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.

***

-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.

***

-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.

---

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.

12-19o

12-19n

12-19m

12-19l

12-19k

What is Absurdity ?

    It is worthwhile to ask this question again, since Forgetting is an insatiable beast:

    What is Absurdity?

     It is easy to oppose it to Law and think that, like following the Law, nothing is easier to do. Yet, to be absurd is both the hardest and the easiest to do. Hardest because we always see our actions as following some universal principle, and easiest because Absurdity, like the Law we feel we do without effort, is also what we cannot but do with the smallest effort. The difference is tiny, and it lies in our belief in whether what we do or not do is founded on our ability to know the nature and meaning of the action that we choose to do.

     Hence, if we say to ourselves, ''I'm going to commit an absurd act'' and think it is equal to saying ''I'm going to do a lawful act,'' or an act that we assume, under the banner of the rational, follows a rule like grammar or an ethic or a positive system: then that intention cannot be absurd. In short, you don't wake up one day and say I will be absurd. It's not something you intend, the same way that you cannot say, ''Today I will make time flow.'' But equally you can't say I will follow this or that Law, not because you can't follow a rule or law, but because, like time, law is what the universe follows whether we like it or not.

     That's why absurdity is hard: we follow a rule inevitably, whether we are aware or not, whether we intend it or not. To be absurd is hard because you need to be outside the universe to do it intentionally, and yet at the same time the easiest exactly when you want to do it intentionally. Everything we do, therefore, is the instantiation of Law. And this is the very basis of Absurdity, not its opposite, that law is inescapable, so that to try to enact it is what absurdity really is. It is not the opposite of Law or Meaning. What is absurd is to affirm that this act or that sentence follows this law or has this meaning. It is not the affirmation of the Meaningless, but the assertion that the act we do or words we say follow a rule or meaning we say they do. In short, absurdity is actually affirming this or that rule or meaning, because we never know which rule or meaning we act out, and eventually we act out one or the other, without the need to follow, like the lack of need to follow Time.

     This affirmation is what is absurd because there is no need to say or think it, and yet, we inevitably say or think it. What is absurd is that exactly and to say ''that exactly.'' And this is the reason that, like in Beckett or Ionesco, reason is itself what is absurd. The very fact of the inevitability of thinking this or that, sensing this or that, the very fact that I can't avoid a meaning or a rule in thought and action, makes my presence in the universe redundant because my thought or meaning is a superfluity, especially when I think that what I think is a mirror of the universe or reality. Why does the universe or reality need a mirror? And yet we are bound to make or be one, simply by being here and having thoughts or using language.

    This superfluity, this excess, this unavoidable doubling, and the awareness of it, is the beginning of the notion of the Absurd. Or you may also equally say: the beginning of Thought. Thus, if we get into the habit of thinking, and feel that this mirroring is smooth and without paradoxical status, is to avoid or evade vainly what must be, and absurdly be, a problematic ethic of our attempt at rationality, especially when that rationality does not see its limits or limitation, an absolute reason that we feel or we presume we exercise every day with every word or action, as a matter of course. To be absurd, then, is not to be irrational, but to be aware both of the superfluity and of the inevitability of rationality.     

(January 2018)        

12-19i, 12-19j

12-19h, 1-7