Politics, poetry and giving attitudes

This is my second attempt at working out the contradictions between a diary excerpt I read from Cees Nooteboom and Sartre's essay "existentialism is a humanism". I'm not quite happy with it but I figured I would share it anyways as I think the main point I'm developing is interesting enough.

In his hallmark essay Existentialism Is a Humanism Jean Paul Sartre points out that if we are to take atheism as a starting point, we will find that there is no a priori morality, instead, all morality is informed after the fact. Existence precedes essence and so the meaning is ascribed to things and people existing after they have come into Being. From this follows, for Sartre, that all human actors inform the world of themselves and the group they belong to (e.g. men, women, working class). The moral imperative thus lies with all human beings for their actions further inform the world of the existence of not just them but everyone who is also part of their group. The issue with this, in this day and age, is of course that many of the classic dichotomies have been abandoned and have been replaced by what can only be described as fragmentation. We are all to understand ourselves as individual, as unique and one of a kind. Social organization is at an all time low, political parties have a fraction of the membership they once had, people have less close friends than before, the social fabric has been torn apart. If we are to take Sartre’s atheist starting point seriously however, and if we are not to abandon the idea of a morality[1], we must give the whole ordeal some more thought.

The social situation Sartre describes no longer applies, but we are still informing each other through our behavior. So what are we informing? I argue that we are informing the world of ourselves as produsers[2], we have come to understand each other (and ourselves) not as individuals aligned by political or social organization but instead as producers and consumers of commodities and content[3]. Our self-understanding has been trapped within a language and consumption pattern that constantly reinforces us to perceive ourselves only as actors within this system of consumption and production. The Philosopher is more closely associated with commercial self-help initiatives such as “the school of life” than with the Kantian[4] and the Poet is sooner considered a marketeer rather than, well, a Poet[5].

We thus find that we are only capable of understanding within this feedback loop of consumption and production, it also means that everything that can not be commodified will be commodified anyways[6], or that they will be left out of the human experience. What feelings are we capable of having in this world? Anton Jäger writes in his hyperpolitiek that we still have political feelings but that they too are fleeting and incapable of latching on to an underlying movement. The market is dynamic by nature, it’s logical endpoint being the interchangeability of everything for everything at all times. Our politics too are capitalist, they take the form of laptop stickers and Instagram posts[7]. They are part of our identity but not capable of escaping the logic of produsing. One of the primary questions thus for me is how we are able of transforming people into political subjects with longevity. One of the big obstacles, I believe lies within our incapacity to understand ourselves outside these always fleeting and interchangeable terms of the market.

Let me introduce my proposal for what’s next with an excerpt from the diaries of Cees Nooteboom. “My relation to myself is as my relation to others: busy, superficial, without much essential contact except through hints and sentimentalities: without fundamentally delving into myself, sailing on intuition. Like someone who dances an old type of dance in a space that could be shot up at any moment. And a deep fear that with the seriousness (ernst) the suffering too shall come.”[8] Here we find Nooteboom opening the window, revealing. He usually evades himself but sometimes the poet gets to see and show himself in glimpses, hints, sentimentalities. He maintains what I call a poetic attitude. My proposal is then that we follow this poetic attitude, that we bracket our understanding of ourselves and each other. We live in a time in the West in which most are no longer contained within social structures preceding them[9], no longer bound by our geography, no longer linked to political parties, we are drifting at open sea, looking for an anchor. But what if we stop looking, what if we refuse to understand ourselves and the other using the anchoring force of the global capitalist[10] logic of produsing. What if we only show ourselves through hints and sentimentalities: embarrassed, doubtful, undecided. Might we evade the business ontology, even come up with new ways of understanding in the process? Our incapacity to listen is only growing, we mostly consume the other[11].

I propose we attempt to exhibit an attitude that when digested leaves the consumer struck and confused. An attitude that when consumed and digested displays so many discontinuities with one’s understanding that it forces resolution.

[1] There have been naturalist attempts at pushing morality beyond the reach of human action, these thinkers attempt to reduce mankind to a mere vessel lost in a wild sea, unable to exert free will. The work of Patricia Churchland is a good representative of this kind of thinking. I would like to reject their worldview, hinging on a lack of free will, with my version of Pascals’ wager. If there is even the smallest chance that free will exists (which, unless science is giving metaphysical certainty which would be antithetical to science, is always there) it is always worthwhile to take the moral question seriously because the rewards (and potential catastrophe) are infinitely large thus compensating for the non-infinite odds of there being no free will.

[2] This is a term taken from Yanis Farouvakis, in short it refers to the fact that within the digital spaces we are both users as well as producers of the content. As Zizek puts it: “In this model, everyone participates in direct exchanges without centralized regulation or oversight—no "big Other" limiting freedom. Yet this utopia has devolved into a dystopia where individuals function as serfs within privately controlled corporate spaces.” Taken from: https://slavoj.substack.com/p/musk-against-bannon-welcome-to-the

[3] I have to note that there are more forces at play here, we still identify ourselves along the lines of gender and sexuality but I believe that the root of the issue is economic. All of these ways of understanding ourselves are mediated by our economic self-understanding.

[4] That’s not to say philosophers should all be Kantians, it’s rather that there is still a relation to a tradition within philosophy within which the philosopher can operate, rather than philosophy being yet another tool in service of the self-help guru. There is also the fundamental question what the boundaries of philosophy as such are and whether they are still related to some of the global issues that require thinking about.

[5] I was once approached by a company I had been talking to in my position as board member of my study association to write corporate poetry for them.

[6] Think of initiatives like renting a girlfriend for a day, mass-produced courses and books on “authentic” living, dating apps.

[7] https://www.404media.co/you-cant-post-your-way-out-of-fascism/

[8] De danser en de monnik, dagboeken 1970-1995, Cees Nooteboom (personal translation)

[9] We are thrown into this world but it as if we are thrown out of a moving car.

[10] Alternatively, Farouvakis argues that we have arrived in a “technofeudal” age in which capital is no longer the most prominent actor but is instead subservient to the “broligarchs” of big American and Chinese tech companies. I’m still in the process of investigating where I stand in relation to this.

[11] Is there anything more exemplary of this than the Instagram profile? A carefully curated and tailored showcase of oneself, that can not be interacted with, that can be dismissed and called upon in an instant?