Marcus A. Doel, Swansea University
For reasons too dull to explain, I now participate in the histrionic delirium of Twitter, the utter pointlessness of which is strangely reassuring. It’s good to know that so much energy is expended to no purpose; energy that might otherwise have found itself yoked to gainful employment—such as the erection of a lamppost, the assembly of a bathroom cabinet or the deportation of this or that stranger. Amongst the general banality, however, three things have stood out. First, emanating from somewhere in Middle England, a desperate yearning for impact: a compulsion to try to strike—or at least stroke—something in the Real, such as a museum, for example, or a mid-afternoon radio programme about cats. Suffice to say that I sat sitting for a very long time trying in vain to imagine the kind of parallel universe in which the “Alliance for Useful Evidence” would exist without a trace of irony or parody. Meanwhile, I ate several buns. Second, an improbable but heart-warming assertion—scientifically proven, apparently—that some typefaces and fonts are ostensibly more truthful than others. (This is why I have written this piece in Palatino, even though you are probably reading it sans serif.) Third, some advice for academics—backed-up with data, graphs, statistics, and suchlike—that basically boils down to these words of wisdom: if you want your writing to sink without trace, then publish it in a book, preferably as a chapter in an edited collection; but if you want your writing to be found by would-be readers, and recognized for the polished treasure that it is, then publish it as a paper in a journal that can be easily searched and readily accessed on-line. Suffice to say that this advice amused me enormously. But it got me thinking. If I were asked to list—in a big long list, a list as long as your arm, so to speak—the best (read that word under erasure, if you like, or add your own scare quotes, if you prefer) things that I had ever read, then my list would consist almost entirely of books: big ones and little ones; red ones and yellow ones; edited collections and single-authored monographs; obese ones and anorexic ones; unpaginated ones and mispaginated ones; and even ones with large numbers of missing pages (such as my original copy of Deleuze: The Clamor of Being).
The list would obviously include all of the books that I have read by Louis Althusser, Paul Auster, Alain Badiou, Donald Barthelme, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Mike Davies, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julien Gracq, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Franz Kafka, Bruno Latour, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, Doreen Massey, Brian Massumi, Gunnar Olsson, Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon, Kristin Ross, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Nigel Thrift, Paul Virilio, Chris Ware, and Slavoj Žižek. It would also include books like The New Dialectic & Marx’s Capital, Formless, Bartleby, the Scrivener, For a History of the Human Body (volumes 1 and 3), The Coming Insurrection, Think Again, History of Modern Non-Marxian Economics, and Just My Type (belated apologies in advance for the ambiguous commas). And if I were to list on the verso of the foregoing list all of the things to which I have returned time after time—not merely to mention them in passing or to mine them for juicy quotations, but returned to them in order to re-read them, to read them afresh, to read them with new eyes—, then this list would consist entirely of books. (As before: but fewer thereof.)
So, imagine the scene. I am sat sitting, bathing in the ebb and flow of an interminable seriasure of unimpactful e-missives indifferently rendered in some default font that is, alas, sans serif, when out of the blue—the blue! (which is the colour of capital—blue–grey—according to Lyotard’s The Assassination of Experience by Painting)—, I am kindly enjoined to write five-to-eight-hundred words or so for a Society and Space Forum on ‘Books of the Decade’—my choice of book (no worries about the genre), and the Decade can be stretched back to 2000, if I’d prefer. Which got me to thinking about a very slim and hugely enjoyable book I once read—on the recommendation of Nigel Thrift, if I recall correctly (although I may be making this bit up, because on reflection I think that I may have come across it in The Grauniad)—, called One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, by Witold Rybczynski, which, by strange non-coincidence (I underline, italicize, embolden or such like for extra emphasis), was published in the year 2000. (Which reminds me of a comic that I once lived in as a lad, on the outskirts of Derby, near Wales, England; just like Perec once lived in a baobab tree at the bottom of his bed.)
Although this may go against the grain of what one might expect from a ‘Book of the Decade,’ I can remember almost nothing whatsoever about One Good Turn, except for a few bits and pieces, not necessarily in this order: (1) screws existed for a very long time in the complete and utter absence of screwdrivers, which may—or may not—make you think about the incongruity of dualisms, oppositions, the twos and the threes, et cetera (Perec has some very funny and insightful things to say about this, by the way, which you can find in Species of Spaces; as does Schivelbusch, in Tastes of Paradise, with reference to salt and pepper); (2) in the eighteenth century—or the seventeenth century, I can’t remember which, but it probably doesn’t matter either way—there was a gentlemanly craze amongst the aristocratic sort for precision screw-making, the important point being that there was no use whatsoever for ‘precision’ screws, which may—or may not—get you wondering about our own contemporary obsession with exacting precision (everything in its proper place, preferably to the nano-, zepto-, and yocto-metre, as if ‘thereabouts’ or ‘one day’ weren’t really enough to be going on with), which, as you know, is an obscenity, and symptomatic of our headlong rush into the over-exposed pornogeography of hyperreality; (3) the spine of my copy of One Good Turn was malformed, which was odd but peculiarly pleasing, and may explain why I have always remembered the title; (4) it probably turns out—at least from a certain angle—that the most important invention of the second millennium may have been the humble screwdriver, without which our world would struggle to hold together, which might make you wonder—or not—about all those books that bang on about money, and clocks, and values, and this, that, and the other (including Nudge-Nudge, Wink-Wink); and, finally, (5) at the end of the day—or the book, whichever came first, I can’t remember—, One Good Turn just goes to show (or went to show: since we are, after all, living in a space-age of dis-enchantment and dis-appearance, which is sometimes not wrongly mistaken for a ‘Consumer Society,’ so-called) that fiction is stranger than fact, the latter of which is weird enough already (which reminds me, I should have added Sophie Calle’s Double Game to the list, if only for what she says about the miseries of smiling).
Somewhere in one of my hundreds of books I have the perfect quotation with which to end. Or rather: stop. I forget which. “Never mind,” as Robert Coover once wrote in A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This.
I am inspired to Tweet a Tweet to my growing cult of followers, who will no doubt be barely able to contain their indifference: A book is for Life, not just for Xmas. Meanwhile, I suspect that not everyone shares my conviction that One Good Turn is a Book of the Decade. Amazon are advertizing used copies for just 1 pence or 1 cent. Which reminds me of a revolutionary quotation with which to end—or rather, stop—, taken from Badiou: not the one about the revolution having no need of scientists, which should, by now, obviously go without saying; but the one about “a complete raising up of the inexistent, from the minimal or nil value to the maximal value: ‘We are nothing, let us be all’” (Second Manifesto for Philosophy, 2011, page 80).
It may be too late, and probably beside the point, but that reminds me of something else. When I started to write this piece I expected that my Book of the Decade would be something by Badiou—probably his Pocket Pantheon (2009)—or else Olsson’s (2007) Abysmal, the weight of which—and wait for which—left me stunned. Never mind.
Now, where was that disposable paper that I had in my hand a moment ago? The one that begins with the line: “The last few decades indicate an apparent gridlock or puzzlement…” Which reminds me of that perfect quotation with which to end, or stop, by Paul Auster, in his brief introduction to the edited collection entitled True Tales of American Life: “What interested me most, I said, were … true stories that sounded like fiction” (2010, page xiv).
