’There is a characteristic myopia of the project. Repetition of a sequence of actions according to a set procedure is often central and one of its effects is to neutralize the teleology of continuous narrative. But repetition has its positive aspects as it focuses attention on minute variations. This allies the project to a kind of knowledge linked to process—Perec’s ‘émergence’(emergence). Repetition fosters a different sort of attention by numbing customary activities. Its temporality is that of progressive ‘tuning in’ to a particular level of existence, a new mode of attention that is responsive to the uneventful, to what is initially hidden by habit. Projects often succeed in making visible what is already there, not hidden but lying on the surface. By diverting attention from a goal to the carrying out of a repeated, preordained programme, the project creates its own intermediate spatio-temporal zone. In so doing, it generates attention to the present, to the unresolved matter of what is still in process (the process may be the spectator’s current flow of awareness). The project is a frame, but nothing that comes to fill that frame can be said to complete or realize the project, which always remains open and unfinished. Yet within its framework a shift, essentially a shift of attention, takes place. The project brings us into proximity with something that might have seemed familiar, but which we now acknowledge more fully. In this sense we can see at work in the project the interface of alienation and appropriation that is central to thinking about the everyday.’

'This interaction has certain aspects that we will leave aside, for example the traditional links of social time to religious beliefs and prescriptions. We shall devote ourselves to only the rhythmic aspect of everyday time. The study of everyday life has already demonstrated this banal and yet little-known difference between the cyclical and the linear, between rhythmed times and the times of brutal repetitions. This repetition is tiring, exhausting and tedious, while the return of a cycle has the appearance of an event and an advent. Its beginning, which after all is only a recommencement, always has the freshness of a discovery and an invention. Dawn always has a miraculous charm, hunger and thirst renew themselves marvelously … The everyday is simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in a conflict between great indestructible rhythms and the processes imposed by the socio-economic organisation of production, consumption, circulation, and habitat. The analysis of everyday life shows how and why social time is itself a social product. Like all products, like space, time divides and splits itself into use and use-value on the one hand, and exchange and exchange-value on the other. On the one hand it is sold and on the other it is lived.'

'Fated to suffer; revealed to be brute to the core, our being pulsing to the same beat as the stirrings of the polyp and the sap that rises in plants. Philosophy has always seen itself as being in the business of discovering truth. The riddle of existence, in Schopenhauer's view, had been solved. Yet after philosophical truth has been achieved, one is entitled to ask: where to? Or again: can this truth be lived, and enter fruitfully into our mode of living? To this question, Schopenhauer's answer took two forms, both of which appeared to modify the above view of the relationship of the human mind to the world, suggesting that the light of awareness—whose importance appeared to have been all but extinguished once assimilated into the rhythms of mindless being—had not entirely lost its place and its significance. And it was a significance all the more numinous given the view of reality that framed it, lending to the operations of the mind an aspect salvific in kind.'

'Nietzsche's resistance to decadence is a kind of asceticism—or we might better speak of an askesis—that can be understood in musical terms. The aim of Nietzsche's decadence-resisting askesis is the attunement of the soul with life. In its most literal sense, decadence simply means "falling down." But one can also read decadence musically, as a "de-cadence" in the sense of a loss of rhythm.'

A catastrophic hard drive failure has cut me off from most of my music for weeks now. Although it's not resolved yet, I'm back up, and I could at least start rebuilding. I'm stranded between different devices and computers old and new, and a lot of what I'm missing now is still there. A lot of what I might have lost for good can be gotten as easily as before. The only thing I stand to lose is the memories, or rather the record, the facts, that would be a spur to remembering—which, as years of making year-end lists have told me, is not necessarily something I will be able to do on my own, without the digital analogue to flipping through the shelves to see where your eye lands. The mood is oddly hopeful, though, like a blue sky, since I do sometimes feel a burden from all that culture, a need to know it better, make sense of it, to make good on having known it somehow, so that it's as if I am suddenly excused from many tasks, and free to choose new ones, or none. But already my empty new computer is acquiring its own library, sprouting like mushrooms. A desire to hear one new record led me back to one old one, several new releases led to more, a curiosity bender that started with looking up just one artist mentioned in a video led to a whole lot of them for good measure; and yes, a couple properly ceremonial re-christenings, the first, 'Top Billin' and elseqs 1–5. But mostly I haven't listened to any of it anyway, which is what keeps me hesitant to plunge back into anything permanent, certainly not before I know or decide whether the sky will remain blue. In any case, the odd devices around still have their satellite caches of music from before, and I mostly have reverted to what was on them, in a kind of recovery mode of my own, as if on a sojourn, traveling light. For a few weeks I listened to nothing but Skee Mask, and then it's been a couple weeks of nothing but Dots & Loops, over and over. I suppose I've played it a thousand times in my life. I suppose I'll play it a thousand more.

'It seems to conflict with these conclusions, however, that the Socratic-Platonic dialectic raises the art of questioning to a conscious art; but there is something peculiar about this art. We have seen that it is reserved to the person who wants to know—i.e., who already has questions. The art of questioning is not the art of resisting the pressure of opinion; it already presupposes this freedom. It is not an art in the sense that the Greeks speak of techno, not a craft that can be taught or by means of which we could master the discovery of truth. The so-called epistemological digression of the Seventh Letter is directed, rather, to distinguishing the unique art of dialectic from everything that can be taught and learned. The art of dialectic is not the art of being able to win every argument. On the contrary, it is possible that someone practicing the art of dialectic—i.e., the art of questioning and of seeking truth—comes off worse in the argument in the eyes of those listening to it. As the art of asking questions, dialectic proves its value only because the person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his questioning, which involves being able to preserve his orientation toward openness. The art of questioning is the art of questioning ever further—i.e., the art of thinking. It is called dialectic because it is the art of conducting a real dialogue.

To conduct a dialogue requires first of all that the partners do not talk at cross purposes. Hence it necessarily has the structure of question and answer. The first condition of the art of conversation is ensuring that the other person is with us. We know this only too well from the reiterated 'yes' of the interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues. The positive side of this monotony is the inner logic with which the subject matter is developed in the conversation. To conduct a conversation is to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented. It requires that one does not try to argue the other person down but that one really considers the weight of the other's opinion. Hence it is an art of testing. But the art of testing is the art of questioning. For we have seen that to question means to lay open, to place in the open. As against the fixity of opinions, questioning makes the object and all its possibilities fluid. A person skilled in the "art" of questioning is a person who can prevent questions from being suppressed by the dominant opinion. A person who possesses this art will himself search for everything in favor of an opinion. Dialectic consists not in trying to discover the weakness of what is said, but in bringing out its real strength. It is not the art of arguing (which can make a strong case out of a weak one) but the art of thinking (which can strengthen objections by referring to the subject matter).'

'The essence of the question is to have sense. Now sense involves a sense of direction. Hence the sense of the question is the only direction from which the answer can be given if it is to make sense. A question places what is questioned in a particular perspective. When a question arises, it breaks open the being of the object, as it were. Hence the logos that explicates this opened-up being is an answer. Its sense lies in the sense of the question.

Among the greatest insights that Plato's account of Socrates affords us is that, contrary to the general opinion, it is more difficult to ask questions than to answer them. When the partners in the Socratic dialogue are unable to answer Socrates' awkward questions and try to turn the tables by assuming what they suppose is the preferable role of the questioner, they come to grief. Behind this comic motif in the Platonic dialogues there is the critical distinction between authentic and inauthentic dialogue. To someone who engages in dialogue only to prove himself right and not to gain insight, asking questions will indeed seem easier than answering them. There is no risk that he will be unable to answer a question. In fact, however, the continual failure of the interlocutor shows that people who think they know better cannot even ask the right questions. In order to be able to ask, one must want to know, and that means knowing that one does not know. In the comic confusion between question and answer, knowledge and ignorance that Plato describes, there is a profound recognition of the priority of the question in all knowledge and discourse that really reveals something of an object. Discourse that is intended to reveal something requires that the thing be broken open by the question.

For this reason, dialectic proceeds by way of question and answer or, rather, the path of all knowledge leads through the question. To ask a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled. It must still be undetermined, awaiting a decisive answer. The significance of questioning consists in revealing the questionability of what is questioned. It has to be brought into this state of indeterminacy, so that there is an equilibrium between pro and contra. The sense of every question is realized in passing through this state of indeterminacy, in which it becomes an open question. Every true question requires this openness. Without it, it is basically no more than an apparent question. We are familiar with this from the example of the pedagogical question, whose paradoxical difficulty consists in the fact that it its a question without a questioner. Or from the rhetorical question, which not only has no questioner but no object.

The openness of a question is not boundless. It is limited by the horizon of the question. A question that lacks this horizon is, so to speak, floating. It becomes a question only when its fluid indeterminacy is concretized in a specific "this or that." In other words, the question has to be posed.'

'The close relation between questioning and understanding is what gives the hermeneutic experience its true dimension. However much a person trying to understand may leave open the truth of what is said, however much he may dismiss the immediate meaning of the object and consider its deeper significance instead, and take the latter not as true but merely as meaningful, so that the possibility of its truth remains unsettled, this is the real and fundamental nature of a question: namely to make things indeterminate. Questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a thing. That is why we cannot understand the questionableness of something without asking real questions, though we can understand a meaning without meaning it. To understand the questionableness of something is already to be questioning. There can be no tentative or potential attitude to questioning, for questioning is not the positing but the testing of possibilities. Here the nature of questioning indicates what is demonstrated by the actual operation of the Platonic dialogue. A person who thinks must ask himself questions. Even when a person says that such and such a question might arise, this is already a real questioning that simply masks itself, out of either caution or politeness.

This is the reason why understanding is always more than merely re-creating someone else's meaning. Questioning opens up possibilities of meaning, and thus what is meaningful passes into one's own thinking on the subject. Only in an inauthentic sense can we talk about understanding questions that one does not pose oneself—e.g., questions that are outdated or empty. We understand how certain questions came to be asked in particular historical circumstances. Understanding such questions means, then, understanding the particular presuppositions whose demise makes such questions "dead." An example is perpetual motion. The horizon of meaning of such questions is only apparently still open. They are no longer understood as questions. For what we understand, in such cases, is precisely that there is no question.

To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.'

The Games of Gargantua