Dostoyevski reminds us that Heine already said that the true autobiography is impossible. Even Rousseau lied in his Confessions. Dostoyevski’s mad, sick man, writing from the underground, turns lying into a method of its own. He can do this because he writes only for himself. ‘I shall never have readers’, he predicts, and this is still the case after almost 150 years have gone by after the publication of Notes from the Underground. Nobody reads Dostoyevski.
Same goes for Kafka. The Kafka Encyclopedia has nearly 400 pages and is a great scholarly work. None of the many pages show any commitment to reading Kafka which, strictly speaking, from a scholarly point of view is not required.
A scholarly remark like the following has nothing to do with actually reading Kafka or Dostoyevski:
The man who was under the floor board’s for more than 40 years, the man who sends his Notes, has the same external and low perspective on humanity as many of Kafka’s ‘heroes’. They are all looking up, whether they’re an insect, a mouse, a dog or standing at the foot of some mountain preparing for a labyrinthine journey without end. The low, external view on humanity does not signify an ontological or epistemological hierarchy. It’s a methodological point of view. It is to create a maximum amount of distance between species in order to obtain the clearest possible view on one’s own species. This is no different from Nietzsche’s strategy in Über Wahrheit und Lüge in außermoralische Sinn: look at humanity on a grand cosmological scale and very little remains. At the very least nothing of truth remains.
Kafka and Dostoyeski know they can never be read by humans. Their work is to be read by insects, mice, and dogs.
Today you took a stroll through the Red Light district for which your city is famous. It’s just a stone throw away from your office and you were bored or wanting which is almost the same thing. But not quite. Some of the girls were beautiful in their clownesque way, most were not. Dressed in flesh the windows frame their bodies, tightly turning their place of work into tiny theatres of bored eroticism. You wondered about the beautiful ones of course, but didn’t feel like entering their theatres, let alone their bodies. You returned to the office still wanting but now enjoying it.
The state of wanting is measured in degrees of boredom. Extreme boredom signals great want. To be able to keep on wanting is only possible if we continue to revel in boredom. Offices are made to store boredom. The office is not very different in this regard from the prostitute’s tiny windowed theatre. Both are temples in which we celebrate our boredom.
In Ian Banks’s book Transition a master torturer working for something similar to what we would call the State is called the Philosopher. This is quite fitting. A torturer asks questions in order to gain information. He does not expect information coming from the mind of his subjects though. The mind cannot be trusted. Instead the torturer relies on the body of his prisoner to tell him what he wants to know. The goal of the torturer therefore is to disintegrate the contents of consciousness, says Elaine Scarry, who wrote the book on torture and philosophy, meaning: the goal is to unmake the world through the infliction of pain. The result, she writes, is the transformation of the body into voice.
The first philosopher to ask questions same as our Philosopher in Banks’s book was Socrates. Our Philosopher-Torturer has only perfected the maueutic method in extrema. Instead of focussing on the labor, our philosopher focusses only on the pain. By systematically violating his subjects the Philosopher-Torturer midwifes information into the world by unmaking the world through the infliction of pain.
Similarly, philosophy has disintegrated consciousness. In the process it has unmade the world. Thought is a subjective experience while philosophy turns thought into an object of academic study. In other words: it objectifies something subjective same as the torturer objectifies subjectively experienced pain. By purposefully inflicting pain (by aiming for aporia, paradoxes etc.) what was subjectively experienced is now objectified.
Philosophy is torture.
Forget philosophy. This shouldn’t be hard. After all forgetting is what philosophy does best.
In fact, it’s ironic and certainly not coincidental that philosophers have turned forgetting into an art. Some don’t like to talk about forgetting. They rather speak about reduction. The mechanization of the world view of course is the most famous reduction. A mechanization or mechanical model (or any other model for that matter), consists of a grammar for a particular vocabulary which can consist of any kind of token (words, sentences, circles, squares, lines, arrows, symbols etc). In the act of reduction or forgetting, what is forgotten is that the mechanical model – really just a set of sentences describing that model – in other words: the explanans, does not fully coincide with its explanandum, that which is made plain. This leads to a fallacy: when something is made plain it is understood to be explained.
The tragedy of forgetting! Just like there is a hubris of total reflexivity (Ricoeur) there is a hubris of forgetting: we take excessive pride in our capacity to forget. We are so blinded by it that we forget that we are only … forgetting. This is what drives techno-science, to use the word Derrida would prefer. The best model, the best simulation makes us forget in the most efficient and adequate way. The peripeteia in this tragedy comes when you realize that there is nothing plain in the world in the first place.
But let’s return to philosophy. Why must we forget philosophy? Because philosophy has come to treat itself as a model of itself. Philosopy does not look at the world anymore (if ever?). It has contended itself with its models of the world. In this sense we can say that philosophy has become mechanized itself and in that mechanization it has reduced itself. Philosophy thinks of itself as a reduction.
To forget philosophy then means to start philosophy again namely by discarding the models, the brackets and the objects, the tropes and qualia etc. etc. In other words and ironically again, even paradoxically: philosophy starts when it forgets itself.
You don’t wear a watch. Time, you say, cannot be carried. Instead time carries us. We are dead weights on the hands of time.
Today it’s no longer true that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism for the simple fact that the end of capitalism is the end of the world. Call this the defeatist position. The capitalist mode of production is at the same time a cannabalistic mode of consumption. Marx says: no production without consumption and vice versa.
When the end approaches, due to dwindling resources for instance, less will be actually produced while consumption will exponentially grow. Not just decadently (though of course cynics will focus on that) but mostly out of necessity. We all want more.
Hence the need for debt. Debt allows us to preempt a future in which there is plenty. Consume now, produce later.
Our confidence in the future is so great that we’ve created debts that can never be repaid. In this sense debt is a prayer without end. The end will come when all debts (economical, ecological, religious and philosophical) demand settlement.
This is the moment the defeatist waits for. The defeatist consumes without hesitation.
Das Allerbeste is für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht zu sein, nichts zu sein. Thus Silenus, that wise and old satyr unveiled a most terrible secret namely that to be is to not to be at all, to be nothing in fact. Yes, we are all born, some say: thrown into the world. But it’s a birth to horror, a birth into total inadequacy which we can only meet with a violent display of blissful and banal narcissism.
We start out by wanting everything at the same time at the very moment we want it: hic et nunc, hier und jetzt, here and now. Why? Because only by demanding it all at once can we overcome the helplessness of our situation, the desperation of our deficiencies. We are indeed a Mängelwesen. The overwhelming sense of deficiency is thinly glossed over by the equally overwhelming sense of godlike power. Every child born into the world is a Stalin first.
Silenus’s best advise – to not be born in the first place – is not an advise we can easily follow. Like almost everything else in life birth is not a choice. It’s a given. Tragically so. In The Birth of Tragedy the story Nietzsche tells us of Silenus is at the same time the story of The Tragedy of Birth.
What’s the point of it all? You read the so-called classics, then the lesser known ones. You ride one hyped author after another. You write the papers, perhaps discuss some thoughts with friends. You learn to rehash arguments not your own, you learn to critique reasons not your own.
They give you a degree because you’ve shown you know how to rehash reasons properly, meaning clearly, unambiguously. You’ve become a master of the creation of photorealistic copies of thoughts unthought by yourself. These thoughts seem more real than your own. It’s easy to confuse the two. It’s hard to distinguish between the two.
It’s true that you cannot reconstruct an argument, however simple or intricate, that you do not fully understand. It’s also true that understanding is not the same as thinking. Or at least not a thinking in which you are the prime mover of a thought.
Maybe one day you try to find your own reasons and are dismayed you can’t find any. You know this is called nihilism and that you are a nihilist. You don’t care.
Some of the lucky ones do find reasons of course, or so they think, and are able to give them important-sounding names like materialism, emergentism, consequentalism. The really luck ones find something they can call existentialism. But not you. No, you go through all of these and none of them brings back home anything for the simple reason there is no home to return to.
Is it possible for a thought to be homeless?
1x1m (an older work, again distance and measurements prevail)
In the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) there’s an exposition of a work by Stanley Brouwn titled 1M=10DM=100CM=1000MM. The question it raises is related to standardization and the lived experience of that. The title card of the works just says 1M=10DM=100CM=1000MM. If you look around you don’t actually see anything. Or to be more precise the title card is hung at the entrance of one of the newly renovated exhibition spaces of the Stedelijk. Once you pass the entrance there’s just an empty room.
It’s fair to say then (as Rudi Fuchs does in De Groene Amsterdammer) that the room titled by that small white card reading 1M=etc. is the work of Brouwn. But contrary to Fuchs I don’t think it’s just empty so that the visitor can fill it with her own fantasies. I take the opposite position: this is an interpassive work of art stripped to its bare minimal characteristics. As such it does not require any fantasy or need to be filled in. It in fact requires nothing at all. It is literally art for art (and not art for art’s sake which is something else entirely).
An interpassive work of art first of all does not require visitor interaction or participation. It preempts any such interactions; every possible action is done for us already. Secondly: in order for something to preempt us it needs to be defined beforehand. Whatever it is, in order to be anticipated it requires a format, a standardized form of representation, which can be recognized afterwards or indeed, and in this I follow Fuchs: a definition. By titling the work 1M=10DM=100CM=1000MM, Brouwn denominates the bare essentials of measurement; in this case of space and distance.
What happens in Brouwn’s work? absolutely nothing. And I mean that in the most literal sense; it’s not a qualification. It is absolute in the sense that 1 meter is indeed 10 decimeter etc which is saying something tautological. And it is absolute in the sense that the room is indeed very, very empty.
The room you enter is defined by measurement: space is defined in terms of distances. Without the title card reading as it does, the room is just an empty room, indeed waiting to be filled, used etc. Brouwn turns the room into art by simply but subtlety focussing it on the absolute minimal requirements for us to geometrically understand space, without us having to bodily move or experience that space: by pointing out the units of measurement, or more precisely by showing us the self-referential units of the measurement of distance. Measurements staring at each other like the walls of the room staring at each other.
(There’s a bit of background on Brouwn over at Frieze: here)
