Borgesian Simulacrum, la deuxième partie

Previously I said that Jean Baudrillard critiqued Jorge Luis Borges for being too conservative about his need for reality and that "Del Rigor en la Ciencia," in Baudrillard's view, was an allegory of the limitations of science.  I think Baudrillard has missed an aspect of Borges' text though, an aspect that actually places "Del Rigor en la Ciencia" as simulacra of the fourth order, that is, as simulacra with "no relation to any reality whatsoever."

Take the epigram that opens Baudrillard's monograph Simulacra and Simulation.  It reads,

The simulacrum is never what hides truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.  The simulacrum is true. —Ecclesiastes

If you know the Bible as well as I do (and I know it quite well, thank you very much), you can perceive immediately that his epigram is in fact not found in Ecclesiastes or anywhere else in Scripture.  Baudrillard invented this epigram and wrote it in such a way that it behaves as a simulacrum.  To most people who have scant biblical reading, this epigram would pass as a true biblical passage.

In the same way, Borges has written a short story that is a simulacrum.  The story simulates an excerpt that may be found in a Spanish 17th century manuscript or book.  It claims to be written by Suárez Miranda, and the title claims to be Viajes de varones prudentes ("Travels of Prudent Gentlemen").  The excerpt claims to be from book four, chapter XLV (chp. 45), and it claims to be published in Lérida, a Catalan speaking part of Spain, in the year 1658.  But if one searches for this excerpt through the archives and libraries, one finds no such book.

Borges is not practicing literary forgery, though he is certainly playing games with his readers: he is simulating 17th century Spanish texts.

This is not the first time Borges plays this game.  In his stories he frequently alludes to fictional books by imaginary authors, The First Encylopedia of Tlön, A General History of Labyrinths, and The Secret Mirror among others.  And neither is he the first to play this game: Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift wrote treatises under the pseudonym Martinus Scriblerus.

But Borges is the first, perhaps, to play with simulation seriously.

Foucault's Laugh

     In The Order of Things, which is Michel Foucault's first major work to bring him celebrity philosopher status in France, he tells us the origin of his book:

"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other" (Introduction).

The Borges passage he refers to is from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," in which Jorge Luis Borges makes reference to a pseudo-text purportedly by Franz Kuhn.  There, Borges compares Wilkins' attempt to categorize and order the world by the invention of an analytical language to the chaotic and wild categories found in a Chinese encyclopedia.  The encyclopedia categorizes animals as:

"(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domesticated, (d) piglets, (e) sirens, (f) mythological, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) crazily agitated, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camel-hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the jar, (n) appearing like flies from afar."

     Foucault reacts to this heterogeneous categorization of animals with a fit of laughter.  Now, his laughter is not like the prophet Elijah's laughter when he witnessed the priests of Baal cutting and slicing themselves in order to call down fire from heaven (1 Kings 18:27).  Elijah's laugh was the laugh of an old man complacently secure in his knowledge.  Foucault's, on the other hand, was a "shattering" laughter, one that kept him "laughing a long time," as he tells us, "though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off" (emphasis mine).

     Foucault's laugh not only indicates the humor he found in reading Borges (and there is plenty of humor in Borges' writings, even if this is hardly mentioned or written about), but it also signifies the anxiety and disequilibrium he felt at having discovered the limits of his thinking and the limits of his imagination.  "In the wonderment of this taxonomy," he continues, "the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

     What Foucault is writing about is how Western societies have given order to the universe and to things and thus trapped themselves in a certain type of thinking.  Western thinking becomes calcified in categories that it considers scientific, logical, operational, and based on a priori foundations, while demeaning other kinds of thinking as irrational, illogical, fallacious—as if only individuals from Western societies can think and everyone else has magical thinking.  Foucault will go on to uncover and question these a priori foundations of Western thinking in The Order of Things.

     Foucault, then, launches his critique of Western epistemology by laughing a laugh that is at once pleasurable and disconcerting, hysterical and hearty, affective and diabolical.  His laugh may be described with a Nietzschean concept that describes a state of creative destruction and destructive creativity, a state that (to use Foucault's language) shatters and breaks and disturbs and threatens all foundations, leaving a primal vision of chaos and misrule—dyonisian.  And yet there is something therapeutic among these ruins: there is an impulse to create anew.
But only if there is first a willingness to destroy.

My Translation of "Del Rigor en la Ciencia"

Of Scientific Rigor

     ... In that Kingdom, the Art of Cartography achieved such Perfection that a Map of a single Province occupied a whole City, and a Map of the Kingdom, a whole Province.  With time, those Disproportionate Maps did not satisfy and the Schools of Cartography erected a Map of the Kingdom that was the Size of the Kingdom and coincided with it point by point.  Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, the Following Generations understood that the extended Map was Useless and not without Impiety turned it over to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.  In the Deserts of the Orient, torn Ruins of the Map perdure, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there is no other relic of the Geographical Disciplines.

SUÁREZ MIRANDA, Journeys of Prudent Gentlemen

Book Four, Chapter XLV, Lérida, 1658.

by Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker, 1960
translated by AE

My Translation of "El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins"

The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
by Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1952

     I have confirmed that the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica suppresses the article on John Wilkins.  The omission is justified if we remember the article's triviality (twenty lines of mere biographical circumstances: Wilkins was born 1614, Wilkins died 1672, Wilkins was chaplain of Charles Louis, prince palatine; Wilkins was named rector of one of the colleges of Oxford, Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, etc.); it is to be blamed if we consider the speculative work of Wilkins.  He abounded in happy curiosities: he was interested in theology, cryptography, music, the creation of transparent beehives, the course of an invisible planet, the possibility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and the beginnings of a universal language.  To this last inquiry, he dedicated his book An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (600 pages in quarto, 1668).  There are no copies of this book in our National Library; to write this note I have consulted The Life and Times of John Wilkins (1910), by P.A. Wright Henderson; the Woerterbuch der Philosophie (1924), by Fritz Mauthner; Delphos (1935) by E. Sylvia Pankhurst; Dangerous Thoughts (1939), by Lancelot Hogben.

     We have all, sometime, suffered those interminable debates in which a lady, with a hoard of interjections and illogicalities, swears that the word "luna" is more (or less) expressive than the word "moon."  Outside of the evident observation that the monosyllabic "moon" is perhaps more apt than the bisyllabic "luna" to represent a simple object, there is possibly nothing to contribute to such debates.  There is no edition of the Gramática de la Real Academia which does not ponder "the envied treasure of the picturesque, happy and expressive voices of the rich Spanish tongue," but this is mere boasting, without corroboration.  Meanwhile, the same Real Academia produces every so and so years a dictionary that defines the voices of Spanish...  In the universal language invented by Wilkins mid-seventeenth century, each word defines itself.  Descartes, in an epistle dated November 1629, had already noted that through a numerical decimal system, we can learn in a single day all the quantities up to infinity and how to write them in a new language, that of notation [1]; he also proposed the invention of an general, analogous language, that would organize and cover all human thoughts.  John Wilkins, around 1664, undertook that enterprise.

     He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which can be subdivided into differences, then into species.  He assigned each class a monosyllable consisting of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel.  For example: de signifies element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the fire element, a flame.  In the analogous language of Letellier (1850), a signifies animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, equine; etc.  In the system of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845), imaba signifies edifice; imaca, harem; imafe, hospital; imafo, asylum; imarri, house; imaru, villa; imedo, post; imede, pillar; imego, floor; imela, roof; imogo, window; bire, bookbinder; birer, bookbinding.  (I owe this last list to a book printed in Buenos Aires in 1886: Curso de lengua universal, by Dr. Pedro Mata.)

     The words from John Wilkins' analytic language are not clumsy arbitrary symbols; each of the constituting letters is significant, just as the letters in Sacred Scripture were for the Kabbalists.  Mauthner observes that children can learn this language without knowing it is artificial; later on in college, they can discover that it is also a universal key and a secret encyclopedia.

     Now that Wilkins' procedure has been defined, we must examine a problem that is impossible or difficult to postpone: the value of the forty category table that is part of the language.  Consider the eighth category, that of rocks.  Wilkins divides them into common (flint, gravel, slate), modics (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearl, opal), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insoluble (coal, clay and arsenic).  Almost as alarming as the eighth, is the ninth category.  This one reveals that metals can be imperfect (vermilion, mercury), artificial (bronze, brass), dross (lime, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper).  The whale figures in the sixteenth category; it is a viviparous, oblong fish.  These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.  In those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domesticated, (d) piglets, (e) sirens, (f) mythological, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in this classification, (i) crazily agitated, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camel-hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the jar, (n) appearing like flies from afar.  The Bibliographic Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos: it parcels the universe into 1000 subdivisions, of which 262 corresponds to the Pope; 282 to the Roman Catholic Church; 263 to the Lord's Day; 268 to Sunday schools; 298 to Mormonism, and 294 to Brahmanism,  Buddhism, Shintoism and Taoism.  It does not refuse heterogeneous subdivisions, e.g., number 179: "Cruelty with animals. Protection of animals. Pain and suicide from the point of view of morality. Various vices and defects. Various virtues and qualities."

     I have registered the arbitrariness of Wilkins, of the unknown (or apocryphal) Chinese encyclopedist and of the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels; notoriously, there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural.  The reason is simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.  "This world," writes David Hume, "was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity" (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, V. 1779).  We can go further; we can doubt that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word.  If there is, we still have to conjecture on its purpose; we still have to conjecture the words, definitions, etymologies, synonyms of God's secret dictionary.

     The impossibility of penetrating the divine purpose of the universe cannot, however, dissuade us from devising human plans, even if these are provisional.  Wilkins' analytical language is not the least admirable of these inventions.  The classes and species that make it up are contradictory and vague; the artifice that the letters in the words indicate subdivisions and divisions is, no doubt, ingenious.  The word "salmon" tells us nothing; zana, the corresponding term, defines (for the man versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly, fluvial fish with reddish flesh.  (Theoretically, a language in which the name of each being indicates all the details of its destiny, past and future, is not inconceivable.)

     Hopes and utopias aside, perhaps the most lucid comments on language that have been written are these from Chesterton: "Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest...  Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals.  He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire" (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904).

Borgesian Simulacrum

Jean Baudrillard is perhaps one of those under-appreciated theorists in academia who is nonetheless a forceful thinker and writer who takes on the tradition of Western metaphysics through his critique of social phenomena, specifically consumerism, value, and exchange.  For me, the most interesting aspect of his work is his distinction between modern and postmodern societies in his book Simulacra and Simulation.

According to Douglas Kellner, "For Baudrillard, modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules."

I think of it in this way: In modern societies I would work, get paid cash, and then I can buy a Black Sabbath record album that I would then play on a record player at home.  In postmodern societies, I am not working or buying anything tangible (cash, album, record player), instead I can simulate work (play with a derivative on the stock exchange), get paid with a code that is transferred to my bank account (now I have "money" in my account), purchase a virtual record player program on my computer (the program promises to simulate the scratches of a needle on vinyl) and play a digital copy of "War Pigs" (which has now been copied and downloaded for the billionth time).

Again, nothing tangible is produced or consumed; instead, signs, images, and codes are (re)transferred, (re)reproduced, and (re)copied, all in an orgiastic playfulness.  

But let me get to the real point of my blog.  Baudrillard opens his book, Simulacra and Simulation, in medias res with this point about Jorge Luis Borges' story "Del Rigor en la Ciencia" ("On Exactitude in Science"):

"If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly...as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra."

What does Baudrillard mean by calling the Borges story "second-order simulacra"?  He won't tell us until we get some pages into his book, and then he tells us that he has divided history into four epochs, each ruled by society's peculiar relationship with images or icons.  He calls these paradigmatic shifts in our relationship with images, "the precession of simulacra."  Here they are in order:

1. the image is a reflection of a profound reality; 
2. the image masks a profound reality;
3. the image masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. the image has no relation to any reality;

Baudrillard, then, calls the Borges story an allegory of an image that masks a profound reality.  If you recall, in the story the map-makers create a map of the kingdom that is the size of the kingdom and coincides with it point by point.  After the life-size map is cast out as useless, beggars and animals live in the map, taking it for the ruins of the real kingdom.  The map of the kingdom is, therefore, a mere corruption of a profound reality.

In other words, Baudrillard believes that Borges is quite conservative in his yearning for reality.  "Del Rigor en la Ciencia" is an argument for the limits of what science must do with reality; it is absurd to be so exact and rigorous in science because then we end up with simulacra that masks and corrupts reality.

Baudrillard argues that we live in an age of pure simulacrum, in which the image has no relation to any reality whatsoever.  So he inverts the Borges story and argues that the map precedes the kingdom, the kingdom is based on the map, and it is only the map that survives as a copy without an original.  There was no kingdom to begin with, there was only a life-size map of the kingdom.

And we are the animals and beggars that inhabit the virtual kingdom.

My Translation of "La Duración del Infierno"

The Duration of Hell
by Jorge Luis Borges, Discusión, 1932

     Hell—a speculation that has become weary with the years.  Preachers themselves ignore it, perhaps because they've been abandoned by the poor, but serviceable, human allusion that the ecclesiastical fires of the Holy Office had in this world: a temporal torment no doubt, but not unworthy within terrestrial limitations of being a metaphor for an immortal, perfect pain without destruction, which the heirs of the divine wrath will know forever.  Whether this hypothesis is satisfactory or not, it is unarguable that there is a general lassitude in the propaganda of this institution.  (Let no one jump to conclusions: the term propaganda is not of commercial origin, but catholic; it is a meeting of cardinals.)  In the second century, the Carthaginian Tertullian could imagine Hell and foresee its operation in this discourse:

"Do spectacles please you? then expect a greater one, the Final Judgment.  What wonder will I experience, what laughter, what celebration, what joy, when I see so many arrogant kings and lying gods agonizing in the very lowest prison of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord, melting in fires more fierce than the ones they ever incinerated for Christians; so many grave philosophers shaming themselves in the red flames with their illusory auditors; so many acclaimed poets trembling not before the tribunal of Midas, but of Christ; so many actors of tragedy more eloquent now in the manifestation of so genuine a torment...  (De spectaculis, 30; citation and version from Gibbon.)

Dante himself, who in his great task to foresee in anecdotal mode some decisions of the Divine Justice concerning northern Italy, does not display an equal enthusiasm. The literary infernos of Quevedo—mere comedic opportunities for anachronisms—and of Torres Villaroel—mere opportunity for metaphors—only prove the growing abuse of the dogma.  The decadence of Hell is in them almost similar to Baudelaire's, who was so skeptical of the imperishable torments that he pretends to adore them.  (A significant etymology derives the innocuous French verb géner from the powerful Scriptural word gehnna.)

     I now consider Hell.  The nominal but thoughtless article from Diccionario enciclopédico hispano-americano is useful reading, not for its dispirited news or for its frightening ecclesiastical theology, but for the perplexity evident in its pages.  It begins by observing that the notion of hell does not belong exclusively to the catholic church, a precaution whose intrinsic meaning is: "Let not the masons say that the Church introduced those brutalities"; but it constantly reminds us that Hell is dogma, and it adds with urgency: " It is to the unfading glory of Christianity that it attracts all the truths it finds dispersed in false religions."  Whether Hell is a fact of natural religion or simply of revealed religion, for me no other topic of theology is as fascinating and powerful.  I am not referring to the simplistic mythology of dung, roasters, fire and tongs, which has been growing at the root and which all the writers have been repeating to the dishonor of their imagination and their decency [1].  I am speaking of the strict notion—a place of eternal punishment for the wicked—which constitutes the dogma without other obligations to place it in loco reali, in a precise space, and a beatorum sede distincto, a different place from that which the elect inhabit.  To imagine the contrary would be sinister.  In the fiftieth chapter of his History, Gibbon attempts to remove Hell's wonder and writes that the two vulgar ingredients of fire and darkness are sufficient to create a sensation of pain that can be aggravated infinitely by the idea of duration without end.  This unhappy objection proves, perhaps, that the creation of infernos is easy, but it does not mitigate the admirable terror of its invention.  The attribute of eternity is horrifying.  Continuity—the fact that the divine persecution lacks intervals, that in Hell there is no rest—is even more so, but imagining it is impossible.  The eternity of the punishment is what is under dispute.

     There are two important and wonderful arguments to invalidate its eternity.  The oldest is the one concerning conditional immortality or annihilation.  Immortality, argues this comprehensive reasoning, is not an attribute of fallen human nature, it is a gift of God in Christ.  It cannot be mobilized, therefore, against the same individual upon whom it is bestowed.  It is not a curse, it is a gift.  Whoever is worthy of it deserves heaven; whoever is unworthy of receiving it, dies in death, as Bunyan wrote, dies without rest.  Hell, according to this pious theory, is the blasphemous human name for oblivion from God.  One of its propagators was Whately, the author of that famous unforgettable pamphlet: Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte.

     A more curious speculation is the one presented by the evangelical theologian Rothe, in 1869.  His argument—ennobled by the secret mercy of denying the infinite punishment of the condemned—observes that to make punishment eternal is to make Evil eternal.  God, he affirms, cannot will that eternity for His universe.  He insists on the scandal of supposing that sinful man and the devil can mock God's benevolent intentions forever.  (Theology teaches that the creation of the world is a work of love.  The term predestination, in theology, refers to predestination to glory; depravation is merely the opposite, it is a non-election translated into infernal punishment, but it does not constitute a special act of divine grace.)  He advocates, then, a declining, waning life for reprobates.  He envisions them loitering in the edges of Creation and the emptiness of infinite space, maintaining themselves with scraps of life.  He concludes: "Just as demons are unconditionally removed from God and are his unconditional enemies, their activity is against the kingdom of God and is organized into a diabolical kingdom, which must naturally elect a leader.  The head of that demoniacal government—the Devil—must be imagined as changing.  The individuals that assume the throne of that kingdom succumb to the phantasm of their being, but are renewed within the diabolical lineage" (Dogmatik, 1,248).

     I arrive at the most unlikely part of my task: the reasons elaborated by humanity in favor of the eternity of Hell.  I will summarize them in order of increasing significance.  The first is of a punitive nature: it postulates that the fear of punishment resides precisely in its eternal aspect and that to question this invalidates the efficacy of the dogma and is like playing games with the devil.  This is an argument made by police-types and doesn't deserve a refutation.  The second one is written: The punishment must be infinite because so is the sin of attacking the majesty of the Lord who is an infinite Being.  It has been observed that this demonstration proves so much that we may infer it proves nothing: it proves there is no venial sin, all faults are unpardonable.  I would add that this is a case of scholastic frivolity and that its trap lies in the plurality of meanings of the term infinite, which when applied to the Lord means unconditional, to punishment it means unceasing, and to sin nothing that I understand.  Besides, to argue that a sin is infinite because it assails God who is an infinite Being, is like arguing that it is holy because God is, or like thinking that all injuries against a tiger have to be striped.

Now I deal with the burden of the third argument, the only one.  Perhaps it is written in this manner: Heaven and Hell are eternal because the dignity of free will demands it; either our deeds are eternal or the "I" is a delusion.  The virtue of this reasoning is not logic, it is much more; it is entirely dramatic.  It imposes on us a terrible game, it dispenses on us the atrocious right of damning ourselves, of insisting on evil, of rejecting the operations of grace, of being fuel for the fire that never ends, of causing God to fail in our destiny, of being ghostly bodies in eternity and detestabile cum cacodaemonibus consortium.  "Your destiny is real," it tells us, "eternal condemnation and eternal salvation are in your hands; this responsibility is your honor."  This sentiment is similar to Bunyan's: "God did not play in tempting me; neither did I play, when I sunk as into the bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me; wherefore I may not play in relating them..." (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; The Preface).

I believe that in our unthinkable destiny, in which infamies rule like a carnal pain, every bizarre thing is possible, even the perpetuity of a Hell, but also that it is irreligious to believe in it.



POSTSCRIPT
On this merely factual page I can also relate a dream.  I dreamed that I awoke from another dream—populated with cataclysms and tumults—and that I awoke into an unrecognizable room.  It grew clear: a general small light defined the foot of the metal bedframe, the standard chair, the closed door and window, the clear table.  I thought with fear, "Where am I?" and intuited that I didn't know.  I thought, "Who am I?" and couldn't recognize myself.  Fear grew within me.  I thought: This disconsolate vigil is Hell, this vigil without destiny will be my eternity.  Then I really awoke: trembling.

Borges, the Other Borges, and the Digital Borges

     The translation of "La Duración del Infierno" has been a tough one.  Because this essay is one of Jorge Luis Borges' early writings, the style and grammar of the sentences can be complex and baroque.  I am almost done with the translation though, and I want to publicly thank my friend Joshua Adachi for reading it and giving me feedback.  He's noted the areas in which my translation seems convoluted and incomprehensible and areas in which the tone doesn't match the rest of the essay.  Of course if there are still any problems with the translation, and I'm sure there will be, I am completely responsible for them.

     For now I've decided to post some YouTube videos related to "El Libro de Arena."  As you may guess, there is a whole digital culture out there dedicated to Borges, and I seem to have tapped into it by writing this blog.  If Borges differentiated between himself as the person who lived day to day and the other Borges who was a celebrity writer, he might have nonetheless been surprised to hear that there is a virtual, digital version of him out there, and that all these constituent elements of his digital identity—the Borges fan art on DeviantArt, the video versions and extrapolations of his stories on YouTube, and the transcriptions of his writings into HTML—can become, as Josh tells me, an object of study in itself: the anthropology and sociology of the digital cult of Borges.