I have been away from here for some time now. Am I returning? When we come back to a place or a practice, what do we return to?
This was a question raised for me, casually, in a conversation at the first conference I have attended since the beginning of the pandemic. In a casual conversation with Megan Poole, she asked the question, “How do you think in a new place?” Maybe because the theme of the conference was on commonplaces—topoi, loci, memory places, that long and confused tradition of rhetoric—this continued to resonate as I listened to a full slate of panels that, more often than not, seemed to be content to think of the old place. But it was also because, perhaps, I have felt displaced in my habits of thinking and feeling since the last time I wrote here. This long post is a digest of my attempts to confront this question and what it has raised for me.
Interiors: Against Nostalgia
People often seem to find it intriguing that nostalgia began its conceptual life as a medical diagnosis, given mainly to Swiss mercenaries in the eighteenth century to explain a set of symptoms that, within a new nosological framework, could no longer simply be called melancholia. What is rarely mentioned in this potted origin story is what the ‘Switzer’ was notorious for: extreme, rapacious violence against whatever village, town, or city they were dispatched too. The Switzer’s homesickness for his picturesque Alpine Heimat was the flip-side of a professionalized violence, psychically detached from any devotion to territory.
Nostalgia for thinking is also a kind of homesickness, but one fixated not on a national landscape but the domain of interiority. Thinking becomes a special preserve of stillness and repose. But is thought’s place naturally interior, or is this instead an ideological phantasm? Adorno argued that the view of subjectivity he discovered in Kierkegaard, one of an infinite “objectless inwardness,” was unconsciously modelled on a rentier’s unfurnished apartment to let.1 We might create a history of interiority that is also one of interior styles—not the Innerlichkeit Hegel imagined as the medieval Gothic cathedral, but the family home, the barristers’ club, the don’s personal library. They are always privately owned or require a special membership for entry — not for nothing is the Tower of fantasy Ivory. The nostalgic lament for a past subjectivity is that though the structures may remain, the special animation of that interior life, what “went on between four walls,” is no longer possible. Yet the lament is a ritual that attempts to preserve thought as a private affair. Those who share this feeling are initiates of interiority. Everyone else must wait out of doors.
For a generation of renters, say, things look different: nothing is less mine than what’s inward. The renter can neither afford the collection nor the hoard. Two related forms have come to dominate the rented interior, forms not new in their result but novel in their significance: the accumulation of clutter and the practice of constant organization. ‘Clutter’ shares an etymon with ‘clot’ — it is something that stops the flow. What is flowing, continuously, in rented space, is the absolute time that one has purchased as the cost of inhabiting it. But this is not a habitable form of time: it is marked by the emptying of the calendar of its social significance, where feasts and jubilees marked exceptions to activity and practice, where one might even impose a Saint Monday holiday upon the owners. How can rented time be accommodated to a lifetime? The signs of clutter become a real if weak protest against rent coming due or the occupation of a space owned by another. One of the attractions of clutter is that there we can locate ourselves, even if looking up our own wakes fills us with dread, disgust, or ennui. This is a feeling, at least, that concerns us.
But the same protest can be found in the inverse passion of organization, one that extends beyond the renter to those who occupy a space they cannot fully live in. The popular genre of internet vlogging, Organize With Me, shows itself in long exposure to be a demand for another life. Once everything is perfectly in place, there is no way to stop. New bins, baskets, containers, shelves must be constantly installed, new rules for sorting pantries, new products with new promises, the same old irreducible signs of life.
This has not prevented us from discovering new pathologies of nostalgic interiority. These are lives whose attachments and fears disorder them from reproducing social life: the hikikomori, the basement dweller, the hoarder. The hoarder is to the bourgeois socialite what melancholia was to mourning: the institution of an interior as social display is now completely absorbed in a private meaning. A logic of intimate value metastasizes and extends to all exuviae. It is a disorder of compassion: where the saint turns narcissism into a universal identification, the hoarder accepts the reified logic of the commodity—what I own is mine—and from this attempts an involuted gesture to universal love. All that is mine must be preserved or I too will be lost.
What separates the hoarder from the antiquarian is the social prestige that gives value to the collection. The image of the hoarder, blocked in their own interior movements by the accumulation of garbage, filth, detritus, may give the impression that the hoarder’s illness is in quantity: too much of everything. But just as we mistake the cause of psychosis for its delusions, those psychic fevers of meaning-making that attempts to patch what the disease has shattered, we mistake hoarding for its accumulations: this is the perverse image of the commodity, whose exchange value has become confused with a future promise of enjoyment. The antiquarian collector, ever the aristocrat, values the removal of an artifact from its commodity form and its return to an older form of private value, the dignitas possession of the singular confers upon the owner. The hoarder’s values are more democratic: anything might be of use, given the right circumstance. One can never be sure what will confer value. Possession becomes a form of insurance against the vagaries of value.
2. Glass Houses
If we turn away from nostalgia, what do we turn towards? Can we think in a new place by simply adopting the new? Here my thoughts turn more urgently towards teaching. There is an anxious tendency within the university to look at the humanities as so much dross on some necessary “soft skills.” It is axiomatic, both for thinking and its detractors, that the humanities do not have scientific knowledge. The “skill” presented to students retains much of what was unthought in the humanistic tradition: the idealized endpoint of education as a growth of virtue. This ideology helps to soften the market realities of a mostly superfluous class of information workers, individuals subject to endless competition and surveillance but unable to produce a clear account of of what they produce. This condition must be accepted, and the role of the erstwhile humanist is to create a new technique for managing appearances. Since appearance itself is now primarily mediated technically, this seems to follow from the prevailing logic of the time. This is often tellingly called “updating one’s approach.”
But the “updated” approach does not emerge from an understanding of the present, but a use of its rhetoric to stop thinking about the unfolding now. More often than not, it protects and fortifies an old habit, one thoroughly compromised by its reaction to the past and its blithe appreciation of the momentary. To be committed to one’s own time is to have no illusions about it. This was Walter Benjamin’s thesis in an essay that means a great deal to me, “Experience (Erfahrung) and Poverty,” published in 1933, the same year as Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard. The work is rich and suggestive—it speaks not of the loss of experience but freedom from it. A new barbarism, yes, but one that may be positive—Benjamin was clearly cribbing from Vico. Our own lack of understanding of our time may be the poetic wisdom from which a new understanding is born. The adoption of glass as a structural material in architecture was an important phenomenon in this development, one he sensed began in the Paris arcades of the nineteenth century. In a glass house, there are no places to collect and order a life as something wholly private. The new glassy houses promised a vision of a world not only wealth was common, but all experience would become common too, or at least citable.
But glass remains an ambivalent material. Transparency is always partial, and glass participates in unequal regimes of vision nearly everywhere it appears: not only in massy skyscrapers that speak to capital accumulation or the weaker promises of privacy afforded by getting tinted windows on your car, but especially in the optical use of glass, including the screen that I am using to type this right now and which you probably are looking at to read it. If the Internet and the ease of photographic capture we now have may still promise a kind of commons of experience, it’s equally true that this new forms of surveillance power can make use of nearly any image, however apparently banal or average its image. A truly global condition: we all live behind glass today. But which side are we on?
One of the most powerful documents of this condition of life is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary Abendland (2011). It consists of footage of Europe at night. There is no verbal commentary, but the sequence of what maintains life in the more comfortable places of global capitalism speaks volumes. Geyrhalter’s laconic statement on the website to promote the film generated its own discussion: “Whoever lives in paradise must be prepared to protect it. A film about Europe in the early 21st century.” The New York Times review, in its typically bland and blinkered style, judged that
It’s impossible to know from the movie whether Mr. Geyrhalter believes this paradise needs protecting or whether something in his words — irony, fury, laughter — was lost in translation.
Having seen this mostly wordless film, it seems that what was lost in translation was the meaning of this silence. If this, the actual maintenance of a paradise is paradisiacal, why is looking at it with the apparently neutral eye of surveillance so unsettling? Why do we begin in an infant intensive care unit and end in a nightclub, what the French call une boite—a box? If we have, as Benjamin thought, already lost experience, that digest of life that can be spoken and passed on across generations, what is it exactly that we find in its place now?
3. Utopias
This year, I read Thomas More’s Utopia, one of the few works of Latin humanism that is still read today, but perhaps is worth returning to not as a classic that “has its place” but the beginning of a tradition without place. As is often mentioned, Utopia is a non-place, as its name in one sense literally means. But I believe it is also a new kind of topos: a mode of invention that is not premised on a response to a case, a situation, or store of knowledge, but a collection of negativity, challenges to the actual, a rhetoric of reorientation.
Precisely because there is no set of instructions for arriving there—one can only find it by getting lost in the sargassum—and because it is impossible to construct independently—its unique geographical features and history cannot be replicated—Utopia cannot be a destination. Its most important feature, though, is that there is no private property on Utopia. The Utopians are often on the move within their island, but rarely leave home. Travel is typically done in groups and with letters that appoint days of arrival and departure, though these letters are easily obtained. Even houses are changed every two years, and in a way that barely disrupts life.
Much more than the details of More’s noble island is the gesture of making a Utopia alive today. Utopian thinking is a frequent whipping boy for very varied political persuasions. It is said that Utopians are retreating from the world into a place of the imagination. Yet here, the sixteenth-century humanist has the advantage over us, for we think that imagination is reverie, falsehood, and speculation. Imagination’s domain had been vastly diminished in the history of European thought, in what we can only inadequately refer quickly to as the Enlightenment. But imagination is the power to interpret experience as contingent not in its causality but in its meaning—just as we might look at a cloud and see in it now a dragon and now a duck, so too imagination has the capability of changing the constitution of our lives from necessary and unquestionable facts to odd and curious anomalies of history. Utopia is a place of strangeness, where everything is new because nothing begins with its own justice. No one is barred from entering, but everyone will need a visa.
Utopian thought is an act of orientation, discovering a relation to place not through presence but through distance. What is valuable in tradition is not wisdom. We will not regain our experience: there is no one alive whose experience can account for the world as it is. Living in a scientific culture does not mean that we have become more scientific, but that we live with the authority of an assumption that some specialized knowledge already exists that understands reality, appearing at once natural and technical, without need of interpretation and without possibility of dissemination. The reaction against this assumption is always in league with its mode of authority: the knowledge that already exists is revealed, emanating from a divine source. That there is something that you, and you alone, must come to understand, that there is a demand upon you placed not by society but by the opacity of your own experience, is today only a feeling, if a powerful one. Should we give this feeling authority, it would set the task of thought today as an urgent clarification of this collective passion, showing within it a living history and a real future filled with holes. And here imagination becomes creative, for one of the conditions for a new place to appear is that it can be brought forth from imagination, an image no longer called a memory because it has been recomposed through a desire that has sought to understand its history as a collective one. I am reminded of the advice my aunt, an artist, once gave me on freehand drawing: “Draw what is not there and the image will be clearer.” This, then, might be what it means to think from a new place.
“And, indeed, it is to be found in the imagery of the apartment interior, which, while it discloses itself only to interpretation, demands interpretation by its striking independence. It is the bourgeois intérieur of the nineteenth century, before which all talk of subject, object, indifferentiation, and situation pales to an abstract metaphor, even though for Kierkegaard the image of the intérieur itself serves only as a metaphor for the nexus of his fundamental concepts.” Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 39