sixty-second part, called “on movement LXII,” of a series of ‘letters’ written to you, the reader, towards a book called, theatre | writing

on movement

We are dealing with two different notions of movement. The one we have described both as mobility which we are subject to, and as comedy; the other we see to be static, a suppressed tragedy: that is, the human comedy subjects us, as its subjects, no others, to this tragedy. We have gone further to say the whole surface is mobilised, giving the impression, metaphysical, or symbolic, we too are. Then, we don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Neither do we know how to go about ourselves. In the effort to keep up, we mobilise these material supplements called identities. And they produce, without seemingly producing effects, unless we count in their effects our greater subjection.

To these two different notions of movement belong two different temporalities: but we ought pause here, since our own doubling is doubling, and we are entering the general economy two-by-two. What lies behind the two is the break over which synthesis occurs, materially, and is either passive or active. To say over is to give it height. This the synthesis does not possess. It possesses no purview, no point of survey. Although… there exist infinite points of survey, or, as Raymond Ruyer would have it, infinite forms.

The forms would be those gestures Kirkkopelto talks of, in the smallest of which there is a world. A world not in movement already, we should add. We might also add that the mobility of the surface is upheld by the void just as the movement is, as a stepping out onto it. That is, the void supports the world; the world comes to be in the subject: the subject is that of survey, but not, as Ruyer puts it, absolute survey.

The distinction between passive and active appears to indicate motority and production, its activity, the component in our boy identity we like to add, and, in passivity, being subject, mobilised, pushed around and in the flow, the component of sociality, or gregariousness, that in our girl identity we like to add. How do then differences in subjects occur except by movement or being moved? Or: is passivity a subjective power, like activity? It is. And sages have called it the greater. Think of the Dao and the position of water, and its power.

Materials make a difference. Two notions of movement; two temporalities; and two types of materials contracted in and by the subject: are not all of them produced by some activity? set in play on some economic level? Let us return to the stone, the stone Heidegger says is poor in world. We can imagine it a dark and black theatre, as belonging to a poor theatre.

The ‘activity’ such as it is is internal, plays inside the stone and in a measure of time that is very very slow. Yet in its externality we are able to immediately discern crenelations, fissures, irregularities, ruptures, texture. Brittleness, flakiness, friability—don’t these rather belong to items which are manmade? As in some drug dream, images fly off from manmade surfaces, phantasmata. To this drug dream there is a temporality of dilations and extreme accelerations.

The stone or the water is passive yet carries its temporality as a force within it that it expresses on its outside, of which its outside is the expression. Two things are happening here, one passive, the other active. Both are powers of the subject: and yet there is another, time. This is time as an edge that passes over things, goes through them, informing them throughout: we have the three, and in time its completion, the completion Heidegger only saw. He didn’t see the stone’s extradimensionality, its fractional activity and its fractal passivity.

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to help it come to pass, and show your support for what I’m up to, please sponsor it: become a patron, here.

If you would like to receive these posts, as they are written, as letters addressed to you, please send me your email address.