Pareidolia
Roy Brand
Did you know that we can see a face in a tree trunk? Did you know that on dark nights we can see animal shapes in the constellations of stars? Do these things exist? And when we hallucinate or daydream, once again we see faces, animals, and apparitions of the dead. In days gone by, when consciousness moved freely on the spectrum between wakefulness and dreaming and hallucination, the realm of the visible also contained imaginary sights whose significance was unquestioned. But even today, there is always something that is visible, but not clearly perceived – becoming, the moment of birth or death, life itself. The Greeks had a name for it: pareidolia – “beyond form” or “beside the form” – the human tendency to see a shape, or read a meaning, in amorphous phenomena.
The term is from the Greek παραειδωλια – παρά (pará) meaning “beyond” or “beside,” and εἴδωλον (eídōlon), meaning “image, form, shape.” Like paranoia (seeing intent in everything), pareidolia is a state of seeing a form of some kind in everything, and is part of our miraculous abilities as human beings to see things in things. This cave wall, with this patch on it, and the special shape of its curvature, together produce a living image. I see it, and if I were only to point it out to you – perhaps with the help of a small line or a dot here – it would be here for you too, and for anyone who comes after us. The creative work extends from the world and how it appears to us in our mind’s eye to one’s consciousness, body, hand, or to language. Thus, things are not merely matter – rock, light, or earth – but rather movement and dialogue between us and the world. Thus, this painting is not merely lines and patches of color, but a beauty full of meaning that is difficult to grasp outside the experience itself. Similarly, these marks that you now read, here on the page, are carriers of thoughts and feelings that pass from one person to another, in a very intimate way.
In the past, pareidolia was perceived as a sign of psychosis, but today it is commonly seen as a normal and universal human phenomenon. It is particularly evident in how children think, or in the worldview of primitive tribes, who attribute a will and consciousness to everything. Gods, humans, animals, the dead, plants, the weather, and often inanimate objects, are all seen as having an appetite or will, a viewpoint, and cognitive abilities – all have a soul. But the pareidolia is not about a childish or animistic worldview; it is a fundamental disposition of the human imagination. Even before we know something, we begin to see things: dots form an image, situations look like patterns, and we can take them apart and reassemble them until we have a theory (from the Greek ‘theorien’ – to look at, or by extrapolation, a way of seeing, a worldview). The world comes into view and becomes comprehensible – it is one of the characteristics of this world that it can become visible and comprehensible. So the visual image is but an extension, a capturing of the ways in which the world opens up to human experience. How wonderful it is that the world lends itself to us in this way? And perhaps that is precisely the basic, native, or classic experience of all things beautiful – the experience of being at home in the world.
Anyone who tries their hand at drawing knows that the closer you get to things, the more their contours fall apart and become fluid. There is really no clear boundary line between one thing and another; rather, there is an aura, light and shadow, and a movement of metamorphosis and metabolism in everything. It is a miraculous experience wherein things seem to dissolve of their own accord at the same time that they are captured or rather marked by art. Art shows them as distinct and as part of the world. The works in this exhibition follow this double movement– the shifting nature of the world, its appearance as form and meaning, and dissolution back into material, surface, and color. In other words, the works simultaneously conjure up an image and dissolve it. In so doing, they reveal the process that requires our imagination to work: the underlying work that brings things together and creates a world. This is an ongoing effort that we get accustomed to. But in particular moments of shifting consciousness – when we wake up, for example, or open our eyes after a long meditation – we notice the coming together of the world once again. If we fail to imagine, facing the work of art, the image breaks down and the painting and drawing once again revert to mere patches of color, the sculpture exposes its rough and meaningless material skin, and the canvases look like sheets of cloth and empty shells, rather than ghosts. Pareidolia – the emergence of a form – is something that goes both ways. In this space between the visible (the world as it appears) and the visual (the image), there is a fertile field of occurrence that is invisible to us. We often do not see how the world is made visible, or how we see it as things, forms, and states. It comes to us naturally, yet is unnatural. It is a mark of human consciousness that can be traced back to prehistoric cave drawings (throughout the Mediterranean) through Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.
The caves have a record of the longest human history – evidence of life, spiritual life, imagination, and human creation, dating back over 30,000 years. What they saw, and felt, and thought, is so remote from us – but the art preserved in the dark speaks to us immediately. I understand them and feel them. I have no idea if they spoke, or what they believed, but I know I am like them, that we are one species. They, too, saw shapes in things, and animals potentially sketched on the walls of the cave as the light of the fire flickered and animated the images. All it took was for them to touch what they saw and fix it with a judicious line, etching, a mark or a bit of paint. And so generations of human beings realized that they see the same things; that they share the same dream or vision. That they live in a world that is real, made of matter and energy, just as they live in a virtual world of imaginary forms and meaning. And that they could move between these two worlds, the material and the spiritual, and feel that they are both – both body and mind -- even though an abyss separates the two. Pareidolia marks the human ability to be a creature of both worlds. It is a characteristic of human existence that it is both real and virtual – a capacity that the contemporary economy of images has intensified, exploited, and heightened, to the point where we have lost it. Today, it is technology that does the imagining for us by seeing forms in things, emotions in a face, or financial potential in how we wield a keyboard and mouse, or gestures and motions on social media.
But in art – and perhaps in philosophy, as well – there is still sensitivity, openness, and attentiveness to the ebb and flow of life. Artists preserve that childish, primitive way of looking at things and how they are formed. In particular, they notice the intermediate states that no longer exist, or not yet. Possibilities that have not yet been realized actually exist, and there is life even in those that have faded away. The world once contained many such shadowy creatures: ghosts, apparitions of the dead, phantoms, dreams, hallucinations, and daydreams. We are fixed on either/or – either awake or asleep, existing or not – but what nonsense is this? The Greeks called all shadow creatures eidola, a term denoting movement and change in a world eternally coming into being. Pareidolia literally means a world that is all eidola – eidola in everything – in contrast to eikon (icon, likeness) which belongs to a binary world of original and imitation. Thus, the eikon/icon is quickly rendered a fake. But in the ancient world there was no single concept for a mimetic visual image, but rather, a multiplicity of such – eidolon – a spectrum of visual existence. In particular, there were no images that “look like something else,” imitations in the Platonic sense; rather, there was something that is visible but not perceived – like life itself, like consciousness – not the things in themselves, but the manner in which they appear.
It is in this realm that art is born. And still today, art harbors the human longing for transitions, for playfulness, for a spectrum of states of consciousness and emergence – but it may also shackle it. Within these boundaries of the frame, here in this painting in front of you, you can see a ghost. Here is spirit trapped in matter. Here, in this sculpture, you can see life arrested, fixed, dead. Here you are: look at them; they are yours; you control it. And here is the phenomenon that used to be a living entity, whose entire essence was becoming, namely life with no form or location. Here this thing is captured and concluded. Art always veers close, too close, to its dissolution.
Translated by Einat Adi
Pareidolia
Roy Brand
Did you know that we can see a face in a tree trunk? Did you know that on dark nights we can see animal shapes in the constellations of stars? Do these things exist? And when we hallucinate or daydream, once again we see faces, animals, and apparitions of the dead. In days gone by, when consciousness moved freely on the spectrum between wakefulness and dreaming and hallucination, the realm of the visible also contained imaginary sights whose significance was unquestioned. But even today, there is always something that is visible, but not clearly perceived – becoming, the moment of birth or death, life itself. The Greeks had a name for it: pareidolia – “beyond form” or “beside the form” – the human tendency to see a shape, or read a meaning, in amorphous phenomena.
The term is from the Greek παραειδωλια – παρά (pará) meaning “beyond” or “beside,” and εἴδωλον (eídōlon), meaning “image, form, shape.” Like paranoia (seeing intent in everything), pareidolia is a state of seeing a form of some kind in everything, and is part of our miraculous abilities as human beings to see things in things. This cave wall, with this patch on it, and the special shape of its curvature, together produce a living image. I see it, and if I were only to point it out to you – perhaps with the help of a small line or a dot here – it would be here for you too, and for anyone who comes after us. The creative work extends from the world and how it appears to us in our mind’s eye to one’s consciousness, body, hand, or to language. Thus, things are not merely matter – rock, light, or earth – but rather movement and dialogue between us and the world. Thus, this painting is not merely lines and patches of color, but a beauty full of meaning that is difficult to grasp outside the experience itself. Similarly, these marks that you now read, here on the page, are carriers of thoughts and feelings that pass from one person to another, in a very intimate way.
In the past, pareidolia was perceived as a sign of psychosis, but today it is commonly seen as a normal and universal human phenomenon. It is particularly evident in how children think, or in the worldview of primitive tribes, who attribute a will and consciousness to everything. Gods, humans, animals, the dead, plants, the weather, and often inanimate objects, are all seen as having an appetite or will, a viewpoint, and cognitive abilities – all have a soul. But the pareidolia is not about a childish or animistic worldview; it is a fundamental disposition of the human imagination. Even before we know something, we begin to see things: dots form an image, situations look like patterns, and we can take them apart and reassemble them until we have a theory (from the Greek ‘theorien’ – to look at, or by extrapolation, a way of seeing, a worldview). The world comes into view and becomes comprehensible – it is one of the characteristics of this world that it can become visible and comprehensible. So the visual image is but an extension, a capturing of the ways in which the world opens up to human experience. How wonderful it is that the world lends itself to us in this way? And perhaps that is precisely the basic, native, or classic experience of all things beautiful – the experience of being at home in the world.
Anyone who tries their hand at drawing knows that the closer you get to things, the more their contours fall apart and become fluid. There is really no clear boundary line between one thing and another; rather, there is an aura, light and shadow, and a movement of metamorphosis and metabolism in everything. It is a miraculous experience wherein things seem to dissolve of their own accord at the same time that they are captured or rather marked by art. Art shows them as distinct and as part of the world. The works in this exhibition follow this double movement– the shifting nature of the world, its appearance as form and meaning, and dissolution back into material, surface, and color. In other words, the works simultaneously conjure up an image and dissolve it. In so doing, they reveal the process that requires our imagination to work: the underlying work that brings things together and creates a world. This is an ongoing effort that we get accustomed to. But in particular moments of shifting consciousness – when we wake up, for example, or open our eyes after a long meditation – we notice the coming together of the world once again. If we fail to imagine, facing the work of art, the image breaks down and the painting and drawing once again revert to mere patches of color, the sculpture exposes its rough and meaningless material skin, and the canvases look like sheets of cloth and empty shells, rather than ghosts. Pareidolia – the emergence of a form – is something that goes both ways. In this space between the visible (the world as it appears) and the visual (the image), there is a fertile field of occurrence that is invisible to us. We often do not see how the world is made visible, or how we see it as things, forms, and states. It comes to us naturally, yet is unnatural. It is a mark of human consciousness that can be traced back to prehistoric cave drawings (throughout the Mediterranean) through Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.
The caves have a record of the longest human history – evidence of life, spiritual life, imagination, and human creation, dating back over 30,000 years. What they saw, and felt, and thought, is so remote from us – but the art preserved in the dark speaks to us immediately. I understand them and feel them. I have no idea if they spoke, or what they believed, but I know I am like them, that we are one species. They, too, saw shapes in things, and animals potentially sketched on the walls of the cave as the light of the fire flickered and animated the images. All it took was for them to touch what they saw and fix it with a judicious line, etching, a mark or a bit of paint. And so generations of human beings realized that they see the same things; that they share the same dream or vision. That they live in a world that is real, made of matter and energy, just as they live in a virtual world of imaginary forms and meaning. And that they could move between these two worlds, the material and the spiritual, and feel that they are both – both body and mind -- even though an abyss separates the two. Pareidolia marks the human ability to be a creature of both worlds. It is a characteristic of human existence that it is both real and virtual – a capacity that the contemporary economy of images has intensified, exploited, and heightened, to the point where we have lost it. Today, it is technology that does the imagining for us by seeing forms in things, emotions in a face, or financial potential in how we wield a keyboard and mouse, or gestures and motions on social media.
But in art – and perhaps in philosophy, as well – there is still sensitivity, openness, and attentiveness to the ebb and flow of life. Artists preserve that childish, primitive way of looking at things and how they are formed. In particular, they notice the intermediate states that no longer exist, or not yet. Possibilities that have not yet been realized actually exist, and there is life even in those that have faded away. The world once contained many such shadowy creatures: ghosts, apparitions of the dead, phantoms, dreams, hallucinations, and daydreams. We are fixed on either/or – either awake or asleep, existing or not – but what nonsense is this? The Greeks called all shadow creatures eidola, a term denoting movement and change in a world eternally coming into being. Pareidolia literally means a world that is all eidola – eidola in everything – in contrast to eikon (icon, likeness) which belongs to a binary world of original and imitation. Thus, the eikon/icon is quickly rendered a fake. But in the ancient world there was no single concept for a mimetic visual image, but rather, a multiplicity of such – eidolon – a spectrum of visual existence. In particular, there were no images that “look like something else,” imitations in the Platonic sense; rather, there was something that is visible but not perceived – like life itself, like consciousness – not the things in themselves, but the manner in which they appear.
It is in this realm that art is born. And still today, art harbors the human longing for transitions, for playfulness, for a spectrum of states of consciousness and emergence – but it may also shackle it. Within these boundaries of the frame, here in this painting in front of you, you can see a ghost. Here is spirit trapped in matter. Here, in this sculpture, you can see life arrested, fixed, dead. Here you are: look at them; they are yours; you control it. And here is the phenomenon that used to be a living entity, whose entire essence was becoming, namely life with no form or location. Here this thing is captured and concluded. Art always veers close, too close, to its dissolution.
Translated by Einat Adi
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
שם העבודה, מידות, מדיום, שנה
Muteness
Roy Brand
A short essay about the relationship between muteness and violence, and about a different possibility for change which arises out of contemplation.
“Taoism suggests that non-action (wu wei) is the only reasonable way of relating to evolution. Not a different action, but non-action.”
First Part:
We cannot fight chaos. Chaos feeds off of the struggle against it, and it is empowered by the opposition to it. Instead of fighting we can ask ourselves: who or what does chaos serve? Who profits, or can potentially profit from the vagueness and the distraction which chaos creates? To observe without acting, to experience without externalizing, in this way, the world will change from within. The only possible revolution is an internal one - from disorder to form, from blindness to insight, from violence to beauty and from chaos to cosmos - a well-tempered universe which is constructed out of mutual relationships and reason.
The beautiful and blue twenty-year old. I can feel their sadness as they are locked into screens. I feel their longing for something different yet lack of ability to imagine anything different. There is no way out. Everything is blocked inside, and the external world appears chaotic yet fixed.
If you have been living in the world of the past twenty years then you have been living inside of the rabbit hole of ‘Oneself’, a reverberatory space that repeats what has already been said. This reminds us of the curse of Echo and Narcissus: the former can only repeat what was said and the latter is fixated within his own image until death. Life now appears to be quite similar; a repetitive binge of echoing selfie clips. Gradually, the familiar turns uncanny and the day-to-day becomes weird and surreal. Things are familiar to the point of estrangement. I am walking dead; a digital bot who acts in the destruction field of the twenty-first century.
My fear is that young people today would convert alienation and sadness into anger, and that this anger will eventually find expression in hatred. This not to speak of a kind of a creative, passionate, poetic, erotic hatred, but of a hatred that is oppressive to passion, and of an anger that is impotent. Muteness turns into violence.
We are currently at the extreme end of an unequal distribution of knowledge. There are very few things which I know yet a lot of information appears to be “out there”. And so, more often than not, out of fear or laziness, I rely on the mediation of experts, commentators, spiritual or religious savants, institutions, political leaders and anonymous corporations. I feel lost in the overload of information. But this is exactly where a revolution is required—an internal revolution wherein I reclaim ownership over the information I consume and disseminate. This entails a change in attitude and a willingness to act without being paralyzed by hesitation. The attitude changes from passivity to ability, and the will harnessed to two horses--passion and reason. In other words, we need to reclaim our ability to feel, understand, judge and navigate for ourselves within the overflowing stream of information.
Revolutionary moments in history are different from one another. A revolution can never be repeated. But there’s one theme that can be detected and it has to do with the relations between information and knowledge. The information is composed of external data that controls the system and holds the power, while knowledge is the internalization and the understanding of how power works. The relevant question to every revolution is the question of adequacy or inadequacy between the amount of information that circulates in the system and the ability to grasp and use it by the individuals involved. One thing is clear, revolutionary moments are those wherein information, which was until that point in time held by a small layer of the population, becomes accessible and open to all.
The printing revolution at the fifteenth century, the industrial revolution at the eighteenth, the communication revolution at the nineteenth century and the digital revolution at the twentieth - in all of these there was a shift in the way in which information was shared and divided. When the floodgate was cracked open, information moved out of the hands of the privileged few and into a shared common space. The invention of print made books available to the public, with modern industry and machinery, the public became mobile and centered in cities, and the digital revolution brought the world to our fingertips. But with every new step new kind of inequalities and injustices appeared.
Now, for example, I know that governing bodies, states and corporations hold an immense amount of information about me, which, for the most, I gave unwillingly but with legal consent. The composition, details and consequences of such information is however outside my purview. To better balance this inequality I can, for example, disconnect myself from “free services”, thereby restoring control over my actions in the shared virtual space. I can also try to better understand the ways in which big data works, and navigate my way in a much more intelligent, responsible and critical way. There is no doubt that, in the last couple of decades, technology has developed at a much greater speed than that of consciousness, and that, technology, rather than human reason and action, is in fact governing society today. My claim is that in order to make a change we must first move the control to the participants.
The story of the last two decades is the story of surveillance, the constant surveillance done by governments and corporations for profit and control. This surveillance is ruinous and stifling. It manipulates communication and stifles creativity and freedom. The digital space must be democratized while democracy itself needs to grow and evolve to counter new challenges. In the long process of attempting to democratize information and open a shared space we have firstly liberated the physical locations such as the countryside, the cities, and the streets. We (our common ancestors) then liberated institutions, occupations, and forms of expression. We have taken possession over palaces and have turned them into museums, we have turned the monasteries into libraries and universities. The next step would be to liberate the virtual space. This would be a long process (revolutions spread over centuries) but it can start now with a change of consciousness and a new attitude - the digital space is our own. We need to take back possession over our information because information is essential for democracy: consistent, high quality information, from reliable sources. Information, like air, water and the sky, belongs to everyone. Information is our natural habitat.
Part two: Muteness and the Art of Reading
Muteness is a characteristic of our time. No one dares speaking out, not in class, not in family dinners, not on paper not verbally. Muteness penetrates inwards and strangles our thoughts and passions, imagination and creativity. Muteness and violence inward and outward. How few are the people who still possess the art of conversing-- who know how to tell a story, to listen and to laugh, to continue their partner train of thought, and deepen it into an open, shared fabric. A real conversation requires real listening-- not someone who tells you who you are or what you “should” do, but a form of open dialogical attention which enables that which cannot be realized individually.
I want to offer a cure for muteness -- the arts, and especially the art of reading. That might come as a surprise since reading is an art mostly practiced alone, by one’s self in a room with a book. And yet, reading is a deep journey beyond oneself. As Marcel Proust, a real virtual voyageur, writes in his In Search for Lost Time:
“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5, “The Prisoner and The Fugitive”.
[“Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux”.]
Art is a journey in time and space, outside of our bodies and consciousness and into that of others, into different times, different thoughts, different desires, passions and fears. When I am reading Shakespeare, I can feel what it was like living in 16th century Britain. Visiting the Acropolis of Athens, I understand what it must have been like in ancient Greece. This is not a theoretical kind of knowledge but a visceral experience, I am living it. Likewise, the art that we do today will communicate with prosperity. It is like sending a capsule of experiences into the future. Art is our magical Noah’s Ark which will land after the flood on a future Mount Ararat and whatever we would like to keep of our present can be reincarnated with it. Art is a form of communication, not the communication of this or that bit of information, but the sharing of experiences and forms of life.
Proust’s art is, mostly, the art of reading and writing. Part of today’s muteness is a result of the crisis in reading. How many of us still read, carry books to read while travelling on bus or train, and keep a few next to bed? And if we still read, and this I know from experience, our attention is deflated. On screens, the eye quickly wanders, not to other worlds but to the next tab where it loses itself again. Proust must have thought about an enthusiastic reader such as himself. He thought about a reader which can hold many details in her memory for hundreds of pages; a reader that can go out for a long, world discovering journey. In contrast to this reader, the reader of today scans the page to ‘get to the punch line.’ Cursorily scanning for information is a new kind of reading and a new kind of thinking. I want to understand something “straight away”, immediately label it, find its place and move on. Of course, there is no time to absorb the constant flood of information, so I am fighting this chaos by labeling it and saving what I can. Maybe ‘one day’ I would ‘go back to it’, I tell myself, with just a little more ‘spare time’, although I know that the amount of information which my phone already contains will take a lifetime to access. This desperate attempt to “save” information reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s story about the angel of history from his last surviving text--” On the Concept of History”. Benjamin describes Paul Klee’s little drawing wherein he observes a flimsy angel, his face is directed to the past where waves of ruins pile-up. He wants to suspend, awake the dead and stitch the ruins back together but the storm blowing from heaven has caught up his wings and it is too strong. It pushes him backwards into the future. “[W]hat we call progress”, writes Benjamin, is “this storm”. Like the angel of history, we are caught up in this storm, moving ahead faster than we can absorb, experience and understand.
That which is lost during the chase after “the bottom line” is a process of creating deep networks of relations. This process includes connecting old and new fields of knowledge, discovering analogies between different ideas and experiences, drawing conclusions, examining possibilities, evaluating truths, as well as transitioning to other ways of looking and forms of knowing. In the midst of the storm that befalls us, there is no more room for play or imagination. Instead, we experience a downgrading of our levels of empathy and the quality of our awareness.
Here reading works as a healing force to counteract the storm of information. The intimate and solitary experience of reading, which takes me away from myself and into the realm of deep empathy and conversation with the experiences of others, is a curing silence. Silence then, yes, as the opposite of muteness: quiet meditation and reflection, rather than deafening anxiety and inattention.
Part three: the end
We are on the edge- on the threshold- or the cusp of a transition period. Something is closing behind while something is yet to come. We are stepping towards the end of the world, at least as we know or imagine it to be.
How can we understand this sense of end without a new beginning? The future or the belief in a future, which was so vital to modernism in the 20th century, is dissipating. Do we still believe in the future; In the future of modernity? Do we believe in progress? Or do we yearn for some radical break, some inexplicable messianic transformation? In the 19th century, Nietzsche spoke about the death of god. “Haven’t you heard,” the madman asks in The Gay Science, “about the death of god?” As if the death had already happened but the horror did not yet sink in. We have killed him when we stopped believing: “I am telling you, we have killed god - you and I! We are all murderers. But how did we do it?... What have we done when we have untied the earth from its connection to the sun? Where will it go now? Where will we all go now?” (The Gay Science, section 125*check)
Even though the remains are still among us and the corpse not utterly cold, there is no doubt that faith in god and the frightful system which it held have withered. But what has come to replace it? Nietzsche argues that we cannot really live without faith, and so we moderns come to replace God with a secularized belief in progress. But what is progress? Simply put, it is the belief that in the future ‘it will be better’. Better how? This is undefined, and it is the beauty of the whole thing, because it gives us the opportunity to shape the future like a fantasy. Each and every one has their own utopia and in it they or their descendants can achieve happiness and possibly immortality. Many today are waiting for technology to save us from the hell which we have created and lead us into the promised land of artificial intelligence. This belief - that someone or something will navigate our lives and save us from ourselves- is still with us today and it is still very strong. How can we imagine life without it?
Finally, what I want to suggest is that this belief is cracked open so that we can say, just like the madman “have you not heard that the future is dead’? Because the thing already happened, though the horror did not sink in yet. And maybe, just like with Nietzsche, the death of the future is not necessarily bad? Perhaps this faith in the future kept us from living as we should here and now? Perhaps the future is our greatest danger? When the belief in the future would fade, we could then take care of this world and this life rather than the one to come. In the present to come we could do things for their own sake rather than instrumentally as means to other ends. My writing here would be only for you, and your art would be only for us; we would not accumulate assets as if we were to live forever, and we would not burn the club on the way to glory. We would have to learn how to live, as the poet writes, “without future, hope or dream”. How would the world look like without a future? Not so different from the world as it is now only without, perhaps, the deceiving disguise of “soon, later would be better”. The end of the world is not tomorrow, it is already here.