Concepts are not what we need
Concepts recycle problems we could do without
Words: Tom Tomaszewski / Photographs: Mark Neville
Kapow!
The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy tells us that, the way the world is now, we need a concept of evil. We disagree. Concepts are like permissions in the computer science sense. A concept of evil would have something in it that insists evil has already happened in the way whoever’s using the concept insists. It could happen again, like that. Like what?
Of course we don’t want evil. But whose evil? Biden’s or Trump’s? Concepts, if they are like permissions are also like clubs. Clubs, groups of people whose intentions unite them as they pick up the concept, and clubs like the The Penguin’s umbrella: a sophisticated piece of kit but still something to hit someone over the head with.
Being hit with a concept is like being mugged. Someone attacks you with one and that’s it as far as thinking goes (Trump, Farage, Corbyn, Trotsky etc). You’re stuck, whacked on the ear, usually arguing in the end over one particular concept, truth.
Anaconcept!
Let’s find anaconcepts — magical things, not clubs — which expose the patterns, structures, dynamics, repetitions and reiterations of intentions persisting in concepts. These would be disarming inventions, gestures, ways of doing life that improvise — conversations which don’t get stuck.
Doing so, we are not alone. Hélène Cixous (Stigmata), Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology), Julia Kristeva (Revolution in Poetic Language), Fred Moten (All That Beauty), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason), Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams), Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark) Roland Barthes, (Mythologies), Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge), Sarah Wood, (Some thing, some-one, some ghost), Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination), Judith Butler (Bodies That Matter), Donna Haraway (A Cyborg Manifesto), Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider) and Bell Hooks (Teaching to Transgress) all understand ana-.
Now let’s forget about anaconcept and look for something else.
Converse
Concepts have become as much a part of serious discussion as clichés have of K-Pop. What would a conversation sound like without a concept? Perhaps like Miles Davis’s unsentimental My Funny Valentine, never played the same way twice, instead of Chet Baker’s melodic performances. Baker fits in. Davis stands apart. Baker stands on his own. Davis is always Davis plus Evans, Coltrane, Williams, Hancock or whoever.
Concepts fit in. They comply because they are already cued up for the widest audience possible. Think of them as melodic. Jeremy Deller’s More Poetry is Needed a giant mural, woke people up to something about what poetry might be. Marina Abramović took to the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury for seven minute’s silence dressed as a CND logo, Glastonbury silenced.
Deller’s mural was demolished by the Swansea City Council. Abramović’s performance was broadcast and recorded. As far as one could tell, the field around the Pyramid stage said nothing for seven minutes, but they would would they? They were there to see Marina Abramović hold a silence for seven minutes.
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Our impatience is palpable. A favourable reception guarantees that somebody knows how to work an audience. Whatever it is we’re talking about, Gil Scott-Heron would have told you it won’t be televised. Or, rather, it wouldn’t be televised like that. Find yourself on the news like Just Stop Oil, of course, and you are in trouble.
To converse might involve turning things around, which doesn’t mean opposing them. Turning, which might have the effect of winning an argument but without the casualties, can involve proposing and imposing. Deller and Davis do this — but you might say the same of Abramović or Baker. The difference is in the dissonance.
This and not going it alone.
Dissonance
Freud wrote about the ways in which we repeat ourselves as like printing from stereotype plates (transference), where the same thing gets laid down with only the possibility of very minor changes. Our aim is to say something hopefully different and not repetitive. It might cause discord and it may not accord with some sort of an idea that whatever we are saying really happened. We would be delighted at the thought of a way of re-Tweeting that failed to deliver the same thing.
Unfortunately (and the Tweet and the re-Tweet are examples of this), once you have a concept it’s damn hard to get rid of it. Concepts function like certain kinds of remembering, the act of recollection never being able to do much more than its best with the way it is packaged.
Packaging
Concepts, like plastic wrappers, are horrid receptacles that never completely disappear. Packaging. You can’t get away from a concept once it’s been packaged to be sold. Race.
Try to imagine a paper-wrapper kind of a concept, something coming at you out of a dream. Something imagined and unforgettable that doesn’t hang around for ever. Think of Robert Browning’s dreams and poetry. Great concepts like freedom, whoever’s saying it, need to somehow be memorable and biodegradable, or at least not be put up on a stage in front of cameras like Abramović insists or, some time ago, Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson believed he had something to say about the Earth. Jarvis Cocker improvised an answer: an unexpected turn.
Conceptlash
Mark’s photographs, all of them taken recently in Ukraine, are about not getting stuck. Photographs are pretty good ways of not getting stuck, maybe needing more hand-eye coordination than anything else you’d call art, of a sort you could hit a ball straight down the line with. They give you more than words can say.
These are no symbols, they don’t stand for anything, which would mean (if you know about symbols) there’d be something broken off about them. They give you something to feel as much as think about. They offer an opening of concepts like nationalism or the news.
These are about the body of life: the Earth.
Conceptualizasplation
In the coming weeks we will study some concepts that we could especially do without. We will grow in number, names being added as we go along. You won’t hear any more about anaconcept, only other things.
We would like to leave you with something memorable and biodegradable. Something emotional, never sentimental.
