1 To
Veronika, my dearest friend whose bright mind and care kept me inspired and going, and my mother who cheered me writing about this Poland which is not the one she
fought for 30 years ago.
With special thanks to
my talented friend Moorea who took on the challenge of proofreading this thesis, Linde and Charlotte who – unlike me - never doubted that I could do this in time,
my incredibly flexible and motivating supervisor Sophie Berrebi,
2
Contents
Introduction ... 4
1. Resist what? ... 8
The Rise of Right-Winged Populism ... 9
Post-Truth Politics ... 14
2. Doublethink in Nineteen-Eighty Four and 2017 ... 20
The Notion of Doublethink... 21
3. How to Deal with Double Binds? ... 25
Imagination and the Aesthetic Dimension ... 29
Play ... 32
Throne and the Altar ... 35
The Double Bind of Critique ... 37
4. Playing Double Binds against Doublethink ... 40
The Scholar, the Teacher and the Artist ... 43
Conclusion ... 53
3
Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorism. Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we,
the scholars, the intellectuals? Bruno Latour,
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.
And, I confess again – I prefer to move forward, even quickly, at the risk of falling, skipping over a few weak points. (Who doesn´t do likewise, at some time, even among the most careful?) I prefer invention accompanied by the danger of error to rigorous verification,
which is paralleled by the risk of immobility – in philosophy as in life, in life as in the sciences.
Michel Serres,
4
Introduction
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell 1
In a search for the term post-truth at the University of Amsterdam library, the article The Dangers of a Post-Truth World by Michael Gross, published in the journal Current Biology, appeared among the first entries. Addressing the threat of emotion-driven disregard of— and ignorance towards—scientific facts in the face of the rise of right-winged populism in the United States and Europe, Gross states:
After two centuries of social progress based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, from the abolition of slavery through to equal rights for homosexuals, humanity’s path seems to have made a U-turn threatening to go back to darker times. Scientists are left wondering not only how this could happen, but also what they can do to make verifiable scientific truth heard in a post-truth scenario. 2
The fact that this article was published in a scientific journal on biology, demonstrates not only a rising concern about the future of scientific research among scientists but also reveals how socio-political issues have entered scientific platforms.
Within the first few weeks of 2017, George Orwell´s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four experienced a boost in sales in the United States, climbing rapidly up the bestseller list on Amazon.3 Depicting a dystopian future in which critical thinking is being prosecuted and
systematically eliminated by the government, the novel, written in 1948, has regained popularity in the course of the current heated debate on so-called alternative facts4. The
term post-truth addresses a phenomenon which acquired new visibility in the current international political context and more specifically, in the politics of belief of what is right
1 Orwell, George. 1984. 1948.
2 Gross, Michael. The Dangers of a Post-truth World. 2017.
3 See for example: de Freytas-Tamura, Kimiko. “George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Is Suddenly a Best-Seller”. 2017. 4 See for example: Bradner, Eric. “Conwav: Trump White House offered ´alternative facts´ on crowd size”. 2017.
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or wrong, factual or false. What is happening right now seems to be a random claiming of truths after the collective realization that there is no objective representation of reality. Distrusting scientifically verified facts and overlooking the embeddedness of such in multiple, at times conflicting, contexts oppose both a positivist and antipositivist stance. The overall question arising at this point is not only how to understand this partial dissolution of the belief in (scientific) facts but also how to deal with such emerging tendencies in contemporary, western society as those who should be able to criticize productively.
Ab-using Friedrich Schiller, Gayatri Spivak re-evaluates the state of Enlightenment and the role of aesthetic education in times of globalization. Her observation of the Humanities being pushed to the periphery of contemporary western society becomes even more alarming considering the recent flare-up of right-winged populism in Europe and the United States proposing, among others, cuts in funding of Humanities and the Arts. For her,
(o)nly an aesthetic education can continue to prepare us for this, thinking an uneven and only apparently accessible contemporaneity that can no longer be interpreted by such nice polarities as modernity/tradition, colonial/postcolonial.5
Appropriating Gregory Bateson´s notion of the double bind deriving from his approach to childhood schizophrenia, Spivak uses his term in the context of the task of the Humanities to be able to think double binds without creating a single bind, to deal with “contradictory instructions”6 without deciding for one side irrevocably.
In the contemporary context, we can call this the double bind of the universalizability of the singular, the double bind at the heart of democracy, for which an aesthetic education can be an epistemological preparation, as we, the teachers of the aesthetic, use material that is historically marked by the region, cohabiting with, resisting, and accommodating what comes from the Enlightenment. 7
Both thinking a double bind in the sense of Spivak and doublethinking in the Orwellian sense take place in the sphere of imagination. What the two forms of imagination provoke, however, is rather oppositional. The first could be regarded as a critical engagement by
5 Spivak, Gayatri. Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. 2012, p.2 6 Ibid, p.10
6
holding two contradictory positions in one´s mind, negotiating their relation and most importantly, being aware of the consequences in case of breaking them into a single bind. The second, referring back to the quote by Orwell, accepts two contradictory positions while ignoring - consciously or unconsciously - their conflicting relation, merging them into one conviction.
But what is the relation between thinking double binds and doublethink and where can possible demarcations be located? What is required for a double bind to remain negotiable without neither breaking into a single bind nor becoming doublethinking? How can imagination become a form of resistance to right-winged populism? These questions and others I wish to address in my master thesis from a philosophical and epistemological perspective. Hence, I will engage in philosophy with a focus on science and critical theory. In the first chapter I will examine the opponent I suggest to resist, namely rising right-winged populism in the United States and Europe. I will approach current, so-called post-truth politics by looking at anti-intellectual attitudes and a possible explanation of a general distrust in both natural and social sciences.
Focusing on right-winged populist rhetoric, in the second chapter I attempt to define the notion of doublethink using the notion of bullshit famously defined by the American philosopher Henry G. Frankfurt.
In chapter three, Gayatri Spivak´s thoughts on aesthetic education in relation to Friedrich Schiller´s famous letters on the Aesthetic Education of Men will serve as my theoretical framework for a possible approach to double binds. After discussing the notion of imagination, I will further explore how play can help to approach contradictory instructions, focusing on its concept coined by Johann Huizinga. Using Victor Turner´s notion of liminality, I seek to define temporal and spatial conditions under which double binds can be played. In the section Throne and Altar, the role of nationalism and religion in the context of imaginative play of thoughts will be discussed. In relation to post-factual rhetoric, the last section of chapter three will be dedicated to the deconstruction of the role of the critic, based on Bruno Latour´s re-evaluation of the latter.
Bringing together all previously defined conditions required to think (about) double binds, I will apply my hypothesis to examples from academia, education, and art in relation to politics and populism.
7
Combining (or rather ab-using in Spivak´s terms) those concepts deriving from different schools of thought and disciplines, I want to contribute to an urgent socio-political issue and examine the potentiality of aesthetic education as a way to oppose emerging tendencies threatening the development of a tolerant, liberal, and critical society.
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1. Resist what?
Any form of resistance needs something—an object of any form—to oppose. Hence, the first step in order to understand, and later on develop, a theory of a form of resistance is to determine the opponent. In the first part of chapter one I will thus describe the current manifestation of the force I seek to withstand, namely the rise of right-winged populism in the U.S. and Europe.
The public promotion of racism and sexism in the name of nationalism— and to a certain extent religion—is causing a legitimate rise of concern. So far Donald Trump´s initial executive orders are aiming to install a travel ban for people from certain Muslim-majority countries (Executive Order 13769)8, a ban on the (international) dissemination
of information about abortion and, as he famously stated during his campaign, to build a wall on the border to Mexico9. In Europe, right-winged politicians such as Geert Wilders
in the Netherlands, Marine le Pen in France, or members of the German party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, hereafter referred to as AfD) who are currently gaining popularity, share anti-Islamic, nationalist, and conservative views with Trump. Although at the current moment the consequences of Donald Trump´s politics and right-winged movements in Europe are not entirely foreseeable, action to resist those tendencies is required to prevent those looming threats to—among others—ethnic and religious minorities and women.
8See Thrush, Glenn. "Trump’s New Travel Ban Blocks Migrants From Six Nations, Sparing Iraq." The New
York Times. The New York Times, 06 Mar. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
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The Rise of Right-Winged Populism
Within the last few years, the rise of right-winged populism in Western countries is clearly observable. While such tendencies have existed for decades, the recent passing of the referendum in the United Kingdom to split from the European Union, better known as the Brexit, the rising popularity of nationalist conservatives such as Marine le Pen, Geert Wilders, and the election of Donald Trump, a right-winged populist, as the 45th president
of the United States, mark a strong upward trend of right-winged politics in Western countries. Like many others devastated by such developments, I could not initially believe them to be true. Growing up in Germany, a country forged by a dark national socialist past, I have been raised with an omnipresent reminder of the consequences of nationalism, discrimination of minorities, racism, and anti-Semitism. However, once I accepted the fact that the recent events are a reality impossible to hide, I asked myself what led to their development.
One explanation for the emerging shift in the Western political climate harkens back to the Euro Debt Crisis evolving in the beginning of the 2010s10, the so-called European
Migration Crisis starting in 201511, and the terror attacks in Paris, Brussels, Nice and
Berlin, which all formed a fertile ground for anti-European Union and anti-Islamic attitudes. Rising doubts regarding the authority and stability of the European Union fed into a spreading fear of and discontent with big mainstream parties that liberal governments were not able to ease. The political scientist Thomas Greven argues that
10See Shambaugh, Jay C. "The Euro’s Three Crises." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
(2012): 1-54. Print.
11See Park, Jeanne. "Europe's Migration Crisis." Council on Foreign Relations. Council on Foreign Relations,
n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2017. <http://www.cfr.org/refugees-and-the-displaced/europes-migration-crisis/p32874>.
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in light of the Eurocrisis and the arrival of refugees, populism is working for right-wing radical and extremist parties, and mainstream parties have not been able to develop strategies to effectively counter this populism.12
While Greven relates right-winged extremism to populism, it is crucial for the following discussion to clarify that a populist per definition is “a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people”13 and thus, is not per se tied to a specific—left- or
right-winged—political agenda. The notion of populism has to be understood as a particular way to address and justify a specific political narrative, or, in other words, “a particular style of politics that is intricately related to particular political ideologies.”14
Simply put, populist rhetoric claims to speak in the name of the ordinary people, whoever they may be. Assuming that the majority of a population is homogenous in their class (middle), religion (Christian) and race (White), implies an unwanted group of people on both ends—the superior elite and the inferior other. Greven argues that
Populism’s central and permanent narrative is the juxtaposition of a (corrupt) ´political class´, ´elite´, or ´establishment´, and ´the people´, as whose sole authentic voice the populist party bills itself.15
In this logic, the understanding of elites as social groups characterized by a high amount of economic and/or cultural capital—to argue with Pierre Bourdieu´s concept of different forms of capital16—entails the imagination of an ungraspable superior group within
society that makes decisions over the people´s heads. The suspicious stance towards an ungraspable and undefinable group of people considered as in charge combined with a feeling of impotence towards them resembles certain characteristics of Anti-Semitism. In conjunction with racism, as the assumption of the superiority of one ethnicity over
12Greven, Thomas. "The Rise of Right-wing Populism in Europe and the United States. A Comparative
Perspective." Perspective (2016): n. pag. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, May 2016. Web. 1 Apr. 2017.
13"Populism." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/populism>. 14 Greven, Thomas p.2
15 Greven, Thomas p.0
16Bourdieu, Pierre, Richard Nice, and Tony Bennett. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
11
another, Anti-Semitism further implies the idea that a certain group perceived as consanguine, plots to the detriment of the population perceived as homogenous.17
The conviction that a nation´s business and allegedly characteristic features (be it economic, political, social or cultural) are the highest priority regardless of and in distinction to the other (nation, race, religion, minority) constitutes the core narrative of classic nationalism. This traditional rhetoric is being re-appropriated by current right-winged populism, which builds up on the conception of “us versus them”.18 That such a
conviction plays into the hands of extremists becomes evident considering
(t)he more ethno-centric the conception of the people, the more xenophobic the positioning against ´the other,´ and the clearer the desire to overthrow democratic governance, the more likely it is that a rightwing (sic!) populist party is also extremist.19
While figures such as Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine le Pen or Nigel Farage argue with (mostly) national motivations, in Poland the current party in power adds a religious dimension to their national-conservative programme. As Greven points out, in the conception of Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice, hereafter referred to as PiS)
the Polish people are considered to be homogenous and catholic. Radio Maryja provides symbolic support of this confluence of Catholicism and Polish identity. The ´common people´ are juxtaposed against a ´liberal, cosmopolitan elite´ ready to sell out the country to foreign interests.20
Here nationalism coincides with religion, adding to the idea of religious affiliation to a homogenous society focused on its nation. The danger of such a conviction becomes evident when the party misleadingly named law and justice, openly supported by catholic
17Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Antisemitism. San Diego, NY, London: Harcourt Brace,
1985. Print. p. 84 18 Greven, Thomas p.1 19 Greven, Thomas p.2 20 Greven, Thomas p.3
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clerks of the country, argues in the name of Christian religion to restrict an already strict abortion law, or even aims to manipulate the national constitution21.
Since a consequent maintenance and unambiguousness in programme is not crucial for the success of a populist party, as also pointed out by Greven22, discrepancies in actions
and communications are very common in current right-winged populist politics. What is important for the success of a populist party is not a rational approach to highly difficult issues, but the suggestion of overly simplified plans for dealing with them:
Trump’s promises of easy solutions to complex problems, without any need for compromise or negotiation, are quite obviously only workable in a fantasy world, but they are appealing to a highly disaffected section of the American public, as are his constant challenges of the supposedly hegemonic ´political correctness.´23
Trump´s intrepidity to use simplistic, generalizing and insensitive language24—mirroring
back on his political actions—contrasts what Greven describes as catch-all parties who are in their political debates and policy rather pluralistic, relativizing and rational. Therefore, when the latter try to argue in a populist manner and try “simple solutions” they lose their credibility. 25
Why “simple solutions” to highly complex problems as promised by right-winged populist parties rarely work out and are often contradictory regarding their consequences, can be shown by the following two examples. First, a strong nationalist attitude opposes globalization as the idea of a globalised society in which people, media, capital, technologies and ideologies26 can move unrestrictedly. However, the consequences of a
rigid isolation from global markets would probably destabilize a country´s economy to
21 The Polish constitutional crisis in 2015, deriving from a PiS-initiated change of the court law evoked strong international critique concerning the state of democracy in this country. See for example Cienski, Jan. "Poland’s Constitutional Crisis Goes International." POLITICO. POLITICO, 27 Dec. 2015. Web. 01 Apr. 2017. <http://www.politico.eu/article/poland-constitution-crisis-kaczynski-duda/>.
22 Greven, Thomas, p.1 23 Greven, Thomas p.4 24 To say the least. 25 Greven, Thomas, p.2
26 See Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota, 1996. Print. p.33
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such an extent that the initially pro-nation argumentation would eventually turn against itself.
Another current right-winged populist attitude aims against mainstream media, a phenomenon which should be particularly important for the further discussion of the notion of doublethink. The German term Lügenpresse (lying press)27 has a long history of
usage proclaiming a distrust in media not sharing the opinion of the according political speaker and was for example used in Nazi Germany as a propaganda tool against Jewish, leftist, and foreign press. Proclamations by Trump concerning the alleged incredibility of mainstream press show a strikingly similar rhetoric to his European counterparts. In a recent tweet he states: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”28. By referring
to established Pulitzer-prize winning press as fake news, Trump uses the same anti-media rhetoric as can be found in Germany.
By effectively muzzling officials of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other scientific institutions29, the new American government put unwanted voices in gag orders
while expressing a general distrust in media. As Edward S. Herman states about the danger of the restriction of media freedom: “a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”30 Next to the convey of contradictory positions, or more specifically the
government´s handling of communication and media, is in itself contradictory and hypocritical.
27 See Brauck, Markus, Georg Diez, Alexander Kühn, Martin U. Müller, Ann-Kathrin Nezik, Vanessa Steinmetz, and Spiegel Online. "Lying Press? Germans Lose Faith in the Fourth Estate." SPIEGEL ONLINE. SPIEGEL ONLINE, 24 Feb. 2016. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
28Trump, Donald J. "The FAKE NEWS Media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) Is Not
My Enemy, It Is the Enemy of the American People!" Twitter. Twitter, 17 Feb. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017. 29 See Johnston, Ian. "Donald Trump Stopping US Government Scientists from Speaking out Publicly Is 'chilling'." The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 25 Jan. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
30Madison, James, cited in Herman, Edward S. Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of
14 Post-Truth Politics
One of the most prominent current expressions of right-winged populism is the communication of contradictory positions in terms of content and language which forms the core discussion of this thesis. While populism and ambiguous political rhetoric are definitely not a new phenomenon, the obviousness in which right-winged populists and nationalists are speaking in contradictions, making false statements and showing an indifference towards facts is frighteningly remarkable and rather new in this extent. While the more and more frequent dissemination of instantaneously refutable assertions is worrisome, the general distrust in media and ignorance towards verifiable information is even more alarming. How can one understand both the process of this current tendency and what distinguishes so-called “alternative facts” and post-truth politics from other forms of populist rhetoric?
Defending Press Secretary Sean Spicer´s false information about the crowd size of the 45th
presidential inauguration on the National Mall, Donald Trump´s counsellor Kellyanne Conway stated in an interview: “Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving—our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that.”31 Conway´s circumscription of Spicer´s false proposition as “alternative
facts”, not only set off an avalanche of outrage, critique and debates on the state of honesty in current politics, but also became a euphemism for spreading false information on part of the current government. Instantly Spicer´s misrepresentation of the crowd size of Trump´s inauguration and shortly after Conway´s defence went viral on multiple media channels, entailing an immediate response by millions of people. A few weeks after coining the term, Conway cited a terrorist attack in the city of Bowling Green, Kentucky, which never took place32, and during a rally in Florida, Donald Trump mentioned a
terrorist incidence the night before his speech in Sweden which did not happen either.33
The coining of the term alternative facts can be seen as a symptom of the popularized notion of post-truth politics in which emotion driven opinions have a stronger impact on
31Conway, Kellyanne in: Blake, Aaron. "Kellyanne Conway Says Donald Trump’s Team Has ‘alternative
Facts.’ Which Pretty Much Says It All." The Washington Post. WP Company, 22 Jan. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
32 See Smith, David. "Kellyanne Conway's Fictitious 'Bowling Green Massacre' Not a One-time Slip of the Tongue." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 06 Feb. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
33 See Topping, Alexandra. "'Sweden, Who Would Believe This?': Trump Cites Non-existent Terror Attack."
15
policy and their communication than evidence supported assertions. Appealing to the emotions of the audience, right-winged populists advance further through the “use (of) negativity in political communication. Tools range from the calculated break of supposed taboos and disrespect of formal and informal rules (e.g., ´political correctness´) to emotional appeals and personal insults.”34
Social media, such as Twitter (preferably used by Trump), constitute a fertile ground for a rapid, wide-arching spread of emotionally charged statements. What per se could be regarded as a virtual representation of manifold opinions, however, became more and more an instrument for shaping respective public opinion.
The term filter bubble, coined by internet activist Eli Pariser, refers to a phenomenon concerning the distribution of information through Google, YouTube, Facebook, and other online platforms. Search history, liked pages and online purchases are collected with algorithms and merged into a profile of the internet user, allowing platforms to react to the predicted needs of the consumer by presenting him or her what he or she is most likely interested in.35 If see only what we want to see, in a unidirectional infinity of
consent, it is no surprise that supporters of the liberal candidate were shocked by the election result. At the other side of the political spectrum, the distrust in major media channels and brands only reinforced previous political worldviews. The mutual accusation of uncritically following ideologies turned social media into a seemingly borderless bull session.
Months before the inauguration of Trump, the Oxford dictionary elected as the 2016 word of the year post-truth, defined as the following: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”36 Justifying their choice, President of Oxford Dictionaries
Casper Grathwohl states:
We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in July when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential
34 Greven, Thomas p.1
35 See Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. London, England: Penguin, 2012. Print.
36 See Grathwohl, Casper. "Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 Is..." Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford Dictionaries, n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
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nomination. Given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time.37
Besides the aspect of post-factuality in contemporary politics, for an examination of the notion of doublethink, and more specifically in order to explain why contradictory or even false statements made by high-ranking politicians are being accepted among a large portion of the population, it is important to depict the extent and consequences of the anti-elite attitude of populism.
Already in the 1960s, Richard Hofstadter described the trajectory of America´s anti-intellectualist tendencies in politics – from Joseph McCarthy to Richard Nixon. As Hofstadter tries to define,
(t)he common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.38
While the value of intelligence is not being questioned, intellect is being understood as “the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind” in which one “examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.”39 While the act of examination, pondering,
wondering and theorizing could be regarded as the smallest common denominator of all academic disciplines, to criticize and imagine is most commonly associated with the tasks of the humanities. Furthermore, Hofstadter points out that the value given inventive skills opposes purely scientific skills for the first are being regarded as beneficial both in terms of the economy and the everyday, while scientific theories are perceived as too far from quotidian concerns.40
Furthermore, quoting Arthur Schlesinger, he states that “Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman,”41 which relation to the aforementioned
37 Ibid.
38Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963. Print. p.7
39 Hofstadter, p.25 40 Hofstadter, p.25
17
characteristic of Anti-Semitism as a perception of Jews to be simultaneously superior and inferior plays into the hands of anti-elitist populists. In relation to current politics, especially in the US, this long-standing resentment of and suspicion towards academics gives one explanation of a reckless undermining of scientific opinion on topics such as vaccination or global warming.
But where does this indifference towards scientific evidence and scepticism towards criticality comes from? Henry G. Frankfurt regards the essence of bullshit as the “lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are,”42 a
concept I will discuss more detailed in the following chapter. Nevertheless, I will anticipate his approach in the context of post-truth politics as he states that:
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of scepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.43
Many scholars, especially philosophers of science, point out that knowledge of any form is always embedded in social and cultural settings. As philosopher Michel Serres illustrates in an interview with Bruno Latour, natural sciences and social sciences must be thought of as co-dependent44. The conception of a social construction of facts questions
the mere possibility of objectivity. In ethnography, for example, it is by now common sense that a photograph can never depict reality, but should be contextualized for any form of analysis.
Even scientific facts are being produced by human actors with their respective social backgrounds, developed in environments dependent on capital, infrastructure and politics. How much science depends on those structures becomes evident when returning to the recent silencing of scientists working on the topic of global warming in the United States.
Although this anti-positivist stance dominating contemporary social sciences criticizes a decontextualized approach to facts, it is incomparable to ignorant attitudes towards scientific outputs on the part of right-winged populists and their followers. In the context
42Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print. p.33/34
43 Frankfurt, p.64
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of scientific research that would entail either a complete relativization of empirical findings and thus play into the hands of deniers of global warming, or result in an unchallenged appropriation of any scientific output for the belief in the possibility of total objectivity. Timothy Williamson summed up in an interview with the Irish Times that:
Obviously it wasn’t mainly postmodernism or relativism that won it for Trump, indeed those philosophical views are presumably more widespread amongst his liberal opponents than amongst his supporters, perhaps most of whom have never heard of them. Still, those who think it somehow intolerant to classify beliefs as true or false should be aware that they are making it easier for people like Trump, by providing them with a kind of smokescreen.45
This hostile stance towards critical minds and scientists in general can be partially explained by Bruno Latour´s approach to the question: Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?46. As a philosopher, sociologist of science, and self-declared witness of the
invention of science studies, his apologetic gesture in the face of post-factual politics and extremists (ab)using the understanding of social constructivism of (scientific) facts already suggests a weighty misconception:
And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.47
What he describes in his essay is what I would call the double bind of truth. While it is important to be aware that facts have been formulated by human actors and thus imply a social and/or culture dimension, also known as an anti-positivist stance, a rejection of scientific evidence can entail fatal consequences. The rise of the abuse of an anti-positivist position by right-winged populists who may deny global warming or stop vaccinating children, justifies Latour´s concern.
45Humphreys, Joe. "Unthinkable: How Do We ‘know’ Anything?" The Irish Times. The Irish Times, 06 Mar.
2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
46 Latour. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." Critical
Inquiry 30.2 (2004). Web.
19
While the critic positions him or herself above what he or she perceives as the “naïve believer” by allegedly debunking the objects of belief, he or she, him- or herself becomes the victim of his or her conviction to be right: “Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right!”48
Subsequently, both parties accuse each other of being wrong or illusive while simultaneously being offended by the disparagement of the objects they believe in. Returning to the question why critique ran out of steam and how anti-intellectualism can be explained, Latour states:
Is it so surprising, after all, that (…) the humanities have lost the hearts of their fellow citizens, that they had to retreat year after year, entrenching themselves always further in the narrow barracks left to them by more and more stingy deans? The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert. One thing is clear, not one of us readers would like to see our own most cherished objects treated in this way.49
In other words—no one, not even the self-critical intellectual, likes to be deprived of the objects they believe in. In conjunction with general suspicion and a hostile stance on the part of populists towards elites, which academics are viewed to be, it is not surprising that a general distrust in the outcomes of science and the humanities could have emerged and that “the humanities and social sciences are peripheral at the top,”50 as Spivak states.
An attempt to solve this mess will be elaborated in chapters three and four, therefore I would like to proceed with the discussion on the language of populism and more specifically, the Orwellian notion of doublethink.
48 Ibid, p.239
49 Latour, p.239/240 50 Spivak, p.2
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2. Doublethink in Nineteen-Eighty Four and 2017
The mixture of attempted censorship, as mentioned in the previous section, the dissemination of false information, and the usage of highly ambiguous language and Conway´s expression of a stance of insignificance towards facts bears a striking resemblance to Orwell´s depiction of a dystopian future—explaining how a novel first published in the late 1940s suddenly became a bestseller again.
Orwell illustrates in his novel Nineteen-Eighty Four a totalitarian regime in which the population is being manipulated to believe in obviously contradictory statements. With everyone under permanent surveillance, the Party has total control over all flows of information, making sure that nobody deviates in thought from what is being promoted as the truth.
Throughout his novel, Orwell coined the term doublethink, which can be explained by the following passage—to which I will return to at several points in this thesis—from the story´s protagonist Winston Smith’s diary:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.51
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At first glance, some recent claims made by current right-winged populists show a striking resemblance to what Orwell describes as doublethink. Trump´s assertion during a rally a few weeks after his inauguration in Florida that: “We are here today to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” and further aiming at the media as constantly disseminating lies52, relates to Orwell´s description of the capacity to be conscious of
truthfulness while simultaneously lying. Trump tries to cover unwanted information, blames the media for a misrepresentation of facts, and accuses them of lying while spreading false information on a regular basis himself.
Regardless of the actual number of people who attended his inauguration, or how strict the vetting of immigrants to the US already is, the flexibility and ambiguity of the implementation of facts is important for the understanding of the uncanny resemblance to the dystopia of Nineteen-Eighty Four. Edward S. Herman states in his approach to hypocritical claims by American politicians until the late 1980s that “(t)he large, indeed widening, gap between elite aims and practice and the needs and interests of the underlying population also requires the constant application and refinement of doublespeak.”53 While Orwell does not use the term doublespeak in his famous novel, it
can be regarded as an acronym of doublethink and his notion of newspeak which refers to the propaganda tool of the fictive totalitarian regime.
Herman´s statement illustrates the conjunction between populism and doublethink which forms the baseline of the further discussion. In the following section I will thus approach the notion of doublethink in relation its current linguistic manifestations.
The Notion of Doublethink
With the notion of doublethink one can theoretically understand the belief and communication of contradictory positions as if they would not exclude each other, but I want to look closer at how doublethink works in practice.
52 Trump, Donald in Gardenswartz, Jacob. "Transcript: President Donald Trump's Rally in Melbourne, Florida." Vox. Vox, 18 Feb. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
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In his essay On Bullshit, philosopher Henry G. Frankfurt approaches a definition of the notion of bullshit in communication. Mostly used as a pejorative term in everyday language, the perception of bullshit evokes associations with deception and can thus be conflated with lying. However, as he meticulously points out, the act of lying requires the speaker´s awareness of a truth he or she means to misrepresent.54 In other words, one
cannot lie without knowing what one actually believes to be truth. Therefore, a liar is concerned with what Frankfurt refers to as the authority of truth55, but rejects it.
Bullshitting, on the other hand, is less motivated by the communication of lies than to “convey a certain impression of (one)self.”56 Thus, lying can be regarded as a possible
aspect of bullshitting, but not a necessary requirement for it. The following statement by Trump before his inauguration demonstrates quite well what Frankfurt means:
We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars. All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.57
In retrospect, the only aspect of his statement which turned out to be closest to a truth is that for many people including Trump himself the turnout of his inauguration was indeed unbelievable. What is important here to understand the mechanisms of bullshit is that Trump´s intention was not concerned with telling either a truth or a lie, but to convey a certain impression of himself and the promotion of an event.
Frankfurst uses a conversation between Fania Pascal and Ludwig Wittgenstein as an example to show how a form of bullshit differs from lying. In a letter, Pascal expresses her frustration about Ludwig Wittgenstein´s question of how she could possibly know how “a dog that has been run over”58 in reaction to her metaphorical description of her
well-being. Her only intention in making this impossible comparison was to communicate how badly she was feeling, regardless of the truth content: “Her fault is not that she fails
54 Frankfurt, p.15
55 Ibid., p.61 56 Ibid., p.18
57Trump, Donald in: Healy, Patrick. "Donald Trump Says He's Not Surprised by Meryl Streep's Golden
Globes Speech." The New York Times. The New York Times, 09 Jan. 2017. Web. 01 Apr. 2017. 58 Pascal, Fania in :Frankfurt, p.24
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to get things right, but that she is not even trying.”59 This rather innocent example
illustrates how easily one can make obviously false statements without jeopardizing one´s credibility. Nevertheless, as Frankfurt points out, bullshit implies a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are,”60 which becomes more
significant if the misrepresented truth concerns speculations not about animal´s emotions but about serious political, social, or environmental issues.
In addition to an indifferent stance towards truth, Frankfurt states that a bullshitting person´s
focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well.61
In relation to Orwell´s description of forgetting what is necessary and remembering what suits the purpose, Frankfurt´s definition of bullshit applies to the notion of doublethink. I would argue, however, that the latter is a specific form of bullshitting, because of its inherent contradictory dimension. In this regard, doublethink is more than lying and adds another layer to bullshit. A doublethinker is not concerned about transferring a truth, he or she rather wants the addressed make believing in the conveyed message while simultaneously getting away with something62. He or she can creatively fake the context
of the said as well, and - most specifically – can thus even communicate contradictions. Let me illustrate those characteristics of doublethink with another statement Trump made about his opinion of gay marriage:
It's like in golf. A lot of people—I don't want this to sound trivial—but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It's weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.63
59 Frankfurt, p.32
60 Frankfurt, p.33/34 61 Frankfurt, p.52 62 Frankfurt, p.56
63 Trump, Donald in: "30 of Donald Trump's Wildest Quotes." CBS News. CBS Interactive, 21 Mar. 2016. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
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First of all, he decontextualizes the question about a stance towards gay rights by relating it to sports equipment he dislikes. Of course preferences in practicing golf have nothing to do with rights of LGBTQ people, demonstrating Trump´s creative approach of inventing context. Secondly, by simultaneously stating that he has many gay friends but is a traditionalist, and ergo not in favour of gay-rights, he does not only avoid making a clear statement on the issue but also communicates a contradiction. This example might demonstrate what Orwell describes as the “ultimate subtlety” of doublethink—the both conscious and unconscious lingual obfuscation for the sake of maintaining the pretence of credibility.
Another example of doublethink rhetoric derives from AfD chairman André Poggenburg: Governments first have to guarantee human rights for their citizens – that´s what they have been elected for after all! However, above all they cannot jeopardize those human rights by guaranteeing dignity, freedom and integrity of strangers at the expense of the security of the own population. 64
The clear misconception of human rights in this statement makes it an exemplary and severe case of doublethink. Needless to say human rights are potentially jeopardized by the implementation of such a conception.
64Translated by the author: „Regierungen haben zuerst die Menschenrechte ihrer Staatsangehörigen
sicherzustellen – dafür wurden sie schließlich auch gewählt! Vor allem aber haben sie diese
Menschenrechte nicht zu gefährden, indem sie Würde, Freiheit und Unversehrtheit von Fremden auf Kosten der Sicherheit des eigenen Volkes garantieren!“, in:
Poggenburg, André: „Ungarn Sichert Mit Containerdörfern Die Menschenrechte Seiner Bürger." Alternative
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3. How to Deal with Double Binds?
Literary theorist and philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak significantly influenced postcolonial theory over the past decades. Most known for coining the notion of the subaltern, as the silenced position of the global-southern marginalized, her work focusses on the question of how contemporary scholars can overcome (or undo) the supremacy of the West in academia.
Born in India, she became the first non-white female professor at the Columbia University in New York and earned her early academic reputation through her translation of Jacques Derrida´s De la grammatologie. Being strongly influenced by his work and her previous professor Paul de Man, her work builds upon the tradition of Poststructuralism and Postmodern Philosophy.65 Derrida´s trademark deconstructive writing style especially
affected hers, partially accounting for a rather challenging reading of her work.
Accepting the challenge of working with her concepts, even at the risk of remaining at the surface of her far-reaching theories, I chose one of her latest writings An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization as the basis of my discussion. As she both addresses power gaps between the hegemonic West and the marginalized Global South and attempts to find new ways of making use of the Western heritage of the Enlightenment facing this asymmetry, I regard her theories as highly productive for the development of strategies to resist right-winged populism.
Reading the news in the end of January 2017, I stumbled upon the Orwellian definition of doublethink right underneath a headline concerning the crowd size incident shortly after Trump´s inauguration. Having in mind Spivak´s ab-use66 of Gregory Bateson´s notion of
the double bind, I instantly saw a relation between the two notions. Getting ahead of myself, both to doublethink and the maintenance of a double bind seemed congruent at first glance. How is it possible, I asked myself, that Spivak suggests the endurance of
65See "Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty." Postcolonial Studies. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2017.
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double binds67 as a necessity to rethink the legacy of Enlightenment in the era of
globalization, while the act of thinking contradictory positions and accepting both of them fuels the engines of blazing right-winged populism?
In order to clarify what is meant by the notion of double bind, I suggest first looking at its definition. According to Oxford Dictionaries, double bind means: “A situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action.”68 Merriam-Webster defines the notion as “a psychological
predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made; broadly: dilemma.”69 “Two irreconcilable
demands” and the reception of “conflicting messages” deriving from one source implies that a double bind´s basic requirement is the communication of a contradiction. Therefore, a double bind situation is based on a dichotomy. However, while the latter means “(a) division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different,”70 a double bind necessarily implies that what is being
conveyed is conflicting and thus contradictory. Moreover, as both definitions imply, in a double bind situation a person is being confronted with an impossible demand. The contradictory imperative puts the individual in a distressed situation—no matter how one chooses, one will regret the decision. In this respect, to withstand a double bind requires a significantly greater force of resistance than simply dealing with a dichotomy.
“When and as we decide, we know therefore that we have broken the double bind into a single bind, as it were, and we also know that change will have to be undertaken soon, or, things will change: task or event.”71 The conditional wording illustrates the subsequent
impact in the case of resolving a double bind. Spivak uses the notion as a productive tool to approach what she regards as “contradictory instructions” with which we as scholars from the humanities and social sciences are constantly confronted.
Being trained in disciplines of both the humanities and social sciences, I can relate strongly to her observation. One of the strongest double binds I have been confronted with
67 Pre-empting the notion of double bind and its relevant contextualization at this point before framing and defining it, I see in accordance with Spivak´s way of writing which she refers to as diffraction. Focussing on her work it became incredibly difficult to write about her ideas in any chronological, not erratic way. 68 "Double Bind." Oxford Dictionaries.Web. 1 Apr. 2017.
69 "Double Bind." Merriam-Webster. Web. 01 Apr. 2017. 70 "Dichotomy." Oxford Dictionaries. Web. 1 Apr. 2017. 71 Spivak, p.10/11
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are the implications of cultural relativism. For example, how to deal with the discourse on female genital mutilation, taking into account the human right of physical integrity and simultaneously keeping in mind the problematic history of Western intervention in other cultures. No matter how one positions oneself, one will feel remorse either way. This double bind is related to what I would suggest as one of the cardinal double binds I approach in this thesis and Spivak discusses in her book: How to maintain the legacy of European Enlightenment while rejecting its foundational elements entailing eurocentrism?
At this point, some of us remind ourselves that the legacy of the European Enlightenment is Doubt. Hope (or lack of hope) and sentimental nationalism (or sentimental postnational globalism) are where much of our world stands now. 72
Her point of departure is the insight that the European Enlightenment as a Western invention inevitably entails notions of nationalism and colonialism and therefore needs to be revalued in an era in which ideologies, people, capital, media and technologies flow globally. She sees the need to develop new methods to teach students how to deal with information, to train “the minds in the interests of the humanities”73 in an era of
digitalization and globalization. In this respect, it is the double bind of local/global which not only forms a focus in her approach to globalization but is also at the heart of the discussion on right-winged populism.
Spivak´s approach is to ab-use the European Enlightenment in a form of sabotage by appropriating useful concepts while rejecting the problematic Eurocentric implications. While the first concept commonly associated with European Enlightenment is the notion of reason, Spivak focusses on the notion of aesthetic, which she seeks to re-appropriate based on Schiller. Picking out concepts she considers as useful in the contemporary context of globalization, and more specifically decolonial thought, she develops new strategies to reinforce the heritage of still-productive aspects of Enlightenment.
72 Spivak, p.1
73 Spivak, in: Harvardupress. "Gayatri Spivak on An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization."
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I would like to propose that the training of the imagination that can teach the subject to play –an aesthetic education—can also teach it to discover (theoretically or practically) the premises of the habit that obliges us to transcendentalize religion and nation74
Spivak´s main approach for the development of an updated training of aesthetic education is based on the notion of imagination. The Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who strongly influenced cultural theory on processes of globalization, points out the crucial role of imagination for the formation of the notion of globalization—both in the global north and the global south.
The image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.75
It is very surprising to me that Spivak does not mention him at any point in her work on the Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. However, compared to her approach of imagination as a training for current and future scholars to deal with double binds inherent in phenomena inherent in the state of globalization, Appadurai regards imagination in the sense of a social practice, as a core characterization of globalization and not necessarily as a method to deal with its implications. Nonetheless, considering imagination as a cultural fact inseparably entwined with processes of globalization, the capability to face the latter derives from within. This said, imagination as a social practice must be understood as a precondition of thinking globally. The contemporaneity of globalization and digitalization demands an approach of simultaneousness in thought which can be acquired through aesthetic thinking, because it enables one to think from a distance and in the here and now.
74 Spivak, p.10
29 Imagination and the Aesthetic Dimension
Given the definition of the notion of double bind, the main question is how to deal with contradictory instructions while being aware that any decision will entail regrettable consequences? An ignorant or indifferent stance towards a double bind would mean to doublethink, an act, however, I seek to resist. Hence, there must be a method other than acceptance or decision-making.
As I have pointed out in the section on post-truth politics, an anti-intellectual attitude is not only an explanation for the acceptance of doublethink rhetoric especially in the United States, it also accounts for the difficulty (if not impossibility) of a dialogic debate. Keeping the definition of the notion of intellect in mind, it is to say that imagination can be understood as the basic requirement for critical thinking and creativity.
Taking the risk of pointing out the obvious, I would like to start with a general definition of this term for a better understanding of her theory and my approach. According to the Oxford Dictionaries imagination means “(t)he faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.”76
Spivak pleads for a rearrangement of desires77 from the sphere of beliefs into the practice
of imagination. The German term for imagination, Vorstellung could be literally translated as “putting-in-front”—the depiction of something in front of the inner eye. The process of imagination implies the movement of the imagined object through time and space yet beyond those dimensions. Following this logic, Timothy Morton´s description of consciousness as action in distance appears applicable to imagination as a practice and thus, implies an aesthetic dimension:
Yet isn’t this an elegant definition of the aesthetic dimension? Action at a distance happens all the time if causation is aesthetic. What is called consciousness is action at a distance. Indeed, we could go so far as to say that consciousness-of anything is action at a distance 78
The capability to move a not physically or sensually present object into one´s mind, implies either a form of travel of the object or the very invention of it. Thinking objects which are spatially absent constitutes any form of consciousness—as has been shown by
76 "Imagination." Oxford Dictionaries. Web. 1 Apr. 2017. 77 Spivak, p.2 and p.10
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Morton´s definition. In this action-at-distance lies the aesthetic dimension, specifying the aesthetic congruent in the Schiller-Spivak-Morton trajectory.
Returning to Morton´s notion of consciousness as action at distance, imagination enables the transfer of objects over undefined and thus unlimited distances, or, as Spivak states: “The content is irreducibly absent in Kant's thinking of the transcendental dialectic, and hence my feeling, that ´the ability to think absent things´ is not too far away.”79Action at
distance can thus be regarded as the requirement faculty in Kant´s transcendental dialectics—the balancing between experienced-based knowledge and the going-beyond what can be perceived, which then constitutes the condition for reason.
How then can imagination help us to manage double binds? Spivak mentions Kant´s notion of transcendental deduction, as “the way in which concepts can relate to objects a priori,”80 but points out that since he does not fill the aforementioned in-between, his
concept is not as useful as Schiller´s introduction of the notion of will: “The drive toward form and the drive toward matter ‘cancel each other out, and the will maintains perfect freedom between them.’”81 Being cautious not to fall for either the illusion of free will nor
the complete rejection of this very notion, Spivak suggests to replace the will with the intention of the actor as his or her driving force:
And yet, as I have insisted for a long time, in the field of agency, the fragile instrument of intention drives us. And therefore, it is on the ground of intended versus unintended mistakes that we can differentiate from Schiller.82
The distressing effect a double bind creates derives from what Schiller indicates as the drive towards two oppositional directions—form and matter/life. Let me illustrate this phenomenon by the example of Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles´ installation Volátil, which I had the chance to experience at the Tinguely Museum Basel in 2015.
Entering a dark room covered in talc I was instantly confronted with two sensations: the soft, cloud-like talc caressing my feet and a strong scent of leaking household gas pinching my nose. The smell filling the air of the gloomy environment prompted me to leave the room immediately—a sensory instruction becoming unbearably urgent when I turned
79 Spivak, p.17
80 Kant, Immanuel in Spivak, p.19 81 Schiller, Friedrich in Spivak, p.19 82 Spivak, p.20
31 1. Volátil 1980–1994, Cildo Meireles
towards the end of the U-shaped room where I encountered a burning candle. I found myself trapped in an impossible situation in which my trained mind alarmed me intrusively while my perception suggested that I´m not in danger. This impossible simultaneousness of being required a mental balance act only possible through the artwork´s playful disarming of a usually fatal combination of matter and experience. Jean-François Lyotard approaches the complexity of an artwork—just as Volátil´s evoking distortion of the real with the imagined – as a form of intensification:
The artist attempts combinations allowing the event. The art-lover does not experience a simple pleasure, or derive some ethical benefit from his contact with art, but expects an intensification of his conceptual and emotional capacity, an ambivalent enjoyment. Intensity is associated with ontological dislocation. The art object no longer bends itself to models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unrepresentable”83
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It is this unrepresentable presentation which constitutes the confrontation with an impossible simultaneity which could never happen in this form outside of an artwork. While Lyotard describes this mechanism, he does not explain here how this effect can be created.
Play
As Spivak already states in her introduction, double binds are not a method one can apply, rather their potential must be achieved by playing them.84 But what does play mean in
this context? Before I am going to discuss Schiller´s notion of the play-instinct on which Spivak is basing her argumentation, I suggest introducing the theory of play by one of the most influential thinkers in this field—Johann Huizinga.
Strongly simplified, his argument in his most notable work is that play forms the basic characteristic of culture, and can thus be regarded as the activity that makes us human, or, as the title of his work already implies: Homo Ludens. Huizinga defines five necessary characteristics of play: First, since it is being executed voluntarily (excepting rites and ceremonies) and never a necessary task, it is a form of freedom. The second characteristic of play is the requirement to step outside of the ordinary, “real” life “into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.”85 Therefore—as point three—play
differs temporally and specially from the everyday life. It is being “played-out” in accordance to a specific chronology—it has a starting and ending point but must be repeatable at any given time.86 Furthermore, it requires a set space: “All play moves and
has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.”87 The fourth characteristic of play is that it demands
“absolute” and “supreme” order88 and thus playing requires one to follow its own rules.
An example would bethe outrage of football fans when players happen to break any of the game´s meticulously observed rules. The last requirement Huizinga proposes is the aspect
84 Spivak, p. IX
85 Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Print. p.8
86 Huizinga, p.9
87 Huizinga, p.10, This specific aspect I will pick up later on, discussing the space in-between a double bind. 88 Ibid.
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of non-profit in play.89 This means that it is specifically not the goal to economically profit
from it, in fact the play is being executed for its own sake.
While Huizinga defines the act of playing, Schiller contextualizes play as an instinct inseparably connected to the aesthetic:
Beauty, as the consummation of humanity, can neither be exclusively mere life (…) (n)or can beauty be merely form; it is rather the common object of both impulses, that is, of the play instinct.90
For him the “sensuous instinct” makes physically perceivable matter—or in his words “Life”—its object while the “formal instinct” deals with “all formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the thinking powers.”91 The play-instinct can be regarded as
the hybrid of the sensuous and the formal instinct whose object is the “living form” and thus beauty.92 Since, as Huizinga argues, play is not matter yet exists not only in the human
mind (animals play as well), it can be regarded as something a priori to humanity.93 The
a priori nature of play, which transcends the human mind and matter, could support the idea that play might be the missing content of Kant´s transcendental deduction—arguing in favour of both Schiller´s and Spivak´s suggestion.
Returning to the installation Volátil, Meireles triggers the play-instinct of the spectator by creating a contradictory living form—the (usually) impossible simultaneous coexistence of the smell of gas and a burning candle—unifying the sensuous instinct of olfactory and visual with the formal instinct of its particular meaning gained through experience-based knowledge.
As the mind in the intuition of the beautiful finds itself in a happy medium between law and necessity, it is, because it divides itself between both, emancipated from the pressure of both.94
89 Huizinga, p.13
90 Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967. Print. p.19 91 Schiller, p.19
92 Ibid.
93 Huizinga, p.3/4 94 Schiller, p.19
