I don’t want more stories. Who decided that they are unconditionally good and that storytelling is making the world a better place? Actually, I don’t want more images either, not at all, but first stories. I wake up to stories, live them throughout the day and before turning off the bedside lamp I pass through a few stories on Instagram that the algorithm pushes in my direction. I step into a café and a story is offered to me, flat or something else white. It’s my choice but the narrative is already laid out. The choice is not mine, or mine as long as somebody else makes money. I recall that song from Shakira, “Underneath Your Clothes,” but I don’t want there to be a story. Stories determine, they predict and as much as they can be exciting and eye-opening, they are equally experts on filtering, excluding, editing out, marginalizing, unseeing and forgetting. Whatever my outfit is is evidently a story but what’s underneath, underneath wrinkles, skin colour, scars, indentations, tattoos, nail polish, shaved or not armpits, is perhaps better off remaining a geography that neither in- nor ex-cludes, that doesn’t guide, pave the way or close doors.
The Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his earlier writing differentiated between openness and being open. Openness, although conventionally understood as positive, is unfailingly partial, negotiated, charged with value and hence power. The outlines of the domain of openness are without exception established by the more powerful or economically prominent entity involved. Openness is always conditioned, whereas being open, or the open, is void of conditions, it’s one and not divided, unnegotiated and can therefore not be imbued with value or power. The open makes no exceptions, lacks any form of dramaturgy and withdraws, contrary to openness that always is a story.
The world and our lives are today so full of stories it’s becoming urgent to protect zones that haven’t already been co-opted, saturated by stories. Globalised capitalism additionally strategically homogenises not just what stories “can” be told, but also their structural framework, how stories are efficiently told or otherwise passed on. There are no more stories that aren’t first of all the story of capitalism. Some say, “I need to tell my story,” but there are no personal stories, since Roland Barthes’ “The Death of The Author” (1967), every and all stories are conventional. It’s not we that tell our stories it’s stories that tell us, and “my,” in my story is evidently an illusion, which is not a problem necessarily, but good to know. The moment your story is told it’s difficult to shake it off. Your story is also the traces you leave behind, may they be broken hearts, police records or search history.
Let’s for a moment consider care practices for places, spaces, times and moments that are not yet caught in the net of stories and their telling.
Stories should of course be told, again and again, all stories. In particular, stories that have not been heard, stories about suffering, ancestry, invisibility, lack of representation, the stories of minorities, abused, enslaved, mothers, the power- and voiceless. Of course, they should be given voice, be told and passed on, but aren’t there also dangers in folding everything into stories, because they are and cannot not in themselves be efficient, linear, comprehensive and, inevitably homogenizing? Stories through their structural organisation reproduce conventional anthropocentric relations between subject and object, human and non-human, nature and culture, and most of all are masterminding binary relations between good and bad, love and hate, inside and outside.
Whatever cannot be made into a story doesn’t exist, simultaneously whatever is made into a story is nothing more than the story, and what a story is, its organization and framework, or can be, is authorized not by the storyteller but by the listeners, who obviously expect a “good” story. Stories and storytelling, although they might portray atrocities and gruesome events, are comforting if for no other reason than that they give the listener the opportunity to identify him, her or themselves, positively or negatively doesn’t matter, in regard to the story. There’s always a hero and someone is always rescued, somebody always learns a lesson or ends up on top as we learned from Vladimir Propp many years ago. Never mind the moment the story has been told, although it might reverberate within us, it can be put aside, placed in the archive and forgotten.
Concerning images this is something that the French philosopher George Didi-Huberman has problematized but there is a need to research storytelling and its effect on memory, remembrance and compartmentalisation, similar to how Didi-Huberman argues that some images must remain unseen.
At some point, the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf wrote about the importance of keeping a wound open and clean. Wounds, he insisted, must not become stories but ongoing events (a duration that doesn’t develop into an extension in time). The moment a wound transforms into a story it’s fixed. Fixed but is it healed or does the trauma remain?
I don’t want more stories because they determine who we are, they force themselves upon us no matter what. I want landscapes because what they don’t do, they don’t settle, don’t draw lines or divide into binary oppositions, don’t bother about having the “weak” saved by the strong, don’t have children push witches into ovens, kings decide for their daughters, sons kill their fathers or informing our kids to stay away from strangers. Landscapes contrary to stories are indifferent. Indifferent, however not in the sense of “I couldn’t care less,” but instead “whatever it is, always of importance.” Not as a permission, which invariably implies authority, but a form of disinterestedness, that isn’t synonymous with uninterested but with withdrawing from taking side, having this or that interest. Disinterested in the sense of a refusal to judge.
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This slight, however crucial misunderstanding indeed is messing with art and forms of aesthetic appreciation. When Emanuel Kant in the late 18th century pins down that art must be contemplated disinterestedly, although his theories can be contested, it’s of weight to interpret disinterestedness in respect of active indifference, without expectations, morals, preconceptions or judgement. For Kant the encounter with art, in other words, is not about openness but of being open, it’s an engagement with a terrain or landscape and so not with stories.
But we object, what about novels, theatre, opera, short stories and pop songs, absolutely but, at least with the Kantian canon the story, whatever it is, is just a smokescreen, a little bit of seduction to enter the real deal, aesthetic appreciation. If this wasn’t the case aesthetic encounters would be identical to a good story, an efficiently laid out, morally appropriate narrative to which each and every reader, listener etc. would have access and comprehend without second thought. In that case, what would we do about Stein, Brontë, Woolf, Beckett or Joyce? And who would be the judge of what good and appropriate is supposed to be? Some expert, from where in regard to what canon or tradition? We know very well who considers himself entitled to be the president of that jury.
Aesthetic encounters are not about stories but the opposite, they are not a matter of openness but about being open, and disinterested contemplation has nothing to do with accessibility or comprehension, but of being with, attending to something, without judgement, of being active yet indifferent.
Now, in the background a murmur: that’s easy, piece of cake, no problem, but give it a try, at the end of the day proper indifference is not just freaking difficult, it might even be humanly impossible.
In a late essay, “To Have Done with Judgement,” published in 1993, Gilles Deleuze proposes that judgement, even if in no more dramatic way than naming something, constitutes the world, and hence that indifference or disinterested contemplation implies a withdrawal, as we have seen, from judging. Judgement is not negative per se, obviously, it offers stability and continuity to relations, people, stuff, order and the world, but judgment, as Alexander Garcia Düttmann comments on Deleuze’s text, “is designed to prevent something new from emerging and new forms of life from constituting themselves.” Engagements with aesthetics implies Deleuze, referring to (predictably enough) Kafka, D. H. Lawrence and, of course, Antonin Artaud, is one of the very few experiences that carry the possibility of postponing judgment, or where judgment refers only to itself and not to a ground, power or, as Deleuze expresses it, to an eternal debt. Art is the domain par excellence where appreciation is not referential, it’s beautiful or I love it, needs no verification, or mustn’t require motivation, not from the individual or group that makes it or those who attend it.
Kant’s as well as Deleuze’s argument most certainly resonates with a modern project but instead of dismissing the line of thought right away let’s instead situate it in our present reality. If art and the engagement with art, is something that withdraws from judgement this implies that the experience, not the artwork itself but the experience isn’t charged with value. The aesthetic experience is not the experience of something, but following Deleuze, it’s the experience of experiencing, or the experience of liveliness, la vitalité.
In a world where every millisecond, every square centimetre, every relationship is relevant only in regard to its value and cannot be otherwise since contemporary globalized capitalism knows nothing else, the aesthetic encounter, making and spending time with art, has become a space and temporality that doesn’t confirm the world as it is. The aesthetic, however, for obvious reasons doesn’t produce alternative, elaborate perspectives or propose solutions. What it offers is the possibility of an all together different sensation or thought to emerge, the possibility to start from a new beginning.
Art, proposed Boris Groys a few years ago, isn’t about making the world a better place, on the contrary art carries the capacity to make things come to an end. An end should just not be confused with simply destroying or breaking something but should rather be understood in the sense of the impossibility to continue like before. The aesthetic experience doesn’t give any directions but is irreversible, it suspends judgement and opens for the necessity of a paradigm shift, a change not in degree but kind.
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Stories create worlds and worlding, imagining other possible or alternative worlds, has since a while been en vogue, the problem, however, remains, those worlds are created in the soil of conventions and knowledges that for centuries have authorised certain forms of power, violence, suffering, hierarchies and so on. Forms of knowledge that were not, but through dominance have been homogenized into becoming white, heteronormative, reproductive, colonial, oriented towards growth and property, in particular in regard to land, and so on.
Listening to the American thinker Fred Moten it is, at least in parallel, necessary to abolish worlds, or with the wording of Jack Halberstam to engage in processes of unworlding. Because, as Moten proposes the very idea of subjectivity is a human invention that has been used to colonialise every animate and non-animate capacity in the universe. So instead of worlding attempting to invent alternatives, unworlding embarks on a crusade against the very conditions that make any world possible. Said otherwise, worlding implies engagements in difference in the degree, which at best shakes the foundation of thought, value or being. After all, comparison (difference in degree) takes place in regard to a given grounds. It’s in fact precisely givens and grounds that need to be approached and this is what unworlding aims at, to, in Haberstam’s language “destroy” worlds as we know them in favour of all together other constellations (different in kind), that might or not be a world. Or as Halberstam proposes echoing Black thinkers such as Moten, Wynther, Gilroy, Baldwin, Spiller etc. black freedom requires the destruction of the world as we know it. And I like to add, that’s not just Black freedom but everybody’s and everything’s freedom.
The question is just what exactly is implied using the word destruction, because after destruction we fix things, rebuild, restore and make sure conventions, rules and governments are reinstalled, and with that power structures, violence and the repressive machine we call language. Unworlding can neither be a question of tearing down, fucking things up, demolition derby, mass destruction or anything that has to do with objects, stuff, animals, societies, people or folks. What it must mean is destruction of nothing at all except structures or systems of thought, and those structures must be demolished in ways that are irreversible, ways that make rebuilding absolutely impossible. Unworlding implies to suspend judgment, to bring openness to an end and create the possibility for moments of being open, unconditionally open.
Unfortunately, Jack Halberstam, ends up twisting the argument of unworlding in an odd manner, unable to halt his arguments before asking the question, for whom? The moment unworlding implies an address when its process gains direction and becomes valuable for somebody or many, unworlding folds in on itself and becomes worlding. In order to suspend judgement unworlding must remain indifferent, must never become a story and remain an open landscape.
1. La vitalité, is sometimes translated vitality and something liveliness. The English translation of Deleuze text uses vitality whereas Düttmann quoting the French edition, translates la vitalité to liveliness. I use liveliness due to the possibly unnecessary context in which vitality can be used, connotations that are not, at least not to the same extent, attached to la vitalité.
2. Everybody’s and everything’s freedom, in regard to that freedom, in any prominent sense, cannot be partial, a privilege for some, but must include everybody. Without relativising suffering, on a philosophical level, both the un-free and those that controls or police freedom, although differently, are un-free relatively a constitution or system. Differentiating between constituted freedom and prominent freedom, freedom without conditions, Moten along with Halbergstam cannon not argue for forms of freedom without conditions, which in Moten resonates with the concept of the undercommons.
