READINGWRITINGTHINKING
Robert appreciation as to what art is?
Hullot-Kentor
Interviewed by Issa Sabah
Issa Are there any questions or topics you feel out of
bounds or ought to be avoided?
H.K. I’ll let you know.
Issa OK then, let’s start with a question I feel very
relevant and important despite its cringe-inducing quality
—Are you happy?
H.K. Well yes, you know, it’s a silly question but it’s
a meaningful one, I mean it’s a—Francis Bacon sort of
says it in a way that makes sense to me, there’s something
just really pleasurable about being alive. And it’s very
puzzling that it’s that way right? That it’s as pleasurable
as it is while one’s in the midst of so much trouble—it
just couldn’t be, it’s just unbelievably difficult to be alive
right, it’s just such a problem —
Issa It’s a constant struggle...
H.K. Isn’t it? And it hurts a lot and it’s also very
pleasurable. Now how that can be, worries me.
Issa So you reckon that you feel that in the balance
of things, the struggle and your resolution with it is
overcoming that struggle or is it at least as it ends, in
making it work? I mean how do you feel about it?
H.K. You mean trying to reconcile—
Issa Exactly, the reconciliation of both.
H.K. I don’t know. I don’t know that I think about
it that way. You know, one has a need to make things.
Exactly how that comes to us I don’t know.
Issa And what’s your view on the saying, “It is what
it is.”
H.K. ...
Issa The phrase itself, “It is what it is.” How does
that strike you?
H.K. It is what it is? You mean just as such? That
phrase? You’ve just popped that phrase on me, it is what
it is. You’d like me to respond to that? Well that’s a good
one. It is what it is. Well, it is what it is, that’s for sure,
you know. Now the experience of, you know in German,
so ist das, and in French, comment c’est, that’s essential
to what art is, when it’s art. That’s it, you know. I think
that’s the experience of it is wh... what it is? That’s the
experience of it is what it is, that sense of one is
experiencing something, that there is something that can
be experienced. Thus it is, that’s a crucial event you
know.
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Issa Touching on art, what is your perception or
H.K. Well, to me, personally, what art is, it’s the
only relief from me that I personally know of. It’s
something that is achieved by what one knows
individually is, that’s if it’s art. There isn’t a guarantee
that it’s art.
Issa So is thinking for you art? Philosophical texts
are generally assumed by others to be wholly separate as
to what constitutes art.
H.K. If thinking is art... if thinking is art. You
know, there’s something of art in all things, right. In the
room, the chair, you can’t really divide it up like the silly
expression of the sheep and the goat, can we? These are
the art-things and these are the other-things. I don’t think
the ideas would make much sense like that. One would
be very pleased if one could think, I mean certainly
artworks are made up of thought, they are thought,
aren’t they? But they are also curious because in the
visual arts you have things that are thinking things that
are made out of stuff and you wonder how can this stuff
think? How does it... is the thought glued on?
Issa How does it bounce back eventually.
H.K. Yeah. How can it be? These are certainly
thinking things and I think that’s the puzzle of making
art—to make thinking things.
Issa Drawing on what you said earlier about
knowledge and the struggle, I remember once you
mentioned that all there is, is knowledge. We learn
things, we understand situations or concepts and then yet
while that’s all happening there’s the apparently real
constant problems of the world as it is right now—the
development of strife for instance. For you, is there really
just knowledge?
H.K. Just knowledge... Well the world takes places
inside knowledge. It’s occurring in every word. I don’t
experience that inside and outside of that there’s
knowledge taking place and then there’s the world. I
mean knowledge is how we grasp what’s other than
ourselves, what is also ourselves.
Issa That’s what I find interesting in your work—
how people of knowledge or thinking may be compared
differently to those with a lack thereof. The lack of
opportunity—
H.K. You’re talking about, wait let me see, there’s
so much to say. I mean I don’t suppose that the universe
is knowledge and I don’t really think that all there is, is
knowledge. I don’t think that. You’re touching on that
question. It’s too big a question but where you ended up
in your question has more to do, I think, with the
 experience of the guilty privilege of knowledge. That
seems to me where you went. So there’s, the good
fortune of education and I definitely feel it that way. It’s
very very unusual to have the chance to sit down with
people and read and talk, it just doesn’t happen in a
lifetime, it does not happen, right?
Issa Have you felt or noticed on your own how
while there are a privileged few, or rather privileged
many who have had the experience of education, they
eventually still fall back and assimilate nothing into their
lives and continue as if all they’ve learned has not had an
impact on who they are or what they do?
H.K. You know I’m probably a little blind to it, to
that, I mean I actually see people take away a lot. I could
be completely mistaken, of course. I just feel a lot
happens and that people really are thinking. I mean you
see it in every class, there’s a whole section of class that’s
not interested one bit, you know, they’re just not. They’re
just having a lousy time waiting for the movie to end.
And that’s amusing in its own way. And there’s nothing
to be done about that. And I’m not really trying to talk
people into it—
Issa It has to be of their own accord.
H.K. It’s nuts. I think it was today where I was
discussing ‘truth isn’t stringent’ and you can’t argue for
the truth, argument is what would deceive you of the
truth. Arguments won’t do the trick for us. When I was
in school, I really didn’t like school, I couldn’t figure out
how come the teachers had all the important books to
themselves, I just really couldn’t stand it. The books
themselves were always really fascinating but the classes
were always excruciating and boring, I couldn’t figure it
out. Why if one were to teach these things why wouldn’t
they come through? That still is a mystery to me.
Issa John Locke? Industrialization—
H.K. How does that explain it?
Issa I’m asking you.
H.K. A shrewd move on your part.
Issa I mean, do you not feel that is what’s
happened? Where we can now rationalize readings of
Karl Marx as either typical art-school humanities or as
petty basic economics instead of using the texts as a basis
of reflection as to how people are really living their lives.
I mean, it is true that the alternative is elusive but at least
to be aware of these problems would be better than not.
H.K. Well I think that it is possible to think in a
way that actually engages the world of objects and that
one can have that experience. That one is in the midst of
that. We find ourselves in the midst of what clearly is the
fundamental conflicts of our life and we’re engaged
there. I don’t find it as something outside life. Maybe I
should but it’s never seemed that way.
Issa Education now has really driven off from what
it’s supposed to be or what it aims to be. An education of
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being, a liberation of thought. Now it’s all really just
boiled down to trade skills.
H.K. It’s boiled down to a group of control
mechanisms. It’s really bleak, I would say. It seems very
bleak. I don’t know and maybe it’ll seem weird but I’m
completely isolated in what I do. I just teach what I have
to teach and life has gone on like that for many years
now so I really don’t know what goes on in other courses,
what the rest of school life is like. I know some of my
colleagues are really good teachers and really carry a lot
with themselves, bring a lot of experience, thinking
experience to the classroom. But in general what you’re
saying is exactly true, what we see is that school is really
being wiped out for just teaching kids how to write
business memos.
Issa Let’s shift gears quickly and have a brief
history of you. A quick curriculum vitae so to say.
H.K. Well, I’ve been around. So when one tries to
describe life from the beginning, there’s really nothing to
it, you know. Born there, went there and then this and
that. I don’t know. The whole thing goes up in smoke.
We don’t even get anything interesting as a skeleton to
look at. You just get a list of things. The puzzle of time is
that I don’t think we can grasp it. It’s not too hard to get
to a point of thinking where we realize we don’t have the
concepts to understand. The body is in space but the
mind isn’t? How can that be? And here we are, our feet is
kicking in the air and we feel so confident as to what
we’re doing, how we’re getting through the day but what
is it we’re thinking about? But then with time, it is, to say
the least—the past is really only knowable from the
present. What is it to look back at things?
Issa How does memory tie in to the past? How does
‘looking back’ shape who you are?
H.K. I don’t feel that I look back. I feel that the
past comes to me, that’s how it feels to me, that’s how I
perceive it you know? I don’t think we go back, I think it
would be too simple to say the past fills the present. That
would be too simple right? I’d like to be able to say
something like that. Modern experience is shaped by an
insight to the primitive but then if you think about that,
that if we are fundamentally primitive that means that
the origin is not in the beginning, it means that it is in
this instant.
Issa But based on the primitive?
H.K. I don’t it is based on the primitive. I can’t
figure this out, Issa. It would be real dandy if I could, I
work at this all the time. I’m always thinkings about this.
Issa What else are you working on?
H.K. Right now, I want to write something about
September 11th, I mean that’s what I’m doing right now.
This short thing I’m writing will be called ‘Phantom
Limb’ and I’m trying to comprehend 9/11 in terms of a
sort of phantom limb, our experience of it. Undoubtedly
 it’s forgotten. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t
happening. How can this be? War came of it, look what
happened. In what sense can we even look back on 9/11
when we’re still shooting people.
Issa Do you feel that is something that pertains only
to America or to the West or is it something much more
intrinsically human? Or at least ‘current humanity’?
H.K. I can’t really presume to know. I mean we
look at Benvenuto Cellini’s life in the 16th century, we
see somebody where there’s a continuity to time. He
doesn’t seem to have the stark sense of having to choose
between the present and the past because he’s in the
midst of time, in the presence of the past, their tradition
is the presence of the past. The United States is
predicated, built on the idea there shall be no past. There
must be no past.
Issa Why is that?
H.K. It’s just—How that happened... I don’t know
how that happened. I see that it’s a continent that was
there to be exploited, has been dug up and concreted
over in the most amazing—it’s hardly a century that
took. Two centuries, three centuries, the whole thing.
Issa Do you feel there’s an issue with the whole
resource thing?
H.K. Ford, Henry Ford said, ‘History is bunk.’ The
United States is a war against history. There shall be no
history. We begin to understand something about the
completely commercial structure of the nation. It’s a
nation without any experience at all. It has excitement
but no experience of itself. It doesn’t have a clue to what
it is. And yet at the same time it’s really occurring, 9/11
is definitely still occurring.
Issa I was wondering—if we look back at all those
thinkers such as Adam Smith, many of the things they
wrote about outlined that these are the pitfalls and
they’re real pitfalls. Yet people go with it, it’s as if people
pick and choose what they want out of thinkers and they
apply it according—and not even out of greed! I guess
out of miscomprehension, I feel.
H.K. It’s actually a kind of automatic activity is
what it most of all is, I think. It’s a kind of automaton.
It’s an economic structure. It’s just economic behaviour.
Tocqueville said no people has ever had idiotic lives as
Americans have. But look what we spend our lives doing.
We just go shopping or we’re out of work dragging
around industry. We don’t have anymore life to ourselves
than economic activity.
Issa And if we tie in Marx to this, do you believe
there’s a natural evolution eventually?
H.K. Well the thing is today I was reading a New
York Times article on the tsunami and if I were to think
to myself how I felt things are I would sound very
sentimental. It would be that silly. A giant wave hit us,
you know. The problem is how to shape reality. You don’t
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want to hurt yourself by saying really idiotic things. You
want to avoid doing that. T. S. Eliot said things like ‘I
think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their
bones.’ Now that comes across. I don’t really like T. S.
Eliot very much and I wouldn’t say that but still the need
to find the words that will carve to the truth, that’s what
is at stake and it couldn’t be more serious, could it?
There’s a reactor melting into earth right now and it’s a
catastrophe of unthinkable dimensions.
Issa That’s the thing, you know, there’s a lot of
issues out there, controversies where people are saying it’s
nuclear propaganda, people against nuclear energy.
H.K. That’s really interesting. One aspect of what’s
ferocious now is the force of the naked lie. We live with
the naked lie. I mean someone’s going to say that there
really isn’t any nuclear disaster or the holocaust never
happened or AIDS does not exist; we can just make a
list. We have to pass laws now, in Germany against
denying the holocaust happened—
Issa Do you feel that’s justified? European nations
creating a law condemning revisionist theories under the
penalty of imprisonment? In nations where liberté,
egalité and fraternité are still driving mottos.
H.K. I think it’s more than justifiable. I regret it. It’s
regrettable. To pass a law of that nature is to try to
defend us against the worst kind of regression. I’m afraid
we need that. I think we could use like thousands of laws
like that. A lot of them prohibiting the president or the
vice-president from speaking. We are at the mercy of
naked lies now. It is a moment of a return of the great
fear. We’re in the midst of that. The transformation in
time is very very dramatic right now. There are tens of
millions of people emigrating from nation to nation.
There are 147 million Kalashnikovs just distributed as a
result of the Cold War. 147 million automatic rifles that
are floating around just like that, that’s one Kalashnikov
for every other American and pretty soon one in every
other American will have one of them, the way we are.
We have a town in the United States where by law one
must carry a gun, in the south. It’s like that. It’s not like
there are many terrible things that history has been privy
to, it’s that we are living in the last several decades in a
return of tremendous crises, on the level of World War I
and World War II. We are in the midst of it. This return
to the great fear, we are feeling the great fear again.
Issa A lot of republicans feel, or at least the GOP
feel that dissent is American. What do you think about
this?
H.K. Well dissent is certainly a good thing. It is a
good thing. We feel tremendous animosity towards one
another in the country right now. I don’t know to a
degree to say that people don’t dissent but there is a
tremendous standoffishness, antagonism and people are
just about ready to go for the jugular I would say. I’d say
 we’re just about there. But meanwhile, there’s this
homogeneity of reality and an absence of binding
critical thought and you’re wondering about that.
Issa How could we remedy that? A lot of modern
thought has underlined the problem as looking for
remedies instead of going at the source and changing the
whole issue so that these problems don’t occur anymore.
Many people see these theories as neo-communist even
though the American way of life has been going
downhill since the 60s in terms of the usefulness
capitalism has had.
H.K. I don’t think that’s a bad thought. I don’t
think there’s any capacity for organization. I think there’s
tremendous dissatisfaction, a whole lot of unhappiness,
10 million homes would have been lost by the end of this
year. If you look out the window, I was standing with one
of the doormen earlier today, Charles and I were
standing by a large window and I said to him, “Charles
you’re the only person I know who looks out a window
on a regular basis.” He replied in his lovely New Orleans
accent, “Well come over here Bob,” and he said, “look
out the window.” “Well what do you see Charles?” “Do
you see anybody happy at all?” There’s not a single
happy person. I feel the kids are lovely, they are adorable
kids, I really care a lot for the students here but look at
the world we’re mixed into, the students don’t look happy
either but they’re such lovely people. He said, “Boy they
really don’t see what’s coming.” But they really do see it,
I mean we really do we feel it.
Issa We feel it. We feel it. But we don’t see it.
H.K. Eric Hobsbawm, a great historian, recently
made the point that it’s no longer conceivable to
organize the poor. It is no longer possible to organize
people. One of the things that was startling during the
Bush years was people were really against Bush. People
had no way to build opposition. The essential nature of
leadership very much impressed me in the Bush years,
that there seemed to be, given the distress, the
recognition that we are living the great lie. It is only
minorities that have ever controlled any part of the
world, right? By definition, a leadership is only a
minority. And if a majority clubs together and says
what’s on its mind, that could be more terrible than
anything in the universe. That doesn’t exactly define it.
It’s a matter of what theory is, what theory is is the
ability to criticize what we wish for, in the most serious
way. People study theory in a most ridiculous way but
theory is really most of all, and it sounds silly I know, but
it’s a critique of what we wish for. The problem is, and it
sounds silly but, the problem is how to wish for the right
thing. Why can’t we wish for the right thing?
Issa Thank you very much.