Blockchain Papers

Allison Margaret Bigelow

On the back cover of Sara E. Johnson's phenomenal new work, Jennifer L. Morgan declares, “This is the book we have been waiting for.” That blurb is no exaggeration. In this beautifully written, brilliantly framed, painstakingly researched communal biography, Johnson makes critical interventions to Black studies, Atlantic history, and comparative literature. She does so by working across visual mediums and alphabetic languages (Dutch, English, French, Kikongo, Kreyòl, Mandarin, Spanish) that are preserved in and omitted from archives in and about the eighteenth-century Caribbean, metropolitan France, and the multilingual book market of Philadelphia.Each intervention—pertaining to frame, art, and language—relates to the others. Whereas the historiography has long focused on actors like Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a multilingual scholar, proslavery advocate, avid bibliophile, and sadistic violator of human rights—in sum, “a repugnant man”—Johnson shows why traditional biography is methodologically and ethically inadequate for Caribbean history (p. 237). Here, instead, Moreau is an “unreliable center” whose extensive literary production surfaces the experiences of the Black women, children, and men whose stolen knowledge and labor made his books possible (pp. 4, 12). In chapter 4, “Encyclopédie noire: Part II,” Johnson re-creates the social world of an unnamed woman, identified only as “mulâtresse,” who appears in Moreau's Parisian diary on February 9, 1787, with an analysis of what can and cannot be glimpsed (pp. 142–48). Chapter 1, “Encyclopédie noire: Part I,” analyzes passages excised from Moreau's published geography on Saint-Domingue to show how his work could not hold the contradictions of racial slavery. Johnson's careful—and caring—attention to materiality appears thematically and structurally throughout the book, often upending dominant conventions. Portions of chapter 7 are set upside down so that readers adopt the perspective of women and men who lived with slave owners’ names branded into their skin. Johnson's “illustrative storytelling” blends sight and sound to re-create affective, humanizing experiences—including misunderstood languages and intentional silence. This critical reframing is the book's first intervention.The second intervention uses artistic creation to reclaim space. Chapter 3, “Print Culture and the Empires of Slavery,” appears in Bodoni font, the closest to Moreau's, in contrast to the other chapters’ Garamond, as a call “to glean meaning from the design of the words and the material conditions that made their production possible” (p. 88). Moreau's attention to books belies his disregard for humans; he treated bound volumes as if they were alive, “even though he knew they were not,” and Black lives as if they were “without feelings for kin that approximated his own, even though he knew that this was not true” (p. 241), as Johnson argues in chapter 8, “Encyclopédie noire: Part III.” Surfacing the mechanics of Moreau's choices proves that he was no mere “man of his times” but an active shaper of white supremacist political economy (pp. 2–3, 58). A counterpoint to Moreau's fabulations is a remarkable range of original art—collages that combine eighteenth-century portraits and twenty-first-century designs; prints, watercolors, and sequins that tell and retell; juxtapositions of newspaper ads, scholarly glosses, fiction, and digital media; composite title pages from primary sources about Chinese history; remixed page proofs from Moreau's Mémoire justificatif (1790)—many in collaboration with artist Luz Sandoval.Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Moreau's multilingual worlds, the book's third intervention. Moreau manipulated the power politics of languages to position himself in enlightened spaces, even as he denied the knowledge and labor of the women and men whose ideas he extracted from Spanish, Guaraní, Kreyòl, and especially Kikongo. Both chapters flip the script on natural histories and vocabularies, genres that present themselves as objective registers of information, to show how they contributed to the denial of Indigenous and African knowledge systems.The global scope of the work shows the terrifying convergence of white supremacy, land and labor theft, and books. Yet the place-based stories of the Black communities and kinship networks that made Moreau's world are always at the center. When the archive is silent on their thoughts, feelings, and intents, Johnson insists that we speculate so that their stories claim space in our scholarship and create a record that future generations of researchers and artists can learn from. After all, writers like Moreau have been inventing so-called facts for 200 years. What is at stake in the scholarly policing that asks us to take Moreau at his word and to deny the same to the women, men, and children he abused?Johnson's stunning encyclopedia, grounded in Black thought and community, is designed as an “antidote” to the “poison” that Moreau, men like him, and the scholars who follow them have long put into Caribbean art, language, literature, and history (p. 246). At the heart of this act of scholarly rigor and artistic creation there are pain and generosity, trauma and pleasure, disgust and love, all at once. It is the greatest book that I have read in a long time.

Nicholas Hammond

814 Reviews Although Moriarty devotes pp. 102-21 to imagination in Pascal, he etiolates the tensions woven between social bonds based on forceand imagination and the ferocious onslaught against natural justice (pp. 128-29), neglecting Pascal's ironic accolade of the 'opinionsdu peuple saines' (Pensees, 101, ed. by Lafuma), whichcelebrates human gumption in establishing laws based on indisputable external signs, and devising the 'regle des partis'. This rule corroborates our rationality when we stake our all on uncertainty both in war and in faith. The Fall, which concusses reason, represents the only plausible hypothesis to synthezise our dualism. In overstating Descartes's and Pascal's criticism of men's flabby grip on the world Moriarty diminishes the audacious modernism of the methods they invented to enable us to resist the siren lure of imagination. In comparison Malebranche appears as a woolly emasculated apologist. His imagi? nation denotes both the soul's input in forming images as the animal spirits inscribe them upon our brain fibres and the body's response. Emotions linking physical traces with ideas are either natural or dependent on God's will (pp. 171-77). Again the soul-body union is explained by the Fall. Malebranche restates Augustine: 'The theory of the imagination and [. . .] communication between the mother's brain and that of the child provides a modern scientific explanation of the mysterious inheritance of sin' (p. 247). No proof is required. Moriarty concludes that in both Pascal and Malebranche imagination generates a phoney subordination, a 'suspicion of interpersonal relationships [. . .] a self-distancing from the social essentialism of [. . .] society (p. 250). None the less, the scaffolding of Augustinian theology may offerprecarious contact between their discourse and the modern age. It may fairlybe contended that Descartes and Pascal erect more robust bridging. University of Glasgow Elizabeth Moles Freedom, Slavery and Absolutism: Corneille, Pascal, Racine. By Ziad Elmarsafy. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 196 pp. ?34. ISBN 0-8387-5548-8. In this often stimulating study Ziad Elmarsafy sets out to read Corneille, Pascal, and Racine as (in his words) 'political theories in the guise of literature' (p. 18), arguing that all three, through their rich treatment of discourses on freedom and slavery, are apologists forabsolute monarchy as incarnated in the figureof Louis XIV. Elmarsafy's analysis of various theoretical treatises and his choice of lesser-known works, such as Corneille's later theatre, Pascal's Ecrits sur la grace, and Racine's Alexandre, are of especial interest. The chapter on Racine in particular offersvaluable insights, such as his idea that 'survival of the state depends on making the slaves disappear either through their sacrifice, as in Iphigenie, or through their emancipation and integration into the fabric of the family, as in Andromaque and Phedre' (p. 144). As rich as these interpretations are, Elmarsafy's keenness to map the works onto his theory of absolutism runs the attendant risk of oversimplification. How helpful, for example, is the comment that Corneille's 'Othon can be read as a substitute for Louis XIV (p. 49)? It is perhaps significant also in his chapter on Corneille that Elmarsafy refers to the 'reader' rather than the spectator, for he ignores the theatrical impact of a character like Othon. Moreover, to say that Pascal's God has much in common with Louis XIV because 'both are male and both defined by their absolute sovereignty' (pp. 61-62) seems both forced and potentially misleading. The hidden God ofPascal's theology is surely very differentfrom the omnipresence of the king. Similarly, to see Racine's Esther and Athalie as a 'comfortingparable about the absolute state' (p. 149) does not allow formany complexities, such as the reality that this liberating king was MLRy 100.3, 200S 815 in the process of destroying Port-Royal (to which Racine was now reconciled) and the mixed signals sent out by the fact that at the end of Athalie Joas will not be the liberating king that everyone hopes him to be, a factwhich is underlined by Racine in the text ofthe play and in the rare footnotes which he himself inserted. These quibbles aside, each chapter contains fresh and exciting interpretations of both familiar and less...

Tom Conley

Reviewed by: Heuretics: The Logic of Invention Tom Conley Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, by Gregory L. Ulmer; xiv & 267 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper. Heuretics designates areas of logic devoted to discovery and invention. This book sets out to reconfigure the metaphors that have dominated investigation since the advent of print-culture and the Columbian voyages. Adventure, quest, risk, discovery: Francis Bacon’s analogy of scientific research to oceanic travel established the stereotypes that Ulmer strives to dismantle. In 1962 Claude Lévi-Strauss noted in The Raw and the Cooked that in our time: “It is no longer a question of sailing toward other lands: only the voyage is real, not the earth, and the routes have been replaced by the rules of navigation.” With the advent of hypermedia, creation becomes an art of selection and combination. Truth gives way to discovery. Creation is likened to a programmed mélange of material ordered by negotiation, intuition, and strategy. Ulmer performs his proof—and proves his performance—by constructing a virtual staging of a multilayered commemoration he fashions from cinema, architecture, Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, American history, and autobiography. The result is a collage of signifiers that apposes literary theory, memory-arts, Gary Cooper’s persona in Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman, 1939), Columbian voyages, Platonic dialogues, and a canon of postmodern writings. Ulmer divides the book into four parts, the first of which crafts the overall method from Cartesian reason and Surrealist practices of juxtaposition and automatism. Part two offers a dynamic definition of choreography, the study of local, inherited, and originary areas in which subjectivity is born. In part three Ulmer [End Page 147] sets forth textual rehearsals, based on Lee Strasner’s Method (via Stanislavsky), that mobilize the space and time of his chosen materials. Part four, “Yellowstone Desert,” bring together the strands of the narrative embroidery into a gag-joke (a “puncept” on Custer and custard) that explodes in the author’s face. A good deal of the work turns on Ulmer’s treatment of chora. Exploiting its signifying potential (chora, corps, choral, chorus, coral) he discovers that the myth of the world’s creation recounted in the Timaeus begins when the demiurge makes an X from two strands of plasma. The chi is folded as colures of a sphere that becomes the globe. Nonetheless the presence of the self as an unknown (x) is inferred (in I, or ich). Ulmer shows that “in subordinating mystery to memory, and arguments to paradigms,” choreography will “engage the users’ premises in the process of learning, opening a mutually transforming circuit between judgment and theory, and hence affect not only (. . .) institutional practices (. . .) but human subjectivation as well” (p. 202). Patterned constructions replace the creation and resolution of enigmas. Hypermedia becomes the technology of new creation, while choreography comprises “the institutional practice for augmenting the intuitions of inference, for writing with the logic of the unconscious” (p. 224). Heuretics extends the field of play staked out in Ulmer’s Teletheory. Here is offered a scheme for creating multileveled texts that are both creative and critical and infinitely generative, and that invite readers to connect electronic media to the unconscious. Most readers will not fail to appreciate the wit of the exposition and the clarity of the creative method. Others will pause over some of its assumptions. Certain critical paradigms, such as the antithetical ontologies of Lacan and Derrida, appear easily reconciled. The unnameable traumas of history (genocide) and psychogenesis (the birth and growth of subjectivity) are glossed with an effortless art of citation (pp. 114, 233). The unconscious is assimilated into an easily “accessed” logic, the latter effortlessly “logging in” to the former. The redesign of the Columbian quincentenary indirectly ratifies some of the modes of control that flexible capitalism seeks to impose upon the unconscious. These four points require greater space of exchange in the rich and problematic dialogue that informs Ulmer’s stunning performance of theory. Tom Conley University of Minnesota Copyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press