I "finished" "reading" Umberto Eco’s fantabulous essay/anthology The Infinity of Lists. The scare quotes are necessary because Eco’s 400+ page volume is two books in one: an extended essay on the idea and example of lists in art and literature and an accompanying anthology od excerpts and hundreds of color plates illustrating his points. I read (and in a few areas re-read) and marked up the essay but only read perhaps 1/4 of the anthology. I’ve read some of the work before… and trying to read all of the examples is just too much. I’ll be returning to the book many times!
The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book. It’s well designed and produced on quality paper. It features scores of full-page color plates in addition to at least twice as many smaller ones. The selections of art and writing encompass both the familiar and the unfamiliar– Eco strikes a nice balance between examples that readers will expect, which are nice to have close to hand, and examples that are sure to be new to even bibliophiles and visual art connoisseurs.
The fundamental premise of the book is to examine various ideas of the "list" as they play themselves out in art and literature. Taking on the topic of lists in visual art– and assuming one wishes to go beyond the obvious kinds of list in literature– presents a daunting task. As Eco notes in the Introduction:
…I had never set myself the task of making a meticulous record of the infinite cases in which the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day) offers examples of lists (though names such as Perec, Prévert, Whitman, and Borges all come to mind right away). The result of this hunt was prodigious, enough to make your head spin, and I already know that a great number of people will write to me asking why this or that author is not mentioned in this book. The fact is that not only am I not omniscient and do not know a multitude of texts in which lists appear, but even if I had wished to include all the lists I gradually encountered in the course of my exploration, this book would be at least one thousand pages long, and maybe even more.
Then there is the problem of deciding what a figurative lists may be. The few books on the poetics of lists prudently limit themselves to verbal lists because of the difficulty in explaining how a picture can present things and yet suggest an "etcetera," as if to admit that the limits of the frame oblige the picture to say nothing about an immense number of other things.
Among the kinds of list Eco describes are: referential & practical lists, poetic lists, assemblages, Vunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, curations, repertories, metaphorical alignments, chaotic enumerations, and lists of vertigos.
Eco first explores the contrast between referential lists (the non-infinite kind) which enumerate– or attempt to enumerate– everything in a domain, and infinite lists. A simple example of a referential list is a telephone book, which lists all phone numbers in an area at a particular point in time. The discussion gets more complex (speaking analogously: what of new and unlisted numbers, what of the series of lists exemplified by such directories, etc), but it anchors one end of the discussion.
The second kind of list is the infinite kind, the one created when the creator can’t possible enumerate all members of the set, but instead "proposes a list as a specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest." Needless to say, "the rest" must be important enough that the reader wishes to– and can productively– imagine more. This kind of list explores the "topos of ineffability" (a phrase, I must say, I love).
I couldn’t help but think how apt the list is as a form and framing device and motif for writing in and with this now-newish media and platform of blogging. Many of my favorite examples in the medium demonstrate the richness of the list in a variety of forms, sometimes a stream of consciousness by an individual or this or that group; sometimes a curation; sometimes a new-media rich commonplace book. The constant flow of memes, almost all of which are lists of a distributed kind, has become closer to a living thing than it ever could in another medium. The ability to flow, reflow, browse and meander with tags, categories, search and link make for living, breathing lists.
I’m sure I’ll post some excerpts from The Infinity of Lists to my own commonplace book, but it’s really a book one needs to experience– as a well-illustrated essay, as an anthology, a fascinating "art book" or all three.
“The eyes of man are sun-like, because art comes and makes them more sun-like. Art is so mighty because it changes our perception of the world. It is almost as mighty as philosophy and not nearly so harmful, because it does not ask anything of us. Art makes no request except one – to be loved – but no other request will a work of art ever make. If we love art and participate in the experience given there then our entire being will be changed, so mighty is this experience and yet so harmless.”
I don’t remember the chain of events that brought me to this extended rumination on "blue"– as color, characteristic and quality– but it wasn’t, as a I first suspected, a treatise on depression. Rather, Gass’ short (91pp) book considers blue as the color of "interior life" and sexuality and what that means in word and mind. I’m not sure how to classify this meandering essay (which is a good thing). It’s part philosophy, part criticism, part personal essay, but at all times happily lead by language:
Blue: bright, with certain affinities for bael (fire, pyre), with certain affinities for bald (ballede), with certain affinities for bold. Odd. Well, a bald brant is a blue goose. And these slippery blue-green sources ease, like sleeves of grease, each separate use into a single–we think–fair and squarely ordered thought machine. Never mind degrees, deep differences, contrasting sizes. The same blue sock fits every leg. Never mind the noses of those Nova Scotian potatoes, blue noses are the consequences of sexual freeze, or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, or rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue thighs. Not alone is love the desire and pursuit of the whole. It is one of the passions of the mind. Furthermore, if among a perfect mélange of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, as among the contents of a pocket one item is a peppermint, it will assume a center like the sun and quire all others take their docile turn to go around.
This thought is itself a center. I shall not return to it.
Gass skillfully brings together examples and thoughts from a variety of sources– Beckett, Joyce, Lucretius, Aristotle, Rilke, Stein– without ever seeming forced:
…As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.
From which he derives sometimes aphoristic metaphors and analogies:
A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance…
It’s hard to describe what Gass is doing (and what he attempts to do) in this sometimes paradoxically dense-but-never-heavy essay full of allusions to both external sources and itself.
Here I reveal my own prejudices about art, about the novel particularly, and about the current clamor of nonfiction (including this very essay).
For me, the Kantian criterion of “disinterestedness”—pleasure “without a concept”—still holds despite the turbid tides of ideologies sweeping over the world since the Critique of Judgment appeared in 1790. The criterion holds, not only because it “suspends” existence for a time, and not only because it permits the “free play of imagination,” but also because, in its self-relinquishment, it invites trust. In that sense, all disinterestedness is spiritual: it turns us into “transparent eyeballs,” for as long as it lasts. “All mean egotism vanishes. I am nothing, I see all,” said the man from Concord. (Of course, the bounties of fiction are not all spiritual; they are also adaptive, evolutionary, as Denis Dutton convincingly shows in The Art Instinct.)
But an ironic serendipity here intrudes: Coetzee himself knows that stories—unlike dogmas, documents, opinions—“tell themselves.” More, in an essay titled “On Authority in Fiction” in Diary of a Bad Year, he notes: “What the great authors are masters of is authority. . . . But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?” For us, who listen rather than speak, a story draws us out of ourselves while the teller’s breath still hangs within the sanctum of our hearing. Isn’t that auricular kenosis?
“Once upon a time”: yes, yes. This “yes” knows a certain truth, the truth of imaginative trust. This “yes” is also what a deep reading of literature demands, the kind of reading implied in Emil Filla’s haunting portrait of Kafka, titled “A Reader of Dostoyevsky”: the very image not just of absorption, but of self-recognition in self-loss.
Nothing here would surprise readers of earlier generations. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis remarks: “In reading good literature, I become a thousand men. . . . I transcend myself; and I am never more myself than when I do.” Nor is anything here alien to later generations—generations are not cast in iron—that might include, say, a Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winner for fiction in 2008. A small-town librarian in New Jersey saved him from being “young and knuckleheaded,” from being poor, brown, immigrant, rejected, by opening the wide world of reading for him. Thus, at a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, Diaz praised readers (not writers, mind you, and not even literature): “We readers will be remembered more than any individual writer for safeguarding that delicate web of human interconnectivity that so many forces wish to buy, capture, enslave, and mine.”
Hear, hear! That “delicate web of human interconnectivity” depends on imaginative trust. (No, literature does not lie.) Still, the Internet is here, not just to stay but to evolve, and the fate of book reading remains in doubt. Studies say this, studies say that, as pols and experts haggle. Meanwhile, young and old alike lead their lives, lost as always in the continual translations of existence, in the play of appearances and whatever reality may be intuited or grasped.
Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses.
“It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings[Pg 3]—and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles—therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Pigs were made to be eaten—therefore we eat pork all the year round. Consequently they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said all is for the best.”
Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up,– to see that we must stick to the subjects of our everyday thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.
Like many who have studied philosophy, Socrates has long had an established place in my intellectual pantheon. How could the man who essentially created Western philosophy occupy any lesser place?
After reading I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates I am left shaken. How could I have read so many works and listened to so many lectures about or involving Socrates without this devastating assessment being mentioned even once? Stone makes a very strong case that Socrates was far from the martyred philosopher, finally executed for standing up for principles that endure today. Instead, Socrates is a brilliant, obsessed, egomaniacal, rabble-rousing flake… more the crazy person ranting in the coffee shop to whoever will listen than the object of the philosophical conversations held in those shops.
Socrates stood firmly and directly against democracy and in favor of a totalitarian, divinely-supported monarchy even after two bloody revolutions that saw the Athenian democracy destroyed by his students. He preached a negative dialectic, delighting in poking holes in the positions of people at every level of Athenian society regardless of their political position. Finally he committed suicide by mocking a jury inclined to let him go with a reasonable fine, practically forcing them to sentence him to death and then staunchly resisting every possible avenue of escaping that sentence legitimately or through escape.
At every turn when the Socrates I believed in had a chance to prove otherwise he chose either silence or mockery. Stone has returned to the source texts and outlines with laser-like detail and precision how historians from Ancient times until today have glossed over almost all of this evidence to hold onto a cherished story supported only by the most contradictory sources and the most charitable (and in most cases obviously wrong) interpretations.
Socrates shouldn’t have been put to death– he wasn’t harmless, by an means, but the Athenian ideal should have found a way to put up with him. But it’s easy to see why an angry and scared group would see it done. In fact, it’s hard to understand why it didn’t happen sooner.
The picture of Socrates I have after reading this (pragmatic, entertaining, often funny and always highly readable) account is of a man tortured by his own, still unsolved questions. A brilliant thinker, Socrates sought absolute definitions, believing that only from that base could a coherent understanding of the world be formed… and in the grip of that obsession– over questions that we continue to argue about almost 2500 years later– he was essentially a broken man. Choosing suicide, which he couldn’t bring himself to do by his own hand, but which he believed to be the only way to fully transcend the earthly limitations of his own logic, doesn’t seem so surprising.
My interest in literary theory has so greatly waned that I could do no more than skim Terry Eagleton’s article on Mikhail Bakhtin. But it did remind me that I was, at one point, captivated by his work, particularly his thoughts on polyphony and “the carnival.”
But what I remember now is the reminiscence by a friend of how Bakhtin would lock himself in his tiny study and work and write for 14 hours or more a day, interrupting his concentration only occasionally to accept black tea and cheese sandwiches. That and the picture of his death mask. The austerity of the work and what little is left afterward.
Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues – and not only them – over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher.
Jean Baudrillard, long a philosophical hero of mine, has died. Baudrillard is often lumped in with other postmodern French philosophers (Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, etc) as retrospectively incomprehensible and oh-so-passe, revered only by a few graduate students and their mentoring faculty. I think that’s generally unfair and short-sighted, but particularly so with Baudrillard, because some of the most meaningful implications of his work on media, communication, representation and counterfeits, simulations and simulacra are only just now beginning to be revealed.
Baudrillard was ahead of his time and a sophisticated thinker, but remained one of the most sensical cultural critics when it came to understanding events like the 9/11 attacks or even the cultural significance of Disney World. It’s sad to know that his voice is forever lost at a time when he is most needed.
As Sartre constantly reminds us, we are what we do.
In short, existentialism is not a philosophy that allows us to feel sorry for ourselves in the midst of our malaise. It is a philosophy with which we can come to grips with these terrible times and actually change them. The recent midterm election was encouraging. What it suggests is that America is collectively recouping its existentialist roots, not because of national pessimism but because of what I hope is the beginning of a cooperative optimism and the sense that things as they are cannot stand.
My discovery today (I’d be upset it took me so long except that just means I have a huge archive of wonderful stuff to read through): 37days. You can read about the blog if you want, but “write like hell” pretty much sums it up…
We work in the company of others (philosophers and farmers, artists and scientists, as we variously require), and we work in the dark. The historian Daniel Boorstin has remarked that ignoring the past in making decisions is like trying to plant cut flowers. Likewise, to ignore the future, when “we’ll all be dead,” is to ignore the present. Here perhaps, at this gathering, we can at least aspire to that alternative space I’ve been addressing, one that is at once inside and outside, a part and apart, much like the workings of our various arts, a space of circulation and exchange. In opposing the profoundly destructive designs of those presently in power, we might consider the architecture of what the poet Robert Duncan once called the ” symposium of the whole,” a site where the other is addressed and not demonized, and where reason and imagination conjoin. Maybe that is the tonic from which the scale will arise.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being “liked,” so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: “I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.” This dynamic isn’t exclusive to art.
I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom
Remember when Alan Sokal published a gibberish paper in Social Text and people around the world proclaimed the death of postmodern literary theory and the exposure of the post-structuralist Emperor’s lack of clothes?
Now that MIT students have done the same thing in a scientific journal, I expect all those pathetic naysayers to join hands and proclaim the death of science the scientific method…
January 9, 2010
Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 
2 Comments »
content rss
