The mystique of reading

Reading has a je-ne-sais-quoi about it that always troubles the reasoning minds.

Source: Hippies Read Too

There is, of course, that insistent kind of reading, to which I often subscribe, which refuses to read the obvious. That, in itself, is an act of rebellion. It’s, if you trust me, a way of asserting a belief in the force of the almighty reader. But try as we might, strive as we might, the text is there with a reason. And that reason is to puzzle us. I don’t mean this in the sense of mystery novels, but in another, more general sense. I mean it in the sense of an encounter. All encounters which are not re-visitations (re-readings) are, of course, by definition, encounters with the unknown. Texts are no exception to the rule. Simply put, we never know what to expect. And that’s precisely what makes texts beautiful, worthy of our effort, interesting at all. Also – infuriatingly challenging. To someone who wants to swear that he/she has decoded the cultural means by which texts are formed and re-formed, i.e. written and read, this reality of the text that never clarifies its intentions is insufferable. The same applies to someone who is completely, unequivocally sworn to the idea of reader’s omnipotence. Their trust in that ability is a little too optimistic, a little too patronising.

But let us assume this was correct. Let us imagine a situation in which the reader, by some miraculous means, manages to get to the core of the game. Let us imagine that a text has been left with no place to hide, that we’ve nailed it, so to speak. So?

Cui bono?

There’s disappointment in revelation

Vilém Flusser said something to a similar effect about his technical images. He made the same supposition. He was in fact able to give good examples of this class of textual objects. When one watches tv, Flusser says, one is flabbergasted by the mystery of the medium. You’re familiar, I suppose, with the children’s puzzlement: how is it possible to reduce people and buildings to such a small size and, moreover, put them inside that box where they act as if they were real? It’s a valid puzzlement, is it not? Most will resolve this shock by suspending their disbelief. The classical solution of the deserter: flight, don’t fight. Pretend the danger didn’t exist. Act as if the difficulty has never been posed. It makes sense. Difficulty, as Yeats put it, wears you out. So why bother?

Source: Early Television Museum

But – adds Flusser – there’s another approach to the problem. It’s something akin to the attitude of the hero: he/she will hold the ground; he/she will fight, will face the difficulty, will get to the bottom of all this puzzlement. In the case of technical images, this is possible, if only at the end of some effort. All you need to know is the technicalities of image production. Once you’ve gained that knowledge you know that electric impulses replicate the images created in a studio and transport those replicas into your own tv set. You’ll know, now, that everything you’re watching is an illusion, that Plato was right, that you can point out with perfect precision the whole process of creation. No more mystique! You can, if everything comes to it, replicate the process, because you are enlightened.

But the bitter truth is this: enlightenment is disappointing. As in Jonathan Swift’s poem, once you remove the layers of makeup from a young lady’s face, you’re left with the horrible truth of her anatomy. And now you have to live with it! Now you have to be happy with the important discovery you’ve made! Congratulations!

The fog that protects signs

And this is only the materiality of texts that I’m talking about. I refuse to go into the metaphysical zone (may I call it that, simply to differentiate it from the material, ‘physical’ constituent: what with the pen and the paper, the computer keyboard and the printer, the videotext and the YouTube channel, and so on and so forth), for fear of not having a proper argument. I believe Flusser’s demonstration to be frightening enough to curtail any attempt at future arrogance on my part. Yes, I can exercise my free will, I can do violence to a text by making it mine (even if I hate the notion of taking-over – of colonising), but I need not be so outrageously arrogant as to ignore the many roads that lead to the text I’m reading into.

The body that reads

So let’s face again this assumption that one can read a text completely. Let’s face that with the evidence of – I don’t know – irony, double entendre, jokes, textual traps, hidden meanings, hermeticism. Etc. Etc. Plagues upon the lives of readers. Let’s do the facing, then let’s go back to the initial idea: the mystique of reading. And see what happens.

Source: Kurz Weil AI

I would define the mystique of reading by reference to that tickling sensation, to that tremor of the limbs, to that quickened heartbeat one experiences when encountering a passage that touches a nerve. Regarded from this perspective, reading is a seismic business. It causes real somatic reactions in a reading subject, palpable as all emotions. Put differently, reading relies on events to prosper. It needs to create those seismic movements just mentioned.

How boring would it be to go on perusing the surface of a flat desert where there’s no hope for an oasis? Very boring, indeed detrimental to all forms of reading. If there’s no projection of a reader’s expectations there’s no pleasure to be gained from a text. The page-turner argument is a perfect tool from this perspective.

In many cases, those sensations generated by a text are little more than a preamble to something that could be more important, more complex. But readers often reject the enlightenment that might reside in the decoding of a passage. They do this for various reasons. ‘We don’t have enough time’ is one of them. ‘We don’t have enough time to spoil our amazement’ is another one. Since reading marks a gap in the mundaneness of life, we might as well go with the wind, accept the chance of deserting.

This escapist theory doesn’t apply exclusively to literature. The reading of a philosophical text follows the same pattern. We read in order to see what happens next. How the argument develops, how the thought is turned into what it is. Since texts are defined by linear progression, there’s no way of avoiding this sense of expectation, this hope for what is to come. And as long as what-is-to-come exists, as long as this present absence titillates us, the possibility of reading’s mystique is unavoidable.

Dead ends

Reading appeals, I believe, precisely because it is such an interesting concoction of certainty and uncertainty. On the one hand the letters in front of my eyes. Always there, bright as daylight, sure as hell, immutable. On the other hand the invisible meaning. Somewhere else, always somewhere else, never on the page, never blinding my sight. The former engenders arrogance; the latter – humility. I mean humility in an almost religious sense. A reader is always a pious reader insofar as they accept the challenge of not challenging the text beyond the point of no return.

As in Flusser’s technical images, what would I gain if I managed to subject the text to my impulses? Nothing but a disappointment, no doubt. I would see the wires that connect the circuits, the strings that make the text stand together. And then what? Then nothing. Then a dead-end.

Mission accomplished followed by the despair of boredom.

Source: Screen Crave

That’s why the mystique of the text is so necessary; why it is so necessary that we stop where there’s still hope. Even if we’re not satisfied. Precisely because we’re not satisfied. Professional writers know exactly what I mean, because to them reading is no longer pleasure but something else. Not quite pain but certainly something else. A professional writer reads in order to rip the text apart, to see its entrails, to smell its guts, to watch the gore of its internal functions, and hereby to discover the ‘secrets’ of other writers. If there is pleasure in this insistence, it will fade the moment this reader asks the ordinary question, Now what? This question is inevitable in relation to any finite objects, because once an end has been reached continuation is craved.

But what a bliss that reading cannot produce finite understandings...

Of technical images, with Vilém Flusser

In essence, technical images represent the end of writing, in at least two senses. They are its polar opposites; and they put an end to the domination of writing as such. This is, in essence, Flusser's theory. To better understand it, one needs to see what’s specific to each of the two forms of expression/notation. And that’s where I’m going now.

Source: Miguel Frias

I've already discussed, last week and to a lesser extent the week before, that to Flusser writing is historical in the sense of its generating historical consciousness by means of linearity. With writing, the World (that terrible chaos that presents itself as our constant embarrassment) is returned to us ordered. But ordered in a special way. Ordered like the files and ranks of an army, like the wires between two telegraph poles, like the trajectory of an arrow about to hit its target. In other words, like the lines of a written text. Although I placed them first, the metaphors preceding this last sentence are the results of writing, not its models. Writing allows us to see the straightness of all these trajectories because, with writing, we have become accustomed to the paradigm of the line. Understanding, reasoning, logic, historical consciousness, etc. etc. – all these are manifestations of straightness.

The least we can say about this way of ordering is that it has transformed the World as well as our understanding of it.

But writing is not exempt from the tests of dialectics. Its rise to dominance implies some kind of fall as well. The fall may not be fully visible now, when we’re at the very beginning of a major transformation. It may never turn out to be a complete, deep, catastrophic fall. But we can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that writing is taking new forms, and that, more than anything else, it is losing ground. Of course, letting go of writing is not an easy task. Writing has been (and still is) one of our closest companions. We have built civilizations based on it. We have glorified and tortured, eradicated and constructed, invited and enforced – with writing on the topmast.

Apparatuses of transformation

But if letting go must happen, in the name of what can we be said to be letting go of writing? Flusser proposes technical images. Technical images, unlike writing, are not linear. The page of a book reads from top left corner to bottom right; or from top right to bottom left; horizontally or vertically. No matter which script is used, the principle is the same: we go about it in a straight line.

This, however, doesn’t apply to images. Images are meant to be taken as a whole. There is no linear reading of a photograph. One doesn’t start from the top left corner and proceeds to arrive at the bottom right corner.

Unlike writing, which is concerned with lines, images are concerned with surfaces. And this is a fundamental difference. But a difference that’s not so striking if we think that, in fact, representation has been making use of images for a long time. Since way before the emergence of writing, to be more precise. The caves of Lascaux are there to prove it.

So the question arises: what’s so special about technical images? What sets them apart from other visual artefacts?

Flusser focuses on one type of image: photography.

Source: Lilip Studio

Now, of course, the immediate thought crossing one’s mind in relation to photography must be something about its indexical value. Indexicality means that a photograph points at an actual object in a way similar to how the index finger does it; and it does so more prominently than, say, painting. A photographer takes a picture of something. Something that exists exactly the way it appears in the picture that’s been taken. Painting, which is also a representation of something, transforms the object. The work of the artist is apparent in every brushstroke, in every conscious use of perspective, of shadows, of composition in general. Of course, a photographer (and a filmmaker more so!) can do all this him/herself, and with relative ease. So this is not where the fundamental difference between painting and photography lies. To Flusser, the actual difference resides in the fact that the camera is a coded apparatus. Realistic as it may seem (a snippet of reality, as the cliché goes), a photograph is the result of the operations inherent in the camera. Images taken by a photographer will be dependent on the mechanical (and more recently, digital) processes made possible by the camera they’re using.

One may argue that something similar happens in the case of painting; that painting, like photography, requires certain material preconditions in order to exist. Yes, but painting preserves the human factor. Errors in painting are completely due to the artist’s application of the material preconditions. Too much colour here, mistaken application of shadows there, there’s a plethora of possibilities where a painter can go wrong. In photography (where the human remains relevant, no doubt), a large proportion of the possible errors are due to the range of operations built into the camera, and over which the user has no control. An experienced photographer will be able to apply the right apertures to the right photographic situations; but they will not be able to overcome the fact that the camera has only this many types of aperture.

So here’s the fundamental rupture. When we use a photographic camera it is not the apparatus becoming an extension of us (which is the classic understanding of technology at large) but us becoming an extension of it. When we press the button of a camera we enable the coded possibilities built into the apparatus to come to fruition. We serve the camera. We help it come to the realization of its potential, of the specific possibilities extant in its code. And that doesn’t quite happen in the case of painting.

With algorithms we jump into post-humanity

With this in mind it’s becoming easier, I think, to see how the latest optical technologies (analogue or digital) are forms of this general subjection to an apparatus. I don’t mean this in a dystopian sense, as the robot that takes over; but rather in the sense of a development whereby the human has vacated its own creation, like a Deus Otiosus that will only return, if ever, in order to punish the independence given to his creation. (Remember the biblical story of the fall?)

Algorithms are a crucial illustration of all of the above; an example Flusser did not have the chance to discuss (he died in 1991, so all of the 21^st-century technologies we’re using nowadays were unknown to him; although he had a fairly good understanding of how an algorithm works).

Digital algorithms take the coding of the camera to a whole new level. They don’t even need our hand to press their buttons. There’s no button for algorithms. The functions of a button are, once again, scripted into the code. And so, apart from the initial turning-on, an algorithm needs no further human input. An algorithm is built to work in its own terms, after its own script, automated to process information (data) by applying ad infinitum the functions written in its code.

Source: Dark Government

The difference between the code of a camera and the code of an algorithm is simple: while with the former we used the apparatus ignoring (not noticing) the code but hoping to be able to control the results, with the latter we are fully aware of the code but no longer in control of the results. What’s more, we are also fully aware that there’s nothing we can do in order to stop the algorithm. Nothing but the ultimate solutions: shutting it down.

So mechanical cameras and digital codes have this thing in common: the repositioning of the human element. The human is no longer at the center of production of artefacts but at the periphery. That’s why ‘post-humanism’ is such a catchphrase nowadays.

The post-human is – due to no simple coincidence – also a post-writing. Of course, writing hasn’t been completely eliminated from the picture (my pun!). We are still deeply immersed in the linearity that’s been guiding our consciousness for thousands of years. Binary code, which stands at the foundation of the digital world, is itself arranged according to the logic of the line. Not only is it written in lines that start in the top left corner and advance towards the bottom right corner; it is also constructed in accordance to a linear causality between code and operation: code is teleologically written, so as to lead to a result visible in a computer operation.

Flusser has pointed out the fact that no definite separation from linear writing is possible as long as we keep thinking and organizing ourselves according to the principles of linearity. I’m not even sure that we should be aiming towards a complete annihilation. That kind of radicalism would verge dangerously on suicide. But major changes are taking place. Of course they can’t be sudden and complete. But they are here, they are questioning the grounds of writing. Two examples of these changes, in which the algorithm reigns supreme, are Google Earth and soft cinema. I’ll discuss them next week. So we’ll see.

A brief history of writing

Last week I touched quickly, insufficiently, on the issue of algorithmic reality. And that brought to my mind Vilém Flusser’s concern with technical images. And so I thought I must say a few things about that now. But before algorithms can come to the foreground I need to say a few things about writing à la Flusser. In what follows I’ll be citing especially “Letters of the Alphabet,” an essay in the collection Does Writing Have a Future?

Source: Te Ipu Pakore: The Broken Vessel

Vilém Flusser’s theories of writing have a strong historical grounding. He proposed that writing makes history. That, on the one hand, it is a practice with a background, with a beginning (Sumerian tablets, Egyptian papyri, Roman wax tablets and stone inscriptions, and so on and so forth). On the other hand, thought, writing makes History. It was only after the invention of writing that historical consciousness was made possible.

The lines that put an end to a babble

The possibility to arrange events in a linear manner, to speak of them as ordered, is the by-product of writing itself. None of this was possible before writing, when, says Flusser, the world existed in a state of mythical consciousness; when language itself was not yet settled, not yet set in stone (or in whatever).

“It is possible to claim that people of that time babbled.”

Because of the absence of writing, pre-literate cultures could not have spoken the way we do, because they had not yet gone down writing’s path.

With writing things became different in the world and in language. With writing we start to see events through the lens of their inclination towards linear ordering. One after another, events partake in a curious pageant that leaves traces on surfaces, i.e. creates a history of the event’s presence and its advancement towards the next event. With writing, we can imagine what has caused an event and what is likely to be inferred from it. That’s because we can see the before and the after of the event in a linear arrangement. And once we can see that we can’t see otherwise: events must have causes and must produce effects. Writing has made it possible to speak of origins and of projections into the future.

Logic itself is the result of writing, says Flusser. Logic, as a form of syllogistic bargaining with data based on causes and effects, on premises and conclusions, on inferences and injunctions, with the intention of arriving at a truth with a chronology of its own, is a derivative, again, of writing, and of its ability to put things into straight lines.

A simple formula

The success of writing appears to have been due to the simplicity of its formula. Once the world is presented in straight lines, it becomes easier to re-present. The simplification that came with the creation of specialized signs (letters able to synthetize the world through simple combinations) turned the human mind away from pictographic representations, which, realistic as they may have been, were time-consuming and sedentary. The Lascaux paintings are still in Lascaux because the caves could not be transported anywhere else; and so, in order to have access to the signs represented there, one had to be there, in Lascaux.

Source: Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire

I can imagine elitism catching roots right there, in the darkness of those caves. Those who could not afford the privilege of seeing the murals were left outside of knowledge, outside of humanhood, forced to gang up with other prehistoric ignoramuses. Deep inside the caves, those paintings were guarded from the outside world by their very remoteness and, by being guarded, they were also preserved.

Writing did not eliminate preservation from the scheme. Hence its success. Since the ability to eternalize an event through pictographic signs was a privilege of representation per se, writing could not ignore it. So it too advanced the promise of eternity. But on top of that, communication by means of these specialized signs presented this huge advantage of being movable. The human animal turns now its attention to lighter surfaces, easier to transport: tree bark, shells, animal hides. Things found in nature (simple, sympathetic to inscription, at hand) are now turned into support for writing.

The personalization of representation

The story goes on, but there’s no time here to go into details. The point, as Flusser formulated it, is this: before writing, the connection with the world was not completely severed. Of course, the animal painted on a cave wall is not the animal itself but a representation of it: a reminder that such things exist out there, beyond the threshold of the cave. The representation, though, has full referential power: it does refer to an actual animal out there, it is an image of that animal.

Writing ruins this certainty. Writing intervenes between image and human being to unsettle their marriage. Letters are representations not of the world but of images of the world, images akin to the Lascaux paintings. This is apparent in the formal resemblance between Western letters and their referents:

“In the fifteen hundred years since their invention, their original form has changed repeatedly, and yet it remains recognizable: the two horns of the Semitic steer (Hebrew: aleph) in the A, the two domes of the Semitic house (Hebrew: beth) in the B, the hump of the Semitic camel (Hebrew: gimul) in the C. Letters are pictures of a cultural scene as it was perceived by those who invented the alphabet in the second millennium B.C. on the eastern Mediterranean.”

This original resemblance has been forgotten, but it must be taken into consideration when we think of how the letters of the alphabet (or of other writing systems) have been allowed to act as representations of representations; of how they were welcomed at the representational games.

Source: Women of Faith

And so, with the emergence of writing, the world took a step back in its relationship to the human element. Now, in order to make the cave painting accessible to others, a writer refers to that representation in an abstract way. He/she does not explain the world to their readers. What they explain is the representation they have of that world. So writing becomes not only a way of objectifying the world but also of personalizing representation, making it the product of the whim of a writer or other. Precisely because a written text can circulate, it can be present where the reality it refers to is not. A writer can describe in writing a bull or a wild horse, and the reader has to take his words for granted. In essence, there’s no way of ascertaining the truth of an utterance when the referent is absent. That’s how rhetoric became necessary: a way of persuading an audience devoid of direct access to the object. That’s how logic turned up: as a way of proving the truth of the world by means of permutations of thoughts and by establishing a diagrammatic proof-building methodology. Both rhetoric and logic deal with abstractions, with their problems as well as their solutions.

No turning back for language

And hence the essential perversion of the relationship between language and writing:

“Something in the spoken language itself calls out to be fixed in place – and in fact, not so much in the memories of speakers and hearers, or in records or tapes, but rather in the writing itself. Spoken language seems to rush toward writing almost on its own, to become a written language and so to achieve its full maturity. After the invention of writing, spoken language appears to be a preparation for a written language, to teach people how to speak properly in the first place.”

This progression mentioned by Flusser is due, of course, to the several stages of evolution that language has undertaken ever since the invention of writing. As writing turned to be language’s technical way of materialization (its own technology), the invention of inscription, once acknowledged, could never be dis-acknowledged. And so language started takin shapes dictated not by its internal forces but by the forces of its technological apparatus (writing).

“Today we have hardly any access to preliterate speech. Even in nurseries and among illiterates, writing has permeated the language.”

So the schism is total. The specialized signs of writing have taken over the realm of representation. But this victory lasted only this many centuries. Flusser finds photography to be the great rupture in the history of writing, the way towards a different form of formulating the world. With cameras and their encoded capabilities, the door was opened to what Flusser called technical images.

Of them (algorithms et al), next week, if the gods of writing are so inclined as to give us a chance.

From the ground up

What is Magritte’s faux pipe an enlightenment of? What do we learn from it? We learn the lesson, the great lesson, the only truly important and significant lesson we are likely to learn from works of art, the lesson of our position vis-à-vis Being. And here I am again, incapable of distancing myself from the problem of Being, bound to it, my feet immobilized, my mind defeated. Being is always there, always present. In saying this, I am stating my ontological confidence in things immutable. God is always there, in everything there is: this is religious certitude at its most fundamental. (Can you see how religion becomes philosophical? Can you see how philosophy becomes religious? Haven’t they always been?)

Above and beyond the things of the flesh and of the mud there are the things of Aether and Ideas: this is the Platonic configuration of the beings-vs-Being problem. The Aether is the region that refuses us. It’s where signs grow towards, in the hope of reaching that impossible-to-reach state of total signification.

Source: Extra Mile Academy

The (re)turn of the artist

What must have been really terrifying to the Lascaux man was the realization that Being could be imitated. To have the world out there and the work of art here, literally at your fingertips (not even in the open anymore, but enclosed in the viscera of a dark, underground space, the cave), that must have caused the frissons of terror in the first man of the arts.

Every true artist misreads the predecessor not because they find them insufficient, but because they know the predecessor is a bunch of signs, of mere approximations. And signs, because they’re made, they can be un-made as well; undone, to use the proper English word. Cathedrals have been destroyed and rebuilt, books have been burnt and rewritten, and so, the capacity of the human race to do and undo has flourished. This is an awful generalisation (an unacceptable excuse for genocides and cultural eradications), but it’s how we can state the nature of signs: the fact of their mutability. And since we’re at this, let’s say that what needs to be added to this realization is the other fact of our existence: the eternity of Being. Compared to it, we are nothing. This too sounds miserable, horrible, atrocious, depressing. And that’s the reason religions promise happiness elsewhere. That’s why there’s happiness promised in philosophical reflection (the happiness of understanding at the end of toilsome reflection). That’s why, among other things, Aristotle found catharsis necessary: the aesthetic relief for a pre-aesthetic terror.

Back to Being

When things are, as said by Vilém Flusser, in that state of primordial terror that precedes and precludes aesthetic pleasure (when our eyes are too weak to resist the explosive brilliance of the new), we are situated so close to Being we can feel the Boom. We are thrown back by the blast, in full astonishment. But then, cautiously or downright irresponsibly (whether we’re cowards or heroes it matters not so far as we have an answer, an attempt at deciphering what’s blown us away), we come back upon Being. We come back upon Being the way criminals are said to return to the place of their crime. Why do they do it? Maybe in order to clarify the terror of the moment when the crime was committed, the shock of its newness.

This return is exactly what transforms us into artistic beings; this insufficiency, this I-want-more, I-want-it-again kind of philosophy. And now, from the distance to which the blast has thrown us, we take a second look and things look less brilliant, less dazzling. Now, with the distance that affords us the courage (heroes always need distance, don’t they?; even if it’s distance from themselves, from their own security, their own instinct of survival), we can finally see the blast as beautiful.
What I think is important to an artist is this awareness of the moment of the blast: the second when Being materialized itself as a terrible event, as a manifestation of a force that pushes forth. Once the artist knows this, they also know that everything that followed (everything that became Man after the fall from Paradise) is an empire of signs. And if there’s anything that can be replicated, it’s this: the process of signification. Not Being. Being is forever unrepresentable, forever humiliatingly greater, embarrassingly more complex, painfully more laden with potential than we can even start to comprehend. So Being aside, let’s get back to the earliest moment when we have discovered ourselves as capable of doing things; when we have discovered ourselves to be capable, tout court.

An epiphany of the ground

Source: China Daily

When visiting the tombs of Emperor Qin, with its life-size soldiers made of terracotta, Annie Dillard had this wonderful revelation of the development of signs. She saw the excavations and the big picture of history being unearthed. But, most prominently, she saw these figures of terracotta men, half-unearthed, half still buried, telluric creatures about to emerge:

“The earth was yielding these bodies, these clay people: it erupted them forth, it pressed them out. The same tan soil that embedded these people also made them; it grew and bore them. The clay people were earth itself, only shaped. The hazards of time had suspended their bodies in the act of pressing out into the air.”

The terracotta men are, obviously, replicas. Ceci n’est pas une pipe applies to them perfectly (not least, because they’re made of clay too). Ceci n’est pas un soldat, Annie Dillard would have said about the men of clay she contemplated, had she been asked to give those objects a definition.

Dillard’s is a very fortunate association, because it employs things of the earth. Signs growing out of the ground to inhabit the sublunary landscapes of humanity, that’s what the terracotta army is about. Terra cotta, cooked earth, earth transformed from its brute state into a work of art, earth pressing art out. This is what all arts are about, really and truly: about growing from the ground up, about pushing signs out of a primordial foundation, about making something out of Being.

Earthen objects, telluric symbols. Earth is easier for us to understand, and that’s why all forms of art have to grow from the ground up. Earth has given us a proper location for Paradise: not in the skies where improbable mythologies often locate it, but laid upon the very earth from which everything grows. The Christian paradise is a place of gardens and trees and flowers, all of which are things that grow from the ground up. The skies, however, are harder to understand, harder to cope with. From the skies fall complex birds with wings that we’ve strived to replicate and managed only partially. From the skies fall stars and angels. They fall, and that’s the key to their understanding: the gravitational force of signification, which pulls everything towards the ground, whence they can grow then freely, smoothly, into works of art, works of the human hand. The skies have given us vague and powerful divinities, forever out of reach, in whose proximity signs are approximate at best.

I want to finish with another quote from Annie Dillard, just because it’s an excellent way of describing the groundness of arts. This time, she speaks of one particular terracotta soldier on the excavation site:

“The earth bound his abdomen. His hips and legs were still soil. The untouched ground far above him, above where his legs must be, looked like any ground: trampled dirt, a few dry grasses. I looked down into his face. His astonishment was formal.”

Source: Xinhuanet

The power of habit

“But woe unto you, O torrent of human custom! Who shall stay your course? When will you ever run dry?”

(St. Augustine, Confessions)

Vilém Flusser wrote a very enlightening essay about the power of habit, which is very much in tune with the point I made last week. Habit (remember?) is what happens to miracles when they are worn out. It is also what happens to technologies. In the essay, Flusser highlights something we know too well: that novelty is scary; it frightens us, it makes us have second thoughts.

The ugliness of beauty

We cannot function well in the company of novelty, because what is new is unknown to us. We are exposed in front of new things. Naked. Impotent. Exposed because opened-up, as is the case with miracles, which reveal to us a truth that we have never been aware of, in spite of the fact that it has always existed there, in the kingdom of miracles, indifferent to us. (Paul Valéry found it deplorable that we, humans, often attempt to count the stars; us, who count for nothing to those stars!)

Source: Gehad Elgalad

And so, goes Flusser's argument, new things don’t come to us as beautiful. They come to us as an almost unbearable tension: the tension between what we know and what we are experiencing right here, right now, as foreign to us. This tension is so high, we can’t resist its power. We lose the battle with novelty at the very moment it becomes apparent to us. That’s perhaps because any new thing is a reminder to us of how immense and yet-unknown Being is, and how threatening to our comfort its manifestations are. Jacques Derrida speaks of “the as yet unnameable,” which, not unlike Flusser’s idea of novelty, is a shock we receive at the level of existence as well as at that of language, and which catches us in a knowledge and linguistic gap. Derrida assures us that the only way this unnameable can be experienced by us, who have no experience of it, is

“in the formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity.”

There it is, right there, the adjective that best defines the encounter with the new: terrifying. It is the very term Flusser uses to talk about novelty.

So. New things are so new to us they are terrifying. They are monstrous; they are frightening; they are ugly. And this is the paradox of beauty pointed out by Flusser: in its earliest form (in the form it takes at its birth) beauty (if we agree that, for instance, the appearance of an angel is beautiful, or the emergence of a work of art that is unprecedented is beautiful too) always appears to us as ugliness:

“Thus ‘art’ is that human activity which aims at producing hateful, ugly situations, situations that cause terror.”

No wonder we spend so much time and so much energy to reject new things. We have done so every time writing and reading were given new material support: when we moved from clay tablets to scrolls, when we moved again from scrolls to codices, when we stopped reading hand-written manuscripts and started reading printed books. Not to mention the jump to computers – which, as we know, has caused so much criticism, in which ‘ugly’ is an often-used appellation.

The terror of miracles

The crucial tension in miracles is that of their initial ugliness. No miracles were miraculous at the moment of their occurrence. Their miraculous nature was made apparent later on, when reflection became possible, when we discovered we were no longer mute, no longer incapable of creating signs to explain the “unbearable lightness of being,” to use the title of a well-known novel. When they happen, when they take place (both as in ‘happening’ and as in ‘occupying a pre-existent space’), miracles are reflection-less. The shock of their novelty impedes us from thinking about miracles, which right then, in their initial manifestation, are mere happenings: “as yet unnameable.”

Source: Kev Design

This is Flusser’s point too. Things beautiful start by being ugly, more likely to be met with rejection than acceptance. However, as soon as we get past that initial moment of shock, once we have accommodated within us the novelty of a piece of technology, we can start talking about things as beautiful. It is only now, after the shock has been processed and we acknowledge that we’ve survived the encounter, it is only now that we can truly speak of beauty as an aesthetic category. In order to move on from terror into beauty, an act of courage is necessary, since, according to Flusser,

“this is that grey zone into which those artists have climbed who have attempted, at the risk of their lives, to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable, to render visible that which is hidden.”

The heroic gesture of poets (of writers, or artists, of those who have the clear-sightedness of critical perspective) is what opens for us, simpler mortals, less complicated searchers for the ineffable, the safe pathway towards admiration. Harold Bloom was right in saying that true poets always misread the poetry of their predecessors, thus creating, for their own readers, the possibility of admiration. It’s easy to understand how: a “looking-over-again,” as Bloom calls this misreading, renews the text: it presents it to the future readers as novelty. And so a miracle is enacted again, and writing can go on, miraculously, towards its completion as an art of miracles-in-the-making.

We can only admire that which we can manage, once the ground-breaking work has been done for us.

On the lowest rung

But this isn’t where the story ends, because we have an interesting tendency of repeating what we can manage. And so, the miracle that started off as a terror becomes beautiful, and then pretty. It reaches one grade lower. This is the manageable beauty of things enjoyed by the masses (and I don’t mean masses in a disparaging way, but as a collective appreciation of things that were once the object of a minority of odd perceivers, of freaks who used to enjoy ugliness perversely).

Once we’ve reached this stage, the next step comes about as little surprise: the intense use of a thing turns that thing into kitsch. This is the ultimate step in the degradation of something that was once beautiful, once terrifying, once of the order of miracles “as yet unnameable.”

Source: The Guardian

Kitsch is prettiness in excess. But most importantly, it is the result of habit. Habit wears out a shirt; it tatters our raptures; it makes something that was unbearably visible into pure invisibility, into non-presence. Pretty things are invisible things. They participate in the life of art by not participating: by remaining invisible and by turning miracles, for instance, into common occurrences.