“To kill a god or an ideal, go for the joints”

Lewis Hyde Trickster Makes This World, p. 253

Hyde is writing about how Trickster stories go about prising open the hegemonical skeleton in order to include themselves or to include new ways of doing and experiencing things in the world.

Hyde explores the notion of skeletal joints, arthron, relating to artus – the articulation of technical skill. But one also thinks of the ‘hard shell’ of existing orders; their carapace if you will – writing this now I think there might be some interesting notions to explore in terms of the difference between these two metaphors and what they have to tell us about the possibilities of growth and change. For one thing, skeletons do grow, but they keep their general shape. Creatures with carapaces cannot grow except through shedding the old shell. This makes me think about competing ideas of scientific progress. For trickster to incite revolutionary change seems more like acquiring a new and better shell, (perhaps a differently-shaped one, too, more hermit crab than clam-like) than disarticulation.  We have to be careful about pursuing the metaphor here, though, because the work of Trickster is not simply disarticulation, but the implantation of whole new structures in the spaces in between, and  my alternate metaphor of shell-breaking/revolution can also be seen as simply a recapitulation of the same-shaped structure on a bigger scale, so neither option is simple. That is not to say that they can’t give us pause to look at the pros and cons of different ways of looking at social constructions.

Returning to Hyde, Trickster’s habit of ‘going for the joints’ can be seen as strongly intersititial – there is a significant component of the introduction of new form. But we could also read this off as belonging to critical activity; going for the joint between theory and practice/observation, introducing the empirical flaw into the nicely-engineered structure. When we think and work critically, we have to have the wherewithal and the confidence to infiltrate our observations into the status quo.

So consider the library experience, and in particular the experience of artists’ books. They have been fitted-in, but perhaps they don’t seem to fit, exactly. This makes us think; where and how can they fit? What structure (what skeleton) would provide the necessary and sufficient articulation to describe their activity, their scope?  This urge, this activity is strongly felt, but (as I’ve argued in my PhD), doomed to eternal pursuit. There is no artist's book. They are always already hybrids of practices, they exist to form such alliances, they exist to find points of articulation to exploit. My research followed this into the effects produced formally, joining together differnt forms and modes of material production, but especially in terms of artistic affect; how it was to be a book-artist and use this means of being more-than-one-thing. In the present context the Trickster analogies seem clear.

What does it mean for us, then, in the library, to encounter this difficulty; and does it begin and end with artists’ books? That uncertainty of whether they are really that exceptional is kind of the whole point. They end up sowing a seed of deconstructive doubt about the structures used to describe everything in the library. I propose that this is to be welcomed as a point of critical reflection, as an incitement to critical awareness.

Hyde notes the ‘harmonia’ of the fixed joints- that which is well made, sound, closely worked-together:

“From such fixed joints come all that is well fitted, well knit, well set; in both classic tongues [i.e. Greek and Latin] the language of jointing connotes stability and order. The Greek harmonia comes from harmos, and as with the modern word, it overwhelmingly implies firm and pleasing design”

p.257

When Hermes carves up offerings so as to include a piece for himself and in so doing stake his claim to inclusion in the Pantheon, he is jointing the sacrifice, creating a new pattern that includes himself. He has introduced a new aspect to the pattern; one that disturbs the existing harmony (but one that eventually works out soundly).

“The ritual holds the articulated animal up against the articulated social and spiritual worlds nd means to demonstrate by their congruence that these various levels of existence participate in a single grand and stable harmony. A stable harmony, that is, unless some trickster akters the way the portions are handed out […] changing the way in which nature, community and spirit are joined to one another.”

P.257

Hyde also notes in a footnote that  not all “those equipped with mental knives will always agree on how to carve the world”, citing Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic form as irrelevant; as not conforming to the reality he (Aristotle) carves up dialectically.

We can see that the dialectical method works for producing an articulate vision of reality; it is how we recognise category, and that is what underlies most of our efforts at cataloguing. But we also feel uneasy about its boundaries a lot of the time, as I’ve discussed above. When Hyde talks using the skeletal metaphor, or I entertain the notion of a carapace metaphor instead, I think that this comes closer to the experience of understanding dialectical forms. We model them metaphorically to understand them. The ‘well-knit  ‘is not a nicely-configured taxonomy; it is a ship, a construction, a mental model. And such harmony as we find in it is the harmony of metaphor : it is the same harmony that Aristotle sees in the well-carved dialectic, but it is more in keeping with our real feelings for things, I think. I certainly think in models rather than in logical pathways: this is, I suppose, a more poetic sensibility. When we find a suitable metaphor to help us understand, and we ‘see’ the congruence lock into place, there is no better word for it than ‘harmony’. Sometimes a really great metaphor will ring this congruence very hard indeed; some great art is informed by the feeling (I want to say awe) that the discovery of metaphor produces.

But metaphor is tricky. You have to watch metaphor. It’ll lead you astray and you will conflate one term with another, reading off the model as if it were the reality. This is bad news for the dialectical purity of our understanding. But though it is sometimes misleading, it is often inspiring too. Sometimes a wander into the woods can turn up new pathways. Deviation from the dialectical structure – inspired by metaphor –  can be instructive, or at any rate it can power our curiosity. Conforming to structure is all very well if the structure really includes everything, correctly. But there are in reality very few fields of human understanding where this is remotely feasible. In a library, some objects in it will lead us on, lead us astray. Artists’ books are tricksters, and they can help us towards an opening, a gap, a wider view.