Studies of unknown joyous objects

Lost trails

 

What always begins is the question of what always begins

Every meaning requires a double at its core, that which makes and unmakes it at the same time. Self-awareness is death. To be born as subjectivity is to die as self-consciousness. Blade Runner and replicants.

What always begins is the question of what always begins. This, what is at hand, cannot be excused, cannot be simply thought of as the presentation of a present, an illumination, or an explication of a ready-made substance awaiting full perception, as if it were a delivery in plain sight.

What are these signs and names but their recommencement in the inexcusable, in the question of what begins as a question, in this spiralling syntax? If before what was produced was “knowledge,” now what we are producing is a positive negative knowledge, knowing what we don’t know or cannot know what we knew and why.

The Comic is a slide between order and disorder, the transit point where thought becomes possible at the place where it also becomes impossible.

How can power have a presumed force of agency, an enforceable clasp or influence, while the subservient ones have none? Power presumes agency if it produces effects or relations of dominance. When we dissent, we consent someplace else and vice versa.

We exist between the void and plenitude. We can call it “becoming” as long as it is what is indeterminate, even when it arrives as seemingly determinate.

We speak where our “bodies” are does not mean we are at the center. We are simply limited by this embodiment. Instead of trying to speak from some discursive distance, as a voice on air straddled between piles of texts assuming speech, a recitative, not an originary act.

Identity=knowledge=being=truth=thought, + classic logic of sign and representation.

A torture and pain culture or society, a comedy of pain, discombobulated, sadomasochist society, using the enjoyment of fantasies as narrative buffer, as role-playing games.

Monumentism as the performance of the master signifier.

Desire is not within, an interior energy, but a structure in which we reside. We are inside it, instead of Desire located or contained in an interior. Capitalism as the fantastic setup of Desire, pretends to be interior responsibility as choice and agency. Your desire is an inheritance, your subjectification. Desire as exterior structure of the sign.

The present as presumed ground of speech means exactly that: deictic frame as the codified fantasy of speech. To hold as fixed a term in a present flow of speech, the constant-variable axis. The socio-discursive space carved out by this vibrational proposition. Game space and the enjoyment of simulated metaphysics of the subject, other, friend, cause, effect, origin, destiny, meaning, etc. Ritual = game space, virtual = ritual.

Irreducible antinomies are necessary for a socio-perceptive field to arrive, to keep happening. Resolution will mean the end of the world, total blackout, the full collapse of the anthropic universe unto itself. Narrativity and contradiction are one and the same energy. Freedom and unfreedom are both true. Non-aristotelian logic. There are no illusions in the world, only signs over signs that preserve the first sign as nonsign. Everything is true. Fiction and fairytale are simply coded ideological fantasies at work masking a socio-cultural logic with the offer of pleasure for enjoyment. Enjoyment, pleasure, and taste are subjectifying fantasies. Stoicism and asceticism are merely delayed forms of the same enjoyment.

We don’t really desire resolution or harmony. There is society because of antagonism, of antinomies. Society=Disharmony=Real. Imagine by Lennon affirms the fantastic nature of a utopian society. What we have is neither dystopia nor utopia, but the irresolution between the two. What is properly more dystopian is the ordinary reality of this irresolvability, of not knowing which value system has real value. The indeterminacy of Ethics itself.

The problem is not the presence or absence of choice or agency, but the question of the real value of this or that choice. Choice’s existence is not the issue but the meaning or value of any choice. Does this choice really have the value I give to it?

What if the world has already ended? This is not a future event. This idea makes history a story with an end to come. Thus, the presence of a story line means that we are in another world. Whatever the previous one was is no longer known.

What if there was really no subject? I am not saying it is a void. That says nothing, since we can’t speak of it as positive void. If we are a noise no better than any, then we are not anything transcendental, because we ask: transcendental for whom? From what point of view? We don’t mirror the world, but only make dialogues among ourselves. Dialectics wants to make our presence special, a “wound” in the universal, as negativity or negation. What was previously there to negate? Who posited, as if this was not our private, anthropic fantasy? That is, where “nature” is posited to bolster a dimension of the human. Dialectics is our drama.

Let’s say, pace Zizek, that the Symbolic is not-all, incomplete, and that some remainder excess resists symbolization. What if there’s just nature through and through, absolutely? That is, inhumanity, monstrosity, which would be the real import of the Oedipal Sphinx’s riddle? The human is a beast with no fixed identity. Nature, too, has neither. The Infinite is not the mystery, perhaps, for we are tethered to it inescapably. The mystery is the possibility of the finitude we assign, or fail to assign, to a place in the Infinite.

A concept is out of joint with itself. That is, a concept is inherently self-contradictory, or carries its other. It undoes itself at the same time it presents itself as itself. It is a self-negating presentation, or presentation as negation itself, as self-negation.

The metaphysics of presence is very far from any simplistic denial of the reality of the present as actual, lived moment. It is actually a technical philosophic argument which is perhaps better phrased as the critique of the notion of the metaphysicality of presence as self-identical presence. The “ordinary” everyday present is the actuality of what has no absolute self-identity, the arrival of what negates itself as itself, as always other. (Hence, some thing always arrives, but its “what-ness” is in dispute, always, since this disputability is its “essence.”) The technical present is a self-negating otherness, or alterity as itself arriving as an always-other.

The function of language in this negation is deployed—as trace or sign—as both exemplar and metaphor, that is, as metaphor-qua-example and vice versa, where the exemplariness of the example is an écart or a withdrawal, a self-distance. Again, language qua trace is a technicality, not to be confused with the ordinary notion of language. It is a notion, however, made complex, since as a temporal event, language acts are not simple communicative or presentational events. As such, language acts involve more than just language. They carry all the weight and energy of event, memory, time, and space. They are historic through and through, even if they have different level, modes or extent of elaboration, complexity, or technological and cultural embodiment.

We exist in different frames; we are in a multitude of mirrors, not a binary one, but a hall of mirrors like in the Funhouse. A virtual labyrinth with many points of view. This is the problem with the notion of “context.” There is not one, but many, and this plurality brings in plural definitions and dimensions. This multi-perspective is not just with the ongoing actuality, but dispersed in virtuality or memory or history. Cubism + Nude Descending on the Staircase.

The vacuity in which Thought finds itself is not a recent idea or problem. Thrown into the being of the Unknown, desire must be in a state of perpetual invention. Each performance is an inauguration, the very moment of the recreation of the utopian space where the performance itself becomes possible. Thus, the performance of being includes in itself the performance of the sphere in which performance becomes possible. Performance is the recreation of the possibility of performance: self-performativity.

                                     

The primary mode of performance is the artistic act. The artistic act is the invention of itself, its utopian space of possibility: auto-referentiality. It reproduces itself by performing its own temporality. The artistic act as performance of itself must inaugurate its own Time, its Rhythm, its Form. As the inaugural evolution of its own possibility, the artistic act is an autotelic event-form because of the pure Void in which it is thrown into being.  It is an autotelic event in a non-transcendental space. The Void in neither positive nor negative essence. It is simply the vacancy left open by the retreat of the Plenitude assumed by the logic of the Copy or Representation or Reflection. Performance does not represent. Representation is the effect of memory finding the ground of sense of the performance, then used as a transcendental alibi to stabilize via binarism the self-enclosed finality of performance.

If representation assumes a Plenitude that grounds it, performance only has the Void where an inauguration literally takes place. Since all “signs” in the Void are impossible events, performance is the gamble of the possible via its own autotelic execution. Here, self-performative reflexivity is not the mark of a triumphant entry or arrival but a foundational act in the desert of the Void.

Hyperform, not form, to accompany the concept of the hyperreal. If mise en abyme presupposes the possibility of immanent limitless expansion, hyperform can be seen as the unlimited performance of performance. Aren’t Borges’ ficciones a dramatization of the problematic of hyperforms? At the limit of the double and the labyrinth, can we see the question of the foundational act that permits the double to be sensed? Or is it Michaux who shows us the mysterious space of performance in the encounter of Being and the Unknown, where the proliferating fantastic measures the incommensurable distance between what is sensed in the mode of doublings and what is beyond this sense through the excessive and the monstrous, the absurd or the incongruous?

Hyperform is the non-representative form of the performance event. It represents nothing but itself, a self-enclosed temporality like a musical performance. No doubt, it is always surrounded by representation, by the logic of the Double. Desire and fantasy within the limits of the cultural and semiotic orthodoxy. Here, the event becomes its perception or conception, with additional grounding in a transcendental other or outside. This is the inescapable fate of performance set up surrounded by innumerable mirror chambers where reflection and refraction reduce it to a substance and a form, idealities that support the signs of sense and the sense of signs.

We are the totality of the ideas that we resonate, a sonic path in spacetime without any absolute meaning. We melt into the landscape that we form and that forms us. Subjectivity is precious because it is so rare, so fantastic, so fictive, so imaginary. What is rare is valued highly. What is abundant is forgotten.

There is a section of a city that can’t be photographed. When drawn, people draw always differently.