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I'm really interested in the idea of what constitutes a harmful book, and especially in the idea that you can quantify, at least roughly, the amount of harm done by a book. Mein Kampf is an interesting one here: I don't know, of course, but my feeling is that the harm attributed to the book was actually done by, for example, the demagogic and/or illegal methods used to get the Nazi Party elected. Presumably the idea that a book can be harmful refers to the fact that it disseminates a certain world-view, or that it makes available information which can be used to harm other people (The Anarchist's Cookbook?), so the argument would be that Mein Kampf has outlived the moment of Hitler's political ascendency because it has access to structures and channels of information transmission which take it out of its original historical/cultural context, and therefore disseminate the ideas therein. But I hear that Mein Kampf isn't that good or persuasive a book, and I suspect that these days it's mostly owned as a sort of badge, a flag of allegiance, by people who are or were already pro or proto-Fascist, rather than because its contents persuaded them to become Fascists - that is, Mein Kampf isn't actually disseminating anything. Sort of like a far-right version of A Brief History of Time: the contents of the book aren't the point because no-one read it; the point is the second-order sign (what Barthes calls a myth): the kind of person owning the book proclaims you to be.
More broadly, of course, not all books gain access to large-scale structures of transmission and reception - and the scale of these structures must be part of the problem, otherwise one of the Ten Most Harmful Texts of the Modern Age might well be a pro-sexual-freedom Satanist Fascist novel languishing in the drawer of a fourteen-year-old Goth in Leicester. So availability/accessibility must be one of the criteria, in other words. But the books which are most accessible are those which are conceptually fitted to being transmitted and received on the available structures of knowledge - the ideas in them have to be recognizable and comprehensible enough for the books to be widely read. That is, the books have to fit into a structure in the culture (the Zeitgeist...). In which case, if the culture has already made a space for the ideas contained in the book, can the harm done by those ideas be blamed on the book? (Of course, some books genuinely propose a new conceptual/epistemological structure and the question of how they get transmitted and received is an interesting - and, to me, very open - one.)
My own feeling is that, if you look at it this way, which I do, a "harmful" book is one which popularizes a bad conceptual framework - which takes an idea, translates it into set of concepts which subterraneanly inform a culture's practices of knowledge and thinking anyway, and allows people to use that idea to back up existing prejudices or power structures. So high on my list would be, for example, Men are from Mars, Women Are From Venus - because it took a set of idiot ideas about "complementary heterosexuality" and the absolute fixity of difference between men and women, and propounded an easy conceptual structure and a shiny new language through which those ideas could be more successfully disseminated - and (surprise, surprise), the Harry Potter books, because they meant that everyone could use the "innocent child" as an alibi for their enjoyment of a series which disempowers its child characters and effaces the existence of queer desire, class difference, the politics of assimilation, and the Americanization of the West.
Um, okay, the Harry Potter books are my own personal thing. But what do you think makes a book "harmful"? |
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