CABINET

a quarterly of art and culture Issue 29 sloth us $12 canada $12 uK 7

cabinet
181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA tel + 1 718 222 8434 fax + 1 718 222 3700 email info@cabinetmagazine.org www.cabinetmagazine.org Spring 2008, issue 29
Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner Editor Christopher Turner UK editor Brian Dillon Managing editor Colby Chamberlain Associate editor & graphic designer Ryo Manabe Art director Jessica Green Development director Elizabeth Grimaldi Website directors Luke Murphy, Kristofer Widholm, Isaac Overcast, Ryan OToole Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, Jesse Lerner, Jennifer Liese, Frances Richard, Daniel Rosenberg, David Serlin, Debra Singer, Margaret Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Wertheim, Gregory Williams, Jay Worthington, Tirdad Zolghadr Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Pip Day, Charles Green, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Roxana Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Editorial assistants Laura Nahmias, Mae Saslaw Cabinet National Librarian Matthew Passmore Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi

Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. Our survival is dependent on support from foundations and generous individuals. Please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Contributions to Cabinet are fully tax-deductible for those who pay taxes to Uncle Sam. Donations of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue, and those above $100 will be acknowledged for four consecutive issues. Checks should be made out to Cabinet and sent to our office address. Please mark the envelope, To encourage more loafing around. Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals for their support of our activities during 2007. Additionally, we will forever be indebted to the extraordinary contribution of the Flora Family Foundation from 1999 to 2004; without their generous support, this publication would not exist. $50,000 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts $15,000 The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs $10,000 $14,999 The New York State Council on the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts Stina & Herant Katchadourian $5,000 $9,999 The Danielson Foundation $500 or under Spencer Finch, Jason Olin, James Siena $250 or under Greg Allen, Fred Clarke, Steven Igou, Deborah Lovely, Ben Marcus, Jason Pickleman, Greg Rowland $100 or under Samuel Berkheiser, Helene Black, Katherine Carl, Stephen Dunne, James Fields, Maria Flores , Krista Jenkins, David Kiehl, Paul Kondis, Karen Lothan, Beth Regardz, Alison Rossiter, Corinne Skinner, Lauren Wittels

Printed in Belgium by the tireless men and women of Die Keure Cabinet (USPS # 020-348, ISSN 1531-1430) is a quarterly magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Periodicals Postage paid at Brooklyn, NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Cabinet, 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Subscriptions 1 year (4 issues): US $32, Canada $38, Western Europe $40, Elsewhere $50 2 years (8 issues): US $60, Canada $72, Western Europe $76, Elsewhere $96 Email subscriptions@cabinetmagazine.org or call + 1 718 222 8434. Subscriptions address: 181 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217, USA Please either send a check in US dollars made out to Cabinet, or mail, fax, or email us your Visa/MC/AmEx/Discover information. Subscriptions are also available online at www.cabinetmagazine.org/subscribe or through Paypal (paypal@cabinetmagazine.org). For back issues, see the last page of this issue. Institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO or Swets, or via our website. Different rates apply. Advertising Email advertising@cabinetmagazine.org or call + 1 718 222 8434. Distribution Cabinet is available in the US and Canada through Disticor, which distributes both using its own network and also through Ingram, IPD, Armadillo News, Ubiquity, Hudson News, DDRS, Small Changes, Last Gasp, Emma Marian Ltd, Cowley, Kent News, LMPI, Media Solutions, The News Group, Newsways, Newbury Comics, Don Olson Distribution, and Chris Stadler Distribution. If youd like to use one of these distributors, contact Melanie Raucci at Disticor. Tel: + 1 631 587 1160, Email: mraucci@disticor.com Cabinet is available in Europe and elsewhere through Central Books, London. Email: orders@centralbooks.com A version of Cabinet printed as a book (and sporting an ISBN) is available through D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers. Tel: + 1 212 627 1999, Email: dap@dapinc.com Email circulation@cabinetmagazine.org or call + 1 718 222 8434 if you need further information. Submissions See <www.cabinetmagazine.org/information/submissions.php>. No paper submissions, please.

Cover: Baby three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus), less than one foot long, found abandoned by a remote trail in lowland tropical rain forest of La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica. Ahhhhhhhh! Photo: Gregory G. Dimijian / Photo Researchers, Inc. Page 4: Thomas Conders allegorical map in a 1778 edition of A Pilgrims Progress, by Paul Bunyan, originally published in 1678. Sloth is hanged, along with Simple and Presumption, on the road past Mount Cavalry and the Slough of Despondency. This color version is from an 1844 reprinting by D. Newell. Thanks Jo Guldi. Contents 2008 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and artists, let alone the idlers who edit Cabinet.

columns
InVEnToRY / InDEX FoR DER RUBER HELEN MIRRA Possibility, as silently purring IngEsTIon / HEXED HousE MARk MoRRIs Nibble, nibble A mInoR HIsToRY oF / TImE WITHouT clocks JosHuA FoER Do tell coloRs / opAl EMILy RoysdoN Lose color, lose gem

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mAIn
HYDRopolIs BRIAN dILLoN Testing the waters THE oRIgIns oF cYbEX spAcE cARoLyN dE LA pEA Gustav Zanders amazing gymnastic devices ARTIsT pRojEcT: moscoW DRAWIng dAN pERJovscHI THE WRITIng oF sTonEs MARINA wARNER Roger Cailloiss imaginary logic THE ImAgInARY EngInEER kRIs LEE Karl Hans Jankes flights of fancy REVERsIng THE REgulAR oRDER oF nATuRE: An InTERVIEW WITH EmIlIE clARk FRANcEs RIcHARd Mary Ward, Mary Treat, Martha Maxwell, and the place of the female naturalist in nineteenth-century science ARTIsT pRojEcT: WEAR THEm All sAN kELLER buIlDIng A bETTER snoWFlAkE: An InTERVIEW WITH kEnnETH lIbbREcHT MARgAREt wERtHEIM Something in the air THE gAmE oF WAR: An oVERVIEW ALExANdER R. gALLowAy Chess with networks THE gAmE oF WAR: DEboRD As sTRATEgIsT MckENzIE wARk Occupation, evacuation, contestation

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THE Young AnD THE REsTlEss dANIEL RosENBERg A history of busy idleness VAsEcTomAnIA, AnD oTHER cuREs FoR sloTH cHRIstopHER tuRNER Better living through monkey glands THE REclInE oF WEsTERn cIVIlIzATIon LAuRA NAHMIAs & NIcHoLAs NAuMAN The story of the remote control FATIguED MARINA vAN zuyLEN Philosophies of fatigue ARTIsT pRojEcT: sloTH InDEX wILLIAM JustIcE FAR nIEnTE: An InTERVIEW WITH pIERRE sAInT- AmAnD sINA NAJAFI Laziness and the Enlightenment

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posTcARD: slEEp-lEARnIng bookmARk: unTITlED JoE dEvLIN

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Toward a CliffsNotes for the Sloth section

coNtRIButoRs
Carolyn de la Pea directs the Davis Humanities Institute at the University of California, Davis, as well as the schools Program in American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on popular technology and science, material and business cultures, gender, and food. She is the author of The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York University Press, 2003) and the co-author of Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Emilie Clark is an artist who lives in New York City. She exhibited twelve years work from her weekly painting project at Morgan Lehman Gallery in fall 2007. In spring 2008, she is exhibiting work from her Martha Maxwell and Mary Treat project at Nathan Larramendy Gallery in Ojai, California, and Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Joe Devlin is a Manchester-based artist who works with marginalia. He earned an MA in Fine Art from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2003. Recent exhibitions include The Couriers Tragedy, International 3, Manchester; the billboard project Inbetween Spaces, Manchester; and a solo exhibition at Persian Two gallery, Valletta, Malta (2008). Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet and the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005), which won the Irish Book Awards non-fiction prize. His writing appears regularly in such publications as Frieze, Art Review, Modern Painters, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Wire. He is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published in 2009. Vadim Fishkin is a Russian artist based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His work has been included in many international exhibitions, including the 2005 Venice Biennial. Joshua Foer is a freelance science writer. He is working on a book about the art and science of memory, forthcoming from Penguin. He can be reached at <joshuafoer@yahoo.com> Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. His latest project is a computer-game version of Debords Game of War. William Justice is an MFA student in the Digital Arts / New Media Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz. San Keller is a Zurich-based artist who works in various media. He is working on a museum that will open in May 2008. For more information, see <www.museumsankeller.ch> and <www.zimmerfrei.li/memosan>. Kris Lee is a longtime contributor to Cabinet and an adjunct professor of virtual media at Sequoia University in Oklahoma. Lees work was recently shown at the 2008 Montevideo:Video Festival in Uruguay. Kenneth Libbrecht is chairman of the Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology. He has published numerous books on snow crystals; the latest news and views of snow crystal research can be found at his website <www.snowcrystals.com>. Helen Mirras recent book Cloud, the, 3 (JRP Ringier, 2007) is an index of John Deweys Reconstruction in Philosophy. She is associate professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and in 2008-9 will be artist-in-residence at the Laurenz Haus in Basel, Switzerland. Mark Morris teaches design and theory at Cornell Universitys College of Architecture, Art and Planning where he coordinates post-professional degree programs. He is author of Models: Architecture and the Miniature (Wiley, 2006) and host of the Architecture on Air podcast series. He is currently co-authoring a book on models as contemporary art with Kathy Battista. Laura Nahmias is an editorial assistant of Cabinet. Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet. Nicholas Nauman is a writer based in San Francisco. Dan Perjovschi is an artist based in Bucharest. Recent solo exhibitions include What Happened to US? at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and I am not ExoticI am Exhausted at Kunsthalle Basel, both 2007. He is represented by Lombard-Freid Projects in New York. For more information, see <www.perjovschi.ro> and <www.lombard-freid.com>.

Frances Richard is a poet who writes frequently about contemporary art. An editor-at-large of Cabinet, she teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn. Daniel Rosenberg is associate professor of history in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and editor-at-large of Cabinet. Emily Roysdon is an artist and writer living in New York. She is currently working on a new book project and a film at an artist residency in Stockholm. Pierre Saint-Amand is professor in the departments of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including The Libertines Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel (Brown University Press, 1994) and The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Christopher Turner is an editor of Cabinet. His book, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came To America, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle (Tbingen, 1993) and Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Cornell University Press, 2005). She is presently writing a book about idleness. McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2007) and various other things. His book on the Situationists, 50 Years of Recuperation, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2008. He teaches at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research. For further information, see <www.ludiccrew.org>. Marina Warner is a writer and curator living in London. She is currently writing Stranger Magic, exploring the influence of the Arabian Nights, and at work on a novel inspired by her childhood in Egypt. Recent exhibitions she has worked on include Eyes, Lies & Illusions at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing at Compton Verney, Warwickshire. Her most recent book, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors & Media (Oxford University Press, 2006) has recently been published in paperback. For further information, see <www.marinawarner.com>. Margaret Wertheim is founder and director of the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. She is currently working on a book about outsider physics and the role of imagination in theoretical science.

columns

Inventory is a column that examines a list, catalogue, or register. / Ingestion is a column that explores food within a framework informed by aesthetics, history, and philosophy. / A Minor History Of, a column by Joshua Foer, investigates an overlooked cultural phenomenon using a timeline. / Colors is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet.

InVEnToRY / InDEX FoR DER RUBER HELEN MIRRA

Swiss writer Robert Walser (188195) composed the text which has come to be known as Der Ruber around 1925 on twenty-four unnumbered octavo-sized sheets of paper. All of Walsers work from about this time until he stopped writing was drafted in a tiny script. So small as to be illegible, for many years these texts were assumed to be written in some kind of code. The penciled microscripts were first deciphered by Jochen Greven, who published many of them in the mid-seventies, including Der Ruber. Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte published their corrected edition of the novella in 198; this later version, translated by Susan Bernofsky, was published by the University of Nebraska Press as The Robber in 2000. Artist Helen Mirra, who has previously indexed volumes by W. G. Sebald, William James, John Dewey, and Jane Adams, started compiling her index of the novella last January while doing research at the Walser Archive in Zurich. The index is reproduced here accompanied by details from a watercolor portrait painted in 1894 by Karl Walser of his brother Robert dressed as the misfit robber Karl Moor in Friedrich Schillers play Der Ruber (181).

Aare, the, 34 adaptability, innate, 100 adventurer, would-be, 6 adventurers, quietest of, 5 anxiety, inexplicable, 52 noble feelings of, 84 approval, show of, as related to a spoon, 11 arms, 102, 112 freckled, 37 arrogance, to take refuge behind, 96 attic, 24, 34 room, irregularly constructed, 15 audacity, sky-blue, 12 authorization, dubious, 40 bashfulness, feigned; as the simplest solution, 123 bed, 69, 77, 105, 113, 124, 128 hard as a board, 46 not yet made-up, 68 of moss, 132 of pure superlatives, 23 belief, that life turns green, smiles, and bleeds, and that it is the first of all things, and that it becomes, perhaps, after years in which little or nothing is believed in, the last as well, and that this is connected to the development of buds, 126 bench, 65, 74, 121 woodland, 2 benignness, as dangerous, 91 birds, local, as less esteemed among local birds than foreign birds, 61 bit, 81 of charm, 26 smallest little, 43 blanket, pulled to the lips of the hero, 4 wet, 32 blood -letting, 77 -stains, centuries-old, 65

book, 3, 16, 17, 58, 106, 114 on the subject of paths, 10 -printer, 92 -printing establishment, 7, 93 -shop, 12, 75, 130 small but meaning-packed, 125 that changed hands, 14 boor, dyed-in-the-wool, 70 boredom, 5, 32 boringness, 81 boulder, amidst breakers, as silent as, 49 bumpkin, 141 Canton Berne, 33 characters, shady, 30 child, irrelevant, 72 chickenheartedness, moral and aesthetic; intellectual circles filled with, 59 cleverness, as a sort of mediocrity, 121 clod, 53, 56, 140 condescension, smiling, 14 conduct, insignificant, which seemed significant, 91 conscience, a, tiny, lightweight, pliant little slip of, 101 contentment, like a lighthouse, 23 conviction, tidy little; like a birdie in its nest, 108 convictions, soft as buttered noodles, 46 countenance, stormy-night, 85 dagger, 10 damselling, 101 deathbed feebleness, 19 detours, 75 dimwittedness, 48 disbalancement, 42 diseases, undeserved, endured, 21

doctor, 92, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 136 Dle, 54 dont-mind-if-I-do-ishness, 2 Dostoevsky, 5 doubters, and those inclined to waver, 49 dullard, 5 end, watery, 59 equanimity, often confused with apathy, lack of interest, 105 errors, noteworthy, 95 evening, the dear friend of little birds, awaited for, so they might revel in his chill, 64 existence, continued; without the performance of work, 3 experiences, early, 6 exploits, thievish, 15 expression, apparently indifferent, 125 feet, 12, 21, 40, 52, 53, 70, 88, 118, 129, 136, 139 delicate, small, grateful, tender, dear, good, sweet, 25 flaws, touching, 16 floor, of droppedness and unselfsufficiency and mishappenstance, 72 flunkeyism, 79 flying-over-the-seas-in-the-dark, 26 foolishness, intelligent, 72 forest, 124 fir, 11 of birches, or whatever sort of trees they were, 67 vestige of; that actually doesnt look vestigal at all, 74 forests, 31, 65, 133 also see woods edges of, 139 primeval, 19 formalities, scruffiness of, 34 friendship, as infeasible, 5

glance, apprehensive, 19 crafty, 50 twice-two-is-four, 98 gloom, surrounding, 98 Goethe, 31, 141 good-for-nothing, 2 without money, 1 green, 11, 39, 45, 77, 133 cheerful, 27 eyes, 37 hat, 56 landscape, 65 non-too-green, 10 roof of, 67 which was probably marvelouslooking in the snow, 10 greenish, 16 and indolent, 65 habit, of always pondering something or another, of brooding one might say, 4 hand, 2, 6, 10, 11, 12, 19, 30, 50, 55, 56, 57, 71, 72, 73, 76, 82, 94, 95, 119, 124, 138 kisses his own, 51 on the other, 54, 110, 130 hands, 1, 2, 7, 14, 16, 18, 51, 58, 75, 78, 83, 93, 104, 120, 126, 127, 132, 137, 139, 140 and legs, 52 his own two, 4 happiness, as related to smallness, 136 thoughtless, 72 he, as pure immediacy, 23 was she, and she, yes, was he, 102 hospital, 95, 135, 139, 140 humbleness, show of, 87 idiocy, the flourishing of, 115 ignorance, 69 impertinence, 114 inattentiveness, 11 indefatigability, unsurpassed, 44 indefinite, the; as auspicious, 95

indexes, drawn up, 31 indifference and irresponsibility, 111 indignation, feigned, 124 indolence, 124, 135 hopeless, 8 infatuation, hopeless, 114 injustice, pouring rain of, 51 insignificance, 11, 60 intelligence, foolish, 72 intrepidity, embodied by hat and hair, 10 items, not-so-fine, 2 kiss, shabby and good-natured, 84 knee, that was kissed, 14 knees, 58, 96 bare, 16 knife stabs, and lightning bolts, 51 lamebrainededness, 89 lament, the loss of which is lamented, 15 lapse, 31 later, at an appropriate juncture, we will return expressly to this point, 99 chapter, in which well hear more, 40 juncture; we will speak of this more at some, 38 momentarily, well return to this, 11 occasion, on which we shall elucidate, illuminate, 41 more on this, 1, 11 more will be said of this, 20, 32, 64 perhaps things will look up, 75 perhaps well return to this, 30, 75 saved for, 31 we might be in a position to say a few words, 16 laziness, 91, 94, 107 lenience, infinite, 88

level of the lowest, lowered beneath the, 79 life, as fractious as indisposed, 80 as knowing and ignorant, helpless and autocratic as a child, infinitely large and a tiny speck, 82 limitations, well-thought-out, 94 links, handy at grasping, 97 little, 1, 5, 9, 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 36, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 60, 62, 64, 65, 70, 80, 84, 94, 95, 99, 101, 105, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116, 117, 118, 122, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141 consideration, 28 epaulets, 99 expense, 30 forest, 124 minds, 114 mirror, 39 mourning bands, 43 piles of sand, 76 Robber, 17 spoon, 12 spots, 37 table, 3, 136 thought, 23 thread of happiness, 110 valise, 30 wheels, 136 worth, 7 loutishness, 5, 48, 87 ungallant, 116 love, as a not-being-able-to-actotherwise, 102 lump, 60 marriage proposals, ephemerality of, 34 mediocrity, 120-22, 134 mirror, as impertinent, 6 misdeeds, well-planned, 77 monotony, habituality, and desensitizing, 111 neglect, mild, 17

nonchalance, universal, 141 nothingness, 35 obscurity, clear-as-day, 139 one, scarcely worth mentioning, 13 ordinariness, flawless, 133 outcast, isolated and annihilated, 38 Panza, Sancho, 14 pencil, 37, 119 people, as breakfast rolls, 49 as insufficiently mediocre, 122 as truest in confusion, clearest in fog, surest in uncertainty, 84 honest; wishing to be seen as scoundrels, 83 perambulation, 127 person, absolutely by no means unhappy, an, 104 whose way of living shows no particular stamp, 72 pistol, see revolver pleasure, utterly unassuming, 72 point in time, which were still a long way from reaching, 38 possibility, as silently purring, 88 procrastination, titans of, 95 railroad journey, 7 lines, 3 man, 5 station, 75 reader, the, 5, 17, 82, 139 revolver, a, 10, 50, 54, 64, 83, 134, 140 river, 17 greenish and indolent, 65 Robber, as a copyist, 31 as a girl, 100, 103-4 roof, 73, 116 hatch, 29 of green, 67 mended by roofers, 92

room, small, sparingly illuminated little, 99 tiny, 69 Rgen, 53 Schiller, 24 scoundrel, 87 seriousness, which shouldnt be taken too seriously, 36 servant, 135 pretending to be a, 68 -hood, 71-74 shelter, leafy, 112 shirker, 10 shortly, where and how to be revealed, 27 shyness, night-bird, 26 sleep, 5, 11, 27, 56, 80, 101, 119, 120, 123, 136, 138 -iness, 3, 59 slob, 83 slothfulness, 41, 107 sluggishness, 8, 45, 56, 87, 117 small, 35, 72, 129, 130, 135, 140 very, very, 112 smile, a, tiny, slight, worried, little, 99 with a touch of condescension, 108 snow, 125, 129 covered in; all the people, handcarts, horses, vegetables, those who ran and those who waited, 73 falling, 71 soon, we shall explain why, 113 spoon, 11, 22, 25, 26, 141 spoons, head full of, 12 subordination, 106 opulent, 92 suffering, as tedious, 109 sunshine, sunniest, 28 tear, tiny, miniscule, almost imperceptible, most enchantingly delicate and lovely, a, 63

telepathy, magnetic, 10 thimble, 82 thought, faintest, 114 thoughtlessness, sunniest, 12 thunderstorm, marvelous, 5 tiny, 40, 63, 69, 82, 101, 123 so, miniscule, so, 136 tomboyishness, 71 tree, 39, 131, 139 -s, 9, 21, 30, 64, 65, 77, 78 chestnut, 76 leafless, 103 trepidation, intrepid, 125 undertaking, booksellerish and literary, 139 unhappy, unspeakably, 10 unkindness, lapped up as if a special treat, 90 unreliability, 93 unruffledness, accustomed, 135 usefulness, as harmful, 73 vagabond, 5 walk, hlderlinishly bright, lovely, 29 woods, 2, 7-8, 38, 39, 74, 118 above the city, 5 pale November, 7 which refuse to be anything but green, 77 yawn, 43, 113 zeal, somnolent, 94

IngEsTIon / HEXED HousE MARK MORRIS

For the children, the chef would always bake a large gingerbread castle, wonderfully decorated with scores of marzipan peasants and serfs scaling the walls and overthrowing the parasitical king and his family. James Finn Garner

Earlier this year a gingerbread castle was sold at a sheriffs auction for $9,104.02. The castle, located in Hamburg, New Jersey, was purchased by a local real estate developer after the previous owner could no longer finance the .3-acre property. The place had once been a tourist attraction; more than a roadside curiosity, but never quite a full-fledged theme park. It is now in steep disrepair. A failed restaurant across the road from the gingerbread castle, the Castle Grille, also came with the purchase price. This unusual structure, eighty years old, features a rusticated base, animal statuary, walls incised with

decorative swirls and turrets seemingly iced with hearts, swags, and dimples of colored stucco. It may or may not be saved from demolition. Several owners have tried and failed to revive its fortunes since the late 190s. What was popular during the Depression through the 1950sthe height of the roadside folly phenomenon might not be enough of a draw today. However, it is one of a handful of remaining buildings designed by Joseph Urban (1821933), who also built the Ziegfeld Theatre, the New School for Social Research, the Hearst Tower, the Palm Beach Bath and Tennis Club, the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, and Mar-A-Lago (the 2,000-squarefoot house designed for Marjorie Merriweather Post and Edward F. Hutton, now owned by Donald Trump). Also an accomplished set-designer for several opera houses, not to mention the Ziegfeld Follies, Urban was commissioned to design Gingerbread Castle by Fred H. Bennett, the owner of a flour mill. In Willy Wonkaesque fashion, Bennett requested a structure, intended to delight children and adults alike, to be built near his Wheatsworth cracker factory. Time, covering the

Prince Charming as he appears in the garden of the Gingerbread Castle. A postcard from Joseph Urbans Gingerbread Castle in Hamburg, New Jersey.

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The enchanted Gingerbread Castle, as it appears on a postcard from its heyday.

opening of the castle in 1930, described Urban as that globular Viennese Architect and stage setter. Bennett recounted that he had been inspired to build Gingerbread Castle after attending Engelbert Humperdincks opera Hansel and Gretel to take his mind off business problems:
My eye was taken by the quaint fantastic fairyland gingerbread house on the stage. The thought struck me, just the thing! Something like that for the children on the old cement kiln across the courtyard from the mill. I went to see the decorator Joseph Urban who designs the stage settings for the Metropolitan Opera, and hes been hard at work on this Gingerbread House of mine
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for two years. It cost $50,000, but if it brings the children and their mothers, its well worth it.

People who claim childhood memories of the Gingerbread Castle in its heyday have snuck beyond the no trespassing signs and blogged creepy photographs of it in ruins; creepy in the way the decay of edible, or seemingly edible, things always are. (Think of the repulsion conjured by Miss Havishams bridal cake in Great Expectations.) The castle was always intended to be eerie on the inside with carved fairies, gnomes, mechanical spiders, bones, and a strange tableau featuring a cauldron of stewing bodies (taken to be the giants handiwork from the story of Jack and the Beanstalk). There

are also colored statues of children throughout and, of course, a witch, who used to fly on a broomstick along the ceiling. As in the Hansel and Gretel tale, the witch was even shoved into an oven at the culmination of the tour. Bennett naturally linked his flour-making business to the traditional gingerbread house, oddly one of those objects where its interest (something as solid as a house made digestible) is not satisfied by actually eating it. Urbans castle plays to the fantasy of imagining oneself, like Hansel or Gretel, eating a life-sized bit of architecture. The Grimm fairytale deals with hunger on many levels. Hansel and Gretel are so hungry they continue to eat the gingerbread house even after they hear the witch warbling, Nibble nibble Their parents, recall, are so hungry they are willing to abandon their kids in a forest to save more food for themselves. The hungry birds eat Hansels breadcrumbs left on the path, making the children lose their way. Hansel is encaged and forced-fed, and only gets freed after an underfed and overworked Gretel cooks the witch. In doing so, Gretel also liberates the other children who had been lured by the house and turned into gingerbread figures at the gateway. Putting the Castle Grille across the street was meant to tap into this suggestion of hunger, except that a hamburger may not be the thing to satisfy an appetite whetted by an illusion of gargantuan pastry. The type of gingerbread used to mold little figures and houses is the most recent and cement-like of its variations. As its name implies, gingerbread was originally spiced bread or cake; a holiday indulgence when spices were luxury goods. Ginger, also used as a preservative, is only one of several spices, among them nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, and ground pepper, that one might include in a gingerbread recipe. Indeed, the French refer to gingerbread as pain d pices, and their version is more like pastry. It is the Old French term for ginger itself, gingebras, that migrated to English as the word for the cake. Nurembergs honeyed Lebkuchen straddle the cake/cookie divide, and it is out of that fourteenth-century culinary tradition that denser dough arrives and forms horses, hearts, and finally, houses. Architecture mimicking gingerbread in a generic sense can be seen in certain late-nineteenth-century house designs noted for their fancy carpentry details, referred to as Gingerbread. More overt architectural references to gingerbread, as seen with Urbans castle, are rare, but others do exist, such as Antoni Gauds gatehouses to the Parc Gell in Barcelona. The new owner of Gingerbread Castle is begging for the return of the many figures stolen from the property in recent years, including the witch and a clapping
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The castle today. Courtesy RoadsideArchitecture.com.

seal that used to balance atop a candy cane. To revive the castle, its old tenants must return. One wonders how far their diaspora extends, how many have made their way to eBay. Certain figures are more integral to the building than others, but it is the exteriors shallow relief detail that ultimately makes up the castles distinctive decorative program, its scrumptious appeal. The Simpsons Halloween send-up of Hansel and Gretel includes a scene in which Homer tries to rescue Bart and Lisa from a gingerbread house, but forgets his purpose once he decides to eat his way in: Homer: Mmmm ... sugar walls. Lisa: Father! I knew youd rescue us! Homer: Oh, rescue you, stuff myself with candy, its all good! Witch: Oh, thats a load-bearing candy cane! You clumsy oaf! With Urbans design, the candy really is load-bearing, but now starting to sag and crumble. In its declining years, even when it was no longer normally open, the castle was recast as a haunted house each October. The decay, fragmented narrative, sad history (including the lost fortunes of previous owners), and bizarre scale of the place all made for an unintentionally perfect haunted house; a witchs house, which is what the Germans call a gingerbread house after allhexenhaus. Hexed or not, New Jerseys State Route 23 will not seem as sweet without it.

1551

13th century

17th century

1614

A mInoR HIsToRY oF / TImE WITHouT clocks JOSHUA FOER

month. Though Abbott Johns table is intended to aid ships by calculating the tidal height for any given hour, it can also be used in reverse to turn the tidal markings on the bank walls of the Thames into a makeshift clock.
1551 Of the sundials many practical shortcomings,

The digital wristwatch counts times passage in the oscillations of a quartz crystal; the atomic clock tallies the resonance of cesium atoms; the pendulum clock, the hourglass, and the clepsydra all transform the force of gravity into a measurement of time. But while nature may mete out times passage in these horological devices, it takes human observation of the heavens to set them. Even the most precise atomic clock must be periodically tweaked to account for variations in the earths rotation. Some clocks, however, are tuned more directly to nature.
1500 BC The first timekeeper is undoubtedly the gno-

mon, a vertical rod that casts its shadow on the ground. No one can be certain when the stick was first transformed into a sundial; however, records surviving from the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmosis III suggest that he carried with him a portable dial which presumably resembled a T-shaped stick that archeologists have discovered and dated to the same period.
13TH CeNTURy The first European tide-table, measuring

the most glaring is the fact that it is serviceable for only half the day. In order to calculate solar time after the setting of the sun, more complicated instruments like the astrolabe are required. A simplified night star clock called the horologium nocturnum, or nocturlabe, is first mentioned in a book on the art of navigation by the Spanish cosmographer Martn Corts de Albacar. The wheel-like device is a kind of analogue computer operated by sighting the position of a well-known constellation relative to the North Star and then twisting an inner dial to the appropriate date in order to reveal the hour.
17TH CeNTURy The cannon dial, also known as the

the flod at London brigge, is created by Abbott John of Wallingford. The thirty-column chart, now in the British Museum, measures the height of the river Thames throughout the day, and as it cycles through the lunar
14

noonday gun, is the first natural timekeeper with an alarm setting. It consists of a small cannon and a lens mounted on a horizontal dial. As the sun passes through high noon, its rays are concentrated through the precisely positioned magnifier, igniting a small amount of gunpowder and setting off the gun. (Courtesy David Ross, Cannon-Mania)
1614 The Paduan physician Santorio Sanctorius spends

the better part of thirty years eating, sleeping, working,

1728

1633

and making love in a specially constructed statical chair that is attached through his ceiling to the arm of a finely calibrated balance. His scientific mission: to weigh precisely all of the food and liquid he consumes as well as the sensible discharges excreted by his body. Subtracting one from the other, he is able to calculate his insensible perspiration, the weight lost through the pores and during respiration. By taking measurements while fasting, Sanctorius determines that the average invisible excretion over the course of a day is 1.25kggreater than the total loss through the more malodorous visible excretions. In addition to laying the foundation for the science of metabolism, Sanctoriuss ingenious experiment is also the first to discover that the human body operates according to a set of daily and monthly rhythms, proof that there is a clock inside each and every person. (Courtesy the Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library)
1633 The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher designs a

1728 Sawai Jai Singh II, rajah of Jaipur, orders the con-

struction of the Jantar Mantar complex, a monumental astronomical observatory built entirely out of mortar and stone. Among the observatorys eighteen colossal instruments is the Samrat Yantra, a ninety-foot-tall sundial that is the largest ever built. Though similar in design to other dials of the day, it is far and away the most accurate. In fact, its two-second interval markings made it one of the most precise timepieces then in existence.
1733 The celebrated Queens College Moon Dial, often

sunflower clock that takes advantage of the blossoms natural heliotropism, or tendency to turn towards the sun as it moves across the daytime sky. Kirchers sunflower floats on a piece of cork and has a needle embedded in its stem that points to the hour. After watching a demonstration of the clock, the French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc rightly concludes that it turns not by the force of the sun, but by an artfully concealed magnet. (Courtesy Museum of Jurassic Technology)
15

erroneously attributed to Isaac Newton, is painted on an exterior wall at Cambridge University. In addition to the traditional solar hours, the timepiece has an accompanying table that can be used to read the shadow cast by the moon. Even with the table, however, a series of four mathematical calculations has to be carried out by anyone wishing to know the time. The moons motion is so irregular that no moon-dial can possibly be accurate, and is to be regarded as providing an exercise in mental arithmetic rather than being an instrument of any practical value, writes the mathematician Geoffrey Colin Shephard. (Photo Jeremy Kessler, 2008.)
1751 Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy, divides the

flowering plants into three groups: the meteorici, which change their opening and closing times according to the weather conditions; the tropici, which change their opening and closing times according to the length of

1733

1751

the day; and the aequinoctales, which have fixed opening and closing times, regardless of weather or season. Linnaeus notes in his Philosophia Botanica that if one possessed a sufficiently large variety of aequinoctal species, it would be possible to tell time simply by observing the daily opening and closing of flowers. He comments, to the consternation of several local horologists, that his floral clock is so accurate that it could put all the watchmakers in Sweden out of business. Though Linneaus seems never to have actually planted an horologium florae, or flower clock, his plan is later taken up with great passion by a handful of nineteenth-century gardeners, who often arrange a dozen or more species in the manner of a circular clock face.
1862 The Horological Journal, the organ of the British

1887 During the same lectures to the Royal Society of

Horological Institute, reports the invention of an ornithological clock by an anonymous German woodsman. The clock takes advantage of the fact that certain species of songbirds are known to begin their songs consistently and precisely at set hours of the morning. Though the report is hazy in its details, it does tell us a few of the species engaged in this timekeeper: the green chaffinch (the earliest riser among all the feathered tribes) sings from 1 to 2 a.m., followed by the black cap from 2 to 3:30, the hedge sparrow from 2:30 to 3, the blackbird from 3:30 to 4, the lark from 4 to 4:30, the black-headed titmouse from 4:30 to 5:00, and finally the sparrow, which chirrups from 5 to 5:30 in the morning.
1

London in which he first describes the condition known as Downs Syndrome, the psychologist John Langdon Down also calls the scientific worlds attention to another disorder: Savant Syndrome. Among the ten original Earlswood asylum idiot savants that Down mentions in his speech is a seventeen-year-old patient who has a perfect appreciation of times passage without reference to a clock or even knowledge of how to read one. Since Downs original description, a handful of other time savants have been described in the medical literature, including a blind musical savant named Ellen currently living in California, whose gift, according to the psychologist Darold Treffert, was discovered one day when her mother let her listen to the time lady on the telephone. After listening for a short while to the recorded voice intone the hour and seconds, Ellen apparently set her own internal clock. Since then, she has been able to tell what time it is to the second, no matter the season.
1929 Dutch botanist Anthonia Kleinhoonte employs a

measuring device known as the aktograph to precisely record the rhythms of a bean leafs movement throughout the day. A thin filament attached to the leaf is connected to a stylus, which draws on a revolving smoke drum. As the leaf rises in midday, so too does a line rise on the drum, only falling back as the leaf begins to slump in the evening. Kleinhoontes measurements demonstrate that the plant lives according to a strict daily rhythm.

1998

1929 2012

Though it was not apparently Kleinhoontes intention, her device can be seen as the first working model of Kirchers sunflower clock.
1929 Ethologists Ines Beling and Karl von Frisch discov-

two hours, others as short as sixteen. It seems entirely random, though it isnt. In fact, his bodys temperature cycle and sleep cycle, normally aligned, have become unlinked, causing his life to be governed by two competing internal clocks.
1998 The worlds first digital sundial, inspired by a

er that common honeybees can be trained to arrive at a feeding site at specific times of the day, suggesting for the first time the possibility of an apian clock that would make use of a collection of bee populations trained to feed at different hours. Thirty years later, Max Renner sets up a pair of identical bee feeding rooms in Paris and New York, with the aim of finding out whether the bees calculate their feeding times based on external clues from the sun, or an internal clock. Renner trains forty bees in Paris to feed at exactly 8:15 p.m. and then transports them across the Atlantic via airplane. The next day, in their New York room, the bees come to their feeding station at exactly 8:15 p.m.Paris time.
1972 French speleologist and sleep researcher Michel

theorem first proposed by the mathematician Kenneth Falconer, is installed in a sundial park in Genk, Belgium. The creation of a trio of German inventors, the timepiece displays the hour and minute just as any standard digital clock would. However, it is entirely passive, and uses no electricity. Instead, the clock takes advantage of an ingenious masking system that translates the angle of the sun into digits.
2012 The Aluna Project, an illuminated forty-meter-

Siffre kisses his wife goodbye and then descends a 100-foot vertical shaft into Midnight Cave in Texas. He remains there alone for 1 days, isolated from the sun and without access to a clock, sleeping only when his body tells him to. On the thirty-seventh day of the Midnight Cave experiment, Siffre undergoes a strange physiological shift known as spontaneous internal desynchronization. Without his realizing it, his schedule becomes wildly erratic. Some days last as long as fifty1

wide glass-and-steel lunar clock powered by the tides of the Thames, is set to begin keeping time in London just before the summer Olympics. Promising to be a twentyfirst-century Stonehenge, the clock will actually extend the day by fifty minutes because of the discrepancy between lunar and solar timethe problem that first led Abbot John of Wallingford to create his thirteenthcentury tidal table. (Courtesy Aluna Limited. Image Mark Glean)

Opals at a jewelry re-sale shop on 14th Street, Manhattan. Photo Ryo Manabe.

coloRs / opAl EMILY ROYSDON

I dont believe that opal is a color. Perhaps it can describe a complicated faade, but it does not maintain itself as a homogenous, autonomous, seen-in-the-world color. Opals are unreliable. They always look different and are, in fact, colorless. I am not making this up. When I followed through on my initial skepticism, I learned that opal is a colorless, liquefied, water-jelly mineral that slips through the cracks of stones. What we refer to as opalthe rainbow sheen and color potpourriconsists of impurities in the silica content. It has one quality that we can relate to the concept of color: the bent-ray/
18

refracted light-ness of visibility. Other than that, I must insist that we acknowledge opal for what it isa gem, an object. To drive my point home, I testify that in order to see an opal with my own eyes I went to a jewelry re-sale shop on 14th Street. There I witnessed a woman selling her cache of jewels for cash. When she was offered $300, her head slumped and she was barely able to speak in her own defense. She needed more, and she wasnt going to get it. For a moment, we were together in a room full of excess; excess and exploitation. I to rebuke the opal, she to collect on her future. I want to consider opal beyond the boundaries of its usual signifiers. Lose color, lose gem. What proper-

ties does it boast in and of itself? Its slippery and always looks different. It accumulates in the right conditions, and is valued for its purity thats when I got it! Wealth. An opal is a conceptual, substitute icon of wealth. (Often milky white laced with rainbows! You see what I am saying.) Like a headlamp in a quarry, the analogy illuminates the face of the miner and the treasure. Lets take the opal to task. But lets do so with the transparency of the silica of which we are speaking. What is at risk for each of us to reveal the material conditions of our existence? It is hard to be forthright about what exactly we have in the world, and about how much more we want. How can we transform the dominant vision of wealth and see how our position in the economy is obscured by the myths of class mobility, poverty as a moral failing, and scarcity? I should be speaking in Is. How I persist with a scarcity model even though I have never missed a meal in my whole life. Should I donate more money to organizations that work on behalf of shared politics? Is it enough to be balls-out honest about my financial status? (At this very moment $2,210.92 in my WaMu Free Checking account, no savings but some form of an inheritance sometime in the future. I own some art and a valuable necklace that was my grandmothers. No real estate, no investments.) What about the environment and how I take great pleasure in flying around the world to do stuff? Well, all this not-so-cathartic disclosure is my way of getting to a point of connection and explication with myself as an imperfect example. Like an opal, my impurities reveal me. The macro on my micro is that it is important that people have a clear understanding of their resources, and how their resources are connected to what other people do and dont have. The thrust is to re-imagine a sense of connection, rather than consumption based on isolation, independence, and scarcity models. I want to consider how good it would feel not to want so much all the time, to get rid of that neck cramp from always looking up the class pyramid. Nary a stone would be cracked if not for the glimmer of impurity begging the hammer come down hard. I have been thinking about opals and wealth a lot recently, and talking to a brilliant friend, Dean Spade, about the potential of direct conversations on wealth and redistribution. Conversations to examine complicity, responsibility, and ethical living in capitalism. Feminist consciousness-raising groups came to mind as an apt model. This process of building a shared analysis from the knowledge already within the room seemed particularly relevant to address the history of a constituency ripe for this kind of social experiment. Why does it get
19

so uncomfortable when we try to talk about the politics of consumption and capital, real estate and inheritance? Why do we so quickly demur to apathy instead of challenging our habits, desires, and the depth of our needs? Why is shame shackled to both a trust fund and a working class past? What is at risk for us to acknowledge the material conditions of our lives? My archive accumulates. My material memory. Is of responsibility. I on unemployment, me and my absent fathers disability check. I am thirty. What is at risk for me? Where does my desire come from? What are the repercussions of my lifestyleon myself, on my own sense of justice, on my environment, on ours? What fear, what failure is attached to this reflection? What is enough? What about opal? How does its ambiguous classification as a color, gem, and object of desire play out? How does the imperfect jelly harden into the myth of meritocracy and upward mobility? How does wealth become so precious and precarious, solidified as a rainbow-hued stone to collect and protect? Lets transform the conceptual, substitute icon of wealth into a more intelligible equation. How can we understand SiO2n H2O?
Stable involved Over-committed twosomenever Hoping to Own Seeking insurance Overwhelmed toonastily Hating two Others
I thank Dean Spade for inspiration, extensive comments, and some precise language to articulate these ideas.

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above and throughout: From the book The Water Cure Illustrated, London, 1869.

HydropolIs Brian Dillon

Have i drunk enough water today? That tumblerful i downed on the way to my desk: was it sufficient to counter what im assured are the physiologically shrinking and drying effects of the black coffee at 8 a.m., not to mention last nights glass and a half of red wine? How ought i factor into the days hydration the effects of a forty-minute run first thing in the morning? This incipient throb in my right temple: does it presage a full-blown headache? are the vessels of the brain starting to contract already, damming up the flow of words and ideas? and what of the skin? is it supple enough, adequately aquified from day to day, to stave off for a time the signs of middle age? Best not to think, perhaps, of the liver, the kidneys, the soft tissues that for all i know are slowly desiccating as i write, crying out for the moisture that in my ignorance i have neglected to channel their way. am i, in short, in danger of succumbing to that peculiarly contemporary malaise: dehydration?
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among the many small anxieties that crowd at the edges of ones physical being in the early years of our century, few are so easily assuaged, so advertisers inform us, as this fear of drying out. a daily liter and a half of the pure element is what it takes, were told, to ensure that we dont shrivel. We should count ourselves historically fortunate that our pseudo-scientific imaginary does not demand a more thorough inundation, for this particular millennial craze is in part a curious return to the rigors of the Victorian water cure. in the middle of the nineteenth century, countless unhappy souls submitted themselves to the most alarming irrigations; a virtual archipelago of hydropathic, or hydrotherapeutic, institutions emerged in Europe, and latterly in the US , to restore dried-up, clogged, or plethoric bodies to their properly humid state.1 They were distinguished from the outset from the already established spa towns and seaside resorts that had flourished in the eighteenth century: hydrotherapy relied on the curative effects of cold water itself, and not on any invigorating minerals that it might contain.

By mid-century, the methods and machinery differed little from one establishment to another; the unwell were sluiced, inside and out, according to accepted techniques. in the early days of hydrotherapy, the patient might merely be rubbed down with a cold, wet sponge, but this soon gave way to more exacting treatments. The wet sheet was the most basic: the individual was wrapped in sopping linen, in turn swaddled in a thick quilt, then overlaid by a feather bed, until only his or her anxious face was visible. as the treatment could last for several hours, a drinking tap was often placed at the upper extremity, and a urinal of some sort inserted at the lower. released at length from this damp chrysalis, patients submitted, depending on symptoms and strength of constitution, to one of several sorts of bath: they dipped themselves in the plunge bath, sat up to their waists in the sitz bath, or inserted only their limbs in the arm and leg bath. Sturdier patients stood under the douche: a column of water descended from a variable height (sometimes up to twenty feet) and the subject gripped a horizontal pole lest he or she should
22

be knocked to the ground as the cataract pounded on the head and shoulders. in a potentially traumatic variation on the simple descending douche, an ascending version was trained from below on the genital area. Throughout the course of treatmentwhich might last weeks or months, and invariably required certain dietary restrictionscopious amounts of cold water were ingested daily. The list of ailments that hydrotherapists claimed to treat was impressively various, though it exempted some common killers of the era, such as consumption. nor could it remove the non-lethal agony of gout. (Both the gouty and the consumptive, however, were said to derive some comfort and alleviation of their symptoms from cold water, even if it stopped short of a cure.) The conditions that responded to a protracted and comprehensive soaking included asthma, pleurisy, measles, scarlatina, smallpox, rheumatic fevers, scrofula, hernia, ringworm, tic douloureux, tumors of the heart, liver, and various glands, syphilis, and mercury poisoning. These last two commonly went together, and it has

been estimated that up to half the clients of the first hydropathic establishments may have been syphilitics whose prior treatment with mercury had proven almost as debilitating as the disease itself. in all cases, what the hydropathist hoped for was a visible crisis of the patients system in the form of boils, itching, eczema, and efflorescence of the skin: all of these were said to result from prolonged use of cold water, and signaled the bodys efforts to rid itself of the corruptions within. if the skin failed to erupt, the purification might be effected instead via the bowels: the shivering, underfed patient was meant to rejoice at the onset of diarrhea. Hydrotherapy had its origins in the small mountain town of Grfenberg, two thousand feet up in austrian Silesia. Various explanations circulated as to how Vincent Priessnitz, a farmers son born in 1799, had come to discover the water cure. it was said that as a young boy he had happened upon a roe, recently shot by a hunter, dipping its wounds in a spring until it had recovered. at the age of thirteen, claimed an alternative founding myth, he had hurt his wrist and thumb while trying to catch a bird, and applied a wet bandage which caused a skin rash as the injury healed. at eighteen, according to another narrative, he was run over by a wagon; several physicians despaired of his recovery, but Priessnitz rose from his bed, pushed his broken ribs back into place against a window-sill, and had himself wrapped in cold wet bandages. after a year, he had almost completely recovered. Whatever his humble backstory, by the 1820s Priessnitzs fame as a healer was such that, at the instigation of local doctors, the regional authorities tried him for unlawful medical practice. His sponges were subject to careful scrutiny, but no drugs were found and he was acquitted. Several such cases followed, but the Water Demon of Grfenberg only drew more attention and acclaim, and in 1839 a commission sent from the imperial Home office in Vienna approved Priessnitzs controversial practice. Despite the austere accommodation available to visitors, sometimes shared with local livestock, the hydropathic university began to attract a respectable clientele: royalty, aristocracy, military officers, civil servants, clergymen, and even physicians and apothecaries. on arriving at Grfenberg, after pausing to admire a fountain dedicated to The Genius of Cold Water (erected by some satisfied patients from Moldavia and Wallachia), they were observed during their first ablutions by Priessnitz himself. Having read from
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the patients skin the state of his or her constitution, he recommended to his bathmen a particular course of treatment: some combination, perhaps, of the head bath, the sweating blanket, and the rubbing wet sheet. This last, recalled one visitor, was dexterously thrown over the head so as to create surprise and a slight shock.2 The patients days were strictly regulated: they rose at 4 a.m., were divested of any extraneous flannel garments or mufflers that might cocoon them against the bracing cold, and took strenuous exercise in the mountain air. By 1842, there were at least fifty hydropathic institutions in Germany, and many more elsewhere.3 They tended to refer back to the original for their authority Bridge of allan was the Scottish Grfenberg, Blarney the irish Grfenbergand to rely on the fame of the founder. Priessnitz, however, was the Socrates of hydrotherapeutic theory: he wrote nothing himselfnor did he read, lest he damage his brainand left the elaboration of his ideas to colleagues and successors. Two such acolytes were the founders of the English Grfenberg, Dr. James Wilson and Dr. James Manby Gully. Wilson claimed to have been the first English physician to visit Priessnitzs establishment, where he took 500 cold baths, 2400 sitz baths, spent 480 hours in wet sheets, and drank 3500 glasses of cold water. in 1842, he and Gullya graduate of the University of Edinburgh and the cole de Mdecine in Paris, and lately, like Wilson, a physician in londoneach set up their own establishment at Malvern, a spa town in Worcestershire noted for the purity of its springs. a decade later, it was rumored that each doctor earned 10,000 a year; among their patients were some of the most anxious Victorian dyspeptics and hypochondriacs: Charles Dickens, alfred lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle. Here we are, wrote Carlyle to ralph Waldo Emerson in the summer of 1851, assiduously walking on the sunny mountains, drinking of the clear wells, not to speak of wet wrappages, solitary sad steepages and other singular procedures.4 The most famous resident at Tudor House, home to Gullys Hydropathic Establishment, was Charles Darwin. in March 1849, having appraised himself of the fees, Darwin took his wife Emma and their six children, as well as a governess and servants, to Malvern. installed in a rented house, he gave himself up daily to the aquatic ministrations of Gullys staff. He rose, he wrote to his sister Susan, at a quarter to seven, and was immediately scrubbed with a wet towel for two or three minutes: his personal washerman scrubbed from behind, Darwin himself in front. He then drank a tumbler of water, dressed himself, and walked for twenty

24

minutes: i like all this very much. He alludes to a wet compress worn throughout the dayit was refreshed by dipping in cold water every two hoursbut does not say where exactly about his person it was placed. Darwin felt the beneficial effect of Gullys personality before that of his treatment: i like Dr. Gully muchhe is certainly an able man. He is very kind and attentive. Before long he also reported himself feeling stronger, and his stomach, the seat of the illness that had sent him to Malvern, somewhat improved: i expect fully that the system will greatly benefit me, and certainly the regular Doctors could do nothing. Physiologically it is most curious how the violent excitement of the skin produced by simple water has acted on all my internal organs.5 in 1846, Gully had published a book entitled The WaterCure in Chronic Disease, and it is in these pages that we can properly discern the nature of the medical and cultural fantasy to which patients like Darwin responded. Central to Gullys apologia for his profession is the notion of a natural sympathy between one organ of the body and another. according to this doctrine, the brain, for example, may be adversely affected by physical events elsewhere. irritation of the stomach leads to stimulation of the blood vessels of the brain: these become congested or plethoric, resulting in a feeling of fullness in the head, impatience and irritability of temper, apoplectic congestion, paralytic congestion, hypochondriasis, and, in the worst cases, insanity or drivelling imbecility.6 Pains in the shoulders or the head; chronic irritation of the liver; tic douloureux of the face, arms, fingers, or thighs; asthma or consumption; tetter, scurf, acne, psoriasis, and dandruff; tenderness and swelling of the feet; the exquisite pain of gout: all of these and many more may be blamed on the sympathetic effect of the ailing stomach upon the body and mind of the patient. at the furthest extreme of his acute new sensitivity, he may become so tender and transparent that he can actually feel a cloud passing in the sky; he may report changes in the wind during the night, or predict snowfalls ten or twelve hours before any other sign appears. The action of cold water upon the body of such a patient consists precisely in setting up a kind of relay or feedback system between the inner organs and the skin. Water draws the blood away from lethargic or shiftless organs and towards the surface of the body. There the excess blood is dissolved, and the remainder returns revivified and ready to flush out the morbid matter that has blocked the bodys fine conduits and culverts. The
25

same effect may be had, writes Gully, by adhering to a healthy diet, taking regular exercise in the fresh air, and refraining from intellectual activity. (like Priessnitz, Gully seems to have considered reading and writing especially injurious to the brain, which perhaps explains why so much of his book is made up of lengthy quotations from certain pamphlets by his colleague Wilson.) Cold water, however, ensures a speedier recovery:
The appetite, rendered keen by the ensemble of the plan pursued, and especially by the water drinking, leads to the digestion of good food, for the processes all tend to the reduction of irritation in the digestive organs; the life in the open air perfects the blood formed from the food; all the processes tend to draw that blood towards the exterior surface and relieve the interior organs; the water drinking and exercise increase the chemico-vital changes of the blood which waste it; and, as the old morbid fluid dissipates, improved digestion is making a better, which is to bring about a healthier nutrition of the frame. It will be seen that the parallel [with diet, air, and exercise] is complete: and as the means of the water cure are only, as it were, an exaggeration and systematization of those to be found in the natural agentsfood, air, and so forth, it may very properly be denominated the hygienic water treatment.7

one might plausibly assume that hygiene is at the heart of the hydropathic imagination, that it is the very purity of the water with which the patient is drenched within and without that ensures his or her recovery. But cleanliness as such is not exactly the metaphoric ideal to which the water cure aspires. rather, it seems that it is the action or movement of water, rather than its rinsing or laving effects, that practitioner and patient hope to promote and to obscurely emulate, even ultimately embody. For sure, water as substance is symbolically opposed to the turbid, at worst alluvial, thickness of blood. it is contrasted too to all manner of oily or unctuous substances: in The Metropolis of the Water Cure, an anonymous account of a treatment at Malvern published by a restored invalid in 1858, we are told there is nothing so likely to draw the gravy out of a man as the lamp bath. it is for all the world like being a fat goose before a slow fire. a bathman attending one such patient, recalls the author, regularly wiped up rich unctuous drops of spermaceous alderman. But the fantasy at work in hydropathy is not strictly to do with the purity or corruption of a liquid: it is rather a question of how that substance moves within and around the body, and

how that flow or filtration allows us to figure the body as an almost inorganic entity. The body is imagined as a medium through which water trickles, percolates, and seethes. it is pictured, in other words, as a kind of geology: composed of uniform strata rather than the gross entanglement of vessels and organs, a medium that can be soaked through and retain its integrity and strength. it is a vision that survives in the tiny schematic drawings of underground springs and gravel beds that appear on the labels of bottled water. We are not meant merely to admire the pure source of the productwe are also asked to believe that our bodies are as solid, porous, and consistent as a hillside somewhere in Yorkshire, Colorado, or Provence. By the 1870s, the vogue for hydrotherapy had declined to the extent that it was only the eccentric and the elderly who still resorted to its rigors. For many of its early enthusiasts and later adopters, the treatment manifestly did not work. But the reasons for the slump are also inherent in the brief popular success of the practice: as hydropathic establishments flourished in the 1850s, they began to offer several sorts of ancillary treatment and diversion, such as mesmerism, homeopathy, clairvoyance, and electrical stimulation. restrictions on diet and alcohol intake were gradually lifted, and even the temperature of the water used was subject to negotiation. Dr. Gully railed against the slipping of standards; in his Guide to Domestic Hydrotherapy of 1869, he wrote: i have known a medical practitioner treatand amuse his lady patients by putting them into a tepid sitz bath containing a wine glass of port wine! varied occasionally by the addition of oatmeal. in the end, however, it was Gully himself who finally and irredeemably corrupted the reputation of hydropathy. in 1876, aged sixty-eight, he was questioned at an inquest into the death by poisoning of a barrister, Charles Bravo. Gully and Mrs. Bravo had previously had an affair, while she was married to a man called ricardo. Both Gully and the Bravos had settled in the town of Balham. a verdict was returned of murder by a person or persons unknown, but James Manby Gullys reputation was in ruins. The Times opined: a more distressing picture of the consequences of indulging unlawful passion has never been drawn. Gullys name was struck from the registers of all the medical societies to which he belonged.
1 The terms hydropathy and hydrotherapy were used more or less interchange-

2 E. S. Turner, Taking the Cure (London: Michael Joseph, 1967), p. 148. 3 Their spread did not go unchallenged: in March 1842, The Lancet condemned

hydrotherapy as having originated in that hotbed of absurdities, Austria, where the crushed minds of men that cannot bear the healthful fruits of free investigation run riot in the extravagances of fantastic credulity or ignorantly strive to breathe life into the dead superstitions and one-idead theories of the Middle Ages. 4 Ibid., pp. 174175. 5 Ralph Colp, To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), p. 41. 6 James Manby Gully, The Water-Cure in Chronic Disease (New York: Samuel R. Wells, 1873), p. 19. 7 Ibid, pp. 302303.

ably. Hydropathy, The Lancet pointed out regularly as the water cure grew in popularity, was an etymological absurdityit denoted, literally, water death.

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above and overleaf: Patients hitting the machines hard at the Zander Institute in Stockholm, 1890s. Courtesy Tekniska Museet/National Museum of Science and Technology, Stockholm.

THe orIgINs of Cybex spACe CarolYn DE la PEa

The Swedish physician Gustav Zanders institute in Stockholm, founded in the late nineteenth century and stocked with twenty-seven of his custom-built machines, was the first gym in the sense that we know the word today. His mechanical horse was an early version of the Stairmaster, a contraption for cardiovascular fitness designed to imitate a natural activity. His stomach-punching apparatus evokes contemporary ab-crunching machines. What makes Zander so important, for anyone trying to trace the Cybex family tree, is what happened when his machines, created in a European cultural context, immigrated to the US in the early twentieth century. They are prototypes of the workout equipment now ubiquitous in american life. in Stockholm, Zanders institute primarily treated children and male workers. Supported by the state, it was equally accessible to those with and without means. The complex mechanized system was believed
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uniquely capable of correcting physical impairments brought about both by accidents of birth and by hard labor. a follower of Per Hendrik lings movement cure, Zander argued that the key to health was not blood letting, purging, or strenuous acrobatics (other allopathic cures of the time). instead, one needed to practice progressive exertion, the controlled, systematic engagement of the bodys muscles in order to build strength. in the US , however, Zander sought and found a very different clientele. His award at the 1876 Centennial and international Exposition in Philadelphia for best mechanical design provided a launching pad for marketing Zander machines as upscale devices for the rising american business class. His machines offered, Zander explained to an american audience, a preventative against the evils engendered by a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office. in fact, Zander claimed, there was no treatment quite so appropriate for these emerging white-collar men (and their wives) as his mechanized system. While doctors pills and potions might be easier

28

to procure and quicker to ingest, the increased wellbeing and capacity for work gained by those who used his machines, he argued, was rich compensation for the time bestowed on them. By the early twentieth century, extensive collections of Zander machines could be found at elite health spas such as Homestead in Hot Springs, arkansas, and at private institutes such as the one Zander set up near Central Park in new York. access to these health machines was a mark of status at the turn of the century. Health spas and gymnasia were not subsidized by the state as they were in Sweden, and the american working class would not have been able to afford the fees required to receive Zander treatments. nor were the working class thought to need such treatments; their hearty bodies were not yet impaired by the sedentary habits of affluent modern life. in mechanized workouts, white-collar americans pumped up their own superiority. By declaring that fitness equaled a perfectly balanced physique, rather than the ability to perform actual physical tasks, body power was shifted from laborers to loungers. if to our twenty-first-century eye, Zanders horse rider hardly looks fit, one must see her in context. not only is she riding a horse (itself a mark of status), but one whose rhythms had been perfected by science. Her mechanical horse, hooked up to an engine, delivered a precise set of trots per second and provided her with a workout that had no equal. The same applies to the suited gentleman receiving his requisite abdominal punches. once health was separated from tasks and turned into tone, machines became a way for those with means to define their bodies as superior. in this respect, Zanders machines do resemble our contemporary Stairmasters, Cybexes, and Pilates devices. Consider how much you pay, if you do pay, to go to the gym. Consider that complicated regimen that the instructor puts you on at your first complimentary consultation: fifteen reps on the thigh extender, thirteen on the bicep pulleys, two sets of ten on the abdominal flexers. Consider the ways in which gyms, especially elite gyms, still function as pick-up joints for the affluent and beautiful. of course, gyms are far more availableand affordablethan they were in Zanders day. Even so, the time to spend working on each muscle and the ability to separate muscular labor from actual physical work continues to bestow a particular superior status on those who sculpt at the gym over those who are merely strong. We are, in other words, still suiting up by going to the gym. its in the expressions worn by the people in
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Zanders advertisements that the real distinction between workouts of 1908 and workouts of 2008 can be found. Take the horse rider. She sits casually astride the machine, one arm out holding the reins on her anthropomorphized device. Her body leans slightly back. Her eyes gaze up at the camera, almost ecstatic, head thrown to the right a bit, a slight smirk on her face. She wears hose and heels, and the strap of her dress has fallen off the shoulder. The abdominal man is more formal but equally relaxed: though his posture is erect, he looks straight ahead, expressionless. His toes extend slightly in the air, revealing that he is actually somewhat reclinedhis weight sinks into the device behind him. Their experiences bear little resemblance to what happened to me at the gym this morning. My twenty minutes on the elliptical trainer were anything but relaxed, reclined, or serene. instead, i struggled to keep pace, manically following the terrain ahead that was mapped out on the monitor (hill climb; level four, two minutes; level six, five minutes; level eight, etc.) as i clumsily followed instructions to move my arms forward and back while my legs were told to go in the opposite direction. next to me, on all sides, were other people similarly focused on fulfilling the demands of their machines. Stair climbers, treadmills, reclined bikes, erect bikes, elliptical trainers with movable rowing arms, elliptical trainers without arms. in all, there were eight different machines to choose from just among the cardio devices. and each had an intricate, and individual, set of demands it required from users. Why do our machines demand so much of us? and how might Zanders, placed in their own cultural moment, help us understand our apparent desire to capitulate to their demands? in fact, Zanders machines succeeded precisely because they demanded little of their users. all you need to do is sit down in the saddle, explained the first american guide to Zanders horse, and the mechanical steed gallops away with you. The electrically driven abdominal and horse machines were designed to administer force to users, not to require force from them. in part, this vogue for passive machines can be attributed to the american desire for convenience. This was not limited to mechanized exercise: Mark Twain wrote of his enthusiasm for osteopathy (the systematic manipulation of the bones and muscles) because, it is vigorous exercise, and others do it for you. More important, however, was an understanding of the body as a system of potential energy, energy that could be released only by regular and perfectly

controlled force. This was the theory behind massage, commonly used at Dr. John Harvey Kelloggs institute at Battle Creek to revitalize worn nerves and tired muscles. Human variability, however, prevented perfect uniform force from reaching the body: one masseur might be stronger than another, one might tire while treating the legs before reaching the feet. Zanders machines eliminated those threats: the machine never tired. as the brochure for the abdominal machine explained, the true benefit of being hit by a set of perfectly rhythmic oscillating leather disks was that sunken vital energy is raised. But was it? Massage, which is what these machines provided, can relax and invigorate, but it does not actually release hidden energy in the body and bring it to the surface. Muscle tone was improved, but not dramatically given the passive pose struck by most patients. The true benefit of Zanders machines, i would argue, was what one promoter termed their mental effect. This, explained one american brochure, was produced by the huge and complicated machines, which it described as a valuable adjunct. in an age of gears and girders, the opportunity to put ones body in the path of new, large, and powerful electric machines may in fact have been part of the benefit. Technology was anxiety-provoking, unreliable, and mysterious. in this context, stepping in front of a mechanical punching partner and riding the trotting horseand emerging not only safe but healthywould have been a rush. Zanders patrons derive their serene pleasure from placing themselves at the mercy of the machine. Zanders bulky machines disappeared by the 1930s, replaced by smaller, more compact equipment and eclipsed by new priorities brought by war and depression. Today, we find ourselves sweating away on our own updated Zander machines. is it possible that when we select from complex menus of simulated terrain options, struggle to keep pace with the machines demands, and precariously balance on multiple moving parts, that we are needlessly complicating our own mechanical interactions for similar mental effects? in an age of iPod soundtracks, customized amazon suggestion lists, and onStar GPS that enables vehicles to practically drive themselves, might we be looking for active complexity for the same reasons our Zander predecessors sought to be passively content?

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A woman poses on a horse riding simulator at the Zander Institute in New York, 1908. Courtesy Museum of the City of New York.

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ArTIsT projeCT: MosCow drAwINg Dan PErJoVSCHi

Dan Perjovschis expansive, sardonic mode of sociopolitical cartooning inscribes itself directly onto public spaces, turning walls and windows into wry message boards. The work featured on the following poster was created for the 2007 Moscow Biennial and executed on windows in the russian capitals partially completed Federation Tower, a ninety-three-story skyscraper in the city center designed to be Europes tallest building upon its scheduled completion in 2009.

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THe wrITINg of sToNes Marina WarnEr

roger Caillois (19131978), polymath, aesthetic philosopher, historian of science, and social analyst of ritual and belief, was friends with andr Breton and a fellow Surrealist; but in 1934 they parted over the Surrealist commitment to mystery for its own sake: Caillois was an investigator of a more empirical temper. Cailloiss disagreement with Breton arose when the two men were shown some Mexican jumping beans: beans that will suddenly twitch and take a leap into the air. Caillois conjectured that there was a worm or larva inside them, and he wanted to dissect one to find out; Breton objected roundly, denouncing Caillois as a low-grade positivist who refused the marvelous and defaced the poetic by wanting explanationsin other words, Caillois was of the party that wants to unweave the rainbow. For Breton, hasard objectifobjective chance or unpredictabilityadmirably disrupted the harmonious patterns of reason and delivered the mind-expanding stimulus of disorder: convulsive beauty. Caillois wrote a lettre de rupture to Breton, which confirmed the depth of his quarrel with Surrealism, declaring that he wanted research and poetry together. He went on, i want the irrational to be continuously overdetermined, like the structure of coral; it must combine into one single system everything that until now has been systematically excluded by a mode of reason that is still incomplete.1 Three years after he quarreled with Breton, Caillois became one of the founders, alongside Georges Bataille and Michel leiris, of the so-called Collge de Sociologie in Paris, which was dedicated to exploring the nature of the sacred in society. Though none was a follower of any particular faith, all three believed in the sacred as a system that exceeded current understanding of reason and psychologythey were experimental mystics, mostly renegades from Catholicism. Two years later, Caillois published an important study of the topic, called LHomme et le Sacr (1939). The three men were fascinated by magical processes, by cosmology, and by stories that anthropologists were bringing back from the four quarters of the globe. The journals and other publications they createdsuch as Minotaure, Documents and Cailloiss own Diogne reveal a restless and sometimes prurient probing of other cultures, especially their members intimacy with altered consciousness, magic rituals, and mysteries of knowledge. a desire to discover stratagems to accede to worlds beyond the senses fired their passion for the votive art, dances, and music which constituted the presence of the sacred.2
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Cailloiss difference from Breton expresses very richly a fissure that runs through magical thinking and becomes more important in the last centuryand perhaps this one. The Mexican jumping bean harbors a larva which, by springing into the air and landing elsewhere, helps to propagate its host. This marvel belongs to natural as opposed to supernatural magic, but it possesses the kinetic unpredictability of oracular devices: like the twitching of a dowsers hazel wand, the quivering intestines of a sacrificed bird, the ouija boards sliding glass, even the Chinese fortune-telling fish that curls up in the palm of your hand to show how passionate you are, it moves to forces in the universe imperceptible to human senses, and consequently seems to illuminate a particular destinythe truthseekers fate. Bretons uses of enchantment tightened the bond between the self and chance: Surrealist practices such as automatic writing, projective imagination, and cadavres exquis doodles enhance subjectivity; these are magical technologies of the individual self. But Caillois made a different rationalizing move out of this impasse. in the preface to Le Mythe et lHomme in 1938, he identified two fundamental attitudes of the mind, shamanism, displaying the power of the individual who struggles against the natural order of reality, and manism, showing the pursuit through self-abandon of an identification of self and non-self, consciousness and the external world.3 This is a very neat linguistic rhyme from two altogether different roots: shaman from russian Siberian nomadic culture, and mana from the Maori concepts of the holy, are both terms introduced into Europe by nineteenth-century ethnography. For Caillois, the aggressivity and power-hunger of magiciansand religious leadersbelong to shamanism, whereas mysticism and poetry belong with manism. He further characterized these different modes of magical thinking as Satanistthe shamansand, on the other hand, luciferian, after the angel of light who wanted knowledge. Caillois, insisting on cutting open the jumping bean and striking out in his luciferian empirical quest for knowledge, was mounting a rescue operation of magic from the realm of irrational, human imagination, resisting the inward turn of the uncanny, and relocating magical thinking out there. There were strong motives for turning magical thinking toward contemporary scientific inquiry, as discoveries and inventions detected and harnessed new, impalpable powers. For one thing, Caillois has his precursors, such as conjurors who early on grasped the potential of new scientific instrumentsnot least magic lanterns, camera obscuras, and

Episode from Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso, painted on stone. Museo Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence.

Tuscan ruin marble. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

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microscopes. in his letter to Breton, Caillois insisted on the marvellousness in science: he remonstrated that the newly discovered theories of the atom had collapsed all earlier thinking about nature; here was a form of the Marvellous that absolutely required a new philosophy (writing in 1934, he was being prescient). a little while after the incident with the beans, when the conflict had acquired a certain moment and fame, Breton explained that Caillois hadnt understood him. He would not have been opposed to cutting one open, he said, but he was determined that all the possibilities that the mystery offered for reverie, dream, and wonder should be exhausted before doing so.4 it does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against dreaming, and Breton was wrong to think Cailloiss investigative methods opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking, which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois was equally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond the subjective self he was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in actual phenomena. in this sense he was more of a believerthough not in a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits. But the distinction cannot be held hard and fast as a standoff between subjectivity and objectivity. as Peter Galison has commented on the rorschach test, prime trophy of Surrealisms long reach, no account of rorschach subjectivity (how we characteristically perceive our world) would be possible without a concomitant characterization of objectivity (how the world is without that distortion). We therefore need a joint epistemic project addressing the historically changing and mutually conditioning relation of inside and outside knowledge.5 Caillois spent his thinking life trying to work out this position. The quarrel with Breton throws light on the survival of ancient wisdom within the newest scientific processes developed probing and analyzing matter. Caillois is in fact not the sole participant in this twentiethcentury aesthetic turn of the oracular tradition. His writing grows gradually ever closer to the precise observation, combined with lyrical delirium, that is found in the prose and poetry of Paul Valry as well as the poetic phenomenology of Francis Ponge. Valry, responding to the discovery of the electromagnetic field, had also found in material phenomena the proof of a secret,
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metaphysical order. These new frontiers of knowledge influenced psychic research, in symbiosis with the invention of new communications systems. approaches to the hieroglyphic universe found in the new science of the seventeenth century offer a perspective on the modern science of the twentieth, when divination changed direction but did not lose momentum. Divining processes help define the character of magical thinking: first, because their prime goal is knowledge, especially of events and outcomes hidden in timemagical thinking yearns to overcome human limits, especially the contingencies laid upon us by the physical constraints of the here and now. Secondly, they posit some power that orders and patterns phenomena and freights them with significance, if only they could be rendered legible, scrutable; this order obeys a unifying energy in the cosmos, which aligns the particular incident or being with a general and universal order according to a correlation between microcosm and macrocosm. This kind of system also finds expression in another magical system, the network of natural correspondences, wrought in a variety of ways (pictorial resemblance, synaesthetic relations, verbal punning), as in Baudelaires famous sonnet, influenced by Swedenborg:
Nature is a temple where living pillars Let sometimes emerge confused words ...

Belief in invisible lattices of significant meaning leads to a third pillar of magical thinking that some individuals are uniquely gifted to interpret encrypted messages. Such people are gifted to tune in to the imperceptible transmissions emanating from phenomena, to sense the presence of hidden aquifers, pick up the ominous aura in a room before a disaster, or scry the floating of an egg yolk in water for news of ships at sea. But this third principle, while warranting the importance of seers, clairvoyants, magi, sibyls, mediums, and channelers, is not indispensable to the penetrating, oracular optic: sometimes, like the guard on the battlements of Elsinore, anyone and everyone can see the ghost and hear its dreadful warning. Materialist mystics, among whom i count Caillois, do not search for self-knowledge, nor for foreknowledge of their destiny, the sirens secret; but they emphatically investigate hidden meanings and scan the deepest horizons of time into infinity: the world turns into an inexhaustible book written in hieroglyphs. They apply the occult wisdom of renaissance neoplatonists and their
opposite: An eye agate from Uruguay. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

37

38

magical cosmology, linking microcosm and macrocosm according to principles which inspired romantic metaphysics, above all in Germany: Goethes anti-newtonian critique and his counter-Enlightenment conviction that the superstitions and folklore of a culture contained intimations of deep knowledge have gained rather than lost ground. Superstition, wrote the German poet, actually only seizes false means in order to satisfy a genuine need. it is therefore neither so reprehensible as it is considered, nor so infrequent in so-called enlightened ages and among enlightened people.6 He continued, We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all. We do not know what stirs in it and how it is connected with our intelligence. This much is certain, under particular conditions the antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical limitations.7 The new horizons of geology, biology, and, above all, physics and mathematics beckoned to literary imaginations, where ancient ideas of magical correspondences, action at a distance, and fields of energy were re-activated and refreshed. Magical thinking in the nineteenth century consequently involved rational attempts at decipherment; its underlying impulse towards intelligible, cogent meaning paradoxically moved it into the traditional terrain of the occult, of sorcery, and shamanism; all its wealth of ingenuity in coming up with irrational measures remained directed at turning the world into a sign system. To the triad of signs set forth by C. S. Peirceindex, image, diagrama fourth form of picturing could be added: the cipher or enigma. in order to decode such signs, various magical principles come into play: a trust in chance as a revelatory organizational tool (a throw of the dice); a belief in microcosmic-macrocosmic relations, which holds that underlying unifying forces impart significance to the appearance of marks and patterns in nature, in phenomena such as cloud formations, figured stones, and spontaneous images; and thirdly, the view that these forces enjoy a different relation to time itself, a magical relation which creates coincidence across time and space, and meaningful correspondences. all three principles return in the twentieth-century aesthetic of organic natural symbolism. as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the mind resist meaninglessness; it invents stories to explain haphazard incidents, and to provide reasons and origins; the amorphous, the inchoate, the formless, have beckoned irresistibly to the shaping powers of thought and imagination. Humans are polyglot creatures of language; signs attract meanings, and symbols stick to forms, verbal and visual. Pattern, design,
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system,significationsmeaning has accrued to every sort of natural phenomenon. The rorschach test represents the most common and familiarscientific!use of icasms, applying for medical ends the idea that the human mind can make sense of forms without inherent meanings, and that the signification the observer discovers there conveys genuine insight into the observers own character and fate. Here the seers role plays back and forth between the two people involved: the patient reads the signs, and the doctor then interprets the import of the reading and projects the interpretation back on the interpreter. The subjectivity of scrying raised a specter of fallibility, and a struggle consequently began taking place to free the processes of decipherment from this debateability; science, as ever, seemed to offer the hope that there might exist a stable field of meaning, a language of things, beyond human error and contingency. Visiting london in 1894, the young poet Paul Valry was excited to a state of frenzy by his readings in the new physicsespecially James Clerk Maxwells Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century were refashioning the perception and the very concept of the physical world: the invisible hand behind the signatures was identified with a difference, and the effect was indeed electric: in Maxwells revelation of invisible lines of force, Valry recognized a key metaphor for the role of imagination in poetic vision, which could also allow phenomena that cannot be directly perceived to come into being and combine together as objects of mental contemplation. For Valry, this work needed an understanding of mathematics: he wanted to perform in poetry a kind of linguistic algebra that would render intelligible the elusive and impalpable geometry of reality. The study of my imagination he wrote in his london notebook, has led me to considerations of mechanics and geometrics, which is hardly astonishing or hypnotizing. it is sometimes possible. role of time, of space, of mass.8 This movement of Valrys exultant thought, as it follows the lines of forces in the electromagnetic field to the physical architecture of space-time and mass, led him to posit a logic of the imagination which attunes human consciousness with phenomena according to deep symmetries that remain invisible and impalpable
opposite: A septarian stone from Germany. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

in the ordinary order of thingslike sound and radio waves, like the interior of the nucleus. The same thought returns in the ecstatic prose poetry of roger Caillois two generations later, as he contemplates rocks and stones, meteorites and crystals. He called stones lore du songe the shore of dreaming and he amassed a wonderful collection, which he left to the Museum of national History in Paris where you can go and look at them; he also wrote two luminous books about stones. These are not about precious stones such as diamonds and rubies but about dendrites, agates, Chinese scholars stonespebbles and rocks that look like nothing much at first but can open up wonders under contemplation. Pierres (Stones) from 1966 is a Valrylike prose poem, intense and rhapsodical. They lead him to understanding the physical make-up of the world, its algebra, vertigo, and order.9 He exults in their inscrutability and their lack of affect, their silence, their sheer stoniness. When Caillois reads the writing of stones, when he pores over the whorls and swirls in an agate, he ponders the revelation of cosmic time they grant him. They provide moreover, taken on the spot and at a certain instant of its development, an irreversible cut made into the fabric of the universe. like fossil imprints, this mark, this trace, is not only an effigy, but the thing itself stabilized by a miracle, which attests to itself and to the hidden laws of our shared formation where the whole of nature was borne along.10 How did the circles in the stone grow therelike tree rings, like ripples in a pond? lines of force exert their power uniformly through space-time at any scale, no matter how small, or how vast. as Darcy Wentworth Thompson expressed it in On Growth and Form:
We are apt to think of mathematical definitions as too strict and rigid for common use, but their rigour is combined with all but endless freedom. The precise definition of an ellipse introduces us to all the ellipses in the world We discover homologies or identities which were not obvious before, and which our descriptions obscured rather than revealed: as for instance, we learn that, however we hold our chain, or however we fire our bullet, the contour of the one or the path of the other is always mathematically homologous.11

The writing in the rock is the signature of time itself, captured as Valryan forms in movement, displaying their growth and articulation over eons in the stilled swirls of their inner core, the camouflage stripes and fault-lines of their structure, their veins and cells; it is possible to see clearly, vertiginously, in these sections through a pebble
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or a rock the flow of organic matter as it took shape and petrified. Throughout Pierres, Caillois writes in a heightened poetic prose, and he discovers an alter ego in the eccentric Taoist painter and governor, Mi Fu, who in the twelfth century found ecstasy in caves filled with stalactites and stalagmites and neglected his duties (a Chinese Prospero) for this secret knowledge, this art which could render initiates immortal. like Mi Fu, Caillois develops a passion to collect stones that are then arrayed in three different but proximate categoriesbizarre, insolite (unusual), and fantastique. like the Taoist, he discovers in stones not beauty but lasting standards and the very idea of beauty, i mean the inexplicable and useless addition to the complexity of the world.12 By the end, Caillois has surrendered to the objects of his study: the ideal state is to let nature pass into you.13 By dint of his enraptured thinking on stones, he feels that he is more alive than ever, chased by the wind of his passionate responses. But he has himself also turned to stone, he feelsand he delights in his metamorphosis. He too recognized in his feeling for stones the operations of a logique de l imaginaire: this logic of the imagination is rooted in the laws of space and time, light and color, evolution and decay, naturally evolving shapes and naturally occurring rhythms, and it provides the underlying structure of aesthetics. Caillois praises especially the kaleidoscopic metamorphosis of phenomena such as flames and waterfalls.14 in his second work focusing on stones, LEcriture des pierres (The Writing of Stones), written towards the end of his life, Caillois struggled to formulate his credo about where his decipherment might lead : The tissue of the universe is continuous he proposed. i can scarcely refrain, from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.15 With this principle, Caillois expands on how a cluster of certain natural circumstances, proclaim, or illustrate, more spectacularly than is usually the case, but at the same time in a manner almost obligatorily reticent and cryptic, the existence of fundamental constants which ensure the latent continuity of the tissue of the world. Then the object makes a sign, becomes sign. it attracts onto itself that exact imagination, which reveals the object more than inventing it.16 The marvelous in nature offers given or found works of art, such as stones, which then shape and lead human aesthetics (we would now say consciousness is hard-wired to respond) from delight to horror,

desire to repulsion. He concludes, Philosophers have not hesitated to identify the real and the rational. i am persuaded that a different bold step would lead to discover the grid of basic analogies and hidden connections which constitute the logic of the imaginary.17 oddly, this perception offered by stones returns us to ancient metaphorical visions of the cosmos; in ovids Metamorphoses, inorganic and organic life, stone and flesh, do not stand as opposite poles but flow and fuse along the continuum uniting all things. Valrys impulse to find a literary analogue operating with language for the new physics vision of nature doesnt disrupt poetrys endeavor or twist it from a long-established orbit. The search for metaphor can march with the experimental method of science, as roger Caillois the manist believedand practiced in his writing and his thought.
A different version of this text appeared in English and Italian under the title The Language of Stones / Il Linguaggio delle pietre in the recent book Joan Jonas, ed. Anna Daneri (Milan: Charta, 2007).

1 Roger Caillois, letter of 27 December 1934 to Andr Breton, in Claudine

Frank, ed. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham, N.C, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 8486. 2 See the fine exhibition catalogue by Dawn Ades, Simon Baker, Caroline Hancock, and Denis Hollier, eds. Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (London: Hayward Gallery, 2006). 3 Denis Hollier, introduction to Anatole Lewitzky, Shamanism, in Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 19371939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 250. 4 Roger Caillois, Intervention Surraliste, in Cases dun chiquier (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 211. 5 Peter Galison, Image of Self, in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk (New York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 292. 6 Ernst Grumach, Goethe und der Antike (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1949), quoted in Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, l992), p. 168.
7 Goethe, letter of 23 July 1820, quoted in Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, op. cit. p. 173. 8 Paul Valry, in Florence de Lussy, ed., Carnet indit dit Carnet de Londres

[1894] (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 114. 9 Roger Caillois, Pierres (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 8. Translation by Marina Warner. 10 Ibid, p. 117. Shared formation here translates Cailloiss phrase lance commune, literally shared thrownness, which evokes the working of clay on a potters wheel. Translation by Cabinet and Marina Warner. 11 DArcy Wentworth Thompson, Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 1027. 12 Roger Caillois, Pierres , op. cit. p. 88. Translation used here is drawn from Jean Burrell, Extracts from Stones , Diogenes , vol. 52, no. 3, 2005, pp. 91-92. 13 Ibid., p. 103. Translation by Cabinet and Marina Warner. 14 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones [1970], trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985), p. 100. 15 Ibid., pp. 103104. 16 Roger Caillois, La Pieuvre: Essai sur la logique de l imaginaire (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1973), p. 229. Translation by Marina Warner. 17 Roger Caillois, Pierres , op. cit., p. 230. Translation by Marina Warner.

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THe IMAgINAry eNgINeer KriS lEE

During a slide lecture in 1970, Karl Hans Janke laid out for the audience his radical vision for producing infinite quantities of energy. Jankes method, which did not require any fuel, relied on a new conception of the atom that could be used to harness the magnetic energy of the universe: My atom, on the other hand, could be called a space-electron atom. Since countless space-electrons are turned into energy in my power plant, it would be correct to call this a nuclear power plant. in contrast to the Soviet atom, i refer to my atom as the German atom. as the lecture continued, Janke found occasion to lament the neglect from which his revolutionary scientific work had suffered: its both strange and unfortunate that, over the twenty years in which ive lived in Hubertusburg, no government official has ever noticed or even shown interest in my work. Jankes very next sentence suggests a cause for this official neglect. in sum, i would like to state that a spiral nebula, bar magnet, tree or bush, a swallow, animals, and human beings with head and motor organs, as well as clouds, stones, atomic systems, transmitterseven manifestations such as war and peaceshould all be measured using a single form! Janke was in fact delivering his lecture not to a learned society but to a group of hospital staff and fellow inmates at the Hubertusburg Federal Psychiatric institution, located in the village of Wermsdorf in the Saxony region of East Germany. The lecturer had been a patient at the converted baroque castle since 11 august 1950, and he was to remain there for the rest of his life. Born in Kolberg in Pomerania in 1909, in his teens Janke moved to Berlin. after graduating from high school, he studied at a dental college while also taking night courses at the Berlin University of Technology. in 1940, he was drafted into the military, but was dismissed in 1943 when the first symptoms of his disorder began to manifest themselves. He left Berlin and headed back to Saxony, where for a while he attempted to make a living as an inventor. in 1945, Jankes father died, and his mother passed away three years laterevents that may have contributed to Jankes ultimate breakdown. in June 1949, he was arrested in the street for making public statements that were misconstrued as political agitation, and he was sent to the Clinic for nervous Diseases in arnsdorf. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, he was transferred to Hubertusburg a year later. By the time he died in 1988, Janke had produced more than 4,500 drawings and hundreds of models of
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various technological inventions, chief among which were fantastic flying machines rendered in exquisitely detailed technical sketches. always fastidiously dressed in the style of a professional (he maintained an office at the hospital), Janke was somewhat condescending toward the nurses, orderlies, and fellow inmates, all of whom he considered ill-educated and of lower rank. He was very cordial, however, toward his doctors, whom he was forever trying to talk into forwarding his designs to scientists at industrial companies in East Germany. His desire to establish dialogue with the scientific community was tempered, however, by his fear that others would steal his ideas. He filed many patents, and his obsession with plagiarism also compelled him to mark many of his own drawings with the words, i swear: own technological data. Janke went to great pains to emphasize that all his technological inventions and ideas were for the benefit of humanity and aimed toward propagating peace. in his final testament, he wrote, i ask you to keep the images and albums with the numerous drawings and models that i created for you humans. His archive was to be forgotten in an attic at the hospital for more than a decade until doctors at Hubertusburg re-discovered it in 2000.
Cabinet wishes to thank artist Carsten Nicolai whose exhibition of Jankes work first brought his work to our and the authors attention.

Sources: Website dedicated to Janke: <http://www.karl-hans-janke.de/krankheituk. html>. Catalogue of the exhibition Karl Hans (Joachim) Janke ein Brevier at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 14 June 6 July 2003, available as a PDF at <www.stilledesfliegens.de>. Catalogue of the exhibition Karl-Hans Janke vs. Wernher von Braun, at the Peenemnde Historical Technical Information Center, 23 June 4 November 2007, available as a PDF at <www.peenemuende.de/index. php?id=58&L=2>.

opposite and overleaf: Drawings and models by Janke. In one photograph, Janke stands proudly in front of his model spaceship Sonnenland at an exhibition of his work at Hubertusburg in the 1950s. Also note the reference to the German atom in the uppermost drawing on the opposite page.

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reversINg THe regulAr order of NATure: AN INTervIew wITH eMIlIe ClArk FranCES riCHarD

like their male counterparts, the nineteenth-century natural historians Mary Ward (18271869), Mary Treat (18301923), and Martha Maxwell (18311881) were dedicated to observation and experiment, amassing collections, corresponding with leading thinkers such as Charles Darwin and asa Gray, and presenting discoveries via publications and exhibitions. Yet they have been largely elided in the history of science. Since 2003, artist Emilie Clark has been working with their little-known archives. Frances richard spoke with Clark regarding her findings.
So, who were these women?

an amaryllis, Zephyranthes atamasco var. treatiae; a harvester ant, Aphenogaster treatiae, and a burrowing spider, Tarantula turricula. Then theres Martha Maxwell. She also spent time in Vineland in the 1860s. Then she and her husband moved to Colorado where he prospected for gold, and she taught herself taxidermy. She identified a screech owl, Scops asio var. maxwelliae, and corresponded with officials at the Smithsonian institution, but her major achievement was being invited to represent Colorado at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. She constructed a grotto complete with a running stream, growing plants, 100 specimens of stuffed mammals, and 400 stuffed birds. The press celebrated her as the Colorado huntress. But she was basically penniless, and lived for the duration of the fair in the faux cave inside her own exhibit. The title of the show was Womans Work.
What kind of sources have you studied in your research?

Mary Ward, Mary Treat, and Martha Maxwell have a few remarkable things in common. They were dedicated to the experimental method. Treat and Maxwell identified new subspecies, and Ward and Treat published voluminously. They all collected with the special zeal of the nineteenth-century naturalist. and all three had to deal with their oxymoronic status as women scientists. Theres been almost no scholarship about any of them. Besides that, theyre pretty disparate. Ward was angloirish. Her cousin William Parsons built the worlds largest reflecting telescope in the 1840s, and was president of the royal Society in london, which gave Ward an entre to eminent physicists, astronomers, and entomologists. She worked as an illustrator of scientific publications, and received communications from the royal astronomical Societyvery rare for a woman in her day. She also wrote a best-seller, A World of Wonders Revealed by the Microscope (1858), which was reprinted eight times before 1880. Mary Treat and her husband moved in 1869 to the utopian settlement at Vineland, new Jersey. Vineland was founded by Charles Kline landis to be an agricultural paradise. no fences; no liquor; salaries doubled for workers. landis was a nut, howeverin 1875 he shot a reporter for the Vineland Independent and was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity. But Treat lived there for decades. She researched control of farming pests and helped pioneer the study of carnivorous plants; she wrote five books and over a hundred articles, and corresponded with Darwin and Gray. Her discoveries include
opposite: A specimen of Nymphaea mexicana collected by Mary Treat. Courtesy the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University.

The Vineland Historical Society has Treats papers stuffed in manila envelopes. Some biographical information is dropped into the books she wrote, which include Injurious Insects of the Farm and Field (1882) and Home Studies in Nature (1885), and theres a fifty-page booklet by a new Jersey biology professor. Most of what we know about Ward comes from her own writing as well. Theres a young-adult biography about Maxwell, and she wrote a book with her sister, called On the Plains and Among the Peaks, or How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection (1879).
How would you describe their careers?

i think of Ward, especially, as being a science writer before that role existed. She wrote for the schoolroom. Treat was more scholarly; she published not only in popular magazines like Harpers Monthly, but in the American Naturalist and the Journal of the New York Entomological Society. The Historical Society has all these postcards from Gray at Harvard, with one sentence about something hes found in a plant theyre both studying, or one scribbled question for her to follow up. She corrected Darwin as he was working on Insectivorous Plants (1875). But that was, of course, just one of his many books. Gray worked on botany at large. insectivorous species were almost all Treat did.
Theres that clich about womens work being local and diminutive. And yet, Maxwell worked on a big canvas 500 specimens installed for a year at the Centennial.

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Maxwell is the weirdest of the three. She mixes legitimate science with sideshow attractions. She was a homesteader, and probably the first white woman to shoot a buffalo; she corresponded with robert ridgway, who was the first ornithologist at the Smithsonian, and with Elliot Coues, who wrote the Key to North American Birds (1872). They catalogued her birds and mammals, respectively, and appended their notes to On the Plains and Among the Peaks. But she also ran a storefront museum, and peddled souvenir photographs of her Philadelphia exhibit, getting into trouble because she sold about 5,000 of them without permission from Centennial authorities. Maxwells personal life also seems to have been most disrupted by her work. of course, the work was disgusting. Theres a passage in On the Plains and Among the Peaks about how she would pause in preparing her mounts to retch. Her daughter Mabel wrote a book i havent yet gotten my hands onthe only known copy is at the Colorado Historical Societybut from what i can glean, she indicts her mother for being selfish and obsessive. Mabel apparently led a very conventional adult life, in spite (or because) of having spent her childhood on a wagon in the mountains, while her mom was pretending she was a dog and tracking animals and shooting them.
Pretending she was a dog?

When she was collecting water-birds, she observed how the dog would hide in the reeds and pounce. So she practiced, and thats how she got her specimens.
Its interesting that Maxwell was the one who struggled most financially, yet seems to have had the most formal education. Were Treat and Ward educated at home?

Maxwell attended oberlin while she could afford it. in the early 1860s, she studied taxidermy at Baraboo Collegiate institute in Wisconsin, and mounted birds for the schools new department of zoology. Then she married a man twenty years her senior. She took care of his children, and they had their daughter. They moved to Vineland, then to Colorado. in 1878 Maxwell went to Boston to enroll in the Womans laboratory of the Massachusetts institute of Technology. She took art classes, too, because she believed that drawing was often the best way to convey her observations. She thought of her taxidermy and tableaux as merging scientific accuracy with artistic expressionnot her personal expression, but expression of the living animal in the wild. Treat went to a private girls academy, and thats
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about all we know of her education. Her father was a Methodist minister from upstate new York, and her husband was a doctor interested in progressive issues like abolitionism, womens rights, and atheism. Even so, they separated soon after they got to Vineland. She owned the Vineland house, and she speaks of herself, somewhat jokingly, as hermit-like. Ward was encouraged to explore science. Theres a story about the astronomer Sir James South noticing her studying with a magnifying glass, and telling her father that he must buy her a microscope. She was trained to draw, as women of the period were if they had any polite education. She corresponded with Sir David Brewster, who invented the kaleidoscope. But as far as i can tell, she entered into her professional contacts with a practical or illustrationalbut not creativeinterest in science. natural history was becoming an industry; it was pre-photography; accurate imagery was needed. Ward had eight children, and she must have been responsible for managing the household. She had to publish Sketches with a Microscope privately, because no one wanted to take a risk on a womans scientific writings. But Sketches was reprinted the next year as A World of Wonders Revealed by the Microscope: A Book for Young Students. it sold well for twenty years. She also wrote a book called Telescope Teachings (1859), so she worked with specialists instrumentation at micro and macro levels. of the three, Ward is most concerned with maintaining femininity. A World of Wonders is an epistolary manual aimed toward girls, so perhaps it had to be particularly proper. Theres a conclusion all about God; she remarks that looking through the microscope is like seeing a faint glimpse of the meaning of Infinite Power. The book is structured around fifty-four items from Wards collection that she examines microscopically things like a codfishs eye, which she enthusiastically peels, or the hair of a mouse. The descriptions are exact,
opposite: Treat collected this specimen of Nymphaea mexicana; today it is considered a holotype, the specimen studied for the first scientific description of a new species. Treat was not the first to notice this species of water lily: John James Audubon painted the flower and credited a German botanist named Lutren for its discovery. After Treat penned an article for the August 1877 issue of Harpers magazine, she received a letter from Professor Charles Sargent urging her to recognize Lutren in the name for the holotype, which is distinct from the species name: It will, however, be proper to preserve Lutrens name, and he should stand always as authority for the species, whoever may draw it up and print the technical description. You know, I dare say, that Lutren was a young German who, years ago, botanized in Florida, and who was killed there by the Indians. He probably made note of his discoveries, but, so far as I know, these have never been published. The name of this holotype is now Nymphaea lutea. Courtesy the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University. Thanks to Carolyn Beans.

but they compare the specimens to domestic things like buttons and ribbons and lace.
This was 1858truly Victorian in terms of what was acceptable for a well-bred lady, and also a period in which intellectuals were struggling to reconcile scientific data with faith.

Yes. Darwin was about to publish The Origin of Species (1859); there was huge controversy regarding evolution, and even people like Gray had terrible conflicts about accepting the theory. Still, Gray was so persuaded that he became the voice of Darwinism in the US , against his Harvard colleague louis agassiz, who championed cre-

ationist ideas in the teeth of geological evidence. Treat was commissioned by the Brooklyn Ethical association to write an obituary tribute to Gray, by the way. They wanted her to explain how he had dealt with religion and evolution, which she did. it was eventually published, but someone elsea manread the speech at the associations memorial. Ward was in a similar situation in that societies for natural research and botanical gardens like Kew that hosted paper-giving excluded women. Treat circumvented this by going her own way. as far as we know, she never even met Gray. She traveled every year to Florida to study a certain set of carnivorous plants, and to the new Jersey Pine Barrens. She had her own menagerie of carnivorous plants in Vineland.

Martha Maxwells installation at the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia. Courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History / Boulder Historical Society Collection.

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What did Treat discover about the Venus flytrap?

across the board with carnivorous species, she discovered that multiple functions cause the insect to die inside the plant. She corrects Darwin on the bladderwort (Utricularia clandestina). He believed that insects enter merely by forcing their way through the slit-like orifice, their heads serving as a wedge. Treat argues instead that a sensitive valve sucks them into the bladder. Darwin writes in a letter of 1 June 1875, i have read your article with the greatest interest. it certainly appears from your excellent observations that the valve was sensitive. it is pretty clear i am quite wrong about the head acting like a wedge. The indraught of the living larva is astonishing. He credits her by name in Insectivorous Plants. She corresponded with Darwin on several other species as well, including the sundews and the Venus flytrap. Darwin wanted Treat to clarify if the flytrap could capture and digest more than one insect at a time. He knows its the insect touching the leaf that causes trigger hairs to close the lobes. (The trigger hairs are different from the toothed cilia you picture; the triggers are isolated hairs that must be touched at least twice before the trap shuts.) He thinks the prey is suffocated. But, in fact, when the leaves close, an enzyme is released that intoxicates the insect and helps break down its body. its the same in pitcher plants, the Sarracenia. Darwin thought the insects would be attracted by the plants scent, crawl inside, just fall to the bottom, and die. But, again, an enzyme anesthetizes and breaks them down. Treat figured this out via very direct meanssticking her finger in a flytrap and letting it go numb, tasting the pitcher plants nectar, and so forth. She theorizes that the secretions are aphrodisiacs. The insects fly in, realize theyre trapped, and may try to fly out, then come back for more. Theyre greedyor theyre tricked. Pitcher plants have a hood with translucent patterning, and Treat observes that these function like skylights. Prey tries to escape through these windows, and is batted back. The deceptive hood propels it to its death. She uses language like that. She doesnt mention God, but shes alert to the issue of violence. This is in 1885:
For several years past I have devoted much time to a class of plants that seem to have reversed the regular order of nature and, like avengers of their kingdom, have turned upon animals, incarcerating and finally killing them. Whether the plants are really hungry and entrap the animals for food, or whether it is only
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an example of the wanton destructiveness of nature I leave the reader to judge.

Even plants are red in tooth and claw. But from Darwin we learn that competitive survival is the order of nature. Thinking about killing and unnatural order, its hard not to wonder about the Venus flytrap, the interspecies predator, being characterized as feminine. Where does that name come from?

The plant is native to the Carolinas; its latin name is Dionaea muscipula. Heres what Donald Schnell says in Carnivorous Plants of the United States and Canada (2002):
Arthur Dobbs brought it to attention in 1763 calling it the Fly Trap Sensitive and specimens were sent to England where it was suspected of being carnivorous. Linnaeus was unconvinced and gave it its current name after Diana, Greek goddess of love and beauty. The most unusual common name known for it in the

An illustration from Martha Wards A World of Wonders Revealed by the Microscope (1858).

18th century was tipitiwitchet. This had been attributed to the Native Americans, but there is no such term in any Native American language then or now. The name was a European vernacular term for female genitalia. Some speculate that botanists sought to make reference to the genitalia in a proper way by choosing Diana. Muscipula was supposed to mean flytrap, but the Latin is wrong and actually translates as mousetrapso, Aphrodites mousetrap!
Schnell sounds a bit confused about the goddesses. Diana/Artemis is the huntress, the moon goddess associated with untamed virginity; Venus/Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty and sexual love. But I suppose its an instructive mix-upthe plant is both virgin and whore. Deceptive, sexual, flesh-eatingits basically a vagina dentata, right? Its graphic. Pornographic.

the females of this or that species are compared to the males. Maxwell was committed to various social issuestemperance, womens rights. There are some quite feisty passages in On the Plains and Among the Peaks, where Mary DarttMarthas sisterholds forth about equality. For Maxwell, oberlin would have been another pocket of freedom. it was one of very few co-ed institutions, and women werent expected to take second choice for their courses, although their time was encumbered by washing and cooking for the men.
So Ward was comfortably well-off, and Treat was selfsupporting. Maxwell seems to have been always scrabbling for money.

Exactly. it has beautiful little flowers, and big teeth. Treat remarks on this combination of violence with beauty. These plants have evolved in very poor conditions to survive through a predatory act. one of her experiments asks, if you give a carnivorous plant more nutrient-rich soil, how does it react? it dies. Most people who try to grow carnivorous plants kill them, because they do everything you would do for a house plant.
They kill them with kindness. Its interesting that this experimentation with natural economies should coincide with the utopian experiment of Vineland.

The Vinelanders were Theosophists, feminists, vegetarians. i havent been able to prove it, but im convinced that Treat and Maxwell must have known each other, or at least known of each other. They were two scientific women in a small, freethinking community. Charles landis wanted to set down a perfect social and political society to fit the natural conditions. and for a time it seems to have worked. Edward Everett Hale, the Unitarian minister, said, Vineland is the only new place i ever visited where i have found the greater part of the women satisfied.
Was Vineland considered scandalous? Were Treat and Maxwell less concerned with religious decorum than Ward?

She was destitute. She earned something selling specimens to the Smithsoniannot taxidermy, but, say, eggs she collected. She stuffed trophies. She set up her rocky Mountain Museum in a storefront and charged an entrance fee of twenty-five cents, which was not dirt cheap. along with her taxidermied Colorado fauna, she showed mineral samples and curios like a suit of Japanese armor. originally she established the museum in Boulder, but it didnt bring in enough cash, so she moved to Denver, where there was more traffic. But it still failed. Periodically Maxwell would convince her husband to be part of her schemes; at one point he agreed to rent their house and live in the museum to save money. at the Centennial Exhibition, she worked in the cafeteria and slept inside her cave for over a year. it was womans work, and there was the woman herself, right before your eyes. She was making a conscious statement about female gumption and capabilities. Heres the opening passage of On the Plains and Among the Peaks:
Womans work! What does that mean? Can it be possible any one wishes us to believe a woman did all this? Couldnt sayIm pretty sure I shant stretch my credulity so muchit would ruin the article! I should think so! Why one might think the ark had just landed here!buffaloes, bears, birds, wildcats, mice, and who but Noah or Agassiz could name what else! There must be hundreds of these creatures! and the last speaker turned to me with the question: Does that placard really mean to tell us a woman mounted all those animals? with an inclusive wave of a handsomely gloved hand. Yes, I replied.

They make the obligatory references, but its not clear how passionate they are about pious feminine obedience. Maybe Treat just wanted to work in peace, and Vineland allowed that. She slips remarks into Home Studies in Nature about how clever, industrious, etc.
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She becomes one of her own specimens.

and theres the heartbreaking fact that she cant get any respectable scientific institution to house her collection. Shes devoted to its preservation, and she cant relax until she knows it will have a permanent home. it never does, and eventually the specimens are destroyed by parasites and the elements.
Is that because she made a mistake? Or is that just what happens to taxidermy after a whileor to taxidermy from that era?

Maxwells death, and had in fact seen her Centennial exhibition. He even borrowed photographs of the grotto, but he never mentions Maxwell as a pioneer in the field. now, all the recognition goes to akeley. around the turn of the century, William T. Hornaday (the founder of the Bronx Zoo) was celebrated for the first grouping display, for his family of orangutans in a tree exhibited in 1879 at the american association for the advancement of Science.
On one hand, these womens lives seem so burdened with minutiaeTreat with her finger in the Venus flytrap and her postcards; Maxwell charging a quarter to see the stuffed fox; Ward talking about whalebones and lace. Theres this painful grasping for traction at the edges of science. And, on the other hand, grand questions about evolution, wilderness, collection and museology, the sexual life of plants, the brutality of Gods providence.

its what happens, especially when the specimens are not cared for. Maxwell actually improved on contemporary methods. She was careful to observe the living animal. She took precise field measurements, and built up the forms with plaster. Before that, taxidermists would use wads of stuffing. Maxwells specimens suffered partly because she had to drag them all over. The last move she made was to Far rockaway, where she got someone to back her in opening a Coney island type resort, with Colorado creatures on display by the atlantic. it was, of course, a complete failure. She wanted the work to go to the Smithsonian, but that never happened. after her death, Mary Dartt tried to get Yale to take it for the new Peabody Museum, but they refused to pay the asking price.
Didnt these institutions believe in it as a project?

all three were quietly radical. Maxwell did anticipate what happened in the West, not to mention in museums. Wards book influenced popular science for decades. Treat discovered multiple subspecies and helped to define the existence of carnivorous plants. But they knew they were living in a culture where their aspirations were aberrant.

Elliot Coues, at the Smithsonian, wrote that such groupings were inappropriate for scientific instruction and that he preferred taxonomic arrays of specimens, organized by size. This probably explains why the Smithsonian didnt want her exhibit, although Coues respected her work. Maxwell was ahead of the curve on display issues. She was the first person, as far as we know, to make museological dioramas accurate in terms of including flora from the area where the animals would be found, dealing with questions of scale and habitat. She posed the animals in action, relating predator to prey. But credit for this kind of realistic taxidermy and exhibition design typically goes to Carl akeley (1864 1926), who built the original dioramas at the american Museum of natural History in new York. The World Taxidermy Championships awards the Carl akeley Medal. Frederic a. lucas, who was director of the AMNH from 1911 to 1923, relates the history of taxidermic dioramas in his biography Fifty Years of Museum Work (1933)he corresponded with Mary Dartt after Martha
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ArTIsT projeCT: weAr THeM All San KEllEr

The Swiss artist San Kellers low-key conceptual interventions often deploy humor to deflate the selfregard of various art world institutions, tropes, and characters, including himself. For his work Wear Them All, Keller was photographed trying on every style of sunglasses available for purchase from the ottica aventino opticians in rome, producing a kind of serialized typology of self-deprecation out of an awkward everyday experience.
Photographs: Schnittholz

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buIldINg A beTTer sNowflAke: AN INTervIew wITH keNNeTH lIbbreCHT MarGarET WErTHEiM

How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire them more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1856

Meteorological definitions distinguish a single snowcrystal from the more general term snowflake, which may also apply to clusters. in the 1930s, the Japanese physicist Ukichiro nakaya set out to study snow crystal formation in the laboratory, attempting to grow individual crystals suspended on a thread. Today, Kenneth libbrecht, Chairman of the Physics Department at Caltech, follows in nakayas footsteps, trying to understand the mechanics of ice crystal formation at varying degrees of temperature, pressure, and humidity inside purpose-built pressure-cooker-sized chambers. Spurred on by thousands of volts of electricity, libbrechts snow crystals sprout like tiny flowers from the ends of miniature ice needles. His research focuses on crystallization at the boundary of the quasi-liquid layer that surrounds all ice structuresa layer that was first suggested by the nineteenth-century physicist Michael Faraday. Though libbrecht now lives in sunny California, he grew up in north Dakota and has plenty of experience shoveling snow. in 2005, he gave a talk about his work at the institute For Figuring in los angeles. in January 2008, IFF director Margaret Wertheim caught up with him in his office for an update and a discussion about physics, big and small.
How did you get started studying snow crystals?

With ice, the growth varies with temperature and with the degree of supersaturation, which is air humidity above 100%. People have made crude measurements but the models didnt fit very well. The fundamental question is how molecules hook up to form a solid lattice. at the beginning of the experiment youve got a vapor, and at the end youve got a lump of ice. What are the dynamics of this transformation? How do molecules connect to form a crystal? Things like that are the underpinnings of physics. ice is a wonderful case study. There are two ways to do scienceyou can either study everything at once and look at generalities, or, what i like, which is to take one specific thing and try to understand the details. im an experimentalisti like to build thingsand ice is a great material to work with.
It seems astonishing in an age when we keep hearing that physicists are on the verge of having a theory of everything that we dont understand small things like snowflakes.

it was one of those funny things. i was sitting around talking with a post-doc and we were thinking about what we could do that would be new and interesting. We started talking about growing levitated crystals, and looking at the physics of crystal growth. So i asked myself, what would one grow? You could grow silicon, but thats been done to death. Then i thought, ice would be easy to do. of course you would grow it from vapor, because the physics is easier, and i thought, well, thats just snowflakes! So i read up on this and discovered how little was known about the physics of crystal growth in general and of ice crystals in particular.
Are there things about ice crystals that make them particularly hard to understand?

Theres an old physics joke about this: Einstein dies and goes to heaven and he meets God and asks Him about the theory of everything. God explains and Einstein goes, ahhh, thats beautiful! i should have thought of that. Then Einstein asks God about turbulent convection, and God says, im still working on that myself. When you put a pot of water on the stove and boil it, you get convection, and a little thing like this we dont understand. There are many such puzzles in science; for instance, whenever you have complex systems. in the case of snowflakes, it is somewhat simpler because you are forming a regular lattice, but its still the molecules jostling around that causes the shapes to form. When you look at a snowflake, you have to understand whats happening at the molecular level, and then you have to understand how that translates into a large-scale structure, which we really dont understand. in a sense, it is a precursor to biology. a tree grows from a seed; how does that work? its very complicated.
People often think of physics in terms of the big questionsthe structure of the universe, the nature of matter, and so on. With snowflakes youre studying something little and mundane. Yet it seems to open out to very fundamental issues in physical science.
opposite and page 65: Snowflakes that fell to earth in Northern Ontario, Alaska, Vermont, Michigan, and the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Images captured by Kenneth Libbrecht with a specially designed photomicroscope.

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Simple Prisms

Solid Columns

Sheaths

Scrolls on Plates

Triangular Forms

Hexagonal Plates

Hollow Columns

Cups

Columns on Plates

12-branched Stars

Stellar Plates

Bullet Rosettes

Capped Columns

Split Plates and Stars

Radiating Plates

Sectored Plates

Isolated Bullets

Multiply Capped Columns

Skeletal Forms

Radiating Dendrites

Simple Stars

Simple Needles

Capped Bullets

Twin Columns

Irregulars

Stellar Dendrites

Needle Clusters

Double Plates

Arrowed Twins

Rimmed

Fernlike Stellar Dendrites

Crossed Needles

Hollow Plates

Crossed Plates

Graupel

i do think this is fundamental physics. its a little like when Michael Faraday, the great nineteenth-century physicist, first learned how magnetic fields can produce electric currents, and someone asked him what that was good for? His famous response was, What good is a boy He grows to be a man. There are many examples of scientists studying wacky things that became useful much later. one of my favorites is liquid crystals. Theyre funny liquids that have unusual optical behavior. They also have some crystal-like properties and chemists fell in love with them in the 1920s just because they were weird. in the 1920s no one said, Gee, this is going to make a great display for a video game someday.
Michael Faraday also speculated about how ice forms, and a number of other great physicists, including Johannes Kepler and Ren Descartes, actually studied snowflakes.

terminology. on the other hand, when you go outside and look at whats falling out of the sky, you do see recurring themes. and some of these cry out for classification. There are stellar dendrites and needles and hollow columns and capped columns and certain types of shapes that you see over and over again. Those are well-established classifications. Then you can add more nuances. The number of classes of snowflake ranges from seven to eighty, depending on which scheme you like. i have my own scheme, which has thirty-five. My scheme is based on how they grow. im always encouraging people to get a magnifying glass and go look. Theres a lot to see with just a two-dollar magnifying glass.
You are also following in the footsteps of the Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, who pioneered the classification of snowflakes. Tell us a bit about his work.

Kepler wrote a treatise on snowflakes. He asked: Why do snowflakes have six-fold symmetry? He observed that when you stack cannon balls, there is also a six-fold symmetry and he wondered if snowflakes might be formed in a similar way. This was in the 1500s, and the molecular view of matter was not invented yet. it was very insightful at that time to look at crystals this way given that it wasnt until the early 1900s that we could prove by using X -rays that molecules were part of crystals. and when it comes to the shapes of the crystals and why they have the particular shapes that they dowe still havent solved that problem.
In your book you have a taxonomic scheme for various snow crystal shapes. How did this classification scheme come into being?

nakaya was a student in the 1920s trained in nuclear physics. like many physicists, he had trouble finding a job because there are only so many positions for nuclear physicists. He couldnt get a job in Tokyo and ended up at the University of Hokkaido in the snowy north. There were no nuclear facilities there, so he had to find something else to do. in Hokkaido they get wonderful snow, so he decided this was an opportunity and started studying snowflakes. He was the first serious scientist to do this. He went outside and categorized things, but more importantly he started growing them in the lab under controlled conditions. nakaya found out they grow differently at different temperatureswhich is still a fundamental problem. We dont understand why that is. He wrote a wonderful book called Snow Crystals about how you do science starting from nothing.
He tried to grow snow crystals on different kinds of threads. What did he use?

People are used to classifying living thingseither they reproduce together and constitute a species or they dont, assuming its a sexual species, of course. But in the case of snowflakes, its more like classifying bread! You have pumpernickel, whole wheat, and white bread. But what if you mix a little pumpernickel with whole wheat? Then you have something else. What you choose to call by a different name is up to you. You can make up as many categories as you want. Breeds of dogs are similar. im not an expert on dogs, but im told there is a committee that decides whats a breed and what isnt. When you classify dogs or bread you have a lot of leeway on what you decide is a classification. and the same is true of snowflakes. its an inexact
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He wanted to understand snow crystals as they fall out of the skywhich is basically single ice crystals. But when he tried growing them in the lab, mostly he got frost, which is a whole collection of crystals interfering with each other. This makes it hard to see whats going on. its not easy to grow single crystalsyou need something for them to grow on. in the sky, they grow on dust particles. nakaya tried all sorts of things: silk, spiders webs, fine wires. Finally, he found that rabbit
opposite: Kenneth Libbrechts classification scheme for snowflake types.

hair worked well. He decided it was because the hair is covered in a thin film of residual oil. it has these knobby things on it every now and then, and the knobby things are where the crystals start to grow. He was able to grow individual crystals provided he dried out the rabbit hair beforehand in a desiccator. Were doing similar things, but weve got a different technique. i never liked the rabbit hair.
Youve tried rabbit hair?

little money that way. its not really a field; its a hobby. i enjoy it immensely, and i wish i had hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on it. But once you get a lot of funding in a field, you get a lot of other people working on it too, and then it becomes mainstream. So, it cant be a hobby anymore.
As a photographer of snowflakes you are following in the footsteps of Wilson Bentley. Many people have loved his books. Are you are becoming the new Bentley?

i did. it didnt work very well for me. i think weve got a better way. We grow crystals on the end of an electric wire charged up to 2,000 volts. When you turn on the current, a needle of ice grows from the end of the wire. it is very, very thin, and then if you turn off the voltage, the needle growth stops and an individual crystal starts to grow like a flower from the end of the needle. We grow them at different temperatures, humidities, and air pressures.
How do you go about creating these conditions?

i dont know about that, but i have gotten into the photography. Many people have their real occupation and their secret wish they had been occupation. ive always wanted to be an artist, or at least a graphic designer. But i dont have a lot of talent in the art department. So this is my kind of art, nature does all of the creating for you. and the technical aspects of photographing the snowflakes really suit my scientific side. i just love the pictures.
Most of the time at Caltech, youre not working on snowflakes but on the enormous LIGO experiment.

i spend a lot of time worrying about that. We grow our crystals in specially built chambers that ive designed. one of the simplest ways is to use a convection chamber. You get a big tank, about a meter in size, and you cool the whole thing off using a refrigerator. if the air inside is supersaturated, then the conditions are right for ice crystal growth. But first you have to nucleate the process. one way is to make a little pocket of compressed air and open up a valve so it expands rapidly. it sort of goes pop. You can also use a little bubble pack for thisthat nucleates crystals very well. or you can drop a little piece of dry ice in. after the nucleation, you shine a flashlight in, and you can see thousands of crystals sparkling in the air. Sometimes we just look at whats falling in the chamber to see how they grow under different conditions. There are different types of chambers, not only convection chambers but also diffusion chambers. another one im working on mixes two types of gas together to form supersaturated air.
You are using the word we. Do you have a group of people who work with you?

Thats right. LIGO stands for the laser interferometer Gravitational-Wave observatory, and its an astrophysics project designed to look for gravitational radiation, which is a little like ripples in space-time. Einstein talked about this and predicted them, although at the time he dismissed them as being far too weak to ever be measured. now were hoping we can. What creates gravitational radiation is large masses undergoing high acceleration. Were talking about things like colliding black holes, neutron stars, and supernovaevery violent events involving very dense objects with high mass. There could even be a primordial gravitational radiation out there that is a remnant from the Big Bang. i am a small player on a big projectit involves around three hundred researchers worldwide. its one of the biggest and costliest projects in physics today. one reason i like to work on snowflakes is that its very small-scale and fastalmost an anti-LIGO . it doesnt require great sources of funding, and it doesnt require a lot of people. You can do an interesting experiment in a month. on the other hand, the outcome is not nearly as profound.
But in a way its equally profound, because, as you say, you are helping to understand the development of complex forms, which is one of the hardest problems in science. Its such an interesting conjunction: the official side

Mostly its a unitary groupjust me and my Visa card. occasionally, i get an undergraduate student who comes in for the summer. But theres no money for post-docs and graduate students . ive never found any funding for this, so i sell my snowflake books and get a
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of your life is working on one of the biggest experiments in physics, and then you are studying snowflakes. Are there any lessons here that science isnt just about cosmology but also about the mundane things around us?

it is almost funny that we spend most of our efforts on certain areas of scienceblack holes, string theory, and so on. Then there are the things that are left behind. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity for people who do want to make some small mark. Most physicists want to work on quantum field theory and the theory of everything. Well, thats pretty hard to do! First of all, some of the smartest people on the planet are working on that, so if you want to make a contribution, thats tough. Whereas, when i got into snowflakes i found there was hardly anybody doing anything. So, it was easy to start thinking about whats going on. There are many things like this.
Do you think physics has become too focused on grand cosmological questions?

Cosmology is about the universe, and theres no question that is good stuff! at the same time, i dont think everyone should do that. ive worked in fields where ive felt that if i didnt get up in the morning and come in and do whatever i had to do, somebody else would just do it. Whereas, with snowflakes, if i dont get up in the morning and do it, nobody else is going to. as i tell my wife, those snowflakes arent going to grow themselves.

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Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho play the Game of War, 1977. Photo Jeanne Cornet. Courtesy Atlas Press.

THe gAMe of wAr: AN overvIew alExanDEr r. GalloWaY

in France, the 1960s lasted until about 1974. it was a decade quick to begin and reluctant to end. Emblematic of the period were militant collectives of various kinds, such as the Tel Quel group, or the Situationist international. But around april or May of 1974as roland Barthes accompanied the Tel Quel editors to China to witness first-hand the Maoist theory they had been espousing back home, only to become entirely disillusioned with this new fad of militancy the entire progressive theoretical framework of the 1960s began to slip away and become irrelevant. The Situationist international disbanded in 1972. Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva turned to theology, to the new Philosophers, and in 1977 replaced their former pro-Maoist stance with a rather unexpected proamericanism. French Situationist Guy Debord never recovered from the crisis of the 1970s. His late life was beset by
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chronic illness brought on by an ever-growing appetite for food and drink. He became more nostalgic and selfabsorbed, mixing manifesto with memoir. By the late 1970s, his former glory as a radical filmmaker and author had faded. The cinema seems to me to be over, he wrote in a 1978 letter. These times dont deserve a filmmaker like me.1 Debord sequestered himself with his wife, alice Becker-Ho, in the remote region of auvergne. They enjoyed playing games together and had tried their hands at Djambi, a board game sent as a gift by Debords benefactor Grard lebovici. Djambi is a distinctly late-modern game. it proceeds not bilaterally like chess but multilaterally with four players. The game tokens are not modeled on a medieval court of kings, queens, knights, and bishops, but instead on the various political actors that make up the contemporary world: the news reporter, the provocateur, the activist militant, and the assassin. Thanks for Djambi, Debord replied to lebovici in a letter otherwise disdainful of the game. The rules

suffer from a contradiction between the games totalitarian goal and its representation of the struggles of an advanced liberal democracy.2 The ridiculous subtext of Djambi was clear to Debord: how could a board game ever correctly model complex political dynamics such as those existing in France in the 1960s and 1970s? What is to be done when control and organization are no longer hierarchical and repressive, but instead have migrated into the form of flexible, distributed networks? Even if it were possible to model such a scenario in a game, thought Debord, Djambi wasnt it. He responded with a game of his own. in January 1977, Debord founded the Society for Strategic and Historical Games. The Society had an immediate goal: to produce a Game of War which Debord had already designed in his head in the 1950s. inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of napoleon, Debords game is a chessvariant for two players. The surprises of this [game] seem to be inexhaustible, he confessed later. it might be the only thing in all my workim afraid to admit that one might dare say has some value.3 With the assistance of lebovici, Debord first produced the game in a limited edition during the summer of 1977. The edition included an 18-by-14-inch game board and player tokens fabricated in silver-plated copper by the intrepid Mr. raoult, a Parisian artisan whom Debord admired and trusted implicitly. By the end of June 1978, after delays due to poor health, Debord finished drafting a written copy of the game rules. i am sending you the rules soon, he wrote to lebovici. The juridico-geometric writing style has cost me innumerable headaches.4 The game board is divided into a northern territory and a southern territory, each with a single mountain range of nine squares and a mountain pass. Each faction has two arsenals, three forts, nine infantry, four cavalry, two artillery cannons (one footed and one mounted), and two transmission relay units (one footed and one mounted). Each combat unit has an attack and defense coefficient, and may move either one or two squares per turn depending on the type. arsenals radiate lines of communication vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. in addition, transmission relays propagate any line of communication aimed at them. all units must remain in direct connection with their own lines of communication, or be adjacent to a friendly unit in communication. if stranded, a unit goes offline and becomes inert. The game proceeds in turns. a player may move up to five units each turn, followed by a single attack
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against an enemy unit. an attack is determined by summing all the offensive power in range of an enemy target square, then subtracting this number from a summation of all the defensive power supporting the same target square. offensive and defensive power emanates from a unit in a straight line, either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. if the offensive power is less than or equal to the defensive power, the unit resists. if the offensive power is two or more, the unit is destroyed. a player wins the game by either destroying all enemy combat units, or destroying the enemys two arsenals. alternately, if both sides agree to quit, the game ends in a draw. While distilled to a simple essence, Debord believed that the Game of War simulated all the necessary principles of war. He did admit, however, that three things were missing from his near-perfect game: climate conditions and the cycles of day and night; the influence of troop morale; and uncertainty about the exact positions and movements of the enemy. That said, one may assert that the [game] exactly reproduces the totality of factors that deal with war, and more generally the dialectic of all conflicts.5 Debords ambitions for the game were grandiose. By evoking the dialectic of all conflicts, he was appealing backward to the power of 1968 and the days of the Situationist international, but also forward to the games future potential in training and cultivating a new generation of militants. But the game was missing more than just climate conditions. in fact, viewed against the silhouette of Debords other work, it is surprisingly square. The spirit of wandering or hijacking, from the Situationist days, is absent in the game. There is no mechanism for overturning society, no temporary autonomous zones, no workers councils, no utopian cities, no imaginary landscapes of desire, no cobblestones, and no beach; only grids of toy soldiers fighting a made-up war in a made-up world. it invites the question: Why is this game relatively unadventurous, while Debords other work is so experimental? Can this be explained through an analysis of media formats, that Debord had a certain panache for radical filmmaking and critical philosophy, but lapsed back into the predictable habits of the bourgeois parlor game when he tried his hand at game design? Why in 1978 would he make a game that had more in common with napoleons 1806 Battle of Jena than Debords own 1968 Battle of Paris? Did Debord simply lose his radical zeal late in life, his Hegelianism finally winning out over his Marxism? in short, why the Game of War and not Djambi?

Debord admitted that the game was bound to a historical period: This doesnt represent wars of antiquity, nor those of the feudal period, nor modern warfare refashioned by technology after the middle of the nineteenth century (railways, machine guns, motorization, aviation, missiles).6 So the Game of War is indeed historically specific, only for a century past (the eighteenth) rather than the present day. in his own comparisons made between the game and chess, he continues the description of historical specificity. He positions chess firmly in the classical period of kings and corporal fiat, while the Game of War belongs to a time of systems, logistical routes, and lines of communication. in chess, spatial relationship between pieces are paramount; the knights tour, for instance, serves as a classic mental projection of pattern and recombination. in the Game of War, Debord maintained this attention to spatial relationships, but added a degree of complexity. The liaisons in the Game of War are not simply the projections of possible troop maneuvers, but a communicative apparatus linking together far-flung fighting divisions. if chesss king is an intensive node, one that must be fortified through the protection of its allied footmen, then Debords arsenals are extensive nodes. Yes, they too must be protected, but they also serve as the origin point for a radiating fabric of transition. in chess the king can never remain in check, but in the Game of War liaisons must always be maintained.7 Chess presents a set of challenges in proximity to a consecrated corpus, a prize, but the Game of War is a game of rhizomatic space itself, the assets of war strung out in long lines and held together by a tissue of interconnection. The lines of communication are crucial. So while the game is in some senses a throwback to the napoleonic era of pitched battles and otherwise conventional warfare, it is at the same time a window into the new flexible, information-based wartime tactics of the new millennium. The Game of War is, in essence, chess with networks.
An English edition of the Game of War, accompanied by a game board, counters, and a rule book, has recently been issued by Atlas Press in the UK. See < www. atlaspress.co.uk> for more information.

1 Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. 5: Janvier 1973 Dcembre 1978 (Paris:

Librairie Arthme Fayard, 2005), p. 451. 2 Ibid., p. 462. 3 Guy Debord, Pangyrique, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 70. 4 Debord, Correspondance, vol. 5 , op. cit., p. 466. 5 Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, Le Jeu de la Guerre: Relev des positions successives de toutes les forces au cours dune partie (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), p. 151. 6 Ibid., p. 149. 7 Ibid., pp. 165166.

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The game begins using the opening formation recorded in Debord and Becker-Hos Game of War (1987). All game stills by RSG, 2008.

Both factions send an offensive vanguard to threaten the opponents arsenal.

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With both sides weakened, Souths final cavalry retreats through the mountain pass.

With South holding a slight material advantage, the two armies face off for an endgame in the western plain.

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72

THE GamE of War: DEborD as sTraTEGisT McKenzie WarK

The only member of the Situationist international to remain at its dissolution in 1972 was Guy Debord (1931 1994). He is often held to be synonymous with the movement, but anti-Debordist accounts rightly stress the role of others, such as asger Jorn (19141973) or constant nieuwenhuys (19202005) who both left the movement as it headed out of its aesthetic phase towards its ostensibly more political one. Take, for example, constants extraordinary new Babylon project, which he began while a member of the Situationist international and continued independently after separating from it. constant imagined an entirely new landscape for the earth, one devoted entirely to play. But new Babylon is a landscape that began from the premise that the transition to this new landscape is a secondary problem. Play is one of the key categories of Situationist thought and practice, but would it really be possible to bring this new landscape for play into being entirely by means of play itself? This is the locus where the work of constant and Debord might be brought back into some kind of relation to each other, despite their personal and organizational estrangement in 1960. constant offered the kinds of landscape that the Situationists experiments might conceivably bring about. it was Debord who proposed an architecture for investigating the strategic potential escaping from the existing landscape of overdeveloped or spectacular society. Between the two possibilities lies the situation. Debord is best known as the author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967), but in many ways it is not quite a representative text. Lately there has also been a revival of Debord the filmmaker, but beside being a writer, a filmmaker, an editor, and a first rate professional of no profession, he was also a game designer. according to Debords second wife, alice Becker-Ho, he patented his Game of War in 1965 ten years after conceiving it. in 1977, he partnered with his then publisher Grard Lebovici to form a company to make board games. The company published the Game of War, and commissioned a craftsman to make four or five sets in copper and silver. in 1987, Debord and Becker-Ho published a book about the game.1 On this account, the game was a part of Debords life for more than thirty years, and had its origins in the midst of the second, political phase of the Situationist international that begins after the break with constant in 1960 and whose larger impetus is resistance
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to the war in algeria. it is, i would argue, an expression in a new form of something both the early artistic and later political phases of the Situationist international had in common despite their different fields of operation, namely, a concept and a practice of strategy. Debords Game of War is a strategy game, and to see this as a major rather than minor part of his legacy is to insist that, above all else, Debord was a strategist, as has been noted by fellow Situationist Jacqueline De Jong.2 and Giorgio agamben observed: Once, when i was tempted (as i still am) to consider Guy Debord a philosopher, he told me: im not a philosopher, im a strategist. Debord saw his time as an incessant war, which engaged his entire life in a strategy.3 The strategist is not the proprietor of a field of knowledge, but rather assesses the value of the forces aligned on any available territory. The strategist occupies, evacuates, or contests any territory at hand in pursuit of advantage. avant-garde movements have a long-standing connection to games, and perhaps to strategy. The Surrealists invented many games.4 Duchamp famously gave up art for chess; he even co-authored a book about it.5 as Franois Le Lionnais observed: What Halberstadt [Duchamps collaborator] and Duchamp perfected was the theory of the relationship between squares which have no apparent connection, Les Cases Conjuges, which was a sort of theory of the structure of the board. That is to say, because the pawns are in a certain relationship one can perceive invisible connections between empty squares on the board which are apparently unrelated.6 Like the Surrealists, Debord invented his own game, but, like Duchamp, it took the form of a sustained effort to create via the game a conception of how events unfold in space. among the Game of Wars particular qualities is that it is not a territorial game. it does not conceive of space as property to be conquered and held. it is instead modeled on classic war games, which go back at least to the time of clausewitz.7 it includes more or less plausible parameters of movement and engagement for infantry and cavalry. Yet it is not really a conventional game of war at all. rather, it models something more like a fullspectrum war, in which the opposing forces are not wholly restricted by their extension in space. Beside the usual fighting pieces of cavalry, infantry, artillery, and the arsenal, the Game of War also includes units for communication. While military units move at given speeds per turn across the board, the lines of communication, so long as they are not broken,
opposite: Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon/Amsterdam, 1963.

are instantaneous and direct. This war can be fought as much on the plane of communication as that of extensible space. What distinguishes the two planes is their relation to time. Debord and Becker-Hos concept of contemporary strategy is one that takes place in a doubled terrain: the first of spatial extension and sequential time, a space of architecture and geography; the second of the simultaneous time of communication. The double terrain of communication and architecture forms the spatio-temporal matrix which in Society of the Spectacle Debord would come to conceive of as world history. While the Game of War looks like its eighteenth-century ancestors, it is actually a diagram of the strategic possibilities of spectacular time. Debord:
The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. Once there was history, but not any more, because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history.8

in the Game of War, history is made mobile again, in an irreversible time where strategy can reverse the course of events. Game of War incorporates the problems of conflict in general within a manageable framework. Debords ambition seems to be no less than to create a game with possibilities for play that are as great as chess but which conceives of play in a different manner. That ones communication must remain intact is equivalent to the rule in chess that the king must not remain in check. Debord includes in his presentation of the game a line from the 1527 poem Scacchia ludus by Marcus Hieronymus. The opening lines of the poem are: We play an effigy of war, and battles made like / real ones, armies formed from boxwood, and play realms, / as twin kings, white and black, opposed against each other, / Struggle for praise with bi-colored weapons.9 That strategic genius, in any field, is the only thing worth commemorating is a characteristically Debordian note. Effigy is a word that might appeal to Debord in its modern sense (as in burn in effigy), given how careful he was to preserve his bad reputation.10 But here it might mean something else: that the game is a form, a moldan allegory, perhaps
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for a certain kind of strategic experience. But the Game of War does not enclose space within strategy as chess does. Space is only ever partially included within range of movement of the pieces, whereas in chess, as Duchamps Les Cases Conjuges shows, even movements on non-contiguous parts of the board affect the board as a whole. in the Game of War, some space always remains smooth and open. The game is also subject to sudden reversals of fortune rare in chess. Debord: in fact, i wanted to imitate poker. not the chance factor in poker, but the combat that is characteristic of it.11 Each side makes its initial deployments in ignorance of those of the enemy, introducing at least an element of the unknown characteristic of poker, if only for the first encounter. The game requires attention to the tactical level of defending each of ones units, since once one starts losing, one can quickly lose many pieces. However, units cannot move or engage unless they remain in communication with their arsenal, making lines of communication particularly vital. Players are usually more concerned with breaking the adversarys lines of communication than with offensive action directed against either the adversarys arsenal, or fighting units. outside of the quantitative struggle between blocks of fighting units is a qualitative one, in which a force suddenly loses all its power when the enemy cuts off its communications, thus the outcome of a tactical engagement over just one square may have major strategic consequences.12 antonio Gramsci famously juxtaposed the concepts of the war of position and the war of maneuver. a war of position is about taking and holding territory, whereas a war of maneuver constantly mobilizes forces in relation to the enemys changing dispositions. For Gramsci, the war of maneuver is associated with syndicalist approaches to political conflict, with rosa luxembourg and the events of the october revolution. He associates the war of position with mature leninism, and the lessons of the defeats suffered across Europe by the movement that the october revolution was supposed to spark. Gramsci: in the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.13 For Debord the strategic thought of the war of position can only justify the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Parties, their obsession with creating

one institutional bunker after another, from the trade unions to the official Communist art perpetuated in their later careers by former Dadaists and Surrealists such as Tristan Tzara and louis aragon. The Game of War is a refutation of the war of position. in the war of position, tactics are dictated from above by strategic concerns with taking and holding one bunker after another across the landscape of state and civil society. By design, the Game of War refutes this territorial conception of space and this hierarchical relation between strategy and tactics. Space is always partially unmarked; tactics can sometimes call a strategy into being. Some spaces need not be occupied or contested at all; every tactic involves a risk to ones positions. it makes sense to move against the enemys communications, but ones own will be stretched in the process.14 as in a game of poker, advantage comes quick and is lost even quicker. Key to playing the Game of War is a talent for judging the moment to move from the tactical advantage to the strategic. Plans have to be changed or abandoned in the light of events: The interaction between tactics and strategy is a continuing source of surprises and reversesand this often right up to the last moment.15 after Constant left the Situationist international, Debord wrote to asger Jorn about what he perceived to be the weakness of Constants new Babylon, and of his work in general: He dodges the real and multiple problems of architecture in supposing them resolved, whereas we have hardly begun to envisage this terrain.16 it is as if for Constant some grand strategy could remake the whole terrain in one go. For Debord, by contrast, the challenge is to envisage the terrain in which tactics could yield a strategy for transforming the architectural terrain, and the point at which this could be effected is the intersection of the architectural terrain with the communication terrain that doubles it, producing new spaces for maneuver against new vulnerabilities. Where Constant imagines the whole of the earth as a space for play, Debord inquires into the accumulated experience of contesting social forces that might make this other kind of play possible. War is the effigy of play. a certain kind of conflict, perhaps a new kind, has to be won before play can appear as more than a caricature of itself, screened off within its closed circle, fading into a dream.
1 Alice Becker-Ho, Historical Note (2006), in Alice Becker-Ho and Guy

3 Giorgio Agamben, Repetition & Stoppage: Debord in the Field of Cinema, in The Situationist International 19571972, op. cit., p. 36. 4 See Susan Laxton, Paris as Gameboard: Ludic Strategies in Surrealism

Consumimur Igni (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), p. 240.

(Columbia University dissertation, 2004). 5 Marcel Duchamp and Vitali Halberstadt, Opposition und Schwesterfelder (Berlin: Tropen, 2001). 6 Quoted in Allan Woods, The Map Is Not the Territory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 199. 7 See Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2006). 8 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 143. 9 Thanks to Michael Pettinger for the translation. 10 Guy Debord, Cette Mauvaise Reputation (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 11 Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, A Game of War, op. cit., p. 156. 12 Ibid., p. 19. 13 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks , trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 238. 14 A Game of War, op. cit., p. 22. 15 Ibid, p. 24. 16 Debord to Jorn, 16 July 1960, in Guy Debord, Correspondance, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Arthme Fayard, 2001).

Debord, A Game of War, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Atlas Press, 2007), p. 7. 2 Jacqueline De Jong, The Times of the Situationists, in Heinz Stahlhut et al, eds., The Situationist International 19571972: In Girum Imus Nocte Et

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sloth

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This issues themed section on sloth grew out of a conference on the cultural history of laziness that Cabinet co-organized in the winter of 2007 with the Philadelphiabased slought Foundation and its tireless director, aaron levy. Held at the Cooper Union, the event drew together a number of writers and scholars for a day of talks and presentations around ideas of indolence, fatigue, and other forms of sluggish mental and physical behavior. The lateness of this, our alleged spring issue, can only be explained by the strangely languorous mood that the theme cast over the magazines entire staff. Rest assured that we are now spraying antikenotoxin vapors into the office and are back to our former industrious selves.

the Young and the Restless Daniel RosenbeRg

How pleasant it is at the end of the day, No follies to have to repent, But reflect on the past, and be able to say, My time has been properly spent! Jane Taylor, The Way to be Happy

in 1818, the engraver Jefferys Taylor published a short instructive novel called Harrys Holiday, or the Doings of One Who Had Nothing to Do.1 This was to be the first of his many juvenile books and one of his best. it also has the distinction of presenting some very odd examples of misbehavior. While other boys in nineteenth-century fiction were off thieving and cavorting and getting into all kinds of canonical mischief, Taylors protagonist, Harry stapleton, was getting into hot water over rarer misdemeanors, among the most curious of which is the unsanctioned hand-copying of a fifty-year-old educational chart, Joseph Priestleys New Chart of History.2 not that Taylor meant anything mysterious in this. as Taylor explains it, Harry made four errors in contriving to copy the chart: the first was willfulnesshe had no real reason to want to do it; the second, impatiencehe didnt take the time to do this delicate task properly; the third, lack of perseverancewhen he got frustrated, he gave up; fourth, and most interesting of allin choosing to copy this elaborate engraving by hand, Harry misconstrued the value of labor in an economy of mechanical reproduction. This was something of which Jefferys Taylor, raised and home-schooled by an engraver, was keenly conscious. and it seems quite likely that Taylor, as a boy, was himself the innovator this peculiar error, and his own father, isaac Taylor, the model for the fictional father who corrects it. in the story, Harrys father tries hard to head Harry off at the pass, to dissuade him from even beginning this scribal effort. it will cost you a great deal of labour and time to copy that neatly from beginning to end, Harrys father argues, ... and, when done, it would only be another of what we have already; it is something like copying a printed book, which would not be worthwhile, you know, because the time it would take must be more valuable than the money it would cost; and with respect to the operation of copying, i am afraid you will find it very difficult to draw all the lines in that chart without a blot or an error; and i can assure you it will be a very fatiguing task to write in all the names.3 of course, had Harry been able to carry his project through, his father might have admired his perseverance, and he could probably have been convinced of

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the instructive merit of immersing oneself in the details of history. still, thats not the way the book plays it. in the view of Harrys father, taking up the chart in the first place is a mistake, and it is only one particularly odd example of the kind of misplaced enthusiasm for which he finds himself correcting his dervish of a child. Harrys persistent error is not laziness or lack of industry in a simple sense; rather it is a roving attention that renders all of his efforts idle. interestingly, though, Harrys Holiday is never quite clear on what we should call this particular problem, and there are very good historical reasons for this. For my own part, i would call it sloth. speaking generally, we might identify two different approaches to the history of sloth. For want of better terms, i will call the first approach lazy and the second slothful. The first approach, the lazy approach, would begin with ordinary language: it would ask what sloth means in our language and culture, how it functions in our system of values, and so forth. These are good, legitimate questions which may help to elucidate sloth as it is. a second approach, which i will call slothful (and which i will opt for), would bracket the ordinary meaning of sloth in favor of an antiquated usage that may have some renewed utility today. To understand sloth in the sense that i propose, it is important to be precise about the meaning of the term. in contemporary english, we are blessed with an abundance of slothish words. a short list might include indolence, idleness, inertia, lethargy, listlessness, sluggishness, inactivity, inaction, torpor, boredom, apathy, deadness, listlessness, paralysis, passivity, dullness, weariness, negligence, dilatoriness, laxness, joylessness, unmindfulness, trifling, time-killing, time-wasting, dilly-dallying, lackadaisicalness, indifference, impassivity, and laziness. However, strictly speaking, sloth is not the same as any single one of these terms. Historically, sloth is a bipolar concept, signifying a kind of dissatisfaction that may be expressed equally through immobility or restlessness. and it was precisely to capture this ambivalence that the term was first adopted in latin. in the Western tradition, the first important discussion of the concept of sloth occurs in the works of the fourth-century monk, evagrius Ponticus.4 The latin term that evagrius uses (which would several hundred years later be translated into english as sloth) is interesting in itself. The term is acedia, from the greek for lack of care (and not from the latin acidus or sour, as the early modern etymologists would have had it).5 Prior to the generation of evagrius, the term acedia had no usage in latin. apparently, evagrius and his fellow monks found it important to distinguish between a
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simple, everyday carelessness or laziness for which latin, like english, had plenty of terms, and a more profound condition of uncaring especially relevant in the monastic context. it is worth pointing out, parenthetically, that in the eighteenth century, a similar kind of borrowing takes place when english writers adopt the French term ennui to designate not just everyday boredom, but a special and powerful kind of boredom equivalent to a psychological or a moral condition.6 indeed, in the 1770s, the london Observer remarked ruefully that the english nation had been fortunate until that time to have gotten along without such a word.7 in evagrius, acedia refers to a loss of the joy in god sometimes experienced by the ascetic and to a consequent distraction from contemplative experience. in his discussions, evagrius is strikingly specific about how acedia, or the boredom of the cell, may be felt. For the ascetic, he says, it is a perturbation of the soul that is tightly wrapped up with the temporal regulation of monastic practice. evagrius writes:
The demon of acedia ... is the most burdensome of all the demons. It besets the monk at about the fourth hour of the morning (10 am), encircling his soul until about the eighth hour (2 pm). First it makes the sun seem to slow down or stop moving, so that the day appears to be fifty hours long. Then it makes the monk keep looking out of his window and forces him to go bounding out of his cell to examine the sun to see how much longer it is to three oclock, and to look round in all directions in case any of the brethren is there. Then it makes him hate the place and his way of life and his manual work. It makes him ... think that there is no charity left among the brethren; that no one is going to come and visit him.8

For evagrius, acedia was a specifically monastic problem, just as was the regulated time schedule itself. and neither would become a general cultural concern for roughly another millennium. evagrius related acedia to more mundane feelings such as sadness and apathy and also, as is clear in the passage just quoted, to restlessness, impatience, and even hyperactivity. Throughout the Middle ages, this constellation of feelings or symptoms was understood to characterize what in latin was called acedia and what in english was referred to as sloth. During the late Middle ages, the concept was finally dissociated from monastic practice and given a scientific explanation based on aristotelian psychology. even during this period, however, its typical expressions were still taken to include restlessness, verbosity, and unregulated curiosity.9 it was not until the Renaissance

Frontispiece of Harrys Holiday, by Jefferys Taylor (1818). Courtesy Cotsen Childrens Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

that the notion of sloth became exclusively associated with inactivity, whether spiritual or secular. This was a radical transformation. all of these characteristics that evagrius or aquinas would have immediately associated with slothdistraction, hyperactivity, and what we still call idle curiosityincreasingly seemed like its opposites. in modern english, the term sloth gradually lost its linguistic pride of place and faded into a vague equivalence with the other words previously discussed. of course, our language never lost its need for bipolar terms. in the Renaissance, some of the semantic slack left by the evacuation of sloth was picked up by the term melancholy.10 but, in general usage and in the rapidly expanding sphere of moralizing literature of the early
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modern period, no term ever quite filled the gap. and with the rise of a powerful ideology of productivity in the eighteenth century in europe, the term sloth itself became equated with simple laziness. From one perspective, this makes perfect sense: unproductiveness was a high vice of the eighteenth century, and clockwatching of various sorts a growing obsession. but as Harrys Holiday labors to argue, activity and productivity are not the same, and improperly directed activity causes problems that a simple vocabulary of laziness does little to elucidate. one would of course be forgiven for wondering whether Jefferys Taylor or any of the other Taylors of ongar actually knew anything about laziness in the first

place, whether it ever even occurred to them as a problem worthy of discussion. To say that the Taylors were industrious would understate the case considerably. each generation of Taylors, beginning with Jefferys Taylors grandfather, a notable painter and engraver, and secretary of the english society of the arts, bore with great seriousness its moral and intellectual burdens, and above all the responsibility for educating the generation to come. and, if the results are any indication, the Taylor children regarded their part in the enterprise with equal gravity. in the years between 1814 and 1867, the Taylor clan was particularly active, publishing at least seventythree books, to say nothing of the scores of others for which they created original images. so remarkable was this family that it was cited by Francis galton as case evidence for the inherited character of genius.11 it needs to be mentioned, however, that for evidence of nature versus nurture, galton could certainly have found a less ambiguous case than the education-obsessed Taylors.12 Though they published on many subjects, it was in the area of intellectual and moral development that the Taylors were most prolific. They wrote poems and stories, textbooks and homilies, and many other works designed specially for children. even today, it is probably the rare english speaker who does not know at least one or two verses from the Taylors such as those from the 1806 poem by Jefferyss sisters, Jane and ann, that begins, Twinkle, twinkle little star.13 The Taylors were innovators of writing targeted at specific age groups. indeed, the first modern usage of the word teen was

Detail from The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, by Hieronymus Bosch, 1485.

introduced by the father, isaac Taylor, in his 1818 conduct manual, Advice to the Teens, or Practical Helps Towards the Formation of Ones Own Character.14 Thus, when Jefferys Taylor set out to write his own book, he was treading on well-known familial ground. as Harrys Holiday begins, it is the eleventh birthday of our protagonist Henry stapleton. Harry, as he is known to his family, is a smart, loyal, educated, imaginative, and energetic boy. but he is also something else, something that Jefferys Taylor has trouble finding a name for. For his birthday, our smart, loyal, educated, imaginative, and energetic protagonist receives two gifts from his parents, reflective of both their affection and their aspirations for their son. From his father, Harry receives a beautiful little pocket watch; from his mother, a copy of samuel Johnsons Rasselas, a philosophical novel about the search for happiness.15 This is all well and good, Harry thinksand a new watch is particularly well and goodbut an even better present would be a break from the incredibly well-meaning household of his parents altogether, to be liberated from the demands of schedule that are always so pressing in the stapleton house. as Harry himself puts it, i should like to be Robinson Crusoe. Father may doubt it, but i know it. i dare say i know what i should like myselfbut he knows nothing about it; he does not want to be any body else, i dare say, because he can do just as he likes; and what is the reason i may not? it is doing as one likes is the thing; it is so disagreeable to be obliged to obey just to a minute, and to be forced to go when that bell rings, let me be about what i will; as if i could not go to my lessons as well afterwards!16 as things go in childrens books, wishes like Harrys are usually granted, and usually to terrible but instructive effect, and that is precisely what happens here. on reflection, Harrys loving, intentional, enlightened, experimentalist, and time-conscious parents find no reason to deny Harry his wish, at least for a period. indeed, they see every reason in the world to grant it. To them, it appears a perfect opportunity for a lesson in the value of schedulesomething, Harrys father notes, not easily done by words.17 so, Harry and his parents do a deal: Harry will have a holiday of one week with no schedule, letting the chips fall where they may. it is no great surprise what happens next. Harry gets himself into various illuminating kinds of trouble. in rapid succession, he tries everything he can think of to amuse himself; as soon as he tires of one activity, he moves on to another. not that garden variety laziness is altogether absent here. in addition to Harry, the book gives us a classically indolent character in Harrys lay-

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Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Sloth, from The Seven Deadly Sins. Engraving in reverse from an original drawing dated 1557.

about friend, edward Vowles, who sulks into the story now and again only to sulk awayall in contrast to Harry who is much too busy to waste his time in sulking. Harry has much better ways to waste his time, and he has lots of them. in the course of his short holiday, he manages to waste his time renovating his rabbit cage, building an electrical machine, painting a wheelbarrow, and rewriting aesops fables in verse.18 and thats not all: he engages in optical experiments, plays trap-ball, attends lectures, leads an expedition, flies his kite, and copies a historical chart. of course, in the intended terms of the story, all of these activities really are a waste of time, not because they are intrinsically useless, but, as we have seen with the chart, because Harry misunderstands their importance, misapplies his energies, and doesnt stick with any of them long enough to derive any value. and the very fact that most of these activities could be productive only goes to emphasize the point. Harry loses his rabbits, breaks the electrical equipment, wastes money on unused paint, gets his friends lost in the woods, and
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plots his chart on an uneven scale. and its not as though Harry doesnt know whats going on. To the contrary, he finds the whole situation humiliating and saddening. His aim, from the beginning, is not to avoid anything, but to do everything in his own time, or, to quote Harry directly, to prove that there is no need for so much bellringing to tell me what to do, or when to do it.19 The issues that concerned Taylor equally concerned the other authors in his family. Advice to the Teens, for example, searches widely for an adequate vocabulary to talk about the specific sorts of distraction faced by an educated, middle-class teenager. in isaacs work, the key term is not laziness or indolence but desultoriness.20 Desultory means scattered, disconnected, or lacking a definite plan. Charmingly, it comes from desultor, a circus performer who leaps from horse to horse, which itself derives from the latin salire, to leap. The key developmental danger for educated middleclass teens, as isaac Taylor diagnoses it, is not that they may wish to do nothing; it is that, la Harry stapleton, they may wish to do everything all at once.

Joseph Priestleys A New Chart of History (1769). Courtesy Library Company of Philadelphia.

The same terminological inquiry is continued in a very popular short story by Jane Taylor, the daughter of isaac and the sister of Jefferys, in 1820, one year after Harrys Holiday. in the story, called busy idleness, Jane attempts to finally fix a name for the Harry stapleton phenomenon.21 The shape of this story itself doesnt take much explaining. it reads very much like a girls version of Harrys Holiday. in it, two sisters, Charlotte and Caroline Dawson, are left alone while their mother goes on a trip. When Mrs. Dawson returns, she finds that Caroline has done her homework and chores. Charlotte, on the other hand, has begun dozens of projectsreading William Cowper, learning shorthand, organizing bookshelves, making a quiltand has completed none of them.22 like Harry, she too tries her hand at versifying, attempting a history of england in rhyme, though, as the narrator notes, the epic stopped short some hundred years before the norman conquest.23 For her behavior, Caroline is rewarded with several gifts, a beautiful little watch chief among them. since Charlotte has completed nothing, she receives a package of gifts from each of which
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her parents have cruelly removed some key component. she gets a fan without a fastening pin, a penknife without a blade, and a telescope without a lens. still, as the narrator says, Charlotte was, greatly encouraged to discover that the last remaining article was a watch; for as she heard it tick, she felt no doubt that this, at least was complete, but, upon examination, she discovered that there was no hour hand, the minute hand alone pursuing its lonely and useless track.24 Jane Taylor had a number of terms for Charlottes disposition, but the key term in the story is the beautiful oxymoron announced in its title, busy idleness. Just as in the case of Harry stapleton, what is at issue for Charlotte Dawson is not laziness. Charlotte is always busy. and this makes perfect sense according to the moral scheme laid out by isaac: those who do not manage their time can never repose. This moral is, of course, familiar today, as are Harry and Charlotte, characters who in so many ways seem prototypically modern. We live in a moment obsessed with time management and hyper-attention. so much so that it is hardly necessary to point out the

feelings of frustration and emptiness, tristitia, to use the latin from aquinas, that we are all supposed to be experiencing in our compulsive email checking, web surfing, texting, and the rest of it, nor to emphasize the immense and growing piles of self-help literature aimed at helping us address this condition. For this reason, it is important to notice that the problem of busy idleness is not unique to our time. This is not to say that there is nothing modern about it: the emergence of the question of busy idleness in a secular context during the early part of the modern period represents a significant development, as does the reorientation of our morality toward questions of productivity. and these emerging concerns are clearly registered in the history of our modern languages. in the nineteenth century, english speakers innovated and borrowed like mad, trying to find the right way to talk about restless distraction. and the Taylors busy idleness was right in the mix. Though the adjectival combination busy, idle existed earlier, this new substantive caught the imagination of many contemporaries and filled a linguistic gap that seems to have been widely perceived. in the middle of the century, for example, Janes term became an important weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of social improvement. Florence nightingale, for instance, uses busy idleness as the name for the frenetic and unproductive activity of the new middle-class (and especially female) subject for whom everything is provided. For a time, the term busy idleness captured something of the zeitgeist, though it faced able competition from other, more exotic terms such as decadence and ennui. but busy idleness is not decadence. it is something that, from the perspective of 1818, at once harkens backward and forward historically. The Taylors had no love for the lazy. in Harrys Holiday, there is no character lower than the sluggard edward Vowles. but in the universe of the Taylors, garden variety laziness was nothing more than that. For the Taylors, the more pressing problem was something for which an exact name was wanting. For a couple of centuries now, weve been improvising on this theme, trying to figure the right way to talk about the restless distraction that, in the period of the Taylors, already seemed epidemic. The Taylors called it busy idleness; today we have a whole new vocabulary of disorders to apply. but, in order to get the thing right, and at the same time not to forget our own rootedness in a longstanding moralizing tradition, we might do well to call it sloth.

1 Jefferys Taylor, Harrys Holiday, or the Doings of One Who Had Nothing to Do (London: Rest Fenner, 1818). Citations here to the 1851 edition. Epigraph from Jane Taylor, The Way to Be Happy, in Original Poems for Infant Minds (London: Darton and Harvey, 1806), vol. 2, p. 113. 2 Remembered now for his discovery of oxygen, early in his career Joseph Priestley was best known for A Chart of Biography (London: J. Johnson, 1765) and A New Chart of History (London: J. Johnson, 1769), which revolutionized the graphic representation of history and influenced the development of statistical graphics. See my Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, no. 36 (2007), pp. 55104. 3 Jefferys Taylor, Harrys Holiday, p. 71. 4 Sigfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967; Reinhard Clifford Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 5 Acedia, Accidie, and Sloth, in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 Patricia Ann Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 7 Spacks, p. 32. 8 Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 12, trans. Luke Dysinger. Available at <www. ldysinger.com/Evagrius/00_Introd/12_var-acedia.htm> 9 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 35, pp. 21-33. 10 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964), pp. 300-6. 11 Francis Galton, English Men of Science (London: Macmillan & Co.,1874); Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (New York: D. Appleton, 1870). 12 Christina Duff Stewart, The Taylors of Ongar, An Analytical Bio-bibliography (New York: Garland, 1975); Isaac Taylor, The Family Pen: Memorials Biographical and Literary, of the Taylor Family of Ongar (London: Jackson, Walford and Hodder, 1867); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-07). 13 Jane Taylor and Ann Taylor, Rhymes for the Nursery (London: Darton and Harvey, 1806), 10-11. 14 Isaac Taylor, Advice to the Teens, or Practical Helps Towards the Formation of Ones Own Character (London: Rest Fenner, 1818). Taylors other juvenile titles include The Childs Birthday (1811), Bunyan Explained to a Child (1825), The Mine (1829), and The Ship (1830). 15 Samuel Johnsons Rasselas (1759) also explores questions of boredom and distraction and ends with a conclusion in which noting is concluded. The 1851 edition of Harrys Holiday contains some small changes: in place of Rasselas , Harry receives a book entitled, Boy Kings of the Seven Seas , reminiscent of Jefferys Taylors own book, The Young Islanders (1842). 16 Taylor, Harrys Holiday, pp. 8-9. 17 Taylor, Harrys Holiday, p. 119. 18 Taylor pokes fun at himself by putting Harry onto one of his own projects. See Jefferys Taylor, Aesop in Rhyme (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1820). 19 Taylor, Harrys Holiday, p. 78. 20 Isaac Taylor, Advice to the Teens , pp. 1-3; 17-8; 40-1. 21 Jane Taylor, Busy Idleness, in The Writings of Jane Taylor (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1832), vol. 3, pp. 179-189; first published in Youths Magazine (May 1820), pp. 146-56. 22 The reference to William Cowper (17311800) in this story is no less motivated than is the reference to Johnson in Harrys Holiday. Note the resonance with Cowpers poem Retirement: A mind unnervd, or indisposd to bear/ The weight of subjects worthiest of her care,/ Whatever hopes a change of scene inspires,/ Must change her nature, or in vain retires./ An idler is a watch that wants both hands,/ As useless if it goes as when it stands. 23 Jane Taylor, Busy Idleness, p. 182. 24 Jane Taylor, Busy Idleness, p. 188.

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Fifty-six-year-old controller before (A) and after (B) the Steinach operation. From How to Restore Youth and Live Longer, by Serge Voronoff (1928).

VaseCtoManIa, and otheR CuRes FoR sloth CHRisToPHeR TURneR

in 1904, the Heidelberg chemist Wilhelm Weichardt made a sensational announcement. He promised a utopia in which men would never grow weary, but would be transformed into industrious and tireless machines. Weichardt thought that fatigue was caused by the accumulation of toxins in the blood, and he harvested a concentrated version of this poison from rats that he drove to death by strenuous exercise. as the toxins built up, he observed, the rats descended into a kind of narcosis or stupor, before slowing to a complete standstill. in his laboratory, Weichardt worked on an antibody. He called the resulting miracle drughis vaccine against fatigueantikenotoxin. in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (1990), anson Rabinbach explains how, after 1870, the religious discourse against acedia or sloth was taken up and replaced by the burgeoning scientific study of fatigue. Fatigue, Rabinbach argues, was considered both a physical and moral disorder: it replaced the traditional emphasis on idleness as the paramount cause of resistance to work. its ubiquity was evidence of the bodys stubborn subversion of modernity. in the eighteenth century, idleness had been presented by artists such as Hogarth as the antithesis of industry; in the nineteenth century, fatigue was
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considered a similar failureit represented the refusal of the body and mind to keep up with the demands of modern labor. Maurice Keim, one of the first of these nineteenth-century theorists, wrote that we flee [fatigue] by instinct, it is responsible for our sloth and makes us desire inaction. in the decade following its invention, antikenotoxin vapors were pumped into berlins classrooms in the optimistic hope that science could save schoolchildren from infection by the dangerous seeds of sloth. The experiment was thought to have incredible beneficial effects. students who had been secretly exposed to the gas for five hours were given a series of mathematical tests that they apparently performed with considerable improvement; their speed of calculation increased by fifty percent, and their answers showed improved accuracy. Pupils who were usually sleepy and bored by the time of their afternoon lessons were now uncharacteristically sprightly. in 1914, on the eve of World War i, it was hoped that Weichardts vaccine would provide the austroHungarian army with a military advantage. but a battery of independent scientific tests conducted on soldiers showed that those who were injected with antikenotoxin performed no better than those who received a jab of placebo. in fact, other nerve whips, as they were called, such as caffeine or cocaine, proved much more effective. However, even these stimulants served only to mask rather than cure the symptoms of fatigue.

The war was fought on other technological fronts, but after the ceasefire the quest for a more useable fatigue vaccine persisted in the dismantled and humbled austro-Hungarian empire. blood was still thought to be the key to curing fatigue and expanding the horizons of human usefulness, but the emphasis was now on the hormones that flooded it rather than the toxins that polluted it. it was Charles-douard brown-squard, a professor of experimental medicine at the Collge de France and the grandfather of modern endocrinology, who brought the importance of these chemical cues in the blood stream to scientific attention. in 1889, aged seventy-two, he injected himself with the juice of pulped guinea pig and dog testicles, a hormonal fluid that he believed rejuvenated him. Though the concentrations of testosterone would have been too low to have any biological effect, brown-squard claimed that he felt awash with new energy, that his brain functioned more quickly, that his endurance was enhanced, and his sexual potency revived. in a book he wrote about the experimentElixir of Lifehe said he felt thirty years younger. He could work into the night, walk up the stairs without holding on to the banisters, and, he noted, his bowel movements improved. news of his elixir was widely publicized and mocked by scientists at the time, who saw in brownsquard a modern Ponce de len (the spanish conquistador famous for his foolish quest for the Fountain of Youth), but three decades later there was a full-blown glandular craze. in June 1922, a journalist for the New York Times wrote: in the last two years the reading public has become pretty well accustomed to the almost continuous hysterical manifestations of concern for its glandular welfare. a war-ridden world has given way to a gland-ridden world. nearly every newspaper and magazine that one picks up contains some referencejocular or seriousto monkey glands and goat glands and the beneficent possibilities in human gland nurture and repair. The physiologist serge Voronoff, a Russian working in Paris, was one of the most infamous of the gland doctors. He thought that the lazy, mentally disabled, run-down, and aged could be revitalized by testicular transplants. Many wealthy men underwent the costly surgery; Voronoff transplanted the testes of executed criminals into millionaires. legal contracts were drawn up with prospective donors, but apparently willing individuals were in such short supply that what one
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scientist called a despicable trade in organs began to develop. according to one newspaper, men were even being mugged for their testicles, knocked unconscious and then robbed of the long-sought-for organs. Voronoff solved this crisis by slicing and grafting the testicles of monkeys onto those of the men who sought his treatment. in his book, Rejuvenation by Grafting (1925), Voronoff promised the patients who acquired his monkey glands that theyd be able to work longer, and that they would be blessed with improved memories, eyesight, and sex drives. He set up a special breeding center on the italian Riviera for chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans that was run by a former circus-animal keeper. What he promised was spuriousaccording to the surgeon and historian, David Hamilton, grafts from other animals would be instantly rejected by the patient, though the resulting scarring might imply they had been absorbed. but the idea that one might be made younger by apes, a kind of evolutionary trick, seeped into the popular mind like water into sand, according to a 1923 article in the New York Times Magazine, for the mind of man has thirsted for this secret for untold centuries. Voronoff became very rich as the hopeful queued up to make their Faustian pact with him. He set up home on the entire first floor of one of Pariss most expensive and fashionable hotels, where he was surrounded by an entourage of chauffeurs, valets, personal secretaries, and chefs, as well as two mistresses. if the body was a machine, its energy quickly sapped by the demands of modernity, it was thought that you could revive it by replacing or augmenting its exhausted batteries, in this case the testes, through grafts or hormonal injections. as Dr. Clayton e. Wheeler, who gave 12,000 goat gland injections to California patients between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-six in the 1920s (claiming in the process to have revived the living dead), told an audience in new York, the human body is just like a storage battery of a motor car or radio whose potency ebbs with use and needs to be reinvigorated at certain intervals to restore its customary vitality. in Vienna, eugen steinach also performed transplant operations. steinach, director of the biological institute in Vienna, was a research scientist who was nominated for the nobel Prize six times in the 1920s and 1930s and performed sex change operations on rats and guinea pigs, triggering the development of the opposite sex by implanting ovaries or testes in his neutered rodents.

The austrian satirist Karl Kraus joked that with these skills, steinach might be able to turn suffragettes into maternal women and journalists into real men. steinach thought that he could treat homosexuality in men by transplanting a testicle of a supposedly normal man to remasculinize the recipient. Though sex reformers appreciated his attempt to establish that there was an innate biological basis for homosexuality, the results of his operations, according to one doctor who wrote his obituary, were to be taken cum grano salis. steinach thought that the vasectomyor the steinach operation as it was then commonly known presented an ingenious solution to the shortage of testicles for grafts. Rather than resorting to simian transplants or animal injections, the patients own glands would be stimulated or re-energized into more youthful activity. Having tested the procedure in rats, steinach believed that the severance and ligature of the spermatic duct would cause the sperm-producing tissue to back up and atrophy, making more room for the interstitial or leydig cells that are also produced in the testicles, which would then flood the bloodstream with hormones and new energy. The first steinach operation was performed in 1918 by steinachs colleague Robert lichtenstern on anton W., a forty-three-year-old coachman who suffered from chronic fatigue: The patient presented the appearance of an exhausted and prematurely old man, steinach reported in his book Rejuvenation Through Experimental Regeneration of the Aging Interstitial Gland (1920), which contained photographs of apparent metamorphosis. His weight was 108 pounds, his musculature was weak, and there was very little cushion of fat, wrote steinach in his report. The skin was dull and conspicuously dry, the hair grey and had fallen out on top, scanty beard, lank hair growth on the trunk and extremities. a year and a half after the operation, the coachman had put on thirty-five pounds. The ex-patient now drags loads of up to 220 pounds with ease. His muscles have developed extraordinarily. The hair on his head is thicker and his beard more strongly developed. The head and face hair grow so quickly he has to have it cut and shaved twice as often as previously. The skin appears soft, with fine down, pliable and moist. This man with his smooth, unwrinkled face, his smart and upright bearing, gives the impression of a man at the height of his vitality. in case this transformation was attributed to suggestion, the operation was performed on anton W. without his knowledge of its consequences and
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hoped-for effects. nevertheless, other explanations are possible: the mans progress might be ascribed to the near-famine and influenza epidemic that ravaged Vienna in the winter of 1918, but had eased up a year later. in april 1923, the New York Times reported an exodus to Vienna of doctors who hoped to learn the secret of the steinach operation. The glamour of acquirement [of these surgical skills] at a great distance, the Times observed, added to the generous fee doctors were able to charge back home. in the Roaring Twenties, thousands of steinach operations were performed in the US and around the world, from Chile to india, and hundreds of booksmost directed at lay readerscelebrated their supposed successes in optimistic patient histories and testimonials. steinach, who had acquired worldwide fame as a result (his name was even used as a verb, to be steinached), made a full-length film of his procedure, which appeared in two versions: one for scientists shown before a medical audience in new York, and the other a popular treatment that never got a theatrical release in the states. according to the New York Times, Viennese crowds were clamoring to get into the movie houses where the film was being shown, and they stood around disconsolately when they were unable to gain admission. The film showed aged rats, barely able to stand. after their vasectomies they appeared rejuvenated (or reactivated, as steinach preferred to call it) and playful. They were finally shown surrounded by new offspring (the vasectomy was only done on one side), their potency fully restored. Men were shown before, during, and after their operations, similarly transformed. There were occasional setbacks to this propaganda campaign. alfred Wilson, a rich septuagenarian who underwent the procedure (for which he paid the thenenormous sum of 700 pounds), died of a heart attack the morning he was to give a talk at londons albert Hall on How i was Made Younger by the Method of Professor steinach. His friends said his death was due to the excitement and over-exertion in which he had indulged on his return from Vienna. according to the australian sex reformer norman Haire, who performed steinach operations in england, [Wilson] had been warned not to be too prodigal of his new-found strength, but forgot that he was in his seventies and tried to live like a young man in his twenties. The result, of course, was disaster. Though he made it famous, the vasectomy was not invented by steinach; it originated in the 1890s as a

A rebellious monkey refuses to give up his glands. Drawing by Aldo Molinari.

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non-traumatic version of castration, which was then employed to treat enlarged prostates (one castrated patient had murdered his surgeon for having emasculated him, setting off the search for an alternative surgery). The first vasectomy done for non-medical reasons was performed by Harry sharp in 1899 on a nineteen-year-old boy at a reformatory school in indiana who indulged in excessive masturbation, long thought by religious zealots to be a by-product of the sin of slothafter his operation, according to sharp, the boy became more of a sunny disposition, brighter of intellect and ceased to masturbate. by 1907, when sharp helped push through the first eugenic act in his home state, he had operated on 176 other masturbating minors. He reported that the patients all improved mentally and physically, in that they increase in flesh, feel that they are stronger, sleep better, their memory improves, the will becomes stronger, and their school progress advances. The mans mind and nervous systemespecially the centers of selfrestraintare strengthened by re-absorption of sperm. by 1937, thirty-two states were performing eugenic sterilizations on criminals, the unfit, and the insane. steinach, however, was advocating the use of these eugenic techniques on the very people who were supposed to be improving the racial makeup of the species. because the operation was not done bilaterally, technically the aging men who underwent it would still be able to reproduce. Harry benjamin, the german-born sexologist who performed hundreds of steinach procedures in the United states (thirteen percent of them on other physicians), claimed that the operation would increase the productive yield of great men: scientists, inventors, artists ... . He meant this both sexually and creatively. sigmund Freud and W. b. Yeats were among the celebrity patients who were steinached, an operation no more serious, according to another respected Viennese doctor who went under the knife, than having your hair cut. Freud had the operation in 1923, aged sixtyseven, in the hope that it would prevent the recurrence of the cancer of the jaw from which he suffered. He told Harry benjamin this when the two men met in Vienna, and that he hoped it might improve his sexuality, his general condition and his capacity for work. in 1934, when Yeats was sixty-nine, he went to see norman Haire in Harley street for the snip. not long afterwards, Haire invited a woman half Yeatss age to dinner, so that Yeats could test out his newly regained sexual potency. it was apparently a success. Yeats spoke so often of the second puberty that he enjoyed, and the creative outpouring it engendered, that the Dublin press nicknamed
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him the gland old man. it revived my creative power, Yeats boasted, it revived also sexual desire; and that in all likelihood will last me until i die. The american novelist gertrude atherton, the prolific author most famous for her bestselling 1923 novel Black Oxen, based on her own experience of the female equivalent of vasectomy (low-dose X-rays to the ovaries), suggested in 1924 that germany, whose best young men had been lost in the war, make itself predominant again by having her supermen subjected to the steinach treatment and rejuvenated. Vasectomies were encouraged for the respected as well as the unfit because it might extend the breeding age of germanys esteemed but otherwise impotent old men. it is estimated that a million vasectomies were performed in the Third Reich for eugenic purposes. in 1944, steinach, who was half-Jewish, died at the age of eighty-three in exile in Zurich. according to benjamin, he died a lonely, uprooted, and somewhat embittered man. The steinach procedure, as its inventor imagined it, was killed off in 1935 when scientists managed to isolate testosterone, and the steinach operation was relegated to the realm of quack therapies. The biological ideas that underlay it have since been discredited (a vasectomy wouldnt stimulate the overproduction of leydig cells, as steinach supposed); in contrast, injections of synthetic testosterone offered a foolproof method of increasing hormone. The steinach procedures reported successes were thereafter attributed to the placebo effect. Unfortunately, those wishing for renewed youth suffer inordinately with the will to believe, warned Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association at the height of the glandular craze. in January 1936, the Los Angeles Times, whose proprietor once underwent injections from goat gland brinkley, the most famous of the glandular quacks in the US , reported that the sensational miracles promised by yarns in the sunday supplements failed to materialize. scientists had been unable to counter the immutable second law of thermodynamics to create a perpetual human machine. after all, the paper concluded, people who live fast should expect to die young.

1938

1955

1903

1956

the ReClIne oF WesteRn CIVIlIZatIon laURa naHMias & niCHolas naUMan

1898 at a private showing for investors held at Madison square garden, modern historys favorite maligned genius, nikola Tesla, first presented his Method of and apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vehicle or Vehicles. Using a radio transmitter to steer, Tesla guided a small boat over a pond. after receiving the US patent for his device later that year, Telsa announced his devil automata in an interview with the new York newspaper The Sun. news of the invention quickly spread, and his friend Mark Twain wrote him a perspicacious letter soon afterwards from Vienna: Have you austrian and english patents on that destructive terror which you have been inventing? and if so, wont you set a price upon them and concession me to sell them? Twain predicted that the armies of the world would bow down before such profound technology, and the remote control would make war thenceforth impossible.1 after a prolonged scandal of intellectual

property and propriety, popular credit for radio technology went to guglielmo Marconi. Tesla retreated into doleful eccentricity, claimed to receive commands from outer space, and spent his latter days with a particularly beloved white pigeon.2
1903 spanish mathematician leonardo Torres

Quevedo built what he called the Telekino. a remote control similar in mechanical function to Teslas, the Telekino employed its own telegraphic code to signal commands. The series of clicks were first demonstrated for use with a childs tricycle, making it possible to animate the vehicle without the necessity of an energetic rider.3 Torres Quevedo then tested his Telekino with engine-driven boats in Madrids Real Casa de Campo pond and in the bilbao estuary where he successfully took full control of a dinghy with a crew of eight at distances of over 1.25 miles.4 He abandoned his intention to use the technology to pilot submarine torpedoes when he was denied funding for his project by the spanish government.

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1938 The Philco Corporation released its Mystery Control, touted as the Most Thrilling invention since Radio itself! ... its truely (sic) unbelievable! its mystifying! Thats why its called Mystery Control! The remote, a hand-held electromagnetic oscillator, sold well, but after a few years, it became apparent that peoples radio listening habits did not require such a device, and Philco stopped its production.5 1941 germans developed the first remote-guided

frequency to hear, remotes now began to use light at too low a frequency to see.
1999 individual americans watched an average of

four-and-a-half hours of television per day.10 Sports Illustrated magazine named eugene Polley and Robert adler Men of the Millenium.11
2004 Mitch altman, a san Francisco electronics

missiles, named V1 and V2, abbreviations for Vergeltungswaffen or weapons of vengeance. an early test model of the V2 recovered by the british was outfitted with a radio transmitter, leading the british to wrongly assume that the missile could be stopped by merely scrambling radio waves.
1950 eugene Macdonald, self-described Commander

prankster-cum-philosopher, invented and marketed the TV-b-gone Universal Remote Control. in a ploy to give people a choice they may not have realized they were missing, the TV-b-gone can turn off almost any television in restaurants and bars, waiting areas, and living rooms the world over. altman continues to report excellent sales.12
1 Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), pp. 160162. 2 Fritz E. Froehlich, The Froehlich/ Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1997), pp. 3940. See also <pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_poevis.html>. 3 Antonio Yuste & Magdalena Palma, The First Wireless Remote Control: the Telekine of Torres Quevado, in Conference on the History of Electronics (Bletchley Park: IEEE, 2004), pp. 115. 4 Antonio Yuste & Magdalena Palma, Scanning Our Past From Madrid: Leonardo Torres Quevedo, Proceedings of the IEEE , vol. 93, no. 7, July 2005, pp. 13791382. 5 <philcorepairbench.com/mystery/history.htm>. Accessed 18 February 2008. 6 Steven D. Strauss, The Big Idea (New York: Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2002), pp. 1014. 7 Ibid. 8 Mike Michael, Reconnecting Culture, Technology, and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 102. 9 Jeremy Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), p. 276. 10 <nielsenmedia.com/nc/portal/site/Public/menuitem.55dc65b4a7d5adff 3f65936147a062a0?vgnextoid=4156527aacccd010VgnVCM100000ac0a26 0aRCRD>. Accessed 18 February 2008. 11 Strauss, The Big Idea, op. cit., p. 13. 12 Interview with Altman conducted by the authors, 18 February 2008. See also <cornfieldelectronics.com>.

of the Zenith electronics Corporation, developed the lazy bones remote control, equipped with a mute button to combat his personal pet peevecommercials. Unfortunately, lazy bones connected to the TV via a cumbersome cable stretched across the living room floor. Deemed a hazard, the technology was shelved.6
1955 searching for a wireless remote technology, Zenith engineer eugene Polley experiments with lightsensitive controls, and in 1955 the company distributed the Flashmatic. basically a high-powered flashlight, the Flashmatic signaled photo cells in each corner of the TV set. Consumers quickly discovered, however, that any light sourcebe it a lamp, passing headlights, or a fireplacecould affect the controls. a sunny afternoon caused the Flashmatic-equipped TV to go haywire.7

1956 Dr. Robert adler redirected Zeniths technological

focus from light to sound, leading to the 1956 introduction of the first practical wireless remotethe Zenith space Command. by clicking the switches on a small, battery-free console, colliding aluminum rods emitted ultrasonic vibrations to reliably signal the TV on and off, change channels, and, finally, mute commercials. Though the space Command required an expensive, elaborate vacuum tube receiver, there was nothing between you and the set but space!8 The clickers technology successfully facilitated immobility for the next quarter century.9

technology replaced ultrasonics as the industry and living room standard. instead of sound at too high a
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ca. 1978 Formerly the province of the military, infrared

opposite: Vadim Fishkin, Lost & Found / Remote Control, 2006. A remote control for the world at large. Courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Ljubljana / Berlin.

FatIgued MaRina Van ZUYlen

in the frenetic lives we lead, while it is not unusual for us to brag about our late nights at work, to recount feats of heroic exhaustion at the gym, we would rather be caught dead than admit to a most excellent bout of napping or a particularly enjoyable daydream. We use our precious days off catching up on email and have even been spotted at the movies taking notes for an article that we may never write. There seems to be no time to waste anymore and our sisyphean tasks and travails fill us with a reassuring sense of exhaustion. exhaustion, indeed, has a curious way of eradicating more complex signs of weariness, one of which being the indeterminate state we call fatigue. being exhausted signifies having paid ones dues to society. Fatigue, on the other hand, generally connotes a weakened state, a deviation from the affirming inevitability of cause and effect, work and repose. like boredom and depression, fatigue is a porous state that lies at the margins of consciousness. From the murky nineteenth-century concepts of asthenia and neurasthenia, to recent discussions of chronic fatigue syndrome, fatigue has in turn been lambasted as proof of cultural decadence, analyzed as an offshoot of alienated modernity, or praised as the sign of our willingness to engage in the impossibly taxing business of ethical living. Historically, fatigue has been looked down on as a malady of the will, the offshoot of excessive introspection, and a blood relative of laziness. Uncomfortable, indefinable, it is an unsettled and unsettling topic that no great philosopher tackled before emmanuel lvinas, who did so in his 1947 book Existence and Existants. so why the recent interest? slowly catching up with laziness, fatigue is emerging as a force to be reckoned with. anson Rabinbachs The Human Motor, Jeanlouis Chrtiens De la fatigue (on Fatigue), and last but not least alain ehrenbergs La Fatigue d tre soi (The Fatigue of being oneself) have all made it clear that postenlightenment culture entertains a curious love-hate relationship with fatigue. its eradication would usher in an age of absolute energy and accomplishments, while its cultivation could lead to radical self-knowledge. Fatigue, then, is both a natural barrier to the efficient use of the human motor,1 and, for the likes of baudelaire and schopenhauer, the most promising way to unlock the central mechanisms of our being. Feverishly discussed in the nineteenth century and heavily diagnosed in over-populated cities like Paris and london, fatigue was blamed on a host of
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interlocking causesthe new expectations democratic society placed on its citizens, expanded leisure time, and the monotony of mechanized work. Manuals such as Marc-antoine Julliens 1808 Essai sur lemploi du temps; ou mthode qui a pour objet de bien rgler lemploi du temps (essay on scheduling, or a Method for living a Well-Regulated life)2 offered idle characters a host of practical solutions designed to combat bodily and intellectual fatigue. Jullien believed that by measuring and cutting up time in rhythmical and orderly sequences, one could get rid of the dangerous idleness that resulted in mind-numbing weariness.3 He makes clear that as civilization advances and as we rely less and less on the body to perform daily tasks, fatigue travels from our bodies to our souls. Cold showers, large quantities of tea and coffee, programmed meals, promenades, praying sessions, and esoteric games were offered as antidotes to the disruptive and antisocial manifestations of fatigue. but these measures were obviously too mild, and one had to wait for the drastic solutions of utopiansturned-scientists to dream away fatigue altogether. Whether in the hopes of boosting productivity, reducing workers fatigue, or combating self-indulgence, fatigue-eradication was at its apogee in the early twentieth century. in 1904, for example, Wilhelm Weichardts monomaniacal desire to exterminate fatigue caused him to invent a sprayable vaccine for german classrooms to help combat harmful fatigue toxins that built up in students bloodstreams. a few years earlier, angelo Mossos bestselling La Fatica (Fatigue; 1891) had convinced readers that fatigue could not only be objectively described, but analyzed and controlled. His desire to help workers by easing their fatigue led him to experiment with muscular mechanics, inspiring him to invent the ergographa work recorderin order to understand the principles of endurance and energy. in an attempt to find a cure for fatigue, experiments were conducted with all sorts of stimulants, narcotics, and dietary regulations to determine the relationship between mental and physical exhaustion. Mossos dark assessment of the fatigued citizendrooping, yawning, spasmingbelongs to the extensive literature written by the veritable army of fatigue-fighters and lazinessdebunkers that riddled the French, italian, and even the american psychiatric landscape between the 1880s and World War ii.4 These physicians were out to prove that fatigue was just another physiological, and therefore solvable, obstacle to the development of the new Man. leading parallel lives, good fatigue and bad fatigue were intricately connected. While Proust was meditating on the phenomenology of sleep and wakefulness,

his father adrien was busy promoting cures against exhaustion.5 and while Flaubert was documenting emma bovarys unthinking surrender to fatigue, he was summoning his readers to a self-conscious version of this weariness through the painstaking act of reading. in contradistinction to escapism (the great antidote to existential fatigue), Flaubert, ushering in Modernisms principled difficulty, was transmitting his characters plodding life-rhythms to his audience, trying to infect the reader with a pedagogically enriching fatigue. My secret aim, Flaubert writes about his unfinished Bouvard et Pcuchet, is to make the reader so catatonic that he will go mad. but my goal will never be achieved the reader having immediately fallen asleep.6 Flaubert might have initially failed to convert his painstaking writing style into real-life weariness, but the trend had been set. What famously fatigued characters such as goncharovs oblomov or Melvilles bartleby had achieved on the thematic level, artists from Chekhov to beckett would radicalize performatively. by dismantling the aristotelian dependency on catharsis and robbing their protagonists of the impulse to act, they were placing inertia at the center of theatrical production and causing the public to be seized with bouts of unendurable fatigue. at the end of an action-packed century, an era that promoted progress over introspection, plotting over plodding, the arts were pinning great hope on ontological fatigue. it was as though cultivating it would counteract positivistic thinking and reinstall slowness and self-doubt as a new aesthetic motor. in the political register, a book like alain ehrenbergs La Fatigue d tre soi (2000), connects lassitude not with productive introspection but with societys craving for lost authority.7 ehrenberg argues that depression stems from the fatigue of being oneself, from the exhaustion caused by democracys abnegation of authority. How could one not be overcome by melancholy, the author argues, when every life decision is up to us? neither church, nor family, nor government tells us who to be; our identity is all ours to determine and to perform. Vaguely echoing Dostoevskys grand inquisitor, ehrenberg warns us that free will is more grueling than meets the eye, and that most of us are not up to it. if so many teenagers are curled up somewhere in a state of larval inaction, it is because they have too many choices and not enough guidance. The book is both persuasive and condescendingly dangerous. it taps into our own overachieving fear of free time and tries to convince us that had we fewer choices, we would avoid those disorienting moments of idleness, those very moments where boredom and fatigue coalesce
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and where pill-popping is at its apogee. We demand from our favorite chemicalsagainst depression, attention deficit disorder, oversleeping, or sleeplessnessthat they mitigate those in-between moments. While ehrenberg warns that our addiction to palliatives is the natural result of democratic chaos, he is tapping into a conservative version of what georg simmel saw as the sensory overflow bred by the urban experience.8 The ease with which pleasure could and can be achieved (from brothels to arcades, from iPods to instant messaging) causes our senses to become stunted, demanding an ever-greater intensity of excitement. stopping such a desiring process is almost impossible. For both the nineteenth-century flneur

Apparatus used for measuring the pulse of the brain, from La Fatica, by Angelo Mosso (1891).

and the present-day jaded web-surfer, fatigue attaches itself, ehrenberg claims, to an insular and narcissistic body that has lost its ties to a greater purpose. it would be unfair to accuse ehrenberg of encouraging a return of authority. still, his warnings hark back to the perennial fear that unless the hours of the day are properly accounted for, free fall into bored and self-destructive introspection will ensue. sectioning the day into a regimen of puritanical tasks and over-scheduling ourselves into healthy exhaustion appear to be the only viable alternative, making good tiredness the sole route to a successful life. if we recall the rhetoric of Fascism, Mussolini also believed in structured leisure and fatigue management: he forced the unruly masses to spend their saturday nights at the opera by giving them free tickets, legislating Verdi over vino. This was supposed to keep his citizens busy, rested, and diverted at the same time. lack of choice, it was understood, would turn the body into a well-oiled machine that would miraculously be saved from the lethal in-between, from melancholygenerating free time. a new history of philosophy around such indeterminate intervals is overdue. From Pascal to baudelaire, from Proust to lvinas, the French tradition has been particularly sensitive to these uncomfortable thresholdmoments, making them a central ingredient in their definition of the human. lvinas makes fatigue, and particularly dead-time, one of the cornerstones of the thinking process, pairing it with the benefits of insomnia, and pressing us to consider it as our chance to be optimally alert to our condition.9 against all logic, he invests fatigue with a moral dimension, seeing it as a heightened state of consciousness, a wakeful mission that will rekindle and seal our contract with ethics. While weariness spells out our refusal to exist, and while indolence postpones any sustained mode of engagement, fatigue gives us a chance to take stock of our hesitation to live. To lvinas, it is incumbent on the philosopher to put him or herself in the instant of fatigue and discover the way it comes about. and to scrutinize the instant, to look for the dialectic which takes place in a hitherto unsuspected dimension.10 Pushing this idea of strain even further, lvinas holds insomnia as the most promising step toward self-knowledge. as forbidding as a plotless novel or an atonal piece of music, insomnia takes fatigue to its foremost point of discomfort. Prisoner of an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down, the insomniac falls into a beckettian pattern of waiting. The degree of anxiety born from this quasi-state of paralysis, a locked-in syndrome of sorts,
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makes thinking the only option. insomnia, then, is an indefectibility of being, where the work of being never lets up.11 in terms of the cultural history of fatigue, lvinass scrutiny of idle attentiveness turns on its head the more conventional nineteenth-century dichotomy between fatigue-ennui, on the one hand, and virtuous volition, on the other.12 Thodule Ribot developed this distinction in his 1883 Les Maladies de la volont (The Diseases of the Will), his concept of boredom closely resembling lvinass state of insomnia, but without the positive spin.13 To Ribot, volition is something reassuringly final; it is what allows us to close the deal by converting any dangerous self-scrutiny into a decisive step. nothing is further from lvinas than such a wish for closure, the latter belying the end rather than the beginning of thought. The ethical contract that lvinas locates in fatigue coincides instead with an awakening, not the smug solidification of calculated decisiveness. one of lvinass great forerunners in the rehabilitation of fatigue was baudelaire, whose vicious attack against hashish in Les Paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises) was rooted in his critique of a sensation-seeking ethos that would lead to a debilitating emptying-out of selfhood. For baudelaire, whatever is not produced by effort and hard thought, whatever chemically obliterates doubt and anxiety, is dismissed as fortuitous and slavish energy. because it creates false enthusiasm and smug laziness, it ends up producing exactly what it was eschewingan immense fatigue. Clearly, baudelaire wants to distinguish between the good and the bad brands of fatigue that his century was clumping together without discrimination. Far from being a shameful pariah, good fatigue actually regulated our core being. He recognized in it that very element from which his hashish-consuming friends in the Club des Hashischins (Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, Thophile gautier, grard de nerval) were desperate to escapenamely, the discomfort and anxiety born from a state-in-waiting, the state that occurs before resolution, whether it be pleasure or pain. baudelaire clamors for the return of such a threshold-state, as crucial to life as is a pause in a conversation. but baudelaires hashish-eaters, like the fatigued citizens described by ehrenberg, are absolutely resistant to downtime, to the only time where fatigue can actually be reckoned with. The result of opium for our senses is to adorn the whole of nature with a supernatural
opposite: Advertisement for Horsfords Acid Phosphate, late nineteenth century. Courtesy the National Library of Medicine.

95

interest, one that endows each object with a more profound, more willful, and more despotic meaning.14 Hashish disguises the mute and still quality of objects, making them aggressively interesting and unnaturally interactive. it also artificially heightens our consciousness, robbing it of the chance of framing the world on its own terms. boosting reality by resorting to chemicals dissipates concentrated selfhood, provoking the quick fix that will contribute to the loss and evaporation of the soul. The drug, rather than distilling perception, will dilute it, provoking the same decay that surfaces in all modern inventions that tend to diminish human freedom and imperative suffering.15 baudelaires meditation refuses all of modernitys escape routes, forging instead a fraternal bond with idleness and fatigue, two of its fundamental tenets. Drugs or disciplining manuals, while taking the edge off of self-doubt, wipe out that beneficial fatigue of being oneself, however cursed such a condition happens to be. baudelaires Paradis artificiels attempts to restore a curiously stretched fatigue, one that hovers between lucidity and despair, on the verge of becoming a philosophical entity in its own right. like hunger, fatigue always comes back to haunt us. Conventionally symbolizing introspections defeat, to more adventurous minds a life without such fatigue will ultimately produce nothing but monotony and disgust. Fatigue, after all, structures stillness, adds texture by resisting a temporality that usually imposes itself from without. but to protect our internal sense of time by cultivating our fatigue is no easy task. so once again, we are confronted with a seemingly impossible choice: do we become attentive to our excruciating fatigue, do we court our insomnia, or do we chase it away, only to replace its vague symptoms with the legitimizing pain of physical or mental exhaustion? For a start, we might recognize the masochism in both of these gestures: each alternative involves pain. Whatever, then, happened to the blissful fatigue that belongs neither to the worked-out body nor to the introspective soul? Where is the liberating fatigue that catches us off-guard, fending off the mindless stimuli of the everyday? as gratuitously perfect as the smoking of a cigarette, it is the delicate threshold separating sleep and non-sleep; it is that second or minute stolen from time and spaceour private access to the sublime. Too fleeting to be over-examined, it has nothing to do with baudelaires fatigue-as-death-wish or with lvinass ponderous reflexivity. its unpredictable jumps and starts, the sudden thoughts it unleashes and steals back, restore us to ourselves as we slip in and out of the accidental and inexplicable joys of momentary unconsciousness.
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1 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 133. 2 Marc-Antoine Jullien, Essai sur lemploi du temps; ou mthode qui a pour objet de bien rgler lemploi du temps (Paris: Didot, 1808). 3 See Alain Corbin, LAvnement des loisirs 1850-1960 (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), pp. 129130. 4 Anson Rabinbach describes at great length Mosso and his fatigue-measuring ergograph, Ferr and his connecting fatigue and crime, and Ferreros campaign against indolencefigures all convinced that fatigue was one of the sure signs of modernitys decadence. 5 Rabinbach, The Human Motor, pp. 156-160. 6 Quoted by Philippe Sollers, La Rage de Flaubert, Le Nouvel Observateur, 20 December 2007, p. 108. 7 Alain Ehrenberg, La Fatigue d tre soi. Dpression et socit (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000). 8 See Kevin Aho, Simmel on Acceleration, Boredom, and Extreme Aesthesia, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, no. 37 (2007), pp. 447462. 9 For a superb discussion of dead time, see Elissa Marders Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 10 Emmanuel Lvinas, Existence and Existents , translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), p. 18. 11 Lvinas, Existence and Existents , op. cit., p. 62. 12 For a comprehensive discussion of boredom, see Elizabeth Goodsteins Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 13 Thodule Ribot, Les Maladies de la volont (Paris: Germer Baillire, 1883). 14 Charles Baudelaire, Eugne Delacroix, Exposition Universelle 1855, in Oeuvres completes II (Paris: Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1975), p. 595. 15 Baudelaire, Paradis artificiels (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1964), p. 69.

artist project: sloth index william Justice

william Justices sloth index is an element of the Human morality index, a website that measures, through several quantitative methodologies, what it considers to be the state of human moral progress on the planet. it draws from real-time information sources such as stock market tickers and human

development index projections, and subjectively assigns that information to units of moral or spiritual measurement based on the capital vices (seven Deadly sins) and heavenly virtues. Following the fluctuations of stock prices for video game makers like Nintendo, breweries such as Budweiser, and the manufacturers of that ur-symbol of couch-potatodom, the lay-Z-Boy recliner, the sloth index tracks the condition of acedia in our consumerist age.

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Jean-Simon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738.

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Far niente: an interview with pierre saint-amand siNa NaJaFi

the roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the eighteenth century, when the new social and philosophical project of the enlightenment, founded on rationality, dovetailed with the emergence of a capitalist economic system based on maximizing efficiency and productivity. this is the century in which the secular gospel of work in its modern form was written. in its most radical articulation, this gospel proposes that freedom and work are in fact equivalent. in his new book, Paresse des Lumires (editions du seuil, 2008; forthcoming in english as The Pursuit of Laziness: Idle Philosophy and the Enlightenment), Pierre saint-amand, professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown university, looks to the eighteenth century paradoxically not for a critique of laziness but instead for a countertradition that champions it. in figures as diverse as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-simon chardin, and Pierre marivaux, he finds the beginnings of a refusal to participate in a social project governed by the work ethic and of a skepticism toward the notion that productivity and industry should be our ultimate goals. sina Najafi spoke with saint-amand by phone.
Why did you choose the eighteenth century as the focus of a book on laziness?

what he calls a state of tutelage. For Kant, laziness is the primary obstacle to an autonomous life. i was interested, however, in examining a counterdiscourse that valorizes laziness. this counter-discourse rejects functionality, resists the ideology of utility, and affirms forms of marginality that radically unsettle the enlightenment project. what is especially interesting is that some of the same figures in my book who promote laziness are also the ones writing apologies for work and labor. Diderot would be one example, as would Rousseau, who begins to associate laziness with freedom in his later work, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker. this is also the case with the painter chardin. many of his canvases celebrate domestic activity, but then you have the other paintings where work is suspended, and the subjects are distractedthey indulge in relaxation and even indolence. thats basically the contradiction, the moment of dialectic, that i wanted to explore in the book. But i wanted to leave aside the question of aristocratic idleness, which is of course a given in the eighteenth century. i wanted to confront instead the particular area where laziness and idleness become figures of resistance within bourgeois economy.
Is the aristocracy exempted from critiques of laziness?

the discourse against laziness really starts in a coherent way in the eighteenth century, as we reach the cusp of industrial capitalism, and as the discourses on labor and economy emerge in their rationality. that is when we see the previously marginal discourse on laziness becoming more and more pointed. in many of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, one finds an equivalence between work and life itself. in Discourse on the Political Economy, for example, Rousseau acknowledges the inevitability of work; when he considers the responsibilities of the state and the well-being of its citizens, he argues that its imperative that work always be necessary and never useless. Voltaire champions the spirit of industry that pervades his century when he writes, to work is to live. and in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?, Kant defines the project of the enlightenment as having the courage to use your own reason. For him, laziness is associated with cowardice, which is the condition for remaining in
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Not exactly. in religious treatises and in a lot of satire, you do see aristocrats being portrayed as lazy, as unproductive. and, of course, during the French Revolution the aristocrat will become the iconic figure of laziness. in 1789, for example, emmanuel sieys formulated, in his influential What Is the Third Estate?, the revolutionary ideas of the nation, which he saw as bound by a common obligation to work. and aristocrats became strangers to this common project because they did not produce anything. But the aristocracy is not really affected by the context of the rising bourgeois economy and its values, which is what im concerned with. after all, the aristocracy is a class that is exempted from all forms of work. leisure is an inherent privilege.
Are people like Diderot in fact reading the emerging bourgeois theories of economics and labor?

we have traces of these theories in the work of someone like Diderot, of the way the discourse of liberal economy is infiltrating the discourse of the philosopher and the encyclopedist. the historian annie Jacob has written on the alignment between the physiocrats, who were the early economists of the eighteenth century, and the

encyclopedists like Diderot. we even find in Diderot allusions to Benjamin Franklins writings on economy the proto-weberian apology for work. Franklins Poor Richards Almanack was translated very early on into French as La Science du Bonhomme Richard. when in Rameaus Nephew Diderots imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and an idlerhe portrays the nephew as a parasite, as someone who lives on the margins of the market economy, he knows exactly what hes doing. But there is a contradiction in Diderots work. He certainly belongs to the category of philosophers who promote labor, who want to valorize work. But in Rameaus Nephew, Diderot creates this unique character who is a hero of non-productiona bohemian musician who does not produce anything that lasts. Diderot shows his admiration for the genius of an artist of unfinished works, for an idler who resists economic finality and is consumed by the present, who refuses employment and subjugation. and its interesting that Rameaus Nephew was written while Diderot was involved in the great busy work of his life, the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote around five thousand entries.
There are also entries in Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopedia that deal with laziness.

discourse followed an existing Christian tradition that defined sloth as a sin. But to what extent was Classical literature mobilized?

Yes, it was interesting to see how Hercules becomes this mythological hero of work. He appears not just in Jaucourt but also, for example, in the seventeenthcentury treatise Trait de la paresse (treatise on laziness) by antoine de courtin. the treatise, which continued to be influential in the eighteenth century, drew on the christian tradition, and considered laziness essentially as what derails a virtuous, useful life. in one nice phrase, courtin describes laziness as a bed for the devil to lie in. and courtin proposed Hercules as the hero par excellence of action, as the paragon of virtue. Hercules is not only present in philosophical works, though; as lynn Hunt shows in her work on the French Revolution, Hercules is also referenced in the French Revolution, which establishes an entire discourse valorizing work. and, of course, we find Hercules later in some fascist discourses.
One of the figures in your book is the playwright and novelist Pierre de Marivaux. He is perhaps the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century and was also quite prolific. It is surprising to see him as one of the people you turn to in your book for evidence of a counter-Enlightenment position that advocates laziness. Can you talk about this?

there are several of them, and they establish a hierarchy; i focus on three. the articles were written by the chevalier de Jaucourt, who contributed many entries to the encyclopedia. at the lowest level, there is fainantise, literally doing nothing, which is described as the most physical negation of activity, a perverted escape from the obligation to work, a fault that reaches the soul. then there is, at a more positive level, paresse, simply described as lack of action. and then oisivet, idleness,which has more noble connotations.
Is Jaucourt drawing on an already accepted ranking of types of laziness? Or is he in fact inventing this hierarchy himself?

One can see in Jaucourts definitions that he speaks very much like the economists who are writing at the time, for example anne-Robert-Jacques turgot. Jaucourt is repeating distinctions that physiocrats like turgot are making between various forms of economic unproductivity.
It was interesting to see that Jaucourt lionizes Hercules and his labors. I assume some of the anti-laziness

Despite marivauxs rich output, laziness is a persistent preoccupation of his in certain autobiographical fragments and in a number of his other writings. i focus on marivauxs output as a young man. in 1721, he launches Le Spectateur franais, a French version of The Spectator, the periodical started by addison and steele in england in the first decade of the century. Le Spectateur was similarly part of a modern aesthetic project that represented an ideological break with the anciens, namely the attempt to put the present into prose. marivaux becomes a painter of modern life, of the world as it is. He anticipates Baudelaires definition of modernity as the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, and he wants to avoid any authorial gravity, any thinking that involves work. instead, marivauxs spectator becomes the scribe of circumstance, and holds himself in readiness for events as they transpire. marivaux insists that openness to the incidental means the total absence of work. at one point, he says, an author is a man who, in his leisure moments, is overtaken by a vague desire to think about one or several

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Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Indolence (The Lazy Italian Girl), 17561757.

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subjects; and one might call this reflecting upon nothing. the spectator abandons himself to the randomness of things. what fascinated me about marivaux is that he is one of those authors who portrays lazy subjects who are in fact very active at the same time. its this contradiction that makes them interestingthis productive un-production. the spectator is busy, and hes busy not being busy. His non-production comes from observing the form of an urban life that produces moments of pure circumstantiality, moments of complete inconsequence. For example, the spectator at one point described a moment when the wind catches the powder in the hair of a bunch of elegant men. its these moments of volatility, pure moments of ephemerality, that Le Spectateur captures.
Are these experiences non-productive in that they dont build on each other and offer a larger perspective?
Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy, Rousseau Meditating in the Park at La Rochecardon near Lyon in 1770, 1770 (detail).

the urban experience gives us these moments of pure futility, where the significance of events is consumed in pure epiphany. so there is nothing to build on! the observations are empty. the minute they happen, they are inconsequential. and theres no judgment. Pure perception is the goal.
In your book, you discuss how the labor that goes into the Spectators busy laziness must remain invisible in order for the project to maintain itself. How does that work?

it appears like trickery, in a way. Because it doesnt aspire to be aristocratic; its simply a perverse play on not giving in to the ideology of work and capital. You see this in chardin as well. the critics of chardin wanted him to find more noble topics for his work, which was simply genre painting and not more elevated history painting. Of course, a lot of the subjects in his paintings are also distracted or lazy. chardins critics accused him of not showing his labor: they accused him of laziness, complaining that they never saw him paint! its true that chardin was a slow painter, and in the eighteenthcentury ideology of work, theres a need not just to be productive but also to show labor. the realization of labor does not only come about in its products, but also in its representation.
The question of representation of labor brings up Rousseau. Can you talk about the various positions that Rousseau stakes out on laziness, political life, and the public representation of work?

Rousseau is complicated. there are a lot of shifts in his work and i didnt want to efface them. On the contrary, i wanted to play with them and see what was going on in Rousseaus edifice. Because, indeed, even very early on in his political writings, in the Discourses, for example, you find an apology for work. He sees work as being contiguous with citizenship, and in the famous Letter to dAlembert on the Theater, he defines work as constitutive of the polis. Yet we see that at the end of his life he elaborates a different subjectivity, this time founded on laziness, idleness, and solitude.
The work that Marivaux refuses is a particular type of intellectual work. But Rousseau is talking about manual labor. Does he make distinctions between different kinds of work?

He does. and its interesting to see that when he himself withdraws from work, his criticism of work is specifically of large-scale manufacturing, which he sees as politically alienating. the work that he celebrates instead is mostly artisanal: work that can be done in solitude, doesnt involve a major production, and doesnt extend to a consumerist society. they are, in the end, for him, non-work. He himself hand-copied sheets of music for money. and, perhaps surprisingly, he thinks of his own work as artisanal because it satisfies all those conditions.
How does his position vis--vis work evolve?

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in his earlier anthropological writings, there is a moment where from his description of the different states of societyagricultural, pastoral, and the more superior cultivated state of societyyou see that he finds the pastoral state the most perfect. and artisanal work is in some sense a manual version of pastoral work, because in the pastoral age, you also have isolated individuals who are obviously not involved in a consumerist goal. But when Rousseau considers work in the social state, he then refuses laziness. He views it as going against the collective will, as a negative. laziness appears only to be acceptable in the state of nature; elsewhere it is a perversion.
In his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau is very interested in the relationship between doing nothing, for which he uses the Italian phrase far niente, and working.

Is far niente not possible in your own house? For example, if you just stayed in bed?

No, he specifically finds these epiphanies outdoors in a sort of harmonizing with nature. and he specifically critiques the cabinet of the philosopher, the philosophers study. He says, my cabinet is outdoors.
What is left of the self after you aerate it, after all of the external ideologies and forces that have shaped your subjectivity have been expelled? Even if doing nothing were able to accomplish this, what would be left of the subject called Rousseau? And a second question: in this moment, even if it were possible, what is left for him to think, or see, or do, or indeed write?

what is left is pure existence, pure affect. that is what, in fact, he seeks in Reveriesthis peculiar moment of pure affectivity.
When Rousseau is back at his desk, does the task of writing this pure affectivity pose a dilemma for him? Is writing the experience of a fully evacuated self an issue?

Reveries represents the moment when Rousseau finally abandons all apology for work. the text re-creates the conditions for idleness: isolation of the individual, the forced distancing of the collective, an artificial state of nature. One form of work that we do find in Reveries is botanizing. this is the sort of peculiar form of work that Rousseau will celebrate. Youre basically working with and in nature, contemplating creation, and collecting. it is the closest to the pastoral age. Botanizing in Rousseau, as he explains it in Reveries, never becomes a scientific, methodical enterprise. Rousseau basically collects plants simply for memorizing. although linneaus is a model who is invoked, in fact the linnean approach is completely deconstructed in Reveries. ultimately, Rousseaus project is not even about naming plants. its about capturing the souvenir of a moment of enchantment. walking involves the same; it is governed by the same economy of ephemerality and bliss.
Does Reveries explicitly discuss the effect of laziness on the self?

Yes, it is an issue. thats what you find in Reverieshe says that the writing traces this ephemerality, this drive toward affectivity. thats why Reveries is written in the form of a diary. its a poignant irony that Rousseaus death is inscribed in the works unfinished state. as he seeks repose, as he searches for this sovereign moment of worklessness, it is ironic that he encounters the most poignant form of reposedeath itself. the shortest reverie is the last one. the book is unfinished; he died before completing it.

Yes, and it is at its purest in the chapters dedicated to the fifth walk and the eighth walk. there, Rousseau develops in full the subject of worklessness, where he finds full autonomy in doing nothing, where you have the individual who finds freedom in the act of doing nothing. in doing nothing, the self is completely aerated. there is an airing-out, an expulsion of external forces. its a little complex; you have a turning inward, yet you are also outside in nature.
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Fast, trusted, proven?: towards a cliFFsnotes For caBinets sloth section

VASECTOMAnIA , AnD OTHER CuRES FOR SlOTH BY CHRISTOPHER TuRnER

To spend too much time in studies is sloth. Francis Bacon, sr.

THE YOunG AnD THE RESTlESS BY DAnIEl ROSEnBERG

Summary

this article reviews attempts made by scientists in the early twentieth century to cure fatigue in men through the use of unusual treatments, including injecting patients with the secretions of animal glands, grafting transplanted monkey testicles onto their existing testes, and performing vasectomies on them.
Quiz

this article discusses the ways in which nineteenthcentury childrens books written by members of the prolific taylor family took up aspects of the classical notion of sloth, which was developed within a monastic tradition, and translated them into morality tales for the new middle-class. Far from connoting inactivity, this notion of sloth encompassed phenomena that today seem antithetical to laziness, such as restlessness, impatience, and busy idleness.
Quiz

Summary

1. in order to test the rejuvenating powers of certain substances, French doctor charles-douard Brown-squard injected himself with A . waters from the Ponce de lens Fountain of Youth B . the juice of pulped guinea pig and dog testicles C. the pulp of juiced guinea pigs and dog ventricles D. the blood of John Goat Gland Brinkley 2. in an attempt to inoculate students against slothful tendencies, Berlin school officials in the early twentieth century pumped schoolrooms full of A. Highly oxygenated air B. antikenotoxin vapors C. Pheromones D. the smell of roasting currywurst 3. the celebrated rejuvenation of w. B. Yeatss sexual drive following his vasectomy prompted the irish press to refer to him as A. Ben Bulbous B. mr. second coming C. the Gland Old man D. the Naughty Nobelist
Practice project

1. what did the fourth-century monk evagrius identify as the most burdensome of all demons? A . the water demon of Grfenberg B . the demon rum C . the demon of acedia D . matt Demon 2. which famous childrens song is taken from a poem written by Jane and ann taylor? A . stairway to Heaven B . i see london, i see France C . twinkle, twinkle, little star D . Youve Got a Friend 3. when Harry decided to hand-copy Joseph Priestleys New Chart of History, his father tried to dissuade him by arguing that A . Harry should hand-copy the more coveted Old Chart of History B . History is not appropriate for forward-thinking boys C . Harry needed to clear copyright on the chart first D . copying an existing chart was a worthless activity
Practice project

um, no.

try copying this issue of Cabinet word for word. Describe the thoughts that come to you as you slowly lose your will to finish the project.

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FATIGuED BY MARInA VAn ZuYlEn

FAR nIEnTE: An InTERVIEW WITH PIERRE SAInT-AMAnD BY SInA nAJAFI

Summary

this article discusses the recent resurgence of philosophical interest around the concept of fatigue, in its physical, aesthetic, and political dimensions. while typically thought to indicate a failure of body and/or character, fatigue has not always been considered in negative terms; in fact, thinkers from Baudelaire to lvinas have defended fatigue as promoting a heightened state of awareness that can lead to new insights.
Quiz

Summary

this interview discusses the rise of a sensibility in the eighteenth century that ran counter to the dominant enlightenment ideology of productivity and work. in figures as diverse as Diderot, Rousseau, chardin, and marivaux, saint-amand charts the emergence of a marginal discourse that champions distraction, ephemerality, and laziness.
Quiz

1. Nineteenth-century physiologist angelo mosso described the fatigued citizen as exhibiting symptoms of A. scratching, sniffing, and staring B. Drooping, yawning, and spasming C. Faith, hope, and charity D. Drooling, lolling, and zoning 2. what, according to Baudelaire, adorn[s] the whole of nature with a supernatural interest, one that endows each object with a more profound, more willful, and more despotic meaning? A. love B. margaritas C. Pink Floyd D. Hashish 3. mussolini subsidized cultural events for the masses, hoping that italians would come to prefer A. Verdi over vino B. Paganini over penne C. canaletto over cannellini D. marinetti over marinara
Practice project

A. the love lives of the countesses spars and lohn B. ephemeral phenomena of modern urban life C. the emergence of the optical industry D. How to get rush tickets for new plays and operas

1. marivauxs Le spectateur franais focused on

2. the shortest chapter of Rousseaus Reveries of the Solitary Walker is the last one because A. His publisher asked him to punch up the ending B. He died while writing the book C. He stopped walking after he bought a unicycle D. He had to get back to his day job as a douanier 3. entries in Diderot and dalemberts Encyclopdie describe which three categories of sloth? A. the couch potato, the slacker, and the stoned B. the do-nothing, the idler, and the lazy C. the two-toed, the three-toed, and the giant D. the benchwarmer, the balker, and the boondoggler
Practice project

close the door to your office, lower the lights, and lean back in your chair. when your boss notices, say that you are engaged in a philosophical thought experiment around fatigue in the tradition of Baudelaire, Proust, and lvinas and are not to be disturbed. Do the same thing again the next day, after you get back from the unemployment office.

in 1751, Rousseau threw away his watch in an act of defiance against the regulated scheduling of life. throw away your watch and take a long walk in a park dressed as Rousseau. write down your thoughts and publish them. use the money from the advance to buy a new, better watch.

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