CODE: SELFLESS – with Harold Schellinx – PART THREE – THE GUY WITH THE HAT!

The following posts were written before the sad and unexpected passing of Harold. We leave them up in his memory.

Best known as an experimental electronic musician working in Europe’s avant-garde underground* since the late 1970s, Harold Schellinx decided to take over WORM for a midsummer week in the hope that we all don’t come. And – get this – we don’t even have to not come to WORM, as he’s often somewhere else, with other people. That’s because the whole thing is, CODE: SELFLESS.

WE TOLD YOU ALREADY IN PARTS ONE AND TWO AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW, WHY HAVEN’T YOU READ THEM BUT ANYWAY-ANYWAY Harold is an interesting chap so we asked him questions about what to do with our codefied angst, and tree leaves (blame Elon Musque) and he told us about rules, and Beuys.

*We neither

Question five (related): Where can we find a code-free world? In fact (related, or not) what *is* code?

Answer five:

Nein. No code-free truth is out there. 

As a collection of individuals that exist ‘out of their heads’ in some construct that we call ‘the real world’, we lost pretty much all chance of regaining access to a code-free (ur-)world (the thing that religious texts and ancient myths refer to as ‘Paradise’, or some similar whatchamacallit), the very moment we began using signs to communicate and language emerged (that’s, in Dutch, de zondeval).

By ‘a code’ we always mean some set of rules. 

Rules for human conduct (as in law), or rules for whatever other kinds of transformation of ‘things’ and their subsequent communication. 

But: there’s always a code that lurks behind a code, behind a code, behind a code, behind a … and so on. Yes, yes, it’s turtles all the way down, in order to carry that weight: the information, ‘which is nothing, and comes at night’. (I think of it as the phlogiston of our day and age).

(Our) code’s original sin is in its chopping up of the inseparable, of the continuous gesture, the flow of time, that is fundamentally un-digital and un-speakable: there is not just a bit, and then another, with nothing in between but a void. No. There is time’s flow. This contentless abstraction of the sensation of time, is what Luitzen Brouwer considered the ultimate ‘ur-intution’ (not only in mathematics, but of all creative activity), that of two-ness or two-ity, where there is the one, and then the second, ‘thought not by itself, but under preservation of the recollection of the first’.

A single singular example of code-free worlds that still are accessible, then are the inner spaces that are home to the fundamentally uncommunicable mental constructions of a solipsist ‘creative subject’ (that, remarkably, as in Brouwer’s intuitionism, can be set to work as a totally valid tool, also in a ‘coded’ world 🙂

Question six: Can tree leaves be used as currency?

Answer six:

Well, definitely they can. And they should (I am, profoundly, not a money fiend: “Against Money” is the one text I continue to write), as, in a deep sense, they already are. Think chlorophyll. Think photosynthesis. It’s trees that keep us breathing. And maybe trees can soften the impact of capitalism’s money-chasing, hi-speed destruction of much of the world as we know it. Was it Joseph Beuys (the guy with the hat, shared a room with a wolf and declared that all of us are artists) who set up a participatory art-tree leaves-farm, and organised this contest for collectors of his work, loudly but vainly protested by bankers, stock market dealers and other remaining hard cash money lovers? Didn’t he invite the 200 winners, all among the world’s leaf-richest art dealers, to join him on a hike into the Black Forest, where they all were given their very own, Beuys-inscribed oak tree to hug, leaf-pluck and take care of?

Nay, probably just my imagination…