Never to Arrive

2nd April 20..

Dear Panamarenko,

We visited your exhibition on Wednesday at the Hayward Gallery and have felt compelled to write to you. Please forgive us intruding upon your privacy but we assure you the reasons are purely immanent.

For many years we have been working on a grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk. We were quite excited to discover some corroboration for our theories in your own toy model of space. Your lecture on the subject caused some strange somatic reactions. After a while we were transported into an irresistible sleepiness although not the kind which excludes perception. Then we woke up very hungry exactly when you were writing E=MC2 on the blackboard. But the hunger which followed the stupor was the sort which left unheeded might lead to rapid loss of consciousness. Fortunately we could dash out of the gallery and eat some provisions. By the time we returned you were again writing E=MC2 on the blackboard. But we could follow your argument somewhat more consciously. Although we think its effect on the unconscious intelligence is far more powerful. You remark about your Hazerug or Schelpvormige Rugzak that it created so much noise the people around your test site fled in fear. Although obviously the object when activated is quite dangerous its noise serves to diminish the danger by warning of potential harm. Not so your lecture. The hermetic character of your theatre of proof which inspires the spectator with the intense desire to understand but withholds understanding in a tantalus-like fashion is far more dangerous. The stupor followed by utter depletion of blood sugars in the brain could be as fatal as being caught up in exploding motors.

We resolved not to want to understand — out of banal survival motives but also not to surrender to obfuscation either.

The part of your theatre of proof which seemed to glide effortlessly into our grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk has to do with what you call “rolling on the space field”. Trying to be as brief as possible, one could say rolling elevates the “Stabilitätsunfall” or capsizing to one of the fundamental principles of motion in the universe. If one could imagine motion without bodies then what would be left in the universe is its constituent and primary vertigo (Schwindel). Your results seem to confirm something we have suspected for years. There is an occult correspondence between the laws governing the maritime accident and this constituent and primary vertigo of the universe. The maritime accident contains the secret to the construction of space.

We live in an area especially suited to the study of accidents at sea. Under dry dock conditions. Seafaring is almost forgotten but the accident at high sea has been preserved for tradition’s sake. The accidents are the last connection to the real life of the seafarer. The secret rule of thumb regarding accidents is one should never treat them as an exception. We were very intrigued by your explanation of the “containing force” -  one wonders why explosions don’t happen spontaneously more often.

The same trigonometry which one uses to calculate navigation of shipping routes can be used just as well to calculate the accidents upon these routes. With one small addition - one calculates how the desired port of destination should under eternal circumstances never be reached. In this way one can quite easily transform the laws of navigation at sea into the laws of shipwrecks. Following a similar logic one can transpose the theorems of geometry into the theorems of the physics of rigid objects especially their change of positions. Einstein invented this transposition logic calling it “gravitation geometry”. “When we add only one proposition to the theorems of Euclidian geometry, that two points of a practically rigid body always correspond to the same distance (Strecke) whatever changes in the position we undertake with this body, thereby the theorems of Euclidian geometry become theorems about the possible relative shifting of practically rigid bodies. Geometry extended in this fashion would be treated as a branch of physics (...). The practically rigid body turns the straight line into a natural object.” (Einstein)

What is a better example of “possible relative shifting of practically rigid bodies” than the “Stabilitätsunfall” or capsizing of ships. Following your expositions of rolling one can imagine the circular motion of stars, sun, etc as the equivalent of the capsizing motion prolonged indefinitely on a gravityless field where there is no up or no down - hence no question of buoyancy. If a ship capsizes it is because its two essential centers of gravity are not aligned — the center of gravity of the ship’s total mass (M) and the center of the submerged part of the ship (F). In essence it is out of gravity when it capsizes. The one side entering the water at greater speed than the other as in “rolling”. But it usually rolls only once - as the capsizing leads it back to gravity or balance or rest. If it were in the space field presumably it would capsize forever like the other space bodies.   “Un coup de dés/ jamais/ quand bien même lancé dans des/circonstances éternelles/ du fond d’un naufrage (…)” (“A throw of the dice/ Never/ Even thrown in/ Eternal circumstances/ From the bottom of a shipwreck (…)”, Mallarmé)

The accident is nothing special but it might be sometimes less, sometimes more than the normal case. It is a normal case with an unknown plus or minus. The unknown too much or too little also follows laws. As Kant writes - “Der Zufall hat Gesetze, zum Beispiel Schiffbrüche.” (“Chance has laws, for example shipwrecks.”) The same law simultaneously establishes the force of habit (Macht der Gewohnheit) and through the accident also cancels it. That is the first provisional axiom of the shipwreck. It is also a paradox. One does not imagine that a law can be confirmed and annulled in the same instant. But that happens in every accident. Not even just the unusual ones. An accident is always rare and equally very common, because it follows a law, or in other words, there are only common accidents which are rare.  (“For the common is rare, and the common measure is, a rarity for the rare (…)” Jacques Derrida, “Loving in Friendship: Perhaps – the Noun and the Adverb” in The Politics of Friendship, London, 2005, p. 43)

That is the second provisional axiom. Therefore anything can happen at any time. Not only theoretically. The accident in the aquatic element still counts as the noblest sort of accident. But since going to sea is becoming almost extinct all manner of holiday accidents must suffice. One would think that the holiday accident would not qualify to be included in the grand theory of accidents because of the obvious absence of the “force of habit”.
But the holiday itself is an immense force of habit and as Horace says “you can change the skies but not the ideas” thus the grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk can be extended to cover holiday accidents as well.

The exhibition of your fortune testing machines resembles an accident more than anything else because it promises so many ways of escaping all destinations. Hence effectively a rescue.

Yours sincerely,

Will to Finitude

1.  The Finite Mass – The Decomposing (Zerfallende) Object
2. “The Trinitarian Formula” – Power, Force, Resistance


1.  The Finite Mass – The Decomposing (Zerfallende) Object

Nowadays the mass embodies the will to power.  A ‘superman’ (Übermensch) only exists, if he can ceaselessly prove his kinship with the mass.  As soon as he distances himself from them, his downfall starts.  Inevitably this is also the downfall of the mass.  That can all take a while.  With the will to power of the mass arises a new concept of power– neither divine nor mythical nor even political – but finite.  From Nietzsche one finds out much about will to power, whilst the emphasis is always on ‘will’.  He divulges little about the nature of this power itself.  For instance in “Human, All Too Human I” in section 460. “The Great Man of the Mass” he writes: “The mass must have the impression, that a powerful, impregnable will power is there; at least it must appear to be there.  Everyman admires a strong will, because no one has one and everyman says to himself, that, if he had one, then for him and his egoism there could be no more limit.” (“Die Masse muss den Eindruck haben, dass eine mächtige, ja unbezwingliche Willenskraft da sei; mindestens muss sie da zu sein scheinen.  Den starken Willen bewundert Jedermann, weil Niemand ihn hat und Jedermann sich sagt, dass, wenn er ihn hätte, es für ihn und seinen Egoismus keine Gränze mehr gäbe.”)  Power seems to be closely related here to egoism – especially in its limitation.  An indirect symbiosis exists between the strong will of the great man and the bounded egoism of the mass.  The strong will of the great man is a surrogate limitlessness – the mass hopes from it the abolition of the limits of its own egoism.

But this in itself does not yet produce an unlimited power – power is always constrained by the familiar appetites of the mass, the restricted (finite) ways in which the mass experiences its desires.  This is a finite power.

Such a mass, as actuality and potentiality (possibility), exists only since the storm on the Bastille.  It is not a question of quantity.  One person can be a mass for himself – as Tibull says, in solis sis tibi turba locis (In your solitude be your own popular unrest, Tibull, Eleg., IV, XIII, 12).  
Threatening is when the mass pursues you like a Doppelgänger, trying to keep you from your projects and plans as if they were his own – as it happens in Kafka’s story “Entlarvung eines Bauernfängers” (Unmasking of a Swindler): “They placed themselves in front of us, as wide as they could; tried to hold us back from there towards where we were headed; prepared for us a dwelling in their own breast as an ersatz, and when the concentrated feeling in us finally reared up (rebelled), they took it as an embrace (…)” (“Sie stellten sich vor uns hin, so breit sie konnten; suchten uns abzuhalten von dort, wohin wir strebten; bereiteten uns zum Ersatz eine Wohnung in ihrer eigenen Brust, und bäumte sich endlich das gesammelte Gefühl in uns auf, nahmen sie es als Umarmung (...)”)

The mass feels itself (and no one contradicts it in this feeling) to be the highest value.  To spread its hegemony over the whole world is the wish of the mass.  The past empires were based on professional armies, rulers and their courts.  The mass did not exist – Francis Bacon called the proto-mass “commons”, from which a ruler had little to fear with a few exceptions: “(…) there is little danger from them, except it be where they have great and potent heads; or where you meddle with the point of religion, or their customs, or means of life.” (“Of Empire” in Bacon’s Essays, New York, 1909, p. 160)

The recurring uprisings of the past such as the peasant wars were mostly instigated by professional groups.  They had specific demands.  Cromwell’s Army represented an early unusual hybrid of mass and professional association.  The “New Model Army” drew its members from an amorphous population of “masterless men”.  They transformed themselves in the course of the English Revolution into a regular force only to decompose back into nothingness again after the failure of the revolution.  Lostness in the double sense – defeat and disappearance - masks the finitude of the army-mass.  For Heidegger ‘lostness’ is a mode only of the singular Dasein – ‘foundness’ or what he calls destiny (Schicksal) takes place in the community or Volksgemeinschaft – but historically absolute lostness is only of the community – when a community is lost it becomes extinct.

Similarly, Badiou’s key concept of “fidelity to the event” (for instance to the event of the Revolution of 1917) hides a secret acknowledgement of finitude.  In Badiou’s presentation the “fidelity” of a “subject” in the “situation” wavers continuously between finitude and infinitude.  However, if the event were not finite, fidelity would be superfluous.  His concept of “fidelity” is a disguised finitude.  He thus dissolves any specific fidelity to an historical event into the fidelity of the finite subject-of-the event to itself: “(…)let’s be faithful to the event that we are.” (Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham, London, 2007, p. 236)

Badiou’s “fidelity to the event” is a quasi-mathematical transposition of Proust’s “à la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time) – whereby “lost” should be understood as equal to “finite”.

The mass itself does not know what it wants.  It only wants to continue to exist (as Canetti says) in the feeling of unconditional ruling and desiring.  Still, because the mass is finite, but the will of the mass to persist in its being is infinite, the mass experiences its decaying provisional nature as an enigma.  The decaying mass moves from its ecstatic fusional ‘oneness’ back into its atomized particularity (the contingent many) – painfully recognizing if only for that brief moment of transition that ‘community’ is not “being-in-common” (Nancy) but a nihilistic “nothing-in-common” (Esposito).  Community is not dwelling or shelter – it is abandonment – to the law and language (so-called ‘form of life’). 

Just as in earlier times, the king was the figure who had much to fear and little to desire, today the mass finds itself in this royal condition of an unclear and wilting consciousness.  The leader who rises up out of their ranks and who will be carried by them, must have the professional and full-time ability to protect the finite mass feeling from its falling apart.  In this sense, according to Badiou’s system, such a leader would be the only faithful subject of the event of the mass.  Eisenstein captures the electrifying galvanising effect of the leader in his commemorative film of the 1917 Revolution “October”.  In the scene “At the Finland Station” the anxious mass waiting for the train presses together in darkness at the train station until someone shouts the redemptive word “It’s Him!” – all faces beam and a huge outpouring of delight banishes all doubts – Lenin arrives on the scene.


2.  “The Trinitarian Formula” – Power, Force, Resistance

Power is often without force.  It must not develop force, it is already beyond force.  The force, which power first expended to become power, disappears into power itself.  It will never again need the same expenditure of force as it did to first become power.  Even when power seems to grow, it does so with a decreasing exercise of force.  That explains the phenomenon, that powerful and ultra-powerful configurations are so easily overthrown.

Resistance on the other hand is pure expenditure of force – out of the point of powerlessness.  Resistance requires an extraordinary quantum of will or will-power.  Therefore the concept – will to power – is actually meaningless, objectless.  When one has power, one does not need will.  Only when you have no power, that means, when existing power systemically hinders you from having power – then you need will – not to power – but to resistance.  Power is related to inertia.  Power is not a dynamic concept.  That is why all the directors in Kafka’s Castle are so tired.

There is no resistance in the world of the accident valet – because it is a world of pure power.  Similar to the airless space of a vacuum – airplanes fly best there, because air resistance does not impede them.  In general, the world of pure power is a world without any hindrance.

(Note: Author’s expanded translation of “Wille zur Endlichkeit” published in Noir Hybriden, 18th February 2010)

Possessions

1.  The Emptiness of ‘My’

2.  Taking Ownership of Shame
3.  ‘My’ Will

1. The Emptiness of ‘My’

The world is full of ‘my’ which is not ‘mine’.  My Book, My Computer, My Documents, My Lord, MySpace, (Where’s) My Stuff, etc.  Everyone knows this ‘my’ is an everyman – an anybody.  Yet one says it with so much fervour of possession.  Wittgenstein kept returning to the question of ‘my pain’.  He concluded that it is impossible to know whose pain it is even if someone calls it his.  Is this because pain is generic or is it the ‘my’?  If you cannot be sure if your pain is yours, of what can you be sure?  My happiness?  Happiness is often illusory, based on false premises.  Adorno says in “Minima Moralia”, anyone who says, “I am happy” is lying. (72)  He or she can only say “I was happy”.  When one is ‘in happiness’ one is not aware of being happy or unhappy – one just is.  When someone says “I am happy” –he is trying to force happiness magically into his world.  He gives birth to himself out of happiness – auto-parturition – to be able to see how he is in his happiness.  An impossible exteriority.
He thus ‘sins’ against happiness, which can never be coerced nor possessed, and whose advent and departure are both slow and abrupt.  Happiness is like truth in its elusiveness – one cannot have it, only be in it.  Does that mean that unhappiness is like falsehood?  And that when one says “I am unhappy” one is also lying?  Or is unhappiness as the state of no longer being in happiness, expelled from all protective happiness shells, reflecting upon this state of expulsion (banishment), as much or more ‘in truth’ than happiness?  Unhappiness is the general, happiness the particular of truth? 

Are then your chimera your own – or do they belong to the age from which you have only borrowed them? Solely from the principle of the conservation of energy – why should any chimera exist merely for the benefit of a singular deluded ‘nullity’?  A chimera collectivizes as much if not more than truth – just as a community is a chimera of being-with or being-in-common.

Whatever it is – ‘my’ denotes ownership, the key term of our mercantile times.  Ownership should be the most tangible relation one could conceive.  But it is not.  Not to act or to be but to have – to be able to say ‘my’ establishes one’s firm roots in the soil of the real.  But precisely this ‘my’ is a nobody, a figment of grammar.  ‘My’ is a form of ‘linguistic alienation’, of identity shredded by grammar – the emptiness of the grammatical body corresponds in some ways to the emptiness of the body it designates.

In the colloquial manner of today – when everything, to make it simple, is couched in the first person – ‘my’ is an absence, a void to be filled by a transaction, an exchange of money for goods.  The transaction creates the ‘my’.  ‘My’ is a reflex and adjunct of possession of an object for which money has been paid.  If someone gives you the object as a gift then you may also say it is ‘mine’ but the relationship of ‘my’ to that object is more tenuous.  The giver might want it back.  You have no rights of ownership as you may have if you have bought your ‘my’.  A gift is always a favour which is riddled with traps of another sort.  Perhaps by accepting the gift, the giver has ‘bought’ you – so that he can now say ‘my’ when referring to you.  This is merely a transaction of a second degree.  Your ‘my’ has been bought, rather than you buying a ‘my’ hegemony over an object.  Mon pauvre (garcon).

Such are the complicated workings of community or communitas as discussed by Roberto Esposito.  The obligations of community often leave you little choice in matters of gift-giving and gift-receiving unless the negative principle of immunitas exempts you from this bondage of the ‘law of the gift’.  The Mafia is based on these sorts of patronage laws – the offer you can’t refuse.  The community is a permanent lack like the ‘my’ itself – the absence of the gift one may never keep which keeps giving itself.
“This is why, if the members of a community are characterized by an obligation of gift-giving thanks to the law of the gift and of the care to be exercised toward the other, immunity implies the exemption from or derogation of such a condition of gift-giving.  He is immune who is safe from obligations or dangers that concern everyone else, from the moment that giving something in and of itself implies a diminishment of one’s own goods and in the ultimate analysis of oneself.” (Interview with Roberto Esposito, T. Campbell in diacritics/summer 2006, pp. 50-51)

Given the phantom nature of ‘my’ - of possession in general – expropriation is not a very solid political aim.  Ownership of the means of production is as empty as no ownership of the means of production.  The ever-fluctuating emptiness of ‘my’ is a virtue (in the sense of power) of capitalism.  Does ‘our’ have more substance than  ‘my’?

2.  Taking Ownership of Shame

One should become like Stendhal and look social debacles straight in the eye.  Admit to shame and one’s own false ambition.  Only in such moments does one sense one’s own superiority, to have committed these gruesome social offences and beyond that to implicate the entire society in one’s own loss of face.  How hard it is to confess, one had wanted to make an unforgettable impression upon persons one holds in contempt – at least occasionally or temporarily.  Why this is so – is ineffable.  When these persons, objects of your disdain, (glad to have belonged to your cohors amicorum, commensales, to the friends of your table in better days) for their part, openly demonstrate their loathing, scorn, vapidly amuse themselves at your cost for all to see – that is when social shame has reached total ripeness.  Shame is not a wound, no blood flows.  Shame paralyzes, makes you feel cold and hot at the same time, goes away slowly like the numbness from a dental injection, leaves an aching point.


3.  ‘My’ Will

What does it mean when something is inevitable?

One type of the inevitable is the irrevocable state.  A word said, a contract signed, a gift given cannot be taken back, undone.  The will let loose in the first act continues to exist, indeed extorts its separate existence from the empirical character (Dasein) who considers this will his own.  After any given act of will there are at least two manifestations of that will – the originating party (Dasein) and all the effects of will, which comprise a sub- or supra-Dasein.  The unwilled will ‘effect’ or ‘astral’ Dasein continues to strive detached from its original body – irregardless of any ‘change’ of will at the source or any other new or subsequent acts of will subtracting from the thrust of the first act.  Far from it to shrivel up and die for lack of life spirits (as clinging vines do when cut off from their roots), it is the disembodied will, which can be said to be inevitable.  A career of the detached will and its ultimate tragedy can be studied in Shakespeare’s King Lear.  When you divest yourself of your will, you usually end up being divested of your life by your disembodied will.  Proof of the innate disloyalty of will is the ease with which one’s ‘own’ will can turn on one in allegiance with heretofore hostile forces.  Disloyalty or infidelity is the natural state – like the force of gravity – or clinamen – an act of will is an atom of intentionality propelled by drive, once out in the universe it has no organ of recognition orienting it ‘back’ to its point of departure.  The astral will is lawless, rudderless, utterly promiscuous and stops only when its amoral energy is depleted. 

The changeability of the will demonstrates nothing so much as that one’s will never belonged to one in the first place, it belongs in the true sense to no one, not even to those hostile forces.  It resides in them as accidentally and as perversely as it once did in oneself.

In later writings, Nietzsche seems to have abandoned his automatic references to power or force as will – in favour of an abstract effect of force in time and space.  He develops a theory of “Zeitatomistik” (time-atomism) in a fragment from Spring 1873, in which he defines force as only a “Funktion der Zeit” (function of time).  The force itself lies in the degree of acceleration or retardation.  He tries to resolve age old disputes about movement and Parmenidean static unchanging force in time and space.  Time is seen as time-space where force needs both in order to exist or manifest itself.  Marx’s idea of circulation posits a movement which is neither pure time nor space – as it does not move in the usual sense of covering distance or being actio in distans, and yet it too as a force is a “Funktion der Zeit”, measured in its acceleration and deceleration between “time-points” at varying distances from one another.  The closer the points are to one another the faster and greater the force of circulation.  (see Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frühjahr 1873 26[12] in Kritische Studienausgabe, herausgegeben von Giorigio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Bd 2227, p. 578)

Sometimes it is very useful not to do anything.  Nietzsche has a curious way of mocking action in “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” (The Gay Science) despite his idée fixe of the will or the act as will-to-power.  How does that fit together?  This mocking of action is implied by scattered remarks in reference to Boscovich and Nietzsche’s rudimentary “Zeitatomistik” (time-atomism) such as:
“no matter (Boscovich)
no will
no thing in itself
no aim”

(“kein Stoff (Boscovich)
 kein Wille
 kein Ding an Sich
 kein Zweck”
Nietzsche, Sommer-Herbst 1884 26 [302] in Kritische Studienausgabe, herausgegeben von Giorigio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Bd 2231, p. 231)

They all must be inseparable concepts for Nietzsche – you can’t have one without being obliged to the rest.  A will has a direction – a goal – for Schopenhauer it is the Ding an Sich, and without matter it loses its aspect of being a power to form/shape (gestaltende Kraft).  The act is still part of vita contemplativa – nothing is further from usefulness for society than Nietzsche’s idea of action.  Everything considered by society to be a means (zweckmäßig) with or without ends is despicable for him.  That is the view of the herd, the “struggle for existence”.  Oddly the proponents of this struggle – “der liebe Spencer et hoc genus omne” (“dear Spencer et hoc genus omne”) –reckon the “voluntary donation of urine” amongst expressions of altruism. (Nietzsche, op. cit., 26 [303])

So why do we still speak of ‘my’ will or categorically assert, “I want”?  To use a trite example – a will is a self-piloting bus or streetcar into which groups of individuals enter, although they each regard themselves as the sole occupant or passenger.  Having reached their destination, they exit the will, expecting its journey likewise to be at an end.  But the will’s bus route is endless and timeless, hence the utter hopelessness of trying to possess it.  In reality it is the master of stopping at the station and going on at the same time.  One can avoid the extremities of risk and disaster by never trusting one’s will to do what one wants, never confide in it or only those things one desires publicized in the whole world or about whose disclosure, divulgence or leakage one is perfectly indifferent.