APP EDITORS’ NOTE:
The essay below, Otto Paans’s “Echoes of the Future: Apprehensive Aesthetics for a Bygone World,” will appear here in serial form, and then be published in full, in a slightly revised version, in Borderless Philosophy 3 (2020).
This is the first installment.
But you can read or download a .pdf of the complete current version of the essay, HERE.
And you can also read more about Otto Paans and his work HERE.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction
II. Postlude
III. Transformation
IV. Apprehension
I. Introduction
How will the world end? Doubtless, every single person has sometimes thought about this unsettling question. The end of the world is often seen as an event that still has to occur. How else would we be able to think about it? This inconspicuous assumption betrays a blind spot on our part: we imagine that when our world ends, the world ends. But what if this is simply not true?
What if our world already ended yesterday?
Or, what if it is in the process of ending? It may be a process that takes some time, but that the end will nevertheless come. Will it be like a thief in the night because no one noticed it? Maybe it will not be exactly unexpected, but it will be surprising that it happened under our very noses.
In this essay, I explore these somewhat counterintuitive issues. First, the idea that our world is ending together with the related claim that some of its parts are already gone. Second, the claim that the previous thought undermines the assumption that we are one with the world. This exploration forms the basis for a new aesthetics suited to a bygone world.
To elucidate these points, I use examples of worlds that have passed by, describing the process of ending as it unfolds. The examples I use will be somewhat unusual, in that they come from a variety of fields: first, the focus on echoes in the work of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov; second, the core premise of the Southern Reach trilogy written by Jeff Vandermeer; third – interwoven throughout, but further explicated in the last section – the sociologist Ulrich Beck’s notion of the metamorphosis of the world.
These examples share a common denominator: they enable listeners, spectators or readers to experience what happens when a world disintegrates, when the coordinates of normality drift apart as the onset of oblivion unfolds. These artistic worlds provide the conceptual and experiential tools for thinking about our current predicament in a world that is approaching its end. The last part of this essay is an extended meditation on this theme, showing how we may wrestle an aesthetics for an ending world from these works.
Against Professional Philosophy is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
Please consider becoming a patron!
