An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular - Softcover

Frederiksen, Martin Demant

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785356992 ISBN 13: 9781785356995

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Martin Demant Frederiksen has a PhD in anthropology. His work focuses on subcultures, urban development, temporality and socio-political change. He is assistant professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Martin Demant Frederiksen has a PhD in anthropology. His work focuses on subcultures, urban development, temporality and socio-political change. He is assistant professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

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An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular

By Martin Demant Frederiksen

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Martin Demant Frederiksen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-699-5

Contents

PREFACE, 
OUDENOPHOBIA, 
SUPERFICIALITY, 
OBSTRUCTION, 
NON-LINEARITY, 
DETOURS, 
REPRESENTATION, 
INDECISION, 
FREEDOM, 
WONDERLAND, 
SILENCE, 
POSTSCRIPT, 
ENDNOTES, 
REFERENCES, 

CHAPTER 1

OUDENOPHOBIA

Nobody likes nothing. I certainly wish with all my heart that it did not exist. But wishing is not enough. We live in the real world, where nothing does exist. We cannot just 'disinvent' it.

Stanley Donwood, Slowly Downward – A Collection of Miserable Stories

PIECES OF GLASS

Some years later we meet again. This time it's in an underground bar in the center of the city, popular among various alternative sub-groups at this time. It's located in a partly demolished residential building, occupying what used to be the downstairs apartment. The day before the bar had held a theme night under the title Forever Alone Party – Love warms you up but Vodka is cheaper. Soaked-and-dry-again flyers from the event are scattered around the premises. It was Oz who suggested the bar; they've been coming here for some time and currently it's one of the only places they can go to. We sit in a tiny room, in what is likely to have been the bathroom, on pillows strewn out on the floor, gathering around a stump from a tree that serves as a table. Two bottles of vodka are placed on the stump along with some small glasses, an ashtray and a shared pile of cigarette boxes. We sit and drink and smoke for a few hours. Post-punk is playing; people come and go; some sit with us for a while before leaving again; others just look inside and turn around.

At some point after midnight a young man, let's call him Morrie, joins us and sits down next to another young man, Hakuna, who is a friend of Oz. They cuddle up together while the rest of us continue drinking and small talking. After a while Oz kindly but firmly asks Morrie to leave, so that we can have the room to ourselves, which Morrie does. However, 10 minutes later Morrie returns with a bottle of vodka in his hand. He goes straight to Oz, stands in front of him and says: "If you ever tell me to leave again I will smash this bottle into your face". Oz looks at Morrie with a disinterested expression and coldly utters: "Leave". As a consequence, Morrie smashes the unopened bottle into Oz's face, vodka and splinters of glass flying in all directions, and Oz falling to the floor. He quickly gets up, though, and throws himself at Morrie, hitting and kicking him as violently as he can, and, given the small size of the room, he also hits the rest of us. An indistinct amount of time goes by, but after a while we manage to separate Oz and Morrie, Hakuna and Mushu (another friend) escorting Morrie out of the room while Queenie (a friend of Oz and I) assist me in trying to calm down Oz. He sits back on his pillow on the floor, bleeding from several wounds in his face and on his neck. We do our best to remove the pieces of glass that have slid inside his blouse and we note that a piece of glass has gotten stuck in the side of his neck. He pulls it out, leaving an open flesh wound, small but still producing a significant amount of blood. Queenie and I try to convince Hakuna and Mushu, who soon return, as well as the staff in the bar, that they should call an ambulance as Oz is bleeding quite a lot from what we feel is a relatively unfortunate place. They all refuse, however, stating that "it's nothing", or "it doesn't matter".

Even Oz is determined that there is no problem. "It doesn't matter, REALLY. It's nothing", he says whenever a voice of concern is raised. It takes us around 2 hours to convince him to get in a taxi with us and go to a hospital. There's one in a suburb some miles from where we are, but distance doesn't matter and the taxi-driver doesn't care.

As we arrive, Oz is escorted into a doctor's room by some nurses while Queenie and I stay put in the waiting room. It's large and empty and freezing cold. We interchangeably walk around in circles and sit on the benches along the walls. We've promised Oz not to talk to the guard outside, or anyone from the staff. And if they approach us we are to state that what had happened was simply an unfortunate accident, no one else was involved, no need to call the police, nothing had happened. The vending machine is broken.

After a good while Oz comes back out with five stitches in his neck. He rushes us outside and insists that we go to Queenie's apartment and continue drinking, which we do. There's nothing cognac can't fix.

The following evening we're at the bar once more. "It was nothing", Oz says, and touches the stiches on his neck while Hakuna attempts to put the table on fire.

SUNDAY NEUROSIS

I sometimes feel uneasy on Sundays, particularly in the afternoon. It's a sensation that is difficult to describe, but it could perhaps be likened to a vague sense of melancholia; the loss of a weekend that is coming to an end, and another Monday morning looming on the horizon. It's not that I don't like my job or am averse to the notion of working, not at all; it's just that I really liked the weekend. So during some Sunday afternoons I come to experience this peculiar numbness where I'm not able to just enjoy the hours that are in fact still left of the weekend. I know that it's dumb and that it would make much more sense to just shake it off and enjoy the present. But for one reason or another I sometimes don't. The last days of a long holiday can feel like that as well, or the days leading up to a trip abroad, such as going to see Oz, where I'm often going alone and leaving my family behind. On some level I actually often look forward to what is coming; seeing colleagues again when going to work, or landing in another country where I have something to do, and I know that I will be coming back to my family again or that there will be another weekend or holiday in the near future. But most of the time I seem to end up prematurely mourning that which is coming to an end.

Sunday neurosis is a notion thought to have been coined by the neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who used his personal experience of being in a concentration camp to develop theories about the human search for meaning. Sunday neurosis refers to the anxiety that some people may come to experience when the work-week is over; the sense of existential emptiness that may emerge through the realization that this week, also, did not lead anywhere or amount to anything. The sensation may result in a state of boredom, cynicism, or apathy and lead people to question whether their lives have a point or not. Frankl referred to this condition as an "existential vacuum"; a crisis of meaninglessness.

My own uneasy Sunday mood is not completely similar to the sensation described by Frankl, and the background for it obviously very much different, but it is somehow related in terms of the loss of meaning at hand; I have a problem letting go of meaning. It might be an occupational hazard; my line of work consists of conveying meaning to others, of providing understanding through text or through presentations. At least, that's how I've often conceived of it myself. Having read Frankl, and others similarly arguing for the centrality of the notion of meaning, I'd also assumed that this was what people in general strive for, that the search for meaning is a general human...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785356992
• ISBN 13: 9781785356995
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 118
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar