might be capable of philosophy. That we might be capable of it, together—together with our friends.
Didn’t he have friends once?, W. says. I drove them away, of course. They ran away in horror. What is W. doing?, they wondered. They wrote him emails. Didn’t he realise he was ruining his reputation ?
Ah, why does he hang out with me?, W. says. It’s not as if he has no options. He chooses to hang out with me, that’s the thing. It’s his choice—or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct?
Either way, he remains in my labyrinth, W. says. His fear: he’ll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until he’s forgotten he’s in a labyrinth. I’m becoming his world, says W. His whole world, and isn’t that the horror?
He’s like an actor who’s forgotten he’s acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that’s it, isn’t it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …
We need a realitätpunkt , W. says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But the only thing of which he can be certain is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.
Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?
What’s happened to them now, his friends?, W. says. They’re scattered to the four winds, he says. They’re fighting their own battles against redundancy, as he is fighting his. And they’re applying, like him, for the tiny number of jobs which appear in the newspapers.
Crowd rats into smaller and smaller spaces, and they turn on one another, devouring one another, W. says, as we pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs. That’s what’ll happen to us, and to our friends, he says. We’ll turn on one another, devouring one another …
It’s the opposite of everything W.’s hoped for. He dreamed we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all, with all our friends; and that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamed we’d mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs …
We speak of thinker-collectives over our pints in The Turf . Of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling dancing round their freedom tree. Of Novalis and the Schlegels, practicing their symphilosophical collaboration on the streets of Jena. We speak of Marx, Engels and other revolutionary émigrés, on the run from the police of continental Europe, holed up in London after the failed revolutions of 1848.
And we speak, coming to the twentieth century, of artistic avant-gardes, of Surrealism and the Situationists, with their manifestos and expulsions. Who was more fierce than André Breton? Who, more demanding than Guy Debord? Antonin Artaud ate too loudly—expel him from the group! Asger Jörn kept picking his nose—excommunicate him at once!
Rules: that’s what we need, W. says. We need to be constrained. We need a prime mover . We need a mastermind to crack the whip.—‘Lapdogs’, he’ll shout. ‘Lackeys!’
And if we can find no leader to impose discipline on us, we must impose it on ourselves, W. says. We must become each other’s intellectual conscience. We must become each other’s leader, and each other’s follower.
W. speaks of the liberating constraint sought by the members of OULIPO—Perec, Roubaud and the rest—with their famous rules, which they use to compose literary works. Palindromes, lipograms, acrostics and all that … OULIPO’s work is collaborative , that’s the point, W. says. Its products are attributed to the group.
Didn’t Queneau call Oulipians
Didn’t he have friends once?, W. says. I drove them away, of course. They ran away in horror. What is W. doing?, they wondered. They wrote him emails. Didn’t he realise he was ruining his reputation ?
Ah, why does he hang out with me?, W. says. It’s not as if he has no options. He chooses to hang out with me, that’s the thing. It’s his choice—or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct?
Either way, he remains in my labyrinth, W. says. His fear: he’ll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until he’s forgotten he’s in a labyrinth. I’m becoming his world, says W. His whole world, and isn’t that the horror?
He’s like an actor who’s forgotten he’s acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that’s it, isn’t it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …
We need a realitätpunkt , W. says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But the only thing of which he can be certain is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.
Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?
What’s happened to them now, his friends?, W. says. They’re scattered to the four winds, he says. They’re fighting their own battles against redundancy, as he is fighting his. And they’re applying, like him, for the tiny number of jobs which appear in the newspapers.
Crowd rats into smaller and smaller spaces, and they turn on one another, devouring one another, W. says, as we pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs. That’s what’ll happen to us, and to our friends, he says. We’ll turn on one another, devouring one another …
It’s the opposite of everything W.’s hoped for. He dreamed we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all, with all our friends; and that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamed we’d mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs …
We speak of thinker-collectives over our pints in The Turf . Of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling dancing round their freedom tree. Of Novalis and the Schlegels, practicing their symphilosophical collaboration on the streets of Jena. We speak of Marx, Engels and other revolutionary émigrés, on the run from the police of continental Europe, holed up in London after the failed revolutions of 1848.
And we speak, coming to the twentieth century, of artistic avant-gardes, of Surrealism and the Situationists, with their manifestos and expulsions. Who was more fierce than André Breton? Who, more demanding than Guy Debord? Antonin Artaud ate too loudly—expel him from the group! Asger Jörn kept picking his nose—excommunicate him at once!
Rules: that’s what we need, W. says. We need to be constrained. We need a prime mover . We need a mastermind to crack the whip.—‘Lapdogs’, he’ll shout. ‘Lackeys!’
And if we can find no leader to impose discipline on us, we must impose it on ourselves, W. says. We must become each other’s intellectual conscience. We must become each other’s leader, and each other’s follower.
W. speaks of the liberating constraint sought by the members of OULIPO—Perec, Roubaud and the rest—with their famous rules, which they use to compose literary works. Palindromes, lipograms, acrostics and all that … OULIPO’s work is collaborative , that’s the point, W. says. Its products are attributed to the group.
Didn’t Queneau call Oulipians
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