Let’s say you start with nothing as in “I got plenty of nothing!”
There is so much nothing, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. It just sits there, moping, doing nothing.
There is no past, no future, because nothing is all one huge homogeneous nothing that doesn’t exist. It is eternal present, tenseless, where everything exists simultaneously but doesn’t. It rides the cusp between past and future unable to become and unable to realise itself as nothing emerges from the undifferentiated homogeneous chaos of nothing. There is no time for anything because there is only continuous nothing. There is no motion and displacement is meaningless because there is none of either. Transcendentally, there is absolutely nothing and because it is homogeneous there is nothing to relate to itself other than the nothingness of itself. There is no distinction between time and eternity because they are irrelevant in the way that present and eternity become one at the asymptotic meeting point of past and future at a present in infinity that is nothing. It is pure instantaneity. There is nothing by which to compare nothing to; there is no contrast; no differentiation; nothing to order; nothing to distance. Nothing is coexistent with itself and simultaneous in its becoming nothing throughout its nothingness. There is no cause and effect, because nothing is unchanging and so there is no cause and there is no effect to the change that is non-happening. In nothing there is no succession, because succession is meaningless in nothing, there was nothing before and nothing will come of it. There was never an a priori and there will never be an a posteriori. There is no origin to nothing and no eschatology to nothing. Nothing will never be anything, it will just be an impossible everything of nothing. There is no experience of duration because there is no becoming or unbecoming; the only emergence is nothing from which nothing emerges. There can be no memory to nothing because there is nothing to constitute an image of the past that can be transposed from the past or projected in to the future because past and future are non-existent and there are no images to be created from the chaotic homogeneity of nothingness. In nothing there can be no estimate of time elapsed because in nothingness there are no predicates, no background for differentiation, no future to differentiate it from whatever present is stasis. Nothing is 100% certainty. Nothing has no expanse, space or extension. Nothing cannot be contained in a receptacle and cannot contain nothingness as it has no boundaries or limits and because it is nothing in its infiniteness of nothing. Nothing is not space; it is neither empty nor full as it is not. It is not what is outside the universe or the universes or the multiverses. It is dimensionless and infinite in its nonbeing. Nothing is indivisible because nothing cannot be divided. There is nothing to divide. There are no objects or subjects in nothing, no subjectivity or point of view. Nothing is not relative to anything else or to itself. In nothing there is no place, position, or order. Potentiality is infinite in nothing, but there is nothing to catalyze incipiency. Mathematics, geometry or abstract thought of any kind cannot exist within it because there is nowhere for them to take form or take place in nothingness. Nothing is so homogeneous in its nothingness that being here or being there means nothing because they are both the same, identical in every respect nowhere. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Nothing is concretely unitary in its nothingness.
Faith is everything in nothing, because it engenders desire and thus action which in turn begets affect and gets the whole ball of wax going. And then you jump off the cliff and hope that Nietzsche was a liar.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Things Your Mother Never Thought She Taught You
I am ensconced in the darkness of my neighborhood cinema...I'm getting sleepy... Very sleepy... ow, the movie is about to start.
The CGI animation announcing the Feature Presentation starts up, but it is designed to play as if the projector is started cold and needs to get to speed as the film runs through it. The footage flickers slowly at first and then faster until the strobing of the flicker effect is no longer visible once the “projector has attained full speed.”
It gets me thinking of the butterfly shutter blades running before the stream of light; it reminds me of the flickering light show of a moth drawn to an open light bulb. Is the moth drawn by the heat of the light or the interplay of light on the faceting of the multi-lenticular structure of its eyes? Could the moth be experiencing pleasure from the lightshow in its visual cortex?
Doesn't this resonate with peek-a-boo? Now you see it and now you don’t. The image is there and then it’s not. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. 48 times a second. The alternation between a pleasureable (agreeable state) and an unpleasant (disagreeable state) that Lacan makes out as a “matter of an intersection between a play of occultation and an alternative scansion of two phonemes.” But contrary to the usual conception of Freudian pleasure, where pleasure happens in seeing the mother and displeasure in her absence, perhaps the pleasure exists elsewhere. Freud goes on at length at the erotogenic pleasurable aspects of sucking (for its own sake, i.e. a pacifier without milk) —perhaps a parallel sensorial mechanism (pleasurable machinism) can be extended to sight for its own sake without involving a subject?
According to Guattari’s reading of Lacan, there seems to exist a desire mechanism in the Fort-Da game where “the wait for the return of the object is constituted as an “anticipating provocation,” which takes form “in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations.” In playing the Fort-Da refrain, the projector becomes a producer of desire (negative affect) during the black out and a generator of affect during the instances of light. This creates a genderless masturbatory “compulsion to repeat” that is checked or contained by the plane of content. Although most readers would dismiss the shutter effect as too rapid an effect to be sensed (even subliminally) as a Fort-Da process, Oliver Sacks has shown through clinical study of his own practice that certain patients with Parkinsonism generate and react to vibratory stimuli many times faster than the shutter of the cinematic apparatus.
I thus foreground the flickering of the shutter as a possible localized sensorial excitation capable of autonomic arousal: could the Fort-Da of the shutter flicker be the generator of affect that generates the dynamic autonomic response that makes the film so eminently watchable and differentiates this medium from all others?
The CGI animation announcing the Feature Presentation starts up, but it is designed to play as if the projector is started cold and needs to get to speed as the film runs through it. The footage flickers slowly at first and then faster until the strobing of the flicker effect is no longer visible once the “projector has attained full speed.”
It gets me thinking of the butterfly shutter blades running before the stream of light; it reminds me of the flickering light show of a moth drawn to an open light bulb. Is the moth drawn by the heat of the light or the interplay of light on the faceting of the multi-lenticular structure of its eyes? Could the moth be experiencing pleasure from the lightshow in its visual cortex?
Doesn't this resonate with peek-a-boo? Now you see it and now you don’t. The image is there and then it’s not. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. 48 times a second. The alternation between a pleasureable (agreeable state) and an unpleasant (disagreeable state) that Lacan makes out as a “matter of an intersection between a play of occultation and an alternative scansion of two phonemes.” But contrary to the usual conception of Freudian pleasure, where pleasure happens in seeing the mother and displeasure in her absence, perhaps the pleasure exists elsewhere. Freud goes on at length at the erotogenic pleasurable aspects of sucking (for its own sake, i.e. a pacifier without milk) —perhaps a parallel sensorial mechanism (pleasurable machinism) can be extended to sight for its own sake without involving a subject?
According to Guattari’s reading of Lacan, there seems to exist a desire mechanism in the Fort-Da game where “the wait for the return of the object is constituted as an “anticipating provocation,” which takes form “in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations.” In playing the Fort-Da refrain, the projector becomes a producer of desire (negative affect) during the black out and a generator of affect during the instances of light. This creates a genderless masturbatory “compulsion to repeat” that is checked or contained by the plane of content. Although most readers would dismiss the shutter effect as too rapid an effect to be sensed (even subliminally) as a Fort-Da process, Oliver Sacks has shown through clinical study of his own practice that certain patients with Parkinsonism generate and react to vibratory stimuli many times faster than the shutter of the cinematic apparatus.
I thus foreground the flickering of the shutter as a possible localized sensorial excitation capable of autonomic arousal: could the Fort-Da of the shutter flicker be the generator of affect that generates the dynamic autonomic response that makes the film so eminently watchable and differentiates this medium from all others?
Saturday, January 24, 2009
WW Spinoza S?*
As you already know, my amoeba amiga doesn't seem moved by much—when I come around to see what she is up to, let’s just say that she doesn’t do handstands! But even if she can't be bothered to wave when I drop by, her reactions to salt and sugar constitute simple yet complex adaptative behaviours that can be imbued with much more meaning than simple adaptation. And when it comes to basic, simple adaptation to an environment, Theo Jansen’s (http://www.strandbeest.com ) strandbeests (Animaris Percipiere & Ventosa) come to mind. And maybe because all this takes place in Holland, it kinda makes me think of Spinoza.
Yes, WW Spinoza S? He would see these beasts running lickety-split down the sand flats, come to a stop in 3 inches of water and backtrack--like sensible adults, these creatures know better than to get their feet wet! Spinoza would understand that one of the strandbeest’s perceptual mechanisms works in such a way that if the tide comes up or the wind sends the creature towards open water and its sensors detect water, their plastic, soft-drink bottle bladders make them go uncontrollably -- from wet to dry land. Actually, the sensors do not sense water: when the sensor’s tip is immersed in water it creates a suction that affects very rudimentary valves, which in turn make the strandbeest move in the opposite direction—if you blocked the sensor with gum, it would likely have the same effect. Yes, WW Massumi S? However, its single channel cognitive performativity provides the strandbeest with a limited responsive repertoire. Yet, even with one perceptive mechanism, we can speak of strandbeests being propelled to action through this cognitive channel by adequate ideas. Can we push this further and speak of the strandbeest’s existence as capable of affective experience?
The biggest hurdle in applying Spinoza's ideas of affect to the strandbeest is that he uses humanity as a paradigm for his theory of affect. And that when he uses the word mind, it would seem to imply that affect is actually the dynamic envelope of the individual affects of whatever constitutes consciousness, i.e. the affect that expresses the compounded underlying affects that are constitutive of the presentness of being. In the case of the strandbeest, its consciousness is constituted by a binary mutually-exclusive affective response to move forward or to move backward. Now, because the strandbeest’s sensory circuitry is so rudimentary, the envelope curve of its affective being comprises one affect, and this leaves very little room or finesse for affective modulation. As clever a creation as a strandbeest is, it is still a brute.
Yet, despite its limitations, the strandbeest is a complete being. It might not be very communicative, but in the way that it reacts to its environment, is this not just pure being? How do I know that it does not think? If we see the mind as as the ever-changing, ever moving entity of presentness interacting with our memory, could the strandbeest have a mind or is it enough for it to have a body? It’s smart enough to retreat from water, and because this affects its self-preservation, can’t we say that it retreats in fear? Can we not also say that even though it is not very smart, it has infallible memory since it consistently remembers to act in exactly the same way in similar conditions? Is its limited cognitive ability sufficient to generate images in its small mind? When the sensors and the valves configure the need to retreat, does a strandbeest generate an image in its mind of what constitutes retreat and then act on it? How do we know that the strandbeest’s private unexpressed cosmology does not imagine the Arizona salt-flats as Heaven and being stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as its own vision of Hell? Why should we be so keen to need to know where lies its seat of consciousness when we don’t really know where lies our own? Does the strandbeest understand freedom as a steady 10 knot wind propelling it across an infinite salt-flat? And as it hums along down the beach, like a tourist taking a solitary early-morning walk by water’s edge at a resort in the Caribbean, couldn’t we say that that constitutes pure joy?
*What Would Spinoza Say?
Yes, WW Spinoza S? He would see these beasts running lickety-split down the sand flats, come to a stop in 3 inches of water and backtrack--like sensible adults, these creatures know better than to get their feet wet! Spinoza would understand that one of the strandbeest’s perceptual mechanisms works in such a way that if the tide comes up or the wind sends the creature towards open water and its sensors detect water, their plastic, soft-drink bottle bladders make them go uncontrollably -- from wet to dry land. Actually, the sensors do not sense water: when the sensor’s tip is immersed in water it creates a suction that affects very rudimentary valves, which in turn make the strandbeest move in the opposite direction—if you blocked the sensor with gum, it would likely have the same effect. Yes, WW Massumi S? However, its single channel cognitive performativity provides the strandbeest with a limited responsive repertoire. Yet, even with one perceptive mechanism, we can speak of strandbeests being propelled to action through this cognitive channel by adequate ideas. Can we push this further and speak of the strandbeest’s existence as capable of affective experience?
The biggest hurdle in applying Spinoza's ideas of affect to the strandbeest is that he uses humanity as a paradigm for his theory of affect. And that when he uses the word mind, it would seem to imply that affect is actually the dynamic envelope of the individual affects of whatever constitutes consciousness, i.e. the affect that expresses the compounded underlying affects that are constitutive of the presentness of being. In the case of the strandbeest, its consciousness is constituted by a binary mutually-exclusive affective response to move forward or to move backward. Now, because the strandbeest’s sensory circuitry is so rudimentary, the envelope curve of its affective being comprises one affect, and this leaves very little room or finesse for affective modulation. As clever a creation as a strandbeest is, it is still a brute.
Yet, despite its limitations, the strandbeest is a complete being. It might not be very communicative, but in the way that it reacts to its environment, is this not just pure being? How do I know that it does not think? If we see the mind as as the ever-changing, ever moving entity of presentness interacting with our memory, could the strandbeest have a mind or is it enough for it to have a body? It’s smart enough to retreat from water, and because this affects its self-preservation, can’t we say that it retreats in fear? Can we not also say that even though it is not very smart, it has infallible memory since it consistently remembers to act in exactly the same way in similar conditions? Is its limited cognitive ability sufficient to generate images in its small mind? When the sensors and the valves configure the need to retreat, does a strandbeest generate an image in its mind of what constitutes retreat and then act on it? How do we know that the strandbeest’s private unexpressed cosmology does not imagine the Arizona salt-flats as Heaven and being stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as its own vision of Hell? Why should we be so keen to need to know where lies its seat of consciousness when we don’t really know where lies our own? Does the strandbeest understand freedom as a steady 10 knot wind propelling it across an infinite salt-flat? And as it hums along down the beach, like a tourist taking a solitary early-morning walk by water’s edge at a resort in the Caribbean, couldn’t we say that that constitutes pure joy?
*What Would Spinoza Say?
Friday, January 23, 2009
My Amoeba Amiga
According to embodied cognition, the brain is hardwired for metaphorical understanding. What are these basic metaphors that are so basic and essential in nature with which we can understand reality, i.e. give duration, consistence to phenomena? I asked my amoeba amiga and all I can say is that she wasn’t exceedingly effusive. She seems to be moved by gradients or variations in concentrations in her environment of suspension or by variations and gradients of light and shadow. So while I mused on this, I put a grain of salt and a grain of sugar at opposite ends of her petri dish and let her enjoy the affects of that for a while.
Putting myself in someone else’s shoes, or in someone else’s cilia so to speak, I ask myself what would consciousness be like if I were an amoeba? When it comes to salt and sugar, likely not too different! But how can we deduce or intuit a model of consciousness based on the amoeba? I don’t think that a human being and an amoeba are the same, but as sentient beings I believe that we share reactive propensities towards our environment. I wondered about what cognitive metaphors she would need for her individual perpetuation as well as be a happening, happy amoeba in her own kind of suspenseful way.
If the amoeba is flat, the pull of gravity will likely have forced the evolution of a perception of above and below, would it have a concept for faciality or symmetry? Being encased in an osmotic membrane, the amoeba is likely sensitive to salinity, so would it have an idea for danger? Being on Earth, on a rotating planet dependent on the Sun’s energy, suspended in liquid, the amoeba is likely also sensitive to gradients of heat, and possibly sensitive to the forces arising from centripetal rotation; its cilia are likely sensitive to movement or microcurrents in its suspension fluid. So, does my amoeba amiga see the light and move towards it? Because it’s hotter in the light, or because there’s more oxygen in brightly lit water? When it moves towards the light, does the amoeba feel happy or suffused by religious sentiment? Would an amoeba consider other amoebas hot and want to siddle up close to them? Or would it consider them stand-offish if they moved away from it? Is my amoeba suffused with love, and rejection and self-loathing as it considers the distance of others?
I don't know whether the physiological aspects of my discussion are valid or not but the concerns could be. There appears to be a certain amount of litterature on cellular communication and response mechanisms.Perhaps there's something here that can extend all the way up the food chain to human scsale and beyond? Spinozist ideas as to what constitutes a body and how it is constituted... something to thing about.
Putting myself in someone else’s shoes, or in someone else’s cilia so to speak, I ask myself what would consciousness be like if I were an amoeba? When it comes to salt and sugar, likely not too different! But how can we deduce or intuit a model of consciousness based on the amoeba? I don’t think that a human being and an amoeba are the same, but as sentient beings I believe that we share reactive propensities towards our environment. I wondered about what cognitive metaphors she would need for her individual perpetuation as well as be a happening, happy amoeba in her own kind of suspenseful way.
If the amoeba is flat, the pull of gravity will likely have forced the evolution of a perception of above and below, would it have a concept for faciality or symmetry? Being encased in an osmotic membrane, the amoeba is likely sensitive to salinity, so would it have an idea for danger? Being on Earth, on a rotating planet dependent on the Sun’s energy, suspended in liquid, the amoeba is likely also sensitive to gradients of heat, and possibly sensitive to the forces arising from centripetal rotation; its cilia are likely sensitive to movement or microcurrents in its suspension fluid. So, does my amoeba amiga see the light and move towards it? Because it’s hotter in the light, or because there’s more oxygen in brightly lit water? When it moves towards the light, does the amoeba feel happy or suffused by religious sentiment? Would an amoeba consider other amoebas hot and want to siddle up close to them? Or would it consider them stand-offish if they moved away from it? Is my amoeba suffused with love, and rejection and self-loathing as it considers the distance of others?
I don't know whether the physiological aspects of my discussion are valid or not but the concerns could be. There appears to be a certain amount of litterature on cellular communication and response mechanisms.Perhaps there's something here that can extend all the way up the food chain to human scsale and beyond? Spinozist ideas as to what constitutes a body and how it is constituted... something to thing about.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
It doesn't slice or dice, but spirally rices!
A shot is imbued with a distinct yet ambiguous temporality that tunes the viewer to the objective subjectivity at hand--that which Tarkovsky calls Time Pressure. But to say that there is one temporality in the shot would be incorrect as there are various temporalities that manifest themselves within it but which overall produce one overarching temporal effect. The one and many yet again reconstituted as affect under the guises of time! It's like orchestral music where each instrument has its own affective temporality that works together with that of the other instruments to create a unitary envelope of unfolding temporality and becoming affect. Although the affect we carry away is fleeting but individuated i.e. consistent and ever-changing, reading any shot closely, we can see that there is more to the surface than meets the mind. Unlike music, there is no analog linear “mathematical wave function” that can be applied upon the image to reconstitutes the multiversity of "visual temporalities" in a shot. An image is not read as a linear stream of information--video can be "visualized" on a "waveform" monitor or relayed as a digital stream of binary code, but not in such a way that prima facie usually makes sense to a television spectator.
On the other hand, music can be digitised as a linear "waveform" as one can see on any digital audio processing software such as ProTools. But the problem remains: how does the auditory function manage to separate the various instruments, the various subjectivites, the disparate temporal saliencies of the various instruments out of the streaming audio? To keep it simple stupid, perhaps the sensorial workings of the inner ear resemble more a manual food mill than a drum, where raw vegetable sound is spirally pressed through a sieve, where the parallel processing capabilities of the brain can keep track of the various riced streams of pureed sound? This could imply that the brain is monitoring a variety of subjectivities, keeping track of an assortment of temporalities and as such juggling a variety of consciousnesses that are melded into one as affect. Perhaps another analogy would be a RADAR screen where a rotating arm sweeps circularly keeping the movement of various objects in perspective and in relative relation to the entire area encompassed by the beaconing scan.
Could affect (as the end-result of the interpretive function of the basic metaphors realised) be the flavor of temporality? Does affect constitute the temporal saliency of consciousness? Is music a metaphor for the basic rhythms of consciousness? Is time the affective intuition of consciousness? Is affect the musical intuition of life?
On the other hand, music can be digitised as a linear "waveform" as one can see on any digital audio processing software such as ProTools. But the problem remains: how does the auditory function manage to separate the various instruments, the various subjectivites, the disparate temporal saliencies of the various instruments out of the streaming audio? To keep it simple stupid, perhaps the sensorial workings of the inner ear resemble more a manual food mill than a drum, where raw vegetable sound is spirally pressed through a sieve, where the parallel processing capabilities of the brain can keep track of the various riced streams of pureed sound? This could imply that the brain is monitoring a variety of subjectivities, keeping track of an assortment of temporalities and as such juggling a variety of consciousnesses that are melded into one as affect. Perhaps another analogy would be a RADAR screen where a rotating arm sweeps circularly keeping the movement of various objects in perspective and in relative relation to the entire area encompassed by the beaconing scan.
Could affect (as the end-result of the interpretive function of the basic metaphors realised) be the flavor of temporality? Does affect constitute the temporal saliency of consciousness? Is music a metaphor for the basic rhythms of consciousness? Is time the affective intuition of consciousness? Is affect the musical intuition of life?
The Equal and Opposite Reaction of Affect
If we accept that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, we could speak of affect as the body's response to actuality. I choose to not phrase it as the body's response to an actuality because this would imply that actuality exists as a stop-and-go progression of discrete events that elicits a stop-and-go progression of discrete responses from our body. In the same way that consciousness and sensation are continuous, so is affect, except that the response of affect is delayed by a half-second! Affect is the body’s outcome, its response-ability to actuality sensed. If a plant has reactive ability, a response-ability to its environment, we could say for example that its heliotropy represents its affective reaction to photic energy. As Kant posits “the effect of an object upon the faculty of representation so far as we are affected by the set object is sensation." Kant doesn’t seem to provide for affect: the faculty of representation which “realizes” sensation would be the terminal point/satisfaction of the effect of an object as a given. It’s a massive pile-up at the dead-end of the one-way street where the representation of the image is the end all and be all of “intuition.” There is too much energy coming in without it being dissipated: the process of dissipation of this energy is affect.
Although Bergson and Deleuze are the philosophers most talked about in film theory today, Kant is likely the more influential and to date the more enduring in that his ideas appear to lay the foundation for the way that understanding happens in Film Theory. Most of orthodox film theory conceives the spectator as a passive, inactive onlooker that soaks in the glow from the screen, like ablack hole: a Kantian disembodied sensibility that mediates the subject-object relation where the faculty of representation is simply a reflection of the spectacle. The plant example constitutes an interesting metaphor for film--unless one is a botanist or an avid gardener, one never considers the plant as a heliotropic organism; the sun beams its rays, and the plant takes them in. Although it is a dynamic relation, it is conceived as a simple predicate imbued with stasis: the sun is up-above, invariable in its beaming, and the plant is below, impassively ever-receptive.
But given affect, we can position the spectator so as to dismiss the idea of the passive observer “taking in” the spectacle; we could liken him to the plant bathing in sunlight and the physical and psychological reaction to the imagery unfolding on the screen as his very own heliotropy. And like the slow-moving plant, there is a certain amount of activity going on behind that deceptively static impassive facade. There is movement happening on account of the sensorial activity taking place: the retina is being bombarded with varying intensities and frequencies light, and the eardrum is vibrating (as is the rest of the body’s surface) in conjunction with the varying low-frequency pressure waves emerging from the speakers. Movement implies change--the causal principle requires it. And to this onslaught of energy on our sensoria, the body reacts: the pulse quickens, the palms moisten, the pupils dilate, the mouth gets dry, our legs tense up... we don’t register any of these responses individually unless we pay particular attention, but while we monitor one, the rest are still going... we usually register them all together, as a bundle, as the envelope curve of the body’s reaction... as affect.
Although Bergson and Deleuze are the philosophers most talked about in film theory today, Kant is likely the more influential and to date the more enduring in that his ideas appear to lay the foundation for the way that understanding happens in Film Theory. Most of orthodox film theory conceives the spectator as a passive, inactive onlooker that soaks in the glow from the screen, like ablack hole: a Kantian disembodied sensibility that mediates the subject-object relation where the faculty of representation is simply a reflection of the spectacle. The plant example constitutes an interesting metaphor for film--unless one is a botanist or an avid gardener, one never considers the plant as a heliotropic organism; the sun beams its rays, and the plant takes them in. Although it is a dynamic relation, it is conceived as a simple predicate imbued with stasis: the sun is up-above, invariable in its beaming, and the plant is below, impassively ever-receptive.
But given affect, we can position the spectator so as to dismiss the idea of the passive observer “taking in” the spectacle; we could liken him to the plant bathing in sunlight and the physical and psychological reaction to the imagery unfolding on the screen as his very own heliotropy. And like the slow-moving plant, there is a certain amount of activity going on behind that deceptively static impassive facade. There is movement happening on account of the sensorial activity taking place: the retina is being bombarded with varying intensities and frequencies light, and the eardrum is vibrating (as is the rest of the body’s surface) in conjunction with the varying low-frequency pressure waves emerging from the speakers. Movement implies change--the causal principle requires it. And to this onslaught of energy on our sensoria, the body reacts: the pulse quickens, the palms moisten, the pupils dilate, the mouth gets dry, our legs tense up... we don’t register any of these responses individually unless we pay particular attention, but while we monitor one, the rest are still going... we usually register them all together, as a bundle, as the envelope curve of the body’s reaction... as affect.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Les Quatre Vérités
What is a concept? It is an approximation of duration. What is to create? To approximate duration. What is duration? Consistency delimited by intervals. What is desire? The inherent drive of ( ) to establish consistency. Immanence is fractal in that it is infinitely consistent and continuous in the extensiveness of its dimensions. What is truth? Continuity between durations at different intervals.
Smoke on the Water
In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant relates an amusing anecdote about a philosopher being asked “What is the weight of smoke?” The answer given was: “Subtract from the weight of the burnt wood the weight of the remaining ashes, and you will have the weight of the smoke.”
Although Kant’s anecdote refers to the determination of substance through phenomena, we can use the same method to analyse mimesis itself. If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark (yes, I know, it is all relative.. but we are human beings after all that work pretty much the same way from one exemplar to the next) and compare that to the everyday reality of the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen “like on Earth”—except for the neighbor’s girlfriend running around in her negligee! The way the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our everyday shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for subjective consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does.
If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs with that which we have come to expect as objective reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with what could be categorized as a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.
Although Kant’s anecdote refers to the determination of substance through phenomena, we can use the same method to analyse mimesis itself. If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark (yes, I know, it is all relative.. but we are human beings after all that work pretty much the same way from one exemplar to the next) and compare that to the everyday reality of the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen “like on Earth”—except for the neighbor’s girlfriend running around in her negligee! The way the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our everyday shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for subjective consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does.
If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs with that which we have come to expect as objective reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with what could be categorized as a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Trying to get my head (& writing) around something
Traditional thinking would have us believe that perception is something that takes place in our brain as the part of consciousness that processes sensorial data without actually engaging memory: the stream of sensorial data is transformed by the brain into imagery that the audio-visual center in our heads plays back to us live as consciousness. Supposedly, the brain takes sensorial raw material, processes it and provides us with an on-going sound and light show that is dubbed reality. This line of thinking creates the perennial divide between the unitary I that does the processing and the other that is processed. The me and the not-me, the me-subject and the it-object that exist as definite, static, stand-alone entities.
A different way of thinking has thought focusing on the infinite extensive reticulation of the shimmering succession of subjectivity and objectivity where progression moves in the any which way of relation and happens as quickly or as slowly as it needs to. In this conception, perception is the realization of the relation. It is not something that happens within us, but within the becoming relation bounded by a ceasing to become and a coming of becoming. Within this discontinuity, perception happens as the affirmation of participation in the unceasing creative process of relation. Any instance of affirmation of becoming is an image, and the succession of these images is consciousness. Reality becomes any instance whatever within the process of all possible creation, a subset of the infinite possibilities of relation. And what constitutes me or you or it is the self-consciousness of the endurance of subsets of relations where affect is the residual afterglow of relation. The me-whatever or the you-whatever: sugar in hot coffee!
A different way of thinking has thought focusing on the infinite extensive reticulation of the shimmering succession of subjectivity and objectivity where progression moves in the any which way of relation and happens as quickly or as slowly as it needs to. In this conception, perception is the realization of the relation. It is not something that happens within us, but within the becoming relation bounded by a ceasing to become and a coming of becoming. Within this discontinuity, perception happens as the affirmation of participation in the unceasing creative process of relation. Any instance of affirmation of becoming is an image, and the succession of these images is consciousness. Reality becomes any instance whatever within the process of all possible creation, a subset of the infinite possibilities of relation. And what constitutes me or you or it is the self-consciousness of the endurance of subsets of relations where affect is the residual afterglow of relation. The me-whatever or the you-whatever: sugar in hot coffee!
A Sight for Sore Ears
I asked Steve Wolloshen, the experimental filmmaker from Montreal and producer of a hand-made animated film to Brubeck's Take 5, if he ever played back the animation without the music track. He answered that there was no point to it as the visual and the audio worked in tandem. Having asked it, I kinda felt stupid about the Duh! dud but being a firm believer in the "No such thing as a stupid question" (for obvious reasons), I strove to find the silver lining to the sow's ear and came up with the corollary that a question may be stupidly posed.
With hindsight I guess what I was trying to ask was, "If the visuals are super tight with the music, when you turn off the music does the eye respond to the visuals the same way that the ear responds to sound? Can sight acquire the sensorial specificity of hearing when the visual stimuli requires it to do so? Do we see differently when we ask sight to perform the task of hearing visually?" The question comes from reading Bergson's Matter & Memory p. 50 "[As per Lotze,] 'sound waves which should give to the eye the sensation of light or luminous vibrations which should give to the ear a sound.' The truth is that all the facts alleged can be brought back to a single type: the one stymulus capable of inducing the same sensation, are either an electric current or a mechanical cause capable of determining in the organ a modification of electrical equilibrium." I kinda feel that the aural circuit is different, from the visual circuit, or the olfactory circuit... but can they be made to "perceive" in the mode of the other's specificity?
Another thing that didn't come up (but should've) in reading Bergson was the translated term "sensitive nerve" in Deleuze is nowhere to be found (up to the end of Chap.1), what did come up was sensorial nerve. I don't have Cinema 1 & 2 in French so I've never checked it... Does Deleuze say nerf sensible?
With hindsight I guess what I was trying to ask was, "If the visuals are super tight with the music, when you turn off the music does the eye respond to the visuals the same way that the ear responds to sound? Can sight acquire the sensorial specificity of hearing when the visual stimuli requires it to do so? Do we see differently when we ask sight to perform the task of hearing visually?" The question comes from reading Bergson's Matter & Memory p. 50 "[As per Lotze,] 'sound waves which should give to the eye the sensation of light or luminous vibrations which should give to the ear a sound.' The truth is that all the facts alleged can be brought back to a single type: the one stymulus capable of inducing the same sensation, are either an electric current or a mechanical cause capable of determining in the organ a modification of electrical equilibrium." I kinda feel that the aural circuit is different, from the visual circuit, or the olfactory circuit... but can they be made to "perceive" in the mode of the other's specificity?
Another thing that didn't come up (but should've) in reading Bergson was the translated term "sensitive nerve" in Deleuze is nowhere to be found (up to the end of Chap.1), what did come up was sensorial nerve. I don't have Cinema 1 & 2 in French so I've never checked it... Does Deleuze say nerf sensible?
The Digital Passion of Resolution
I felt compelled to rent and watch Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc after reading Deleuze's references to it and it was fun to feel the close-ups in a new way. It's great how Dreyer lets the subtleties of expression run the full course of their complexities as they cross the actors' faces like slow motion lightning forcing a retracing of the rethinking of the sequence that has just transpired. It's 1928 and it shows... Silent film has fully developed its story-telling potential and is now ready to go beyond the action-image. It's now ready to accept the dimension of the "internal", except that it gets hijacked by sound for another 20 years. Dreyer's Joan of Arc seems to go that extra push into the inside by giving time to allow the full modulation of feeling on each face as expression of feeling-thought in motion. And even if we can't see the forces that generate the thought, we can definitely see the results as cues as to how to read and summarize what precedes it while colouring our intuition and expectations as to that which is coming. We could call the beautiful b&w images hyper-real due to the overall look of the film created by superior optics, incredible amounts of light, a super-fine grain stock, the filtration of the light to offer preferential treatment to select parts of the light spectrum during shooting and the colour palette used in the art-direction to keep everything within grey midtones. But in contrast to the hyper-reality of HD TV, I wonder if the heightened sense of reality and the crispness of the resolution of the image in HD is not because there is more but because there is less, a "subtraction" of sorts, the contrast between the fine-grain resolution of the retina vs. the fine coarseness (or the coarse fineness?) of the HD chips. What I mean by this is a sampling/representation that lacks continuity in the spectrum of representation (or a too coarse a sampling to define the spectrum of presentation) and we feel that it is hyper-real because there is not as much fuzziness to figure out in the making sense of the image. We feel the choppiness of digital sampling as crispness and the smooth continuity of the analog as fuzzy and out of focus. The "fattiness" of listening to vinyl is so much more satisfying than the lack of presence and dry crispness of a CD and as Brian Massumi says it's perhaps because fat (gras) indiscriminately affects all your taste buds--it provides broad-band satisfaction to the full-spectrum resolution of your (gustatory) sensoria. Perhaps the sensorial pleasure of roundness and smoothness of film lies in the continuous full-spectrum depth and complexity of the analog? Perhaps we are being sold on the super-crispness of the digital as a positive when in fact it is a negative and a shortcoming dictated by the imperatives or limitations of the technology and their marketing strategies? 0 or 1 vs 0>x<1? Bonjour Zeno, comment tu vas?
Close-up Bites
Nadine Gordimer
Andrew Wyeth
I just received a link to a site/film/book/process presentation called Wisdom which has some very interesting portraits of "celebrities" at http://www.wisdombook.org/
The director/photographer, Andrew Zuckerman, http://www.andrewzuckerman.com/ comes from the nether-world of advertising where he does some fast-shutter speed pics of animals and of various objects/products exploding. The Grey Goose Vodka video with slo-mo pours and air bubbles through vodka on ice was kinda nice.
Zuckerman gives a good interview in the making-of video of Wisdom and the various portraits are quite interesting. Although most of the celebrities presented are not part of my firmament of star celebrities, the portraits present a stillness that I have not seen in portraits by Avedon, Newman, Bourque-White, Penn, Arbus or Liebowitz. The portraits are the antimatter of Weegee's crowd shots. Not all the portraits have this "still" quality about them, but the ones that seem to exude it (to my eye) would be: Dave Brubeck, Zbeniew Brzezinski (though it is more distant), Dr. Terrence FitzGerald, Frank Gehry, Dr. Jane Goodall, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Kissinger, Willie Nelson, Michael Parkinson, Helen Suzman, Andrew Wyeth.
The portraits seem to be part of a different tradition than what we conceive today as a head shot. They mix Avedon's white background portaits with romanticized 1930's portraiture: the informality of Avedon travels inside while exhibiting a romanticism devoid of passion, as if the face conveyed their individual process of spatializing ideas but without the ideas.
Traditionally, it is contended that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, but the framing would seem to argue for a different stance: Zuckerman would have it happen on the bridge of the nose and parts of the cheeks! The framing gives undue weight to the lower part of the face--and though usually this means below the nose, in these images it would mean everyting below the eyes. The eyes are relegated to the back-seat as the face is presented as a whole rather than as a association of provileged parts. There is something going on between the nose and eyes that makes you look at the face in its entirety. It's as if Zuckerman tries to decenter the gaze and force you to see the face as a totality. In the way that we would pull out features from the background, i.e. she has a stong chin or he has soft eyes, the face conflates the individual features into a whole that metaphorically exudes their take on life. If I say that metaphor is the process by which concepts are spatialized, it could mean that these images of faces individually impose intervals and duration whose particular time signatures would be stamped on these faces. I don't know what they are thinking, but I feel like I might have an idea as to how they process the world... perhaps this is why I look so puzzled and bewildered in photographs? Peace out.
What a Difference a Difference Makes
In a text I’ve been working on titled What is an act of creation? Deleuze addresses a group of filmmakers in 1979 and asks them a number of questions pertinent to the cinema: “What is an act of creation?” “What is the truly cinematic?” and “What is a cinematic idea?” I’d like to share his answer to the third question because I was thinking and writing about Solaris in pretty much the same way but in a more “concrete” manner. The translation of Deleuze’s text is kinda choppy—you can ascribe that to the translator (yours truly) or to the fact that it was based on an audio transcript... I didn’t try to smooth it out any more than this because I wanted to show Deleuze’s formulation of ideas as he presented them.
“It’s in what’s proper to the cinema that one finds cinematographic ideas. To dissociate the visual from the aural, is… why can’t it be done in theatre? Why? It is possible, but when it is done in the theatre, unless the theatre has the means to do it, we say that the theatre has adopted it from the cinema. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is such a cinematographic idea to ensure the dissociation of the seen and the heard and the spoken—of the visual and the aural, that... that it would seem to address the idea of what is it to have a cinematic idea? Everyone knows what that consists of. I will answer in my own terms because... a voice speaks of something, at the same time. Thus, we speak of something, while at the same time, they make us see something else, and finally, that which they speak to us about is underneath what we are being made to see. That third point is really important. You can feel that, and that is a place the theatre cannot follow. The theatre can adopt the first two propositions. They show us something but we are made to see something else. Meanwhile, that which is spoken of lies beneath that which we are made to see—and it is necessary, or else the first two operations would have absolutely no sense, they would be utterly uninteresting. If you prefer, we could say, in other terms more..., the word rises into the air. The word rises into the air at the same time that the earth, which we can see, sinks more and more, or rather at the same time that this word which rises into the air speaks to us, that which it speaks to us about sinks beneath the ground.”
I had been thinking about Solaris (what else is there to think about?)and about what makes it such an engrossing film. From the point of view of the average North-American spectator whose sci-fi expectations have been modelled around Hollywood sci-fi fare such as Bladerunner (1982) or The Terminator (1984), Solaris has no sexiness or pazazz. In comparison to The Matrix (1999), the visual effects are totally unspectacular. As entertainment, Solaris lacks an action-motivated plot that is engaging and easy to hook into like Star Wars (1977) or War of the Worlds (2005). In contrast to Alien (1979) the horrific aspect of the “alien monster” is totally played down and unlike Close Encounters (1977), the alien contact angle is anti-climactic. In comparison to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) or 12 Monkeys (1995) the time-travel aspect is totally downplayed. The narrative itself is intractable and refractory: as a drama, the average viewer would likely have no patience or common-ground with Tarkovsky’s humanistic intellectual vision and would find the whole thing boring. There’s also a disconnect from the alienating and distancing effects of non-North-American cultural artefacts (art direction, unfamiliar wardrobe, foreign language, unhabitual concerns, unfamiliar talent, etc). From a North American perspective and its deeply entrenched generic expectations, we are presented with a film that on all surficial considerations comes up short on every front.
In spite of this, the film is consistently mentioned on the lists of best sci-fi films of all time. What exactly is it about the film that makes it so engrossing? If this cannot be gleaned from the surface aspects of the filmic image, where do we find the value-added content? We have no choice but to look at the film in a different way, not for what’s there on screen but to how it means or to what it points to. But just how does the film mean other than what is on screen? What is it about the image being shown that points us to look at the image in a different way? What exactly constitutes this different way?
If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark and compare that to the everyday reality on the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen on Earth the same way. How the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does. If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs from that which we have come to expect as reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.
In linguistics, this methodology is known as the analysis of deep structure and allows us to analyse the temporal manifestation of abstract meanings as a narrative whose parts are constituted by what we are seeing on screen but not necessarily a part of it. This kind of analysis allows us to discern narrative structures based on the progression of pictorial stylistics, issues of temporality, the representation of consciousness, the manifestation of the intrusion of memory, individuation, becoming, psychological concerns, etc. i.e. any metaphorical or conceptual process, in terms of its manifest temporal unfolding.
Cognitive science makes use of these elements of abstract meaning based on embodied metaphors as constitutive of sets which can be analysed through set theory or Boolean logic to analyse their constitution and interaction in order to create blocs of conceptual meaning as duration. Set theory in itself provides an interesting metaphor for conceiving the plane of immanence as the open, divergent infinite set of all possible elements of meaning and subsets as durations as presented in the philosophies of Bergson, Bachelard and Deleuze. The process of constituting and deriving meaning in cinema can be looked at in terms of set theory, where the infinite but closed number of cells of manifest and abstract meaning constitute the work. The subsets constituted by these various elements can be dissolved and reconstituted into different sets with different scope, emphasis, scale i.e. a variety of intervals, in order to investigate different concerns or affinities such as auteurism, the evolution of meaning of camera movement within the works of a particular filmmaker, etc. And these affinities do not only manifest themselves at a surficial level but at a hidden or abstract level.
Heidegger in Identity and Difference writes:
“Always and everywhere Being means Being of Existence... In the case of the Being of Existence and the Existence of Being we are concerned every time with a difference. We think of Being, therefore, as object only when we think it as different from Existence and think Existence as different from Being. Thus difference proper emerges. If we attempt to form an image of it, we shall discover that we are immediately tempted to comprehend difference as a relation which our thinking has added to Being and to Existence. As a result, difference is reduced to a distinction, to a product of human intelligence. However, let us assume for once that difference is an addition resulting from our forming of a mental image, the problem arises: An addition of what? And the answer we get is: to Existence. Well and good. But what do we mean by this “Existence”? What else do we mean by it than such as it is? Thus we accommodate the alleged addition, the idea of a difference, under Being. Yet, “Being” itself proclaims: Being which is Existence. Wherever we would introduce difference as an alleged addition, we always meet Existence and Being in their difference... Existence and Being, each in its own way, are to be discovered through and in difference... What we call difference we find everywhere and at all times in the object of thought, in Existence as such, and we come up against it in a manner so free of doubt that we do not pay any particular attention to it... What is the meaning of this oft-mentioned Being? If under these conditions Being exhibits itself as a being of..., in the genitive of difference, then the question just asked would be more to the point if rephrased: What in your opinion is difference if both Being as well as Existence each in their own way appear through difference?
There is something here, except I don't know what it is... equating the process of subtraction as differenciation. It would seem to mean that the parallel in the processes imply that the secondary meanings operate as a state of Being... Interesting...
“It’s in what’s proper to the cinema that one finds cinematographic ideas. To dissociate the visual from the aural, is… why can’t it be done in theatre? Why? It is possible, but when it is done in the theatre, unless the theatre has the means to do it, we say that the theatre has adopted it from the cinema. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is such a cinematographic idea to ensure the dissociation of the seen and the heard and the spoken—of the visual and the aural, that... that it would seem to address the idea of what is it to have a cinematic idea? Everyone knows what that consists of. I will answer in my own terms because... a voice speaks of something, at the same time. Thus, we speak of something, while at the same time, they make us see something else, and finally, that which they speak to us about is underneath what we are being made to see. That third point is really important. You can feel that, and that is a place the theatre cannot follow. The theatre can adopt the first two propositions. They show us something but we are made to see something else. Meanwhile, that which is spoken of lies beneath that which we are made to see—and it is necessary, or else the first two operations would have absolutely no sense, they would be utterly uninteresting. If you prefer, we could say, in other terms more..., the word rises into the air. The word rises into the air at the same time that the earth, which we can see, sinks more and more, or rather at the same time that this word which rises into the air speaks to us, that which it speaks to us about sinks beneath the ground.”
I had been thinking about Solaris (what else is there to think about?)and about what makes it such an engrossing film. From the point of view of the average North-American spectator whose sci-fi expectations have been modelled around Hollywood sci-fi fare such as Bladerunner (1982) or The Terminator (1984), Solaris has no sexiness or pazazz. In comparison to The Matrix (1999), the visual effects are totally unspectacular. As entertainment, Solaris lacks an action-motivated plot that is engaging and easy to hook into like Star Wars (1977) or War of the Worlds (2005). In contrast to Alien (1979) the horrific aspect of the “alien monster” is totally played down and unlike Close Encounters (1977), the alien contact angle is anti-climactic. In comparison to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) or 12 Monkeys (1995) the time-travel aspect is totally downplayed. The narrative itself is intractable and refractory: as a drama, the average viewer would likely have no patience or common-ground with Tarkovsky’s humanistic intellectual vision and would find the whole thing boring. There’s also a disconnect from the alienating and distancing effects of non-North-American cultural artefacts (art direction, unfamiliar wardrobe, foreign language, unhabitual concerns, unfamiliar talent, etc). From a North American perspective and its deeply entrenched generic expectations, we are presented with a film that on all surficial considerations comes up short on every front.
In spite of this, the film is consistently mentioned on the lists of best sci-fi films of all time. What exactly is it about the film that makes it so engrossing? If this cannot be gleaned from the surface aspects of the filmic image, where do we find the value-added content? We have no choice but to look at the film in a different way, not for what’s there on screen but to how it means or to what it points to. But just how does the film mean other than what is on screen? What is it about the image being shown that points us to look at the image in a different way? What exactly constitutes this different way?
If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark and compare that to the everyday reality on the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen on Earth the same way. How the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does. If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs from that which we have come to expect as reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.
In linguistics, this methodology is known as the analysis of deep structure and allows us to analyse the temporal manifestation of abstract meanings as a narrative whose parts are constituted by what we are seeing on screen but not necessarily a part of it. This kind of analysis allows us to discern narrative structures based on the progression of pictorial stylistics, issues of temporality, the representation of consciousness, the manifestation of the intrusion of memory, individuation, becoming, psychological concerns, etc. i.e. any metaphorical or conceptual process, in terms of its manifest temporal unfolding.
Cognitive science makes use of these elements of abstract meaning based on embodied metaphors as constitutive of sets which can be analysed through set theory or Boolean logic to analyse their constitution and interaction in order to create blocs of conceptual meaning as duration. Set theory in itself provides an interesting metaphor for conceiving the plane of immanence as the open, divergent infinite set of all possible elements of meaning and subsets as durations as presented in the philosophies of Bergson, Bachelard and Deleuze. The process of constituting and deriving meaning in cinema can be looked at in terms of set theory, where the infinite but closed number of cells of manifest and abstract meaning constitute the work. The subsets constituted by these various elements can be dissolved and reconstituted into different sets with different scope, emphasis, scale i.e. a variety of intervals, in order to investigate different concerns or affinities such as auteurism, the evolution of meaning of camera movement within the works of a particular filmmaker, etc. And these affinities do not only manifest themselves at a surficial level but at a hidden or abstract level.
Heidegger in Identity and Difference writes:
“Always and everywhere Being means Being of Existence... In the case of the Being of Existence and the Existence of Being we are concerned every time with a difference. We think of Being, therefore, as object only when we think it as different from Existence and think Existence as different from Being. Thus difference proper emerges. If we attempt to form an image of it, we shall discover that we are immediately tempted to comprehend difference as a relation which our thinking has added to Being and to Existence. As a result, difference is reduced to a distinction, to a product of human intelligence. However, let us assume for once that difference is an addition resulting from our forming of a mental image, the problem arises: An addition of what? And the answer we get is: to Existence. Well and good. But what do we mean by this “Existence”? What else do we mean by it than such as it is? Thus we accommodate the alleged addition, the idea of a difference, under Being. Yet, “Being” itself proclaims: Being which is Existence. Wherever we would introduce difference as an alleged addition, we always meet Existence and Being in their difference... Existence and Being, each in its own way, are to be discovered through and in difference... What we call difference we find everywhere and at all times in the object of thought, in Existence as such, and we come up against it in a manner so free of doubt that we do not pay any particular attention to it... What is the meaning of this oft-mentioned Being? If under these conditions Being exhibits itself as a being of..., in the genitive of difference, then the question just asked would be more to the point if rephrased: What in your opinion is difference if both Being as well as Existence each in their own way appear through difference?
There is something here, except I don't know what it is... equating the process of subtraction as differenciation. It would seem to mean that the parallel in the processes imply that the secondary meanings operate as a state of Being... Interesting...
InKantation of Sweetness
Say I take a spoonful of sugar and stir it into some water. I can choose to impart it with a specific "duration" which I'll call sweetness; but if there's no me or you, or no other humans around to impart duration, then there is no duration given, so no time is created and no space is required, and so there's no sweetness, or water or sugar that is being given duration.
As an extension of this, what or who imparts that duration which constitutes "me"? Is there an entity on another dimension commanding the manifestation of my duration, or is it simply my soul? But if thee is an entity on another "universe" as ANW would say, what constitutes their temporality? What occupies the interval that constitutes continuity with that other dimension? Is it me or is it the inherent "desire" in nothingness to generate duration? I don't even know if the questions are being posed correctly. What all this says to me is that we might think we understand how things operate and that we can hope to someday understand how it all works, yet ultimately we lack the means to perceive, imagine, intuit beyond our bounded cognitive possibilities or understand beyond the metaphors we can confection.
As an extension of this, what or who imparts that duration which constitutes "me"? Is there an entity on another dimension commanding the manifestation of my duration, or is it simply my soul? But if thee is an entity on another "universe" as ANW would say, what constitutes their temporality? What occupies the interval that constitutes continuity with that other dimension? Is it me or is it the inherent "desire" in nothingness to generate duration? I don't even know if the questions are being posed correctly. What all this says to me is that we might think we understand how things operate and that we can hope to someday understand how it all works, yet ultimately we lack the means to perceive, imagine, intuit beyond our bounded cognitive possibilities or understand beyond the metaphors we can confection.
The Timaeus: Ontology and Cognition
Re-reading the Timaeus, I feel Plato's tactile sensorimotor mindset feels very similar to Bergson's tactile metaphors in the Duration chapter in Time and Free Will. But then I feel a similar connection between various speculative ontologies... Plato, Spinoza's Ethics Ch. 2, Bergson, Whitehead's P.R., Simondon and then Einstein and I feel that they all present very similar conceptions, or at least, that given the scientific knowledge of the various ages, they seem to present very similar ontological outlooks. Add to this Lakoff's cognitive ideas and I end up thinking that the speculative direction in philosophy is a continuation of this tactile sensorimotor mindset that is put forth in the Timaeus. Lakoff would posit this as the inevitably human conception of reality because our cognitive make up cannot do otherwise except see the world in this way. Cognition is a result of the metaphors the brain and the body generate in order to create epistemological sense, or duration (or something to that effect). Whitehead says that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato; perhaps it is inevitable.