#Recollections of Wittgenstein

[philosophybits]

Polemic, or the art of throwing eggs, is ... as highly skilled a job as, say, boxing... keep your face straight and throw them well! The difficulty is: not to make superfluous noises or gestures, which don’t harm the other man but only yourself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees, ed.

[philosophybitmaps]

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of the Ears

The philosophy of the ears examines the role of hearing and sound in human experience, perception, and understanding. It explores the auditory sense as a way of engaging with the world, particularly in relation to communication, music, language, and consciousness. The ears, as the organs of hearing, play a critical role not only in sensory perception but also in how we understand time, space, and meaning.

Key Themes in the Philosophy of the Ears:

Auditory Perception and Reality:

Hearing provides a unique way of perceiving the world, distinct from vision or touch. Sound is temporal and dynamic, and the philosophy of hearing explores how this shapes our experience of time, movement, and change.

Unlike sight, which is oriented around spatial dimensions, hearing is immersive, with sound surrounding us. This leads to philosophical questions about how sound contributes to our sense of place, environment, and presence in the world.

Hearing and Language:

The ears are crucial for understanding language. Spoken language depends on the ability to hear, and through hearing, we comprehend meaning, tone, and context.

Philosophers of language have explored how sound influences the structure of communication, including the emotional, symbolic, and practical aspects of spoken words. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, explored how meaning is conveyed through the sounds of language, while J.L. Austin focused on how spoken utterances perform actions in the world.

Music and Aesthetic Experience:

The philosophy of the ears is deeply connected to the philosophy of music. Music, as an auditory art form, engages the ears in profound ways, evoking emotion, memory, and reflection.

Philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have examined music as a form of non-linguistic expression that communicates deep truths about existence and human emotion, offering an aesthetic experience that is uniquely accessible through hearing.

Sound and Memory:

Hearing plays a key role in memory. Sounds can evoke strong emotional responses and memories, often more intensely than visual stimuli. Familiar sounds, such as a loved one’s voice or a piece of music, can trigger recollections, suggesting that auditory experiences are deeply tied to personal and collective memory.

This ties into phenomenology, where the experience of hearing is explored as part of how we relate to and recall the past, shaping our understanding of identity and lived experience.

Hearing and Consciousness:

The experience of hearing is closely tied to consciousness. Sound can shift our awareness and attention, sometimes affecting our emotions and thoughts on a subconscious level.

The phenomenology of hearing looks at how auditory experiences contribute to the flow of consciousness. Sound is immediate and often cannot be ignored, meaning it can shape attention and awareness in ways that other senses do not.

Sound, Silence, and Meditation:

Silence is as important as sound in the philosophy of the ears. Philosophers like John Cage have explored the relationship between sound and silence, emphasizing how silence is not merely the absence of sound but a space for reflection and deeper awareness.

In Buddhism and Zen, the practice of deep listening and silence is often used in meditation to focus the mind and cultivate inner peace. Hearing becomes a means of connecting to the present moment, highlighting the ear’s role in spiritual and contemplative practices.

Hearing and the Ethical Dimension:

Hearing has an ethical dimension, particularly in the context of listening. To truly listen to someone involves not just the mechanical process of hearing sounds but being open to understanding and empathizing with the speaker.

Emmanuel Levinas argued that ethical responsibility involves "listening" to the Other—being receptive to their needs, suffering, and presence. The ears are thus not just passive receivers but active participants in interpersonal ethics and moral responsibility.

Hearing and Social Interaction:

Hearing plays a fundamental role in social interactions. The act of listening is essential to communication, collaboration, and understanding within societies. The ear is the organ that allows us to engage with others, participate in dialogue, and form communities.

In this sense, the ears are key to the philosophy of communication, where listening is as important as speaking. Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue emphasizes the importance of genuine listening in establishing meaningful relationships between individuals.

Ears and the Body-Mind Connection:

The ears serve as a gateway to both intellectual and emotional experiences, illustrating the connection between body and mind. Auditory stimuli can provoke both cognitive processing and visceral emotional reactions, reinforcing the idea that the mind and body are interconnected through sensory perception.

Embodied cognition theories suggest that hearing influences not just our mental states but also our physical interactions with the world, shaping how we navigate and interpret our environment.

Hearing and Power:

Hearing can be associated with issues of power and control, especially in the context of surveillance and modern technology. Sounds can be used to influence or manipulate, whether through propaganda, advertising, or sonic warfare, raising ethical questions about the role of auditory perception in power dynamics.

The politics of hearing also involve issues of accessibility, as people with hearing impairments may experience the world differently, leading to discussions on the societal importance of hearing and the right to access information and communication.

The philosophy of the ears emphasizes the importance of hearing in shaping our perceptions, experiences, and interactions with the world. Hearing is not just a sensory process but a way of engaging with time, language, music, ethics, and consciousness. Whether through the experience of sound, silence, or listening to others, the ears connect us deeply to both the external world and our inner lives.

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics Presents: A reading from ‘The Last Unravellings of the Logoclast – Alan Halsey’

During this event there will be short readings from Alan Halsey’s posthumous collection by Geraldine Monk & friends.

Venue: Mappin Building, Mappin Hall, The University of Sheffield

***

“Alan Halsey, much missed, always remembered, cherished here so extraordinarily beautifully by Geraldine Monk with this exquisite little collection with Free Poetry, lives on in the scribbles and the artful verses, moving, stimulating, so effortlessly on the button, every page a spirited wonder.” — Adam Piette for Blackbox Manifold

Alan Halsey, 1949-2022 ran the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, U.K. for twenty years and continued to work as a specialist bookseller and editor of West House Books when he moved to Sheffield in 1997. Alan was a poet, artist, publisher, editor, bibliophile, logoclast, scholar and humourist. What was thought to be his final publication Remarks of Uncertain Consequence was published by Five Seasons Press shortly before his death. We now know that it was not his grand finale. Some of his most notable publication amongst his prodigious output include Wittgenstein’s Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005), Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006) and Selected Poems 1988-2016 (Shearsman 2017). Five Seasons also published The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995) and Lives of the Poets with Martin Corless-Smith (2009). He edited the three volume Collected Poems of Bill Griffiths’ (Reality Street) and edited and introduced Thomas Lovell Beddoes Death’s Jest-Book (West House Books 2003). As a graphic artist he collaborated with Kelvin Corcoran, Steve McCaffery and Gavin Selerie; his solo text-graphic works include Memory Screen, shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005, and In White Writing (Xexoxial 2012). With Martin Archer he co-directed and composed pieces for the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices whose third album Warning: May Contain Notes was released on Discus Records in 2016. He was an Affiliated Poet at Sheffield University’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics.

Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s. Her major collections include Escafeld Hangings, West House Books (2005) and Interregnum, Creation Books(1995), Selected Poems Salt Publishing (2003) Ghost & Other Sonnets (2008). In 2012 she devised and edited Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition, which she described as a ‘collective autobiography’, Shearsman Books. Her most recent collection They Who Saw the Deep was published in 2016 in the United States by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions.

She lives in Sheffield, England where she ran West House Books and its imprint Gargoyle Editions with her late husband Alan Halsey. She is a founding member of the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices for which she has composed several pieces including We TalkThrough Walls, Midsummer Mummeries and Up & Down at Bishop’s House (with Alan Halsey and fellow collaborator Martin Archer). She is an affiliated poet to The Centre for Poetry and Poetics, University of Sheffield.

Please note, this event is an in-person one so we would love you to be there but if you can't travel you can log in by no later than 6.20pm on the link: meet.google.com/nju-skpq-avt

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/.../reading-last-unravellings...

[labryinth11]

Are all stories true?

etymology … story = history

Great question. Our memories consist of constantly revised stories. We rearrange recollections to help provide premises for things we experience in the present. Memory distortion: an adaptive perspective.

It’s unsettling to realise, but we make sense of what’s happened in the past by what’s happening now (we might call that ‘causality’) and we make sense of what’s happening now by what happened in the past (we might call that ‘historical precedence’). These concepts might appear identical, but they are actually different projections of the same sets of datapoints.

I suggest Causality joins the dots ‘from left to right’ (looking forward to show what happened next) and History joins the same dots ‘from right to left’ (looking backwards to see what happened before). In concert, these performances of patterns compose what we consider cogent, like contrapuntal harmony. They actually adjust their tuning to match one another - like mathematical modelling of a time-series.

So, if I were to ask you ‘what did you do today?’ you will actually tell me a story. Even if it is very detailed, the narrative will feature a perspective that will produce a picture according to inclusions and omissions. ‘I had a nice cup of coffee’. Black or cappuccino? What volume of it? At what moment and in what manner? How many sips did you take? Was there a spoon on the saucer?

Without encoding every possible property of the state of affairs you are naming as an event, have you told ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’? Is such a thing even possible? How much truth is enough, and what are you intending to truthfully communicate to me? The fact that you had one cup, the physics-chemical properties of the coffee, or that you enjoyed it? Surely the truth must include all of them! Otherwise you are cherry-picking in order to render your reality!

But that’s just what we do. That’s what we always do. In scientific data there is this devil called ‘noise’. Stuff that is ‘insignificant’. The signal-to -noise ratio is the heart of any evidence. How do we know what matters? Well, it depends on what we are trying to model. When I was a kid doing molecular biology people still talked about ‘junk DNA’ like it was a fact. Who does that now, in the age of epigenetics? (Regulatory RNAs and the demise of 'junk' DNA)

So, ‘what happened’ starts to become a deeper question than we might realise when we consider how communication across time (even when we use video recordings from certain angles) necessitates the reduction of reality into sets of symbols (be they words or even pixels) such that what we recall as a representation of what happened is never ‘what happened’ - it is our picture of what happened.

Pictures communicate different properties. Here is one of my favourite pictures of Time. Anyone who knows the title of the image will see why I am using it as an example here.

��The Persistence of Memory”

Did this really happen? Of course not! Clocks don’t melt. However, this really happens and is happening even as you think about what I have already said.

In summary, all stories can be true in a sense, even when those stories involve sentient mice and grateful dolphins. Don’t panic (and always take a towel) - that doesn’t mean there is no distinction between forensics reports and fairytales. However, what aspects of truth a story is intended to communicate stipulates its form. The restaurant at the end of the universe may not be a place in space, but we have all been there.

Serious or satirical? Like Wittgenstein suggests, that depends on whether you get the joke.

— david moore on quora

[toskarin]

i recently picked up subahibi. how much wittgenstein do i need to be familiar with before reading it? i read the tractatus years ago, but my recollection of it is pretty rusty.

you'd only really need the Tractatus and Remarks on Colour to get all the Wittgenstein, but trying to get all the literary references is a bit of a fool's errand with Subahibi unless you already read everything incidentally beforehand. and I'm not going to tell someone to read Wittgenstein and Kant to get a better understanding of an eroge, no matter how good it is

which is all to say that SCA-Ji is pretty fun if you went to school for that kind of thing or had a phase for it. I honestly got a lot out of recognising the poetry, as well

the good news is that most of the references are either explained in the text or lend to the general paranoid-surreal atmosphere, so it's fine to be left scrambling here and there. hell I think that's an important part of the vibe, even

[old-jeanz]

Hello all, I've decided to post my psycho-thriller/ horror story on tumblr. Please do tell me what you think and if I should continue it. It can also be read on wattpad @/ondeathrow

The "//" refers to the voice in the main character's head. I hope you enjoy.

Updates will be every Monday, Thursday and Sunday.

- Sean.

Daku. | a psycho-thriller.

"whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"

- ludwig wittgenstein.

chapter one: stains.

//isn't blood quite similar to red wine? both create a stain, which is hard to get rid of. if they're spilled on your garments, you must leave them to soak, and even then the stain remains.

"I mean you're not wrong, but I suppose there are many things similar to red wine. scars that no one can see, voices that no one can hear", the male replied into the emptiness of room as he swirled the red liquid around the glass.

surely it was not strange to have a voice in your head, right? everyone is in need of a companion, especially when solidarity is your only roommate. this particular lost soul had few acquaintances and only but one close friend. it didn't bother him in slightest, he found the very essence is socialisation pointless.

it's true when they say that silence says a thousand words. there is nothing more mentally taunting than being alone with your own thoughts. however, a knock upon the rattling silver doors of the warehouse caught his attention.

//who could that be?

"It must be kazue..", he mumbled quietly to himself. "come in!".

with that, the warehouse door was brought up, and a feeble looking figure nimbly ushered inside, before shutting the door (if it could be called that even).

"why're there cobwebs all along the walls, ugh! I thought you would've sorted that out by now", kazue bellowed in vexation.

it was he who was the "one close friend" of our beloved protagonist. their friendship was odd to say the least. with two men from completely different worlds somehow coexisting, it almost made one wonder if their worlds were much different at all.

kazue's childlike brown eyes widened at the sight of the lighter that was suddenly in his friend's hand.

"h-hey...what're you doing? WAIT STO-"

before he could even finish his sentence, the cobwebs full of spiders was set alight and his friend was leaning leisurely against the wall, watching as a light show occurred right in his presence.

"oh....you don't like it, kazu? you were the one complaining anyways", the taller lulled out, crossing his arms over his firm chest with a roll of his eyes.

"I don't know why you decided to live here. it's old, not even a house, it's in the middle of nowhere, I got lost at least 3 times before actually reaching you, plus there are zero people around to ask for directions".

it was obvious that at this point, kazue was fed up of how strangely his friend lived.

"that's how I like it, I didn't ask you to come around, you made that decision yourself", his friend shot back, making his way to a long wooden table that ran along the wall of the warehouse to about halfway.

he sat down and allowed his chin to rest in his palm, his colourless locks gently shadowing his eyes. without looking over, he beckoned for kazue to sit beside him as he retrieved an opaque grey pouch from his satchel.

the silence wasn't tense like it was a while ago. however, with kazue's eyes practically slicing his loyal chum open, it was clear he had something to say. it was also clear that his friend would not like it.

"when are you going to stop?", his voice came out wearily. as if he was afraid of either being verbally stabbed or physically thrown across the wide space that surrounded them.

"when I see fit, stop acting like you don't do the same things I do".

though it was nothing but factual, kazue concluded that his friend and himself were not the same. to their business associates, they were s-class murderers. assassins. silent killers. but kazue still was able to live a relatively normal life within the streets of osaka. besides, he had his girlfriend, a legal job and a good social life. killing others was something that he got into for a revenge case, not for life.

unlike his comrade that sat next to him, kazue stopped when he got the closure he needed. it was crystalline who was able to let go, and who was not.

kazue brought his fist to his mouth and coughed quietly, searching his mind for something to change the subject.

"do you remember akira hinode?", he questioned, tracing his fingers along the dents in the table.

"are you referring to that really tall girl that everyone mistook for a boy in the year above? she was like the hulk dressed in a pretty outfit".

"funny you should mention that, she became a he last year".

his friend finally turned to him as he raised a brow in subtle interest. "I'm not surprised, even her parents- his parents accepted it. I remember when we were all at school. it was snowing and one of her underlings had called to me to say they had made me a present. when I dashed outside, I saw a snowman that they said was me. I was overjoyed by it".

kazue had never heard this story before and leaned forward like a Cheshire cat waiting for another treat.

"then akira had walked out with a baseball bat, and with no hesitation whacked the head off of my snow form. right in front of my whole class".

"wha-", kazue stammered. not what he was expecting... at all.

"what's his name now then?", his friend seemed unaffected by the recollection of that memory. meanwhile, kazue felt like someone had clutched his heart and dug into it with their rusted nails.

"akio higasa".

his friend rose to his feet, twitching his brows in utter confusion before a sinister smile crept onto his face.

"are you sure? my my this is quite sentimental isn't it", he spoke in a hushed undertone.

"what do you mean?", kazue's head tilted in concern at the change in his companion's demeanour.

"it seems that...", the white haired male began while reaching into his pouch. "a certain akio hagasa is going to die tonight. must've got on one of my client's nerves".

"you're not really gonna kill him are you?"

"what do you mean? a job is a job, no matter who the victim is", the white haired explained. "it will be nice to have a reunion, though he won't know who I am at first. I'll say : hi there, I'm daku. I'll be your executioner for tonight".

[thehumanfront]

Wittgenstein time

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, our description of time is a linguistic game. 

There are two games to choose from: ‘information-time’ and ‘memory-time’.

Information-time refers to a public-chronology—the use of clocks, diaries, calendars, and so forth. However, really, information-time is just a measurement of something else: currently, on Earth, ‘one second’ has been calibrated to mean ‘9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom’.

Memory-time, in contrast, is an arrangement of personal memories which allows us to manage events with personal expectations. Measurement-time, however, is underpinned by subjectivity. For in this game there is only ‘before’ and ‘after’ and ‘earlier’ and later’. There is no ‘past’ and there is no ‘future’, unless someone claims a present.

We usually express memory-time with indexical sentences—references to objects which change with context, rendering it ambiguous. For example, the sentence, ‘Yesterday Bill was in my house,’ could convey a meaning of a human known as Bill being present in the spatiotemporal location of my house; in another context the sentence could refer to my neighbour’s donkey Bill breaking into my tree house. (Both could have occurred half an Earth-spin ago.) Memory-time, then, is a system for internal referencing; it is made to be external with language. Objects can’t be placed in external temporal space because we can’t measure it with physical criteria.

Yet no matter which kind of time we refer to—which game we play—the sentences we utter about time are deprived of standalone meaning. Both forms of time reference changes in the external world relatively: one is recorded with respect to caesium atoms; the other is founded in subjective recollections.

Wittgenstein warns us to be clear as to which one we are referring to. Without clarity, we’ll have to prioritise one and be forced to confusingly express one with respect to the other.

[relatablepoetryandquotes]

“A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Personal Recollections, by Rush Rhees

[philosophybits]

Sometimes my ideas come so quickly that I feel as if my pen was being guided.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees, ed.

[philosophybitmaps]

[insearchofwisdom]

In those recollections Rhees also recalls that Wittgenstein worried, in a manner typical of his severe self-criticism, that he was a "monster.” This criticism echoes a discussion about the authenticity of the philosopher in Plato’s “Phaedrus.” Socrates admits he has failed to obey the Delphic injunction to know his own self and declares it 'absurd to consider problems about other beings while I am still in ignorance about my own nature.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/opinion/wittgensteins-confession-philosophy.html

[deadpanwalking]

dpw what's on your to-read list? :)

Ludwig Wittgenstein by Edward Kanterian

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk

Recollections of Wittgenstein by Rush Rhees

Wittgenstein by Severin Schroeder

I'm going through something.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Florinda by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1852)

Florinda is an oil on canvas painting by the German painter and lithographer Franz Xaver Winterhalter. It was completed in 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The legend of the 8th Century Visigothic king Rodrigo of Hispania tells how Rodrigo’s seduction of the beautiful maiden Florinda ('La Cava') initiated the Arab conquest of Spain. In this scene Florinda (centre left) and her companions, all draped to varying degrees in luxurious Indian silks, prepare to bathe in the grounds of the castle near Toledo where she lives, unaware that they are being watched by King Rodrigo who hides in the bushes nearby.

Rodrigo falls violently in love and seduces Florinda, to the anger of her father, Count Julian, who secretly meets with the Moors and encourages them to invade Spain. In the subsequent war Rodrigo is killed in battle by the invaders, who subject the country to their rule for two hundred years. Franz Xaver Winterhalter wrote in a letter dated 1869 that his inspiration for the painting was a sixteenth century Spanish ballad entitled La Cava, and his painting follows the text closely.

He might also have been aware of the Romantic treatments of the subject by English writers in the early years of the century, for example in the epic poems The Vision of Don Roderick by Sir Walter Scott in 1811 and Roderick, The Last of the Goths by Robert Southey (1814).

Perhaps a more immediate inspiration was the staging of a new four-act opera by Sigismond Thalberg, Florinda, ou Les Maures en Espagne, which opened in July 1851 at Her Majesty’s Theatre during one of Winterhalter’s summer visits to England.

Queen Victoria attended the opera during its opening month, and enjoyed seeing her singing instructor of twenty years, the celebrated bass Luigi Lablache (also the composer’s father-in-law), performing the role of Florinda’s father, Count Julian. Queen Victoria purchased the painting for Prince Albert in April 1852, writing that she had seen, ‘a most beautiful picture by Winterhalter, his favourite work, which I have purchased for Albert’s birthday, but which can be no secret, as it has to go to the Exhibition. The painting was hung in the Queen’s Sitting Room at Osborne House, initially without a frame. Florinda was favourably received at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1852, where it was particularly admired for its colour and the beauty of the female figures. Historical genre painting was an unusual departure from Winterhalter’s typical court portraiture of the 1840s and 1850s. There is perhaps in its design a recollection of earlier depictions of the Ovidian scene of the bath of Diana observed by the hunter Actaeon. Winterhalter had used the arrangement of a circle of figures in a picturesque outdoor setting fifteen years earlier in his Decameron of c.1837.

The artist clearly found the composition satisfactory, as it was to be reused, with the picturesque woodland setting, for his later group portrait, The Empress Eugenie surrounded by her Ladies-In-Waiting of 1855 (Compiègne, Musée national du château).

The striking similarity between this later painting and Florinda, even to the extent of the position of the key figure, did not pass unnoticed and popular scandalous rumour suggested that the Empress and her ladies-in-waiting had modelled for the deshabillé figures in Florinda - in fact the Empress did not marry Emperor Napoleon III until 1853.

One European princess however does appear to have been a model for the picture. In 1860 Queen Victoria wrote of the Princess Wittgenstein, ‘She still very handsome, having been a great beauty & her head painted by Winterhalter, appears in his “Florinda”’ (Journal, 12 October, 1860).

[disturbingbookclub]

Wittgenstein’s Nephew is an autobiographical work by Thomas Bernhard, originally published in 1982. It is a recollection of the author's friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a member of the wealthy Viennese Wittgenstein family. Paul suffers from an unnamed mental illness for which he is repeatedly hospitalized, paralleling Bernhard's own struggle with a chronic lung disease. Thomas Bernhard - Wittgenstein's Nephew : A Friendship https://bit.ly/3d9hKnh - free delivery worldwide

[hyunjoochung]

Two Books, Topography of Discomfort, The Power of Art

Chung Hyun Joo Independent curator, Doctor of Philosophy

This exhibition has two purposes; to introduce the two books, Twins May Stories and People’s Marchings in May, and to reveal in particular the viewpoint of Kim Hyun Hee(金昡希), who designed the books. Seven people participated in the project “people’s marchings in May”: painter Chang Yoong Chia(章永佳), researchers Kim Seo Ra(金茜拉), Mark Teh(鄭家榮), Teoh Ming Wah(張敏華), Jeong So Ra(鄭蘇螺), Chung Hyun Joo(丁玄珠), and book designer Kim Hyun Hee.

Twins May Stories and People’s Marchings in May

Twins May Stories and People’s Marchings in May are the culmination of Chang Yoong Chia’s exhibition, “People’s Marchings in May” (2018.5.17.-6.30.). He produced three artist books for his presentation, and Twins May Stories is one of his artist books. For his books, he used the May 18 Democratization Movement as a subject matter for recollecting the trauma of the May 13 Racial Riots in Malaysia, which he inherited from his parents.

The articles published in People’s Marchings in May are a full complement and extension of the articles in the newsletter for the exhibition. Teoh Ming Wah, who works as a freelance writer, suggested to me to include the participation of Malaysian writers, thus making the book as it is: written by Kim Seo Ra and Mark Teh, Teoh Ming Wah, Jeong So Ra, and Chung Hyun Joo. Focusing on the exhibition “People’s Marchings in May” in terms of art philosophy, art criticism, sociology, political philosophy, and epistemology, we wanted to provide a forum for public opinion to recollect and reflect on the two May incidents concealed and degraded for a long time.

Kim Hyun Hee joined the project by taking part in the book’s design at the end of writing the essays. She created a topographical map by linking the points that she recognized about a complicated, but common history of the May incidents in Gwangju and Malaysia, which are “geographically separated.” Her questions about the history of violence and the truth of history engraved in two May incidents that we should be asking to know, overlap those of Chang Yoong Chia. Through the process of constructing her questions, she commemorates and comforts the victims of the incidents. Let’s take a look at her intention embodied in the books.

Topography of Discomfort

“I wanted to look into the history of violence through two incidents, 5.13 and 5.18, while also show the attitude of the artist who tries to reveal the truth and face his own internalized fear.”

-Kim Hyun Hee's artist notes-

When we read the books, the narrow and long format comes to us first with the covers of the two books, which she pairs in black and red. What the book format forms, is the shape of ‘shoes,’ which symbolizes military boots and marches, used as the central motif in Twins May Stories. The form of shoes refers to the rallies and subsequent bloodshed, that is, the dizzying and chaotic footsteps through entirely reversed situations that daily life suddenly turns into a violent situation.

Besides, the format is not suitable for the structure of the open book because of uneasiness to unfold well when a reader holds the book. The annoyance of the size hinders the immersion of reading, especially People’s Marchings in May. This feature causes discomfort that is difficult to recognize clearly, which will make the reader continue to fix the book because it does not open well when held in hand.

By drawing on the unfamiliar format of the book, Kim Hyun Hee tightly weaves the book’s structure causing the body’s discomfort, with the truth of the two May incidents that we will confront throughout the book. Along with this relationship, the physiological discomfort of the body continually penetrates and hinders the psychological space of the reader, who gaze in miserableness at 5.13 and 5.18. The topographical map of discomfort is engaged in the relationship between the book and the reader. The intention is to make the readers experience at present the distress of Chang Yoong Chia, who brings forth his inherited trauma, the anxiety he feels as he is urged to forget his unforgettable memories. With this design, what Kim Hyun Hee expresses is the profound consolation and solidarity of Chang Yoong Chia’s suffering and the victims of the incidents.

The power of Art

The project began in the winter of 2016 when I asked Chang Yoong Chia about his solo exhibition in Gwangju during Candlelight rally, and ends in 2020 with Kim Hyun Hee’s presentation postponed to the end of June due to the COVID-19 infection. So far, the political situation in both Korea and Malaysia has changed rapidly. Malaysia’s Pakatan Harapan(Alliance of Hope) coalition government, which succeeded in changing its regime in May 2018, was collapsed in late February 2020 by a coup led by BERSATU and Parti Keadlian Rakyat established by former members of the racialist UMNO, after only 22 months in power.

I didn’t know what to say to my Malaysian friends when they woefully announced to me the news of the coup. How does the political situation in Malaysia go in the age of quarantine caused by COVID-19 infection? And as poets of daily life, what do artists want to evoke and change, revealing their looks in intended design?

In this project, the seven creators sympathized with each other’s awareness of the problems of 5.13 and 5.18. They did what they could do in their positions, and then discussed and visualized them from various aspects by relying on each other. Through this solidarity, every act of these artists opens up something unutterable or invisible, the memories for May incidents and the social traumas out “to the surface, so that everyone can see it.” What they reveal is currently absent from human relationships: the process of negation humanness.(1)

Kim Hyun Hee identifies with the memory and suffering of violence, structures them in the books with discomfort as an expression of absence. Through her eyes, the project expands the form of resistance to the re-designation of the memories of victims. The work of art asserts its unique power of the form of resistance and remembering. The constancy of art will then go against Wittgenstein’s philosophical maxim that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent and the intellectual nihilism of the notion of the end of history or ideologies.(2)

--------------------

(1) “Interview”, People’s Marchings in May (Gwangju: FLUXUS/Gwangju, 2020), p. 242. (2) Jacques Rancière, “The unforgettable”, Figures of History, Trans. by J. Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. 55.