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Notes on The Spectacle No.43.
A Response to Blanchot’s Silence.
To Jacopo Valli

by Axidentalists Axis and Jacopo Valli

September 8, 2012


Axidentalists Axis

Thanks. I enjoyed the piece very much – quite a task [We’re dealing with the Jacopo Valli’s article, «The useless community» (La comunitŕ inutile), appeared on Kasparhauser on June 21, 2012].

Of course Blanchot was in a state of almost constant critique, which means that theory dominates praxis.

I cannot content myself with that idea inasmuch as it pertains to describing what it is not — unless it remains a literary exercise; itself a critique, such as Stanislav Lem’s novella.

Between — for instance — the two absolute ideas of ‘sound’ and ‘silence’, there is a third. That is the correspondence between what silence actually IS and what is an absence of coherence (that silence corresponds to an absence of meaning, translation or interpretation).

I don’t mean pattern and chatter, but the formed and the formless, and their common origin in chaos. Silence is an artificial (theoretical) condition: maybe non-existent.

Physiologically or environmentally, the organs of perception revert and relate to the total individual body, so only a total lack of sensory stimulus could result in “silence”: a total lack of the physiological organs of perception. A lack of understanding of input and a total lack of input. Every nuance leads to nostalgia except if and when a “new” stimulation (object) has no semiotic value: contains no information pertaining to previous signs and/or signifiers. This does not mean that this new stimulation will not be referred to via old contexts, only that it does not originate from those contexts.

With this in mind I would ally chance and chaos – the latter as the progenitor and the former as the substance of “idea”. The problem of critique in this respect is that it trains a mind to think in reformist terms: that structure itself - as opposed to 'element' - is open to modification (reformism), and that it presents scope for revision, and that revision in itself can be ‘novel’.

By strange coincidence, when reviewing Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure I encountered almost the same initial problem as when I tried to translate your essay, in that when using “quick view” instead of viewing the .pdf, the novel was scrambled – i.e. interspersed with lines of ‘meaningless’ characters. Add to that the fact that the .pdf itself is partially constructed of sideways views, and I would infer that Blanchot is no Edward Lear, even if we agree that Lear is conditionally similar.

Paradox is itself a reference to normalcy, as is historicity a reference to false memory. Firstly, ‘conditioning’, and secondly, space and time alter our individual perceptions (semiotics). Then language intervenes also, via the conditioning and perceptions of the originator/s and the mediator/s.
No matter how novel the character might be, once recuperated into a scene, that character becomes imbued with the banality of experience.

Made-up names for objects are ubiquitous in the workplace, when the workforce communicates openly. Sometimes those false words replace the original. But there is nothing stopping a community creating new grammar also, or no grammar, or effectively operating in a condition of harmony within an absence of verbal communication. Rather than multi-tasking, multiple-input/output tasking. But this multiple-I/O tasking is not constrained by language, only by the level of intent; or rationale implicit in its execution.
Current (20th century) thought despises ‘utility’ for the very reason that reduction (in a philosophical context), is misappropriated as ‘restriction’. That analogues are best interpreted via iteration, and that ‘meaning’ is subjective. This is the triumph of Spectacular “thought”.

I believe that view to be wrong: that meaning is not subjective; only interpretation is subjective. Un-mediated definitions of objects, in fact, could quite easily be ubiquitous.

That one is neither a jack-of-all-trades, nor a mistress/master of one, but instead a mistress/master of all. Only in that respect does language limit the potential of any community (group of individuals). In fact that limitation is only in respect of a community's ability to define itself to those outside. Recuperation is “experience without praxis”.

Abstraction in general defines an object, but not its condition. Conditionally we can define a car as “not working” from economic, philosophical, ecological, or other points of view. Ontologically, it has a level of “mechanical veracity” (truth), which follows an idea of motive potential.

Whereas Post-Modernism would seek to create critiques of each individual aspect of the vehicle and then perhaps datamine the resultant information, a more conclusive approach would be to act as if its relationship to commodity is the best evidence of its utility, and that then, only the construction of false desire creates the disparities in commodity relations and “reality”. That individual ‘desire’ is at odds with any holistic consensus at the very root (should such a holistic consesnus exist).

One has to define in what way birth and death are unique moments in existence, before one can simply define them as being so. If that ’impossibility’ or definition is merely due to a lack of the modes of communication, then we must return again to the problem of ‘delivery’: mediation.
I first came across this idea in the Wire song “40 Versions”, which contains the lyric:
“It’s not hard to see another unique event
When you miss the beginning and you miss the end”

But we need not miss the births, nor the deaths of others. Only clear descriptions of their essential elements are lacking. They are unique events to each of us as individuals, but ubiquitous in that they happen to every one of us. This means that in some condition, there is contained the ideas of both birth and death, but that this silence is only a condition of both Spectacle and critique (recuperation). In reality, the resonance of both conditions is inescapable.

As with the example of the car, birth and death have a level of ‘truth’ which lies outside the individual (Post-Modernist/subjective) interpretation. That it is functional as an object outside critique. That in fact we are all of us constantly and irrecoverably aware of those two moments. That perception (experience) is an algorithm defined by the singularity at either end of the cycle, and that the Spectacle itself is dedicated to removing the idea of community from the mind of the individual by removal of these two empathic and ever-present conditions.

Existentialism (now only a Post-Modern reply to Nihilism) covers both bases by leading us from joy to sorrow, via experience, and linearly to iteration.



Jacopo Valli

Thanks for your reply, Axidentalist.

Why do You think that critique pertains primarily to theory? Personally, I don’t divide in two theory and praxis, not perforce, at least: that kind of dualistic partition has roots in platonism. And to me, Blanchot seems to be essentially non-dualistic, but for the use of some terms, then linguistically, that is immaginaly: this is the point of my critique to his use of the term “communauté”.

Clearly, monistically, silence does not have ideal ontological autosubsistence. And the fact that only a total lack of sensory stimulus could result in silence — possibility philosophically related to the reflections on perception of Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, as an instance — doesn't mean that silence could actually exist “in sé” (otherwise, We’re once again platonically, dualistically trapped in anthropocentrism and idealism and/or realism).

Once more in a monistical perspective, form and substance ontologically coincide; then, the formed and the formless are not actually divided: the parting reside “in the eye”, in the ability and/or desire not only to look, but to see; to observe analitically and deconstructively, maybe with a flair for ostranenie.

Chaos as the Being: 1 = n = 0 = infinite sum of possibilities, difference of a self with itself (Deleuze).

I agree with You in thinking that meaning is not subjective; only interpretation is. And so the point is the meaning: excluding the delightfully western faith in the ontological Nothing, the world, that is the Being, that is the sum of entities or modes (Spinoza), has no meaning/sense, but is (sic!) meaning/sense of itself (Chaos as the Being...).
Actually, for the umpteenth time monistically, I think that there are no meanings, but only intepretations producted by the interation of the Nature (the Being) with itself.

The meaning is the infinite sum of interpretations/possibilities. Ontologically. And the problem of a meaning/sense of the world is purely human and — I guess — defeatable through the sweeping use of a non-regularly, non thomistically (and, in general, westerly) interpreted reason (Jean Baudrillard affirms that Chaos and reason are not really conflicting with each other).

I think that postmodernism could only be a perpetual, immanent, aesthetical/ethical, destructive (I don’t dialectically oppose destruction and construction, ontologically), actively nihilistic (I consider active nihilism as the only actual “post-punk” nihilism) “strategy” (theory = praxis), far from both an idea of critique as recuperation/reformism and an aptitude — revolutionary or not — to (re)constitute systems.

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Bram van Velde, Braises, 1980



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