jjupille's reviews
470 reviews

I had only read _Blindness_, which blew me away, before reading this. I can't locate my copy of Blindess, whichs is a bummer because sometimes something like having it around and seeing which I made note of can help me process another one by the same author. I will check for notes on B here.

JS's writing is so delicious, so light and lyrical, lots of nicely flowing streams of consciousness which don't meander too much - just lots of well paced inner monologues. I also like how he does dialogue, rendering it into the same style, not so much what the characters speak to each other as to how the interaction flows, like a nice flat stone skipping along the surface of one person's perception.

The story, ideas? I am still processing. Defiitely, as all of the summaries say, about how we --in modern, bureaucratic society-- construct the living and the dead. The "modern bureaucratic society" angle is key for me, given that I work on human institutions in my day job. I do think institutions -- here, the state-- construct us to a great extent, certainly try to. How the state officializes us becomes who we are and who we were, after we are gone. But of course there's so much more to it than that. The state is so limited (absurdly so, in some cases) in which it can capture about us, how the methods it uses in trying to do so are just iimpossibly ill-suited to the task. The state here tries to reduce us to some basic census chracteristics, but of course we --not least as shown by the lives of Senhor José, the unnamed woman, the Registrar and, in fact, every person in the story-- are so  much more complicated than that. 

So we can have a name, but we remain fundamentally unknowable. Senhor J's hidden life certainly speaks to this. The shepherd's activities with the graves of the dead-by-suicide, which Senhor J thinks to expand to all denizens of the cemetery near the end, speaks to the fundamental futiility of trying to impose spare bureaucratic order on such things. And it sounds like the tail end of his career will afford Senhor J opportunity to follow that logic even further, from within the walls of the Central Ministry.

These are all just some initial ramblings. This is an absolutely delicious read. I love Saramagao so much, and now I wnat to get all of this stuff and continue having this lovely voice in my own head.

~~ random snippets of text follow ~~

"not a day passes without new pieces of paper entering the Central Registry ... but the smell never changes, in the first place, becaues the fate of all paper, from the moment it leaves the factor, is to begin to grow old, but often on the new paper too, not a day passes without someone's inscribing it with the causes of death and the respective places and dates, each contribting its own particular smells, not always offensive to the olfactory mucuous membrane, a case in point being the aromatic effluvia which, from time to time, waft lightly through the Central Registry, and which the more discriminating noses identify as a perfume that is half rose and half chrysatnthemum" (1).

"There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angles, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of somethat that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because they the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos" (11).

"you should know better than anyone that the dead people here aren't really dead, if the papers you have in your hand are those of the unknown woman, they are just paper, not bones, they're paper, not putrefying flesh, that was the miracle worked by your Central Registry, transforming life and death into mere paper" (149).

"memory, which is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it has only a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow" (170).

"The human spirit ... is the favorite home of contradictions, indeed they do not seem to prosper or even find viable living conditions outside it" (228).

Totally fascinating, challenging for me until I gave in to the rhythms.

Just a few quick updates.

1) the modern city. Pretty obvious, but I guess I came across someone saying this is a very early book to capture the shattering dysphonia, the choppy rhythms, the sensory overload, the vast multitude of the modern (i.e., automobile-era) city. I don't know enough to say whether that's true or not, but it certainly captures all of that amazingly.

2) micro-macro. So, clearly, Franz Bieberkopf isn't really in control of his own destiny. Beyond his impulsiveness and lack of rational decisionmaking and planning, he is buffeted by social structures far beyond not only his control, but his very reckoning. There's something Döblin is doing, with the very micro/local focus on FB and Berlin Alexanderplatz, the one little part of the vast city, that I can't quite put my finger on by that is very effective. It's almost Foucauldian in showing how the huge shit goes all the way down to the capillary. He really captures how any other particular/local manifestations would be completely different in their details, because there's just so much arbitrariness going on, while still operating by the same principles that we are all pretty well fucked to deal, in our partial ways, with whatever life imposes on us. So there's a lot of interest structure-agency, macro-micro, gestalt kind of stuff happening here.

Final note: after putting it down, I rated it 3.75. I think I was just a little exhausted, depleted. Here, maybe a week or ten days later, I have upgraded to 4.25. Why? Because the book is still swirling around in my head. I love when that happens, and that's always to the book's credit.

Ahhh, Kafka. Kafka Kafka Kafka. So Kafka. Little Karl Rossmann is such a little sweetie. One feels so bad for him as the world does what the world does, but he is so plucky, so steadfast, so imperturbible, I absolutely adore him. The sharpest contrast between this one and The Trial and The Castle for me is that the world confronting the protagonist here has less of an internal logic (a logic of its own). In the other two, the world operates by very strict rules, which seem perfectly clear to all of the occupants of all of the other roles while of course being perfectly inscrutable to the protagonist (and the reader). I guess that's still true here, but things are more diffuse. Instead of just the legal or administrative system, Karl is confronted with many different social orders, each of them with its own logic. I suspect the words above don't make much sense. It's just that rather than a narrow organizational context or "institutional logic" many different orders come into play here.

This ended up being super sweet for me!

What an odd book. Brilliant but breezy. Random passages and bullets follow.
 

The Brits conquered or traded with foreign nations. The Americans wanted to administer them. US is profoundly bureaucratic, but we miss it because this is bureaucratic capitalism, i.e., private sector (Graeber 2015, 13). 

"Total bureaucratization" (Graeber 2015, 18): "the gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profit" (Graeber 2015, 17) 

there is an anthro lit on "cults of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world" (Graeber 2015, 22). Meyer, etc. Strong decoupling. These formed almost "magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience or training they are supposed to represent" (Graeber 2015, 22). 

Requiring pharmacists to be credentialed in all kind of elaborate and ongoing ways extracts from the students and gives to the financial interests that loan them money to pay for it. "This system of extraction comes dressed up in a language of rules and regulations" (Graeber 2015, 24). 

"Whenever someone starts talking about the 'free market', it's a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He's never far away" (Graeber 2015, 31). 

generic bank branches: "these are the perfect symbols of our age: stores selling pure abstraction -- immaculate boxes containing little but glass and steel dividers, computer screens, and armed security. They define the perfect point of conjuncture between guns and information, since that's really all that's there" (Graeber 2015, 33). 

fascinating observation: ATMs never dispense incorrect amount (pp. 35-36). 

DEF "structural violence": "forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm" (Graeber 2015, 57). 

banks, etc.: "All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force" (Graeber 2015, 58). 

"there is a direct relation ... between the level of violence employed in a bureaucratic system and the level of absurdity and ignorance it seems to produce" (Graeber 2015, 65). 

"what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative" (Graeber 2015, 67). "Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable effects at all" (Graeber 2015, 68). Hmmm ... running and jumping into a lake. May not have social effects, but may well. 

"situations of structural violence invariably produced extremely lopsided structures of imaginative identification", (Graeber 2015, 69) i.e., interpretive labor (Graeber 2015, 67). "Within relations of domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question actually work" (Graeber 2015, 71). Recall politeness, the V and T, etc. Contradicts himself p. 95 in saying "those on top relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks" 

"Police are bureaucrats with weapons" (Graeber 2015, 73). 

"Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization" (Graeber 2015, 75). 

"The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly of coercive force come together" (Graeber 2015, 80). 

the "real" in "real estate" is not derived from res as "thing", but form the Spanish real – whoa (Graeber 2015, 86). 

Marx: what makes people unlike bees is that we first raise structures in our imagination (Graeber 2015, 88). 

"The subjective experience of living inside … lopsided structures of imagination – the warping and shattering of imagination that results—is what we are referring to when we talk about 'alienation'" (Graeber 2015, 94). 

notions such as the public, the workforce, the electorate, consumers, the population "are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic" … they are "machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered" (Graeber 2015, 99). 

what happens to the working class struggle when there is no longer a traditional working class? It turns into identity politics (Graeber 2015, 112). 

"there appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment [in] technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control" (Graeber 2015, 120). 95% of robotics research funded by the Pentagon, which is why we have no Jetsons maids. Biggest medical breakthroughts are Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin: "tailor made … to ensure that [our] new professional demands don't drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy" (Graeber 2015, 129). 

change of tax regimes: Bell used to invest in research because profits were so highly taxed (Graeber 2015, 127). 

"There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers" (pp. 134-135). See Strathern's Audit Cultures for an anthro look at this sort of thing. See also Sarah Kendzior 

great close to the chapter on declining rate of profit: free ourselves from bureaucracy, and "let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history" (Graeber 2015, 147). 

path dependence of bureaucracies: once created, they find other problems that need solving, they create new problems, and they move to make themselves indispensable (Graeber 2015, 150). "The only way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East" (Graeber 2015, 151). 

#SMM high modernism is largely inspired by the German post office (Graeber 2015, 153). The Post Office created the German nation (Graeber 2015, 155). 

"games are pure rule-governed action" … they "allow us our only real experience of a situation where all ambiguity is swept away. Everyone knows exactly what the rules are" … "Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules", whereas play "implies a pure expression of creative energy" (Graeber 2015, 191). 

play is present "when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself" (Graeber 2015, 192). 

"What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play" (Graeber 2015, 193). 

play is purely generative of rules, not constrained by them (Calvinball). In social theory, this logic finds expression in sovereignty (Graeber 2015, 193). 

Freedom is "the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating" (Graeber 2015, 199). Language really exemplifies this. We love to play around with different formulations, but we also write a grammar book. 

"no system can generate itself. Any power capable of creating a system of laws cannot itself be bound by them" (Graeber 2015, 213). 

Galtung on structural violence 

Jonathan L. Katz "Don't Become a Scientist" at wustl 

Victorian era sci-fi futures "last moment before the carnage of WWI, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible" (Graeber 2015, 251) #SMM

Act of Creation is one of my favorite books. This one provides more foundation and more scaffolding around that one, especially as it relates to the nature of hierarchic systems and a logic of paedmorphosis (step back to leap forward). A trusted friend finds his account of evolution a little too Lamarckian, but I found it pretty persuasive. The last part, on schizophysiology as why we are so fucked, is fascinating. He goes off the rails in several places, IMO, but I just love reading Koestler.

Very hard for me to evaluate this very odd book.

In my simpleton's view of the world, this slots in to "the shattering of the modern mind" that occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, involving Freud, Einstein, etc.etc., but most importantly World War I, when any worldview premised on the idea that the world made sense no longer made any sense. Cendrars lost an arm in WWI, and the whole book is really just a way to engage madness without getting too worked up about it.

The title character is famously misogynistic, and the title of course can be read that way. I read it as "death by vagina", the idea that as soon as we are born this crazy world starts killing us with its craziness. I'd need to read around the book a lot more and porobably read it again more knowledgeably to really get into other takeaways, but to me it expresses the kind of nihilism that the avant-garde in every field was expressing.

Some philosophizing on pp. 102-103 of my edition, starting with the theme of the uselessness of all action. This sets the only real task as annihilation. "In the last analysis, scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allw us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. We can now put our metaphysics away in the musuem of international folklore, we can confound all a priori ideas. How and why have become idle, idiotic questions. All that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being, of the universe, of life. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system" (p. 103).

And,

"Haven't you gotten it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past ...? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral, and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?" (pp. 181-182).

If you like Pollan,  you will like it. It's a little breezier than how to change your mind, but it's really good.

Sands is a legendary international lawyer and here he weaves the threads of his grandfather Leon and celebrated international lawyers Raphael Lemkin (who originated the legal concept of genocide) and Hersch Lauterpacht (who originaed the legal concept of crimes against humanity). All three of these Jewish men have early-to-mid 20th century connections to Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv in what is now Ukraine and its environs, and had personal / family experience of the horrors that people can inflict on each other on ground bringing so many different folks into proximity. A fourth protagonist is the Nazi governor of the region around Lemberg during WWII, who implemented the Final Solution there - Treblinka was in his territory.

Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.

Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.