A man is lost to the world; and it is not the news, one has been so for a while. The shuttered firmament of the sky and the sense of groundlessness underneath are ontological evidences to this. Haphazardness is the sovereign sign of things around and whatever is said, shown, written and done under the guidance of its authority, everything at once is sensed as the remnant stretched out in the midst of deserted boundlessness.
If philosophically traditional and overly functional term contingency is usually defined in opposition to the notion of necessity, the word haphazardness with it’s a way less formalized history of meaning, stays outside the lexical canon of metaphysics. Haphazardness is not the concept and never meant to be something of that kind. What is asked of it in the spatiality of this text is to imprint wordily the general atmosphere of things around.
A word taken in its experiential immanence, devoid of all formal attributions, of all technical determinations but contemplated in the stillness of language. Time passes in-between words and we become older with its everlasting immeasurability. What a word reveals in its personalized temporality (commonly referred as a biography), is that it is never the automatic engine of communication, the instrumental device appropriated by the dynamisms of factual extensions, but the crystalline substance of a life implicating ones reality of time.
The immanent truth of a word implicates self in its non-representational intensity; what follows after is the innermost sense of time explicated in its unmediated simplicity.
Was not Nietzsche’s profound anticipation to define truth as a movable army [Ein bewegliches Heer] of metaphors and metonyms, an instant when the language and word in particular, as the transcendental element of it, exposed to be the source of grand illusions hovering all over the mankind, at least over the metaphysically conditioned part of it? [cit.]. What the philosopher had not envisaged, possibly deliberately and due to his conscious anti-politicality, was the power of resentment (sooner or later) destined for being redirected towards the language itself. In the era of technocapitalism it is witnessed invisibly that every historically postulated crime owns a lining of a tacit vengeance taken against the language. And a word in its essence, the most sonorous of all the vital things in human existence, ontologically given as the nearest at our hand, is carried in the debris of overmechanized communications, in the fundamental impossibility of its proper usage, something that is called conversation.
Haphazardness is the universal muteness of word. It is the pure negativity of chance, deceptive promise of progress unfolded in its troublesome caricatureness. The gift of impersonal language once thought to be the hope-abode for the noblest of all expectations, i. e. to liberate human being from the egophanic bonds of slavery, has been indirectly personalized in it. Obviously enough, haphazard world is commanded by the cult of capital and every ounce of practice in it is authorized by the impersonal personality of profit. Is not it thought provoking that even the political semantics of medically indispensable practices of pandemic times, are fully appropriated by capitalistic axiomatic? If not so, then where from to trace all those “redemptive” intuitions, which in their separated assuredness are empirically proved to be the simple erroneousness of reasoning? Thing is that capitalistic haphazardness not only devalues the sphere of facts but along with it neglects the very possibility of facticity of haphazardness itself. Primarily this is why the capitalistic haphazardness is the pure negativity of chance.
There is an aphoristic saying by Evald Ilyenkov that “a faceless man is like a clock without hands” [cit.]. Taken in its abstracted autonomy, the phrase in the closest approximation captures the sense of human existence in general. But do not the limits, either of epistemological or of ethical kind, of such consideration merely affirm the negativity of chance alone, instead of questioning the essential problem of human condition in the pandemic times? The very meaning of this problem consists in the “fact” that in the world wrapped up in hazardous indeterminations, objectively conditioned and necessary things are thought to be the simple insufficiencies of haphazardness per se.
From today’s point of view the dreary haphazardness (trostlose Ungefähr) that Kant once apprehended as the guiding thread of reason in case of latter’s misuse, appears to be the average sign of human incapacity, if compared with the image of haphazardness in its actual modality [cit.]. Haphazardness ceases to be merely dreary but becomes excessively hazardous for all kinds of living expressive variations. Universal muteness of word systematizes its negativities and that is why political value of conversation is regained for the nth time; at the end of the day does not every hope born out from the truth of consolation make its first steps in the impossibility of communal language?
Picture: a picture from the series “Packages” by Yrjö Edelmann (2015; source).