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.