'MAN'S FILLINGS PICKING UP WEIRD MESSAGES FROM UFO ALIENS':
FILLING IN THE PSEUDO-SUBLIME
Robert R. Cheatham
The artist (according to an eighteenth century critic) must take care not
to allow the representation to take over, to express itself. In relation to
the the body, the space of representation must match the space of the real:
the body is pictured correctly when it is precisely controlled by the real
space in which the body is experienced. (Use of perspective is necessary
for this control or 'something else' is depicted). It is this 'something
else' that troubles...: the representation of the body may be 'faulty'
precisely on account of its excess, the surplus produced by representation
and in between the intention of the artist and the representation itself.
Peter de Bolla
The Discourse of the Sublime: History, Aesthetics and the Subject
...then they play clumsy antics before an audience which has never been moved;
it cannot be otherwise, when the speakers are in an ecstasy, and the hearers
are not.
Longinus in On the Sublime
Anomaly no longer has the tragic side of abnormality, nor even the dangerous
and deviantside of anomie. It is somehow harmless, harmless and inexplicable.
It is the order of a pure and simple apparition, the rising to the surface of
a system (ours) something come from somewhere else. From another system?
Anomaly has no critical incidence in the system. Its figure is rather that
of a mutant.
Jean Baudrillard
Fatal strategies
The "promiscuity of the networks" destroys this mechanism (of tacit consensus).
The unlimited possibility of inter-individual communication generates
"overrepresentation" which can be compared to an overexposed photograph: it
no longer represents anything but light itself, i.e., only the principle of
the image reduced to its potentiality, exposed to all its unrepresentable
possibilities. The overexposed image is thus sublime, and like The sublime
it generates terror. It also generates obscenity.
Gerard Raulet
The New Utopia: Communication Telos #87
Statue of Elvis Found on Mars! Headline in Weekly World News Contemporary
sublime as...dismemberment. The scattering, dissemination of former wholes
along a network of circuitry: constrained and then dismissed. Constraint
functioning as identity, dismissal and simultaneity posing as communication.
(One would have to say 'posing' since how can there be communication between
non-centers?) Something happens (perhaps a variation of the Lyotardian 'Is it
happening?' In this case it is indeed happening, it is just that no 'one' is
sure what 'it' is.) The arc of understanding which traditionally encompassed
communication (past,present,future; forms of causality and the translational
torsion which always mediated) and which we could just as well describe as
an onto-theological ark of covenant, has been broken. If earlier forms of the
sublime betoken an ineffableness due to hydraulic instability on the part of
representational systems (the theme of flooding being a venerable nineteenth
century metaphor) then we shall allude to a late twentieth century
incommunability which effaces and mutes not only its own ability to access
and verify intelligiblity but also that of other systems which it comes into
contact with, a viral contamination iatrogenic in nature, packaged with the
tools of rationality: a twining system of monstrous doubles. This
incommunability is assuredly not due to a lack of systems and subsystems which
foster circulation of bits and bytes of information and neither is it due to
a lack of addressees for which information is shunted from station to station,
from post to post-. Here, it would be tempting to revert to deluvian metaphors
again, and then to the psycho-sexual with all the problems both of those
entail, to problems of identity formation and subsequent dissolution rather
than starting with a strange attractor, as chaos theory would have it, and
foci and identities resulting from that process. (We might be reminded here
that 'pseudo-' depends [literally] from and on a main axis of meaning.
'Pseudo-' depends on an adjudication of meaning which is faithful [a word
similar to 'pseudo-' in this sense] to axial interpretations.) There are
systems that confound (or at least confuse) such dichotomous pendants as
'Truth' and 'Falsity', the most obvious being the para-sympathetic system
known as rumour. The skein of relations that form a rumorological system
derive their strength precisely from this inability to adjudicate even though
(or because) 'communication' as information transfer is happening at
exponential rates. It is precisely this accelerating capacity to process
information that creates the corresponding conditions for disinformation and
various forms of communication infection. In attempting to install procedures,
methods, situations whereby 'truth tables' would delineate all the possible
values in the system, we have simultaneously introduced a 'confusor' operator.
Every attempt at de-monstration is a doubling operation and whenever there is
doubling we have one foot in the land of monsters. The performativity of
monsters takes place in the land of rumour.
(1) The performative should be doing something as opposed to
just saying something, (2) The performative is happy or unhappy as opposed to
true or false.
J.L. Austin
Rumor exists as an insatiable, unexhaustible performative, in fact the
archetypal unhappy performative. Unhappy because it is always restless, on the
move from and to: "un-heimlich" (german term used by Freud, meaning literally
un-homed, but also uncanny) because it is unhappy or unhappy because it is
uncanny? (A felicitous fit would be beyond the capacities of rumor on a
purely pragmatic Austinian scale, i.e., to be happy or, presumably, congruent.
Rumor is what it is precisely because it cannot be congruent, cannot fit in
properly.) The truth or falsity of rumor's reports hardly seems to matter.
(Theanonymity of rumor is an aid to its unverifiability. To whom should one
turn to legitimate the rumor? If it is false it can't be verified---although
the continuation of the rumor even in the face of contrary evidence seems to
be proof that rumor creates its own 'channel of verification and legitimation'
through the very strength and endurance of its narrative structure, sharing
with fiction that same ability. On the other hand, if the rumor is true, the
true component has perhaps chosen rumorology as its vehicle of dissemination
in the hopes of obscuring or resisting total clarification: once information
becomes embedded in a rumorological circuit, the concept of a completely
unveiled truth, the truth and nothing but the truth, becomes tenable only as
a pole around which further dissemination and dissimulation can take place.)
Would that there were rumors of good fortune; if they exist they seem to have
a life much shorter than the bad and in fact if kept in circulation long
enough seem destined to turn bad, proof--if proof is possible in such an
indeterminate field--of the psychological correlate of the Austinian
unhappy/happy performative scale and its tendency to uproot and put into
circulation even the most determinedly home-ly by Tun-homing them (this might
or might not be the home-less problem). At the same time it points to the
basically indeterminate --perhaps even aporetic--nature of 'heimlich' as
even Freud has pointed out in a long passage which explores the etymology of
'heimlich' and 'unheimlich' at the end of which he asserts: "Thus heimlich is
a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until
it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimich. Unheimlich is in some
way or other a sub-species of heimlich." (By this token--icon of another
circulatory system--we might say that there is a certain beauty---those
satisfactions we already know about---which belongs to this circulation or
rather this anonymous circulation. And is it this anonymity or the
circulatory effects which we find so entrancing?
At first glance it might seem that the circulation we find entrancing and the
anonymity we might find 'beautiful' (through its self-less absorption) would
fit the aesthetic notion encountered in the nineteenthcentury 'sublime', a
notion dismissed by feminists, pragmatistsand positivists of various stripes
as carrying various covert ideologies in its voluminous, indeed infinite,
folds. But what if we are entering into an era of an entirely different
sublime and perhaps even more threatening than the vertiginous slippage that
those of the nineteenth attributed to their fabulous, uncanny landscapes in
that it is a consummation of that 'Other' sublime? If one wished to genderize
this new sublime perhaps a word based on the image which best iconifies it---
matrix (matrix also brings to mind sieve or filter). The medium through which
this new sublime manifests itself would be rumor, unapproachable in any final
truth and unapproachable because of its multifariousness and beautiful because
of its disseminative qualities. (Matrix also means mother. I leave it to more
capable and intrepid writers to explore the full ramifications. This would not
necessarily be feminist but it would also not not be feminist). When faced
with infinite (potentially) iterative sets, an unlimited series, we must
succumb to Kant's mathematical sublime; when faced with a transcendent moral
idea, the bottom (or is it the top?) again opens up--such as the biblical
injunction against graven images--and the incommensurability of imagination's
limitations and reason's expansiveness reveals an abyssal tear. But the
contemporary sublime, vertiginous in its repetitive, particulate simplicity
and the resultant, re-combinate potentialites of near identical units,
grouped in matrix, does not share with its older variant the stillness of
contemplation and alienated differentiation from a total un-realizable Other.
Rather, we must now see the attempted activation of every potentiality as
indication of that incommensurability--the necessity of the activation of
potentiality and the impossibility of that activation. (This must be the
philosophy behind a culture of Total Productivity, Progress, and liberal
political economy in general. Of course, these are also categories which fit
handily into Western psychoanalytic notions of desire. The overlapping of
these areas is no doubt necessary for the successful realization of either.)
The resuscitation of difference through identicality becomes merely another
potential activation and the activation, actively, of the differentiation
'difference/identity' and their 'necessary' identity becomes yet another
abyssal sublimity but one based on different nodes than previously--in fact
based on the confusion/conflation of the mathematical sublime and the moral
idea sublime.
Unlike the Burkean framed theatrical experience of the tragic sublime, wherein
delusion, illusion, phantasms and the real could readily be differentiated,
the contemporary 'pseudo'-'sublime' cannot be so readily placed in focus
(other than the literal framing of the above scare quotes). It could not be
otherwise, given that performativity (where the p.- s.---even the initials
mark the marginalia, the "oh yes, don't forget this!" quality of such an event
--- resides) is now everywhere always through the aegis of the technical
media. Who needs the framing device of the theater? The parergonal excesses
of the new virtual spaces created by the technical media push rumorological
para-systems to a new level of non-concrete performativity, which in turn call
into question the old regimes of performance, power, the real, the symbolic,
the imaginary, and the constitutive elements of space and time and their
relationship. And that's not even the para-system. That's simply looking over
our shoulder at where we've been, not where we are.
According to Shreber, rumor and gossip, possessed of ever accelerating speed,
participate in the emptying out of individuals who are replaced by "cursory
contraptions".
Lawrence Rickels
Aberrations of Mourning
Perhaps what is needed here is a translator; or even better a translator
device, a contraption that would shuttle between the 'old' system and the
'new', the one that is most visible and the one that is invisible. This
device would not be a dis-membering or cursory device but would be a re-
membering device, the most beloved contrivance of the academy and hence the
professions . This 're-membering device' however is the seat of the problem,
since it seeks through the instauration of methodologies to halt the expansion
of rumour, cursory contraptions, signs which signify but have no (apparent)
referent. By re-membering it hopes to dis-member those systems that seem to
dissolve and contaminate the straight forward performance of its linkage
between matter and sign, little realizing that matter is the performativity of
the sign. The progressive attempt at materialization of language and sign
systems has the effect of emptying that same materiality, derealizing it,
creating cursory contraptions and rumours: not as a side effect of this system
but as a prime component of its functioning.
It should be fairly clear that it is hopeless to ask for recipes, directions,
blueprints, plans, menus, etc. Not that they have disappeared, far from it. If
nothing else the extrapolation of the technical media has made for an
explosion of 'calculability', as Heidegger put it. If by Architecture, Art,
Medicine, etc., one means access to, and efficient utilization of, planning
methodologies which exploit to the maximum the relation between matter and
sign (thus rendering that relation concrete and hence a question of style),
then we are living in a golden age but an age which, paradoxically, is off
the gold standard. Increasingly the only thing which exists now is
performativity but a performativity which when it enacts itself, brings forth
rumours and ghosts, cursory contraptions and exoskeletons, an emptying-out or
hollowing.
From the dictionary:
-
apostatize
-
to abandon one's beliefs or church;
to forsake one's principles or faith next word down:
apostemate--to form into an abscess; to swell
and fill with pus.
-
apodeme
-
the plates of chitin which pass inward
from the exoskeleton of arthropods and divide as well
as support the internal organs.
-
apodictic
-
absolute certainty
How can one possibly work (and I emphasize work as opposed to play) in such a
place, a place where something becomes something else (and a thing which
ceases to be a 'thing')? A circulatory system composed mostly of vents and
leaks, the rumourological system as false crossing: or rather where truth and
falsity operate under a different currency system. Listen: prayer as rumour:
And let us not forget what Aristotle said about prayer (eukh`e): it is a
discourse (logos), but it is a discourse that, somewhat in the manner of a
performative, is neither true nor false (all' ou`te alethe`s ou`te pseude`s).
Jacques Derrida
The Politics of Friendship
Listen: rumour of war, rumour as war: (the second part of Henry IV act I
introduction enter Rumor, painted full of tongues) open your ears: for which
of you will stop the vent of hearing, when loud Rumor speaks? I, from the
orient to the drooping west Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth. Upon my tongues continual slanders
ride. The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with
false reports: I speak of peace, while covert enmityUnder the smile of safety,
wounds the world: and who but Rumour, who but only I,Make fearful musters and
prepar'd defence,Whilst the big year, swoln with some other griefs, is thought
with child by the stern tyrant war,and no such matter?...
How is one to "act" in such an environment? (For the moment, a moment that
I shall not be able to get beyond in this paper, I will not differentiate
between the ethical parameters of acting in and upon an environment and the
mere fact of 'being' in the environment. The problem here is not as simple
as it might seem since it would require an elucidation of the boundary between
techne and being as well as the frame which holds them together. What I am
alluding to is the ineluctable doubling that is already evident in this primal
question. I take for granted the doubling of all marks ---including the
ethical---which then arises and the subsequent shadowy realm of the
rumorological attempt to mesh being and techne, an attempt based necessarily
on dis-membering, contrary to what Heidegger thought. In a material world, all
re-membering is dis-membering. This is Progress). Is it possible (or
desirable) to en-act (in-form) without per-forming in such a situation? (This
question is asked since performativity, the condition under which daily life
takes place, brings in its wake an inability to make the cuts necessary for a
genre-producing machinery. Any performativity entails a certain monstrous,
or fused, aspect since the 'rational' intellect cannot fully carry out its
methodological constructions and cuts [proscriptions and prescriptions] in a
world based on performativity and its concomitant confusion of true and false,
thereby lending a certain improvisatory cast to the proceedings. This is not
necessarily the same as pragmatism.) Can the proscenium on which knowledge
is staged be done away with, leaving strictly Transferral and Translation
without the shadow and the translator? And what would it mean to do away
with (or more realistically: what would it mean to attempt to do away with)
the framing mechanisms which all Transferral and Translation to take place?
An oxymoron: continual apocalypse---the rumour. Making Something appear: is
that enough?