Susan Buck-Morss

LO-B

Tell me how this picture book of philosophy began. What was the process of working on it like?

SB-M

Adam contacted me with the idea of putting our team together. I didn’t know Kevin before—I knew nothing about his philosophical tee-shirts at Boot Boyz Biz—but I've since discovered his work has a huge following.  I mentioned the project in Warsaw recently, and Polish friends exclaimed: “Boot Boyz Biz? We know exactly what that is.” Adam felt intuitively that our three-way collaboration would work. He has long had an interest in making books in new ways. I previously knew Adam as one of the principles at Project Projects, a now-closed design studio that created a website for me in 2012. It’s a beautiful website, and many of the essays in the new book can be found there. The idea of putting these essays back into book form was Adam’s.

We began the project during the Covid shutdown. I was teaching courses on Zoom. Kevin sat in on my seminar: “Walter Benjamin as Method.” This shared experience impacted the design of the book, as Kevin could see how I understand the significance of Walter Benjamin’s work. One of the sections of our book together is called “Class Quilt” and it’s basically my syllabus for that course. Under the title “Benjamin as Method,” is my typed syllabus, and each week of seminar readings is visually activated on the pages that follow. So, it’s essentially the whole course, but illustrated. Some of the images are from my work and others are ones that Kevin found relevant. That chapter, that “room” is a real collaboration.

LO-B

Was that element of collaboration something that happened immediately or did it take some time?

SB-M

We thought this project would be done quickly. It ended up taking a couple of years, and a lot of back and forth. You couldn’t just throw anything in—at least that was my position. Kevin couldn't just put an image in because he liked it or a quotation from Deleuze having nothing to do with my essays. There had to be some discipline, some way of keeping the philosophical content coherent. Adam’s brilliance saved the project, enabling the merging of our work as a montage of different approaches. He maintained the integrity of the scholarship—all the credits, all the footnotes are there, just placed differently than the way we are used to. Adam’s own style as a book publisher and website designer is very clean, very clear. He was able to keep the different levels of the project visible, maintaining their autonomy. That slows the reading process. It encourages contemplation. When these qualities started to become visible through the book’s design, I thought, “Okay, this really is a collaborative way of working, a collective project, and my texts are being transformed in the process. This book mediates among generations, interlinking people with different talents, different readerships, and the consequences are truly interesting.” I would say that for the first year, Adam’s role was to keep us all together. Then when we hit our stride, it began to be fun. I found it helpful to write a short text as “foreword,” explaining the project as an experiment. I just wanted it to be clear why this book had happened, what was going on and, moreover, to admit that we had had our struggles. Authors don’t usually like their work to be re-represented, thereby losing control, and I was no exception. But the process became intellectually rewarding—and fun.

LO-B

Each of you has your own introduction as well.

SB-M

The idea of each of us having introductions also came later. I wrote a new piece, “The ‘How’ of Knowledge,” explaining my interest in images, and the influence of John Berger.  I'd once worked with Berger. It was my first job after graduate school. It wasn’t for long, but we did collaborate. I thought Adam should write an introduction too, saying why he initiated our project, why he felt it was a good idea. And so he wrote one, and then Kevin’s is the third, which is mainly Kevin being Kevin and having all kinds of energy with graphics—it’s amazing to me how he does it. I remember at one point, one of the essays was only half-energized by Kevin, and the rest was kind of just the way I had written it, and I was disappointed. I missed that energy.

LO-B

Not only images but some text too, right? He picks up especially on Benjamin’s “innervation.”

SB-M

Yes. When Kevin took up this idea visually, I saw its meaning much more clearly. Benjamin wrote: “Images in the mind motivate the will.” He means there's a way of reading that is not passive. It's an active experience. It involves dialogue with your own understandings, your own visions. Kevin’s way of working conveys that.

LO-B

How important are images to your own writing?

SB-M

I use them all the time. I think better with images than I do with words. But Kevin can really energize a text with the way his mind collects images and puts them in certain relationships. Over the course of making this book, I think we both became better at this form of image-work. When we hit certain snags and got through them, we had greater appreciation of the way images make ideas comprehensible.

LO-B

How did the idea of having different “rooms” as chapters emerge?

SB-M

Kevin wanted twelve rooms because he envisioned the book’s chapters as tracks on a musical album. At first, I was frustrated by the idea of rooms—as an enclosed space -chambre (French) or Zimmer (German)—but in English “room” also has, dialectically, the opposite meaning—an open space, as in “making room”—but that doesn’t translate (cf. espace; Raum), so I was worried about it. Also, and this is a bit of an arcane point, Benjamin's colleague, Theodor W. Adorno, developed a critique of the bourgeois interior—roughly that if you are writing in your private room as a bourgeois philosopher (think Heidegger in his Black Forest cabin), you never get outside to the materialist realities that, for example, Marx made central to his critique of commodity fetishism. Benjamin elaborated this idea in The Arcades Project. He has a convolute called “The Interior.” In their domestic interiors, he writes, the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century sequestered pianos with ivory keys, tiger skins as rugs, ostrich feathers—these imperial commodities of capitalist exchange were privatized within that space, cut off from the process of their accumulation by dispossession. So, I had reasons to be critical. I first thought we had to include those reasons, but then the point became too historical, too elaborate, too intellectual maybe. So, we dropped it. I went with rooms. And I'm not sorry, the rooms idea is nice—each of the rooms is self-contained, like the picture of the row of rooms that’s on the inside of the back cover—an image that appears in another place in the book, it’s one of the early ones we were working with. The philosophical architecture of the book is not a closed system. The ideas are loosely framed, amenable to fragmentary appropriation. Of course, the fragment, and the way of working by constructing changeable constellations is a method to which I have long been sympathetic. If you can see these “rooms” as autonomous spaces that don't build on each other in a hierarchical way, then I'm in favor of rooms—seeing, making room for thought.

LO-B

Some of the image juxtapositions are really fascinating—can we talk about the Manet and Mapplethorpe on pages 388-389?

SB-M

I gave a lecture at the Tate Modern in London on Manet and Mapplethorpe years ago. But it has never been published because I couldn't get certain image releases. In both the Manet painting (Young Lady in 1866) and the Mapplethorpe photograph (Philippe and Parrot, 1979) there are parrots. And I use the analogies of form as a way of comparing Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS-related complications, with Manet, who died of syphilis. These creative workers were both scandalous. Manet, of course, is now sacrosanct but Mapplethorpe is not seen the same way.

There are some other wonderful juxtapositions in the book—some of my own, some inspired by my collaborators—that make the book so much more interesting than a simple anthology. As you know, a lot of scholars in my generation produce anthologies of their articles as a “reader.” This book is a substitute for that kind of anthology, even while it recirculates my work. It does so without reverence for the past rendition (still available on my website or in print), but, rather, as a kind of revitalization, animated by other minds in the present. That strikes me as worthwhile.

LO-B

I would love to hear more about the drawing by John Berger on the title page.

SB-M

I save things. I have a historian's mentality. I was telling Adam and Kevin that I worked with Berger, and as they too found Berger inspiring, they wanted me to find the drawing, so I searched through my files and there it was. When I met Berger, I had just finished my dissertation and was working for the Transnational Institute, which was the international branch of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C., a leftist think tank. The Institute was giving fellowships to people like Berger and other prominent intellectuals on the left, who were making a living just through their writing. And of course, the writers appreciated this help.

So, poor John was enlisted to the Institute’s impossible task of launching an “encyclopedia of knowledge,” that would be for the 20th century what Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s was for the 18th. I got off the train in Switzerland as a very young person supposedly heading this encyclopedia project. He was already established, of course, but he was very open, very collaborative from the beginning. Anyway, he drew that image and other notes on a paper placemat in a restaurant where we had lunch. It was in a small village close to where he lived. The drawing was a man obviously, and I complained that it was too much of a man, so he made adjustments.

That experience was of course wonderful for me, very exciting. Susan Sontag was also involved. She was extremely cordial when I met her in her New York apartment. I had just finished my dissertation on Adorno, and had published an article from that, which had been picked up by Edward Said and Sontag knew about it. So, I had some legitimacy in these kinds of circles, but I was just beginning my career. Ultimately the encyclopedia project didn’t get proper funding, and the whole endeavor was abandoned.

LO-B

Some of the images in the book are from your personal archive, but many are not. You mentioned not being able to get image permissions earlier, did that happen with this project?

SB-M

Of course, we were worried about that from the beginning. The halftones in the book, which make the images quite blurry, were a necessary protection. At first, the plan was to use color all the way through, but that became too expensive. And so, there needed to be alternatives, a lot of open discussions among us as to what those alternatives might be. Many technical issues had to be considered that only someone like Adam, who produces books, could figure out.

LO-B

Regarding your collector's mentality: how do you collect images? While you’re writing, before, or after?

SB-M

I often discover the images first. Sometimes I will collect a series of images without a written text. I now sometimes write my work completely as a PowerPoint: A slide with just a little bit of text, then an image, perhaps another, then text, then image. That feels like a comfortable way to work/think. It breaks out of the conventional academic mode.

The last book I wrote, which came out in the middle of COVID, is about the first century. It's written in classic scholarship style—there are 300 books in the bibliography, etc. And it took me nine years to write! YEAR 1: A Philosophical Recounting is about three first-century writers who considered themselves Jews, but people today don't read them in this way. If you will, it's a very contrary book, but I found the research extremely enlightening. The publisher MIT is a wonderful press, but very traditional. I should have intervened more strongly with the layout—the endnotes should have been footnotes, the images should have worked differently too. And there should have been less text on each page (but it’s already 400 pages long!) Marketing an author like me on a topic like the first century was not the easiest task. Now, however, with the human suffering in Gaza, the historical material in this book works strongly as an antidote against Zionist misconceptions of history. I dearly hope it can help.

LO-B

I was thinking about Arendt calling Benjamin a “pearl diver” in terms of his collecting and recombining of quotes—does that practice resonate with you at all?

SB-M

It does, but Arendt quite surely wouldn’t agree. Most Benjamin scholars approach him in a way quite different from my own method of work. The inspiration for me is simply the arresting power of a fragment, an image. I just see something and think, “There’s something here that's important to unpack.” I may not even be able to translate it into words yet. In my essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” for example, I have some images at the end that compare Hitler’s image to different things—one is a picture of a crying child. I thought these juxtapositions were brilliant, my best use of images in a text. But this end section isn’t in the new book. Kevin did something quite different. He inserted [p. 359] an image showing a bunch of different faces under the headline “How are you feeling?” It kind of mimics what I was getting at with identifying emotions in Hitler’s gestures—but in a much more hilarious way. My original essay ends with a theory of fascism not included here, and in a very serious tone. But the idea of putting this silly set of images next to the text, I just love. I don't know why I find it so rewarding, but I do. At first, I thought, "Okay, I'm supposed to take a serious philosophical point and make it funny? Oh no.” But something else goes on here. What we first think is funny maybe needs to be taken seriously. Good humor is often very serious. 

So, I think a dialectic, if you will, is working at various points in the book, in the way that the text and images are juxtaposed. And I don't know if you can do that alone, as one writer. Think of Deleuze and Guattari writing together. Deleuze was the more philosophical mind, let’s say, and then Guattari takes over without indication of an authorial switch, and the text goes someplace totally elsewhere. I think most fruitful collaborations work against hierarchies.

LO-B

I’m glad you brought up “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” as it’s such an important essay. While reading the new book, I wanted to find the original, published in October, and of course the differences between the design of the two is like night and day, while the text remains the same. The ideas about memory in that essay seem key to some in the new book. For example, you write about Benjamin’s understanding of modern experience as neurological, as centering on shock (with Freudian insight). You write, “Without the depth of memory, experience is impoverished. The problem is that under conditions of modern shock—the daily shocks of the modern world—response to stimuli without thinking has become necessary for survival.” This feels so true today. Perhaps even more so than when it was published in 1992?

SB-M

I'm going to surprise you and say, maybe that's not so. I taught a course last fall, which was very mindful of the sensory ways ideas are conveyed. Students read “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics” in October and also the shortened version in our new book so they could see what happens when the media presentation changes. When it comes to shock, you know it’s Hegel who says that the agent that causes the wound also brings a healing. It seems to me that one of the big differences between 1936, when Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay was written, and our own time, is that the reproduction of sensory experience is now extremely lifelike, almost real. It's not a diminished form.

In a way, there’s a healing that goes on because of the mediation. We're not facing it head-on, so there's some buffer. I'm thinking, for instance, of the horrible images from Gaza. People seeing those images respond with enormous empathy for Gazans, manifesting perhaps a new level of planetary solidarity. You can't look at those images without that kind of universalizing response. There’s a political power generated by the sharing—mass sharing—of sensory experience through hand-held media transmission—private cell phones, close to the body. Everything about the media today is so lifelike, so actual (in real time). There's a heightened sensory capacity that doesn’t so much buffer shock as expose us, despite distances, to the necessity for collaborative political action, a rejection of inhumane actions wherever they become visible.

I mean, if you look at the newsreels of World War II, they’re always presented as good guys versus bad guys, depending on who's making the news reel, and the presentations are very simplified. There’s much more intensity today within mediated experiences. They buffer the shock just enough to allow reflection, and it leads more directly to political critique. That reflection may be much more universal.

LO-B

More collective?

SB-M

Well, what I find so moving is that people who have no so-called common “identity” can feel a collective intensity of shared suffering.

LO-B

Sounds like there’s some hope, or optimism there. Maybe like Gramsci’s optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect?

SB-M

It’s a political impulse. I’m not at all a left-wing melancholic. I really do think that if we’re at the end of the era of Western dominance and White dominance, and American dominance, that's okay. So, I’m not lamenting the eclipse of a certain kind of Enlightenment. And I do think that we get much further if we try to think, “Okay, what now becomes possible?” Because that's precisely what Benjamin did, right? He wrote the Artwork essay in the same year that Leni Riefenstahl made Triumph of the Will, which was using the new media to mesmerize the crowd and aid Hitler. And Benjamin was saying that the potential of this new media is precisely something different.

But of course, as Martin Jay used to say, “Don't make Benjamin your hero, because that means that to be successful, you have to be rejected by the academy, become impoverished, and commit suicide at the age of 48.” So, he can't be our model here.

You mentioned this famous phrase of Gramsci, and, again, as I said, I'm not pessimistic. There is so much potential in our era—but we don't control the situation as individuals. For instance, we don't control how what we write is read. We don't control what people do with it. And that is a good thing. Of course, the Trump phenomenon is very unfortunate, but to blame Trump or to blame social media, is just too simple. So, I'm not very tempted by those discussions.

LO-B

I find your optimism refreshing because there's so much pessimism now.

SB-M

But isn't that also true for artists? I hear from young artists all the time that they are pessimistic.

LO-B

Well, the art world is a difficult place to be optimistic. I remember the great Howardena Pindell saying that the arts are often the last to change. I’m just thinking about another famous quote that I wanted to ask you about, one I know you’re very familiar with, which comes from Marx: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Do you think that’s happened yet?

SB-M

No. But if a philosopher works together with someone who makes T-shirts who works together with someone who makes books, and all of this gets elaborated on social media, then there are new ways of connecting our individual efforts. That was a lesson I learned from this project. If you really believe in democracy, then the point is to change the world. But that doesn't mean that philosophers will change it. And there are all kinds of new ways that ideas are disseminated. For every bad example we have, there are other, fascinatingly fruitful examples. It seems to me that we’re at an all-time high of possible activities. That's what is good about the new ways of working together. They make thought active.

LO-B

And manifest.

SB-M

Yes, and again, the word innervation is important—it manifests thought and makes it active, or, to put in another way: thinking itself is an activity that changes you. And then it's not a question of philosophers, or a party, but rather, just people, linking together in new ways.

LO-B

I agree with you about thinking—it makes thought active in a slow way. Because this book seems to ask for a slower read even while it is a very busy looking object.

SB-M

That's right. But that's what a book does. Adam is such a believer in the book as a medium, which can’t be replaced, and that's very important. I mean, if this project were done at the speed of Instagram there'd be nothing left to “motivate the will.” So, the book plays with information overload. But then, it also retains the capacity to be contemplative.

LO-B

Okay, one more question, which I tend to ask in long interviews. What can people depend on in this time of deluge? What kind of armor can they take up?

SB-M

I’m not even sure armor is necessary. We need better forms of mediation as I was saying before. I taught a class a few weeks ago and we were discussing how the technologies of sensory reproducibility can enhance our capacity to communicate. So, I would say that there's no deluge—or rather, what's suffering a deluge, a catastrophe, is the modern order of western supremacy, of white, male supremacy, of capitalistic “progress” in the domination of nature. And it's a painful moment because most of us have bought into that order at some point—not just white males. So, it's painful, but there is enormous creative potential beyond it. The horrible, global, capitalist system has integrated us. Let's keep that part, let's remain integrated, and then take on the system.