This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
XENOECOLOGY: Encounters with Alien Life
Steven Swarbrick
“In space, no one can hear you scream.” That was true of the original Alien.[1] Sound requires a medium. In Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction classic, Alien, horror is the medium, and yet the film is oddly mute. Yes, there is the shouting among the crew members, who all fall victim to the alien, except one; the blaring alarms; the emergency destruct system; and Mother, the onboard supercomputer’s ticker-tape-like instructions. Moreover, there is the alien, whose screeching, hissing, animalistic sounds are less a warning than a signal that it is too late; if you hear the alien, you are as good as dead.
However, when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the surprise hero, confronts the reptilian, acid-spitting alien in deep space, their encounters are nearly silent, save for the whooshing of airlocks and discharge of weapons. The final sequence of the 1979 film, in which Ripley discovers the alien stowaway in her shuttle, is unnerving because no words are exchanged between the hunter and the hunted. They do not share the same medium. No language and no sound mediate their interactions. The tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” is apt not only as a description of physical space (sound does not travel in a vacuum), but also as a metaphor for the lack of relation between Ripley and the alien. There is a vacuum between them that only death eliminates. Even when the alien makes its victims parasitic hosts—incubators, essentially, for the alien offspring—a gulf remains between the host and the parasite. The iconic scene in which the alien bursts from the stomach of Ripley’s crewmate, Kane (John Hurt), demonstrates that while the alien can take up residence in its victim, it cannot coexist. The alien occupies its human host as an “internal foreign body.”[2]
The psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche developed the term “internal foreign body” from Sigmund Freud to identify elements of a foreign language that do not assimilate to conscious meaning but persist as alien cargo in the subject’s unconscious. Language, Laplanche argues, may be a shared medium, and we are constantly translating one language into another, including gestures and other non-verbal signs. But the language of the unconscious, which includes our sexual traumata, does not translate except as a glitch or paroxysm in meaning. The unconscious bursts out, like the alien from its host. The otherness of the unconscious message is thus appropriately called das Ding (the Thing) by Jacques Lacan and “enigma” by Laplanche because it yields no translation.[3] The enigmatic message is the nonsignifying wound around which language and subjectivity grow, like a burl on a tree. It acts as an internal foreign body, menacing sense from within.
To be sure, the alien message is social, but only in the limited sense that it comes from outside, from the unconscious of the other, which is implanted in us from birth. “The enigma leads back,” Laplanche writes, “to the otherness of the other; and the otherness of the other is his response to his unconscious, that is to say, to his otherness to himself.”[4] We are, from the beginning, bombarded by the language of the other, including signifiers, gestures, touches, and vocalizations, and are therefore always translating social cues. Parasitizing these social messages, Laplanche claims, is the subject’s unconscious (the other’s and our own), with its treasury of alien messages, ciphers, and drives, relaying, not the social per se, but the sexual unconscious of the social: its libidinal underside. The internal foreign body exists or insists in a shared medium—language—but does not cooperate with it. Much like outer space, the internal foreign body is a vacuum in things, words, and ideas, which neither sound nor sense penetrates. The Thing does not resonate.[5] As Todd McGowan explains, “[Lacan’s] das Ding is a version of the Kantian thing in itself translated from knowledge (where Kant has it) to desire. It isn’t what we can’t know but what our desire can’t reach. Das Ding is a Kantian concept through and through.”[6]
Lacan furthers this Kantian lesson in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he posits the Thing (das Ding) as the alien body housed in the other and ourselves. Shifting terrain from the thing-in-itself to psychic space, Lacan theorizes das Ding as the internal foreign body occupying the other, a terrifying, nonsignifying monster constantly threatening to devour its host and anyone who dares confront it. To continue the outer space analogy, the alien Thing is a vacuum in language; “[it] is an inaccessible and unknowable void that attracts the subject’s desire.”[7] As such, it has no relational character. One does not relate to das Ding; it cannot be drawn out of its lair, brought into the open, dialogued with, or appeased. Das Ding partakes of no medium. It is a pure annihilating void.
Ripley’s nearly silent battle with the alien is therefore emblematic of the battle one undergoes when brought into the zone of das Ding. I say “brought into” since no one willingly goes there. Lacan praises Antigone as an exception, whose ethical stance orients her to das Ding. Two of Lacan’s readers, Mari Ruti and Richard Boothby, extend the significance of das Ding to both artistic and religious practices.[8] Nevertheless, the Ding concept stands for a trauma that neither art, religion, nor ethics can mollify, since their power derives from the obliterating force of this primary nothingness. Lacan’s point about das Ding is that it is the primal repressed of the psychic system, the parasite that cannot be negotiated with or removed since the entire human edifice is built on its alien nest. Get too close to it, and interpsychic space—the social medium—collapses. It is the Thing in usmorethan us, to borrow Lacan’s poetic turn of phrase.[9] The parasite that bursts from the human body in Alien is horrifying because it visualizes the inhuman stowaway—the internal foreign body—inhabiting us all. Alien—and perhaps science fiction in general—is Kantian in this precise way. It confronts viewers with the “extimacy” (i.e., intimate exteriority) of the Thing.[10]
A philosophical reversal happens in Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, which premiered on TV in 2025.[11] Although much of the TV series resembles the original Alien—there are monsters, Mother, corporate pawns traveling through deep space, and a no-nonsense female protagonist, Wendy (Sydney Chandler)—the show’s philosophical coordinates shift radically. The alien in Alien: Earth enters symbolic space, the very thing that was impossible in the film franchise and in Kant’s exo-philosophy. Even the psychoanalytic notion of the “internal foreign body” makes symbolization hard, if not impossible, to think, because the Thing is radically individual. My Ding is not yours. Your Ding is not mine, although I may desire it. The alien remains a private horror. One cannot socialize das Ding; one either succumbs to it, or, in the case of Ripley, jettisons it (for a time).
The change in the alien’s status in Alien: Earth cannot be overstated. In philosophical terms, it is the difference between Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself and Hegel’s dialectic, which brings the unknowable thing into symbolic space and vice versa. In psychoanalytic terms, the change in the status of the alien corresponds to Lacan’s abandonment of das Ding, which marks the high point of his Kantian period, and subsequent theorization of the objet a. According to McGowan, “Lacan moves from an emphasis on das Ding in Seminar VII to a focus on the objet a two years later. … The crucial difference is that the objet a, unlike das Ding, has an immanent status for the subject, not a transcendent one. The objet a does not reside in the beyond but disturbs the field of representation from within.”[12] The difference between these concepts thus comes down to where one puts the limit: das Ding is an outer limit; objet a brings the outside in.
Compare the ending of Ridley Scott’s Alien to that of Alien: Earth, and the difference in these philosophical positions becomes pronounced. Alien ends with Ripley, the sole survivor, save for her cat, trapped in a shuttle with the alien. She must eject it into outer space, where it belongs—where there is no shared medium of sound or language—to live. The Ripley of Alien is a monad floating through space, where she does not scream because no one can hear her. She suffers from her alien Thing privately (Figure 1).
In contrast, Alien: Earth ends with a collective (Figure 2), including the “Xenomorph” (Figure 3)—the name given to the alien in the TV series—highlighting, I can only speculate, its transformed status as both a stranger (xenos) and a guest-friend deserving hospitality (xenia). In Homer’s The Odyssey, when the goddess Athena first visits Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, she appears as a stranger and “guest-friend.”[13] Their interactions and much of the poem turn on this crucial, Ancient Greek concept of hospitality or xenia: the reciprocity between guest and host. In Alien: Earth, the Xenomorph is a guest in more ways than one: it is a stranger; moreover, it is an immanent exception within the social fabric. Whereas Ripley confronts the alien as an outer limit, a devouring hole, the Xenomorph inhabits the symbolic medium.
Figure 1: Ripley in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)
Figure 2: Wendy and co. in Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth (2025)
Figure 3: The Xenomorph
The Xenomorph is not the only alien in the series. The central characters are children—“Lost Boys,” in the Peter Pan-inspired logic of the show—who, because of terminal illness, became candidates for a high-tech, transhumanist experiment by one of the Earth’s controlling corporate entities, Prodigy Corporation. The experiment implants the children’s minds into humanoid, synthetic bodies, notably, adult synthetic bodies: “hybrids” with superhuman strength. They are child guests in mechanical forms. They are also guests on the occupied island where Prodigy Corporation is headquartered. The alien of Alien: Earth arrives via shipwreck. A rival corporation, Weyland-Yutani’s deep-space research vessel, crashes into Earth, carrying the Xenomorph and a collection of other outer-space oddities, including a cunning octopus-like creature, nicknamed “The Eye” because of its oversized eyeball, that invades and overrides its organic host. Lastly, the child hybrids are invaded by memories—past traumas—that their programming did not eliminate. Although their consciousness was translated into computer code, their adult engineers did not anticipate the unconscious reserve of enigmatic messages that would hijack their program. The hybrids are internal foreign bodies: implanted in machines; implanted by enigmatic messages.
The guest-host dynamic structures the entire series, with the host, Prodigy Corporation, failing to uphold the obligations of xenia or hospitality. The Xenomorph is a “product” in the words of Prodigy’s CEO, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). The conquest of foreign life, particularly the island ecology where much of the action takes place, puts Alien: Earth in a colonial framework of occupation and control. The shipwreck and crossing of identities into hybrids (human and robot, friend and enemy) also puts the series squarely in the fantasy genre, where it would be at home with Peter Pan or William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The dramatic reversal from Alien to Alien: Earth is not simply the change of location, from deep space to Earth. Nor is it the emphasis on reversal as such. The crossing of alien and host is essential to the entire Alien franchise. Moreover, as Jarek Paul Ervin writes, “the dystopian Alien films have long stood out for dealing explicitly with class and rapacious capitalism.”[14] The explicit political messaging of the series, viewed against the backdrop of the Trump Administration’s white supremacy, anti-immigrant hostility, and xenophobia, as well as the tech industry’s collusion with the far-right, providing the technology to surveil, arrest, disappear, and kill foreign and “internal foreign bodies” (leftists, immigrants, Palestinians, Black, Brown, and trans people), furthers the Alien films’ anticapitalist critique. Instead, it is the reversal of philosophical paradigms that truly sets Alien: Earth apart.
Alien: Earth is a Hegelian TV series. Whereas Alien confronts viewers with the impossible Thing, impossible because the alien is outside representation, the Xenomorph in Alien: Earth undergoes a radical shift: from the alien Ripley shoots into outer space to the “guest-friend.” The outsider enters the social link.
This transformation does not happen instantaneously. If we think in terms of translation, from place (outer space) to place (Earth), and language to language, it is a process. The mediator in this process is Wendy, the leader of the band of lost children, the first human-synth hybrid, and the CEO’s favorite piece of R&D. Wendy is a wunderkind in a synthetic body who has the unique ability to translate human, computer, and alien code. She is a product of translation—the translation of a child’s mind into a machine—and learns to communicate with the Xenomorph held captive by Prodigy. Wendy slowly perfects the rhythmic clicks, chirps, and animal chatter that the Xenomorph recognizes as its mother tongue. In contrast with Ripley’s near-silent standoff with the adult alien, Wendy gradually befriends the child Xenomorph, who obeys her as its mother. For the first time in the Alien franchise, the alien is no longer a pure annihilating force; its actions appear structured. It communicates. It listens. It protects. It collaborates.
In one of several superimpositions, we see Wendy’s face overlaid on a distant landscape. A silhouette of the alien appears against Wendy’s parted lips, stirred, summoned, and even metaphorically birthed through the labial aperture (Figure 4). Both figures appear partially negated: the alien is reduced to an outline, and Wendy to a partial object, the mouth. The voice emanating from the mouth stirs the alien to action, and yet it also stirs in the viewer an echo of the Thing: sound that does translate into sense.[15] To be sure, the voice makes sense to Wendy and the Xenomorph. However, we are outside their sonic exchange. The superimposition operates an internal exclusion or parallax between sound and sense, and between the alien and Wendy.
Figure 4: Wendy and the Xenomorph superimposed
Laplanche, as we said above, theorized the alien message as an untranslatable kernel of raw negativity that never transforms into meaning but parasitizes meaning and language. He called the alien thing the “enigmatic message” because it comes from outside us, at birth, even before birth, and well after, as we are trained, civilized, Oedipalized, and domesticated through language and cultural codes, assimilated, that is, to the adult world. We enter the world as a polymorphous frenzy of partial objects and drives, and gradually transform into a civilized (repressed) subject. Laplanche’s point is that this ordinary translation from child to adult is never seamless. The grit in the gears of the child’s transformation is the enigmatic message: outer space brought inward. Trauma, in this sense, is a structural component of the civilizing process. We are eccentric beings, ex-centered by the unconscious, because we are (to ape Martin Heidegger) first and foremost beings-with-others who are also invaded by unconscious messages: the exo-factor in our psychic makeup.
Crucial to Alien: Earth is that it dialectically reverses the nonsignifying message. Whereas Ripley and the alien had no means of communicating, Wendy and the Xenomorph converse; they even bond. However, the result is not the complete assimilation of the alien into the human world—the world of adults. Instead, the newly formed social link between Wendy and the Xenomorph triggers Wendy’s all-out rebellion against the human world of adults, namely, Prodigy Corporation.
The Earth of Alien: Earth is entirely dominated by corporate capitalism; the poorest of humanity live in squalor; and the Prodigy CEO, Boy Kavalier, dreams of creating a transhuman future, in which human-machine hybrids are free to leave the devastated planet and colonize outer space. Wendy disrupts the CEO’s tech-bro fantasy. Wendy learns to communicate with the Xenomorph, and the result is a complete destitution—a break from the corrupt world of humans and capital, where she, no less than the Xenomorph, is held prisoner. The alien in the machine and the alien with the machine undergo subjective destitution: divesting from the Prodigy Corporation, their corporate family, and host.[16]
Here is the Hegelian dialectic at work: the outside (the alien) enters the social fabric, becoming alien to its former representation, and the social, in turn, becomes alien to itself. In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes: Substance is equally Subject.[17] What this means is that, on the one hand, Kant’s thing-in-itself is not an isolated substance wholly exterior to the world of subjectivity. On the other hand, subjectivity is not external to the Thing. The most horrifying thing imaginable, the Xenomorph, is the “guest-friend.” That is the thesis of Alien: Earth. It critiques the colonial fantasy of assimilation, transforming what is foreign and strange into the familiar, as well as the hateful rhetoric of xenophobia, rejecting what is foreign as unassimilable, by turning the adult world (the world of high-tech commodities, disaster capitalism, ecofascism, and outer space colonialism) inside out. The collective we see at the end of Alien: Earth, when the child-synths and Xenomorphs have overthrown their adult captors, is an exo-collective or xeno-collective. It is forged by the stranger, by what is alien (lacking) in their mother tongue. That, after all, is Laplanche’s point: language is incepted by an alien tongue. Although we translate the messages coming from outside, they encrypt something that does not speak, much less obey.
It is not hard to recognize the xeno-collective as a chosen family, as a xeno-proletariat revolting against its capitalist and Oedipal host. The Xenomorph and child-synths are forcibly displaced, aliens on Earth and in the bodies that others program and control. As figures of xenia, they expose the hostility of their hosts, who try to immunize their “tech” as soon as the aliens rebel or malfunction. They are also eco-radicals, insofar as they show that the island’s colonizers are the true invasive species. Finally, they are code breakers, not because they decode all differences and dialogue seamlessly, but because they recognize that the virus is vital to the code. The enigmatic message is an internal foreign body, not to be refused.
I propose “xenoecology” as the term best suited to Alien: Earth’s philosophical reversal. The heterodox collective of psyche, machine, human, and alien is not so much a community with a defined boundary as an xenoecology of subjects connected by what they all mutually lack, in which the boundary between inside and outside is never clear.[18] Xenoecology welcomes aliens: extraterrestrials, yes, but not exclusively. What it welcomes primarily is the “internal foreign body,” which is extra-human in the sense Lacan registers when he talks about the “in you more than you.”[19] The “in you more than you” is a +1, an uninvited guest, at the ecological table. Although we do not have the words to represent it, its presence is undeniable. The +1 sticks out, derails the conversation, sucks up the oxygen, and overstays its welcome. It does not belong, yet it insists on being here. We think this outsider might have something to offer: How can we put the +1 to work? But the uninvited guest does not play nice. It mucks things up rather than playing its part. It does not ask to be included; it extrudes the outside. The +1 has this negative dimension: one foot in, and one foot out the door. Its disturbance is local, but its source is nonlocal. Its topology is a hole: atopic. What is more, the +1 that Lacan calls das Ding and objet a, two figures of nothingness, is a guest one cannot disinvite. It takes up residence as an internal foreign body, a virus, or an alien, but the truth is that there would be no inside without it—the internal foreign body structures ordinal space.
Donna Haraway conceives of ecology as a dinner party where companion species break bread.[20] Timothy Morton theorizes ecology as a rave where “strange strangers” bump and grind.[21] Eugene Thacker speculates about out-of-this-world encounters, the slimier, the better.[22] And xenofeminist Helen Hester views the cyborg as the emissary of a post-natural, post-gendered world.[23] The xenoecology I posit welcomes these strange strangers as comrades. However, the alien life I investigate is neither a dinner guest nor a pure beyond nor a messianic messenger of the transhuman to come. Instead, xenoecology concerns aliens who are already here, who do not eat, sleep, or translate. Xenoecology is not about nonhumans, but neither is it humanist in any straightforward sense. Its interest is the inside other (enigmatic messages and drives), aliens with no plan to assimilate.
One could criticize xenoecology as excessively intrapsychic, with nothing to offer realpolitik. While that is true in one respect—it is intrapsychic—my gambit is that an ex-centered psyche is crucial to political ecology. The latter is, by and large, lumpen bio-historicism. It examines bodies and their contexts. We can call this form of criticism geocentric: reading how the outside acts on bodies and vice versa. It reads via GPS.
Psychoanalysis offers a Copernican alternative: reading how the outside acts from within, de-centering “our” home (psychic space) and by extension, ecology. Laplanche’s theory of the “internal foreign body” or das Andere, the other in the unconscious, the inside other, aims to fulfill psychoanalysis’s Copernican calling by ex-centering subjectivity. Xenoecology not only welcomes the ex-centered subject but also derives from it: it is composed not of insiders but of inside others, an ecology that is not place-based or geohistorical but uprooted: extra-terrestrial. Its signet, the +1, makes aliens of us all.
At a time when global fascism, ongoing settler colonialism, and genocide, aided by tech companies and the billionaire class, ruthlessly enforce inhospitality, including inhospitality to the planet it plunders, xenoecology proposes, not inclusion, not the liberal tolerance of differences, but the ethical risk of welcoming the Thing (void of every social formation) into the social fabric where it cannot but distort it. In Alien: Earth, Wendy hears the alien as a desirable distortion and vice versa. The rhythmicity of the young Xenomorph’s clicks and chirps activates her unconscious desire and draws her to it. Jamieson Webster notes that “all desires [are] born from a lack.”[24] She relates Freud’s belief that “our first memories are centered on the sound of our own crying.”[25] Our first helpless “modulation of breath into a cry is a tool of survival that is also the beginning of memory—one that stretches all the way back to the beginning of the species, maybe even life”:[26]
Our cries are indelibly etched into our minds alongside whatever experiences of pain or fear as well as the soothing by others that (hopefully) follow. All memories have an acoustic accompaniment that goes back to these first ones—a double archive in the mind. … We are, in the Freudian universe, utterly helpless as human infants. And yet, the infant has this power to solicit.[27]
The Xenomorph’s cry solicits Wendy’s memory of being born helpless (first, as a child; second, as a machine; and third, as a new subjectivity in league with the alien). The result is not simply more inclusion, but a total transformation of social life. The thing that was previously excluded—the reptilian, shapeshifting, acid-spitting alien—becomes the “internal foreign body” of a new social formation. One could critique this outcome as a domestication of the Thing. Is the alien not ultimately Oedipalized or normalized by Wendy? Although this is undoubtedly a risk, the alien is not simply Wendy’s pet or child. The alien dislocates her from the language of her captor and the ideology of capital. She becomes a stranger in common with the alien, strange to herself. Moreover, while viewers get to hear Wendy and the Xenomorph speak, their discourse is, to us, purely sonic, stripped of meaning. The show maintains the foreignness of their alien tongue. Their cry solicits ours.
[1]Alien, dir. Ridley Scott (Twentieth Century Fox, Brandywine Productions, 1979).
[2] Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (New York: Routledge, 1999), 256.
[3] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 43.
[5] Philosophically speaking, the Thing (Freud and Lacan) and the internal foreign body (Laplanche) register, in psychoanalytic terms, the exo-philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who posits the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich) as the impossible object of knowledge. “Kant’s philosophy depends,” Todd McGowan writes, “on a contrast between knowable appearances and the unknowable thing in itself. For Kant, the thing in itself doesn’t lie beyond the realm of appearances but rather constitutes the limit of that realm.” Todd McGowan, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 108.
[6] McGowan, Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, 108.
[7] McGowan, Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, 106.
[8] See Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis; Mari Ruti, “The Brokenness of Being: Lacanian Theory and Benchmark Traumas,” Angelaki 28, no. 6 (2023): 123–70; and Richard Boothby, Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023).
[9] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 268.
[11]Alien: Earth, creator Noah Hawley (20th Television, 26 Keys Productions, Brandywine Productions, FX Productions, Living Films, 2025–).
[12] McGowan, Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, 109.
[13] Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: Norton, 2018), 1:106.
[14] Jarek Paul Ervin, “Alien: Earth Is a Much-Needed Defense of Humanity,” Jacobin, August 18, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/08/alien-earth-television-sci-fi-dystopia-review.
[15] See Mladen Dolar’s term “object voice” in A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4.
[16] On subjective destitution, see Steven Swarbrick, The Earth Is Evil (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2025). On divestment as a psychoanalytic act, see Steven Swarbrick, Divest: An Essay on Political Masochism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2026).
[17] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.
[19] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 268.
[20] Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 17.
[21] Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 41; and Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 153.
[22] Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011).
[23] Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018).
[24] Jamieson Webster, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (New York: Catapult, 2025), 15.
Sometimes on The Teletubbies toys seem to be just ordinary toys: a pink and blue scooter, an orange ball, a black and white hat, a red bag. One of these toys is assigned to each individual within the microsociety, and no more. There is only one of everything, four toys in all, and there are only four individuals. Sometimes these toys are played with by the individual to whom they have been assigned, at other times they are co-opted temporarily by another individual. Other toys appear, are played with, and then quickly disappear. Generally these other toys are toys that are not a part of the society per se, but rather interlopers or intruders.
Sometimes the monitoring force that seems to be harbored somewhere beneath the ground (perhaps because insufficient resistance to radioactivity or some inefficiency when faced with the planet’s atmosphere) extends its submarine-like periscope directly through the dirt or through the floor of the “facility”—or whatever one chooses to call the artificial structure in which the microsociety resides. How this is done is perplexing: the ground or floor seems undamaged once the periscope retracts. And rather than being a periscope exactly, it appears to be a stylized voice pipe or a loudspeaker. This force controls the society, though at times the individuals are reluctant to obey it. Perhaps the facility is carceral in nature, and this force is their jailor, if this is the sort of incarceration scenario that demands a jailor. Another force, this one seemingly above ground, housed atop a long thin pole and apparently powered by wind—unless this is merely a relay tower for a force housed altogether elsewhere—seems attuned to the society in a different way. It casts a pink static into the air and calls the four individuals to the top of a hill where, as they writhe, they receive signals that manifest in the form of sounds and images displayed directly on their skin.
This is assuming that what covers their body is, in fact, skin. One should be cautious about making assumptions of any kind regarding these individuals. It is not skin of a sort I am familiar with. Perhaps a carapace of some kind, or a sheath.
These body-displayed images seem to offer the record of a lost civilization. Sometimes they display a series of toys—a toy “farm” for instance, complete with “horses” and “cows” and “sheep” and a “turkey”, with an intelligent creature of a nature other than that of the members of the society providing commentary—toys that are different in form and number than anything the members of the society possess. The four individuals constituting this society enjoy watching these images, and always insist that the mysterious force rebroadcast them again immediately onto their bodies by shouting the words “Again! Again!” At times the force complies, at other times it does not.
As for their usual toys, they initially seem to be merely ordinary toys—and indeed they are until the moment when, abruptly, they are not. Consider Tinky Winky’s bag, which he designates at times as “Tinky Winky’s special bag,” referring to himself always in the third person. Subjective and objective pronouns do not exist within this society: the individuals are always referred to only by their proper names, though possessive pronouns do assign a gender to them. This red bag is able not only to hold objects that are small enough to fit within it, but, in addition, to hold objects far too large for it. Indeed, the bag seems a sort of multi-dimensional hole, and though it is little bigger than a purse or handbag, it can contain the other three toys: the large orange ball (Lala’s Ball), the hat apparently made of real or simulated Holstein hide (Dipsy’s Hat), and the pink-and-blue scooter (Po’s scooter). It seems to have infinite dimensions—everything placed within it fits—though it also retains the weight of the objects, so that if all three other toys are put inside, the special bag toy can no longer be moved, as if there is always conservation of mass. It is good for storing toys, but not for transporting them.
This is not the only quality of the special bag, not the only thing that makes it special. It is also an inscription device. If you sing a song into the bag, it preserves it, repeating the song when the bag is opened. But if you try to preserve too many songs, they become hopelessly jumbled. There is something sinister about the bag, and one has to wonder if Tinky Winky is fully aware of what he is carrying.
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The videos broadcasted on the belly skin of individuals within this society reveal the play patterns and toys of a lost civilization, but these are not the only toys to impinge on the society from the outside. We are witnessing a liminal culture, which is apparently being observed by an advanced or future civilization: the latter sometimes sends objects which can be (and always are by the society) interpreted as toys.
These objects suddenly appear, always queued by a disembodied voice saying “One day in Teletubbyland, something appeared from far away.” One moment, the landscape is devoid of the toy, and then, suddenly, there it is, palpable and present, suggesting some sort of brief and most likely deliberate and even calibrated slip in the space-time continuum. When these toys appear, they make a sound that is specific to the kind of object they are, but muted, as if the object is in mild pain. These toys can be, for instance, “mittens”, or a “door”, or a “tooter”. They are always colored blue and pink, and in this they resemble Po’s scooter—which suggests that the same civilization that provided the scooter, the blue and pink civilization, is also offering the society these other technologies, even if only temporarily. Other objects that are not toys possess these same colors and are perhaps technology from the same civilization as well: the blue table the local society eats at for instance, or the two machines that make the only food we ever see the society eat: the “tubby toast” machine and the “tubby custard” machine. Are these indications of a caretaker civilization that oversees the society? Is it the same civilization that seemingly lives in the ground below them and communicates only through loudspeaker-periscopes?
And what of the civilization or civilizations that originally provided the non-blue-and-pink objects: orange ball, Holstein hat, red special bag? What has become of it (or them)? Does it (or do they) no longer exist?
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The Case of the Mittens
When the mittens appear, they are found by Tinky Winky. “What’s that?” he asks, to which the disembodied voice responds “It was a pair of mittens.” The tense is odd here, as if the event seems to have occurred in the past, even though Tinky Winky is living the event concurrently, as we observe him. “Mittens!” he declares and then stands there unmoving until he is told, “Tinky Winky put the mittens on.” Again, past tense, but this does not stop him from putting the mittens on in the present, which is in fact the future in relation to when the statement was uttered.
At first, he affixes them to his ears, but whether this is because he is playfully rebelling against the proper use of the technology or because he honestly does not understand how mittens are meant to be deployed is never clear. In this world, with these beings, either seems possible. The disembodied voice gently scolds him, this time in present tense, and he removes the mittens to try again.
Through means that are beyond my understanding, Tinky Winky manages to affix the mittens to his knees. This is a strange and baffling moment. I have tried to imitate this with a number of pairs of mittens but have never succeeded. I can only conclude that either there is something about these particular mittens or something about Tinky Winky himself that makes it possible. He is again gently scolded by the disembodied voice for doing this.
At last he affixes the mittens over his hands, and receives praise from the disembodied voice: “That’s right, Tinky Winky. Mittens go on your hands.”
Dancing follows, along with slow, hypnotic gyrations of the mitten-encased hands. A moment later Po arrives on her pink-and-blue scooter, as if drawn by the pinkness and blueness of the mittens, and the mittens are relinquished to her. She encases her own hands in them, claps for a time, “And then,” the disembodied voice tells us, “the mittens disappeared.” Indeed, they do, vanishing off Po’s hands in mid-clap.
These mittens will never be seen again.
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The Case of the Door
It is Po who stumbles upon the door, which, like the mittens, appears out of nowhere from one moment to the next, summoned by that same soothing but sinister disembodied voice. The door is in the middle of a meadow, freestanding, not attached to a structure.
The individual known as Po approaches the door on foot, without her scooter. “What’s that?” she asks, and is told by the same disembodied voice in the same inappropriate past tense, “It was a door!”
At this point, a sort of mind control may well occur. “Po opened the door,” the voice indicates, which seems a sort of trigger phrase that makes Po open the door in the present. Po repeats this same phrase, poorly, mutilating the English language—clearly not her native tongue—and then proceeds to make the phrase an accurate descriptor of events: she opens the door, laughing and giggling and repeating the phrase.
The world on the other side of the door seems to be the same as the world on this side of the door, as we would expect from a door not attached to a structure. In other words, the door is meaningless. It does not separate inside from outside, but is instead surrounded by the outside on all sides.
Or is it?
“Po went through the door,” commands the voice. And indeed, Po does.
“Po shut the door,” commands the voice. And Po does, hiding herself from us on the opposite side.
It is at this moment that the true and dreadful nature of the door begins to be revealed. Another individual, Lala, comes along, sees the door, asks what it is, and prepares to open it. Lala, despite approaching the door from the side upon which we suspect Po to be standing, does not acknowledge Po or even seem to realize she is there. A moment later, when Lala knocks on the door, Po answers and invites him in, closing the door behind him. Lala’s surprise and pleasure when he sees Po suggests that Po was not on the other side of the door at all, but rather in a world that can be accessed only by going through the door, a world that seems to be identical to this world, but is not.
A moment later, Dipsy appears. Like Lala, he notices the door but does not seem to notice either Lala or Po who should, by all rights, be on the other side of the door. Commanded by the voice, Dipsy knocks on the door, and Lala and Po answer. Upon the disembodied voice’s command, all three go through the door, shutting it behind them.
Tinky Winky, the final member of the society, appears. The same process is repeated: no awareness of the other three initially, then knocking and passing through. All four are gone. “And then,” the disembodied voice tells us, “the door disappeared.”
My theory is that because this is an instructional recording rather than an actual happening, the four individuals are still present once the door disappears. It is meant to teach us, the viewers, to go through any buildingless portal we find, to teach us how to do so, to suggest it is a kind of game. It is meant to make it so we cannot help but turn the handle rather than flee, and then enter.
But will we be found behind the door once it disappears?
I do not believe so. I believe that like the door, we will simply be gone, and never be seen again.
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The Case of the Tooter
The final object I will discuss is designated the tooter. The tooter is essentially the rolled-up mouthpiece-equipped party favor known as the noisemaker, but massive and perhaps semi-sentient. It appears, as do the other objects, from far away, with the strangled noise that asserts its manifestation into this particular reality. It is found, again by Po. Po, at first, riding her scooter, does not notice it, but the object asserts itself, making its noise anew, less strangled this time.
“Po,” the disembodied voice tells us, “got off her scooter and blew the little tooter”—again that same confusion of tenses. Po is helpless to do anything but obey.
The tooter, blown, extends to a tremendous length. Indeed, it is longer than Po herself. This suggests that the lung capacity for these individuals (if it is proper to think of these individuals as having lungs per se) is enormous, unnaturally so.
When Lala appears, we begin to discover that this is no ordinary object. Instead, it is an object that seems to adapt itself to each user and their ability to expel air from the frozen opening in their face. Lala, a more developed and mature specimen, “decided to give the tooter a very big blow,” we are told by the disembodied voice, and a moment later Lala does so.
The tooter seems, impossibly, to extend for dozens of meters, only ceasing when its feathery, noisy end comes into contact with the posterior of another individual, Tinky Winky. Tinky Winky quite understandably desires to see the object demonstrated again. Lala obliges, but this time the object only extends to the same length that it did that first time with Po, despite the force with which Lala blows. The magic of the toy, by which I mean the technology of the object, apparently has to be renewed. Or perhaps, so we suspect, it can be activated only once per individual.
Tinky Winky takes the tooter and blows on it, a “very, very big blow.” Again, the unusual nature of the object is activated and it travels even farther, knocking off the hat of the final individual of the society, Dipsy, before rolling back up. Dipsy, unlike Tinky Winky, does not immediately trace his way back to the other three, and thus leaves Tinky Winky in possession of the tooter. Tinky Winky decides to give the tooter a “very, very, very big blow.”
We might expect, as with Lala, that nothing extraordinary will happen, that the object will not activate a second time. But, in fact, it does activate, as if Tinky Winky’s decision to add an extra “very” to the size of his blow is enough. Or perhaps this process is controlled from beginning to end by the disembodied voice. Perhaps the disembodied voice is making the decision as to whether the tooter will extend in a normal fashion or in a more disturbing and impossible way. We do not know what forces are controlling the seeming flexibility of objects in this terrifying universe. The individuals do not know either, but they do not seem to care.
And then, as suddenly as it has come, the tooter disappears. We will never see the tooter again.
[1] “Sometimes on The Teletubbies” first appeared in Brian Evenson, Salt Lake City (Berlin: Sacred Parasite, 2025), in a limited-edition of 300 copies.
This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
Elemental History: Zumthor after Hölderlin
Nathan Brown
Perhaps poetry is unexpected truth. It lives in stillness. Architecture’s artistic task is to give this still expectancy a form. –Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture
Water: Kunsthaus Bregenz
May 9, 2022. Evening in Bregenz. “What springs from pure source is a riddle”:[1] the Bodensee was formed by the Rhine Glacier during the last ice age. Now over its western horizon the sun gleams above a wall of clouds, purpling the hazy amber sky as a swan glides through the water where it gathers into the bay by the town, encountering architecture. Later the surface will be crystalline, intricately faceted under a dense blue darkness stretching out across its expanse toward the last shades of pink sinking over the southern reaches of the Black Forest.
Figure 1, Lake Constance, Evening of May 9, 2022, Photograph by Nathan Brown
It seems to have been from there, “In dark ivy…at the gate / Of the forest,” that Hölderlin’s hymn to the Rhine looked southeast,
as the golden noon, Visiting the source, descended The steps of the Alps, The godly-built I call them, In accordance with ancient custom, The stronghold of the Heavenly, where yet Many things decided in secret Still come down to men[2]
The Rhine flows from Lake Toma at 2345m, emerging from the mountains as it passes between Haldenstein and Chur, joining the south shore of the Bodensee just west of Bregenz and flowing out the west end of the lake, over to Basel and up along the Black Forest, past Strasbourg, all the way through Bonn and Cologne, out into the North Sea. One can still grasp the torsion of the landscape Hölderlin evokes at the beginning of the second strophe, the feeling of jagged stones comingling with green trees, the distant woods drawn together with alpine forests and craggy peaks by water rushing violently or settling into the depth of peaceful lakes with the sky overhead, moving through atmospheric transformations of its light:
But now, within the mountains, Deep under the silver peaks And under jocund green, Where the shuddering forests, And the rock heads look down one over Another at him, day-long, there In coldest abyss I heard The young one wail For deliverance, his parents heard With pity how he raved And accused Mother Earth And the Thunderer, who begot him, But mortals fled the place, For it was dreadful, there lightless he Thrashed in his chains, The rage of the demigod
It was the voice of the noblest of rivers, The free-born Rhine,[3]
I wonder if today Hölderlin’s voice does not feel just as ancient, just as epochally incongruous as the voice of the river did then, raging at the constraints of its birthplace beneath the silver peaks of the Alps. Perhaps it seems even more removed. From the path along the shore of the Bodensee, Kunsthaus Bregenz looks like nothing so much as a cube of glacial ice, glowing with blue-green light on the cusp of the bay as the night falls. In the morning, if it’s bright enough, the interior of the museum will be illuminated only by the light of the sun.
Figure 2, Kunsthaus Bregenz (1989-1997), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 3, Kunsthaus Bregenz, with Café/Administration Building, Photograph by Nathan Brown
May 10. The light is truly elemental, a substance that seems not only to illuminate space but to coalesce within it, as if it were a volume in which one were suspended, even as if it were holding apart the walls. The geometrical plan of the museum is minimalist, its lighting system elaborate: four stacked floors compose a cube supported by just three weight bearing slabs of exposed concrete, vertically articulating the building and structuring the interior space at perpendicular angles. A glass façade of 712 etched glass panels is divided from the interior frame by an interim corridor, allowing light to filter into empty space above the ceilings of each floor, which are likewise composed of etched glass panels and suspended from concrete two meters above by hundreds of steel rods. There are no windows or glass walls on the upper three floors; you are surrounded by an enclosure of concrete beneath the glass ceilings, articulated by a grid of square panels. Yet light breathes through the panels above, reflects off the smoothly polished terrazzo floors below, pours throughout the space and draws you up each staircase like the opening of another world, even as each level formally replicates the one below.
Figure 4, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Architectural Plan, Interior Levels and Staircases
Figure 6, Kunsthaus Bregenz, First Floor, Exhibition by Dora Budor, Continent (2022), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Here is Zumthor:
A fine haze floating over the water, a radiance hanging in the air: the light of Lake Constance. Our dream was to capture this light in the spaces of the new art museum in Bregenz….We worked out how the daylight would enter the exhibition spaces laterally. The three shear walls supporting the stacked spaces would provide shading; different daylight zones would evolve and change with the course of the sun. The daylight entering from the sides gives shape and texture to the spaces; and the viewer senses the orientation, the position of the sun, the time of day….Daylight hits etched glass. The etching of the glass diffuses the light evenly. The building façade made of large air-flushed glass panels and the similarly constructed glass ceilings play with this effect. Between these outer and inner glass membranes there is a sealed liner of insulated glass which in the upper stories is hidden by the free-hanging glass panes of the ceilings. This is what gives the impression of light freely entering the exhibition space.[4]
The mood achieved by this architectural concept and its material realization is a state of relaxed yet focused concentration, a desire to remain within a space unlike any other in which one has been. There is a diffusion of one’s attention at first through the play of elements and textures composing each floor—stone, glass, light; rough, smooth, gauzy—and then a gradual and sustained focus on the artworks on the walls or installed in the open expanse of the columnless rooms. One wants to stay: this is the foremost feeling of place in this museum, and in this primary sense the architecture is adequate to the art it exhibits. It may be more beautiful; it may indeed be more significant. But it draws out and inclines attention not only toward itself but through itself toward the work. It is attention of a peculiar gravity—not necessarily somber or severe but, yes, one could say devotional. Prepared by an architectural atmosphere, this comportment is then attuned to works of art.
The space itself is concentrated in these rooms. Not compressed, but dense with ambiguity. Modular repetition lends a sense of seeking and of questioning to the phenomenal field of each floor: what is it I am sensing? What is illuminated not by, but as this light? What is implicit in its relation to stone and glass? Because the mere presence of natural light in so solidly enclosed a space is profoundly unfamiliar, there is a sense that each ascent to a new floor, each repetition of this structure might reveal some new element of its significance. And indeed this is the case. I take my time on each level, sitting with my back against a wall taking in the environment, wandering slowly between different regions of perception, various distributions of the light, concentrating on the artworks, letting my focus shift back to the space, taking photographs which force another relation to light, to reflection, to the intersection of planes and the parallelism of ceiling and floor. Then I walk up a staircase, running my fingers along the sheen of the polished concrete walls on each side of the grey steps, toward the light above, gleaming through the ceiling of the next level. At midday, or in early afternoon, it gets brighter as one rises from floor to floor. One has an intense awareness of the levels beneath, of depth below and of surface above, such that it gradually comes to feel as though one is surfacing as one moves upwards, as though the feeling of suspension conveyed by the modular repetition of this light and these illuminated ceilings is that of body of water in which one is immersed. I am immersed in a volume, moving upward toward light overhead, as if I were rising from the bottom to the surface of a lake.
Figure 7, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Staircase between First and Second Floor, Photograph by Nathan Brown
It is the ambience of the light, the surround of its inapparent origin, its filtration and diffusion, that suggests this sense of elemental immersion: not light, but water. One comes slowly to a recognition of what has been achieved. There are no windows, no views, and the Bodensee is nowhere visible from within Kunsthaus Bregenz; rather, the volume of the building itself seems to be within the lake. This is the sense of elemental displacement conveyed by the volume itself: walls enclosing a rectilinear space within a façade, the façade invisible from within; the interior walls invisible from without. From the square outside the museum one can make out the ghostly structure of the staircases through the haze of the etched glass panels. Yet the outline of those staggered, diagonal corridors seems to occupy a void interior. Once inside, there is scarcely a recollection of the outside world, so saturated is the space with phenomenal and psychological interiority, so oriented is one’s sense of spatial directionality to what is above or below.
Figure 8, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Third Floor, Exhibition by Dora Budor, Continent (2022), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Despite the stony bulk of its concrete walls, this is an unearthly space. Its geometrical rigor and the modular repetition of components combine with the strange diffusion of its light to produce a monadic world, yet one that takes on a curious feeling of synthetic contiguity in relation to the lake. One knows the lake is there, to the north and to the west, just across the road, with the promenade extending from the shore. But one feels the lake surrounding the volume of the building, feels the water even within it, sublated by the substance of the light, such that the sense of a subaquatic world is somehow omnipresent; one breathes within it. The terrazzo floors, poured seamlessly over the slab, are liquid in their consistency and shimmer. Elemental synthesis. There is a feeling of the glacial source, formed into a place one can remain for a while,
And hear, how within From silver libation bowls The source streams, poured By pure hands, as ice crystals
Are touched By warm rays and overthrown By gently enlivening light Peaks of snow drench the Earth With purest water.[5]
Excursus: Natur
Hölderlin’s “Homecoming: To Relatives” begins with a description of the Alps in proximity to the Bodensee, before later narrating a return to his native Swabia:
Within the Alps it is still bright night and the cloud, Composing poems full of joy, covers the yawning valley within. This way, that way, roars and rushes the playful mountain breeze, Steep down through the fir trees a ray of light gleams and vanishes. Chaos, trembling with joy, slowly hurries and struggles, Young in form, yet strong, it celebrates loving strife Amidst the rocks, it seethes and shakes in its eternal bounds, For more bacchantically morning rises within. For the year grows more endlessly there and the holy Hours, the days, are more boldly ordered and mingled. Yet the thunderbird notes the time and between Mountains, high in the air he hovers and calls out the day. Now in the depths within, the little village also awakens and Fearless, familiar with heights, looks up from under the peaks. Divining growth, for already, like lightning, the ancient Waterfalls crash, the ground steaming beneath the falls, Echo resounds all about, and the immeasurable workshop, Dispensing gifts, moves its arm by day and night.[6]
This passage is a key point of entry to Hölderlin’s poetics of the elements, through which he coordinates the relationship between the gods and what he will call, with profoundly self-conscious attention to the act of nomination, “Natur.” The strophe moves through a composition of elemental powers. The cloud, covering the mountain valley, composes poems full of joy. Through the valley the mountain breeze roars and rushes. A ray of light gleams and vanishes through the fir trees. And now Chaos—Hesiodic origin—trembles with joy amidst the rocks, seethes and shakes within eternal bounds in the manner Hölderlin will attribute to the Rhine in his hymn of the same period. Ancient waterfalls crash on steaming ground, and Echo resounds throughout “the immeasurable workshop,” dispensing the gifts of elemental beings—the mountains, the light, the breeze, the waterfalls—through synesthetic resonance. The village wakes into the holy hours, the days, the endlessly developing year of this confluence, “ordered, mingled.” The poem describes heights that are familiar to the village, but where the poet has never been: it transmits the poetizing joy of the cloud even as “bright night” still lingers in the Alps, the darkly gleaming medium of imagination.
The second strophe then turns to the realm and the dispensation of the god—“der reine / Seelige Gott”—who dwells “above the light,” higher still than the height of the peaks familiar to the mountain village,
Meanwhile the silvery heights gleam peacefully above, Up there the luminous snow is already full of roses. And still higher up, above the light, dwells the pure Blissful god rejoicing in the play of holy rays. Silently he dwells alone, and brightly shines his countenance, The aetherial one seems inclined to give life To create joy, with us, as often, when, knowing the measure, Also knowing those who breathe, hesitant and sparing, the god Sends true good fortune to towns and houses and gentle Rain to open the land, brooding clouds, and then you, Dearest breezes, you gentle springtimes, And with patient hand brings joy again to those who mourn, When he renews the seasons, the creative ones, refreshes And seizes the silent hearts of aging men, And works down to the depths, and opens and brightens up, As he loves to do, and now once again a life begins, Grace blooms, as before, and present spirit comes, And a joyous courage spreads its wings once more.[7]
The aetherial one—frequently named Father Aether in the poems of this period—bestows life and fortune upon the mortals and “renews the seasons.” The god opens, brightens, refreshes both the earth and “the silent hearts of aging men.” First we encounter the Alps and “the measureless workshop” of elemental composition; then we encounter the god—who dwells alone in silence, yet higher than the light itself—who orders and mixes the elements themselves, inscribing the rhythm of the year. Through the invigorating distribution of elemental essences—rains, breezes, holy rays, the opening and brightening of the depths of the earth—springtime brings joy to those who mourn, life begins, grace blooms, spirit presences, and courage spreads its wings.
In the opening strophes of “Homecoming,” prosopopoeia mediates the relation between physical processes and divine agency. In the first strophe, realist description is blended with allegorical style (Chaos, Echo), while in the second strophe, apostrophe (“you, / dearest breezes, you gentle springtimes”) intimates the animating power of the aetherial one upon the elements and seasons. The Alps are the poetic site of that which dwells on high, where the little village and the towering peaks encounter the mythic powers of creation and the transcendence of the god. Poetry praises the most high, and in the very act of doing so—sublating earth and heaven through the productive negativity of language, transfiguring powers and things through tropes—it lifts them into another medium, into letter and voice, whereby the interiority of feeling emerges from the meaning latent in sense.
But the metaphysical and physical harmony of the scene described here is riven and disoriented in Hölderlin’s mature poetry by the crisis, the turning point, of modernity. In “The Archipelago,” the gods themselves are afflicted with melancholic yearning for those who had venerated them, while the separation of godless mortals from divinity and community is not only a matter of spiritual destitution but of the mode of production:
But the light above, even to this day it speaks to men, Replete with beautiful significance, and it rings out the Thunderer’s Voice: do you think of me? and the sorrowing wave of the Sea God Echoes it back: do you never remember me, as before? For the heavenly ones like to repose in the feeling heart; Always, as ever, the inspiriting powers still gladly guide The striving man and omnipresent Aether Lives and rests and reigns in the hills of the homeland, So that a loving people, gathered in the father’s arms, Be humanly joyful, as ever, and one spirit common to all. But alas! Our kind wanders in night, dwells as in Orcus, Godless. And they are forged only To their own exertion, and each in the roaring workshop Hears only himself and the brutes labor heavily With mighty arm, without rest, yet ever and ever Fruitless, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor. Until, awakened from the nightmare, the soul of men Rises, youthfully glad, and the gracious breath of love, Again, as often before, upon the flowering children of Hellas, In a new age over our calmer brows Blows the spirit of nature, the far-wanderer, again Silently abiding the god appears in golden clouds.[8]
Here again the elements mediate the relation between gods and men. The gods of the Greek archipelago are in abeyance, but “even to this day” the light “speaks to men”: it calls out the voice of Thunderer, which echoes from the “sorrowing wave” of the Sea God. The mediation of the light and the wave conveys the trace of the gods as the question of their recollection. The gods desire their affective interiorization by a “feeling heart,” in the form of worship. In a more famous passage from “The Rhine,” this desire is described as a need (bedürfen) that takes the form of an exception: their own immortality is enough for the gods, and they have need of one thing: they need “heroes and men / And mortals” because the most blessed feel nothing by themselves (Die Seeligsten nichts fühlen von selbst) and therefore need another to feel on their behalf—to partake of feeling in their name (in der Götter Nahmen / Theilnehmend fühlen ein Andrer / Den brachen sie).[9] Earlier in “The Archipelago” this need for human beings to partake of the divine through affective receptivity depends upon elemental mediation: when the noble mortals of antiquity no longer live beside the Sea God, it is the “hallowed elements” (geweihten / Elemente) which need the hearts of men to feel their glory, as heroes need wreathes.[10]
In “The Archipelago,” “omnipresent Aether” still “lives and rests and reigns” in the geographical site of ancient Greece, and the “inspiriting powers”—“always as ever”—still offer guidance, such that “a loving people, gathered in the father’s arms, / Be humanly joyful, as ever, and one spirit common to all.”[11] But it is precisely at the moment when Hölderlin so achingly evokes “the communism of spirits”[12] that he then delivers his most harrowing description of the industrial division of labor as what Marx will call “a process of separation” (Scheidungsprozess). Whereas there is and ought to be one spirit common to all, “our kind” (unser Geschlecht) is nevertheless historically divided from the social actualization of spiritual equality and community by the social form of a labor process in which “each is forged / only to their own exertion” rather than bound to others. Human beings are reduced to beasts (die Wilden) whose brute strength is figured as a single “mighty arm,” divided from intellectual and spiritual synthesis and laboring without rest: “Fruitless, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor.”[13] Hölderlin is never more proximate to Marx, contrasting the communism of spirits with the alienation of labor and the strange fruitlessness of labor power expended toward what will come to be understood as the production of surplus value and the accumulation of capital. Note that the “immeasurable workshop” of the elemental processes evoked in the first strophe of the poem, which dispenses gifts and moves its arm day and night, returns here as “the roaring workshop” in which each “hears only himself.” Hölderlin’s historical poetics is bound to his poetics of the elements because the latter involves a pathos of receptivity that should enable us to feel the gods through the elements, and thus enable the gods to partake of this feeling through our feeling hearts, but which is overwhelmed by the sensory oblivion and temporal fruitlessness of the factory. Industrial labor is figured as a nightmare from which the soul will eventually awaken, and the passage concludes with the utopian vision of a new age in which the breath of love will blow the spirit of nature over the relaxed brows of a revived humanity, ready once more to perceive the silently abiding god in the golden clouds.
But if it is “the spirit of nature” that will reawaken humanity to the presence of the gods through the mediation of the elements, we must bear in mind that “Nature” is explicitly thematized as a concept by Hölderlin, as a poetic name, which itself emerges from the “desolate time” of modernity. In “At the Source of the Danube,” the patriarchs and prophets of Asia were the first who knew how to speak to God alone, but these strong ones—rooted on mountains and “fearless before the signs of the world”—are now at rest. Their absence bequeaths a question—from whence?—to which they did not pass on an answer, and to this reticence responds an act of nomination which makes the given new:
But if you, And this must be said, All you ancients, would not say, from whence? We name you, under holy compulsion, we Nature! name you, and new, as from the bath rises From you all that is godly born.[14]
Hölderlin’s grammar and syntax are strained to a breaking point. The reference of the question “woher?” is ambiguous, as if to redouble and further complicate the silence of the ancients who did not answer it.[15] The act of nomination—Natur!—is postponed by the attribution of a “holy compulsion” and then by the repetition of the verb “nennen,” before the name itself abruptly intervenes between predicate and subject (“Wir nennen dich, heiliggenöthiget, nennen / Natur! dich wir”). The advent of the name both lags behind and precedes its constitution as grammatical object (“dich…dich”), as if interrupting and rearranging a stutter. Amid these grammatical contortions, the evental articulation of Natur supplements the abeyance of a source: the name stands in for the authoritative transmission of an origin, the absence of which produces its supplementary enunciation. “Nature” seems to refer to phusis: that which is godly born, that which emerges, new, as if from a bath. But here the sentimental signifier (Natur) of the naïve (phusis) self-consciously thematizes the retroactive structure of its historical emergence, its belated nomination of an absent source, and thus it not only posits the source to which it refers, it also knows this act of positing—the production of the name—as the necessity of its belatedness. The enunciation positions the sense of the name as the historical significance of its positing. Phusis would be the immanent emergence of that which has itself as its own end, of that which grows into its growing. But here poiesis is the renewal of what is named by the act of naming, which knows what it makes in the very act of making. “Natur!” answers “woher?” but the source does not proceed the act of nomination: the techne of poetic art is the production of the position—grammatical and historical—in which the name may displace the absence of an ancient source by producing itself as the source of the new.
Grammatically and conceptually, Hölderlin’s poem thus understands that Nature is not a given: Nature is the name of the historical sublation of phusis by poiesis through techne. The advent of the modern, through the default of origin, is inscribed by the signifier “Nature.” The significance of the inscription may be grasped through its relation to the key passage in the fifth strophe of “As on a day of rest…” (Wie wenn am Feiertage…), in which Hölderlin locates the source of the ancient gods themselves in song:
You ask of them? in song their spirit drifts When from the day’s sun and warm earth It grows, and storms, those in the air, and others Long foregathered in the depths of time, And more meaningful, more resonant for us, Roam between heaven and earth and among the peoples. They are the thoughts of the communal spirit, Coming to rest in the poet’s soul[16]
Should one ask after the gods, it is in Hesiod, in Homer, in Pindar that one may find them. Their presence, historical eclipse, and possible return is not a matter of objective circumstance; it is a matter of the relationship of poetry, of song, to the community. Yet their incorporation into song also stems from the elements: it grows from sun and the earth; it gathers in storms and it roams between heaven and earth as “thoughts of communal spirit” which come to rest in the soul of the poet. The elemental growth and transmission of the spirit of the gods thus has a deeper genesis as well, emerging from storms which are not “those in the air” but “others / Long foregathered in the depths of time.” These are “more meaningful” and “more resonant” for us, replete with hints and presentiments. Here one powerfully senses the indistinction of the historical and the metaphysical in Hölderlin’s poetic thinking: the revolution implicitly roams through the lines as it roams “among the peoples,” even as these storms foregathered in the depths of time may have many other resonances as well. A poet like Hesiod narrates a mythic cosmological genesis that has, as its condition of possibility, a process of physical cosmological genesis, and his poetic activity has historical conditions. “The poet’s soul” gathers these apparently discrepant registers “from the signs and the deeds of the world” and transmits the confluence of their becoming in song. The spirit of the gods—“ Die Allebendigen, die Kräfte der Götter”—is neither “objective” nor “subjective”: it stems from the synthesis of a complex spatio-temporal genesis—physical, metaphysical, historical—communally distributed yet gathered and recorded by a certain kind of soul (that of the poet). The “spirit of the gods” is physically ineffable and historically fragile; the depths of time are inscrutable, and elemental sensations are transient. “But what lasts, the poets establish.”[17]
Hegel’s remarks in his Lectures on Fine Art may help us to think through the stakes of Hölderlin’s lines:
Thus, for example, in the case of the Greeks, art was the highest form in which the people represented the gods to themselves and gave themselves some awareness of the truth. This is why the poets and artists became for the Greeks the creators of their gods, i.e. the artists gave the nation a definite idea of the behaviour, life, and effectiveness of the Divine [Wirken des Göttlichen], or, in other words, the definite content of religion. And it was not as if these ideas and doctrines were already there, in advance of poetry, in an abstract mode of consciousness as general religious propositions and categories of thought, and then later were only clothed in imagery by artists and given an external adornment in poetry; on the contrary, the mode of artistic production was such that what fermented in these poets they could work out only in this form of art and poetry….This is the original true standing of art as the first and immediate satisfaction of absolute spirit.[18]
It is not only that the spirit of the gods may be found in song, but that poetry is, or was, the creator of the gods and therefore of the religious ethos. The gods did not proceed their poetic representation, as content fitted to verse and embellished by figurative language; they were made by poetry, and “this is the original true standing of art as the first and immediate satisfaction of absolute spirit.” Hegel judges, however, that such satisfaction is at an end: “For us art counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself.”[19]
The pathos of Hölderlin’s position is that it accords with Hegel’s historical judgment—“But friend! We have come too late”[20]—yet, given his irrevocable poetic vocation, he cannot abide this verdict. Thus, the vocation of the poetic word will still be the enunciation of the holy, but we have seen that the word enunciated, Natur, has come to occupy the place of the holy insofar as it articulates a historical-conceptual-poetic complex:
But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come, And what I saw, the Holy be my word. For she, she herself, older than the ages And above the gods of Orient and Occident, Nature is now awakened with clamor of arms, And from Aether on high to Abyss below According to fixed law, as before, begotten of holy Chaos, Inspiration, the all-creating, again Feels itself anew.[21]
Paul de Man, in his scathing 1955 review of the essays collected in Heidegger’s Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1950), is right to insist that “The awakening of nature, caused by the poet, is not the immediate manifestation of Being, but the awakening of history that resumes its progress,” and he is right to insist that “for Hölderlin, religious experience is also a mediation.”[22] But de Man’s encounter with Heidegger’s Elucidations would have been more fruitful if he had also acknowledged that Heidegger does not understand “being” as immediate presence, and if he had reconstructed Heidegger’s account of Hölderlin through a more adequate understanding of the ontological difference: the being of beings is not a being, and thus it cannot be understood as present-at-hand; being-qua-being must be thought as a movement of temporal exteriority that ungrounds immediate presentation and is thus the ground of historicity itself. If Heidegger himself may have strayed from clarity on this point in his Hölderlin commentaries, we are nevertheless in a position to reconstruct and understand the sense of the word being on the basis of his most rigorous investigations of the question, whether early or late.[23]
In any case, our own commentary allows us to grasp the event which is narrated and the narration of the event as the confluence of a complex, historical, and highly mediated poiesis. Natur is explicitly willed as a Holy word, and the advent of its application to phenomenality is said to depend upon a waiting of indeterminate duration. Nature is that “she” named as “above the gods of Orient and Occident,” and we have seen that this naming is explicitly thematized as a self-consciously historical and poetic act in “At the Source of the Danube.” “Nature” is awakened “with clamor of arms”: the advent of the name, conceptualizing and historically positing the Absolute, is announced—and the announcement, the annunciation, is registered as a violent event, as the ruptural force of positing. In and through this positing, inspiration (Begeisterung), the all-creating, feels itself anew. As it does so, it lays claim to the purview of the Absolute, from Aether above to Abyss below, through the generative (gezeugt) contradiction between Chaos and Law. The relation between Nature and Inspiration is itself a generative contradiction: each gives rise to the other, through the force of the event of the name. Poiesis is the advent not of the identity of presence but of the generative non-identity of a source, of the contradictory reflexivity of telos. Intervening at the crux of an arduously and intimately constructed historical-conceptual problem, poetic positing makes manifest the force of this non-identity in its effectivity. Poiesis actualizes, activates the implicit contradiction endemic to the modernity of poetry. Natur is the name of that contradiction, yet this is in no sense a deflationary reading: it is because poetry sustains the capacity to construct the context in which an epochal name can take place that it may retain the power Hegel says it has lost. This itself is the deepest contradiction of Hölderlin’s poetic activity: the name of “die älter denn die Zeiten” must be articulated in the poem, and this articulation occurs within the time of the making of the poem itself, within the belated age in which the poet actually lives.
At the core of early German romanticism, we thus find the following structure: Nature is poetically posited—in a highly self-conscious act—as that which confers the power of poetic positing, and this reflexive structure itself emerges from and indexes historical conditions of possibility that are distinctly modern. Again (wieder), “Inspiration, the all-creating … / Feels itself anew.” Inspiration creates the Nature by which it is created. Hence the claim of Hölderlin’s work to centrality amid the development of German Idealism: Natur is not only, at the heart of this development, the signifier of a sentimental rather than naïve orientation; it is not only the ironic signifier of the ungrounding of ground; it is a contingent name made necessary by historical circumstances that will themselves be called a “holy compulsion.” The singular role of the poet among the philosophers is that he not only thinks and theorizes but constructs, through the intricately sited advent of the name, the position of this positing. No longer given, the holy must be made (poiesis), and this making is the reflexive work of a historical complex upon itself as historical and thus embroiled in the contradiction of “the holy” coming to be through the recognition of its dispersion.
The Death of Empedocles is the drama of this contradiction, and it is here that Hölderlin grapples most explicitly with the elemental mediation of the relation between the flight of the gods, the concept of nature, and the historical problem of poetic vocation in modernity. In the figure of Empedocles, Hölderlin finds a figure of separation, of the severance of that unity with the gods enabled by unity with elements—a unity Empedocles is said to have achieved—and of the tragic resolution of this severance through a sacrificial reunification predicated upon the elimination of individuated existence. Within this movement, Natur—to which Hölderlin’s Empedocles dedicates his inaugural hymn—takes on a recondite dialectical significance. It stands in for the Greek phusis, to which Empedocles addressed his ancient poem; thus it designates that which Empedocles theorized, and poetized through his philosophy of the elements, the four roots. Yet the German Natur is also a displacement of the ancient term by a concept which, articulated in the wake of Spinoza and Kant, cannot but be distinctly modern. Thus Natur is not that which Empedocles theorized: it is the sublation of the concept of phusis by a signifier whose sense can only be properly understood through an interpretation of its meaning in the drama at issue: The Death of Empedocles. Through Hölderlin, Empedocles comes to speak a modern tongue, and when he says Natur the word bespeaks, bequeaths, the name of a historical problem: not only the problem of separation from and yearning for integration within the Whole (the sentimental), and not only the problem of separation from the powers and the ethos of the ancients (the modern), but also the problem of how, at the crux of the modern and the sentimental, the conceptual sublation of phusis may be positioned as the hinge joining tragedy and utopia, joining the destiny of separation to the politics of community.
The complex role of the elements in this dialectic is evident in the contradiction between speeches by Mercades, in the Second Version of the drama, and by Empedocles in the First Version. Mercades recounts an “arrogant harangue” (übermüthiges Gerede) he heard Empedocles deliver in the marketplace:
You honor me, He answered them, and you are right to do so; For nature cannot say a word; The sun and air and earth and all her children live Like strangers to each other, as though Alone and not belonging. True, the ever forceful ones Do wander in the spirit of the gods; These free, immortal powers of the world Surround the transitory lives Of others; and yet Like plants out in the wild In untilled ground, in The womb of gods is sown The seed of mortals; Its nourishment is meager; dead the soil Would seem if that One were not found To minister it, awakening life, And mine is the field. In me alone The mortals and the gods are fused In force and soul, becoming one.[24]
“For nature cannot say a word” (Denn stumm ist die Natur): according to the hubristic speech of which Empedocles is accused, the elements “live like strangers to each other,” without the conjoining of philosophical thought to poetic speech. “Alone and not belonging,” the separated elements are in need of a synthesis that nature is powerless to achieve: it requires “that One” in whom “The mortals and the gods are fused / In force and soul.” This synthesis depends upon the bestowal of the power of the name: “For I / Befriend the strange,” Empedocles is said to say; “my word bestows / A name on what’s unknown.” Nature would itself seem to be such a name, applied to that which is mute and is nowhere empirically accessible as a determinate being. It is the name of elemental synthesis.
In Act 1 of the First Version, Empedocles recollects his unity with “intimate nature” and laments the condition of “haughty pride” in which he desecrated her shrine (“Das Heiligtum hast du geschändet”).[25] Yet he also weaves inspired descriptions of the Nature he mournfully apostrophizes, drawing together its texture through paeans to “the light of the sky,” “the earnest earth,” “the sacred founds, where quietly / the waters gather,” and “the winds [that] wafted otherwise within my grove.”[26] The unity of Nature is declared lost even as it is composed through elemental poiesis: what is said is that Empedocles has been “abandoned by it all,” but the poetic beauty of the saying itself still evokes the “ancient consonance” of “great nature” (“deinen alten Einklang, große Natur”).[27] Poetic utterance possesses the twofold power to make manifest that consonance, as a consonance of elements, precisely through the articulation of its disruption by hubris and its fall into silence within “my mute and mortifying breast.”[28]
In Act 2, amid his reconciliation with and sacrificial departure from the Agrigentians who had banished him, Empedocles arrives at a reversal of the arrogant harangue reported by Mercades in the Second Version:
Instead of me, when I am far away, let speak The flowers of the sky, the blossoms of the stars And those of the earth in thousandfold germination; Divinely present nature Needs no speech; no never will she leave you to Your own devices, if but once she has drawn near. For inextinguishable is the moment that is hers; And with her, victorious throughout the ages, Bestowing blessings from above, fire celestial. And when the glorious days of Saturn come, The new, more manly days, Then think of times gone by, and live a life warmed by The genius of your fathers’ sayings once again! To celebrate with you will come, as though invited by The canticle of vernal light, the all-forgotten world Of heroes rising from the realm of the shades, And with the golden clouds of mourning may Your memories be gathered, joyful ones! about you.—[29]
In the “arrogant harangue” reported by Mercades, nature is mute, and thus it needs the synthetic power of speech to fuse the separated elements. Here, on the other hand, “Divinely present nature / Needs no speech [Rede],” since the flowers of the sky and those of earth may speak (sprechen) in the absence of the philosopher/poet. Nature, whose moment is inextinguishable, will bestow its blessings through “fire celestial,” and “the all-forgotten world / Of heroes” will be “as though invited by / The canticle of vernal light.” Poetry draws together elemental powers through the discursive speech it tells us nature does not need. Yet, as I have argued, “nature” is itself recognized in Hölderlin’s poetry as a name and a concept conferred upon elemental synthesis as that which it produces: i.e. the unity posited by this concept emerges from an act of positing rather than an act of representation. Thus, Natur is the name of the separation of nature from itself as that which “needs no speech”: the separation of nature from phusis. And again, everything here depends upon the precision through which poetry, through which poetic drama, positions signifiers. Poetry produces concepts immanent to its movement, interior to its determinations, through the formally singular distribution of otherwise common words: such would be the dual power of poiesis and techne within the poetic text.
As the sacrificial movement of The Death of Empedocles draws to a close, that synthesis of the elements it calls Natur is positioned as the impossible suture of tragedy and utopia. It is impossible because “all-transforming Nature”[30] cannot play the role it is assigned in the drama. Signifier of subsuming unity, sublating the process of autotelic genesis signified by phusis into the Idea of the whole, it cannot mean what it says, nor say what it means, because it is riven between contradictory imperatives to designate the whole and, in order to say what the whole is, to dissolve it into the enumeration of particulars.[31] Nature is mute, and thus needs speech, but nature needs no speech: it speaks. This mute speech takes the form not of concepts, not of words, but of the phenomena those designate. Consider the great utopian prophecy with which Empedocles takes leave of the polis:
Oh, give yourselves to nature, before she takes you!— For you have thirsted long for things unfamiliar, and As though imprisoned in a sickly body the spirit Of Agrigent is yearning now to slough off the old ways. So, dare it! your inheritance, what you’ve earned and learned, The narratives of all your fathers’ voices teaching you, All law and custom, names of all the ancient gods, Forget these things courageously; like newborn babes Your eyes will open to the godliness of nature, And then your spirit will take flame from The light of heaven, sweet breath of life Will then suffuse your breast anew, And forests full of golden fruits will sway beneath The wind, and springs will jet from rocks, when The world’s life, her spirit of peace, embraces you; She’ll nurse your soul and calm you with a blessed lullaby; And from the velvet twilight of delight The green of earth will glisten once again And mountain and sea and cloud and star, The noble forces, all heroic brothers bound to you, Will then appear before your eyes, that like a warrior Your breast will clamor mightily for deeds, and you Will dwell within your own grand world, shake hands With one another, give the word and share the good. Oh then dear friends—partake of deeds and fame, Like faithful Dioscuri; each will be the equal of The others—like slender statues in repose your New Life will come to rest on well-conceived Arrangements, letting law tie confederate bonds. You tutelary spirits of our all-transforming nature! then, Oh then, you’ll summon all unto your cheerful side, you Who take your joy in heights and depths, However toil and luck and sun and rain may Befall the heart of mortals in their narrow quarters, You will invite from all the far-flung corners of the world The liberated peoples to the celebrated festival, Hospitable! pious! for mortals then will donate lovingly Their very best; no form of servitude Will cramp and crush the breast— [32]
According to Empedocles, “the spirit / Of Agrigent is yearning now to slough off the old ways,”and devotion to nature is the means by which this will be achieved. Giving oneself to nature, and thereby courageously forgetting ancient custom, is the act through which “like newborn babes / Your eyes will open to the godliness of nature.” The reflexive structure of this act seems to imply a surrender of political techne to the autotelic unfolding of phusis: giving oneself to nature opens one’s eyes to nature—rather than culture—and this will then give rise to the cultural rebirth of the community: new laws, well-conceived social arrangements, equality, and universal peace will grow from or indeed within immersion in nature, as “new life.”
The utopian logic of this speech is in high tension with the tragic destiny to which the suicidal will of Empedocles testifies. By his own account and that of his followers, Empedocles devoted himself to and was at one with nature; yet precisely this attainment seems to have resulted in its ruination, giving rise not to political wisdom but rather to the hubris through which he elevated himself above the community and declared himself a god, the “lord and master” of nature itself. Moreover, the imperative to “give yourselves to nature, before she takes you!” precisely conveys the suicidal course on which Empedocles is bent: since nature is the concept of the whole, integration into the whole is incompatible with individuated existence. This is the logic of his sacrifice.
Yet what he ends up saying in the midst of his prophecy is also implicitly at odds with its conceptual teleology: it is not “nature” per se but rather golden fruits that sway beneath the wind, springs that jet from rocks, the velvet twilight, the green earth, mountain, sea, cloud, and star—i.e. particular manifestations of the elements, not the immanence of their synthesis—that will “appear before your eyes.” These particulars are precisely what Empedocles will lose when he plunges into Mount Etna: he will surrender the drama of individuation, of determinate existence, to which distinctions among the elements gives rise. Thus his speech may be taken to imply a wisdom its speaker does not quite grasp: address yourselves to the particulars, to the resolutely individuated roots from which they stem, to determinate manifestations of transformation rather than to becoming itself, rather than to the subsuming force of “all-transforming nature.”
~
If I have exercised a certain vigilance with respect to the teleology of the concept of nature, or indeed to the Kantian sense in which nature is an Idea, that is because the question of the relationship between the elements and nature offers an approach to the drama of individuation with broader implications not only for Hölderlin’s poetics, but also for Peter Zumthor’s architecture, and for the modern history of the arts to which they belong in different ways. It is mediation that I see at stake in this question. In Hölderlin’s figurative schema, the gods need mortals to feel the phenomena in order to feel themselves—one might say, in order to exist—and the elements are those essences of phenomenality that mortals feel. Insofar as they are both essences and individuated, they preserve a layer of mediation between being and beings, relating the particular to the universal without dissolving singularities of phenomenal presentation into the whole of becoming.
I would like to read Peter Zumthor’s work as a technically meticulous and soulfully poetic effort to foreground such mediation—elemental mediation—in the field of contemporary architecture. In doing so, I would like as well to bring out the historical stakes of that effort, or at least to limn certain contours of its historical determinations and implications, slowly but surely, in a manner that may only become clear toward the end of this essay. That is to say, long passages in my descriptions and discussion of his work may not seem to be “historical,” but we will see if the approach takes on that character as the breadth of what is at issue in Zumthor’s architecture comes into focus.
The relation of modernism to modernity would alter the terms of the romantic complex with which Hölderlin grapples, and here I can only touch upon this vast intervention through Zumthor’s relation to the architectural modernism of the International Style. It is the industrial production of materials—glass, steel, reinforced concrete—that enables the structural innovations of the International Style, in particular the powers of geometrical abstraction and transparency grounding its disputed, complex, and contextually specific negations of local context—or, if one likes, its contested claims upon the transcendence of history and nature. As Kunsthaus Bregenz demonstrates, Zumthor has thoroughly absorbed the conceptual strengths, the aesthetic achievements, and the technical affordances of his modernist precursors (particularly Mies), yet his work is steeped in regional craft traditions, frequently devoted to the use of local materials, and constitutively informed by site specificity.
Zumthor often reflects on shifts in his architectural formation—from his apprenticeship as a cabinet maker in his father’s workshop, to his modernist education at the College of Applied Arts in Basel and the Pratt Institute in New York, to his eventual recognition of the need to integrate these elements of his training with a historically and geographically specific approach to site and community. He comments on this trajectory in an interview with Mari Lending, published as A Feeling of History:
Looking back, I see that my work and my specific approach to architecture has developed over a long period of time since I received my first modernistic training at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, modelled on Bauhaus ideas. Then, design was all about being innovative, about finding new solutions to mostly old problems, about fighting history, even overcoming history. Since then, my approach to design and history has changed a lot. Looking at the world around me now makes me realize: Everything I see is history. Almost everything that surrounds us, our landscapes, villages, and cities, down to our houses and the rooms where we live, is fully of history; we just have to see it. Everything has been made by someone, by people I don’t know, people I have never met, and most of them long dead. Increasingly, that is a reassuring feeling, it makes me feel part of the world.[33]
We will see in our commentaries on Zumthor’s Therme Vals, Kolumba Museum, and Bruder Klaus Field Chapel how deeply and variously this commitment to history informs his practice. For now, we can register not only the recognition of historical determinations that comes to suffuse his work, but also his sense of the effort required to “see” history, to become familiar with the unfamiliarity both of natural history and of what has been made by “people I don’t know, people I have never met, and most of them long dead.”
With his formation in mind, I would argue that Zumthor’s architecture is a signal exemplar of what should be called late modernism. The depth of its immersion in modernist practices is matched by the clarity of its indifference to “postmodernist” fashions, which enables a concentration upon what his training as a cabinetmaker, his study of local craft traditions and the specificity of each site, can bring to the poetic treatment of materials and architectural environments. This late modernist practice involves an important relationship between modernism and romanticism. Hölderlin’s poetry is intensely attuned to the geographical specificity of the regions upon which it meditates and to the communal and existential separations of modernity, which it expresses and transmutes through the pervasive allegory of the flight of the gods. Yet this allegory mythologizes a historical process at the same time that it naturalizes it through the recuperative construction of the concept of Nature—one ultimately riven between tragedy and utopia and thus overburdening the problem of separation with the metaphysical vocation of achieving, through elemental synthesis, the hen kei pan—an overburdening dramatized by the tragic fate of Empedocles.[34]
When he comments on his work, Zumthor sometimes speaks in a way suggesting the persistent temptation of such overburdening. His thinking about the relation between elements, things, and the states of mind transpiring through them must be precisely apprehended while also being delimited in its application to his architecture:
The world is full of signs and information, which stand for things that no one fully understands because they, too, turn out to be signs for other things. Yet the real thing remains hidden. No one ever gets to see it. Nevertheless, I am convinced that real things do exist, however endangered they may be. There are earth and water, the light of the sun, landscapes and vegetation; and there are objects, made by man, such as machines, tools, or musical instruments, which are what they are, which are not mere vehicles for an artistic message, and whose presence is self-evident.
When we look at objects or buildings that seem to be at peace within themselves, our perception becomes calm and dulled. The objects we perceive have no message for us; they are simply there. Our perceptive faculties grow quiet, unprejudiced, and unacquisitive. They reach beyond signs and symbols; they are open, empty. It is as if we could see something on which we cannot focus our consciousness. Here, in this perceptual vacuum, a memory may surface, a memory that seems to issue from the depths of time. Now, our observation of the object embraces a presentiment of the world in all its wholeness because there is nothing that cannot be understood.[35]
“There is nothing that cannot be understood” does not mean that everything is understood. It means that understanding is not what is ultimately at issue: there is nothing that cannot be understood because it is a “presentiment,” not the task of understanding, that surfaces in the psyche. Nevertheless, I think Zumthor oversteps the mark his own work inscribes when he refers the kind of presentiment it produces to “the world in all its wholeness.” What I think he means is that the clearing of the faculties—which grow “quiet, unprejudiced, and unacquisitive”—produces a condition of negative capability in which the observation of the object gives way to the presentiment that the world is not an object, and therefore that “world” is not a phenomenon determinable by the faculty of understanding. Perhaps there is a teleological intimation at issue in the experience Zumthor describes, but I think his remark implicitly confuses what Kant calls an aesthetic idea with what he calls an idea of reason. An idea of reason is “a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate”: i.e. it is the concept of a concept, an Idea, such as “the world in all its wholeness.” An aesthetic idea is “the counterpart (pendant) of an idea of reason,” and it is different from the latter insofar as it is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e. concept, to be adequate to it.” “The world in all its wholeness” is itself a determinate thought, a concept raised to an idea, that is not adequate to the presentiment Zumthor describes, which, I would argue, “give[s] the imagination an impetus to think more, although in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended in a concept.”[36]
When it is achieved, Zumthor claims, the self-evidence of architectural presentation refers us to elemental essences—earth and water, the light of the sun, landscapes and vegetation—and these, he says, are “real things” that exist, as are technical objects such as machines, tools, and musical instruments. The made is equal to the given insofar as it presents realities that “are not mere vehicles for an artistic message.” These realities may present themselves as “self-evident,” rather than as signs for other things, yet, through the quietness of the perceptual faculties they produce, they also occasion a “perceptual vacuum” in which “a memory may surface, a memory that seems to issue from the depths of time.” Thus, Zumthor describes a state in which what is sufficient to itself produces something other than its presence: a recollective temporality in excess of both subject and object, the surfacing of that which is emphatically not present to a perceptual beholder. The being of beings is not a being—i.e. it is neither a being within the world nor the world in all its wholeness—and might thus be accessed through a presentiment that takes the form of a memory, at the limit of conscious and unconscious activity, rather than through the immediacy of what is there. The self-evidence of mere things or the architectural presentation of elemental essences, when these come to the foreground of our experience, mediate an emergence from “the depths of time,” and because this emergence is mediated, because it passes through elements and things, it is not only ontological but historical. Being and history encounter one another in the passage through aesthetic ideas that arise from determinate presentations.
In the case of Kunsthaus Bregenz, modernist technique allows a treatment of materials that releases and configures elemental potentials which evoke and reconstruct the history and the feeling of the landscape—in particular, the immediate proximity of the Bodensee and the deep history of its glacial formation. It is the signal innovation of the International Style, the curtain wall façade, that enables the building’s unique filtration of natural light into the enclosed spaces of stacked levels through hanging glass ceilings, while weight-bearing elements—the three perpendicular concrete support walls—lend the interior environment its strange combination of massive structural heft and floating, geometrically articulated illumination. The tension between these conveys the sense of elemental suspension that imbues one’s ascent through the modular repetition of levels with the feeling of rising through an aqueous environment, illuminated by the filtration of light from above. The unseen presence of the lake and the unconscious sense of its glacial formation (perhaps registered through the glowing, icy tint of the light) enter the building, creating a mnemonic and phenomenological evocation of history and site through the geometrical and structural affordances of modernist style.
Zumthor notes that materials “can assume a poetic quality in the context of the architectural object, although only if the architect is able to generate a meaningful situation for them, since the materials in themselves are not poetic.”[37] He admires and attempts a precise and sensuous approach to materials “anchored in an ancient, elemental knowledge about man’s use of materials” which can also “expose the very essence of those materials, which is beyond all culturally conveyed meaning.” Materials have innate qualities, an elemental essence, yet it is their formal treatment and structural configuration, the manner in which their preparation is related to use and sensuous experience, and their relation to site and architectural context, that endows them with a poetic significance which is always specific to a particular building:
The sense that I try to instill into materials is beyond all rules of composition, and their tangibility, smell, and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language we are obliged to use. Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out the specific meanings of certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can only be perceived in just this way in this one building. If we work towards this goal, we must constantly ask ourselves what the use of a particular material could mean in a specific architectural context.[38]
In Kunsthaus Bregenz, it is the relational treatment of glass and stone surfaces (etching and polishing) in coordination with the structural disposition of steel frame, grid façade, and rectangular supports that activate an elemental mingling of light and volume evocative of the displaced yet circumambient water of the lake, which enters into the poetic significance of the materials. Modernist minimalism, and its structural deployment of geometrical abstraction, enables the sensuous concretion of historically and geographically specific significance drawn from elemental relations and their phenomenal effects.
Returning to moments in the art of modernity that Zumthor’s work incorporates, we might say that the architectural modernism of the International Style overcomes the romantic recourse to Nature as a compensatory metaphysical totality, but it sometimes does so through a hypostatization of Form tending toward abstraction from historical and geographical context and a use of materials sometimes indifferent to site specificity. Like Hölderlin’s romantic poetry, Zumthor’s late modernist architecture takes the expression of elemental essences as a central artistic problem. Yet it finds among the traditions upon which it draws the resources of a double negation: a negation of Nature by geometrical abstraction; a negation of ahistorical Form by craft and by site. In order to understand how this double negation achieves a practice of elemental expression adequate to the demands of a dialectically rigorous late modernism—one that incorporates rather than disavowing the inheritance of both modernism and romanticism—we have to follow Zumthor’s work into Graubünden, and then up the Rhine to Cologne and Wachendorf.
Excursion: Graubünden
Toward Therme Vals. But first we need to survey some of the works that constellate the region, allowing us to frame the achievement of Zumthor’s masterpiece.
May 11. Werkraum Bregenzerwald exemplifies the combination of modernist form and local craft traditions in Zumthor’s architecture. Completed in 2013, its function is to display the work of local artisans of the Bregenzerwald region—cabinetmakers, carpenters, builders, plumbers, metalworkers, graphic artists, goldsmiths, upholsterers, and stove-makers, who formed an affiliation in 1999. As Zumthor writes, “the local artisans wanted to build a craft and design center in their valley…where they could get together and show their craftsmanship to the public, undertake common projects, make furniture collections and material archives available, hold conversations with clients, schedule seminars and workshops, and celebrate special occasions like the Artisans’ Ball with the valley residents.”[39] After a thirty-minute drive southeast through the forest from Bregenz to Andelsbuch, the low profile of the transparent glass showroom and its overhanging dark wooden roof looms into view alongside the road in the center of town, with meadows stretching out from the parking lot behind it into the green hills.
Figure 9, Werkraum Bregenzerwald (2008-2013), Photograph by Nathan Brown
The rectangular parallelepiped of the façade is composed of large panels of clear glass framed by steel beams. It encloses a large open volume, punctuated by dark wooden columns, wrapped with narrow black leather bands along the lower third, and structured by two large concrete blocks which house, in their interior, a stairwell to bathrooms and a kitchen, with another block outside housing an elevator. These stabilize the imposing wooden roof floating overhead and substantially overhanging the rectangular façade, structured by a grid of open squares with dark-blue felt padding inside for acoustics and with lighting and electrical systems set within the frame. The dark terrazzo floor was arduously poured in over a dozen layers without expansion joints or structural articulations to alleviate pressure, thus taking on a uniform consistency and a liquid sheen while acquiring anticipated fault lines over time. The space is vast and flexible, open to a wide variety of configurations for exhibitions and displays, and above all open to the surrounding exterior for events, visually connected with the countryside and the road.
Figure 10, Werkraum Bregenzerwald, Interior, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Architecturally, the overhanging dark roof and clear glass box are strongly reminiscent of Mies van Rohe’s 1968 Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin, and this may be the only Zumthor building one could plausibly describe as “derivative.” But it is differentiated from Mies’s gallery by the important structural role of the large concrete volumes with their interior rooms, and the structural bulk of these lend the building that peculiar tension between mass and lightness also characteristic of Kunsthaus Bregenz, an intermingling of gravity and open space. The Werkraum building, however, does not seek the kind of emotional gravity achieved by the Kunsthaus. Here the darkness of the roof, of the floor, of the columns and their leather wrapping, of the concrete volumes does offer a somber tone, but not one that is psychologically complex or mnemonically evocative. The mood is open yet formal: rationally serious and reflective but not emotionally dense; rather it is conducive to the attentive curiosity appropriate to the commercial character of the building and the informative character of its exhibitions, a mode of attention that is sharp but also convivial and brisk.
The construction of the building and the sourcing of its materials was carried out in collaboration with the local craftspeople whose work it would represent and with whom Zumthor had established relationships during the construction of Kunsthaus Bregenz in the 1990s. Their skill is evident in the detail of the leather wrappings, in the meticulous application of the floor, in the joinery and the lighting. One can acquire a small box of maps as a guide to notable architecture and craft workshops in the region: an homage to the heyday of the International Style thus spirals out toward local traditions carried into the present and intersecting with the prolific range of late modernist architecture throughout Vorarlberg.[40]
May 12. Into Graubünden. I’m staying in Ober Says, a tiny village in the mountains just north of Chur and Haldenstein, where Zumthor’s studio was constructed in the mid-1980s. My neighbor, visible from a balcony overlooking the mountains across the valley, is a charismatic pig who wanders snorting along a path circling the adjacent yard. From the village there’s a path into an open meadow stretching out to a ridge along which I walk to a copse of trees, looking over the valley, where I read Hölderlin for a while in the evening light:
But the handmaids of heaven Are miraculous, As is everything born of the gods. Try taking it by surprise, and it turns To a dream; try matching it by force, And punishment is the reward; Often, when you’ve barely given it A thought, it just happens.[41]
May 13. From Chur, one passes into Haldenstein across a bridge over the Rhine. Walking toward the north end of the village, one sees the patio garden of Atelier Zumthor (1985-1986) on the right, with cherry trees and a shaded rear façade of glass and wood. The windowless west side of the building rises like the end of a tall shed, yet one whose simplicity is so beautifully rendered its provenance is unmistakable. An exterior shell of long and narrow larch-wood slats, weathered to a matte blue-grey, foregrounds the verticality of the structure and suggests its designer’s apprenticeship as a cabinet maker. Around the corner, the vertical slats of the wooden shell directly meet the road and slope down its incline right along the length of the building, as though having grown into or out of the ground it covers. The formal artistry of the narrow slats blends with the natural tone of the wood and the organicism of the structure’s sloping horizontal asymmetry.
Figure 11, Atelier Zumthor (1985-1986), Haldenstein, Photograph by Nathan Brown
A distinctly small, isolated square window toward the north end matches a regional feature one sees among other alpine homes in the village, but, well above eye-level, a long rectangular strip of narrow windows stretching across the façade again distinguishes the architectural formality of the structure and draws attention to its height. These windows illuminate, from behind, the drawing studio on the second floor, which looks out from the larger windows on the other side to the relative privacy of the garden patio. Beneath the upper windows, near but slightly off center, a black metal rectangle protrudes from the wooden shell, encasing the door within its brooding shelter. This rather alien detail, a floating portal, framing and shielding the only street-side door, marks off the building from the architectural world of the village, and it marks the privacy and reflective interiority of the space as well: this is not the sort of door one knocks on uninvited. One finds again that Stimmung characteristic of Zumthor’s architectural oeuvre: the muted drama of a soulful intelligence—one that is naturally at ease, calmly articulate, refined, confidently composed.
Passing back over to Chur, the Shelter for Roman Architectural Ruins (1985-1986) is a shed-like construction, composed of a permeable sheath of wider, horizontal wooden slats. The two cubes facing the road are each punctuated by a black, protruding metal box that frames a large window. The sheds glow from within when illuminated at night, and the large box windows draw the visitor to gaze inside at the excavated ruins. Around the side, a door frame dramatically protrudes from the shell on the left, first in a vertically articulated, accordion-like extension of the wood, then into a black metal box with a visible, built-in stair step floating just above the ground.
Figure 12, Shelter for Roman Archaeological Ruins (1985-1986), Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 13, Shelter for Roman Archaeological Ruins, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 14, Shelter for Roman Archaeological Ruins, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
There seems to be an argument at issue in these protruding door frames, or at least a rhetorical figure: these are not only doors but passageways, thresholds extending into exterior space and thus claiming it as part of the interior, as an extension of the interior, and therefore—figurally as well as functionally—as an assertion of interiority. Between exterior and interior, one is meant to undergo a change of state. In terms of program, the protruding door frame also marks directionality: one walks into the first cube and then across a footbridge toward a similar accordion corridor connecting it to the next shed, a passageway visible from the exterior. Above, enormous skylights extend from the roofs and, dramatically, into the interior as recessed diamond boxes (their corners pointing at the sides of the box sheds). One notes that both the Atelier and the Shelter are marked by ornamental flourishes that are nevertheless examples of minimalist commitments: sharply denoted geometrical volumes articulating thresholds between interior and exterior (windows and doors) serve a rhetorical and thematic purpose while strongly conveying a mood—slightly ominous, or at least mysterious, demarcating a gravity inherent to the act of passing between worlds. In order to be noted as thus implicit, it has to be explicitly marked.
Toward the north end of Chur, the Apartments for Senior Citizens (1989-1993) bring the foregrounding of wood by the Atelier and the Shelter back into harmony with stone. The apartments extend as a long, two-story volume equally divided by twenty-two recessed balconies facing east toward the setting sun across the valley. The structure has the feel of a constructivist rectangular plane, extending across a gently sloping incline above a narrower concrete foundation and rounded by a curving path for residents to walk on. The thick stone walls, which dominate the two ends of the rectangular volume, are made of tufa blocks in varying sizes: creamy, porous, warm. The stone blends together with the larch-wood window frames and balcony railings facing across the valley. On the access side of the building, it forms column-like divisions between large windows along both stories of the whole façade, also framed in wood and illuminating corridors and common areas.
Figure 15, Apartments for Senior Citizens (1989-1993), Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 16, Apartments for Senior Citizens, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 17, Apartments for Senior Citizens, Chur, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Zumthor notes that “the trio of tufa masonry, exposed concrete ceilings, and larch-wood is familiar to the people in this area; it even has something refined about it, for in Graubünden tufa was once used for important public buildings. The waxed larch-wood floors are made of really thick boards fixed on a lath underlay, and they sound like wood when walked upon.”[42] The low rectilinear extension of the building, the massive solidity of its end walls, the geometrical regularity of its windows and balconies framed in regional materials, and the hanging flower pots and tapestries that come to decorate them create an earnest synthesis of abstraction and vernacular dignity. “The circumstances must have been favorable, for today I realize that we succeeded in building a rather elegant senior citizen’s residence for ordinary people within the framework of the budget granted by the state.”[43]
May 15. St. Benedict Chapel (1985-1988). One must be cautious in attempting to describe this building, trying to state the sense of its presence. Perhaps it is the most evasive, ambiguous, and profound of Zumthor’s works. What is it about this simple chapel that forever anchors in the psyche? Why does it strike one with the emotional singularity of an unprecedented form, imposing an ambiguous demand?
Figure 18, Saint Benedict Chapel (1985-1988), Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
From Chur, one approaches Sumvitg heading west along the highway, then turns up toward the chapel along a narrow, winding road above a valley, hairpin turns leading you into the foothills. One parks near the ruins of the old chapel, destroyed by an avalanche in the early 1980s, its rough stone walls cresting a mound of earth, the contours of its base grounded in the curvature of the slope, extending out toward the expanse of the valley. Further along the upward curving road, then turning up a footpath to the left, Zumthor’s chapel appears against the background of a dense evergreen forest with grey peaks rising above it. Low on the left, with a doorway extending from the narrow end of the building into concrete steps meeting the path, the curvature of the building slopes down the steep hill such that the wider eastern side of the building, down the hill, is twice the height of its narrow western side by the path. The chapel presents a modest entryway, the protruding doorframe angled so as to guide those approaching toward the wooden door composed of narrow vertical slats with a beautiful curved metal handle, extending horizontally above a traditional keyhole notched in a metal square.
Figure 19, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 20, Saint Benedict Chapel, Door Handle, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Larch-wood shingles, blending light and dark brown to black, present the curvature of the volume to the eye beneath a ribbon of narrow, vertical windows at the top, delicately divided by narrow wooden slats, opening here and there onto the interior. A slightly arched metal roof above a horizontal ribbon of windows, wooden shingles encasing a sloping volume all the way down to the earth, the door extending organically from the low side of an as-yet indistinct shape, the ladder structure of a fragile wooden bell tower rising vertically beside the front of the building. This is what you see as you approach the chapel, the valley stretching out to the right into distant recesses, ringed by mountains; grey rocks growing out of the hill to the left, grass flowing down into flowering yards and meadows.
Figure 21, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Viewed from the front, the chapel presents a sharp vertical wedge, bending out below the curvature of its roof along its swelling sides. Inside, the interior presents a gestalt of the building’s geometry, grasped piecemeal from outside: the shape of a leaf, or a boat, or a drop of water. From the center of the narthex, one sees a single curve rounding the apse behind a simple altar and widening around a row of light ash wood pews toward the narrow angle of the wedge behind you, closing the shape. On the right side of the pews near the doorway, a copper holy water font, greened inside; a metal cross in the center of the altar; to its left, a Virgin and Child icon housed in a small metal box supported by a delicate metal plinth; worn wooden floors beneath the pews, a beautiful wood beam ceiling above, both made of diagonal boards meeting in the middle of the dewdrop form. Vertical wooden beams, unfinished, rise just inside the curvature of the chapel’s walls like minimal interior buttresses, articulating the space, separated by thin metal rods from a silvery sheath around the walls, which catches the light and the shadow from the ribbon windows above, drawing the unseen outside into the lemniscate curvature of the unified interior space.
Figure 22, Saint Benedict Chapel, Interior, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Stepping back outside, the building pours you down its northern flank to view it from below, where it rises commandingly above the steep slope of the meadow. The tiny chapel now takes on the disproportion of the sublime. It is as though the figuratively quaint form of the Christian ichthys had grown, as one sought to encompass the entirety of its exterior shape, into a colossal Leviathan, imposing and serene. Viewed at an angle from the northeast, or facing the building straight from the east, where it extends furthest down the hill, its form seems strangely unprecedented, sloping organically down the hill yet rising above it toward the sky, mountain peaks in the background, jutting with imperious command toward the valley, intensely defamiliarizing, as unearthly in its form as was the light of Kunsthaus Bregenz, yet curiously akin to its own environment. Indeed, the chapel protrudes from the hillside like one among the rocks surrounding it, growing out of and punctuating the green meadow with their grey mass. The shingles on the north side of the building have taken on a glowing silvery sheen, like the curved panels around the interior walls. Those on the southern side are a warm brown, flecked with lighter or darker panels and absorbing the gaze just as the grey, shimmering planes on the other side seem to deflect it.
Figure 23, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 24, Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
It is of course the rotation of the earth around the sun that determines these phenomenal transitions: shimmering grey, soulful brown, alternating in the round. The ground of these appearances is planetary, and this structure grows from the earth like a beacon of some unrecognizable beyond. One cannot overstate the ominous sense of implausible advent emanating from this form. Yet it seems at the same time earthly, descending modestly down a grassy slope and then looming up from the now sudden height of its rounded eastern wall. Through this strange double sense of humility and grandeur, one feels the earth gathered into a sign of itself, meadow and rock, wildflower and mountain, planet and place, growing from the hillside as a form which resists any referent, even as it invites a proliferation of analogies. Drawing one’s gaze out into the valley, indicating it in a manner implicit in the lengthwise ruins of the older church, yet grasped and radicalized by the sharp incline of this location, the structure designates its own site. That casual drift of the base of the Atelier in Haldenstein down the gradual incline of the slope onto which it was built…something was already there that could enter into the profundity realized here: the earth become unearthly while made manifest as ground. The distinction of the building from the rocks to which it is akin: it is not what the sign means but that it is a sign which is unsettling.
Something of the uncanny imperative of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” speaks through presence of this structure:
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.[44]
Whereas in Rilke’s poem it is the absent countenance of the sculptural figure that endows the form of its torso with the generative power of the gaze, emanating as if from within, in the case of the Zumthor’s chapel it is the incommensurable harmony of exterior and interior worlds which generates the cognitive and emotional negativity of its form. Explaining his aversion to rectilinear forms in churches, Zumthor writes, “The idea that its exterior form would be defined by a single interior space fascinated me. This is the notion of a simple vessel. I wanted to find a soft, maternal form for my vessel.”[45] Yet the softness of this interior form, the gentle curvature of its enclosure, finds itself not only in harmony but also in tension with the ominous sculptural presence of the exterior, the heft of a massive diagonal volume rising above the valley. Mediating this contradiction, one realizes, is the horizontal plane of the interior floor, shaped by the interior walls yet indifferent to the exterior slope of the hill. Indeed, the floor of the chapel extends from the entry on the west, nearly level with the path outside, to the midpoint of the eastern wall, which slopes down the valley. I.e. the floor, extending above the sloping hillside on interior supports above a stairstep foundation, approximately bisects the verticality of the chapel’s highest wall.
Inside the chapel, with no windows at eye level, the slope into the valley beneath is perceptually and proprioceptively negated; outside the chapel, faced with the curvature and the diagonal, downward flow of its exterior walls, which seem to grow upwards from the slope of the earth, the horizontal stability of its interior surface is difficult to imagine. It is the horizontal plane of the floor—invisible from without, projecting into the invisible valley from within—that engenders and stabilizes the dialectical torque of this structure, the irreconcilability of interior humility and exterior magnificence. Space is actualized as the medium of a dialectical relation between the expansion of distance and the gathering of enclosure, which brings into relation two intimately correlated manifestations of Geist: the expansive exteriority of the world and the sheltered interiority of reflective meditation, each negating the other while nevertheless synthesized by a subject who perceives and who feels—whose body, obdurately located in the space it constitutes and inhabits, comes to know itself as the locus of this synthesis.
Consider the opening strophe of Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace”:
The anciently built hall, blessed by custom, Is aired, filled with heavenly, quietly resounding, Gently modulating music; glad clouds Of scent drift over green carpets and, Far-shining, abundant with ripest fruits And gold-wreathed chalices, Well-ordered, a splendid row, The tables rise on either side Above the levelled floor. For, at the evening hour, Loving guests have pledged To come here from afar.[46]
Although what is depicted likely has no direct empirical referent—it is the representation of an imagined scene, laden with the artifice of symbolism—the strophe is nonetheless an act of poetic mimesis in the Homeric sense reconstructed by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato.[47] Poetry, here, is the preservation and transmission of paideia; representation is the mimesis of ethos. Hölderlin sets the table. The guests are expected; they will have their expectations. Readers will read the poem—and this is very much a presentation piece, a program.
The tables themselves are set upon a levelled floor. Thus they balance the gold-wreathed chalices and the bowls of fruit. The tables are wohlangeordnet: they are properly arranged. The hall is altegebaute and Seeliggewohnte: it is aged, well-known, sanctified, welcoming. What is implied here is a system of cultural norms that has been not only properly but “splendidly” (prächtige) adhered to. It’s important to note that it is not particularly relevant, as it certainly was in Homeric epic, whether or not these are the norms of Hölderlin’s own culture: what matters is the representation of an ethos as one’s own. This contingency is one aspect of the “sentimental” disposition of Hölderlin’s modern poetry, a disposition that applies not only to the representation of nature but also to the representation of culture, which may treat the mimesis of tradition as if one belonged to it—as how things ought to be—though it may well stem from another time or another place.
Figure 25, Saint Benedict Chapel, Holy Water Fount, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 26, Saint Benedict Chapel, Icon, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The hall is aired (gelüftet). Architecture is the medium through which the elements enter into the interior space of their intentional deployment, of their constructedness. The passage of air between exterior and interior space seems almost given, least in need of intentional design, yet it is also that element most closely identical to the shape of space itself. The hall, in Hölderlin’s poem, is the interior space of expectation—it designates the site of an arrival from afar—and it is prepared through exposure to exteriority, the air which passes through it. If the incommensurable moods occasioned by the outside and inside of Zumthor’s chapel—the disproportion of the sublime and the simple harmony of the beautiful—emphasize the power of architectural mediation to divide and yet synthesize the given and made, to construct a unitary tension between these, so too do the form and the content of Hölderlin’s strophe. For while its content is the mimesis of ceremonial propriety, “Celebration of Peace” opens with a headnote begging the reader’s patience with the impropriety of its verse, which breaks with regular measures of Hölderlin’s previous odes, elegies, and hexameters. If “some should think such a language too unconventional, I must confess to them: I cannot do otherwise.” The floor of the hall is levelled, but the form of the verse is uneven—and this is the case, Hölderlin insists, insofar as his song stems from nature: “On a beautiful day—they should consider—almost every mode of song [jede Sangart] makes itself heard; and nature, whence it originates, also receives it again.” Just as nature receives every manner of song it gives rise to, so should the unconventional verses Hölderlin cannot help but compose (ich kann nicht anders) be received as participants in the choir of the Whole.
Poetry, unlike architecture, is not subject to the law of gravity. Within the anciently built hall, the floor must be level so that the tables can hold the chalices which hold the wine; they must support the bowls that hold the fruit. The floor of the Zumthor’s chapel may bend and flex, with the slightest incline toward the center, but it must support the altar that holds the cross. Yet space passes through the hall or the chapel, ungrounded, and poetry may include the words “table” or “chalice” in uneven measures without spilling the imagined yet unmentioned wine. Air is said to hover over the Hölderlin’s green carpets; it really does surround Zumthor’s ash wood pews, and every kind of song one may hear on a beautiful day must pass through this elemental medium. Yet air—elemental space—is nevertheless shaped by architectural form as it passes through the valley, around the curvature of the building, or as it circulates within its enclosure. And the song of poetry—unmoored from the gravity of ground—is measured by verse, even if that verse is irregular.
Something about this play between regularity and irregularity, convention and its displacement, is as vital to Zumthor’s chapel as it is to Hölderlin’s opening strophe. Through the dialectic of slope and plane that distinguishes exterior and interior physiognomy, through the uneven earthliness of its foundation and the horizontal projection of its horizontal floor, the chapel foregrounds the give and take of architecture’s negotiation with gravitational force, even as it also foregrounds the shaping of space itself: the rounding of its evanescence, the leeway of light from on high. The disjunction of interior harmony and exterior disproportion nonetheless partakes of the same form, the same contour. What would come to be called free verse—the singularity of Hölderlin’s lines—also involves this play between propriety and disproportion. As the form of the poem—the space it occupies on the page and the song it traces in the air—is shaped by the play between measure and unmeasure, between rhythmic ground, the stability of the left margin, and the gravitationless flux of sound and signifier, the content of the poem tells us that the tension it thus constructs involves an elemental passage between nature and culture, into and out of the shapes we make with the space we are given: “und gelüftet is der altgebaute, / Seeliggewohnte Saal.”
Excursion: Sils Maria
May 16-18. Three days in Sils Maria (Figures 27-28). Green meadows stretching out from the town toward the Lake Sils, circled by meandering wooded paths leading up into the Alps. Hiking up toward the Lunghin Pass—a triple watershed with runoff to the North Sea along the Rhine, to the Mediterranean along the River Po, and to the Black Sea along the Danube—one encounters the Lunginsee, an alpine lake at 2645 meters, which seems a frozen double of the Silsersee far below.
Figure 27, Sils Maria, Lunghinsee at the Lunghin Pass, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 28, Sils Maria, Silsersee from the path toward the Lunghin Pass, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The Lunginsee glows gently with a blue-green hue, nestled among the crags, while the larger lake on the valley floor gleams and reflects the clouds above, drifting in the clarion sky within and across the ring of snow-capped summits. Glances of Enzian along the mountain path, a snowless meadow to lie in the sun; a simple afternoon.
Since around us are heaped The peaks of time, and the most beloved Live near, languishing upon Most separate mountains, Give us blameless water, O give us wings, minds most true To cross over and to return.[48]
A riddle compounding itself just where it finds its solution: it is as though Hölderlin had been here, where blameless water runs down to the source of the Rhine.
Earth: Therme Vals
May 19-22. Therme Vals (1990-1996). From the road below it appears as a huge rectangular plane of grey stone emerging from the side of the valley, fifty-eight meters long and nine meters high, asymmetrically hollowed by rectilinear volumes encasing large dark windows set back from the façade, and also dotted by smaller square windows flush with its surface. Again, one is struck by the sense of a geometrical structure having grown from the earth, monumental and imposing, yet belonging to the ground it recedes into. Above the rectangular façade, grass and wildflowers grow over the roof of the building, merging with the slope of the hillside.
Figure 29, Therme Vals (1990-1996), Facade, Photograph by Scott M. Schultz
Figure 30, Therme Vals, Grass Roof and Northern Wall, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The building is conceived as a single volume, set into the hill and articulated within by fifteen massive blocks that support ceilings up to five meters high. The blocks create meandering paths through the structure while also enclosing different baths and relaxation rooms within their interiors. The environment feels essentially subtractive: one moves through voids and sinks into water. Displacement is not only foregrounded as a somatic, elemental experience, but also as the governing concept of the work. In this sense, architectural concept and elemental sensation are indistinguishable.
Figure 31, Therme Vals, Plan of Meander and Blocks, Peter Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 2
Figure 32, Therme Vals, Meander and Blocks, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
The construction of the building’s stone walls involves a deep relationship between architectural form and local site: they are composed of 60,000 deep grey slabs of Vals gneiss, sourced entirely from the quarry just outside the village, cut to varying lengths and stacked in narrow layers, streaked here and there with white quartz and marked by endlessly fascinating occlusions. All the shingles of the roofs in the town are made of this stone. The geometry of the masonry—stacks of sheet after sheet of implacably hard yet narrow, delicately cut gneiss—conveys a sense of gravity and compression, implicitly suggesting the metamorphosis of the original rock, 300 million years old, by the formation of the Alps 50 million years ago, a process resulting into the ridged layering of stacked wedges characteristic of Vals gneiss before it is cut or processed.[49] This sense of compression is offset by the vast empty volumes one moves through in the main space of the building and by the silky texture of the water, as well as by the light seeping in through narrow openings along the edges of the cantilevered concrete ceiling slabs, high overhead and supported by the blocks, as well as through the grid of blue windows in the ceiling above the main interior pool, each illuminated after dark by a lamp stemming from the grass roof outside.
Figure 33, Therme Vals, Central Pool, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
Brass doors and railings lend a rich but muted metallic gleam against the play of blue water and grey walls. In the main outdoor pool, three large, cylindrical brass founts curve overhead, continuously pouring heavy streams of water into the pool, where it cascades over the body and laps into overflow channels along the wall. The floor of the pool is an irregular pattern of rectangular slabs, a grey-blue mosaic flowing into shallow stone steps. In the corridor through which you enter the baths, mineral water flows from spigots at intervals down the concrete walls, staining them with textured shades of ochre and crimson. Dark, glossy wooden cabinets and leather benches warm the changing rooms, and the long staircase through which one enters the vast main space of the baths, slowed by its gradually descending steps, lends a sense of theatricality to the unveiling of their interior world, with its flickering patterns of light across stone and water. The blocks around the central indoor pool form a pinwheel pattern, divided asymmetrically by wide stone steps leading into and out of the water from all four sides. Descending into this vast interior space, one glimpses the large windows looking out onto the valley on the east side, and, below the entry stairs on the right, a narrow corridor of water through which you can swim directly into the outdoor pool, passing under a metallic curtain marking the division of the interior and exterior.
Figure 34, Therme Vals, Exterior Pool, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
Kunsthaus Bregenz expels the water of the Bodensee from one’s field of vision through the construction of a windowless monad, yet draws the sense of a subaqueous world into the building by the filtration of light through its ceilings. Therme Vals hollows a cavity into the earth, yet everywhere presents the elemental absence of what has been removed through the surrounding compression of layered stone, such that one seems to inhabit the empty space left by removal of these sheets of rock from the nearby quarry. Water mediates the relation between stone and void. It suspends one within the element of that mediation. It also suffuses the air of the steam rooms; the sounds of water pouring into itself or lapping against the walls echo against the stone and through the air. Because the interior is underground, wedged into the hill, one is reminded of the source of the natural thermal springs just above the building, which flow out of the earth into reservoirs below and into the pools. Precisely because one moves through its absence, earth is the elemental dominant of Therme Vals, drawing water, air, light and heat together in the field of its reconstruction as volume.
Figure 35, Therme Vals, Lounge Area, Photograph by Fabrice Fouillet
As usual, it is the meticulous treatment of materials that enables an expression of elemental essences: a foregrounding of hardness or mass, of fluidity and immersive depth, of the transmission of sound or the feeling of humidity, of streaming illumination or the play of shadows. But what is singular about Therme Vals is how the complex and flexible choreography of space and experience enables such expression in a manner that is above all dramatic.
Figure 36, Therme Vals, Interior Pool, Photograph by Ulrike Parnow
The steam rooms, set deep under the hill in the southwest corner of the building, and easily overlooked as one moves through the space, are emblematic of this dramatic choreography. On blueprints one sees two identical sets of three staggered chambers running parallel, yet each is inaccessible to the other: a shower room at the near end leads into one set of rooms; an identical shower room at the far end leads into the other set of rooms, such that one enters each set from the opposite direction of the other. This layout is only gradually and dimly discovered or reconstructed as one explores this portion of the baths; thus the differential repetition of experiencing the same rooms in different directions conveys, initially, an eerie sense of displaced recognition. In either direction, one steps from the shower rooms through a leather curtain into a chamber about three meters square, thick with steam and illuminated only by a single golden light overhead. To each side there is a solid rectangular block of black basalt rising some three feet off the ground, about two feet wide and seven feet long. One lies on these slabs staring up at the ceiling, watching the steam gather and disperse as it pours into the room below another leather curtain leading into another chamber. One chamber leads to the next, identical except for the increasing density of steam and intensity of heat, until at the back of the third chamber one encounters the source of the heat: a hieratic brass cylinder, rounded at the top, rising from the ground and ringed by brass railings. The progression through these chambers imposes a sense of formal inevitability and lapidary rigor, even as the experiential process is obscure, mysterious, perhaps claustrophobic. Though one knows the high ceilings and the outdoor platform of the baths are around the corner, one feels deeply encased in the earth, even entombed, in the hazy depth of these chambers, their heat resonating through brass as if from the core of the planet.
Figure 37, Therme Vals, Floorplan (steam rooms upper left), Peter Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 2
As one meanders through the baths, the distinct environments within each block are gradually discovered—the Fire Bath (42 degrees) with its red concrete walls; the small Cold Bath (14 degrees) just across from it, into which one plunges down steps leading into the water from a narrow corridor, surrounded by blue concrete walls; the Flower Bath, with its floating marigold petals and fragrant mist; the Sound Bath, into which one swims around two corners through a narrow water corridor, with its underwater jets rumbling through the high square enclosure of rough stone walls ringed by brass railings just above the surface; the Drinking Stone, with its beautiful brass fountain pouring unfiltered mineral water straight from the warm spring; the Sound Stone, in which one sits or lies in the dark on an upholstered bench listening to a minimalist sound piece by Fritz Hauser, Wanderung (1996), composed especially for this room using sounding stones made by the sculptor Arthur Schneider; the deep quiet of the rest spaces, with their square picture frame windows and the glossy warm sheen of their polished wood lounge chairs. The sense of seeking conveyed by the concatenation of these experiences, their sensory and elemental textures, is indeed “romantic.” Through the artwork, through the exploration of its made form and of the occasions it makes available, through the choreography of natural materials and embodied sensations it constructs, one seeks that confluence of conscious and unconscious activity which is its source and which is transformed by every passage through its determinations.
Figure 38, Therme Vals, Exterior Pool, Photograph by Ulrike Parnow
Zumthor emphasizes the manner in which the expression of elemental textures, eventually delivered to phenomenality through meticulous craftsmanship, initially emerged from attention to affordances of site:
We observed the place, its surroundings. We were interested in the stone roofs, their structure reminiscent of reflexes on water. We walked around the village and, suddenly, everywhere there were boulders, big and small walls, loosely stacked rough plates, split material; we saw quarries of different sizes, slopes cut away, and rock formations. Thinking of our baths, of the hot springs pushing out of the earth behind our building site, we found the gneiss in Vals more and more interesting; we started looking at it in greater detail—split, hewn, cut, polished; we discovered the white “eyes” in what is called augen gneiss, the mica, the mineral structures, the layers, the infinitely iridescent tones of grey.[50]
It is the particular structure of this stone that catches the eye and leads to a closer investigation of its properties; it is the stone’s particular situation in this place that begins to inspire architectural ideas. When Zumthor speaks of form, the order of process is similar:
Form is not something we work on—we apply ourselves to all the other things. To sound, noises, materials, construction, anatomy, etc. The body of architecture, in the primary stages, is construction, anatomy: putting things together in a logical fashion. These are the things we apply ourselves to, while at the same time keeping our eye on place, and on use. That is all that is demanded of me—here is the place, on which I may or may not have some influence, and this is the use. We generally create a large model, or a drawing. Usually it’s a model. And sometimes you can see at that stage that it feels right—things are coherent. And then I might look at it and say: sure, it coheres, but it isn’t beautiful. So at the end of the day I actually do take a look at things. What I find is that when things have come out well they tend to assume a form which often surprises me when I finally stand back from the work and which makes me think: you could never have imagined when you started that this would be the outcome.
One begins with materials, with their properties, with place, and with the problem of coherent construction. Beautiful form emerges from the way in which these come together, and through adjustments to their disposition. It does not stem from a priori ideas.[51]
This order of architectural practice matters because it allows unconscious determinations to enter into the process of composition: memories, feelings, sensations that emerge in the investigation of relationships between materials and places. Moreover, this openness to contingencies of process, through the investigation of materials and places, relays the welling up of thoughts and feelings to those who experience the architectural environment. In the case of Therme Vals, Zumthor notes in this respect not only the use of local stone in the buildings of the town, or the rocks dotting the green hillsides, or the source of the spring behind the building site, but also of histories and local structures spanning radically discrepant timescales: an old advertisement for Vals sparkling water featuring an image of “The Vals Valley 80 Million Years Ago,” showing low mounds of earth immersed in a primordial lake, or the cathedral-like interior of the nearby Albigna dam, built with stone and concrete.[52]
Of course, these histories and materials—in the fragility of the emotions they generate—are vulnerable to appropriation. Zumthor describes his move to Graubünden and his purchase of a small farmhouse in Haldenstein, after his studies at the Pratt Institute in New York, as part of his immersion in “the spirit of ’68.” He explains that his political orientation, and that of his friends among Swiss Germans in the late 1960s and 1970s, was set against the relevance of “art” and “design,” and that he was then involved in the Bauernhausforschung project, inventorying farmhouses in Graubünden for some ten years before finally making his way toward a career in architecture.[53] Zumthor speaks of Therme Vals as “purely a project of the community,”[54] and one might view it not only as a personal reconciliation of his locally oriented politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s with his modernist architectural education, but also, more generally, of the communal ethos of that period with the formal possibilities of minimalist abstraction, so resonant in his preparatory studies. “The Thermal Baths in Vals were never envisioned as a marketing product that would attract attention through name recognition or by being an architectural landmark,” he notes. “The overriding concern throughout was the quality of the services: bathing as an experience and a ritual…We architects were able to think the Therme Vals in radical terms because the people in Vals permitted us to think in radical terms.”[55] This was possible because of the income the community drew from sales of sparkling water and because the President of the community-owned hotel and others were able to rally citizens of the village around Zumthor’s project at town meetings.
By 2012, however, the commune was unable to afford necessary renovations of the hotel complex dating from the 1960s, and the spa and hotel were sold to local property developer Remo Stoffel for 7.8 million Swiss francs, concluding a battle for ownership between Stoffel and Zumthor himself.[56] Though it was voted through by the citizens, Zumthor viewed this sale as the end of the communal ethos of the baths: “This project was a social project, me and my wife lived there for almost twenty years with the community and it was owned by the community and was successful. It now belongs to a financial figure who bought all of it and destroyed it. The bath is a landmark so nothing will happen to the bath, but this social project is dead.”[57] Visiting in 2022, it was hard to disagree with that judgment. The Therme remains open to residents of the village at a reduced rate, but, overall, the site operates as a luxury resort, with packages including helicopter flights to an alpine glacier.[58] The beauty of the baths remains inviolable, but the emotional experience of that beauty is indeed compromised by the economic conditions of possibility for accessing it. Though ownership of the baths reverted from Stoffel to the municipality later in 2022, that seems unlikely to change.
Excursion: Swabia
May 24. The source of the Danube is disputed. The river rises from the confluence of the Brigach and the Breg in Donaueschingen, the site marked on the shore by a stone engraved with the distance in kilometers to the Danube delta of the Black Sea, 2779. Symbolically, the Donauquelle is located at a spring on the grounds of the Donaueschingen castle, marked by an ornate circular pool with allegorical statues (1895) by Adolf Heer, and by a small temple where the spring flows into the Brigach beside Schlosspark Donaueschingen. Here elms lean over the river banks, the current sweeps flowing algae toward the confluence with the Breg, and swans swim slowly upstream.
Figure 39, Donauquelle in Donauschingen, Sculptures by Adolf Heer (1895), Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 40, Donautempel (1910), Donauschingen, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 41, Swans near the Donautempel, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Hydrologically, however, the source of the Danube is the source of the Breg in Furtwangen, which is marked by a humbler plaque claiming it as the Donau-Quelle. In 1981, the Minister of the Interior of Baden-Württemberg declared that the source of the Breg should no longer be named as the source of the Danube on official maps, inflaming a decades-long rivalry between the two towns.
Whatever the case may be, at the site where the flowing water takes on the determinacy of the name—Donau—just where the Breg and the Brigach come together, it is now a highway overpass that dominates the site. As of May 2022, its concrete pillar bore the graffitied inscription ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) which may be a more apt commentary than allegorical statuary or municipal rancor on the course of the relation between Nature and History in the twenty-first century.
Figure 42, Marker at the Confluence of the Breg and the Brigach, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 43, Freeway Overpass at the Confluence of the Breg and the Brigach, Photograph by Nathan Brown
If at the Donautempel one thinks of Hölderlin, watching the swans dip their heads in the holy sober water, here one might think of him being hauled off by the authorities to Authenrieth’s clinic in Tübingen, where he was encouraged to accommodate himself to the way of the world by having a mask strapped to his face to prevent him from screaming. Doch Alles geht so.
May 23. The star-shaped ornament has gone missing, but water still flows continuously from the wooden stem of Heidegger’s rustic fountain into the hollowed log beside the Hütte in Todtnauberg. It’s a lovely place, long grass blowing the wind, wild flowers running downhill into the nestled valley, green Schäferkopf shutter holders peering out from the wood shingle siding. One is not, however, struck by the recessed mystery of the site. It’s a little retreat just outside of town, a second property, not a Brothers Grimm hermitage lodged deep in the forest.
Figure 44, Fountain at the Heidegger Hütte, Todtnauberg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 45, Heidegger Hütte, Todtnauberg, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 46, View toward Todtnauberg from the Heidegger Hütte, Photograph by Nathan Brown
May 25. On the other hand, no matter how familiar one may be with its image or how often one has contemplated the strange destiny it embodies, the Hölderlinturm resonates more powerfully than expected with the beguiling contingency and symbolic weight of its location on the Neckar. Ensconced in mournful willows alongside the Tübingen Stift, where clusters of roses bloom on vines in the courtyard, it sits as well across the river from the Plantanenallee on the Neckarinsel, which leads down to the memorial of Swabian lieder composer Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860), erected by the Nazis in 1941. Silcher’s arrangements of Volkslieder were published in songbooks distributed to German soldiers, like the field volumes of Hölderlin’s poems. Signboards by the monument show photographs of the foundation stone ceremony in 1939: columns of plane trees bedecked with swastika banners. Graffiti on the monument itself reads NAZI DENKMAL.
Figure 47, Hölderlinturm viewed from the Nekarinsel, , Tübingen, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 48, Roses in the Courtyard of the Tübingen Stift, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 49, Silcher Denkmal (1941), Nekarinsel, Tübingen, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Stift, Turm, Denkmal—the triangle of a triple catastrophe: the failure of philosophy to cultivate the rational determination of history; the incompatibility of Hölderlin’s social and historical world with the ground of his vocation; the reactionary incorporation of deutsche Gesang into the project of genocidal ethnonationalism. The leaves of the plane trees rustle overhead along the Neckarinsel; the peak of the Turm glistens in the sunlight to the north; here in the courtyard of the Stift, just to the west of the Turm, the vines stem from the earth and rise up the walls—hier ist die Rose, hier tanze. The river murmurs as it passes by. We are on our way up the Rhine to Cologne.
Air: Kolumba Museum
In those days Germany, a hectic flush on its cheeks, was reeling at the heights of its savage triumphs, about to win the world on the strength of the one pact that it intended to keep and had signed with its blood. Today, in the embrace of demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring in horror, it plummets from despair to despair. When will it reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of this final hopelessness, will a miracle that goes beyond faith bear the light of hope? –Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
In May 1942 Cologne was subjected to the RAF’s first “Thousand Bomber Raid,” in which some 1500 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, destroying much of its medieval core. On June 29, 1943, over ninety percent of the city was left in ruins by British and American bombardments. By the end of the fire bombings inflicted upon German cities toward the end of the war, with massive air raids in October 1944 and March 1945, Cologne was reduced to skeletal remnants presided over by the dark form of its magnificent Cathedral, the construction of which had begun in 1248 and was completed in 1880, now damaged but not destroyed.
Figure 50, Chapel, “Madonna in den Trümmern” (1947), Gottfried Böhm
Southwest of the Cathedral, St. Kolumba church had lain in ruins since 1943, its original Romanesque structure dating at least to the ninth century, its Gothic renovation from the fifteenth. Parts of several walls remained, preserving the hollow form of their early Gothic arches, along with the base of the Romanesque tower and, standing exposed to the elements at the crumbling northeast pillar of the former nave, a statue of the Virgin and Child—the infant headless, the Mother of God’s downcast eyes gazing diagonally into the rubble. The statue would come to be venerated as the Madonna in the Ruins, and in 1947 Cologne architect Gottfried Böhm was commissioned to build a chapel around it, an octagonal sanctuary completed in 1950 with choir windows by Ludwig Gies installed in 1954. The windows convene flights of angels, nearly abstract grey and beige diagonal planes across the verticality of narrow blue panels, their round yellow faces at once innocent, solicitous, perplexed, as if having just arrived from the heavens to see what might be asked of them in this fractured place, where shelter is so fragile.[59] In 1973, archaeological excavations uncovered vestiges of Roman buildings, along with further traces of the medieval and Gothic churches. Ruins above and ruins below—relics, remnants, riddles, traces of transformation both abrupt and gradual, intentional and unforeseen, catastrophic and callous or tender and careful, replete with imagination, memory, and hope.
May 27. The architecture of Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum seems to breathe, in and out, the dialectic of shelter and exposure with which the site is suffused. Commissioned in 1997 and completed in 2007, the building preserves the walls of the older churches as part of its own, it folds the whole of Böhm’s chapel into its enclosure, and it holds open a space for the archaeological excavation. At the heart of the ground floor is a vast room supported by slender forty-foot pillars rising from the open ground of the excavation, the depths of which are traversed by a zigzag footbridge of red sandalwood with wide, sumptuously polished handrails.
Figure 51, Kolumba Museum (1997-2007), Cologne, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 52, Kolumba Museum, Excavation Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
With the ruins below spot-lit by conical pendant lights, descending from the ceiling high overhead, the bridge leads here toward the arches of the medieval ruins, there toward the stained glass windows adorning the octagonal form of the sheltered chapel, allowing one’s gaze to drift down into the ancient stones or up toward perforations high in the warm grey brick work, rising over the older walls, through which light and air flow from outside, illuminating angels in cerulean glass, speckling the matter of centuries, and flickering—absences themselves composing abstract artworks—with intimations of exteriority. The red-brown warmth of the footbridge; the illuminated stones of the open ground; the dark survival of arches and pillars; the lighter grey of the brickwork rising above; the bright blue and yellow of the stained glass: all of these constitute a single space that seems to be composed of fragility and endurance, in which the tension between these amounts to the composition of space itself. In the reflective atmosphere of this room, at once meandering and still, calm and brooding, the openness of space itself seems to be unveiled and protected.
Figure 53, Kolumba Museum, Excavation Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
One feels powerfully, yet with a certain lightness of determination, how vulnerable are all our projects to the vicissitudes of history, to the carelessness of our ambitions and the blunt stupidity of violence, how everything that we infuse with form and spirit may collapse back into hunks of matter, a heap of broken fragments, yet may also be recovered, reconstructed, preserved and witnessed—indeed, worshipped. The footbridge ends in an iron gate passing back outside to a small courtyard, enclosed by the gothic walls of the former sacristy and marked by the somber weight of Richard Serra’s sculpture The Drowned and the Saved (Die Untergegangenen und die Geretteten, 1992), its title drawn from Primo Levi and its two L-shaped pieces of forged steel mutually supporting one another to form a horizontal beam.
Figure 54, Richard Serra, The Drowned and the Saved (1992) at Kolumba Museum, Photograph by Nathan Brown
As one approaches Kolumba from the east, walking west from the Rhine along Brükenstrasse, one passes by this courtyard formed of the old sacristy, into which one can see through the empty arch of an original window. One then turns the corner north onto Kolumbastrasse, where the basalt wall of Böhm’s 1956 extension of his chapel remains, built into the massive western facade of the new structure. At the northern edge of the basalt wall, a large, smooth handle is carved directly into the black stone of the door, opening into the chapel where a round basalt altar marks the center of the sanctuary, with the Madonna in the Ruins suspended on the wall between the stained glass windows which one sees in the round from the interior room on other side.
Figure 55, Kolumba Museum, Basalt Wall of 1956 Extension of Böhm’s Chapel, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 56, Kolumba Museum, Basalt Door Handle, 1956 Extension of Böhm’s Chapel, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Entering the foyer of the museum, floor-to-ceiling windows on the left look out onto a large open courtyard, occupying the former site of a medieval cemetery, accessible through glass doors with slender rectangular handles wrapped in strips of dark leather. Eleven tall, spindly honey locust trees rise into the open volume, their wispy foliage filtering the light, their narrow trunks demarcating the bed of stones strewn throughout, scattered with chairs to sit and reflect. The southern wall of the courtyard offers a clear view of the brick masonry intersecting with medieval columns and arches.[60] The lower eastern and northern walls are built of rammed concrete, its earthy beige layers conveying, already, a material sense of the sedimented histories one will encounter in the excavation room. A long stone bench, running below the surviving arches, is the permanent plinth of a sculpture by Hans Josephsohn, Large Recumbent Woman, a dark, seemingly charred figure lying on its back gazing up at the sky.
Figure 57, Kolumba Museum, Doors to Courtyard, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 58, Hans Josephsohn, Large Recumbent Woman (2000), Kolumba Museum, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 59, Kolumba Museum, Doors to Excavation Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Returning to the foyer, large double doors of metal open onto a small antechamber divided from the excavation room by heavy brown leather curtains. To the right of the doors, a dark narrow staircase leads upward toward a concrete wall, before turning back toward the upper floors. The railings are polished teak, a warm contrast to the steel railings of Kunsthaus Bregenz, just as the warm yellow glow of the lighting so markedly shifts the mood from the turquoise, aqueous illumination of Zumthor’s Bregenz staircases, which poured through the etched glass above. Here the passage from one floor to another is more deeply contemplative, as if to emphasize the predominance of affective interiority over the phenomenal and structural virtuosity of the museum on the Bodensee. The mood is religious, preparing our disposition to encounter the collection of the Archdiocese of Cologne, housed on the levels above. As at Bregenz, the space of the exhibition floors glows with the silky polish of continuous terrazzo poured between lustrous concrete walls. Exterior light from vast yet sparsely interspersed windows gleams around corners, while spot lights illuminate works in display cases of stained laurel grain veneer and starkly outlined rectangular openings in the walls reveal darker interior galleries, slightly raised above the floors of the concourse to mark each passage into these other worlds.
Figure 60, Kolumba Museum, Third Floor, Photograph by Nathan Brown
The first level over the ground floor passes above Böhm’s chapel and alongside the double height of the excavation room, lending a sense of spatial contiguity with the vast expanse sheltering the ancient stones. The uppermost floor then covers the entire footprint, curving around the central courtyard and housing one of the museum’s major decorative and emotional flourishes—its reading room. Here the minimalist restraint of the building gives way to relative luxury: walls and ceilings paneled in veneers of kava wood cut along its “pyramids,” vectors and branches of lighter wood decorating the warmth of its brown hue.
Figure 61, Kolumba Museum, First Floor Reading Room, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Brown leather chairs and benches rest on mahogany floors beneath delicate pendant lights of circular glass suspended from curving wires which recall, descending from above, the curving trunks of the honey locust trees in the courtyard. A vast window across the whole western expanse of the room illuminates its interior, filtered by grey curtains of light silk, tinted with yellow or pink according to the light. Finally, a room in the northeast corner, the last into which one passes, displays the finest of the museum’s treasures: Stefan Lochner’s gorgeous Madonna with the Violet (c. 1443)—double of the Madonna in the Ruins, beneath, and kin of Lochner’s altarpiece, Adoration of the Magi, housed in the Cathedral and constituting the spiritual center of Cologne. In the northeast corner of the room a large window looks out over the courtyard below toward the Cathedral itself—that stony, obdurate miracle of architectural commitment and historical persistence, its dark spires anointing the impassive sky.
Figures 62 & 63, “Madonna in den Trümmern” and Stefan Lochner, Madonna with the Violet (c.1443)
Fire: Bruder Klaus Field Chapel
May 28. Reduction. Inside the chapel, the charred, serrated, concave indentations of its walls rise toward a teardrop oculus overhead, into which the space inclines as it ascends. This is the primal impression of the enclosure: rough, dark, burnt matter, texturing an ascension toward light that appears as a two-dimensional surface, a shape cut out of the sky, abstract form of the open. A wheel with six spokes extends overhead from the conical walls on a single iron shaft, and dots of light glimmer here and there through small blown-glass spheres, somehow embedded in the rough concrete. This is a very simple space: a unified curve expanding from the triangular steel doorway into an oval room with a lone bench, a rectangular steel votive stand for candles, and, mounted on a narrow stele, the bronze cast of a head resembling Bruder Klaus, whom the chapel venerates. When it rains, water collects in a shallow depression in the center of the lead floor. But in its simplicity, this is a harrowing setting. The gaze inclines inevitably upward, but the soul bends in stricken humility, as if itself scorched by whatever fire blackened the rough-hewn surface of these striated walls.
Figure 64, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel (2001-2007), Wachendorf, Photograph by August Fischer
Figure 65, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Occulus, Photograph by Flemming Ibsen
A certain doomed tranquility prevails, a primordial insufficiency to one’s surroundings that still feels, somehow, as though it is enough. An insufficiency sufficient to surrender.
Mein Herr und mein Gott, nimm alles mir, was mich hindert zu Dir. Mein Herr und mein Gott, gib alles mir, was mich fördert zu Dir. Mein Herr und mein Gott, nimm mich mir und gib mich ganz zu eigen Dir.
My Lord and my God, take all from me, that keeps me from Thee. My Lord and my God, give all to me, that brings me to Thee. My Lord and my God, take me from myself and give me completely to Thee.[61]
Zumthor’s chapel fulfills the most basic, teleological task of Catholic architecture: it inducts the poverty of the soul into the apocalyptic grandeur of its exposure to sacred conflagration. Gently, it overawes.
The exterior form of the building is the sign of that stark grandeur. A monolithic tower rises, twelve meters high in five rigid planes, over the fields outside the village of Wachendorf. The field chapel was commissioned by two farmers, Hermann-Josef and Trude Scheidtweiler, as a place of spiritual contemplation dedicated to Niklaus von Flüe, the ascetic saint and mystic known as Bruder Klaus, who lived from 1417-1487. Zumthor cites the importance of the saint to his mother and the inspiration of his “straightforward, uncompromising character” as personal motivations to take on the project.[62]
Figure 66, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Wachendorf, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Figure 67, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Architectural Drawing, Peter Zumthor
Figure 68, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Interior Frame; Figure 69, Rammed Concrete Layers, Photograph by Nathan Brown
Designed over the years Zumthor was also working on Kolumba, the chapel was largely built by the Scheidtweilers and their friends, who cut and trimmed the trunks of 112 pine trees, which were then formed into the teepee-like structure defining the interior space. Concrete was then mixed of local gravel and sand and packed within an irregular pentagonal frame around the timbers in twenty-four rammed layers of 50cm each over twenty-four days of work. When the rammed concrete walls were set—stabilized by hollow steel shuttering ties which would come to hold the blown-glass spheres through which points of light pass to the interior—the interior wooden frame was then burned with a slow fire over three weeks. When the scorched timbers had dried and shrunk away from the walls they were removed, leaving the open oculus above and the charred concave striations which set the tenebrous mood and the serrated texture defining the enclosure. Molten lead was poured for the uneven floor, likewise establishing a sense of the building as wrought in fire, as the cooled form of liquid heat: residue, remainder, and refuge. Yet the steel door which opens onto the curving passageway into the single room is a geometrically regular triangle, abstracting the irregular pyramidal form of the interior structure and also symbolizing the elemental essence of the building: the tetrahedron, formed of four triangles, is the Platonic solid of which fire is composed in the Timaeus.
Figure 70, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Triangular Door, Photograph by Nathan Brown Figure 71, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Entryway, Photograph by Yuri Palmin
Running one’s hand over the earthy texture of the tower’s layered exterior, one recalls the rammed concrete walls delimiting the courtyard of Kolumba. From that courtyard, one remembers as well the seemingly charred figure, staring up at the sky, of the reclining sculpture by Hans Josephsohn, who also made the stele on which the bronze head is set inside the Bruder Klaus Chapel. Indeed, the chapel in Wachendorf has a recessed yet deeply resonant relation to Kolumba and to the history of Cologne. The fire-bombing of that city unavoidably lingers in the scorched walls and the residual scent of smoke inside the chapel. It is a subtracted obelisk of sorts, the hollow interior pyramid of a vast stone monument commemorating not only a Saint who dreamed of a burst of light inside the womb, but also a city that became a grave of fire. This is a place in which the dead and the unborn rise from beneath the floor, seep in through the hollow ties in the walls, descend from the light above. A space in which the living and the dead may come to seem undifferentiated.
Figure 72, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, Photograph by Lars-Christian Uhlig
Zumthor speaks in calm tones of his thinking toward the form of this the chapel: “the design became clear and elemental: light and shade, water and fire, material and transcendence, the earth below and the sky above.”[63] Yet there is something here of the extremity from which Hölderlin spoke as one struck not only by Apollo, but also by Dionysus:
So his bolt fell, the poets say, On Semele’s house when she desired To see the god unconcealed, and god-struck She bore holy Bacchus, thunder’s fruit.
And so the sons of the earth now drink Heavenly fire without danger. Yet we are bound—o poets!—to stand Beneath the god’s thunder with bare heads To seize the Father’s bolt itself In our hands and pass the heavenly gift, Folded in song, to the people. For only if our hearts are pure, Like children, our hands blameless,
Dedicated to a Saint, the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel is also a place of meditation and absolution for those of us whose hands are not blameless, which have been seared by a bolt from on high. Folded in song? Poetry speaks, even sings, but the element of which Zumthor’s work is finally composed, the element of architecture, is silence. Here that silence, ripened by decades of architectural practice, has truly been dipped in fire.
Coda: Beyond Happiness
But if you, And this must be said, All you ancients, did not say, from whence? We name you, under holy compulsion, we Nature! name you, and new, as if from the bath rises All that is godly born.
Hölderlin writes these lines in the early nineteenth century, one among a generation of epochal thinkers, dreaming of a Swabian republic, of the spread of freedom and equality throughout Europe, of its deepening into something called the communism of spirits, of one’s limited yet indispensable role in a world historical project on the cusp of coming to fruition. The “we” to whom Hölderlin refers names “Nature,” as if for the first time, amid the making of a new history to which the project of aesthetic education would be an essential contribution. Hölderlin does indeed lay claim to nothing less than the identity of phusis, poiesis, and techne. But his life is shattered by the intersection of that claim with historical, existential, and psychological determinations beyond his grasp. Then it is saved by Ernst Zimmer and his family, who give Hölderlin a place to be and a community to be with, a home, there along the banks of the river he loved so well.[65]
Figure 73, “Here lived and rested Hölderlin,” engraved plaque at the Hölderlinturm
What thou lovest well remains the rest is dross What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee
…
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention and true artistry,[66]
~
nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria [67]
In these lines from the Pisan Cantos, one is meant to feel the weight of the contradiction between Hölderlin’s proto-communist republicanism and the disaster of Pound’s modernist fascism, as well as the difficult correspondence between the beauty of Pound’s verse, the searching free rhythms of Hölderlin’s hymns, and the complex appeal to “nature” and to elemental feeling they develop. Hölderlin’s life and verse were already inscribed in and by the catastrophe of modernity, unfolding through the moment of its most hyperbolic ambitions and simplest hopes. “For this is my keenest hope,” Hölderlin wrote to his brother-in-law, “the belief that keeps me strong and active: our grandchildren will be better than we are, freedom will come one day, and virtue will thrive better in the holy warming light of freedom than in the icy zone of despotism.”[68] His hope has not been realized.
In 1993, Zumthor was commissioned to design the building for an International Exhibition and Documentation Center, “Topography of Terror,” on the site of the former Gestapo-SS headquarters in Berlin. It was to be a three story structure, built as a transparent shell articulated by a bar structure organizing rigid frames, which would constitute the different spaces of the building. The idea was to create a form that “was not meant to symbolize anything” but would rather stand lighly on the terrain and expose the site, including two piles of rubble and the excavated ruins of underground rooms that were used for torture. The ground level of the space would enclose these remainders without commentary, while the two upper levels would be “dedicated to its historical placement and documentation, its role in writing history, to teaching, interpretation, and information.” What is at issue in this twofold design is an effort to preserve the force of material facticity, prior to its explicit framing by representation and narrative. “We wanted to let this historic terrain speak for itself,” Zumthor writes, and here we might locate a commitment to elemental history, to the manner in which history might be felt among earth, stone, air, and light—framed by architecture as “historic terrain” where meaning might emerge from materials prior to discursive orientation.[69]
Immediately encountering practical and theoretical disputes, and eventually undone by difficulties with contractors, inadequate funding, and, according to Zumthor, “political machinations by the Federal Government,” [70] the building was never completed. Partial construction was torn down in 2004, and the unfinished project counts as the major disappointment of Zumthor’s career. Nevertheless, the devastation of the Second World War enters into his work through the museum in Cologne, where elemental traces of ruins do indeed speak for themselves, and in his chapel at Wachendorf, where an interior scarred by fire transmits intimations not only of the spiritual stringency of a saint, but also of the conflagrations of history. If Hölderlin’s romantic poetry draws the sense of the elements into the whole of Natur, while also recognizing the latter as instance of sentimental nomination, Zumthor’s late modernist architecture registers the historical resonance of that romantic project, the complexity of the manner in which elemental feelings mediate the relation between nature and history.
As Kolumba was completed, Peter Zumthor arrived at a simple idea for an expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, commissioned in 2008 and opening in 2026: a one level museum set between two horizontal concrete slabs, floor and ceiling, the form of which relays the bubbling up of prehistoric tar pits on the site.
Figure 74, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Geffen Galleries (2008-2026)
Figure 75, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Geffen Galleries
The shape of the plan is something like a pool of oil, its sweeping, irregular curvature and vast windows extending over Wilshire Boulevard, where automobiles run untrammeled beneath.
The cars run in a void of utensils —the powerful tires—beyond Happiness Tough rubbery gear of invaders, of the descendants Of invaders … The context is history Moving toward the light of the conscious[71]
Crude oil below, artworks above—matter formed by spirit and by history—suspended on a single plane between earth and heaven, there to be gawked at, maybe sometimes even seen, truly recognized, by the distracted subjects of late modernity.
Figure 76, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Geffen Galleries
[1] Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Rhein in Hölderlin: Samtliche Werke, Vol. 2.1, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1951), 143. The Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe is cited hereafter StA. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[2] Hölderlin, Der Rhein, StA 142. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[3] Hölderlin, Der Rhein, StA, 142. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[4] Peter Zumthor, Peter Zumthor: Buildings and Projects, 1985-2013, Vol. 1 (1985-1989), ed. Thomas Durisch (Zurich: Verlag Schneidegger & Spiess AG, 2014), 137.
[5] Hölderlin, Die Wanderung, StA 2.1, 138. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[6] Friedrich Hölderlin, “Homecoming,” trans. Keith Hoeller in Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 25. Translation lightly modified.
[8] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 110. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[9] Hölderlin, Der Rhein, StA 2.1, 145. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[10] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 104. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[11] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 110. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[12] In an important article, Joseph Albernaz has made a persuasive case that Hölderlin is the author of the fragmentary text titled “Communismus der Geister,” included by Beissner in the Stüttgarter Ausgabe under the category “Zweifelhaftes” (Doubtful). With David Brazil, Albernaz has also produced a translation of the text into English. See Joseph Albernaz, “The Missing Word of History: Hölderlin and ‘Communism,’” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 97.1 (2022): 7-29. See also Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Communism of Spirits,” trans. Joseph Albernaz and David Brazil, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 97.1 (2022): 5-6.
[13] Hölderlin, Der Archipelagus, StA 2.1, 110. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[14] Hölderlin, Am Quell der Donau, StA 2.1, 128. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[15] Beissner offers an attempt at reconstructive paraphrase in the Stuttgarter Ausgabe: “Der erste Satz schließt mit dem Fragewort ‘woher?’ Zu paraphrasieren wäre etwa folgendermaßen: ‘Aber wenn ihr nun, ihr Alten, nicht sagtet, woher, aus welcher inneren Kraft ihr es verstanden habt—was täten wir ohne dieses Wissen, um zum Göttlichen zu finden? Was tun wir, wenn uns die Überlieferung in dieser Hinsicht stumm bleibt? Wir wenden uns dann aus eigenstem Antrieb, “heiliggenötiget,” zur Natur, rufen sie an, beschwören sie, “nennen” sie, und darauf wird uns das Göttlichgeborne aus ihr entsteigen’” (StA II 695f, Friedrich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Gedichte, Ed. Jochen Schmidt, 848.
[16] Hölderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage…, StA 2.1, 119. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[17] Hölderlin, Andenken, StA 2.1, 189. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[18] G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 102.
[20] Hölderlin, Brod und Wein, StA 2.1, 93. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[21] Hölderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage…, StA 2.1, 118. Trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[22] Paul de Man, “ Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin” (1955) in Blindness and Insight, ed. Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, pp. 261, 263. See Martin Heidegger, “As When On a Holiday…” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller, Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000, pp. 67-99.
[23] The rigor of Heidegger’s ontological thinking in Being and Time lies in his recognition of ekstatical temporalization as constitutive exteriority: time is the being of beings, which is not a being. The existential analytic is a methodological/ epistemological condition of possibility for the disclosure of temporality as constitutive exteriority, but, in turn, the constitutive exteriority of time comes to be understood as the condition of possibility for there to be the sort of being that can carry out the existential analytic (Dasein). Thus, I view the methodological relation between epistemology and ontology in Being and Time as mutually constitutive, reflexive, and self-grounding: far from failing to get clear of the Dasein-analytic in order to think being-qua-being, the latter is revealed through the former as its own ground. Heidegger’s later thinking of the event is, to a degree, consistent with the ontological findings of Being and Time, but it often gives way on his earlier coordination of the existential analytic (epistemology) with the disclosure of being-qua-being (ontology). Among his later writings, those texts in which I think Heidegger manages to sustain the non-metaphysical ontological reflections of Being and Time include “The Essence of Ground,” “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” and “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[24] Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 117.
[31] This is the paradox noted by de Man in his analysis of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances.” See Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-262.
[33] Peter Zumthor and Marie Lending, A Feeling for History (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 2018), 15.
[34] On the relation of the romantic fragment to the overburdening of literature with the vocation of expressing the infinite in finite form, see Aubrey Wasser, The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of LiteraryForm (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 11-37.
[35] Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2010), 16-17
[36] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:314.
[39] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 5 (2008-2013), 35.
[40] See Arge H.A.T. Bregenzerwald, Umgang Bregenzerwald, Egg: Bregenzerwald Tourismus, 2015; and Otto Kapfinger, Architecture in Vorarlberg Since 1980, Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 1999.
[41] Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Migration,” in Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 67.
[42] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 1, 123.
[43] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 1, 123.
[44] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 67.
[46] Hölderlin, Friedensfeier, StA 3, 533. Trans. Nathan Brown.
[47] Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963).
[48] Hölderlin, Patmos, StA 2.1, 165, translated by Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[49] See Sigrid Hauser’s description of the formation of Vals gneiss in Hauser and Peter Zumthor, Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007), 28.
[50] Peter Zumthor in Hélène Binet and Sigrid Hauser, Peter Zumthor: Therme Vals (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007), 24.
[51] Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2006), 69-70.
[53] Peter Zumthor interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner, May 2015, Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art: 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lufVOqRWpLQ
[57] Peter Zumthor qtd in Jessica Mairs, “Therme Vals Spa has been Destroyed, says Peter Zumthor,” Dezeen (May 11, 2017), https://www.dezeen.com/2017/05/11/peter-zumthor-vals-therme-spa-switzerland-destroyed-news/
[58] As of June 2024, rates for local residents to access the baths are 50 CHF/day or 35 CHF for children, while rates for other guests are 60 and 50 CHF for the baths alone. Hotel reservations including access to the baths start at over 700 CHF/night in the main hotel or 330 CHF for a room in the adjacent “House of Architects.”
[59] For a timeline of St. Kolumba church and the Kolumba Museum, see Kolumba, ed. Dominik Duka (Prague: Krystal Publishers), 2007.
[60] The handmade bricks with which Kolumba is constructed were designed specifically for the project by Peterson Tegl in cooperation with Peter Zumthor: https://en.petersen-tegl.dk/kolumba/products/
[61] This is the prayer Bruder Klaus, Saint Nicholas of Flüe, the patron saint of Switzerland. See the page for Nicholas of Flüe at The Matheson Trust for the Study of Comparative Religion, https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/nicholas-of-flue-brother-klaus
[62] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 3, pp. 121-122.
[63] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 3, p. 121.
[64] Hölderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage…, StA 2.1 119-120, trans. Nathan Brown and Stephen Ross.
[65] On Hölderlin’s years in the Turm, see Giorgio Agamben’s, Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Welling Life, 1806-1843, trans. Atla L. Price (London: Seagull Books, 2023).
[66] Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970), 541.
[68] Hölderlin, letter to Karl Gok, Tübingen, September 1793, Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (Penguin, 2009), 17–18.
[69] Zumthor, Buildings and Projects, Vol. 2, 59-61.
This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
aillelujah?
DX Aminal and Lera Winehouse
On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis / One cannot think and write except when seated.
–Flaubert
There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.
Only thoughts reached by walking have value.
–Nietzsche
We grow out of the earth, out of all its impurities, and everything that is on earth is in us.
–Platonov
~
aillelujah?
~
At the height of this summer in Athens in the company of a fine swimmer and man Steve Corcoran, hands holding watermelon and fish, we roll through a street marketplace and crash on them cold steps next to a fruit cart and a golem tree. Lick fingers, beat the blaze with peaches, take it in: the origin. Two shopkeepers on each side of the footpath engage in a dialogical ad campaign to attract buyers:
Oranges! Juicy oranges, for a juice or a salad or a mousse, yesss, you beautiful young lady inside the yellow shorts will surely make good use of them – for your well-being on our earth! You shouldn’t listen to him, beautiful, he sells good oranges, true, but this new harvest of mine is juicier clearer sweater or tarter, if you wish, and any exchange comes with free clementines, which you may like to try if you enjoy things like oranges – can you imagine!
~
Some events process a lifetime
~
The bodies lift together, adding plates to weights, supporting the bar on comrade psycho bench to avoid decapitation… screaming encouragement and babbling awestruck admiration when a body goes further, digs deeper, lifts higher.
When a body is found juicing, they are humiliated, cast out, condemned.
In this respect, they act together to spur each body into more extreme feats, pushing each other to the next level. Competing to achieve personal glory, but enraptured at participation in the experience of gang warfare, all bodies fight against the weakness of the mind that sets limits and decides boundaries and what is possible.
The body of the philosopher is a proof of the health of their critique.
~
The Japanese writer and body builder Yukio Mishima wrote a brilliant essay Sun and Steel, an account of his experience in discovering his body. From a bookish childhood mired in words and concepts to an adult life of action and movement, Sun and Steel is also an attempt at philosophy of the body. In Mishima’s writing there is a thread that extends back to Nietzsche, the last philosopher, the philosopher of the body.
The most important thinking is done in concert with the body.
The most harmful thinking is done in service of an abstract like “soul”, “spirit”, “self”, “identity” against the body.
~
At a crossroads, on the other side near the traffic lights you see a person in the golden age, around 55 with a heavily laboured body, the surface fading, each line and curve of soft tissue meeting the hardened will under duress. They can be great or poor workers and teachers, angry with life or gentle, and most likely witty. It’s a green light, you see them approaching, show some respect, step aside. Under a different draw of conditions, you would not be able to tell their spade suit and age.
~
“From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term ‘theory’ was derived, and the word ‘theoretical’ until a few hundred years ago meant ‘contemplating’, looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualise it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: as a spectator you may understand the ‘truth’ of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it.”
~
Makar, an everyman from down below, fell asleep, “and his suffering passed into a dream: in the dream he saw a mountain or some elevation, and on the mountain stood a man of science … the man stood silently, without seeing the grieving Makar and thinking only about the general scale of things, not about the private Makar. The face of that most learned man was lit by the glow of faraway mass life spreading in the distance beneath him, and his eyes were terrible and dead from being on such a height and looking too far.”
Makar in Doubt (1929) is a composition by the divine Andrey Platonov, a Soviet prodigy who lived up to Stalinisms by forging peasantariat background, folk vernacular and critical literature, dusted with bureaucratic slang, into one of the brightest modern examples of a free-loving language and man of letters under the totalitarian thumb.
Platonov’s unpredictable, unfamiliar and precise perspectives on familiar things, struggles and paradoxes live on these pages, inspire films and theatre shows, but destined for glory he was born to lose, appearing to the audience of critics “like the holy fool of old who spoke the simple truths that were as dangerous to the new rulers as they had been to the bloody Tsars of early Russia” (Ginsburg, 1975).
~
“Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a gentleman whose Christian names were Thomas Henry – you may possibly have heard of him – he was no less a personage than the Grand-father of the great Aldous Huxley – once found himself threatened by a predicament similar to that in which I stand tonight. He had been asked to lecture a distinguished group of people. What bothered him was this: what assumption was he to make about the existing knowledge of the audience? He adopted the sensible course of asking the advice of an old hand at the game; and was told ‘You must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything, or that they know nothing.’” (Crawley’s Banned Lecture)
~
Suppose a gifted author once took seven years to bend morphology into an essay-story. How should the reader approach it to bring out the dead author?
~
The sun of thought does not rise cyclically – it’s possible to predict neither the trajectory of your thought nor if it’s a star.
~
The sweat of labour in the sun will teach you more about the meaningless indignity of life than the ink of a thousand philosophers and poets. This is a good thing.
Good things come from insight into the wisdom of Silenus.
~
A fierce body in thought creates energeia, friends strong as teeth, however chipped, and claws to grip.
~
Life is without charm or gravity if not for a daily experience of overcoming limitations – the physical sensation of danger is paramount to forming a robust body and mind, as are periods of calm and leisure.
There is a certain reckless mentality that comes from working a job that is inherently unsafe. As far as standards for workplace safety go, there are some jobs that cannot be made appropriate for the physically disabled, weak or timid. There are jobs that cannot be made safe, even for the physically strong and daring. There is no way to safely lift a stainless-steel fridge up a flight of stairs… a misstep or careless rhythm can break a limb, a neck, crush a face.
The absurd costs necessary to ensure a safe lift of a fridge upstairs would have even the most ardent trade union workplace safety official book a cash job removalist.
The physical brutality of the task means that the removalist is going to have a reckless mentality.
No robot can do this job – this job is timeless – we will carry heavy shit as long as there is heavy shit to carry and as long as our backs can take it.
~
Let us ask, in this spirit: who will brave the reckless thinking on our behalf?
~
Daily exposure to danger and risk offers a clarity on the ruthless nature of what types of people are to be spared exposure to harm and what types of people are expendable.
Your physical comfort and security is always dependent on other people taking risks and enduring danger on your behalf. This is one of the most important revelations about the nature of freedom. If you don’t have to fight or die for your personal freedom, if you don’t have to shovel holy shit, it is because someone else has done it on your behalf, or did it a long time ago, or is doing it on your behalf, right now, taking the risk so you don’t have to…
Or, you are not free at all…
~
raw thoughts fit the times of war
~
“We do not believe in ready-made principles or theoretical plans. In the days to come we will define, through our actions as well as in a series of articles, the content of the word ‘revolution’. For the time being, however, this word gives meaning to our preference for energy and honor, to our decision to be done with the spirit of mediocrity and the moneyed interests and with a social state whose ruling class failed in all its duties and demonstrated a lack of both intelligence and heart.” (Camus, Combat, August 21, 1944)
~
If the readers are fond of taxonomic reasoning and epigraphs by Aristotle, we recommend Smith’s monograph The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. This erudite and elitist study problematises the complexity of philosophical life that, when honestly inspected, cannot be primarily associated with the academic modality and its aggressive standards. Another and perhaps more transgressive way is by analogy with the excommunicated Benedict Spinoza who notes that the concept “anger” – or “wonder” – can’t designate all cognate experiences, that each instance is unique (in its impurity). This way, Bento the Pious cracks open a crevice to the infinity of possibilities, not the messy six for beginners.
~
In a petite 1959 piece On the Word “Bread”, inaccessible to AI data analysis available in English, Herman He|sse ɘƨƨ|ays against “difficult, long and pretentious words, phrases and expressions [like ‘dividend’ or ‘existentialism’ that] have one and the same deficiency – they lack voluminosity. Such words carry information, but do not possess the bewitching force of expressivity carried by real words; they do not come to us from below, from the earth, from the folk, but emerge from above, from editorial offices, from factory bureaus and chancelleries. Centuries-old, seasoned, full, heavy and solid-like-virgin-metals-words are ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘ancestors’, ‘the earth’, ‘a tree’, ‘a valley’. Each of them is equally understandable to a shepherd boy and a professor and a member of the parliament; each calls upon reason and our feelings, raises a wave of memories, representations and sensations; each of them presupposes something eternal, unchangeable, in the absence of which it is not possible to live.”
If the octagenarian indeed shares a secret and, when simple things are twisted like our borders and the stakes are high as the sky we see, shouldn’t we dedicate ourselves, friends, to such soma-thoughts?
~
By infinity of possibilities we imply not only the numberless plurality of being (e.g. a writer or parent), but also the possAbilities to engage in critique that evade the standard analytic skill-set built for service to the order of things. We have knowledges that move imagination, that help to orient ourselves with heart in any environment (e.g. “kokoro”), that make us sweat as a social lubricant, dance together and contradict with purposiveness ad infinitum
“Infinity” “plurality” “poverty” “supremacy” as conceptual problems on their own amount to no insights that can dramatically reorient one’s life. With the traditional blunt huge tool dubbed reason at our disposal, what and how can we learn anything meaningful about practices like Deep-Time Diligence in Aboriginal communities? An ability between ancestrally related bodies to join a supramaterial sphere, observe and communicate despite material distance¿¡ Alas, the two ontologies at present are as apart as rapist fracking and narcotic abstractions are from local lifeforms and lore as sources of decision-making.
Still, if a more apt time for paranormal critical activities is yet to come, will it ever?
~
Hail Mother Mary: the odds of driving out the neo-akademik spirit are as thin as a critical decision to withdraw from a successful career and commit to other things, philosophically and provisionally; or as thinly possible as our Verso All Stars collectively committing to free manuals for impressionable adolescents and to hands-on revolutionary activities, entailing criminality. But the lustre of salaried intellectual life, that is, the professional affirmation of self-worth & the smog of security that feed (off) the academic status are too hypnotic, too desirable to resist incarnating. Instead, outperforming in the employment lottery-racing, a junior member or veteran characteristically never looks back, under the wing of the tertiary industrial complex. Forrreal, in cubicles and corporate costumes, myriad life processes (impressions, digestion, daydreaming) adapting to the commotion of office spaces, linearly designed, condition one’s critical perception and instincts – originally rooted in the wild and community, which will enhance your visionƨ in the dark!
~
Give us a consensual dekulakisation of the university!
~
The emergence of wild thoughts is to be welcomed appropriately. What must be prevented, however, are the crimes induced by practices like domestication, e.g. a housebroken forest cat who forfeited their “right” to be “outside”, to climb, sharpen claws and root around.
~
Blessed be children as truths they discern are lucid. Nine-year olds ask one another a round of questions in a small class. The first question is “What do your parents (caretakers) do”? Two kids in the circle happen to have parents engaging in critical thinking. First, the girl sums up proudly, “My mother is an academic”, and after a quick reckoning the boy smiling at her says, “Well, as for my dad – it’s a philosophical question”!
~
Small critical talk tickles
~
As they speak and listen, as their minds labour, their bodies numb: behold!
Professional events offering presentations of the latest research for a fee and theatrimechanical rites into tertiary excellence on a workday scribble away in imagination a sapientissimus shape in a bodybuilding club.
Refracted in the mirrored walls, the presenter performs skilful acts of intellectual aerobics, drawing from other notable athletes. Can you enlarge & stretch the body (of thought) the way I do? Can you appreciate its significance? Of course, polite criticisms are welcome!
…Call me Eyesore Maxxx. [Clears throat] Now, should you wish to throw a discus (of thought), prepare to strip and get nude before the audience, remember? Now take your time: should anybody on the other side like to catch (up with) the discus, then nudity will be the condition of their growth, pain and joy, right? [kisses teeth]!
What?
~
Mainstream critical instruction is comparable to a traditional urban tour, give or take – even the independent educational cells (EGS, MSCP, NCRP), pedagogically speaking, operate in the manner of the academic regime, where teaching as risky performance is long threatened by corporate gang mentality. Young readers may still wish to give it a crack, since the alternatives are scarce(ly funded by the public). But if you are curious enough, you will see that the tour’s “sights”, including the avant-garde, are prominent enough to emerge in your experience from one point of view or another. The only thing we recommend is that when you are in a new city, do some basic research, but to a tour please prefer an eccentricity of getting lost to seek a way out. Let your sights, your guide and charisma find you!
~
Is your body eager, warm and calm enough, to dive nude into a freezing sea? Two recent luminaries, Wittgenstein and Zarathustra, are playfully pessimistic about the academic way of life while being one with solitude in bare nature. However, no BODY seems to care about such autobiographical facts because they are, in their raw essence, incompatible with any existing, megapolicy-driven model of education.
And meanwhile life is simple and full, ‘nature likes to hide’, you have to know this… waves times ǝpochs and backs collapse…
~
“Disease and mental instability cause health. The men who have taken the most extreme risks, who have done what may have disgusted other people or what other people have condemned are the men who have advanced our civilisation.” (Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School)
~
Rats laugh – Darwin’s dog had a sense of humour – the timbre of elephant’s laughter – the wide silent laughter of a great ape – self-irony of Socrates eluding Plato who never laughed in public – and our salty friend in eternity, neither dead nor alive, zigzagging, confusing death with life, galloping on the Turin horse:
“when nothing else from today has a future, our laughter is the one thing that does”!
~
Allez hop! Many wonderful writers and artists are clearly mad or unhealthy in the eyes of the crowd. This is not a place to discuss Democritus, Plato or Artaud on m/b/adness, but for our purposes here we can pin it down to oddities and eccentricities in thinking and acting that can enlighten, fire up and endanger, bewilder and alienate. To recall one anecdote, as his host in Turin recounts: the nude Nietzsche (in the candlelight, we imagine), dancing and playing piano improvisations on one of the nights before his collapse. Shortly after he received a letter from the University of Basel, on Thursday, January 3rd, notifying him that his stipend – his bread and butter – would be cut in half.
And leaving aside for a moment Wittgenstein’s unnameable pedagogical style in Cambridge, did this dialogue take place?:
Russell: Norway would be dark.
Wittgenstein: I hate daylight.
Russell: It would be lonely.
Wittgenstein: I prostitute my mind talking to intelligent people.
Russell: You’re mad.
Wittgenstein: May God save me from sanity.
~
If philosophical activity is boiled down to critical thought in the living body, academic writing today, as we witness its decay, is like a tongue falling back into one’s throat as the muscles relax just enough to cause snoring. Sorry!
Reflection, writing and reading as revelatory activities and everything individual and celestial that goes along with them… when shaped in the requisite image of the “scholarly” model, a critique is twisted into a stillborn criticule. To wit, a top-tier paywalled paper on Nietzsche’s sunny gnotion of “golden laughter”, stylistically and fundamentally, is its own subject’s anti-thesis. The author is not required to live through an experience of the subject matter, and so the doublet forms an antinomy, the body of which is as lifeless as a dissected anti-Anti-Christ.
Call it Atavistic amnesia serving Itself, all and none, Folly Unit-ed, or another disfigure of thought… so long as one’s manners and purpose can be reduced to a transactional incentive, non-being, to bait, a blatant curse of narcissism… even the most cited criticule, a sold-out Foucault symposium in the Danish Kingdom, the most viewed Žižek monologue – will heighten the blood circulation of no BODY – won’t cause our sweat to BREAK!
O gods, let them die in artificial peace, screw geek-chic – here’s to critique!
~
One of the questions in a first-year level philosophy class delivered by a neural network was as follows.
“What exactly do you imagine when you think of me”?
A bright spherical room accommodated a dozen students moving around. Some buzzed near the standing desks, others cocooned in pre-arranged beanbags, a few people rested against the warm glass wall dividing them from a massive terrarium.
The ice-breaker worked with distinction as 72.4% of the class appeared “engaged or pensive” [LeGiON33// as per 7.3.15 of the Excellence Manual].
The first one to raise e-hand was Matthew Da A. [LeGiON33// ID: €●●○○○■]: “Thank you for this thought-provoking question. I imagine the spark of plasma produced by an electric arc”, he said, moulding an obscure hologram.
“That’s an outstanding analogy, ●●○○○■. Even if I didn’t have access to your records [LeGiON33// consent granted/FN: °••°•°°°], I would still guess that one of your ancestors was a welder. Yes, yes, philosophy can teach you, ●●○●○○■, and us many critical skills”.
“I picture a key-hole, for some reason”, suddenly whispered Pearl Gully [LeGiON33// ID:£○●○○●○], adding, “and it’s being oxidised”.
[LeGiON33// ! sudden 66% attrition of interest in the audience/immediately apply technique 6.23.4 as per the Excellence Manual].
“That’s quite original, ○●○○●○, thank you kindly, wouldn’t the class agree? And the student by the glass barrier [LeGiON33// ?], – you all guys wear similar new clothes and you are not identifiable from the back, – your neck is swaying side-to-side, vision seems in sync with the eyes of the diamond python, yes, You – what do you picture?”
This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
Southern Circuits
Henry Neim Osman
Victor Grippo, Analogía I, 1971, electric circuits, electric meter and switch, potatoes, ink, paper, paint and wood
Victor Grippo, Analogía I (2da. Version), Potatoes, zinc and copper electrodes, voltmeter, electrical cable and nylon monofilament, chair, wood, cloth, and text panel
Buenos Aires, 1970: Victor Grippo exhibits Analogía I. Forty potatoes are installed on the wall, their yellow-brown bulbous shapes inserted into a white grid. Each potato is placed in its own cell and connected to by two wires, red and black. In the middle, splitting the potatoes into two groups of twenty, is a voltmeter that measures the collective electric generation of this ensemble and a short text that elaborates the titular analogy in Argentine conceptual artist Victor Grippo’s Analogía I (1970/1) between the potatoes stored energy, connected by a grid of wires, and the burgeoning social conscience of a networked society.
Sao Paulo, 1977: Grippo remakes Analogía I. The voltmeter, text, and potatoes remain but the modernist grid has been disappeared as the potatoes are placed on a long banquet table. Strewn across a white tablecloth, with their wires tangled above, the clean lines of the first iteration have disappeared. Yet the analogy remains, transformed by the shift from the formal elements of the grid to the implied formlessness of the sheer mass of potatoes, from an organized matrix to a set of forms closer to how the potato itself might grow in the ground, as the set of potatoes behind the empty chair demonstrate. In the space between the grid and the tangle, between the modernist and organic networks, lies the politics of Grippo’s analogy.
Analogy comes from the Greek analogos, or proportion, meaning that it is the relation between two things unmediated by numeric counting. Analogy, and the analog, is not ontology, Kaja Silverman tells (or warns) us, but rather a similarity with a difference (2015). This essay takes up Grippo’s titular AnalogíaI as diagram, machine, and networked system, by attending to the synchronic difference of analogy and the diachronic difference of Grippo’s first and second versions. The first difference concerns the grounds for this analogy itself, in which biological and technical systems are analogized to the social. How was a political problem able to be understood as analogous to both interconnected vegetation and to the technical approximation of natural networks? In the same historical moment in which Grippo made his Analogías, and in response to similar concerns about how to, and whether one could, compare natural, technical, and social systems, Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela posited autopoiesis, or biología del conocer, as the theory of life’s self-production. Autopoiesis was always more than a theory of life, having distinct political and social dimensions both for Maturana and Varela, who disagreed on the organicism and holism underlying the theory’s political application, and the uptake of autopoiesis in varied realms, from Nikolas Luhmann’s legal theories to Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of Man. Analogía I offers a parallel trajectory, one in which social, organic, and inorganic systems are circuited together and stages the same tension that lead Maturana and Varela to disagree on the possibility of a political autopoiesis.
If the first difference concerns analogy as a structural principle, and the theoretical grounds for Grippo’s analogy, the second difference takes up the precise meaning of the historical shift in the formal elements of Analogía I. At first glance, much has changed. The grid, with its clean lines and roots as a technology of organization and territorialization, would seem to be opposed to the interwoven wires and roots of a natural form. Does not a grid overlay and overwrite the contingencies of life? Does not there seem to be a startling difference between the cell-like grid and promise of a different, and perhaps more natural, mode of social organization in the second version of Analogía I, in which the potatoes are strewn across a communal table? At first glance the grid appears to be a technology that captures while the second version would be one that frees, bringing forward the tensions inherent in a work that claims to model, slightly tongue in cheek due to its elementary-school experiment, how a computer could model social conscience. It also restages centuries old debates between mechanism and vitalism. Yet the table, chairs, and plot of soil in the second installation maintain the sharp angles and rectilinear forms of the grid. These two iterations are less distinct than they appear, reducing the severity of the formal shift and the seeming antagonism between the two different network topologies. Rather than a crisis of meaning, in which the work calls forth a certain indeterminacy to the politics of the network form because of interchangeable topologies, what is left is a subtle critique of demands to model the interdependence of the social field and its web of mutual interdependence or care, located here in roots and wires, by overdetermining its relationship to natural and technical systems. The shift in the formal elements of the network here offers a path away from a holism of the network that emerges from the historical conditions of the Southern Cone in the 1970s, like autopoiesis, by allowing the social field to determine itself as an open site of contradiction.
II
Grippo, Sin titulo, 1966, oil and graphite on linen
In 1966, Grippo began his investigation of energy and the circuit in a series of abstract paintings of geometric elements. In a work from this year, a simplified set of forms are rendered in primary colors of contrasting red, blue, and yellow, which transform the visual language of technical documents into a set of iconic relations. Here, abstraction is what enables analogy: stripped of their specificity, these works invoke everything from silicon chips to abstract textiles to concrete and constructivist art. The clean lines preface the machinic nature of Grippo’s later works, yet the individual icons are disarticulated from a larger circuit. Silicon chips have oft been compared to a range of visual forms. Media historian Lisa Nakamura, writing on the early production of silicon chips by Fairchild Semiconductor by Navajo women, notes how in 1969 Fairchild, in its own publicity material, would parallel the abstract design of Navajo woven rugs with the design of silicon chips. Placing images of rugs and chips next to each other to draw forth their shared formal elements, Nakamura underscores how the “resemblance between the pattern of the rug depicted on the first page and the circuit is striking and uncanny. It makes the visual argument that Indian rugs are merely a different material iteration of the same pattern or aesthetic tradition found within the integrated circuit,” (2014, 926). Computer scientist Bernhard Korte compares early integrated chip designs from the 1960s to the 1980s to works by Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers, because “the structures inherent in chip design and chip reality are, after all, nothing but simple geometric forms,” (1991, 63).
While Grippo’s circuit paintings make a parallel movement in the same historical moment, abstracting the set of shared simple geometric forms between chip design and abstract art, these paintings also recall the development of arte concréta or concrete art in Argentina. Concrete art as a term was first coined in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg and was widely embraced in Argentina and Brazil by artists like Lidy Prati in the 1950s. Deeply mathematical, concrete art was non-representational, meaning that geometric forms – point, line, and shape – referred to nothing more than themselves as representations of pure rationality. As a 1946 manifesto by the Argentine Association of Concrete Art contends, “A scientific aesthetics will replace the millenary, speculative and idealistic aesthetics” and “Concrete Art familiarizes man with a direct relationship with things, not with the fiction of things,” (Inventionist Manifesto, 1946, 8). Grippo’s later work pushes back against the anti-idealism of concrete art, and even the early paintings seen above pair the visual language of concrete art with a set of forms that recall a range of natural and technical systems. The open two and three pronged shapes, separated by small dots, recall the abstracted elements of a computer circuit and “were figurative… I went on to use abstraction and from there a certain symbolism,” (Grippo, 2004, 319). In bringing what he termed mechanical models into conversation with concrete art, these paintings bridged concrete art’s anti-idealism with a certain symbolism. In an interview, he described this process as moving from “painting them [mechanical forms] (like a step in a process of evolution) to incorporating them into a system of symbols, a language,” (Grippo, 2004, 321). The structuralist influence here presages how the later network in Analogía I is a one defined by the (negative) relations between its constituent parts.
In the following year, Jorge Glusberg, an Argentine artist and curator, founded Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), of which Grippo was a part. CAyC’s first exhibition was Arte Sistema which brought together the cybernetic systems thinking that was already circulating in European and American art practices with an inherent social critique from the South.[1] Glusberg framed these interventions as an ideological conceptualism, a phrase borrowed from Spanish critic Simon Marchan Fiz (Zanna, 2009). This was a refashioning of conceptualism as a distinctly political project tied to third-worldism and anti-psychiatry. Glusberg deployed this term to distinguish CAyC’s projects, and later exhibitions and interventions organized by Glusberg as Grupo de los Trece, from Western conceptualism, which he argued failed to respond to the political and material specificities that CAyC and Grupo de los Trece faced. This echoes what Luis Camnitzer calls the “regional clock,” which distinguishes the distinct temporality of regional conceptualisms (of which Europe is one as well) to critique universal periodizations (Camnitzer 2007, 28). At the same time, this was not a group of works united by a singular ideology nor by a unified mode of critique. Rather, they were organized by their opposition to the dominant ideologies, both artistic and social, in contemporary Argentina via a wide range of dematerialized practices (Glusberg, 1972).
In 1970, amidst these shifts in Argentine art production, Grippo’s practice turned from circuit paintings to large scale installations, often using the potato, that grappled with social issues. Grippo writes that he:
[B]egan to work with potatoes as a material… ‘to consecrate’ an everyday object and discover its multiple significations. Art and science—logic and analogue—served as instruments. Later, almost without thinking about it, I articulated some symbols: man’s foodstuffs, the trades, energy and the rose, the disequilibria and consequent transformations. (Grippo 2014, 16)
The potato is a central part of Grippo’s complex visual language, along with roses and lead, due to his ongoing interest in alchemy and the history of science and served as a connection to life and liveness, in particular. He also writes, in verse, that:
I consider myself a realist
what is more real than a live potato
what is more real than Pb (lead) carried [sic]
shown in its fixity, in its behavior,
what is more real than seeds (Grippo, 2014, 19).
Life, then, is as much the object of Grippo’s work as the circuit. Change over time, growth, the ability to open and change with the world, the living material of the potato symbolizes the possibility for both individual and social growth. He also, in a conversation remembered by critic Guy Brett, cited post-war British military experiments aimed at building biological batteries powered by micro-organisms as one influence,(Grippo 2017, 8). Analogía I, then, can be read as a more liberatory re-reading of this military project that sought to imagine a biological battery for social conscience instead of for military power.[2]
At the center of this re-reading, both theoretically and literally, was the voltmeter and related text at the center of the first version of Analogía I. In it, Grippo lays out three analogies: (1) between “Papa (Quechua name)” and the Latin concientia, “the inner feeling through which man acquires an appreciation for his actions… freedom of conscience. Right recognized by any government to each citizen to think as he pleases.”; (2) between the potato as “daily function; basic food” and “daily form of conscience; individual conscience,”’ and (3) “extension of daily function” source of electric energy (0.7 volt per unit) and “extension of conscience. Source of conscience of energy.” [3] The potato here becomes the locus of a set of entangled analogies to energy, freedom, rights, and conscience, both individual and social, but also how we become aware of our own actions and their impact on others, which is to say, it asks about networks of care on a macro level.
Each tuber’s .7 volts of latent power are wired together, measured by the central voltmeter as an analogy for the general power of the social field. In connecting each individual potato with wires, the rhizomatic root network of a potato plant is replaced with the technical assemblage of wire, electrode, voltmeter and potato. Put differently, a technical network replaces a natural one, materializing and systematizing the formal relations between different parts of a single organism. Unlike the cybernetic analogy, which placed organic and inorganic systems on the same field, allowing for a set of equivalences and exchanges between distinct systems, Analogía I refuses distinctions between the organic and the inorganic in favor of a different network analogy, in which the social field is always already natural and technical. There is no distinction to be overcome. A series of distinct phenomena are thus rendered parallel, as potato is equated to person, energy to cognition, and a burgeoning techno-organic network to social relations. Further, the voltmeter computes the total electrical generation produced by the system which, following Grippo’s own analogy, is a computation of a social conscience and consciousness.
It is precisely this question of the politics of the network that returns us to the grid. Analogía I forwards an ambiguous politics that vacillates between the potential of a coming-together referenced in the written analogies to the severity of the grid itself, a move that celebrates mutual care while also subtlety critiquing the political potential of this analogy through the grid that mediates the network. Justo Pastor Mellado notes that as much as Analogia I is about an emerging consciousness, the potatoes are enclosed in wooden cages (Mellado, 2004, 308). The cell of the grid echoes the plant cell, which at the moment of its discovery was named after the Latin cella, for a small room reminiscent of a monk’s cell (Mazzarello, 1999). The plant cell was then always emergent from an architecture of power meant to organize bodies, or in this case raw being. Multiple parallel cells, separate but together, produce the vitality of multicellular life just as different potatoes, distinct but linked together, produce consciousness for Grippo. We could term this cellularity, denoting the collapse of social and spatial relations with biological ones through the figure of the cell. Pastor Mellado also argues that just to mention an electrode “reminds us of torture; in particular, the application of an electric current to the body,” (2004, 308). A computer that models social conscience and consciousness becomes as menacing as it is liberatory, capturing life as much as it emancipates it.
Yet more than the torture chamber, the grid here denotes a tension between the organic and the inorganic and the twin processes of regularization and normalization. As Bernhard Siegert notes, the grid is a cultural technique of ordering and representation that is first an imaging technology, because it projects a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane, secondly a diagram that traverses the real and the symbolic, and finally it constitutes a world of objects imagined by a subject in his reframing of the Heideggerian gestell (Siegert 2015, 98). Put differently, the grid is a medium that merges representation and operation through deixis. Yet a second idea of the grid for Siegert emerges in which it symbolizes a cartographic imaginary emergent from South America and Argentina in particular. Here, the grid is the organizing principle of colonial topography, a division and organization of space that, while originally devised in antiquity, reaches its advanced form in the Spanish colonial city plan, which is infinitely reproducible and expandible (2015, 108-9). It is in the city that the grid re-emerges in three dimensions, moving from abstract deixis and cartography to a principle for the ordering of space through reproducible cells, which are both organizational technique and visual practice. And it is in Argentina that Siegert locates the apogee of the grid as a spatial technique in three dimensions. In 1929, Le Corbusier visited Argentina, where he developed his theory of the cell as the building block in architecture, both via his trip in an ocean liner to Argentina and his plane rides over different cities in South America, like Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Montevideo, which had distinct grid plans. For Siegert, “Le Corbusier’s real model for cellular construction was neither plant nor prison but the machine,” an idea that he claims only developed in his visit to South America (2015, 116).
Is not neither plant nor prison but machine the central principle of Analogía I? As neither holist organic networked, linked by mutual exchange and care, nor model for the prison cell, Analogía I is a model of a social machine that is always-already organic and inorganic, holding the potential for new ways of coming together just as much as it holds the potential for capture and control, a contradiction that structures for Grippo’s installation and that he never seeks to paper over. Yet, the grid here takes on a distinct valence, as, contra Siegert, it is not a cultural technique of ordering and of territorialization, emerging from cartography and Renaissance perspective, but a network architecture.
III
This second formulation of the titular analogy is thus not a return to a prelapsarian before, bringing a social conscience back to the soil, which in this version is constrained to a single square behind the chair. Each potato remains networked and connected to a single point: a voltmeter, albeit one that instead of dividing the installation into two equal parts is set off to the side like a pulpit or control panel. There are three major changes here: the grid has been replaced by a non-standardized and distributed network; some potatoes have been returned to the soil without being disconnected; and an empty chair holds not the head of the table but serves as a step for yet more potatoes as they move from ground to a set table, or vice-versa.
Analogía I (2da. Version) rejects the grid as organizing principle but does not reject the central analogy of the installation nor Grippo’s material theorization of the social as an (in)organic machine. If the first iteration was organized into a set of discrete elements, here there is a return to more seemingly natural forms that recall less the prison cell than woven knots of roots in soil. Despite organizational differences, Grippo’s intervention remains the same, asking the viewer to analogize a deceptively simple system of potatoes and wires to a broader theory of the social. In both, it is the voltmeter that serves as the interface between system and environment. The formal shift in organization between the two installations, alongside the maintenance of the analogy itself, may seem to point to an incoherence to the political claims that ground his analogy. However, it is the refusal of easy organicist interpretations that would prioritize organic networks as a model of the social or mechanistic interpretations that would prioritize technical interconnection that grounds Grippo’s work. The fundamental contradiction between the two different version of Analogía at the level of the politics of their networked form, between each potato being held separately or strewn across a table such that they can touch each other, speaks to the tension between the network as a mode of control and a new horizontal modality of care, even as they both remain more similar than they appear.
In 1972, between the two versions of the installation, CAyC organized an exhibition in a public plaza. Grippo installed a rural-style oven to make bread, handing out warm bread in an installation that merged proto-relational art, arte povera, and his own interest in transforming simple materials through heat and energy. The next day, the police impounded the installation and destroyed the oven. The epigraph to the exhibition has included a long quote from Louis Althusser, that “One could propose the hypothesis that a great work of art is that which acts within an ideology at the same time that it distances itself from it to constitute an act of critique of the ideology it sets forth, in order to allude to different ways of perceiving, feeling, hearing, etc., that surpass existing ideology by freeing itself from its latent myths,” a line of critique that aptly applies to Analogía I as well (Longoni 2004, 285). Analogía I proposes new ways of interconnecting and raising the social conscience while also subtending such a possibility, forwarding an ideology critique of both the network and attempts to organize the social following nature’s own systems of interconnection, holding up care as critique and critique as care.
A parallel debate on the relation between nature and the social and the politics of the model was occurring across the Andes, where Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela De Maquines y Seres Vivos began outlining their theory of autopoiesis or la biología del conocer and eventually diverged due to Maturana’s belief that a social autopoiesis was possible, an organicist turn that Varela strongly disagreed with. Autopoiesis is a theory of self-organizing systems that grapples with the foundational question of what is (cellular) life, but it is a theory of politics and social organization as well.[4] Autopoiesis, in its beginnings, concerned how nervous system activity, and thus the organism in general, is only triggered by the nervous system itself, and the “external world would have only a triggering role in the release of the internally determined activity of the nervous system.” (Maturana and Varela, 1980, 121). It is in this observation that autopoiesis is borne, as the circular activity of the organism (or the cell, or the system) constitutes the auto-, the self-production at the heart of the theory. A central question is thus how can an organism maintain its own identity as it constantly changes.
Maturana and Varela distinguished between the organization of a unity (an inside, a system, an organism) and a medium (in which the unity is embedded), which can also be phrased as the difference between the system of relations that constitute a unity and the actual structure of a unity in a particular moment (Maturana, 1972, 46-47). Organization is maintained even as structures change. Further, the relation of unity to medium, or how the unity is embedded and relates to its environment, is a pre-requisite for life. In a late publication, Varela reframed the central tenets of autopoiesis as whether the system has a semi-permeable boundary, is self-producing, and able to regenerate the components of the system (Varela 2000). Key to these distinctions is semi-permeability and operational closure. The former is how autopoietic systems are organizationally closed but structurally open, while the latter refers to how autopoietic systems are neither representational, because the terms of the systems reactions are determined by its organization, nor solipsistic, because the nervous the system does interact with the environment at the level of its structure. Outside inputs are triggers that are only registered if the system’s organization allows them to be. The relatively simple recursivity of first order cybernetics’ theories of feedback is now transformed to one in which the observer is not a neutral transducer of information but actively produces itself.
Analogía I is not an autopoietic system per se, but the tension between an autopoietic theory of a system and Grippo’s installation reveal something of a nascent Southern circuit, emergent from the political and material conditions of the Southern Cone, organized around the same central contradiction as the two versions of his installation. The network modeled in both versions of Analogía I contains something of a cybernetic enclosure, as it is only accessible through the voltmeter that selectively determines and processes the systems output. What is crucial here is not the network itself, in autopoietic terms the structure, which is of course not self-reproducing as a potato cannot wire itself nor produce new mechanical components, but rather how Grippo analogizes two distinct autopoietic systems of the organic potato and the social, united by a technical apparatus. It is here that the political implications of autopoiesis can be drawn forth, even as autopoiesis is often understood as either an epistemological or ethical rather than political quandary by interlocutors in the humanities and social sciences. This is the crux of Cary Wolfe’s critique of how autopoiesis contains a humanism that:
manifests itself in the philosophical idealism which hopes that ethics may somehow do the work of politics. What we find here, in other words, is (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s formulation) a kind of “strategy of containment” whereby the post-humanist imperatives of second-order cybernetics are ideologically recontaied by an idealist faith in the social and political power of reason, reflection, voluntarism, and what Jameson calls “the taking of thought (1995, 62).
For Wolfe, this is due to Maturana and Varela’s transformation of the particular values of their milieu into a universal theory of the system, particularly their focus on the necessity of love, which is transformed into imperative. This leads to a confrontation with the fundamental idea for him that all points of view are not valid because they have differentially distributed effects in the social field. Where then is social antagonism?
If Wolfe seeks to uncover a latent humanism in autopoiesis, Sylvia Wynter turns to autopoiesis to understand, and subtend, the production of the liberal human throughout her work, starting with her 1984 essay “The Ceremony Must be Found.” For Wynter, whose wide-ranging oeuvre is too expansive so be summarized here, autopoiesis serves as the mechanism for her hypothesis of auto-speciation and elaborate a “new science,” in conjunction with Caribbean thought (Wynter 2003, 328). Autopoiesis serves as the logic behind how sociogenesis functions, in material-semiotic systems, and how certain genres of the human have become overrepresented, leading to a world in which Man2, or the liberal homo oeconomicus has come to stand in for the human.
Wynter, while primarily focusing on autopoiesis as a biological theory that she brings into conversation with Black and Caribbean philosophy, attends to autopoiesis in its larger dimension as theory of the social. Yet, the focus remains on neuro-biological feedback, particularly among her interlocutors. For Katherine McKittrick, Wynter:
[R]eads biological theory to claim that autopoiesis—the consensual circular (not teleological-evolutionary) organization of human life through which we scientifically live and die as a species—draws attention to “a new frame of meaning, not only of natural history, but also of a newly conceived cultural history specific to and unique to our species, because the history of those ‘forms of life’ gives expression to [a] . . . hybridly organic and . . . languaging existence, (2015, 145).
Such readings of autopoiesis render it a theory of the cell and remove its epistemological, and political, valences. Similarly, in the same volume, Walter Mignolo charts a divide between autopoiesis as theory of perception in which:
[T]he living organism that fabricates an image of the world through the internal/neurological processing of information. Thus, Maturana made the connection between the ways in which human beings construct their world and their criteria of truth and objectivity and noticed how their/our nervous system processes and responds to information. (2015, 106)
What is missing here is precisely how autopoiesis was never just a theory of perception, except perhaps in its earliest form as Maturana and Lettvin’s experiments on the frog’s eye 1959, over a decade before Maturana and Varela first deployed the term autopoiesis. In rendering autopoiesis a scientific theory transferred to the social field, the particularities of autopoiesis’s emergence remain obscured.
Autopoiesis was always-already a critique of reason, at least for Maturana if not for Varela. In their later years, the two diverged on precisely this question of politics. Maturana, in a 1991 letter responding to a review of the Tree of Knowledge, critiques “the defense of truth, the defense of reason, or the defense of universal transcendental values under the claim that the defender is intrinsically right and the others are intrinsically wrong,” (1991, 92). Here, Maturana is suspicious of both reason and truth and their claims to universality grounded in an enlightenment idealism, because he distinguishes between “constitutive operational legitimacy of all manners of living in the biological domain,” which “does not carry with it the acceptance of all manners of living as equally desirable in the human domain of coexistence,” a distinction that echoes the autopoietic division between organization and structure (Maturana, 1991, 92). Central is how Maturana can never know what is “biologically, transcendentally good” or “biologically transcendentally bad,” (1991, 90-91). Maturana is not speaking abstractly about reason or truth, however. He grounds his critique in Pinochet’s dictatorship, which he opposes on political grounds rather than by that he is intrinsically right. This is clearest in a response Maturana wrote to Morris Berman’s review of The Tree of Life. Berman claimed that Pinochet was, when read autopoietically, “biological distortion” and that Allende was “biologically legitimate,” leading Maturana to contend that “Berman says that he is not ‘willing to display any tolerance; to people like General Pinochet. If he says so because he thinks that he is intrinsically right and that General Pinochet is intrinsically wrong, he is speaking like General Pinochet,” and that “Salvador Allende does not “represent one of the highest forms of biological integrity,” as Berman says. He was a human being who could not escape being trapped in the meshes of a network of ideological fanaticism. There is nothing like a biological distortion or like biological integrity in the domain of biology,” (1991, 91, 96) In a strange turn of phrase here, Maturana both rejects claims to biological legitimacy through an understanding of biology. Even as nature cannot be used as the grounds for making a political claim, he still deploys autopoiesis as a framework for politics: there is no operational legitimacy in biology, but only autopoietic operations are legitimate.
For Maturana, then, autopoiesis is a political response to organicist claims that ground politics in biology, or biologize and naturalize the political field, while, at the same time, contending that the very rules of the social are still emergent from biology – he wants to have it both ways. He applies autopoietic semi-permeability or operational closure to the political realm to ground the autopoietic organization of politics in nature or in his words biology, while disavowing such moves at the level of structure. Varela strongly disagreed with Maturana’s turn to autopoiesis as a theory of the social field because:
[A]ll extension of biological models to the social level is to be avoided. I am absolutely against all extensions of autopoiesis, and also against the move to think society according to models of emergence, even though, in a certain sense, you’re not wrong in thinking things like that, but it is an extremely delicate passage. I refuse to apply autopoiesis to the social plane. That might surprise you, but I do so for political reasons. History has shown that biological holism is very interesting and has produced great things, but it has always had its dark side, a black side, each time it’s allowed. (Varela, 2002)
In rejecting the inherent organicism and holism of Maturana’s autopoiesis tout court, Varela underscores the failures of politics emergent from biology, a charge that Maturana himself tries to avoid by distinguishing between how all life has operational legitimacy and the non-acceptance of all these legitimate autopoietic unities as good. Following Wolfe’s critique, this is also the effect of a latent humanism in autopoiesis both in its development of universal rules and in its inherent speciesism. Autopoiesis seeks to escape organicism by the same mechanisms with which it defines its own semi-permeability to the world: operational closure.
There is an echo in Maturana and Varela’s debates over autopoiesis’s political valence and how it can serve as a critique of reason and truth, due to how it destabilizes any claim to a universal even as, via sleight-of-hand, it functions through a set of seemingly natural laws itself, of the tensions between the two instantiations of Analogía I. Turning to autopoiesis uncovers a shared concern with how social systems are modeled on, nested in, and emergent from natural systems following natural laws that emerged in tandem. Yet Grippo never offers a hierarchy of one system to another, in which the social field is immanent from and reducible to, at the right level of abstraction, the organization of a cell. Instead, he makes a parallel move, destabilizing the network as a technology of either capture and liberation, restaging Maturana and Varela’s debate. Beyond showcasing a crisis of meaning of the network in this era, there is also a nascent critique against reducing mutual interdependence to a technical or natural system and the easy analogies between environmental and natural networks that impoverish both. In thus critiquing overdetermined theories of the social field by acting within it (via the model), Analogía I makes the network and circuit visible. In the move between the grid and the entangled network, between the plant, the prison cell, and the machine, what structures the scene is a social and political field that remains open and able to serve as the grounds for politics. The social can never be fully resolved because the same analogy can be organized differently such that one iteration can be read as a torture chamber and another as a cell. If for Maturana “the social is constituted in relations of love,” (1991, 89) which are also relations of care, Grippo’s installation models a different yet related circuit in which antagonism, difference, and contingency, which is to say politics itself, remain open. Systems, and here the social, can be organized differently – that is the work, rather than ascertaining a certain truth in nature or technics. Instead of elevating biologically inspired notions of care and love, at the risk of holism or organicism, pace Varela’s critique, Grippo holds them in delicate tension: machine and vegetable, electricity and life, grid and tangle.
Henry Neim Osman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He works across media theory, science and technology studies, and philosophy of technology. His dissertation, “Analog Immediacy: Computation and Critique at the Ends of the Digital,” historicizes the recent resurgence of analog computing and AI and critiques how life is reconceptualized by new computers at the limits of the digital. His work has been published in Digital War, Film Quarterly, Surveillance & Society, and Media Fields.
References
“ICAA Documents Project Working Papers Number 5.” Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), 2017.
“Victor Grippo,” Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), 2014, 16. Accessible: https://muac.unam.mx/assets/docs/p-057-f_muac_016-int-grippo.pdf.
Camnitzer, Luis. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Gilbert, Zanna. “Ideological Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption.” rebus: a journal of art history & theory 4 (2009): 1-15.
Glusberg, Jorge. “Arte e ideología,” Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano. Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), 1972.
Korte, Bernhard. Mathematics, Reality, and Aesthetics – A Picture Set on VSLI-Chip-Design. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1991.
Longoni, Ana. “Víctor Grippo: his poetry, his utopia.” In Grippo: Una Retrospectiva, ed. Marcelo Pacheca. Buenos Aires: Malba, 2004. 283-291.
Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980.
Maturana, Humberto R. “Response to Berman’s critique of the Tree of Knowledge.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 31, no. 2 (1991): 88-97.
Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Boulder: New Science Library/Shambhala Publications, 1987.
Mazzarello, Paolo. “A unifying concept: the history of cell theory.” Natural Cell Biology 1, E13–E15 (1999).
McKittrick, Katherine. “Axis, bold as love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the promise of science.” Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (2015): 142-63.
Mignolo, Walter. “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human?”. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick. New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2015, 106-123.
Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous circuits: Navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture.” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 919-941.
Pastor Mellado, Justo. “Víctor Grippo’s Chilean novel.” In Grippo: Una Retrospectiva, eds. Marcelo Pacheca. Buenos Aires: Malba, 2004. 307-311.
Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural techniques: Grids, filters, doors, and other articulations of the real. Fordham University Press, 2015.
Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Van Doesburg, Theo. Concrete Art Manifesto. Accessible: https://monoskop.org/images/9/91/Concrete_Art_Manifesto_1930.pdf.
Varela, Francisco “Autopoïese et émergence.” In La Complexité, vertiges et promesses. Ed. Réda Benkirane. Paris: Le Pommier, 2002.
Wolfe, Cary. “In search of post-humanist theory: the second-order cybernetics of Maturana and Varela.” Cultural critique 30 (1995): 33-70.
[1] Contemporary writers like Jack Burnham, writing in 1968, argue that this marks a shift “from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates not from things but from the way things are done,” Jack Burnham “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum, September 1968; South here refers to a broader reorientation along the lines of Joaquin Torres García’s provocation that “Nuestro norte es el sur,” or that our north is the south.
[2] There are echoes of Joseph Beuys here as well, who two decades later began his own series using lemons as batteries. Beuys knew of Grippo but the level to which he was influenced by Grippo’s earlier practice is still debated.
[3] This text is the translation used by an English-language version of Analogía I (first version) bought by Harvard Art Museums in 2010.
[4] Autopoiesis can be traced back to Maturana’s foundational 1959 paper, co-authored with Jerome Lettvin, Warren Mculloch and Walter Pitts, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s brain.” Before this paper, the retina was seen as a light receptor that simply transferred light into visual signals that were then processed by the brain. What Maturana et al. showed was that, after implanting an electrode onto the optic nerve, there were feature detectors that processed visual information directly in the retina itself, prioritizing for the frog visual recognition of small, intermittent quickly moving dots, which were termed “bug detectors.” The retina was no longer an objective sensor passing information along, but proof that the frog never neutrally saw. Instead, the structure of its eye determined and constructed the frog’s view of reality such that perception was not automatically representational. This is a type of boundary work, producing what would later be termed an operational closure onto the frog. Autopoiesis took this intervention further to show how the observer produces what they observe, moving beyond the assumption in this early article that there was an objective reality to which the frog did not have full access.
Literature isn’t Invaluable—But It Can be Redundant
Nathan Taylor
Theodor Adorno once suggested that it’s pure ideology to believe anything like a fundamental human need for art exists (1997, 330). We might as well live in a world with no art at all. We’d get by just fine, Adorno surmises, not only because art doesn’t satisfy our most basic physiological needs, but also because we live in a system—monopoly capitalism—that perpetually manufactures false needs. Inevitably, any perceived need for art would be satisfied by something else. In such a world, art is nice to have, but it doesn’t sustain us, even when, as Adorno feared, it becomes an accessory to those transactions and exchanges that do—as in the culture industry.
Adorno’s suggestion—a kind of thought-experiment–is an exercise in considering what art, or literature, is worth. Yet unlike many proponents of aesthetic or literary value, Adorno is willing to concede that art might well be a superfluous or redundant part of life under capitalism (against a cultural elite that imagines art to be a necessary feature of their world). For the thinker of negative dialectics, however, that redundancy is a virtue, part of art’s power of determinate negation, its capacity to “break up the external exchange of need and satisfaction” (1997, 331). In its redundancy, Adorno is arguing, art refuses the transactional economy of commodity exchange that otherwise liquidates, as he might put it, all human life under capitalism.
I rehearse Adorno’s thought experiment because its basic logic is still with us in discussions of literary and aesthetic value. When humanists today defend art’s value or critique its ideological character, they tend, like Adorno, to imagine that some aspect of the aesthetic might escape capital’s value relations, whether they describe that escape, with Adorno, as superfluity or, more positively, as art’s immaterial worth. Even thinkers who don’t share Adorno’s patent sense for aesthetic negativity subscribe to a similar value exceptionalism, as some critics have usefully described it.[1]
Take Michael Clune’s recent Defense of Judgment, for instance, which puts a contemporary spin on the old genre of the defense of literature. Like Adorno’s thought experiment, Clune’s apologetics gnaw at common sensibilities about art, in this case by exposing the bad-faith positions that “professors” of literature (in both the sense of academic instructors, and the older sense of those who profess or avow) adopt when they claim equality but judge hierarchically. Clune, by contrast, concedes the elitism of judgment as a singular pathway to a “sphere of value not subject to market determination” (2021, 37). Judgment, by this account, acts as a bulwark against the market’s own metrics of value like popularity and sway, which Clune takes to be adjuncts to sales figures masking as falsely democratic ideals of preference. As part of an aesthetic education—one that requires, Clune admits, training, expertise, and a sizable investment of time and money—judgment points to artworks “that are worth our time”, and in doing so moves beyond economic value to “promise … values we may not yet know how to value” (182).
Taken together, Clune’s and Adorno’s critiques exemplify a particular brand of aesthetic exceptionalism, which we might more aptly describe as alternate inflections of a discourse of the invaluable, in all the semantic ambivalence afforded by that prefix “in-”. Clune treats art as a repository of something immeasurably valuable; Adorno as a negation of the economic laws of value that dictate exchange relations. One (Clune) reaches beyond the economic, the other (Adorno) pits itself against it. Both, however, align art and literature with a distinctly non-capitalist form of value—an invaluable value. Notwithstanding their political differences, or the fact that capital’s prospects of producing value look very different in 1970 than they do in 2021, Adorno and Clune share, in other words, a framing of the aesthetic in antagonism to what each respectively identify as resolutely capitalist modes of valuation. They treat aesthetic works less as exceptions to “the nets of the market”, as Clune puts it (2021, 10), than, with Adorno, as the vicars of values “no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (1997, 310).
Look around a bit and you’ll find plenty of other iterations of this double discourse of the invaluable. Its origins are undeniably Romantic, a trademark feature of an aesthetic movement that was historically coeval with capital’s reorganization of social life around the production of economic value. Friedrich Schlegel, for one, was explicit in dubbing literature “infinitely valuable” and thus paradoxically incommensurable to any other object of value (Schlegel 1967, 156). In doing so, he was following upon Kant’s Third Critique (1790), the widely acknowledged source of any attempt to demarcate artisanal or craft work from fine or free art as one that is produced without regard for remuneration and judged without interest.[2] In post-Kantian aesthetics, the double discourse of the invaluable would prove profoundly influential in attempts to describe the unusual dynamics of cultural production.[3] Even the most resolute critics of economic value flirt at times with the discourse of the invaluable, as when Marx, knee-deep in debates about productive and unproductive labor, likens Milton to a silkworm: “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature” (1976, 1044). It’s easy to blame this on Marx’s residual romanticism, but the fact is that Marx’s organicist metaphor of the silkworm would seem to hold open the prospect that certain kinds of art-making escape capital’s law of value.
Value, from within
In pointing to the enduring allure of the invaluable, I’m not suggesting we relinquish the attempt to locate a way out of the value relations we live in (abolishing those relations remains a worthwhile endeavor). I am urging that we think more precisely about what those value relations entail. The frame of the invaluable does this by revealing something otherwise obscured by the either/or-logics of aesthetic exceptionalism: while both negative (Adorno) and positive (Clune) inflections of the invaluable suggest a privative relation to economic value (either contravening or surpassing a capitalist form of value), they still remain squarely within the problem of value. That is, they adhere to a third, alternate sense of the prefix “in-”: less grammatically nullifying than relational in the sense of being located within, even installed in a regime of valuation. The question becomes how the shibboleth of the invaluable operates this side of the laws of value it combats, laws which generate the desire for a discourse of the invaluable in the first place.
In their account of literary value, Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon target positions like Adorno’s and Clune’s for how they imagine discrete domains of aesthetic and economic value, “endlessly worr[ying] over their degree of separation or intermixed-ness” (2017, 212). Usefully, Clover and Nealon dispense with the hackneyed terms of aesthetic autonomy to demonstrate how such models promulgate a story about modernity that can be alternately triumphant or tragic but which is always incremental and linear (“a story in which there is simply ‘more capitalism’ now than there once was”) (212). Such a narrative, they argue, is quick to devise a social ontology of subsumption which literature might variously resist or succumb to. In holding open the prospect “that there is some kind of value external to capitalist value”, these domain models neatly separate the politics of the aesthetic from the economics of value expansion under capital; they imagine literature and art might point the way to modes of non-capitalist valuation in which the political economy of value would have no sway (213). Where domain models falter, per Clover’s and Nealon’s argument, is less where they desire an alternative to capitalist valuation than where they overstate the political effectivity of aesthetic value as an “opposing form of value” or overlook the historical development of artmaking in its relation to the shifting and often volatile ways capital reinforces its efforts to expand value (208). Any proper understanding of literary or aesthetic value would, by contrast, begin by assessing that relation, by offering a measured historical account of “the particulars of how we have ended up organizing life so as to produce value” in the first place (196).
This critique might strike some as unapologetically materialist (it is), but its import for assessing the invaluable is patent. For one, it prompts us to think more intensely about the social basis of a desire for the invaluable, for an enclave of non-economic value. It also demands a more robust historical account of art and literature’s position within the arrangement of social life around value production. These are tall orders, but one way forward, I’d argue, would be to query whether the sort of fine art or literature we’re inclined to label invaluable might not more properly be described in terms of its worthlessness, that is: its dynamics of devaluation. Rather than construe this circumstance of an art rendered worthless, redundant, or superfluous to economic value production as an outside to value (as Adorno surmised with his thought experiment), we might grasp its superfluity as both an effect of and condition for capital’s efforts to expand value, as part of capital’s internal dynamics. What the materialist approach to value clarifies is this: what capital throws off as superfluous or redundant for the expansion of value doesn’t lie outside the value relation but is rather its most glaring consequence. Superfluity is, then, the negative corollary to an extended process of accumulation; the inverse to a superabundance of commodity goods and a paradoxical feature of the build-up of social wealth in the form of value—a dynamic that contemporary crises and so-called “jobless recoveries” make overwhelmingly clear.[4]
From this angle, we can see that Marx might in fact have been onto this sense of the invaluable when he labelled Milton an unproductive worker. Marx’s metaphor of the silkworm might seem to suggest a Romantic escape from the capitalist industry of letters, but his point in specifying Milton’s unproductivity is this: the value of Milton’s literature can only be assessed by first assessing its position within the larger arrangement of social life around the production of value. As Sarah Brouillette points out, Marx isn’t saying that Milton’s literature “articulates the pristine, original, self-grounding individual imagined by bourgeois aesthetic theory” (2019, 527). What he is saying is that unlike the assembly-line-like writer churning out texts for a publisher to sell in a literary marketplace, Milton is not valorizing capital when he puts pen to paper. The social setting of his artistic work is different, even redundant, but it nevertheless remains defined by its relation to that social arrangement.
What are the consequences of this sense of the invaluable for literary study? For discussions of literary value? To get a handle on what a more ambivalent sense of the invaluable might mean for how we appraise literary value, we could do worse than to turn to the literature present at the genesis of both that form of value and the discourse of the invaluable—a literature that would prove influential for nearly all discourses of value in the value-obsessed nineteenth century, and one which would subsequently find its way into Marx’s own thinking of value: German Romanticism.[5]
Superfluous Life
In 1838, the German Romantic Ludwig Tieck published a short novella titled Of Life’s Superfluity (Des Lebens Überfluss) in a novel literary format: the paperback literary periodical. This publication was significant—beyond its place and format of publication—for several reasons. For one, Tieck was an epochal figure. He was hanging around in Jena, the hub of early Romanticism, when the Schlegel brothers were translating Shakespeare and working through the aftershocks of Kant’s critical philosophy, which for Tieck as for the others of his cohort implied that art is sacrosanct. Tieck was around when Goethe died in 1832, as politics grew heated in the restoration years that followed the French Revolution and when early socialists began devising their own romantic alternatives to industry. Tieck watched the Prussian guild system collapse and the market for factory laborers rise. And sitting in the relics of a feudal court, he saw a new generation of radical writers like Marx and Heine (who despised Tieck) flee to political exile as Europe inched towards yet another revolution. All of this is to say that when Tieck published a story about life and superfluity in 1839, he’d long been witnessing the reorganization of social life—and its art—around the production of what he, decades ahead of Marx, called surplus.
The novella’s plot is simply told: two banished lovers, one bourgeois, one aristocrat, are forced into exile and withdraw entirely into the confines of their impoverished attic apartment. Compensating for their economic deprivation and isolation in a gruellingly cold winter, they turn their surroundings into a refuge for poetic life, doubling down on their romantic commitment as they renounce any and all material possessions as frivolous surplus. Their renunciation is part of what the male protagonist, Heinrich, dubs a cynical—in the sense of Diogenes—philosophy of poverty. As the lovers run out of firewood, the situation grows desperate. Heinrich, under the influence of one Crusoe-tale too many, elects to chop down and burn the wooden staircase that connects the lover’s apartment to the outside world—a move that both solves and exacerbates things by fully severing ties to the mundane and “prosaic” world, as he describes it (Tieck 1854, 18). Yet what should’ve put an airtight seal on their poetic enclave ultimately does the opposite: the world of prose returns in full force in the novella’s final scene when the owner of the house—the lovers’ landlord—shows up, police in tow, with an eviction notice, seeking restitution for the violation of his property.
The saving grace—and turning point—comes with the arrival of an old friend, who managed to locate the lovers-in-hiding by way of a prized 1477 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that Heinrich, tight on funds, had pawned off, but in which he’d noted his current address. Along with the Chaucer edition (a book Tieck well knew marked a new print age of literary distribution), the friend—a speculator—brings Heinrich a hefty return on an investment he had brokered in a colonial joint-stock company. As the friend puts it: “The capital which you had entrusted to me at the time of my departure has so rampantly grown in India that you might now consider yourself a rich man” (67). That’s enough to placate the landlord, who had mistaken Heinrich for a property-destroying socialist revolutionary but who’s happy to receive redress after all. In the end, that capital and the rare book act as the novella’s deus ex machina, restoring order and marking the lovers’ turn of fortune towards a less threadbare life.
It’s a dramatic and tightly wound story. Even worse, it’s an overwrought one, begging to be read as a tongue-in-cheek allegory of Romanticism’s own unwinding, written by its longest-living representative. The allegory operates through a matrix of cliched references to Romanticism itself: its penchant for medieval romances and tales like Chaucer’s, its obsession with arabesque and ornate forms, and its penchant for the absolute and unconditional, in the sense of the self-enclosed, the inwardly absolved of the world, and the stubbornly indolent (what in the heyday of theory was called ‘inoperativity’).[6] But Tieck’s allegory, like all allegories, has a second layer: its explicit concern with economic value. The novella offers a compendium of a new vocabulary of capitalist value, from “surplus” and “superfluity” to “consumption” and “capital”. And it would appear upon first glance to promulgate the “cozy axiomatics” of Romantic anti-capitalism, as Gayatri Spivak once put it: “use good, exchange bad; use concrete, exchange abstract, etc” (Spivak 1999, 177). But what makes Tieck’s novella late Romantic is how it employs the protocols of Romantic irony to evoke and parodically depose those axiomatics simultaneously.
Back to the staircase: If the novella is begging to be read as an allegory of the invaluable value of the poetic—which finds abundance in absolute minimalism, and wealth in renouncing material needs—this allegory pivots on the question of whether there exists a “bulwark” against the encroachment of market value, to frame it as Clune might. In Tieck’s novella this bulwark is the staircase that Heinrich destroys to hold the “prosaic” world at bay. Tieck’s text is clever in its use of symbols and its form: it refuses any absolute “inside” or “outside”, any unidirectional up or down, and it knows that antitheses are, like the staircase, still a form of relation. So even when the staircase is gone, its owner is not. Hence the landlord, whose arrival on the scene not only marks the return of the prosaic (after its negation) but also the self-defeating logic of conflating surplus with superfluity. Heinrich confronts the landlord with his philosophy of cynical poverty, arguing that the staircase was a superfluous and “empty luxury”, a redundant relic of the prosaic economy he rejects (thereby following the example of Diogenes, who threw away his wooden cup after seeing a peasant drink water with his hands). The landlord, however, counters: “I once saw a guy hold his mouth straight up to the faucet to drink … so your Mr. Diogenes might just as well have chopped off his hand” (Tieck 1854, 61).
The landlord’s point is this: unconditionality has its own painful conditions and any effort to be absolved of those conditions, to withdraw into the invaluable space of the absolute, to make a virtue of deprivation, isn’t a pathway to another sort of overabundance but an exercise in frivolity. Here, the dual layers of the text’s allegory collapse into each other. Heinrich’s Romantic attempt to valorize an unconditional poetic existence runs up against a value relation that had rendered him superfluous to its prosaic world. As he puts it: “The world left me and I left the world to the extent that nobody was willing to appraise my value at a noteworthy amount” (45). Heinrich’s hope was that to be superfluous to the world might mean to be afforded the luxury of resigning. But he is forced to admit that to be invaluable is in fact to be devalued, cast off as surplus in the specific sense of redundant and worthless to that world’s circuits of valorization, yet still painfully accountable to them.
The novella patiently works through the paradoxes of this worthlessness. It maps a social space in which a valuable enclave of non-value might be defended to the point of its collapse; and it insists on the impossibility of such an autarkic space of non-value. Ultimately, Tieck’s novella operates beyond a “domain model” of value by virtue of the way it stages the deus ex machina of capital and its superintendents—the investor, the cop, the landlord. The prescience of Tieck’s play with surplus and superfluity is crucial here. It’s 1838. It would be another two decades before Marx would identify the ‘moving contradiction’ of capital in the way it reduces its very source of growth, “posit[ing] the superfluous in growing measure as a condition—question of life or death—for the necessary” (Marx 1993, 706). But that reduction is what Tieck’s novella enacts in a register for which the term allegory turns out to be a stretch. Tieck’s text takes the purported unconditionality and invaluable value of Romantic literature literally. It says: in an age of seemingly self-aggrandizing capital, Romantic literature’s trademark surfeit—the poetic overabundance that Friedrich Schlegel at the outset of the century still called invaluable—flips into redundancy. Tieck’s prose still cleaves, just barely, to the Romantic fantasy of being rid of conditionality altogether. But it also stages the breakdown of that Romantic idea, which buckles under the pressure of a nascent realism, one that consists in demonstrating that fantasies of the invaluable last only as long as it takes to be evicted. In other words, it cancels out its allegory of Romantic absolution from the world by pointing to the overt and very prosaic fact that to be in excess of the world is simply to be redundant to it.
Our discussions of literary value might benefit from attending more carefully to this redundancy, not as the basis for an invaluable aesthetics but for how it anticipates an ambivalent dynamic of value production that continues to exert its pressure today—capital, cops, landlords, and all.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso.
Beech, Dave. 2015. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Boever, Arne De. 2019. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2019. “Literature and Culture”. Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, edited by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman, 525–31. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Clover, Joshua. 2019. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso.
Clover, Joshua, and Christopher Nealon. 2017. “Literary and Economic Value”. In Christopher Nealon, Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, 195-213. Leiden: Brill.
Clune, Michael W. 2021. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. “[Lyceums-Fragmente]”. In Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, Vol. 2:1, edited by Hans Eichler, 147–64. Paderborn: Schöningh.
Simmel, Georg. 2011. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tieck, Ludwig. 1854 [1838]. Des Lebens Überfluss. In Ludwig Tieck’s Schriften, Vol. 26, 3–70. Berlin: Reimer Verlag.
[1] On economic exceptionalism see Beech 2015; on aesthetic exceptionalism see Boever 2019 as well as his contribution to this issue.
[2] Here’s Kant: “Beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated (independently of remuneration) without looking beyond to another end” (2000, 198). Tellingly, Kant’s double freedom is what Marx inverts when he notes that the historical prerequisite for capital is the laborer’s freedom “in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale” (Marx 1976, 272).
[3] The double discourse of the invaluable plays an outsized role in sociologies of culture as well, from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money to the “pragmatic” sociology of Luc Boltanski today. Arguably, it is this discourse which constitutes the central object of study for Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the “restricted field” of cultural production as well, which begins with an analysis of an “economic world turned upside down”, one in which artists’ insistence that their work is priceless (“without commercial value”) facilitates the emergence of a distinctly non-economic set of criteria for evaluating a work’s worth (1995, 81). For Bourdieu, a work’s status as economically invaluable is its condition of possibility for becoming valuable within the symbolic economy of the restricted field, which paradoxically can be converted back into economic capital.
[4] On surplus and superfluity in this sense, see “Misery and Debt” (2010).
[5] Marx’s penchant for the sort of Romantic fairy tales that Tieck helped establish as a genre is well documented. It’s notable, however, that Marx’s own fairy-tale rhetoric is most evident when he’s writing about the lumpen with little awareness of Tieck’s fairy-tale like novella about surplus and the lumpen. On Marx’s fairy-tale lumpen see Clover 2019, 194.
[6] See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988. Giorgio Agamben, an eminent thinker of inoperativity, discusses Tieck’s novella in another context in Infancy and History (1993).
This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want.
Groucho Marxism: Charles Bernstein’s Kinds of Poetry
Michael Davidson
“I am for avant-garde comedy and stand-up poetry” (350)[1]
“Am I just a voice crying in the wilderness, or am I a just voice pleading aggrievement?” (163)
The Secret Word
In the opening of the 1950s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, the MC, George Fenneman would introduce Groucho Marx: “And here he is, the one, the only…”–leaving a blank for the audience to shout: “GROUCHO!”–followed by the theme song, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” Groucho, cigar in hand, would then display the “secret word” for the day which, if one of the contestants said it, would drop down from the ceiling, attached to a duck with a cigar (on one occasion, the duck was replaced by Harpo and on another, by Mamie Van Doran), and Groucho would hand the lucky winner $25.00 (later this amount was increased to $100.00). Fenneman would introduce our two guests for today’s quiz and step off stage, leaving the floor open for Groucho’s witty, often acerbic, repartee with the couple. As for the duck falling from the ceiling, these were the halcyon days of early television when the medium was figuring out how far it could go, what visual tomfoolery one could get away with. Ernie Kovacs was the inventive impresario of the medium, Spike Jones was its resident composer, and comics like Cid Caesar, George Burns, Henny Youngman, Milton Berle and others exploited the physical limits of the black and white screen and the unpredictable qualities of a live audience. Groucho’s verbal wit and arch retorts were somewhat improvisational, but they also subverted the interview format by endless asides and miscues. Was this avant-garde comedy or stand-up poetry?
In Charles Bernstein’s terms, the secret word for today is “pataquerical,” a nonce formulation for his aesthetics that could easily apply to Groucho’s humor. What he calls the pataquerical is “a flickering zone of counterfactuals that allow for possibility, reflection, intensified sensation, and speculation” (11). In an earlier essay in The Pitch of Poetry, “The Pataquerical Imagination”, Bernstein finds one of its sources in Poe whose “Poetic Principle” expresses the scandalous belief that poetry “has no concern either with Duty or Truth” and that personal taste is superior to transcendent ideas” (Bernstein: 2016, 299). He also relates it to Marx’s critique in The German Ideology of young Hegelians for their belief in critique as a value for its own sake rather than as a dialectical process “that has no end point but like a Klein bottle doubles back on itself…” (Bernstein: 2016, 296). In its invocation of Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the pataquerical is a poetics of process, irresolution, and speculation and as a result cannot be confirmed by an appeal to “convention, accessibility, compromise, refinement, or humanist literary values,” qualities abundant in what he labels “Official Verse Culture” (OVC [296]). It is tempting to see the pataquerical as a version of what one interviewer calls Bernstein’s “Groucho Marxism,” his fusion of comedy and subversion, borsht belt humor and social critique. Against “aesthetic illiberalism” that neutralizes and normalizes, the pataquerical is like the duck, a “secret word” that drops down to interrupt the show and surprise the audience. Bernstein’s new book, The Kinds of Poetry I Want serves as a brief on the pataquerical in its multiple forms, both aesthetic and political.
The title and much of its imperative are taken from Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1961 book, The Kind of Poetry I Want, which advocates “A poetry that is—to use the terms of red dog–/ High, low, jack, and the goddamn game” (MacDiarmid qtd. 153). There’s plenty of the red dog in Bernstein’s poker hand–from Lucretius, Sartre, and Tao Te Ching (high) to Bob Dylan, Thelonious Monk, and Cid Caesar (low). And the variation on MacDiarmid’s title stresses the multiple “kinds” of poetry Charles wants, wanting itself being a value seldom mentioned in aesthetic discourse. Writings about poetic value that posit some universal standard or monadic formal closure are countered by a word for unfulfilled desire: the kinds of poems he wants are the kinds of poems he finds lacking.
The book is divided into three “acts,” each of which is subdivided into multiple “scenes” containing a wild mixture of genres: interviews, poems, homophonic translations, protestant letters, erasure texts, midrashic commentaries, concrete poems, and aphorisms. The range of genres is matched by the book’s heteroglossic display of idiolects—from broad-based comedy to stentorian jeremiad, from one-liners to flat-footed howlers, from scholarly analysis to cliché and bad puns. This variety reflects the venues in which earlier versions were published or given as talks. The lengthy interviews are among the most important statements of Bernstein’s poetics; his responses to questions from Vicki Hudspith, Thomas Fink, Braulio Paz, Andrew David King, Feng Yi and others give him a chance to elaborate on his favorite issues and incorporate often moving autobiographical information. He is a generous respondent, providing extended answers with attendant asides and detours that deflate some of the interviewers’ more ponderous questions. The book concludes with one of his most important essays, “Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime,” that deals with the phenomenon of translations based on the sound of words rather than sense–from Zukofsky’s Catullus and David Melnick’s Men in Aida to his own collaborations with Leevi Lehto and Richard Tuttle. The tutelary genius of homophonic sublime is Cid Caesar whose doubletalking in nightclub routines involved a virtuoso highspeed imitation of various foreign languages, a routine that animates the essay’s opening remarks:
Never met a pun I didn’t like.
I’m a veritable Will Rogers, with plenty of roger but without the will to say enough’s enough already. All instinct. Like a Brooklyn Ahab stalking a whale in the backyard or a curmudgeonly Odysseus hurtling towards his sirens.
But wait a sec.
This is not the opening of a nightclub act. (349-50)
But in one sense the essay is a kind of nightclub act using homophony to provoke other kinds of associations beyond the auditory.
In keeping with the parodic qualities of Jarry’s pataphysics, Bernstein engages in a wide-range of speech genres—from mock-didactic oratory (“I come to you today at the 138th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association…” [155]), literary prize announcements (“…no one can doubt that this work is one of the most ambitious books of poetry published in our time” [312]) and hyperbolic jargon in recommendation letters (“What distinguishes Danniello, and makes him such a strong candidate for admission to our doctoral English program, is his deep animosity to literature” [319]). Like Pope and Swift before him, Bernstein tilts at the canons of approved public discourse by mimicking their authorizing rhetoric. Idiolects are more than ventriloquized satire; they carry the weight of their institutional provenance, the authority of the professoriate, the publishing industry, the academic marketplace through which literary culture is formed and reinforced.
The Kinds resembles several of his previous collections, A Poetics, My Way, Attack of the Difficult Poem, The Pitch of Poetry, in its eclectic variety, but one through line is the work of Jewishness in an age of cultural cancellation and identity politics. He invokes T.S. Eliot’s infamous worry in After Strange Gods (1933) that “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” (Eliot qtd. 155). As a self-declared free-thinking Jew himself, Bernstein recuperates free-thinking for the kinds of poetry he wants—that of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Larry Eigner, Hannah Wiener, David Antin, Johanna Drucker, Jerome Rothenberg, not to mention the borscht belt comedians he invokes. At one point he modifies Charles Olson’s opening to his book on Melville, Call Me Ishmael, by saying, “I take RACE to be the central fact for those born in the Americas. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy” (33). In a way the substitution of “race” for Melville’s “space” recognizes the degree to which American manifest destiny of expansion was authorized by the erasure, relocation, and marginalization of racial others—including Jews.
Which is not to say that Bernstein has not addressed Jewishness in previous works. Here, however, the theme is supported by his use of “midrashic antinomianism” that links Jewish rabbinical commentary with American Protestantism, or as Bernstein might say, Reb Ben Ezra meets Emily Dickinson (164). Both parts of the phrase stress the Word as an infinite possibility, unsettled in its meanings and tolerant of its misunderstandings. Midrashic antinomianism could apply equally to avant-garde writing or Jewish humor: “Groucho Marx’s jokes are allegories of escape and especially escape from being defined. The Jewish comic, like the Jewish poet, dodges, deflects, evades, ducks” (45). Bernstein devotes many passages in the book to his own relationship to secular Jewishness, growing up in an assimilated household, albeit, as he has said, with Jewish and Zionist identifications.[2] Antisemitism was prevalent in Bernstein’s early life at Harvard and became linked in his mind with more conservative literary traditions, often, ironically enough, traditions reinforced by Jewish academics and poets. In a lengthy letter to Paul Bové included in the book, Bernstein discusses Lional Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination as an example of cultural consensus among Jewish intellectuals of the cold war period who also “dodged, deflected, evaded and ducked” in order to assimilate. Trilling was not a Jewish neocon of the Commentary variety like Norman Podhoretz or Hilton Kramer, but he nevertheless embodied an “Arnoldian figure of a high culture where Jews might be heard if not seen as such“ (298). Thinking of Trilling’s student, Allen Ginsberg and his Columbia classmate, Louis Zukofsky, Bernstein sets up a contrast between the “illiberalism” of Jewish Cold War intellectuals and writers who confronted antisemitic headwinds by different means.
In The Kinds more radical strains in Jewish cultural traditions are linked to avant garde practices, but Bernstein realizes that experimental poetics itself has recently been attacked for its presumed racial exclusions. With events such as the Mongrel Coalition for Gringpo manifestos of 2015, Janet Malcolm’s attack on Gertrude Stein in the New Yorker, Dorothy Wang’s reconsideration of the “Poundian-Objectivist-New York School-Language-Conceptual tradition,” Juliana Spahr’s and Stephanie Young’s critique of the “white room” of academic writing programs, experimental writing is suddenly under the microscope for its whiteness and, in Malcolm’s case, Fascist complicity.[3] In Natalia Cecire’s terms, “Experimental writing is a white recovery project” (Cecire, 2019: 34). Implicit in these responses is the idea that formal experiment erases identity, both personal and cultural, and that its endeavor is purchased by silencing minority voices, histories, idioms. Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist performance of Michael Brown’s medical autopsy would be the most notorious version of such practices and has been the object of numerous anti-racist critiques. Identity, as Bernstein acknowledges, “remains a volatile issue for the poetics of invention,” nowhere more evident than in antisemitic attacks:
Ezra Pound’s attack on Jews as rootless cosmopolitans echoes in today’s culture debates. The ahistorical/revanchist quest for a deep or authentic identity as the sole property of a single group, which has fueled the rise of the global right, is toxic for the kind of poetry I want. (39)
This toxicity, however divisive, fuels a good deal of the book’s tone of aggrievement (more on this later) and its attempt to understand the precarious status of Jewish writers as both outsiders (“rootless cosmopolitans”) and poetic innovators. Bernstein seeks to realign a politics of race and anti-racism with rootlessness as both a cultural and aesthetic value, not by advocating a revolution of the different but by bringing more of Groucho to the Marxian table.
Taste or What I Want
The pataquerical has an ethical component in its emphasis on the unfashionable, the mundane, the awkward, the banal. By exposing the all too familiar (and thus disparaged), Bernstein hopes to create an expanded field of knowledge against fixed and accepted standards. Poems that win prizes and appear in The New Yorker or New York Review of Books or that are taught in creative writing programs are, in terms Bernstein develops elsewhere, “absorptive,” drawing the reader into the poem, affirming what one already believes, while effacing the ideology and historicity of its production.[4] The agonized voice of Lowell or Plath gives way in the 1970s and 1980s to a more self-effacing voice, what Charles Altieri calls the “scenic mode”: “The task is not to transform the social but to make voice an index of how we can register the complexity of the given and thus develop our personal powers for responding to experience” (Altieri, 1984: 36). Official Verse Culture (OVC) is somewhat of a red herring today, however, since its confessionalist prototype is rather out of fashion. And more to the point, OVC now includes many of Bernstein’s friends and fellow poets who appear in those venues and teach in those programs. Perhaps mainstream poetry is a necessary fiction by which to measure the poetry one wants.
Bernstein asserts the positive value of taste in defining his poetics, and in this respect counters Kant’s privileging of aesthetic judgment and disinterestedness over taste by asserting his own will to choose. Kant says when we put something on a pedestal as beautiful, we presume that others must find it so (“the delight in an object is imputed to every one” [Kant: 1952, 53]). But if we speak of something being beautiful for me we judge based on interestedness and quotidian circumstance. In the aesthetic tradition from Kant and Baumgarten to Arnold, Eliot and the New Criticism, judgments based on personal taste are lesser forms of appreciation since they do not aspire to universal assent. But its minority position allows for greater freedom: “[Larry] Eigner may well be an acquired taste. But for the kind of aestheticism I want, all tastes are acquired. You feel it on the tongue before you prize it in the mind” (167). Here affect trumps reason; we taste pleasure before we digest it as pleasurable. There is a risk that in claiming personal taste as a value he engages in a specious form of aestheticism that argues for specificity as an end in itself. Occasionally that risk produces a kind of aesthetic nervousness: “Am I just a voice crying in the wilderness, or am I a just voice pleading aggrievement?” (163).
The term “aesthetic nervousness” is used by Ato Quayson to describe the encounter of an able-bodied person with someone with a disability. He explains that this encounter may be startling or uncomfortable, but it also instructs one about the body presumed to be normal. I’ve adapted Quayson’s term to describe the aesthetic nervousness deriving from an encounter with the “different text”–one that refuses absorption, veers in unpredictable directions, poaches on other idiolects and speech genres. The phrase also refers to Bernstein’s willed fence-straddling around his voice–whether a Cassandra or an Achilles. In both cases—the reader’s confrontation with the unsettling text or the poet’s ambivalence about the impact of their words—a kind of revelation is possible.
Disability theorists might call the knowledge gained by such a revelation as a form of “cripistemology,” how living with physical or cognitive difference produces alternate forms of knowledge, ways of seeing, hearing, thinking. Bernstein addresses this issue in his essay on the pataquerical in The Pitch of Poetry by referring to the work of disabled poets such as Jennifer Bartlett, Hannah Weiner, Jordan Scott, Amanda Baggs and others whose work is a direct outgrowth of neurological and developmental conditions. A cripistemological approach to their work is antithetical to what many people regard as triumphalist compensation where, because of a physical or cognitive limit, the poet “adapts” to another sensorium or medium. Rather, cripistemology describes a critical perspective on social norms and conventions derived from living in a different bodymind. Bernstein’s own perspective is formed by living with a form of cognitive dyslexia that impacts his spelling and word order and, beyond that, inspires his verbal wit:
Then again, the comedy I use is sometimes linguistic pratfalls: mistakes proliferate. That may be a way to cover my own cognitive dyspraxia, my tendency to invert words and letters and confuse left and right. Freud called such slips of the tongue parapraxis. And that’s another root of pataquerics (234)
For Freud “slips of the tongue” or parapraxes signal the eruption of repressed content, an unconscious substitution of a wrong word to cover a word with traumatic associations, often of a sexual nature. Dyslexia, however, is not about repressed sexual urges (Bernstein might beg to differ) but is a neurodevelopmental condition relating to language processing and the ability to form words and word sequences. His dyslexia is evident in poems like “Defence [sic] of Poetry,” a response to an essay by Brian McHale that deals, in part, with Bernstein’s work and whose academic prose is undermined by the poet’s dyslectic inversions:
My problem with deploying a term liek
nonelen
in these cases is acutually similar to
your
cirtique of the term ideopigical
unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce
interprestive proacdeure. (Bernstein: 1999, 1)
I’ve discussed this poem elsewhere but see it as an instance of Bernstein’s displacement of reasoned discussion (a poet’s response to his critic) by neurodiverse means.[5] Its title invokes Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” (also a response to a critic, Thomas Love Peacock) but its typographical errors, often based on McHale’s language, transform a speech or writing “defect” into a generative repurposing of the critic’s language. In his essay, McHale speaks of difficult poetry deploying a kind of nonsense (e.g. versus “common sense”) that “ should be valued for itself, not as “a critique and demystification of current language practices” as he claims language-poets advocate (McHale: 1992, 25). Bernstein would rather speak of the “ideological” importance of those practices, the degree to which nonsense makes sense by unsettling expectations, and undermining seriousness. What I have called the cripistemological is when an ableist truism—your speech defect must be fixed—is cripped by exploiting the means of vocal production differently–in other words, to use error as another kind of sense. “Poetry, the kind of poetry I want, is not the unmediated expression of truth or virtue but the bent refractions, echoes, that express the material and historical particulars of lived experience” (43).
What I’ve called the ethics of the pataquerical appears when the counter-intuitive, counter-factual aspect of the poem creates, to paraphrase A.N. Whitehead, speaking of propositions, a “lure proposed for feeling” (Whitehead: 1960, 284). The end of the poem is the opening of (lure to) possible alternative avenues of meaning, sensation, knowledge. The book’s opening work, “Ocular Truth and the Irreparable Veil,” illustrates–quite literally–how a text “opens” possibilities by “closing” off its textual surface. “Ocular Truth” is a heavily redacted version of several prose essays, words and phrases blacked out to reveal a second hidden or alternate text. The poem’s title, based on Othello’s demand of Iago that he provide “ocular truth” of Desdemona’s infidelity is here complicated by a poem whose ocular truth is both revealed and obscured by blacked-out passages. One discerns a complex unweaving of several political themes concerning racism and cancel culture in a work that cancels portions of its prose. In the poem’s most readable (least censored) section, Bernstein responds to a New Yorker article by Peter Schjeldahl about the controversy over the cancellation of several exhibits of Philip Guston’s work.[6] The art critic sees these cancellations based on Guston’s representation of Ku Klux Klan images as “exemplifying divisions that are splintering the United States,” including attacks on cultural institutions, curricula, and public forums (Schjeldahl: 2020, 78). In his article Schjeldahl refers to those “cosmopolitan” audiences who complain of such cancellations and who espouse openness to troubling material against those who argue that an exhibit displaying racist subjects curated by an all-white staff is repugnant. Schjeldahl is of two minds, wanting to see the show but sympathetic to those “who neither find humor nor seek subtlety in racist symbology” (Schjeldahl: 2020, 78; Bernstein: 2024, 8). Bernstein seizes on the contradiction of an art critic who uses “cosmopolitan” to refer to an elite, culturally blinkered art audience when the term has historically been applied to Jews—like Philip Guston. It is as though one racial client has erased another, a fact embodied in a text censored like parts of Pound’s Pisan Cantos or Cold War FBI files. “Surely the problem,” Bernstein says in the poem, “is that Guston’s [word blacked out] figures are too legible—especially when coming from rootless cosmopolitans and cultural Bolshevists” (8). This is the conundrum that pervades the tone of aggrievement: that the cancellation of one form of art for revealing racism cancels an artist who is the historical subject of racism. Bernstein’s erasures, then, are perhaps the most “ocular” way to illustrate this conundrum. It is probably significant that Schjeldahl’s article was written on the cusp of the 2020 Trump election, an event that anticipated a more pervasive and troubling erasure of culture.
A Voice Pleading Aggrievement
The inaugural poem of this book sets the tone of aggrievement that permeates many of the essays and interviews. In one section Bernstein provides a mock blurb for an imagined anthology called “Alter Kockers”, using the Yiddish term used in Jewish comedy for an “old shit” and that includes “centuries of poems of bad advice and denial, guaranteed to pour salt on wounds large and small from poets who developed exquisite expertise in nursing ‘old wounds in old age…” (285). This may be Bernstein’s rueful comment on the resentment that comes with aging, now satirized in an anthology distributed by the “You Bet Your Life! Press’s Dorothy Parker collection.” It may also be a reference to the feeling of world-weariness in the current political battle over relevance. The Right is aggrieved at Wokeness while the Left is aggrieved at the Right’s aggrievement. Aggrievement is different from Nietzsche’s use of ressentiment to describe the resentment of the slave class at their subservience, placing the blame for their oppression onto the dominant class. Trump-era aggrievement would seem to be transactional, a zero-sum game of accusations and retribution rather than a dialectic of masters and slaves. Today’s aggrievement is a vicious circle: “A nightmare is haunting America and Europe; its slogan could be: ‘I am aggrieved by your aggrievement’” (42). The danger as Bernstein points out is a depoliticization and a “reversion to instinctual loyalties” (42). Aggrievement takes several forms in the book, despair at the failure of the poetics with which Bernstein is identified to accomplish a revolution in aesthetic tastes and practices. He is also aggrieved at the ways that this poetics has been attacked for its whiteness, elitism, racism, cosmopolitanism, the latter term marking the return of the repressed antisemitism associated with rootlessness. And finally, aggrievement describes the historical moment of Trump’s ascendency, his attacks on knowledge, culture, science, immigrants, and people of color.
But a final association with the term is the hidden “grief” in aggrievement, and here Bernstein’s own grief over the tragic death of his daughter, Emma, haunts his concerns about a world in a perpetual agon. To hear “grief” in aggrievement, is to rescue feelings of loss out of social resentment and suffer the calamity of one’s aggrievement: “The enemy of my enmity is my calamity.” Or again, “When the child dies, the father dies. It’s a mortal wound. What disappears in death grows wild in imagination” (152). Aggrievement may be the ontological form of dialectics, the way bottomless melancholia may be harnessed for resistance and critique. The mortal wound of a family’s loss cannot be healed, but it produces a wild imagination in the breach.
Conclusion
Being aggrieved can lead to a vertiginous binarism: “hatred of the avant-garde is prerequisite for entry into any official verse culture worth its smelling salts. the avant-garde is a
good target because it is, indeed, populated by fascists, miscreants, and malcontents…” (157). But surely the former holder of the Gray Chair of Poetics at Buffalo, the Donald Regan Chair at Penn, Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the Bollingen Prize— protests too much. This contradiction between the scourge of OVC and its invited guest speaks to Bernstein’s pataquerical imagination, attacking binaries by occupying them. OVC may be a straw man for a condition that doesn’t exist, but that’s no reason not to witness its impact, suffer its disregard. The “essays and comedies” as his subtitle to The Kinds indicates are spirited responses to various occasions and provocations, a chance to talk back to interviewers and interlocutors who, in some cases, have a much too sedimented notion of what he’s up to. Like Groucho, he unsettles those assumptions by not sticking to the point, going off on tangents, quoting a few lyrics from a Rogers and Hart musical.
The Kinds of Poetry I Want, like much of Bernstein’s work, courts its own instability, Neither a book of criticism, poetry, vaudeville act, or some kind of hybrid genre it’s all of the above and a good deal more. The book’s willingness to be uncool, even silly, makes it vulnerable to attacks by both conservative critics and Marxist scourges, attacks he encourages. The provocative nature of Bernstein’s often unfashionable positions is an occasion for dialogue, contestation, response. But as I’ve said with regard to its treatment of aggrievement, there’s a cost to being rootless, and the book records the historic implications of this condition as well as his own relationship to that charged condition. Like his friend, David Antin whose talk pieces fall between the stools of poetry, philosophical discourse, and stand-up/ improv, Bernstein’s pataquerical imagination pursues a poetics of errancy, what he calls “Aversive thinking” (“Avoid frame lock, trouble consistency” (341). In this book’s mosaic of genres and literary styles he avoids frame lock almost successfully. Emily Dickinson in one of her letters to Higginson, says, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” (Dickinson: 1986, 208) In Bernstein’s case, if a word falls from the ceiling, he knows that’s poetry.
References
Altieri, Charles. 1984. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 2011. Attack of the Difficult Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 2024. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 1999. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 2016. The Pitch of Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 1992. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cecire, Natalia. 2019. Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetic of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Davidson, Michael. 2022. Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error. New York: New York University Press.
Dickinson, Emily. 1986. Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McHale, Brian. 1992. “Making (non) sense of postmodernist poetry.” In Language, Text, and Context: Essays in Stylistics. London: Routledge): 6-35.
Olson, Charles. 1947. Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Plath, Sylvia. 1981. “Lady Lazarus.” In The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper and Row. 244-47.
Quayson, Ato. 2007. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schjeldahl, Peter. 2020. “Us Cosmopolitans.” New Yorker 96.32: 78-79.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1960. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Harper and Row.
[1] Charles Bernstein. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Page numbers for all subsequent references to this volume will appear in parens without the title.
[2] For a full account of Bernstein’s early life see his interview with Loss Pequeño Glazer, “An Autobiographical Interview,” in My Way, pp. 229-52.
[3] On the Mongrel Collective see Alec Wilkinson, “Something Borrowed.” New Yorker, Sept. 28, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/something-borrowed-wilkinson; Janet Malcolm, “Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Got to Heaven.” The New Yorker November 6, 2006; Dorothy Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014; Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room.” Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 20, 2015 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-program-era-and-the-mainly-white-room/.
[4] See Bernstein’s “The Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics, pp. 9-89.
[5] See Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error, pp. 78-81.
[6] Peter Schjeldahl, “Us Cosmopolitans.” New Yorker 96.32 (19 Oct., 2020): 78-79.
This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.
Witnessing Corecore as an Epideictic Call to Care
Caddie Alford
It’s early January 2023. You’re on TikTok. Comedian Bo Burnham’s song “Microwave Popcorn” has become viral audio.[1] Banking on that virality, user @sebastianvalencia.mp4’s video starts with Burnham’s unmistakable “I put the,” but before “packet on the glass” plays, the video skips to another “Microwave Popcorn” video, then another, then another, and then a high-pitched buzzing gets louder over a scrolling blur of videos from a “sad Family Guy edits” playlist. The video cuts to black and the words “Wake up” appear. Some lilting piano notes begin to play over a shot from the 1998 film The Truman Show, which transitions into an interview with comedian Hasan Minhaj saying, “The internet and technology created an idea of infinity. And the reason why life is beautiful is because it is fundamentally limited.” That quote tees up animations from the 2008 Disney Pixar film WALL-E of humans glued to devices and media, spliced with clips of actual humans walking around head down with their phones in front of them. Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous 2021 brand change announcement starts playing—“Today, we’re gonna talk about the Metaverse”—but only long enough to cut back in time to his somber and shaky 2018 testimony to Congress: “it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.” More from Minhaj’s interview rounds everything out before cutting back to black. The video—this stew of obvious yet idiosyncratic contrasts—has 2.1 million likes.
Screenshots of two cuts in sequential order from @sebastianvalencia.mp4’s corecore TikTok video, 2023.
The above style of editing on TikTok is called “corecore,” which is a genre that dramatizes a fraught relationship with TikTok’s -cores, or suffix tags that index micro aesthetics. Corecores elicit the platformization of feeling—“vibes”—ranging from poignant to maudlin. Corecore edits can be disorienting like other odd editing trends, but they’re somewhat outside trend categories. Since #corecore is, as post-disciplinary duo Y7 explain, “a category defined by the very act of categorization,” there isn’t the same “immediate implication of an aesthetic” as you might see with a weirdcore edit or meme, which is an aesthetic that consistently pulls from early internet graphics (Y7 2023). No, corecore “took trends and trending as its subject” (Y7 2023).
On January 1, 2021, user @masonoelle may have been the first to create a corecore with, as always, a fairly slapdash compilation of clips on “the climate crisis (polar ice caps melting, deforestation, major flooding), critiques of the United States Army, and the oversaturation of media” (Mendez 2023). By late 2022, corecore videos had amassed enough of a following and recognition that journalists started reporting on it. Kiernan Press-Reynolds’ account became the blueprint, describing the “anti-trend” trend of corecore as an “algorithmically-generated craze that boils down to an amorphous intangible “vibe,” a free-floating aesthetic with no roots outside TikTok” (Press-Reynolds 2022). Cultural critics, journalists, and everyday TikTok users have debated whether corecore was a profound aesthetic intervention or just elementary shitposting.[2] Press-Reynolds notes that the discourse surrounding corecore has almost been more interesting than the videos themselves: “people argue corecore is more than memes: it’s a politically charged art movement critical of capitalism and technology’s atomizing effect on society. The other camp says the videos are all about surreal humor and vibes; the amorphous essence of subjective interpretation; intangible emotions” (Press-Reynolds 2023). Corecore videos often make either niche sense or too much polemic sense.
Eventually, as is the way of all trends on TikTok, corecore slowly ran its course. Offshoots like #hopecore emerged and they, too, ran their course. Both gave way in late 2024 to a mutt aesthetic—“hopelesscore”—which is known for depicting negative, anti-social, and/or depressive quote animations via fonts and over visuals typically associated with motivation, like footage of a sunset at a beach.[3] As I develop in this essay, corecore gave way to a significant lifeworld, full of substantial audience interest as well as aesthetic appropriation. This ongoing lifeworld suggests that corecore is less a question of signification, or a question of “content” and meaning, and more a rhetorical question of effect and reception: a critical mass of these unruly “anti-trend” aesthetics indicate rhetorical heft and cultural significance at a time when the future of TikTok in the US both as a platform and a political topos remains unclear.
This interdisciplinary essay draws from rhetorical studies, tech reporting, and media studies to argue that corecore could be productively thought of as a contemporary version of the epideictic, which is the rhetorical genre of praising or blaming. In Debra Hawhee’s words, the main objective of the epideictic is “to render explicit something already known, and then to intensify preexisting commitments” (2023, 27). One of the three Aristotelian genres of rhetoric, the epideictic is demonstrative and often ceremonial oratory. The epideictic helps shape “the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives” (Walker 2000, 9). Common scenes for the epideictic are funerals, weddings, roasts, holidays, and so on. A typical example is someone giving a retirement speech for their colleague. By collectively honoring their colleague’s attributes and past actions, the retirement speech also solidifies that specific community’s (surface-level) majority values vis-à-vis work, career paths, expressions of collegiality, and so on. The conventions and strategies of the epideictic genre are in the service of all parties walking away feeling at least affirmed in their convictions.
For the purposes of this essay, however, I am most interested in the connections between the epideictic and the act of witnessing. Hawhee defines witnessing as “weighty assertions of material presence that lay bare injustices and demand a reckoning” (2023, 8). Witnessing “foregrounds justice and morality,” so “keeping witnessing front and center” is crucial for addressing ecological breakdown (2023, 8). She uses the word “keeping” there deliberately, to be in line with arguments that “identify witnessing as the defining act of our time” (2023, 154). In the face of ecocide and the widespread denial of that ecocide, the act of witnessing is an increasingly salient process by which to respond to—and emphasize—precarity. Witnessing is front of mind for scholars responding to precarity. Current scholarship like Michael Richardson’s Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World (2024), for instance, expands the scope of traditional articulations of witnessing to include nonhuman witnesses like image recognition systems. In this conception, witnessing is a relational project that necessarily exceeds the “capacity to “know” inherited from Western epistemologies” (2024, 8). The genre of the epideictic both ritualizes and mobilizes that relational project through memorializing, capturing, eulogizing, and bearing responsibility,[4] all of which are essential to witnessing.
Each corecore can be thought of as a witnessing because each corecore is an attempt to make “a core out of the collective consciousness” (Townsend 2023). Aesthetics scholar Mitch Therieau comments that the videos ‘“have a sheen of smoothness and detachment, but it’s like people are screaming underneath”’ (Glossop 2023). Corecore is the dark, ironic -core, documenting and making salient the ecocidal fallout from, in corecore’s POV, digitality: “racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983; Kelley 2017), techno-solutionism (Kneese 2023), cyberlibertarianism (Golumbia 2024), and all the other asymmetries that inhere in how the internet and digital technologies have been both symptoms and drivers of crisis.
And still, while corecore videos are tender, often scrambled efforts, reframing corecore as epideictic witnessing reveals a key yet obscured component: platforms. For this special issue “Critique as Care” in memory of my dearly missed former colleague David Golumbia, “to hold space,” as the CFP asked, “for simultaneity and contradiction,” I want to posit that the opposite of corecore—TikTok LIVE and its commercial livestream program—is a window into how the platform witnesses us witnessing it through such “disobedient aesthetics” as corecore.[5] After all, it would not be a piece in honor of Golumbia without an interrogation of the antidemocratic politics of the technics themselves. I felt strongly about critiquing TikTok LIVE when I wrote this piece in 2024, but in 2025, after the law banning TikTok did not go into effect and US users received not one, but two notifications of shameless propaganda, I feel compelled. Through an analysis of livestream by way of leaked documents, reporting, and outputs, I will suggest that TikTok witnessed corecore through what Anna Munster and Adrian Mackenzie term “platform seeing” (2019), or a platform’s modality of perception “produced through the distributive events and technocultural processes performed by, on and as image collections are engaged by deep learning assemblages” (2019, 10). Through these assemblages, TikTok observed corecore and continues to turn those values back onto themselves. Moreover, these platform-seeing assemblages will always bear witness and therefore always absorb and warp user-generated epideictic truths, which confirms the need to protect platformed epideictic witnessing. In this essay, I articulate the epideictic functionality of aesthetic interventions to claim that they are acts of witnessing. Ultimately, in doing so, I reach for connections between a praxis of care, critique, and scholarly witnessing.
The Epideictic Witnessing of Corecore: Fatigue
Writing about the development of twenty-first century art and performance as they’ve been shaped by digital technology, Claire Bishop states that there are new conditions of spectatorship (2024, 4). Bishop attends to those terrains through examining how attention has been historically and culturally defined as a normative value and practice in relation to art and artistic interventions.[6] Just like media and technologies, we know that art structures ways of seeing that support and run counter to dominant expectations for how to express and cultivate aesthetic taste.[7] “Spectatorial conventions” form from repeated interactions with artistic strategies, “individual inclinations, and unforeseen contextual eventualities” (2024, 35). With this appreciation for the rhetorical contingencies of mediated and distributed attention, Bishop questions whether there is a hierarchical difference between attentional modes. She cites dance theorist André Lepecki (2016) who argues that the “spectators” of social media are more passive than “witnesses:” “only the witness sees the whole performance and is embodied and emotionally in touch with what they are seeing” (2024, 79). With fluctuating conditions of spectatorship, however, it is just not that simple.
Within digitality, hierarchical paradigms of observing do not apply, if they ever did. Social media users are constantly toggling between modes of spectating, from platform specific modes to occasion specific modes, through and beside interfaces. We are at once spectators and Lepecki’s witnesses: such distinctions break down in participatory publics where we are all performing and negotiating multiple appeals to ethos, only for algorithmic visibility filtering to displace or gather views. While detachment is a part of these modalities, social media spectatorship is not reducible to detachment or distraction.
Part of why I was drawn to put the epideictic into conversation with corecore and witnessing is that it offers a figuration of spectating that anticipates these fluid conditions of spectatorship. Intriguingly, the figuration that the epideictic offers is related to theory and theorizing. As Sharon Crowley explains, in ancient Greek the verb theorein meant ‘“to observe from afar”; it refers to someone sitting in the topmost row of the theater. A theorist is the spectator who is most distant from the scene being enacted on stage and whose body is thus in one sense the least involved in the production but who nonetheless affects and is affected by it” (2006, 27). The implication is that distance—distraction, perhaps, or mediation—does not necessarily entail a lessened audience experience. This hybrid, bodily, and slightly detached theorein was precisely what was expected from epideictic audiences. Christine Oravec confirms that theoria—observation—was the “function assigned to the epideictic audience” (1976, 164). The epideictic audience were there to receive the disclosed values and unearthed truths from rhetorics of display: “theoroi means one who looks at, views, beholds, contemplates, speculates, or theorizes. These various translations indicate a kind of insight or power of generalization, as well as a passive viewing” (1976, 164). There were three different varieties of theoria and all invoked a journey: Andrea Wilson Nightingale explains that “the first two involved pilgrimages to religious oracles or festivals and, in the third, the theoros travelled abroad as a researcher or tourist” (2001, 29). Distance and detachment are crucial to all three versions of what Nightingale calls these “envoys” of meaning. Audiences for the epideictic weren’t given an immediate call to arms so much as primed to feel—the warm camaraderie from mutual recognition, certainly, but also an appreciation, both analytic and intuitive, for the artistry of what they were observing.
Scores of scholars have pointed out that the epideictic is a unique and slippery force—it compels engagement with its strange temporality, for instance[8]—but I mainly want to focus on its connection to aesthetics. Dale Sullivan accounts for at least four purposes of the epideictic: “preservation, education, celebration, and aesthetic creation” (1993, 116). Each of these purposes require attention to style; the epideictic rhetor was expected to use “many kinds of amplification” and magnification (Aristotle 1368a). In fact, part of the audience’s job in fulfilling theorein was to observe the rhetor’s skill: was the rhetoric effective at being affective? The audience was invited to “respond to the speech itself as an aesthetic object” (Oravec 1976, 168) by opening themselves up to “the sensory qualities of the speech itself” (Oravec 1976, 163)—the qualities and strategies that most stimulate “through the senses” (Oravec 1976, 171). This nexus of disinterested detachment, sensitized senses, and judgment speaks to a lineage of aesthetics as sensory persuasion, in the doubled passive and active act of beholding: as Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman elaborate, “aesthetics is not only about sensation or receiving information understood as a passive act; it is also about perception, the making sense of what is sensed” (2021, 34). Sensory persuasion encompasses how epideictic amplification makes values and revelations matter.
In sum, the epideictic aims to surface commitments by creating an occasion wherein audiences re-view these commitments through aesthetic sense-making. Aesthetic sense-making is a significant modality for uncovering value paradigms even as they potentially emerge from, or refuse, hegemonic value paradigms. The tension from that relationality produces ambient anxieties and the aesthetic sense-making of the contemporary epideictic are how we might witness those anxieties. Platforms are indeed technologies of control as well as extractive systems—a “hellscape of dreary stimuli”—and still, user-generated epideictic efforts—“an oasis of unthinking vibes” (Press-Reynolds 2022)—bring to light misdeeds and unease.
In response to that “hellscape,” many of us have no other recourse but to bear witness. And in the context of TikTok as in the tradition of the epideictic, bearing witness will always be aestheticized. For example, the main rhetorical strategy across corecore videos is aesthetic juxtaposition. Take this popular corecore video, bookmarked 266 thousand times. It begins with a kid being asked about how much money they want to make when they grow up to which they respond they want to help people feel okay. That innocence influences the viewer to receive every other clip as evidence that we are not, in fact, OK: sped-up footage of a traffic intersection, Ryan Gosling’s character in Blade Runner 2049 screaming, a row of elderly people monotonously pressing slot machines in a casino, and a violent crowd pushing into some big box retail store. The drone of an organ pad orchestrates a melancholic vibe.
The comments on this corecore, as with many corecores, express mutuality—a chorus of users commenting “real” or “thank you” or “this is why…”—because in the truest sense of the epideictic everyone gathered and compelled to receive the display enters a “timeless, consubstantial space carved out by their mutual contemplation of reality” (Sullivan 1993, 128). Although the phrasing of “consubstantial space” might imply a flattening of difference, Jodie Nicotra clarifies that platformed epideictic “does not issue from and to an already-constituted community; rather, by virtue of a process, it enacts a community” (Nicotra 2016). The corecore contrasts are aesthetic stimulants that work to unravel a new-old value, some heretofore muted or jumbled realization on the tip of our tongues. Even with all the alterity of a shifting online “audience,” corecore edits initiate aesthetic sense-making that discover, over and over, one particularly salient shared truth: fatigue.
Fatigue sounds about right because it is right. Broadly, Sianne Ngai notes, “aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Ngai 2015, 1). As a result, aesthetic categories and aestheticization are, as McKenzie Wark summarizes, “in-between play and labor, and they signal an era in which work becomes play and play becomes work” (2020, 16). The imperative to self-optimize while negotiating an overwhelming lack of boundaries, infrastructure, trust—the list goes on—is exhausting. Indiscriminate monetization levels all content, and that leveling is traumatizing when political and economic hierarchies could not be more pronounced in most contexts. The constant transmission of Black trauma through the “trope” and “trap” of what Legacy Russell calls the “Black meme” remains especially unbearable (2024, 8). And for a while we spoke to and out of this despair, relying on what Nathan Schneider terms “affective voice,” or the feeling that you are speaking truth to power, which platforms purposefully confuse with “effective voice,” or the actual “instrumental power to change something” (2024, 20). But given years of outrage and never seeing much happen, years of hyper-algorithmic feeds that prioritize hot takes amid the capitalist fracturing of communities and relationships, we’re now plagued with, to borrow from Kate Lindsay, “opinion fatigue:” users are increasingly making “the choice to opt out or otherwise radically alter how they post their thoughts online” (Lindsay 2023). Lindsay speculates that context collapse has been a part of this shift because “Public opinion around a topic can shift but is then sometimes retroactively applied to internet opinions formed long before this new consensus” (Lindsay 2023). It’s all too much. We’re tired.
The aesthetic collisions of efforts like corecore inclined us to witness this ambient anxiety. It’s not that the young and the online are sensitive, triggered by every politically incorrect message. Not even close. Their fatigue is an existential kind of fatigue. Witnessing this fatigue—displaying and holding this fatigue in common—should have been the start of us coming together to agree on one simple point: never again will we let tech companies perform historical reenactments of feudalisms at the expense of our health, our environment, our institutions, our democracies—again, the list goes on. And while fatigue doesn’t seem like the most effective tool for profound witnessing, I’m reminded of Tamika L. Carey’s 2023 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference keynote in which she draws from Black feminist thought and narratives to trace and reimagine the concept of fatigue. Carey argues that “conversations about fatigue invite us to refine our approaches to listening, to deepen our understanding of relationships, and to invest in reparative practices” (2023, 3). Fatigue, Carey points out, can be marshalled into a resistant form of impatience, or a productive refusal to participate in harmful practices and systems. Fatigue can help us find an in-road into repair: Carey perceives the potential to allow fatigue to orient praxis toward restorative justice, rest, and community-oriented self-care. Witnessing fatigue—really coming to terms with what this fatigue means and how it was wrought—might have been the first rhetorical step toward emancipation from Big Tech. The problem is, they witnessed us witnessing fatigue and they also said: never again.
The Platform Witnessing of Corecore: Engagement
In October 2024, the public was given a rare window into internal TikTok research findings and communications, including information about the degree of effectiveness of remedial measures, how the app more than appeals to young users, content regulation practices, and so on. Fourteen attorneys general led an investigation into TikTok; attendant lawsuits from more than a dozen states claim that the app knowingly hooks children and younger users. Each lawsuit contained redactions due to confidentiality agreements with TikTok. However, the lawsuit filed by the Kentucky Attorney’s General used digital redactions that Kentucky Public Radio could read. These redactions “appeared to primarily quote and summarize findings from internal TikTok documents and communications” (Goodman 2024).
These documents say the quiet part out loud. TikTok’s own research “states that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety”’ (Allyn et al. 2024). The NPR report continues: the time limit tool, which lets parents set daily screen time limits, was not implemented to help teens reduce their time on the app. TikTok was curious whether the tool could, in their words, improve “public trust”’ (Allyn et al. 2024). Kentucky investigators also found that TikTok made changes to their algorithm to address ‘“a high volume of…not attractive subjects”’ (Allyn et al. 2024). The algorithm had been retooled to boost content from creators the company deemed attractive. TikTok’s content moderation is faulty and inconsistent. They rely on artificial intelligence for the first go around and human moderators come in “only if the video has a certain amount of views” (Allyn et al. 2024). Internally, TikTok acknowledges “substantial “leakage” rates of violating content that’s not removed. Those leakage rates include: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia;” 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation;” 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse;” 30.36% of “leading minors off platform;” 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault;” and “100% of “Fetishizing Minors” (Allyn et al. 2024). And yet, a presentation for top company officials “revealed that an internal document “instructed moderators to not take action on reports on underage users unless their bio specifically states they are 13 or younger” (Allyn et al. 2024). An unnamed TikTok executive said the reason kids are on TikTok is because the app’s algorithm is so powerful that it “keeps them from “sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes” (Allyn et al. 2024).
The technicity of this platform—how it moderates and curates content, how its algorithm (micro)manages what users encounter, and how the interface is designed to prioritize video and deprioritize everything else, including context—is a technicity inseparable from cyberlibertarianism in that those logics have afforded this technicity just as much as this technicity furthers those logics. Golumbia specifies that cyberlibertarianism is not a coherent dogma: just like fascism, many of its tenants and appeals are contradictory. Cyberlibertarianism is, however, a useful concept for identifying doctrine based on “anti-democracy” and pro-corporate foundations (2024, 16): a cyberlibertarian faith in tech wants to reconfigure “social and cultural phenomena into free market terms” (2024, 36) so that it can do away with democratic institutions, expertise, and governments even while claiming such ideals as “democratization,” “community,” “voice,” “access,” and “engagement” (2024, 46). Golumbia explains that this rhetoric looks both ways: “we seem to be talking about copyright, freedom of speech, or the “democratization” of information or some technology. But if we listen closely, we hear a different conversation that questions our right and ability to govern ourselves” (xxiii). Are the conditions on TikTok, for example, democratic if its algorithm places users into “‘filter bubbles’ after 30 minutes of use in one sitting”’ (Allyn et al. 2024)? Can we claim democratic conditions after “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” was broadcast on every US TikTok user’s interface?[9]
As I see it, cyberlibertarianism is of a piece of other naming projects that attempt to capture how digitality promotes a deregulated market that will somehow take care of hate speech, disinformation, doxing, AI sludge—everything. Schneider, for instance, argues that the design of platforms is feudalistic because the politics of this design increasingly nudges users “toward autocratic or oligarchic forms of community governance” while simultaneously profiting off their habits and behaviors (2024, 44). I also think of Damien Smith Pfister and Misti Yang’s conceptualization of technoliberalism (2018), which they define as a governing rationality in which digital technologies assume complete democratic and epistemic power to siphon technical expertise and resources while jettisoning democratic opportunities for deliberation. While these concepts have precise histories and trajectories, all three illuminate digitality’s translation of democratic principles into economic imperatives and concentrations of power.
The technicity of TikTok is a product of this twisted cyberlibertarianism x feudalism x technoliberalism collab. It’s the same collab that corecore bore witness to, but it’s also the same collab that witnessed and reabsorbed corecore. Both Hawhee and Richardson note in their work on witnessing that in both senses of the word “arts and acts of witnessing, fortified with the clarifying power of insistence that they gathered over the course of the last century, are expanding to include nonhumans as well as humans” (Hawhee 2024, 4). Witnessing is not a singular project, but something that multiple agents enact. “The human viewpoint,” Joanna Zylinska reminds us, is “precisely a viewpoint”—one of and through many (Zylinska 2023, 129). The transformation and industrialization of vision during the twentieth century turned “vision” into what it is in the twenty-first century: “machine-based process” (Zylinska 2023, 10). Platforms like TikTok “see” through what Munster and Mackenzie call “observation events” that are “distributed throughout and across devices, hardware, human agents and artificial networked architectures such as deep learning networks” (2019, 5). Even without humans and even without datasets of visuals, platforms deploy observation to collect, process, and analyze data. These “observation events” bear witness, a form of “computational spectatorship” (Heras 2019, 180).
Corecore edits were perceived by platform observation assemblages. Composites of cylberlibertarian-feudal-technoliberal logics repurposed corecore creations into acts of platform witnessing. The fruits of the original epideictic witnessing—the value of really dwelling with what collective fatigue might mean, for instance—were seen for what they were only to be absorbed to serve antithetical purposes. As one of the original corecore creators wrote on an Instagram story: “The whole point of this stuff is to create something that can’t be categorized, commodified, made into clickbait, or moderated—something immune to the functions of control that dictate the content we consume and the ideas we are allowed to hold” (Mendez 2023). Although the effects of creating, witnessing, engaging, and circulating corecore can’t all be commodified, these acts of witnessing were still subject to platform seeing. The closest existing theorization of platformed epideictic is Nicotra’s in which she attends to the architecture of mid 2000s Twitter to argue that “epideictic acts of public shaming demonstrate the inexorably technological nature of all rhetorical acts—that the technologies are not separate or supplemental to the rhetorical acts, but are rather co-constitutive” (Nicotra 2016). Attention to technologies is the reason Nicotra refashioned the epideictic, turning what was mostly considered a rhetorical genre into a potential. Unfortunately, the algorithmic systems of platform architectures “tam[e] potential into probability” (Richardson 2024, 87).
If corecore presents one end of a spectrum of TikTok content—as radical as the moderation is going to allow—the opposite end of that same spectrum is TikTok Live and its livestream program, which is widely experienced as the “unregulated underbelly of the app” (Press-Reynolds 2023). For example, Forbes reporter Alexandra S. Levine released a damning account of TikTok Live in 2022—“How TikTok Live Became ‘A Strip Club Filled with 15-Year-Olds”—exposing how the livestream function has enabled predatory behaviors toward vulnerable users. Live is “one of the darker manifestations of the gig economy to date” (Press-Reynolds 2023). Creators want “gifts”—money—and TikTok doesn’t care how they earn that money because TikTok will take a huge cut from every transaction. Press-Reynolds explains that this structure is different from a structure like Twitch where creators build up a fanbase. Fanbases can be built on TikTok, too, but mostly live-streaming creators just throw everything under the kitchen sink to “hook viewers and coax donations” (Press-Reynolds 2023). It is no accident that these “donations” are designed to look like things rather than money: hearts, cars, flowers, animals…many of them are AI slop, from “money gun” for 500 coins to “naughty chicken” for 299 coins. Viewers buy and give these “gifts” for all kinds of reasons, but you can see how the habit of giving could result in chemical responses: will the creator acknowledge me if I send a gift? What about now? What if I send a gift to this creator? Livestream banks on a tempting—and sometimes expensive—mode of parasociality.
Since creators do receive some funds from “gifts,” the BBC reported in 2022 that displaced people and families in Syrian camps were begging for hours at a time on livestream. This begging created a mini economy, with people in the middle supported by “live agencies” in China working directly with TikTok to help unblock accounts while the agents in the middle take a cut of the profits by providing streaming equipment (Gelbart et al. 2022). BBC monitored gift streams of $1,000 an hour, but creators only received a fraction. The reporters note that “TikTok said it would take prompt action against “exploitative begging” (Gelbart et al. 2022), diverting attention away from the real problem.
Users have wildly different experiences on Live, which has produced a variety of what Motahhare Eslami et al. term “folk theories” (2016), or sense-making narratives that social media users form from their experiences on black-boxed platforms. On one YouTube video about the “dark side” of Lives, a user comments that they’ve “seen other types of streams, where a man forces a disabled man who lives in what looks like a hut, to dance to tiktok audios in a dress.”[10] Another writes about one that was streaming, without context, a baby with macrocephaly. One person confirms in the comment section: “I’m from Syria, and yes the situation there is very very very rough, money, jobs, food, water, and electricity are in very very short supply.”[11] In the subreddit r/changemyview, a user writes a post titled “TikTok’s live feature is immoral. It gets clicks by putting disabled people on the feed like animals at a zoo.”[12] This “folk theory” is an attempt to bear witness to what they’re observing. However, someone responded, “this isn’t how that works; the application you were speaking about tends to display content that associates to your previous history/what it thinks you may have interest in.” Someone else writes: “On my TikTok all my lives are musicians and anime cosplayers.”[13] While this particular subreddit is designed to expand and often correct the original poster, such countering and sometimes moralizing of “folk theories” from other users is part of why “disobedient aesthetics” like corecore edits are so vital: they provide another layer of mediation to “folk theories,” toward honoring the ambiguities of platformed living. The long and short of it is that no one has any real idea about how Live works, in general and for other people: it’s sometimes neat (musicians playing the piano) and sometimes cozy (work from home employees inviting body doubling). It’s also unexpected (“Yea this shit is hella weird, i saw one where some guy was just slowly peeling away boiled eggs and kept spamming “tap tap tap tap thank you thank you send gift”) or gives dystopic vibes (“I keep seeing one [sic] with people laying on clinical beds, rocking side to side. My mind takes me to weird places”).[14] Given the structure, we cannot control where we will end up. As one TikTok official stated in the redacted documents, “a major challenge with Live business is that the content that gets the highest engagement may not be the content we want on our platform” (Allyn et al. 2024). Sexualization of teens…refugees begging…babies with macrocephaly—I think I’ve seen this corecore before.
Corecore used aesthetic juxtapositions to reveal fatigue with Big Tech platformization. Those aesthetic collisions intended aestheticism—a more sensitive orientation—through the shock of dissonance and layers of mediation. TikTok used platform seeing to digest these aesthetic collisions, spitting them back out as more monetized livestreams. Those events, however, intended anesthetizing, or the kind of numbing that keeps you transferring funds and doomscrolling. TikTok’s livestreams took the chaotic user-generated epideictic witnessing of fatigue and forced it to become a witnessing of the Big Tech value of engagement. In a turn of events that writes itself, Tim Cook announced the “newest iPad Air” in March 2025 by showing a mock-up “trend report” on, you guessed it, #corecore.[15] Years later and Big Tech continues to commodify what was never meant to be commodified.
Scholarly Witnessing: Care
The 2024 Oxford Word of the Year was “brain rot,” defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”[16] At a moment in time when platforms are rolling out AI features that no one asked for and that no one is really ready for, only for AI generated images to become “evidence” of falsehoods,[17] “brain rot” encapsulates a growing, but ironicized concern about the content we’re taking in. “Technolibertarian notions that technologies are value neutral and that information wants to be free,” Jonathan Carter and Misti Yang emphasize, position “the general intellect as a boundless frontier to be exploited” (2023, 367). For “brain rot” to get chosen as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year means that there is now a much broader recognition of that exploitation. Since aesthetics stick around longer than trends, we’re surrounded by the remnants of witnessing that were unceremoniously churned into revenue streams. Where epideictic content like corecore might have rhetorically positioned us as observers—theoroi—social media rhetorics like the functionality of LIVE position us to rot.
This special issue asked us to bring nuance to critique—to perform scholarly critique from a place of care or caring even while actively discrediting computational solutionism, as Golumbia stressed time and time again. Critique as care is my effort to come to terms with the original display of corecore for what users wanted it to be, not for how the algorithmic systems witnessed and twisted them. Critique as care, then, is an articulation of the scholarly version of witnessing that can bear out from observing—theorizing—user-generated rhetorics as meaningful attempts to navigate unfair power dynamics. By attending to corecore, I extend theories of epideictic rhetoric to better accommodate platformization and its effects on rhetorical acts. By forwarding “platform seeing,” I think alongside Richardson’s question: “If algorithms are themselves witnessing, making knowledge, and forging worlds of their own design, what might it mean to witness their workings?” (2024, 81). In calling attention to leaked documents demonstrating TikTok’s internal culture and praxis, I take seriously Shannon Vallor’s provocation that if Big Tech ultimately remakes our world in its image, scholars might pay for our “habit of epistemic caution with our lives and our children’s futures” (2024, 162). By that she does not mean to undermine best practices for responsible scholarship as much as she means to encourage scholars to, once ready, inhabit force, passion, and courage—to just say, “this is cyberlibertarianism.” And it is fucked. Romeo García and coauthors echo that provocation, writing that “scholars are also guilty—sometimes unconsciously—of re-subjecting those they write and think about to the same epistemic violence they wish to trace, critique, and/or unsettle” (2024, 294). It is not, they write, that the scholar is “the observer merely observing.” Rather, “because the scholar engages in human work (wording) and human projects (worlding), they are indeed active actor-agents who have the capacity to engage in doings otherwise” (2024, 294).
Now would be a good time to quote Golumbia’s close friend, George Justice, who wrote the forward for Cyberlibertarianism. Justice calls Golumbia the “most optimistic pessimist you could ever meet” (2024, ix). He goes on to say that the pages of Cyberlibertarianism “are dark in their insistence that the technologies we deploy in nearly all aspects of our lives have been built on fundamentally antidemocratic, antihuman premises,” and yet the “richness of his thought betrays an essentially hopeful belief in powers of the human mind to contemplate, understand, and attempt to change the world for the better” (2024, ix-x). As a scholar, I have not always understood that you can do both: you can hold these systems accountable and you can still be curious. You can practice sound citational politics and you can hone a unique voice and you can seek traditional venues and you can innovate. Something I have always appreciated about rhetorical training is that it exercises your capacity to find nuance, but in the past that training has prevented me from also finding certainties. I came to Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018, attempting to start a book project that was curious—not certain—about what was happening to opinions vis-à-vis social media. Golumbia, on the other hand, had just published a article earlier that year titled “Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy.”[18] He had already predicted brain rot.
I’m reminded of that expression of two ships passing in the night. But I eventually arrived to a place still informed by care, but very certain that things were as bad as Golumbia had known them to be. My last correspondence with him was to thank him for a talk he did on fascisms and to send a book review I had just written of a rhetorical studies collection on fascism. He was thrilled that I was doing research and teaching about these topics. He wrote, “I would love to talk some of these things over when we both have a free second…,” because while fascism is certain, scholarly care is boundless.
Caddie Alford (she/her/hers) is associate professor of rhetoric and writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a digital rhetoric scholar whose interdisciplinary research examines emergent forms of information, communication, and sociality. Her recent book—Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality—addresses social media rhetorics by creating an affirmative theory of opinions to identify and repurpose a spectrum of truths. Some of her work has appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech; Rhetoric Review; and enculturation.
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[1] Creators were making lip dub videos with the moment in the song when Burnham stages an increasingly frustrated dialogue with himself:
I put the packet on the glass (What glass?) The little glass dish in the microwave (Got it) I close the door (Which door?) The door to the microwave! What is wrong with you?!
[2] “To me, Corecore’s “aesthetic” reads as an art school freshman’s first found-footage project in Adobe Premiere Pro (no, I’m not projecting) presented with the societal dread induced from doom-scrolling on one’s phone at 2am after one too many bong rips on a weeknight (again, not projecting …)” (Nayyar 2023).
[3] For a smart analysis of hopelesscore, see Adam Aleksic’s 2025 substack essay, “How Hopelesscore Became even More Hopeless.” https://etymology.substack.com/p/how-hopelesscore-became-even-more.
[4] Bradford Vivian confirms that witnessing as a mode of communication and rhetorical goal is “generally epideictic in nature” (2012, 191). And as Hawhee writes: “the documentary work endemic to the epideictic genre, in short, serves the rhetorical purpose of witnessing” (2023, 28).
[5] Borrowing apt language here from Anthony Stagliano’s Disobedient Aesthetics: Surveillance, Bodies, Control (Alabama University Press, 2024).
[6] The book’s main project “aims to move beyond the moralizing binary of attention/distraction, to dispense with attention’s economic framing to jettison plenitudinous modern attention as an impossible ideal, and to rethink contemporary spectatorship as neither good nor bad but perpetually hybrid and collective” (2024, 35).
[8] As Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard articulates, “By bringing together images of both the real—what is or at least appears to be—and the fictive or imaginary—what might be—epideictic discourse allows speaker and audience to envision possible, new, or at least different worlds” (1996, 770).
[9] Quote is from the second notification that US TikTok users received on January 19.
Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm
Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal
“It is the philosophy of [Black] music that is most important.”
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Music
“You listen to it, the concept might break you.”
Eric B. and Rakim, “I Know You Got Soul”
An experiment: what would happen if a group of academics from fields as varied as, say, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, musicology, and dance–many of whom are professional or amateur practitioners of rhythmic artistic forms themselves–thought collectively about the problem of conceptual and theoretical work and its relation to rhythm? How does rhythm—and its attendant art forms—allow us to produce philosophical or conceptual thought? What concepts (ethical, political, aesthetic, or otherwise) emerge from music, dance, sound, motion, and vibration? What began as a series of questions, a collective conceptual and methodological risk, yielded results that could not have been anticipated: an ensemble of theories and insights, in and out of sync, harmonious and discordant.
As a category, rhythm names a sensory interface with the world, an entry point into temporal unfolding across scales: the rapid revolutions of electrons around nuclei, the immeasurably slow deaths of distant galaxies, the ebb and flow of human breathing, the seasonal migrations of birds, the steady build of a tropical storm. Rhythm implies cyclicalities, departures and returns, dramatic interconnections of bodies and systems. Artists who focus attention on rhythm—musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers—do so in ways that can draw receivers’ attention back to their own bodies, their own senses, their own perceptions of movements, changes, event boundaries.
To think and make through rhythm is to unsettle many of the philosophical inheritances of the imperial West—the atomized, liberal thinking subject divorced from dependency or human relation; the epistemology of the zero point, a thinking that emerges miraculously, without geographic or embodied context; even, and especially, conceptions of “the human” that presume a universal subject devoid of locational or experiential specificity; or, more accurately, implicitly demand accordance to a colonialist hierarchy that measures humanness by way of proximity to an imposed ideal.[1] With that in mind, the concepts that can emerge from a focus on rhythm promise engagements with people, environments, and their attendant histories, promise concepts that can defamiliarize and unsettle knowledge presupposing of a totalizing universal subject, if for no other reason than that they openly emerge from sensory experience, from bodies in and of motion. Rooted in and expressive of the particular—sensoria, situation, movement—such concepts reach for the kinds of integrative and provisional knowledge perhaps only available through relation: what Glissant once called an “open totality.”[2]
Inspired by multidisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar Michael J. Love’s concept of “(rhy)pistemology,” which he understands as “the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music,” this special issue aims to expand the labor of critical theory and philosophical thought to include embodied forms of knowledge across intellectual, artistic, and cultural traditions. Rather than taking rhythm, music, or dance as an object of theory or thought, we emphasize theory and thought that emerges from or through rhythm. Fumi Okiji’s work on “jazz as critique,” Alexander Weheliye’s commitment to “thinking sound,” Jonathan Leal’s “thought-forms,” and Maya Kronfeld’s notion of spontaneity as political concept are only a few examples of the transdisciplinary and trans-sensory lines of inquiry that inspired this collective conversation.[3]
Drawing together artist practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplinary positions and critical traditions—comparative literature and media, critical theory, philosophy, global Black thought, anthropology, Latinx and Latin American studies, dance, music and sound studies—this special issue pursues the promise of (rhy)pistemological inquiry. Whether through the temporal elasticities of beat tapes, or in-the-moment creative improvisations, or the slow arcs of dancing bodies in midair, or the linearities exploded by language artists, or the interplay of narrative storytelling and shot intercutting in film, and much more, we asked these scholars to consider what happens to extant concepts when stress tested against rhythms across scales, as well as in what concepts can emerge when we attune ourselves more fully to our contexts and, fundamentally, foreground that we always think from our bodies, one breath at a time.
The present collection of work is one result of a series of collaborations and conversations in which a broad, porous community of thinkers and artists have participated. Since 2023, the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab “Thinking Through Rhythm” study group–which includes graduate students and faculty from Comparative Literature, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, French and Italian, English, American Studies and Ethnicity, Roski School of Art and Design, Kaufman School of Dance, Thornton School of Music, School of Cinematic Arts, and Annenberg School of Communication–has met monthly to read and discuss scholarship on music and rhythm, eat and drink, and to listen to music together. We then convened a seminar at the March 2024 American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Montreal with colleagues from across the country. Yet another variation of the group met at Art Share L.A. in May 2024, where rhythmic performances met academic presentations. Each of these experimental encounters felt both subversive and joyful: presenters and members of the public remarked on the liberating experience of thinking with one’s senses, pushing back against the compartmentalization we often impose on our “professional” selves.
Indeed, each of the participants in this ensemble of thinkers has a unique, eccentric relationship with the conceptual work that often goes by the name “philosophy” or “critical theory” as well as dance, music, and experimental sound. Theorists and practitioners, writers, dancers, music-makers, and listeners, we share a frustration with the way that rhythmic art forms remain objects of study rather than being considered sources of knowledge or sites of conceptual work in themselves. In addition to those whose writing is included here, Natalie Belisle, Gabrielle Civil, Arne De Boever, Jonathan Gómez, d. sabela grimes, Stathis Gourgouris, Edwin Hill, Jane Kassavin, Kara Keeling, Leah King, Josh Kun, Fumi Okiji, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Mlondi Zondi and others have participated in prior and subsequent conversations and gatherings. At the Art Share L.A. event, we were fortunate to count on the participation of artivista Quetzal Flores and composer/pianist Paris Nicole Strother, who accompanied Alex Chávez, Maya Kronfeld, and Michael J. Love in their music-making. The interventions are both conceptual and methodological; indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of artistic practice and expression are laid bare through the troubling of the boundary between what is often categorized as “theory” and “practice.” Thinking through rhythm is necessarily performative, embodied, and transmedial, sonic, visual, and verbal, some of which will be captured through images and links to sound and video in what follows.
The first trio of interventions detail concepts mined from Black American improvisational and rhythmic music and dance: (rhy)pistemologies. In the lead essay, Michael J. Love introduces us to the term he coined to evoke and name the knowledge conveyed through material practices in the Black American vernacular tradition: call and response, active listening, and producing rhythms in real time (what often goes by the name “improvisation”). For Love, (rhy)pistemology—knowing through the rhythm—is inseparable from these traditions. It is also a practice of liberation: similar to Nina Simone’s recollection of brief instances of freedom while making music, Love theorizes the rhythmic, percussive-corporeal practice of tap as a mode of “getting caught up,” accessing a Black queer “elsewhere” (Nadia Ellis)—a utopian future that (as Kara Keeling reminded us in Los Angeles, citing the late José Esteban Muñoz) just might always already exist. Love’s duet with Maya Kronfeld—which they created for the May 2024 meeting—incorporates sampling and looping, improvisational rhythms and theoretical arguments.
Kronfeld’s “Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge” argues that rhythmic form produces concepts that are “inchoative knowledge,” drawing upon the work of Immanuel Kant, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis. This not-yet-knowledge does not drive rhythmic practices, but rather emerges from forms-in-motion. She takes Thelonious Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular in “Straight No Chaser” as an instance of Black experimental rhythmic practice that is “about to be knowledge.” Such insights do not necessarily negate concepts in the Western philosophical tradition, but rather shed crucial light on that for which this tradition fails to account, as well as that which it has violently eclipsed or suppressed. Kronfeld “puts it together” (Elvin Jones’s term for spontaneous composition) in her transmedial theorization: logical argument supplemented, displaced, and oxygenated by her own engagement on keys with the questions posited.
In “So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s),” Michael Sawyer, for whom Kronfeld is a crucial interlocutor, takes up Toni Morrison’s ekphrastic challenge—“how can I say things that are pictures”—by asking, “how can I write things that are sounds?” Drawing upon the ancient Japanese art form Kintsugi, Sawyer develops a theory of reparative “rememory” (Morrison) in Black cultural expression. Bringing together jagged shards of a broken whole—namely, the generative disruption of the blues in Sonny Rollins’s The Saxophone Colossus and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, themselves fragments of other broken, beautiful objects—Sawyer’s close reading of sound is at once shattering and restorative.
We tend to think of rhythm primarily in sonic forms; yet what happens when we are to consider images as possessing their own rhythms? Presented initially at the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association convention in Montreal, the interventions by Jamal Batts, Seth Brodsky, and Eyal Peretz evaluate rhythms of the moving image. In “Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing,” Jamal Batts advances a theory of sound in and as film, specifically, Black queer diasporic cinema in the final decades of the last century. Through close readings of Marlon Riggs’s short film/music video Anthem (1991), as well as the incorporation of poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Batts identifies Afro-diasporic, non-linear queer continuities in visual rhythm, sound, and voice. Drawing on Black experimental film theory (Michael B. Gillespie, Robeson Taj Frazier, Arthur Jafa), philosophy of Black music (Fumi Okiji), and others, he demonstrates the ways in which rhythms work to disrupt the violence of racialized representation, introducing gendered difference into the “unruly intramural sociality of blackness and queerness” which he understands as “entangled, relational, and stereophonic.”
Invoking Fred Moten’s fugitive, fleeting statement to Harmony Holiday about music’s genesis—“in the absence of time, we made rhythm”—Seth Brodsky’s “Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat” argues that Freud’s notion has been mischaracterized as a nihilistic death cult, suggesting that music points to a distinct dimension of the drive, beyond nihilism. Through a close reading of the music video to Brittany Howard’s “Stay High,” Brodsky highlights Howard’s rhythmic syncopation, a rhythmic displacement that is untimely in its time travel to past “happy” rhythms (Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” rather than his “A Change is Gonna Come”) and future bleak horizons: in its visualization of the rhythm and repetition of the workday, the music video would serve as consolation to essential workers toiling long hours in the early months of the pandemic. Yet Brodsky wants to insist upon something more complicated at work. Although the eye can only perceive one rhythmic fact at a time, the ear can process multiple elements of sonic information simultaneously: music fabricates, dilates, and sutures gaps. Brodsky’s theory of music as “a foundational practice of driven beings” exposes the fallacy at the heart of contemporary misreadings of the death drive, inseparable from the pulse of life.
Eyal Peretz’s “Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb” explores the activation of a new form of time in Christopher Nolan’s film. Distinct from Batts’ analysis of “queer cadence” in experimental cinema, and Brodsky’s consideration of the folding of image into rhythm in Howard’s music video, Peretz’s intervention focuses upon the formal elements of the 2023 film, what he describes as “rhythmic editing.” Identifying the activation of a new temporality set in motion by the conception and detonation of the atomic bomb, he asks whether the rhythmic editing of the cinematic image represents, extends, or interrupts this new temporality. What constative or performative intervention is carried out by Nolan’s arrythmias?
Naomi Waltham-Smith joins Peretz in taking up the relation between rhythm and arrythmia in “Deconstruction’s Hemiolas.” Presented initially as part of the “(Rhy)pistemologies” seminar at ACLA, Waltham-Smith’s essay evaluates the role of rhythm in the work of deconstruction. A scholar of music and philosophy as well as a musician herself, Waltham-Smith demonstrates how the concept’s arrhythmia can be “most passionately moved by” the labor of deconstruction. Indeed, deconstruction’s arrhythmias expose the anarchic concepts as always already more than one: deconstructions. Owed to its syncopated remarking, deconstruction bears affinities with decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, and queer thought. Incorporating a structure not unlike the 3-against-2 of musical hemiola, she advances a theory of deconstruction’s arrhythmia through close readings of five texts: Derrida’s Glas, Moten’s In the Break, Lacoue-Labarthe’s “L’echo du sujet,” Cixous’s “Le théâtre surpris par les marionettes,” and Bennington’s response to Nancy.
The two concluding pieces return us to the performative, rhythmic thinking tested in Los Angeles. Musician and anthropologist Alex Chávez opened the Art Share L.A. meeting with a performance and talk (“Sonorous Present”), the written component of which has been included in the present issue. During the live event, in conversation with Quetzal Flores and Jonathan Leal, Chávez explored the contemporary conditions of possibility for sonic mourning in a bordered world. Through multimedia performances of selections from his acclaimed 2024 album, Sonorous Present, Chávez elaborated on the rhythms of artistic and scholarly process, highlighting the necessary imbrication of (auto)ethnographic research and related music composition for the type of introspective and community-driven praxis he pursues. His written piece expands these ideas across its three sections—“break,” “qualia,” and “cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)”—using a poetics of grief to map contemporary logics of nationalist (American) containments, and in effect, to meditate on political and conceptual possibility. In doing so, Chávez’s work begets questions that resonate across Black studies, border studies, anthropology, and Latinx studies, as well as with the offerings across this special issue: what are the rhythms of our mourning? And how might focusing on them amid the repeating violences of nation-states lead to increased conceptual, political, and artistic freedom?
Finally, “Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound” documents a conversation held between Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill following Gallope’s drone performance, “Region.” Gallope’s electronic, multisensory presentation invited the public into a transformative experience of deep listening, a voyage through space and emptiness. Trained as a musicologist, Gallope has kept his scholarly and artistic lives largely separate until now. Yet the shift of focus from his first book to his second is significant: while the first (Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable), details philosophical reflections on music, the second (The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978) understands philosophy as emerging from music-making itself. After the performance, Gallope and Hill discussed what it meant for Gallope to perform for the first time in an academic setting, how disciplines and institutions allow for or foreclose the possibility of musical thinking, as well as taking up the central question of “(Rhy)pistemologies”: how are concepts fashioned through rhythmic practices?
Pursuing these questions—enacting this collective experiment across repertoires, methods, and disciplinary structures—has reminded us of the promise and urgency of humanistic inquiry at once artistically engaged and communally rooted. What if?What now, then? At each turn, the project has, in effect, foregrounded the conceptual possibilities of expressive forms that reach beyond insular, rarified knowledge circulation, centering instead those registers of criticism, theory, and multimedial expression that center bodies and minds in motion, alive to the sinew of experience. Our work together produced its own rhythms, its own cycles of affect and analogy, critique and convergence, and this, in its way, has been a reminder of what has long been the case in those increasingly necessary spaces where conscious relation is held in high esteem. Provisionally, then: to think through rhythm is to attend to relation and greet the world as it has been, is now, and hope it can be—at distance from those forms of thought that would deny the world.
Listen to it. The concept might break you.
[1] See Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Vijay Iyer, Fred Moten, among many others. For a recent example, see Iyer’s 2025 lecture at the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, “Musicalities: Scenes of Sonic Social Life.”
[2] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. (University of Michigan Press 1997), 171.
[3] In recent decades, scholarship in Black studies, cultural history, and music studies has expanded the conversation around these issues immensely. For a few immediate touchstones, see Fred Moten’s In the Break, Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies, Shana Redmond’s Anthem, Josh Kun’s Audiotopia, R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophes, Emily J. Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul, and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound.
My collaboration with Michael J. Love (see video below) is an attempt to work against the all-too-common backgrounding of rhythmic forms and their epistemic contributions.* Rhythm in jazz and Black music more generally is often trivialized and denigrated even when it is being applauded – the proverbial “damning with faint praise.” Specifically, when the complexities of polyrhythm and swing are admired, they are increasingly treated as decontextualized, ready-made ratios to be labeled and then implemented according to some “cheat code.” Unlike melodic and harmonic virtuosity, the rhythmic language that takes decades of study to acquire, develop and master often does not even register as a zone of competence. Reducing or denying rhythmic knowledge-making and the central role it plays in the music has always formed part and parcel of the fear and control of blackness and black form, especially as jazz gains what Rey Chow calls “cultural legitimation” (Chow 2010; E. Davis 2025; Ramsey 2004; Lewis 1996).[1]
“One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison writes in her foreword to the novel Paradise, is “that it never produces new knowledge… It seems able to merely reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions” (Morrison 1998: xv). In a photo from Morrison’s 1994 collaboration with Max Roach at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1994, one glimpses the new forms of inquiry that emerge from the interplay between verbal and rhythmic art.[2]
I elaborate the literary dimension of my argument elsewhere (Kronfeld 2025), but I include Morrison’s critical observation here to clarify what’s at stake for Love and me in our artistic and scholarly practice and help us shake off some tired old binaries about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Jazz’s emphasis on the new emerges precisely in the context that Morrison describes: jazz and other experimental art forms are not inherently radical (a fact which is crucial to their radical potential) but rather contain the prerequisites for radical action and change, namely to be able to produce new knowledge, in contradistinction to self-replicating discourses. Not having had the luxury of resting well with conventional meanings, Black musical aesthetics continue to be necessary for clarifying the sociohistorical and racial contexts that make modernist crisises of referentiality so salient (Best 2018; Moten 2018; Gilroy 1995).
Elsewhere I have discussed the elision of jazz drummers’ epistemic contributions within the context of modernist aesthetics and critical theory (Kronfeld 2019, 2025). But as Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. reminds his readers in The Power of Black Music, “Rhythms… are not solely situated within the confines of drums” (Floyd, 2017: xxvi). Here I focus on the rhythmic contributions of pianists in order to de-essentialize the rhythmic imaginary while simultaneously emphasizing time’s primacy as jazz’s most salient text. These pianistic traditions can be seen as the afterlife of those “other percussive devices” named by Baraka in the wake of the criminalization of the drums and their communicative power (Baraka 1963: 27). In what follows, I draw on theorizations of swing by Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Georgia Anne Muldrow, and of the blues by James Baldwin and Ahmad Jamal.
It bears reminding here that rhythm qua aesthetic dimension provides space for the recovery of past forbidden, as well as the discovery of new, not-yet-available concepts, for past/future thoughts not yet thinkable (cf. A. Davis 1997: 163-64). This emphasis on process carries affinities both with Frankfurt School aesthetics (Kaufman 2005, 2000) and with Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s characterization of Africanist aesthetics (Gottschild 1996; Love 2021); but it also sets into sharp relief the divergences between these critical traditions. Angela Davis navigates this critical juncture between Frankfurt School and Black aesthetics in her Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, which remains ever salient: “My use of…the aesthetic dimension rejects its association with ‘transhistorical,’ ‘universal’ truths. I propose instead a conceptualization of ‘aesthetic dimension’ that fundamentally historicizes and collectivizes it.” (A. Davis 1997: 164). In a section from her Billie’s Bent Elbow (2025) entitled “Aesthetic Form in the New Thing,” Fumi Okiji draws a distinction between aesthetic form and musical form: “aesthetic form is ultimately processual even when it is encountered in the objectified work thing” (84). Okiji continues: “Aesthetic form is as much the means toward our congregating in performance or rehearsal, practice, or listening as our (co)habitation of musical space is the means to aesthetic form” (85).[3]
The potentialities that swing encodes in jazz and Black music more generally are never finished being known, rendering them answerable to unforeseen future circumstances, as well as to past and present experiences that have been occluded from view by structures of oppression, domination and appropriation (Okiji 2025, Kronfeld 2025). As jazz musicians have always taught, the innovative spatio-tempo/ral building blocks of Black music are attuned to the now precisely by virtue of being historically saturated, encoding what Georgia Anne Muldrow calls “new paths of articulation” (pers. comm 2023; cf. Ramsey 2004; Floyd 1996). [4]
Think of the way that Thelonious Monk’s rhythmic phrasing disrupts racialized aesthetic conventions of beauty qua the “pleasant” or “agreeable” while opening new, disruptive possibilities within the beautiful, what Monk called “ugly beauty” (Monk 1968). It is, in fact, this capacity for disruption that is beauty’s philosophical legacy (Ginsborg 2015, Moten 2017). In the process of his simultaneous rejection and illumination of the beauty ideal, Monk repurposes and radicalizes Charles Baudelaire’s postromantic metaphor in Les fleurs du mal (Baudelaire 1994 [1857]).
It is crucial to theorize from what rhythm artists say and do before “applying” theory to them (Defrantz 2001:43). As Dizzy Gillespie maintains in Notes and Tones, the landmark musician-to-musician collection of interviews, the history of Black music in recorded form – the sound – ought to be the primary text of jazz studies: “We are documented in records, and the truth will stand” (A. Taylor 1977:127). That primary text can be fruitfully interpreted and put into dialogue with any number of theoretical frameworks – if, that is, the sonic text itself has not been erased by being conflated ontologically with its transcriptions.[5] Increasingly, as musician-educators around the world can attest, jazz theory and even the widely-circulating jazz transcriptions of recorded standards and original compositions (e.g., The Real Book) not only pre-empt but often replace entirely the listener’s (and musician’s!) direct encounter with the musical text itself, cancelling out the epistemic interventions embedded within rhythmic, harmonic and melodic form.[6] This has created an unhappy correspondence between what Barbara Christian called “The Race for Theory” and the racist exclusion of the musicians from the study of the music (Christian 1987).
So what does it mean to theorize new categories from Monk, from Ahmad Jamal, etc.?
Let’s attune ourselves to the new forms of knowledge embedded, for example, in the first bar of Monk’s twelve-bar blues “Straight No Chaser.” One aesthetic theory perspective here might see Monk as producing inchoative knowledge (knowledge-in-process), or as engaged in a negative mimesis that encodes the violent attempts at the erasure of earlier Afrodiasporic rhythmic traditions of communication (Adorno 1997; for critiques see Okiji 2018 and Kronfeld 2019).[7] But does this sit comfortably with the epistemic theories embedded within Monk’s left hand and the traditions it both registers and transcends? In contradistinction and perhaps even in challenge to the interpretive framework of inchoative knowledge that I have gestured at above, the term jazz musicians often use for what the music offers –without invoking the usual positivist-empiricist baggage – is information. More accurately, the positivist-empiricist connotations of the term are both ironized and re-signified. This is how pianist Fred Hirsch, quoted in Paul Berliner (1994) puts it: “A Charlie Parker tune like ‘Confirmation’ should give you information” (231). And Amiri Baraka explains, invoking a Black Music epistemology that dismantles the alienating distinction between life and art: “Music is a living creature…The sounds carry whatever information rests in those frequencies and rhythms and harmonies” (Baraka 1996:141).[8] As Monkish re-imaginings and critical analyses by contemporary pianists continue to attest, the beginning of “Straight No Chaser” is replete with information (Jason Moran 2015; Eric Reed 2011; Fred Hirsch 1998). On the 1960 recording of “Straight No Chaser,” there is a flat-9 (a B-natural in the key of Bb) in Monk’s left hand that destabilizes the later oversimplified popular reception of the tune (listen to the accents at 0:00, 0:02, 0:08 and 0:13). Monk sounds like he is playing a G, Ab and a B-natural – the kind of “closed-position voicing” with a minor-second interval on the bottom that Robin D. G. Kelley rightly characterizes as a Monkish signature (R.D.G. Kelley 1999). As I have described elsewhere (Kronfeld 2021), the kind of listening that jazz practitioners engage in often runs counter to what Monk disciple Steve Lacy once described as “the bad habit of thinking in chords” (Eiland 2019, 95; R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 291).[9] Now, I love chords as much as the next piano player, but I understand why they have come to represent a characteristically American paint-by-numbers epistemology.[10] The “chord” applied as a pre-conceived, static generality (as in “Oh, just play a Bb7 chord in the first bar of ‘Straight No Chaser’”) risks obscuring the singularity of these notes, these intervals and voicings that need to be given credence and discrete attention. A Monkish theory of knowledge warns against allowing a pre-determined category to co-opt or occlude what’s in front of us. It may not be too much to read this as an allegory against white supremacy that is embedded in jazz listening practice – and offered to all listeners.
Just as Monk’s harmony requires unlearning the “bad habit of thinking in chords,” fully internalizing his rhythmic language calls for acquiring a new episteme, even as this language in turn sets the terms for basic fluency after Monk. Prof. Thomas Taylor, who instructs his drum students to study Monk’s piano comping, describes the studious listening required for such language acquisition when it comes to Monk’s rhythm: “If you haven’t listened to this 200 times, you don’t know it. And 200 is actually really on the short end.” [11] Even Miles Davis famously commented that it took him ages to properly learn “Round Midnight”: “I used to ask [Monk] every night after I got through playing [‘Round Midnight’], ‘Monk, how did I play it tonight?’ And he’d say, looking all serious, ‘You didn’t play it right.’ The next night, the same thing and the next and the next and the next” (M. Davis 1989: 78).
In the piano intro to “Straight No Chaser,” before being joined by the rest of the band, Monk plays through one chorus (12 bars) of the melody (from 0:00 to 0:14). Monk’s left-hand chord (a cluster more than a chord), with its modernist flat-9 harmonic intervention expressed as if it were a simple statement, alternately reinforces and plays off of the right hand’s melody by first accenting beat 1, then the “and” of beat 2, then beat 1 again, then beat 4, then the “and” of beat 4, then beat 2, then beat 2 again, finally landing on the “and” of beat 2. Thomas Taylor observes about Monk’s spatialization of rhythm: “He is a master at playing in unpredictable places. So unless you really know this version, you won’t ever put your left hand where he’s playing. It is as if Monk is doing an exercise where he plays every possible beat, but you don’t know which will come when.”[12] The spaces generated in between the accents are, of course, a crucial component of the rhythmic structure. John Edgar Wideman writes, letting his own elisions do the talking: “Silence one of Monk’s languages, everything he says laced with it… An extra something not supposed to be there, or an empty space where something usually is” (Wideman 1999: 551; cf. Sawyer 2025; Holiday 2023; Moran 2015). After this Intro, Monk plays the changes under “Straight No Chaser”’s melody in a more conventional way. But because we have become attuned to those dissonant clusters and accents in the Intro, now the expected itself sounds unexpected (T. Taylor, pers. comm. March 2, 2025).
From a drummer’s perspective, Thomas Taylor criticizes the overwhelming tendency to flatten out Monk’s rhythmic concepts. Take Monk’s comping under Charlie Rouse in “Bright Mississippi,” for example. The bouncing right-hand figure that Monk plays high up on the piano in response to the melody is neither swung eighth notes, nor straight eighths, nor triplets. “Maybe they are triplets that get slower, stretched and straighten out,” offers Taylor. The drummer’s perspective demonstrates the inchoative, in-process forms that real rhythmic concepts take – as opposed to the cookie-cutter molds and oversimplifying labels that prevent such rhythmic phrases from being heard accurately.
The very idea that harmonic analysis can be pursued independently of rhythmic phrasing is one of the fallacies that we need to shine a light on, and it’s a deeply ingrained problem in institutionalized jazz pedagogy (Murray 2017: 118; Wilf 2014; McMullen 2021; Baraka [Jones] 1967). Monk’s swing is the refutation of the “straight” in his title “Straight No Chaser” – even and especially when the left-hand harmonic accent lands squarely on the 1 –akin to what Amiri Baraka calls a “negation of a negation” (Baraka 1996: 22). Thus, it is not just that Monk swings what is straight, but rather that his rhythmic phrasing undoes the binary between swung time and straight time. As composer Anthony Kelley (pers. comm., May 6, 2023) pointed out to me, Monk’s composition “Misterioso” and its left-hand phrasing is an excellent example of the way in which the straight is also swung—is in effect reclaimed by swing as a parody of rigid conventionality. (Monk 2012 [1958]; A. Kelley 2024).[13] Monk shows the connection between rhythmic syncopation and harmonic dissonance. They operate in tandem. Rather than taking for granted syncopation as rhythm manqué (displaced rhythm; rhythm ‘minus’ something), Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular lays bare the distortion that results from the presupposition that something called “straight time” is primary. As saxophonist Howard Wiley suggests, the construct of syncopation itself is perpetually in the process of being freed by its practitioners, although, by the same token, this generates the ever-present danger that it can be “‘taken back’ [by hegemonic powers] at any time” (Wiley, pers. comm, 2019; Kronfeld, 2019: 35)[14].
Just as Morrison rhetorically asks in relation to Ralph Ellison’s novel—“Invisible to whom?”, one may ask about Monk’s fame for his off-beat syncopations—syncopated to whom?[15] In other words, what is perfectly logical, to quote Monk himself (Kelley 2009, 2020), only appears as a deviation when going out of one’s way to negate and ignore the epistemologies embedded in Black Musical Space (in James Gordon Williams’ terms; Williams 2021). Thus, contrary to popular belief, what makes jazz unpredictable is precisely what makes it a language (cf. Moten 2018 on Chomsky 1986). Monk’s unpredictability becomes the language one needs to know. Monk’s swing is the refutation of the “straight” in his title “Straight No Chaser” – even and especially when the left-hand harmonic accent lands squarely on the 1 –akin to what Amiri Baraka calls a “negation of a negation” (Baraka 1996: 22).
I center Monk in the context of this issue on R(hy)pistemologies because Monk’s rhythmic prowess on the piano has been vastly underacknowledged by critics.[16] To put it bluntly, Monk’s harmonic interventions have fit more comfortably within modernism as it is traditionally construed than has his sense of rhythmic groove, swing and danceability.[17] In contrast, Robin D.G. Kelley offers a key discussion of the racial politics of “swing” and their impact on Monk’s conditional acceptance into the avant-garde (RDG Kelley 1999:52). Indeed, musicians have always emphasized the primacy of Monk’s time.[18] James Gordon Williams writes that Monk “encapsulated Black musical space” (Williams 2021: 15). Williams describes the profound impact of Monk’s teaching on the master drummers of his generation and after: “From Monk, [Billy] Higgins received observational lessons about space and time” (Williams 2021:54). Williams “view[s] African American improvisation as a deployment of oppositional spatial knowledge that reflects the material conditions and imaginations that shape Black lives on a daily basis” (Williams 2021: 9). Williams’ theorization of “musical place-making,” the improvisational mapping, even the “spatial insubordination” of Black music draws on Katherine McKittrick’s Black Geographies and bell hooks’ “radical creative space” (Williams 2021:6). The black sense of place reflected and generated in “African-American improvisatory and compositional practices” both indexes and calls into question the “spatial domination” and “hegemonic spaces that have displaced Black people” (Williams 2021:6-8).[19] Black musical space becomes especially salient in the context of policing and the racialized state violence inflicted on Monk himself.[20]
In his solo piano recording of “Evidence” (Monk 1954). Monk’s rigorous implication of the “one,” [i.e. beat 1], evoked via negation, becomes particularly salient.[21] A complete rhythm section unto himself, Monk breaks the silence on the “and” of beat 1, opening up the possibility of a half-time feel – the kind of implied time that evokes the clave and a whole past and future of progressive Afro-Cuban music. As is well known, Monk’s composition was based on the standard tune “Just You Just Me,” which he later retitled “Justice” spelled “JUST – US” – an ironic criticism of the Justice that is “just” for the racially unmarked (Edwards 2001; Leal 2023). His new title, “Evidence” takes apart rhythmically the feigned coherence of dominant evidentiary norms.[22]
But Monk’s use of time and rhythmic form, as we have seen, also points—both ways, as it were—to past and future transnational developments within Black American music from timba to funk to R&B and hip-hop. Here is Miles Davis in 1989:
I think a lot about Monk these days because all the music that he wrote can be put into these new rhythms that are being played today by a lot of young musicians – Prince, my new music… a lot of his music reminds me of the West Indian music being played today”… You could adapt some of his music to what’s going on now in fusion and in some of the more popular veins; maybe not all of them, but the ones that got the pop in the motherfucking head, you could. You know, that black rhythmic thing that James Brown could do so good, Monk had that thing and it’s all up in his compositions (80).
Davis’ remarks toward the end of his life foreshadow emerging theoretical paradigms drawing on Black musical aesthetics in recent years to theorize non-linear, trans-generational temporality (Okiji 2017; Sawyer 2025). They also resonate with recent intergenerational jazz practice by contemporary drummers like Kendrick Scott, who during COVID organized thirty-eight drummers to perform a virtual communal version of Monk’s “Evidence” (Scott 2020).[23]
In my dialogue with Michael J. Love about this, inspired by Love’s own work on the marginalization of the rhythmic vernacular within contemporary dance, I shared that an issue closely related to Monk’s often misunderstood rhythmic syncopation are the “grace notes” that are often illegible because they are taken as mistakes and sometimes kept out of the transcriptions, rather than attended to in their complexity as being where the music is actually happening.[24] This has to do with the idea that the rhythmic vernacular is the core text; but as Love has shown, drawing on Brenda Dixon Gottschild, it is precisely this Africanist dimension that is repressed (Love 2021, Gottschild 1996). Love and I have both witnessed with frustration from the dance and piano sides of jazz performance that in mass culture, extensive, convoluted maneuvers are often performed to avoid acknowledging the existence of Afrodiasporic rhythmic intelligence on its own terms.
In his important but still underappreciated 1936 philosophical monograph on the music of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke writes that “jazz is in constant danger” from commercialization (Locke 1936: 174). In fact, this is one of the main preoccupations of his book on the Black music of his time (Porter 2002:45-47).[25] Locke quotes at length from Louis Armstrong’s own book Swing that Music, which was also published in 1936. Armstrong’s Swing that Music has frequently been mistaken for “mere” biography or memoir, rather than offering the radical theoretical and historiographical critique of the music that he in fact contributes in this work (Veneciano 2004: 272; O’Meally 2022). Armstrong writes: “The reason swing musicians insist upon calling their music ‘swing music’ is because they know how different it is from the stale brand of jazz they’ve got so sick of hearing. But in the early days, when jazz was born, jazz wasn’t that way at all… We can now look back [remember, he is saying this in 1936!] and see where jazz got side-tracked. We won’t have many excuses… if we let today’s swing music go the same way” (Armstrong 1993 [1936]:122, qtd. in Locke 1936: 110). Armstrong anticipates the critical stance Baraka takes as LeRoi Jones in his 1963 Blues People in the chapter “Swing: From Verb to Noun,” where the noun is the grammatical correlate of reification. But already for Armstrong, “swing music” is itself the name of the attempt to wrest jazz back from the co-opting forces that dilute it and threaten its newness. Margo Natalie Crawford’s readings of “anticipatory, liminal” texts of the Harlem Renaissance provide an important context for Armstong’s observations. Crawford demonstrates that Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston “anticipate” (a technical notion Crawford imbues with both historiographical and rhythmic aesthetic valences) the Black Arts Movement in their trenchant critiques of black music’s commercialization (Crawford 2017).[26] Enriching the dialogue with the verbal art of his day, Armstrong draws an analogy in Swing that Music between the linear plots of pulp fiction and the commercialized versions of jazz. He writes: “I do know that a musician who plays in ‘sweet’ orchestras must be like a writer who writes stories for some popular magazines. He has to follow along the same kind of line all the time” (29). Armstrong continues: “[The conventional writer] has to write what he thinks the readers want just because they’re used to it. But a real swing musician never does that” (29). He speaks here from the center of the Afromodernist call for experimental renewal, for a novel musical language that will continually resist the stultifying linear progressions demanded by white commercial markets.
After drawing on Louis Armstrong’s critical poetics of swing, there is another artist Alain Locke specifically identifies as being able to preserve his art in an unadulterated way – Jimmie Lunceford. In the 1935 recording entitled “The Melody Man” (Lunceford 1935) you can hear a syncopation that evades capture. Propelled by drummer Jimmy Crawford’s brushes, the tightness between the horns and rhythm section prefigures James Brown’s band. I take this to be an example of the swing under the swing that continues to inform contemporary creative practice.
Mama, You Can Bet! (2020); Denderah (2013). Written, produced, arranged & performed by Georgia Anne Muldrow.
Georgia Anne Muldrow (b. 1983) is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose works brings together rhythmic and harmonic innovation, new epistemologies, and community-based activism. She recorded the 2013 album Denderah and the 2020 Mama, You Can Bet! as Jyoti, the pseudonym given to her by Alice Coltrane and reserved for what Muldrow calls her “one-woman jazz ensemble.” Here, as on all her studio albums, Muldrow plays every instrument. On Denderah’s fourth track, “Sup,” which echoes the BPM (beats per minute, or tempo) of “Melody Man,” listen for the drum language of the brushes – done on synthesizer. Muldrow is taking apart the syncopation even further. Peeling back the swing behind the (co-opted) swing, she layers her brushes over existing syntax of the 1920s and 30s, disclosing that era’s own repudiation of the commercialized “pulp fiction” music diagnosed by Louis Armstrong. Her brushwork on synthesized drums here illustrates the avant-garde reach of both past and present: “The syntax is there for you to be able to create a new path of articulation, but there always comes a time when it comes back to where it began” (Muldrow, pers. comm, October 30, 2023).
Georgia Anne Muldrow with Maya Kronfeld on keyboards as part of Justin Brown’s NYEUSI. 2018 Nublu Jazz Festival at SESC Pompeia in São Paulo, Brazil. Featuring Josh Hari, Chad Selph, Nadia Washington, Jaime Woods, Josh Hari. Photo courtesy of the author.
This intergenerational focus on rhythm lays bare the shortcomings of critical discussions of improvisation that center exclusively on melodic instruments, rather than on rhythm section instruments (drums, piano, bass) in their rhythmic functions. These trends are related to the willful misperception that blues is merely jazz’s more simple precursor, an erroneous historiography that is all too often used to justify the exclusion of Black artists and teachers from educational spaces. Counteracting these tendencies, Rhonda Benin reminds us in her vocal performance course of the same name that “Jazz Ain’t Nothing but the Blues” (Benin 2024). Benin, a vocal artist-educator and member of the Linda Tillery Cultural Heritage Choir makes clear that Blues as avant-garde roots music is precisely jazz’s chief template for ongoing revision, mutation and innovation (Tillery 1999, 2014; cf. Hunter 1998).
In James Baldwin’s essay “On the Uses of the Blues” (1964), he argues that black music is engaged in a form of direct truth-telling that makes good on the very communicative function that hegemonic language has abandoned. Baldwin makes the surprising move of correlating blues singer Bessie Smith with fiction writer Henry James, arguing that both artists fulfill the promise of creating non-reductive, non-deadening knowledge in a dominant culture whose expertise lies in the “distinctly American inability (like a frozen place somewhere)…to perceive the reality of others” (Baldwin 1986: 14). This provocatively interracial, trans-disciplinary rewriting of the American canon is based on black music as the irreplaceable model for truth-telling (“information” in the language of jazz artists) in a culture of evasion and denial. Baldwin writes: “‘Gin House Blues’ is a real gin house. ‘Backwater Flood’ is a real flood. This is what happened, this is what happened, this is what it is” (59). Baldwin’s own rhythmic reiteration asks us to grapple with the idea that the blues song is a real gin house, rather than a reference to one—flying in the face of the sacrosanct use-mention distinction in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of language (Cappelen, Herman, Lepore, & McKeever, 2023). But we can correlate Baldwin’s astonishing claim (his subsumption of the mere mention of the blues to the uses of the blues) with an idea shared across Frankfurt School and Afro-modernist aesthetics that art works, particularly in social contexts of violent erasure, must embody rather than describe (M. Davis 1998; Kaufman 2005). Baldwin’s twist, however, is to insist on the primacy of these acts of artistic embodiment, claiming—from the standpoint of Black music—that the possibility of literal truth-telling hinges on such artistic acts.
The modernist trope of exhaustion with available descriptions is greatly clarified by its Black critique of referentiality. But this critique is only possible thanks to the complex legacies of Black rhythmic forms in the music itself, legacies which are still often feared by and excluded from academically-codified philosophical aesthetics (and we can argue, are not fully theorized even in Baldwin’s essay, where discussions of lyric and lyricization are most prominent).
Baldwin’s own use of “the blues” would have been invoking a holistic notion of the oneness of Black music (Wiley, pers. comm. May 15, 2009) that even now emphasizes the continuities among and between jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, funk, hip-hop and even those genres later coded as white, such as rock n’ roll and punk. Genre distinctions between jazz and blues are widely regarded among practitioners of the music as artificial, and too often marshalled to perform a colonizing function (Baraka 1963). I’ve suggested that Black music according to Baldwin catalyzes the modernist critique of descriptive, propositional knowing. At the same time, however Baldwin also calls into question Kantian/Frankfurt School notions of aesthetic autonomy by insisting on the claim that in a coercive society, Black music isliteral description.
The salience of rhythm in the U.S. and other regions of the African diaspora is due not only to the textural – and indeed textual! – richness and complexity of Black rhythmic forms but also to the systemic racism that has prevented descriptive content from being encoded in other channels; for example, in the lyrics, as Tyfahra Singleton has shown (Singleton 2011). James Baldwin writes: Americans are able to admire Black music only to the extent that “a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it” (Baldwin 1951; my emphasis). And what is being protected, he’s saying, is the white sense of self. The sentimental in American culture, we might say, is a defense against the tragic and the critical.
As a closing counterpoint, I’d like to offer an example from Ahmad Jamal’s album Happy Moods (Jamal, 1960). I’ve selected the track “Excerpts of the Blues” because we are often taught harmony on the model of a binary cliché between major chords as happy and minor chords as sad; but applying that false binary to the blues make the innovations of the blues form illegible (recall that Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” is also a blues!) The blues take us behind that notion of major as opposed to minor thirds, but more importantly, they take us beyond the emotional binaries that Baldwin diagnoses as so uniquely American, where “happiness” is a vapid, saccharine substitute for real joy. This is what makes Ahmad Jamal’s Happy Moods so interesting. In the piece entitled “Excerpts from the Blues,” Jamal demonstrates that major seven chords are part of the blues (whereas in codified jazz pedagogy, blues harmony is most frequently associated with dominant-seven chords). This then becomes a point of departure for other colors and hues, as when he lets C major 7 (the piece’s tonic or “home” key) get inflected by its minor 4 (F minor). Like Monk’s swinging of straight time, Jamal reclaims this major 7 sound not as empty optimism but as containing within it all the emotional complexities of the blues. The form of the composition itself holds all that together: the A section is built on a 1 chord that is a major seven; then the B section is a traditional blues as we might expect it to be, based on the dominant sound.
Every bar of “Excerpts of the Blues” is a masterclass; indeed, it is sometimes observed that one bar of Ahmad Jamal contains within it the whole future of recorded music. I have created a two-bar loop out of the material from 0:11-0:14, which I have notated (imperfectly!) as a bar of 4/4 followed by a bar of 2/4. At the “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm” Conference, I improvised on the piano along with this six-beat loop, joined by Paris Nicole Strother, founder of the group We Are KING.[27]
Along with trio mates Israel Crosby on bass and Vernel Fournier on drums (brushes), Ahmad Jamal expands existing concepts of rhythm and harmony, but does so out of a capacious sense of spaciousness. The array of interlocking parts means that it’s never just one thing. There is 1) the relationship between the drums and bass; 2) the relationship between Jamal’s two hands at the piano (note the unexpected accent on the triplet in the left-hand chord just as the harmony darkens and deepens); 3) the change in rhythmic feel within a single line in the right hand, where Jamal’s melodic phrase switches mid-stream from triplet time (swung) to march time (straight), and back again. With Ahmad Jamal, you feel the “both/and” of it all. The trio is playing different facets of the blues simultaneously, just as Jamal himself is showing us so many different facets of the harmony and rhythm, all at the same time.
Many thanks to Thomas Taylor and Tobin Chodos for help with notation-interpretation.
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Notes
* I am grateful to Erin Graff Zivin, Jonathan Leal, Michael J. Love, Paris Nicole Strother, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Thomas Taylor, Inger Flem and the participants of the “‘(Rhy)pistemologies’: Thinking Through Rhythm” conference at the USC Experimental Humanities Lab, and to Art Share Los Angeles. Special thanks to my longtime interlocutor, Michael Sawyer. Earlier drafts were presented at the 2024 ACLA in Montreal, and at the University of Pittsburgh, 53rd Annual Jazz Seminar. Special thanks to Aaron J. Johnson, Michael C. Heller, and Yoko Suzuki. My discussion of Ahmad Jamal here benefited from “Ahmad Jamal: In Appreciation,” moderated by Dr. Michael P. Mackey with panelists Dr. Alton Merrell, Dr. Nelson Harrison, and Judge Warren Watson. November 3, 2024. University of Pittsburgh Hill Community Engagement Center. I thank Stephen Best, Anthony Kelley, Philip Rupprecht, Davina Thompson and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable discussions and feedback. I would like to acknowledge my late father Amichai Kronfeld (ז״ל) for teaching me drum exercises before I could walk.
[1] Guthrie P. Ramsey discloses “the ways in which blackness troubles the disciplinary boundaries among the subfields of music scholarship” (Ramsey 2004: 19). See George E. Lewis on “an ongoing narrative of dismissal, on the part of many…composers, of the tenets of African-American improvisative forms” (2002:216). My participation in Eisa Davis’ sound-based conceptual art work “The Essentialisn’t” informs my thinking here. For full text see E. Davis 2025 . See also https://www.jackny.org/whats-on/the-essentialisnt-5 .
[2] Audio available via Les Nuits de France Culture 2020; cf. Cobo-Piñero 2022; Dunning 1995; Kronfeld 2024.
[3] Recall that Amiri Baraka insisted that the term “Aesthetic” in the “Black Aesthetic” is “useful only if it is not depoliticization of reference.” See Baraka’s 1989 essay entitled, “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture” (Baraka 2009: 9-28). He writes, “The Blues is not even twelve [bars] necessarily, the insistence on that form is formalism” (24). Baraka’s notion of “functional music” has offered a key challenge to reductively formalist paradigms of aesthetic autonomy (Baraka [Jones] 1963). For in-depth discussion of Baraka’s explicit and implicit poetics, see A. Reed 2021. Kwami Coleman illuminates the “ostensible [and ultimately untenable] wedge” in jazz criticism of the mid-60s “between writings on the avant-garde that focused on the music’s design and writings that addressed its social politics” (2021:268). The deeper readings of aesthetic form offered by Okiji and Davis all too often fell out of view in formalist criticism of the twentieth century and beyond. Kaufman (2000) and Wolfson (2000) critique and correct this reductive reception.
[4] Guthrie P. Ramsey, following Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., writes: “The process of repetition and revision that characterizes these musical styles shows how black musicians and audiences have continually established a unified and dynamic ‘present’ through music” (Ramsey 2004: 36; Floyd 1996). See Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” (Jones 1967). For critical engagement with Baraka’s influential essay, see Ramsey 2004: 36.
[5] See Berliner (1994), DiPiero (2021), Lewis (2002), Monson (1996), Wilf (2014) for critical perspectives on the dominating “paper-based” approach. See Prouty (2005) for an illuminating study redressing the limits of “prevailing institutionally based narratives of jazz education’s history.”
[6] For an illustration via divergent interpretations of Monk’s “Round Midnight,” see DeVeaux 1999, 223-24. See Baraka as LeRoi Jones (1964) on the racial and epistemological problematics of notation when it comes to Monk’s and Louis Armstrong’s solos (14).
[7] For an account of embodied knowledges and Afro-diasporic rhythmic form that denies the success of such attempts at erasure, see McPherson 2025.
[8] See also Fumi Okiji’s discussion of Muhall Richard Abrams (Okiji 2018).
[11] See the unprecedented article by Taylor in Modern Drummer featuring trumpet and piano transcriptions from Kind of Blue rendered for drumset, “Comping With Miles and Wynton” (T. Taylor 2003) and his forthcoming book, It’s All About the Ride!: The Ride Cymbal and Snare Drum Book (T. Taylor 2025). For further resources, see https://www.thomasdrum.com/teaching
[12] See Samuel A. Floyd: “In Monk’s playing, almost every event is unexpected” (Floyd 1995: 82)
[13] See Kronfeld, 2019. See also Kelley on his recent completion of Mary Lou Williams’ unfinished last work “History: A Wind Symphony,” performed by the Duke Wind Symphony on April 13, 2024. Interview in Walker, Khalifa and Shelton-Ormond, 2024
[14] For a major musical and ethnographic intervention in the historiography of swing, based on research at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, see Howard Wiley & The Angola Project, 12Gates to the City, 2010, compact disc. See also Atkinson 2016.
[15] See Morrison’s challenge to Ralph Ellison: “Invisible to whom?” (Greenfield-Sanders 2019)
[16] In contrast, see Robin D. G. Kelley on Monk’s “rhythmical melodies” and his stride piano mastery, as heard from the perspective of Herbie Nichols (RDG Kelley 2009: 98-99). And see Somers 1988, Haywood 1994-1995.
[17] See R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 46, 231-232 on Monk’s dancing reflecting his desired rhythmic pulse for the band; for further philosophical implications centering swing see Carr 2023.
[18] Jason Moran comments in a Downbeat Blindfold Test on Carmen McRae’s lyricized arrangement of “Straight No Chaser,” entitled “Get It Straight”: “The lyric that jumped out was ‘The time is a dancer’ because that’s one of the most important things about… Monk” (Moran/Alouette 2018: 98).
[19] See also Baraka on polyrhythm as a Pan-African “acknowledgment of several…‘places’ … existing simultaneously” (Baraka 2009: 23).
[20] See Robin D.G. Kelley for an account of Monk’s beating by police in Delaware: “According to Nica…one cop started beating on his hands with a billy club, his pianist’s hands” (R.D.G. Kelley 2009: 254). See also Art Blakey on Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Monk: “I watched… how they destroyed [Bird] and Bud and the way they’re destroying Thelonious Monk now” (A. Taylor 1979: 248).
[21] “The one” (i.e. the first beat of the measure or phrase) is the implicit temporal marker that serves as the point of departure for each rhythmic phrase and is loaded with metaphysical significance. Pianist Jon Batiste describes Monk’s “Evidence” as exemplifying a technique he calls “the rhyming of notes” (Batiste 2021).
[22] Both Brent Hayes Edwards and Jonathan Leal have written brilliantly on Monk’s composition as making palpable “fragmentary evidence” (Edwards 2001; Leal 2023). Amiri Baraka’s earlier reading flips the script by stressing an Africanist epistemology: “Evidence, Monk says… [Black] life is meant, consciously, as evidence…Everything is in it, can be used, is then, equal — reflecting the earliest economic and social form, communalism” (Baraka 1996: 21-22).
[24] See citations of Ran Blake and Chick Corea in Feurzig 2011.
[25] See Eric Porter’s discussion of Locke’s ambivalence: “Locke’s optimism was tempered by a recognition that the popularity of jazz threatened the integrity of the music as a black expression”(Porter 2002: 47; Locke 2022).
[26] Crawford focuses on Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama, written after Newport Jazz Festival, where the speaker asks “What’s gonna happen to my music?” (Crawford 2017, 28).
Toni Morrison, deep in the complexity of the novel Beloved, asks a question for all writers that is relevant for the thinking that I am going to present here: “…how can I say things that are pictures?” (Morrison 2004) Voicing what Morrison has written, the author saying through the writing of “things” that are the images of the transgenerational and transsubjective mode of cognition, Rememory, that is the engine of Beloved, introduces the technology of sound that is the preoccupation the guiding concept here: Rhythm. This allows us to propose, a series of questions:
How can I write things that are sounds?
How can I make sounds that are pictures?
I want to begin again with the technology of shattering as a form of making that will serve as the common mode of inquiry for this exploration; adding a question to the ones that have begun to pile up: how can I say things that are broken? A text that allows us into this question is Makoto Fujimura’s Art & Faith where the artist writes:
Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art form of repairing broken tea ware by reassembling ceramic pieces, creates anew the valuable pottery, which now becomes more beautiful and more valuable than the original vessel. (Fujimura 2004)
This art form consists of, in the first place the search for a beautiful object, that then, in the second place, must be shattered, to serve as the beginning of a new beginning, when in the third place it is reassembled. Similar to the limitations of writing, Kintsugi is not a practice that can be presented in its totality—finding/shattering/reassembling—and it is only through the final movement that we can reverse the journey from caterpillar to butterfly across the temporal smear of the metamorphic journey. In the 16th century, according to Fujimura, “Kintsugi is likely to have been refined out of tea culture … and the aesthetic of Sen no Rikyū.” (Fujimura) Rather than kill a servant who shattered a prized piece of tea ware, one of Rikyū’s acolytes had it reassembled, “using the Urishi Japanese lacquering technique with gold gilding.”[1] What all this means is “[t]hat Japanese kin stands for ‘gold’ and tsugi means to reconnect” but tsugi also has, significantly, connotations of “connecting to the next generation.” (Fujimura)
Stitch 1
I want to be intentional here and in the first act of connecting broken and separated shards emphasize the connection between generations exemplified by these Japanese art practices to Morrison’s project of dealing with the crisis of the Middle Passage with Rememory. “And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else.” (Morrison)
Fujimura, in his text, visits his native Japan and finds himself at the 6th Dimension Café to think with Nakamura-san, “a youthful Kintsugi master…in the midst of vinyl records.”[2] That afternoon, Fujimura, and Nakamura-san work through the dimensions in order to arrive at a definition of the Sixth Dimension, which is where I want to linger for a moment before, ultimately, proposing a Seventh. Fujimura writes:
We live, let’s say in the 3rd dimension trying the best we can to deal with time and space. The idea of Kintsugi mending…perhaps is the 4th dimension. The 5th dimension…will be what Nakamura-san showed me next; an 18th century teacup mended with early 20th century fragments…Nakamura-san opened a 6th dimension…it’s the Kintsugi master searching for fragments and broken pots, not for the purpose of mending them, but for contemplation. (Fujimura)
Following the logic of the space that Fujimura has presented for our thinking I want to turn attention to the vinyl records that line the walls of the 6th Dimension Café. Out of that gathering I will pull two objects for our work in an effort to participate in the practice of existing in the 6th dimension, mindfully, and its preoccupation with shards. Shard #1 is Sonny Rollins’ side The Saxophone Colossus that is itself a shard made up of jagged fragments of other broken objects. The particular part of the Shard of the album that allows us this practice is the first track, “St. Thomas”. A fragment that is made up of a rhythmic fragmenting and rupture of what I will call here the coherent incoherence of the undisturbed disruption of the rhythmic necessity of the Blues.
The second object of preoccupation is the recording that serves as the disciplining framework of this thinking, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue that I want to shatter further to focus our attention on the shimmering omnipresence of the bearable lightness of the darkness of something less and more than the most velvety shades of dark blue.
Shard 1: Saint Thomas
I want to be careful and in doing so explicit about the stitching together that is here. Morrison asks us about representation and the break between the thing and the expression of the thing. Fujimura regards his art practice as an act of faith that is informed by the art of pulling together the pieces of a whole that has been broken. Returning with never having ever left, it is Morrison’s cognitive realm of the recognition of the non-existence of the breach that is the weaving together of the break that is already full. It is the lack of faith of St. Thomas the Apostle, who probes the stigmata of the risen Christ in order to prove to himself, in a deficit of faith, that this figure is who he purports to be. St. Thomas is the ancestral home of the saxophonist and the tune of the same name that erupts for our consideration.
I want to go to Sonny’s second solo and examine how the artist breaks it and then, in the practice of sonic Kintsugi, puts it back together in an act of blasphemy in the shadow of the colossus. I want to point us to the moment of the breaking that preoccupies me here that is underscored by what I believe is a gasp of disbelief from master percussionist Max Roach. Sonny finally and belatedly disrupts the blues, approaching the resolution of the line from another direction to satisfy the need for completion that is only coherent because Roach knows the form and practice of that which Sonny has shattered for the purpose of reassembly.
I want to lay alongside this shattering a shattering of the shattering by putting back together what Rollins broke before leaving this object as Fujimura and Nakamura-san have allowed us to consider the implication and aesthetic value of its existence as sublime in its shattered nature.
Shard 2: Oh Ye of Little Faith
Third Citizen: We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do; for, if he shows us his wounds and tells us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them.
Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 3
William Shakespeare
I want to first present at least two trigger warnings that will introduce my examination of the opening object of the canonical Kind of Blue. First, the album is in the wrong order. Second, Cannonball Adderley walks off with every solo on the album.
The first instance of blasphemy is exemplified by an ongoing conversation Prof. Kronfeld (Maya) and I have that has spanned over ten years and elaborates itself in a back and forth between us that trades objects and thinking. Here is one on this point.
Me: I figured out why I never really “got” “Blue in Green”. The order of the album should be “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “All Blues,” “Flamenco Sketches,” then!!! and only then “Blue in Green.” It slows down the pace and I just need to get to “All Blues” after “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader.”
Kronfeld: I really wonder who decided the album order. Would not be surprised if it was NOT Miles. And as usual your attention to temporality and it’s non-ornamental function prevails!! (pers. comm., 2024)
What this conversation implies is that Miles, or whoever organized the album, is practicing the same type of disruption of the resolution of the blues that we witnessed in the play between Rollins and Roach within the confines of St. Thomas.
As is clear from the title of this paper, I want to center the opening moment of the album “So What,” and think with and through it to unearth its relationship to the question of generative disruption, and re-constitution. I’m most interested in the way in which the first opportunity we have to live with the song unfolds by thinking with Miles fully mindful of his iconic and predictable admonition that if you knew what he was thinking you’d be him. An interesting improvisation of Descartes…I think like Miles therefore I am Miles. We will leave that to the side for now.
This reveals the primary point of separation for us to develop some way to suture the break(s), so to speak, between artist and listener. To this point I am most interested in the in the long durée of the song from its birth at an iconic recording session and the way it evolves over the next several years.
Careful attention to the life of Miles Davis reveals an anecdote. Miles never owned a car that was not constructed by Ferrari or Maserati. For my part, the opening of the version of “So What” on the album is resonant of Miles’s love affair with Italian automotive art.
The start of the original album version is exploratory. Miles has just picked up the car and walks slowly around it, his fingers, that normally are employed to tease notes from his horn, trail over the hand formed sheet metal before he finally lowers himself into the driver’s seat and turns over the engine that rumbles to life. There is an existential or perhaps even ontological gesture I want to mark. Ferraris are the product of an unbroken genealogy back to the art practice of the Italian Renaissance. Miles didn’t create the car, but he is in the position to appreciate, operate, and stress it to unearth its performance. Similarly, “So What” is the product of an unbroken line back to the foundation of the blues and Miles is a steward of that apparition.
The rhythm section here serves as the engine, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and the pistons in the form of Jimmy Cobb, on traps.
Stitch 2
Bill Evans helps us here with his liner notes to Kind of Blue that bind us to the framing we have been pursuing all along writing:
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.
The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.
This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflections, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician. (Evans 1959)
I am interested here in thinking about the breach between what we have learned about the series of unbroken lines I am attentive to here. In this instance the one between object, breaking, and repair that Evans wants to further blur by speaking to the need to produce the coherent line, without discernible breach between thought and performance. This analogy, pursued by Evans, takes us back to Morrison’s question regarding saying something about or that is a picture. Here the pianist wants us to understand that the album before us is a picture converted to sound; broken while at the same time seamlessly related to the larger form that provides the linkage necessary for proper translation and evolution that can be rendered coherent.
Miles has started the engine, and its note arrives in the form of Jimmy Cobb on ride who makes the cymbal shimmer, emitting a form of unbroken light that revolves around the groove… a lighthouse guarding a rocky and dangerous coastline. Cobb defines the contours of the groove while at the same time filling it to the point of overflowing and then, in an act of kenosis, lets the air out of it before filling it again. This is the back and forth of swing, the pendulum that flows hither and yon that allows me to take up the second instance of blasphemy.
What we know about the pendulum and its swing is that it loses power with each trip through the arc of its travel. In the world we inhabit this means that you can hold a cannonball to your nose, literally touching it, release the 300-pound piece of iron and let it swing and stand your ground because on its return it will be short of hitting your face. It has expended energy on its trip there and back so it will eventually come to rest. This is one type of swing and one type of cannonball.
This does not apply to the Cannonball otherwise known as Julian Adderley. I want to contextualize the praise I intend to heap on Adderley here over and above that I grant to the play of Miles, Trane, and Evans. Miles is eager to leave bop behind. Clap hands, here comes Charlie. Cannonball represents a shattering of the shattering of the project that Miles has insisted upon; playing with and thorough modes which the altoist demonstrates is the invitation to find the blues-based possibility in that problem. Miles is fly fishing. Cannonball is trolling the bottom with stink bait for catfish. He is pure soul and his insistence on anchoring Miles’s project to the vernacular of the blues is revelatory. It frees it and allows us to flatten the relationship between rhythm section and soloist blasting the hole in the blues that James Brown will fill. The relationship, no, marriage between Cannonball, Paul Chambers, and the metronomic Jimmy Cobb cannot be put asunder. Evans insists upon comping with the cords and here I mean cords not chords woven by Miles and these three collectively become the Third Citizen of Coriolanus breaking the bond, sticking their tongue in the wound and giving it voice. Clap hands here comes Charlie.
Shard 3: So What Now
Here we are: at some distance yet closer than ever to the vinyl we pulled from the shelves of the 6th Dimension Café, we find ourselves years later in the past in Copenhagen. Cannonball has been told to lay out to the point of not making the trip and Bill Evans has been replaced with the symmetrical blues shouting of the sonic architect Wynton Kelly. Cobb and Chambers remain, forming the engine block that Miles intends to modify seeking not just more but a different form of performance. Now there is no need for the slow walk around the machine, it is already fueled and ready to go, and Miles snaps off the time to signal the breakneck pace he requires. They, the collectivity, understand everything there is to know about this thing and this tour is the angle quickest for flight for Coltrane, the event horizon of his trip to beyond. I am curious here about this process that is the mana of sonic art but the poison of literature: plagiarism, self or otherwise. So what?
These restatements of the case, over and over, night after night on this European tour are worth exploring in detail. “So What” becomes like a sea monster that has some parts of its body above water, recognizable, and others below the surface. All of them connected and labyrinthine. The version we are thinking with in Copenhagen witnesses Miles returning to the language of bop that he has tried to abandon. The modal complexity of “So What” invites or perhaps requires the rhythmic and harmonic intricacy of bebop. Clap Hands. Here comes Charlie.
In the other versions on this tour, Miles finishes his solo in his classic form. Laconic. Clipping off the final sentence leaving the listener to wonder if they missed the final farewell, never to hear from him again. Not here. He hangs around daring Coltrane to get rid of him by blowing him away on a flight of fancy that the crowd boos; sound that is edited from the recording. Trane is preoccupied with the line he is exploring; this is the tour that includes the iconic and revealing interview when he answers the following question from the too hip to be hip radio host:
Interviewer: Would you say, would you say that you’re trying to play everything you hear?
Artist: Well…
Interviewer: At one time, or something like that?
Artist: No, there – there are some set things that I know, some devices that I know, harmonic devices that I know that will take me out of the ordinary path, you see? If I use them. But I haven’t played ‘em enough and I’m not familiar with them enough yet to take the one single line through ‘em so I play all of ‘em, you know, tryin’ to acclimate my ear so I can hear.
I mentioned earlier that Cannonball had opened the portal between this improvisational form and the blues that is filled by funk. There is joy in repetition. The time is short, but I want to propose that the James Brown walks the road Cannonball paves all the while repeating the groove until he has exhausted it of its kinetic energy only after he has been able to acclimate his ear. Doin’ it to Death. When JB calls for horns, he is adding that to the groove to discipline it before it slips the tether and spirals out of control. Trane’s horn serves as warning to the possibility of opening doors that are hidden in the groove that cannot be closed. A shattering that can only be repaired with more breaking. These are the two paths that lead to the 7th Dimension.
Conclusion
I want to return to the beginning in order to get to the end and truncate Morrison’s question, rendering it as “How do I say things?” Fujimura, along with Nakamura-san propose a method: Make the beautiful object. Break the beautiful object. Repair the now more beautiful object for the breaking. Recall the sixth dimension stops short here, using the broken object as the site of meditation and contemplation in service of the production of the new thing.
Morrison calls this Rememory, the encounter with a sufficiently shattered object with another sufficiently shattered object both of which mix the shards together so the separation, time and place of breaking, and the possibility of joining is lost to the point of mattering in not mattering.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” (Morrison)
Sonny is rememory-ing. We left unremarked his calypsonian reading of the blues or vice versa that itself is another shattering, a rememory that belongs to somebody else, but the Brooklyn born Saxophone Colossus has grown up with the sound of his Island ancestors all around him. How it arrives or who it belongs to or its situatedness in or out of time and place is the thing of the thing. He plays with the rememory of the blues and shatters it by failing to resolve it which becomes the object of confusion and upon reflection the practice of kintsugi by Max Roach who is determined to reassemble the tea set and is taken aback when Sonny steps on the already broken porcelain. And so what?
It is all more and less than the darkest shades of kinda blue(ish) because Miles is in flight from Bird only to find that it is swing that sung and delivered him to where had already always been. Clap Hands. Here comes Coltrane.
None of this is possible without Nakamura-san’s Sixth Dimension, the form, practice, and café. Recall it is the identification of the broken object for purposes of contemplation that is the stuff of the 6th form. I want to propose that the 7th Dimension is both a contemplative and active practice of working with objects that are properly broken which requires that we identify the component parts of the thing in order to identify where this ends and that begins.
“So What” exemplifies this because there is no melody per se. It has already distanced itself from the concept of song and in that separation the shards become the thing they were not meant to be: a song in the hands of other artisans.
Literature—the practice of writing—resists this generative technology. The journey from Morrison to Fujimura along with Nakamura-san, to tarry with Max and Sonny, to arrive at the limitations of the album version that only gets itself figured out by hundreds of acts of what writers and critics of writers would call plagiarism, is needed in this world so we can say things that are pictures.
References
Evans, Bill. 1959. Liner notes to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue. Columbia Records.
Fujimura, Makoto. 2021. Art + Faith: A Theology of Making. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Morrison, Toni. 2004. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books.
Rhythm is as central to Black film as it is to the blackness of life. I’m interested in thinking about sound as foundational to what scholar Darius Bost terms the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, might provide a reading of works from this era. Here, I will take two paths toward a theory of sound in and as Black queer diasporic cinema. I will reserve my comments to two interrelated elements, rhythm and the voice. I will work to draw out how the filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s montage and poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in various experimental film works lay a rhythmic mark on the constellation of the varied labors referred to as Black film.
One unlikely source to begin thinking the itinerary of rhythm and Black queer film might be scholar Robeson Taj Frazier’s recently published book KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, about experimental L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Ben Caldwell’s astro-grounded aesthetics. Caldwell, the founder of KAOS Network—a media arts education center and performance space in historically Black Leimert Park—produces work that evinces an artistic hydraulics which moves across scales. In remarks delivered during the 1992 Black Popular Culture conference filmmaker, Arthur Jafa, Caldwell’s former student at Howard University, proposes an aesthetic agenda for the Black filmmaker—to transpose the tonality and movement of Black music into the making of Black film. In Jafa’s forward to KAOS Theory, he reveals that it is in Caldwell’s work where he first encounters what he terms a “fully realized jazz cinema” (Jafa 2023: 6). Frazier’s work guides the reader through the aesthetic maneuvers that visualize this improvisatory impulse in Caldwell’s visual practice, or what scholar Fumi Okiji might describe as “the play, the wrestling and cooperation, of disparate parts” that is the “fecund blackness” of jazz (Okiji 2018: 6, 4).
In the 1980s, Caldwell co-founded the performance ensemble Hollywatts which included actor Roger Guenveur Smith, musicians Mark Broyard and Vernon “King Oji” Vanoy, and filmmaker Wesley Groves. Hollywatts employed video work, hip-hop, reggae, vocalization, theater, and musicianship in order to forge uncommon connections amongst distinct community formations. Their performances and Caldwell’s film works were projected on site via monitors controlled by Caldwell and Groves. Their projections were manipulated in such a way that they would tremble, pause, deform, and play in reverse—a live improvised rhythmic visual response to the sounds of Hollywatts’s musical performance (Batts 2024). Hollywatts’s practice gave presence to the always immanent liveness of the moving image. Caldwell’s and Groves’ skill as filmmakers and projectionists “enabled Roger to engage in a call-and-response with the videos; he would ask the screen a question, and Ben’s edited videos answered with an image or cinematic sequence. Then the image was rewound and reshown when Roger repeated the question or made a statement, he and the screen engaging in back-and-forth chant” (Frazier 2023: 178).
In this essay, I argue that much of the Black queer experimental film of the 1980s and 90s, considered in the most expansive of terms, utilizes both sonic and visual rhythms to challenge the racializing mechanisms that seek to submerge the queer potency of blackness across the Black diaspora. This work, resonant with Hollywatts’s extension of the cinematic via Black sonic methodologies (i.e. call-and-response), is conversant with Michael Gillespie’s concept film blackness, which seeks to “[suspend] the idea of black film by pushing for a more expansive understanding of blackness and cinema” (Gillespie 2016: 5). Gillespie queries “What do we mean when we say black film? Black directors, actors, or content?…What does the designation black film promise, and what does it disallow?” (5). Part of the impetus for this line of questioning is to expand the objects and modes of study available for understanding how blackness becomes visible on screen and the variegated work its figuration performs. The avant-garde musical methodologies employed in experimental Black queer cinema offer a potent avenue for thinking the import of (Black) sexuality, in its filmic deployment, as a rhythmic-visual tool advancing a processual blackness.
Visual Polyrhythms
In his forward to KAOS Theory, Jafa describes a scene from Caldwell’s 1977 film I&I: An African Allegory that makes me see Riggs’s 1991 experimental film Anthem with new eyes. Anthem is an 8-minute short film/music video soundtracked by house music, punctuated pauses in the rhythm, and a whiplash sound effect. Riggs dances in front of a white tarp graffitied in memorialization to the late Joseph Beam, the progenitor of Black gay cultural production as the editor of the first anthology of Black gay men’s poetry and prose. Certain motifs flash briefly but effectively, punching through the frame and rhythmically playing as what could be termed imagistic beats interrupting the moving image. I’m most interested in the still images of drag queens and trans women, including the legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson, which work in the montage alongside Riggs’s image and stock footage of West African dance from the continent. Although, as Stuart Hall has argued, we always risk the flattening of Africa with the excision of context, the images of moving and leaping bodies conspire to both thicken and collapse our vision of time (Hall 1989). I would argue that this is accomplished through rhythm.
The house music that is played throughout is given a visual polyrhythm via figures whose appearance does not necessarily align with the metronomic back beat of the music, but form their own contrapuntal incision. This maneuver is heightened in scenes of dance filmed at Club Bella Napoli (the dancers are listed as the Bella Boys in the credits). The scenes give off the feeling of a strobe light, where vision oscillates between granular clarity and complete darkness. The metaphorical strobes do not align with the soundtrack, much like in Riggs’s experimental documentary from 1991, Tongues United, where still newspaper obituary photographs of those who have died from AIDS-related complications are flashed sullenly in and out of time with the sound of a heartbeat and then a fast-ticking clock, ending with a picture of the director himself in preparation for his own certain death. I would place the sound of (Riggs’s?) heartbeat in dialogue with the mimetic sound of the heart in another experimental short film/music video from the era; white filmmaker John Sanborn’s Untitled (1989), an impassioned exploration of choreographer Bill T. Jones’s grief for and memory of his late partner and collaborator Arnie Zane through dance, montage, and music. The video ends with Jones forcefully and rhythmically beating his chest, the sound and echo giving the impression of a powerful though slowing heart in motion as Sanborn gradually pans the camera away from Jones and the lights fade to black, leaving Jones in the otherworldly place of his deceased partner’s voice, which provides the background for the film.
In Anthem, as in Tongues and Untitled, it is as if the beat were a form of rhythmic visual accumulation. In Jafa’s elaboration of Caldwell’s film I&I, he focuses on “a sequence… composed entirely of black-and-white still images that triggered such a shift in my thinking, that I’m still working out its implications… There’s a staccato montage of images that demonstrated conclusively the possibility of imposing on cinema the feel and flow of black music” (Jafa 2023: 16). Caldwell’s mixing of photographer Diane Arbus’s imagery with Black representations leads Jafa to ask “How was it” then, “black cinema?” and Caldwell’s later work made Jafa question “Does cinema have any potential therapeutic value?” (7). I’m interested in this provocation to questioning because it speaks to Gillespie’s assertion that “black film is always a question, never an answer” (Gillespie 2016: 16). Potentially, a focus on the rhythm of film blackness, as opposed to the Black on film, can go some way toward keeping the collapse of racial “referent and representation” in abeyance (2). Other still images that Riggs calls upon to flash on screen are ACT UP’s slogan Silence = Death, the American flag, and the Pan-African flag in red, black, and green. At the end of the video, all of these images flash, waver, and visually layer as blues musician Blackberri sings “America” a cappella while Hemphill, looking directly at the camera, confidently recites in his deep voice, with a slight lisp, the words to his poem “American Wedding,” here an erotic suture to a mesh of moving imagery without certain confluence.
The film is, in an aslant way, conversant with Caldwell’s Hollywatts and what Frazier describes as the group’s use of certain “film/video images” and “audio cues” as “predetermined ‘constants [which] served as the groups collective metronome supplying them with the foundational indicators, cues, and steady pulse to perform and ‘play in time.’ It was within the gaps and breaks between these cues that they experimented, improvised, and cultivated new interpretations. Such improvisatory shifts were often rhythmic…” (Frazier 2023: 178). The use of improvisation as a technique in the cutting and editing of sound and video—a visual rearticulation of jazz improvisation—allows for readings of blackness as recombinant and always already in process as opposed to fixed (Linscott 2016). Thinking with Riggs’s Anthem as improvising with the prerecorded audio of Black queer house music, American and Pan-African visual and sonic iconography, archival still images of Black queer life, movement imagery, and stock and pre-recorded footage opens a new texture for considering the ways in which his work signifies an ongoingness, an enduring aesthetic and corporeal beat at some distance from the registers of mourning, melancholia, and political malaise and toward what Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman calls the Black ecstatic or “black queer… representational practices that punctuate the awful now with the joys and possibilities of the beyond (of alternate worlds and ways)” (Abdur-Rahman 2018: 344). Riggs’s non-linear, rhythmic, and arrhythmic experimental juxtapositions of video and sound picture compressed, dense, and compassionate relations out of step with normative scripts and clock time, allowing for dynamic, mutable, and vital interpretations.
The Black Queer Ensemblic
In the DVD extras from the Frameline distributed version of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied there is footage of poet Essex Hemphill practicing his narration for the documentary. Unlike the talking head footage featured in the actual film, here Hemphill’s head is for the most part faced down, looking at the pages from which he’s reading as opposed to the direct and straightforward glare he delivers in Tongues. When he does look up from the page, it’s an obvious look behind the camera at Riggs as if for approval. He looks to the director, a fellow Black gay man, for confidence as to his delivery. Two things stand out to me about these images. The first, is my own surprise at seeing Hemphill unsure of himself. On screen, both visually and vocally there is an assuredness to his posture and tone that did not prepare me for Hemphill in rehearsal for his part, in the process of steadying his body for the screen.
There’s much yet to be written on Hemphill. There’s that striking voice, its particular grain evoking the work it was put to across open mics, college campuses, bookstores, and films throughout his life. His voice is special. There’s a reason it was so often utilized. It’s the anoriginary Black queer vocal, strong and sensual, the erotic considering the pornographic, a vocal caress (Lorde 1984). It has the quality of leadership in its steadfastness, found consequential under a context of heightened premature death. His voice could also be read at the level of pace, the quality of his pauses and repetition. His masterful control of his instrument, from the page to film, is why hearing difference in that voice is so shocking; like when his voice cracks when facing his mortality as an ambivalent Person with AIDS at the Black Nations/Queer Nations? conference in 1995. His is also a voice that requested a complement. His live performance work was often performed in chorus. What would it mean to read that replayed instrument that is the materiality of Hemphill’s voice on film as music?
The second aspect of this footage that draws my attention is its focus on the sound of the voice. Hemphill and Riggs share moments of poetic dialogue, reciting poems meant to be read in tandem, that require their voices to layer and rhythmically meld. At one point in this behind-the-scenes footage, Riggs admonishes himself for forgetting to pause as Hemphill had suggested. His rereading of the text is lovely, varying mightily in tone, intonation, and texture as to communicate the anguish of silence and the multitude of inscriptions it bears. The intense focus on sound between two stars of the Black Gay Renaissance reveals a keen understanding of its import in this moment. In particular, the sound of Hemphill’s voice is a leitmotif in Black queer cinema. It is utilized in Riggs’s films Tongues Untied, Anthem, and Black Is…Black Ain’t (1995), Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Aishah Simmons’ No! A Rape Documentary (2006), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995), and as the narrator’s voice in a documentary on Black gay men and transgender women based in Philadelphia titled Out of the Shadows.
If, as Amy Lawrence has argued, the projection of the seamless convergence of sound and image that is film produces a “fantasmic body” which Mary Ann Doane refers to as a “unity, cohesion, and hence, an identity… holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference,” then it could be reasonably argued that Hemphill’s voice is an indispensable joint that holds together a Black queer body (in pieces) (Lawrence 1992: 179; Doane 1980: 45). I, of course, use the term “joint” here in reference to Brent Hayes Edward’s deployment of the term in his elaboration of the underexplored gaps between the politics and cultural productions of diasporic and Pan-African artists and organizers thought to be a cohesive body. As Edwards theorizes, “The joint is a curious place, as it is both the point of separation… and the point of linkage… Articulation is always a strange and ambivalent gesture, because finally, in the body, it is only difference—the separation between the bones and members—that allows movement” (Edwards 2001: 66). I want to consider this difference as movement via the voice of Hemphill as it crosses the ocean between the United States and Britain in two films that feature his voice (as well as that of blues singer Blackberri).
Both Julien and Riggs highlight a number of Hemphill’s poems and share one entitled “Now We Think.” Julien, in Looking for Langston, uses the work during a sparsely decorated scene where a Black man sits while watching a pornographic film. Alone, Hemphill shares the well-known words “Now we think, as we fuck, this nut might, kill us” in a rather straightforward manner. The film pictures the Black man cropped in shadows, smoking a cigarette with close ups of his mouth. When the poem mentions the possibility of “a pin-sized hole in the condom, a lethal leak,” Julien cuts to a close up on his pursed lips with the slightest of openings. At the mention of a kiss, the lips reappear. When Hemphill utters “turn to stone,” there is a cut to the making of a statue. As with the majority of the film, the scene is full of potential associations and unanswered questions. Hemphill never appears but is gestured toward by imagistic substitutes. His voice is a specter, a potentiality for the image but not its dictation.[1]
In Riggs’s Tongues, Hemphill performs the work with his frequent collaborator Wayson Jones. The scene is embellished by a pig latin version of the line “now we think as we fuck” (repeated rhythmically by Jones in the background throughout) and quick visual fades between Hemphill and Jones that intensify in pace as the poem accelerates. For the majority of the poem Hemphill’s voice is contained and steady, but as his reading proceeds his voice becomes more brash and emphatic, ultimately leading to his sensual and panicked belting of the line “this nut might…” repeatedly in a crescendo that ends with his unexpectedly composed and quiet recitation of the words “kill us.” The scene concludes with Hemphill and Jones delivering shared orgasmic moans to the camera, mouths wide in ecstasy. The filmic rhythm of the poem is slowed and then quickened to enact an erotic intensity.
The scenes share an interest in the gaze. However, in Julien’s work the subject looks past the audience toward his own projected screen, whereas in Riggs’s work you are the desired, a direct interpolation into sensuality, the hoped for other to the “we.” There’s also an emphasis placed on the line “sucking mustaches” in Julien’s film not present in Riggs’s. The erotic intensity of these scenes, work with different vocal paces and volumes; they stimulate differing affects, punctuating and overlaying the deathly stakes of the AIDS crisis. They offer various direct and clipped orations and introspective muted tones, a Black queer ensemble under the influence of a singular voice.[2]
There are numerous understudied and untraveled pathways for thinking sound and Black queerness on film. The cacophony of sound and image that Black queer film instances may be the raucous band that forms the polyrhythm of blackness in and as what Okiji refers to as “sociomusical play;” here, around the terms of sensuality (Okiji 2018: 4). In the defiance of form located in the rhythms of jazz and house music, Black queer experimental cinema finds fugitive movements that refract and recompose the terms of blackness and sexuality in a moment of acute narrative constriction, risk, and crisis for Black life. Play and improvisation with the structure of visuality through rhythm provides lines of flight from the imperatives of racialized erotic restraint, punctuating convivial and unexpected relations across time. To focus on the sound of the visual, and the visual of sound might give us a peek into the unruly intramural sociality of Black and queer as entangled, relational, and stereophonic forces.
Bost, Darius. 2019. Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carroll, Rachel Jane. 2023. “What Can Beauty Do?” In For Pleasure: Race, Experimentalism, and Aesthetics, 39–86. New York: New York University Press.
Doane, Mary Ann. 1980. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” Yale French Studies 60:33–50.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2001. “The Uses of Diaspora.” Social Text 19 (1): 45–73.
Frazier, Robeson Taj, and Ben Caldwell. 2023. KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell. Los Angeles, CA: Angel City Press.
Gillespie, Michael Boyce. 2016. Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film. Duke University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 1998. “It’s A Family Affair.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 310–15. New York: The New Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1989. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Framework 36: 222–37.
Jafa, Arthur. 1998. “69.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 249–54. New York: The New Press.
Jafa, Arthur, Robeson Taj Frazier, and Ben Caldwell. 2023. “Forward.” In KAOS Theory: The Afro-Kosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell, 6–7. Los Angeles: Angel City Press.
Julien, Isaac, dir. 1989. Looking for Langston. Strand Home Video.
———. 1994. “Confessions of a Snow Queen: Notes on the Making of The Attendant.” Critical Quarterly 36 (1): 120–26.
Lawrence, Amy. 1992. “Women’s Voices in Third World Cinema.” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, 178–90. New York: Routledge.
Linscott, Charles “Chip” P. 2016. “In a (Not So) Silent Way: Listening Past Black Visuality in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.” Black Camera 8 (1): 169–90.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches, 53–59. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
Moten, Fred. 2017. “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/Ings.” In Black and Blur, 86–117. Durham: Duke University Press.
Neumeyer, David. 2019. “Studying Music and Screen Media.” In The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, edited by Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard, 67–74. New York: Routledge.
Riggs, Marlon, dir. 1989. Tongues Untied. Frameline.
———, dir. 1991. Anthem. Frameline.
Sanborn, John, dir. 1989. Untitled. Electronic Arts Intermix.
Stilwell, Robynn. 2007. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” In Beyond the Soundtrack, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 184–202. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Notes
[1] Robynn Stilwell refers to filmmakers’ play with diegetic (a part of the story) and nondiegetic (outside of the story) sound as the “fantastical gap,” a visual-sonic in betweenness that allows for the subversion of viewers’ aural expectations. Rachel Jane Carroll notes Julien’s use of this technique with house music and the sound of the ocean in Looking for Langston as ways of probing identification and diasporic loss and connectivity. See Stilwell 2007. See Neumeyer 2019. See Carroll 2023.
[2] In much the way that Fred Moten in “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings” reads a productive and “sexual politics” in the disagreements of Black diasporic musicians who seek to exceptionalize the national character of their Black music and its genres (while disallowed from entry into the national family) the work of Riggs found strife in diaspora; critics who, including Julien, read an essentializing impulse in Riggs’s work in terms of racialized desire and masculinity. Instead of plotting Riggs and Julien as combative aesthetic forces, I read the way they rhythmically play with the same instrument, Hemphill’s voice, as a shared though tenuous desire in the making and positioning of difference as an unfixed commitment to new creative potentialities. Their relation is generatively posed as disjunctively choral due to the history and present of blackness and its spatial dispersion. See Moten 2017. See Julien 1994. See Gilroy 1998.
Steve McQueen’s 2020 film Mangrove is an historical drama about the racism of the criminal justice system and Black resistance against police repression in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the prism of the trial of a group of demonstrators known as the Mangrove Nine. One scene set in April 1970 shows a young Darcus Howe, recently returned from Trinidad, trying to educate a distracted Frank Crichlow, the owner of the eponymous Caribbean community restaurant in Notting Hill that was subjected to a dozen police raids in the period January 1969 to July 1970: “Trinidad has been remade, Frank. I saw it. I heard it. The revolution has changed the very rhythm of the people’s speech, talking with greater deliberation, pausing before speaking and such. As if it has provoked an unconscious social patience. It was truly something to behold” (Siddons and McQueen n. d.: 34). It was fitting to cite this passage in a paper given in the city of Montréal.[1] The immediate spark for the Black power revolution in Trinidad was a demonstration against the visit of the Canadian Governor-General in solidarity with students from the West Indies at Sir George Williams University in Montréal who had been singled out for arrest after an occupation on campus protesting a professor’s racial prejudice.
Before he can invoke C. L. R. James, Howe is interrupted by the phone ringing. Crichlow’s speech, as he complains in vain to his local MP about police harassment of a Black business, is hurried and marked by increasing exasperation, cutting across the measured rhythm delivered by revolutionary action that Howe extols. Frustrated by the impunity with which the police engaged in racial targeting and violence, members of local community, together with Black Panther activists, organized a demonstration on August 9, 1970 at which the Mangrove Nine were arrested. They were later charged with incitement to riot in what was widely seen among Black communities and leftwing allies as a deliberate strategic attempt to put a halt to the emerging Black power movement in Britain. One of the striking features of the trial was that Howe, who would become a prominent anti-racist campaigner, writer, and broadcaster, and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, who was the leader of the Black Panther Movement, would choose—against the advice of the majority of the defendants’ white lawyers—the radical tactic of self-representation. Toward the end of the film, Howe, played by the British second-generation Jamaican actor Malachi Kirby, delivers what a newspaper at the time described as a “‘blockbuster’ defence closing speech” at the Old Bailey (Post Mercury 1971).
In the absence of surviving court transcripts, the screenplay drew on extensive documentary research: a newspaper that serialized the proceedings, other publications at the time, and the files of the radical white lawyer Ian Macdonald representing one of the other defendants which contained a copy of Howe’s closing statement (Siddons 2020). The screenwriters punctuate Howe’s speech with iterations of the phrase “it’s closing time” to signify that, while the case may be coming to an end, it marks the opening up not only of specific issues but also, irreparably, of British history as a whole to Black consciousness. It marks, in short, the necessary possibility that any closure or teleology be interrupted. This is what brings the rhythm of speech into critical dialogue with the rhythm of history’s unfolding and of the metaphysical unfolding of the concept of history. As if to analyze this asynchronicity, Howe prefaces his rhetorical triple strike with a reference to Hamlet, scribbled by his co-defendant and partner Barbara Beese on the top of his script and itself a syncopated repetition in that it displaces the white sovereign subject of politics and thereby disrupts the rhythm of Shakespeare’s line, itself an interruption of verse by prose: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever a Black people were born to set it right” (Siddons and McQueen n.d.: 87; emphasis mine).
This is a film in part about rhythm and its syncopation. A letter from 1946 to his second wife Constance Webb shows that Howe’s hero, C. L. R. James, is very much attuned to rhythm. While James is more interested in Shakespeare and other European examples, he shares with Caribbean musicians an awareness of how rhythm can not only materialize racial and class oppressions but also analyze them critically and express the struggle for liberation (James 1992: 151–52).[2] This may seem paradoxical for a close reader of Hegel such as James. The German philosopher reserves the radical capacity for openness to the other and for negativity to the white European, leaving Africa without relation and without history, as Rei Terada (2023) has argued. And yet James continues to think the syncopated rhythm of revolutionary history with, not against, speculative logic. His idiosyncratic reading of Hegel and its ramifications for his politics are beyond the scope of this article, except to note that, in his close readings of the Logic in his Notes on Dialectics, the self-movement of the dialectic in the mutual implication of subjective consciousness and object—what in the Preface to the Phenomenology is figured as “the immanent rhythm of the concept” (1977 [1807]: 36; trans. modified)—lies at the heart of James’s theory of historical development and working-class emancipation (1980 [1948]).[3] What I will, however, suggest is that the radical rhythmic action of the Mangrove Nine, on the streets and in court, participates in a heterodox syncopation of Hegel that has affinities with deconstruction, without collapsing into or being exhausted by it. There are, if you like, syncopated deconstructions.
In what follows, I will analyze the key sections from the Phenomenology’s Preface and then, with reference to a few passages where Derrida speaks to the notion of rhythm, I will assess to what extent the self-differentiation of Hegel’s speculative proposition might be said to anticipate or even already to march in step with deconstruction’s law of spacing. Baart Zandvoort (2020), for example, summarizes the issue at stake—namely, whether there is another difference whose contradiction would not be merely a moment on the way to self-identity—while also questioning whether Hegel and Derrida can be so cleanly distinguished on this point.
Where is the point where arrhythmia breaks away from rhythm to be located? How can we be sure the arrhythmic pulsation of the arrest will not be resolved once again in a more rhythmic rhythm? The impossibility of deciding on such a point, which Derrida elaborates again and again, is already fully prefigured in all its baffling complexity in Hegel (Zandvoort 2020: 368).
Especially given Derrida’s idea of the trace as re-marking, as a double strike, the thought would be that that a genuinely radical rhythm necessarily remains at least somewhat arrhythmic, that it would always already have to have interrupted even itself and have ruined any teleology—and, with it, any Eurocentrism—in advance. The idea that the concept is irreducibly syncopated is not unique to deconstruction. But deconstruction may nonetheless be the movement of philosophical thought that is most passionately moved by, even finds its own engine in, the rhythming of the concept—in its beating, spasming, jerking, pulsating, vibrating. In its syncopated re-marking, rhythm resists being subsumed by the totalizing and exclusionary point of the concept. This gives deconstruction an affinity with other heterodox modes of conceptualization—decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, queer thought that is inextricably rhythmed with practice and syncopated against Hegel.
II
Hegel invokes the metaphor of rhythm as a way to distinguish two ways of thinking or reading. The difference between speculative and ordinary proposition is likened in §61 to “to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between meter and accent” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38).[4] The notion of rhythm had been introduced in §56, which asserts that logical necessity just is the “self-moving” and “self-differentiation” of the subject in its being its own concept (34), and in §60 the concept is said to “present itself as the coming-to-be of the object” (37). This “rhythm of the organic whole” is characterized as an interruption of what Hegel calls “picture-thinking [Vorstellung],” as well as of formalism. In each of those kinds of thinking there is a degree of stasis or stability. In the ordinary propositions of representational thinking, the subject relates to the content as predicate or accident, “remaining inertly over against it” as a “fixed self,” “passive” in the face of a multiplicity of passing predicates (37–38). Formalist argumentation, in §58 meanwhile, is “freedom from all content, and a sense of vanity towards it” (35), turning its presentation into the “principle of the content” (36).
Speculative thinking and reading, Hegel contends in §60, leaves this “solid ground” “shaken” (37). Once the subject has passed over into the predicate, it finds there is not a predicate as such but the substance of the concept and that, instead of being able to float freely above, it has entered and is absorbed into the content. As the predicate becomes the organic whole, it has the effect of weighing down thinking, depriving it of a sovereign liberty. The effect is akin to a rhythmic jolt. Thinking, which at the same time “in reality feels itself checked by the loss of the Subject” as something that is not already implicated in its own otherness, “missing it, is thrown back on the thought of the subject” (38). In §62, Hegel repeats the same propulsive metaphor in conclusion: “Thinking therefore loses the firm objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content” (38).
The speculative proposition is said to “destroy” the ordinary proposition in a “counterthrust [Gegenstoß]” against the distinction between subject and predicate that it presupposes (37–38). Katrin Pahl expressly reads speculative logic as a syncopation of ordinary representational thinking, disrupting its grammar’s triple strike of “A is B” by failing to deliver the predicate’s expected third-beat accent (2012: 111–12). Figured as a dance in Pahl’s analysis, speculative logic leaves the choreography tottering by throwing the subject back on the other foot, only for it to miss its own first-beat accent in an “awkward pirouette.” Pahl wants to read Hegel as a deconstructionist avant la lettre.
To assess the extent to which Hegel’s rhythm is already arrhythmic, let us read closely what he says in §61 about the rhythm of the concept and the conflict between meter and accent:
Rhythm results from the oscillating midpoint and the unification of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent dies away. (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38)
Translating Hegel’s “schwebende Mitte” as “juggle,” Pahl contends that “this harmony, to be sure, amplifies dissonance, interference, and syncopation” and that “for Hegel, this conflict [between identity and difference] does not have to be (dis)solved but can be made productive as a harmonic disunity in oscillating motion” (2012: 109–10). On this interpretation, speculative logic balances the two rhythms by treating syncopation as a kind of counterbalancing act. And yet, Hegel openly concedes, this unifying harmony results in accent dying away. Notwithstanding the argument she wants to make about the priority of syncopation in Hegel’s conception of rhythm, Pahl’s metaphorical footwork illustrates precisely this point: that, far from creating, say, a hemiola, any off-beat accentuation actually falls away in the harmonious unity of a vibration. This raises an interesting question about the rhythm of reading—one which preoccupies Derrida in Geschlecht III (2020b) where he employs a tactic of leaping and zigzagging when reading Heidegger so as to head off the risk of collapsing its different and sometimes conflicting beats into consonance. When a text declares A to mean B, not simply does it allow for a strong reading “C” that it says without meaning to; it has perhaps already gone so far as to declare that A is C. Does this rhythm of reading Hegel itself exhibit the juggle that Pahl attributes to Hegel?
III
Writing in the left-hand column of Glas about the “ternary rhythm of the ‘potencies’” in Hegel’s philosophy of nature, Derrida takes a different view:
What Hegel says about the structure of the Potenz—which will also be true of the dialectical moment—explains to us how he, Hegel, intended to be read. One can transpose what he states about each Potenz to each organized totality of his text, which both repeats and anticipates, and yet marks a leap, a jump, a rupture in repetition, all the while ensuring the continuity of the passage and the homogeneity of a development. A plurality of continuous jolts, of uninterrupted jerks: such would be the rhythm. (Derrida 2020a: 121b)
Derrida’s reading depends on the way in which “the absolute totality arrests itself,” much as, in §58 of the Phenomenology, Hegel describes how the subject, in order to “sink [its] freedom in the content,” in a “refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept,” must exercise a measure of restraint “which is itself an essential moment of the concept” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 36).
Derrida analyzes the way in which the concept holds itself back under the heading of what he calls here and elsewhere “stricture,” a self-strangulation that makes the gl catch in the throat and which logic, he claims, “organizes Hegel’s text”:
Any commentary would disqualify itself that, qua commentary, did not follow its prescription or that dragged its feet hesitating between explication and rupture, within all the oppositional couples that sustain in general the history of the historians of philosophy. There is no possible displacement of this history without displacement . . . of what in Hegel’s text imposes this rule of reading, i.e. a displacement that itself would escape the dialectical law and its strict rhythm. It seems like we are not there yet; and this can no more be done in one blow than by continuous approach. The event cannot be as noisy as a bomb, as flashy or burning hot as metal placed in the fire. Even if it were an event it would here be—stricture against stricture—unobtrusive and marginal. (Derrida 2020a: 123–24a)
In the right-hand column, Derrida glosses the gl as
a voiceless voice stifling a sob or clot of milk in the throat, tickled laugh or gluey vomit of a gluttonous baby, the imperial flight of a bird of prey swooping down all of a sudden on the back of your neck, the sticky, frozen, cold piss name of an impassive Teutonic philosopher, with his well-known stammer, sometimes liquid and sometimes guttural and tetanic, with swollen or cooing goiter, everything that rings strange in the tympanic pit or canal, spit or paste on the soft palate, orgasm of the glottis or uvula, clitoral glue, abortion cloaca, spermchoke, rhythmic hiatus of an occlusion, staccatodance spasm of an eruptojaculation, syncopated valve of the tongue and lips, or a nail falling in the silence of the milky voice” (137–39b).
The displacement of Hegel’s rhythm would entail neither continuous transformation nor rupture but stricture against stricture, the syncopation of stricture. Instead of one rhythm against another, there would be arrhythmia against arrhythmia, and a redoubling of speculative logic. Or as he puts it in his introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography, if rhythm’s double bind “is still too linked to opposition, contradiction, dialectic . . . to that kind of undecidable that derives from calculation and from a nervous dialectical contraction . . . it would be necessary to think an other undecidable, to interrupt this double bind with a gap or a hiatus—and recognize in an arrhythmic caesura the respiration of rhythm” (Derrida 1989: 34–35). The “antirhythmic” rhythm that Derrida thinks with Hölderlin and Lacoue-Labarthe interrupts interruption as oppositionality (1989: 42).
Glas is replete with references with spasmodic rhythms. In a key passage it refers back to one of Derrida’s earliest and most extensive discussions of rhythm in “The Double Session,” which I am proposing to read as elaborating a way of breathing rhythm into arrhythmia, less as a transcription of the voice than of a machinic pneumatics. Rhythm is involved early on with a footnote to Émile Benveniste, who emphasizes its pre-Socratic conception as movement rather than form: “what . . . works toward the decapitation or ungluing of the text is the regular intervention of the blanks, the ordered return of the white spaces, the measure and order of dissemination, the law of spacing, the rhuthmos” (Derrida 1981: 171). Rejecting the hypothesis of an infinite undifferentiated polysemia, Derrida speaks of “a kind of poverty, I would even call it a very singular and very regular monotony,” which is rigorously distinguished from the totalizing power of the concept to pin down multiplicity to a single point (251). Rather, the blank folds back upon or re-marks the play of meaning. This mark, imprint, or strike belongs to the series that it might be added to or subtracted from without being its transcendental origin or end while pointing to the blanks, gaps, or spacing between the terms in the series (252–254). It thus “re-marks” the syncopations that make the series possible through the relations among the elements that unite them in their dispersion—syncopations on account of which seriality, as identity, is impossible.
Rhythm is also at the front of Derrida’s mind in Geschlecht III where his theme is, as already mentioned, reading “in abrupt jumps, leaps, and [this time—NWS] zigzags” (2020b: 1). Setting deconstruction against the rhythm of metaphysics, he upbraids Heidegger for gathering the plurality of poetic tones into the harmonious resonance of the fundamental tone or Einklang, which literally means sounding as one (71). Analyzing the distinction that Geschlecht III draws between polysemia and dissémination, Geoffrey Bennington provocatively suggests that deconstruction’s rhythmic re-marking or re-striking may yet invite a closer comparison than Derrida might want with the harmony of metaphysical logic.
We might still wonder if the monos of the monotonous re-mark does not invite a more generous re-reading against all the unifying or gathering motifs that Derrida is so suspicious of in Heidegger, and even whether that kind of monotony (or writing, textuality, trace, dissemination, différance . . . ) is really so clearly distinguishable from what Heidegger repeatedly characterizes in terms of oneness, unity, uniqueness, Einklang, and so on. (Bennington 2020: 435)
IV
Is there, though, a political urgency to syncopate monotonies? For Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda (2018), the syncope in the speculative dialectic is re-marked by a mark—the dash that comes at the Phenomenology’s closing time, signaling, if not a lapse of consciousness, then digression and also propulsion. But one ought not be seduced by its monotonous regularity into reducing the Derridean blank to the simplicity of self-propelling speculative thought, “having its otherness within itself” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 34). One consequence of Derrida’s rhythming of arrhythmia, his syncopated stricture, is that there is no “the” deconstruction that would march to the same beat but rather multiple deconstructions each choreographed to rhythms out of step with one another and even with themselves, a series of deconstructions only by virtue of the spacings that separate them. Every other is every bit other.
These multiple, syncopated deconstruction give rise to a vertiginous precipitation, as Derrida might put it—as the kind of accelerated rush to close embodied in the hemiola as we approach a cadence. Rushing headlong into these syncopations, then, Jean-Luc Nancy’s rhythm of the senses—which must also be understood as the syncopations that disjoin them—and his deconstruction of Hegelian dialectic do not coincide with Derridean dissémination but tend more toward an “archaic propulsion” or primordial recitative that opens up the space of the subject (Nancy 2013: 254–55). Nancy’s transcendental vibration is rhythmed, Bennington suggests, even to the point of noise—“rhythm’s scum,” he quips (Bennington 2011: 19). Even Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s twin embraces of rhythm as condition of possibility subtly beat against each other, one drawn toward haptocentrism, the other psychoanalysis.
Then there is Hélène Cixous’s virtuosic meditation on the rhythms of puppetry, in which every person and object involved in the theatre is imagined as being “put into movement by . . . the gentle shocks of the puppeteer” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 66). Puppetry is a metaphor not only for writing, reading, and staging but further, I am suggesting, for speculative rhythm. The playwright dreams of being a drumskin on which characters stamp out a rhythm with puppet steps (64). The movement of the puppet, “so abandoned to the motilities and movements of its puppeteer that it no longer bangs at the edges,” enjoys a suspended freedom, not weighed down by having to tap its feet on the ground (68). Equally, on its immobile face there is “a scrolling through of all the great tragic grimaces” (72). The puppet must be “two-but-one” in a simple, exact unfolding of the dance, without jerking (70–72). But it also has a double rhythm that evokes the blanks of “The Double Session” without collapsing into them: “The puppet writes with time, in full intervals, in (invisible) whites [blancs], separating and tying together the regular full stops, the sentences, the lines, the bonds of passion, drawing the space from which will burst forth the shout, the crisis, the access, disjoining, cutting” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 72).
Cixous’s description of punctuation as outburst, as the release of vibrational anticipation, like “the leap of the cat crouching for a long time in the vibrating body” (72), brings me to my final example. Fred Moten’s explicitly political filtering of the Derridean deconstruction of dialectical oscillation as a “deconstruction of the machinery of exclusion” in his reading of Amiri Baraka’s essay “The Burton Greene Affair” (Moten 2003: 125). In Moten’s reading, Baraka’s essay is all cross-rhythm, syncopation, and stammering in a recalibration of the “rhythmic marking of racial difference” (127). In turn, the vibration of improvisation and Black aesthetics in Moten’s thought is set—in syncopated resonance with and resistance to Derridean deconstruction—against the “interminable and systematic opposition and oscillation” of European metaphysics between identity and difference, collection and division (132), which, he reminds us, “begins and ends at the illusion of the originary” (130). In an interesting re-punctuation of Derrida’s assault on the gathering power of the logos, Moten’s focus is the question of “ensemble.” Via this concept, he reminds us of the political stakes of rhythm and its deconstruction: that the question of rhythm and its interruption is also that of community and belonging, of being together. Situating Baraka’s particular variant of nationalism amid the neocolonial capture of Third World liberation movements, amid “a certain economic world picture in which the dual motion of fragmentation and homogenization, exclusionary differentiation and metaphysical sameness, are evident” (130), Moten underscores the possibility of “obfuscate[ing] the ensemble in the spirit of an other tradition, one that would read, reflect, and transcend the interinanimation of being, language, race, and (the crisis of European) humanity” (131). This ensemble, he exhorts, “will have been given in the cut between rhythms . . . in the arrhythmia that separates these rhythms” (127).
The ensemble of hemiolas that I have enumerated—more in precipitous haste toward closing time than measured rhetorical strikes—likewise resists any unity or gathering into a harmonious resonance. There is no “the” deconstruction of Hegelian rhythm. And deconstruction and Black radical thought, if they make an alliance, it is not in a traditional convergence of struggles under a single banner or a unity of tactics. Rather, it comes only in the negotiations, the tension of one thread or string beating against the other, even as they become more or less tightly entangled. If there is any single strike, any monotony, among this scattered or shattered set of arrhythmias, it is found only in the syncopations that separate their deconstructions. And politics perhaps just is the insistent sustaining of these hemiolas.
Cixous, Hélène. 2016 [1999]. “Theatre Surprised by Puppets” [Le Théâtre surpris par les marionettes].” In Cixous, Politics, Ethics and Performance: Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil, bilingual edition, edited and translated by Lara Stevens, 64–79.Melbourne: re.press.
Comay, Rebecca and Frank Ruda. 2018. The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “The Double Session.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 176–285. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Désistance.” In Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, translated by Christopher Fynsk, 1–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2020a. Clang. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2020b. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo, translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ilieva, Evgenia. 2024. “Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James’s Hegel.” Hegel Bulletin 45, no. 1: 144–65.
James, C. L. R. 1980 [1948]. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Westport CT: Lawrence Hill & Co.
James, C. L. R. 1992. “Letters to Constance Webb.” In The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw, 151–152. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mahabir Joy A. I. 2002. “Rhythm and Class Struggle: The Calypsoes of David Rudder.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3: 1–22.
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. “Récit Recitation Recitative.” In Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, edited by Keith Chapin and Andrew T. Clark, 242–55. New York: Fordham University Press.
Pahl, Katrin. 2012. Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Terada, Rei. 2023. Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Zantvoort, Bart. 2020. “Arrested Development: On Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28, no. 3: 350–69.
Notes
[1] I first presented this essay at the 2024 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association as part of a seminar, organized by Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal, on “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm.” I am most grateful to the comments and questions made by participants and auditors.
[2] On the political significance of rhythm in Caribbean music, especially Trinidadian calypso, see Mahabir 2002.
[3] For a discussion of James’s reading of Hegel’s Logic, see Ilieva 2024.
[4] Throughout I have modified the translation of this text in various places for clarity.
Production photo of Michael J. Love’s (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) at Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX (April 12, 2023). Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete.
b2o: an online journal is an online-only, free-to-read, peer-reviewed journal published by the boundary 2 editorial collective, with a standalone Editorial Board.
This special issue was solicited for b2o: an online journal by Arne De Boever and Kara Keeling. The peer review process for all starred (*) articles was facilitated by the special issue editor Erin Graff Zivin and Arne De Boever (for b2o: an online journal). All articles were prepared for publication by Erin Graff Zivin and Arne De Boever.
Jamal Batts is a scholar, writer, curator, and Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Swarthmore College. His work considers the relation between Black contemporary art, sexuality, and risk. Previously, he has served as a Stanford University IDEAL Provostial Fellow, a Curator-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. His writing appears in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic.
Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017). Since 2019, Brodsky directs the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars at the University of Chicago and around the world, is executive editor of the biannual Portable Gray, and runs the music-performance initiative Gray Sound.
Alex E. Chávez, an artist-scholar-producer, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of three book awards, including the coveted Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018). He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work, having recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores for Emmy Award-winning films, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists. He is co-editor of the volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades (2022), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research, and his work appears in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.
Michael Gallope is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978 (University of Chicago Press, 2024), and co-editor of the The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Poetry, Art, and Dance, 1950–1975 (Getty Publications, 2025). As a musician, he has worked in a variety of genres that span a range of experimental music, rock, and electronic dance music. In Minneapolis, he performs with the minimal-ambient band, IE.
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. In addition to her three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008)—she has edited two special journal issues and three books, and published over 50 articles and book chapters on Latin American and comparative literature and media, philosophy, and critical theory. Graff Zivin is currently completing her fourth book, Transmedial Exposure: Towards an Experimental Humanities, which evaluates the ethics and politics of experimentation across media, forms, and disciplines.
Edwin Hill is Associate Professor in the Department of French & Italian and the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity, and a Faculty Fellow in the USC Society of the Humanities. His first book, Black Soundscapes White Stages (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), builds a conceptualization of sound as a terrain of post/colonial conquest and contestation where one’s place in the world is critically imagined and experienced. Hill’s current book-in-progress, entitled “Black Static and the French Republic of Sound,” deals with sound culture and the politics of race and emotion in contemporary France. Hill’s scholarship appears most recently in the edited volumes: Sounds Senses (Liverpool UP, 2021), The New Modernist Studies (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music (Liverpool UP, 2021). Edwin Hill is also the creator, host, and executive producer of Dance Hubs, an audio docu-series about street dance and spaces of creative movement.
Maya Kronfeld is assistant professor of theory in the Literature Program at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Music department and the Philosophy department. Her book project, Spontaneous Form: Philosophy, Literature, Jazz integrates literary studies with Kantian approaches to the philosophy of mind and jazz studies. Her work appears in The Review of English Studies, Radical Philosophy and Jazz & Culture and is forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, the Cambridge Guide to Kant and Literary Studies and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory. Kronfeld is also a professional pianist who has collaborated with Georgia Anne Muldrow, Toshi Reagon, Linda Tillery, Nona Hendryx, Thana Alexa and Antonio Sánchez, Christian McBride, and Taylor Eigsti, and lent her skills to drummer-led projects by Justin Brown, Blaque Dynamite, Nikki Glaspie and Thomas Pridgen. Maya played keyboards on Nicole Zuraitis’ How Love Begins, which won the 2024 Grammy for Best Vocal Jazz Album, and on Taylor Eigsti’s Plot Armor, which won the 2025 Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. She is piano faculty at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and performed most recently at the Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals.
Jonathan Leal (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press, 2023), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Book of Criticism, History, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. His next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract with Duke University Press.
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar who, through a rigorous embodied practice, calls and responds to Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics as he rhythm-dreams of futurity. Love is Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. He was a 2021-23 Princeton University Arts Fellow and his work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival and ARCOS Dance. His research has been published in Choreographic Practices and he has presented at meetings of the Dance Studies Association and the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Love’s video and installation collaborations with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson have earned them the 2023 ArtPrize Juried Time-Based Award and the 2021 Tito’s Vodka Prize. In New York, Love and Jackson’s videos have been programmed by CUE Art Foundation and the New Museum and screened at the Museum of Modern Art. Recently, Love was one of four dance artists featured in filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Trace Of An Implied Presence at The Shed. Love’s credits include the Broadway laboratory for choreographer Savion Glover and director George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along…, and roles in works by choreographer Baakari Wilder.
Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author, among others, of The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame, and, forthcoming, Messengers of Infinity:On the Pictorial Logic of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Michael Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Literature & Culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He has authored four books: An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave: 2018), Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto: 2020), Sir Lewis (Grand Central Publishing/Legacy Lit, 2025), and The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2026). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Malcolm X in Context (Cambridge University Press) and the co-editor of Cambridge’s New Elements of Black Thought Series. He is the co-editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and on the editorial boards of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, Critical Times, and the PMLA Advisory Committee.
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College. She works at the intersection of continental philosophy, sound studies, and music theory and is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024).
Return of the Repressed: Oceanwide’s Angeleno Ghost City
Michelle Chihara
In the early 2000s, the American press became fascinated with Chinese “ghost cities.” Images of darkened condo towers in new but empty districts appeared across the media, from Al Jazeera to CNN. In Ordos, at the edge of the Gobi desert, a modernist museum like a flattened Lego egg sat surrounded by canyons of silent skyscrapers. Tianducheng was a faithful mini-recreation of the city of Paris, France, complete with flower boxes and Tour Eiffel, that stood eerily quiet. Other extravagant developments were never finished or occupied, from Chenggong to Guangzhou.[1]
China’s unprecedented boom cycle had provoked a building frenzy far beyond what the economy could absorb. When the bubble burst, thousands of newly middle-class Chinese investors lost their savings and never received the homes they had been promised. The results looked post-apocalyptic. Trampled banners in deserted ballrooms and parkways gathered dust, among row upon row of echoing McMansions, with vines crawling up the unused walls.
Across the press, and in Chinese official discourse itself, the ghost city trope “supplied a charged new metaphor through which to report on China’s property sector” (Woodworth 2017, 1273). The idea never gained a precise sociopolitical definition. It was always a phrase that served as a lightning rod for controversy and debate, even as it gained currency within China itself. The state worried about ghost cities, as it sought to balance its command-and-control policies with the actions taken by Chinese families now free to use real estate—in the proud US tradition—as both shelter and primary investment strategy (Ibid.).
Most of the journalists writing for North American audiences assumed that ghost cities were the problems of a planned economy not our own. Some economic papers on the topic also functioned on the premise that authoritarian capitalism and its failure to respond to market signals were to blame for “government subsidized overbuilding.”[2] Both presumed that the ghosts were exotic and foreign, fallout from misguided policies. But the realities of the global economy have brought these specters back to haunt the West.
One critic calls London’s architectural trend of catering to the needs of empty luxury dwellings the necrotecture of the global super-rich (Atkinson 2019). Dubai and South Korea have ghost cities; the website Vacant New York tracks empty commercial and residential properties; historic chateaux listed as short-term luxury rentals on AirBnB dot the French countryside amongst the overcrowded and under-funded banlieues. To many Marxist critics, this is garden-variety over-accumulation. These are simply the busts at the end of the boom cycles, they’re endemic to capitalism, authoritarian or liberal. And it’s true that, like the original ghost towns of frontier California, the Ordos Municipality was built on speculative mining profits.
Even if they’re not new, however, the dynamics that created ghost cities in China persist and metastasize. If anything, they’re getting more severe. The Western coverage of China may have been laden with the ironies of Orientalist clichés, and yet, the aesthetics were a transnational means of involving the public. Ghost cities give democratic stakeholders a way to see the severity of the problem, a way to grasp the local consequences of finance’s Gordian knot, in all its international interconnectedness.
***
In downtown Los Angeles, about a year ago, base jumpers and graffiti artists claimed an abandoned development as their own by filming viral videos from inside the empty towers. On Instagram, one video is captioned “the calm before the storm.” It opens with a wide shot, drone footage set to hip hop.
Two young men stand at the top of an unfinished building. On iron girders high above the city, they swim in golden sunset light. As they move catlike across the bare beams, they look deliberate but impossibly relaxed. They control the swoop of their cameras with their thumbs.
In the next beat, they base jump. A series of five narrow rectangular parachutes glides down, flashes popping off all around. But if the silks spiraling between the graffitied towers were the main attraction, the preamble at sunset best captures the lonely dangerous beauty of the act.
Every floor of these unfinished high-rises–on every level, in every window–was tagged by a graffiti crew. Leaving a mark on the buildings became, through online subcultures, a sine qua non of street self-branding. The aesthetic additions to the abandoned towers, at the heart of the city, brought press attention and sparked global interest. The police stationed themselves around the perimeter, parked at every corner of the lot, to shut it all down.[3]
Most of the public discussion at the time centered on whether or not the graffiti was art. Should taxpayers should be responsible for the clean-up and police patrols? But in February, the Los Angeles Times’ last article about the empty buildings called them a “Capital Fail”(Miranda 2024). Of the many journalistic articles about the towers, this one, in the Arts and Culture section, came the closest to articulating what the ghost towers in eye of the storm truly represented: The fact that land use in global cities, including in the heart of urban America, is being driven by the opaque needs of international capital.
***
The original project in the heart of downtown L.A. was built by a Chinese company called Oceanwide (now Tonghai), through a funding mechanism known as the EB-5 visa program. This program has been inviting foreign investment into the US since the 1990s, giving predominantly Chinese and sometimes Indian people a way to transform their home currencies into dollars, while essentially purchasing green cards. If they invest a certain amount, they receive a financial path to permanent residency and citizenship. The program is a highly-contested set of rules, subject to multiple news investigations and Senate hearings, with detractors labeling it “Citizenship-for-Sale.”[4] EB-5 investments have raised persistent concerns about fraud and money laundering.[5] And yet, despite recent controversies around Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner using the program to finance part of a deal in New York, the program was recently renewed (Hackman and Putzier 2022; Democracy Forward 2022). EB-5 was originally supposed to create American jobs in rural areas or districts with high unemployment. The evidence suggests that it has, instead, primarily served the needs of international real estate developers.
Oceanwide is down the block from the Metropolis, another EB-5 project created by some of the same players. The Metropolis was completed, and it includes a finished boutique hotel with requisite rooftop pool and spa, plus luxury condos. The developer sold the complex at a loss in 2022 (TRD staff 2022). The owners have had trouble filling the sparkling columns. It’s not so much a ghost city as a glass zombie.
Commercial vacancy rates are at a record high in downtown Los Angeles, and EB-5 investments have contributed to a glut of overly-vacant luxury units, in an area desperately in need of affordable housing.[6] Some of the Oceanwide contractors are now suing to get paid. The property was named in an FBI warrant targeting the corrupt city councilman, Jose Huizar, who is serving time for fraud related (of course) to real estate development and a bribery scheme with yet another Chinese developer.[7] The results, in other words, for the city, are an aesthetically interesting mess. And as with the scandals around the mayor of New York taking bribes from Turkey, local politics have become inseparable from the demands of far-flung developers.
During China’s boom, unsurprisingly, the economy provided Chinese investors with myriad methods of circulating their funds into global dollars, like EB-5. But this isn’t exactly what Xi Jinping wanted. Since 2016 or 2017, Jinping has been cracking down on capital controls. By 2020 and 2021, the Chinese state was locked in a game of chicken with its own real estate giant, Evergrande. The Communist Party had generally worked to backstop problems in its economy, to stop them from spreading. But in the face of $300 billion debts and the need to slow overheating markets, Evergrande was ultimately forced to back down, all the way down, into liquidation (Wu and Steinberg 2017; Saeedy and Feng 2024). You can now see some of Evergrande’s ghost cities being demolished online.
The CCP wanted to water its local economy with more of its own funds, it wanted investors to spur growth at home. It also wanted to discourage high-risk, high-reward speculation. These goals are sometimes at odds.
Money created quickly is fast money. It carries a certain momentum when it goes looking for high rates of return. It needs appreciating asset classes in which to park itself. Much of the capital that has fled China has gone against the wishes of the CCP, but not all, and not all fast money can technically be counted as fraud.
Money laundering, in the original sense, meant hiding the criminal source of profits by routing the funds through legitimate businesses. But much of the fast money coming out of China falls into more of a grey area, within systems that obscure all profit sources equally. Drug cartels, Eastern European oligarchs, crooked Malaysian prime ministers, American tech entrepreneurs, and middle-class Chinese investor—they all share the same access to financial anonymity.
Capital flees into dark money, increasingly out of reach of the regulations of any one nation. As soon as Chinese developers amass a certain level of capital, they become international players. Once fortunes reach a certain size, they enter a space in some ways above and between Wall Street and The City, above and between the laws on the books in any one center of global finance—what one financial journalist calls Moneyland (Bullough 2019a).
The US national security state does sometimes lash out against truly illicit money, with tools largely provided by the Patriot Act. The Department of Justice has powerful allies and works with NGOs like Global Financial Integrity. And at the same time, the US is the fastest growing tax haven in the world (Bullough 2019; Bullough 2019b). It has brought the race to the bottom of the deregulation barrel back to its own shores. While the US is the home base for the most powerful shadow banks and hedge funds, capital flows with no restrictions across borders, hunting for the next loophole or program that might provide an edge or an arbitrage opportunity. The aftermath of the 2008 crisis has only entrenched the dynamics that knit high-end real estate developers across the globe into one unstable, highly speculative market.
Many middle-class Chinese investors have lost out through the EB-5 program, alongside Angeleno taxpayers. But the needs of finance’s big dogs never jibed with the needs of regular people. International capital pushes funds into luxury building trends that don’t take their cues from local markets. The result is almost never good local jobs, the erstwhile promise of EB-5. It’s empty towers in the midst of a housing crisis, as the tent cities continue to rise around the tagged and abandoned monuments to indifferent global wealth.[8]
***
The drone footage at sunset—with the bright painted letters popping against a tangerine sky and the young people dangling their legs off sky-high rafters—was created by young street artists and influencers. They were looking to create value, for themselves, on the social media platforms owned by corporate America. They incidentally aestheticized faultlines in the global regime. But the images haunted the public and drew audiences because they expose a tear in the fabric of the city.
The display of daring by the base jumpers invites comparison with an iconic 1932 photograph of iron workers in New York City. The New York Herald-Tribune’s black-and-white image of “Lunch Atop A Skyscraper” similarly captured the public’s attention. In that moment, workers on a beam 850 feet in the air—eating and smoking— sat in for the aspiration and hopes of a generation of immigrants. Their bravado became the symbol of the skyscraper itself, an incarnation of the zeitgeist.
Today, the young men on the girders with their drones are the dystopic version, Miracle on 34th Street reshot as Blade Runner. Romanticizing the bravery of the Irish laborers in the ‘30s validated their role in the emerging financial order, just before the New Deal. The 21st century ghost towers in L.A. are more counter-cultural, more cyberpunk than daily news, more dystopic carnival than imagined community.
At the same time, the taggers and base jumpers created a kind of impromptu and spontaneously vibrant public space. They acted as a reminder that in the wake of hollowed-out cultural institutions, in search of least a certain density of weak ties, people will take back the city center. The aesthetic is the only way for the public to engage, on the ground, with the consequences of dark global finance.
***
In moneyland, it’s almost impossible for local municipalities like Los Angeles to hold developers accountable. The concrete construction of the Oceanwide towers means the luxury units can’t be remodeled into smaller apartments. Even demolishing the towers represents an extraordinary expense in a dense urban context.
Corporate partnerships that span both countries, and currency-sterilization in a dollar-based global economy, are pulling China and the US deeper into an increasingly complex relationship. Conflict has been growing around everything from the Belt and Road program to China’s push to control resources in Africa to the data and IP policies of social media giant TikTok. International security concerns and trade wars, state capitalism and crony capitalism and the gray areas in-between, all are increasingly enmeshed. Local interests are increasingly pit against the needs of capital, with no resolution in sight, as the temperature rises (Loughlin and Grimsditch 2021; Ip 2024).
There are coalition groups like the Hedge Clippers (as in, they clip the excess growth of hedge funds) trying to address issues like the carried interest tax loophole, a boring-sounding but multi-billion dollar glitch that lets hedge funds avoid massive amounts of taxation. Organizations like LAANE and SAJE, here in Los Angeles, are doing the long slow work of organizing community stakeholders across sectors. These groups seek to hold big, international money locally and democratically accountable. Aesthetics will always play a part in that organizing work.
Ghost cities may once have seemed exotic and foreign. But the street artist Nick Sozonov’s drone shots of Oceanwide bring the trope home and give local audiences purchase on the topic. Attention spans now move at the speed of TikTok. It’s hard to keep people focused on the details of financial loopholes, they keep slipping away behind a cat meme. But art reminds us that when we look in the mirror, the empty towers are still there, looming right behind us.
Michelle Chihara is Associate Professor of English at Whittier College, where she teaches media studies, contemporary American literature, and journalism. Recent peer-reviewed publications include chapters in Money and American Literature and Los Angeles, A Literary History, both forthcoming in Cambridge University Press (2025. Other essays have appeared in Post45: Contemporaries,Politics/Letters, Bloomberg, n+1 and Avidly.org. She was formerly the section editor for Econ & Finance at The Los Angeles Review of Books, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief. Her current book project is a journalistic trade book about behavioral economics, working title Behave! The science of influence in American culture.
References
Atkinson, Rowland. 2019. “NECROTECTURE: Lifeless Dwellings and London’s Super-Rich.” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 43 (1): 2–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12707.
“BASE Jumper Leaps from Graffitied Towers in Downtown L.A.” 2024. KTLA News at 5. KTLA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9dEFqbgX-Q.
Bullough, Oliver. 2019a. Moneyland. New York: NY: St. Martin’s Press.
———. 2019b. “The Great American Tax Haven: Why the Super-Rich Love South Dakota.” The Guardian, November 14, 2019, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws.
Chan, Melissa. 2009. “China’s Empty City.” Al Jazeera, November 09, 2009. YouTube https://youtu.be/0h7V3Twb-Qk?si=1p3oQJcXuaBSuBcB
Chung, Stephy. 2016. “Abandoned Architectural Marvels in China’s Largest Ghost Town.” CNN, November 21, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-ordos-ghost-town/index.html.
Democracy Forward. 2017. “Uncovering Kushner’s Involvement in Renewing Visa Program,” 2017. https://democracyforward.org/lawsuits/uncovering-kushners-involvement-in-renewing-visa-program/.
Hackman, Michelle, and Konrad Putzier. 2022. “Congress Set to Revive EB-5 Program Giving Green Cards to Foreign Investors.” The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-set-to-revive-eb-5-program-giving-green-cards-to-foreign-investors-11646861559.
“Hearing on ‘Citizenship for Sale: Oversight of the EB-5 Investor Visa Program’ before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on June 19, 2018 | USCIS.” 2018. June 19, 2018. https://www.uscis.gov/tools/resources-for-congress/testimonies/hearing-on-citizenship-for-sale-oversight-of-the-eb-5-investor-visa-program-before-the-senate.
Huang, Josie. 2017. “As DTLA Vacancies Rise, Landlords Increase Breaks on Rent, Parking | LAist,” September 15, 2017. https://laist.com/news/kpcc-archive/in-high-vacancy-dtla-landlords-offer-move-in-speci.
Ip, Greg. 2024. “America Is Sliding Toward Chinese-Style Capitalism.” The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/economy/america-is-sliding-toward-chinese-style-capitalism-fff67df4.
“L.A. Joins Ranks of Cities with ‘ghost Towers’ with Graffiti-Covered Oceanwide Plaza.” 2024. Los Angeles Times. February 10, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/newsletter/2024-02-10/la-oceanwide-plaza-essential-arts-arts-culture.
Lloyd, Annie. 2017. “Downtown L.A. Vacancy Rate Highest In 17 Years | LAist.” LAist, September 16, 2017. https://laist.com/news/downtown-la-vacancy-rate-highest-in.
Loughlin, Neil, and Mark Grimsditch. 2021. “How Local Political Economy Dynamics Are Shaping the Belt and Road Initiative.” Third World Quarterly 42 (10): 2334–52.
“Newly-Discovered EB-5 Scam Highlights Fraud, National Security Weaknesses, Need for Long-Term Reform.” 2017. https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/newly-discovered-eb-5-scam-highlights-fraud-national-security-weaknesses-need.
“Our Latest Report: Housing Shortage on the Rise in LA – The Angeleno Project.” 2023. https://theangelenoproject.org/the-hard-facts/.
Saeedy, Alexander, and Rebecca Feng. 2024. “Evergrande Was Once China’s Biggest Property Developer. Now, It Has Been Ordered to Liquidate. – WSJ.” The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/articles/evergrande-faces-imminent-liquidation-after-talks-with-top-creditors-break-down-4af5f657.
TRD staff. 2022. “Greenland Sells Metropolis Apartment Tower for $504 Million.” The Real Deal, November 9, 2022. https://therealdeal.com/la/2022/11/09/greenland-sells-metropolis-apartment-tower-for-500m/.
Witthaus, Jack. 2023. “Downtown in Distress: Los Angeles Signals Why Nation’s Office Space Headaches Could Last for Years.” CoStar, March 19, 2023. https://www.costar.com/article/531623023/downtown-in-distress-los-angeles-signals-why-nations-office-space-headaches-could-last-for-years.
Wu, Jane, and Julie Steinberg. 2017. “Big Chinese Deals Stall on Capital-Outflows Clampdown.” The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-chinese-deals-stall-on-capital-outflows-clampdown-1485563072?mod=article_inline.
Zahniser, David, Emily Alpert Reyes, and Joel Rubin. 2019. “FBI Corruption Probe Goes beyond L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar to Include Other City Hall Figures.” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2019, sec. California. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-huizar-warrant-20190112-story.html.
[1] Al Jazeera (Chan, 2009) and CNN (Chung, 2016) are just two of many examples.
[2] See Ghost Cities of China website at MIT (http://ghostcities.mit.edu/)
[3] This was widely covered in the news, but see (“BASE Jumper Leaps from Graffitied Towers in Downtown L.A.” 2024)
[4] See (“Hearing on ‘Citizenship for Sale: Oversight of the EB-5 Investor Visa Program’ before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on June 19, 2018 | USCIS” 2018)
[5] See (“Newly-Discovered EB-5 Scam Highlights Fraud, National Security Weaknesses, Need for Long-Term Reform” 2017)
[6] See (Witthaus 2023), (Huang 2017) (Lloyd 2017)and (LA CAN) and (SAJE) reports.
[7] See LA Times article for a link to the federal warrant (Zahniser, Reyes, and Rubin 2019)
[8] (“Our Latest Report: Housing Shortage on the Rise in LA – The Angeleno Project” 2023)
Image: Identitarian Indolence – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2023 
