Početkom ovog mjeseca (5. kolovoza) umro je Bernard Stiegler, jedan od najvažnijih suvremenih francuskih filozofa. Stiegler je bio inspiracija mnogima, kako zbog svojeg neobičnog životnog puta (u mladosti je nekoliko puta opljačkao banku, a u zatvoru je doživio svojevrstan preobražaj i postao filozofom), tako i zbog svoje filozofije, posebice svojih spisa o tehnici (najvažnija knjiga mu je trotomna Tehnika i vrijeme),

Osobno nikad nisam čitao Stieglera, ali bih svakako htio za početak pročitati njegov autobiografski esej Prijeći na djelo. 

Ovdje je kratak tekst koji je povodom Stieglerove smrti napisao njegov kolega i prijatelj, filozof Yuk Hui. 

Klimatske promjene

Prošle godine ljeti postojao je jedan period kad sam bio lošeg raspoloženja zbog klimatskih promjena odnosno njihove konkretne manifestacije u vremenskim prilikama. Tih je dana u Zagrebu također kišilo, ali ne ovako snažno kao ove godine. Sjećam se da sam u jednoj objavi ovdje napisao da je pisati prikaz Mortonove knjige jedino što bih trenutačno mogao raditi. I zaista, pisanje tog prikaza, u kojem su nažalost također primjetni tragovi mog tadašnjeg psihičkog stanja, bila mi je psihoterapija. 

Problemi s raspoloženjem zbog klimatskih promjena počeli su još na proljeće kad sam sam se prvi put počeo ozbiljnije zanimati za taj fenomen (ili prije skup fenomena) nakon niza godina provedenih u ignoranciji. Naravno da sam čuo za klimatske promjene/globalno zatopljenje još u djetinjstvu, čini mi se, ali bih nekako uvijek potisnuo tu informaciju. To se iznenada promijenilo prošle godine. Efekt je bio tako snažan da mi je u tom jednom periodu bilo teško misliti na bilo što drugo. Moj interes za studij, koji je već popustio otkad sam upisao petu godinu, dosegnuo je najnižu točki. Nisam imao volje dolaziti na nastavu ni učiti za ispite. S vremenom se stanje popravilo. Napisavši prikaz Mortonove knjige, moram priznati da sam osjetio olakšanje jer sam učinio nešto po pitanju problema koji me tako brinuo. Naravno, očekivanje da će se nakon našeg teksta nešto promijeniti u svijetu obična je iluzija na kojoj, međutim, počiva velik dio akademske industrije. Taj nesrazmjer posebice dolazi do izražaja u humanistici čiji tekstovi ponajmanje utječu na stanje u svijetu, a često dolaze upravo s takvim (revolucionarnim) ambicijama.

Sada, godinu dana kasnije, naviknut na loše vijesti kad je riječ o klimatskim promjenama nastojim ostati pribran i ne dopustiti da one snažno utječu na moje raspoloženje. Uostalom, stanje je takvo (loše) kakvo jest, prognoze su takve (katastrofalne) kakve jesu i ništa osim snažne i ujedinjene (globalne) političke akcije ne može imati učinka.

Za kraj jedan od najnovijih članaka o topljenju leda na Antarktiku: https://www.portalnovosti.com/topljenje-planeta?fbclid=IwAR1bcZ98CoBeeLrjbcC7gwE3LRBeTiT-3Hk1SgC3GzPontyv-CH7sQCqncA

Quote of the day

Aaron Schuster on Deleuze's understanding of complaining:

"Complaining can be like prayer or song or dance, a hymn to what is above the person or greater than him or her: but this is nothing other than a dense combination of forces and affects that compose and decompose an individual existence. For the truly gifted complainer, it is no longer the person who complains but the complaint that complains itself in and through the person. This is the properly Spinozistic or Nietzschean complaint, as a form of self-overcoming." (Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, p. 17-18)

Critique of bioethics and other forms of life-centered philosophy

I recently wrote this short text (mostly as a sketch for a more elaborated critique) in which I criticize still prevailing discourses on life. 

It was partly meant as a response to all those civic associations and politicians from the right political spectrum who claim that they want to defend life (mostly that of unborn children) but also as a critique of some philosophical positions, namely that of bioethics. To summarize, the problem I see with those forms of discourses on life is a) that they favourize living beings in opposition to non-living matter and b) that they think life (only) as a sort of transcendence, as something which is possessed by / belongs to individual beings. 

In my view, there are two types of philosophy on life. One is that which revolves around the concept of life but which is actually anthropocentric or which at least speaks about life from the point of view of living beings (human or other animals). The second is a philosophical tradition which really tries to think life and which is usually recognized in the history of philosophy as a philosophy of life. Two famous representatives of this tradition would be Nietzsche and Bergson and its revivalist in the second half of the 20th century would be, of course, Deleuze. What is common to these philosophers is that they try to think life as immanence and thus as something which extends beyond the life of individual beings. This text allies itself with that tradition. Without further ado, here is the text:

Life is pure immanence, pure bliss (Deleuze). No one, no politician, no human being can protect life but only succumb to it. One never protects life which has no face and cannot be protected but only an individual (wo)man which is in-Person and that is a completely different thing.

Furthermore, this is why the ethics which are centred around (preserving of) an individual life are so stupid. I know it will sound rude but it is not life - my life, your life, their lives - that is important but how one lives one's life. That is the only possible domain of ethics. Finally, the category of preserving does not pertain to life in the first place because life, for the most part, consists of the sheer opposite - wasting of energy. So what does it mean to say that (human) life does not matter? Isn't that pure nihilism. I wouldn't say that it necessarily must be nihilism. For me, it is first and foremost an attempt at realist and materialist thinking. And indeed, it is not people's lives that matter but people themselves. There's no need for this recourse to a notion of life in order to give dignity to a human. We grieve because someone is not alive anymore but we do not really grieve over his/her life but over him or her as a person.

To put it shortly, life (what Deleuze calls a life) is the ontological principle and therefore cannot be the object of value. All human values exist because of life or are dependent upon it but life itself does not have a value! There's no intrinsic value of life and so life itself can never be sufficient reason to keep living. It is the creation of (new) values or, to put it more generally, what we do with our lives, that makes life livable (bearable) in the first place. Finally, life does not contribute any surplus value to living beings as opposed to non-living things. (And what about viruses?) All that exists - living and non-living beings - is equal and equally in the Real. 

Finally, what about human-machine relationships as represented in the films such as Blade Runner and Terminator 2. If it was (biological) life that mattered, we could have no emotional relationship to a cybernetic organism. But we relate to a machine because of its human aspects. So it is not important whether one is a living organism or not but whether one is a person and what kind of person!

And the only people who care not about people themselves but about their lives are really capitalists because capitalism needs people, among other reasons, to invest their (living) energy into a system. Capitalism converses living energy into a profit. So when one Croatian minister said that he is sorry for all the lives we lost due to coronavirus pandemic because Croatia needs lives of all those people, I think he really meant it. All the lives are more than welcome if they can be exploited for economy.

To conclude, life is a concept for biology (and maybe philosophy) but not for cheap moralising. If we cannot think life immanently and as immanence, I suggest we stop using the term.

Thought of the day

The only things which are consistent in man are the way he loves and the way he thinks. Everything else is characterized by the lack of consistency, thereof by contigency which is the effect of time. The one's body and personality can change radically over the time, to an extent that they become unrecognizible. But thought and love  always remain the same, they are the essence(s) of man which are equally immanent as life itself. The man thus can in his life love only one woman (and all the women he loves are therefore in one and the same woman) and the way he loves her (including the structure of his desire) remains unchanged. The same goes for thought. Although contours of one's thinking can change over time, there is no radical break or rupture. Behind every ostensible break there is a continutiy to be proved. From the day one starts thinking, one always thinks on the same path.

Reading Crash by J.G. Ballard

I have first read Ballard's Crash as an undergraduate in my third year of college. Though I already had some traumatic experience involving technics/technology to invest in the reading of the novel, I wasn't able to appreciate it as a work of literature. The story certainly was interesting (though bordering sometimes with appal) but I couldn't find much enjoyment in writing itself. One of the reasons might be that I was reading it in Croatian translation. The other might be that I was simply too young and inexperienced for that kind of literature. Finally, I was still a bit traumatized so it wasn't the easiest for me to read such text which could stimulate unpleasant memories.

Reading it this year, it really feels like (perverted) poetry of cars and highway overpasses. Ballard's descriptions are simply beautiful, both clinically precise and poetically imaginative with its various analogies between the shapes of the human body and that of the car. And it goes especially, of course, for his descriptions of sexual intercourses. But it should be noted that it is not so much eroticism per se (play between desire and its object) that interests Ballard (or characters in the novel), but new possibilities of sexuality that are opened by the convergence between human and technology. It is the world of pure geometric forms that apply equally to organic and artificial beings. It is pornography! Although not experimental as Atrocities Exhibition, Crash marks already on its formal level one of the peaks of Ballard's writing.

It somehow beautifully coincided that at the same time as I was reading Ballard's novel, I was going through the discography of Ultravox. I would say that of all the British singers/songwriters influenced by Ballard's fiction (Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith and others), John Foxx probably stands as the closest musician to the "sage from Shepperton". The reason is that Foxx's lyrics do not only deal with the same topic of intertwinement between eroticism and technology (or inscription of the former into the latter) Ballard's fiction but also possess something of Ballard's style of writing, transposed into lyrics, of course. So while it may be that "The Cars" by Gary Numan comes as the most easily remembered song representing the 80's fascination with cars, it is actually Ultravox's "Maximum Acceleration" that conveys the same reciprocity between human sexuality and technological landscape as found in Ballard's cult novel. John Foxx will continue to investigate the same phenomenons in his first solo album which can also be regarded as the best soundtrack to Ballard's Crash. 

* John Foxx will later pay homage to Ballard with a conceptual album B-Movie (Ballardian Video Neuronica) released in 2014.

Degrowth of philosophy

Today I had the opportunity to listen to the talk by one Italian professor of philosophy who was talking about philosophy, ecology and ethics, mostly basing his talk on the book by Felix Guattari, Three Ecologies. I haven't read Guattari's book yet but from the account of the speaker, one would assume that it still preserves the authoritarian position of philosophy over ecology and people. At one point in the talk, he even said that we need philosophy to tell us (people) how to act, to restore our relationship with nature and some similar idealist cliches.

But why shouldn't philosophy act upon itself (and suspend its master position) in the same way that other disciplines (including sciences) should do in regard to the ecological crisis? But no, philosophers always think that they are somehow excluded from the problem.  

That is why I sympathize with Laruelle who is advocating for degrowth of philosophy (I still have to read his proposal for generic ecology to get a better understanding). Although he is deeply aware that what (non-)philosophers can produce is yet another form of fiction (eco-fiction), it is probably the best philosophers can do, instead of pretending as they usually do. 

Just a little information that I will be giving a talk on Laruelle's non-ethics on Friday (via Zoom) at the (virtual) student conference "Ethics: its theory and applications from antiquity to postmodernity".

Programme of the Conference can be found here.
To apply for the passive participation in the Conference go here.

More conceptual art

Untitled, 2020.
(empty blog post) 

Thought of the day

Sometimes I ask myself why does this cat of mine have the happiest life of us all but then immidiately I realize - and that is the type of consciousness, I believe, we share with all sentient beings - that the only (safe) way to live the happiest life possible is to oversleep it, because every engagement with life, every attempt to live (because to live means to try to affirm existence of one's being to the fullest) brings with itself pain, loss and suffering (mental and physical) which threaten to overwhelm us once and for all.

What are speculative and non-standard philosophy: very brief introduction

Since this blog bears the name "speculative thought", I realized that it would be good to finally elaborate a little bit on it, just for the sake of clarity. Since I recently started to compose a text about speculative and non-standard philosophy, I decided to share an excerpt from that text (work-in-progress) here.

"First of all, let us start by saying that both types of philosophy can be traced in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Though François Laruelle, the originator of non-philosophy and non-standard philosophy, criticized Deleuze and Guattari insisting that his non-philosophy should not be conflated with their pop philosophy (or whatever we want to call it), it is safe to say that the former duo did a huge step not only in enforcing speculative thinking back into continental philosophy (Deleuze did that already in Difference And Repetition and The Logic of Sense) but in pushing philosophy towards non-standard practice of philosophy. So how are we to recognize this non-standard philosophy, at least as Deleuze saw it. The answer lies precisely in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of philosophy as production of concepts. So the first important notice is that of creation (production) and the second is that of the effect because for Deleuze and Guattari it is not so much the question of whether the concept somehow touches the truth or not but what it does. In that regard, it can be said that Laruelle’s project further elaborates on this conviction by constructing highly abstract and rigorous philosophical apparatus. As Ray Brassier points at the end of his essay on Laruelle’s »axiomatic heresy«: “In non-philosophy, radical axiomatic abstraction gives rise, not to a system[1] or doctrine inviting assent or dissent, but to an immanent methodology whose function for philosophy no one is in a position to evaluate as yet” (Brassier 2003: 34). Isn’t this precisely what Deleuze and Guattari wanted to do – construct (theoretical) machines for their future effectuation?

Let us now briefly turn to the term speculative philosophy. As we have already said, among French poststructuralists Deleuze is primarily the one (although Jean-François Lyotard also deserves to be mentioned) to be credited for the renewal of speculative thought (speculation) in philosophy. During the nineties in England, right at the time of Deleuze’s death, occurred an explosive emergence of speculative thought, especially in convergence with the border genre of theoretical fiction, in the writings of the members of the so-called CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) such as Nick Land, Mark Fisher and Reza Negarestani[2]. By the early 21^st century speculative thought became incorporated into ambitious philosophical projects of speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier who want to reclaim philosophical access to the reality independent of human thought. In their work speculative thought becomes the kernel of philosophy which in the combination with scientific knowledge enables the approach to the absolute."

---

[1] Whether or not did Laruelle during his philosophical journey lasting almost half a century indeed construct a system is a complex question. However, even if we describe Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a system of thought, we must differentiate it from classical philosophical systems of his contemporaries like Badiou and Žižek. In one interview Laruelle for example said that he constructs a system, but that it is made up of collisions. See: “Laruelle: Concept Collider”, https://fragilekeys.com/2017/12/10/laruelle-concept-collider/.

[2] Actually, Reza Negarestani has never been a member of the CCRU for the plain reason that he lived and worked in Iran but he was a close associate and regularly contributed to the writings of the CCRU group. 

Statistika

Kako je nedavno prošlo godinu dana od pokretanja ovog bloga, odlučio sam iznijeti podatke o tri najčitanije objave, a to su:

1.) "Osvrt na film Badiou"

Pomalo neočekivano, ali možda samo znak da bih trebao pisati više osvrta na filmove. Tekst je nastao u vrijeme kad, mislim, još nisam pročitao nijednu Badiouovu knjigu. (Nedugo nakon toga pročitao sam Manifest za filozofiju). Drago mi je ako je tekst potaknuo nekoga da pogleda film ili pročita neku Badiouovu knjigu, kao što sam i tada napisao. 

2.) "Osvrt na tribinu 'Književnost i otpor'"
Prvi tekst objavljen na blogu. U njemu se već daju iščitati naznake kritike stvarnosne proze i neorealističkih poetika, čime sam se počeo tada baviti.

3.) "Letter to a friend"
Ponovno rani tekst. Postoji nekoliko sličnih "pisama" koje sam napisao svojim imaginarnim prijatelji(ca)ma. Ne dijelim više neke od stavova iznesenih tamo, ali to je možda ogledni primjer mojih pokušaja pisanja u formi pisma.

Quote of the day

Laruelle on the transformation of Christianity and religion:

"Man-in-Man as being without-consistency, revealed by murder and persecution, is designed to oust the old onto-theo-logy, its diverse branches, and to rethink the Christian and Gnostic experience under ultimately human forms. We do not practice or import any atheism, in undertaking an exercise of thought we sufficiently 'believe' in God, Christ, and more so in the Hell where these shadows live. We believe in a God who claims to take place of Man-in-person and who is in Hell. In a Hell whose other name is 'the World' dominated by the Principle of Sufficient Church. But also in a 'non-Christian' Christ rather than an Anti-Christ. This is the human trinity that we oppose to all those all-too-divine religions. A trinity that is no longer of three persons, but of Man-as-final-identity announcing his being-human in the World within the radically subjective figure of a Future Christ that every man who is in-hell has in becoming." (François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, p. 30)

Loneliness

There are numerous things which can be discussed in regard to the Covid-19 pandemic and there are certainly some of its implications and some lessons which should be taken from this situation in order to help us cope with or even prevent similar events in the future. It is also known that many people, especially on the left, have called for this pandemic to be taken as a crucial stimulus that should lead us towards the transformation of society. Whether it is solidarity or barbarism (everyone for oneself) that is going to prevail in the future, that is the question. Unfortunately, for the system to be shifted in a different direction, that of what is usually called a sustainable future, I do not have much hope. 

In this text, however, I want to discuss something different, much less ambitious and probably even unpolitical at first glance. It is known that situations like this one that force the whole population into isolation can have a strong effect in inducing loneliness (and depression) in people. People who are especially liable to those effects are the people who live alone but who are not completely content with that condition.

This is also the situation in which the emergence of this epidemic/pandemic caught me personally. While I can imagine that some artists/philosophers might have found this situation helpful in a little bit perverse/narcissistic way, because it offered them a reason (#stayathome) to withdraw in isolation and commit themselves to their work, this was not the case with me. The opposite response, that of commitment to the political/communal aims was also not my primary reaction. To be honest, political (communal) came to me as secondary, to some extent even as a substitute for the unattainable intimacy.
For the last couple of months, from the start of the new year approximately, I have been coping with the strongest loneliness I have ever experienced in my life. There are two important and interconnected reasons for it: the severance of the connections with the university which was the institution that literally organized my life and determined my acquaintances for the last five years and parallel loss of few friends with whom I regularly used to talk and "hang out" during my studies. However, with these severances of the old relationships (that with university and that with former friends) also came something unexpectable which promised not so much to substitute for those lost relationships but to enable me to take new paths in my life, paths which I felt were much needed. So it was not the question of finding a way to re-territorialize myself either within the family or within the academic institution but to continue the process of de-territorialization already initiated through writing. It was the question of finding new intensities which could supplement and work with those already found in philosophical thinking/writing.
I was just starting to explore those when this epidemic happened. So if I were to summarize my life in the last few months, apart from my writing there was only one thing (structural but nonetheless completely aleatoric) worth mentioning. I realized that this battle (loneliness) must be won on a different ground - that of real life. As a result, the thing into which I started to invest all of my remaining hope were some unpredictable encounters (chance-meetings) that used to happen to me occasionally - about once or twice a month. I started gambling with my fate, as Brian Ferry would put it, in the purest conviction of (anti)philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Unfortunately, though, I remained too much of a philosopher (and masochist) for it was only later, but never in that very moment, that I recognized these chance-meetings as small events (falling in love, to put it bluntly). Swallowing in the feelings of guilt and shame afterwards I started to think about them (places, times and persons who accompanied them) extensively (the whole theory soon followed).[1] When the epidemic was announced in Croatia, I entered into the self-perpetuating circle of suffering. The compulsion to repeat in its cruel sense. What soothed me before was that the lost chances might soon be changed for a new one which will be realized (effected). But these days were suddenly over. The streets were emptied,  the contact was forbidden and the chance for meeting someone was practically obliterated. I would not know how to describe the condition in which I found myself better than by using a metaphor of a rat in a maze. It was not depression (for desire was constant but it couldn't be aimed anywhere) but yes, loneliness. I've never felt my work so pointless. I continued to read and write, either for my Master thesis or for my other projects, but I cannot say that it made me feel any better. No, it was just dull work.

Now, after this introduction about my personal situation, I want to discuss briefly loneliness in men and women and a different way in which this universal condition affects two sexes. The following discussion mostly refers to loneliness in the way it affects young people (adolescents) like me. 

Well, it seems to me that the strongest form of loneliness in men appears as something strongly connected with sexuality. To put it simply, loneliness in men (heterosexual and homosexual alike) almost always has to do something with sexual desire or even more precisely, sexual drive. What must be kept in mind nevertheless is that it is not reducible to want (lust) for sex. It also includes a wish  (though little bit unknown at first) for sharing life with the other person, which essentially means experiencing the world in a different way, and the need for tender (loving) feelings. However, it seems that this male loneliness first and foremost appears as something sexual, which undeniably has to do with man's hormonal constitution. Mark Fisher summarized greatly the painful experience of being a male adolescent, especially in today's pornographic age. While writing about Birthday Party, he notes:
"(...) if women want to know what it is like to be inside the body of and brain of an adolescent male, they can do no better than listen to these songs. This is crucially not just about (lyrical) content but also form – the lurching funhouse-cum-torture chamber topographies of the music capturing the chaos of a seething reptile brain stewed in hormones and programmed by pornoscopic junk, the whole racket kept from devolving into the totally inchoate by the dumb implacability of drive, impersonated in the BP and the Bad Seeds by Pew and Adamson’s bass."[2]
But knowing that it is about hormones - testosterone - makes it a little bit easier, right? "It ain't me babe", as Mark Hollis sings in the song "Desire". So it is something that has to be endured on the one hand, as Mark Fisher points out in his text. But there is more to it. And that more points towards intimacy and tender feelings. Or if we are to be slightly misogynistic, we would say that it has to do with the kindness of women, as Ballard would have written. The point about male loneliness is that it mixes both sexuality and tender feelings. Otherwise, it would be just lust: "Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you/ But I know it's only lust" (Gang of Four, "Damaged Goods"). We can notice this difference also in the way that woman is perceived by man. While in lustful longing woman embodies sexual object or even partial objects, to a lonely man who desires intimacy the woman with whom he falls in love almost inevitably appears as an angel.[4] David Sylvian captures perfectly this figure of woman-as-angel in the song "The Other Side of Life" where he sings: "She comes and goes / The other side of life / Sheltering only / The other side of life".
But what about loneliness in women? We are tempted to ask ourselves do women feel lonely at all because, as contemporary mainstream media wants to reassure us, women are doing completely fine on their own.[5] While this is certainly true on the one hand, that does not mean that they do not suffer from loneliness or even depression. But we must differentiate female loneliness from the male one because, for all that I know, female loneliness isn't usually connected with sexuality. That is not to say that women don't have a sexual drive. They certainly do, though in much more moderate doses than men. So what is then the cause of loneliness in women and moreover how do they experience it? I would be lying if I said I knew. I guess that it is caused by the need for intimacy and sharing life-experience just as in men. So it is in a loneliness that both men and women experience their need for intimate/love relationship. The second reason might have to do with the not-wholeness of woman I have already discussed previously. Though both capitalism and patriarchy offer a woman an exit from such a condition, these exits are false. It is actually learning to live with it both passively, by enduring it, and actively through creativity (becoming), that is a woman's task. Just as men have to learn to live with their desire (and direct it towards something creative), women have to learn to live with their not-wholeness. But that should not be conceived as an obstacle preventing them from actualizing their potentials but quite on the contrary, it is because of those universal structures of their being that men and women are capable of it in the first place.

---

[1] I'm willing to elaborate the whole little theory one day but currently, it would be too painful to do it.
[2] Fisher, Mark, „This desire to possess her is a wound: Nick Cave and masculinity as pathology“ (see here).

[4] It is only now, retrospectively, that I am able to understand the kind of infatuation through which poets like Dante and Petrarca might have gone.

[5] Many theoreticians agree that single women tend to manage their lives and careers in a contemporary western capitalist society better than their male contemporaries.

O Mortonu i Tamnoj ekologiji - revizija

Kako je već prošlo pola godine otkad sam napisao prikaz[1] knjige Tamna ekologija: za logiku budućeg suživota Timothyja Mortona i kako sam u međuvremenu stekao kritičku distancu koja mi je nedostajala za vrijeme pisanja prikaza, htio bih se nakratko vratiti vlastitom prikazu te proći još jednom kroz tekst kako bih ukazao na ona mjesta koja bi iz današnje kritičke perspektive vrijedilo dopisati ili preispisati.

Prikaz započinje neobičnom uvodnom rečenicom: "Kako se s godinama klimatske promjene počinju sve znatnije očitovati, a različiti ekološki problemi sve više isplivavaju na površinu, u suvremenoj ekološko-filozofskoj misli sve češće nailazimo na taman i depresivan pogled na budućnost ekologije, čovječanstva pa i mišljenja uopće." (str. 163) kojoj je posve nepotrebno pridodana fusnota koja ne donosi nikakvu novu informaciju. Već se pri takvom početku vidi da je tekst pisan s velikim emocionalnim ulogom. Moglo bi se reći da autor nije samo pisao pod utjecajem Mortonova mišljenja, već zapravo i njegova afektivnog stila. Prikaz knjige zaista jest pisan mortonovski, ako već možemo govoriti o Mortonovu stilu, a za što mislim da postoji dovoljno materijala.  Ono što bi međutim moglo biti filozofski problematično u uvodnoj rečenici jest miješanje zabrinutosti za budućnost čovječanstva sa striktno filozofskim ambicijama suvremene filozofije koja filozofiji pošto poto želi vratiti pravo na govor o apsolutu. Naposljetku, pišući fusnotu nisam toliko htio aludirati ni na jednu konkretnu knjigu, koliko na opću atmosferu u suvremenoj filozofiji i kulturalnoj teoriji. (Za ilustraciju te atmosfere vidi jednu od prethodnih objava.)

Nakon uvodnog predstavljanja autora dolazi odlomak u kojem sam podsjetio na sukob između dekonstrukcijske (književne) kritike i ekokriticizma (ekokriticizmu bi se mogao pridodati i ekofeminizam) te pokušao vrednovati objektu usmjerenu ontologiju u kontekstu prevladavanja tog sukoba. Taj odlomak i dalje mi se čini kao jedan od najvalidnijih u prikazu. Jednostavno rečeno, pozivajući se na Mortonove argumente, pokušao sam uputiti kritiku koncepta prirode kakav koriste ekokritičari, kao onaj utemeljen na metafizici prisutnosti i binarnim opozicijama (čovjek - priroda, kultura - priroda). Priroda nije izvanjsko čovjeku pa tako ni ekologiju ne možemo definirati kao disciplinu koja se bavi čovjekovom dominacijom nad prirodom. Točnije mi se čini definirati ekologiju kao disciplinu koja se bavi proučavanjem složenih odnosa između živog i neživog svijeta te načinom na koji čovjek svojim aktivnostima mijenja uvjete samog života na Zemlji te tako utječe na život svih drugih živih bića. Tako dolazimo do Antropocena, ključnog koncepta za uvodni dio Mortonove knjige, koji sam u fusnoti definirao kao "nezgodni trenutak" (radi se zapravo o vremenskom periodu od preko sto godina u koji se obično smješta početak Antropocena, od početka industrijske revolucije pa do prvih testiranja atomske bombe) u kojem ljudska vrsta postaje geofizička sila na planetarnoj razini. Postoje naravno određene alternative predloženom konceptu (kapitalocen, ktulocen) o kojima Morton ukratko raspravlja, ali to nije od središnje važnosti za njegovu knjigu, iako možda sadrži određene implikacije.[1] 
Sljedeći odlomak koji se odnosi na strukturu same knjige kao i na Mortonov stil od središnje je važnosti. Zamjećujem kako je "Mortonovo pisanje asocijativno i eklektično" te da kao takvo "ono uvelike potkopava svaki pokušaj sažetog i preglednog izlaganja sadržaja knjige." (str. 164). Ta primjedba naime ima velike posljedice i za same Mortonove koncepte i njegovu argumentaciju što sam međutim propustio istaknuti. Nathan Brown zato u svojem osvrtu na jednu drugu Mortonovu knjigu upozorava na možda i temeljni problem Mortonove ekološke filozofije, a to je njezina konceptualna nesređenost i posljedična nekonzistentnost filozofskog mišljenja koje autor pokušava oblikovati u svojim knjigama. Ukratko rečeno, Mortonove knjige pune su zanimljivih ideja, ali ako zagrebete malo dublje ispod njihove retorički izazovne površine, vidjet ćete da su one konceptualno često vrlo nesređene. Uzrok tome je što Morton, unatoč tome što ga se naziva jednim od vodećih ekoloških filozofa, nije razradio vlastiti filozofski sustav (uglavnom se priklanja OOO), već se u elaboraciji svojih ideja oslanja na različite, nerijetko međusobno suprotstavljene filozofe (za Mortona su primjerice jednako važni Deleuze i Harman).
Nakon ove kratke digresije o strukturi Mortonova mišljenja vratimo se ponovno samom prikazu. Nastavak prikaza slijedi tok izlaganja u samoj knjizi koja je sastoji od tri dijela (velika poglavlja) naslovljena "Prva nit", "Druga nit" i "Treća nit" i dva kraća poglavlja "Početak poslije kraja" i "Kraj prije početka". Takvi nazivi poglavlja već upućuju na petlju kao temeljni koncept knjige.
Uz napomenu da bi bilo vrlo teško pregledno izložiti sadržaj knjige, odlučio sam ipak napisati kako "Prva nit započinje uvođenjem nekih od temeljnih koncepata ekološkog mišljenja, kao što je antropocen, pri čemu se paralelno s time autor upušta u kritiku humanistike i njezinih različitih ogranaka (primjerice kulturalnog marksizma) koji odbijaju misliti te hiperobjekte i tako priječe razvoj ekološkog mišljenja." Cijela Mortonova prepirka s kulturalnim marksizmom i humanistikom generalno u ovoj pa i u drugim knjigama, zaslužuje zasebnu analizu. S jedne strane neosporno je da tradicionalna humanistika kakva još uvijek dominira na sveučilištima ima malo toga za reći o antropocenu i našoj ekološkoj stvarnosti. Jedan od središnjih razloga, i tu je Morton u pravu, jest neadekvatnost njezina konceptualnog aparata. S te strane Mortonova kritika kulturnog marksizma kao i ekokriticizma čini se opravdanom. Morton nas zatim, kako navodim, poziva da se "otrgnemo" antropocentrizmu i korelacionzimu kako bismo mogli misliti ono što naziva hiperobjektima. (Pitanje može li se globalno zatopljenje nazvati objektom, ma uz kako god široko shvaćanje objekta kakvo je svojstveno OOO, ostavljam po strani.) Autorov odnos prema kritici antropocentrizma također bi bio vrijedan detaljnijeg razmatranja, ali za ovu priliku pažnju ću posvetiti samo obuhvatnijem konceptu korelacionizma kojeg uvodi Quentin Meillassoux u knjizi Poslije konačnosti: esej o nužnosti kontingencije.[2] Problem  je naime što OOO pa tako ni Mortonova filozofija ne mogu biti shvaćeni kao "izlazak iz korelacionizma", pogotovo ne na način na koji taj izlazak vide Meillassoux i Brassier. Već sam naziv ovih filozofskih pravaca - objektu usmjerena ontologija (OOO) i objektu usmjerena filozofija (OOP) - rekao bih, svjedoči o tome da se radi o filozofiji koja ostaje unutar korelacijskog kruga. Ukratko, Mortonova kritika korelacionizma u knjizi Tamna ekologija zapravo je kritika antropocentrizma (privilegiranje relacije između čovjeka i svijeta), a njegov odgovor na problem korelacionizma zapravo se, karakteristično za OOO, svodi na proširenje korelacionizma (još više korelacionizma, molim!), a ne njegovo odbacivanje! Ukratko, sve ono što Morton zamjera kulturalnom marksizmu, spekulativni bi realist mogao zamjeriti Mortonovoj filozofiji![3]
Nakon tog uvodnog kritičkog obračuna s humanistikom, Morton ulazi u ono što predstavlja srž njegove knjige, a to je kritika onoga što naziva agrilogistikom. Riječ je dakle o logici upravljanja i organizacije života koja stupa na snagu s uspostavom agrikulturnog društva. Iako se nisam imao prilike kasnije time baviti, rekao bih da Mortonova "dubinska kritika" koja traži pokretača koji je doveo do današnje ekološke krize u dalekoj prošlosti, mnogo prije industrijalizacije i prvotne akumulacije kapitala, ima težinu. Iako je sasvim jasno da nam se utjecaj koji je agrikultura imala  na današnju klimatsku krizu može učiniti neznatan u usporedbi s utjecajem industrije fosilnih goriva čiji smo taoci i dan danas, to nije poanta Mortonove kritike. Mortonov je cilj bio, kako sam, čini mi se, napisao, pronaći obrazac mišljenja čiji su zahtjevi uopće doveli do industrijalizacije i tako pokazati da su stvari pošle po krivu mnogo prije izuma parnog stroja. To međutim ne bi trebalo shvatiti kao alibi fosilnom kapitalizmu. Nažalost, takav podsjetnik kao i uopće kritika kapitalizma izostaju u Mortonovoj knjizi.
Što se pak Mortonova tri aksioma agrilogistike i posebice njegove kritike zakona neproturječnosti tiče, ne bih u to ulazio više nego što sam to učinio u izvornom prikazu. Posve sam svjestan kontroverzi koje mora izazvati pokušaj rušenja načela nekontradikcije, ali također mislim da Mortonovu kritiku tog načela treba sagledati u kontekstu knjige i onoga čemu ona teži, a to je obrana teze o ekološkoj isprepletenosti i međuovisnosti. Također je treba sagledati u vidu njezina duga Derridaovoj dekonstrukciji metafizike prisutnosti. Naime Mortonova kritika načela nekontradikcije zapravo se uvelike oslanja na Derridaovu dekonstrukciju binarne opozicije između bitka kao prisutnosti i nebitka kao odsutnosti koja bi trebala biti dobro poznata humanistima. Međutim, upravo je to Mortonov problem. On želi da njegove teze budu utemeljene u matematici i empirijskim znanostima, dok se u izvodu svojih argumenata oslanja prvenstveno na retoričku domišljatost svojstvenu poststrukturalizmu. S jedne strane kritizira humaniste i tako nepotrebno odbija čitateljstvo kojemu bi njegov način argumentiranja ipak trebao biti donekle blizak, dok s druge strane nikako ne može očekivati da njegovo idiosinkratično teoretiziranje ozbiljno shvate čitatelji bliski empirijskim znanostima.
Slijedeći istu nit dolazimo i do drugog važnog pojma u Mortonovoj knjizi, a to je arhelitik. Ovdje bi se dakako moglo uputiti da autorovo mišljenje zalazi u idealizam, pa makar onaj svojstven dekonstrukciji. Primjetno je to kad Morton piše o arhelitiku kao svjetlucanju i žamoru koji progoni dvanaest tisuća godina agrilogističke sadašnjosti. Pa ipak, autorovo odbijanje da se prikloni bilo antimodernizmu bilo modernitetu s osjećajem, mislim da nam daje vrijednu lekciju. Ekološko mišljenje ne bi trebalo tražiti ni u jednoj od tih opozicija, već u njihovoj dekonstrukciji.
Što se tiče ekološke politike kojom se Morton kratko bavi u trećem dijelu knjige, ona ostaje jedno od najvećih problema Mortonove filozofije, ali i OOO općenito. Naime, kako se dosad pokazalo, nema politike koja bi se dala osmisliti na ontologiji kakvu zastupa OOO. Stoga ne čudi Mortonova odbojnost prema tzv. humanističkim težnjama da određena ontologija pretpostavlja i specifičnu politiku. Ali zapravo jest tako. Ako ontologija ne bi bila sama sebi svrhom, onda bi ona svakako pretpostavljala i određenu politiku i etiku. Naspram neke originalne političke teorije, Morton se nažalost priklanja već pomalo izlizanim postmodernističkim koncepcijama mnoštvenosti. Zasigurno je točno da bi ekološki aktivisti, političari, umjetnici i filozofi trebali surađivati u borbi protiv ekološke krize, ali to se, kako vidimo, nažalost ne događa; to jest, dok znanstvenici, filozofi i umjetnici upozoravaju na sve veću prijetnju klimatskih promjena, političari uglavnom ignoriraju njihove apele. Mortonova slika međusobne suradnje ostaje stoga odveć idealistička.
Posljednji dio knjige, kao što sam upozorio u izvornom prikazu, jedan je od najzanimljivijih, a bavi se strukturom osjećaja kakva prati našu ekološku stvarnost. Taj dio knjige vrijedno je pročitati i iz osobnih razloga jer nudi jedan mogući način suočavanja s depresijom uzrokovanom ekološkom krizom, ali i drugim obesrhabrujućim momentima vremena u kojem živimo. Mnogo je tu još stvari vezanih uz treći dio knjige, a koje se posebice tiču autorovih viđenja estetike, ali koje sam izostavio i u izvornom prikazu.

Ovdje dakle moj osvrt na moj vlastiti osvrt završava. Nadam se da sam uspio skrenuti pozornost na neke aspekte Mortonove knjige i njegove filozofije spram kojih sam u izvornom prikazu trebao zauzeti nešto kritičniji stav. No sve u svemu, budući da i naslov sugerira da je riječ o prikazu a ne o kritici, mislim da to nije tako velik propust.

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[1] Vidi ovdje. Također svi citati u tekstu preuzeti su iz prikaza.

[2] Moglo bi se reći da Mortonovo odbijanje koncepta kapitalocen korespondira s nedostatkom ozbiljne kritike kapitalizmu u njegovoj knjizi.

[3]  Napominjem da moja definicija korelacionizma dana u prikazu nije najtočnija jer je formulirana prije svega prema tome kako Morton preuzima Meillassouxov koncept.
[4] U Mortonovu kritiku kulturalnog marksizma i njegovo reduktivno čitanje Marxa koje se svodi na nekoliko opaski o tome što je Marx napisao o pčelama nije na meni da ulazim. Međutim o tome da na Mortonove prigovore marksizmu treba gledati možda ponajviše kroz vid interakademskog obračuna (OOO vs. marksizam) uputio je Nathan Brown. Vidi Brown 2013: 70.

Quote of the day

Towards the Stranger-Subject or Angel (Absolunaut Navigating in Gravitational Extraterrestrial Levitation):

"The angel has nothing but his pure subjective capacity of going beyond himself, dissolving any appropriating retention, and mediating any essentialization of his existence: having no country, the angel is a stranger without nostalgia; having no profession, he can systematically abolish the division of labour; always speaking in a sort of foreign language, he can practice a generalized translatability between the local modes of thought and aspire to ‘pure language’ (Benjamin); in short, being nothing but a local germ of subjectification, he can be everything." (GC 2011: 366)

"The angel is a subjective typology synchronous with modern science, which is to say a barred, errant, (trans)finite, mutant, and outcast human being; an unidentified flying subject lacking any transcendental at-homeness; an alien whose transcendental structure, far from being the enclave of an immediate and apodictic experience, is the condition of possibility of its irreversible alienation in an uncanny immanental plane." (GC 2011: 367)

Both quotes are taken from the following text:  

Catren, Gabriel, "Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism", in Speculative Turn: continental materialism and realism, ed. by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, Melbourne: re.press, 2011. 

Quote of the day

Isabelle Stengers on two transcendences of our epoch: the intrusion of Gaia and global capitalism.

"That I have been led to characterize both the assemblage of coupled material processes that I named Gaia and the regime of economic functioning that Marx named capitalism by a mode of transcendence highlights the particularity of our epoch, that is to say, the global character of the questions to which they oblige us in both cases. The contemporaneity of these two modes of transcendence is evidently no accident: the brutality of the intrusion of Gaia corresponds to the brutality of what has provoked her, that of a development that is blind to its consequences, or which, more precisely, only takes its consequences into account from the point of view of the new sources of profit they can bring about. But the questions of contemporaneity they pose don’t imply any confusion within the responses. Struggling against Gaia makes no sense – it is a matter of learning to compose with her. Composing with capitalism makes no sense – it is a matter of struggling against its stranglehold." (Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism)

Plans, feelings, updates

This writing was not planned but I had such a strange day that I cannot help myself but write. So what is to be said? Here I will briefly try to go through my thoughts and feelings in the last few weeks. These were the weeks in which my personal experiences got strongly if unexpectedly intersected with my thoughts again. So where to start?

1.) I will start by mentioning sexuality and love because these were the topics I preoccupied myself with in the last few weeks. I was writing one essay in which I investigated the way sexuality was understood and represented in European art from the 60s to 80s focusing on some specific artists whose poetics I found very similar. Writing this essay coincided with me finally realizing a meeting with a person whom I wanted to meet for almost two years. 

2.) In the same period came my decision to distance myself from the humanities. I came to the conclusion that this is the best way to fight against what Brassier termed once as "mammalian stupidity". I feel myself wanting to go in that direction - liberation of thought of its human constraints. But this is also not to be understood as some philosophical misanthropy. No, on the contrary, I think that philosophy can help people (serve them) but in order to do it, it (philosophical thinking) must first liberate itself from human phenomenological experience.

3.) Returning back to what I started with - sexuality and love, or even more general male-female relationship. I'm going to remember this day because this afternoon as I was walking the streets, going to visit one exhibition and then returning from the exhibition, I went pretty far in elaborating my thoughts on the male-female relationship and how it can be rethought. Then the same afternoon I had such an unexpected "meeting" (eye-contact actually) with a person whom I don't know and whom I shall maybe never meet again, but if it wasn't for that person and missed opportunity to talk to her, I probably wouldn't be writing this text now. 

4.) I want to conclude with plans for this blog. I will soon stop writing this blog for at least a couple of months, the two biggest reasons being my personal problems (loneliness, depression, etc.) and loss of readership. I just don't want this blog to turn into self-analysis. That's it for now. I hope to finish soon a few more texts and then put a blog to sleep. 

(Writing) philosophy and cultural theory in the end times

There is a sense of urgency and maybe nothing more...

In recent times when I started writing texts which belong more to cultural theory than to literary theory, because of their mixing of different art forms which are being discussed, I've also started to ask myself what is the point of writing cultural theory/history today or, to be more precise, what seems to be the most urgent task of cultural theory today. To me, it is definitely the archaeology, the concept I have already used a couple of times in my writings here but whose intended meaning and definition I am not yet ready to elaborate in a full length. Instead, I will just state that with each decade we are becoming more and more endowed with concrete historical material for writing these archaeological studies. But it is not just a matter of pure time course. It has more to do with the end of history or what recent cultural theorists formulated as the closure/disappearance of the future. For the last two decades of our cultural history future is not on the horizon any more.

So when I started writing my archaeological studies, I asked myself for whom am I writing them. And this question "for whom" becomes now more radical than ever because it is not any more the question of specific readership (academics or non-academics). It is now the question of whether there will be (human) readership at all for these texts. 

To return briefly to the disappearance of the future, here we have an obvious reverse opposed to nineties:

"M is probably the last thing I produced in the amphetamine-libidinal cyberpunk style. As is typical with that mode, there is a high degree of compression; ideas that could have been explored for (at least) a chapter are crashed through not so much like there’s no tomorrow as in the cyberpunk conviction that tomorrow is already here and we have to catch up. (Mark Fisher, 2005)

You see the difference. Now everything that is being written in philosophy, literature and cultural theory with the sense of urgency,  I would argue, it is written precisely in that sense that there is no tomorrow. That is not to be understood in the sense that it is written because there might be no tomorrow (in the sense of motivation); no, for the thought and human creativity are still the only initiators of the work, but if it is written with the sense of urgency, it is apparent where does this sense of urgency comes from.

And now, if this really is the ending (we are talking about the end of civilization, too)* and the beginning has never been more uncertain, we can and should ask ourselves what does it mean to do philosophy and cultural theory in these end times. Now, if we really accept these end times in their literal meaning of definite ending and suspend or even reject every notion of utopia (even the non-philosophical one), then there's no one to provide us with the answer to that question. So here is the strange point we are arriving at, the point at which thought separates itself from human wish for self-preservation and survival. So to briefly reformulate what has already been stated, the thought has never been more endowed with the historical material for writing the archaeological studies of the history of human culture (philosophy included) but the humans who are still the phenomenological subjects who are writing these histories would have to do it without asking themselves about the future existence of their readership. So to conclude, it is just at the (end) times when there's a sense that everything is falling apart, going to waste and that there really might be no (human) future, that the thought sees its opportunity to seize the leftovers of the human energy and radicalize itself to the point never seen before in human history.

* In my opinion, and it is just getting bleaker as I continue my archaeological studies, culture as moving envirionment which creates conditions for the emergence of the novel kind of thinking has already been obliterated. So you see the utter misery of a cultural theory today - the archaeology might not be the future (in a sense of a new academic trend) of cultural theory because it is already its only possible present. 

Bleak vision

We already live in a dystopia. It is not that the world looks like a nightmare, it is a nightmare. The question is only how much worse can it get. Will we be forced to count it by numbers every five years, like nightmare 1, nightmare 2, etc.
The world already resembles the world taken over by technocapitalist singularity as Land has described it back in the 90s.
It is not that the world is devoid of people. No, it is much worse: people are thrown onto the streets in order to starve or / and suffocate to death. It is like the world (read: capital) is telling people that it doesn't need them. There is nothing in it for them. So when I was writing in my recent text that capitalism operates by the process which can be termed as unworlding the world, it should be stated that this process has already been finished in some way. The world is separated from the people (not just from the proletariat any more) by the capitalist caesura. It can be even said that the world doesn't give itself to man any more - to that extent has it been transformed by capital.
So the only possible politics today would be those acted by the subject not completely placed into this world. The world must be saved for the people by the subject of this world (but not in this world) acting for the world and returning it back to the Man, but man now understood as Man-in-Man that owns his proper name to the Real itself.

Zagreb, 22 January 2020

Antonioni

Kako trenutačno u kinu Tuškanac traje retrospektiva posvećena Michelangelu Antonioniju, a kako je Antonioni jedan od svega nekoliko redatelja uz koje su me vezali podjednako intelektualni koliko i osobni interesi, to jest bolje rečeno, da nikad nisam mogao odvojiti jedno od drugog, odlučio sam posvetiti jednu objavu baš Antonioniju. Nekako se ova retrospektiva poklopila s mojim nedavnim vraćanjem Antonioniju, točnije njegovoj trilogiji, u svrhu pisanja jednog rada koji se bavi seksualnošću u europskoj umjetnosti (roman, film i popularna glazba) od 60-ih do 80-ih godina, ali za kojeg nažalost ne mogu reći i da će biti objavljen uskoro. Da ne duljim, ovdje donosim dio eseja o Antonionijevu filmu Zanimanje: reporter (1975) koji je nastao skoro pa prije točno godinu dana, ali s kojim nikad nisam bio posve zadovoljan pa ga nisam ni pokušao objaviti. (To ne znači međutim da ga smatram lošim; inače ga ne bih dijelio.)

Bijeg

           Drugi dio filma[1] omogućuje nam prije svega da pobliže razmotrimo Lockeov bijeg – od čega to Locke bježi, zašto i kamo ga to vodi. Nastavak filma pokazat će Lockeov neuspjeh da nastavi Robertsonovu egzistenciju. Unatoč tome što će Locke ispočetka nastojati ispuniti Robertsonove uloge (odlaziti na njegove zabilježene sastanke), izostat će uspjeh i Locke, izuzev početnog sastanka u crkvi, neće uspjeti nastaviti Robertsonovu egzistenciju. Zamjena identiteta ostat će tako tek pokušaj bijega od vlastite egzistencije. Pa ipak, zadržimo li se još malo na Lockeovu neuspjehu da nastavi Robertsonovu egzistenciju, mogli bismo reći da Locke nije „propao“ samo zbog vlastite indiferentnosti, već i zbog zatajenja određenih kontekstualnih uvjeta. Sjetimo se razlikovanja između konstativa i performativa što ga je uveo britanski filozof jezika J.L. Austin. Za razliku od konstativa koji mogu biti istiniti ili neistiniti, performativi mogu biti (samo) uspješni ili neuspješni odnosno točnije rečeno, pospješeni ili nepospješeni, pri čemu ovdje dodajem da performativima ne nazivam samo jezične činove, već i nejezične činove, što će reći tjelesne pokrete odnosno geste. Ako dakle Lockeove pokušaje da ispuni Robertsonove uloge razmotrimo kao performative, možemo reći da oni ne bivaju pospješeni zbog određenih kontekstualnih uvjeta. O kakvim se uvjetima točno radi, film nikad ne otkriva.

            U drugom dijelu filma nalazimo dva očigledna prizora bijega u kojima Locke bježi od svojeg producenta (ranije u filmu) odnosno od svoje supruge (kasnije u filmu). Njih dvoje nastoje stupiti u kontakt s čovjekom čiji je identitet Locke preuzeo, dakle Robertsonom, uvjereni da je on zadnja osoba koja je bila u kontaktu s Lockeom. Njihova nastojanja dodatno će se pojačati nakon što Rachel, Lockeova supruga, sazna da je njezin muž zapravo preuzeo Robertsonov identitet i da se nalazi u opasnosti.

            Nastojeći se sakriti od svojeg engleskog producenta Martina Knighta, Locke će i ne znajući kamo ulazi ušetati u jednu od Gaudijevih građevina gdje će upoznati studenticu arhitekture (Maria Schneider) koja će mu uskoro postati pratilja u bijegu. Upravo će ga ona, dok se budu vozili iz Barcelone, upitati od čega bježi na što će joj on reći da okrene svoja leđa prednjem sjedalu. Kadrovi koji slijede predstavljaju paralelu onima iz uspinjače, ali uz dodatak dinamične perspektive. Rekao bih da nam kadar prolaska kroz drvored daje najbolju mogućnost da shvatimo bijeg kao formu egzistencije. Ono što se prvo naslućuje u tom Lockeovu odgovoru jest to da on ne bježi ni od čega određenog. To je apstraktnost koja se krije u rečenici „Okreni svoja leđa prednjem sjedalu!“: Locke bježi od svega što ostaje iza njega. Sam će Locke to potvrditi u sljedećoj sceni riječima: „Pobjegao sam od svega. Svoje žene. Kuće. Posvojenog djeteta. Uspješnog posla. Od svega osim od nekoliko loših navika.“ 

           Postavlja se pitanje je li Locke pobjegao ili još bježi. Iako Locke, čini se, želi sugerirati da je ta radnja dovršena[2] (a da se samo njezine posljedice osjećaju u sadašnjosti), mislim da se njegov iskaz može shvatiti i na drugi način, što će reći kao iskaz o bijegu kao nedovršenoj radnji. Odlučujući faktor za takvu interpretaciju ima figura pokretnog automobila. Subjektivni kadrovi iz perspektive studentice arhitekture otkrivaju dinamičnu perspektivu u kojoj se sadržaji pogleda nalaze u neprestanom protjecanju (mijeni).  To će reći da ono od čega egzistent bježi ne samo da nikad ne predstavlja tek neki pojedinačni aspekt realnosti, već se i ti pojedinačni aspekti neprestano mijenjaju. Samo prisvajajući dinamičnu perspektivu (pogled iz vozećeg automobila), bjegunac može pokušati uhvatiti se u koštac s nedovršenom stvarnošću. Tek kada je nedovršen, bijeg može biti shvaćen kao forma egzistencije. Upravo su takvim, uz neizostavne političke implikacije, bijeg u filozofsku misao nastojali uvesti (vratiti) Deleuze i Guattari. To nije više samo To nije više samo bijeg-od, nego i bijeg-ka^[3]. Na sličan način, rekao bih, bijeg konotira u književnom opusu Thomasa Bernharda. S druge strane, postoji bitna razlika između bijega o kakvom govore Deleuze i Guattari, primjerice u vezi s Kafkinim životom i pisanjem, od bijega Davida Lockea kakav iščitavamo u Antonionijevu filmu Zanimanje: reporter. Za Deleuzea i Guattarija bijeg je pozitivan čin, bolje reći fluks. Jedino traženjem pukotina u stvarnosti i konsekventnim bijegom stvara se mogućnost jedne drugačije stvarnosti. I u Bernhardovim romanima, mada se likovi na bijeg odlučuju iz krajnjeg očaja (pritisnuti sa svih strana zidovima stvarnosti), bijeg predstavlja kreativni odgovor i jedinu mogućnost „preživljavanja“. Lockeovo bježanje naprotiv otkriva bijeg samo u njegovom negativnom značenju, dakle kao bijeg-od. Lockeova egzistencija posve se svodi na bježanje, ali njegov bijeg pritom ne otkriva nikakvu mogućnost za jednu drugačiju egzistenciju. Locke čak ne otkriva bijeg ni kao iscrpljivanje svih mogućnosti, kao što je to često slučaj s Bernhardovim likovima. Njegov bijeg, kao što je već rečeno, naprosto postoji samo u negativnom značenju.

            Obratimo li pozornost na dijaloge između Lockea i njegove pratilje u posljednjoj trećini filma, mogli bismo doći do zanimljivog zaključka. No prije toga trebali bismo u razmatranje problematike zamjene identiteta uključiti još jedan pojam, a to je osobnost (sebstvo). Ostanemo li unutar egzistencijalističke paradigme, osobnost bismo mogli shvatiti kao skup karakteristika ljudskog bića koje mu se pridaju na temelju njegove egzistencije. Za Sartrea egzistencija nije učinak osobnosti, već je obrnuto osobnost učinak egzistencije. Egzistencijalizam dakle shvaća osobnost kao „esenciju“ koja proizlazi iz egzistencije (egzistencijalnih izbora). Ako Lockeov odnos prema egzistenciji poprima formu bijega, što će reći odsustva bilo kakve stabilne forme, onda postaje i nemoguće govoriti o njegovoj osobnosti. Locke tako postaje »čovjek bez svojstava«. Zauzmemo li se za drugačije, esencijalističko shvaćanje osobnosti, kao Lockeov problem onda možemo prepoznati nemogućnost promjene osobnosti. Zaključci se međutim bitno ne mijenjaju. Lockeova bezidejnost, bolje reći besciljnost i neusmjerenost po pitanju njegove „nove“ egzistencije ekvivalentna je njegovoj nemogućnosti da promjeni vlastitu osobnost. Scena u kojoj studentica arhitekture budi Lockea zaspalog ispod limunova stabla predstavlja scenu njegova propadanja u staro sebstvo i štoviše priznanja da nikad nije postojalo drugo. Sve ostalo bilo je pretvaranje, kao da želi reći Locke. Unatoč svim tehničkim pomagalima i performatiovnim gestama, Locke, jednostavno rečeno, ne uspijeva pobjeći od samoga sebe.[4] Za koje god se shvaćanje sebstva opredijelili, nepobitnom ostaje činjenica o neraskidivoj povezanosti sebstva i egzistencije. Ključnim se u tom pogledu pokazuje dijalog između Lockea i studentice arhitekture iz posljednje četvrtine filma u kojem studentica arhitekture pokušava uvjeriti Lockea u svu beznadnost njegova bježanja.

-        Slušaj. Ne možeš biti takav, samo bježati. Stoga održi sastanke.

-        Nikoga neće biti tamo, kao ni na drugim mjestima.

-        No Robertson je dogovorio te sastanke. On je vjerovao u nešto. To je ono što želiš, zar ne?

               U tom dijalogu pred nas iskrsava netom utvrđena veza između egzistencije (egzistencijalnih izbora) i osobnosti. Robertson je vjerovao u nešto, stoga je održavao te sastanke, ili obrnuto, Robertson je održavao te sastanke pa je stoga i morao vjerovati u nešto. Razlika između egzistencijalnih izbora i ispraznih performativa ogledala bi se u upravo u tome: jedni uspostavljaju relaciju sa sebstvom, a drugi ne. Studentica arhitekture doslovce pokušava spasiti Lockea (njegovu egzistenciju kao i njegovu osobnost), ali Locke više ne može prihvatiti ni tu posljednju slamku spasa. Njegov pokušaj da nastavi Robertsonovu egzistenciju, u koji ni u jednom trenutku zapravo i nije vjerovao, potpuno je propao i ono što preostaje jest istrajavanje u ogoljeloj egzistenciji čovjeka bez svojstava.

            O Lockeovoj „sudbini“ ne može se više mnogo toga reći. U zadnjoj trećini filma postaje jasno da se Locke nalazi u slijepoj ulici (pritisnut s obiju strana i svojom i Robertsonov prošlošću) pri čemu je njegov povratak na staru egzistenciju moguć samo teoretski. Nakon što se Locke i studentica arhitekture raziđu, on odlazi na posljednji Robertsonov sastanak koji završava jednako neuspješno, to jest nerealizirano, kao oni prethodni. Kadar u kojem Locke sjedi oslonjen o bijeli zid jedne kuće rekao bih da predstavlja prizor njegova konačna poraza. Ta scena već zbog svoje minimalističke ikonografije i plošnosti kadra – u suprotnosti s kadrovima Gaudijevih neogotičkih pročelja iz ranijih dijelova filma – kao da sugerira redukciju Lockeove egzistencije na golo postojanje, ispražnjeno od svakog smisla, ali i mogućnosti za akciju uopće. Locke se u takvoj situaciji, sjetimo se, našao i ranije[5], nakon svog neuspješnog pokušaja da stupi u kontakt s gerilcima, ali ono što je tada predstavljala Robertsonova iznenadna smrt – iznenadnu mogućnost da revitalizira svoju egzistenciju prisvajajući tuđe ciljeve i motive – sada izostaje. Razlika se ogleda i u Lockeovim gestama. Ovog puta izostaje apsurdna pobuna – obraćanje svevišnjoj instanci – a ono što preostaje zapravo je samo čekanje.

Ali iščekivanje čega? Pa ako postoji neko stanje koje upućuje u golosti svoje jednoznačnosti na onu apsolutnu izvjesnost svakog čekanja, onda je to ono u kojem se nalazi Locke. Riječ je naravno o iščekivanju smrti. Sugerirao bih da se prizori u hotelskoj sobi pri kraju filma, barem na apstraktnoj razini, mogu protumačiti kao iščekivanje smrtne presude.[6]

            Signifikantno je da je sam svršetak Lockeove pustolovine identiteta ispripovijedan unutar jednog jedinog kadra u trajanju od nekoliko minuta. Unutar tog su kadra prikazana dva po svemu suprotstavljena prostora: Lockeova hotelska soba i gradski trg. Prvo od njih već je ranije izjednačeno sa zatvorskom ćelijom – ono je prostor predsmrtne izolacije, a u konačnici i mjesto preminuća (ali i ubojstva)[7], dok gradski trg predstavlja jezgru zajednice, ali i što je ovdje još važnije, prostor življenja i to u njegovom interpersonalnom iskustvu. Pa ipak, ono što je u tom kadru presudno, i što najviše zaokuplja pozornost, jest kretanje kamere, a posebice onaj trenutak u kojem ona izlazi iz Locekove sobe i ulazi na prostor trga. Tamo se na jednom malenom prostoru i unutar kratkog vremenskog razdoblja susreću svi ključni akteri filmske radnje, a da se pritom među njima ne uspostavlja kontakt koji bi podrazumijevao ikakvu dublju vezu od one u kojoj protječu kontakti Lockea s domaćim stanovništvom na početku filma. Drugim riječima, putanje egzistencija likova susreću se u točki u kojoj se njihova određenost Lockeovom egzistencijom sada dovršava njegovom smrću. Pa iako smrću logično završava Lockeova egzistencija, pitanje njegovog identiteta time još nije okončano. Podsjetimo se da identitet bilo kojeg subjekta kao člana zajednice nikad nije u njegovoj nadležnosti, već je određen činom prepoznavanja kao priznavanja od strane drugih. Naš se identitet u tom smislu uvijek i jedino verificira u očima Drugog. Signifikantno je u tom kontekstu da Rachel Locke koja je dotad neumorno tragala za svojim suprugom, suočena naposljetku s njegovim mrtvim tijelom, niječe kako ga je ikada poznavala. Studentica arhitekture pak bez oklijevanja priznaje da ga je poznavala, ali ona ionako ne može posvjedočiti o njegovom „pravom“ identitetu pa tako Lockeova zamjena identiteta ostaje prividno nerazjašnjenja na kraju filma. Mogli bismo reći da Lockeova egzistencija i njegov identitet ostaju rascijepljeni i ne bivaju, čak ni prividno, pomireni jedno s drugim ni nakon njegove smrti. Sljedećim citatom iz Chatmanove studije, za koji mislim da se odlično slaže s onim na što sam htio skrenuti pozornost u svojoj interpretaciji, završavam ovaj esej:

         „Lockeova smrt ne smije nas pogoditi kao nešto tragično ili čak alarmantno. U ovom  najfilozofičnijem                              od svih Antonionijevih filmova, smrt se doima podjednako kao stanje uma i tijela. Uzmemo li sve u obzir,                           Locke je umirao tijekom čitavog filma. Proces je postupan, postupan kao i pretposljednji sedmominutni kadar                    filma. I glazba slavi njegov prelazak, nježno i lirično i tek s najmanjim tragom melankolije“ (Chatman 1985: 202). 

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[1] Približno drugih sat vremena trajanja filma.

[2] Rečenica u izvorniku glasi: I've run out of everything.

[3] To međutim ne znači da bijeg ima konačno odredište. Isto vrijedi za Deleuzeov poznati koncept »postajanja«. Paradoksalno kako to zvuči, postajanje-ženom ne uključuje postajanje ženom. To su dvije posve različite stvari (politike).

[4] Mogućnost da se pobjegne od samog sebe bila je duga Antonionijeva preokupacija koju je istraživao u svojim filmovima.

[5] Aludiram na prizor u kojem Locke usred pustinje sjedi oslonjen o svoj džip. 

[6] Smatram da je ovdje moguće uspostaviti dalju paralelu između posljednjeg razgovora Lockea i studentice arhitekture i razgovora između »stranca« i svećenika iz Camusova romana Stranac. Koliko god Lockeov i Mersaultov stav prema smrti bili oprečni, u oba slučaja radi se o pitanju kako se čovjek suočava s izvjesnošću svoje skore smrti.

[7] Naglasimo da dva ključna prizora u filmu i dva događaja koja označavaju početak i kraj njegove egzistencije pod tuđim imenom – neposredan čin zamjene košulja (kao čin zamjene identiteta) i ubojstvo – nisu direktno prikazani. 

Igor Grubić's poignant meditation on capitalist realism

Igor Grubić made a beautiful yet poignant, both documentarist in its method and poetic in its expression, exhibition on the so-called transition from socialism to capitalism. Yet I would suggest, in accordance with my previous post, not to interpret such exhibitions just as nostalgic (even in its critical modus) but as hauntological. So not as the art which merely contrasts the previous regime to the present one (socialism to capitalism) but as archaeological art which claims that, to borrow Bruno Latour's words, "we have never been modern."

"Although disaster is near, the absurdity of human helplessness is best reflected in the ignorance of the facts that systematically leads us to the final disappearance, loss and tragedy. Powerless in the face of machinery of the political system and big money, the intimate spaces of freedom disappear from the map of the city." (Demolished Caravan)

"The image of the worker wandering the empty factory floors is constantly there; it returns and recurs..." (Reflections of A Sleeping Worker)