The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin began “The Physiology of Taste” (1825) by declaring, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” You are also what you read — or, perhaps, what you own.
So Leah Price writes in an article in the Times. You are what you own: ah yes, books–notice your book-reading identity relies not so much on consuming books by reading them as it does on by doing so with your money–and what they show about your personality. Checking out someone’s bookshelf for a peak into their fealties, political beliefs, taste, and, of course, spending habits, seems so self-evident that it is a strange realization that it wasn’t always something that people did.
For our day, we went to see the Cattelan show at the Guggenheim. When we arrived, the museum seemed to be very crowded: a line of people had queued up, waiting to get in, and I thought, “Well, I bet it was even more crowded during the free day.” But we waited, patientlike, with tourists and old people. “Is this the line?” “Unless you’re a member.” The crowds were denser inside. We concurred that it was a “madhouse.”
Tomorrow morning will be a definitive moment for the occupation in Liberty Plaza. Broomberg will have succeeded or not. I hope it goes well, that the occupiers can hold their ground, that the police–really, the white-shirted thugs who seem to enjoy clubbing and macing people–do not get out of hand. But we’ll see. No matter what happens with the occupation of the park, I also hope that the nascent movement survives the night and continues to serve as a magnet for disaffection. Because that’s what it is doing: drawing incoherent discontent into media discourse, drawing physical bodies together so that people can learn to organize and relate politically, drawing strangers’ conversations back the occupation’s motivations, goals, and effects. I’ve had a lot of those conversations the last several weeks. Here are some vignettes.
There’s a point, around 6:15 or so, where the discussion turns to ways that unions can reshape some of the tactics of striking. It concerns public sector workers, like nurses or garbage handlers; instead of striking, for instance, nurses could bring in more people and demonstrate how things would look and work if there were adequate funding for adequate staff. That’s a fine suggestion. But me, I like the second idea, which is instead of simply letting trash sit on the street everywhere, garbage handlers let it sit and stink only in specific neighborhoods. Or pick it all up and drop it off in specific locations. Whether or not that would be as effective is hard to say.
The change of tactics indicates a change in the conception of the goal of the strike. Not merely more wages, or whatever (quite important things). But using the actual form of what is done as a strike action to encapsulate some characteristics of the sort of society the strike would like to bring about.
And, of course, dumping trash on the lawns of the rich’s megamansions. That, that I like.
I went to the assembly held in Washington Square. The organizers described it as the second New York general assembly; it appeared to have been successful. There were many people, so many that I had a hard time finding any I knew. Once things got underway, facilitators set up the human mic by distributing their most vocal throughout the crowd and staging two tiers of repetition. (That should give a rough estimate of the crowd: otherwise, we packed the central circle of the square, the one with the fountain, full.) “Mic check!” repeated twice, things got underway.
…Cleisthenes has been credited with a significant change in Greek political vocabulary, the application of the word nomos, instead of the traditional thesmos, to designate statutory law. What is significant about this change is that, while thesmos implies the imposition of law from above and has a distinctly religious flavour, nomos–a word that suggests something held in common, whether a pasture or a custom–implies a law to which there is common agreement, something that people who are subject to it themselves regard as a binding norm. The application of nomos to a statue became common usage in Athebs, which had thereby adopted ‘the most democratic word for “law” in any language’. –Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords, p. 36
I wish I hadn’t lost so much of the little Greek I had. Meiksins Wood quotes Martin Ostwald at the end of this, and it’d be somewhat nice if I knew a bit more of the wordshape that nomos had on the verbal landscape of Athens. Or thesmos for that matter. Because claiming that nomos was the most democratic word for law in any language is all but certainly hubris, but y’know, the linguistic and metaphorical facets of the words would be nice to know.
I wrote a longish poem over the past several months, and am now going to polish it a bit more and then bind it in two editions. The first will have three instances, and be a handmade box containing 25 Polaroid images, each of which will have a section from the piece on its back. The second will be a standard, three-signature artist book, with a single Polaroid on the cover. Polaroids are beyond cliché at this point–that you can only get film these days from a website that caters to kitsch underscores this–but the fact they are no longer throwaway works well with the larger thrust of the piece. It feels good to have written something, but now I need to scrape together funds: Polaroid no longer being throwaway means that it’s no longer cheap. Maybe I’ll try Kickstarter.
I’m finishing up editing on Roger Gathman’s book on Marx this week. There’s a great passage in it on what Marx thought about revolutionaries who confused their lifestyle with their goals:
Throughout his life, Marx expressed only derision for those “revolutionaries” who focused largely on their own personal experience and in the process became celebrities. He did not think of politics in terms of “gentle souls” and “noble spirits”; to him, such talk was on the level of petit-bourgeois socialism, which sought to impose an ahistorical vision of justice on society. It was in extreme bad taste, Marx thought, to make politics the repository for your sentiments. The object of revolution should never be confused with the experience of the revolutionary.
35. I dreamt I was falling in love with Alice Sheldon. She didn’t want me. So I tried getting myself killed on three continents. Years passed. Finally, when I was really old, she appeared on the other end of the boardwalk in New York and with signals (like the ones they use on aircraft carriers to help pilots land) she told me she’d always loved me.
Bolaño. I appreciate the way he thinks about loving.
I live in New York and sometimes write things here. You can write me at jcdavis at awedge period net. Sometimes I’ll respond. You can follow my twitter if you click the little button below.
All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. — Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach
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