APPARENT DISORDERS OF REGIONAL ONTOLOGIES

BETWEEN

(para-normal / para-modern / para-sites)

Encapsulation and Transmission

Fehta Murghana

(This is the last public appearance by Fehta Murghana before her tragic death and was a performance/presentation response paper given at the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism. We are gratified that the estate of Ms. Murghana has allowed us to present a second paper from her collected work. See Perforations 7 for The Puncture Effect: Encrypted Space, Modernism and the Hoarse Men of the Apocalypse by Ms. Murghana as well as a short biography. The actual performance of the current paper involved two tape players on either side of the room, playing the recorded versions of the left and right portions of the manuscript; Ms. Murghana enlisted a male colleague to read the central portion as he paced back and forth through the audience.)

My only apology for what follows is that it is a response to an event, the 1893 Worlds Fair, its midway and womens pavilion, and its embedding in another event, Robert Segrests paper (and the misunderstood news of what that paper was about as it filtered first through Durham Crout, then Jennifer Bloomer, and finally the author Segrest himself: an example of telepathic print-through perhaps and encryption at yet another level, one difficult to convey, indeed, similar to historical elision, misprision, and encryption), with the intent to achieve an effect and not a result (and certainly not an argument) : all in accordance with Henry Adams comments in 1893 that the exposition defied philosophy . . . since Noahs Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill-jointed, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the exposition had ever ruffled the surface of the lakes.

Three types of construction are involved: 1) the performative, which allows a certain idiosyncratic delimitation and forcing of spatiality; 2) a certain seductive genderfication (and [anti-] gender-alization, as in sensuous particularity versus abstract generality); 3) an unthought (or more properly non-discursive rationality) encoding through textuality, of event and the every day and its occluded transmission through time. All three depend on the covering over and the clearing up simultaneous which the performative make possible.

Also, three types of material are presented here: uncredited quotes from theory and philosophy (although for this textual version I have provided the proper names), my own gloss, and descriptions of cities by women who claim to have been abducted by flying saucers.

WE COULD SAY

We see the everyday, the domestic, as that deadening realm of repetition, of hand-to-mouth tasks, the mundane reality of servicing mechanical causation. Is this inevitably the case? Is the fantastic simply an embedded instance of the everyday, which in post-modernitys haste (a quickening born in modernism) to unfurl depths into easily charted surface topologies, would just as easily make visible those occluded passages which dwell in the everyday and yet claim to owe no loyality there (except of a peculiarly transgressive sort)? To what extent is the occult a pli selon pli, a fold upon fold, of a generally explicable world surface? (And to what extent is it . . . a woman?)

THEY COULD SAY We of the world scientific community wish only to make things easier, to make your burden lighter, to clear your gutters, to straighten the path, to unblock the passage, to make your play more efficient, to clean and straighten up your playground. Therefore, there shall be no hidden! There can be no hidden! But what would it mean to take the folds out of the gut, the alveoli out of the lungs, (the woman out of the world)? Digestion/breathing/reproduction of a certain sort would stop.

We think of wiping the patina off the everyday, restoring its luster, as perhaps the Situationists thought of clearing away the encrustations that technique had laid on it, restoring the unity of the everyday and the primal. A subversion of the machine! We will, they say, become spectators only, making festivals of the arcades, the malls, the science, the machine. . . Then the truly, the truly . . . what? will emerge. We think: we will be demur, we will defer, we will hesitate. . .

But . . . machines still come to us in our deepest fantasies, those which want to be taken for real. In our institutionalized (you pick the institution) are enacted the passion-less play of the robot, that poignant desire for a lack of desire and the invulnerability which accompanies such a desire-less state: to be free of being with a little b-, or rather, the sly substitution of little b- with big B-: the king is dead, long live the King! (The new Being, of course, is Science/Machine so big and global, so smooth, so invulnerable, so hard! lets celebrate our new Kingdom, our recent demise/rebirth.) De-authenticated life at its most authentic: in the heart of the machine age, to be in tune with the zeitgeist, what could be more real than to think oneself a machine, a readily changeable program? Who will fuck us now?

We no longer ask Is it real or is it Memorex? We now ask Is it Memorex or Sony? What becomes of the real when the commercial elevates the everyday gesture to the archetypal?

The paradoxical post-modernist practice of lauding repetition (in all its forms, including plagiarism, etc.) as a mark of distinction, as a quantitative overload which gives rise to qualitative thresholds, leaves aside the question of the unique object. That is not precisely the same as an unfathomable woman, er, that is, object. Perhaps the hope is that the repetitive assemblage itself, in its collectivity, will over-ride containing conceptual systems, a point which vastly under-rates the recuperative power of contemporary conceptual attitudes. The power of the repetitive assemblage then becomes as suspect as the unique object as a forcing mechanism to sunder constrictive networks. Thus, even supposedly primal points-of-origin become mere points on the post-modern grid, of equal valence with all the other points/histories/subjects, whether speculative, historical or contemporaneous: the parthenon becomes a commercial for perfume. And it is not that the Parthenon is of a different structure from the perfume: one cannot be used to critique the other.

The revolutionary, apocalyptic impact of the domestic as the hidden, the occult(ed): the occult(ed) as the impossibility of ever arriving and yet its necessary possibility; the along-sideness; its parasitic, parallel structure assures those necessities and denials. It everywhere vanishes and re-appears in the thin air of the everyday. Is it happening? asks Lyotard.

The everyday, the domestic; as an assemblage of contingent moments, none of which has any precedence over any other: a tableau based on parataxis. How vulnerable this must be to the sudden strike, with all the pins lines up so neatly, or rationally, all the events of the domestic, locked in, lined up equally but lined up in the shape of a pyramid, saturated directionality. Its not the force of the strike (necessarily) but the way you strike the lead pin. Contingency is always most vulnerable to the miracle, the unannounced, the unannouncable (and unenunciable): the sudden saturation of the banal with luminescent; or thixotropic, solid land giving way to a collapse, Freuds dreaded mudslide (check his own mudslinging at Jung/occult/woman.)

or: the sudden linkage of disparities in metaphor.

telepathy

angels

ufos

(the telephone system? check sys op Avital Ronell)

The formidable but outlawed, or circumscribed arsenal of cum-municators linking the everyday/everywhere domesticity and the slippery waviness of . . . what? What we want, what we need, what we can never have the absolute Other, Total Communication, total manifestation (presence, both ours and Others), total depth with no surface, saturation with no signification . . . salvation, redemption. Is the question of what is real even pertinent anymore except as to which wrench to use and if that is the only real question now, after Wittgensten, then we are in the realm of the supernatural machine, after Frankenstein (written by a woman), and a rose is a rose is a rose, after Gertrude Stein, becomes a simulacral trap, luring us even further into a mirrored cul-de-sac, with each rose leaning further into the hyper-real (after you-know-who).

The hidden and the observed: both carry a refractory charge, diverting resources and re-arranging economies, the occluded whited-out by a fundamental, implacable detour; the observed by fundamental thereness, like the purloined letter. Or even better, like the scarlet letter: seen but not acknowledged, fucked but not loved.

Two enclosures: one never below ground, the other never above ground: and yet they cross at the surface there is a midway, a between at the everyday, held in reserve by the domestic. Its place marker is archaeological and paleonymic, not even historical, seeping through the fissures of the domestic. However festive, it is the site of mourning and disappearance: (en)crypt(tion).

The crypt hold in reserve, a permanent fund waiting for us all but one which appears to have no cash value, it cant be turned. The crypt is a holding place in a circulatory system, a place marker which cannot apparently be claimed. The site can always be found (that is part of the nature of the marks on the crypt and the crypt as mark) but when opened there is always nothing there . . . the contents have already gone (in contrast to Heideggers well known formulation concerning the pervasiveness of language). Nothing can be made of the contents, of the dust, no edifice, no creature, because they are perpetually absent, always already gone. Or rather they find their presence perpetually elsewhere in mourning, remembrance, the crypt serving as only a sort of virtual construction, its presence merely an indicator of true absence, of truth as absent. As with its caretaker, the archaeologist, the construction of the crypt must always remain secondary to the reconstruction of its contents, a reconstruction which can only ever be figurative, never literal, for the very existence of the crypt assures the present of its eventual absence (but not disappearance) and perhaps does more than hint at the perpetual presence or absence even as the crypt is being built on the outskirts (so to speak) of domesticity even as that places it squarely in the middle of the everyday, among the arcades, the consumables, the flesh.

The crypt as password (shibboleth) into the entrance of an anti-universe, where circulatory patterns reverse, the economics of presenting become (a terrible word to use for there is no becoming in this ant-universe, there is only continual reserve, revenants, perpetual deferring) or bump into and cling to an opaque mom-block, making a mockery of history, turning any sort of circulation into a virtual event (even here it is beginning to work a backwards causality!), life as a purely regional ontology, the marked crypt always serving chiasmatically, reversing, reducing, rendering all events to a paradoxical not yet and equivalent always gone. The crypt, a marker, a flexible pointer, pointing everywhere, from its perspective of nowhere.

The sole job of the crypt is not to contain the burrowing, the seepage, within its borders but the opposite to convey its lack of contents, its burrowing, continual breaching, to all who approach.

While the crypt (and encryption) is built by the inevitable forces of the everyday and maintained by the force of its separation from that realm, the flying saucer, aerial (en)crypt(tion), is a production of the totally other, at least ostensibly, and yet its uterine architecture is maintained by the spontaneous devotion of the everyday.

To be released from stasis, at the birth of the modern is to be always caught in motion or soon-to-be motion, stasis and encryption deferred, jerky fluidity. The invagination torn loose at its thinnest section, midway, the cigar becomes the saucer, the ground recede but then it comes back. (The first ferris wheel was constructed in 1893. When was the first submarine invented? Remember the phantom, cigar-shaped airships of 1897? Saucer pre-cursors of matrix functions.) If not the final frontier, the form pre-forms a final severance; but the cult of the everyday anomaly, in this case, (in a womans case?) an aerial encryption, the quasi-event which enters history crab-like, is always the same in its difference. We are constricted and then we are freed into the red city. and there are no curbs.