Lars Iyer - Dogma

It’s the opposite of everything W.’s hoped for. He dreamed we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all, with all our friends; and that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamed we’d mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs …

We speak of thinker-collectives over our pints in The Turf . Of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling dancing round their freedom tree. Of Novalis and the Schlegels, practicing their symphilosophical collaboration on the streets of Jena. We speak of Marx, Engels and other revolutionary émigrés, on the run from the police of continental Europe, holed up in London after the failed revolutions of 1848.

And we speak, coming to the twentieth century, of artistic avant-gardes, of Surrealism and the Situationists, with their manifestos and expulsions. Who was more fierce than André Breton? Who, more demanding than Guy Debord? Antonin Artaud ate too loudly — expel him from the group! Asger Jörn kept picking his nose — excommunicate him at once!

Rules: that’s what we need, W. says. We need to be constrained. We need a prime mover . We need a mastermind to crack the whip. — ‘Lapdogs’, he’ll shout. ‘Lackeys!’

And if we can find no leader to impose discipline on us, we must impose it on ourselves, W. says. We must become each other’s intellectual conscience. We must become each other’s leader, and each other’s follower.

W. speaks of the liberating constraint sought by the members of OULIPO — Perec, Roubaud and the rest — with their famous rules, which they use to compose literary works. Palindromes, lipograms, acrostics and all that … OULIPO’s work is collaborative , that’s the point, W. says. Its products are attributed to the group.

Didn’t Queneau call Oulipians ‘ rats who will build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape? ’, W. says. We are those rats, we agree. We need liberation. But first, we need to build a labyrinth.

We speak of the so-called ‘vow of chastity’ of Dogme95—of Lars Von Trier and his friends — who banned all artifice in the making of their films. No stage sets, no blue screen, no CGI dinosaurs or period pieces of any kind. No score; no weeping violins.

Films have to descend to the everyday, and tell stories about the everyday, that’s what Dogme95 demanded, W. says. Films have to concern themselves with reality. With love. With death. — ‘Pathos!’, W. says. ‘It’s all about pathos!’

Dogma: that’s what we should call our intellectual movement, we agree. We should make our own ‘vow of chastity’, our own manifesto. On Magdalen Bridge, leaning over the Cherwell, we cry out our rules over the water.

First rule: Dogma is spartan . Speak as clearly as you can. As simply as you can. Do not rely on proper names when presenting your thought. Do not quote. Address others. Really speak to them, using ordinary language. Ordinary words!

Second rule: Dogma is full of pathos . Rely on emotion as much as on argument. Tear your shirt and pull out your hair! And weep — weep without end!

Third rule: Dogma is sincere . Speak with the greatest of seriousness, and only on topics that demand the greatest of seriousness. Aim at maximum sincerity. Burning sincerity. Rending sincerity. Be prepared to set yourself on fire before your audience, like those monks in Vietnam.

And the fourth rule? Dogma is collaborative . Write with your friends. Your very friendship should depend on what you write. It should mean nothing more than what you write!

W. reminds me of the collection, Radical Thought in Italy . Paolo Virno! Mario Tronti! They’ve always been a touchstone for him. It’s pure Dogma, he says. They’re all friends. Their essays have no quotations, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as though they were world-historical . That’s another rule, W. says: always write as though your ideas were world-historical. And always steal from your friends. Steal from everyone! In fact, that should be compulsory: Dogma plagiarises . Always steal other people’s ideas and claim them as your own.

A free man should walk slowly, that’s what the Greeks thought, says W. The slave hurries, but the free man can take all day. — ‘Slow down!’, he tells me, as we wander out through the meadows to The Trout . I know nothing of the art of the stroll , W. has always said. I know nothing of the pleasures of the flâneur.

W.’s always had a messianic faith in the walker. No one is more annoyed than he by the channelling that forces the pedestrian through a predetermined route. For this reason, W. has always hated airports. There’s only ever one direction in an airport, he says. And if you’re allowed to wander away, it is only to tempt you to buy things from the innumerable shops.

Doesn’t Newcastle airport channel every traveller through a shop floor? It scandalises him, W. says. He wants to knock every bottle of perfume from the rack. He wants to smash every overpriced bottle of wine. But here, today, in the meadows? Every direction is open to us, he notes. We can walk wherever we like and as slowly as we please.

We remember Mandelstam’s great walks through the streets of St Petersburg, before he was imprisoned for his poem about Stalin, and murdered in the Gulag. He composed poems in his head as he walked. He wrote them in his head, as he walked along, and then went home to write them out. And when he was betrayed, and his manuscripts destroyed, his wife stowed them in her head. A precious cargo.

W. knew I was a would-be man of culture when he saw her memoir Hope Against Hope on my bookshelf. It didn’t matter to W. whether I’d read it or not, or whether I had any real idea of what it contained. The title itself must have excited me: that was enough for W. The title, and the myth of Mandelstam, exiled from his city and murdered in the Gulag: I had a feeling for that; what else could W. ask for in a collaborator, in these fallen times?

Celan, in the midst of his walks, would phone his wife with the poems he had written in his head, W. remembers. And didn’t Celan claim to have seen God under the door of his hotel room? He saw God as a ray of light under his hotel door, W. says, it’s very moving.

Ah, but what sense can we have of Mandelstam, of Celan? What can we understand of poetry, in the Age of Shit ? In the end, we love only the myth of poetry, the myth of the world-historical importance of poetry, and the myth of ourselves as readers of poetry …

We love poetry because we have no idea about poetry, W. says. We love religion because we have no idea about religion. We love God because we have no idea of God …

There’s Walser, too, the patron saint of walkers, W. says. Walser, walking in the Swiss Alps. Walser, who’d long since devoted his time to being mad, rather than writing: he knew his priorities. He was mad, and the mad walked. And one day — fifty years ago, nearly to the day — they found him dead in the snow. He’d walked his way to death. Which is to say, says W., he’d met death on his own terms, far from his mental asylum. And that’s exactly his point, W. says. The walker meets the world on his own terms. The walker — the slow walker — meets the world according to his measure, W. says.

Ah, if only we were as wise as Walser, that is to say, as mad as Walser. If only we understood that our duty is to walk, not to write, merely to walk and not to think. To give up thinking! To give up writing! To give up our reading , which is really only the shadow of reading, the search for the world-historical importance that reading once had. But we go on, don’t we? We collect our books. We surround ourselves with them, the names of Old Europe, when we should have been walking, just that, all along.