Germatics

Germatics Felix Rebolledo May 2021 In terms of an opening conception, there is an undeniable political dimension to the initiative of ‘prototyping social forms’ (PSF) which putatively would entail proposing novel modes of organizing relational being towards widespread adoption. These germs as causal agents of collective change would have as pragmatic end some transformative dismantling of established social order towards novel or innovative emergent reorganization. The germ as an instigator of change seeks to undo any persistent hold on subjectivity by the powers that be, the apparatus of sovereignty and governance, and dissolve any resolute general laws that flatten any saliency that diverges from the established. If the currently operative institutions as the form of interiority of a system are somehow inadequate or insufficient to deal with a situation, the introduction of a germ will have the effect of breaking down the ties that keep tightly reticulated systems static, unresponsive, and exclusive. The operative dictum is that if it’s fixed, it needs breaking. As such, the germ unbinds and disorganizes a tenacious and ineffectual existent to permit and induce the emergence of a fabric of immanent relations as a diffuse and polymorphous abstract machine that loosens the conventional and habitual of established operating procedures or practices. The germ is a specific form of exteriority that is positive in its agency — it is exterior because the apparatus of power has no dispositif of its own as interior agency that will allow the dismantling of any of its internal components or the dissolution of any of its constitutive structures — if anything, because its function is its own maintenance and the perpetuation of its status quo. And it is positive in that it is actively seeks to free up the binding of semiotic creative possibility that a closed system of semiosis wishes to conserve. The problem that a germ is invoked to resolve is neither the apparent problem that the germ will ultimately solve, nor the direct obstacle to the germ’s doing what it is intended to do; the apparent problem is the symptom of the underlying condition. The problem’s manifestation as problem is an indication that the real site of the problem exists in the organizational conditions that did not foresee the problem, that was unable to prevent it, that does not have the internal initiative nor the wherewithal to organize the effort, nor the persuasiveness, the organization, nor the power of the will to rally the resources to resolve the situation. The object of the germ’s deployment is the inherent fixity of the apparatus supposedly in place to stave off the kind of problems that the germ is being sought to resolve; its mission is overcoming the internal functional inertia that precludes the insertion of any other competing or challenging mechanisms that question its authority or sovereignty. Possibly, one of the upshots of the germ’s productivity is to dissolve existing social, political, legal networks in order to give a different group a kick at the can, or at least enable the apprehension of where the actual predicament lies. The processual germs that our research-creation initiative seeks to generate are abstract machines that produce becomings. The germ in itself is insignificant, but its function is not to transmit or relay its machinic message — it is not a cog, it is the (in)formation. Its machinic purpose is to leverage movement in other cogs, which in turn motivates other cogs, etc except that at some point it becomes apparent that these cogs are meshed in such a way that they turn together but leveraging each other’s movement as one giant circle jerk, which as it turns out are all in sync, marking time losing sight that the germ ought to be making time rather than representing it… not merely a mechanical time piece but a time machine. The germ’s contagion is “a machine against the apparatus” (D&G, 1987, p. 352) — it unties the bond and betrays the pact — the transduction that is produced is a transformative becoming. Contrary to the usual hylomorphic conception of using forms to model matter, the germs are not hylomorphic operators. They do not propose a model upon which the matter can be fashioned, but rather operate as catalysts for change. If the germs are conceived in terms of social forms, their onus is not to be topically applied onto the social to obtain desirable effects. The germs are neither subjective forms nor energic supplements or sinks that influence social or political processes one way or the other. In stead, the germs are ethical propositions that dissociate themselves from any moral stipulations — and rather than produce general forms or universals, they precipitate desire that foments change: they hasten the production of events as singularity conditions that replicate and are relayed through the collective. This is counter to an economic model that is applied far and wide as a policy or initiative that affects all simultaneously without regard to the singularity of the individual. Here the individuals relay the germ’s (in)formative advance as a transductive line that torches through the common fabric, like the leading edge of a grass fire, advancing as a flaming front of flame that leaves everything behind it scorched. This thin strip of fire that is the limitary horizon of advance, not only heralds the advance of regime change, it is the regime change-over in action, from what was there before to what change-over that leaves behind its passage the pre-individual detritus from which novelty will emerge. The transduction is the activity of the fire, but the germ is not the transduction itself, it is "an operation, physical, biological, mental, social, by which an activity propagates from one place to another close within a domain, basing this propagation on a structuring of the domain operated from place to place. But contrary to Simondon’s conception of transduction, the transformative passage of the germ does not leave behind a set of informational instructions to restructure the remains or structure them anew — the germ’s transductive activity leaves behind a landscape of potential. And rather than destroy value, the ravaging of the common represents the opportunity to produce more value during re-construction and the rendering the virtual actual. The germ’s dissolutive potency lies not only in its emergent destructuration but in its epistemic innovation that is threatening to the State apparatus. The germ does not reproduce what was there prior to its transformative passage and neither does it follow the pre-existent organizational striations laid down as guiding any future development or evolution. Rather, the passage transforms the reticulation and concatenation of the semiotic by changing the conditions upon which it is environmentally based — by virtue of changing the landscape, that which is thought when engaging it and the modes of engaging with it also change, thereby introducing novelty into the mix. Were we to consider our germs as molar agents of change, they would have no pretensions of being applied en masse as pandemic contagion towards a widespread dissolution of social organization, and neither would they be looking to militate actively or purposely seek a specific outcome. These agents represent an activist praxis which looks for innovation and change at a social scale that is closer to home as a reflection of dwelling — at the local and the personal level expressed through the creative prototyping of unarchival practices as deconstructive constructivity. If the archive represents a storehouse of knowledge that acts as a depository of seeds that will eventually replicate the disciplinary tree of knowledge, the processual germ bank is a cache of unarchival kernels that seeks to unfetter processes of creation as rhizomatic proliferation of deterritorialization. The germs represent the undoing of the fascia that bind creative freedom to productive presuppositions, in order to release their creative potential and inventive promiscuity as unrestrained practices. Collectively, the germs embody a research creation methodology that banks on the productivity of process-production than on processual outcome as product. The productivity of these practices arises implicitly in the doing and not from the result as a done thing, and the value emerges in the transformative gesture itself as the wealth of information that arises out of novelty. The germs as contagious rehearse a perceptual semiotics in terms of coming to appreciate the value creation of how we participate interactively and dynamically in the world rather than producing a DIY instruction manual or recipe book. We look to locate germs as prototypes of social forms within semiotic production as part of tacit methods or practices of deterritorialization without necessarily pre-tracing the path of reterritorialization. This allows for a creative and innovative emergence of autonomous or immanent self-organization according to new paradigms of perception, of apprehension, where invoking method is not intended as a repeatable determination of truth, but as the description of the movement of thought as processual advancement. The germ serves to elaborate the notion of activism not in terms of a by-the-book methodology applicable in the macro-political realm towards a specific result, but as an informing of research-creation practices as une démarche à suivre whose engagement with creative practices is the prototypical resourcing we seek. There is an implicit or tacit science here, but not the science that we usually refer to as a “systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe”. It is a more personal mode of doing science, of performing semiotic creation anchored in private experience and the individual’s engagement with the world that does not claim to move to any specific foundational, common form. The social dimension of PSFs is an abstract machine that is not geared to a widespread ‘contractual’, social acceptance but simply a nominative attribute that identifies it and associates it with sign-function as its mode of existence in such a way that it does not fall into re-articulating modes of representation of the same elements in new trappings, but in the taking advantage of signs as springboards for creative differenciation, for transforming and morphing. It is immanent and emanative, a mode of cognizing emergent difference and going with the flow that changes us within and thereby changes what our body can do and ends up doing by changing our capacities and capabilities for interaction. To activate the notion of PSFs requires that we engage the notion of the prototype, the πρώτητύπος, (proto-typos), as the obvious first exemplar of a thing, the proto- of creation, that verifies its operation. But we do not wish to identify it as an object that is the first of its kind, or the first realization, or the first or primary type of anything that we produce and has a mechanical functional operativity in the world to be subsequently improved, refined or enhanced, or the exemplar from which copies, imitations, representations will be made, as a source of the common. The prototype is a variant repetition of the specific machine that is looking to be revealed by, through and within its emergence. If there is a machinic quality to it, it would have to be expressed as an abstract machine, as a semiotic assemblage that ceaselessly drives signification and the production of difference in variegated repetition. We can move in the direction of prototyping as producing the exemplar, the first of a series of iterations, that over time becomes the staging of repetitions, into the realm of the practices of prototyping, of producing the prototype as the rendering actual of a vague notion, a productive constraining that enables actualization by channeling the expression of unwieldy abstract potential and invest it with physical heft and actual somatic existence. If the reader were to be expecting a technological object as the final elaboration of our process of invention, within the scope of our paper it would express itself in terms of a revelatory technology (Heidegger, 1993) that would produce a technological object revelatory of a human activity, a contrivance that brings us into a free relationship with the essence of that which concerns us in terms of generating a particular movement — this is what makes the technological mediation interesting as common, as a one-at-a-time mass medium… If we translate prototype literally as first impression, we tie the concept to practices of discerning and resolving what could be a first impression. How do we resolve the novel entity, object, body, from an undifferentiated background of pre-individual potential, when there are no pre-existing “hints”, clues, indices, to point the way, to direct our sense-making and individuate the thing? This is discerned by noticing that the body has done something, something different for a change, which as William James asserts, that a movement of thought is revealed or betrayed by a movement of the body. So by being consciously aware of the reactive movements of the body we can correlate that to the stimulus and response in order to discern the formation of a new neural pathway as interpretive of a new way of thinking. One can never make a first impression twice, but that does not corroborate nor substantiate the originality of the impression. The prototype is only saying that it is the first impression that has been recognized as such — for whatever was producing the impression could have been there all along but not making any cognizable impression because there was no “structure” that would permit the cognitive perception. We had no idea how to look for it nor to recognize it! Therefore, the prototype is not necessarily the objective creation of an objective thing, but the creation of the conditions that would permit its discernment. These conditions can be both internal as well as external: the internal would entail the intellectual capacitation that would facilitate the logical advance as intuitively inferential; the external entails the creation of environmental conditions propitious for creative innovation. One cannot induce things to appear, i.e. use the practical arts that lead to revelation, if one does not have the cognitive apparatus to cognize novelty. Thus, technics and its attendant techniques need to be in place whose primary affordances detect the appearance of difference as the resolution of change having occurred. If freedom is the essence of truth, freedom is the freeing up of associative valence towards novel relations and allowing them the logistical freedom or liberty to associate at will, so as to produce assemblages whose operative coherence constitutes truth value as a machinic operativity. We may not like or appreciate what has emerged, but its value is expressed in the creative activity that produced it as an origin of creative potential and in the finished entity as possible jump-off point for new possibility. The created object takes on new value not in itself but as creative object whose constitutive conditions of creation as the truly creative revelation, and the end products take on the rôle of a prehensile node as a hinge or fold that articulates advance from an established given past towards a future that is uncharted but opened up as exploratory possibility into novelty. There might be value in the prototype itself by virtue of what it can do, but its deeper, more significant value comes from its leveraging of the creative research-creation and its semiotic concreteness. In research-creation there is no “correctness” to the creativity or its product, just like there is no moral imperative that pushes towards the capitalization of the creative or merchandising the fruits of labor — the emphasis lies on rendering the process common. Thus, the productivity as objective results takes a back seat to the consideration of the operativity itself and creative pluralization of outcomes as potential. If the resistance to novel propositions is based on memorial preconceptions or ingrained habits, the function of germs within the practices of PSF is to dissolve and overcome those preconceptions and habits that resist novelty and constrain creativity. If for Heidegger, production is “an activity whose performance has a result, the finished structure, as its consequence”, for us production is found in the activity itself. What interests us is the (in)formation of activity, the technē of bringing forth the liberation of creation: a technē of technē, the arts and practices and techniques that liberate and free up the “making something appear”. Within this realm of productivity, the social takes on a different form. It is no longer an aggregation of interdependent individuals, but a shared commonality expressed through the transindividual of a common notion as a communal property in its most general generative sense. This transindividual shared commonality has similar properties to language as that which belongs to no one yet belongs to all and manages to mediate sociality. Language is thus a technē of social (in)formation that is common property and constitutes a mode of revelation, of making things appear — as a making visible before us and as enabling of cognition or discernment. PSFs as a social praxis share with language this capability, for language does not have a monopoly on the semiotic of social forms. And so, the practices that we seek to develop are social through their transindividual micropolitical technē. Roman Jakobson initiates his elaboration of his study of linguistics and communication with a quote from D. M. MacKay that states that the primary aim of information theory is “to isolate from their particular contexts those abstract features of representations which can remain invariant under reformulation” and concludes that the linguistic analogue is the phonemic search for relational invariants (Jakobson, 1960). In terms of generating or prototyping Social Forms, we seek to discern emergent forms that may be archived and repeated at will, and copied or mimed as users deem fit. What the Prototyping Social Forms group has tried to do is to produce conditions conducive to speculative propositional experimentation according to the practices of research-creation in order to generate new forms as abstract machines of emergent semiotic possibility. However, traditional forms have operated in linguistic modes in the service of communication of content, whereas the forms or generative frameworks we are looking to generate look to be more inclusive in terms of the semiotic regimes they can be applied to in terms of instilling new forms of relation by which we can produce new models of self that are based on the creative invention of self and of appreciating our relationship with the world. We use the word appreciating in both the sense of valuing our existence and also of making our experience richer. These new forms do not purport to produce more coherent, adequate or verisimilar pictures of what are roundly accepted as Ideal, Universal or Standard representations of unchanging, static preconceived possibilities. Rather, they seek to overcome gravity through the joyful levity of introducing play, fabulation, contingency while incorporating processual complexity, multiplicitous densification, identitary dissolution, within heterogeneous, rhizomatic, communicational environments. The germs as processual forms serve two roles. Firstly, they promote the deconstruction and deterritorialization of existing structuration which has become so ankylosed that they cannot produce any free variation or creative openness, because the networks of relation are too rigidly massified and too inflexibly triangulated. Secondly, they leave open the landscape for new modes of territorializing: the point of these forms is not to free up participating elements in order to replicate existing representations, but to liberate these elements within themselves to participate freely in new assemblages. The germs are not representational overcodings of some putative underlying reality, but practices of dismantling, dissolution, deconstruction that till the ground towards new modes of cultivation. Unlike the seed that needs care and attention through all its phases to its becoming fruitful, the germ’s contagion is immediate in its effects: infection is directly clinamic — it activates inflection upon contact and deviates the becoming with minimal prevarication. This is not a moral quandary of sickness and health, of purity and taint, of sin and innocence, but an expression of the ethics of propagation where the pragmatic result is what is taken into account in terms of the capacity to act. The result is a transductive transformation of the existent texture of the experiential and not simply of its material conditions. The social is relational and even if its mediation is considered material, its agency is produced by the semantic informational — to the modes by which the infectiousness of contagion repurposes occupation: both as a taking up of space and as the activity of being-doing that transforms space-time according to a new organizational regime. This new organization is impermanent, evolutive, adaptive for the transformative effects of the agency of the germ are not readily accepted by the host; they might be summarily rejected or fully incorporated, or somewhere in between, but the contagion by a processual germ permanently alters the capacity of the body to act and to react, to be acted upon. Does this textural transformation constitute positive change? The processual germ enters a system because it finds a receptive host: the host might not have known how receptive it was, but it presented the optimal conditions to implant itself and propagate. The germ seeks to find a node that is well connected, that repeatedly strikes an influent node, that sits at the junction of various semantic chains to free-up the greatest number of elements and allow them to recombine afresh. For example, by not being adequately prepared nor steadfastly committed to fight COVID-19’s diffusion, much of Western society was actively susceptible in a passive mode to viral contagion. Society’s susceptibility, expressed in its present condition of being decimated by the virus, presents the right conditions, i.e. is receptive to the application of a remedial social form that will alter its receptivity, i.e. reduce its susceptibility to being infected or heighten its readiness or strategies to fight any new contagion. Prior to the pandemic, the infrastructure was in place to accept the social form, but not in a state of receptivity. The germ is similar to any object of thought, but it is also very different. It is similar in that it appears on the surface of becoming not as immanent emergence from within but as it is said in French, “as a hair in the soup”. In itself it is no big thing, but what it unclenches pragmatically, the subsequent movement generated is disproportionately out of scale. The germ is a mote in the eye, I, aye. Whereas an object of thought emerges organically from the pre-individual welter of possibility, the germ lans upon propitious conditions for its arrival, reception and propagation. And its success depends upon the propitiousness of the receptivity as material conditions. Its successful propagation depends upon how successful and how cleverly it fits in with the conditions a host offers or provides the germ. The germ is not opportunistic, it simply makes itself very much at home in the conditioning environment provided by the host. But in terms of emergent social forms, the germ is a machinic McGuffin. The germ is an agent of flux. It not only accelerates but is a catalytic device that induces dissolution, that renders fluid that which it comes in contact with and which might have been “solid” and “fixed”. The processual germ is an agent of deterritorialization that renders fluid the reticulated composition of a social milieu and allows participating semiotic components to to recombine afresh according to a formal amalgam of what was there before with the activist influx of novelty-creation that the processual germ injects. An ontological distinction needs to be made between the seed and the germ. They can both be made to inform the social in different ways and constitute two different modalities of producing social agency/subjectivity… one is arborescent and rooted, portable and implanted; the other functions through contagion and transduction, its propagation is self-propelled and [opportunistically] invasive and adaptive. The notion of the seed involves the idea of the clinical and concern, of tending and cultivating, of the archival for posterity; and its implantation feels more formally structuring and acculturating in that the temporality involves patience and waiting, nurturing and clinical concern. The notion of the germ and its propagative contagion at first feels more scientific and less artisanal… more high-tech lab and less hands in the soil. For germs, the scientific lab as repository is more for safekeeping, for security, for protection, as opposed to preservation of cultural heritage; and it feels better suited to articulate the textural and the textile as possibility within social fabric and process as immanent from the common of the social in that the advance of contagion is the immediate of its own mediation — the mediation as media and mediation is its own mediatic culture as modal milieu of processual advance as immediate transformation. The pragmatic functioning of a seed needs to be interpreted metaphorically in that the agency of a seed is at one remove from the notion it seeks to implant; on the other hand, the transductive action of the germ is directly transformational in the processual advancement, in its alteration of the social fabric, no matter how the social is defined. The processual germ bank as an experimental scientific milieu is also of a different nature from the processual seed bank, if anything because of their mode of activating change and producing new forms. As Simondon asserts in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020), if we understand the event as constituted as the application of form over matter as constitutive of a hylomorphic object, an effective technical operation must institute a mediation between the form and the matter. The form does not act autonomously on the matter to produce the transformed technical individuation, it actually requires some technical participation to see it through — as such, the implementation of the germ as a social form takes on the character of the seed, for what defines the seed is this technical concern for seeing through the operation of (trans)formation as a before and after of (in)formation. So that for the successful implementation of the seed, the proper conditions need to be in place: the receptivity of the “social ground” has to be adequate to host the seed and the form has to be disposed for the ecosystem or milieu into which it will be implanted. Only then can we be certain that the seed can take root and allow the successful mediation between seed and soil to begin to effectuate change as a technical operation. Sometimes the most receptive “ground” is the most inhospitable of environments, but if the novel social form is to be accepted, the receptivity must be in place as somehow articulating the possibility of confidence in its transformative power — even if it is a passive willingness to receive the seed — the ground must somehow green-light the acceptance or the form has so much motivational power that it spurs a surge of contagion throughout the social body as acceptance. The space upon which the germ operates is indefinite and non-communicative even though what spreads a germ’s contagion is “communication” — its linkages of dissemination require contact but in the sense of association by connection which can simply be an over-arching selection or designation…. It’s a topological space that contains much more than containment. The manifold’s elements are polyvalent and so their agency is not restricted to one semiotic plane and so their activation or disactivation can result in functional blackouts on many planes and many fronts.

Cinema 1 Chapter 1 Page 1 Paragraph 1

Bergson does not just put forward one thesis on movement, but three. The first is the most famous, and threatens to obscure the other two. It is, however, only an introduction to the others. According to the first thesis, movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering.

What Bergson is saying here is that movement is distinct from space. In order for covering to take place, there must be displacement and displacement is only one type of movement (and not the only type of movement). The words actually say it when we use the spatializing metaphors of language as in “to take place” as in taking up space or “covering space” as if covering a bed with a blanket. In this conception of the universe, space is voluminous background whereas movement happens through it, within it. It is a 2-D metaphor applied to a 3-D phenomenon: as if a point was moving alongside a flat plane. The movement happens within the space but not as a part of it, not constitutive of it. So, what is space? As Bergson would have it in M&M p. 206, “Abstract space is nothing but the mental diagram of infinite divisibility.” The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided. From a classic perspective, space is divisible and movement is indivisible: space is a referenced three dimensional system where time exists as a fourth dimension independent of the space. Space in itself is an empty yet solid entity which is homogeneous and has no temporal dimension within it. Movement or change cannot be reconstituted from static sections (slices), beca use continuity would be absent from the sequentiality. In classical mechanics, we would say that the momentum and speed have been removed from within the section thereby rendering each section indeterminate in terms of the completion of the movement. The continuity is singular, unitary, and cannot be decomposed into constituent elements or parts. Every constituent part would create a discontinuity at the start of the segment and at the end of the segment, a halting balkiness which the movement’s continuity-as-a-whole does not have. Constituting movement from static images, each having a velocity of “zero”, is impossible because the summation of zeros will always amount to zero. I cannot excise a portion of movement, i.e. a transversal moving image at a particular instant, because each instant of now must integrate the dynamic evanescence of pastness and incipience of futureness inherent in the covering of space. Likewise, we cannot constitute movement out of static slices because we cannot imbue them with a continuity the slices do not have. I can intercalate an infinity of static images between two immobile plates but these will be just as immobile. We cannot add movement to a static image. In the same way that Achilles would never reach his destination, he would have been unable to start, because the distance between him and the first point is infinitely divisible and therefore unreachable.

The So What Factor.

Apart from the gee-whiz aspect of McIntosh’s and Kirschner’s “art” works which in themselves constitute only slightly aesthetisized science-fair projects, the ideas that they bring out are simple ones which have been existent for quite some time and rather well understood. The direction of the work is novel but its creative drive ought to punch through the “so what?” threshold. I like art as much as the next guy, but why should I have to say it’s great when it only fetishizes the common-place and only foregrounds the obvious?

I saw the “plans” for McIntosh’s Undulations in a chapter dealing with interference and resonance patterns in a pan of mercury in Duncan and Starling’s Text Book of Physics, vol. 2 Heat Light and Sound originally printed in 1917. If “artists” wish to illustrate interactivity or adaptation or evolution with scientific ideas, they should do so in a manner that is à la hauteur des temps or beyond, otherwise, it’s an insult to the intelligence and imagination of the spectator. There is a difference between minimalism and simplicity. I have no problem with “scientific” art per se, but the demonstration of a process au premier degré is not sufficient to constitute an artistic experience.

Natural processes and scientific or technological ideas deserve more focus than the simplistic reductionism that these two projects seem to want or be able to apply to them. And here I’m not referring to the implicit beauty that emerges in wave tanks or wind tunnels or watching copper sulphate crystals grow. Although some of 20th century art from Dali, Magritte, Balla, or Duchamp uses a scientific thématique, the concerns tie-in beyond the technique or the work at hand. Technological art of the type presented by McIntosh and Kirschner rose from a different experience than the artistic. You’ve likely seen etchings of some kind or other of a man of science demonstrating to a peer the production of some process of other: the one that immediately comes to mind is Newton’s demonstration of the breakdown of white light through a prism into a spectrum of colours. Is the demonstration in itself art? Later on, these demonstrations go public as travelling expositions or presentations of scientific findings and breakthroughs in public lectures. And now the presentation of this scientific knowledge has made its way from Scientific American to the Discovery Channel. But wait, now you can also own your very own piece of scientific process and exhibit it right in your very own home... Remember Sea Monkeys? Or the mail order ant farms? I think I’m choking on my madeleines.
The scientific experiments of the 19th and early 20th centuries not only demonstrate a level of sophistication in the understanding of these basic physical, chemical, electrical processes but a finesse and elegance in their demonstrations with simple unsophisticated means. And here I mean “demonstrations” such as Cheshire’s disc, or Bunsen’s Grease-Spot Photometer, or apparatuses to produce Lissajous figures, or Chladni’s figures, or devices to determine the velocity of light. Never mind the scientific and technological advances made in the latter half of the last century! The technical processes and their attendant technologies demonstrate an understanding of the ideas involved that far surpass the simplification of their explanation. “Is there anything more beautiful than a nuclear submarine or a Mercedes turbo-charged V-12 engine?” WW Simondon S?

There’s a huge divide between the understanding of the world by scientific and technological disciplines versus those of the artistic and philosophical disciplines. Is it that the scientific and technological advances are so far ahead of the aesthetic and philosophical understanding of the nature and implications of these advances that their simplistic depiction or representation as aesthetic ideas tend to be naive? Isn’t the device itself the best description of the process or processes to be illustrated? In the example of the Merc V-12, don’t we have the interactivity and adaptation to external inputs in a variety of circuits (electronic, thermodynamic, kinetics of gases, etc)? Don’t a lot of people already get it without getting all aesthetic about it and having to show it at the MOMA? I know people that would look at a Bosch turbocharger rapturously, in the same way that some people would look at a Bosch triptych. Or perhaps you have to actually make a turbocharger at home in order to really get its significance and be able to partake in the confrérie of techno art? But for me, what I find most lacking in the tech-art projects is the element of cleverness or surprise that grabs you by the throat and takes your breath away (the unheimlich manoeuvre) or the beyond the common-place as well as a scientific understanding of the principles at hand that would elevate these two projects from the mundane to the sublime. Do these simple presentations reflect McIntosh’s and Kirschner’s lack of appreciation for scientific and technical finesse or is this a reflection of the poverty of current artistic discourse? What if I were to put a multi-meter across the electrodes of Kirschner’s piece and looked at the needle oscillate? Exactly, so what!

Cosmogony of the Liver

Like all beginnings that have come undone and all the ends that subsequently have come to be, that which binds every thing in relation could no longer do so, and, yes, the center could not hold: the divine energy of the universe had once again made itself known as the celestial intervention of its own undoing. I embrace you death for it is only through you that life is felt! Life comes into being at death’s door and in death’s den is where life comes to be. For no matter its duration, life is but a slow path to a much too quick demise and death is never swift enough in its begetting of new lifeblood. Order gives way to the disorder of becoming as darkness emerges from pulsating light to eke out passage on the pilgrim’s path. Abandon your steadfastness to the unfaithfulness of order in the same way it abandons you as it yields to its undying constancy to the ever-changing nature of disorder. Embrace the errancy of migration and dispersal; the way of the unknown, on a sea of uncertainty, unguided by stars, helmed by faith. From the very same impurities which cause emergence and becoming, the very same substances that will ultimately decide my existence and role, that which I reject as the not-me yet shall define the very essence that gives meaning to what I am, and from which I derive my nourishment and sense. The tree of knowledge of that which is salutary and that which knows how to dispel evil has spread its branches deep within me and guides my ways. A wave ripples, an arborescence of quicksilver and crimson and gold glimmers as the tree of becoming that branches out within every possible reach within me. And I have not forgotten what you have asked me: that surface that covers my dendritic excrescence, that pertains to me alone, that shelters my untrammelled pulsating viscous cosmos of warmth and muffled gurglings, I would have to answer that it is the product of intension, extension and expanse that allow all things to exist together yet blind to each other. And I cannot tell you more about the lifeblood that courses through my being any more than I can tell you about the lifeblood of that emptiness which contains that which contains the universe: the ethereal vapours that clothe the becoming raindrops that meet the river that flow into the sea to meet the oceans of uncertainty and evaporate as the red mist of morning and become the purple clouds of dusk. For they all exist as intervals of differentiated many and as one: what constitutes the ocean constitutes the drop, and drops do constitute the waves of which the sea is made. One or many, many or one. They are not the same but the many feel as solid as the one and the one is sentient like the many. To look, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, images all of which I am not, but reflect that which is not there as if it were in ways in which I can comprehend but never really understand. The closer you look, the less you will see. The more you seek, the less you’ll find. No thing is every thing and every thing is no thing. Where the two shall meet is where you will become one with the present. The past is at your back: turn around and it will be in front of you like the imagined future that is yet to be but has been. The future is behind you: turn around and it will face you, uncharted and unknown, yet imaginable and predictable, like the past that it dictates and draws towards itself and is doomed to repeat in infinite variations of itself. You will find difference in the repetition and order to the repetition and similarity to the disparity for chaos fuels the appetite of order’s false satiety to exist as one. And static and unitary as you would like the object of your being to be, from however many vantage points you wish to compose an image of it, it will be the same but never alike. Its every facet is a facet of some thing that is other to your being even though to it linked you are as one. And to that expanse which is infinite and unknowable yet determinate and convergent, I would apply the God-given factor of 1.7 in determining the fractal dimension of extension of its being in order to determine its infinite expanse.

Let there be light

Apparently any kind of electromagnetic radiation can either be particle or wave depending on how one chooses to look at it. Looking at it as a stream of particles makes it easy to visualize and the wave is easy to represent as a squiggly line doing its sinusoidal ondulations as it courses through space. And we say that it travels through space at 186,000 miles per second. But what travels at 186,000 miles per second? The photons as tiny little particles of light traversing the universe like a stream of shooting stars? Or is just a manifestation of the characteristics of the wave function?

The frequency established has a specific wavelength which in turn has a specific velocity but nothing is really going anywhere, just a whole lot of shaking going on! The wave is not a line wiggling in space, it is more of an expanding pulsation of intensification that ripples through space where the frequency remains the same unless disrupted by gravity. This means that it is not only the medium that changes as the radiation pulsates through it but the intensity itself of the lightwave that is changing as well. Now, once the sine wave is established, does anything really move or does it simply stand in place, doing the wave, like spectators at a hockey game?

As I take in light's pulsations, I bask in the everpresent now. I can see the waves rolling towards me, surging beneath me, and receding into the distance. What is it that made Einstein think of waves and trains and what does that have to do with alarm clocks?

The Pulsating Onion of Spacetime

It doesn't get any more basic than this. On page 1 of Cinema 1 Deleuze writes "Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering." How exactly does it do so? What is the moving? What is the direction of forward motion and where is the behind that is being left?

The process of movement transforms the space in which it happens: it re-texturizes it as it ripples through. In order for covering to take place, there must be displacement. Isn't that particular and curious all at once? The words actually say it as we use the spatializing metaphors of language as in “to take place”. Yes, exactly. How exactly does movement cover space? It doesn't, it stays put and shakes like hell; the speed, hence time is in the shaking. It's the pulsating onion of spacetime doing its thing! Space is voluminous background whereas movement happens through it, within it, without going anywhere. Or is it time? The movement is within the space but is not a part of it, nor constitutive of it. Why should space be divisible? And why should it only become “visible” when there is a change, when there is an acceleration? When there is light? This would mean that there is a difference between motion as displacement and motion as vibration. Particle or wave? Space can only be when there is change and the only motion that allows this is vibration because it is in vibration that change occurs. A constant state of displacement, i.e. constant velocity does not allow space to form because the relativity is constant and does not allow the observed/observer relation to take hold. What moves relative to what? Who moves relative to whom? Is it the space that is covering the motion or is it the motion that covers the space? The term displacement hides a variety of “things.” What does displacement displace? Space? And where is it displaced to? To think of displacement, one must conceive of a substantial body that occupies all void not occupied by other entities. As the body is moved from one place to another, ethereal space fills in the volume immediately which our object has just vacated. Displacement also hides the heterogeneous nature of movement except in ideated circumstances—displacement happens when one feels acceleration or change in the temporal or spatial representation of the event. Apparently, photon inertia covers these bases.

Newtonian time conceives of itself as homogeneous and continuous and Newtonian space as a homogeneous and continuous entity that is somehow anchored at its origin and allows an ideal displacement to happen homogeneously relative to a static background, just like time. But if both “entities” have the same properties, does that not make them not necessarily the same, but alike? We tend to think of time as linear, and space as voluminous. What’s that about? Is time the textural difference between one location in space and another? Is time the how-happens as opposed to the when-happens of the where-happens? Is time simply the qualitative change of being?

Stand up and do the Wave!

In the green book, Arie Altena writes on “art” projects by Thomas McIntosh and Roman Kirschner. McIntosh’s project Ondulation in which the invisible is once again rendered visible “consists of a basin filled with 2,000 litres of water, which is gently made to move by sound coming from speakers installed underneath. A pattern of waves arises on the surface of the water. Beams of light trained on it reflect this pattern onto a projection screen on the wall.” I must say that I had to laugh when Altena expresses his exasperation at “visitors who cannot resist tapping on the glass of the basin to create new waves. The piece was not designed for such interaction.” Who are these pretentious mortals who deign interfere with the unfolding of the divine plan?

The thing I find most captivating about McIntosh’s demonstration is that it made me think about vibration not only as an interactive process but as a potentially adaptative and evolutive one: as one adds waves, the interaction changes, i.e. becomes complexified and takes on new patterns that stabilise with time until disrupted either by new audio waves (or pesky humans). These new patterns may be more or less beautiful, more or less complex in appearance, but they demonstrate that with each and every new wave that is foisted onto the system, the overall pattern of the reflection changes into something else. Cool!

But isn’t this also the way affect works? Doesn’t every interaction beget a new affective outcome? Could this be called the montage effect of affect? (WW Eisenstein S?) Except that in the case of real-world, open-system affect, the montage effect happens not as a result of two already existing affects, but is infolded into a pluri-multitude of already-there affects that have undergone an infinite process of recursive interaction with each other. Ow!

The second thing I found interesting about McIntosh’s demonstration is that in thinking about vibration as an interactive “evolutive” process it made me think of vibrations of another sort, at another durational level. If we break matter down, we inevitably come to find that the more it is broken down, the less particular material there is to constitute it. There comes a point where the particles are so broken down that we end up with wave functions which amount to no certainty of there being anything anywhere to form what we usually constitute and conceive as matter. One is left with a conceptual ideation of the possibility of something (whatever) coming into being that somehow ends up becoming being―within this vibratory interactivity of waves and wave functions, the interaction yields a standing wave that constitutes the resonance of being. I know that this is a shaky argument, but I think that this thinking of vibratory interaction can also be applied to thinking about affect metaphorically as a wave pattern constituted in turn by other waves.

The third thing I found interesting about McIntosh’s demonstration is that in the creation of the projecterd wave patterns we could see areas of intensifications of darkness and lightness with areas of gradation in between. What jumps out at me is that in considering rhythms we tend to think of them as discrete individuated binary constructions: black and white dualities (toc, interval, toc, interval, toc, interval, etc) when in fact there is attack and decay to the incipiencies of both decay and attack themselves and to the intensifications as well. The philosophy of process cannot think in terms of entities without always keeping two things in mind: that no thing is static and that nothing is static. If you is, you is in “changement”. Being of any kind is never static, even in the standing wave that is the duration of whatever entity. And in its predestined and unavoidable interaction with any and all other entities, the individual entity is part of one quaking, shaking, vibrating entity of being.

In his article, Altena also mentions the “art” work of Roman Kirschner. The object consists of an electrolytic ferric chloride solution in which iron wires subjected to low electrical currents are suspended. Over time, crystals begin to form and grow from the suspended “electrodes” and as the voltage running through the wire-crystal-electrolytic solution changes as a result of the altered conductivity due to changes in concentration in the electrolyte as the crystals grow, the differences are fed into a computer, applied onto a 4/4 pulse and converted into sound. Wah! Wah!

Apart from the making process audible and visible, what drew my attention was the question of the form coming into being―the pretence of the hylemorphic. Other than flicking on the current, what induces the crystal to form out of the solution? If I have a jar of potential happening, what is it that I need to make being come to be? I’d put the jumper cables on that question and gun the engine no problem!

It's Nuthin', Honey!

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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?

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...