Brainz Disruptive
The book includes a chapter by Alice Koubová entitled Inner Peripheries of Life in Late Modernity, which deliberately works with an experimental mode of writing on the boundary between an account of the situation of late modernity and a phenomenological analysis of experience.
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Excerpt of the chapter Inner Peripheries of Life in Late Modernity
Introduction
For the past three weeks, people close to me have been getting in touch every day. They describe how at times they can no longer even move, how fear has wound itself around them and pierced them through, how they weep uncontrollably on the tram, how their once full-blooded hope now whimpers on the bed with its throat tied off, how emptiness grins at them. They used to speak of the threats posed by the actions of the American president, the Czech prime minister, ministers and oligarchs, of the precisely formulated brutality of the economic elite, but now they also speak of relatives, of people at work, in sports clubs, of friends on social media. With horror they tell me that at the family Christmas gathering an aunt held forth that Hitler unfortunately never managed to finish his work, that Ukrainian children are the source of all Czech suffering, and that Russia has fine literature, despite the fact that the aunt had never in her life had the slightest motivation to acquaint herself with the literature of any nation whatsoever. They describe how their colleagues at work regard a fairy tale about a lesbian couple as definitive proof that the logic of the world has been dislocated and must be set right with a firm fist, with force, without mercy. Either us or them, either our blood or theirs.
The social discourse of violence is rising. At the same time, our lives go on. We keep working, communicating, writing scholarly texts, meeting grant obligations, going to lectures and looking at the artistic work of others.
It matters that I was invited to reflect on the work of Lukáš Hofmann in precisely this social situation. The brief was unconventional and, for me, very appealing. The aim of this text is not to offer art criticism of any particular work by Lukáš Hofmann, nor an interpretation of his work in terms of historical comparison. Instead, I was given the opportunity to think through how the work of Lukáš Hofmann might be related to socio-politically relevant themes, to sketch a loose yet evident link between his aesthetic communication and an analysis of society, so that the result would be an autonomous text in the field of philosophical and social reflection.
Lukáš Hofmann is very often part of his own performances. He is the author of the concept, the director and the performer. He is inside the works he looks at from outside. Through his encapsulation he distances himself; through his distance he binds himself to what he speaks about. He thus observes the world from afar, yet that distance arises from the inner edge of reality. If I am to capture this authorial inclusion in themes that allow for detachment from reality, I ask myself to what extent I too may be included in the analytical account of society I am meant to provide. May a scholar dare to write the way an artist dares to create? I decide: if I am not to write about Lukáš Hofmann but alongside him and beside him, so as not to lose my connection with him, I must in a certain sense repeat his gesture; I must find the inner periphery from which I will speak. I therefore decide to acknowledge my personal position in this scholarly text and to include it in the account.