My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.

–Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, pp. 323-324

–simon critchley, infinitely demanding

The pursuit of truth seems to have been pretty much a constant in the official history of all human endeavor: science, ethics, politics, education, even aesthetics and romance all take their bearings from the implicit and apparently self-evident horizon of Truth. Even liars adhere to the supremacy of the truth they strive to travesty or conceal. Yet, ensconced as it may be in common sense, that apparent self-evidence is somewhat troubling. For the paradox, of course, is that if we need truth as our guiding beacon then it can only be because we are errant bodies in a world replete with error. And being in denial about that paradox has led our verists to some massive hypocrisy and not much verism of any substance at all. But what if it were the other way round? What if truth was not an earthly principle at all? Where would that leave us? Not in the hands of the relativists, to be sure, because they too have their shifting horizon of explanatory truth, which they call relativism. What if the ordering principle of reality were error itself? What would that mean? How could we face up responsibly and honestly to something so apparently irresponsible? By denying it even as errors continue to accumulate daily? Or playing with it, to tease out… not its truth but its potential?

—-excerpt from original post by Steven Wright at NorthEastWestSouth (please read further also for insightful comments!)

BM: Shock. That’s what Peirce says. Affect for me is inseparable from the concept of shock. It doesn’t have to be a drama. It’s really more about microshocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives. For example a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly, with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. This is the onset of the activation I was referring to earlier. I’d go so far as to say that this onset of experience is by nature imperceptible.

This is one way of understanding “microperception,” a concept of great importance to Deleuze and Guattari. Microperception is not smaller perception; it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. According to this notion of shock, there is always a commotion under way, a “something doing” as James would say. There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption. At the instant of re-jigging, the body braces for what will come. It in-braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising.

You can sometimes feel the in-bracing itself, most noticeably in startles or frights. Before you can even consciously recognize what you’re afraid of, or even feel that it is yourself that is the subject of the feeling, you are catapulted into a feeling of the frightfulness of the situation. It only dawns on you in the next instant that you’d better figure out what might have done the catapulting, and what you should do about. It is only then that you own the feeling as your own, and recognize it as a content of your life, an episode in your personal history. But in the instant of the affective hit, there is no content yet. All there is is the affective quality, coinciding with the feeling of the interruption, with the kind of felt transition I talked about before. That affective quality is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this purely affective rebeginning of the world.

– Brian Massumi, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics“

C = the condition of not knowing (gap) the possibility of being wrong

If there are no false facts, if the very possibility of the undoing of the verity of a fact is a condition of its being, then what are facts at all, as there are no absolute truths? facticity’s relativity becomes its very demise.

Cloudiness as a form of ambivalence, a sign of pretentiousness or insecurity. Such a wide spectrum from which misassumptions may arise, as the two often get mistaken for one another, and yet it was not my intention to propose falsehoods but let us in the least offer the conditions for possibility. Yours appears to me a world of absolutes and war. If the other can only exist as with or not-with, all presuppositions being made, the other can only exist as a response to you. Division is practice gravitating around one. No one else should exist in their own right. There are no third options, and increasing clarity is a meddling with belief, “feelings are facts” are truths are a name borrowed, and that’s simply great.

Let us hope that we act in pursuit of certain truths, at the level of valuation rather than facticity. Is action with an assumption of truth the same as action in belief? To believe with such certainty your own “truth”fulness may negate the need for communication at all, all others (not-with) being mere falsehoods (is this no hierarchy?). Or rather, a cruising for a bruising.

What else is there? Where is the third term, and what forms of dialogue could manifest them? What is C if it is a non-affirmation, a radical passivity? Can such passivity exist ex-stasis, as a language of linkages and motion rather than objects? To move one’s self besides oneself, no longer a subject, ecstasy, spaces in-between. This conversation began by a notion of two. You and your audience as binary, but if we would dare leave the spaces of solidity (it was our high school physics teacher Mr. B who taught us the value of absolutes while he tormented us during examination periods with bells attached to his shoes. “Never ASSUME. It makes an ASS out of U and ME.“), we find a neither-and; a condition C, being outside the self, of not knowing yet not quite not-self either. Infinitely tied to self, C is always conjunctive, one whose very possibility takes us outside of the frames of assumption.

The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes “messages“ between the two hemispheres. Corpus Callosum, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of, de-picts, creates, examines, presents, consists of, and is, “betweens.“ Between beginning and ending, between “natural“ and “artificial,“ between fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002. It’s a tragi-comedy of the cinematic variables. Corpus Callosum juxtaposes or counterpoints a realism of normal metamorphosis (two extreme examples: pregnancy, explosions) in believable, “real“ interior spaces with “impossible“ shape changes (some made possible with digital animation). First the camera, then we in the audience, observe the observations of the “real“ people depicted in the obviously staged situations. What we see and what they “see“ is involved in shifting modes of belief. There seem to be (though there is no narrative) a Hero and Heroine. However, from scene to scene they are different people costumed identically or altered electronically. The sound – electronic like the picture – is also a continuous metamorphosis and as the film’s “nervous system,“ is as important to the film as the picture. Or: the sound and the picture are two hemispheres joined by the artist. Corpus Callosum is resolutely “artificial, “ it not only wants to convince, but also to be a perceived pictorial and musical phenomenon.

– Michael Snow (quoted here via ArtTorrents, quoted via via…)

The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition, which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.

- John Calhoun, quoted in The Condition of Postmodernity, by David Harvey

– george kubler, THE SHAPE OF TIME, 1962
(from the press release of discovering absence, sounds interesting, maybe you go?)

“… the whole edifice toppled towards the street and would have crashed down into it had not its slow fall been met by that of the house opposite …”
Heinrich von Kleist, The Earthquake in Chile

Speech Practice: Suspended Collapse is located within a situation that constantly sets aside any reference applied to it. Yet, pushing for a collapse of the given situation this rehearsal speculates on a brief suspension that allows for the appearance of a gap within language itself.

Speech Practice: Suspended Collapse is a rehearsal for one reader and two writers. Hosted by acting from zero at the GfKFB am Flutgraben, Berlin, it will be displayed at the same time in the showroom Scriptings at Korjespoorsteeg 9/12, Amsterdam.

Speech Practice: Suspended Collapse takes place on Wednesday, 1 July, 14.00-22.00 hours. You can attend the rehearsal online at the Department of Reading and at Scriptings at Korjespoorsteeg 9/12.

Speech Practice is part of the project Ongoing propositions under different conditions by Sönke Hallmann and Achim Lengerer. The series is dedicated to the simultaneous performance of reading, writing and speech within a rehearsal situation. This rehearsal takes place with the participation of Inga Zimprich.

http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/SpeechPracticeSuspendedCollapse