"Follow-Up" #10

"The poem attempts to pay careful attention to everything it encounters; it has a finer sense of detail, of outline, of structure, of color, and also of the 'movements' and the 'suggestions.' These are, I believe, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with mechanical devices which continue being brought to ever higher degrees of perfection. No, it is a concentration that remains aware of all dates of history.

'Attention'--permit me at this point to quote a maxim of Malebranche which occurs in Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka: 'Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.'
...
And what, then, would the images be?
That which is perceived and to be perceived one time, one time over and over again, and only now and only here. And the poem would then be the place where all tropes and metaphors are developed ad absurdum.

Topos study?
Certainly, but in light of that which is to be studied,: in light of u-topia.
And human beings? and all living creatures?
In this light.

Such questions! Such demands!
It is time to turn back."

--from "Meridian" by Paul Celan, adapted from Jerry Glenn's translation given in Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan by Jacques Derrida (NY: Fordham UP, 2005) pp. 182-3.

"Follow-Up" #9

From Baudrillard’s the intelligence of evil, or the lucidity pact again:

"The peculiar role of photography is not to illustrate the event, but to constitute an event in itself. Logic would demand that the event, the real, occur first and that the image come after to illustrate it. This is, unfortunately, the case most of the time.

         A different sequence demands that the event should never exactly take place, that it should remain in a sense a stranger to itself. Something of that strangeness doubtless survives in every event, in every object, in every individual. This is what the image must convey. And, to do so, it must also remain in a sense a stranger to itself; must not conceive itself as a medium; must not take itself for an image; must remain a fiction and hence echo the unaccountable fiction of the event; must not be caught in its own trap or let itself be imprisoned in the image-feedback." (99)

"There is a haziness about the real.

         Reality is not in focus. The bringing into focus of the world would be ‘objective reality,’ that is to say, an adjustment to models of representation—exactly like the focusing of the photographic lens on the object. Fortunately, the world never comes definitively into focus in this way. "(98-99)

"We must then strip away, always strip away, to get back to the image itself. Stripping away brings out the essential point: namely that the image is more important than what it speaks of, just as language is more important than what it signifies. "(98)

"Follow-Up" #8

[from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) Trans. Michael Hardt]

         “When the real world is transformed into an image and images become real, the practical power of humans is separated from itself and presented as a world unto itself. In the figure of this world separated and organized by the media, in which the forms of the State and the economy are interwoven, the mercantile economy attains the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over all social life.” (78)

         “The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.” (79)

         “For this very reason, ..., the era in which we live is also that in which for the first time it is possible for humans to experience their own linguistic being—not this or that content of language, but language itself; not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks. Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.

         Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion—without allowing what reveals [itself] to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals [itself], but bringing language itself to language—will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified. … [T]hey will enter into the paradise of language and leave unharmed.” (82)

"Follow-Up" #7

   [from Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime again]

“Because we are no longer capable today of coping with the symbolic mastery of absence, we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images.

Now, the image can no longer imagine the real, because it is the real. It can no longer dream it, since it is its virtual reality. It is as though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transparent to themselves in a ruthless transcription, full in the light and in real time.” (4)

“Perhaps, through technology, the world is toying with us, the object is seducing us by giving us the illusion of power over it. A dizzying hypothesis: rationality, culminating in technical virtuality, might be the last of the ruses of unreason, of that will to illusion of which … the will to truth is merely a derivative and an avatar.

On the horizon of simulation, not only has the world disappeared but the very question of its existence can no longer be posed. But this is perhaps a ruse of the world itself. The iconlaters of Byzantium were subtle folk, who claimed to represent God to his greater glory but who, simulating God in images, thereby dissimulated the problem of his existence. … This is what we do with the problem of the truth or reality of this world: we have resolved it by technical simulation, and by creating a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see.” (5)

“The harmonious equivalence of nothing to nothing, of Evil to Evil. But the object that is not an object continues to obsess us by its empty, immaterial presence. The whole problem is: on the outer fringes of the nothing, to materialize that nothing; on the outer fringes of the void, to trace out the mark of that void; on the outer fringes of indifference, to play by the mysterious rules of indifference.

There is no point in identifying the world. Things have to be grasped in their sleep, or in any other circumstance where they are absent from themselves.

…

Not to be sensitive to this degree of unreality and play, this degree of malice and ironic wit on the part of language and the world is, in effect, to be incapable of living.” (6)

“But it is the same with any object that reaches us only in a definitively altered state, even when it does so on the screen of science, in the mirrors of information, or on the screens of our brains. Thus, all things offer themselves up without a hope of being anything other than illusions of themselves. And it is right that it should be so.

Fortunately, the objects that appear to us have always-already disappeared. Fortunately, nothing appears to us in real time, any more than do the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars would be there simultaneously and the celestial vault would be an unbearable incandescence.” (7)

"Follow-Up" #6

EMPTINESS
   [from Dzogchen by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2000) trans. Geshe Thupten Jinpa & Richard Barron]

From the point of view of how mind is perceived by direct experience, it should be noted that mind is not an object of a direct experience which realizes the ultimate nature of mind. This is because when you realize the ultimate nature of mind, that awareness only realizes the emptiness of mind and not the mind itself...[because] study, contemplation, and meditation prove that it lacks an independent nature. (145)

... if we were to question how the presence or absence of emptiness matters to us, the answer is: it doesn't! The fact that there is emptiness does not make any difference to us. What does make a difference, however, is our understanding and realization of the empty nature of things. (147)

"Follow-Up" #5

CRIME
     [from Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996) trans. Chris Turner]

This is the story of a crime--of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion--the virtual illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality.
...
Though the crime is never perfect, perfection, true to its name, is always criminal. In the perfect crime it is the perfection itself which is the crime, just as, in evil's transparency, it is the transparency itself that is the evil. (-1)

---

We artists, too, are always coming close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But we turn away from it, and our work is the trace of that criminal imperfection. The artist is, in Michaux's words, the one who, with all their might, resists the fundamental drive not to leave traces. (1)

---

[Reality] submits to everything with unrelenting servility. Reality is a bitch. And that is hardly surprising, since it is the product of stupidity's fornication with the spirit of calculation--the dregs of the sacred illusion offered up to the jackals of science.

To recover the trace of the nothing, of the incompleteness, the imperfection of the crime, we have, then, to take something away from the reality of the world. To recover the constellation of the mystery, we have to take something away from the accumulation of reality and language. We have to take words from language one by one, take things from reality one by one, wrest the same away from the same. (3)

"Follow-Up" #4

FUNDAMENTAL
     [from Dimasio's Self Comes to Mind]

"There is an inescapable and fundamental difference between the strictly controlled aspect of the life process present inside our organisms and all the imaginable things and events out in the world or in the rest of the body. This difference is indispensable to understanding the biological foundation of the self processes." (199)

"The brain needs to introduce into the mind something that was not present before, namely, a protagonist. Once a protagonist is available in the midst of other mind contents, and once that protagonist is coherently linked to some of the current mind contents, subjectivity begins to inhere in the process." (201)

"What is being added to the plain mind process and is thus producing a conscious mind is a series of images, namely, an image of the organism ...; the image of an object-related emotional response (that is, a feeling); and an image of the momentarily enhanced causative object. The self comes to mind in the form of images, relentlessly telling a story of such engagements." (203)

"Follow-Up" #3

SCENE

(from Baudrillard again--that Lucidity Pact)

     "In itself, the image is bound neither to truth nor to relaity; it is appearance and bound to appearance. That is its magical affiliation with the illusion of the world as it is, the affiliation that reminds us that the real is never certain... .
     And in this sense, unfortunately, one may say that images are rare--the power of the image being, most of the time, intercepted by all that we try to make it say.
     The image is, most often dispossessed of its originality, of its own existence as image, and doomed to shameful complicity with the real." (91)
     "This...murder of the image...lies in this enforced visibility as source of power and control, beyond even the 'panoptical': it is no longer a question of making things visible to an external eye, but of making them transparent to themselves. The power of control is, as it were, internalized, and human beings are no longer victims of images but rather transform themselves into images." (94)
     "This is the sign both of our ultimate transparency and our total obscurity." (95)
     "For the sign is a scene, the scene of representation, of seduction, of language: in language, signs seduce one another beyond meaning... . And the disappearance of this scene clears the way for a principle of obscenity... .
     No seduction, no representation: merely the integral coding of the body in the visible, where it becomes in fact definitively real, even more than it is really!" (69)
     "At this stage, the image is nothing but an operator of visibility--the medium of an integral visibility that is the pendant to Integral Reality, becoming-real going hand in hand with becoming-visible at all costs: everything must be seen, everything must be visible, and the image is pre-eminently the site of this visibility." (93)

"Follow-Up" #2

IMAGE

(from A. Damasio,
The Feeling of What Happens--Harcourt, 1999 & Self Comes to Mind--Pantheon, 2010)

Most of the brain's work may be described as image-making; however, where our words pretend to present these presentations straight from the world, they fake it. They fake us past the facts: that cross-signals integrate thousands of images in any moment's perception and interoception; that the words themselves have, likewise, a multiplex of components (play across grapheme, phoneme, and morpheme patterns stored; calling upon concepts and their inter-weavings mapped through learning; allusions and associations not necessarily attended to; and links to the somato-sensory background pat-down, Olson's proprioception, of body-mind-state in any moment); and that images in all modalities, including the five senses, depict processes and entities of concrete and abstract kinds inter-related, convergent and divergent, sometimes concurrent or sometimes super-imposed. "Thought" is the word we accept to denote such a braided flow; "stream," coupled with the fancier "consciousness," goes along as our metaphor for both the braided surface, maybe changing beds, and the weave of currents high and low that is seen or felt by anyone fishing them. In those currents are neural flashes and recognitions mapped against the maps we hold in the "neural machinery which embodies innate and acquired implicit dispositions" (Feeling 319). These mappings are the habits and habitats that enable and inhibit representations. It is their "correspondences," not "the picture," through which our image-making works (321). Funny how Spicer said that too, from the linguistics end of this pile of sticks.

"Follow-Up" #1

ILLUSION

[from Baudrillard's The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, (Berg English edition, 2005) 84-85]

   "We must have a sense of this illusion of the Virtual somewhere, since, at the same time as we plunge into this machinery and its superficial abysses, it is as though we viewed it as theatre. Just as we view our news coverage as theatre.
   Of the news coverage we are the hostages, but we also treat it as spectacle, without regard for its credibility. A latent credultiy and derision prevent us being totally in the grip of the information media.
   It isn't critical consciousness that causes us to distance ourselves from it in this way, but the reflex of no longer wanting to play the game.
...
   It would be best, then, to pose all these problems in terms other than those of alienation and the unhappy destiny of the subject (which is where all critical analysis ends up).
   The unlimited extension of the Virtual itself  pushes towards something like pataphysics ... pre-eminently ironic science, corresponding to a state in which things reach a pitch that is simultaneously paroxystic and parodic.
...
   At the heart of this artificial reality, this Virtual Reality, this irony is perhaps all we have left of the original illusion, which at least preserves us from any temptation to one day possess the truth."

"Get the Picture" #11

EAR

(pour les Imagistes)

Words chalked up to

experiences show thru

as if they could be simply clear not

hefting thoughts we feel by ear

in the tongue all along

the cultural fake out

of visualizability.

"Get the Picture" #10

GROW

         (for Brigid)

Dirt’s mind’s words

we grow in it that

the plant shapes:

leaf, stalk,

shoot, ear, silk, tassel,

corn—and clouds come

to talk back

what the sky says

all along.


 

"Get the Picture" #9

CALLED

         (for Medea Benjamin)

To peel away the blur of a kill

called a bugsplat on the screen

and see beneath it the dead & maimed,

to recognize the fleeing squirters

as having lives and the right to a hearing,

to kettle the truths of these situations

and bring their boiling to a point:

these are strategies and stratagems

borne to us by euphemism’s art

in the force of metaphors

many of my students learn before

they come to class on the GI Bill

and there unlearn the lying in this

name game.