HAPPINESS IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK
Living in the Moment
‘[...] intellectuals and aesthetes began to discover […] that they could be thirsty, that they could be hungry, that they could feel desire. This discovery was greeted with demonstrations of joyful and emotional surprise: poetic hymns to thirst, to hunger, to desire, to fountains, to taverns, to fruits of the earth […].’[1]
For Henri Lefebvre, the early modern world was one of hedonism, with a positivistic view of wealth and abundance, a joie de vivre which revealed itself in the prolific production of literary and artistic works. In such an atmosphere, it could be said that happiness could be had only behind gilded doors that were closed to the possibility of the banal-as-redemptive. In essence, Lefebvre called for the death of the resilient 19th century fantasy that alienated one person from another and high culture from everyday experience; only then could progress begin to dust itself off and get to work. Just as it had at the turn of the century, it had become the common practice within early capitalism to disguise reality or ‘real unhappiness’ with what he called ‘fictions of happiness’; these might include suggestive messages from advertising and leisure activities or the concept of time off from work.[2] It is this dialectic that examines how modernity has created the need to define the parameters of free time and how labour justifies them. Leisure, in its broader sense, is formulated in such a way as to invite passivity; in the same way, it serves as an escape or relief from everyday life. Significantly, early modern life categorised the experience of artworks and their production into the realm of leisure; art as utilitarian or ritualistic was no longer of the everyday, it had come to indicate amusement rather than instruction and thereby reduced the potential for effective living and, indeed, happiness distinct from escapism. It is not that art failed to reflect life, but that art, by its very nature, removed itself from life. By removing itself from life yet at the same time reflecting it, art translated what Lefebvre felt should be transformed instead. Hence, the contemplation of artworks --- even if their subject matter involved everyday life --- denied those artworks any real effectiveness within everyday life. Our assumption that the everyday is ignoble, common, boring, and devoid of complexity has caused us to misguidedly invent, project, and daydream and has rendered us incapable of comprehending that a better understanding of the human condition, as ultimate and bitter-sweet, can be obtained from the real or quotidian that exists beneath the clouds. That is to say, at first, happiness appears to be an elusive utopian endpoint, but it is within the dystopian encounters of everyday life that it can infinitely manifest, as a pulse.
Handling Equipment
Martin Heidegger was interested in flushing out the inherent qualities of an authentic moment, that instance when one simultaneously recognises and comprehends the whole as a sum of its parts; this focus on the essence of being infuses the hermeneutic tradition he supported when considering ‘the Thing’ or das Ding in experiential terms. The question of origin or essence is quite important when pondering the feasibility of an art of everyday life as something concrete and physical, something that can be visited, viewed, and experienced. Why do mundane materials become the subject matter of some artworks and what power do they carry when they do? Instead of representing the everyday through distant observation, what if artists began to hand-pick the things of popular culture, infiltrating and re-contextualising their works through a hybridisation of materials, thereby bringing about a shift in values between the marvellous and the banal, combining them to produce something one might call poetic? Since our world consists of plural subjectivities, it is accepted that a palatable theory of everyday life and the many forms of happiness within it can never be closed or wholly definitive. It is interesting to note then that Heidegger chooses to focus on the everyday object as a potential socio-political unifier. He introduces the term ‘equipment’ to indicate that set of objects that become ‘things’ when used --- when their function is identified and indulged. Though Heidegger’s artistic frame of reference is primarily limited to early modernist and classical works and hence lengthens the distance between things and works, it is still apparent that these ‘use-objects’ are undoubtedly what we as disseminated individuals with unquantifiable experiences have in common. In this sense, for Heidegger, their relationship to the autonomy of artworks --- those objects without an everyday function or use, per se --- is integral. Any preconceived notions of purpose, function, or other defining qualities of the thing occlude its ‘thingliness’, as it were, and render it mere equipment. Rather than assign meanings or identifying objects in such a fashion and leading the practice of thought towards an overly scientific world-view, Heidegger suggests that ‘[w]e ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own being.’[3] This approach might then tease out from objects something more profound, something inherent and unthinkable, in the sense that it would not be bound by the limitations of language, for ‘equipment, having come into being through human making, is particularly familiar to human thinking.’[4] Consequently, and to the impediment of any comprehension of the thingly, ‘[i]t is in this process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment.’[5] Within the gesture of the artist we recognise our own --- the being of things and our comprehension of variations of utility reflects the happiness of being-in-the-world.
Causing Effects
The theme of the everyman was taken up by political theorist and phenomenologist Hannah Arendt in her seminal work of 1958, The Human Condition. Denouncing existentialism in favour of a concept of plurality, she cites the ‘human condition’ as the historical development of humanity from ancient Greece to modern Europe, and establishes a model for thinking in terms of everyday life by invoking the vita activa, which she compares to the vita contemplativa as a state not only of thought but also of action. Arendt suggests three categories for this active life: labour, work, and action. Labour refers to the physicality of being (i.e. the human condition as one of living and dying); the category of work corresponds to the artificiality of things, their production and consumption; the category of action, therefore, becomes an achievable goal thanks to the eradication of all worldliness from one’s notion of the self. For Arendt, the mode of action represents that state in which subjectivities are reminded of their plurality; they are reminded that the world is shared. Such action is the state in which the fundamental notion regarding the unpredictability of politics is enabled, and the tool for thinking in terms of commonality. She writes:
The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.[6]
If modernity as we have come to understand and experience it encourages insularity and alienation, then it detracts from a comprehension of the real and inhibits participation which, ironically, engenders such a comprehension and begins to hint at notions of happiness. Importantly, Arendt argues, it is the artist who has traditionally transposed disjointed and individualised experiences which, if overlooked, encourage an illusion of privacy that contributes to the inactivity of solely contemplative living. Happiness, like the world, exists only when it is shared.
[1] Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, John Moore, trans., (London: Verso, 1991), p. 104.
[2] Ibid., p. 35.
[3] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter, trans., (New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 2001), p. 31.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., p. 32.
[6] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 50.
O autorze/ About the Author
Wood Roberdeau (urodzony w 1977 w Dallas w Stanach Zjednoczonych) jest pisarzem i pracownikiem akademickim. Ukończył studia magisterskie w dziedzinie sztuki współczesnej w Sotheby's Institute of Art oraz uzyskał doktorat z kultury wizualnej na Goldsmiths College, University of London, gzie obecnie pracuje jako wykładowca historii sztuki. W swojej pracy naukowej Wood zajmuje się sztuką współczesną i teorią sztuki z naciskiem na odnawianie się neo-awangardy, idee socjologiczne codzienności, relację pomiędzy estetyką i polityką oraz wzorce poetyczności.
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