Continuing with part 2 of our interview with Gregory Jackson, aka Gregory the Asshole we turned to ask some questions about philosophy and the relationship to the event, space and art.
Philosophy is a rational, logical and objective discipline in comparison to mostly subjective arts. You have decided to combine art and philosophy in one multi-disciplinary event. Is this an artistic or philosophical project? How do you feel Philosophy and art relate to each other?
Well, first of all you would have to distinguish between philosophy as the rigorous, academic discipline that it has become, and philosophy as it was meant to be – i.e. the love of wisdom. Philosophy has become a very rational discipline, but it is out of this fundamental failure of western thinking – to subordinate the love of wisdom to something ‘rational’ – that this combination takes place. There is great wisdom in the arts – certain philosophical thinkers knew this all to well. Heidegger, for example, used the poetry of Hölderlin and the paintings of Van Gogh as inspiration for a lot of his thinking. Even as early as Plato this was known in philosophy, seeing the wisdom that the poets had access to as a threat to his philosophically founded, rational based tyrannical utopia. Heidegger ditched philosophy for thinking, and it is thus out of my love for wisdom, or better – love for thinking, that I bring together philosophy and art. Creativity is the vehicle of thinking and therefore thinking is artistic by nature, but philosophy and art have failed to think in the creative but rigorous way that thinking requires. What I am doing here is not a combination of philosophy and art and thus neither an artistic or philosophical discussion. Instead, it is an attempt to engage in a deeper form of thought that either discipline, as the limited institutions we’ve created out of them, can do on their own.
In the case of your event, you are using artistic works as stimuli with which to think from, what is the function of the works of art and their relationship to the space in which they take place? Do the works have their own inherent meaning?
I believe that artworks cannot simply exist on their own, but must exist inside a context. When we try to de-contextualize a work and, for example, bring it into an art gallery, we’ve ripped it from its power. Its power doesn’t exist in its aesthetic value but in the way in which it inhabits the space it is in, in how it affects that space. Art silently reflect on, and in turn defines, how we think about the world, but can only do so when it relates to its space in this way. So, in the case of this event, we are creating the thought-things for this space and this context to open up a questioning surrounding the enigma of what thinking really is. This is why we are not opening up an exhibition with the thought-things, which due to their nature as a thing that thinks requires more this contextualization then a traditional artwork. The focus is not on the thought-things in themselves, but on how we engage with them, and we must do so from the space of thinking we open up in the event.
The thought-things are all exploring something conceptually, and in that sense they have meaning. But the meaning is never closed; there is never a ‘right’ answer. And not in the sense that it is all ‘open for interpretation’. I mean, they are in a way, but in essence the works are ontologically incomplete. This means that they do indeed explore something, and therefore there is a meaning of sorts, but they only do so in so far as to give the participants in the event a foothold with which to engage in some of the questions and ideas that relate to the concept of the event over all. The art is not in the thought-things, which is why we don’t call them artworks, but in the engagement between the participants and the ‘stimuli’, as you put it, that we’ve created. Therefore if the thought-things all had inherent meaning then it would just be a cryptic text that we’ve written that the audience either figures out or does not. But with creating something that only question, that makes a point of sorts, but never is fixed, the audience becomes participants and the thought-things themselves secondary to the results of an engagement between participant and thing. This then leaves space for an artistic moment to open up, where thinking, which creativity underpins, can be achieved.
‘Space’ seems to be a recurring motive for the whole project. Do you mean physical space? Or space as an architecture of the mind? Or perhaps something more abstract then that?
I would call thinking the recurring motive, but space is an important foundation for that. What space refers to here is a way in which we inhabit the world when we think, a region we enter that allows us to think in a certain way at a certain time, using various capacities to different degrees that we have at our disposal – rationalization, moods, emotions etc. It might sound abstract but it is actually the opposite. What space we are in when we think or engage with the world is entirely practical. It is common to say ‘I am in a bad space’, or ‘there was a good space at the party’ etc., it doesn’t refer to physical space but instead refers to a way in which relevant things where structured to us. This is not explored so much in philosophy. What I’m really doing here is just bringing this common knowledge into a more focused setting to find out what its really about and how much it determines how we think about things.
It might be relevant to note here also that this Kantian idea of the ‘thing in itself’ is slightly outdated. Space isn’t relevant when I can think about the essence of a coffee cup as it is in itself outside of its environment – i.e. the coffee cup as it is in itself. But things exist inside a space; I can only think about what that coffee cup is in relation to the table, the kitchen, to coffee, and to the way that I relate to the coffee cup. These things are all ordered in a structured way depending on my historical time and on the way that the world matters to me, a structure I am unable to fully grasp but exists nonetheless. In this sense, a space I enter in to or attune to shapes the way I think about the coffee cup. I’ll think about coffee entirely differently if its late and I want to go to bed or if I’m hung over in the morning.
You say “by thinking in a space, and interacting with conceptual art works throughout this space, we are invited to participate in a more primary questioning: not what is thinking itself but, instead, how is the space from which we think?” Why do you ask for “How is the space” and not also “what” or “where” it is? Why is this “how” most important?
Because the “what” and the “where” are irrelevant in the context of thinking about thinking, which as you point to above there is a paradox of sorts assumed here because we are using thought to think about itself. Space is just a metaphorical construct I’m working with to best exemplify something about the enigma of thinking that we want us to explore (we being me and my partner, conceptual artist Camille Lachlan). So what and where this space is would only bring us into a very messy area of metaphysics that would be easy and fun to discuss but irrelevant. “How” is this space changes this irrelevance. What and where your anger is are not really helpful questions, but how is your anger – as in, in what way are you angry right now, just might tell me a bit more. When we start thinking about space we step further outside the rationalization process and begin to reflect on a way in which we are attuned to the world. This what and where cannot help us here. But “how” is this space might tell us a lot about how we are thinking and in what way.
Thank you Gregory for your input, if anyone has any comments please feel free to make them. Gregory will launch GTA002 on 16 May in CFCP at 7pm.
Philosophy is a rational, logical and objective discipline in comparison to mostly subjective arts. You have decided to combine art and philosophy in one multi-disciplinary event. Is this an artistic or philosophical project? How do you feel Philosophy and art relate to each other?
Well, first of all you would have to distinguish between philosophy as the rigorous, academic discipline that it has become, and philosophy as it was meant to be – i.e. the love of wisdom. Philosophy has become a very rational discipline, but it is out of this fundamental failure of western thinking – to subordinate the love of wisdom to something ‘rational’ – that this combination takes place. There is great wisdom in the arts – certain philosophical thinkers knew this all to well. Heidegger, for example, used the poetry of Hölderlin and the paintings of Van Gogh as inspiration for a lot of his thinking. Even as early as Plato this was known in philosophy, seeing the wisdom that the poets had access to as a threat to his philosophically founded, rational based tyrannical utopia. Heidegger ditched philosophy for thinking, and it is thus out of my love for wisdom, or better – love for thinking, that I bring together philosophy and art. Creativity is the vehicle of thinking and therefore thinking is artistic by nature, but philosophy and art have failed to think in the creative but rigorous way that thinking requires. What I am doing here is not a combination of philosophy and art and thus neither an artistic or philosophical discussion. Instead, it is an attempt to engage in a deeper form of thought that either discipline, as the limited institutions we’ve created out of them, can do on their own.
In the case of your event, you are using artistic works as stimuli with which to think from, what is the function of the works of art and their relationship to the space in which they take place? Do the works have their own inherent meaning?
I believe that artworks cannot simply exist on their own, but must exist inside a context. When we try to de-contextualize a work and, for example, bring it into an art gallery, we’ve ripped it from its power. Its power doesn’t exist in its aesthetic value but in the way in which it inhabits the space it is in, in how it affects that space. Art silently reflect on, and in turn defines, how we think about the world, but can only do so when it relates to its space in this way. So, in the case of this event, we are creating the thought-things for this space and this context to open up a questioning surrounding the enigma of what thinking really is. This is why we are not opening up an exhibition with the thought-things, which due to their nature as a thing that thinks requires more this contextualization then a traditional artwork. The focus is not on the thought-things in themselves, but on how we engage with them, and we must do so from the space of thinking we open up in the event.
The thought-things are all exploring something conceptually, and in that sense they have meaning. But the meaning is never closed; there is never a ‘right’ answer. And not in the sense that it is all ‘open for interpretation’. I mean, they are in a way, but in essence the works are ontologically incomplete. This means that they do indeed explore something, and therefore there is a meaning of sorts, but they only do so in so far as to give the participants in the event a foothold with which to engage in some of the questions and ideas that relate to the concept of the event over all. The art is not in the thought-things, which is why we don’t call them artworks, but in the engagement between the participants and the ‘stimuli’, as you put it, that we’ve created. Therefore if the thought-things all had inherent meaning then it would just be a cryptic text that we’ve written that the audience either figures out or does not. But with creating something that only question, that makes a point of sorts, but never is fixed, the audience becomes participants and the thought-things themselves secondary to the results of an engagement between participant and thing. This then leaves space for an artistic moment to open up, where thinking, which creativity underpins, can be achieved.
‘Space’ seems to be a recurring motive for the whole project. Do you mean physical space? Or space as an architecture of the mind? Or perhaps something more abstract then that?
I would call thinking the recurring motive, but space is an important foundation for that. What space refers to here is a way in which we inhabit the world when we think, a region we enter that allows us to think in a certain way at a certain time, using various capacities to different degrees that we have at our disposal – rationalization, moods, emotions etc. It might sound abstract but it is actually the opposite. What space we are in when we think or engage with the world is entirely practical. It is common to say ‘I am in a bad space’, or ‘there was a good space at the party’ etc., it doesn’t refer to physical space but instead refers to a way in which relevant things where structured to us. This is not explored so much in philosophy. What I’m really doing here is just bringing this common knowledge into a more focused setting to find out what its really about and how much it determines how we think about things.
It might be relevant to note here also that this Kantian idea of the ‘thing in itself’ is slightly outdated. Space isn’t relevant when I can think about the essence of a coffee cup as it is in itself outside of its environment – i.e. the coffee cup as it is in itself. But things exist inside a space; I can only think about what that coffee cup is in relation to the table, the kitchen, to coffee, and to the way that I relate to the coffee cup. These things are all ordered in a structured way depending on my historical time and on the way that the world matters to me, a structure I am unable to fully grasp but exists nonetheless. In this sense, a space I enter in to or attune to shapes the way I think about the coffee cup. I’ll think about coffee entirely differently if its late and I want to go to bed or if I’m hung over in the morning.
You say “by thinking in a space, and interacting with conceptual art works throughout this space, we are invited to participate in a more primary questioning: not what is thinking itself but, instead, how is the space from which we think?” Why do you ask for “How is the space” and not also “what” or “where” it is? Why is this “how” most important?
Because the “what” and the “where” are irrelevant in the context of thinking about thinking, which as you point to above there is a paradox of sorts assumed here because we are using thought to think about itself. Space is just a metaphorical construct I’m working with to best exemplify something about the enigma of thinking that we want us to explore (we being me and my partner, conceptual artist Camille Lachlan). So what and where this space is would only bring us into a very messy area of metaphysics that would be easy and fun to discuss but irrelevant. “How” is this space changes this irrelevance. What and where your anger is are not really helpful questions, but how is your anger – as in, in what way are you angry right now, just might tell me a bit more. When we start thinking about space we step further outside the rationalization process and begin to reflect on a way in which we are attuned to the world. This what and where cannot help us here. But “how” is this space might tell us a lot about how we are thinking and in what way.
Thank you Gregory for your input, if anyone has any comments please feel free to make them. Gregory will launch GTA002 on 16 May in CFCP at 7pm.
From Philosophy to Electronics – Q & A with Gregory Jackson – Part 1
We asked Gregory Jackson, aka Gregory the Asshole to do a two part interview prior to his gig in CFCP. The first part deals with the project, Gregory the Asshole and the second part which we will publish tomorrow goes into the philosophical nature of the project.
As a short background Gregory immerses himself in both Philosophy and electronic sound production, to produce a multi-disciplinary art project. Gregory seeks to open a clearing space where the destructive separation between art and thought can be rectified by allowing ideas to be explored to greater depths within an experimental context.
Gregory along with the Dublin Laptop Orchestra and Slavek Kwi perform in CFCP on Friday 16th May at 7pm.
Gregory, you call the event an experiment. What is the experiment about and what is its goal? How does it relate to thinking and the space?
Well, it’s an experiment because it’s relatively new and undefined to me, or even understood. I have a sense with what I want to do with the Gregory the Asshole project. I know it involves thinking, but I know it’s thinking in a different way than philosophy has allowed me to do. If you read Nietzsche you can see his conviction that music is fundamental to life, and he could also see that music and art are a far supreme version of communication then language. Similarly, by the end of his thinking career, Heidegger was more interested in poets then he was classical thinkers. Academic philosophy refuses to accept this. Some can accept that Heidegger did it, they accept Nietzsche said what he said, but what are they really doing about it? They are still reading these texts the same way they’re reading Kant. They are researching this stuff the way philosophy has always researched; reading and rationalizing. Art teaches me something in a way the rationalization process cannot; I feel it in my body even if I can’t think it through clearly in a well-written text. But a well-written text can only transmit a certain amount of knowledge to me. It’s like what Heidegger said about the Hammer; you can’t sit back and think about a hammer all day and then know what it is. You have to just pick it up and use it. Art engages with our bodies in that experiential way and I don’t see why really rigorous thinking can’t happen here.
But it’s an experiment because I don’t know how to achieve this experiential thinking yet. That’s why this first event, paradoxically, is engaging with this very idea; what is thinking? Is it more then what our minds can do? Can we think using art as a means? It’s the topic that will clarify more what it is I’m trying to do here and how it might be done, and from here we’ll keep experimenting taking shots at the dark of what I’m feeling is possible here and how we might do it until someday we stumble on something genuine and real.
Can you briefly describe your musical projects and your collaborations with the Dublin Laptop Orchestra and Slavek Kwi?
Gregory the Asshole began about two years ago. I suddenly went through a burst of creativity and began to write a lot of music that I was really excited by. At the time I had also began to immerse myself in philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Nietzsche. These together got me interested in exploring ideas with my music. At first the only way I had to do it was using samples of people talking, which I took from my love for ‘God Speed You Black Emperor’, who use a lot of powerful interviews in their music. This was in my first E.P. However, the project only developed in its current form (a constantly evolving process) when I met conceptual artist Camille Lachlan. She was interested in similar things, using art to explore ideas and concepts and using art to teach us something and communicate with each other. Her medium, however, was visual art and not music. We worked in Berlin together, where we eventually met some of the discrepancies in how the art scene had developed. There are many interesting things happening there, but over all, the art scene has become stagnant. So, we got interested in the challenges for art today, and join the current dialogue around what needs to happen to further new practices in art. That’s the spirit of this project.
This E.P and its launch takes this into account, using music to achieve an ‘under-going’ (Nietzsche), to teach me something – which ended up being about thinking and this idea of space. I didn’t come up with the idea from nowhere; the process of creating this E.P thought me that. The music, as a result, follows a narrative of this process, which is there for the participant as they listen, perhaps teaching them what it thought me if it finds them in the right space. I still use interviews at points, but there purpose is to strengthen a message that is already there, as opposed being the sole source of a message. The launch was then a collaboration between myself and Camille, together bringing what was happening in the E.P on a conceptual level further, using visual art and music to try to achieve this thinking experiment.
Regarding the Dublin Laptop Orchestra and Slavek Kwi, they are other musicians who, I feel at least, are well able to explore conceptual elements in music in an innovative way. For this project I asked them if they were interested and when they were I just had a number of conversations with them about the concept of the launch, what was being explored, and what aspect of it I wanted each of them to explore in their performances. How they explore it is up to them, as long as I feel they understand what it is we want to achieve. I then have to trust their artistic and conceptual capabilities to explore that.
Your event focuses on the concept of thinking itself, as opposed thinking about something specifically. You are trying to think about thinking, how is this possible? Does thinking exist on its own? Can it be thought separately from the language we think in? What about other stimuli we are exposed to? So, can thinking really think about itself?
That’s a good question as it definitely presents the paradox of what I’m trying to do here. I ask myself the same question in the philosophical reflection released alongside this E.P. where I say ‘Can a tree bloom about its blooming flowers by blooming?’ It sounds like a ridiculous sentence, but its point is a thought experiment aimed at precisely this question; we can think about the coffee cup because the coffee cup exists outside the process of thought, and so we can step outside the use of the coffee cup itself and reflect back on it through the use of thinking. But what happens when you turn thought in on itself and think about what it is you do when you think. I don’t have a direct answer but I can try to provide a certain amount of reflection on the topic for the purposes of the question.
First of all, the question touches on different forms of thinking itself. Philosophy has a dominant tendency to reduce good thinking to rational thinking. Heidegger was one of the first to really show how other forms of experience, other then the rationality, can show us fundamental things about the world. In his ‘What is Metaphysics’ lecture he shows how if we are to think about what Nothing is, or ‘the Nothing’, a concept that underpins a lot of his thinking, we cannot use rational means and instead need to reflect on moods. Here, as he points out, if we are to reflect on ‘Nothing’ rationally we would come to the conclusion that the Nothing doesn’t exist, as things are, and nothing isn’t, and thus nothing isn’t real. Science assumes this. But as Heidegger points out, ‘Science wants to know nothing of the Nothing’, and thus employs the concept it wishes to dismiss in the dismissal itself. Heidegger goes on to argue that it is within anxiety, a mood in which ‘attunes us’ to the world in a specific way, that the nothing reveals itself, as it is here that the sense in which we give to the world, the coherent structure in which everything makes sense to us, begins to slip away, and we get faced with the nothingness that underpins everything.
The argument is interesting, the results of which are not necessarily related to our question here. But what’s interesting, for our purposes at least, is the play Heidegger’s thinking has here, between two different forms of thinking; a rationalization of sorts, which only functions to categorize an experience, a mood, something entirely irrational; anxiety. Thinking ‘attunes us’ to the world in a sense, and thus moods think, for sure, but just not in the same way that rationalization does. Rationalization categorizes.
The thing is, philosophy has always operated under a conception of what the mind is, and thus always operated under a theory of thinking. Plato felt the mind was there to give us access to the forms; an ideal version of what everything is in the appearing world. Therefore philosophizing, or in his view rationally thinking about what everything truly is in essence, would bring us closer to the forms and therefore truth. Descartes then decided that this world of ‘forms’ was actually in our mind, and thus we became subjects with a world of objects outside of us that we have access to, but is obscured by our subjectivity, this distance between us and the outside world somehow coming closer through, once again, being rational. I’m obviously massively generalizing here with these thinkers, but short of writing a book it would be impossible to express the complexity of these dynamics.
So, I would say a number of things about this. Rationalizing about thinking, as in using the chatter of the mind to cognize definitive theories about what thinking is, might not be possible. Its been done, as I’ve pointed to above, but its always been problematic. A recent change that occurred in philosophy was when the phenomenological tradition began to undercut this distinction between subject and object, and instead of my emotions being something inside me that obscured my ability to think rationally, emotions were out there in the world that I become attuned to on some level, and thus they become genuine access into the way things are in the world. Thus, Heidegger was able to categorize anxiety as a fundamental attunement to the world.
Thinking is definitely a capacity that we have, and so it does exist on its own, and is used outside of language. For example, take a moment when you are thoroughly engaged with music, like in an improvisation where musicians must communicate with each other without the use of language. There must be thinking involved here somewhere, because you are changing and moving the direction of the music, engaging with the people you are playing with etc. The last thing you want to do, though, is start up the chatter in the mind, i.e. rationalizing, which only serves to get in the way of a good improvisation.
Rationalization needs language because its use is one of a categorization process. But you don’t need language for an improvisation in music, nor in anxiety. Yet in improvisation we are communicating, and in anxiety we are attuned to something fundamental about existence. This is thinking, but it’s hard to imagine it that way because of the western traditions tendency to reduce thinking to rationality. Thinking does exist on its own, but perhaps cannot be rationalized about outside of language. But there are other ways of attuning ourselves to the world – spaces we can enter into – that reveal and teach us something about thinking outside of that.
So thinking can think about itself, and thus there has to be ways we can enter into spaces that show us something about thinking which rationalization can’t. This is what we are using art-works (actually, what we refer to as ‘thought-things’) for. But will thinking be ever able to exist in a formula or a text? I doubt.
Please name one artist whose work inspired or influenced you and why?
I’d have to say the prime influence for all of this is Nietzsche. His ability to combine his personal growth with his thinking, which he believed are inseparable, is mesmerizing and it’s why he’s such a good writer. He ‘writes with his own blood’, as he says, but in doing so explores some really important and fascinating ideas. I want to do the same with my art form, engaging myself on a personal level to mediate ideas through my art, which is there for people to engage with and develop also.
The second part of the interview we will publish tomorrow
We asked Gregory Jackson, aka Gregory the Asshole to do a two part interview prior to his gig in CFCP. The first part deals with the project, Gregory the Asshole and the second part which we will publish tomorrow goes into the philosophical nature of the project.
As a short background Gregory immerses himself in both Philosophy and electronic sound production, to produce a multi-disciplinary art project. Gregory seeks to open a clearing space where the destructive separation between art and thought can be rectified by allowing ideas to be explored to greater depths within an experimental context.
Gregory along with the Dublin Laptop Orchestra and Slavek Kwi perform in CFCP on Friday 16th May at 7pm.
Gregory, you call the event an experiment. What is the experiment about and what is its goal? How does it relate to thinking and the space?
Well, it’s an experiment because it’s relatively new and undefined to me, or even understood. I have a sense with what I want to do with the Gregory the Asshole project. I know it involves thinking, but I know it’s thinking in a different way than philosophy has allowed me to do. If you read Nietzsche you can see his conviction that music is fundamental to life, and he could also see that music and art are a far supreme version of communication then language. Similarly, by the end of his thinking career, Heidegger was more interested in poets then he was classical thinkers. Academic philosophy refuses to accept this. Some can accept that Heidegger did it, they accept Nietzsche said what he said, but what are they really doing about it? They are still reading these texts the same way they’re reading Kant. They are researching this stuff the way philosophy has always researched; reading and rationalizing. Art teaches me something in a way the rationalization process cannot; I feel it in my body even if I can’t think it through clearly in a well-written text. But a well-written text can only transmit a certain amount of knowledge to me. It’s like what Heidegger said about the Hammer; you can’t sit back and think about a hammer all day and then know what it is. You have to just pick it up and use it. Art engages with our bodies in that experiential way and I don’t see why really rigorous thinking can’t happen here.
But it’s an experiment because I don’t know how to achieve this experiential thinking yet. That’s why this first event, paradoxically, is engaging with this very idea; what is thinking? Is it more then what our minds can do? Can we think using art as a means? It’s the topic that will clarify more what it is I’m trying to do here and how it might be done, and from here we’ll keep experimenting taking shots at the dark of what I’m feeling is possible here and how we might do it until someday we stumble on something genuine and real.
Can you briefly describe your musical projects and your collaborations with the Dublin Laptop Orchestra and Slavek Kwi?
Gregory the Asshole began about two years ago. I suddenly went through a burst of creativity and began to write a lot of music that I was really excited by. At the time I had also began to immerse myself in philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Nietzsche. These together got me interested in exploring ideas with my music. At first the only way I had to do it was using samples of people talking, which I took from my love for ‘God Speed You Black Emperor’, who use a lot of powerful interviews in their music. This was in my first E.P. However, the project only developed in its current form (a constantly evolving process) when I met conceptual artist Camille Lachlan. She was interested in similar things, using art to explore ideas and concepts and using art to teach us something and communicate with each other. Her medium, however, was visual art and not music. We worked in Berlin together, where we eventually met some of the discrepancies in how the art scene had developed. There are many interesting things happening there, but over all, the art scene has become stagnant. So, we got interested in the challenges for art today, and join the current dialogue around what needs to happen to further new practices in art. That’s the spirit of this project.
This E.P and its launch takes this into account, using music to achieve an ‘under-going’ (Nietzsche), to teach me something – which ended up being about thinking and this idea of space. I didn’t come up with the idea from nowhere; the process of creating this E.P thought me that. The music, as a result, follows a narrative of this process, which is there for the participant as they listen, perhaps teaching them what it thought me if it finds them in the right space. I still use interviews at points, but there purpose is to strengthen a message that is already there, as opposed being the sole source of a message. The launch was then a collaboration between myself and Camille, together bringing what was happening in the E.P on a conceptual level further, using visual art and music to try to achieve this thinking experiment.
Regarding the Dublin Laptop Orchestra and Slavek Kwi, they are other musicians who, I feel at least, are well able to explore conceptual elements in music in an innovative way. For this project I asked them if they were interested and when they were I just had a number of conversations with them about the concept of the launch, what was being explored, and what aspect of it I wanted each of them to explore in their performances. How they explore it is up to them, as long as I feel they understand what it is we want to achieve. I then have to trust their artistic and conceptual capabilities to explore that.
Your event focuses on the concept of thinking itself, as opposed thinking about something specifically. You are trying to think about thinking, how is this possible? Does thinking exist on its own? Can it be thought separately from the language we think in? What about other stimuli we are exposed to? So, can thinking really think about itself?
That’s a good question as it definitely presents the paradox of what I’m trying to do here. I ask myself the same question in the philosophical reflection released alongside this E.P. where I say ‘Can a tree bloom about its blooming flowers by blooming?’ It sounds like a ridiculous sentence, but its point is a thought experiment aimed at precisely this question; we can think about the coffee cup because the coffee cup exists outside the process of thought, and so we can step outside the use of the coffee cup itself and reflect back on it through the use of thinking. But what happens when you turn thought in on itself and think about what it is you do when you think. I don’t have a direct answer but I can try to provide a certain amount of reflection on the topic for the purposes of the question.
First of all, the question touches on different forms of thinking itself. Philosophy has a dominant tendency to reduce good thinking to rational thinking. Heidegger was one of the first to really show how other forms of experience, other then the rationality, can show us fundamental things about the world. In his ‘What is Metaphysics’ lecture he shows how if we are to think about what Nothing is, or ‘the Nothing’, a concept that underpins a lot of his thinking, we cannot use rational means and instead need to reflect on moods. Here, as he points out, if we are to reflect on ‘Nothing’ rationally we would come to the conclusion that the Nothing doesn’t exist, as things are, and nothing isn’t, and thus nothing isn’t real. Science assumes this. But as Heidegger points out, ‘Science wants to know nothing of the Nothing’, and thus employs the concept it wishes to dismiss in the dismissal itself. Heidegger goes on to argue that it is within anxiety, a mood in which ‘attunes us’ to the world in a specific way, that the nothing reveals itself, as it is here that the sense in which we give to the world, the coherent structure in which everything makes sense to us, begins to slip away, and we get faced with the nothingness that underpins everything.
The argument is interesting, the results of which are not necessarily related to our question here. But what’s interesting, for our purposes at least, is the play Heidegger’s thinking has here, between two different forms of thinking; a rationalization of sorts, which only functions to categorize an experience, a mood, something entirely irrational; anxiety. Thinking ‘attunes us’ to the world in a sense, and thus moods think, for sure, but just not in the same way that rationalization does. Rationalization categorizes.
The thing is, philosophy has always operated under a conception of what the mind is, and thus always operated under a theory of thinking. Plato felt the mind was there to give us access to the forms; an ideal version of what everything is in the appearing world. Therefore philosophizing, or in his view rationally thinking about what everything truly is in essence, would bring us closer to the forms and therefore truth. Descartes then decided that this world of ‘forms’ was actually in our mind, and thus we became subjects with a world of objects outside of us that we have access to, but is obscured by our subjectivity, this distance between us and the outside world somehow coming closer through, once again, being rational. I’m obviously massively generalizing here with these thinkers, but short of writing a book it would be impossible to express the complexity of these dynamics.
So, I would say a number of things about this. Rationalizing about thinking, as in using the chatter of the mind to cognize definitive theories about what thinking is, might not be possible. Its been done, as I’ve pointed to above, but its always been problematic. A recent change that occurred in philosophy was when the phenomenological tradition began to undercut this distinction between subject and object, and instead of my emotions being something inside me that obscured my ability to think rationally, emotions were out there in the world that I become attuned to on some level, and thus they become genuine access into the way things are in the world. Thus, Heidegger was able to categorize anxiety as a fundamental attunement to the world.
Thinking is definitely a capacity that we have, and so it does exist on its own, and is used outside of language. For example, take a moment when you are thoroughly engaged with music, like in an improvisation where musicians must communicate with each other without the use of language. There must be thinking involved here somewhere, because you are changing and moving the direction of the music, engaging with the people you are playing with etc. The last thing you want to do, though, is start up the chatter in the mind, i.e. rationalizing, which only serves to get in the way of a good improvisation.
Rationalization needs language because its use is one of a categorization process. But you don’t need language for an improvisation in music, nor in anxiety. Yet in improvisation we are communicating, and in anxiety we are attuned to something fundamental about existence. This is thinking, but it’s hard to imagine it that way because of the western traditions tendency to reduce thinking to rationality. Thinking does exist on its own, but perhaps cannot be rationalized about outside of language. But there are other ways of attuning ourselves to the world – spaces we can enter into – that reveal and teach us something about thinking outside of that.
So thinking can think about itself, and thus there has to be ways we can enter into spaces that show us something about thinking which rationalization can’t. This is what we are using art-works (actually, what we refer to as ‘thought-things’) for. But will thinking be ever able to exist in a formula or a text? I doubt.
Please name one artist whose work inspired or influenced you and why?
I’d have to say the prime influence for all of this is Nietzsche. His ability to combine his personal growth with his thinking, which he believed are inseparable, is mesmerizing and it’s why he’s such a good writer. He ‘writes with his own blood’, as he says, but in doing so explores some really important and fascinating ideas. I want to do the same with my art form, engaging myself on a personal level to mediate ideas through my art, which is there for people to engage with and develop also.
The second part of the interview we will publish tomorrow