The subject-supposed-to-know, perception, and salience

-The privileged subject-supposed-to-know: a certain clean access to a knowledge, an idea, an experience: as if only a privileged discourse or subject awareness has some unlimited or special access to them, and that others must be initiated into this sensus communis.

This utopia of intersubjectivity leads to a utopia of community, identity, history, and nationality. You have, then, the production of “group” consciousness, the fabrication of the common experience, the geometric point of intersection among different velocities.

-We are some kind of floating boats of consciousness whose sole ground is movement itself, so that a genre of the quest for referentiality or a center is what mainly characterises our existential condition. The telos of our condition is therefore the search for a telos for our condition.

There is, in this search, a “fishing” motion, a line thrown into the void, and the perpetual return of a fantasy, or the fantasy of a return. This return, then, becomes the referential ground, which is none other than the after-image of the fantasy running after its own mirror image into the void.

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-On abstraction: everything is actually abstract. But the informalist art we identify as abstract would remind us of the macro- and micro-scale: nebulae and quantum chemical reactions. The mesoscopic where we have forms that we identify as the most figurative are no less abstract, and perhaps are the true abstract figures, being mere discrete forms of familiar objects, distinct from the great and small informalist scales of galaxies and quanta.

The realism granted to naked eye objects or fields would like to cover up the abstract nature of the mesoscale. But reducing them to pure shapes or outlines foregrounds the abstract nature of both medium and message.

To evoke some abstract but intimately mythic ideas, a compelling spectacle or vision, and it can be a lot of things. To attain it thus using the most economic presentation of form or material form. The goal is to make it so subjective that it becomes universal. No narrative in a piece, but when combined would have one. Of discovery, trial and error, of passage, of change etc.

The subjective is often opposed to the objective, but the subjective carries its own factuality, and by this very recognition, raises it to a universal. (The notion of an invalidated subjectivity (the ''wrong'' answer) as either a political aesthetic hegemony or simply a very local negotiational misunderstanding.)

Anatomy of perception, from classical age of retinal imagery without technological mediation, to one where perception is already technological, as a machinic product, as prosthetic processing. It is like photography, where every image perception is a mediatic production.

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-On aesthetic salience: the aesthetic is less about symmetry than asymmetry in the mapping for cognitive salience. Information or the sign, even as it depended on redundant mapping motions, cannot avoid the necessary presence of asymmetry, non-correspondence, and heteromorphy.

Even as it suppresses the incongruities, mapping for salience is critically dependent on the unevenness and mismatches among elements placed in congruent or cross-referential propinquity. That is, in a network of resemblance marked for informational salience.

In addition, the arrival of the aesthetic percept signals the operative presence of the logic of the double placed in W/S accentual or marked up relationship. Like the cultural logic in which the exterior other is essential in the emergence of the perception of the interior self, the aesthetic is the coupling of a pair posited to be opposites or separates, reunited after a prior disjunction, following a dialectical movement.

Hence, asymmetry is a sine qua non condition of aesthetic perception.

Language and forgetting

There are no natural speeches. As a medium, I am the site where the Other speaks, not as a singular voice traceable to some pure origin, but as a multitude. I am legion.

We take it for granted, as a matter of course, that whatever it is we do is grounded in the natural. Look at the ease by which I say what I say, or think what I think. Discourse is what others do. I, on the contrary, speak. The other's utterance is a recitation of heard and overheard language, a relay point of rumors.

My speech, meanwhile, is pure expression, the exteriorization of an originary interiority, whose rise to the surface is like the natural flow of a spring or geyser. I don't recite, I speak freely as myself. The thoughts that flow out of my speech are as natural as the air and sound which accompany or compose their expression. Truth has the same effortless facility as my breath.

When we assume tacitly that our speech is natural, we mean that it is a discourse without history, without a past, without guile. It is purely innocent, as expression of self evident, unbiased established truth. If I am reciting at all, I am merely restating the already obvious natural order of things and ideas. Stating is not a performative... It only reflects and does not recreate or reproduce lived reality.

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A culture defined essentially by its construction as memory and memorial is set, by a tautological extension, against the forces of forgetting. But forgetting, then, is a real element without which the culture of memory and the memory of culture lose their reason for being in various forms of ritual, art, education, recitations, songs, representations, commentary, journaling, recording, reporting, and so on. Time and space are accompanied with aide de mémoire facilities, tools, techniques and technologies.

Forgetting is at the core of our cultural dynamic, of language and the practice of languages. It is that chasm we wage war against, a history more enduring than human time itself. Writing paradoxically unites them as the practice of both remembering and forgetting. The pain of loss is as equal, and almost indistinguishable, from the pleasure of recovery. Metaphor is the marker of both the proximity and distance of that which is most culturally and consciously significant and signifying.