Abstract
This chapter examines Minima Moralia Redux from 2011 by US-Salvadoran author Eduardo Navas, and analyses it in terms of its rewriting of the 153 aphorisms of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. The chapter demonstrates how the various levels of remixing of Adorno’s text create new interpretations of the original for the twenty-first century. It reveals how, where Adorno’s book scrutinised social practices and institutions of the era of bourgeois, statist capitalism, Navas’s remix techniques produce new, updated aphorisms for the twenty-first-century era of late informational capitalism. Navas makes use of a variety of new media formats and tools—including the blog as platform, word clouds as visualisation tools, and search engines for retrieving information—to take an oppositional stance, and interrogate the textual formats themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
In this story, included in the collection Ficciones, Borges tells the story of fictional author Pierre Menard, who sets out to rewrite Don Quijote for the present day, only to end up rewriting the text itself, word for word. Scholars have frequently commented on the intertextual nature of Borges’s story, its problematisation of notions of literary authenticity, and that it reworks a text which, in itself, involved complex reworkings of prior literary paradigms; as Woof sums this up, ‘into this superficially simple story, Borges has built numerous difficulties and complexities, much of which bear on our logical comprehension of fictional undertakings and most especially that text which serves as the story’s source. Don Quixote, considered to be one of the most important precursors of the modern novel, is fraught with paradoxical constructions and violations of the principles of verisimilitude’ (Woof 1999, p. 194).
- 2.
It is worth noting that another of the authors studied in this volume, Belén Gache , also dialogues with Borges’s tale in another of her works, this being the piece ‘Escribe tu propio Quijote’ included in her 2006 collection Word Toys.
- 3.
See my 2012 article ‘Post-Digital Remixes and Carnavalesque Relinkings’ for a detailed analysis of this work.
- 4.
Although for ease of reference I have here given the author of the Magna Moralia as Aristotle , it is worth noting that the authorship of Magna Moralia has been disputed, with some scholars arguing that it was written by a pupil of Aristotle rather than by Aristotle himself; see Nielsen 2018 for a comprehensive overview of the positions taken by scholars on this text , in which, in Nielsen’s words, ‘views about the authenticity of the MM fall on a continuum, running from outright dismissal to carefully qualified defenses of its authenticity’ (Nielsen 2018, p. 198). That said, most scholars nowadays concur that it is a genuine work of Aristotle ; see Simpson, who argues that ‘suffice it to note, first, that the majority of scholars who have devoted serious study to MM (notably Von Arnim and Dirlmeier) do think it genuine, and, second, that MM itself contains a passage that is almost a self-confession by the author that he is Aristotle ’ (Simpson 2014, p. 368). Moreover, even those who doubt the authenticity of the text view it as representing Aristotle ’s ideas; as Cooper argues, since it ‘seems to report in someone else’s hand lectures of Aristotle ’s on ethics’, it therefore represents ‘the earliest version of Aristotle ’s moral theory’ and so can be understood as reflecting his views, if not actually written by him (Cooper 1986, p. xiii).
- 5.
Although there was a notable boom in conduct literature in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, coinciding with the consolidation of the middle class, the aphorism itself of course has a long literary history which stretches back to classical antiquity. See, for instance, Morson’s detailed history of the aphorism, in which he traces the aphorism to as far back as Biblical proverbs, arguing that ‘the oldest and most commonly used aphoristic genre is the “wise saying”: the pronouncements of sages and the anonymous wisdom of past generations that circulate as proverbs’ (Morson 2012, p. 7).
- 6.
These three parts correspond to the three sections of Adorno’s original: Part 1, which included aphorisms 1–50, written in 1944; Part 2, comprising aphorisms 51–100, written in 1945; and Part 3, comprising aphorisms 101–153, written between 1946 and 1947.
- 7.
Although most immediately recognisable as a digital format, it is worth noting that word clouds also have a pre-digital , print heritage; Jänicke and Scheuermann identify the precursors of tag clouds in Stanley Milgram’s 1976 mental map of Paris, and also in the German edition of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaux (1992), which included a word cloud on the cover to summarise the content of their book (Jänicke and Scheuermann 2017, p. 199).
- 8.
In the most widely used print translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia , the version by Jephcott, this phrase appears as ‘Thereby has private life also been marked’ (Adorno 2005, p. 34). However, Navas has here used the translation available on www.marxists.org, hence I cite from this version here.
- 9.
Again, I cite here from the online translation that Navas has used for his work. This sentence in the print translation by Jephcott reads: ‘Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled with fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better’ (Adorno 2005, p. 34).
- 10.
See, for instance, Peters’s (2009) detailed study of folksonomies’ visualisation techniques, especially tag clouds, as well as their usefulness as facilities for efficient information retrieval; or Sinclair and Cardew-Hall (2007) for an analysis of the popularity and usefulness of tag clouds on folksonomy-based websites, including Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati.
- 11.
It is worth noting that the title given to this aphorism in the published English translation—‘Memento’—loses the emphasis on transparency and mimesis that the original German title contains.
- 12.
In the published translation by Jephcott, this paragraph appears thus: ‘No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level’ (Adorno 2005, p. 85).
- 13.
Interestingly, it is worth noting that in chapter 6, ‘English and National Languages in the Age of the Internet’, Mizumura sees the internet as one of the culprits for the loss of national and regional languages.
- 14.
It is worth noting that Bentham’s model of the panopticon, and Foucault’s reading of it as the way in which surveillance is instilled in the individual, that underpins Zimmer’s development of the theory of dataveillance is not agreed on by everyone. Although not making specific reference to Zimmer, Siva Vaidhyanathan has coined the term ‘cryptopticon’ to refer to ‘an inscrutable information ecosystem of massive corporate and state surveillance’ (Vaidhyanathan 2012, p. 67). Providing an analysis of the myriad ways in which our behaviour is tracked, from social media platforms and browser cookies through to store discount cards and mobile applications, Vaidhyanathan argues that, ‘unlike Bentham’s Panopticon, the Cryptopticon is not supposed to be obvious. Its scale, its ubiquity, and even its very existence are supposed to be hidden from clear view. […] Unlike Bentham’s prisoners, we don’t—perhaps can’t—know all the ways in which we are being watched or profiled’ (Vaidhyanathan 2012, p. 67). The subjects of the cryptopticon, for Vaidhyanathan, find it impossible to know whether and how they are being manipulated, and, indeed, they become complicit in the process of profiling and behavioural prediction.
- 15.
Minima Moralia Redux was exhibited at the Public Access exhibition, curated by Rachel Falconer, at the Living Space Internet Cafe in London in June 2012. Viewers in London and connected up from elsewhere in the world were invited to contribute to the work.
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Taylor, C. (2019). Twitter Poetry and Rethinking the Aphorism: Eduardo Navas’s Minima Moralia Redux (2011 to date) (US-El Salvador). In: Electronic Literature in Latin America. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30988-6_6
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