y'all got any fuckin cöncepts?

I.

Back in 2018, there circulated a meme that was just a moth, photographed through a window, peering in, eyes like alight with desire for "lamps".

And then there was this series of memes riffing on the radically monomanic desire of the moth wanting only the lamp and all of the lamp at all times.

Last week, I participated in a conversation at the Uni, organized by the Autonomous Colloquium, on the topic of mental health in Academia, and the conversation made me think of this meme, just as my past two days make me think of that conversation (yes, I've used this overly cumbersome word three times in the same sentence).

As we discussed the position of the doctoral student between precarity and privilege, chance and risk, the shifting vibes of the different positions – "Being a doctoral student is such a privilege that complaining is not only embarrassing, but tone-deaf" vs. "The massive mental health problem within academia as a whole and within doctoral studies especially, must be addressed by all means", to paraphrase the two more radical  (=worthwile) positions to the point of caricature – allowed me to think of my own position as  intensely caught between just that: privilege and precarity; and thereby, to use that overused word again, to what degree my position is toxic (for myself and others). It is toxic, I think, because it is founded on a toxicologial basis.

To put it bluntly, there is just no feeling in the world I desire more than the feeling I get from a successful sentence, which I will, for matters of pretend-clarity, define here as an arrangement of known things in a way that they produce an unknown thing. If I manage to achieve this, I receive a very obviously somatic kick, some mixture of endorphine, serotonine, adrenaline, and what not; a cocktail, anyway, that is just as unmistakably specific as the particular conjuction of phrases that make up the sentence; impossible to confuse with anything else, and equally impossible to imitate.

If I am addicted to this feeling, the point of my position as a doctorate student is that I get paid for living out my addiction rather than, as is maybe more common, having to pay for my addiction. This, to me, is the privilege: Somebody pays me money to sustain my habit – very little money, true, but pecuniam non fucking olet if you're addicted anyway, paid or not.

And it is a habit, a bad habit, or a set of good and bad habits, inseparable from each other ("habit stacking" was a term used last week, in the mental-health-conversation: every time you brush your teeth [habit 1], you take your medication [habit 2]).

And a lot of what could be called bad about the habits is related, I think, to the fact that writing has an aura. Now I don't mean 'writing' in the sense of written words (as in "the writing on the wall"). I'm not talking about a sense of awe connected to words looking positively gemeisselt on a page. I mean the process of writing, the doing-writing. And I don't mean 'aura' in the high-concept sense that Walter Benjamin concocted ("Eine Erscheinung der Ferne, so nahe sie sein mag"), at least not necessarily. I use 'aura', here, like the people afflicted with migraine use it: that hostile stretch of time announcing that It is going to arrive more or less soon, sprinkled with a wide array of bad things not necessarily quoting The Migraine Itself, but sure to make your day somewhat or massively worse.

So to writing, at least in my experience, there is this aura; the feeling that you are going to write soon, that doing-writing is going to happen, and with it – possibly – the kick you crave, but it is not happening yet, and that is obviously bad. It is bad because, obviously, addict you are, you want it now, and because writing is that one thing that is not the real thing, but, in U2's formulation, "even better than the real thing", so everything else now really pales and you're waiting –

– and that's the habit, isn't it; isn't this the very point of addiction, the hinge around which it turns: the waiting? –

– and I'm always nervous, but within the aura of writing, I get really nervous. This is non-writing, a practice much more intimate to writing as any medial question (the keyboard is as historically replacable as the quill, but the non-writing is here to goddamn stay, I'm afraid). To seriously talk about writing means talking about the non-writing part of it, and how that "non-" part works in ways Laruelle couldn't imagine in his worst (or greatest, what do I know) nightmares. What I do these past two days, caught in the aura, is non-reading, non-sleeping, non-talking, non-eating, non-enjoyingmyself. Do I hate it? Yes. But I will see through it because just like the migraine aura, it holds a promise, and what is promised surpasses all of this because all of the non-writing is part of the real things, whereas writing is, as I said, and U said it 2, even better than the real thing.

But then all of this is addiction-talk, and the obvious symptom of this is that I only talk about myself and my kick, whereas the question is very obviously how everyone else must live with my non-writing and my writing; and the short route is to come back to the privilege of the (my) doctoral student position, and how the privilege is that it supports this habit, financially, yes, but also through granting me all sorts of leeway and loopholes when it comes to the question of being a functioning member of society, a question that academia considers of extremely little relevance; a good thing when you're a rampant addict, basically a moth clinging to a windowsill, eyes alight with desire; a bad thing when you're looking for some healthier form of Zwischenmenschlichkeit. I can spend weeks and weeks on end non-writing, and this is tolerated.

And the precarity, in turn, can hardly be summarized more succinctly, I think, than by saying that what academia does is that it gives me the liberty to indulge in my dependence, which is to say that I am, like any other addict, weakened and vulnerable, bottomlessly dependent not only on the substance, but metonymically dependent on the providers of the substance, and the sleight of hand performed by academia is that it quite easily positions itself as that provider (rather than language, or the literary system, or the world, or whatever other entity you could be tempted to choose, here). Nowhere else, it whispers (=bellows), would you be literally paid for indulging in your habit. Nobody else will tolerate the aura-phases, the stretches where you do nothing but non-write.

This is only the most trivial way of formulating academia's specific hold, the way it finds a way of making chance itself a risk, not even touching upon the ways it inflects what you would even consider a worthwile source or place or closet for your kick.

Simultaneously, then, academia can be characterized as something that profiteers from addiction, ruthlessly exploits the addicted. The rarity of "Hey, somebody pays me for my addiction, that's not exactly normal" must be thought as coincident with "Hey, somebody exploits addicts, that's not exactly normal".

Imagine the slavery you could put moths through if you only tell them that there is such a thing as the enlightenment.

II.

What the above meme soon evolved was the idea of using umlauts to express 'mothness':

Now, I think these umlauts deserve a moment of attention, because I think they relate in several ways to the problems outlined above. What do they do? I have no idea. But I could imagine a few potential functions.

(1) They indicate intensity: As if the purity and power of the moth's monomanic desire for a lamp would eventually squeeze a few diacritics out of the signifier: "lamp" is the adumbration of a human relationship to a lamp (trivial, basic, instrumental), whereas "LÄMP" bears the umlaut-trace of the sheer desire-heat directed at it by the moth.

The umlaut, in this case, would be the signpost for that (LÄMP) which is even better than the real thing (lamp).

(2) They indicate preliminariness: Looking for 'lamp', the moth only has 'lämp', that is: something that could possibly be a lamp ("do you have LÄMP?"), but as long as it is not 'it', it doesn't deserve to be called it, although it is promised all around.

The umlaut, then, would be like the "non-" prefix of non-writing; a viral aura, infecting everything else ("BRÖTHER"), at least as long as there is no lamp.

(3) They indicate a risky interchangeability/confusion: An epistemological precarity on the part of the moth-addict, ready to take everything that has umlauts for that which is even better than the real thing.

The umlaut, here, is the marker of a chain of (at a cost) interchangeable signifiers, maybe spawned by the original confusion light/lamp, and then all the way down: light/lamp/lämp/göd/etc.

(4) They indicate a death drive (=the desire for waiting), an annihilating component to desire; the idea of a flame that will, eventually or abruptly, burn the moth (bürn the möth): The umlaut-points are simply the eyes of the moth staring out at you from the wörd; just like the light shimmering, as if desired, in the eyes of the photographed moth, is the light from the phone taking the photo – in the words of Spinal Tap: "You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you".

This case allows for two interpretations: Either the umlaut shows how self-destruction is self-observation (and vice versa); or the umlaut indicates a passionate, possibly lethal desire for an inhuman, gothic, hexagonal life.

III.

How to live with the cöncept? That is, how to live with the aura of that which you desire with all intensity (although it is either death-like, or lethal, or both), and never confuse it with the concept, even if academia tries to sell you one for the other?

How to live with syntäx, with the phräse? How to live with the chäpter?

That is, with the power and the disgust these words evoke, with their diacritic gonads, with the obscenity of their unrequested diacritics? With the utter undesirability that must be sustained, and that will look back at you like or because it is you ("I’m not going to martyr myself [...] but I will turn into a moth. I will become uglier and darker and lonelier and more undesirable, because that’s the way it’s got to be").

Earlier, when claiming that "the question is very obviously how everyone else must live with my non-writing and my writing", I said that "the short route is to come back to the privilege of the (my) doctoral student position, and how the privilege is that it supports this habit". The long route, is of course, to talk about how everyone else must live with my non-writing: Of course, I'm non-listening to music, non-cooking food and non-buying groceries, but more importantly I'm non-answering to my friends, non-replying to messages, non-talking to the people around me, and I'm a non-partner to my partner, all in the name of the cöncept or the chäpter or the lämp.

For that mental-health-conversation of last week, we could send stuff that would interest us as talking points beforehand. One of those points sent was the question of how to square writing with relationships; curiously enough, it was not talked about during the session. And some part of me was glad about this, glad to not have to admit that I have no idea how; but of course it would have been a necessary talking point, because isn't that on some level where academia really loses most of what it has going for it: Yes, yes, it pays you for your habit; but on the other hand, it does not give a fuck about you; and someone else, or several elses, decide to actually care for you even though you have that habit. And I suppose as soon as someone loves you even though you are an addict, you will clearly see how shabby those look who only pay you for your addiction, how little of a redeeming factor that actually is in the big picture.

So why even talk about mental health in academia without talking about those who have to live with the mental health of those in academia; those who witness (and partially bear) the reign of the cöncept without really sharing the desire for the concept? How to measure the cost of our privilege without considering those who invest even without interest? Only with this extension, I feel, we would be able to adequately measure both the price paid and the prize shared.

All non-writing is collaborative anyway.