Inadequate ideas
In the early days of the pandemic, someone on my Twitter timeline recommended the book Dispatches From Moments of Calm, with text by Alexander Kluge and images by Gerhard Richter, as timely reading to adjust to the dislocations of lockdown. Naturally, I brought it with me this week on vacation.
Much of the book deals directly or opaquely with the collective experience of news events, many pertaining to war, and how that contrasts with or redirects our more private experience of life. For Kluge, this partly plays out in the difference between news photographs, self-consciously framed to be information-rich and illustrative of certain narratives or interpretations of events deemed newsworthy, and haphazard snapshots or art photography, which derive a certain timelessness from operating outside the realm of journalistic documentation:
Lothar Müller writes that the concept of the present and a consciousness of contemporary history in terms of the topicality of daily newspapers have existed since about 1800. It is the urban news network, represented by the rhythm of morning, afternoon, and evening papers in Europe's capital cities that constitutes the matrix, the changing flow of relevant facts. The element of this news world is surprise ... It is out of such news values, and not out of the facts themselves, that the daily image of the reality of our world is put together. The products of poetry form an antithesis to this daily fluctuation.
In a later passage, Kluge claims that "newspapers and their pictures remain responsible for our knowledge of what is happening in reality. Very little of this can be checked using our own senses. However, without such news, the world we immediately perceive around us would have no collective rhythm."
Obviously there is a different rhythm of topicality now, dictated by the immediacy and capacity of social media, and novelty remains central to it, as well as an intensified sense of obligation. What possible excuse could one have for not being informed, for not having an opinion, when silence can be readily misunderstood as apathy, or compliance, or endorsement of what is transpiring?
On vacation, the collective rhythm around me is acutely different from what I can track on my phone. I've opened many tabs and closed them, with a deepening sense of shame and futility. The news and the flow of perspectives fill me with sadness, both ordinary sadness and "sad passions" in Spinoza's sense, the kind of affects that diminish one's sense of possibilities, one's ability to act.
In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze describes how there are three kinds of people that "Spinoza does not cease to denounce ... the man with sad passions; the man who exploits these sad passions, who needs them in order to establish his power; and the man who is saddened by the human condition and by human passions in general." Not that anyone can avoid sad passions, but they are always, on this view, a form of external manipulation that tends to compound, as they render a person less able to combat them with their inner resources. Most days, social media seem full of such people, collectively incentivized to seek some sort of power or compensation in broadcasting themselves from these perspectives.
Despite this, the obligation to remain informed, to belong to the collective flow seems irresistible, as if it were irresponsible to be ignorant, though I don't know from what standpoint I could judge myself to be truly understanding anything. From within the grip of sad passions, I want to make some show of potency, assert a capacity to act: I want to write something, post something, share something that strikes me as useful or efficacious. The platforms are there for me. After all who knows what chain of circumstances my gestures might enact? But there is no guarantee that my reactivity isn't just redistributing the sense of urgent uselessness I'm afflicted with, imposing my sad passions on who knows who.
Perhaps what Kluge writes about "poetry" as an antithesis to "daily fluctuation" applies to this condition. "Poetry" in that sense may be a matter of speaking of the mundane things that fall within our everyday competencies, or it may be a matter of remembering it's not always essential that one speak at all.