Philosophers and similarly-minded
people have been asking what things are—in themselves (as if they could be in
something else), in relation to other things in themselves, in relation to what
they might or should be, in relation to what they were or might have been, in
relation to what they are not, not in relation to anything in particular: in short, they’ve been asking (i.e. the
philosophers, not the things) and some of the better ones have even been asking
about asking: what asking is—for as long
as asking has asked philosophers to ask, some philosophers have asked.
That’s great.
But they’re always asking about
the same things: time, death,
nothingness (as if you could ask about nothingness!), love occasionally
(occasionally, since asking and loving seem to negate each other), truth (way
too much), god (back in the god ages), and more recently about other things
that nobody ever used to ask about (maybe because they [the things, not the
askers, though also the askers] never existed or maybe because we finally got
tired of truth and god and time, realizing they had no answers [and although
they looked like substantive words were just punctuation marks {question marks
specifically}, like everything else], needing as we seem to other things to
pretend to have answers hidden behind or in them) but now seem urgently
important, like communication, gender, sex, and money.
Maybe we just have to cycle
through all the words until we realize that answers—like truth, god, time,
nothingness, love, communication, sex, gender, money—don’t exist. Only death exists … but what kind of answer
is death?
In the meantime, though, I’d like
to help humanity along its little path, its little discovery project, and begin
asking what other things are in themselves and in relation to all those other
things.
I could begin with tomato—a compelling choice, to be
sure—as I’m pretty sure nobody knows what tomato
really is, and philosophers seem to have entirely ignored tomato. It’s not just the
old debate about whether tomato is a
fruit or vegetable (any real philosopher [but what is a philosopher?] knows this
question is a decoy—it doesn’t probe deeply enough into the essence of tomato), it’s that this commonplace
confusion points to the essence of tomato: that is, its essential ambiguity. Tomato
has nothing to do with fruit or vegetable, lycopene, lutein, Vitamins A, C or
E, potassium, zeaxanthin, or anything of the sort. The truth of tomato is a kind of manifoldpointing. (In order to sufficiently explore the nature
of tomato, we are compelled to avoid
the common expressions, for it is only through the uncommon that we have the
opportunity to open up new understandings and see the original face, so to
speak, of tomato.) This manifoldpointing
is no simple polyinterpretativeapparati,
but goes far beyond this, into the realm of pointyplurality,
an authentic multimurkiness of manifoldpointing beyond polyinterpretativeapparati thrusting us
inevitably into polypointymaniplurality.
But we are not speaking of tomato.
We shall leave tomato in its manifoldpointing
of pointyplurality.
Instead, we could begin with tree.
But nobody knows particularly what tree
is anymore, so let’s not do that. Or bicycle, which we would find—after much
pain and evidence—is the only remaining freedom left humanity, the perfect
fusion of nature and technology, the evolutionary apex of civilization, and the
only reasonable successor to god. Or coffee, which we would find after a
thousand pages and a billion tears, as that-which-sustains: the
sanguinary-fuel-future-incarnation-of-liquidity-without-which-all-would-be-lost. We would then have the necessary foundation
to juxtapose bicycle and coffee, the simulated modern equivalents
of freedom and fate (albeit in their solid and liquid manifestations,
respectively) and begin discovering how things really work, not just in
themselves but in relation to each other and so in relation to all things. We would then have knowledge and vision. We would be gods.
Yet, let’s not be too hasty. The road to divinity has many limbs and
absurdities on its besotted way, as the Greeks and many others have taught
us. Our thing-in-itself project is vast
and we can only become gods the painful way—one word at a time. (And there are so many words! And they [not
us] keep making new ones!) So—yes—let us
not forget tomato and tree and bicycle and coffee, let
us not even forget god and death and time, let us not forget (for we unfortunately can’t) communication and sex and money, but let us
move on to a word that contains and transcends all these, that might very well
be the-thing-under-and-in-and-over-and-through-the-thing-in-itself-and-the-things-in-themselves. It might be the word behind the Word and
words; it might be the word that spoke speaking into existence.
I’d like to ask (I’d like asking
to ask me to ask) about something more (and even most) essential to modern
times—a thing so central to what it means to be human in the third millennium that,
to my knowledge, it’s entirely escaped being asked about by anyone who knows
how to ask (or who asks or who wants to ask or thinks it has the right to ask
or is known as an asker). And, if our
wheezy little species is anything, surely it’s Homo Askius (or Homo Askus—my
Latin is rusty, even as everything before now is rusty). This thing is ubiquitous, relatively novel,
coveted, synecdochal (in that it’s emblematic, a portend, of a vast future, in
the way that Christ begat and adumbrated a new age), almost (and perhaps
becoming) self-generating, the archetypal union of opposites (clean-dirty,
noisy-silent, evolved-primitive, seen-unseen), the far-near of Marguerite Porete, the eureka of Archimedesthe, the alaytheia
of Heidegger, the kenosis of Paul,
the Tao of the Tzus, the book-of-the-month of Oprah, the money shot of porn, the sunyata of Gautama, and the avocado-that’s-not-in-your-fridge-but-you-really-want-at-three-in-the-morning-but-you’re-too-lazy-to-go-to-that-24-hour-supermarket-five-minutes-away-and-get-it. Most importantly, it’s vertical—and thus
reaches for heaven in the way that Christ once did but can’t any longer because
just like he was born twice, he’s died twice—once physically, a second time
spiritually and symbolically. Much as we
say we love the earth—its horizontality, its inescapable sphericality—we really
do love lines, stretching everywhere, stretching up, way way up … to
immortality, clouds and eternal darkness.
And isn’t this the test of the human (the genitive plays both ways [and
even more!]: the human test of the
universe, the universe’s test of us):
whether lines are historically and ontologically antecedent to circles
and so embedded at the foundations of reality, whether circles are, whether
somehow (god and gender forbid!) neither is or both are, and/or whether
humanity can do anything but any of this other than perhaps pretend that it is
and whether this pretending is sufficient (for a time at least), and even
whether sufficiency is sufficient. But
we digress (or rather we are—or have been—digressed).
What, then, is a condo?
We must not say condominium,
we must say condo, for reasons that
will become apparent if they haven’t already.
We must, as good askers (there are
no philosophers any more, as there is no longer any philosophy or philosophies;
there are only askers and asking [or askings] or being-asked [or
being-askeds]), take this thing, condo,
place it in our palm as something fragile, new, original, vast, precious,
caress it tenderly, peruse it through myriad lenses, drop it, throw it high,
hit it with a sledgehammer, cover it, lose it, turn it around, describe it as
the blind ones and the elephant (each description tentative, insufficient,
passionate), allow it to describe us, destroy and recreate it in its manifold
irreducibility, misspell it, play pinball with it ... in short, we must do to
it and allow it to do to us what we have done to the world and the world to us
... without this, we will never know what condo
is, we will never have had ourselves made known.
Naturally, we don’t have the time
or even interest to do all this; thus, reconciling ourselves to the moderately
depressing thought that condo will
always remain elusive, murky, just-beyond-our-grasp, we nevertheless proceed,
in hopeful futility, even as we get ourselves (or are gotten), somehow, out of
the bed each morning and somehow trace the sun to its dubious decline and find
ourselves back in bed, doing the same thing as the night before, more or less,
without, frankly, having learned anything particularly or advancing anywhere
other than toward that one thing of which we shall not speak at this moment, as
the sun is shining and the trucks are roaring by and someone next to me in the
cafe is blaring some stupid YouTube explanation about carbohydrates from her
very loud Mac and i can barely think about condo
let alone death that-other-thing, but we may speak of at (yes, two consecutive
prepositions are ok) some point since it (the doing and the speaking) seems (seem)
inevitable and that is that or this and let’s get back to condo.
Condo.
Disturbingly similar to condom.
Not a chance occurrence, we have been led to believe by credible sources
in manners that enhance their credibility.
That one only has to add an m
(or mmmmmmmmm—that culinary, sure, and
peccable sign of embodied delights) to the end of condo to manufacture in language (the only reality, as every
sophisticate knows, because the only dream) that modern shield of pleasure
might very well begin to point us in the direction of condo’s natural and original face.
The key, we will begin to
understand in our challenging yet rewarding exploration, is modern shield of pleasure. As is the nature of such constructions, we
are initially in doubt as to whether condom—and
so condo—protect us from pleasure or
protect us from that-which-inhibits-pleasure.
For we first must acknowledge the hope of pleasure that is generated by
the extensive fashion of condo: the manufactured and reified prestige, the
anonymous privatized sky-cell (a kind of heavenly incarceration, the self as
jailed and jailor), the essential virtualization of home through the privileged divorce from land and history, the
intangible yet compelling and pervasive marketing and branding (even to the
point of having the developer imprinted on every door), the facticity of the
buildings themselves—great conglomerates of urban clubbing and sterility (a
kind of bloodless war mediated by coitus and pharmaceutical ecstasy), the
vertiginous and expansive feeling of rising up to look down on the world, the
metallic comfort of the womb of technology (its murmurings and lights). These are all indisputable and, collectively,
rough negotiators of significant sectors of significance in modernity.
Yet. These very attributes that promise pleasure
are also the ones that frustrate it, distancing as they do the human from its
origins, leaving it to traverse greater and greater distances (requiring more
sophisticated, novel, and expensive tools—prosthetics) to maintain even the
semblance of a relationship with a ground of any sort (whether real or
simulated is irrelevant), unless one accepts language itself as a ground, which
it may be, but, like any nameable ground (and isn’t language the ultimate
nameable ground, being comprised only of names?), is insufficient to ground.
So there is very little difference
between standing before a floor layout of a prospective condo and a prophylactic
display in a drug store, very little difference between the act of purchase,
the imbued hopes, the ambiguity and ambivalence of the entering and exiting—the
experience of temporary habitation—and the complex, varied, and dubious
narratives that develop after the purchase and the act.
So the condo shields us from
pleasure (through stretching our existential circumference further from the
earth) and shields us from pleasure’s traditional enemies (death, decay,
morality, children—all unavoidable products of the earth). This dual movement is encapsulated in the
removable m (mmmmmmmmm)—its sensuality, brevity, and innate ubiquity. For there is far less spiritual, emotional,
linguistic, and experiential distance between condo and condom than
there is between condo and house.
Condos’s intrinsicity (of
stretching through a double-shielding) is seen—showing more ominously or
enlightenedly, dependent on factors which we are ill-equipped (in time
particularly) to deal with presently but seem to be related to such things as
branches of science and art that haven’t yet been exposed or invented
(dependent on factors which may be similar to the ill-equipped ones that were
just referenced)—through the seeing that is novel
to civilization, as it is euphemistically called, and central to the prostheticized heart of condo. Central, because seen and seeing, eyeing and eyed, mirroring and
mirrored, are the molecular building blocks of condo’s spirituality, without which it would crumble in the manner
of the Tower of Babel. Novel, because the Bentham-Foucault
panopticon has been most fully actualized in condo (not primarily in prisons, hospitals, universities, courts,
businesses, schools, factories, the military), most insidiously actualized in condo, because of its deeply embedded appearance
of non-hierarchy, of privilege, of middling and rising money, privacy, and
safety. Condo is, before and above anything else, a complex system of eyes,
in which the jailed are so wholly obsessed with the jailedness (politely termed
freedom) of others that they come to
think (indeed they come to think so long before they see the face of the
obstetrician or midwife yawning at them through the vagina’s expulsory maw) of
themselves as jailors. Or they would so
come to think if it were not that in their role of jailors watching the jailed,
they cannot also help to see (albeit in shadow) the role of the others as
jailors watching themselves as the jailed, thus exposing, in a manner, the
necessary opposites, without ever uniting them except in the schizophrenia of
the modern dweller of condo, yielding
a foundation stone for the utterly corpulent and blind psychotherapy industry
(or, rather, industries) to produce a simulacrum of union.
So condo’s stretching is also made manifest through the almost
infinite separation of panopticonal jailed and jailor, sprinkled liberally
through the fleshy diaspora of dwellers in condo.
As is typical in modernity, cinema
comically and recently adumbrated the concept of condo, even if the
Bentham-Foucault panopticon seriously and distantly adumbrated it in
words. I speak, of course, of Rear Window, which seems to us—in condo—the seed and egg of our modern
situation, a homunculus of condo, a
bonsai tree of eyed and eying. That I
can see—from a condo cell, without straining—roughly 1,700 other cells (I have
counted) and, with binoculars (even Mr. Stewart used these), into these other
cells, seeing then the abject incarceration of the jailed who think they are
jailors, who think they are free—jailed to their 830h march downtown, jailed to
their very large flatscreen TVs, jailed to their genitals, jailed to their
laundry, jailed to their exercise regimen, jailed to their consumptive and
desperate need to be jailed, clearly demonstrates the end of humanity and the
beginning of condo, the human
becoming (and in some cases having become) the Kinder Sorpresa, as it were, within the larger, more glamorous and
necessary, egg. For who really pays any
attention to the cheap plastic forgettable toy within—it is almost immediately
discarded, breaks, or is lost—what truly matters is the experience of egg (or
cell), of branding and anticipation. In
short, what matters is condo, not
what is inside. The eyes, the jailed and
jailing, simply provide the pretext for condo;
condo, if it could act or speak (and
its non-acting and non-speaking are its redemption and apotheosis), might rub
its little necessity—us—on the head or derriere and say, Ah, how blessed, how eyed, how necessary … how irrelevant.
And here a most striking discovery
presents itself—one which not only encapsulates the condo in its existing and
future situation as the condom of the city, in its capacity as shield and pleasure of the human, its
protector and joyful spurting, but experiences the condo as the veritable
stretching of significance: both as the
radii that evolve the human past its limits (the stolid vertically transcendent
massively visible house and the glittering horizontally immanent massively felt
home) and as the center (the repository of darkness, insignificance, doubt) and
circumference (the edges of light, significance, knowledge) of that
circle. The condo is and has become and
is becoming that mystical sphere, incarnate and incarnadine, bold and
vulnerable, everywhere and nowhere, full and empty, shadowy and intractable,
silent and boisterous, of which the ancient prophets foretold in their visions
of the great city of god, of heaven on earth.
But all this is only a little
scratching! We could speak of con do – the con of action (in comic
contrast to can do—the past slogan of
a large North American bank), signifying the simulation of deed, its ruse,
pointing to a returning to the wu wei of the East. We could speak of con dough or even con
doe. We could speak of con dom – the domination
of cons, the new king dom of simulacra. Indeed, it is
not a long bridge then to comedo (through condom and cum do and come do), Latin for glutton
(noun) or I consume or squander (verb). Or condor, a large predator that eats dead
animals. Condos are not far from the
coffin-apartments advocated in the nouveau architecture of Jodorowsky’s The
Holy Mountain. It is not difficult to
see the condo as an essential evolutionary stepping stone to a new race of short
legs (for who needs to walk?) and huge eyes (all the better to see you with, my
dear!), precipitating future wars between the horizontal people of the houses
and the vertical and eyed race of the condos; like the Neanderthals before Homo Sapiens,
the people of the earth will have no chance.
The condo dwellers will win.
We could speak of all this. But we must return to our task of
watching. And, frankly, the exploration
of things-in-themselves is exhausting.
But if the signs and signifiers that condo
presents to us seem at times labyrinthine and murky, let that not reduce our
attraction to condo’s truth but
rather propel us toward it; for is not the truth of a thing not what it
initially and superficially presents but the fruit of hard labor acquired only
through pilgrimaging through a thing’s thingness, refusing the temptations of
ease and escape, the fruit of becoming a thing’s thingness through significant
and frequently arduous feats of hard empathy, the fruit of walking around the
concrete commonplaces which comprise the marketplace of the thing into (while
hardly ignoring these edifices, for they are highly instructive in their
negative signs, in their pointing to the antithetical essence of their being)
the commodious and healthy air of the thing itself, even as one mounts Everest
to finally stand on the pinnacle, practices scales to perform at Lincoln
Center, or lives to confront and so surpass death and so live.
***
So we have seen not what condo is or might be, perhaps, but what
asking is—its nature, its essence, its face.
So we have seen that the question that is asked is often not the
question that we think is being asked, but the question behind the question,
the asking behind the asking, the condom behind the condo, the punctuation
behind the substantive, the doubt behind the certitude, the awe behind the
philosophy. And this seeing, we see
after our asking, is the nature of condo.
But not only of condo but of all things.
And this common nature—this bond—is our humanity: our bestiality, our divinity. That it is now encapsulated in 20 square
metres in the sky should not surprise us.
We are a species that, surpassing, reach. Now that our arms—or at least our
prosthetics—reach horizontally around the spherical exuberance and despair of
the earth, now that we have effectively abandoned the search for a vertical
divinity, we can devote our fickle attention to sticking our prosthetic arms (indeed!
all our prosthetics!) into the air, into space, beyond our natural reach, looking
endlessly into the endless darkness of other eyes, and discovering (if that is
the word) what is not there.
