...close to Impenetrable

UFO Drag Queen

2011-11-25T06:25:00.000-08:00

Coming soon on FORT!/da? Books
http://www.pd.org

Coming soon on FORT!/da? Books: http://www.pd.org

2011-03-31T06:45:00.001-07:00

Theses on Freedom

Freedom means never worrying about which scale, gender, genre, code you have to use.

Freedom means never even having to even consider any of the above.

Freedom means learning to pay an instrument and then forgetting what you learned.

Freedom means never learning to play an instrument but play it anyway.

Freedom means never having to say you’re sorry.

Freedom means always having to say you’re sorry.

Freedom means being the King.

Freedom means having no kings.

Freedom means humming a Pooh tune.

Freedom means whistling.

Freedom means knowing how to read.

Freedom means playing it by ear.

Freedom means listening very well.

Freedom means never listening at all, just doing.

Freedom means cleaning up after yourself.

Freedom means letting the chips fall where they may.

Freedom means playing what you want, where you want, when you want.

Freedom means silence and letting things play themselves.

Freedom means making a hole or cracking something open.

Freedom means filling something that wasn’t a hole in the first place.

Freedom means looking around and thinking that everything could be different

Freedom means looking around and realizing that everything is perfect just as it is.

Freedom means looking around and realizing that everything is perfect…except for this one little thing.

Freedom means never having to look around.

Freedom means I’m always afraid someone is more free than myself.

Freedom means always being slightly afraid and paranoid.

Freedom means no one can tell me what to do and I can’t tell anyone else what to do…unless I have manipulated/seduced them to think that doing what I want them to do is the way to be free.

Freedom means that the idea of ‘freedom’ can be the biggest scam of all.

Freedom means, total freedom means, that no one does anything, everything comes to a stop.

Freedom means the ability to add two plus two and come up with five.

Freedom means following all the rules and being successful and happy.

Freedom means not following any of the rules and being unsuccessful and melancholic.

Freedom means noise and cacophony.

Freedom means a single pure tone, unstoppable, going on forever.

Freedom means it cost nothing and it’s dumb.

Freedom just the opposite and is the most expensive thing in the world and YOU my friend will be able to afford it.

Freedom means youth and time.

Freedom means age and timeless.

Freedom means nothing.

Freedom means everything

Freedom means there is no real stage without a curtain and there is no world without gravity.

Freedom means gravity turned on its head.

Freedom means something is always seeping out from invisible cracks.

Freedom means being lost.

Freedom means we have no idea where anything is…except ‘mything.’

Freedom means we have no idea whether there IS anything at all.

Freedom means, the very IDEA of freedom means, that everything is rapturous, glossy and shiny.

Freedom means an ecstasy so great, its density cannot be contained in the world.

Freedom means beauty is dead, dead to every general but special to the private who wanders lost on the battlefield.

Freedom means that, if it were complete, total, we would each crawl up our own black hole and disappear.

Freedom, total freedom, means all beauty would finally collapse into One Most Beautiful Thing at the End.

Freedom means total beauty is total freedom….one disappears into the other.

Freedom means the disappearance of memory.

Freedom means the remembrance of all the disappearances of every thing, leaf, entity since the Beginning and holding it back, preventing ghosting and haunting.

Freedom means “nothing left to lose.”

Freedom does not exist FOR the machine.

Freedom, total freedom, means there is no redeeming (saving, securing, repurchasing) anything or anybody.

Freedom is sort of LIKE a machine, a mechanical disconnect from ‘fate’ and ‘destiny.’

Freedom is incompatible with fate and destiny.

Freedom is the dissolution of all categories.

2011-03-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Crossing the Great Divide

A recent issue of National Geographic magazine has a feature on the great animal migrations all over the world, that single-minded travel by all sorts of animals. Their travel is intense and often spectacular, braving incredible odds to reach Someplace Else.

Biologist Hugh Dingle has identified five characteristics that apply to all migrations: "they are prolonged movements that carry animals outside familiar habitats; they tend to be linear, not zigzaggy; they involve special behaviors of preparation (such as overeating) and arrival; they demand special allocations of energy; [ ....and lastly] migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside."

I began to think about the article while I was sitting at a local coffee shop recently. I looked up from my conversation and noticed that all of the small tables had a laptop whose user was also plugged into headphones. I commented to those at my table that we were the only people actually present in the room in a way, all the others had vacated to some virtual space or other.

It often seems as if the whole culture is in a migratory mood, in some great hurry to get to some unspecified Other Place. And yet there is probably no one who would own up to such a feeling of necessity or urgency (or at least any sort of ontological urgency so to speak) -- not that testifying to a mood is equivalent to actually HAVING the mood. And in fact such urgencies as migrations can hardly be considered as a mood but more like a drive, in the psychoanalytic sense of BOTH sexual urgency as well as a more generally applied meaning to the term 'drive', i.e., a 'fervid attention to the greater mission,' albeit 'attention' that defers attention from itself. Perhaps it's the sort of drive which addiction brings, trance-like almost, to connecting actions and goal, a goal which is itself a rapturous, trance state, an emptying of self and filling by some foreign (although never really THAT foreign since it is very very close, so close as to be largely invisible, occluded, most of the time; David Punter writes very rapturously, attentively, addictively to all the phenomenological pendants to this whole complex).

Of course the most visible and blatant of such such raptic transport is waht might be broadly termed the religious impulse..or maybe spiritual impulse if the term 'religious' makes you wary.
But as a pure phenomena, and as such must remain hidden, it would seem to be omnipresent in everyday life, a utopic, in a strict sense of nowhere as well as another sense of everywhere, impulse/drive which must be continually policed, both by secular and religious authorities.

Certain;y this Great Migration is not a recent one for the human species. It seems to have first started with the migration of matter to life and then to consciousness. And who is to say that is the end? or what might be next? Our immediate experience of ANYthing is just far too short to make certain judgments and even our archives have certain flaws, as we are occasionally able to see through tears and abrasions in the surface of those collected memoires of ghosts and revenants, perhaps other flows and times, perhaps NEVER to be really available to this tarnished and tangled flesh. But who knows really? This flesh is still mysterious; I love this quote from a radio broadcast in 1966 from Michel Foucault. It leaves hope of a sempiternal salvation lying in wait somewhere in the folds of our fleshy being, something beyond the bounds (and binds) of our immediate being and experience but waiting, always waiting. Perhaps this will turn out to be the reason for our machines at the end of it all.

"The prestige of utopia--to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible, protected--always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body."

The Domesticaton of Deep Time

2011-01-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

This morning as I was meditating in the bathroom, I stared at my son's toy dinosaurs on the floor. I was struck for a moment at the ease with which the unthinkable becomes palatable and made digestible. Even the deepest time becomes a source for iconography, a way to protect the borders of the self/ego/group, a setup for enclosures of one sort or the otherm the Kantian limitation on human hope, through the categories etc, being perhaps the most sublime and intractable ontological enclosure. (W.J.T. Mitchell has written a book, The Last Dinosaur, which deals revealingly with the cultural implications of this particular shard of deep time.)

There is no doubt that the very concept of Deep Time has a Romantic resonance that doesn't sit well with the pragmatic, a-week-is-ancient-history, electronic tonalities of web 2.0 that we all must swim through daily. I have to give credit to some aspects of Speculative Realism for giving a certain amount of philosophical intensity and contemporary currency (at the always continuous risk of eviscerating it in the very ways which it uses to form and transmit its arguments).

But also one must wonder at such (purported) escape pods. since, to quote Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: it starts in laughter and ends in screams. One can only think of the monstrous place of H. P. Lovecraft these days: perhaps a place where the Dionysian (the Left hand way) and the Apollonian (the Right hand way) merge. Whichever way it is the Terror seems to always wait in the wings... and WITH wings perhaps, as the ominous last scene of Hitchcock's The Birds seems to ominously indicate. That principal of collapse is always over on the Other Side ---best, as in Kant, to say that it is unreachable. Still, makes one wonder if nevertheless IT can't reach over to US, that isan inexorable movement which sometimes resembles fate and other times just arrogance, forgetfulness, and the sheer historical press of matter impinging in a negative way on consciousness---which leads to anothe kind of shear.

The Secret History of Emergent Matter

2010-11-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

I recently came across a blog site with the title "The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices" that so excited me that I was compelled to at least THINK about doing a post on the general idea (and of course often times the reason we find something fascinating is that it is congruent already with something in us)--and now I am actually writing something. Perhaps this will be ongoing for a bit, perhaps this will be it.

Two other bits of bibliography came to mind immediately. One is Jacques Derrida's 'Psyche-Inventions of the Other' article and the other is Colin Bennett's 'The Dream Life of Prototypes.'

There are some deep holds of a particularly Platonic variety on all sides of this discussion, which especially for web events (a Deleuzian environs if there were ever one) makes it dangerous--or perhaps only self-fulfilling prophecy...which makes it precisely the phenomena under discussion: was 'something' there (available in some sense, present w/o being present) before it actually appeared. One would assume a sociological truism regarding the social and cultural conditions that must be present before an invention can come into existence but that doesn't always seem to be the case, at least overtly, to wit, the ancient Greeks who had certain inventions (i.e. a rudimentary steam engine) but could never bring it into operability, consigning it to a category of parlor trick or toy. (I also think of the so called Antikythera Mechanism found not too long ago, sometimes called an astronomical computer as well as numerous other ancient 'gadgets' that never were able to form into a density enough to create a technological society per se: there must be another 'space' which forms before the thing itself appears.)

herewith a few quotes appropriate (i.e., 'timely' or 'untimely', both being of importance) or not:

ll cultures run out of time. Their states as programmatic states are only partial functions of their physical development in political and economic terms. Their economies may be quite sound, but if the psychic structure is incapable of producing new metaphors in terms of that thing called vision, they will certainly die.

To try and avoid such a systems-death, cultures generate closet subtexts rather like a liner carries life boats. Such boats are kept under wraps, and are hardly the subject of general conversation on board since they are reminders of the possibility that the strength of Nature may be far stronger than the strength of the most powerful ship or the most convincing paradigm.

If we see the lifeboats as anomalies, then we can see alternative thinking as hidden sub-routines and covert agendas which are kept sustained at a low energy level as semi-legal experimentation. The paradigm, as a form of information-life, keeps its options open therefore, ready to change the goal posts very quickly if it senses that resources and processes are becoming exhausted, emptied of metaphor by being deprived of fresh psychic resources, and therefore incapable of imagining beyond itself.

In this model, we have disembodied intelligence itself acting rather like a live foraging animal, using all the tricks and deception and camouflage needed to stay alive as an entity.
......
Therefore we may have to consider seriously the rather uncomfortable idea that pure information is forever an evolving and unprecedented form of life, complete with its own intention fields.
....
In these terms, parapsychology, metal bending, UFOs, and remote viewing, may be looked upon not as anomalistic areas within the traditional sterile “real” versus “unreal” debate, but as sub-routine options for a possible evolving world-modelling of belief systems. This represents the Post-modern view that sees the birth of anything and everything as a creation of an ideological flux within time-elements which are kinds of symbolic dream-theatres.

In this sense it is possible to conceive of “matter” as a form of information-life whose “body,” as it were, consists not of atoms, but of advertisements, presentations, shows, acts, and endless performances struggling for cultural prime time.

Colin Bennett

Those who are familiar with certain image theorists such as W.J.T. Mitchell's What Do Images Want? will find a kindred spirit here when Bennett writes later on that certain images seem to have an almost-evolutionary strategy as "information-animals grazing on the cud of belief, having evolved into pure techno art form". Indeed, the idea of autonomous agents operating within the human sphere yet somehow not fully attached to that sphere has become almost a common place in modern life and culture, whether in the many varieties of conspiracy theories, or the object-oriented ontologists, going back to the dialectical image of Walter Benjamin, perhaps all drifting lazily outward from some sort of Leibnizean monadalogical concern. (I drag the monad into this because, well this is a blog after all, but I began to think of the very elegant book by Daniel Tiffany 'Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance' which, while not dealing with the image as such except in terms of the poetic image, there is incredibly rich material dealing with the grounds of cultural constructions and the blurry topographies which "would seem to be the inevitable condition of a road that is also a way of singing or thinking"...and here also: "Like monads, works of art are forms--centers of reflection--which mirror all other forms. Hence the modern doctrine of formalism in the arts promises to deliver through reflection--through continuous experiment--a 'peculiar affinity' of expressive [i.e., 'magical'] correspondence between forms [which are denied relations as objects]" and in general, the idea of the enigma and of 'perception without consciousness' in general. And in turn, in thinking of Benjamin, dialectical image, monad I am drawn to Peter Fenves excellent book 'Arresting Language: from Leibniz to Benjamin' and the chapter on Leibniz and the name: "Leibniz never ceased to investigate the relation of individuals to the species of which they are supposedly members".)

And the Derrida article will have to wait. Thanksgiving and a two year old are competing for attention.

Fastners Pasquill: new FORT!/da?

2010-10-27T07:50:00.000-07:00

A new book available from FORT!/da?.
A diificult to characterize offering from Mr. Derek Pasquill (but stylistically let's call it Benjaminian in at least it's pulling of quotes to illuminate a somewhat hidden center) but entries organized encyclopedically

Herewith a few pages:

Fastners Pasquill

An A to Z of the Islamic Prosthesis framed by diverse material

'Why is it all so important to you, Apthorpe?'

'My dear fellow, it’s taken me years to collect.'

'Yes, but what’s in it?'

'That, old man, is not an easy question to answer in one word.'

Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms

Contents

A1: 'Azm – Islam's civilizing mission

B1: Baldwin's Effect – culture genetics

B2: Balthasar's Feast – nocturnorama

B3: Bamboccianti – divine truths probed through indirect means

B4: Bathing – based on reality

B5: Battlefield – shaping

B6: Belly Laugh – laughter, Enlightenment stage

B7: Berserkr – ecstatic battle fury

B8: Biffed – attack, element of surprise

B9: Blasphemous Lingering – upward striving

B10: Brazil – nausea, ontic greed

B11: Breenbergh – fuses figures and landscape into a smooth unity

B12: Bricklaying – concerted but unregimented enterprise

B13: Brocken – Coleridge, upward striving

B14: Buffo – animeme bites man

B15: Bum Bil Bee – repeating act, ashes to ashes

B16: Bumbles – unimaginable rise of Islamism

B17: Bumptious Buckeen - Queneau

The Doll Universe

2010-06-28T04:47:00.001-07:00

The Doll Universe: The Terrifying Joy of Matter is out on FORT!/da? Books

Here is an excerpt from the postscript by Ture Bural:

The doll is an internalized landscape—but Eischer-like, mapped onto the surface, a depopulated region that consists only of interval, a ‘middleness’ of landscape…all that is outside us—which forever bear a muddled distinction of indistinction between an ‘opening’ or a ‘wound’ and cicatrix of memory that forever and always bears the two within itself, the violence of an uncanny sign of time itself (and will always lead to some thought of a Coming, a messianic event which will heal that abyssal split. Should that happen the doll, all dolls, all other intermediaries and ephemeral bodies would disappear.).

Go here should you wish to purchase a copy.

Guest Post: episode V of Hunter's Trance: Cunt Estreat b/w Sur Face

2010-01-27T08:32:00.000-08:00

For this post I have the pleasure of presenting a piece from the continuing Hunter's Trance series by de Bentvueghels who, if all goes well, will have a book on Fort!/da? Press. The work included below has some controversy attached to it, mainly by virtue of it's original title, Cunt Lore.

Although an erudite short piece, the word 'cunt' sets off alarums in many people the way few words do. Following Cunt Lore will be another version of that piece. The author puts the relation to the first work thusly:

[the] second version of Hunter's Trance Ep 5 [....] duplicates as it were a chiastic structure found in the original - where the main text is mirrored by the notes so as to create two Vs - a figure already prefigured or foregrounded in the X in the lower half of the Book of Kells Tunc page.

By setting up a mirror episode, albeit one in a faulty mirror, risks or engenders a sense of Vertigo which perhaps is one aim of this exercise.

----

Hunter's Trance. Episode V: Cunt Estreat

A guest post by de Bentvueghels

Previous episode here http://arts.hurryupharry.org/2010/01/09/hunters-trance-episode-four/

Cuntense

1. V
2. Litters slittering up and louds of letter slettering down
3. The Cunt Coloring Book
4. The Rainbow Portrait
5. House of Cunt: "The plaintiffs were estopped by grand playsaunce."

1. V

"At the end of the first chapter of his Allegory:Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Angus Fletcher noted that allegory always tends toward the geometrical and diagrammatical dimensions of language, toward a duplicitous writing that calls for two different and simultaneous modes of apprehension. Substitution of different typeface in modern editions all but obliterates this will-to-diagram the printed word. Obviously the fifth chapter of the third volume, 'Sur des vers de Virgile,' requires that 'V' hang over the contents 'like' both a cutting blade and a monogram for the female pudenda; the letter synthesizes sexual difference, which the long essay takes such pain to suggest in discursive ellipsis. Frame's edition - among others - uses the '5' to signal what Florio's word apprehended immediately with its use of 'V.' On typographical grounds alone, it can be argued that Florio's is the only possible translation of Montaigne." (1)

"I shall not fail to include among these precepts a new discovery, an aid to reflection, which although it seems a small thing and almost laughable, nevertheless is very useful in stimulating the mind to various discoveries. This is: look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes adorned in various ways with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills. Moreover, you can see various battles, and rapid actions of figures, strange expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good, integrated form. This happens thus on walls and varicoloured stones, as in the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word you can imagine.

[...]

Do not despise my opinion when I remid you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvellous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things and similar creations, which may bring you honour, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things." (2)

2. Litters slittering up and louds of letter slettering down

"'And you can haul up that languil pennant, mate. I've read your tunc's dismissage.' (298.6)

This proves, I think, that Joyce was claiming to have discovered an appositeness for the diagram as an illustration of a part of a woman's body named by an anagram of Tunc. The 'tenebrous Tunc page' has a serpentine capital T in the top half followed by a line of capitals reading UNCCR and then a smaller capital U. The decorated capital T Joyce calls 'Big Whiggler' (284.25) following this by 'NCR'. In the bottom half of the page in The Book of Kells the words are arranged in two triangles with apexes touching to form a St Andrew's cross. This with 'lines of litters slittering up and louds of letter slettering down' (114.17), gives yet another parallel with the Finnegans Wake MS." (3)

"Yet that is not in the end my point. There is another near miss, a mix-up of the middle two letters in the word cunt. I don't think the critic necessarily meant by what we on the East coast would mean by cunt. I think there was a transposition of the n and the u. Quite understandable. Easily done. Happens a lot. It is the figure of synchesis or confusion of letters. And, of course, the u is an n upside down. All of which is to say that the word that fit was Cnut. A Cnut of a bloke, meaning a fossil, an archaism, and the equivalent of King Cnut. It is pronounced Canute but spelled Cnut.

[...]

I need to point out that the Cnutist makes a virtue of failure. Cnut turned his impotence into a powerful lesson. There is an exquisite closeness and a didactic miss. And part of the lesson was obviously that failure is something to learn from and specifically that we need to recognise who we are. There are a lot of things, sovereign or subject, Cnutist or Marxist, liberal or feminist, that we just cannot do. Sooner or later you are going to have to face up to your near misses. And perhaps surprisingly given how little account history has paid to Cnutism, it turns out to be quite an optimistic enterprise." (4)

3. The Cunt Coloring Book

"I knew that the things we don't have names for, or images of, are the ones we label crazy and bad. I believed that reclaiming labial imagery was a route to claiming personal power for women. Using soft pencils, I did drawings of every woman who would let me, then I used tracing paper to translate them into easy-to-reproduce ink drawings. I made copies on card stock and sold them through local women's bookstores. I learned there was a market for these images. Women liked them, liked to hang them on their walls, and give them as gifts.

By November 1975, I had turned the drawings into a coloring book called The Cunt Coloring Book. No other name seemed really to fit, although the word 'cunt' was not one with which I was particularly comfortable. The alliteration, though, was nice. I also liked the idea of combining a street term for genitalia with a coloring book, because both are ways that, as children, we get to know the world." (5)

4. The Rainbow Portrait

"Nonetheless, if the erotics of the portrait entail a contemporary reading of the mantle's folds as mouths or vaginas, the political dimension of the queen's erotic allure cannot be ignored.

[...]

John M. Archer reads the folds as 'tongues,' the shift from Frye's to Strong's to Fineman's to Archer's interpretation of the folds indicating the difficulty critics have had in attributing meaning to the fold, itself a particularly canny iconic representation of a sliding signifier. The painting clearly eroticizes Elizabeth's body, whether or not one sees the portrait in the same way as Fineman, Frye, Archer, and Strong. The ambiguous folds, in combination with the vaguely phallic rainbow and the string of pearls looped suggestively round Elizabeth's genital area, image an erotic potential complicit with the sovereign vitality the portrait projects. Moreover, the capacity to transfix with both an erotics of ambiguity and an ambiguous erotics fortifies the absolutist dimensions of the portrait, for Elizabethan absolutism depended on precisely such an effect both to create its allure and veil its weaknesses." (6)

5. House of Cunt: "The plaintiffs were estopped by grand playsaunce."

"A percentage of guys still do it to their wives, or so the pollsters would have us believe. Wouldn't be totally freakish. Wonder what the smell is like. If she even. The swampy scent Roseanna exuded in her twenties, most unique, not at all fishy but vegetative, rooty, in the muck with the rot. Loved it. Took you right to the edge of gagging, and then, in its depths something so sinister that, boom-o, beyond repugnance into the promised land, to where all one's being resides in one's nose, where existence amounts to nothing more or less than the feral, foaming cunt, where the thing that matters most in the world - is the world - is the frenzy that's in your face. 'There! No - there! Right ... there! There! There! There! Yes! There!' Their ecstatic machinery would have dazzled Aquinas had his senses experienced its economy. If anything served Sabbath as an argument for the existence of God, if anything marked creation with God's essence, it was the thousands upon thousands of orgasms dancing on the head of that pin. The mother of the microchip, the triumph of evolution, right up with the retina and the tympanic membrane. I wouldn't mind growing one myself, in the middle of my forehead like Cyclop's eye. Why do they need jewellery, when they have that? What's a ruby next to that? There for no reason other than the reason that it's there for. Not to run water through, not to spread seed, but included in the package like the toy at the bottom of old Cracker Jack box, a gift to each and every little girl from God. All hail the Maker, a generous, wonderful, fun-loving guy with a real soft spot for women." (7)

A poly-tics of conjury rather than conjuring tricks, suspending an art of cundiction, without consummation or consequence?

Notes

(1) Tom Conley. "Institutionalizing Translation: On Florio's Montaigne" in Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy Literature Art. editor: Samuel Weber, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 59, n. 4.

(2) Leonardo da Vinci. Trattato, cod. urb. lat. 1270, 35v, Modo d'aumentare e destare l'ingenio a varie inventioni (How to expand the mind and conduct various inventions) in Philippe MacMahon, trans. Treatise on Painting, Princeton, New Jersey, 1956, vol.1, pp. 50-51 and vol.2, passim.

(3) James Atherton. The Books at the Wake: A study of literary allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Faber & Faber, London, 1959, pp. 65-66.

(4) Peter Goodrich. "A Fragment on Cnutism with Brief Divagations on the Philosophy of the Near Miss" Journal of Law and Society, Law and Literature, edited by Patrick Hanafin, Adam Gearey, Joseph Brooker, Volume 31, Number 1, March 2004. Goodrich here explains how he has received an email from a colleague attaching a chapter from a doctoral thesis he is supervising, which includes an anecdote about a comment found in a copy of his Legal Discourse:

"This book is written by a cunt of a bloke. Fucked if I can understand it!" (p. 133)

Goodrich imagines, or rather, sitting with the synecdoche and riding with the metalepsis, estreats the frustration of the comment's author, suggesting that, given his having been 'fucked' by a book, he should talk to an analyst about his pattern of object choice, as so:

"Just as an aside, the analysis could get pretty complicated. Imagine how it would go: 'my lover is a Lacanian and so he refuses to say his own name'; 'she follows Zizek and only ever allows me to look at her genitalia'; 'I know he is besotted with Irigaray but help us through the differences'; 'he has been reading Judith Butler and now he is convinced that he has to fake all his orgasms'; 'he is a decontructionist and so whenever we arrange to meet it is never in the same place'; 'he's an old fashioned Sartrean and only loves me for what I am not'; 'she's a Levinasian and will only make love to my face." (p.135, n.3.)

Of course, one might also subject Goodrich to similar sessions:

"My lover is a Goodrichean and proximity has become painful"; "she follows Goodrich and now flushes a lot", "I know he is besotted with Goodrich but help us get closer"; "she has been reading Goodrich and misplaces my letters all the time"; "he's an old fashioned Goodrichean and estreats me bad"; "she's a Goodrichean and keeps looking through me."

Or, as Miss Prism might have placed it, "The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what Fiction means." (Quoted by Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will. An October Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, England, 1991, p. 38.

However, all joking aside, Goodrich concludes his brief examination of Cnutism with a sobering reflection, one that one might be tempted to read with the optimism which Goodrich alludes to earlier: "... that this is all there is: a painful proximity, an exquisite flush, a near miss, that comes along with passing through." (p.141.)

(5) Tee A. Corinne. "Artist's Statement:On Sexual Art" Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No.2, Women's Bodies and the State (Summer, 1993), pp. 369-376. Copies of the Cunt Coloring Book may be obtained at Amazon as well as Coco de Mer which usually has some on its shelves http://www.coco-de-mer.com/Splash.html Rather oddly the British Library does not hold a copy - in case, perhaps, readers are tempted to try their colouring skills?

(6) Daniel Fischlin. "Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the 'Rainbow Portrait' of Queen Elizabeth I" Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 184-185. Fischlin comments that Joel Fineman is transfixed by the erotics of the portrait, and here is Fineman on the 'salacious ear .. which covers and discovers the genitals of Queen Elizabeth': "Given all this, what is genuinely mysterious and surprising about the Rainbow Portrait, especially if we assume this large picture was originally displayed at court, is the way the painting places an exceptionally pornographic ear over Queen Elizabeth's genitals, in the crease formed where the two folds of her dress fold over on each other, at the wrinkled conclusion of the arc projected by the dildo-like rainbow clasped so imperially by the Virgin Queen. I think of this ear as one version of the 'increase' that 'from fairest creatures we desire' to which I earlier referred. In reproduction, the vulva-like quality of the ear is perhaps not so readily apparent, but, enlarged and in florid color, the erotic quality of the image is really quite striking, as is the oddly colorless quality of the rainbow, a kind of dead rainbow."
The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will. An October Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, England, 1991, p. 228.

(7) Philip Roth. Sabbath's Theater. Jonathan Cape, London, 1995, pp. 434-435.

NB: 'Estreat' is a legal term for a figure or resemblance, and is commonly used for the copy or true note of an original writing.

----

take 2/episode 5

Hunter's Trance. Episode Five: Sur Face

A guest post by de Bentvueghels

Previous episode here http://arts.hurryupharry.org/2010/01/09/hunters-trance-episode-four/

Contents

1. V
2. Litters slittering up and louds of letter slettering down
3. Viragos intactas
4. The Rainbow Portrait
5. Venusberg: "The plaintiffs were estopped by grand playsaunce."

1. V

"At the end of the first chapter of his Allegory:Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Angus Fletcher noted that allegory always tends toward the geometrical and diagrammatical dimensions of language, toward a duplicitous writing that calls for two different and simultaneous modes of apprehension. Substitution of different typeface in modern editions all but obliterates this will-to-diagram the printed word. Obviously the fifth chapter of the third volume, 'Sur des vers de Virgile,' requires that 'V' hang over the contents 'like' both a cutting blade and a monogram for the female pudenda; the letter synthesizes sexual difference, which the long essay takes such pain to suggest in discursive ellipsis. Frame's edition - among others - uses the '5' to signal what Florio's word apprehended immediately with its use of 'V.' On typographical grounds alone, it can be argued that Florio's is the only possible translation of Montaigne." (1)

"I shall not fail to include among these precepts a new discovery, an aid to reflection, which although it seems a small thing and almost laughable, nevertheless is very useful in stimulating the mind to various discoveries. This is: look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes adorned in various ways with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills. Moreover, you can see various battles, and rapid actions of figures, strange expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good, integrated form. This happens thus on walls and varicoloured stones, as in the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word you can imagine.

Do not despise my opinion when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvellous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things and similar creations, which may bring you honour, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things." (2)

2. Litters slittering up and louds of letter slettering down

"'And you can haul up that languil pennant, mate. I've read your tunc's dismissage.' (FW 298.6)

This proves, I think, that Joyce was claiming to have discovered an appositeness for the diagram as an illustration of a part of a woman's body named by an anagram of Tunc. The 'tenebrous Tunc page' has a serpentine capital T in the top half followed by a line of capitals reading UNCCR and then a smaller capital U. The decorated capital T Joyce calls 'Big Whiggler' (284.25) following this by 'NCR'. In the bottom half of the page in The Book of Kells the words are arranged in two triangles with apexes touching to form a St Andrew's cross. This with 'lines of litters slittering up and louds of letter slettering down' (114.17), gives yet another parallel with the Finnegans Wake MS." (3)

"Yet that is not in the end my point. There is another near miss, a mix-up of the middle two letters in the word cunt. I don't think the critic necessarily meant by what we on the East coast would mean by cunt. I think there was a transposition of the n and the u. Quite understandable. Easily done. Happens a lot. It is the figure of synchesis or confusion of letters. And, of course, the u is an n upside down. All of which is to say that the word that fit was Cnut. A Cnut of a bloke, meaning a fossil, an archaism, and the equivalent of King Cnut. It is pronounced Canute but spelled Cnut.

[...]

I need to point out that the Cnutist makes a virtue of failure. Cnut turned his impotence into a powerful lesson. There is an exquisite closeness and a didactic miss. And part of the lesson was obviously that failure is something to learn from and specifically that we need to recognise who we are. There are a lot of things, sovereign or subject, Cnutist or Marxist, liberal or feminist, that we just cannot do. Sooner or later you are going to have to face up to your near misses. And perhaps surprisingly given how little account history has paid to Cnutism, it turns out to be quite an optimistic enterprise." (4)

3. Viragos intactas

"I rise, O fair assemblage! Andcommincio. Now then, after this introit of exordium, my galaxy girls, quiproquo of directions to henservants I was asking his advice on the strict T.T. from Father Mike, P.P., my orational dominican and confessor doctor,
C.C.D.D. (buy the birds, he was saying as he yerked me under the ribs sermon in an offrand way and confidence petween peas
like ourselves in soandso many nuncupiscent words about how he had been confarreating teat-a-teat with two viragos intactas about what an awful life he led, poorish priced, uttering mass for a coppall of geldings and what a lawful day it was, there and then, for a consommation with an effusion and how, by all the manny larries ate pignatties, how, hell in tunnels, he'd marry me any old buckling time as flying quick as he'd look at me) and I am giving youth now again in words of style byaway of offertory
hisand mikeadvice, an it place the person, as ere he retook him to his cure, those verbs he said to me. From above. The most
eminent bishop titular of Dubloonik to all his purtybusses in Dellabelliney. Comeallyedimseldamsels, siddle down and lissle
all! Follow me close! Keep me in view! Understeady me saries! Which is to all practising massoeurses from a preaching freer and
be a gentleman without a duster before a parlourmade without a spitch. Now. During our brief apsence from this furtive
feugtig season adhere to as many as probable of the ten commandments. touching purgations and indulgences and in the long
run they will prove for your better guidance along your path of right of way. Where the lisieuse are we and what's the first sing
to be sung? Is it rubrics, mandarimus, pasqualines, or verdidads is in it, or the bruiselivid indecores of estreme voyoulence and,
for the lover of lithurgy, bekant or besant, where's the fate's to be wished for? Several sindays after whatsintime. I'll sack that sick server the minute I bless him. That's the mokst I can do for his grapce. Economy of movement, axe why said. I've a hopesome's choice if I chouse of all the sinkts in the colander." (5)

4. The Rainbow Portrait

"Nonetheless, if the erotics of the portrait entail a contemporary reading of the mantle's folds as mouths or vaginas, the political dimension of the queen's erotic allure cannot be ignored.

[...]

John M. Archer reads the folds as 'tongues,' the shift from Frye's to Strong's to Fineman's to Archer's interpretation of the folds indicating the difficulty critics have had in attributing meaning to the fold, itself a particularly canny iconic representation of a sliding signifier. The painting clearly eroticizes Elizabeth's body, whether or not one sees the portrait in the same way as Fineman, Frye, Archer, and Strong. The ambiguous folds, in combination with the vaguely phallic rainbow and the string of pearls looped suggestively round Elizabeth's genital area, image an erotic potential complicit with the sovereign vitality the portrait projects. Moreover, the capacity to transfix with both an erotics of ambiguity and an ambiguous erotics fortifies the absolutist dimensions of the portrait, for Elizabethan absolutism depended on precisely such an effect both to create its allure and veil its weaknesses." (6)

5. Venusberg: "The plaintiffs were estopped by grand playsaunce."

"Castle construction became in the twentieth century the speciality of haunted Californians and (as in Kafka's The Castle or Ludwig's Bavaria) of their correspondents on the other side of the same unconscious. In San Jose, for example, the haunted heiress of typewriter and gun money feverishly rebuilt and expanded the Remington fortress estate according to a layout conceived in the ongoing attempt to misguide the approach and reproach of phantoms. (Similar avoidance mechanisms were built in Fresno and Death Valley.) At San Simeon, Hearst projected the souvenir, ultimately, of his two-year European trip alone (in early adolescence) with his mother.

[...]

The bicoastal orbit of California increasingly comes full circuit as Disneyland replicas are placed ever closer to Neuschwanstein, the model of the Disney castle and crypt (paintings in the Singer's Hall are previews of Bambi). King Ludwig II, himself the advance preview of the case of D., combined gadget love with background music. The grotto at Linderhof was an experimental electrification project which Siemens provided (when the red light shone it was Venusberg; blue light on meant Capri). It was the primal amusement-park float or ride: its mix of late Romanticism and turbine-powered media technology promised the small world after all. While the hidden band played in the grotto, Ludwig drifted in the swan-shaped boat to the backup tunes of the generators making waves and Wagner. This continental drift coupled the king with Sacher-Masoch (and his mistress). But since those were still 'individuals,' it remained a blind date without consummation or consequence. Once the couplification of drives was admitted by mass culture, Ludwig would become, in the trail of his withdrawal into suicide, one of the ghost writers of Disney culture." (7)

Tics of conjure rather than conjuring tricks, suspending an art of cundiction, without consummation or consequence?

Notes

(1) Tom Conley. "Institutionalizing Translation: On Florio's Montaigne" in Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy Literature Art. editor: Samuel Weber, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 59, n. 4.

(2) Leonardo da Vinci. Trattato, cod. urb. lat. 1270, 35v, Modo d'aumentare e destare l'ingenio a varie inventioni (How to expand the mind and conduct various inventions) in Philippe MacMahon, trans. Treatise on Painting, Princeton, New Jersey, 1956, vol.1, pp. 50-51 and vol.2, passim.

(3) James Atherton. The Books at the Wake: A study of literary allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Faber & Faber, London, 1959, pp. 65-66.

(4) Peter Goodrich. "A Fragment on Cnutism with Brief Divagations on the Philosophy of the Near Miss" Journal of Law and Society, Law and Literature, edited by Patrick Hanafin, Adam Gearey, Joseph Brooker, Volume 31, Number 1, March 2004. Goodrich has received an email from a colleague attaching a chapter from a doctoral thesis he is supervising, which includes an anecdote about a comment found in a copy of his Legal Discourse:

"This book is written by a cunt of a bloke. Fucked if I can understand it!" (p. 133)

Goodrich imagines, or rather, sitting with the synecdoche and riding with the metalepsis, estreats the frustration of the comment's author, suggesting that he should talk to an analyst about his pattern of object choice, as so:

"Just as an aside, the analysis could get pretty complicated. Imagine how it would go: 'my lover is a Lacanian and so he refuses to say his own name'; 'she follows Zizek and only ever allows me to look at her genitalia'; 'I know he is besotted with Irigaray but help us through the differences'; 'he has been reading Judith Butler and now he is convinced that he has to fake all his orgasms'; 'he is a decontructionist and so whenever we arrange to meet it is never in the same place'; 'he's an old fashioned Sartrean and only loves me for what I am not'; 'she's a Levinasian and will only make love to my face." (p.135, n.3.)

Of course, one might also subject Goodrich to similar sessions:

"My lover is a Goodrichean and proximity has become painful"; "she follows Goodrich and now flushes a lot", "I know he is besotted with Goodrich but help us get closer"; "she has been reading Goodrich and misplaces my letters all the time"; "he's an old fashioned Goodrichean and estreats me bad"; "she's a Goodrichean and keeps looking through me."

Or, as Miss Prism might have placed it, "The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what Fiction means." (Quoted by Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will. An October Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, England, 1991, p. 38.

(5) James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Penguin Books, 1999 [1939], p. 432.

(6) Daniel Fischlin. "Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the 'Rainbow Portrait' of Queen Elizabeth I" Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 184-185. Fischlin comments that Joel Fineman is transfixed by the erotics of the portrait, and here is Fineman on the 'salacious ear .. which covers and discovers the genitals of Queen Elizabeth': "Given all this, what is genuinely mysterious and surprising about the Rainbow Portrait, especially if we assume this large picture was originally displayed at court, is the way the painting places an exceptionally pornographic ear over Queen Elizabeth's genitals, in the crease formed where the two folds of her dress fold over on each other, at the wrinkled conclusion of the arc projected by the dildo-like rainbow clasped so imperially by the Virgin Queen. I think of this ear as one version of the 'increase' that 'from fairest creatures we desire' to which I earlier referred. In reproduction, the vulva-like quality of the ear is perhaps not so readily apparent, but, enlarged and in florid color, the erotic quality of the image is really quite striking, as is the oddly colorless quality of the rainbow, a kind of dead rainbow." Joel Fineman, op. cit. p.228.

(7) Laurence A. Rickels, The Case of California. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1991, pp. 235-236.

Conjunction V

2010-01-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

We are always constrained by some sort of social apparatus (or prison if you are such a mindset), even to the point of the language we use, one of our most primal relationships to each other and the world (and hence recalling the famous phrase, the prisonhouse of language or the fly in the fly bottle, from another tradition.)

Nevertheless.

We have intimations, even from the sometimes apparently impregnable view of 'knowledge; something which has been called 'non-knowledge', that peculiar relationship of blindness and insight,each apparently relying on each other.

In a most interesting book by George Didi-Hubermann called Confronting Images he refers to 'spontaneous philosophy', that is, when we view an image it immediately sorts our orientation of the world without any effort on our part. A certain amount of work is then needed to find openings and gaps in the image. IF we do live in a local region of many, for lack of a better term, parallel universes we must find a way to a non-knowledge (which immediately becomes a knowledge) which has power in its powerlessness (a Blanchotian/Levinasian/Batailleian position). Did-Hubermann glosses the location of this spontaneous ordering:

"Where is its motor, where does it lead, on what is it based? It is based on words, only words, whose specific usuage consists of closing gaps, eliding contradictions, resolving, without a moment's hesitation, every aporia proposed by the world of images to the world of knowledge. So the sopontaneous, instrumental, and uncritical use of certain philosophical notions leads the history of art to fashion for itself not potions of love or oblivion but magic words lacking conceptual rigor; they are nevertheless efficacious at resolving everything, which is to say at dissolving or suppressing a universe of questions the better to advance, optimistic to the point of tyranny, a battalion of answers."
Georges Didi-Hubermann, Confronting Images

Here is to the grinding of one bit of knowledge against the other, creating, if nothing else,
here below a bit of phosphorescent dust as a result of the grating:

"It would be unfortunate [....] to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of sight and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenology of place, time or especially of the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word 'day,' but it is very difficult not to conceive of the pattern of one's past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and partial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in the accounting for their occurence. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say, ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit."
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory

"Why the fairies took infants and children was also subject to considerable discussion. Not all agreed with the most popular theory that it was to improve the elfin breed, though many noted that female fays appeared to have difficulty bearing children. Some, including Hugh Miller, Lady Wilde, and many collectors of Scottish lore reported that folk belief that human infants were used as substitutes for fairy offspring in the elfin annual or septuannual sacrifice or tithe to the devil. Another motive for abducting children, especially boys, in Scotland, was said to be the belief that a champion of mortal strength but fairy indoctrination would one day emerge to lead the forces of Elfland against human beings. Yeats, Lady Gregory and others argued that fairies needed mortals for their physical strength. As one of Yeat's informants told him, the sidhe were shadows and spirits who could not move objects. 'But they have power over mankind, and they can bring them away to do their work.' Some even argued that, since the salvation of fairies was questionable, they needed mortals to be with them at the Day of Judgment. Canon J. A, MacCulloch indicates how frequently this case was made in stating that fairies stole human beings 'to share in the spiritual benefits of the religions from which ....[they] are supposedly excluded.'"
Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

"It was with the introduction of the theory of evolution that fantasy was free to grant invention or other sudden changes and chances the power to switch channels on evolutionary progress and fast-forward plant-life or machines to the top of development. As soon as Darwin's theory was out, his fans were hit by fantasies of parallel fast lanes of development that relocated the missing link to interpecial relations between humans and machines (see Samuel Butler's Erewhon). Evolution provided the context for imagining that thought can or must go on beyond the body, and that means beyond the retro, repro bonds between the sexes. Humans are still the genitals of the machine that is evolving for us. The higher machines, which 'will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two only' (Butler, 212), will be reproduced in the group metabolization or psychology of tensions between replication sex and the production of one or three by two at a time."

"As genealogy of media, mediations, and means of human being, evolution comes on strong with constitutive interruptions, gaps, so-called missing links. This throws a precision fit with every way the breakdown of mourning always admits, via the narcissistic and psychotic conditions of conditionings of a melancholic attention span, the frontal shot of direct connection with our technologization."

"The link with the missing--the haunted relation--is what keeps selection (not unlike substitution) going, going, goner. The link Benjamin misses in his reading of our current techno-evoution can go by the name 'aura,' the ghost inside techno-selection, inside the either-aura. After Benjamin, Andy Warhol and Shirley MacLaine fine-tuned 'aura' for the selection stardom of channels. But Benjamin might as well have borrowed his aura, the notion of a retrenchment of the missed link with presence that flickers even in certain media-technological products over time, from the trenches of World War I. Down there aura designated the zoning-out phase of acceptance of whatever psychosomatic convulsions and techno-metabolizations of trauma were coming soon."
Laurence Rickels, Nazi Psychoanaysis, V.3: Psy Fi

Juxtaposition IV

2009-12-03T13:17:00.000-08:00

After Ferdinand de Saussure's death, a number of boxes and folios of notes were found dealing with anagrams and their connection with Indo-European linguistics and Latin poetics. Written around 1906 but not generally published until 1964, the discovery became somewhat foundational to certain aspects of modern French poststructuralist theory (esp. Kristeva and Derrida). By all reports, Saussure became somewhat obsessed with finding another layer of meaning in certain Latin texts (specifically, but not consistently, I believe it was the names of gods found in the first words/lines of texts). It's not particularly important what the subject of th anagrams were for my purposes but the fact that another system of meaning lurked 'beneath the surface' meaning of the work and unknownst and unwilled presumably by the author of the surface work.

That phenomena, i.e. a secondary level of msaning which is forever threatening to overtake and dethrone the ostensible primary meaning, has become a staple of popular culture and new age culture (remember 'Paul is dead' supposedly encrypted into an early Beatles song?). Reverse speech has now become enshrined among some as a possible route to truth, as well as the bible code and a host of other phenomena such as stegonography encrypting messages in pictures. They all have in common the idea of a second level which, from the point of view of the intended surface level are subservient to it but which threaten it. One could even say that this shadow/substance relationship is part of the fabric of modernity officially since Freud, Marx and Nietzsche and that the materiality of language seems to configure ITSELF, fractal-like, in the same way that atoms orient and connect themselves in very complex ways, ways which are still coming to light (speaking of which there is some evidence that DNA molecules emit and absorb light for seemingly communicational purposes: is this true or another example of this paradigm playing itself out?)

Perhaps, somewhat as Greg Bear (and maybe not only Bear, but some aspects of physics would make a good story) fancifully speculates in THE CITY AT THE END OF TIME, books themselves are entities which communicate somehow. Certainly it seems that way as I find these combinations. It's easy to see how one could become a kabbalistic word mystic. Herewith another combination leading to Moire communication retrieval.

(and while I'm thinking of it: might also be the/a source of the countermovement to modernism generally...I'm reading Daniel Tiffinay's wonderful book INFIDEL POETICS where he links a certain strand of counter-enlightment thinking to Leibniz's monadological speculations viz:
"Leibniz's theorization of 'perceptions we do not apperceive.' an idea anchoring the first systematic mode of subliminal or unconscious experience." That is, a second order of experience largely undetected.)
---
How To do Things With Words, J. L Austin

"So far, well and good. The action may be performed in ways other than by a performative utterance, and in any case the circumstances, including other actions, must be appropriate. But we may, in objecting, have something totally different, and at this time quite mistaken, in mind, especially when we think of some of the more awe-inspiring performatives such as 'I promise to . . .'. Surely the words must be spoken 'seriously' and so as to be taken 'seriously'? This is, though vague, true enough in general -- it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem. But we are apt to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go onto believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance."

Russian Criminal Tattoo: Encyclopedia v. II

"The tattoos drive and guide a thief's career, they 'appoint' him to new positions. They 'make' him take certain decisions, perform precisely regulated actions, carry out an entire complex of 'ritual' activities. The tattoos 'shape' the daily life of the thief, they subordinate his entire life to themselves. The reality of the tattoo is the symbolic basis of the world of thieves. The thief lives through his tattoos, he is mentally immersed in this reality, that is, he dissolves into the symbolic world of his own body. Like the Herman Hesse character who gets into the last carriage of a train and rides away -- a train that he himself drew on the wall of his cell."

[....] a thieves desires are the desires of his tattoos. A thief's basic desire is to match his tattoos perfectly, that is, to carry out the law of thieves, to be acknowledged by his own tattoos, i.e. by the Other, who spares the thief death and humiliation. But if it is the Other who speaks and acts through the tattoos, in a certain sense the tattoos are pictures of the thief's unconsciousness. That is, the world of criminal tattoos is to a certain extent a realm of the externalisation or, perhaps, visualization of the unconscious."
Anne Applebaum

The Old Straight Track, Alfred Watkins

[....] imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain to mountain peak, as far as teh eye could reach, and paid out until it touched the 'high places' of theearth at a number of reidges, banks, and knowls. Then visualize a mound, circular earthwork, or clump of trees, planted on these high points and in low points in the valley other mounds ringed reoud with water to be seen from a distance. Then great standing stones brought to mark the way at intervals, and on a bank leading up to a mountain ridge or down to a ford the track cut deep so as to form a guiding notch on the skyline as you come up. In a bwlch or mountain pass the roacd cut deeply at the highest place striaght thorugh the ridge to show as a notch afar off. Here and there and at two ends fothe way, a beacon fired used to lay out the trak. With ponds dug on the line, or streams banked up into 'flashes' to form reflecting points on the beacon track so that it might e checked when at least once a year the beacon was fired onthe traditional day. Al these world exactly on the sighting line. The wayfarer's instructions are still deeply rooted inthe peasant mind today, when he tells you -- quite wrongly now -- 'You just keepstraight on."

Out from the soil we wrench a new knowledge, of old, old human skill and effort, that came tothe making of this England of ours.

For as in Puck, Rudyard Kipling's tale siings:
She is not any common Earth
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare."

Juxtaposition III

2009-11-30T18:25:00.000-08:00

A re-cap for all you late arrivistes (of course this being the web, the last are the first): finding my library in disarray one lugubrious night spent staring at spiderwebs in the corners, I found that the disarray of the books did indeed seem to have a shimmering order, if not aura, to them in the chance clinamen that had happenstanced them. Herewith selections from some of the juxtapositions -- without, however, lingering on possible overtures which the collisions may generate. But first another fortuitous selection from a new Greg Bear novel, The City At the End of Time, I was reading last night. I trust you will see the resonance.

"His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deeriorating coming apart in sections -- jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle."
Greg Bear

From Proust, Samuel Beckett:

"The point of departure of the Proustian exposition is not the crystalline agglomeration but its kernal -- the crystallized. The most trivial experience -- he says in effect is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain coor and raised to a cerain temperature. These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each one is kept at its distance at its date. So that when the inprisioned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breath the true air of paradise, of the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lost."

from Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Dan Auiler:

Sequoia sempervivens is the classic redwood that gives this forest its beauty, and its ancient slendor would of course have attracted Hitchcock. The stand of trees through which Novak and Stewart wander is more than a thousand years old. The Latin name and definition is prominent in all the literature connected with the Big Basin; the film's explicit reference suggest the same was true in 1957.

No on at the park has any recolletion of the Vertigo filming nor does ajy park record remain lof the two-day visit. The crew's shooting days were shorter than usual -- under five hours.

"On October fourteenth, most of the time was spent on the conversation just prior to the redwood cross-section scene. Judging from where the Jaguar is parked and where the redwood lcut is positioned, the scenes were filmed on a trail known today as the Redwood Trail. The two and a half page sequence was completed in a number of setups, the most difficult one requiring seven takes; in the final cut of the film, only a page of the material remains. Though Big Basin has (and still has today) a cross section like the one in the film, all of the dialogue surrounding the cross section itself was shot later on a soundstage and then integrated seamlessly with the location footage."

from In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Douglas Curran:

Madeleine Rodeffer became interested in flying saucers through reading a 1954 classic, Cederic Allingham's Flying Saucers From Mars. The book mentioned George Adamski's similar encounter with a blond Venusian named Orthon. A search of her local library turned up three titles by Adamski: Flying Saucers have Landed (1953), Inside the Space Ships (1955), and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). Deeply moved by Adamski's writings, Madeleine paced a call to his home near Mount Palomar, California. 'I became so convinced that Mr. Adamski was telliing the truth that the first time I called him on the phone, I offered, 'I would like to know what I can do to help you spread the word.' Adamki's reply was simple and direct: 'Read and learn all you can. Be open-minded and do what you feel is right.'"

Juxtapositions II

2009-11-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

The second one of these, these...bibliomancies for lack of another word, until I get tired of these diffraction grates...but of course a book person ... or perhaps rather some kind of feral scholete who, rather than truth, enjoys the sparks ..but then, what is truth without the sparks and grating mists?

Again, the books were found lying together after a year of debauchery; the first bookmark or placeholder was followed. The sometimes Orphic nature of the concatenations comes from chance placement. There are times when the whole library becomes a visceral writhing of energies, sedimentations, cautious circumspections and ebullient demands, patent nonsense mied with the darkest but profound obscurities --and me stymied in differentiating the two, that it seems as if a Lovecraftian door will --or perhaps already has done so -- open any second and draw them all in with a deep eldritch inhalation combined with the sound of snapping shut.
rc
--

Awaiting Oblivion, Maurice Blanchot

• You will never find the limits of forgetting, no matter how far you may be able to forget.

• "But if I remembered eerything and told you everything, there would be nothing more for us than a single memory." -- "A common memory? No," he said solenly, " we shall never belong in common to memory." -- "To forgetting, then." -- "Perhaps to forgetting." -- "Yes, when I forget, I already feel closer to you." -- "In a proximity, however, without approach." -- "That is correct," she eched fervently, "without approach." Also without truth, without secrecy." -- "Without truth, without secrecy." -- As if disappearance were the last pace of any meeting. Forgetting will separate us slowly, patiently, though an identically unknown movement, from whatever still remains in common between us." [....]

• Being is yet another word for forgetting.

Mesopotamian Myths, Henrietta McCall

Radiant with terro, Marduk sets out on the road to Tiamat, but at the sight of her his will crumbles and he cannot decide what to do. Although this sees somewhat unrealistic, it is a common mythical device (used also in the epic of Gilgamesh) to heighten tension, by putting the inevitable victory temporarily in the balance. Tamat sneers, and Marduk's courage returns. He challenges Tiamat to single combat.. His the climax, the geat battle scene towards which everything has been leading:

Face to face they came, Tiamat and Marduk, sage of the gods.
They engaged in combat, they closed for battle.
The lord spread his net and made it encircle her,
To her face he dispatched the imhullu -wind, which had been behind:
Tiamat opened her moth to swallow it,
And he forcced in the imhulla -wind so that she could not close her lips.
Fierce winds distended her belly:
Her insides were constipated and she stretched her mouth wide.
He shot and arrow which pierced her belly,
Split her down the middle and slit her heart,
Vanquished her and extinguished life.
He thresw down her corpse and stood on top of her.

The gods who had formed part of Tiamat's terrifying army then panic and turn tail, but they are caught by Marduk and bundled into the net where they cower

Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre

We expect the harvest of cut grain to be fine and rich; but these grains are breaths, nothing, not even a bit of air that one exhales: one will make sheaves of nothingness. The strange being who haunted the woods, whether woodland god or criminal, was defined only by his functions: having beocme a harvester of nothing, he vanquishes with his breaths, everything is canceled; the rocky, compact density of this of this sound unit and the shimmering of the light around the t=stone concealed a cold, dark emptiness. A signification beyond ;the syncretic interpenetration of the meanings was suggested to us; and this signification is the destruction of all signification, the challenging of all prose; Genet put the whole country side into this verse, but only to annihilate it. The capturing of the world, an act guided by resentment, ends in catastrophe.

Juxtapositions I

2009-11-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was staring with no particular purpose at the bookcase in front of me. The books have been moved around repeatedly and so are mostly in no order, many of them lying on tops of shelved books by the threes and fours.

I was reminded of some quip about the connections and patterns that a library can make, even under fairly well-ordered circumstances so herewith a series of volumes that were truly found together, usually stacked on top of each other, set adrift into meaning by the clinamen, by making a nice trinity.

I have, more or less, randomly selected a a quote from each book, in the cse of two of these, by a pencil or other bookmark stuck and left in place.

Looking For Orthon: The Story of George Adamski the first flying saucer contactee and how he changed the world, Colin Bennett

"Western thinking in general has great difficulty with these intermediate forms and partial states of being. Such an order of matter is excluded (rather than unkow) from science, banished to those far regions (either microscopic or interstellar) where rationalists alwasy locate thier mysteries, if only to daunt inquistive heathens, the uninitiated, and, of course the great partly-washed."

Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan), Ann Carson

'The riddle (griphos) was a popular form of after-dinner entertainment and Athenaios tells us that Simonides was an expert riddler. He preserves two examles of Simonidean riddles (both incomprehensible to me) and appends a list of popularly conjectured solutions. 'Some people explain the riddle thus...but ohters say...and others again...' The point is, good riddles do not say what they mean. It is an innately stingy form of discourse, disguising its data and begrudging its truth. 'You know the riddle advertises all the techniques that the joke conceals,' said Freud. The ridde advertises everything except its own punchline.'"

The New Spinoza, Warren Montag and Ted Stolze.

"The Lurian conception of evil, the qelippah, which is for the Kabbalah the obverse of the En-Sof, was to play in this event, we have said, the role of a crystiller of the new doctrine. The rein of husks and shells (the literal meaning of qelipah) traditionally used by the abbaloists to designate the universe of 'evil and the demonic powers' had drifted, since Isaac de Luria, toward an interiorization of the demonic prinicple at the very root of the En-Sof (the hidden god who is indefinite and foreign to every creation, which Jacob Boehme will Grund, the foundation of God the Creator) so that the word in its complexity can reach existence:
'Know therefore that the supernal space is like a field, and ten points [that is, sefroth] are sown in it. And even as the grains [of seed] grow each according to its virtue, so also these points grow according to its virtue; and as the grains do not attain to growth and perfection if they remain in their original manner of being -- for only in their decomposition is thier growth -- so it is also with these points .... Only by their breaking could the divine configurations [parsufim] be perfected.'
As elliptical as the text is this is the rule of Kabbalah), one thing, in any event, appears indisputable: the idea of the necessity of a wrenching that, setting out from the essential negativity of the divine, provokes the scattering whose splinters are the world. This world of disorder and multiplicity -- sometimes cmpared with that of the various colors issed from the compostion of white light -- 'had to fall from the high summit to the depth of the pot soa s to be smashed and dished to pievces, like the wheat which is separated into flour and bran by grinding. Moreover by their fall the unclean forces are separated from holiness.'

Dromos: Life After Ever: Our Glorious Future in the New Quantum

2009-11-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

"For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the 'ancient contaminations'." Roberto Calasso

The race course has been pitched to a new level---but levels go up AND down, right? (bad case of enantiadromia: every state of development at its zenith pitches over into its opposite). But...even so... those levelings can be crossed, obliquely (there you go, loxodromic), perhaps requiring abandoned gods fitting the descriptions of Gustave Moreau as it ITSELF becomes crossed with the clonal crossings of the Island of Dr. Moreau:

"Huge, pale figures, tremendous, lonely, dark and desolate, fatal, mysterious lovers condemned to titanic infamies. What will become of you? What will your destiny be? Where can you hide your fearful passions?"

(But we have a plan, we, us humans, to deal with such, and this is always where we seem to wind up folks; as that great metaphysician Bela Lugosi put it in Bride of the Monster "Home? I have no Home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal; the jungle is my home. But I shall show the world that I can be it's master. I shall perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world." )

Suffering from gadget disorders, the fundamentals of fetishism, we will no doubt find it hard to pass from the Thing to its outlet, to its let out-ness or even better, to the acting-out (escape even) of that Thing in itself, that bit of plastic, silicon, copper, whatever, scooting away from us (always 'scooting away' but never quite making it, the nature of the act-trying-to-get-out, can't get no traction in the rain), tending to its chores in the solar system.

It's the hardest cross-over act in the world, hanging on the edges of frayed rotting matter, looking over to the next clump zipping ahead of us, maybe into the future we think -- always brighter and shinier, yes? Atomic supermen on the march!

It's the fearful en-trance of Einstein's spukhafte fernwirkungen accusation against Niels Bohr's new quantum club, beginning to beat god about the head: 'Spooky action at a distance'‹-too much like some hoo doo infection, some non-locus hocus pocus (etymologically speaking, some transsubstantiation going on there, from the latin meaning: "here is the body"‹-now of course it means: "WHERE the heck is the body!?", just about the only thing we can get out of Freud's fort/da swollen foot dance now, the Oedipus Waltz, holding our collective family drama breaths [in waltzology, atem pauze] in between phase-state changes.

And then, too, this, ex post facto, is what the old folks pass back and forth:

"...he is surrounded by night; suddenly a bloody head juts forth here, there another white figure, and just as suddenly they disappear. One glimpses this night when one looks into the eyes of another human -- into a night which becomes frightening; here each of us is suspended confronting the night of the world." G.W.F. Hegel

Apocatastasis

2009-11-13T05:00:00.001-08:00

APOCATASTASIS*

( " the heretical doctrine of the redemption of even the radically evil as well as the good; it promises a fulfillment without sacrifices." )

Inexorable and reversible. The inescapability associated with fate and the linearity inexorably connected with technology would not seem to make a good match and even to be at odds. Everyone would perhaps like to do away with the melancholy of fatefulness and the never-going-back of inexorable life (which always seems to have only one end). Much better to concentrate on the care and tending of our machines which seem to back up on a dime, undo the done, and seem to want to save us even while they are killing us. The interesting question is this: what happens when you mix the two modes or they meet in the middle: the abject melodrama of the inanimate and the newly-found technical messianic reversibility (from death to life) of the animate? This is perhaps the ONLY question for art - or anything else - now.

Kenosis: The False Meat of Empty

2009-11-08T08:21:00.000-08:00

Kenosis: The False Meat of Empty

Phil. 2:6 sqq.: "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man."

"Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin if the copper wakes up a bugle, that is not its fault."

Gilles Deleuze in Kant's Critical Philosophy

the elements of the avatar:

Fundamental to the idea of the avatar is a temporal constellation of: multiplicity, simultaneity, periodicity, historical intrusion in, and often for, a sacrificial economy; then, lurking to the side of, and perhaps inherent to 'avatar periodicity' is trauma, suffering, and re-gathering or redemption. Although foremost in its mystical and millennialist form, this phase is rarely considered in technical circles where representation of a 'personality' or type or even representation itself, in the case of post-structuralism and postmodernism, is foremost. The avatar is also 'powerless' in a fundamental sense whence derives the concept's great power and a strategy of winning based on loss, defacement, and dis-ability a position which would seem to put it at considerable odds with the calculative power of techné and sacrifice even as it opens it to the concept of 'collapse' as integral to the technical.

(One could also make a point that techné is coterminous with reclamation, gathering, collecting and that chasmatically indigenous to the density of collapse and catastrophe is redemption. That density finds its aufhebung, relief, or grace in Christian kenosis. The notion of kenosis, or self-emptying, allies with both Avataric and Lacanian suturing / point de capiton, a point that is extruded by and makes oblique the forces which 'quilted' it into existencethe suturing of the Real and the Symbolic similarly forms a visible 'ridge' which simultaneous indicates and obscures its processes of creation. This is all too similar to the Catholic Church's dictum that "According to Catholic theology, the abasement of the Word consists in the assumption of humanity and the simultaneous occultation of the Divinity." [This also very close to the Heideggerean assumption of both the uncanny and the divine as "the Being that shines into every thing ordinary" (Parmenides, pp 101 and 115)] There is no getting to the 'other side' of the process because human reality is stitched together in such a way that 'both' sides are always present, but the visibility of one always obscures the other. Compare with kenosis, for example in Philippians 2:6 : "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man." The notion of kenosis also overlaps certain eastern spiritual concepts as well as an emphasis on concepts such as the impersonal, the inhuman, and the extreme in Lyotard, Agamben, and Benjamin, among many other modernist philosophers.)

The 'hard' definition of avatar is the descent of a god into matter of many different forms, a rotation of divinity into humanity, a form of incarnation but without exhaustion of the godstuff, plus a plenitude of representatives popping up occasionally through history.

Perhaps the avatar, in both the mystical and the technical variant, could be thought of as a leading edge of a foreign mass which becomes intimate with the crudities of barely conscious matter (that is, us humans), the simple animacy of animal life not being sufficient for its purposes. (though it does raise the question of whether animals can have avatars and whether an avatar is a three-way or two-way mimetic consultancy.) For consciousness which has suffered a fundamental fall into the darkness of matter, the avatar is a guide back to the homeland of consciousness through avenues of delay, return, suffering, redemption, witnessing. Without separation and suffering there would be no need for the concept of avatar to have developed.

the rest here

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

2009-11-04T16:32:00.000-08:00

materials: concrete, laser, glass case, sand, cigar, day-glo paint, video
size 10' x 4'

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film 'Old Boy,' the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operability, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus' and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds'’

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human its essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of its surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materiality of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendence -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a 'secret' form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the Medusa Effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

Deep Time

2009-10-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

October 10 2009

For those born under the sign of Saturn, that is, those of a melancholic disposition, they—I mean: me—often feel as though they are left holding the bag of time. Or maybe it should be called the Boxing Glove of Time, wherein they are left trying to always dodge a left hook but continually misjudge the punch. This, mainly because they are always looking in the wrong direction; or rather, they are always too farsighted and find it difficult to focus on the close-at-hand, which always seems broken to them. And unlike the Heidggerean thesis of the broken tool (that is: it becomes visible finally to the user), that broken-ness, while all too visible, is also shrouded in an opaqueness, obsidian, granitic in its misprisioned ‘everydayness’. One—I mean: me—sinks into a slough of forbodings, misgivings, and displacements from the Now—even to the extent of a repudiation. The solution is to view the extension of time, with all which that vertigo (keeping in mind the new focusing technique which Alfred Hitchock used in the movie Vertigo: a moving forward, while focusing back; recall also the scene in the redwood forest in re: to deep time) entails for the melancholic, and to draw it into ever deeper folds and distances. (One is reminded o the recent discovery of a huge new ring around Saturn, previously unknown). The melancholic is ‘happiest’ in the leaden folds, densities and depths of those distances and rings out beyond the sandbox. That is to say, he is happiest in his un--or non-happiness.) And certainly those densities can, in fact must be, carried inside, a singularity, seemingly not of one's making, which continually peels away and abrades all senses of subjectivity and solid placement. If nothing else, this is what continental philosophy has taught us: that these aggregate distances – within and without – don’t disappear with the Machine and the New world which it promises, don’t evanesce into the positive pole of the currents of history, but are destined to perennially appear, an abyssal gate always in place, sometimes concealed -- most of the time actually – by the mechanisms of the everyday, non-deep time world. The Virilioian fractionating of the world by speed and acceleration only papers over that time (the buzz word now is messianic time, inhabiting the ordinary world as chips and splinters, as Benjamin had it, occasionally puncturing through) but it continually throbs beneath the surface, waiting. And since it primarily 'inhabits' language, it is not eradicable but is only visible by the tensions it enacts, the torsions of nothing on nothing, a 'face on the void.'

Under these circumstances, the sublime must puncture itself and release something more akin to the uncanny.

Deep time surpasses any notion of human, in fact makes a mockery of any valorizing of the human. The speck of whatever it is to be human is absolutely engulfed by time and mocks…well, it doesn’t even mock since mockery has to be a product of human sensibility; but at any rate it make hash out of all preconceived notions of everything and inasmuch as science is a human pursuit, tends to make short work of any such notion as well.

Gregory Benford has a book out from a few years ago called Deep Time and deals with a 'simple' project to retain human legacy over vast seas of time and to make visible the vicissitudes of relatively recent time, ten thousand years or so; it becomes surpassingly more difficult than one might think to assess its parameters. How much more daunting then to consider even past that mark, a mark that no one will see. Perhaps there are ways around such temporal constraints – but only under deliverance of what might now be considered a supernatural agency … and even so.

An admirable book by Quentin Meilassoux, After Finitude, has catalyzed a whole internet wave of considerations and publications on such speculations under the rubric of Speculative Realism (Check out the Uranomic site and what seems to be the house journal of SR, Collapse). But for now that is neither here nor then. What is the psychological correlate of deep time? And how traumatic must it be? Indeed would we become a society of monks? (as in Neal Stephenson's new book Anathem; interesting also that Greg Bear’s book The City At the End of Time deals with such deep time – if not end of time – propositions. Oddly enough, speculative fiction often tends to be predominantly about deep time while religion and spirituality tends to be a coraling of such, Christianity being the prime example of containment. One might think it the other way round if they were not careful. Perhaps that is why science – and its henchman capitalism -- of necessity must be nihilistic, while religion seems oddly twisted always back into the human community.; I suppose the waters can get quite deep here: Hegel might consider, on the contrary, science to be an example of bad infinity and not religion.)

While loss and yearning seem to be the benchmarks of melancholia, and hence endemic to the human prospect, or at least those born under the sign of Saturn, it does seem more properly a function of modernity itself, even as a side project of modernity. In some respects to be modern is to be forever home sick --- but also and equally to be in denial of such. Perhaps that is why redemption must be forever a thing which always already occurred. Perhaps that is why noise bands, noise as element of composition, has become so…so now: it is the truncating of everything in a premature delerium, no fulfillment, no possibility beyond that null state; not a sounding of the catastrophe (to play off Blanchot here) but a crawling inside, an inhabiting of catastrophe, the complete truncation of Deep Time or any sort of time really other than a equally weighted implosive now. Perhaps a way of avoiding (one thinks) all possibility of homesickness, loss, yearning..but there is no more philosophical music than noise and ultimately there is nothing more empty and loss-filled than philosophical ruminations, nothing more sick of home and hence homesick than philosophy.

It seems to me appropriate that the new picture of Saturn becomes MUCH more encompassing, extending its rings into every finer regions. Reminds me of nothing so much as the legions of thrones, principalities, et cetera, all the other legions of angels moving eternally around god and passing away only to be eternally replaced.

Come to think of it, much like language also.

2009-09-16T05:39:00.000-07:00

The Age of Living in the Crack

I came across a quote from the film director Jean Renoir to the effect that “A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” It could well be said (and has been said well) that the same is true of books and ideas: most writers and thinkers have one book and/or idea which they massage variously in a life-long career. I was thinking recently as I was working on a bit of writing that that is surely the case with me. Although looking over whatever meager production I have done in installation art or writing or sound production has all veered in the same direction -- although when called to state the connections between the pieces and the way they move together (like , say, when one is asking for money to do something), I become a little flummoxed since, to some degree, it defeats the purpose of a more subterranean approach. There is no necessity for so corraling events except under the duress of money -- which can be a considerable pressure these days.

At any rate I was re-reading The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes and came across a long quote which Taubes attributes to Carl Schmitt (within the quote at the end Schmitt quotes Kierkegaard) which seems to address much of what I've been concerned with, in however feeble a manner. In reading the quote over several times it strikes me as to how much the bifurcation spoken of therein spreads out to many other contemporary artistic, cultural and theoretical concerns:

Precisely a philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be intersted in it to the highest degree. The exception can be more important to it than the rule, not becasue of a romantic irony for the paradoxical, but becasue of the seriousness of an insight that goes deeper than the clear generalizations inferred from what ordinarily repeats itself. The exception is more interesting than the norm. The normal proves nothing. The exception proves everything: it not only confirms the rule; rather, the rule exists only through the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanims that has beocme torpid by repetition. A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possibe in theological reflection even in the nineteenth century stated: "The exception explains the universal and itself. And if one wants to study the universal correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the universal itself. Eventually one grows weary of the incessant chatter about the universal; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the universal cannot be explained either. Generally, the difficulty is not noticed because one thinks the universal not with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, however, thinks the universal with intense passion."

It's interesting to think that this may a sort of theological notion (think: the resurrection, miracles), albeit one which underlies much of secularist modernism in its administrative overflow (see G. Agamben's recent work for elucidations).

Although it could be argued that actually LIVING in the exception could be difficult, perhaps that is exactly what living in a messianic age would entail: coping incessantly with the exception. And after all what is the current idea of the coming Singularity but exactly that? It would certainly be something close to impenetrable.

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9

2009-08-31T05:17:00.000-07:00

Outside the Borders of the District: on District 9
part 1

"At first glance, it appears that the uncanny is a fear of the familiar, whereas nostalgia is a longing for it; yet for a nostalgic, the lost home and the home abroad often appear haunted. Restorative nostalgics don’t acknowledge the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey. Reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts."

Svetlana Boym

"In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than ability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable. To be named – even when the namer is Godlike and blissful – perhaps always remains an intimation of mourning. But how much more melancholy to be named not form the one blessed, paradisiac language of names, but from the hundred languages of man, in which name has already withered, yet which, according to God’s pronouncement, have knowledge of things …

"In the language of men, however, [things ] are over-named … over-naming as the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) of all deliberate muteness."

Walter Benjamin

"Time is precisely the impossibility of an identity fixed by a place.

[….]

While place is dogmatic, the coming back of time restores an ethics."

Michel de Certeau

Giorgio Agamben begins The Open with the now-famous passage concerning a painting in the back of a Hebrew bible from the thirteenth century of animal-headed humans at a banquet table of the righteous on the last day, a possible reconciliation of the animal and the human at the point of concluded humanity.

However, with the power of computers in special effects we no longer have to wait for the reconciliations ofthe end of time and concluded humanity, since chimeras are the bread and butter of the film industry. And while theriomorphs (the combination of gods and beasts) can only be simulated who is to tell how far that simulation will, in a thousand years, eventually reach?

District 9, while giving off the glint of a simple metaphor of apartheid, transferred to stranded space aliens, would indeed be a weak film (as would the whole concept of science fiction) if that was the only conjecture/concatenation being proferred. (The very same 'weak' thesis of the movie was put forward by the-president Ronald Reagan in the context of a world that would become united if there were the threat of invasion by space aliens.)

The deeper reading would be two fold and each related to the other: 1) the nature of the exilic condition, of homelessness (and the relation to the uncanny); and 2) the relation of the human to the animal (and that unsettling of relation to one’s own body as home and the uncanniness that results).

The next day after seeing the movie, I recalled the place of the hand in Heideigger’s meditations on techne (the well know ready-to-hand and present-to-hand) and Derrida's attempt to investigate the undecidability of touch and the hand (in both Jean-Luc Nancy and Heidegger). Now is not the time to rehearse any of these positions other than to point out the primacy of the human 'hand' in the movie as it turns into its alien other – which of course would be closer to the parallel of the hand associated with the radical other, the tentacle.

(I’m also now reminded of an earlier project, the text of which follows:

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film ‘Old Boy,’ the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operabilty, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus’ and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds.'

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human it’s essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of it's surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materialty of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendance -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a ‘secret’ form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the medusa effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)

Even though the protagonist, a human, is slowly turning alien, his hand has apparently turned completely into an alien hand/tentacle , a fact which, significantly, allows him to fire the alien weaponry (which cannot be operated by the human hand). There is certainly 'monstrosity' here but it is uncertain what 'shows forth' (at the root of the word monstrous, eg., de-monstrate): the human, the alien, or the animal. One might say that the coalescence of the alien and animal (the gestures of the scavenging stranded space creatures all reference apes, and predators; the only time that this does not appear to be the case is in the presence of the technology they have hidden and are using to reach their home world: in that case they take on the bearing of the human, even to the point of incorporating an infant alien) yields the possibility of an uncanny third, almost a gnostic concept (perhaps by way of a more contemporary bio-cybernetic) of relation of flesh as sheath and consciousness as inhabitant of vessel.

N.B. Some might wish to look over the J. Derrida's series, Geschlecht (especially Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand) where issues of chirology (right/left symmetry) and issues of sexuality and related issues of race, genre, nationalism and the idea of a neutrality between positions; certainly in terms of the aliens in District 9, they seem effectively neutered even though the idea of interspecies sexuality is raised to discredit the protagonist. Not knowing the codes of that species, they seem flattened in terms of the categories humans most often use to make judgements: race, sex, nationality, etc. The idea of the uncanny is largely unfigured here. )

The (square root of two) Resurrection of the Body: Hyrdrocarbon Angels Streaming Down the Gulf

2009-08-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

pt 3

"Only a resurrection redistributes death and life to their places, by showing that life does not necessarily occupy the place of the dead."

Alain Badiou: St. Paul ...

"A higher calculus without remain(s): what consciousness wants to be."

j. derrida, Glas

"… it is a question of opening up the earth—dark, hard, and lost in space."

Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure of Christiantity

"The (any) return is always a form of technic, always ahumanly existing before the human, and creating the human. To want to return to the before of return is to want to return to either the animal or the divine, difficult sometimes to tell the difference. [….] To want to see the singular (re) appearance of what has gone, died, disappeared: is that not the height of folly as well as the greatest experiment in the technical, the engineering of an alternate world, a world that is potentially present everywhere, all the time, a threshold continuously being opened and closed simultaneously, a world constituted by the individual subject, the human continuously striving for sovereignty, eve the object world brought along, skein of nodes: “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." (Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit. This taken from a section in The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes. Shortly after the quote Taubes glosses this by referencing Spinoza and Schelling as they pursue it in a generalized sense but extends it by allowing as to the possible of the individual 'I' being included in the equations: this would have to be the materialist reserve of any possible Christian vectored resurrection, no generalized eastern resumption of essence but a full-flavored self, the 'I', as improbable and fantastical that sounds to modern ears.)”

Fehta Murghana from That Which Comes

Can a re-gathering of distributed being be considered resurrection? If it is a simple numerical dispersion, it’s a question of: can it be done by human structure or is it an impossible proposition? (We humans consider anything that we can’t do to be impossible). This, even though it has been an imperial command for since we became conscious,. There is something in us that wants to come back, sometimes against our best (collective) wishes. Is that something that knows better than our individual consciousness …or is it a simple remnant of past eras encoded in our thought, myths, conduct? Whatever, it forms the most formidable thought for those who can think it and none can really, fully, since to think it totally means that one has come back. Which means that it passes from thought/potentiality to a fait accompli, ceasing to be impossible, passing from mere zombie thought into total presence, into our very objects, environment, stones, machines, the cry of the inanimate becoming audible, the invisible becoming only transparent.

An interesting article by Fernando Vidal (Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of the Body, Critical Enquiry, summer 2002) covers a great deal of ground but a couple of quirky attempts to account for bodily resurrection are those of Bernard Nieuwentijt’s 'stamen' theory from 1714 and Charles Bonnet’s 'other brain' theory. Stamen means filament or thread and if resurrection is possible, reasons Nieuwentijt, then identity must be somehow ‘threaded’ through matter and time, reproducing itself or hatching, like the stamen which continues the flower, into matter but keeping some ur-identity. Vidal glosses this in a footnote: "The stamen theory, which may be called the germ theory of bodily identity, has a descendent in Saul Kripke's notion of the necessity of origin, according to which a person’s identity is ultimately defined by genealogy; the one thing we cannot be is the offspring of parents other than our own". See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford, 1980. Of course this has the taint of that now much feared idea of essentialism, not to even speak of the taint of questions of origin. This reference certainly made me go back to the venerable Kripke book.

Vidal glosses Charles Bonnet (late 1700s) thus (I quote at length because it seems oddly prescient for a futurist, cybernetic world):

"Personal identity depends on memory (Locke’s thesis), and memory is based in the brain. It follows that, if man is to keep his identity in the afterlife, his soul must remain united to some indestructible organ, perhaps the same that functions as the seat of the soul. Bonnet describes it as a 'little ethereal machine' and as an 'indestructible brain' encased in the brains of our terrestrial bodies. In addition to being the seat of the soul, the little machine is the germ of resurrected bodies. I will therefore act in truly embryological fashion, producing bodies in accordance with the preformationist emboîtment theory of generation.

In short, our present brains enclose another brain, destined to develop in the afterlife and to restore our identity, personality, and boy together. Since the resurrected body will be spiritual and incorruptible, the 'small human body' hidden in the seat of the soul must be physically different from our bodies of flesh."

Perhaps the mystery is not that things are different but that they remain the same.

Perhaps science (or at least science's 'body,' technology, the point at which idea becomes material) is another venue for the mystery.

Some wait, as if paralyzed, waiting for the dream.

2009-08-07T05:02:00.000-07:00

footnote to previous part 2, regarding number and resurrection:

"In effect, it is law at the purest, formalist level, law as "the ideal of the
matheme," that governs the new coming into being of the subject. Thus, to the
question: "But why is it necessary to reject law onto the side of death?" Badiou answers:
"Because considered in its particularity, that of the works it prescribes, the law blocks the subjectivation of grace's universal address as pure conviction, or faith. The law 'objectifies' salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ- event." As such, the event is, by itself, an "illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude." The evental situation, before subjectivation, is the site of "the excess of grace, thus, of a pure act," i.e. the resurrection.

Although Badiou addresses a philosophical-political question in his analysis of
Paul and the law, what comes through the apparent antinomianism of the message is, unexpectedly – as if to corroborate the very evental process he describes – the
reanimation of law in a different guise. That is, in the truth-event, there is not a rejection or repudiation of law sensu stricto, but its realignment, rearrangement, to effectuate the resurgence (resurrection) of the subject."

Re-interpretation of Paul's Concept of Law
Tawia Ansah

2009-08-07T04:15:00.000-07:00

The Hemipygic Resurrection of the Glorious Body: The Law En-Fortressed and Made to Walk
part 2

I had work done on my car recently and they needed the VIN number, a 17 digit identification number that details type of car, origin, where assembled, the order in which it was asembled etc. I was thinking that it is sort of the car’s DNA code, providing the car with a barebones bid for immortality – at least as much as 17 digits can provide. All the threads that concern the physical makeup of the car and the genetic we might say, as opposed to contingent knocks and bumps of acccidentality that make up real life as opposed to VIN life. The VIN numbers are threads that, when knotted together form the vehicle secret life.

That said, perhaps it would seem feasible to resurrect the car given a totalizing accident. However, and without going into philosophical disquisitions on identity from the Greeks to the computer age, most folks would contend that the car was reconstructed, not resurrected. The 'secret code/life' of a human would have something to do with consciousness and not necessarily with place of assembly (which is not to say that would not have an impact, contingent and genetic somehow coming together in a knotted tsunami of time, place, terrain, perhaps even position in re: to the rest of the universe; to a greater or less degree it seems this is what we think of as the human -- and perhaps other living, impactable entities -- with perhaps even some added dispositions and reckoning that we have little kin of, except by hearsay, myth, magical thinking or other eldritch considerations, none of which I discount by the way). I suppose the purported law-like regularity of the universe, always, everywhere and everywhen, could be called to the bar at this point. (Although, now that I think on it, the VIN resurrection scenario fits perfectly now, at least as far as filmic bring-backs; one only has to think of the Transformers series and maybe even the Terminators…certainly don't seem that far from a zombie re-instatement of an appliance and calling it alive.)

The Law (of matter) perhaps only seems implacable here, filmed over, encrusted with its own come-backs, precedented, trusted to have been here before, perogative of lost innocence, portrait of returns piling ever higher: the Law does not have a human face and after it has broken free from the natural world it has no 'Age' but looks 'back' which it configures silently, invisibly, out in the Open and inato the Forward, Janus -faced. (The Christian Resurrection would say, in its very heart: the Law is made to be broken and it will be done by Him after which we all follow, facing into the sun, rising from our graves, round the rim of the earth, the air on that Last Day filled, packed with shining Dead; well, that's the plan anyway....may take our trusty servant, the Machine, that other Law, to open the graves even more than it has already done.... what is it w. benjamin said? "... even the dead will not be safe", only the barest of the bare lifers will be let in. Huzzah! )

LivingDead the Law marches silently over the frozen tundra, The Law as zombie machine (number) has taken over all possibilities of resurrection, until the real Messiah returns to break one and install another regime. And that is always 'any minute now,' (the same as my grandfather's disposition (deacon's sketch) of time and salvation sketch at the front of this article which hangs on my desk now, timeless Law becoming a matter of genealogic threading though matter, the Law of Reproduction the only law that counts, oddly enough, for an inhuman law, your DNA (the soul's VIN?) nailed to the cross, spiraling, spiraling ever onward...

At the heart of the heart: does anything beat there? There beats the Inhuman Resurrection, composed of those same angel feathers, insanely beating, lifting....

"Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro"
Rowan Williams

So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

2009-07-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

The (Half-Assed) Resurrection of the Body: Angel Feathers in the Gorge
part 1

gorge (gôrj)
noun
the throat or gullet
the crop or stomach of a hawk
the maw or stomach of a voracious being or animal
food or a meal to fill or stuff the stomach
the contents of the stomach
a feeling of disgust, anger, etc. it made my gorge rise
the entrance from the rear into a bastion or projecting section of a fortification
a deep, narrow pass between steep heights
☆ a mass that blocks up a passage

It is no wonder that the zombie has become a leading cultural indicator in the current ‘new age.’ It seems inevitable that the various Copernican revolutions would lead to the final dethroning of all forms of agency and subjectivity, to the point that official rationalist ideologies would leave nothing behind their razed path but mindless matter and soul-less motion.

Oddly enough, such a turn of events may make the idea of the ‘resurrection of the body’ less of a transcendental theological idea and more of a contemporary immanentist conceit. A populist/futurist version of projected resurrection can be encountered in the so-called Toynbee Tiles . (If their origin is correct, the relationship between memorialization and the idea of zombies – that is, half-assed resurrection as a memorialization of rage – becomes more tenable),

And yet….while bandied abut often in techno circles (freezing the body or just freezing the head; or uploading consciousness into a container and robotizing the body into which it would then be downloaded), all of them are about a truncated continuance of existence, a zombified existence; not a re-birth as a portal or threshold or opening. (|) .Apparently this ‘death-in-life’ would be the continuation of the neoliberal state by other means. But whatever it, death, means it is one of the most untouchable of the untouchables while yet remaining the most formative of life.

I like this long piece form Nancy’s Noli me tangere on the ‘non-ness,’ the pushing away of Christ’s resurrection:

“What for religion is the renewal of a presence that bears the phantasmatic assurance of immortality is revealed here to be nothing other than the departing into which presence actually withdraws, bearing its sense in accordance with this parting. Just as it comes, so it goes: this is to say that it IS not, in the sense of something being fixed within presence, immobile and identical to itself, available for use as a concept. “Resurrection” is the uprising [surrection], the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other and f the one disappearing IN THE BODY ITSELF AND AS THE BODY. This is not a magical trick. It is the very opposite: the dead body remains dead, and that is what creates the “emptiness” of the tomb, but the body that theology will later call ‘glorious’ (that is, shining with the brilliance of the invisible) reveals that this emptiness is really the emptying out of presence. No, nothing is available here: don’t try to seize upon a meaning for this finite and finished life, don’t try to touch or to hold back what essentially distances itself and, in distancing itself, touches you with its very distance (in both senses: touches you with and from a distance). It is as though it were touching you while permanently disappointing your expectations, touching you with what makes rise up before you, for you, even that which does not rise up. This uprising or insurrection is a glory that devotes itself to disappointing you and to pushing your outstretched hand away. For its brilliance is nothing other than the emptiness of the tomb. The ‘arisen’ does not mediate the one through the other: he exposes (he ‘reveals’) how they are the same absenting, the same gap that one dares not touch, since it is this gap alone that touches us to the quick: o the point of death.”
[….]
“The resurrection is not a return to life. It is the glory at the heart of death: a dark glory, whose illumination merges with the darkness of the tomb.

“The glorious body is the one that leaves and at the same time the one that speaks, that speaks only in leaving, that withdraws, withdrawing as much into the darkness of the tomb as into the ordinary appearance of the gardener. Its glory radiates only for eyes that know how to see, and those eyes are nothing but the gardener. But the gardener speaks, and he says the name of she who mourns the departed. To say the name is to say that which both dies and does not die.”

This is a somewhat claustrophobic (non) vision one might say. No wonder that the demotic imagination would prefer UFOs piloted by the dead or telephone calls from the dead, the vast pyramid of the dead waiting to be funneled into ‘here’ from wherever they are (or not – one can hardly say ‘where they are stored’ since that is not exactly what is meant; in fact it becomes hard to say exactly WHAT is meant when speaking of death All we can say is that as long as language continues and that reproduction continues a sort of resurrection continues and which is different from a zombie resurrection of death in life which techno threatens (and oddly enough under the same sort of hubristic expectations that religion engenders in coming up against that black and endless wall.) All life is asymptotic against that wall in a positivist view and a lemniscate of Bernoulli in a more mystical indeterminacy, death a crossing, moving from one node to another., perhaps not resurrection but a recombinant infinite return: Christianity in all its forms (social, bureaucratic, scientific world view) as opposed to the sorceric pagan (one might also call the idea of ‘resurrection’ as a personalized particularity as opposed to the triumph of anonymous materiality.

But what is matter but a continuous string of itself, continuing to coil through itself, returning always to the same place?

Falling Rocks, Becoming Rock: roll away the stone!

2009-05-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

For quite a while I had been looking for a DVD of the 1957 movie by director Jack Arnold (who also did The Creature From the Black Lagoon) called Monolith Monsters. It is apparently not available but I happened to do a search for it yesterday on YouTube and there it was in all its black and white fifties glory.

(It will sometimes give you an option to watch all 8 segments automatically)

The storyline: A small western community is beset by a strange phenomena. Apparent a meteor has fallen and is composed of a strange rock-like material but the fragmented pieces of which have the startling ability to grow a hundred feet tall when water hits it, and then to topple whereupon the tip begins the cycle all over again, rising and falling, crushing whatever is in the path of this roving forest of falling rocks. And of course the town people take various actions to ‘cut them off at the pass’ as the deluge proceeds down from the high desert.

Oh, and I forgot one thing: if a person touches one of the weird rocks, they themselves start to slowly turn to rock.

I suppose if I had not posted the article on otoliths ('rocks' inside the head/ear which establish direction, stability, and hence ‘way-finding’ if I can put it that way) and its opening on the holy ka’ba, the Islamic black rock which some claim to be a meteorite, I would not have been so struck by (re)finding Monolith Monsters, about rocks which seem to have a, albeit crude, life of their own and can cause a reification (becoming thing-like) in living creatures.

I use the term reification purposely. It is often used in socio-political studies to indicate an effect that various state apparatuses can have on the individual, making them purposeless, with little affect or direction other than what the apparatus gives them – rock-like in other words!

And of course we HOPE that artistic/creative activity can have an apotropaic quality [From Greek apotropaios, from apotrepein, to ward off : apo-, apo- + trepein, to turn.]
'referring to an image or device which is designed to ward off unwanted influences' --- and often times by being a part of the evil, or by seducing it, in order to get it closer and deal with it (e.g., homeopathic medicine). Although in this case I think of those Japanese beetle traps which contain a hormone, intending to entice the bugs but ALSO sending out a general signal which can flood the area with unintended consequences. (within the context of the film, the apotropaic magical substance that undoes the rock monsters is…salt, which of course is a crystalline thing itself and if it had to be used widely , that is, outside the saintly mystical precincts of the desert where such monstration often and appropriate takes place, would wind up killing all life!

The line between living/dead, creative/destructive, the sacred/profane wavers tremendously. As far as I can tell, the apparatus seeks to confine that oscillation while creative activity often seeks to live in that oscillation and even to expand it. Of course that used to be the idea of the 'avant-garde' (living in that oscillatory boundary) and all the other arts (which seek comfortable perception and hence form part of the walls and devices that make the apparatus work; this is called ordinary life and can be a good thing...think life in war time -- er, the old sort of war time -- when nothing works).

Now that doesn't seem to be the case, since the central core of capitalism seems to be a sort of experimentalist impulse which it has found out can be a way of expanding markets and inventing new resources (the cyberworld) which it can exploit. We see now that the advance guard in the arts was aptly named. The image and the apparatus have found a way to mutually reinforce themselves, and most times with little regard for the 'human' element but rather most importance placed on the structural supports (not that it’s that easy to tell them apart—but that’s another story…sorta.) In a way, which I won't expand, everyday life now IS a sort of wartime, at least in the speeds, tensions, collisions, accidents, disruptions that now seem continuous.

But the becoming-alive of the obdurate, admantine stuff which surrounds us is an old story (along with the becoming-rock of the human, most famous being the tale of the medusa; but that’s another story too… sorta) as is really the blurred line dividing the two (e.g. Ovid's Metamorphosis). Perhaps what is different now (arguable. Some would say nothing is different now) is the tech we have to facilitate those transitions…what happens when artists are able to make chimera with table top equipment? (which reminds me of a new movie which I haven't seen yet – Splinters - but which seems to have some elements in common with the Monolith Monsters with the same difference as other fifties sci fi / horror films from then: then the horror was always from the outside trying to get in; now its from the inside trying to get out; think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.)

Perhaps that is where the apparatus and the image truly fuse … but I wouldn't start jumping for joy just yet …wait until you REALLY hear rocks falling.

Zombies, Apparatus, and the Image of the Nation: pt.1

2009-05-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Zombies, Apparatus, and the image of the nation

Franco Moretti once claimed that the two seminal ‘monsters’ ( from 'de-monstrare', a showing forth, demonstration) for modernity – and the West -- were Frankenstein and Dracula; Frankenstein represented the monster of production turned loose on itself (made up, collaged together, bricoleur, odds and ends gathered and forced to articulate), all subjectivity being turned on a lathe, so to speak, constructed out of numerous parts and sources. The other side of that early industrial model of life and literature was Dracula, a monster who fed on desire and subsisted in the shadow of that other industrial monster, the one based on overweening scientific hubris.
(The book that alludes to these analogies is SIGNS TAKEN FOR WONDER, published in 1983). His new work however is based on quantitative sociological analysis –he works with the history of the novel-- and became controversial.

His new book on graphs, trees and grids as a way to track literature would suggest zombie (systems of analysis, protocols) -- has supplanted has supplanted those early monsters. Nowadays though, zombies are everywhere – just like the idea of the apparatus is everywhere and controls what we can see, where we can go ---and perhaps who we can be.

If the Frankenstein monster maintains life at any cost, taking apart other bodies and lives to do it, so does Dracula sustain life at the cost of death—or vice versa. But the zombie sustains itself in the stroke between life/death, feeding on both death AND life…just as an ‘apparatus’ does in its most formal presentation. 'Zombie banks' anyone? These things live inside us now; and in fact we are unable to separate ourselves from them. (‘Debt’ and the monetary system in particular seeming to form quite dense nests). The zombie IS a sort of apparatus – or rather, is you wish to be less literal, forms the latest incarnation of monstrosity, or a showing forth of the inner workings of human articulations.

And another thing that points to the zombie being an apparatchik: the previous monstrations had their original in canonical texts by Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker, there is no text per se at all for the zombie. First came the image and the concept (I think; if this is not the case and there WAS an ur-text for the zombie let me know) via contact with some tribal cultures (i.e. Haiti) but in industrial cultures, contact came through another apparatus, movies and later video, both are systems of image representation supported by large apparatuses of workmen (see, e.g., Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction).

But perhaps in some sense, we have never been alive, perhaps life has always had a zombified aspect to it: being inhabited/possessed by another system, our ‘consciousness’ (and what exactly IS that anyway?) a phenomenal result of the clash of of those internalities.

Don't we already 'live' in this place of the resurrected dead, you and I? Sluggishly (or rapidly it could be we now think also) moving over the landscape waiting for the big break, the big event, or maybe just any event which wold release us from the inhabitation of the stroke between life/death.

Perhaps we have always been zombies.

2009-04-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη.
Aion [eternity] is a child at play, playing draughts; the Kingship is a child's.
Heraclitus

Lucianus, Vit. auct. 14. Context:--And what is time? A child at play, now arranging his pebbles, now scattering them.

•••

In the 1996 Time Burton movie, Mars Attacks! (based on a baseball card series from 1962 of the same name) all the aliens speak in a smack-smack repetitive baby babble talk. All the sounds seem to be the same mak-mak-mak over and over again. How can that possibly convey any information? But entering the film (a spoof on the genre), we emerge, like most of Burton’s films, into a child-like syncope. Faltering rhythms and animation drop us out from the real world into a cartoon world, fit and yet not-fit for babies. Vast instrumentalities are represented in a humorous way – the same as with the world of babies and childhood in general. We embark on a voyage into an uncanny valley, and in the case of childhood, the formation of startling chreodes which gradually, with time and persistence, wear into grinding patterns of familiarity: adulthood.

But for a short period we are witness (and participants only as second order audience) to the animated remains of a once glorious kingdom (the threshold now available only through extensive and sophisticated technical means); a mysterious communication of non-sense with action: the place of gesture as precedent to language, where objects, gesture, ritual become so deep they appear disconnected from contemporary bare life, language floating around incantatorily, performatively: phantasms increasingly severed from the intimacy of gesture and place (a severance which has been in motion since the beginning, but perhaps now within creased velocity).

It is a place which has dropped out of sight so far from ordinary experience (which, in a way, is dropping from sight also) that its fabulousness, this kingdom of hidden presences, seems to be entirely one made from a frayed, thread-worn, and gossamer cloth, spider-web cloth, melting in the noonday sun, the only entrance now through our machines; which brings it (this uncanny abyssal which is continually cracking underfoot) back with a terrifying immediacy, an otherness … but with yet a strange familiarity to it. The mak-mak-mak syncope of childhood aligns with the disappearances of children into the mysterious hill over yonder, abduction by fairies, aliens, now everything slowly coming into sync with the technical alien.

To Heraclitus we are perhaps all babies on that eternal beach, caught in yet a higher order swoon, an arhythmic hiccup, waiting in vain for some vaster presence to pick us up, to stop the crying, to salve the wounds, to point out another hill over yonder (techne) which we can enter and disappear for an aion or two.

Res-erection and Left A Head

2009-04-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

'Writing', as inscription or exscription, is a (perhaps THE) living death, death in life, not degree zero but zero degree, that is, an absolute zero degree, cessation of all movement; but such cessation as has been gained by COMPLETE movement, at least around various axes (sic. or axies if you insist) which have chopped away all biology, leaving the Glorious Body, the heat body, the meat body behind (or maybe a head), resurrection and insurrection and erection bound together:

“Two bodies, the one of glory and the other of flesh, are distinguished in this departure and in it they belong, partially but mutally, to each other. The one is the raising of the other; the other is the death of the one. Dead and raised [levee] are the same thing ---'the thing,' the unnameable - and is not the same thing, for there is no sameness here. What happens with the body and the world in general, when the world of the gods has been left behind, is an alteration of the world. Where there used to be one same world for gods, men, and nature, there is henceforth an alterity that passes through, and throughout, the world, an infinite separation of the finite - a separation of the finite by the infinite and thus of the flesh that glory separates from itself.”
(JL Nancy, Noli Mi Tangere)

At a certain point - absolute zero, 'writing' - everything must become ghostly, whited out, become deathlife in a haunted universe (that is, every thing both live and dead), held in suspension by the limits of hauntological constraints, the chief one being: did you exist before?
and then: can you re-appear? Zombie? On Jupiter? The dead piloting UFOs? (bony faces locked in a rictus of joy, no cock pit, zooming through the plane of exposure) ... or just lined up waiting to get inside the tent? Isn't this the name of the Western enterprise?

Infinite: Tin Cans Around Saturn

2009-04-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

Local artists (and by local I mean no actual area but the idea of particularity) sometimes seem to believe in the piled-on scrum only and effect not to think that anything beyond that matters (that is, the universalism as defined by the critical impulse, the writing of the event of art, etc.) so to say, not to believe in the interruptive aspect of art and consequent start-up anew (this is the agility of the scrum) but only in its power to get the individual game going. A closed ‘spiritual’ realm, not a phenomena immersed in history, writing, politics, science and all the other things that impinge on everyday life ---but which are not-quite-everyday. In that sense, there is an aspect of art (perhaps especially in times of stress) that is deeply conservative, certain practioners preferring to stick close to the body and an immediacy of affect. Populist art, that is, art that tries to stay away from the historical and centrifugal rigors of serious art, often strives for that immediate pragmatic closeness (although any ‘striving’ would seem to launch it, eventually, into another category; economic if nothing else.)

At any rate, I’ve been trying to think about why art can be so boring much of the time and yet why Art can have a frisson of enlargement about it that art tries to stay away from. (Though often times that simply strikes me as a ploy on the artists’ part.) To put it another way, the local artist often times tries to steer clear of a certain, um, relationship shall we say, with the infinite, the (non) thing which would tempt them from the immediate and often smacks of religion. (Although the more astute of us realize that often times that which is not becomes that which is, and that which is becomes that which is not.)

And so I come across a passage this morning:

"Modern art has also turned towards the event, or the possibility of the event. Modern art knows that it has no objective status. It knows that it does not incarnate any prior idea in its supposed wholeness and unity. In its resistance to objectiﬁcation and its practice of ‘disincarnation’, modern art becomes increasingly concerned with ‘precarites evenementielles’. The most radical examples of this are installations, happenings, and jazz. Here, again, it would not be hard to describe a many-sided modern literature of the event, including Mallarme, Kafka, Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Imagism, William Carlos Williams and various traditions in post-war American poetry." (Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, Andrew Gibson)

Gibson makes the point that this modernist approach fiddles with the controls of history and can lead to thoughts of an ‘evacuation of history’ as exemplifies by the work of Samuel Beckett. It strikes me that ‘regional theater’ (to use the performative for all the arts) is precisely not interested in such epochal formations as a history bending event. The popular is precisely that which has already been slightly (not too much) bent.

And of course the coils of history often bend in unpredictable ways (it’s why we still have history… which is not the same as progress however, no matter how much neoliberal thought might have it be so).

But what caught my eye in the quote above was ‘disincarnation’. Specifically, its relation to Corpus, a beautiful and mystifying text by Jean-Luc Nancy; a few quotes from the section I am reading now and the stated and implied chiasmatic relations of local/universal, body/spirit etc:

"Incarnation is structured like a disembodiment."

“The signifying body – the whole corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and semiological bodies – incarnates one thing only: the absolute contradiction of not being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies it.”

Heads and tails. A flipping of a (coming) quantum coin: or rather acephale and aphallic, cut off the head, put it in a can, and shoot it into orbit around Saturn, leaving the tail to spawn .. or is the other way round? “No head or tail, then, since thing provides support or substance for this material. I say ‘acephalic and aphallic,’ not ‘anurous,’ which is fine for batrachians. An impotent, unintelligent body. Its possibilities, forces, and thoughts lie elsewhere.”

Insurrection and resurrection take place simultaneously. (As well as beheaded/headed.)

Toynbee Tiles written all over streets scattered from here to Sao Paulo:
"The dead are resurrected on Jupiter."

Meanwhile here on earth the corpses are cinematically animated: zombies and vampires, proliferating, perhaps, regarding that bend in history, we should say clinematically: "Clinamen, a fragile, fractal prose, inclining to accident. Not the body-animal of sense, but the areality of bodies: of bodies indeed, including the dead body. Not the cadaver, where the body disappears, but the body as the dead one’s apparition, in the final discreteness of its spacing: not the dead body, but the dead one as a body – and there is no other." (Corpus, 53)

Art forming the dead shells, re-animation, finite and infinite swarming along its closed track, luminosity of kelipot, now irremedially mixed with the core, becoming sphere.

First, evacuate and abandon
tin cans to Mars…
flung from head to tail
comet

No W Here Then pt. 3

2009-03-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T03:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-01-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

"There comes a point in the creative course of every great artist or
poet, when the image of beauty which, up to that moment, he had pursued
in a seemingly continuous upward movement, suddenly reverses direction
and becomes visible vertically, in its fall. It is the movement that
Holderlin defined, in the notes to his translation of Sophocles, as
'caesura' or ‘'anti-rhythmic interruption': when the word, as if checked
in mid-flight, for a moment reveals not what it says, but its own nature
… that untitled messianic moment in which art stays miraculously still,
almost astounded: fallen and risen in every instant."

"Bellezza che cade", Giorgio Agamben
published on Cy Twombly, 8 Sculptures, Roma, American Academy, 1998,
p. 5.

(Unfortunately, I've not been able to find the whole Agamben article in English so it would be too forward to to comment on what is not there. But the tone of Agamben's often work is often, superficially I think, is often looked at with suspicion in America because of instants like the beautiful last two lines. For many, perhaps, there seems to be an unbearable proximity to a sort of Biblical hermeneutic; and then of course there is the formidable relation with other fields of humanistic discourse that is a bit overwhelming for American analytics.)

The quote is immediately striking because of the syncope that art 'suffers' in pursuit of beauty, a fainting away from what many would see as the true vocation of art into a mysterious stillness, perhaps even silence and accompanying inaccessibity of a sort. But what sort is it? It is as if the art work has been salvaged from its yoke to the human and has become simltaneously alive and dead, the portal of art made available to another side... if there were another side. Impossibly, it hangs there, tremulously, half lit, half in darkness.

Anthropocentric Metaphysics

2009-01-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

I just came across an article which came out in the academic journal Political Theory from 2005 which I somehow missed. I suppose because of my own theoretical bias (e.g. they reference Agamben and Derrida, etc) I find it one of the most interesting approaches to 'liminal studies.' Certainly there are not many such articles on the UFO phenomena in academic journals to begin with so it should stand out. The article is entitled 'Sovereignty and UFOs' and is available here.
There is also a response to a critique of the article here. The comments section is interesting to peruse since it seems to indicate the same problems of the almost-unavoidable idea of surmounting 'anthropocentricity' -- which is the very thing the authors are trying to point out: how do you know that you don't know something? Mostly it would seem that ignorance is much like the old joke of the man looking under the street light for a lost item, not because that is where the item was lost but because the light is better there. An 'epistemic failure,' as they put it, of the reigning paradigm of all human studies -- that is, the 'human' -- puts govenance mechanisms in a troubling situation. It's certain seems easy to see that such state sovereignty regarding such has been at work in the 'modern' for quite a while. It is almost as if certain anti-bodies are formed to work against not only many liminal states, but also the human populations which carry the 'infection' of what the sovereign state sees as the irrational and the superstitious. And since a cul-de-sac of knowledge exists on both sides (albeit in different directions), it gives mis-recognition of both sides.

This obviously not an easy thing to perceive. Philosophically, perhaps it could be said that the phenomenological tradition (especially deconstruction) is an attempt to 'dust' all sorts of linimal portals at the threshold of the human and to at least illume those limits. The crossing of those portals is another thing altogether. Often times charges of verging on, or passing over into the 'inhuman' result from those investigations.

Interesting then that so called 'speculative materialism' is putting forth another philosophical strand which attempts to dance into some of these issues. (The most fabulous, in all senses of the word, is the recent book by Reza Negarestani: Cyclonopedia:Complicity with anonymous Materials, speculation and philosophy...lots of speculation... And also the journal COLLAPSE from Britain..see also After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux and many new blog sites devoted to the general area).

A couple of short quotes from the article:

"Because the contemporary capacity to command political loyalty and resources depends upon it, the assumption of anthropocentrism must be unquestioned if modern rule is to be sustained as a political project."

and

"This does not mean that UFOs are in fact humanly unknowable,
but they might be, and in that respect they haunt modern sovereignty with
the possibility of epistemic failure."

Ufologists often talk about a coming date (always coming) when secret files will be released etc. This certainly doesn't deal with such conspiratorial issues but the article is very successful in pointing to a skandalon, perhaps indemic to human cognition which might stand in the way of any real recognition of the phenomena.

I'm also reminded of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and the place of ignorance and chance in forming most aspects of the world. I've found that there is even a new term for the study of ignorance: agnotology. More data does not necessarily mean we know more; in fact it may give a complacency about what we (think) we know.

On another website, I seemingly misleadingly said that the Black Swan lends itself to the proposition that anything can happen at any time...perhaps not quite so radical as that but it would seem to verge toward the same sort of ignorance of events and both their probability and improbability....and as Wendt and Duvall put it, a threat to anthropocentric integrity -- rather a threatening failure of systems how we know things.

"I push one step beyond this philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, and one that
has obsessed me since childhood. What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with
the following three attributes.

first, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past
can convincingly point to its possibility.

Second, it carries an extreme impact. third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. "

Many find it better to just keep looking under the street light...afterall it's almost impossible to see anyplace else.
And besides way too much trouble to even attempt.

Yearning

2008-11-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

As I was watching the new Del Toro film on dvd, Hell Boy II: The Golden Army, it was impossible not to think of a riff on Heidegger's writings wherein the status of the human (and presumably the constitution of the perception of not only our being/ontology but those forces which escape us and yet somehow still seem to participate in our formation) was to proceed from gods (in terms of, e.g., ancient Greece/Rome), then in medeval times to creatures, then to modernist abstractions of fields of force. Somehow that tripartite series I attribute to Hubert Dreyfus. In searching for that movement, I came across the Dreyfus website, an article on Heidegger and Foucault, which I think addresses at least the latter part of the declension (I use 'declension' purposely but as a more ambiguous term than simply deterioration or degradation - though perhaps there is that - but also in this sense of the dictionary: a bending, sloping, or moving downward: land with a gentle declension toward the sea, keeping in mind Foucault's declining nature of the human face as it is washed away at the edge of the ocean in The Order of things):

The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects.

And yet. our tech seems intent on reviving all manner of creatures. And for that matter, for the subject, and consciousness, to become another species of matter, the great death drive of the human, if we can be some Freudian about it for a sec.m meeting up with the great 'yearning' of matter to become conscious.

Dead Writing (discontinued) --move to 'creatures'

2008-11-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

at least for now. I was going to discuss the NY Review of Books article by Zadie Smith and some of the work around hauntology and the new world of objecthood and it's (and materialism generally) co-terminus fabrication of both in 'selfhood' (and vice versa). But I've lost the urge. Besides the dead (and the undead, and the never-dead) are always there, waiting., both ahead and behind us. So no fear there of being surpassed/sublimed/sublated or any other aspect of -rosa becoming sub- or super-. Check out some of the (European) blogs on 'speculative materialism.' Funny how place is not erased even on the net.

Dead Reading

2008-11-13T10:04:00.000-08:00

Three different items have recently oriented me to the title above. 'Nekros' mean 'dead body' in the original Greek. While not an oxymoron, the term 'dead body,' from the point of view of a die-hard materialist would have to seem somewhat problematic, perhaps needing to find a necessity to disavow life as any special category . Or for that matter, 'dead' as a special category, both being (for that hard-dead materialist) simply positions on a continuum of some sort of movement/non-movement. And while there can be forms of life, can there be forms of death? One would suppose that our straw materialist would reply that is a barrier (not even a barrier really, which after all assumes that there is something, a threshold, abyssal/abyssmal or not, on another 'side': there would only be here, within an imminent monad I suppose.

But nevertheless, necrological concerns abound, popular forms of death-in-living, such as vampires, and zombies, as the chiasmatic form life-in-death. In fact we would not be too remiss to say that these two forms (that is, death-in-life and life-in-death) set up the polar co-ordinates between which most of thought and culture moves. (One might also say in concordance with this that the mostly-hidden CONVERGENCE and folding of those two forms into the apocalyptic, forms another massif under modernist western archepelagos: various fundamentalisms and/or the technologial singularity seem to escape from all sides of the valley of consciousness and genealogy. leaving us to wax nostalgically about when we were alive, or, in the case of our objects and gadgets, when we were not-alive.

I just finished Lucius Shepard's The Golden, a fabulous tale of intrigue within the vampire world ... and if you've read any Shepard you know that the writing itself is often fabulous and with a tinge of the hysterical which only a vampire novel can provoke in its depictions of the realms of the dead. But of course hysteria is somewhat appropriate, since the term itself denotes an ecstatic wandering of desire outside of itself, a dislocation.

The other two items are a changing of the status of the object (material) in some art discourses and a recent literary review by zadie smith in the New York Review of Books on the changing (or not) nature of narrative ...but next time.

Ink on the Edge, Skinned a Life

2008-10-25T06:22:00.000-07:00

For the eyedrum show Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies, Fehta Murghana had a piece from her estate on the problematics of hoaxing, This is a portion of a piece left out, on tattooing and psychogeography.
RC

This photo is from material left out of Bladerunner, the Ridley Scott movie. Here we see the replicant Roy Batty. Of most interest are the tattoos on the upper left side side of his chest, looking like circular formations, quixotic, indecipherable really, designs which we can guess to relate to his short lived career as a spaceship pilot. Given the rest of the movies thematics of remembrance, false memory, questions of identity, it would be natural to relate the marks to identity somehow. Knowing that the replicants were basically short lived prisoners, conducting the work of a space faring civilization in conditions where 'normal' humans could not or did not choose to work may help.

Perhaps they were attachment points for neural control devices. But for our purposes they function exactly the same as traditional tattoos: boundaries markers, points de capiton sewing up memory and place, bringing them to a visible head.

In the essay acccompanying the book Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, V. 2, Alexie Plutser-Sarno makes the point that the criminal's tattoos speak for him/her, that when the criminals meet for the first time, or they interact with authorities, it is the tattoos which communicate: "The tattoos are like a mass media complex purveying propaganda opposed to the authorities"; from the thief's point of view words "only obscure the meaning of the abolutely reliable information that his tattoos communicate." The tattoos form an ideal world, and an ideal 'I' and a stable state of identity that precedes and bests the human's interior view of himself. Batty's markings, like the crop markings in the fields of England further eschew representation strategies for geometrization, a final unlocking of a unstable state of mudane existence onto some otherworlds/interdimensional state of reality and a re-loading into geometry, an anonymous (oddly enough, odd since it is backed by the currency of the person standing there yet made evanescent in her reality of presence) fateless mode delinked from death and loss, turned to figure. And perhaps the closest a replicant can get to knowledge of self, which is, if we are to believe the western traditions of The Book, also the way through and into the divine, the skin marking the only real boundary.

Round in Circles

2008-10-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

It is most often (inevitably one would say) that there are levels of accountability in society and levels of un-accountability. Since these apparently economic concepts arise through concepts and constructions of 'credit' or credulousness or investment in certain plans of reality (yes, not inappropriate to call all this 'theological' as Agamben and others have noted), any alternative accounts of reality seem 'bankrupt' -- and in a most literal sense. What previously were thought of as 'signs from the heavens' are always thought of, sociologically, as symptoms of cultural and social pressures, tensions and dislocations. The 'economy' as we have come to love and hate it, is always fenced round with baton wielding angels, ministerial enforcers of P.O.V. for the great Treasury To Come. Pursuit of any unacounted-for (and un-wanted) signs will surely lead to a sort of moral bankruptcy.

Is it any wonder then that the resurgence of the 'paranomal' (other than its perennial ebb and flow) seems tied to the free-floating economy of the web, where credit, either in its citational form or its monetized form, seems to be undergoing a phase shift into some other sort of creature (recent national and global events would attest to this also)?

I recently curated and wrote a catalog entry for a show called 'Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies'. You can find the result of that over at FORT!da? books or just off of the Public Domain site. Of course it could also be the case that I have 'symptomatized' something here also. In the distancing of this theorizing about it, it is all be inevitable.

It will be interesting to see the reactions of folks to the show itself which opens in a couple of weeks at eyedrum art and music gallery.

Unfortunately, one thing which I planned but did not have time to work into the show was tattooing and psychogeography and the 'talking object' and diagram as is now being discussed in certain art theory circles.

here was the original call for the show:

Crop Circles, Cosmograms, Psychogeographies

If nothing else, perhaps it can be said that modernity is about diagrams,
schematics, blueprints, Rorschalk cards, flow charts, maps, floorplans and
all the other graphic devices designed to simplify and link the real,
material world with the abstract world of thought and feeling. The same
thing might be said of the visual arts in general.

The infamous crop circles started mysteriously appearing in the fields of
England in the mid-Seventies. Over the past thirty plus years, they have
become the source of much speculation, wonderment, hoaxing: were they made
by artists? By aliens? By intelligent plasmas? Unknown terrestrial forces?
Covert military operations? As with everything, your answers depended on
your proclivities and stations in life. At the very least, they were
beautiful and 'artistic' and SEEMED to be some form of cosmograms, in the
same league with mandalas, Mayan city constructions, Egyptian
mega-constructions, archaic native American pictographs and other nativistic
schematics which seemed to link an astronomical world above with the
terrestrial world below . and to imbue those diagrams with a purported
spiritual power.

All these types of 'ground-based' diagrams also have in common implicit
psychological connections with the land even to the point of creating those
connections ex nihilio. The term 'psychogeography' was coined some years
ago to account for the feeling that the 'beach under the pavement' somehow makes
itself felt in ideas, feelings, and 'spirits'.

The visual arts show at eyedrum art and music gallery will explore these
connections and forms: What are these forms? Do they have effects and
affects or is 'aesthetic' sufficient? Can they be created anew? Does
technology facilitate these 'cosmic figures' and give them new voice or
does it kill them off in paving them over and leave us with a dead schematic ...
which nevertheless still tries to speak?

Time (and Catastrophe)

2008-08-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

In order to keep this thing rolling, I'm going to re-post something from another abortive blog attempt. Everyone knows that if a blog is hot/for the next five minutes no one cares (as if anyone cared anyway). But the rationale for THIS particular post is a book I'm reading for another book poroject called APOCALYPSE THEN: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World by Arthur Williamson, on the idea of the foundational aspects of 'apocalypse' --- true, not exactly the same as catastrophe but I don't have time to for explication of text at the moment.
--------

Catastrophe

"Nature is constantly straining against its chains: probing for weak points, cracks, faults, even a speck of rust. The forces at its command are of course colossal as a hurricane and as invisible as a baccilli. At either end of the scale, natural energies are capable of opening breaches that
can quickly unravel the cultural order."
Mike Davis / Dead Cities

Catastrophe works like fingerprinting techniques at a crime scene. ‘Dusting for prints’ reveals that ‘absence’ is never absolute and that both the innocent and the guilty hover around every scene of misery and disaster, occasionally one being mistaken for the other. But in the end, they are all human prints and the grief is always contained and analyzed (‘triaged’ as they say, in the early accounting that medical emergencies require), and packed away as trauma requires. Or worked out as ‘just keeping going’ requires. The military draws a cordon around the diseased area and, eventually, rebuilding commences…

But natural catastrophes (if one were sufficiently scientific and objective, every catastrophe would be seen as ‘natural’) don’t really leave fingerprints. In fact, they are more like the dusting substance itself, revealing, as Mike Davis’s quote above alludes to, latent breaches and cracks in the social order, the cracks that underlie every human endeavor but which remain muted or covered over and which all human order is devoted to maintaining.

Our cities are monuments to this octopus like quest by humans to search out every exposable facet of natural potentiality and put it to work in the service of a human motivation. (Usually these days that exploration is in the service of capital acquisition; it has becomes hard to extricate that aspect of late modern life from any other aspect of life, some are ready to tell us there is no difference anymore—and, really, never was a difference).

But while the human agenda is always to quell the urgency of the natural (one suspects that the military is merely the outgrowth of this extremely long term human trend: ‘repelling the intruder’ covers much ground). ‘Global survival’ is merely shorthand for technical competence and engineering .. that is, more, but better, levees, earthquake predicative apparatuses, mid-ocean tsumnami sensors, satellite surveillance.

The Great Missoula Flood

On TV last night there was a special about an area in Washington state called the Scablands. The topography of the area is so strange that it took a few years before scientists think they discovered what caused these weird rock formations that covered an area hundreds of miles in length. Apparently 20, 000 years ago a gigantic glacier some 23 miles wide and 500 ft or more high formed in one of the valleys during a period of extreme glaciation. They theorize that the huge wall of ice stopped up the river going through the valley and caused a lake to form bigger than two of the Great Lakes. At great pressure, the case at the bottom of this immense frozen block, the water does not freeze at its normal 32 degrees Fahrenheit but manages to stay liquid till it is 31 or 30 degrees. There it slowly begins its regime of crackdom, slowly but surely bringing down the huge mass, its very size inculcating its demise. Nevertheless, the cracks don’t signal a permanent new regime since the old conditions are still present and the mass slowly begines to form and rise again.

Catastrophe of the south

I’ve written before about the apocalyptic mindset of the southerner. I recently came across a southern artist who had concentrated his large canvases on southern disasters and it made me realize the special relationship that the south has to catastrophe, all the way from it’s founding as a center of slave activity, to floods and hurricanes, to the fighting and subsequent defeat in the civil war, to economic collapse of king cotton and so on. No wonder the peculiar mind set of the old south, the feeling of being put-upon by outsiders, and the isolation that came before that, the inferiority complex and the aggression that often accompanies that state of mind.

The final end of catastrophe is often disappearance, perhaps not even all at once that ways of life succumb and transmute or just are destroyed. In fact, it would be unusual for catastrophe to have THAT much power. More often it’s simply the power to command abandonment, a small tricking away of power.

The Relation of the Extreme(s) to the (always coming) Disaster

The radical ends (primordial and eschatological) are always far before and far after. The current cultural fascination of the extreme in all areas is perhaps in its own way a recognition of those radical possibilities, but in an immanentized version of the old transcendental, the always present possibility of being un-homed and even the courting of the uncanny through the extreme, the possibility of strtetching the human to the limit of sensation, cognition, possibility even to the point of death, the only really firm extreme that anyone will experience. (Even then it’s problematic whether it could be called an experiencing of a limit.)

2008-08-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

It seems appropriate to start a blog to try to get Public Domain, Inc.'s new publication series some visibility., so here goes.

You can go here to find out about upcoming releases, and material relating to the contents of the publications themselves and various other miscellanea.

To see the first three releases (more planned and info on those later) you can go to
http://www.pd.org and scroll down to the bottom of the page (and visit some of the other features at the site if you wish).

From the inaugural release page:

Strictly speaking, Freud's observation in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, of the child's tossing of objects (shouting, Freud thought, 'FORT!' or gone in German) and subsequent reeling back in ('da', or there), becomes problematized at the beginning of the twenty first century. One does not need Freud to know that objects (and subjects) thrown out may or may not find their way back -- and if they do come back it is often in the guise of a haunting (if it makes you feel better, you may call it an 'effect'). This playful sending out and receiving back, or not, or in a burnished form, marks a new, apparently gravity-free stage of history, where even the fundaments may return eventually, even continually, perhaps heralding (as a purported non-appearance) some form of the Eternal Return, much feared/beloved by Nietzsche. But if so, all appears in that tight nexus that Benjamin examined in the aura, a simultaneous mixture of the very distant within the very near, a glamour which refuses to go away and perhaps bewitches to a greater extent than ever before but hidden, exerting subterranean pulls within the flows of our machines.

But what is 'writing' if not the pulsations of these powerful flows and folds of temporality and spatiality, writing forming the liminality and false intimacy of a Mobius strip, forever stitching along the border of inside and outside, nearest and furthest, object and subject, and all the other metaphysical dyads that have whirled through the human mind probably from the beginning of the time when there began to be such a thing as the human mind.

There, in that problematic -- fascinating, fabulous, dead yet undying --stroke between, there is where this new/old venture resides, the skototropic surplus mass that can never be fully moved past the stroke . . . and yet never fully assimilated.

There, write there.

-------------

stay tuned, more to come.