[lbo-talk] Salt

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Nov 10 12:22:27 PST 2008


I haven't read Salt, but I have read his previous, Cod. This is quite a genre. I was round a friends' the other day, and he was reading the history of the Potato. A social history, of course. And I have read a history of Oil which I am sure is but one of many.

It is an interesting genre, which dwelling on material culture quite interests me.

Having said that, though, it all reeks of what Marx called 'commodity fetishism', the belief that objects move people, and not the other way around.

It puts me in mind of the story in Ilya Ehrenberg's Story of the Automobile, which experiments in telling history from the point of view of things. In an aside he has a British civil servant being congratulated by Churchill for having cornered the world market in rubber. Churchill flatters the man 'you will go down in history' only to snatch it back by correcting himself, 'rubber history'.

P.s. my favourite 2 stories in Cod are 1. that Basque fishermen discovered the Newfoundland Coast before Columbus found America, but decided not to tell anyone, so that they could carry on taking advantage of their cod monopoly

2. that somebody projected forward the fecundity of cod to estimate that in time one would be able to walk across the Atlantic on their backs.



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