W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Somewhere in here, I also finished re-reading Austerlitz. It's a novel that suggests stuff might have subjectivity—ghosts might exist, metal columns might talk to the (admittedly crazy) protagonist, lettuce might dream. Objects can do this because the content of their communications is all about the past. Nostalgia gives objects this subjectivity—think of the flavor and smell Proust's tea-dunked cookie jumping out of his tea cup and shaking him by the shoulders and shouting at him to remember his childhood at his aunt's house in Combray.

Austerlitz finds this personalization creepy, though, because it also suggests that people aren't people anymore. It talks a lot about Europe in the thirties, about Facism and anti-Semitism getting more and more popular, and about the terror of people who don't WANT their subjectivity anymore. (Lettuce might be people, but lettuce-people can't do much about evil Nazis who've voluntarily given up their personhood to go marching together through Nuremburg.)

And Austerlitz himself has very little agency. Mostly he does things because inanimate objects—radios, ghosts, memories—tell him to. In a way he's a medium, I guess, letting the past speak through him. (In another, he's a schizophrenic, who mistakenly believes in voices that aren't there—except the unnamed narrator seems to find his stories quite reasonable, and I did too.) There seems to be a larger complaint about how twentieth-century Europeans lost their personhood just as objects were getting new kinds of personhood (radios are a machine that TALK!!!) going on as well—and while the de-personalizing of humans seems to be a problem, the personalizing of objects might not be terrible. Sebald's not afraid of robots, anyway.

Foucault and The Order of Things

Not really sure how to talk about this one. I think Foucault wasn't really sure how to talk about it either. He makes ideas into objects, I guess, and then arranges them in different ways, so that at one point there's an absolutely terrifying graph of lines and boxes and arrows pointing in different directions that indicates the shift from eighteenth-century ways of thinking about things to the nineteenth-century ways. The whole book hovers around three particular ideas that Foucault makes things: words, money and work, and life. They're things, in part, because eighteenth-century empiricism, which makes everything into things, reified them in various ways, so that Foucault can talk about how the eighteenth century made words into a class of things through the study of grammars; how political economy made labor an object that you can trade for any other object (food, sofa cushions, a new dress); and how botanical nomenclature (???) made life into words and stuff.

This is confusing, right? He also wants to talk about how those three things flow into each other, which he does in ways that are beautiful but also hard to follow.

I think this is all the brains I have to devote to thinking about Foucault right now. I finished reading him more than a week ago, so this is pretty sketchy.