On technology and the classless society

Marx’s argument amounts to this: any project to deliver a classless society, with wealth distributed according to need, must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself. It can’t be based on schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers. And you can’t return to the past.

This passage, I am told via Nick Srnicek's tumblr (by way of Mark Fisher's Twitter feed), comes from Paul Mason's book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012; they appear to have been pushing this book rather hard). I find the formulation helpful, because it allows me to directly address something that's been nagging at me for a while now, making me feel alienated from most currents of the Left. I have no idea what Mason actually discusses in his book on this point, but it was excerpted as if it stands alone, and it is close enough to other leftist formulations that I feel justified in taking it as it is. Anyway, whenever I read something like this, I want to shout: The classless society of the future cannot "be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself"!

I see this as a massive problem, yet when I do want to shout, I instead hold back, not wanting to get into an internet battle I don't often have the patience for. Feeling insufficiently read up on this or that theoretical model, or otherwise under-informed, or wary of being accused of nostalgia, of Luddism, of Romanticism, or something like that. That said, here are just a few (very) preliminary points that occur to me:

1. Too often technology is taken for granted, in the sense that advances are taken as the natural order of things. This is fitting, I suppose, in that capitalism itself is experienced as simply the way things are and must be, as the air we breathe, as natural. I don't think that's the problem here, but it's common enough, even among leftists.

2. Just in general, theoretically, it seems to me that a classless society implies a situation in which the state no longer exists, and a situation in which, by definition, class inequalities, along with massively hierarchical institutions, also no longer exist. In which case, precisely how could such a society be based on the most advanced organizational forms created by capitalism? Or, perhaps the problem is, what is meant by "advanced"? Is "advanced" a value judgment? (If so, how is that judgment made, and by whom?) Otherwise, I fail to see how the massively hierarchical corporation, or government agency, or the like, can possibly be the model for, or basis of, a classless society of the future.

3. Politically, not enough attention is paid to the circumstances through which our advanced technology is produced and maintained. Questions need to be asked concerning the source of the energy needed to develop, produce, and maintain today's advanced technology. Who does that work? Would a classless society transfer, by force, the energy needed to fuel such a process? Or, how would a classless society justify the continuation of such transfers? How would it justify the kind of labor needed to make it happen? (Is the internet possible without cheap oil?)

4. Practically speaking, it seems obvious to me that our current ecological situation all but screams out that we need to come to terms with the idea that our advanced technology will not be available forever. While we have them, we should feel no compunction about using the various advanced tools currently at our disposal, but it seems to me we should not expect those tools to always be available.

5. Notice how the question is framed (and almost always seems to be framed): either you believe the classless society should be based on the most advanced technological and organization forms created by capitalism, or you're guilty of utopian dreaming ("schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers") or of romanticizing this or that pre-capitalist past. Often it's explicitly framed like this: either you're resolutely modern, or you're a dangerous dreamer who romanticizes the past. I maintain that this binary is unhelpful. The past has a lot to teach us, and we've forgotten much.

Ok, that's enough for now; more to come.

"the fruit of insomnia and migraine"

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine.

As I've noted previously, Nabokov often took great pains to ensure that readers would not read any ideas into his work, or any messages or political statements of any kind. On the other hand, he never missed a chance to take a potshot, as in the above passage, taken from his decidedly minor (and short) Russian novel, The Eye. The passage is a fairly typical Nabokovian aside, both in its content and its irrelevance. Its complete irrelevance to the fiction surrounding it signals to the reader an actual opinion, bordering on an idea, possibly even, heaven forbid, a political idea held by the author. As usual, when it comes to extra-literary matters, Nabokov had little idea what he was talking about. (And though I enjoy and admire much of Nabokov's fiction, I'm inclined to think his influence, at least on literary criticism, is rather pernicious.)

As fun as it is to make jokes at Nabokov's expense regarding his special pleading and other nonsense (and it is fun), I'd intended to use this passage to lead into a post about Marx and misreadings and his popular reputation. Nabokov is, alas, far from the only person to not understand the first thing about Marx, or to mistakenly believe he was a proponent of some kind of "economic determinism". In the event, I couldn't quite get going on it. Perhaps another time. But, since we're here, let's look at another quote from Nabokov:

Rowdies are never revolutionaries, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. All belong to the same family of goofy hoodlums--with a sprinkling of clever rogues among them.

This bit of silliness, we are told by Patrick Kurp, comes from the interview Nabokov gave Philip Oakes in The Sunday Times, in June 1969, which was later collected in Strong Opinions, which I have noted elsewhere, is surely one of Nabokov's worst books. Kurp, another writer whose literary sense I have great respect for, and who often makes similar claims to avoiding politics, unpleasantly saw fit to post this the day police evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park in New York.

Re-revisiting the Big Dalkey Get

Three years on, and given my stated plans to read what I have and to get rid of excess books, it seems time to take another look at my enormous Dalkey Archive purchase. When this blog was but a month old, I posted a list of the 55 Dalkey Archive books I'd acquired a couple years previously when a friend and I took advantage of their big sale (100 books for $500, with five thrown in for free; my friend let me take the extra five). At the time of the original post, I'd read 23 of the 55 books. In 2009, I updated the list, by which point I'd read 31, but also discarded four. As of today, I have read 35, and several are likely to be discarded (read and unread alike). It should be noted that, at $4.55/book, I made out very well on the sale, even if I never read any of the remaining books.

Here, again, is the list, with those I've read in bold and the discards crossed out:

1. Chapel Road, Louis Paul Boon
2. Rigadoon, Céline
3. Some Instructions to my Wife, Stanley Crawford
4. Storytown, Susan Daitch
5. Island People, Coleman Dowell
6. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
7. Phosphor in Dreamland, Rikki Ducornet
8. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, Stanley Elkin
9. George Mills, Stanley Elkin
10. The Rabbi of Lud, Stanley Elkin
11. Van Gogh's Room at Arles, Stanley Elkin
12. Mrs. Ted Bliss, Stanley Elkin
13. Foreign Parts, Janice Galloway
14. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass
15. Quarantine, Juan Goytisolo
16. Blindness, Henry Green
17. Concluding, Henry Green
18. Nothing, Henry Green
19. Doting, Henry Green
20. Fire the Bastards!, Jack Green
21. The Questionnaire, Jirí Grusa
22. Flotsam & Jetsasm, Aidan Higgins
23. Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley
24. Time Must Have a Stop, Aldous Huxley
25. A Minor Apocalypse, Tadeusz Konwicki
26. The Age of Wire and String, Ben Marcus
27. Reader's Block, David Markson
28. AVA, Carole Maso
29. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso
30. Cigarettes, Harry Mathews
31. Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews
32. 20 Lines a Day, Harry Mathews
33. The Human Country, Harry Mathews
34. The Case of the Perservering Maltese, Harry Mathews
35. Women and Men, Joseph McElroy
36. Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Odile, Raymond Queneau
39. Collected Novellas, vol. 1, Arno Schmidt
40. Nobodaddy's Children, Arno Schmidt
41. Two Novels, Arno Schmidt
42. Is this what other women feel, too?, Jill Akers Seese
43. The Sky Changes, Gilbert Sorrentino
44. Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
45. Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
46. Pack of Lies, Gilbert Sorrentino
47. Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino
48. Under the Shadow, Gilbert Sorrentino
49. Something Said, Gilbert Sorrentino
50. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
51. Annihilation, Piotr Szewc
52. Monstrous Possibility, Curtis White
53. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. one, Marguerite Young
54. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. two, Marguerite Young
55. Marguerite Young, Our Darling, Miriam Fuchs, ed.

Ok, by now I've read 35 of these books. With the four already discarded (unread), that now leaves 16 books. Of those remaining 16, six are in storage (the Arno Schmidt books, the Sorrentino books, The Making of Americans) and so don't really affect my immediate need to downsize (though I kind of wish they were on hand). Of the four books I read since the last update, three were novels (both Coleman Dowells, of which Too Much Flesh and Jabez was easily my favorite, and Nicholas Mosley's The Hesperides Tree), and the other was Curtis White's book-length essay on post-modernism and politics, Monstrous Possibility. I especially appreciated White taking Fredric Jameson to task for his account of "post-modern" literature ("It is simply inadequate and intellectually irresponsible to account for contemporary fiction with a twenty-year-old label ('fabulation') and one novel from E.L. Doctorow."), as well as his criticisms of the American left and its abandonment of culture (gets in a couple good, not undeserved, gibes at the Albert/Chomsky wing).

I don't have much to add about the prospects of reading the ones still as yet unread, beyond what I wrote about them in the last update, other than to say that recent passes at both the Goytisolo and the Gass have been much like previous attempts. The Goytisolo strikes me as vague and showily literary; the Gass still seems overly cute and not as much fun as he seems to think it is. I love William H. Gass, but his prose style can be a bit much at times (if you're not in the right mood, it can be excruciating), and in cases where he is explicitly playing with the size and shape of the words themselves, my mind drifts. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is so short that I'll probably hold on to it, just to keep it with the rest of his books, even if I never quite warm to the game. There is, however, a solid chance that I get rid of Goytisolo's Quarantine, since the writer otherwise means nothing to me (I've read only his The Marx Family Saga, and was somewhat underwhelmed by the experience). I do still intend to read at least some of the sections of Joseph McElroy's enormous Women and Men, but I fear that it, too, will ultimately not be long for my library. Marguerite Young's even more enormous Miss MacIntosh, My Darling sits quietly there, awaiting my clear-headed, clear-eyed attention, which I hope to have to give it before too long. I know of almost no one who has read this book, incidentally, but did just recently notice that Umbagollah, the blogger at Pykk, is currently in the middle of it, so that will be interesting to monitor.

Of the 35 books I've already read, a few may well hit the discard pile. I'm thinking the Susan Daitch (I much preferred her novel, L.C.), the Rikki Ducornet (along with her other books; I enjoyed them, but they aren't essential to me; may re-read her novel The Stain), Mosley's The Hesperides Tree, which was ok, but nowhere near as good as Impossible Object (or, indeed, Hopeful Monsters). I'm undecided on Chapel Road, Island People (though I'm definitely keeping Dowell's Too Much Flesh and Jabez), and The Questionnaire. Some Instructions to My Wife.... is a goner.

I noted in the earlier update that my attitude towards Dalkey has shifted somewhat over the years, but that they nevertheless remain an exemplary publisher. This remains the case, of course, even if I'm not quite as into the so-called post-modern fiction they often champion. Still, they continue to publish plenty that I'd like to read, especially as they've greatly expanded their catalog of translated titles.

"a sense of wonder and disbelief at his own temerity and at the responsibility he had assumed"

In the midst of deciding I was going to be reading a lot of fiction, we took a family trip to the library. Browsing the general fiction display stacks while Aimée looked for some children's books about the Chinese New Year, I managed to find a few books of interest to me (the display stacks at the library are packed with all kinds of commercial crap and Booker-style "literary" fiction; I'm impressed they have anything at all in those stacks that I want to read: most of the good stuff, when the library has it at all, needs to be retrieved by a librarian), including John Williams' much-blogged-about novel, Stoner. I read the novel soon thereafter.

I'd been reading about Stoner for years; since it was reissued in 2006 by NYRB (originally published in 1965), it seems to have been able to consistently find new readers, many of whom have blogged about it. Everyone says much the same thing: the prose is of remarkable clarity, it is old fashioned, yet beautiful, even perfect. I can confirm that these things are true. It is at times enormously sad, yet not finally a sad or depressing novel.

This is the novel's opening paragraph:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues."

I've mentioned more than once that recently fiction has often felt like an imposition. I'd open a novel, or begin a short story, and the opening paragraphs filled me with some despair. The very idea of having to learn about characters and settings and to begin following some kind of plot seemed profoundly boring to me. And yet, this feeling had often come over me, for years, when I attempted to read more conventional fiction. If a novel, written in the third person, began with a reference to a year, and specifics about a place, my eyes would glaze over. And yet here, I wanted to read on beyond this paragraph, felt pulled into the next paragraph and the next. Perhaps it was Stoner's death being introduced in the second sentence, and the whole arc being circumscribed at the outset: there will be no adventures or out-sized experiences for this character. The life is small, the events in it matter little to the wide world. This isn't unusual for a novel either, though, so why do I care this time? I read on, and I have to admit that the apparent smoothness of the prose carried me forward, more or less unperturbed. What's the difference?

Perhaps it's the quiet. Stoner is a quiet book about a small life, a man who is quietly heroic in his way. He'd entered college, at his father's suggestion, to study agriculture, expecting to graduate and return home with knowledge useful for his family's farm. But he never does return home, stray visits aside, staying at the university his entire adult life. Along the way he is married, has a daughter, an affair, various conflicts at the university, dies. Such material sounds utterly conventional and unpromising. It is in fact riveting. And the prose, in its precision, and in the manner in which Williams handles the ups and downs of Stoner's life, allows for some quiet contemplation of concerns that are very similar to my own. Here, for example, is a passage from later in that first chapter:

"But don't you know, Mr. Stoner?" Sloane asked. "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Sloane said softly.

"How can you tell? How can you be sure?"

"It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that."

This passage spoke to me; would that I'd had someone able to so directly tell me such a thing about myself. Though perhaps it simply took me too long to find that which I love. William Stoner's fallen in love with literature. He writes a dissertation, which he later expands into a book:

His expectations for his first book had been both cautious and modest, and they had been appropriate; one reviewer had called it "pedestrian" and another had called it "a competent survey." At first he had been very proud of the book; he had held it in his hands and caressed its plain wrapper and turned its pages. It seemed delicate and alive, like a child. He had reread it in print, mildly surprised that it was neither better nor worse than he had thought it would be. After a while he tired of seeing it; but he never thought of it, and his authorship, without a sense of wonder and disbelief at his own temerity and at the responsibility he had assumed.

But that's it, for his own writing. Fortunate to not be subject to today's mindless publish-or-perish nonsense, he publishes nothing else. He does later get an idea for another, probably better book, and begins working towards writing it, but, frustratingly, events in his life conspire to prevent him from actually doing so, and before long it no longer seems essential that he bother. The quiet equanimity with which Stoner accepts his situation, and his responsibility for it, is one of the sad pleasures of this novel. His life could have been different, overall happier; he knows it, but it is his own, and that's enough.

TBR

And again the blog lies fallow, with several draft posts hanging fire. I wanted to post something about what this year will hold, so here goes.

Three weeks ago, I finished reading James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, a book I'd been reading slowly over the course of the last year. It's not very long (336 pp.), but my general lack of familiarity with Southeast Asia itself (as opposed to the criminal American wars in Southeast Asia, about which I know all too much), let alone anthropology about upland Southeast Asia, slowed my reading down considerably. In truth, I was more interested in Scott's general points than in retaining specifics about the hill peoples who are his ostensible subjects, as fascinating as many of those specifics are. So I read slowly.

But this post is not about Scott's book. I finished reading it and looked at my book shelves for what to read next, expecting it to be non-fiction of some kind, since I'd been in that mode for months. Then I realized I felt a bit overwhelmed, over-stuffed with facts and ideas. It's true that the books I expect to get to were not immediately to hand, but all of sudden I couldn't bear to pile even more facts atop the others. And, really, I need time to process what I have read, and to write; a slowdown was in order. So, while in the coming year I do expect to continue following the non-fiction reading threads I've been following (i.e., feminism, history of capitalism, etc), my more immediate plans and expectations involve fiction. Fiction, which has lately so often seemed an imposition, an impertinence, not to mention a waste of my time. But then it does depend on what you're reading, doesn't it? Even so, it's not always the book's fault.

Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods got the year off to a fine start, helping to break the fiction impasse. It's not the great book that The Last Samurai is, but it's a spot-on satire of business speak and human resources nonsense, capturing the cliché-ridden, vacant language of sales and business perfectly; it's very entertaining. Then I re-started Mathias Énard's Zone, a novel I'd read about 135 pages into last Spring, I think, before stumbling, taking a pause that became a break that dragged on and on and finally became too long for any kind of thread to be picked back up upon re-entry. This reading went much better, the sheer velocity of the writing carrying me forward with relative ease. There are some great pages in that book; I still think of it alongside The Kindly Ones, not just because both were translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, but I think because of the focus on the unpleasant details of the labors of war. Then I noticed that several people in my Twitter feed were talking a lot about the Hungarian writer, László Krasznahorkai, a name that was vaguely familiar (probably from old Waggish posts), but which had not really registered with me till now. Comparisons to Bernhard, of course, got my attention, though I'm skeptical as to their accuracy or usefulness. (Comparisons to Bernhard rarely do anyone any favors.) All of a sudden, I felt excited about fiction again. Krasznahorkai's novels The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War were duly added to my wish list.

But I can't rush out and buy them just yet, because a big purging is upon us, and I must do some reading in order to make the purging at all effective. In the summer, we are planning to move, still in Baltimore, but to a somewhat smaller location. This means shedding some possessions, including of course many excess books. The problem is not just the fact that I've kept tons of books I've read that I no longer have any interest in seeing, let alone re-reading. (As much as he's become an easy target, with good reason, I'm not sorry to have read several Ian McEwan novels; after all, I needed to start somewhere. But do I really need them taking up shelf space?) The bigger problem is the large number of books I acquired fully intending to read, someday, which I've not yet gotten to. Worse, upon closer examination, I now expect that many of them will never be read. Some of these acquistions are a product of my days of despair, a period in which I was increasingly interested, so I thought, in more and more authors, more and more kinds of fiction. Why I wasn't using the library more often is beyond me. Just stupid, I guess. (It literally did not occur to me to use the library until a couple of years ago, which is just wrong for so many reasons.) In any case, I amassed piles and piles of books. For example, as noted here previously, I participated in one of those big Dalkey sales, where you could buy 100 books for $500. I split this with a friend, but still, this is a lot of books to get in one fell swoop (now, of course, they have smaller such sales available). It strikes me that it's time for another post revisiting the fruits of that purchase. Re-reading the last update, from 2009, I'm reminded that I didn't always look on my so-called "days of despair" with actual despair, that "I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature". But it was this expansiveness that caused me problems, that ultimately became untenable and more than a little silly. For along with the McEwan-ish books (your Booker winners and shortlisted, your NBA and NBCC winners, and so on) was the mass of "post-modern" books, before I ever had the slightest idea what modernism might be, not to mention various so-called "genre" books, a concept I once considered much less critically than I do now.

I'm not going to write about those conflicts again here, but the point is I have a lot of books and many of them need to go. I started to pull books from the shelves, read a few pages, and make harsh decisions. It turns out I'm not ever going to read Kathy Acker. I'm just not. That's two books. I read Walter Abish's How German Is It years ago, and I mostly liked it, I think (if memory serves, the second half is not as engrossing as the first), but did I like it enough to have also acquired two other Abish novels? Do I even remember which one I bought first? Flipping through How German Is It, I quickly realized I didn't want to read it again; reading the first chapter of Alphabetical Africa revealed to me that I no longer have the patience for those kinds of experiments; Eclipse Fever didn't hold my interest at all. Three books, and boom: off they go. Still in the letter A: look at all those Martin Amis books! Amis, of course, straddles the Booker/post-modern line, and though I've long since soured on him, and find him rather odious and boring anymore, he was once one of my favorite writers. I'd always thought I'd go back and re-read the better ones, to see if they held up. To that end, Money, London Fields, and The Information remain, but all the rest go, including the incredibly overrated memoir, Experience (again, it's not terrible, but this is when it started to go south for this reader, even before his ridiculous Stalin memoir and post-9/11 Islam-phobic blather), and probably The War Against Cliche. The idea is to re-read those three, and then discard them, so don't be surprised if I'm reading Martin Amis in the coming months. And Stephen Dixon. And Alasdair Gray. And A.L. Kennedy.

Before I get tempted to bore you further with a list of all the books I plan to re-read, keep, or discard (topic of another post, no doubt), I should probably come to a close here. The overall, brilliant strategy looks like this: read books I have before acquiring new ones, discard books that no longer need to be in the collection (be harsh), make use of the library. Repeat.

Books Read - 2011

As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2011, in chronological order of completion; links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts; following the list are comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.

1. A Language Older Than Words, Derrick Jensen
2. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Immanuel Wallerstein
3. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Marilynne Robinson
4. Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson
5. Prose, Thomas Bernhard (Martin Chalmers, trans.)
6. My Prizes: An Accounting, Thomas Bernhard (Carol Brown Janeway, trans.)
7. Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
8. Concrete, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.) (re-read)
9. Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard (David McLintock, trans.)
10. The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald (Michael Hulse, trans.)
11. Yes, Thomas Bernhard (Ewald Osers, trans.)
12. In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness, Chris Mercogliano
13. The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
14. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Ellen Meiksins Wood
15. Sex & War, Stan Goff
16. A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, Vivian Gussin Paley
17. The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
18. Spurious, Lars Iyer
19. Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, Rebecca Wisnant & Christine Stark, eds. (excerpt from Andrea Dworkin; from D.A. Clarke)
20. Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag
21. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv
22. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker
23. Death Sentence, Maurice Blanchot (Lydia Davis, trans.) (re-read)
24. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Sara Ruddick
25. The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell (Charlotte Mandell, trans.) 
26. The Last Novel, David Markson
27. The Tyranny of Science, Paul Feyerabend
28. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici (re-read) (also, also, also)
29. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo
30. The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth, Shlomo Sand (Ames Hodges, trans.)
31. The Man of Reason: "Male" & "Female" in Western Philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd
32. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich
33. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child, Alice Miller (Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, trans.)
34. Ubik, Philip K. Dick
35. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
36. The Female Man, Joanna Russ
37. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
38. Tell Me A Riddle, Tillie Olsen
39. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
40. We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson
41. Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, Catherine Lutz
42. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Vandana Shiva
43. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism & Culture, Susan Bordo
44. The Village and the World: My Life, Our Times, Maria Mies (Madeline Ferretti-Theilig, trans.)
45. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Peter Linebaugh
46. The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice, and sustainability, Lierre Keith
47. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
48. Reflections on Gender and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller
49. The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding
50. The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa (Enda Brophy, trans.)
51. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, David R. Roediger
52. Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, W.E.B. Du Bois
53. Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black, bell hooks (re-read)
54. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks
55. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
56. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Immanuel Wallerstein
57. We Who Are About To..., Joanna Russ
58. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
59. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750, Immanuel Wallerstein
60. The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (Dmitri & Vladimir Nabokov, trans.)
61. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward An Autobiography of A Race Concept, W.E.B. Du Bois
62. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
63. The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom, Vivian Gussin Paley

Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 30
Number of books written by women: 33
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 0
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of books in translation: 14
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 2 (Lars Iyer, Stan Goff)
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 12
Number of books read on the Kindle: 5

Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 24
Number that are poetry: 0
Number that are memoirs:1 (I'm arbitrarily counting Bernhard's My Prizes here)
Number that are re-reads: 1
Number of authors represented: 15
Number of books by female authors: 10
Number of female authors: 7
Number of books by American authors: 11
Number of American authors:
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 3
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 3 (Stead, Iyer, Shelley)
Number of books in translation:10
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by female authors: 0
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Russian)
Most represented foreign language: German (7: 6 Bernhard (plus a 6th non-fiction-ish Bernhard), 1 Sebald)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 0
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 6
Number of science fiction books written by women: 4

Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 1
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915-1944: 3 (Gilman, Nabokov, Stead)
Number of books from 1945 to 1970: 8 (all 3 Sh. Jackson, both PKD, Olsen, Blanchot, one Bernhard)
Number of books from 1971-1989: 7 (Le Guin, both Joann Russ novels, 4 Bernhard)
Number of books from 1990 to 1999: 1 (Sebald)
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 3 (Markson, Littell, Bernhard's My Prizes)
Number of books from 2011: 1 (Iyer)

Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 39
Number of books by female authors: 23
Number of books in translation: 4
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 3
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 7
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 2
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 13
Number about pop music: 0
Number about science: 3
Number about feminism: 14
Number about parenting or education: 5
Number that are anthropology: 2

Comments & Observations:
This turned out to be a good reading year, all things considered, though you wouldn't know it from reading this blog. The skimpy number of links to posts in the list above is but one measure of the blog's extreme slowdown. Still, the reading itself was fruitful. 

Overall, I completed quite a few more books this year than last, though not coming anywhere close to previous years. The numbers were heavily skewed towards various kinds of non-fiction. In addition, not only did I succeed in finally reading more women writers, but in fact for the first time I read more books written by women than by men. Weirdly, my sense was of the women heavily out-numbering the men, but it was really only by 3 books. No doubt this is an indicator in itself of male privilege. (How does the story go? When women number as little as 25% of any group, men tend to report that it was "dominated" by women? I could look that up, but you get the idea.)

I began the year finishing up Derrick Jensen's inimitable Language Older Than Words, which I actually did succeed in writing about. Soon I was reading Marilynne Robinson's two related collections of essays. I'd meant to write about those (they're worth writing about; I may yet write something drawing on them after all) but never got around to it. They're the closest things I read this year to literary criticism; I'm not convinced that's what they are. Then came the several Bernhard books, including a re-read of the excellent Concrete, which long ago was the first Bernhard novel I ever read. I also loved Woodcutters and Wittgenstein's Nephew, both of which I rate very highly, if perhaps just under the brilliant trio of Concrete, The Loser, and Old Masters (Extinction remains as yet un-read). I did not much care for Yes. Looking at it in context, it seems to point away from the heavier early novels and towards the lighter later ones that I prefer. But it felt off, and awkward, all the way through. Mixed in among these was Sebald's The Emigrants, which is probably my favorite of his novels. I finally waded my way through to the end of The Man Who Loved Children; the novel's many stretches of beauty may not have made up for the title character, who is perhaps the most unreadably annoying and obnoxious major character in literary history. Part of me wants to never again pick up another Christina Stead novel, going against my informal rule to give authors more than one shot; another part of me figures, well, at least that fucker won't be in the rest of them. (Right?) Besides, I already have Letty: Her Luck sitting there waiting for me. Gah. I spent a goodly amount of time with Jonathan Littell's remarkable novel, The Kindly Ones. It was on my mind for weeks, and I can still recall several scenes vividly. And yet, it shocked me a little to see it there on the list. I read that this year? Seems ages ago. Spurious was the only novel originally published in 2011 that I completed, but at least it was a good one.

For most of the year, I frankly had a hard time reading fiction. The characters and plots felt like impositions. So, the rest of the year was fairly dominated by non-fiction, except for a stretch during our summer trip, when I read my first two Philip K. Dick novels (I liked them just fine, especially Ubik), three Shirley Jackson books (all of which I thoroughly enjoyed, especially the novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle), the Tillie Olsen collection (the first story of which is devastatingly moving; the rest of which didn't work for me at all; I could barely make my way through them), and Joanna Russ' The Female Man. Later on I read Russ' We Who Are About To... I tend to forget she was a student of Nabokov's. One wonders what he would have thought of her fiction. In any event, I appreciated them and, as I've noted previously, I expect Russ to figure in this blog's future. Finally, I should mention The Dispossessed, my first Ursula Le Guin novel, and likely not my last.

I read no poetry this year, other than stray attempts at some Geoffrey Hill, and a few poems from Kay Ryan's Best Of It collection.

Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of without yet completing by the year's end:

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from margin to center
Kolya Abramsky, ed. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution
Rosalind Belben, Is Beauty Good
Mathias Énard, Zone
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Early in the year, I got the brilliant idea that I'd get a Kindle and use it to read pdfs, including pdfs of various books I'd come across (this was around the time of the February events in Egypt, when I really wanted to read Rule of Experts by Timothy Mitchell, and had acquired an e-copy of it; I still want to read it, but not on the Kindle). Well so, I got a secondhand-ish Kindle, and set about converting pdfs and. . . it didn't really work out. It's annoying; all too often, the books get all mangled in the conversion process. I did, however, discover that Amazon has all these free public domain books, so I downloaded several. Which is how I finally read, after all these years, W.E.B. DuBois' masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk. Later in the year, I read his second sort of memoir, Darkwater, also on the Kindle, then Dusk of Dawn, not on the Kindle. I expect to be reading more DuBois, especially his monumental study, Black Reconstruction. The Kindle experience is not one I relish. It's nice having easy access to several books at once, but frankly I don't enjoy the interface. No doubt more recent iterations, or something like the iPad, would change my opinion of e-reading somewhat, but on balance if I'm going to use the Kindle, I do not want the book to be long. (God, the last thing I'd want to do is read Proust on it. Ugh.)

In my brief Kindle-pdf experiment, I did read one full book, Stan Goff's Sex & War. Goff's book is a personal exploration of the links between militarism, misogyny, and sex from a feminist perspective. This led directly to the multi-author Not for Sale collection and really initiated one of the two great non-fiction threads of the year: feminism. I've already written about the Ruddick and Russ books and their role in this, as well as my re-read of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch. I read a lot about feminism and science (cf. Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding) and feminism and philosophy (Susan Bordo). Federici led me to Dalla Costa, and also recommended Maria Mies' memoir (which, alas, I didn't think was very good, as a book, though she says many interesting and important things in it). My prior knowledge of Mies' classic Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale had led me to Vandana Shiva's work. All very helpful, fascinating, important. Ruddick's Maternal Thinking and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born are, as noted, bibliographical goldmines.

In the midst of all this, I attended an excellent panel discussion on race, here in Baltimore, held at 2640. David Roediger was scheduled to be there, but was a no-show (some travel complication), but his famous study of the white working class, The Wages of Whiteness, was available for sale there. I snapped it up and read it immediately. A great book, to be sure, which saddened me deeply, but which also reminded me of my longstanding interest in the American history of race, which had been my focus in college and for the first few years after college (and which is why it was so weird I'd never read DuBois). It further brought to mind that the first feminist I'd ever read was, in fact, bell hooks. So I re-read the hooks I had (Talking Back), realized that I'd long since internalized her basic critiques of liberal white feminism, wondered if this wasn't why I'd not spent any time pursuing feminism as an area of study until very recently, even as events in my personal life helped radicalize my own feminism (though not necessarily in ways that would be familiar to the so-called (white) "radical feminists"). Then I took hooks' first book, Ain't I a Woman, out of the library, and in short order consumed it. And it, too, is a bibliographical goldmine. So now, in the coming year, I have a huge, interesting list of women writers to read, which crucially includes many women of color.

The other great non-fiction reading thread, which of course I see as related, was furthering my reading in the history and workings of capitalism. Last year's big deal was volume one of Capital itself. This year meant world-system analysis and anthropology, along with Marxist histories from the likes of Peter Linebaugh, as well as Federici's book, and the Italian Wages for Housework feminists she was originally linked with. The Long Twentieth Century, by the late Giovanni Arrighi, had been my only previous encounter with world-system analysis, but I'd found that book so fascinating, and so surprising and yet persuasive, in particular how it flew in the face of Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism, that I wanted to know more. I came across Immanuel Wallerstein's brief introduction to world-system analysis, which is a delightful sort of historical overview of both the world-system itself, and the analysis. Late in the year, I saw Wallerstein speak (also at 2640). I picked up and read the first two volumes of his monumental study, The Modern World-System. I'll have more to say about these works in separate blog posts (really!), but suffice it to say that many things make a lot more sense to this reader after reading these books than they did before. Then, just before the end of the year, I read David Graeber's utterly engrossing book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and more and more things started to fall together. I see Debt as a perfect complement to the books by Wallerstein, Arrighi, Mies, Federici, Linebaugh & Rediker, etc. But again, separate blog posts are in order to explore the book itself and its relation to those others.

Before closing, I'd like to say a brief word about the small clutch of books about children and parenting and education. Many such books touch on a lot of important things, but seem of limited value insofar as the authors do not seem aware of the implications (political and cultural) of the problems they raise, and the types of solutions they seem to favor. Chris Mercogliano's In Defense of Childhood and Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods fit in this category. Vivian Gussin Paley's books manage to escape this problem by being more focused on day-to-day practical matters involving the play of young children in schools. I've written a little bit about her work before, but I'd like to emphasize how inspiring I find her work. Again, though, the political implications of what she writes about are incredibly vast (and part of me would love to know what Josipovici would make of it!). I hope to revisit her work in future blog posts as well. Finally, Alice Miller's book, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware is utterly fascinating and a necessary corrective to Freudian nonsense about sex drives and Oedipal complexes. Incidentally, Miller was not a feminist herself, but in the afterward to the edition of the book I have, she did highlight the work of feminists in bringing to light various poisonous parenting practices.

Ok, that wraps up another year of reading. Thank you.

Ritual

The other day, Adam Kotsko posted an entry titled "Religious but not spiritual", in which he first quoted from Adorno's Minima Moralia:

Behind the pseudo-democratic dismantling of ceremony, of old-fashioned courtesy, of the useless conversation suspected, not even unjustly, of being idle gossip, behind the seeming clarification and transparency of human relations that no longer admit anything undefined, naked brutality is ushered in. The direct statement without divagations, hestitations or reflections, that gives the other the facts full in the face, already has the form and timbre of the command issued under Fascism by the dumb to the silent. Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for treating people as things.

...and then wrote this:

Once the empty gestures of courtesy are swept away, we aren’t inducted into a new realm of sincere, unmediated human brotherhood — rather, we are left with nothing but the brutality of market relations. Similarly, once we get rid of “religion,” we’re left with nothing but prideful (and empty) speculations and a demand for the warm fuzzies we associate with spiritual ecstacy.

My main focus is not on the spirituality element, though, but on the element of ritual. I have found that the “empty gestures” of life, the little rituals — touching glasses before drinking, going through the meaningless exchange of “hi” and “how are you,” etc. — have felt more and more important and necessary.

The day before I read this post, I'd happened to be leafing through my copy of Chris Knight's Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, looking for references to the ways in which the work of feminists had informed his (brilliant) study, when I came across his discussion of Lévi-Strauss, who had claimed that mythology "has no obvious practical function", and virtually ignored ritual altogether (at least in the works under review here), much to the dismay of specialists and other anthropologists, on both counts. Anyway, in light of the Adorno passage, and Kotsko's remarks, I'd like to share what Knight says in this context (Mary Douglas citations are to her book, In the Active Voice):

It is difficult for non-anthropologists to appreciate the significance of ritual in non-western cultures, because, as Mary Douglas (1982: 34) has written, the belittlement of ritual is central to our European tradition. To us ritual means, as she writes, 'the formal aspect of religion. "Mere ritual", one can say, and "empty ritual", and from there to mumbo jumbo and abracadabra'. Ritual is merely external; Europeans give priority to the internal, 'spiritual' aspects of religion. Ritual is mere form; we give priority to content. Ritual seems like a façade—we want to know what lies behind the façade.

But in non-western cultures, such activities as singing, dancing, healing, rain-making, life crisis ceremonial and public mourning are not façades or masks drawn across life. They are the meaningful stuff of life itself. Without ritual there would be no sociality, no collective power, no sharing of life's central and most meaningful moments. [...] 'It is form indeed,' Mary Douglas (1982: 36) comments, ' but inseparable from content, or rather there could be no content without it. It is appearance, but there is no other reality.' For many people in non-western cultures, ritual is culture.

Perhaps the best starting point in attempting to define ritual is to think of it as the collective dimension of intimate, emotionally significant life. It is collective action at those points where this reaches deep into personal, sexual and intimate emotional experience. Hence sexual intercourse is not necessarily a ritual, but if it occurs during a preordained 'honeymoon' following a public marriage ceremony it is. A young woman's first menstruation is not a ritual, but her puberty ceremony makes it so. To eat food is not ritual, but to participate in a public feast is. What turns even the most intimate and physiological of personal experiences into 'ritual' is symbolic behaviour which makes it collectively acknowledged, sanctioned and controlled. And with collective control comes power.

Ritual is collective symbolic action which in the most powerful way organises and harmonises emotions. Without this, there could have been no early human language, no 'kinship', no culture. A society which was a mere assemblage of egotistic, competing individuals would have no ritual domain and could not have one. On the other hand—turning to the opposite extreme—let us visualise an imaginary society whose members were unwilling to eat, to make love, to speak, to mourn their dead or to do anything unless they were sure that what they did formed part of a collective act. In such a society, each person would try to synchronise her or his behaviour with that of others—with the result that life would seem 'ritualised' to an extreme degree.

This is why 'form' in ritual is so important. It is simply not possible for humans to synchronise their behaviour collectively without reference to recurrent, standardised, memorable patterns. To Westerners, this may make ritual seem insincere or artificial. How can genuine tears—as at a funeral—be brought on to order at a precise moment determined in advance? How can a chorus legitimately express joy or love? It is thought that no act which has to be directed or controlled collectively can be as valid as the spontaneous action of an individual. This, however, says much about the individualistic assumptions of western culture. It helps to explain 'the poverty of our rituals, their unconnectedness with each other and with our social purposes and the impossibility of our having again a system of public rituals relating our experiences into some kind of cosmic unity' (Douglas 1982: 38). In general it can be said that societies or groups value ritual to the extent that they value the maintenance of collective solidarity, and disregard it to the extent that individualism becomes the dominant ethic.