Aloha! Should Johnny Rotten Mind His Language?

Johnny singing his heart out on The Late Late Show Eurosong 2023 Special 

RTÉ Television Centre, Dublin (3 Feb 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

Sadly, Johnny Rotten has failed in his bid to emulate Johnny Logan and will not be representing Ireland in this year's Eurovision Song Contest. Somewhat ironically, the 67-year former Sex Pistol and his post-punk outfit Public Image Ltd., were defeated by a group calling themselves Wild Youth.    

The song that Rotten safety-pinned his hopes on - 'Hawaii' [1] - is described as a love letter to his 80-year-old wife, Nora, who - as he never tires of telling us - has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 

 

Whilst the track with its refrain of remember me, I remember you, is certainly touching, one can't help but find it a rather feeble response to his wife's condition when compared, for example, to the ferocious song written in response to the cancer that killed his 46-year old mother, Eileen, in 1978.

There's nothing nostalgic or sentimental about 'Death Disco', as Rotten rages in despair at the dying of the light in his mother's eyes and watches as she lies choking on a bed, surrounded by rotting flowers [2].

 

His Eurovision entry, by contrast, is much more accepting that all journeys end and that all one is ultimately left with are memories of happier times - if one's lucky, that is, and dementia doesn't rob you of the past as well as aggressively restrict your ability to think and carry out everyday activities in the present.     

Perhaps, being generous, we might say that 'Hawaii' is the song of a more mature and reflective songwriter, whereas 'Death Disco' was the composition of a young man almost insane with anger. 

 

However, for all its poignant charm, 'Hawaii' still wasn't selected for Eurovision: in fact, it finished fourth out of the six songs competing and was given a lukewarm reception by the judges. But then, the Irish have never really accepted London-born Lydon as one of their own; he was even arrested in Dublin once, in 1980, and spent a weekend in Mountjoy prison on a trumped up charge. 

 

Still, maybe it's for the best that PiL didn't win the vote. For in this age of political correctness, certain voices have been raised in woke circles about the problematic use (or appropriation) of the word aloha by non-Hawaiian speakers like Lydon ...

 

 

II.  

 

In a recent article publised in USA Today, David Oliver suggests that it's time to stop using culturally sensitive words out of context [3]. Just because you can say hello in Hawaiian, writes Oliver, that doesn't automatically give you the right to do so. 

 

For aloha isn't merely a simple greeting. It has a profound (some might say sacred) meaning for native speakers, referring to a spiritual force that might be described as love, peace, or compassion; a force that is fundamental to existence. Aloha means recognising this force in oneself, in others and in all things.

 

I suppose a Heideggerian might identify aloha as an elementary term - i.e., one that speaks Being [4] - and it might be argued that it is devalued when coming from the mouth of a tourist, or someone who uses it simply to add a little exotic colour to a song lyric.

 

Personally, I wouldn't want to take this argument too far. However, I can agree that we all need to be cautious and respectful when using words that we don't fully understand and which speak others in their otherness; i.e., we all need to mind our language, as it were - even Mr. Rotten.      

 

 

Notes

[1] 'Hawaii', by Public Image Limited (John Lydon / Bruce Smith / Lu Edmonds / Scott Firth), will be released on vinyl as a limited edition 7" single later this year. To watch the official promo video, click here. Or to watch the band performing the song on The Late Late Show, click here. 

[2] 'Death Disco', by Public Image Limited (John Lydon / Keith Levene / Jah Wobble / Jim Walker), was a single release in June 1979 on Virgin Records: click here for the official video. An alternative version entitled 'Swan Lake' can be found on Metal Box (Virgin Records, 1979).  

 

[3] David Oliver, 'Is it time to stop saying "aloha" and other culturally sensitive words out of context?', USA Today (13 Jan 2023): click here. 

 

[4] For Heidegger, the ultimate task of philosophy is to preserve the force of the elementary words in which Dasein expresses itself. See Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Blackwell, 2001), p. 262.

Being is Time: Life in the Present Perfect Continuous

Image credit: UCLA / Horvath Lab

 

Somewhat paradoxically, whilst having a minimal sense of self on the one hand, I've always possessed a strong sense of self-continuity through time on the other, and have never really bought into the Shakespearean idea of there being seven distinct ages into which a single life might be neatly divided up [1].

 

Thus, when someone asked in relation to a recent post adapted from the Von Hell Diaries [click here] whether it made me sad to realise that forty years had passed since the events described on 3 October 1982 - or frightened to think that I would soon be passing from middle age to old age - I had to say no, not really.

 

For like Jaz Coleman, time means nothing to me, and whether something happened forty years ago or yesterday, it's all the same to me [2]. I am that unity of past, present and future. That is to say, I understand time not just as something that can be measured by the ticking of a clock, but as fundamental to our being. Indeed, one might even say that being is time.     

 

And unlike the Killing Joke frontman, I don't even have to shut my eyes in order to remember childhood thoughts and feelings; for I still think those thoughts and experience those feelings. In other words, because I live in what might be termed by a grammarian as the present perfect continuous, I've no need to make an imaginative journey back in time, or to dream.      

 

But aren't you worried that you're just stuck in the past?, asks the same interrogator.

 

Again, the answer is not really. 

 

In fact, I'm more concerned - as a philosopher - with the consequences of privileging the present [3] and having a vulgar conception of time in which the past is denigrated as that which we must move on from and leave behind, as if no longer important, when, in fact, not only does the past inform the present, but it awaits us in the future too [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm thinking here of the famous monologue in Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy As You Like It (1623) which opens with the line "All the world's a stage". However, I'm aware of the fact that this division of human life into a series of stages was a commonplace of art and literature and not something invented by the Bard of Avon. Whilst ancient authors tended to think in terms of three or four such stages, medieval writers liked to think in terms of seven for theological reasons.   

 

[2] I'm quoting from the Killing Joke song 'Slipstream', from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions, (Noise Records, 1990): click here. The track was written by Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker and Martin Atkins. Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group.

 

[3] I am increasingly sympathetic to thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida who are concerned that the understanding of Being in the metaphysical tradition is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present; i.e., that the present is viewed as more real or immediate than the past or future, with the former seen as merely the 'no-longer-now' and the latter as merely the 'not-yet-now'. 

      This tradition has run all the way from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond; see, for example, Lawrence's 1919 Preface to his New Poems (1918), in which he writes of the incarnate Now as supreme over and above the before and after and of the quivering present as the very quick of Time. For Lawrence, the past and future are mere abstractions from the present; a crystallised remembrance and a crystallised aspiration.

      Lawrence's preface can be found as Appendix I to The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 645-649.      

 

[4] I think Heidegger refers to this ontological baggage in Being and Time (1927) as Gewesenheit (i.e., our been-ness).

 

 

To Hold On or Let Go (Reflections on a Garden Gnome)

Festhalten (SA/2022)

 

 

I. 

 

In a sense, much like the figure pictured above, we are all hanging on for dear life to the great flowerpot that is the world we know and love. 

 

And of course, being able to hold on, hold tight, and hold still is crucial at times. But then, equally crucial, is knowing when and how to let go ... 

 

II. 

 

This question is often addressed by poets and playwrights; most famously by Shakespeare in Hamlet (1603) [1]. 

 

Interestingly, D. H. Lawrence chooses to discuss whether to let go or to hold on not only in terms of the individual, but at the level of the species:

 

 

Must we hold on, hold on

and go ahead with what is human nature

and make a new job of the human world?

 

Or can we let it go?

O, can we let it go,

and leave it to some nature that is more than human

to use the sperm of what's worth while in us

and thus eliminate us?

 

Is the time come for humans

now to begin to disappear,

leaving it to the vast revolutions of creative chaos

to bring forth creatures that are an improvement on humans

as the horse was an improvement on the ichthyosaurus?

 

Must we hold on?

Or can we now let go?

 

Or is it even possible we must do both? [2] 

 

 

That's an amusing additional question to end on - one to which I'm not sure I know the answer: perhaps it is possible; perhaps it isn't. 

 

But maybe the best way to confront the blackmail of an either/or is simply to refuse it like Bartleby; i.e., to choose not to choose as a matter of preference; to understand that when faced by a situation that demands we select one option or the other we can always smile say neither/nor, thank you very much [3].     

 

 

III.

 

Philosophers and religious thinkers have also debated whether man's great goal is self-preservation (holding on) or self-abandonment (letting go). 

 

Nietzsche for example, spoke in an early essay of man as a being who clings on the back of a tiger which empowers but also threatens to devour him [4]. 

 

However, he also writes about the need for man to let go - of the past, of God, of friends, etc. - and discover how to forget (a crucial aspect of innocence as Nietzsche understands the latter); don't be a memory-monger, he says, learn, rather, to love fate (i.e., embrace a kind of non-willing and move towards a state of what Heidegger likes to term Gelassenheit - a mixture of serenity, joyful wisdom, and a sense of release) [5].   

 

That, I suppose, is the vital point; letting go is also a letting be, allowing things to sparkle in their own freedom and mystery.         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring, of course, to the the opening line of the soliloquy given by Prince Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." For earlier refelctions on the verb to be, see the post of 5 August 2022: click here.

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'To let go or to hold on -?', in The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 372-73. Note that this is not the full poem reproduced here; there are five other stanzas before these closing verses.

[3] Having said that, I'm not a great fan of Herman Melville's figure of Bartleby the Scrivener; see what I write in the post published on 31 January 2013: click here. 

[4] See Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 80. I discuss this idea in a post published on 23 September 2020: click here.

 

[5] Heidegger borrowed the term Gelassenheit from Meister Eckhart and the Christian mystical tradition. He first elaborated the idea in a 1959 work which included two texts: Gelassenheit and Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit: Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken. An English translation of the latter was first published in 1966 as "Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking". It can now be found as Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, (Indiana University Press, 2010). 

      For a post published on 24 February 2021 in which I discuss the idea of Gelassenheit in relation to the Money Calm Bull: click here.    

 

 

Nietzsche Popped My Cherry: Reflections on Heidegger's Hymen

Artwork by Wesley Johnson

 

The hymen is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, 

neither the inside nor the outside. It is that which stands between; 

the intimate binding middle that brings together two bodies whilst holding them apart.

 

 

Someone from Wisconsin - America's dairyland - who, when not making cheese, likes to read European philosophy and listen to old school punk rock, suggests with reference to a recent post that perhaps what Heidegger means by the phrase Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is that Nietzsche was the one who took his philosophical innocence or purity - his virginity, if you will - and that the phrase might productively be read in relation to Derrida's thinking on the hymen [1].      

 

That seems to me to be a clever and helpful insight. And I do like the idea of Heidegger being broken by Nietzsche in the sense of being fucked and fucked hard (or fucked up and fucked over). One can't help recalling Deleuze's interpretation of the history of philosophy in terms of penetrating (and being penetrated by) those authors who move us most (something that ultimately results in monstrous offspring) [2].

 

The key thing is that inspiration comes not from above, but from behind and below and that there is no immaculate conception; there is, rather, pain, violence, bloodshed ... Philosophy is not an ideal love of wisdom, but a perverse form of libidinal materialism. 

 

Heidegger isn't merely stimulated by Nietzsche's ideas, he's ravished and broken by the insistence with which Nietzsche imposes himself; Nietzsche infiltrates, inseminates, and impregnates. Which is why Zarathustra's instruction to his followers to lose him and find themselves, isn't so easy. Once the hymen has been torn - and one's virginity is lost in the very act that proves its existence - there's no going back; one is fatally wedded to Nietzsche for life.      

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Unfortunately, my knowledge of Derrida is very limited; as far as I understand it, hymen indicates both proximity and separation; i.e., the relation and the difference between two bodies. But what this tells us - or how we are supposed to think la logique de l'hymen in relation to the Nietzsche/Heidegger relationship - I'm not quite sure. 

      For Derrida's description of the hymen as a kind of mediating space, see 'The Double Session', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 210-215 

 

[2] See Deleuze, 'Letter to a Harsh Critic', in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

Nietzsche Broke Me

maierfiles.myspreadshop.at

 

 

Heidegger's intriguing late confession, as reported by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, that Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is usually translated into English as Nietzsche broke me. 

 

It's a straightforward if not entirely satisfactory translation. And still the meaning of the sentence remains unclear; what does it signify to be broken by someone? More precisely, what does Heidegger mean when he says he's been broken by Nietzsche?

 

Does he mean, for example, that reading and thinking with and against Nietzsche in an intense and prolonged manner has left him feeling exhausted, even shattered? That's possible. Nietzsche, of course, even drove himself into a state of mental and physical collapse by pursuing his own philosophy and attemping to revalue all values. 

 

Or does he mean he's ultimately been unable to overcome or surpass Nietzsche; is this Heidegger submitting or quietly conceding defeat? Again, that's possible. As one commentator says: "Heidegger never loses Nietzsche, never 'locates' him, never shakes free of him, because Nietzsche never releases his grip on Heidegger." [1]

 

But, on the other hand, maybe Heidegger means that it was Nietzsche who enabled him to find his own voice and to shine with his own light (for the silence is also broken and so is the new day) - i.e., that it was his confrontation with Nietzsche in the mid-late 1930s which helped him make a shift in his thinking away from Being and Time (and National Socialism).

 

Interestingly, the German word kaputt - which we use in English (though spell with just the one 't')  - derives from the French term être capot, which figuratively means to lose, or to be ruined, but which, more literally, means to have a bonnet pulled over your eyes, leaving you confused and unable to see. 

 

So perhaps that's what Heidegger meant when he said that Nietzsche left him feeling kaputt - not broken, or beaten, exhausted or destroyed, but hoodwinked (blinded, deceived, misled ...).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] David Farrell Krell, 'Heidegger's Reading of Nietzsche: Confrontation and Encounter', Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Oct 1983), pp. 271-282. Line quoted is on p. 271.       

      As Krell goes on to say: "That is fortunate. The tempestuous encounter with Nietzsche prevents Heidegger from becoming what so many interpreters have taken him to be, namely, a bloodless shade of Hegel." [271]

Thanks to Maria Thanassa and Sophie Stas for their help with this post. 

 

For a follow up post - Nietzsche Popped My Cherry - click here.

At the Well with Martin Heidegger, D. H. Lawrence and Onyofi the Chimp

Photo: Digne Meller-Marcovicz

 

Water is H₂O; hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

but there is also a third thing, that makes it water. 

And nobody knows what that is. [1] 

 

 

I.

 

There's a famous photo that circulates within philosophical circles of Heidegger carrying a bucket of water drawn from the star-topped well outside of his small, three-room cabin in the Black Forest Mountains of southern Germany. 

 

Heidegger loved this location and he worked on some of his key texts whilst staying at die Hutte. It was, for him, an authentic dwelling place with which he claimed an intellectual and emotional intimacy [2].

 

It's a nice photo. And it suggests that, for Heidegger, a well is more than simply a hole in the ground that allows you to access water; there's something magical about a well and - along with natural springs - they have an important place within the cultural and religious imagination.   

 

So, the question is: Does water drawn by hand from a well possess qualities that water from a tap does not? 

 

D. H. Lawrence certainly thought so. He regarded indoor plumbing as something which fatally intervened between himself and the naked forces of life: "Every time we turn on a tap to have water [...] we deny ourselves and annul our being." [3] 

For Lawrence, when we draw water directly from its underground source, or kindle a fire with some sticks and dry grass, we partake of the Mysteries. Like Heidegger, he believed that we lose far more with all our labour-saving appliances than we gain [4].

 

It sounds, of course, like nonsense to those whose thinking about the natural elements is (knowingly or unknowingly) shaped by scientific understanding; to those for whom water, for example, is merely H₂O. 

 

But it's surely worth remembering just how miraculous clean, fresh water is and it surely wouldn't hurt if we explored the ontological status of water and started to think it as a thing, rather than simply as a resource (or standing reserve) to be exploited and consumed [5]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Here's another question: Can non-human creatures - such as apes - also partake of the mysteries of the sacred well?

 

Lawrence would probably be okay with this idea, but Heidegger might start mumbling about the animal being poor in world and lacking hands, etc. 

 

However, rather amazingly, researchers have just discovered that Ugandan rainforest chimpanzees are digging wells of their very own in order to access and/or filter drinking water and that the practice is spreading. This behaviour is relatively rare in the animal kingdom and it's the first time it's been observed in rainforest chimps. 

 

It's believed that an immigrant female chimpanzee, called Onyofi, introduced the new skill into the community, after she arrived in 2015. Her well-digging activity immediately attracted attention and soon other young chimps and adult females were copying her (not so the adult males, although they happily drink the fresh water once all the hard work's been done) [6].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'The third thing', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 447. 

 

[2] See Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut, (The MIT Press, 2006).  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years Before the Mast', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 117. 

[4] This does not mean that we must do away with all technology and indoor plumbing. As Heidegger writes: 

      "We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices and, also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature." 

      See Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, (Harper Torchbooks,1966), p. 54.

 

[5] This idea is developed at length by Kalpita Bhar Paul in his essay 'A Heideggerian Perspective on Thinking about Water: Revisiting the Transition from Hydrology to Hydrosocial Nexus', Environmental Philosophy (2019). This work is available to read online (or to download as a free pdf) on academia.edu: click here.

[6] See Hella Péter, Klaus Zuberbühler, and Catherine Hobaiter, 'Well-digging in a community of forest-living wild East African chimpanzees', in Primates (2022). It can be accessed on SpringerLink by clicking here. Or, for a digested read, see Olivia Miller's article 'Rainforest chimpanzees dig wells for cleaner water' (28 June 2022) on the University of Kent website: click here.  

 

 

A Philosopher's Guide to Home Decorating 1: Always Use a Paintbrush Not a Roller

Deutsche Philosophen malen lieber mit Pinseln 

(SA/2022)

 

 

We all know the advantages of working with a roller rather than a brush; thanks to its porous character, the former holds far more paint and provides a thin, even coat over a larger surface area.

 

Thus it is that rollers are much favoured by those who worry about saving time and money, which is probably the majority of people drifting round Homebase like DIY zombies.   

But even if the roller is a faster and more economical method of painting walls and ceilings, as a philosopher I continue to advocate for the use of a fine set of brushes and decorating slowly with great care taken over every stroke, so as to create a more textured and individual look.   

 

Ultimately, the paintbrush is a genuine hand tool (and thing) in the way that a roller is not. 

 

That is to say, when one paints with a brush, one works in a blind fashion that is determined by the body (its pleasures and fatigues); when one uses a roller, the mind is very much directing things and the eyes remain wide open at all times. 

 

I don't know if Heidegger ever painted his mother's house, as I am now doing, but he certainly knew a thing or two about the vital importance of what he termed handwork (which, rather surprisingly perhaps, also includes thinking) [1].     

 

Just as the typewriter degrades the art of writing, so does the roller degrade the art of painting [2]. Take a brush in your hand and paint with it and you will understand that, in its essence, it is more than merely useful - it is reliable. 

What does that mean? 

 

Well, according to Heidegger, the reliability of things (as things) - be they tools or items of footwear - consists in the fact that they "embed human beings in those relations to the world that make life stable" [3].

 

A roller is reliable only in the most banal sense of the word, exhausting itself in pure functionality. It might allow you to quickly add colour to the walls of a property, but it won't allow you to paint a dwelling place (any more than email allows you to compose a love letter). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See my post 'You Need Hands' (1 June 2019), for remarks on Heidegger's love of the human hand: click here. 

 

[2] Readers are reminded of my three part series of posts reflecting on the typewriter published in June 2019: click here, for example, to read part one on the case of Martin Heidegger and the Schreibmaschine.   

 

[3] Byung-Chul Han, Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 69. 

 

 

Notes on Byung-Chul Han's 'Non-things' (Part 1)

 

Polity Press (2022) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Once upon a time, to value material objects - or things - was seen as some kind of moral failure; a sign that one lacked spiritual refinement; that one was greedy, vulgar, and superficial.

 

But times have changed and, today, more and more people are waking up to the fact that if they wish to do more than live their entire lives in a virtual universe, then they had better find a way to reconnect with actual objects which provide a (relatively) stable physical environment in which to dwell and encounter other beings.      

 

Philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han has been telling us this for some time now and, in his new book, he describes how the terrestrial order is disappearing before our very eyes; that is to say, how the world of things is being rapidly replaced by a digital realm of Undinge. 

 

Not only does digitalisation disembody the world, it abolishes memory, as the Japanese author Yōko Ogawa foresaw in her 1994 novel Hisoyaka na Kesshō [b] - a work that Han nods to in the preface to his new book, although, as he points out, in contrast to her fictional dystopia, "we do not live in a totalitarian regime whose memory police brutally rob us of our things and memories" [viii], it is, rather, "our intoxication by communication and information that makes things disappear" [viii]. 

 

In other words - and this is the main argument of the book - non-things obscure actual objects, including human beings, draining them of physical presence as they effectively become ghosts in the machine: "We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud." [1]          

 

 

II. 

 

The old tree at the bottom of the garden - or that little wooden table which has stood in the corner of the frontroom for as long as you can remember - these things provide a calm centre to the world and stabilise our lives by providing a level of familiarity and continuity that you won't find in the frenzied virtual realm. 

 

Even the so-called internet of things, is really just an attempt to turn things into information terminals. Similarly, 3D printers "devalue the being of things" [3], transforming them into "the material derivatives of information" [3] - simulated objects which you can interact with but never touch or hold tight (not that we still possess hands). 

 

It's impossible to be Heideggerian in the land of non-things: for Dasein dwells in the terrestrial order of things. The smart home is really just a smart prison allowing ever-greater surveillance of our lives; we are being incarcerated, says Han, in the infosphere - and its happening in the name of greater freedom (not the freedom to act, but the freedom to choose; the freedom of the consumer). 

Another thing that is vanishing, is truth - remember that? It seems we don't have time for it any longer: "In our post-factual culture of excitement, communication is dominated by affects and emotions." [6] Spend a few minutes on Twitter and you'll soon find that out. 

 

Not only do we have no memories of the past, we cannot promise the future; as Nietzsche recognised, we are no longer capable of making commitments or being faithful - again, these things require too much discipline, too much hard work and too much time. We're too playful - and too pain averse - to practice even the slightest degree of cruelty towards the self. 

Those who still have hands and feel themselves able to act, have a duty to safeguard those old things in which memories are stored (to resist the urge to sell everything on eBay) - and to self-harm ...

 

III.

 

So: is it better to own a small record collection, or be able to access unlimited music online? How you answer this question tells us a good deal about what sort of human being you are (and not simply what generation you belong to). 

 

Possession, as Han says, "relates to the paradigm of the thing" [13]. 

 

Those like Klaus Schwab who think access rather than possession is the key to happiness, are not, it seems, interested in forming intense libidinal ties to objects. Indeed, some of these people are "no longer able to dwell with things or to imbue them with life" [13]. 

 

Personally, I love objects from the past - particularly from childhood (not that I have many) - even objects which have no value, interest, or meaning to other people (such as an old sea-shell). As Han says, possession is characterised by intimacy and is psychologically charged: "Things in my possession are vessels filled with emotions and recollections." [15]

 

In an interesting passage, he continues:

 

"The history that things acquire in the course of being used for a long time gives them souls and turns them into things close to the heart. Only discreet things, however, can be animated by intensive libidinal ties [...] Today's consumer goods are indiscreet, intrusive and over-expressive. They come loaded with prefabricated ideas and emotions that impose themselves on the consumer. Hardly anything of the consumer's life enters into them." [15]

 

This, sadly, is particularly true of children's toys and games (not that modern parents seem to care or the youngsters know what they are being denied). But it's also true of books, which have also lost their thingliness and their fate: 

 

"An e-book is not a thing, but information; it has an altogether different status of being. Even if we have it at our disposal, it is not a possession. It is something to which we have access. [...] It lacks the auratic distance from which an individual fate could speak to us [...] and it does not allow for the formation of intense ties. [...] E-books are faceless and without history. They may be read without the use of the hands. There is a tactile element in the turning of a book's pages that is constitutive of every relationship. Without bodily touch, no ties can emerge." [16] 

 

 

IV. 

 

Talking about the heavy weight of fate ... We now come to a chapter in Han's book on smartphones; in a nutshell, he doesn't like 'em. Like Walter Benjamin, he prefers the big, heavy phones from back in the day, which had "an aura of fate-like power" [18] about them. 

 

You don't get that with a smartphone - you get something small and light that you can put in your pocket; something that makes you feel in charge and connected to a non-resistant world that is at your fingertips 24/7 (the digital illusion of total availability). 

 

Meanwhile, what passes for and remains of the real world is desecrated as smartphone users retreat into their own self-enclosed space, where all is image and information. We carry the smartphone, but the smartphone enframes us, depriving reality of its presence and human beings of lived experience.

Oh, and don't get him started on the smooth design! Something he has previously compared with the trend for Brazilian waxing and the art of Jeff Koons (as discussed elsewhere on this blog - click here, for example). 

 

Their shiny smoothness shouldn't disguise the fact that smartphones are essentially the "devotional objects of the neoliberal regime" [24]; a regime that is itself smart enough to know that by serving our needs and exploiting our freedom it can exercise complete control.  

 

Whilst they may well function as devotional objects - i.e. a digital form of rosary - they are not transitional objects (i.e. a digital form of teddy bear or security blanket). And that's because they do not represent the other - rather, they are an extension of ourselves and the relationship we have with them is narcissistic. We might better think of smartphones as autistic objects (i.e. hard sources of sensation which ultimately destroy empathy and intensify our loneliness).     

 

 

V.

In a post from October 2013 on selfies, I said this:

 

"I have no wish to add my voice to those who suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem. I understand the arguments put forward by concerned commentators, but fear that they often collapse into precisely the sort of moral hysteria that greets everything to do with technology, sex, and the play of images." [c]

So it's a little awkward - if I wish to appear consistent - to now agree with Byung-Chul Han's critique of selfies: "A selfie is an exhibited face without aura. It lacks 'melancholic' beauty. It it characterized by digital cheerfulness. [...] A selfie is not a thing ..." [33]

 

However, he's right that an old (analogue) photo lovingly kept safe in an album is a thing in a way that a digital image stored on one's phone is not: "Because of its material nature, it is fragile and exposed to the processes of ageing and decay." [29]

 

And he's right also to say: "In digital photography, alchemy gives way to mathematics. It disenchants photography." [31] Worse, it eliminates the referent - i.e., kills the thing it seeks to represent - and instead of capturing something of the real world, it generates a "new, expanded reality that does not exist, a hyper-reality that no longer corresponds to reality" [32]. 

 

If e-books have no history and smartphones have no fate, then digital images have no destiny and selfies have no secrecy. They don't deserve to be printed - only quickly viewed and then deleted. Snapchat is an instrument of what Han calls perfect justice and "represents the culmination of instantaneous digital communication" [34].

 

The problem I have with a lot of what Han says here is related to the question of the human face, something he regards far more positively than I do. Also, he wishes for photography (and human life in general) to be accorded a certain seriousness and depth. 

 

Thus, he hates selfies for "announcing the disappearance of the kind of human being who is burdened by destiny and history" [36] and for giving expression to "a form of life that devotes itself playfully to the moment" [36]. But I think that's why I like them - I don't want to see people - especially young people - looking mournfully into the camera like beasts of burden weighed down by the spirit of gravity.   

 

VI.

 

I like this idea: "Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps." [37] 

 

In other words, AI lacks the "affective-analogue dimension, the capacity to be emotionally affected, which lies beyond the reach of data and information" [37]. 

 

Not only do heartless machines lack passion, but they aren't prone to moods either - i.e., they can't attune themselves to the world in the way human beings can and so cannot access the world (or read the room, as it were). 

 

Oh, and they're also deaf, which is a problem, as genuine thinking requires the ability to listen. 

 

Which is all very reassuring, particularly for Heideggerians keen to reaffirm Dasein's uniqueness. Han will be telling us next that robots lack spirit ... 

 

"Artificial intelligence may compute very quickly, but it lacks spirit." [38] 

 

See - what did I tell you? 

 

Without a pinch of Geist, all AI can do is assemble Big Data which will provide knowledge of a rudimentary kind, but won't reveal unto you the secrets of the universe, or even allow you to understand the results of your own data gathering. 

 

Human thinking may have its limitations, but, at its best - when it has become a form of erotics and seems to some a kind of madness or idiocy - then it is more than mere problem solving: "It brightens and clears the world. It brings forth an altogether other world." [43]

 

And the main danger that arises from AI, "is that human thinking will adapt to it and itself become mechanical" [43].     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022). The work was originally published in German as Undinge: Umbrüche der Lebenswelt (Ullstein Verlag, 2021).

 

[b] This novel by Yōko Ogawa has been translated into English by Stephen Snyder and published as The Memory Police, (Vintage, 2020). 

 

[c] To read the post on selfies and the rise of the Look Generation in full, click here.  

This post continues in part two, which can be accessed by clicking here ...

On Chthonic Vitalism 2: In the Etruscan Tombs with Giorgio Agamben

 

Etruscan tombs (Tarquinia)

 

The aim of those who practice philosophy in the Etruscan manner is to learn how to die.

 

 

I. 

 

For D. H. Lawrence, the Etruscans conceived of everything in terms of life - even death [a].

 

But the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees things the other way round; for him, the Etruscans conceived everything in terms of death - even life - and their civilisation was (whilst vital) fundamentally chthonic in character. 

 

This is evidenced by the fact that although the Etruscans chose to build their homes on sites which were ostensibly above ground, they chose to dwell in a more profound sense in the vertical depths: "Hence the Etruscan taste for caves and for recesses dug into the rock, and their preference for tall ravines, gorges, and the steep walls of peperino [...]" [b]

 

Those who visit the tombs, writes Agamben, "immediately perceive that the Etruscans inhabited Chthonia, and not Gaia" [109] and that they had their true being in the underworld - were epichthonioi as the Little Greek would say - and not on the surface of the Earth facing skywards. Agamben writes:

 

"The uniquely subterranean character of these Etruscan spaces can also be expressed, when comparing them to other areas of Italy, by saying that what we are seeing is not landscape as such. The affable, familiar landscape that we can serenely embrace with our gaze and which overruns the horizon belongs to Gaia. In chthonic verticality, however, the landscape vanishes; every horizon disappears and makes way for the nefarious, unseen face of nature." [110] 

 

 

II.

It's not that Lawrence is wrong exactly to stress, as he does, the vitalism of the Etruscans, it's just that he fails to emphasise the chthonic nature of this vitalism. Agamben is spot on to write of this fascinating people with iron in their soul: 

 

"They did not love death more than life, but life was for them inseparable from the depths of Chthonia; they could inhabit the valleys of Gaia and cultivate her countryside only if they did not forget their true, vertical dwelling." [110-111]

 

This is why the tombs hollowed out in the naked rock do more than merely house the dead and allow us to imagine how the Etruscans conceived of the afterlife; they also allow us to more profoundly understand "the movements, the gestures, and the desires of the living people who built them." [111] 

 

The reason that the Etruscans "built and protected the dwellings of their dead with such assiduous care" [110], was because of their "unshakable chthonic dedication (rather than, as one might assume, their chthonic dedication arising from their care for the dead)" [110].

 

They understood - in a way that most modern people do not - that life only exceeds mere existence and flowers into the fourth dimension when it "safeguards the memory of Chthonia" [111]. 

 

In other words, because we are mortal, then confronting our own finitude and learning how to live in the knowledge and the shadow of death is the most vital aspect of being human. As Heidegger says: Dasein is essentially a being-towards-death [Sein-zum-Tode] [c]. 

The Etruscans demonstrated "that there is an intense community and an uninterrupted continuity between the present and the past, and between the living and the dead" [111]. We forget or dismiss our relationship with the underworld, with the realm of matter, with death, at our peril (a point that the New York based German artist Heide Hatry makes repeatedly in her work). 

 

For ultimately, not only must Gaia and Chthonia be understood as inseparable, but the world of the living (the biosphere) "cannot exist without exchange and interaction with the chthonic thanatosphere" [111].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the first post in this series on chthonic vitalism - 'In the Tombs With D. H. Lawrence' - click here.

 

[b] Giorgio Agamben, 'Gaia and Chthonia', in Where Are We Now? trans. Valeria Dani, (ERIS, 2021), p. 110. Future page references will be given directly in the post.

 

[c] See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Division II, chapter 1.

 

On Finding Ourselves in a State of Exception (Part 1)

Giorgio Agamben

 

We will have to ask ourselves the only serious question that truly matters: where are we now? 

And it is a question we should answer not just with our words, but with our lives too.

 

 

I.

 

A state of exception is one which grants the powers that be the right to suspend parliamentary procedure and transcend the rule of law in the name of the greater good - or, as in the case of the coronavirus pandemic, public health.

Although the idea that a ruler or government may need to take extraordinary measures in order to deal with an emergency of some kind is nothing new, the concept of Ausnahmezustand was introduced into modern political philosophy by Carl Schmitt (someone who, as a prominent member of the Nazi Party, knew a thing or two about creating and exploiting a crisis situation in order to consolidate and extend power).     

 

The concept was then further developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who, in his book State of Exception (2005), argues that rule by decree has become an increasingly common phenomenon in all modern states. To illustrate this, he traces out the manner in which the September 11 attacks mutated into a war on terror; something which involved invading Afghanistan and bombing Baghdad, but also justified the creation of a surveillance system (in the name of homeland security) which placed everyone under suspicion. 

 

The key thing is: temporary measures have a way of becoming permanent once they are put in place; i.e., the exception becomes the rule ...

 

 

II.  

 

And so, here we are in 2022 ... 

 

But, asks Agamben, where are we now as we enter a post-pandemic world? 

 

To try and answer this question, Agamben has collected 25 short texts written during the state of exception triggered by Covid-19 [a]. Reflecting upon the Great Reset affecting Western democracies, he observes with astonishment as a majority of citizens not only accept but demand unprecedented limitations on their freedom.

 

Agamben took a lot of criticism for these short texts, including from fellow intellectuals who, rather than think through the political and ethical consequences of the measures taken during the pandemic, gleefully supported mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing rules, and programmes of mass vaccination.

 

But he should, rather, have been commended for his courage in speaking up and speaking out when so many remained silent or simply echoed the official line that biosecurity (and protecting the state health system) is all that matters.  

 

 

III.

 

Agamben cerainly doesn't mince his words: he explicitly states at the outset, for example, that, in his view, "the dominant powers of today have decided to pitilessly abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy - with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions" [8] and replace it with a new order that smells suspiciously despotic. 

 

We've not seen anything like this in Europe since 1933, "when the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler, without formally abolishing the Weimar Constitution, declared a state of exception that [...] effectively invalidated the constitutional propositions that were ostensibly still in force" [8] [b].

 

New governing techniques - sold to us via a compliant media and our favourite online networks - combine ideals of wokeness and wellness into a kind of zen fascism. But, rather touchingly, Agamben remains optimistic; he can still envision new forms of resistance "and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them" [10] [c]. 

 

I'm not quite sure I understand precisely what he means by this politics to come, but he insists it will "not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the techonological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it" [10] [d].

 

Hmmm ...

 

 

IV. 

 

The coronavirus pandemic was one thing: the climate of panic cultivated by the media and authorities in order to establish a state of exception was something else. Who now would disagree with that? With the fact that the response to Covid-19 was disproportionate to say the very least. 

 

But then it provided the ideal pretext for imposing exceptional measures and increasing the level of fear that has been "systematically cultivated in people's minds" [13] in recent years; fear which makes us regard everyone as a vector of infection. 

 

Even those individuals who appear perfectly fit and well may be asymptomatic plague-spreaders. In fact, the apparently healthy are more dangerous than the obviously sick - so it becomes necessary to lock everyone up (or down) just to be on the safe side. 

 

And if this results - as it must - in the deterioration of human relationships, well, too bad; "even loved ones must not be approached or touched" [15]. Bare life is better than risking even the tiniest chance that one might get seriousy ill and die. 

 

But, unfortunately, bare life and the fear of losing it, "is not something that unites people; rather, it blinds and separates them" [18]. A society that values survival at all costs (which is even prepared to sacrifice freedom) ultimately isn't a society at all. 

 

And it certainly isn't a dwelling place; a Heideggerian word that Agamben seems to cherish, much like Byung-Chul Han, who in his most recent work insists mankind no longer knows how to dwell on the earth and under the sky [e]. It's certainly hard to dwell when you are socially distanced from other mortals and think that communicating on Zoom is preferable to meeting face-to-face. 

 

Like Agamben, I don't believe you can sustain or create a community based on new digital technology alone. In the end, hell is not other people, but the suspension of real friendships and physical contact with others.     

 

 

V.  

   

One of the great zombie-mantras of the pandemic - certainly here, in the UK - was: Follow the science [f].

 

But perhaps instead we - particularly journalists - ought to have interrogated the scientists. Because it is often mistaken - and often dangerous - to entrust everything to those in white coats:

 

"Rightly or not, scientists pursue in good faith the interests of science and, as history can teach us, they are willing to sacrifice any moral concern in this pursuit. No one will need reminding that, under Nazism, many esteemed scientists executed eugenic policies, never hestitating to take advantage of the camps for the performance of lethal experiments they considered useful for the progress of science [...]" [44-45]      

  

Experimental vaccines anyone ...?

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (ERIS, 2021). 

      This work was originally published in Italy as A che punto siamo? L'epidemia come politica, (Quodlibet, 2020). 

      All page numbers in the post refer to the updated English edition which has added chapters.

 

[b] Some readers will baulk at this hypothesis and find it silly (or offensive) to compare what is happening in Europe now with what happened in the 1930s. But Agamben insists that the liberal democratic order is "being replaced by a new despotism that, with the pervasiveness of its controls and with its suspension of all political activity, will be worse than the totalitarianisms we have known thus far" [42]. 

 

[c] Agamben would hate my description of his thinking as optimistic. As he tells one interviewer (Dimitria Pouliopoulou): "Pessimism and optimism are psychological states that have nothing to do with political analyses: those who use these terms only demonstrate their inability to think." [64]

 

[d] Speaking with Dimitria Pouliopoulou, Agamben says this about his idea of a politics to come: "For a careful observer it is difficult to decide whether we live today, in Europe, in a democracy that sees increasingly despotic forms of control, or in a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy. It is beyond both that a new, future politics will have to appear." [69]

 

[e] See Byung-Chul Han, Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022). I reflect on this book in a post that to be published shortly. 

[f] Whilst Agamben hints at a zombie-like aspect of the pandemic when he refers to human bodies "suspended indefinitely between life and death" in a twilight zone, unable to escape "its strictly medical boundaries" [64], I can't help thinking first and foremost of the ever-brilliant Mark Steyn whenever I hear someone utter the phrase follow the science: click here. 

 

To go to Part 2 of this post, click here.

Travels in Hyperculture With Byung-Chul Han 2: Is There an Alternative to Tourism?

(Polity Press, 2022)

 

 

I. 

I closed part one of this post with a question that Byung-Chul Han puts to his readers: "When the 'here and now' becomes a repeatable there and later, will we have gained something or lost something?" [a] 

 

To put this slightly differently: should we celebrate becoming hypercultural tourists, or should we discard our Hawaiian shirts and seek out an alternative way of being in the world? Might we, for example, endeavour to become pilgrims - walking the earth and giving form to the formless, making the fragmentary whole, as Zygmunt Bauman [b] would have it? 

Well we might: but probably this would be futile. For hyperculturality is an evironment that produces (and allows for) a particular type of tourist - not pilgrims. Bauman, says Han, remains a romantic thinker who fails to recognise what is so unique about the hypercultural tourist; one who "knows neither longing nor fear" [41]. 

 

Unlike pilgrims, for example, hypercultural tourists always remains in the here and now; they are not "on their way to a counter-world, to a There" [40]. 

 

Having said that, I still wonder if there is an alternative to tourism ... Or must we all learn to laugh like Odradek [c] and accept ourselves as patchwork individuals with multicoloured natures? 

 

 

II.

 

It's obviously important to get terms straight: to understand that hyperculturality is a contemporary phenomenon that is uniquely different to interculturality, multiculturality, and transculturality ...

 

According to Byung-Chul Han, the first two of these things are historically "connected  with nationalism and colonialism" [53] and, philosophically, they "presuppose the introduction of an essentialist notion of culture" [53]. 

 

As for transculturality, which is all about transgression and the crossing of borders, that also has nothing to do with hyperculturality, wherein different cultural forms are simply placed side by side in a "borderless hyperspace" [56] and one is afforded the opportunity (as a tourist) to browse. 

 

Hyperculture also differs from multiculture "insofar as it involves little remembrance of origin, descent, ethnicity or site" [56-7].    

In sum: 

 

"Contemporary culture is marked not by the trans, the multi or the inter but by the hyper. The cultures between which an inter or a trans would take place are un-bounded, de-sited, and de-distanced: they have been turned into hyper-culture." [56]

 

Hyperculturality also "presupposes certain historical, sociocultural, technical and media processes" [57] and is linked to "a novel experience of space and time, a type of identity formation and a form of perception" [57]. 

 

 

III.

 

One of the things I like about hyperculture is that it doesn't regard appropriation as something sinful. 

 

Indeed, hyperculture desires and requires an intense level of appropriation in order to effect a dynamic process of transformation and engineer difference. Nothing is seen as alien and off-limits or has protected status; nothing belongs to anyone. Everything exists for consumption ...

 

One might ask at this point how hyperculture differs then from late capitalism; is it not just the cultural logic of the latter in much the same way as postmodernity was formerly described by its critics [d]? 

 

I'm not sure Han addresses this question. Though he does say that supermodernity - unlike postmodernity - is not ironic; it contains "an affirmation that the ironic mode cannot grasp" [68]. It's also friendlier, says Han. Which is nice, I suppose, as friendliness promises "maximum cohesion with minimum connectedness" [69].   

 

 

IV.

 

Perhaps, in the end, the tourist is simply another kind of wanderer; a figure that Nietzsche praised in Human, All Too Human (1878-80) [e]. Both wanderer and tourist move in a de-sited world and lack any final destination. However, whilst acknowledging the similarities, Han ultimately rejects this comparison:

 

"The wanderer's form of existence [...] does not resemble that of the hypercultural tourist. His way of walking still lacks the leisureliness that characterizes the tourist. And the world of the 'wanderer' is still peppered with deserts and abysses." [75]

 

Despite everything, says Han, Nietzsche "remained a pilgrim" [76] at heart and his wanderer remained on the path of struggle and suffering (a via dolorosa). 

 

And despite Nietzsche's remarkable far-sightedness, "he could not yet have suspected what kind of culture would emerge [...] He did not develop the idea of a hyperculture." [65]

V.

 

Han closes his study with a section entitled 'Threshold'. In it, he makes yet another return to Heidegger; if Nietzsche didn't quite see what was coming, Heidegger saw it emerging and rejected it outright:

 

"For him, hyperculture would be the end of culture as such. He repeatedly laments the loss of the homeland [Heimat]. The media, too, are blamed for the disappearance of the homeland, and ultimately also for the disappearance of the world." [77]

 

It's mass media - and now social media - which has carried people away into illusionary worlds that are not worlds, turning them into tourists. There's nothing primordial (from the perspective of Being) about surfing the internet. 

 

For Heidegger, the world has material reality - its a place of rocks and trees and meadows in bloom, as well as jugs and bridges and things made by hand - it's not a simulation made up from signs and images which we stare at on a screen, rather than dwell within. 

 

As a Lawrentian, of course, I'm naturally sympathetic to Heidegger's construction of a simplistic and romantic counter-world, as Han calls it; it might lack plurality and diversity, but at least it includes books, animals, and silence. 

 

Ultimately, one has to choose: to be a pilgrim-wanderer who crosses thresholds in silence but with a face "contorted in pain" [83]; or a hypercultural tourist "smiling serenely" [83] and chatting endlessly. Homo dolores, or Homo liber - I'll let you decide ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 37. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] Byung-Chul Han refers us to Bauman's text Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, (Blackwell, 1995). As we will see, Han doesn't seem convinced by Bauman's attempt to resurrect the pre-modern figure of the pilgrim; one that re-theologizing thinkers and those looking for a fixed abode or home in the traditional sense often fall back on  

[c] Odradek is the strange creature in Kafka's short story 'The Cares of a Family Man' (see Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman's Library, 1993), pp. 183-85. 

      Like many other critics and thinkers, Han is fascinated by Odradek's hybrid identity and the fact he has no attachment to any site, or home. He writes: "Odradek's identity is not controlled by any teleology [...] he is not part of any purposive horizon [...] it is an identity that is cobbled together from various parts" and his laugh "has something ironic, mocking or uncanny about it" [48]. 

      However, although Odradek's nature "does somewhat resemble the patchwork structure of hypercultural identity" [49], he is not, concludes Han, a hypercultural tourist in the full sense.   

[d] I'm thinking here of the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson and his 1991 study Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press). For Jameson, postmodernism is a form of mass-popular culture driven by capitalism that also obliges us to consume.

 

[e] See aphorism 638, in Section 9 of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.