I’m getting married and taking my first-ever driving lessons this month. I’m getting pretty good at tying my own shoelaces as well.

I recently got my thesis deposit updated on the UWE repository page; you should now be able to download a copy should you wish, from http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/18767/

Here’s the abstract:

Thirteen interviews are used to examine uses of metaphor as a way of artists pursuing practice in books, including ‘the book-as-space/time’,’ the analogue self enacted through books, the ‘promise of reading’, etc. These are shown to exhibit a metaphorical consistency of practice that opens up some of the tensions a more formalist view of artists’ books indicates, but cannot explain. The research makes explicit certain tacit practices of artists’ books’ practice, in doing so offering a model for its interpretation through the extended significance of metaphor in artistic practice. This is offered in the hopes of suggesting new approaches to some of the tensions proving insoluble to the critical functions of the field as it stood at the time of research.

Bon voyage!

The Telegraph recently included a piece about research done at the University of Liverpool on brain function whilst reading literature. The literature professor working on this research, Philip Davis, has swum into my ken before:

I had heard about this research before, watching the BBC’s Reading Matters series. (Recap the relevant scenes here). At the time it had seemed to me to attach to some of the material I was most interested in in the area of literature and society, the sort of material explored by Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice, or by Wayne C. Booth in The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction. All of these sources attached somewhat contentious tags to the effect that reading fiction was a good “training ground” for empathy. That by ‘being around’ and caring about fictitious others, we could develop the habit of attaining others’ points of view and get better at making judgments with a high degree of empathetic understanding. For my part, I found this area fascinating, because I was interested in the idea of books offering the prospect of the ‘projected self’, and of ideas of empathy and identity derived from my readings of Paul Ricoeur. (My own research was about how working with and in books affected primarily visual artists’ creativity and ideas of themselves).

The Liverpool work wasn’t strictly speaking to do with empathy, but about the power of reading to make us make new connections; however, the two subjects are related (and both were featured in the BBC programme I referenced). The comments in the newspaper article do bring up the problematic relationship of assigning behavioural-scale meaning to brain function; that correlation is not explanation in and of itself. Nevertheless, the outcomes are, if not surprising, a step towards understanding some of these impulses, values, feelings from a more scientific viewpoint. The point is, I think, not to understand that Shakespeare makes us think, but to allow those feelings, those experiences, new language that can bring it closer to the naturalistic fold when and if that seems apposite.

My interest was piqued by the language used by Philip Davis in describing how ‘The Shakepeared Brain‘ jumps ‘electically’ to new connections, new meanings and insights when confronted by Shakespeare’s challenging language and shifts in word-usage. Davis’ language reminded me of my own interst in metaphor as (confusingly) a metaphor for how we can happen upon insight and new constructions – a concept that figures broadly in my 2010 PhD thesis. That is to say – the linguistic trope of metaphor does not describe what physiologically or mentally happens when I experience metaphor, but it coins a striking likeness in another field of being. Metaphor is a trope, not a neurological description: but it is something that happens to our minds. In reading, it sometimes works a bit like this: jumping from word to word, we notice a new meaning when some unusual word is jammed, hugger-mugger, into a new context. This isn’t a metaphor. This doesn’t follow the form of metaphor, but it works in a similar way; ‘madded’ is mad – but not quite, or not only. The metaphorization disrupts our expectations and lets new meaning new connection, into the reading.

Another comment in the Telegraph was that the research showed nothing surprising. Well, perhaps not; but being able to build a naturalistic and quantifiable picture of the benefits of reading has value not only for therapeutic application, but in defending reading and its paraphernalia as not ‘merely’ of cultural value, but of positive impact in other measurable ways.

It turns out that Davis is (or at least was in 2010) the editor of the Reader magazine, to which I’ve linked a couple of times here. I’ll definitely be looking at their output in future.

Snow, darkness, melancholy.

I’ve been reading from stoic authors recently, but downloaded the 2007 album ‘In darkness Let Me Dwell‘ with Stephen Stubbs, Maya Hornburger, John Potter & Barry Guy as a bit of a wallow. It’s a well-considered collection of Dowland songs with some interesting new arrangements including saxophones and double-bass. I quickly got into the lyrics of ‘Come Again’, and, desirous of finding out whether the singer’s phrase ‘to die!’ was indicative of some form or romantic ecstasy (as well as the fulfilment of the hobby-melancholist’s desire to dissolve in a miasma of self-indulgence), came across notes for a lecture by Dr Lars Eckstein. Some of his references seem to confirm my filthy-minded suppositions, but there are a wealth of other analytical facets he considers, including how Dowland’s song puns on existing structures of romantic and ‘melancholic’ mores. Fascinating, and just the thing to consider huddled in the northern European darkness, waiting for the sun, too, to come again.

“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.

A major concern for libraries, and in particular for university libraries that are trying to play a part in engendering good research capabilities in students (and in so doing justify their own existence as well as improving the lot of the organization as a whole) – is information literacy.

Quite a bit of work in information literacy at the moment involves team working – in this respect it works hand in hand with contemporary pedagogical practice. People are brought into dialogue with one another to create team projects, and it’s thought that this allows people to use different skill sets that are more or less germane to their own learning styles, and, in the dialogue process, it encourages a reflective practice.

I have my own views about whether this fits in all that well with the typically time-poor lot of today’s student who probably needs to spend a little more time by his or herself absorbing the basics, but I do think that the whole collaborative working ethic has some good effects; in particular in the area of codiscovery. It can be frustrating to try to find ways to pool effort, though but that’s another story.

One of the ways in which structures can be coordinated to pool effort, though, is through games. Games typically have clearly set out rules or achievements, and we can work well together on games because these are easy to see and easy to share the effort towards. It’s one of the things that McGonnigal writes about in her book Reality is Broken which argues for making more aspects of real life work and achievement function a bit more like games. Games have a nice ramp of difficulty, they give constant feedback on one’s achievements, and they are often specifically designed to make working together not only possible, but fun. It’s not something I have personally had that much experience of; I don’t really have the time to devote to something like World of Warcraft or its ilk that would give me a proper sense of what it is like. But I get the idea.

McGonigal points out that the sorts of feedback and camaraderie that a project like Wikipedia depends upon approach these game-traits, and that to be a good player often means being a good collaborator. But she has this to say about collaboration, and I think it bears relating to what I’ve been writing about lately in terms of Trickster and especially the work of trickster in deconstructing categories and expectations:

“Extraordinary collaborators are adept and comfortable working within complex, chaotic systems. They don't mind messiness or uncertainty. They immerse themselves in the flow of the work and keep a high-level perspective rather than getting lost in the weeds. They have the information stamina to filter large amounts of noise and remain focused on signals that are meaningful to their work. And they practice possibility scanning: always remaining open and alert to unplanned opportunities and surprising insights – especially at bigger scales. They are willing to bypass or throw out old goals if a more achievable or a more epic goal presents itself. And they are constantly zooming out to construct a much bigger picture: finding ways to extend collaborative efforts to new communities, over longer time cycles and towards more epic goals.”

(McGonnigal)

This seems to me to be a description of a person who is on their toes, ready for what the unexpected can provide. I’m not sure what it is about this that makes them an extraordinary collaborator, per se, but it certainly would seem to mark them out as someone with a high degree of critical skill – someone who is on the lookout for the seeds of insight – someone a bit like Picasso when he says “I do not seek, I find”.

Also worth picking up on, I think, in what McGonnigal notes, is this capability in terms of creativity when the going gets rough: thriving on chaos, doing one’s own filter work (or indeed, one’s own dirt work, bringing the unexpected and the alarming into play). In the wilds are where we often find inspiration.

Eli Pariser picks it up in a different way in The Filter Bubble – for him the absence of “chaos, messiness and uncertainty” engendered by the smooth, personalized edges of a powerfully personalized information filter, degrade our ability to see for ourselves when there is a diamond in the rough. One of the things McGonnigal’s exceptional collaborator is doing is that they are doing their own filtering: they are aware of what they exclude and what they include, and they are constantly scanning for stuff they didn’t think to include before. This doesn’t necessarily happen in the filter bubble: it’s automatic, and we cannot be aware of what’s outside it. What it does is invisible to us.

For Pariser, this blocks out the challenge that makes searching and learning worthwhile (something that is, McGonigall’s model, a crucial aspect of games design.) Sometimes the challenge itself lies in the chaotic nature of the information; and decoding or otherwise working with this can be a valuable prompt for curiosity, attention and learning.

Pariser notes:

“the filter bubble […] can block what researcher Travis Proulx calls “meaning threats” the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas.”

Proulx is quoted by Pariser:

“”The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events, and they had no way to make sense of them” Proulx wrote. “Hence they strived to make sense of something else.”

For similar reasons, a filtered environment could have consequences for curiosity. According to psychologist Gorge Lowenstein, curiosity is aroused when we’re presented with an “information gap.” It’s a sensation of deprivation […] but to feel curiosity, we have to be conscious that something’s being hidden. Because the filter bubble hides things invisibly, we’re not as compelled to learn about what we don’t know.”

This is not a good game: nor is it a good learning experience, because it is too easy, and it trains us to ignore the rough edges, rather than to pay attention to them.

To bring this full circle, we have to imagine what an information literacy programme (which frequently invokes the language and techniques of gaming) would do if it wanted to harness the power of these information gaps, of these challenges to sense. It would have to include some difficulty; and if it is really serious about preparing its graduates for working with libraries, it has to include the deconstruction of the library system itself: no system is foolproof or complete. It is up to us as its users to seek the gaps in it. Or, as Lewis Hyde has it, Trickster works in the aporia, in the gaps. One justification for collections such as artists’ books in libraries is that they provide just the sort of diificult, protean material that catalogues and other systems of understanding find difficult to deal with. They can be a good place to help students understand the edges of what it is possible to describe. [Beyond this they have much of value in themselves, but merely to come to grips with the difficulty of their definition can be instructive and help raise critical awareness of the research process and its tools.]

(Continuing extracts and notes from Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes this World )

Hyde, around page 241, takes up our inability to see that which is not represented in our taxonomies or sciences. It’s a perennial problem of observation; that we see the phenomena that we expect to see. The results we get are very often informed heavily by the patterns of recognition we are apt to use.

This can be bad news for experimental research of course: the phenomena an experiment produces may not be those we expect to see, and we may miss them entirely if we are too confident in the inductive presuppositions that are often a good and valuable ally in our understanding.

It can be bad news for creativity too, moreover, or for the basic research we do to situate ourselves vis a vis a topic or an object of study. Depending too solidly on any system of understanding can make the functioning of creative insight in all its theatres of operation, a more difficult task. One of the points Eli Pariser makes in The Filter Bubble  is that personalized forms of searching impose a knowledge structure (or rather, filter) that imposes a certain ordering sense on the information-world we see through it. This is all very useful, and helps us build strong, if artificial, means of inference. But he makes the points that we are alone in this bubble, and that it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible. How do we circumvent it? How do we counteract its effects and inoculate ourselves with the raw experience once in a while? (Can we turn it off? Is that what is needed?). Similarly, libraries order information in highly particular ways. But they are highly visible and they are not personalized. Furthermore, they often surprise or irritate us; I propose that such irritation is valuable, sensitizing us to the inadequacy of all systems of order, and reminding us that finding out is hard work, or it is if we are doing it well. This goes somewhat against some of the central library tenets of making the user’s search easy. Yes, help the user, but help them to work critically with information too. There are enough machines to make it easy. How can we help them when it gets hard – hard to find the truth that is at stake for a particular situation, when every source of information has its own agenda? How can we build critical literacy?

Hyde takes this up as part of the work Trickster does, especially in his in-between forms when he does not conform to the types or definitions that his audience uses to see the world (in fact, Hyde uses the history of Frederick Douglass, a man who had once been a slave, and whose personal history saw him write and rewrite his own story over the course of his lifetime, and find himself defined or mislabeled in ways he at various times found hard to accept or had to work through). Hyde notes how any audience has its judgments, or stereotypes that cannot easily comprehend or ‘see’ mixed, hybrid or new identity; “any such mixed identity is absurd, unthinkable, and unreal.”

All such judgments are in some way predicated upon a subjective notion of what the person or phenomenon under review actually is. As an audience, or as researchers, we do well not to repeat the error of the naturalists Melville describes in The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade (a passage noted by Hyde at p221 of Trickster makes this world):

"Experience is the only guide here; but as no one man can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it. When the duck-billed beaver of Australia [the platypus] was first brought stuffed to England, the naturalists, appealing to their classifications, maintained that there was in reality no such creature; the bill in the specimen must needs be, in some way, artificially stuck on."

Herman Melville The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade p.94

Longmans, London, 1857

Our typologies must grow to embrace the natural history of the platypus, so to speak. But the shock of the new is not simply that it greets us with the unexpected; it serves also to disrupt our settled ideas of the organisation of things. When we are open to new knowledge, we are also in a state of critical receptivity, and this is a state which also holds its structures of definition under review. To admit the platypus, we have to be able to suspend dogmatic responses to what is possible or right. The value of 'wild cards' like the platypus is that they elicit a radical response that either exposes our dogma for what it is, or begins in us the process of constructing a more inclusive critical apparatus.

If wisdom is the knowledge gained from experience, (phronesis, as Ricoeur has it) then we can gain wisdom from experiences like these, in never again holding our truths to be unassailable.

In a library environment, we might come across similar discoveries that jolt our sense of the possible; or at any rate challenge our sense of what constitutes the proper boundary of definition. I would propose that such experiences are valuable precisely because they can help instill in us a receptivity and flexibility of mind that stands ready to respond to such jolts. When we find, to our surprise, that our experience "is not coextensive with what is", the surprise helps us to formulate a self-reflective critical literacy. Contrariwise, if we are never challenged by the unexpected, if our sole experiences of searching, finding and researching are limited to verifying what we feel we already know, it would seem likely that we run the risk of etiolating our sense of wonder. Without the light of serendipity, we run ever more deeply into the channels of what we expect to find.

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…