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

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

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?

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

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

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Conjunction V

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