It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 1)

Front cover image from Mark Fisher's 

The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Let me confess from the outset that one of the main problems I have with Mark Fisher's work is that I'm unfamiliar with many of the books, films, and records that he chooses as points of reference, so often feel unable to comment. Thus, I intend sticking here to his more general remarks on the weird and the eerie, about which I feel better able to discuss.

 

According to Mark Fisher, the weird and the eerie are closely related (but distinct) modes of strangeness, each with their own properties. The former draws our attention to that which does not belong and instills a sense of wrongness; the latter troubles the notion of agency (human and non-human) and makes us question existence and non-existence. 

 

Neither terrifies or deeply distresses, so much as make us feel vaguely apprehensive or uneasy.    

 

And neither has much to do with with Freud's concept of the unheimlich and should not be equated to the latter. The attempt to do so, says Fisher, is "symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside" [a]; i.e., returning to the safety of a long familiar (if hugely influential) idea that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain the outside "in terms of a modernist family drama" [10]. 

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fisher begins his study of the weird by turning to H. P. Lovecraft - a writer whom Graham Harman predicts will one day displace Hölderlin as the philosopher's favourite [b] and someone who intuitively grasped that nothing is weirder than reality (i.e., the natural-material cosmos).

 

As Fisher rightly says, when you really stop to think about it, a black hole is weirder than a vampire or werewolf. 

 

Lovecraft is the daddy of weird fiction; the man who long before George Michael encouraged characters and readers alike to venture outside - even if doing so "often ends in breakdown and psychosis" [16] for the former and fascination "mixed with a certain trepidation" [17] for the latter.

 

There is nothing surprising or suspensful or even truly terrible in Lovecraft's weird tales. And yet they compel our attention, even as they repel us at the same time with their inhuman quality; i.e., their insistence that "human concerns, perspectives and concepts have only a local reference" [18].    

Fisher is spot-on to insist that Lovecraft is neither a horror writer nor a fantasy author; that his weird realism is something very different from either of these genres and that his tales "depend for their power on the difference between the terrestrial-empirical and the outside" [20][c] and on their sheer originality.

 

 

III.

 

Like Lovecraft, H. G. Wells also understood something of the weird, even if his work is, in many respects, very different from the former's. 

 

One thing both writers shared is a concern with thresholds and the fatal possibility of "contact between incommensurable worlds" [28], an idea best illustrated in an episode of Seinfeld when George's independence (and sanity) are threatened by the transcendental shock of worlds colliding [d].   

 

It's probably always best (if not always possible) to keep worlds apart, although the weird, as a phenomenon, is that which unfolds in the space between them. 

 

 

IV.  

 

Moving on, Fisher introduces a notion of the grotesque, which, like the weird, "evokes something which is out of place" [32] - although unlike the latter it often evokes laughter (the only humour in Lovecraft, says Fisher, is accidental).

 

And the "confluence of the weird and the grotesque is no better exemplified than in the work of the post-punk group The Fall" [33], particularly in the period 1980-82. 

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Mark E. Smith's combo is limited. In fact, I can only name one of their songs; the 1980 single 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' (and that's only because I often heard it on John Peel, not because I went out and bought it). 

 

So I'll just have to take Fisher's word for it when he insists The Fall "are remarkabe for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque" [33] and produced "what could be called a popular modernist weird [...] with all the difficulties and compulsions of post-punk sound" [33] [e].

 

In the same period Fisher was getting worked up over The Fall, I was listening to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow and had more interest in post-punk piracy than the weird and grotesque; indeed, I seem to remember finding groups like The Fall too depressing (perhaps even too Northern) for my tastes; even their laughter issues "from a psychotic outside" [35] and that didn't sound very funny to me at the time.           

 

However, if what Fisher says is true, I would probably find The Fall more amusing now (although I suspect I would still find them a band more interesting to read about, than fun to listen to).   

 

 

V.

 

Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story? 

Mark Fisher thinks so:

 

"By its very nature, the time travel story [...] combines entities and objects that do not belong together. Here the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods [...] and the weird effect typically manifests as a sense of achronism." [40]

 

Again, that's one of those true-but-kind-of-obvious statements that Fisher seems to specialise in. Here's another: time-paradoxes also trigger a feeling weirdness. Indeed - who would argue with that?  

 

 

VI.

 

"There is another type of weird effect that is generated by strange loops [...] not just tangles in cause and effect [...] but confusions of ontological level." [45]

 

These confusions particularly play out at the level of simulacra and simulation, putting the nature of being and reality into question - just ask Thomas (Neo) Anderson. Or Baudrillard. Is there anything weirder than living in a world one knows to be a cleverly constructed simulation but which still feels real?      

 

 

VII.

 

If it wasn't in the least surprising that Fisher should open his study of the weird with Lovecraft, it's equally unsurprising that he should close it with the director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, David Lynch.

 

For in many ways Fisher seems weirdly trapped in the 1980s and '90s; a man still gripped by the same philosophical ideas (and postmodern obsessions) that shaped his thinking when writing his Ph.D. on cybernetic fiction-theory [f]. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that his fascination with the weird and eerie goes back as far as he can remember. 

     

Now, whilst some might suggest he move on and find new interests, I rather admire the manner in which he has stayed true to the authors, singers, and filmmakers, he loves best. But David Lynch isn't a particular favourite of mine, I'm afraid; there are certainly films by the other two Davids - Fisher and Cronenberg - I like more than Mulholland Drive (2001), though they're perhaps not as weird in the sense that Fisher uses the term.   

 

As for Inland Empire (2006), not only have I not seen it, I've not even heard of it - how weird is that?

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 10. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] See Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).

 

[c] Just to be clear: "The outside is not 'empirically' exterior; it is transcendentally exterior; i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself." - Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 22. 

 

[d] Seinfeld, 'The Pool Guy' [S7/E8], dir. Andy Ackerman, written by David Mandel (1995). Click here to observe the devastating effect it has upon George's mental health when he experiences the colliding of worlds: George is getting upset! Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that this tale unfolds within a weirdly comic universe, rather than a weirdly tragic or melancholic one.

 

[e] Perhaps the only author who writes with such intense conviction about the pop music they love is poet and playwright Síomón Solomon; see his 2020 text Hölderlin's Poltergeists in which he celebrates that other critically-acclaimed post-punk band from Manchester, Joy Division.     

 

[f] Fisher's Ph.D. thesis was entitled: Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. It was completed in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Warwick and submitted in July 1999. A PDF of this work is available via the University of Warwick publications service website: click here. The first line opens with the words "Isn't it strange [...]". 

      Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective inspired by the work of Nick Land and Sadie Plant known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Although I was also in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick at this time and initially had Land as my Graduate Progress Committee member overseeing my own doctoral research project, I never crossed paths with Fisher, which, looking back, I now rather regret.  

 

 

Part two of this post - on the eerie - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

Final Reflections on Hölderlin's Poltergeists (A Drama for Voices by Síomón Solomon)

(Peter Lang, 2020)

 

 

I. 

 

Astute readers may have noticed that whilst I published a quintet of posts last month on the supplementary writings contained within Síomón Solomon's study Hölderlin's Poltergeists,* I didn't actually comment on the highly original adaptation of the radio play which is at its heart. 

 

This was due to the fact that although Nietzsche may figure prominently in my intellectual background, I simply do not feel qualified to do so: I am not a German literature scholar and not only have I never studied Hölderlin, but I hadn't even heard of Stephan Hermlin or his 1970 audio drama, Scardanelli, before reading Solomon's book. 

 

Further, whilst I've read a lot of novels and seen a lot of films, my knowledge and appreciation of plays is shamefully underdeveloped. I don't know why, but watching plays unfold on stage, or listening to them on the radio, has always filled me with a kind of performance anxiety. I even find reading plays troubling. 

And so, I'm perfectly happy to accept Dan Farrelly's estimation of Solomon's work as a "beautiful, free and creative translation" which "opens access to an extraordinarily creative poet who is superbly served by the playwright and his translator" [1]. 

 

Happy also to reproduce below remarks made by Solomon in his introduction, which give a fascinating insight into his thinking and working method ...    

 

 

II. 

 

According to Solomon, although his adaptation is rooted in "an exhaustive attentiveness to the minutiae" [2] of Hermlin's original German text, he has nevertheless seen fit to take a transmorphic approach in accordance with which he has made "a host of minor and major infidelities to the mother script, from compensations (moved text), borrowings (untranslated language items), tweaked directions, insertions and elisions to new dramatis personae and whole scenic re/writings" [3]. 

 

Solomon continues:

 

"As a result, the source text - already, of course, a seething intertext implicating a range of semiotic fields (Classical/Romantic poetics, early European psychiatry, Franco-German revolutionary politics, epistolary erotics, etc.) - has been both critically trimmed and lavishly enhanced. Our clamorous ark of thirty-five speakers [...] through twenty-eight scenes - roughly doubling Hermlin's quantities in each case and all doing their many varieties of violence to Hölderlin's voice - has been accordingly relaunched as a keening vessel of ventriloquized voices, in which ill-starred poets, idealist philosophers, literary editors, hamstrung employers, pious relatives, mortified lovers, political tyrants, ghoulish voyeurs and anonymous critics collide and collude." [4] 

 

In consequence: Solomon calls his work a 'remix', "aiming as it does to offer a musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [5]. 

 

And in sum: "Hermlin's play has been treated playfully, with a passionate recklessness or irreverent love" [6] that some might term abusive fidelity. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dan Farrelly, Senior Lecturer in German (retired), University College Dublin. I am quoting from the blurb provided by Farrelly for the back cover of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

[2] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 13. 

[3] - [5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 14.

 

* The quintet of earlier posts inspired by Hölderlin's Poltergeists are: 

How Fascism Makes Killers Of Us All (With Reference to the Case of Stephan Hermlin)

 

There is No Tongue That is Not Forked: Notes On Síomón Solomon's Fantasia of Translation 

 

A Brief Note on the Life and Work of Stephan Hermlin 

 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli 

 

We Are Transmitters: Reflections on Síomón Solomon's Audiopoetics 

 

 

What's in a Name? Quite a Lot When That Name is Scardanelli

Ja, die Gedichte sind echt, die sind von mir, aber der Name ist gefälscht! 

Ich habe nie Hölderlin geheißen, sondern Scardanelli!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche is not the only great poet-philosopher and madman of German letters. Before him came the early Romantic figure Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who, long plagued by mental illness, was finally committed in 1806. 

 

Deemed incurable - despite the belladonna preparations and cold water baths - Hölderlin was released into the care of a kindly carpenter called Ernst Zimmer, who gave him a room at his house in Tübingen. Here, Hölderlin would spend the last thirty-six years of his life; a period referred to by those in the know as the Turmzeit. 

 

During this so-called Tower period, Hölderlin would occasionally write rhymed quatrains signed with a variety of theatrical-sounding pseudonyms, including Scardanelli, a name which Stephan Hermlin would use as the title of his 1970 Hörspiel, which deals with the poet's breakdown triggered (arguably) by the realisation that there is little room for art in a world dominated by politics and philistinism; something that Hermlin himself would also come slowly to accept despite his life-long communist affiliations and affinity.

 

II. 

 

Offering as it does a "musical variation on a pre-existent artistic matrix" [1], one wonders why Síomón Solomon didn't simply call his translation-adaptation of Hermlin's play Scardanelli: an Extended Remix, instead of opting for the (admittedly more paranormally suggestive) title of Hölderlin's Poltergeists.

 

For whilst I appreciate his desire to announce the work's originality and emphasise its spectral chaos, I think the name Scardanelli should have remained in the title somewhere or other. For Scardanelli is a name that has a real magic to it and which has continued to resonate within creative circles for over 200 years; not just amongst poets and playwrights, but also composers, filmmakers, and even graffiti artists. 

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the large-scale Scardanelli-Zyklus project that the Swiss composer Heinz Holliger worked on from 1975 to 1993 (ECM Records); the 2003 film written and directed by Harald Bergmann entitled Scardanelli, and starring André Wilms as Hölderlin (see image below); and of the fabulous piece of street art (reproduced above) painted on shutters in Milan and posted on the designer Campbell Johnson's Instagram account: click here [2].

 

My point is this: the name Scardanelli unites a wide range of artists and artworks and I think Solomon's work is best understood in relation to this world rather than the academic world of German studies. There's no doubting Solomon is a fine scholar: but he is also an amazing artist in his own right.  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Síomón Solomon, 'Translator's Introduction', Hölderlin's Poltergeists, (Peter Lang, 2020), p.13 

 

[2] Mention must also be made of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker's recent collection of poems entitled Scardanelli, trans. Jonathan Larson, (The Song Cave, 2018); a collection haunted by the presence of Hölderlin throughout, an author to whose work Mayröcker is, by her own admission, addicted. Click here for more details.       

 

 

Gelassenheit: Notes on Heidegger and the Money Calm Bull

 This is the Money Calm Bull

 

 

I. 

 

One of the ads on TV that I find intriguing (and, indeed, faintly amusing) is by an online price comparison business specialising in financial services, featuring a bull who, apparently, is calmer than a banana [1]. 

 

"Why? Because with countless ways to save, from car insurance to energy, his bills are under control with MoneySuperMarket." [2]

 

He is thus able to handle whatever life throws at him - including stress-inducing situations ranging from the socially awkward to the life-threatening. Even when an asteroid threatens to smash into the Earth, the Money Calm Bull keeps his cool.      

 

Indeed, he's more than just stoical in the face of danger, he's positively serene; one might even argue that the Money Calm Bull displays an instinctive understanding of an important concept belonging both to Christian mysticism and Heideggerian philosophy: Gelassenheit ...

 

 

II. 

 

Within the Anabaptist tradition, Gelassenheit not only means composure or serenity, but implies submission to God's will and an acceptance of the world as is - the latter being an idea that Nietzsche develops in his teaching of the eternal recurrence, demanding an affirmation and not merely an acceptance of mortal existence, with every pain as well as every joy repeated ad infinitum.

 

For Heidegger, on the other hand, who developed the concept of Gelassenheit in his later thought as a fundamental attunement to being, the key aspect is releasement - a letting go of self and a letting be of others, or, more precisely, of things, in all their mystery and uncertainty. 

 

Heidegger may have rejected humanism, but Gelassenheit provides a powerful ethical component to his work (what we might term after Hölderlin its saving grace) - one that frees us from having to will and worry all the time and allows us to become a bit more like the Money Calm Bull. 

 

Of course, it's crucial to keep in mind that Heidegger is not arguing for a mere reversal within what he terms the domain of the will (i.e., the realm within which modern humanity has historically determined its essence):

 

"Rather, Heidegger's thought calls for a twisting free of this entire domain of the will and a leap into a region of non-willing letting-be that is otherwise than both will-ful activity and will-less passivity." [3] 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] The first ad in the series, created by those clever people at the Engine Group, began airing in June 2020. It was directed by Nick Ball (Blink Productions), has a voice over provided by the actor and comedian Matt Berry, and utilises Mozart's famous Piano Concerto No. 21 (1785) for the score. Click here to watch on Vimeo.       

 

[2] I'm quoting from a MoneySuperMarket web page featuring the Money Calm Bull: click here. 

[3] Bret W. Davis, 'Will and Gelassenheit', Ch. 12 of Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, ed. Bret W. Davis, (Routledge, 2014), pp. 168-182. 

 

Let's Go Outside: Notes on The Horla

Cover of the 1908 edition 

of Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla 

I.

The concept of the Outside is as important to me now as it was twenty-five years ago when I decided to entitle my doctoral project on the work of Nietzsche and Lawrence Outside the Gate, referencing not only one of the little rhyming preludes to The Gay Science, but also the Killing Joke album of that title from 1988. [1]  

I suppose my understanding of the concept has remained fairly consistent over the years; mostly shaped by the occult musings of Richard Somers in Kangaroo (1923) about dark gods and invisible strangers in the night, tapping at the doors of human perception in order to gain admission into our world which we have illuminated with electric light in order to banish the darkness and create the illusion of safety, even though we remain standing on the edge of an invisible abyss. [2] 

That's Foucault I'm paraphrasing and his attempt to think the thought from outside has also been an important influence on my work; a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in literature - such as in the work of Sade and Hölderlin:

"Can it be said without stretching things that Sade and Hölderlin simultaneously introduced into our thinking, for the coming century, but in some way cryptically, the experience of the outside - the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings?" [3]

I think it probably can - and I think we can say also that Guy de Maupassant is another writer who gives us an experience of the outside in his unsettling short story Le Horla (1886/87) ...

II.

The word Horla is, of course, a neologism coined by Maupassant; an amalgam of the French words hors and là.

Thus, the Horla is literally the one who is out there - always waiting for a chance to enter so that it can steal your milk and water and drive you out of your fucking mind; an alien entity that threatens to overwhelm (and possibly supersede) humanity. Who said the Übermensch couldn't have an extra-terrestrial origin - or come, like a virus, from out of the jungle or Brazilian rainforest?

The 42-year-old victim of the tale has not only been mentally unhinged by his experiences, which started with a strange malaise and a kind of nervous anxiety, but reduced to a pitiful physical state:

"He was extremely thin, cadaverous even, as some madmen look when they are consumed by an obsession. Their bodies seem ravaged by one sick thought which devours them faster than any disease or consumption." [4]

His doctor prescribed cold showers and sedatives and the latter at least helped the man to sleep; unfortunately, sleep turned out to be even more intolerable than the insomnia. He explains why:

"'As soon as my head hit the pillow, my eyes closed and I was out. I mean out completely. I fell into absolute nothingness, a void, a total blank. My self became completely dead until I was suddenly, horribly awoken by the most appalling sensation. An unbearable weight was lying on my chest and another mouth was sucking the life out of me through my own.'" [237]

Obviously, that's not very pleasant and no one would want to experience such a thing. Nor, I suppose, would most people - there are doubtless exceptions - want to see their roses plucked by an invisible hand and sniffed by an invisible nose belonging to an invisible being. I mean, greenfly can be a problem enough as it is.

And to have anyone reading over your shoulder - or absorb your own reflection - is always profoundly irritating, is it not?

The poor man eventually admits himself into the care of an eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Marrande, who overcomes his own professional scepticism and concludes that his patient's experiences with the Horla may well have been all-too-real. He informs his colleagues: "'I cannot tell if this man is mad or whether we both are ... or whether ... man's successor is already in our midst ...'" [244]    

This last idea is one that the man has already developed very eloquently:

"'What is this being, gentlemen?  I believe it is what the earth is waiting for, to supersede humanity, to usurp our throne, to overwhelm and perhaps feed on us as we feed now on cattle and wild boar. We have sensed and dreaded it for centuries. We have heard its approach with terror. Our forefathers have been haunted by the Invisible.
      It has come.'" [243]

Notes

[1] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 'Joke, Cunning, and Revenge: A Prelude in Rhymes', number 57. The original German verse, entitled Wählerischer Geschmack, [Fastidious Taste] reads:   

Wenn man frei mich wählen liesse,
Wählt' ich gern ein Plätzchen mir
Mitten drin im Paradiese:
Gerner noch - vor seiner Tür!

Which we might translate as: When given a free choice, / I'd choose myself a place / in the centre of paradise: / Better still - outside the gates!

To play the title track from the Killing Joke album - digitally remastered in 2007 and provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group in 2015 - click here. 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 285:

"The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, there was no outside, it was all in. The Unknown became a joke: is still a joke.
      Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry."

[3] Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. Brian Massumi, (Zone Books, 1987), p. 17.

[4] Guy de Maupassant, 'The Horla', in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, trans. Siân Miles, (Penguin Books, 2004), p. 236. Following page references are given directly in the text. Note that this is the first version of the tale, published in 1886, and not the longer, more developed version of 1887. 

Thanks for the Memory (Notes on Hope and Heidegger)

Thanks for the memory / Of faults that you forgave

Of rainbows on a wave / And stockings in the basin

When a fellow needs a shave ...*

I.

Bob Hope was an Anglo-American actor and comedian whose career spanned almost 80 years. He appeared in more than 70 movies, starring in 54 full-length feature films, including seven Road movies alongside Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour.

Whether he ever read - or even knew the name - Martin Heidegger is not certain: but I doubt it. The latter wasn't particularly known for his witty one-liners. Having said that, it's equally doubtful that the German philosopher was a fan of Hope's, although I suspect he might have smiled at his signature tune ...

II.

Thanks for the Memory is a popular song composed by Ralph Rainger, with lyrics by Leo Robin, for the film The Big Broadcast of 1938 (dir. Mitchell Leison) and starring - amongst others - Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, who perform it [click here].

It won the Academy Award for best original song and has regularly featured on the American Film Institute's list of top 100 cinematic tunes. But that's not why I think Heidegger may have had a sneaky regard for it.

That, rather, relates to the fact that the song title - which in German reads Danke für die Erinnerung - could easily have been lifted from his work, as it neatly summarises his idea that thinking is both poetic recollection and an act of gratitude: Denken ist Danken, as he liked to say (having picked the phrase up from 17th century pietism).

In order to explain what he means by this we need to turn to his brilliant series of lectures published as Was Heißt Denken? (1954) ...  


III.

In What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger pays homage to Mnemosyne [Μνημοσύνη], the daughter of Heaven and Earth, bride of Zeus, mother of the nine Muses, and goddess of memory.

It is clear, says Heidegger, knowing his ancient Greek mythology and having read his Hölderlin, that the latter term - memory - means "something else than merely the psychologically demonstrable ability to retain a mental representation, an idea, of something which is past" [11].  

Memory is a special type of thought:

"Memory is the gathering and convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thought about first of all. Memory is the gathering of recollection, thinking back. It safely keeps and keeps concealed within it that to which at each given time thought must be given before all else, in everything that essentially is, everything that appeals to us as what has being and has been in being. Memory [...] the thinking back to what is to be thought is the source and ground of poiesis.** This is why poiesis is the water that at times flows backward toward the source, toward thinking as a thinking back, a recollection. [...] Poetry wells up only from devoted thought thinking back, recollecting." [11]  

And thinking-as-memory understood in relation to and in terms of poiesis, is also a way of giving thanks, which we understand once we know that the words think and thank have the same etymological root. In Old English, for example, the verbs thencan (to think) and thancian (to thank), are closely related and the Old English noun for thought, thanc, surely places gratitude at the heart of thinking.

Heidegger describes thanc as the great clue-word. But it means something very different from the modern word thought, which usually involves ideas and opinions: "Compared with the root thanc, thought in the sense of logical-rational representations turns out to be a reduction and an impoversishment of the word that beggar the imagination." [139] 

Thanc is more a word of the heart than the head; i.e., "that innermost essence of man which reaches outward most fully and to the outermost limits" [144].

This might all feel a bit contrived. But it seems a brilliant observation to me that invites us to think further about the relationship between the words thinking, thanking, and memory. For what these words designate "is incomparably richer in essential content than the current signification that the words still have for us in common usage" [142].   

And further, Hedegger's work obliges us to hear Bob Hope's signature tune with new ears. In giving thanks for the memories, Hope is giving thanks for the many gifts he has received; from the love of a good woman to the gift of being. That is to say, for all the things - great and small - that he cares for and that touch him as a human being, defining and determining his nature:

"If we understand memory in the light of the old word thanc, the connection between memory and thanks will dawn on us at once. For in giving thanks, the heart in thought recalls where it remains gathered and concentrated, because that is where it belongs." [145]     

See: Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray, (Harper Perennial, 2004). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

*Note: I have slightly modified the translation here. Gray's use of the word poesy for ποίησις just feels wrong to me, so have replaced it with poiesis (which seems a little less literary and a bit more philosophical).  

Thanks for the Memory lyrics © Sony/TATV Music Publishing LLC

What are Poets for ...?

Hölderlin's question - which became Heidegger's question also - wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? remains, for those of us who are interested in such things, a matter of some urgency. 

For in a time of fake news and a general poverty of thinking - these things characterizing our own destitution - clearly we need to acknowledge the importance of those who have the ability to attend closely and carefully to language and its limits (poets) and those who might theorize such a method of thinking in relation to the world we live in today (philosophers).     

Of course, this doesn't mean we need poets to simply set the facts straight, nor signal their moral and political idealism by speaking truth to power - a cant phrase coined by Quakers in the 1950s and adopted ever since by would-be warriors of social justice and so-called activists. If I want to hear opinionated idiots express their beliefs, then I can follow them on Twitter.

Poets must never assert anything as all-knowing subjects. And poetry must free itself of any conceited humanism, becoming Machiavellian in its objective purity; sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son âpreté, as Nietzsche would say. We don't speak such poetry; it speaks us. And, more, it transforms the world; not through noisy direct action, but through silent deferral that opens up the possibility of Newness.

In other words, poets are not there to serve as commentators on world events - verse is not a type of flowery journalism. Their task, rather, is to provide the preliminary conditions necessary for a demonic Event: something that unfolds in time, but which is nevertheless Unzeitgemäße and Unheimlich in the sense that it comes from Outside; something which radially changes our understanding of reality and allows us to scrape off the viscous covering of doxa protecting categories of the present.

Poets, then, still have a profoundly important role to play in this era of despots and crackpots. But, alas, I sometimes think the real question we should be asking is: Wo sind die heuter Dichter?              

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part I)

Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936)

According to Blanchot, Nietzsche is quick to grasp that all the modern world’s seriousness is confined to science and the "prodigious power of technology". Lawrence refers to this (poetically) as the triumph of the machine.

Whilst Nietzsche doesn't entirely deplore this fact, happy, for example, to support the experimental practices of science, he is by no means able to affirm the above development without reservation; not least of all because he identifies modern science as the descendant and heir of Christian moral culture. In other words, it's a machine-embodied unfolding of the ascetic ideal; an expression of mankind's pathological will to truth.

Thus, for Nietzsche, science and technology is fundamentally nihilistic in character, full of thinly veiled metaphysical prejudices and productive of reactive knowledge-forms which may yet prove fatal not only to the Christian moral culture from out of which it has grown, but to the possibility of culture per se as it puts on ice all the illusions which are necessary for the sustaining of culture and, indeed, life itself.

In addition to this fundamental antipathy between vital illusion and the pure knowledge drive, Nietzsche claims that science is incapable of serving as the foundation of culture because, unlike art, it knows nothing of “taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, exaltation, or exhaustion” and so cannot evaluate, cannot command, and cannot create. At best, when coupled to the huge resources of capitalism, science is capable of building a tremendous industrial-technological civilization, such as our own, but, for Nietzsche, this is not a genuine cultural formation because, whilst it is certainly capable of organizing the chaos of existence and constructing a monolithic system or network, it lacks style.

Style, insists Nietzsche, always involves the constraint of a single taste. But it is not merely the imposition of universal laws or categorical imperatives; nor does it seek to make all things and all forces familiar, similar, and predictable. The ideal abstractions of science may very effectively allow for the manipulation of the world and the subordination of life to a tyrannical knowledge form - logic - but this is not the same as mastery and the artist of culture is more than a mere systematizer.

Failing to make the distinction, the technocratic man of reason confuses bullying with a display of strength and mistakes force for power. This is perfectly illustrated in  Lawrence's novel Women in Love by the figure of Gerald Crich; a character driven to impose his will and authority over himself and his workers, just as he does over his red Arab mare. Gerald’s world, the world of industrial civilization, has been described earlier by Lawrence in The Rainbow:

“The streets were like visions of pure ugliness ... that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly ...
   The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. ... The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. ...
   The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid.” 

If such a mechanical world essentially lacks style, so too does it entirely lack meaning. At best, it retains a strictly functional residue of the latter that allows it to continue to operate. How to give value back to such a world - and a little loveliness - is a concern shared by Nietzsche and Lawrence. They both fear, however, that so long as the nihilistic-scientific perspective retains its authority, there can be no revaluation. For such a perspective has not only made the barbarism of the modern world unavoidable, but it ensures the destruction of all other perspectives and modes of being.

And yet, perhaps there is hope to be found where we might have least expected to encounter it. This is one of the great lessons of encouragement given to us by Heidegger in his essay entitled ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. At the heart of this work are the following lines from Hölderlin: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.

Commenting on these lines, George Steiner writes:

“To realize that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological devastation and political suicide, is to realize also that salvation is possible ... It is in the very extremity of the modern crisis, in the very time of nihilistic mechanism, that hope lies ready.”

It is important that we avoid misunderstanding here; hope does not lie in the fruits of science and technology themselves and it is not, therefore, a question of accelerating the production and proliferation of ever-more sophisticated machines in the erroneous assumption that only a micro-chip can save us. If, on the one hand, technophobes who rebel naively against technology and curse it as the work of the devil should rightly be challenged, then, on the other hand, technophiles and neo-futurists who argue for an ever-greater technological manipulation of life deserve also to be met with critical resistance.

Heidegger would surely have agreed with Lawrence that “the more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses”. Thus, if we are to find our way into a new revealing, then we will have to find a way to creatively manifest these forces. And if we are to deepen our questioning of nihilism and technology, then we will need to resist the temptation of easy solutions and the blackmail of being either for or against science.

It is only via such a questioning - one that manages to touch on the essence of technology - that we can find hope. For it is only by daring to think the latter, which is to say, move closer to the very danger that threatens us, that “the ways into the saving power begin to shine” more brightly.


Bibliography

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years before the Mast', essay in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', essay in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993). 
George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).


Note: Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.