User:Lbattich/On three cultural objects

The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book

Stephane Mallarmé

Initial description of three objects

• Text

I have selected several short excerpts from various writers: Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce. These textual fragments vary in length from a sentence to a full paragraph. They all deal with the question of how to approach history, and particularly textual history. Nietzsche and Whitman, in their own way, advice the reader not to rely on existing concepts and written ideas from others, but to approach the world afresh. Their works have now become part of our cultural baggage, and so their advice has a hint of paradox.

• Moving-image

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow, 1565, oil on wood

Andrei Tarkovski, Solaris

Lars von Trier, Melancholia

I have selected a sequence in a film that highlights the practice of cinematic quotation. In one scene of Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, the main character flips through an art book display, changing its pages from Suprematist images to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Hunters in the Snow. This painting points us to Andrei Tarkovski's Solaris, where Bruegel's works are either alluded or actually displayed in several sequences of the film.

• Artwork

Kurt Schwitters, Hanover Merzbau, 1923-1936

A different approach to the use of cultural fragments is embodied in Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau installations. These works are made of different artefacts collected by the artist, which are contained in an architectural structure. Such structure, however, preserves the works only by rendering them inaccessible.

A narrative approach to exploring three cultural objects

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce, Ulysses, Part I, Episode 2.

“Life itself is a quotation.” Jorge Luis Borges

“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.” Stephane Mallarmé

On certain evenings Cecil would find himself sitting earnestly at his desk, yet unable to accomplish any sort of purposeful activity. A book lies open on the desk. In most circumstances Cecil would take care to know which book it is, by whom, what page he's reading at the moment. On this evening, prey of a numbing stupor that restrains his usual actions, Cecil sets his mind to wander. Guided purely by the imagination, certain associations of ideas inevitably lead him to David Hume's remarks:

"IT is evident that there is a principle of connexion between the different thoughts or ideas of the mind, and that in their appearance to the memory or imagination, they introduce each other with a certain degree of method and regularity." The imagination, most unruly among the human faculties, nevertheless acts according to principles of association, and provides meaningful connection between ideas. It would go beyond the purpose of this text to enquire into the psychological motives behind Cecil’s associations on this peculiar evening. A descriptive approach, however, would suffice to elucidate the connectives in his nocturnal deliberations. When such connectivity may seem wanting, we should then be reminded of Hume’s prerogative:

“[E]ven in our wildest and most wandering reveries, nay in our very dreams, we shall find, if we reflect, that the imagination ran not altogether at adventures, but that there was still a connexion upheld among the different ideas, which succeeded each other.”

As much as he is unable to accomplish something useful (write that email, complete that application, and so on), Cecil is unable to explain why the sight of an unidentified book would lead his mind to recall Walt Whitman’s admonition in “Song of Myself” :

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through

    the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

There is a slight paradoxical hint within these lines. Even when Whitman warns against “taking things from him,” his characteristic trumpeting tone and urgent vitality seem to contradict his very advice. Today, over the centenary of Whitman's death, the paradox is exacerbated: Whitman himself is to Cecil no more than a “spectre in books,” his eyes now “the eyes of the dead.” Logically, the problem has the self-referential tone of Epimenides' paradox: Epimenides the Cretan states that "all the Cretans are liars."

What is Cecil to do with these lines? One approach would be to treat the “spectres” as no more than that, historical shadows, relative points of view, tentative opinions to be looked at with the detached objectivity of archeological interest. But this approach, for all it’s claim to objectivity, does not render them less spectral. Pressured to discontinue this line of thought, Cecil’s unruly imagination proceeds to other texts, other quotes, other spectres. Nietzsche:

"He who lets concepts, opinions, past events, books, step between himself and things – he, that is to say, who is in the broadest sense born for history – will never have an immediate perception of things and will never be an immediately perceived thing himself; but both these conditions belong together in the philosopher, because most of the instruction he receives he has to acquire out of himself and because he serves himself as a reflection and brief abstract of the whole world."

Nietzsche's and Whitman's remarks seem almost like an affront to Cecil's own mode of thinking: to think by quotations and citations. For all his desire to join Nietzsche on his journey to become a "reflection and brief abstract of he world," unmediated by the words of others, by alien concepts and historical opinions – for all his desire to achieve Nietzsche's purported immediacy, Cecil cannot disenchant himself from the specters. A vast horizon of cultural debris and historical data opens itself to him, crowded by most delectable quotes and concepts, dead eyes and wandering specters. Yet not all of such specters are encountered in books or written works. Not all specters have to be actually read, nor experienced as such, to have their effect and influence on our thought. Unread and unseen, the objects within Kurt Schwitters' Merbau remain hidden by the evolving structures.