Because It's Not There - Climbing Theory Because It's Not There

Otto von Busch: https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/fac...

Umwelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt



0:35 - Otto on design, fashion, hacktivism, theory etc.

6:42 - reluctance to talk fashion

7:56 - almost habitually lying

8:40 - drab vs. color 

8:56 - climbing clothes

10:28 - clipping shoes on bag

11:28 - carabiners

12:35 - where does function turn into style?

14:14 - fashion as risk, gamble, game

15:07 - vital, spiritual vogue, living in images

16:00 - coolness

17:30 - trying on new selves

19:19 - fashion as ecosystem

20:30 - gortex earring Monastery anecdote

22:18 - policing and self-policing

23:55 - this ever-present fluid medium of images and affects

25:45 - Uexküll, tonality, energy

26:37 - climbing as spectacle, being on display

28:10 - umwelt

29:40 - example of the uniform

30:32 - musicality of umwelt

31:06 - unknowing of fashion

32:40 - inhabiting clothes climbing

34:30 - wearing

36:00 - packing for a journey

38:10 - sprezzatura, making it look easy, natural

43:24 - climbing style

44:00 - gratuitousness

46:50 - Ashima Shiraishi

55:45 - Alex Megos

59:30 - Topo Designs

1:03:00 - Anton Krupicka

1:16:00 - fashion operating system

1:19:00 - hacktivist strategy

1:23:00 - climbing gyms as 'creative' spaces

1:26:00 - climbing holds as designed, aesthetic objects

1:27:06 - SoIll 

1:28:00 - and so much more!


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ALWAYS STOPPING TO EXPLORE VAGUE MOUNTAIN WAVES OF ADVENTURE BY LETTING THE HORIZON BE WHAT IT IS (BISEXUAL ALPINISM)



0:34 - the weirdness of arriving (on an adventure)

1:24 - exploration as return, as love, as horizon

2:07 - why leave home? type 1 vs. type 2 (fun)

3:50 - 'I wish I was anywhere else'

4:24 - 'are climbers lying to each other?'

5:48 - desire to summit as desire to come down

6:30 - climbing as planetary or wandering movement

7:24 - the call for fun of climbing and beauty of vagueness

8:17 - vagueness and value 

9:40 - play as home

10:23 - exploration as inversion of outside and inside

11:23 - etymology of 'exploration' and the call

12:25 - climbing as surfing

13:30 - paradoxes of experience

14:14 - climbing as returning time and mnemonic anagogy

15:28 - opening lines of canto 28 of Dante's Purgatorio

18:30 - the swerve (clinamen), folding of time, resignation

20:18 - Leopardi's poetics of vagueness

21:19 - the onsight

22:43 - 'rather than being brittle, not vague, and kinda fragile'

23:30 - swerve, turbulence, spontaneity, composition

27:50 - crudeness of our analytical self-accounting

28:25 - paying attention to the whim

30:30 - 'we learn despite ourselves'

30:45 - learning as recollection, aphaeresis

32:24 - ascent as reversal of descent

33:00 - climbing as dropping out vs. mainstreamization

35:25 - climbing as reification of exploration, means becoming ends

37:24 - #neverstopexploring, discovering great outdoors of your inbox, mountains of debt

39:55 - boredom and hypocrisy  

42:20 - honesty, shame, learning to be a shitty climber

43:50 - blue collar climbing

45:16 - new Gunks guidebook, chasing history

52:00 - 'peak climbing'

55:50 - downclimbing or offwidthly wiggling out of climbing a la The Shining 

1:00:00 - climbing and military allure

1:02:00 - exploration as double passage known and unknown

1:03:00 - exploration becomes self-exploration

1:04:00 - varieties of self and what you find honest

1:05:00 - Heidegger on letting the horizon be what it is

1:15:00 - kids teach us how to play



Adjacent routes:



Serres, Michel. 2018. The birth of physics.

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO. 2019. ZIBALDONE: the notebooks of leopardi.

Brinkmann, Carolin. (2008). From infinite pleasure to "abyss of indeterminate thoughts". Leopardi's pleasure theory and indefinite poetic. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. 58. 419-444. 

Harding, Warren, and Beryl Knauth. 2016. Downward bound: a mad! guide to rock climbing.

Margret Grebowicz. 2021. Mountains and Desire.

Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Discourse on thinking: a translation of Gelassenheit. New York: Harper Perennial.

Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. Goods: advertising, urban space, and the moral law of the image.














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WHEREIN WE PURSUE THE ANTI-STYLE OF (THE) INDEX FURTHER INTO THIS SOMEWHERE BY NOT GOING THERE, POINTING OUT ALONG THE WAY THAT IF YOU CLIMBED A ROUTE YOU NEVER DID BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO -- With Jon Nelson! 

1:49 - climbing role models, indication, presence, uniqueness of Index Town Walls 5:47 - climbing and deixis, throwing pebbles anecdote, proprioceptive ground 8:51 - local vs. universal markers, immersed perspective 10:30 - language as medium of climbing, meaning of 'ascent' 13:39 - Jon Nelson, the name Index, allure of the place, the quarry and fifth force tunnel 21:45 - climbing and physics, math; climbing as problem, proof, demonstration 26:28 - Jon Nelson's climbing style, hardcore, anti-style 29:57 - Jon's style in relation to the essential negativity of the This, the problem of being, the event of language (via Agamben) 32:39 - honesty in climbing vs. conquest/achievement 33.20 - indexicalism, process, situatedness (see Hilan Bensusan) 33:39 - on naming, Jon's theory of route naming, Index names 38:52 - Jon's route development in Japan 39:43 - Kuniyoshi Kataoka's research into climbing language and deixis 42:25 - continuum of climbing and deixis in the social gestural 'language' of reading/scoping routes 46:08 - succeeding by failing 48:20 - wanting the climb vs. wanted to have done the climb 50:43 - the preference for putting up new routes 52:06 - first descent style 53:28 - The Alpinist movie and going where you are not supposed to 55:04 - experimentalism and (non)escape of facticity, I-me chain of being 56:26 - creating something, example of Mike Massey and Zoom 57:52 - route as gift of unique experience, non-consumable currencies, subculture 59:57 - Gunnar Karlson on the beauty of a climb vis-a-vis proprioception, the intersubjective world of climbing 1:01:35 - like a giant oil painting laid on the landscape, climb as artwork, quote from Gadamer's Relevance of the Beautiful 1:02:57 - name as index of that auto-deictic dimension of the route 1:04:04 - Black Sabbath on the Diamond 1:05:07 - relations between climbing and music 1:10:56 - a way of trying to make climbing not become like any other activity 1:13:36 - climbing and mystical potentiality (doing what you can't do by not doing it) 1:15:06 - surprised by still not falling off the hub of the universe 

“[T]he significance of the This is, in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential negativity. . . . The problem of being—the supreme metaphysical problem—emerges from the very beginning as inseparable from the problem of the significance of the demonstrative pronoun, and for this reason it is always already connected with the field of indication . . . Deixis, or indication . . . is the category within which language refers to its own taking place.” (Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death) 

“43. Why indices rather than characters, signs, distinctive markings? Because the body escapes, is never sure, lets its presence be suspected but not identified. It could always just be part of another, bigger body that we take to be its house, its car or its horse, its ass or its mattress. It could be nothing more than the double of that tiny, vaporous other body that we call its soul and that escapes through its mouth when it dies. All we have at our disposal are indications, traces, imprints, and vestiges.” (Jean-Luc Nancy, 58 Indices on the Body) 

“In every Instant being begins; around every Here rolls the ball There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra) 

Adjacent routes: 

Hilan Bensusan, Indexicalism and the Metaphysics of Paradox. 

Kuniyoshi Kataoka, "Co-Construction of a Mental Map in Spatial Discourse: A Case of Japanese Rock Climbers' Use of Deictic Verbs of Motion." 

See also: Climbing - Philosophy for Everyone: Because It's There.




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WHEREIN WE THINK OURSELVES FEET FIRST OUT-INTO THE LUMINOUS CAVE OF CLIMBING THEORY AKA SILENT HUNGER FOR WHAT IS NOT THERE



adjacent routes:



Francesco Petrarca. Ascent of Mt. Ventoux. 

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 

LaSportiva Theory

Bo Earle. "Climbing without Ascent: Nietzsche’s Circuits of Pretense." the minnesota review 90 (2018): 114–129. 

Nicola Masciandaro. "Because It's Not There: A Vision of Climbing and Life." Chapter 5 of On the Darkness of the Will. Milan: Mimesis, 2018. 123-37. 

Olivier Massin (2014). Qu'est-ce qu'une montagne ? [What is a mountain?]. In Olivier Massin & Anne Meylan (eds.), Aristote chez les Helvètes. Ithaque.

Jeff Smoot. Pumping Concrete. Fourth Hill, 2018. 

Meister Eckhart. "Sermon 13b." -- "Here I live from my own as God lives from His own. For the man who has once for an instant looked into this ground, a thousand marks of red minted gold are the same as a brass farthing. Out of this inmost ground, all your works should be wrought without Why. I say truly, as long as you do works for the sake of heaven or God or eternal bliss, from without, you are at fault. It may pass muster, but it is not the best. Indeed, if a man thinks he will get more of God by meditation, by devotion, by ecstasies, or by special infusion of grace than by the fireside or in the stable - that is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak round His head and shoving Him under a bench. For whoever seeks God in a special way gets the way and misses God, who lies hidden in it. But whoever seeks God without any special way gets Him as He is in Himself, and that man lives with the Son, and he is life itself. If a man asked life for a thousand years, 'Why do you live?' if it could answer it would only say, 'I live because I live.' That is because life lives from its own ground, and gushes forth from its own. Therefore it lives without Why, because it lives for itself. And so, if you were to ask a genuine man who acted from his own ground, 'Why do you act?' if he were to answer properly he would simply say, 'I act because I act.'"


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