Re: [-empyre-] volume zero: expanding the circle: generative inquiry

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

In dealing with received ideas, doesn’t the point of rupture – the point of
breaking with and from them – suggest itself as the place of maximum
mutability? Things could go one way or another.

Aliette:
… quelque chose qui doit déjà être assez connu pour être circonvenu. Au
contraire, la connaissance est toujours active et interactive, elle n'est
jamais close, entre connu et inconnu car elle prend toujours en compte
l'inhabituel et l'accident possibles…quelque chose qui doit déjà être assez
connu pour être circonvenu.

One doesn’t know what is about to happen in the individuation of chance
encounters, in relationships between entities. Despite what one can know
about controlling intensities – lowering or raising temperature, for
example – before variation and individuation, consistency self-posits on the
horizon of the particular: it is an age of (poetic) machines, making time
and topology, which, in their becoming, suggest Warhol’s dictum, “pop is
liking things”.

I say this not to add the profound superficiality of bathos to the theme,
nor to agree with Dirk that the “cycling upward of theory [calls] for some
crude dadaistic irony”, but to point to the simulated innocence of pop as
similarly, gyrically, recursive, as a ‘return of the same’ (Warhol also
said, “the more we think that we’re individuals, the more we are the same”)
and to compound the old-in-and-out out-and-out plasticity and promiscuity of
forms, the erotic of levels of forms, modes and contents, high low, pop not,
cool hot.

2.

The problem with modernity is that it hasn’t finished with us, not that we
haven’t finished with it. Ideas we have about it are often those for which
the receipts are missing: so there is no clear accounting for its
perdurance – its seeming bankruptcy but continuing equity.

(A collective audit is disinterested in the premises where it takes place
except in the degree to which it constitutes an asset or a liability. And we
have not yet left the building, even as the building seems to have left us.)

Creative acts have a degree zero, as do those of destruction, in courtly
accounts. But let it not be said that we, along with the invisible tribunal,
are paying court; unconscious imitation is homage nonetheless: the system as
a whole must come to bear at the point of its rupture.

2.l

I introduced the idea of the erotic above (and I hazard to introduce these
fragments into the discussion) in order to rebrand in the light of
Foucauldian discourse on sexuality the art-institutional monolith of
modernity as ‘incitative’ rather than ‘repressive’. So that: art-discourse
seeks what is of its own as power: a self-surpassing, through the consistent
rupture (contemporaneity) of displacement, that is recuperable (antiquity)
as continuum (modernity, by any other name as sweet) – recuperating what has
not yet had a chance to (be) give(n) (a)way. And a futures market: a
discourse punting on its own ability to sublimate and desublimate at will.
Double-entry deferment.

2.m

In this account, the s/avant-gardes, sometimes idiots-avant, lubricious with
l’idee-savon, work on their confessions of art-practice in a panopticon no
longer topological but m-powered, virtual, discursive and self-imposed (and
self-cleaning of complicity: redemptive).

Which brings me to the speed of information transference: media (i.e.
consciousness) arrive before consciousness (i.e. media) can assess adequacy
to reality: the data-flow is on an information-theory gradient of value, not
a gradient qua value absolute/aesthetic or performative/functional.

Rupture becomes a discursive effect: dialectics in binary succession
approach series and exceed/accede to continua.

2.n

Relativisation occurs in a time-frame further downline, where time ends,
after Julian Barbour.

Simon Taylor