apocatastasis

txt from installation

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

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

LAW : fort da ...yes!no?

 legislating the fort da:

The Fort! Da?

Fehta Murghana

".... Infancy names the insistence, even the exigency of the
fictive or the figural in conscious life (the exigency that gives
the insistence of the primal scene).

[....] "Infancy has an irreducibly 'fabulous' dimension."
Christopher Fynsk

"[The infant or child] enters or is entered into, the places where
speech falters and language chokes in the throat of a political
body, where the questions of fair representation is peremptorily
dismissed or simply not addressed."
Avital Ronell

In the case of the hut, the child is indeed father to the man....but what of the
mother? Whenever architects write about the hut, it always begins -- and
ends -- with the primitive, that other to the place that we are always subsided
to in western culture.

Everything is always seen to take the path from lowest to highest, a time
scheme which allows for the piling of debris behind (or in front of,
depending on whose viewpoint you take) the angel of history.
But as a child growing up in the wilds of Mississippi, there was no past, and
the future was planned within the confines of numerous 'forts', built and then
abandoned. We were like dogs, twisting in the high grass to flatten it, a
holding place, just enough space to rest and peer over the top of the grasses,
seeing but unseen. Haven't little boys (and girls? Shouldn't there be a
maternal / fort function there [da

] also?)
always built Forts? But then aren't
Fathers always just returning from the War and just so, aren't little boys
always building forts? Isn't the fairy kingdom of the ancient ones in the
hillock always over the next rise? A fortification of the Eternal against the
depredations of the present, hedge against the closing of the porthole,
childhood is itself the gradually eroding fort-against-time, sempiternal now
hollowed out, rotted from the outside in (or is it the other way round? Those
huddled in the fort of the Red Death are sempiternally the last to know).
A childhood fort is not even yet a hut, that most minimal of adult habitat, but
is vaporous, porous to time, even as it attempts to grasp it and balance
evenly between above and below. The fabulousness of the fort or the child's
dwelling is no more than a sketch, sometimes literally chalk on pavement, a
demarcation of inside and outside. Or no more than a confabulation of
cardboard and quilt. (Indeed, it is often a
point de capiton
as Jacques Lacan
had it, a quilting point, or sedimentation of meanings gathered together and
reinforced, a place for the sprouting of the fabulous and the mythic. Later, as
the fort morphs into the hut, the Freudian
fort/
da
function is perhaps more
descriptive with the dispersion of meaning that the 'da' of the other, over
there, brings into play: it is no longer a matter of circling the wagons but of
making a mark to allow entry through other thresholds, not a gathering in a
clearing but an ecstasis, sinking in, uncannily, and not out, sublimely: the
difference between the juvenile fort and the adult hut.)

The fort formed a juridical outline of space and action, perhaps the first
'legal' outline that the child can establish outside the home (no wonder it's
called a fort!), the first outside force or strength (the meaning of 'fort') that
the child can muster.

Deep in the piney woods of Mississippi I built
forts, nestled in clumps of privet hedge in an
otherwise featureless plain of perpetual twilight
pine barrens, carpeted by pine needles; or bits of
lumber nailed together almost haphazardly in low
lying limbs above blackberry bogs; or scooped out
of muscadine vine rambles; cornstalks woven
together in the middle of a dry, feverishly hot corn
field and more. Some lasted a day, some weeks or
even months, a very few perches hanging
bedraggled from tree limbs after years, still.

As Giorgio Agamben notes, play transforms structures into events. (It is left
to adults to reverse that process into memorialization.) The childhood play
of de-marking space into forts, huts, and fairy circles enters into an
acceleration of time to the point of a momentary stoppage of history ... or
rather, the formation of a palimpsest of times in the guise of spaces, with
immediate forgettings.

Curved round into the beginning, the ghostly carapace of the fort fades into
the structure of to-come, an extemporization of the boundaries and
thresholds yet to be marked.
---
(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no
more, suppose, suppose this: the child - is he seven years old, or eight
perhaps? - standing by his window, drawing the curtain and, through
the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall
of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child's way, his play space,
he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with
clouds, grey light - pallid daylight without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely
black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had
broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore
been lost therein - so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the
vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all
nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable
feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the
child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an
endless flood of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow;
attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live
henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.
Maurice Blanchot/
The
Writing of the Disaster
---
O touseled head standing on the edge of the 'hundred year ocean' eyeing vast
expanses of twilight night stretching overhead and in front, receding to
infinity, steps on royal road fading to unseen inevitable failure...but now,
NOW! Life stretches out like a train speeding to the horizon in a Kansas
wheatfield, a limitless blinding expansion except every expansion needs an
expansion gap, an exception, a marking to set off remaindered
impossibilities: fortification, to enable impossible happiness, destined to
loop around beginning to end, from fort to coffin, both containers of
im/possibilities, delayed, defrayed, forgotten, alpha and omega of
desoeuvrement, workless in any possible world.
---
Only Children can create a counting rhyme that opens up to
impossibility and only children can sign of it happily.
M. Blanchot / The Step Not Beyond
-----
Oh Fort! The first/last halo we will have, going from skin, to marking on
world-skin, to the halo of the debris of your worklessness pretending to be
useful, to coffin, to earth, world layered round with the bones of the dead,
ivoried interlock waiting for the last round, pretending to see everywhere
and always.

'Hence the 'halo' always indicated, in some way or
another, a change of the nature of time. It signified
the haloed individual person or place, participated
also in a category of 'time' which was different from
the one determining the natural life on earth as the
medieval mind understood it. The halo, it is true, did
not remove its bearer into the aeternitus Dei which is
without continuity because in all times, past and
future, are present. Yet the halo removed its bearer
too: removed him, scholastically speaking, from
Tempus to aevum, from Time to semipiternity"
Kantorowitz, The King's Two Bodies

Oh! Halo of material circling, circling, circling, endless immemorial summer
of childhood, thin hub of light layered over the frozen waste world of
childhood's end in Spielberg's AI (all you crankheads out there moaning
about the epistemological errancy of this vision of total intelligence: go tell
your mama!) the child plays on, even as thought slows to a stop, protracted
in time's abysmal fairy fort/da:

'Aion is a child
at play, playing draughts'
(Heraclitus’ fragment B 52

: “The age (eternity / aion) is
the kingship of a child, playing dice (knucklebones, draughts)”

LAW n+daemon

O crippled, crook'd humanity! the straight path is neither ahead, above or under, only K's door, always closing, the LAW is always waiting like a shoe horn next to the always too tight shoe, instead of a way out, the way in. Law thy name is daemon:

He believed that he perceived something in nature (whether living or lifeless, animate or inanimate) that manifested itself only in contradictions and therefore could not be expressed in any concept, much less in any word. It was not divine, for it seemed irrational;  not human, for it had no intelligence; not diabolical, for it was beneficent; and not angelic, for it often betrayed malice. It was like chance, for it lacked continuity, and like Providence, for it suggested context. Everything that limits us seemed penetrable by it, and it appeared to do as it pleased with the
elements necessary to our existence, to contract time and expand space. It seemed only to accept the impossible and scornfully to reject the possible. This essence, which appeared to infiltrate all the others, separating and combining them, I called “daemonic,” after the example of the ancients and others who had perceived something similar. I tried to save myself from this fearful thing.

                           Goethe quoted in Agamben, the Adventure

LAW n+mystic and it's non-other

" The conflicts of mystically oriented individuals cannot
be resolved juridically and they do not find in law a place where
they can debate their differences or find an agreement. Instead
Cacciari turns to Simone Weil’s attack on theology’s dependence
upon Roman law and to Benjamin’s notion of the messianic in
order to align mysticism with a non- juridical view of justice.
The mystical view of justice as an uncontainable break with the
course of the world is irreconcilably opposed to any political
theological attempt juridically to compose the differences
between the transcendent and the mundane, with Cacciari
insisting upon the ‘antidialectical nature of mysticism’ and its
affinity to ‘everything that exceeds the norm, the linearizing violence of the law’ (Cacciari 2009"

from howard cagill's introduction to m. caccari, The Withholding Powler, on political theology and specifically on the concept of the katechon.

also this, glossing  previous article by cacciari:
'On the Theological and Mystical Dimensions of the Modern Political’

"Cacciari’s essay seemed to arrive at a revolutionary gnosticism whose paradoxes
resembled those already diagnosed by Jacob Taubes, while
remaining aware that this made its own oppositions very
vulnerable to dialectical capture. After a further decade of work,
Cacciari’s Dell’Inizio emerged as the extended effort to lessen if
not avoid entirely the risk of dialectical capture facing the
opposition of political theology and mystical, gnostic revolution
embodied in the oppositions of ‘Law and Justice’. This entailed a break with the progressive philosophy of the ages of the Father, Son and spirit originating in the philosophy of history of the
Calabrian Abbot and mystic Joachin di Fiore that would prove
a powerful current in the radical philosophy of the twentieth
century."

LAW n+state of exception

" Agamben calls the originary relation of exception ban [bando]: he who has been banned is not simply outside the law, but is rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed to the threshold of indifference in which exterior and interior, life and law become indistinguishable, and this is law’s originary relation to life.

In The Time that Remains (2000), Agamben recaps the argument in 3 points:

1) The relation of exception presents an absolute indeterminacy of inside and outside. In the state of exception, the law is in force in the form of its suspension, it applies in withdrawing itself, and thus includes what it rejects; this means that there is  no outside of the law, that the law, by including its outside in the form of exception, coincides with reality itself.

2) This means that in the state of exception it is impossible to distinguish between compliance and transgression. In this sense, the law, since it coincides purely and simply with reality, is absolutely unenforceable: unenforceability is thus the originary figure of the norm.

3) Therefore, in the state of exception, the law is absolutely nonformulable, it no longer – or not yet – presents the form of a prescription or a prohibition. In the state of exception the law acts uniquely through its non-formulability.

Schmitt’s account of the exception, by isolating the decisionistic and thus anomic core of all juridical and political systems, tells the truth about the political and the nature of law. We live today, even in Western so-called democracies, in a Schmittian world."

    from  carlo Salzani, The sentence is the goal:agamben's notion of law

LAW n+sources

" the three main sources from which Agamben construes his notion of law: Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka. Whereas Schmitt unveils the true nature of the law in the exception, Benjamin shows its intimate connection to violence, and Kafka describes its emptiness and self-referentiality; from these three sources Agamben construes the picture of a law that ‘presupposes itself, retrospectively legitimating its own, non-legal, foundation and establishing a circle in which law’s authority stems from law itself’.12 This circular structure is what must be de-activated and rendered inoperative, and Benjamin and Kafka also offer a redemptive route in their profane messianism."

‘The Sentence is the Goal’: Agamben’s Notion of Law
Carlo Salzani
              

LAW n+play

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.
G. Agamben

LAW-n+existence

(We could also say: “existence is law,” but if law, in general, essentially traces a limit, the law of existence does not impose a limit on existence, it traces existence as the limit that it is and on which it resolves. Thus existence as “essence” withdraws into the law, but the law itself withdraws into the fact of existing. It is no longer a law that could be respected or transgressed: in a sense, it is impossible to transgress; in another sense, it is nothing other than the inscription of the transgressive/transcendent possibility of existence. Existence can only transgress itself.) jl nancy Experience of Freedom  30

Extreme

Extreme
1. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?
You just put yours lips together and - blow"
Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and To Have Not

Any extreme has to have the leavening agent of the in-between, that which is not extreme but holds the extreme(s) open. The lips of the extreme ARE the extremes, opening and closing around the great void that, though not present allows every bit of presence to form, spittle clustered around the lips and given form by the lips, another form of extremity which, unlike say the arms or legs, interfaces with the most abstract of the verging on the outside (always the place of the extreme): language, food, the sexual other, and the other generally. In other words, all the places to go without moving, all the invaginated uncanny extremes that mark thresholds and boundaries, all the hard things to grasp, pluck, tow, caress, stick through the lips or caress their external membranes...oh baby, that's where it starts and ends, starting THROUGH it's ends, and startling through it's ends. You want to eximprovise ()tremely, it starts at the ends of the flesh, but doesn't come back to itslef, doesn't touch itself...only in the NON-extreme form, where the lips meet, where the flesh returns to it's own, touches it's own or what looks like it's own, do you have regular improv. The other form is more or less like death, waving wanly from beyond the tips of the fingers, waving though the inferno, through the scrim of flesh: matter, noise, silence moving out, at the antipodes.

"It is the opening that incommensurabalizes - there where it spaces itself out. The mouth is at the same time place and non-place, it is the locus of a dis-location, the gaping place of the 'quasi permixtio' between soul and body, which is to say the incommensurable extension between them and common to both, since the mouth - any mouth, before any orality - opens an opening. On Touching, J. Derrida, from chapter 2: Spacings - The Incommensurable, Syncope and Words Beginning with 'ex-' p 29

'... mouthing the ring of the contracture around the noise 'I'"
J-L Nancy quoted in On Touching

2. Extremophiles
The two 'lips'' of 'im' 'provisation' form around the bolus of a habitable - loosely speaking - structure, of negating the extemes (and those membranes can be Noise and Silence, both rounding into the other as they verge into a catastrophic totality, pointing to the final two extremes of Total Order and Total Disorder: having to choose between frigid total stasis, no movement whatsoever, and the total freedom of heat death, no possibility of formation of bonds or foundations: small choice of heaven and hell) by negotiating the extreme into a navigable point of arrival, nothing having been provided before hand, the foresight of having seen beforehand and provided for not possible: the very nature of the extreme, the inability (and yet, at a certain point, necessity) for it to be contracted around the provisions, the composures left on the shore, no, im-provisation is always condemned to be left adrift between the two shore-lips of the river, forming the spittle between the lips, in advertent lubrications which nevertheless can never bond or fuse the lips of the extreme into a total contracture (forming the noisy silence into the 'I' or anything else), instead always - this is the inelegant fiction improvisation is always relegated to forming a 'jumping off' place where it will then solidify itself into something real and non-negotiable, non-perishable: the composition, the state, shit, spit: some total form of life/non-life, the moment of not-providing leading to the 'real' feast of provisions at the end of the journey, set asides, hard-tack, ticky tacky. wishy washy ...

Abandon...again

Abandon

Abandon/pull-back
Leaving ahead the pulling together, the banding together leaves us in the tzum tsum, the kabbalistic Big Pullback, leaving us enough room to get our shit together, to dance the mess around w/o Big Daddy or Big Momma jammin’ on the brakes, def. Can’t get no satisfaction under those terms, when They’re around then all you got left is to blow yourself up, dig?

"If from now on being is not, if it has begun to be only its own abandonment, it is because this speaking in multiple ways is abandoned, is in abandonment, and it is abandon (which also to say openness). It so happens that 'abandon' can evoke 'abundance'" [6]. Abandoning the body politic not only means leaving behind -- or deserting -- the military foundations of politics, but it also means a radical opening of the body politic to its own abandon. When the body politic is in abandon, it opens onto notions of the common, the open, the distributed. "What is left is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks."
Jean-Luc Nancy in Birth to Presence


5 entries found for abandon.
A'·ban'·don tr.v. a'·ban'·doned, a'·ban'·don'·ing, a'·ban'·dons

1. To withdraw one's support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: abandon a friend in trouble.
2. To give up by leaving or ceasing to operate or inhabit, especially as a result of danger or other impending threat: abandoned the ship.
3. To surrender one's claim to, right to, or interest in; give up entirely. See Synonyms at relinquish.
4. To cease trying to continue; desist from: abandoned the search for the missing hiker.
5. To yield (oneself) completely, as to emotion.

n.

1. Unbounded enthusiasm; exuberance.
2. A complete surrender of inhibitions.


Improvisation is never about the impossibility of avoiding risk but the necessity of entanglement with possible catastrophe (another name for risk), another form of abandonment, a non-meticulous pre-shadowing of possibilities (it has to be non-meticulous because otherwise we are constricted again by the 'bandon', by the need for the levers, for the banding, the binding to pre-existence needs, like the need to band a refrigerator to a hand truck to get it over the threshold; like the need for these words, these grammars, to bind us all in place, safe for release later on. Given the choice between catastrophe (the always untimely risk of failure, of waiting to be pushed over the edge, a point beyond where decisions can be made, a hazy fork in the road where the paths ahead have been blown up) and abandon, don't we almost always 'choose' catastrophe (even our language begins to abandon us here: how could one CHOOSE catastrophe) over a kind of willing abandonment to alternative trails and forms and grammars and notes and routes and silences and forests and cities? Even the word 'abandon' itself fractures into an electrified jelly of ordinances resisting abundance, giving over to a sort of emptiness, but then into an object/noun world of overwhelming, even sublime abundance, beyond the banding restraints of the military body politic (yes, the 'military' as a strata which would stretch through all bodies, binding and furrowing and herding and planning) and over into an open shedding, into the commons, the radically distributed, an "irremediable scattering"

To improvise, the only route through any radical open scattering of possibilities, thin, invisibly thin path stretching between catastrophic emptying and ecstatic pleasure beyond measure. O precious speck of open time, momentary threshold enduring beyond, before, behind all reasonable expectations! 'Get on the good foot': the only need for getting on the good foot, not because we have found ourselves catastrophically condemned to march to/on the good foot but because the good foot abandons itself to itself, changing even all bad foots into the good one(s). To improvise is abandoned to dance this mess around...

gimmick...and kitsch?!

the dualities below being part and parcel of marginal creatures every where, and para--.

from Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai ,Critical Enquirer, winter 43

"The gimmick saves us labor. The gimmick does not save labor (in fact, it inteansifies or  even eliminates it).
The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too hard. The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too little.
The gimmick is outdated, backwards. The gimmick is newfangled, futuristic.
The gimmick is a dynamic event. The gimmick is a static thing.
The gimmick is an unrepeatable “one-time invention” (Jameson’s singularity) The gimmick is a device used “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times” (Twain’s joke).
The gimmick makes something about capitalist production transparent. The gimmick makes something about capitalist production obscure"

and then this note:

" It might be tempting here to collapse the gimmick into the broader concept of kitsch to which it is undeniably related, and into which so many other equivocal aesthetic categories have been for so long subsumed. Yet to do so would be to lose sight of the gimmick’s fascinating specificity. Certainly the commodity aesthetic of kitsch is as much a product of the capitalist mode of production. Yet its concept does not encompass the connotations of labor-saving technology that the gimmick does. The paradigmatic kitsch object that is the tchotchke, bibelot, or collectible—snow globes, cookie jars, fuzzy dice—makes no promise to save anyone time or effort; in fact, often just the opposite, signifying dilatory pleasures, a utopia of luxurious purposelessness or affordable waste. Most significantly, kitsch is an aesthetic of consumerism and does not call up the image of production or draw it into reception in the direct way that the gimmick qua technique or device does." 

Dead again

Soon you'll raise your world above ours
blazing a trail from our graveyards to a satellite
this is the iron age: distilled a from a lump of coal,
Champagne bubbling for the mighty!
There are dead and and there are colonies.
There are dead and there are bulldozers.
There are dead and there are hospitals.
There are dead and there are radar screens
to observe the dead
as they die more than once in this life,
screens to observe the dead who live on after death
as well as those who die
to lift the earth above all that has died.
O white master where are you taking my people
and yours?
Mamoud Darwish, 'Speech of the Red Indian'
trans. Sargon Boulous