Library and Fetish

I Library – II Collection – III Borges – IV Memory – V Conspiracy – VI Matthew – VII Fetish – VIII Fetish Art – IX Fetish and World – X Library and Fetish

I Library

A library is currently considered a stock of pieces organised according to certain parameters – Dewey Decimal number, or in a certain configuration on a shelf, and so on. Physically, the items are placed in sequence in regards to their content. Nothing about this definition takes into account the context around it.

The label ‘library’ can be applied to an art gallery. It can be applied to a collection of objects, such as porcelain frogs, or stamps. As it stands, only the human experience (nothing in the definition) separates a library and a collection. Take, for example, the VHS/video store restoration project undertaken by James Rolfe, known to most as the Angry Video Game Nerd. He has this project where he’s tried to preserve the aesthetic of video rental stores from the early ’90s. He converted a chunk of his house into a replica of a video store, complete with posters, promotional flyers, shelves organised by genre, wooden paneling, and a small television in one corner to demo DVDs. Why is this important?

Crucially, Rolfe has not watched every video he owns. And he doesn’t understand every detail of the ones he has watched. This, more than anything, makes Rolfe’s VHS collection a ‘library’. A library is a place of learning, where some of the work inside is recognisable and some is completely unknown. The anti-library is the only kind of real library, because a collection of books lacking mystery is merely a collection. And a collection implies uniformity in style and substance and outlook.

II Collection

What’s wrong with uniformity? Nothing, in itself, but it does prompt the following observations. Each book in a library references another. Occasionally, they disagree with one another. That’s the ideal. Fights will happen in any good library. I don’t mean exclusively in the literature, and I don’t mean explicit contradictions: if you own two separate films about Dracula which present him wildly differently, that’s an argument too. You can synthesise both Draculas and gain a deeper understanding.

A library must have a curator who has not read every book inside the library. This not only prevents the curator from getting a swelled head, but also physically imposes on that person the reality that not everything fits into their model of the world.

Uniformity, and having all the books in the library read by the curator, results in a Tower of Babel that believes it can explain the entirety of the world with one handy universal framework, which is impossible. This is not a library. The library, then, by necessity, must be consistently growing, because if that weren’t the case the curator would finish it. The logical conclusion? It only takes a matter of time before we end up with Borges’ Library of Babel, where every possible computation of 25 characters plus a period and comma are combined in an infinite library. Luckily, you will die before this happens. (It would be interesting to see a VHS or video game library of Babel, where every possible combination of data is entered onto an unlimited number of tapes, discs, and cartridges.)

This is what differentiates a library from a collection; the fact that a library can’t be finished. It is a permanent, but liquid fixture. It can never be fully understood, or catalogued; until it is destroyed or broken up, it is a work in progress.

III Borges

The main issue with collecting anything is that if something was important enough for you to consider it important, the object that housed it becomes merely a reference tool. Memory and understanding, and the desire for understanding, is just as, if not more important. In any case, if you considered something truly memorable or important, the fact of actually owning it would become less important. If it was worth your time, you’d remember it, and since memory is a creative act, one would stymie their own creative process if they were to recall things too clearly.

Take the Borges story “Funes the Memorious” where the man with the eidetic memory is cursed both by being uncreative and knowing that cataloguing all his memories would take as long as experiencing them again, since he remembers every perceived detail. Stimulus causes him pain. In creating the game Dark Souls, director Hidetaka Miyazaki noted that the experience was designed with childhood memory in mind – he read books in English that he barely understood and was forced to exercise creativity in filling the gaps by himself. Funes, tragically, would be unable to do the same, and thus misses out on an essential part of the human experience. A misquote is often more interesting than the original, because it can be compared and contrasted to note the difference. Or – as Borges would say – “my memory has improved it.”

IV Memory

If you read something and forgot it, or it made no personal impact, you wasted your time. Similarly, if something really impacts you, it doesn’t need to be preserved through photography or retained on a shelf, because you will remember it organically. With individual context as well – the book’s smell, the greasy fingers of the man in the store who handed it to you, and so on. A digital ‘library’ lacks this. All is sorted the same few ways, according to strict, accurate, unforgettable rules. The grime, dirt, and unremarkable qualities of a work will disappear. “All subjectivity on the matter will be lost. It will be viewed from a historical perspective, as a classic.”

Roberto Calasso, in his work The Art of the Publisher, railed against the concept of the fully indexed library. Things should be allowed to be lost, essentially, because as every horror analyst tells us, the possibility is more exciting than the existing object. Combining books removes an element of what they are: their covers, their context, paratext, their real-world circumstances. To refer back to Borges again, this is the idea he was hinting at in Funes the Memorious, and more so in The Immortals, and finally came right out and said in A Weary Man’s Utopia. ‘Forgetting’ is man’s greatest ability and the thing we should treasure above all else.

A digital library is not a library by virtue of being digital and thus unable to forget or lose data in a natural way.

This brings us to the library of the modern world.

V Conspiracy

The Internet causes discussion to warp in on itself and become incestuous. Where before there would have been a few specialist books or even a mere handful of experts to wax on a given topic, say, cult films of the late 1980s, there are now legions engaged in constant dialogue. And everything that was famous before is now ultra-famous.

This much is obvious; the following is less so. The ability to share anything at any time creates the following problem, and a thousand variations. Consider the following: a young literati has a copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children on his or her bookshelf, he or she does not necessarily have any interest in Turgenev, or Russian literature. Their bookshelf contains one Russian novel surrounded by American/Anglo novels. It has nothing to do with their purview at all. What is this man, or woman, getting out of Turgenev? He or she didn’t know who Turgenev was until five minutes ago. He or she was told he was a classic author and had to be read, and so there he sits on the shelf alongside Toole and Tolkien. He or she only bought Fathers and Children because it was featured on a ‘best books of all time’ list on some two-bit newspaper roundup.

The sheer number of ‘best of’ lists for books which proclaim the titles of the most obvious classics alongside books that have taken pop-culture by storm for one reason or another has multiplied beyond belief. And, of course, the lists always have the same nonsensical selection of Anglo-American classics. I say nonsensical because they have nothing to do with each other. What does the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos have to do with War and Peace? What is the relation between Don Quixote and Bleak House? These are not bad books. But they lie in completely different fields of study, and completely different contexts, and comparing them is not a thing to be done lightly in a throwaway list with a cheap numerical grade attached.

It’s something to be done with purpose, with a hypothesis that relates the two together, that justifies them even being mentioned in the same sentence. Add this hodgepodge placement of repetitively touted Anglo-American classics to a list over and over again – they only become more popular and more likely to end up on shelves that have nothing to do with them and with no understanding on the part of the librarian.

A good library’s books all have some relation to one another. But this relation is often twisted, illogical – maybe it relies on a twin equivalence mentioned in a third book, written itself for another field of study entirely, which could potentially connect John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps with French composer Erik Satie and 9/11 in a way that doesn’t seem ridiculous. A good library is a game of shifting webs. Let’s pare that down further: a library is a conspiracy.

A bad library is one made entirely of recommendations with no individual choice put into it, with nothing but top 100 classics-type books. The fact that the same books appear on these top 100 lists all the time may serve as a testament to their quality, but is also (perhaps, in some cases, more so) a testament to their capacity as memes. This may seem obvious, but there’s a layer of depth to this statement that should be explained.

VI Matthew

The Pareto distribution is a social sciences theory, colloquially known as the ’80-20 rule’ where 20% of the population owns about 80% of the wealth. And 20% of the top 20% receive 80% of that wealth. And so on ad infinitum. It can be applied to sales of books quite easily – Harry Potter outselling every other book that exists save perhaps the Bible. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King basically have 99% of all royalties ever earned by the profession of actually writing books. Every other author ever shares the remaining 1%.

This is related to another theory called The “Matthew Effect”. This is the Matthew Effect, so named for a quote from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: credit is ascribed to the famous, making them more famous. People who are ignored stay that way. When Harry Potter sells a million copies it will probably sell a million copies more, because it can tout the fact that it’s sold a million copies, and because so many people who have read it are telling other people to read it that the capacity for growth grows alongside the product itself.

Discussion on a given book on the Internet exponentially multiplies because the criticism and discussion propagate among themselves, thanks Matthew, and the more of it exists the more Google takes note of it and pushes it to the front page, which causes more people to notice it, which causes Google to promote it more in search results, and so on and so on. Everything becomes this giant feedback loop of plugging and praise for one particular book.

And the result is that some clueless young person buys a copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children and puts it next to Toole and Tolkien on their shelf of entry-level classics with no particular theme, and never reads it, because it has nothing to do with anything they’ve ever encountered, or planned to encounter. But they were told it was good by hundreds of sources on the Internet, over a very long period of time, so they eventually caved and bought it.

It becomes a critic’s job to focus on obscurities, because that is how they are raised from their sorry state and become ‘classics.’ To Kill a Mockingbird shows up in every ‘best books ever’ list and The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamandis shows up in none of them.

Lists are reductive and not conducive to understanding, discussion, entertainment, or meaning. It would be better to create articulate analyses of the literature of different countries, giving precedence to obscure yet skilled authors, to enrich the public sphere. This is where the Internet becomes a boon rather than an ad-machine shilling the next Harry Potter novel, because with the Internet, you can dig up an expert on anything. Just convince that expert to talk about what he, or she, is an expert in! Get him or her to jump down the deepest rabbit hole they can find, and report back. Because what they find will be interesting. What they find, in fact, will be a fetish.

VII Fetish

Having a fetish is essential for survival. Let’s define our terms, quick, before someone decides to search my hard drive. I’m not talking about a fetish in the sexual sense.

In a sentence, a fetish is a specialisation undertaken for its own sake, a private interest (not reliant on anyone else sharing it for it to interest you) that serves as a framework through which you interpret the world. Or a ‘motivating framework’. Take as an example the man with a great interest in games, who interprets changes in his life as the movement of pieces on an allegorical board. Or the literati who characterises his life according to Campbell’s monomyth. A doctor who (consciously or not) views people in terms of their illnesses. A chef who views the world as split by what people eat, and how they eat it, rather than by national boundaries.

Applied to a work of art, a fetish is ‘what makes this work different from another, its specific focus.’ What I call ‘good’ art typically has a clear, unique fetish, while ‘bad’ art is generic and lacks one.

VIII Fetish Art

An artist can’t not have a fetish, in the sense that every artist is chasing an archetypal version of themselves.

Problems in that area arise when they try to copy other people instead of following their own potential – there are a lot of 20-something slightly bright types who’d like to become unique and so they look for all the unique books and read them and sometimes pretend to read them and all become like each other. But you can’t do that or you’ll fall into the trap of never having fun with it. It won’t become a compulsion to be the best you can, but a compulsion to be the best version of whatever that archetype is, that can never be achieved. And since it’s an archetype of someone who’s essentially incomplete, you don’t want to become that. You have to chase the archetype of yourself instead.

To return to a more general view of the fetish, we’ll examine its actual, non-theoretical meaning.

IX Fetish and World

Examining the older meaning of the word ‘fetish’ independent of its modern, exclusively sexual connotation puts one in mind of a religious idol, a little wooden figure worshiped by some West African tribesman, which he believes contains a spirit. While it may seem incongruous with the above explanation, it fits quite well: a God, a supreme being, is the filter through which the hypothetical man interprets the world.

And there’s no reason to discount that old definition, since a fetish and a god are the same. They contain the key to meaning: a solid bedrock, an unquestionable foundation. Unquestionable in the traditional sense due to superstition, certainly, but now unquestionable as a result of the time put into it, the hours of understanding gained from a lifetime of experience. A fetish contains its own minuscule, gargantuan world: within the area of a single art-form or of a profession is a universe-full of specialist terms, of ideas, a personal history relative to the history of everything outside of it, which may actually belie or contradict another fetish’s history in tone if not in content (think of art history, mostly unconscious, peaceful trade, versus the history of conquest between nations, versus the history of cooking).

People don’t often understand what they like. They hear Clair de Lune on the radio and assume they enjoy ‘classical music’ and then they hear Schoenberg and get bored in seconds, despite it ostensibly being the same through their lens. They define classical music as music played by non-rock instruments. Meanwhile, someone with a fetish for formal written music would immediately assert the difference between 20th century modernist music and French impressionism, and understand them in detail.

This results in a great deal of disappointment for fetishists, as demonstrated by the following generic, yet oft-cited exchange:

A said, “I enjoy all music except rap and country.”

B said, “Excellent! Try this.” He then proceeded to play death metal.

A said, “Oh, no, I don’t like this.”

This exchange was repeated ad nauseam until nothing remained but indie rock.

What B ought to have said was “I enjoy indie music, and I can tell you about the little universe of indie rock, but nothing else.” But there was no way for B to know how little they knew, because they didn’t follow the fetish far enough.

Ask a 21st century atheist what God is and he’ll reply with some dismissive answer about a primitive psychologically driven superstition and a protective, idealised sky-daddy. None of the terms of religion or the practices thereof have any meaning for him. Ask a 12th century Frenchman what God is and he’ll say that God is the underlying reason for everything, and the existence of his God – his fetish – is what allows him to define everything, understand abstract events. He can look at an assortment of religious tools, symbols, icons, and understand how they all fit into the overarching tapestry of Christian faith – what each piece means, what it’s used for and why.

In other words, for the man with the belief, the man with the fetish, somewhat arbitrary practices have their own meaning and map onto the world in a very specific, specialist way. (To use a secular example, a chess player understands the reason each piece moves the way it does – because it corresponds to a medieval combatant.) The Frenchman can look at the Crucifixion and see it as more than a Jewish rebel being strung on a cross in some backwater Roman province, can view it as the supreme moment of salvation of all of mankind, because he understands the underlying meaning of Jesus being the Son of God, and uses that fetishistic/specialist understanding to interpret the event, where a 21st century atheist would not. (This is what I mean in part when I say the history of a fetishist and of a normal person, or rather a person with a different fetish unrelated to the historical event in question, are different).

Whoever lacks a fetish lacks meaning: all aspects of life assume an equally important, agnostic, characterless character, and the observer becomes a post-modern nightmare zombie with only a casual interest in everything, unable to decide anything is more important than anything else. What happens then? Well, apart from them being unspeakably boring to have a conversation with, they never become better at anything in particular than anyone else. Try this hot take on for size: someone with a fetish for terrible schlocky science fiction from the 1980s has a better understanding of life than someone with a scattered interest in classical literature. The former has delved deep enough into something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that he’s gained an understanding of the difference between things that appear to be the same. The latter person has spread himself thin and through a wide, yet shallow experience, and hasn’t comprehended that difference.

This is the essence of a fetish, or, rather, this is how you know you have a fetish: when you can tell the difference between things that laymen would assume were identical (or, at least, similar). A fetish is also the basis for empathy because of how people characterise one another as non-entities unless they have direct interpersonal experience. Fetishism allows one to notice the minute differences in what may appear identical. In that sense, you could say that an especially empathetic person had a fetish for people.

X Library and Fetish

To reiterate, and conclude.

Samuel P. Huntington, a 20th century American political scientist, coined the phrase ‘clash of civilisations’ to describe how people in different tribes interacted throughout history. History, however, is not a clash of civilisations, but a clash of fetishes. A progression of our race on the individual level. Even when applied to kings and presidents, the fixation is what drives history – the fixations of millions creating social movements, the fixation of important leaders changing each other’s minds, etc etc.

Investing in a fetish – a body of knowledge, a library, a store of experience–they’re all the same thing-is necessary in order to live alongside (rather than below) the people around you, in order to rise above the level of philosophical zombie, to become a human being by investing in the activity of a human being: an intense, almost arbitrary, meaningful focus.

So, then, what is a library? And what is a store of memory, experience, knowledge? Only us. We are each a conspiracy, and a fetish.