solidarity and the object

What is this thing thinking that is different from experience? Is it ethics? This is some (adverb) thinking. What can we say writing with no voice as voice. We think we are making an elaborate way or plea not not be read.

Why is writing about a sound of popular music different than a subject to the event of (the historical experience) of the sound of the song of the subaltern feminine: cultural jouissance radiating from structural antagonisms of the non-existent antonymic entity, namely that society doesn’t as such exist. The birth of metaphysics and fantasy and ideology: what Other as the basic moment of what do Others Enjoy.

The parallax Real is to be opposed to the standard Lacanian notion of the Real as that which returns, “always returns to its place,’ namely that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the same, but the hard bone of contention that pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances. Emphasis mine, of course.

The inherent misogyny that is said to persist in the Mad Men television series is enacted on a purely virtual level. In other words, ‘it’ is essentially not there because the narrative has decided to embody its subaltern feminine song in a series of racially successful drawn female characters. The viewer, so accustomed to reading a patriarchal text, now plays the properly obscene and perverse game of uncovering, unconcealing, pointing out in surprise the historical wrong, which effectively restores the misogynist line. Solidarity should not be a surprise. Or, as Bert Cooper might say, let them open the kimono.

Nothing happened to him. He happened. The emergence of the New cannot be reduced to its causes or conditions. Only if there is a Subject can an event occur within an Evental Site. The different modes of subjectivity are simultaneously the modalities by which the subject relates to the Event. As in Kant’s transcendental, “the conditions of our experience of the object are simultaneously the conditions of the object itself.”

Who, what, when, and why in the world of style. The Real is the impossible hard core that we cannot confront directly, and only horizon through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. Or perhaps, and slightly refined by the parallax Real, we can say that the very hard core of the Real is virtual, actually non-existing (in sensuous excess of language), an X which can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are “all that there actually is.”

In the fine Texas Tradition, listen to the ZZ Top song “Master of Sparks” at 45 Rpm and suddenly our wine yields its flavors: New Wave, Roky Erickson, Cab Calloway, a decidedly non-feral, medieval feminism, the stooges as the true evental site of the Stonewall Riots, Ike and a singing Tina Turner: religious hymns that cannot absolutely say that Jesus was born of mother only.

The Kantian antinomy of value that is and is not generated in the process of production: it is generated there only ‘in-itself.’ There is a temporal gap between the production of value and its actualization. Even if value is produced in production, without the successful completion of the process of circulation, there is stricto senso no value. This is the temporality of future anterior: value “is” not immediately; “it” will have been, retroactively-actualized, per-formatively enacted. Value is generated ‘in-itself,’ and through the completed circulation process it does become ‘for-itself.’ Possibility is a purely negative quality. Deleuze converts Kant’s argument from possibility to virtuality, and thus from the role of guaranteeing causal efficacy to one providing sufficient reasons. The virtual is the realm of effects separated from their causes. Effects, in the physical world of bodies, follow causes, but transcendentally, these incorporeal special effects establish a strange precedence. Considered apart from their physical causes, and independent of bodily instantiation, they are something like the generative conditions, the meanings or reasons, or what Whitehead calls the final causes.

If rock critics like to repeat the phrase, “the velvet underground didn’t sell a lot of records in their lifetime as a band, but there influence is profound on American underground music. They are, quite literally, the face that launched a thousand garage bands,” then.

The ZZ Top song “Sheik” from their self-titled debut Tres Hombres has the flavor of Nigerian Highlife music recorded on James Brown’s own record label.

Because I could not remember the Holderlin poem fragment, the very instance that Derrida so loved. Regardless, in the film The Social Network, our first historical tragedy of Silicon Valley, protagonist Mark Zuckerberg (qua Stan Lee hero) writes a computer program called Mash-up by hacking into the Harvard mainframe database. This is a metaphor for intelligence, or rather, cognition itself. Thought, or what is thinking, is repressed desire, actualized in-itself as virtuality. Desire is productive of the Real; desire produces the real. For Kant, desire is the power of being the cause, through one’s presentations, of the actuality of the objects of these presentations. Ideas are presentations referred to an object but are as such that they can still never become cognition of an object. Cognition and desire go out from the subject to the world, while the pleasure of beauty comes in, from elsewhere. In desire, as in cognition, experience begins with a subject. In aesthetic feeling, experience begins outside, and culminates, or eventuates, in the subject.

Updike and his ilk were amazing stylists of the American idiom, and the strength (descriptive) of their writing at the sentence level is like a technological warfare—nuclear anxiety as the phallic formation of a gelded superiority. As a strategic policy, however, it remains a kind of ideological stalement.

The Kantian Matheme. Something about Christianity and the guilty tendency to establish economies: to distribute goods, to speed the movements along standards of measure; the capture of certain repetitive movements of freedom according to the imperatives of desire. “It was only in appearance that Christianity overcame real Judaism. It was too refined, too spiritual to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by raising it into the ethereal realm. Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism. Judaism is the vulgar practical application of Christianity. But this practical application could only become universal when Christianity as perfected religion had accomplished, in a theoretical fashion, the alienation of man from himself and from nature.”

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. There is no meta-language, and as such epistemology collapses back into ontology. Being is univocal. Everything is an event, and the rational human holds no special place. We, the thought of which being our first condition, simply do things on a higher and more reflexive level. Epistemology must be demoted from its central role. The whole point here is to ‘free out notions from participation in an epistemological theory of sense-perception.’

The question thus becomes how can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature? Operating as a guideline, or as a frame of reference, the regulative idea works problematically to establish the conditions out of which solutions or decisions can emerge.

A Kantian antinomy is a technical phrase used to describe an antagonism that cannot be resolved via higher dialectical synthesis. Such antagonisms, those that pulverize sameness into a multitude of appearances, elevate terms like “Gucci” and “Society” and “Identity,” into a series of the inaccessible Thing-in-itself. In other words, the irreconcilable antagonism between totality and the individual is the fundamental feature of society, or what Zizek would term a fundamental fantasy. The status of the Real is a pure parallax, and as such, non-substantial. It has, quite literally, no substantial density in-itself, for it is actually just a gap between two points of perspective. The radical antinomy that seems to preclude our access to the Thing-in-Itself is already the Thing itself.

Earth qua Real is the impenetrable abyss of the ontic which withdraws from ontological disclosure, or the horizon of the disclosure itself, invisible on account of its excessive self-evidence. The so-called Hegelian move here would be to define the two levels: the Beyond and the obstacle screen that distorts our Access to Beyond (the impenetrable abyss of the ontic, or everyday consciousness as event—Or the live invisibility, the horizon of the disclosure itself). Defined as such, or reduced to the abstraction of the antinomy, the Earth defines its becoming as the oscillation between these two levels.

C__ and I went for a long walk this morning. The dog ran through the caked brushy canyons tanned with dust, her tongue grew large and red her pacing mouth foamy with spit. Later we met someone downtown for lunch. The au jus and the beer made us sleepy. Afterward, we went along to run boring errands; boring to be running the errands of someone buying the supplies of the recently moved; boring to walk the clinical opportunities of a Rite-aid. The whiskey we bought there was asked for, and we waited for it to be brought out of a locked plastic prison by a wary yellow woman with dark hair and doughy breves gathered in cotton. It made everything more remote, flared with a guilty sense of loss.

A woman in the elevator was waiting on the basement floor with a basketful of plaid pungent with the flat humid scent of the cleaned said seventh floor, she asked, without looking at anyone in particular. The moment felt palpably informative, even purposeful, a sensitivity then embarrassed and so defused into polite queries about the practices of the laundry. No one is sure what to do with strangers, even those accustomed to dealings beyond the pale of disinterestedness. Outside there was a fading print painted on a further building. Broadway Arcade Building. There was a kind of fair-faced girl from the mountain states standing in the street, we remembered. It was two streets over and earlier in the afternoon. Standing on Main just removed from Los Angeles, her clothing was made awkward only by daylight and the warmth of the sun. A desert malady of fuzzed layers, her shoes were too big. She lacked the bearing of a salesperson, but there was some wonder whether something was or was not. Gold jewelry priced in hand, loose diamonds, faintly prohibitive ways; the bored men speaking in tongues, outside, wearing always fake versace tight and tucked against slick bellies; women, almost distracted, inside with eyeliner and black scalps well-kept, their eyeballs like some shimmering dead judgment. Always passing off observations in the place of movement—two men kneeling in the dirt facing one another. We will give you money for whatever needs you have. We want to feel your animal body if only fucking for drugs is the wildness we can conjure here.

The police had a young man handcuffed against a wall when we arrived home later. He wore the tall white socks of the bangers and his car was paneled in a scaly red, all soft porous chrome and blown tint. A nearby woman waiting for the bus watched the proceedings with no less hostile concern for the boy. We walked up the sidewalk, right through the encamped mall of the arrest, and felt re-assured. Street gangs are profoundly reactionary, even fascist cells. Difficult young men do not make anything, only scarecrow revolts.