gained wealth “had I transferred my activity from books to business.” 22 But the truth about the use, as opposed to the abuse, of books does not finally come from the scholar. Instead, it comes from the books, reanimated and in full voice. The final pages of Alberti’s treatise are ventriloquized, projected into, and through the very entities that stand to suffer either use or abuse. This “is what the books themselves (if they could speak) would demand of you.”
Do you hope for wealth, while you learn from us not to fear poverty? Or have you somehow overlooked the fact that nothing belonging to us is for sale? … Do you want power, honors, glory, and status? … Can you have missed … the fact that virtue is all around you when you are with us, that we love no greed, no arrogance, no passion, no spiritual flightiness …? … With us, you will expend more moderate labor and show a more exacting kind of virtue … Learning and the arts give you this glorious thing: that you are free to aspire to wisdom … If you focus your energies … in the direction of the goals we have described, you will find that study is full of pleasure, a good way to obtain praise, suited to win you glory, and to bear the fruit of posterity and immortality.
Learn from us. With us. Nothing belonging to us is for sale. The animated and personified voice of “the books themselves (if they could speak)” is uncannily anticipatory of another and later discussion of use and abuse, Karl Marx’s evocation of the voice of the commodity in the section of
Capital
called “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”:
Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other, we are nothing but exchange-values. 23
Alberti’s books do not see themselves as commodities—or, to demystify the speaker, Alberti did not envisage his talking books as having an exchange value. “If a man wishes to cultivate his mind,” the books declare, “he will inevitably come to despise, hate, and abhor those filthy things called pleasures and those enemies of virtue known as luxury and riches, as well as all the other plagues that infest our life and our spirit, such as honors, elevated stature, and grandeur.” 24 And “Let it be no secret to you … that we are more inclined to have our lovers poor than rich.” 25
It’s not easy to say whether this idealistic fantasy about literary studies is due more to the era when Alberti was writing or to the youth of the author. But it is clear that it is a condition contrary to fact.
When Friedrich Nietzsche came to write his own, equally caustic estimation of the pitfalls of historical scholarship, its use and abuse, he, too, would use the device of literary projection onto a (normally) nonspeaking object/subject, in this case “the animal,” distinguished from mankind in that it lives unhistorically, without memory, anticipation, or context.
Observe the herd as it grazes past you: it cannot distinguish yesterday from today, leaps about, eats, sleeps, digests, leaps some more, and carries on like this from morning to night and from day to day, tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to the stake of the moment … The human being might ask the animal: “Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?” The animal wanted to answer, “Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say”—but it had already forgotten this answer and said nothing, so that the human being was left to wonder. 26
Books, commodities, animals. What do they have in common? Within these respective arguments, each is a counter in a discourse about a discipline in crisis, a discipline at a turning point: literary studies, economics, history.
Do you hope for wealth, while you learn from us not to fear poverty? Or have you somehow overlooked the fact that nothing belonging to us is for sale? … Do you want power, honors, glory, and status? … Can you have missed … the fact that virtue is all around you when you are with us, that we love no greed, no arrogance, no passion, no spiritual flightiness …? … With us, you will expend more moderate labor and show a more exacting kind of virtue … Learning and the arts give you this glorious thing: that you are free to aspire to wisdom … If you focus your energies … in the direction of the goals we have described, you will find that study is full of pleasure, a good way to obtain praise, suited to win you glory, and to bear the fruit of posterity and immortality.
Learn from us. With us. Nothing belonging to us is for sale. The animated and personified voice of “the books themselves (if they could speak)” is uncannily anticipatory of another and later discussion of use and abuse, Karl Marx’s evocation of the voice of the commodity in the section of
Capital
called “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”:
Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other, we are nothing but exchange-values. 23
Alberti’s books do not see themselves as commodities—or, to demystify the speaker, Alberti did not envisage his talking books as having an exchange value. “If a man wishes to cultivate his mind,” the books declare, “he will inevitably come to despise, hate, and abhor those filthy things called pleasures and those enemies of virtue known as luxury and riches, as well as all the other plagues that infest our life and our spirit, such as honors, elevated stature, and grandeur.” 24 And “Let it be no secret to you … that we are more inclined to have our lovers poor than rich.” 25
It’s not easy to say whether this idealistic fantasy about literary studies is due more to the era when Alberti was writing or to the youth of the author. But it is clear that it is a condition contrary to fact.
When Friedrich Nietzsche came to write his own, equally caustic estimation of the pitfalls of historical scholarship, its use and abuse, he, too, would use the device of literary projection onto a (normally) nonspeaking object/subject, in this case “the animal,” distinguished from mankind in that it lives unhistorically, without memory, anticipation, or context.
Observe the herd as it grazes past you: it cannot distinguish yesterday from today, leaps about, eats, sleeps, digests, leaps some more, and carries on like this from morning to night and from day to day, tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to the stake of the moment … The human being might ask the animal: “Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?” The animal wanted to answer, “Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say”—but it had already forgotten this answer and said nothing, so that the human being was left to wonder. 26
Books, commodities, animals. What do they have in common? Within these respective arguments, each is a counter in a discourse about a discipline in crisis, a discipline at a turning point: literary studies, economics, history.
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