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boneglueSeeing Like a State, James C. Scott. 1998. 357pp. University library. Reread.
This book was massively foundational for me. One of the first academic books I ever read seriously; it changed the course of my intellectual life. On reread I am happy to maintain that it is a splendid introduction to some issues of the nation-state, its epistemology and its means of control, across multiple periods and times that will interest the student of “modernity” (whatever that means). There are likely other and more precise texts; its sweeping quality is exciting but suspect, and now perhaps recalls Reddit-beloved sages-of-everything with increasingly thin credentials like Jared Diamond. But it’s held up for me over at least the last decade, and Scott is much more esoteric in his interests than anyone writing for popular press. As Scott would likely say, the broad and the narrow are in dialogue.
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“The Double” and “The Gambler” ["Двойник. Петербургская поэма", Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema, and "Игрокъ", Igrok], Fyodor Dostoevsky. ~ 300pp? Due to a certain series of events I read The Double in a Pevear and Volokhonsky translation borrowed from a friend, and The Gambler in the Constance Garnett translation, from the university library.
I liked these, especially "The Gambler", which is deliciously cynical. They have not stuck with me like BK, but--high bar. I would like to challenge myself with a little completionism around Dostoevsky, and these feel a bit like the completionist's materials to me but maybe I'll re-assess.
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L'Étranger, Albert Camus. 1942, my edition 2012. In French. 144pp. A friend lent me this astonishingly beautiful Futuropolis Gallimard edition in large format illustrated by José Muñoz. Reread.
A thin slab of stone. John Dee apparently owned a piece of flat black obsidian cut to the shape of a mirror in which he would see visions. Dee's mirror was Aztec in origin, by the way. See a little below, in Along and Structures. (I left this enigmatic comment without an explanation even to myself the first time I jotted down these thoughts on this classic French novel of a pathologically indifferent personality who commits a murder and is imprisoned. I was restless, frankly dissatisfied. I recognized the novel's effect, but my mind drifted as I contemplated it. I was thinking of colonial critique, which is fair but has been said by better thinkers. A month later I had to come back to clarify to myself. I still have nothing further to say.)
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Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles. 1943. 180pp. Little free library.
What a bizarre, salty, pleasurable little book. Two strange upper-class women have parellel adventures, each alone. Everything everyone does is nonsensical, but somehow also makes perfect sense: maybe their self-certainty convinces you. At one point I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Such a blatant, nonchalant style. I kept thinking of Chantal Akerman for some reason. The unspooling of time and space. Nights shamble forever, distances are crossed in instants. Depth and forwardness.
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Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Ann Laura Stoler. 2019. University library.
Structures of Indifference, Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry. 2018. Purchased for me by a friend at a University of Manitoba Press book sale.
Happened to read these shortly after my Seeing Like A State reread and they prove an interesting duo to develop those ideas. Stoler cites Scott; McCallum & Perry cite Stoler. Weirdly, this is a coincidence. I actually took out the Stoler because I was searching seperately and ineptly for work on epistemic anxiety, which the book is not about. As a result, I only read some chapters, but they were incisive enough that I may go back when I get the excuse. Stoler's work is on archives from Dutch administrators of Sumatra; McCallum and Perry are concerned with the story of Brian Sinclair, an Anishnaabe man who died of a completely treatable bladder infection in a Winnipeg emergency room because the triage nurse skipped him and multiple observers assumed he was homeless and drunk. There's something about the minor, scratchy affective qualities tapped here: anxiety, indifference. I think a common popular representation is that conscious malice is the key affective scaffold of colonial dominion. Stoler argues, in maybe a single brilliant page (259), for the predominance of Georg Simmel's Lebensluge--doublethink, living a "vital lie". That the colonizer always knows what is going on, but is always dissimulating even to himself about its nature to maintain stable affect or self-image or to reduce cognitive dissonance. This is a formulation that deeply impressed me. McCallum & Perry find, for example, that the inquests into Sinclair's death focused overwhelmingly on the logistics of the triage room. Is this indifference? Or is it the half-purposeful decision, never articulated by any single colonial agent, to continue, continue, continue pretending?
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Movies and TV:
This book was massively foundational for me. One of the first academic books I ever read seriously; it changed the course of my intellectual life. On reread I am happy to maintain that it is a splendid introduction to some issues of the nation-state, its epistemology and its means of control, across multiple periods and times that will interest the student of “modernity” (whatever that means). There are likely other and more precise texts; its sweeping quality is exciting but suspect, and now perhaps recalls Reddit-beloved sages-of-everything with increasingly thin credentials like Jared Diamond. But it’s held up for me over at least the last decade, and Scott is much more esoteric in his interests than anyone writing for popular press. As Scott would likely say, the broad and the narrow are in dialogue.
+++
“The Double” and “The Gambler” ["Двойник. Петербургская поэма", Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema, and "Игрокъ", Igrok], Fyodor Dostoevsky. ~ 300pp? Due to a certain series of events I read The Double in a Pevear and Volokhonsky translation borrowed from a friend, and The Gambler in the Constance Garnett translation, from the university library.
I liked these, especially "The Gambler", which is deliciously cynical. They have not stuck with me like BK, but--high bar. I would like to challenge myself with a little completionism around Dostoevsky, and these feel a bit like the completionist's materials to me but maybe I'll re-assess.
+++
L'Étranger, Albert Camus. 1942, my edition 2012. In French. 144pp. A friend lent me this astonishingly beautiful Futuropolis Gallimard edition in large format illustrated by José Muñoz. Reread.
A thin slab of stone. John Dee apparently owned a piece of flat black obsidian cut to the shape of a mirror in which he would see visions. Dee's mirror was Aztec in origin, by the way. See a little below, in Along and Structures. (I left this enigmatic comment without an explanation even to myself the first time I jotted down these thoughts on this classic French novel of a pathologically indifferent personality who commits a murder and is imprisoned. I was restless, frankly dissatisfied. I recognized the novel's effect, but my mind drifted as I contemplated it. I was thinking of colonial critique, which is fair but has been said by better thinkers. A month later I had to come back to clarify to myself. I still have nothing further to say.)
+++
Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles. 1943. 180pp. Little free library.
What a bizarre, salty, pleasurable little book. Two strange upper-class women have parellel adventures, each alone. Everything everyone does is nonsensical, but somehow also makes perfect sense: maybe their self-certainty convinces you. At one point I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Such a blatant, nonchalant style. I kept thinking of Chantal Akerman for some reason. The unspooling of time and space. Nights shamble forever, distances are crossed in instants. Depth and forwardness.
+++
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Ann Laura Stoler. 2019. University library.
Structures of Indifference, Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry. 2018. Purchased for me by a friend at a University of Manitoba Press book sale.
Happened to read these shortly after my Seeing Like A State reread and they prove an interesting duo to develop those ideas. Stoler cites Scott; McCallum & Perry cite Stoler. Weirdly, this is a coincidence. I actually took out the Stoler because I was searching seperately and ineptly for work on epistemic anxiety, which the book is not about. As a result, I only read some chapters, but they were incisive enough that I may go back when I get the excuse. Stoler's work is on archives from Dutch administrators of Sumatra; McCallum and Perry are concerned with the story of Brian Sinclair, an Anishnaabe man who died of a completely treatable bladder infection in a Winnipeg emergency room because the triage nurse skipped him and multiple observers assumed he was homeless and drunk. There's something about the minor, scratchy affective qualities tapped here: anxiety, indifference. I think a common popular representation is that conscious malice is the key affective scaffold of colonial dominion. Stoler argues, in maybe a single brilliant page (259), for the predominance of Georg Simmel's Lebensluge--doublethink, living a "vital lie". That the colonizer always knows what is going on, but is always dissimulating even to himself about its nature to maintain stable affect or self-image or to reduce cognitive dissonance. This is a formulation that deeply impressed me. McCallum & Perry find, for example, that the inquests into Sinclair's death focused overwhelmingly on the logistics of the triage room. Is this indifference? Or is it the half-purposeful decision, never articulated by any single colonial agent, to continue, continue, continue pretending?
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Movies and TV:
- Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) dir. Kenneth Anger (Watch this incredibly artful fan rescore too)
- Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) dir. Maya Dern
- Pas de Deux (1968) dir. Norman MacLaren <- Finally, cancon for tripping
- Simon of the Desert [Simón del desierto] (1965) dir. Luis Buñuel
- Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) dir. Frank Pavich
- Les Ordres (1974) dir. Michel Brault
- The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) dir. Ted Kotcheff
- Challengers (2023) dir. Luca Guadagnino