Kant and The Flash

This record just so: when watching a movie and there is a particular sequence, a clip that one remembers now suddenly again as having been notable before, long ago, in childhood. Perhaps this particular clip of Tim Brooke-Taylor in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is precisely so imprecisely significant as to be exemplary. Random and definitive, marked or impressed or -- memorialized? recorded? -- and forgotten. A passing moment. The motion/stasis aporia comes back at us inverted from the extended case or species of it that motion pictures present: still images present the appearance of motion, but now the clip of this recorded time plays the "same" way each time. The moving still, compared to the still image: not a moment frozen in time, but the freezing of the motion. But this uncanny of frozen or definitive motion falls again over the abyss of the doubled or split "instant" or moment, requiring that gaping of time to bridge to another moment where it must be played again in order to even repeat the lost moment, the crypt of oblivion. One uncanny for another: still life or the living dead. And then the "same" withstands those chasms to find the difference, movement of station, times, disposition, "psychology" (the complication «of» psychology, both what that brings to the rest, say physics, and what the physics brings to it): you can't look at the same river twice.

The flash, and another meaning of this: The Flash. The comic book character. The problem has always been of representation. First off -- perhaps most conspicuously? -- it's always about portraying him, our perpsective, the audience. How does he look when he runs? Streaks coming off him, a blur, all a streak, lightning. If not so much cliche or pedestrian, perhaps because that's all, to a certain extent, still rather behind the idea of someone who can "run" the speed of light. It's still a conveyance of speed within a scale of human, all too human perception. It has to be brought into our frame. Like expressing time with spatial figures. It's a representation within the scope of, well, vision, the visible as we know it. But what about his perspective? Running -- we'll get back to this -- the speed of light? What would everything look like? Would there be a looking like? And the speed of light -- how would this even be running anymore? Wouldn't it be -- light?

The Flash is really the original idea of magic. Not necessarily in the same way all the superheroes are, or are really a modern version of mythic figures and -- thus -- wish fulfillment. More particularly, one of the oldest ideas of magic -- and certainly those in medieval times, when this was a trait of witches -- was to defeat, overcome, collapse, render moot or without power: time and space -- distance! To cover distance without time! By which it's not even really so much about increased velocity as no need for velocity at all. Being here or there in an instant, as if without succession. Conquering, or moreso rendering moot, time. (The theme of Nietzsche looms, here: idealism's revenge on time.) But if The Flash simply popped from one place to another, he would be a magician, a sorcerer, like the superhero versions of those, and then not about the portrayal, the rendition, providing some expression or sensation of -- movement, speed, velocity. It turns out that light as one of the reaches of physics has this similar aporia: particle or wave, thing or relation, postive or effect, where what it is is indistinguishable from how to portray or convey it, it's representation "is" its presentation (we make the "is" self-conscious here because something's being done to that, too). What kind of "thing" is light? Or if not a thing, then what kind of thing is anything? The flicker of phenomenon. The flash.

In conclusion, that transcendental aesthetic cannot contain any more than these two elements -- space and time, is sufficiently obvious from the fact that all other conceptions appertaining to sensibility, even that of motion, which unites in itself both elements, presuppose something empirical. Motion, for example, presupposes the perception of something movable. But space considered in itself contains nothing movable, consequently motion must be something which is found in space only through experience -- in other words, an empirical datum. In like manner, transcendental aesthetic cannot number the conception of change among its data a priori; for time itself does not change, but only something which is in time. To acquire the conception of change, therefore, the perception of some existing object and of the succession of its determinations, in one word, experience, is necessary.

-- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter CPR), sec. I.8

With Kant, the problem is space and extension. This all has effect on time, the conception of it, which could be expressed analogously as time and extension, but is already the problem of space and extension. How are these not the same? How are they different? Is this a philosophical problem or a non-philosophical one? A problem within philosophy, or a problem its view is privileged to see? Is this metaphysical or material? And Locke or Kant? How do they situate this and how are they situated with this: inside or outside philosophy?

Along one line, there is the problem -- well, the matter or articulation of subject and attribute, by which extension becomes merely a quality of a thing. Along this line, the pure presence that is also substance can strangely allow the stripping away of all attributes. But as it turns out, according to Kant, in the CPR, space and time are already this too, a kind of substantial version of themselves without other things that are merely attributes: extension, change, motion.

This difference of space and extension is betrayed in comments on time, ultimately a comment on motion which betrays how this static concept of time seems based on the same concept of space. Even this space, this conception of space, this use and figure of space, is mobile, or at least variable, by it's own flickering of perspective in an aporia of the term between connotations, like the aspects or angles of a cube drawing. This would be unavoidable in any philosophy, let alone language. Kant ups the ante, even as immanent or a kind of structure of human perception.

The flickering cube -- "space," a priori, concept and intuition. And how does containment work? The containment of this containment? In one of the most famous comments from CPR: "Thoughts without content are void." Of course, but a tautology? Void? Or nul? How does thought have a "content"? What would be separable as the container, here? This perhaps gets into the whole matter of faculty v. datum. Is this already the spatialization of thought? Of the thought, or a thought? Is a figure a mere figure? Does it actually hold what it's expressing? And here it seems this does have pertinence: how is thought divided, thought, a thought. A flow, individual units. And it seems to be not merely semantic, but even what is not merely about the semantic, the hinge between the formal, or even grammatical, and the significance or meaning or "thing," the referent that is not supposed to be managed by this reference. Kant's keenness, here, was enough to rile the "rationalists" of a perhaps older order, or at least one tradition (Spinozists, Leibnizians), but it also seems Kant's discourse is driving at a different location of this essentialism. (Presence as unity, and a priori.) And this would fall back on -- figure. The "medium" but as sine que non of expression "itself." Kant's Copernican turn demonstrates this double orientation: the retort or redress of one foundation appears to make another. But it is this orientation. To say that it's the way we're conceiving things as a limit -- to leave one assertion, or axiom, but to make another by effect -- what is "in" what? Space/time "in" the mind, or vice versa? And this image, figure, flickers, ripples out, doubles.

The presupposition of what the truth should be. The unity of the pure understanding or system. Back to the container question, this flickers the sense -- half empty, half full. A limitation stated as a foundation. This approaches Goedel (also Husserl) rather directly. "Hence the sum of its cognition constitutes a system to be determined by and comprised under an idea; and the completeness and articulation of the system can at the same time serve as a test of the correctness and genuineness of all of the parts of cognition that belong to it." (This is another of the statements where Kant knows ahead of time what the truth is supposed to look like, as if, indeed, there were a container that it was expected to fill.) But we know, as much by Goedel as by "practical" or anecdotal sense, or even clinical psychology, psychopathology (this can also serve as a call of Lacan's "Kant with Sade"), that a "complete" system, an airtight system, a self-enclosed system, has nothing to guarantee that its "perfect" inner workings correspond to anything -- else, outside it. A system cannot be both complete and self-validating. This is even circularity, what these other more complicated proofs have demonstrated in other ways. By another demonstration, supplementarity via Derrida. Kant also says, "because these conceptions spring pure and unlimited out of the understanding as an absolute unity."

A comment aside, inside and outside, general and for or about this Kant: Communicable -- the slash -- contiguous. Connected by proxy. Touching, not touching. Familiar and not. Relation, distinction. Sameness and difference. What does unity consist of? How to even ask the question? How does unity consist? In what does it inhere, adhere?

CPR: Book I, Ch. I, Sec. I -- "understanding is a cognition through conceptions -- not intuitive, but discursive." (The German is also "diskursiv.") Logic as speech. Reason as argument, discourse, running about over a subject. This is rather opposite of a priori, inherent. And this may be another route to the suggestion of the "structuralist" or at least linguistic or semiotic turn to Kant, that what he's even describing is really the "faculty" or agency of language.

CPR -- the very expression "a priori" -- holds the problem of this orientation, this matter of orientation. Former, before. It is referential and has become fixed. The same problem of origin. A horizon as a limit -- the limitless limit, the imaginary line. The abstract or vague or rippling as a factum or datum.

Sec. 12, Of the Originally Synthetical Unity of Apperception. Why am I this me? Where does the me occur? (This might be the best form of this question! Scanning it as a matter of place even more dynamically, between even the internal and external, the psychological and -- geographical -- and how does location really "ground" itself otherwise -- and also the implication of temporal in the bleeding of the where and when, whence.) The necessity for Kant to state the unity of a conception as the unity of a consciousness -- is this not also the interesting, strange, stating of the matter? "The unity of this apperception I call the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori, cognition arising from it." (Here is one of those statements of the truth beforehand, but where Kant seems to admit to it, or to the more speculative quality, perhaps of all this.)

Section II Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding, of the Possibility of a Conjunction of the Manifold Representations Given by Sense § 11. "But the conjunction (conjunctio) of a manifold in intuition never can be given us by the senses; it cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the faculty of representation." What is the faculty of representation? Then, "of all mental notions, that of conjunction is the only one which cannot be given through objects, but can be originated only by the subject itself, because it is an act of its purely spontaneous activity." What is conjunction? Does it -- really -- occur? Is this not perhaps phenomenality itself?

Kant's reduction to "faculty," to that as towards his a priori, has two orientations, thrusts, or effects: (1) away from other locations of -- perhaps uncritical -- unity, objective in materialist or even prior rationalist vein; (2) another kind of reduction to a unity, at the least a kind of deferential gesture towards a condensation. This is the flicker, like representation itself. Even if the "faculty" of representation -- or conjuction, more of this onion skin layer of terms Kant uses that all seem to be difficult to separate and orient with each other, which is genus, which species, for example -- could be located "in" -- what? -- the mind, us (distinctly human, Kant specifies several times, though perhaps more by limitation than prescription), the self, in cognition positivist or idealist or rationalist, there has to be some where of correspondence, the differentiation necessary for any conjuction (as Kant points out himself, sometimes from the other way around, analysis presupposing synthesis, e.g.).

We might say -- and often do -- different "things" have to be conjoined, even in the statement, figure, or whatever theoretically underlies, is more basic or sub-standing, substantial to that: synapses, the firing of nerves, circuits, some fundamental force of data -- and this rather pushes the phenomenality of the "thing" towards that even of force, for the way representation works, a kind of non-instantaneous instant non-force that gives the force to all things, since it also grants "thing" to all things. Object, as well. Even -- but we could say also "thus" -- subject. The question of "where" this representation occurs remains impossible to locate absolutely since it is this location. Just as there is no absolute location of place, thus place, no absolute points "in" space, for one thing even empirically -- physically or materially, factually -- because all place, space, extension is in motion. There is only location -- locating, as a gerund, noun from action or process, not fixed or proper -- relative to another, extension, differentiation, difference that is also temporal. The spacing of space, what is neither physical, nor ideal, nor conceptual, but the play of these each giving the others. Kant started us in this direction, toward the problem, the complication of an objective reality distinct from this subjective part of it.

The two paragraphs beginning with "The 'I think' must accompany all my representations": The matter of unity -- the unity of the self or self-consciousness slips in because of or by way of the necessity of the unity for the -- a priori, cognition, conjunction, synthesis, intuition, thought, representation (the rotation of these in Kant is significant, not just another matter). But as with Kant's whole enterprise, he often seems as much letting in by what appears the gesture of closing the door -- expressly. "The unity of this apperception I call the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori cognition arising from it. For the manifold representations which are given in an intuition would not all of them be my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness, that is, as my representations (even although I am not conscious of them as such), they must conform to the condition under which alone they can exist together in a common self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. From this primitive conjunction follow many important results." Just as he says there can't be analysis without this synthesis presupposed. Communicable, again.

All this is "in" Kant. As in between the lines. If we even say the space between the lines, it might seem to press the figure too hard, make it clumsy, but in Kant's case that becomes an even more dynamic figure. Apart from the general signification -- where does meaning occur -- and its import for Kant's whole project of this location, there is more particularly the way Kant's text, at least CPR, functions with this flickering. It seems even more express in his case, as if the requirements of his operation, even rhetorically, even if also it seems not the overt intent, because what seems express is this, at least gesture or posture of his, to assert, to create a reductive axiom or axiomatics, of truth, even against many former attempts.

Kant's "a priori" is itself one of these flickers, a way to avoid saying "substance" in the way Locke pointed out was problematic, but at the same time effectively serving the same function as innate. The matter of something underlying or prior, material as what comes before, is the problem of the origin, which we could express as the horizon. To state something is absolutely so of itself without derivation is the same thing as to state an origin. We always have that double bind. We flicker with Kant.