Extra paper

PAGES FROM THE SECRET MEMOIRS OF A TAPE-TRANSCRIBER: A NIETZSCHEAN NOTE ON KNOWLEDGE (My thanks go to Frédéric Gérard for his untiring and most gentle coercion, without which I would not have gotten myself together and brought the following out into open air. I also owe a great deal to the audience and the organisers of the conference 'Archaeology of the body' at Stanford University (15-17 February 2002), where I presented my reading of Nietzsche for the first time to an audience composed mostly of archaeologists. Without the cue that the organisers provided, the analogy implicit in 'the bodies of knowledge' wouldn't have occurred to me. And without my experience with that audience, I would not have had 'evidence' to believe that what Nietzsche taught me to be a predicament of freedom and joy, might very well be a displeasing (or banal, or dismissible) proposal of uncertainty for many intelligent people…)

Oğuz ERDUR
Uçaksavar sitesi, Füzeciler sok. No. 26/13 Etiler, Istanbul, TR.                       
oguzerdur@yahoo.com                                                                                   

'It is nonsense, said reason.
It is what it is, said love'.
Erich Fried

'True, we love life, not because we are used
to living but because we are used to loving.
There is always some madness in love.
But there is always some reason in madness'.
Friedric Nietzsche

A comment on this 'commentary'

This is not a 'commentary', as I have already said with the title above. I would hate to be a disappointment for anyone who hopes to find, in the following paragraphs, a 'sociological evaluation' of the CANeW meeting - which is what I was asked to write by the organisers. I would hate to be a disappointment for them as well. But this is just not that.

But let me explain. For this disavowal does not save me from the disgrace of not having done what I could have (and perhaps should have) done with this opportunity. After all, aside from attentively following the two days of the CANeW meeting with a notebook in hand, I have also transcribed the recordings of the panel debates for publication. Further, I have had a privileged access to all the possible 'data' around CANeW; debates, papers, correspondence, budgets, e-group discussions etc., which the organisers have kindly and eagerly provided me with - in the hope, I imagine, of getting an outsider's view included in CANeW, as impartially as possible.

Well, I am not impartial. Stating the obvious, of course. In the spirit, that is, of 'the great archaeological tradition of stating the obvious' - as I might quote a jubilantly cynical archaeologist I have met this past year. Alas! Cynicism, Nietzsche argues, is 'the highest thing that can be attained on earth' (Nietzsche 1979:73).

My engagement with CANeW has to do with the fact that I happen to be muddling through a project of my own which I refer to as 'an ethnography of archaeological knowledge production' - a cultural anthropology of archaeology, so to speak. But this rather broad and 'disciplined' designation should not be misleading, in terms of its would-be implication for what I set out to do with this 'commentary'. What I will do here follows not so much whence I come, that is, the land called 'cultural anthropology', but rather from what I am - that is, 'a stranger to archaeology'. A stranger, I would like to think, in the sense in which Georg Simmel talks about 'the stranger':

'The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relationship is organised, in the phenomenon of the stranger, in a way which may be most briefly formulated by saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near. For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction' (Simmel 1950:402).

'If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how' says Nietzsche (1954c:468). That, in a nutshell, is what gives me the unease with which I have so far operated in my own quest for knowledge. Figuring out a 'why' of knowledge under which I can subjugate my efforts with due belief. And that, in another nutshell, is the problem with which I come here as a stranger - the problem through which I will speak.

What an 'ethnographic' study on a discipline (or an essay on a disciplinary event) would have to produce, similar to what a study on a village by an ethnographer produces, is primarily a descriptive account. That is, a how, the why of which is no longer immediately available and/or easily believable for us living in the post-metaphysical world - the why here being the disciplinary meta-narratives of self-legitimisation that determine the descriptive narratives of how that are produced within that discipline.

What I am referring to is the condition, the emergence of which Nietzsche warned us about, as early as the end of the 19th century: '[T]he highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer' (1968:9). More recently, this 'postmodern condition' of knowledge was baptised with the infamous phrase 'incredulity toward meta-narratives' (Lyotard 1984). We happen to be at a historical juncture where it is no longer possible to believe, without substantial discomfort and conflict, in the grand narratives of modernity. The fable that a good-hearted belief in the merits of knowledge is sufficient, in itself, to guide us towards a betterment of human life, has lost its epistemological potency. Nor can we find comfort, therefore, in the disciplinary meta-narratives that give direction and legitimisation to our efforts.

The implication here for me, which is also congruent with the most essential teaching of Nietzsche's philosophy, is that an ethno-graphy without an anthropology is as meaningless as an anthropology without a real-life purpose. But just what is that real-life purpose?

True enough, socio-cultural anthropology is a 'cultural critique' for ourselves through the study of others (Marcus and Fischer 1986). But, in much broader terms than is implied in my own little 'ethnographic' enterprise, who that 'ourselves' is and who that 'others' are have gotten ever harder to identify. And more importantly, again, and again, and again, anthropology is a cultural critique, surely - but towards what?

My engagement with archaeology here, therefore, is not from the 'culturally relativist' point of view of an anthropologist. An anthropologist, theoretically speaking, is to consider systems of ideas and ways of life with due respect, in their own terms. But this idea is indeed a tricky one, not only because it presumes that criticism belongs only with belonging, whereas 'belonging' itself is a very problematic idea within our globalising post/modernity. Moreover, within that same context, the idea becomes the expression of what actually is the problem - that, with the secularisation of knowledge, knowledge becomes emptied of its value contents. The questions of value are kicked out of inquiry in favour of questions of meaning - as though meaning and value could (or should!) ever be separated.

It is this problem of the 'value of truth', that I deflect to archaeology, through CANeW, though the issue is by no means specific to archaeology. Nor, of course, to anthropology. It is all of us who are implicated in this question. And in dealing with this dreadful trouble - what Nietzsche calls the need for a 'revaluation of all values' (Nietzsche 1979:126) - '[w]e can't rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us' (Bataille 1992:3).

This, however - this 'ludicrous' and 'overwhelming' responsibility - is not the end of the story - as in the story of the end of stories. It is rather the beginning for us, I believe. Precisely whence we have to start telling our stories.

Originally intended as merely an internal dialogue, the following are the written bits of what my engagement with CANeW made me think.

I do realise the potential consequences of this act of revealing what, to some, will perhaps be disturbing remarks. And I indeed hope to create that effect, for otherwise, my efforts are either trite or incomprehensible or irrelevant or redundant, all of which would be infinitely worse than 'disturbing'. But I also do hope that, in the case that I do manage to disturb, the gesture of engagement from a stranger will also be taken as an attempt at 'positive' interaction. Wouldn't you agree, after all: 'The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends' (Nietzsche 1954b:190).

Lastly, I reworked the pages of my 'secret memoir', need I say, once I decided to publish them.

The pages from 'the secret memoirs'

'What is most needful is by no means
certainty but rather, to quote Nietzsche's
happy phrase, "the courage for an attack on
one's convictions".'
Walter Kaufmann (1980:9)

Daring to speak? Caring to speak?

How does one speak? Nietzsche: 'Oh how fortunate we are, we men of knowledge, provided only that we know how to keep silent long enough!' (1967:17).

How to speak? Wait and see and figure out the truth for yourself, experience it in your body - that there are no grounds for truth? And see that this is the 'public secret' (Taussig 1999) behind speaking? - and start speaking, at which moment, you become deeply implicated in that 'public secret' so that you can hardly keep pointing at that groundlessness, for you too are now speaking on the basis of that same groundlessness?

(But what to do with this revelation right here then, this revelation behind question marks?! - the last moment of nostalgia perhaps, a last instance of memory before willful forgetfulness…)

How is it, I wholeheartedly wonder, that people compose themselves (or chance does that for them?) as bodies that are able to go ahead and speak - about the so-called 'processes' that run across huge territories and across millennia?

Very well. A Nietzschean remedy. Here is a 'process' that runs across a 'minute':

Speaking on speaking

'Speaking is a beautiful folly', says Nietzsche.

One always says more and at the same time less than what is implicit in the claim of speaking.

One says less, for speaking is always a pretension. It is a pretension to communication. Words are loaded with empty metaphysical claims. They are 'a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms' (Nietzsche 1954a:46).

One always says less in speaking, because speaking is always a claim to truth or to communication, whereas thinking itself is necessarily analogical rather than causal. And there is no communication or truth without causality. Without the guarantee that words and things causally touch one and other. And there never is such a guarantee. (That 'touching' is more casual than causal, perhaps?) Hence 'illusive bridges'. Hence 'the beautiful folly'.

Speaking is a leap of faith. From the only mind that we have access to, towards other minds that we presume to work on the same model. On the model that we have access to, that is, our own mind.

One says less in speaking than speaking implicitly presumes since the urge to speak comes before what is being spoken. 'Once Early Humans started talking, they just couldn't stop', says Steven Mithen (1996:211). That is how what perhaps was initially a rather more instrumental faculty became generalised into what he calls 'cognitive fluidity'. How our minds acquired the capability of 'meta-representation'. How the mind got to the point of representing itself to itself.

Once Early Humans started talking, they just couldn't stop. That is to say, what is being spoken has always been subservient to the act of speaking itself! The act of speaking is not extended to fulfill a functional need for the contents of speech. Just the contrary. The spoken is merely a means to expand the faculty of speaking. 'Meaning', therefore, the self-proclaimed contents of the spoken, is something infinitely more effete than the thing it claims itself to be.

Quoting Nietzsche: 'It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a mere means' (Nietzsche 1974:180). We could make this observation even more radical by replacing 'knowledge' with 'speech'. It is something new in evolutionary history that 'speech'…, well actually, no…, it is something new in evolutionary history that 'sounds' want to be more than a mere means! A means, that is, to justify the use of an accidental faculty, an evolutionary gimmick, and its abuse ad infinitum.

But reverse the coin and in speaking one actually says more than what s/he presumes to say. One always speaks about who s/he claims to be, who s/he doesn't even realise to be, what kind of a relation s/he presumes to have with those s/he speaks, what kind of fears s/he reveals to be hiding, what kind of threats s/he holds back, what kind of obliviousnesses s/he operates with, what kind of desires s/he strives to match with their objects, and so on. Speaking is also a subliminal self-advertisement and a giving away of what the self would perhaps rather hide. Speaking is a crack in the nut. Speaking is a transgression that the speaker allows on the speaking self. Transgression in the way Foucault means it (1977:29-52). Crossing the line, turning back and erasing the line.

Speaking therefore is a sort of madness (for the lack of a better word!). But it is a madness to be loved, for the only other alternative is ressentiment and silence. And 'there is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness' (Nietzsche 1954b:153).

It is in this sense that focusing on the act of speaking, rather than the spoken, is justified. In order to find the reason in madness (which is harder than to find the madness in reason!) - to take a peek into the cracks that transgress the speaking self, that advertise it, that give it away, that reveal, that hide, that put the cart of the spoken in front of the horse of speaking. In order to take a peek, in short, into the ways in which that eternal paradox that Heraclitus discovered - the 'play in necessity' (Nietzsche 1962:68) - playfully justifies itself ad infinitum:

For true enough, (I suppose), to quote this time in full:

And true enough. How else, if not as a striving after a 'comic solution' - of the 'play in necessity' - could our efforts to go on in this pointless knowledge game be possibly justified?

The 'comic solution' - Nietzsche:

Bodies of knowledge

'The body is a great reason…' says Nietzsche,

The analogy is too clear to miss: We speak 'I', whereas it is our bodies that do the-I-that-speaks. This holds for the 'bodies of knowledge' we call disciplines as much as it holds for our individual bodies. That is to say the following perhaps:

The bodies of knowledge we call 'disciplines', discipline the bodies of the practitioners of knowledge we call 'scholars', according to their specific needs for self-perpetuation and self-transformation. (Very similar to the idea in evolutionary biology set forth by Richard Dawkins (1989) that we are 'the gene machines' - the instruments that our genes devise in order to perpetuate themselves.)

This shall have risen to the level of scholarly consciousness since at least Michel Foucault's work on the mutually constitutive relation of power and knowledge (e.g. Foucault 1980). There is an inescapably circular relationship between the ways in which power creates and recreates knowledge and the ways in which knowledge creates and recreates power. This is what is implied by Foucault's idea that power is creative, rather than destructive. Power creates, through discourse and practice, the deeds and words of the people entangled in the matrices of power. Disciplines discipline scholars, scholars sustain disciplines with scholarship. 'A scholar is a library's way of making another library', as someone truthfully mocked.

So just as the specifics of the human body - that is, 'the war and the peace, the shepherd and the herd' of that body - create the voice that speaks 'I' on behalf of that body, the bodies of knowledge called 'disciplines' too create the voices that speak on their behalf. The internal operations of the body of knowledge are what make the specifics of the production of knowledge possible. And in the case of these bodies of knowledge too, the part of the body that speaks 'I', on behalf of that body, is necessarily only a part of the story. The voice that justifies the body of knowledge is justified by that body, which is linked to its outer contexts of reality in infinitely more complex ways than a naked functional relationship claimed by the voice-that-speaks-'I' would imply.

That is to say, the arguments of self-legitimisation, such as 'People need pasts and archaeology provides them that', fail to link the internal operations of the body of knowledge to the voice that speaks 'I', as much as they fail to link the body of knowledge to its outer contexts with due precision. The body just puts the voice to task, in order to justify itself, rather than speaking 'truthfully' about itself and its relation to what is outside of it. Reflexivity in this sense is more about functionality and instrumentality (or actually idleness!) than about truthfulness.

If one must, the extent of explanation of functionality is this extent, perhaps: There is archaeology because there has been archaeology.

And if one must: The reason we want to know is because we do. And we keep wanting to know because we have been. And we know because we can.

And if one must (though I have already said this): The reason we speak is because we can. And we do speak because we have been.

And as for these 'explanations' I offer here:

How could my explanations be at all different, when I first turn everything into an image - my image!

The family picture

A conference is a specific instance of a body of knowledge saying 'I' - a battle and a truce…

Of course, as any other body saying I, to whom the body says 'I' matters a great deal. This crudely is implicit in the post-structrualist idea of a 'de-centered self' (Cf. Schrag 1997). The audience and the context greatly determine the voice that speaks on behalf of the self that becomes centered for the occasion.

CANeW, however, is an interesting sort of a conference. Unlike the annual symposium in Ankara for instance, where the body of knowledge gets its passport picture taken, so to speak, in order to be presented to the bureaucracy along with its official I.D. card, CANeW is more like a family picture. Yet, not a snapshot. It is a formal family dinner let's say, where the young and the old, uncles and aunts and cousins meet, speaking within the family, yet not necessarily all too sincerely. The gathering is among people that are closely related, but it is not necessarily a cozy one. The less so, perhaps, for this dinner party is a first of its kind - gathering around the same table, the young and the old, the youthful and the wise, the closer and the more distant, the joyful and the resentful, and so on.

The 'I' of the body of knowledge, that is to say, speaks to itself. Yet formally. It is confrontational here and there, it contains implicit hazards and power games throughout, but is polite and formalistic in general. And it is self-congratulatory at the end of the day. The cousins gossip with and about one another, during and after the party. I'm pretty sure the uncles and aunts do too. The younger ones are resentful about the scolds they have gotten from the older ones here and there. Or they feel victorious about how they gave some to this aunt or to that uncle, on this or that score. 'Why do you reckon uncle somebody didn't bother to come?' one asks. 'Ah. He must be busy raising funds!' the other replies. 'And what do you think is the great aunt's story?'

The politics of siding with one another

Power is hardly timid in self-revelation. Who agrees with whom serves as a replacement for theory. The issues, rather than being handled by theoretical discussions (for theory actually implies a relative egalitarianism, though one could hardly overemphasise 'relative' here - concerning the act of defining, naming, delimiting, fitting data into schemes, which schemes?, by what justifications?, where do those schemes come from?, what about the data?, what kind of assumptions, observations, metaphysics go into these processes?, so on and so forth) are tackled all too often by statements of personality, postures of authority, and claims to experience - of having been there and having done that.

But surely, how could one expect a reverence to theorising when the enterprise is openly antagonistic to theory? When will to knowledge is proud to have forgotten that 'realism' too rests on a priori philosophical assumptions, that it too is just one assumption of reality. - 'A bad one at that!' a surrealist would have militantly declared. 'Only the Apollinian surface of the Dionysian!' Nietzsche would say. 'And only someone who doesn't read philosophy can take his realism to stand for reality itself!' a philosophy teacher would have didactically added. -

The result: A tenuous theoretical argument that could otherwise be easily expelled by a theoretical debate, is dismissed - can merely be dismissed - by the accusation that it 'starts building the house from the roof…' (But no house is built 'empirically' - without 'theory!' Even those that do not follow an explicit plan, do follow at least the idea that there will be a house there once they finish what they do!)

Refusal of theory as territorialism

'Theory' is more about a conceptual universe than anything else. 'To philosophise is to create concepts', as Deleuze says. And 'you will know nothing by concepts if you have not first created them' as he paraphrases Nietzsche (Deleuze 1996:407). Theory is thus a field within which the terms of a debate are defined - a field of thought that defines the parameters of thought, which in return, is perpetually redefined by the thinking process, the parameters of which it defines. A perpetually circular move, the inclusion into which nevertheless, saves one from the illusion that s/he is discovering something new, making an 'original' argument. It saves one from false excitements and, to the extent possible, false pretensions.

Furthermore, and what perhaps is more important, in quite a sharp contrast to what the empiricism of the sort that is exemplified here would have us believe, one is always-already within that field, always-already floating in that conceptual universe. 'Semeiosis' never stops, as Peirce argues. All the beginnings and ends are arbitrary. And we are always-already involved in the Semeiotic process. 'Man and words reciprocally educate each other' (Peirce 1991:84). And theory comes to us, implicitly, in that perpetually circular education. How else would it be possible for an outsider to immediately recuperate the terms of the debate within a discipline?

And once this is realised, the question becomes whether we are to remain subservient to a 'theory' that we do not even recognise to be operating through us, or whether we want to take the matters in our hands - to the extent that that is possible, that is. And that extent is surely a limited extent: 'Just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us' says Peirce (1991:71).

In this vein, the 'post-processual' debate in Archaeology, though not explicitly addressed in CANeW, is 'the-post-debate-as-usual' for someone looking from outside. Which affirms the point about the 'always-already'ness of theory. The fact is that the see-saw we call 'post/modernity', swinging back and forth between post- and modernity, is necessarily relevant for everybody working in any area of the human sciences. For the terms 'modernity' and 'post-modernity' refer to the conceptual universes within which our thoughts on this or that issue or problem, regardless of their disciplinary contexts, are always-already embedded.

Once this is realised, the illusion of realism or empiricism implied by the refusal of and/or antagonism towards philosophy and/or theory is explainable only in terms of power, in terms of a negativity, an exclusionary will, a territorialism. In terms of the specific disciplinary mechanisms behind the authority claims. Mechanisms that are perpetuated by those whose embeddedness in the specific modes of exclusion speak, through them, in the form of territorialism that seeks to drive theory out. For the opposite would deflate the air of importance that seeps into the generalised economy of non-excitement that perpetually expresses itself in speech.

(Let's face it!, said a young archaeologist, shooting herself courageously in the foot, 'Archaeology is boring!' (Boivin 1997:105). I personally wonder how her career is coming along.)

Stories and 'origins'

This, to me, is a brilliant moment of naiveté. It is a well-intentioned honest self-defence, perhaps, as far as the-human-body-that-speaks-'I' is concerned. As far as the-body-of-knowledge is concerned, on the other hand, it is a 'Freudian slip', so to speak, of the-voice-that-speaks-I, revealing something about the-body-that-does-the-I-that-speaks-'I'. And the momentary revelation is this:

Convergence to a story is in the habit of posing itself as convergence to 'reality'. This comes out only when the truthfulness of the story that plays that game of convergence is questioned rather too viciously.

'Fact' is a poor analogy of 'reality' (not even to open the Pandora's Box called 'truth'). But even when brief lip-service is given to this realisation, it is let go all too easily. The drastic implications of what this means are simply not attended.

And arguments keep converging to logic, as they pretend to be converging to 'truth'. But truth in this sense, is the weakest form of knowledge, as Nietzsche teaches. For logic gives you nothing other than what you yourself put in! But 'coherence' goes wild, goes out of hand, forgets itself, and fancies itself as some form of 'completeness'. To paraphrase Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness theorem: A complex system can't be coherent and complete at the same time (Hofstadter 1980). Coherent is the antithesis of complete! Argument is the antithesis of reality. 'Life is no argument' as Nietzsche argues! (1974:177).

And how else, if not with this kind of a willful forgetfulness, could one dare to talk about the 'origins' of anything whatsoever within the 'untextability' (Dening 1991) of reality? Even if one were to assume just for a second that that could possibly be done, that origins of anything could possibly be detected, what would the origins of an accident tell us about the so-called 'processes' before and after and around that accident? What does a thread tell us about the 'it-is-what-it-is' of reality?

So the question becomes, wherein comes this urge to converge? What purpose does this desire-out-of-existential-anxiety serve - the inquiring mind redirected away from the truth of tragic wisdom, as Nietzsche sees in the Socratic dictum of 'know thyself!' (Nietzsche 1967a). This false pretense to 'ontological security'?

Well, the question here is already the answer!

And the question to follow: Can we allow that self-deluding concealment of a pathological will to knowledge to take its course once we realise its 'origins'? (This, of course, is what Nietzsche did - traced the genealogy of that will to knowledge - which is pathological because it is life-negating, rather than life-affirming - reveal it so that… but 'so that', what?)

And if not, that is, if we see that we shall not allow this life-negating ressentiment of representational thinking, this will to 'Egypticism', this will to mummification (Nietzsche 1954c:479), to take its course, once we realise it to be operating behind this will to knowledge, this '… principle that is hostile to life and destructive…' - what, then, is our way out? Where do we go from this '"[w]ill to truth" - that might be a concealed will to death' (Nietzsche 1974:282)? From this concealment, once our revelation starts marching towards becoming yet other concealments, regardless of the intentions we think to be transparent to ourselves?

And bang! I hit my head up against the same wall again. What can I possibly say? By what rights do I assume the 'duty' to 'wake up' anybody? Revelation of the face behind the mask - of the face that does not exist… And by what power am I to assume that I possibly can? (And, surely, who is to wake me up?) - 'Anyone in the audience want to respond to that?'

And the big pause…

Well, alright. Representational thinking is tied to ressentiment as Heidegger deflected from Nietzsche's genealogy of the pathological will to knowledge:

Why? What does it mean that representational thinking is determined by the spirit of revenge? It means this:

Hidden in the desire to take account of reality, Nietzsche demonstrates, is a genealogy of hatred of life. The otherworldly dismissal of this-worldly life by the priest and the desire to truthfully represent the deceptive appearance of reality by the scientist, the desire to find the stable truths behind the elusive, to 'mummify' life (Nietzsche's phrase), are intricately intertwined. They both stem from the same metaphysical mistrust of life. They both rest on the two-world system (of truth vs. appearance) which has sustained itself from Plato to Descartes to Kant. That is, till Kant separated the noumenal realm from the phenomenal, the things-in-themselves from the things-as-they-appear-to-us, hoping to have his cake and eating it, having both an Almighty God and a realm for human freedom and knowledge.

But it was all too pleasing for Nietzsche's appetite to devour on this cake, this badly concealed secret: all this knowledge on the noumenal realm that Kant was speaking about - he was speaking about it from within his own phenomenal realm which he set out to separate from the noumenal! Where was the supposed inaccessibility of the noumenal for us, then?

So Nietzsche abolished the noumenal. 'The 'apparent world' is the only one: the 'true' world is merely added by a lie' (Nietzsche 1954c:481).

But woe onto those who are ready to find comfort in thinking that the abolition of the depth gives way to a straightforward realism of the surface! One needs to turn only a few pages to see how Nietzsche affirms the Pandora's Box he has just opened:

Appearances without truths. Masks without faces behind… Non-representational thinking. Amor Fati. Love and affirmation of life without a ground. Living dangerously. Zarathustra is the advocate of 'life', 'suffering' and 'the circle' (Nietzsche 1954b:328). Marriage of tautology and paradox. Why? Because love is a tautology because it does not argue why, nor does it believe in argument and explanation. Why? Because love is a paradox because it has to affirm its archenemy as well, for 'ressentiment' too is within the life that love sets itself out to affirm. Alas, this paradox too must be affirmed, one has to realise, if one is to side with love. But let us not let things get so out of hand - at least not here and now.

Back to representational thinking. 'Representation has so far been determined by the spirit of revenge'. And archaeology represents the past? What to do with that?

The archaeologists - they are trying to understand the life as it was lived then and there. (Is this a problematic generalisation? The Nietzschean can only hope so!) That is, of course, they are converging to evidence and that is an entirely different matter than converging to life as it 'really' was in the past. But that is another story. (And I've already mentioned it.) Say, there is some meaningful 'correlation' between the evidence that they seek to converge and the 'life' that was lived in the past. Say, we have made that huge leap of faith. And based on that, say, we understood how they, the folks of the past, lived. Where they cultivated their food. Why they didn't go elsewhere. How the community was structured. The gender relations. The power relations. Even the symbolic universes in which they have dwelt… And? And there is a big pause… Say, we perfected, whatever that means, our knowledge on Çatalhöyük. Or on the Central Anatolian Neolithic. Or the entire neolithisation process in the Near East, Anatolia, Balkans, Europe… And? The big pause…

(And if one is to respond saying, 'No. Perfecting our knowledge, whatever that means, converging to the life in the past in that general stroke is not what we are after. We do know that that can't be done!' - then the question becomes: 'Why, then, do you want to converge to the truthful representation of a wall?')

The only conclusion one can draw, then (the only one I can draw, anyway), is that knowledge is a practice in the real world. It has many structural, institutional, habitual, accidental, metaphysical determinants, which we can never exhaust. It is through these determinants that it is linked to the real world, situated and embodied in the practices of real life practitioners. And it is meaningful only in this sense, as 'it is what it is', something that tautologically belongs to real life. It is paradoxically just there as a practice, as a being of becoming (cf. Deleuze 1962). And it is also meaningful only as an absurd pastime activity, as in 'absurd pastime activity called life', for the practitioners of knowledge who find meaning in the quest for 'finding meaning in the past' (cf. Hodder et al. 1995). Practitioners who are (willingly or unwillingly) engaged in the Socratic irony?

- And now that you fix this as a piece of truth, hiding behind question marks, Herr Erdur, it gets caught up in the paradox of a truthful 'so what?' It too shoots itself in the foot. 'What is your point? Go pick apples then!'

Then again, now that that 'all science' Nietzsche talks about above is already here - whence-ever it came! - my way out is perhaps in pointing at that other question: 'for what?' - by asking, that is, the broadest moral questions on knowledge. The question of value. Inquiry, alright - but on whose expense? With what kind of opportunity costs, both internal and external? What kind of other knowledge enterprises could there have been in stead? (Nietzsche's 'gay science!') Or what kind of other enterprises, in general? Other possibilities of relating knowledge to life?

Questions for another millennium perhaps… Alas! Nietzsche: 'The value of truth must be called into question experimentally, after the demise of the God of ascetic ideal' (1967b).

'I', the disciple of Dionysos

'I' must keep this in mind, however: It is hardly fair to expect everybody to take their lives so seriously lightly, to take life itself so seriously lightly, as 'I', the disciple of Nietzsche, do. Not everybody's will to power is a seeking of power in order to denounce power. 'I' am what 'I' am because 'I' simply cannot carry, to 'me', the unnecessary and perhaps unbearable burdens of memory and belonging. 'I', following Nietzsche, am after the smallest possible jewels with the highest worth. Which are always useless. But people do have use-value calculations in their lives with what they do - for good reasons too, of course. The need to feel significant. The need to identify oneself. The need for a job. And people pay opportunity costs for not doing other things. And they of course care about those costs that they pay. Not everybody is so alienated from the game called the 'real life'. Not everybody is (and is willing to be, and is even fond of being) a stranger no matter where s/he is. People have husbands, wives, kids, families. For this or that reason, they start playing the game. Pyscho-pathologies of all sorts. (No offense to anyone, of course. Not that 'mine' too could possibly escape being included in that definition. Pascal: 'Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness' (cited in Becker 1972:27).) And that pretty much covers everything behind the quest for knowledge. Always a personal pyscho-pathology (which itself is, of course, always embedded in various contexts of reality). But that later on turns into a need to go on playing the game. For what else really? Can everyone possibly be ready to take the risk of flushing their accumulations down the toilet on an impulsive decision? [Like publishing their private thoughts!?]

But precisely that is what Nietzsche asks 'us' to do: To dare! 'To live dangerously' (Nietzsche 1974:228). (And even Kant (1995:1) had defined enlightenment with the dictum: 'Dare to know!')

But am 'I', 'myself', actually - daring? All this posing vis-à-vis 'myself'. All this babbling. Even 'I' who is situated at the margins of institutionalised power (just yet!?), even 'I' - am 'I' actually ready to flush it all down?

Anti-reflexivity: But this all is a secret personal memoir anyway. Plus, of course… your body doing I, my dear self vis-à-vis myself…

Meaninglessness on par with Meaning

My paradox, my grand contradiction, the trauma that I myself repeat (Freud 1989), my own path to nowhere: I don't trust words. I see the void behind them. I see the nothing they refer to. I see the pretense of being that they are in the eternal flood of becoming. But I confine my life to them. I limit my quest for meaning to their realm. I surrender my life, my health, my body to their mercy. For 'I' am a 'man of letters'!

Then, I go around and say, 'See, this is all meaningless'. Just as it is us who make meaning out of nothing, I too make something out of nothing - Only, 'I' call it 'meaninglessness!' This is what Blanchot means when he says 'Nihilism is tied to being' and not to 'nothingness' (1977:126).

And of course Nietzsche: 'The basic fact of the human will [is that] it needs a goal - and it will rather will nothingness than not will' (Nietzsche 1967b:97).

Plus, a more physiological reminder too of course - 'Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier, and simpler' (Nietzsche 1974:203). And a feeling is something of the body. A function. A reaction. A chemical process. A neuro-electrical discharge. Force. Whatever. One must not neglect the organism behind it. The organism behind the feeling, which is behind what ends up passing as a thought.

But why is it that we are in the habit of focusing on the product - no! not even the product! just the plastic packaging! - and missing the factory entirely?

Yes-saying

Alas! There has to be an empathetic, affirmative 'yes-saying' to my criticism. I must not act only on the demands of my demon. And it is this:

There is no point, ultimately, in asking the meaning question with a shrill. Meaning is made the moment somebody finds a game meaningful. The rest is will to power in real world. Structures sustain themselves. People are willfully recruited into different games. They have their own agendas of seeking-after which do not necessarily correspond to the proclaimed seeking-after of the discipline. In fact, they hardly ever do. And this actually might be a thread to follow: The lip-service with which a discipline justifies itself to the outside world, thereby making the personal seeking-afters of the people that it uses as a mouthpiece also legitimate. This might be worthy of revelation.

Then again, I already see that theoretically. Nothing to be discovered. Well, Nietzsche to the rescue again:

And elsewhere: 'Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows' (Nietzsche 1979:70). A hint for archaeologists, perhaps? Or a blasphemy for the believers of knowledge? (Hint: The hint is in 'ultimately'.)

Alas! Zarathustra narrates his riddles only to those who 'hate to calculate' whenever they can 'guess' (Nietzsche 1979:74).

Anyway. The affirmative is that this is a game à la Heraclitus: 'Lifetime is a child playing'. And perhaps my personal seeking-after can be the propagation of the 'comic solution'? That might be the towards-what of my efforts, my descriptions of the 'how of why'. (True, to repeat: 'If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how'. But we simply don't have that why. We, who are living within the epidemic of globalised and ever-globalising nihilism. We who have to live with the fact '[t]hat the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why?' finds no answer' (Nietzsche 1968:9).)

So I was saying, the propagation of the 'comic solution' shall be the towards-what of my efforts, my description of the 'how of (the lack of) why'. Rather than a destructive effort, an attempt at a 'tragic solution'. For the latter is actually self-defeating. By all means. Both as an argument. And as a position in real life. 'If you don't find this meaningful why the hell do you bother! Leave us alone. Go find yourself another sandbox to play in!'

True enough, no matter how I or anybody else feels about it: It all is what it is. The tragedy of having to affirm the comical? Or, the comedy of having to affirm the tragic? Zarathustra's 'most abysmal thought' - 'the eternal recurrence'. And the stranger has to remain 'near' too. Only distance will not do.

So here, then, am I, with a good old Nietzschean heart - 'true, we love life…' - repeating Nietzsche's heed to us, the lovers of knowledge:

And his call to us all:

Finally... the question mark.

To summarise towards 'the question mark': Nietzsche considers the philosopher as a physician. Which is a direct outcome of the cultural 'sickness' he diagnosed and prophetised the emerging spread of; namely, 'nihilism'. The entire Nietzschean endeavour can indeed be read as a struggle to restore to life that which the enlightenment enterprise of secular knowledge 'demystified' and did away with: namely, its meaning.

Nietzsche's struggle is directly related to the morality underlying his philosophy, which is - The only legitimate purpose knowledge can serve is life itself. For Nietzsche, untruth is as necessary a condition of life as truth is. Indeed, one can hardly tell which is really which. The justification, therefore, of the quest for knowledge can no longer be a self-legitimising idea of 'truth' - life has to take its place. Hence the early Nietzsche's scold of the scholars as 'spoiled idlers in the garden of knowledge' (1980:7).

According to Nietzsche's alternative view that restores 'philosophy' to its original meaning as 'love of wisdom', the experiments in knowledge elevate the human body, that is to say, life itself. And his call for us the lovers of knowledge is to 'lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do - back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning' (1954b:188).

So here perhaps is the Nietzschean question on knowledge in general, the question that is also my most sincere question, the question that is dearest to my heart, the question that is 'so black, so tremendous that it casts shadows upon the man who puts it down' (Nietzsche 1954c:465). Here is the question on knowledge, deflected to archaeology:

After more than a century later of Nietzsche's scold to scholars as 'spoiled idler in the garden of knowledge', to what extent is the enterprise of archaeological knowledge production capable of becoming an experiment with knowledge - for 'cleansing the body', towards 'giving the earth a meaning, a human meaning?'

In short - can we escape 'the garden?'

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