Stillness

 

The divine is an event of stillness. It lets us listen: ‘The verb myein, “to initiate”, means etymologically, “to close” – notably the eyes but, more importantly, the mouth. At the beginning of the sacred rites, the herald would “command silence” (epitattei ten siopen).’1 We live in a time without consecration. The fundamental verb of our time is not ‘to close’ but to open – ‘the eyes but, more importantly, the mouth’. Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it. Stillness produces nothing. Capitalism therefore dislikes stillness. Information capitalism produces the compulsion of communication.

Stillness sharpens our sense for the higher order, which, however, need not be an order of rule or power. Stillness can be extremely peaceful, even friendly and deeply delightful. A ruling power may be able to silence the subjugated, but an enforced silence is not stillness. Real stillness knows no compulsion. It does not subjugate; it elevates. It does not take away, but gives.

For Cézanne, the task of the painter is to establish silence. The Montagne Sainte-Victoire appears to him as a rising massif of stillness that he must obey. The vertical, the rising, demands stillness. Cézanne creates stillness by withdrawing and becoming no one. He becomes a listener: ‘His only aspiration must be to silence. He must stifle within himself the voices of prejudice, he must forget, always forget, establish silence, be a perfect echo. Then the landscape will inscribe itself on his sensitive tablet.’2

Listening is the religious gesture par excellence. Hölderlin’s Hyperion says:

My whole being stills and listens when the gentle ripple of the breeze plays about my breast. Often, lost in the immensity of blue, I look up into the aether and out into the hallowed sea, and it’s as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of isolation were dissolved in the life of the godhead.

To be one with everything, that is the life of the godhead, that is the heaven of man.

To be one with everything that lives, to return in blissful self-oblivion into the all of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain pinnacle, the place of eternal peace.3

We are no longer familiar with that divine falling silent that elevates us to the life of the godhead, to the heaven of man. Blissful self-oblivion has given way to the excessive self-production of the ego. Digital hypercommunication, unlimited connectedness, does not bring about attachment or a world. Rather, it effects isolation, deepens loneliness. The isolated, worldless, depressive I moves away from that delightful all-embracing unity, that holy mountain pinnacle.

We have abolished all transcendence, all vertical order, that demands stillness. The vertical gives way to the horizontal. Nothing rises. Nothing becomes deeper. Reality is flattened out into information and data streams. Everything sprawls and proliferates. Stillness is a phenomenon of negativity. It is exclusive, whereas noise is the result of permissive, extensive, excessive communication.

Stillness emanates from what is unavailable. What is not available stabilizes and deepens our attention; it brings forth a contemplative gaze. That gaze has the patience needed to see the long-lasting and slow. When everything is available and accessible, attention remains shallow. The gaze does not linger. Like that of a hunter, it wanders.

For Nicolas Malebranche, attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul no longer prays. It produces itself. Extensive communication distracts the soul. Only those activities that resemble prayer go together with stillness. Contemplation, however, is opposed to production. The compulsion of production and communication destroys contemplative immersion.

According to Roland Barthes, photography ‘must be silent’. He does not like ‘blustering photographs’. He holds that, ‘in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes’.4 The punctum, even the truth, of photography reveals itself in silence, when one closes one’s eyes. The information tracked by the studiumis blustering. It imposes itself on our perception. The imagination is set in motion only by silence, by closing our eyes. Barthes quotes Kafka: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.’5Without imagination, there is only pornography. Today, perception itself has something pornographic about it. It has the form of immediate contact, almost of a copulation of image and eye. The erotic takes place when we close our eyes. Only stillness, the imagination, discloses subjectivity’s deep inward spaces of desire:

Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: … to say nothing, to shut my eyes.6

What is so ruinous about digital communication is that it means we no longer have time to close our eyes. The eyes are forced into a ‘continuous voracity’.7 They lose the capacity for stillness, for deep attentiveness. The soul no longer prays.

Noise is a visual as well as an acoustic filth. It pollutes the attention. Michel Serres derives the pollution of the world from the animal’s will to appropriate:

Tigers piss on the edge of their lair. And so do lions and dogs. Like those carnivorous mammals, many animals, our cousins, mark their territory with their harsh, stinking urine or their howling, while others such as finches and nightingales use sweet songs.8

We spit in the soup so that we may have it all to ourselves. The world is polluted not only by excretions and material waste but also by junk communication and information. It is plastered with advertisements. Everything is crying out for attention on a

planet completely covered with garbage and billboards … On each mountain rock, each tree leaf, each agricultural plot of land, you have advertisements; letters are written on each blade of grass … Like the legendary cathedral, the landscape is swallowed by the tsunami of signs.9Non-things block out things, pollute them. Junk information and communication destroy the silent landscape, the discreet language of things:

Imperious images and letters force us to read, while the pleading things of the world are begging our senses for meaning. The latter ask; the former command…. our products already have a meaning, which is flat. They are the easier to perceive because they are less elaborate, similar to waste. Images are the waste of paintings; logos, the waste of writing; ads, the waste of vision; announcements, the residues of music. Forcing themselves on our perception, those low and facile signs clog up the landscape, which itself is more difficult, discreet, silent, and often dying because unseen by any saving perception.10The digital seizure of land produces a lot of noise. The battle for territory gives way to the battle for attention. Appropriation also takes an altogether different form. We incessantly produce information that has to be liked by others. Today’s nightingales do not sing sweet songs in order to chase away others. Rather, they tweet in order to attract others. We do not spit in the soup to prevent others from enjoying it. Rather, our motto is sharing. We now want to share everything with everyone else. The result is a roaring tsunami of information.

Things and territories determine the terrestrial order. They are not noisy. The terrestrial order is still. The digital order is ruled by information. Stillness is alien to information. It contradicts the essence of information. Still information is an oxymoron. Information steals the silence by imposing itself on us and demanding our attention. Stillness is a phenomenon of attentiveness. Stillness is created only by deep attentiveness. Information, however, dissects attention.

According to Nietzsche, in a ‘noble culture’, people do ‘not … react immediately to a stimulus’. Such a culture develops ‘the inhibiting, excluding instincts’. You need to ‘let foreign things, new things of every type, come towards you while assuming an initial air of calm hostility’. Keeping ‘all your doors wide open’ and being ‘constantly poised and ready to put yourself into – plunge yourself into – other things’, that is, ‘the inability to resist a stimulus’, is destructive of the spirit. The ‘inability not to react’ is ‘a pathology, a decline, a symptom of exhaustion’.11 Total permissiveness and permeability destroy a noble culture. We are increasingly losing the ‘excluding instincts’, the ability to say ‘no’ to the advancing stimuli.

We need to distinguish between two kinds of potentiality. Positive potentiality consists in the ability to do something. Negative potentiality is the ability to do nothing. The latter is, however, not identical with the inability to do something. It is not a negation of positive potential but a potential of its own. It enables spirit to engage in still, contemplative lingering, that is, deep attentiveness. In the absence of negative potential, we develop a destructive hyperactivity. We become submerged in noise. Stillness can be restored only by a strengthening of negative potentiality. But the dominant compulsion of communication, which is ultimately the compulsion to produce, intentionally destroys negative potentiality.

We constantly produce ourselves. This production of self is noisy. Creating stillness means withdrawing. Stillness is also a phenomenon of namelessness. I am not the master of myself, of my name. I am a guest at myself; I am only the tenant of my name-hood. Michel Serres creates stillness by deconstructing his name:

It is indeed Michel Serres. Because my language and my society call it my own name, they pretend that I have the ownership of these two words. However, I know hundreds of Michels, Miguels, Mikes, or Mikhails. Similarly, there are Serreses, Sierras, Junipero Serras, all derived from a Ural-Altaic name designating a mountain. I have sometimes met exact homonyms…. And so, proper names sometimes mimic or repeat common names, even place names on occasion. Mine, for instance, quotes the Mont-Saint-Michel, in France, Italy, or Cornwall, three neatly aligned locations. We inhabit sites that are more or less prestigious. My name is Michel Serres, but it is not my own; I am just its tenant.12

The appropriation of a name, in particular, produces a lot of noise. The strengthening ego destroys the stillness. Where I step back, where I lose myself in namelessness, where I become weak, there is stillness: ‘Soft, I mean aerial and volatile. Soft, white. Soft, peaceful.’13Nietzsche knew that stillness goes along with the withdrawal of the I. Stillness teaches me to listen, to take note:

the genius of the heart, that makes everything loud and complacent fall silent and learn to listen, that smooths out rough souls and gives them the taste of a new desire, – to lie still, like a mirror that the deep sky can mirror itself upon … the genius of the heart, that enriches everyone who has come into contact with it … [making everyone] perhaps less certain, more gentle, fragile, and broken.14

Nietzsche’s ‘genius of the heart’ does not produce itself. Rather, it withdraws into namelessness. As a will to power, the will to appropriate retreats. Power turns into friendliness. The ‘genius of the heart’ discovers the strength in weakness that finds expression in the splendour of stillness.

Only in stillness, in the great silence, do we enter into a relation with the nameless, which exceeds us and in the face of which our efforts at appropriating the name seem feeble. The genius ‘who becomes each man’s guardian at the moment of birth’ also rises above the name.15 The genius makes life more than the miserable survival of the I. He represents a timeless present:

Genius’ youthful face and long, fluttering wings signify that he does not know time … That is why a birthday cannot be the commemoration of a past day but, like every true celebration, must be an abolition of time – the epiphany and presence of Genius. This inescapable presence prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity and shatters the ego’s pretension to be sufficient unto itself.16Absolutely silent perception resembles a photograph taken with a very long exposure. Daguerre’s photograph Boulevard du Temple actually shows a very busy street in Paris, but because of the extremely long exposure, typical of daguerreotypes, all movement disappears. Only what stands still is visible. Boulevard du Temple exudes an almost rural calmness. Apart from buildings and trees, only one human figure is recognizable, a man who is standing still to have his shoes cleaned. Perception of the long-lasting and slow thus recognizes only still things. Everything that rushes is condemned to disappear. Boulevard du Temple can be interpreted as a world seen through divine eyes. Only those who linger in contemplative calmness appear to God’s redeeming gaze. Stillness redeems.

 Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben and Monica Ferrando, The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore, London: Seagull Books, 2014, p. 10.

2. Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1931, pp. 131–3. Quoted in Theodore Reff, Cézanne: The Late Work, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977, p. 406.

3. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019, p. 8.

4. Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 53ff.

5. Ibid., p. 53.

6. Ibid., p. 55.

7. Ibid.

8. Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 1.

9. Ibid., pp. 69f.

10. Ibid., p. 51.

11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 153–229; here: pp. 190f.

12. Serres, Malfeasance, pp. 87f.

13. Ibid., p. 89.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 175.

15. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, New York: Zone Books, 2007, p. 9.

16. Ibid., pp. 11f.

Non-things

Upheaval in the Lifeworld

Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Daniel Steuer