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  • The Artwork without Cardinal Direction:Notes on Orientation in Adorno
  • Gerhard Richter (bio)

The German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann once described the attitude and altitude of abstract thought as follows: “This theory design pushes the presentation [Darstellung] to unusually high levels of abstraction. Our flight must take place above the clouds, and we must reckon with a rather thick cloud cover. We must rely on our instruments. Occasionally, we may catch glimpses below of a land with roads, towns, rivers, and coastlines that remind us of something familiar.” “But,” he continues, “no one should fall victim to the illusion that these few points of reference are sufficient to guide our flight.”1 When thinking works to push beyond what already has been thought, not in the merely additive sense of annexing or occupying new territory but in the sense of engaging with what remains unthought and perpetually in withdrawal, it may no longer be possible to rely upon our usual organs of sense perception. Does not the thinking that wishes to transgress what is customary and admissible to think fly without the burden or benefit of received models of orientation? Would orientation itself not have to be rethought, pried, for example, out of the hands of what in the recently reformed German university system often is referred to, in a perhaps prematurely triumphant tone, as Orientierungswissen, or orientational knowledge? Would this thinking not also require a reinscribing of orientation into the very question—indeed, [End Page 754] as the very question—of the relation between thinking and orientation? And what implications might such a reinscription have for our various discourses of thinking orientation, such as spatial orientation, sexual orientation, mathematical orientation, and so forth? In what ways might this reinscription problematize our understanding, for example, of architectural orientation and its reliance upon the sun and cardinal directions to denote the directionality of a building? After all, the etymology of “orient-ation” can be traced back to “the Orient” as that which lies in the East. And might not our insistence upon such a moment of nonself-identity inadvertently undermine our orientation to person, place, and time as measured by a psychiatric mental status exam that seeks to ascertain whether symptoms of psychotic disorder, dementia, dissociative amnesia, or other such breakdowns in orientation might have occurred? One also thinks of what in the U.S. and elsewhere is called “student orientation,” an event that takes place before these same students go, in a hideous yet telling phrase, “shopping for classes.”

Georg Lukács’s well-known 1920 formulation of “transcendental homelessness,”2 which recalls Novalis’s early romanticist definition of philosophy as a perpetual homesickness, speaks to the question of orientation in modernity, as does Michel Foucault’s epistemic intuition that our “present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” “We are at a moment,” he continues, “when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points.”3 While it might be argued that the category of the “far,” in the oppositional pair of the near and the far, has been increasingly eviscerated, since Foucault’s 1967 intuition, in favor of an (electronically mediated) experience of perpetual nearness, availability, and simulated presence—so that “farness” in the twenty-first century has, in a sense, ceased to exist—the question as to how to orient oneself in that reconfigured space of experience has hardly left us. On the contrary, what orientation may mean to the critical field today cannot but be thought in relation to the networks of a cultural and political paradigm sponsored by a relentless global technocapitalism, in which, as J. Hillis Miller reminds us, the orientational [End Page 755] viability of critical thought today must measure itself against such heterogeneous threats as “global climate change…that may soon make the species Homo sapiens extinct,” a “global financial meltdown brought about by the folly and greed of our politicians and financiers,” “catastrophic unemployment,” “endless...

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