Auf eine Lämpe

In child-Switzerland, where diminutives dominate the semiological topography and surpress any aspirations back down to its valleys, having "lämpe" is a disciplinary countermeasure. It is to accept at the same time the harassing nature of disciplinary punishments like scolding and to shake it off as a sticky nuisance without real weight or meaning.

Lämpe is something you almost never encounter in academia, because everything in here likes to suggest it is for real and consequential. You can fail or you can get critized or bullied, but you do almost certainly not have lämpe, because either the hierarchies are too weak (in the case of the Mittelbau) or too strong (in the case of your employer which is at the same time your evaluator and referee) for the concept.

But why does academia allow for cöncepts like anxiety issues, nervousness, stacked habits, mental disease and writer's block in light of writing, but not, what seems to be a crude, but also fitting way to put it, to have lämpe with your text?

Auf eine Lampe

Noch unverrückt, o schöne Lampe, schmückest du,
An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen hier,
Die Decke des nun fast vergessnen Lustgemachs.
Auf deiner weissen Marmorschale, deren Rand
Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem Erz umflicht,
Schlingt fröhlich eine Kinderschar den Ringelreihn.
Wie reizend alles! lachend, und ein sanfter Geist
Des Ernstes doch ergossen um die ganze Form -
Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art. Wer achtet sein?
Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst.

"Wer achtet sein?" The moth of course. It buzzes around the lamp like an umlaut around its vocal. The moth is the thing that sees the beauty which does not want to be seen and is addicted to it.

Like the moth to its lamp, every concept has its cöncept, every writing, at least the doing-writing which is probably a different animal, has its aura of non-writing. And every non-writer has their caressing moths, the one's who stick around them despite their addiction: like the art-pour-art work that is teasing its audience. "Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es ihm selbst." The "Kunstgebild der echten Art" does not care for its carers. It shines or seems (a phaenömenon of the noumenön) - philologists debating - in itself, or in the art work, or in the Geist. Who knows? It does not care.

Academia does not care either, at least not for the concept of the "successful sentence" - "an arrangement of known things in a way that they produce an unknown thing". The addiction of academia is not that you get paid to write successful sentences. You are allowed to produce them, sure, and you even get a form of appreciation - though not enough (otherwise it wouldn't be the machine where successful sentences are so rare that you have to import it from theory and art books or from >50 year old philosophy). What you get appreciation for, on the other hand, is the self-pity of non-writing, the Aufschubidoo, the aufschüb. (The thing that gives you "schüb".)

Academia is rather a system that profits from the lost kicks; it is an addiction to the unwritten, but brilliant sentence, but in its unwrittenness. It is an addiction to impostor-anxiety for which the pay roll is cruelly well-measured: You never earn enough to be the spending or (financially) helping part of any relationship, rather you rely on some form of visible or invisible Entgegenkommen, but you also earn so much to not feel entitled to more: Because you yourself survive, and you yourself are writing the dissertation and you yourself like the sentences - the unwritten phrases more than the written phräses, of course -, it is just bad luck that you yourself always wind up with others (sometimes even others from outside the academic contexts, beware).

To make a kick out of the non-kick, to create an addiction to not getting what you want is the academic twist: It follows neither the cöncept nor the concept, but the perpetual difference between the two, the - are you sitting? - Differänz. Thus, "having lämpe" is too weak as it hints to a solution, something you could get rid off. Maybe by a mediation between concept and cöncept - if not an Aufhebung, a compromise - that makes you want to live it.

Let's umlaut vibe shift Morike's phrase to a phräse:

Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art. Wer ächtet sein?
Was aber schon ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst.

Academia "ächtet" the concept and the phrase, by pushing you back from it. It motivates you to an ostentious demotivation - an individual struggle that gives you access to the language of a collective struggle through which you can connect, at least, to other academic moths. But if you look closely enough, the struggles of many academics do not have a lot in common - except one: precarity -, and they try to mediate or communicate through writer's block or the non-writing. If you make this struggle seem solveable, if you write too easily or even with enjoyment, if you regard it as merely "lämpe", you become suspicious in the eyes of your peers. This is part of what professional writing entails, of course. Stretching the doing-writing, celebrating the non-writing, arming it with bureaucracy.

But in academia the weight of past literature, of the Känon, wears not only you down, but your environment, because it is unreachable, but it is only unreachable, because it has been written, and you can't or shouldn't write, at least not too much or too visibly. Writing has to be cut off from you and has to have been there before you. This is the part that makes relationships almost impossible. Everything of worth has an Already, but your writing is caught in the aura of the Soon and Not-yet. You are paid and working, but not happening. You professionalize non-writing, because writing remains your goal - how can you adjust this to relationships, how can you explain this the ones you should compensate for the Entgegenkommen?

Scholars point out that "nun fast vergessen" in the original does exactly hint to the Already-there of the tradition which can't be fully written off: "But Mörike’s phrase, as it stands, suggests that the lamp, once and for all, is in a condition of “almost…,” a condition that implies continuing change and is even conceivably reversible, thus not “once and for all.” (Benjamin Benett: Criticism as Wager: The Politics of the Mörike-Debate and Its Object) It can not be completely forgotten, but it is almost forgotten to the point where you could write again: the phrase, the chapter, maybe. If you work on your cöncept, your phräse just long enough, you could achieve it. But the moth-version leaves no doubt that the mighty and frugal Already of the concept or the phrase does not need another - still unwritten - phrase or concept:

"Was aber schon ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst."

No one asked for it. No one asks for lämpe, ever.

But maybe you should.