Language as sign function, speech function v. language function. How everything else in the subjective, neurotic (specifically obsessive?) relation can also be figured by this relation of language. Reduced to -- because by the subject it(her/his)self. The subject wants to reduce to the code before even a puerile "analysis" would. A la Lacan's remark about how the subject becomes one in language, but only by losing the self as an object, the example: giving oneself to the drift of language itself -- what is also necessary, in at least two senses, for the sake of getting the subjectivity, recognition, interaction, or simply the demand (of -- the subject, love, whatever, etc.), but also because it's strictly unavoidable regardless of that purpose -- is also the experience of the anxiety, more generally what Lacan refers to as how knowledge is paranoiac, of this drift, and thus an attempt to turn it into pure call and command, code, causality. Effect. This leads into the generalized sensation as that of computers, the manual always involved there in the automatic, and the always semblance of effect with the click. We come to be trained to the sensation that there is any effect at all, over or beyond a specific effect or object we once may have been seeking.
We just want language to command.
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Our sociability, our society, is anti-social.
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The open. The undetermined day, like the fields, around the road, everything faceless, turned away. As against the restlessness with this.
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Whole. There is a triteness to this, and it probably has been used that way, but another figure for all this about the ego, the imago, the ideal-I, is the word "whole" and that it contains "hole." "Whole" and "hole" come from different etymologies, but we still have in English this "whole." "Whole" containing "hole" nonetheless is the conundrum of the early dealings with the notion of the self, imago, object. Imagine also the paradox this way: can you build a container with no opening? Is it a container? Or a house that is a solid block with no interior? The very notion of "whole" is already dependent on this notion of container. Just like the Greek ideal of the sphere. Is the Greek sphere solid? We're right there again at the envy of the thing. And another route to Caillois's problem of the temptation of space. As soon as we get this notion of an ideal whole we want to be, it depends on the matter of being a container, and having openings. And all the fears of violating the container, the whole, the body. The invagination and incorporation of the exterior, the fact we're already a matter of bringing in the outside, connected, but thus invaded, breathing it, and even dependent on our own consumption of others.
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Faith in numbers.
Faith by numbers.
Literalism and idealism together, belief in literality, mathematics, adequatio. Pious and materialist at once.
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The double sacrifice is also something that is occurring all the time. A constant event. The imago of the other is how we are experiencing the other as image and accent and diction and stroke, and not seeing ourselves. We don't see and hear ourselves in the other as we are, as the other sees and hears us, even while this absorption in the imago is narcissistic infatuation. The person we're trying to be when we say "be yourself" is made up of these other influences of the accent and gesture and bearing of other people.
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Anthropologism. The trick for the theologians.
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I went back to San Francisco and found myself haunting my old streets, my old paths. But I didn't find me. The me of back then then remained ignorant, blissful or desolate, of this portent.
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Back to my books, my dead friends who are so much more lively.
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We have reason to believe.
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Thought, statement, phrase, verse that will express this moment as if to lift over all moments, but this too must be overtaken in the stream of moments, thought, statement, phase, verse. The height or depth that we want is also the banality, the repetition of this compulsion. How many times, how to count this across ages, across a day. How to count persistence.
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Memory, thought, moves. It runs. It's not static. What this means qua time and time as this. Important to see this as redress. It is flight, fleeing like birds on approach, like fireworks, fading as soon as the burst, afterimage. Already on the way to forgetting. Already forgetting. No less than what would otherwise be event, time is spent with memories. They take time.
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I try to be still and still is passing.
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The space of sense and apprehension, desire, is also that of figure, space to be filled. What to call this? This is also play.
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The trick of the maxim: that everything behaves as a maxim.
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Teaching is not presuming to know better, but showing learning, that is, showing how you didn't know better.
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I'm not real. I'm fake. I have no right to this expression. I have no authority. Everything transpires without my having any credence. What passes for humility is my courtesy, my sacrifice before the other before the fact. In fact, it is just the opposite of my assertion, claim or right, but it is the basis for assertion, nonetheless the assertion, how it works.
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There is a tendency to grow like a plant, only to the capacity of a container. To learn only in that capacity too well and comfortably. It's analogous to being too literal, when it's not that itself.
There are people who abstract one quality as if burning over again exhaust from the same fuel. This becomes a blind faith in the positive itself, as if the effect or repute could suffice to achieve anything else. As if there were not also the condition of circumstance, and this leads to no discernment, no taste for the difference of situation. No sense for diversity that could make even one quality more supple.
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Recognition. How to track this down. All the ways it shoots off. Does recognition want to be about life or beyond life? Is it not to escape life and condition, and does that not in turn fall back into the conflict itself of consumption? Recognition also can mean not just recognition for the self, already that conundrum of personal attribute made of the other, but also the recognition «of» the other by the self, already this division of the self that, composite of all the "consciousness" of this division -- recognition is already this division, though it would seem separate, but also in a way in which the division precedes as condition -- the consciousness of life, death, pain, harm, privation, separation, but also the apparent contradiction of indistinctness.
Recognition «of» the other is also itself a conundrum, ambivalent: to be seen is also a danger, and thus the compulsion to blend in, be immersed, not be seen.
Being one and some, and "being" itself is thus not simply assertion, but reaction or the state one reacts to, thus also, in one sense, non-being.
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The matter of god. First, there is the problem of a creator of matter, as if a creative agency preceded any material from which anything could be made. Then there is the matter of matter itself, the movement, change, flux, energy, the perpetuity of process. Matter is thought earthbound, in the frame or horizon of the ground, of this fashioning of only a relative stability, where these more fleeting agencies affect smaller changes in the mode of the material that in much larger movement makes up these agencies, the "creators."
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It all comes to abstraction. Which bears out the point even as the weight of the reduction, as overbearing. As force, violence, catachresis. Language (grammar, a la Nietzsche), or representation, memory, time -- all these come to the problem, «matter» of abstraction. The surest operation of abstraction is to hide its operation. To think of it as mechanism is to be watchful, critical even in the use and craft of it, to see how it is both untenable and unavoidable. When we draw an object it's no less natural than artificial that we don't draw everything we see. The object is no less composite in itself than with what's around it. It's always also a matter of the frame. To draw a sign is always the matter of this connection implied. Express, to draw the sign on the highway always showing its roots, the ground where it's planted or the construction it's attached to.
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Another expression of the double helix paradox, or vicious spiral, of narcissism: There is not a divide between hysteric and obsessive neurosis, but rather this is a tissue, and it forms a Moebius strip, because of that mediation of the other Lacan speaks of. They thus would be passing back and forth with each other, and in fact each mode can act as the other's provocation, as a kind of vicious cycle, which would also make the interaction of these modes, as in between two people, affective in other ways, have effects in other ways. Somewhat homologous to sadism and masochism a la Deleuze, they are not strictly or perfectly complementary, but are more like two grades in a distribution of reacting to or trying to resolve the same irreducible. Thus the common part: neurosis. (And in the Lacanian scheme, on a broader developmental axis with paranoia and psychosis.)
There is some complementarity, some inversion involved in the orientation towards the other. But this falls back to the narcissistic paradox of dependence on the other both still have. This might also be expressed as a vicious triangulation, and it's because of the manner in which each is trying to assert the self, but which can only be as other via the other. The hysteric -- or better, the hysteric mode -- wants to be the object of attention, and the obsessive's objectification of the other leads to the conundrum of the self as this other he/she/it must so objectify. Again, as with the sadist and masochist and even more like those directly, it is the matter of control, the notion, wish and anguish of it.
This in turn is about the unity, co-extensiveness or flushness of the self, part of the double helix, because the very division involved in self-image is the engine for this. The irreducible gap allows the idea, ideal, imago, which is also the desire to close the gap. As Blanchot says, the narcissist's reflection is an abyss, because s/he can never see the self. "I" cannot close the division of reflection and moreso, the agency of the other, to be both myself and have a view of myself, what immediately necessitates being: other.
Thus Lacan's emphasis of knowledge as paranoiac. Note this as development of Freud's pleasure and reality principles, and compared to Levinas on knowledge, comprehension, totality.
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In youth self-determination often becomes an allergy of being anything, as if we were responsible, to blame, even for conditions as choice or creed or allegiance.
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Location. Place. Larger implications for the notion of presence, for thing, for stasis or fixed value. Which may amount to: teleology as justification, itself presupposing, if "unconsciously," precariousness. As with date, the date, dating things, there is the derivative sense of the identification of a place, spatially, with place names, addresses, etc., as if this location -- this locating, localization (and here we might also begin to see, get a hint of, an analogy for, the matter of "being," the gerund v. the hypostatizing as noun) -- were itself fixed, fundamental. The sense of this is really more like a receptacle, or at least a compartment (this in turn would get into the difference of place and thing, of a thing that holds other things, but conversely, extension of any thing as place). But even the projected sense of the fate of place and person, identification, is partaking of this same relation, as with the date, that shows the flicker of the designator and designated, between themselves and among other data, things. A date taken away from the other data it coordinates, orients, like an address in time, is empty of content, abstraction representing forgetting as much as memory.
Location is also this gerund, this flicker and ripple. Imagine it with the little marks used in comic books around figures to indicate movement, themselves sometimes like parentheses. Even its fact, fait, being done, means that it must also continually be done. The "subject" gives itself to this relation of identification, a relation that would seem to be only on the "formal" level or that of data. This means that for a subject, a perceiving creature or perceptive system, a "consciousness," or perhaps for, not just the sensing, who or what senses, but sense itself, there is containment in the relation of data at the same time as containing it in comprehension.
Another form of this parallax: thinking things. It works both ways, switches, flickers, as thinking about and composing with things, or as the things which think. To use a text version of those comic book marks, «thinking things». At the same time, this is what activates place, bears out how it is active, its activization, how the subject has this activity of locating, location, not just as physical activity, but in identifying, designating, articulating, even with the teleological projection of some fundamental or metaphysical identity with place, fate or myth.
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Dispossessed
Travel, perhaps especially road travel, because of the road, the line of the road, brings the horizon in. It doesn't make the distance, expanse into home, property, but something like the inverse. This is the absurdity of land as ownership, what land means as the undoing of property that is the condition of it. In the great expanses of the American west, land opens onto sky. As if. What we're given to notice that we don't or forget at home or in a different habit. But this distance, travel, wandering and horizon goes on there too.
Even day and night are this turning of the world that we now see as the road running, our stillness now at this inertia. We see how passing is given as stillness.
This expanse of the day, the horizon that comes through us and is not just before us, set off, opposed, also shifts the quality of time as expanse. We're not given just to deadline, finitude bearing in on us, dividing or apportioning time, but to drift and the indefinite, the desert or ocean of time. Perhaps more, of timelessness. Our own time is this breath and beat of expiration in these imperturbable cycles, the geological, astronomical, atomic. There is not one scale, not even time, to hold us.
Incomprehensible, literally and figuratively, neither by mind nor hand, thus exceeding all work, like pi opening the chasm not just beyond number but within it (and thus ek-sistence), this running on, the indefinite running into us, is distance, drift, idleness as the substance of property. Travel and see the indefinite extension, the beside of purpose, there in the room, the hotel or restaurant themselves as outlying, the fringe, pockets of the expanse. The sky comes in and is brought home. Idleness is there, time as distance in the work of things like the space in matter, solidity as the energy holding atoms together, that inertia.
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Music in the car
Driving on the highway surrounded by magnificent vistas, it's hard to know which way the colossal and sweeping sense works. Taken in and overtaken: it's a view of the exceeding of view, a vertigo of up and outwards. Suddenly even the fixity of being here is turned upside down. Falling is holding us in all this.
Listening to music in the car, we moderns have a soundtrack for all this going on, framing all this and what we're doing, carrying sense. The Native Americans had their Great Spirit (abstracting various versions) by which all this -- ground, land, mountains, expanse, clouds, sky, wind, the sun, light -- were just as much living as the plants and other creatures, and perhaps more a matter of the personal and sensible than religious, since in a way it was about communciation, all this sense. To imagine from that view: along with all the other mechanisms that came and disjoined land and time (the equivocation is in the terms themselves), these tin boxes with people closed up in them with their smaller boxes of tinny sounds, zipping down the road as if they weren't already engulfed by all these elements.
However routine, the distance even matter or mechanism has from myth or religion, we're never without this sensibility, whatever form we use to convey the great spirit of things. From outside the car, high up, we are in little bubbles of this "reality," termites absorbed in activity and sensation mute to an eagle or alien, or even the passengers of an airliner with their headphones on.
This works as a counter to the religious or non-religious alike, to any easy presumption of what frame would subtend, since precisely it would be that totalizing field. There is an outside of the frame, the distance by which we see this sensibility as affect. This shift of axis is the hole in things, the space in things, the play in things. It is the exceeding, bigger than and between, the figuration possible as the bracket or field of any figuration.
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Objectification is almost the opposite of what is thought in idealism. We could say naive idealism, but this may be the very naivete of idealism. This also has consequences for idealism, even though it also comes from idealism. Rather it entails the tangle of idealism, a presupposition that only appears as a contradiction later, with pronouncements against objectification.
Objectification is not first (logically primary) reduction to an object, does not begin by committing a sin against the ideal. What it would even be called already shows the matter of derivation. The ideal, consciousness, essence, life, soul, the personal, subject. Precisely the matter. Precisely matter. Subject matter. As in Aristotle's geneaology, and after him.
The whole philosophical subject/object problem, Idealism's disaffection with the impermanence of solidity, material, and the whole attribution of that solidity, "thing-in-itself," etc., is all there in the Lacanian analysis of psychological development: imago, ego ideal, the phallus. The conundrum of this idealism, this subjectivity, is it wants to believe in the object. It wants to be the object. Thus, the jealousy of the thing.
The thing has always been the thing. Because there is no thing.
Objectification doesn't begin by treating other living souls, perceiving creatures, or subjects, as mere objects. It begins by perceiving, attributing, producing, object in the first place. Again, there in the etymology, ob-ject: to throw before. "Thing put before the mind." Something put in the way, in a way that makes the literal meaning have very broad, figurative -- historical, logical, philosophical -- significance. "Subject" is even derivative of object geneaologically, in the modern sense of the term not just chronologically, but because of the former sense as underlying matter. Although this is in no way to offer a naive faith in some fixed value of words or terms or even etymology, by this route, too, we can see how the subject has been subject to the object.
In short, he is a "no"-object; in other words, a subject: he desires himself beyond himself, such as he is not.
-- Mikkel Borch-Jaconsen, Lacan The Absolute Master
Which brings me back to this -- what idealism, subjectivity want is to be unconditioned. But they simultaneously want to have the solidity, uniformity of the thing. They want materiality without any material condition. Caillois is never far off, at least for me, the whole thing about the temptation of space. And Lacan bears this out in another way. A perceiving thing will always have this tension of being both separate from and a part of the environment. The tension of not being able to include the self in the field of perception. The hole in perception is always the point of view, otherwise: the self.
In some ways, again the opposite of a naive idealism, what we do is offer ourselves to each other as an objectification. (Another form of the double sacrifice, the voluntary and involuntary exchange, relation, x.) This is a way we keep in check the enormous subjectification that we tend to take for natural law, as if everything, including others, were only the way I see them. The enormous subjectification of objectivity.
Reducing our own subjectification, even in a way as symptom, is a civility. We know this in more ordinary situations as getting out of our own head. And an idealism that believes it is exempt from doing this very thing, even in its good faith of lifting others to some non-objectified value or status, the status or value attributed as beyond status and value, transcendent, itself no less susceptible to the problem of reduction, abstraction, thus being an objectification, would be the worst form of that subjectification.
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Power must suffer division. First there is not even realization, so to speak, of power without such division -- what is pure force without expression, medium, event, incident, relief. But also because of the further extent of this.
No axiom should justify itself because no axiom can justify itself. Another way of saying they do because they can't.
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The vanity of understanding
The right to be offended
(Archaeology.)
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