°p.123
Bryan - of the always-excellent Subtopia - plays p.123 tag, and having piled hangover upon hangover, I imagine, foolishly, this is going to be a quick and easy post.
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
Mine below the fold - and Amie’s and Pom’s, they be tagged.
But, Sophocle’s Antigone doesn’t run to 123 pages, or not the edition I have in front of me anyway (someone can, of course, buy me the Wyckoff translation if they’re inclined). Nor does Butler’s Antigone’s Claim. Nor Nancy’s The Creation of the World - unless that footnote on Heidegger can be made to count. (I start to wonder if my inclinations are running to very short books of late … and missing my books in Melbourne.) The next one off the small stack, then.
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition:
Yet, while specialization of work is essentially guided by the finished product itself, whose nature it is to require different skills which are then pooled and organized together, division of labor, on the contrary, presupposes the qualitative equivalence of all single activities for which no special skill is required, and these activities have no end in themselves, but actually represent only certain amounts of labor power which are added together in a purely quantitative way. Division of labor is based on the fact that two men can put their labor together and ‘behave toward each other as though they were one.’ This one-ness is the exact opposite of co-operation, it indicates the unity of the species with regard to which every single member is the same and exchangeable. (The formation of a labor collective where laborers are socially organized in accordance with this principle of common and divisible labor power is the very opposite of the various workmen’s organizations, from the old guilds and corporations to certain types of modern trade unions, whose members are bound together by the skills and specializations that distinguish them from others.) [And, I’ll add the fourth sentence.] Since none of the activities into which the process is divided has an end in itself, their ‘natural’ end is exactly the same as in the case of ‘undivided’ labor: either the simple reproduction of the means of subsistence, that is, the capacity for consumption of the laborers, of the exhaustion of human labor power.
Arendt - besides writing long sentences and so books that can run beyond 123 pages - has hit upon something of the interminability of capitalist work, of egalitarianism as exhaustion, a post-marxian riff on Toqueville’s remarks about ceasless restlessness and democracy. This fragment is, too, a reminder that Arendt is not a liberal, as she is so often claim or adopted to be, but a peculiar kind of syndicalist.
Reading this now, it also - apropos the dutiful discussions of the commons that punctuated the last 48 hrs of some more uncommon enjoyments - reminds me that there is something really, really wrong about the veneration of the commons. To be fair though, that discussion was not entirely one of veneration - but the rather too-dialectical positing of the ‘autonomous organisation of the commons’ viz a parasitical capital (and rent) tends to displace the possibility of a thorough critique of the commons as - or, with - the idealised imaginary of an internalised, interminable labouriousness. Some of which I gestured at here.
But since I really need to go have a greasy breakfast now, and stop feeling like a constant net-worker, consider yourself tagged if you’ve not heretofore been and are inclined to do so, or I’ll come back later and dob someone in. Or, put another way: if you’re not autonomously inclined to do the work, command will assert itself.
I’ll tag a couple of itinerants in the blogspheres, Amie and Pom.
Well, I’m under no illusion that responding to this meme/tag will be easy. Indeed, I am brought up short by the first requirement of picking up the “nearest book”. I’ve never found books to be inert objects, so you can imagine my difficulty. Then again, I wonder what “nearest’ means here? Nearest to hand or nearest to heart? The nearest book on the desk or the nearest in memory, the one that one can recite by heart? Questions of the archive, as you know, and of mal d’archive.
But I’m going to try and keep my feet on the ground and pick up the book “nearest at hand”, so to speak. Actually two books, because I cannot choose between my left and right hand. On top of the stack of books closest to the right hand is Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire, in the Quadrige/PUF edition. Page 123 is from the chapter, “souvenirs et mouvements”.
The left hand is trying to knock the nearest stack over so that it can avoid picking the book on top. That is Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache, in the hardbound 1959 Neske edition. (yup, a first edition.) Page 123 is from “Aus Einem Gespräch Von Der Sprache”.
On that note, I will step away…
Amie [March 2, 2008 @ 6:55 pm]
The box match, metonymized into the figures of “blue-jacket” and “hombre,” is between the cities of Algiers and Oran, taking place at the dusk of a humid summer day in a hall in Oran filled to brim with thousands of men. At this 1953 stage (4 years before he has been awarded the nobel prize, and 3 before the battle against the French has started) Camus is peeking as a ‘stranger,’ that is to say, with a desire that fluctuates between diffusing in this fraternal crowd and escaping there and then the thick briny air it exudes. It’s an age old rivalry between the two cities that flares up on occasions like this given vent by the contempt each side holds for the other—the ‘stiff bourgeois’ that his compatriot from Algiers appears to be in the eyes of the inhabitant of Oran, the provincial, lumpen ‘with no manners’. The capital is identified with the strict order of the colonial bureaucracy, whereas in the province, the ‘foreigners’ and the ‘natives,’ the Arab or Berber Algerians and the pied-noir, relate to one another in a kind of balance reached at pragmatically, one could say an immanent formula of being-with that owes little to the dictates of the colonial state power, from whose surveillance the Oranian community falls remote. The city fosters a singular intermingling between the ‘natives’ and the pied noir, as between the Arab and the Berber—the latter still a latent fault line obscured by the prevalence of French control, but will be sharpened soon after the withdrawal of the colonialists. In the independent Algeria, Oran and Algiers will continue their rivalry through other means, as a local ruling elite, no less stiff than their French counterparts, takes over the control of the capital and is not only contemptuous of the unmannered Oran, but turns to dismantling the singular distribution of the social it finds in that city, to sweep up its diversity with the homogeneity of an Arab-Islamic nationalism.
“Minotaur, or Stopping at Oran” in Summer (1953)
pomegranade [March 2, 2008 @ 8:38 pm]