Why "Why" is a Silly, Dangerous Question

The question why inspires reverence. It's considered to be the very stuff of great minds, of curiosity, of what drives us to know more. But it seems to me not just a silly question but a dangerous one. 
 
Why assumes that there is motivation that lurks behind experience, within the heart of the phenomenon, that drives it and explains it. Why assumes the great prejudice of Judeo-Christianity, that there is a soul that lurks within our bodies, a driver that steers action. Experience, it seems, is never enough. We always have to add something else, something outside of experience — as if life needed any justification other than itself. 

Why assumes a cause. But life has no cause; life happens. Cause and affect is a local relationship that we use for practical purposes. On a cosmic scale, there is no cause, there's just happening, allatonceness, a network of effects.

As Foucault argues so elegantly, this why that we imagine lurking behind action birthed police interrogation, the infinite probe of what's in our minds. Yes, you killed someone but why? You must tell us! We must study you! Forever! (After all, the soul is infinite so our interrogation must be infinite.) Why is the justification for the infinite abuse of prisoners.

 

But even from a local empirical perspective, why is the wrong question. Think of the absurdity of asking why when I spin a bucket of water, the water doesn’t fall out. To say it's centrifugal force is not to say anything at all. It’s to offer a tautology (pace Nietzsche). We spin a bucket; the water stays put; we say there’s a force. It’s hilarious and absurd.

To ask why of empirical events leads to an infinite regress  — Why does the water stay put? Why is there centrifugal force? Why is there gravity? Why are there bodies? It’s why ad infinitum until we finally say, Well, uh, God. God is why. Stop asking.  God: a primal mover that puts an end to the inquiry. This is the ideology of why: it is the nihilism of belief in God, of something outside of everything that explains everything — as if nothing could explain all this. 

Colloquially, we use why when we mean how. I say to my friend, You're being silly. She furrows her brow and asks: Why? And the pedantic schmuck that I am, I reply, I have no idea but I can tell you in what way you're being silly.  

Or we ask something like, Why does an elephant have a trunk? And then we explain how elephants use their trunk to their advantage. This doesn't answer the question why because to ask why an elephant has a trunk is downright absurd. If it didn't have a trunk, it wouldn't be an elephant. Duh. But by using why rather than how or in what way, we suggest that evolution is actually not random, that there's motivation and reason within the arbitrary generation of species. To ask why an elephant has a trunk is to put God back into evolution and efface Darwin completely.

Why is nihilistic. It looks backwards, away from events, from what's happening, away from life. Why wants to remove all this silly life to get at some truth. Which is why — that is to say, how or in what way — why is so dangerous, so violent: it tears at life itself, seeks to efface it, erase it, debase it.  

Life happens. There is no alternative. Elephants have trunks; there's no reason to it. It's just the way it is. There may be possible worlds, possible lives, things that might have happened had you gone there, done this, kissed her (or not). But to seek an alternative to life, to try to brush it away to get at something better is to miss life all together. The trick is not to ask why but to enjoy what's happening right now. Who cares why you did it (whatever it is)? If you want to do it again, do it again. If you don't want to do it again, don't do it again. Asking why will only bury you deeper in a pit of misery.  You are what you do, not why you do it (pace Nietzsche).

So much of Western philosophy has been driven by one question: Why is there something rather than nothing? That is a nihilist's question. It begins with the assumption that there is such a thing as nothing. But there is no nothing. The world is filled to the brim, always and necessarily. There are no blank spaces. And, more importantly, there is nothing else, no other way that it could have been.

And no other way that it should have been. Should is partner to why, wishing life to be other than it is. Our crappy religions and silly moralities proffer what should be — which has us doubt our lives, judge our lives, compare our lives to something that is not. But all there is is all this.

The philosopher's question should not be Why is there something rather than nothing? but How is there this (and not that)? That question begins with life and life's most generative function: differentiation. This is a question that doesn't ask why, doesn't probe under and behind life, doesn't look backwards. This is a question that looks at life actually happening, wishes it no other way, and then makes sense of how difference comes to be, how something declares itself this!  

Of course, the wise one — rarely the philosopher — doesn't ask any questions at all.  

What I Learn From Playing Music, Especially Because I Suck

I've been playing guitar since I was 16 when I borrowed a friend's and taught myself the chords to CSNY's "Teach Your Children." Since then, my frequency of playing has fluctuated from not touching a guitar for years to playing every day for months.

In any case, I suck. Really. That's not humility or modesty. It's reality. I am a bad guitar player. I can play the chords; I can wail a blues solo for hours (much to the chagrin of those around me). But I just don't have musical sense. I can't tell if a note goes up or down. I'm not sure if that means I'm tone deaf but I do know I couldn’t carry a tune if my life depended on it. My rhythm is, uh, not terribly rhythmic. Or is it terribly rhythmic? Anyway, I have a poor sense of rhythm, to say the least. 

I pick up my guitar and I play the same damn lick or I strum some (in my mind) Neil Youngish or Pixie-ish surf chords. Usually after that, I don't know what to do. I don't know what the guitar wants from me. I can't hear it and it can't hear me. It's pretty much how I feel when I'm in Paris (which is not very often). I know enough to sound like a moron; I understand less; and once the conversation goes past the preliminary greetings and, perhaps, one carefully construed insight, I'm at a loss. I'm not even conversant in guitar.

But unlike French, I can't learn the language of guitar by playing more. The fact is I hit a wall and it becomes a strange, unwieldy thing in my hands rather than an instrument. Still, I find my reckoning with the guitar, with making music, a constant education  — and not just about the guitar.

There are times, usually when I'm feeling loose and good (ahem), that I begin writing these little ditties. I'll feel a certain inspiration and some lick comes out of me (writing that here, I am suddenly quite taken with this word, lick — a reaching taste, tongue taking in a moment of the world). But even in these inspired moments, I hit that same wall. I don't know what to do next.

But it's not because there's a lack of things to do. The canvas is not blank. It's chock full, filled to the brim. I could do this Steven Stills thing; that VU type thingy; move into that down strum, two string new wave kinda thingy; bang away either punky or Sabbathy. 

As Deleuze says in his great book on Francis Bacon, the artist doesn't come to a blank canvas. He comes to a canvas overflowing with the already done, with cliché. The artist's job is not to create something from nothing; it's to create something new from the old. It's to slice away, take away, tear away as much as it is to add.  

I see the sign on the music store wall in "Wayne's World": No Stairway to Heaven. Because picking up a guitar, our instinct — or my instinct, at least — is to become Jimmy Page, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Marr. It's to be the rock star, the punk rocker, the folk hero. It's to be someone else, to be what's already been — and to sound just like him or, you know, more soulful. This is one of the great lessons of playing an instrument, something you learn in your very fiber as you play: cliché looms, cliché abounds, waiting for us all at every turn. (Not that this is all bad. There is something beautiful, even educational, about feeling like Jimmy Page, if only for a fleeting moment.)

So I try to put aside all those pre-packaged licks, those readymade riffs. I take to the fret like a pioneer and begin plucking here, bending there, strumming odd chords. I shift rhythms, change strum patterns, alter volume and speed. I try to break the cliché (without becoming one — after all, breaking form takes many forms that, at this point, are all too tired).  

And where do I end up? In the chaos of noise. I keep noodling, changing, shifting, alternating until whatever coherence there was has long dissipated. This is what drives children and girlfriends away, and quickly. 

It's an incredible experience that puts me face to face with the cosmos. I'm reaching, licking, for sense, for song, and can't find it. It — that elusive musical sense, a song, a score, a piece of music — refuses to come into existence. It's not that I am trying to make form from the formless. It's that I'm trying to steer all these possibilities — these notes and riffs, these songs, these histories from Beethoven to Beck — into some kind of something that won't come. 

And just when I think I have something, just when I feel there might be a there there, I realize I'm playing "Sweet Jane" only syncopated. Damn. 

I can write an ok moment now and again. But I never know what to do with that moment, where to go next, what to do next. I see nothing and I see everything and it's all just a big old jumbled mess.  

And so I try simply to lay it down. To grab onto a riff and repeat it, over and over. I want that delirium of repetition. I want to slip inside the secret beat of life, the cosmic rhythm, and be carried along its currents, grooving for eternity. 

But I can't. I try to repeat the riff. I really do. I tell myself, Just play that same stupid thing over and over. I go two, four, seven measures. And then I come in early or late; I add a beat, an upstroke, an accidental flourish that doesn’t fit. I get flustered, confused. I have no idea where I am anymore. Am I behind? Ahead? I don't know. It's humiliating. 

So I try to take lead. Maybe if I sit on top of the groove, I can ride its wave, pushing and pulling with my mad minor blues scales. And for a moment there, I’m rocking! I’m at the very crest of cosmic becoming! I am the lizard king!  And just as soon as I find it, it’s gone. I flub a note, screw the rhythm, get smothered by the wave.  Once again, humiliation.

But trying to find it, to feel it, to ride it is an education. O, to find that groove of grooves, to slide on in, to be taken in by the pull of the universe itself! To ride that wave! If only I knew how to swim.

To play an instrument is to reckon the cosmos. As you try to make sense, to get in the groove, you come up against the terrible tyranny of cliché on one hand and the terrifying abyss of chaos on the other. It is a humbling education that places your entire body and mind — your very being — in the thick and thin of it.  

Of course, some people move well with music. My friend Eugene crafts crafty songs readily and has been doing so since he was five. No joke. He speaks music; he thinks in music. Me, I think in words. I can parry clichés or embrace them and feel comfortable. This is not to say that I write well; it's only to say that I'm comfortable in the medium, with its way of operating, its set of demands. I can split infinitives, shift voice, make references and feel just fine.

But with music? Oy vey. How do I make my way amidst that torrential team of possibility, that storm of what is, what has been, what can be — all those songs, notes, moods, progressions? Can I catch a groove, if only for a spell? Can I spin the world fantastic, even if only once? How? What do I do? How do I position myself? What is my posture to be?

Even Eugene, that musical whiz, must turn and face the frenzy. Such is the task of life. We live inundated with cliché while chaos looms, relentless and merciless. Such is our fate. This is what we do as we dress, talk, kiss, write. Playing music amplifies the challenge, bringing the lesson to the fore — all the more because I suck.  

A recent track from Eugene's band, Here Are the Facts You Requested. 

Their take on cliché is to incorporate it, play with it, dj it. 

The Ideology of Focus

Emerson's transparent eye, seeing without seer.

Focus, we assume, is a good thing. It is the stuff of the driven, the smart, the aware. We laud it without thinking. Focus! we snap at our kids as they daydream, play with a stray cheerio, babble on about aliens. Often, as we ready and rush for school at some godawful hour of the morning, I'll find my 10 year old son half naked in his room, one pant leg creeping up his calf as he plays with a freshly constructed Lego concoction, Vroom vroom.....bckshssssss....boom. Inevitably, I let the door fly and bark: Focus, dude, focus. 

The assumption of focus pervades. We believe focus is a natural movement of the eye, the lens bending to account for the difference in distance of objects and light. It defines our cameras which proudly offer autofocus. And not only will the camera focus automatically, it will automatically focus on faces.

Focus, like all things, is ideological. It necessitates that one thing be clear, be the center, while the rest blur into periphery. Why do digital cameras focus on faces? Sure, it's what most people photograph. But such is the way of focus: it keeps certain things fixed in view to the detriment of everything else. We privilege faces, the human. This is the very ideology that has lead to the decimation of the planet, the tyranny of the ego. The seemingly innocuous, even useful, autofocus on faces is destroying life itself.

But focus is not just ideological. It enacts the very ideology of ideology. Ideology is the demand of certain elements over others, a focus on this or that thing and the marginalization of other things. Focus, which we ideologically assume to be biological, enacts the hierarchy of a certain kind of knowledge and a certain mode of imperialist oppression.

Focus, for a moment, on your image of focus. The eye is the center to which the world comes, the center from which we observe. The world gathers itself to a point and radiates its energy, its very being, to a single point: the human eye, that conduit to the brain and its so-called intelligence. Or else our two eyes conspire together, like marksmen, to zero in on their target.

Inbound focus
Our image of in focus is a pyramid, a hierarchy. (That's an eye, not a fish.)

Outbound focus
Our two eyes conspire, like marksmen, to zero in on their target and bring into the fold.

We believe focus is so elemental that we find it difficult to imagine not focusing. I remember the first time I saw Andreas Gursky's photographs. I couldn't put my finger on what was so strange about them. And then I realized: there is no focal point. They are not pictures of per se — not pictures of people (portraits) or nature (landscapes). They sprawl, often infinitely in all directions.

What a strange image of a soccer game! Where is the focus? Where is the center?

At some point, absolute focus — focus without center — becomes blur.

Focus is constitutive of humanist ideology that imagines humans at the center of the world, our emotional lives essential, our dominion supreme. This logic of focus — this demand of focus — defines our sense of story. Hollywood (almost) always gives us one figure we that is at the center around which everything else revolves. We focus on Nemo and his terrible plight (he's lost, it seems, and must be found). But then think of Loony Tunes. There is no focal point, no center. It's all in focus at the same time that it's all a blur of motion and mayhem. Which is to say, in Loony Tunes, we don't focus on any one element: we see it all happening, a blur of action. 

This is what we call empiricism: seeing it all, letting it all happen. What we usually do is come to the scene already focused. We see the face, we follow the ball, we root for Nemo. But there are other ways to see.

We can see without focus. This is where the scientist and the mystic meet. At their best, they come to the world unfocused, their eyes not zeroing in. On the contrary, their eyes go wide, go panorama, to take it all in. They resist focusing, resist putting any one thing at the center. A crappy scientist comes to his experiment, comes to the world, already knowing what's going to happen. He comes to the world with focus. The best scientist lets his eyes go slack, yet clear, to see what focus cannot.

And so I imagine a different architecture of vision, one not premised on hierarchy, pyramid, target, one not predicated on focus.  I come back to Emerson's transparent eyeball, an eye that is not the tool of the seer, an eye that is seeing, an eye that is not the center point but moves amidst the endless teem and flow of all things. Forget the seer who stands still to train his eye on his object. See the eye that is transparent, the world moving through it as it takes in the world as part of the world. 

The eye is not the center. Nor does it focus. It moves amidst the fray, part of the fray.

Taking Pictures: on Marc Lafia's Gowanus Showroom Exhibit, #image

Marc Lafia's show, #image, is at the Gowanus Showroom April 4 -20.

On the walls hang large prints of images. Upon closer inspection, we realize that they are screen shots of Tumblr posts, notes and all. Are they photographs? What are we looking at?

Many bristle at the idea that these could be photographs. They imagine the photographer as the master behind the lens, the soul in the machine, the author of a pure creation. So Lafia must be doing something else.  

But what is it to "take a picture"? The expression itself already suggests a posture other than creator: the photographer takes a picture, takes an image that in some sense already exists. He just puts a frame around it — which is not to belittle the act. On the contrary, all we're ever doing is framing and reframing the world. To frame and reframe is to create.

From one angle, Lafia is a realist or even naturalist photographer — only his domain is not Yosemite or the slums. It's the circulation of images through social digital proliferation. His desktop is a viewfinder onto the world of digital images; when he hits control-shift-4, he is opening and closing his shutter. He is taking the picture.

Well, doesn't everyone do that? Can't anyone do that? Yes, of course. We are all photographers, taking images and showing them off to the world — on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. Some of us are, alas, better than others. Just as anyone and everyone can take a picture of Yosemite, some people take nice pictures of Yosemite, more interesting pictures of Yosemite. So it is with Lafia: he is a terribly keen photographer of the natural virtual landscape, giving us the emotionality and beauty and provocation that abounds. This is nothing if not an exceedingly elegant show.

Lafia is not just appropriating images he finds. (How the art world glommed on to that word, appropriation, and never let go. Oy! Appropriation has some value as a figure and function within the socio-political economy, such as when a marginal group takes a word of their oppressor and uses it differently. But in the world of images, it is bereft as all art is necessarily appropriation, a taking up of the world.) He snaps these images in their native habitat so that we see the "notes" that circulate with them. These are not just framed images from the web; these are snapshots of images making their rounds, moving through the world. Just as a nature photographer halts the cheetah's movement as it blazes across the savannah, Lafia halts the image as it streams through the virtual sphere. 

The effect is uncanny, at once familiar and unfamiliar. We look at these and think: Hey, I know this. And then, in the same breath, What the heck is it doing here hanging on this wall? It is this double take that splays the very apparatus, the very function, of photography. This tension is the very movement from everyday-everywhere images to the prescribed practice of what we call photography. Images that make their rounds so unassumingly, unceasingly, are snatched — taken — from their natural environment, blown up, framed and hung in the inevitably white cube of the gallery. Such is photography and that, as much as these images, is what Lafia is displaying. That is what is hung on the wall: photography itself. 

Meanwhile, punctuating your movement through the gallery are transparent plexiglass cubes that house what seem to be paper sculptures but upon closer inspection turn out to be books sawed, cut, (re)framed into elaborate postures and juxtaposed with other books and objects. The cubes are not just tasteful containers: they themselves frame these unbound books, creating a new kind of image.

Books, of course, were the original interweb; the printing press, the pre-digital digital. Books were the way to reproduce the same images — even if just words — and disseminate them in these discrete containers. Then along came the digital and literally blew the covers off the books, undid their binding, sent the images within every which way. (The individual book sculptures are quite elaborate, their content inflecting their arrangement, what they sit with, how they've been framed such as when stills from Antonioni's Blow Up sit with a tennis ball and an apple. Each cube is truly an exhibit unto itself. Follow them and you'll experience an entire history of the image.)

Walking around Gowanus Showroom, I kept thinking that these plexiglass books sculptures were explosions of books, of the printing press, that unloosed their images onto the walls and into the ether. The book is not dead: it's been taken up, reframed, by Tumblr. 

And then you notice on one wall a large, two-frame glass door leading outside. Frames are everywhere, taking images of you, of me, of everything. Beyond the door, you see these incredibly elegant swaths of what turns out to be colored silk, blowing more or less gently in the wind, framing and reframing the trees within the billowing cube. These swaths become digital camera filters à la Instagram or the iPhone. Walk inside the soft cube, and the world outside becomes recast, filtered, framed. This is your iPhone camera only you can walk around and through it.

The image doesn't just hang on the wall, to be looked at when you go to galleries and museums. Images are everywhere, everything, all the time (pace Henri Bergson). Images are social, circulating, morphing, constituting and reconstituting themselves always, relentlessly. Images abound. All is #image.