The following extract from Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World shows how slipping in between the definitions can both get the Trickster what he wants, but also ends up enlivening the system itself: he 'casts new spells even as the old ones are undone'.

"A bit of luck and a trick of craft gave Hermes something to trade with that was not part of the old economy. Like the person who has found buried treasure or like the craftsman who has dreamed up a new technique, Hermes appears with a kind of wealth [the music of his lyre] that eludes the received moral grid, and patron of smart luck, he turns it to good advantage and exchanges gifts with Apollo.

With all this enchantment and disenchantment, then, Hermes manages to resolve the dilemma he posed in the speech to his mother ("either they give me honor or I steal it"). He resolves it with a theft that confuses the definition of theft, with lies that muddy the truth, with speech that shifts the threshold of shame, with chance operations that dissolve hierarchy — and with a musical tongue that casts spells even as the old ones are undone."

[p219]

Such work is the strategy of interstitiality; work which crosses the boundaries, shifts the goalposts and blurs the definitions. In so doing it makes room for new inventions and new ways of appreciating that which is made; crucially it also makes us see that the old order wasn't really sufficient to contain the realities of practice as it is really done.

It's something we come across when we want to catalogue or define artists' books. The work of many artists is based right in this strategic niche; to find the exploitable niches that reorder the understanding of the world. It's really part of what we've understood as the notion of avant-garde for some time now, and it is just as frequently part of the tactical DNA of how contemporary artists like to work with being situated relative to their identities, societies, place, etc. They often like to cross, penetrate, deconstruct or otherwise play the trickster with what they encounter. And that work they do frequently helps us towards what might be called a critical literacy. Our encounters with 'Olympian Hegemony' are ever afterwards tainted with the possibility of an Hermetic transformation.

What I would like to present in the research I want to do over the coming year, is the effect of artists' book collections in libraries as a kind of kernel of doubt, of indeterminacy or of interstitiality, that can establish in its users the same kind of useful suspicion of the knowledge structures that surround their research experience. I think that this can make them cannier researchers, and can help mitigate the effects of a close-fitting 'personalized' research experience: such 'doubtful experience' punctures that experience with its inventive, ribald energy.

More notes and extracts from Lewis Hyde Trickster makes this world:

[When Hermes finds the lyre, is it luck? Or is it something else? When Picasso says ‘I do not seek, I find’, what is he saying about research?]

P214: “Much like Hermes’ lies and thefts, the creation of the lyre from the shell of the tortoise [a lucky find for Hermes that brought him ‘unending riches’] produces its own befuddlement, its own confusion of categories. Archaic Greeks believed that if wealth was not earned by the sweat of the brow or received as a gift from a friend, then it must have been stolen. Earned or stolen, gift or theft: by such oppositions agrarian kinship understood the acquisition of riches. A lucky find, a hermaion such as the lyre, eludes these categories.” […] “it seems to come out of nowhere and, at first, to have no place in the order of things. It seems a bit shady […]”

Hermes happens upon this material by chance, and is able to summon the technique to create the lyre from the happenstance turtle shell, because he is not constrained by the structures around him. His production of and achievement of value for his lyre (within the Olympian schema to which he aspires as his birthright) are part of the work of ‘tearing a hole’ in the perfection of the Olympian envelope. He eludes categories.

I’d like to ask what is at work when we have experiences of research serendipity. It too, is a little shady. We end up with notions and interpretation that are 'out of left field', that are perhaps a little 'far –fetched'. They don’t have the legitimacy of toil. (Incidentally, I’m sure that the sheer toil of grounded theory is just about all separates it from free interpretation… apart from the fact that it leave a nice trail of the assumptions the researcher is making.)

When we have materials in the library that elude categories, too, they may be apt for us to stumble across; and further, they may perhaps help to keep us alive to the possibility of fresh conjunctions, fresh meanings for the things around us that are usually so circumscribed by categories. A pharmakon if you will; a notional poison (it breaks the system) that really brings the system back to lively life (it reorients the system more usefully and vividly with the present and opens the way to new plenitude). As with the system, so with the researcher too, especially when we become used to a smoother, more personalized experience of information

Extract and notes from Lewis Hyde Trickster Makes this World

·         On polytropism:
p51-2

“There are many such shifty-skinned or verispellis animals […] In the Greek tradition the creature […] most renowned is the octopus […] for the Greeks, shape-shifting was a virtue.”

[Hyde here quotes Theognis “cleverness is more valuable than inflexibility”; ]

P52
“Trickster is polytropic, which in its simplest sense means “turning many ways” (though the Greek polutropos  is also translated “wily,” “versatile,” and “much-traveled” […] thus is Trickster and thus is the polytropic man, shifty as an octopus and colouring himself to fit his surroundings, putting on a fresh face for each man or woman he meets, charming, disarming, and not to be trusted. […] For the ancients, the ability to change one’s skin was not merely a matter of disguise, because the skin was often imagined to reveal the inner being […] to be able to change the skin raises serious puzzles about identity.”

·         P62- general note on trickster–
“He knows how to slip through pores, and how to block them; he confuses polarity by doubling back and reversing himself; he covers his tracks and twists their meanings; and he Is polytropic, changing his skin or shifting his shape as the situation requires.

·         On Aporia:

·         P49 “ In rhetoric and logic “aporia” – the English word derived from aporos – means a contradiction or an irreconcilable paradox. To experience aporia is to be caught in a tunnel with a fire at either end…”

My notes on aporia as it relates to the artists’  book take on the problem with definition: the definition of essences is related to the Aristotelian idea of classification. A thing is essentially one type of thing and not another. Understanding the world depends on identifying the true nature of such essentials. When I have elsewhere described artists’ books as metaphorising both the artists’ practice, and the potentialities of their physical form, I was describing the process whereby they render themselves both one thing and another. To catalogue the artists’ book is to enter into such a quandary. When the book artist enters into the process of creating artists’ books, there is something of an intention to provoke such a problem, I think; the identity of the artist is changed, the definition of the object is uncertain, and it unsettles and penetrates different orders of legitimacy. This is trickster work; unsettling order and opening the door to plenitude.

p.13 “When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth”, we are closer to the old Trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this world seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it a new form.”

That twisting form, that uncertainty of the artists’ book, is a mark of its polytropism. It appeals to different contexts at different times. It is always locally-relevant, its meaning based on context, rather than occupying a spot in a fixed system of categories. That is why, I think, it poses an interesting problem in librarianship, because it epitomises one of the struggles(or, indeed, aporia) libraries face in making knowledge accessible. In order to create the means of access, catalogues must pretend to the possibility of essences, even though these are, in both the relativist and practical senses, only the most temporary of arrangements.

·         On the relationship of serendipity and research.

·         P 128 “”I do not seek, I find.” Picasso’s famous dictum underlies the wandering portion of his artistic practice. […] a friend was stuck writing her thesis when, wandering aimlessly through the library, she happened on a carrel where someone had spread out just the article she needed. […] if only preconception does not block the avenues of sense, accidental finds are all around us.”

·         P131 [Quoting Picasso again] “In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the pocketbook that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something […] even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our imagination […] When I paint, my object is to show what I have found, and not what I am looking for.”

[These are instances of the lucky find, the serendipitous event. For Picasso, it wasn’t so much about looking for what he wanted, but about having a state of readiness to react to what was available, of being open to serendipity. This is a different sort of intelligence to that which searches out and categorises in the sense we mostly mean when we think of research. But it would seem to be an important if less-acknowedged part of our experiences of creativity in all areas (not just the creative arts). Think of the examples of inventors dreaming the solution to their problems, or of adapting the solutions they happen upon in nature or in other disciplines. These are as often found as sought.

I think that it may be important to keep at least an underground stream of this sort of consciousness available to us as we strategise the future of libraries, especially in an era when the pendulum of search is swinging so far towards the quantified and the personalised. When the internet decides it knows what I want to find, it places a barrier in the way of my finding-by-accident. That is not to say that those serendipitous materials are no longer available to me, but that they become more of a matter of searching than finding. There are effects on our creativity (more fulsomely explored in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble and elsewhere) of getting what we want and what we expect to get, all the time. We might wind up badly prepared for those moments where the world brings us the unexpected.]

·         On the notion of ‘dirt’
[In the sense that is important here, dirt is that which is not included in the framework under consideration – it’s the stuff which doesn’t fit in to the catalogue, so to speak.]

p176 “Where there is dirt, there is always a system of some kind, and rules about dirt are meant to preserve it.” [but] “Dirt is one of the tools available to Trickster as he makes this world.”

[One of the uses of dirt is to fertilise the world. Dirt is, in a sense, revivifying; the rot of dying matter is what new life springs from, or …]

p. 179 “In this world, in Trickster’s world, life and death are one thing, not two, and therefore no one gets rid of death without getting rid of life as well […] When purity approaches sterility [Trickster] will tear a hole in the sacred enclosure and [import dirt]”

[In fact, transgression itself can be seen to possess a ‘vivifying grace’  see the section around p182 on Mercurius, the Christian tradition, and the place of the unconscious symbol and the occult science, in dealing with that which the orthodoxy – ‘arid’ and ‘powerless’ when entirely removed from this world – cannot encompass. The worker in dirt is also sometimes a worker in the powerful connections necessary to make the order work again. There needs to be traffic with dirt. And, just so, a lively catalogue, a lively structure for knowledge, needs continuously to del with its ‘occult’ side; that which is not, or is difficult to catalogue, holds the dirt that can revivify our understanding of how to progress the structure, or better, to keep it tropic – or turning. The ‘turn’ is seen as the hallmark of the hermeneutic; of the understanding that continually interprets in new ways. Lewis puns on this in passing, coining ‘heremes-neutic’. Indeed the interpreter does partake of the Trickster sometimes; in each new interpretation or translation of cultural material there is at least a little bit of ‘something coming in the back door’. For all that is lost in translation, there is usually something gained, also.

It’s interesting to me that Lewis chooses artworks as the examples he can find of present-day dirt rituals (he looks at Serrano’s Piss Christ, and an exhibition of some of Mapplethorpe’s S-and-M homoerotic photographic works.) The social drama that these works unfold is one of importing that which does not belong into the public arena. But as the drama unfolds, these works and the discussions they arouse revivify the values of church and the plenitude of human sexuality. Rather than remaining dirt, they expand and open up the values of the things they might at first set out to attack or shock. Serrano is a Christian, and the jurors who sat on the obscenity trial for the Mapplethorpe show reported that they felt enlightened by the images. Doors – or pores –  are opened. This is one of the things art does. Like trickster, it travels around recontextualising the world as it finds it: the world we occupy is largely built on the foundations of previous generations of such interpretation. Culture doesn’t just happen. It’s built on the meanings of generations of people. Art in particular is the art of opening up new ways of seeing the world; not simply visually, but in all meanings of the term. Where I have described artists’ books elsewhere as better described as being like a camera than a ghetto, I meant to evoke this sense that they could be a travelling doorway into other contexts. Projecting the space they find themselves in to themselves, they can be a permanently available threshold across which to argue new turns.

Part of the strategy of artists’ books is to do with their subject matter and construction. But another, equally important part, is their particular style of distribution. They piggyback the circuits of legitimacy that belong to publishing, the library; into national collections and the bookshelves of their readers. They get to where they don’t belong. Like dirt, like Trickster.

Another effect of such dirt, one that lewis notes too, its its effect of ‘making us see what is in front of us’  – “how do we see what is really in front of us?” p192  — Piss Christ makes us see the figure of Christ through the body fluids that do not belong there: through urine, through blood, through milk (in different iterations of Serrano’s theme). This is really no different to the theme of the crucifix itself: it is there to distanciate us from the purity of the thing we are looking at. Here God is a suffering man; the dirt is there to shock us into seeing how absolutely real the event is. I’d relate this to the effects certain kinds of difficulty in research can give us too. When we are faced with a less personalised, less easily-consumed set of information, our faculties of critical interpretation are better-engaged. We work better when there is an occasional jagged edge to keep us awake. (This is something explored in both Eli Pariser’ s The Filter Bubble and in McGonnigal’s Reality is Broken). My larger theme is to propose artists’ books in the library as exemplary of the sort of material experience libraries can provide that keep the ‘detailed texture’ of search rougher and more interesting.]

More soon…

The last three books I bought, I bought electronically, and read them on a number of computers using various among the 'Kindle for X' programs available. They were a convenient and portable way of consulting some non-fiction material, and I'll do it again. I particularly liked the aspect of being able to keep well-ordered notes and bookmarks as part of my reading history. Some of my non-fiction paper books have their margins crammed with rather difficult-to-read notes, and bits of paper pasted in at the back with my index entries for various pet subjects not identified in the supplied indices. The electronic versions of these are an improvement.

But the reading experience itself wasn't always as good. I was never very far from distraction on my netbook or on my iPod, and that's the point Johann Hari also makes in his recent post "In the age of distraction, we will need books more than ever", quoting David Ulin:

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…. It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.

The point Hari makes is that "in the age of super-speed broadband we need dead trees to have living minds", staking out the point that concentrating on what others have to say  takes time and concentration: the empathy that narrative offers needs us to engage strongly with it, and Hari makes a case for books as a suitable technology for this: they help us withdraw from the present; they are an aid to the kind of reflective concentration that helps us turn a subject, an idea, more carefully in our minds to find a better relationship to us. He points out that the more a Kindle does — the larger the number of bells and whistles it has, the less useful it is as a medium for reading itself.

Being connected can have more than one meaning, it would seem. It's valuable and exciting to have instantaneous access to whatever we want, and it's useful to have an ever expanding set of tools to do that with; but there is another kind of contact – written up in works like Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice,  or Wayne Booth's The Company we Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. This is the contact of empathy, carried through in the narrative form. I cannot say for sure whether my empathy is engaged as fully with a Twitter stream or a Facebook update. My reading history, as it were, in those areas, is very poor. There are no great works, no great events I can share wholeheartedly in (perhaps I am doing it wrong). At any rate the kinds of interaction and sympathy I feel in conversational forms is far better mediated as a conversation.

But it does seem to me that there is something valuable in the longer form, in the lack of distraction, and in the deeper human contact I feel from books.

For me it is not a matter of technologies, or of convenience; it is one of attention and empathy. If electronic devices can approach this level of concentration and engagement, by simply allowing themselves to serve a simpler function, I think they will maximise their effectiveness, rather than leaving something unfulfilled: we can build other tools for other kinds of contact. In other words, the closer the Kindle comes to being a book, the better I will like it.

Would you do it on the web? Would you get stuck in a rut and find that you were looking at the same things in the same ways?

What techniques would you use? Google scholar's pretty good. And of course you would have bibliographic references within those. Maybe you have paid access to a subscription database so that you can actually get to see more of those papers, not just their abstracts.

How do you find out, though, those authors who come sliding in out of left field into your subject? How do you get access to other people's ideas of what might be relevant? How do you break out of your own personal viewpoint on what relevance is?

Google wants to help you, heck, everything on the web wants to give you nicely-personalized, relevant results.

But what counts as relevant isn't just those things that most closely chime with the resources or the theories you're getting comfortable with. It's those things that challenge you, those things that are uncomfortable, and those things that take you off across into other disciplines and areas where analogous research or insights are waiting to be brought into contact with the ideas you brought with you.

I still think that libraries are good places to get this to happen. They can be good places to be surprised and challenged by information that supplements and disrupts the material you can easily gather online.

This isn't an argument for books, per se – though I do think that there are cognitive and critical reasons to access a range of media that includes them – as much as it is an argument for the importance of knowledge structures that cover a range of subjects as a public commons, rather than as a personalised niche.

Reading from Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble just now, I came across the following:

Maintaining seperate identity zones is a ritual that helps us deal with the demands of different roles and communities.

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubbble, Loc. 1610

This is in the context of web personalisation and the competing strands that moticvate different measures of our preferences and marketable interests. Pariser mounts the Facebook 'one identity' notion as having problems when we want to consider how people actually behave. Having different facets to one's identity isn't necessarily a mark of a lack of integrity (except in a very limiting and literal sense) – and, as Pariser points out, most of us find ways to behave differently in different contexts.

This reminded me strongly of my findings when I was working on my Ph.D. in artists' books. There was a strong indication among the artists I worked with, that as well as the technical aspects artists' books made it possible to combine, there was a strong 'affect effect' : it made it possible for them to think of themselves in different ways, of altering the modes of practice they used and thought with. (I.e. as well as the tools of, for example, poet versus printmaker, they get to think like a poet versus a printmaker, and combine both in one medium.) The artists' book becomes a place in the imagination where different aspects of the creative self can come together and exchange ideas and points of view. It helps that it is also well-adapted as a multimedia form so that aspects of the technical and material mingling are a germane part of this. But here the similarity to the filter bubble discussion is in the sense of the book forming a ritual place for exchanges between different roles and communities. (There are also Trickster resonances here, in that the mingling of these streams will often  produce unexpected effects).

There are sites and opportunities for different roles and identities to come together – to bisociate their interests, as Pariser might put it when nhe discusses the roots of cretaivity. We find aspects of our other selves in serendipity, because we happen uppon something that interests us while we are looking for something else. That is, while our intention belongs to the 'self' we adopt in the moment, for a particular search or activity, our 'dormant selves' can be interested in things that come up along the way.

Libraries can offer a kind of world-representing panorama that keeps these waysides open, however partially (in both senses of 'partial', they may be.) Moreover, in surprising us and occasionally confounding us, they provoke not only serendipity, but an awareness of the 'otherness' of human-created information. Other people interpret the meanings you see in front of you. Others have catalogued, decided, inscribed their meanings. They are undoubtedly different from yours in subtle ways, and they may, in your opinion, just be plain wrong. We become more critically aware of other people's part in creating the media we consume when these alarm signals exist (some thing Pariser also mentions). These same alarms can offer a criticl distanciation from media, but they can also offer us material for critical reflection on our own knowledge structures and assumptions – it may, after all, be we who are wrong and not the speaker. When media can be consumed with none of these snags or alarms, when they represent back to us little more than an increasingly smooth mirror of our own opinions and preferences, they deny us the opportunity for both serendipity and critical awareness; further, they narrow the nourishment of the self to that single point of view that is calculated as the median center of our marketable likes and dislikes.

“if we could convince every Internet user to volunteer just one single hour a week, we could accomplish a great deal. Collectively, we would be able to complete nearly twenty Wikipedia-size projects every single week.”

Jane McGonigal Reality is Broken pt 3 How very big games can change the world

Blimey.