8th Lecture 2016 »Are you Experienced?«
If you can just get your mind together
Then come on across to me
We'll hold hands an' then we'll watch the sun rise from the bottom of the sea
But first
Are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have
I know, I know
You'll probably scream n' cry
That your little world won't let you go
But who in your measly little world are trying to prove that
You're made out of gold and -a can't be sold
So, are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have
Ah, let me prove it to you
Trumpets and violins, I can hear in the distance
I think they're calling our names
Maybe now you can't hear them, but you will
If you just take hold of my hand
Ah! But are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful...
Jimi Hendrix, 1967
»Against the empty, continuous, quantified, infinite time of vulgar historicism must be set the full, broken, indivisible and perfect time of concrete human experience…«
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, London: Verso, 2007
»Hear My Train A Comin’«
Well, I wait around the train station
Waitin' for that train / Take me home / From this lonesome place
Well, now a while lotta people put me down a lotta changes
My girl had called me a disgrace
Dig / The tears burnin' / Tears burnin' me
Way down in my heart / Well, you know it's too bad, little girl,
it's too bad / Too bad we have to part (have to part)
Dig / Gonna leave this town / Gonna make a whole lotta money
Gonna be big / I’m gonna buy this town / An' put it all in my shoe
Might even give a piece to you / That's what I'm gonna do,
what I'm gonna do »[…] a theory of experience truly intended to posit the problem of origin in a radical way would then have to start beyond this 'first expression' with experience as „still mute so to speak“ – that is, it would have to ask, does a mute experience exist, does an infancy [in-fancy] of experience exist?
And, if it does, what is its relationship to language?«
For Walter Benjamin, the „poverty of experience“ was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin’s complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben’s profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought and art: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious.
»Experience is just this, being born to the presence of sense, a presence itself nascent, and only nascent. Such is the destitution, such the freedom, of experience.«
Jean-Luc Nancy, Birth to Presence, Stanford University Press, 1994
»Freedom Manipulated (by powers, by capital): this could be the title of our Half-century. Thinking freedom should mean: freeing freedom from manipulations, including, first of all, those of thinking. This requires something on the order of revolution, and also a revolution of thinking.
[…]
Existence as its own essence is nothing other than the freedom of beings.«
Jean Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, Stanford University Press, 1993.
»Youth«
Shadows settle on the place, that you left.
Our minds are troubled by the emptiness.
Destroy the middle, it's a waste of time.
From the perfect start to the finish line.
And if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs.
Setting fire to our insides for fun
Collecting names of the lovers that went wrong
The lovers that went wrong.
We are the reckless,
We are the wild youth
Chasing visions of our futures
One day we'll reveal the truth
That one will die before he gets there.
And if you're still bleeding, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of our feelings, they are dead and they are gone.
We're setting fire to our insides for fun.
Collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home,
It was a flood that wrecked this home.
And you caused it,
And you caused it,
And you caused it
Well I've lost it all, I'm just a silhouette,
A lifeless face that you'll soon forget,
My eyes are damp from the words you left,
Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest.
Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest.
And if you're in love, then you are the lucky one,
'Cause most of us are bitter over someone.
Setting fire to our insides for fun,
To distract our hearts from ever missing them.
But I'm forever missing him.
And you caused it,
And you caused it,
And you caused it
Elena Tonra (Daughter), 2013
Notes on Experience
To save a moment of being (or to extend it into infinity) we only have the tool of repetition. To repeat the moment or the row of moments, we need rules, i.e. some kind of choreography or screenplay and a space within the repetition can take place.
The writer Peter Handke said in an interview about his work: "Every sentence must first become physically to become grammatically."
Every sentence is made of repetitions of movements which have been taken out of time into the timeless state. A sheet of paper filled with signs is nothing but a potentially timeless space of movements. With or without me, the signs are fixed beyond time. They might just as well not exist. They exist in an arbitrary state as long as I do not start with my reading. The same it is with me; as long as there is nobody who will read what I am, I will exist in the same state as though I did not exist.
Notes on Analysis of the Objects
With my daily notations, I get the definitions of coordinates and movement, which I need to transfer words into pictures.
I can use coordinates, given within the pictures (photographs, drawings or paintings), to define the breathing of the vowels. In every vowel is the vow included; the promise as well as the oath to stay beneath the law of speaking. Also I can transfer the vowels and the points from vowel to vowel, which are the consonants (put together in syllables), into notes. All these transformations are going back to the movement of the human body.
Experiences with simple structures:
– Walking
– Breathing
– Counting
– Recording
– Recoding
First Day
Second Day
Third Day
Fourth Day
Fifth Day
Sixth Day
Seventh Day
