An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular

by Martin Frederiksen

Overview

There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785356995
Publisher:	Collective Ink
Publication date:	08/31/2018
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Martin Demant Frederiksen has a PhD in anthropology. His work focuses on subcultures, urban development, temporality and socio-political change. He is assistant professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

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CHAPTER 1

OUDENOPHOBIA

Nobody likes nothing. I certainly wish with all my heart that it did not exist. But wishing is not enough. We live in the real world, where nothing does exist. We cannot just 'disinvent' it.

Stanley Donwood, Slowly Downward – A Collection of Miserable Stories

PIECES OF GLASS

Some years later we meet again. This time it's in an underground bar in the center of the city, popular among various alternative sub-groups at this time. It's located in a partly demolished residential building, occupying what used to be the downstairs apartment. The day before the bar had held a theme night under the title Forever Alone Party – Love warms you up but Vodka is cheaper. Soaked-and-dry-again flyers from the event are scattered around the premises. It was Oz who suggested the bar; they've been coming here for some time and currently it's one of the only places they can go to. We sit in a tiny room, in what is likely to have been the bathroom, on pillows strewn out on the floor, gathering around a stump from a tree that serves as a table. Two bottles of vodka are placed on the stump along with some small glasses, an ashtray and a shared pile of cigarette boxes. We sit and drink and smoke for a few hours. Post-punk is playing; people come and go; some sit with us for a while before leaving again; others just look inside and turn around.

At some point after midnight a young man, let's call him Morrie, joins us and sits down next to another young man, Hakuna, who is a friend of Oz. They cuddle up together while the rest of us continue drinking and small talking. After a while Oz kindly but firmly asks Morrie to leave, so that we can have the room to ourselves, which Morrie does. However, 10 minutes later Morrie returns with a bottle of vodka in his hand. He goes straight to Oz, stands in front of him and says: "If you ever tell me to leave again I will smash this bottle into your face". Oz looks at Morrie with a disinterested expression and coldly utters: "Leave". As a consequence, Morrie smashes the unopened bottle into Oz's face, vodka and splinters of glass flying in all directions, and Oz falling to the floor. He quickly gets up, though, and throws himself at Morrie, hitting and kicking him as violently as he can, and, given the small size of the room, he also hits the rest of us. An indistinct amount of time goes by, but after a while we manage to separate Oz and Morrie, Hakuna and Mushu (another friend) escorting Morrie out of the room while Queenie (a friend of Oz and I) assist me in trying to calm down Oz. He sits back on his pillow on the floor, bleeding from several wounds in his face and on his neck. We do our best to remove the pieces of glass that have slid inside his blouse and we note that a piece of glass has gotten stuck in the side of his neck. He pulls it out, leaving an open flesh wound, small but still producing a significant amount of blood. Queenie and I try to convince Hakuna and Mushu, who soon return, as well as the staff in the bar, that they should call an ambulance as Oz is bleeding quite a lot from what we feel is a relatively unfortunate place. They all refuse, however, stating that "it's nothing", or "it doesn't matter".

Even Oz is determined that there is no problem. "It doesn't matter, REALLY. It's nothing", he says whenever a voice of concern is raised. It takes us around 2 hours to convince him to get in a taxi with us and go to a hospital. There's one in a suburb some miles from where we are, but distance doesn't matter and the taxi-driver doesn't care.

As we arrive, Oz is escorted into a doctor's room by some nurses while Queenie and I stay put in the waiting room. It's large and empty and freezing cold. We interchangeably walk around in circles and sit on the benches along the walls. We've promised Oz not to talk to the guard outside, or anyone from the staff. And if they approach us we are to state that what had happened was simply an unfortunate accident, no one else was involved, no need to call the police, nothing had happened. The vending machine is broken.

After a good while Oz comes back out with five stitches in his neck. He rushes us outside and insists that we go to Queenie's apartment and continue drinking, which we do. There's nothing cognac can't fix.

The following evening we're at the bar once more. "It was nothing", Oz says, and touches the stiches on his neck while Hakuna attempts to put the table on fire.

SUNDAY NEUROSIS

I sometimes feel uneasy on Sundays, particularly in the afternoon. It's a sensation that is difficult to describe, but it could perhaps be likened to a vague sense of melancholia; the loss of a weekend that is coming to an end, and another Monday morning looming on the horizon. It's not that I don't like my job or am averse to the notion of working, not at all; it's just that I really liked the weekend. So during some Sunday afternoons I come to experience this peculiar numbness where I'm not able to just enjoy the hours that are in fact still left of the weekend. I know that it's dumb and that it would make much more sense to just shake it off and enjoy the present. But for one reason or another I sometimes don't. The last days of a long holiday can feel like that as well, or the days leading up to a trip abroad, such as going to see Oz, where I'm often going alone and leaving my family behind. On some level I actually often look forward to what is coming; seeing colleagues again when going to work, or landing in another country where I have something to do, and I know that I will be coming back to my family again or that there will be another weekend or holiday in the near future. But most of the time I seem to end up prematurely mourning that which is coming to an end.

Sunday neurosis is a notion thought to have been coined by the neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who used his personal experience of being in a concentration camp to develop theories about the human search for meaning. Sunday neurosis refers to the anxiety that some people may come to experience when the work-week is over; the sense of existential emptiness that may emerge through the realization that this week, also, did not lead anywhere or amount to anything. The sensation may result in a state of boredom, cynicism, or apathy and lead people to question whether their lives have a point or not. Frankl referred to this condition as an "existential vacuum"; a crisis of meaninglessness.

My own uneasy Sunday mood is not completely similar to the sensation described by Frankl, and the background for it obviously very much different, but it is somehow related in terms of the loss of meaning at hand; I have a problem letting go of meaning. It might be an occupational hazard; my line of work consists of conveying meaning to others, of providing understanding through text or through presentations. At least, that's how I've often conceived of it myself. Having read Frankl, and others similarly arguing for the centrality of the notion of meaning, I'd also assumed that this was what people in general strive for, that the search for meaning is a general human condition. Until I met Oz and his friends.

BEWARE, NOTHING!

In Janne Teller's children's novel Nothing the young boy Pierre Anthon one day stands up in the middle of class and announces: "Nothing matters. I've known that for a long time. So nothing's worth doing. I just realized that." After this, he leaves the classroom, goes outside, and climbs up into a plum tree. His classmates are stunned by this and almost immediately they collectively come to feel a strong urge to show Pierre Anthon that he should climb down from the plum tree, and to show him that there is meaning in life. That it is something rather than nothing that matters. They therefore decide to pile together a series of items that are particularly meaningful to themselves in order to illustrate what meaning is. They place this pile of meaning in front of the plum tree in order to make Pierre Anthon change his mind. But he doesn't, and ultimately the classmates' struggle for meaning ends in violence among themselves. In literary circles Teller's book is applauded and it is subsequently translated into a number of languages. But it also creates uproars. Several Norwegian schools ban the book. Some French bookstores refuse to sell it. Parents in Germany refuse to allow their children to read it.

Oudenophobia is the fear of nothingness. It is the fear that may suddenly engulf a person when she or he comes to think of death, and the possible void that follows. Or when thinking about the emptiness of outer space; that, on the one hand, before the coming into existence of the universe there was nothing and, on the other, that the universe is continually expanding into what also appears to be nothing. These are dizzying questions: ones having kept many children awake at night, myself as a young boy included. Some of them are touched upon in the story of Pierre Anthon sitting in the plum tree, and oudenophobia is perhaps what led some people and groups to protest against children reading the novel.

In another novel, The Trial Begins, the Russian writer and Soviet-dissident Andrei Sinyavsky depicts how the main character, Yury Karlinsky, begins to have trouble falling asleep. The reason for this is that he is tormented by the thought of one day having to die, a thought that enters his mind especially when he is lying on his back. It is not because his life is in any immediate danger and he knows that if he lived his life more carefully, for instance by quitting smoking, he might very well prolong his life by several decades. Yet still, the thought of having to die, of turning into non-existence while the rest of the world goes on in full vitality, is unbearable to him. That there, upon his death, for him will be eternally nothing. He curses the Soviet authorities for having supplanted faith and individual immorality with Communism, and for having thus deprived him from a soothing measure of self-deception. He abruptly sits up in bed and, despite knowing it to be deadly, lights a cigarette. He feels life returning to him upon each drag, "He was smoking, dead men don't smoke".

We know descriptions of Nothing from both literature and mythology. While in Teller and Karlinsky's novels, nothingness and meaninglessness are existential phenomena that the main characters ponder over, there are other varieties in which nothing is more of a physical being. In Michael Ende's classic fantasy novel The Neverending Story, the villain is the formless entity called "The Nothing" which spreads through and devours the land. In Scandinavian mythology the creature Nidhug eats away at the roots of the Tree of Life, threatening to turn the world into Nothing. Yet, contrary to these other textual representations, in Teller's novel nothing, nothingness and meaninglessness are not necessarily bad things. It is the search for meaning itself, the keen insistence on meaning, the desperate clinging on to something that is the root cause of problems. In the midst of violence and existential threat, it is meaning standing forth as the problem.

But nothing and nothingness are not just figures of novels and myths. As this book seeks to illustrate, they at times play a very central part in everyday social life, in various guises and incidents, as does meaninglessness. And they do not necessarily do so in a purely negative sense. But why is it that nothing has come to be seen as a figure creating fear? What consequences does this fear have on the ways in which we perceive of and analyze the world around us? And what might be lost in the insistence on meaning and the negation of nothingness? It's interesting why so many people fear nothing. But perhaps even more interesting is why some people don't.

GEOGRAPHY IS POINTLESS

Some years later we meet again. This time it's for a longer period than usual. Unfortunately Oz has caught conjunctivitis, "a bad grammatical virus" as he calls it, which prevents us from meeting up the first weekend that I'm around. But we soon find a rhythm.

A few phone-calls back and forth. We agree on meeting at 4 p.m. in front of Oz's work. Mushu is already there waiting when I arrive. Soon after Oz comes out; we kiss on the cheeks and start walking.

Oz sighs. "A friend of ours just died from liver-problems. My boss's son also just died, from leukemia, he was only 11. The dog of one of my other friends just got hit by a car. And this fucking wind in the city is driving me crazy. And then there's my eye infection. And I started having problems with my ear as well. And it's spring!".

We have to go by his doctor where he picks up a prescription for some antibiotics. He immediately tells the doctor that he doesn't intend to take it before after the weekend. "Because you're gonna drink?", she asks and allows him to wait a few days. We jump into a taxi and head to a pharmacy. The pills are expensive; Oz wonders how people who don't have medical insurance get by. He's still working as a translator for a foreign organization, but on a different project now, and who knows for how long. We jump in another taxi and head towards the suburb where he lives. In the small shop by his building we buy vodka, juice and cigarettes. Oz hates this particular shop. One has to go to six different counters to get various kinds of groceries, and it's much more expensive than other shops nearby. But then, he doesn't bother walking to those other shops either. So we buy what we need to buy here, and hate it.

I tell Oz and Mushu about the different aspects of my new project on "nothing". Oz thinks it's a strange project, but he's happy that I came. He hadn't expected us to ever meet again. He never expects that when people leave the country, that they'll ever come back. He'll consider going to the art exhibition that I'm setting up as part of my project. Maybe. Though probably not.

He talked to Hakuna on the phone earlier. He had mentioned to him how I had been hanging out with Athos from The Three Musketeers yesterday. Hakuna had said he thought I was mad. Oz had reminded him that all his friends are. Hakuna himself had called Oz at four in the morning to announce he had just realized something: that geography is pointless, that it can't be used for anything.

GRAVITATION AND STONE-SUCKING

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre establishes that being and non-being cannot be seen independently from each other; they only exist in relation to one another. Hence, there is no such thing as completely nothing, but there is also no such thing as completely something. This is why it's better to speak of "nothingness" rather than nothing. But then, why not also speak of "somethingness" rather than something? Even though the issues at stake here are deep philosophical questions, the baseline is really quite simple: Nothing/something is not an either/or question. Rather, it is at all times a question of both/and. The same may be said about the notion of meaning: The meaningful can only exist because of its relation to what it is not (the meaningless), and vice-versa.

There have been many depictions of how people seek an escape from the meaningless, fighting Nidhug's gnawing on the Tree of Life or running away from The Nothing. Contrary to this, what follows is an engagement with the meaningless, and a depiction of how nothingness and meaninglessness are intertwined, not just with each other but also with their opposites. This is an approach inspired by Samuel Beckett who, in his writings about nothing, worked on a constant deduction of meaning alongside descriptions of indifference towards this meaninglessness. This was, as noted by Mladen Dolar, not an insistence on complete nothingness, but rather a gravitation away from something and towards nothing. In his reading of Waiting for Godot and other Beckett novels and plays, Dolar compares the writing style of Beckett to that of James Joyce. While Joyce, he notes, was interested in infinite addition (n+1), Beckett was interested in the exact opposite: subtracting meaning (n–1). "One can easily imagine", Dolar writes, "the two writers reading their proofs, Joyce relentlessly adding new twists, and Beckett constantly crossing out, deleting scenes, paragraphs, pages. For one there is never enough, for the other there is never little enough".

Dolar goes on to insert Beckett into another literary juxtaposition that is worth taking up here, namely differences between Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre in their respective descriptions of picking up a stone. In Beckett's novel Molloy, the protagonist sets up a system for sucking on stones that he finds on a beach. This is a depiction, writes Dolar, that can be seen as a response to the opening scene of Sartre's Nausea in which the protagonist equally engages in the activity of picking up stones on a beach. Yet while in Nausea only one stone is chosen, in Molloy multiple stones are picked up, and whereas Sartre's hero is disgusted by the stone to the point of becoming nauseous, Beckett's hero indulges in his own disgust, putting the stones in his mouth to explore their tastelessness.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Martin Demant Frederiksen.
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Table of Contents

Preface 1

Blindspot

Oudenophobia 4

Pieces of glass

Sunday neurosis

Beware, nothing!

Geography is pointless

Gravitation and stone-sucking

Superficiality 14

Dato digs a hole and then he fills it up again

Blood and gravy

Dusting

The bones of father gabriel

Obstruction 21

I heart gloomy

Exit-entry

The apraxia challenge

I heart eucalyptus

Yes we can't!

Non-Linearity 31

Athos in the park

Something doesn't happen (and someone is not there)

Sideways

Winds and mirrors

The road to nowhere

Detours 40

Hakuna's gone fishing

Suspensions of belief

The adventures of moby

An inhuman gathering

Hijacked

Representation 47

Diy pet cremation

Pit-stop on the cone-trail

Streams

Wallpaper frenzy

Conscious sedation

Indecision 57

Hakuna wakes up

The latter-day dude

Oz goes out

Whiskey starts writing

Does difference make a difference?

Freedom 67

Welcome to the anti-church of hatred

Default mode

Et tu brod?

The doing of nothing

Inactivity, again

Dolphins for m-

Wonderland 77

Imagine being a sober gitte nielson

Decadent city

Nihilism at the tea party

Post-artistic breakdown

Whodunnit

Silence 88

Gravitation

Vertical features

Joyful pessimism

(S)un-day null morpheme in-action

Postscript 95

Lavender sunset

Endnotes 97

References 109