W. finds me in a despondent state on the phone. ‘Your lines of flight always go splat! against the wall, don’t they?’ He’s right. I’m like the cartoon mouse who hits the wall hard and then slides down. Why did I think I could escape philosophy for music? What madness was that?
Every year it’s the same, says W., every year a new idea. What are you writing on, he asks. ‘Will Oldham’, I say. I tell him I’ve printed out the lyrics and the tablatures (which I don’t understand). ‘But it’s not going anywhere, is it?’ It’s true. It’s going to be Blanchot again, isn’t it? I tell him I’m never going to write the word Blanchot again, I said (but I’m lying). It’s Dogma rules, which allows you to plagiarise from whomever you want. Plagiarise, but do not quote. And only one proper name per essay. These are just some of the things Dogma means.
Dogma’s a way of life, W. and I agreed back in Oxford. Friendship is very important to Dogma. Always praise your friends’ work to the skies. Never mention the work of careerists. Despise them. The rules of Dogma are yours to make up. It depends on the situation you’re in. Is everyone writing about the history of philosophy? Then drop the history of philosophy. Is it all commentary and paraphrase? Then drop that, too. What matters is clarity, we agreed, and limpidity. And passion, I said. You have to be willing to fight to the death for every line, we agreed. And there must be no scholarship, we agreed.
Of course it’s already been done. ‘Read this’, says W., giving me Badiou’s Ethics, ‘pure Dogma’. But it was Flusser who is the first dogmatist for each of us. Limpid 4-5 page essays on every topic, each beginning as though over again, each written far from the mainstream, in many different languages, overlapping in theme and content, but never aping itself. ‘Do you see how beautifully and simply he writes?’, I said to W., when I showed him the Writings. ‘It’s because he knows everything and has forgotten everything’.
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