veridiction:s

Politiesocioloog Jaap Timmer van de Vrije Universiteit bekeek de beelden en vindt het moeilijk te beoordelen hoe (dis)proportioneel de klappen en trappen van de agent waren. “Het ziet er natuurlijk niet fraai uit, maar we weten niet wat de omstandigheden waren en wat die agent voorafgaand voor zijn kiezen heeft gehad.” — Op de beelden is duidelijk te zien dat de vrouw die een trap krijgt, de agent filmt. Maar filmen is “zeker geen reden” voor politiegeweld, stelt Timmer. Dat vindt ook Boumanjal: “Dat heb je te dulden als agent. Het betekent niet dat het niet irritant is, maar het mag.” — Wél mogen agenten in bepaalde situaties geweld gebruiken als iemand zich wil onttrekken aan een aanhouding. De vraag is in hoeverre dat gebeurt bij de vrouw die klappen krijgt met een wapenstok. Zij lijkt weg te lopen van de agent, maar Timmer kan niet goed beoordelen of dat een poging was haar aanhouding te voorkomen.
NOS, January 28, 2026

A “sociologist of policing” working at a university is interviewed by the Dutch State News Agency. He’s asked to comment on videos taken by bystanders of an incident about possible police violence. In the video itself that starts shooting from the moment a policeman’s holding the arm of one of two young women, evidently moslim, and holding his baton in his other hand just as he uses the same hand to press in on his portophone botton. He’s walking away with one lady, presumably towards the police car. The young woman being taken away is unserious, laughing. Her friend, with her camera in her hand, seems more receptive of the situation’s gravity. She’s been filming already and now walks behind the policeman and her friend. She’s not filming as she walk, holding her phone as if she’s apping, or as if she’s asking something from the policeman while taking notes. The policeman has already looked back and now when he turns the lady behind him is just more than a leg distance away; he has to extend his to kick the lady somewhere between her knee and hips. She falls to the ground. Her arrested friend now panics, no longer laughing. His grip seems loosened and she moves in the direction of the fallen friend. This quickly ends up in an altercation between her and the policeman who hits her with the baton. Bystanders’ dismay can be heard. Other policemen, who were apparently around, now are seen in the frame, intervening. The woman (we read that she’s 23 years old) is caught again and receives some more beating as she obviously made the policeman mad.

There are other shots of overlapping moments and later instances, but us stay with this bit about which the university sociologist is requested to comment. Specifically, he is quoted as commenting on two smaller fragments of the main video. The first comment is about the policeman kicking the person who’s walking freely and chooses to follow the police. Our expert says that judging the kick (is it “abuse”, is it “racism”?) depends on the possible things the policeman might “endured before this.” We can ask what kind of a thing to endure would be relevant? This question is rhetorical indeed and defeats the sociologist’s comment at face value: whatever he might have endured must have either warranted an arrest or not an arrest. The woman who walks is obviously not arrested. Nothing warrants the kicking of a free young woman who is looking down at her phone and at that moment is not posing any threat. If she had scolded him before, will that justify physical violation later? If anything earlier would justify the kick later, when the threat or harm was over, then could he go back to her at any time, let’s in two weeks, and kick her to the ground? The kick is not, in any possible way, a later defense against a previous act, which we must conclude from the the policeman’s own act of arresting one and not the other did not legitimate arresting her in the first place. Is there any other way we should understand the way our experts is commenting and querying this incidence and the material?

The second comment given by the sociolost is on the policeman hitting the arrested 23-year old with his baton. He cannot judge, he is quoted as saying, from the video. This would depends on knowing whether she was walking away or was resisting of arrest. The woman is not running but walking and engaging with the police in solidarity with her friend. The scene is, we see some seconds later, full of policemen on bikes, and her clothes would not allow her to get very far also. But alas. We want to see what the sociologist does who is consulted as an expert and the party that holds knowledge and help us see what we see. He does not ask the question about the arrested woman, the question that he just asked about the policeman: what might she have endured before this? Is this because he’s a sociologist of policing, or what the news agency calls politiesocioloog, and not a sociologist of (moslim) arrestees? Does this mean he is uniquely specialized in inquiring what the police “endures” which apparently has to epistemic implication with regard to what other actors endure?

It is, for one part, and I’m convinced an obviously and consequential part, in the image what the arrested lady has endured before she “walks away”. At first, she’s laughing. (Is this really happening? Am I caught up in an online image now suddenly? Am I framed, now for real, by an image that always had a veneer of fiction and artificiality? Is this real?) Then her friend is kicked to the ground. Her friend is kicked and falls to the ground, by the police who’s taking her away. Let me ask you, the reader, how would you feel? Do you feel blood surging towards your head just as you read this? And what would your gut feeling tell you to do?

What the policeman might have “endured” (which, as we said, does not warrant a violent act later) must obviously remain a question limited to what he might have endured at the hands of the second woman. It is not a question of what he might have endured during his childhood or adolescence; what he might have thought of the many images that we can assume most people have seen, the most recent ones being of American police brutality; what he might have endured seeing the twin towers fall, seeing burnt and mutilated children in Gaza, or drone images of men of color “of military age” being exploded remotely; What might he have thought when the Dutch military went to war in Afghanistan to “liberate” their women and what might he have felt when the face cover some of them (who ended up in his country) was banned by law, barring them from public offices “to liberate them”, and when a prominent politician of his country published a campaign image of an old wrinkly grimacing woman in hijab, the same woman who now, still not liberated, had become the ugly enemy?

Well, the policeman cannot be seen in such these relations! Just as there is no racism in the sociologist’s society (it needs to be made plausible by the judiciary every single instance) there is also no other things that make relations between skin colors, discourses, images, fears and other affects. The question of endurance is applied only to the presumably generic situation, the few minutes of interaction between two “women” with shopping bags and smartphones in their hands and a policeman whose persona now only exists as what the women might have elicited in him to put him on the edge of his professional persona. Outside this image, now happen to be videographed, the policeman is the generic typical policeman, and the moslim veiled women are the moslim veiled women. Where is there is no image there is the stereotypical image. (Otherwise how can we judge?) You just insert your own preferred image. We do that. And the sociologists does that too. He is not presumptuous, well, no, he’s minimal. Because we can see in whose “endurance” he is interested. Now we have the stereotypical image of the kind of academic that he is!

Do we ask what the women might have endured? If we do, do we constitute isolated individuals of them just as we did with the policeman? Do we say that “no way will the violence of a policeman against your friend give you a reason, let alone legal reason, to question his authority”? (Lets be clear that in common Dutch parlance, as drawn from the law, the police may use “proportional violence”.)

The great weakness of civil conversation of citizens of any status in the modern societies that I know is that they will never go any further than contradicting each others’ argument. Perhaps we can count on one hand the number of people in this civilization who can climb up the second half of Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement. But the Graham himself has been blind to the mountain to which Gilles Deleuze pointed, the image of thought that has stupefied us all, holding us from thinking in terms of anything (whether we use the terms to confirms, rejects or refute) but those terms that bring us back to our failure.

Let us cut out the question that is relevant for us. Legal parties are negotiating evidence. What can we expect of the university sociologist of policing, that is, of the expert who is brought in to help the public form an opinion/judgment about an incidence? The journalist’s interest is first all, not a question like that of “what can we learn from this?” or “what does this say about our current society”? No such interesting questions. The question is “can we recognize this as the same in the series over which two different group never will agree and of which we know what every party will say?”

The sociologist is asked a question that is usually posed to legal experts. It is a question of guilt and everyone is well-trained in roleplaying in it, with a tv remote or smartphone in hand. He neither rejects nor repurposes the question in accordance to his discipline. His overall answer is this: when “all” the evidence is there, one can judge. What constitutes “all” itself becomes an enigma, remains unexplicated. The answer further propagates the common confusion about who judges, about the institutional of judgement. He does not defend his expertise, which is not law but sociology. A sociology which we might, naively but tellingly, expect to be a study of ‘police society’ whose relationship to the judiciary institution, for example, would be more or less interesting one. We can guess why everyone wants to play the judge here (the journalist asks the judiciary question, expects the “public” to be wanting of judgement, the sociologist plays along in confidently filling in the journalist about what is needed to judge. The image of science that most of us inherit is the Kantian figure of the scientist as judge, and the figure of the emancipated citizen as the person who is able to pronounce rational judgment is welded to this same Kantian image. Anyway, to imagine ourselves as judges, and in order to be able to move on already before the real judge’s indictment and read/judge the next incident, we have entertain a confusion about the who-ness of the judge (in technical terms the enunciative properties of the legal utterance).

At the same time, the following is obvious: there is a sociology that is mobilized in the sociologists’ commentary that enables the expert to produce either the judgement or the qualification of what is required for judgment (what did the policeman endure at the hands of the women?). The kind of society of judges that is propagated here is that, to the surprise of no one, an isolate-individual society without history, without confluence of actions from one scene to another, of sovereignty of individual types and independence of occurrences. The scenes are as generic as the individuals acting on its stage. Generic and yet the question that might explain their actions is somehow posed asymmetrically. Everyone plays along: the journalist receives the question of endurance, the epistemological sympathy of the sociologist for the policeman, notes it down and reports it. The journalist, just like the sociologist evinces no surprise when the latter suggests that there could be something that might justify the policeman kicking the woman, which however would not have warranted arresting her. Here, relationship between the journalist and the expert must also not be questioned. They are independent. In several sense: one expert is any expert to ask that and there is no question of explaining or justifying why this expert was approached. Fill in your stereotype of the generic expert. The journalist does not scrutinize the expert’s answers. That is not part of the relationship between one who asks to report and the one who knows. Everything is as if one is filling a form. There is no surprise, which is why we can already judge and place the incidence and what we know of in the same old series. Both the presumptions of the sociologist that enable him to comment and the relationship between the journalist and the sociologist as the text exudes are consistent: we live in the image of thought, we recognize everything. Everything remains fictional (until one day it happens to us).

Let us anticipate the retort that such a serious and critical reply to one article written for the lowest denominator reader is not warranted. The expert surely couldn’t have taken this as seriously as his research paper that he needs to finish. Well, if a motorcyclist crashes his motorcycle sliding out the garage, should he be permitted to drive on the street and the highway? The low level of seriousness with which would be asked to take such news adds to the fiction and the incivility. Those young women themselves underestimated the power of racism just as we underestimate how our media ecology polluted with more-or-less formulations has become a pillar of a negligent and destructive society.

Let us then sympathize with the inconsistency of journalistic and expert discourse for a moment. After all, the want to hold a balanced view and both the sociologist and the journalist are deferring judgement rather than judging! This itself amounts to a misreading of their discourse, itself based on the view that we should have a balanced view of their what they say (and “fair” also, for God almighty’s sake!). But surely, here the will for a balanced view is prioritized over what is seen in the image and the criterion of consistency. The balanced view is not balanced. It is asymmetrical. One party (should I really name this one party?) almost never misses out of receiving the “benefit of the doubt.” But the norm of balanced view, even if more consistently applied, is dogmatic when it has to deny both what is one seeing (the second woman poses no threat) and the things that one can very safely assume bind persons in a society (the women are friends and feel solidarity at forcible separation, first go along, then, when kicked have reason for distrust).

An big older man carries away a young woman with force in bright daylight! The law allows him to “proportionally” violate them physically. The reality in which we live is not balanced and is not civilized. A civilized image of violation does not contribute to civilization but is an element of incivility.

—

But now again, and more generally, what can we expect of our universities and epistemic authorities? These institutions have been subject to a hollowing out now for a few decades.

There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility 
of interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them value or
meaning. They are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer 
works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel
the imagination. But if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in
the very violence that creates them. - David Graeber, 2006

It is time to state a new understanding of cynicism, following a few developments within and without cynicism itself, to account for what cynicism looks like in a new climatic and catastrophic regime. It is time to detect and modify those new cynical modes of response that leave our environment in the hands of destructive forces.

I will propose cynicism as abandonment, in which cynicism will no longer be recognized as an attitude, a negative one, in an economic environment, but a search for small uplifting regions of inner experience concurrent with inconspicuous abandonment of larger zones of ecological (including human) exhaustion.

The cynicism of the 20th century was, in retrospect at least, not sustainable. For Peter Sloterdijk, cynicism was a mechanism of coping with modern economies, building in security for self-identity from the caprice of working life to which one held on externally for earning a living but capitulating the meaning of labor and value in retaining (a sense of) control over one’s private feelings and intellect. This strategy was one in the mode of sacrifice, sacrifice of one’s productive energies as well as the milieu of consumptive and productive economy. It was moreover a middle class strategy, suitable for those who did have work and a home to be cynical for.

The cynicism that fenced the inner experience from ongoing erosion, cleared the grounds for “identity.” Quite a lot of events culminated into a segmentation of populations into identities, e.g. market segmentation and later on social networks technologies. These matters are critical yet beyond the purview of my text here. The contribution of the strategy of cynicism of fencing those parts of the mind that could justifiably be protected at the cost of whatever found itself beyond: an honest remark, the risk of speaking up, feedback on errors necessary for correction, moral engagement tout court, etcetera.

However, the juice is finished and people are burning out even while capitulating regions of their lives to save what’s left. Psychological coping with structural defects is untenable. Soft skills too wear out when dealing with hard problems.

What had its place in human communications, its corrective mechanisms, is more and more a liability and a risk whose cost keep increasing: to have a “reality check” with a superior is a very special case. The person below will be compelled to abandon this “reality” while the superior thinks “rationally” about externalizing risk, to (almost consciously and purposefully) “fail upwards”. Both have to abandon parts of reality to keep the economic game going. Neither are cynical and cynicism is no longer an attitude, whether a philosophical or affective one. Cynical is the situation that requires this kind of exchange; it is the economic situation. The best cynical person is the one who can participate in this situation with the greatest naïveté, through a close correspondence of the opposites (of cynicism and naïveté). The economic situation, the labor relation, the exchange goods, seem under control and no one can accuse it of a problem; because the problem that it has created and is exacerbating has been left outside.

This outside, which is left in ruins, expands whilst the “domain of freedom” shrinks. This outside I call the cynical landscape. I mean to be very inclusive with what belongs to this category of landscapes. Otherwise I would be saying nothing new here. We can take the example of almost any organization, private or public. No cynical person can be spotted here. Cynicism would be that which is left outside, which would problematize what is going inside the organization if it would get in. It would almost make the stakeholders of the organization think again. But this place itself is abandoned; it is full of outside corners. Plans are watered down. Those who could compare the quality of the work delivered has declined dramatically have left and will never produce a relevant history of the organization through time. They might not even be able to say what is “lost” because it might not have been measured as factor in the productivity of the organization’s runners. The new people must stay hopeful. The bosses must always sing highest notes. But the contracts are temporary, the plans are watered down, the risk of mentioning errors are great for all layers. The communications are read carelessly because bonding activities, which would familiarize the employees with each others personal vocabularies, have been cut down. Many conversations must be avoided. Talks don’t touch on any matters of importance. Those who hang on have learnt not to care, not because they are evil. No–and this is the point–they know they cannot afford caring. The organization has become vacuous. It produces a token of what it is supposed to do.

Even with a token, there is something left inside. The work of abandonment is never done; the token itself is reason for further emptying out.

In numbers we abandon numerous landscapes sooner or later. The feeling of cynicism is avoided by leaving the landscape were cynicism germinates, even if this landscape is where living takes place, or decisions about a highway trajectory, future investment, or an algorithm that could discriminate is made. Thus cynicism as affect is no longer a concept that would help us detect this destructive version of the cynical reason.

These organizations learn to continue without care, and bind labor and force not by adding care but by punishing deviance and dissent. The punitive response is not a choice from meanness, in reality the organization has no capacity to incorporate the issues that are brought up. We speak here of organizations where bureaucracy is entrenched and institutions that hold on to out-of-touch calculations, trickle-up hierarchies, and an economy of expendable human resources (among other materials). But even if the feeling of cynicism is replaced with a new breath, the act of abandonment has been definitely and ultimately cynical.

Thus response is added on top of cynicism, because the way to taking on the root causes is diligently gated by those who, we are learning to say, “benefit from the current situation.”

I already implied that abandonment is not particular to those who, so to say, are exploited or exploit themselves. It is a general mode of response. These same groups who “benefit from the current situation,” those who we can call the irresponsible guardians, their calculative organization that inflexibly call the shots and command the scripts, they divest from zones they consider unfit for business–zones previously exploited and sacrificed. They themselves feel abandoned, moreover, whenever they fail to reproduce the business identity. “In your suit you’re someone, without it you’re nobody.” They take not-caring as their ultimate motto, having learnt as MBA freshman or otherwise to minimize the cost of winning, an abandonment of anything that would obstruct the pre-determined goal more and more a obligation.

Let us be clear that the job of “business,” its birth right, is to only speak positively of solutions, solutions that are ready to be sold, or can be promised. Solutions that promise a future profit. It is its job to excavate new and cheerful opportunities. In this definitive sense every businessman is an idealist, just as any entrepreneur is “creating a better world” and is pragmatic too. But on the same grounds business has to remain silent on the much larger group of problems that invite no business solution. Business speaks of cheerful opportunities even if the enunciator and the interlocutors are staring at a scene of a disaster, a ghetto, or tortured landscapes. As if one can pick and choose what critical and collective problems one finds attractive to tackle! It should be clear, business cannot replace the hard work of politics.

But also urban spaces and infrastructures, with the famous examples of Detroit or Flint Michigan, are left behind in their toxicity. Values extracted from those locations now “positively” infest other promising landscapes. And at the same time, castes of lower order leave their deserted lands where the slowly unfolding catastrophe has devastated their livelihoods. We can now put the movement of refugees out of their burning homes and the movement of  urban “human resources” leaving science, government, and (its subsidiaries,) and corporations, into one picture. We are all in a flight. The difference is that some of us can retreat into zen-accommodated jobs and tiny green bubbles, based on what is already extracted and accumulated from the landscapes that are left outside view, while others end up between and within the walls that prevent them reaching the inhabitable bubble. There isn’t enough place on an earth that is becoming tinier and tinier as we abandon it further.

Surely, enough minion figures will remain to occupy existing positions in institutions. But trust and enthusiasm will everywhere plummet and recede into a silence of negativity.

And I emphasize again. I speak of minions, but none of us, none of these groups are cynical in attitude, or cynical in consciousness. It is a basic fact of life, and it is that one thing that economics got right: that everyone does his and her best. So no, the landscapes are cynical and our strategy to deal with them are intelligible even if complicit.

Thus every landscape is abandoned, however differently, by its sustainable parts and supportive attachments, left either to decay or peak in exploitation.

Herein lies the advantage of talking of cynicism within a story that is otherwise not new to many ears. It identifies a concerted response in humans that allows us to put into one picture the process of de-civilization, be it in an office within a skyscraper where bizarre talks about the newest conspicuous consumptions or advancements in exploitation take place, or be it large stretches of land skinned and devastated, or the good old distrust in the capacity of others to think that takes place within a casual exchange of opinions. The original point is that, as such, the retreat to a “local community” or “just doing one’s job” will be counted as a cynical reaction, an abandonment of a world which sooner or later will, once again, intrude our bubble; whereas re-engagement with abandoned zones, ruins, and decaying institutions will become a new question and a new invitation for amor mundi.

Its originality too is that it does not exempt anyone. It is about those lower on the ladders of hierarchy who abandon their ambitions, and also those higher in the hierarchy who abandon the care for their subjects. It is symmetrical and recognizes neo-cynicism as a common material condition, not a psychology. Hence my use of the word “landscape.” It is not a matter of “those others” who are mistaken, misinformed, misled, compromised, polarized majorities, and those who want to retreat into their gated parcels. This is a direct warning to the reader. It should point toward us, more than it would point to “others,” those others in whom we have abandoned our hope and our connection.

We cannot go back, of course, to the never-resolving promise of a globalization. But neither is it possible to isolate a region of the earth from the havoc and toxicity that we have spawned elsewhere. Refugees will always try to reach our bubbles to which we fled first, awakening our bad conscience–a conscience which we will violently try to expel! Retreat is part of the problem as it adds to the abandoned landscapes, and the only solution moves in the direction of reclamation and distribution of all areas of responsibility, especially since we now have disturbed almost every landscape on Earth.

——–

Retreating into one’s mind and bubble, characteristic of both the 20th-century cynicism and the 21th-century zen neo-cynicism, will not save us; it will add to the destruction even if passively, by merely failing to act up against it. Retreating into smaller lives, moreover, is a privilege of those exactly who can nevertheless consume the world and inherit a better part of a still unjust distribution of the consequences of the environmental mutation. It means the evasion of our political prerogative, that is, our inevitably collective problem.

Retreat is a psychologization, neatly in line with the impoverished metaphysics of sorting things out in no more than two categories of being, psyche and world, culture and nature. It might make the greater world a little better, or a little less worse. But it does not compensate for the necessity to reclaim–a reclamation that will not be easy in any regard, considering that we are occupied with so many bad habits that invite us to close our eyes, or which is the same, to stay positive! We will have to work this out later, since this is an expansive topic. My focus here is on the subtle but crucial difference between cynical retreat, which is proliferating, and reclamation, its necessity. Most crucially we should dare to suspect cynicism in positive talk and as inconsequential–that is, merely psychological–attitude, if we want to begin distinguishing problems from solutions at all.

I should say more on my meaning of psychologization. I mean by it examples such as promotion of psychological techniques, e.g. mindfulness meditation (which increasingly tends to desensitize than to sensitize to experience and experience of thought in particular), psychotherapeutic internalization of response to oppressive conditions, gaslighting and propaganda techniques, catering to mere images of facts, or more radically the fundamental confusion between information (the response to which is “OK”, meaning “correctly received” and nothing else) and knowledge (the response to which is substantive and differential). I also mean the reduction to “opinion” of plain facts (not scientific facts; see H. Arendt’s Truth and Politics), expansion of the marketing and communication dispositifs that create mere images forming curtains between insides and outsides, helping us in the way of abandoning.

These are historical movements that isolate experience from the world and have been positively employed in following the doctrine that nature is deterministic and a domain exclusive to science and scientists, whereas the psyche is the domain of the freedom of individuals, however impotent. However, an isolated psyche is nothing but a psyche compromised and neutralized. The impotence is programmatic to a habitual 20th-century politics that misidentifies it as a solution to the problem of mass upheaval and popular uprising. Such impotent psyche cannot orient itself in the world except by following some external authority without an ability to examine and judge.

To understand, but also to modify the new cultures of coping, its neo-cynical variety, we should respond to the demand of de-psychologization and prevent falling back into nature-culture and mind-world dualisms. psychologization of human response to material exploitation has, in the end, exacerbated our condition.

This is no different than going from the perception of cynicism as attitude to cynicism as a material effect on all landscapes. For longer now, we have understood cynicism as a psychological condition and response. But now we can speak of factual abandonment, in line with reality. We can detect cynicism in its silence, a silence that is a very loud representation of those bio-impoverished landscapes that lay waste or are being wasted.

To see the material cynicism in what is left in silence, and to de-psychologize the dark outside when someone says something bright and positive, we have to start seeing the darkness that surrounds these situations: for example, the situation someone speaks of ‘taking care of oneself’ (but did you give up on caring for the world to be able to take care of your “self”?), ‘I leave that to the scientists’ (but they need your help, your interest, and your scientific ambition to continue), or ‘nature will resolve with or without us’ (and yet our irresponsible guardians will not let this nature go its way). ‘In the scale of the universe we are insignificant.’ (Aren’t you maddeningly presumptuous of your own greatness to make such a comparison in the first place?)

The same holds for business talk and professional relations. In its positivity we should learn to detect and name what it lays waste in silent darkness–both in its downtrodden back offices, its displaced sights of production, as well as the landscapes that it empties out. This is necessary because the prerogative of optimism and the entrepreneurial and networking etiquette of “always being upbeat” has become part of the problem. Without a downbeat, the music will not continue. We don’t want to find ourselves remaining positive within an ever-shrinking area of life and experience. Better to be negative in the forest than to be positive inside a prison cell.

We should dare to be integral and address the difficult silence. We have to become able to recall what we previously had given up personally and collectively, or in reverse, what landscapes have left us hopeless and are in need of our care. And thereby we can sense, again, what regions of existence are calling for our concern and care. And not only that, there might be a reward waiting for us: the experience that, yes, the world is more spacious than our enclosed and colonized psyches and lives, a world that can prove yet again that it is accommodating and inhabitable.

———

What happens after detecting, naming, and struggling to reclaim depends on particular and situated responses. Something not to be generalized. The net of generalization is now surely too thin and infirm to extend over all the complex landscapes. But above all, the point is to resist expelling those cynical landscapes from our minds and to resist being satisfied with one’s parcel only, leaving the movement of business as usual to its devices. However it happens, the lesson remains: out of sight is never out of existence.

This could sound like good sense and as such hopes to reach the being of the reader. But it can also be regarded as old news. “Of course we try to care.” “We are already working full capacity and cannot take on board more than that.” Or it can be seen as empty words or “it’s easy for you to talk.” It can be read as a cynical text itself (it does not deny being part of the contemporary). Or the response can be “and what solutions do you propose?” I believe this text has done sufficient work if it has sensitized us to the displacement of cynicism and enabled us to spot it where is happens and shift course at any juncture in life where cynicism dissuades to care and have us close our senses.

“We already care” is indeed a legitimate reply, but I am certain that only a very small group can so exclaim. The persuasion of others to care also instills the hope that the task will become less difficult and exhausting. But the question of structures that dissuade care remain a question and to the same extent the task of care remains doubled: one of caring for what is damaged, “a damaged planet,” but also questioning the forces in place that do the damage.

Thus in shifting the cynical response to one of care (you could say, a shift to an old and healthy cynicism/kynicism that does care about the state of the world and the varieties of existence), it will not be a matter of caring for what we encounter in its state of being in peril, and caring for the landscapes where we now are, and those landscapes which we gave up previously. No, its second layer is that of following the lines from place A about which we care to place B and C and perhaps further, that is, Bs and Cs that cannot be separate from A. This is not only true for “geopolitics” where we need to shift from thinking in border to thinking in rivers, ocean streams, jet streams, zones of convergences, soil depositions, mineral movements. It is true for almost anything subject to the attempt of “purification” and homogenization: everyone’s ancestry is already composed of As, Bs, Cs, and more. Genetic inheritance is not the only inheritance. Everyone is a little bit ancient Greek, a little bit gangnam style, a little bit Arabic in counting and semitic in writing. Everyone is a little bit plastic and organic. We all reproduce many things only one of which is human children–we reproduce styles, memories, practices, air-conditioned atmospheres,…

…

Yes, if you believe that these matters of shifting opinion, and you read in agreement (or disagreement, whatever), put the piece of text aside, go to bed and tomorrow find yourself in your workplace without noticing a possibility of connecting the cynical look and your work routine, then you are still defending your isolated self against what is really going on. Your “poor little me” is still valuing itself greater than those things that make the life many possible. Yes, you have a reason to think that things cannot change that quickly, that the distance between abstract and philosophical concepts are always too great from what is concrete, practical, and the daily prerogatives of our lives. (But your daily life is not free of abstractions, it’s just that you are familiar with them.) You have to pay your bills first before you can spend any little amount of time trying to make a change for the good. You have good reasons to stay in this situation. Tomorrow the situation will necessarily be worse: your job is even more precarious and your reasons feel more impending: to hold on. You are already living life in the reverse direction, looking into the constricted corner as the remaining little spot where you could live life as you know it. Diogenes has no hold over you. Truly, not everyone can live in a wine barrel as there must be winemakers and barrel makers around. For the reason of life you are justified to walk the streets of the city whose road all lead to finitude and termination (death would too fertile a word to call it, as from ashes the new Phoenix rises and the flesh becomes soil for flowers). It will be choice, a truly free choice for you to make, to look into the unknown on which our collective lives depend.

And for those of us who keep to our humble contributions at the limits of home and work (and I have done both), this should be a question for us, one that demands examination, whether we are not living in a bubble that we have built to merely keep out of sight those parts of existence that make us feel desperate and cynical. Whether this neo-cynical way of life will prove sustainable. The real and good cynicism might after all be the one that actively engages with whatever is imperfect in the world. Our world is indeed not ideal and very complicated, the cynic knows, but it remains our world.

The School of Athens, by Raphael (1509-1511). Apostelic Palace, Vatican.

Acknowledgement: This piece, its style and reasoning, is indebted to historian of science Michel Serres.

Note: I suggest the reader to “View image” in a “New window” to switch back and forth when reading. The text points out to parts of the painting in studying it.

This story is oft-told: With our hands we point to the places in the world, where we want to invest the attention of others. “Show it to me,” demanded the person who wanted to found a claim of knowledge on evidence and demonstration. “Look, see? There it is,” was the response of the investigator who pursued the construction of evidence. To the extent that we can point to something we can persuade ourselves and others that that something is there. The index finger is an ordinary prerequisite of knowledge. But what does the other hand do?

In Raphael’s School of Athens, where all the fathers of Western knowledge figure, we can see those fingers. Most pointing fingers are on the right hands. How should we understand the function of the left hand? And what does this hand say about the Homo Sapien and his life of knowledge? Do the left hands play the mere supporting role? They seem to be supporting, but merely?

In the center of the Raphael’s painting are depicted Plato, on the left, and Aristotle on the right. Plato points upwards, as if that is the place the eternal forms have home, in unity. Aristotle’s gesture covers the world beneath his middle, to the myriad of things. “This is where we have to look.”

Plato and Aristotle are holding books. They are, moreover, holding them differently. Shouldn’t that tell us about a second difference between the philosophers? Shouldn’t the left hands reveal yet another variety in ways of relating to the world, or to text and words at least? What difference has Raphael imagined and depicted in their use of their left hands, or their use of books? Is it anything other than the imitation of his own painting gesture–the brush in his right hand and the color palette in his left? Or would he have held himself onto his place with his left hand, while he was painting this wall? Or maybe someone else gave him a hand?

Can the other figures in the painting help decipher what the left hand is supposed to do? Almost all visible left hands are holding something. To the left of the man beneath the stairs and leaning onto the stone block (it is said the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus figures here), a dark-skinned man stands to hold open a book. With the right hand he points to something in the book while with his face he is asking for the attention of a scribing figure, the bald man. Does the upright man know the difference between written words and the things to which those words refer? He does not get to receive the gaze of anyone; is he attached too obsessively to the text like the Arab scholars who ardently translated and preserved Greek texts? Anyway, whether this is a version of ‘orientalism’ or not, his gesture seems out of joint. The left hand holds too awkwardly onto the thinner half of the binding, already wanting to turn the page while the right hand desires to remain on the current page. His right hand and his gaze diverge and divide rather than unify the attention. A confused coordination of the body exemplifies a clouded mind; a clouded mind is visible through a confused body. Lastly, he is asking for the attention of someone who is already engaged with writing himself (the bald man, he could be Pythagoras) and who is already in a better learned circle, or learning circle; this bald man does not merely write, he writes in relating to an object (even though, and even more so, to an object that itself refers still to yet another thing…), to the small drawing board in front him, held with another left hand, with the hand of a boy–young Archimedes showing his “principle.”

And all the while a third and older figure is learning from him–Pythagoras–making notes with the usual distribution of tasks among the hands. This is Anaximander, another geometrician (it does not matter for the sake of our treatise what his contributions were). Paradoxically, Anaximander was born before Pythagoras. And Archimedes set foot on earth long after Pythagoras passed. The order of learning is depicted in the wrong direction! But no, the message is that they were all working towards the same orderly laws. If they would be alive at one and the same time, as they do in Raphael’s masterpiece, the older men would surely learn from the young Archimedes because his results are the purest and closest to the truth, all condensed onto one diagram. But this is so only because Archimedes had to learn from the prolific texts and tales of Pythagoras, who absorbed the scribbles and notes of Anaximander.

How could we know our world and coordinate ourselves within it, if not by learning to direct our gaze, fix our attention, and follow our wise elders even more closely than they have done themselves? And could they know anything if not by making things that also gesture towards, for example, the sun, even when it is night, to a building that is yet to be built, to the here-after, which is arriving but always beyond a horizon? And how could we know the greater existence and the dark side of the moon if not by somehow holding it here and now, and so, manipulate it?

How could we point out those things, sensations in our bodies, the force of wind, the order of the movement of the stars, the regularities of falling bodies, the process that gives forth new living creates, things do not lie in front of as objects and moreover objects that fit in our hands, between our arms and fall within the scope of our vision? Admittedly, this is the theme of “indexicality,” which itself is a meaning of objectivity, that Bruno Latour has ethnographically proposed as what scientists seeks to construct and maintain: we should be able to point at the difference or piece of evidence at any point of our investigation. What I seek to add is to connect this to a certain posture and bodily composition, so that we get to know how we insert our human bodies into environments where science is practiced. The reader has probably guessed by now that we can do this thanks to the genius of Raphael’s visual knowledge of bodies and his knowledge of the Greek men.

Let us study the painting further. Is the dark-skinned man a student, maybe a presumptuous learner? No, the learners are on the right. With a group of four they are collected around a board laid down on the ground on which an older man in a red robe (they say it is Euclid) is exercising geometry. Here we see the teacher drawing with his right hand stretched maximally, while he is supporting his bent posture, presumably, with his left. The floor not only holds the surface on which he exercises his art, but its flatness is a perfect match for the purposes of his drawing. And what do the pupils do? Their attention shifts to everywhere. The point here (imagine my right hand pointing) is not just that they are learning to grasp and master geometry, but that they learn geometry to the extent that they learn to properly use their hands and gaze. In this current situation only the learner closest to the board is close enough to retracing the circle that the teacher is producing, with fingers of the left hand imitating the teacher’s. Other pupils either lack coordination of hands and eyes (in the middle), have two left hands (upper right), or have reversed the usual functions of the hands and are (thus) pointing incorrectly (upper left young man).

To know the world is to know how to hold it and how to point to (clear and distinct) things in it. It is a matter of the right position, the right distribution of tasks int eh body, the right technical extensions for both tasks of holding (surface, paper) and pointing (pen, compass). It even includes privilege just as it is a question of proximity. It is a matter of learning how to use one’s body in the proper relations to what is to be handled.

Learning geometry, and doing philosophy, then are not very different from sawing wood, screwing a screw, knotting a knot, threading a thread. They are just another sort of practice, to them belonging certain disciplines of the body.

But perhaps this distribution of the holding hand and the hand that draws, saws, knots and threads, I mean this lateral function of our bodies, has changed more recently. Perhaps with driving cars we still give directions with the right hand and hold onto to the energies of the car with the left–at least outside the UK and some of its current and former colonies. But with the typing machine and the computer? Right-handedness and left-handedness have changed. It is a new meaning in construction, a new ambidexterity. What is clear is that it corresponds to a new distribution of things in our world, and thus a new bodily posture appropriate to it. What is clear is that this is as historical a matter as it is physiological.

I eye the painting once again; The man lost in thought, leaning onto the block to the left of the middle–not with a netbook but pen and paper. He is the quasi-Heraclitus who is said to have received his ideas exclusively from things in the mind: words, inspirations, epiphanies. His left hand does not hold onto a book but a head, his head. He is not pointing to his head (which, we’d expect by now, he would do with his right hand), which would have a very different meaning–one of which is: I am mad. Rather, he is evidently thinking–he is holding his head as if getting a grip on his thoughts. His left hand on its turn is supported by the stone table, which also keeps a paper on its place. Is the left hand the model for tables, and are tables substitutes for left hands? Is the table ever invented to free the left hand of its burdens of holding objects for the right hand to manipulate? Does the table makes the difference, among others, between the farmer, who holds a scythe (left) and swings it (right) and the man of knowledge who depends on others for holding, stands on their “shoulders,” so to say, whilst pointing to beyonds with a visionary finger? It is not an unusual hypothesis at all if one is familiar with the argument of “the extended mind.” That he places his left hand on his heap or grips a book, misguides us into thinking that he did all by himself, out of his head and merely by words on papers.

Do the hands refer to two complementary meanings of the world? That there are separable things and objects in the world to which we can give differentiated attention, all of which together form a supported and supporting whole? Do the differences between the right and the left hand, in Raphael’s depiction at least, point to the difficult relationship of wholes and parts? It is plausible that hands are differentiated in their functions. It is hopefully plausible too that this differentiation corresponds to the possibility of practicing deeds that produce knowledge of the world. Is it possible that what we call whole and parts, which still has an enigmatic place in the world of the sciences (especially that of the complex systems and also in the hypotheses on lateralization of human brain functions) is, at last, explicable thanks to the left and the right hand?

And a few more hands. Let us notice the old man on the stairs, beneath Aristotle. He does not care for his posture or his cover. His care is for holding the plate or paper at the right distance, on which he reads. His right hand is relieved of duty (he is retired and does not command anyone any longer, does not teach or communicatie), while his right arm is also a pillar that holds his reading shoulders and head (his energies go into sustaining his old days and his aging body). He does not point out anything even though we can see he has great interest in knowledge. We won’t know whether what is going on inside his dark head is genius or a lost mind–until he is tested and succeeds or fails in convincingly pointing out what he has learnt and can learn us too.

And this question of genius or madness, perhaps, brings about the dismayed hands of the young person who has his back turned to us. “Look at him”, asks the left hand, “what do we do with this condition of being”, asks the right hand. Is this young figure also learning, as his left hand is doing right hands’ work? Not possible to deny. But as our previous figures did, this left hand is actually holding the whole of the man, so that the right hand can pose a question about a part of him. Just notice how the left hand is meticuously oriented flatly towards the pith of old body’s matter, and the right hand is inviting to question by directing itself at him with open and undetermined gesture. It is the job of master painter, not to deny.

Possibly, what is under our attention is given by the right to the left hand to hold, so that afterwards we can lay our focus further towards the parts of what is now a whole in its own right–or better, its own left.

Prominent wholes, the earth and the heavens, are in fact held by noble figures to the right of the students of geometry–we can enumerate the variety of disciplines here in this one painting. A geographer is holding a globe with his left hand (young Ptolemy?), and the other has the sphere of the heavens balancing, curiously, on his right hand (perhaps the older Ptolemy, or Hipparcus). Does my narrative break down here? Is the neat distribution of functions of holding and pointing, supporting and manipulating, among right and left nevertheless arbitrary and wishful thinking on my part? (And looking at the statue of the soldier on the right, we have the functions of attacking and defending. With the musician, though also somewhat ambiguous, we also have holding and striking.) Not quite if we see how the sphere of the heavens are resting on the stretched fingers of the astronomer. Not, if we ask ourselves, as if we were contemporaries of Raphael, “could we get a hold of the stars?” It is impossible for Raphael to use the left hand when the heavens are concerned. They have a hold on us, not us of them. The astronomer can have the heavens spinning on his fingers, only as a puzzle, with a paradoxical look.

It is a beautiful lesson, if I am correct, that to know the heavens properly is to know that it is impossible to hold them, impossible, in fact, to map its infinity like we map the finite earth on a globe. And it is also to speculate, that it is already held for us (and what do we call the creature that hold the heaves for us?); we only need to point. It is a second marvel, another lesson, that to do geometry means a different repertoire of holding and pointing than doing astronomy.

Until, of course, left hands start to fix spectacles, series of lenses, telescopes, in front of our eyes. Heavens and stars can be brought closer to us. While the right hand is busy individuating heavenly bodies, the crafty left hand has not sit still. A little exchange between the hands has transformed quite a few destinies. A few instruments placed in between the eyes and ears on the one hand and the stars on the others have transformed the programming of our muscles.

And so the right hands of Plato and Aristotle have to point differently in our times, even if their concern remains with philosophy. The world of Ideas is now no more in the heavens than it is a supposed non-place, with no spatial coordinates. No more are the layered skies the greater place that holds us and our little world in its place. Nowadays we even find non-places on Earth. For them we have to look at any generic metro station, thanks to the point made by Marc Augé–at least before art works where especially commissioned to make it possible to tell stations from one another.

So, things have become somewhat more complicated now. But we still feel the need to give anything its proper place, and a way of pointing things out in trying to relate to them. And there is no other ways than to count our bodies in when we do so, no other way than to be ambidexterous about it. The ways we use our hands remain efforts towards such a world. We never stop using them some way or other.

—

For this text, to stay with Raphael’s philosophers, why, again, are Plato and Aristotle employing their left hands differently? With Aristotle we can play on his similarity with Pythagoras, the fuzzy scholar. Both of them hold their books in use, or ready to be used–more than Plato does, who pretends to already speak from the book. Left feet of both Aristotle and Pythagoras are visibly helping along. Their books are grounded in that way. What is written in their books is supported by what is here and near or is brought nearby. Yes, even Pythagoras brings things nearby with his art of numbers and geometry of distances.

But Plato understands Pythagoras differently (and Raphael agrees, in painting Pythagoras on Plato’s side). There is no point in closing in on anything or taking a distance, no use for manipulating and experimenting. What is there in the book is already as close as possible to the truth, which is in another world of Ideas. One has to have learned by heart. And this accomplishment is signaled by the restful way of holding the book under one’s arms. If for Aristotle the book must be constantly opened to consult, to check, make additions and subtractions, for Plato, the book is already finished. If for Aristotle the book must change steadily, as if there is no difference between a book and a notebook, because it refers to constant change in the empirical world, for Plato the book must refer to the ultimate truth and once written the book itself will be ultimate. For Plato everything is already at the right distance, including the paradox of knowing truths that are infinitely far away. And so, manipulation, experimentation is unnecessary. He is the armchair philosopher, with the left hand resting while the right writes. (At least, this is the received idea of Plato, in Raphael’s time and in our time still.) With Aristotle the left hand will never rest, even if from our point of view he misunderstood the varieties of change in the world.

We inherit both of these philosopher and others. Somehow they are united, or mingled, in our endless repertoire of gestures and meanings. Is the smartphone more Platonist or Aristotelian? Does it help us with accessing the world or does it alienate and confuse us? Does it try to clear up our place in the greater cosmos, or give us the feeling of a universal mind without a particular place, a mind in completely free relation to all things? Does it make us cosmopolitan, or creates new ways for us to be localized? The answer is not one or the others, but somewhere in the direction of having to learn anew how to properly grasp and index the new arrangement of things. This is what Michel Serres meant with the new law that will emerge out of the Internet.

And so, we live in a world with even more figures demonstrating an even larger diversity in the use of hands. Could we represent that diversity in an image or series of images? What would those series say about our skills and presuppositions about the cosmos? If the image and the appreciation of hands is in a rubble, because we hear and see so many things but hardly sense what they point out, at least the morale here is straightforward, and can hopefully be apprehended as more than a banality: that whatever happens we will have to make sure that we know the right hand from the left.

And not to forget the basic precondition that it is a privilege to have two hands free, and to be able to go to school–which indeed means: free time–a privilege that is still not universal as well as badly implemented in State education. As such the following ideals are both intelligible and sensible: to give others a (left) hand, to emancipate, to convene together in holding our world and join our gaze, and share knowledge. In the least, can we, come closer to this little justice, in accounting for the efforts of the left hand as much as we have praised the right in our historiography of knowing? For the care that must be given to all the things before we can point so effortlessly to them? And more broadly, to take on matters of our existence more evenhandedly? Not mere abstractions, but still an ideal to reach for.