Usable as quotes, I suppose. But because Virno does not touch upon the role of new media at all, his 4 seminars on the multitude do not really ‘apply’ to any reality nor research I’m involved in now. Not even when he touches upon the coupling of private/public. Yet am happy to’ve read it. If only, for me, as an update on Aristotle and Marx.

‘Private signifies not only something personal, not only something which concerns the inner life of this person or that; private signifies above all deprived off: deprived of a voice, deprived of a public presence. In liberal thought the multitude survives as a private dimension. The many are aphasic and far removed from the sphere of common affairs.’ p. 24

‘I believe that in today’s forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out.’ p. 24

‘The contemporary multitude is composed neither of “citizens” nor of “producers”; it occupies a middle region between “individual and collective”; for the multitude, then, the distinction between “public” and “private” is in no way validated. And it is precisely because of the dissolution of the coupling of these terms, for so long held to be obvious, that one can no longer speak of a people converging into the unity of the state.’ p. 25

‘One could say perhaps that “not feeling at home” is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept of the multitude.’ p. 34

‘The One of the multitude, then, is not the One of the people. The multitude does not converge into a volonté generale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect.’ p. 42

‘In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes labor (or poiesis) from political action (or praxis) , utilizing precisely the notion virtuosity: we have labor when an object is produced, an opus which can be separated from action; we have praxis when the purpose of action is founded in action itself.’ p. 52

‘One could say that every political action is virtuosic. Every political action, in fact, shares with virtuosity as sense of contingency, the absence of a “finished product”.’ p. 53

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles & New York, 2004.

Vanavond ben ik in De Waag, bij de presentatie van Poëzie op het scherm. Met onder andere Geert Buelens en Paul Bogaert en Rozalie Hirs. Ik zal er een artikeltje over schrijven voor de nieuwsbrief van het Fonds voor de Letteren.

http://www.fondsvoordeletteren.nl/actueel.php3

18.15 – 21.30. Juist voor donker terug, heerlijk weer om te fietsen, weinig wind, 20 graden, bewolkt, na negenen zo’n oranje zonsondergangshemel. Favoriete klims opgezocht. En de Hagelstein (als de klim vanuit Remersdael, linksaf bij de kerk, inderdaad zo heet), die had ik nog nooit gereden.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – Mesch – Mheer – Banholt – ri. Gulpen – Slenaken – Schilberg – Teuven – Gieveld – Eperheide – Epen – Diependaalse weg – (Vijlenerbosroute) – Sippenaeken – Bos van Opsinnich – Remersdael – Hagelstein – St. Pietersvoeren – St. Martensvoeren – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Kanne

And then I just finished Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude. Mixed feelings about that one. It has a good and very usable explanation of the concept of multitude. (Expect quotes later on). But for me Virno seems too caught up in his past as theorist of the 1970’s Italian workers movement.

Virno’s analysis of the Post-Fordist condition doesn’t strike me as very insightful in the sense that it basically seems to repeat what (one thinks?) one knows from let’s say the newpapers. (I am almost sure one can find better analyses in economic literature, also analyses of ‘virtuosity’, and the importance of language and talk at work).

The difference is that Virno’s analysis refers often to Marxist theory and indeed to the 1970’s worker’s philosophy of Potere Operaio. That is his ‘true’ background. Very interesting in itself, and surely the Italian Autonomist movement and its theories are very, very fascinating. As Lotringer states in the introduction, Virno takes up this past explicitely instead of not simply not referring to it too much, and that is a positive thing according to Lotringer. But at some point every sentence seems to bear the imprint of Virno’s involvement with the 1970’s workers movement, with the collectives — his theorizing seems a theorizing through that experience. Or rather, maybe I should write that this is the ’emotional feeling’ of Virno’s prose. And this put me off as the book progressed. I must admit, then, that I did not read the last chapter (his 10 theses on the multitude) very well.

But then, it might also come down to the fact that I am interested in the concept of the multitude as far as I can make it ‘work’ in reference to blogging, writing, the transformation of publishing and the media, the transformation of speaking/writing in public; I — personally — am not working on the issue of a workers movement, or on a theory of labor. And ‘new media’, indeed media, are not Virno’s thing.

Blake Morrisson: The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (or rather, the Dutch translation). The kind of book of which one says: that’s a good read. Simply an example of what an historical novel can be nowadays. Well written, well done, well researched. (Not ground-breaking, not difficult, sort of journalistic). A good insight into the constitution of a new technology, in the form of a novel. I read it with pleasure. Yet this sort of novel one only enjoys when one has an interest in the subject matter.

… in contrast to:

Flann O’ Brien, The Third Policeman, the book I’m currently reading. Ireland; bicycles and I realize, the ONE and ONLY true precursor to the strange prose of Ben Marcus. Very funny too (though you’ll not catch me laughing out loud when reading, I hardly ever do).

I did know of Flann O’Brien. His books were even translated into Dutch, published in that series of light blue books (in which also one Pinget novel was published — before IJzer started publishing Pinget translations), and of course remaindered. I did borrow his books from the library ages ago. But I never got to read them. Strange, I must’ve not been into bicycles yet…

Flann O’Brien:
http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/obrien.htmlhttp://www.necessaryprose.com/obrien.html
http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/obrien.html

Ben Marcus:
http://www.benmarcus.com/

IJzer:
http://www.uitgeverij-ijzer.nl/

18.00 – 20.45. 21 graden, zuidenwind en zwaarbewolkt. Fijn fietsen na een weekend zonder ritje. Reed de Loorberg a 19 tot 20 km/u op, even snel als jongen met geschoren benen, de snelste van een groep die me achterop kwam.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – Mesch – Libbeek – Mheer – Banholt – Schilberg – Slenaken – Loorberg – Gieveld – Teuven – Opsinnich (half) – Remersdael – Veurs – St. Martensvoeren – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – Kanne.

Hmm, favoriete klims in de afdaling: Schilberg, Gieveld. Volgende keer andersom.

Next weekend = Jan van Eyck Book Weekend. With a.o. a Tomorrow Book Projects Workshop; Stuart Bailey’s Manifesta print-on-demand shop, Gerhard Rühm (really!!), lots of Fluxus and Concrete Poetry books on display, and more;

and then of course, on sunday, 15.00 hrs. the presentation of Ubiscribe PoD 0.9.0, the publication we (Jouke, Sandra, Claudia, Inga & me) have been working on in the past 2 weeks — starting with putting content (text, images) into our wiki, ending, temporarily, with a paper publication. (In the wiki one can find already new stuff added). I just send some last corrections to Jouke. Tomorrow morning the pdf will be at the printers. Launch & learn is the term we’ve devised for this kind of ultra-quick production. It’s like learning to understand again/anew what editing is, what ‘editorial labor’ entails.

Programme for 20/21th May: http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_3_events_info/arc_06_bookish_weekend.html.

Werk-ethos: dat ik de neiging heb om me te verontschuldigen dat ik een dag vrijaf neem voor een lange fietstocht — zeker in een omgeving als de Jan van Eyck en met vrienden die al hun tijd in het atelier lijken door te brengen. Ik nam vrijaf, zei verontschuldigend dat ik tot 1 uur ‘s nachts had doorgewerkt (werk afgemaakt, zodat ik zou kunnen fietsen). Ik kon pas om 8 uur ‘s avonds weer echt door met werk (wachten op het doorskypen van correcties).

Hoogzomer. Felle zon, geen wolkje in de hemel. 26 graden. Weinig wind (juist een beetje voor de afkoeling). 11.00 – 17.00. Besloot richting Aken en dan naar het Hertogenwoud te rijden (het rondje La Redoute moet nog even wachten). Tussen Aken en Raeren ken ik de namen en de ligging van de dorpen niet, ik moest vaak op de kaart kijken. In het Hertogenwoud volgde ik deels de fietsknooppunten: genieten. (Sinds ik hier voor het eerst kwam, een jaar of 12 geleden, hou ik van dit landschap, dit bos). Vanaf Eupen de grote molen erop gegooid en met wind in de rug langs de grote, drukke weg geraasd, om snel terug te zijn.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – St. Martensvoeren – De Plank – Teuven – Opsinnich – Sippenaeken – Gemmenich – Drielandenpunt – ra. bos in – ra. dalen (onverhard) – Chappelle – Kelmis – Hergenrath – Astenet – Walhorn – Neudorf / Raeren – ri. Hydro aluminium – Vennkreuz – Steinley Venn – Stausee Eupen – Eupen – (46 – ri. 28 – 52 – 53 – 54 – 55 – 41 – 40) – Welkenraedt – Henri-Chapelle – Veursbos – St. Martensvoeren – Moelingen – Lanaye – Kanne.

Daarna tot kwart voor vier ‘s ochtends gewerkt.

Funny. Amazon sends me one of those e-mails ‘Recommended for You”. Out of the 8 books they recommend me, I already own 6, and I have read 7. I have published reviews or articles about 3, and blogged about 2 others. The books are Infinite Jest, The Age of Wire and String, The Rifles, Europe Central, State of Exception, Homo Sacer and the Open. DFW, Vollmann, Agamben. The only book I do not own is Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems — and that one is, yes, high on my have-to-read list.

Apparently the software knows my taste quite well. But is this good recommendation? (Of course, the reason is that the software doesn’t know what I’ve bought at Atheneum in Amsterdam. And I think I prefer to get an e-mail that makes me smile, above eagerly awaiting what the software figures out I might like. Hmm, do I?)

Started reading through The Rustle of Language, collected shorter essays of Roland Barthes from the period 1966 – 1980. Some of these I’ve read before, a few I’ve read many times — like From Work to Text. I particularly like Barthes when breaking free of it, the structuralism of his earlier work is still present.

Having read 80 pages up till now, I’m struck by 2 things: 1. the ‘beauty’ of Barthes writing — even when glues together too many subordinate clause in one sentence, 2. how clearly al lot of what he writes fits in, well, the Zeitgeist. However ‘timeless’ and ‘abstract’ his theorizing of reading and writing may be, reading through these essays again, it becomes apparent how much it was also grounded in, let say, the ‘spirit’ of the times, and how much his ideas are tied to issues that seem to’ve been topical at the time.

Anyway, some by now ‘classic’ quotes:

‘(…) the Paradox of the reader: it is commonly admitted that to read is to decode: letters, words, meanings, structures, and this is incontestable; but by accumulating decodings (since reading is by right infinite), by removing the safety catch of meaning, by putting reading into freewheeling (which is its structural vocation), the reader is caught up in a dialectical reversal: finally he does not decode, he overcodes; he does not decipher, he produces, he accumulates languages, he lets himself be infinitely and tirelessly traversed by them: he is that traversal.’ On Reading, p. 42

‘Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flies, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49

‘The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, infelcted by Enlish empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of th “human person”.’ The Death of the Author, p. 49/50

‘(…) linguistics furnishes the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument, showing that the speech-act in its entirety is an “empty” process, which functions perfectly without its being necessary to “fill” it with the person of the interlocutors: linguistically the author is nothing but the one who writes, just as I is nothing but the one who says I: language knows a “subject”, not a “person”, and this subject, empty outside of the very speech-act which defines it, suffices to “hold” language, i.e., to exhaust it.’ The Death of the Author, p. 51

‘(T)he modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text: he is not furnished with a being which precedes or exceeds his writing, he is not the subject of which his book would be the predicate. (…) (W)riting can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observation, of representation, of “painting” (…) but instead (…) a performative.’ The Death of the Author, p. 52

‘Once the Author is distanced, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes entirely futile. To assign an Author to a text is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signified, to close writing.’ The Death of the Author, p. 53

All quotes from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (transl. Richard Howard), University of California Press, Berkeley &c., 1989 (1986/1984).

& when I said that Barthes’ theory is tied to topical issues of the sixties, I mean for instance that his ‘death of the author’ also has to be seen in the perspective of the struggle against a certain kind of literary criticism, a way of teaching literature that was very much ‘under fire’ then. As long as Barthes’ theory is applied to literature and to writing as such, I have always found it very inspiring and to the point. As soon as one tries to apply it to political or legal speech, problems arise. I’d say.