THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XIV: HAVING NOTHING TO SAY AND NOTHING TO DO

No photo of Lucia Diego exists on the Internet. Why nobody has ever said anything. Why all saying says emptiness. Why no context needs context to be contextless. Why emptiness context-depends.

HAVING NOTHING TO SAY

People talk and they have nothing to say: such a simple thought might one day be stripped of any appearance of bitterness. Perhaps it is mostly true. Think of Jean Genet sitting opposite a man on a train and having an idea too simple to bear:

this person in front of me is just as good as me

Humans rarely want equality. They hate above all when you treat them as an equal. Equality is the most daring thing in the world and the most savage. Ripley understands Newt [see part XIII], at least to begin with, in her muteness. The men of the stellar troop think Newt is ‘brain-locked’ and ‘useless’—a culprit of trauma, guilty of not being able to offer full sentences—but Ripley hears what Newt has done as enough of what needs to be said or may have been said.

What Newt has done, like Greta Thunberg, is to survive at a young age, with the ‘real monsters’. Lucia Diego, the curator, intervened in the art world in 2016/2017 in something like the same way, with the same directness we are directly analysing and holding to here.

LUCIA DIEGO—THE LOST GIRL

One could research Lucia at the time, yet few seemed to want to read everything she had said as a coherent ensemble. Our inner circle little girl still wants to listen to what little revolutionary girls have to say, and we want to speculate for now that this is beyond any sense of sexual transition or theoretical polymorphism. One of the things locatable then—in 2017—was something Diego said in a Facebook post on 16 August 2012, a post which nobody ‘liked’ and which was later deleted. It now forms the following reading cue:

they have nothing better to do than to do

This is a beautiful example of what we mean by a ‘language’ without possibility of question, a verdical ‘language’, a primary language of the ‘declarative’. This ‘language’ is not some utopian possibility, a poetics; it is the frequency already contained in the ‘language’ certain creatures—all of us to some extent—speak and clonally reproduce, but which it takes attention to note and formalize.

THEY HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN TO DO

In saying, simply, ‘they have nothing better to do than to to’, Diego says something so simple that most of us will have thought it and dismissed it a million times in a lifetime: that ‘doing’ makes little difference, that all they do is do. The interjection of a child is perhaps heard here, but is held in a grammatical form that is neither grown-up nor childish: the thing we call ‘doing’ is perhaps nothing at all, and has got us nowhere, and this defines a certain ‘they’. ‘Doing’ and the ‘done’ in every possible sense we can imagine—think for example of what Karl Marx analyses and describes in terms of industrial production—are, in fact, Diego says, a kind of busy-body faux-historical way of doing nothing better than nothing; there is nothing better than nothing to do when one appears to be doing and producing something. All that has appeared to have been something that got us somewhere has turned out to have been nothing better than a nothing that got us nowhere. Who could say such a thing, and fully mean it?

History is made of things that did make a difference, and progress has always made a difference. There are millions of tiny events and beautiful productions that have been something, and that have made of lifetimes memorable events. But what if that isn’t the case at all? Why does the thought of its dismissal necessarily mean its dismissal? Isn’t it obvious by now that there is more than nothing, and even more than something, and that we should be grateful for this, but also that this gives us a chance to ask questions or make statements that might appear too childish, ridiculously beautiful, painfully true, overly abbreviated, and so on? Imagine, in other words, that nothing isn’t known at all.

Or, instead, which is the same:

nothing is over

GRETA HERSELF

Let us come back to Greta and try to name her without getting distracted by her name. Greta names the situation wherein we ask, finally, because we have to, because there isn’t time for anything else, even if there is, the questions we have just asked, the only ones we need pose, the simplest, the newest, the oldest. Even if we cannot prove that the questions she suggests and the sentences she declares are unprecedented, even if we stop believing that her name has any effect, then at least her voice and name allow one to think that something is happening in terms of the way ‘language’ has of saying, finally, what it cannot say and what it could not say before now because it did not have to.

In other words, perhaps Greta, she too, says nothing. Perhaps she does nothing. But also, perhaps she is the one, the name, of the one who says this, just as much as, or even more so, than Diego or Antigone. All they do is do, and they never do, they never do enough of what it would take, enough of what it would take to take into account the ‘real monsters’, enough of what it would take to take into account what needs to be done with a view to actual survival, the survival of life, actual living on, actual conditions of life, and not just life at the cost of survival of all those living.

Here is Newt’s original question, another more than simple reading cue: 

Why do they tell little kids that?

This is what Newt asks just after she says that ‘real monsters’ are real. This is the original question, especially perhaps today, because it is the question of why the adult lies to the child about the radical presence of the monstrous in the world. It’s not just ‘why did you lie to me about Father Christmas’, it’s why did you lie to me about the whole thing, the whole notion of doing and what you are doing and what can be done, and why did you lie to yourself, about nothing and the nothing of doing, and the nature of nothing as emptiness and not nothing, and so on.

The question that Greta poses, which is really a declaration, a declaration of serene independence, is: do you even know what you are doing? Do you, even you, know what you are doing? And what if nobody does? The perhaps hiddener and perhaps ultimater question here, ultimately childish and child-like and ultimately enlightened and mature, perhaps is:

why is anyone doing anything?

This may be taken in every possible sense: for example in the most contemporary sense, given ‘the state of the world’, given ‘where we are’ and ‘how bad things have got’, why is anyone doing anything? Isn’t this what Greta’s bare name without name, bare voice without voice, is asking, and the reason why even though we love her we also fail to love her, even though we listen to her we fail to listen to her and even despise her?

Because she says: it won’t make any difference. And, this as a cue to come back to:

blah, blah, blah

Why are you doing. Why are you not doing. How dare you. What. Why. How. When. The reversal she, ‘Greta’, performs is the putting of the adult in the place of the regressive child, and the putting of the little girl, which is to say childhood, and even regression, in the avant-guard of the race (we might call this ‘transcendental childhood’). Whether she fails or succeeds in this doesn’t matter and doesn’t come into it, because this is what she is.

Moreover, whether the possibility of these questions and statements of Greta’s and Newt’s and Diego’s cracking anything open is real or imaginary doesn’t matter or come into it either, since what happens here is the possibility of what happens only in the latest sense: the possibility of asking without question mark ‘why is anyone doing anything at all’.

A NOTE ON THE CONTEXTLESS CONTEXT OF THESE READING CUES

All parts of the series called ‘The End of The Universe’ depend on something like a plastic methodology, a methodology of ‘reading cues’. By reducing the content of this blog to small phrases, surrounded by a context of quasi-superfluous commentary, we provide the reader with a kind of net of jewels.¹ To avoid saying too much, and doing nothing, we reduce a large amount of discourse to something that can be taken away. On the other hand, since the truly contextless can be invaded by a sense of overdetermined nothing (‘reading into’), we also add a supplementary text as optional.

In the same way, ‘doing nothing’ and ‘saying less’ are not quite viable here—simply because humans always end up saying something, however silent we become. This is partly why Strawson’s speculations about beings without intentionality are important in part XIII and why AGI is naturally being evoked whenever we contemplate doing and saying less and more.

But speech—or at least writing—always provides a context even if we don’t add it in ourselves. This may well mean that the surrounding of these ‘reading cues’ with commentary is actually a double bluff: without any context at all, the reading cues would be overwhelmed by the illusion and context of no context at all (over-reading instead of reading like a machine). With context, they have the chance of being even more isolated and incised, more shining than jewels.

1. A suicide net of angelicism jewels. I always imagine suicide nets with butterflies in them, or me resting in the suicide net, high up, with the butterflies on my face. This is how it is, in a way.