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#0: Gathering

One can only gather what is already scattered. One can gather potatoes or flowers, stones, courage, one can gather speed, gather one’s wits, gather dust. In all of these cases, gathering brings about a concentration, a coming together, an intensity (of potatoes, of courage, of dust) in an otherwise dispersed field.

And yet, the gathering of potatoes and flowers are obviously not similar… When one gathers potatoes, one knows exactly when the work is done. One knows exactly where to look, the gathering narrows down to the ‘picking up’, and the chronology of the labour is strictly tied to the spatial expansion of the field. The labour can be planned, time consumption calculated, tasks carried out.

When gathering flowers, the mere ‘picking up’, the fulfillment of the gathering, shrinks. What grows instead is the roaming and rambling of the search. This rambling even encompasses the purpose or result of the gathering: One’s aesthetical criteria for the bouquet change with every flower picked and with every twist of the route. There was not first a plan, an ideal bouquet, and then its fulfillment or realization. And yet… some strange image, a bouquet-ness, initiates the gathering in the first place, something guides the gathering subtly even before the first flower is picked. This image is far more vague than a plan, it is rather an internal and shapeless image. It is a peculiar type, maybe not unlike an expectation, a mood or a feeling. The unpredictability of the gathering is inherent in this type. It is, simultaneously, no particular bouquet and all possible bouquets. Similarly, no clear point in time or space determines when the job is done. But all roamings come to an end, and all flower bouquets have a size.

The scatteredness and dispersedness of the field is retained in the bouquet.  Is it not true that the unity or simpleness of a bouquet comes across as a proliferation (rather than a narrowing down) of possibilities? The multiplicity of the route (its turns, places, environments, worlds) is present in the bouquet, which is a bundle of minor choices. A bouquet is a collection with an inherent incompleteness; it never claims to be a botanical overview or to exhaust the range of possible bouquets. And yet, half a bouquet is still a bouquet, half a rambling is still a rambling… As a thing, the bouquet is complete at every moment, however simple, however paltry.

In practices of gathering, there is both pushing forwards and turning back, there is play, there is groping in the dark, there is roughness and there is the element of chance. Gloom is there, and grace and luck. There is the performing of simple tasks, gathering what needs to be gathered, the discarded as well as the adored.

And there is being exposed: To the elements, to people, to the risk of failure, to losing your way. Therefore, gathering is always hopeful. It dares, out of necessity, to hope for the unhoped, for that which could never fully be anticipated or planned in advance, for that which arrives, just like joy, without wage or contract. This mode of expectation is very far from the mere foreseeing of the fulfillment of our plans. It is, in the words of Lana del Rey, ‘remembering that the world is conspiring for you and to act in a manner as such’.

Hope, in this sense, is a mood, an attunement, a certain trustful attitude towards change and future. The ‘strength’ of hopefulness is not to be mistaken for the ‘force’ to shape the stuff of creation to our will. Rather, it is the courage to face and appreciate the turns of things, of events, of our lives, as fundamentally open and undecided.

‘Big Sori’ is our name for an abandoned and unfinished school building constructed towards the end of Georgia’s Soviet period. The model in this exhibition is part of a project for reinhabiting the building.

( …6) Archetype, idea, essence, category, genus etc.

GATHERINGS

This web page, we hope, will be received as a gathering place and, in due time, as the documentation of the acts and practices of gathering. Also, it will function as a collection of what has been gathered. What will be gathered is of many kinds — for the lack of a better word we call them threads. They involve stories, maps, moods, technical details, imagery, words, meanings, tendencies, strata, memories, intimations. In other words, this web page is to be received as a somewhat messy multiplicity. It is an incomplete list, it is a small wooden box that is not full ( … 1 ). For now, we have hardly gathered anything ourselves, Onis Skola is very young, and great expectations take the place of hard earned findings. And yet, there are certain things that we already know, certain things that we already hope for.

“We are all young before the world”, says Edouard Glissant, and “that youth is the capacity to feel all the flows of the world blend together, mix, in a way that is absolutely unexpected and absolutely inextricable. Utopia is the strength to feel that”. 

Now, before dealing with any ideas of utopia, let us for a moment consider gathering – its ways, moods, attitudes and techniques – as a possible reaching towards Glissant’s youth.

One can only gather what is already scattered. One can gather potatoes or flowers, stones, courage, one can gather speed, gather one’s wits, gather dust. In all of these cases, gathering brings about a concentration, a coming together, an intensity (of potatoes, of courage, of dust) in an otherwise dispersed field.

And yet, the gathering of potatoes and flowers are obviously not similar… When one gathers potatoes, one knows exactly when the work is done. One knows exactly where to look, the gathering narrows down to the mechanical ‘picking up’ and the chronology of the labour is strictly tied to the spatial expansion of the field. The labour can be planned, time consumption calculated, tasks carried out. This is by no means noted to diminish the purposeful, calming and rhythmical activity of gathering potatoes, of doing a good job, of staying in the track. And in a certain sense, this mode of gathering constitutes the ever fleeting ideal for all other gatherings.

When gathering flowers, the mere ‘picking up’, the fulfillment of the gathering, shrinks. What grows instead is the roaming and rambling of the search. This rambling even encompasses the very purpose or result of the gathering: One’s aesthetic criteria for the bouquet develop, metamorphose, with every picked flower and with every twist of the route. There was not first a plan, an ideal bouquet, and then its fulfillment or realization. And yet, something initiates the gathering and guides it subtly, even before the first flower is picked. This something is more vague than a plan, it is rather some virtual, internal image of a bouquet ( …2 ), a peculiar type ( …3 ), maybe not unlike a mood or a feeling. The unpredictability of the gathering is inherent in this type, it is, simultaneously, no particular bouquet and all possible bouquets. Similarly, no clear point in time or space determines when the job is done, that the bouquet is finished. But all roamings come to an end, and all flower bouquets have a size.

Now, one might claim that this initial, vague contour that guides the gatherer, this bouquet-ness, is gradually (that is, by every flower picked) replaced by the actual bouquet. That the ‘imagined’ is substituted by the ‘real’. This is a common line of thought ( … 4 ); it does, however, reduce the virtual bouquet to a mere plan and the actual bouquet to a mere result. In other words, it treats flowers like potatoes.

If we want to treat flower bouquets like themselves ( …5 ), we need a model of thought that allows us to treat the bouquet-ness as real, not only as a model ( …6 ) for actual bouquets but as something within (coexisting with, inseperable from) the actual bouquet.

This would lead us to the claim that the scatteredness and dispersedness of the field is retained in the bouquet. That the initial contour owes it vagueness to this scatteredness. And is it not so that the unity and simpleness of the bouquet never comes across as a narrowing down of possibilities? That it rather hints at an infinite range of other possible bouquets? ( … 7 ) The multiplicity of the route (its turns, places, environments, worlds) is present in the bouquet, which is a bundle of minor choices. The bouquet is a collection with an inherent incompleteness; a bouquet never claims to be a botanical overeview or to exhaust the range of possible bouquets. And yet, half a bouquet is still a bouquet, half a rambling is still a rambling… As a thing, the bouquet is always complete, however simple, however paltry.

Thus, the bouquet is an index of both its gathering and the scatteredness that every gathering presupposes. It is the coming-together and the dispersedness. It depends for its being a bouquet on both: It is never finished, closed, and yet it is complete at every moment… As such it has the traits of a gesture. (Agamben note).

Heidegger: The jug is not a jug because it is produced, it is produced because it is a jug.

Now, both flowers and potatoes have their place in the lives of humans.

Gathering dust ( … ) is not an activity, never a job, it does not involve movement in the sense of a migration, movement in space… The picking up is is only present in an entirely passive, and hardly recognizable, form. And yet, gathereing dust brings about a change, a mutation or metamorphosis… Something is picked up.

Gathering courage…

In a truly modern turn of events we have come to understand spreading and gathering as opposites, mutually excluding, one action cancelling or rewinding the other. … With this turn arises the understanding of gathering as a fulfillment, as mere realization.

Now, when one gathers historical evidence (let’s say of the historical evolution of the Oda House), one might be aware that modes of gathering vary greatly.

In practices of gathering, there is an amount of mechanical pushing forwards, there is blindness, there is play, there is groping in the dark, there is roughness and there is the element of chance. Gloom is there, and grace and luck. There is the performing of simple tasks, gathering what needs to be gathered, the discarded as well as the adored. 

And there is being exposed: To the elements, to events, to people, to the risk of failure, to losing your way. But (or rather, therefore) gathering – this maybe less prestigious sister of hunting — is always hopeful ( . . . ) It dares, out of necessity, to hope for the unhoped, for that which could never fully be anticipated or planned in advance, for that which arrives, just like joy, without wage or contract. This mode of expectation is very far from the mere foreseeing of the fulfillment of our plans. It is, in the words of Lana del Rey, remembering that the world is conspiring for you and to act in a manner as such.

Hope, in this sense, is a mood, an attunement, a certain trustful attitude towards change and future. It is completely irreducible to ‘what you are left with when you have lost control of the situation’, as the common use of the word might suggest. The ‘strength’ of Glissants utopia, similarly, is obviously not to be mistaken for the ‘force’ to shape the stuff of creation to our will. Rather, it is the courage to face the turns of things, of events, of our lives, as fundamentally open and undecided.

UTOPIA 

“What strength does Glissant refer to? Something very different from force.” ( Simone Weil )   

In gathering, and in being exposed, there is intense attention. There is the reading of obscure and hardly visible signs. There is putting your ear to the earth to hear its trembling, there is humming a refrain to yourself in the dark. There is arranging and rearranging your little collection like a child — curious, plain and optimistic — like someone young before the world ( . . . ) 

A few remarks on the word ‘threads’: In the ecological thinking of recent decades, many such alternative namings have emerged within the domain of academic research suggesting looser, messier and less hierarchical versions of knowledge. ‘Threads’ is no exception; among others, Timothy Morton uses it as an alternative word for chapter in ‘Dark Ecology’.

With the word threads, the ragged and imprecise qualities of a rough fabric are almost automatically evoked — and this rustic, hairy, dirty, open ended and poorly woven textile immediately seems to suggest itself as a more appropriate metaphor for the World as such than the stainless, seamless and frictionless anaesthesia implied in modernist machine metaphors. We might be further encouraged by the fact that woven textiles often demonstrate a paradoxical juxtaposition of regularity and serendipity. So far so good, we welcome the neolithic connotations.

But is the World, the all-there-is, then woven, so to speak? Well, some things are woven, such as baskets, melodies, fishing nets, some primitive facades, small neolithic bags for gathering, Papua New Guinean war vests, to name a few. 

However, acknowledging this is very far from suggesting weaving as a dominant structure or process in the formation of everything, metaphorically or not. We rather start from the assumption that there is no dominant process; that everything that surrounds us is products of specific — and highly particular — historical processes. Or, as put by Judge Holden, one of the great gatherers in late modern literature: “The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part.”

This renders the status of the ‘gatherer’ somewhat humble, if not amateurish. Bereft of standardized or routine procedures for gathering historical evidence (which always rely on this or that dogma, this or that assumption about dominant formation processes) — and their accompanying ‘worldviews’ — what expertise, what authority, does the gatherer hold? 

The world is rendered strange, not “bled of it’s strangeness” ( . . . ) 

The relevance of such considerations reveals itself in the gathering: 

We have no need to replace one hegemonic conception of the World with another. On the other hand, when dealing with threads, one might want to pay close attention to things that are actually woven.

Too often, attempts to escape the confinements of a knowledge regime lead to nothing but a metaphorical displacement of this very regime. This is hardly an escape, for, as Heidegger reminds us, ‘only within the arena of the precise can something be imprecise; only here can the lawfulness of the precise be missing’. ( 4 ) In other words, if we go looking for refreshingly vague, primitive or imprecise modes of knowledge, we (maybe unwillingly) acknowledge a preconceived and mechanical juxtaposition of knowing with all other ways of finding our way.

Therefore, when we say threads, we do not mean to suggest the somewhat manic idea that everything consists of ‘threads’ (or lines, meshworks, nodes, connections) or should be considered as if it were. Neither do we want to imply the mechanical notion that everything and everywhere is connected. Some things are connected with each other, but more things are certainly not. 

By threads, we wish to convey the notion of something to follow. Something, however, that is not fixed, rather a line that is followed while it is drawn. A story that is invented while it is told — and yet, all stories are echoes, all books are made out of other books. We also wish to imply something small ( . . . ) although, small in relation to what? Compared to the World, a thread can be very large (and very relevant too). We hint at something that is exactly as fragile as it is important. We want to imply something near and intimate, and yet, perhaps the homely emerges only as a modality of the unhomely.

A thread is nothing but an investigation of such seemingly opposites. A thread stretches from one side to the other. It signifies a path of sorts, a migration, a change, a movement. And maybe one gathers the strength to feel the thrill, along with the anxiety, of not seeing the end of a thread.

( . . . ) This utopia is courageous, not only because it draws attention to our fundamental exposedness, but also because it has no definite contour, it is not a utopia in the sense of a blueprint for a ‘better future’.

From a purely modern point of view, this is highly disturbing. 

Some trades might be ( . . . ) wine making, for example, somehow incorporates this openness, it is ( . . . )

In advance, we might receive the ability to be mystified by the commonplace, this capacity so characteristic of the child and the young before the world. 

Ultimately as youth in the sense of Glissant:
( . . . ) To remain within the realm of the open and undecided, which exactly amounts to remaining within the realm of the exposed. 

( 4 ) Heidegger, s. 436 kjsflk.

Therefore, when we say threads, we do not mean to suggest the somewhat manic idea that everything consists of ‘threads’ (or lines, meshworks, nodes, connections) or should be considered as if it were. Neither do we want to imply the mechanical notion that everything and everywhere is connected. Some things are connected with each other, but more things are certainly not. 

By threads, we wish to convey the notion of something to follow. Something, however, that is not fixed, rather a line that is followed while it is drawn. A story that is invented while it is told — and yet, all stories are echoes, all books are made out of other books. We also wish to imply something small ( . . . ) although, small in relation to what? Compared to the World, a thread can be very large (and very relevant too). We hint at something that is exactly as fragile as it is important. We want to imply something near and intimate, and yet, perhaps the homely emerges only as a modality of the unhomely.

A thread is nothing but an investigation of such seemingly opposites. A thread stretches from one side to the other. It signifies a path of sorts, a migration, a change, a movement. And maybe one gathers the strength to feel the thrill, along with the anxiety, of not seeing the end of a thread.

( . . . ) everything that is about to change is strange.

Moods, forms and shapes of the gathered ( . . . )

A collection ( . . . ) Borges ( . . . )

Tradition and youth before the world ( . . . ) Georgia and Denmark ( . . . )

A collection as a model for complexity ( . . . ) John Law + Annemarie Mol, Borges liste ( . . . )

Hölderlins poetry as ‘not symbolic image’, no metaphor ( . . . )

( . . . ) a string in the maze so that we may not lose our way ( . . . )