Lars Iyer

Leaning Into the Wind

One Speaks

'In the beginning was the Word'. The Word, Logos. But what if there were no beginning, and no Logos, only logoi in the plural? Speech, says Sinthome, does not simply instantiate the transcendental structure of language, as though language as such and in general exists before and after its speakers. The structure itself is in the individuals who speak, even as it cannot be reduced to any one individual speaker. As an emergent pattern, it has a kind of agency of its own, depending upon the relations of feedback that give it a ever-provisional substance, letting it quiver above a particular community of speakers like a rainbow over a waterfall.

That is what a language is, or an idiom, and as it quivers, it changes, too; its life does not depend upon an act of History [Geschichte], as it does for Heidegger. True, a language can come close to death, to routine, to ruts well worn; but language can also be reborn, it gives itself to other uses as it is nothing other than this giving, abandoning itself to those uses that flicker between speakers. Between them, and not in them – language is not an interior affair, but belongs to our interrelation. Between us, and floating among the assemblage of which we are a part – the network of practices, of institutions that mean our utterances are collective and never simply individual, that we must be thought together with others, as part of a whole that we speak when we speak.

Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to enage the 'one speaks' of language – to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.

One speaks - the collective, the quivering rainbow, rooted in nothing and spanning through nothing. Language like a swarm of midges over a river. Or like the flashing light on the river's surface. But in Deleuze's ontology, there is no river, or there is only flashing, only clouds and clouds of midges. Language nothing yet, nothing in itself, but that floats through an assemblage and cannot be thought in its absence. Nothing in itself, but still more than the individuals who speak it. Nothing – and much less than the enunciation of the Word, the Logos that stands at the beginning of everything.

Trust

No logos, as Sinthome says, but only local and emergent logoi. Logoi at different levels of scale and temporality, converging and diverging in different waves. And language as only one way in which these logoi can be thought.

The early Heidegger allows logos to translate Rede, discourse, using these words to indicate the common, shared world of which we are part and that lends itself to particular articulations. Rede is to be rigorously distinguished from Gerede, chatter; we will lose the things themselves by our idle talk. But if talk is never idle, if the logos is constituted by what we say such that language is not understood merely to articulate but to act? If the shared world is also what is made by particular uses of language (particular logoi in which language is engaged and engages us)?

Then perhaps there is a way of reclaiming for ourselves the efficacy of language, of speaking in a new way, not in a new language, but letting the old one resound differently. To disarticulate language, to discover the breaks at the level of syntax, to discover (to let there be discovered) a new style (a language within language, a rainbow that leaps up from the streaming of language) …

Acts of reading and writing, says Sinthome, are not the acts of a disembodied spirit who would judge, select, reject, dismiss … If the mind is the brain, reading leaves a physical trace; texts enter and interpenetrate me; I cannot have done with them even when I think I've had done with them. And so we've all been all the names in history; discourses by a million writers have coursed through us.

So too with writers, who have so many other writers in them, part of them. For a long time, I suppose a writer felt part of the tradition of these predecessors; the aim was to renew existing idioms, to give life to existing forms. With modernity, the burden on the artist changes: is it sufficient to trust the judgement of others with respect to his work? his own instinct? The latter seems more authorative than the former – and yet a modern artist like Kafka, as Josipovici has said, 'seem to have been able to develop and grow through an innate trust in the act of writing itself, in their willingness to embrace confusion and uncertainty and to find a new voice in the process'.

A new voice: the young Miles Davis tells his father he's dropping out of Julliard to play in jazz clubs. That's okay so long as you find your own style, says his father, or at least this is what's recounted in the autobiography. Your own style, your voice: then is style to be conceived in terms of individuality, as the mark of an original artist? Is it the result of deliberate effort, to be worked at or improved?

For Deleuze, style is to be thought as a way an idiom (language, music, painting …) might be inhabited, and not in terms of the activity of a particular person. As Lecercle puts it in his account of Deleuze's thought, 'the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author's name'. The subject can be understood as an individual, to be sure – as this author, this musician – but it is also a collective, an assemblage that speaks through her. 'If there is a subject, it is a subject without identity', Deleuze writes.

Then what, in this context, does it mean to place one's trust in writing, as opposed to the authoritative judgements of others? What of the significance of being found by style (of letting a new voice float through an assemblage), and affirming it in turn? In the beginning was the Word, the Logos - but what of the logoi that are born with style?

Leaning Against the Wind

An example. The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It's a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he's too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.

The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then – disaster – his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It's dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn …

Reading, rereading Gathering Evidence, I imagine the mature Bernhard as an action painter, spilling great loops of paint on a canvas laid flat. Great iterative loops, again and again, but each time growing wilder, more hyperbolic, stretching the sentence. Bernhard has his eye like Pollock on the whole of the composition, but if there is structural cohesion, exemplary control, it is cohesion in collapse, and into which every detail is caught up. The book turns like a whirlwind, gathering in its massive sentences all and everything such that there is never a distinct compositional focus, and no detail matters more than any other; there's only the whole, the all-at-once that is reaffirmed on the canvas of each of his books.

So with Bernhard's narration of his cycling trip. The trip is the prose; to cycle like Kafka's Red Indian, leaning into the wind is also to write against the good sense of writing. The effort of the 8 year old to climb upon on his silver-painted bike is the same as the 50 year old who writes the last volume of his memoirs …

The maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. How did he arrive at it, his style? By working at it, improving it – by mastering a literary skill? But its controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling spastically forward is not the result of a deliberate organisation of language. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).

Standard language stammers, trembles and cries … but Bernhard's inimitable style cannot be reduced to the brutality of his experiences. The events his autobiography reports are co-constituted by the manner of their telling; one feeds the other; his life is what his style permits, as it no longer represents the world, but enacts the forces that comprise it. Bernhard who writes as Van Gogh paints stars buried in the wells of night, or Pollock paints looping spirals – it is affect and intensity that dictates the content of his work, even his autobiography. Affect, intensity, as they lead Bernhard to select those events that enact what occurs when he begins to write.

Pitted Against Everything

In An Indication of the Cause, the second part of the English edition of the autobiography (though the first one Bernhard wrote), the 13 year old Bernhard takes up a scholarship in a school in Salzburg, even as the city is bring bombed from the air. Misery sweeps over him; he tries to hang himself. Bernhard's prose is delirious with horror. In the third part, The Cellar, the 15 year old Bernhard drops out of school and takes up a position as a grocer's apprentice in a grim housing project where he would contract tuberculosis.

'I was pitting myself against everything', he writes. Against the school and its teachers, against Salzburg, even against the dreams his beloved grandfather held for his protégé. Yes, against everything and leaning against the wind. The fourth volume, A Breath, does not tell of the first story Bernhard published in 1950, nor of his encounter with hislifeperson, with whom he travelled and as he later recalls, received terse encouragement for his writing.

By the time he published Frost, Bernhard discovers his style, or it finds him, such that as author, as writer, he is pitted against everything- against Salzburg, against Austria, against the Nazi past, against Austrian Catholicism: everything, and these selected, these drawn into the maelstrom of his narratives because of the style that found him and to the level of which he raised himself to be able to write. Ah, that style, that streaming that survives Bernhard and reaches us even in English translation.

In the Cold, the fifth volume, relates Bernhard's mother's painful death from cancer, and his own return from the sanatorium. His grandfather dies too, and he finds the death of his forebear, who laid claim to the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, liberates his own early attempts to write. Bernhard reads his own poems to his dying mother, and it begins, that leap that takes him past the tradition of his grandfather, past philosophy and the whole of literature. A leap that braces him against the whole of what has become his past. He is the last of his line, he's been picked out. There'll be no other; his style is inimitable, but he is only a vortex in the whorl of his writing. Bernhard is a name for us of a plughole around which all of culture seems to swirl. But how did he pull out the plug?

The Hatred of Writing

It is not that Bernhard confirms, by his writing, the bygone world of which he was once a part and his own place within it. It is that this world is also born from his style: that a kind of hatred arises from the activity of writing. And this more than the hatred for Austria, the Nazis or the Catholic church. Or that swept up that hatred as part of its movement, its perpetual agitation.

Rereading, reflecting, I wonder if it is a surprise that the object of hatred was more fitting for an Austrian postwar writer than for others. The total compromise of authority, of state and church, and perhaps of the German language … And I think that with Bernhard the hatred that is part of style (the hatred of authority, of cultural models, or of an inherited model of literary style) met with what legitimately called forth hatred in an infinite spiral, rising up into a whirlwind of loathing, and that this was the motor of the storm of his work, that let it swirl into the stormclouds of European modernity.

How did Bernhard come to trust in his style (the style that lent itself to him, and from which as a writer he was born)? Was it through his lifeperson, who supported and encouraged his writing (but discouraged it, too, when necessary – causing him to throw whole manuscripts in the fire)? Was it the memory of his grandfather, who wrote, he said, for the unborn? Or was it as he found the correlate of its perfect storm in the horror that was perpetually reborn in Bernhard's Austria, that fed back into the vast and looping sentences, and looping repetition of his books? But those same sentences were in search of the hatred that could justify them, and how could Bernhard, born of his style live but as he was pitted against everything?

In the beginning was the Word – is that it? Or is it that literature (modern literature, our eternally new modernity) writes against the Word as the good sense of language? In the end (modern literature always belongs to the end, to the last gasp) was the Word and the tearing down of the Word. And at the end, where writing was impossible (for modern literature begins with the impossibility of writing) is also the beginning, thelogoi, the thousand styles of those writers who are born from the style they discovered and that discovered them.

Posts from the archives follow. They were supposed to point the way to a literary critical/ philosophical book, which I never got around to writing.

I've started a new blog, Wittgenstein Jr, for a new novel. Non-consecutive, unplanned, no real idea where it will go, or if it will be any good.

I'm speaking with Laura McLean-Ferris and Paul Pieroni at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 11th January.

'The Trouble With Productivity'. Artists, writers and curators today, more than ever, take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance. One is constantly expected to be productive, professional, and to deliver good work. Is this the way we really want to work? How do people working within the arts manage the imbalance between work and life? Can one be productive by being less productive? Are there creative possibilities in exhaustion, failure and laziness? Writer and critic Laura McLean- Ferris, Paul Pieroni, curator of Space, and writer and philosopher Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, discuss the potentials in being less productive.

Q. Are you interested in Facebook?

A. No, not remotely. It gives me the uncanny feeling that normal people have become so unimportant for those in power and business that self-presentation is the last resort.

Friedrich Kittler interviewed

What's interesting about Shakespeare is that he's interested in madness as a language. What Shakespeare is saying is […] that mad people speak in an extraordinary way. And one of the things about mad people is that they seem able to perform being mad as well as as it were being mad or we wonder really what they want us to think they're saying.

They perplex us […] Mad people are very important to Shakespeare, because it is as though they enact how perplexing language is, especially when it's as its most intensely poetic.

Adam Phillips, from a South Bank Special on Art and Insanity here.

What's ragged should be left ragged.

A miracle is, as it were, a gesture which God makes. As a man sits quietly and then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run on smoothly and then accompanies the words of a saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence. – Now, do I believe that this happens? I don't. […]

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill. / Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Go on, believe! It does no harm!

No cry of torment can be great than the cry of one man. / Or again, no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer. / A man is capable of infinite torment therefore, and so too he can stand in need of infinite help. / The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite torment. / The whole planet can suffer no greater torment than a single soul. / The Christian faith – as I see it – is a man's refuge in this ultimate torment. […]

After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched.

Are all men great? No. – Well then, how can you have any hope of being a great man! Why should something be bestowed on you that's not bestowed on your neighbour? To what purpose?! If it isn't you wish to be rich that makes you think yourself rich, it must be something you observe or experience that reveals it to you! And what do you experience (other than vanity)? Simply that you have a certain talent. And my conceit of being an extraordinary person has been with me much longer than my awareness of my particular talent.

The thought working its way towards the light.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. / Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning of think about things in a new way. The change is a decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is hard to establish.

In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? – Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one!

[…] a man will never be great if he misjudges himself: if he throws dust in his own eyes.

How small a thought it takes to fill someone's whole life! […]

The purely corporeal can by uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called 'miracles' must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

[…] Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be. –

I cannot kneel to pray because it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. […]

Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.

The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart.

A typical American film, naive and silly, can – for all its silliness and even by means of it – be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film.

Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens – why should I concern myself that the fruits of my labours should not be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in any case be more than clever.

Sometimes you see ideas in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway).

The book is full of life – not like a man, but like an ant-heap.

One keeps forgotten to go right down to the foundations. One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down.

'Wisdom is grey'. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour.

My thoughts probably move in a far narrower circle than I suspect.

Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes.

Perhaps one day this civilisation will produce a culture. […]

When you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

[…] the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes or does.

What I am writing here may be feeble stuff; well, then I am just not capable of bringing the big, important thing to light. But hidden in these feeble remarks are great prospects.

(For the Preface). It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon – this is what I wish for it – be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader. […]

I ask countless irrelevant questions. If only I can succeed in hacking my way through this forest!

Bach said that all his achievements were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength. And someone who, with all this, can also express himself perfectly, simply speaks to us in the language of a great man.

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

A writer far more talented than I would still have only a minor talent.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Tradition is not something a man can learn; nor a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. / Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Moore stirred up a philosophical wasps' nest with his paradox; and the only reason the wasps did not duly fly out was that they were too listless.

In the sphere of the mind someone's project cannot usually be continued by anyone else, nor should it be. These thoughts will fertilise the soil for a new sowing.

Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.

Ambition is the death of thought.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'

For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.

If Christianity is truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.

I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?

I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us 'the existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us. […]

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

God may say to me: 'I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them'.

Wittgenstein, random remarks from his notebooks, from Culture and Value

Interview with Adam Phillips here.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.

My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.

I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.

We are struggling with language. / We are engaged in a struggle with language.

Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.

What would it feel like not to have heard of Christ? / Should we feel left alone in the dark? / Do we escape such a feeling simply in the way a child escapes it when he knows there is someone in the room with him.

Within Christianity it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

Working in philosophy […] is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)

The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable. […] Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumpled. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled.

A confession has to be a part of your new life.

I never more than half succeed in expressing what I want to express. Actually not as much as that, but by no more than a tenth. That is still worth something. Often my writing is nothing by 'stuttering'.

I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. […]

Incidentally, when I was in Norway during the year 1913-14 I had some thoughts of my own, or so at least it seems to me now. I mean I have the impression that at the time I brought to life new movements in thinking (but perhaps I am mistaken). Whereas now I seem just to apply old ones.

The delight I take in my thoughts is a delight in my own strange life. Is this joy of living?

Don't play with what lies deep in another person!

The face is the soul of the body.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do.

If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice will be cursed.

The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.

The horrors of hell can be experienced within a single day; that's plenty of time.

The light work sheds is a beautiful light, which, however, only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light.

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. […]

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

I find it important in philosophising to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff. […]

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.

You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.

In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

No one can speak the truth; if he has still not mastered himself. He cannot speak it; – but not because he is not yet clever enough. / The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in falsehood and reaches out from falsehood towards truth on just one occasion.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say. I.e. though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. / One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil. […]

Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed. […]

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level., so that they immediately decline as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. […]

One might say: 'Genius is talent exercised with courage'.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning, – then it can be put back into circulation.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

You must say something new and yet it must all be old. / In fact you must confine yourself to saying old things – and all the same it must be something new. […]

As we get old, problems slip from our fingers again, as they used to when we were young. It isn't just that we can't crack them, we cannot even keep hold of them.

Don't demand too much, and don't be afraid that what you demand justly will melt into nothing.

Philosophers use a language that is already deformed as though by shoes that are too tight.

You can't build clouds. And that's why the future you dream of never comes true.

Virtually in the same way as there is a difference between deep and shallow sleep, there are thoughts which occur deep down and thoughts which bustle about on the surface.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophises yearns for.

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.

My account will be hard to follow: because it says something new but still has egg-shells from the old view sticking to it.

some notes of Wittgenstein from Culture and Value

You used to be believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.

In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you.

Your suicide was an action, but an action with a contrary effect: a form of vitality that produces its own death.

You are not among those who ended up sick and old, with withered ghostly bodies, resembling death before they've stopped living. Their demise is the fulfilment of their decrepitude. A ruin that dies: is this not deliverance, is it not the death of death? As for you, you departed in vitality. Young, lively, healthy. You death was the death of life. Yet I like to think that you embodied the opposite: the life of death. I don't try to explain to myself in what form you might have survived your suicide, but your disappearance is so unacceptable that the following lunacy was born along with it: a belief in your eternity.

Stray paragraphs from Eduard Leve's Suicide

That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world. Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides. It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction. In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity.

Wendy Brown, interviewed

Will Buckingham's brief review of Spurious.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian on the Not the Booker event hosted by Melville House at The Book Club in Shoreditch last week.

Fleur MacDonald in The Spectator on The White Review and (in passing) the Manifesto of mine that was published there.

(Apologies for the lack of real content at the blog. This should change soon.)

'Literary Melancholy', a long new interview with me by David Winters is now up at 3:AM. On the Manifesto, the Daniel Davis Wood essay and other things.

D. Quentin Miller reviews Spurious for the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

I've written an essay/manifesto available here.

(link corrected)

When word reached Sun Ra of John Coltrane's death, he was distraught. Even though they had only met a few times Sun Ra felt that Coltrane was truly remarkable, both as a man and a musician, and that he even had messianic qualities. At some moments he seemed to take the responsibility for his death on himself – claimed that he should have given him more warnings, or that the secret knowledge that he had told him was too much for him to handle; but at other times he said that Coltrane had been warned, that if he had joined the Arkestra it would never have happened, and it was his own fault. The Arkestra played at a memorial for Coltrane at the University of Pennsylvania shortly after his death, and for years afterwards Sun Ra would suddenly bring up Coltrane's passing in conversation as an object lesson – whether to himself or to others was not always clear.

from John F. Szwed's Space is the Place

Philosophical Humour

This novel explores an inter-relationship between two characters who live in a disillusioned time at the end of history. However, despite showing the influence of Kafka and Beckett the use of humour in the work undercuts the apparent despair often conveyed by the characters and in the process suggests something redemptive is available. The work is intended as the first part of a trilogy of pieces and its register will only be fully clear when all three parts of the work are complete but just alone it indicates something serious precisely in its frivolity and indicates a philosophical future for novelistic humour. Whilst much of the discussion appears initially a "heavy burden" the overall effect of the novel is childlike in the best sense and promises a kind of transfiguration of the reader. It decidedly deserves wide exposure as it is a book which has the potential to make philosophy generally accessible, not least through showing its presence within the key literary works of modernism. It is also, throughout, screamingly funny. Its worth a read both for the ideas and for the laughs. Read it: you won't regret it!

Kantian 3, Not the Booker review

How about the following as an ingredient list for a comic novel?

1) An philosophical analysis of subjectivity as intersubjectivity (relation to Other)

2) A buddy tale

3) A compendium of aggressively-nasty-as-funny comedic shtick

Not a likely juxtaposition, perhaps; but then the successful close association of contrasts is the essence of many a tasty recipe. Lars Iyer has achieved just such an inventive and rewarding blend in his novel “Spurious,” which gives us the fraught friendship of two self-described “victims” of literature. The notion of a conjunction of contrasts characterizes the reader’s response as well; in this case it's laughing and thinking, simultaneously, an effect often sought but seldom as successfully realized as in "Spurious". As we read and laugh we sometimes feel as though we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We are thereby subtly drawn into the web woven by the much-put-upon narrator, who reveals himself, not directly, but through the relentless mediation of his descriptions of his friend “W.” The neologism “frenemies” might well have been invented to describe their relation to each other, but with a decided emphasis on the first syllable. We listen in and laugh as the two friends discover each other through the Other, sharing the miseries of frustrated hopes and encroaching horizons.

I'll conclude with own small exotic ingredient, a pinch of Musical Comedy lore. Reading “Spurious” we happily learn anew the truth Vera Charles confirms for Auntie Mame (talk about comedic shtick!) , “Who else but a bosom buddy will tell you the whole stinking truth?”

Steve Pantani, Not the Booker review

Since I am W. and this book has for some unknown and bizarre reason actually reached the final stages of this superb tournament (if I might use a sport metaphor, which reminds me of the time that I took Lars to a football game and he referred to the crowd as the 'audience'), I might, for the first time and in public so to speak, say something about it. First of all, it is all true if slightly exaggerated. We really do live and talk like that. Secondly, Lars is funnier than we are, if that makes any sense. Thirdly, even I laugh when I read it, and I was there. Finally, I do actually think it is beautifully written. And this is my last word. The only response to the times we live in is a kind of desperate humour which I think Spurious has bucket loads of.

William Large, Not the Booker review

Any book in which the two main characters often seem to converse by drawing willies is always likely to find a place in my heart. And this did not fail to, although perhaps I was not as fond of it as some.

The good points. The characters are well crafted, realistic and honestly drawn. Their foibles are the same as all of ours, regardless of their austere professions and indulgent rantings. I defy anyone not to be in stitches as W continually berates Lars, but also touched by their genuine friendship that seems to know no dishonesty, which is perhaps a rare thing. W's often acerbic wit, whilst it might be cutting, does not seem to be made with a genuine intention to upset or undermine Lars. His remarks are nearly always followed up with a slight against himself, although he is always, of course, marginally superior in every way.

The only story that this book could be said to have is in regard of the spread of the truly horrific damp in Lars' house. But this is not so much a plot, more a metaphor. It spreads malignantly throughout the book and, towards the end, on every page. I read it as a metaphor for the underlying state of Lars' life as it spreads, unhindered and undiagnosed, through his house as it does through his life. To me, and perhaps I am wrong, W's concern was expressed in the only way he could, through his acerbic wit. But it was still genuine and still very touching.

Yet this book, although marginally the best in the Not the Booker, to me had some major drawbacks. I found it a little difficult to read. It is short, not running to more than 200 pages I don't think. Yet it took me a week to read. I found that I struggled to read more than 20 pages at a time. Each sitting was at the most 20 minutes, before I’d start reading a non-fiction book which I was reading concurrently. I didn't find that it hooked me. Perhaps that is the lack of a plot to carry me through. However, I think that it is mostly because, I believe, this was initially a blog written by the author. And it shows. No 'chapter' is more than 8, maybe 10 pages long. It is very episodic and very repetitive so that you don't feel like you are getting anywhere. Occasionally, one chapter will seems to be told again in the very next chapter, using different words. In fact one might say that nothing happens: nobody comes and nobody goes. But perhaps that shows its fidelity to actual life, rather than to imagined life.

Whilst I personally think that this is a fair criticism, others might point out that this is not a story. This is a portrait of two people and, in particular, of their friendship. And as just that, as a portrait, it is very touching indeed.

Anthony Dickinson, Not the Booker review

How fitting that a book called Spurious, that started life as a blog, should be a frontrunner for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. This not being the Booker, Spurious is neither a state-of-the-age doorstopper, a fictional resurrection of a misunderstood historical personage, nor a parochial lament warbled from the banks of the Liffey. It is instead a series of blogpost-sized snippets following the repetitive interactions of a tragi-comic double-act – the down-at-heel narrator Lars, and his hilariously harsh friend W.

Lars and W. are relatively undistinguished philosophy tutors at English universities, and both are united by a feeling of utter inadequacy, irrelevance, stupidity and, well, spuriousness in the face of their intellectual heroes. They meet, talk, drink, despair and console, but mostly W. just mercilessly – and hilariously – abuses Lars. In one particularly funny passage, W. compares their friendship with that of Blanchot and Levinas – except whereas the French philosophers exchanged correspondence of depth, significance and high seriousness, W. and Lars draw each other pictures of cocks on the internet. Their problem, W. notes, is that neither of them is a Kafka – they are both Brods.

Lord Adonis, Not the Booker review

Spurious is an un-English book in several ways – partly because of its complete lack of interest in the mode of mainstream, lyrical realist fiction that is so dominant in this country, but also due to its subject matter and tone. W. and Lars’s heroes stem from the tradition of continental modernism – from Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot and Beckett to Bela Tarr – and they are infused with a very European anxiety. The book also owes a great deal to Thomas Bernhard, who is unmentioned but whose presence is unmistakable throughout.

Following the distancing technique employed by Bernhard in novels such as The Loser and Old Masters, the entire narrative is reported to us by a narrator (Lars), who is the passive figure in most of the interactions. Thus the book consists for the most part of the thoughts and opinions of W., though the only narrative access we have to him is second hand. This introduces an aspect of what James Wood calls ‘double unreliability’ – we know that W. has been rewritten by Lars, but we don’t know to what extent. As in Bernhard, the characters’ voices are subsumed in the act of narration, reinforcing the insurmountable distance between art and life, and the impossibility of writing.

Indeed it is this sense of distance and impossibility that is perhaps the central current running through Spurious. Lars and W. are anachronistic figures chasing a seriousness and authenticity of intellectual experience that seems to be no longer attainable. Even their despair is ironic, clichéd and absurd – the very possibility of authentic thought seems to have withered and died, crowded out by the intellectual giants in relation to whom their failure is assured. As with Bernhard and Beckett, Spurious is pulled along by gallows humour, but the bleakness and despair underpinning it is real too.

Spurious will probably remain a cult book that appeals primarily to those with the sort of intellectual interests that lead them to empathise with Lars and W. That said, for all its acknowledged spuriousness and self-mockery, it is a book that responds to serious questions in a way that is honest, thoughtful and deceptively profound. It is, in the best possible sense, the opposite of the sort of book that normally wins the Booker Prize. That it seems likely to walk off with that award’s tongue-in-cheek inversion is therefore entirely appropriate.

Grinding Repetition, an Idiot Punching Bag

I had good reason to pre-order my copy of this particular book as it was written by Lars Iyer, my philosophy lecturer when I studied in Newcastle ten years ago or so.

I used to read his varied and dense blog of the same name while at university and I was particularly drawn to the passages about the person he would simply refer to as W., his friend and apparent tormenter.

I often wondered why abbreviate the name to W.? Everyone knew who it was. He would gladly tell his philosophy groups stories about his friend and use his full name, which also begins with W. Was it just a hint towards anonymity? Did it preserve anything? Was it due to Lars’ obsession with Kafka, and a stylistic nod to the character, K.?

The novel. Within the first few pages, I had a feeling that I had read some parts before – of course I had on the blog itself. Pretty soon it ceased to matter. There is grinding repetition. It often has you think you have turned the page only to reread the same page again. Not unlike the feeling of reading Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller, where the protagonist keeps returning his faulty books to the bookshop only to discover the whole book never really existed.

So what is Spurious about? It is a hedonistic journey into the apocalypse with W. and his idiot punching bag, Lars. The novel is a series of numberless chapters, mostly quite short. Something I quickly noticed is that Lars seems almost anonymous to the reader. Like the character of I in Withnail and I, he is for a large portion of the book nameless and exists only as mirror to W. W.’s speech is the only speech that is reported. Lars never gives us an opinion directly – every thought or attempt at thought is refracted through the hilariously hateful sneer of W.

I had the pleasure of meeting the real W. once or twice in Newcastle. I particularly remember sitting out on the sunny terraces of The Cumberland Arms and watching the two of them go into a hilarious double act of improvised verbal depravity. They would riff scatologically, each trying to out-gross the other, while draining pints of real ale. It wasn’t clear whether this was an act for our benefit, or whether we had somehow caught them backstage, or in private. Either way it was hysterical and I remember eventually leaving them and wondering down the steps to Ouseburn valley in a hazy stupor, inventively swearing to myself like some kind of unwashed Malcolm Tucker.

W.’s accusations in the novel are contradictory and often harsh. Much like the rough banter of friendship many men will recognise, only it is dressed up in a pretentious philosophical babble. W.’s main concern is that they are both philosophers, both studying and lecturing on the subject of thought and yet neither one of them has had a single thought worth mentioning. Not one original thought. They are always on the verge of thought, it seems, but how would they know if they even know if they had an original thought? Instead they drink endlessly and shamefully, dousing themselves in their own unfulfilled dreams (whatever they were) and increasingly bleak future.

Kafka is endlessly referred to as the ultimate hero. Are either of them Kafka or are they both Max Brod, the friend of Kakfa who refused written instructions to burn all of his works after he died? How is it possible to be friends with someone with such literary power? It is ok for Lars and W. because they are both Max Brod. They are both the jealous friend, the idiot incapable of pure thought.

Where the blog form can be overwhelming, endlessly scrolling down white pages to no fixed conclusion, the novel lends itself well to this repetitive style. While essentially we are none the wiser at the end of the book, we have been given a deep insight into the bizarrely intense friendship Lars obviously has with W. There is a wonderful recurring motif of Lars’ moulding and dampening house. It evolves into a character itself and Lars develops an ambivalent relationship as the moisture grows from a wet stain to a freely flowing river inside his house – a beautifully disturbing image. Perhaps a grand metaphor for modern living and indeed modern dying.

Do read it, it’s a treat.

Dan Collective, Not the Booker review

Last three posts from Dogma, due out Feb 2012.

Pre-order Dogma at Amazon UK or Amazon USA. Or order it directly from Melville House themselves, meaning you can receive it a month early.

The cover of Dogma is above.

A Diogenes Barrel

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

The Opposite of the Gods

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

'This wood, for example. That field. And that – what is that?' A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it's only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. – 'You were looking for something', he says. 'You knew something was missing'.

He sees it in his mind's eye: I'm carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I'm cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I'm following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I'm looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I'm looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of gods.

These Are the Days

A visit to my hometown. To my home suburbs, W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …' When did it go wrong?, W. asks. Where did it go wrong?

He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no expanse!, W. says. There are no vistas! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …

This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies above the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …

It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of hope, W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.

Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?" W. asks his friend Lars while Spurious takes its course. He decides they are both the latter, buffoonish adjuncts to a writer whose work is so authentic and truthful that he would rather his friend burn the lot than expose it to universal misunderstanding. But he didn't burn anything, and the fact that Spurious exists for us to savour is due to both Lars' and W.'s quality of Brodness. W. is right: they too have listened to Kafka and ignored him. Moreover, Kafka did not write blurbs for his friend's regrettable novels, so the unreliable reviewer who wrote on the back of Spurious that it is not only a comedy but "a profound philosophical rhapsody playing out the culmination of the religious narratives of East and West" is not Kafka either. So where can he be found?

If Kafka were alive today he would not care to write novels, particularly if the pinnacle of literary achievement is the prettification afforded by a garland or, worse, popularity. Writing to a friend, he said that we should read only books that wound and stab us or that make us feel banished into forests far from everyone. He went on to write a few. Today these would be the last to win a prize. This is where Kafka can be found: with matches at the ready. It is the great virtue of Spurious that it seeks the flames Kafka desires while, at the same time, due to its Brodness, it revels in soggy kindling. Such ambition and hopelessness combined is liberating.

SteveofThisSpace, Not the Booker review

Funambulism

It's no secret that I love this work of fiction – I even blurbed it on the back cover. It is frankly one of the most brilliant works of fiction I have read in a long time. You know, we're told that novels shouldn't be like this, we're told that novels should be something else. But Spurious eschews this notion – and becomes a novel like no other because of it. Dripping in scathing wit, irony and deep, deep despair it pulls the reader in. Holding us close. Both laugh-out-loud-funny and achingly sad it seems to exist somewhere strangely in between these two extremes. Lars Iyers balances these opposites with all the vim and skill of a funambulist. But what strikes me most about Spurious is that packed within this flimsy, little oddity of a novel is a whole philosophical discourse that seeks to examine the rupture between eastern and western thought, the incurable obsession with our own endtimes, and the cyclical nature of the death drive – and Lars Iyers STILL manages to make all this a hoot! Wonderful Stuff.

RourkeLee, Not the Booker review

Forever Spurious, Never False

Spurious is a seriously funny book. It makes us feel the pain of failure, absurdity, moral weakness, and damp kitchens. But it also invites us to enjoy this pain, to share it with others, and to wash it down with the best gin in the world. The relationship between the narrator and W. is painfully real. Will W.’s scathing and relentless criticism of the narrator never cease? Will the narrator never fight back? But here, too, in the misadventures, failed encounters and bad manners of our heroes, there is enjoyment and love. There is also something more: genuine philosophical insight. In its own irreverent way, Spurious engages – with its own kind of reverence – with some of the most important thinkers and issues of our time. Emerging from the damp of a gloomy flat, infected with the flat melancholy of late modernity, are brilliant reflections on Kafka, Rosenzweig, Spinoza, Levinas, Blanchot and others. Spurious is the best kind of philosophical novel: a comedy that invites us to engage in the seriousness of thought without taking ourselves too seriously.

Sazerac, Not the Booker review