Being right, and being interesting

[imomus]

On Wednesday I took the train to Schloss Wiesenburg, a 12th century castle about 90 minutes down the tracks from Berlin. The composer David Woodard is currently enjoying a residency there, writing a book about the failed utopia of Nueva Germania.



The schloss towers, literally, over a hamlet of 500 people -- quite the smallest community I've visited in some time. There are only two hostelries in town, and no taxi -- a fact which hit home when David and I managed to miss one, two, then three Berlin-bound trains from the tiny station. We ended up tramping up and down the muddy forest track that links the station to the castle most of the evening -- under shockingly bright stars sometimes, in snow blizzards the rest.



Finally, there was nothing for it: I spent the night in the Presidential Suite, overlooking the schloss' impressive gardens.



Conversation ranged from Demeter (Greek goddess of fertility) to the "sex guru" Osho. I managed to get back to Berlin on Thursday in time for a meeting with writer Ingo Niermann and his friend, the artist David Lieske. In Wohnzimmer we talked about people who want to be right, and people who want to be interesting, and how they're often at cross purposes. Ingo shocked me by saying he wanted to be both!



People who want to be right: Responsible, logical, consistent, Anglo-Saxon in their fear of contradiction and paradox and vagueness, people who want to be right will argue and fight, because what's right must win, of course. They're likely to claim that "objectivity" is on their side. They're unlikely to be relativists. They're interested in power. They think the ethical is more important than the aesthetic. They believe in justice, order, consensus, unity. While uninterested in statistics and methodologies, they remain convinced that things can be proven and quantified, and believe that this is important. Theirs is the realm of non-fiction.

People who want to be interesting: Irresponsible provocateurs, flamboyant intellectual dandies, artists, dreamers. For them, truth is strategic, contextual, conditional. For instance, if everyone believes one thing, it becomes important to challenge that belief and to assert the suppressed truth of the opposite point of view. The suppressed truth will have a temporary power precisely because it's been hidden from view. There will be a rushing "return of the repressed". But soon afterwards the status quo, the doxa, will reassert itself, and the people who want to be interesting will have to move on to new terrain, and look for new suppressed truths to express. Life, for them, is a constant quest to stave off boredom. They don't care whether they're right in any enduring sense (they don't even believe that's possible). What matters is to challenge, to arouse, to provoke, to entertain, to stimulate, to open up new vistas, new avenues of consideration -- even forbidden ones. Theirs is the realm of speculation, of fiction.



What's so interesting about Ingo -- co-founder of Redesigndeutschland, author of books like Umbauland: Ten German Visions, and a leading campaigner for the Great Necro-Pyramid -- is that his genre is speculative non-fiction, which combines an interest in the interesting with a quest for actuality, for rightness, for the making of fact. Perhaps nothing can be truly interesting unless it -- at the very least -- aspires to become right, real and true.

Comments

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I don't want to be interesting, I already am interesting. Fuck you!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Interestingness is above all a relationship between the (potentially) interesting and the (potentially) interested. It therefore requires communication, compatibility, and strategies of charm, seduction and humility.

[(Anonymous)]

This classification is pure Momus gold. "Let's see, how can I put a load of derogative descriptions that have no internal connection whatsoever except that they denote things I don't like in one class, and a description of how I see myself (boy, aren't I creative!) into the other? Oh, shoot, I like statistics (even if I don't know how to compute it), so I'll just excise this from class A, no one will notice."

der.

[(Anonymous)]

You think you want to be interesting, Momus, but in fact you want to be right. Your cultural commentary posts always seem like lessons from on high. They're statements, rather than dialogues. I've never seen you change your mind as a result of anything said in the comments section.

The Texas Tosser

[(Anonymous)]

"Here's me in a chateau. Oh, and yesterday I talked to an artist, a writer and a musician. Not that I have anything 'interesting' to say about them, or indeed anything to say about them at all - that would merely muddy the take-home message which is 'Momus hangs with an arty crowd'. And finally, let me share with you a spurious binary that makes me look good."

David Kamp was right!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think you've misread this a bit, der. I wasn't excising the statistics from the column of the Right, and I certainly wasn't trying to reclaim it for the Interesting. No, statistics has to remain in the Right column. (The Interesting prefer scenarios.)

Rather, I was qualifying or detailing how the Right would seek to use statistics. Glancingly, rather than deeply. Because the more deeply you go into statistics, into the methodology of statistics, the more you become a formalist and a relativist. And that's something those who wish to be Right hate. It pulls the carpet out from under their quest.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

People who want to be interesting are invariably dull, sheep like graphic designers called Chris.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A far better critique would be:

"He calls David Kamp a snob for attending Long Island dinner parties, then ends the week in the Presidential Suite of a 12th century Schloss deep in the Brandenburg forests!"

But of course that would be a hypocrisy argument, and, as you probably guessed, I am readying an argument as we speak which will prove -- for now, if not once and for all -- that hypocrisy is the most shallow criticism known to man. It's just another word for "stimulating dialectical complexity".

[(Anonymous)]

Rather, I was qualifying or detailing how the Right would seek to use statistics. Glancingly, rather than deeply.

Hoisted by your own petard!

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't "methodology of statistics" a bit of a pleonasm?

Could you elaborate on how getting deeply "into statistics, into the methodology of statistics, [makes] you become a formalist and a relativist"?

Also, I would have thought that "how the Right would seek to use statistics. Glancingly, rather than deeply" pretty well characterises your use of (pre-compiled) statistics. But maybe I misread the intention of the piece and you meant, in a rare moment of self-criticism, to place yourself amongst the Right?

der.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, the sound of Momus reaching for his straw man...

[(Anonymous)]

My sentiment exactly. What really irks me about the posts here is how they present statements (quite often interesting ones) that would need more support than is given as uncontestable facts (as "Right"), and then when contradictions are pointed out, the Aesthetics Card is played ("I want to be interesting, it's all rhetorics, etc.) and the comment thread is left to die.

der.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Reaching for his scenario.

no show

[(Anonymous)]

i have a friend whose changed her name and started acting distant since returning from pune and joining up with the osho tribe...what conclusions did you come to about this guru ?....have you ever tried yoga , meditation?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to be interesting, it's a kind of gentilesse, a courtesy to the person you're talking to. There's nothing worse than people who deliberately bore, and just think you should take them as they are, warts and all. That's the ultimate arrogance.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

I don't there's anything wrong with wanting to be interesting per se, it's more people who make it very obvious that they are trying very hard to be interesting. It usually involves converse trainers somewhere along the line.

Are people ever deliberately boring? Or is it more that they would like not to be boring, but find that they are and then try to justify it as a kind of lifestyle choice?

[(Anonymous)]

truth is strategic? so you're delibarately trying to make your readers cringe at every sentence? god, this is depressing, and quite frankly a load of old bollocks

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think you could make a new Dunciad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunciad) of modern bores (Morrissey sort of started it with that song "The World is Full of Crashing Bores"), or rather a catalogue of reasons people have to be boring, including:

* vested interest
* not wanting to appear pretentious
* preferring repetition to variation
* babytalking others, and the power that gives one over them
* the wish to avoid the danger that speaking out invariably entails
* genetic mealy-mouth
* lack of aptitude for self-expression
* communicating in languages other than one's own
* desire to avoid offending

and so on...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it seems that I want to be interesting, that you are indeed interested, and that the communication, from that point of view, is a successful one, der.

I'm not really sure what "support" you think some of these posts requre. For instance, obviously embedding a lot of Togawa Jun videos is pretty good support for the statement "Togawa Jun is great", and showing books containing the word "snob" in the title is pretty good support for the claim "David Kamp is a snob".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on how getting deeply "into statistics, into the methodology of statistics, [makes] you become a formalist and a relativist"?

I would have thought it was fairly obvious: the closer you get to statistics, the more you realise that they can be sliced and diced in a way that proves just about any point one might care to make. One also realizes that questions can be framed in ways that produce quite widely different answers, and that then leads to a concern with how things are framed -- that's what I'm calling formalism, a shift to the adverbial, to the how rather than the what.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

For those who are more concerned to be interesting than to be right, truth is strategic -- what's true is always true only in relation to what is currently believed, and may be the opposite of it. Things might be true, in other words, only because they're currently disbelieved, or sublimated, or undervalued. This kind of truth value is contextual, contingent, relative.

[(Anonymous)]

This explains nicely why that one line reference to (not even a review of) this blog triggered that monstrous reply recently: the person called your blog (and by extension, you) "boring", which in your world must be the worst thing one can say.

Go on, say something outrageous! You're not boring!

der.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We were discussing this in relation to Christian Kracht's visit to North Korea: he went to the border with South Korea wearing a pink suit and saw sinister men staring at him with binoculars from the South. I was delighted with this image -- and found a kind of sublimated, contextual truth value in it -- because it inverts the cliche that people approach the border and see scary guards observing them from the "Axis of Evil". (And the fact that the phrase is Bush's shows the danger of agreeing with the standard view, and who it aligns one with.)

Now, a lot of people here were disgusted with Kracht's act, and his blithe reporting of it. But I would very much support it, and acts like it, for boldness, for provocation, for daring to put another point of view, for liberating buried truths, and for holding up a mirror to the kind of silly things we believe about ourselves. There are very, very few people really able to provide this valuable service, and therefore very, very few truly interesting writers and thinkers -- I'd say Zizek is another.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But you'll notice that I didn't shout "This blog is interesting, fuck off!" Instead, I looked at the relationship between the two parties. Kamp was being paid to review a blog he'd never normally look at. We were people who'd struggle to find common interests at a dinner party.

My focus couldn't be on anything integral, because I don't believe there is such a thing as "integrally interesting". Interestingness is a relationship. Now, this also relates to the pointless skirmishing that tends to happen in the Comments section. If it takes two to get some interestingness going, it also takes two to get some boringness going. What's more, exactly the same thing can strike some as interesting and others as boring. So it's pretty pointless for those bored by the kind of things I write and show here to keep trying to convince me of the error of my ways. It's not an error -- there is no such thing as error, there's just personal incompatibility. And there probably is a blog out there you'll enjoy because you're compatible with it.

Unless, of course, what you enjoy is precisely being incompatible with this blog?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not talking about those posts.

Anyway, the phenomenon rather proves my point: I come here because I'm interested in the things you think you're right about, mostly because I don't think you are. I wouldn't come if you weren't claiming to be right. If you just said completely random things (rather than just starting with something and then adding largely random other bits), no one would come.

der.