Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Three)

Cover of the Portuguese edition 

(Relógio D'Água, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

The ethics of inactivity rests, according to Byung-Chul Han, on timidity. For it is timidity which increases our attentiveness (our ability to listen) to others and to the world. 

 

I'm not sure about this, however, and wonder if the German word Scheu might better have been translated as shy. For shyness, it seems to me, is not quite the same as timidity; it lacks the nervousness or fearful aspect of the latter and is more about instinctive reserve [b].

 

But maybe I'm mistaken: I'll leave it to any passing etymologists to decide the matter ...  

 

 

II.

 

"The root of the current crisis is the disintegration of everything that gives life meaning and orientation. Life is no longer borne by anything that supports it, and that we can support." [48]

 

In other words - words first uttered by a madman 150 years ago - God is dead. One might have hoped that we'd moved on from here and realised that nihilism needn't be dressed in the gloomy dark colours of the late 19th-century. Personally, the last thing I want to do is give life meaning and point it in the right direction. 

 

Nor am I interested in ideas of immortality and the imperishable - when Han uses these words I think of D. H. Lawrence mocking those who desire to witness the unfading flowers of heaven [c]. 

 

I'm sorry, but I like the impermanence of things and the fact that all things pass. What Han calls temporal structures - annual rituals and festivals - may provide the passage of time with a certain architecture or narrative, but they don't, thankfully, make time stand still. I'm all for preserving the rhythym of life and allowing being to linger, but that doesn't mean stopping the clocks.    

 

Nor do I want incontrovertible truths - even if they are said to make happy (there's more to life than happiness and there's also more than one type of happiness). And I'm sick of being weighed down by powerful symbols. 

 

The latter may very well influence our behaviour and thinking "at the pre-reflexive, emotional, aesthetic level" [50] - and symbols may be excellent at creating the shared experience that enables the formation of a socially cohesive community - but that doesn't always result in compassion, does it? Just ask those who lived under the swastika, or hammer and sickle.      

 

"A community is a symbolically mediated totality." [51] That's Han. But it could be Heidegger. Or might be Hitler. And if my failure to long for a "wholesome, healing totality" [51] makes me a splinter or fragment lacking in being, that's fine. Liberal society has many downsides - it isolates the individual and forces them to compete - but living in some kind of people's community that promises fullness of being and salvation is not something I desire.  

 

Although, having said that, I do understand the attraction of what Lawrence terms a democracy of touch [d] and I suspect that's the sort of community Han is thinking of when he talks about creating ties between people invested with libidinal energy (though I'm not sure that Eros is the answer to everything).  

 

 

III.

 

Having got roughly half way into (and thus also half way out of) Han's book, let us remind ourselves of his central argument: "the highest happiness is owed to contemplation" [53] - not action. It's an argument we can trace all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. 

 

Ultimately, we act in the world so that we might one day be afforded the time to sit and wonder at the world. Being free to gaze in silence and stillness is the reward for all our efforts. If, as Heidegger says, Denken ist Danken, then to gaze in awe with eyes opened by love is also to express gratitude - and, more, to give praise:   

 

"The ultimate purpose of language is praise. Praise gives language a festive radiance. Praise restores being; it sings about and invokes the fullness of being." [55]  

 

To which we can only add: Hallelujah! - and quickly turn the page ...

 

What Han basically wants is to have at least one day of holy inactivity per week: to reinstate the idea of the Sabbath in which time is suspended and man is released "from the transient world into the world to come" [60]. 

 

I've no objection to that (even if I remember keenly the boredom I felt as a child each and every Sunday). But I do tire of his religious language (as I do when listening to Jordan Peterson, for example).

 

 

IV.

 

Han spends a good deal of time in the chapter entitled 'The Pathos of Action' critiquing Hannah Arendt's political thinking. But that wasn't what interested me. Rather, it was the material on Socrates and his daimon that caught my attention ...

 

It seems that the latter does not encourage Socrates to speak, rather it prevents him from acting, as he makes clear in this passage from the Apology:

   

"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people's affairs [...] but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this [...] is that something divine and spiritual comes to me [...] a sort of voice [...] and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward." [e]

 

This strikes a chord with me because I also have a daimon of non-commitment holding me back in this manner; one who persuades me to turn away from every door that is opened and decline to accept any opportunity offered. People think it's perversity on my part - or a lack of self-confidence combined with a lack of ambition - but it's not; it's this mysterious demon which Han terms the genius of inactivity.  

 

According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben - quoted here by Han - this demon is both what is closest to us and what is most impersonal about us; that which is beyond ego and individual consciousness; that which shatters the conceit that we are fully in control and free-willing; that which "'prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity'" [79][f].  

 

Han follows this up with the following fascinating passage:

 

"The properties that make us someone are not genialis; that is, they do not accord with the genius. We meet with the genius when we cast off our properties, the mask we wear on the acting stage. The genius reveals the propertyless face that lies behind the mask." [79]

 

This countenance without properties is what we might also call the faceless face; or perhaps even (borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari) the probe-head [g]. To be inspired, says Han, is to lose face and cease being someone "encapsulated in an ego" [79]; i.e., to be enthused is to become self-detached. 

 

However, as Larry David teaches, it's vital to curb enthusiasm. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, caution is the golden rule when dismantling the face and/or building a body without organs; "you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality" [h].

 

This, arguably, is the most important - and most often overlooked - point in A Thousand Plateaus.  

 

V.

 

The crisis of religion, says Han, is a crisis of attention: "It is the soul's hyperactivity that accounts for the demise of religious experience" [86-87] - and, indeed, the destruction of the natural world. 

 

I don't agree with Han that a Romantic [i] and religious understanding of the world is necessary, but it might help to just slow down a bit and appreciate not just one another, not just birds, beasts and flowers, but even inanimate objects (each one of which vibrates and radiates at the centre of its own paradise). 

 

This doesn't mean uniting with the infinity of nature, it means rather living cheerfully in the material realm on a flat ontological surface, or what Lawrence calls (after Whitman) the Open Road. The goal is not a community of the living, but a democracy of objects wherein all things can interact in a vaguely friendly manner but outside of any transcendent system of meaning.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the Portuguese edition - featuring some of Cézanne's nude bathers - please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.

 

[b] I have written in praise of shyness in a post published on 27 May 2014: click here.

 

[c] Referring to the kingdom of heaven established after the material universe is destroyed, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their new Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness. How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!" 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.

 

[d] See Stephen Alexander, 'Towards a Democracy of Touch', chapter 13 of Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 262-275, wherein I examine and develop Lawrence's idea introduced in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). There are also several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that discuss the idea: click here for example.

 

[e] Plato Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, (The Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 115. Han quotes this section (31 c-d) from a different edition; Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).

 

[f] Han is quoting Giorgio Agamben writing in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (Zone Books, 2007), p. 12. 

 

[g] According to Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the face "lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of probe-heads [...]"

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 190.

 

[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160.

 

[i] Han seems to see himself as a disciple of Novalis, the 18th-century German poet, novelist, philosopher, and mystic. He certainly subscribes to a similar model of Romanticism, writing, for example, that the Romantic idea of freedom is a corrective to our liberal-bourgeois notion of individual freedom, just as the Romantic conception of nature "provides an effective corrective to our instrumental understanding of nature" [92]. 

      He also argues that to Romanticise the world is to give it back "its magic, its mystery, even its dignity" [94] and that it is a mistake to describe "the Romantic longing for a connection with the whole" [96] as reactionary or regressive. It is, rather, a fundamental human longing. Obviously, I don't share Han's Romantic idealism or fervour and don't think I want to live in a promiscuous future world in which things don't only touch but permeate each other and there are no boundaries.     

 

 

To read part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Two)

Cover of the original German edition

(Ullstein Verlag, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

 

One of the key paragraphs in the opening chapter of Vita Contemplativa is this one:

 

"The dialectic of inactivity transforms inactivity into a threshold, a zone of indeterminacy that enables us to create something that was not there before. Without this threshold, the same keeps repeating itself." [17]  

 

In other words, the threshold of inactivity engineers difference and produces the new. For example, only silence enables us to say something previously unspoken and unheard of [b]. Madonna's insistence that we all express ourselves may be accompanied by a funky upbeat dance track, but the message is inherently fascist, ensuring conformity and sameness [c]. 

 

Jamie Reid was right: pop music keeps young people under control [d] and pop stars like Madonna are merely the "sexual organs of capital, the means of its procreation" [20].

 

Or, as Byung-Chul Han writes: "The compulsion to be active [...] turns out to be an efficient means of rule. If revolution is inconceivable today, that may be because we do not have time to think." [18] 

 

Perhaps if young people listened to less music and read more poetry, they'd be able to liberate "the immanence of life from the transcendence that alienates life from itself" [21]. Whether this results in bliss is debatable, but, who knows, it might at least rescue them from the abyss of the virtual and the hell of the same.  

  

II.

 

I have written several posts on Torpedo the Ark that refer to Cézanne's work - click here and/or here, for example - but I've never come across the notion that his canvases construct a landscape of inactivity in which things are wedded to one another until now.  

 

It's a nice idea. Or, at any rate, I like the idea of things falling in love and entering into "frank relations with one another" [24]; of tables and trees and bowls of fruit all interacting in a friendly manner whilst shining in their own singularity; "liberated from human intentions and actions" [24]. 

 

Cézanne's landscape of inactivity: "cuts ties with humanized nature, and restores an order of things that is not anthropomorphic, in which things can be themselves again" [24-25]. His apples, for example, are not merely fit for consumption, as D. H. Lawrence recognised [e]. 

 

This is at the heart of Cézanne's greatness; the fact that he allowed objects to "have their own dignity, their own radiance" [25] and didn't put himself into every picture. Indeed, he knew that a painting only succeeds when the artist makes himself absent.

 

 

III.   

 

Because he essentially comes out of the German Romantic tradition, it's no surprise to see that Han loves nature and posits the "reconciliation between humans and nature" as the "final purpose of a politics of inactivity" [26].   

 

He coninues: 

 

"The Anthropocene is the result of the total submission of nature to human action. Nature loses all independence and dignity. It is reduced to a part of, an appendix to, human history. The lawfulness of nature is subjected to human wilfulness and to the unpredictability of human action." [31] 

 

What can be done? 

 

Heidegger famously concluded that only a god can save us [f]. But for Han what is needed is an angel of inactivity to "arrest the human action that inevitably becomes apocalyptic" [33]. It's reflection that will lead us back from the edge of catastrophe and to that dwelling place where we have our being (on the earth and beneath the sky).  

 

Reflection - and learning to wait: "'Waiting is a capacity that transcends all power to act. One who finds his way into the ability to wait surpasses all achieving and its accomplishments'" [35][g] - which, arguably, is simply a Heideggerian version of the English proverb: Good things come to those who wait.

 

Han seems perfectly okay with this delving into folk wisdom, but I have to admit it troubles me; what next - should we write in praise of common sense and popular opinion ...? I do like reading Heidegger. And I do like reading Byung-Chul Han. But you have to be in a certain mood to do so ...

 

 

IV.

 

Funny enough, Han speaks about mood in Vita Contemplativa ... Being-in-a-mood, he says, precedes the being of consciousness and allows being-there to find expression. But mood is not something of our choosing or at our disposal: "It takes hold of us [...] we are thrown into it" [36].

 

And that's a good thing, as it reveals that our being-in-the-world is determined less by activity than by primordial ontological passivity. Actions are never thus "entirely free or spontaneous" [36]. And even thinking, says Han (following Heidegger), is grounded in mood. 

 

Thus, AI doesn't really think because it isn't capable of extracting thoughts out of mood: "Contemplative inactivity [...] is alien to the machine" [37], even when you switch it off. For the machine, to think is simply to produce data - it's certainly not about expressing gratitude.  

 

 

V.  

 

To return to the question of how to save the natural world, clearly we need a radically transformed relationship with the latter and this requires thinking through. That doesn't mean not doing anything, but it does mean questioning the will to activity that has brought us to where we are today:

 

"There can be no doubt that the determination to act is necessary in order to rectify the catastrophic consequences of human intervention in nature. But if the cause of the impending disaster is the view that what is absolutely fundamental is human action - action that has ruthlessly appropriated ad exploited nature - then we require a corrective to human action itself. We must therefore increase the proportion of action that is contemplative, that is, ensure that action is enriched by reflection." [ 40-41]   

 

It also means learning to breathe again ... for the compulsion "to be active, to produce and to perform. leads to breathlessness" [41]. That's certainly true. I've been slowly suffocating for the last eight years and very much hope that taking time to reflect a bit more carefully will, in future, allow me to finally catch my breath ...

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the original German edition, please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.  

[b] This is an idea found in the work of Deleuze, which Han acknowledges by quoting the following passage: 

      "So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." 

      See Gilles Deleuze, 'Mediators', in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 129. 

[c] I have written about this song by Madonna and the socially corrosive effects of insistent self-expression in a post dated 6 August 2023: click here.

[d] The artist Jamie Reid is best known for his work with the Sex Pistols. His Stratoswasticaster design was intended to alert people to the oppressive nature of the music industry. Click here to view on artnet.

[e] See Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182- 217. 

      For Lawrence: "Cézanne's apples are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate entity, without transfusing it with personal emotion [...] It seems a small thing to do: yet it is the first real sign that man has made for thousands of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists." [201]

[f] This phrase - which, in the original German reads Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten - comes from an interview given by Martin Heidegger to Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for Der Spiegel magazine in September 1966, but not published until after his death in May 1976. 

      The interview touched on many aspects of Heidegger's thinking, including the relationship between philosophy, politics, and culture. It was translated into English by William J. Richardson and published in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. 

 

[g] Han is quoting Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, (Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 147. Heidegger goes on to say: "In waiting, the human-being becomes gathered in attentiveness to that in which he belongs." Something I try to remind myself of when at the bus stop. 

 

 

Part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part three of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be read by clicking here.

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part One)

(Polity Press, 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

The subtitle of Byung-Chul Han's new little book is In Praise of Inactivity [a]. But it's important to understand at the outset that he uses this term in a positive philosophical sense. That is to say, he conceives of inactivity as a negative potentiality; the ability to do nothing.

 

But Han is not merely encouraging us to be idle in the laid-back and whimsical manner of Tom Hodgkinson - although, to be fair to the latter, I feel I was perhaps a little harsh on him back in 2012 [b]. Nor is he encouraging his readers to learn the art of immaculate perception so they can look at life without desire [c].     

 

He wants us, rather, to engage in a form of deep attentiveness that is central to the vita contemplativa [d]. To perform less: to consume less: to be still and silent a little more, so as to radiate in our own starry singularity and not merely keep rolling on and on like a stone subject to mechanical laws.    

 

 

II. 

 

In a line that would delight the witches of Treadwell's, Han writes: "Inactivity has a logic of its own, its own language, temporality, architecture, magnificence - even its own magic." [1] 

 

Inactivity, he goes on to say, is an intensity - an unseen power that is crucial to Dasein's existence (not a weakness, an absence, a lack, or a defect). And philosophical reflection - or thought in the Lawrentian sense of the term [e] - is born of this intensity. 

 

Only machines don't know how to rest or reflect; artificial intelligence is born of activity, not inactivity. They - the machines - may be very good at organising and coordinating chaos, but they don't know how to give style, which is why they may drive society forward, but they'll never give birth to culture:

 

"History and culture are not congruent. Culture is formed by diversion, excess and detour; it is not produced by following the path that leads straight to the goal. The essence at the core of culture is ornamentation. Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival. Life receives its divine radiance from that absolute decoration that does not adorn anything." [3]   

 

 

III.

 

Han is basically reviving an old set of terms and values, such as festivity and luxury, whilst rejecting those terms and values that define our present (utilitarian) world order: efficiency and functionality. Freedom from purpose and usefulness, he says, is "the essential core of inactivity" [5] and the key to human happiness. 

 

Which is fine - this remains an important teaching - but it's nothing new. And one can't help wondering if Han doesn't spend far more of his time endlessly re-reading those authors whom he privileges rather than contemplating life (and the natural world) directly. 

 

For whilst there are plenty of DWEMs in his book, there are very few live animals; even the hesitant wing of the butterfly is a reference to an elegy by Schiller (via Walter Benjamin) rather than to an actual insect and I miss the sound of bees buzzing and birds calling in his writing. 

 

Unfortunately, when you enter the space of thinking opened up by Han, it feels like one is entering a magnificent library or a cathedral rather than an "unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge" [f], or a jungle with "tigers and palm trees and rattle snakes" [g] and all the other wonders hatched by a hot sun. 

 

I think it was Sartre who once said of Bataille: 'He tells us to laugh, but he does not make us laugh.' And I kind of feel the same about Han: he tells us to dance and to play, but he fails to make us feel either lightfooted or lighthearted. Likewise, when he gathers us round the camp fire - a medium of inactivity - we are not warmed.   

 

 

IV.

 

I suppose the problem I have is that Han is just a bit too much of an ascetic philosopher. 

 

Thus, whilst he wants to revive the notion of the festival, he insists nevertheless that festivals must be "free from the needs of mere life" [7] and tries to convince us that it's better to fast than to feast; that the former is noble in character and helps initiate us into the secrets of food.  

 

What is inactivity, he suggests, other than ultimately a form of spiritual fasting. 

 

I have to admit, I don't like this idea of going to bed hungry and going to bed early; nor, for that matter, do I want to go to bed cold, as I've done that too often in the past and it doesn't make life any more vital or radiant. 

 

Nor does it make it easier to sleep - the latter being  a medium of truth for Han (as for Proust and Freud): "Sleep reveals a true internal world that lies behind the things of the external world, which are mere semblance. The dreamer delves into the deeper layers of being." [9] [h]

 

Again, that's not the kind of idea - or language - that I'm comfortable with. I simply do not believe that sleep and dreams are "privileged places for truth" [9] - even though I love a good nap as much as anyone.    

 

However, I'm a bit more sympathetic to the idea that boredom - as that state of inactivity which allows for mental relaxation - is something we should cherish (even whilst coming from a punk background in which being bored was just about the worst thing that could befall one). 

 

I understand now that boredom isn't half as boring as the distractions invented to relieve us from boredom and that the less able we are to endure boredom, so our ability to enjoy life's real pleasures or do great things decreases. As Han says: 

 

"The seed of the new is not the determination to act but the unconscious event. When we lose the capacity to experience boredom, we also lose access to the activities that rest on it." [17]

 

And so it is that now I admire those who, like David Puddy, can just patiently sit still during a flight without having to flick through a magazine, watch a film, or start a conversation [i].    

 

 

V. 

 

Blanchot, Han reminds us, places inactivity in close relation to death: as the utmost intensification of the latter. 

 

And so too does he suggest that art also requires an "intensive relation to death" [12]. It is death, for example - not the will to knowledge or self-expression - that opens up the space of literature and writers can only write thanks to their inactivity and their proximity to death.

 

And the best writers, as Roland Barthes recognised, are those who dare to be idle and do not continually affirm their authorship of a text, or constantly promote themselves: "They give up their names and become no one. Nameless and intentionless, they succumb to what happens." [15] 

 

In an interview for Le Monde in 1979, Barthes marvelled at the simplicity of a Zen poem which perfectly expresses what it is he dreams about:

 

Sitting peacefully doing nothing

Springtime is coming

and the grass grows all by itself [j]   

 

It's a nice thought that inactivity has a "de-subjectifying, de-individualizing, even disarming effect" [15]. That, in other words, it allows us to disappear and leave nothing behind us but a smile like the Cheshire Cat ...

 

 

John Tenniel's illustration of the Cheshire Cat beginning to 

vanish in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865)

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2024). The book was originally published as Vita Contemplativa: Oder von der Untatigkeit (Ullstein Verlag, 2022). All page numbers given in the post refer to the English edition. 

 

[b] See the post entitled 'How to be an Idle Cunt' (29 Dec 2012): click here. 

 

[c] See the post entitled 'The Voyeur' (29 April 2013): click here. 

 

[d] This Latin phrase - popular with Augustine and the scholastics - comes from the ancient Greek concept of βίος θεωρητικός formulated by Aristotle and later developed by the Stoics. In English it is usually translated simply as contemplative life.   

 

[e] "Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness [...] a man in his wholeness wholly attending" and not the "jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas". See D. H. Lawrence, 'Thought', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 580-81. 

      I discuss Lawrence's philosophy of mind with reference to this poem in a post published on 4 Dec 2015: click here.  

 

[f] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 53.

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 165.  

 

[h] Click here for a post on sleep and dreams published on 6 Feb 2015. 

 

[i] David Puddy is a fictional character on the situation comedy Seinfeld, played by Patrick Warburton. He is the on-and-off boyfriend of the character Elaine Benes. Click here to watch the scene I'm thinking of in the season 9 episode 'The Butter Shave' (dir. Andy Ackerman, 1997).  

 

[j] See Roland Barthes, 'Dare to Be Lazy', in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), p. 341. Han quotes this haiku on p. 15 of Vita Contemplativa.  

 

 

Further reflections on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be found in part two of this post - click here and part three: click here.   

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 4: The Stain of Place

Laura Oldfield Ford Ferrier Estate (2010)

 

 

I.

 

Many years before Laura Oldfield Ford published her Savage Messiah [a], the Specials had already famously declared that London - like many other cities across the UK - was coming like a ghost town [b]. And I'm surprised, as a matter of fact, that Mark Fisher didn't mention this in his introduction to Ford's work. 

 

But then, having said that, I suppose it could be argued that whereas the Specials were bemoaning the state of the country - the poverty, unemployment, crime, and shut-up shops they witnessed in city after city as they toured the UK - Ford was more concerned by the loss of character and the displacement of long-time residents as working-class areas were redeveloped. 

 

In a nutshell: the Specials hated to see neighbourhoods run down and Ford hated to see them done up. Who really has the best interests of the poor and dispossessed at heart is debatable. But, according to Fisher, it is Ford who is a kind of medium through whom ghostly voices speak:

 

"The [...] voices she speaks in - and which speak through her - are those of the officially defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of its finance-friendly SimCity." [184] [c] 

 

If these are the people that Ford and Fisher choose to romanticise on the one hand, on the other are those they deem the enemy: young professionals who sit outside Starbucks sipping coffee and "'gently conversing in sympathetic tones'" [185]; those who advocate neoliberal modernisation, which, in practice makes London "safe for the super-rich" [185]. 

 

At the risk of being accused of being a middle-class wanker or a class-traitor, I have to say that this reading of things in such stark terms strikes me as a little simplistic. I don't particularly like the way in which East London is being gentrified, but don't really see the aesthetic appeal of abandoned factories and slums. 

 

Nor, as a matter of fact, do I very much care for brutalist architecture and "'a virulent black ecomomy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters'" [185] - i.e., the kind of people who "could not be regenerated, even if they wanted to be" [189].

 

 

II. 

 

Ford studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and did her Masters at the Royal College of Art. For her graduation show at the latter in 2007, she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel against a scene of urban chaos and one wonders if she regrets the passing of old London primarily because it deprives her of an aesthetic backdrop.

I suspect she's precisely the kind of bourgeois anarchist that Rotten railed against; friends with and celebrated by all the usual suspects, including Fisher, who, like Ford, also fantasises (in a quasi-erotic manner) about a punk London full of "spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted" [186] in which one could drift and daydream; "a labyrinth of side streets and spaces resistant to the process of gentrification" [187].  

And she is precisely the kind of figure whom Jarvis Cocker so brilliantly skewers as a class tourist i.e., one who wants to live like common people and do whatever common people do; one who thinks that poor is cool, but who will never fail like common people or understand how it feels to live a life with no meaning or control [d].

 

For when not drifting round city streets mapping the psychic contours of the city or taking part in a protest - for she's an activist as well as an artist - the author of Savage Messiah is arranging her latest exhibition at a posh gallery or lecturing across the UK and internationally on issues surrounding urbanism, architecture, and memory. 

 

Her life, in other words, is full of meaning and purpose and she's very much in complete control of her own professional destiny (even if she tells us her existence is precarious).  

 

III.

Ironically, if you take Fisher's word for it, then Savage Messiah was written precisely for someone like me; "born too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary afterglow" [189]. 

 

But, for much the same reason I hated Crass [e], Ford's work is really not my cup of tea ... 

 

Certainly not in its radical politics, although I am rather drawn to the hauntological aspects; to the fact that it is imbued with a sense of mourning and that it stains London "with particularly intense moments of time" [191] [f].   

 

At it's best - when it "invites us to see the contours of another world in the gaps and cracks" [192] of an urban landscape - then Savage Messiah is inspiring. 

 

But, at its worst - when Ford keeps banging on about the need to forge collective resistance to the occupying powers of neoliberalism and suggests that the truth is to be found "'in the burnt out shopping arcades [and] the boarded up precincts'" [192] - then Savage Messiah bores us to tears.   

 

 

IV.

 

In a k-punk post date 4 March 2006, Fisher tries to foist another neologism on us: nomadalgia ... i.e., the sense of unease induced by anonymous environments that are more or less the same the world over. These spaces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness.

 

In other words, nomadalgia is a form of travel sickness born of what Byung-Chul Han terms hyperculture [g].

The problem is, nomadalgia is such a clumsy-sounding term and I really can't imagine anyone ever using it other, perhaps, than hardcore members of the Fisherati [h]. 

V.

We've almost reached the end of Fisher's book. 

 

In fact, I've nothing to say about Chris Petit's Content (2010); or Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) (2011); or Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010); or John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986); or Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins (2010) ... 

 

I've not seen any of these films and, if I'm being completely honest, I don't particularly want to (although the inhuman eco-alien perspective of the latter sounds interesting and, if forced to watch one of the above films I'd choose Keiller's, as I'm all for a little biophilia and a "dark Deleuzean communion with Nature" [228]). 

 

Also, I'm getting a little tired of Fisher's lazy and predictable ideological take on everything: capitalism is evil and therefore anything which frustrates it - strikes, riots, financial crises - have to be for the good. In an Afterword, Simon Reynold's acknowledges that Fisher had allowed his political thinking to settle into "a compassionate and anguished Leftism" [246] - i.e. all too humanist for my tastes.

 

Thus, there are surely questions about hauntology's durability as an aesthetic and philosophy - as there are about the political importance of Fisher's (unfinished) book on Acid Communism, intended as a joyful - even vital - alternative to capitalist realism (i.e., a sort of fantasy philosophy inspired by hippie ideals of community and caring for one another). 

"We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he'd lived to pursue its ideas" [249], says Reynolds. 

 

But, unfortunately, I think we can. For "confronted by a world  run amok with the competing delusions and [...] fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition" [250-51], Fisher might have returned to an old idea of truth to provide him with a foundation; who knows, he may even have ended up at the foot of the Cross! [i].

Notes

[a] Laura Oldfield Ford (aka Laura Grace Ford) is a British artist and author (born in the magical year of 1973). Her work explores political themes in the context of British urban spaces. Her zine Savage Messiah (2005-09) examined the changing character of London during this period. It was later published in book form (Verso, 2011), with an introduction by Mark Fisher.

 

[b] The number one single 'Ghost Town' by the Specials was released in June 1981. To me, evoking as it did themes of urban decay and inner-city violence, it was the last great punk single. 

     Although the Specials were from Coventry and residents of the latter assumed that the group were referring to their home town - angrily rejecting the song's characterisation of the city as being in a state of terminal decline - the video for the song, directed by Barney Bubbles, was actually shot in East London and ends with the band standing on the banks of the River Thames at low tide: click here to play on YouTube.   

[c] Mark Fisher, '"Always Yearning for the Time that Just Eluded Us" - Introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011)', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (ZeroBooks, 2022), p. 184. 

      Future page references to this edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Jarvis Cocker is the lead vocalist and lyricist with the Britpop band Pulp. Their hit single 'Common People' was released from the album Different Class (Island Records) in May 1995. The song is a critique of those who ascribe authenticity to working-class culture (and I'm pretty sure Mark Fisher would also disdain such an idea - but may be wrong about that). 

      Click here to play on YouTube and watch the video directed by Pedro Romhanyi, featuring the actress Sadie Frost as the unnamed art student from Greece with "a thirst for knowledge" and a desire to experience real life. And click here to read a post dated 2 October 2018 in which I discuss 'Common People' (and it's brilliant interpretation by William Shatner).   

[e] Crass were an English art collective and punk band from Essex. Formed in 1977, they promoted anarchism as a political ideology, an aesthetic, and an alternative way of life. Dressed in black military-surplus style clothing, they were, for me, the anithesis of the Sex Pistols.

      Mark Fisher in his introduction to Savage Messiah notes how Ford's work is reminiscent of Gee Vaucher's work for Crass. 

 

[f] Fisher returns to this idea of staining in a later piece included in Ghosts of My Life on Mark Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) (2011). He writes of how Thomas Hardy stained the landscape of Wessex with his passions - just as the Brontë sisters stained Yorkshire. I can't help wishing Fisher had said rather more about this intriguing idea, one that reminds me of something D. H. Lawrence writes about the way in which the living souls of men and women subtly impregnate their material environment; see his essay on Edgar Allan Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). 

 

[g] See the post dated 30 Jan 2022 entitled 'Travels in Hyperculture with Byung-Chul Han', click here.

[h] Another neologism - this time coined by Fisher's pal and comrade-in-arms, Simon Reynolds; see 'Spectres of Mark: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Fisherati', Afterword to Ghosts of My Life ... pp. 233-252.

[i] Obviously, I'm just speculating here about Fisher's direction of travel. Although, in 2013, he did admit that, like many other thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx, he sometimes struggled with his atheism, saying: "It's all very well professing a lack of belief in God, but it's much harder to give up the habits of thought which assume providence, divine justice and a secure distinction between good and evil." It can be difficult to recall that such moral ideas "are not written into the universe, but exist only in ourselves, in relation to our desires and interests".  

      See Mark Fisher, 'Beyond good and evil: Breaking Bad' in the New Humanist magazine (18 Dec. 2013): click here to read online. 

 

Bonus: click here to enjoy a ten minute drift with Laura Oldfield Ford ... Part of the exhibition entitled There is a place, at the New Art Gallery Walsall (Jan- April 2012).

Nostalgie für das Ding

Dorothee Richter and Kim Novak as Gillian Holroyd in

Bell, Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine, 1958)

 

 

According to Dorothee Richter, who - among other things - is a professor in contemporary curating at the University of Reading, nostalgia for the thing is always reactionary and, as such, makes her feel uncomfortable and unhappy [1]. 

Which is a shame. 

 

However, at the risk of adding to her discomfort and distress, I'm afraid that my fascination with das Ding - whether in the prose poems of Francis Ponge [2], the philosophical reflections of Martin Heidegger [3], or the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan [4] - grows stronger by the year. 

 

Richter can't quite understand why there are thinkers - like Vilém Flusser [5] and Byung-Chul Han [6] - for whom the thing is still an alluring object, albeit one that is rapidly vanishing in this virtual age of Undinge: 

 

"Have we not been here before, and have we not, with good reason, rejected the auratic view of things? [...] Why is there this cyclically recurring nostalgia for the thing in its pure aspect?" [7], she asks.

 

And, yes, I suppose we have been here before. And perhaps there are good reasons to be suspicious of those who become too taken with the idea that things, including artworks and human beings, have a magical quality or essence. 

 

But, having said that, who wants to live in an entirely disenchanted world where everything has been dissolved and digitalised into quantifiable data to be processed by artificial intelligence? 

 

I don't. And, if I'm honest, it shocks me that anyone would.

 

When push comes to shove, I stand with the young witch I met recently at Treadwell's [8], who told me that when non-things beckon her to enter a virtual hell, she relies on the saving power of bell, book, and candle to summon her back to reality.           

 

Notes

 

[1] Dorothee Richter, '(Non-)Things or Why Nostalgia for the Thing is Always Reactionary', OnCurating,  Issue 45: click here. 

      This is a slightly modified version of an essay, trans. Judith Rosenthal, that was originally published under the title '(Un)Dinge, oder warum die Sehnsucht nach dem Ding immer reaktionär ist', in Interdisziplinäres Ausstellen, ed. Sabine Fauland, (Österreichischer Museumsbund, Vienna, 2016).

 

[2] Francis Ponge (1899 - 1988); French essayist and poet. Influenced by both surrealism and phenomenology, Ponge developed a unique style of writing in which he closely examined everyday objects. See Le Parti pris des choses (1942), a collection of 32 prose poems, translated into English by Beth Archer Brombert as Taking the Side of Things (1972) and as The Nature of Things by Lee Fahnestock (1995). 

 

[3] Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976); German philosopher. Considered to be among the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th-century.  In a series of post-War lectures delivered in Bremen, Heidegger discussed the question concerning modern technology and spoke about das Ding as a gathering place of the Fourfold. See Insight Into That Which Is, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012).    

[4] Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981); French psychoanalyst. Discussion of the thing constitutes one of the central themes of his work in 1959-60. He uses the French term la chose interchangeably with the German term das Ding. For Lacan, the latter refers to the thing in its dumb reality, entirely outside of language and the unconscious (thus ultimately impossible for man to ever fully imagine or describe). It remains, however, an object of desire to which we continually return; the unforgettable Other.   

 

[5] Vilém Flusser (1920 - 1991); Czech-born writer and theorist who lived for a long time in Brazil. Initially under the spell of Heidegger, Flusser developed his own take on the question of things and non-things; see Dinge und Undinge: Phänomenologische Skizzen (Hanser, 1993) and The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, (Reaktion Books, 1999); a series of insightful essays (translated into English by Anthony Mathews) on things including wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas, and tents. 

[6] Byung-Chul Han; South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany. I have discussed (or referred to) many of his ideas and books on Torpedo the Ark. In a note to his recent work, Non-things, trans Daniel Steur, (Polity Press, 2022), Han writes: 

"There has been an increasing interest in things in cultural studies over the past few decades. This theoretical interest in things, however, does not mean that things are becoming more important in everyday life. On the contrary, the fact that they have become the explicit subject of theoretical reflection is a sign that they are disappearing. [...] Similarly, 'material culture' and the 'material turn' can be understood as reactions to the dematerialization and dereification of reality brought about by digitalization." [99-100]

I review and discuss this text in a two-part post published in June 2022: click here to go to part one.       

 

 [7] Dorothee Richter, op. cit. 

      By the thing in its pure aspect, I think Richter is referring to the thing as a thing-in-itself [Ding-an-sich] with its own unique presence in time and space. This latter is what Walter Benjamin termed its aura - dismissed by Richter as merely a bourgeois attempt to spiritualise the object and give it aesthetic value or abstract beauty outside and above any political history or meaning. For Richter, all such thinking is mythologizing and there are no objects outside of language; a tree, for example, is a concept, not a thing (in itself) - indeed, the entire universe is mind-dependent. As an object-oriented philosopher, I don't subscribe to this correlationism.  

[8] Treadwell's is a bookshop located at 33, Store Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1. It specialises in esoteric titles and stocks various herbs and ceremonial oils used in occult practices and/or modern pagan witchcraft. It was opened in 2003 (originally in Covent Garden) by proprietor Christina Harrington. I have given over thirty papers at the store: click here for details. For further information visit: treadwells-london.com

 

 

In Defence of Isis Veiled: What a Practice of Occultism Might Mean in an Age of Transparency

Cover art for the Treadwell's Paper 

Occultism in the Age of Transparency (2023)

by Stephen Alexander (shadowy version)

 

 

This post is a slightly revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's Bookshop, on 7 September, 2023. The event was graciously hosted, as ever, by Christina Harrington, and marked my return to the store as a speaker after an absence of eleven years [1]. 

 

 

**************************************************

 

 

The Veil of Isis is a metaphorical and artistic motif in which nature is personified as a goddess, covered by a veil or mantle representing the inaccessibility of her secrets [2]. 

 

Illustrations of Isis with her veil being lifted were extremely popular from the late 17th to the early-mid 19th century and were usually intended to show the triumph of Reason. However, even occultists were happy to play this game of indecent exposure; Madame Blavatsky, for example, used the metaphor of Isis unveiled when expounding the spiritual teachings of Theosophy [3]. 

 

According to Blavatsky, whilst scientists and philosophers revealed only material facts and superficial forms, she would penetrate further to the most hidden truths. That, to me at least, is a shameful ambition.

 

And I don't much like it either when practitioners of modern ceremonial magic also attempt to unveil Isis, or command demons hidden in darkness to make themselves apparent and obedient to the will of the one who has summoned them forth. 

 

For me, occultism - particularly in this, the age of transparency - should be a defence of concealment and anonymity, not making visible and naming those beings who stand dark on the threshold of the Unknown. 

 

I don’t want to violently drag everything out into the open - least of all some poor demon - so it can be subject to our x-ray vision. For even gods and demons die when they shed all negativity (all shadow, all darkness). That’s why Goethe’s Faust encouraged us to hold tight to the veil of Isis, even if we can never embrace the goddess, or catch anything other than a glimpse of her [4]. 

 

Occultism is ultimately not about revelation, but mystical initiation. And this involves closing your eyes and shutting your mouth; for it's an attempt to maintain the silence and stillness. Thus, when casting a spell, for example, whisper it in a voice that is lighter than breath. For magic, like poetry, is an event of stillness (i.e., a phenomenon of negativity) that enables us to listen to the silence (to be attentive to the darkness). 

 

In other words, magic is about tuning in to intensities; about forming a sensitive relationship with the world "that is not characterized by representation (that is, by ideas or meaning) but by immediate touching and presence" [5]. Only in silent stillness "do we enter into a relation with the nameless, which exceeds us" [6].

 

Silence, stillness, secrecy, and shadows are the fourfold of terms at the heart of occultism. 

 

And I would suggest to any would-be wiccans or neo-pagans here this evening that, instead of trying to move with the times and making secret rituals open to everyone, you stay concealed, hidden, and withdrawn. 

 

And, above all, stay still: for just as we can only ever catch a glimpse of the gods, they can only cast their gaze upon those who "linger in contemplative calmness" [7]. 

 

In sum: occult practices and magical rituals are symbolic techniques of becoming-imperceptible [8] and I’m hoping, that via a form of occultism, we might learn how to stage our own disappearance and darken the world, giving it back its shadows, its secrecy, and its silence. 

 

For whilst people talk a lot about plastic in the seas and worry about their so-called carbon footprint, I would suggest that light pollution and noise pollution are far more threatening to our ontological wellbeing. 

 

 

Photo by Paul Gorman 

(as posted on Instagram)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Readers can find a full list of previous Treadwell's papers by clicking here.

 

[2] The motif was based on a statue of Isis located in the ancient Egyptian city of Sais, which was said to have an inscription reading: I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle - which admittedly sounds like a challenge. For an interesting philosophical study of this topic, see Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (Harvard University Press, 2008). 

      Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both ancient and modern thinkers (the latter including Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger), Hadot traces successive interpretations of a cryptic phrase which has long intrigued the Western imagination and is attributed to Heraclitus: Phusis kruptesthai philei (Nature loves to hide). 

      Hadot concludes that there are essentially two (contradictory) approaches to nature: the Promethean, or experimental-questing, approach, which embraces technology as a means of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets; and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, approach, according to which such a denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. 

 

[3] Blavatsky’s most famous work - Isis Unveiled:A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology - was published in 1877. For some, a seminal text; for others, a work largely plagiarised from the writings of other occult authors. 

 

[4] Whilst most people understand a glimpse simply to mean a brief or partial view - to catch a quick look, perhaps in passing, of something or someone - it has a more poetic and philosophical resonance for those with ears to hear. D. H. Lawrence, for example, was fascinated by the word and often used it in his late poetry to describe how aspects of divinity are seen in the faces and forms of people when they are momentarily unaware of themselves. It's this glimmer of godhood which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes the flesh gleam with radiance or the bright flame of being. See the related group of verses on pp. 579-582 of The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

      Heidegger also privileged the word Blick, which I would translate as glimpse. For Heidegger, a glimpse is a kind of lightning flash which provides an insight into that which is, whilst, at the same time, guarding the hidden darkness of what remains forever withdrawn. See 'The Turn', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 64-73.

 

[5] Byung-Chul Han, 'Stillness', in Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 77. 

 

[6] Byung-Chul Han, 'The Magic of Things', Non-things, pp. 56-57. 

 

[7] Byung-Chul Han, 'Stillness', Non-things, p. 83.

 

[8] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996). According to the above, there is one becoming towards which all other becomings rush, marking the immanent end of becoming and providing the process with its cosmic formula; the becoming-imperceptible (279). 

 

 

Readers who are interested might also like to see two earlier posts that acted as previews to the talk at Treadwell's: 

 

'In Memory of Anne Dufourmantelle: Risk Taker Extraordinaire and Defender of Secrets' (14 May 2023): click here 

 

'On Georg Simmel's Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies' (10 August 2023): click here.