Biblioclasm: biblio– comb. form + Greek - klasmos breaking
Born in Rome during the student protests of December 2010, and again in London’s demonstrations of that same month, the Book Bloc would not normally figure in a chronology of libricide. After all, no actual books were destroyed. But, as we shall see, it’s not all about the books.
A witty and practical piece of protest theatrics, the Book Bloc is essentially a line of home-made DIY shields made to look like over-sized books with a view both to protect protesters from the visciousness of flailing police truncheons and to send out a message by making a gesture symbolising the need for culture to defend itself in the face of an aggressive ideology against which it sees itself in perilous opposition.
The eloquence with which the Book Bloc images embodied the underlying message of these protests was, for me, what made them stand out from the routine and generic shots these kind of events invariably produce; photos of angry cops, masked faces, and smashed window panes. This is something that sets the images apart, too, from the more scandalous, headline-grabbing photos of Charles and Camilla besieged in the royal Rolls Royce, and the unfortunate snaps of Charlie Gilmour swinging from the Cenotaph. But what, then, is the nature of this eloquence? Why should these mock-up books have such an impact? This question started a train of thought.
Wu Ming, the nom de plume/guerre for a small collective of authors – whose novel, Q, was one of the titles featuring in the Roman Book Bloc – put forward an imaginative and lucid reading of the particular choices made in selecting the ‘books’ holding up the front line (partly available in translation from the Italian here). The Decameron’s plague represents the current blight of the ‘atomization of social relationships’, echoed by Asimov’s The Naked Sun, whilst the obsessive futility with which the quixotic people chase after the Great Whale of ‘berlusconism’ (Moby Dick) is represented through Cervantes and Melville. And so on.
Similarly Jay Griffiths, author of Pip Pip (a book in London’s bloc), indulges in a more nostalgic exegesis of the titles on display, focussing mostly on the aptness of the protest’s nod to Huxley’s Brave New World and the spectre of 1968.
Griffiths begins her article with the observation that “It’s a very strange thing to watch a policeman take a truncheon to a book.” This attention to the visceral language of destruction – surely an ontological imperative of the Book Bloc – is largely seen to be missing from both Wu Ming and Griffiths’ accounts. And it seems to me that this language points to something else; namely, the destructive poetics of that other mass social and cultural practice called biblioclasm – defined as the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media.
In another article, Wu Ming write, “This afternoon, in Rome, students confronted the cops while carrying shields with book titles on them. The meaning was: it is culture itself that’s resisting the cuts; books themselves are fighting the police.” Futhermore, the people behind the London Bloc have said of books that “we teach with them, we learn with them, we play with them, we create with them, we make love with them and, sometimes, we must fight with them.” The idea that it is the books themselves fighting the police, and that they are effectively comrades in arms, reveals something profound about the way we conceptualise books – as somehow animistic entities possessing independent powers. This is something David Abram has touched upon, arguing that books (or texts) are ‘speaking subjects’ taking up the same place in ‘culture’ that was once occupied by rivers and trees in societies subscribing to animistic concepts of nature.
It is perhaps this same idea that caused Ray Bradbury to say “I felt it [Hitler’s ‘burning of the books’] as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh”. Interestingly the allusion to transubstantiation made by Bradbury corresponds to the transformation of the book-object’s use-value in moments of crises. In the Book Bloc, the symbolic change can be described as teacher-to-warrior, in biblioclasm this trajectory goes from perpetrator-to-victim; regarded with suspicion of being a propagandist of ‘dangerous’ ideas by a régime or social group, the book is set upon and silenced.
The cuts in education and funding are more than measures to alleviate gargantuan deficits. These cuts are also ideological. In these specific cases they are attacking the university institution, sewing the seeds to change it from a forum where knowledge is taught, created and disseminated, to a marketplace where profit rules above all. These cuts are deeply anti-culture.
What I saw in the Book Blocs of Rome and London was indeed a symbolic self-defense of culture. But it was more than that. By marching these cardboard and styrofoam tomes into the violent tumult of the front line, these protesters were, in essence, offering up their carefully selected titles to be destroyed in a ceremonial act of sacrifice. This has the effect of being a kind of reverse biblioclasm, a self-immolation – a literary Jauhar of sorts – and suggests a considered détournement of the poetics of oppressive violence.
Tomas White of the biblioclasm blog, charting the ‘secret history’ of book destruction, or libricide, as a paradoxical practice common to all literate cultures throughout the ages.
Read-in, sit-in, an offspring of the Book bloc?
Read-In Saturday « LRB blog
http://www.lrb.co.uk
If you’re in London and not sure what to do on Saturday afternoon, why not grab a book and head down to the read-in at the Vodafone shop on Oxford Street? It’s being organised by UK Uncut to protest against both the mobile phone company’s tax avoidance and the recently announced cuts in local government funding:
The Library bloc’s mission is to target Vodafone and highlight the government’s 27% cuts to local government budgets. Vodafone’s £6bn tax dodge could pay for every single cut to every single council everywhere in the country for the next two years. Library bloc will meet inside Vodafone’s flagship store to stage a read-in. At exactly 1.04pm, on the librarian’s signal, everyone will sit down, take out a book and begin reading. If you want to join Library Bloc bring flyers, banners and a book. And remember…shhhhh!
The action will be done by 3pm.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/12/15/thomas-jones/read-in-saturday/
great piece. it scores important points by emphasising the visceral aspect (batons striking books) and the aspect of ‘books themselves as actors’.
i disagree on the idea of ‘sacrifice. imho what’s going on is performative risk-taking i.e. “both I and the book put ourselves on the line to construct a radical critique”.
jeffrey juris has written some good stuff on this drawing on his experiences of g8 protests: see for example ‘Performing Politics’ and ‘Violence Performed and Imagined’ http://www.jeffreyjuris.com/articles.html
Bernard-Henri Lévy once used a poem by Victor Hugo, apparently written after the burning of the Tuileries library, as a way to relate to the 2005 burning of the Paris banlieues. Lévy recounts:
It’s interesting, even a touch paradoxical, that biblioclasm has been practised by both 1) the elites who fear the empowerment of the ‘masses’ through reading books and 2) the downtrodden who despise the fact that only the elites have access to the knowledge contained therein.
There may be a twist, however, relevant for today:
Perhaps the elites do not really know how to ‘read’ while many of the downtrodden ‘read’ only too well.
But does this imply a third class of downtrodden elites? Does the Book Bloc represent a Hugoesque new poet, a symbolic gesture of guardianship that literally shields the treasures of emancipatory knowledge … ?
Gilbert,
The idea of this third class of the ‘downtrodden elite’ is an interesting one, and it brings up a major problem being faced by the movement.
There are a depressingly large number of people who take a disparaging view of the student movement in particular. Most remarks I hear tend to be wholly reactionary, focusing on the damage done to state and commercial property as counterproductive to the cause. The resentment is deflected away from the elites denying access to higher education and onto the ‘downtrodden’ themselves. And this is, I think, propagated partly via the relationship they have to property (I’m thinking of the inordinate importance attached to the violence depicted in the media as a warning of what the ‘feral mob’ could do to YOU and YOUR material goods if the kettle lines were to break — material goods YOU work so hard everyday to accumulate whilst this bunch of dirty hippies sits about all day at YOUR expense).
In a way it’s a shame that the majority of the ‘downtrodden’ don’t hold a position similar to that of Hugo’s arsonist communard, for at least then the sanctity of property would disappear and the antithetical category (2) of your biblioclast schematic would be born. I think the Book Bloc is an attempt at a sublimating gesture in the absence of this category.
The symbol of the book-object is especially apt as it can be used in a variety of meaningful ways, not least of which as a gesture of the destruction of property. At the same time, the shielding aspect of the Book Bloc does achieve that gesture of guardianship you mention.
By offering themselves to the truncheons, the ‘books’ occupy the threshold between being the guardian of knowledge (symbol) and the object of destruction (material), just as the ‘books’ themselves are simultaneously both ‘book’ (symbol) and shield (material). In other words, the functions of both material object and its corresponding symbol are transposed in the sublimating gesture, resulting in the Book Bloc becoming both preacher and arsonist or as you say, the ‘downtrodden elite’. As such, the Book Bloc is an expression of the problem at hand; how do we redirect the schizophrenic resentment of the downtrodden?
Could a certain ‘schizophrenia’ of the downtrodden be an advantage? See CLT post of 21 December 2010: Towards a Radical Anti-Capitalist Schizophrenia?
There has been interest in the original Victor Hugo poem. Here it is in French (I couldn’t find an English Translation).
Just to pick up on the idea of the Book Bloc as an act of symbolic self-immolation, it’s both disturbing and interesting to see a growing trend, in the Arab world, of very real acts of self-immolation: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/17/the_arab_worlds_horrific_new_trend_self_immolation
In addition to the acts mentioned in this piece, reports have been coming in over the last half-hour describing yet another self-burning in Mauritania.
The following is an incomplete list of political acts of self-immolation worldwide since 1963:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_self-immolations
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