Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted
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"You do too much!" "Where do you find the time to write so much?" Such are the frequent refrains of my family and friends. So is it paradoxical to willingly agree to contribute a text on overload, being myself so much overloaded? An expert on the subject, admittedly. Perhaps analyzing this syndrome will help me to exorcise it, and thereby to distance it, simply by having summoned it before me. Having looked at it in the light of day, I will free myself, superstitiously, from its shadow.
There is an element of all this underlying this text, and thus also in its beginning. To think about overload is to elude one's own condition in order to do even more; it's to shrug one's shoulders—a rich expression—in order to better assume, to better shoulder the load, in fact. In other words, when overloaded, aim nevertheless at overload. I will stop there, since Georges Bataille (La Part Maudite) has commented on this interesting notion of over-expenditure. But let's keep in mind that overload invokes prodigality.
Pareto's Law
The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) proposed an axiom, a variation on "one only lends to the rich." It's a banal observation: human societies organize themselves in such a way that a minority accumulates the resources available to the collectivity. In one of its versions, Pareto's axiom is that 20% of a population appropriates 80% of any resource or riches.1 As we will see, such distributions by Pareto lead us, at very least, to temper our notion of overload, and to relativize the quantitative criteria used to document them.
As a scientist who practices inverse reasoning, I am interested in applying Pareto's Law not to the banal case of the unequal distribution of goods to consumers, but to the much more interesting case of literary, artistic or scientific creation. In this spirit, cultural production, of which texts are a sub-category, would be limited to writers who, already overwhelmed by polishing other works in progress, have absolutely no possibility of accepting yet another assignment. Nevertheless, instead of saying "I have already given," they submit to their own internal demon, [End Page 108] and reply, "There's nothing I'd like better than to give one more time." They make overload a moral imperative.
Empty Message Found on a Bottle
I transcribe here something I found on a bottle of Château Cap de Mourlin, St. Emilion, appellation contrôlée. This is the text in its entirety:
This St-Emilion Grand Cru is a mixture of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Malbec. For the nose: an intense bouquet of red fruit. In the mouth: full-bodied, supple. Well balanced, tannins present but blended. To be drunk within 5-8 years, preferably with meat, game and subtle cheeses.
It presents itself as a description. Admittedly, it is not a narrative. But it is not a description either. The anonymous author presents it simultaneously as the portrait of a drink, and as a representation of the olfactory and gustatory sensations to be experienced by drinking it.
The initial assertion is irrefutable. Does its opacity, with the enumeration of the various vintages but no details of their relative proportions, arise from poetic license? Or from a will to mystification?
Let's take a moment to breathe deeply from our wine snifters. The fiction-effect attracts us toward a fairy tale: inhaling this wine, we find ourselves back in "the verdant paradise of childhood loves," we are transported by the writer into an oriental tale, without our being able to say whether it takes place in a vegetable garden (gooseberries and blackberries), an orchard (cherries) or a forest carpeted with bilberries and blueberries.
Now let's taste it with our lips and our palates—let's fill our mouths with this wine. This is what we are invited to do by the label. Its text, in a directive and inciting style, propels us from the harvest or from gardening to characterizing, to this magical form of thinking by which the ingestion of a food...
