In volume 1 of The Accursed Share Bataille lays out the general laws of energy, the universal principal of waste on the thermal, energetic, caloric level. The plant squanders most of the energy that the sun bestows on it, even more waste as the plant is eaten by the herbivore, again paid in kind when the herbivore itself is eaten. These laws, being universal, find themselves folded in to our laws of general economy (volume 1), ourselves, in the form of sexuality and eroticism (volume 2), and ourselves again in our subjectivity, in the classical sense, as a subject in a social organization,(volume 3) differing in structure through time, but primarily focused on feudal society and it's transition into industrial society; be it bourgeois or communist. Volume 1's outlays (har) cover metabolic processes, photosynthesis, death, digestion; the simplest forms this waste takes. The more complicated forms require at least the barest developments of pre-feudal society in place, allowing for the potlach, gift giving, war, luxury consumption, religious formations. The modes of religion excesses include the economic surplus drawn upon to sustain the clergy, literal sacrifice, in the example of the Aztecs, human sacrifice (volume 1), the piligrimage, or in the transcendent divine joy of the mystics (filed under eroticism, volume 2).

    For eroticism, there is a great deal to get through here about taboo, transgression, prohibition, desire, how these overlay on animal sexuality to form human sexuality. Man as an animal constantly negates the natural external world, and then that negation is called 'natural'. How is this negation brought about? In general, through our labor, our life creating actives, and our deaths. In sexuality, through the taboo, and it's wide adherence. I don't want to tread through the whole analysis Bataille subjects eroticism to, instead, a very uncharitable one dimensional reading might go: doesn't this thing, which is fundamentally pretty simple, seem to take up a great deal of our time and energy? Irrefutable, the firmament upon which stand-up comedians everywhere tread. Plus a whole lot about the coupling between sex and death. Again, have to agree with the perverted Frenchman's worldview here. His readings of the works of Sade and Cervantes inform the role of eroticism in the system of waste, a further but less analytic exploration is found in Bataille's Story of the Eye, which I read before his philosophic works and is a tough one to get through, even for the open minded green reader.

    The third volume focuses on the concept of sovereignty, which is defined rather unorthodoxly and I must admit, is rather difficult to peg down even after finishing the book. The feudal conception of sovereignty is the easiest to get a handle on and the one that gets the most attention, there is a literal sovereign, and after some religious justification is meted out, this guys is the one who is allowed to spend your money in the most perfect, divine, wasteful way possible. The sovereign has no restraint on excess consumption, allowed to indulge to the point of ruin. The restraints that are placed on the sovereign are ones that would diminish his grandeur, appearances must be kept up, their presence must inspire awe and anything (namely, labor) that could lessen their stature is forbidden for the divine subject.

    Sovereignty under bourgeois society is tricker, the subject has been upended as the organization quantum, the classic formula holds, they have been replaced by the object, and relations between objects are found where once there were relations between subjects. The bourgeoisie for all their wealth cannot bring themselves to earnestly emulate the sovereign's right to spend wastefully, as they opine for the status quo that they themselves overthrew, they are compelled to overwhelmingly spend in a productive manner. Bataille reiterates the long thorn in the left's side, that revolutions have only ever found success against feudal order, and never against an entrenched bourgeois, who are too hardworking to earnestly protest against.

    Sovereignty in communist society is even muddier than it's counterpart, the potential shoe-in of Stalin must constantly disavow his own sovereignty. There is also a sovereign feeling that takes a different form in the subjects of the different systems. The feudal subject feels some errant ray of divinity hit him watching the king's procession or seeing his likeness captured in a statue. The bourgeois subject gets to posture and play the social status games. The communist subject is a little more confused about his feelings of personal sovereignty, Bataille says there's some sort of Nietzschean will that's negated by the economic system. A case of 'every man wishes only to have better than his neighbor', the bourgeois subject thinks the same, but this is a game they are encouraged to play.

    Bataille's attempt to create a new set of laws of political economy, is stuck rather squarely in a materialist framework, no matter how hard he appears to veer off course with all the sexuality and human spirit stuff. He has a conception of excess and waste which is squarely pegged to the form of society it takes places in, the same follows for his concepts of sovereignty, subjectivity. When talking about sexuality he focuses on what we are not allowed to do, claiming that adherence to taboo was the origin of civilization and 'human-ness', the divinity of the feudal sovereign is due to his prohibition against laboring. This knowing through negation results in the aim stated in the preface of the first volume, it reframes economic production as secondary to expenditure, and you end up with a commodity that's congealed waste instead of the accumulation of productive labor-power. Where then, do we take this negated form, what's the negative theological development to the object fetish?

    What the hell does is it mean that fiction is postmodern? I have my own definition useful for quick diagnostic testing. This two prong approach can easily be applied by other dum-dums lacking comparative literature degrees:

• Are the characters or author getting really mad about TV?
  • You are definitely reading a postmodern novel
• Do you feel like the author is having too much fun with him/her-self?
  • You are very likely reading a postmodern novel

    House of Leaves fails test 1 but aces test 2. This book gets constantly compared to Infinite Jest (passes both tests) online, which I find is a rather unfair comparison based on the heavy use of footnotes (sorry, endnotes) by both books. Infinite Jest has a non-linear narrative, but has a firmly linear endnote structure where House of Leaves has a hypertext inspired endnote (and footnote) structure, there's mixed media, there's cyclical graphs, house/haus/maison always appears in blue if you've purchased the color edition.

    The story (The Navidson Record) and the meta-story (Zampano) and the meta-story (Johnny Truant) and the meta-story (Whalestoe Institute) and the meta-story (Editors, —Ed) at various points will break the forth wall and wink at the reader, revealing that a character knows something about the other narratives they should have no way of knowing based on a naïve reading of the timeline. You get offered up an opportunity to try to re-fit all the pieces of the puzzle into something consistent, and frankly, I didn't feel like it. The same for the various hidden codes within the book, I did a few of them, you can spot places where there's similar blocks of semi-nonsensical text where there's probably a secret waiting for you lucky few who want to manually ROT13 an entire page worth of text, but I'm not that guy.

    The Navidson Record which is the main story, is a novel-within-a-novel about a film that doesn't exist (later winks to the reader imply that the film is real) it's written by Zampano, and it drives him insane (later winks to the reader imply that he didn't write it), and after his death it's found by Johnny, who is driven insane by reading it (later winks to the audience imply that not only is the novel-within-a-novel in circulation, but the novel-in-your-hand containing johnny's storyline is also in circulation). An obvious read of the book is that Danielewski in writing House of Leaves was trying to write the Navidson Record (which, for anyone who's fallen off the rails, he has also written, it appears in full in the novel-in-your-hand, it's not simply a plot object), a book that makes the people who read it go insane trying to decipher it (the novel-in-the-novel, the Navidson Record, not the film-in-the-novel-in-the-novel the Navidson Record, which is the documentary that the novel-in-the-novel is about (the movie also seems to drive everyone who watches it insane) wherein a magical house makes everyone who lives in it or spends too long in it, say it with me now—go insane).

    Woof. To his credit, I think he succeeded, there's a house of leaves forum that unfortunately has internally linkrotted as their software stack has updated over the years, which is a real shame. You can try to work around the old url scheme and see that tons of people have combed through the book for acrostics, run character frequency maps, tried to parse entire sections of the book as morse code, various numerological tricks, in short, they've driven themselves absolutely nuts over this thing. I didn't have that sort of drive, but I was definitely willing to gloss over some other people's attempts, until I got bit by the linkrot. Personally what's kept me up in the dark hours is thinking about the typesetting that had to be done for this book. A quick flip through will give you the sweats, but the sections with the blue window were genuinely upsetting to me, I've written LaTeX by hand but that's not even in the same universe as whatever formatting black magic is on display here.

    On top of the purely technical impressiveness of how much effort must have gone into getting the words to display on the page correctly, getting ergodic literature to feel like it's not just a parlor trick is heroic, especially at this scale. I think that a final wink to the reader is that this is a hypertextual novel which cannot be represented digitally, the physicality of the novel is an important part of the delivery of the story. I really wouldn't have been able to imagine the existence of such a book if I hadn't read it firsthand.

The first of Engels' major publications, a long-form boots on the ground reporting of the squalor and disease found in every quarter the Irish inhabit. Sparse on theory, feel free to skip this one.

    "On Saturday afternoons, especially, when the whole working population is on the streets, the crowd who live from huckstering and peddling may be seen. Shoe and corset laces, braces, twine cakes, oranges, every kind of small articles are offered by men, women, and children; and at other times also, such peddlers are always to be seen standing at the street corners, or going about with cakes and ginger-beer or nettle-beer. ^[xxxi]"

1. ^[xxxi] Two cooling effervescent drinks, the former made of water, sugar, and some ginger, the latter of water, sugar and nettles. They are much liked by the workers, especially the teetotallers. — Note by Engels

The proletariat yearn for soda.