Naturally the très grand projet just grew ever grander and grander. They gathered up all the latest philosophers – meaning the general thinkers and writers, like Voltaire, Rousseau, and d’Holbach. They toured round Paris workshops to see how the various crafts were performed, they went to new factories to see how steel or electricity could be produced. They made crafty craftsmen reveal their working secrètes. All the time, the list of subjects grew bigger and bigger and crazier and crazier. They had articles on Adoration and Anatomy, Bees and Beauty, Cookery and Electricity, Forges and Fornication, Jesuits and Jansenists, Magic and Masterpieces, Salt and Superstition, Vice and Voluptuousness. The state grew worried, the church grew worried, and soon the books were being censored and banned. As a result the entries began to get even stranger and stranger – because the Reason crowd had to find weird new ways of slipping their arguments in. All Europe joined in the game of censorship and secret information, and sure enough the Encyclopedia became the most controversial, the most important, the most necessary book of the Age of Reason. As you rightly told us, Bo.
The trouble was the project simply spread and spread. Soon they were revising the entries even before they were written, or planning new printings, or selling off new rights to new publishers who then created completely different versions. Knowledge was changing and developing at such remarkable speed that nobody knew how to keep the thing up to date. Then to make matters worse a new generation of philosophes started to dispute the original entries. So the project kept growing and growing, and costing and costing, and the subscribers didn’t know what they’d let themselves in for and the printers kept getting into trouble, and there were plagiarisms and pirate editions, and so on and on, until the whole thing then got caught up in the complexities and terrorisms of the French Revolution.
All this was watched with some amusement by a certain Mr William Smellie, of Anchor Close in the Haymarket, up there in rational Edinburgh. In 1768 he determined the Empire should strike back, and he started up the project that made me what I am today: the Scottish encyclopedia that he chose to call the Encyclopedia Britannica. Unlike the French, who were now trying to invent even more complicated trees of learning to fit all the elements into, he stuck firmly to the good old alphabet. And, unlike the French, Smellie knew how to pass on what he was doing to Posterity. He vowed to produce edition after edition, supplement after supplement, revising, developing, but always sticking to the original plan and hanging on to the alphabet. And that’s what they’re still trying to manage up there on Michigan Avenue right now.
So encyclopedia followed encyclopedia, right into our own postmodern times. But what about our friend Diderot? Well, from the very beginning he knew there was a problem, and he brilliantly realized what it was. The simple fact, as I know myself, is that All You’ll Ever Need to Know today isn’t All You’re Going to Need to Know Tomorrow. If the human mind kept on ticking, reasoning, discovering, if science kept investigating, if the globe was being circumnavigated and new societies discovered, if knowledge kept on exploring even at the eighteenth-century rate, the day would come when you’d need a book bigger than the universe to store everything known about it. What’s more, it would be impossible to amend old knowledge with new knowledge. And no single individual, no one map of learning, no perfect tree of knowledge, would ever be able to hold the great think together. Reason would go cosmic. The whole thing would implode as a result of its own investigations. In fact, the perceiving mind, the dear old cogito, the thinking human person, would dissolve – creating, as you reminded us yourself, Bo, a whole new age of darkness, in which all knowledge would be available, but nobody could ever possibly know it.
In fact the tide would sweep in and the whole Enlightenment project would simply destroy itself. The result, as Mary Shelley and Foucault both tell us, would be the end of the humanity of knowledge, which would exceed and then manipulate its creator. It didn’t mean science, discovery, data would cease. Quite the opposite. They’d multiply at such a chaotic rate they’d pass beyond the province of reason, the bounds of the book, the unity of text, the reach of the human mind. Machines would be able to provide information to each other. We’d acquire a random and ever multiplying set of signs, signals, systems that lay beyond any philosopher, any philosophy, any encyclopedia – exactly our problem at this moment, Bo, now we’re off on the Enlightenment Trail.
But don’t think Diderot was beaten. He found the answer to this too, toward the end of his life. What was really needed, he said, was a thinking machine, a machine that could do its own computations and outrun the human mind. With the result that, sandwiched amongst his many other activities – arguing, talking, buying pictures, writing essays, poems, plays, stories, travelling, conspiring, producing pornography – you’ll find that he set out to imagine a complicated calculating and coding machine for the convenience of soldiers and politicians. His thinking machine in time became the Babbage Machine, the great numerical calculator. And that became the Turing Machine, which in turn became the mainframe computer, which in turn became the same desktop or laptop PC, available from a neighbourhood store near you so that you too can process words and numbers, or rather let them process you.
And this is why – and I’m very sorry about this, Bo, but it’s got to be true – we no longer live in the Age of Reason. We don’t have reason; we have computation. We don’t have a tree of knowledge; we have an information superhighway. We don’t have real intelligence; we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue truth, we seek data and signals. We no longer have philosophers, we have thinking pragmatists. We no longer have morals, we have lifestyles. We no longer have brains that serve as the seat of our thinking minds; we have neural sites, which remember, store body signals, control genes, generate dreams, anxieties and neuroses, quite independent of whether they think rationally or not. So, starting from reason, where did we get? We have a godless world in an imploding cosmos. We have a model of reality based on a glorious chaos. We have a model of the individual based on biological determinism.
So now what’s All We’ll Ever Need to Know? We need to know there are machines that are cleverer than we are, so none of our systems of knowledge function as complete explanations of anything, and our understanding is always a partial phenomena. Knowledge exists independently of the thinking mind, which we don’t really have anyway. What do we have left, then? Perception and data. We see; it is. Our data comes from any source, human or artificial, and easily processes itself into something else or spirals away into some other system. It comes in any form: word, book, symbol, icon, visual sequence. It can jump from code to code, language to language. It needs no thinker, requires no author. Anyone can have knowledge without knowing a thing, except how to switch on a machine that supplies it. You buy brains in a box. You have access to all knowledge and remain in a state of total stupidity. Switch on, log in. This is all you’ll ever need to know. Isn’t that right, Bo? (BO: Nej, nej, no it isn’t. I completely object . . .)
I thought you might, that’s why this isn’t my paper. (BO: This isn’t your paper?) Who needs a paper? You have a printout already. I thought what I’d do is comment on the paper of the previous speaker . . . (BO: But no, we already agreed . . .) I’ve every respect for our colleague here, even if he is white, male and British. But this morning he treated us to a total mystification, and I think we should deconstruct it. (BO: Nej, nej . . .) Sorry, Bo, I’m a deconstructionist. Let’s deconstruct . . .
Let’s start with today’s number one mystification. You may have noticed how our speaker began by misrepresenting the splendid intentions of Roland Barthes in his indispensable essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Okay, I know what I’m saying can sound illogical, because what Barthes says is we don’t have any way of knowing an author’s intentions. True, but I think we could just agree that when he wrote his essay he had no interest in graves, bodysnatchers, or corpses that fail to arrive on time. When he talks about the Death of the Author, he’s telling us there
are no writers, only writing, because writing is trapped in language and is not attached to a real world. So what he’s talking about isn’t the Death of the Author. It’s the Death of Authority. In other words, he’s doing for all of us.
Leading to the second mystification. Our speaker offered to distinguish between a paper he didn’t give and a story he couldn’t tell. Suggesting he understands the difference between papers and stories. (ALMA: But of course there is a difference. That is why we complained it was not a paper.) Okay, what is it? (ALMA: Papers make statements and stories make fantasies.) You mean, papers make truth claims and stories make fiction claims? (BO: Yes, exactly.) I’m afraid there isn’t a real philosopher who could agree with you – not in America, anyway. (SVEN: But that is just America . . .) Right, let’s take what we heard this morning. What was it? A paper, or a story? (AGNES: Of course it was a story . . .) Did it make truth-claims, or fiction-claims? (BIRGITTA: I have no idea, I just enjoyed it . . .) What did it sound like? A witness statement, right? I did this, I went to this funeral, and so on. There was an ‘I’ in it, so you thought it sounded true. Like my story about being an Encyclopedia Kid – which I just made up, incidentally. (BO: But this is absurd . . .)
No, it’s a question about the state of intelligence in the age after reason. Look, let’s just suppose my name is Detective Inspector Gervase Hawkeye of New Scotland Yard. I’ve been presented with a worrying case-file: it’s the case of the Strange Death of the Author. It seems the victim, a British guy called Sterne, has just come back from Paris, where another author has been stealing from his work. Next thing he’s found dying in his London apartment, crying, ‘Now it is done.’ My duty is quite clear; I need to know what was done, and who did it. Consider what happened next. Our guy is given a hasty funeral, with no headstone. Within hours the grave is opened, and the corpse is on a table at Cambridge University, where they take off the top of the skull. Then someone claims to identify the victim, so the body is taken back to the graveyard and buried again. Years later, the body is dug up again, and only identified when some guy comes along with a marble bust. Frankly I’ve never heard a more suspicious set of circumstances. I decide to investigate the case.
Right away I seem to get the breakthrough I need. We have a new statement by a highly reliable witness, a college professor, no less. He knows where the corpus delicti now lies. He saw it reburied, in some place called Coxcomb in Yorkshire. What’s more, he can claim some two hundred other witnesses, all of them professors. There’s even a canon from York Cathedral called Cant. Canon Cant? Okay, it still sounds convincing, until I check the file more closely. Our witness has attended a funeral, sure. Except the corpse has gone walkabout in Wales. He wasn’t at the real ceremony at all. The actual burial occurs several months later, when the witnesses have all left, except for a few who were so full of sauce at the time they can hardly be expected to testify to what was happening. So what do we really have here? More suspicious funerals than Agatha Christie ever thought of. A respectable academic witness who, along with two hundred other professors, is quite prepared to take part in a funeral that didn’t happen.
Now let’s ask this: what is the real purpose of a funeral? To bury a known corpse, confirm the person is dead, and show the body has been interred, so the heirs can profit and the tax authorities can dive in. Therefore I have to ask myself, as an officer of the law, just why are all these academics so obviously conspiring together? My friends, I suggest we take a rather closer look at our witness. I put it to you he’s provided no evidence at all to show us Larry Sterne’s body lies in that grave. I put it to you there’s nothing to show that if a body was ever buried at that funeral it was Sterne’s at all. I put it to you his whole story is a continuous spiral of lies and deceptions. In fact I suggest to you this supposedly trustworthy professor is simply not what he seems.
So what is the real purpose of this mystification? In my opinion, your honour, our pleasant professor is actually part of a vast cunning academic conspiracy, the like of which the world has rarely seen. It spans several centuries, it takes in many parties. I won’t mention the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the Templars. However, our friend did refer to Mozart, who of course died himself in suspicious circumstances – as Aleksandr Pushkin was to establish in his famous play Mozart and Salieri, a very remarkable portrait of the murderous jealousy that can be felt by one artist for another. (BIRGITTA: I always thought that was because Mozart revealed all those Masonic secrets in The Magic Flute . . .) Maybe. The fact remains that Mozart’s death remains mysterious to this day. So does Sterne’s. Which is why I start to ask myself – could it be that what was sauce for Wolfgang Amadeus was sauce for Larry Sterne?
Members of the jury, I ask us to consider again this apparently amiable professor who spoke to us all this morning. Isn’t it now clear that every single thing he said to you was exactly what he described himself as being interested in – a cock-and-bull story, a fictive tissue of lies? In fact I suggest to you that this guy is the front for a ruthless band of people who, over generations, have every need to hide the facts about the true life and death of Mr Sterne. Why? Maybe the answer lies in our friend’s own inadvertent words. Sterne was a famous and successful writer – great enough to go to court, rich enough to invest in property. Yet, even before he was dead, he was already forced to watch his work being re-used, recycled, plundered and plagiarized, a process that still continues. How do we prove a crime? Means, method and motive, right? Maybe today we’ll never really know what happened to Sterne in Paris and London. But we do know there’s hardly a serious writer of fiction then and now who didn’t somehow benefit from his death, and whose plagiaristic impulses and artistic jealousy were enough to lead to murder. My good friends, isn’t it obvious that – along with many other persons unknown, over the generations – the professor who sits so innocently among us is in fact a liar, a rogue, and a guilty party in the case of the Mysterious Death of the Famous Author?
BO looks at VERSO, utterly mystified.
BO
No, Professor Verso. I don’t think he meant that. He meant to tell us a true story.
VERSO
Ah. So you’re saying there are true and false stories.
ALMA
We all know the difference between fact and fiction.
VERSO
Okay. What are stories of fact? Histories, biographies?
BO
Scientific documents, medical papers, contracts, treaties—
SVEN
Manuals, instruction books, all those things.
VERSO
Encyclopedias? Works of philosophy?
AGNES
Yes.
VERSO
The Bible, the Koran, the Torah?
BO
In a sense.
ALMA
Of course. I don’t understand what you’re saying.
VERSO
Let’s take the things we call fictional. What are they?
BO
Novels, poems, plays. Comedies, tragedies—
ALMA
Fantasies, fairy stories—
VERSO
Take Diderot, then. He wrote works of philosophy, encyclopedias. He also wrote plays, novels, stories. Are they all the same kind of thing, or are they different?
BIRGITTA
You’re explaining that papers and stories are just the same?
VERSO
I’m saying they’re just two different systems for making narratives and organizing language. Some of them we call true and some we call fictional. And I’m saying that Diderot seems to have understood that too. Which is why a lot of his writings aren’t statements but stories or plays or dramatic dialogues with conflicting opinions.
BO
I really don’t see what you are trying to prove, professor.
VERSO
I’m saying the categories you’re using don’t exactly work. You see truth statements and fiction statements. I see different ways of systematizing thought
and language. Some pretend to be true and some don’t. But maybe you remember what Diderot said about the task of the philosopher: ‘It can be required of me that I look for the truth, but not that I should find it.’
BIRGITTA
So papers and stories are really just the same?
ALMA looks at her angrily.
ALMA
Of course not. You can get a grant for one of them but not the other.
VERSO
Sure, they’re functionally different. But the truth is all of us, historians and scientists, philosophers and actors and novelists, we’re all really in the same boat.
BO
Then it is not this boat, I hope. Professor Verso, really. You have not helped us at all. You are confusing us further. If we listen to the two of you this morning, we will not have a Diderot Project.
VERSO
Oh, I think you might have something else. A real Diderot Project.
ALMA
Bo, don’t listen. This is a disaster.
BIRGITTA
I think it is very nice. I always prefer stories.
ALMA
Don’t you realize you are all behaving like very wicked children? If you start talking in this way, you could spoil the entire project. All this is your fault.
ALMA turns fiercely on MOI.
MOI
I had hardly anything to do with it.
ALMA
You had everything to do with it.
BO
Please, please. Let us try and stay calm. It is not quite the end of the world. Not yet. I suggest we take a break for today and consider how we want to use our Diderot Project. But remember, if your attitude is merely cynical, we may not be able to continue—
SVEN
You mean we won’t be able to go to Petersburg?
BO
Of course we go to Petersburg, Sven, we have no choice, I cannot turn round the ship. But we won’t have a valid project. Our researches in print will prove unproductive. Our grant will be threatened, and there may even be no book from it. Now, Alma, come. We will go to our cabin—
To the Hermitage Page 22