A Window into Consciousness

The Night.  The Person.  The Place.

Viewing the ragged horizon from the fifth floor of the Building.

The dark draws in and the lit windows pick out the name zigzag fashion.  A company, ViKor, is spelt out.

The West side advert to the sinking sun; the name blocked in in the black as jewels glass.  The person on the right leg of the K let’s suppose.  What does standing there feel like?

How is he aware of things, assuming that he has been out in the street, arms akimbo, at other times, looking back up? 

One Two

A wrinkled box of water.  I into a painted corner unlock the blue clatter of the tin.  On this is the island on which I live where birds fly high nothing survives the four winds into which the dust motes speed like the red nailed barbs of the cactus animals that society has bent on pasteurisation.  The verb denotes action.  Or vice versa.  Everything dies.  Everything dies is always something and something being what it is is always there.  There are two on my island.  Walls define it.  Two of me.  Being what I am.  Each finitude stays like a cut and paste advert hanging above the kites of fallen horses.  Where I hide what’s worst is hidden.  Has no place to hide but in creation.  The other is my echo.  I don’t believe I’ve ever heard.  This is my sad egg.  My happy hatch.  Where all sands down.  My patch of grass, my full blown flung dung of self, food arrives here, a toil of Pyramis.  In this little place of sun. 

Postmodernism - definitions

The postmodernist condition describes our absolute divorce from Nature.  Scientific, technological, cultural.  Religious.

Life moves against no ground.  Where am I writing this?  Only the vague idea of a planet persists.  And that is that, but still it doesn’t say where I am.  Technologically I stand ‘outside’.  I say I am English.  This is English.  Pinglish.

The shopping mall, the tv, the phone: who am I?  These are my defining objects; ’humanising’ my mortal condition - it seems.  But they make transparent my state of actual unreality too: a being of nature but where ‘nature’ has ceased to be recognisable.  Machines that render ubiquity make of the world of ’everywhere’ a world nowhere. 

[Click on Category '1' to the left.]

I define myself by not defining myself.  By ’speaking up’.

A disjunction; for the modernist man is with nature, but the postmodernist only recognises nature by its absence. 

Wilder

Positing the concept of infinity is our way of making a face for the wilderness.  But that articulation is a finitude. 

Infinity: Where is It?

A worm in the rain: does it occupy infinity?  Is that why birds sing?  To make the incorrigible real.  Life is a two way street.  Infinity Street.  For Finite lives on it too: on Finite Street = this world, which is wholly ordinary.  Infinity … Picture someone with their eyes in bandages, throwing a dart at a dartboard.  Bulls-eye! In either case - someone says - it, the finite, stands on infinity’s foundation - exists on its basis - .  Like a shell on a beach.  After all the infinite must be bigger (much bigger) than the finite, they say; obviously it must contain the finite.

But why that way round especially?  Why not, in the finite, in the mere ordinary object before me, the mere pencil, infinite extension? - why not in its length of eight inches, including the rubber affixed to its end, which is the pencil’s ‘dart flight’, why not the inverse infinity of finitude?  Another world? 

… So - but supposing that, if it is to be seen, infinity requires (like the blindfolded dart-player) some sort of quantum sense, that if it is to be detected it needs a special kind of intuition … isn’t that requirement irrational? - So that we seem obliged to say of whatever is infinite that it is also infinitely incomprehensible - except by occult means.  If infinity is not to be finitely understood, again: what is it?  The ruler does and doesn’t contain its incommensurable length.  We draw a blank.  Yet reason proposes it.  Infinity: “The ruler is not a ruler - but the ruler is a ruler!”   You can’t be wrong without being right.  For neither is neither but both are both - at the same time!  Nothing but Something.  This but That. 

Upstream at downstream.  Front of back.  Forwards in reverse.

… All metaphysical confusion arises as a result of this: that is, the compulsion to think on absolutes confronts us with infinity.

As a child riding on the back seat of the family car, I would shut my eyes and think myself into the sensation that the forward motion was backwards.  Shadows would pass over my closed eyes forwards but I would see them backwards.  Lying on a bed staring at the wardrobe it took only a second to think myself standing upright and the wardrobe sideways …

Metaphysical Objectivity.

What is ‘objectivity’?  Its invocation seems to suggest the world itself, the ‘absolute’.  But if we speak of the absolute as an objective idea, of the world - this seems to be the same thing - how is that absolute?  Well, but oughtn’t there to be an absolute?  When someone says: “That is objectively real”?    When you or I say: “The world is objectively real.”

The language game seems of secondary concern to its thought, so that any admission that this ‘purely’ objective world is a metaphysical illusion generated by supposing that it is not a language game would seem to be quite wrong.  The sense that objectively the world exists only in the terms in which the word means ”true” or “false”, or “real” or “unreal” and so on of a given ordinary instance seems (as it were) the mere shadow of the ideal that we aim at, so is it set it to one side. 

The Ownership of the Actual

Is it true?  Is objectivity a matter of who owns it?

What kind of world does a flea die into?

Objectivity says: this is a world of rational limit.

And it is - to rationality.  But a flea is not a rational being.

It is fundamental to things that they are ‘wild’.

Of course.  And the rationality of the human estate does not remove the wilderness from human reality.  It simply means we are capable of creating worlds that imagination can own.

What doesn’t exist

I am inclined to say that this world exists because of what doesn’t exist.  Yet how can what is borrow from what isn’t?

As though actuality rests on wholly ethereal foundations!

The Banal

Zizek: The premise of Zizek’s theory is that the subjective violence we see – violence with a clear identifiable agent – is only the tip of an iceberg made up of ‘systemic’ violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

Divisions are identified that seem to define the world ‘as it really is’.  These sorts of divisions are decisive - we believe - because they refer us to what is familiar.  But Zizek’s remarks here merely follow the same old sorry pattern of yore.  This is the pattern that sticks to contrite academia’s formal pieties.  Philosophy has been apologising for itself ever since Bertrand Russell.   The defining terms make academia plausible in the context of the ‘real world’ it seems; it has to prove itself relevant to the world; therefore this must be the world that everyone is familiar with and takes for granted: even if is the very acceptance of this world that is itself part of the problem.  We have something that is basically just a pat-a-cake incantation: something that is as categorically fantasised as Tolkein’s ’good’ and ‘evil’: life as rendered according to an image of ’science’; with what is ‘human’ within this being mere ’subjectivity’.   The objective is regarded as the ’systemic’ truth of impersonal hard fact.

… So, let’s ask anyway.  What is violence with “a clear identifiable agent”?  What makes it ’subjective’?  Is it the agent or the clarity that does this?  Is the violence without a perceptible agent to be called ‘objective violence’?  (For instance, because it is less ‘resented’ in seeming ‘natural’.)

My criticism is this.  That the impulse to identify fact and objectivity in this simple, clear way is like the rictus of a smile adopted to keep in with a certain crowd; it merely confirms the prejudices of the crowd being sucked up to.

For the genuinely revolutionary we have to look further afield.

A Subjective Infinity?

With a sweep of the arm I make a gesture of inclusion.  “This world.  The world.”  The world. 

I look at the picture and I see that it wants to be a world.

Does that mean that it wants to be this world?

The gesture of infinitude. 

In one case I want to mean a limitlessness but in the other the opposite.  “In the first case I associate the world with my subjectivity.  It can be anything.  In the second case I am referring to what it is actually, as a matter of fact.”

Ostensive Definition

“This …. “

“‘This’ … what?”

What?

This …

This world.  This world.

What, which world?  Whose?

This - this world.