Basserode

WRAPPED IN SKY SKIN

Vital Experience
We have long reckoned that lived experience must respectfully bow to the tutelary figures of knowledge and morality. We have also long pretended to believe that the cracks in morality's wall do not affect the mighty edifice of knowledge, and vice versa. We duly saw things experienced and lived slowly dissolving, shedding the factor of vitality contained therein, and this, needless to say, was all in the name of the alleged almighty objectivity of facts. Our gestures quite simply became facts, and the authors of gestures which could not become facts were either irresponsible or guilty.
Robert Musil was probably one of the rare figures, at least in the first half of the 20th century, along with Hermann Broch, to have shown up the absurdity and, above all, the danger of this division, which is as vague as it is vain. For example, by taking the individual as a being who can be defined by his/her albeit complex psychology was an attempt to fit his/her doings into pre-established schedules. It goes without saying that considerable chunks of our patterns of behaviour seem capable of responding to these orders, and capable of finding their place within these patterns held out to them by rationality, like so many decoys or easily wearable masks. But these schedules simply leave aside the nevertheless more essential issues that were then described, for want of anything more precise or better, as hailing from the soul. These issues, which psychology saw fit not to address, form the arena of vital experiences. Musil called this realm the realm of "soul themes" (1), and it just so happens that it has to do with everything which science seems bound to exclude. It is the realm of "the individual's reactions to the world and to other people, the realm of values and evaluations, ethical and aesthetic relations, the realm of the idea"(2).
Over these past few decades, the major change occurring in the realm of individual life is the fact that the pseudo-rationality associated with the law of commodities has imposed its order on all gestures of existence. Everyone is either bound to obey the injunctions of a morality which is shown across the board to be no longer the expression of a shared or divided reality, but used, to the contrary, to veil innumerable acts of violence, or they are bound to try to recognize themselves in the image transmitted to them by the snapshots which haunt the world. Any person trying to elude this twofold trap ends up being at once the trustee of vital issues and also forced to invent new patterns of behaviour, whereby it is possible to cope with this situation of dispossession.
A vital experience is an aesthetic experience, in the sense that it involves having managed to develop a stout taste for certain things in life.
In the speech given by Joseph Brodsky when he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1987, the Russian poet observed that "any new aesthetic reality helps man to specify his own ethical reality .../... an aesthetic choice is invariably individual, aesthetic suffering is invariably personal suffering. Any new aesthetic reality turns the person it has affected into an even more private person, and this private character, which at times takes on the form of literary or other taste, may per se, be, if not a guarantee, then at least a form of protection against enslavement"(3). So vital experiences are those which consider both that there is no need to respect the fictitious distance introduced between experience and object, between what is lived and what is thought, and between oneself and others, by means of the laws of pseudo-sciences which are at the beck and call of the mercantile order, and that, quite to the contrary, such distinctions should be done away with.
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Jean Louis Poitevin
20 June 2005
Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods