square white world

the being-square of a circle

– Gilles Deleuze

Proceed by sense alone.

What work? Think! Think!

in the work I’ve done, the objects have been part-objects, even when dealing with characters, Brecht, for example in Simplicity [page below], have been unsatisfying – insufficient to the sensed imperceptible, in the end lying just outside, husks and shells: husk forms, shell contents. A tone of rhetoric or an attitude, antipoetic, for example, has prevailed over the breakthrough, which has always been a matter of leaving the egg only to find oneself in an endless incubator. Representation has affirmed representation, in error. The error being that there is nothing outside of representation, when exactly that nothing can provide the difference, does.

Deleuze contradicts Werner Herzog’s “What we lack are sufficient images” by saying that it’s not that there are too many images, it is rather that there are too many cliches. A cliche will never cut through the veil of cliches (think apocolyptic banality!), yet in opposing cliche to banality to cliche, I’ve imagined the veil rent, the temple overturned.

�Antipoetry, like atheism, is grounded on a prior affirmation of that which it negates, a judgement in its critique. Duchamp’s ‘anart’, in contrast, finds its object outside art without negating art, without a critique, a morality. Duchamp:�”I wanted to destroy art – only for myself.”

�

the clearing is necessarily dark, obscure -�a black round. Its�reality attested to by the squareness and whiteness of the represented world, after the law of contraries.

Crossing it is neither a movement of colonisation, of opening it up to traffic, of smuggling into it signs of property or propriety, nor of transgressing against a representative order.

a square white world demands a black sun. Even so, traversing the round black shadow burnt permanently on the plane of representation is to wade thighdeep in ashes, to feel one’s legs – the “boys” – lose traction and watch them smiling into invisiblity.

This is what Mark Wills (?-2006) called burning roses – the burning bush – the future talk: the cut back to the graft-mark.

The past loves a clearing – and is in the pure past outside of timespace – more than the clearing loves�a past. Loss of sense – Big Sense – belongs to ‘us’ who choose to set foot on the white square�but the clearing has its own sense.

Noone has explored this concept further than Gilles Deleuze. I wonder at the speed at which we now endeavour to cross�and are encouraged to�assay our crossings. If we go so fast, pain becomes impossible. It is perhaps on the affirmation of pain, its possibility, that I find nothing, yet, in Deleuze, to reassure the antinomian.

And it might still be on this ground that there is a rapprochement between the essayistic critical elan and analogon of Paul Virilio and the innocent philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’s Being/difference in a life. The latter’s (non)being insists in the dark round as the complement to�this critical time and (un)critical silence about the square white and represented world.

The clouds were torn tonight and screamed when they could not contemplate themselves as a cat lying on its back, a bear mounting another bear, a griffin, creatures… they felt the pain of�their inability to�express, regardless of their narcissism, their passive syntheses. They could only become.�They envied us.

from the labyrinth beyond time and space we�find our way�into a clearing

– adapted from Marcel Duchamp