Claire Sorin

Keywords: journal, autobiographie, femmes, 19ème siècle, corps, souffrance, mémoire diary, autobiography, women, 19th century, body, suffering, memory

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In Lensink's and other scholars' essays, the pattern and criteria of classical autobiographies are perceived as male defined while the diary is valued as a genre congenial to women's self expression, adaptation and resistance to gender constraints. Thus, in the last two decades of the 20 th century, the diary became the combined object of a literary and feminist debate (Franklin, Gannett, Huff, Hogan, Nussbaum). Yet, the greater authenticity of diaries becomes problematic when multiple and elusive manuscript versions exist. Lensink herself was confronted with this puzzling issue a few years after the publication of Emily Hawley Gillespie's journal, when she realized that, to some extent, she had worked on what she calls a "faux diary." ("They Shut Me Up" 153) A detailed description of the material composition of the volumes will shed light on the complex processes of rewriting at stake. In 1952, Emily's daughter, anxious to document pioneer life in Iowa and, above all, memorialize her mother's life, gave her mother's journal to the Iowa State Historical Society of Iowa City. While the volumes for 1874-1888 are in the hand of Emily, the journals covering the years 1858-1874 were a holograph copy written by Sarah who confided the original manuscripts to a nephew. In the 1980s, as Lensink was completing her study of the diary, she unsuccessfully tried to check the original manuscripts and, relying on a number of clues, eventually concluded that the daughter's copy was globally a faithful one. (A Secret, xx) Only a decade later did she learn that Sarah had entrusted to the nephew not one but two versions of her mother's diaries for this period; indeed, in the 1870s, when Emily was a wife and a mother, she rewrote her young years' record. When Lensink (by then Temple) had access to the two manuscript versions, she was astonished by the subtle yet significant differences between them. By "recopying, reordering, revising, reinventing, and revitalizing the text of her life" ("They Shut Me Up" 160), Temple demonstrates that Emily "memorialized her best youthful self" (157), staging herself as a refined and educated heroine of romance, embellishing her role in her parents' household and enhancing her sexual purity. There are several hints, even in the subsequent journals covering 1874-1885, that Emily was fond of "copying over" her old diaries but the earliest drafts have not been recovered. Dealing with multilayered texts covering several decades of a lifetime obviously embarks scholars on a frustrating quest for the original manuscript. Such quests, aside from often proving impossible, remind us that a diary has a life and a body of its own which, in the end, are often meant to immortalize the author's most positive self. In many ways, Emily wanted to be a model of "true womanhood," a good wife, a perfect mother, a virtuous Christian. Yet, for a number of reasons, her married life on an isolated farm failed to provide the ideal she aspired to; her use and shaping of the diary followed a paradoxical dynamic that consisted in masking and unmasking the growing sense of dissonance that characterized her life. This sense of dissonance reached a climax in the last years of Emily's life, and particularly after 1885, when she was struck by disease. The purpose of this essay is to explore the complex connections at stake between the diarist's body and the textual body of the diary by focusing on the journal covering the last 14 years of Emily's life (1874-1888), when tensions with her kin and within the household dramatically increased. The manuscripts of these diaries are part of the gift made by Sarah to the Iowa Historical Society of Iowa City, and they are, as said above, written in Emily's handwriting. The manuscripts reveal that the author's mode of inscribing the body reflects the painful duality she suffered from and evolves into a pattern of martyrdom in which the diarist occupies a self-effacing center stage position. In the same way as Emily created an authorized version of her "best youthful self," it seems that she crafted a version of her best aging and dying self through the construction of a martyr figure. 2

Hiding and recording the slow disintegration of Home

When Emily Hawley married James Gillespie in September 1862, she renounced the ideal type of a genteel, refined and educated partner who could have offered her the middle-class lifestyle she craved for. The pressure of time (24 was then a rather late age for marriage), combined with her attraction to James and her wish to have a home, pushed her to accept the difficult lot of a farmer's wife. There is ample evidence in the writings of Emily that despite her desire for financial independence and initial reluctance to matrimony, she cherished the Home as the sentimental and moral haven extolled by Victorian culture. Before her marriage, she had written two short stories, one a tribute to women's autonomy ("Woman's Rights"), and the other a homage to family life ("Evenings at Home") which, although contradictory at first sight, both pointed to the domestic sphere as the only place compatible with real happiness. (Lensink, In the early stage of her marriage, Emily filled the diary with references to their happy home, describing James as her loved companion, fearing for his health, dreading his going to fight in the civil war, and blessing God for the birth of their children. 3 The entry for February 25, 1866 reads:

We are at home, & may we not safely say all is well? yes (sic), we are a happy family circle; little Henry just learning to talk, & baby just begins to be cunning-James is so kind, O may I thank God for giving me such a kind husband & may I try to return his kindness.

Emily was much aware of the moral virtues of true wifehood and motherhood that an increasing number of advice manuals was spreading. 4 She tried to conform to a wife's obligation to ever be "kind," patient and cheerful, and she was conscious of the awesome responsibilities of a mother. (A Secret, 127) Like many other 19 th -century diarists, she used her journal to simultaneously confess her shortcomings, find relief in prayer, and testify to her virtuous intentions. But a fairly uncommon aspect of Gillespie's diaries, given the author's social background, lies in the recurring insertion of poems (some copied and many composed) that break with the linearity and monotonous rhythm of the daily entries. Increasingly, Emily used these poems to signal jarring events and emotions:

Clean up house &c. James help Uncle thresh 'tis the first day of the fair, I would like to go very much indeed.

But when a man wont A woman can not-We must try to not despair Our little children yet need care, May God be with us every day, To guide us safely through And help us to endure The trifles which crowd their way-Then let us truly, safely live & tell That all is well,-all is well (September 24,1872)

The first segment of the first sentence is quite representative of the type of content found in most entries, i.e. a factual description of her own and the family members' activities. The second segment refers to her thwarted wish to go to the fair which, as the introductory lines of the poem indicate, seems related to her husband. Typically, the tone and message of the remaining lines sound like a prayer and the conclusion, "All is well," echoes Emily's favorite motto. The whole extract provides an interesting example of obfuscation, a strategy that many diarists resort to when dealing with delicate subjects. 5 In the poem, Emily stages a selfless persona, melting the "I" into generic or ill-defined categories ("woman", "we", "us"). At the same time, the whole poem gives shape and strength to the subdued voice which is not only that of a devoted Christian mother but also of a lucid woman aware of the oppressive patriarchal system she lives in. It is worth noting that a few months before this entry, Emily lauded the paper Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, to which she subscribed, and claimed "may right prevail; may women vote & help to make the laws which govern them." (March 22, 1872) 6 By the 1870s, tensions already existed in the couple but the next decade was marked by a strong deterioration of the family structure. The main reason for this was that James apparently suffered from manic depression, alternating suicidal impulses and violent outbreaks. In the 1880s, the diary recorded the growing frequency of his "bad spells" (308), his "fits of insanity" (335) his cruel treatment of farm animals (270), his bullying his son Henry (304, 335) whom he once tried to strangle, and the scornful, abusive language that he often used when addressing Emily. Yet, the strategy of poem writing, which here combines a legacy to her children, an assertion of her literary skills, and an expression of mastered despair, gradually gave way to occasional spontaneous outbursts of frustration or rage; in 1882, Emily bitterly noted: " I have burned 20 years of my life by the heat off (sic) that stove," and a few years later, disgusted with James's decision to use the hard won money she had made with her turkey raising in order to pay the taxes, she wrote in anger: "I shall not raise any next year, I can not be such a slave any more." (December 10, 1885) Through the 1880s, the diary becomes the tale of the terrible transformation that the home undergoes, as well as the tale of Emily's desperate efforts to "keep our little family together." (August 17, 1885) By 1885, her hopes definitely crumbled when her husband, who had given her a deed of the farm a few years earlier, forced her to sign it back. After resisting his continuous pressure for two years, Emily had to comply in order to avoid paying her father's debts. This humiliating surrender, which reflected women's inferior legal position, literally and symbolically dispossessed her of the Home she had striven to build: "I gave James a deed of the farm; indeed I felt as though it was signing myself out of a home." (April 2, 1885) And a few months later, revealing James's early suicidal behavior, she made this radical statement which leads to wonder how far she embellished the truth in her earlier diaries: "I have never seen a happy day since less than two weeks after we were married." (August 10, 1885)

The crisis over the deed of the farm occurred in a more global context of kin strife, for Emily had strained relations with her father and her sister who sided with James. 7 In this disintegrating family network, Emily's health significantly declined, as though the collapse of her domestic structure also impacted her most intimate home-her body. Eventually leaving her house-the couple separated and she and her children moved to Manchester in 1887 while James remained on the farm-Emily, who had now become an invalid, could only count on her son, her daughter, and her writing.

Writing beyond the body: the head as metaphor of the self

By the mid 1880s, the diary, both in its form and content, is dominated by several types of interconnected dysfunctionalities. The dysfunctional family 8 it describes is coupled with the increasingly dysfunctional body of the diarist, which ultimately entails gaps in the textual body of the narrative. What is of interest here is to explore how Emily Gillespie inscribes her suffering body in order to shape and transmit an immortal version of herself, and how she ultimately weaves her dying body into her "Diary of Life." This phrase, which is the title of a poem she composed and noted on the title page of a volume of her journal in 1876, not only confirms the autobiographical status of the diary but also its life-giving force. In many ways, diary writing is used by Emily as a powerful healing and regenerating tool which not only provides immediate relief but also long lasting meaning. At the heart of the diary as therapy, memory and memorial stands the figure of the sacrificial mother and martyred wife with which Emily increasingly identified. By the mid 1880s, and especially after the spring of 1885, shortly after she was forced to "sign [her]self out of a home," Emily started to record a "dizzy feeling" in her head and she mentioned fatigue in a different way; while many previous entries simply mentioned her feeling tired after a long day's work, she now introduced comments on the exhaustion that affected her body, her activities, and her writing : Phrenology offered, in Emily's eyes, the scientific proof of her intellectual and moral superiority, an argument that could be opposed to her husband's and her sister's vexing sarcasms. The glorious description of her head, which redeemed her weak hands and feet, also materialized her identification to a spiritual-rather than physical-being. It can be argued that, like the diary itself, the head functions as an empowering metaphor of the self. Finally, this entry stages the diarist as a saint ("you scarcely live in this world", "your great desire for right") who sacrificed her genius for the sake of her children. The head, thus, represents a threshold between the material and the immaterial worlds, where the sick diarist believed she was standing. Ironically, her head, which embodied a higher form of life, also caused her death. A couple of months after the phrenological chart that deciphered the shape of her wonderful skull, she was the victim of a brain "congestion":

am
I believe it to be congestion of or on the brain, and but for cold water it seems as if my head would burst […] perhaps a few seconds it did seem as if my head was being crushed through the entire portion of the brain in the vicinity of the Whole top of my head above the ear I had to hold it with both hands with all my might to even have the least impression toward keeping it together […] My head feels literally to have been smashed to pieces, it hurt so badly that it affects my eyes so as to make an appearance of stars among waves, so I can hardly write, and when the worst makes me dizzy too.

(August 8, 1885)

The reconstructed narrative of her brain's "explosion" combines detailed space references, with a concern for naming the disease that struck her, as the underlined segment indicates. The images of crushing and bursting testify to Emily's attempt to precisely define the pain she experienced and echo other entries where she notes feeling "crushed" by her husband's, sister's or father's hostility. (293,298) In this climactic episode, her brain "feels literally to have been smashed to pieces," generating pain but also a new inner universe of "stars among waves" that pathetically evokes visions of infinity. Most significantly, the gesture of holding her head with both hands in order to "keep it together" seems to have a discursive counterpart through the act of diary writing that also aims at patching the smashed pieces of her self and restoring her unity. The last long comment devoted to the diarist's head bears on the mysterious connections between the brain and literary creation:

There is one singular thing that appears to act upon my brain, or has done so at times when I am tired […] a sensation not of pain but like a flash, of some unseen object passing through or rather over the very top of head beneath the skull; it must be an electric curant (sic) of an immortal hope; or a helper for invariably when such flashes occur my thoughts are active in the extreme; my pen will go faster and faster until a story founded upon facts is completed in romance. I believe I will write a novel & get it published; will found it upon facts which have come under my observation. (March 1, 1886) In this passage blending the physical and metaphysical, Emily endeavors to decipher, through her own brain, the mechanism at stake in artistic creation. Electricity materializes the "flash of genius" activating the mental powers detected by the phrenologist and in the process, the weary diarist is sublimated into a famed author. The free movement of the pen, going "faster and faster until a story founded upon facts is completed in romance" (italics mine) starkly contrasts with the circular "round of kitchen work" and the physical pain imprisoning Emily. The act of transforming true but unknown facts into published (and hopefully memorable) fiction is ultimately meant to substitute deadly repetition with immortality. This suggests that, beyond its recording and comforting functions, "the story founded upon facts" constructed by the diary was destined to be transfigured into a work of art. Of course, the difficult question, given Emily's habit of carefully crafting her "Diary of life," is to assess to what extent the journal blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction.

Emily never wrote the novel she mentions for she suffered from a severe stroke in May 1886, which left her half-paralyzed. The diary entries covering her last years are filled in a deteriorating handwriting which seems to attest that the final volume is indeed an original version. At this stage, the diary's body and the failing body of the diarist are engaged in a complex mirror effect involving and evacuating physical pain.

"She died a martyr to her two children": the diary as memorial

While the head functions as a powerful metaphor of the diarist's self, Emily Gillespie is careful not to identify too closely with her helpless body. Yet, the last section of the diary can be considered as a form of autopathography, a term Couser uses to designate a great range of texts constructing "an autobiographical narrative of illness." (Couser 65) The types of narratives of illness produced by 19 th -century diarists widely vary in scope, style and content. Some, like Louisa May Alcott's record of her final years, can be extremely factual and seemingly devoid of emotion (Sorin); others, like the one by Alice James, are witty, deep and elaborate tales of physical suffering and the disease's progress. Emily Gillespie's account of her illness is neither terse nor sophisticated, and the diseased body, with its daily story of pain and decline, is not staged as a central object of discourse; at the same time, the crippled body certainly stands as the central validation of Emily's autobiographical legacy. In the same way as Emily had chosen to highlight her empowering brain, she opted, during the last stages of her debilitating illness, to stress her selfless soul and clear conscience. In the process, her writing espoused a double movement of acceptance of pain and denunciation of tyranny, of submission and resistance, turning the diary into a testimony of martyrdom. 10

In her last years, Emily became increasingly vocal about the causes of her disease which she primarily attributed to her husband's insane and sadistic behavior. The diary records more and more scenes of daily humiliation, as James occasionally accused her of pretending to be ill to avoid work or, paradoxically, railed her impotence. Once, in an entry that reads like an allegory of her utter subjection, she relates that James refused to lend her his hand and obliged her to hold on to the wheelbarrow and crawl back to the house. 11 When describing such scenes, Emily typically introduces, through direct speech, the terse and brutal voice of James before concluding on her own dignified endurance: "Ugh! You are the most helpless woman I ever saw for anyone that pretends to know as much as you do, you know everything but cant do anything' I made no reply." (December10, 1885) Increasingly, however, the tone of some entries becomes openly accusatory. Reflecting on the causes of her failing heath, she bitterly noted:

I fear my disease is paralysis from over work physically and mental trouble for the past ten years has been more than I could endure, especially the last five years, but I have tried with all my might to overcome the great strain imposed upon me by him who promised to protect and support me through life, but my nerves broke down, my strength failed & now I can scarce walk; however I can not be too thankful I have been permitted to retain my mind. (April 11, 1886) The term "nerves," an echo of the numerous entries mentioning her feeling "nervous," seems to confirm that Emily accepted the 19 th -century medical theory according to which women were biologically dominated by their nervous system. (Rosenberg, Smith-Rosenberg) Her potential fear of becoming insane is also a reflection of this theory which claimed that the nervous system was intimately connected to the womb's functions; thus, the menopause was commonly described as a period when women risked losing their mind. (Smith- Rosenberg,191) While there is evidence that Emily dreaded the effects of the menopause, 12 the above quote clearly points to her husband as the cause of her physical and mental breakdown.

Referring to the broken vows of matrimony ("him who promised to protect me and support me through life"), Emily not only exposes her spouse's treason but also the potential danger of the institution of marriage. In a subsequent entry, worried that her daughter might choose the wrong partner, she compares marriage to "a lottery" and describes suitors as "full of deceit […] with their false tongues" eager to seduce and rule (April 25, 1887). Emily's disillusioned critique of marriage targeted lustful manhood as well as male laws which reduced wives-and especially farmers' wives-to "slaves." The references to women's (and her own) slavery become more numerous as the diary records her failing health. When her aunt died, doubtlessly thinking of her own situation, she exclaimed: "she is another one to die a slave to work and the will of man to rule […] he [her uncle] intended to get her for a wife to work and she did work." (March 8, 1886) The home ideal and the "family circle" that Emily used to cherish are finally redefined and reduced to a mother-children sphere. It is inside this sphere, ultimately materialized in the new house she and her children moved to, that, as an invalid, she strove to depict a harmonious domestic unit, ruled by love and solidarity. Significantly, the demonization of James is coupled with an idealization of Henry and Sarah which Emily's diary writing operated through a rigorous process of selection. As Temple and Bunkers note in their comparative study of Emily's and Sarah's journals, incidents shedding an unpleasant light on her son's behavior or her daughter's reputation were consciously deleted. (207-208) Instead, Emily underlined her son's kindness and praised her daughter-whom she saw as "myself living again" (February 13, 1886)-for her unfailing support. It seems indeed that Sarah never failed Emily, both during and after the lifetime of the latter, for she took care of her mother's sick body and diary.

After the stroke that left her paralyzed, Emily turned to her daughter as her main nurse and hope for improvement. The mention of professional doctors is globally rare, considering the seriousness of her disease. At one point, the diary mentions magnetic therapy, a popular practice at the time "involving the application of mild electrical charges for correcting physiological imbalances that caused disease." (A Secret, 426) Emily, confident in the power of electricity (let us recall her description of its supposed effect on her brain), writes about the regenerating effects of the doctor's treatment, finding that her "hair is not as white"; "it is like bringing the dead back to life," she noted, "In the evening when he draws his hand over me, one can plainly see an electric light follow his fingers upon my flesh; he says he thinks I will get well & be healthier than I ever was before." (April 12, 1887) Yet, the treatment was costly and shortly abandoned, leaving the patient with traditional homemade remedies-potato poultice, catnip tea, warm bath, camphor rubbing, and rest. Emily's enthusiasm for magnetic therapy may have been boosted by the doctor's vision of her disease for Sarah notes in her diary that he "said pa is a poison to her & it is no wonder she is paralyzed." (Bunkers,All is Well,118) The comparison undoubtedly confirmed Emily's, and now her children's conviction, that the main culprit, the true original disease in a sense, was James, the "raving maniac." Logically, then, it is not so much in medicine that Emily believes as in powerful counter poisons to her tyrannical husband, i.e. freedom, financial independence, and healthy physical and mental food. Reacting to James's advice about taking a "patent medicine" and his rebuke that she "did not do something," she confided in her diary: "I would if I could, I would ride out every day & have oysters & fish and other healthy diet & happiness for my brain & let patent medicine go into the turkey feed." (March 9, 1886) Taken together, the journal's entries covering the last five years of Emily Gillespie's existence, construct a story of disease that is gender and class based, and also hagiographical.

In spite-or perhaps because-of the increasing physical pain and powerlessness of the diarist, the journal chooses to leave out the graphic details liable to reduce the author to a "mass of helpless clay." (February 7, 1888) While Sarah's diary provides a minute account of her mother's fainting spells, vomiting, fever and disagreeable smell, Emily's volume emphasizes her daughter's tireless devotion, and, in terms reminiscent of her younger days as a frustrated wife, her own struggling efforts at conforming with the model of the perfect invalid.

I try to be pleasant and happy all the time, though I am so poor in flesh that the hipjoints are so sore I can scarcely lie on them at night. Yet I have a good appetite […] I really crave oysters […] but I suppose it is not healthy to eat too much and Henry does not like for me to eat it. (January 23, 1887)

With its mention of oysters and the veiled critique addressed to her son, this entry vaguely and disturbingly echoes the previous passage involving James. It is likely that Henry was not always a model of kindness 13 but such glimpses remain rare and carefully worded. Likewise, the references to her sore body parts adopt a rather factual tone and express the intensity of pain mainly through the monosyllable "O" or underlined segments. Very few entries are wholly dedicated to physical suffering, and when pain is mentioned, it is usually inserted among other external events:

[…] I only weighed about 50lbs. nothing but a perfect wreck of humanity. the joints & bones-O! how they hurt when I was moved. Ah, me… Sarah is attending the Normal. (August 4, 1886)

[…] a bed sore came on the joint of my left hip [… Dr Sherman has dressed it 4 times, he cut out a piece of dead flesh larger than a walnut. It is better, has been O so sore. Mr Huftenlen came here the 10 th to board & make his home, last Monday he asked Sarah to marry him too old […] (August 30, 1887) Calamous (sic) day. Clowdy (sic). Sarah cutting a vest for Henry […] I have two terrible sores, hip joints came though the flesh. Oh how glad I was to see Henry. he came home yesterday […] (February 2,1888)

One has to turn to the daughter's diary to get details about the size, the depth, and the terrible smell of these "putrid" hip sores. (All is Well, 121-122) Emily's partial masking of her flesh caught in the process of decay may be linked to a fairly common and healthy movement of dissociation of the self from the disabled body. (Wendell 330) Yet, in her case, the principal reason is to be found in her wish to leave the journal uncontaminated by the literally rotting body of its author. As an expression of her best and immortal self, the diary's textual and material coherence must be preserved. That is why Emily, who had been used to writing on a daily basis for over 2 decades, laments the holes in her diary as much as those in her hips. When illness prevented her from writing, she expressed her sorrow for "leaving" her journal in a manner recalling her mention of physical pain:

O! dear; I had to cry when I saw how long since I wrote in my Journal. (November 6, 1887) I am Sorry to so leave my journal […] (August 30, 1887) Once more I try to write, am sorry indeed to have so neglected my journal & could have written many things I would like to have remembered, but each time when I felt like writing no one was near to ask for pen & ink & Book, or were busy. (September 5, 1886).

The will to "remember" and, we could add, to have many things remembered, was actuated through Sarah who, at her mother's request, wrote in the diary and filled in the gaps, literally re-membering the text. 14 These entries, written in a different hand contrasting with the distorted signs laboriously traced by Emily's crippled hand, weave mother's and daughter's bodies and voices into polyphonic and polymorphic texts that blur or rather enlarge the identity of the original narrator and ultimately announce and assert the status of the diary as a filial enterprise. A perfect illustration of this can be found in Emily's will, written by Sarah in the entry for February 7, 1888. Both the will and its mode of insertion testify to the fact that the diary had by now become a literal projection of its author's death, or remaining time. Interestingly, Sarah began writing just following her mother's previous entry (p. 373 of the hard bound volume) but as though she/they? had anticipated that Emily still had a few days to live, she continued p. 378, after the very last entry in Emily's hand. Thus, the broken handwriting of the living mother finds itself encapsulated in her own posthumous voice, inscribed by Sarah. The six-page will is not only about Emily's transmission of her earthly properties; it is also the tale, voiced by the mother and inscribed by the daughter, of Emily's marriage to a suicidal and frantic man who frightened her and forced her to return the deed of the farm (which, she insisted, made it invalid), of her patient suffering, her unceasing efforts at promoting happiness in the family, and of her final decision to forgive James. In fact, these six pages provide a condensed and concerted version of the diary. Curiously, Emily did not mention her many journal volumes in the long list of items she transmitted to her children.

Had she and Sarah agreed orally about what was to be done or could she not resign herself to listing her Diary of Life among hair flowers, armchairs, and other material items? In any case, contrary to the wish of many diarists, she never mentioned destroying them, since they had consciously grown into a testimony of her martyrdom:

Cannot walk yet. it is indeed a trial to bear. The heart is sometimes broken by trouble & its possor (sic) dies a martyr. I tried so hard to live through it without being known by the outside world, suffered untold sorrow by hearing his abusive language […] God alone knows I have prayed every day that I might know the right way & do right in all my words and doings. I can say with all my heart my conscience is clear. (December 25,1886) Sarah, when she donated the diary to the Iowa Institute, fulfilled her mother's implicit wish to make it "known by the outside world" and interestingly, she took up the term "martyr" twice in the dedication. In her introductory note to the diaries, she stated: "she died a martyr to her two children, God bless her dear memory; her life full and fleeting with toil and sacrifice"; also, adding a very entry to the journal, dated June 30 1948, and written in a deteriorating handwriting similar to that of Emily, she wrote: "It grieves my heart to review my dear mother's sorrows. She gave her life a martyr to her children." One may wonder why Sarah did not write that Emily had died a martyr to her husband, and why she readily accepted the guilt inherent to her mother's sacrifice. This could be to conform to Emily's desire to be remembered as a selfless, exemplary "Ma," 15 offering her life to live up to the ideal of true motherhood. Most likely, Sarah preferred to immortalize her mother as a heroine, rather than a slave.

Emily Hawley Gillespie's diary offers a compelling example of the complex facets and multiple functions of diary writing in 19 th -century America: far more than a mere record of events, this journal combined the roles of confidant, emotional outlet, proof of the author's literary skills and high intellect, possibly legal evidence of her husband's insanity, testimony of her purity, piety and suffering, and memorial securing a form of immortality. To the very end, Emily considered the diary as an extension of her life, as testify her last words, recorded in Sarah's diary: "She could not cry, for the muscles of her face were paralyzed. She would say […] 'O! I can't tell you ' & 'write' & 'paper'." (March 27, 1888) This work of a lifetime, and of mother-daughter collaboration, emerges as a carefully crafted text that blended selection, deletion, obfuscation, and a subtle balance between concealment and revelation. By repeatedly and forcefully exhorting herself to patience and silence, Emily indirectly complained and resisted, as showed her obsessive repetition of "all is well" and underlined statements such as: "I will try to never complain of anything". She also left these puzzling lines: "I have written many things in my journal, but the worst is a secret to be burried (sic) when I shall cease to be." (September 5, 1886) Scholars to this day have not been able to break this "secret" which probably refers to an unspeakable injury inflicted by James. By hinting at the fact that the deepest truth must remain untold-as perhaps some of her original manuscripts must remain invisible-Emily has managed to this day to steep her diary (and herself) in mystery and she has consciously shaped it as a casket impossible to unseal and impossible to bury.

Bibliography

3 Emily gave birth to Henry in 1863 and to twins in 1865 but only Sarah survived. Her comment about the stillborn twin (July 7, 1865) indicates that she did not wish to have many children. Financial reasons and her educational ambition for her offspring may explain her desire to control her fertility. That she was successful in doing so reveals that the couple probably used contraceptive devices besides the menstrual coding that Emily inscribed in her diary. (A Secret 185) 4 Although primarily partaking of a middle class ideology, the cult of domesticity and the criteria of true womanhood (defined as piety, purity, submission and domesticity in Barbara Welter's seminal essay), impacted a wider scope of social strata. Among the most influential vectors of the domestic ideal were Godey's Lady's Book, Catharine Beecher's "A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School," first published in 1841, and later revised and expanded into the immensely popular The American Woman's Home (1869), co-signed with Harriet Beecher Stowe. While there is no evidence that Emily possessed these books, Lensink notes that she subscribed to Peterson's Magazine, which also promoted the values of domesticity. ( 189) 5 Obfuscation, the act of deliberately making something confused, partakes of the wider phenomenon of encoding that Suzanne Bunkers perceives in 19 th -century women's diaries. She defines encoding as an oblique mode of writing, including "indirection, contradiction, deviation and silences." Bunkers notes that "A woman might speak indirectly by deleting the pronoun "I" or by using qualifiers such as possibly or I think that […] She might employ silences in choosing not to write about such taboo subjects as sexuality, labor and childbirth, and menstruation." ("Midwestern Diaries and Journals", 192) Emily Gillespie uses many forms of encoding in her diary, through the poems, the blurring of the pronoun "I," the recurrence of "seem" qualifying her statements, the marginal notes, and her avowed (or uncommented) choice of silence. Her pregnancy and childbirth are not detailed, like in many 19 th -century women's diaries. 6 Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly was the radical women's rights newspaper supporting suffrage, free love and spiritualism, edited by Tennessee Claflin and her scandalous sister Victoria Woddhull, who ran in the 1872 presidential election. Emily Gillespie's approval of the newspaper was not incompatible with her religion, universalism, which stressed reason, universal salvation, education and human potential; as such, the Universalist philosophy was congenial to women's claim to equality. (A Secret 186-187) Besides, the paper's radical denunciation of the sexual double standard and its global vision of woman as the "slave" of man's laws were probably welcomed by Emily Gillespie.

7 Emily regularly describes herself as slandered and abused by her kin. She especially had conflicting relations with her sister Harriet whom she found uneducated, unfeminine and unjust; the diary reports that she accused Emily of making James work like a slave (March 15, 1885) and that she repeatedly sided with him. There were also conflicts over the bureau which Emily's mother bequeathed to her but which ended up in the hands of her father.

8 Suzanne Bunkers uses this phrase to describe the Gillespie household, providing the following definition: "one whose members do not think or behave in healthy ways. According to Janet Woititz and Melody Beattie, families that suffer from forms of physical and/or emotional abuse are dysfunctional. Paradoxically the dysfunction seen and felt by family members is often well hidden from individuals outside the family unit. This 'invisibility' is one of the hallmarks of the dysfunctional family" ("Diaries and Dysfunctional Families" 232).

Emily and Sarah indeed often confide in their diaries that James has a double personality, pretending to be kind and concerned in public, and behaving like a maniac private.

9 Phrenology, now considered a pseudoscience, was an immensely popular discipline in the 19th-century which claimed that the study of the skull's bumps and shape can reveal the person's "faculties." In the late 19 th century, phrenology was starting to lose some of its prestige but Emily, like many other people, was still attracted to the inward possibilities it pointed to. She also had a chart made of her children's heads which revealed promising futures for them.

10 Etymologically the term "martyr" is related to "witness"; in the present context, the act of diary writing makes Emily not only the object but the witness to her husband's cruel treatment, as it eventually turns the diary into the witness to her suffering.

11 It must be noted that Sarah's diary also recorded her father's "fits," his cruelty to animals and humiliating treatment of her mother. Bunkers suggests that the recording of James's misdeeds, in mother's and daughter's diaries, may have been part of a plan to compile evidence in case of divorce on the grounds of inhuman treatment and endangerment of life. ("Diaries and Dysfunctional Families" 224)

12 "I do wish I may not be so nervous […] my hope & prayer, that I may never lose my reason as many have done at my age of life." (May 6, 1884) 13 Sarah's diary relates that Henry, on inviting a guest to sleep at their house, told his mother he was ashamed of her appearance in the morning and would rather she did not sleep in the hallway. This led her to sleep on the floor of Sarah's bedroom. The incident is not mentioned in Emily's diary which only notes that she slept on the floor. (Temple and Bunkers,(207)(208) 14 After her stroke in early May 1886, the diary is kept sporadically until August 27 and her daughter wrote an entry on May 26. In late 1887, entries in Sarah's hand became more frequent: November 16, December 28, and February 7 1888.

15 Emily routinely refers to herself as "Ma" in the diary.

  Underlining words is recurrent in the journal to signal intensity and condense implicit commentaries. In her mid 40s, Emily considered herself old ("[my hands] are like a faded rose; yet tis all right" September 18, 1882) and she attributed her swollen feet and throbbing heart to "dropsy" (most likely caused by high blood pressure). Picturing her husband as a heartless persecutor, she notes that James denied her suffering from this disease: "he does not like to have any one say anything to me about dropsy or being sick, it is his way to let one sicken & die."(May 31, 1885) In the course of 1885, Emily thought that she was actually about to die and the journal's entry for June 1st takes the shape of a will. A few days later, she consulted a phrenologist 9 and got a chart of her head, the result of which she proudly noted down:Said it was the most remarkable head he ever examined. that it was almost impossible for a person to reach as high a position as I was capable of doing & also desirous to do. Why it beats all-you scarcely live in this world, but from your high knowledge & great desire for right you live, as it were, heavenly, and and (sic) when in the other world you can only find ideas of the beautiful fulfilled (& much more he said) That I could be one of the finest poets, one of the best authors & in the finest arts I could have reached the very highest. […] All is well. My children amply repay me for all I have been obliged to-well-give up.(June 8, 1885)

tired of so much work. I sometimes wonder what was designed for woman to do, seems as if there is no end. (August 8, 1884) I done all I could this afternoon. O dear how tired I do get. my heart beats so fast every little thing I do, and my head, it is bad or at least feels bad. (May 4, 1885) Am so tired but can feed the turkeys by lying down on the ground to rest. my heart beats fast; my feet swell & I am weak. (May 21 1885)

Mend three cupboard doors where mice had spoiled them; it was a hard job for me to do. am too tired to write, and feel discouraged

[…]

(October 16, 1885)

Both terms will be used interchangeably in this essay, as they are by most diary scholars. "Diary" and "journal" both "come from similar Latin roots meaning day or daily, and referring to a day's travel, or daily entry or information."(Gannett,(105)(106)

For the purpose of the present essay, the microfilm of the diary manuscript covering 1882-1888 was consulted. By the term "construction," I do not mean that Emily Gillespie lied about her suffering or invented imaginary wrongs. My suggestion is that she attempted to construct a discourse of a model invalid that served many purposes.


Rodrick Wallace
email: wallace@nyspi.columbia.edu

Canonical instabilities of autonomous weapons under fog-of-war constraints: extending the Data Rate Theorem to cognitive systems

Keywords: control theory, fratricide, information theory, laws of land warfare, Rate Distortion Theorem, spontaneous symmetry breaking

Under fog-of-war conditions, skilled human operators of complex manmachine cockpit weapon systems have repeatedly been unable to avoid fratricide incidents and violations of the laws of land warfare. In spite of these continuing catastrophic failures, autonomous weapons have been proposed that entirely remove the man from the command loop. Formal analysis, via an extension of the Data Rate Theorem, shows that fully autonomous weapons under constraints on incoming environmental information will be subject to sudden, highly punctuated collapse to a dysfunctional ground state in which 'all possible targets are enemies'.

Introduction

Autonomous real-time systems are widely proposed for both civilian and military enterprises. Since '94% of fatal traffic accidents are driver-related', the mass media argument goes, 'eliminating the driver from the loop will decrease traffic deaths by more than nine tenths'. This is eerily reminiscent of the famous beuracratic old saw that 'if a woman can produce a baby in nine months, nine women should be able to do it in a month'. In similar fashion, a rush-tojudgement argues that autonomous weapon systems can me made that adhere to the laws of land warfare, in spite of the infamous Patriot missile fratricides during the first Gulf war, and the manifold ongoing drone war catastrophies in 1 which cognitive man-machine 'cockpit' systems were unable to operate successfully under fog-of-war conditions [START_REF] Hawley | Patriot Fratricides: The human dimension lessions of Operation Iraqui Freedom, Field Artillery[END_REF][START_REF] Scharre | Living under drones:death, injury and trauma to civilians from US drone practices in Pakistan[END_REF]Columbia 2012;Stanford/NYU 2012).

Here, we will extend the Data Rate Theorem that links control and information theories [START_REF] Nair | Feedback control under data rate constraints: an overview[END_REF]) to real time cognitive systems under fog-ofwar constraints, highlighting the inevitability of their highly punctuated catastrophic failure, rather than 'graceful degradation under stress'.

The Data Rate Theorem

The Data Rate Theorem [START_REF] Nair | Feedback control under data rate constraints: an overview[END_REF]) establishes the minimum rate at which externally-supplied control information must be provided for an inherently unstable system to maintain stability. Assuming a linear expansion near a nonequilibrium steady state, an n-dimensional vector of system parameters at time t, x t , determines the state at time t + 1 according to the model of figure 1, so that

x t+1 = Ax t + Bu t + W t (1)
where A, B are fixed n × n matrices, u t is the vector of control information, and W t is an n-dimensional vector of white noise. The Data Rate Theorem (DRT) under such conditions states that the minimum control information rate H is determined by the relation

H > log[| det[A m |] (2)
where, for m ≤ n, A m is the subcomponent of A having eigenvalues ≥ 1. The right hand side of Eq.( 2) is interpreted as the rate at which the system generates 'topological information'. The proof of Eq.( 2) is not particularly straightforward [START_REF] Nair | Feedback control under data rate constraints: an overview[END_REF], and, via expansion of a simple correspondence reduction, we will use the Rate Distortion Theorem (RDT) to derive a more general version of the DRT.

3 An RDT approach to the DRT

The RDT asks how much a signal can be compressed and have average distortion, according to an appropriate measure, less than some predetermined limit D. The result is an expression for the minimum necessary channel capacity, R, as a function of D. See [START_REF] Cover | Elements of Information Theory[END_REF] for details of the proof, and the Mathematical Appendix for a statement of the theorem. Different channels have different expressions. For the Gaussian channel under the squared distortion measure,

R(D) = 1 2 log[ σ 2 D ] D < σ 2 R(D) = 0 D ≥ σ 2 (3)
Figure 1: A linear expansion near a nonequilibrium steady state of an inherently unstable control system, for which x t+1 = Ax t + Bu t + W t . A, B are square matrices, x t the vector of system parameters at time t, u t the control vector at time t, and W t a white noise vector. The Data Rate Theorem states that the minimum rate at which control information must be provided for system stability is

H > log[| det[A m |],
where A m is the subcomponent of A having eigenvalues ≥ 1. For an autonomous cognitive system, the control signal u t becomes the incoming 'target' data, in a large sense, which may be highly interactive for driverless cars and weapons closing on evasive subjects.

where σ 2 is the variance of channel noise having zero mean.

Our concern is how a control signal u t is expressed in the system response x t+1 . We suppose it possible to deterministically retranslate an observed sequence of system outputs x 1 , x 2 , x 3 , ... into a sequence of possible control signals û0 , û1 , ... and to compare that sequence with the original control sequence u 0 , u 1 , ..., with the difference between them having a particular value under the chosen distortion measure, and hence an observed average distortion.

The correspondence expansion is as follows. [START_REF] Feynman | [END_REF], expanding on ideas of Bennett, identifies information as a form of free energy. Thus R(D), the minimum channel capacity necessary for average distortion D, is also a free energy measure, and we may define an entropy S as

S ≡ R(D) -DdR/dD (4)
For a Gaussian channel under the squared distortion measure,

S = 1/2 log[σ 2 /D] + 1/2 (5)
Other channels will have different expressions.

The simplest dynamics of such a system are given by a nonequilibrium Onsager equation in the gradient of S, (de Groot and Mazur 1984) so that

dD/dt = -µdS/dD = µ 2D (6)
By inspection,

D(t) = √ µt (7)
which is the classic outcome of the diffusion equation. For the 'natural' channel having R(D) ∝ 1/D, D(t) ∝ the cube root of t. This correspondence reduction allows an expansion to more complicated systems, in particular, to the control system of figure 1.

Let H be the rate at which control information is fed into an inherently unstable control system, in the presence of a further source of control system noise β, in addition to the channel noise defined by σ 2 . The simplest generalization of Eq.( 6), for a Gaussian channel, is the stochastic differential equation

dD t = [ µ 2D t -F (H)]dt + βD t dW t (8)
where dW t represents white noise and F (H) ≥ 0 is a monotonically increasing function. This equation has the nonequilibrium steady state expectation

D nss = µ 2F (H) (9)
measuring the average distortion between what the control system wants and what it gets. In a sense, this is a kind of converse to the famous radar equation which states that a returned signal will be proportional to the inverse fourth power of the distance between the transmitter and the target. But there is an even deeper result to be found.

Applying the Ito chain rule to Eq.( 8) [START_REF] Protter | Stochastic Integration and Differential Equations[END_REF]Khashminskii 2012), it is possible to calculate the expected variance in the distortion as E(D 2 t )-(E(D t )) 2 . But application of the Ito rule to D 2 t shows that no real number solution for its expectation is possible unless the discriminant of the resulting quadratic equation is ≥ 0, so that a necessary condition for stability is

F (H) ≥ β √ µ H ≥ F -1 (β √ µ) (10)
where the second expression follows from the monotonicity of F . As a consequence of the correspondence reduction leading to Eq.( 7), we have generalized the DRT of Eq.( 2). Different 'control channels', with different forms of R(D), will give different detailed expressions for the rate of generation of 'topological information' by an inherently unstable system.

A DRT for autonomous cognitive systems

A deeper approach to the dynamics of real-time autonomous systems is via the 'cognitive paradigm' of [START_REF] Atlan | Immune information, self-organization and meaning[END_REF], who recognized that the immune response is not simply an automatic reflex, but involves active choice of a particular response from a larger repertoire of those possible to it. Such choice reduces uncertainty in a formal manner, and implies the existence of an information source. See [START_REF] Wallace | Consciousness, crosstalk, and the mereological fallacy: an evolutionary perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Wallace | An Information Approach to Mitochondrial Dysfunction[END_REF] for details.

Given an information source associated with a rapid-fire autonomous system -characterized as 'dual' to it -an equivalence class algebra can be constructed by choosing different system origin states a 0 and defining the equivalence of two subsequent states at times m, n > 0, written as a m , a n , by the existence of high-probability meaningful paths connecting them to the same origin point. Disjoint partition by equivalence class, essentially similar to orbit equivalence classes in dynamical systems, defines a symmetry groupoid associated with the cognitive process. Groupoids represent generalizations of the group concept in which there is not necessarily a product defined for each possible element pair [START_REF] Weinstein | Groupoids: unifying internal and external symmetry[END_REF]. The simplest example would be a disjoint union of groups.

The equivalence classes define a set of cognitive dual information sources available to the autonomous system, creating a large groupoid, with each orbit corresponding to a transitive groupoid whose disjoint union is the full groupoid. Each subgroupoid is associated with its own dual information source, and larger groupoids will have richer dual information sources than smaller.

Let X Gi be autonomous system's dual information source associated with the groupoid element G i , and let H be the 'control' information rate associated with incoming environmental signals, in a large sense. [START_REF] Wallace | Consciousness, crosstalk, and the mereological fallacy: an evolutionary perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Wallace | An Information Approach to Mitochondrial Dysfunction[END_REF] shows how environmental regularities -road conditions, 'target' characteristics or evasive behavior -imply the existence of an environmental information source.

We can construct a Morse Function [START_REF] Pettini | Geometry and Topology in Hamiltonian Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics[END_REF] as follows. Let H(X Gi ) ≡ H Gi be the uncertainty of the dual information source of the cognitive autonomous system. Define a Boltzmann-like pseudoprobability as

P [H Gi ] = exp[-H Gi /κH] j exp[-H Gj /κH] ( 11
)
where κ is an appropriate constant depending on the particular system and its linkages to incoming information from the embedding environment that acts here as a 'control' signal for a DRT-like analysis, and the sum is over the different possible cognitive modes of the full system. A 'free energy' Morse Function F can be defined as

exp[-F/κH] ≡ j exp[-H Gj /κH] (12)
Given the inherent groupoid structure, it is possible to apply an extension of Landau's picture of phase transition [START_REF] Pettini | Geometry and Topology in Hamiltonian Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics[END_REF]. In Landau's formulation of spontaneous symmetry breaking, phase transitions driven by temperature changes occur as alteration of system symmetry, with higher energies at higher temperatures being more symmetric. The shift between symmetries is highly punctuated in the temperature index, here the minimum necessary 'control' information rate H taken from the embedding environment. Typically, such arguments involve only a very limited number of possible phases.

Decline in H, or in the ability of that incoming information to influence the system as characterized by κ, can lead to punctuated decline in the complexity of cognitive process possible to the autonomous system, driving it, in a highly punctuated 'symmetry-breaking' manner, to a ground state collapse in which, as with the Patriot missile fratricides and drone war massacres, 'all possible targets are enemies'. Indeed, these were 'best case' scenarios where skilled human operators had ultimate control.

Fog-of-war conditions are not like playing a slow-paced game of Go.

Discussion and conclusions

The kernel of the argument is that combat is an inherently unstable dynamic relation between competing cognitive entities. For autonomous weapons, information from the embedding adversarial environment acts as a control signal, u t in the sense of figure 1, permitting a sequence of mid-course corrections enabling completion of the system's assigned function. Experience finds that high-end man-machine cockpit weapons systems repeatedly and persistently fail to avoid fratricide or violations of the laws of land warfare. The formal analysis here shows that autonomous weapons in a rapidly-changing environment -a fog-ofwar limiting the magnitude of H -will not gracefully degrade under stress, but instead will display sudden punctuated collapse onto a dysfunctional, indeed murderous, ground state unable to differentiate friend or the innocent from foe.

It has been said that 'the language of business is the language of dreams'. The assertion that autonomous weapons will avoid significant catastrophic mistargeting is a business-driven fantasy. A political leadership that embraces dreams in the conduct of war might well find itself embroiled in persistent nightmares of war crimes accusations and prosecutions.

Caveat Emptor

6 Mathematical Appendix: The RDT The distortion between paths y n and ŷn is

d(y n , ŷn ) ≡ 1 n n j=1 d(y j , ŷj ) (13)
The central characteristic of the Rate Distortion Theorem is that the basic result is independent of the exact distortion measure chosen [START_REF] Cover | Elements of Information Theory[END_REF].

Suppose that with each path y n and b n -path retranslation into the y-language, denoted ŷn , there are associated individual, joint, and conditional probability distributions p(y n ), p(ŷ n ), p(y n , ŷn ), p(y n |ŷ n ).

The average distortion is defined as

D ≡ y n p(y n )d(y n , ŷn ) (14)
It is possible to define the information transmitted from the Y to the Ŷ process using the Shannon source uncertainty of the strings:

I(Y, Ŷ ) ≡ H(Y ) -H(Y | Ŷ ) = H(Y ) + H( Ŷ ) -H(Y, Ŷ ) (15)
where H(..., ...) is the joint, and H(...|...) the conditional, Shannon uncertainties [START_REF] Cover | Elements of Information Theory[END_REF].

If there is no uncertainty in Y given the retranslation Ŷ , then no information is lost, and the systems are perfectly synchronous.

This will almost never be true. Thus the minimization is over all conditional distributions p(y|ŷ) for which the joint distribution p(y, ŷ) = p(y)p(y|ŷ) satisfies the constraint of having average distortion ≤ D.

The Rate Distortion Theorem states that R(D) is the minimum necessary rate of information transmission which ensures the communication between the interacting entities does not exceed average distortion D. Thus R(D) defines a minimum necessary channel capacity. [START_REF] Cover | Elements of Information Theory[END_REF] provide details. The rate distortion function has been calculated for a number of systems, often using Lagrange multiplier or Kuhn-Tucker optimization methods. Cover and Thomas (2006, Lemma 13.4.1) show that R(D) is necessarily a decreasing convex function of D for any reasonable definition of distortion. That is, R(D) is always a reverse J-shaped curve. This is crucial: convexity is an exceedingly powerful mathematical condition, and permits deep mathematical inference on system dynamics.

  Suppose a sequence of signals is generated by an information source Y having output y n = y 1 , y 2 , .... This is 'digitized' in terms of the observed behavior of the system with which it communicates, for example a sequence of 'observed behaviors' b n = b 1 , b 2 , .... Assume each b n is then deterministically retranslated back into a reproduction of the original signal, b n → ŷn = ŷ1 , ŷ2 , .... Define a distortion measure d(y, ŷ) comparing the original to the retranslated path. Many distortion measures are possible. For example, the Hamming distortion is defined simply as d(y, ŷ) = 1, y = ŷ, d(y, ŷ) = 0, y = ŷ. For continuous variates, the squared error distortion measure is d(y, ŷ) = (y -ŷ) 2 .

  The rate distortion function R(D) for a source Y with a distortion measure d(y, ŷ) is defined as


In such way we obtain a sort of overturned pyramid of the different goods, where the vast majority are private goods, produced by the logic of the market and defined in the language of economics by being at the same time rivals and price excludable. We would then have the classic public goods, which are non rivals and non price excludable. The state would have to be taken in charge by the state.

Lastly, according to Ostrom, we would have the common goods, defined by being essentially rivals but unlikely price excludable.

The primary limit to these theories in terms of a prescriptive political economy, both on a theoretical and empirical level, is that they consider the economic frontiers, which delimit the perimeters of the public, private and common to be determined and almost eternal. In this perspective, the common would only be considered as an 'enclave', that is to say a third minor term standing amid the dialectic between state and market, without however notching their hegemonic role in the functioning of the economy. It would simply be another failure of the market. In this context we situate the approach of the Common in the singular.

To this theoretical setting the approach of the Common the in the singular opposes three central points:

• The dynamic of the Common touches on such a vast spectrum of activities, which make it impossible to demarcate it in terms of the natural characteristics of the goods (rivalry or excludability).

  You are here: Blogs Interview with Dr. Carlo Vercellone, one of the leading theorists of cognitive capitalism and economist at the CNRS Lab of The Sorbonne Economic Centre (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, CES). In your research: "Theoretical Framework on future knowledge-based economy", you describe the concept of the Common as a new form of economic and social organisation. How can we manage collective knowledge, resources and digital infrastructures in the new economy? There is a close relationship between the first D-CENT report we wrote "Theoretical Framework on future knowledge-based economy" which is dedicated to the analysis of the knowledge economy and the second report "Managing the commons in the knowledge economy" which presents our reflections on the management of the common in relation to the development of alternative currencies. of the analysis presented in the two reports can be summarised as follows. Firstly we have developed a reading of the new capitalism based on a fundamental distinction between two levels of analysis, which are often confused in contemporary studies. More specifically, the new capitalism, which I call here "cognitive capitalism", cannot simply be identified as a variant of what, since the European Lisbon strategy, goes by the name of knowledge economy. Cognitive capitalism and knowledge-based economy are two distinct concepts that coexist and often contradict each other. The knowledge-based economy stands for a new phase of development of material, immaterial and intellectual intelligence in society. Cognitive capitalism can be defined as a new stage that follows industrial capitalism, whereby the central stake of value extraction and accumulation leads to evermore control and privatization of the collective production of knowledge and transforms it in capital of a fictitious good (in the sense of Karl Polanyi). In this context, the accumulation of capital builds upon a strengthening of the intellectual property rights and consequently drives revenue mechanisms that render artificially rare certain resources that would otherwise be abundant, such as knowledge and information. The development of the commons is comprised of three principal and strictly interrelated forms, which I believe can be identified in the concrete experiments we are developing with D-CENT: • The development of intensive knowledge communities mostly related to activities linked to the informational revolution, as with the exemplary model of the free software and the , the copyleft model nowadays extends also to the material production, for example in the case of the makers and 3D printers. • The "production of man for man" in the case of health and education, both through the development of the social and collaborative economy and through bottom-up experiments of re-appropriation of institutions of the welfare state through democratic participatory mechanisms. • The management of ecological resources which goes hand in hand with the rediscovery of a central role played by traditional forms of knowledge, which are not simple residues of the past but key elements for the development of a knowledge based society emancipated from the more predatory forms of regulation dictated by cognitive and neoliberal capitalism. In your theorization of the Common there is a reinterpretation of the political economic theories that have categorised common goods only on the basis of goods which by virtue of their nature cannot fall under the categories of public or private. What are the limits to this model and how does the Common in the singular relate to the notions of commons and common goods? The previously explained dynamics stand to show the vast and diversified spectrum of activities involved in the logic of the Common. The economic theories of public and common goods (theorised from Samuelson to Ostrom herself) establish precise technical and natural frontiers between respectively the logic of the public and that of the state, the  Menu Search Nesta private and the market and the common, according to the intrinsic characteristics of the different goods.

•

  It is only the collective cooperation and deliberation that can elect certain goods to the statute of common goods, according not to the intrinsic characteristics of these goods but to social objectives of production. In this sense the common re-introduces democracy in the choices of production. • The Common is characterised by forms of property, which are opposed to the principal of private and exclusive property. Therefore the common established the concept of inappropriability and guarantees a democratic accessibility. D-CENT is pioneering bottom-up democratic experiments in Spain, Iceland and Finland. What are some key elements of these experiments that are defining alternative models of management of the commons in a democratic way? The concept of the common, has the potential of becoming dominant. Once we have taken into account the fact that, even if the common were to become a dominant model, forms of organizations based on the private sector and the market on the one hand and on the public sector and the state on the other, would not disappear. Therefore we need to think of a way to put in place a new hierarchical articulation between the principles of common, public and private. In the sense that the principles  Menu Search Nesta of the common in their radical and participatory democratic dimension can contaminate the public and the private sphere and give rise to hybrid forms. Let me give two examples: 1. A democratization of institutions of the welfare state according to the principles of the common. Here the concept of co-production is essential in that it accepts the possibility for bureaucratic institutions of the welfare state to become the object of a democratic reappropriation, based on forms of selfmanagement, by those who would normally be considered as users. 2. The same goes for bottom-up democratic experiments in local public administration, all those forms of deliberation that extend participation in the management processes. For example in the case of the labsus network in Italy or in the borough of Chieri. The borough of Chieri has assigned to its citizens a number of rights of use and property. The D-CENT project fits perfectly well in this context by providing theoretical and practical tools to enhance processes of participatory democracy and forms inspired by the common: whether they are platforms for deliberation, alternative currencies, voluntary work that enlarge the network of participation in the management of the public administration. It is extremely rare for a project to inscribe itself in the world of the common, which in a sense prepares the ground for the seeds of the future to be planted. D-CENT not only is actively involved through its experiments in this field, but it is recognised as one of the biggest projects imagined and financed by Europe for Europe.  Menu Search Nesta

The concrete measures of D-CENT's impact are important, but what really matters is that this project is opening new spaces for concrete experimentation of a future democratic society based on the common.

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