"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

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

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'

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

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

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

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?