To the Hermitage (26 page)

DAY TWO

HE comes from the ante-room, wearing his black philosopher’s suit. It still seems to cause amusement among the beardless BOYARS, pantalooned CHAMBERLAINS, tousled CHAMBERMAIDS, bewigged HUSSARS and black-cowled MONKS who keep wandering freely in and out. His armchair awaits him. SHE, wearing a military sash, is standing looking out of the window.

HE

Your Most Munificent and Glorious . . .

SHE

No, no, Doctor Didro. How’s your backside today?

HE

Better for your concern, Your Serene Highness.

SHE

I see there are ice-floes today on the Neva. Soon it will freeze over. First the Neva, then all the Baltic waters. Then we shall all be marooned here together for the winter.

HE joins her at the window.

HE

I really don’t think so. The sea temperature isn’t low enough. And there’s no moisture in the atmosphere—

SHE turns and looks at him.

SHE

You’re a meteorologist then? And a prophet too? Evidently there’s no end to your accomplishments.

HE

It’s true, I’m both those things. But then I’ve tried to be almost everything. I’ve studied and written on many matters. Weather, watermills. Beauty, ecstasy, perfection. Bees, sexual pleasure—

SHE

For or against?

HE

For, madame. God—

SHE

Against, no doubt. Humility?

HE

Yes, I wrote on that too once – and I’m very proud to admit it. I produced an encyclopedia, Your Royal Highness, a big book of universal knowledge—

SHE

I’m well aware of that, Mr Librarian. You may recall I offered to publish it for you here in Riga. When you had got yourself into so much trouble at home with your popes and priests and publishers—

HE

Priests, of course. One quarrels with them all the time. I have to. As I told you, I was a little priest myself once. Popes I don’t know, and shouldn’t care to. Publishers are amongst the boldest, the wisest, most generous of all humankind, risking their fortunes for our opinions. That is, so long as they don’t keep too much company with princes, priests, or popes. Or bankers or the lowest tastes of the people.

SHE

You wrote on sovereigns. What’s your view of them?

HE

Ah. Well, in my view a truly enlightened sovereign would be the most finest and most beautiful thing in the entire story of the world.

SHE

Better than a water-mill?

HE

Of far greater utility, Your Imperial Majesty . . .

SHE goes and sits down on her sofa, and looks at him.

SHE

Tell me, sir, have you read my ‘Great Instruction’?

HE

The ‘Grand Nakaz’? Of course. The state censor banned it in Paris. I read it immediately.

SHE

And your opinion?

HE

I thought it was a . . . really great instruction. I admired it profoundly. A model for all civilized societies. Such a pity the Great Instruction’s only a Faint Suggestion.

SHE

I’m sorry?

HE

I understand you’ve yet to put it into practice.

SHE

That will happen, when the time comes. Mr Philosopher, my country is my greatest experiment. I mean to be careful to see it is a good one.

HE

Then you make an ageing thinker very happy. I’ve always known the time would come when Enlightenment would sweep down from north to south. Already you’re turning the rest of Europe into a wilderness of pagans and savages.

SHE

You think so?

HE

Good men will deify you in your own lifetime. Sages will prostrate themselves before you in delight. I myself long to the toes of my boots to be of service.

SHE looks at him.

SHE

I think you already have been, Mr Librarian. You have only to look around you.

HE looks gratified.

HE

True. I can’t tell you the joy I feel when I raise my eyes to your Rembrandts and your Rubens, and think the taste they first delighted and ravished was mine. The pleasure when I look and see the drawings in my notebooks turned into real buildings and palaces.

SHE

It pleases you.

HE

It’s exactly like waking from some disgusting and deliciously erotic dream, only to find the whole thing is quite real after all.

SHE

Have you quite done?

HE

Not at all. The dream has hardly begun yet. I can assure you there’s plenty more where that came from . . .

SHE

What do you mean?

HE reaches into his bag and his pockets. Notebooks and papers tumble everywhere.

HE

See. My plans for Russia. Sixty notebooks of them. I’ve been writing them down ever since I left Paris.

SHE

No wonder you took so long to arrive.

HE

Plans for a university. The organization of a police force. A scheme for a city, rules for a guild of crafts. A class in sexual anatomy for the improvement of young girls. Plans for education, toleration, emancipation, legislation. A law on divorce. I’m for it. A law on gambling. I’m against it.

The COURTIERS are laughing.

SHE

You have been busy.

HE

A scheme for creating a Russian bourgeoisie, done by importing Swiss. A plan for preventing a revolt of the serfs . . .

SHE

Ah! How would you do that?

HE

Abolish serfdom. Within minutes you’d have no further problems with serfs.

SHE stares at the ever-growing pile of notebooks.

SHE

Such a pity we have only a few short afternoons. I am an empress. I have other things to think of than you.

HE

Perhaps, to make sure neither of us waste precious time, I might write you a memorandum every day. Then, if you were to rise a little earlier than usual—

SHE

Mr Philosopher. Each morning I rise before five. I do four hours of papers and red boxes before I take black coffee, which is my only breakfast. Then I see my generals and counsellors. I settle petitions, resolve church affairs, since I happen to be the grand Metropolitan. I issue laws. I check the safety and borders of my nation. I see ambassadors, deal with foreign monarchs, threaten the Turks. I eat lunch.

HE

I understand, Your Highness.

SHE

Affairs of state are onerous, but I usually manage a reading hour. When noontime dinner is done, and half this court is sleeping, playing games, or enjoying sexual adventures, I choose to relax a little with a few dear friends, or perhaps improve my health, mind or spirit. I mean these hours now, Mr Librarian, which you may consider yours. I trust you mean to employ them wisely and well—

HE

So do I, Your Imperial Highness. I have considered it.

SHE

Well, away you go now. Send me your paper tomorrow. And I will read it and tell you exactly what I think.

HE

I can ask no more, Your Grand and Imperial Mightiness—

HE rises to go to the door. She calls after him.

SHE

Oh, and you are completely wrong about the Neva, Mr Philosopher. I have discovered experience always outdoes theory. And I’ve lived here now for twenty years. When the sun goes red like that, the Neva is always going to freeze—

END OF DAY TWO

ALL YOU’LL EVER NEED TO KNOW
Jack-Paul Verso
Dept. of Contemporary Thinking, Cornell University

Hi there! Good morning, my friends. As you can see from the printout I’ve just put in front of you, the paper I’ve written is called ‘All You’ll Ever Need to Know’. Maybe before I start out you’d like a brief personal explanation of why I chose that particular title. I picked it because I happen to be an Encyclopedia Kid. What’s an Encyclopedia Kid? You’d know the answer to that right away if, like me, you’d been a poor kid in the Bronx, growing up in a high-rise apartment on an old urban block. It was a neighbourhood of tough kids, and we kids all looked the same. We attended the same public school, we ate the same hot dogs, went to the same ball-games. We looked the same – but we weren’t. Because in any good ghetto, there are the street dudes, the ones who know all the action, the ones who by age six are already stealing autos and dealing crack. And then there are the four-eyes, kids with big spectacles and little muscles, who get up at four to deliver the papers, and sit reading books when they go to the beach. There are the little Capotes and the little Einsteins, the ones whose parents want them to be musicians, lawyers, brain surgeons. These are the encyclopedia kids.

Why encyclopedia kids? Right, take me. My parents were third-generation Jewish immigrants who’d come from Lithuania, somewhere right out over the Baltic there. They were observant, they were ambitious, they prayed in the synagogue for only one little favour: give us a Mozart in the family. They bought me a junior cello. They taught me chess. They put science journals under my pillow. In those days the salesman used to wander round the apartments looking for parents like mine with kids like me. They were selling encyclopedias, and we were the perfect market. They brought
The Book of Knowledge
, amazing stuff, all about how to build a submarine or make the perfect brownie. But the great one was the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, which was in thirty-two bound buckram volumes, came with its own bookcase, and cost over a thousand dollars. But, as the salesmen said, it was all worth it, because the
Britannica
didn’t just contain knowledge. It contained All You’ll Ever Need to Know.

So I was a natural encyclopedia kid. The odd thing was I didn’t have an encyclopedia. Every week I could hear my poppa at the door, arguing with the salesmen. ‘You think I’m dumb?’ he’d say. ‘Some Britannico. I know where you fellows make these things. They make ’em in the stockyards of Chicago, aren’t I right?’ And right he was, because by the time I grew up the
Britannica
was an all-American project, printed and published by the University of Chicago. Which was fine by me, but not by my pop. ‘Jackie,’ he’d say, ‘you hang right in there. Homework isn’t all. One day I’ll buy you a hundred per cent echt Britannico, the kind they made back over there in Britain, not some lowdown fake they fix up on Michigan Drive.’ Then one day he came home with it. I have no idea how did it, how many dollars he paid. He must have trawled every used bookstore in Manhattan. But there it was, twenty-eight volumes in their own wooden bookcase, not the American 13th but the grand old, imperial British 11th. ‘Now you learn what there really is to learn,’ he said.

He was right, because that set made me special. Okay, all the other four-eyes on the block knew all there is to know. But I soon knew more than that. I knew all there was to know once: when the Great War still hadn’t happened, when women didn’t even exist yet, when you were being educated to rule an empire that stretched over a quarter of the globe. TV may not have been invented. Nobody had figured out E equals MC squared. You went around without a Freudian unconscious, but, when push came to shove, you knew things that could astound. For example, I can advise our last speaker there’s no mystery about where Shelley’s heart is buried. It’s in Bournemouth. But did he also know that heart-burial is a cardinal sin, anathematized by Pope Boniface VIIIth in the thirteenth century? And if you want to know the first man in England to carry an umbrella regularly, I can tell you. Mr John Hanway acquired the habit on his Grand Tour, when he realized what protected you against the sun could also protect you against the rain. And, Bo, if you think this is a little irrelevant, let me tell you John Hanway was an almost exact contemporary of Denis Diderot, meaning he could have carried a rain umbrella too.

But this wasn’t all. From the encyclopedia I learned all about encyclopedias. As you’ll all know they began spreading across the European nations in the seventeenth century as a result of the explosion of knowledge. The first alphabetical English encyclopedia was by Ephraim Chambers, started in Edinburgh in 1728. When the French decided they should have one, they simply took Chambers’ and started to translate it. But the project ran into difficulties, the first French editor broke his leg falling down a hole, and so the project was handed on to two young philosophical hacks and wannabes, called d’Alembert and Diderot. They at once saw the problem. Start an encyclopedia and it’s hard to stop, because knowledge keeps expanding to fit: new science, new mechanics, new philosophies, new political viewpoints, new discoveries. So they devised a fresh,
très grand projet
, as advertised in 1750. They’d provide a total system of modern knowledge, framed around the three branches of the great tree of learning: Memory, Science and Imagination, otherwise history, philosophy, poetry. They’d include invention, science, medicine, the crafts and the technologies. And they’d augment it with constant supplements that would tell you, in continuous supply, All You’ll Ever Need to Know – Then, Now, In the Future.

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.