27th May 2008
On Attitudes: What is to be done with indifference?
· What is indifference, and what does it mean to be indifferent?
· Who are the indifferent—or are we all infected with indifference?
· Is indifference a problem that needs to be solved?
· Are there occasions when indifference is appropriate?
· Can indifference be a strategy to affect change?
Yesterday evening at the Goethe Institute, Lisa Le Feuvre and Edgar Schmitz of the Serpentine Gallery held the final “Sweatshop” in their latest series of critical conversations, “On Attitudes.” The topic for discussion revolved around the question “What is to be done with Indifference?” Addressing an audience of around 70-80 people were three speakers:
The entire event took place between 7 and 9:15pm. Lotringer spoke for the longest length of time (no less than 45 minutes), perhaps upstaging the others, as he seemed prepared to make more challenging and interesting statements about the topic at hand. Lotringer’s comments, and some of the concerns I have with what he said last night, constitute the basis for this piece of writing.
Before I proceed with commenting on Lotringer’s discussion, however, I’d like to explore the term at issue, “indifference.” What is indifference, and what does it mean to be indifferent?
There are obvious associations with the term, “indifference,” and some of these are more useful than others. As I was planning this piece of text, I accidentally started using the term “disillusionment,” as though I’d fused this terms together with “indifference,” or had even thought I’d spent an evening listening to speakers discuss “disillusionment.” At first I just brushed all the ideas I’d come up with aside, and then I soon realized that there might have been a reason why I conflated the two terms. Of course, I realize the terms are not the same, nor do they mean the same thing, but they are not entirely disconnected.
When I was on the “disillusionment” track of thinking, I started to think about its opposite, as I often find this a useful way of approaching a problem: what would it mean or look like for this not to be the case? If one were not “disillusioned,” would that mean that one was “illusioned” (which my spellchecker wants to change into “illumined”) – that is, steered by illusions, perhaps even “deluded”? If so, why is “disillusionment” seen as such a bad thing? Surely it would be better to be steered by reality rather than the chimerical. Alas, the “disillusion” I’m referring to may have less to do with “illusions” and more to do with “hope.” This was not cleared up, however, upon seeing two rather contrary synonyms (read usages) for “disillusion”: one, “to bring down to earth;” the other “to disenchant” or “to let down.” Though not the same, it is easy to see how one could draw some correlative relationship between disenchantment and disillusionment.
This kind of conflation is something Lisa Le Feuvre committed during her summing-up, and it seemed all the more vexing because her conflation wasn’t articulated as a problem, nor was her conflation made transparent as an intentional act. One can only guess that she wasn’t aware of the conflation. Instead, while attempting to organize what the speakers had said into some kind of coherent hole, Le Feuvre spent very little time saying about anything what had just been offered by the speakers; instead she launched into a description of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” – an overly abridged description with which David was most unpleased, he confessed later over a glass of wine at the Polish club. The reason for this, I accept, could have been because Eric Alliez French accent made it difficult to decipher what he was saying, and at the risk of completely omitting him from her summation, Le Feuvre opted to ignore all the speakers. My sense is that she intended to proceed as she indeed did, since her rendition of Bartleby was neither improvised nor unscripted, and she read something which sounded conspicuously like the Wikipedia entry for “Bartleby.”
Having not read Melville’s “Bartleby” myself, I didn’t take issue with this aspect of Le Feuvre’s presentation – her reduction of the story’s essential elements. Instead, I was bothered by the unannounced and unwarranted employment of one term in exchange for another, which, in my opinion, became quite problematic. Rather than staying with the term “indifference,” Le Feuvre exchanged it for the term “withdrawal,” implying through this linguistic sleight of hand that the two terms have the same meaning, which they do not. One may withdraw without being indifferent, and one can even be indifferent without withdrawing. In a sense, through passive resistance, Gandhi withdrew, but he was most certainly not indifferent. In fact, it was his very lack of indifference that led him to withdraw in a most particular and successful sort of way. Conversely, politicians participate in social decision-making processes all the time, some of which they know or care almost nothing about, and in such circumstances could be described as “indifferent” to those whom their policies affect. It should be noted that one can withdraw as a consequence of indifference, but substituting the term “withdrawal” for the term “indifference,” without any sort of explanation, is problematic.
With that out of the way, I can focus on my concerns related to Lotringer’s talk., which I have sectioned into three main categories: capitalism, chaos, and perversion.
CAPITALISM
After the evening was wrapped up at the Goethe Institute, a number of those in attendance proceeded next door to Ognisko for a post-Sweatshop drink at the Polish Club. Situated in an Exhibition Road building, the Polish Club houses an elegant lounge and restaurant – a refreshing departure from the usual pub atmosphere. After a couple glasses of French Sauvignon Blanc, we were the last of our group to leave, and as we approached the door, we crossed paths with Lotringer. Somewhat tipsy, I took the opportunity to tell him that I enjoyed his talk, but that I recognized several problems with it, and proceeded to outline what they were. One thing led to another, and as we got onto the topic of the Holocaust, as I do, Lotringer mentioned that he had a painful connection to that period of time. He didn’t elaborate, nor did I ask him to, but he mentioned it more than once. I momentarily forgot how to pronounce his name, and accidentally referred to him as “Lestranger,” which made him smile, and when I mentioned Camus I pronounced it correctly, and started saying how much I loved France, and then Sylvère mentioned that he is not actually French, but a Polish Jew by birth, who, after the Second World War, immigrated first to Israel and then to France. He said he didn’t realize Zionism was a political movement until he had already been a part of it for a few years, at which point he promptly moved from Israel to France. He seemed anything but apolitical this evening.
According to Lotringer, indifference is a byproduct of capitalism. The tacit argument, I would assume, goes something like this. In order to function and flourish, a capitalist system requires an urban or semi-urban environment in which to operate. Large numbers of communities converge to combine talents and labor for the creation of goods and services, thus forming urban centres. The mechanism feeds itself, for the more people that join the urban centre, the more people that are required for the operation of its internal mechanisms. The city-dweller is a working machine; overwrought with stimulus, and allocated less space than one’s rural counter part, smaller living quarters necessarily require a division of the family unit, making the extended family a thing of the past.
As family ties are loosened and sometimes severed through distance, work, and the reduction of spare time, the urban individual becomes more and more isolated. With the invention of new technologies, workers find and lose jobs more frequently, and consequently relocate to areas closer to work. Work is one of the primary places that people seek to be near when looking for a new home. People come and go, transience becomes the norm, and the concept of “neighborhood” has more to do with shops and architecture than people. The familiar face is unfamiliar in reality, and since capitalism engenders competition, there is little to be gained from befriending one’s co-workers.
In a capitalist society, it does not “pay” to care. Looking out for the “other” comes at a cost, either to one’s own safety or to one’s success. There is nothing in it for the concerned; it pays to be indifferent.
The problem with this analysis of capitalism is simple: if capitalism breeds indifference, why are some people not indifferent? What accounts for degrees, stages, or phases of indifference? If, as Lotringer describes, we are all indifferent, why do I feel non-indifferent about a number of issues? Am I deluding myself?
CHAOS
As a way to release or deflate indifference, Lotringer suggests that social chaos is a productive way towards disempowering it, that it’s a “healthy” way of dealing with indifference. This sounds uncomfortably like Bataille’s “general economy,” and I’m not sure I recommend this as a solution.
more to come…
PERVERSION
Way of mitigating indifference.
more to come…
June 3, 2008 at 4:44 pm |
Hello TL – sorry for not noticing your post sooner!
Your conflation of the terms ‘indifference’ and ‘disillusionment’ is of great interest to me – and I agree that there is an obvious, though not entirely stable, association between the two. For me this is a pretty central area of concern – and I have to wonder whether my blathering on about disillusionment in the Polish bar contributed to your mixing of terms. I’d be the first to admit that my use of the term ‘disillusionment’ does not correspond to any straightforward dictionary definition – in fact I’m still trying to unpack what this term suggests for me in relation to my research, to art practice, to thought, politics, etc. – but I think one of the most important factors is its suggestion of a collapse, a kind of falling out or into another state – as well as a kind of stripping away. Of course, there is something of the sense of becoming ‘un-deluded’, so to speak, but I really like your simple reference to hope, and the fact that this reference was intuited and not immediately backed up by common usage. There is also, for me, something about being faced with the banality of things, perhaps the sheer material presence of matter, or some unbeating heart that seems to (not) tick common to everything. What interests me most is this sense of movement – a motion that might be conceived of as the non-movement of indifference, which again takes us into the paradoxical world of Blacnchot, where it is almost impossible to firmly grasp what is being spoken about indirectly.
Whilst Lisa Le Feuvre’s lack of interrogation of her use of ‘withdrawal’ is indeed problematic and worth bringing up, I think the references to Bartleby were relevant to what was being talked about, and in fact it seemed inevitable that the scribe would make an appearance at some point or other. [I was half-expecting Bouvard and Pécuchet to come bumbling in – and you might say that their ceaseless appetite for all things has nothing to do with indifference, but I wonder – there was a comment made by Lotringer where he referenced Consumerist Theory and a deadlock encountered when “all things are equally preferred”, which not only made me immediately think of Melville’s copyist, but also to Flaubert’s pair of clerks skimming the surface of all their various endeavours with homogenising haplessness, which might be a kind of indifference – that of the perpetual amateur, the grey of the middling – until finally they come back to rest in the neutrality of copying once more.] In saying that, I think that a number of words are problematic when it comes to Bartleby – not only ‘withdrawal’, but also ‘indifference’ itself. It could be argued that the scrivener is not subject to the same sense of withdrawal and indifference – that these terms do not apply to him precisely because he has ‘stepped out’ of any relation with their points of reference. It is just this kind of quandary – having to speak of Bartleby in terms that seem to have no relation to him, as if by his becoming-ambiguity (neither withdrawn nor fully present, but somewhere in between) he had contaminated the language one is resigned to using to either try to reach or describe him.
Though there were numerous points of interest in all of the presentations, as well as the summations / introductions made by the hosts, I agree that Lotringer was the most compelling speaker at the event. I enjoyed his references to Ballard’s Crash and Artaud as specific examples of routes though what he called the pervading indifference instituted by global capitalism. These two instances of going to extreme lengths to feel, or to embrace indifferentiation, living without affect, were linked by Lotringer to a sense of everything becoming fully exchangeable – a remark that he made on more than one occasion, and seemed to conjure a kind of grey world of anonymity in the face of the unrepresentable. Perhaps in relation to Artaud, the trajectory of Lotringer’s talk seemed to be the notion of working into, or working with, this pervasive indifference – which is not something that should be considered as subject or object (if I’m clear on this) but something like a (im)material substance (reference was made here to the expression, possibly in French, of being the equivalent to “I have hate.”) He suggested, perhaps again relating to Artaud (and to Crash?) another turning away, another fold into indifference – as if it were cookie dough, smoke to be stirred. Rather than extremes of violence – or indeed the lack of restraint that might be associated with Bataille’s general economy – Lortinger seemed to be advocating a refrain from disclosing, and the insertion of distancing through a kind of calculated indifference – or more specifically, a process of ‘complexifying’ indifference. I’m unsure as to the calculations that might be implied here and any obvious forms of strategy, etc. This kind of complexification is no doubt a difficult position to describe, but it seemed to be located outside any binary of passive (shield & obstacle) or strategic (pro-active, subjective?), or to somehow involve being indifferent to indifference. Such a process of exacerbation of indifferentiation, deepening it in order to anticipate some ungiven exit, or pushing it to a point where is reverses itself (a kind of ‘collapse’…?) was associated to the work of Baudrillard and Virilio by Lotringer himself.
There were other things I noted down – his references to inertia within speed fascinated me, and indeed I’ve been trying to write something that relates to this (at least in my head) for some time now, without success. These ‘ecstasies’ of collapse and catastrophe he described – and an image was conjured of someone with their fingers in an electrical socket, a bind between racing at high speed and being absolutely locked – related to a general ‘dispossession in relation to events’, also seems very important for me.
A question he raised, perhaps more generally related to capitalism, concerned the problem that, if obstacles are absorbed and used by the system, how might the system be otherwise displaced? He made some remark about allowing the system to generate its own poison, with specific reference to Alfred Jarry and Pataphysics – can anyone shed any further light on this. Obviously, I need to familiarise myself with each and every ubu as soon as I can.
I also enjoyed Adrian Rifkind’s references to Roland Barthes series of lectures of The Neutral, recently compiled into a book by Rosalind Krauss, especially when he made reference to Barthes use of a scene from War and Peace and a sense of making oneself invulnerable, which seems to be a underlying concern of my own project – the details of which I am still coming to grips with. Conflations between ‘indifference’ and ‘invulnerability’ might be my own problemtatic starting point for something! Rifkind’s references to the Baroque (was this via Deleuze?) and, as I think he put it, ‘twisting and squeezing out of indifference’, seemed to correlate with the complexification of indifference suggested by Lotringer.
Going back to Lotringer again – in the Q&A session I think he spoke about indifference in relation to the art world and a growing tide of undifferentiated matter – again related to what he called an ‘excesses of exchangeability’ – that not only demands a straightforward effort of resistance in the idea of ‘not being led’, but also, perhaps more complexly, of being prepared to fail, being left open to this capacity in the approach of ‘soft subversion’. [This reference to softness was linked in my mind to the edge of discernibility, so to speak – here I’m going to expose something of an inner geek – and made me think of The Third Policeman, where there is, at least in my memory, a pointed implement that tapers to a point so reduced in dimensions that it is possible for it to puncture matter on a cellular level… and to an edition of the Miracleman comic re-imagined by Alan Moore, where a seemingly invulnerable opponent can only be struck by a weapon when it is cast with the right slowness, somehow then free to pierce his layers of superhuman protection. These images of membranous screens and the methods through which they might be penetrated keep recurring to me – symptomatic of a relation to practice, no doubt…]