#12: James Joyce, Paul Scheerbart, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes
Hi friends. It’s been a while. I had my winter break and I went home to Austin and saw some friends and managed to not get covid. I did get food poisoning though and I threw up for the first time in 16 years. I did it about 2-3 times an hour from 11 pm to 7 am. It was a terrible experience and I really just wanted to fall asleep. After I learned how to not suffocate while puking, I kind of leaned into the extremity of the event and enjoyed it for what it was. I had always believed and found comfort in the fact that you couldn’t get food poisoning as a vegan. I was wrong.
I got home from Austin on the 5th and went straight to Quinn’s family’s mountain house in North Carolina with a bunch of my favorite and best friends (including everyone in Glue). It was a lovely experience and it was the first time I had seen some of them since the before the pandemic. We hiked, cooked, ate, played games, and watched 964 Pinocchio.
School started up again on the 10th. I’m in 15 hours along with finishing my thesis and working part time. I think it will be a terrible few months. I’m going to have to make a serious effort to read LESS. 9 of the hours are public health classes which will be fun work but boring lectures, I’m sure. The other 6 hours are a class in the WGSS department called “Violence and Vulnerability” and a class in the Comp Lit department about “The Work of Memory.” Those should be very fun and stimulating throughout.
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
I read in public quite a bit and nobody has ever said anything about the books I’m reading, despite all my embarrassing and secret desires to have that cliched conversation. The one time I took Finnegans Wake out of my house and into the airport, everybody had something to say about it. None of them had actually read the book though. (These weren’t the conversations that I wanted.) What I gathered from these conversations are that people seem to be very scared of the incomprehensible or the “challenging.” I myself put off reading this book for some time because of its reputation. I admit, it was fucking wild and there was one 60 page stretch where I truly had almost no clue what was going on and it was getting to be a little exhausting. However, this book offered an experience that I’m sure no other book can. Of course, I did not understand all of it or even most of it. I often used a guide or two or three as handrail while reading in order to situate myself. People are right; it is not an easy book. But why would you want it to be?
Because of the way that Joyce manipulates language and sound, he is able to say many things at once. He creates a richly layered book that plays on the cycle that Giambattista Vico developed in his New Science and modern life in Dublin.
Derrida has this concept he calls dissemination: the unstoppable conveyance of all possible meanings of a polysemic word. Many philosophers have struggled to find ways to limit the functioning of a polysemic word to one irrefutable meaning (J. L. Austin, Searle, etc.). The most obvious way we all determine an intended meaning is through context. However, to Derrida, context itself is a highly unscientific concept. He argues that dissemination will always be in effect. It’s part of language.
Joyce, like and before, Derrida saw this dissemination as a feature of language, not a bug. Joyce constantly, and I mean constantly, bends words to make them fit in the layered storylines he works with. These nonsense words call to mind the many possible words that fit the stories being told. The “mamfesta” is both a manifesto written in defense of the protagonist and the progenitor of the cyclical novel. An “act of Goth” describes a divine miracle in one sense and the ostrogoths who represent, for Vico, one iteration of the war-waging era of his four part cycle. Joyce, in his funny version of English, creates not a confusing polysemia in which the reader struggles to decipher what is meant, but instead an overwhelming dissemination in which the multiple possible meanings are all intended. The difference may seem negligible, but I think that the overwhelming sensation that Joyce creates is a far more anarchic and freeing one than the sensation that confusion produces. It is an exciting sensation to grapple with as a reader.
Each time I have summoned the courage to read one of those “impossible” and intimidating books, I’m always shocked at how much it’s still just a book. If you also let that get in the way sometimes, I encourage you to just push through and read the books you are interested in.
Rakkóx the Billionaire & The Great Race by Paul Scheerbart
I started 2022 with a pair of fun novellas by Paul Scheerbart, who some call the godfather of German sci-fi. I had tried his bigger novel Lesabéndio five or six years ago but was quickly defeated by its prose styling. Walter Benjamin had intended to write a book about Scheerbart before his life was cut short, if that tells you anything.
Rakkóx the Billionaire is a funny little story from 1901 about a billionaire who owns a Department of Inventions staffed by a head genius and other geniuses under him. “To be able to recognize his concrete plans he was first obliged to concentrate on increasing his means of power.” Thus begins a set of grandiose ideas, proposed by the head genius, to make a military with the members of the animal kingdom. Things go awry. Rakkóx fires his head genius and instead focuses his efforts on turning a cliffside into a monumental work of architecture to immortalize himself. The fired head genius wages war and both men fall from their places of glory and become objects of worship.
The Great Race (1900) tells the story of worm spirits racing each other to some destination where they will be untethered from their stars and become autonomous. The novella plays with ideas of autonomy, individuality, community, understanding, knowledge, and ignorance. All of this done through bizarre, nearly incompressible architectural ideas about soap bubbles, spider silk, cones, opals, glass, and more. They are very different, but I was reminded of the Ravicka novels by Renee Gladman which I wrote about a few months ago. Despite the novella being written in 1900, it also reminded me of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which I will write about in the next newsletter. Understanding, total system understanding, which the worms seem to strive for in their efforts to become gods, slowly becomes an impossibility and they are urged to “take everything as merely a flowing game. This way you will understand the world better than before.”
The writing in these stories is frenetic and bizarre. Proto-dada, proto-futurist. I’m thankful to his English translator who has translated so many of his books now.
Second Treatise of Government by John Locke
John Locke was a pretty bad philosopher. His essay on human understanding is pretty laughable. This was too.
In the second treatise, which I read 100 pages of for my Violence and Vulnerability class, Locke lays out the groundwork for liberalism via some social contract theory stuff and the right to property. For those critical of liberalism, it’s as unconvincing as you’d expect. His arguments are brief and shallow and some of them even seem to be made in bad faith. If you, like, LOVE the constitution or something you might think this is brilliant.
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Philosophically, this book is far more interesting than Locke’s treatise. The fantasy of the initial era of a war of “all against all” is at least kind of extreme which is fun. Of course, the solution Hobbes proposes is a solitary king which is less exciting. The notion that Locke and Hobbes have (and Rousseau and probably a million others) where they can magically deduce how humans behaved in prehistory is comical and I can’t believe they got away with it even for a second.