low-impact languaging
“And informational books need not be kept separate from fiction, biography, or poetry, as they are in libraries. The reading shelves where children browse is a place where any kind of discovery can be made, where books need not be replaced in their exact niche, and where ‘good’ readers and ‘poor’ readers may choose books from the same shelves and explore the same book together.”
– Time for Discovery1
Ceferino Piriz has composed a work called The Light of World Peace. “In this book,” he begins, “presentation is made of what we might call the great formula on behalf of world peace.”2 The book begins with a division of the history of civilization into three periods. The first period ends in 1940, comprising everything “inclining toward the world war”; the second goes from 1940 to 1953: “everything that has inclined toward world peace or world reconstruction”; and the third and final period starts in 1953, goes to the year 2000 and “consists in that everything will march firmly toward the efficient management of things.” Piriz also sorts the human species: white, yellow, brown, black, red and pampa. The society of nations Ceferino proposes will occupy a building with seven chambers, six of which will each be occupied by delegates from nations of each race, with a president of the same color, and a seventh will be occupied by the General Staff of the Society of Nations.
Hold it. Something’s shifting here. We’ve crossed from visionary formulation into something stranger—a politics of precision so excessive it begins to feel ritualistic. What I can’t do here in this writing is important. For the extraordinary quality of Ceferino’s proposal for world peace is its absence of summary, economy, or abbreviation. Each element of the proposal is repeated even if identical to the preceding one except for one word. Thus: “a first chamber would be occupied by Delegates from countries of the white race, and its President would be of the same color; a second chamber would be occupied by Delegates from countries of the yellow race, and its President would be of the same color…” and so on. Except it is I, not Ceferino who says “and so on.” He goes and repeats the formula, applying it to each race in succession. The only way I could reproduce the effect would be to reproduce the passage: How could I hope to reproduce the effect of an absence of summary with a summary?
Already in this first bit of Ceferino’s book (which I, reader of Hopscotch, am reading over the shoulder of Traveler, a character in that novel), I encounter the impulse to cover every existing particular thing with a name. Of course, these labels – brown race, pampa race – are, like any name, abstractions. But it is as though Ceferino’s writing expresses in addition an impulse to undo the violence of abstraction by taking abstraction to the level of absurdity. Mindful abstraction? If you consider that one of the costs of abstraction, of names and labels, is that they always leave behind a remainder of rich, elusive, mutable detail, then Ceferino seems to be seeking an antidote in the construction of a universe of abstractions that, through its very persistence, at least suggests or evokes that lost remainder.
William James once spoke of “vicious intellectualism” or “the abuse of naming” wherein we fall into the trap of believing that once we have called a man an equestrian we have made him forever unable to walk on two legs.3 The problem with names, for James, does not lie in names themselves. He knows as well as you or I that nothing human would be possible without names. The problem with names lies actually in the mindless, forgetful way we use them; lies in that we forget that the name is not the thing.
And the problem with this could be phrased in several different ways. It could be an aesthetic problem wherein the name appears thin and flat compared with the vital, satisfying richness of the thing itself. Or it could appear as an ethical problem – as though some violence has been done to things by excising a name from its flesh. But for James, the most persuasive way of expressing the problem is in practical terms.
The problem arises, from James’ point of view, when we treat a thing for some purpose or another as though it were itself limited to the dimensions and qualities of its name. Then that thing might well rear up and slap us with some limb that our naming had allowed us to forget it had.
Naming is an instrument that can help us carve a path through an otherwise more or less impenetrable jungle chaos of things. But we must beware of the path we cut, of what we’ve cut, what lies to either side and trampled at our feet and above all, of the fact that the path is of our making and so is our responsibility. We must learn something like a deep ecology of naming, low-impact languaging, how to step lightly with our words. From this perspective, Ceferino’s mad attempt to account for everything in his system looks like a giant scar reminding us of the abuse of naming. And yet, even in that scar, something begins to shimmer. This, already, begins to reveal the political force of style.
But there’s actually more. Ceferino will describe the forty-five so-called “National Corporations” which would make up the exemplary country, as well as their responsibilities. Now I can see that his manic naming, followed through with great persistence, begins to generate unexpected relations among things. For example: “(33) NATIONAL CORPORATION OF CHURCHGOING GUARDIANS OF COLLECTIONS AND THEIR HOUSES OF COLLECTION (all houses of collection, and idem. houses, deposits, ware houses, archives, museums, cemeteries, jails, asylums, houses for the blind, etc. and also all employees in general of said establishments). (Collections: example, an archive keeps files in a collection; a cemetery keeps corpses in a collection; a jail keeps prisoners in a collection, etc.”.
Imagine all these particular “houses of collections” gleefully liberated from the burden of their usual labels: the museum (normally under a Ministry of Culture) happily runs off to dance with a jail (that has itself escaped from the Ministry of Justice). And these old labels in turn start to seem oddly narrow and arbitrary: Why shouldn’t a school, for example, or a teacher, be part of a Department of Corrections, along with a hospital, a mechanic, a tailor and the company that manufactures erasers? They are.
You see, it starts to work on me the way it works on Traveler: “What’s the reason,” he asks himself at one point, “for that ‘etc.’, for the fact that at a given moment Ceferino stops and chooses that etcetera that is so painful to him? It can’t just be the weariness of repetition, because it’s obvious that he loves it, or the feeling of monotony, because it’s obvious that he loves it (his style is rubbing off on you).” And it’s rubbing off on me too, and finally what could be a better mark of style?
Listen to Nietzsche: “To communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos through signs – that is the meaning of every style.”4 Communication also means infection [Ù8, 35, 67, 68, 81]. Now read this description by Gilles Deleuze:
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression [a new style he means] . . . in all their work movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement – in other words, the abstract logical movement of ‘mediation’. They want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.5
Infection. Like a fever or virus that like life contains the mechanisms to ensure its own mad reproduction and proliferation.
This infectious quality (which I find in Julio’s writing and way of seeing also) assumes particular importance when I recall the larger ambition of Ceferino’s tract. Ceferino’s own writing participates in the third stage of civilization: the efficient arrangement of things so as to ensure world peace. For him all civilization until 1940 tended toward world war, the most massive exhibition of violence, destruction, displacement, and death in all of human history.
Perhaps Ceferino’s tract contains a secret elixir, one that is released subtly in its style and approach. So his real contribution to world peace lies not in his particular arrangement of things, but in his undaunted willingness to scrape off the crust of earlier names and to meticulously reconstruct the world in language. Maybe it’s the same old language, but it undeniably produces a new world insofar as it makes possible the production of new relations between things, relations that elude the ruts of centuries of convention.
Maybe it would be too much to say that the catastrophes of the 20th century trace back to the abuse of naming (though it’s not too much to assign this vicious intellectualism a role in concert with other vices). But either way, it’s certainly simple – if difficult — to assert and act in accord with the truth that the elaboration of a sustainable, peaceful world would be facilitated through the practical exercise of the imagination so that old names and relations are shrugged off as impractical conventions and new ones attempted in their place. If we feel tempted to dismiss this as harebrained we can heed Traveler’s observation that “he was doing Ceferino an injustice, since his geopolitical system had not been tested out as so many others that were equally brainless.”
Finally, among the old relations, names, and stances that Ceferino’s writing wipes away are those that cause me to freeze up and look away when an experiment is proposed. Maybe the National Corporation for INVENTION would house not only factories and laboratories, but also bedrooms and artists studios. Who is the jazz musician who appears on stage in a lab coat because, as he said, it’s all about research?
I feel a shiver of exhilaration, a rush of gratitude every time I open one of Julio’s books and enter the National Corporation for INVENTION. As I shift the kaleidoscope and reconstruct my relationship with the world, I remember that Julio placed Ceferino there not as a joke but as a kind of beacon—a figure who shows, in his own way, how rearranging language might rearrange reality. To read him is to be infected with the fever of invention.
1 Time for Discovery, Informational Books, Comp. By Evelyn L. Wenzel and May Hill Arbuthnot(Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1971).
2 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Chapters 129 and 133. In Spanish: Rayuela [1963] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), Ch.’s 129 and 133.
3 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 60.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 44.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 8.