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

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.