Friday, September 7, 2012

Notes: Written across history and crisis.



Written across history is to say written through crisis and history after crisis; which is to say afterwards as resistance, and so often hysterical. By way of an introduction. These are  rough notes, perhaps in the way of extended endnotes and  the writing style needs much work but it serves enough to introduce an idea. Basic stuff, but it seems repeating this is worth it since it may not be assumed to be taking as granted. (Too tired right now to check this text, again.)

A-priori, nothing new, which is truly novel, can happen. The creation of newness and of the novel happens after a-priori sensual experience ...

to quote Hegel's lecture on Kant:
a. The a priori fact of sensuous existence, the forms of sensuous existence, constitute the beginning of this transcendentalism. Kant calls the judgment of the same the transcendental aesthetic. Nowadays aesthetic signifies the knowledge of the beautiful. But here the doctrine of intuition or perception is taken from the point of view of its universality, i.e. from what in it pertains to the subject as such.
(Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Section Three: Recent German Philosophy, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

Within this scheme the production of a new aesthetic and new conditions of experience is not possible. It remains ungrounded. Only then, absolute deviation is able to exceed this and establishes itself within sameness as that which can only come afterwards; after the initial a-priori conditions laid down by Kantian aesthetics. In this way is universal force, after a-priori conditions and becomes an aesthetic ground, without yet having any real substance beyond it's modes of existence. So it is with a poetics.

This can be difficult to understand and a caesura is needed. While having no real substance that be can understood as an object of contemplation, which is to say no real sensuous existence as an aesthetic object of beauty or even sublime experience, absolute deviation comes into existence as a force outside of what is given a-priori and is able to establish grounds, in which even while still being outside what has already been established a-priori, is still something which can be done. This happens outside the closures given by a-priori substance which limit aesthetic experience to what exists. Within the conditions of existence only that which can be experienced is given status as possible and what is outside is given over to what is given a-priori as impossible. A dialectic, as with Kant and Hegel, cannot form here as an opposition of possible and impossible since this remains limited by a-priori substance. Resistance is always somewhere else. An absolute deviation poetics outside this dialectical maneuver would be making history and as such comes into being as what is given afterwards and outside any given a-priori ground.

Absolute deviation gives sameness in itself difference which is more immediately real then the a-priori existing state of which it is said to be available to sensual aesthetic experience. Being made available here is an aesthetics beyond that already established by Kant and Hegel. This is to say beyond Romanticism which has already established itself on existing nature as substance. Such poetics may be considered as resolutely modernist. It gives only what is novel. That which is resolutely and relentlessly new. It appears suddenly, as if a sublime process, so may well be associated with a later Kantian sublime. It may appear as a difficulty.

This is also a giving such that Absolute Deviation Poetics comes to exist in a relation to history and can be discussed as being in relation to history. This may be a history of art but is also a history of humanity. This does not harbour an anti-humanist sentiment since this limits what is human to a-priori existing substance and does not allow for even the hope of a people to come. Any such Utopian hope is then dismissed by such an anti-humanism as only that which exists and so it may be further claimed this cannot exist and cannot be real. What becomes at stake is reality itself and so disputed becomes outlaw.

But, this is to be done with philosophy and this can be used as a limited idea. Kant and Hegel offer a  limit after which there is no philosophy of poetics and philosophical aesthetics. It is here that one may also find Absolute Deviation Poetics, giving to capital letters more then a proper noun which it may well not have need of, except as a spirited free indirect style and a confusing of noun and verb. The nature of this founding is something else. Poetics as a way of making intimately with aesthetics and technical problems belonging to that of writing poetry, making images and media arts.

This way of introduction obviously carries references to Foucault and Deleuze and a thanks needs mention given especially their writings on modernist poetics and aesthetics. Philosophy does indeed have its own way to go and lets leave it that path. What is hopefully introduced above is the separate streams open to art which has an aesthetics belonging with art and also a way into understanding how art is to be modernist. Being outside is both before and after, now. Now is novel. A phantom like appearance.



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