Month: July 2020

The preface to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History stands out among introductions to ancient books for being particularly self-deprecating. That’s partly because, as a work addressed to an emperor, it has to approach its dedicatee in a cringing way. The other half of the problem is that Pliny seems disaffected with his own subject matter. That’s “nature,” as the title of the work suggests: a “sterilis materia,” Pliny calls it, nobody’s idea of a good time to read or write about.

There’s a pun in the Latin that suggests Pliny is playing a trick on the reader. “Natura” is that which “gives birth” to everything, so how could it be sterile? Why isn’t it generative at the level of description, too? How come nature can “give birth” to everything except a lively prose style through which to represent itself?

Another way of putting the same question is to ask “what’s nature, really?” Implicit in the prologue is a sense of nature as a given object that Pliny, like other encyclopedists before him, aims to represent in a culturally legible form. The task of representing nature then imposes its own imperatives, notably and problematically the imperative to completeness. The necessary capaciousness and universality of Pliny’s imitation is what makes nature into a sterilis materia, paradoxically forcing a kind of deadness on “life” (id est, vita) by pursuing its imitation ever outward into a bad infinity. An endless scope, no room for making selections or anothologizing: Pliny’s putative approach is rather like that of Borges’ librarian of Babel, cataloguing an archive that, just because of its infinite extent, can’t mean anything to anyone.

Fortunately for those of us who work on him, the method actually on display in Pliny’s NH could hardly be further from the description of it that he offers in the prologue. In the preface, Pliny insists that the true representation of nature has no room for rhetorical figures or the kind of mirabilia that make the thaumasiographical tradition so engaging; from book 2 onward, however (book 1 is an index and list of auctores), Pliny violates both these rules more or less routinely. His talents as a rhetorician and stylist are debatable (in Antike kunstprosa Eduard Norden stigmatizes Pliny as, basically, the worst, which I think is unfair), but Pliny’s bent for reporting miracles and freaks of nature means we should probably locate him within, rather than in opposition to, the genre of thaumasiography.

The task of depicting nature turns out to be much more complicated than the preface’s rhetoric of accurate and full imitation would lead us to believe. In a sense, that’s obvious: infinite nature fits within the bounds of Pliny’s finite book, so selections must have been made. Pliny foregrounds the problem near the begining of book 2, when he insists that “nature” as far as it matters to us only includes (to put it anachronistically) our own solar system. Pliny knows and does not refute the claim, advanced by Epicureans and others, that worlds similar to ours dot an infinite universe. But he excludes these at the outset, marking off a bounded part of nature as the object of his own representation. Lato sensu, that’s what NH book 2 does in general: it defines nature, and, by defining, it selects.

The preface promises to hold a mirror up to nature. This is a metaphor that we can understand. Book 2 invites us to look for another metaphor. If the map isn’t the territory, then what is it? And also, what’s the territory?

I’m definitely not saying anything revolutionary when I answer those questions by saying that nature, in Pliny, is thoroughly acculturated. If Philippe Descola is right to tag Rome as a society that, like our own, splits nature from culture, then Pliny and his readers have no more ever been Roman than we have ever been modern. Nature exists for Pliny insofar as it interfaces with (a certain) human culture: far from standing on opposite sides of a divide, nature and culture mutually and intimately define.

The upshot of that, less frequently appreciated, is that neither nature nor culture can serve as an absolute measure for the other. In Pliny, they pass the task of measuring back and forth: sometimes culture evaluates nature, sometimes nature condemns society. Even stranger (and I’ll discuss some examples in a later post or two), nature sometimes seems to take over the task of representing from culture and actually to represent culture. In those cases, the map is a map of itself. There is no territory.

In early 1993, contaminated hamburger patties served at Jack in the Box – a personal favorite of mine, though for locational reasons not one I get to visit often – sickened more than seven hundred diners. Four children died. It was a disaster, a mass poisoning carried out inadvertently and in plain site. A fast food franchise had deployed biological weapons against its own citizens. Jack in the Box made amends by running a series of ads through 1993 and early 1994 that showed a mascot-headed terrorist annihilating a boardroom full of corporate types who, it was implied, bore all blame for the contamination. I remember the ad where the mascot dynamites the boardroom with particular clarity, because it seemed to me at the time to predict the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City later that year. I was eleven and prone to draw imaginary connections. But I wasn’t wrong: as fast food goes, so goes the country.

America imagines itself as a land of freedom, but food is metaphysically the opposite of that. What more frequent reminder is there of our fundamental unfreedom, our inescapable submission to the laws of nature, than that we have to take the time to feed ourselves or else we’ll die? That’s not freedom, that’s constraint, the background human condition and also why capitalism, using “free labor,” manages to work people about as hard as slavery did. You have to buy food from the Man: he pays you with one hand and takes your money with the other, and, in the middle, you work.

Fast food is America’s way of obscuring that grim truth. The Americanness of the solution is as follows. First, minimize the time it takes to eat, minimize the role that eating plays in people’s lives; make food always be ready to hand. That way, you can almost forget the iron necessity of eating. Then, take advantage of the speed of fast food to shorten lunch breaks and its cheapness to cut real wages. Finally, monetize fast food as another object of consumer choice, a marketing ploy that people have been trained to misrecognize as the very substance of freedom. Necessity reappears as branding. That’s the American Way.

Repressed necessity has a way of reasserting itself and reappearing at inconvenient moments. Necessity is an choice between life and death; fast food branding obviously wants to hide the second option, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. When you eat at a fast food restaurant, you’re putting your life into play.

The fast food restaurant is a characteristically American way of death. You can do an eating fail, for instance, as did the victims of the great Jack in the Box burger contamination and those of countless other similar disasters over the last half-century. They thought they were eating, but they were doing something different – the stakes perhaps obscured from them by the fact that they were doing it in the presence of one or more giant cartoon clowns. Or, like Rayshard Brooks, you can get executed by cops for gumming up the wheels of commerce. Or, like people throughout the supply chain during the coronavirus pandemic, you may be forced to risk your life as an “essential worker” in close contact with customers and other employees, any one of whom may give (or take) a COVID infection.

Yes, you’re an essential worker, even though nobody respects you and you make minimum wage or less. That’s America, baby! You’re stuck in a work environment that, by way of branding, all at once infantilizes the customers and trivializes the workers. Nobody’s going to take you seriously as long as you’re working next to a cardboard standee of a clown or a Kentucky Colonel or an illiterate cow. But your job is serious: you’re mediating survival for maybe hundreds of people every day.

This frantic haste to eat and forget eating leads, inevitably, to accidents. Yet carelessness gets encouraged at every turn, a carelessness that is at once casual and metaphysical. In McDonald’s, nobody cares about the food you’re eating and you don’t care about your own mortality, something of which hunger and the need to eat and the everyday difficulty of finding food might in other circumstances remind you.

An architecture student from the moon might have a hard time telling McDonald’s apart from a children’s hospital: same harsh fluorescent lighting, same vinyl or plastic furniture, same garishly cheerful decor. Could we blame them for not realizing that color schemes make all the difference? McDonald’s makes money by getting you in and out the door as fast as possible, something allegedly encouraged by painting every surface yellow and red; Children’s hospitals decorate in blues and greens that invite you to stay a while, because they make more money that way. Both enterprises only turn a profit by economizing death.