square white world

All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact:
Be — don´t try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming,
your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.

I was going to write something about this

and about only last night having seen Skyfall, the Heineken® Bond movie. Obviously, directed by Ninja, Terence Neale and Saki Fokken Bergh, “Fatty Boom Boom” has more directors. Skyfall only has – named – Sam Mendes, and he does a terrible job. There are enough pauses in the dialogue to make another movie. It is a kind of verbal colander. I wondered if every sententious pause was there 1) as a chiaroscuro to the narrative, in the hope it might achieve the relief of real depth 2) to be arch and give the impression of a clever double entendre or to signal ambiguity. Because the film makes ambiguity a principle of its composition. However it is not the sort of ambiguity that leads you to ask, Is this the case? or rather is it…? There is no question raised by the ambiguity of Skyfall: every step is so ponderous and overdetermined and yet unmotivated by either the narrative requirements of the action genre or by what I hesitate to call the psychology of the characters. The ambiguity does not open but closes down the option of thought. It is strictly unnecessary.

I was therefore going to write something about artistic necessity. In order to stand on its own something must be there which it is necessary to say. It is necessary here and now to say it. The artist feels the need and responds, some would say, quite uselessly.

Some would say it is the particularity of that something which eludes value or having value placed on it. The uselessness of art would then be a gloss on how what is necessary is also elusive, escaping the claims to which those interested – in its use, value or both – try to hold it.

In this light, I would have been writing about Lisa Densem’s dance work, We Have Been There (Cloud in Hand), which it struck me days after seeing it has a lot in common with butoh. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before. Perhaps I was not paying attention. I did pay attention to the work’s reception, here and now, and I thought, The friendly reception of art kills critical thought; it anaesthetises to what is essential: which might just be that which makes the work necessary. And: When art has friends like these, who needs detractors?

I felt similarly about how Barnie Duncan’s … Him – although neither brilliant nor dire and so not provoking extreme reaction – drowned in its warm reception: its particularity dissolved, like a biscuit in tea. But but there is something that needs to be said about how this kind of necessity is connected with what was a theme in this square white world some years ago: the question of why the director is necessary. Because … Him was let down by its director, almost as if the only response, right from the first day devising and rehearsing, which the finished show could be conceived of as eliciting was this absence of reaction, of delight or outrage, this friendly and cowed, somehow fearful, lukewarm, reassuring, congratulatory and self-congratulatory (because we pulled it off!), wet-soggy, patronising pattercake of bloodless and ill-defined consensual conciliatory and pacific palliation.

I would prefer to be outraged but is outrage really possible among friends who know each other so so well? Is delight? Is passion?

An outsider seems to be necessary as much as a need, a distance that truly finally tyrannises.

And with these thoughts still half-formed I sat down at my keyboard which through its screen now opens out onto a world of distraction and found Konstantin Bessmertny, whose Russian name means deathless.

– Konstantin Bessmertny, 1881

And I saw that it was good.Then I visited his domain [here] and read:

There is never any difference — not because it comes down to the
same in the answer, but because it is never anywhere but in the
question, and in the repetition of the question, which ensures its
movement and its disguise.

— Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 107–108

What follows is not representative of Deleuze’s aion. It is my reading and the flaws in it are also mine.

Aion is a pure surface in contact with the outside. It has no immemorial or historic depth to it. Pure surface, it is opposed to chronological time, or chronos.

Chronos allows metaphors, such as depth – the depths of history or memory – and those spatial metaphors derived from geometry and mechanics – a linear, circular time, the wheel of time and the time of mechanical causation, acceleration and dynamic action and reaction. Chronos is metrical, the time of measure and mathematical judgement. Chronos is figurative, can be represented in linguistic and mathematical codes and symbolic registers. Finally, chronos represents time and is what we normally talk about in dealing with representations of time.

The necessity for another understanding of time, aion, comes from the intuition that the present is unrepresentable. However, aion does not connote the present. Aion is in contact with this present, its surface pressed to it.

The problem, therefore, addressed by the concept of aion as a schema of time is the special status of the present. The past may be knowable and the future unknowable but the present can only be a subject of incomplete representation. It is never quite there, never entirely there. It never fully expresses itself – in figural or figurative terms, in symbolic or material registers – and must remain open both to the fully realised past and to the as yet unrealised future.

Aion is not just another word for the present, it regards the present as the outside and it is in regard to the present that it arises as problem and fact. The outside, then, consists of you and I in an unquantifiable present, a present, that is, unquantifiable by or according to chronos. The outside is everything that is in this present moment. It is possessed of all the forces that are brought to bear at a singular point in time which itself is unqualifiable, unable to be given a place or position except in relation, and a present which is literally and exactly incapable of taking place. Place comes, or the place the present left a moment ago, comes after, from a knowable and representable past, from a realised time, chronos. Place is a quantifiable dimension of time and belongs to chronos.

The reason to talk as if forces were taking control and overrunning the present is to point to that of which we are all too aware in subjective experience: that we plug in the past, the realised, the quantified, knowledge, identity and material and symbolic entities to what exists for us in the present moment. We extract forces from things and subjects only in so far as the present, our present, is invested in them, interest, the interest of forces soon to be annihilated, in a moment. We feel affects from objects and others only in so far as they are capable of taking place in a present traversed by forces. These forces occupy the outside, they are the outside into which we are plugged and into which we plug what is affectless, inert, anorganic and lifeless. The world as represented somehow achieves and gets to this present, this outside, which cannot be represented.

Aion provides the point of achievement and getting to whereby the world is then accessible to measure and quantity, to scientific and mathematical intelligibility. The movement whereby the world crosses from the future to arrive in the past is through an outside. This movement is absolute rather than able to be relativised according to fixed points. It is the movement of the present and a passage over and against aion’s pure surface. The word ‘pure’ is meant to reinforce the dimensionlessness of the surface not to impose or import an hierarchy or morality.

If the present is absolute movement, the play of a multiplicity of forces, then aion is pure surface. Aion gives a temporal record of an absolute movement without coordinates.

Relative movement occurs with coordinates; points are already in play, in position. By permitting the taking place of the present, its occupation by the forces of the outside, plugging in, aion shows that both movement and points must be created. Chronos will be the sort of time in which points and movement are coordinated but is not the sort of time necessary for their creation because chronos cannot get near enough to the present that is unrepresentable. But then aion is like the membrane the need for representation would interpose between chronos and this outside present.

In fact, the relation works the other way around: aion gives rise to chronos through its contact with all that can be said to be. Since the existence of both the past and present may be refuted but that of the present is irrefutable.

Movement must be created. Aion is the edge or skin of this creation as it presses against the outside. On its surface – which is why it is never pure in the sense of importing or having an hierarchy or morality imposed upon it – the relative points of singular movements, the lived moments of singular durations are made and appear. Aion embodies the play of infinitesimals on its surface; which means aion embodies all movement as that between and among differences in intensity, giving rise to the singularities that chronos takes and represents along physical and no longer absolute registers.

Aion because it is a pure surface in contact with the forces of the outside and the absolute present and because it skins or covers the process of a universal creation in terms of all movement itself moves outward. It is like a tsunami advancing irresistably against which we stand for a moment and into which we disappear. It is also like a seam or fold extending the length of time and reaching to the depths of space and carrying all of time and space along with it.

…

This description of aion was included at the end of a short email exchange with Justin B. Rye. I had initially sent Justin the briefest of notes saying that he’d left Deleuze’s aion out of A Guide To SF Chronophysics , where it might not belong, but the possibility it could – the epithet ‘science fiction’ is not altogether misplaced in application to Deleuze’s writing – and that its inclusion might upset some or all of the laws said to apply to temporal schema (or “chronophysics”) in even their fictional deployment was prompt enough for a note. Justin responded with

I’d never heard of Deleuze’s aion.  Googling for it, it looks like the
usual kind of timewasting wordgames churned out by professional
obfuscationists.  Can you suggest some reason anybody with a
functioning brain should take it seriously?  What, for instance, are
the real-world phenomena that it claims to provide a better
explanation for than alternative approaches?

His last email to me provided a running commentary – through-written – on the preceding description of aion which remains entirely and uniformly consistent with this response.”This is such overwritten nonsense it might as well be a hymn to Hulmu,” he interjects at his wittiest. He offers to fetch me a straitjacket and ends writing, “I’m sorry, the only thing it’s much like is a load of old toss.” Strangely, his sign-off throughout our correspondence was

JBR
Ankh kak! (Ancient Egyptian blessing)

Perhaps what he says is true.

But I am interested in hearing your reaction.

small corners, tricks of light and sound; odours that find recess in me, a cup to sit in for a second or two; enough to weigh down an indentation, an impression; the echo of a memory that is not there, or should not be.

…

a gin that projected light, chopped into pieces to coincide with blinks, so that an impression of movement was achieved. Always the same movement, endless. The same woman on the same stairwell, taking the same three steps, continuously; a horse running to nowhere; a naked patriarch, swinging an axe. He says that the more one watches, the more their time becomes real, and the watcher’s time leaks out, becoming insignificant, the same as watching the water for too long.

– B. Catling, The Vorrh, Honest Publishing, Croydon, 2012, pp. 187-9

A prayer almost found its way to his lips. It began in the icy fear of his heart, the ventricles white with the frost of anticipation, and travelled outwards to become a pressure, like wind against the meat sails of his lungs. Funnelling up, it passed like a shadow through the rehearsal of his vocal cords, up into his mouth, tongue and lips, before being garrotted by the thin, taut wire of his mind.

– Ibid., p. 217

A huge, brown cow stood next to the bed. It wobbled, balanced comically on train tracks made of meat jelly, as the doctor sat below it, pulling at its udders; streams of hissing tea jetting into his white enamel pail. He filled his syringe from the steaming fluid. It misted the glass tube of the instrument, filling the room with its moist, bovine vapour. The cow smiled through the fog with the most natural expression of quiet delight.

– Ibid., p. 282

The vibration passed through them, through the turning ball of life, through the furniture and the floors, and all the way down to the well, where its harmony increased and spun, igniting tiny engines that ignited tiny engines that ignited tiny engines.

– Ibid., p. 449

Rhio tagged you in a post. You can choose if you want to add it to your Timeline.

Rhio wrote: “”If I could find someone who just looked at me like I’m a girl, like a girl they want to be their girlfriend……I just want a guy to be dating me as a girl.” — Taylor Swift, Vanity Fair article, April 2013. Now, you tell me: does that sound like a 23 year old woman or a 15 year old teenager?”

Here’s a picture of me or Taylor Swift juxtaposed with what happened when I clicked on the link and broke fb’s suckerthumb.

Natacha tagged you in a post. You can choose if you want to add it to your Timeline.

Natacha wrote: “Magie Taylor “The Experience””

Here’s Maggie Taylor’s picture of me:

Here is an interesting link to an exhibition comparing Maggie Taylor and Jerry Uelsmann.

Meanwhile, as Scoop calls him, a Takapuna man has been named by Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine as one of the world’s leading intellectual property strategists. Paul Adams is named among 300 worldwide.

Paul Adams is CEO of EverEdge IP, the company that undertook my Intellectual Property Position Review, recommending that the software and prototype for company be built. Paul Adams’s company additionally recommends that I bring together a team with the skills to take company to the public.

If you can help, please contact me.