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Reductio ad Parnassum

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Gradus ad Absurdum:

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Part I: Poetics and hermetics beyond hermeneutics,

or to move beyond the horizon of things.

THE question of movement, of affecting and being affected, begins with setting the stage—a mis-en-scene receptive to comic or tragic acts. Or, we may write into being, as the mathematicians do, with a passive voice that obscures the existence of their initial transgression; interventions into what is presented as a logical development free from any active subject: "Fiat mundi"for i who speaks (the subject belittles itself to a passivity—wishing to be a voice without a body, to become the gaze of nobody from nowhere, or pure objectivity.) Thus spake he unto he, "let there be mind-forged manifolds which chain my thought to its form and my movements to what it performs, to free me from my unfreedom—the paralyzing anxiety of my utter freedom." From these utterances, barred and prohibited or not, rendered external from their usual implicit and secreted murmur, emerge worlds that play out glittering and folding into themselves in the manner that voids are full and lively with fluctuations of hidden beings, enveloping precursors distributed in wait for bits, creatures, machines, to arrive on the scene and interact. Though, the apparently feigned passivity is not feigned at all—for in truth, the mathematician who is not merely following conventions is called to a particular initiation of the world into the symbolic (though many would be too embarrassed to admit it)—and thus simultaneously bringing symbols into the world, expressing the passivity of the encounter or their being moved by the appropriate linguistic voice.

Already a complication arises with claims of "mind-projection fallacy" and the various notions of "constructivism" (crimes of mental forgery.) Are manifolds constructed if their causes lie outside the mind, if the mind is itself forged with and from a greater world? Why should we end the chain of relations with the mind and not ask how the mind came to construct in the first place? Even in cases where constructions are emergent, that is, nobody explicitly constructs anything but phenomena appear nonetheless, the question of what moves them stands (say for concreteness, nobody believes a social convention, but everyone believes there exists others that believe it, so out of politeness we all nonetheless follow the convention as if we all believed in the end anyways—for, science, politics, religion, and the codes which mediate signs, etc. follow the motto: it works even if you don't believe it, where in all cases even dis-believers believe it insofar that it presents itself in phenomenon and forces one to navigate in a particular way that works.) The selective ending to the chain of relations with the mind (the same sort of selection done by soyentists who, mostly unconsciously, end data-taking when the expected results are achieved—or a form of selection bias) retains secret privileges for the liberal subject who is supposedly free to construct and project on to the world (regardless if it's full or faithful to the world), to meditate, medicate and not question the underlying scripts which determine one's movements. We will not, however, begin with positing the existence of sets or manifolds (multiplicities) of worlds as those steeped, often to the point of bitterness, in rigorous foundations tend to; for movement begins when we're thrown out of the experience, a shock, a liveliness, but also a bit of death in the nervous spasm of becoming self-conscious—nonetheless, not to the point of rigor mortis. There is no thought of sets, collections, universes, topoi, endowed with consistency given by a transcendental unity, nor with the immediate awareness of other points (of view or otherwise), nor even any thought in general—but only the gap in passing from the moving to the unmoving, from intuition and thought and vice versa, the soft inner kernel of a machinic exterior that animates a life of its own, seemingly human to the point of inhumanity yet still incommensurable with the symbolic (lines of code as its genetic sequence.) It is here with the empirical, precisely the point of departure from the internal logic of the formal, symbolic, mathematical—that's the sense-making foundation from which we shall begin; "solvitur ambulando," left unspoken to the tortoise by the walking dog who bites at the heel, but the tortoise remained unconvinced.

In immediate access to experience, we begin in our own frame and the habit of sense taken for granted, that of the center of the world—not a world, not a point of view supplemented by a complementary sense which decrees what's true and false, but the point of view of the one subject to the world (but not yet the subject of the world.) For there is no indefiniteness in this reference frame; one does not conceive of some worlds appearing here and there from the richness of milieux, from sources of emitted signs of particular curvatures or motions. But rather directly perceives that one does not move for the world, but that it moves around you, for you. Shall we call it narcissism or geocentrism? The terms are loaded with historical baggage whose weight contradictorily hastens one to an immediate conclusion. But swiftness and lightness must be earned, for it's a strength that must be developed by throwing off the impure gravitas of prima materia, not the words, but their sense that is immediately transmitted to generate a bodily reaction, a gut reaction determined by pure instinct trained by countless initiations into milieux. But a frame does not determine what is good or bad, true or false, or evil, for that is the domain of a particular sense (such as "common sense" or "what everyone knows to be true") which inevitably evaluates its members who participate in it as good or bad (truths becoming conventions becoming new truths.) Geocentrism is recovered immediately upon dropping the assumption that the Earth's frame is static—it is merely non-inertial, or perhaps dynamical in the sense that it's an actual body that moves and is moved by other bodies in the universe—that is, it had a dynamic genesis whose traces persist, always already rotating and tuned to her own frequency when we landed. Otherwise, her dominant attraction to Apollo drives a geodesic orbit, which in her eyes appears as if Apollo is driven towards her, orbits her, brings light to her. It should be understood that animism and anthropomorphization, be they present or not, are particular modes of sense-making just as reductions to materialism: In the former, the spiritual and human become non-spiritual and inhuman by the fact that everything becomes spiritual and human, just as the equations such as human = human explodes into arbitrariness as a pure tautology, opening the space for a replacement of the variable (to, say matter = matter, where matter similarly becomes non-material in the materialization of everything.) Though they are formally equivalent (at this scale), they move people differently (for an uncritical positivist would scoff at animism in favor of materialism, and contrarily for the mystic.) Similarly, Freud's reduction of the signs of milieux to sexuality and infancy precisely opens the theory up to empirical forces in one's life through its tautological equations (enfant = enfant) and, with the analogous equality, desexualizes sex into mindless mechanical motions as the drives pass into the psyche (and, for the skeptical, who proclaim psychoanalysis is too rational or not rational enough, Bernays has shown one should not swiftly discount Freud—for, again, the question is "what does it do?" as living, breathing sets of ideas, stories, mythos, that grows and flows with the ages to preserve its truths through poetics and hermetics—as it always had.)

The self-centered frame of the narcissists, meanwhile, is set in believing they can "fix" themselves or another, that they have newfound powers to make the world move for them, to heal the wounds they've inflicted in a past life—an unresolved guilt from a shame and hatred of certain creative-destructive powers which consume their image. Is this not what the prophet meant when saying Narcissus will live long so long as he "does not discover himself"? For the discovery precedes the desire for a rose-flushed image, or mingling gazes with a youthful self(ie), as the contents of his self-discovery are the cause of his desire: The rejection of Echo, who sings a pure selflessness. All that remains of her afterwards is a pure and innocent desire for a missed perfection, her disembodied voice. For her body was destroyed by the source and cause of her voice, that of a particular youth that becomes a sign emanating from what appears as an internal beauty, a pure source of a singular voice, a soul that expresses itself outwardly and overflows with an unknown radiance. She wishes to echo it back, to repeat it in and through her, to become a flower herself through which she may express her will. But in going to the end and meeting Narcissus, she finds a fanged truth at his core, something she could never express—an auto-fixation forever prohibited to her (precisely because she finds this in herself—the haughtiness of Sodom and Gomorrah that "aided no needy.") A voice is that which persists and is passed on from the destroyed body, at least those bodies that have stayed true to their desire, for it is what a body can do—an arm swings, a walk, to sing and dance, to speak and talk and laugh and play, to write, to live and die in a certain way, all express a singular voice of a particular individuation, a style, a personality that lives on beyond death of the body (with no residual floating organs as with Orpheus). Narcissus in all his pride thus discovers in himself a movement that was always already there, perceived as a lacuna, a rejection of Echo (a rejection of himself) just as narcissists discover they've been moved the entire time by the graces and judgments of other,s by reading themselves into all signs (and thus Echo and Narcissus were always already one by their very disjunction—as the purely selfless also develops a narcissism, but precisely one from framing themselves; as in watching herself from the outside, a double consciousness from external gazes, and thus with a twinkle in her eye, framing herself for the crimes of duplicity, re-presentation, becoming the exalted nothingness of a pure and innocent martyr.) However, just as geo-centrism is a redeemable frame (with a dynamic twist), one need not move beyond narcissism: Echo has found an escape path internal to narcissism itself—to become a voice without a body, the true calcination of a rigorous depersonalization from which one's will becomes the pure movement of the world, becoming one with the underlying scripts which mediate all speech. (Narcissus, meanwhile, becomes a body without a voice—i.e. with no will or desire—or moving to the hereafter through the transmigration of his soul.)

Intrinsic spin, twists, internal movements, may be at first seen as an unknown deviation from a pure static geo-centricity and ego-centricity, as a lacuna of a perfect rational universe made for oneself—though, it's not the rejection of this dynamism that redeems the framing, but the dynamisms themselves taken all the way to their end: a non-inertial geo-centricity and a depersonalized ego-centricity. But the discovery of such movements opens one up to question how this movement came to be: What unknown past have we unfolded from? Why do we even frame the world for our crimes, or frame it for its artistry? What was instinctively forgotten?

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