(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
You look at the world, Donald Trump, wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, deep and environmental crisis. And we haven't even mentioned all the other crises, working life, private motoring, mass industrial animal production, educational culture, health.
"How the hell did we get from the '68 enthusiasm to this situation where everything seems shut down?"
"It's a catastrophic situation", says the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dollar (1951–) and adds: «How the hell did we get from the 68 enthusiasm to this situation where everything seems closed down and where the revolutionary 68 talk seems completely out of place. But that is certainly not a reason to give up the thoughts of 68. It is rather the time to remember them and fight what the world has become.» This conversation with Dolar also gave me the impression that it is not so much the socialist 68 culture that he is asking for, but the collective belief in another world. An atmosphere and an energy where you reach for something. Where you are not locked in by the established cultures of knowledge, but where you can once again ask the absolutely necessary and naive questions. At the time, there were many processes going on simultaneously all over the world, says Dolar, "the university protests in West Germany, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the United States, anti-colonialist movements, artistic movements and rock music." One could also mention women's movements, other forms of living, and new movements within film art. One could also mention new work environments in work cultures.
What I particularly cling to is an energy and power in time. Which nourishes hope and faith.
As Dolar puts it: «The world was young and open, it was magical.»
I wrote earlier this year about German Ernst Bloch and his philosophy of hope in an article for MODERN TIMES. Here I mention that Bloch then wrote his first book about utopia with the First World War as a backdrop, that he explains Western civilization as a process of revolutionary explosions that break through traditions and ways of life, where art and philosophy show us the glimpse of a another horizon, another community. There is always this 'something more'. Because without a belief in the glow of utopia, Bloch writes, we end up like TS Eliot's cavemen with a «hollow world space in a disenchanted atheism». Has the constant work focus, busyness and the search for safety and comfort sucked the life out of us and thus also the utopian glow and search that keeps us awake as human beings?
The speed of everything
Just in my adult life from about the mid-80s and the fall of the Berlin Wall until now, everything has become about work. All conversations you overhear in the city's rooms are about work and status, about buying an apartment and investing in things.
Fill out forms, spreadsheets, ten-plan points, so as not to be fired, so as not to be unhooked.
But the real difference is the hustle and speed. The speed of everything. Everyone must run stronger. Everyone runs stronger. The various processes in working life have undergone a drastic increase in pace. From ordinary work organizations such as schools and administrations to craftsmen and medical clinics. Everyone expects faster responses. All the time, things are ticking in that people have to deal with. Everyone keeps busy keeping busy. Keeping busy keeping busy keeping busy. Fill out forms, spreadsheets, ten-plan points, so as not to be fired, so as not to be unhooked. As if time itself now lives its own life, like a pond that fills up, again and again, a great circle without borders. Like an anonymous current, a nerve current, a world current. A serial life without transitions, without thresholds, without closures, without rituals, where everything and ourselves just slip through. Glides by. A place without duration.
A mindful withdrawal
Back in the 80's people used to sit in the parks and play chess. Even my father's lawyer friend J. Holm could be chatted with in the late afternoon. There was rarely the same rush. The universities resemble more and more a consulting organisation. Today, 80 percent of all education is about teaching young people how to communicate and find technological solutions to the challenges of sustainability.
I get tears in my eyes when I see how the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze could create an open curious laboratory for free thinking at the Bois de Vincennes in the 70s and 80s. Here everyone could join in, even the homeless and the juggler over in the park could ask questions and think along. Everyone became wiser. No one was busy in the same way as today.
Like the ancient Greeks I see every year sitting in the square on my Greek island, here they chat, play a board game, look out to the valley and the sea. What I experience here is life. Or like my son who is currently traveling through the 'stan' countries and meeting generous people and magical landscapes. Where he looks out towards an open horizon without being guided by immediate goals. But where he makes up his own thoughts and experiences.
You can do this in several ways. The point here is simply that it is only through a mindful withdrawal from the immediate impulse (the ticking of technology), our constant busyness and seduction that thinking becomes possible. The life of thought is therefore dependent on a certain distance to the world we sense, and to ourselves on stopping. The distance is actually a prerequisite for getting closer to reality.
The feeling of being alive
Perhaps this is what has happened: we know everything we need to know about climate, health, the importance of general education, a life with a shorter meaningful working life, we know all that. All that is about to ruin it for ourselves. And yet we continue. Is it resignation? Is it a lack of faith in the future, in the world? Is it cynicism and indifference? Or, is it about us no longer having this experience with what fundamentally makes life worth living? That we have lost this more lasting joyous power of life energy? This feeling of being alive. Because we have gotten used to a life where everything is about looking at ourselves as a means to an end. Always setting goals for ourselves. Maybe this is exactly what drains us? Because we have become used to looking at ourselves and at people as such as an infinite potential that can and must be realized through constant productivity. What we sacrifice are not potentials, but im-potentials, our ability to actually not have to be anything, to run after something, to reach the goal quickly, etc. Because to be alive is precisely to find room for the speechless, for play, for wonder, for mere being.
It's clear we won't get there. We are kept in a kind of busyness that makes it impossible for the individual to think his own thoughts. Jacques Ranciere is onto this. The demand for constant work and production has gone and become the most efficient way to control and manage the people. We do not see and feel it, because we are fused with it. With the communication, the seduction, the busyness. While we gradually empty life of joy, ingenuity and the desire to explore. As the media thinker Franco 'Bifo' Berardi puts it: «We renew our love of work because economic survival becomes more difficult and everyday life becomes lonely and boring: Big city life becomes so miserable that we might as well sell it for money.»
A kind of pre-political energy
In a world where most people think about raving, art is a generous opening to life – as with Kris Kraus. This is how we would like to see art. You create art to reach out, to share a world that is subtle, beautiful, ugly and strange. To share a life. Let us not forget that: That it begins with the devotion, the love for the incomprehensibility of this world. In a sense, being closer to life, where it begins, where we actually see the world, a world that touches us, that responds back. A form of resonance. We wake up. A flow of heat, as Ernst Bloch called it, where the most banal matter allows itself to be registered with astonishment. What matters in the long run is whether it makes us wake up, again have a sense of living in a world that is interesting.
For me, it is clear how much of what art really means in our lives is also the magic and warmth Dolar describes from 68. A kind of pre-political energy. A collective atmospheric force. Some of the same things are at stake here, being able to confirm life in an open quest. To break through the falsehood, to find a bottom in our own experience, which often has a bottom in others as well.
Back to the busyness, the increase in pace, perhaps the most noticeable thing about what has happened in the last two generations is time as this abstract and at the same time that which affects everything else: which paralyzes our ability to think, our ability to stop and most importantly: our ability to to live, to have a deep sense of what it means to be alive.
As the Polish theater critic Bojana Kunst writes in her book Artist at work goes (2023): "People need to have a sense of slowness because it is the only way we can distinguish between desirable and possible change." Time is not a project that must be realized all the time. Rather, time itself consists of many imperceptible small shifts and obstacles. It is about living in a different way compared to the times. Our way of moving. A time other than the linear time, the measured time, the busy time, a slower time, a discovery of duration. Sink into the substance, to work with a material, with the time it takes, and create distance from the pulsating anonymous flow of time.
In reality, practicing many of the life forms and energies that were also part of the magic of 68: wonder, laziness, play, friendships, unexpected inspirations, quirky existences, strange vibrations, wisdom, conversations, crafts, wandering, free thinking, slowness.
