Remixing Mystory

My guiding instruction for my final poetics posts actually comes from my Julien section.

“The general who wants to win the battle and the painter who wants to capture the landscape must not acquiesce their inner desire and force it upon the world, rather they must observe the tendency of the world itself and locate the points at which the world’s tendencies converge with their own.”

Essentially, don’t try to control the production of felts, but rather wait to receive them. This point coincides with the final point from the first post of my poetics using the topic modeling software: electracy is interested in the unconscious fluidity of experience.

Intersperse moving and still images in your experiment because each genre conveys a unique relationship to time. In addition, don’t try to control the flow of events in a filmic felt as you won’t really know what you have made until it is finished and you notice how the disparate moments you originally focused on have been reconstituted by their relationship to the whole film.

Although we have focused mostly on visual felts throughout the semester, I don’t see a reason why we can’t use audio in our production of felts considering that music is perhaps the most visceral form of artistic expression and one that we also happen to share with other animals.

From this, I am going to produce a short video/photo montage experimenting with some of the slow motion techniques mentioned in The Cinematic as I circulate back and forth between the temporal registers of still and moving images. In this way I hope to hold true to my instruction that “there is something of the still that is only discernible in its relation to the moving.”

Since it is important to “observe the tendency of the world itself” for this part of the experiment, I will spend most of my time in the editing phase so I can test out a variety of compositions and note the serendipitous juxtapositions that arise from the technology itself. I’m not sure what images to use for this project. Perhaps the Community and Career sections, using moving images for Career and still images for Community which might work to formally reflect my conception of these aspects of my life. My career is moving forward, constantly changing and adapting to circumstance while my community remains the same, in the past.

Presencing Absence in Images

This quote from the middle of my Prezi was useful for grounding my theoretical points about the role of absence in electracy: transition from image to image is the thing (the limit) which is “present only in the form of absence.”

According to another one of my quotes, this “thing” or “limit” is the subject: “Thinking is the subject’s search for the thing (the real) whose very refutation makes it (cogito) possible.” As a visual genre, the photo montage most effectively captures the conductive movement that characterizes the subject’s unconscious.

From this I want to create a photo montage in the spirit of David Campany’s notion of “late photography” by returning to those sites of wreckage that are passed over every fifteen minutes or so in the media blitzkrieg of instant access. However, my “sites of wreckage” are not physical sites but digital sites such as old memes or stories of pop culture that have since been relegated to the cyber-refuse bin.

This would be a good project to use material from the Entertainment and Family sections of mystory. Perhaps even interspersing my subjectivity in the moment of transition between a still of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and a familiar family photo.

In this project, I will be following Lacan’s instruction by noting that repetition can be characterized as the search for the moment in which an event “seems to be under an obligation to yield itself” (i.e. the real, “original” encounter) (51). Movement is important here because encounters with the real are not static: “you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.” The real is moving and inaccessible, and I can only circle it through this transition that conveys the illusion (the veil) of an encounter with it.

In choosing individual images for this montage, try to follow this advice: “create an image that brings you to the point of action and then stalls, allowing the imagination’s invocatory nature to carry you into the here and now of the present only to have the image pull you back to the precipice from which you threw yourself. This is the “unresolved oscillation” of viewing experience (60).”

This would also be a good project to explore the rim-like movement described by Lacan and extrapolated by Christian Metz in his chapter of The Cinematic. In this quote from my mapping project, Metz seems to be telling me to create images that allude to off frame elements: the absence of the off frame element must be evoked by a feeling that is within the image’s frame. Similar to the temporal tension between past and present that I discussed earlier, this punctum propels the viewer outside the frame of the photo only to discover that the “thing” she is in search of was always already the lack initiated by an element within the image itself. This is Lacan’s image of the rim as a diagram of the movement of desire, entering into the gap only to return from where you came.

Virtual Punctums

For my next few posts, I want to push my instructions for my experiment further into the electrate realm by positing more specific techniques to try out for my project while referring to the data gathered from the first two posts of my poetics.

One of my favorite quotes from my Prezi mapping is “represent the objet petit a by creating circuitous images of displacement while keeping in mind that to ‘get at’ what is ‘not-get-at-able’ you do not actually ‘get’ there, you can only circle it.”

I think this would be a great conceptual starting point for creating some augmented reality images using Aurasma. By overlaying virtual images onto physical images I could formally enact the “not get at able” and use the photos that I created in mystory as the visual material for these virtual (unconscious) images.  

To keep this project from depending too much on technological gimmickry, I need to find images that generate a punctum, overlaying these onto less engaging and/or staged (dead) photos such as portraits.

A good place to look for punctual images (at least for me) is my photos folder, which contains a large amount images that I have seen countless times and immediately call forth a particular feeling from that time in my life. Maybe set your screensaver to slideshow mode and watch the images pass before you randomly, noting ones that create a punctum.

Because Aurasma allows you to link the virtual images, I could also link to particular sections of mystory, thus creating a circle back to the first part of the project and rereading it in terms of the material gathered in the second part.

The New Language of the Unconscious

Lacan claims that “the unconscious is structured like a language” relations to his notions of the subject and counting (20). Besides the fact that this is one of the phrases for which Lacan is most well known, it also resonates with me at a formal level simply due to its axiomatic brevity. It seems to demand attention, especially considering that Lacan in in the process of explaining “the unconscious,” one of his four fundamental concepts.

First, and as Lacan is quick to note, the phrase is indebted to the structuralism of Claude Levi Strauss, from whom Lacan derives his notion of the “relations that have already been determined” before the establishment of societal or human relations. Lacan writes that these structures “are taken from whatever nature may offer as supports, supports that are arranged in themes of opposition. Nature provides-I must use the word-signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them” (20). Lacan then continues by noting that the most significant aspect of this pre-structuring is how it attunes psychoanalysis to the way in which subject formation occurs at “the level at which there is counting, things are counted, and in this counting he who counts is already included” (20).

Looking again at the way that Lacan structures his argument formally (“I must use the word”), it seems that he wants us to pay attention to the importance of the term “signifiers” in his structuralist account of the unconscious. With this in mind, it seems that Lacan’s phrase, “the unconscious is structured like a language,” might be interpreted as follows: the material signifiers through which meaning arises in language is analogous to the material signifiers through which the unconscious arises in the subject. In addition, these “material signifiers” in the unconscious come from “nature” and thus are not necessarily limited to the signifiers that constitute a language.

It also seems important that Lacan describes these signifiers as coming together “in a creative way,” implying that the unconscious structure which results does not function on a logic that is confined to the physical or “natural” limitations from which its signifiers arose. The connections among the signifiers in the unconscious are akin to the connections we made in the felt section of our mystories.

One instruction to be gleaned from this analysis might be to expand our understanding of language beyond its phonemic emphasis in literacy. We might also consider returning to semiotic/structuralist theory such as Levi-Strauss, Greimas, and Barthes as we attempt to represent signifer relations in our electrate metaphysics. How does the proliferation of image, video, audio, and text initiate a new semiotics?

Taxonomies of Electracy

In his analysis of the shi in ancient Chinese poetry, Julien reproduces a taxonomy of poetic forms created by an 8th century literary critic. Julien writes, “Wang Changling, the author of another list of strategic dispositions in poetry, this one written more than a century earlier, resisted the temptation to be so cryptic; his catalog is easier for us to learn from. In this list we are not distracted by external examples of gesture and posture; the text itself says everything, and we need only interpret it. It might be worth pausing to study it” (118).

An instruction that could be developed from Julien’s focus on the taxonomy of 8th century Chinese poetry in his extrapolation of shi is to locate and “interpret” electrate taxonomies. Important to remember in this instruction is not so much the individual categorizations themselves, but rather the method of categorizing employed by the author.

To do so, we must also partner with Julien in moving away from the dismissive stance that the taxonomy is nothing more than a “desultory, whimsical rumination” and consider the possibility that there may be “discreet and subtle links beneath the apparent disorder” (123).

Possible areas to explore might the sudden proliferation of “list” articles that is currently bombarding social media (buzzfeed in particular comes to mind). Following Julien, it might be more accurate to focus on lists whose subject matter would be inherently difficult to categorize in a rigorous or exhaustive manner (such as poetry). What can the connections initiated through analysis of these categorizations tell us about an electrate metaphysics?

Contrast: Playing Nice with Jullien

In addition to his general contrast between Western and Eastern metaphysics, Jullien presents a series of more specific contrasts between various Western and Eastern cultural entities (theorists, aesthetics, strategy). For this post, I want to focus on Part Two, or the section on art and aesthetics, which I believe most explicitly outlines the role and importance of Contrast within the notion of shi.

In his first section "Absence of Mimesis: Art Conceived as the Actualization of Universal Dynamism," Jullien explores the Chinese emergence of “an autonomous aesthetic mindset” following the disintegration of the unified empire at the close of the second century A.D. Contrasting this Eastern artistry with the West’s propensity for mimesis or representation, Jullien describes a Chinese aesthetic that simultaneously captures universality and particularity rather than merely depicting universality or particularity. He writes, “artistic activity was seen as a process of actualization, which produced a particular configuration of reality….The particular disposition that receives form can potentially express the universal dynamism” (75). In this way, the painting is not an replication of the dynamism within reality but is itself a new dynamic moment of reality. Shi innovates rather than recapitulates. Possible instruction: MOVE AWAY FROM REPETITION AND TOWARD INNOVATION. This is an instruction we know well by now, even if we do not always heed it.

As he moves to a more specific example of aesthetic shi (poetry and literature), Jullien complicates this notion of contrast as I have been presenting it as a movement from one place to another (away from X and toward Y). Instead, Jullien argues, one should “exploit the potentials of both those contrary qualities” in order to adequately reveal their essences which can only be grasped through their differences. Jullien warns, however, not to confuse this  contrast that promotes originality with the “contrariness, contradiction, and quasi-mechanical subversion” that leads to mere novelty (87). Contrast, as opposed to contradiction, strikes a balance between a subtle “tension” and an overt “saturation that permeates the tension and brings about relaxation and enjoyment.”

The important thing to glean from this example in thinking about our instructions for Contrast is to keep in mind that contrast maintains, rather than “moves away from,” differences, and not only that, but it maintains differences only to the extent to which the false resolution toward which tension inherently gravitates is forestalled by the “harmonious saturation” that makes the tension tolerable. An instruction: PUT YOUR CONTRASTS TOGETHER, BUT MAKE THEM PLAY NICE.

Two Instructions: Contrast

Ulmer brought up a few points about metaphysics last week that I think it would be useful to revisit here as I search for instructions for inventing electracy within Jullien’s text. First, Ulmer mentioned that we have no need to repeat the metaphysics of Aristotle (i.e. present a metaphysics of the “thing”), we already have one of those. What we need, according to Ulmer, is a metaphysics for electracy which, in contrast to the totalizing nature of Aristotelian metaphysics, operates at a more subjective level. Ulmer: “The claim of Internet Invention is that the wide image is a personal metaphysics.” As Ulmer pointed out in class, Jullien’s extrapolation of shi (propensity, tendency) in Chinese culture serves as a starting point for thinking about the shi of our wide image as a personal metaphysics which we can utilize for the invention process. From here, we are to use Jullien to explain the first slot in Ulmer’s  CATTt generator (Contrast).

Thus, the question guiding this blog post is: what does Jullien have to teach us about Contrast?

As a whole, Jullien’s text contrasts Western and Eastern metaphysics and, as Aaron pointed out in his email, Jullien strongly favors the Eastern notion of shi over the Western category, extrapolating shi’s general characteristics from particular cultural practices (e.g. calligraphy, landscape painting, etc.) while positing the static Western category as a general rule from the outset (13). Perhaps this bring us to our first instruction for Contrast: MOVE AWAY FROM THE GENERAL AND TOWARD THE PARTICULAR.

However, before I move to the particular, let’s stick around with the general for a second. This idea of “moving away from the general” seems like a good opportunity for a conductive puncept between General (Western abstraction) and General (army commander) considering the amount of attention Jullien gives to Chinese military tactics. As I pointed out in a previous post, Chinese Generals operated under the attitude of predestined victory: “victory is simply a predictable outcome of a balance that operates in his favor” (26). Winning a battle was not a matter of forcing one’s will upon the situation, but rather aligning one’s desired outcome with the shi of the situation.

Perhaps the Chinese General is a good figure to “move away from” due to the strong connotations of “victory” and “triumph” associated with him. What if, for electracy, “winning” is less important than “losing?” Another possible instruction for Contrast: MOVE AWAY FROM WINNING AND TOWARD LOSING.