The texts I read live their own lives. Some of them keep to themselves, some mingle with the others, some texts wither slowly, only to be picked up again years later and some spiral into something new. This past summer and now autumn I’ve been reading the 1970-1995 diaries of Cees Nooteboom, a Dutch poet[1], one of my country’s most translated writers. To me his diary entries occupy a world of their own, reading them is an experience not unlike that of eating the madeleine, safe for the fact that it carries me to a world I’ve never been before and that there is a distinct afterglow of these worlds that accompanies me throughout my days. More recently, I’ve also been reading and watching lectures from Mark Fisher, specifically his capitalist realism. A book friends had recommended to me but that I hadn’t looked into thus far. From this, and a plethora of recent political events (the western refusal to face the Palestinian genocide it fuels, the lack of real answer from the left in Europe and the US, the ever-worsening Muslim-bashing in my country and abroad), I’ve been feeling a strong necessity to do something that feels like it means something. In my case, it has been mostly reading, hoping that at some point I will be able to grasp enough of whatever this is and transform it into some sort of political action. This piece, although when its seed was planted months ago, has transformed into something that I believe touches on something vital. The ability to come up with new and novel ideas. Fisher speaks of the slow cancellation of the future and I believe this, precisely this, to be one of the deeper underlying issues that we are facing in the West. Although Europe (and the US) are, and have been, profoundly hypocritical in their liberalism, we must recognize that many of its citizens too are held hostage by the governing dynamics of the systems we live in. What follows below is an early and brief exploration of breaking with parts of these dynamics. I will write more as I develop these ideas.
Cees Nooteboom writes:
“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.”[2]
In here I read a refusal to be understood, to understand oneself. There’s a sense of anachronicity in there, an anxiety about confrontation. There’s also a stark contrast with one of the key humanist mantras: know yourself! This idea that the only forward is taking responsibility for your actions, for knowing who you are and what you want and how you will get there. Instead Nooteboom, the poet, only gets to see and show himself in glimpses, hints, sentimentalities. Whilst rereading Sartre’s famous existentialism, in which there’s a massive responsibility to know oneself, something struck me. In this essay he argues that our behaviour informs the world of who we are. Existence preceeds essence and so if as a bartender, I serve people poorly, I am, constantly evermore, reinforming the notion of bartender. As a result of this I carry moral responsibility for my behaviour. But what if I exhibit very nuanced behaviour? Behaviour that is misinterpreted, horribly misunderstood. More importantly: what if I am incapable of understanding my own behaviour! What if I understand my own behaviour in this brutish, dead and dreary way, what Fisher calls the business ontology. What if I can only understand myself as a producer, as part of a market, as valued within this framework. Am I responsible for this misinforming? For Sartre, probably, but I’m not so convinced. I believe there is space, growing out of the necessity of this issue, for an informing of the world which happens through this poetic attitude that I find in Nootebooms excerpt.
When we create in this world, we are constantly asked to explain, make intelligible, make understandable that which we are doing. The core issue with this is that the primary mode of understanding has become an understanding following from a business ontology. You have to make intelligible, explain, understandable in relation to the market, which as a result kills most creative enterprise. The market is more interested in reproducing past cultural success than it is in creating something avant-garde or experimental. In order to create the new ideas which are necessary for a creation of a new and different future we must first allow ourselves to stop understanding ourselves and to stop being understood. However, I believe, we are free, our existence precedes our essence, we can escape our business ontology, but first we must disengage with it. Ignore it, see what comes up if we do.
This leaves us with Nootebooms poetic attitude, in refusing to know and show ourselves, refusing our own and others business ontology to pacify our own creating, we may find ourselves capable of informing the world of something new.
[1] I like the term poet as its more open than philosopher, thinker or writer. It’s open for constant reinterpretation and almost anything can be, if the reader is a little open to it, understood as a form of poetry. The single common element being the ability to constantly ameliorate itself in search of something strange and new.
[2] De danser en de monnik, dagboeken 1970-1995, Cees Nooteboom (personal translation)
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