[-empyre-] The Self and Post-Reality

[simon]

On 18/01/14 06:41, B. Bogart wrote:
> I've taken multiple theories of dreaming, mental imagery,
> mind-wandering and perception and developed an Integrative Theory. The
> jist of the conclusion is continuity between perception, dreaming and
> mind-wandering. Dreaming is not a special case of cognition, but rather
> is what our brains are always doing.
Gilles Deleuze disintegrates the Platonic image using the simulation or 
simulacrum. Is a to-and-fro along similar lines occurring here? from the 
many simulations to the one reality and from the (presupposed) one 
reality (body, self) to the many simulations?

In another thread I tried to answer to an unwillingness to participate 
and interact in a discussion about interaction and participation. But 
perhaps I got the theme wrong. It was to the produced simulation of the 
putative art work I was referring which requires as a condition, more 
than the participation of the artists, workers, performers or machines, 
the interaction of its audience or spectators, the potentialised general 
public, in order to be realised. And perhaps this is not the main 
reference for this discussion. But to pursue this mistaken identity for 
a few notes:

Ben (?) Bogart's post made me think of the integrative impulsion as a 
factor in the development of the simulation - whether the many of 
phenomena or the one of the self, body, world, reality - and on the one 
hand we seem to have a situation of work - and labour, whether material 
or immaterial - being fractalised under the social conditions of 
neoliberalism, with its technologies of communication, surveillance and 
production (of fractal subjectivities and partial selves) while the 
other hand directs its effort ever more ardently and with whatever good 
will and consensus as to its good will it can gather towards organising 
things in favour of identity. This sleight of hand largely goes 
unrewarded and is largely futile. And its organising in order to 
represent the just effort, the good effort, is overall easily 
assimilable even as it extends the technologies of communication, 
surveillance and production of fractal subjectivities and partial 
selves. That is, its terms of reference - self - are the terms of 
representation - of the post-reality - of fractal or network time.

To proceed feelingly then what I find in encountering an art work which 
wants me to do something with it rather than wanting to stand up on its 
own immediately is that I am being organised. It is to the surfeit of 
organisation that comes out of this integrative impulsion that I tend to 
react, abreact. And this could be carried over and I believe should be 
to more traditionally passive forms of interaction: at least the sitcom 
with the laugh-track dissimulates that favourite of right-thinking 
artistic producers - engagement. Active engagement.

An audience at a conventional play in a black box theatre needs to be 
disorganised as much as the visitor to a gallery or other venue who is 
organised by the scene to step into a black box and engage with a 
performer, machine, actor. Which is only to state my preference for a 
disintegrative theory of crowned simulation and for the body that does 
not see, hear, feel or write, from the dream to the work of art.

It is ironic that since noting my avatar might be burning my Fckb 
(disemvoweled out of extreme unlike) profile page has been occupied by 
an actor I worked with years ago on a piece handling the fluctuations of 
gendered selves called The Orange God. He has ostensibly felt compelled 
to occupy me by a desire to produce a play he has written about a 
crime-fighting shaman. But he can no longer connect the partial selves 
between this character and his desire to present it and my engagement 
with him as either a director or a friend. It's hard to know what to do 
to help him out of what is clearly a frustrating situation in which he 
is the paranoid player. The organs he has produced resist organisation 
and in themselves they provide obstacles to integration: he has 
territorialised, for example, on an avidity for financial gain and 
refers constantly to the money he's going to make from doing his one-man 
show - the Dali-organ; he has territorialised on - the Pomo-organ - an 
exaggerated need to steal from everywhere and from everybody: the show 
is called Omon Ra and the Invisible City, conflating Victor Pelevin and 
Italo Calvino - armed with whom will be like, he says, walking into the 
bank with an uzi. And so on. And Pomo-organ and Dali-organ do not 
connect except in the most rational sense of cause and effect.

Best,
Simon Taylor