Altered Book: Les Conquérants by André Malraux, Éditions Rencontre, 1928.
Who Counts: Neo-Babylonian Word Problem
Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, 2010) 2011
Anna Wexler, USA
| Altered Book: Les Conquérants
by André Malraux, Éditions
Rencontre, 1928. With sandpaper, Japanese (Yuzen) paper, Iraq map, ribbon, white-out. Malraux’s first novel, Les Conquérants, recounts the 1922 dockworkers’ strike against the British in Hong Kong through the tense interplay of Communist revolutionists, nationalist forces and rogue “terrorist” elements seeking to control the struggle to free China from colonial influence. As I put the original text under selective erasure, it became the palimpsest for fragments of the infinitely more absurdist and violent narrative of the contemporary invasion and occupation of Iraq (whose colonial history includes four decades of British rule) by ostensibly liberating U.S. and allied forces. For example, from the Postface by Malraux, these phrases rose to renewed legibility: “… NOTRE monde … génie occidental … ‘idéologues’ … des cultures mortes … ces vieilles mains qui tâtonnent dans l’ombre … des psychotechniques américaines … tout à fait en vain … les cadavers plus encore … la création réelle d’une culture démocratique … absurdement fixer ici un modèle … pseudo-histoire …” (… OUR world … occidental genius … ‘ideologues’ … of dead cultures … these old hands groping in the shadows … american psychotechniques … completely in vain … still more cadavers … the real creation of a democratic culture … to absurdly fix a model here … pseudo-history …). In the altered text, the total absence of ethical position, even deformed versions like those depicted in the original, mirrors the nihilism and despair I often try to avoid feeling about the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq. Only the memory of Al-Mutanabbi Street as a sanctuary of cultural tolerance and political debate, and the restorative project to which this book is an offering, provide some respite. Who Counts: Neo-Babylonian Word Problem With Japanese (Yuzen) paper, twine, thread, gold pen, Iraq map, cuneiform numbers, adhesive letters, portfolio holder and pages. Thanks to Margaret Bellafiore for inspiration with the visual conception and to Joe Wexler for help with writing large cuneiform numbers. Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, 2010) was a fascinating exhibit of cuneiform clay tablets dating from the second millennium BCE on which calculations and exercises, including word problems, had been inscribed by students and teachers. After attending it, I read Eleanor Robson’s Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 2008) and was struck by her association of Old Babylonian mathematical literacy with justice understood as accurate measurement and calculation, a major attribute of royal ideology and “the ordered urban state”. My second book emerged from the disjunction between this ancient value of numerate justice and the current obscene “politics of numbers” behind extreme disparities (over 900.000) in the calculation of civilians killed in the Iraq war. This focus was confirmed after reading initial reports of the March 5, 2007 bombing of Al-Mutanabbi St. in which I encountered statements about the impossibility of knowing exactly how many were killed that day on the street of booksellers. I appropriated linguistic conventions and genres of cuneiform word problems from Robson’s study and used Maria Karagiozakis’s article, “Counting excess civilian casualties of the Iraq War: Science or Politics?” (The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, June 22, 2009) as the documented source for shocking numerical discrepancies. |
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