I thought I’d have a go at writing about this. And I thought I’d start with this poem which I wrote a year or two ago. It’s more about getting old than death, but I like it better than others I’ve written.

I want

I want I want I want

I swim in a sea
past the shine of waxed legs
and the bulging hollows behind knees

I dodge through a whirl
of gleaming saloons
and purring convertibles

I wander in a garden
of shelves and stands
bepetalled with famous names and faces

And, stretching back in time behind me,
yes, there are some startling hills
and full-leafed trees
and infinite meadows
which divert my view
from thrown out scraps,
broken stumps,
dry earth,
and withered weeds

I want I want I want
more flowers in full bloom,
more undulating glades,
more rides to stir me
on horseback, on motorbike,
on switchback or trapeze

I want you
and you, and you, and you
I want you and me,
and us
that most of all, yes, us

One day. I suppose,
what I shall want -
I shall want
to lie unmoving,
to close my eyes,
to never wake again.

The thing is, I don’t really think I’m afraid of death. In a way, it will be a relief.

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says that ‘Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing’.

That’s not quite right, for me anyway. What I’m afraid of is too many things uncompleted, too much unfinished business, leaving a mess, leaving stuff for my children to sort out. My fantasy is that when I die I will have cleared up all my belongings, chucked them out or arranged them neatly: and gone down into a space under the floor and drawn a board over me. A fantasy never to be achieved of course.

But the more I have tidied that mess, the more I am ready to die, the more alive I am, the more I can make sense of my life.

So here is my piece of wisdom: pay attention to clearing the decks, do it often, do it today, because tomorrow you could die!

Perhaps, to put Heidegger’s Dasein in different words: Being There is keeping the decks clear; we are alive through keeping that death-space ready.

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

The proficient reader, familiar with all that has been written about the loss of the humanist ideals is probably not going to be much impressed with what I found in the mysterious notebook, in one of Beirut’s back streets, perched over a cemetery constructed on the remnants of a Phoenician temple. This is precisely my point, and a way forward: Things have a habit of coming back, especially in cities like Beirut. Moreover, things don’t just simply ‘come back’. When they do come, they bring with them an inexplicable sense of dread, which may be due to the fact that we thought that what has come back had been lost forever, that it is no longer ‘real’ or from our reality, and as such it throws all of this reality into doubt. I’ve heard, for instance, that in some Arab countries, people still erect tents in the backyards of their newly constructed mansions. For some, this is a certain sign of backwardness, but this is far too easy a conclusion. These tents were supposed to have disappeared, and yet here they are where one least expects them, unassuming and filled with dread, precisely because they are fragments of a past that was supposed to have been buried by modernity. In that sense cities like Beirut live in a perpetual fear of what has been gone manifesting itself again, coming to life in the form of a long forgotten relative from some mountain village who has come to pay us a visit in our chic, urban condominium where the neighbours only speak perfect French, or maybe in the form of an old picture of a grandfather in his outmoded outfit, lying in the attic, or a mispronounced word revealing the dialect that we try so hard to get rid of.

I believe that the same dread emanates from the building with the slightly tilted axis of symmetry, which is opened up and fragmented, sure, but which still contains fragments of what used to be, fragments that contain a perpetual threat of them coming to life again, casting a shadow of doubt on the way things are right now. After all, a “monster” is only monstrous insofar as it is formed of the same members that constitute the human body, but in the body of the monster these members are ‘rearranged’, deformed, while all the while carrying traces of what they used to be, of their original purity. This is why all monsters have humanoid features. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be monsters at all, at least not scary monsters.

The notebook’s writer knew all of this, he felt that dread affecting his whole being, at least I assume he did when he wrote:

My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body, insofar as the house was already an indication of my body. This is why my body always extends across the tool which it utilizes: it is at the end of the cane on which I lean against the earth; it is at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars; it is on the chair, in the whole house; for it is my adaptation to these tools.

The monstrous, fragmented body becomes part of the morselated, apprehensible house (and, by extension, the city around it), and not simply a metaphor for it. Furthermore, the house becomes a precondition of that body, and not vice versa.

This brings about many different problematics, but I’ll restrain myself to seeing one through, because I believe that it would be a way of deciphering the enigmatic statement about Pollock mentioned above. What would happen when the fragmented body encounters the decay of the things which have become its extension? Buildings decay, cities decompose in front of the un-amazed eyes of their citizens, and even the most monstrous of bodies can become ill. I encountered a great number of such questions in the notebook, especially towards the end:

What would happen if the air-conditioning system at Spinney’s just stopped working? What would happen if the ceiling in ‘Acid’ started leaking water on the dancers inside? What if people in the Abraj cinemas started to feel the cracks in the aisles beneath their feet? What if the letters in all of the new neon signs in Downtown Beirut started to drop out and the streetlights stopped functioning? All of this may happen so suddenly, and still all the buildings will remain joined by passages that are the conduits of nothing. They will become like jello left out in the sun for too long.

All I could do was imagine the end of the world – but, amazingly, the author of the notebook provided me with an answer, or maybe the beginning of one. Actually it looked more like a plan for action than a real theoretical answer: My body is everywhere is no longer a metaphor for the body in fragments, but a real possibility for the body in perpetual motion. The body is everywhere, it walks around the fragments of the city, with each step encountering fragments that remind it of how things were, or how they could have been, feeling at all times the loss of something that it can never determine, seeing the world ending at every moment, and yet it cannot stop. The only option for this body is to map everything with exquisite detail, to map not the beginning of things (like maps and architectural plans usually do) but their inevitable end.

I decided to make a map of Beirut using the crap left behind by dogs as landmarks. This first sounded like a silly idea, even a repulsive one, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. Beirutis do not have a tradition of raising dogs, yet, one can, of late, encounter dog crap everywhere. In addition, dogs are soiled animals according to Islam, and yet more and more people, many of them Muslims, are seen walking their dogs. Who owns these dogs, where do they live and where do they take them for their walks were my initial questions – questions that I could only answer by placing myself in a different temporality, in a slightly recent past, when dogs were not fashionable. Then, I realized that in order to produce such a map, I have to radically change my point of view, or the position and nature of the looking eye to be more precise. I cannot simply use the Eye-in-infinity-looking-below that is used in regular maps. Finally, the idea of making a map based on my movements following the movements of the people and their dogs struck me like a bomb on the head. This map doesn’t need a looking eye, and still, the question of what it would look like still haunts me.

Two pages after that in the notebook I saw the statement about Jackson Pollock, neatly framed in a textbook. Right below it, I read what seemed to be an explanation of the statement, that Pollock’s paintings are really city plans:

Jackson Pollock was not really painting, he was moving in and out of the canvas, letting the paint drip or splash in different ways. The lines on the canvas are precisely the lines that his motions created; the lines are a recording of these motions and actions, accompanied at all times with a great feeling of loss, the loss of the original purity of the flat white canvas. At the same time, he couldn’t help but succumb to the sense of dread that emanated from the fact that he was indeed a part of this big heap of decomposing and fragmented lines that lay beneath him. The past and the future became encapsulated in the present moment.

That was the last piece of coherent writing in the notebook. After that, one could find bits and pieces of texts – some of them very poignant – packed in the remaining few pages, things about “looking for a saviour” or an old man  “who is speaking to me. His lips are moving but I can’t hear what he says”. What I believe is that the architect went on to carry out his plan of the eyeless map, although I can’t imagine how, or what the result would look like. I still hope that, maybe one day, I’ll meet him, and maybe I’ll recognize him and we can talk a bit – although, judging from the last phrase he wrote in his notebook, the chances for that are really slim. It was, by the way, the only sentence written in French:

“Soyons désinvoltes. N’ayons l’air de rien.”

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Read Parts I and II here and here

These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

Does the above constitute an insight into the enigmatic statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings?

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I believe so. But, before we get to that, there is a distance to be walked, so to speak. What struck me most about the above description of the staircases was the sense of dread that I felt emanating from these words (was it the dread of being “sucked in” by the other worlds? The fear of the permanent state of non-control that was implied? I don’t know.) What was also remarkable was the fact that these words, and others in the notebook, absolutely, though unintentionally, destroyed all the foundations of the Vitruvian notions of beauty and order that we are so accustomed to, that are so ‘natural’, almost like a fatality. I remember hearing that the French magazine Paris-Match once voted Beirut ‘the ugliest city on the Mediterranean’, and I could imagine the French reporter walking around and brushing shoulders with the notebook’s author, each seeing the same things, and yet so differently. What I mean is that, while the eyes of the architect in question were opening issues up for scrutiny and questioning, the reporter of Paris-Match was forcing these issues to a closure, or what seemed to be a closure from his perspective.

At one point, for instance, the author wonders why the axis of symmetry in buildings, when it existed, was always a vertical axis (later on, I found out that he already knew, and that his question was only rhetorical). He then went on to talk about the visual ambivalence created by what was probably an involuntary horizontal axis of symmetry in some of Mies van der Rohe’s constructions. After that, he started a series that began with “what if?” One of them, for instance, was to ask what would happen if the axis of symmetry was tilted 20 degrees to the left or to the right. It was theoretically conceivable, of course, but would it still remain an axis of symmetry? And, more importantly, what would the resulting building be, what would it resemble? The question of resemblance is of central importance to this issue. The axis of symmetry had to be vertical because – at least in the humanist architectural tradition inherited from the Renaissance – architecture was analogous to the human body, to the perfect human body that was shaking of centuries of being put to shame by the system of thought prevailing in the Middle Ages. The theoretical writings of the Old Masters of the Renaissance, from Alberti to Palladio and Leonardo da Vinci, confirmed this analogy between body and architecture, and turned the human body into an authoritative foundation for architecture.  However, it seems that, since then, there has been a gradual loss of that body from architecture, until it became clear, in the modern architecture of our modern times, that the premises of architecture are to be found in a high degree of technology and specialization. So, why is our mysterious author preoccupied with the human body to such an extent?

If we think again about tilting the axis of symmetry a few degrees to the right or left, what kind of conclusions can we draw? The easiest and least interesting one would be a building that seems to be partly embedded in the earth on which it is built. But, that would be in sharp contradiction with the fact that the axis of symmetry’s main function is to give balance to the building. In that sense, the two parts created by the axis have to be not only identical, but of equal value. Clearly, the two parts of a partly-buried building are not, and cannot be, equal. That would leave us with the only logical conclusion possible for tilting the axis of symmetry: to remain balanced, the building itself has to be ‘dismembered’, opened up, and each mass, each detail, would find its balancing equivalent a little farther up or down. That is not a simple thing, and it introduces new problematics that architecture has to deal with – especially if the axes are, as it usually happens, multiplied in one building (a building with, say, two axes of symmetry, one in the plan and one in the façade).

The body as authoritative metaphor loses its centrality

it cannot fix or stabilize. Rather, its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizably human but embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the monstrous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity, but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morselated, the broken.

This body is not simply an inversion of the classical ideal body, not only the act of turning that body (and all the concepts that are based upon it) on its head, like at medieval carnivals, for instance. It carries with it an irrevocable loss – the loss not only of that holistic body, but also of what used to hold it together, and the world that had been built around it.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Read Part I here.

]]> http://www.htlblog.com/?feed=rss2&p=654 http://www.htlblog.com/?p=646 http://www.htlblog.com/?p=646#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:52:55 +0000 Glendinning http://www.htlblog.com/?p=646

In the first part of this discussion about the meaning of life I suggested that the recent absence of reflection on this question was due in large part to a general acceptance by European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries of “the secularisation thesis”. Writings taking up themes related to the significance of our lives were framed by an assumption that the historical movement of modernity was forging a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science. Classic questions concerning the meaning of life seemed to be wrapped up with ideas of providence that had no place in a rational and scientific age.

My central claim was that the historical narrative embedded in the secularisation thesis is both factually unconvincing and conceptually inadequate. Religion has simply not gone away and there are no signs of it doing so any time soon. Moreover, the movement of secularisation should be understood within rather than against a religiously – and specifically Christian – understanding of the world and the significance of our lives. It belongs to the Christianisation of the world.

How, then, might we begin to think about the question of the meaning of life if we forgo the secularisation thesis? First, we no longer need to regard the becoming-secular of the world as a radical loss of religious meaning, or as a movement into nihilism. On the other hand, in an age not given to mysticism or metaphysics, and in the light, I would add, of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, it is clearly no longer so credible to conceive our lives in terms of some other grand historical narrative either. The (“cognitivist”) idea that the world or history or humanity has “an intrinsic meaning” (a logos of some kind) that is on the way to realisation is not, in my view, the lens through which the meaning of life should be assessed.

In this part of my discussion, I want to recommend that we make a change in the vocabulary of this debate, and propose rethinking questions concerning the meaning of life in terms of the idea of a life worth living or living a worthwhile life. This, I want to say, is not something that can be assessed except from the inside, and from the inside not just anything will count as living such a life, though nor will only one kind of life be regarded as such either. It is not, I want to suggest, a matter of finally knowing how to live but of creating a life that can be experienced as worthwhile.

This may be regarded as yet another secularisation of a religiously significant construal. However, I do not want to think of this in terms of that kind of contrast. One of the things I want to affirm is that a non-believer can accept that a religiously-informed attempt to understand the significance of our lives does not need to be regarded as something that prevents us making a step forward in that ambition. Someone who has no or little instinct for religiosity – like me – need no longer think, as the modern secularisation theorist still must, that he or she is, at bottom, an enemy of religion.

On the other hand, I am suggesting that someone today who is still interested in forming, say, a correct conception of spiritual advance, is going to have to do so without the old idea that what makes a life worth living is its alignment with a logos that precedes us and to which our thinking is answerable. We have to accept that the kinds of things that people say give their life meaning are not “discoveries about the moral universe” but belong to an effort to create a life worth living. I am, I hope, aware of the extent to which we have failed to achieve that.

However, given that we are no longer to be “cognitivists” about this, can we, today, give an account that would really allow us to make sense of this as a failure? To do so would seem to presupposes a standard against which to compare our life, a standard which could be regarded as capturing what is genuinely proper for human existence: an idea of the good life. In the first part of this discussion we saw that David Wiggins identifies one conspicuously objective conception of what is proper to the good life as no longer available to most of us: no longer available ‘unless we are Marxists’. He means, of course, unless we think of ourselves as committed Marxists. ‘Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit.’ The worry is, however, that unless we are Marxists – or at least unless we can frame an objective non-religious conception of what is proper to the good life – we have no basis on which to assess whether we are moving towards or away from the attainment of the good life. Any continued interest in emancipation and progress would be strictly nonsensical. Wiggins claims that our increased resistance to historico-messianic narratives does not imply that we have lost interest in ‘emancipation or progress themselves’. But can we retain that interest – and not be Marxist? We probably can’t.

This is not to invite yet another Marxist “revival”. Rather it is to acknowledge that we belong to societies with a history whose self-understanding cannot be radically dissociated from a Marxist heritage. As Derrida notes, ‘whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism.’ There is a complication to every discourse that would say that our interest in emancipation or progress could be radically non-Marxist or can simply do without Marx. Especially if we think we are not Marxist. Here is Derrida again:

A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.

Unless we are going to be naively unwitting Marxists, we had better attend to this inheritance. We need to attend to the spectres of Marx and Marxism. Especially today, when it is so often announced that Marxism is dead.I will come back to this, but first we need to acknowledge that Wiggins’ political naivety is coupled with a historical insight. It is, I think, plainly true that ‘we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit.’ It is as one of the last great attempts to elaborate a grand historico-messianic narrative of emancipation and progress of this cognitivist kind that Marxism has its place in Wiggins’ account. If I was a Marxist, or a Marxist through and through, I would have an understanding of the significance of our lives which showed our present condition as alienated and which pointed towards a historical movement of de-alienation – a historical movement in which it will all come right in the end, if we can only get our collective act together and build that revolution.

Would I be taking unjustified advantage of the “we” if I were to say we don’t believe that, we can’t fall back on a philosophy of the history of the alienation and de-alienation of man like that? I don’t think so. In our time, we need to shift decisively from thinking in (classical messianic) terms of a world with a coming end, to (but holding on to something of that messianism) making sense of the coming of a world without end. I mean the crucial questions for us today are about creating the conditions for long-term sustainability – not finality or eschatology.

But even if that is the long term ambition – the realisation of a sustainable society, one that can keep going and will not crash around our ears – still sustainability is not the goal at any price: we are aiming at realising conditions in which people (one can hope more and more people) can lead lives that are worth living. And my question is whether, if we are not Marxists, we can even make good sense of the idea that not every way of living a life will be a life worth living. I believe we can.

To explain why, I want to return once more to Wiggins’ discussion of the meaning of life, and to an example he gives of a contrast between two lives. It is a discussion in which he invites you as a reader to acknowledge that only one of these people is actually living a worthwhile life. For our purposes, the significant point is that this is something you are able to do (that is to say, you as someone who belongs to a particular society with a continuing history) without appealing to or claiming to possess a fundamental “truth of man” which devolves into a conception of a final “end of man”  His example is this:

There is a difference, which we as participants insist upon, between the life of a man who contributes something to society with a continuing history and a life lived on a plan of a southern pig-breeder who (in the economics textbooks, if not in real life) buys more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs, to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs… The practical concerns of this man are regressive and circular. And we are keenly interested, on the inner view, in the difference between these concerns and non-circular practical reasoning or life plans.

The latter (a life lived on the basis of non-circular life plans), Wiggins suggests, “fans out into a whole arborescence of concerns”. This kind of image is important to us in considering our own lives and the lives of those with whom we live. If we live in a society in which, by our lights, such a life is increasingly unavailable to most of us, then we will have failed to create conditions in which we can think we are living a worthwhile life – and hence singularly failed to create the conditions of actually living such a life.

Within the limits in which any such judgement is possible, the lives that are most worth living will belong to those who do most, here and now, to “insist upon [this difference]”, those who keep it alive. That is to say, it will belong to those participants for whom the idea of finally having done with it is experienced most intensely or most keenly as something to resist.

What are we to resist, then? First and foremost: the rule of every doxa of messianic arrival. For example, the rule of any religious orthodoxy. The virtues of secularity, the virtues of a public space emancipated from domination by religious authority, do not fall with the collapse of the secularisation thesis. On the other hand, I also want to resist that secular variation which claims with equal evangelical fervour to possess the truth of man and which thus promises that we can learn, finally, how to live in a proper end of man. I mean Marxism.

In our time we certainly need to preserve – and preserve without naivety from Marxism – something of the classic interest in emancipation and progress. However, this inheritance can no longer be classical through and through. In particular it will have to do without the cognitivist idea of a final end of man, and everything associated with it. And that is a considerable qualification. As Derrida acknowledged in his summary of what he does not want to inherit from Marxism, what must be left behind is (his words): ‘almost everything.’

In Europe and America today, thinking on political questions is still surprisingly freighted by the spectre of extreme-left-wing politics. Whenever there is a call for the politicisation or re-politicisation of issues and questions, wherever, by our lights, there needs to be concerted political action, governmental or not, national or not, there is a sense of continuity (whether welcomed or opposed) with the radical political traditions of the past. And in virtue of its historic centrality to the struggles for equality this is an experience run through with a certain identitarian pathos for those who situate themselves on the left in politics. Those struggles really have changed the lives of many for the better and the landscape of thinking for all. The fight for women’s rights, for example, has fundamentally and I would think irreversibly challenged the classical conception in which the proper sphere of activity and devotion for women was almost exclusively domestic. Such struggles are clearly not over, and are sustained today, at least in part, by the memory of classic forms and formations of political agency (the party, the strike, the organisation of militant activists).

And yet it is far less clear (though I confess I feel at the limits of my already limited competence in pronouncing on this) whether the continuation of such struggles for emancipation and progress requires a repoliticisation of society, a “return of the political”, in the Marxist and neo-Marxist tradition. Indeed, in view of the historical legacy of Marxism, and in particularly the terrifying nightmare of Soviet Marxism, certain political struggles today might also take politically unusual or unexpected forms with respect to a tendency internal to that tradition. For example, they may include efforts to forge a limit to the extension of the political, not only in private life, but also in society more generally. There is a general right one might call for not to be monitored, and not to have informers, whether technological or human, everywhere. As Derrida noted in “The History of the Lie” with an obvious allusion to Hannah Arendt, the idea here concerns ‘the limits of the political’. What is called for is a right to resistance to the order of the political, resisting the limitless extension of political reason to the whole of life.

I put this emphasis on a right to limit the extension of the region of the political in sympathy with a central claim in Geoffrey Hawthorn’s early work on the history of Enlightenment social theory up to and including Marxism; the claim that such theories have been premised on what has turned out to have been the radically misguided idea that it is through the politicisation of every problem that we can make the kinds of changes to society that will forge a passage towards an ideally just social and individual condition. On this conception the task of politics will be to give the last word concerning the realisation of a good life. Today we understand better than before that we need to resist social power being dominated by this kind of classical political desire. Or again, the power of any political regime should always be limited since there just is, as Levinas said, no ‘regime without evil’. We know now that any political regime that thinks it canworst.

This is very difficult for us to come to terms with because we are strongly inclined to interpret resistance to the kind of economic neo-liberalism that dominates today – resistance, that is, to the kind of regime that seeks the limitless extension of economic reason to the whole of life – as the expression of a desire to see a return or revival as a force in power of what one might call the politicalforce that can bring changes in society – which we do not believe can be fulfilled by economic neo-liberalism. As Klein puts it, there is an encouraging sense that the election of Obama expresses ‘a longing in people for something more than shopping’. But this does not mean that there is a longing in people for a revival of the idea of mass active political participation in the classical sense either. For example, the idea that the election of Obama has shown there is a taste for the idea of participating in an active way in an ‘independent social movement’ which ‘build[s] the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites’ is not obviously right at all. If fingers are in the air, one could equally well argue that the election of Obama – electoral approval of his taking the highest political office in America – shows that there remains a stubborn hope among the electorate there that their electorally approved political elites will attempt to bring about, by the power they wield or by the force at their disposal, the changes they say they want to make, or the strengthening of fragile achievements already won, and that the political elite will do so in a way that enables the electorate to avoid having to get so personally involved themselves. neo-liberalism of Marxism. For example, sticking her finger in the air, writer Naomi Klein suggests that the election of Barack Obama ‘proved decisively’, among other things, ‘that many, many people’ very much ‘want to be part of a political project larger than themselves’. What is right here is that the resistance to economic neo-liberalism has expectations regarding the proper disposal of power – the proper deployment of

The ‘political project’ is already, quite obviously, ‘larger than themselves’ even when it does not call on them to become more publicly demonstrative. Some think that this is more or less the last word on participation: political activism has been outsourced. That is not a view I would like to endorse. Becoming more publicly demonstrative oneself may well be what is necessary if or when political elites do not deliver change you believe in or, when you are seized with an interest or concern off the current political agenda and attempt to politicise it. But this is not Klein’s view, and she admits that her conception is built on a significant ‘nostalgia’. My worry is that it is also built on a profound amnesia. The political project is not over. But like the religious neo-liberalism that preceded it and the economic neo-liberalism that has succeeded it, the effective power of political neo-liberalism should be limited.

Copyright © 2010 Simon Glendinning

I know that this statement hardly makes any sense, and, to be honest, I was as much surprised by it when I first read it as any reader would be. Still, I have to admit that it carries an eerie truth that one cannot shake off very easily – especially since the conditions of how I came across that statement may have reinforced the emotional charge encapsulated in it.

I was, in fact, taking a long, slow evening walk in the back streets of my neighbourhood, an activity which I used to practice regularly when I was younger. Now, I do it less often, since somehow, as life goes by, a regular activity becomes a burden. My walk took me from the Sioufi garden, up the hill to the region behind the Saint-Cœurs school, then from there to the Lazarus school, which I circled to get to Sassine Square, passing over the old Greek Orthodox cemetery of Mar Mitr. I once read somewhere that the cemetery and the church next to it were built on the site of the remains of an old Phoenician temple, and, almost dizzied by the strong scent of the cypress trees planted there, looking everywhere except ahead of me, I stumbled on an old black suitcase lying on the side of the road. In normal circumstances, I would have left the suitcase there and walked away, but I saw what looked like a small notebook sticking out of the case, and my curiosity led me to pick it up.

There is a reason, of course, for my long and boring digression – the small black notebook is precisely where I found the statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings. The notebook was practically filled from cover to cover with writings, notes and drawings made by someone who was definitely an architect, judging by the nature of the texts and drawings, which all revolved around the city – Beirut, to be exact – or, more accurately, around the physical experiences of the writer in that city. I started flipping through the pages with anticipation and a sense of insecurity, because I thought that its owner would be waiting for me around the next corner to reclaim his property. I couldn’t make a lot of sense of what was written, since it was dark and all I had for light was a dim, yellowish street lamp that hardly illuminated anything at all. However, I could tell from the state of the texts and images that the writer had been in a state of urgency, especially towards the end. When I got home and finally examined the notebook closely, my original feeling was confirmed: The texts and drawings of the first few pages are deliberate and ordered – almost rehearsed – but then, further towards the end, this sense of deliberation subsides, and we are left with an almost haphazard collection of unrelated thoughts and drawings. Also, and in addition to the fact that the author was obviously in a hurry towards the end, the last few pages were extremely dense, as if no corner on the paper, no matter how small, had been intended to be left white. In fact, what started out as writing was ultimately transformed into unfathomable graffiti, which was made even more unintelligible by the fact that the drawings were entwined into what was written, to the point that both had become indistinguishable.

That said, after careful examination, it became very clear that there was no unity in the notebook. Of course, notebooks are not meant to have unified contents, but that’s not what I mean: it seemed as if the notebook was made of fragments, and, despite the coherence of these fragments, their condition made it very difficult for this coherence to come through. An idea would start on page 6, for instance, and then would be continued on page 19, while the pages 6 to 19 were permeated with other ideas that would start there and end a few pages later. Each of these fragments, I thought, produced its own meaning, while the general meaning of the whole thing would only unfold itself in relation not to the writer (as in, say, a diary), but to the city he was living in, experiencing with all his force. The notebook was a metaphor for Beirut.

I write “was” because there was something extremely ominous about the form of the notebook, a feeling that was later supported by the content of the ‘work’. It seemed as if the architect, the author, knew that his life would end, or let’s say would be radically changed, when the last white spot on the last page was filled with his ideas. That would probably explain why the last few pages were filled up almost to the point of explosion – or, if I wanted to use the metaphor of an old city within its walls, I would say that the inhabitants of such a city were certain that only void and death lay beyond their city walls, so their buildings became denser the farther one went from the centre to the periphery of the city. Didn’t sailors in ancient times believe that their ships would fall off the horizon if they ventured into the open sea? The architect had been an urban sailor from these ancient times.

My suspicions were, as I mentioned above, confirmed by some of the scattered ideas that I read in the notebook. Beirut was his whole universe, and there was no indication whatsoever of anything that might have existed beyond it. Here is, for instance, one of those fragments I spoke of (I made the effort to re-arrange it, so that it regains its unity, and becomes easier to read):

These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Tony Chakar is an architect based in Beirut, and will be speaking at the Liverpool Biennial on June 2nd 2010.

Wake up everybody! Goethe’s on the loose in Lebanon and has already been hotfooting it north and south with various travelling companions, one of whom being the glorious Rami Zurayk whose From ` Akkar to ` Amel (co-authored with Sami Abdul Rahman, with photography by Tanya Traboulsi) is a joy and a wonder to behold. Rumours of a walk from Beirut to London are without foundation. As long as we have an act of God on our side, we’re staying here until forced to fly away like angels.

In post-war Britain academic philosophers did not talk about the meaning of life. Analytic philosophy dominated British philosophy, and this kind of philosophy was dominated in turn by philosophy of language and by epistemology. Moral philosophy, along with aesthetics, mostly hid in a corner.

But in 1976 a distinguished analytic philosopher, David Wiggins, delivered a paper called “Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life”:

Even now, in an age not given much to mysticism, there are people who ask “What is the meaning of life?” Not a few of them make the simple “un-philosophical” assumption that there is something to be known here. (One might say they are “cognitivists” with regard to this sort of question.) And most of these same people make the equally unguarded assumption that the whole issue of life’s meaning presupposes some positive answer to the question whether it can be plainly and straightforwardly true that this or that thing or activity or pursuit is good, or has value, or is worth something. Finally, something even harder, they suppose that questions like that of life’s meaning must be among the central questions of moral philosophy.

The question of life’s having a meaning and the question of truth are not at the centre of moral philosophy as we now have it.

Not at the centre of moral philosophy – and nowhere near the centre of philosophy in general. Not in 1976. Not in Britain. And while it is true that in Continental Europe philosophy was being done in ways that were at least more congenial to raising the question, still, there too, generally speaking, such ambitious efforts were rare.

They are still rare, but not so rare today and I know of a number of professional philosophers who are grateful that they can now write about the deepest questions of human life without embarrassment. Why has this happened at this time? Why has it become possible to discuss this kind of theme again?

Let us begin by asking why it might be that discussion about the meaning of life went off the radar in philosophy during the twentieth century – and also off the radar beyond academia too, off the radar in the West during the last hundred years or so.

At the risk of gross simplification, I want to suggest that the background to this state of affairs can be framed in terms of the acceptance by European intellectuals of what has been called “the secularisation thesis”. This thesis was developed by different thinkers in different ways, but social theorists like Weber, Durkheim and, in his own fashion, Marx, led the way in thinking we could describe the historical movement of modernity in Europe in terms of a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science.

This story belonged with an even more long-run picture: one which conceived the movement of the whole history of the world in terms of a transition from an origin that was primitive, barbarian, savage – and basically animal – moving slowly and in stages through developments in human society towards a modern, rational and scientific end. There is here the idea of History as Progress towards an ideal End of Man and towards an ideally civilised form of social life. The secularisation thesis dovetails with that wider discourse of modernity: it is the idea that the movement into a rational and scientific age is one which is likely to see primitive and traditional conceptions not only of the world but also of the significance of our lives increasingly give way to rational and scientific ones. The old illusions will, in all likelihood, wither away, and in the future, soon, we will have finally emancipated ourselves from myth, superstition and religion. We will have finally learned how to live.

The secularisation thesis became increasingly matter of course for European intellectuals in the late 19th and 20th centuries. So when people were writing at that time – in philosophy, in history, in politics and in sociology – there was this unquestioned background that, while there were still some foolish believers around, the proper methods were finally making their way; and the methods with a future were rational and scientific, and would have nothing to do with religion at all.

Before I explore this thesis – a thesis which concerns nothing less than the becoming-secular of the world – we should pause to acknowledge that for many people the claimed changeover in our thinking and believing that the secularisation thesis presents was a cause for considerable anxiety. For many, though they may have kept quiet about it, the sense of loss of a religiously articulated understanding of the significance of our lives was not the loss of an illusion or delusion at all, but rather the loss of a way, perhaps finally the only intelligible way, through which we could make sense of the idea that there is something to be known in this most important of domains. What seemed to be disappearing was the most profound, rich and satisfying (“cognitivist”) discourse through which we might hope to come to know what is to be known about the meaning of life. And when religion falls away or is eclipsed then all you are left with is an utterly mundane life in which it is totally unclear why, ultimately, we should think that there is anything more to life than shopping.

Of course, many of the proponents of the secularisation thesis thought there was a promised land ahead too; an end of history to come which would be some kind of ultimate realisation of human flourishing without illusion. So they wouldn’t have thought at all that the disappearance of religion was leading towards a life without the means to grasp the meaning of life. But for many people the apparent eclipse of religion was a profoundly worrying event for Western humanity; they felt that secularisation would leave us with a life deprived and devoid of meaning: a nihilistic post-modern condition, where “anything goes”.

Today, however, something else is swimming into view. Today, the question is not whether there is anything left to value in an increasingly secular world, but whether we should regard the secularisation thesis, independently of any optimistic conception of an end to come it may harbour for some, as in any sense worth giving credence to any more.

I mean: religion, religiosity, a sense of spirituality, has simply not gone away.

Nietzsche, looking at his fellow Europeans in the late nineteenth century, found in the self-professed atheism he increasingly saw around him nothing but a retreat from the idea of God as the “father” or the “judge”. That apart, the religious instinct seemed to him still vigorously alive and well. And this was in Europe, not in parts of the world where religion in various forms was more obviously still thriving and not withering.

I do not think that there have been any fundamental changes since Nietzsche was observing Europeans. It is becoming evident that in reality there has been little or no weakening in religiosity, even if there is a weakening of a certain difficult idea of God. The weakening of that difficult idea is leading, no doubt, to some weakening of ties to those ecclesiastical authorities which carry it. And as a result we see a decline in religious practices of certain kinds (church going, for example). But this is a decline in certain religious practices without a parallel decline in religiosity.

Europe, the supposed vanguard of world secularisation, is, we should now accept, simply not the exception in the world, not the vanguard of secular reason surrounded by great swathes of humanity still going on in its infantile ways as if nothing has happened. No, Europe, like everywhere else, has remained solidly religiously committed. Indeed, even in traditional terms the picture is not the one we might have been led to believe: self-identifying as a religious believer of some kind is still incredibly high among Europeans. In Britain in 2002, for example, over 70% of those responding to the census declared they were Christians – with about 45% or so still saying they believe in the more difficult idea of God too.

Instead of increasing atheism, we should perhaps talk instead of changes to patterns of religiosity in Europe. Rather than being part of a congregation or seeing oneself as being bound to a given ecclesiastical authority, we now have dominant  models of the pilgrim, who is on a personal religious search, and the convert who rather late in life comes to see their life in religious terms or in some kind of a spiritual light. What one “finds” along the way may or may not be construed a matter of finding God. Nevertheless, for most Europeans or those whose life is saturated with the European heritage, it is most likely that one finds oneself to be a Christian of sorts.

For me, then, the secularisation thesis has simply been blown away – and blown away both by the facts about continuing religiosity and by its own utterly dismal understanding of what religiosity actually is (namely, as akin to a belief in the existence of fairies). People today have turned around to see that this religion thing which was meant to be going away has not gone away at all, and it is not, in any case, what we thought it was.

On the other hand, there has been a change. It is a change that the secularisation thesis was an attempt to come to terms with and to which it itself belonged; a movement or mutation within the Christian world in Europe that it was itself within.

What we need now is a new way of thinking about the change that has taken place in Europe during the last two or three hundred years. Three hundred years ago God and God’s plan for man was at the centre of the self-understanding usual among Europeans; at the centre of the European understanding of the world and the significance of our lives. We now live in a time when that is no longer true. The secularisation thesis was one way of trying to grasp that change. But it was inadequate. I think David Wiggins began a helpful kind of re-writing of that inadequate idea in his essay on the meaning of life when, in the heat of the Cold War, and writing now of our time as a time after Darwin, he said this:

Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit. It is not that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress themselves. But whether temporarily or permanently, we have more or less abandoned the idea that the importance of emancipation or progress (or a correct conception of spiritual advance) is that these are marks by which our minute speck in the universe can distinguish itself as the spiritual focus of the cosmos.

That’s a big ‘shift’, as he says. But the crucial point, it seems to me, is Wiggins’ insistence that we should not interpret this shift as a loss of interest in emancipation or progress – or indeed of spiritual advance. In short, whatever changes we are looking at in Europe in the last three hundred years, the mistake is to interpret these changes either along the lines of post-modern nihilism or along the lines of the classic secularisation thesis. For my own part, what I would propose is that we conceive the becoming-secular of Europe not as a movement of the becoming-atheist of humanity (a movement towards our becoming, one and all, rational humanists) but as a moment within the long run event of the becoming-Christian of the world: it is a mutation within that movement, an alteration within an event that we can call the Christianization of the world.

On this view one has to see the movement of becoming-secular of the world not as a movement away from Christianity but a movement within the unfolding history of the centuries of Christianity in the West. Secular norms of judgement and reasoning did not fall from the sky as some kind of ready-made alternative to a Christian world view – nor did they arrive from outside the West as an import of sorts. They grew from a Western cultural tree, which is Christian.

The missionary ambitions and messianic vision held within the outlook of the secularisation thesis are equally Christian. The picture of the long run of history that I introduced at the beginning – the discourse of modernity that tells of a transition from a primitive distant past, through ages which were given to magic, myths, superstition, and religion, breaking finally into an age which is not – that story runs profoundly parallel to the idea of providential history that belongs squarely within the Christian tradition. All the terrible things that we see going on in the world today and everyday – for the Christian we are to understand that there is compensation for all this, compensation for past and present suffering, in the idea that there is a redemptive end to come, that this is all part of God’s plan for man, and that there will be some final end of things in which believers find their just reward. If we can only spread this good news we can all learn, finally, how to live. That Christian religious idea of providence can be translated very rapidly into the sort of conception of history in which “modern” Europeans belong to an advance guard in the emancipation of the rational subject or the emancipation of the working subject, a revolutionary movement that will lead towards some triumphantly final end of history where all the terrible things that have happened will have worked themselves out. These are secularisations of Christian, distinctively Christian conceptions of providence.

So I think one of the most important points we need to learn today is quite how fundamentally Christian is this secular world in general – and its secularisation thesis in particular.

Indeed, Christianity carries within itself the decisive conceptual resources for the idea of a distribution between the secular and the sacred that we find everywhere in the West today. In the Bible we read, for example, Jesus saying “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark, 12:17). That idea of the possibility of some form of “separation of Church and State” – what one might also call the death of God in the world – is already inside the Christian understanding of the world and the significance of our lives.

We should not understand the secularity of Western society that we see today as a kind of external imposition onto a Christian conception which is basically alien to it. Again, the deep flaw in the secularization thesis is to conceive the movement of recent history – a movement in which, it is quite true, Christian ecclesiastical power has been waning – as a break from a religious and especially Christian epoch. On the contrary, it belongs to the movement of the Christian world…in deconstruction.

Copyright © 2010 Simon Glendinning

This is an edited transcript of some of Simon Glendinning’s contribution to a Forum for European Philosophy Dialogue with Edward Skidelsky on “Modernity and the Meaning of Life” held at the LSE on 18th January 2010. A more formal presentation of some of Glendinning’s claims can be found in his essay “Japheth’s World: The Rise of Secularism and the Revival of Religion Today” in The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp 409-426, 2009.

Dear Walkers,

I am delighted to be able to let you know that the next physical communion of Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group has been arranged for Sunday 21st March 2010 - and we’ll be meeting in Hampstead, don’t-you-know. If you’ve forgotten what GEAWG feels like, look at this:

We will meet, friends and strangers, at Burgh House at 2pm, to be led, via a poetic phenomenology, into the pagan prehistory of Hampstead Heath.

It’ll be like Time Team, only with a pay-off!

If you would like to join us please email shahidha.bari@htlblog.com for pre-walk reading matter.

Our PAY-OFF, walkers, comes in the form of the delectable Anglo-Argentine artist Eloise Fornieles who will perform for us our rite of Spring atop the Heath. She’ll be like Heathcliff, only swarthier.

I think we’ll walk past Keats House and also the Magdala pub, site of the crime passionel which led Ruth Ellis to assert “it’s obvious that when I pulled the trigger I intended to kill him” - thus securing her neck in Pierrepoint’s noose. We’ll check out the bullet-holes in the wall, Eloise will perform for us on the Heath, and then we’ll head to Dick Turpin’s hidey-hole The Spaniards Inn for a frenzy. Sound good? Children and animals welcome.

So you’ll need decent shoes and you’ll want to bring plenty of water and some sustenance (look after yourselves, for the love of Goethe). Bring some money in case you want to go into Keats House or have a port and lemon in the Magdala, or a more Turpin-esque beverage at the Inn. Oh, and be prepared to usher in the Spring.

It sounds so good I’m going to wait at Burgh House NOW in case I miss it. Meet me at 2pm Sunday 21st March 2010. And don’t forget: IT’S FREE!

Ever,

JWvG

NEWSFLASH

Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group will be meeting again this year at How the Light Gets In, Hay-on-Wye. Keep an eye on their site for more details!

Press coverage of last year’s festival

Nemonie tells me that a wide-ranging discussion eventually turned to Mr T. Blair and Sir J. Chilcot, and all concerned agreed that Socrates’ unsurpassed if incomplete and humble account of the nature of knowledge, viz.

Knowledge = Justified True Belief + a Logos or Rationale of said belief

seems to have passed straight through the bowels of contemporary politics. Let the fool say what he likes in his heart, if his belief is to be carried politically in the form of a decision, let us have good reasons.

It was with a heavy heart, then, that we raised our greasy placard outside Queen Elizabeth II Conference Hall this Friday, with fellow protesters whose number is now so very diminished, and is predominated by the Zarathustra-like, almost medievally mad - including myself. Yet Saturday 30th January was witness to the second Progressive London Conference led by Ken Livingstone, and here our hearts lifted in appreciation of Ken’s persistence in the cause of justice and equality. In attendance was a rather curious Daily Mail journalist - an odd addition to an environment in which people were seeking to advance a political thinking to hold open a future for new and exciting ways of living. But, lo, said journalist had been sent to investigate the claim made by the quite malignant Andrew Gilligan that a participating speaker was in fact a supporter of terrorism. As with Gilligan’s various campaigns against Livingstone’s mayoral administration, which have been shown to be unfounded according to several independent, and independently verified inquiries, this slur was publicly refuted with reference to the logos or rationale that serves justified true belief. Mehdi Hasan, senior politics editor at the New Statesman enjoined us to be brave: to have courage in a form of thinking that proceeds according to what serves justice and equality, and thereby seeks always to refute the thinking that serves only the few. Then we will be able to say, with Socrates: “I have no regrets about defending myself as I did; I should far rather present such a defence and die, than live by defending myself in that other fashion.” Will TB be able to say as much?

As CZJ might put it, being Welsh, “willy fuck.”

Such is the fatal circuit of what Michel Foucault calls the Christian hermeneutics of desire opposed to the pagan aesthetics of existence. In a seminar at New York University in 1980, Foucault is reported to have said that the difference between late antiquity and early Christianity might be reduced to the following questions: the patrician pagan asks, “Given that I am who I am, who can I fuck?” The Christian asks, “Given that I can fuck no one, who am I?” Foucault’s insight is profound, but let me state categorically and without a trace of irony that, as a committed atheist, I side with the deep hermeneutics of Christian subjectivity against the superficial pagan aesthetics of existence. The question of the being of being human - who am I? - that begins with Paul and is profoundly deepened by Augustine arises in the sight of God. The problem is how that question survives God’s death. This is Rousseau’s question in his Confessions, it is Nietzsche’s question in Ecce Homo, and it is Heidegger’s question in Being and Time. In my less humble moments, I think of it as my question as well. Whether or not he exists, we are slaves to God.

Copyright © 2009 Simon Critchley

In September 2008, Simon Critchley inaugurated the How to Live project with a secular sermon on the theme of how to live. The above is an exclusive extract from a new project. In 2010 Simon will be touring the UK (with Shahidha and Nemonie) in the new How to Live Ambulance. An appointment register for the Open Heart Surgery will be available soon.

Simon Critchley is chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently at work on two new projects: one on the faith of the faithless, and one on being inauthentic.