This essay was a first course work on the MA I took at Goldsmiths. Episode 3 stands in reference to Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context” (in: ibid, Margins of Philosophy. 307-330) as this part was written as a sort of spontaneous reaction and playful account immediately after close-reading it. The essay version published here is without any footnotes and only with a selected bibliography while the original academic version of course had many references in terms of both books and footnotes.
Taking Flight
Three Episodes
1. Wanderlust. Arrival on Lines of Flight
Once, my friend told me about having counted all her flights and trips by train and car of the previous year. I have forgotten how many transfers between places this added up to but her eyes were wide with astonishment. A few days ago, in a chat on Skype – a conversation jetting between London and Berkeley – another friend and I began to list the cities where our friends currently live equally temporarily as us: Paris, Berlin, Brussels, New York, Barcelona, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Mexico DF, Amsterdam, Vienna, Shanghai. Having moved to London merely six weeks ago from New York this is my 5th “stop-over” in less than two years, and I wonder for how long. Like my friend I also chart the places I have been to: by layering all the different swimming pools which I have ever used. But I will come to that later.
Upon hearing about so many transitions, a journalist meaningfully nodded to me recently: “Ah, Today’s youth…”
But what? Sojourners, vagrants, nomads, exiles, expatriates? Strangers? Liquid moderns? Even rhizomes?
Synonymous nouns presented by the dictionary for the verb “to sojourn” are “visit, vacation, rest”. Examples of where people apparently go to enjoy this activity are given too: Paris and La Riviera. For “vagrant” it paints the image of a person who wanders about idly, with neither permanent home nor employment, like the vagabond, the tramp, or even more judgmental, the beggar. As a perhaps less pejoratively suggestive equivalent I also find “nomadic” in this entry. It is enough to feel society’s general suspicion associated with “the gypsies” and, correspondingly, there is the verb “to gyp” for “defraud or rob by sharp practice”.
Migration and expulsion are phenomena as old as humankind. Therefore – although this essay was introduced on the notion of “Today’s youth” – I want to suggest with Vilém Flusser that we keep in mind here the Christian story of Paradise, the Jewish mystic story of the divine spirit and the world, as well as the existentialist story of man as a stranger in the world. Another familiar image for the diasporic, wandering, unresolved being is of course „the Jew as eternal foreigner and…as someone who wanted to enter the world of nations, who wanted – deluded or not – to go home.“
Indeed, concepts of nomadic life and exiled existence have been a great preoccupation for many contemporary intellectuals and novelists, especially for those who themselves were/are culturally displaced and/or polyglot. Equally, many visual artists have put forward very different visions of globalisation by making the experience of their own travels, contemporary nomadism, migration and other areas of transit and passage part of their constant themes. Numerous works offer us nuanced and differing approaches, views and interpretations of the shifting geographical and ideological borders of the world which we are living in today. To list only a few: the airport photographs by the Swiss duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss, the American Martha Rosler or by Albanian-French multi-media artist Anri Sala; or the photographs of illegal immigrant workers by Santiago Sierra; or site-specific performances such as Mexican artist Alfredo Jaar’s “The Cloud”; and also the spaces Rikrit Tiravanija proposes; finally Gabriel Orozco’s as well as Pavel Braila’s videos and photographs and the major web-project “Tracking Transcience” by Hasan M. Elahi.
On the one hand, there is the seductively seamless and stylish image of the frequent flyer, who travels lightly, Blackberry in hand, with Business Class from one hotel room to the next. While on the other hand there is a more subtle preoccupation for the misery and cumbersomeness of those for whom new places are still neither completely accessible nor immediately manageable culturally.
So no matter whether the world which those intellectuals, theorists and artists inhabit and portray be rather small or large, a common denominator seems to be that the world is populated by all sorts of uprooted strangers. By people who are not at home “here” – wherever it is that they are (today). Everyday life seems to be that every day is different. To use Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor, we find ourselves in the liquid stage of modernity where shapes and structures are trickling through our fingers.
What does it mean for us if apparently change is the most permanent condition of human life? Which are the things no longer granted for someone who lives under such circumstances? And what might be gained instead? Which behaviour, which ways of making and maintaining contact with other people make enduring this state of constant change possible? Maybe it would help to start by assessing what does not seem to be valid or so easily available for “Today’s youth” anymore…
I will depict a third friend’s situation here: Earlier this year he moved from Munich to Berlin, from Berlin to Copenhagen, and most recently, from Copenhagen to Vienna where he now plans to stay for at least the next four years. Working on different collaborative artistic projects, at the time of each move he was lucky enough to find himself integrated into a network of people and this way meet someone, where he and his backpack could “crash” for a while. The end of the respective project always in sight from the beginning, the question of establishing his own home obviously never posed itself. Now, in Vienna, this will eventually change but at the moment he is still merely “sitting” someone else’s flat (who himself happens to be abroad working on a project).
The points I wanted to make with this little anecdote are hopefully kind of clear: this friend has neither home nor permanent employment. Nor does he (dare to) expect a contract for a job, which will commit him for the next 40 years. (Yet, he cannot be defined as the “vagrant” from above for he does by no means practice idleness but is rather always busily involved in his projects.) Most of the times he does not seem to suffer very much from these losses of … stability? He carries certain belongings around with him and finding himself among until recently unknown people – who nevertheless share this way of contemporary life – he has no great difficulties becoming attached. To quote himself, his life resembles a certain “state of emergency being the steady state” and he can set up his “bivouac” anywhere.
So, ok, he has no home. But he does have the skills to gather strings and things and improvise himself a safety net with what he finds. By interconnecting with and drawing from previous encounters he can make do with whatever. Where ever. He is provisional, temporary and flexible. A presence on the move, in a flow, he reliably manages to be his own home even if everything around him is (again!) unusual.
He might be a secret master of Zen, knowledgeable of “Ichigo-ichie”, the Japanese practice of treasuring every moment and trying to make it perfect, or even another Don Juan delighting in spontaneity and inconsistency. Philosophical thinking is informed by the belief that only in a distance to the familiar – only in the tension of antithetical relationships – only where we are able to discover, uncover the world as something strange, unfamiliar to us, can we ever find out something which allows us to see differently and, from this seeing “otherwise”, understand something. Vilém Flusser formulates this as follows:
“Habit is like a cotton blanket. It covers up all the sharp edges, and it dampens all noises… Because habit screens perceptions, because it anaesthetizes, it is considered comfortable. …If the cotton blanket of habit is pulled back, one discovers things. Everything becomes unusual, monstrous, in the true sense of the word un-settling…The Greeks called this ‘discovering’ of the covered up aletheia, a word that we translate as ‘truth’.”
Finding such a way of life – along an “inventory of traces” – does seem quite promising in order to “grasp human experience” – or at least to gain a sympathetic nod by Deleuze and Guattari who so vigorously disadvise us from ever “send[ing] down roots, or plant[ing] them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting to the old procedures.”
Here, I do wonder whether such a freedom of up-rootedness does not seem to reduce one’s freedom to the “mere right to come and go as one pleases” and what happens to ethical commitments or long-term loyalty if the spirit (and the heart) ceaselessly drift from one place to another. How to prevent a hyper-relativist attitude of anything goes in postmodern systems of fragmentation and loss of unity? How to value our relationships in the absence of guarantees offered by tradition and shared narratives that used to show us the “right” way, and where with each attachment we make ourselves dependent on a person similarly free to choose and full of surprises and unpredictability? Isn’t also the frailty even of such concepts as human rights all too evident a sign for the precariousness of our contemporary circumstances? These are crucial questions to which the answers are not easily deliverable, and the less so within such a small text as this one. In terms of the mental space opened up here it is important to mention them nonetheless. Undeniably in this young new century we have already experienced such a great deal of change that it is somehow questionable how the old solidarities and values of humanism, and subsequently too the identities based on them, are supposed to function as leading principles also in the future. Rather, it could be like what Edward Said says: “what is true…is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.” Thus regarding and affirmatively cherishing experiences as if they were about to disappear, means also to discover that not to establish new roots but constantly be “in between” is exhausting. Homesickness, Weltschmerz, nostalgia certainly have their roles in this game: When I visit people who have a settled home (best also living together), who have all their stuff at one place: their books and photographs not in boxes but in shelves, and on walls – in such moments, I sometimes become melancholic for a future in which I too might own such a home outside myself and, with this, a more definite reference point for my own belonging… At the same time, however, I remain self-conscious that this seeming burden of not (yet) striking roots anywhere but to remain “driven” and on the road (with only a comparatively small, mobile household) has been of my very own choice. “Thus, the question of freedom [becomes] not the question of coming and going, but rather of remaining a stranger,…different from others,…to change oneself and others as well.” Independence, self-determination and a capability of confronting ”the entire world as a foreign land” which deserves it to be discovered with a curiosity and a gratefulness that take as little as possible for granted. Certainly, related to this is a strong attraction to the pushing of limits and tearing open of reality: both physically and mentally, as if on a constant testing ground, plus the courage to negotiate and translate across, between and beyond “the lines”. What this does not mean, and what I would see as highly dangerous if it did, is the unscrupulous elimination of any ethical vantage point in the sense of anything goes: rather, it makes life itself entirely into an ethical project.
“Fremd und sonderbar ist, wer sein eigenes Sein in der Welt, die ihn umgibt, behauptet. Dadurch gibt er der Welt einen Sinn und beherrscht sie auf eine gewisse Weise. Beherrscht sie tragisch, integriert sich nicht. Die Zeder ist in meinem Park fremd. Ich bin ein Fremder in Frankreich. Der Mensch ist ein Fremder auf der Welt.”
“It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.” (E.Said)
- When I dream of flying, I am swimming through air.
2. Like a Fish in the Water? Blue Box. Infinite Swimming
Water is blue, is transparent, is elemental. Like air.
Water makes me weightless and free to move.
Unfold yourself: in all directions. Boundlessly.
I hold my breath and submerge.
The world becomes silent.
The sounds of my blood and the sounds of the water blend.
Immersed in water, I am enveloped by open space.
I am everywhere. I can reach everywhere.
Unconfined floating.
Swimming, the body makes smooth transitions between rhythmically even movements of arms, legs, lungs. In a general forward striking along the lane, my swim is a steady, cyclical flight. Yet, close your eyes and see: We are in space. We are for space.
Swimming, there are no clear beginnings or ends, it happens in continuance, as one respiring flow: The same recurring gestures. The same speed. The same time.
Or: no feeling for time? Everything happening at once, presently?
Or: over and over again?
Is this, what they call Aeon? “The indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened”? Imagine the spiralling loops drawn by the hands and feet of the swimmer and be reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s images of open rings, circulation of states, enchainement.
“And flux is reality itself, consistency.”
Eyes shut wide in a becoming spectre of Blues. Memory is released through the middle, and, draped in a patchwork-net of blue, I am swimming between all my pools: we are a thither-ing swarm. Multiple dancing to successive lateral percussion in immediate cohesion with the outside: bodies and water become mutual displacement, which enchants turbulences to dovetail. [27] Set free of a center of gravity, thoughts are streaming inside-out-outside-in, becoming blue spectres, perfectly there.
Beyond my pool, I am swimming. Brims are spilling over.
I am being spilled over: swimming, I am in all my pools.
“Ultimately the universe appears as the area of plain, uniform color, the single great plane, the colored void, the monochrome infinite…It is like a passage from the finite to the infinite, but also from territory to deterritorialization…Blue in particular takes on the infinite and turns the percept into a ‘cosmic sensibility’ or into that absence of man, man who passed into color.” (Deleuze/Guattari)
Not all nomads are world travelers.
- Four lucky hours spent at home.
3. My Heart Belongs to Daddy (Quote of a Song)
Yesterday, I sent a text message. I told her that my brain was on fire, lighted by Derrida. Trying to follow, grasp, repeat the thoughts and ideas expressed in his text I was constantly challenged to think the unthinkable. Now, returning from a lecture about “Signature, Event, Context”, I almost feel I should congratulate myself for this simple text message! Because it seems like I had actually understood yesterday what deconstruction holds together; even if it does so loosely; and even if I had, therefore, comprehended only as barely as possible if at all possible. Now, I feel relieved, almost elevated, because the tension I was feeling for the two days during which I had been working on the text can be read as the very subject of this lecture – and also of last week’s: Adorno’s notion of “thinking” as a situation of unconditional tension between logic and intuition, between judgment and experience…
To follow Derrida’s trace was such a difficult weekend-activity! For the quest I had been supplemented with a sort of map holding information on the context of the event and his signature. Reading it carefully, I entered a thick forest. I realized, somewhere it was burning. I had to get through this – in any case. Even the fire, as it would turn out, was for a reason.
Impassable ground beneath my feet; rocky and slippery. Sometimes, I tried running, would then trip, even fall. Roots in my way that refused to be run over like that. I realized I was hungry. This map. It was all I had. So I ate the text. I was well aware of my exhaustion. (The paper hadn’t been very sustaining nourishment.) Actually, it was hard to say for how long I had been en-route. Bushwhacking, I had to surrender my natural sense of time to the muted light of this thicket. And where exactly was I anyway???!
Growth, growth, growth.
At least I knew one thing: It was the text, which had led me into this! Because I had beguiled myself that I would be able to pin down Derrida with the help of this text, I hadn’t paid attention to what happened around me: trees closing in on me. That’s what you get! Alone in this jungle! How will I ever find my way out of all this entanglement? An open field of vision really is important! Had I known it would be for such a price, of course, I wouldn’t have agreed to participate in “Who finds Derrida”!!
Yet, I better not upset myself too much and rather not waste my energies. So I comforted myself by thinking (reversely now!) that, actually, rather than having been pushed into this by anything or anyone, it was precisely me – with my zealous curiosity and conviction – who had been so after playing along… Suddenly I thought of that dog Anticipation biting its tail and I even giggled a little bit.
So rather than still worrying about solving the game I decided to concentrate on the jungle - after all wasn’t this now quite a different, unexpected game with myself at the centre, surrounded by the jungle like by an intricate text? If I pay close attention to all possible signs, there surely must be a way out, a path to follow. Don’t they always say that there exists no such path for you outside yourself? Maybe.
But then, shouldn’t I start out by spotting where I am right now?
And for the first time I gave the trees around me a closer look. Mais, le vert était où? Amazingly, they had no leaves! Instead, from the branches and twigs of those trees dangled letters and words from all sorts of languages. Swirling around me were whole sentences and fragments of ideas mixed with personal memories and knowledge that must have escaped the fire in my brain as if wanting to help me get on with this situation.
Absolutely unexpectedly everything seemed to lie clear before me. The same jungle now flashed up as a sweeping valley. Endless! Everything up to (and including) the horizon, sharply visible. And yet, although it had all been there at once and unconditional, it’s impossible for me to speak of it. The very split-second – and this is still speaking of too long a moment – that I realized that the jungle I was immersed in really was something like a Valley-Being-A-Jungle-Being-A-Valley, everything had disappeared: What I was left with was a re-gathering self-consciousness of the sort when you come to from a deep sleep not knowing at first where you are. And I was just as exhausted from that sleep as if I had been wrestling wildly in my dreams while the world had stood still.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauman, Zygmunt: Liquid Modernity. London 2000.
Bourriaud, Nicolas: Postproduction. New York 2002.
Braidotti, Rosi: Nomadic Subjects. New York 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles / Guattari, Félix: Rhizom. Berlin 1976.
A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis 2005.
Percept, Affect, Concept. In: What is Philosophy? London 1994. 163-199.
Derrida, Jacques: Of Grammatology. Baltimore 1976.
Signature, Event, Context. In: Margins of Philosophy. London 1982. 307-330.
Flusser, Vilém: Die Zeder im Park. In: Vogelflüge. Essays zu Natur und Kultur. Munich
2000. 37-43.
Exile and Creativity. In: Writings. Minneapolis 2000. 104-109.
Hoffman, Eva: Lost in Translation. London 1989.