Tag: ontology

In Essence

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy2 Comments

“It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality, in its reality which is that of the being.

The ‘subjectivity’ we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ‘subject.’  It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences of being himself…but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness.  Now we hold that ‘subjectivity,’ whether it is placed in phenomenology or in psychology, as one may wish, is only the emergence in the being of a fundamental property of language.  ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’  That is where we see the foundation of ‘subjectivity,’ which is determined by the linguistic status of ‘person.'”

-Emile Benveniste-

“signification occurs only through discourse, that discourse requires a subject, and that the subject itself is an effect of discourse.”

-Kaja Silverman-

Our Mysterious Callings, er, befuddling vocations

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Philosophy4 Comments

continuing qualia…


{eliminating parts of speech and tense(-ing)s}

            Where we began, and when, was next-to-nothing.  How must have been something, and the what bears repeating.  Complex and variegated channels, ganglia alike to beans taking root, nutty and filigreed.

The event is conception and all its pertinent involve (where-when-events) – resultant growth of hairy little what-hows.

What is a theme-and-variations composition, melodies often scarce to trace, but certainly music!  Thrumming drumming subtle, with irregulating tremors, shushing swinging bellowed strings, replete with punctuations.  A human is a riffing thing, something of artist’s collage coupling biological systems and common laws relatively, referred to as patterns.

Person is an unstaid element, living requiring stimulation and acknowledgements, enough continuity to be.  Elaborate contexts of nurturing structures and their vice-versas.  Cells swimming fluids, objects in umwelts, mini-beasts scuttling a globe, as seen from various distances (perspectives not visibly limited).

Existences like screens full of mimeographed transparencies layered and colored by hands.  Bewildering tangles of syrup and string.  Odd combos when mirrored by mirrors, as mirroring means.  Two-sided at least.  Reflected subjectivities / subjective reflections, sort of spinning things set on a gyro turning tilting.

Nurturing structures of what-hows commons: language, culture, environment and arts.  Structuring nurture of sustaining nourishment, awareness (attention) and semblance of security.

And there you have a person (a what-how) and a world (where-when-event); synonymously person-making-world, er, world-making-person toggling looping recursive spirals adjusting discontinuous connectivities…

Perhaps each and overall what-how’s where-when-events all beggar why (i.e. remain puzzling) at which point (or somesuch of the like) there probably arises a who.  Who and why as yet unknown, being conjectured derivatives only from how-what in where-when-events.

All demanding further potentially endless inquiry and study and inventive erasures of conventional grammars and parts of speech.

To be continued…

An Equation

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, WritingLeave a comment

I’m running through files trying to organize things and adjust to a new computer.  Once in a while I stumble on something I hardly remember making but still feel a deep accord with.  This was one of those things.  I think it stands for.  Still.  What.

(i only wish it were still freezing)

Here goes:

Moment: Airy

(being an experiment, in theory

a result)

 

It is hard.

It is hard and it is cold.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.  Well below the freezing point.  But his gloves staid on, his lips held a cigarette, and he boxed.

He could box that paper.  That paper-thin page.  Already beaten to a pulp.

 

Him with a theory.

The theory a sort of equation.

The equation as follows:

 

ALL (whatever a person is, has, does) + ALL (a person’s skill, effort, strength, talent, knowledge and ability)

= Appearance of Art (momentarily)

Notation:  A + A = AA

An utter mystery to him.

So he sat in the freezing cold, a pen in his hand, the ink sludging slow, paper on a desk, digging/ exposing / exploring himself, believing / composing / revising language,

oh, and the catalyst necessary to the actual experimentation of this theory – (he writes) – MAKING

One had always to be making (working, acting, writing, performing) with ALL (of him or herself) and ALL (of one’s capacities, faculties and tools) to carry out this experiment, i.e. to test the hypothesis.

Catalyst: (he notes) making (out of/into/with/toward)

Source and goal (purpose, intent) unnecessary, indifferent

Any action requires an energy source.  In this case: living organism possessing capacities, perhaps even proficiencies, and coffee, and cigarettes.

No specified laboratory or station or constituents (conditions) to each his own [marginalia]

 

Quite a simple test really.

Requiring no great funding, no special services or permissions, few qualifications, variant supplies.

Simply vast amounts of time and consistent (persistent) and enormous amounts of effort. (As he saw it).

 

Reviewing centuries of other experimentations and practitioners of this simple eternal test led him to observe : “results in momentary airy results”

(often discovered in different places at different times dependent on observer – even in same test results – thus airy, ephemeral moments)


 

Feeling he had yet to produce an AA.  A momentary Appearance of Art, he was compelled to introduce a compendium of criteria – identifiable attributes – whereby to justly analyze resultant artifacts and actions.

Again the qualities boiled down quite simply:  put the equation into reverse for the observer or verifying assistant:

an Appearance of Art results through the remaking process or catalyzation of the observer,

requiring as a result, ALL of the observer’s person and ALL of the observer’s capacities,

faculties, abilities.

Notation: criteria for AA to be AA:

AA = (must equal) A + A

He practiced this experiment from both sides of the equation – attempting to verify Appearances of Art by engaging / observing / remaking results that demanded enormous effort, large amounts of time and all of his experience and capacities, and as the performer of the experiment – devoting vast amounts of time, energy and effort of his total self to the making of Appearances of Art.

 

It wasn’t going well.

It is hard (extremely difficult)

And it happens to be very cold (causation: weather in Winter)

 

He’d read of other conditions explicated by practitioners before him: contingencies such as warmth, geographical position, silence, wealth, solitude, suffering (the Ss came up quite often); specific environments, times or places, assistant substances or particular tools or resources, even difficulty itself had been recorded – but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, certainly no agreement, in fact, very often direct and incommensurable contradictions between one catalystic experimentor of A + A = AA and the next, which led to his marginal note (copied above): “to each its own”

 

He carried on, in spite of the grave difficulties, confusions and multivalent referents of the equation’s elements.  Once in awhile he believed he had discerned a momentary result – an appearance of art in his own private performances of the experiment; unfortunately he could not obtain verification of his tests from contemporary scholars/students/or adepts of the ancient and cryptically-clear equation.

He had no trouble himself verifying most attested AAs, given sufficient time and effort, but, as he progressed in his work, identification became more efficient yet verification demanded more and more of him, devouring his time, energy and effort, interfering with and greatly complicating his own experiments and test cases from the equation’s other end.

He began to understand why past personages were led to choose to practice and perform the experiment from one side or the other.

 

It is hard.

It is cold.

And there is only so much time and effort.

There is only so much living organism to be had.

Limitations began to seem insurmountable.

But by now he had come too far.

There was only to go on.

 

It is hard, he wrote.

It is hard and it is cold, he recorded.

Hard as in difficult.

Each thing.

And cold because of the weather.

But my gloves stay on, he wrote, and my lips still hold a cigarette, right to the end.

His gloved hand fighting the pages.

There is only so much life.

 

 

 

N Filbert 2012

 

 


Being Ourselves – an active ontology

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Philosophy, Writing4 Comments

BEING OURSELVES

an active ontology

 

            To be, so they tell me, at least mostly fluid.  How to be that, too, in the other kind of way?  Beyond “fact”?

Water (or blood), being good for that, because it can be inside and outside at once, leaving and filling a vessel.  That is, it can be spilling out while going in.

As if ‘the other kind of way’ were metaphor.  But it’s unlike.  In fact, for us, it’s exactly the same, just different.

Therefore, rigid as I might “seem,” this is not actual-factual, I am mostly liminal.

Which could (factually) explain the constancy of change, or, how we identify effects of wind, e.g. fluctuation; i.e. the rippling of emotions or mood.

My faith in these “facts” alters, like my beliefs about most everything else, including my self.

That would be “natural” then, if by “natural” we meant “according to widely accepted notions of facts.”  (For example.)

Be that as it may, I’ve heard talk about a collusion between professed “facts” and perpetually mystifying “reality” as some instance of joinder (called, perhaps “knowledge”? or “wisdom”? – an alignment of facts with reality – a “truth”?).  What some might describe “accord” or “harmony”?  A sort of “peace.”  Akin to the “angle of repose”?

Would that be being in multiple ways?  At once, of course.

 

To synthesize:  the purveyors of fact inform me that I am mostly fluid (even as my knee pops when I rise, and I’ve a hard time rotating my neck).  If, in fact, I am fluid (mostly) I am asking how it is that I am being fluid in another way (from another perspective, i.e. do humans multiply being?).

 

A viscous question.

 

“And how is the riddle of thinking to be solved? – Like that of flame?”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein-

            In other words.

 

Find a liquid view.  For instance – rolling in a bathtub or sharktank in heavy rain.  Feel water, see through watery eyes, taste saliva, breathe liquid in (mostly).  What else do you think you are?  Grab a bone, a lock of hair and some of your own flesh.  Hold.  If you’ve a mind or soul, thoughts or theories – liquefy them, put them through a juicer until they’re at least 70% fluid – pour them in.

 

What does he mean “the mind is the great slayer of the real” (Benjamin Lee Whorf)?

Or the poet – “there is nothing in life except what one thinks of it”… and “I am what is around me” (Wallace Stevens)?

 

So, mostly fluid, with watery eyes, drenched or submerged – logically, like a porpoise or whale – we would be bringing “fact” and our “reality” to a closer accord in the “actual.”  60-80% fluid inside, 60-80% immersed outside, working our imaginations and thoughts, self-perceptions and beliefs toward a more indivisible, continuous flow…

What sorts of things do we wring from such “harmony”?  “That reality is continuous, not separable, and unable to be objectified.  We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley).  We cannot be submerged in water and watching ourselves swim at the same time, we would (presumably) have to exit the flow and look at a still or moving picture of ourselves (doubling time?) while “reality” and “facts” kept flowing, moving, going on (including the “unreal” activity of watching ourselves swim).

The trees blur into the sky as if they share a surface, as road to carlights, to earthen shoulder, grass, flower, again to tree: “reality is something transitory, it is flow, an eternal continuation without beginning or end; it is denied authentic conclusiveness and consequently lacks an essence as well…it is not evaluable” (Mikhail Bakhtin).  Abstracting and division put us in the realm of the unreal, while the activity (of abstracting and perceiving difference) is, in fact, really occurring.

Submerged, blurry, inseparable and flowing…constantly and continuously…

to be and not to Be…

Dive.

Leap.

Swim.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Drift.

Flow…

 

and finally…to drown…dissolve…

 

N Filbert 2012