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.

On Defeminisation and Remasculinisation

Jonathan Borofsky: Male/Female (2000)

colour lithograph and screenprint (47" x 32")

borofsky.com

 

 

If losing a mother may be written down as a Wildean misfortune, then to lose one's sister and an ex-wife in the same year certainly looks like carelessness on my part - although since two of the above removed themselves from my life of their own volition, that perhaps mitigates any accusation of negligence. 

 

What's striking is how these deaths have resulted in a significant defeminisation of my world and how it got me thinking that perhaps that's not such a bad thing; that, arguably, wider society might also benefit from a cultural defeminisation (and, indeed, a dequeering). 

 

For perhaps just as we need what is most evil in us for what is best in us, so too an active element of masculinity - even at its most heteronormatively toxic - is essential for human wellbeing. 

 

However, as models of masculinity have varied across time and place, what it might mean to remasculinise culture is debatable and I can't stand those idiots who think it's just a question of manning up [1].

 

D. H. Lawrence would probably insist it's more a matter of rediscovering what he terms phallic tenderness [2].  

Notes

[1] Having said that, I have in the past been willing to let this phrase pass: click here. 

[2] Lawrence introduces this notion in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) and other works from this late period. In brief, for Lawrence, the phallus is not merely an organ belonging to the male body, but a sacred symbol of relatedness which forms a bridge between man and woman (and to the future); as for tenderness, that's his term for a passionate form of human contact based upon the inspiration of touch - i.e., it's his word for the desire that is productive of social reality. 

 

 

What Was I Thinking? (28 December)

 

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

28 December (2013-2021)

 

Sometimes, it's interesting to look back and see what one was thinking on the same date in years gone by - and sometimes it's simply embarrassing ...

 

Our God is Woman: Our Mission is Protest! 

On this date in 2013, for example, I was keen to express my support for a twenty-year old philosophy student and Femen activist, Josephine Witt, who staged a one-woman protest at St. Peter's Cathedral in Cologne, briefly disrupting a televised Christmas mass by getting her tits out and declaring herself to be God, before half-a-dozen horrified clerics wearing an assortment of robes pulled her from the altar, bundled her out of the building, and handed her over to the secular forces of law and order. 

 

I'm not sure I would now be quite so sympathetic to such an action. 

 

 

In Praise of an Unnatural Death 

 

Skip forward three years and on this date in 2016 I was keen to challenge the judgement of God by refusing to accept what medical professionals describe as death by natural causes; i.e., the all-too-predictable kind of death that results from illness, old age, or an internal malfunction of the body and its organs. 

 

As a philosopher, I argued, one should always desire and seek out the opposite of this; i.e., the joy of an unnatural death, be it by accident, misadventure, homicide, suicide, or that mysterious non-category that is undetermined and which, for those enigmatic individuals who pride themselves on their ambiguity, must surely be the way to go.

 

I then confessed my own preference to be executed, like William Palmer, the notorious nineteenth-century murderer known as the Prince of Poisoners, who is said to have climbed the gallows and placed a foot tentatively on the trapdoor before enquiring of the hangman: Is it safe? 

 

I would like, in other words, to go to my death with the cool courage and stoicism of the dandy and a ready quip on my lips that might cause even my executioner to smile (and serve also to annoy the po-faced authorities who demand seriousness and expect contrition in such circumstances).

 

 

To See More Clearly Than Ever Before 

 

In December 2018, meanwhile, I was entering my Daphne Du Maurier phase - a phase that never really passed and became a long-lasting love for the author and her astonishing body of work. On the 28th of this month I wrote a series of notes on one of her near-perfect short stories - suggested to me by the poet Simon Solomon - 'The Blue Lenses' (1959).

 

The premise of the post and story was the same: what if everyone were to suddenly lose their human features and be seen with the head of the creature that best expresses their inhuman qualities; not so much their true nature, as what might be termed their molecular animality - would we still find this gently amusing? I suspect not: in all likelihood, initial astonishment would quickly give way to horror. 

 

However we choose to describe it, du Maurier's tale is not simply an imaginative fantasy and she, like D. H. Lawrence, is "another of the writers who leave us troubled and filled with admiration" precisely because she was able to tie her work to "real and unheard of becomings". Hers is a genuinely black art, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.   

 

Judenstern

 

Making particular reference to the case of Serge Gainsbourg, back on 28 December, 2019 I was concerned with the history of the badge that Jews were often obliged to wear for purposes of public identification (i.e., in order to clearly mark them as religious and ethnic outsiders). 

 

Although we tend to think of this practice in the context of Hitler's Germany, the Nazis were actually drawing upon an extensive (anti-Semitic) history when they revived the practice of forcing Jews to wear a distinctive sign upon their clothing, including, most famously, the yellow Star of David with the word Jude inscribed in letters meant to resemble Hebrew script.  

 

Gainsbourg was required to wear such as a young boy in wartime Paris; an experience he made bearable by pretending that it was a sherrif's badge, or a prize that he'd been awarded, and which he eventually wrote a song about: click here. 

 

 

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

 

On 28 December of the following year, 2020, I expressed my fascination with piquerism; i.e., the practice of penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives - something that I traced back to young childhood and the time I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she would explode like a balloon with a loud bang.

 

Following this, I then explored episodes of knife play in the work of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are several, including the notorious scene in chapter XXIII of The Plumed Serpent (1926) in which Cipriano publicly executes a group of stripped and blindfolded prisoners with a bright, thin dagger, plunging the latter into their chests with swift, heavy stabs. 

 

I think even at the time I was uncomfortable with this and not able to dismiss it with the same ease as Kate Leslie who, if shocked and appalled at first by the killings, eventually concludes that her new husband's penchant for a little ritualised murder is fine if carried out in good conscience.

 

 

Jane Ciracylides: the Girl with Insect Eyes

 

If over the Xmas period in 2018 I was reading Daphne du Maurier, in 2021 I was enjoying the work of J. G. Ballard, including a short story entitled 'Prima Belladonna' which was included in the collection Vermilion Sands (1971) - a collection which celebrates the neglected virtues of the lurid and bizarre within a surreal sci-fi setting described by Ballard as the visionary present or inner space; the former referring to the future already contained within the present and the latter referring to the place where unconscious dreams, fears, and fantasies meet external reality. 

 

The alien female figure of Jane Ciracylides, with her rich patina-golden skin and insects for eyes, has continued to fascinate me to this day. Who knows, perhaps I'll get to play i-Go with her one day (even if she always cheats).  

 

Shrinking Violets

Field pansy (Viola arvensis) 

Photograph by Samson Acoca-Pidolle

 

I. 

 

Born in February, I've always been very attached to that colourful garden flower known as the pansy and which belongs to the wider family of violets.   

 

The fact that the English name is derived from the French word pensée - meaning thought - also appeals to me as a philosopher, as it did to D. H. Lawrence, who famously called his late series of little pieces written in 1928-29 Pansies [1].   

 

And so it saddened me to read the latest news out of France that wild pansies are evolving into self-pollinating plants and so producing ever-smaller flowers ...

II.

 

In a recent report in The Guardian, Phoebe Weston explains how rapidly declining insect numbers [2] have obliged pansies to find an alternative method of reproduction and effectively abandon the mutually beneficial relationship formed over millions of years with their six-legged friends [3].

 

Unfortunately, this traps both pansies and their pollinators in a vicious cycle; for when plants make less effort to attract insects and produce less food for them to feed on, this accelerates their decline, which in turn ... well, you get the idea.  

 

A scientific study conducted outside Paris [4], found that the flowers of field pansies are 10% smaller and producing 20% less nectar than thirty years ago and previous work indicated that the number of plants relying on self-pollination has increased by a quarter over the past two decades. 

 

The speed of this real time evolution has, apparently, surprised researchers - just as it has disheartened me, for I don't want to live in a world of shrinking violets in which insects no longer gaily buzz ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic' (5 Oct 2019): click here.

 

[2]  Falling insect numbers have been reported by studies across Europe. One German study (conducted on a nature reserve) found that there were 75% fewer insects in 2016 compared to 1989. See the post entitled 'Insecticide and the Eco-Apocalypse' (21 Oct 2017): click here. 

[3] Phoebe Weston, 'Flowers "giving up" on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate, say scientists', The Guardian (20 Dec 2023): click here. 

[4] See Samson Acoca-Pidolle, Perrine Gauthier, Louis Devresse, Antoine Deverge Merdrignac, Virginie Pons, and Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, 'Ongoing convergent evolution of a selfing syndrome threatens plant–pollinator interactions', New Phytologist (Dec 2023): click here.

 

 

Winter Solstice with D. H. Lawrence

Winter Solstice by the Sea (SA/2023)

 

"Now in December nearer comes the sun

down the abandoned heaven ..."

 

I. 

 

I am always happy when the shortest day and longest night of the year have come and gone.  

 

Several cold months may still lie ahead, but it triggers a genuine transformation of mood to know that the sun has reached its lowest point in the sky and, having stood still for the briefest of moments, thereafter begins its slow ascent; that, no matter what happens, it can't get any darker. 

 

I know the birth of baby Jesus around this time of year excites the imagination of many, but it means nothing compared to the symbolic rebirth of the invincible sun and I understand why the winter solstice has been marked by ritual celebrations within many cultures for millennnia. 

 

The prehistoric pagans who erected Stonehenge - and even the modern day Druids who still meet there now - aren't idiots and Yule means more to me than the Nativity.     

 

 

II. 

 

As one might guess, D. H. Lawrence was another fan of the winter solstice, as he was of all events on the solar calendar that chart the movements of the sun and the wheeling of the year. In a poem written in November 1928, he speaks of how "As the dark closes round him" the sun "draws nearer as if for our company".

 

Interestingly, Lawrence also claims that there exists a tiny sun within him - situated at "the base of the lower brain" - that communes with the great star above, exchanging "a few gold rays" [1]. 

 

III.

 

It would appear, reading this verse, that for Lawrence - as for many others who share his predilection for philosophical vitalism - the sun is more than a material object that can be adequately described and understood by physicists and astronomers. 

 

And if, primarily, Lawrence is concerned with the relationships between men and women, he nevertheless insists on the crucial importance of the relation between humanity and the sun. Perhaps the term that best describes this relation is correlation. For there is clearly a notion of mutual interdependence between the sun and humankind in Lawrence's work; i.e., we can't think one without thinking the other. 

 

And yet, correlation doesn't sound a very Lawrentian term and I think he would be happier speaking about correspondence. For correspondence implies a far closer level of intimate proximity between terms; they become not merely interdependent, but analogous at a certain level:

 

"There certainly does exist a subtle and complex sympathy, correspondence, between the plasm of the human body, which is identical with the primary human psyche, and the material elements outside. The primary human psyche is a complex plasm, which quivers, sense-conscious, in contact with the circumambient cosmos." [2] 

 

What Lawrence really wishes to do is reverse the idea that life evolves from matter and argue instead that the material universe results from the breakdown of primary organic tissue. Unfortunately, as much as I love Lawrence's work, I cannot share his anti-scientific thinking. Thus, I don't believe, for example, that: "If it be the supreme will of the living that the sun should stand still in heaven, then the sun will stand still." [3] 

 

This is simply an occult conceit; the frankly preposterous fantasy that there can be a magical suspension of the laws of physics at the behest of human will power. It's one thing wishing to project oneself into the "the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions" [4] in order to release the poetic imagination, but it's something else believing the astrological heavens revolve around the figure of Man.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'November by the sea', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 394-95. This poem can be found also in the LiederNet Archive: click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Two Principles', (First Version, 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 260.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance' (1920-1), Appendix IV: Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 395. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse, by Frederick Carter', in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46. 

 

 

Some of the material in section III of this post is revised from the essay 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence', which can be found on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website: click here. 

 

Dead Men Make Good Mould

Decay is the Laboratory of Life

(SA/2023)

 

 

Because so much of my thinking has been informed by the work of D. H. Lawrence - and because, as the author of a book of essays on thanatology, all aspects of death are a matter of continued philosophical interest - it means I can never see a pile of fallen wet leaves slowly decomposing without recalling the following lines from Fantasia of the Unconscious:

 

"Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls." [1]   

 

That's quite a hard teaching from the materialist school of general economics - one that Bataille would happily affirm - but its apparent callousness in the face of some kind of huge event that results in the mass destruction of human lives doesn't detract from the essential truth that life is rooted in and thrives upon death, and that "the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not putting forth a newness" [2] out of the decay of the old.

 

Or, as the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani puts it: "Through decay, life and death multiply and putrefy each other to no end." [3] 

 

So, next time you see a pile of rotting leaves - or, indeed, contemplate a mass grave of human bodies - try to overcome your horror and console yourself with the knowledge of how compost enriches the soil with organic nutrients and provides sustenance for a range of detritivores on both the macro and micro level; for dead men make good food as well as good mould.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Ch. XV, p. 266. 

      For readers who prefer to consult the 2004 Cambridge Edition of Fantasia, published jointly with Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and ed. Bruce Steele, see p. 189.   

[2] Ibid.

[3] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, (re:press, 2008), p. 184. 

On Oblivion

 

I. 

 

I was interested to hear the Chairman of the D. H. Lawrence Society, Mr Alan Wilson, claim in a recent sermon streamed live from St. Mary's Church, Greasley, on the theme of (so-called) Lawrencian Spirituality [1], that Lawrence was searching for something "beyond ultimate oblivion".

 

For although he was right to identify the importance of the term oblivion in Lawrence’s late poetry [2] - and whilst I would agree with Mark Fisher that "awareness of our own Nothingness is [...] a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [3] - there is no beyond oblivion; that's the tremendous challenge of the concept and why it is incompatible with the fundamental Christian belief of eternal life.  

 

In other words, if you subscribe to the idea of oblivion, you must accept the final sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom and the total erasure of self. To hope for life beyond oblivion, is as absurd as wishing to be remembered after one has been completely forgotten.     

 

 

II.

 

Whilst there may be some religious adherents who subscribe to the idea of oblivion [4], I tend to think of it more as a philosophical (and neuroscientific) concept, associated with those for whom death means what it says on the tin: the cessation of all consciousness (or subjective experience) and complete non-existence in any personal sense of the term. 

 

Socrates famously considered the question of oblivion when he was sentenced to death. Addressing the court, he first considers the possibility that his soul will migrate from this life and this world to the next life and next world. 

 

Although this idea appeals to him - because then he'll be able to discuss philosophy with all the great thinkers of the past - Socrates is nevertheless prepared to accept that death might, in fact, be terminal. This prospect doesn't frighten him, however, as oblivion essentially means to his mind a dreamless and uninterrupted sleep [5].  

 

Later thinkers, including the great Roman philosophers Cicero and Lucretius, basically came to a similar conclusion; i.e., that death was either a continuation of consciousness or cessation of it, and that if the former, then there is no reason to fear death; while if the latter is true, then there's also no good reason to be deeply troubled (for one will know nothing, feel nothing, be nothing).

 

As Epicurus famously put it in his Letter to Meneoceus: 'When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not.'

 

 

III.

 

Ultimately, oblivion is really just a term for a mind-independent reality; i.e., a reality which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, "is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable" [6].   

 

I don't know if saying that makes me a nihilist, a naturalist, or an extinctionist. But it certainly makes it difficult to subscribe to Lawrence's vitalism which makes oblivion strangely inviting; like a relaxing bath that we pop in and out of, feeling refreshed and reborn into a new body.

 

What such a cosy idea ignores is the fact that, as Ray Brassier reminds us, ultimately there will be no cosmos to be reborn into; that one day - roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now - "the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment" [7]. 

 

Brassier continues: 

 

"Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience - irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call 'asymptopia', the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called 'dark energy', which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness." [8]

 

In other words: oblivion über alles ...

 

I'm sure some believers will mumble about this universal annihilation all being part of God's plan, but, of course, we know that's bullshit - this is the disintegration of God's plan and the return to formless and empty chaos marks the triumph of evil.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Those with an hour and twenty minutes to spare and who are interested, can watch Wilson and two other speakers, Anthony Rice and John Patemen, discuss their understanding of Lawrentian Spirituality on the D. H. Lawrence Society YouTube channel by clicking here. The event took place on Saturday 18 November, 2023, at Greasley Church (Nottinghamshire).

 

[2] See the poems beginning with 'The Ship of Death' and ending with 'Phoenix', in 'The Last Poems Notebook', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 630-641. Almost every poem in this sequence contains the word oblivion. The amusing thing is that Lawrence explicitly warns that any one who attempts to ascribe attributes to oblivion is guilty of blasphemy - but that, of course, is precisely what he's doing.   

 

[3] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p.157. 

 

[4] In Christian theology, for example, there is a notion of annihilationism which opens up the idea of oblivion. In sum, it's the belief that after the Last Judgment, all damned human souls and fallen angels - including Lucifer - will be totally destroyed and their consciousness extinguished. 

      Annihilationism thus stands in contrast to both the belief in eternal torment and the belief that everyone will ultimately be saved and given eternal life. Although the idea has come in and out of vogue throughout the history of the Church, annihilationism has tended to be a minority view. In 1995, the Church of England's Doctrine Commission declared that Hell may, in fact, be a state of total non-being (i.e., oblivion), rather than a place of eternal suffering.

 

[5] One could, if one was tempted to do so, challenge Socrates on this idea of death as a kind of sleep - just as one might challenge Lawrence's poetic descriptions of death as a plunge into darkness, or the idea that we are merely dipped in oblivion so as to be reborn on the other side. 

      In his paper 'Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity', the naturalist philosopher Thomas W. Clark critiqued such flawed descriptions and the temptation (even amongst some atheists) to imagine that we might still - in some miraculous manner - experience or know death. By using the language of darkness, silence, and peaceful oblivion we effectively reify nothingness; i.e., make it into a positive condition or quality, into which the deceased individual can then be conveniently lodged.

      Clark's paper was originally published in 1994 as a lead article for the Humanist. It was reprinted in The Experience of Philosophy, ed. Daniel Kolak and Ray Martin, (Oxford University Press, 2005) and in The Philosophy of Death Reader, ed. Markar Melkonian, (Bloomsbury, 2019). It is also available to read on Clark's website Naturalism.Org: click here.

[6] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 228.

[8] Ibid.

 

 

This post is in memory of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), whose final collection of short stories was published under the title Oblivion (Little, Brown and Company, 2004). The image at the top of this post is based on artwork by Mario J. Pulice for the cover of the first edition of this work.  

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 3: Hauntology

Le fantôme gris 

Mark Fisher (1968-2017)

 

 I.

 

"Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension." [a]

 

I suppose that's true; we're all familiar with a ghostly wail and the creaking sounds of a haunted house, for example. And it's amusing to realise that, as Fisher says, sometimes it's a question of hearing what's not there; "the voice no longer the guarantor of presence" [120]. 

 

Derrida's neologism thus "uncovers the space between Being and Nothingness" [120]; that spooky realm where objects that go bump in the night are real but not actual and Schrödinger's cat silently meows.    

 

Real ghosts - and ghosts of the Real: there's no need for a notion of the supernatural, which is what one of Fisher's favourite books and films [b] - The Shining - makes clear. Horror is already present within the world, within the everyday, within the family: home is where the haunt is ...  

And this word, haunt, is, says Fisher, one of the closest we have in English to the German term unheimlich. For just as the latter can switch from that which allows for the familiar (or homely) to the unfamiliar (unhomely) in the blink of an eye, so the former "signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it" [125].

 

 

II. 

 

When I was younger, I used to love Angela Carter and read nearly all of her books, be they novels, short stories, or works of non-fiction. One book I particulary loved was American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Vintage, 1994), which consists of nine tales, the first four of which are based on American folklore. 

I don't know if Fisher ever read or ever refers to Angela Carter in his work, but when I came across the following paragraph in Ghosts of My Life it reminded me of the above book by her:

 

"America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World ... but here they are ..." [128]

   

 

III.

As a child of the 1970s, I grew up watching a lot (and I really mean a lot) of television. 

 

So when Fisher writes of "uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube" [133] [c] - particularly in the children's programming of this decade - it was obviously going to pique my interest. 

 

And I have to admit, I love the idea of a TV set as a ghost box; that's certainly preferable to the idea of it being a device designed for the amusement of idiots - a boob tube as our American cousins used to call it.

 

I still watch a lot of television - and a lot of it is still British television from the 1970s. It's not just that it reminds me of my childhood, but that it has "a certain grain [...] that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss" [135] [d]. 

 

I like the voices and the faces (and the clothes) of the people in the 1970s. They may all be dead now - may just be ghosts in a machine - but they're my kind of people and make me feel at home. Nostalgia doubtless plays a part in this, but it's more than that - Fisher would say it's a longing for what he terms popular modernism and not so much a lost past as the promise of a lost future. 

 

Speaking of promises ...

 

 

IV.

I hate the promise of digital music: which, as Fisher says, is the promise of an "escape from materiality" [144] and the eradication of crackle - i.e., the sound of dust, dirt, and damage; the sound of static build-up; the sound of joy. 

 

The loss of crackle spells the death of pop. 

 

No wonder then that many artists still release tracks on vinyl and invoke the sound of the past and a "whole disappeared regime of [tactile] materiality [...] lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension" [144].      

 

I don't care about keeping music live - but I do want to keep it analogue. For in an enchanted sound-world, crackle should not be excluded and the pleasure of placing a needle into the outermost groove should not be denied.     

 

 

V.

 

Is this true: 

"What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental [...]" [155]

 

I mean, it might be true - but I don't think it is. And where's the evidence for this claim, which, like so many of Fisher's other claims, is made without any real attempt to back it up.

 

I do tend to agree, however, that encounters with angels might prove to be "as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons" [155] [e], though I'm not sure that's because nothing could be "more shattering [...] and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy" [155].    

 

Actually, such angelic tranquility - an experience of what Rudolf Otto terms the numinous - might actually be very welcome in the world right now, even if it is "associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness" [157].

For contrary to the idea that we should feel good about ourselves and always be positive, "the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [157]. As Fisher goes on to note: "There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us" - i.e., our own egos. 

As D. H. Lawrence would say, grace is the sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom, the glory of darkness; a willingness to be erased and made nothing; to be dipped into oblivion in order that we might be renewed [f].

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 120. Future page references to this work will be given in the text.

      Of course, as Fisher later notes, hauntology doesn't just have a sonic dimension, there is also an important visual dimension; "the eerie calmness and stillness of photography" [152], for example, which is so good at capturing lost moments and presenting absences. Photography - the art of painting with light - also allows one a glimpse of a world that is radiant and not weighed down with darkness (although this is arguably a Gnostic quality rather than hauntological).      

[b] The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was adapted into a 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as the writer Jack Torance. King hated the movie because of its deviations from his book (and the fact that Kubrick had rejected his screenplay, preferring to co-write his own with novelist Diane Johnson). 

      In his piece on The Shining (adapted from a k-punk post dated 23 Jan 2006), Fisher chooses to side-step "the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians" and treats the novel and the film "as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences". See Ghosts of My Life, p. 120. 

      I don't dislike the film, but can't say it's one of my favourites. And as I've never read the novel, I don't intend to say very much here about Fisher's interpretation of The Shining.

 

[c] One obviously thinks of the famous scene in Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982) when five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O'Rourke) presses her hands to a TV screen displaying post-broadcast static and declares: "They're here" (referring to the spirits of the dead). 

 

[d] As Fisher writes elsewhere when analysing why it is programmes made today fail to capture this '70s grain: 

      "There must be some technical reason - maybe its the film stock they use - that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video." - Ghosts in My Life, p. 76. 

 

[e] Fisher is making this claim on the basis of work by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his 1917 text (translated into English as) The Idea of the Holy.

 

[f] See the poems 'The State of Grace', 'Glory of Darkness', and 'Phoenix', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 591 and 641. 

To read part one of this post on Lost Futures, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on the Return of the 70s, click here.