Something missing is missing
Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature
In short, this is an exploration of what goes missing when one looks for meaning. And although this in many ways is not a book that is as such obsessed with clarification, an initial one might be in place. Namely, the interrelation of nihilism, nothingness and meaninglessness that forms my point of departure. There are many definitions of what nihilism is or can be, and a vast literature exploring different angles and conceptualizations of the notion.1 Although he neither coined the term nor was alone in depicting it, it is likely to be the work of Friedrich Nietzsche that first comes to mind when hearing about nihilism. The specter of nihilism for Nietzsche had risen through a decline of values, an enervation of the will. Nietzsche’s solution was to accelerate this condition through an active or radical nihilism, as opposed to a passive form of nihilism, in order to create new values.2 As read by Deleuze, passive nihilism may be seen as “a world without values”, whereas its opposite radical nihilism is a situation of “values without a world”.3
On a descriptive level, this book departs from characters most closely resembling the former, with sentiments often aligning with the character Pechorin in the Lermontov novel A Hero of Our Time; one that is likely to have inspired Nietszche in his writings on nihilism.4 The novel presents context and situations full of action but where, for those partaking in this reality, nothing is perceived as happening. In the words of Bulent Diken, “a constellation in which nothing is held absolute and everything is subjected to critique”.5 In the pages to come, we are thus not dealing with the kind of political activism that for instance surrounded the Russian nihilist movements of the 1860s6, but rather with displays of nihilist sentiments. For that reason, I therefore follow Simon Critchley, via Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett, in seeing nihilism here as a crisis of meaning and distrust in endpoints.7
There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world, one perceived consequence of this being that people increasingly turn against both society and political establishments with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. As such, despite the fact that encounters with meaninglessness, nihilism and nothingness are often seen as troubling there is reason not to be blind towards the presence and actual consequences of meaninglessness, and to turn away from seeing these phenomena or notions only as troubling but also as factual realities. The “hedonistic nihilism” noted by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism is revealing in this context: a world where imagining political alternatives becomes increasingly difficult and action therefore comes to seem pointless.8 In many ways, the present book departs from this type of situation and seeks to depict from within. As such, it is a book that gravitates towards nothing. It does not do so through a standard linear narrative (that would betray its contents) but through interwoven snapshots, scenes and fabulations.
Stanley Rosen has argued that nihilism is primarily a theoretical and only secondarily a practical or cultural phenomen.9 The question is then, how we may approach instances in which nihilism, nothingness and meaninglessness do in fact exist as components of social life. Social sciences are typically centered on conveying some form of coherence and meaningfulness10 and as a consequence, nothingness and pointlessness may easily come to stand forth as a challenge. Hence, a form of radical nihilism will perhaps make itself present now and again, mainly in the shape of invitations to consider radical alternatives on the level of theory, analysis and writing, paraphrasing respectively Ghassan Hage and Joao Biehl either as forms of radical imagination or as alternative figures of thought.11 Lisa Stevenson, in Life Beside Itself, has called for seeing what cannot be clearly understood as a legitimate ethnographic object, and for being attentive to moments when facts falter in the shadows of discursive certainties. Her method of doing so is aiming at an imagistic rather than a discursive way of knowing, one that is suggestive rather than fully decoded.12 A principle similar to what Michael Taussig terms the imaginative logic of discovery.13 In the following pages, some is fiction and some is not, and I do not pinpoint which is what. Some of the fictitious parts of the book were conceived (or imagined) by me, but most are the product of conversations with some of the people who appear in the book, forms of collaborative imagination. Moreover, the different sections jump between points in time and make no mention of specific geographical locations. As such, this is both an anthropological monograph and a piece of experimental ethnographic fiction14, one that blends ethnographic fieldwork, observations and writings with various literary devices. Using this approach is not because the ethnographic material cannot say enough in and of itself, but because literature, film, imagination and fiction were part and parcel of the field.
“The world is all too easily stuffed with meaning”, writes Simon Critchley.15 From herein, I hope that will not be the case.16