No W Here Then pt. 3

One could say that the great mystical traditions teach a certain sort of blankness, as a receptivity that Lyotard recognizes and to which Heidegger’s clearing perhaps acts as a precursor. But these seem to be connective moments, maybe not entirely empty of intention and waiting. But how about what seems to be a more contemporary loss, or abandonment of body, or thought, or feeling, more akin to an involuntary shock / severance (or even imposed as in the case of Agamben’s Muselmann), maybe akin to the numbness of the 'shock of the new' which modernism supposed represents (or maybe it’s Benjamin's involuntary memory which erupts through the layers of nowness) or maybe some more archaic, spasmodic shudder which has a reach from some more chthonic ranges, signals hard to decipher now, so faint, attenuated, etiolated has the relation between earth and flesh become, fallen Greek gods whose only Homeric duty now is to cause dissociation, a flattening or numbing, the only thing that can pass for blankness or emptiness; a syncope or interregnum, the (non)thing most feared by the managers of where we are now, a cause for institutional concern since now (this is not 'now-time,' jetzeit, presumably), is not an emptied kairos but every moment to be programmed, leaving no blank spaces (and what is childhood but the beginning blankness of us all) until the final Great Blank of death.

In The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, and the chapter entitled 'The Anesthetic Animal,' Daniel Heller-Roazen describes a contemporary 'suffering of thinking' which procedes by excision of feeling and even identity, minds for which the perception of bodily feelings apparently no longer exists, a mind without body: "A common insensibility, however 'inhuman' it may have seemed to Aristotle, has become the rule: we are all, to rewrite Musil's famous phrase, 'men without perceptual qualities.'"

Earlier, Heller-Roazen had written of this depersonalization phenomena:

"This may seem a strange state, and, in the course of the millennial reflection on the nature of the speaking living being in the West, there is no doubt that it is novel. But it can be said to have been in part anticipated by the tradition. One metaphysical determination of human nature now reaches its fulfillment. The animal vanishes from man: in a speaking being, thought and existence remain, at least absolved of the animal power that was the sense of life. Such an 'absolution,' to be sure, can seem a parody of fulfillment, but that makes it no less fulfillment of a sort."

Thus a parade of blank faced, puppetized serial killers, school shooters, random violence, and the pursuit of the 'X-treme' in all areas of twentieth century life, anything to fill what seems to be an empty space which all the flotsam and jetsam of a life lived in media saturation strives to patch ("jetsam has been voluntarily cast into the sea (jettisoned) by the crew of a ship, usually in order to lighten it in an emergency; while flotsam describes goods that are floating on the water without having been thrown in deliberately, often after a shipwreck"), lives in the shadow of the ship wreck/catastrophe and disaster in slow motion.

This is the fate of fate: to be fateless:

"Are the great affects of the twentieth century, the sensible impressions discovered then and not before, not all feelings of the progressive retreat and vanishing of all feeling? The 'poverty of experience' (erfahrungsarmut) identified by Benjamin, the state of ‘being left empty’ (leergelassenheit) said by Heidegger to define the ‘deep boredom’ we all know, the overwhelming insomniac impression of the bare fact that ‘there is’ (il y a), described by Levinas as an absolute 'experience of depersonalization': these basic impressions are the fundamental feelings of a culture that has bid farewell to the primary perceptual power of the tradition. They are the affects that belong to animals who strive to think and to think about themselves with increasing might but who no longer sense that they sense, if not in perceiving at the limit, that their ailing perceptions are, in truth, of nothing and of no one."

[….] "Some may wish to deny the fact; others may lament it as an evil of the present; still others may celebrate it as a triumph of a resilience of the mind and body unseen unti now. But the truth is that a transformation in the speaking living being poses a challenge to thought that can hardly be avoided. [….] Any ethics worthy of the name must confront the promise and the threat contained in the sensation that today we may no longer, or may not yet, sense anything at all."

From the point of view of the Coming Machine Culture, the ability to dissociate, dis-assemble, and re-assemble body and soul will no doubt be seen as a virtue. It is already, wot!

No Where Woman pt.2

If the idea of the blank (or the empty, or the silent, or the apophatic) is impossible (albeit a necessary impossibility in all its forms, and more, referred to previously) then a closer approximation would be a severing of connections, a cutting off, a jettisoning even as that somehow seems impossible as well. At the very least a disconnection while still connected. (The most extreme instance of such disconnection/connection is explored in an essay by Nicola Masciandaro, Beheading and The Impossible: "Beheading severs the space around it, producing in its before the presence of something that already has/can never happen and in its after the presence of something that did not/never stops happening. [….] One way or another, the severed head keeps speaking to its self-otherness, producing a discourse unlike any other, as a token of the reality perceived only through the transcendence of human discourse."[....] "Inevitably, the severed head stays ahead, bleeding, glowing, calling from within this living dream to play fast and loose with ours, to speak its secret. Beheading is impossible." )

One is also reminded of the Lyotard essay, "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?" significantly enough, in the book entitled The Inhuman, wherein techno-science, that is, thought, creates its own body since the two are inseparable, a paradoxical dance that can only begin (always over again) with a blank-which-is-a clearing, which has been filled and then obliterated (or disremembered) by the body in all its forms: "In what we call thinking the mind isn't 'directed' but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour. [….] …the suffering of thinking is a suffering of time."

But...how does that temporal suffering manifest itself in the blank? And what pathologies / evolutionary paths does it lead to?

No Where Man, pt 1

The idea of a 'blank space' is no doubt a metaphysical conceit (even as the idea of a blank check seems increasingly possible, even necessary, in the current climate; if one were sufficiently Marxist a connection would indeed be drawn). We now know that there isn't even really anything called 'space' pure and simple but rather the knot called space/time/matter, all apparently convertible one to the other in some eldritch manner. Even the very basis of space itself, if base (Al-queida in Arabic) is the right word to use, and according to quantum and string theory dynamics, is a bubbling cauldron of nothingness folding continuously in on itself and in communication with the whole of its parts and perhaps of all times, more in attunement with the ancient Greek idea of the khôra .

Nevertheless the idea of a blank space is an attractive notion, along with its anti-blank, the idea of a New Jerusalem, perhaps a hypercube of incredible density and dimensions, wherein all souls will reside. It seems that both 'spaces' are proceeding in their development, perhaps becoming co-terminous at some point.

Giorgio Agamben points toward such a terminal condition regarding such a space through out his writings. Below is a lengthy quote from Remnants of Auschwitz. Here, there seems to be a peculiar combination of a New Jerusalem, an impossible density, and the blank, an impossible emptiness:

"In 1937, during a secret meeting, Hitler formulates an extreme biopolitical concept for the first time, one well worth considering. Referring to Central -Western Europe, he claims to need a volkloser Raum, a space empty of people. How is one to understand this singular expression? It is not simply a matter of something like a desert, a geographical space empty of inhabitatns (the region to which he referred was densely populated by different peoples and nationalities). Hitler's "peopleless space" instead designates a fundamental biopolitical intensity, an intensity that can persist in every space and through which peoples pass into populations and populations pass into Muselmanner. Volkloser Raum, in other words, names the driving force of thecamp understood as a biopolitical machine that, once established in a determinate geographical space, transforms it into an absolute political space, both Lebenstraum and Todesraum, in which human life transcends, every assignable biopolitical identity. Death, at this point, is a simple epiphenomenon."

An interesting correlate to this is to ask whether our psyches evolve to take account of these new (say, within the last 150 tears or so) 'worlds in collision.' One might be surprised by how many people think that the human mental 'evolutionary set' is laid in stone, along with its physical comportment and may oscillate somewaht but hasn't basically changed since the structure of Homo sapiens sapiens was 'finalized' by evolutionary theory. (And one side of this is shown by the new research which claims that 'religion' is a recent evolutionary development in the brain; one is reminded of that perhaps forgotten, and controversial, book which seems to be the reverse of these new findings, by Julian Jaynes on the bicameral mind wherein the mind was ONCE bifurcated and allowed the gods to speak --that is, the other side of our brains which allowed 'godness' --but became superceded.)

Next, new mental pathologies, notably persons who do not feel like 'persons,' who, unlike animals which were once commented to have feelings but no thoughts, now claim thoughts with no feelings, connections, or bodies.

One of a kind, None of a kind

We cherish the idea of a one of a kind. But the sui generis is a problematic concept --- assuming it could exist and that if it could exist that it could be recognized. After all, what does it mean, to recognize something? Usually to slot it into a category, either Kantian if you are slightly metaphysical, or everyday, or even into Foucault's Chinese dictionary where things start to form their own categories. I suppsoe the latter is a start at problematizing a species which heads its own genus. We could stick Wittgenstein's admonition against the possibility of a private language also, as the opposite of such, or at least an oxymoron, since the very idea of language is something that has hooks outside itself and maybe is even totally consisting of the outside with an inside (not total for sure) being merely a condensation of sorts.

The sui generis is a hinge concept being hate and loved, seemingly simultaneously. On the one hand, the one of a kind is a mythical beast much beloved by collectors and when it enters the economic realm of valuation it is truly priceless: either not worth putting a price on it or astronomically valuable, only affordable by, say, institutions or individuals so weatlthy that they function as institutions.

But then of course monsters are sui generis. Having no kin (think of Victor Frankenstein's creation) they roam lost and abandoned, excoriated, practically unseeable because of their category confusion and when they are seen, confusion begins, and almost immedately thereafter the lighting of torches and, as Jeff Goldblum puts it in Jurassic Park "then later there is running and screaming." One could even say that monsters are de-monstrations of 'hinge-ness' (aligned with that favorite of cultural studies 'hybridity').

'Hoaxing' is rife at this hinge point, a hinge between the human and the in- or non-human, the barely sensed and the no-sensened but nevertheless felt in some fashion, btween self-consciousness and consciousness which simply seems to have a self. For some, the lucubrations formed by this pivot demand the daylight, an agency which will dry up, expose, what is perceived as the dankness, or at the very least the anxiety caused by uncertainties of origin, placement, and apparent irrationality due to febrile human perception. Often times, the only way ordinary human perception/conception can make sense of the 'one of a kind' is to imitate it in a teasing manner, so as to say, 'look, there is really nothing there; I did this." Perhaps art started that way; perhaps in some respect it still proceeds in that fashion, in the long Hegelian haul of some obscure, half-seen (itself we see now as somewhat monstrous) dialectic.

the one of a kind, the sui generis, hence falls prey to the legal concept of res nullius, from Roman law meaning things which are unowned, or lost and abandoned, but which CAN therefore be taken up by the first one who comes along and claims ownership. I would say that hoaxing is a form of ownership, as well as de-coding that which was formerly lost and abandoned in the sense of unreadable. The untranslatable: from a certain viewpoint everything SHOULD be translatable, should have its Champolion and Rosetta Stone ... if it doesn't have such (that is, theatens to remain res nullius) then it must be a hoax and ownership can be claimed under the rubric of a default because of a sort of false consciousness. (The Voynich Manuscript is the most recent example of this phenomena....and interesting that it compares it to the 'monstrous' text of H. P. Lovecraft, the Necronomicron).

But what of the idea of the 'offene stelle,' a blank space akin to silence, to withdrawal, maybe akin to apophatic 'prayer', maybe Eastern nothingness, maybe what was formerly known as 'nature' before it began to cease to exist? Where is the neceesity of blankness now to be inscribed, in a completely ajudicated world, a world where being-filled-formed-taken ('ownership') is peremptory? (Late Latin peremptorius, from Latin, destructive, from perimere to take entirely, destroy, from per- thoroughly + emere to take: 1 a: putting an end to or precluding a right of action, debate, or delay)

The Hidden

Occasionally the surface of language which we inhabit (and whose promises we fulfill or not) take on a slightly less burnished quality. The everyday seems a bit less reflective, a bit more perplexing. Under the right circumstances poetry can have that effect (though to the extent that it has to announce itself as such, the effect of 'peering beneath/through the surface' may be diminished; I'm fully aware that this terminology is not re rigeur these days and that all we are supposed to have are a gradually escalating/descalating series of imbricated structures proceeding through micor- and macro-scales. I suppose there is little yet in the physicalist spectrum that would lead us to think other wise.) But language may be another matter, so to speak, a peculiar combination of matter and anti-matter whose point of rupture can everywhere be felt and no place where it can effectively be focused on, purely and simply as itself, outside the regime of the necessities of communnication.

I am reminded of the possibilities that language holds encoded in its structure, by a recent article (here) in physics site where in words are modeled after entangled quantum states, (what they call 'spooky action at a distance' after the quantum spukhafte funverkungen of Neils Bohr) and seems to say basically that all words are somehow tangled together and speaking one may somehow elicit a great many others. I will leave it to others to try tosay how reliable such ascheme may be for further exploration, but it does leave the door open for various other weird phenomena e.g., the reverse speech effect (record a speech, play it backward and uncannily there seem to be sections which are intelligible and whcih seem to undo the meaning of the promary speech.

Lest one be though a complete kook, the last years of Ferdinand Saussure's researches involved the anagrammatical properties of language. In his case, a study of an ancient poetic form called the Saturnian in which poets encoded a name (gods, patrons, etc) into the words of the poem: a message within the poem. Apparently he became disturbed by his findings (they existed only as a large series of notes and weren't published in his lifetime); presumably by the poetic, verging on the mystical, taking precedence over the pragmatic. As Julia Kristeva put it, "poetic language adds a second, contrived, dimension to the original word" said second language "transgressing the rules of grammar" at the point where "reason strives to hold madness back to the limit of its own truth." (Sylvere Lotringer, The Game of the Name, a review of Jean Starobinski's book on Saussure's collected and assembled notes, Les Mots sous les Mots, published in 1971.)

But what if there are anagrammatical moments when the contrivance, the method of secondary poetic/prophetic inscription, becomes obscured or even occulted? When the question of who, if anyone, has overlaid one text to another becomes problematic indeed and a secondary structure WITHIN the primary text seems to come alive on its own accord, even haunted by an aspect for which an accounting is hard to come by. That is, Sassure's hunt for an 'authorial intent' was to bear no fruit because this (somewhat anomalous) structure of language itself somehow contrives to write on and beyond itself, as in Heidegger's notion that 'language speaks us.' There psychoanalysis has found fertile ground. One wing of this 'monoblock' thesis of language led to post structuralism and deconstruction. You wouldn't necessarily know it from the academic language but this can be spooky stuff as can be seen by the bible code folks, reverse speech advocates, steganography, and in fact all areas where there is a surface and a hidden, encrypted substrate. Popular culture is filled with examples

Within this doubled 'substance' there is another question of authorial intent: the coding is put there by human agency; the coding appears as an 'accident' of structure (whatever/however accident could be said to operate in such circumstances; off hand I can think of no convincing explanation/proof of the way those two levels would communicate with each other, although I suppose evolutionary biology would contend that the relation between phenotype and genotype has been taken care of. This is not exactly what I'm thinking of, but this is: a code written upon the DNA code. I'm also reminded of the failed attempt by William Newbold to find meaning in the scratches of the penstrokes of the writing of the Voynich Manuscript. It seems that pursuit of an uncanny encrypted world fosters its own form of madness.) And the third possibility would be that it was placed by a non-human agent. The last does not fit any measure of scientific correctness with the exception of the faint possibility of an alien consciousness somehow placing a code.

Anf finally to place somehow in juxtapostion here, the idea of 'telepathy' and 'text' as a massaging of the quantum field effect as postuated above. I would point to the lastest issues of the newly revamped (?) Oxford Literary Review's issue on telepathies which I enjoyed tremendously but which may of little use for someone attempting to solve something.