a thing in itself

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.