I had a discussion with a friend about enthusiasm, within a discussion about alienation (for instance, the splitting of oneself between one’s work and one’s job) – a type of enthusiasm that burns through categories, making one’s work in general total, unfragmented, all over the result of one mind, a unified will. Then is one not only not an artist or architect or writer or baker, but one doesn’t even make art, design architecture, write or bake – one produces – perhaps it could be called producing oneself, since all other categories are externally decided divisions. My friend regarded enthusiasm as the most important part of his work (pausing for a moment to ask me where the Michael he knew had gone, the one who smiled and played the drums in his studio). If skepticism and doubt are considered conservative traits (and they usually aren’t) then I suppose in the conversation I appeared as a self-preserving or gullible person who would maintain the distinctions and classifications so as to feel a sense of order and control; to preserve the world the way it has been handed to me in order to not get lost in an indeterminate and unfamiliar, new place. Where imagination and ideas patrol like devastating, formless, productive cyclones. I am not so sure that repeating or reiterating these titles – putting on the guise of one of these roles – or doing/performing these actions while denying the titles or identities (which still describes a thing with its associations) – is conservative. I likened it to the idea of the experiment: (perhaps temporary) assumption of an identity “other” than our own, which perhaps seems to presuppose a certain claim to self-understanding and also objectivity and distance, but is a way to experience something “else”.
In light of enthusiasm, a character is an awkward and extraneous obstacle, a bit of ornament, or a growth to be worked on therapeutically. It is an excuse to dampen enthusiasm (“that other one is in my way”) or to deviate irrationally (a turn of direction, an external influence, the assumption of a position), a choice or fragmentation or relativism because this other character or this character (being one) offers its set of behaviours and habitat as traits, externalities to try on, settle into, rebuke or throw away. As a tool for thinking, characters bring with them in codes and chains and even whole bodies the resources to measure associations and those tendencies we take as given components of our identities. A character has to play wholeheartedly, however, otherwise it risks showing us nothing but tactical manoeuvres (though these motions, these deviations could be profitable or not, could be advances, or breaks, in a rising trajectory) – maybe not wholeheartedly but at least completely superficially, covering every curve; again, risking the implication of a centred perspective, that one knows who one is, beyond all the characters. The commitment that gives enthusiasm its good name is not avoided through this logic, but for better or worse desire can become confused. We can stray and warp, and we don’t necessarily return to an original, a true position. We return to an alienated position, but clearer as alienated through the character’s lessons.
(originally posted on the Vitamin Creative Space blog, 07/08/2009)