No Object #9: Note on Buddhist Thought and Hegel's Sense of Limits

On page 112 of "For they know not what they do", Zizek comments in an attempt at clarifying Hegel's concept of "limits" that the signifier reaches toward the Real and falls short inside the limit of signifying; it always already "goes wrong in relation to itself and the object inscribes itself in the blank opened by this failure." Madhyamaka philosophy says the object is built of three things: causes, relations to/of its parts, and our conceptual apparatus attempting to signify all this at the limit of re-ification. Both angles say the same thing in their tangled idioms: we meet the world in a ground established by our limits at the task of meeting it; this is its existence for us.

No Object #8: Charlie McCarthyism & Palimpsestasis

 

The idea of “class struggle” does not

name a thing but rather the urge

to again expose class as we must when

the Democrat-wing of the Hegemony tries to become

“the voice of the middle class” and thereby

avoids the fact of its

“ventriloquization” by the 1 %.

When the Honors program at your college

turns away from race to questions of

beautiful thought or non-racialized

environmentalism or pro-choice or

anti-death-penalty politics, we have

stasis because class is

actually erased or written over as if in a

“palimpsestasis.”

The party provides something new to worry over

while forgetting that women, prisoners, and species are

victims of money: “tutto che scintille…”

can draw your eyes away,

and money  confers “aristo”-cracy

only thru the myth of how naturally

“cream rises to the top.”

The struggle to bring a new layer of struggle

to public attention fails when

it gets translated back into

this tongue of power that comes from

the belly of the invisible beast:

ventriloquism for the dummy is

spouting talk from another’s guts

while the mouth just smiles.

No Object #7: When a Subject Objects

Zizek opines, in "For they know not what they do" (2nd ed., London: Verso, 2002), that "a signifying chain is 'subjectivized' precisely by way of its metaphoricity: what we call 'subject' is ... a name for the very gap that prevents human language from becoming a neutral tool for designation of some objective state of things... . In other words, our speech is 'subjectivized' precisely in so far as it never 'says directly what it wants to say'." That's on page 49, but he goes further with this later in a footnote on page 95 where he asserts that his hero Lacan would have it that "it is not enough to say that the subject's identity is always, constitutively, truncated, dispersed because of the intrusion of an irreducible outside" because "the 'subject' is nothing but the name for this 'mutilation,' for this impossibility of the 'substance' to realize itself fully" in us. This is in a note to a paragraph that asserts that the "'identity' of an object consists in the feature that re-marks the asemic space of its inscription" with what is always already "one trope too many" in the attempt to designate the object precisely. All that philosophy baggage is part of Zizek's careful and thorough project of reclaiming Hegel's original sense of dialectics as including the little excess by which the object is out of our grasp and how we sense ourselves really only in this subjective grasping effort. That is what makes the world, as we know it, go round. This concept opposes the most common "objectivism" and reaches toward the greater reach of The soi-disant Objectivists. This becomes more engaging when the "object" and "subject" are grasped in a politico-historical dimension, and more engaged, of course. On page 100, simply by putting the words "class struggle" in the objective position, Zizek unfolds a sharp example: "Although 'class struggle' is nowhere directly given as a positive entity, it none the less functions, in its very absence, as the point of reference enabling us to locate every social phenomenon not by relating it to class struggle as its ultimate meaning ('transcendental meaning') but by conceiving it as an(other) attempt to conceal and 'patch-up' the rift of the 'class struggle,' to efface its traces." This reading tool lets us grasp things as having that lost dimension of effacement not quite in them but without which they are not what they truly are but only what they would be seen as.

This very computer offers itself as a neutral tool accessing a common space, but as soon as "I" put "class struggle" next to it both "neutral" and "common" have to answer to class differences in access to and accent in this machine's usage.

No Object #6: The Quantum Mechanics of Protest

Apparently, the protest simply does not possess both a position and a momentum simultaneously.

It follows that there is an intrinsic fuzziness in the microworld that is manifested whenever we attempt to measure two incompatible observable qualities, such as position and momentum. Among other things, this fuzziness demolishes the intuitive idea of a protest moving along a distinct path or trajectory in space. A quantum projectile cannot have both at once.

In daily life, we take it for GRANTed that strict laws of cause and effect direct the bullet to its target along a precisely defined geometrical path in space. We would not doubt that when the bullet arrives at its target its point of arrival represents the end-point of a continuous curve which started at the barrel of the gun. No so for protests.

It is sometimes convenient to think of each protest as somehow possessing an infinity of different paths, each of which contributes to its behavior. This is how the protest can keep track of what is happening throughout an extended region of space. The fuzziness in its activity enables it to "feel out" many different routes.

(Thanks to The Ghost in the Atom)

No Object #5

It is the urge to read the picture showing up with the words as "illustration" that makes possible the slight delay entered when there's some doubt about that. When it is not so obvious that the picture shows what the words are saying, what becomes obvious is the delay itself. As Zizek wrote in For they know not what they do (Verso, 1991, rev. 2002): "This dialogical economy therefore implies a purely logical temporality: a temporal scansion between the moment of expectation and the moment of its disappointment, a minimal delay of the second part of the tautology. Without this minimal temporality, the proposition A = A remains a simple affirmation of identity and cannot produce the effect of pure contradiction." He is talking about Hegel's commentary on "God is ... God," but the dissolution works likewise, as it can do in words alone when reference is delayed; however, there people turn away or merely back to some quality in the words themselves.

No Object #4

For Kipling

If
the assumption is that the world is badly screwed up,
If
we realize that both social relations and personal relations are screwed up by the social system of capital investment and growth,
If
we get it that this is what makes even the environment steadily deteriorate,
If
the sense of relations sweeping thru the social, personal, and environmental also extends to the inner (intra-) personal,
If
language can be seen to be a focus at the core of all this,
If
consciousness shows thru as the very core,
If
consciousness can be changed by experience of awarenesses playing across language and other perceptual relations,

then

poetry matters, especially where it can stop objectifications from reifying "the world."

No Object #3

Nicole Brossard writes in French but has her books readily translated. In her most recent in English, there is this that fits this project:

in each language our violence is intact
we inhale it with its collisions
its t/errors and small print
then in 3steps in a Neues museum
stroke of the bow
an image deflects our attention

This is a section from a serial poem called "Piano Topology" in a series of poems called "White Piano" in a book called White Piano (Toronto: Coach House, 2013). It deals with the image on the cover of that book too, a photo of an installation called Missa that is made of many identical pairs of shoes hanging all in the same walking pose from wires, piano wires perhaps to be bowed. The resonance "deflects our attention" and calls it toward resonances. This is the no-object theory at work with and beyond imagery. Now you see it and you don't.


 

No Object #2

Please, look back at Kevin Cashen's video of my reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz (May 8, 2012) and my remark there about "incommensurability." It was posted here on May 22, 2012. It can also be reached directly on You Tube at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y693tTrBGJg&feature=youtu.be

Then, look at the talk from the University of Washington @ Bothell's "Convergence" conference on poetics (Sept. '12), where the pictures play another role in "illustrativity." This video was also put together by Kevin Cashen (thank you). Its link is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Echx5aBCjg

No Object #1

     What you see is what you get. Examine that and it opens again and again, like a joke. It never says what you see is what is, although "the moons are as they are" (Dogen, again). What you get is what you will see, mountain/snow for instance. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a song by Donovan, then there is a great jam version by The Allman Brothers, and the Dead incorporated it too. You can only get what you've actually seen, and the way words become part of that is where money comes in. And as long as money's coming in, the music gets heard. And that's basically all you can get out of the Sixties' system unless the words bang into themselves while crowding towards their object, as in the "Mountains and Waters Sutra" of Dogen. This piece was collected in what the English-speaking world calls the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, but the French call it La Réserve visuelle des événements dans leur justesse. "There are mountains hidden in treasures," asserts the final section of this "visual reserve of events in their justice." As we try to see what we can get from this, it occurs to me that in such a dialectical "Hegelianism without reserves" (as Reb Derrida called it), incommensurability might just be just.

No Object #0

     The object here is to bring the concept of the object into view, and to object to it. Many resources will be marshaled into this project. Baudrillard is a big help, as he was for the "Follow-Up" pieces, but so are the Tibetan Buddhists who have been writing about this for many centuries. Good old cartoons, too, will be of use because they play with images of objects. Poetry seems to have gotten stuck short of the requisite play, again, and the plastic arts (incl. photography) hesitate to object to the object most of the time and get "drawn" back into objectification.
     The American Zen thing of truly objective seeing and being falls short, and so does the effort to scramble and deny realities. As Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime says, there is "no longer any need to confront objects with the absurdity of their functions, in a poetic unreality, as the Surrealists did" (73). Our arts have hovered over various versions of this absurdity for a century now, grasping it and rejecting it. Recent avant-garde poetry has tried to include critique of social constructions in language by going both ways: some absurdist and some as anti-absurdist as the sentences of Ron Silliman. Claims are made for the value of parataxis over hypotaxis or the twists of hyper-hypotaxis or the exposé of phrasings like those in adverts or political memes through echo or translation, but still at the still center of it all is the assumption of a reality/unreality divide and the idea of a need to confront the reality we all live with/in.
     The point that Baudrillard builds beyond these attempts is that there is "[n]o longer any need for a critical consciousness to hold up the mirror of its double to the world:" that art and thinking that would expose the falsities or positionalities of the world have been undone by our world itself. "[O]ur modern world swallowed its double when it lost its shadow, and the irony of that incorporated double shines out at every moment in every fragment of our signs, of our objects, of our models"; in this post-modern world, "things move to shed an ironic light on themselves all on their own." The fresh need to present this calls for something like parody but not resolvable into a reality opposed to the laughably ironic in our world of things--not simply "meaningful" mockery. Because things "discard their meanings effortlessly," they need only to be presented in their "visibility" for us. "This is all part of their visible sequencing, which itself creates a parody effect" (73).
     The 800-year-old writings of Dogen can take us to a Japanese foothold in this area of thinking too. His moon, his finger, his words, all are pointing to it. His moon (tsuki) is total (tsu) possibility (ki).

                            Snow

All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.
Playing with the moon, ridiculing wind, listening to birds....
Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.
This winter I suddenly realize: snow makes a mountain.

            translated by Philip Whalen with Kazuaki Tanahashi
                    from Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen,
                    ed. Tanahashi (North Point: SF, 1985).

"Follow-Up" #11

It is not a question of defending radical thought. Every idea one defends is presumed guilty, and every idea that cannot defend itself deserves to disappear. On the other hand, one must fight all charges of irresponsibility, nihilism, or despair. Radical thought is never depressive. On this point, there is nearly total misunderstanding. Ideological and moralistic critique, obsessed with meaning and content, obsessed with the political finality of discourse, never takes into account writing—the act of writing: the poetic, ironic, allusive force of language, of the juggling with meaning. It does not see that the resolution of meaning is to be found there—in the form itself, the formal materiality of expression.

         …

         Critics, being unhappy by nature, always choose ideas as their battleground. They do not see that if discourse always tends to produce meaning, language and writing, for their part, always create illusion; they are the living illusion of meaning, the resolution of the infelicity of meaning by the felicity of language. And this is surely the only political—or transpolitical—act that can be accomplished by the person who writes.

again from Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime.  Trans. Chris Turner. (London: Verso, 1994) 102-103.