Nein. a Manifesto Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Eric Jarosinski

  Cover art by Luc(as) de Groot

  Illustration of Theodor W. Adorno by Luc(as) de Groot.

  Trademark Eric Jarosinski, 2014

  The Theodor W. Adorno quotation on the epigraph page is translated by Eric Jarosinski and is taken from a conversation between Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Horkheimer’s collected works: “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis,” in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Nachgelassene Schriften 1949–1972. S. Fischer 1989. The publisher is grateful to S. Fischer Verlage for permission to quote.

  Some material from the Afterword originally appeared in different form in the author’s article “#failedintellectual” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to: Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2437-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9083-3

  Black Cat

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

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  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  15 16 17 18 5 4 3 2 1

  “The pleasure of thinking—it cannot be recommended.”

  —Theodor W. Adorno

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Nein is not no. Nein is not yes. Nein is nein.

  2. Nein believes in nothing. Militantly.

  3. Nein does not take questions.

  4. Nein regrets to inform you.

  5. Nein is not the medium. Nein is not the message.

  6. Nein does not thank you for shopping.

  7. Nein is not style. Nein is not syntax.

  8. Nein says no. To a yes. That is a no.

  9. Nein closes its eyes to your surveillance state. Your dating profile. Your blog. And hears the sea.

  Glossary

  Afterword

  Introduction

  It’s not hard to say no. It’s hard to say it right. At the right time. For the right reasons.

  Harder still to keep saying it, especially when we live in a world of yes. A tyranny of yes.

  Yes to family. Yes to friends. Yes to terms. Yes to conditions. Yes to work. Yes to play. Yes to a life of yes, yes, and yes, please.

  But there is another life. An uncertain life. It sings a song to no. Of no. For no.

  Not just any no, however. A no of not now. Not yet. And not only.

  The no of Nein.

  1. Nein is not no. Nein is not yes. Nein is nein.

  2. Nein believes in nothing. Militantly.

  3. Nein does not take questions.

  4. Nein regrets to inform you.

  5. Nein is not the medium. Nein is not the message.

  6. Nein does not thank you for shopping.

  7. Nein is not style. Nein is not syntax.

  8. Nein says no. To a yes. That is a no.

  9. Nein closes its eyes to your surveillance state. Your dating profile. Your blog. And hears the sea.

  Glossary

  Adorno: German for YOLO.

  Aesthetics: Art for the artless.

  Analytic philosophy: When mathematicians try their hand at poetry.

  Anxiety: Fear of the unknown. (Depression: Fear of the known.)

  Aphorisms: 1. Old ships in new bottles. 2. Philosophy for those with little Zeit. Written by those with little Geist.

  Art: The silence of the ancient mariner’s painted ship. Upon Coleridge’s painted ocean.

  Art history: The study of art without art. And history without history.

  Atheism: A religion without a prayer.

  Benjamin, Walter: The mourning of philosophy cut short by history.

  Book: A relic of the days when paper was wasted on words.

  Borges: Argentina’s greatest German author.

  Brunch: The one thing everyone believes in on Sunday.

  Capitalism: The ship of state rigged by pirates. (Communism: The ship of state rigged by the state.)

  Change: What you want. When, where, and how you do not want it.

  Close reading: The art of reading what has never been written in order to write a book that will never be read.

  Coffee: The diuretic of enlightenment.

  Cold War: A conflict too expensive to be fought, but too cheap for a Roman numeral.

  Commodity fetishism: Mistaking someone’s labor for something you would want to buy.

  Consumption: Capitalism’s drug of choice.

  Continental philosophy: What Europe does when it’s depressed.

  Craigslist: A casual encounter with the social contract.

  Culture: The cigarette not smoked after not having sex.

  Cynicism: The hope that someday you will have known better all along.

  Dead certainty: Socrates without a question.

  Deconstruction: Reading with a microscope. Thinking with a hammer. And writing with an erasure.

  Degree: Devised by doctors to take one’s temperature or tuition.

  Dialectics: A Werner Herzog documentary narrated by Klaus Kinski.

  Diplomacy: The art of turning swords into plowshares. Plowshares into tractors. And tractors into tanks.

  Discretion: An undertaker who never says die.

  Elegy: Pathos played in a minor key.

  Emoticon: Symbol expressing an emotion we can no longer express in the form of a face we can no longer countenance.

  English: A language everybody speaks but nobody can spell.

  Ethics: Curiosity killed by a cat.

  Europe: A continent tied to the left that drifts to the right.

  Failed intellectual: One who tries to intellectualize one’s failure. And fails. At times brilliantly.

  Foreign policy: The logical extension of illogical domestic policies.

  Frankfurt School: An institute that taught us to read Freud like Marx. Marx like Hegel. And Adorno like Adorno.

  French: A language invented for making love, but used to make cheese, revolution, and philosophy.

  French theory: Americans who still smoke.

  Freudian slip: When the unconscious speaks in tongues.

  Fundamentalism: A literal misreading of the misunderstood.

  Genius: When sadness speaks to loneliness. And laughs.

  German: A language invented for philosophy but used to build automobiles.

  German beer: Carefully brewed in accordance with purity, and slowly poured in defiance of gravity.

  German literature: Where protagonists go to die.

  God: 1. A deity who looks like Marx, was pronounced dead by Nietzsche, and envied by Freud. 2. The monster over our beds.

  GOP: An American political party devoted to the principle of one nation under God. And one above.

  Graduate school: Related fields seeking advanced degrees of separation.

  Grammar: IKEA assembly instructions that are different in every country. But only available in German.

  Happiness: A feeling of well-being appreciate
d once it has stopped.

  Hegel: A philosopher best understood if never read.

  Hermeneutics: The science of reading text messages. (Critical Hermeneutics: The art of deleting them.)

  Hipster: Indifference wasted on the young.

  History: The victors’ present for the vanquished.

  Hope: A beacon made of fog.

  Humanism: The sober realization that we’re all we’ve got.

  Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs nor mistaken.

  Instability: When capital is frightened by its own shadow.

  Instagram: A marketplace in which pictures of your cat are exchanged for a thousand unspoken words of derision.

  Internet, the: A network of cables, wires, and tubes connecting us all. To cables. Wires. And tubes.

  Joyce: A stream of whiskey that has traded clarity for consciousness.

  Justice: A stick disguised as a carrot.

  Kafka: A law under arrest.

  Kitsch: The indifference that will always love you.

  Life: A leading cause of death.

  LinkedIn: A close-knit community of distant acquaintances who would like you to join in the fun of finding a job.

  Lobbying: Buying influence from those selling affluence.

  Logic: A multiple-choice question that is A. True or B. False.

  Lottery: A round-trip ticket from delusion to grandeur.

  Love: 1. A temporary truce between indifference and disgust. 2. A second that charges by the hour. 3. The comfort found in knowing that at least one other person has judgment as poor as your own.

  Marriage: A union of two souls. On strike.

  Marxism: The balding theories of the bearded.

  Melancholy: When a dash of disappointment renders an etching of sadness.

  Metaphor: Just another word. For just another word. (Simile: The metaphor’s, like, less articulate cousin.)

  Mid-life crisis: The sudden realization that you’ve been dying all along.

  Morality: The damned damning their damnedest.

  Morning: Something that can never be fixed once it’s been broken.

  Nabokov: A collector of butterflies who releases them as paragraphs.

  Nationalism: The fallible notion of an infallible nation.

  Negotiation: The art of making a turn of phrase sound like a change of heart.

  Nietzsche: A poet with a philosophy. A system without a method. A mustache with a man.

  Nihilism: The idealistic notion that nothing can change the world.

  Nothing: Everything you always wanted. But less.

  NSA: An American intelligence agency devoted to protecting the world from privacy.

  Online dating: Your last best hope of finding people like you who don’t like people like you.

  Patriotism: The love of country by those who’ve never left it.

  Peace: What everybody’s fighting for.

  Performance art: Six Doppelgängers in Search of a Selfie.

  Philosophy: The love of wisdom befalling those seduced by their own.

  Poet: One who breaks lines to complete a thought.

  Poetry: The fullest expression of language’s forbidden desire to die alone.

  Politics: A Greek tragedy set in Italy. (Political rhetoric: Smoke that can’t look itself in the mirror.)

  Postmodernism: Never meeting a cat you didn’t already know from the Internet.

  Praxis: Word used in theory to avoid it in practice.

  Profit: A dog that runs away from the poor and returns to the rich.

  Progress: A drone afraid of flying.

  Prose: Poetry without the poetry. (Poetry: Prose without the punctuation.)

  Psychoanalysis: Smoking your father’s cigar. On your mother’s couch.

  Pun: A small change to a word reflecting a far larger error in judgment.

  Quip: A joke told in tweed.

  Religion: A set of beliefs about why yours are wrong.

  Rhetoric: The art of saying what people don’t want to hear in a way they wish they’d said.

  Romance: The French art of living a long life of small deaths.

  Romantic comedy: A sad movie in love with the box office.

  Science: The art of method.

  Selfie: A portrait of someone we used to know. Taken by someone we used to respect.

  Semiotics: The study of how meaning is made to be misunderstood.

  Smart phone: A device designed for working too late and dying too soon.

  Social media: 1. A technology for following those you don’t want to lead and befriending those you don’t want to know. 2. A gated community of ideas.

  Society: A system of errors.

  Spanish: A language spoken by Cervantes. In a story written by Borges.

  Sunday: A day kept holy by sleeping off spirits.

  Tattoo: A permanent and predictable statement about one’s dynamic individualism.

  Technology: The deepest abyss on the flattest of screens.

  Theology: A field devoted to writing the unreadable about knowing the unknowable.

  Theory: A branch of philosophy and comparative literature devoted to disregarding both.

  Time: Wasted space.

  Today: A present nobody wants. But can never return.

  Tomorrow: What we always want to see. Until we do.

  Translation: The art of losing trees in a forest.

  Transparency: A clear demonstration of that which remains clearly hidden.

  Truth: 1. That which nobody wants but everybody has. 2. A love song in German sung by a drunken Russian sailor.

  Tweet: Both a noun and a verb for a text that is both too short and too long.

  Twitter: Attention Spam.

  Wanderlust: A sudden desire to be stuck in traffic.

  Weekend: The two days of the week when your alienation is all your own.

  Žižek: 1. A Slovenian passing as a Stalinist. 2. Lacan without a mirror.

  Afterword

  This little book is the result of a rather spectacular failure. While struggling to write an academic tome, one I hoped might help me get tenure at an Ivy League research university, I discovered Twitter. In large measure this would prove to be the end of not only the project I had been working on for so long, but of my academic career as a whole. It was also the start of a strange new occupation as what I’ve termed an Internet aphorist, though I still have difficulty defining exactly what the job entails.

  Having never been one for blogs or social media, I was singularly unimpressed with Twitter when first introduced. Yet I soon found its 140-character limit, relative anonymity, and the escape it seemed to offer from the isolation of academic life extremely liberating. I invented a fictitious journal—Nein. Quarterly: A Compendium of Utopian Negation—and began developing an online persona based on Theodor W. Adorno, one of the philosophers I’d been struggling to write about in my book. For better or worse, from that point on my days were spent ignoring the ticking of the tenure clock while writing jokes and aphorisms about philosophy, art, language, and literature.

  What’s emerged in the few years that have followed, apart from unemployment, is a perspective that is misanthropic yet romantic, authoritative yet absurd, principled yet darkly nihilistic. In short, I found a voice that is both invented yet somehow more authentic than that hiding behind the tortured qualifiers and anxious hedging of my academic work. And to my surprise, it spoke to others as well, gradually finding real resonance and a highly diverse global audience.

  My accomplishments to date have been modest, yet they might well mean more to me than my abandoned book project ever could have: some people are learning German, reading Kafka, or studying philosophy who might not have otherwise; in my work online and in European newspapers I’ve been able to represent a somewhat alternative, self-critical American perspective abroad; and I’d like to think that a depressing joke about cultural pessimism and despair has occasionally managed to brighten someone’s day.

  It is no exagge
ration to say that I owe thousands of people thanks, both online and off, for the kindness that has made this venture possible. Despite the apparent bleakness of my work, I’d like to think that some sense of that spirit of generosity has managed to survive within it. Kafka is quoted as having said that there is always hope—just not for us. In its own little way, this book seeks to second that.

 

 

  Eric Jarosinski, Nein. a Manifesto

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