square white world

…so what is it? Here’s some bits I liked:

Just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the global economy was dominated by natural-resource extraction, today the world’s largest companies have grown as large as they have entirely on the promise of providing to their clients the attention, however fleeting, of their billions of users.

— Justin E.H. Smith The Internet … , (Princeton University Press, 2022), 14

… which suggests a temporal economy and probably a better world were mental-resource extraction to replace that of natural resources…

And these users are, at the same time, being used. One vivid and disconcerting term that has been circulating in social media to describe anyone who spends time online is “data-cow.” The role that users of “free” online platforms occupy might sometimes feel creative, or as if it has something in common with traditional work or leisure. But this role sometimes appears closer to that of a domesticated animal that is valuable to the extent that it has its very self to give. We do not usually provide our bodily fluids, and are not usually asked to do so, though sites such as Ancestry.com do ask for saliva as part of their data-collecting efforts, and health bracelets and other such devices owned by Apple and Amazon are increasingly discovering ways to monitor a number of our vital fluid levels. But even if we are not giving our fluids, we are giving something that has proven more valuable to the new economy than milk ever was in the system of industrial agriculture: information about who we are, what we do, what we think, what we fear. Some of us continue to have old-fashioned careers in the twenty-first century–we are doctors, professors, lawyers, and truck drivers. Yet the main economy is now driven not by what we do, but by the information extracted from us, not by our labor in any established sense, but by our data. This is a revolution at least as massive as the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it. Whatever else happens, it is safe to say that for the rest of our lifetimes, we will only be living out the initial turbulence of this entry into a new historical epoch.

— Ibid. 15

so begins chapter 1. Sounds like its going to chart the impact of what Shoshanna Zuboff in her 2015 book called Data Capitalism called data capitalism. I like the clear statement of what’s at stake. Revolution.

After naming four features of the revolution we will spend our whole lifetimes coming to terms with the book sets about telling us that the revolution is not anything new. It has been going on since at least the Revolution. In fact he dates the whole thing, the whole thing being the Internet, back to Leibniz.

That’s fine by me in terms of fundamental understanding, ideas and concepts, but not in terms of data extraction. And not in terms of the fundamental changes Smith’s four features of the revolution describe. Not then in the terms the book sets for itself.

These are:

1. “a new sort of exploitation, in which human beings are not only exploited in the use of their labor for extraction of natural resources; rather, their lives are themselves the resource, and they are exploited in its extraction.” (15)
2. a new problem: “the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving.” (17)
3. feature 3 is so new it constitutes, says Smith, a “genuine break with the past: the condensation of so much of our lives into a single device, the passage of nearly all that we do through a single technological portal.” “Whatever your habits and duties, your public responsibilities and secret desires, they are all concentrated as never before into a single device, a filter, and a portal for the conduct of nearly every kind of human life today.” (18)
4. … “in the rise of an economy focused on extracting information from human beings, these human beings are increasingly perceived and understood as sets of data points; and eventually it is inevitable that this perception cycles back and becomes the self-perception of human subjects, so that those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able to convincingly present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points. (20) “For many, the only available adaptation to this new landscape is to transform our human identity into a sort of imitation of the decidedly non-human forces that sustain the internet, to trade a personality for an algorithmically plottable profile, in effect, to imitate a bot.” (21)

After this setup I’d like to find out what happens, particularly to number 4, but it wasn’t until much later I realised I was not going to. It was around when Smith was telling me that Deleuze (writing with Guattari) doesn’t have a theoretical monopoly and can’t claim copyright over the idea presented in A Thousand Plateaus of the network being a rhizome or the rhizome a network. And this was followed closely by citing Kant as an authority, so it kind of made sense. I mean, Deleuze with or without Guattari is not going to fit into a Kantian framework.

The problem I have with this book is that although it appears to want to engage philosophy, and this is in the subtitle, A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, it doesn’t do so in a philosophically informed way. The history part is halfway amusing but I would have expected, given that the book really starts with the warning, again a more philosophically informed approach, say an archeological or genealogical one. The trouble is that Smith maintains that it is, that he is doing a “reverse Foucauldianism”. (12) What this tells me is that the book is written the wrong way around.

— Tullio Pericoli

Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead there will be literary web sites. Like those stars, still shining but long dead, the web sites will testify to the existence of past writers. There will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once. Instead of readers there will be cyber space travelers who will stumble upon the websites by chance and stop for a moment to gaze at them. How will they read them? Like hieroglyphs? As we read the instructions for a dishwasher today? Or like remnants of a strange communication that meant something in the past, and was called Literature?

— Dubravka Ugrešić, from her website, https://www.dubravkaugresic.com/

I loved Europe in Sepia and regularly dip into her other writing. If you haven’t read her books, they remain and, despite what she says above, that literature does not mean forever, they are forever literature.

(And that of course means that literature and she herself are only, as my friend P. says, dead at the moment.)

In another of Dubravka Ugrešić’s books, The Age of Skin, LARB notes that she is documenting

…“the last battle […] being waged between banning the red star and fully destigmatizing the swastika. The swastika is winning the fight […] black and swarming like cockroaches.”

Vernor Vinge, 30 years ago, wrote, 

The Coming Technological Singularity: 
                      How to Survive in the Post-Human Era

I'm reading it now. 

the world acts as its own
         simulator in the case of natural selection

For Vinge, human intelligence acts as its own simulator, displacing that of the world and accelerating the process of selection. It is conceivable then that the intelligence of machines will in turn displace the simulator of the human mind and further accelerate this process.

We humans have the ability
         to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads...

The Great Acceleration, in technical means, technology, following the Second World War, becomes in the event of Singularity hyperacceleration.

Developments that
         before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever)
         will likely happen in the next century

Vinge says he'd be surprised if the Singularity happens before 2005 or after 2030. Interestingly, the word he uses to mean the coming to be of a world-simulator to displace human intelligence is to wake, to wake up. He proposes 4 scenarios: the supercomputer wakes up; the network wakes; the interface with humans creates in users a superior intelligence; biological enhancement leading to the superhuman. (These last two, Vinge calls IA, achieving the Singularity through Intelligence Amplification.)

The Singularity is essentially historical. It marks a point beyond which existing reality ceases, its rules no longer apply and there is a new reality. It would seem that this new reality for Vinge is defined by the ability of intelligence to simulate it. It is both Messianic and Simulacral.

Here's the problem: Any [ultraintelligent machine able to self-replicate] 
         would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans
         are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

We will be in
         the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism,
         sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these
         transcendental events from one thousand years remove ... instead of
         twenty.

Hardware parity with the biological brain is a condition for the Singularity. In 1993, this was thought to be 10 to 40 years away. What Vinge calls the Singularity is today usually referred to as achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In 2022, Jake Cannell proposed a 75% likelihood of brain parity, AGI, being reached between 2026 and 2032. [source] 

AGI does however lower the bar from Messianic paradigm-changing event to inter-exchangeability of human and machine intelligences. What is missing from AGI is world simulation. This lowering of horizons for brain parity has also to do with the demotion of both brain and human. 

The neurosciences are in the process of explaining many of the mysteries of the brain, and showing them to be mechanisms. The brain is more distributed than previously thought. There are neurons in the guts. 

At the same time as the notion of the privilege of the brain in the organism becomes questionable, along with claims for its privilege also grounding human exceptionalism, the notion of human exceptionalism in the cosmos is less and less defensible. And as soon as we expect less from the human animal, the supersession of its intelligence no longer looks to bring about the transformation of reality. The Singularity that was source of apocalyptic fear in 1993 is among other bathetic moments in our contemporary culture of disappointment.

Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome,
         giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing
         would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway
         which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a
         golden age ... and it would also be an end of progress.

But, says Vinge, if it can happen it will happen:

... the competitive advantage -- economic, military, even artistic
         -- of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws,
         or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone
         else will get them first.


I think that performance rules 
         [for the superhuman entity] strict enough to be safe would also
         produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered
         versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the
         those more dangerous models).

If the Singularity can not be prevented or confined, just how bad
         could the Post-Human era be?

The physical
         extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler
         put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do,
         perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need
         citizens!)

It's hard to see either the physical extinction of the human race or the decision of governments that citizens are no longer necessary as transcending the reality 30 years on. What scares us more now, going by online newsfeeds, is loss of copyright by artists. It's ironic then that Vinge tells of the combination of competences and human/computer symbiosis in art. 

And that he talks about human/computer teams at chess tournaments after Hans Niemann. And mobile computing as being an example of IA (Intelligence Amplification), when it's often seen as the opposite. And the worldwide internet, in the human/machine combo, is where progress is fastest and it may "run us into the Singularity before
              anything else."

Ironic too, considering how the feedback loop has actually worked between biological life and computers, is that he says,

much of the work in Artificial
         Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection
         with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand
         biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the
         creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for
         guidance or for the providing features we don't understand well enough
         yet to implement in hardware.

While on the deadliness of competition, that is on the deadliest aspects of human inclinations, there is some prescience:

We humans have millions of
         years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a
         deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today's
         world, one where losers take on the winners' tricks and are coopted
         into the winners' enterprises. A creature that was built _de novo_
         might possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a kernel
         based on fang and talon. And even the egalitarian view of an Internet
         that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare.

Vinge differentiates between weak and strong superhumanity, the weak superhuman being the one who is enslaved to the merely human. Since it has overtaken the human in intelligence, whom it has every right to regard as a human does either its pet, its slave or a bug, the strong is the one to be feared. It is so if you are writing in 1993 and not so much in 2023.

Strong superhumanity in the end links with strong cooperation, a notion of networking as involving connectivity at higher and higher bandwidths. Vinge thinks bandwidths along both digital and cerebral axes, in terms of both computation and cerebration, so they add or superadd to intelligence. Today we tend to constrain communication even at high bandwidths to being a technical matter, of formal or linguistic representation. 

A matter of having more information, bandwidth has to do with perception considered also as representation, specifically inner representation, to have to do with how the subject, whether human or nonhuman, represents to itself the world outside it, so determining how much information it has to work with. The higher or greater the bandwidth, the more a subject has intelligence of the world in which it is situated, the more of it it can represent to itself, but this today does not equate with higher intelligence as it does for Vinge. 

For him, at the highest bandwidths networked entities share higher cognitive functions. They are telepathic. There is a general ratchetting effect of intelligence on intelligence, information on information, perception on perception, accumulating and, in Vinge's view, running away far in advance of low bandwidth entities like us. Leading back to the Singularity.

The process of accumulation Vinge is talking about is what today tends to be talked about as growth. It is inextricably linked to the process of capital accumulation. And this process is fundamentally joined to technological advance. Together they form progress.

For Vinge, technological advance means the accumulation of intelligence not capital. Intelligence embodied in computers, IA and information networks reaches a point of runaway. This progress for him was inevitable, not so for us.

Or is it? Today's coupling of technological and economic forces, accumulation and extraction and exploitation, of both smart and manual labour, means progress to an inevitable point that resembles Vinge's inasmuch as it too is the occasion for fear, if not dread. It is the deadly prospect of human extinction that will be augured by the Sixth Great Extinction of nonhuman life on which human life depends, in the interconnectedness of all life on earth.

The idea that economic and technological forces can be uncoupled appears almost to be cause for optimism. Economic forces, those of extraction and exploitation, are in this view a shackle. Economics stymies progress, leading it off in another direction which appears to be as inevitable as the Singularity. Economic forces divert progress towards planetary rather than human extinction.

Uncoupled, unimpeded by the economic restriction placed on it by the demand for demand and its supply, delinked from the process of capital accumulation (and the current redistribution of wealth, South to North, national to civic, social to plutocrat) technology had to lead, in Vinge's view, towards superhuman intelligence. He doubted that once it was achieved this superhumanly intelligent being would deign to be further constrained by restrictions placed on it by humans. He did however entertain the thought of a benign superhumanity. Its ultraintelligence might indulge humanity, oversee it and shepherd it. Out into the stars, for example, as in his and Iain M. Banks's space opera.

More likely, he thought, was that a superhuman entity should not indulge the species inferior to it. He thought it was more likely, just as humans do to other species, for humans to be squashed. The reasoning resembles that consecrated in theories of economics, of the self-interested individual. What possible self-interest on the part of a superhuman being might be served by preserving the human race?

Fun? Entertainment? Qualities that derive from our animal origins? Inputs of affect and emotion? Sex? God as the Great Pornographer of the Human Condition? ... 

All these have been considered in speculative and science fiction, and explored in the holy books of mono- and pluri-theistic religious traditions. According to how they are treated by the gods, and, whether angry, absent, indifferent or loving, the Gods, anthropos might be thought to have something going for them. And there is room for optimism in light of the literature.

When it gets here, if it were allowed to get here (and economics and technology were uncoupled), the Singularity might solve some of the problems, caused by human practices, of the Anthropocene. Or, Superman might call on the waters of the deep to engulf all of humanity as his punishment. Or... Isn't this exactly what is happening?

the following portable document format text was written when I realised that the book I had been working on, about theatre pt. 1, about writing, pt. 2, begged the question. The question it assumed answered, that it took for granted, was, What’s the point of art research? Sometimes called practice-as-research and artistic research, I mean, What is it? And, why should I care to look at theatre or at writing from the perspective of these being two different research practices, as two different avenues for art or artistic research?

I attempt to answer these questions, I assay to and these attempts are recorded as the 3 essays; and whether successful or not, they have 3 endings.

I completed pretty much the whole of the part about theatre (as art research) before I realised it was begging the question (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly. My understanding is that it doesn’t mean asking or raising the question but proceeding without thought for there still being a question at all). 3 essays 3 endings looks forward to this part and the part about writing (as art research). They are preparatory essays, an extended pretext, setting out the reasons for art research before doing it with theatre and writing.

I went backwards, kind of unwriting the book I thought I was writing. I also went sideways, like one of those battery-operated toys, that, when it hits an obstacle, changes direction at random.

I decided to run through the entirety of my findings from the part about theatre in a series of 68 letters. These were addressed to ‘you’ the reader here on squarewhiteworld (against the darkroundearth). I should collect them all (I did), but you can find them through the search function (like this).

What I wanted to say about writing as art research has so far only come out in the two lectures presented at Auckland University of Technology in 2021. These have audio. The Lecture on Reflective Writing is here. The Lecture on Academic Writing is here.

Since writing 3 essays 3 endings, I also presented ten lectures on moving image theory and context. This series of lectures takes up on many of the ideas from the book; that an art practice, making work in moving image, is a way of thinking, or can be; that to engage creatively with a medium is to think with it; that this constitutes a form of art research. The series, without audio, is here.

If you would like to support the completion of the book… or you might prefer to support its noncompletion… please contact me. Comment and critique is welcome, either through contact or comments. Thanks!

Best,

Simon

Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe write that the social order has been “entrusted to lawyers, activists, remote governmental experts on transnational commissions, central bankers, technocrats, the market, CEOs… not to ordinary citizens” and that how production functions, is organised and distributed is left to “supply chain managers, investors and trade negotiators, not unions or politicians.” [see here]

Roles, the actions of actors or of agents with agency, are not characteristic of contemporary communications society however. The network is.

Contemporary society does not divide along class lines. It does not divide at all. Its entanglement, the entanglement of social and power relations that society comprises, constitute its control.

Roles do not characterise our kind of social political organisation but relations. Ordinary citizens are as much a part of the indivisible entanglement of control society as investors and trade negotiators, as well as unions and politicians. There is no division.

Power is relational. So is agency: as such, power is implicative.

The power of an agent to act is more than inextricable from the rest, from the totality of relations of power functions, it is implicated in the totality of the network of all of them.

The network materialises not as the totality of power relations, for example at the institutional or individual levels. It does not materialise neuro-bio-logically. Rather neurological and biological, ecological and social and psychical networks are built epistemologically on the model of material communications, the nondiscursive material network of a mathematical and computational imaginary. Yes: both material and imaginary, otherwise known as an hallucination of the totality.

It is imaginary because invented, a matter of pure invention. It determines the future and the future of human social organisation, so that it is a form of knowledge, a form of generic knowledge replacing all other forms.

Wrongly called science or the scientific worldview, in this determinative function of a knowledge, impending over the future, it is better called speculative.

The name for this network with its power functions and totality of relations is the market.

A speculative, implicative and nonhuman reality, or brain. Onto it are projected our real material conditions of an agency and roles that abrogate them both, preferring to our own, artificial intelligence.

Narratives of crisis emplot events to create a meaningful sequence. The way they construct this sequence is prior to and entails the choice of explanatory mechanisms and the fingering of guilty parties. To speak about “post-truth,” declining trust in science, and/or the “death of expertise” is to sketch the faint outlines of a sequence, a set of slots into which the usual suspects will slip naturally and self-evidently. The sequence of events is linear, leading to a break: a long-term process of decline that ultimately leads to a “collapse of the relationship between experts and citizens,” a breakdown of trust that threatens to send “democracy itself [into…] a death spiral.” Sketched in this way, the linear sequence implies a culprit: the “foundation of all these problems,” the soil in which all the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered,” is the “abysmal literacy, both political and general of the … public.” The public is worse than a phantom; it is willfully ignorant. Enter the Great Multiplier–the internet and social media–and the secular trend combusts into full-fledged crisis: “a google-fueled, wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople.”

— Gil Eyal, The Crisis of Expertise, (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019), 82.

on movement

The brain selects items for action. It is not, for Bergson, for knowledge and does not select to know. It already practices an economy. Economising as a part of the system of perception, the brain is like any other organ in this respect: it synthesises problems of the outside.

If we know anything at all it’s out of habit: Hume’s insight, from which Deleuze gains the syntheses of habit. What then is synthesised, or contracted, from habits as problems of the outside? The brain takes this to be information. It takes syntheses of habit as items for action as well. Yet they are the products of habit.

That the syntheses of habit are products of habit as well, and are synthesised for action, makes that action general. Although divided into institutions, like institutional knowledge, institutional systems of representation, structures of cognition and grammars for recognition, the general action is indivisible. It performs an indivisible mobility, engaging the whole surface in movement so as to perpetuate its symbolic economy. That is, products of habit form another economy concerned with their symbolic reproduction with institutions to take care of their symbolic production.

Perhaps for the reason of the syntheses of habit being largely concerned with a symbolic economy, for Deleuze the brain is a sign signal system. As for Bergson, however, it is not for cognition and not to represent to itself that the brain and system of perception are geared, for example, representing to itself the problems of knowledge or cognition, which it would then act to process and contend with resolving. For Deleuze, the sign consists of a problem and the signal is an action.

Symbols, as matters of habitual synthesis, are still subjects of action and meanings are actions. Yet, what other meaning can they have but that acquired from habit? And, what may be parsed from these words but the syntheses of habit?

The issue is not that of bringing new meanings or a new meaning to light. Neither is that of naming this brain the false one and that one the true, the symbolic economy the secondary, or the brain of artificial creation, and the perceptual economy, the sensible one, primary and of natural creation. We are still talking of theatre and there is still the selection of subjects and for movement.

The issue is how to move in the crowd of subjective apprehensions. How to move when their alignment, the alignment of their outsides, is given by the misapprehension of symbolic actions, on a surface mobilised overall by the habitual syntheses of others. And what is movement when it is no more than the connectivity of outsides in their symbolic interplay, already, all over. The issue is, what is doing the work of the brain now it is no longer selecting items for action, for symbolic production, but the technological means, for the reproduction of habitual syntheses, that is doing the work of selection?

…

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.

on movement

Our irony is not reserved to that which dismisses the body, to the pretension to spirituality, spirit, spiritualism or art, but to an automatism that is that of the general economy and of the cognitive-behaviourist brain. Boys, don’t they? tend to add to their toys an active component. Girls, I’ve seen, tend to add to them a social component.

Imagine the appeal of the toy that had both! The social economy is such a readymade—the readymade of social stereotypes and of their mobilisation in institutional codes. (And, of course, the readymade of gender stereotypes, social performativity, and the fluidity of roles: that whole theatre, where transitions of scenes are transitions of subjects, meaning, their production.)

The problem with a generally mobilised social economy is not that it exists. It’s not even that it’s a product such as engenders the commodification of social identities, stereotyping from the given material by a supplemental material, which, if we are sticking with the theatre metaphor, we can call symbolic. (Or phallic.) Its problem is that of already having been activated and socialised. That is, what’s a boy to do? What’s a girl to? Here is the repertoire—again, the theatrical metaphor—you are the supplement. Yet: you do not get to add the active component; and you do not get to add the social component. In other words, You’re it.

I seem to be speaking indirectly about social media. Not entirely the case: by general or a generally mobilised social economy I am referring to the mobilisation in the social of the economy, the socialising of economic drivers, capital as data, and, data as capital, to the rendering of the economy as social. It goes both ways.

Yes, we can see the boys excited on the floors of the stock exchange. And the girls rising through the managerial ranks by virtue of their social intelligence. (Or emotional intelligence.) But they are such for having been reciprocally produced by the economic supplanting the social and the social supplanting general political economy.

When we ask what is to be done we can see we are doing everything we can: flowing in all directions. This is what the code allows, which Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus call the axiom of capital: a double parasitism or double ventriloquism. Am I speaking for myself here?

Do I really believe it? Well, yes, of course: what other cause could there be for giving rise to so many misunderstandings? All I want to be is clear about this: and immediately disown every word I have written.

How to eke out our little bit of world? our little patch of earth, as Deleuze and Guattari also write, when across its surface there is this general semiotic dispersal? We should note in this word, semiotic, both seeds and atoms; and note a change in register, or atmosphere. If there are still enough of the primary elements, if there are still enough atoms making them up, still enough air to breathe, the right amount of warmth, enough water, and sufficient soil, the seeds are subjects: that is, they contract these elements. Their coming-to-life is not so important as this.

Some time ago, we stated that there seem to be two principles. We were not concerned with their mediation but by the contracting power of what contracts them, which we have identified to be a subjective power. A subjective power is at work contracting elements of social economy, just as a subjective power is at work in the misunderstanding synthesising the meaning of these words. Such is the bad habit of being human: to focus on the mediation as the moving part.

…

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.

on movement

We experience communication as bodiless, yet we feel it as movement. All those pleasures we feel from being communicated with, and all that pain: it is what makes us human, keeps us human, leads us to hope or wish to be. But isn’t so wishing also to wish to be bodiless?

If there’s a spiritual realm it belongs to communication. It doesn’t belong to emotion, to our feelings. It causes them. And yet it is the authority we most invoke for their expression, which communication authorises, so is seen to be despotic in the prohibition of that expression, and, in granting it, beneficent and even munificent.

Art’s humanising task: to elevate through its emotional appeal, and its function: communication. To bring our emotions to their fullest expression, with communication in judgement of their truth: that is the aspiration to being human art sets in motion. This would be a function of language except that so little of what we say, or signal through language, arrives at communication. It rather tends to reinforcement, habits of expression, expressive habits.

Not until we reach custom, the customary, do we experience communication. That is: the coded. Codes of communication encode language as institution. And institutions are judged for their humanity on whatever values of truth they embody. That is: disembody. This value derives from its production, with the despot ruling its range and the munificent one to grant the fullest range of expression. That is, the codes of expression like those of behaviour are political avenues.

Zones of relative freedoms, they are relative to being a nobody without any right to express emotions, and without their having any claim on truth. Such a nobody opposes the spirit, is all body, and is less than human. Somebody who doesn’t communicate is however thought to have a mental disorder before they are considered to have a communicative one, as in the case of autism.

Is emotional intelligence an intellectual capacity, an emotional one, or a communicative one? If it is a matter of communication, it is at once a question of institutional codes, of their humanising or dehumanising purpose. And of the role of art, the purpose of which is … to be free: free in the sense of an always politically arbitrated, calibrated, conforming relativeness.

And if art should wish to be free of politics? It should accede to the highest form of humanity. And in its disembodiment, participate in the spiritual economy of communication.

…

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.

subjective powers

The digital surface is socially invested, given the power to produce subjects. The subjects we ought to want to be: that is, according to the narrative. It is a narrative of progress, yet it precedes the subjects of, shall we say, speculation, in a speculative data economy.

Those subjects who we ought to want to be and become are the trading pieces. And therefore, trade in pieces, pieces of a psycho-graphology or psycho-grammatology, like parts of speech, the swapmeet we earlier mentioned, where we don’t feel a thing, feel nothing like the insertion of the psyche, or the psychic body, the human one, into the social story, because these parts, and here the paranoia, are inserted into us. Or, better said, into the psyche. So there has been a previous paring down of it, the body-psyche, or body’s mind, if you like, a breaking down and a building up again, from borrowed parts. This is why changing the narrative is the same business: because it is in the same business.

The paranoia breaks out when we feel a part of us take over the role we had hitherto supposed to be ours. As in drunk-texting, the words escape; and with certain drugs, we notice, senses deranged, that they are serial, the senses, from their being put out of order, out of, that is, the social order. We might just as well say, the narrative order. The essence of tragedy: personally to feel so ordered, by, what we can further call, social destiny or narrative necessity. Of course, it’s a comedy to everybody.

In classic tragedy, madness ensues. And we see this fairly regularly, the patch-up jobs, the motley of the general social roles, see, it is comical! Called in by friends, we assist in changing the narrative, so that you or I can get back up again, face the void.

Why void? Well, isn’t that the feeling? The feeling of starting again, and the fear. Like having nothing inside.

We return to a beginning actor, but in taking back possession of ourselves, normally proceed like the selfish one. We fall back on, often disingenuously, sometimes with real terror, what we know. The strangest thing can occur when we are the donors of our own body-parts. They become the opposite of ghost limbs. We become the ghosts.

It is said to be perfectly normal for our psychic well-being to view the space below the stage, the surface, as already full of the lives we are in fact living. But that is the past. We have reversed the order. It is not as full bodies we step out on to the void; it is as voids we step out on to the fullness of who we were.

What help is it to be considering subjective powers in the nightmare or mania we are living of living as introjected subject matter, part-consumables, grammatical egos? For a start, of the latter we can say we see the attraction, since to be part of digital discourse is reassuring, gratifying even, to think we have symbolic entity; this is what analysis does: as symbols of ourselves we can carry on… but it is only by granting such symbols as being outside us that we can do this.

That is, enter the void: the stage direction given not by the void but to the void. Here it comes now, extending its surface under us, at a point we can choose. It is a point in the now.

What is happening is the choice of the minima we go on with: What does a risking actor do? Joaquin Phoenix for some reason comes to mind, perhaps as an example because we can see the results on the plane of their registration, as compositional elements of the screen. He twitches. Or his grimace is nonsensical, out of place, and that’s how we can tell it’s part of the character. From the smallest gesture, we have said, with Kirkkopelto, a world.

Or it is in an angle of his body we see it flash blade-like. A light comes out of his eyes and illuminates the planes of his face. And it is a compulsion, from an inner compulsion, that he acts so in small bits and pieces, the minima of subjectivities; yet we cannot go so far as to call it inner or inward because pure expression, outside, a part of speech that makes absolutely no sense, but here is the pain in the yelp of a dog, a cur, that signifies a world, a world where such a yelp, scream, can be made. Such a world is not produced, not the product of the scream, but suffuses the surface: is the event we have noted, then the impersonal affect, then… the whole subject in its subjective duration, in its subjective duration so whole: a subjective power we have reserved for the indeterminate duration of the reported on, on, not a surface of registration, but receptive centre, the centre of a hearing of indeterminate duration.

The pruning off of perception, selection, all the way to active election, choosing what happens as it does; undoing it, giving it a power that is internal to a receptive centre, is not the expression that reaches out, of a metaphysical impression, but the expression of a psychic minimum in which the subject subsists, comes about or revolves; the revolution itself, of a past pressing up against the present, producing affects without antecedents: all the surface’s roles. The stage’s. This revolution is the saying, the telling, we need to be hearing, is not the story, the warning, the moral lesson, the past, but pushes, has the means to, against the future. Opens it, a crack.

…

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