On Differences in Speaking: 20 Examples

View transcript: On Differences in Speaking: 20 Examples

Text: ON DIFFERENCES IN SPEAKING / 20 Examples
Text: I AM PRIMARILY A FILMMAKER! Encounter with Christoph Schlingensief
Christoph Schlingensief: Technically my background is in cinema. And what I find interesting about film is that the work is destructible; that in the old days the copy, the actual film, used to consist of grains – if it was developed at temperatures above the acceptable limit, it fell apart into those grains. And in the projector the film itself needed to be kept at a low temperature. For example, all those nitro films … I used to have a projector in Mülheim an der Ruhr with a built-in tank that had to be filled with water and inserted between the film and the light bulb. The water was heated up. And if it got too hot – to the point where the nitro film might have caught fire –, an alarm sounded. The water started to boil before …
Kluge: Like a tea kettle. But the animal protection organizations put an end to that practice. Because if you add fish to this procedure, that’s not a good idea. They would be boiled.
Schlingensief: That was in fact an idea we had at the time: to put a fish into this tank. It would have kept disrupting the projector beam by swimming around, and you would have seen random dark spots on the screen. But we were also planning to let it cook and then, once it was done, we would have eaten it after the performance together with the viewers, the audience.
Text: Christoph Schlingensief
Kluge: One fish for so many people? That’s a feat that would have required the help of Jesus Christ …
Schlingensief: There are 50 fish bones that one could use. In the end, we didn’t actually go through with it. The time of Otmar Bauer was over, so we decided not to do that.
Kluge: But it’s interesting that in your new installation, slowly making its way from Iceland to Africa, South Africa – Lüderitz Bay, now Vienna, the Burgtheater, and then …
Schlingensief: Hagenberg too.
Kluge: Hagenberg, then Salzburg … an absolutely unique space where these things are being revived.
Schlingensief: Yes, and perhaps even earlier than that – the point of origin might have been the Parcival in Bayreuth. Space turns into time.
Kluge: The sequel. They are all descendants of Parcival. He barely had any biological offspring himself, isn’t that right? Oh well, Lohengrin. But Lohengrin did not have a son himself. Parcival did not have any grandchildren. And Elsa didn’t have a child. What happened to Elsa in the end?
Schlingensief: Throws herself off the edge. Throws herself off the edge, or more recently she blows up the entire party – that’s what happened in Konwitschny’s production.
Kluge: And the swan could not have done anything. Right, the swan …
Schlingensief: Well, Elsa.
Kluge: I get it. But the swan could not have impregnated Elsa. And Elsa could not have impregnated the swan.
Schlingensief: In Sao Paulo the swan lost his head when Lohengrin ran into him. Singing, he steered towards the swan, bumped into a corner, and then the head fell off. But he kept going … he merely glanced down briefly at the head and then continued singing.
Kluge: And that stuck?
Schlingensief: That’s the kind of thing that sticks with me. That sticks with me.
Kluge: In evolution, that’s what we call a mutation …
Schlingensief: That was the hour of birth.
Kluge: … it’s about promoting opera. It goes on and on. The neck-less, head-less swan is the real sensation.
Schlingensief: Yes, it’s the moment of birth for a new way of thinking. The head is now on the ground, so we have to check what it is doing there.
Kluge: And then you have a picture of the festival palace here, the festival location …
Schlingensief: We have the festival theater here. We also have the original Mozart latrine, made of gold.
Kluge: Of gold. Just like there are different versions of the “Bundesfilmpreis” in silver, in gold, in copper and so on, he has a golden toilet into which to hang his testicles. It’s the testicle dangler …
Schlingensief: You can see two imprints. So you can see that he had very long, sagging nuts. And on top of the festival theater you can see an expressive dance performance that we recorded ourselves but which supposedly was created in 1972.
Kluge: If you were a judge for the international testicle competition: what would be relevant qualities? Because, shall we say, they are not exactly beautiful according to the golden ratio.
Schlingensief: There are people who … because one is always longer than the other, from what I have heard … they undergo surgery so that everything is on the same level. That’s not something I believe in.
Kluge: But an even level is not the same as the golden ratio. Because they are not really segmented, they are ribbed, in a strange way …
Schlingensief: They have this small dividing line in the middle. For me that’s almost the most interesting part about them. This line in the middle which contracts abruptly when you step into the cold after sweating in the sauna – and there’s this dividing line as if the entire body was divided in two parts.
Kluge: Which it is. There are two arms, one nose …
Schlingensief: But with two nostrils.
Kluge: … exactly. But only one mouth. With more than two teeth.
Schlingensief: One mouth … but we have two vocal cords.
Kluge: See? But one larynx.
Schlingensief: One larynx with two gaps. We have basically fallen victim to the twin-mania. But only America has succeeded in it.
Text: Twin-mania
Kluge: As if we were the result of two beings merging into one.
Schlingensief: Yes, and that’s why America … William Hearst for example bought confessional boxes in Europe. Always two identical ones. That means, one had to be on the left side of the door, the other on the right. That’s twin-mania. And there are the Twin Towers. That’s what happens when you don’t have your own history. You want to accumulate things, and you want to have two copies of everything because if one gets lost, you still have the other. That’s why a lot of people also have two cell phones now.
Kluge: They used to say that the camera, which the Lumière Brothers and Edison invented at the same time, really combines the concept of the bicycle with the concept of a sewing machine. Exactly like photography, by the way. One part punches holes into the film strips, the other part transports them. And this apparatus of yours that we can see here, which spins, spins twice, that has something of a camera as well.
Text: Schlingensief’s animatograph marks the return of the CINEMATOGRAPH
Schlingensief: It’s an enormous walk-in camera. Basically like an Imax theater for the poor. That means, here I am entering this thing … and I can see what my testicles look like through the screen of the skin covering my testicles, my nutsack.
Kluge: Are there windows?
Schlingensief: I am going to put windows in.
Kluge: You get a special pair of pants. They are open at the bottom – although it’s thoroughly covered so nothing is dripping or so – but yes, they are open. It’s like a greenhouse.
Schlingensief: Yes. You are practically sitting in a testicle dome, you are a sperm cell, and you are gazing out into the world. And this world is being projected by means of four different films which – and this is where space turns into time – undergo an autonomous cutting process through rotation.
Text: Christoph Schlingensief
Kluge: It’s a cutter.
Schlingensief: Yes, a cutter. And that is also my favorite cutting technology, where the film cuts itself. I have programmed a number of pre-settings such as a motif … or a character constellation, but I let the film cut itself spontaneously. And that is the function of the animatograph. The machine demands material and then uses it to create its own world.
Kluge: It cuts them up, or what would you call that? They are painted over, is that right?
Schlingensief: They are superimposed, repainted. If the machine was cutting them up, they would only turn to small pieces. That’s what happened in Hof. In Hof, the film ended up being chopped into pieces. My first big screening of “Tunguska,” my first film with our friend Alfred Edel, ended in disaster because the projector developed its own mind, chopped up the filmstock, and somehow the film caught fire – even though I had actually already filmed the incineration with a friend at the drawing table. We simulated a film burning that later actually took place in reality. The film got chopped up and the projector …
Kluge: The projector was so intelligent that it recognized the director’s intention, which had already been realized …
Schlingensief: The projectionist had left because he was annoyed that the film was on fire – well, that the film simulated being on fire instead of actually burning. Because then he could have intervened. He was offended and left, locked up the projection booth. And after he left, the projector decided to catch fire for real, to chop up and destroy the film. The projectionist had left and the film got destroyed and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Kluge: The fire trucks arrive, wee woo. They interrogate you.
Schlingensief: Yes, and Hof was in mortal danger. The Hof Film Festival was in danger. And my film was done.
Kluge: Did they charge you with anything?
Schlingensief: In the end, there were merely seven people left in the room. Seven people who were still sitting there, and I turned a vice into a virtue by saying: Films always need to be cut up and then thrown at the spectators. Every spectator should take the first piece they find, turn it in at the exit; they put everything back together with a splicer, and then we watch this film again. But of course no one actually did that. That is still waiting to happen.
Kluge: You would say that you are primarily a filmmaker.
Schlingensief: Most definitely.
Kluge: And could you tell me: What is film?
Schlingensief: For me, film is – if we are basing this on the kind of film we are familiar with, you for much longer than I am – I mean, exposed film stock, that’s almost like a living being. It’s destructible. It is flammable, can be blurry, can change over time, can shrink over the years to the point where it doesn’t fit anymore into the projector that has just recently been used to show this film.
Kluge: And then, what do you do?
Schlingensief: Watering.
Kluge: You are talking about underwater film. There is cosmic radiation film, but that is primarily used in weather research. But in the stratosphere, cosmic radiation will destroy the emulsion. Which creates extremely interesting structures. What is … ?
Schlingensief: Those are the dots that you get when an airplane travels at an elevation of about ten thousand meters. Those are the dots that you end up seeing on the retina.
Kluge: Precisely. Then there is the downtrodden film, which means: Natives stomp around on the emulsion long enough to crush it. So in a way the exposed image is crushed as well, it’s very interesting.
Schlingensief: Or unexposed filmstock can be exposed through the blows of a hammer, simply through the friction, the contact with the material. The blow generates a spark and that leads to exposure. That’s energy.
Kluge: A negative.
Schlingensief: Yes. There’s no light, just a blow, but that’s energy too.

***

Woman 1: Where is my suitcase, if I may ask? Did you take it? What were you thinking?
Woman 2: You know exactly what I was thinking.
Woman 1: To simply walk into a room and take a suitcase …
Woman 2: Yes, that’s what I am doing.
Woman 1: You can’t just take someone else’s things.
Woman 2: You can if they have something that’s yours.
Woman 1: You sit here like a hen in her nest, watching everything. Nothing is allowed in this house.
Woman 2: You just waltz in here without knocking. That’s the …
Woman 1: If someone takes my suitcase, I am not going to knock and say: Oh, how nice. What were you thinking?
Woman 2: I was thinking that it might help me get the rent you owe a little faster.
Woman 1: Oh, the rent. This is really too much. Come on, I said three months. I said I was going to pay the rent after three months.
Woman 2: I don’t care.

***

Speaker: In this short feature we are directing your attention towards the fact that waiters carry their trays in the left hand. The right hand remains free.
Waiter: Look, this one’s only half full …
Interviewer: The day before yesterday I saw a waiter carry a tray in his right hand, is that correct?
Bartender: That’s wrong.
Waiter: That’s wrong.
Interviewer: What is the right way to do it?
Bartender: In the left hand.
Waiter: The left hand. I need to have one free hand so I can help a lady into her coat when she wants to put it back on, for example, or when she wants to take it off. Or when the lady hands you her empty plate, you need to be able to take it from her.
Bartender: And the reason is that I always serve the guests their drinks and food coming from the right. Because people have the tendency, when they get scared, to lean to the left. Most of the time they lean to the left, that’s why I have to serve them from the right – that decreases the danger of them suddenly jumping in fear when I approach.
Waiter: Most people are right-oriented. For example, you can find … all stores are organized in a right-oriented way. When people go somewhere they always look to the right first. We are used to things coming from the right. If you come from the left, you take them by surprise.
Interviewer: And what does that have to do with the job of a waiter?
Waiter: Well, so I don’t scare the customer, so that the customer feels at ease, that he can sit in peace, that he is comfortable, so that he stays longer and drinks more, for example, which means he brings in more money.
Bartender: And so that I don’t run the risk, when I come from the left … it’s possible that the customer is not expecting me and ends up knocking the beer off my tray in reflex.
Waiter: Yes, that happens when you serve people from the left. That is correct.
Bartender: And that doesn‘t happen from the right. Not as often anyway. Because they expect it, because they know they are going to be served from the right.
Interviewer: And now, could you show us how to hold this thing?
Waiter: Like this: four fingers underneath, this one for balance, the heavy stuff in the back, closer to my body, the lighter things in the front.

***

Text: April 26, 1986 – Saturday, 10pm
Worker: And then I bring the excavator, because it’s below level. Everything that is below level has to go, I can take it down with my excavator. And of course we sort of need to comply with safety regulations. That’s important for our own sake as well. We are not wearing armor, after all.
Passenger: Super upset. My life is not normal anymore. I don’t get it, what’s the union for? What are laws for? We have the 5-day week. Why is he allowed to do demolition today? It’s absurd, and I want to know the truth. I insist on my right to ask: Where is his permit? Why can millionaire pigs do what they want, while we have to follow the rules? That’s all. Thank you.

***

Voices: What are you planning to do with your so-called freedom? – Peace and quiet. – They are useless. [Hubbub of voices] Freedom! How I love thee. – Listen, is human masculine or neuter? Is disgust masculine or neuter? – Nothing, nothing. [Hubbub of voices] Could you be quiet for a moment? [Hubbub of voices] Is this even Christian? [Hubbub of voices] … to become quiet and peaceful. – What is a robber? I used to think, a Czech. But a robber is something different in the true sense of the word. – You see. If someone is religious nowadays, people immediately think they are crazy. But you should come visit us. At the parsonage you can play tennis, read, play chess, and watch TV.

***

Text: With Sophie Rois / “Comrade Schlingensief” Volksbühne January 26, 2008
Sophie Rois: Heiner Müller. I chew the sick man’s diet death Flavors the taste After the last Endoscopy in the doctors’ eyes My grave was open I was almost touched By the experts’ sadness and almost Was I proud of my unvanquished Tumor One moment long flesh of my flesh. December 12, 1995.
Kluge: And we are dedicating this to Christoph Schlingensief.
Rois: Should we maybe also sing a song for Christoph? For Christoph Schlingensief and the Fellowship of Ottensheim an der Donau.
Kluge and Rois: I once had a comrade, you will find no better. A bullet came a-flying … da-da-da … Is it my turn or yours? He was swept away … da-da-da … The drum called us to battle, he walked by my side, in the same pace and step. In the same pace and step. A bullet came a-flying, is it my turn or yours? Da-da-da … My good comrade.
Rois: The fragmentary quality is absolutely okay. The intention is clear. I think it’s good.
Kluge: And we need to do this because he is worried. Today he went to Oberhausen to see his mother. And the doctors are already waiting with the scalpel.
Rois: … I think he would be very flattered to know that we …
Kluge: No, he calls himself Comrade Schlingensief, since that night, he is Comrade Schlingensief.
Rois: Comrade Schlingensief. Well, that’s who he is.
Kluge: And that’s another thing that … Ms. Rois, that has got nothing to do with the old … he is the least soldierly person I know.
Rois: No, and that would be rather simplistic.
Kluge: Way too simplistic. But still, he’s thinking about it, because the previous generation has sacrificed something, even though it was for a mistake. And that moves him.
Rois: And it’s a nice image to use the word comrade, because I did go a part of the way with him, and you could say that we have fought quite a few battles together. Then we went our separate ways and that’s fine too. But we are still …
Kluge: I saw you two embracing each other at the Congress of the Pain Association. Fake blood meets lifeblood. There you are in the role of Isolde, the wordless Isolde, mute as a fish, and he as Tristan or Parcival, but with the music from the “Twilight of the Gods.” He was still on a somewhat ambivalent path, a sort of hybrid Wagner course. And then he used that to produce Parcival and continued that in Manaus and so on. But it’s a key scene at the time, and that’s what we were filming.

***

Text: Herbert Hausdorf, my mother’s brother /
Text: My mother
Text: Herbert Hausdorf
Text: Oldest son of my maternal grandmother / Horribly disfigured by grenades in September 1914 / My grandmother, who died at 101, never recovered from the loss / She never forgave the loss / She also never mentioned it anymore because she noticed that her suffering was a nuisance to acquaintances, relatives, even friends /
Text: My grandmother 1914
Text: “You need to be able to forget”/ That was her plan / She never believed she would succeed / The boots were bought at a store on Leipziger Straße / The sailor suit came from Berlin-Südende / Five buttons on the uniform technically indicate an “Admiral of the Fleet” / The bright eye is that of “Dribble Lieschen” (my mother’s childhood nickname) / She carried on part of the “destroyed brother’s” nature / Just as every person carries some of the breath of their fellow humans / The breath that several happy people take at the same time is the best / “MY RENDEZ-VOUZ WITH DEATH”

***

Kluge: So you had your papers on you. A Christian would bring a crucifix. But you had your stack of poems.
Heiner Müller: Poems and other texts. Simply because – it’s an old superstition. For years I never got onto a plane without bringing a random unfinished manuscript with me. Because I assume that I am meant to finish it. And if that doesn’t happen for some reason, it’s not my fault. It was a way to rid myself of blame.
Text: Heiner Müller, playwright
Kluge: So you pretended to work. You keep working on something so that it would be unfair not to let you finish. You speak in a whisper. Do you only have one vocal cord left?
Müller: One vocal fold, I have been told, has been paralyzed as a result of the surgery. And it requires several months of speech therapy, of exercise, for the other vocal fold to be able to compensate for the loss. The hardest part is to start the vowels clearly.
Kluge: What are you supposed to do?
Müller: The A for example. The exercise is about creating a sound chamber, as wide as possible, in your mouth – you press your tongue against the bottom – and within this sound chamber you try to produce the vowel as clearly as possible without adding a consonant at the beginning – the consonants are the crutch. It’s easier to say Ha! Instead of Aa!
Kluge: Like an actor. In a sense, you do what they usually do in theatre …
Müller: I have to learn how to speak.
Kluge: How to speak.
Müller: I have to learn how to speak. Vowels are difficult. Aa. I can’t do it yet. I can say it with an H. But that’s wrong. Ha is easy. But A is very difficult. Apparently starting vowels the right way requires a flexible vocal fold.
Kluge: And O and U?
Müller: Are the same. The I also works the same way. I might be a bit easier.
Kluge: On the other hand, vowels rarely stand on their own in spoken language.
Müller: But they often stand at the beginning of a word.
Kluge: Could you describe to me the situation during the evening before the surgery. How do they prepare you for such a radical operation?
Müller: It’s basically like this: You know that you could die any day for any reason or due to coincidence. But of course it’s a very different situation when you know, there is a specific day where you are either going to live or you are going to die. That’s a new situation, a new experience. And I was interested in that as an experience. I have to admit that I also constantly told myself that I would live. And that’s important, of course, that helps. A lot depends on willpower, and … or, well, willpower, perhaps rather imagination than willpower. And this new experience … it’s … of course you don’t get a lot of information about what’s going to happen.
Kluge: But it’s a bit like a court trial.
Müller: You can put yourself into the situation of a man on death row who knows that he will end on the electric chair. That’s definitely something it is related to. But it’s also about … at the time, I just happened to read a not very good spy thriller that quoted a poem by … which I think we haven’t been able to find yet … an American poet from WWI.
Kluge: … about the battle of Ypres.
Text: The Battle of Ypres.
Müller: … about the battle of Ypres, where we find the phrase: “I have a rendezvous with Death, On some scarred slope of battered hill.”
Text: “I have a rendezvous with Death, On some scarred slope of battered hill.”
Kluge: And then you wake up the next morning.
Müller: I woke up after … oh, you mean before the surgery. Yes, you wake up and barely have time to think. It’s a very automated process.
Kluge: The lights switch on in the entire hospital, so to speak, is that right?
Müller: I have no idea. I don’t think so.
Kluge: There is no rooster crowing.
Müller: No rooster crowing, no.
Kluge: And now … Socrates, the night before his death … they sacrifice a rooster to Asclepios. The deity of health. That’s an important moment …
Müller: There is a correlation here. Of course there is an equivalence. You have to pay for your hospital stay in advance, so basically you are making a down payment for your execution. You know they are not going to kill you for free. You have to make a down payment. In that sense, this is a secular form of the rooster sacrifice.

***

Text: Dimiter Gotscheff reads from Heiner Müller’s work
Text: On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1899 - - Carp! The Bat! - - - we were looking forward to the next day, January 1, 1900 - -
Dimiter Gotscheff: Is your mouth still open, does your tongue wag obediently still to prolong your time? Watch how silence will shatter your talk. What are cities to me? I see none here. They are nothing. Fantasies. Images made by words, dream habitations, traps blind eyes have set in empty air, branches out of rotten heads where lie mates with lie. They do not exist. Green does not exist. Bald is my spot of earth. Let yours be so. This Lemnos is a thing which idle gods stretched without purpose between one nothing and another; razed and scabbed and possessed by a fire in its bowels stolen from the gods; and bare it shall remain till it reconquers nothing from its scabs emptied once and for all when Night takes back the stars it lent. Pluck out your eyes. They lie. Their sockets will speak truth. As for my life, it knows one single truth, which is your death.
Text: Sir Henry, People’s Theater at the Rosa Luxemburg-Platz
Text: From: PHILOCTETES, play by Heiner Müller
Text: Dimiter Gotscheff, Deutsches Theater
Text: 1999 we are excited again: To another thousand years!

***

Kluge: You are a concierge. You have been working in this position for 13 years.
Ute Hannig: Yes, for 13 years. My mother was a concierge as well. I grew up with that from early on.
Kluge: It’s like that everywhere in Paris, right? Every building is guarded by a concierge.
Hannig: Exactly. Every building has its own concierge, and she is the soul, the spirit of the building, so to speak. If we concierges were to go on strike, all of Paris would …
Text: Concierge, Ute Hannig
Kluge: No one can leave the house … no one can enter or leave the house. And that is … these keepers of the keys have been around since the French Revolution. They are also inspectors, in a sense. They keep the public enemy out.
Hannig: The enemy is kept out. But we do sometimes turn a blind eye when someone wants to sneak in.
Kluge: But you don’t take bribes. You cannot be bought.
Hannig: Oh no. I cannot be bought.
Kluge: You invested all your savings in Russian government bonds. That means the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Hannig: Yes, unfortunately I did. That was a very disappointing, disappointing story. By now I have … I cried a lot and also felt a lot of anger. I put all my savings, year for year I put everything together, collected everything under my table. I don’t take bribes. And this money, which I collected for years, I invested in the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Kluge: And now the war happens, then the revolution, and the Soviet Union does not pay anything back.
Hannig: It’s gone. As if it had disappeared into thin air. The Russians don’t pay anything back. I am very very angry at the Russians. After all, the Russians copied our idea of the Revolution. Me, a concierce, a Paris concierge, I am Paris, I am France. That means I am the Revolution. In a way I am the mother of the Russian Revolution, and I was betrayed and abandoned by my own children. That is so very disappointing, I have to say.

***

Text: TWO EGYPTIAN CROCODILES
Text: Primitive Diversity Pictures
Text: Ulrike Sprenger reports - -
Text: Professor Dr. Ulrike Sprenger, Konstanz University
Ulrike Sprenger: This crocodile, in the control of a human, has been captured – presumably because it had attacked and eaten people –, captured including the eggs, so that not even its descendants might be able to cause trouble anymore. And the tradesman encounters another tradesman with his own crocodile, and they decide to publicly display the crocodiles, like on a fairground. So a crocodile fight instead of a cock fight. Here we see the crocodiles fighting in the foreground. But during the fight they seize the opportunity and ultimately devour both the traders and the spectators. Here we see the story of Robinson, and each individual image illustrates one very important scene, but from the individual scene we can also understand the story as a whole. For example, here in Image Nr. 5, you see Robinson building a hut in the background while in the foreground, Friday is roasting meat over the fire. This one image of Robinson represents the force of civilization. He builds a house and he cooks his food. Two markers of civilization which Friday could not have accomplished without him, but for which Robinson still requires Friday’s help. So here we have the entire story of Robinson and Friday in eight pictures, but the whole story is also told again in the roast and the construction of the shed in Image Nr. 5. And in a similar way, the concluding Image Nr. 8 also tells us the entire story again. Here we see Robinson’s return after he is rescued from the island. Robinson throws himself at his father’s feet, he has returned home to his family and brings with him the treasures of his experiences, the things he has lived through; he is welcomed back as a member of society. The ordeals that he was subjected to are also interpreted as a divine ordeal – solitude as the process of becoming human without the parents’ help. But now that this is behind him, he is back in the circle of his family, at his father’s feet. And in the background we see Friday, who is now wearing clothes, that means he is introduced into society as a brother, he is now dressed, but on his arm he is still carrying a parrot as souvenir of the foreign world, which can now also be integrated into the bourgeois order.

***

Text: KEYWORD: IDEOLOGY
Kluge: For Marx, ideology is “necessarily false consciousness.” What does that mean?
Joseph Vogl: That means, reality – including so-called empirical reality – is something that presents itself in a consistently simulated, falsified, misleading, if you will, relationship. Necessarily false consciousness means to have the kind of access, functioning access to the world where my actions, my cognitive faculties, my faculties of desire are sufficient to navigate reliably within reality – except for one significant misconception, except for the fact that my efficient behavior in this world, that my efficient behavior in this world, that the excess of my desires and their satisfaction in this world overlook one specific factor, that is the irony that with all insights, all these desires, all these actions, I am working towards my own death without realizing it. Necessarily false consciousness means believing to be alive while bringing about my own death.
Text: KEYWORD: ALIENATION
Kluge: Keyword alienation.
Vogl: Alienation is a concept with a long history; a concept with an impressive biography. And just like with any other concept with such an impressive biography, there are two possibilities: either the biography of this concept has survived the world, or the world has survived the biography, the lifespan of this concept. If you look at this concept as one with an enormous biography, with a meaningful biography, if you will, with a conceptual and biographical career, then we would need to trace it back to its original habitat, its biotope, and ask: what constellation, what birth constellation has shaped this concept? And I would claim that the concept of alienation was born into a world where social conditions, including political and economic conditions and the perspective of enchantment emerge. That means, the concept of alienation emerges from a constellation of social magic – and he describes an enchanted relationship, that means a forgery of conditions, a perpetual forgery of conditions, in which I and Not-I, the self and the other have become increasingly interchangeable.
Kluge: My own experience is taken away, my reality is pulled out from underneath my feet. I lived during a specific time, I worked hard, I dedicated myself to the cause. Part of my life lies there. And now this time is torn away – because of a new ruling dynasty, because of a lost war, a disaster. I am without my reality.
Vogl: And thus the concept conjures up a scenery, a setting that is populated with – if you will – a high number of uncanny elements. One of these uncanny elements is the doppelganger, my alien I. Another uncanny element is the thing that has developed a mind of its own, that has grown legs, that moves independent from my will. The third agent in this constellation would be the emergence, the appearance of the unconscious – something inside me which possesses a hidden, secret knowledge I cannot access myself. All these things work together in this strange enchantment and inspire a plan for decryption, a plan for observation that is invested in correcting the world of things, in correcting the facts.
Kluge: And I demand another world, a second life, because I didn’t really have the first one, the life I am currently living.
Vogl: And at the same time, this means that a strange entanglement of our definition of humankind is present in the process of alienation; an entanglement that cannot be resolved through man himself, not through the I, not through the anthropological substrate. So you need a different lynchpin, a different Archimedean point. It has to lie far beyond the horizon, somewhere in the relationships of small things, small objects, such as a commodity. That’s where we can recognize how inevitably I misjudge my own relationship to myself. And this misconception, the core of this misconception is alienation, which harbors a glowing promise – the promise that at some point in a distant future I might be my own master, master of myself.
Text: KEYWORD: What is SUBJECTIVE-OBJECTIVE?
Kluge: What is a subjective-objective relationship? For Marx that is a core concept, a central concept. There is nothing purely subjective, nothing purely objective.
Vogl: The subjective-objective relationship is basically an intellectual apparatus – it is the attempt to construct an intellectual apparatus.
Kluge: In order to understand what is really happening.
Vogl: Yes, in order to understand what is really happening, but even more: It is a machine just like all other machines built to produce something. There is no machine that doesn’t produce something, every machine has its production order. And there are two parts to this: first, a machine needs to be set in motion. And what’s interesting about the subjective-objective machine is that it has two ends, and you can flip a switch on each side in order to set it off. As soon as a subject begins to move, an object world is being set in motion as well. As soon as an object world moves, a subjective moment is set off as well – that’s the first thing. And that functions according to a preset program. A machine is also programmed, that means a subjective-objective relationship is a relational program. The question is: what is produced in this subjective-objective relationship? And you might say: What is being produced here – that is the same for Hegel as for Marx – what is produced here is world. A very specific world. And there are two interesting moments here: first, it’s possible to produce a world of forgeries, a world of forgeries where subjective-objective relationships produce objects where this relationship – subject and object – has disappeared; they can simulate a kind of synthesis which suggests that objects, foreign things are attainable, can be held in one’s hand, that they contribute, so to speak, to the equipment, the comfortable equipment of existence. That means, a machine for producing illusions. The dialectical gaze, the Marxist gaze would be: This machine has to be sabotaged. Because sabot is the French word for a wooden clog, and that’s what is thrown into the machine. Like the operations of early-industrial workers who stopped the machines to get a reduction in working hours. So this apparatus, this dialectic apparatus that produces illusions, comfortable objects which I …
Kluge: … it can be stopped.
Vogl: It can be stopped through protests, through spanners in the gears, which can be used to create something. And I think that’s the other subject of production, the other result – the realization of a basic alienness, the recognition of the impossibility of adopting a production world in which the subject, which is part of the machinery, is always already a slave, subservient, is always already a fragile, exploited being.
Kluge: But it seems to me that in this point we can see that the machinery of the subjective-objective, that means the machinery of knowledge, cannot simply stopped with a clog; in fact, there is a second machinery that works rather well and that could appropriate the subjective-objective relationship, could take it up not as an illusion but a real connection. By lowering my shields, through connection, through anticipation of the other. That would be the case in love, but also in war – when I am quicker to understand the enemy than the enemy understands himself – as well as in production or inventions.
Vogl: That means that if on one side, this machine produces illusions …
Kluge: … then it can also produce anti-illusions …
Vogl: It can also produce truths, and truths …
Kluge: Useful realities, useful for people.
Vogl: And it does. It does, also in a Marxist sense – in Marx’s sense, or in the sense of the Capital –, and one thing is crucial about this production of truth, which is that this truth cannot be found anymore within me, not anymore within myself, not in my consciousness – but in the things out there, in the relations of production.
Kluge: Or in between. As Marx says and as capital demands – as he analyzes it. And this results in an odd distorting mirror, because Marx so diligently and righteously analyzes how capital acts – it causes social change and a manipulation of the subjective-objective relationship – that he fails to describe the other side, or at least not beyond his early writings, that is: what would the appropriation of experience in the gap between two subjects, or a thing and a subject or whatever, look like? What does a positive production of conditions of reality look like? That’s not something he talks about.
Vogl: That’s not something he talks about, or at most he hints at it. I would say that one of the most useful definitions of that which is being produced and of the truth that is produced in the process, that which is true or real, would always be the intermediary. That which lies between us, between me and the collective, between me and the objects, between me and the relations of production …
Kluge: When I am speaking, between the two speakers.
Vogl: Exactly. That’s why it might also be interesting to ask the question: How can we even identify the scene of truth? What would be a setting in which truth manifests itself? Ultimately they are always spaces …
Kluge: Truth or coherence.
Vogl: … or coherence – in-between spaces always play a significant role. Think for example of the negotiating table. The negotiating table is nothing other than an empty center where truth is produced in a long-winded process. Or you might think of the court room. Why do witnesses, defendants, judges, attorneys, and spectators sit around an empty center? Because they know that only in this empty center can truth become manifest.
Kluge: In the middle ages, rulers hold meetings on bridges. Everyone meets in the middle of the bridge. Not just for security reasons, but also because the potential for understanding lies at the interface between two opposites.
Vogl: That’s where the potential for understanding lies, as well as that which can be taken away as the substrate of this communication – whether we call it truth, or reality, or commonality. The main problem, however – and it is an architectural problem – is that if you say truth requires architectures of truth, then truth needs an empty space, a cleared space, a staked-out space, even if it is marked by a court tree … or by a first barrier that clearly separates the world on one side and the place of negotiation on the other. These truths are tied to operations of interruption, of severance, of creating an unmarked space. That would be a theater of truth, and it would be the in-between space within this subjective-objectively working machine. Truth manifests neither on the side of the subject nor the side of the object, but only in the processing chain between them, which in fact …
Kluge: At the separatrix, the interface. And this exists within every human being as the potential for sensitivity. People can do that. Except that the book by Marx that we would need on this topic remains to be written.
Vogl: It would need to be a book where Marx has developed a higher consciousness and sensitivity for his own anthropology. That means for a human being whom he always already imagines as a worker, as someone who sees themselves as a thermodynamic machine, as someone who is tied to their production process …
Kluge: … but who is capable of association, the free association of the producer.
Vogl: Exactly. Someone who would be capable of thinking this relationship, the relationship of objective-subjective relations without mankind, without the coordinate of mankind. This is where a Marxist anti-anthropology is needed, so to speak, which does not present mankind as the universal point of reference.
Kluge: So that for once he steps outside the framework of the pre-man. And as long as he does, he can engage with others as a global citizen. Then he retreats into his shell like a snail.
Vogl: He returns but is equipped with what the 18th century has provided in anthropological knowledge – a high degree of self-awareness, a high degree of sensual-intellectual connection, a strong drive towards emancipation, the possibility of illusion, etc. And this is a blind spot for Marx, and most certainly in his Capital – not to emancipate man into a man but to emancipate from within man. This challenge, or you could say, this centrifugal movement is something that the Capital did not achieve.

***

Text: WHAT DOES NOTHING MEAN? / Oskar Negt on a philosophical concept
Text: G.W.F. Hegel
Kluge: The most important general categories: Nothing and something, good and evil. Could you explain the term Nothing in a philosophical sense? What does Nothing mean?
Oskar Negt: Negating Nothing … Nothing … Well, first of all, it has the status of a concept – like Something.
Kluge: It’s the opposite of Something.
Negt: Descartes would say that it is an innate idea, just like the notion of God, and … we have an idea of Nothing that might inspire something like a horror vacui, a fear of the vacuum, so … but if we think of a Something, we also need to consider the Not-Something, the negation of Something.
Text: Oskar Negt, philosopher and sociologist
Kluge: And according to Kant – different philosophers have different understandings of the term, after all – according to Kant, what is the negation of Something?
Negt: The negation of Something would be negation – the concept does play a role in his table of categories: negation. But Nothing is always determined by Something. That means, the Negation of Being is Nothing. And Nothing has been attributed a lot of different facets throughout the history of philosophy, a lot of characteristics. If a Buddhist talks about the negation of the world, this sense of Nothing possesses a liberating quality, a conservatory quality, something one can … it’s about tranquility, tranquility.
Kluge: Which gives rise to new Being. Which gives rise to different possibilities of Being. The possibility is the Nothing – for a Buddhist that would not sound absurd.
Negt: No. That’s why different religions have different spaces with different connotations that they call Nothing. In a philosophical sense, Hamann is certainly not talking about anything other but the negation of Something. But the negation of Something is also not simply empirical: You can neither prove Something, because it’s a general concept …
Text: Johann Georg Hamann, philosopher in Königsberg
Kluge: The interesting thing is: I can imagine a Something, and I can picture a fractured Something. But there is something strange about the word Nothing, similar as with Darkness. I can picture the Dark, I can imagine something specific as being dark, but I have enormous difficulties to imagine the noun Darkness, which represents something general, so to speak – the Orcus, the abyss, something that transcends Being …
Negt: All of those have spatial and temporal characteristics, they have spatial and temporal characteristics, and therefore would not fall under the category of Nothing.
Kluge: But in modern science there’s the notion of spheres consisting of extremely brief moments in time. So brief that they could have only existed immediately after the beginning, following the origin of the cosmos, mere centimeters away from the big bang. And that’s where a physicist or cosmologist would locate Nothing as the idea of pure potentiality. Here, blurriness and potentiality and improbability increase to a degree that no natural laws or atoms can emerge from it. That is a concept of Nothing that does not only have a definitory function. This Nothing still exists today in the smallest elements and the briefest time frames, and would perpetually generate an instance of Being or Something that is not Nothing.
Text: Distance between galaxies / Time
Negt: That may be true. But as humans equipped with sense and sensibility, any notion of Nothing we develop emerges against the background of the categorial framework of Something. That means, Being always defines our understanding of Nothing.
Kluge: Where is Nothing hiding now? Is it hiding in the gaps of Being? Is it like an ocean of Nothingness surrounding Being? Where is Nothing?
Negt: I would answer that question in a very orthodoxically Hegelian manner: Nothing is nothing more than negated Being.
Kluge: That means, it’s another characteristic, another status, another aggregate state of Being.
Negt: And if you have movement, if you have some kind of process, Being and Nothing are always …
Kluge: … intertwined. Without Nothing, Being cannot act.
Negt: There is no movement without the negation of Something – negation not meant here in a Heideggerian sense. Hegel explains this very poignantly at the beginning of his Logic. He says: Let’s start with Being – but Being, sheer Being, what is that? Sheer Being is Nothing. It has transformed into Nothing because it doesn’t have a specific purpose. So you could say that sheer Being and sheer Nothing are identical, have become one and the same. Only Becoming establishes specific transitions from Being to Nothing: Over the course of a specific development, a process, that which exists is negated and shifts into a different aggregate state.
Kluge: In a film, one split second is dark – the transport phase – and another split second shows an image: does that work as an emblematic image or metaphor for the interplay of Being and Nothing in movement? Is that plausible?
Negt: If you think that a dark spot is Nothing, then yes. But if you don’t see it that way, because you do see something even in a dark spot – which is likely –, then it’s not Nothing.
Text: Oskar Negt, philosopher and sociologist
Kluge: Next question: If a film cut – that is, an image – and a second cut – again, an image –, are in contrast with each other, and the cut, which doesn’t actually exist in itself, evokes a certain association: that would be a cinematic montage à la Godard, is that correct?
Negt: That’s correct.
Kluge: It creates an inherent movement.
Negt: But the cut means that our senses and our mind …
Kluge: … are set in motion.
Negt: Are set in motion and thus do not actually recognize this line, this cut.
Kluge: They fill in the gap.
Negt: Exactly. They bridge the gap. You don’t actually see the cut.
Kluge: The Nothing in film is the Something in our mind.
Negt: What is Nothing in film?
Kluge: The cut. That means, the film is really paused at that point. It does not actually create anything other than a contrast, a naked, uninterpreted, unbridgeable contrast. Hence the desire to bridge this gap because our minds …
Negt: Well obviously. It keeps going. No one can retrace the moment of the film cut in their mind.
Kluge: It’s not possible.
Negt: Yes.
Kluge: So, if I misspeak, and you fill in the correct word; or if I omit something and you complete the sentence, simply because we are both here. Then Nothing would be that which quasi magnetically attracts meaning.
Negt: That’s why I want to return to the Hegelian definition: These small units that can be defined as Nothings are specific Nothings. That means they are Something of a Nothing. People define this something as Nothing, but that’s not really true because it’s not actually a vacuum, there is not actually a gap.

***

Woman: Well, first and foremost you have to pay attention to traffic. The town is very small, narrow, lots of cars, and so many construction sites. At the stop, you need to focus on passenger exchange. Passengers have to get off, they have to get on the tram. When that’s done, the passenger exchange, well, then the bell rings, the doors close, and you start driving.

***

Kluge: Comrade Willi Schmidt from Karl Marx University in Leipzig.
Willi Schmidt: Yes, I came here, I was delegated, so to speak, directly from the workshop to a professorship.
Kluge: And it’s about the subjunctive from a dialectical-materialist perspective.
Schmidt: It’s about the professorial chair for the subjunctive.
Text: The last grammarian of the GDR
Kluge: From the perspective of the worker in a workshop, we could do without the subjunctive, because it’s complicated. You could just say: The machine runs.
Schmidt: The machine functions. It functions or it doesn’t function.
Text: Willi Schmidt, Training manager
Kluge: That’s not a subjunctive, that’s a fact.
Schmidt: If something is complicated, it becomes a challenge that we can solve. It does not need to be a deterrent.
Kluge: If I fixed it, the machine would run again.
Schmidt: The machine functions, would function.
Kluge: Functioned, or functionary?
Schmidt: Functionary.
Kluge: Because the expression “The machine runs” is wrong. It doesn’t run. It does not have feet.
Schmidt: No, it functions. But of course in colloquial German we say: “A machine runs.” It runs smoothly. You can certainly say that, but the correct expression is: It functions.
Kluge: And what about the comparative? It functions, it functioned, it has functioned.
Schmidt: Exactly.
Kluge: And the subjunctive?
Schmidt: It’s weak. It remains weak. A weak verb.
Kluge: A weak verb. A strong verb would mean …?
Schmidt: Would be … not to function.
Kluge: Fly, flew, flown.
Schmidt: That’s different. Verbs derived from French or Latin are usually weak. Only the purely Germanic verbs are usually strong.
Kluge: Like for example?
Schmidt: Sing, sang, sung.
Kluge: Wave, waved, waved.
Schmidt: Or go, went, gone. Or whatever you like. Words with Germanic roots usually have a strong conjugation. Foreign words never do.
Kluge: And that has consequences for the subjunctive?
Schmidt: Yes, that makes the subjunctive more difficult. Because function, functioned, would function, functionary, that’s …
Kluge: Production decreases. If we worked more, it wouldn’t sink.
Schmidt: To sink is another strong verb. Sink, sank, sunk. A strong verb. No comparison.
Kluge: For a Cuban, that’s tricky. Sing, sang, sung sounds pretty similar.
Schmidt: Well, one ends on a K, one on a G. That’s something one should be able to learn.
Kluge: Well, but you can’t hear the difference.
Schmidt: Why not?
Kluge: In Saxon, with a soft pronunciation?
Schmidt: No no no, we don’t do that. We speak Hanoverian Standard German. Even if Hanover is in West Germany. But that’s how the language has developed. And Weimar is not that far from Hanover, after all.
Kluge: People are debating right now about whether the subjunctive could not be axed. Economically speaking that would mean a less complicated way of talking. But you are saying that the subjunctive actually has a significance for Marx and the dialectical-materialist method. Utopian thought for example can only be expressed in irrealis mood in the subjunctive.
Schmidt: Exactly. Otherwise it would not be utopian anymore. I need to be able to grasp the concept of utopia on the level of language as well.
Kluge: The subjunctive as request.
Schmidt: As request … as appeal …
Kluge: Noble be man, merciful and good. If you said: Noble is man, merciful and good – that would not be true.
Schmidt: Grammatically it’s correct. Just not in regard to its message. Man is not noble – he should be noble.
Kluge: That means he should improve.
Schmidt: Yes of course.
Kluge: His current degree of noblesse is not enough.
Schmidt: No. He is not noble. He ought to be noble. That’s what we are working on – we are trying to improve humanity.

***

Text: The rubble woman who had to fix her husband
Rubble woman: I have to decide what I want to talk about. We have to do so much with those bricks, we have to clean off bricks all day. We have to clean the bricks and then we have to turn them in so that they have something to build with. And that goes on for eight hours a day or longer. And that’s pretty … and then the children on top of that. We don’t have any time. But we also need to eat, sometimes you would like to cook something. But the women, and it’s always the women, they help each other, so we can at least have some soup. And then in the evening the men come home. And they sit at home … Oh, I still remember when my Heine returned from war. It was terrible. He wasn’t doing anything.
Kluge: He had to be fixed.
Rubble woman: He had to be fixed like a car. You had to move slowly, slowly … he couldn’t bear loud noises, couldn’t sleep in a normal bed. Could only … stone … wanted to sleep on the floor. First I had to bathe him. I had to bathe him every night, he liked that. That warmed him up. He also couldn’t properly … hash browns … he didn’t want to eat that. It was too much for him. His eyes were so big. I almost didn’t recognize him.
Kluge: His self-confidence also had to be reassembled.
Rubble woman: And there was nothing left of our relationship. He had been a strong father. A strong man. And now the children see a father … who doesn’t talk and has lost his self-confidence, his self-consciousness. He is just sitting there and always …that was quite something. And it went on for a long time. I was always extremely careful. Sometimes I had cigarettes for him. That was good. I was always collecting cigarette butts. Because there was no tobacco. And I would roll him a cigarette. A cigarette was good. It was a horrible sight, but … slowly, very slowly I managed to restore him, I nursed him back to life, and … I organized real coffee beans for him, he liked that too, real coffee … and well, of course, when I … but he didn’t tell me anything, he never told me anything. Nothing, nothing about the war at all. I kept begging him: Tell me what it was like. What’s going on with you. But no, no, he didn’t say anything. Sometimes he cried out in his sleep. Sometimes he cried. It wasn’t easy.
Kluge: The women have to fix their husbands.
Rubble woman: Yes, the women have to fix their husbands. That’s the title of this chapter.

***

Woman: Since they found out at the office that I am living with you, everyone is giving me funny looks.
Man: Why? The guys like me, don’t they?
Woman: It seems that something is undermining your popularity at work. I don’t think anyone would go have a beer with you if they knew that someone else was watching.
Text: STRONGMAN FERDINAND
Man: Two things are working: the cold air and the tree. Beyond that this drill has been a failure.
Woman: But it’s only November.
Man: You have to practice for Christmas Eve. Otherwise it’s never going to work. Only children don’t have to practice. Grown-ups get into fights if they don’t properly practice for Christmas Eve.
Woman: But it’s not Christmas Eve yet.
Man: But it’s coming for sure.
Woman: Carp and roasted goose … they don’t even have those here in this region.
Man: First presents – we are going to imagine those. Second candles and a tree – check. Third, think of the hungry children in India.
Woman: At least it’s warm there.
Man: Fourth, seeking shelter. Sheep in Iceland who got lost in a snow storm, are herded into the warm barn by me just in time. Sixth, records, seventh, miscellaneous.
Woman: We can go home now, I’m done vacationing.
Man: Next Sunday, we’ll do Spitzbergen.

***

Text: BOMB SCRAPS AND STEEL TARTARE
Text: Helge Schneider: “It’s too bad we can’t eat TANKS!”
Helge Schneider: Do you have fire for my cigarette? / By the first you have to go with me in bed. / Almost a very very good idea. / And after that we gonna drink a very lot of beer. / We are the firefuckers / We are the firefuckers / We are the firefuckers / We’re coming to fuck in your town. / I play the guitar only for the shine / I look a woman that is very fine / We are coming for fucking / but you gotta know / we fuck for nothing / only for the show.
Kluge: You are not working here as a butcher, nor as a deli service worker, nor a knacker, but as a disarmer.
Schneider/“Erwin Tacke”: Exactly. Only – and you already mentioned this – my actual profession, the job I was trained in, was knacker. But because of my high unemployment I was forced to make a career change, and I got lucky. Thanks to retraining I was able to start here in shredder plant A.
Text: Erwin Tacke, military equipment shredder
Kluge: You worked your way up, now you are running the plant.
Schneider/“Tacke”: That is correct.
Kluge: And you are supervising the sales department.
Schneider/“Tacke”: Exactly. One moment – Dieter, take the one in the front back again. Make sure to carve out a good chunk. I can take my glasses off now. It’s so bright in there, that’s why I am always working with protective glasses on.
Kluge: Looking straight into trolley can tear out your eyes.
Schneider/“Tacke”: It’s because the machines we take apart, sometimes with a blow torch, sometimes contain nitro …
Kluge: … glycerine?
Schneider/“Tacke”: …lacquer. The outer layers of these fighter jets … are often covered in nitrocellulose lacquer … because it’s lighter … than hammer blow paintwork.
Kluge: It’s a strange feeling. In war, or in free nature, you never get this close to a tank.
Schneider/“Tacke”: Well, some people do. But I would not want to be in their shoes. Because tanks, they are quite … it’s a little sad. That’s why I like working here, because we take these things apart.
Kluge: And you cut them up into nice portions. Like tartare.
Schneider/“Tacke”: It’s kind of fun to take apart a tank. The turret is the fillet piece.
Kluge: Because it spins so nicely.
Schneider/“Tacke”: Just a moment. Dieter! Leave the turret for now! I’ll take care of it later! Go work on the F11 for now!
Text: Department for bomb scraps and airplanes

***

Text: Chamber singer Hannelore Hoger as AMNERIS in Verdi‘s AIDA
Hannelore Hoger: On the stage I am not a private person. I put myself in the position of the character and try to bring her to life.
Kluge: A public figure.
Hoger: I don’t know if it’s a public figure. It’s a fictional character.
Kluge: Does it ever happen that a singer – out of enthusiasm or rage – suddenly starts singing the wrong opera? For example, one moment she is in a scene from Aida at the ocean, then suddenly she is in Othello?
Hoger: I have hardly ever experienced that. The music itself would serve as a warning. And if you sing a role like that, you have to immerse yourself a little in Egyptology. These four animals, the snake, the frog, the scarab – the dung beetle –, and the shrew, the tiny shrew. The shew, this tiny animal, the size of a nail, a finger nail, really a quite endearing animal. And I often take these four animals … I keep all of them as pets. I own all of them … the snake is a little tricky, because obviously I don’t want to torture the animals. But I keep all of them in a terrarium, the frog and the dung beetle, it’s small and it like it a lot. That’s the scarab, it is shaped beautifully and shimmers in green. It’s a small beetle but it brings good luck, it’s a good luck charm, just like the sun. It represents the sun, and as we know there is no life on Earth without the sun. And then the cow plops a cowpat into the grass, a big cowpat, and the scarab picks out the straw with its many legs and rolls it into a ball. It uses the dung – that’s why it’s called dung beetle after all – to form a ball, a big ball, which grows bigger and bigger, until eventually it is at least 20 times as big as the beetle itself. A beautiful round ball of dung, and with its hind legs the beetle buries it in the ground so that the sun doesn’t dry it out. It digs a hole in which to put this beautifully crafted ball, and then, when the beetle gets hungry, it digs it out again with the sun. A wonderful process.

***

Text: What is a rhizome? The desire for the improbable in Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze
Text: “A non-hierarchical expression that touches anyone - -”
Kluge: What does the expression rhizome mean?
Vogl: Rhizome is technically an expression that stands in a certain competition to the concept of the system.
Kluge: It means root?
Vogl: The rhizome is the network of roots, the network of roots, that means it is a complex growth of different pathways that are all connected and create a simultaneously oddly blind and enlightened constellation.
Text: Dr. Joseph Vogl, Translator and Romance Studies Scholar
Kluge: The roots of a tree that are actually the branches?
Vogl: Exactly, for example, but that don’t convey the idea of coherency focused on one particular point. That means, the roots can only be experiences, if you will. That means, they can also be experienced philosophically by transposing a train of thought onto their own labyrinth.
Kluge: A live one.
Vogl: Yes, not just alive, but one that preserves the decisionist moment of unpredictability. That means someone who enters the rhizome will be confronted every moment after the next bend in the road, after the next turn with a proliferation, a growth, a crossroads, or a dead end that will prompt him to engage in strange acrobatics. That means someone within the rhizome has to be blind and clairvoyant at the same time. He has to get used to the darkness, he can’t see, and at the same time he has to react in some way to every turn in the path. In that sense, the rhizome …
Kluge: He also has to find his way back?
Vogl: No, not back, but …
Kluge: There is no Ariadne’s thread.
Vogl: No, and that is basically the point. The Ariadne’s thread has disappeared, or as Foucault used to say: Ariadne hanged herself, Ariadne doesn’t exist. The red thread has disappeared. And in that sense, there are two sides to the rhizome or rhizomatic thought. One the one hand, it’s the representation of a chaotic situation that cannot be controlled by reconstructing transparency. On the other hand – and that would be the vanishing line, if you will, the critical vanishing line of this kind of thinking –, it is the attempt to reconcile or connect things that appear to be incoherent, that seem far removed from each other. Someone who thinks in a rhizomatic way is someone who exposes himself to the challenge of representing the irreconcilable as compatible, just for a moment. That means, different areas of society that are far removed in social topographies are brought together, and that’s how this thought …
Kluge: … which is crafted, that’s an expression we might use. It has nothing to do with the German philosophical tradition of the truth revealing itself, in the first volume …
Vogl: Indeed, it has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with the division of the faculties, it has nothing to do with the division of different intellectual capacities.
Kluge: So I would say: I can’t tell if it will ever become practice. I can’t tell if it’s true. And yet there is truth, so it’s not a form of relativism. It is not a school of skepticism.
Text: An example for: “Experimental Philosophy”
Vogl: No, it is not a school of skepticism. By never walking anywhere but on the spot I am currently occupying, an old and esteemed relationship in philosophy collapses – the relationship between theory and practice, that means, between a target, a theoretical guideline, and its realization.

***

Text: John Fiore, Conductor
John Fiore: The role of Hector’s widow is exclusively a dance or acting performance – she comes on stage and does something. And her soul, her pain is communicated by a solo clarinet. For me, this is one of the most beautiful moments in the entire opera. The chorus says: Andromaque et son fils, Andromache and her son … Ô destin! Ces clameurs de la publique allégresse … Et cette immense tristesse, ce deuil profond, ces muettes douleurs! Les épouses, les mères pleurent à leur aspect…