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Contemplation is crucial for art, philosophy, and politics. It gives one the thinking space to parse out what matters and to discover unexpected connections. It gives thought time to mature. Many philosophers, poets, mathematicians, and scientists have been ardent walkers. Han also notes how contemplative repose can lead to a deep sleep of fecund dreams, another possible source of inspiration or insight. While most philosophers champion a vigilant wakefulness against numb, oblivious slumber, Han is one of the few who champion the generativity of restful sleep. He juxtaposes such sleep against an anxious, restless insomnia on the one hand and an instrumentalized “power nap” on the other, both of which are common in achievement-cum-burnout society and neither of which allows for a deep visit to the “true internal world” of dreams. Han turns to Marcel Proust, who meditates on how both dreams and waking contemplation allow unbidden memories to resurface in epiphanic fashion. Such sleep, like profound boredom, is a state of deep relaxation ready to receive such gifts. Contemplative silence, Han holds, “enables us to say something unheard of.” In contrast with frenetic activity in which one continually reacts, contemplation prepares one to act decisively.

[…]

Han’s brief discussions of a “politics of inactivity” in Vita Contemplativa will likely deepen this frustration rather than dispel it. But Han leaves little doubt in his concern for societal problems and democracy that he is not politically quietist and that he thinks the cultivation of contemplation can be politically transformative. This cultivation is meant to be countercultural, clearing new space and opening a new sense of possibilities, in individual lives but also in communities both small and large.

Byung-Chul Han: Vita Contemplativa by Steven Knepper, Mousse 89.

poetry may not change the world, but might change you – Evie Shockley

Anahid Nersessian reviews Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead (“Cher Connard”) in the New Yorker.

“… the letter, even when it arrives as an e-mail, is the opposite of the social Internet: a medium that invites each correspondent to read carefully what the other has to say, and to respond in a way that will keep the conversation going as opposed to shutting it down. Most importantly, it is not intended for a public audience. We don’t write letters to get clicks or win followers; we write them, as Rousseau suggests, to discover what we think and what we want, to give an account of ourselves and to make it available to others, risking the discomfort of their close attention.”

It makes of “subsistence” a synonym not for scarcity but for abundance. “The residual,” after all, can, as [Raymond] Williams reminds us, retain “an alternative and even oppositional relation to the dominant culture.” Simply by clashing with the present and the concerns of the present, the outmodedness of the residual can meta-morphosize into the “emergent.” By embodying “a fissure, a rupture, a clash,” the anachronic, in Ramizi’s words, can become a “harbinger of the new.” In Ramizi’s analysis, the transformation occurs when paysans are not merely inert figures of anachronism (Marx’s “sacks of potatoes”) but when they become instead actively, even impudently anachronistic

[…]

After all, individual profit and competition are foreign to the subsistence economy and to peasant culture generally. Elements of practical communism and organic solidarity are known to persist in Indigenous agriculture and peasant practices. The small, autonomous grower maintains productivity by conforming both to tradition and to the natural conditions such as he or she found them. The principle of production in the peasant economy is that of satisfying the immediate needs of the family and thus developing and preserving the family’s autonomy. As a repository of use values, as well as of knowledge of the land and its usages, the paysan is a source of memory and history.

The commune form : the transformation of everyday life / Kristin Ross

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, Anne Carson. A review in BookForum, 2020.

““opportunity,” which in the original Greek is used to describe the rare points that can be pierced on a body clad completely in heavy bronze armor, the “mortal spots.” If you move the accent to the first syllable, the same word was “a technical term from the art of weaving to indicate the thrums of the web or, more specifically, that critical point in space and time when the weaver must thrust her thread through a gap that momentarily opens up in the warp of the cloth.””

Julia Halperin on Cady Noland in T Magazine.

“People started putting an emotional spin or a psychological spin” on the story, the writer Greg Allen, a Noland obsessive, said. “When there became a reason, it was people calling her mental health into question. It was misguided and driven by the misogyny and ableism that were more unchecked in that era.”

“Noland visited Sotheby’s to view it [“Cowboys Milking” (1990)], along with two other works destined for the block that season, and found its corners so damaged that she considered the work totaled. Sotheby’s called off the sale. Noland allowed the other two sales to proceed: “Bloody Mess” (1988), a haphazard-looking collection of beer cans, headlight bulbs, rubber mats and other objects on the ground, sold for $422,500, while “Oozewald” (1989), a larger-than-life silk-screen-on-aluminum cutout of Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, with an American flag stuffed into one of eight oversize bullet holes scattered across its surface, sold for $6.6 million. The latter made Noland, for a time, the most expensive living female artist at auction.”

Cady Noland, Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt (Museum MMK), 27 Oktober 2018 — 26 Mai 2019.