TABLE OF CONTENTS I. THINKING Martin Heidegger- What Is Called Thinking.2John Dewey- Democracy and Education..11Bell Hooks- Critical Thinking...12 II. MAKING Joseph Beuys- I Am Seaching for Field Character.......16Ludwig Borne- How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days.18Roberto Matta- on Leonardo Da Vinci....20Donald Winnicott- Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self.22 III. MAKING THINKING Susan Sontag- Against Interpretation...26Arthur Danto- Philosophizing Art...28John Dewey- Art as Experience....32Gilles Deleuze- Desert Islands..40Thomas Hirschhorn- 24h Foucault......41 IV. COMMUNITY Allan Kaprow- Notes on the Elimination of the Audience..44Martin Duberman- Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community ....46 1md ( fi'n \+e e.\{' Wk.+- '5 Cq IIed. 1h LECTURE I . We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be " ready to learn thinking. leel{" .As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such learning, we have admitted that we are not yet capable of thiruoog. Yet man is called the being who can think, and rightly so. Man is the rational animal. Reason, ratio, evolves in thinking. Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but can't. Perhaps he wants too much when he wants to think, and so can do too little. Man can think .. to_c1.9 so. Tllls poss16ility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking. For we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as the keeper who holds us in our essential being. What keeps us in our essential nature holds us only so long, however, as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us. And we keep on to it by not letting it out of our memory. ,:.Memory')is the gathering of thought. Thought of what? :> 24 5 WHAT IS CALLED Thought of what holds us, in that we give it thought precisely because It remains what must be thought about. ot:.. back, a gift given we Incline toward it. Only when we are so inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking. In order to be capable of thinking; we need to learn it first. What is learning? Man learns when he disposes everything he does so that it answers to whatever essentials are addressed to him at any given moment. We learn to think by giving our mind to what there is to think about. What is essential in a friend, for example, is what we call "friendly." In the same sense we now call "thought-provoking" what in itself is to be thought about. f[ives us to think. But it always gives that gift just so far as the thought-provoking matter already is intrinsically what must be thought about. From now on, we will call "most thought-provoking" what remains to be thought about always, because it is at the beginning, before all else. What is most thought-provoking? How does it show itself in our thought-provoking time? if- Most thought-provokinKis that Rill 'I1oLtbi.nJri.ng -not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking. True, this course of events seems to demand rather that man should act, without delay, instead of making speeches at conferences and international conventions and never getting oeyond proposing ideas on what ought to be, and how it ought to be done. What is lacking, then, is action, not thought. And coUld be that prevailing man has for centuries now acted too much and too little. But how dare anyone assert today that we are still not thinking, today when there is everywhere a lively and constantly more audible interest in philosophy, when almost everybody claims to know what philosophy is all about! Philosophers PAR.T I are the thinkers par excellence. They are called thinkers precisely because tbjnkjng properly takes place in philosophy. Nobody will deny that there is an interest in philosophy _ today. But-is there anything at all left today in which ;:.: man does not take an interest, in the sense in which he understands "interest"? Interest, interesse, means to be among and in the midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with ing. And interesting is the sort of thing that can freely be regarded as indifferent the next moment, and be displaced by something else, which then concerns us just as little as what went before. Many people today take the view that they are doing great honor to something by finding it interesting. The truth is that such an opinion has already relegated the interesting thing to the ranks of what is indiffer. ent and soon boring. . It is no evidence of any readiness to think that people show an interest in philosophy. There is, of course, serious preoccupation everywhere with philosophy and its problems. The learned world is expending commendable efforts in the investigation of the history of philosophy. These are useful and worthy tasks, and only the best talents are good enough for them, especially when they present to us models of great thinking. But even if we have devoted many years '\ to tbe intensive study of the treatises and writings of the great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we ourselves are thinking, or even are ready to learn thinking. On B;-0,...,.,I. the contrary-preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we .,:t are thinking just because 'we are incessantly "philosophizing." Even so, it remains strange, and seems presumptuous, to assert that what is most thought-provoking in our thought36 7 WHAT IS CALLED THINKING? provoking time is that .we are still not thinking. Accordingly, we must prove the assertion. Even more advisable is first to explain it. For it could be that the demand for a proof collapses as soon as enough light is shed on what the assertion says. It runs: "k Most thought-provoking in our thought-provokinG timf! is that we arf! still not thinking. It has been suggested earlier how the term "thoughtprovoking" is to be understood. Thought-provoking is what gives us to think. Let us look at it closely, and from the start allow each word its proper weight. Some things are food for thought in themselves, intrinsically, so to speak innately. And some things make an appeal to us to give them thought, to turn toward them in thought: to think them. What is thought-provoking, what gives us to think, is then not anything that we determine, not anything that only we are instituting, only we are proposing. According to our assertion, what of itself ~ v e s us most to think about, what is most thought-provoking, is this-that we are still not thinking. . This now means: We have still not come face to face, have not yet come under the sway of what intrinsically desires to be thought about in an essential sense. Presumably the reason is that we human beings do not yet sufficiently reach out and turn toward what desires to be thought. If so, the fact that we are still not thinking would merely be a slowness, a delay in thinking or, at most, a neglect on man's part. Such human tardiness could then be cured in human ways by the appropriate measures. Human neglect would give us food for thought-but only in passing. The fact that we are still not thinking would be thought-provok_ PART I thinking is by no means only because man does not yet turn sufficiently toward that which, by origin and innately, wants to be thought about since in its essence its remains what must be thought about. Rather, that we are still not thinking stems from the fact that the thing itself that must be thought about turns away from UlI:lI:l, has turned, awa.y long ago. We will want to know at once when that event took place. Even before that, we will ask still more urgently how we could possibly know of any such event. And fmally, the problems which here lie in wait come rushing at us when we add still further: that which really gives us food for thought did not turn away from man at some time or other . which can be fixed in history-no, what really must be thought keeps itself turned away from man SInce the . be-r ~ g . .On the other hand, in our era man has always thought in some way; in fact, man has thought the profoundest thoughts, and entrusted them to memory. By thinking in that way he did and does remain related to what must be thought. And yet man is not capable of really thinking as long as that which must be thought about, withdraws. If we, as we are here and now, will not be taken in by empty talk, we must retort that everything said so far is an unbroken chain of hollow assertions, and state besides that what has been presented here has nothing to do with scientific knowledge. It will be well to maintain as long as possible such a defensive attitude toward what has been said: only in that attitude do we keep the distance needed for a quick running dash by which one or the other of us may succeed in making the leap into thinking. For it is true that what was said so far, and the entire discussion that is to follow, have nothing to do with scientific knowledge, especially not if the discussion itself is to be a thinking. This situation is grounded in 48 9 PART I WHAT IS CALLED THINKING? . the fact that science itself does not think, and cannot think -which is its good fortune, here meaning the assurance of its own appointed course. Science does not think:. This is a shockjng statement. Let the--statement be shocking, even though we immediately add the supplementary statement that nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking. That fashion, however, is genuine and consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies there unbridgeably. There is no bridge here--Qruy tho hmp. there is nothing but mischief in all the makeshift ties and asses' bridges by which men today would set up a comfortable commerce between thinking and the sciences. Hence we, those of us who come from the sciences, must endure what is shocking and strange about thinkingassuming we are ready to learn thinking. To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever dress themselves to us at the given moment. In .order to be capable of doing so, we must get underway. It is important above all that on the way on which we set out when we learn to think, we do not deceive ourselves an_d rashly bypass the pressing questions; on the contrary, we must allow ourselves to become involved in questions that seek what no inventiveness can find. Especially we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally. To do that, we must at the same time come to know it. We said: man still does not think, and this because what must be thought about tunis away from him; by no means only because man does not sufficiently reach out and turn to what is to be thought. What must be thought about, turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name? Whatever withdraws, refuses arrival. But-withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even con- * cern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him. Being struck by actuality is what we like to regard as constitutive of the actuality of the actual. However, in being struck by what is actuai, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns and touches him -touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping hiln by its withclr!l.wal. Tht! evertt of withdrawal could be what is most present in all ouT present, and so infinitely exceed the act:uality of everything actual. What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all. Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are drawing toward what draws, attracts us by its withdrawal. And once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what draws us, our essential nature already bears the stamp of "drawing toward." As we are drawing toward what withdraws, we ourselves are pointers pointing toward it. We are who we by pointing in that direction-not like an incidental adjunct but as follows: this "drawing toward" is in itself an essential and therefore constant . pointing toward what withdraws. To say "drawing toward" is to say "pointing toward what withdraws." To the extent that man is drawing that way, he points toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man, and then also occasionally someone who points. No: drawn into what withdraws, drawing toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is man. His essential nature lies in being such a pointer. Something which in Itself, by Its essential nature, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws toward what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws away, it points, not so much at 510 without interpretation. He continues with these two lines: name of a daughter of Heaven and Earth. Myth means -both the appearance and that which has its loGOS are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into opposition by philosophy as such; on the contrary, the early Greek thinkers (Parmenides, fragment 8) are precisely the ones to use mythos and logos in the same sense. Mythos only at the point where neither mythos nor logos can keep to its original nature. In Plato's work, this separation has already taken place. Historians and philolOgists, by virtue of a Platonism, imagine that mythos was destroyed by logos. But nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the God's withdrawal. THINKING? PART I 11WHAT 18 CALLED In a draft to one of his hymns, Hoelderlin writes: "We are a sign that is not read." "We feel no pain, we almost have Lost our tongue in foreign lands." The several drafts of that hymn-besides bearing such titles as "The Serpent," "The Sign," "The Nymph"-also include the title "Mnemosyne." This Greek word may be translated: Memory. And since the Greek word is femJwe Rfl!ai DO rult! if WE! translate Ujjame Memory." For Hoelderlin uses the Greek word Mnemosyne as the Titaness. According to the myth, she is the the telling word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and make appear essence in the appearance, its epiphany. Mythos is what has its essence in its telling-what is apparent in the unconcealedness of its appeal. The mythos is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being. Logos says the same; mythos and and logos become separated and opposed prejudice which modern rationalism . adopted from Mnemosyne, daughter of Heaven and Earth, bride of Zeus, in nine nights becomes the mother of the nine Muses. Drama and music, dance and poetry are of the womb of Mnemosyne, Dame Memory. It is plain that the word means something else than merely the psychologically demonstrable ability to retain a mental representation, an idea, of something which is past. Memory-from Latin memor, mindful-has in mind something that is in the mind, thought. But when it is the name of the Mother of the Muses, "Memory" does not mean just any thought of anything that can be thought. Memory is the gathering and convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thoue;ht about first of all. Memory is of recollection, thinking back. It safely keeps and keeps concealed within it that to which at each given time thought must be given before all else, in everything that essentially is, everything that appeals to us as what has being and has been in being. Memory, Mother of the Muses-the thinking back to what is to be thought is the source and ground of poesy. This is why poesy is the water that at times flows backward toward the source, toward thinking as a thinking back, a recollection. Surely, as long as we take the view that logic gives us any information about what thinking is, we shall never be able to think how much all poesy rests upon 'thinking back, recollection. Poetry wells up only from devoted thought thinking back, recollecting. Under the heading Mnemosyne, Hoe1derlin says: "We are a sign that is not read ..." We? Who? We the men of today, of a "today" that has lasted since long ago and will still last for a long time, so long that no calendar in history can give its measure. In the same hYJlU1, "Mnemosyne," it says: "Long is/The time"the time in which we are a sign, a sign that is not read. And this, that we are a sign, a sign that is not read-does this not give enough food for thought? What the poet says in 612 Ir AT ts CALLED THINKING? these words, and those that follow, may have a part in showing us what is most thought-provoking: precisely what the assertion about our thought-provoking time attempts to think of. And that assertion, provided only we explain it properly, may throw some little light for us upon the poet's word; Hoelderlin's word, in turn, because it is a word of poesy, may summon us with a larger appeal, and hence greater allure, upon a way of thought that tracks in thought what is most thought-provoking. Even so, it is as yet obscure what purpose this reference to the words of Hoelderlin is supposed to serve. It is still questionable with what right we, by way of an attempt to think, make mention of a poet, this poet in particular. And it is also still unclear Upon what gr?und, and within what limits, our reference to the poetic must remain. Summary and Transition By way of this series of lectures, we are attempting to learn thinking. The way is long. We dare take only a few steps. If all goes well, they will take us to the foothills of thought. But they will take us to places which we must explore to reach the point where only the leap will help further. The leap alone takes us into the neighborhood where thinking resides. We therefore shall take a few practice leaps right at the start, though we won't notice it at once, nor need to. In contrast to a steady progress, where We move unawares from one thing to the next and everything remains alike, the leap takes us abruptly to where everything is different, so different that it strikes us as strange. Abrupt means the sudden sheer descent or rise that marks the chasm's edge. Though we may not founder in such a leap, what the leap takes us to will confound us. It is quite in order, then, that we receive notice from the very start of what will confound us. But all would not be PART I 1 ~ well if the strangeness were due only to the fact that you, the listeners, are not yet listening closely enough. If that were the case, you would be bound to overlook completely the strangeness which lies in the matter itself. The matter. of thinking is always confounding-all the more in proportion as we keep clear of prejudice. To keep clear of prejudice, we must be teady and willing to listen. Such readiness allows us to surmount the boundaries in which all customary views are confined, and to reach a more open territory. In order to encourage such readiness, I shall insert here some transitional remarks, which will also apply to all subsequent lectures. In universities especially, the danger is still very great that we misunderstand what we hear of thinking, particularly if the immediate subject of the discussion is scientific. Is there any place compelling us more forcibly to rack Our brains than the research and training institutions pursuing scientific labors? Now everyone admits unreservedly that the arts and the sciences are totally different from each other, though in official oratory they are still mentioned jointly. But if a distinction is made between thinking and ~ the sciences, and the two are contrasted, that is immediately considered a disparagement of science. There is the fear even that thinking might open hostilities against the sciences, and becloud the seriousness and spoil the joy of scientific work. But even if those fears were justified, which is emphatically not the case, it would still be both tactless and tasteless to take a stand against science upon the very rostrum that serves scientific education. Tact alone ought to prevent all polemics here. But there is another consideration as well. Any kind of polemics fails from the outset to assume the attitude of thinking. The opponent's role is not the thinking f role. Thinking is thinking only when it pursues whatever speaks for a subject. Everything said here defensively is 714 WHAT IS CALLED THINKING? PART I 15 always intended eXclusively to protect the subject. When We speak of the sciences as we pursue our way, we shall be . speaking not against but for them, for clarity concerning . their essential nature. This alone implies our conviction that the sciences are in themselves positively essential. However, their essence is frankly of a different 'sort from what 0lU" universities today still fondly imagine it to be. In any case, we still seem afraid of facing the exciting fact . that today's sciences belong in the realm of the essence of modern technology, and nowhere else. Be it noted that I am saying "in the realm of the essence of technology," and not simply "in technology." A fog still surrounds the essence of modern science. That fog, however, is not produced by individual investigators and scholars in the sciences. It is not produced by man at all. It arises from the region of what is most ..; still..not thinlring;-none of us, including you, me first of all. This is why we are here attempting to learn thinking. We are all on the way together, and are not reproving each other. To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time. Depending on the kind of essentials, depending on the realm from which they address us, the answer and with it the kind of learning differs. A cabinetmaker's apprentice, someone who is learning to build cabinets and the like, will serve an example. His learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather kno.wledge about the CUstomary forms of the things he is to build. If .he-is-to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself ansWer-and respond abov.e all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood-to wood as it enters into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be detennined exclusively by business concerns. Every pandicraft, all human dealings are constantly in that. danger. The writing of poetry is no more exempt from it than is thinking. Whether or not a cabinetmaker's apprentice, while he is learning, will come to respond to wood and wooden things, depends obviously on the presence of some teacher who can make the apprentice comprehend. . True. Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teach- , ing more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. is m?re than learning because what teaching calls for IS tbIs: toJ.etJe.a.at. 1 in-:fIct:;IeU--:ngthing else be learnechthan-leamm-g. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful infonnation. The teacher is a.head of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he learn. The teacher must be capable ( of being more teachable than the apprentices. The assw:ed_of his . .ground than . those who learn are of.theirs: If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official. It still is an exalted matter, then, to become a teacher---which is something else entirely than becoming a famous professor. That nobody wants any longer to become a teacher today, when all things are downgraded and graded from below (for instance, from business), is presumably because the matter is exalted, because of its altitude. And presumably this disinclination is linked to that 8THINKING? PART I 17 16 WHAT IS CALLED most thought-provoking matter which gives us to think. We must keep our eyes fixed firmly on the true relation between teacher and taught-if indeed learning is to arise in the course of these lectures. We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like 'building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a "handicraft." "Craft" literally means the strength and skill in our hands. The hand is a peculiar thing. In the Common viewJ the AimQis port of 6UI' bodily o;ganism. Rut the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organspaws, claws, or fangs-different-,by Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft. But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly , ..I! imagme. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes-and not just things : the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand's gestures run l")-t 1everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think-not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man's simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper time. We must learn thinking because our being able to think, and even gifted for it, is still no guarantee that we are capable of thinking. To be capable, we must before all else incline toward what addresses itself to thought-and that is that which of itself gives food for thought. What gives us this giftl the fjiH of WPAt mllt prgperly thoYght D99Ut, is what we call most thought-provoking. Our answer to the question what the most thought-pro, ..... I ,ivoking for our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking. The reason is never exclusively or primarily that we men do not sufficiently reach out and turn toward what properly gives food for thought; the reason is that this most thoughtprflvoking thing turns away from us, in fact has long since turned away from man. And what withdraws in such a manner, keeps and develops its own, incomparable nearness. Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking-even though he may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal may remain as veiled as ever. All through his life and right mto his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this- draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps the secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. 918 WHAT IS CALLED THINKING? Thinking has entered into literature; and literature has decided the fate of Western science which, by way of the doctrina of the Middle Ages, became the scientia of modern times. In this form all the sciences have leapt from the womb of philosophy, in a twofold manner. The sciences come out of philosophy, because they have to part with her. And now that they are so apart they can never again, byItheir own power as sciences, make the leap back into the source from whence they have spnmg. Henceforth they are remanded to a realm of being where only ,thinking can find them, provided thinking is capable of doing what is its own to do. W}l@i1 mim IS drawing into What withdraws, he points l._I' into what withdraws. As we are drawing that way we are a "If : sign, a pointer. But we are pointing then at something , which has not, not yet, been transposed into the language of our speech. We are a sign that is not read. In his draft for the hymn "Mnemosyne" (Memory),Hoelderlin says: "We are a sign that is not read, We feel no pain, we almost have Lost our tongue in foreign lands." And so, on our way toward thinking, we hear a word of poesy. But the question to what end and with what right, upon what ground and within what limits, our attempt to think allows itself to get involved in a dialogue with poesy, let alone with the poetry of this poet-this question, which is inescapable, we can discuss only after we ourselves have taken the pa~ h of thinking. LECTURE II How shall we ever be able to think about the oft-named relation between thought and poesy, so long as we do not know what is called thinking and what calls for thinking, and therefore cannot think about what poesy is? We modern men presumably have pot the slightest notion how thoughtfully the Greeks experienced their lofty poetry, their works of art-no, not experienced, but let them stand there in the presence of their radiant appearance. Yet this much might be clear to us right now: we are not dragging Hoelderlin's words into our lecture merely as a quotation from the realm of the poetic statement which will enliven and beautify the dry progress of thinking. To do s'o would be to debase the poetic word. Its statement rests on its own truth. This truth is called beauty. Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance. We are compelled to let the poetic word stand in its truth, in beauty. And that does not exclude but on the contrary includes that we think the poetic word. 19 10\ OtMUCRACY AND EDUJATION - the place where revolution originates, changed by stepping through the basic emocratic structure and then restructuring the economy in such a way that it 'ould serve the needs of man and not merely the needs of a minority for their Nn profit. That is the connection. And that I understand as art. ;eph Beuys/Dirk Schwarze, report on a day's proceedings at the InformiitionsbQros der 'gilnisacion fOr direkte Demokriltie durch Volksilbstimmung, Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972): nslated in Adriani Giltz. et al. .joseph Beuys: UJe and Work (New York: Barrons. 1979) 244-9. Joseph Beuys I Am Searching for Field Character//1973 Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionaryrevolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS AWORK OF ART. This most modem art discipline - Social Sculpture/Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor or architect of the social organism. Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of Fluxus and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can rum Into J pollrleJlly pfBfl uerive E8Uflng EHFaUgk @aEJl shaping history, But all this. and much that is as yet unexplored. has first to form part of our consciousness: insight is needed into objective connections. We must probe (theory of knowledge) the moment of origin of free individual productive potency (creativity). We then reach the threshold where the human being experiences himself primarily as a spiritual being, where his supreme achievements (work of art), his active thinking, his active feeling. his active will, and their higher forms. can be apprehended as sculptural generative means, corresponding to the exploded concepts of sculpture divided into its elements indefinite - movement - definite (see theory of sculpture), and are then recognized as flowing in the direction that is shaping the content of the world right through into the future. This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism). but also of religious activity. EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who - from his state of freedom - the position of freedom that he experiences at first hand - learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FlffiJRE SOCIAL ORDER. Selfdetermination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom); in the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Selfadministration and decentralization (threefold structure) occurs: FREE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM. THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL is born 16Communication Qmm in it must b@ J ORe-WAy ft6W ftom the teacher to the taught. The teacher takes equally from the taught. So oscillates _ at all times and everywhere, in any conceivable internal and external circumstance, between all degrees of ability, in the work place, institutions, the street, work circles, research groups, schools - the master/pupil, transmitter/receiver, relationship. The ways of achieving this are manifold, corresponding to the varying gifts of individuals and groups. THE ORGANIZATION FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY THROUGH REFERENDUM is one such group. It seeks to launch many similar work groups or information centres, and strives towards worldwide cooperation. Joseph Beuys. '1 am Searching for Field Character' (1973). in Carin Kuoni. ed.. Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph 8euys in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. 1990) 21-3. / ARTISTS' WRmNGS Collective Actions Ten Appearances//1981 The five-person Collective Actions group. working in Moscow from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, represent a particularly poetic and cerebral approach to partidpation. Ten Appearances is typical of their work in taking place in fields outside the dty, with a small number of partidpants who took an active part in the action and then contributed to its analysis. These gestures differ from Western equivalents of this period in being preoccupied with art's internal reception and drculation, rather than in its relationship to sodal institutions. Ten spools on vertical nails were affIXed to a board (60 x 90 cm) which was laid upon the snow. Each of the spools was wound with two to three hundred metres of strong. white thread. Each of the WqS t9 the end of a thread from one of the spools and. unravelling the thread from the spool. move in a straight line into the forest surrounding the field. Thus the ten participants were to have dispersed from the centre of the field in the following directions: I. Pivovarova N. Kozlov A. Zhigalov V. Skersisi Y. Albert .. L. Talochkin O. Vasiliev V.NekIasov I. Kabakov The participants were instructed to move in a straight line as far as the forest and then. entering the forest, to continue on into the depths of the forest for about another fifty to one hundred metres, or to the point where the field could no CoUective Act1ons//Ten Appearances//127 17LUDWIG BORNE TRANSLATED BY LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days There can be found today men and works which offer instnlction in how to learn such things as Latin, Greek, and French in a mere three days, and such things as accounting in a mere three hours. How one might become in three days a truly original writer has, however, yet to be indicated. And yet it is such a simple thing! To do it there is nothing one needs to learn, only much one needs to unlearn. There is nothing new one need to experience, only much that one need forget. In today's world, the minds and works of the learned might be compared to ancient manuscripts where one must scrape away the boring disputes of would-be Church Fathers and the ranting of inflamed monks to catch a glimpse of the Roman classic lying beneath. With the birth of every new mind comes the birth of beautiful new thoughts. With every individual, the world is reborn. And yet, somehow, the unnecessary and distracting scrawl of life and teaching conceals and obscures these original texts. One can arrive at a fairly precise view of this state of affairs if one thinks of the following. We recognize an animal, a piece of fruit, a flower, and things of this sort as what they are. Could one, however, say that someone who knew partridges, raspberry bushes, or roses only by means of partridge pie, raspberry juice, or rose oil had a full and accurate understanding of these things? And yet, this is how the arts and sciences-and indeed all realms in which we first approach things through thought rather than the senses-proceed. These things are laid before us prepared and transformed and, in truth, in such fashion that we never come to know them in their raw and naked form. Opinion is the kitchen in which all truths are slaughtered, plucked, minced, stewed, and spiced. We are in need of nothing so much as books without reason-books, namely, that present to us actual things and not mere opinions. The question is: how can one arrive at solitude? One might flee his fellow man-but then one finds oneself in the noisy market of books. One can throw 63 18one's books away, but how does one free oneself from all the conventional knowledge that schooling has stuffed in one's head? In the true art of selfeducation, what is most needed and most beautiful, but also rarest and often poorly accomplished, is the art of making oneself ignorant. Just as in a million men only a thousand are thinkers, in a thousand thinkers only one truly thinks for himself. A people is like a porridge which receives its unity only from the pot in which it is found: the pithy and firm will only be found at the bottom, in the lowermost layer of a people: porridge remains porridge, and the golden spoon that takes from it a mouthful does not eliminate the principle of relation by separating the related from one another. True striving in the cause of learning is not a voyage of discovery like that of Columbus, but a journey of adventure like that of Ulysses. Man is born abroad: to live means to search for one's homeland. And to think means to live. The fatherland of thought is the heart: at this well he who wishes to drink that which is fresh must himself create that freshness. Mind is but a stream. Thousands have set up camp along it and dirty its water with washing, bathing, and the like. Mind is the arm; will is the heart. One can acquire strength: one can make the strength grow. But what good is strength without the courage to use it? A shameful and cowardly fear of thinking holds everyone of us back. More repressive than any governmental censorship is the censorship which public opinion exercises over the works of our intellect. To become better than they are, most writers would not require more intelligence but more character. And this is a weakness that stems simply from vanity. The artist and the writer want to outstrip, want to tower above their comrades. But to tower above them they must stand next to them; to overtake them they must follow the same path. In doing so, good writers are very much like bad writers in that in the good writer can one find the bad writer entire. The good writer is simply something more: the good writer follows the same path as the bad writer, only he follows that path somewhat farther. He who listens to his irmer voice instead of the cries and clamor of the market, he who has the courage to teach to others what his heart has taught him, will always be original. Sincerity as regards oneself is the well of all brilliance and mankind would be more brilliant if it were simply more moral. And now, here is the practical application I promised you: Take a stack of paper and write. Write everything that goes through your mind for three consecutive days with neither hesitation nor hypocrisy. Write down what you think of yourself, what you think of your wife, what you think of the war with the Turks, what you think of Goethe, of Fonk's trial, of the Last Judgment, of your superiors. At the end of the three days you will scarce be able to believe what new, unheard-of thoughts have come to you. And that, my friends, is how to become an original writer in just three days! 64 Harvard Review 31 19..... j 's' II '" I '- I \. U " ........ " 1", t-' I .... selves. The same methods of automatism lead each of us to this rich and Motherwell was singularly conscious of the coments of his preconunique personal complex, but that to which we are led "differ[sJ for scious. And his preconscious seems more to have been the scene of hills everyone, to the exact degree that each person differs from another."21 and oceans than that dank forest of surrealist monsters and irrational And he observes, in confirmation, not only how different each of the ab- fears, though he had plenty of his own private demons to deal with as stract expressionists who resorted to automatism are from one well. It is the psychic compost of the daily experiences that forms our other-just as the sun'ealists who resorted to it differ each from each-but characters and our work, and what automatism yields is continuous with also how practitioners of the two movements differed generally from our most common experiences. Matta evidently found this puzzling. In one another: "How different, in ultimate thrust, are each of these two an essay for an exhibition of Matta's work at the Rose Art Museum at movements." Motherwell, in personal conversation as well as in the in- Brandeis University, Nancy K. Miller wrote that "the Americans Matta terviews he granted, loved to describe the experiences that were peculiar was intimate with . .. had never been completely comfortable with an to him, and that explained this or that feature of his paintings. art of images containing metaphorical ramifications."24 The emphasis The first time we met, after having exchanged several letters, he took here should be on the word images. For Matta's method was evidently me to a restaurant he liked in Banksville, New York, where we spent some close to a kind of game, consisting in making marks and then seeing what hours talking, not about philosophy or about art, but about our lives, sort of image one could find in the mark, rather in the manner Leonardo about women, marriage, money, and children. He was immensely re- describes in a famous and influential passage regarding the use of a motlieved, he told me. afterward; he h.ad had a kind of nightmare the night tIed wall as an aid to Matta is characteristically impish in de-before about meetmg me, and I thmk he must have feared that I was go- scribing what Leonardo dId : ing to hold his feet to the fire of unremitting abstract discussion. Moth- D1"1 LeD t-..tu-Jo erwell had reached a stage in his life he was not anxious to talk ab- V/'hc:, ; stractly about abstract Ideas, attamed, as it were, to a philosophy DtAof painting that served him admirably, as an artist of course, but also as someone who found himself increasingly called upon to talk about his art and the history in which he had played a role. There was little reason for him to go back, so to speak, to the philosophical drawing board. Our conversations were always personal and delicious, about what both of us, given our francophilia, would designate ies cboses de ia vie. The difference was that in talking about himself he was talking about his art, for his art really was himself: "As for my lifelong interest in blue, it should be remembered that invariably I spend summers beside the sea."?' "In some ways all an artist's past years remain intact, but particularly, as everybody knows, childhood impressions. [Dore Ashton] is the only one who has ever remarked how crucial was the fact that I grew up in pre-war California ... . (The hills of California are ochre half the year)."13 Leonardo da Vinci, as against the academic stillness that disturbed him in the work of Raphael and the classics, invented a new approach. He said that it was very boring to start with a white piece of paper and put a line on it, because all you are doing is putting what you know in the paper. He said you should start from a spOt on the waH, humidity. If you look at a spot for a while, he said, something wiH start appearing by a funny process called haHucination. He would see whatever came in the hallucination, like we may see a horse in clouds. He said foHow that image. "When it comes to seeing things in the spot on the wall , you will be doing things you don't know-you will be discovering and inventing things. And you'll have more fun. That is my technique. If I see in the spot on the wall something I know, I erase it and wait until something else comes along. And then I see something which to me is fascina ting because I don't know what it is.. .. I get amused. I get surprised. That's what I told the School of New York-I said "start like that and be very amusing." 20... , ' 6 ' ' ' ~ ' .... , .... u .. , ..... I "" .... ' .... ' CBeing bored and having fun are hardly motivations we dare ascribe to Leonardo. Nor can we ,dtogether imagine the serious young Americans as in the least driven by the desire to be amusing. Matta continued: ) They made spots themselves-Pollock's spots, Motherwell's spots, etc. But then I told them to go the next step which is to get into the hallucination. I asked them to see things in the spot, because what they would see comes from our being, our social and emotional being. But they stopped there and didn't go into the next step.!5 "Matta," Miller writes, "attributes the direction of Americans away from the poetic and philosophical toward an emphasis on the process of making pictures to American pragmatism." As though it were practical considerations and concerns alone that made the Americans stop short with abstraction and not go on into "hallucination." But in fact this refusal was the entire crux of the "original creative principle." Motherwell, Miller goes on to say, "took his separate course in 1944 with a replacement definition for ' psychic automatism.' .. . He stated, 'Plastic automatism, as employed by modern masters like Masson, Mira, and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconscious. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.' "26 But as we have seen, "new forms" was less the issue than not repeating, manneristically, old ways of being modern, was less an issue than enabling American artists to be modern, without being sham Europeans. The new forms could come from whatever formed their spirits. Abstraction was in some way internally connected with this. But abstraction, too, was something one could acquire, as an artist, and still be a mannerist. There was something infectious in Joan Mira, for example, and although Mira adamantly refused the label of abstract painter, the biomorphic blobs floating in thin space like amoebas under a cover glass lent themselves to abstract painting in America, as much so as did circles and triangles and squares. The "doodle" was neutral within what one might call the vocabulary of accepted abstract forms, but what was important about it, it seems to me, was the fact that it could be-perhaps had to be-done without being controlled by conscious mental process. But to have an identity of any kind, as a representation, would require conscious direction of the pen or brush. It would perhaps be unthinkable that someone could produce, say, the Ghent Altarpiece by doodling.27 Even to draw the human torso requires some degree of conscious attention. So one has to disengage from the hand and let it find its way across the surface. In recollecting the meetings that took place between himself and the scarcely younger Americans-Pollock, Peter Busa, William Baziotes, Gerome Kamrowski, and Motherwell-Matta reported that he felt it important, if it was to be a group, that its members agree on a direction, find a vocabulary: "I remember that some of the first things we used to do were things like that-images of man. I felt we had to keep a degree of reference to reality. It couldn't be all explosion, you know." And Matta spoke of going through a phase of "explosion," of "chaotic circles of drippings," which was "an expression of my anger in terms of the war," and then, afterward, his return to "anthropomorphic things," which "created a very definite divorce with the Americans, and especially with Motherwell. When he came to visit me, he would say, you are coming back to the figure." And Busa, in that same interview, added that Motherwell "had an abhorrence of the figure as I remember. As soon as we painted the figure it was as though it wasn't art."28 It was as though the return to the figure meant a falling away from the universal creative principle. Memories differ. "Around 1943," Motherwell remembered in his letter to Edward Henning, "Matta abandoned us, as is his wont."29 "I became sort of the fellow who wasn't accepted," Matta remembered in his conversation with Sidney Simon: "They were happy as long as my work expressed cosmic violence and whirlpools. I think it was a pity we didn't see more of each other. Because action is not necessarily the bands." But doodling, in Motherwell's sense, really was what the hands did , acting on their own. "It was a fratricidal situation in many ways," Busa recalled. lo Motherwell gave every evidence of believing himself to have discovered what he set out to find, and in the retrospective mood more or less 21W i "'nico+t72, PLAYING: CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF uses the concept of the potential space between the mother and the baby. In the development of various individuals, it has to be recognized that the third area of potential space between mother and baby is extremely valuable according to the experiences of the child or adult who is being considered. I have referred to these ideas again in Chapter 5, where I draw attention to the fact that a description of the emotional development of the individual cannot be made entirely in terms of the individual, but that in certain areas, and this is one of them, perhaps the mam one, the behaviour of the environment is part of the individual's own personal development and must therefore be included. As a psychoanalyst I find that these ideas affect what I do as an analyst without, as I believe, altering my adherence to the important features of psychoanalysis that we teach our students and that provide a common factor in the teaching of psychoanalysis as we believe it to be derived from the work of Freud. I am not involved by deliberate intention in the comparison of psychotherapy with psychoanalysis or indeed in any attempt to define these two processes in such a way that would show up a clear line of demarcation between the two. The general principle seems to me to be valid that psychotherapy is done in the overlap of the two play areas, rhat of the patient and that of the therapist. If the therapist cannot play, then he is not suitable for the work. If the patient cannot play, then something needs to be done to enable the patient to become able to play, after which psychotherapy may begin. The reason why playing is essential is that it is in playing that the patient is being creative. THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF In this chapter I am concerned with the search for the self and the restatement of the fact that certain conditions are necessary if success is to be achieved in this search. These conditions are associated with what is usually called creatiVity. It is in playing P YIN Si : b R AT I Y TIVITY fll'ig TH ( HUCI=l nlE H l 7} in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being crea11ve that the individual discovers the self. -(Bound up with this is the fact that only in playing is communication possible; except direct communication, which belongs to psychopathology or to an extreme of immaturity. It is a frequent experience in clinical work to meet with persons who want help and who are searching for the self and who are trying to find themselves in the products of their creative experiences. But to help these patients we must know about creativity itself. It is as if we are looking at a baby in the early stages and jumping forward to the child who takes faeces or some substance with the texture of faeces and tries to make something out of the substance. This kind of creativity is valid and well understood, but a separate study is needed of creativity as a feature of life and total living. I am suggesting that the search (or the self in terms of what can be done with waste products is a search that is doomed to be never-ending and essentially unsuccessful. In a search for the self the person concerned may have produced something valuable in terms of art, but a successful artist may be universally acclaimed and yet have failed to find the self that he or she is looking for. The self is not really to be found in what is made out of products of body or mind, however valuable these constructs may be in terms of beauty, skill , and impact. If the artist (in whatever medium) is searching for the self, then it can be said that in all probability there is already some failure for that artist in the field of general creative living. The finished creation never heals the underlying lack of sense o(seif. - Before developing this idea further I must state a second theme, one that is related to the first but needs separate treatment. This second theme is that the person we are trying to help might expect to feel cured when we explain. The person might say : 'I see what you mean; I am myself when I feel creative and 2274 I am must The 7S PLAYING: CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF when I make a creative gesture, and now the search is ended.' In practice this does not seem (0 be a description of what happens. In this kind of work we know that even the right explanation is ineffectual. The person we are trying to help needs a new , experience in a specialized setting. The experience is one of a non-purposive state, as one might say a sort of ticking over of the unintegrated personality. I referred to this as formlessness in the case description (Chapter 2) . Account has (0 be taken of the reliability or unreliability of the setting in which the individual is operating. We are brought up against a need for a differentiation between purposive activity and the alternative of non-purposive being. This relates to Balint's (1968) formulation of benign and malignant regression (see also Khan, 1969). trying to refer to the essentials that make relaxation possible. In terms of free association this means that the patient on the couch or the child patient among the toys on the floor be allowed to communicate a succession of ideas, thoughts, impulses, sensations that are not linked except in some way that is neurological or physiological and perhaps beyond detection. That is to say: it is where there is purpose or where there is anxiety or where there is lack of trust based on the need for defence that the analyst will be able to recognize and to point out the connection (m several between the various components of free association material. In the relaxation that belongs to trust and to acceptance of the profeSSional reliability of the (be it analytic, psychotherapeutic, social work, architectural, etc.), there is room for the idea of unrelated thought sequences which the analyst will do well to accept as such, not assuming the existence pp. 148-163) contrast between these two related conditions can perhaps be illustrated if one thinks of a patient who is able to rest PLAYING: CREATIVE ACTIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF after work but not able to achieve the resting state out of which a creative reaching-out can take place. According to this theory, free association that reveals a coherent theme is already affected by anxiety, and rh.e col1esiolj of !S e Ptrhap it i to be accepted that there are patients who at times need the therapist (0 note the nonsense that belongs to the mental state of the individual at rest without the need even for the patient to communicate this nonsense, that is to say, without the need for the patient to organize nonsense. Organized nonsense is already a defence, just as organized chaos is a denial of chaos. The therapist who cannot take this communication becomes engaged in a futile attempt to find some organization in the nonsense, as a result of which the patient leaves the nonsense area because of hopelessness about communicating nonsense. An opportunity for rest has been missed because of the therapist's need to find sense where nonsense is. The patient has been unable to rest because of a failure of the environmental provision, which undid the sense of trust. The therapist has, without knowing it, abandoned the professional role, and has done so by bending over backwards to be a clever analyst . and to see order in chaos. It may be that these matters are reflected in the two kinds of sleep, sometimes denoted REM and NREM (rapid eye movements and no rapid eye movements) . In developing what I have to say I shall need the sequence: (a) relaxation in conditions of trust based on experience; (b) creative, phYSical, and mental activity manifested in play; (c) the summation of these experiences forming the basis for a sense of self. Summation or reverberation depends on there being a certain quantity of reflecting back to the individual on the part of the trusted therapist (or friend) who has taken the (indirect) ( 2376 PLAYING : CREATI V E ACTI V ITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF communication. In these highly specialized conditions the individual can come together and exist as a unit, not as a defence against anxiety but as an expression of I AM, I am alive, I am myself (Winnicott, 196 2) . From this position everything is creative. CASE IN ILLUSTRATION I wish to use from of it WOIDill1 who is having treatment with me and who, as it happens, comes once a week. She had had a long treatment on a five-times-a-week basis for six years before coming to me, but found she needed a session of indefinite length, and this I could manage only once a week. We soon settled down to a session of three hours, later reduced to two hours. If I can give a correct description of a session the reader will notice that over long periods I withhold interpretations, and often make no sound at all . This strict disCipline has paid dividends. I have taken notes, because this helps me in a case seen only once a week, and I found that note-taking did not disrupt the wurk in this case. Also I often relieve my mind by writing down interpretations that I actually withhold. My reward for Withholding interpretations comes when the patient makes the interpretation herself, perhaps an hour or two later. My description amounts to a plea to every therapist to allow for the patient's capaCity to play, that is, to be creative in the analytiC work. The patient ' s creativity can be only too easily stolen by a therapist who knows too much. It does not really matter, of course, how much the therapist knows provided he can hide this knowledge, or refrain from advertising what he knows. Let me try to convey the feeling of what it is like to do work with this patient. But I must ask the reader to exert patience, much as I needed to be patient when engaged in this work. PLAY I NG: CREATI V E ACTI V ITY AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF 77 An example of a session First, some life details, and arrangements of a practical nature about sleep, spoilt when she gets het-up, books for sleepmaking, a good one and a horrifying one; tired but het-up, so restless; rapid heart-beats, as now. Then, some difficulty about food : 'I want to be able to eat when I feel hungry.' (Food and books seem somehow equated in the substance of thi s desultor y 'When you rang up, you knew, I hope, that I was too high' (elated) . I said: 'Yes, I suppose I did.' Description of a phase of somewhat false improvement. 'But I knew I wasn't right .' 'It all seems so hopeful till I'm aware of it ... ' 'Depression and murderous feelings, that's me, and also it's me when I'm cheerful. ' (Half-hour gone. The patient has been sitting in a low chair, or on the floor, or walking about.) Long and slow description of positive and negative features of a walk she had taken. ' I don't seem able quite to BE - not me really looking - a screen - looking through glasses - imaginative looking isn't there. Is that just doctrine about the baby imagining the breast7 In the previous treatment that I had there was an aeroplane overhead when I was on the way home from a session. I told the analyst next day that I suddenly imagined myself being the aeroplane, fiying high. Then it crashed to the ground. The therapist said: "That' s what happens to you when you project yourself into things and it makes an internal crash." 'I I I have no means of checking up on the accuracy of this report of the previous analyst's interpretati on. 2425.3 "\5 a. II\. ,--A \".st 12 Against Interpretation part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of fonns--the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements; cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film. 8 What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? For I atn not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place? _ "V'I ?1 What is needed, first, is more attention to rorm in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary-a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary-for fonns. * The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of fonn . On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky's essay, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," Northrop Frye'S essay "A Conspectus of Dr