Transcript
Speaker: You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing. Creator and host, Ken Valente. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
Speaker: It's interesting because I've been I followed the podcast industry because like when I operate in something like I want to know the industry. And so it's been a fascinating thing to look at. But this whole video audio thing is such like a like there's this massive thing within podcasts of being like, yo, antiquarian, you still on audio? Audio and it'd be like, and and and some of us, you know, whatever your preference, because i love video too. But like, and then some people are like, you know, this is a freaking like audio radio program. That's what we fucking do. Like, you know, and and other people would be like, boom, you're going to pop that up and get your clip and get your video. And it's like, yeah, you know.
Speaker: Maybe. so it's like this this clash or something, you know? it's Yeah. I mean, suppose it's just people do listen to everything and do everything on YouTube now. or yeah You mentioned it right there. The number one discoverability for podcasts.
Speaker: primarily in audio form is YouTube search. So um everybody, ah this is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast here and got Steven Seidenberg. Really excited to talk to Steven, philosopher, photographer, thinker about art, a writer um with ah ah books by the title of Anon.
Speaker: and Coda in ah prominent work in photography, the architecture of silence. And Stephen, seeing your work in in seeing in hearing and hearing your thinking, seeing your thinking, I'm very happy to have you on the show. I wanted to ask you, and I'd love to have philosophers pop on here, how'd you how dod you arrive at philosophy? It's usually a distinct story for for anybody who pops into that discipline.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I came to it fairly early when I was a teenager. I started reading really things in more in kind of wisdom literature, I suppose, ah just as ah as a way of trying to answer some of the questions that were most ah troubling me and were most disturbing my life, in fact. ah is So kind of Western mysticisms of different kinds. Yeah. yeah Nothing of any
Speaker: significance And and in in in the process came across Gurdjieff and then through Gurdjieff, P. D. Ospensky. P. D. Ospensky is not a significant philosopher per se as a popularizer or philosophical narrator of Gurdjieff's work, as ah who is also ah ah not not a thinker whose work I particularly value. but um Ospensky was trying to give the Gurdjieffian system a kind of ah way of speaking to the Western philosophical tradition. And I...
Speaker: I found one of his books. I read this book, Tertie Morgana, it was called. And there was a footnote in the text to the Critique of Pure Reason, to Kant in the Critique Pure Reason. Yeah, yeah. Which I had no knowledge of. Yeah. And somehow, through some miraculous...
Speaker: intervention, there was a copy of of a translation of the Critique of Pure Reason at my otherwise almost completely vacuous local bookstore. Wow. In the mall, as it were. the mall, the critique. In the mall. Yeah, and it was a in a section called philosophy and philosophy slash spirituality. So it gives you a sense of what... There were two things that were that had significant value for me ultimately, which was the critique of pure reason and being in nothingness. Both of those texts we'rere were there for whatever reason. and ah And so I unwittingly purchased a copy of the Critique of Pure Reason and and ah found myself transported in all kinds of ways. And and it was an entry into...
Speaker: what it could be like to ah examine these the questions of epistemological questions and basic questions of the relationship between ontology and epistemology. um And at the same time, you know, I was, it was, I, it was out of nowhere. It was, I was just picking this up on my own. Yeah. Of course, through Kant found myself reading Kant's predecessors, immediately reading Hume and then reading the other ah ah British empiricists and the, and ah those in the, in the Cartesian tradition as well. um And, and,
Speaker: the The interesting thing about that for me, i think that was generative in a way that is perhaps distinct from other people who pursue philosophy is that it it it be in in in the absence of contextualization, I was able to read these works as works of literature.
Speaker: not just so i was also yeah yeah just like a fresh um and i don't mean to to interrupt you there but just just just talking up talking about the con um and just like pausing there for a second because it's not too often you get to talk about or the reactions or how you arrive arrive at it i i did not to go too deep into it but when i did the ah master's of philosophy at marquette university I had the four courses that were required courses, traditional and Jesuit, at least in the tradition, was Plato, Aristotle, k and Aquinas.
Speaker: So when I got to Aquinas, kind of later in my learning or contact with philosophy, but completely blew me away. Like I felt so challenged, so deeply challenged, so excited by like these ideas that I'm like, I felt like I didn't know anything about philosophy prior to like,
Speaker: bumping into the comp like that. And it's so, when you were talking about how like you find it and like in the bookstore and then see it, I want to know like fundamentally on the aspect of dealing with that text, which I found deeply, like I was driven by the difficulty of it.
Speaker: How did you, how did you handle that thing? Like you said, you even approach it as literature. Like when you bumped into that biggie, like what was like, how'd you go through it? in ah For whatever reasons, and i I don't really have an explanation for this, it immediately made sense to me. It's not that it wasn't difficult. And when I say I i was treating it as literature, I mean, I thought of it as a literary work as though it were being narrated as ah as opposed to so the transparency associated.
Speaker: with between the between the narrative voice of a philosophical text and the the and there's there's some notion that philosophical literature i call it it has is merely um descriptive rather than literary. And But if you look at the forms of those texts, I mean, if you look at Hume and Descartes and Kant, let's say, at the earliest parts of this tradition, or if you look at Plato and Aristotle, these are literary texts. Plato is writing dialogues. Yeah, so yeah. So there is no, you know, it's ah it's a confusing thing for people to realize that ah that we we have we don't have Socrates. There is no Socrates. Socrates is any more than there's a Hamlet.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. you your school that shakespeare is speaking through hamlet we shouldn't assume and of course the neoplatonists didn't assume that plato was speaking through socrates they thought there were that there were doctrines that weren't being stated that may have be aligned with socrates but the third position the position of the reader and presumably plato's position is one which is an observer two a conversation an argument between two other positions. So with now that's it's more obvious with Plato because it's a form that we we associate with with theatrical production. with um
Speaker: But if you think about Hume and Descartes, for instance, their ways, ah modes of narrative are radically distinct and they are, in a manner of speaking, ah experimenting. They really are inventing forms of discourse Each of them in the in just a similar way that, I don't know, you could say the same of Aquinas for certain. And you we know this, we we we accept it, for instance, of ah Augustine to speak of the the elemental, some of the elemental figures that define the church we're in in writing a kind of autobiography in the Confessions, and it which is a form that hadn't existed before.
Speaker: Yeah. So this is, it's true throughout this particular, it was true through all literatures. You know, there wasn't the novel as we know it, the sort of absurdly ah stultified and structured form that we have it in now. yeah And in poetic forms have always been experimental, though we try to to force them into into boundaries. and And so for for me, the I was reading Joyce and Beckett and Pound and Melville and Dickinson and others. At the same time, I was reading Kant, and it was for me to see that this there was a continuum.
Speaker: And then you know you get to Kierkegaard and you you have or Nietzsche. Both figures are doing exactly what is kind of playing with the position of the reader and as an interlocutor for the text. a Kierkegaard will will give you ah ah ah narrator who is talking about manuscripts that they've found and then presenting those manuscripts, which are have no resolution.
Speaker: and it's ah it's And he's writing under many different pseudonyms, and those pseudonyms are disagreeing with each other in different texts. So he's not giving us a position. And the same way I would say a figure that he i I would call a philosopher, but he is is generally associated with the literary tradition, Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese.
Speaker: thinker and poet and philosopher who writes under all of these heteronyms and they are not, they can speak to each other in ways that are quite interesting. So when I'm writing philosophy, as it were, that that both the texts are, the texts themselves are multivalent. they are They are speaking to each other. and speaking within the text in ways that are contradict kind of contradictory also. And at the same time, there is no, I always have a position of direct address to the reader, which is similar to how some philosophical texts are written, though it's also how Beckett writes his prose or how Dostoevsky writes some of his prose, for instance. And in all of those instances, we
Speaker: we're being asked or even required to assume that we're being manipulated and that there are rhetorical purposes at hand. And I think this is true even in, ah we we think of Kant as, in in a sense, the the the most profoundly normative of thinkers somehow. But the the the work is radical. It's absolutely radical.
Speaker: And, ah you know, you get you and the form of the work is radical. You can't there. There are there's the intervention of very of of of schemata that are that have no place in a narrative text.
Speaker: as we understand narrativity. It is wide-ranging and moving and very strange strange undulations that obviously seem, or or at least the text presents as though they are the only possible next place But they're not the only next place. And they are their their choices that God is making for rhetorical purposes. And then when you get to the antinomies, you have this absolute oddity of of opposing argument that are at absurd ah on on opposite sides of the page without resolution. i mean, it's ah it's fantastic.
Speaker: I love the way you describe it. I think there's something about it.
Speaker: my love of literature and connection to some of those questions, which have such a dynamism for me within philosophy. um ah Whether you're talking about like on the form with St. Augustine or in particular with Kierkegaard, because I've always thought that the the mixing and the the layers and the authorship in all these like querying up in like there's so much philosophy right within that. So it ends up being this relational bit that you mentioned, like where now you're the reader and you're brought into it. And I thought right off the bat of like.
Speaker: ah Some folks I talked to and is like, who's the greatest writer? and and and And some folks can't even get off Plato because of like. the all that's underneath and the not dispositive telling and the lack of resolution and where is the Plato in the Socrates and the Socrates and the Plato. And for me, like in talking to you about that, like as an intellectual area is so exciting. It's like what makes philosophy exciting for me because you bounced around a bit and it isn't as –
Speaker: you know, like didactic or something, uh, in the sense of what, uh, and what you're doing. Um, how did you, uh, Steve so much to talk about philosophy, bop more into it, but sure what about photography? Uh, what happened there?
Speaker: I started, i was, uh, always drawing and, and doing visual work as a kid. it was something I, I really, ah that I was compelled to do and drawn to do, and writing as well. But, uh,
Speaker: I had ah an uncle who was a photographer and he had a darkroom and he, I mean, he, he was ah not, ah not ah he didn't make his living that way, but he was an enthusiast and a serious hobbyist.
Speaker: And so, yeah, He showed me how to develop film and make prints and taught me some basics about how to shoot and how to use a camera. So that that was early.
Speaker: um i continued to do it through... College in some ways, though not as a central focus.
Speaker: And in fact, when I was at university and I i was studying photography, and ah really in the most casual way, just as a place with ah with, I went to Bard College, and there was a great photography program because there's a great photographer who still teaches there, named Stephen Shore.
Speaker: um And so, you know, I, I had some conversations with Steven. I had some, I, I, I, I did a little bit of work, uh, but i I, determined that my future was, through philosophy graduate school at that time. So I, you know, that was my focus. I was heading towards a PhD in philosophy and, uh,
Speaker: and
Speaker: Ultimately, that that proved less satisfying than I'd hoped it would. So after I finished and talked for a little bit and decided to move back to being an artist and a writer of literary prose rather than of say, philological or critical prose, which is what happens in the context of literature.
Speaker: the philosophical, the academy in the U phone world. So, sure. i um, there was a confluence here in, um, on, photography. had a recent guest on his name's Victor V Gerbo out of ah Brooklyn musician. i didn't expect we were talking in his, um,
Speaker: father had was ended up being the curator of the the the legacy estate ah artwork of Andres Kertes, Hungarian.
Speaker: yeah And I'm talking to he's like, well, you know who that is? I say, yeah, yeah, I've seen it in and the books. And he's like, so he sent me this beautiful book about it and then like really just erupted because I always think about photography. It's just sometimes I'm like drop into my books and and dig and and dig into it. um ah Talking about talking about um ah photography, I had just a question about place because within the work that you do, ah you encounter that. and
Speaker: ah Sometimes when I take photos, part of the idea of is, and this is very simplistic, is to capture something that isn't there or or is there as a sense of place, if there's like anything to convey there.
Speaker: um You're and thinking of like architecture, space, place in the photography that you do. ah How are you trying to engage with the physical areas that that that you're near, that you're ah photographing? like the What are you trying to help convey? I don't know if that's the right word. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, you know, it's different for different projects. And and the Architecture of Silence project, which is it' placed very specifically in an area, ah a relatively small area, that between the cities of Matera and Altamora in but Basilicata in Puglia.
Speaker: respectively, ah in southern Italy. it ah i i In a sense, I understand my photographic practice as, first, to it's ah it's a practice in series, which is to say it's a conceptual practice. it's like it were It shares a great deal with how I how i would like to to understand the kinds of conceptual art that I care about, with which is to say that it it it um It functions through mechanisms that we are familiar with, say, in music or in literature, through repetition, through repetition of structure, ah repetition of compositional structure, or of, say, semantic limits within the frame or within the series. So there's always an overarching project that defines a series of photographs for me.
Speaker: And in in the... in in every project that I do. I'm never i never interested in ah representing something that is merely there in front of me. I'm never, I, I, my work is still, and I know we talked before the podcast about discussing the nature of photography as it were, my work is still Mexico in some way to use the ultimately semiotic or Percy in term, right? It's still is in it it still is asking the viewer
Speaker: to understand it, the the the image, as having a causal relationship or ah being caused by indexing what's in the world.
Speaker: ah And rather than being a way merely, ah i'm not I'm not trying to express how I feel. Right. And that's true with all of my work. I don't I don't care about how I feel. I don't care about how you feel. I don't really care about how anybody feels. I care about other ways of understanding the world, which might make me or you feel some way or, you know, the work that I make may ah ah cause some feeling state. And I hope that it does in any of the forms that I, that I make work.
Speaker: Um, but I'm not trying to tell you how I feel. Yeah. And I'm trying to make other kinds of points that make you feel something. And it's a difference from, you know, there's a lot of contemporary photographic work that some of which is very good that that is, in fact, about ah it's it's referring back to it's part of the turn of.
Speaker: what some might call post-modernity, I would say it's a it's ah a resolution of and an emphasis of a certain aspect of modernity, but a turn back to ah the speaking about the self and about about what's happening for the person making the work.
Speaker: And, you know, that's fine. I also don't like, i'm I'm totally uninterested in confessional poetry. I don't, if a poetry, if a poet is telling me about their life, I'm not interested in the work.
Speaker: Maybe it's good. Maybe it's not. first Right, right, right, right. I, ah no, I, I, I love, it really helps convey um just intent or like, you know, why, why any of us try anything, right? Like what we're trying within the art. I wanted to ask you though, when did you first see yourself, you know,
Speaker: as an artist? Was it a seminal moment or is there still discomfort with it? I mean, when did when did you see yourself as an artist? Yeah, i always did. Even when I was practicing things that would be called art a only in private, without public, you know, I was still making work both as a writer and as ah as a photographer and as a painter, in fact, ah while I was, say, primarily publicly a philosopher, but I understood my life as a philosopher and my work as a philosopher, as an artist as well, for the reasons we're a player. Yeah, love that.
Speaker: And I actually don't see the work that I make, the work that I continue to make that gets, that is often called poetry or whatever it is, it's published by poetry presses in part because it's the only place in the Anglophone world where anything that is, any avant-garde writing published.
Speaker: Yes. ah Poets and people interested in poetry and press is interested in poetry are interested in all kinds of writing. That is. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, yeah. And so, ah but that's me doing philosophy. That's those works, Coda Anon. I had there four before this. Coda, my most recent my sixth book, actually, sixth book of literature. And they are all, they they are all me being a philosopher. That's how I understood ah what it is to be a philosopher. And it's why I felt like I couldn't be a philosopher in the Anglophone academic world, because it isn't how philosophy works here.
Speaker: ah It's fine. It's just not a part of the way that people understand what philosophical literature is. in in it has It's poetry now. So fine.
Speaker: Fine for me. I ah really enjoyed listening to CODA. um Thank you. That work. Yeah. um There's an excitement inherent in the conversation, in the the areas that I talk about, because like you know philosophers you know always address them like the why and the vitality of philosophy or the or the why. and And folks like you know you and i as you know as we know why or we can feel we can we can feel it, right? and And one of the things I like about ah talking to you and so in seeing your work is
Speaker: your rejection of like what stultifies philosophy, right? Like, you know, like, you know, even when you're talking about the outlet for what you're trying to communicate as a philosopher, what are going to Philosopher, poet, and where that, where that shows up in um experimentation or with your photographs,
Speaker: It's not the ah imposition of feelings. It's the the creation of some, I would say, again, loosely, it like an art state. So, like, there's an active engagement with the philosophy, which, like, I totally understand and which excites me about um philosophy. And when I turned, like, it was this twist, like, I had studied philosophy and I went into the labor movement deemed as super practical, I didn't have the separations in my head, right? Like I was like, I'm in contract negotiations and dealing with conflict. I got my interpretation of the text and I got my historical basis, for my interpretation of the text and I'm arguing about it. Like there was a lot of flow there where I was like, i don't know, I'm a philosopher, union rep, professional arguer, trained arguer, schmuck, asshole. Like I don't know, like all that. All of the above. But I'd love in in talking about like your your survey of things, um the engagement with the fundamental questions like authorship and and feeling of what art's trying to convey.
Speaker: What is, Stephen, what is art? Like what is art for you? Like the big philosophical question, like what's art for you? You know, i there I don't think there's any easy answer to that question. i think that there's there are many different possible arts, so to speak, and ways in which one can understand. And also, I don't think we need to make a strong distinction. i think when we when we when we say art, we're actually describing... ah i in there's There's often a confusion. where where and this is
Speaker: part of the problem with the way we'll talk about art generally is they want to know they want to know why is this art and that not art, right? As though it's a property of the object, of the thing, of the artifact.
Speaker: And at the same time, they are ah imposing their own sense of the experience of art. It's beautiful, it's this, it's that, you know, whatever, it it moves me in one way or another.
Speaker: And so they it's it's a complexity that ah Kant, for instance, ah describes in his book,
Speaker: third critique, which is really the beginnings the beginning of modern philosophy of art and and thinking about art in a philosophical way as this ah this vision of universal voice. we We speak knowing that what we're describing he's just talking about the beautiful and the sublime. Of course, he's not thinking in and, but we can extrapolate all the classifications that we do, that we use to think about art as well.
Speaker: And he's saying, we understand that there's a, that this is a, ah about a way in which ah what he calls the play of the senses, something that has to do with sensibility as it is reflected back or entirely personed, right? Subjective. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. um And at the same time, we require ourselves to speak with universal voice ah and to to to speak as though it's a truth claim. Interestingly, Kant, of course, demonstrates how that type of relationship to the to the artifact is an essential piece of of what he ultimately calls teleological judgment,
Speaker: and thus of the epistemological systems that give us any kind of knowledge. so But I think we can, for for simplicity purpose for for purposes of this conversation, maybe come at it through, say, some more recent thinking. I don't know, we could say... you know Nelson Goodman, for instance, in the languages of art or some other ah other contemporary analytic philosophers thinking about art, but also, again, ongoingly ah the way in which Heidegger thinks about art.
Speaker: you know These are systems of discourse that have rules, that have that have mechanisms for breaking those rules, and for expanding the the rule giving mechanisms of the discourse.
Speaker: So, or the the the ways in which we we understand the rules of the discourse. um So, I mean, I'm not going to define art as a set of practices a collection of artifacts.
Speaker: ah It's a set of experiences and a set of ways of talking about them. um what i What I would say is that ah there are practices, let's say, even even the distinction between art and craft, which is so radically imposed on art markets, ah certainly in the West, though much less so in other places where things that we understand to be craft and are marginalized as craft here can be And we see that now, how important, ah for instance, textile arts are and how yeah expressive and and powerful they can be. The same is true of photography, of course. Photography was not initially thought of as an art at all. It was seen as, as as it was too easy to be an art.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And so in some ways, the difference between a practice the practice of an artist and the practice of someone, a hobbyist, an enthusiast, has to do less with how the work is received in the world than it does with how the maker understands the work to be in discourse with other artists.
Speaker: ah If the work is not in a discursive context, it doesn't have to be artists, other artists that are seen as as as um acceptable, or as but if the work is not understanding itself in relationship to the practices of other artists, then it's not ah then it is not art in the way that we're talking about now.
Speaker: It's a different kind of practice. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, love you mentioned, uh, Kant's critique, uh, judgment. I, I remember a studying again, uh, Kant and, you know, what I found, like I took Kant as a guide to like, uh, what he thought was most important to do with this time as philosopher, like epistemology,
Speaker: ah uh, morals, ethics, um and the prominence of of art. And that was a work which i um I still think about and grapple with because the experience with Kant is to to kind of go back and and and to work on it and and to figure it out. But um ah that critique of judgment, like when you have what I've enjoyed, I've had contact with is the opportunity and the guidance to study very smart people talking about art and how that lights us up. Like for whatever reasons, the ideas behind it or whether so you know whether it's the shock or the beauty where our breath is taken away or we start crying, like all these kind of like unexplainable things. Like I just love...
Speaker: attempts to try to get at that magic and like, well, what's, what's happening ah to us. Steven, related to what art is right now, um I ask a question and um
Speaker: like right now we're recording in the summer of 2026 is the role of art, like in this world, like art now, is its role any different than it has been or is it,
Speaker: holding us a similar place of art, just arting. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's, it's exaggerated in different ways, but it's a similar place. I would say that the, the we it's hard to predict.
Speaker: ah Well, I'll here, I'll, I'll, I'll reveal my interest in and and and commitment to a vision of art as Gramsci saw art ah and gra Antonio Gramsci, the ah great Italian Marxist thinker. And and as A mechanism that can can move us away from, say exploitation by virtue of counter-hegemony.
Speaker: So if we understand that ah that, in fact, we are culturally and economically driven towards exploitation, always, both exploiting others and the our own exploitation. yeah The escape from that can happen through counter hegemonic art, which is why i think that art, that ah that part of how we have to evaluate art is the the ways in which we understand it to be challenging those who encounter it.
Speaker: So how does it challenge, how does it push ah in various emotional and intellectual ways to, to how does it make the interlocutor im uncomfortable in one way or another? yeah One can be made uncomfortable by by beauty or by sublimity or by shock or by all kinds of things. You know, it's not, it is it That doesn't mean one particular kind of art or one particular set of responses. But um I think we we are in an era, ah i probably in ways that I don't fully understand even through social media and other mechanisms of dissemination, where it's
Speaker: where the most radical of artifacts is used in, uh, primarily and understood primarily through the promotion of hegemonic impulses and, and essentially, uh, uh, corporate profit, too profit yields. So, um, uh, so it's different in that way, but we can,
Speaker: you know we At the same time, these forces have always have been since certainly since ah the Industrial Revolution, been the same forces. And they work they they they work through different mechanisms, through technological development, but that's also been a constant process of of of revolution and counter-revolution, as it were. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're talking to me and popped into my brain. um You mentioned Heidegger being time before, but um both the thinking Heidegger on art, but in particular on technology, it's hugely influential to me. And like, there's a ah point where my brain zaps back to my learning long ago. And just like in the ah question concerning technology for, for listeners, and hopefully I do it just a simple, basic job of explaining it, but like,
Speaker: The history of technology is being an extension of like the human hand, the human body. And then there is this separation where technology is kind of removed ah from us and ah technology has its own. ah space and ah largely through within this what I think I find wonderful about the essay and in overall as far as understanding is like kind of the role of um art or the poetry role of poetry more in particular at pointing us to some to something else and I was hearing that and in in and what you're saying like pointing us to something else and And I even when I experienced and now I experienced it then, it sounded like such a like weird, fruity philosopher type of thing to say. Right. Like we have the the rise of technology and its separation from us.
Speaker: And but there's something radical and deep that's always made sense to me and what he's saying of. In my head, it's poetry, art, some other form that pulls us back to our humanity. Like why the hell we're breathing and and stuff.
Speaker: That piece has always been so powerful to me. And I just wanted to bring that out because I was listening to talking about in it it like just the what else that causes us to question.
Speaker: Right. What's going on? Yeah, that's a great essay and an important essay. And, you know, I think that that Heidegger's failing, and this is Heidegger's failing, is that he's never, he never is really able to, ah to, to,
Speaker: speak to Marx at all. and And so he fails in that essay as well. to the understanding of the So he he points out this understanding of the world, as a standing as this way of thinking of the world as a standing resource, as though that happens outside of the world.
Speaker: kill is greek production i mean it's Yeah, yeah. yeah yeah It's not that there aren't insights there. There are. and Yeah. But there are... ah There are failings as well. Oh, very, very, very ah well put. i got I got to make sure the titular question of the ah episode and gosh, philosophers, i ah you're going to scream at me and be like, yeah, come on, I'll do this. um ah Stephen, why is there something rather than nothing? we get a trained philosopher here. Like your knowledge is extensive.
Speaker: Tell us, tell us if you can. Okay, well, you know, i would I would say there isn't something rather than nothing. So the that the problem is, I'll give you the Hegel's answer in a sense, which is it's just, it's it's a it's a category mix-up of a question.
Speaker: Right. So we we it's ah he Hegel essentially says when we when we say something, we mean ah a particular, a thing, a thing that is and has qualities. When we say nothing, we mean in this question, in the Leibnizian question, or as that's formulated, we mean ah a,
Speaker: ah abroad We don't mean the absence of something the way that we would when we say, if I say, oh, there's a dog in the in in in the yard and you say and you look at the window and you say, there's nothing there, right? That's the something and nothing that serve as ah as a duality, as a dichotomy in relationship to one another.
Speaker: Hegel says, no, it's actually being and nothing that are the questions. That's what's being asked. And this is the beginning of Hegel's logic. So, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and being in nothing are the same thing.
Speaker: They are the same thing. They are they are indistinguishable. we we there's't there's And it's inconceivable to think of one without the other, to understand one without the other. And what we're really living, a different sort of question would be, why is there becoming? Becoming is the thing that matters. And that's that's what happens out of this dialectic between the dialectical understanding of being as, uh, having its corollary in nothing with, uh, in the broad sense.
Speaker: So, Oh yeah, Stephen, uh, something about talking to another philosopher that helps, it helps my brain. Uh, I, I, just really, um, I really appreciate, um,
Speaker: your areas of inquiry and and and and talking about art and really ah dropping down into it, but also for you as ah as a practitioner and also the lack of separation between some of these categories that I think that are limiting when you're talking about whether it's philosophy in the academy, what you're engaged in, categorizing,
Speaker: you you you know, with words of of the limiting pieces i see within within capitalism or markets that that you you were pointing to But just like a fresh talking about art ah overall, I wanted to let you know I really – I'm going to be delving deeper into your works. um i have i've ah i've i've I've loved the experience of them.
Speaker: Absolutely um great talking with you and also have some of the chops here on the something rather than nothing. And like um the the the art questions, because ah the conversation itself for me is is is deeply stimulating and. um ah As far as the markets and for making sure people know where to encounter your things, ah Stephen, ah how do folks, you know, encounter your work, get your work, listen to your work, et cetera?
Speaker: I have a website, which is my name, stevensidenberg.com. I have an Instagram feed, which is ah less significant to me. um But at my website, you can, and of course you can order books from bookstores or online sources, my literary works or or collections, books of photographs. um Sometimes there are shows here and there, maybe there's nothing up at the moment. So I can't tell anybody to go see something right now, but there will be in in in the next year.
Speaker: year, couple of shows. um And ah let's see, where else can you see my work? I guess that's main mainly it. You can, as you alluded to earlier, I've done for my last three books, Coda, Anon, and Plain Sight before it are audio books that I've done separate from the publisher of the book publishers of the books so that I can make them freely available. So those can be streamed or so you could look me up on Spotify and you'll see a couple of like, you know, three hour so-called podcasts, which are really just me reading, doing a full reading of these texts.
Speaker: And, and please avail yourselves of that if you like, and maybe it'll, you'll, you'll be interested in, in, uh, in looking at the, the actually reading the book as well.
Speaker: So, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and thanks for that. And listeners, just something that I, I was able to easily, uh, access and highly recommend, uh, Stephen's work. Um, uh, thank you for the discussion, uh, Stephen Seidenberg. Uh, you know, a long list of things and categories, right? Artists, the philosopher, you know, writer. um But thank you so much for the engagement in, in, in ideas here. And this is exactly why it like I do the show on what's stimulating and a lot of listeners just, just love it. Like what is, you know, the mysteries are, why do we, you know, why are we kicking this around? Cause it's important. So I just wanted to thank you deeply and for your time.
Speaker: Yeah, it's great. You take care. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, I hope so. All right.
Speaker: This is something rather than nothing.
