Sunday, February 21, 2010
Kangas writes that by contrast with Plato, for Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, "the instant of eternity has to be thought of as the 'extreme opposite' of eternity" (p. 189). He continues:
The instant, in other words, is not allowed to be reduced to mere evanescence or illusion; rather, it is precisely the real. The event is not a passage to reality, but reality itself. Or more simply: passage as such is real, identity is illusion. This evaluation of what remains between being and nonbeing is conditioned on defining eternity with a forward direction. Eternity is not what remains eternally self-present, or what can be reduced to that, but what never ceases to beckon and threaten from the future. The eternal cannot as such be integrated into the present but remains essentially futural: the present and the eternal are thus extreme opposites. This essential gap, the excessive futurity of the eternal, awakens precisely anxiety. And anxiety imposes the most strenuous demand upon the subject.
(ibid., Kangas' emphases, my bold)
Why would the recognition of a reality of passage be conditioned upon any sort of eternity, or indeed, an extreme dialectics? Is the real being reified surreptitiously for the sake of dialectic, in contradiction to any professed relaxation within the anarchy of the instant? Well, we are speaking of passage as such, passage considered apophantically. In what sense aren't we speaking of the real from within an idealism?
I harbor serious doubts about excesses of futurity. Are these doubts consistent with a practice of ataraxia? How does the skeptic deal with the sudden, existentially? Is there any existential import to skepticism—would it be arrogant to deny any such importance, as arrogant as the denial of edifying discourses, perhaps?
Possibly there is no merely about the evanescent.
Labels: dialectics, Kangas, Kierkegaard, spasmoreality, transcendence
Sunday, November 01, 2009
The philosophical question of the moment is whether the spasmoreal is mediated by ideation or any passage through an ideality that would mean exposure to its repercussions. Where does the shudder of the sudden come from? Could this shudder be symptomatic of an awareness of recollection exactly as it happens? We couldn't be aware of such an awareness and still be in the process of recollection, could we? Yet there appears to be some trace of such a subterranean awareness in the shudder, which gives sense to the spasmoreal.
In spasmorealization are we technically operating within consciousness, i.e., one observes spasmoreal moments within a more or less phenomenal unicity of existential duration, or do we instead in spasmorealizing enact a modality of sudden consciousness, a modality that would paradoxically carry within itself both an awareness of its coming into being and simultaneously an inability to be fully aware of itself (in its ongoing recollective aspect)? Now imagine that irrealization is a condition of possibility for any spasmorealization. Immediacy is the condition of possibility for any mediacy. And why not?
You may well accuse me of misreading Kangas. He relates that according to Kierkegaard recollection is a specific kind of repetition that is neither reality nor ideality, but both reality and ideality that has been. But let's look for a second at what's being said of repetition. (We'll come back to it again, I'm sure.) Is repetition either reality or ideality? "Repetition indeed has the same structure as mediation: reality is cancelled (hæves) and set into the light of ideality at the same time. The real is made plastic for consciousness" (Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 84). Is the spasmoreal plastic, and if so, has it been made plastic for consciousness? (In such pathways one risks thinking that if consciousness plasticizes itself with a sufficient feeling of suddenness one may speak of spasmoreality, and the problem remains that, being conditioned upon irrealization, the imagination may have surreptitiously canceled reality in the very giving of the spasmoreal; the spasmoreal is always spasmoreal—and in that cancellation its sense of suddenness is jeopardized. Could we really then be talking about the spasmoreal as such?)
Anyway, to return to my misreading, Kangas says very clearly that as repetition, "consciousness is itself the gap between reality and its re-presentation" (p. 86). Let's play along for a second. The spasmoreal would not then be a mode of consciousness but something like a place where consciousness finds itself, and, one might add, finds itself duplicitously. Does consciousness really belong here, it seems to ask almost itself. The point of the misreading is that repetition is decidedly outside of reality, even if it's only outside in the sense that there used to be something real which people called repetition. However, if I believe that, what do I make of the shudder of the spasmoreal? Does this signify for me in any way a manifestation of repetition? Indeed it's hard not read the shudder as itself expressive of repetition at the same time the shudder is the attenuation of a trauma, not the trauma itself, but a repercussion. The repercussion is the blur within apophansis. It gives a sense that consciousness is not merely intentional, that is, consciousness of something, but also of something else again. We can give the something else again the name recollection but are we thereby any closer to understanding it? How much closer to understanding could we be than sudden? We could say this recollection is ongoing. Does the spasmoreal, in order to be sudden, carry within itself the cancelation of this ongoingness?
Labels: Kangas, Kierkegaard, spasmoreality
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Kangas' thoughts about the traumatic raise questions for our project of thinking about the question.
The trauma is less an experience than a quasi-experience, for what defines trauma is a tear in the fabric of presence itself. Consciousness is exposed to more than it can integrate and, unlike the experience of the sublime, does not recuperate itself in a secondary moment. The effect of the traumatic event is a dephasing of consciousness from its own temporality: the temporal "now" is no longer lived as an integral moment, relating to past-present and future-present, but placed out of time and out of being.
(Kierkegaard's Instant, p. 53)
Should we move then to thinking the quasi-experientiality of the question, the "as if" nature of the way the question unfolds in what we provisionally identify as experience? Let's note a rupture. Something about the question escapes the moment. Something escapes recuperability. Do these "somethings" have the status of things in our apprehension, or do we call them "things" only in the vaguest way possible, not to grasp them, but to feel our way around them. If it would be more exact to speak of the escaped or the irrecuperable, it would still leave something unsaid, something "out of being."
The question (the lovely question of rhythmosophy) appears to have an "as if" dimension, as if it were extramomentarily sprung from being. This sharing of space with the epoché, the bracketing of onticalities, occurs by virtue of its quasiexperiential irruption, which is nonetheless for being out of the present still yet spasmoreal. Is the quasi-experience in general spasmorealized? Question appears as if by surprise and interiority is dragged into question, as-if-dragged; is that the same way the questioning person is dragged into question?
More than anything the question interrupts. What kind of beginning is this?
Labels: epoché, Kangas, Kierkegaard, questions, spasmoreality
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Allusiveness
Barbaras on language:
Against the intellectualist conception which posits the material sign and the signification side by side as positive entities, linguistics discovers that sign and signification become positive beings and are then ordered to each other only by a process of active differentiation carried out first on the signifiers themselves. It is truly by this process that the signifiers become signifiers in the strict sense, that is, carriers of significations. The signification is not attached in a univocal manner to a sign but is situated between the signs as the invisible place where the signifying acts intersect. The sense intended in speech is a "qualified nothingness" whose unity is designed by means of the incessant differentiation of spoken words. Consequently, the sign is never truly isolable and the sense never strictly present in any spoken word; it is sketched in them as their secret web and remains therefore allusive, by principle disappointing every attempt to possess it in person. The sense is reached only in a lateral fashion, beside itself, across the figures in which it is incarnated.
(Being, p. 179)
Chaosmic Metaphoricity
In my usage "spatiality" hardly ever refers to bare geometric space but rather to space as it is lived; similarly "meaning" refers not to a purely intellectual realm of displaced and displacable abstractions but to an embodied gesture towards the world, an expression of mien. The orders of extensa and cogitans are not originary. From such a viewpoint metaphor takes on an ontological and chaosmological significance. "Far from the metaphor bearing on objects already circumscribed," Barbaras explains, "things proceed from a general 'metaphoricity,' from a universal participation that they concentrate or crystallize in order to be constituted into things" (p. 195, Barbaras' emphasis, my bold). This view of a general metaphoricity apparently describes an inhabited world, a universe of life and of leeway. Can there a cosmos in which leeway as such exists without the possibility of response to leeway?
Anarchic (}∅{) Individuation
Barbaras says that "individuation does not designate an incomprehensible phase preceding the individual whose clarification then necessitates recourse to a principle" (p. 183, Barbaras' emphasis) and likewise, "individuality makes sense only insofar as it does not proceed from a principle, and . . . the individual has individuality only insofar as individuality cannot be assigned. The individuality of the thing can be maintained only by remaining unfulfilled, just short of the point where it could fixed as a principle" (p. 184). Does this argument about things also hold for persons, unique, living beings? I think it's rather meant to: "individuality is characterized by its ability to foil every search for a principle of individuation; to be attentive to the individual is to understand that the search for such a principle is meaningless. One must instead say that the individual produces its own 'principles' as asymptotic poles of its pre-individual life" (p. 186). Does }∅{ designate the total absence of principles, or the autopoetic generation of its own proper extempore "principles?" Can these be separated? Is general metaphoricity not a principle?
An errant thought: "sense at its maximum degree of errancy, nowhere gathered together, pure allusion, horizon" (p. 181). I allege that allusion is like enough to a gathering, a playing along, or a play towards. I note a tension between errancy and allusion; at the same time }∅{ means the absence of an apriori gathered; the allusive gathers up in itself even prior there being an in in itself. The allusiveness of this very concatenation of thought has not escaped my notice. Not even direct quotation erases the allusiveness of sense.
Barbaras says that the "ultimate ground of the real consists of . . . 'rays of the world' which do not lead to the rank of principles" (p. 190). To speak of the ultimate betrays a desire for principles. "Ultimate ground," "ultimate moment": }∅{ issues no ultimata. "Ultimate" must be understood figuratively. The desire for the arche is born autopoetically, in the leap. Rays of the world never arrive at the arche, but they approach the arche asymptotically. The penultimate is truer than the ultimate to chaosmic metaphoricity. It belongs with the spasmoreal, though it is "almost" ultimate. It alludes to another order.
Labels: anarchy, Barbaras, metaphor, spasmoreality, uniqueness
Friday, July 17, 2009
Corradi Fiumara calls for a deeper appreciation of the reader on the part of writers of philosophical texts:
In a perspective of open systems, Danto suggests that we should not overlook the way in which philosophy functions as literature does, not in the sense of extravagant literary artefacts, but as engaging with readers in striving towards some sense of organic unity. Literature, in fact, can be regarded as being about the reader at the moment of reading through the process of reading. In his view the texts require the act of reading in order to be complete, and it is as readers of a certain type that philosophical texts address us at all; the variety of texts implies a correspondingly great variety of possible kinds of reader, and hence of theories of what we are in the complex attitude of reading something. The propensity to neglect the reader is a derivative of an inclination to leave creatures of the sort readers exemplify outside the situation which the text purports to cope with. Some outlooks almost constitute examples of such an oversight, as if supported by a view of philosophical writing which renders the reader nearly evanescent; it is a view which sustains a sort of "disembodied professional conscience," in Danto's language. He also remarks that science can get away this largely because even when it is about readers, it "is not about them as readers and so lacks the internal connection philosophical texts demand because they are about their readers as readers." If we rotate the discussion in this sense, then we come to appreciate an inescapable live relationship between any living beings engaged in philosophy in its real sense.
(Metaphoric, p. 25)
Noting a movement from regarding the philosophic text as artefact to a forum of vital philosophic engagement, this would present an opportunity to revisit any obligation the writer has to produce readerly texts–but do we read necessarily with an ideal writer in mind?
Like a fern choreosophic textuality unfurls in the direction of the spasmoreal. The evanescence of the reader implied by the gesture towards sudden reality, evanescence is at the same time made evanescent by the implication of a choreography. A rhythmic reading of the text is solicited, a reading which calls into question any finitude attached to reading. Did it have to be there in the first place in order to be called into question? In saying something is "called into question" do we affirm its reality at any level?
The relation between rhythmosophic reading–a style of reading that reads and rereads, relearns and therefore unlearns–and spasmorealization is akin to preparation, and also to unlearning. Just as one selects which texts to read, one selects which texts to reread. Which are the texts that are most likely to lead to spasmorealizations? What are their attributes?
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, philosophy, reading, spasmoreality, text
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Lived depth is both meaningful and labile, David Morris tells us (The Sense of Space, hereafter Sense). Morris distinguishes lability from malleability and metamorphosis, and explains that by saying lived depth is labile he means that "it is open to alterations that propagate from within our experience of it, where the kinds of alterations are themselves open to alteration" (p. 19). Among the rudiments of lived depth we can further note plasticity, the unfixity of thresholds, bodily movement, or, better perhaps, dynamic, chiasmic movement. Morris helpfully defines "dynamics": "Dynamics are simply shifts in self-organization; the intrinsic ordering of perception always reflects the interaction of body and environment, and changes to either will, as a matter of course, produce changes in self-organization" (pp. 15-16). As an aside, does sense in movement rehabilitate Sinngebung?
When we make the leap from the givenness of the chiasm to the givenness of the }∅{, now understood as a modality of our acceptance of the chiasmatic and coexistential extraordinaries, our way of accepting wild meanings, even those that may be our own—the flavor of the spasmoreal is everywhere now—then we come to question the givenness of the autopoietic. In what depth does it unfold? Naturally we are imagining a physis that has yet to be studied except in fragmentary, inchoate crossings. Can there be a betweenness that doesn't be tween with(in) an encapsulating space. Possibly a (between)space (s p a c e) of multiplicities: an autopoietic space, let's imagine (}∅{, too, for kicks—of course we ask about its givenness—does the attribute ever give rise to the eidos?).
Intersubjective spatiality: "One's sense of depth and space is not simply rooted in the crossing of one's body and the world, but in the crossing of one's existence and an other's existence" (p. 25). I note a radical difference between our perspectives, Morris' and mine, far more radical than the substitution of the * and its spasmoreal multiplicity of relatioms for the pattern of the X. Morris wants to attend to the grounds of the encounter with the other (p. 28). I'd rather see }∅{ as a condition of the encounter, at least provisionally. I don't know whether the encounter can be grounded without being ground to a halt.
Labels: chiasmus, epoché, flux, Morris, motility, physis, plasticity, spasmoreality, spatiality
Monday, June 09, 2008
The first skoppic principle (relational architecture) is the breach. As we have seen, the skoppic function transposes a breach of skipping around from the axle tree of the synkairotic to the axle tree of the syntagmatic (syntactic yada yada syntactile yada yada syntacit yada yada }∅{). The }∅{ heralds the Fa Passage between atonicities, the pure diatessarial leap, delfYan sunflower in the myrrour of myrrours, the plagiodelphic breach again }∅{ again. "A monad is the semblance of a world," Massumi says, to which a proper reply might be "}∅{." }∅{ stands for a representation of the breach (transposed into the diatessarial, the mode of its standing for). It is of course the empty set that excludes no members; remember, this is all about shape.
The sheer volume of what is excluded from the breach compels us to imagine a reality without any breaches, as we might imagine Reality without the Unicorn, or more multiversally as we might imagine a reality without a selected molecule of H2O. Well, the ways of irreality are limitless. I won't pretend otherwise. As I picture it, a world without breaches would be a quiet world, a world without spasms, without startles of any note. The reality that pertains to the breach, insofar the breach is pertained—actually it's eminently, if paradoxically, pertained by its own }{—is a spasmoreality. A spasmoreality contains an irreality in a special sense of holding with; it holds with irreality by holding an opening for irreality. Here we are talking about the myrrour of the spasmoreality; spasmorealities as they are lived hold a multitude of openings for irrealities. We should have a precise understanding of reality at this juncture. Reality is the sense of a world's duration (with this necessary proviso: we have no reason to believe that continuity covers all the possibilities of duration). The spasmomonde is the world whose sense of duration is characterized by the startle, or by startles. Picture a world without starts, a dead world. This is the kind of world bracketed out by the breach (and its representations); well this is a paradox (which won't be discussed away) not the least of which because the dead world also pertains to the breach by the same logic that anything pertains the breach, and hence as the spasmoreal and its worlds pertain to the breach. I won't say the spasmoreal and the thanatoreal pertain equally to the breach. How could I know such a thing? A thanatomonde may also describe a world without causality. Ideally, causality should be able to be startled. The reality pertaining to which causalities may be startled must by definition be a spasmoreality. We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the spasmoreal opposes the thanatoreal or contains it in any sense other than the sense of holding an opening for it. If we could read backward from the diatessarial (and everything that relates to, everything it elapses) into the synkairotic we would see that the breach holds an opening for itself—its opportunism does not stop at itself, but only startles, which is how it carries half the synkairotic into the breach, as a startle. It's not as if the breach had a reality and its reality were spasmoreality; spasmoreality merely pertains. One might object that thanatoreality also pertains to the breach. What is special about spasmoreality's pertaining to the breach, or to a reality of startled causation? Thanataoreality pertains only through the breach. It has not other avenue of pertinence. Spasmoreality we can't be sure of. It pertains to the breach, and through the breach, but whether it follows other avenues of pertinence is not yet clear. It may be something of a flâneur. How does it pertain? If the reality of startled causation is also a spasmoreality, there is then a sense in which spasmoreality appears to pertain by doubling, which may be autoreplication, or some more familiar form of reproduction. Familiar words spring to mind, but we should be wary of thinking they describe the spasmoreal: viral, virtual, simulacra. Spasmoreality is not genuinely familiar. Probably it doubles itself by a process of meontic renewal, having one flipper periodically/at all times in irreality. However, we would never become aware of inhabiting a thanatomonde did it not pertain to the breach (as well as through the breach). An equality of pertinence can never be excluded from possibility, that is, from spasmoreal possibility most broadly conceived; more narrow ideas of possibility may bypass such an equality altogether. We must be able to imagine that a possibility may be seen merely in its thanatic aspect, or through its thanatognomic signs, even though they will appear to us as dead only by way of the breach, which, in a sense, holds thanatoreality up to its myrrour. The challenge, in the breach, is to discern living relation from revivifying dead relation, or, in an objective mode, the startle from the twitter of a dry nerve. Intuitively this is known by explorers of the spasmomonde and its doubles, which is why the rampike becomes a potent symbol, as delfYan zombies haunt the passageways.
"Kojima is on to something." The words recur. It would be eight kinds of wrong to believe that shape belongs exclusively to the sharing of opportune moment and all that signifies. Shape pertains to the passage between the synkairotic and the }∅{—and so we begin to imagine that the breach doesn't contain everything, that its reality isn't the spasmoreality of all spasmorealities, or any manner of real synthesis of all that lives and dies. There is this business of the from/to structure of experience, or movement of experience, that we can use to characterize the breach. Does it belong to the breach? Is from/to autospastic? Why study the gift? I reckon we shouldn't want to mystify, though there may be depths to plumb, nuances to unwrap, gestures to perfect. The gift requests a certain latitudinarianism. If the breach comes with a from/to, does it wipe the from/to away? Does it send it back?
Shape is given with the movement from the synkairotic to the }∅{; shape is given with the world. We remain totally within the realm of phenomenality, perhaps a lived phenomenality. (There are many sad clowns in the realm of phenomenality; oh well.) I've been saying "spasmomonde" as if its world could be defined by a certain sense of its duration, while it remains possible that a nonsense relation obtains between a world and its duration. If a spasmomonde were characterized by a nonsense of duration, its reality would have to be something other than spasmoreality properly conceived. I'm not persuaded that most spasmorealities aren't in fact improper, and in that sense the myrrour of spasmoreality may well be improper. As I see it a nonsense of duration is thanatognomic (which is why I would caution against allowing virtuality and its cousins to be thought yet). Spasmoreality holds an opening for irreality, and by the same gesture it holds an opening for thanatoreality, though it does not contain thanatoreality in any but this highly special sense, and if we find better ways of talking about continence and pertinence we should jump ship. This holding of openings is what allows shape to be presented, or to present itself, if that's what it does. In any case shape is never given by itself, but always with the world, and never in a vacuum, or what amounts to the same thing, in a dead living space, a space of dead things and furnitures, but always in the passage from the synkairotic to the }∅{, or, as may equally be the case according to the logos of the skop, the passage from }∅{ to the synkairotic, which may indeed be the originary passage, if the breach has an originary—of course we have our doubts.
Could there be a given world given with no shapes, not one measly shape? This is like asking whether there can be a world of no duration. The difference between not having any duration and not being able to make sense of a duration is inconceivably close to pure difference. Is from/to a shape? Is the breach? Always we are able to look at things sideways. Shape however is not what it appears to be seen only from a profile or an aspect; shape always has in its appearance a from-the-inside which makes it shape. We want to know shape in, or better, through the breach. Shape startles. Only a spasmoreality could hold an opening for that which is mondial by neither excluding nor containing worlds, that is, by the breach. Such is shape.
Labels: dolphins, kairos, Kojima, Massumi, monadology, nonsense, shape, spasmoreality, Thales