Theory 4 (Email 14)

Hi Kendra

  "Fetish" is a good anchor for gathering the CATTt.  It is useful even at the basic level of heuretics proper, reminding us to pay attention to terminology.  Psychoanalysis, like any inventive methodology, dealt with the challenge of naming its new areas of inquiry by appropriating some existing vocabulary.  This vocabulary  is catachrestic, meaning that it is a figure for something that does not have a literal sense.  If we keep  in mind the original source of "fetish" we recognize that the term is eloquent, even if Freud used it pejoratively to some extent.  I discuss this in Internet Invention (Marx and Freud both using fetish negatively to name features of the industrial city, versus artists who somewhat later used it positively).  It concerns promoting some ordinary item of everyday life to a position of symbolic power. 

"Castration" is similarly evocative:  a source of much misunderstanding of course, but also eloquent in naming a condition of limit, disempowerment, control, threat--and reminds us of stakes in desidero.  The most relevant thing for us in the discussion is the description of operations and logics associated with fetish and castration.  You picked up on the practical value of Metz's conversation.  He is drawing upon Lacan of course, applying Lacan and psychoanalysis  in general to cinema.  He is using the theory to articulate the match between theory and practice that concerns us also:  that there are features of the camera and photography that correlate with the theoretical account of human primary process (the Unconscious). 

We need cameras to write with or through the Unconscious so to speak.  For  example, the logic of fetishism in the psychoanalytic context is that of denial, disavowal (defense)--the child's denial of sexual difference.  This scene must be generalized to the logic, which persists in adult experience, allowing a person to maintain two conflicting positions simultaneously:  "I know, but all the same" (or, the translation I prefer, "I know, but still...").  I know (= science); but still (= belief).  These two version of reality are on different planes.  We have to assume in the context of grammatology that there is a use value for this operation of primary process.  The "still" has choral functionality (it is conductive). 

Aesthetic Attitude

Moment Against Now

 Konsult includes aesthetic attitude in the public sphere, to exercise and enhance capacity to be affected.  The attitude is modeled in several areas of common experience:  tourism, movies, the arts.  Konsult applies the vanguard project of merging art with everyday life, not to make art, but to put the stamp of being on becoming.  Moment against dromosphere in any case attempts praxis as poiesis.  Orhan Pamuck, in his novel Snow, tells the story of Ka, an exiled poet who return to Turkey to report on a wave of suicides, and also on the possibility of reconnecting with a woman he had known in his youth.  He has not written any poetry in a number of years.  But during the events of his visit, the old creative capacity returns, at least briefly, and he is able to write a poem.  The example is relevant to us not for the poem, but for how the feelings of significance arise in the midst of ongoing events, pursuing both professional and personal projects, while reflecting on the meaning and purpose of his life.  The immediate lessons may be derived from the gradual dawning of inspiration as the circumstances of recent incidents begin to form into a system of correspondences producing epiphany, Einstellung (Wenders).  The citation is selective, just to note the flavor of the account.

He made his way along the train track, past the snow-covered silo that loomed overhead like a great white cloud, and was soon back inside the station. As he passed through the empty, dirty building, he saw a dog approaching, wagging its curly tail in a friendly way.  It was a black dog with a round white patch on its forehaed.  As he looked across the filthy waiting hall, Ka saw three teenage boys, who were beckoning the dog with sesame rolls.

There was a long silence.  A feeling of peace rose up inside Ka.  They were so far from the center of the world, one couldn't even imagine going there, and as he fell under the spell of the snowflakes that seemed to hang in the sky outside, he began to wonder if he had entered a world without gravity.  When everyone had ceased to pay any attention to him, another poem came to Ka.  The poem was made up of many of the thoughts that had come to him all at once a short while earlier: the falling snow, cemeteries, the black dog running happily around the station building, an assortment of childhood memories, and the image that had lured him back to the hotel: Ipek. How happy it made him just to imagine her face--and also how terrified! He called the poem "Snow."

Much later when he thought about how he'd written this poem, he had a vision of a snowflake; this snowflake, he decided, was his life writ small; the poem that had unlocked the meaning of his life, he now saw sitting at its center.  But--just as the poem itself defies easy explanation--it is difficult to say how much he decided at that moment and how much of his life was determiend by the hidden symmetries this book is seeking to unveil.  Before finishing the poem, Ka went silently to the window and watched the scene outside: the large snowflakes floating so elegantly through the air.  He had the feeling that simply by watching the snow fall he would be able to bring the poem to its predetermined end.

Ka's Snowflake Diagram

EPS (Existential Positioning System)

Africa, 1805

 Konsult is a practice to correlate existential experience with everyday life materiality.  For an environment to be intelligent, the apparatus needs to manage not only physical location (GPS), but EPS, which requires tracking not only presence but absence (differance).  If conventional wayfinding gives coordinates that say "You Are Here," Existential coordinates engage a more complex orientation:  You are where you are not, and are not where you are.  A Visit is an event of encounter between egents and places, both of which involve dimensions that are not phenomenal, not present, without presence and not presentable.  Thoreau's Walden concludes with a figure that provides an emblem for EPS:  What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.  Choragraphy as ontological mapping takes up this question of coordinating material and spiritual wayfinding, exploring the shifting borders and thresholds between inner and outer identity formations.  

Thoreau's passage is emblematic because it uses global exploration and mapping as a metaphor for self-knowledge (the kind of knowledge and the mode of expression within the cognitive jurisdiction of Arts & Letters disciplines informing EmerAgency consulting on Well-Being).  The challenge of EPS choragraphy is that the spacetime for which it is responsible is a second-order construction, figurative rather than literal, emerging through aesthetic formal manipuation of media.  But the promise of ubimage is to create an interface convergence of literal and figurative dimensions of human experience.  Clive James's explanation gives an idea of the nature of figuration that renders intelligible the nonphenomenal dimension absent from all maps.

Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention.  To take the most startling possible example, think of "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Everyone knows the first line because everyone know the poem.  "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring" is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way. Only two lines further on, however, we get "Thrush's eggs look little low heavens" and we are electrified. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash  of illumination. But we wouldn't even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands.  A poem ... is dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself.  (Clive James, "Little Low Heavens," Poetry, Sept. 2008).

Two aspects of James's description are worth noting in our context:  the figure of electrification and the lightning strike of an image, resonant with electracy and flash reason; that the version of reality made receivable through aesthetic indirection is -- like Plato's chora -- beyond both thought and perception.  This point must be kept in mind, in  the context of ubimage, given the (legitimate) resurgence of interest in phenomenology by commentators on pervasive computing, who (rashly) ignore the critique of phenomenology motivating most of French poststructuralist philosophy, not to mention deconstruction.

                                                             

Seduced's Epiphany

Jeanne Duval

Our game is not "Prisoner's Dilemma," but "Seduced's Epiphany." To receive the accident we occupy the position of object, within the field of event.  The relay comes from Modernism in general, Baudelaire in particular, and his strategy of becoming commodity (see Walter Benjamin's reading).  As alternative to the calculation of Game Theory, with its grid of all rational options, fatal strategy "feels lucky" in recognizing that what seduces is the fetish (the object cause of desire).  In place of expanding into a narrative scenario, the consultation locates the sender of event.

No longer to explain things and to set their value in objective criteria and in an unbounded system of references, but, on the contrary, to implicate the whole world in a single one of its details, an entire event in a single one of its features, all the energy of nature in a single one of its objects, dead or alive--to find the esoteric ellipsis, the perfect shortcut toward the pure object, the one which is not involved in the division of meaning, and which shares its secret and power with no other (FS, 146).

Strategy learned from the poets in Paris, adapting to the shocks of industrial cities.  The trauma of alienation, of objectification, separates from the experience of agency.  Agency in any case moves elsewhere, outside, neither spirit nor self, but into the collective order, as operant subject.  It returns (the uncanny) in the form of event, accident, and this effect is what fascinates, since the accident is us (Problems B Us, slogan of the EmerAgency).  The extimacy of communication requires poetic method:  Baudelaire's correspondences first of all, followed by all the variations (Eliot's objective correlative, Rilke's Weltinnenraum, Joyce's epiphany, Benjamin's dialectical image, Freud's Unheimlich).  The allegory has become immanent, the commodity is anagogical.  The lyrical image registers the shock in the microcosm of the disaster in the macrocosm.  Baudrillard learns from Baudelaire how to receive the intimations of the real, by treating phenomena of public policy as miniaturizations (mise-en-abyme).  Our pain poses the question of Befindlichkeit (Heidegger, how do things stand, for me, for my situation in the world?).  The disaster answers:  obesity, cancer, terror.  These are the mirrors that fascinate.

The Accident Replies

Gift Economy

Target instruction is to receive the Accident as a sign.  Theory now refines this instruction.  These specs begin with one of the primary moments of Theory's response to Target's call:

This liquidation of metaphor, this precipitation of the sign into brute, senseless matter, is a thing of murderous efficacy.  It is of the same order as the meaningless event, the catastrophe, which is also a blind reply, without metaphor, of the world as object to man as subject.  It's always like this that destiny becomes specific:  at a given moment, at a given point, signs become objects, impossible to turn into metaphors, cruel, without appeal.They cut short any decipherment, become confused with things (which is why fate is a dreamer, with the unintelligible instantaneity signs and words have in dreams).  The strategy of the object, like that of the woman in the story [she sent her suitor one of the eyeballs he claimed to admire], is to be confused with the thing desired (FS, 153).

Some terminology is clarified in this statement.  "Fatal" as adjective in French means "predestined" before it means "lethal." A "fatal strategy" is one that maps this default trajectory, this entropy, this passage of the world.  Hypertely is our version of "entelechy".  The other point is to note the challenge posed to electracy by the dromosphere or dimension collapse.  The reason why "scene" disappears is because media (information) and event have merged:  information and world coincide.  What the Greek language singing Homeric epics was to literacy, the ubiquitous broadcasting of pop entertainment (including all journalism, databases and the like) is to electracy.  Philosophy (literate metaphysics) was created out of written Greek culture (mythos into logos).  Electrate metaphysics must be created out of the signifying materials of pop information.

Baudrillard's qualification of the catastrophe as "pure" (p. 36) alludes to his instruction for us, to be found in his discussion of Baudelaire and the inception of "pure art" in Bohemian Paris (about which more later).  Meanwhile, the blind reply in the Real is the end of literate metaphysics (the excrescence overrunning all literate categories), not the end of signification.  It is the point of transfer into electracy (in progress).  We need to apprehend the attributes of the accident-sign, in order to outline the language which emerges with it as a whole, even if existing in our moment only synchronically, with its diachrony coming from the future.

If the waves of meaning, if the waves of memory and historical time are receding, if the waves of causality around the effect are fading (and the event today comes at us like a wave; it doesn't travel only "over the waves" -- it is a wave indecipherable in terms of language and meaning, decipherable only and instantly in terms of color, tactility, ambiance, in terms of sensory effects), it is because light is slowing down, because somewhere a gravitational effect is forcing the light from the event, the light which carries the event's meaning beyond itself bearing messages, to slow to a standstill, and the same is true of political and historical light, which we no longer perceive but feebly, and for the light from bodies of which we receive only faint simulacra (FS, 36-7).

Part of the implication concerns the apparatus:  that cinematography (the optical unconscious) is required to make these effects of the dromosphere (so far in excess of human faculties) legible.  The Museum of the Accident as tale requested an exhibitable event, and we agreed that the graphics of abstract art afforded appropriate means to register the forces manifested in the material break-up.  The instruction is: learn to read and write "accident."