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.

Annihilation: SF, universalist discourses, and the posthuman era

Annihilation: SF,  universalist discourses, and the posthuman era

Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth. 
 –Lena, in Annihilation

     There is a debate about when Science Fiction (Sci-fi, or SF as a more or less definable genre) began. Some would say in the work of Lucian, A True Story, written in the 2nd century AD, or from Somnium, a novel written in 1608 in Latin by Johannes Kepler. Adam Roberts (2018) argues that the systematic sensibility of SF as a genre should be seen to have emerged during the rise of the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century during which time the critique of religious authority has relaxed censorship against progressive scientific thinking. The gap of over a millennium between the Greek prototype and the Reformation re-emergence of SF is the function of scientific inquiry shifting to protestant countries where “the sort of speculation that could be perceived as contrary to biblical revelation could be undertaken with more (although not total) freedom.”  

     The replacement of magical or supernatural by technological tropes is a core feature of SF, even if, as Roberts observes, “some Catholic strand in science fiction... is present in the vast majority of good SF, whether written by Catholic authors or not.” Indeed, as a universalist discourse, Christianism, with its coterie of angels and demons recodifiable into other tropes of extraterrestrial or extra-human otherness, can even be said to provide an Ur-form not just for SF but for many narrative genres like the Gothic or Horror as well. As Darko Suvin (1979), a major historian and theoretician of the genre, expresses it:

Basically, SF is a developed oxymoron, a realistic irreality, with humanized nonhumans, this-worldly Other Worlds, and so forth. Which means that it is—potentially—the space of a potent estrangement, validated by the pathos and prestige of the basic cognitive norms of our times.

Within the ambit of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the first novel of his Southern Reach Trilogy (Authority and Acceptance being the second and third) published in 2014 and adapted for film in 2018 with Natalie Portman in the lead role, it can be argued that several modes of universalisms intersect to push a supposedly not-really so Pop Culture hybrid subgenre of SF called the “New Weird” into the New York Times Bestseller list and place it on the stage of globally recognized novels.

     Before the success of his trilogy, VanderMeer said in an interview that he had “worked as an agent, as a publicist. I worked in a bookstore. I'd seen the book culture from all the different points of view you can.” The difficulty in breaking through the Young Adult SF and Fantasy fiction market defined by major successes like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Hunger Games or Twilight with a tale without the usual triumphant ending or redemption at the end was immense. His practical experience in and knowledge of the “communications circuit” in Book history (Robert Darnton 1982) allowed him to navigate the legal and commercial intricacies of the network of the American publishing industry. Darton writes: 

     To see the subject as a whole, it might be useful to propose a general model for analyzing the way books come into being and spread through society. To be sure, conditions have varied so much from place to place and from time to time since the invention of movable type, that it would be vain to expect the biography of every book to conform to the same pattern. But printed books generally pass through roughly the same life cycle. It could be described as a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader. The reader completes the circuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act of composition.

     Although the historical development of SF as a genre traces itself back to Europe (if we disregard the SF “ancient aliens” reading of Indian or other ancient epics), the literary conditions there defined by the polarization between high and Mass Culture in the early 20^th century have disfavoured SF’s rise as a major novelistic hybrid genre with serious literary import. This is something that even Goethe had realized. In The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, Theo D’Haen narrates: In an 1829 essay on a German translation of Thomas Carlyle's Life of Schiller, and after having mentioned the inevitability of the coming of world literature, Goethe writes that "what suits the masses will spread and will, as we can already see now, give pleasure far and wide ... but what is really worth-while will not be so popular."

     As Adam Roberts has remarked, SF in a European country like France could be seen to have reached its heydays with Jules Verne. In general, however, despite the new glamour of SF plots which the Hollywood film industry cross-pollination has conferred on them, SF novels have kept their quasi Mass Culture status and appeal. This is a fact that could be seen to have worked strongly in its favor in terms of dissemination or readership potential, especially in the United States where SF has supposedly seen its Golden Age in the 30s to the 50s with the emergence of canonical greats such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, or Philip K. Dick, an age spurred on by the network of a penny-friendly pulp fiction industry and SF popular review magazines. The establishment of the Hugo Awards in 1953 and the Nebula in 1966 and many others after is major step in the growth of the prestige of the SF genre.

     Although the communications circuit is not a universalist discourse or trope in itself, it does provide the material conditions for the universalization of a genre, subgenre, or hybrid genre. This universalization can be seen as the collective effect of the market forces of commercialization, the formation of readership demographic, and the normalization of printed forms that such a relationship must require as a horizon of exchange and expectation. It would be interesting to see how the very notion of genre is the product of such a circuit, producing a “cognitive norm” which can then be transgressed, not without any commercial risk for both writer and publisher, as in the case of VanderMeer’s Annihilation where clear-cut triumphant ends have no typographical place. However, the role of the circuit cannot be over-emphasized as was shown by Mariano Siskind (2012) in the historic development of Magic Realism (both as an aesthetic idiom and as a subgenre of the Novel) and the global success in the publication of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

     If the communications circuit is the network in which authorial, lectorial, commercial, legal, spatial, literary, and formal identities are forged and reinforced, it is thus so only because the circuit is the channel upon which the negotiation of cultural values and ideologies—in which society sees itself reflected—is conducted. Hence, it is hardly surprising that the first major specimens of World Literature are of mythic and religious nature, written either in verse or prose: from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Quran, to the Bible, for example. The birth of the notion of a Weltliteratur in Weimar is perhaps a direct effect of a networked geography, something that was emerging in a quicker pace in 19^th century Europe than elsewhere, undergoing the massive phases of the Industrial Revolution and enjoying the high point of European Imperial and Colonial history through which Europe became the metropolitan global center of the flow of goods, bodies, culture, and wealth. 

     The universalizing discourse of religion is undoubtedly a major component of the globalization of literature. Theo D’Haen (2012) cites Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett for whom World Literature is necessarily informed by such religious universalism:

   World-literature to Posnett is literature produced in cultures held together by what he calls “religious” or “political” cosmopolitanism. Examples of the former are the Hebrew and Islamic cultures. Examples of the latter are the Greek, or perhaps better Hellenic, and Roman, or perhaps better Latin, cultures. “Between the world-religions of Israel and Islam and the world-cultures of Alexandria and Rome there are, no doubt, very wide differences,” he admits, “yet, though the former reach universality through social bonds of creed and the latter reach universality through the unsocial idea of personal culture, the outcome of both is to rise above old restrictions of place and time, and to render possible a literature which, whether based on Moses or Homer, may best be termed a 'world-literature'.” For Posnett, then, the determining characteristic of such a world-literature is its “severance of literature from defined social groups” or “the universalising of literature.”

     The capacity of religious metanarratives to provide the framework for works of World Literature has made them logically indispensable in the constitution of collective historical sense and memory, something which Frank Kermode has underlined in his work on the poetics of fiction, The Sense of an Ending (1967). The notion that the scientific progress of Modernity since the Enlightenment has rendered religious metanarratives marginalized components of the literary imagination in the 20^th and 21^st century is arguably not quite accurate. The arrival of Science as a universalist discourse of Modernity may be the second major component driving the destiny of a novel or any literary work toward global status, but only because the gaps in the positive knowledge of Science are complemented by the revisions of various mythic idioms made available by a global print culture. God may no longer be there before the Big Bang, or before the first single-celled organisms until the emergence of Homo Sapiens, but Chance alone is not a satisfactory explanation in a formally teleological Narrative that demands a structural grammar of agents, actions, and recipients. The need for an Alpha and an Omega contributes to the unsettling atmosphere of a tale whenever such arch-structures are kept at bay or merely implied by the use of a hanging or unsolved mystery. 

     Thus, despite being at odds with one another, religious and scientific motifs can combine directly or indirectly to produce interesting tales such as Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, or The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke. The supernatural may no longer be around, or replaced by other beings, or simply left hanging as a question, but the Absurd and the Enigma can only be perceived as the counterpoint of a Universe imagined with meaning and purpose, even if they remain unverifiable components for Science in general. However, the discourse of Science does provide explanatory universalist logics of its own which tease out the unknowns of a Universe full of mysteries, logics which provide other metanarratives that ground the imaginaries of SF worlds.

     Such a combination of universalist discourses may not be so obvious at first in VanderMeer’s Annihilation, riding as it does on the theory of panspermia wherein life on Earth was seeded by microscopic life forms from meteorites, an idea made more explicit in the 2018 film adaptation. Although it was kept a mystery in the Trilogy, it could be inferred as an unformulated question concerning the source of the incredible and complex biodiversity on the planet. In the place of a mythic narrative of creation, Annihilation deploys the tropes of evolutionary biology and accelerated genetic mutation happening in the cordoned off region called Area X, an unexplained and growing ecosystem on the Florida coast. Area X seems to be developing into a “pristine wilderness” composed of yet unseen species resulting from a radical horizontal gene transfer between and across all plant and animal species, and not just among closely related kingdoms like bacterial organisms. There is also a hint that inorganic or inanimate elements such as the walls of the “tower” may also be endowed with some sort of living attributes. 

     To Lena, the biologist of the 12^th expedition of four women, Area X is an expanding transitional ecosystem which is transforming life’s organizational chart beyond recognition. Faced with the “tower,” which was actually a circular mound on the ground with a small opening that tunnelled underground (reminding us of Odysseus’s Hades and Dante’s Inferno, a metaphor of the Earth as Womb, or the Unconscious), the anthropologist remarked that it was made of “ambiguous” materials. For the biologist who became immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions after inhaling fungal spores, the walls were somehow alive. (Lena: “The tower was a living creature of some sort. We were descending into an organism.”) They were covered with colored fungi spreading out and forming written words: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that...” The religious tone is unmistakable.

     Lena’s own transformation began right after her spore contamination. She described it as a kind of glow inside her growing and spreading slowly. It was as if it marked the moment of her organic assimilation by Area X, echoing the fungal writing on the tower or tunnel walls which she copied on her notebook: “There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.” With it, she was gaining extra-human abilities: “I had brought a flashlight but found I could see well enough by the green glow that emanated from my own body.” “The bioluminescence of the words on the wall had intensified, and the glow from my exposed skin seemed to respond in kind, lighting my way.” Her transitional state allowed her to survive her encounter with the ubiquitous moaning creature of Area X, described with almost human-like qualities: “A suggestion of the side of a tortured, pale visage and a great, ponderous bulk behind it.” It had “an almost plaintive keening, calling out to her, “pleading with [her] to return, to see it entire, to acknowledge its existence.”

     Going back to the base camp, her new abilities allowed her to survive a gunfight with the military-trained surveyor:

      “You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should kill yourself so I don’t have to.” I didn’t like her casual tone.

      “I’m as human as you,” I replied. “This is a natural thing,” and realized she wouldn’t understand that I was referring to the brightness. I wanted to say that I was a natural thing, too, but I didn’t know the truth of that—and none of this was helping plead my case anyway.

      “Tell me your name!” she screamed. “Tell me your name! Tell me your goddamn fucking name!”

      “That won’t make any difference,” I shouted back. “How would that make any difference? I don’t understand why that makes a difference.”

      Silence was my answer. She would speak no more. I was a demon, a devil, something she couldn’t understand or had chosen not to. I could feel her coming ever closer, crouching for cover.

     But no one really dies in Area X. It seems that the alien ecosystem absorbs everything, recycles everything, and even human consciousness itself seems to get “redistributed” into other forms or bodies, as if it were a field of metamorphoses worthy of Ovid, a new mode of Eternal Life. The fungal writing on the wall apparently confirms this: “That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing...” Area X is capable of re-transcribing genetic material in endless ways, as if it were preparing for its final project: cloning human beings, but in a redesigned structure carrying all the signatures of the ecosystem of Area X. Later expeditions indeed had members returning back home with half of their memories gone, mere doppelgangers of their former selves. All of them, however, die of cancer and organ failure later on, failed prototypes of the genetic lab which was Area X.

     In the 2018 film adaptation, this transition is made explicit, beginning with the sudden return of Lena’s husband, who was a part of the 11^th expedition to Area X. At the end of the film, the couple met again in the secured facility where they were held by a secret government agency of the Southern Reach. Their eyes glowed with the “shimmer” of Area X, getting re-acquainted as if for the first time, searching for the fragmented memories of their former selves. The Edenic motif is difficult to ignore, as we realize a new Adam and Eve had been reborn on Earth. This meeting marks the beginnings of Homo sapiens 2.0.

     Within the fictional universe of Area X’s mutagenic ecosystem, Michel Foucault’s intimation of the limits of the age of “Man” had become a reality:

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end…..If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

Even if in the Trilogy there was no surviving replica of Lena’s husband, the concept is clear: Area X is building a new species after Homo sapiens. Its previous prototypes didn’t survive, but later on, many will, including Lena’s “Ghost Bird” (appearing in Acceptance). The dissolution of Homo sapiens 1.0 is dramatized as a lost of self-identity by Lena’s husband, whose journal she reads:

I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time...

     In the Trilogy, the universalist discourses of religion and biological science are tied up with the universalizing notion of Humanity as a species, whether under God or under Darwin, or whether under the liberalist or secular form it took after the Renaissance. In Area X, there are no more individual identities as there are no more humanity as we know it today, a humanity steady in its anthropocentric view of the world and history. In a strange revision of the Edenic myth, it is a newly minted humanity or a “Posthumanity” which no longer had dominion over everything, a Posthumanity closer to non-Western ideas of animism.

     Despite its darker themes of human dissolution before an unknown force of Nature, VanderMeer’s Trilogy reaffirms the import of these universalizing discourses in the production of literary works which address the global thematic scale of a World Literature grounded on the intersection of concerns beyond race, creed, or nationality. If today such a work of fiction, SF or not, also integrates the current Ecological Emergency as another universalist discourse to bolster its status as a global literary consciousness, it does so in a critical manner such that it redefines the universal itself as that which exceeds Humanity in all its discursive forms. The next evolutionary stage of World Literature will appear only to abdicate its anthropocentric moorings to reaffirm the “World” in it as the only legitimate binding universal located at the end of an all-too-human identity or at the cusp of the radically Other.

Works Cited:

D’Haen, Theo. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London & NY: Routledge, 2012.

Darnton, Robert. “What is the history of books?” in Daedalus 111(3): 65-83, 1982. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024803. Accessed May 12, 2018.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London & NY: Routledge, 1989.

Mariano Siskind. “The Genres of World Literature: The Case of Magic Realism.” In D’Haen Theo, David Damrosch, & Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World Literature. London & NY: Routledge, 2012.

Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction, 2nd edition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a LiteraryGenre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

VanderMeer, Jeff. Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy). NY: Farrar, Straus and  Giroux, 2014.

Writhing

Writhing, “to make continual twisting, squirming movements or contortions of the body.”  But also “thing,” a squirming twisting thing. The materiality of the conceptual, the conceptuality of the material. Materially symbolic, symbolically material.

What if what we consider to be semic 1) requires the included exclusion of the asemic and 2) would need a remediation to show that things are reversible, that the semic is also asemic and vice versa? Hence, the asemic is really just an in-version of the semic, and vice versa? The Sign is a Perspective. It’s how a perspective organizes its environment to facilitate self-navigation. It creates the GPS coordinates to sense its movement, but from another perspective, this movement may be sense-less, but not meaningless in an absolute way. It’s just the sense of the other movement must be framed so that it is co-ordinated, and attains a sense, but from another perspective. Thus, what has no sense gets a sense. But this new sense itself is another movement, which has no sense by itself unless framed by another perspective, and so on.

Perhaps, the asemic and the semic are DESIGN functions. For example, an asemic piece is framed by the Page, or by the Screen, the Frame, etc. You have words, paratexts, titles, headings, comments, etc that frame it. It doesn’t mean one or the other doesn’t exist, or one eliminates the other. Each is simply the in-version of the other, since both are limit concepts, ideal notions that keep meaning going by an on/off oscillation. There, possibly, oscillation. And oscillation is movement, twisting, squirming, writhing. Leftwich’s “pansemic” is close, since it seems to lead to Noise or Complexity as the Cosmic Soup. I would use a neologism: Aseemic, to include a phenomenological dimension that oscillates sense and nonsense, seeming and being. A, SEE, SEEM, IC. It’s the adjective becoming a noun and vice versa. Writhing. Non-resolving dialectics of Nature-Culture?

Related ideas. Nature as Book. Matter/Energy as information in physics, whose language we are translating. Translation is the condition of knowledge and being, “a formal translation of objects” or “an emergent relationship between objects instead of a relationship between idea and object” (Noah Roderick, The Being of Analogy, 2016). Translation as a movement of analogy? Writhing as translation of objects. Like Ovid’s bodies and forms? Noah Roderick:   

The experience of superficial similarity (i.e. analogy) is neither an indicator of some deeper commonality nor a mere illusion; it is the effect of objects translating or conforming to the forms of other objects. And wherever there is translation or conformation, there are new objects entirely. There is emergence. In the case of analogy, these objects happen to be ideas of categories. It is in an analogy, no matter how humble or how grand, that we may suspend the distinction between knowing and being.