Below are the questions, comments, concerns and anxieties submitted by readers:
Question:
I am uncertain about my own work. About success and failure. About producing more objects in a cluttered environment. About individuality and the validity of genius. I am uncertain.
Answer:
You raise some interesting issues here, not only in relation to the excess of signification that currently conditions our environment but also the unstable terrain in which postmodernism has left us - having rejected ideas of the sovereign individual (leading to collectives of artists such as Claire Fontaine).
The relationship of the individual to their environment comes up frequently in the literature on anxiety. Simon Crichtley argues in a blog post entitled Being and Time, part 5: Anxiety that:
“Our everyday existence is characterised by complete immersion in the ways of the world. The world fascinates us and my life is completely caught up in its rhythms and activities. The question Heidegger asks in Chapter 6 is: how is the being-in-the-world as a whole to be disclosed? Is there an experience where the world as such and as a whole is revealed to us? Is there a mood in which we pull back from the world and see it as something distinct from us? Heidegger’s claim is that being-in-the-world as a whole is disclosed in anxiety…”
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