Notes Toward a Lower Literacy Rate | Elijah del Medigo

Guest Column #025

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The following pensées are the product of renewed thought on the subjects which animated my latest public work, to wit: the tower of Babel, & how to get out (and in); the blurred distinction between feature & bug; extinct or dying usages of the comma; saying the quiet part out loud, and so forth.

The choice to present my thoughts as fragmentary is a careful one, taken for several reasons: First, it is a literary crime to take up extra space; Second, reasons of Zeitgeist; Third, I have found the impressionistic, scattered experience of reading fragments, a form which shades into poetry, to be remarkably clarifying. One can, from a series of almost-unrelated thoughts, trace the curve of an argument. Reading fragments is viewing the spattered blood in the aftermath of a sacrifice, or perhaps a murder: haphazard, irregular, but a well-trained (or well-instincted) eye can deduce the exact curve the knife took, a careful, thoughtful, clean sharp arc. All this is to say that it is easier.

We already know the broad shape of things:

- In a virtual world constituted by infinite text, starting a new magazine, writing another book, or, for that matter, another tweet – any act of communication – is bringing coals to Newcastle.

- Even the most meaningful of texts is drowned, made obscure, by the semiotic sea, our flooded public square.

- The metadata of “yet another essay” is attached to even the most penetrating prose.

- Even blood & wine lose their color when spilled in the public baths of opinion.

- When fighting or taming a self-referential monster, to reference the beast is to become it.

- Detached commentary is simply the view from a higher floor of the Tower of Babel.

- We are tired of writing about it, and when we do, we are contributing to writing it itself.

- What may once have been a republic of letters is now an anarchic mass democracy spotted with minor fiefdoms, and behind the facade, irl, brick, mortar, and men continue to crumble. There is no successor ideology because there are no successors; the emperor isn’t unclothed, he simply isn’t. Anything unperceived by the society of the spectacle can be presumed not to exist: supply chains, childbirths, the halls of power. Détournement is no longer a strategy: the spectacle is endlessly self-disrupting, endlessly self-referential, endlessly self-critical. By the time the merry-go-round gets back where it started, it has become a cliché.

On the other hand, the total divorce of the lens, the overlay, the mirror – whatever media was before it ate everything else – from its ostensible referent means that the real world has been left unsupervised.

Diagnostics are only meant to be done once. Happily for diagnosticians (I refer to the relatively competent among the chattering class), a constantly mutating cancer requires constant re-evaluation.

Anxiety about artificial intelligence is understandable as an existential exercise; calculation was one thing, but the machine has started to excel in the humanities, the package of disciplines which – it’s all in the name, as always – we thought made us human. The solution, I think, is paradoxical: first, we will need to acknowledge, sooner rather than later, that the humanities never really humanised us.

This realization needn’t have waited until now – Auschwitz should have been enough – but late is better than never. The second prong of the strategy, directly opposed to the first, is the isolation of whatever it is in art and music and literature that no machine will ever be able to replicate, a factor which may have more to do with the beholder than the beholden. The ability to experience art, not merely to critique or evaluate it, to enter into dialogue across time & space with the creator [the religious overtones cannot be escaped], is paramount. I leave the completion of this thought to people more familiar with the terrain.

The line between “friend” and “enemy” runs through every human heart, making it a difficult baseline for conducting politics.

Mortimer Adler’s bookshelf was never going to solve our problems. A canon is a weapon which must be loaded and reloaded; it can only shape the trajectory of its projectiles, lend them lift & force.

The metaphor is precise: an unloaded canon is nothing but a battering ram.

Perhaps more important than the arc of the knife is where the victim’s head was at the time.

Wittgenstein’s “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”, a rule honoured solely in the breach, cannot compare to R. Pinhas of Korets: “anyone for whom speech is not as difficult as building a tower [!] has not yet entered the service of God.”

The pun presupposes a precise knowledge of etymology; “pun”, from the Hebrew פן , face[t].

The Free Marketplace of Ideas differs from any Republic of Letters which came before it, all of which had borders, barriers to entry. The advantage of this, for those interested in genuine aristocracy, is that the expansion of the agora to fill the whole polis means that everything and nothing is, strictly speaking, political, anymore. What may once have required ugliness and violence now requires mere curation, both of the beholden and of the beholder, and patience.

Imitatio Dei requires that we follow God’s rule of cataclysms, explicated (where else?) in the Talmud, glossing on Isaiah’s phrase “for a day of vengeance is set in my heart”: R. Yohanan said: “to my heart I have revealed it; to my limbs I have not revealed it.” Resh Lakish said: “to myself I have revealed it; to the ministering angels I have not revealed it.” We would do well to recall the etymology of the word: when Greek-speaking Hebrews (dual citizenship in Athens and Jerusalem goes back longer than we like to admit) referred to the “Apocalypse of John”, they were referring to the text itself, the revelation it contained, not its eschatological content.

Revelation, in whatever form it comes, is a private matter; there is a reason that even the most violently monotheistic of thinkers must resort to the marital metaphor when it comes to things divine. A band of religious fanatics do not have religion in common so much as fanaticism. I have rarely or never discussed religion with the most religious people I know, nor they with me; we simply bask in the silence of a twice-received epiphany. (The way to know you’re listening to the silent radio station is simply the absence of static.) Nobody notices a bullet wound in an explosion; the same applies to signals and noise.

The renaissance of the cringe, the instinctive aesthetic-moral judgment, is one of the better linguistic developments we’ve seen of late; the worst has been the association of petty preference with the cringe, the filtration of opinion through feigned instinct.

Legend tells of a king who sent his court painter to the desert to paint Moses, the man of God; upon his return, he was hanged, because he had painted the ugliest man conceivable, but unjustly so, because his work had perfectly captured the features of the lawgiver. This story has been torn out of books by anxious zealots since the moment it appeared in print, yet it does not die, because it has the ring of truth to it.

The foundation of real brotherhood is to criticize one’s friends prior to one’s enemies, and oneself prior to one’s friends. (It is worth noting that the desire to be right cannot simply be inverted to a masochistic desire to be wrong; the only way to achieve judgmental equilibrium, the view from nowhere, is to obviate the desire to be at all. Liberalism is for aristocrats of the soul, in that sense.) In that spirit, some reconsiderations:

Plague is not merely a technical difficulty, as original instinct dictated; it is simply the making-explicit of a Zeitgeist of illness. Beyond glib puns about virality, it is the literal manifestation of our malaise.

Nietzsche, somewhere, describes the nose as the highest of the sense-organs; he was preceded as always by the Jewish mystics, who read Isaiah 11:3 as the elevation of the olfactory to the level of the Messianic: the redeemer is simply someone with an impeccable sense of smell. The “good taste” of poetasters and dilettantes will be subordinated to the sense of smell, which detects from a distance that which aesthetic taste perceives in proximity. The plague occludes the olfactory, the prevention obscures it, which, for N. and I, is the triumph of the clinical, the middlebrow.

Fever, similarly, and the obsession with its prevention: there is a letter of R. Joseph Rozin to the second-to-last Lubavitcher Rebbe which describes fever as a purifying fire, the white-hotness which purges a vessel of the vestiges of what it has absorbed; it reminds of the Lurianic description of the world-cleansing fire which descends just before Shabbos; l-b-n, the root for white-heat, the method not just of purifying but of reducing a substance to pure formless matter, the prerequisite for reshaping. To criminalize fever, to obsess over its reduction, is symbolically to ban catharsis and its twin, reforgery.

The same applies one level of abstraction up: illness is a clarifying process at the individual physiological level and also at the level of the body politic; unhealth reveals itself and also a more precise understanding of health. Opposites are embedded in the fabric of reality for this purpose: they are there so we can learn what alterity is, and then to serve as a backdrop for its actualization.

Moses removed his mask to communicate the word of God, the earliest literalisation of unmasking-as-Revelation that I know of.

Political legibility is not merely poor strategy, it is simply gauche: it is impolite to announce your desires to the world.

Literacy on its own is not a salve or a salvation. (I return here to an earlier theme.) It is also not a one-size-fits-all enterprise; there is no perfect hermeneutic, there is simply getting to know each author, an enterprise which ultimately can only be conducted initially by a series of mutual misunderstandings. Knowledge of an entire corpus is not necessary for knowledge of the man: those who knew Voltaire had not read all 270-odd of his works, in fact nobody ever has, and yet to say they did not know the man is obscene. The same applies to the discipline of genealogy (sorry, N.), the dissection across time and space of a mind is of sublime importance and interest but simply unnecessary to the supremely important and interesting thing, which is knowledge of another mind, the only coherent refutation to solipsism.

[Il]legibility operates on multiple levels: the letters and their crowns are visible, but their vocalisations and cantillation are not. (Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must sing.)

Usage of the royal we is not a sign of independence, of standing-alone, since there is no king without a nation. It is simply a sign that one contains, whether within or without, multitudes.

Exit strategy on its own is possibly the wrong framework: useful as it is for those with the means, it abandons the playing field/mirage to people who don’t know what to do with it. Opting out of history must be the starting point, not the endpoint, to a re-entrance strategy [‘re-entrance’ has two meanings], a home base in the real from which to sally forth into the Real. Cats are perfectly poised, relaxed in their tension, tiptoeing royally along the edges of garbage cans: so must we be.

My personal penchant for the semicolon, represents, I think, a preference for endings which are never really endings.

Intellectuals and artists retreat into pastiche, exaggeration, parody, not out of an affinity for the form but to avoid the crippling fear that what they are doing is already, has always been, pastiche, exaggeration, self-parody.

A note on Jewish iconography, such as it is: Daniel prays toward the open window, the closest architecture gets to a total void.

Borges wrote of a massive, territory-sized map, but he never mentioned its most fascinating feature, the 1:1 scale model of the map it contained, recursive, multiplying, endlessly obscuring itself: You Are Here.

The best codes are those which don’t even need to be understood by their users.

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Elijah del Medigo is a friend of the family. You can follow him on Twitter @heliashebreus.