What happens when nothing happens?

When I find myself in an unfamiliar place, I’m overcome with the urge to exhaust it, to cover as much ground as I can and reach to some kind of arbitrary, invented limit of photographs I could make there. Like the cartographers of Borges’ story constructing a map of the Empire to match the size of the Empire itself, I aspire to a completeness that borders on the absurd. *In the name of completenes*, Georges Perec writes, *we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede to knowledge all in one go*. One rainy October weekend in Paris, Perec himself sat in a cafè at the Place Saint-Sulpice detailing every occurence that passed through his field of vision, forming an account of *what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds*. Despite his efforts to chart all the minutiae that typically go unnoticed or unremarked upon – the ‘infra-ordinary’, as he termed it – he demonstrated that even the whole of our individual observations amounts to very little, barely a drop in Heraclitus’s ever-flowing rover. In Italo Calvino’s Story “The Adventure of a Photographer”, the protagonist remarks that *photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images*. This view only encourages my feeling that it’s necessary to apprehend the entirety of a place. But, then again, by what means could this even be realized? And how might I contend with the idea that photography is otherwise devoid of meaning?

— Alan Huck, I walk towards the Sun, which is always going down.

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Being of A Paper Cup

“[…] Humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured. The worry is not wether the world will end, as in the old model of the dis-astron, but wether the end of the world is already happening, or wether it might already have taken place. A deep shuddering of temporality occurs. Furthermore, hyperobjects  seem to continue what Siegmund Freud considered the great humiliation of the human following Copernicus and Darwin, Jacques Derrida rightly adds Freud to the list of humiliators – after all, he displaces the human from the very center of psychic activity. But we might also add Marx, who displaces human social life with economic organization. And we could add Heidegger and Derrida himself who in related but subtly different ways  displace the human from the center of meaning-making. We might further expand the list by bringing in Nietzsche and his lineage, which now runs through Deleuze and Guattari  to Brassier: “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” (Nietzsche) And in a different vein, we might add that OOO radically displaces the human by insisting that my being is not everything it’s cracked up to be – or rather that the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine.

 — Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, p.16

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Inferior Child

‘The work of the painter and of all other representative artists [is] far removed from the truth and associated with elements in us equally far removed from reason, in a fond liaison without health or truth. […] Representative art is an inferior child born of inferior parents’ 

— Plato

 

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Die unsichtbaren Tore

„… das Todestor, als das wichtigste der unsichtbaren Tore, für uns alle, ohne Unterscheidung, Tag und Nacht, geöffnet… Er nannte den Tod die wundersamste Reise, die der Mensch vermöchte, ein wahres Zauberstück, die Tarnkappe aller Tarnkappen… die letzte und unangreifbare Burg aller Freien und Tapferen.“

—  Ernst Jünger

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Do Nothing

The Secret of Permanent Creation: Whatever you’re thinking; think something else. Whatever you’re doing; do something else. The Absolute Secret of Permanent Creation: Desire nothing, decide nothing, choose nothing, be aware of yourself, stay awake, calmly seated, do nothing

— Robert Filliou

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Full of Evil Thoughts

 

Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comicbooks survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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The Law Of Space Is Above Politics

 

Brodersen had awaited that line of attack. That was my own offhand example. Calm down. But okay, here `tis again. But tell us, Joelle. Navigation is yours, then, Langendijk said formally. Archer communicates secretly, with the secret connivance of the watch ship captain in the Solar System- communicates secretly with his secret masters, who tell him to take us to a secret place? Isn’t that a little melodramatic? Earnestly: Think, too- the law of space is above politics. You don’t find any of this unthinkable, do you? N-no. As captain of a watchcraft, Archer has authority over me, he said. Good Lord, you can’t mean that, Second Engineer Torsten Sverdrup protested. That was very soon after its formation. Which is a logical non sequitur, actually. What are you free to tell me? I presume you can give me some argument, some reason to dog my hatch. The wealthiest man on Demeter is not altogether a private citizen. Finally, he enlisted in the Emergency Corps of the World Union Peace Command. Not quite a surprise. Prepare to obey his instructions. Is he? I don’t pretend to be very sensitive where people are concerned, but I have had some exposure to cliques and cabals on high political levels.

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It was the Worst of Times

Hartmann Fahrgeschäfte,
Bochum, September 2014

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

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