Published in the same year that James Joyce began his ‘Work in Progress’ (later to become Finnegans Wake) and a year before André Breton’s surrealist manifesto, Malinowski has stumbled on the notion that we are all talking about nothing most of the time and that this is something to cherish.

2

For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 1955.

3

The phatic element of John Cage’s writing is the true vehicle for his thoughts. Discussing his ‘Essay on Nothing’ the dance critic Jill Johnston noted that

There is no logic in Cage’s lectures (unless it be the logic of style, which is everywhere in evidence); he merely describes situations, or gives spontaneous voice to convictions and insights, or rambles coherently about nothing

As if to undermine even the faintest possibility that his texts might still be restored to order by the conventional reading habits of his audience, Cage supplements his book Silence with various anecdotes, deliberately aimless as in the following examples:

Once I was visiting my Aunt Marge. She was doing her laundry. she turned to me and said, “You know? I love this machine much more than I do your Uncle Walter.”

*

When Vera Williams first noticed that I was interested in wild mushrooms, she told her children not to touch any of them because they were all deadly poisonous. A few days later she bought a steak at Martino’s and decided to serve it smothered with mushrooms. When she started to cook the mushrooms, the children all stopped whatever they were doing and watched her attentively. When she served dinner, they all burst into tears.

These stories, scattered throughout his lectures, echo the structure of the Zen koan - a short, enigmatic text given to a monk’s pupil as a puzzle which may lead to enlightenment. Certainly, Cage was influenced by the ethos of Zen and the work of Alan Watts, the principle stimulus for the transmission of Zen in the West. He is always careful, however, to undermine any sense of gaining ‘something’ through enlightenment, and tellingly included a Japanese monk’s lament - ‘Now that I’m enlightened, I’m just as miserable as ever’.

4

It’s something that Impressionist painters used to do. whenever they were unsure of the true colour of something, they’d look at its reflection in a piece of black glass. They thought that the only way they could ever see the true nature of something was to reflect it onto something dark.

Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming, 2000.

5

In January 1979 Andy Warhol exhibited his Shadow paintings - a large sequence of abstract canvases which he described as ‘one painting ... with parts’. The origin of the images on which they are based remains uncertain. His studio assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, believes they are taken from a series of photographs of abstract maquettes in the Factory. Warhol himself said that they had their origin in ‘a photo of a shadow in my studio’. Lynne Cooke, in an essay on the paintings notes alternative histories which claim respectively that they were based on photographs of children’s building blocks; they were based on the the shape cast by an erect penis; or on the cast shadows of the Empire State Building.
        Each canvas was restricted to a single colour and the imagery was dominated by two abstract compositions, with large, sweeping brushstrokes visible in many of the pictures. The paintings were hung low, edge to edge, in a continuous frieze around the gallery with no deliberate sequencing of the images. Julian Schnabel, describing Shadows for a 1989 catalogue remarked that ‘There is almost nothing on them. Yet they seem to be pictures of something.’
        It is tempting to pursue the circularity of Schnabel’s statement and conclude that the ‘something’ he detects in the paintings is ‘nothing’ and the ‘nothing’ which Warhol confronts in Shadows works on many levels. Victor Stoichita, in A Short History of the Shadow, traces the impulse for the series of images back to a photograph of Andy Warhol and Giorgio de Chirico taken sometime in 1974. Both artists stand in deep shadow - de Chirico stares balefully at the camera like an old master of horror, while Warhol seems to wince as if suddenly possessed by a dark force. Four years later, De Chirico died in November 1978. A month later Warhol began the series of paintings which became Shadows.
        For Stoichita, the work ‘unveils Warhol’s debt to De Chirico’ as he ‘replaces the Italian master’s shadow stories with storyless shadows.’ For Victor Bockris, Warhol’s biographer, the context of his subject’s life is just as important at this point as any homage to a dying master. Chronicling the Factory scene at this time he writes

The façade of good times was cracking. The nonstop night-time revelry began to take a toll... All the major players in Andy’s life except Vincent Fremont suffered from drug and liquor problems and started breaking down around him.

Shadows, despite its abstraction, documents this entropy. His sequence of silkscreened photographs are fractured glances into the margins of his life, echoed in the self-portraits of the same period where he plays with negative images or is haunted by his own shadow on the Factory walls.

6

        Movement
        The feeling of a ship or a train or a bus beneath me, each with its different rituals, its different rhythms. A destination was useful because it was a substitute for purpose; it answered any question I was likely to be asked. Movement became my reason for being, my excuse. Movement for its own sake. I forget who it was who wrote about the importance of doing nothing, how the art of doing nothing is one that most people seem to have forgotten. Well, I decided to resurrect the art. In doing nothing, I would be reduced to what I was moving through. I would, quite literally, become part of the scenery. I would blend, immerse. Dissolve.
        And wasn’t this, also, in the end, a way of dealing with death? Death, which is the root of all anxiety. Death, which requires us to justify ourselves. Death, which makes us believe in God.
        All that I could happily dispense with.
        Do nothing. Whatever happens, happens. Let it come.

Rupert Thomson, The Book of Revelation (1999)

7

There are now several histories of zero and the concept of nothing on the market. Like many popular science books they start easily and gradually work towards the mathematics of the phenomenon. It is at this point that much of the general population find themselves floundering. Very possibly the mathematics of nothing is intensely moving, and for scientists the real excitement of mathematics lies in its abstraction from the world around us. John D. Barrow, in The Book of Nothing, writes for example,

In the end mathematics was too great an empire to remain intimately linked to physical reality. At first, mathematicians took their ideas of counting and geometry largely from the world around them. They believed there to be a single geometry and a single logic. In the nineteenth century they began to see further. These simple systems of mathematics they had abstracted from the natural world provided models from which new abstract structures, defined solely by the rules for combining their symbols, could be created. Mathematics was potentially infinite.

This is essentially where the real story of the vacuum universe takes off but it is also the moment at which something more intimate vanishes. Zero, nothing and the cipher have a humbler life among the general population where they remain tied to the physical world, denoting the accidents, breaks and interstices along the course from birth to death.
        In an interview later entitled ‘On Philosophy’ Gilles Deleuze calibrates theory to this more humanistic pitch when he talks of the empty spaces in his own curriculum vitae:

If you want to apply bio-bibliographical criteria to me, I confess I wrote my first book fairly early on, and then produced nothing more for eight years. I know what I was doing, where and how I lived during those years, but I know it only abstractly, rather as if someone else was relating memories that I believe but don't really have. It's like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleep-walking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place.

In the public arena, as celebrity and the search for biographical detail reaches new levels of intensity, these gaps in peoples lives are assuming new importance. With figures as diverse as Arthur Rimbaud, Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes it is the unknown and apparently empty years they spent away from the spotlight that now assume almost mythic status.
        Even among these names, the writer Thomas Pynchon looms larger than most. His twenty year disappearance from public view and from publishing left a void that could only be filled by increasingly bizarre rumours and legend. Even before he vanished it was notable how invisible he had become with few photos in circulation and few biographical facts available to the media. By the late 1980s, while fans were speculating that he may be writing under the guise of ‘Wanda Tinasky’ - a homeless woman in California - several hazy photographs of the author surfaced briefly. To the shock of the media and the public, it was clear that Pynchon had a perfectly respectable address in the Upper West Side of New York where he was raising a family and living an unspectacular life.
        Around this time, Pynchon began to publish again - first with a preface to a collection of his older short stories, entitled Slow Learner and later with two novels, Vineland and Mason & Dixon. In Slow Learner, echoing Deleuze, Pynchon views his earlier self as if looking at a stranger:

My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn’t dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can’t very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?

What Thomas Pynchon the Elder has learnt slowly during his long ‘catalepsy’ is the impressive extent of his own ignorance, the geography and the local economy of the empty spaces that are in all our lives:

The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything - or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well

To inhabit such territory demands a strategy for survival - an expertise in doing nothing. Obligingly, in 1993, Pynchon published an essay in the New York Times Book Review on the subject of ‘Sloth’, detailing the history of this sin. Arguing that it is ‘the vernacular of everyday moral life’, he outlines the ways in which we do nothing or do something at such an imperceptible pace that we appear to do nothing and thereby evade attention and the chore of making difficult choices:

Though it has never lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price, a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest. The compulsive pessimist's last defense -- stay still enough and the blade of the scythe, somehow, will pass by - Sloth is our background radiation, our easy-listening station - it is everywhere, and no longer noticed.

When another author - David Bowman - investigated the invisibility of Thomas Pynchon he discovered that, in fact, his whereabouts were well known and that not only had one previous researcher given up because it was too easy but that CNN had tracked him down and captured him on film in one afternoon. Despite this, Pynchon remains badly documented and, even in the pirate archives of internet, photos of the writer are scarce. Clearly we need his anonymity as much as he does and we are conspiring to maintain it. For Bowman, who eventually viewed the CNN tape, something was lost - ‘I'm still left a little sad. For me, the 20th century is over early - the last free man has been hunted and trussed.’

8

I remember now that Feldman spoke of shadows. He said that the sounds were not sounds but shadows. They are obviously sounds; that’s why they are shadows. Every something is an echo of nothing.

John Cage, ‘Lecture on Something’

From ancient China there is a description of a vibrato technique: Remarkable is the ting-yin, where the vacillating movement of the finger should be so subtle as to be hardly noticeable. Some handbooks say that one should not move the finger at all, but let the timbre be influenced by the pulsation of the blood in the fingertips pressing the string down on the board a little more heavily than usual.

Such extreme sensitivity of touch is of the essence in a performance of Feldman's music. In the piano pieces the depressed key is gently eased back to position to minimise the obtrusive sound of the key mechanism, time is allowed for the minutest of harmonics to resound, and at the end of the phrases fingers steal away from the keys noiselessly.

John Tilbury, ‘On Playing Feldman’

Morton Feldman has written an opera in one act to an original text by Samuel Beckett. Entitled Neither it is scored for soprano solo and full orchestra, and was commissioned by Rome Opera, where it receives its first performance on May 13, 1977, conducted by Marcello Panni...
        When the text eventually arrived, Feldman was struck by the space between sentences - a form of visual punctuation. His natural, if idiosyncratic, response was to concentrate on each line in isolation. 'First of all, like a conventional composer, I started to scan the first sentence: To and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow...

Howard Skempton, ‘Beckett as Librettist’

10

Often nothing is no more than something imperceptible to our senses or beyond the reach of our technologies. Black holes - a modern emblem of nothingness - are the clearest example of this. The gravity at work in a collapsing star is so powerful light cannot escape its pull and so we cannot see the phenomenon. Yet, through physics and mathematics, scientists have been able to confirm their existence. In a simple primer on black holes Kitty Ferguson offers an explanation of what happens:

Gravity was the force that gave birth to the star in a cloud of gas. It was the force that kept the star in balance for all those years, not allowing it to fly apart but also contributing to the processes that prevented its collapse. Now, after millions of even billions of years have passed, gravity is the force that claims the star as its victim, squeezing all its enormous mass to something the size of the sun...then to the size of the earth...to the size of the moon...to the size of London...St James Park...the lake in the park...a duck on the lake...a tennis ball...a marble...the head of a pin...the point of a pin...a microbe... For a star ending up more massive than about 3 solar masses, we know of no power capable of halting this catastrophic collapse. The star continues to crunch down even after it has become a black hole. It’s best to think of a black hole not as a star, but as what happens to spacetime around a star that goes on collapsing to near infinite density.

Beyond this point, the understanding of the phenomenon involves gravitational redshift, quantum vacuums, virtual particles, antiparticles, and the Einstein-Rosen Bridge or ‘wormholes’. It is here that most of us turn to Star Trek for further elucidation, finding the science more imposing and less exciting than the metaphor and the potential narratives it might generate. For the moment it is the capability of black holes and wormholes to transform the landscape of our imagination which has the greater resonance.
        In art too, the imperceptible has the same ability to capture human imagination. In the late ‘60s, the artist Robert Barry used this fact as the basis for a series of works focusing his audience on potentially infinite concepts while demonstrating the finite boundaries of human and technological perception. In his ‘Inert Gas’ pieces, Barry would release commercially bottled ‘noble gases’ back into the earth’s atmosphere and in his ‘Carrier Waves’ works, he had small transmitters constructed which would blot out all radio waves within the immediate vicinity of the gallery. The latter pieces in particular were seen as sculptural by the artist who has since described that saying

Sculpture is the only word I could think of for it, because they were, the boundaries were, theoretically, infinite. But because our technology isn't infinite, there were limits as to where we could actually perceive this piece to be. And so technically, there were bounds; conceptually, it was infinite.

In another context he defends the infinitesimal nature of these works in the following way:

These forms certainly do exist, they are controlled and have their own characteristics. They are made of various kinds of energy which exist outside the narrow arbitrary limits of our own senses. I use various devices to produce the energy, detect it, measure it, and define its form.
        By just being in this show, I’m making known the existence of the work...
        ...there are many other possibilities which I intend to explore - and I’m sure there are a lot of things we don’t yet know about which exist in the space around us, and although we don’t see them or feel them, we somehow know they are out there.

Barry made this work in the vanguard of the conceptual movement which emerged at the end of the 1960s but it is clear that interest in the possibility of depicting absence was not confined to the that group of artists. While Warhol investigated shadows throughout the ‘70s, others such as Gerhard Richter explored ideas of nothing through painting in the mid-1980s. Richter’s ‘Grey’ paintings in particular provided him with a vehicle for his own definition of the subject:

Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings not associations; it is really neither visible or invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.
        To me, grey, is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible designated area of colour.

In a series of ‘Notes’ from this period there is a clear urgency in Richter’s confrontation with ‘the monstrousness of the Void’ and he remarks at one point that his work on his abstract paintings is the ‘only natural thing’ adding ‘I know nothing, I can do nothing, I understand nothing, I know nothing. Nothing’. At other times, he echoes Robert Barry in his awareness of the limits of our senses, science and philosophy:

It is not possible to visualize Nothing. One way to gain some idea of that terrible state is through the impossibility of visualizing anything before, after or alongside the universe. Now since we very much want this visualisation, but know it only as one that we can never have, it is an impossibility that we experience, existentially, as an absolute limit.

For Richter, as for Robert Barry and the scientists attempting to define Black Holes, there are a set of physical limitations which eventually shade into philosophical paradox as they wrestle with the impossibility of making absence present.
        In Underworld (1999), Don de Lillo uncovers another set of limitations that come into play when we are confronted with an embodiment of Nothing in everyday life. One of the novels characters, Brian Glassic, drives out to a landfill site on Staten Island and surveys the enormous operation in progress to deal with garbage:

He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza - only this was twenty-five times bigger...All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space...And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour...

The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it...

Just as weeds are the dark reflection of plants, so rubbish is the state of nothing into which derelict objects are banished. In this case, however, the mountain of ‘nothing’ is imperceptible because we choose not to see it. As De Lillo’s character notes, while contemplating ‘all that soaring garbage’ - ‘The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us’.

11

For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly presented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)

12

Thursday night, July 31,1930. At 9:40 pm. on CBS Radio James La Curto portrayed "The Shadow" for the first time in the Detective Story Hour. The show ran from 1930 - 1954 and after the shadow began to appear as a character not just a narrator, the part was played for a year by Orson Welles in 1938.
        Victor Bockris records that, as a child, Andy Warhol was an avid listener to the programme:

Hitler’s speeches, Churchill’s impassioned and defiant voice and Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts from London brought the sounds of the war into the Warholas’ living room. According to Mina Serbin, all Andy ever talked about was how many people were dying. His favourite radio character was the Shadow, whose signature statement was, ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows ...’

Andy knew too. By 1978, beginning the Shadows series, he knew that the Factory, like a black hole, was exerting a fatal gravitational pull. Anyone in its orbit was collapsing under the strain. He himself was a slowly dying star, camouflaging the seriousness of his work under a layer of dismissive comments (Shadows was just ‘disco décor’ he remarked in a New York Magazine article on the exhibition).

14

We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.

Charles S. Peirce, "Logic of Events" (1898)

15

September 1977. Andy Warhol lent over seventy objects to the New York Museum of American Folk Art for an exhibition curated by his friend, Sandra Brant. Amid the surrealistic bric-a-bric and primitive examples of early US product design lay Warhol’s favourite piece - an eighteenth-century pale blue door and doorframe. “I like the door best,” he said. “You can go in and out of it and still go nowhere.”