Mind the Gap (Notes on Heidegger and the Japanese Concept of Ma)

As much as I love objects, it's the pathos of distance between them which fascinates the most; that gulf of negative space and suspended time in which relations are conceived (for even love is a product of the void). 

The Japanese have a word for it: ma - sometimes translated into English as interval or gap, though I doubt very much the verbal injunction to mind the gap issued by London Underground invites us to consider the play between being and non-being (or form and formlessness). But then, to be fair, London Underground are more concerned with passenger safety when leaving the train, than opening ontological doors through which a black sun might shine.   

However, despite the prosaic nature of rail bosses, there are thinkers in the West who have shown a sensitivity to the concept of ma. Heidegger would be an obvious example, who, in a meditation on the thingness of things, has this to say about the essence of a jug: the jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel. That is to say, it's the holding nature of the jug that is crucial. But this holding nature belongs to the emptiness of the jug - it's not a physical property of the clay as such.

In other words, Heidegger is arguing that although the sides and bottom of the jug appear to hold the liquid contents, at most they merely contain the fluid. We pour the wine, for example, between the sides and over the bottom of the jug and whilst they are obviously crucial to the operation, they are not essential; the wine flows into the empty space and it is this void that does the vessel's holding.

It's for this reason that the potter who is credited with making the jug, doesn't really make it at all; he simply shapes the clay on the wheel. Or, more precisely, he shapes the void, which ultimately shapes the jug, the potter and all things (including music, language, flower arrangements and peace of mind).  


See: Heidegger, 'The Thing', essay in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1971), pp. 163-80.

On the Truth of Things

Artwork by Tyler Feder

roaringsoftly.com

According to Foucault, the ancient Greeks were mostly interested in a conception of public and political parrhesia that obliged them (and accorded them the privilege) of speaking the truth to others (including those in authority), in order to guide them and help facilitate wise government. 

The early Christians, on the other hand, were more concerned with a personal-psychological form of parrhesia (eventually institutionalized as a system of penitence); the moral obligation of each individual to confess the truth about themselves, in order to be freed from the burden of sin and thereby saved.

This, as Foucault says, is a significant moment of transformation in the long history of parrhesiastic practice; a history that he goes to great pains within his late lectures to reconstruct in order that he may better analyze the relations between subjectivity, language, and power - this essentially being his philosophical project in a nutshell. 

Now, fascinating as this project is - and one has to invariably return to politics and psychagogy (or questions concerning the governance of self and others) sooner or later - I have to admit that one of the great attractions of object-oriented ontology and other related forms of what Bill Brown terms thing theory, is that they allow one to be seduced by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the asking of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject, final solution, or great point of correlation.

In other words, the beauty and the truth of things is they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.


Note: The lyric quoted in the final paragraph is - as I'm sure everybody knows - from the song 'My Favourite Things', from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music (1959).