Thinking about Origins

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading3 Comments

Along the networks of transductive reading, the following productive co-constitutive readings…

“The beginning is not the same as the origin.  When the beginning emerges, the origin recedes, leaving in its wake a past that becomes our future to form a circle that never closes…It is important not to convuse beginning with origin.  Origins are always obscure even when beginnings are not.”

–Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere-

“What if, instead of placing self-self interaction at the center of development, we were to posit relation as key to experience?  Relation, understood here in a Jamesian sense, is a making apparent of a third space opened up for experience in the making.  This third space (or interval) is active with the tendencies of interaction but is not limited to them.  Relation folds experience into it such that what emerges is always more than the sum of its parts…”

–Erin Manning, Always More than One–

bear with me – this is extended, but so merits reflection (I think)…

“What if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding?  Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward.  Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world.  This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor.  It happens across strata, both actual and virtual.  A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing.  But not on the skin or in the body.  Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage.  This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world…”

complex adaptive systems diagram

“…In equal measure, the world also tends toward the becoming-body.  Body-worlding is much more than containment, much more than envelope.  It is a complex feeling-assemblage that is active between different co-constitutive milieus.  It is individuation before it is self, a fielding of associated milius that fold in, on, and through one another.  For the associated milieu is never ‘between’ constituted selves: the associated milieu is the resonant field of individuation, active always in concert with the becomings it engenders.  Becoming-self is one of the ways in which this folding (body-worlding) expresses itself, but never toward a totalization of self – always toward continued individuation.  ‘To think individuation it is necessary to consider being not as substance, matter or form, but as a tensile oversaturated system beyond the level of unity’ (Gilbert Simondon).  Self is a modality – a singularity on the plane of individuation – always on the way toward new foldings.  These foldings bring into appearance not a fully constituted human, already-contained, but co-constitutive strata of matter, content, form, substance, and expression.  The self is not contained.  It is a fold of immanent expressibility.”

one more paragraph worth considering?….

“senses of self are less bounded phases than fractal phase-spaces composed of interweaving strata.  ‘Once formed, each sense of self remains fully functioning and active throughout life.  All continue to grow and coexist’ (Daniel Stern).  No stratum is ever completely disarticulated from another in the creation of emergent senses of self.  Rather, strata veer through and across one another in the associated milieu’s intensive fielding.  As the infant ages and becomes verbal, for instance, their sense of being a coherent, willful, physical entity – foregrounding strata phasing toward organization – may intermesh with the frustration of not being able to express the feeling-vector of intensity that remains a key aspect of the tending toward coherence – foregrounding the strata phasing toward the virtual or immanence.  Every becoming is tinted with this double articulation.  There is no stable pre- and postverbal state.  There is no stable identity that emerges once and for all.  Becoming-human is expressed singularly and repeatedly in the multiphasing passage from the feeling of content to the content of feeling, a shift from the force of divergent flows to a systematic integration.  This is not a containment toward a stable self.  It is a momentary cohesiveness, a sense of self that always remains colored by the interweaving of forces that both direct and destabilize the ‘self’s’ proto-unification into an ‘I.’  With all apparent cohesiveness there remains the effect of the ineffable that acts like a shadow on all dreams of containment.  For double articulation reminds us that singular points of identification always remain mired within the complex forces of their prearticulation, prearticulation not strictly as the before of articulation, but the withness of the unutterable, the ineffable – the quasi-inexpressible share of expressibility – within language.  There is no self that is not also emergent, preverbal, affectively oriented toward individuation.”

–Erin Manning, Always More than One–

“That from which I emerge approaches by withdrawing”

-Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere–

reflections….?

“Transductive Reading”

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Journallings, Reflections, Traces4 Comments

Warning:  an unfortunate side-effect of immersion in summer, family and graduate studies is the near-impossibility of crafting fragments of writing into art.  For the time being, then, if you choose to read this blog, it will consist primarily of recommendations, snippets, quotations and reflections with hopefully a weekly creative venture of flash fiction or a poem or two.  The following will fall under the “Reflections” category.

I mentioned “transductive” a few posts ago.  As defined by Gilbert Simondon, a transductive relationship is “a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituants: e.g. humanity and technics are indissociable” (from Bernard Stiegler, Technics & Time, vol 2: Disorientation).

I read books by piles.  From time to time I post an updated “currently reading” list, usually comprised of 50 or more books that I keep lined about my desk as a privacy barrier and womb-like conversational enclosure.  I dip in and out of these, ruled by something like mood or intuition – at times I sense exactly what voice or rhythm, style or subject I desire, crave, or need for some sort of equilibrium I lack, and slowly regain by engagement with these texts.  In other words, for my own sense of sanity, well-being, provocation or anticipated growth, I need a collective of minds and voices, styles and subjects to wake me, challenge me, inform me, soothe me, spur me on.  Here’s a smattering from each of the stacks surrounding me…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

What I recognized today, is that the way I read is transductive – each voice, style, subject, mind I engage is co-constitutive of the others I take in.  

For example, today I’ve been primarily soaking in Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere, and Roland Barthes‘ The Preparation of the Novel lectures.  Barthes describes the urge to change, to purpose singly, “to invest / disinvest / reinvest” as an experience of the “middle-of-the-journey” – an impossible location, but “nothing other than the moment when one realizes that death is real” and time changes, everything is re-evaluated, re-purposed, the familiar is questioned and made strange.  I think (transductively) what Taylor refers to as “Elsewhere“: “not so much a place as a condition that renders whatever had seemed familiar utterly strange…the axis of the world shifts, even if ever so slightly, and what passes for normal changes.”

These books are filled with insight, interest and intrigue (as are the whole swoop of titles in the slideshow), but today, today, I am revelling in the company and conversation these writings (surrounding me) construct and carry one, the opportunity I have to be in the midst of it, my mind like a circuit-operator, pushing buttons, pulling plugs, reconnecting, crossing wires, silencing…reading this way is kind of like the work of conducting a symphony – except the melding sounds occur only within the ampitheatrical shell of my own neuronally-linked brain…transductively.

These works co-constitute me, and come to co-constitute my transductive relationships with my loved ones, environment, world.  Taylor writes provocatively of all the betwixt and betweens of reality – “I am never sure whether light makes the mountains appear or the mountains make light visible…Darkness in the  midst of light and light in the midst of darkness…There is a texture to light that allows – no, requires – the tissue of vision to be constantly woven anew…”

“Paradoxes and contradictions form the very stuff of our lives…the challenge of teaching, writing, and, indeed, living is to join the abstract and the concrete in thinking about questions that truly matter” (Taylor).  

At this stage in my own biolography…I feel this acutely and persuasively.  The “before / after” of which Barthes writes so fluidly – that there is not enough time left to go on creating projects for the future, what lies behind has not achieved the “wanting-to-write” sufficiently…Elsewhere has been visited (or has visited)…and change, choice and directions must be purposed…

“To Want-to-Write‘ (Vouloir-Ecrire) = attitude, drive, desire, I don’t know what: insufficiently studied, defined, situated.  This is clearly indicated by the fact that there’s no word for this ‘wanting to’ – or rather, one exists, a delightful exception, but in decadent, late Latin: scripturire, used just once (in the fifth century) by Sidoine Apollinaire, the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand who defended Clermont against the Visigoths (major poetic work).  What I mean to say is: since a word exists in one language, albeit only once, it is wanting in all the others…

     Why?  Probably because underrepresented, or perhaps, in a more complex manner, because here the relationship between the drive and the activity is autonymical: wanting-to-write is only a matter of the discourse of someone who has written – or is only received as discourse from someone who has managed to write.  To say that you want to write – there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write – not scientific discourses…an order of knowledge where the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive (and, in that case, belongs to an erotics) – Or, put differently again: writing is not fully writing unless there’s a renunciation of metalanguage; Wanting-to-Write can only be articulated in the language of Writing: this is the autonymy I referred to…”

-Roland Barthes-

I’m there.  Elsewhere.  Wanting-to-Write…

 

New Feasty Arrivals – kudos Inter-Library Loan

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading2 Comments

How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields
The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes

 

Significant?

On By Alias HarlequinIn Journallings, Traces, Writing2 Comments

Toying with significance, practicing writing by hand.

                 Cause of which:  online graduate school (hybrid) perhaps.  Blackboard (not a blackboard + a hand moving chalk), wikis, MS Word, blogosphere…

                  Writing is a different word than typing (“keyboarding,” “texting,” “thumbing,” “fingering?”)

                  Handwriting – is there another?

Writings is different from typing.

not only pacing.

Significance - Handwriting

Significance

“People exist

to attach importance”

(Rae Armantrout)

Exercise.

Once I had the most beautiful pen-man-ship.  Admired, envied, revered.

My hand now working by jolts and shirts (“stammering”)

Wife says I jerk in the night, in my sleep.  As if the wires were hot and crossed.  “Traumatic,” she says.

Like my father.

Who has elegant penmanship – consistent, beautiful, and flowing.

What I aspired to.

And achieved.

Now interruptive.  Herky.  Stuttering.  Multi-controlled.  Cross-wired.

Muscles, nerves, vision, brain + its fabricating memory and prediction: out of sync.

     I exercise a few moments in which I don’t feel particularly pressured and am thinking about significance.

“I listened with great interest and desire to have it be of no significance.

But you know how it goes.  Significance abounded.”

(Percival Everett)

Now my thoughts arrive sturdier through a machine.  Body – extension – return.  The pen was extension.  The ink.  Dependent on the body.  Embodied, enminded.  Transductive.

“‘transductive’ (a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituents)”

(Gilbert Simondon)

Tools.  Media.

Humanity — technology.

Me : keyboard : thought : language.

Me : pen/paper : thought : language.

Transductive.  Co-constituent.  Interdependent.

Significant?

Dreaming of – imagining – my recovered penmanship.

Therefore, exercise.

Communication.

Transductive.

“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood.  Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention.  Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change.  Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present.  Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning.  Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical.  Even if the language is unknown.  Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content.  Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.”

(Percival Everett)

“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased”

 

Window Dressing

On By Alias HarlequinIn Experimenctes, Writing18 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, May 31, 2013

Copyright - Janet Webb

You, in your bluish hue – nostalgic and hopeful – ever inhabiting a kind of aether, neither here nor there, but possible – like heavens, like waters – deep, open, beyond.  A different form of presence, not with, but altogether.  Perhaps.  Whereas I, in fleshy, earthbound, soiling tones – dressed to catch the eye – hang myself into the world of shapes and edges, angles and points – risking extravagant extension rather than mirroring sea and sky.  Butting bodies – yours forgiving and surrounding, just shy of the resistance for friction – mine stolid and secure, and flagging its pronouncement.

N Filbert 2013

Who Controls The World

On By Alias HarlequinIn Writing3 Comments

This is SO what I try talking about – so clearly represented! Cheers Edgar Morin, Bruno Latour, Humberto Maturana, Paul Thibault, Jay Lemke, et. al…. thoughts?

Stammering Great Literature

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Writing3 Comments

“Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language.  To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation.  But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty”

–Marcel Proust–

“Having a bag into which I put everything I encounter, provided that I am also put in a bag.  Finding, encountering, stealing instead of regulating, recognizing and judging…It is an assemblage, an assemblage of enunciation.  A style is managing to stammer in one’s own language.  It is difficult, because there has to be a need for such stammering.  Not being a stammerer in one’s speech, but being a stammerer of language itself…writing does not have its end in itself precisely because life is not something personal.  The only aim of writing is life, through the combinations which it draws…and there is no method for finding other than a long preparation…”

-Gilles Deleuze-

 

Borrowed Mask 1.

On By Alias HarlequinIn Poetry2 Comments

The only rule,

the only law

of genius, of imagination, of abandonment, of truth,

is change.

.

Not reworking, but change.

.

What is this borrowed mask?

The same old song once more?

Will Apollinaire defend us

this time?

As he did Renoir,

                       his Arcadia, his nudes.

Who will bring back

the soul of art?

Who will bring it back

from the Underworld?

                      Picasso having played

                      Orpheus this go round.

2.

Never rework,

the influence being imaginary

at best, but isn’t that

enough?

.

Always new again,

though there is no new

                    matter.

No new paint.

Only rearrangement.

No change.

Nothing to be changed.

No looking back.

No back upon which

                               to look.

-Percival Everett-

Waiting for words to tell…

On By Alias HarlequinIn Art, Current Reading, Journallings, Writing3 Comments

Immersed in summer and studies, I find myself struggling with capacities of some purer form of origin beyond connections.  The creativity that satiates me in relationship and studies is one of associations, extensions, combinatory experiments of life-experiences and informations and knowledges.  Fiction and poetry, in a unique manner, seem to process the connectivities and associations invented somehow more within myself.  Not so much in activities of external bonds and ties that loop within/without between concepts and voices, persons and family, and my own; but what bonds those activities and informations spawn within me.  I am finding that these recognitions and constructions take a different sort of time and attention than the frenetic and immediate processings of conceptual knowledges and intimate relations.  Those, of necessity, must be continuous, on the fly, in situ.  Creative writing, in distinction, requires for me the ability for bracketing a space and time in which I am able to attend (somehow) to the recursive loops and dangling ganglia of my own organism of thoughts and emotions.   A sort of internal processing vaguely distinguishable from reciprocal or social processing.  It may not even be real, but only a sensation of process, a variant attention, a sidelong perspective.  In any case, it emits something unique in my writing and reflection, feelings and sensations, and something that I cannot simply produce; something that must be prepared and allowed for, visited, beckoned, welcomed.

I recognized this as I struggle to create for a project, and also possess a yearning to be creating new fictions.  The process art both provides and requires is unique and intense, difficult and serious.  It calls to mind the “effortless efforts” of things like meditation and awareness, mindfulness and tolerance.  The writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson piqued this recognition for me and I will share a couple of early paragraphs from her book The Telling.

“[1] There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait.  In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity.  We know we are explainable, and not explained.  Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told, but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place.  Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness.  Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

[4] Everywhere can be seen a waiting for words that phrase the primary sense of human-being, and with a human finality, so that the words themselves are witness to what they tell.  The waiting can be seen not only in the eager inclined posture of believers.  It can be seen also on the faces of disbelievers, the idolizers of the evident: they are not happy in their impatient assurance of there being no cause but uncaused circumstance, they wear the pinched look of people whose convictions make them a meagre fare.  In the eyes of all (in the opaque depths in them of unacknowledged presentness to one another) are mirrored (but scarcely discerned) concourses where our souls ever secretly assemble, in expectation of events of common understanding that continually fail to occur.  We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are.  We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.

[5] …A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time – the telling of what came first and before done forever…How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions!  Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with one another for our ears; and science competes with all together.  And for each we have a different set of ears.  But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.“

from The Telling by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 1967

 

Here. Now.

On By Alias HarlequinIn Current Reading, Traces3 Comments

Reading Maturana & Varela’s accounts of how we ought to go about engaging scientific activity (and life)… with integrated mindfulness/awareness and sense of our embeddedness in whatever we are observing, inquiring…

coupled with required textbook for LIS – metacognition and reflection in learning contexts:

and then this comes on…..the sound of the meaning, I guess….