{"id":147988,"date":"2020-10-01T11:09:27","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T15:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=147988"},"modified":"2020-10-01T12:01:33","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T16:01:33","slug":"notes-on-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/10\/01\/notes-on-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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August M\u00fcller, Liebesgl\u00fcck \u2013 der Tagebucheintrag<\/em> (Detail), ca. 1885, oil on canvas, 12 3\/4″ x 10 1\/2″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I think of books or works I love that reference the \u201cnote\u201d in their titles, I begin to realize that it\u2019s not the note as such that is the defining feature of these books, but the preposition that accompanies the word: Notes OF a Native Son<\/em>; Notes ON Camp<\/em>; Notes FROM Underground<\/em>. In the first case, the weight falls on the particular subject position of the writer. What makes the note signify is the \u201cNative Son,\u201d James Baldwin, whose notes these are. In the second case, the phrase deflects our attention away from polemic even though the essay overflows with assertions. There is a certain authorial insouciance that becomes possible when I deign to publish my \u201cnotes on\u201d anything, as if to say one can only claim such indefinite a phrase for a title if one is feeling very definite about oneself. But, then, to combine the \u201cnote\u201d with \u201ccamp\u201d is to ironize the note itself, decked out as an Oscar Wildean aphorism, and Sontag\u2019s \u201cnotes on,\u201d in this case, is more audacious than strictly philosophic. In the case of the marvelous Dostoyevsky title (and I have to say I don\u2019t know how it sounds in the original Russian), the place from which the notes issue takes top billing, and this requires that we heed the type of notes these are (like those secreted in a bottle or furtively slipped through the chink in a wall); their intended recipient (surely not me, not you, but some accidental or imagined Other); and the ambiguity of their authorship (are they those we\u2019d rather suppress, sent from unconscious to conscious? those scripted in a hand not our own but issuing through us? those that will tarnish the minute they hit the light of day or the piercing eye of the wrong recipient?).<\/p>\n

Notes are never neutral.<\/p>\n

Take the \u201cextreme literary empiricism\u201d of Georges Perec\u2019s post-Holocaust, post\u2013May \u201968 An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris<\/em> (translated by Marc Lowenthal) alongside Dziga Vertov\u2019s post\u2013Bolshevik Revolution manifestos on the camera eye as an exceptionally attentive note taker. Both projects are underscored by a distinctive politics<\/em> of noting, in the first instance of the \u201cinfraordinary,\u201d or as Lowenthal describes it, \u201cthe humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday\u2014\u2018what happens,\u2019 as [Perec] puts it, \u2018when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds,\u2019\u201d and in the second instance, of what Vertov calls \u201clife caught unawares.\u201d The constraint that Perec gave to himself was to return to the same Parisian locale over the course of three days, and to record \u201cthat which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance.\u201d A fastidiously observed record of quotidiana, the book erupts into a subtly divined poetry of all that slips past the surveying gaze of the omnipresent police. <\/p>\n

Perec is always working within and against the de-realization of the Holocaust and its diabolic inventories. In this, I am reminded of Osip Mandelstam and how those few who survived him (at least fifteen hundred writers died under Stalinism between 1924 and 1953) held fast to the belief that someone had scrawled onto a labor camp wall a line from one of his poems, even though it was never clear where and when exactly Mandelstam died. That sentence read: \u201cAm I real and will death really come?\u201d Like Vertov working in a much earlier period, Perec\u2019s hyperrealism is never hard-edged\u2014it matches atrocity with ebullience, playfulness, and even laughter. For a politics of noting, there was none better than Vertov, whose dedication to visual phenomena only accessible to the camera eye had as its self-expressed aim \u201cso that we not forget what happens and what the future must take into account.\u201d<\/p>\n

We come into the world handled, carried, and, it is hoped, caressed, passed from hand to hand to hand, and gaze to gaze, a life-giving relay that yields in time a painstaking and laborious self-configuration arrived at via endless forms of representation, all of them historically grounded and politically imbued; we learn, if you will, to see, and by extension, to know, think, and feel. Imagine having the audacity to try to alter characteristic modes of perception and discourse by way of your notational art as Perec, as Vertov, did, convinced that this is where political change begins.<\/p>\n

Imagine how this requires that we do some noting about noting, that we study our relationship to how and what we note. To do that, let\u2019s put to one side all the things we know about notes\u2014for example, that they range in registers of mere mention to emphases, from enumerations to underscores\u2014then climb a winding stair of counterintuitions, like:<\/p>\n