fragilekeys

The key discovery is that the “steam of consciousness” is outside, without there being any “outside” anywhere.

It never exactly reflects back upon itself or shapes up into a conscious being. It never folds over itself or doubles up. If it can appear as historical, it is only because the stream can recognize itself through the very same power that undoes, underdetermines and unbinds it—by a sort of “return” to the stream, which is more like the Turn of the stream itself in its indefinite restlessness—or rather, in the stream’s remaining with itself the Same, despite whatever is made to ripple in the it, the stream’s “turning itself (in).”

That the stream of consciousness is in its turning “outside” every object or position of consciousness (whatever might be observed to be floating along the current) can lead to the well-intentioned illusion that it is actually language or some other ephemeral or incorporeal material—not a constituted language made of definitions and grammars, but the primordial soup of thought, made of infinitely divisible and reshapeable sounds and letters and senses—as well as numbers and their relations (quantum and geometrical)—or perhaps of ghosts and spirits, evil and benevolent, but above all in-visible forces—or finally of things themselves, of pure reality-matter, however it could be conceived.

But whether we call it consciousness or language or materiality, all we can know is that every access to it (if it be an “it” at all, which is doubtful given the fundamental instability and “non-objectivizability” of the stream) is common, generic. No one ever owned an ounce of it for themselves; and every splash they made there was sent instantly elsewhere. The history of the stream can be viewed fruitfully as a karmic chain, or as unconscious traces, or as structured in an astral field or in a cosmic hologram—all these metaphors (or simply “phors”: carryings without distance, without any exterior space of passage or transfer) express the “immanence” of the stream (to) itself—meaning that we are each entirely submerged or pre-(e)merged, so much so that there is no “we” but this quantum of expression: One-stream that flowed from no source (because never leaving itself, because it is nothing but the flow of the generic Same, source of “no one” as generic Turn)―a wave that ever laps and never lapses and ever goes: “oceanic transindividuality.”

What is lived experience itself—whether we call them memories or moments or anticipations—how could we describe it if not in this way: as essentially ripples in the stream of the One or even as the wave (of) One-stream “itself”? Generic waves, not added, not accumulated, never subtracted, never folded, but simply superposed and superposed without our action or effort: instantaneous “participation” of every lived wave in the generic stream—which now needn’t be seen as conscious or unconscious, linguistic or beyond language, because it is simply lived and that is sufficient: without any need of predication or definition, because “accessed” only as quantic faith in the stream.

The key discovery is that we are indivisibly “in” this “outside”—so much so that this (out)side is nothing-but-in-One. Thus the ease of access for thinking to the undivided essence (of) the stream. With our vision thus in-verted, with the distance that would separate us from it reduced to an objective appearance not at all of the essence of the Real, we see there is no “side” that is not “in(side)”; and that the One-stream, by the simplicity of its radical immanence, by its unilateral essence, comes one time each time prior to “what is”―prior to any determination that could be made of the stream.

Thus the joy of splashing, of entering each time for the first time into this flow we’ll never leave―the peace of consciousness seeing itself in-One-streaming.

—May 24, 2017

One of the benefits of studying philosophy is to discover in detail, and in all their ramifications, the “logic” behind certain ideas that, in the real world, are widespread but dispersed, and thus partial, incoherent. Sometimes one even finds a philosopher who can serve as a sort of direct ‘representative’, on the level of ideas, of what millions of people think and do in a more confused, or a less systematically explicit way; by reading that philosopher, one can better understand what sort of ideas or ideologies are running through the heads of those people. A tendency which is scattered all over in tiny fragments―and which often reigns unconsciously, unquestioned―is neatly condensed in the doctrine of the one philosopher. That makes it easier to grapple with, not just because one can now see it “all at once,” but also because it can be brought into conversation with other ideas from other philosophers, who are inevitably representative of others. (To be clear, philosophers do not represent the people who hold these similiar ideas, but rather the idea’s mechanism, its virtual operating kernel, its abstract state or basic processing unit, which is most susceptible to modification and repurposing―as well as abuse and laziness in its handling―and thus most likely to crop up anywhere, in guises the philosopher-representative helps us learn how to detect.)

The political left has been under the sway of “multiplicity” for many years. The idea stems from a simple, egalitarian intuition, which hates domination and loves level playing fields. There should be no (or less) vertical structures, no ugly leaders at the top of hierarchies telling people how to live their lives, since this would automatically be authoritarian and repressive. There should instead be an infinite number of horizontal relations, connections, and correspondences: to each participant in the social, their own user profile. Likewise, different groups should respect each other’s differences―and perhaps keep their distance―, with no single group prevailing over any other. All should be equal, meaning we should listen to everyone and “love them for who they are.” This leads to the notion of a “we” that is a kind of shattered togetherness of the many: an ensemble of disparate entities without any sort of unity being imposed on them and without any imperative to commingle. Every piece of this multiple is to be left to its own freely-chosen existence, and its rights to do so are to be defended and bolstered if need be. Above all, there is never to be a “One”; and so whenever liberals invoke the One, they mean the One of pure multiplicity, the One of never-ending difference.

In 1976, two philosophers published a book that advances a similar notion. They titled it A Thousand Plateaus and it has earned a great deal of fame over the years, as has the idea of desiring machines and “rhizomes” it advances. The latter was an especially profound conceptual invention, an early attempt to think the burgeoning network of identities and fluidities which we now know quite well as our world and whose structures are decentralized, distributed, and nodal. A figure drawn from biology, the rhizome is set in opposition to the tree: instead of the arborescent arrangement of deep roots, solid trunk, and layered branches, which represent a unified center or system (the One), the rhizome refers to organisms like mushrooms and potatoes, which shoot their roots to the side, create anterior bulbs in any direction, and often form vast horizontal networks underneath the earth without any “center” anywhere and without any overarching system or plan for proliferation (the multiple). The essential thing here is that, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” The directive is thus to rupture, prolong, connect, relay, conjugate; everything may and shall come into contact in the general circulation; if any link is broken, the rhizome starts up again on an old line; it operates immediately in the heterogeneous, at multiple entryway points; the rhizome is an intersection of flat multiplicities, consolidated nowhere but virtually everywhere. Continue reading →

CULLET is an online art archive that I have been curating since 2014. It can be accessed at: https://www.facebook.com/Cullet-580481965368250/. This article will share a bit about the idea behind this archive and Cullet’s evolution. The reader is encouraged to visit the “Album” section on the Cullet Facebook page and see what is going on. The following is little more than a supplement, a glance back and ahead.

I initially conceived of Cullet as an archive of “archive fever,” to develop an idea from Jacques Derrida that was one of my main inspirations along the way. Such an archive would try to include not only straightforward texts about archiving and the archive, but texts that expressed the *desire to archive presencing* as such–the drive to save and remember qua prosthesis, not just anything, but the eruption of existence itself, the instant of coming into being. How to archive the miracle of occurrence itself? I tried to find texts that could stand alone, torn from their context, and yet exhaled unto their final period a complete world. But they should also contain and present a “theory” of the archive unto themselves, that is their own: a stand-alone statement about the entire outlook of the Cullet project. In this way, Cullet would articulate a theoretical statement about archiving, only exclusively through the materials. I would then pair those texts with other already-complete worlds: paintings that resonated or problematized or commented upon the texts somehow. Together, these pairs were meant to be small bundles of compact creative energy, waiting to unfurl and explode in the minds and eyes of viewers.

After nearly four years as of this writing, there are about 300 of these pairings. Slower work than I imagined, to be sure, it took some time to get a feel for the direction I wanted to take the project. I have taken care to try and elevate the inspirational-quote-with-a-cool-picture-online to the level of an “artwork.” I realize this is a bit comical, but I sought to achieve it by having a relatively clear, philosophically motivated and backed concept; a rigorous although essentially intuition-based selection process regarding the raw materials (inevitably guided by my own aesthetics); and a logic of collage that avoided the arbitrary and kept ever in sight its core desire to “archive presencing” (the immomental). Of course, countless other themes relating to memory, time, energy, creativity and life got included and interwoven in this way, but in my mind the same imagination leap, the same seek for existent novelty was always at stake: “the” novelty of existence in its each-time-unique jaillisement, Hölderlin’s das Reinentsprungenes.

The process for creating a “cullet” almost invariably begins with a text that I find, often during occasions when I purposely sit down with a stack of random books (some of which I’ve never opened or read in full before) and flip through them looking for paragraphs and passages that catch my eye, which in this moment is on high-alert for complete worlds, for detachable morsels of thought that are seeking a new space to unfold into, one with more freedom. This activity I affectionately call “culling.” Once texts are found, I then go to the painting archive on my computer and phone (3,000 to date) and try to find a “match.” It is a bit like trying to find the words a good visual spouse or vice versa; after all, it being an archive, they’re going to have to live together for quite a while. Sometimes, of course, no match is found, or the text proves faulty. Numerous extractions lie dormant and single, like all the paintings waiting their mating moment. Often this process requires going online to find new images, which sparks off its own new searches and discoveries.

The Cullet project is motivated mostly by the pleasure I gain from these “heat seeking” missions. Every find is in principle random, which makes a successful pairing (I admit there aren’t so many) all the more precious. But despite the lightness of the production phase, up to now I have remained rather “purist” about the aesthetic of presentation, treating the wall a gallery space. Something about the project led me to be very careful and modest, out of respect for the materials – and for the immomental itself. While I do enjoy this very clean, art-book look, it has inhibited Cullet from its other original purpose, which preceded the whole idea of making the pairs: namely, to assemble and share raw materials for creative inspiration for others, any other. Continue reading →