Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0605080129330.6950@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: 5
Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 01:29:44 -0400 (EDT)
5 As in digital manipulation of layers, the world is flattening by the subject; is always flattening; there is no depth; depth is an illusion; multiple viewpoints; apparent histories; apparent identities. The flattening of the world: the stitching of ontologies, suturing epistemologies. Thus the thetic, continuously working as the gesture works. The gesture is working language; language gestures, gesticulates. Language is always at a loss; hence the fury of language, presence of obscenities or thickening, escape routes, of interjections, phonemically other. Representation is the same; the same of the other; chiasmus: other of the same. It is a disturbance of flattening which is flattening. Disturbance is the apparency of discontinuity, anomaly; flattening is substantive; substance. To disturb - to nudge - is to initiate bifurcation, response. The limits of discontinuity are catatonias; analogic inerts; substance is limitless. Consider an epigenetic landscape: the flattening of the real. Consider elementary catastrophes and their extending sheets: disturbance. 6 In my work several decades ago (I mention this only in relation to Badiou), I wrote and write of farming-out; the perception of temporality, of progress, resulting in the collocation of disciplines, subjects, within which specialists take care of advance, increased knowledge, goods. Temporality tends towards complexity; cellular automata can grow in-conceivably chaotic within a few generations. The regular or reiterated which is death (certainly without recursion which leads to quantitative jumps) is unimaginable; it is the circumlocution, centrifugal forcing, of the world. The apparency of disturbance tends towards centering. "Now I must proceed without time."; with the perception of time; of what is known now, what is processed now, as opposed to; what was processed; what was processed then. What was conceived then; what I conceive now what was conceived then. This is a conceiving; a state of conceiving; the bundle of conceivings constitutes the world which appears undergoing transformation; always irreversible. But not irreversible in fact: from presencing, from presence there is nothing to return to; the state is unpresent, non-present; one says "the state has vanished" or "we've moved on." 7 "I conceive of the world as such-and-such." "What is it that is being conceived? What is conceiving?" 8 There is no Now; there is no philosophy of the Now. The present presence is smeared, fuzzy; it is degenerate; it was never generate. Philosophy is from present presencing, from this smearing; it is irrevocable; it cannot be constituted otherwise. The Absolute is embedded in time; there is no Absolute to return to; the embedding is within the present. The text is always its memory; the text - any text - is always memory. I speak and write concretely: this is such-and-such a writing which is only inscription, artifact; the artifact is present, before you; the artifact is presenting by virtue of your procurement. Everything, the world, artifact, product-production, appears as, exists within, reconstitution; the subject (who is always already embedded) recuperates, which is the definition of the subject; objects do not. To recuperate is to draw boundaries, definitions, negations: X = this; not-X = that. Not-X is always problematic; it's "that" may be fuzzy, complementary; chained; non-existent; indecipherable; generative or degenerate, degenerative. This is the difficulty of the monopole in ordinary language within an ordinary world; that is, what is termed the "lifeworld," or world of daily life. The lifeworld is presencing, as if a gift or given; there is no negative or negation; negation is a drawing. What occurs, occurs, is, is. Flattening is necessary construct; thus disturbance within flattening portends negation which is channeled within flattening. This is the sphere of daily life which appears extended. 9 Fiske: The "discovery of the law of gravitation, as well as the invention of such a superstition as the Hand of Glory, is at bottom but a case of association of ideas." I cannot comprehend Being; Being does not exist in my comprehension, nor in my understanding, nor in association, nor in empathy. Of beings, I understand association. Being is a taste, a connoisseurship of the world or collector of the world, tending towards the final object. If Being is not absolute, what is? It is as if what is given "is given"; it is not; the thetic tends towards the thetic; circumlocution occurs within the same flattening as the world at large; writing is such a tendency. The philosophy of sex, of sexuality, of love, of war, hate; the philosophy of culture; of media theory: all are farmed-out; all are within the provenance of disciplines, speciality. Art is the drawing of negation; art is a disturbance of association; art reveals the flattening and non-Being of the world; even within its presentiment of Being, non-Being. Art is corruption; preservation holds its own in the skein of decay. To create is to bifurcate; creation is discrete, the rasa no exception. The commonality of art is gesticulation; the commonality of art and language is gesture. As for sexuality: "Language is always at a loss; hence the fury of language, presence of obscenities or thickening" [5] - rupture is production; sexuality infects the social; the infection is the social. Jouissance and preservation: farmed-out to psychology; psychoanalytics; biogenetics; anthropology: this central drive whose centrifugal emotion colors everything; presents or re-presents the philosophical as determinative property, boundary, territory and its circumambulation. Sexuality has no belonging; philosophy is a speaking or carrying-out a longing for belonging, lengthening of situation, just as death dissolves belonging which rites recreate for the survivors. Obscenity is obscenity in its absence, its impossibility, of circumlocution, a symbolic axis of interiority. Obscenity is that which is spoken because it cannot be spoken; philosophy is an obscenity; a pornography; its speaking is a flattening; a circumdiction of disturbance; what is called a therapeutic or meditation; a dreamwork or working- through; what is symbolic labor. In labor exchange value and use value are equivalent; to think otherwise is to mistake ontology for content. The value of labor lies in reification; in "fitting" (Bohm); in the production of materials; of thought; operations within or across ontologies; emotions or prime numbers; bricks or philosophy. Obscenity is valuable in its valuelessness; it works, working through nothing; it is contrary or wayward, contradiction; obscenity occurs within the Sheffer stroke dual "neither A nor B"; in its elsewhere; in its range outside the organization and data-basing of labor and its production. 10 Of the absurdity of analysis of X: X-beneath-the-sign-of-Y- analyzed or mediated by Z: Z(Y(X)) for example; forgive the errors of category. A loss: Philosophy exists qua philosophy to the extent that Y is problematic; that Z turns away; turns the other face; that the tending of X; of the world; is towards Other. What can be said dissolves in speciality; in the interconnections among specialities; in the discourses of specializations; that is, in the discourses of analysts; perhaps in analytical discourses or discourse. The value of art is in opposition to the value of labor; art is active and potential laborlessness-in-produc- tion; obscenity underlies both; underlies philosophy; violence and sexuality underlie obscenity; obscenity underlies both. 11 By default we are stewards of the earth. [11+ forthcoming]