Travels in Hyperculture With Byung-Chul-Han 1: We Are All Tourists Now

 

In nil sapiendo vita iucundissima est

 

 

I.

 

As Jarvis Cocker correctly observed back in 1995: Everybody hates a tourist [a]. 

 

However, according to German philosopher Byung Chul-Han, writing ten years later in his 2005 study Hyperkulturalität [b] - and in agreement with the British ethnologist Nigel Barley - we are all more or less tourists dressed in Hawaiian shirts today; not because of a universal desire to explore faraway lands and experience foreign cultures, but because there are now no faraway lands or foreign cultures in a globalised world [c].

All that remains post-globalisation is hyperculture, or what some refer to as supermodernity; an era of accelerated technological change that results in a transformation of time and space - and, indeed, our very humanity. 

 

Hyperculture goes way beyond anything foreseen by Zarathustra, though perhaps he glimpsed something of it when he flew into the future [d]. To understand it a little better, let's take a closer look at Byung Chul-Han's study ...  

 

 

II.

  

The Greeks, of course, had a profound understanding of culture in terms of harmonious manifoldness; that is to say, unity in diversity cultivated on the very soil of discord and difference. Culture, for the Greeks, is what Nietzsche regards as the giving of style to various forms of life (whereas barbarism - the very opposite of culture - is precisely a "lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles" [e]).  

 

Byung Chul-Han also returns to the ancient Greeks on the question of culture. His reading, however, is informed by Hegel rather than Nietzsche, although in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), the former also speaks of the genesis of Greek culture in terms of heterogeneity and otherness in need of being overcome. 

 

In other words, whilst Greece was born of an original chaos of peoples, it was only via a long process of discipline and breeding that the true spirit of Greece could unfold. 

 

But whilst Hegel "tries to do justice to the fact" [3] that heterogeneity is an elementary aspect of the Greek character, once they have forged a European identity he stresses the importance of belonging to a happy home in which there is no longer any desire for that which is outside or alien; the foreign is now dismissed and it's all about family and fatherland.

 

This might have some negative consequences - such as being unable to see beyond one's own position or hear strange sounds - but, as Herder argues, it is precisely this myopia and deafness that allows for a state of cheerful self-contentment: "'National happiness' emerges because the 'soul' forgets the 'manifold dispositions' that dwell within it and elevates a part of itself to the status of the whole" [5].   

 

This type of happiness is unknown or of little interest to tourists in Hawaiian shirts. For they lack style, that is to say, lack the self-discipline needed for culture in the old sense characterised by closing one's eyes and one's ears to certain sights and sounds in order to see what is near to hand and hear the song of one's own soul. 

 

Han writes:

 

"Their happiness is of an altogether different kind; it is a happiness that emerges from an abolition of facticity, a removal of the attachment to the 'here', the site. In their case, the foreign is not 'sickness'. It is something new to be appropriated. The tourists in Hawaiian shirts inhabit a world that unbounds itself, a hypermarket of culture, a hyperspace of possibilities." [5-6]

 

Thus, these tourists in a hypercultural reality - which some, like Ted Nelson, term Xanadu - are just as content as natives living in a spiritual homeland bound by borders and rooted in bio-terrestrial reality (blood and soil), and they are certainly freer in many regards.  

 

 

III. 

 

The irony, of course, is that we were promised by the globalists that new modes of transport and new communications technology would open up the world and expand our horizons. But globalisation has shrunk cultural space and condensed everything:

 

"Heterogeneous cultural contents are pushed together side by side. Cultural spaces overlap and penetrate each other. This unbounding also applies to time. Not only different sites but also different time frames are de-distanced [...] Cultures implode; that is, they are de-distanced into a hyperculture." [9]

 

Again, some seem perfectly okay with this (although their happiness is reminiscent of that experienced by Nietzsche's letzter Mensch, which he describes as the happiness of a flea). Others, however, are not so pleased and feel obliged to offer resistance:

"There are many for whom [hyperculture] means the trauma of loss. Re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world. Thus, hypercultural de-siting will have to confront a fundamentalism of sites." [10]

That doesn't sound great. Deleuze and Guattari, who famously discuss all this in terms of de- and reterritorialization, warn of the dangers of attempting to recodify the world and form neo-territorialities based upon past ideals and the invention of new falsehoods. Ultimately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, "artificial, residual, archaic" [f] and, at worst, prone to quickly becoming fascistic.   

But I'm not sure how much we need to worry: mythical time (in which everything and everyone has a fixed place) is surely over. And so too is (linear) historical time. We are left, then, like it or not, living in this time; the time characterised by Vilém Flusser as that of the bit (rather than the image or the book):

 

"It lacks any comprehensive horizon of meaning. It is de-theologized, or de-teleologicized, into an 'atom-like' 'universe of bits', a 'mosaic universe' in which possibilities 'buzz' like points, or 'sprinkle' like 'grains', as 'discrete sensations' [...] 

      In this 'universe of points' [...] Dasein is surrounded by freely hovering possibilities. In this way, the 'universe of points' promises greater freedom. After all, the future is 'everywhere' that I 'turn to'." [12]

 

Heidegger might not like it - may think it compromises authenticity, dis-inherits Dasein, and produces a dictatorship of the They - but  I have to admit, I rather like the sound of this space-time that is more vortex than void, particularly as it allows also for increasing interconnectedness (with others and with things), expanding the future by creating an abundance of relations and possibilities. 

 

Whether this is driven by Eros, or a more perverse inclination, is debatable. But it's certain that even though hyperculture may help to bring about new forms and possibilities of being, Heidegger would not be persuaded to consider the upside of life today: "Faced with a colourful patchwork society, he would invoke the 'we' of a community of fate." [14]       

 

Ultimately, Heidegger is interested in dwelling, not travel and tourism. And he would fail to see that hyperculture is not merely universal monoculture. Sure, you can buy a Big Mac anywhere in the world - but it's fusion food that really defines what's going on today: 

 

"This hypercuisine does not level the diversity of eating cultures. It does not just blindly throw everything into one pot. Rather, it thrives on the differences. This allows it to create a diversity that would not be possible on the basis of preserving the purity of local food cultures. Globalization and diversity are not mutually exclusive." [16] [g]

 

 

IV.

 

As might be clear, devising a (non-essentialist) model of contemporary culture that is able to capture the dynamism of what's unfolding today isn't easy. And to be fair, Byung-Chul Han does a pretty good job. 

 

One understands from reading his essay how hyperculture is detached from any origin and brings heterogeneous elements together in such a manner that ideas of near and far, indigenous and foreign, become untenable; how culture is now boundless and unrestricted and we are all tourists within it. Not so much nowhere, as prepared to bid farewell to a here "that used to give Being its auratic depth, or rather the semblance of an aura" [34].           

 

We might also describe this culture as rhizomatic in nature - and Han credits Deleuze and Guattari for developing a concept in their work which "proves suitable for the description of certain aspects of hyperculture" [27]. He also summarises it for readers unfamiliar with the idea:

 

"The 'rhizome' denotes a non-centred plurality that cannot be subjected to any comprehensive order [...] Thus, a rhizome is an open structure whose heterogeneous elements constantly play into each other, shift across each other and are in a process of constant 'becoming'. The rhizomatic space is a space not of 'negotiation' but of transformation [...] Rhizomatic distribution, even dispersal, de-substantializes and de-internalizes culture and thereby turns it into hyperculture." [27-28]    

 

We can contrast this with an arboreal model of culture with its deep roots and branches. Further - and finally - rhizomatic hyperculture is not one of inwardness or remembrance. It has, if you like, no soul; or, to use Benjamin's favoured term, no aura - "the resplendence and radiance of a specific 'here and now' that cannot be repeated there [34]. 

           

Still, as Han notes, there's no need to lament de-auratization in terms exclusively of loss (such as loss of origin, loss of essence, loss of authenticity, or even loss of Being as Heidegger would have it). Maybe - just maybe - something good will come of all this; "another reality, which shines in the absence of the auratic" [36].

 

The question is: "When the 'here and now' becomes a repeatable there and later" [37], will we have gained more than we lose? 

 

To find out how Byung-Chul Han answers, readers are invited to click here for part two of this post.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Pulp, 'Common People', single release from the album Different Class (Island, 1995). 

[b] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, (Merve Verlag, 2005) This text has now been pulished in an English translation by Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022) and page references given above refer to this edition of the work, rather than the German original. 

[c] Just to clarify at the outset: when Byung-Chul Han speaks of a hypercultural tourist, he does not necessarily mean someone who is always jet-setting or globetrotting: such a person is already a tourist when at home; there is no here or there or any final destination to arrive at. 

[d] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Land of Culture'. 

      Han credits Nietzsche with being "one of the few thinkers capable of looking far ahead, of resonating with vibrations that came from the future" [31]. Indeed, I might be being unfair to Zarathustra in suggesting that the idea of hyperculture was beyond his ability to conceive. Perhaps the thing that ultimately lets Nietzsche down is his insistent aestheticism, which "tends towards a re-teleologization, a re-theologization, of culture" [33].  

[e] Nietzsche, 'David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). p. 6. 

[f] Gilles Deleuze and Félix, Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257. 

[g] Interestingly, it's not just Heidegger who has an issue here. As Han reminds us: "Out of a fear of diversity, Plato already condemned the use of spices and the manifold dishes of Sicilian cuisine." [17] Amusingly, the attempt to maintain cultural purity and defend national cuisine always leaves one with egg on face. 

Manhole 69

 And above us all fluorescent tubes shall hang ...

  

I. 

 

'Manhole 69' is not, as far as I know, the name of gay sex club (though maybe it should be). 

 

It is, rather, the title of a short story by J. G. Ballard [a], concerning a medical experiment in which three volunteers have their brains tampered with so that they can exist without sleep and thus be able to live life 24/7, rather than spend a third of it as an invalid snoring their way through "'an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica'" [68], as the doctor in charge of the research puts it.

 

This same doctor - Dr. Neill - is convinced that his work marks a crucial evolutionary advance for man as a species [b]. As he tells his young colleague, John Morley:

 

"'None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we've freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel, we've added twenty years to those men's lives.'" [67-68]

 

Unfortunately, total wakefulness soon proves to be a nightmare. Because sleep, of course, and the chance to dream, is more than "'an inconvenient symptom of cerebral anoxaemia" [69]. Nor is it merely a form of idleness - i.e., a vice or moral failing - as some neoliberals seem to believe; the sort of fanatics who pride themselves on being able to get by on as little as three or four hours sleep a night.

 

Sleep is vital to our health and wellbeing. For if nothing else, as Morley points out, sleep gives us the chance to switch off and escape: "'Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the shock of being yourself'" [69] and to prevent you becoming like a waxwork dummy with open, unblinking eyes set in faces with "the empty, reflexless look of psychic zero" [87], which is what happens to Bobby Lang and his two fellow test subjects. 

 

As Morley concludes:

"'Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word 'sleep' fifty times. After a point the brain's self-awareness dulls. It's no longer able to grasp who or why it is, and it rides adrift. [...] 

      The central nervous system can't stand narcotomy.'" [87]

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, the negative consequences of sleep deprivation in the name of a life lived to the max have recently been explored by several cultural commentators and political theorists, including Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society (2015), a work I discussed on Torpedo the Ark a couple of months ago: click here. 

 

Readers might also be interested in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2014), a work in which Jonathan Crary also develops the argument that by expanding market values into every aspect of life and allowing consumer capitalism to operate around the clock, we have fatally submitted to a form of torture and compromised our own physical and mental wellbeing. 

 

As the author notes:

 

"Behind the vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected schema of a week, extracted from any unfolding of variegated or cumulative experience. [...] A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machine performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. [...] An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history [...]" [c]  

 

Crary suggests that sleep - as a restorative withdrawl that is intrinsically incompatible with the 24/7 world of neoliberalism - might provide a possible form of resistance and a refusal of the fascist imperative to always be wide awake [d]. 

 

He writes:

 

"In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. [...] Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present [...] it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it." [e]. 

 

Concluding:

 

"Sleep is an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistable forces of modernization." [f] 

 

In other words - and as Heidegger might say - Nur ein langes Nickerchen kann uns retten ...           

 

Notes

 

[a] 'Manhole 69' was originally published in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1957. It was then included in the collection Chronopolis and Other Stories, (Putnam Publishing, 1971). Page numbers given in this post refer to the tale as it appears in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 56-89. 

      The title, by the way, refers to a small narrow room or cubicle, without windows, and with just a solitary bright light shining from behind a steel grille in the ceiling; a place where it's always 3 a.m. After a while, it's easy to imagine the walls closing in ever closer. 

      Readers might also note that prisoners subjected to sleep deprivation - a form of torture endured by many victims of extrajudicial rendition - are often confined in rooms lit by high-intensity lamps and so cramped in size that they make it impossible even to lie down.   

 

[b] One of the three test subjects, Robert Lang, buys into this line of thinking, even though, as Morley points out, leaving the seas behind in order to become air-breathing creatures, isn't analogous with eliminating the need for sleep. Interestingly, Lang also subscribes to the view that sleep is a form of pseudo-death that keeps the human psyche orientated towards its own mortality. Eliminate sleep, therefore, "'and you also eliminate all the fear and defence mechanisms erected around it'" [78].  

      Cf. D. H. Lawrence writing in Fantasia of the Unconscious on the relationship between ourselves and the death-realm which is "active every moment of our lives", but particularly whilst we sleep and the individual consciousness is suspended and we lie "completely within the circuit of the earth's magnetism". It is this circuit, according to Lawrence, which removes the deadness (i.e. tiredness) of the body: "For each time we lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed, or laid in line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active death circuit, while we sleep." 

      See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 177.    

[c] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (Verso, 2014), pp. 8-9.

 

[d] Readers will doubtless recall that Deutschland Erwache! was one of the Nazi Party's most successful and oft-repeated slogans (taken from a poem by Dietrich Eckart entitled Sturmlied). Contrary to what many people believe, fascism compels to speech and constant activity; it never lets its citizens enjoy a silent night in which they might sleep in heavenly peace and dream their own sweet dreams.

 

[e] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, p. 10-11. 

 

[f] Ibid., p. 13.   

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From Porn to The End of Theory)

Byung-Chul Han

 

IV. 

 

Whilst philosophe du moment Byung-Chul Han gives reference to the four great Bs of 20th-century French philosophy - Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, and Baudrillard - it's clear that The Agony of Eros (2017) is primarily written under the influence of Alain Badiou. 

 

Which means his defence of love is really just an excuse to stage a neo-Marxist assault upon techno-capitalism, developing his argument that the latter is responsible for creating a burned-out society in which an obscene (pornographic) ideal of transparency and self-disclosure is the cultural norm, compromising other values, including secrecy, silence, and shame, upon which eros (and mental health) depend.    

 

Writing in The Burnout Society (2015), Han describes a pathological landscape shaped by depression, attention defecit disorder, and exhaustion, all thanks to a 24/7 lifestyle of continuous positivity - a form of violence in his view - in which we are all expected to become entrepreneurs of the self. This leads not only to ever greater levels of self-exploitation, but to narcissism, and thus the extermination of Otherness, which, once more, is crucial for love and, indeed, society. 

 

For when subjects are concerned exclusively with themselves, then relationship with others becomes impossible - as does thought - and we end up living in l'enfer du même ruled over by the kind of painfully inferior and deeply stupid politicians presently posturing (and virtue signalling) on the global stage. 

 

Anyway, let's return to The Agony of Eros (2017). I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers given refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press. 

 

 

V.

 

Porn

Han opens his fourth chapter with the kind of concise statement that readers will either love or loathe: "Porn is a matter of bare life on display." [29] 

 

It's an attempt, I suppose, to distill Baudrillard's rather complex idea of porn as the hyperreality of sex (i.e. the more sexual than sex) into a kind of pithy observation that some will find profound and others see as a piece of shallow sloganeering. Of course, it could be both ... 

Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez le surréalisme, said André Breton [a]. But if you love Love, you're also going to hate porn, which, according to Han, is antagonistic to eros and spells the end of sexuality as he would have it; i.e., something authentic, something natural, something sacred. 

 

The pornographication of the world is, he says, "unfolding as the profanation of the world" [29] - and this is a very bad thing; presumably because some things, like love, should be reserved only for the gods and not made freely available for misuse and commercial exploitation by mortals. 

 

Men might be encouraged to play with love - one possible definition of erotics. But should not be allowed to debase love - one possible definition of porn, in which there is nothing playful, nothing sanctified, nothing mysterious: "In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy." [32]             

 

Again, all this interests, but it does seem to be going over old ground; do we really want to resurrect the tired opposition between eroticism on the one side and porn on the other? One recalls D. H. Lawrence's axiom: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." [b]  

 

 

Fantasy

 

In Why Love Hurts (Polity, 2012), Eva Illouz makes the fascinating claim that, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, desire is no longer determined by the unconscious mind, so much as conscious selection. 

 

What's more, she argues, we have had our imagination heightened by all the faces and bodies we encounter online, with the result that we are more often disappointed with those we meet in the real world; the flesh never shapes up.  

 

Han doesn't quite buy this though: 

 

"Counter to what Illouz assumes, desire is not 'rationalized' today by increasing opportunities for, and criteria of, choice. Instead, unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. [...] Today's ego [...] does not desire. To be sure, consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. But desire is something different from both wanting and needing. Illouz does not take the libido-economical particularity of desire into account." [37]

For Han, fantasy survives because it inhabits an undefined space that is outside the network of information-technology: 

 

"It is not heightened fantasy, but - if anything - higher expectations that are responsible for the mounting disappointment experienced in contemporary society." [ 38]

 

The high information density of social media is not conducive to the imagination. That's why, says Han, "pornography which maximizes visual information [...] destroys erotic fantasy" [38]. The secret of eroticism is that it forever withdraws the object of one's desire from view; it provides a glimpse, but never reveals all. Love - like horror - takes place in the shadows. Indeed, at its most extreme, love is blind and makes blind; a retreat into the "twilight space of dreams and desire" [40].        

 

Unfortunately, today, "faced with the sheer volume of hypervisible images, we can no longer shut our eyes" [40]. Compulsive (and compulsory) hypervigilance certainly makes it extremely difficult to do so and hypervisibility might be thought the "telos of the society of transparency" [40-41].  

 

The agony of eros thus involves not only a crisis of fantasy, but being forced like Alex in A Clockwork Orange to have our eyelids clamped open, so that we might see everything all of the time. 

 

The Politics of Eros

 

Oh dear, Byung-Chul Han and I are forced to part company once more; too much talk, right from the off, concerning the universal nature of love (Badiou) and beautiful souls guided by Eros (Plato) ... 

 

As for contemporary politics within a burnout society, well, according to Han, it's founded on pleasure-based desire (epithumia) and has no interest in either eros or thumos - the latter being something I have written about on Torpedo the Ark: click here and/or here, for example [c].

 

Whilst acknowledging that "a politics of love will never exist" [44], that doesn't stop Han dreaming of love stories unfolding against a background of political events and of a secret resonance existing between politics and love. For political action is "mutual desire for another way of living - a more just world aligned with eros on every register" [44]. 

 

Is it? That's news to me. I mean it could be that, but it could be something entirely different; a politics of evil, for example, which understands love to be an eternal part of life, but only a part: "And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease [...]" [d].      

 

That, in a nutshell, is my concern with Byung-Chul Han: that he turns a once healthy process of the human soul (love) into a diseased ideal and I suggest he read Lawrence's hugely important novels Aaron's Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923) to get an astonishing insight into this. Or some Nietzsche.      

 

 

The End of Theory

 

When not inspired by the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism, Heidegger was moved by the beating wings of the god of love; it was Eros who encouraged him as a thinker to venture along previously untrodden paths into the incalculable. At least that's what he told his wife. And Han believes him, because he also believes that:

 

"Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same." [47] 

 

Thinking not only becomes more powerful, but also more uncanny, when it's eroticised. Without erotic inspiration it just becomes dreary and repetitive: "Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere 'sensuality'." [48] 

 

This is why an artificial intelligence will never be able to produce a beautiful philosophical concept and why genuine thinking "transcends the positivity of given facts" [49] and data-analysis. Confronted with the "pullulating mass of information and data" [50], says Han, we need theoretical thinking more than ever. For theories, like ceremonies and rituals, "confer form on the world" [50] and keep things from breaking down into sprawling chaos.

 

In other words, information overload "massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise" [50]. And that's a problem, because thinking "as an expedition into quietness" [50] demands calm. We are faced with a spiritual crisis at top volume: "Rampant, massive information - an excess of positivity - makes a racket." [50] 

    

And just as we can't close our eyes, neither can we block up ears. Philosophy might be the "translation of eros into logos" [52], but when it speaks it does so in a seductive whisper, it doesn't shout or issue commands. And it still respects the importance of silence. 

 

And on that note, I'll shut up ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] No surprise that Byung-Chul Han eventually calls on André Breton for support, describing the surrealist reinvention of love as "an artistic, existential, and political gesture" which "ascribes a universal power to eros"; the power of poetic revolution and renewal. See chapter 6, 'The Politics of Eros', in The Agony of Eros. The lines quoted are on p. 46. 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Having said this, Lawrence does then go on to call for rigorous censorship of genuine pornography, which he says you can recognise "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit" [241]. Where Lawrence and Byung-Chul Han appear to significantly differ is on the question of secrecy. Whereas the latter thinks it fundamental to eroticism, Lawrence writes:

      "The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved." [243]

      Of course, Lawrence was writing in a different time. Today, pornography is not underworld or under the counter, it's freely and openly available online and the styles, values, and norms of the sex industry have been largely determine mainstream culture (this is what is meant by pornification). Still, what he writes in this essay is something that the author of The Agony of Eros might like to consider.   

 

[c] Whilst I don't expect Han to have read either of the above posts, I'm surprised he didn't refer to Peter Sloterdijk's work on thumos in his psycho-political study Zorn und Zeit (2006). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 328.

      See also Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) in which I discuss the politics of evil (as well as the politics of style, the politics of cruelty, and the politics of desire), with reference to the work of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. 

 

 

To read part one of this post - Melancholia to Bare Life - click here.       

 

 

On Following the Science

Follow The Science Art Print 

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redbubble.com

 

 

When politicians says they will follow the science it means they are abdicating their duty to think and their responsibility to lead; they are hiding behind experts in order to justify their decisions and excuse their inevitable mistakes; Chris Whitty is basically a human shield employed to protect Boris Johnson. 

We repeatedly heard this phrase from UK government ministers during the Covid-19 pandemic - and I'm sure we'll hear it again this winter, if and when they decide to bring back social distancing, reintroduce mandatory mask wearing, and impose a new lockdown.

 

It is, as I indicate, a form of political cowardice and dishonesty, as well as a (perhaps wilful) misunderstanding of how science works; one that relies upon a rather slippery notion of consensus, when, in fact, there is no scientific agreement about how best to deal with a viral pandemic. 

 

Epidemiological models, based on what we have so far discovered about Covid-19, can vary greatly depending on the assumptions made by the modellers and how the data produced is interpreted and then implemented as actual policy. As one commentator has noted, government ministers "can trawl for evidence that suits their purposes or invest selectively in the types of research that are likely to show them in a favourable light" [1].  

 

Ultimately, the public are being misled whenever a politician claims to be simply following the science, even if political choices are (to a greater or lesser degree) informed by scientific findings. This is not because all politicians are liars or inherently corrupt; they may well be sincere in their belief that they are following the best scientific advice. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't guarantee "that this advice reflects an unbiased, unambiguous picture of how different policy options will work out in practice" [2].       

 

It's a shame that members of the mainstream media haven't done more in pointing this out. Too often during the pandemic, journalists simply followed the government's line in the naive belief that they were thereby also following the science. How refreshing it would have been if Laura Kuennsberg, for example, had stood up at a press briefing and reminded the PM that science does not think ... [3]

 

     

Notes

 

[1] Alex Stevens,  'Governments cannot just "follow the science" on COVID-19', Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 4, (June 2020), p. 560.  Click here to read online.  

 

[2] Ibid.  

[3] I'm borrowing the provocative claim made by Heidegger in Was Heisst Denken? (1954): "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht." See the English translation - What Is Called Thinking? - by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 8.

 

 

An Untimely Meditation on How to Write an Effective Blog (The Nietzsche Birthday Post 2021)

 

"It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow 

and the day after tomorrow, 

has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today ..." [1]  

 

 

Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask what makes a really effective post: 'Is it the personality of the writer alone that determines this?'

 

No: the effectiveness of a post has nothing to do with the personalty, the biography, or the psychology of the one who is said to have authored it - any more than it consists in allowing the reader to recognise themselves in the text. 

 

It's how untimely the post is in itself that counts and, ultimately, the strength of a text "is measured by the extent to which it refutes its creator - i.e., grounds something altogether different than that on which its creator himself stood and had to stand" [2]. 

 

That's why D. H. Lawrence was right to advise that we trust the tale and not the teller of the tale, although he's mistaken to say that the text merely tells us the truth of the present [3]. For at its best - which is to say at its most Unzeitgemässe - great writing of all description occupies an anomalous and ambivalent position in time, often speaking of and to a readership to come [4]. 

 

Haunted by the past, perturbed by the present, the untimely blogger projects their work into the future like an arrow, affirming that Greater Day which is not simply our tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow [übermorgen] which belongs to the distant stranger [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §212, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 2003).

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings VI', 34, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 318.  

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.  

[4] Nietzsche famously makes an appeal to posterity and often likes to describe himself (and his philosophy) as untimely; i.e., "acting counter to our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come". See the Foreword to 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60.  

      Readers who are interested in this topic might also like to see Duncan Large's excellent essay, 'On "Untimeliness": Temporal Structures in Nietzsche, Or "The Day After Tomorrow Belongs To Me"', Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 8, Autumn 1994, (Penn State University Press), pp. 33-53. Click here to read on JSTOR.

      As Large rightly points out, affirmation of the future - in all its openness and possibility - is, for Nietzsche, the mark of a true philosopher; whilst, on the other hand, insistence on a perpetual present with no sense of futurity (only progress) is a sign of cultural decadence.

 

[5] Or, as Duncan Large describes it in the above essay, "the radically other time of the Übermensch, situated beyond a hiatus of qualitative temporal difference" [p. 49].    

 

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

Adam Eget, Super Dave (Bob Einstein), and Norm Macdonald 

in the first episode of Norm Macdonald Live 

 (26 March, 2013): click here.   

 

 

I. 

 

Adam, who wishes to start a blog, writes to ask where I get my ideas for posts from. 

 

To be fair, although this is not an original question, it isn't as dumb as some people think and deserves an answer, rather than a snort of derision or a look of disdain. In fact, to enquire after the origin of ideas and the creative process is to ask something philosophically important.

 

And so, Adam, let me try to say something that might help ...

 

 

II. 

 

An idea - from the Greek term ἰδέα, meaning a visible pattern - is now more commonly defined as an abstract concept or (after Descartes) as a mental representation of an object. Many philosophers, being forever caught up in the realm of ideas, have considered them ontologically to be the fundamental category of being. Further, they consider the capacity to form, comprehend, and exchange ideas as an essential (and defining) feature of mankind [1].

 

Some people like to believe that ideas spontaneously generate from out of nowhere; that no real effort or serious thinking is required. Artists, for example, will often speak of inspiration. But whilst I don't wish to deny eureka moments or the divine influence of a muse, I think we all know that inspiration is usually born of hard work. 

 

Similarly, I'm sceptical of the idea of innate ideas believed to be universal, i.e., something which all people are born knowing (intuitively), rather than something they have learned through experience - what D. H. Lawrence, for example, terms blood knowledge. If you want to have ideas - particularly new ideas - then you need not only work hard, but get out into the world and encounter things. 

 

Having said that, I'm not advocating any and all forms of experience and by hard work, I do not mean mere toil. As Heidegger says, sometimes the most vital form of activity is waiting patiently and preparing for the future and allowing one's work to become an inner illumination of the heart [2]. 

 

Ultimately, good ideas cannot be compelled and, ironically, may often result from those times when work seems to go slowly or badly; i.e., those moments of failure.                      

 

 

Notes

[1] Plato, for example, argued that there is a mind-independent realm of unchanging and universal ideas or forms. Real knowledge is knowledge of these ideas; knowledge of the material world (which is subject to change) doesn't count for much in his view. 

 

[2] I take this phrase (and idea) from section 150 of Heidegger's 'Ponderings IV', in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 186. 

Heidegger Vs Tyson Fury

Tyson Fury Gypsy King 

by Ryan James Wilson 

ryanthedesigner.uk

 

 

As someone who has always admired those brave enough to enter the ring and dedicate themselves to the always brutal, often bloody - sometimes deadly -  art of boxing, I would like to send my congratulations to the self-styled Gypsy King, Tyson Fury, for defeating the American Deontay Wilder and thereby retaining his WBC heavyweight title. 

Boxing - a sport that transcends sport, being as it is about so much more than competitive physical activity - has inspired many great writers and film-makers and even though Fury undoubtedly has his flaws and shortcomings (made much of by critics who seem not merely to take issue with some of his remarks, but object to his very existence), he's a remarkable figure. 

 

Amusingly, however, I've just come across this note by Heidegger which seems to offer a counter-view to my own: "An age in which a boxer can be acclaimed a great man and be deemed worthy of the usual tokens of honour, in which purely physical virility (brutality) counts as the mark of a hero," is an age where there is little or no place for philosophy.*

 

Of course, Wittgenstein would argue that the philosopher must be prepared to fight for a space in which to think and that the philosopher who isn't prepared to regularly engage others in intellectual combat is like a boxer afraid to enter the ring.  

 

 

* See Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations III', 177, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks (1931-1938), trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 134.   

You Know We're Living in a Society

George Costanza: defender of society and civilisation -

'The Chinese Restaurant', Seinfeld, S02/E11, (1991): click here.

 

 

In this era of identity politics, nobody wants to talk positively about society and its benefits. 

 

Instead, people prefer to speak of whatever community they imagine themselves belonging to on the basis of gender, race, religion, or a host of other identifying factors that they determine as crucial to who they are [1]. 

 

Often this sense of self is rooted in an experience of injustice or feelings of social exclusion and oppression. Communities thus often spend a good deal of time asserting their rights and (somewhat ironically) demanding recognition by the wider (mainstream) society that they either reject or wish to radically reform. 

 

People coming together on the basis of shared experiences and values sounds reasonable and can be empowering. But when communities become self-enclosed groups with special interests and are suspicious or resentful - even hostile - to those on the outside, then things can quickly develop in way that is problematic.           

 

Even Heidegger - whom one might have supposed to be very much for traditional (quasi-mythical) forms of Gemeinschaft and against modern, inauthentic forms of Gesellschaft - warned:

 

"The much-invoked 'community' still does not guarantee 'truth'; the 'community' can very well go astray and abide in errancy even more and even more obstinately than the individual." [2] 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a very amusing scene from one of my favourite episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm - 'Trick or Treat' (S02/E03) - Larry David identifies himself as a member of the bald community: click here.   

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations III', 153, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 127. 

Excessive Brightness Drove the Poet into Darkness

Damien Hirst: Black Sun (2004) 

Flies and resin on canvas (144" diameter)

Photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates 

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

 

 

I. 

 

For D. H. Lawrence, darkness is not thought negatively as a total lack or absence of visible light. 

 

In fact, for Lawrence - as for Heidegger - the dark is the secret of the light [1]; an idea that reminds one of the esoteric teachings of Count Dionys on the concealed reality of the sun and the invisibility of fire.

 

According to the latter, the brightness of sunshine is epiphenomenal and there would be no light at all were it not for refraction, due to bits of dust and stuff, making the dark fire visible: 

 

"'And that being so, even the sun is dark [...] And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire. The sun is dark, the sunshine flowing to us is dark. And light is only the inside-out of it all, the lining, and the yellow beams are only the turning away of the sun's directness.'" [2]

 

Thus our luminous daytime world is really just a surface effect; the underlying reality is of a powerfully throbbing darkness, as great thinkers have always understood and which is recognised within various religious mythologies [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Some of Lawrence's loveliest poetry is written, therefore, beneath the dark light of a black sun [4]. But he also acknowledges the chthonic reality of darkness and likes to write of the hellish aspect of flowers, insisting, for example, that they are a gift of Hades, not Heaven [5]. 

 

This is clear in these lines from his famous poem 'Bavarian Gentians':    

 

"Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

darkening the day-time, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom" [6]     

 

In 'Gladness of Death', meanwhile, Lawrence dreams of actually becoming what some might term a fleur du mal:

 

"I have always wanted to be as the flowers are

so unhampered in their living and dying,

and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are.

I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted

there among the dark sun-rays of death. 

I can feel myself unfolding in the dark sunshine of death

to something flowery and fulfilled, and with a strange sweet perfume." [7]

 

At other times, however, Lawrence's dark musing is less floral in character and takes on a more nihilistic aspect as he longs for complete non-existence:

 

"No, now I wish the sunshine would stop,

and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies

and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out

between two halves of darkness;

the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound

obliterating everything. 

 

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light

would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down,

and it would be thick black dark forever.

Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,

nor death, which quivers with birth,

but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable." [8]

 

Now, I know that post-Freudians - even really smart ones like Julia Kristeva [9] - will tend to read a poem like this in terms of dépression et mélancolie, but those of us who know Lawrence will understand the necessity of being made nothing and dipped into oblivion [10].   

 

Notes

 

[1] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

      In a poem entitled 'In the Dark', the narrator (whom we can assume to be Lawrence) tells a frightened female figure (whom we can assume to be Frieda) that even when she dances in sunshine, it is dark behind her - as if her shadow were the essential aspect of her being. 

      See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 170-71. And cf. this stanza from 'Climb down, O lordly mind': "Thou art like the day / but thou art also like the night, / and thy darkness is forever invisible, / for the strongest light throws also the darkest shadow." The Poems, Vol. I, p. 411.     

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Ladybird, in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180. 

      Lawrence probably got this idea of the black sun from Mme. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888), though it by no means originated in theosophy; the ancient alchemists, for example, also wrote of the sol niger. Today, it's our physicists who talk of dark energy and dark matter; and neo-Nazis who fetishise the symbol of the black sun.       

 

[3] In Greek mythology, for example, Erebos was one of the primordial deities; born of Chaos, he was a personification of darkness.

 

[4] Lawrence's 'Twilight', for example, opens with the line: "Darkness comes out of the earth". See The Poems, Vol. I, p. 12.

 

[5] See 'Purple Anemones', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 262-64.       

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bavarian Gentians' [1], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 610. 

      See also 'Glory of Darkness' [1], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 591, in which Lawrence eulogises the darkness embodied in some Bavarian gentians which make "a magnificent dark-blue gloom" in his sunny room.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Gladness of Death' [2], The Poems, Vol. I, p. 584.  

[8] These are the first two stanzas of Lawrence's '"And oh - that the man I am might cease to be -"', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 165-66. 

      This theme of an annihilating darkness can also be found in 'Our day is over', ibid., p. 369.

[9] See Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (Columbia University Press, 1989). 

      For Kristeva, depression is a form of discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated. This depressive discourse often reveals itself in poetry or other creative forms of self-expression. See Garry Drake's M.A. thesis - D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems: 'A Dark Cloud of Sadness', (University of Saskatchewan, 2008) - which reads Lawrence's work in light of Kristeva's theory: click here. 

[10] I'm referring here to one of Lawrence's last poems, 'Phoenix', which can be found in The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 641-42. 

Most of the poems by Lawrence that I refer to in this post can be found online:

 

'In the Dark' - click here.

 

'Twilight' [aka 'Palimpsest of Twilight] - click here. 

 

'Purple Anemones' - click here. 

 

'Bavarian Gentians' - click here. 

 

'Glory of Darkness' - click here.

 

'And oh - that the man I am might cease to be' - click here.

 

'Our day is over' - click here. 

 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here. 

 

 

Hello Darkness My Old Friend ...

Hello darkness, my old friend - by Niranjan Morkar

dribble.com

 

 

I. 

 

The three fundamental laws of logic - (i) the law of non-contradiction; (ii) the law of the excluded middle; and (iii) the principle of identity - are all well and good, but cannot be thought valid for all forms of thinking. 

 

Why? Because - whether our logicians like to admit it or not - some forms of thinking rely upon creative madness and daimonic inspiration and so are not regulated by reason alone. 

 

Our very greatest poets, for example, playfully affirm paradox, ambiguity, and what Barthes terms the pleasure of the text; they are unafraid of appearing inconsistent or irrational and are proud to proclaim that if, like Whitman, they contradict themselves that's fine with them (for they contain multitudes) [1].        

 

II. 

 

Similarly, our great poet-philosophers, like Heidegger, argue that even the most enlightened thinking requires darkness: 

 

"This darkness is perhaps in play for all thinking at all times. Humans cannot set it aside. Rather they must learn to acknowledge the dark as something unavoidable and to keep at bay those prejudices that would destroy the lofty reign of the dark. Thus the dark remains distinct from the pitch black as the mere and utter absence of light. The dark however is the secret of the light. The dark keeps the light to itself. The latter belongs to the former. Thus the dark has its own limpidity." [2] 

 

This dark limpidity of thinking, is something that must always be protected. However, it's hard to do so when everything is now lit up with electric lights and we aspire to an ideal of excessive brightness that is brighter than a thousand suns.

 

As Heidegger says:   

 

"The light is no longer an illuminated clearing, when the light diffuses into a mere brightness [...] It remains difficult [...] to keep at bay the admixture of the brightness that does not belong and to find the brightness that is alone fitting to the dark. [...] Mortal thinking must let itself down into the dark depths of the well if it is to see the stars by day. It remains more difficult to guard the limpidity of the dark than to procure a brightness that only wants to shine as such. What only wants to shine, does not illuminate. [3]

 

In sum: whenever you start to think about thinking, you are instantly transported into darkness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51: click here to read on poets.org.  

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, Basic Principles of Thinking (Freiburg Lectures, 1957), in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 88.

 

[3] Ibid., pp. 88-89. 

 

 

This post (as promised) is for Jenina Bas Pendry. 

 

For a sister post to this one, click here.

It's Not the Cough That Carries You Off ...

Capsula Mundi

 Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel

 

 

Growing up, whenever I had a cold my father liked to joke (à la George Formby Sr.): It's not the cough that carries you off - it's the coffin they carry you off in [1].

I remembered this when reading the following passage from Heidegger in relation to the German regular verb stellen (which in English means to set in place, or to position):

"The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin. What is produced, set here, is not tantamount to the merely finished. What is set here stands in the purview of what concernfully approaches us. It is set here in a nearness. The carpenter in the village does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a 'death-tree' [Totenbaum]. The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and the farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighbourhood. 

      Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced." [2]   

Personally, I would love to be buried like King Arthur in a coffin made from a tree trunk, preferably oak, that has been split longitudinally and hollowed out by a skilled local carpenter. 

 

Having said that, I'd be just as satisfied with any number of alternative arrangements, providing they can legitimately be described as natural (eco-friendly) forms of burial; i.e., methods of interment which use biodegradable materials and do not artificially inhibit decomposition of the corpse. 

 

Basically, as long as my body is free to rot, I'll be happy - although, at the moment, I'm particularly keen on the egg-shaped burial pods envisioned by designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, which will have trees planted directly above them, so that decomposing waste is sucked up by hungry young root systems in search of nutrients.

 

In this way, death flourishes, as Heidegger would say, and this flourishing determines (in part at least) the surrounding woodland and the life within it.     

 

 

Notes

[1] George Formby Sr. (1875-1921) - known as 'The Wigan Nightingale' - is acknowledged as one of the greatest music hall performers of the early 20th century. His comedy played upon northern stereotypes and his own poor health; he even incorporated his bronchial cough into his act and came up with the saying that my father liked to repeat whenever the opportunity to do so arose. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis aged 45.    

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Positionality', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, see Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 25. 

 

 

This post is for Heide Hatry: Königin des Todes und eine Ausnahmekünstlerin.