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⍆ In Presence, April-May 2022
⍆ An Image (for Cheeriah First. Thinking of breaking boundaries of form and exhibitional perversions), April 2022
In Presence
April-May 2022
Everything that can be said cannot always be said clearly[1], but can always be said succinctly.
Letting you in on something before I have fully understood it.
Transitioning, am I_____new, is me_____ New
is engenred, ___now genre, congratulations! New is a now product.
Crystallising as systemic and becoming rhetoric,
participating in creating discourse
≈capital≈power≈perception.
As you step out of analysis
And look at the future:
What do people want? What do people need?
People seem not to want discourse but might need discourse. Institutions and institutioning might be inevitable[2]. Meanwhile, such a major number of ‘things’ currently being the case in this world are commonly considered to be — simply — wrong, malicious, perverse, corrupted, collapsing, plain shit.
People want change and need revolt. Every human being is after revolution, at revolving, always, at all times — revolt as the condition of revolution[3] and perpetration of this movement. The equilibrium of revolt being to revolve.
Everyone is constantly thinking about change. Change is what we desire and matters most to us[4]. And if already in change and revolving, we want that movement to continue. Keep going. To let the pleasure go on,
People The individual Have revolution points.
Presence is that point. Presence is essential for revolving.
(Presence might even just be revolt.)
People wanting to learn how to and see themselves proceed beyond discourse
And not be alone,
Presence is revolution in being, being non-general and localized—Sharply Softly
localizing Collapsing the general and
at the same time annihilating of that location at each iteration.
To intervene in the monadic space of iteration, a space of potential.
To lever on the joint.
How does theory access the joint? (Theory, not analysis). The monadic space of iteration? Theory being abstraction that must not corrupt concreteness. Theory being to describe the world in a non-analytical way (meaning, without up-setting - theory shouldn’t move, shouldn’t go there) by extending our logic unbiasedly through abstraction, maintaining it without needing to become general; respecting, coexisting with specificity; embracing without (dis)solving; holding contrast.
All decisions taken in the world being concrete. All decisions taken in the world being taken by individuals within their monadic reasoning. No system being followed consistently across time. No rationality and no escape from approximated rationality. Iteration being the only discreteness of the continuous. The moment of iteration within a
continuous being moving: iteration being time and thing collapsing into a single such unit of identity, of constituency(: an image?).
Discourse remains collective and general, but the way we are isn’t — we are connected, but this connection is a space, not a string; a space of projection. We are singular and specific environments, projections inbetween, travelling across and through others. (Hold on-to the unrepresentability of such space). Any and every environment being total, in so far as it contains full reality, all interactions; at the moment of iteration, its singularity is what counts.
How do you access the joint?
Theory:
(The idea is for theory to exit a space of analysis and access presence as locus of revolt.)
(Presence is semantically intuitive: its meaning clears in its feeling.)
Abstractly/Theoretically}} What is presence?
Presence is the collapse (or the folding, yet not the fold) of iteration into a thing, of definition into an image, of individual into environment.
(Now theory being about siding presence with revolt).
Presence as much as revolt, the only thing it can be, is expansion.
Every definition — from the movement of your finger
to the dispersion of belief
through the beating of his eyelash
— can only be and is such in expanding presence[5].
Expansion, the pursuing of presence, is equal to diversification. (Otherwise, know you’re cheating). Expansion that engages Being in its layeredness necessarily brings along a
natural inclusiveness that shares nothing with static dialectical oppression and dualism, an inclusiveness presents some bizarreness, biasedness, under-the-aegisness in being
concrete (something spreads and diversifies), in being ‘personal’ and moody, singular in the way diversification is mapped out. This world is so damn specific in its everythingness!
in Presence can only be expanded. Restriction is a logical fault at this point, or a necessarily temporary step within analysis.
Within this spectrum, ethics concern systems of behaviour that are after particularity and richness, more than polarized/ing systems geared on survival schemes. Richness is the ethical goal, in being expanding presence, a space of revolt.
Thought/The world begins and ends with an icon[6]: a present image. Everything is representation, formation, for, through and beyond form.
Everything forms and is icon. Imaging and reality are versions of each other. Everything
thinks uni-directionally and expands.[7]
The world can only be discretized in the presence of an image; be formed in and out of its presence.
Presence is a name, the name of the unspoken, for what resists and cannot be reduced.
Life-language is naturally coded to leave this space under; to let it breath, undisturbed by discovery.
Get under. Keep under.
Presence is not being in the world but being the world.
(How to?
Oh Sensibility,
Similar questions yielding us back to a space of analysis. There is no process per se —the ‘process’ is the feeling of the movement, the self-evidence of the contrast itself,
the coexistence of continuum and iteration.)
If dying is in fact the only collective reality we are:
Alternative ways of thinking (meaning alternative ways of doing, constructing, mapping out, actioning, representing, materializing, realizing) that have been proposed within
analysis lack the human incentive element — the antideath, to actually be realized, to concretely, sustainibly travel inbetween, across collectiveness.
Posthumanism is cool, but where’s the dough? You cannot cue a collective shift/ transformation without an antideath and cannot hold one from happening with it.
Let us not discard this element. Let us respect and not ignore the reality of death.
A shift in focus within criticism of capitalism might let us stop attending the rites for the rites’ sake. Capitalism sucks, yes, but capital mantains potential. Alternative thinkings are powerful, yet capitalism might well maintain grasp collectively as long as it remains the Antideath, the clearly quantifiably best-performing response to human incentive: to human greed for power and possibility, for power of acquisition, for sex: in short, for anything that dis-appears (the fear of) death. (Adding the fact that any-thing in this world — even if just through the pretext of the feeling of having it — can be bought (because it can): an old problem that remains unsolved(/able?)).
Posthumamist theorists must be able to outline how we can implement new ways of thinking in producing concrete human incentive, i.e. in producing wealth, cuing a switch to a new antideath. They must address wealth production directly, engage theoretically with it at the core level of their thinking. Posthumamist theorists must also be economists. Redistribution strikes as a fiscal-political utopia[8], but new ways of thinking implemented in producing wealth might mean our set of problems could turn out to be of an altogether different kind.
(I too am just hanging my shit out to dry.)
____________
Notes:
[1] through Wittgenstein, Tractatus, prop. 4.116
[2] Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 90
[3] Kristeva, Revolt, especially pp. 85-86, 120-122
[4] And such change is usually featured/characterized as the individual’s gap-bridging action between their life and their desires.
[5] It seems nonsensical to analyse what is or isn’t expansion for a given situation. The moment one tries one steps into analysis, goes into
overdrive: one thinks they’re focusing on actual expanding, but what one is actually critting is a different, already diversified movement -
expansion is actually left before them: outside, around, under analysis.
[6] cf. Steyerl, Too Much World, the whole thing; Kohn, How Forests Think, in particular pp. 9, 30, 41, 51
[7] Ibid.
[8] against Piketty, Capital, pp. 471, 516-526
An Image (for Cheeriah First. Thinking of breaking boundaries of form and exhibitional perversions)
April 2022
The making of an image is about a) creating, b) maintaining in letting resonate, and c) degenerating, a point-to-point correspondence between unities.
Any unities : any material.
Meaning, anything identifiable and identified. Something you can stably ‘point towards’. Meaning that there is objectivity regarding what constitutes the material (that an objectivity is already given, taken on); that its features - its specificity in relation to the context of realization - are present in evidence (accompanied by emergence), enumerable, and generating, at the moment of correspondence.
Here is material openness.
How are unities made correspond? Correspondence is brought about by making unities proximous.
Once proximous, in being proximous, unities realize, together; simultaneously, spontaneously, in-acting the correspondence both temporally and spatially. The point being that material openness ensures realization.
Here is an image of the future contaminating the present. Here is something that is, in a space of undeterminacy.
This correspondence that is the image, is never strictly visual, physical, or conceptual, but spatial, meaning structural, f-actual: concerning the way the embodied sobject is realized, actualized, spatialized.
Working is about creating and maintaining the proximity that makes this possible. About letting the image resonate and become ethics. About making it de-generate as to speedily (we suckers for speed), simply realize alternative narratives.
The ‘geometral point’ from which the image can be appreciated is the instant in which its object is manifested as this framework. The object is the evidence, or clearing (lichtung), of this space. It is the light source of being ‘at work in the frame’. The evocation and clearing is the sheer presence of the image as the object (matter), and this object only is meant to populate the exhibition. Presence being something undefinable in being the flesh of definition itself.
Both filming and film are chosen as spaces for this image to live in. They are spaces of proximity; spaces of projection (planning, setting up); spaces of recording. ‘Film’ means the data and light strings and file(s) and their manipulation space merging into a single space: a -scape, a context of utter liminality, due to reversibility intrinsic to the adjacency of strings and manipulation space.
Proximity is worked for. The image is maintained. Unities are material. Ethics results. Filming and film are spaces of proximity. The exhibition is no space of proximity, but a space of potential, markedly financial.
I have just described the cornerstone of a space that is open.
This world can take on different grounds.
Its nature ground is fiction; but it can equally drive social life.
Do you want it to be driving your social life? Let it drive your social life.
In fiction, possibilities are endless. Emotional, affectional content combinations, are endless; I believe these a fertile grounds for ethics.
Now, the image has an arbitrary tendency to use this City as a -scape. I am here and I begin.
INTIMACY
INTENSITY
POTENTIAL VIRTUAL REAL
MONISTIC RELATIONAL STRUCTURE
DOXA δόξα
INFORMATION
TRANSVERSAL
ETHICAL FORMS OF BELONGING
[BASE] UNIT
REFERENCE
RADICAL IMMANENCE
CENTRALITY
IDEA/FACT OF CENTER
‘UNSENTIMENTAL’ RESPONSE
INTENSITY
____________
Notes:
Drawing on some J. Lacan, Fundamental Concepts, §7 Anamorphosis, p.83-86 in the Norton ed. 1978