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Photography is deposed and its monopoly on image-production is succeeded by the computer. In this circumstance, why paint?

Painting brings the painter into direct contact with things as they are. And in patient, attentive seeing, the instant unfolds and overflows in myriad possibility — a practice forms. By practice I mean a set of constraints to induce states of acute, active attention, to direct curiosity, to reclaim agency without intermediary, to develop discernment, skill.

The practice is emancipation from the flatness and immutability of prevailing structures, where knowledge attains to empeiria1 — from experience — rather than didaxis2 — what is told. Painting is an act whose provenance is bodily, local, and unrepeatable. The practice is entirely self-directed, it is for you but self-less, it teaches you to “become who you are”3.

It does not delay, it overcomes impediment and dependency, overrides a “learned hopelessness” it approaches what is ready to hand and is disinterested in questions of relevance, utility and effect. What matters is that one sees for themselves. The painter intuits that their vocation is as old as inquirying and continues to be the most direct form of it — independent and unmediated.

Delaying this labour is an act of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi4) and must be resumed at once! The practice teaches that impoverishment is not a property of being but of the symbolic order supplanting it.

When technology as a mode of revealing becomes totalizing, it actively conceals other possibilities. Enframing (Gestell) is invisible to all within it.5 But Painting escapes this mode of revealing that asserts itself as the only mode. And its beauty is the aura of sovereignty attained.

Painting is not without difficulty — it is — but it is a necessary difficulty. Equivalent to the construction of the domus, it too is refuge from disruption. It is the antithesis of engineered states of “dark flow”6, of depletion, of “depressive hedonia”7 where life is perceived to be elsewhere, viewed upon a screen8. Painting is the simple reassertion that life is here.

”And if he left off dreaming about you … ?”

Interviewer: Let me see, twenty, thirty centimeters. Chalk. Rag. Sixteen years. Incomplete. “blue”, “green”, “stone”, “landscape” — not names, descriptors. Otherwise, no explanation. Nought but daubing. Why?

Subject: Let us start here, “And if he left off dreaming about you…?” 9 As Borges’ epigraph does of man, I ask it of Art, what is lost? Let me read

In his almost perpetual state of wakefulness, tears of anger burned the man’s old eyes.
He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres — much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind. He understood that initial failure was inevitable. He swore to put behind him the vast hallucination that at first had drawn him off the track, and he sought another way to approach his task.9

I: Her Stesichoros may recognize your hero

Stesichoros: I will tell you about blindness

Interviewer: Yes do

S: First I must tell you about seeing

[…]

S: Paintings completely covered the walls right up to the ceiling at the time the atelier was lit by gas fixtures and it glowed like a dogma but this is not what I saw

I: No

S: Naturally I saw what I saw

I: Naturally

S: I saw everything everyone saw

I: Well yes

S: No I mean everything everyone saw everyone saw because I saw it

I: Did they

S: I was (very simply) in charge of seeing for the world after all seeing is just a substance

I: How do you know that

S: I saw it

I: Where

S: Wherever I looked it poured out my eyes I was responsible for everyone’s visibility it was a great pleasure it increased daily

I: A pleasure you say

S: Of course it had its disagreeable side I could not blink or the world went blind10

I: “The world went blind” and you’ve not answered — what’s lost?

S: The Open11. His sire draws a man from it. Stesichoros cannot blink lest he blind the world.

I: But this craft is a plaything.

S: Precisely, all things are born of the interplay of the vital, the lithe, the living that in their union rejoin the Open.

The symptoms appear — all impatient, all spoilt by the immediacy of computation. Existence bifurcated into digital and physical planes of identity. Unsatisfiable expectations carry over boundaries and exacerbate inadequate interface. Physical resistance impedes gratification. That which does not yield immediately never arrives, attention is redirected. Dreamt futures nullified in the instant uttered, forgotten with rushing insistence. These are the maladies of the faithless visitor for whom the future’s cancelled. 12

[…]

I: You use this machine to ask why paint

S: Yes. This ascendant technology is vast, but bounded — use reveals the limitation.

I: And, are you not embarrassed to continue after the reason was confiscated

S: That shame is for others

I: Can you complete this work

S: The ouroboros encircles this hour

Afterword

Adumbration

The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent. Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is picked up again.13

The Market Economy does not provide a backstop for the pernicious decline in the value of human being, especially the economic value (Marx’s “exchange value”14) of human labour15, and of subsequent, darker questions of embodiment, of birthright claims to citizenship, to property ownership, to sustenance, mobility, to independence of thought, to a body. Already, resources are being reprioritised. Are systems once conducive to human becoming to be repurposed for machine becoming?

Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: [Unnütze Esser (useless eaters), lebensunwerte Leben (life unworthy of life), limitershchiki (limiters)] yes16

And of man seeking good,
doing evil
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard17

”Become who you are”

The phrase “become who you are” appears throughout Nietzsche’s works:

Was sagt dein Gewissen? — “Du sollst der werden, der du bist”
What does your conscience say? — “You shall become the person you are.” 18

”… oh Zarathustra, who you are and must become — behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is your destiny! That you must be the first to teach this doctrine — how could this great destiny not be also your greatest danger and sickness! Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times, and all things with us… Now I die and disappear, you would say, and in an instant I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs — it will create me again! I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent — not to a new life or a better life or a similar life — I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things” 19

Ecce Homo: Wie man wird, was man ist
Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is

That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life — the temporary sidepaths and wrong turnings, the delays, the ‘modesties’, the seriousness squandered on tasks that lie outside the task — have their own meaning and value. They are an expression of a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where nosce te ipsum would be the recipe for ruin, self-forgetting, self-misunderstanding, self-diminution, narrowing, mediocritizing become reason itself. 3

The source behind all three is Pindar, Pythian Odes II.72:

γένοι’ οἷος ἐσσί μαθών
”Become such as you are, having learned what that is.” 20

The becoming is not spontaneous but won from striving for self-knowledge, which in the Ecce Homo passage is paradoxically redefined as a kind of self-forgetting.

Footnotes

  1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.1, 980b25–981a12, trans. W. D. Ross, revised Jonathan Barnes, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 1552–1553: empeiria as knowledge accumulated through direct, repeated encounter with particulars — the experienced person knows that, bodily and unrepeatable, prior to and irreducible to transmissible theory

  2. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I.1, 71a1–2, trans. Jonathan Barnes, Oxford University Press, 1975/1994, pp. 114–115: ‘All teaching [didaskalia] and all intellectual learning [mathēsis] come about from pre-existing knowledge’

  3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (written 1888, pub. 1908), “Why I Am So Clever” §9; trans. Walter Kaufmann, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 254

  4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Philosophical Library, 1956, pt. 1, ch. 2, p. 87: ‘The one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.’ Self-deception in which consciousness simultaneously holds and denies the truth it flees.

  5. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ (‘The Question Concerning Technology’), 1953, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1954; trans. William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 309–314: ‘Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance.’ And: ‘The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.’

  6. Mike J. Dixon, Jennifer A. Stange, Chanel J. Larche, Craig Graydon, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Kevin A. Harrigan, ‘Dark Flow, Depression and Multiline Slot Machine Play’, Journal of Gambling Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2018, pp. 73–84. doi:10.1007/s10899-017-9695-1

  7. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, 2009, p. 22: ‘depressive hedonia… the inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure’

  8. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. and annotated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014, ch. 1, §2, p. 2: ‘The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.’

  9. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Circular Ruins’, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin, 1998). Originally published in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), collected in Ficciones (1944).

  10. Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, Random House, 1998, pp. 147–148

  11. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Eighth Elegy (1922); discussed in Martin Heidegger, ‘Wozu Dichter?’ (‘What Are Poets For?’), 1946, in Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track), trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ‘The Open’ (das Offene): ‘the great whole of all that is unbounded. It lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn… they do not dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open.’

  12. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books, 2014, pp. 14–16: ‘the slow cancellation of the future… this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of “newness”, of perpetual movement’ (p. 15); ‘the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future’ (p. 16)

  13. Nick Land, ‘#Accelerate: A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’, 2017, §2: ‘The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late… Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is picked up again’

  14. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band, Verlag von Otto Meissner, Hamburg, 1867, Kap. 1 §3. English edn: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin/New Left Review, 1976, pp. 125–131: ‘The exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind.’ Selected for the distinction not for political allignment.

  15. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1935–1936, in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 23

  16. Ross Douthat, ‘A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough?’, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, 2024, https://youtu.be/vV7YgnPUxcU?t=2295

  17. Ezra Pound, The Cantos, Canto CXV, in Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1969). Revised Collected Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1975)

  18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), §270; trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 219

  19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-85), IV, “Das Honig-Opfer”; trans. Walter Kaufmann, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Penguin, 1978)

  20. Pindar, Pythian Odes II.72, c. 475 BCE. The Greek γένοι’ οἷος ἐσσί μαθών is Nietzsche’s source for the imperative ‘become who you are’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft §270; Ecce Homo subtitle: Wie man wird, was man ist). Nietzsche owned and annotated Pindar. The Pindaric formulation contains a qualification absent from most Nietzsche citations: μαθών (‘having learned’) — the becoming is not spontaneous but won through the labour of self-knowledge. Standard critical edition: Bruno Snell and Herwig Maehler (eds), Pindari Carmina cum Fragmentis, 2 vols, 8th edn (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987). English translation: William H. Race (trans.), Pindar: Olympian Odes, Pythian Odes, Loeb Classical Library 56 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)

Anne Carson Ezra Pound Friedrich Nietzsche Guy Debord Jean-Paul Sartre Jorge Luis Borges Mark Fisher Martin Heidegger Nick Land Peter Thiel Stesichoros Accelerationism Attention Bad faith (mauvaise foi) Dark flow Depressive hedonia didaxis empeiria Enframing (Gestell) Exchange value Autobiography of Red Being and Nothingness Capitalist Realism Ecce Homo Ghosts of My Life Metaphysics Posterior Analytics The Cantos The Gay Science The Society of the Spectacle Thus Spoke Zarathustra The Circular Ruins The Origin of the Work of Art The Question Concerning Technology