Performing the Absolute. Marina Abramovic Organizing the Unfinished Business of Arthur Schopenhauer - Critical Essay

Organization Studies, Annual, 2000 by Pierre Guillet de Monthoux

In Search of Direct Experience

Schopenhauer's transformation of Kant's critical philosophy into a constructive one rests on his view of man as a mix of mind and matter. He was as far from the nineteenth century materialism that reshuffled Hegel into Marxian faith as he was from libertarian anarchism. As a young student, he despised Fichte's transformation of Kantianism into a doctrine of pure subjectivity. To believe that man can shape the whole world out of his subjective imagination is sheer madness. Instead of a 'subject' Schopenhauer prefers to talk about the 'individual' as a subject and object that have fused together. Instead of using the word 'object', Schopenhauer introduced 'body' as a modem philosophical term. 'Ding an sich' in us was embedded in an intertwined mix of mind and body. Once its hiding place had been localized, philosophy needed a method to lure it out. Before Kant, philosophy had not needed any methodology; philosophers just did their thing in itself. Schopenhaner was inspired by Plato and Vedic Indian wisdom, whic h was also 'new-age' to early nineteenth century romanticism, but, after Kant, he sees no way of returning to their classical philosophizing. Ancient Greeks and the Indian gurus plucked philosophy from nature and life, like fruit. After Kant's enlightenment, reality, as a philosophers' garden of Eden, was lost for ever. Schopenhauer pessimistically notes how the modernization alienates us from paradisaical sources of ancient wisdom. Now, everyday life was far from the wise conversations held at the agora of Athens. Cultivated life was blurred by political ideas and conceptual jargon packaged in streamlined logic. Nature became artificially engineered into visions of science and industry.

Almost two centuries ago, Schopenhauer realized that the construction of modem reality was becoming a complex process of discursive and imaginary mediation. The philosophers' agora had been glutted by avalanches of texts and images incorporated into ideologies, incarnated by technologies. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer resists and defends a philosophy of unmediated truth by waging a war against the two mystifying forces of incorporation and incarnation, making us believe that the message is equal to its media.

Material Art

Oliver Blomeier explains his work:

'My work is material performance. I make old forgotten records perform in public. If you read the vinyls carefully and you will notice the "unauthorized public performance prohibited" label. So I can't play them in public. I put them on this record player, a record a day, and in the afternoon I switch on a heat source placed closed above. In a couple of hours, the performed record is deformed. Vinyl melts and bends into beautiful shapes. The record spins as transformed matter instead of transmitted sound. You could smell them, see them and touch them. This is my performance.'

A Modern Methodology for Experience

Schopenhauer had personal experience of incorporated philosophy. As a young teacher he was unable to attract any participants to his own seminar at the Berlin University, simply because ambitious students hoping for a career in Prussian bureaucracy all attended Hegel's lectures instead. Hegel was very [acute{a}] la mode and provided his audience with intricate conceptual elaboration that was far too analytical for Schopenhauer's philosophical taste. Luckily, though, Schopenhauer possessed the financial means to live an independent life. After his defeat at the Berlin University, he could turn his back on the academic corporation. Doctor Schopenhaner became a Privatgelehrter who despised 'beamtete' university professors. They were state servants and consequently their philosophy deteriorated into instruments of social order. To Schopenhauer, Hegel's Vernunftphilosophie was a terrible case of incorporation. It was removed from contemplation and served as a greenhouse for the social theories that he accused supp lied conceptual power to bureaucratic organizations. The fact that this critique of Hegelianism gave Schopenhauer his international repute seems to confirm his suspicion. Outside his narrow circle of German admirers, Schopenhauer' s writings acquired fame as an antidote to Hegelianism, the Prussian ideology of which, the British feared would colonize the civilised world. Paradoxically Schopenhauer's own philosophy became a useful weapon in the English imperial fight against a German ideology that, for instance, according to Alfred Marshall, threatened to incorporate Europe in its 'empire in the air'.