The image comes from my childhood home, an image close to my own dreams.
"countless numbers of people are no longer prepared to believe that one has to 'learn something' so that things will be better later. In these people, I believe, a suspicion is growing that was a certainty in ancient cynicism (Kynismus): that things must first be better before you can learn anything sensible [and I note here the discussion of Jean Luc-Nancy and the issue of "sense"]. Socialization through schooling, as it takes place here, in Western societies, in general, is a priori stupefaction, after which scarcely any learning offers a prospect that things sometime or other will improve. The inversion of the relation between life and learning is in the air: the end of the belief in education, the end of European Scholasticism. That is what conservatives as well as pragmatists, voyeurs of the decline as well as well-meaning individuals alike find so eerie. Basically, no one believes anymore that today's learning solves tomorrow's 'problems': it is almost certain rather that it causes them. (Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. xxix)
Der Kritiker smile and not wearing gray trousers and coats, bobbing like penguins, like the birds that we see bobbing, a balance with a weight at the bottom, bouncing from this perspective to that. There is not much to say of Der Kritiker: they live boring judge lives, living in brick tenements under black sky, their lighting is always a very stark and literal light (with clean well lit cookie cut snow men shaped like cut out collage of Matisse color).
The wise live elsewhere, in some other place from Der Kritiker:
The wise live behind waterfalls with golden sunlit fountains, the last and golden sun from behind radiant black branches:
This is the place of wisdom, explains the Oppermann,
He says this wearing his inimicable reading glasses, as he will have to read everything over at least once again.
krei-
DEFINITION: To sieve, discriminate, distinguish.
Derivatives include garble, crime, certain, excrement, crisis, and hypocrisy.
1. Basic form with variant instrumental suffixes. a. Suffixed form *krei-tro-. riddle1, from Old English hridder, hriddel, sieve, from Germanic *hridra-; b. suffixed form *krei-dhro-. cribriform, garble, from Latin crbrum, sieve. 2. Suffixed form *krei-men-. a. crime, criminal; recriminate, from Latin crmen, judgment, crime; b. discriminate, from Latin discrmen, distinction (dis-, apart). 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *kri-no-. certain; ascertain, concern, concert, decree, discern, disconcert, excrement, excrete, incertitude, recrement, secern, secret, secretary, from Latin cernere (past participle crtus), to sift, separate, decide. 4. Suffixed zero-grade form *kri-n-yo-. crisis, critic, criterion; apocrine, diacritic, eccrine, endocrine, epicritic, exocrine, hematocrit, hypocrisy, from Greek krnein, to separate, decide, judge, and krnesthai, to explain. (Pokorny 4. sker-, Section II. 945.)
You may have known this already, and Oppermann tends to become irritated by too much word-play ("too Derridean, too much like chewing gum!").
We must get out from under the crisis in order to extend beyond the critique. Things have got to get better before we can learn anything more. (cynicism and education in a nutshell): but we fancy ourselves as "Der Kritiker." We stand and take preposterous positions, locations and co-locations: executing ourselves and our decisions: "I will read this, and then I will write a formal critique of your position, and then get back to you later." How many times have I heard Oppermann say this to me? How many times have I laughed? - As if writing could ever criticise writing! Writing only produces more writing. We can make notations and obliterate pieces of the text, but it is only for emphasis. We can burn the whole lot of things, but this then is just a matter of insistence, a certain vehemence that we had to impute to a moment or an argument.
Our identification with "Der Kritiker" may have begun in college, when an associate of ours R.- came up with the faux identitat known to us as "Gunther Liebenstrauss." This fictional character was R.-'s manner of dismissing philosophy with an even more preposterous philosopher character, really it was a concatenation of dislike, sardonic wit from which he was invented. Liebenstrauss was said to have written several books, the first of which had to do with the fictional concept of "Ausneig." "Ausneig" is a word that sounds sufficiently German for English speaking individuals to believe it to be a genuine article, a concept of German existential philosophy, vaguely modeled after Nietzsche and Heidegger. "Ausneig" (or perhaps better in this instance as "out-snide") had some relation to existence, perhaps a call to existence itself:
"the mountain is Ausneig."
Again the fictional character of Liebenstrauss wrote several books, each of which was thousands of pages long of indecipherable philosophic prose: again hyperbole on top of the somewhat excruciating reality of the German philosophic tradition. Liebenstrauss wrote his first major work (which never was memorable to me in it's title) and then his subsequent writings were: "The Critique of Ausneig," and "The Third All-Encompassing Critique of Ausneig" and so forth. From this position a fictional "philosopher" both wrote and then theoretically annihilated his own philosophical discourse. This was not an insignificant thought for R.- and Oppermann in 1989. I participated in the discussion only half-heartedly: perhaps I lacked imagination, or perhaps I just felt very identified, and quite naively, with this philosopher type. Perhaps there was some "truth" that I was looking for, even if it eventually became Leonard Cohen's "awful truth" as I was to discover only later on....
"How Western Civilization has worn out its Christian costume."
"Once more it becomes clear how Western civilization has worn out its Christian costume. After decades of reconstruction and the decade of utopias and 'alternatives,' it is as if the naive elan had suddenly been lost. Catastrophes are conjured up, new values find ready markets, like all analgesics. However, the times are cynical and know: New values have short lives." (Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynnical Reason, p. xxvii)
The time is up, and the players and the educators simply have to tip their top-hats to this awful truth that things have got to get better before we can learn any more. I mean we have built the neutron bomb, for heaven sake: things have got to be better before we can learn any more: we learned how to obliterate the planet: things have got to get better before we can learn any more!
What is the purpose of entering this complaint about our collective insanity? Why all this ranting and raving, when it is not like Oppermann or I could do anything about it? What is more, to speak on this matter seems obscene. It seems as though people most of the time simply ignore this condition that sits in our cultural realm of possibility. Yet Oppermann and I have discussed these things, perhaps lightly, irrelevantly: as if entering into a discussion anywhere would be anything more than irrelevant. And he has sent me post-cards that depict the concentration camps, and the memorials to the victims of the first use of nuclear war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Confronted by a power in the atom bomb: a rune of our own ending, extinction, all life as a project as we know it, a deafening explosion of all of heaven on the surface of the earth: a seismic display of this "catastrophe," which is a crisis not only insofar as human life is concerned (and "human life," insofar as it is a cliche about all of us, is relatively irrelevant) but also for a great many other living species on this planet.
It's always this bad, and I am sorry: Here we enter into the threshold between cynicism and obscenity:
you cannot learn any more till somehow something gets better: you cannot learn any more till you have found some way to grieve over the billion, billion souls you could in the realm of possibility vaporize in any given moment.
(Movement from mere ranting to terrifying psychopathy and obscenity of our current civilization, if you think my language is obscene, then please consider the matter of which I speak, and I apologize for the obscenity, it is after all nothing more than a ranting at another obscenity, which I cannot seem to fathom):
Who holds the keys to this worlds biggest shot gun yet imagined, that we as a collective have aimed at our own head? Who holds the decision making process that we should sit for the next 50 or 100 or 500 years with a shot gun muzzle nuzzled in to our dental work? Who the fuck has decided to do this, thinking it would be a great idea: who the fuck keeps their finger on the trigger?
We could say its the good old boys now in office at the head of the United States? We of course say that the devil made us do it: protecting us from all those devil Nazi boys, protecting us from the fanatical loyalists ready to defend the Japanese home islands to the death.
You ask me to be realistic in what I say, to somehow be sober about the whole thing, but I ask you: Help me persuade this god who holds our hands over the trigger, making us believe that this is the right thing to do, to keep the muzzle pointed directly into our mouths, shooting out teeth, roof of mouth, septum, brain and brain stem, back of skull, and lest we not forget scalp, hair follicles, six month's growth of hair. Tired of crisis, tired of critique: but what is there left?
Will there be no more beautiful races of stallions across the sand under blue sky, crying: "ALI!" "-ALI!" "-ALI!" as the thunder of the horses each time passes near?
Crisis and Critique: Der Kritiker.
No more of any oil crisis, or any other crisis.
The image of critique came from my earliest days of youth, when I heard from my father that "The Critique of Pure Reason" was the most difficult book of all to read, and I resolved that my mind would be lucid enough to read and trample in bare feet through the flower beds of that garden, I resolved to read the Critique of Pure Reason, as absolute and in a sense indisputable, insuperable as the real light of truth.
But the Critique of Pure Reason turned out to be mostly boring, after all it was kind of a poor feast of literary merit, not that everything is literary, I suppose that Spinoza's proof is wondrous in its single substantiality, like some homogeneous flake of being. Like cake mix thrown into this life in the form of a bread pan. Flop!
The question remains as to why at this moment I bring up the issue of the "bomb" in relation to my friend Oppermann. The only answer I can imagine relates to the notion that the friendship has reached a critical mass.
At this juncture of critical mass, the weight or matter of the relationship begins to glow: Enough attention has been paid to the relationship in order for it to radiate it's own energy. Had this been done before? Does the relationship itself take on its own autonomy at a certain point? Does it become it's own life-form?
What is the meaning of relationships in the age when we have isolated the isotope? Is there an atomic physics of friendship and thought?
The implications for thought in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy is that we are limited by finite singularity. The infinite remains ungraspable, and the infinity of the other (Levinas) is withdrawn.
But in the age of the isotope, thinking itself can obtain a critical mass: as verified in matter itself: we can refine thinking to the point that it produces a highly toxic, but high energy producing material. The cost to society, and to thinking, is the production of terrible waste by-products. Moreover thinking is called upon to stand in reserve constantly under our endless energy of technological industrial light: thinking is forced.
Friendship is forced as well by virtue of the technologies of analysis, to refine certain isotopes, highly unstable emotional matter is condensed and placed in "reactors" where the energy is set to be released back into the collective once again. I suppose that a "web-log" acts as a "reactor" of sorts.
The threat is that the energy exchange will get botched: collectively this ammounts to the horror of nuclear suicide. And as for suicide of the friendship? -So far, thankfully, Oppermann has stolidly approved of the insanity of writing a web-log devoted to relating to him, even if there is a place in the web-log where I am capable of category (indictment of the problem of evil, according to Kant, in each human soul) and of the categorical imperative: an "imperative" because of our imperative to deal with the terrifying capacity we have for evil. So far Oppermann and I, in Kantian fashion, maintained a protestant, calvinist (calvino-esque?) manner managed to enervate the instinctual, literal forces of our lives. And Sloterdijk himself points to Kant as the "enervator:"
I presume that this violent "Aging process" is in place in order to find a place of solace (an alembic is the pre-technological form of a "reactor", and represents a quintessential "safe and contained place" for volatile reactions.
So has the friendship obtained a critical mass?
Oppermann mentioned the film "The Quiet Earth," which he thought of as being somewhat mediocre, but he went on to imagine an idiot, pontificating, and in Greg Brown's voice:
"I walk around ancient cities
scribbling little notes in my notebook"
In Ursula Leguinn's "Lathe of Heaven," a last man, dying at the end of the catastrophe, dreams his slack and wimpy existence in the future, he meets a power-hungry "Doctor Haber." But the dream becomes stranger still: as the Haber alter-ego implodes by virtue of obtaining his own desire, another reality begins to inform the predicament...
