smoke fog 7:Noise 2

NOISE 2: MAGNETIC DIVINATION

"Invisible things flit through the teeming immensity. What is below human beings perceives through a fog that which is above them." Victor Hugo

Most immediately, we can think of that which is below human beings as objects and as all other living things, although Hugo was referring to the statistical phenomena of the crowd, the "impenetrable obscurity of mass existence" (Walter Benjamin). This "teeming immensity" is penetrated with modernist attempts to extricate the 'crowd' from its 'objecthood', to liberate it from its inexpressiveness, from the fog-like opacity which the material world apparently institutes through the aegis of the psychic aggregate ( mob mentality or the collective unconsious, depending on ones mind set). At the same time, however, these redemptive extrications (such as those of Marxism and perhaps Freudianism) required the presence of the modern statistical mass (the proletariat, the superstitious and pre-critical horde) in order to enact their own enabling liberatory gestures. Inasmuch as these gestures also enact a performative impulse which frames action (as methodologies are always assumed to do), the teeming immensities of the crowd can be easily seen to contain not only demonstrations and chants but also consumption and chance, especially when separated from any chiliastic teleology, all aligned with shock and catastrophe (Benjamin's angel of history), hallmarks of modernism: the transgression of the gestural frame at virtually the same moment that it is instituted. (Just as, for example, the photograph is framed, time is sliced and frozen; and yet the photograph is exceeded by the photographic apparatus itself, and the 'optical unconscious,' the unseen structures, which it reveals. We may take that to be the case with all exemplary re-presentational media structures. It is now possible to freeze not only the individual moment but statistical events and processes on a world-wide basis, perhaps revealing an 'event unconsciousness', the search for--or better yet, creation of -- 'secrets'.)

The moment that is being freed for the next millennium is the transgressive instance of the second stage of trauma, the phase of recognition and memory (of secrets), jolted by a demographic telematic apparatus of global proportions, memory freed from the exigencies of experience, released into an ether (of at least two sorts) of virtual experience, a re-ordering of causal orders, befitting a quantum age. This matrix of virtuality constitutes a boundary membrane, the main characteristic of which is porosity, perhaps not the final product of enlightenment but a tuning coming from a slowly dissolving orchestra pit before the collapse of stage into audience.

smoke fog 6: noise

NOISE

This clotted fog, mental, physical, material, so intimately connected to the terror of the cemetary and the opening of the earth and of all sorts of crypts (everywhere announcing the spreading miasma of etheric doubles, which the digital can only mimic, as a sort of power ploy used by mimesis, and which the historical dialectic can only sheath in various rhetorics and delaying tactics) always serves the escalation of boundary intrigue. Fog has become the epitome of that New Matter, formerly opaque, now seen as merely a noisy boundary between Energy and Information, more void than solid, yet throwing up a very convincing facade of imperturbability. This new foggy matter is the utmost in flexability and adaptability, best exemplified by the extropian use of the utility fog or "nano-fog". (This would be a fog composed of foglets, each of which would be the size of a human cell and would be composed of a supercomputer chip and 12 manipulable arms on the surface of the octohedral surface; a cubic centimeter would contain approximately 16 million of the foglets. Their purpose would be to create a complete environment, able to change almost instantaneously and capable of creating almost anything.)

At the extreme limit of the boundary between noise and information (that is, within the boundary itself), the differentials between matter and energy, signal and data, become so blurred as to be non-existent; or rather, the normal mechanisms for dealing with border disputes are not available since all hermeneutic strategies are based on an a priori determination of starting points -- but, inside boundaries, such determinations have yet to be established. Gravity, basis of all interpretation, has disappeared. Inside boundaries (within the fold, at the hinge, cardo, or heart of the matter) noise and signal merge, become chiasmatic even. On what basis does one set up beacons in the fog?

 All belongs to the shadowlands, ultimate border between the living and the dead, where the only operable function seems to be a species of magic, conjurings in the flux, strange attractors. "Immersed in background noise with its fractal agitation, the observer attracts the directional flux. It comes toward him, it is bound to. Should there be some wind, it will blow in his direction, any other point, for him, will be in the background. Immersed in disorder, all order is directed toward him. Toward him, at him, and against him." Michel Serres, 

The epistemological correlate for knowledge here becomes rumor, conspiracy, generated at every moment in conditions of extreme multiplicity and boundary disorder, new decision trees created at each instance and concommitant criteria for un/verifiability. At this point, one can only, as the saying has it, 'give up the ghost': "...I am a castaway of perception. I am swallowed up in space, drowned in its murmuring, the multiple always overflows me. I am a subject only when I am on the verge of fainting, dying." (Serres, ibid, p.65).

The trauma for boundary inhabitants: give up the ghost (cyborg) or become the ghost (sorcerer). They may turn out to be the same. The problem remains one of navigation, of determining longitude and lattitude, only partly dependent on the cocoon-like spinning of the gyroscope.

smoe fog5: opaque

A Beside: Learning to be Opaque

Since the dispelling of all sorts of fogs is the cornerstone of the modernist enterprise and its prime patrimony from the enlightment, it is no wonder that the rise of a certain 'dangerous' opacity, inextricably connected with communication (what isn't now?) and its' technology, is causing uneasiness (or elation, depending). This is so particularly among those who have fetishized transparency in its various modes, especially as its role, by no means transparent, in the great modern institutional panopticons.

The concept of public space serves to provoke anxiety now, not least of all among architects, the self-professed 'custodians' of that arena. Inasmuch as that space is the site of the conflict/collision/meeting of the particular and the general, it may always have caused a certain uneasiness for those who passed though it (even though now we only seem to pass through it, the modernist emphasis seems to be on living in that space.) we have only to think of Walter Benjamin's meditations on glass/transparency when he wrote in 1929, "Everything to come stands under the banner of transparency." ... And subsequent modernism's infatuation, both materially and ideologically, with the possibilities of transparency, and its utopian placement, as a form of psychic management of the public arena. We have only also to think of Philip Johnson's early glass house, any downtown AND suburban office park and before that, Bruno Taut and the Glass Pavilion in London at a turn of the century expo.
It has turned out however that transparency may not be the tool of leverage it was originally conceived to be. In thinking that glass would allow the public arena to be expanded inward to the interior, the architects of modernity were perhaps hoping for the instauration of Adolfe Behne's sentiments that "When all intimacy has ceased, man begins to breathe." Of course, it didn't turn out to be that simple. Transparency now seems to be a duplicitous quality, something that postmodernism in its many variants has become aware of, even to the point of instigating various forms of opacity, mirroring (doubling), and renewal of ideas of particularity and singularity at the expense of generality, albeit in the form of the frame surrounding the glass (which, as we know, can readily transform, even shatter, the contents of the frame if sufficient torque is applied. Early theorists were quite aware of this and attempted to minimize the framework as much as possible. In a true public space there would be no framework, an apparent impossibility).

Early on, it became apparent that, as Pierre Missac puts it (and a certain almost almost metaphysical taint seems to bleed through):, "Quite rapidly, the brillant light came to seem unbearable, ..., as though needing to feel the space around them enclosed by walls..." Subsequently tinted glass, special louvers, etc were devised. Much of what the 'philosphers of suspicion', Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud and subsequent continental theory, have had to contribute to the modernism/postmodernism debate has been a re-examination of the frame--and quite often at the expense of transparency. Transparency now has a pharmakonological aspect, which takes two forms, neither apparently at odds with each other: its ability to shatter into deadly shards and its ability to affect transmissibility--terrorism and communication (the most advanced, most dense form of data transmission now uses glass cable; one way glass has long been used for surveillance purposes. And just as an aside we should remember that glass has always played a part in scrying, divination, and prophecy [and transparency is always on the way to becoming a screen or mirror or, ultimately, for glass, a slab of granite; something which it shares, no doubt, with the body) . As it turns out, prophecy -- and even enthusiam as public religious 'discourse'-- is never very far from any discourse on public space.] Both of these aspects now account for current anxieties regarding public spaces.

Utopian transparency has given way to dystopic C3: military terminology for Control, Command, Communication. The opening up of interiorities via transparency has now come to be seen as a pillaging of interiorities, both historical (and certain forms of postmodernism hold responsibility here) and psychical in the form of evacuation ( -- or 'hollowing out' as Adorno put it --) of subjectivities and subsequent re-filling in the form of commodity fetishism, criss-crossed and maintained by an information infra-structure. This data highway now promises to do for the interior landscape (and perhaps also exteriorities--the boundaries seem to becoming increasingly porous) what the physical highway has done to the physical environment: erosion of distance, a speeding up and densification of temporal ordering, alteration of sense ratios, the eradication of local communities, fragmentation, heterogeneity. In contrary motion are various forms of institutional consolidations, mergers, and alliances on a global scale; formation of non-contiguous communities ('inoperative' in Jean-Luc Nancy's phrase) as well as uprisings of more archaic communities based on race, ethnicity, religion, and recreation; a curious static-ness of human nature' wherein mythological structures seem to be constantly erupting, especially through technical media and cinematic special effects

While high theory seems to be increasingly shorn of gravity, floating free of earthly constraints, the popular imagination becomes increasingly mythologized, dwelling on draconian fantasies, neo-gothic architecture, subterranean, even uterine, formations taking precedence over Corbusian garden cities, the tracing of enatic lines over (and sometimes against) agnatic geneologies--the fearful Return of the Mothers, Goethe's Faust might exclaim.. The atrium has now come to encompass all of space, an invagination wherein even the space between buildings comes to seem merely the interior of another, vaster space, albeit a space enclosed in darkness and water (one has to only think of the city scapes in many popular recent movies: Bladerunner, the Batman series, the recent Judge Dredd; in fact, in almost every movie wherein the environment is equal to or takes precedence over character, certain mythological dicotomous restraints seem to apply.)

The public space, then, as it is activated through terrorism, communication, commodity fetishism, and prophecy seems to be taking on some of the tensions which Julia Kristeva ascribes to psychoanalysis in its attempt to counterbalance authority and transgression as in the following quote: "The ensuing equilibrium preserves the vitality of this discourse, a vitality that grows out of the immanence of death (the discourse of knowledge) and resurrection (the discourse of desire). As a result, psychoanalysis upsets the social contract, which is founded, according to Freud, on an act of murder. Analysts do not shy away from being dead fathers of knowledge, but the are also subjects of affect, desire, and joissance. Consequently, they are distanced from schools and institutions and concentrate instead on restructuring other people's  psyche.." (New Maladies of the Soul, 35).
Architecture is, however, an even more peculiar form of pyramidology, literally exhausting interiors, eviscerating natural structures, trees to lumber, volcanic interiors to cement, melting beaches to glassine surfaces, a peculiar form of resurrection indeed where the dead are the first priority. Little is left for the public space but the ghostly dance of commodities, objects, deaths brought back to life under the sign of Saturn: leaden, melancholic, the world itself become a thing, "the planet of detours, delays" making one "apathetic, indecisive, slow" (as Susan Sontag once described a certain modern temperament).
No wonder then that architecture becomes the chosen site for the terrorist's attempts to communicate, interrupting by re-inscribing a discourse of particularlized destructive desire onto bunkered generalized knowledge (the industrial state, as the Unabomber has it; the scientific method itself!), attempting an instauration of his own particularized brand of prophecy, 'signature effect' (of neccessity irrational, Benjamin's destructive character' smeared across the landscape) requiring as his glass ball, shards, fragments, as his only recourse, working perhaps 'backwards' from desire (the hope for SOME sort of resurrection--personal, social--) rather than 'forward' from knowledge, the inevitable chiasmatic crossing forming the new public space (always doubled now, uncanny, paranoiac, mobiated).
And as sorcerers and those who live in the blues have always known, crossroads are dangerous places.

smoke fog 4: trauma

TRAUMA

"...The impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time." Cathy Caruth, "Trauma and Experience: Introduction" in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p.9
 
If the leading characteristic of fog and fog-like events is a 'dispersed systematicity' or a 'granulated amorphous effectivity' or an 'environmentally sedimented atmospheric zone' or a 'zone of atmospheric instability between two adjacent zones' or an 'area of confusion' or visual noise or a term for obscured vision (and like enfleurage there is gentle but nevertheless definite gradient in the range from dispersed/multiple to obscured vision, theory-wise), there is also a tinge of the trauma of the enfilade in the cultural reception of 'fog' (various para-logics perhaps, even the biological itself in its current, perhaps temporary, opaqueness) and in its use as an antithesis of logic, of, on the one hand, the confusion it brings about, and on the other hand, the threat of the appearance of some monstrous other, usually connected with the reappearance of the dead.

Trauma comes from the Greek word meaning wound, which in turn derives from the word for 'to pierce,' or perforate. On a physical level it is the idea of a violent shock or wound and the idea that there are thereby consequences affecting the whole organization.

Organisms are protected by thin shells, both physically and psychically; should these be breached by a traumatic event, the resources of the organism are marshalled to control the damage. In some cases, the traumatic event is so overwhelming that the organism cannot cope immediately but encapsulates it further, in a 'holding tank'. This may serve to temporarily protect the whole organism (psychically) by delaying and postponing reaction. This encrypted energy however can also work to re-orient the organism in ways not readily perceptible. The very resources of the organism itself work to obscure the origin of the trauma, the source of the problem. Just as in a sort of conceptual fog, there is condensation between the first scene (or wounding) and the second scene (or discovery), often obscuring vision either way. History itself seems to partake of this foggy view. ("For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessiblity of its occurrence." Cathy Caruth, ibid, p. 8)

If referenciality disappears, anxiety severs all speech, leaving a bodily dimension, a gestural system, system of objects -- rather, the uncanniness of a system of objects freed from a system of subjects: "Anxiety makes the subject no longer know who it is. It takes part in its own 'wild' deconstruction, if one can put it this way. This 'one' is no longer a subject but an indeterminate presence which feels invaded by a feeling of uncanniness." (M. Haar, Song of the Earth, p.45)

The appearance of the uncanny is the system past its limits, boundaries, membranes, where parts of itself have broken off, creating a doubling effect through sheer out-of-control iteration, attempting to fill all space and disconnect time (thereby making all of time available). Unlike the sublime, which is well within the limits (sub-limned) and attempts to see through the space to the end, all the while calculating the time of arrival (which is always placed at an infinite remove), the uncanny situates itself immanently through the very placement of objects in space: saturation then condensation; objecthood itself becomes the site of the unanny. The sublime is teleological, apocalyptic, millennialistic, binary, a product of unclosable distance, 20/20 vision, product of production itself, producing its own scopic orbitals (for the sublime, what goes around, comes around: a lame dialectic, hobbling in circles, waiting for a crutch [prosthesis], with no antidote/thesis in sight). The uncanny, product of and conducive to, terror and anxiety, is assembled through delay and trauma, relayed through prostheses, doubling., emergence of monstrous Other.

possible smoe fog 3: the dead

THE DEAD

"It is now becoming clear that EVERYTHING we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return--not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense--and to reach the very heart of our ultra-sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness--a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter." Jean Baudrillard, "The Melodrama of Difference", from The Transparency of Evil

But this is the rationalization of systemization, the route from the local to global (or the finding of the general within the particular, the moment of the theoretical--a balancing point in the hermeneutic circle by which we entered this fog) via the cut of particularization or the 'digital'. This perhaps only bears a passing resemblance between the living/dead switch, but it does bear the mark of the inextricable/ineradicable economy of heat-transfer and entropy: still the land of the dead (and the unliving--which is not precisely the same as the dead. Life is just a subset of the dead, Nietzsche) One can think of the optimum condition for circuitry (as cold as possible for maximum electron flow) and then consider the fog flowing out of the mouth of the priests in The Exorcist, or any number of other films where the pneuma (geist) of the body becomes momentarily visible as a kind of ectoplasmic stand-in for the human essence, made visible as the indicator, the stroke, as the limit point between two realms. The dead have no memory, only trails; the un-living do have at least temporally based data storage of the sort: center/periphery, a functional equivalent of subject/object, particular/general but here the trauma of consciousness cannot make the cut into memory, for any cut only fractalizes, furthering the processing horizontally, spatially but not temporally:

 "Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine."
"These delicate arms, cilia quivering in turbulence, are born of the low white fog, these here, an infinite number, fade away, they break up, though they return aperiodically, others rise higher only, once again, to disappear, those there gel into an edifice, steeples." Michel Serres

smoke fog 2:smoke

SMOKE

"When the world is reduced to a network of interchangeable connections, there are truly no more subjects who face objects but only gigantic circulations of energy, products, information, and consumption. Everymore removed, ever less inserted in a situation or a determinate site, technological man more and more finds himself decontextualized, simultaneously integrated and dispersed. The sense of the near and the distant becomes blurred. The oblivion of the Earth is the oblivion of the originally local and regional character of thinking and action." Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, p. 5 "...there is no space in general, and everything brings its space with it, a place takes place by itself. Thoughts are not the fruits of the earth. They are not registered by areas, except out of human commodity. Thoughts are clouds. The periphery of thoughts is as immeasurable as the fractal lines of Benoit Mandlebrot. Thoughts are pushed and pulled at variable speeds. They are deep, although core and skin are of the same grain. Thoughts never stop changing their location one with the other. When you feel like you have penetrated far into their intimacy in analyzing either their so-called structure or genealogy or even post-structure, it is actually too late or too soon. One cloud casts its shadow on another, the shape of the clouds varies with the angle from which they are approached." Jean-Francois Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. p. 5. 

Even shadows take on a certain solidity in the fog, a penumbral presence that bends around corners, plastered to the edges, like a rumour that haunts a certain strictness of being (like Being shadowing being--or vice versa), of language, of discourse, the body politic. The chiaroscuro partitioning of shadow/light forming shifting blocks of truth/falsity--there SHOULD be rigid demarcations (after all, it's in black and white, on/off), perceptual truth tables. But such 'truth-telling' only works at high noon (although artificial light can create the same effect--or affect in that case), after fog/smoke has been burned off and, though there are shadows galore, they are sharp edged, measurable. But even then, even here with the sun overhead, eclipses can happen, something large burns nearby, millions of bits of particulate matter scale the air, rising in the warm, casting a pall, loosening the connections between thing and shadow cast.

Smoke: the inevitable aftermath of catastrophe, the caterpillar's writing of the disaster, hoving over the cooled remains, cinders, husks left, the last testimony of the dead: mute, toxic witnessing of departed flame. The smoke is always, already (everywhere) rising above the sacrificial altars of the twentieth century, like the augurs and appeasements to the gods which the greeks were constantly seeking: all that is solid turns to smoke (fitting Marxian inscription on the tomb of itself as well as the greco-hebraic gravesite which was/is/shall always be burning: burning at both temporal ends, smoke from the shrines at Eleusis turning up above Edison Electric in New Jersey).

The modern temptation to continually poke through the smoky rubble, finding victims, looking for evidence, is only part of our patristic heritage, our burden of hermeneutics: an attempt to find the match which set the world burning (and in that burning world is where techn resides and best finds its resources: Terminators striding the smoky debris, hunting out the last Living Humans, smoking out the last possibility of metaphor). Like the sublime, smoke hides, mimics the uncanny, perhaps even releases the uncanny under the traumatic pressure of parsing (smoke/cinders) which fast oxidation causes (burden of life in oxygen! : The Original Trauma). Technology: the fastest oxidation possible, so fast that it always seeks to frame uncanny fog within its representational structures, always attempting to make it a theatrical effect, nostalgic and propaedeutic, History and Future the other parsing that technology knows, at the same time. It's almost as if smoke were dreaming of fog, as if it could conjure up its uncanny Other under the pressure of burning (pressed through a sieve, a net, chora,) as if its sacrificial altars could re-constitute the gods and goddesses, (artificial) life embossed into the smoke.

But, for now, like the hookah-smoking catepillar in Alice In Wonderland, the smoke turns inevitably into letters before dissipating, a metaphor which may be taken to allude to language in general and, in our case, language under pressure of extrusion from global telematic services: within a final puff of smoke the caterpillar is transformed. (We would perhaps not be remiss in pointing again to Walter Benjamin's wizened theological dwarf operating in conjunction -- but out of sight -- with the automaton chess player with the aim of installing -- or revealing -- the "weak messianic force" in techn.) Has the prosthetic hookah aided the transformation? Or has it merely thrown up a smokescreen to hide the transformative process? Whence comes the transformation? The smoke, the internal exigencies of the caterpillar ('natural law'), the letters (as a sort of kabbalistic incantation), the hookah (as a prosthetic enabler), or the presence of Alice (the x and y of which a certain ontological feminism might beckon, a transformative possibility of a body that an Alex can only observe)?

possible smoke fog ahead 1

...woke this morning to swirls of fog and thoughts of prolepsis  in re: the never ending Ourobouros-like tail biting. I leave it to the reader to disentangle the parts, if such prophetic possibility present itself. To that end (always pregnant with the beginning), I came across this quote from Leibniz in Roberto Calasso's book Tiepolo Pink. In passing one might note also the cloudy, clotted scenes from Tiepolo's work, along with the the scenes of fairy lore of Victorian painter Richard Dadd and the more 'modern' work of contemporary artist Maurice Clifford; the enigmatic detail of these artists no doubt leads to an awareness of an occulted sensibility overall :

The outcome of these little perceptions is therefore more efficacious than one would think. They form that je ne sais quoi , those inclinations, those images of the qualities of the senses, clear as a whole, but confused in their parts; those impressions that surrounding bodies make on us, and that embody infinity; the bond that every living being has with the rest of the universe. One may even say that as a consequence of these little perceptions the present is pregnant with the future and laden with the past, which plots all (sýmpnoia pánta, as Hippocrates put it), and that in the smallest of substances penetrating eyes like those of God might read all the concatenation of the things of the universe.

GW Leibniz 

 The following is from a perforations issue, subsequently printed in the perforations collection as a hypertext
...

INSECTICIDE

(When I was a boy, passing hazy summer days in a small southern town, the highlight of the week was the twilight trip of the truck fogger which slowly huffed through the neighborhood spraying out a thick fog of insecticide to stem the equally thick fog of mosquitoes, nano-like and insistent in their omnipresence. Jumping on our bikes, my friends and I would follow the truck, holding our breath and swooping in and out of the fog, intent, no doubt, on acting out our own version of the emergence of monsters from the mist, the combination of twilight and fog too irresistable to ignore. If the fog which we saw in the saturday matinees at the monster triple features would too seldom--if ever--come to us, why, we would go to it.)

The power of 'fog' is thus not only an industrial (ala 19th century production modes) effect (and isn't a bullet preeminently an industrial artifact?) but rather its power resides in its disseminative effect, its ability to flow into the farthest interstitial reaches. (Like an insecticide fogger, set to go off and into every nook and cranny of a room, killing every roach no matter where it's hiding. Will some future superroach be able to adapt and live off those fogs, come, even, to await with eagerness its arrival?) Modernity and modernism themselves have many of the same traumatic qualities of this search-and-destroy feature of the anti-insect fogger and its inevitable covering-over of every available surface. Inasmuch as modernism has historically been about the "shock of the new" (which has, from a post-modernist point of view, been about the conversion of temporal qualities to spatial, or the substitution of surface effects for depth configurations), the 'post-modern' can be seen as the dissemination of modernism through the aegis of capital flow, under the cultural dominance of global multi-national corporations and an imbricated telematic infra-structure of computers, video, and telephone service. A form of indeterminate transfer of systematicity for which the terms enfilade and enfleurage are evocative but inadequate unless they can somehow be combined.

The hallmarks of this tail end of modernism have now passed from shock (is anyone shocked by anything anymore?) to uneasiness, dread, expectation, and anxiety. The sharp slap of shocks, administered repeatedly to a system (by a system), rapidly become, in the first moments of trauma, hidden; the organism learns to cope, learns to encrypt that originary scene, managing to put up with the increasing miasma that seeps out of the crevices, cracks and then starts to define those cracks. Effects begin to be noticed outside the crypt as energies begin to be invested in objects. As speech is quelled under the pressure, the objects begin to speak, but heard indistinctly, seen through a glass darkly (even as the object world becomes ever more insistently present, the 60-cycle humming of nano-mosquitoes).
The second scene of trauma, the scene which establishes consciousness (a temporal cut), the scene of discovery, still has not taken place. And like enfilades's establishing cut through sortie, abolishing one scene and creating another simultaneously, and enfleurage's hind brain reliance, scenes of modernist discovery kill at they same time that they discover (or remember) the 'evidence'. What would be the establishing 'cut' for the machinic phylum, spirited (machined?) away from the trembling, shaking, swaying Kore-tic organic? What must be killed and what is remembered? Oleaginous escape from inorganic depths forming from toxic interior to the outside covering the exterior..., pushing toward some ultimate alien aufhebung. "What then is the unhuman? It is, first of all, a limit without reserve, something that one is always arriving at, but which is never circumscribed within the ambit of human thought/" Eugene Thacker
 

magical but linear Mobius

The thing fascinating about the Mobius strip is its attempt at eruptive simultaneity, one side turning into the distaff side. I feel that way about many things (viz, the ionic fort/da) the collapse of presence and absence through the agency of the middle way, the stroke. I feel that way about the phenomena of kitsch (and its vertiginous, poisonous kin),the funereal middle stroke taking over every sort of dialectic, turning all it touches into a flattened smirk...either that (maybe preferable) or turning something into a humourous decombustive nothing.  And I see that in what is maybe, ostensibly it's opposite...witz

From Jean-luc Nancy, essay collection :

 Witz cannot control; that is why philosophy began with its exclusion. It enacts combinations without knowledge, it remains heterogeneous even after combining the heterogeneities it produces, it seduces without trying, couples without fecundating, and we remain fearful of it as long as our expectations remain high—it can literally do anything. Literary elegance, which always remains “elegance,” even when it descends into vulgarity, once a literary project or proposal comes into existence, becomes a protest against this “anything,” against chaos—and, likewise, philosophical reasoning, always remains “reasoning,” even when it makes use of the resources of a brilliant Witz. The triviality, the verbal chatter, the femininity and lack of consistency of the “bon mot” have always worried and threatened the works of Witz from below, even though those works have also drawn their resources and justifications from them. Of course, it is always possible to control Witz, to yoke it to the production of knowledge and of works that have always had the finality of judgment. But because they had reached the peak of such control, the romantics watched as it suddenly disintegrated in their hands. Their attempt to use Witz to engender everything saw the return of something that was most characteristic of Witz (or rather, of that which never creates the Witz but a Witz) but cannot be appropriated, cannot be introduced into any work (not even and, especially, into Tristram Shandy)—its uncontrolled birth.

I'm thinking that witz and kitsch have more in common than might be first imagined, with witz taking the high ground, intellectually speaking. Witz being a sanctioned virtue directly opposed to the fungibility of  ktisch's one-step-from-the-bottom.  But in fact the two operate in conjunction with each other. The flaws of one reflected in the virtues of the other (creating the other actually; a one-two punch coming and going).

Making Reservations...

...or at the very least, being resistant to getting anywhere. Although ostensibly about resistance in psychoanalysis, the many items in Rebecca Comay's article will be instantly recognizable to any number of human activities, even, the attempt to do ANYTHING sometimes it seems. And of course from analysis' perspective, even extensively quoting from the article(s) can be a form of resistance, all circulating around a central vibrant void with its own quixotic demand/drive which requires an infinity of interpretation--a necessity (or impossibility) which can only be engaged if there is the ding an sich somewhere around a corner or an horizon; perhaps language itself is the carrier of the virus:

 It’s about the breakdown or atomization of time. Unmodified by intervening history, removed from circulation, the past intrudes as a static, isolated remnant; unconscious repetition takes the place of conscious memory, and the present evaporates from view. Or, which might amount to the same, it’s the present that impinges: everything is happening here and now, as if there were nothing and no one outside the room, no time outside the session, only the infinitely dilating now, a moment of pure immediacy inoculated from every context, untrammelled by antecedent or aftermath, expanding infinitely to fill all time. Above all resistance is the breakdown in language when the chain of associations comes to a halt, or never gets off the ground, when nothing comes to mind, when speech fails to spark, when despite or because of your best efforts the whole thing sputters and stalls and goes off the rails; or when, fleeing silence, you fill the air by telling stories or by concocting theories about language’s own inevitable failure. It’s always tempting to think of resistance as a failure of productivity: the work gets interrupted because the analysand goes on strike, stops talking, stops generating material (strange industrial language) for analysis. But resistance can also take the form of a crisis of overproduction: there can be an endless proliferation of material that keeps forestalling any possible resolution; every interpretation generates new material to work through, new dreams demanding interpretation, new symptoms to consider, including the vicissitudes of resistance itself. Either way: the analysis gets mired down in a search for resolution that is either preempted or kept dangling forever out of reach.

Rebecca Comay, Resistance  and Repetition:Freud and Hegel
research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 237-266, also on Academia.edu

Flatness

A book is born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form in search of itself, in search of a deployment and appeasement for its impatience. Jean-Luc Nancy

Perhaps Nancy's quote (from his very short and luminous book on books and bookstores) may have been true in all social eras but it also seems too obviously true that writing as well as 'writing' during a time in which everything seems kairotic;  the presence of hyper communication makes everything seem propitious (coming while at the same time leveling all aspects of information. Everything seems on the edge, on the verge, overblown and oversold, something assembling itself while simultaneously falling apart. In a way terribly claustrophobic as butterfly wings on the other side of the earth flap and generate risings and fallings. Things seem too fast but also not fast enough, as if going faster will lead us to some Elysium Fields where all has come and rest can ensue, as though Something  that was always on the Way has finally Come, a Cosmic Klaxon has sounded, every thing magnetized, fragments taken heavenly shape, over and out. But the very opposite is happening, we now become ensnarled in, aa Baudelaire put it in Paris Spleen "the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot". Beginnings and Ends now become merely ... the middle. No wonder the Flat Earth theory has become inexplicably popular: everything now seems equidistant from every other, all prophets become equally close to the source, the soi-disant end of time equally true for all and none:

[....] no one can say that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. I beg you to consider how admirably convenient this combination is for all of us, for you, for me and for the reader. We can cut wherever we please, I my dreaming, you your manuscript, the reader his reading. [....] Take away one vertebra and the  too ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again and without pain. Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone." From first paragraph of Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen.

miasma: end/starts yet again

This is nominally the second volume in the Mississippi series (LAW: eschatology), consisting of folds, pleats, involutions, moving from etiolated personal history to the metaphysical and theoretical, back to the aesthetic mass folded and creased forward and backward, generated by the first person conceit and then third person. And not only can this volume be considered as 'art damaged' but that theory and internet damaged as well. Some might say that it has left nothing but then we know the pleasure of such shredded desuetude since these are the forms a great many live in today, the personal (and anarchic) preceding it at one time and succeeding it at other time, a question of agency always being the fall guy. Perhaps the precinct of rational thought must of necessity be left alongside the road, unable to enter those shining towers and institutions(the inhabitants less and less available while becoming more and more visible; that is about to change no doubt). In which case all writing can amount to no more that kitsch, blemishes and stains on the way 'forward', curios from a last forgotten stage, the ragged decentered edges and camps of modernity and postmodernity, constituting inscrutable opacities, understandable as nothing but exclusions from aggregations of large data pools, any hermeneutic giving way to archivization and display. In such a real the thing which perdures is not biography but life as writing, the screenplay within the play, the signals within the smoke. This also is where Law resides, fitfully prophetic and looking backward, beautiful--and fearfully unbroken in its own primal reserve--much in fact like the subjective itself. Law, like Capital, vast,  cold, and indifferent: false infinite of H. G. Wells' Martians, struck low at the end by the activation of homo sapiens auto immune system. bodily memory and archive emerging much like the uncanny also held in reserve. running over broken ground running toward milky ways galaxies revered in the 'old home place' memory being the biggest false infinite false because memory always closes the circuitry at the end looking backward from the past not the future nothing but a Mobius strip itself, no, himself, always finding the same place over and over again, twisted, foiled, refrigerated: poor man's infinity...right after the latest movie that is. The Last Things and the first things maybe the same things? the fusions within all poetry...

G-

gravid gravitas gravity grave
all beset with heaviness sunken below probeheads, loads of gravel, beyond purchase
salamanders increase alchemically underfoot
Beings of Fire unquench-able balls rolling around the living room floor/tilted, subject to gravitywave
settling in one corner where I sat hunched round the AC hanging on the window, sweat blown,
not serious enough to be impressed by the gravity of the sit.u.a.sun. hitman in a stroll through  moonlight gravely festering in constant memory, grave the only constant... another view: always gravid, full not empty no matter what yr theory says

screams in the night

“Because it is himself that the Southerner is writing about, not about his environment: who has, figuratively speaking, taken the artist in him in one hand and his milieu in the other and thrust the one into the other like a clawing and spitting cat into a croker sack. And he writes. [....] That cold intellect which can write with calm and complete detachment and gusto of its contemporary scene is not among us; I do not believe there lives the Southern writer who can say without lying that writing is any fun to him. Perhaps we do not want it to be.”
William Faulkner, intro to The Sound and the Fury 

Once upon a time, feeling the vague pinch of mortality, I gave my father paper and pen and asked if he would record family recollections. Much time went by wherein he finally scribbled a few pages. Starting out in a factual manner, it descended into a furious telling of wrongs done to him by various brothers and sisters (counting eight all together) and resentments approaching a biblical scale, frightening in the condemnations. The calm diagesis and hermeneutic of the progressive airing (e.g., public radio's audio story board) of grievances had no place in this old testament landscape. Writing did not act as some cathartic release but rather was lava like in its heat and subsequent hardening when exposed. There was no artifice here but rather the raw, unmediated ding an sich of genealogical defenestration. And that was the end of that experiment. Perhaps Ortega Y Gasset got it wrong: much of the time, the past repeats not because we have forgotten it but because we remember.


  

frayed poetics

yes I don't want to get out of the way, from falling upward while gliding sideways, away from  tentacular embraces, seething sidewalk skids, awaken from way back when, yes, like a child again but not.
evidence all around of Niagra Falls, Memphis, New Orleans, all the while ratcheting high up in the air, tops of trees, aunts and uncles circling, new motif of ruin and wrack ancient waterways pose underneath Mozelle and Bennie all the others making a supernatural circuit like a child again but not  

We take the old pink 57 chevy out to indian mounds get invaded by bugs from hell while our brethren push from below  forming helmets of colliding clouds  Meanwhile the others scurry around in the dark edges of the campfire, delux furnishings cob web cabin yes bugs light up tippy tree tops; they make the entire circuit from below to above for your fandom, your incomprehension, your guilt amen hosannahs forever and again emerging from the salt flats for your wounds little gilt picture frames to sit on the piano: law of the family.

surface glow

The iridescence and perfection of a soap bubble is due in part to the surface tension of the surface; if the torsion changes even minutely the structure will pop. If one's receptors were set correctly, the fairy screams might be heard as the shards tinkle away.

The End...again and again and...

 Perhaps Law (whatever it is)--other than the title of a very long Stephen King frightfest novel--stretches from, and overlaps with, all beginnings as well as all endings, as a frightening threshold which is empty and holds no one back from entering or leaving....and yet is unable do either, like Kafka's man from the country: "Nothing—and certainly not the refusal of the doorkeeper—prevents the man from the country from passing through the door of the Law if not the fact that this door is already open and that the Law prescribes nothing. " and " [....] Cacciari, even more decisively, underlines the fact that the power of the Law lies precisely in the impossibility of entering into what is already open, of reaching the place where one already is: “How can we hope to ‘open’ if the door is already open? How can we hope to enter-the-open [entrare-l’aperto]? In the open, there is, things are there, one does not enter there. . . . We can enter only there where we can open. The already-open [il già-aperto] immobilizes. The man from the country cannot enter, because entering into what is already open is ontologically impossible” (Icone, p. 69). Seen from this perspective, Kafka’s legend presents the pure form in which law affirms itself with the greatest force precisely at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything—which is to say, as pure ban." and ' The open door destined only for him includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him. And this is precisely the summit and the root of every law." (Agamben, Homo Sacer)

And thus we come to every moment being both open and closed:

"Already in St. Paul and St. John there is a tendency to conceive of the End as happening at every moment; this is the moment when the modern concept of crisis was born~St. John puns on the Greek word, which means both 'judgment' and 'separation.' Increasingly the present as 'time-between' came to mean not the time between one's moment arid the parousia, but between one's moment and one's death. This throws the weight of 'End-feeling' on to the moment, the crisis, but also on to the sacraments. 'In the sacramental church,' says Bultmann, 'eschatology is not abandoned but is neutralized in so far as the powers of the beyond are already working in the present.' No longer imminent, the End is immanent. So that it is not merely the remnant of time that has eschatological import; the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a benefaction from the End, now immanent. History and eschatology, as Collingwood observed, are then the same thing. Butterfield calls 'every instant... eschatological'; Bultmann says that 'in every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awake it.'"
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

The attempt to redirect history from totality End-determined: techne's imperative seems to be solely NOW (a matter simply of more data acquisition (The Resurrection will no doubt come from this haecceity before any sort of Beyondness; "step by step slowly I turned"). The Ride is easier if one can maintain position at the top of the wave of transition/acquisition.  The view is perhaps more grand also (Truth or Falsity is not that germane, more a matter of consonance). "The notion of an End-dominated age of transition has passed into out conscious, and modified our attitudes to historical pattern."

"[....] eschatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present in every moment, the types always relevant."
Kermode

"We project ourselves--a small, humble, elect perhaps--past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle"

Who this 'we'? what is the nature of this projection? Who are able to 'envisage ontologies of alterity beyond the confines of the historical present?'
Kermode

another Beginning/Ending: Murghana

[Another interminable Beginning...must all beginnings always match up with endings? only if they are infinite on both 'ends' (thereby doing away with ends/beginnings, Joyce's Riverrun, simultaneity of all things, monadically speaking).]

"All human projects have beginnings and ends."  This statement might be said to constitute a Law, perhaps when ends and beginnings are thought together, the Prime Law, at least of a sort of metaphysics of western theological signposts. The Law appears, at least in retrospect of time/space correlates, as a bony articulated outcropping, governing itself from those eternal mists. However even the most hard edged, austere epistemology (say, Kant) must find a frayed, fuzzy micro rhizal co-inhabitor which can be used to unfold the central structure. And there is where Heidegger and Derrida enter the dance hall and, now at least, get booed for being old-fashioned and Counter Revolutionaries to the various plots cooing to find a way to leave the dance hall and to get out into the Great Open once and for all and leave all that semio-smoke and crypto-fog inside with all the Gauloises, everything fusing together indicating that origins and closures (Hegel) are in for a difficult dialectical ride...but after all loo at all the dialectical opportunities which appear to be leaving the Hall of Object Systems: narco-redoes, techo gadget love, occultist inie outies, and other Mobiating head trips.

non-moderne

Moderns always ask the question 'how did we get here' (after answering the question 'how do we get there') and then 'how do we get out?
and then Thodor Adorno's:  ‘Even the fullest awareness of the disaster threatens to degenerate into gibberish’ . and I take that this full awareness is the enlightenment heritage.  We, us moderns, are always on the slippery slope of kitsch, the impure hoaxer, a masquerade for true being; and then landing in piles of kipple, Philip K. Dick's term for the piles of debris which seem to mount up everywhere and mysteriously automatic.in its generation.

Hand/s off!

[....] the more mysterious the source of the trace, the more persistent the feeling that something is really there. This is the point at which speculative thought seeks a foothold. As if in mockery of the dispassionate, scientific reflections of phenomenology, the speculative thinker sets out in search of the ineffable, feeling his way experimentally towards an interpretation.
Bloch's Traces, The Philosophy of Kitsch. T. Adorno 

Kitsch (and kipple) are infecting even the highest levels of the public/political sphere now. Perhaps this designates a new relationship between the host and the para-site which seeks to transform the whole modernist apparatus as we move more fully into the anthropocene. For sure, everything that was not/is not solid anymore (which is everything now) is beginning to float and vibrate with increased intensity, as all anchoring become suspect. At times there seems to be no way 'forward' because the very concept of forward (progress, happiness) is viewed with suspicion as just more of the same. The very idea of 'handing' off the baton to the future seems fraught with debris and triviality...and while the band plays on. The idea of the acheiropieta --really, the myth of an invisible inhuman hand working its way through history--does not carry the emblem of materialism emblazoned across any working or efficacy (the beginning of Agamben's inoperativeness?).

It has long been held that 'the critical mind' is one that shows the hands of humans at work everywhere so as to slaughter the sanctity of religion, the belief in fetishes, the worship of transcendent heaven sent icons, the strength of ideologies. The more the human hand can be seen as having worked an image, the weaker is the image's claim to offer truth. But this is only true to the myth of the acheiropoieta: that which is made without hands. Both science and religion are desirous of the state of the acheiropoieta icon, but the fetish subverts the aesthetic: fetishes have to be made. Human hands cannot stop toiling producing images, pictures of all sorts, to still generate, welcome, and collect objectivity, beauty, and divinities, exactly as in the --now forbidden--repressed, obliterated old days. The acceptance of this cheiropoiesis is the recognition of a new angelic collective with hands, not wings, simultaneously concealing (making occcult) and revealing(making) the face of God. 
Magical Thinking: History Possibility and the Idea of the Occult, Stuart McWilliams

kitsch is never done for

From Daniel Tiffany's endlessly interesting book on kitsch:

The vehemence of the modernist campaign against kitsch demonstrates that, beneath the current associations with mediocrity and harmless pleasure, kitsch has always functioned as an irresistible locus of moral and aesthetic taboos: triviality, hedonism, fakery, but also—somewhat incoherently—homosexuality and fascism.Unresolved in the wake of high modernism, the anxiety about the pleasures (and dangers) of kitsch continues to assert itself in forceful, though perhaps less absolute, ways. If radicalism in the arts implies—at least in part—reorienting the viewer towards whatever appears to be vacuous, trifling, indulgent, or worthless, then kitsch still marks an elusive frontier: to equate art and kitsch, or to deliberately produce kitsch. as if it were art, flirts even now with artistic suicide, with the self-destruction of art. 

Kitsch in its original formulations is said to be the antithesis of “true” art—what Greenberg calls “synthetic art.”  More bluntly, he states, “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. … Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious.”  Broch declares simply, “Kitsch represents falsehood (it is often so defined, and rightly so).”  For certain modernists, the spurious nature of kitsch is inseparable from its mimeticism (which Greenberg calls a “surplus of realism”), in contrast to modernist abstraction.  Whatever the terms of comparison (between kitsch and “true” art), the basic attitude towards kitsch adopted by the modernists who defined it is riddled with condescension. It is crucial, however, to emphasize that the term “kitsch” has been used historically by only a restricted segment of society, the intelligentsia. What the elite calls “kitsch” may in fact conform to the basic criteria of “art” for many people. Thus the person who consumes and enjoys kitsch is never “the person who uses the word ‘kitsch.’”  From a sociological perspective, then, kitsch is an aesthetic category suspended between those who control its public name (to destructive ends) and those for whom it has no name (or who prefer not to use its public name), between those who refer to it with contempt and those who enjoy it without irony, reservation, or shame. This polarized structure reinforces the fundamental terms of misidentification and uncertainty surrounding kitsch: Is it art or not? But also, is it true or false, authentic or fake? Kitsch is thus not simply a particular kind of artifact but an artifact imagined and judged in divergent ways by communities in conflict with one another.

[,,,,]

Acknowledging the interdependence of elite culture and the adversarial potential of popular culture inevitably engages Peter Bürger’s conception of the historical avant-garde as a movement integrating art and life, vanguardism and populism. 16 From this perspective, kitsch may eventually be regarded not as the nemesis of the avant-garde (in Greenberg’s formulation) but as a baffling mutation of Dada, a development marking the collapse of the iconic—and unstable—opposition between avant-garde and kitsch.

Questions on the digital world --AI, the 'uncanny valley' of extreme mimicry, etc.--cry out in the noisy void.

kitsch me if you can

Kitsch as an odd fellow traveller, beggar lice on the coat tails of the modern, a stain which modernism fears as a viral agent somehow devaluing the modernist values in kitsch's banal but not ironic values, values which seem to magically appear with the advent of the modern. Truth or fiction? It really doesn't matter to kitsch as it forms its own totemist confusions of its origins and purported values of just there-ness, doppelgangers of beauty and strength without being very strong and often of a surprisingly banal and etiolated beauty. Is something else going on here, in kitsch's duplicity, something impossible to ignore and yet difficult to see and conceptualize? Except of course as an exercise in a certain stupidity and culpability of the masses, not to even speak of its governing mood of melancholia:

For champions of modernity, fear of the occult is an essential fear. Its presence even at the heart of the scientific revolution, however, speaks insistently of a view of history harsher still than the evolutionary myth: we have escaped nothing in our history, and what we presume to have escaped still dwells within us.

Magical Thinking: History possibility and the Idea of the Occult, Stuart McWilliams

kitsch

I started thinking, albeit somewhat unconsciously, about kitsch upon the closing of our gallery in The Town. We had plans for the gallery to be an outpost of new works which were historically aware of the changing circumstances of world culture, globalism, tech, and all the rest, and how small towns and villages were impacted. As it turned out, those sorts of artistic interrogations were completely off the mark. As was feared, the idea of kitsch overflowed the banks. The choice was to go with the flow, and become a devotee of kitsch (if that is even possible once one becomes aware of kitsch), or flee. Which we did. (I believe however that it is possible for kitsch to be redistributed under the rubric of art but that is a precarious reprocessing job and often misunderstood outside the urban precincts of 'Art'; it can sometimes be accomplished as folk art. And there is also the idea that for a great many folks kitsch itself is art. period. Hence all the jokes about 'avant-guard modern art'.)

Clement Greenburg opined that kitsch and modern avant-guard arrived around the same time, out of the destructive social forces of industrial modernism that were changing the nature of experience, that old cultures were being destroyed but the masses still needed some kind of easily digestible diversions so kitsch was born:

The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.

So kitsch would be formed from the detritus of a mechanical culture. Kitsch became a placeholder for the rubes and their approach to art:

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money-not even their time. The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

So art as a research program and operating on it's own grounds as its own pincers of a world wide (in actuality, as the West) dialectic, hence unfurling its own data projects as art works, installations, mixed media, destructuring projects in general (cubism, expressionism, conceptual art and so forth) as worthy of the highest accolades of Western modernist accreditation while kitsch is simply the leftovers, the miserable tailings falling off the great milling projects of modernism: the knick knack, bric a brac, tchotkes endemic to any great cultural process.

The problem is that kitsch slowly forms its own world system, parasitically feeding off its host modernity, giving an illusion of, impossibly, time regained, forming vertiginous encrustations of affect and nostalgia. In watching the animated film Guardians of the Galaxy #2 one is confronted by the talking tree trunk Groot who loves to listen and dance to old pop songs while an Eternalist de/restructuring of the universe takes place all around him

Green Lion Won't Come

Robert Cheatham  Almost every definition of alchemy will read it as an unscientific precursor to chemistry. Its main efforts were to turn base metals into gold, to find a formula for eternal life, and of course the search for the Philosopher’s Stone as a sort of universal elixir/morphing agent of everything, from its most generalized dissolved state (prima materia) into its most perfectible and pure state. The exoteric mechanism was through the mixing of materials and moving though a series of transformations; the accompanying and necessary esoteric part involved mysterious internal transformations of its sorceric participants. Unlike old-style nineteenth century positivist scientific enquiry, the mind, its subtending regions and powers, was thought to be a necessary part of the process of transformation. Until recently the inclusion of what is now called “The Observer Effect” (from quantum theory) was heresy to the standard model of scientific investigation. After Kant, the subject and the object were thought to make a clean break and conditions of contamination of subject/ivity with the object of enquiry were to be avoided at all cost. Much contemporary thinking now questions the possibility of the purity of such states: the object and its range are now thought to be more mysterious (perhaps verging on ‘mindful’) than a positivist scientific account would contend; the subject could also have a more objective aspect (under the duress of AI studies and the other neurosciences). It might not be too awkward to say that future sciences will have a touch of ‘magic’ about them (since magic has always been about– whether in folklore, hoaxes, or ‘reality’– those fluid boundary regions where the external and the internal, the single and the multiple, the finite and the infinite meet and transmute each into the other.) And of course alchemical processes are accompanied by cryptic symbols and visuals thought to facilitate the efficacy of those transforming processes . (In that respect alchemy shares a certain relation to the image world as do other occultist studies such as Voudon with its cryptic veves which are thought to designate and facilitate the inward rush of spirit entities; also the ufological concept of ‘alien image/text/self-activating software wherein ‘supernatural-like’ alien machinery reads and manifests itself).
Karen Pinkus contends that to start a discourse on the theory or practice of alchemy “is already to be caught up in a form of ideology that structures both alchemy and writing. Alchemy cannot be said to exist as a method or practice standing outside of or beyond writing. Like writing, or inasmuch as alchemy is writing, it is an admixture of opposites, dominated by the couple inside and outside, ‘the matrix of all possible opposition.’ The question of what is ‘outside’ of alchemy is fundamental.” [1]
The ambivalence of the question of inside or outside is to be caught in a position of oscillation which can lead away from the alchemical master narrative in which matter and human (and animality [2] ) are finally redeemed and stabilized and/or in which the unfortunate opposite can happen: degeneration, unbinding, collapse – in other words, reverse transmutation. Only an employment of rhetorical or logical strategies can deny or disavow such a fall. Pinker quotes Derrida on the figure of the pharmakon, a substance simultaneously poison and remedy:
This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be—alternately or simultaneously— beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance—with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy—if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as anti-substance itself: that which resists any philosopheme.
The most audacious of this pharmakonological haunting and conjuring by images is photography, the technically facilitated image and its accelerated cognates: the moving image, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence, all of which confuse reference and source, or, also embracing the generic, if you believe some theorists, do away with reference all together. Roland Barthes proposes in Camera Lucida “a theory of photographic becoming in which the photograph is a force of transformation: in which models become images, images become subjects, and subjects become photographs. And these images move and have their existence inside us” [3] so that, as Bill Viola writes: “…images live within us. At this moment we each have an extensive visual world inside of us…We are living databases of images – collections of images – and these images do not stop transforming and growing once they get inside of us.” Or, as W.J.T. Mitchell [icon theorist] phrases it, “What do pictures want?” Alchemy is about nothing if not putting into agency the symbolic and the pictorial, activating the porous solidus between the lingual and the visual. (That sutured slant is also called, appropriately enough, a gold coin, the very metal that the alchemists most adored … and which is still the case as the alchemical aspect has entered into the occult world of financial wizardry [4] and banksters, as well as the world wide simultaneous image culture.)
[To continue this line of thought using this piece from Cadava and Cortes-Rocca]:
Within this logic of transformation and metamorphosis, it is impossible to sustain the abstraction we call ‘reference.’ The relation between the reference and image, does not presuppose an object whose being and existence precede, or remain outside, the process through which it becomes an image. On the contrary, Barthes suggests that photographic representation stages—makes absolutely ‘literal’—what is at the heart of modern representation and this is precisely the putting into crisis of a temporal order in which first there is an object and then later its representation…. [5]
So, moving quickly now, what if alchemy weren’t a contorted version of some sorcerer’s wet dream, and what if it didn’t just disappear due to its ‘wrongness,’ and in fact didn’t disappear at all? What if it has worked only too well in its emphasis on (cryptic and dark) transmutation (a motif which one can only observe to be as old as humanity itself or even, though the evolutionary imperative, the same as humanity’s ascent), alchemy always being the dark mechanical side of transmutation, even reflected in the constitution of its name: the al prefix from Arabic the root perhaps coming from Greek Khem or Khamé, meaning dark or black and then linking up with the foundation of the dark arts in Egypt, finally making its way into the European traditions through its importation from Arabic. Pinkus makes the point that “chemistry itself is a purely Arabic word, from chama or hama (meaning ‘he hid or covered up’) stressing the fact that the knowledge of chemistry/transformative processes is passed down in secret; or from kimya or kimyao (burning, furnace) to which was added the prefix al ).” She goes on to say that Paracelsus, the great Renaissance alchemist-doctor, claims to have been taught the art by a “Muslim in Turkey who also gave him the universal dissolvent or azoth – death, or that which purifies; or the alkahest, the spirit, or sophic fire, which is key to ‘al-chemistry,’ a science named from the Arabic chom, and Hebrew cham, meaning heat. Perhaps the word derives from the proper name Cham or Ham, son of Noah.”
Enough of the dark etymology. The point is that the cryptic side of the phenomena known as alchemy is by its nature and nomenclature a dark pursuit. What if an alchemical imperative has escaped (or always has been) a worldwide culture—and has gone wrong?
This is somewhat the thesis of Scott de Hart and Joseph P. Farrell in Transhumanism: a Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas. In the introduction they state:
[….]superintending all the alchemical images and their implied agendas that we survey here, there is one standing out above them all, that both compels the agendas, and simultaneously reveals some of them as forms of false alchemy; the image is that of primordial simplicity, androgeny, or ‘Nothingness,’ or physical medium, or aether, or ‘ocean of quantum flux,’ or Grand Architect of the Universe. The image goes by many names, depending on the fashion of the age, and the particular agenda emphasized, but it is, nevertheless, the same image.
This means that modern man is in a predicament, for he is about to be sacrificed either upon an apocalyptic altar of alchemical science, or, if one is to believe the ‘Three Great Yahwehisms; – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – slaughtered by a righteous God come back to restore justice to the world by an unparalleled bloodletting, prior to mankind’s final transformation – if one is to believe a certain strand of Christian fundamentalist eschatology – into the very same sorts of alchemical creations as the transhumanist science they excoriate. Either way, the transhumanist gospels of Science or the revelations, prophets, and ministers of Yahwism are saying the same thing: the New Age is here; prepare to die as part of your process of alchemical transformation.
To read the world now is to convert it into world – actually universe spanning images – images which have an intimate and secret life, relations which glide into affinities and analogies, creating chimeras along the way. The World Wide Net is an alembic which seems to possess processes which appear distinctly alchemical (when not sublimed into a different reference structure). Individual desiring-engines collect, foreign bodies roam the web finding, ghost-like, native bodies (and we are all simultaneously, ‘natives’, and nomads, from that view point—which is everywhere and nowhere, the heimlich (homed) and unheimlich (uncanny, unhomed). We no longer can tell, foresee, or predict even what sedimentation will form. Fiction and its other forms, mashups creating shadow events which often supercede the true event, i.e., the new saying “False information can create true events”: information, or rather the information which survives the cauldron of theatricality/performativity, becomes a form of fictive presence brought into manifestation and presence. We thought that modernism was all about evaporation/dissolution, disappearance, transparency, absence, abandonment, forgetting of presence. But as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht says, these aspects of modernity may wane since “some of the ‘special effects’ produced today by the advanced communication technologies may turn out to be instrumental in awakening a desire for presence.” Indeed. A second world is being manifested in front of our eyes. The world is coming alive again, re-enchanted through the aegis of an alchemical instrumentality, not through a cabal of wizened sorcerers, but though our instrumentation itself, digitalization working toward even greater triumphs of manifestation and transmutation, “both a spiritualization of matter and a materialization of light” (Giorgio Agamben).
However, one doesn’t need to postulate secret cabals of aliens, or pointy hat alchemists/sorcerers since our world wide technology is beginning to activate itself in some fashion, perhaps even the return of the bicameral reality that never really went away but updates through the aegis of the new hypertechnical/military/entertainment complex to facilitate new emergences, new forms, hybrid plasticity, flesh with apparition. As Colin Bennett so aptly puts it:
The prototypal form is a unique combination of glamour, entertainment, and technology combined with all the mock-cerebral elements of science, and engineering.
If information is a new form of intelligent life, the prototype as a meme of information has, over the past 30 years, developed branches of new life for itself. We have seen its ability to mount implicit eroticism and glamour constructs, but over the past thirty years, it has developed two new areas of mass-suggestion both in terms of popular belief and national military industrial involvements.
In yet another attempt to change its image, the information complex that is the prototypal form has vanished its image altogether. This “new invisibility” contrasts with the glaring visibility of Nazis and aliens in myth and folklore, films and SF novels. I refer to the vanishing of the prototype, or rather its journey into technological legend, a journey very different to the clatter-and-bang of its Nazi manifestations. This disappearance is a process that has steadily developed over the past forty years.
By way of contrast, there was a time when the prototypal aerial form was a vital part of a nation’s ego, technological muscle, its hopes and dreams. It was anything but invisible.
As always the fantasists are the key to opening our own life-saving sense of wonder. They create the outlines of fantastic new options which we absorb despite ourselves. We may despise and ridicule them, we secretly admire their courage and their nerve, which never fails them. Like the anomalies, the adventurers we are about to meet are always on the night- side of town, where the real action is. Their mad devices are an essential part of our secret lives, seeding ourselves into the future quite beyond our three score years and ten.[6]
Perhaps it is the case that “alchemical” processes begun millennia ago, at the very start of hominid speciation, are just now beginning to reach their fruition or at least visibility (or failure). If so, X marks the spot of the chiasmatic crossing between the human and its hybrid chimeric others, plastic DNA unfolding, molded at ever greater rates and combined with the machine.
Notes
[1] Karen Pinkus, Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence.
[2] One is inevitably reminded of Giorgio Agamben’s opening to The Open: Man and Animal and the entire theriomorphic eschatological explorations of animal headed gods. The whole book is germane as a propadeutic to the question of open horizons and a closed horizon of any purported anthroposcene :
It is not impossible, therefore, that in attributing an animal head to the remnant of Israel, the artist of the manuscript in the Ambrosian Library intended to suggest that on the last day, the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature.
It might indeed be the case that monstrosity will be the order of the (end of) days, in the sense of a final blow to a purely human-centered universe. All of the alchemical transformations will act to usher the human off the stage, as Foucault imagines on the last page of The Order of Things.:
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
[3] Bill Viola from his exhibition catalog, quoted by Agamben in Nymphs
[4] See e-flux online journal #62 article by Philip Grant which looks at the mysteries of hyperfinance, gold, and the alchemical/occult: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-real-an-unreality-financial-markets-as-occult/
[5] from Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca, “Notes on Love and Photogaphy,” in Photography Degree Zero, Ed. Geoffrey Batchen
[6] Colin Bennett, The Dream Life of Prototypes. (Taken from his now-defunct website, Combat Diaries, closed after his recent death.)

Coda to MCW : Purple Haze/are you experienced?

"... To live an event as an image is not to see an

image of this event, nor is it to attribute to the

event the gratuitous character of the imaginary.

The event really takes place – and yet does it

‘really’ take place? The occurrence commands us,

as we would command the image. That is, it

releases us, from it and from ourselves.”

Maurice Blanchot

"It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies--not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls."  
F. Kafka, a Zurau aphorism

"Not only has the border been punctured porous by the global market and international corporations, together with desperate emigration from the south, but the border as cultural artifact has been diffused to cosmic proportions. It's phantasmatic reality looms daily larger than ever.
Michael Tausig 

"What if the voice of the friend which comes from beyond  me and is the voice of the law which comes within me as Heidegger says, cannot be heard without a certain noise? What if a law that would be without noise[....] would no longer be a law?"
Rudi Visler 

"[....] a determination to maintain the possibilities of a private realm of a world not always already owned and controlled by the demands of the public sphere or capitalist politics."
thomas Docherty 

"The theorem of image: all reality gives rise to its own limitlessness in the attempt to exclude its opposite--it is the refusal of fantasies that makes them a reality." 
[....]
"If place is cognate with a destiny then landscape draws one into an estranging experience of a place without DESTINY."
Laurent de Sutter 

----
To all those who enter Maurice Clifford World, the question of the experience of experience (the estrangement of the 'real world' , the uncanny landscape which de Sutter and Jean-luc Nancy depict) creates immediate problems of belief, whether and to what end now-ing and knowing can be determinative in constituting a stable, yet irascible, modernist (that is, based--all too solid  word here since nothing is 'base line'-- on simultaneity and nihilism) reality? Like Ray Miland in the fifties movie, The Man with X-Ray Vision, the extreme transparency that develops out of addiction to transparency gives rise to a mystic and apocalyptic vision in which even the demiurge of Law cannot stand before those forces. In fact all the now-discredited versions of reality which have been met with and battle done, said gigantic, monstrous forces being chthonic, or deep landscape, in nature, spring forth again from being tossed to the ground. Law itself becomes labile and hybrid, noisy and unstable. Experience, now 'experience', becomes impoverished and comes under corporate ownership, mediated though a wire. Modernism's 'nothing is here' flips over into 'Something Is Coming'. Every resistance folds back on itself, all becomes portal, gateway, threshold.

MCW in his lived thought patterns, dives headfirst into the most esoteric and counter-intuitive regimes, following the flow of an experimental optic--which amounts in practice and off the canvas: 'experience' which we are reminded is no longer acceptable in any sort of scientific framework (other than perhaps some versions of Newtonianism in his last papers dealing with biblical and kabbalistic concerns and no doubt toward messianic concerns which Newton's 'scientific work was to support).

But, he thinks, as so many have thought both the ignorant and the genius, if you cannot trust what you can see, feel, have sensate impressions of (none of which is germane to the modern scientific enterprise).  The answer is that in fact you can trust nothing. He can only have, but barely, trust that he can bring paint to surface, object nailed to assemblage, video turned on; but outside that, through the opening of whatever 'art' may be, is the wild frontier, it's all he can do to paint the scrims onto which this 'dark matter' (so out of sync with the reality engine which science proper affixes to everything) is in contact, a darkness which is boils up in a boulabaise of liquid mind, solid energy, and diaphanous matter. Who is the Authority here? What god or gods--lately dead--can sign the guarantee which would refute, confute the resulting uncanny mixture, the stuff oozing out of all the cracks and gadget miscegenation, hybrid mixtures of life and death, the coming machine?  From the MCW point of view there is none, nothing but Foucaltian power generators of the episteme which, once put into micro-places, i.e. the subjectivity nearest  you, that is, starting from yourself, then  once one sees past the initial guard posts, everything gets melted away and like Wiley Coyote, one realizes that he has overshot the abyss but is still running above it and come the awareness comes the fall. (There may be something to be said for the sheer 'coming' whether in the messianic sense or in the sense of pleasurable jouissance, or both simultaneously--although the personal sense of pleasure, lends itself to a subjective 'melting into' there is also a cultural, religious, even epistemological sense of the group pleasure at the thought of the scuttling of  'officialdom' and all the sure and overweaning knowledge that they bring forward, the feeling that everything must 'come to a head' -- if not to the other end.) And after all: what is it to 'have' (as opposed to be 'had by') an experience...and for that matter, what is it to have, or be had by, a self? Like belief, perhaps which comes down to what one is willing be believe in strongly enough (or that one can BE believed in) in order to reach a certain--or uncertain--state of grace, floating through the debris. And perhaps here is where proof and belief part ways while being held together by shear nothingness:

"The space between worlds, variables, and constants, the gap upon which all truth depends, is like a fulcrum which allows two opposing weights and forces to cooperate, with the aid of nothing more than the touch of a finger, in overcoming gravity. The truths of correspondence are a little like this: ponderous weights (Energy, Mass; I think, I am) are lifted and lowered only because they find their center in absence. As Lao Tzu reminds us, the cartwright's art is most focused not on the rim, the spokes, the hub, or the axle, but on the space he must leave between the hub, or the axle: it is there that the wheel turns and the cart moves.

What this means is that the essential, the irreducible, or the fundamental point in the world, in discourse, and in machines is very like something which is not there: an opening, a space, a gap which joins. If the wheel and axle were to fall into the background, one could see this space where the movement is a ring of light."
The Persistence of Memory, Philip  Kuberski

MauriceCliffordWorld

Maurice Clifford World: Force of Entanglement,

a phenomenological fragment

I am under the spell of an image. It is the vision that demands

that I say everything the vision gives to me.

    Pierre Klossowski

breathe

MauriceCliffordWorld: primal prometheus attempting to spring out of and simultaneously burrow into the flatness of everyday life, trying to be free of the weak messianic (technical) force of everyday life -- and its ill-prepared drum and bugle corp/se --both internal life and external life, attempting to wrench free into some sort of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge where everything falls away in the obsessive search for IT, down the tubular and out and then flooding back into the tulpa, er, I mean the Tube, a conspiracy, THE Conspiracy, all connected with everything, maximum leveraged payout, a pagan world of multiplicities, back doors, only to break out upon the labyrinthine, obsidian black mirror, granitic emergence of the monumentality of the Law (what is THAT?! It must be conspired continuously to us apes, we who are always determined to spread feces on the granite corridors) the constant breathing together of the Law, yet constantly shifting, undermining hyper-monadologies, connecting all the way up and all the way down, escape proof, seamless, forming its own bedrock reality, gods flaming on dead, the secret life of rust revealed over and over, the corruption of every sort of body yet forms continue to bleed through the massiveness of the Law, fabulous, phantasmal and continual sproutings, incredible verdancy escapes through the mysterious cracks of the laws of form, a ginned up profusion, haunted by the artistic and mystic: mystical because speechless, breathless, vertiginous assaults, artistic because freedom and the soul of the uncanny nest in each other, Russian Dolls at the still center of Maurice Clifford World (MCW), debris launching upon and breaking against that MCW Center (always shuttling back and forth, periphery  to center, forces hopelessly entangled, cum smeared dialectic breeding breaking the spiraling force sliding back and forth breathing time and space folding numerous rotten supports blasted apart and jammed back together, the Black Mirror grabbing bits of rot with a tip of the brush, trying to pierce with dead inky paint matter and skin of dinosaur poems, porosity being the secret lie of the canted solidus holding apart the apocalyptic and the prophetic, the one always carrying the other it its temporal wake, through porosity even, meanwhile waiting for the breakout, the final entanglement of all loose Ends, MCW entertains eldritch unthinkables, where SOMEbody must know SOMEthing, concerning the Last Days of the empire of rust, even mounded up into a fake, fairy Institution of Rust death dirt debris, conspiring beyond the Edge, beyond the Pale, signal propagating through the soil of WHERE WE ARE NOW!! Even you! no matter where who when living dead, Spukhafte Fernwirkungen spooky signal entanglement  no matter you are in the continuum of to come, has been, still here: yes, we are all becoming MCW now, the breach of the old sublime by the uncanny, arriving from underneath, sub-Euclidean chthonic forcefield beneath of irreducible haecceity, the unique ‘thisness’ on the verge of being subsumed by the neuter of generic rust of death, the explosion of the flat frame: how to capture on flaming canvas the exploding pustules and yet...there is always some other, subaltern, some other position--let’s call it Egyptian--that hides in full sight from MCW, a conspiracy that is always, fruitlessly, to suture the prophetic and the apocalyptic, energy centers that never fully reveal themselves but must be launched against endlessly, on voyages of dark matter and dark energy, sorceric incantations wrenched to frame, both for and against the fog of rust and particulate matter urging production of delirium, ecstatic masses leaping dangerously from rift to rift, from death to death, attempting to stave off any universal disaster:  “The end of the world haunting this ‘prophet’ of the absence of the other, the catastrophe of the Last Judgement in whose abyss he disappears, comes to a halt before ‘the name of that which has no ‘name’ [....] no nothing, no thinking about nothing, concerning nothingness can be allowed to punch a hole in the corpus of his identity. He is at the last frontier--the putrescent--before total decomposition, and he can allow himself no rest and no absence, for there is nothing other than this proliferation.”  Michel Certeau, on The Institution of Rot

Breathe

MCW, painter of uncanny proliferation, blood sacrifices (all breathing together now, all guilty) energy torrents released whether Mayan pyramids or hyper capital collapse of 9/11 or ‘only’ the ongoing collapse of the modern sublime empty, emitting or receiving furls and coils of energy blackening the canvas surface with fugitive figures mired in chthonic misery and mystery, instead of pyramids now mystery cosmic linkage of appliances and being (“Built of rust and dinosaurs’ oil, the appliance has a ‘state of emergency built into it, its failure mode [default position, redundancy] necessary for its operation. Every manu/fractured object is an explosive device that has already been exploded--and is now, as modernity--shrapnel in mid-slo-mo flight. The hand always a trigger, the target nowhere in sight.” small appliances, Fehta Murghana)

MCW realizes and seeks to make manifest this powerful techno-mantic, even messianic, phrase: ‘Collective Synchronization can act like a phase transition’ wherein, behold! ‘Something New Emerges (is that ever the case now? Wouldn’t all breathing stop, final fulfillment?) In MCW the new always arrives besotted, clogged in clouds of debris, lust, rust, dust, particulate matter of ever increasing density, blotting out light, even as the canvas cuts away to reveal galactic planes of compaction and fragmentation of brush’s whisk, dip and twirl, inhuman force tangled with all-too-human.

breathe