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.

"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)