(alternating analytic and (self) expressive statements)

"The word bifurcation means forking and is used in a broad sense for designating all sorts of qualitative reorganizations or metamorphoses of various entities resulting from a change of the parameters on which they depend." — V. I. Arnold [1]

"Redemption looks to the small fissure in the on-going catastrophe." — Benjamin [2]

by Csaba Polony

This paper consists of notes written during the last decade or so. They are arranged roughly in chronological order and re-written in accordance to my present awareness/understanding. Throughout the process of composition, I have tried to be guided by the following statement by Adorno: "Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance… What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole." (Minima Moralia). Doubts, as always, remain. On the other hand, I have also taken to heart these words of Merleau-Ponty: "In morality as in art there is no solution for the man who will not make a move without knowing where he is going and who wants to be accurate and in control at every moment. Our only resort is the spontaneous movement which binds us to others for good or ill, out of selfishness or generosity." (Cezanne’s Doubt)

Perpetual sameness in perpetual change: it’s all covered: as all terrestial space has been plotted, mapped, filled, divided, subdivided, developed, redeveloped, recycled, under the constant gaze of artificial satellites; so has the spontaneous period of culture come to an end: forms which now emerge become as recreations, bracketed, self-conscious, provisional, indeterminate; but (to date) lacking in the emancipatory effect that had been hoped would come once, "all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." (Marx - Communist Manifesto)

...it does seem like there’s been some kind of turning point: evocation of the potential of complete formlessness, self-awareness turned into something like a narcissistic self-enclosure, like cold elastic plastic wrapped around a sweaty-slithering body programmed to simulate a mirage of organic spontaneity... a complex of unknown fragments bantering around during a minute stretch of time in a lifeless illusion given arbitrary signs for the purpose of historical identification... a bland billboard grin crossed by chartreuse checkered chips . . . a surface dancing of lacquered ribbons on crusts of air-filled oil-water... a controlled environment filled with pleasure-pain electrodes into which, at regulated intervals, isolated, presumably self-sufficient, ravaging modules are introduced to navigate through negative-positive laser-beam bursts in accordance with game-plans drawn up by ever-present invisible masters....

The choice comes down to this:

A basic task of the revolution is to retain or (re)create non-commodified consciousness in forms adequate to our time. So, after the draining of traditional cultural structures and the bankruptcy of modernism by the trajectory of the commodity form, consciousness needs to be (re)filled with a deep-level historical (social and natural) awareness of our reality—such a process being an integral part of the over-all struggle against commodity relations.

Or:

The exhaustion of previous cultural forms has cleared the way for a new phase of culture, which is no longer connected to nature-based metaphorical systems, but is purely man-made. Subjectivist expression is superceded by a field network of simultaneous interactions and processes, which we may individually join or help set off. This stage will be realized only when all our attachments to old forms have been obliterated.

...sensory endings, rippled crevices, slaves with illusions of freedom, escape from the hands of time, laugh cry get mad get paid get laid get sick get well work eat live love die—that’s all: a private morphology of a micro-second brain pulse... a bubbling festering cauldron where end or beginning threads dangle among flickering light-beams dancing on display monitors which gauge the shape, density, mass, temperature, relative momentum and temporal duration of an arbitrarily delineated series of vectors projected form a grid mapping a random sample of sectors designated as "current events" . . .

Life-experience in commodity culture is ever eroded from an original unconscious sense of wholeness to ever atomized, disjointed parts and fragments. First, consciousness becomes restricted within the shell of each individual. Organic bonds to others disintegrate. Next, the internal psychic parts within the, by now, atomized consciousness are split apart, separated, detached, loosening all sense of relational contact. The unfolding of this process turns us into passive consumers under the ideological banner of "individual freedom" leaving "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest... " having "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies... in the icy water of egotistical calculation." (Communist Manifesto) As a result we have a world today that is a tangle of lies, manipulations, continual assaults on human sensitivities, a directionless rampage of unrestricted greed, vanity, desecration of nature, internal and external pollution, and hopelessly narrow self-aggrandizement—accompanied by the ever-accelerating drain of eons of experience that made up our species. Judgements are at best provisional, at worst purposeful obfuscation’s. Hypocrisy, deceit, lies, are the normal discourse in this society.

...there are no more memories, they’ve dissipated like early morning dew in the heat of the rising sun.... everything became transparent, immediate, no mysteries, no dreams, fear replaced by psychological anxiety... and then, one day, I’m note sure exactly when, there was difference: the presence of a "new persona" who actually seems to be able to function on all the necessary levels required for survival: talk without undo embarrassment; mingle with strangers without being debilitated by a rush of defensive panic; coolly gauge a potentially dangerous encounter and respond with appropriate threats while maintaining control; elicit friendship and warmth, and even manage, for the time being, to make enough money to pay the bills. But it’s all very strange: who or what is this strange new creature of adjusted responses....?

"Post-auratic art" [3] is not capable of revealing hitherto unconscious aspects of social/historical reality; but, at best, passively reflects or condenses what the general socio-economic conditions have already created. This is so because with the elimination of artistic autonomy, creative work resorts to the manipulation of already existing cultural codes as given "objective’ material. The possibility of evoking concrete or abstract potentiality through the imaginary flight of what ought to be is made impossible. Also, regardless of intentions, the manipulation of given elements (e.g. modes of representation, dated styles or fashion, news events, audience responses, "objective social systems," etc.) end up acquiring the trappings of a particular "art-style" (while claiming to be opposed to "aesthetic" aims, "anti-aesthetic," etc.) which can only be passively contemplated as pieces of elitist fetishized fashion. So any objective value of such works remain centered in promoting careers and in becoming part of the art worlds’ game of investment speculation.

On the other hand, "Art as Praxis" (activist, engaged art) has been unable to provide a viable alternative to subjectivist expression—primarily because of the objective absence of a genuine revolutionary group subject of appropriate universality (the "universal class," the proletariat, on the level of culture has remained a formal abstraction, rather than a living, self-conscious culture with organic continuity, such as was the case with traditional, pre-capitalist cultures). So, to date, "Art as Praxis" has been unable to resolve the inherited modernist bifurcation between subjective, individual awareness and rational, objective processes—not only because of a lack of n adequate subject, but because the injunction of "Art as Praxis" requires a dominant conceptualized strategy (a constant screening for the "correct ideology"), thus one-sidedly negating the subjective mode.

So, the movement of the liberation of consciousness from the "dead weight of the past" has lead, all too often, to a further enslavement to necessity than was true during the hey-day of classical bourgeois mimetic distance, by the implosion of reflective distance into immediate experience, regressive pseudo-mythology, passive documentation, or ideological manipulation.

And so, as Adorno said about philosophy, autonomous art, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.

But what or where are areas of potential meaning?

Possibilities: location and sublimation of vestiges of use-value and the negation of the dictatorship of the commodity form. Or, cultural forms emerging from the arid abyss of total commodity exchange and the struggle against the liquidation of the integral whole personality, and/or (re)constitution of a new subject that would embody the realization of the fully autonomous personality cognizant of and in harmony with the essential forces of social/historical/natural development.

global consciousness + disintegration of traditional subject + continued advance of science + regressive ideologies ("supply-side" economics,, "creationism," " new age" cults, rise of fundamentalism) + electronic revolution (computerization, telecommunications, etc.) + genetic engineering + world population boom + growing disparity between economic classes, 1^st and 3^rd world + failure of centralized planned economies + disintegration of international communist movement + (re)commodification of aspects of state sector ("deregulation, privatization", etc.) + ecological crises (ozone depletion, deforestation, nuclear and toxic waste, species extinction, etc.) + continued nuclear proliferation + space exploration

Are we at the beginnings of a new metaphorical system? Current dominant social/cultural forms seem to fixate on the adolescent or even infantile states of ego-development. Emotions are raw, extreme, black and white, simplistic. Yet, they are a-ffected, consciously produced according to pre-existing cultural codes from the past: skeletal re-creations of congealed, dead, emotional labor-time. So, it would seem, rather than a new stage in some new social being that is in formation, such developments can be seen more as regressive effects of the complete commodification and subsequent dismemberment of subjectivity that has unfolded during the last two or three decades.

The aftermath of the dissolution of art forms has been their stylistic, self-conscious reconstitution, without, however, revealing new content, or providing visions of life and reality which resolve or are improvements over the dilemmas that modernist culture had left us.

Antimony of dominant "post-modern" culture:

- (self) conscious spontaneity as reified artifice

or:

- a substanceless anonymous collectivity

no matter how much I pretend otherwise, or go through periods when it’s forgotten, still the need persists: to (re)create the "condition" -- a deeply felt presence that reverberates internally, as in "the sudden correspondence, beyond intellect and will, of an external image and an inner constellation." What was (or is) this "condition"? In the past its forms have been: the Aborigines’ Dreamtime ; Eliade’s Primordial Time, ("…the symboic return to the atemporal instant of primordial plenitude…" [4]) Hegel’s Subject-Object Unity; Blake’s, "If the doors of perception were cleansed/ everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."; Rilke’s Angel; Benjamin’s Dialectical Image or Profane Illumination. Whether or not this "condition" can be (re)created in real, non-idealist forms is a basic issue that I’ve been unable to come to a definitive postion on. Still the need persists…

The over-development, success,, of our species has divested cultural language of its deeper significance that is tied to the species’ struggle for survival. Being "too successful" has rendered "species-survival" meaningless -- hence cultural systems as well. For our principle means of survival has been our ability to overcome external nature through our conscious mind. Survival has been made possible, since the original of our species, through the struggle to dominate nature through reason. But we have now reached an historical stage where the continued application of this principle is seriously threatening not only our survival but life on earth as a whole. So the very logic of survival now demands that we paradoxically liberate ourselves from this "law" (modes of behavior evolved through self-preservational instincts) by transcending this "law" by conscious (self)transformation from the need to dominate nature through our reason, to becoming in harmony with nature.

After the disintegration of bourgeois, western, euro-centered subjectivity and the exhaustion of traditional cultural systems, an all-round global awareness, no longer shackled by the master-slave dialectic, has the potential to come into being. However, even though the "historical subject" has been dispersed by the development of the commodity form, still the commodity system continues to expand all over the world -- including cannibalizing itself (e.g., nostalgia as a permanent style, re-makes, etc.), "re-colonizing" state sectors, and dismantling socialist systems. So commodity fetishism continues to spawn distorting ideologies (from the media adulation of pure commodity consciousness, regressive escapes like "new age" cultism, or the technocratic cult of the machine [contradictions of human history resolved with artificial intelligence as the next higher stage in evolution]), which prevents the emergence of al all-round social awareness. Still, peering through the maze of media mirages, a faint, tentative, anxious, anguished gaze -- born out of relentless opposition and struggle against the commodity form -- may be coming slowly discernable -- shackled though it is by the impenetrable, invisible electronic digital pulse beats of commodity exchange which constantly usurps, swallow, and vomits back our (self)images in a mindless bombardment of "consume, consume."

A man peoples the universe. What do I believe? This world is real. Physical phenomena are the same in essence as mental phenomena. A unitary world in eternal flux. Trajectory of history: matter becoming conscious. Complete self-consciousness, individually experienced, is impossible (except through the illusion of mystical flight) since it would presume all matter becoming conscious of itself simultaneously. But the evolutionary development of reality involves a continual process of transformation of forms: energy > matter > mind > matter > energy ad infinitum. Our species is a particular organization of natural forces, formed through a definite process of physical and social evolution. There is no certitude. To become conscious within the unconscious movements of history requires one to take a stand for particular kinds of possible human life based of forms of concrete potentiality present in the world today .. that is the only (limited) way that a dialectical unity ("Identity of identity and non-identity" - Hegel) of mind and matter, as individually experienced, becomes possible -- shorn of as much illusion as can be in one life-time (complete dis-illusionment is as impossible as is complete self-consciousness)…

"Without hope we live in desire." - Dante, Inferno

It’s a problem of hope: where are we headed?

- pollution

- toxic wastes

- over production

- population explosion

- radioactive dumps

- disintegration of collective self

- ozone depletion

- "greenhouse effect"

- AIDS epidemic

- human experimentation (artificial hearts, genetic engineering, cross-species transplants, etc.)

- commodification of human reproduction (surrogate wombs, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, etc.)

- end of all teleological projects

- interpersonal relations wedded by incessant egoist competition

- all economies based on the inherent structural necessity of continuous growth on a planet of finite resources

- human species becoming like a cancer devouring the products of all terrestrial evolution in the vain attempt to achieve physical immortality.

So how can life have meaning in a world blustering with nuclear warheads in an ever more polluted, raped, desecrated landscape, with all space choked by the sheer magnitude of humanity’s debris? Where is it all going?

…excavating substance from the void. blackness. from the long buried calcified sediments of east-africa to the depth psychology of commodified abstracted fragmented contemporary life. beyond the "death of ego-personality" unearth the moss-encrusted damp roots that haven’t seen the light of day for unaccountable eons, blackness. solid depth, layered, from which emerge live forms begging to spring to life, carved, scraped, molded to substantiality. a somber meditation of intangibility, minute tracings passed the vanishing point…

Human mastery over elemental nature has been purchased at the price of seriously eroding the sense of life’s purpose. All our sensations are bound up with basic survival patterns. These no longer have relevance in our daily actions, and have instead been used as a way to artificially stimulate us to keep us consuming and working, working and consuming. So we continue to be controlled by the dominant social structure, within which we become reduced to isolated atomized sub-atomic particles floating around self-consciously, which we haphazardly counter by awkward attempts at self-inflation, or quickly erect delusory surrogates to vainly try to cover-up the mounting terror of total isolation, with the hope that praise from others might justify our lives to ourselves); otherwise, we can’t face the likelihood that it’s all just a purposeless mass of protoplasm in a state of inexorable decay.

"Everything has happened"

All the potential variations on individual, subjective, experience of previously formed social identities based on inherent potential (limits) of individual behavior have occurred.

All our inherent responses as individual receptive/ perceptive beings have been activated and subjectively processed; so all subsequent experience as experience appears as if it had already occurred.

i.e. there’s nothing new.

It has all become conscious.

…it was the first time that it had happened for quite awhile, at least 10 years, maybe more. The last time the dream was different, only the intensity of the fear and terror was the same. Then, the tree’s long sinewy dark-green leaves hovered, tangled and threatening, over my head and began to draw closer and closer. The terror of inevitable strangulation threw me into a panic flight in the black night looking for comfort that was nowhere to be found. This time, after more then 10 years, it was different. It began rather uneventfully. I was driving on the Bay Bridge, at night, coming home from San Francisco. As I came out of the bridge and approached the fork where the freeway branched off into two directions:, on theleft was 580 and to the right 17 (its been since renamed 880, also known as the Nimitz Freeway, or "blood alley" because of the high frequency of fatal accidents on a stretch of the Nimitz through Oakland-- and, interestingly enough, the stretch of 880 in question was destroyed by the earthquake of 1989) Anyway, as I was approaching this fork in the road, I was overcome by a paralyzing indecision about which way to go. My arms locked onto the wheel and I was powerless to decide which way to turn, as I began to panic at the thought of the inevitable violent crash ahead. But rather than a cataclysmic ending -- my arms still locked and immobile-- the car just "took off," to the left and up into the deep, dark-blue, starless night sky, and at an ever accelerating speed. The panic of immobility was being replaced by a growing, deep-seated primal fear, growing in intensity with the rate of acceleration. I began to wonder whether or not I should just "give in" to the flight, thinking to myself, "After all, you’ve always been able to control flights in dreams at will, so just go with this like a dream of flying and take control of it and make the car land safely." But the acceleration just continued, and suddenly some kind of barrier was breached -- a breakthrough into some other dimension in which all semblance of my ordinary reality of cars, bridges, freeways was lost. Outside the car, which no longer could be said to e a "car," as boundaries of distinct objects, or "inside" and "outside" vanished -- they no longer applied. "I" no longer was distinct either, Everything was Space, covered, consisting of what may be described as a kind of uniform grid-like pattern: dark, silvery-blue lines in an all-enveloping regularity, enmeshed in, or more precisely, part of, an over-all deep dark blue plenum. But as I started to become conscious of this "new space" (and all of this breakthrough into this new dimension happened in a very quick indeterminate amount of time -- seconds or nano-seconds) the thought occurred to me that the "image" by which this new spatial dimension was presented to me, seemed not quite right. Was it really "of itself?" Or (anyway) how did I know that what I was seeing was the reality revealing itself to me in its actuality? Couldn’t this al just be some device, an artifice, which my mind imposed on this, which is really an unrepresentable new reality? If so, isn’t it true that all that I am capable of is falling back on some "pre-conceived" iconography? And further, doesn’t this turn of events mean that by now even my unconscious, in the dream state,, is incapable of direct, undistorted experience? That by now truly everything in my experience has been divested of concrete images which directly produce their own reality? Even my unconscious, in the state of dreaming, had fallen under the sway of "commodified space." NO "idea" can any longer spontaneously evoke its own image. Instead, only preconceived, pre-existing, dead iconography is possible. Needless to say, the analysis at the end of this dream-tale occurred once I had woken up; on the other hand, it’s impossible for me to know at what point the dream "stopped," or when I woke up, and my conscious mind began to ponder what it had just been through.

through the process of modernization becomes:

fragmented, atomized --- expanding power of the species

as the social system becomes more and more rationalized (continued growth of scientific knowledge, technology, quantification of all life, etc.) personal, subjective, individual experience finds it difficult, if not impossible, to relate, experientially, to the totality, as was possible through traditional nature-based symbolic metaphors. Internal, organic, subjective experience can no longer locate external equivalents -- that are also communally shared.

Industrialization, modernization, to date, has only been able to create a functional, mechanical collective consciousness which, as it utilizes only one pole of consciousness (analytic, rational mind),is unable to provide individuals with an organic sense of integration with the social body and the cosmos as a whole. Thus, regardless of how much social/economic/ equality is achieved, the problem of subjective experiential fulfillment, other than bodily gratification, remains unsolved. So any future progressive, truly emancipatory politics, has to be able to address this problem in new and different ways than the economistic or good intentioned humanism of past progressive movements.

THE PROCESS: (FROM THE "DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT"TO THE "LOGIC OF RECONSTRUCTION")

MAGICAL SQUARES: END OF THE NARRATIVE: EMERGENCE OF THE STRUCTURE: CONTROLLED NATURE: DIALECTIC DERAILED: BEYOND REPRESENTATION: DISINTEGRATION OF THE STRUCTURE: RAW, DECENTERED IMPULSES: MYTHICAL RETREAT -- DIRECT STIMULI RECEPTION -- SYSTEM MANIPULATION: UNBOUNDED DIFFUSE ENERGY OR RECONSTITUTION OF (NEW) SUBJECT.

*

^1. V.I. Arnold, Catastrophe Theory, translated from Russian by G. S. Wassermann, based on a translation by R. K. Thomas, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1986, p.2.

^2. Walter Benjamin, "Central Park," trans. Lloyd Spencer in New German Critique, no. 34, (Winter 1986).

³. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crises, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1975, pp. 84-86.

⁴. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, Harper Torchbooks, NY, 1959, p. 82.