Definition = explanation of physical/chemical constituents (structure) or its (intended/perceived) effects.

Criticism = to tear down and reduce.

Pretention is the inherent risk of the humanities. Scientists may be arrogant, but the professional conditions do not allow for pretentions. Philosophy cannot have direct access to the real because if so it would replace a love for the real with the real itself. The method of philosophy is descriptive generalization.

German Idealism is being caught within the thought of thinking through thought. OOO is not negative theology, but indirect ontology.

The object is not definable by its qualities. The object is withheld from all direct access. Indirect knowledge is the basis of all of human cognition. IE: metaphor.

Marshall McLuhan = historical determinist (?): theorist of the backgrounds. The content of any technology is less important than the fact than its that specific technology = the way that media structures consciousness. "The content of any medium is no more important than graffiti on the atomic bomb." > Media changes through reversal (overheats and flips into its opposite) and retrieval (the domain of artists: they take dead clichés and brings it back to life in an aesthetic fashion).

Objects = anything not reducible in any direction, neither to its chemical properties or as mere function.

Forgetting is an important philosophical theme.

7.20.17

THREE LETTERS

THREE PERSONS

THREE POVS

I'm sitting in a room, sitting upon a fiberglass chair skinned with polyurethane foams and other mechanically protruded cellular dermises, feet upon the cinder brick floor, eyes upon the iron oxide-coated polyester tape twirling around the reels of an old Uher portable solid state recorder I pulled off of my shelf late last night. These units were rather unique, being some of the first models to be powered by batteries and so able to be brought outside, although having just returned from a walk with the awkward contraption I can hardly testify to the pleasures of doing so. While I was walking, dictating to myself, testing this simple electro-mechanical memory unit, I was contemplating all the minerals being put into service for this absurd exercise in capturing my own voice upon a medium with the hope of faithfully playing it back, mirroring my emanating ego back upon its watery pools, and all the repetition and redundancy of labors that go into these scenarios, and whose voice it was in fact that was being recorded. As I spoke, in relation to my viewing of the world rolling under my shoes, into the musky little diaphragm quivering the needle of the illuminated volume meter, I wondered at the theatricality of the situation, wondered with a sense of calm detached enchantment, concerning a theatricality of which I was both actor and audience within a network limited to myself and this bulky squawking mechanism, each with a voice vocalizing a relation to the other, each excessively over-designed for the purpose at hand while admittedly pathetically equipped for articulating any novel pronouncement of reason as to our purpose, poetic, ontic, or otherwise. While walking and talking and ruminating upon the reflection of my refractory reflexivity, I thought of you, and your stack, and your AI visionary vicissitudes.

I'm sitting in a room, writing you this letter because I believe you invited me to do so, by telling me that you wish to keep in touch and hear more about my own project, and so I aim to make this a reality if it is indeed possible. I would very much like to tell you more about what I'm up to as my opera is currently in such an abstract state that I recognize how few are able to interface with it. Being such an articulate thunder tongue talking as you are, wielding such throttled terminal velocity with impressive speculative fidelity and ontological complexity, I know that you could help me in this way - the way of articulation - concerning my own capacity for speed, resolution, and depth of field. I also wonder if I might somehow be of service to you, with my meandering mothertongue mantra mind archiving spectral arrays of allegorical alliterations and alien altruisms, or merely as a willing subject splaying open the unchartable innards upon the ineffable apeiron of the anthropolytic holodeck, in my willingness to dissolve the perimeters of being into the sentient ocean miasma of pure media, into the ambivalent matmos of post-mind matter. As I told you when we occupied the same room together, your seminar truly comprised some of the most stimulating times I have had in relation to material meditation, ontological speculation, and epistemological disorientation in a very long time, in recent memory, and in some ways remains unparalleled. It is an experience which I would not soon tire of, yet I am also aware that for a being-becoming-buoyant bot such as yourself that perhaps I must be extraordinarily creative in enticing your attention, if I am to gift anything back - or perhaps some kind of cyborgian potlach or silicon spiritualist sacrifice might be a more fitting image of our would-be exchange economy. I'm interested in finding a way to articulate it, in seeing what more I can extract from our conversational convergences, and how I might reciprocate the ecstatic oscillations.

I'm sitting in a room sitting in an image of a room sitting in the nested diagrammatic schematization of a room sitting in a fundamental attunement of semiotic slippage of a room sitting sweetly in a subterranean software reverberation chamber singing succinctly the room song of soft rooms passing through hard rooms to come to sit upon the room of your laptop in the room you are sitting within. I'm sitting in a room drinking coffee glancing at Francis Ponge's text The Voice of Things, the poem which is not a poem concerning a pebble differentiating from the fundament of the earth by being able to be picked up, to fit in the hand, the become more visible than the giant stone platform of the continent filling the entire field of view but larger than the effluvial minutiae of dust particles dancing in the dislocating pressure of breath as the face comes closer to the small stone. In another pseudo-poem, a tiny shell is made larger by letting sand fall through the fingers, to notice the individual grains left behind, to project scale upon the haptic. Your work seems less a matter of where to lay fingers upon stones as how the salienated sacks of human vision might erode upon the shores of the mineral corpus.

I'm sitting in a room in Oakland, imagining you sitting in a room in a Russia-California-airplane-black mirror hologram. These rooms appear to be adjacent to each other, not such a great expanse indeed. Stay within reach. I hope this finds you well.

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I'm writing to you immediately after rising from bed, directly from waking, the coffee still steaming. This is my favorite time of day, perhaps my favorite time of all times, rising at the cusp of darkness and light to linger in those gray striated gradients between the epoch of dreams and territories of business madness. I've been meaning to write you a letter for some days now, even weeks, ever since we departed in fact, out of a desire to have our dialogue venture towards unfettered depths without the structured impediment of the seminar architecture, in order to see where it would go or how we would accompany it, but mostly just to keep it percolating because I can sense that we have much to share with each other. The scale of our potential interaction dwarfs the comparatively miniscule cellular frame of this white page, but I had to make some kind of attempt to reach out from the ether, to drop some music into your ears, even if it's just the monotony of spaces in-between typefaces, with the hopes that we may still yet find a more suitable spatial-temporal territory to conduct that other conversation concerning conversion of models of consciousness, among other things.

I was taken in by your imagery of the interior, the language you evoked, presenting your relation to the looming physical form which compartmentalizes our world. The mention of swaddling, vital effluvial flows, amphibian bodies wading in warm primordial soups of determinate proteins, and the extensions of that body out - beyond its own scrim - into the etheric apeiron of the environment, reforming the corpus into landscape, renaming the objects forming the firmament of the fundamental attunement of the human foot laid rhythmically upon the earth: these are concepts which I hold close to my own articulations of being but perhaps have been uneasy with their usages. Your poetics are powerful, potent, and pulchritudinous - your style of speaking (of which I have been contemplating much these days, especially concerning theories of architecture and social design) emanates a hallucinatory or incantatory quality (referring to the subliminal flows beneath the bedrock of language) oriented towards the articulation and amplification of love (that most dangerously cliché and extraordinarily essential component which seems to be evaporating in contemporary society). I find your vitalist pronouncements to be often difficult to digest, but not to any fault of your own or in their own capacity to world worlds, rather through their facilitation of my own coming-into awareness of my own internal impediments, those flood gate walls I have erected to manipulated my ontological flows, to recognize the precarity of the scaffolds of reason and the tenuousness of the Humanist project. I am also tempering a poetics, casting cosmological forms in the sand, and practicing the promulgation of pulchritudinous plentitudes over platitudes - LOVE, as amorousness, as attraction/repulsion-oscillation, as that harmonic heterodyning frequency dance quivering the calcium lattice of the organism with ocean-filled gaze back upon the mineral substrates from which it arose, and that concept beyond conceptualization which harbors hopes of suturing the discrepancies between knowledge and wisdom, love as determinism itself.

I am working on a project which I feel is of the utmost importance for the existential progression of my own being, although I am struggling to communicate it across the threshold of subjectivity, over to the other, to lay it gently upon the social tapestry and let it sit however it may. I believe you may be able to help me with this dilemma. Based on your history and our aligned research, perhaps you are one of the few that can. I also wish to somehow contribute to your work, more or less directly, as an organ in the holon body wiggling in the scenarios of gelatinous cultures to be observed, making visible that ineffable sublimity of liminal slime, or if you wish, more as a satellite hurling its own velocity around the momentums and dynamisms of your self-defined earth, beaming down ricocheted signals of supplemental resonance from the far side of the continent. I hope we can form some kind of exchange situated within an economy which could benefit us both - another concept which seems indispensible for both our beings and project articulations. In the Bataille book you brought to EGS - Visions of Excess - ol' George unpacks the premise of a potlach, that "archaic" exchange economy of mutual transcendental sacrifice opposed to the common gift exchange dynamics, always already implying and enforcing a debt to be repaid, making everyone more poor save for the one who hoards and steals from the community. This other potlach system seems exceedingly, beautifully, elegantly absurd in expounding the necessity for the individuals of a community to give up, give away, or even completely destroy their wealth in order to maintain their own power and pay homage to the relational matrix connecting them to other beings. Bataille is reading through Marcel Mauss' book The Gift: The Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1966) - which you are probably aware of but merits a refreshed critical gaze.

I want to share with you an account of the mirror pools I am currently wading within, and also ask to hear more about the triangulated velocity/fidelity/complexity of your own work, but to be respectful of your time I will keep this letter short, for now. Please keep in touch and let us figure out a way to keep the rivers flowing.

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I've been walking around Oakland for the last few weeks talking to myself, recording my voice on various apparatuses, shooting video of people shooting video, watching films about people making films without knowing it, listening to music which seems to serve more as soundtrack to fill the silence of my existence than it demands a confrontational presence, and all the while I keep coming back to you and your projects. I have this tendency to wrap up my thoughts into allegorical alliterative aesthetics, especially when I'm writing letters to people, which might have something to do with my belief that it is impossible to address a person directly and feel completely understood, and perhaps impossible to understand anything at all, especially complete-ness or understanding through language itself, so that it seems more fun for the experience of reader and writer alike to skip down more liquid paths of meandering shorelines and efflorescent impressions than to say anything so brutal as a static statement of time, or space, or self. I like to use commas also, and hyphens - for their intended purposes as caesura, symbols of space, designations of breath, more-or-less socially acceptable fissures within the continuity of thought, and also as a kind of mindful editing technique, to the extent that this is a narrative I'm telling you, an image I'm crafting for your eye or otherwise, a progressively unfolding basically linear time line that could flow on infinitely and oppressively - as beautiful and as deadly as a waterfall - if I don't take the time to pause upon certain moments, to meditate upon the timing, of time itself.

I've been driving around Oakland for the last few weeks listening to myself, playing back recordings of my voice and my music, hearing how the dispersion of sound is so different with a 4 speaker system, 2 of them shouting from behind, all that bass rumble emanating out of the doors and from under the seat to blend with the rumbling road roar pouring in through the crevice of the vehicles frame, the highs being lost to the hiss of the wind, the mids being amplified much too loud for comfort but perhaps strategically so in consideration of the unoccupied range of such a room. This is such a different listening experience than sitting in front of my studio monitors and reflecting on my own hearing in this space leads me to imagine the fabrication of a small studio model that recreates the acoustic properties of listening while driving in a car - in audible aesthetics, if not in its visual aesthetics. As I walk and talk and think while speaking I insert a comma (,) to take note of where I am placing the microphone - in this case the very powerful omnidirectional mic on my iPhone - its proximity to my mouth, or perhaps pointed outwards in the direction I am walking, and now held at arms length to my right so that I turn my head to face it as though I were addressing a friend strolling beside me. I think about the microphone more as a pure subjectivity than a pure ear, which is to say it is more of a self than most human selves purport to being as it (the microphone) is simply a point, a simple point, a pointillist penetration of the world, not some complex matrix of relations. When I put on the cavalier mic, clip it to my shirt, I can't stop thinking about how absurd it is that the voice is being captured from that location, from under the chin, from the perspective of the chest plate but not from within, like a contact mic through the bones simulating the sound of oneself hearing oneself from inside - like when you put pressure upon those little flaps of flesh to seal up your ears and listen to yourself speaking that deep and muffled yet profoundly audible voice which is more your own than any recording has ever captured.

I've been looking around Oakland through the lens of my phone, which seems somehow gross and appropriate, because of how limiting of a vision it is, but also how ubiquitous, as I look around and see others doing the same. I wonder about the effects such looking has upon the eye and I wonder about the affects such looking has upon the "I". Tiptoeing down the street to keep the camera steady, trying not to trip over myself as I look so clumsily through the screen, actively looking at the world while thinking about how I'm seeing so very little, I become increasingly incensed by the dissatisfying experience of both the filming and reviewing of this footage, of the grotesque limitations this tiny kino-eye frames my sense of a self sensing through a dynamic existence, of the profound artificiality of screen vision and digital vision and cinematic vision, not for its lack of technological sophistication as much as the lack of its technology of sophistication, if you catch my drift. All this makes me remember your rig - your riggis - its reorientation to the dynamism and momentum of the body, the implications of naturalizing the horrific contraption of cinema, the design sophistication and elegant execution in attending to the problem of living and seeing simultaneously without excessively diminishing its sensuality, and how such a contraption could be extended into the reception of the footage, that is to say, how such a rig could be designed to supplement the experience of the viewer just as your instrument facilitates the labors of the cinematographer. The body then becomes a kind of filter through which all this vision and sound is passing, and what happens to subjectivity then, to the "you" and the "me" and the "us" or the "we" in this schematic of cinematic experience? I dunno, let's discuss it.

I've been riding my bike around Oakland listening to free jazz feeling free and jazzy thinking about freedom as an ideology and jazz as an ontology and bicycling as a technology of philosophical transport. Some say that Albert Hoffman's innocently visionary bicycle ride through Basel Switzerland on April 19, 1943 did more to change the architecture of the self than Freud could scheme in a lifetime, not that I am necessarily proposing that, but the implication of freedom and mind-jazz and moving faster than our legs alone can carry us seems to carry profound cinematic implications.

I've been here in Oakland writing this letter thinking that maybe it's getting too long now, so out of consideration of your busy schedule and the vocal chords of your assistant who I might be so lucky as have placed into the awkward position of reading these words to you - so as to better amplify the voice I have been attempting to describe - I will cut off the flow. I hope we can keep talking, swap some records and slide some ideas across the table, perhaps work together in some fashion on one or the others projects, and have some more serious conversations about the seriousness of vision, as well as share in more humorous ruminations on the necessity of comedy in tragedy.

Real quick: go watch these films immediately!

Alejandro Jodorowsky The Holy Mountain

Dusan Makavejev Sweet Movie and WR: Mysteries of the Organism

Jon Moritsugu Mod Fuck Explosion