Subject: sliding with a word like silence unlike anything
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 17:14:59 -0500 (EST)


> 
> "The condensation of fragments and the plasticity of images" ((///), 
> 3-14-98) are examples of "what is common to all men" (Heraclitus, 
> fragment B2), and therefore are, or can be seen or treated as, refuse 
> that can be left out of a gathering of 'worldly' items -- such as 
> experiences and events of waking life, shared events, collective 
> experiences, in short, what is defined or given-to-be via identification 
> with beings in the world.  That which is left to the province of sleep, 
> however, the realm of 'opinion', which operates outside and away from 
> the common, is the truly personal, the uncontaminated: all that we can 
> swear to as being _savoir absolu_ ... the dependence is the impermanent, 
> the temporal -- and from there one can only proceed to the isolated 
> apocalyptic aspects of "the dissolution of consciousness" ((///), 

To add, I was remembering Bataille's response to the word silence which is
most difficult to lay out as inner experience since each time one writes
it out, one already closes it off in speaking and making some noise.
Unless, in that very activity that Barthes would call jouissance one were
using noise as a way of dissolving the reification that a word's meaning
can have on our tendency to keep going across a surface with words
flattened out and smooth where the texture no longer offers any friction
to possible becomings, and then language gets really slippery as if it
were putting its edge on ice.

> 
> How easy it is to ignore the ground upon which you are standing!  An 
> identity forges itself in relation to pure absence; the absence is the 
> tool used by the individual, the _emergent_, to forge an identity.  A 
> fragile line, a trace, left behind by some ancient or anterior artist, 
> provides the very lack of meaning, the word lacking all but form, 
> required by the would-be being-in-the-world (now merely an emergent) who 
> wishes to inject the presented stele with a disseminating meaning of 
> his/her own.  And what is s/he left with but a fist-full of problems?
> 
the ground? you mean the ice on which I am slipping?

I think by impression or an image, which remember Nietzsche says moves to
being a word and then a concept, is meant an event of becoming that is not
conserved in so far as it is intense because if it wasn't intense then
it's experience would be mediated by a conscious interpretation guided by
concepts which Nietzsche calls myth. So an openess to impressions, nuanced
manner in Lyotard's neo-Cezannian sense, is an ability to loose the
constraints of rationality so necessary in what the surrealist took to be
automatic writing. But where did Bataille/Artaud take this since I don't
think there was any radical break but a disagreement about how to go on...?
One can discern in Artaud an alchemical reading where the very loosening
of the constraints of reason has as an a-logical consequence the production
of fire that can dissolve words and turn then into ash or noise
(Kristeva's semiotic, Lacan's object little a, Bataille's excess of
communication that we have with laughter and crying). When words wrap
themselves around the ashes you get imagery of dissolution, breaking
apart, becoming dust and loosing lines in the nothigness that a period
brings. It is not ludicrous to link this up with Diderot's notion of a
hieroglyphic image which is a place where there is the most energy. And
what is energy if not the turbulence of stimulants where we exchange with
each other nothing but the jouissance of needing to come back, to return a
line in whatever way we know how and no matter how little you may think
your voice sounds and no matter how unintelligible things can get when in
making a cut (///) somewhere and starting to graft we loose each other and
find between all of us not an identity but the distance that brings
us together in reading the withdrawal of all meaning?

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////  


--