Fragmentary Thoughts about History, Truth and Skateboarding
If one speaks about future, one always also speaks about desire: for a better, humane future. Whether the notion of future is utopian, dystopian or something in-between: this wish of happiness is always expressed through it. The time that has yet to come is a space of projection and possibility; this seems to be the main reason why we think about it. As playground of the possible the contemplative access to it seems impossible; or at least only possible insofar as one abstracts from everything that originally initiated ones thinking. It is as if the future would demand that we fill it with our desire. I myself won’t discuss a possible future, won’t show you my desires, won’t launch some good old “speculative analysis” but give my take on why it has to be done and how it can be done. Now, obviously, this is a topic about which a shit ton of texts have been written. I neither claim exclusivity nor radical newness; I just want to write a little about radical newness.
The Paradox of the New
The starting point of this essay may strike many as unsatisfying, for I will simply take it as a given: the world today is totally corrupted. It is not just because there is suffering, alienation and injustice, but rather because all this doesn’t have to exist, because there is neither (historical) meaning nor necessity in suffering, alienation and injustice.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.”
Karl Marx (1979) [1852]: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte”, in: Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 11, International Publishers, p. 103f.
But even if one apprehends the world as totally corrupt, there must be a hint of difference, a little deviation, which makes our despair possible: only if we have the idea of a better world can we despair of the actual one. That is the paradox of the new: it not yet is, yet we want it. Thus, that we are able to apprehend the new, besides being located in—and determined by—the old, is a condition of the possibility of despair. But where is this difference located? Why can we grasp the empathic concept of the new? For many it has something to do with the difference inherent to history—the coming into existence of things and their decay. We can despair because we are historical beings for whom, in retrospective, something that was annihilated gains a strange new aura in which the humane is expressed—which never suited it while it was.
“Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole. The traces always come from the past, and our hopes come from their counterpart, from that which was or is doomed.”
Theodor W. Adorno (1973) [1966]: “Negative Dialectics”, translated by E.B.Ashton, Routledge, p. 377f.
That is to say, we are only able to apprehend the idea of truth while turning to the past. Truth understood in a Hegelian manner as the abolishment [Aufhebung] of all (societal) antagonisms. But whatever is apprehended itself is only actual in the present. Actuality means presence. So even though we may not be able to apprehend the appearance of truth in the present and therefore must turn to the ghosts of the past, it is only actual in the present. I will turn to the mechanism behind its appearance.
The diverting gaze
I label that mechanism the diverting gaze. The one who gazes doesn’t need a relation to the past to experience the idea of truth. Yet what was gazed there can only be fully apprehended through a reflection on the past. Seldomly, in a spontaneous impulse, the diverting gaze mediates a volatile grasp of what is good; that is to say, it transcends being through an experience of the possible. It momentarily overcomes the total delusion, and is able to grasp some little, volatile moment of surplus meaning that doesn’t rely on the anamnesis of the past. However, a serious lack of reason is revealed here: the truly revolutionary can only be understood retrospectively. Its meaning in its entirety slips through the hands of the contemporaries, who are therefore unguided by reason and left with experimenting: they can plan to invoke the idea of truth in their social practices but this isn’t correlated to the outcome. The outcome is understood retrospectively, can only be apprehended by us, we who are the future generations. Sadly, that we must apprehend it means that until now what was promised by the past always failed. The insistence that the possibility of a reconciled society appeared in those lost futures can be proven only by the coming into existence of such a society. Until then, the solidarity with those who suffer and the hope that suffering will end is theoretically uncatchable. This is the pre-theoretical investment of Critical Theory.
One of those lost futures is the origin of skateboarding.
What is so remarkable about these periods is the way in which space was appropriated and its functions converted. These new social actions contested the given through the promotion of a sense of the possible. When looking at this example it immediately becomes clear that the diverting gaze is inseparably linked to social practices. More precisely: We can interpret it as the mental state behind the action itself, as the experience, which accompanies the social practice. To use the urban space the way skaters do, means to see past the socially approved norms of usage of an object, past its functions.
When surfing was transposed to the sidewalks that was the expression of a gaze which doesn’t romanticise its parts, but rearranges them in a way, that they move into new readable constellations.
It is thus not only the praxis of interpretation of the social practices that can be called ‘hermeneutic’: the gaze itself is a hermeneutical one. Interpreting the phenomena in an unusual way invokes the intuition of something radically different (without fully apprehending it). That surely is one reason for skateboardings status as part of the counterculture—both in self-conception and in external ascription—and its emphasis on freedom. Instead of saying that it is inseparable from praxis because it’s the driving force of it, one could also say the diverting gaze itself is activity; not that of a singular subject but of a universality mediated through singular subjects. The Universal is the apparition of the idea of truth on the horizon of the future, i.e. the present. The diverting gaze is the mediating concept between the acting individual and this universal idea. When we say that it appears in and through social practices respectively through objectivations of them but is itself a universal we could, likewise, in reference to Hegel, say: it is spirit [Geist].
The structural foundation of the diverting gaze
From where does the diverting gaze originate? As it is nothing but a reconstellation of parts, if there is a reason at all, it must be searched for in the social structure of the world. Because it itself is a certain constellation of objects (and/or men). And even though it sweats out a context of delusion, despair proves its imperfection. The given could not completely absorb human subjectivity and spontaneity; it grants some sort of asylum which makes deviation possible. Since the end of Fordism, society is infamously aligned to the consumer. As consumers it is our duty and our pleasure to take part in a multitude of consumption. But these acts don’t necessarily go together. In fact, for the reflective thought they prove to be contradicting tendencies of the real. As Mark Fisher notes in reference to Jameson:
“‘Being realistic’ may once have meant coming to terms with of [sic] a reality experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment. We are confronted with what Jameson, in his essay ‘The Antimonies [sic] Of The Postmodern’, calls ‘a purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will’. The ‘reality’ here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible and any previous moment can be recalled at any time.”
Mark Fisher (2009): “Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative?”, Zero Books, p. 54.
Fisher describes two reactions of the subject to this: cynicism and forgetting/memory disorder. To live in the present becomes an adaptive strategy. Opposed to this, the diverting gaze is a result of non-compliance. The subject refuses to forget. Instead it reorganizes the non-matching to a new unity.
The enclosing of skateboarding
The diverting gaze can never be explicitly forbidden because it synthesises parts of the already given (and allowed) to a new, possibly subversive unity and thus slips through the mesh of the obligatory and forbidden. But creativity is also one of the main elements of the new capitalist ideology. Now not only the entrepreneurs shall take part in ‘creative destruction’ but also the employees. This is why ambiguity suits the diverting gaze and its products: On the one hand it can promote utility and rationality (expansion of markets); on the other hand it can create a new constellation of objects, which is more than its parts, which contains spirit, which shows the possibility of a reconciled society.
Even though power cannot prohibit it, it can respond to its product, i.e. recursively adapt its strategies to unwanted outcomes. This is what happened to skateboarding. It was enclosed. On the one hand through the building of skateparks, i.e. space whose approved function is to be skated; on the other hand through the adjustment of space in a way that it becomes unskatable. For the attentive observer, ‘skatestoppers’
Needless to say, that the periods sketched above aren’t exclusively expressions of the diverting gaze. The process of normalisation not only befell skateboarding from the outside. It seems that the products of the diverting gaze themselves have the tendency to fossilise. Now, at least for the subculture of skateboarding itself, the norms for the use of space, that is to say its functions, are set. Over the time, skateboardings approach to architecture became normalised to a point where there is not only a defined repertoire of moves one can (i.e. one should) make to interact with space but also where people interacting differently are sanctioned. This is maybe best expressed through judgments in contests. At the latest when skaters unleash the concentrated power of their peculiar nomenclature to describe a movement, it becomes clear that there is no place left for the new in this completely structuring system. Also—especially in the second period from the seventies to early eighties—there were many skateboarders, who built their own ramps and that way supported the determination of skateboarding’s functions. There are many skateboarders, who make an effort and cooperate with their city’s departments for new skateparks (not for the ‘skatestoppers’ admittedly). Many want this enclosure because skateboarding was institutionalised. What could be considered as subversive in the past isn’t anymore. But this is seldom understood, neither on the side of the society nor on that of the skateboarders, who continue to praise themselves as subversive rebels while perfectly fitting the demands for the new subject. The apparition disappeared through the institutionalisation of skateboarding: mere entertainment remained. And in the post-Fordist society to be entertained means more than ever to agree. Once institutionalised, the diverting gaze no longer works as concrete negation. That’s why it isn’t suited as a principle for leading a good life in a not-even-that-good world. It is only the gateway of spirit into a world deprived of meaning, which itself conjured “the spirit that denies”, who proclaims that “all that doth exist, should rightly to destruction run”, but unlike Goethe’s Mephistopheles in the hope—that the humane future is yet to come.
Jan Benthele currently studies Philosophy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (M.A). Before that, he studied Philosophy and Sociology at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (B.A.). His main theoretical interest lies in critical social theory. Somehow, he always found a weird pleasure in studying texts about how miserable our situation really is. He thus acquired a little expertise in Adorno’s Philosophy. Besides that he didn’t really accomplish anything (He’s got a Little teaching experience).