Aurelio Madrid on "The Aesthetics of Decay"

(“untitled” by Aurelio Madrid )

Aurelio Madrid has written a lucid, rich, and extensive commentary on my The Aesthetics of Decay. Among his many incisive points, he does an admirable job of translating the book’s main ideas into a more digestible format. To this end, I’m indebted to him. Madrid is also right to have read the book alongside Robert Sokolowski’s very fine Introduction to Phenomenology, given that much of the “methodology” of the book remains implicit—an issue I hope to have resolved in the next book. I will respond to his commentary soon (in the middle of a move), but for now I wanted to thank him for spending the time to read The Aesthetics of Decay with such attention and care. Hard to think this book came out 4 years ago, almost to the day…

Anxiety (2): Self-Consciousness

You have a morbid phobia of standing in queues. In the supermarket checkout, you feel oppressed from every angle by the facticity of other people. You experience the flesh loosening its grip on the bone beneath the skin, with every pore of the human body a recipient of the world’s uncertainty, danger, and chaos. At times, you are frozen by the anxiety of being “spotted” in public, as though your human body were a magnet inviting the eyes of the world to gaze at it. In the shopping mall, the materiality of the floors and the solidity of the walls becomes amorphous, its density gives way to an uneven, jagged surface. You cling to the walls, your heart is beating rapidly and your throat is dry. Fearing imminent collapse, very often you will suddenly leave the place you are currently in, so that you may find a safe place to faint. You hold your palm to the side of your face in order to ensure your head is still a thing of the world. No words can reassure you that you are a thing of this world, no place dark enough to shield you from the anxiety of your everyday life.

Anxiety is narcissism and narcissism is anxiety. Far from being dispersed, the anxious, ontologically insecure self not only persists but is amplified in the world. This is the strange logic of anxiety: it simultaneously fragments the unity of the self while also placing that fragmentation at the centre of things. Indeed, anxiety’s “threat” to self is at the same time a vindication of the self as a centre, a fundamental commitment to the narcissism of selfhood. Because of this fragmented centre, the world of the anxious subject takes as its point of departure an exaggerated, hyper-real view of things, in which perception and attention are drawn back to the anxious subject. R.D. Laing approaches this double-bind in terms of master-slave dialectic with no resolution. For him, the anxious subject must become an object in the world in order to vouchsafe his own reality. At the same time, “since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else.” Only through being depersonalised does he lose his visibility and so find his place in the world. To this end, the anxious subject’s striving toward a state of annihilating invisibility entails a flight into their own non-being, a deliberately forestalled dialectic in which self-consciousness remains mute and a primitive consciousness takes over.

*(Photo from Gerald Kargl’s "Angst," 1983)*

Anxiety (1): Ontological Insecurity

What to think about the place of anxiety as an ontologically privileged mood in philosophy? Its origin, clearly articulated in Pascal and then Kierkegaard, has its roots in contingency of human life. This contingency is not only the province of the human as a thing in the world—Pascal: “I am afraid and wonder to see myself here rather than there”—but so too of the world the human creates. The world does not come preformed to perception, but unfolds as an event, spontaneous and indeterminate. For Heidegger, this disclosing of the world as a world coincides with the mood of anxiety. For him, anxiety has double intentionality to it: on the one hand, the value human existence confers upon the world “sinks into indifference.” On the other hand, through this recession, anxiety accents its positive structure: through it, the nothing is revealed. The revelation of the nothing is anxiety’s gift to metaphysics.

All of this is perfectly familiar to any introduction to existentialism, and in existential therapy circles, anxiety has been harnessed as a pathway to the disclosure of value. Thus in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and Medard Boss, anxiety assumes a hermeneutic aspect to it. For them, anxiety is not something to be “cured,” but a mood to be read. More of this later perhaps. For now, I am again thinking through the experiential aspect of anxiety, which has been curiously overlooked. More broadly, I am concerned, above all, with the relationship between the unreality of the world and the loss of self, each of which is an expression of anxiety.

On this point, R.D. Laing remains especially insightful. The strength of Laing is that he gives flesh to Heidegger’s conceptual structure, inserting the body where Heidegger’s da-sein analytic leaves us disembodied. Laing’s visceral account of “ontological insecurity” signals a subjectivity “more dead than alive” whose loss of identity is marked by a lack of temporal continuity, a feeling of being insubstantial, estranged from his body, and a fundamental insecurity with regard to other people, such that relation to others is a matter of being “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying” the self. Here, Laing’s Hegelian influence is directed toward the ontologically insecure person, for whom no dialectic reconciliation between self and other is possible.

In the impasse, the stability of the embodied self is consistently put in question, and the anxiety marking ontological insecurity is orientated toward the preservation of the self. This is the “engulfment,” which Laing regards as the threat to the autonomy of the self. Alongside engulfment, “impingent” is the term Laing applies to “the full terror of the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in…” This sets in place the germs of an agoraphobic experience of the world: for the ontologically insecure person, movement is stifled from all directions by a need to retain spatio-temporal continuity, and thus preserve an intensely delimited “reality.” Far from a liminal state, Laing is right to recognise the incipient presence of impingement in the everyday: “Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.”

Where is the self in this de-realised world? Failing to reconcile self and world, time and other, he nevertheless persists both spatially and temporally. Life goes on, as Laing says. Central to this experience of the world-as-anxious, for Laing, is the disunity between mind and body. As with Merleau-Ponty, the normal experience of embodiment takes as its point of departure an ownership of “one’s own body.” One’s body is “mine.” Complete identification with my body, not only as a physical thing, but as a centre of experience, means that being orientated in the world coincides with being secure. By way of contrast, Laing speaks of the unembodied self as placing the body as secondary to the “mind.” I am not entirely convinced by this. It seems to me, that far from privileging mind over matter, the anxious experience of the world encounters the body as all too real, all too present. Too present, the anxious body protrudes into the world, its flesh a mass of contingency and anonymity—leading to the problem of self-consciousness. But that’s for next time.