THE RITUAL “We run as fast as we can in order to stay in the same place,” cultural historian Peter Conrad said more than 20 years ago. “Everything that requires duration takes too long, and everything that takes time takes too much time,” philosopher Günther Anders observed in the 1950s. Did we always have the feeling that we had too little time and too much to do? When did the era of the frenetic standstill begin? When did the simultaneousness of things become the norm? Since when has the fear of missing out been pushing us into a compulsion to act? Why do we try to keep up with the “world time” at all, which increases exponentially, as opposed to the “lifetime”? When did time become so fluid? Sociologist Byung-Chul Han also asks himself why we do not want to inhabit time anymore, when he writes: “Time is lacking a solid structure these days. It is not a house, but an inconsistent flow. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of individual moments of present. It rushes away. Nothing stabilizes it. The time that is rushing away is uninhabitable.” Increasing Being by Increasing Having In fluid times like these, people increasingly long for something solid. We need anchor experiences, we pine for depth, authenticity, intensity; and at the same time we quash everything that might enable such experiences – for fear of losing time, for fear of falling by the wayside. We accumulate different jobs, partners, travels and objects, hoping that they will make us feel rich within – sociologist Gerhard Schulze calls this “increasing being by increasing having”. Variety has precedence over sameness – despite the fact that sameness, which is produced by repetition, provides stability. It structures time, it offers orientation, it provides an anchor. Repetition is unjustly accused of inhibiting creativity. Is it really fair to curse learning something by heart as a waste of time? Or might there not be a certain kind of power in repetition, which is an essential characteristic of rituals? “Rituals [...] transform being in the world into being at home. They make the world a reliable place. They are in time what a home is in space. They make time inhabitable. Indeed, they make it accessible like a house,” Han says. And don’t we all know this: The meeting with friends once a month which follows a certain script and feels so satisfying and full. Even rituals that may seem strange can create meaning: Ludwig van Beethoven sang the scale up and down while he was washing his hands, and poet Friedrich Schiller put rotten apples into his desk drawer because he “needed the smell of decay in order to write”. Music also celebrates repetition. One good example is Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero”: the subject is consistently repeated 18 times without any variation. Many reviled this “long, progressive crescendo” as a major provocation. Others, like expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky, praised this sameness: “The repetition of the same sounds, their suspension condenses the spiritual atmosphere, which is necessary in order for feelings to mature...”. He viewed it as an intense absorption, an encounter with himself on a deep level. A similar approach is used in performance artist Marina Abramović’s “Cleaning the House” workshops, where participants count rice grains or look each other in the eyes for hours or do everything in slow motion for a day. Rituals, repetitions, sameness: Maybe we can give them a quiet little chance in the torrential gush of the present. And see what happens. Recommended reading: Hartmut Rosa – Acceleration Wassily Kandinsky – Concerning the Spiritual in Art Byung-Chul Han – Vom Verschwinden der Rituale Image: Seonghi Bahk (From our series "What inspires us")

Resonance “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” French writer Blaise Pascal wrote a long time ago. Being alone in a room, on one’s own and without any external stimuli and influences, is a frightening idea. But not always. Many people today long for this opting-out, for silence, for deceleration. Retreats and sabbaticals are more popular than ever, as reflected in the words of Austrian poet Ernst Ferstl: “Time that we take is time that gives us something.” Is deceleration the answer to the speeding and the velocity of life? Should we spend more time in rooms alone? Or is this hiatus just another event in our jam-packed schedule of life? Sociologist Hartmut Rosa believes that deceleration is not the solution because, in his opinion, hardly anyone approves of being slow as an end in itself. According to Rosa, slowness is only the other side of the coin whose front side is acceleration. But what is the solution then? A different relationship to the world, Rosa concludes, which he calls resonance. Resonance is what happens when we are moved and touched by something. When another person, a work of art, a tune or nature strikes a chord and resonates within us, thereby changing us. Resonance is a successful encounter, the opposite of a relationship to the world that is characterized by alienation. In order to feel resonance, we must engage with the person or thing that has the potential to create resonance – and quit the rushing and hurrying, because under stress, nothing resonates. With his concept of the “new vagabond”, philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests a similar path: “Instead of leisurely strolling around, one rushes from one event to another, from one information to another, from one image to another. [...] But today’s society not only lacks the leisureliness of the flâneur, it also lacks the hovering lightness of the vagabond.” He praises the emptiness between events, which he calls “an empty interval in which nothing happens, in which no sensation takes place” – a productive or “active, inventive” (François Jullien) in-between, where something new can be born – a time of lingering, of drifting, of simply sitting around. Much like in German humorist Loriot’s sketch “Feierabend” (“home time”), in which a man’s wife repeatedly asks him what he wants to do and the man, comfortably sitting in his armchair, keeps replying: “I just want to sit here.” In the words of novelist Sten Nadolny: “I am now ready to let time pass and wait for a miracle. When you do this, you behave in a peaceful way and still remain sufficiently alert in order not to miss anything.” Recommended reading: Hartmut Rosa, Resonance - A Sociology of the Relationship to the World, Suhrkamp, 2016 Francois Jullien, From Being to Living, Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlag, 2018 Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, Polity Press, 2017 Watch: Loriot’s „Feierabend“ ("home time") “Related Topics” from our series: Rapidity of Time Non-Objectivity Negative Space Interspaces (From our series "What inspires us")

THE RAPIDITY OF TIME There would have to be 72 hours in a day in order for us to accomplish everything that is expected of us, sociologist Hartmut Rosa believes. The fact that there are only 24 hours “results in our living in a state of temporal insolvency. We are never be able to repay the time which we incur as a debt because of the things we have not done. The consequence is that at the end of the day, people always go to bed as guilty subjects”, he continues. So much more has been happening in the hours and minutes of the day ever since the world has started speeding up, and ever since we have been living in two dimensions simultaneously: the ‘real' world and the virtual world. While waiting in line at the supermarket checkout, we write WhatsApp messages and klick through various apps in order to ‘work of' the little red notification dots. The feeling of not having enough time is omnipresent – and paradoxical: Because, in fact, thanks to technological and scientific progress, we have more time than ever before. Things which used to require traveling long distances and investing many hours can now be taken care of online within a few minutes. “From the age of marching to the age of buzzing” is what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls this condition. Because we are speeding, we have the feeling that time is passing more quickly. This perceived shortening of time is frequently considered as threatening – that is probably the reason why ‘retrotopists’ say, “Everything was better in the old days.” In order to escape the feeling of time passing too quickly, we seek refuge in doing and making things, in ‘vita activa’. We fill our time with events, but that does not seem to change our impression that time goes by too fast. Days crammed with one event chasing the next feel strangely unsatisfying. Byung-Chul Han sums it up succinctly: “A long list of events does not add up to an exciting narrative.” In his opinion, people’s perception of time passing so quickly is due to the fact that there is no ‘permanent' or ‘lasting’ present anymore; instead, there is a succession of events that are over soon or that are not even brought to a close: “The impression that time is passing at a significantly faster pace than it used to arises from the circumstance that people are not able to ‘linger’ anymore, that the experience of duration has become so rare. People constantly start over, zapping through ‘life options’, precisely because they are not capable of completing one option anymore.” Or, to quote George Orwell: “Time does not pass more quickly than it used to, but we are running past it more hurriedly.” Even a hundred years ago, there were sixty minutes in an hour. That is likely the reason why we find it so difficult to make decisions, because once you opt for a way to spend your time, you say no to all the other things that would have been possible in the same period of time. And saying no to events is something that many people find difficult, because it is associated with fear – the fear of missing out. And yet, might there not also be an element of joy in such a deliberate act of renunciation? After all, like Hartmut Rosa says, we are not going to succeed in squeezing everything into 24 hours anyway. Recommended reading: - Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung, Suhrkamp Wissenschaft Verlag, 2005 (to be released in English under the title Acceleration: The Change in Temporal Structures in Modernity) - Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, Polity Press, 2017 Image: Romain Meffre & Yves Marchand (From our series "What inspires us")

SMELLS “Nothing is more memorable than a smell,” author Diane Ackerman said. Smells can trigger memories quite suddenly: The apple pie, fresh from the oven, transporting you back to your childhood in the countryside, decades ago; the perfume your partner wore on your first date brings images of that evening setting from the past to the present. Smells are like an elemental force. They break through all barriers and enter our system as fast as lightning, where they color everything. Without taking any detours, they flood the brain’s limbic system, which is where our emotions are located. These emotions have the power to conquer you in a positive or in a negative way, to cause euphoria or to overwhelm. In this respect, smells have a mystical, incomprehensible quality. “Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it,” Patrick Süskind writes in his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Odors are omnipresent; just as we have to breathe, we have to smell. Interestingly, research has found that most people only smell with one half of their nose for three quarters of the day. In the same way as there are left-handed and right-handed people, there are apparently also left-nosed and right-nosed people. The topic of smelling is larger than we might think – we even include it in our language: Some things ‘stink to high heaven’; and when something’s not quite right, we ‘smell a rat’ or tell others to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’. There are intense odors – such as the scent of a perfume – and less intense ones. The grandparents’ house has a smell. An old, often-read book, to which paper and ink gave off fragrances over the years when exposed to sunlight, heat and moisture. The city has an odor. The morning, just after sunrise. And then there are odors you cannot smell: Every person has a scent that is barely perceptible. But it is there, and it plays a decisive role in our choice of a mate, according to neuroscience. These individual scents are called pheromones – chemical messengers via which people exchange sexual information. “Due to its close connection to sexuality and voracity, the sense of smell bears the sign of animality,” sociologist Jürgen Raab writes. Smells make us feral – this assessment is one of the reasons why philosophy has regarded the olfactory sense as primitive and subordinated it to the other senses for a long time. Aristotle and Kant denigrated it, as did Descartes, who called the sense of smell ‘coarse’. It wasn’t until Nietzsche that this sense received a more positive attention again, when he linked it to the faculty of cognition: “My genius is in my nostrils.” Later, French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote entire poems about odors; he was crazy about them and – as the story goes – loved working with scented ink. Today, perfumes are increasingly regarded as an independent art form. Perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena calls his perfumes poems, short stories, novellas or novels. In Patrick Süskind’s novel, protagonist Jean-Baptiste Grenouille does not possess a smell of his own. His feeling of lacking an identity eventually becomes so unbearable that he turns into a murderer: he wants to create the perfect perfume from the scent of young women – in order to be loved, just like they are. If one’s own smell contributes to one’s sense of identity, can wearing a perfume enhance it? Can something individual be made visible by making it smellable? Or can a perfume even distract from one’s own smell? Can it conceal or modify an identity? (From our series "What inspires us")

THE MASK The mask serves different purposes for different people: Some use it to hide or protect themselves, others put it on to make something visible which they consider essential. Therefore, the mask – in this case, the visible mask you put on – can either conceal or illustrate one’s ‘true’ identity. From one moment to the next, it lets people slip into a role which allows them to be different and to take liberties they normally repress – because they want to be good persons. But it is not always about being good or bad – the reason for wearing a mask can also be the wish to be someone else for a change. ‘Someone who loves anonymity has many things to hide,’ publicist Franz Schmidberger said. Think of the masquerade ball in Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, where protagonist Fridolin casts off his social self along with all his shame as soon as he puts on the mask and lets his desires guide him. But masks are also worn by people who want to distract from themselves or remain anonymous in order to put the focus on something else, such as the art they create – think of metal band Slipknot or Marilyn Manson. A mask attracts all the attention when it is worn by one single person, but it disappears in the crowd when everyone is wearing it, such as the followers of the Occupy Wall Street movement, or people celebrating Mardi Gras. Maybe that is why the invisible masks are invisible? The invisible masks we wear, be it consciously or unconsciously. The roles we assume in life, or of which we believe that we have to assume them, and of whose mask-like character we are frequently not even aware. ‘A person who does not know that he is wearing a mask is wearing it most perfectly,’ German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane said. Clothes are another type of disguise, located somewhere between visibility and invisibility. They are a mask for the body which says: I want to be perceived one way or another. You show yourself the way you want to be seen, and ideally what you wear corresponds to aspects of your inner self that are turned inside out. ‘Every morning when you wake up you put on a new disguise,’ Gil Scott-Heron sings in ‘When You Are Who You Are’. So the mask at a masquerade ball is a visible mask worn over the invisible one – a double disguise, in a way. ‘After the carnival, we are forced to wear masks again,’ said German philosopher Manfred Hinrich, as if it was impossible to not wear a mask. But is it? Is it possible to be completely and utterly authentic? Was Roman philosopher Seneca right when he said, ‘No one can long hide behind a mask; the pretense soon lapses into the true character’? Image: Amanda Wellsh by Ishi for Vogue Netherlands December 2014 (From our series "What inspires us")

NON-OBJECTIVITY “In my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form,” said Kazimir Malevich when he showed his Black Square on a white background at the 0,10 Exhibition in Petrograd in 1915 and was met with great outrage and resistance. Critical voices reviled it as a “dead square” and “personified Nothing”; it represented the first work of Malevich’s Suprematism – the art movement founded by him which focused on color, form and “pure feeling”. But what was intended as reproaches can also be interpreted as praise: after all, creating a Nothing was exactly what Malevich wanted. And the attribution of “dead” can be understood as breaking a taboo as well. Why did Malevich, that important representative of the Russian avant-garde, wish do move away from natural forms? What about them caused him to despair? The fact that they pretended to depict reality but never could? The fact that they thus, in a sense, lied to the viewer’s face? “Art is not a copy of the real world. One [...] is more than enough,” said writer Virginia Woolf. “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon,” according to a wise old Zen saying. “This is not a pipe,” surrealist painter René Magritte wrote below the painting of a pipe – because it was not a pipe that you could smoke, but only the painting of a pipe. Nor is it possible to fall down the word well. “The world as the feeling of an idea, regardless of the picture – that is the content of art. A square is not a picture, just as a switch or a plug is not electricity,” Malevich went on to explain. The painter wanted to reduce everything to pure creation, because it did not pretend to be something else, it was vacant in the sense that it could be filled by anyone who engaged with it. “Unclassification is the germ of all possibilities” – that was his conviction. Pure creation thus promotes creativity, and it can cause something new to emerge in someone else. It is open and it opens doors, it breaks down boundaries and shows other perspectives. Does it accelerate change? Does it dispel the fear of that which is different, unknown? Does it open up people? Image: Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915 Recommended reading: Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014 Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, Kerber Verlag, 2014 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Penguin Classics, 2000 (From our series "What inspires us")

(From our series "What inspires us")

(From our series "What inspires us")

THE INDIVIDUAL, THE ANTI-UNIVERSAL. “All that is individual, incomplete, diverse is claimed to be merely preliminary, superficial and inadequate,” wrote Austrian-born British philosopher Sir Karl R. Popper. What he meant by that was that totalitarian systems, which strive for unity and wholeness, perceive plurality and individuality as a threat. Another philosopher, François Jullien, identified “the Universal” as the foundation of such closed systems: “The Universal considers itself as complete, as a final achievement, and it no longer asks whether something might be missing; it rests in its positivity and sees no reason for further progress. It does not initiate anything anymore.” A static Universal, doomed to stand still: Nothing happens anymore. Open societies need the Individual, it is the only possibility for plurality to develop. What is this Individual, what does it do? It is non-static, constantly in motion, constantly changing, standing out from the Uniform, constantly questioning itself. It is the only way for new things to arise, it is the only way to escape what author Juli Zeh, in her novel “Unterleuten”, called a “brave new world - standardized, entertained, administered; a herd of citizens”. Where does one find one’s Individual, which leads to plurality, openness, and eventually to something new? Frequently, it can be found in the gap, in the “active, inventive Between” (see posting “The Between”), and it is always located outside the Uniform, outside the herd that never asks why. Book Recommendations: Sir Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Publisher: Routledge (1945) François Jullien: There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity, Publisher: Suhrkamp (2017) Juli Zeh: Unterleuten, Publisher: btb (2017) (From our series "What inspires us")

NEGATIVE SPACE 
MA is the Japanese word for emptiness, interval, pause, interstice. In architecture, it is the space between two pillars or table legs. It is not an open, opening space but an “imprisoned” space that is confined, framed. It is always in relation to what delimits it. There is nothing in this negative space. But is a Nothing that is clearly delimited and has a certain space really nothing? “The pause is also part of the music,” Stefan Zweig said. And the table wouldn’t be one were it not for the negative space between its legs. The slash painting by Lucio Fontana, the founder of Spatialism – an art movement which aims at breaking up the two-dimensionality of works of art – addresses this negative space in two ways. On the one hand, there are the brutal-looking slashes, which are essentially Nothing: they have no matter and are therefore non-matter which breaks up or interrupts matter. They seem to be breathing something out, releasing pressure, and this aggravates them – that is why they rise up, cause the edges of the matter to swell up, create shadows and transform two dimensions into three. At the same time, even though they are “only” non-matter, they are more visible than the tangible, firm canvas. It is they that are first perceived. What do we see, in the painting? Eight clean slashes, one might say. But one might also say: a dark-white canvas, interrupted by eight slashes; after all, the canvas is a Something, a Thing, and there is more of it there. On the other hand, in this slashed painting, there is the space between the slashes which is perceived as negative space, much more so than the slashes themselves. Is that what it is? A Nothing between nothing? And: If the surface of the slashes was larger than the canvas, would they be the negative spaces then? What is negative space here, and what isn’t? Photo: “Concetto Spaziale” by Lucio Fontana (From our series "What inspires us")

INTERSPACES When, in the midst of matter, there is suddenly a rupture filled with nothing but dark air, then that is far more than what would be there if this disruption did not exist. Like a wound, this space filled with a between attracts all the attention. If the cube was complete, who would even notice it? It is only the nothing within it that makes it something, that arouses interest (interesse: Latin for “to be between”). “The between has no ‘being’, no in-itself, no essence, nothing of its own. More precisely: The between ‘is’ not. But by no means does that make it neutral or, in other words, ineffective,” says philosopher François Jullien. The between is loud, it has an effect and it confuses, it provokes and creates disquiet within the observer. It poses questions which require answers – and they are never the same. Between: this also implies the existence of boundaries or things between which it can be and take effect. Any gap needs poles, a top and a bottom, a left and a right, a front and a back. It creates tension, and in this tension lies fecundity: something new can – or MUST – arise from nothing, because the tension is only bearable when it is temporary. If it was there all the time, not leading anywhere, if it did not provoke at all, it would not have a reason to exist at all. It wants to be heard, seen, felt; it demands the attention of someone who feels confused, to whom it whispers: Make something of me, release me. It wants to be translated, everything else is unbearable. It only becomes bearable when it is transformed into something else, for that is the reason of its existence. “By opening up, the gap gives rise to another possibility. It lets us discover resources we had not considered until now, of which we had not even suspected they exist,” Jullien says. Book Recommendations: François Jullien: Vom Sein zum Leben, Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin (2018) François Jullien: Es gibt keine kulturelle Identität, Publisher: Suhrkamp (2017) Photo: “Plaster Cube under flushing Water One Week”, 1987, Installation by Sui Jianguo, from www.suijianguo.com (From our series "What inspires us")

DESNATUREZA Nature bursting through architecture. Ostensible nature, because someone made it burst through. “An image of nature, as it is not nature in fact,” according to Henrique Oliveira, the creator of this structure that coils around itself and tears up everything that’s in its way, this thick umbilical cord made of plywood, this art-work made of natural materials. A creation of human hands, a conception of a human mind, an object made of natural materials which appears to have a life of its own; “this idea of controlling life and the impossibility of controlling life,” says Oliveira. Nature merges with culture, and the sense of control is very close to its loss. Image: Desnatureza, Art by Henrique Oliveira, www.HenriqueOliveira.com (From our series “What inspires us”)

(From our series "What inspires us")

(From our series "What inspires us")

(From our series "What inspires us")