No One is Ready: A Conversation with Catherine Christer Hennix | Nora Fulton
January 31, 2023
Catherine Christer Hennix | image: Ari Marcopoulos
Catherine Christer Hennix is a Swedish composer, musician, mathematician, and poet best known for her position at the forefront of the development of drone music. Hennix has studied and worked closely with figures across the many fields she inhabits, such as Fluxus-adjacent American musicians La Monte Young and Henry Flynt, German electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath, and Alexander Esenin-Volpin, a Russian exponent of intuitionist mathematics, as well as many more. Nora Fulton is a Canadian poet and theorist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal who has previously written on Hennix’s little-studied literary contributions, as collected in Poësy Matters and Other Matters in 2019 by Blank Forms. In the summer of 2022, Fulton got in touch with Hennix in preparation for her first live performance in nearly half a decade.
June 2022
Nora Fulton
Catherine, I hear you’re based in Istanbul these days, and that you’re studying Arabic and the musical form of the maqam there – how is that going? I’m excited for your performance later this summer in New York, and I’m wondering if it will be related to this period of study?
Catherine Christer Hennix
Actually, maybe not so much. I have an ensemble called Blues Alif Lam Mim, and that was a connection, but through COVID and various other things, to keep that band together was extremely hard, so those pieces were only performed one time. But I still keep composing it, and the studies of maqam are essential for that composition.
NF
I remember you were going to come to New York for this performance before COVID hit, so I’m really glad it will come together. Your piece is entitled “Solo for Tamburium” – is it related to your album Solo for Two Tamburas?
CCH
Well, this is the computer version of it, and the other is a composition that is performed with acoustic tamburas, but I’ve never been able to do it in public. It’s also very difficult to set it up because it’s quite a quiet instrument. I do however have a tape version of a recording in my studio in Berlin, so that is the version that exists.
The tamburium is an electronic version of the tambura, so in other words, I have 88 keys instead of just 4 strings. See, the tambura existed originally in two forms, and it originated in its modern form in Persia: one was fretless and the other one was with the fret. And that became, basically, the tambura you have today. The fretless version was discarded by the Persians, but they kept the fretted one, and the other one went to India. I mean, Persian was still the lingua franca in India, in Afghanistan, in that entire area back in those days, so it didn’t survive except in India, and it was refined continuously, especially in the 19th century. So anyway, this is a way of transforming the sound of the tambura, but you have 88 different keys that you can press. I don’t know how many tones you can get on the fret board, but probably not as many.
NF
I understand that in maqam there’s usually a reading of classical poetic works alongside the music, is that correct?
CCH
You have maqam with poetry, and many other versions, I mean, also secular versions. But maqam is actually a scale form and a way of modulating. Maqam means “top of place,” and it can also mean “the place from which you recite a poem” – a specially designated space within another space from which a kind of performance takes place. It’s consecrated to that type of activity. Before it became a musical term, which I guess was around a thousand years ago, that was in Persia, by Al Farabi, it could have all kinds of other connotations, but I have not actually looked for them actively.
NF
I was curious whether you think about your performances that way – what their potential relationship to poetry might be – given that you write poetry as well. Are the places from which poetry and music come separate for you?
CCH
They can be separate. They can come together. It all depends on what you want to do. In my Abstract Noh Dramas, which is a form of poetry, I have all kinds of ideas of sound. The other poems that I have written have no connection with sound at all.
NF
When did your encounter with poetry happen? Given that your poetry is in English, I have wondered if it came out of your encounters with artists in New York in the late ’60s, or if it preceded that.
CCH
I wrote poetry a little bit in Swedish, but it was very discouraging. I was rejected by all publishers, so I sort of stopped, and I started to try to read, to write, in English. In the beginning, yeah, it was pretty bad I have to say. I mean, it didn’t work at all. I simply didn’t know enough English. I did have training, because I knew many Americans, so I spoke a lot of English daily, but that was the colloquial side, you could say, with jazz musicians in New York. But yeah, I kept up with it because, you know, Swedish has a very small vocabulary. There is this fantastic vocabulary in English. I read a lot in English, so I was plugging along until it started to gel a little bit.
NF
Blank Forms published a collection of your writings a few years ago, and that text focuses on poetry you produced from 1976–9. Was it simply that those years in particular were the ones of heavy poetic production for you?
CCH
Well, I wrote mainly the first batch of Noh Dramas in that time, the Abstract Noh Dramas, and then there was poetry on the side. I mean, minor stuff. But then I wrote more in the ’80s, and I started to write Butoh Noh, and then in the ’90s I started to write rather extensively. I wrote a very long poem called No Man’s Memorial, and there were several more Butoh Nohs, and in the end I did a Variable Butoh Noh called One Darks Two Darks. That was an especially interesting poem for me because it was a continuation of No Man’s Memorial. And, by the way, there is a terrible spelling mistake in one of those poems, which I would like you to change.
NF
Oh, is there? What is it?
CCH
Let me look it up, since you’re there.
NF
Okay.
CCH
This is page 167.
NF
This is in No Man’s Memorial?
CCH
Right. This is the third verse. “Before hunting dawn [the blue deer]”, it says. But it should be “hunting down [the blue deer]”.
NF
I thought that was intentional, given the line break, as if this was a description of the morning sky, so it re-characterizes the image of the deer, the sun, all these things in the poem and their connections to a search that is going on. And the presence of blue in the poem is something I wanted to ask you about. It’s a color that I associate with, say, Novalis, with his blue flower, with the romantic tradition in poetry.
CCH
“The blue deer” actually comes from a name of the cactus peyote [referring to its use by the Wixárika, a Mexican indigenous people]. That is why everything is glowing.
NF
In the preface to One Dark Two Darks, you talk about Mallarmé being the last major innovator in poetic thinking, and I feel like he is viewed that way by many people for different and conflicting reasons. In your preface you suggest that his real achievement was stripping away the particularity of language in a way that reveals what is modal in poetry, this pure formalism. One could say that mathematics does this too. Where do you see the connection between poetic thinking and mathematical thinking?
CCH
I studied mathematical linguistics early on, as a part of my music studies – Generative Phonology, the Chomsky–Halle version of Generative Grammar for Phonology. You may know the book The Sound Pattern of English. It’s a classic book in phonology by Chomsky and Halle, and it shows how the syntactic structure determines the phonetic structure, in particular the stress patterns. Wait, can you hang on a sec?
NF
Yup, no problem.
CCH
Somebody is coming with yogurt to me – I have to let him in.
[LONG PAUSE]
CCH
Okay, I’ve got fresh yogurt. They have very good yogurt here.
NF
I would love to try that some day. But we were talking about poetry and mathematics?
CCH
Right. So when you study language from a mathematical point of view, you can look at texts as solutions to equations. When I was a teenager I was also interested in concrete poetry. There was a Swedish poet named Öyvind Fahlström who at the time did quite amazing stuff, quite untranslatable, or extremely difficult to translate, because it depends on the musicality that is peculiar to the Swedish language. But it was no joke, sort of unsentimental letter painting or word painting, you could say. One of his inspirations was serial music, so he gave the words numbers and then generated a word order according to the technique of serial music. I saw it as both shocking and illuminating. And there was another Swedish guy who worked with statistical linguistics. They took a bunch of Swedish words and assigned them certain probabilities, and then they asked the machine to construct a bunch of sentences. And it was a little bit Surrealist.
NF
Like automatic writing.
CCH
Yeah, right. But it had an edge that was very unsentimental. I mean, there is a sentimentality sometimes in Surrealist poetry that was completely absent here. It had a clinical purity, so to speak. That fascinated me. Fahlström did it in the ’50s but he was rejected then – more in the ’60s this was popular, and then he was lionized for a while, but then he was shut out again. He was also a very interesting painter, and he wrote drama pieces as well.
NF
You have an essay in Poesy Matters that I love, because it’s so ambitious and unforgiving in the stance it takes on poetry and poetic experimentation: “Poetry as Philosophy and Poetry as Notation.” I kind of read it as an attack on poetry, on its inevitable sentimentality and thus conservatism, but the essay also talks about the things that only poetry can do. Most critiques of poetry will say, you know, “there’s nothing poetry can do that can’t be done elsewhere or in some other way,” or will say, “poetry is archaic” or “poetry is decadent” or “real poetry doesn’t exist any more.” But you talk about poetry in its singularity even as you attack it: you describe poetry as something that sets limits on the human mind, on thought, but you also quote the Rg Veda, where poets are described as “those who have an ear for the norm.” So what do poets do with the norm when they hear it, and what should they do with it, in contrast to what they actually do?
CCH
Well. . . That’s a very deep question. In my intervention or intersection with the arts, I became interested in the parts that were in opposition to the ordinary forms of art. My parents’ house had very conservative concepts about art. Everything I did they considered to be incomprehensible. They thought it was not to be listened to or not to be read, that it was so far-fetched it wouldn’t go anywhere. But what I thought, and what we learned in school convinced me of, was that art and music is really boring. I mean, Western art and music and literature is boring. So when I found out by myself that there was experimental art and literature, I thought that was an interesting twist on the artistic angle on creation and understanding. I mean, say, the understanding of language. I am thinking of the French experimental writers, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute.
NF
Edmond Jabès is someone you’ve spoken highly of as well.
CCH
For me he was very important too.
NF
The traditional story about experimental art, now that it has been fully metabolized as a “sub-category” of art, is that there are people who identify norms in order to transgress them, as if they’re trying to do something wholly other to the norm. This preserves what is normative even if only as a counterpoint. But there are also people whose interest is purely in the axiomatic dimension of art, rather than whatever those axioms might create. In these cases normativity becomes so distributed that it is disempowered somewhat. On the one hand, listening for the norm in order to evade it, on the other, transforming what one listens to into the norm.
CCH
The first time I read Robbe-Grillet, my reaction was, “Oh, can you really write like this?” In other words, he did set up new norms, but simply by undermining current norms he formulated new ones, so to speak, implicitly. Then the old stories fell apart like a house of cards. In one blow. Not piece by piece, but all of it, right away. There was no hesitation about that. And in jazz you had the same thing with Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor. It was all about going beyond what had already been done and the sky was the limit.
NF
In poetry, too, avant gardes and disruptive movements in art come and go, but there are gravities and inertias that pull poets back to that world of sentimentality that you mentioned you were wanting to get away from. People can read work that blows up the familiar, blows up their ideas of poetic value, and maybe that work becomes a part of their “diet” when it comes to an engagement with art, but they can still sit down and read or write a love poem, an ode. Everyone can still write a poem about spring.
CCH
Well, that happens across the board, like with jazz. Think about Archie Shepp, playing standard honky tonk blues in his older days. Many people lose the edge they once had. And either they would just repeat what they had done for all those years, over and over again, or go back to a style they had played before. I’m mainly familiar with the jazz scene because I knew so many jazz musicians, and I saw what happened in New York, and in Sweden. The whole thing fell apart because of the politics in the United States, and in Europe as well. What was really creative was simply muffled. It didn’t receive any material support at all. Unless you were independently wealthy, you could not pursue it.
NF
Do you think the roots of this muffling are always material, economic, and institutional, or is there also something about the way these discoveries in art might at times represent a real danger for the artist? There is that temptation to step away from an edge once you get there.
CCH
Yeah. I think those two tendencies work in tandem. People do, after a while, just lose their edge. You have to keep innovating, but at a certain point, with any background, you cannot go further. You have that choice, to repeat yourself or to change everything altogether. The second thing is that, I mean, if you’re 30 years old and all you’ve done is play saxophone your whole life, you have no marketable skills except playing the saxophone.
NF
Or writing poetry.
CCH
You’re sort of stuck, and all you can do is just go out there and play the saxophone. This is our culture – it kills everything. Avant gardist work is not profitable, and you make more money with a pop band or a symphony orchestra than with an avant-garde ensemble with only a hundred people in the audience. It is not a great business proposition.
NF
It seems like you’re saying that in principle there would be no limits for discovery and innovation in art outside such a culture.
CCH
There are two things. The education that people get in music today is not solid. You learn a lot of technique, many people have amazing technique, but they’re not taught what to do with it. They have all this technique but they just dance around with it. They don’t have the foundation for going further. Real music education takes a long time. Thirty years ago in India, somebody you would hear play would have been in schooling for 20 years before he’s allowed to play his first performance. I mean, you start when you’re five. And here you start when you’re 18 or 20, and you graduate when you’re 24. What do you know – nothing!
NF
And then those 24 year olds go and start teaching other people. . .
CCH
Everything is undermined. Their question is, “How much money do we get back from investing this much money in these sort of students?” This is very different from when I grew up. When I studied logic in Stockholm at university, there were three people in a class and it was not cancelled. This was a two-semester course, and it was not cancelled. No student dropped out. Today, any course that is less than 10 gets cancelled automatically. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you teach: if less than 10 people are there, the topic is worthless.
NF
It’s very depressing.
CCH
Indeed. I mean, the whole of Western culture, its foundation, is destroyed. This takes generations to fix, and now it’s too late. So it can never be repaired.
NF
Could I ask about your interest in psychoanalysis a little bit? Has this also been a long-term interest or education for you?
CCH
Well, I guess I’m not so much interested in psychoanalysis as such. I never really read Freud, except his early stuff on hysterical women and things from that time. But Lacan has a certain way of formulating ethical or philosophical problems, and he ties a lot of it to our bewitchment by language, either in psychosis or neurosis or perversion. Already if you think about the observer in quantum mechanics, there is a subject there who is drenched in language, and he must think in language the entire time, because the report he will give from the result of the experiment will be in language. So he cannot evoke any mystical things, nothing that escapes his language. Everything has to be accounted for. You sort of have to pad the account in various ways so that it appears to work – that is the art, so to speak, to make it look as if it works, as if you were a magician who was able to draw together all these concepts in an order such that everything becomes clear.
NF
When you say that there is a padding that fills in the gaps for the subject, is that something art produces too?
CCH
I mean, the conventions, the shackles within which you are performing, they do this padding for you. The whole society and culture is padding, so that you can quickly get to your goals. The padding can never be questioned, but it’s the padding that must be questioned.
NF
But I’m trying to think of what you mean by padding – art, fantasy, ideology?
CCH
Well, say, an animal cannot perform as successfully as we can when we make our breakfast. We turn things on, we take things from the fridge, we toast the bread, blah, blah, blah. All of that works for us but not for the cat because the world is not padded for the cat. We just have to push buttons and open a door and close a door and we have everything there for us. The cat just needs to run out and get a mouse and whatever – nothing is provided for the cat in that convenient way. We pad our reality in such a way that the Real, in Lacan’s sense, is avoided. Except when we burn the toast or something like that. Then the real comes back.
NF
This reminds me of your interest in the concept of the sinthome in Lacan’s work, and how that relates to your art, specifically the color algebra pieces, which you apply to binary theories of sex and gender in a visual way that plays on the visuality of gender segregation signage in bathrooms and so on. Psychoanalytic theorists like Oren Gozlan have tried to describe a sort of sinthomatic construction, the symbolic padding that makes the real survivable for certain sexuated positions such as that of the transsexual, as something aesthetic, as something that art does. Is this part of what you mean by padding?
Catherine Christer Hennix, Algebra w/ Domains, acrylic on canvas, dyptich, 200 x 500 cm, 1973–91 | image: courtesy of the artist
CCH
Uh, no. The symptom has to fit into an already-existing padding. You cannot have a sickness or a symptom that cannot be understood. That just gets dismissed. You have to have a symptom that people can read, you see? If your leg is hurting and you’re not limping then people think you’re putting them on. It’s only when you limp that you can convince somebody that your leg hurts. And this is a sort of padding in the culture – there’s no prop here, exactly, but there are conventions. If you don’t show certain signs, those signifiers, what you’re saying is not happening. This goes into every single order of society, and when the padding starts to break up, as it does now, for instance, all over the place, you see that it is just padding. But only when you have these catastrophic events that are coming over us right now do you see that what was taken for granted was actually just padding. It was nothing. It was just people’s imaginations that kept it together.
NF
It’s pretty harrowing to realize that.
CCH
It’s a hefty thing to think through, indeed.
NF
It’s sort of like the end of a dream or a romance, where you look back and it’s like there was nothing ever there.
CCH
Yeah, no, this is why it is so catastrophic. When people realize that everyone else is going crazy, then everyone will go crazy. That is the most dangerous moment in a social formation.
NF
What drew you to psychoanalysis, when did you encounter it? Because I know you studied with a group of theorists in Paris.
CCH
That was in the ’90s. I had the occasion to be in Paris and followed Jacques Alain Miller’s seminars for a few years.
NF
Is it still a discipline that you see some potential in, or is it something that, like art and music, you feel has also retreated from its discoveries?
CCH
I mean, Lacan actually never had any real students. He told them, “You have not understood a word I have said, just go home, all of you.” But Lacan had a particular angle on things that was in my opinion quite truthful. He asked things that other people didn’t ask, in contexts where they actually made a difference. It may have looked like he was a bit careless, and in some ways I guess he was, very much, but he did have a kernel of carefulness that those who followed him simply failed to live up to.
NF
I’m thinking of a recent polemic of Jacques Alain Miller’s that he wrote in response to a talk Paul Preciado gave at the French Psychoanalytic Society, in which Preciado had criticized, rightfully, psychoanalysis’ treatment of transsexuality. Some people found Miller’s critique of this critique quite transphobic, and it is, but to me it didn’t seem to really consist of anything at base other than a staking of territory, a territory that is in any regard quite empty.
CCH
It’s all become a business enterprise. I mean, it’s a multi-million dollar enterprise he’s got, and it’s sort of a joke. Have you ever seen him give a lecture?
NF
No, I have not.
CCH
It’s a joke because he’s imitating Lacan in his speech and in his mood. It’s very strange that Lacan gave him the authority to carry on the work, because he must have known the guy was not on the money. But I’m not familiar with his stuff anymore. I used to be in contact with people throughout the ’90s, but over the last twenty years I found what they were doing less and less interesting. The last thing I saw was some kind of European Psychoanalytic Association that wanted to integrate neurophysiology with psychoanalysis, and I thought that was just too much. After that, I sort of quit. But I still study Lacan’s texts. I studied him already in the ’60s, actually, but I didn’t know anything about analysis, and I thought this was a very strange side of philosophy.
I thought, this is a very interesting guy who looks at things about signification in a different way. Not exactly in a new way, I mean, you can find it in Indian semiotics and stuff like that. But yeah, for a long time I thought he was a minor philosopher. I spent my time studying classical Indian music and composing my own music, and getting my graduate studies in Logic finished. I went to Berkeley, California, in 1971, so I was not in contact with psychoanalysis at all until I happened to be in Paris and happened to go by a bookstore with Seminar XX. Then I returned to Sweden in 1990, and they had a Lacan seminar going on with a French woman who was very good. A student of Lacan. They had learned that I was in Sweden, so they called me up to talk about Lacan, logic, and cybernetics. So I met her, and she sort of explained to me what Lacan was doing in a way I hadn’t understood before. Then I started to read him from another aspect.
NF
Does psychoanalytic theory, particularly in its ideas on sexuality and sexuation, also uncover something that we pad our world with?
CCH
I think the padding needs to be attacked from many directions. It must be undermined on a foundational level. But I don’t know, people are on so many different levels. Sometimes a completely stupid poem could be very illuminating for a person who will not read anything else. We are looking for something more, but something that likely doesn’t exist unless we do it ourselves.
NF
I have a sympathetic instinct that says, okay, if someone has a profound revelation about themselves thanks to an encounter with some banal or stupid or sentimental or played out piece of art, or a completely levelled off feature of the world – “padding” as you say – and they feel it’s profound, and maybe it illuminates something about their identity, their sexuality, their sex, their sensitivity to life, anything – this instinct in me says there must be something in the structure of the experience they’re getting out of this completely stupid pseudo-artwork that is common to anything else that could structure such an experience, even in the more rarified works we’re talking about. I’m not saying that what gets illuminated is the same but that the structure of illumination is the same in some way. But then again, I guess following that instinct is risky because it tempts you to, you know, take the world seriously.
CCH
I think that’s extremely risky. I don’t know what you mean by “taking the world seriously,” but I think that’s extremely risky. I mean, the person we’re talking about, the person who is illuminated by a sentimental artwork or poem, she is not looking for Lacan or La Monte Young or anything like that. That person is just looking for an opening, and needs that opening to breathe. For her, La Monte Young would just be oppressive. Everybody is so disturbed that they need their own personal culture to bring them to a place where they can breathe again. I think one should be generous and should let everything pass as long as it’s not disturbing other people, but, on the other hand, there needs to be a measure of forbearance, an updating of data, rather than a taking of old data from old models. There is an incredible complexity to modern society because of all the connections that are being made. Say there were a thousand connections one could make a hundred years ago, well, there are a million today, and every single connection is a potential point of conflict. Even then, everything still remains quite disconnected from one another. There are hundreds of thousands of warfronts, here, there, everywhere. Yet you must persist along these lines, because there is no other structure possible.
NF
The hurly-burly.
CCH
It is more than anyone can muster. People are defeated before they even start.
NF
Defeated before a conflict even happens.
CCH
Yeah.
NF
Is there a temptation to retreat? What should we do with that?
CCH
There can be nothing but a tactical retreat. Some people do retreat out of disgust or nihilism, or whatever, but there is no way you can fight this with the given means. The situation that we are in has to be thought through in a very different way. It’s like a tsunami that is on its way, and the first order of things is to make sure you’re not swept away by it, and then you figure out what you do when it’s all over. You have to wait and see what opportunities offer themselves.
July 2022
A month later, Catherine Christer Hennix was sitting at a table by the door at Blank Forms, in Brooklyn. She sat beside a laptop, upon which the livestream of the James Webb Space Telescope deployment was running. The telescope was entering its operational mode after a slow cooling phase that had begun a few days before, and the timer told Catherine (and each person who trickled into the performance space that evening) that 15 hours remained before its data collection would begin. We are now able to see the images produced by a composition of the device’s many collection panes, but on July 11 the stream still showed them all in separation – it offered only the gradual tightening of a horizon.
James Webb Telescope panels | credit: NASA and James Webb Space Telescope Team
This was not the night of her performance – her first in years, and her first in a decade in North America. July 11 was a rehearsal. As Catherine noted afterwards, the very idea of a preliminary attunement to performing her music again for the first time in four years, in a space completely unlike the one in which she was set to perform later in the week, was somewhat silly. Of course, her playing was transcendent. The next day, I returned to Blank Forms to continue the conversation with her I had begun a month prior. Catherine was living there for the duration of her month-long stay in New York. The address above the buzzer outside had been replaced with her name on a small sticker, just in case anyone in the neighborhood was looking for her.
We talked more about psychoanalysis, and specifically the way it touched on transsexuality, and the way Catherine’s views on art extend into these ideas. What interested her about Lacan, she said, was that he sensed that the signifier – the same signifier in many uses, by all appearances – could repel the subject when placed in one structural position and welcome them in another, especially when it comes to signifiers of sex and sexuality. This was something that the linguists whom Catherine had studied as a young mathematician could never explain, she said – no amount of deep grammar could reach the gravitational forces of these elements for what it is that we are, a logic that impresses itself wordlessly upon our capacity to enunciate ourselves and our desires. One piece of Lacan’s, in particular, was especially important to her, she said: L’Étourdit. In its punning title, this late piece by Lacan claims that “the turn speaks.” Relating her own experience of reading it, Catherine recalls being struck by the idea that one must commit to a “turn” to enter language, one must contort in some way. For those who cannot make such a turn – those with the wrong velocity, the wrong angle, the wrong balance, those populations who may for the moment be illegible as subjects to those pulling off the turn – the only option is banishment, or a place outside the walls.
I asked her if she related this phenomenon to the exclusion of trans people from public, intellectual, and spiritual life. Her example was fascinating: she noted that the historical function of the transsexual, at least in the non-transsexual world, was often as an oracle of some kind. It is a truism at this point to say that “trans people have always existed,” that globally and historically there are countless examples of transition, nonbinarity, and forms of sexuation beyond the cissexual, and that Western imperialism and colonialism exported its taboos into places where they did not exist previously. But as Catherine asked, given all of this, why is it that these subjects in particular are pictured as oracles, priestesses, conduits to some other world or other knowledge? Why, she asked, would giving place to the transsexual – or, I might add, the cissexual desire to destroy the place of the transsexual – proffer a knowledge of some kind? For Christer, this scene arises not because we actually hold such a knowledge, but because structurally we function at times as an outside of the episteme, an outside of a world. It is in the idea of an “outside” that humans have continually looked for non-tautological truth, she said, ignoring the fact that truth must always be tautological.
In Catherine’s words, “no lessons are on offer.” Especially, she thinks, when it comes to an engagement with philosophy. For her the entire field – whether continental or analytic, from Kripke and Brandom to Deleuze and Heidegger – is less about ideas and more about personages, about “competitive charlatanry.” Wittgenstein, unsurprisingly, is one of the few she unabashedly admires. Still, Catherine’s feeling is that philosophy can never “furnish results,” “solve conflicts,” or “approach truths,” unlike psychoanalysis, art, and mathematics. As she said, “the formal systems they develop never match the way a problem works its way into an episteme.” It is not that she takes a deflationary view of metaphysical concepts such as truth, she clarified, but that all truths follow from certain assumptions, preconditions, axioms, which she aims to “make explicit” in her work. The questions of charlatans do still concern her, then, but they cannot be approached without error, without the application of a logic – she favours the logicism of her teacher in mathematics, the Russian intuitionist Yessenin-Volpin, who had called logic “the science of avoiding error.”
But, I asked, how can one retain a concept of error that might be avoided, or not, if the very notion of truth is a part of this philosophical charlatanry? Doesn’t error require the existence of a truth not attained? Catherine qualified her statement: all truths, she said, are tautologies. For example, Yessenin-Volpin’s position in mathematics, known as ultrafinitism, rejected the sense of infinity and the set of all natural numbers, given that there is no notation that can convey it; from such a standpoint, truth only exists in its demonstration, as if demonstration itself is truth. (Yessenin-Volpin was the son of the poets Sergei Yessenin and Nadezhda Volpin, in fact.) For Catherine, this is akin to the revelation in the desert before Moses: it is “the ‘I am’ that proclaims ‘I am.’” It is this fundamental tautology that any larger logical system, such as that of mathematical logic, depends upon. For Catherine, logic is also that which is lacking in the use of language today, she said, for example in the laws of a civic body. Yessenin-Volpin, too, had once aimed his ultrafinitism at the law, advocating an almost Adoptionist or Karaite stance on language’s ability to avoid self-contradiction. Catherine described all systems of jurisprudence today as “floundering” in the absence of a logic that can tolerate tautology, and one example she used was the self-evidence of trans embodiment, which it shudders to think may rest upon an irreproachable “I am” – all of these modes of thinking, so desperate to find firmer footing than what tautology offers, reach beyond their ken, and according to her delude themselves into thinking that they can reach something like a judicable world. “We are taught how to feel each other with words instead of fingertips,” she said. It struck me as an attitude not at home in the present, and an interesting inversion of her teacher’s own position.
Catherine Christer Hennix’s keyboard at 99 Scott, Brooklyn, July 2022 | photo: Nora Fulton
“The problem is that no one has been taught how to encounter what is coming.” “What do you think is coming?” I asked her. “Well, you know.” “Do I?” “Yes, you do, you know. The coming failure. Everything is failing.” She chuckled: “No one is ready.” Throughout our conversation that day and a month before, an undercurrent of dread kept coming up, a feeling of collapse visible throughout so much of the current world order, the failure of all the customary political and economic images of the world, of the body, of the ways we can be together, of what one can aspire to or hope for. There was a thunderstorm warning in effect for the city. The humidity and heat were oppressive, and I wasn’t dressed for rain. On my way out we continued talking, about the poetry of Chika Sagawa and Yoshimasu Gozo, whom she was excited to read, and about her years in California when she had taught math at Berkeley. She said she had been there from 1971–3, and would go into San Francisco to explore on her free days. “What was the city like in 1971?” I asked, halfway out the door. The apocalyptic mood lifted suddenly. “It was fun,” she said, “it was very fun.”
Catherine Christer Hennix is a Swedish musician, mathematician, poet, and artist living in Istanbul.
Nora Fulton is a poet and doctoral student living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
