Resisting Zombie Culture

I’m addicted. And, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Recently, traveling on the sky-train in Bangkok, I was suddenly struck by the blindingly obvious: urban-dwellers are constantly surrounded by screens. Looking around the sky-train, I saw a long line of screens high on the walls - pumping out ads, music videos, news - while underneath those screens, more screens in the hands of passengers - texting, playing, watching. Coming to a stop, there were more screens waiting. There were screens while walking to the shops; there were screens while shopping. And, screens waited at home. Screens at which I worked - and relaxed. Clearly, we like to watch. We like to watch a lot. We like to watch like an alcoholic likes a drink.

In May 1968, students and and workers took to the streets of Paris in protest. Almost eleven million workers went on wildcat strikes (in fact, it is from the May ’68 protests that the term wildcat strike was first used). The protests had began when students occupied an administration building at the University of Paris at Nanterre. At the beginning of May, they were joined in their protest by students of the Sorbonne; by mid-May, two-thirds of the French workforce joined students in support and began strikes that brought the entire economy of France to a complete standstill. The president of France, Charles de Gaulle, was flown to a French military base in Germany. France was on the cusp of another revolution. However, the protests - and the violence that accompanied them - subsided almost as quickly as they began. De Gaulle, who quickly called elections for June of that year, was returned by the largest majorities in French history. Though the protests were a political failure, the term mai 68 is a term still used in France to demarcate a seismic shift in French society and cultural attitudes from the conservative France of pre-May ’68 to what is considered the more progressive and liberal France of today.

What were they protesting? The protests had begun with university students resisting what they saw as class discrimination and bureaucratic control within the university; however, as the protests grew it become clearer that what was being objected to was the way in which technology, consumerism, and capitalism were a mix that increasingly worked to control lives and limit freedoms. Central to this notion and to May ’68 itself were the ideas of a group of intellectuals and writers loosely coming together - beginning in 1957 and dissolving in 1972 - as Situationist International (SI). SI argued that - even though much of the West had entered a post-scarcity world - the system of capitalism - for its very continuation - needed to maintain the notion that we need to struggle to survive. This supposed need to continually struggle for our day-to-day survival cuts us off from the possibility that in a post-scarcity world we had now become free to live our lives as a play of desires, the realization of pleasures, and the creation of intensely lived situations of our own choosing. This sense of struggle arises and is maintained, particularly in advanced or late capitalism, through commodification and alienation. By separating commodities from their use-value and increasingly stressing and amplifying their exchange-value, one is no longer satisfied merely by acquiring the commodity for its use (e.g. I don’t just want to tell the time; I want a Rolex), but rather  begins a self-imposed struggle to grasp the seemingly magical quality that the commodity promises and yet never ultimately and finally delivers. In late capitalism, this exchange-value commodification spreads to all aspects of our lives, including our work and our leisure. We have not only become alienated from our work  - alienated in the sense that we can no longer recognize our work as our own - (e.g. these are not shoes that I made; I am only a cog in a long process that goes into making these Nike shoes), but have also become alienated from our leisure as it too has become progressively commodified. We now find ourselves in a world where virtually all our relations are mediated by commodities, and connection and lively situations between people seem vanished. More and more we are propagandized into believing that there are only two modes of being in the world: producing and consuming. Thus, in this world of late capitalism, and in a similar vein to Martin Heidegger’s critique of instrumental reason, situations and activities, such as laughter, poetry, playing, drinking, wandering, chatting, creating, joking, reading, and loafing (any human activity that lies outside of commodification and instrumentality) become forms of resistance.

In his work of critical theory, Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, one of the key founding members of SI, writes that the Spectacle is not merely a collection of images, but rather images which mediated the social relations between people. In late capitalism, argues Debord, the commodity has completed its colonization of social life: being has become having, and having has become merely appearing. The Spectacle offers up images where commodities take the place of relationships between people, and where increasingly people become passive observers. Simply put: where commodity fetishism dominates, we substitute living/being for having; however, the impossibility of having all, most, or even particular commodities, means that having quickly becomes supplanted by appearing to have - that is, by images of having. Thus, passive identification with images replaces living and being, while our social relations become almost completely mediated not just by what we have, but by what we have become to believe - via the Spectacle - we are on the cusp of having.

In advanced Western capitalist countries, technology has increase our productive efficiency by ten-fold in the last half-a-century. And yet, many, if not most of us, are convinced that the world of work is an absolute necessity to survival. Where are the hours of leisure that were promised decades ago when technological advances were then on the horizon? That excess of time promised to us to be a parent, a citizen, an artist, a loafer, a thinker, a wanderer, a friend. But it is not just our time that has been colonized; have a look around your city and you will see that space is almost wholly constructed for the purposes either of production or consumption. One of the forms of resistance suggested and practiced by members of SI was that of the dérive. The dérive is basically purposeless wandering through an urban landscape. This seems in itself seems innocuous enough - i.e. wandering through the streets without any purpose or place to go; however, as you walk, perhaps a little slower than usual, leaving yourself open to whatever impression or feelings that may come, you may notice how the space has been constructed to keep you on the move and in a certain direction; how at almost every point you are being sold something; how the mere slowing down of your pace draws sighs of frustration from others as they hurry past, or looks of suspicion when you stop for a period of contemplation in the mall - a mall crammed with cameras and surveillance. Situationist International partly drew its inspiration for the dérive from Charles Baudelaire’s writings of the flâneur - coming from the French verb, ‘to stroll’ - the notion of the flâneur is not limited to the peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking" and is often used to critique modernity. Walter Benjamin, the cultural theorist and thinker, utilizes Baudelaire and the notion of the flâneur in his unfinished masterwork, The Arcades Project. The dérive is closely associated with psychogeography, which, as Guy Debord and others in SI defined it, was "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” and,  "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities ... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.” (I suppose that means no sky-train!)

The practice of psychogeography is central to the writings of Ian Sinclair in books such as: London Orbital and Lights Out in the Territory. Will Self’s recent novel, Walking to Hollywood, is informed by his practice of psychogeography. Amongst books that give a history of Situationist International are: Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, which draws out the influence of SI on late 1970s punk rock; Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age; and, the recently published, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark.

Recommended Reading:

Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (New York: Verso, 2011) 

Swimming Against the Narrative(s)

The sun, the sea, the food, the daily massages. The long lazy days of reading on the beach. And, it was cheap. Very cheap. In those days, the Aussie dollar stretched a long, long way in Bali. I am as guilty as anyone. In 2001, when I returned to Bali for the first time in 15 years, two days after 9/11, at least once a day, I heard myself saying: “You should have seen this place in 1986; it was paradise.”

My first trip to South East Asia. Bali. I was there with my ex-wife, an actress in a popular TV soapy, and Dave, a friend who had recently become the world’s highest-winning television quiz show champ. We didn’t venture far. It was enough to lie on the beach at Legian, having our every whim catered for - and read. With absolutely nothing to do, my urban-wracked brain calmed, allowing a delightfully refreshed ability to concentrate. I was reading books at an astonishing rate - one or two a day. I can’t recall any of them now, except for one: Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray.

Perfomance Notebook

Swimming to Cambodia is not a work of fiction. Rather it is an edited transcript of a theatre piece performed by Spalding Gray, an actor, playwright, screenwriter, and monologist. And, it’s as a monologist that he is best known, sitting at a table in front of the audience with nothing but a glass of water, a notebook, and a mic. Minimalist theatre. Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia relates the story of his involvement as an actor in the film, The Killing Fields, director Roland Joffe’s film about the Khmer Rouge and the experiences of three journalists: Cambodian Dith Pran, New York Times correspondent, Sydney Schanberg, and British journalist Jon Swain. Gray plays a small role in the film as the assistant to the American ambassador to Cambodia.

During his Swimming to Cambodia monologue, Gray gives a potted history of the United States’ ‘secret’ war against Cambodia and subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge. It goes something like this: Cambodia allows the Ho Chi Minh trail to enter eastern Cambodia along it border with Vietnam; the US begins a secret (this was done without the approval of the American congress) five year “carpet” bombing campaign against Cambodia; it is estimated that 25% of the enemy is killed (interestingly the US military’s own psychological warfare unit during that war determined that killing only 10% of an enemies forces can result in “profound psychological damage”); the Khmer Rouge, hiding out in the jungles of northern Cambodia, links up with and is trained by the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao; eventually the US loses the war and leaves Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge (under the leadership of Pol Pot, who while receiving a education in France read Marx and became equally enamored with back-to-the-land Rousseau-ism and peasant-as-proletariat Maoism); and on 17 April 1975, the bombed-to-madness child-soldiers that made up the Khmer Rouge (the vast majority of the Khmer Rouge soldiers were boys and girls under 18 years old) entered Phnom Penh and began a hellish reign of terror which lasted 4 years and killed - according to the most commonly accepted (conservative) estimates - 1.5 million people out of a population of 7.1 million - or, one in five Cambodians.

None of this left much of an impression on me as I lay on that beach in Bali in 1986. I like to think that it is because the numbers were too staggering, the human-toll too horrible to contemplate. But, the truth is that I was far more interested in the Spalding Gray the actor and artist, the notion of the monologue as a form of theatre, and if I, as actor recently out of drama school and getting absolutely zero work, might be able to conjure up something similar. I wasn’t alone. By the end of the 80s, with Spalding Gray’s continuing output, his zeitgeist popularity, and the film of Swimming to Cambodia (directed by Jonathan Demme) hitting the art-houses, plenty of other out-of-work actors had the same idea. By 1989, Sydney theatre seemed to be awash with confessional Spalding-Gray-types with Aussie accents. I was driving a taxi.

I have now visited the “Killing Fields” (known in Cambodian as Choeung Ek ) over 15 times. I seen the 5,000 plus human skulls that lie behind glass in the memorial Buddhist stupa - many, many times. I have wandered the “fields” - many, many times; where one may very easily dislodge some half-buried tattered and faded cloth, a human tooth, or a bone fragment with a misplaced foot. Just as many times, I have been to S-21 (known in Cambodian as Tuol Sleng), the former high-school in downtown Phnom Penh which served during the period of the Khmer Rouge as a prison and place of torture. Nearly 17,000 people are known to have entered Tuol Sleng; of these only twelve are known to have survived.

The reason that I have visited both places so often is that between 2005 - 2009, I led study tours down the Mekong River from Chiang Kong to Luang Prabang, flying to Siam Reap (Angkor Wat), then to Phnom Penh - followed by a speedboat into the Mekong Delta and finally a bus to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). After dinner each night the group would listen to a lecture from a leading South East Asian expert or academic. One of the lecturers who had the deepest effect on me was Dr. Leakthina Chan-Pech Ollier, a Cambodian academic who left her country of birth at the age of ten, just before the arrival of the Khmer Rouge into Phnom Penh. Dr. Thina had lived in the United States from that age, eventually receiving a PhD in French literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She had returned to Cambodia and was now living in Phnom Penh. I had the good fortune to hear her talk many times.

Dr. Thina was extraordinarily good speaker (full of fascinating digressions as many of the best lecturers are); her lectures, however, were often met with a degree of disapproval from the group. The reason for this was that Dr. Thina had been rigorously researching the commonly accepted numbers of deaths during the Khmer Rouge period and had concluded that the number from direct killing (e.g. torture and murder) was far less than was the commonly accepted number, and that the number of indirect deaths from, what might be called “mis-adventure” (e.g. starvation and disease), was much higher. What I found most interesting about this was how strongly the group (and, as I would later find out, many other academics and writers on Cambodia) reacted. It was obvious that there was much invested in this particular narrative, whether or not it might be correct. It was my understand also that Dr. Thina's focus was not so much on the preciseness of those terrible numbers, but rather on the power of the narrative itself. Cambodia was (and still is) caught between two dominant narratives: that of its ancient greatness during the period of the Angkor empire, and that of the modern-day horror of the Khmer Rouge. Without a loosening of these dominant narratives, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for Cambodia to construct fresh narratives and new national identities. Dr. Thina’s approach was Foucault-ian, an attempt to find a way in which to locate the ruptures in these narratives, and thus hopefully exceed their constraints. The point to be made was not quantitative, but emancipatory.

Sometime in 2009, returning from a tour, I got a phone call from the head office in the US: Could I ask Dr. Thina to “tone it down a bit”? No. I couldn’t. Thus my career in educational tourism came to a close. Five years earlier, I was shocked to hear of Spalding Gray’s suicide. He had thrown himself from the Staten Island Ferry after a long bout of depression brought on from the injuries that he has sustained in a car accident in Ireland in 2001. Haing S. Ngor, who, after surviving the horrors of the Khmer Rouge had won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Dith Pran in The Killing Fields, was murdered in 1996 by a Los Angeles street-gang when he refused to surrender the gold locket which held a picture of his wife - a picture that he had torn from her identity card after she was taken away never to be seen again, and which he kept hidden - at great personal risk - during the years of his forced labour in a Khmer Rouge work camp.

On 10 December 2010, director Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Che, Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen) brings to the cinema his documentary on the life and work of Spalding Gray; And Everything Is Going Fine.

Recommended Reading:

Chau-Pech Ollier, Leakthina. Winter, Tim (eds). Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of  Tradition, Identity, and Change. (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Gray, Spalding. Swimming to Cambodia. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985).

Finite and Infinite Games

“There are at least two kinds of games. Once could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”


In spite of of its cult-status, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility is probably a book you have never heard of. And, although on first glance, you may think this is just another one of those self-help books that seem to occupy the ever burgeoning self-help sections of bookshops these days, it is written by a serious academic with a slew of well-researched and finely argued monographs to his name.

Professor James P. Carse is a religion scholar who has taught the history and literature of religion for many years at New York University. He describes himself as a writer and artist, but more interestingly as someone who does not believe in any God, though still religious "in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all."

Carse occupies a much more interesting area of religious discussion than those rather pedestrian arguments for atheism put forward in the last couple of years by Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al., where a belief (and that’s all it ever could be) for atheism is argued without ever tackling the sticky problem of belief. Whether we believe in God or believe that there is no God, without a questioning of the very notion of belief itself, we can end up (as I think Hitchens, Dawkins, and others have) merely as fundamentalist believers in atheism - i.e. atheism as (ultimately) dogmatic as any belief in a God.

Carse explores a much more interesting and fertile ground, that falling between belief and unbelief. In his book, The Religious Case Against Belief, Carse argues that believers will confidently offer up a list of their most valued and thought-out views. However, they do not just hold these positions, they declare them. As in the case of Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al., it is not enough that they hold these views, but it is also important that you also know them. Hitchens (who, by the way, I have always held a great respect for, and more so after just finishing his wonderfully written memoir, Hitch 22) presents his argument for atheism in a highly cogent and even entertaining way. But what almost always gets lost in this display, is that while convincing you of the rightness of his/their view(s), any contrary view is being situated as plainly false. This, according to Carse, is the problem with belief (even, say, a belief in atheism): all belief is perfectly matched with its opposite; and, because of this, all belief is not only belief in, but also always belief against. Therefore, belief must not only focus in on the contrary stance of others, it is dependent on it; which means that anytime the passion with which that opposing view is held fades so does the corresponding belief. As Carse asks: “How could the existence of God be denied except if someone supplies a God to be denied? To be an atheist you need just the right theist to face off against. Believing is an inherently self-contradictory act.”

The reason for the cult-status of Carse’s book,  Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, is that it gives one an almost visceral understanding of what it might be to have a religious stance toward existence without any need for belief.

Recommended:

 www.jamescarse.com

 Carse, James P. The Religious Case Against Belief. (New York: Penguin, 2008).

Carse, James P. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Random House, 1986).

UbuWeb & Henry Miller

If your taste in the artistic (or life) leans toward the avant-garde, then you will love AbuWeb. The site is full of gems. Everything from John Gage interviews, a intensely mad Paul McCarthy video, John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" (if anyone has Geoff Dyer's essays on Berger, "Ways of Telling," can you tell me!) to a wonderful 3-part doco on Guy Debord and Situationism: "Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972." It is a goldmine, but it does make one wonder if an avant-garde is even possible anymore. Forgive me my nostalgia.

The doco called "Dinner With Henry Miller" is a blast. This is simple enough. Just Henry having dinner with friends; the camera locked off and running for about 30 minutes while Henry and companions enjoy (apparently mediocre) food and (and somewhat better) wine. Henry is there with his current and last girlfriend, Brenda Venus (don't jump to any conclusions; she's as sharp as they come), and they talk about all manner of things with Henry interjecting to gently tease the off-camera cook about the low quality of the food. Henry finally settles on a riff about Blaise Cendrars the one-armed - he lost an arm on the Somme while in the French Foreign Legion - novelist and poet and friend of Henry's during his time in 1930s Paris. Apart from the rollicking conversation and the pure joy of listening to one of history's greatest raconteurs weave a yarn, what struck me was this is Henry Miller two months before he died! Obviously, he was eating, drinking, smoking, screwing, having a good time, and telling outrageous stories right till the end. But then again, he only lived to be 88 - should have stuck to vegetable juices and early nights.

Cendrars by Modigliani

Recommended:

http://www.ubu.com/
http://www.ubu.com/film/miller_dinner.html

Being Critical (1)

I have spent the last three weeks in Australia with a very good friend of mine, Greg Wilding, who is finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Queensland with the art historian, Rex Butler, as his supervisor. His house is fairly isolated on the top of a hill in the Byron hinterland. It was just the two of us there for those three weeks with a few breaks to go to the shops to resupply. He is doing an art history thesis and is a practicing artist himself. Our days were full of discussions about the state of Australian art and more specifically the thrust of his thesis, which was - to outline it very broadly - that the dominant theories and practice of what might be called postmodern appropriation and quotational art in Australia during the last 20 to 25 years has brought about a necessary need to theorize, and thus, a concomitant increase in art bureaucracy. Why? When an artist appropriates an art work as part of their own art practice, then it becomes necessary to contextualize that art work as something more than merely copying, or less kindly, plagiarism. With the rise of theory as being necessary to the contextualizing of an art work comes the increasing power of the art institution. The way in which Australian art institutions have wielded this increased power has, according to his argument, been to "de-mediate" any contrary view. In other words, any view or theory that might question the legitimacy of postmodern appropriation/quotational art practice has in Australia in the last two decades been denied any platform of expression. Greg goes on to use  Lacan, Zizek, and the works of the Australian artist Mike Parr to re-examine postmodern critiques of origins and originality by suggesting that along with the act of appropriation is also the necessary act of dis-appropriation both of which are grounded by the Lacanian Real, or the un-speakable and un-knowable. And, it is this that he points to as that which is also the original (never repeatable) of an artwork worthy of our attention. Ultimately, Greg is trying to suggest what might be post of (as in 'after') the postmodernist project.

(I am going to send the above to Greg and see how much of his argument I got right. I will post his corrections later.)


Recommended Reading:

Butler, Rex. Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory. (New York: Continuum, 2005).

"The Nothing Nothings" - Martin Heidegger and the Question of Being

  For some people Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the twentieth-century. For many others he nothing but a double-talking mystifier who philosophizes in a meaningless language of his own making. Once in a philosophy tutorial I heard a frustrated student brush off Heidegger by quoting an oft-quoted phrase of Heidegger's from the set reading: "the nothing nothings." This seemingly nonsensical phrase was enough for the student to decide that she didn't need to bother herself with any further reading of Herr Heidegger.

One can understand the student's frustration, and why many other thinkers have 'brushed off' Heidegger in a similar manner. What I would like to do in this post is to briefly examine some of Heidegger's ideas, especially his central inquiry into the nature of being, and, perhaps, bring to light just what he might have meant by the phrase that so frustrated that student, "the nothing nothings."

As a teenager Heidegger had read Franz Brentano's On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. This formulated within him a burning question which was to be central to his entire intellectual life. The question that obsessed Heidegger, and which led him in 1927 to publish his masterwork, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was: the question of being.

The question of being - in other words, what exists, how do we know that it exists, and what do we mean when we say something exists - is the central question of that branch of philosophy called ontology. This fundamental question was first posed in Western philosophy by the ancient Greeks. Heidegger, however, felt that since Plato the inquiry into being had taken a major theoretical wrong-turn by thinking of being as a property or essence that was continually present in things.

In many of the thinkers that Heidegger would later influence, particularly Jacques Derrida, there is much theorizing about the metaphysics of presence - which simply means to posit being as a substance - and how to philosophically overcome it. In Derrida's case, he goes about trying to overcome the metaphysics of presence by deconstructing metaphysics. He does this by pointing out the conceptualizing of being as a stable substance that provides the (faulty) logical coherence of any metaphysical system. Derrida's deconstruction is a latter development of Heidegger's theory that to even ask the question of being we needed to understand being, not as substance, but as "the space in which things appear and become meaningful to us." In other words, being is an absence rather than a presence.

Now, we should be able to take a stab at what the phrase, the nothing nothings, means. If being, as understood by Heidegger, is no-thing - in fact, the no-thing-ness absolutely necessary for things to appear - then it is the very capability of nothing (noun) to nothing (verb) that is the primal allowing by which any thing at all can appear. In other words, space/absence (Being) is absolutely necessary for the appearance of things (beings).

You might look at it this way: if one was to describe the room that they are sitting in they would usually begin by describing all the things that occupy the room, and they might feel that was the best way to get a fairly accurate description of the room. We would not, in most cases, describe, or even mention the space between each thing, nor the space within the room. And yet, most of the room is space. Similarly, how often are we aware of the silence out of which all sound arises and falls? Or, of silence as pure potentiality out of which it possible for any sound to arise, anything from a Mozart symphony to the sound of a car crash. If we can imagine silence as a kind of internal space, then it is possible also to understand more subtle objects, such as feelings, sensations, and thoughts, as also arising and falling within space, our own subjective space of silent being-ness; and that internal space is just as necessary for the appearance of internal objects as external space is necessary for the appearance of external objects.

Many thinkers have drawn comparisons between Heidegger's thought and various Eastern philosophical systems, particularly Buddhism and Taoism. Some of the similarities can be striking - and also helpful. Thus, I would like to draw such a comparison here. In the ancient Tibetan Buddhist philosophy of Dzogchen, one's attention is also directed to these two apparent spaces, while at the same time inquiring: In what way are these two spaces different?, Are they different?; Where does the internal space stop and the external space begin?; and, Could the two spaces really be the same space (or absence) with the difference merely being a creation of thought? A brief contemplation of these questions can often lead us to, at least, an intuition of no-thing as the fundamental ground of all things. But, perhaps, more importantly, it can lead us to an inquiry into the nature of our own being, our selves, and thus to intuit the ground of our own subjectivity, not as substance (e.g. soul, essence, the real me, etc) but as an absence within which all phenomena arises, sustains for awhile, and ultimately disappears. Thus, Heidegger coins the term Dasein, to point to our own human subjectivity as not substantive, but rather as "the clearing for beings."

So, yes indeed, the nothing nothings - otherwise, Heidegger might say, how else could the world of things appear. But, even more profoundly, the later Heidegger will point to the absence which allows the world as our very selves, our dasein. In other words, we are not in the world, the world is in us.

Recommended Reading:

Wrathall, Mark. How to Read Heidegger (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005)