https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/bilderatlas-mnemosyne). (p.9–10)

It is in this way that Warburg ‘sets art history in motion’, both by articulating a concern with motion as such (over, for example, static ‘poses’), but also by ‘setting into motion’ the discipline itself. “From now on [...] we shall have to imagine what art history might become, with Warburg, in the age of its reproduction in motion.” (p.12)[^1]

Through this Warburg is able to take a perhaps ‘dangerously’ kaleidoscopic view of art history’s subject matter, “to gain access to a world open to multiple extraordinary relationships”:

> “... this _excess_ no less than this _access_ contains something dangerous, something I would call _symptomatic_. Dangerous for history itself, for its practice and for its temporal models: for the symptom diffracts history, unsettling it [...], it is in itself a _conjunction_, a collision of heterogenous temporalities (time of the structure & time of the reading of the structure)” (p.12)

This ‘excess’ generates a kind of _‘knowledge-montage’_ which “rejects the matrices of intelligibility” – rejects an evolutionary, ‘positivist’ or teleological approach to the discipline – and instead recognises that “...[the] image is not a closed field of knowledge; it is [instead] a whirling, centrifugal field...” (p.13)

However, there are risks with this approach. Complicating Panofsky’s reassurance that art history is a ‘humanist discipline’, Warburg surrenders himself to the (Nietzchean) possibility of a ‘complete loss of self’; to the question of _pathos_ and _pathology_. (p.13-14)

Some interesting questions here from Didi-Huberman:

> - “Is art history prepared to recognize the _founding_ position of someone who spent almost five years in a mental institution...? Someone who ‘spoke to butterflies’ for long hours [... whom doctors] had no hope of curing?”[^2]
> - “Must one [...] speak of Warburg’s art history as a _‘pathological discipline’_?”
> - “Was not speaking to butterflies [...] the definitive way of questioning the image as such, the living image, the _image-fluttering_ that a naturalist’s pin would only kill?”
> - “Was it not to recover, through the survival of the ancient symbol for Psyche, the _psychic_ knot of the nymph, her dance, her flight, her desire, her _aura_?” (p.14)

As an aside, I will note here the emblem of the Warburg Institute.[^3]

![](/warburg-emblem-small.jpg)

> “Warburg, for his part, never ceased to rethink the questions, and this caused him to rework the whole body of his thought each time, reorganizing it, opening it up to new fields.” (p.14)

What can be learned from the concept of ‘pathology’, what is useful in it for us? Didi-Huberman approaches this in two ways:

1. Just as Nietzsche enters philosophy through the door of the “birth – and survival – of tragedy”, Warburg enters art history through the “renaissance – or survival – of Antiquity”. This theoretical relationship to Nietzsche shows, perhaps, the Dionysian sensibility present in Warburg’s work: his reinscription of ‘pathology’ through the _‘Pathosformel’_ (the pathos formula) as an “archaeological science of the pathos of Antiquity.”
2. This _Pathosformel_ as a means of interpreting the ‘symptom’ – which Warburg understood as a “movement in bodies”, a ‘passionate agitation’ – that works as a “visible expression of _psychic_ state that had become fossilized [... in images]”[^4] In this way Warburg went beyond a medical definition, understanding ‘symptoms’ not as “‘signs’ (the _sēmeia_ of classic medicine)” but as something akin to _‘unconcious memory:’_ “...their temporalities, their clusters of instants and durations, their mysterious survivals...”(p.15-16)

Perhaps we can characterise these approaches as either _archaeological_ or _anthropological_, or each an intersection of the two? This is the _anachronicistic_ nature of Warburg’s method or _Pathosformeln_: “It includes jumps, cuts, montages, harrowing connections. Repetitions and differences...” It sets art history in motion because “...the movement it opens up comprises things that are at _once_ archaeological (fossils, survivals) and current (gestures, experiences).” Postage stamps ‘taken with’ (which is to say ‘comprehended’ alongside) bas-reliefs... (p.16-18)

> “...it is a matter not only of _incarnating the survivals_ but also of creating a ‘living’ reciprocity between the act of knowing and the object of knowledge.” (p.18)

In this way, through his archival work, Warburg seeks – like Walter Benjamin – to restore the ‘timbre of those unheard voices’ across Antiquity (and into the present moment) not simply through reproduction, but by setting _himself_ in motion; “[displacing] his body and his point of view” such that this ‘unconcious vision’ might at last be seen. (p.18)[^5]

---

[^1]: There is a point here to make about Benjamin, the ‘thought-image’ in Theses and the ‘Work of Art...’
[^2]: A fascinating insight here from the Warburg Institute: [Aby Warburg’s ‘Bienentanzbrief’](https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/blog/aby-warburgs-bienentanzbrief)
[^3]: From the [Warburg Institute](https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/about-us/history-warburg-institute): The emblem, which appears above the door of the Institute, is taken from a woodcut in the edition of the De natura rerum of Isidore of Seville (560-636) printed at Augsburg in 1472. In that work it accompanies a quotation from the Hexameron of St Ambrose (III.iv.18) describing the interrelation of the four elements of which the world is made, with their two pairs of opposing qualities: hot and cold, moist and dry. Earth is linked to water by the common quality of coldness, water to air by the quality of moisture, air to fire by heat, and fire to earth by dryness. Following a doctrine that can be traced back to Hippocratic physiology, the tetragram adds the four seasons of the year and the four humours of man to complete the image of cosmic harmonies that both inspired and retarded the further search for natural laws.
[^4]: Here Didi-Huberman is borrowing the analysis of [Gertrud Bing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrud_Bing)
[^5]: A thought here about the question of the ‘totality’ – the ‘cognitive map’ from Jameson?


Notes on Aby Warburg

notes-on-aby-warburg-the-image-in-motion


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](https://www.google.com/maps/@50.9564842,-0.8123638,3a,75y,113.94h,89.6t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMpDA630tFt5YA9_INj4Ng5rWSxhE7tq8uu47Hp!2e10!3e11!6s%2F%2Flh5.ggpht.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMpDA630tFt5YA9_INj4Ng5rWSxhE7tq8uu47Hp%3Dw900-h600-k-no-pi0.40112043562228905-ya359.93770028774617-ro0-fo100!7i10240!8i5120?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTEwNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D), 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](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-7050ph-232/nash-black-and-white-negative-st-andrews-church-didling-sussex), 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.

[^1]: [https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/HarLyr?rgn=main;view=fulltext](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?

![](/pure.gif)

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.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout.

---

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


Pure

pure


Notes for the book [_Medieval Thought, St Augustine to Ockham_](https://archive.org/details/medievalthoughts00leff) by the late [Gordon Leff](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/05/gordon-leff-obituary), published in 1965 as part of Penguin's [Pelican series](https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/PELBKS/pelican-books).

---

# Part 1: The Aftermath of Rome (c.400—1000)

## Introduction to the period

Leff frames his introduction to the early period of Medieval Thought through the breakdown of the Roman Empire – its collapse gives rise, he writes, to an apparant paradox: On the one hand there is the confusion of continuous invasions, ‘transitory kingdoms’, the ‘replacement of Roman law  and order by instability and unrest’; and on the other, from the c11th onward, a series of ‘positive achievements’ and ‘imposing names’ which, through making themselves apparent with a ‘sudden flowering of society’, force us to recognise developments across the period. (p.23)

The collapse of the Roman Empire was not, of course, felt evenly across the region or distributed uniformly over time. In ‘Romanized provinces’ such as those in North Africa, Gaul, Spain and Italy there was no immediate break with Roman ways, despite continued attacks from ‘the outside’ by Germanic tribes (Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc) and dissolution ‘from within’, with the growing allyship of ‘barbarian’ groups (_foderati_). In those regions along the Rhine and in North-West Europe there was, however, a significant ‘reversion’ which only became more pronounced in Britain after the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the c5th. (p.24–25)

A twofold division therefore emerged within Western Europe between the 5th – 11th centuries:
1. The West became divorced _from_ the Empire in the East, a process of extrication which developed into the c7th and held firm until the c11th (at which time such regions could begin to ‘vie with the higher civilization of Byzantium’). 
2. And then, _within_ the West itself, there emerged a ‘marked divegence between the countries north of the Alps and Italy.’ A gradual shift in focus within Europe moved the _locus_ of development from the Mediterranean cities (which had been _foci_ of trade with the East) to the North West as agrarian societies took hold once again. (p.25)

Leff here makes an interesting point in ‘playing down’ these changes, arguing that such shifts should not be understood as a “sudden lapse from civilization” but rather:

> ...most of the areas beyond those fringing the Medierranean had always been more barbarian than Roman. The Empire had been largely an artificial creation without firm foundations, upheld primarily by the army and the tax-gatherer; its industry was driven by slavery [...]; its trade [...] was not for large-scale needs; its culture did not extend beyond its own ruling class[^1] (p.26).

The Church was then the only organisation able to retain such a ‘universal character’ and consequently became the most influential actor during this period, a ‘bastion of order’ with the capacity to preserve the past and reshape the future. Following on from Imperial modes of administration it was able to take charge of cities and partially hold together a fractious region. All the remaining ‘Barbarian’ kingdoms or alternate modes of organisation that formed out of the Roman Empire, were ‘swept away by succeeding incursions’ (bar the [Franks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks)): the Justinians by the Lombards in c6th; the Islamic incursions into the Mediterranean during the c7–8th; and the Viking invasions of the c9–10th in the north-west (p.26-27).

With this background of external attack and internal division established, Leff positions the empire of Charlemagne – King of the Franks (768–814) – as a key moment through which we can “glimpse [...] the new order of society that was emerging”. Here we learn of: 
1. the _growing authority of the papacy_ through names such as [Gregory the Great](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I), [St Benedict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_of_Nursia) and [St Augustine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo), its unifying doctrine and growing monasticism; 
2. the _power of the Frankish Kingdom_ through [Clovis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_I) and [Charles Martel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Martel); and 
3. the _‘pre-eminence of Anglo-Saxon culture’_ through [Bede](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede) and [St Boniface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Boniface) (p.27).

The Carolingian Empire reveals and confirms 4 key points within the ‘aftermath of Rome’:

1. That the centre of gravity (the _‘foci’_ of European culture) had shifted from the Mediterranean (cities) to north-western Europe (agrarian societies).
2. That wealth and authority had become bound up with landholding, in other words, the establishment of an essentialy feudal order. This included systems of vassalage, compacts of service and protection which distributed authority (Leff adds, “one of the great stumbling-blocks to effective royal power was the rival jurisdiction of the aristocracy over their own retainers”).
3. The ‘supreme importance of the church’ which was ‘alone [the] cohesive force amid the welter of tribes and kingdoms’. In this way the Church also became indispensable to law & order (“spiritual power played an important part of governing a conquered people”) and conversion (from the late c6th) became one of its leading activities. It also held a monopoly on technqiues of government such as learning and literacy (monasteries were to the Middle Ages what academies were to Ancient Greece). Such was the power of the Church that only kings who cooperated with it were able to succeed (as in the Carolingian Empire).
4. The position of the king is revealed as neither the supreme or ‘absolute’ military or administrative power (as in imperial Rome) but rather contingent upon ‘the local aristocracy for law and order.’ While in the centralised bureaucracy of Rome ‘what the Emperor decreed had the force of law’, in the network of custom and obligation that comprised the Middle Ages, ‘decrees’ of this kind could have no such effect (p.27–29).

This final aspect puts into clear relief the manner in which a European _‘telos’_ was rediscovered. The development of the role of the King, from ‘personification of the tribe’ to ‘God's representative’, shows the “...revival of the imperial idea [...] that Christendom was the heir to Rome.” It also shows how dependent these Kingdoms were on the personality of their rulers, and the central place that the Papacy occupied in Western Europe (p.30).

The main impact these transcontinental changes had on the production of ‘culture and learning’ was, therefore, to tie ‘thought’ to the church – to make it ‘inseperable from ecclesiastical and monastic life [...] subordinated to the training of clerks and monks’. However, Leff writes, as the image of the Roman Empire waned from memory, ‘things Roman became evermore an object of veneration’. The Carolingian renaissance is then positioned, once again, as a prism through which one might see this growing veneration – and the development of a more independent, more organised approach to learning and knowledge preservation – take hold.

“Despite the blows by the Northmen against the main moastic centres, enough of their work survived to help the cultural revival of the eleventh century.” (p.30-31)

## St Augustine and his Successors

Leff writes that _within_ the ‘dark ages’ there is a need to distinguish between the c5–6th and what comes after for two reasons:
1. They were still close to classical thinking, with a ‘high level of expression and culture’;
2. They contained two thinkers who were to have an enormous influence on the whole of the middle ages: _St Augustine_ and _Boethius_.

### St Augustine

The North African scholar St Augustine moved through a series of beliefs in his lifetime; from [Manicheism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism), through [scepticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism#Philosophy) and [Neoplatonism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism_and_Christianity), to Christianity. As with all [‘early Fathers’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Fathers)

---

[^1]: This précis seems very much in-keeping with David Graeber's account in [Debt](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf).

Medieval Thought

notes-on-medieval-thought


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 60<sup>th</sup> 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 13<sup>th</sup> 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]

![](/sign.gif)

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 60<sup>th</sup> 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. 

---

[^1]: _Appiccicoso_ = sticky, _-’ino’_ is diminutive = _Appiccicosino_, ‘ines’ is plural

[^2]: [This is how Venice will fall, Mario Piana, 29 October 2021](https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/10/29/this-is-how-venice-will-fall)


Signs

signs


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 England_[^3] – 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.

---

[^1]: [https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a03_01.htm](https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a03_01.htm) (1315)
[^2]: [https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/christ-iii/](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of_England)
[^4]: [https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-english-theophrastus_1708/page/10/mode/2up](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](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036018417&seq=484&q1=negroes)


List

list


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.


Solstice

solstice


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Website development for Ebbsfleet Citizen Archive, comissioned by Cement Fields. Designed by work-form and built using Next.js (with Mapbox) & Hygraph.

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Ebbsfleet Citizen Archive

ebbsfleet-citizen-archive


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](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2085558-if-youre-20-30-and-your-main-circle-isnt-discussing) 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]

---

[^1]: [https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2085558-if-youre-20-30-and-your-main-circle-isnt-discussing](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](https://archive.org/details/annieernaux-unefemme-1987/page/n9/mode/2up))

[^3]: [No. 73, Thursday, May 24, 1711, Addison](https://dev.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/12030-h.htm#frj2)

[^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](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/03/08/a-growing-passion-for-naked-ambition/ddced947-b241-4a67-9c14-7126ddb8812d/)

Ambition

ambition


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.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

---

[^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


Unrest

unrest


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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_%28Klimt%29#/media/File:The_Kiss_-_Gustav_Klimt_-_Google_Cultural_Institute.jpg). (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.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout


Kiss

kiss


Summary & notes for the book [_Specters of the Atlantic_](https://www.dukeupress.edu/Specters-of-the-Atlantic/.) by Ian Baucom. Published in 2005 by Duke University Press.

---

## Chapter 1

Baucom begins in Liverpool, with a petition sent – yet, importantly, left _unread_ – to the Lords Commissioners of the Admirality, who oversaw much of the administration of the Atlantic slave-trade, in July 1783. The letter detailed the story of the [_Zong_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre) massacre, written and sent by anti-slavery campaigner [Granville Sharp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Sharp). Baucom therefore begins, quite intentionally, by positioning this book as a _counterarchive_ – the “...book is a history of that unacknowledged letter, [...] the silence it writes into the history of empire and the modern, and the efforts that have been made to broach that silence” (Baucom, 2005, page 4).

What _is_ acknowledged by the Lords Commissioners, in the logs of proceedings for which we have records, paints a “surreal” picture of their day-to-day business. Baucom gives the example of minutes from July 3, 1783 in which: the widow of a late Captain is awarded 100 pounds a year and half pay; a Lieutenant, who lost his right thigh in action, is awarded 5 shillings a day and half pay; etc. In this sense the Lords Commissioners “do not emerge [...] as the architects of history, but as its petty clerks, accountants...” What such a macabre focus shows therefore, is the triumph of a “monetarizing anatomization of the body” – the triumph of something like bookkeeping over “an embodied knowledge of history” (Baucom, 2005, page 5–7).

Liverpool, numbering as it does among the capitals of ‘shipping, trading and finance’ developed during this time period, is then, for Baucom, a capital of what he calls ‘the _long twentieth century_.’ This claim is intended as a corollary to Benjamin's ‘Exposé’ of the 1930s, in which _Paris_ is claimed as _the_ ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’[^1]. What, for Benjamin, marks Paris' importance during the c19th is the manner in which the _commodity form_ takes hold within Parisian life, and how this articulates and extends an ‘increasingly global culture system’ and how the “fetish character of commodities [stands] at [its] center” (Baucom, 2005, page 8–9).

For Benjamin – as articulated by Baucom — the key principle of the commodity (and the global system from which it springs) is the production and ‘petrification’ of _exchange values_. What c19th Paris highlights is the development of a system of exchange “whose central activity was the display, inspection, collection, and consumption of [...] commodities, [...] whose signature aesthetic object was [... for Benjamin] the _allegorical fragment_”. This relation to allegory (and specifically the _allegorical form_ developed in c17th Europe) is important, as it “enacts the central logic of commodifcation by conferring on its subject matter an _abstract signification_ analogous to the economic value that capital processes of exchange confer upon the commodity.”[^2] This leads into a system of _identification_ inherent to [commodity fetishism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism): even those economically excluded from circuits of consumption are, to quote Benjamin, “imbued with the exchange value of commodities to the point of identifying with it”, obscuring for all the _labour_ from which these commodities ultimately derive. Paris, with its Haussmannian boulevards, inflected though the allegorical prose of the flaneur (as in Baudelaire), thus stages itself as the ‘world center of commodity fetishism’ (Baucom, 2005, page 9).

Liverpool (and the _Zong_ in particular) is to Baucom, therefore, what Paris is to Benjamin – in that it articulates and extends a set of logics which condition capitalist, colonial modernity as we experience it today. In developing this analysis Baucom highlights the commodification of the slaves themselves, how none of the names of the 440 people purchased by Luke Collingwood (captain of the _Zong_) survive, and yet their ‘values’ (“30 pounds a head”, or £13,200 in total) do. In keeping with the ‘monetarizing anatomization of the body’, Baucom writes that “what we [do] know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted [...] was the violence of becoming a ‘type’”, a type of person, nonperson, property, money or _commodity_. (Baucom, 2005, page 11).

More generally, the question of what was or was _not_ known to the British administrators and insurers of the c18th begins to articulate the logics of financialisation Baucom is counterposing to Benjamin's focus on commoditization – what we might call something like an _actuarial imaginary_[^3] or _actuarial epistemology_. By insuring the _Zong's_ ‘cargo’ for over £15,000 while knowing ‘little more than the name of the ship and its captain’ the role of a certain type of ‘imagination’ is foregrounded and accredited. Baucom concretizes this shift in referencing both: the struggle between an _empirical_ (evidentiary) and a _contractural_ (credible) epistemology, one which is played out in the debates (and court cases) between slave traders and abolitionists during this time period; and the well documented economic transition between the 'old landed and new moneyed classes'. (Baucom, 2005, page 15-16)

Here Baucom turns to the analysis of scholars such as [J.G.A. Pocock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._A._Pocock) and [Michael McKeon](https://english.rutgers.edu/people/emeritus-profiles/emeritus-profiles/6232-michael-mckeon.html), who demonstrate the ways in which the emergence of _the novel_ itself mirrors broader epistemological shifts in c18th British public life: “...whose ontolgy is to the precusor genres of genealogical history and genealogical romance what mobile property is to landed property and whose theory of knowledge is to a classical historical epistemology what credibility is to evidence.” The _Zong_ trials are then, for Baucom, also a test of the ‘novelization’ of this new collective imaginary – its protocols of ownership, underwriting and valuation. (Baucom, 2005, page 16)

In a very basic sense this ‘test’ puts the lie to the idea that there was no material evidence of the slave trade in Britain during this time, and furthermore shows how this evidence operates on a ‘belated’ temporal logic (the time and distance of the slave trade effectively requiring merchants to conduct business on credit). This again relies on a reversal of those protocols of value creation central to commodity captal – here, “value does not follow but precedes exchange”, exchange does not create value so much as retrospectively confirm it, offering “belated evidence to what already exists.” Returning to Benjamin's schema – in which the nineteenth century ‘enthroned’ the commodity-as-allegory of the seventeenth – we can see the ‘long twentieth century’ as that moment which “makes sovereign the value form legally secured in the _Zong's_ marine insurance contract.” Just as Benjamin's nineteenth century inherits or is ‘encoded’ by the seventeenth, the long twentieth inherits the eighteenth. (Baucom, 2005, page 17-18)

![](baucom-centuries.gif)

But how – or rather why – is it that these anachronistic moments ‘encode’ one another? What philosophy of history can account for the repetition _in_ (or _over_) the nineteenth century of the seventeenth? 

Here Baucom turns to [Richard Halpern](https://as.nyu.edu/marc/people.richard-halpern.html), in his analysis of Benjamin's linking between the allegorical and commodity form – as Halpern writes: “the commodity is, in essence, _practical allegory_ [... devaluing] its own thingly existence, as does allegory, in order to signify an invisible realm of values...” whether that of ‘meaning’ or ‘exchange’.[^4] Building on this, he turns to Frederic Jameson, whose “explanation, or explication, of such reptitions emerges from his theory of _genre_.” For Jameson, genres seek to ‘resolve’ (or at least ‘encode’) the “concrete experiences and ideologies of their particular historical moments”, they “survive by carrying within themselves [...] the signature ideologies of their formative moments, which they then rewrite onto the subsequent historical moments in which they are redeployed.” Genre critique is then, for Jameson, the analysis of what he calls _‘formal sedimentation’_: “The ideology of form itself, thus sedimented, persists into the later, more complex structure.”[^5] (Baucom, 2005, page 19)

And yet still, absent within these accounts, is, for Baucom, a “theory of _causality_ for such recurrences.” While Jameson shows the ways in which “generic repetition signals the political restaging of some earlier ideological contest, he does not tell us _why_ a particular genre should survive”. Here the frame of Baucom's question is subtle, asking: “...why, in this case, the _repeated_ generic instance (nineteenth-century allegory) should temporally coincide with the _original_ rise to dominance of the ideology it is said to encode (commodity capital) rather than signaling the belated _return_ to dominnace of that ideology.” (Baucom, 2005, page 19-20)

Here Halpern's conceptualisation – of the commodity as ‘allegory in the sphere of social practice’ (practical allegory) – is positioned as an answer. Reversing the traditional Marxian analytic of ‘base and superstructure’ Halpern argues that the commodity “cannot offer a historical-materialist ‘explanation’ of allegory [...but rather] occupies the inverse position: it is not what underlies allegory but what exceeds [or surpasses] it.” Allegory is rendered ‘obsolete’ by way of the commodity-form's perfection and globalisation of its logic of representation: allegory is not the literary ‘effect’ of commodity capitalism, it is instead “something closer to an epistemological condition of possibility [...], a mode of representation which enables [...] an intensification [of this form of capital].” (Baucom, 2005, page 21)

So what “happens to that logic of representation, that phenomenology, over the course of the intervening century?” What then of the relationship between the eighteenth and twentieth? Here Baucom turns to [Giovanni Arrighi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Arrighi) and his ‘oscillating’ theory of capitalism's historical repetitions and intensifications. In doing so Baucom maps Benjamin's ‘repetocentric’ periodizations of capital on to Arrighi's analysis of its long and short _dureés_, arguing that something like “Benjamin's cultural materialism [is required] to reveal the ways in which the oscillating forms of capital inform and are informed by the shifting phenomenologies and recycled generic protocols of cultural practice.”[^6] (Baucom, 2005, page 23)

For both Arrighi and Benjamin “time does not pass, it accumulates”: for Benjamin, time accumulates, above all, _in things_ (in the commodities we have been discussing); and for Arrighi, it does so in what [John Ruggie](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706885?seq=34) calls capital's ‘spaces-of-flows’ (in  the warehouses, store windows, quarters of high-finance, stock exchanges, etc)[^7]. From this observation Arrighi constructs a history of capital constructed through periodic _dureés_ or “systemic cycles of accumulation”, each containing within it the “elements of Marx's general formula for capital [MCM'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_mode_of_production_(Marxist_theory))”. Baucom then maps Benjamin's seventeenth and nineteenth centuries onto Arrighi's cycles not so much as ‘periods’ in their own right, as “the _midpoints_ (the commodity moments) of the larger cycles within which they are encompassed” (specifically the centrepoints of the Dutch and British cycles). (Baucom, 2005, page 25-26)

![](baucom-timeline.gif)

Returing then to the _Zong_, Baucom seeks to position the historical moment in which it sailed within this schema, with paricular focus on the MM' phases (which overlap the MCM') during which “capital seems to turn its back entirely on the thingly world, sets itself free from the material constraints of production and distribution, and revels in its pure capacity to breed money from money...” These are moments which Arrighi describes as ‘moving forward and backward simultaneously’, in which “old regimes [of accumulation] are repeatedy resurrected as soon as the hegemony that superseded them is in its turn superseded...”, an ‘accumulation of primitivity’ in which “apparently ‘late’ or ‘mature’ finance capital [...] finds itself succeeded by the more ‘primitive’ commodity form that it, in its turn, has just succeeded.” (Baucom, 2005, page 27-28)

---

[^1]: Walter Benjamin, _Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century_ (1969) [[link]](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566965)
[^2]: The quote Baucom provides from Benjamin's _Arcades Project_ is perhaps clearer: “The key to the allegorical form, is bound up with the specific signification which the commodity acquires by virtue of its price. The singular debasement of things through their signification, something characteristic of seventeenth-century allegory, corresponds to the singular debasement of things through their price as commodities.” For more on this read: Bainard Cowan, _Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory_ (1981) [[link]](https://www.jstor.org/stable/487866)
[^3]: A term proposed by Lauren Berlant in _The Epistemology of State Emotion_ [[link]](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11725.6) and developed by Ben Dibley and Brett Neilson in _Climate Crisis and the Actuarial Imaginary: 'The War on Global Warming'_ [[link]](https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.69.08.2010).
[^4]: Richard Halpern, _Shakespeare among the Moderns_ (1997) [[link]](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv5rf0r9). Baucom also cites Susan Buck-Morss and her conceptualisation within the _Arcades_ of a ‘counterallegorical‘ project which can ‘awaken’ the meanings which lay within them.
[^5]: Frederic Jameson, _The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act_ (1981) 
[^6]: Later Baucom writes: ”If Arrighi's model holds true we could predict that the two commodity moments of interest to Benjamin would each be preceded and followed by a money phase, a moment in which capital acucmulates, primarily, not in the commodity form but in the paper, credit, stock, or other speculative forms of finance capital. If Arrighi's model, in its turn, is reread through Benjamin, then we could further predict that each of those money phases would coincide with or be accompanied and enabled by a series of epistemolofical transformations and the emergence – or reemergence – of a set of cultural forms which dialectically _encode and make possible_ these reorientations of capital. Arrighi's history of capital, I am thus suggesting, provides the grounds for a historicization of Benjamin, while the methodological framework of Benjamin's analyses of aesthetic and cultural forms provides the grounds for an epistemolofical counterhistoricization of Arrighi.” (Baucom, 2005, page 26)
[^7]: The passage of Arrighi which Baucom cites, by way of explanation, is as follows: “Marx's general formula for capital (MCM') can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capital investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as a world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phrases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM') phases. In phases of material expansion money capital ‘sets in motion’ an increasing mass of commodities (including commoditized labor-power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital ‘sets itself free’ from its commodity form, and accumulatio proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx's abridged formula MM'). Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full _systemic cycle of accumulation_.” Giovanni Arrighi, _The Long Twentieth Century_ (1994)

Spectres of the Atlantic

specters-of-the-atlantic


The Four Hour Academy is an experimental institute of education which aims to act as:


The Remainder

the-remainder


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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout.

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

<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1787855335&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=true&show_comments=false&show_user=false&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true"></iframe>

---

[^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](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.


Pain

pain


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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) 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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

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[^1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwjYU5VXqdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwjYU5VXqdQ)
[^2]: [https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED46675](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](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)


Tradition

tradition


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](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kyrtill) 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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

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[^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._


River

river


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…!

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout


Haunt

haunt


Notes for a presentation briefing a project on the concept of the _designer as author_. This is intended for a third year (level 6) audience.

---

## 1
In this short introduction I want to give a very brief overview of what is a very long-standing debate. That is the role of the concept of _authorship_ within design practice.

## 2
“Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages. But theories of authorship also serve as legitimising strategies, and authorial aspirations may end up reinforcing certain conservative notions of design production and subjectivity... What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?”[^1]

## 3

![](/mary-in-the-robe-of-wheat-ears.gif)
#### Two woodcuts of _Mary in the Robe of Wheat Ears_

As Michael Rock says, in its historical reconstruction, graphic design – as a discipline separated from the rest of artistic production – has been concerned mainly with communication or reproduction over ‘origination’. That is with processes of duplication and dissemination rather than the creation of original works. Writers create works of literature and designers produce the books and typographic systems that disseminate them. Painters create works of art, and designers create reproductions of them for wider distribution.

Here we have an example of two woodcuts – the risograph of medieval europe – both depicting _Madonna_ or _Mary in the Robe of Wheat Ears._ In the second image, a replica from the 15th or 16th century, a portion of the inscription reads: “The image is the image of Our Lady when she was in the Temple; [...] and in this way she is depicted in the Cathedral of Milan.” As historians have pointed out, what is interesting here is that the inscription comments directly on the process of duplication: drawing our attention at first to the historical scene of Mary in the temple (“The image is the image of Our Lady”), but also to another picture in Milan, which this picture is supposed to be a picture of.

## 4
Much of the time, confusions around historical forms of authorship arise because we are trying to think in a very modern way about what is a very old practice. As we can begin to see in this European example, production and replication have not always been so distinct from one another. Instead, such images acted as direct ‘substitutions’ for one another, linked by a chain of replications that did not diminish the idea of its originality, but rather stood in for it (and perhaps enhanced it). Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood call this a ‘substitutional’ approach to authorship, one which views artifacts in terms of replication and, through this replication, as “belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously.” (A temple in Jerusalem, a Cathedral in Milan, and a church in Germany where it was found?). The power of the image is derived not from the figure of the original named author, so much as the many anonymous authors who have produced and reproduced these historical substitutions.

This ‘substitutional’ mode is counterposed to the ‘performative’ mode of authorship. As Nagel and Wood write: “To describe the authored work as a _performance_ is to emphasize its punctual, time sensitive quality. [The] work restages the given and creates an impression of novelty.” Here what is emphasized is not the manner in which a given artwork reproduces the past, but instead how it restages it to intentionally produce a novel effect. “The author does not simply deliver a preexisting packet of information but generates something that did not exist before.” Something new.

## 5

![](/madonna-of-the-yarnwinder.gif)
#### _Madonna of the Yarnwinder_ Leondaro Da Vinci (c16th)

This idea of the performance formed the basis of artistic value for early humanists and renaissance men like Leonardo da Vinci, who saw the _singularity_ of the artist as underwriting the singularity (and the significance) of their work. In the 15th and 16th century he wrote of painting as the highest of all sciences for this reason: “Painting alone remains noble, it alone honors its author and remains precious and unique…”. For Da Vinci, and other artists of the High Renaissance, a humanist philosophy came to define the power of authorship, elevating the performance of the individual artist to a historic level: “...[intervening] in time by _performing_ a work.” 

Here we can see a novel evolution of the image of the _Madonna_, similar to the woodcuts of _Mary in the Robe of Wheat Ears_ but in many ways completely transformed: the composition, the setting, the materiality, the use of linear perspective. Many aspects of the painting render an image unmistakably authored by Leonardo da Vinci, and _this_ fact – that it is made by Da Vinci – becomes as important to the work as what it depicts. 

## 6

![](/madonna-of-the-yarnwinder-reproductions.gif)
#### Various reproductions of _Madonna of the Yarnwinder_

Through this understanding of authorship we see, over the course of European art history, the concept of a cannon forming – one infamously composed of white, male, western-european artists (which you will remember from your work in ‘Whose History’ last year). In the case of painting, we can find evidence of this canonization quite simply through the number of copies made of a single painting. In the case of _Madonna of the Yarnwinder,_ almost forty copies survive, many painted in the century after its original production. (Which was a lot for the 15th century!)

## 7
The problem of the cannon is, however, not only its lack of diversity however, but also that – through its structure, ‘by design’ – it frames the preconditions of interpretation, critique and inquiry entirely around the figure of the author. If you think of a timeline of art history – or the history of graphic design – one tends to imagine it as a straight line punctuated by historic figures, authors and artists. Is it possible to imagine it in another way?

## 8 & 9
In his essay _The Death of the Author_ – which really is central to this whole debate – Barthes challenges this historic centrality of the author, writing that (9): “The author is a modern figure” – which is to say a historically determined figure, and therefore capable of change – “a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages, [...]·it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human person'.” And that, by virtue of this prestige, a critic’s “...explanation of a work is always sought in the [person] who produced it, as if it were always in the end, [...] the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.”

## 10
Returning to Rock’s essay, he explains the problem or at least the limitations with this dependence on the author: “...the author as origin, authority and ultimate owner of the text guards against free will of the reader. Transferring the authority of the text back over to the author contains and categorises the work, narrowing the possibilities for interpretation. The figure of the author reconfirms the traditional idea of the genius creator; the status of the creator frames the work and imbues it with mythical value.” And this is, of course, true not only of text or painting – but any form of cultural production open to free interpretations, including design work.

## 11 – 13

![](/mnemosyne-atlas-1.gif)
#### _Mnemosyne Atlas,_ Aby Warburg (1925—1929)

![](/mnemosyne-atlas-2.gif)
#### Panel 39 of the _Mnemosyne Atlas,_ Aby Warburg (1925—1929)

![](/mnemosyne-atlas-3.gif)
#### _Mnemosyne Atlas,_ Aby Warburg (1925—1929)

However, at the beginning of the 20th Century there were some who were working to design an alternate framework for interpreting these historical works of creative practice and history itself. For most of us today, it’s natural to look at many pictures at the same time. We do it every day via internet searches and digital pinup boards.

But viewing fine art pictures in this nonlinear way, with no accompanying text and outside of a museum, was radical 100 years ago. This is partly what makes Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne (nemosenee) (the goddess of memory) Atlas,” in English, an encyclopedic collection of almost 1,000 images, so significant.

Warburg, a German art historian and cultural theorist, worked on the atlas from 1925 until his death in 1929. To make it, he took reproductions of artworks and images of coins, celestial maps, calendars and genealogical tables, as well as advertisements posters and postage stamps, and pinned them to wooden boards covered with black cloth. He rearranged the panels in his library in Hamburg and used them in lectures, and wanted to publish the atlas as a book.” [^2]

In this way Warburg sought not to create a linear timeline of art historical practice, focused on styles and authors, but instead a non-linear atlas, focused on recurring motifs from antiquity to the present day and how they continue to condition and inform contemporary life. That is why, in his collection, we see postage stamps next to Greek coins, advertisements next to historic sculptures.

What Warburg is interested in here is not the *author* but the *reader*. In the process of producing the atlas he decentres the historic authors of the work he reproduces, and even himself as an author of the atlas, instead producing a resource for others to interpret their own history in a radically new way. 

## 14
In this he echoes the sentiment of Roland Barthe’s *Death of the Author:* “...a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the *reader,* not, as was hitherto said, the *author*.” 

## 15
In a more explicitly design-oriented context, Ellen Lupton builds on this theme in her essay _The Designer as Producer._ She writes that, as designers, “There exist opportunities to seize control—intellectually and economically—of the means of production, and to share that control with the reading public, empowering them to become producers as well as consumers of meaning. As Benjamin phrased it in 1934, the goal is to turn “readers or spectators into collaborators.”” Giving us a goal to work towards as designers engaged in authoring our own work.

As Warburg’s atlas shows, design practice often sits between these different modes of temporality and authorship, the substitutive and the performative – trying to work with the affordances of each. More, perhaps, than in fields of fine art or literature, design is concerned with the reader, the audience – and through this concern does not tend to author individual works so much as systems of understanding other works.  The idea of a cannon, for example, is the result of a design process. One that goes on to condition future acts of design – some call this idea ‘ontological design’.

## 16
Over the course of this journey from the 15th to the 21st century we see many reversals take place. From a collective, mysterious ‘substitutional’ mode of medieval authorship to an individualistic ‘performative’ mode in the renaissance. In the 20th century we see attempts by Barthes, Warburg, Lupton and others to challenge this individualistic framing, looking to engage the reader directly in the production of meaning within creative practice.

This is in part why the production of archives, collections and systems for remixing previous work have taken a central role in how we think about contemporary design practice. 

---

[^1]: [Eye Magazine | Feature | The designer as author](https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-designer-as-author)
[^2]: [This Atlas of Art and Memory Is a Wonder of the Modern World - The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/arts/design/aby-warburg-memory-atlas.html)

Designer as Author

designer-as-author


![image](/design-systems-1.gif)

_Design <> Systems_ is a 'special interest group' running out of the BA Graphic Design course at Camberwell.


Design Systems

design-systems


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.”

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout



Summary & notes for the book [Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory](https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745324104/philosophizing-the-everyday.) by John Roberts. Published in 2006 by Pluto Press.

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## Prologue

Roberts begins with a sceptical view of the ‘everyday’ as it is deployed in contemporary discourse (art, design, architecture, fashion, etc). After the modern/postmodern turn, art has moved to the ‘everyday’ not as a _utopian_ prospect but instead as “a _meta-signifier_ of social and cultural inclusivity [as well as…] each discipline’s interdisciplinarity” . His text is then an attempt to overturn this conceptualisation of the ‘everyday’ as a ‘theory of consumption’ or ‘ordinariness’ and “reinstate the philosophical and political partisanship of the concept” (Roberts, 2006, page 1-2).

He aims to do this by mapping out the pre-WWII debates on the everyday, evaluating the concept as ‘a basis for a _critique of culture_’ as such. There are four strands to these debates:

1. The Leninist extension of politics into cultural politics during and after the Russian Revolution (Trotsky’s cultural activism; Soviet Productivism and Constructivism);
2. The transformation of European Marxism into a philosophy of praxis out of Marx’s critique of traditional materialism and the return to Hegel and the philosophy of consciousness (Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Lefebvre);
3. Freud’s demedicalization of mental disorders and illness;
4. The emergence of the new avant-garde documentary art and literature.

What unites these strands is an “extraordinary attentiveness to the political form and significance of cultural activity and change”. They address this not as a “‘politicization’ or instrumentalization of the _content_ of art” [^1. Benjamin] but instead as a means of exploring the ‘alliance’ of culture and politics, the manner in which “the revolutionary transformation of the everyday presupposes the radical transformation of the content of social and cultural experience itself…” The everday is thus conceptualised at the interstices in which “art, aesthetic experience and labour” come into relation with one another and that might therefore be rethought “in the interests of, and as part of, proletarian emancipation and the democratization of cultural production.” This therefore poses a challenge to the ‘segregation of politics from culture’; the ‘categories of art and labour’; and ‘traditional accounts of aesthetic experience’. (Roberts, 2006, page 4)

In his own words, Roberts’ account is then antithetical to prevailing ideas of the ‘everyday’ in contemporary cultural studies; seeking to reintegrate an understanding of ‘cultural production and consumption’ and defend the possibility of “cultural theory as a revolutionary critique of the social totality”. For this reason, his critique focuses on the ~50 years between 1917 and 1975; the ‘semiotic turn’ found in the work of De Certeau and others (from 1974 onwards) who reoriented “the debate away from a general theory of cultural production to the productive consumer” (Roberts, 2006, page 5). There are then 3 key time-lines which track the rise and fall of the theory of the everyday between 1917 and ‘75:

1. The Russian Revolution which “shattered the class-exclusions and genteel aestheticisms of the old bourgeois culture and academy across Europe and North America between 1917 and 1939.”
2. The post-war anti-Fascist Liberation in 1945 – in France and Italy – “which unleashed a popular and intellectual dissent from the official forms of political restitution associated with the old prewar bourgeois ruling parties and culture.”
3. The modernist counter-culture of 1966–1974 (most evident in ‘68) which, “although detached from the earlier avant-garde forms of the ‘everyday’ continued the revolutionary critique of high culture and political economy.”

These movements and counter-cultural practices are unifiable to the extent that they “[decoupled] cultural production from bourgeois institutions” (with varying degrees of success) and established links between culture and extra-cultural (democratizing/democratic) forces ‘from below’ in “deprivatized and collective forms”.

> “This was a period of cultural groups and artist collectives, free associations and free exchanges – particularly between artists and non-artists.” (Roberts, 2006, page 8)

After 1974 we see the reassertion of the capitalist state against this period of counter-cultural resistance, “stripping the public realm of [its] public content…” and commodifying access to culture. This ‘restitution’ was spurred not by the ‘counter-hegemonic content’ of such groups however, but as a result of increased labour militancy between 1966 and 1974 (“as well as the socialized and non-market spaces and cultural interests attached to such militancy”). This form of ‘reprivatisation’ attempted to restore levels of profit and reclaim the ‘social hegemony of the bourgeoisie’ in part by creating “a culture of dissociation between art, labour and counter-cultural form.” (Roberts, 2006, page 9)

> “One of the outcomes of the dissociation between art and counter-cultural form for artists was the generalized subordination of cultural praxis to aesthetic discourse.” (Roberts, 2006, p. 15)

Roberts’ book is then a reassertion of the importance of the originary theoretical texts (Lefebvre in particular) and critical practices that formed the ‘everyday’ as a concept; asking, in a sense, what was lost after 1975 and what it is that we ‘cannot do without’ from this earlier period. This is productive not only for a critical re-evaluation of the concept but also uses it as a “singularly valuable [tool] in mapping the philosophical and political legacy of revolutionary politics” itself (Roberts, 2006, page 11):

> “Its theorization as a concept, as such, remains incontestably tied to the revolutionary content of its own early history: the insistence on the indivisible link between the critique of the capitalist value-form and the possibility of radically new cultural forms” (Roberts, 2006, page 13-14).

## The Everyday and the Philosophy of Praxis

The Russian Revolution is decisive in severing – or indeed, _reversing_ – the “ontological marriage between ‘everyday life’ (_Alltag lebens_) and ‘inauthentic’ experience”:

> “Where the industrialized everyday was once identified with that which was beneath high cultural attention or held to be bound up with limited notions of experience, it became the source of cultural renewal and political and philosophical scrutiny.” (Roberts, 2006, page 16)

This is an example of what Roberts calls, the _‘post-revolutionary securalization of the everyday’,_ the idea that “the production of culture lies in the reconquest and immanent theorization of alienated, industrialized experience”  or, more straightforwardly, the “breakdown of the dualism between art and cultural agency” (Roberts, 2006, page 18). This is evident:

1. A theoretical pivot away (found in Lukács) from neo-Romantic ideas of authentic experience (as ‘inscribed in the judgement of art’) towards a recognition of the ‘critical immanence’ of everyday life.
2. The ‘desubjectivization’ of the subject found in the emergence and institutionalisation of Freudian psychoanalysis. In recognizing symptoms as ‘psychic distrubances in daily life’, “alienated experience becomes meaningful and purposeful experience” (Roberts, 2006, page 18-19).

Two major transformations then follow in our understanding of the authenticity/inauthenticity of everyday experience:

1. A ‘hermeneutics of the everyday’ is developed in the (psychoanalytic) elevation of ‘everyday speech’. One must _listen_ to a patients experience in order to understand and diagnose them.
2. The Bolsheviks break the fatalistic link between collective experience and religion/culture: “thereby allying social transformation with cultural transformation ‘from below’” (Roberts, 2006, page 19).

In almost utopian fashion, [byt](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/national-identity-in-russian-culture/byt-identity-and-everyday-life/885C2C0EF784AC1198EC93AEBF421FF9) (everyday life), is transformed from that which is ‘thought of as empty, featureless and repetitive’ into the ‘source of extended collective engagement, intervention and transformation’ (Roberts, 2006, page 20).

This is precisely the point made by Lenin (and Trotsky after him) that the ‘consolidation of power’ depends on the ability to transform political work into cultural work, mediating ‘all aspects of social and cultural life’ through political ‘evaluation and transformation’ (Roberts, 2006, page 21).

However, in the Bolshevik case, such mediation occurs not through an ‘aesthetic critique of capital and political economy’ (as in emancipatory discourses of labour, gender, etc?) but rather a ‘technical and technist transformation of pre-capitalist forms as the demand for industrialization’. What Roberts calls the _‘machino-technical imperative’_ (Roberts, 2006, page 22-23).

This overdetermination of the everyday through such a machino-technical imperative is evident in the ‘Revolution’s submission to Taylorism’ which at once operates as the dynamic base from which the Revolution sprang, and also serves as its ‘future social negation’. (Roberts, 2006, page 24).

The avant-garde (Constructivist and Productivist artists and theorists) are useful in this, as they are able to question, more open-endedly, the relation between emancipation and the machino-technical; i.e. what _cultural form_ might the emancipation of labour take? or “in what ways is the emancipation of labour from capitalist relations of production actually compatible with the machino-technical?” (Roberts, 2006, page 25).

The avant-gardes help conceptualise ‘the defining terrain of the concept of the everyday’ through their “participation in production as the basis for the transformation of the identity of both workers and artists, and the de-alienation of art and labour…”; the (contiguous) movement from Bolshevik ‘machino-technics’ to ‘senuous liberation’ from/through productive labour. (Roberts, 2006, page 25-27).

This shift from ‘revolutionary politics’ to ‘revolutionary _cultural_ politics’ arrives at a profound historical juncture, ‘transforming the tenets of orthodox Marxism’ in C19/20th Europe which, in its evolutionary (non-revolutionary), positivist, scientistic and economistic outlook, was effectively anti-cultural. In the work of Benjamin and others the concept of the ‘everyday’ (understood as a ‘category of revolutionary cultural transformation’) therefore opens up a “means of uncoupling Marxism from […] mechanistic social categories of orthodoxy…” (Roberts, 2006, page 27-28).

> “[During this period] the everyday signifies something like a _generalized point of attraction_ for the critique of prewar Marxist orthodoxy and bourgeois science. […] Where we find reference to the everyday, we usually find a philosophical discussion of revolutionary agency [or revolutionary praxis]” (Roberts, 2006, page 29).

Revolutionary praxis here is understood, after Marx, as a ‘unity of external, material transformation and self-transformation’: “Both subject and object are transformed in a continuous and mutually determining process” [^3 Ranciere, singing unity] . Discussions of the everyday (in the 1920’s) therefore open up onto the “the phenomenological basis of revolutionary practice”, advocating explicitly for a connection to be (re-)established between “political struggles and the problems of cultural mediation and transformation” (against the orthodoxy of the Second International) through a political reorientation towards the conjunctural and the _particular_ (Roberts, 2006, page 29-31).

A return to German idealism, and questions of the philosophy of consciousness (via [Korsch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Korsch)), then becomes a means of defending Marx’s “commitment to questions of social agency, class consciousness and cultural activism” as a qualification for his “discovery of the quantifiable tendencies of capitalism”:

> “…after 1917 Marxism faces a clear choice: between its collapse into a positive science, and a return to the dialectic philosophy of Hegel.” (Roberts, 2006, page 33)

Lukács’ contribution lies here, in taking Hegel’s notion of ‘self-knowledge’ as that which ‘shapes and directs human emancipation’ and integrating it into class analysis: the bourgeoisie are constrained by processes of _[reification](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm)_ (which conceal self-estrangement and dehumanization through the convergence of ‘subjective experience and objective social and economic forces’); the proletariat, on the other hand, achieves self-knowledge through work, “as a commodity through [their] labour, his or her knowledge becomes practical and active” (Roberts, 2006, page 34) . For Lukács then ‘revolutionary praxis’ is then a question of ‘revolutionary self-knowledge’:

> “The everyday is neither ‘inauthentic’ nor ‘authentic’, but rather, the temporal and spatial order out of which the alienations of proletarian self-knowledge will emerge.” (Roberts, 2006, page 35).

There is however a contradiction, for Roberts, in Lukács’ analysis: the way in which material change is _mediated_ (in a concrete sense) separately from ‘the forms and modalities of everyday (cultural) practice’. The everyday is elided in favour of the (somewhat abstract) Party as the ‘only concrete and practical’ form of mediation. (Roberts, 2006, page 36).

[Lefebvre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Lefebvre) identifies this issue with Lukács’ all-too speculative concept of a ‘total’ class-consciousness, arguing that “no such historical consciousness is to be found in the working class anywhere in the world today” – he insists, in other words, on “the concrete, contradictory and everyday conditions of mediation.” (Roberts, 2006, page 37-38) Going further, Lefebvre identifies alienation not as the ‘inescapable condition’ which revolutionary consciousness overcomes (or emerges out of), “but the _productive_ and conflictual force of this consciousness” – ‘critical thinking and action’ must, in fact, _begin_ with the reproductive everyday habits and customs of workers. (Roberts, 2006, page 38)

This conception of ‘alienation as a productive category’ opens up a ‘critical hermeneutics of the everyday’ – seeking to _learn_ from culture, rather than merely _assimilate_ it into theory. The philosophy of praxis might then be understood (for Lefebrvre) as the convergence of Marxism as a critique of the commodity form and as its ‘possible cultural hermeneutics’ (Roberts, 2006, page 39-40)


Philosophizing the Everyday

philosophizing-the-everyday


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).[^3] 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](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

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[^1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/26/protest-over-too-much-fuss-about-pollution-1970](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](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)
[^3]: [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](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)


Pollution

pollution


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_.


Dilettante

dilettante


Summary & notes for the article [_Moral Economies of the Future – The Utopian Impulse of Sustainable Prosperity_](https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/aetw/wp5/) by [Will Davies](https://williamdavies.blog/). Published by: [Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity](https://cusp.ac.uk/)

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## Introduction

The discipline of ‘economic sociology’ is predicated on exploring the ways in which amoral, technical aspects of capitalism derive from moral commitments and norms (for example, how money  originates as a promise or market exchange as normative reciprocity). ‘Moral economy’ seeks to demonstrate “the ways in which economic institutions are fundamentally _constituted_ as normative conventions” – that the distinction between economic ‘value’ and social ‘values’ is misguided, (p. 1), for example: how statistics “depend[s] on the moral assumption that all human beings should be counted, for public policy to be justified…” (p. 2) The sociological question is then: _which_ normative/ethical frameworks are at work _where_ (and which are being suppressed)?

What Luc Boltanski calls the _‘sociology of critique’_ is a way of mapping the moral arguments and conflicts that focus on the failure of capitalism to deliver on these moral promises. Davies’ issue with the form of these investigations is that “they [tend to] focus on the present and the living.” (p.2) There are two particular problems with “treating economic actors as operating [only] within shared and contemporary moral spheres” (p. 2-3): the problem of (1) _‘integenerational justice’_ and; (2) the commitments people have towards their so-called _‘afterlife’:_

1. The “individual and intergenerational lifecycle is implicated in questions of economic justice.” As inequality rises, “income is increasingly linked to the ownership of assets, rather than to labour” and exacerbates itself. “Moral instincts to conserve goods for future generations are diverted from public assets and traditions and towards private ones” For the less well-off, “decisions to spend money now can have ramifications that last decades into the future”; for the more fortunate, they are “protected from this by accumulation of wealth and asset price inflation that began decades in the past.” (p.3)

2. The anthopocene forces us think with a ‘vastly extended time horizion’, “well beyond what any orthodox economic or moral frameworks are capable of capturing.” In response to this shift, frameworks within moral and political philosophy are being developed to accommodate the interests of unborn generations and dispense with the linear view of the future as a continuation of the present.”  (p. 4)

The question of temporality (and its representation, valuation and calculation within contemporary capitalism) then becomes a moral & political problem – moral economy must be reconfigured to take the concept of time and the norms which institute it (i.e. financial instruments) more seriously. For Davies the question becomes one of how “capitalism confronts (or avoids) demands for a radically different economic future and concern for the radically distant economic future.” (p. 4)

## The future as economic artefact

Modernity changes ones experience of time at an individual and societal level – history, after the 18th century, is no longer cyclical but rather something that unfolds progressively – we _expect_ things to change over time. This change occurs first as a form of ‘philosophical conciousness’ and then as an ‘explicity cultural formation’ with the emergence (after Jameson) of aesthetic modernism, sci-fi and future-oriented political projects. Davies’ contention is that “there has been comparatively little sociological attention to the ways in which its particular institutions, norms, and practices embed this orientation towards the future.” (p. 5)

In line with Jens Beckert, he argues that the productivity of a capitalist system is, in part, bound to ‘the unpredictability of the future’. Focusing on Beckert’s term _‘fictional expectations’_, we see how “actors represent the future in such a way that it appears _as if_ it were an empirical reality that can be acted on…” Money is a key example of this, it functions effectively only when “we invest confidence that it will retain its value in future and that others will continue to accept it in future. Saving money is a way of preparing for a future that cannot be known in advance.” Credit money in particular, “takes on a transcendent moral quality, thanks to the hopes and trust that are invested in it.” (p. 6)

The moral aspect of this institutional relationship to the future lies in how economic actors “involve promises which are in principle binding” – key examples may be CSR and branding/reputation-building.

Outside of the firm, in the wider economy, we also see how “[e]conomic promises regarding the future are often parasitical on political and social promises provided by the state.” Institutions leverge guarantees given by state actors to face the future with some confidence (however this is waining). ‘Calculative devices’ and other forms of rationalisation may also be used, but this does not “alleviate the ontological unknowability of the future, [which is] therefore ultimately dependent on the power of human imagination and binding power of moral commitments.” (p. 7-8)

Following Beckert, there is a ‘politics of fictional expectations’ – if power in the economy is coterminous with one’s ability to reify their image of the future, this power is unevenly distributed, and even where it does aggregate there are dangers:

> “One of the dangers of over-dominant imaginaries is that economic actors start to take the future for granted, allowing the ‘pretence’ that is at work in fictional expectations and forgetting that it isn’t real.” (p. 8)

## Neoliberal futures

> “A central proposition of neoliberalism is that centralised political visions of the future are inherently faulty and potentially dangerous.” (p. 8)

Translated into Beckert’s terminology, the neoliberal economist’s problem with governmental planning, is that it _imposes_ a ‘fictional expectation’ on society, regardless of whether individuals wish themselves to invest it with credibility. Their alternative is to propose a form of the future that no collective can control or intentionally design (such as is found in Keynesian approaches of planning), but rather one in which a multitude of “private visions […] can be developed, propagated and sold to investors and consumers.” Davies argues, after Philip Mirowski, that the legitimation for this kind of marketised future comes from the neoliberal “_epistemological_ premise that there is no reliable knowledge on which authoritative public policy could be founded…”  The only role of the state is therefore to maintain and manage a decentralising ‘political framework of society’ which is as steady and constant as possible. (p. 9)

The effect of this arrangement privileges economics at the expense of politics:

> “Just as the opportunities for political actors to represent the future then goes into decline, the opportunities for economic actors to do so expands greatly […] …there is no type of future eventuality that can’t potentially be incorporated into this paradigm via instruments of risk management, forecasting and insurance.” (p. 11)

Techniques of ‘risk-modelling’ and ‘future-mapping’ developed for neoliberal markets therefore come to permeate an increasing portion of individual and collective life. Problems (social, environmental, etc) which therefore appear as ‘_effects_ of corporate strategy and capitalist growth’ are then retooled as _opportunities_ for _new_ strategies and growth. “The moral economy of neoliberalism is one that seeks to represent all commitments – including those to the future and to future generations in calculable monetary terms […] it _requires_ individuals and firms to respect obligations of debt, contract and compensation...” (p. 10-11)

## ‘The future’ lost and found

Critics of neoliberalism (Berardi, Jameson, etc) argue that neoliberalism’s emergence has brought about a so-called ‘end of the future’ “in the sense that it emerged in the 19th century as a [modernist] space of political fantasy and promise.” This now-postmodernist sensibility of an a-histortical politics displaces the hope for a radical, _collective_ future into a desire for “discovering different spaces or different bodies as they co-exist in the present.” In line with much other neoliberal thought, ‘exuberance’ over the future is diplsaced from “the realm of political society and culture into the institutions of finance.” (p. 11)

> “In Beckert’s terms, it is the fictional expectations of professional risk assessors, credit-raters and model builders that come to _count._” (p. 11)

There is a problem internal to this financialisation of the future, however, in that risk assessment (and other forms of expectation-building) “doesn’t _just_ represent the future; in altering behaviour in the present, it also _changes_ the future that ultimately elapses.” As Elena Esposito writes: “Economic theory has failed to observe itself and its relationship with its object of study.” Donald Mackenzie describes this ‘self-cancelling prophecy’ as _‘counter-performativity’_ – financial models and techniques “project linear futures, while transforming society in non-linear ways.” (p. 12-13)

A second issue appears in how inequality and generational wealth close down the (supposedly productive) openness and uncertainty of the future. Through asset-inflation, the rise of rentier capitalism, and inheritance, capital serves not as a “…a tool for engaging with uncertainty, [but rather] as a means of minimizing it, reproducing advantages in the process.” This again breaks with the modernist idea that the future will be different ot the past, as inequality appears increasingly as an inbuilt feature of neoliberal society. (p. 13)

Davies then argues that instead of capitulating to a ‘neoliberal epistemology’ which simply demands more risk-taking, we might instead seek alternate ways of imagining and represeting the future which are ‘non-financial’ and ‘uncalculated’ – namely the concept of **utopia.**

Borrowing from Ruth Levitas, Davies turns to the ‘utopian impluse’ as a methodology for reviving the capacity “to represent alternative imaginary futures [as] a necessary first step towards then considering the plans and political artefacts necessary to pursue them”. This methodology is another form of _moral sociology,_ the impulse an essentially ‘normative’ and ‘critical’ one, “seeing as it stems from a feeling that something important is lacking in the present.” (p. 14) Importantly:

> “By retaining a sense that they are fictitious and imaginary, utopian representations of the future have a realism that financial calculations lack. […] In that respect, utopias needn’t only exist as future imaginaries, but – in a postmodern fashion – can be separated across space, not time existing in the present” (p. 15-16)

## Imagining sustainable prosperity

A common critique of capitalist growth is that it is unsustainable yet assumes its own infinity. However, Davies notes, looked at from another (perhaps sociological) angle it appears _too_ sustainable, suriving ‘all manner of social, environmental and financial crises’ and discrusive critiques. The _anthropocene,_ however, in its emergent complexity and extended temporality, poses a severe problem to a “mentality of both ‘planning’ and ‘risk’” (p. 16):

1. If 20th century **planning** was predicated on the _knowledge_ of _experts_ who “imagined, designed and implemented [the future] as a collective project”, the 21st century ecological crises we face are, in this sense, ‘unknowable’. After Dale Jamieson, “we cannot wait until all the facts are in before we respond. All the facts may never be in” (p. 17). Similarly, the rising prosperity which enabled an ‘experience’ of collective futurity was itself predicated on accelerating industrialization and extractive practices.

2. 21st century **risk-management**, on the other hand, cannot deal with the very long-term, non-linear nature of ecological crisis. Costing ‘externalities’ into capitalist production might work for short-to-medium term investment strategies, but not for multi-generational effects. Secondly, as discussed, the _discursive_ _position_ such strategies create for themselves edge out alternate (collective) proposals for reform, even integrating anti-capitalist sentiments as a source of legitimisation (Boltanski).

Ultimately, Davies says, “[d]ifferent types of moral commitment to the future are required, accompanied by different institutional mechanisms for mediating these commitments.” (p. 18) “The task today is to refresh optimism – and credible optimism – regarding the future, but in ways that cannot simply mean a nostalgic revival for the modernism of the 20th century.” (p.19)


Moral Economies of the Future

moral-economies-of-the-future


Summary & notes for the article [_Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered_](https://www.jstor.org/stable/778700) by [Susan Buck Morss](https://www.susanbuckmorss.info/). Published in: [October, Vol. 62 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 3-41](https://www.jstor.org/stable/i231804)

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## I

Buck-Morss starts the essay with a reversal of Walter Benjamin’s essay _The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction._ In this essay Benjamin writes that: ‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: **war**…’, a statement that seeks to align fascist politics with aesthetic forms of justification (as in the Futurist Manifesto). He writes that with such reasoning humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it is capable of experiencing its own destruction as an aesthetic enjoyment…” He posits, as a counter to this fascistic ‘aestheticization of politics’, a communist response, the ‘politicization of art’. ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 3-4](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

However, as Buck-Morss notes, Benjamin must intend this in a more complex manner than simply making culture a vehicle for (Communist) propaganda. Instead, she argues, this is an issue of intepretation, that Benjamin shifts the meaning of his conceptual terms (politics, art, aesthetics) in setting out this dichotomy:

> “He is demanding of art a task far more difficult -that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity's self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 5](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=4))

Instead, Buck-Morss brings Benjamins analysis (and intentions) into line with other interpretations of modernity’s impact on aesthetic discourse (Ranciere). That, “if we were really to ‘politicize art’ in the radical way [Benjamin] is suggesting, art would cease to be art as we know it.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 5](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

## II

As Terry Eagleton writes, and as Buck-Morss quotes:  *"Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.”* In this ‘revision’ of Benjamins text she turns to an etymology of ‘aesthetics’ which, for Buck-Morss, he has returned us to:

> “_Aisthitikos_ is the ancient Greek word for that which is "perceptive by feeling." _Aisthisis_ is the sensory experience of perception. The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality-corporeal, material nature.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 6](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=5))

From this we can begin to make sense of the claim that in ‘politicising art’ we are also “undo[ing] the alienation of the corporeal sensorium.” Buck-Morss maintains the contemporary importance of this sensorium, that “[t]he senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilzable trace…” and that this trace remains a part “biological apparatus, indispensable to the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 6](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

## III

In the 1700’s, Buck-Morss notes, one might have placed a concern with aesthetics within the field of animal instincts as opposed to philosophical inquires of ‘Art, Beauty, and Truth’. Alexander Baumgarten, who first articulated ‘aesthetics’ as an autonomous field of study, worried “one could accuse him of concerning himself with things unworthy of a philosopher” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 7](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)).

The fact that this sense had effectively reversed by the early C20th is remarkable – that ‘aesthetics refered to “cultural forms rather than sensible experience, to the imaginary rather than the empirical, to the illusory rather than the real” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 7](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=6)) . In his book, _The Ideology of the Aesthetic,_ Terry Eagleton shows how the meaning of this term shifts from ‘critical-materialist connotations’ to ‘class-based sensibilities’, through German idealism (with caution) to the ‘neo-Kantian schemata of Habermas’ who uses it as a ‘sandbox’ to which are consigned ‘vague’, ‘irrational’ ideas.

What persists through this narrative, Buck-Morss argues, is a ‘motif of autogenesis’, the myth of man’s ability to _imagine_ (and therefore _create)_ something that _is_ not; of ‘total control’, of creating the world according to plan. Modern man is, in this view, rendered _asensual,_ *an*aesthetic: “The truly autogenetic being is entirely self-contained. If it has any body at all, it must be one impervious to the senses, hence safe from external control. Its potency is in its lack of corporeal response.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 8](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

This can be seen in Kant’s writing on the sublime. Humankind, for Kant, is separated from nature in its ability to _disobey_ its senses, to resist self-preservation in the face of danger. ‘Aesthetic’ judgement then defines ones ability to withstand all ‘sense-giving information of danger’, as in the case of the warrior or the general. In his example, an ‘aesthetic judgement’ decides in favor of the general over the statesman, and of _both_ over the artist. Buck-Morss argues that this esteem is dervied from their desire to “[shape] reality rather than its representations” and in doing so “are mimicking the autogenetic prototype, the nature- and self-producing Judeo-Christian God.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 9](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

> “The moral being is sense-dead from the start. […] The moral will, cleansed of any contamination by the senses, sets up its own rule as a universal norm. Reason produces itself in Kant's morality the most ‘sublimely’ when one's own life is sacrificed to the idea” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 9](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

This motif of a masculine (homophilic), autonomous, autotelic, sense-dead subject, one capable of ‘self-starting’ or remaining ‘sublimely self-contained’ continues to develop throughout the C19th and into the 20th.

This is, however, _not_ the view/history of the ‘aesthetic’ that Buck-Morss (or Benjamin?) percieves to be the most productive.

## IV

Returning to this idea of the ‘human sensorium’ Buck-Morss turns from Kant to Hegel and his book _‘The Phenomenology of Mind’._ In summarising Hegel’s claim that to understand the mind one should examine what it _does_ not what it _is_ (as a neurologist might) she also argues that the discourses of philosophy and of natural science split.

Buck-Morss then sketches out the (somewhat cybernetic?) concept of a ‘synaesthetic system’ that might reunite them, starting from the physiological idea of the ‘nervous system’ rather than the brain:

> “The nervous system is not contained within the body's limits. The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment. ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 12](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=11))

This system is ‘open’ not only to the world through sensory organs, but also internally through a discontinuous synaptic network.

## VI

“Walter Benjamin's understanding of modern experience is [similarly] neurological” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 16](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=15)) . Relying on Freud’s insights into shellshock – in which the ego, under extreme stress, ‘employs conciousness as a buffer’ – one discovers *an*aesthetic processess designed to shield the organism against stimuli: “…blocking the openness of the synaesthetic system, thereby isolating present consciousness from past memory.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 16](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=15))

Benjamin’s insight was to take this idea and apply it to modern life (industrial production, street crowds, casinos, etc) where shock ‘has become the norm’: “Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of shock-impulses that consciousness must parry” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 16](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=15)) . Mimetic or compulsive responses to stimuli (such as those exhibited by those shocked) are used as a deflection against the outside world rather than a means of incoporating it (and empowering oneself). This is most evident (after Marx) in the experience of the factory.

Buck-Morss writes that “[p]erception becomes experience only when it connects with sense-memories of the past”, but in a world of constant injury, accident and ‘perceptual shock’ one becomes “cheated out of experience” as a general state. The synaesthetic system reverses its role: “[its] goal is to _numb_ the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of *an*aesthetics” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 18](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)).

What results is a ‘crisis in perception’ in which “[it] is no longer a question of training the eye to see beauty, but of restoring "perceptibility” ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=17)) :

> “The dialectical reversal, whereby aesthetics changes from a cognitive mode of being "in touch" with reality to a way of blocking out reality, destroys the human organism's power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake: Someone who is "past experiencing" is "no longer capable of telling … proven friend … from mortal enemy” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 18](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)).

## VII

Over the course of the C19th anaesthetics then becomes an ‘elaborate technics’, an industry unto itself. Hypnosis, hydrotherapy and opium are added to the narcotic arsenal of ‘coffee, tobacco, tea, and spirits…’ In 1869 doctors first prescribe ‘anaesthetic tecnhiques’ against ‘neurasthenia’, symptoms of which include ‘shattered nerves’, ‘breakdown’, etc. This condition, in line with the above, was thought to be brought about by the ‘wear and tear’ of modern life. ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 19](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

Over the remainder of the C19th use of drugs such as opium became increasingly normalised, and expanded into other areas of life (day-care), medical treatment (surgery) and recreational use (‘ether frolics’). Buck-Morss notes it as significant that the “use of anaesthetics in medical surgery dates […] from the same period of manipulative experimentation with the elements of the synaesthetic system” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 21](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)).

## VIII

It is no surprise in all of this that ‘drug addiction is characteristic of modernity’ [^3 Bauman], Buck-Morss writes: “It is the correlate and counterpart of shock”. It is also no surprise, therefore, that the ‘experience of intoxication’ would expand out of this biochemical source and produce a ‘narcotic […] out of reality itself’ in the form of the _phantasmagoria._ ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 21-22](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH))

A phantasmagoria is a form of _technoaesthetics,_ described as ‘an appearance of reality that tricks the senses through technical manipulation’ (as in a light show, and later, shopping arcades, tourist bubbles and ‘experiences’). For Buck-Morss, the goal of such interventions is to manipulate ‘the synaesthetic system by control of environmental stimuli’ in an attempt to ‘anaesthetize’ the organism – not through numbing, but through _flooding_ the senses. The political effect of this is realised in the _shared_ experience of a physical phantasmagoric intervention (as opposed to an individualised ‘trip’) which further normalises such intoxication: “Sensory addiction to a compensatory reality becomes a means of social control” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 22](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=22)) .

This creates a difficult situation for the artist:

> “The role of "art" in this development is ambivalent because, under these conditions, the definition of "art" as a sensual experience that distinguishes itself precisely by its separation from "reality" becomes difficult to sustain” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 22](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=22)) .

The _flaneur_ is similarly indicative of this shift:

> “Benjamin describes the flaneur as self-trained in this capacity of distancing oneself by turning reality into a phantasmagoria: rather than being caught up in the crowd, he slows his pace and observes it, making a pattern out of its surface. He sees the crowd as a reflection of his dream mood, an "intoxication" for his senses.” ([Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 24](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)) ([pdf](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/VPRJP5YN?page=23))

[The myth of ‘totality’ returns in the the unification of the senses, as in the operas of Wagner]

Marx, makes the term phantasmagoria ‘famous’ in his description of the world of commodities whic veils the production process and (much like the flaneur) encourage consumers to ‘identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams’ ([Buck-Morss, 1992, page 25](zotero://select/library/items/7Y8UAHZH)).

## IX

## X

## XI

## XII


Aesthetics & Anaesthetics

aesthetics-anaesthetics


Summary & notes for the article [_Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display_](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343930) by [Susan Buck Morss](https://www.susanbuckmorss.info/). Published in: [Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), pp. 434-467](https://www.jstor.org/stable/i257781)

---

## 1

> "This was the cold war era, when life on the planet literally hung in the balance over the issue of how government and economy were related." (p. 437)

Buck-Morss starts with two familiar diagrams: one, a contemporary (1985) sociogram of relationships at a university industrial research centre; the other (1977), a 'basic hierarchical structure of modern business enterprise'. Their characteristics are, in turn, as follows:

1.  The former is representative of a 'second industrial divide' showing a "restructuring of capitalism characterized by decentralized production and changed technologies of flexible specialization, technologies that impose a competitive strategy of permanent innovation..." involving (via Robert Reich) "one-fifth of the U.S. population..."

2.  The latter, the 'first industrial divide' depicts the standard organisation of 'operating units' which are managed by a hierarchy of executives who surveil and coordinate a continuous process of mass production. The transition from this mode of organisation to the more 'flexible' former version is prompted, in part, by the automation (computerization) of managerial roles and functions.

The shift from the 'first' to the 'second' industrial divide is a radical one, and involves not only the restructuring of the firm, but also the wider political-economic landscape. "When giant corporations reigned supreme, their top executives, 'corporate statesmen,' were close to political power." (p. 436) In the context of the cold war, this is as true for the West as the USSR; however, "...it was not similarity in form but the flow of power—and goods—that counted..."

> Because they owned the means of production, capitalists had no need to control the product. whereas in capitalism power was a consequence of the distribution of goods, in Soviet socialism the distribution of goods was a consequence of power. [...] **It is the depersonalization of exchange within capitalist society that depoliticizes economic power, no matter how close capitalists and politicans may become.** (p. 437)

This differentiation between flows has a large impact outside macroeconomic contexts as well, on processes of subjectivation, individuation and the 'feeling' of freedom for a given 'polity':

> Under capitalism, no matter how bureaucratic the organization, such points of market indifference—and therefore of individual freedom—are productive of the very fabric of society. Under Soviet socialism, in contrast, a person's indebtedness was 'infinite,' even for Party members; because symbolic social exchange—social obligation and sacrifice—was conceived to be without limits..." (p. 438)

For Buck-Morss, within this logic, it is clear that 'cold war capitalism' delivered the goods over Soviet socialism: "Given the criterion of consumer plenty, Americans easily believed that the public interest was synonymous with the growth of national firms." (p. 438) A smooth 'vision' of the national-economy was produced which bound together intranational polities without recourse to explicitly political processes.

However, this is wrong (again via Reich): "The American polity [...] has become unstuck from the American economy..." evident primarily through rising wealth inequality and the ability of 'world citizens' to 'slip the bonds of national allegiance.' This is an issue, because: "[w]hen members of the same society become aware that they 'no longer inhabit the same economy', they are tempted to reconsider what they owe each other." (p. 439)

This is problematic not only as a 'legitimation crisis' for the welfare state, but also for the social polity more generally, as it "challenges the very definition of the collective [...] itself." (p. 439)

## 2

How does the (Western liberal-democratic) nation (developed in C18th Europe) imagine a collective is formed?

> "The proposition that the exchange of goods, rather than denoting the edge of community, is capable of functioning as the fundament of collective life necessitated the discovery that within the polity such a thing as an "economy" exists." (p. 439)

This 'discovery' was in-fact an invention (Foucault): "every new science creates its object. [...] The great marvel is that once a scientific object is 'discovered', it takes on agency." (p. 439). This process of invention/discovery is itself predicated on the process of **'representational mapping'** — such 'doubling' allows the viewer to see the whole _as if_ from the outside. (p. 440)

> "Navigational maps were prototypical; mapping the economy was an outgrowth of this technique." (p. 440)

For Morss, the French '[Physiocrat](https://www.britannica.com/topic/physiocrat)' François Quesnay provided the first such map in 1758 through the 'discovery' of two schemes: "circulation (circular flow) and production (the fertility schema), folded into each other in the same social body." (p. 443) This scheme cut against mercantilism's 'zero-sum' theory of trade and wealth creation, demonstrating the generation of surplus value _within_ the European economy via the sphere of production (Marx), rather than relying solely on colonial extraction of previous metals.

Quesnay's 'economic picture' — predicated on the productivity of agricultural processes and advances — served as a basis from which one might argue "that the economic system had no need of government control..."; taking on a 'metaphysical' quality, described (by [Mirabeau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_Gabriel_Riqueti,_comte_de_Mirabeau)) as a "...great machine" of nature, "animated and directed by its own springs" as in "no need of outside direction" (p. 445).

In his own time, however, Quesnay's political-economy was still dependent on the king as only he was "in a position to see the whole and govern according to the natural laws that guaranteed its rational functioning." (p. 444) There was a moral aspect to this — private, mercantile fortunes were for him a "clandestine form of wealth which knows neither king nor country..." As Schumpeter writes: "here then, was _la raison_ [reason]_,_ with all its uncritical belief in progress, but without its irreligious and political fangs. Need I say that this delighted court and society?" (p. 444)

## 3

Two decades later, in _The Wealth of Nations_ (1776), Adam Smith undoes this relation to the 'king and his authory' — the 'whole body of the people' is both the consideration and audience for his work — and "...this social body that sees itself described is a new one." (p. 445)

Against feudal theories of the social body as effectively 'similar to that of a man' (Rousseau) — with a head (sovereign), brain (laws/customs), digestion (industry/agriculture) & circulation (economy), as well as an overall 'general will' — Smith 'secularizes' and 'pragmatizes' the polis: "it must be produced by doing..." Produced, specifically, by the 'laboring masses': "The economy is the place of creative action. And politics recedes from center stage." (p. 446)

This 'machinistic' description of the universe is not a metaphor (as it is for Quesnay and Rousseau): "machines are, literally, the means whereby labor, divided and specialized, becomes productive." (p. 446) _Agriculture_ is supplanted by _industry_ as the arena in which we can 'see' a new schema of economic fertility — hence why Smith chooses the pin factory as his main example: "small enough so we can 'see' the principle of the division of labor that governs the whole." (p. 446) Unlike in Quesnay, however, there is no perspective (neither King, God nor Reason) from which the whole productive social body can be viewed... (perhaps this is a reason for the _invisibility_ of Smith's 'hand'). We can only see the _effects_ of this fertile process, in the commodities which start to pile up.

> "Smith's fertility schema is the multiplying effect of a procedure, not something, nor even somebody. [...] This division causes the productivity of labor, machines, capital—not vice versa." (p. 447)

There is, however, a moral issue with this arrangement:

> "The same division that causes the social organism to grow in wealth also causes the individual worker to become [spiritually] impoverished. [...] Here is the paradox in Smith's view of homo faber: each real body is stunted in order for the social body to prosper." (p. 448)

The figure of the 'consumer' (who can now have coats, shoes, utensils, bread, beer, windows, etc) is then positioned as an answer to this problem, and "with the wave of a hand, the victim of the division of labor becomes its beneficiary." (p. 449)

However, for Morss, there is an issue with this logic, an issue predicated on the inequality of the new situation (some do very little, and still benefit from the division of labor):

> "The division of labor, upon which the wealth of nations depends, creates (against nature) a society of unequals. Class difference is the by-product of national wealth—and it is class difference that determines one's power in the marketplace, including the power to bargain effectively for the price of one's own labor." (p. 449)

This is what defines the 'invisible hand' — that which "opens up a blind spot in the social field, yet holds the whole together." (p. 450) The 'body' of this hand is "composed of things, a web of commodities circulating in an exchange that connects people who do not see or know each other. [...] Commodities are the key to Smith's defense of the new social body; despite distinctions between rich and poor, all members of "civilization" can console themselves, because the quantity of things they possess marks them as superior to much of the world's population..." (p. 450)

The role of _desire_ in theories of the social body then becomes an important point — people have to be made to _want things_. The 'invisible hand' also serves this purpose 'harmonizing the whole' by 'cunningly' orchestrating each individual persons' desire (against their intentions). However, this can become an unsatiable, runaway process: as the 'face-to-face society' morphs into a 'thing-society', the 'pleasure of mutual sympathy' which constrains self-interested behaviour begins to dissapear. Instead of sympathizing with their 'compatriot' one empathizes with the commodity, mimicing its expansiveness. The 'social nexus of civilization' is then predicated on the insatiable desire for commodities within each individual.

Smith counts on this 'natural' instability for the health of the 'collective level' of the economy (which simultaneously produces a 'schizophrenic' eceonomic subject at its base): "the _deceptive_ promise that happiness will be gained through the possession of objects is the decoy whereby nature ensnares the imagination and transforms it into a collective good." (p. 453)

> "Not demand, instrumentally and rationally calculated, but desire, deceived by commodities as decoys, is the motor force of Smith's 'economy.' We are caught in its orbit as self-interested monads who precisely in our unreason bring about reason's goal." (p. 453)

This argument relies upon contemporaneous innovations in the field of visual representation that makes it possible to chart the effects of the 'invisible hand'. During this time [William Playfair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Playfair) — who invented the line, bar, area and pie chart — was creating a _'Commercial and Political Atlas'_ that, "rather than attempting to provide a God's-eye view of the whole", provided a "form of data graphics [that] correlates two measurements [...] over time." (p. 455) Borrowing from Edward Tufte's analysis of Playfair, Morss notes:

> "Brand new is the fact that, unlike earlier maps, the graphical design is 'no longer dependent on direct analogy to the physical world. ... This meant, quite simply but quite profoundly, that any variable quantity could be placed in relationship to any other variable quantity, measured for the same units of observation.' 'Relational graphic[s]' link 'at least two variables, encouraging and even imploring the viewer to assess the possible causal relationship between the plotted variables'" (p. 456)

This new 'image' of economic processes allows one to argue causes on the basis of effects (correlation =?= causation); to show "patterns of market behaviour that emerge unintentionally from the aggregate of individual decisions..." (p. 456).

> "Playfair's work lays the ground for the method of producing knowledge within the new discipline of political economy-not a picture of the social body as a whole, but statistical correlations that show patterns as a sign of nature's plan." (p. 457)

## 4

This 'discovery' of the 'natural' laws of political economy (along with the newfound role of commodities/money equivalents as a mediator of social relations) caused an 'extraordinary revison of the social body' — one which split the social collective into two visions:

1.  The **economic**, a 'grand philosophy' which sought to place "an anthropology, a political theory, a theory of social practice all within the orbit of economic life, appropriating them from the realm of political power and police control." (p. 456)

2.  The **political**, predicated on traditional notions of civic virtue (described above).

The contradiction in Smith's political philosophy lies in the fact that the "civic society he desires is founded on principles inimicable to the economic society he describes."

For Morss, Hegel is one of the first philosophers to break with both 'traditional ancient' and 'Enlightenment' meanings of civil society, instead identfying it (_bürgerliche Gesellschaft_) as precisely that society created by what Smith calls political economy.

> "...Hegel's original insight [is] that civil society, as "modern society," is produced by a historically specific form of economic interdependence, one that follows all of the principles of logic that Smith described" (p. 457)

Hegel understands and fears, in particular, the new, blind or 'accidental' "infinity of human needs, the limitless growth of both goods and human desires..." which this system of interdependence or 'mutual dependency' produces. (p. 458) The state, through law and the police, as a kind of _deus ex machina,_ then necessarily become an oppositional power to bring order, set boundaries, and operate against the 'wildness of the system'.

However, it goes further than this, as, for Hegel, the qualities of these 'accidental' events within the marketplace can be transcribed (via the battlefield) onto the 'history of progress'. The same way in which, for Smith, 'reasons' cunning (encoded in the 'natural laws' identified in Playfair's charts) operates regardless of the intentions of individuals, for Hegel, it "is through the passions and desires of great men, political actors rather than economic ones, that reason 'cunningly' works its way out into history, achieving, for collective action, a rationality denied to that of individuals." (p. 459) The invisible hand returns!

> "Hegel's 'cunning of reason' plays, on the politico-historical level, precisely the role that Smith's "invisible hand" plays on the socioeconomic level, including the ideological role of justifying the harm done to individuals in terms of "progress" for the social collective." (p. 460)

## 5

> "Not qualitative judgement, but quantitative measurement [became] the criterion of scientific knowledge." (p. 462)

Importantly, however, both Hegel and Smith "understood political economy as belonging to a more general philosophical discourse, one that entailed critical reflection..." (p. 460) This 'normative dimension' is, it seems lost, in the 'deep epistemological break' between classical (1700's) and neoclassical (1800's) economics; the 'professionalisation' of the discipline which sought to purge the 'science' of economics from such psychological, or value-oriented concerns. Despite 'demand theory' hinging on the 'subjective desires' their origin is intentionally shrouded in mystery.

> "Economic theory is now concerned with the far narrower task of describing "laws" that account for regularities of market behavior as a self-interested rationality of means, while it remains totally indifferent to the normative questions about the reasonableness of individual motives or the substantive rationality of social ends" (p. 461)

Neoclassical theories such as 'marginal utility' elide the problems or questions of class polarization, and even growth (the fertility schema), by focusing only "...on individual economic behavior, wherein the same mechanism of scarcity and demand sets the price of labor's wages, interfirm purchases, and consumer buying." (p. 463) The only value economic problem is the _pricing_ and _resource allocation_ of _fixed supplies_.

The principle characteristic of neoclassical economics is then minimalism in its 'visual display', microeconomics. This is the end of political economy as a philosophy:

> "Once this happens, critical reflection on the exogenous conditions of a "given" market situation becomes impossible, and the philosophy of political economy becomes so theoretically impoverished that it can be said to come to an end." (p. 463)

## 6

Many would welcome the dissaparance of philosophy from economics, and the (not uncontested) success of neoclassical theories. Wasn't this the problem of Soviet socialism? Even Keynesianism "never tried to deduce from the economy a vision of society as a whole" (p. 465)

The only view available is that of the individual, "even when economic actors are states or firms, their profit-maximizing reasoning occurs without any vision of the whole." (p. 466) This is problematic in the domain of political action:

> "When Foucault praises the invisibility of Smith's hand because it does not allow the sovereign sufficient knowledge to control the social field of individual desire, he forgets the other side, that the desiring individuals also lack this knowledge, and that such knowledge is vital for effective political response" (p. 466)

The rise of reactionary nationalism, for example, is in part due to the condition of 'blindness' to the 'objective deteminates' of social life (Morss gives the Russian 'big bang' as an example).

> "A philosophical, critical vision of the social body as it is produced by the global economy provides an alternative to the politics of renewed nationalism. Such an alternative vision has the healthy advantage of corresponding to the facts because economic interdependence, not ethnic purity, is what our world is really all about." (p. 466)

Morss finishes by not only calling for alternate visions of the global economy, but also by calling out the dearth of 'theory' today which can meet this challenge of 'envisioning the social whole.' The problem of representations of the 'global system' will not go away because theorists refust to speak about it.


Envisioning Capital

envisioning-capital


Notes for the book [_The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible_](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/politics-of-aesthetics-9781780935355/) by Jacques Rancière, published (in English) in 2004.

---

# The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics

Politics, for Rancière, is to be examined through the concept of the _‘distribution of the sensible’:_

> “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” (page 12)

This _distributive_ (and therefore more straightforwardly political?) aspect of this concept can be understood in two ways:

1. “[An] apportionment of parts and positions […] based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that deter­mines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.” For example, after Aristotle, “a citizen is someone who _has a part_ in the act of governing and being governed” (page 12)

2. “…another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distri­bution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens.” For example, again following Aristotle, a slave can understand the language of their master but does not ‘possess’ it. Less dramatically, after Plato, “…the distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.” (page 12)

The _sense-able_ and _aesthetic_ dimension then follows from this:

> “There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the age of the masses’…. aesthetics can be understood […] as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.” (page 13)
>
> Put simply: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.” (page 13)

_How is it then, that artists engage with this form of aesthetics?_

‘Artistic practices’ and their interventions are ‘secondary’ to this ‘primary aesthetics’ they are “‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.” (page 13) Again following Plato, Rancèire divides this practice into three approaches or ‘forms’: the _written_, _theatrical_ and _choreographic_.

_Writing_ and _theatre_ are “two major forms of existence and of the sensible effectivity of language […as well as] structure-giving forms for the regime of the arts in general.” (page 13)

- The _theatre_, or ‘stage’ “which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces.” (page 13)
- _Writing_ similarly, ‘steals away’ “to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circu­lation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space.” (page 13)

However, these two forms are “prejudicially linked from the outset to a certain regime of politics, a regime based on the indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation of partitions of space and time.” (page 14) In other words, these ‘figures of community’ are dependent on various forms of political institutionalisation (democracy, the law, etc). In contrast:

- The _choreographic_, is offered as a third ‘good’ “form of the community that sings and dances its own proper unity.” (page 14) That is to say, there is an alignment between regimes of aesthetics and politics(?).

These are not a definitive list of ‘artistic practices’ or ‘aesthetic regimes’ but are rather:

> “…three ways in which discursive and bodily practices suggest forms of community […] three ways of distributing the sensible that structure the manner in which the arts can be perceived and thought of as forms of art and as forms that inscribe a sense of community: the surface of ‘depicted’ [mute] signs, the split reality of the theatre, the rhythm of a dancing chorus.” (page 14)
> It is through the contingent development, ‘intermingling’ and recontextualisation of these practices of distribution that new forms, sensibilities and ‘ways of living’ can be produced.

_An example?_

Rancèire gives the specific example of “the type of painting that is poorly named abstract”, which he equates (after Plato) with the “‘anti-representative revolution’ [already present in] the flat surface of the page” and in the “ways in which typog­raphy, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced.” (page 16) He writes that while “modernist discourse presents the revolution of pictorial abstraction as painting’s discovery of its own proper medium’: the two-dimensional surface […] A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible.” (page 15)

The ‘interface’ created between ‘mediums’ through this new ‘surface’ (i.e. connections forged between ‘poems and their typography’, ‘theatre and design’, etc) links “the artist who abolishes figurative representation to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life.” (page 16) This ‘interface’ is political in how it revokes a twofold politics inherent in the logic of representation:

1. “On the one hand, this logic separated the world of artistic imitations from the world of vital concerns and politicosocial grandeur.” (page 17)
2. “On the other hand, its hierarchical organization - in particular the primacy of living speech/action over depicted images – formed an analogy with the socio-political order.” (page 17)

The result being:

> “With the triumph of the novels page over the theatrical stage, the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the elevation of artisans’ art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art into the décor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of s was overturned.” (page 17)

To conclude, for ‘aesthetics and politics’:

> “The important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.” (page 18)

For ‘the arts’:

> “The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible.” (page 19)

## Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity

Rancière is not keen on the concepts of _modernity_ or the _avant-garde._ For him they confuse or conflate two things:

- The “historicity specific to a regime of the arts in general…”
- “…the decisions to break with the past or anticipate the future that take place within this regime.”

Before elaborating on this however, Rancière provides a distinction between ‘three major regimes of identification’ within the western tradition of art, as a way of situating the issue:  (1) ‘_ethical regime of images_’; (2) ‘_poetic_ or _representative regime of the arts_’; (3) ‘_aesthetic regime of the arts_’. They can be described as follows:

1. For the _ethical regime of images_, ‘art’ is subsumed under a concept of ‘images’ and such images are themselves the object of a twofold question:

   1. A question of their ‘origins’ and therefore their ‘truth content’. We can think of this through the problem of representations of the divine, or (again, after Plato) ‘the simulacra of painting, poems, and the stage’ (i.e. reality vs. appearance).

   2. A question of their _end_ or _purpose,_ their _uses_ and _effects._ In other words, how such ‘imitative’ images, are used distributively to educate and organise communities.

   In this regime, “…it is a matter of knowing in what way images’ mode of being affects the _ethos,_ the mode of being of individuals and communities. This question prevents ‘art’ from individualizing itself as such.” (page 21)

2. For the _poetic_ or _representative regime of the arts_, the substance of ‘the arts’ is identified in the _poiēsis/mimēsis_ couplet*.* This is ultimately a regime that makes ‘fine art’, ‘art’ and hierarchies within art visible to a community, articulating what is and isn’t art. (See [Joe Blakey’s glossary](http://joeblakey.com/ranciere-on-art-glossary-of-terms/))

   - It is _poetic_ insofar as it identifies the arts within a “classification of ways of doing and making […] as well as means of assessing imitations”.
   - It is _representative_ insofar as it is the “notion of representation or mimēsis that organizes these ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging.”

3. Finally, the _aesthetic regime of the arts_, stands in contrast to the representative regime – it is “_aesthetic_ because the identification of art no longer occurs via a division _within ways of doing and making_, but it is based on distinguishing a _sensible mode of being specific to artistic products_.” ‘Aesthetics’ does not mean a theory of sensibility or taste, but is rather “the mode of being of the objects of art…” (art is whatever art is). This seems(?) similar to the processes of defamiliarization made explicit through Dadaist art (readymades, etc), now generalised into “a form of thought that has become foreign to itself…” In short: “The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity.” (page 23)(Again, see [Joe Blakey’s glossary](http://joeblakey.com/ranciere-on-art-glossary-of-terms/))

## On Art and Work

This complex intellectual equation can be simplified substantially if one realizes that what he is doing is combining, in a clever way, art history with labor history. ([http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp](http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp))


The Politics of Aesthetics

notes-on-the-politics-of-aesthetics


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.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout


Hulks

hulks

Towards a Minor Etymology

minor-etymology


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.

---

This article was written for a monthly column – _The Remainder_ – in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout


Lime-fingered

lime-fingered


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  <source src="/work-form-site.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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Website development for design studio [work-form](https://www.work-form.co.uk/). Designed by work-form and built using Next.js & Prismic CMS.


work-form website

work-form-site


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_?

---

This article was written for a monthly column in the [Sticky Fingers](https://stickyfingers.cargo.site/In-Your-Letterbox) monthly mailout

---

[^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


Intercourse

intercourse


![image](/inside-1.jpg)
![image](/inside.jpg)
![image](/inside-3.jpg)

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Catalogue produced on the occassion of Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hasting's exhibition [_Inside_](https://www.hfkd.dk/11420176/inside) at the Huset for Kunst & Design in Denmark.

![image](/inside-4.jpeg)

---

All photos courtesy of [David Stjernholm](https://www.davidstjernholm.com/).


Inside

inside

Montez Radio

montez-radio

Methodological Timelines

timeline-workshop


Excerpts from the Masters module _Designing Politics_ supervised by John Reardon and Michael Dutton. It explores

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# POLYCRISIS OR PERMACRISIS? WORD OF 2022

In a 1980 speech to the Conservative Women's Conference, Thatcher famously said: _“We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept **there's no real alternative**.” \_That slogan,_ [‘There is No Alternative’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative#:~:text=%22There%20is%20no%20alternative%22%20(,British%20prime%20minister%20Margaret%20Thatcher.) \_– no alternative to the self-admittedly unpopular policies of a newly financialised era – speaks anew in our current era of [polycrisis](https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-165-polycrisis-thinking).

Indeed, any recourse to ‘balance’ reads as tragedy in the year 2022 – when the list of crises constitutes a 1-minute-read of its own – and balance via “the market” as farce. And yet, it is still the ‘balancing act’ of an innovative ‘invisible hand’ that is relied upon to adjust responses to these crises through, it seems, ever-quickening cycles of boom and bust. This particular coping-mechanism, which favours quick-fixes over long-term planning, may work for now but, as Adam Tooze writes:_ [“The more successful we are at coping, the more the tension builds.”](https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33)_

It may then be wise to think less with the _polycrisis_ – that is to say, the diversity of crises we face in the present – than the **_permacrisis, _**and the idea that such crises are here to stay… “that we now see our crises as situations that can only be managed, not resolved.” For more [read on here.](https://theconversation.com/permacrisis-what-it-means-and-why-its-word-of-the-year-for-2022-194306)

# SUN EXPLODES: MARKETS REACT

What happens when we think of the life of the Sun as a business cycle?

Some scientists believe that the current phase of the star's life-cycle will end around [5 billion years from now](https://bgr.com/science/scientists-think-they-figured-out-when-the-sun-will-explode-and-kill-us-all/). On the one hand, that can be read as a long bull market, and optimistically, leaves a lot of time for continued economic growth; on the other, it seems that the thermonuclear cadence of a speculative solar economy fails to speak to the lived reality of our present moment. A moment which, as we’ve identified, is one of ever-quickening, ever-diversifying, ever-deepening crises. However – somewhere in-between – the Sun’s theoretical limit as an economic actor may expose something of the radical contingency or strangeness at the heart of cycles of all kinds; from fashion and physics to finance and biology.

The alignment of moons, planets and stars – and the cadence with which they orbit the Sun and other bodies – have a longstanding, important place in cultural memory. Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain, has been said to serve as a sacred meeting place, consecrated by celestial events such as lunar eclipses. Some have even argued that stonehenge was used to predict such eclipses. And such spectacular chance encounters between these orbits offer up a sense of oscillatory time that is profoundly plural – that exposes the plurality of ‘times’ which sit within what we think of as ‘the present’. Orbits within orbits.

These oscillations and repetitions take place on the earth as well, and similarly occur within one another – “a present whose present time is not singular but plural, not present to itself alone but to a cycle of ‘times’ it accommodates within itself.” As the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi might say: “Time does not pass, it accumulates…”[^1] And this concept is as evident in stone-henge as it is in the discounted commodities of Black Friday.

As Baucom writes, paraphrasing Benjamin, “...time accumulates in _things_, even, or particularly commodified things whose commodification entails not only the assignation of an exchange value but the willed repudiation of the time stored within them, the denial of [...] the time it took to make them, the value of that labour time, the collective past-life it encodes, or even, or indeed much less, as ‘practical’ souvenirs of an antecedent phenomenology.”

What then to make of the ‘times’ contained within a moment whose ‘cultural logic’ turns to the abstractions of high-finance – with its stock exchanges, bond, credit and currency markets – over the grounded commodity and its materially ‘antecedent phenomenologies’? For Arrighi, each and all cycles of capitalist accumulation are twinned – Marx’s famous MCM (Money–Capital–Money) is paired with a second figure MM (Money–Money) in which money-capital can ‘set itself free’ from the commodity form. The linear notion of a ‘late’ stage of Capitalism is then, in this view at least, no more than a repetition of previously financialised moments – one which, according to Baucom, “inherits its nonimmediate past by intensifying it…”

Many critical analyses of capitalist cycles of development aim to show how such repetitions can be broken, how orbits can be unwound and smoothed out, flattened into a linear trajectory once and for all. But what happens when we start thinking through cycles? The cycles we want to see intensified, in all their plurality and diversity? Is a moment in which we are free to think outside the commodity form, not a moment for ever-denser orbits?

As Benjamin writes in the Arcades: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” Or, as Warren Buffet put it: “the rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.”

# SLOWING GROWTH: WHOSE FOOT’S ON THE DECELERATOR?

The latest projections for 2022’s global growth rate are in and, once again, have been revised down – this time, to just over 3%, almost half of last year’s 6% jump. In the distance, 2023 seems to continue the trend with estimates hovering at around 2.7% for the world and just 1.1% for advanced economies. Such downward pressure on GDP statistics have multiple causes, but the full effects have yet to be seen. In October of this year Gaurav Ganguly, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, somewhat pessimistically said recent actions by the UK government had made a dreaded period of stagflation and recession “almost inevitable”.

However, a slowing in growth or ‘degrowth’ of the economy may not be the inherent evil it is often taken to be. Degrowth activists and researchers have been advocating for similar – albeit managed – declines in traditional measures of productivity since at least 2008. While the negative growth of 2020 (with the social and economic pain that was caused by Covid-19) is often used as a straw-man to combat this line of thinking, “sceptics of ‘growth as prosperity’ do not want a recession, or, as is looking increasingly likely, a depression”. Instead they wish to take the largely unmanaged ‘decline’ of the present and manage this process, retooling the global economy to look beyond growth as an overarching economic, social and political goal – to slow things down on purpose instead.

The choice then appears to be between those who wish to weather an ‘almost inevitable’ economic forecast, and those who don’t (or can’t). The question is then, whose foot would you rather on the decelerator?

# TAKE THE DAY OFF: A SOCIETY OF CHOSEN TIME

“Go to any high-street bookshop and alongside those books promising to instruct readers on how to influence others, accumulate fortunes and achieve career success, one can also find a shelf of books telling readers to slow down, find a better ‘work–life balance’, and seek happiness by consuming less.”

Thus begins David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work, a publication which documents through anthropological observations and interviews the joys that can be found from a managed decline – a slowing – in one’s working life. In ‘advanced economies’ such as the U.K. at least, there is clearly a desire twinned with the neoliberal drive for personal success and self-development – to break from the circuitous logic of accumulation and acceleration. Throughout the conversations Frayne holds with those who have reduced or eliminated their working hours (predominantly outside of conventional retirement), people reflect on such a standard logic through the work- week:

“I guess it was just like, the less I worked, the more I realised I didn’t have to. I guess it’s just looking at friends who are still stuck in the cycle of working to pay ridiculous rent, doing Monday to Friday and then going out for the weekend and getting completely hammered, and then spending the next few days at work being really miserable and then recovering enough for the weekend to come around, and then feeling just about OK enough to do the whole thing again.”

In the financial sphere, one is reminded of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street and the lawyer who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to do any other task required of him, refusing with the words “I would prefer not to.” Taken to its extreme, such inertia kills Bartleby, but in Frayne’s account – echoing Kate Soper – it is in fact the so-called ‘good life’ of work and play that is killing us all, as she writes “It is, after all, now widely recognised that our so-called good life is a major cause of stress and ill-health. It subjects us to high levels of noise and stench, and generates vast amounts of junk…”

Following André Gorz, we can clearly see how the material culture of ‘ever faster production turnovers and built-in obsolescence’ becomes enmeshed in what he calls a Politics of Time – a politics that optimistically preempts what he came to name ​​a (somewhat utopian) ‘Society of Chosen Time’. This society would shift “the production of the social bond towards relations of co-operation, regulated not by the market and money, but by reciprocity and mutuality…” and, as Frayne points out, the single most important feature of this society would be a society-wide policy of shorter working hours.

It seems then that an answer to both ecological and personal collapse lies in thinking carefully, slowly through the politics of time – whether that leads to the lofty goal of a ‘society of chosen time’ or not. Such a political project may seem abstract to some... unsure of where to start? Our advice: Take the day off.

---

[^1]: Spectres of the Atlantic, p.24


Meantime Management

meantime-management

Gravity Road

gravity-road


> [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](http://evening-class.org/)_, which he imagines has a similar sensibility to this class here. An alumnus of ‘Designing Politics’, [Chris Lacy](http://christopherlacy.co.uk/), 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.

---

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

---

[^1]: This quote is taken from Jakob Jakobsen's wonderful research project [Antihistory](https://antihistory.org/deinsti) exploring the Anti-University.


An Apology

an-apology


![image](/entropia-2.gif)
![image](/entropia-3.gif)


Entropia

entropia

Token Earth

token-earth


![image](/marathon.gif)
![image](/marathon-abc.gif)
![image](/marathon-step.png)
![image](/marathon-live.gif)
![image](/marathon-gilet.gif)

---

Type design for [Ware Collective's](https://ware.zone) 24 hour live stream event [_MARATHON_](https://ware.zone/events/marathon). The design is an adaptation of [Swiss 721 Black Extended](https://www.linotype.com/1086487/swiss-721-family.html) (designed by [Max Miedinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Miedinger)) which is used for the Ware 'w' logo. The gilet's were produced by embroidery specialists [Lavant Workwear](https://lavantworkwear.co.uk/).


Marathon

marathon


![image](/disgrace-1.gif)
![image](/disgrace-2.gif)
![image](/disgrace-3.gif)
![image](/disgrace-4.gif)

Book produced to accompany the production of Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hasting's etching series "Disgrace", since purchased by the [Government Art Collection](https://artcollection.culture.gov.uk/artwork/19037/)


Disgrace (Book Design)

disgrace


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.

<video width="100%" src="/devices.mp4" autoplay loop muted></video>
<video width="100%" src="/synthetic-city.mp4" autoplay loop muted></video>
<video width="100%" src="/synthetic-bridge.mp4" autoplay loop muted></video>

---

[^1]: Hito Steyerl, A Sea of Data
[^2]: Rob Horning, Plausible Disavowal


Synthetic Imagery, Synthetic Imaginary

synthetic-imagery

Twenty Terrifying Tales of Our Technofeudal Tomorrow (Book Design)

twenty-terrifying-tales

Geofinancial Lexicon

geofinance-online

geofinancial-lexicon


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?

---

This essay was written for the publication [_Energy Systems_](https://wellprojects.xyz/product/energy-systems/) accompanying [Well Projects'](https://wellprojects.xyz/) 2020 [programme](https://wellprojects.xyz/programmes/energy-systems/) 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](https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/18893/) at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning.

---

[^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](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](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/](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](https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf)) p.34
[^14]: Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.7


Optimizing the Earth

energy-systems

DIY Critical Theory

diy-critical-theory


_Creature Coding_ is a two-part workshop which provides an introduction to [p5.js](https://p5js.org/), a JavaScript library for creative coding. Originally written for the [Illustration programme](https://www.arts.ac.uk/subjects/illustration/undergraduate/ba-hons-illustration-camberwell) at Camberwell, I have since run this class at other universities, as part of staff training sessions, and during CSM's [Digital Innovation Season](https://digitalinnovationseason.com/W-Jack-Clarke).

Through this workshop, students explore basic concepts of the software to produce digital "creatures", developing coding skills in relation to a specific project.

<iframe width="100%" height="500" src="https://editor.p5js.org/JackClarke/full/6XD1MI6r_"></iframe>

<iframe width="100%" height="700" src="https://editor.p5js.org/JackClarke/full/yyLYo5K46"></iframe>

<iframe width="100%" height="700" src="https://editor.p5js.org/JackClarke/full/dYiNBDQL4"></iframe>


Creature Coding

creature-coding


![image](/an-attempt.gif)

At last, late one night he finds the final link in the chain. A cursor flickers in the darkness as a flimsy grey mouse is held in place by five miniature digits. An empty shell in the terminal. Sweat mixed with circuitry. A grubby finger hovers. A single click & the portal opens. His spirit catapulted up thru the ceiling. A shimmering knotwork of refracted waves and frequencies surrounds him, opening out onto a hazy otherworld. 500 miles up he encounters an earth based religion practiced in the clouds. A fantastic sky splayed out over an infinte array of hillforts and reservoirs. Druids and warrior queens gesture towards him, muttering the codes to ethereal spells as he floats carelessly overhead.


any attempt to control the environment or the self by means which are either untested or untestable, such as charms or spells

any-attempt

Interpolate (Toronto)

interpolate-toronto


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  <source src="/ware-site.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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Website development for music collective [ware](https://www.ware.zone/). Designed and developed by me using Next.js & Prismic CMS, featuring an integrated audio player.


Ware Collective site

ware-site


![image](/who-counts.gif)
![image](/who-counts-2.gif)

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?


Who Counts?

who-counts


![image](/altcoin.gif)
![image](/altcoin-hat.webp)


Altcoin

altcoin


![alt_text](/pompeii.gif)

“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 witnesses[^2] 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 1km<sup>2</sup> – 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 17µm<sup>2</sup>.

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.

### \*

![alt_text](/planned-obsolescence.gif)

> 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]

---

[^1]: Leah Williams, [https://twitter.com/mymonsterischic/status/1022950001947885568](https://twitter.com/mymonsterischic/status/1022950001947885568)
[^2]: Schuppli, _Material Witness,_ [http://susanschuppli.com/research/materialwitness/](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](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/](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/](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


Planned Obsolescence

planned-obsolescence

Distributed – Content Free

distributed-conversation


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]

![image](/nonhuman-wiki.gif)

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User: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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scepbot) and [Russbot](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/User: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.

![alt_text](/nonhuman-publishing.png)

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...

![alt_text](/nonhuman-publishing-2.png)

...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](https://automatedinsights.com/) (AI). In their own words, [Wordsmith](https://automatedinsights.com/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’](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/07/what-caused-pound-flash-crash-brexit-fallen-sterling) 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.

![alt_text](/nonhuman-publishing-3.png)

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.

![alt_text](/nonhuman-publishing-4.png)

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…

![alt_text](/nonhuman-publishing-5.png)

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.

---

Adapted from a talk given at the [DISTRIBUTED symposium](https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/distributed/) organised by David Blamey ([Open Editions](https://openeditions.com/)), Joshua Trees ([Books From The Future](https://booksfromthefuture.info/)) & the Royal College of Art

---

[^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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_Commons/Awards)
[^3]: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171774](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/](https://www.wired.com/2017/03/internet-bots-fight-theyre-human/)
[^5]: [https://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith](https://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith)
[^6]: [https://automatedinsights.com/case-studies/associated-press](https://automatedinsights.com/case-studies/associated-press)
[^7]: [https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/study-news-automation-by-ap-increases-trading-in-financial-markets](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](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37582150)
[^9]: [http://www.litfmag.com/issue-4/towards-a-theory-of-thing-women/](http://www.litfmag.com/issue-4/towards-a-theory-of-thing-women/)


Nonhuman Publishing

distributed

Tiodtsuj

tiodtsuj


![image](/UKGBDfinal1.jpg)
![image](/UKGBDfinal2.jpg)
![image](/UKGBDfinal3.jpg)
![image](/UKGBDfinal4.jpg)


UKGBD

ukgbd


![image](/autolex.gif)

The [Autolex](https://autolex.abstract.supply/) is a generative tool for conceptual thinking. It currently holds 18,432 possible words.

It is a very simple system made up of two lists – one of [prefixes](https://autolex.abstract.supply/data/prefix.json) and the other of [suffixes](https://autolex.abstract.supply/data/suffix.json) – the prefixes provide the _end_ of the definition for the generated word, and the suffixes define the _start._ For example, the suffix _-obial_ is equivalent to _"The small yet living or vitalised quality of,"_; and the prefix _Cosmo_ is equivalent to _"the cosmos, world or 'outer' and/or that which pertains to the universe seen as a well-ordered whole."_ Together, they make:

> Cosmobial: The small yet liv­ing or vi­tal­ised qual­ity of the cos­mos, world or 'outer' and/or that which per­tains to the uni­verse seen as a well-​ordered whole.

The only other trick is to truncate the last letter of the prefix if it matches the first letter of the suffix, as is the case with the _-o-_ in _cosmo_ + _obial_.

---

## Some favourites

[Anarchomorphic](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Anarcho&s=omorphic): An object, process or function that takes its shape from or is literally formed of that which lacks obedience to an authority.

[Abhorrocene](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Abhorr&s=ocene): An age of that which is abhorrent, repugnant and capable of inspriring absolute disgust.

[Gaiatude](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Gaia&s=tude): An object, individual or process which contains qualities of that which relates to the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, mother of the Titans and more generally to the earth as we understand it today.

[Tic-tectonic](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Tic-&s=tectonic): A large-scale (often global) event, object or process of that which is both idiosyncratic and habitual, repetitive and nonrhythmic.

[Oedious](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Oedi&s=ous): An object, entity or event qualified or characterised by that which relates to Oedipus or Oedipial functioning.

[Cosmobial](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Cosmo&s=obial): The small yet living or vitalised quality of the cosmos, world or 'outer' and/or that which pertains to the universe seen as a well-ordered whole.

[Annihiapeutic](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Annihi&s=apeutic): A therapy or remedial process concerned with annihilation, complete destruction and/or obliteration.

[Urational](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Ur&s=rational): A rationality of that which is primitive, original, or earliest.

---

## Why does it work?

Most of the words provided by the autolex _'work'_ due to its use of [compounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound) and [blending](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word). This is a common, productive word-formation technique in the English language which takes morphemes and adds them together – it does this in both _hyphenated_ (e.g. _Tic-tectonic_) and _solid_ form (e.g. _Oedious_). The autolex levereages the [neoclassical compound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_compound) form in particular, which composes words from classical language roots (Latin or ancient Greek).

The (neoclassical) compound is at the heart of 'modern' technical and scientific vocabulary and its use (or overuse) during the transition from Middle English to Modern English sparked what is known as the [Inkhorn Controversy](https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/inkhorn-controversy-latin-greek-english-words/). As Geoffrey Hughes writes:

> The Inkhorn Controversy, as it is termed by historians of the language, derived indirectly from the invention of printing in that it arose from the issues generated in translating the classics, which the dissemination of the press had made more popular and economical. In the 'new' sciences, many borrowed words were accepted as the basic technical vocabulary. Some of these terms, like _algebra_ (1541), _alcohol_ (1543), and _chemistry_ (1605), came from the Arabs, but most of the word-stock came from Latin and Greek. These included _anatomy_ (1528), _optics_ (1579), _mathematics_ (1581) and _physics_ (1589). From the pages of Francis Bacon alone we find first instances of such scientific neologisms as _dissection_, _acid_, _hydraulic_ and _suction_.[^1]

Brought about by this cultural renaissance, such words were often adopted into or created within English to fill a morphological or, more often, [semantic gap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap). A semantic gap occurs when a particular meaning or distinction which is visible elsewhere within the lexicon (or is present in a foreign vocabulary) is absent.[^2] However, not all writers or academics of the time agreed with this ['latinisation'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_of_names) of English as a means of filling such holes. In his 1573 _Book of Witcraft_, Ralph Lever recognised that there was a need for new terms to define new concepts or devices and argued that preexisting monosyllabic _English_ words would allow for adequate compound terms rather than adopting seemingly overcomplicated Latin:

> Nowe the question lyeth, whether it were better to borrowe termes of some other toung, in whiche this sayde Arte hath bene written: and by a litle chaunge of pronouncing, to séeke to make them Englishe wordes, whiche are none in déede: or else of simple vsual wordes, to make compounded termes, whose seuerall partes considered alone, are familiar and knowne to all english men? For trial hereof, I wish you to aske of an english man, who vnderstandeth neither Gréek nor Latin, what he conceiueth in his mind, when he heareth this word a backset, and what he doth conceiue when he heareth this terme a Predicate.[^3]

Lever lost, and by 1665, with the creation of the _Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society_ (a name itself indicating the extent of his defeat), academics began publishing scientific periodicals in English (not Latin), accelerating the introduction of new, complex, compound terminology. This history is, in part, what makes non-standard generations such as ['Infragamous'](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Infra&s=gamous) intelligible to a contemporary audience.[^4]

The other reason such words _'work'_ (which we are discovering quickly in this account) is due to the interwoven historical and material qualities of language itself – to _politics_, _pronunciation_, _probability_ and _paranomasia_. For example: [_oedious_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Oedi&s=ous) works all the better in its homophonic (and, perhaps, semantic) relation to _odious_; [_geoceptual_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Geo&s=ceptual) to _geospatial_; [_parascopic_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Para&s=scopic) to _periscopic_; [_ecoecho_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Eco&s=echo), [_tic-tectonic_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Tic-&s=tectonic), [_tic-technics_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Tic-&s=technics) or [_libididex_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Libidi&s=dex) through alliteration and repetition; [_contrafacture_]() through it's speculative connection to [Walther von der Vogelweide's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_von_der_Vogelweide) [Kontrafaktur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrafactum); [_schizography_](https://autolex.abstract.supply/?p=Schizo&s=graphy) through Lacan's essay of the same name (and of which perhaps the autolex is an example [^5]) or Deleuze and Guattari's _schizoanalysis_. The list goes on.

This is not yet a question of _meaning,_ but of _functionality._ In their writing together, Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) explore this distinction through their own 'pragmatic' theory of language; provocatively, they write of language not as a _communicative_ medium to be reconstructed scientifically (as in conventional lingustic approaches), but rather a (somewhat ambivalent) _power-relation_ that 'compels obedience': “[a] rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker.”[^6]

In a sense, we can see this sentiment at play in Lever's nationalist critique of latinisation in English. The function of using (and, indeed, advocating for) 'backset' over 'predicate' is not to more adequately communicate a given idea, but rather to compel a more 'authentic' British identity into existence.[^7] Throughout their philosophy D&G are less interested in the question of what language _is_ – and to this we might add politics, economics, psychology, etc – than in _what it does_, in _what cases, where, when_ and _how_ it functions within a “a whole micropolitics of the social field”.

We might think of the [Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature)](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/oulipo) (Oulipo) as a kind of examplar in this context. The Oulipo, comprised of a group of writers and mathematicians, sought to emphasize systematic, self-restricting means of making texts which often resulted in _nonsense_. One of their most famous poetry techniques – n+7 – replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Such a procedure takes Jane Austen's opening line of _Pride and Prejudice_ – _“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”_ – and translates it into:

> It is a tuber universally acknowledged, that a single mandible in postcard of a good founder, must be in want of a willingness.[^8]

This is an obviously playful approach to language, one which actively elides authoritative or scientific modes of analysis or meaning-making. Jacques Bens: "Potential literature would be that which awaits a reader, which yearns for him, which needs him in order to fully realize itself"

> Some concepts call for archaisms, and others for neologisms, shot through with almost crazy etymological exercises: etymology is like a specifically philosophical athleticism. [^?]

> Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers." [^?]

---

[^1]: Hughes, G. (1988) _Words in Time._ Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell (The Language Library). p.101
[^2]: A classic example _within_ contermporary English is the gender neutral parental sibling or sibling-child; while we have _father_ (male), _mother_ (female) and _parent_ (neutral), there is no equivalent for an _uncle_ or _aunt_. _Pibling_ and _nibling_ have been [proposed](https://www.dictionary.com/e/aunt-uncle-niece-nephew-words/).
[^3]:
    Lever, R. (1573) [_The arte of reason, rightly termed, witcraft teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute._](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A05388.0001.001?rgn=main;view=toc) London.
    Adopting Lever's method of _witcraft_ here, an interesting exercise might be to take the neologism 'autolex' itself as an example to evaluate such a constrained approach. In line with the 'neoclassical' sensibility described above, _auto-_ derives from the ancient Greek _αὐτο-_ meaning _self-_ and is used here as a clipping of _automatic_ (itself derived from _αὐτόματος_ or _autómaton_ meaning _self-moving_). The 'suffix' _'-lex'_ is in-fact intended as an abbreviation of the word _lexicon_, also of ancient Greek origin. Combined, they form a [portmanteau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_word) of clipped compounds: _Automatic_ + _Lexicon_ becomes _auto-_ + _lexicon_ which turns to _auto_ + _lex_.
    It would seem that there is no word for an automatic process that derives from Old English and Proto-Germanic roots – as a rough approximation we might use the prefix _self-_ or _seolf-_ and the term _stir_ or _styriende_ (displaced by _move_) to give _self-stirring_ or _seolfstyriende_. To this we could add [_word-loca_](https://bosworthtoller.com/36486) (_-loca_ meaning lock, or enclosed space) or [_word-hord_](https://bosworthtoller.com/36477) (_-hord_ similarly meaning _hoard_ or _store_) both terms for _vocabulary_ present in Old English. This gives _self-stirring word-hoard_ or (more speculatively) _seolfstyriende wordhord_.
    wordtōl (word-tool) or wordwyrhta (word-worker) from wyrhta we get wright (as in playwright)
    [^4]: Incidentally, a search for _'Infragamous'_ appears to show only a single use case in a book of [_'Essays on the history of the Tamil people, language, religion and literature'_](https://archive.org/details/tamilstudiesores00srin/page/380/mode/2up) published in 1914, in which Muttusvami Srinivasa Aiyangar writes: “The Brahmans of the East coast, though they consider themselves purer in blood, are generally darker in complexion (like the Brahmans of Bengal) than the easy going wealthy and infragamous Namburis, which is no doubt due to the climatic conditions and the hardships they had been subjected to during the previous ten centuries of residence on the scorching plains of the unprotected East. I have called them 'infragamous' as there has been a kind of social sanction to the loose marital connection of the younger male members of the Aryan Brahmans with the women of the Dravidian castes in the Kerala country.”
    [^5]: “...'the poetics of Freud's work' constitutes the 'first entry way into its meaning.' Far from forgetting this lesson, Lacan stresses it with research which, even in his early publications, probes into 'style.' Thus, even before his dissertation, in 1932, his study of a 'schizography' is directed towards defining, within pathological writing, the procedures 'related to procedures uniformly present in poetic creation.' In 1933, Lacan's thesis opens onto 'the problem of style,' that is, onto a group of questions 'forever unresolvable for an anthropology which is not freed from the naive realism of the object...'” De Certeau, M. (1983) [_Lacan: An Ethics of Speech_. Representations, No. 3](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3043785). p.25
    [^6]: “[Language] is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.” Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) _A Thousand Plateaus._ p. 88
    [^7]: The role of subjectivation through language is of real importance in D&G's 'pragmatic lingustics'. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes: “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” Lecercle, J.-J. (1990) _The Violence of Language._ pp. 252–257
    [^8]: [The Spoonbill Generator](http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/texts/austen.html)
    [^?]: Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994) _What is Philosophy?_ New York: Columbia University Press (European Perspectives). p.8
    [^?]: _ibid._ p.10


Autolex

autolex


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![](pwb-3.gif)


Training for Explotation

training-for-exploitation

Re:Tool

retool


![](mcm-1.png)
![](mcm-2.png)
![](mcm-3.png)
![](mcm-4.png)
![](mcm-5.png)
![](mcm-6.png)

---

Model and Countermodel is a reader of collected texts about practitioners who have proposed risky yet rigorous alternatives to conventional wisdom across art, design and architecture including exemplary attitudes, frameworks, methodologies and methods.

176 pages, A4 (210 x 297 mm / 8.27 x 11.69 inches) \
Compiled by Yvan Martinez and Joshua Trees \
Designed by Jack Clarke

---

## [Download a PDF of the book here](http://booksfromthefuture.info/files/M%C3%98_CM%C3%98.pdf)


Model Countermodel

model-countermodel


![image](/office-space-poster.png)

People are working longer and longer hours, yet wages are decreasing. These long hours are bad for our mental and physical health, bad for our relationships, and bad for our communities. We are meeting to do something about it: demand a four day week!'

Together with Wealth Press and Deptford Cinema we co-organised a screening of cult classic slacker film Office Space. This was followed by a group discussion opening up a community dialogue for the Demand a Shorter Working Week! campaign. Evening Class with be collaborating with WP on future events and the campaign in general, the current manifesto can be found here.

![image](/office-space-detail.png)
