In the last blog, I mentioned the publication of the UC Emeriti Association’s bulletin, Newsletter 1.3, and its article on the decision taken already in 2014 by the Executive Vice-Chancellor and the UCSC Librarian to transform the Science & Engineering Library (SEL) into a space that would accommodate more students. Below, I share some reflections upon finding out that books of interest to me in the history of ancient technology were not on its shelves or in the catalog any more.

In the summer of 2016, after consultation limited to top administrators and the Academic Senate’s Library Committee, the UCSC Library removed 83,577 volumes from the Science & Engineering Library. They were not stored elsewhere as for instance the UC Berkeley Moffitt Library did when doing its fourth story renovation. They were not sold or given to individuals or to other schools, steps that might have taken time and been more costly. They were apparently shredded. A few books were left on the lower floor. The list of titles was eventually made available in two lists: list 1 and list 2.

I use the MacHenry Library almost daily for research and very rarely go to the Science and Engineering Library for history of technology items. It was December 2016 when I needed to consult a book on ancient technology. The book I was looking for is one of nine volumes by R. Forbes, a classic collection titled Studies in ancient technology. I knew exactly where it was supposed to be, as I had used the series a few times before. The whole collection was gone. The five large volumes of Singer’s History of Technology (1954–78) from Oxford University Press, or the valuable original French edition of Gille’s Histoire des techniques (Paris: la Pléiade, 1978), had also disappeared. When I learned about the removal of books, I wondered how many monographs in the history of techniques and technology had been weeded out. About two thousand items in my estimation, on the basis of the lists linked to above. More if one takes into account the fact that some of the one-line titles in the list of 83000 items removed from the collection represent multiple volumes. I looked into atlases also—there had been about 150 of them—and found by sampling that perhaps 65% had also been removed and destroyed. See my list of atlases.

My first questions regarding this particular removal of materials were about the quality of the selection and the availibility at other sites. I could see that important books had been removed, while what I thought were less useful books were still on the shelves. But de gustibus non est disputandum. The selection was apparently done on the basis of recent usage and acquisition (five years), which explains what to me looked like odd judgment calls. Everyone would probably agree that such a selection should not simply be made by quick mechanic means and that input from faculty and students should have been sought. Had there been a call to the faculty for input on the removal lists? Not that I know of.

Fortunately, those books or articles are still accessible in digital format or in print via Interlibrary Loan, ACLS Humanities E-books, WEST journal archives (Western Regional Storage Trust, part of the California Digital Library or CDL), JSTOR, JACS archives (Journal Archiving Campaigns, also part of the CDL), or Hathitrust.org (for texts before 1924). And fortunately also, since the library has switched to a user-defined needs after losing nearly all of its reference librarians or collection management personnel, I have been able to order new print books that I cannot find in the UC system or that are rare by using the recommend-a-purchase webpage.

This is relatively good news. As is good news—more broadly speaking—the fact that extraordinary open and free digital repositories and bibliographic tools are available universally. Examples of this are numerous: Perseus for classical texts and materials, the high-resolution photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical materials, Neo-Assyrian documents, epigraphy collections, three-dimensional tools, etc. So, the abundance of digital tools—provided one knows what to look for—is a dream for anyone with limited access to printed books. Even more extraordinary is the instant, flexible access to scientific journals that university libraries provide.

But—to come back to the books culled from the Science & Engineering Library and available digitally—my experience is that it is not always convenient—compared to the quality provided by print—to read digital copies of books as page changes, size of images, column view for two-columned pages, difficulty of navigating indices, type of screen, make e-reading inherently cumbersome. Referencing page numbers in research is awkard and sometimes impossible. Permanent addresses for digital documents and digital object identifiers are only as good and persistent as the organizations behind the servers. Furthermore, some of the books and atlases that were removed are not accessible anymore in the other UC collections. For instance, one print copy of the Atlas Carta of Judaism in the Middle Ages exists at UCSB but is not circulating. The Singer volumes on technology mentioned above are available in digital format from five UC Library “groups,” but difficult to read in this format. I imagine that the use of the word “groups” means that each library system, for each campus of the University of California, has become a separate contracting unit trying to get a better deal from “knowledge-bundlers,” and that is a much broader problem.

The issue is not only the physical ease of consultation of the digital version or the print, if recalled from one of the repositories. There is also the financial and political matter of access, once university libraries begin to pay rent for digital pieces of knowledge rather than for the print version. Public and research libraries manage large collections of print materials. The acquisition of these materials in print gives certain rights to libraries and users. The libraries own the copies they bought and can use them with considerable freedom. In the past few years, however, libraries everywhere have been digitizing their holdings and purchasing limited rights to new digital works through contracts with distributors. The rights granted by the holders of these digital materials tend to be much more restrictive than the “first rights” associated with print copies. Typically, these digital copies are not sold but on loan (“license”). It is not clear how the commercial, legal, and copyright decisions are arrived at and what their parameters are. The universities have responded by encouraging the development of open source repositories (CDL, UC, etc.), but one wonders if they can scale up, especially given the financial and career pressures. The university is also trying to maintain universal open access as well as trying to control publishing expenses and subscription fees. On this difficult, moving target, see the recent failure of the negotiations with Elsevier. So, the rights of first use of the printed copy seem to be endangered by large bundling companies that prefer to rent knowledge for a short period of time and for a certain number of readers and have the means to impose their conditions on increasingly weakened libraries. The accessibility for the public at large is jeopardized because of security and cost concerns (no access to a Virtual Private Network or to university email, for instance). Richer and larger campuses can extract better conditions. The enlightenment’s ideal of common access to universal knowledge repositories is therefore threatened—not that it was ever achieved before—.

Back to UCSC and the elimination of thousands of books from the SEL. Why did it happen? One can guess at the local reasons: the urgent need for space for a much larger population of students; the pressure on admissions from the central administration of UC (UCOP = University of California Office of the President); the competition for students; the absence of public capital for building more residences; the tremendous technological changes and the broad perception that scientific culture and aspirations can be framed and acceded digitally, the disregard for the print medium, etc. This perception is reinforced by the obscure way contracts for publications are structured by bottomline-driven information and media companies. And Congress played an important role in abandoning the notion of a Digital Public Library in the late nineties and in extending copyright in 1998 to 75 years—in practice 95 years for the materials published between 1924 and 1977, see copyright page, Hathitrust.org. The problem is exacerbated by the cost of access to public universities and the need felt by public institutions, including UC, to recharge expenses via units, departments, divisions, “groups” (i.e. UCB or UCLA vs UCR or UCSC). This is by default a “divide ut imperes” situation.

Given the seriousness of the political, financial, and intellectual issues I have alluded to above, I wish the leadership of the UCSC campus had engaged faculty and students in a much broader discussion before pulling the trigger on a radical transformation of the Science & Engineering Library.

Where is the center in today’s capitalist politics? In yesterday’s NYT, Brooks argued that his own brand of conservatism is the only sane path between the equally nasty chaotic vulgarity of Trumpian associates, and the unrealistic ultra-liberal left. His efforts are symptomatic of the common search for an evanescent “middle.” There would be a way to avoid the two extremes and reach a wise, rational compromise based on community and moral values. Brooks’ position is absurd and naïve if not hypocritical. He defends the humaneness of capitalism and refuses to see that what he holds dear—moral values, care of the neighbor, community—is actually at cross purposes with capitalism and constantly under pressure of being destroyed by it. The greed exhibited by Trump and associates is not particular to them. The values of absolute freedom, infinite expansion of self, and spreading of desires as part of a market-based self-correcting machine—see already Pascal’s view on this in his Thoughts, no need to reach for your Ayn Rand—are actually destructive of trust, fidelity, cooperation, and community. And to equate the right—the extreme right actually—with the left side of the Democratic party makes no sense when the whole system of representation not only has long tilted right but has also become less representative of large urban segments of the population. What is called left wing in the US corresponds to the social democracy of several European countries. In response to the great depression of the thirties and two world wars, these national systems have controlled until now the most nefarious tendencies of capitalism by regulating it and ensuring basic universal systems of family support, education, health, retirement, and low military budgets. They represent a “middle” solution that Brooks sees as ultra left. One would expect his tendency to expound on morals and virtue to lead him to defend family support, a free public education of quality, a universal health system, a higher minimum salary, proper retirement, social security, a more rational use of the military, and environmental change. He doesn’t. The idea of a virtuous, rational middle he never stops peddling is a poor moralistic disguise and an excuse for more disastrous economic or political decisions and further wrecking of the communal and cooperative approach to life he considers most important.

The media has made much of a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Toronto who has been taken to task for the perceived conservatism of his ethic and political views. Jordan Peterson’s ideas are built in part on neurological, cognitive theory and in part on a Biblical and Christian message that has been recast in the Jungian mode, as far as I can see. I looked at the site where he advertises his lectures, but was immediately alarmed by the all too quick definitions with which he introduces the stories of Genesis. He sees something primordial in them, reads the gospel of John into them as a long tradition has done before him, and eliminates history. If history is an artificial catalogue of facts and events hanging on a chronological frame, indeed, why take that route, but as good scholars show (beginning with L’Hour 2015), Genesis 1 actually introduces the audience or readership to an open, dynamic history rather than to a mythic structure that helps submit generations to ever-renewed forms of exploitation by hearking back to an idealized past as the only possible future. That is, the author of the text of Genesis is eminently aware of the historical conditions of human existence and tries to formulate answers believed to be revealed or at least adumbrated by an ineffable divinity. In other words, for the author(s) of Genesis 1–11, history and theology are two sides of the same hand. I hope I’m in the spirit of Tillich in saying that. In The socialist decision, published in early 1933 when Hitler grabs power, Tillich writes that “Human life involves more than a mere development of what already is. Through the demand [of the other] humanity is directed to what ought to be.” The first three chapters of Genesis and more generally 1–11 are anti-mythic in that precise sense. Gen 1 is in prose, not verse like all other epics of creation. It opposes the golden repetitions of incantatory myths. It refuses to fix humans as servants of past, immutable greatness. It refuses to MAGA as it refuses fake glories. Rather than looking backward, it invites humans to create the timely order in which life can expand as being and consciousness of it.

We have entered the twentieth century and bought a dishwasher. I’m surprised by its power consumption. It does take less water than I do when doing dishes by hand and gives a bright shine to the wares. When there are six or more guests at the table, to load the machine is more discreet than to do tons of dishes in full sight of everyone. I cannot think of any other advantage. The machine transforms into a much more complex network of invisible relationships a working moment that had so far remained relatively simple: dishes and silverware washed in a sink, running hot or cold water, all things locally provided and repairable by oneself. But with my new Bosch 500 something, I have become part of a more complicated knotting of myself to the world. I can’t see any time or energy savings. It still strikes me as a luxury object by which I signify to everyone that I’m ready to move away from utilitarian, slightly noisier and messier ways of cleaning my plate, towards a dilatory, invisible purification. We’ll see if it becomes an object of necessity. One thing is sure: doing the dishes cannot be proposed as a choice to children who are reluctant to practice their music instrument. Given the alternative of doing the dishes as being their share of the house chores or practicing music, they might well be tempted to chose the miraculous machine.

The war of 1914–18 was seen from the beginning as a terrible catastrophe, Our father, who was born in 1906, had a vivid memory of how the call came. The bells began to toll at an unheard tempo on the first of August 1914. He was eight. The family was beginning to cut the harvest in the fields surrounding the farm in the Tregor area of Breton-speaking Brittany. The wiki tells me that approximately 3,8 million French reservists were to join about 800 000 soldiers on active duty. He remembered that the unusual tolling of the bells came as they were cutting the grain with sickles and scythes. All work stopped. Then, one of the workers, in an unprecedented gesture, threw his sickle far from him towards an embankment and started to walk home to join his regiment. Tools were highly personalized even though they were to be shared when a task needed to be taken up by someone else. Pitchforks’ handles were shaped by every farmer and journeyman in a special way. The blades of a sickle or a scythe were forged locally, fitted with handles at the smith’s or at home, and sharpened by the worker before any important task by hammering the edge on a small anvil sunk in the hard clay of a barn. Tools were extensions of a person. Throwing one’s sickle was a never seen gesture of great anger at the world as well as a figuration of one’s own absurd death; perhaps also a kind of political demonstration and revulsion before the human autodafe that so many workers saw coming.

Les lignes suivantes sont tirées de mon journal de 2007.

A la lecture de quelques textes réfléchissant aux humanités ou plus exactement à ce phénomène américain qu’est le “post-humanisme”, je découvre sur la toile la liste faite par Manuela Rossini de quatre éléments de base de ce post-humanisme de cauchemar:

(1) “Life” does not inevitably depend on being embodied in a biological substrate; i.e. information triumphs over materiality; (2) (self-)consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon in the evolutionary history of humankind and quite insignificant with regard to human nature and identity; (3) the human body is a prosthesis and can thus be extended and its parts replaced ad infinitum; (4) intelligent machines are the “natural” descendants of homo sapiens.

Quant au 1, il est facile de remarquer qu’une information n’est pas une connaissance. Veut-on réduire ce qu’on a cru être jusqu’ici les conditions d’une connaissance aux conditions d’existence et de flux d’une information sans sujet? Dans cette version de la supériorité du logiciel sur le matériel, on en est encore à la division esprit-corps. Aucun progrès depuis Descartes et plutôt une régression. Basta. Il y aurait aussi un post-humanisme critique ou un méta-post-humanisme. Le vocabulaire lui-même indique dans quel brouillard le projet se meut: critique dans les soubassements des Lumières, sans retour possible à Hegel, mais aussi avec le droit inné à reprendre à nouveaux frais la critique des anciens textes tels que Paul, les évangiles, la Bible, en faisant l’impasse sur quelques siècles de travail. On peut se demander ce que ça donnera.

Il y aurait impossibilité du retour à l’Aufklärung à cause de sa division en espèces, son autoritarisme, etc. Impossibilité aussi du retour à une dichotomie sujet/monde. La solution selon Derrida, Wolfe, Latour (j’imagine?), Haraway, etc., serait de se transformer en membranes, en passages de corps à corps. Mais ceci n’est-il pas une sorte d’incarnation sans respiration, une répétition à l’infini de systèmes d’information qui me paraît être en contradiction avec le fait qu’on tire sa subsistence sinon sa substance de nos salaires, pensions, retraites? Se faire pèlerin—donc décentré—, se dématérialiser pour se faire tout aux autres, sans limite préconçue, puisque la limite ou le sujet vivent dans l’abandon de tout ce qui était illusion de sujet, tout ceci est très ancien. Rossini soutient que dans ce néo-matérialisme,

they [human and non-human bodies] constitute each other through relationality and dynamic interactions.

Il ne se présenterait que du corps et des relations, sans création. Adieu l’ontologie, vive le devenir. Encore une petite note sur la place donnée à la sexualité dans ces réflexions: la jouissance est proposée comme antidote à une société néo-libérale capitaliste qui serait contre la sexualité et pour la reproduction mécanisée, y compris pour l’hétérosexualité. Mais le plaisir n’est-il pas justement l’une des bases de cette société? Investisseurs capitalistes et critiques radicaux paraissent d’accord. D’après ses pratiques financières, la société néo-libérale est contre l’engagement parental, le temps dépensé sans compter auprès des enfants par les mères, pères, éducateurs, etc. Ce temps passé à élever ou à soutenir est bien plus long que celui exigé pour la sexualité. Celle-ci est comptabilisable—du moins d’après les publicités—, alors que le temps donné par exemple aux enfants ne l’est pas: il ne se compte pas, du moins pas encore.

The choice of a supreme court justice is proceeding to its foregone conclusion, The senate is about evenly divided on the issue but has a slim majority for Kavanaugh. I regret that the opponents of this particular judge have used a single social issue—sexual violence and his responses to the accusation—to oppose him rather than the broader reason, which is his documented, very conservative partisanship in politics, including the politics of gender and reproduction, and on bread and butter issues. Opposing him on his economic and political views of society would not have carried the day either. On the contrary, more votes, including those of some conservative democrats, would have gone his way. But the needed political reflection and debate on the fundamental issues of economic and social justice would have had at least a chance to continue and unite all citizens of good will instead of being temporarily derailed as secondary.