I Hope You Miss Me Too (Sam Brown, explodingdog.com)
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At last I have come across a brilliant site in so many ways. My won work on ianhays.net may be of interest to people who also look and are interested in this site. I was surprised a little at Joyce’s face on what I take to be the “home page” and also further on a detail (used more than once) from the Book of Kells that Joyce once referred to as one of his sources for the creation of Finnegans Wake, which, alongside Ulysses and Marcel Duchamp’s work I am influenced by in my texts and visual works. I’ve read a lot of Deleuze, and some of Badiou, but I started when I was 17 reading Wittgenstein, then Nietzsche and so on and so forth. This site works so very well thank goodness I found it on an impulse of discovery and, of course, a huge dose of chance. Please keep up this excellent and profound study and site.
I wasn’t sure where to post my paper on singularity so I suppose its here that I’ll post it…
*In existential ontology, the ‘One’ means that there is only a single, cohesive existence which can only possess one exclusive identity/experience at any one time – eliminating the existence of others. ‘Multiplicity’ means a non-totality (inconsistent identity) of existence/nature, allowing for a multitude of simultaneously existent subjects/others.
Pre-Socratic ontology was dominated by the one/many problem debated by majority defenders of the one existential domain paradoxically containing multiple simeultaneously exclusive identities/presentations of one existential situation. This topic of debate came to a comparably relative rest after Plato and Aristotle planted the seeds for furthur spiritual and intellectual division which have grown into an ever-popular theory of a mutually self-exclusive (non-) identity for existence composed of an infintismal spectre of pure multiples interweaving the presentations of situations to form no cohesive existential identity. Despite the many great thinkers to have reflected on this unsettled grandmaster of paradoxical problems (Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fitche, Schelling, Sartre, Cantor, Wittgenstein, Hiedeigger), none have come quite as close to laying out for the laymen so explicitly and straight-forwardly the one/many paradox as the contemporarily popular thinker Alain Badiou.
Badiou himself, despite his convictions, acknowledges, in the openning remark of his ‘Numbers and Numbers’, the despotism of the number – multiplicity and it’s functioning. Humanity is so dependent upon the symbolic division of multiples that it has grown intellectually and spiritually entrenched in the vast spectrum of false abstractions only possible within the phenomenal realm of belief. When we believe in the apparent seperation of objects and subjects as an absolute condition we allow ourselves to be divided and conquored by our exclusion from others and nature. One can only evidence a functional, not existential, duality between presentation/will and the situation/being, yet the situation in which one finds one’s self today on earth can do a lot to turn this duality of a self-presented object into an absolute ontological division into the others of infinite multiples. The event is without a doubt a phenomenal object of infinitely divisible scope.
Ontology – the ancient logic of reflective reasoning regarding questions of what can and cannot exist or be, and how existence can be catagorized as such. The tools at our disposal – the gifts of our existential intellect – include the conceptual valences of space & time, dimension & void, unity & polarity, contingency and necessity, static & energy, phenomenal & noumenal, existnential domain(s), in/finite quantity, elements & sets, ect. Although widely thought of as a uselessly speculative metaphysics, this methodical system of inquiry, when properly practiced, yields at its fruition the fundamentals of all existential architecture. So the question is: what is the central question of ontology?
The peak of ontological thought has been polarized between two opposing camps: unity vs multiplicity – is this a multi- or uni-verse? Since the most common spiritual instinct &/or intellectual conviction is that a unified field, force, or spirit underlies a symbolic duality of our presented world/s, today the theory of ontological multiplicity appears to many as the radical and therefore intellectually fashionable theory as evidenced by the popularity of contemporary theorists of multiplicity. But fashionable radicality obviously isn’t why academia is studying multiple theory – it has been proven, by works such as Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, that we give up intersubjectivity itself along with the negation of ontological multiplicity. No longer can one endorse a unified existential domain without identifying oneself as its exclusive phenomenon, nor can one endorse co-existence without negating a common uni-verse.
You don’t recall choosing this body or world before you were born into the evental situation of spacetime. Your exclusive presentation/experience is a direct production of the existential domain’s/(universe’s) ontological functioning. There is no way you have been experiencing existence forever up to now – experience, or any evental sequence for that matter, requires an absolute point of origination. The existential domain is an infinitely noumenal being always-already preceding the originative event of spacetime. Effects require causes, but the theoretically perceived total multitude of cause + effect events occuring in evental totality is an infinitely divisible conceptual lexicon forever to be but partially signified & noumenally non-existent beyond any ray of phenomenal virtuality – an abstract reflection of the event’s live data-processing.
If infinite being needs an originative point for spacetime’s evental release, and an originative event is an effect requiring a cause, then what effects the orginative cause of evental origination? Only an onto-logical function of the existential domain itself can effect an originative cause for spacetime – it was a phenomenal cause that forced noumenal being from static to fluid motion because the existential domain is a real identity which cannot escape time’s infinite set logic. Lets say you are this originative phenomena incarnate(something I am prooving now) – all existence in its pristinely infinite static was ontologically forced into birthing itself into the infintismally small point of evental duality containing the noumenal situation’s presentation – so all being, the infinite, has cohesively manifested as exclusive self-reflection to spark the spacetime sequence ad infinitum. How will you, the infintismally small evential identity of the existential domain, ever multiply into others?
It is impossible to escape the gross inequality between presentation and the totality being presented because one’s past is inaccessible regardless of the situation, and our situation for that matter is obviously well beyond any possible total self-reflection. The form of presentation is a contingency which holds no effect over one’s noumenal identity.
The event is too infintismally minute (absolute on the size spectrum) compared to it’s preceding being to divide it’s exclusive presentation.
Once infinity reflects itself the infintismal center-point of the plennum explodes and evolves into the multidimensional evental domain we are now. The event necessarily is infinitely spectral in potential scope because its manifested in the infinitely static spatial-dimension and therefore has no existential boundries for its evental boundries.
If the psyche originates within a unified field, the total field is made psychic through that exclusive self-reflection. Nothing, being nowhere, cannot produce something, therefore theres always-already something rather than nothing. If nothing is added or substracted from everything, and the evental cannot be retracted, we can deduce the substantial as infinite being.
The phenomenal spectrum is a necessity from which all contingent sensory-expression emanates – weight, smell, taste, vision, sound, texture, heat, emotions/ethics, signifiers, ect. -
The evental continuum of infinite being we call the unified spacetime field needs an originative point of manifestation. The experience of existential presence is the only force of infinite existence and as such it needs no preceding physical cause to spark itself into evental origination.
The ‘objective’ location of subjectivity w/in spacetime’s finite field isn’t somewhere w/in one’s body/sense-organ, but is rather the very totality of spacetime’s evental finitude. This finite subject as whole finite object (as infinite plentum) is a unitive duality function. There is no reason to think that an object’s totality should be self-expressed in order to be the object of self-expression.
The finite domain of spacetime is the brain proper enveloped within static infinitude. We are accustomed to conceiving our human brain to be the sensual object enveloped in an experientially negative/unexpressed spacetime-field, but its the spacetime field en toto which is the universal brain proper, with all the experiential modalities therein as experiential-neurons, with static infinitude as the true negative of being.
Only the raw real of infinity itself could stretch into such a spectrum of intra-dimensional finitude.
Through me the spacetime field presents itself via a cognitive complex of spontaneous memory associations in chemical configurations contouring to sensual stimuli. This self-expression must be manifest within the finite spacetime domain and is therefore an objectively existent (self-) signified which one has direct access to – the only object to which any existent object could have subjective access to is the object of its self-expression – the universe.
If being preceded experience, what consitutes being? An existence substantiates being regardless of what exists – this is the default we know as universe. The multi-dimensional shapes which have taken form within the spacetime continuum cannot configure in any such complex which alone should speak to us as multiple. The nearly empty and dual-quantum structure of protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, gravitons, dark matter and energy, ect. comprise a field of spacetime practically infinite for its experience but essentially finite in manifest form – infintismally finite in relation to its static domain of infinitude.
One is the field and its figure. None of the potential thoughts and senses which arent occuring exist in any form – all that exists is the infinte field of static and its finite center-point of figure.
In order for exclusive and co-existent subjects to exist they each must reflect their own existential domain as a seperate presence from others. This inevitable onto-illlogic of the multiple cannot account for the common thing with which each theoretically co-existent subject uses to communicate with other existentially exclusive domains.
Experience is the unified duality of infinitely abstracted waves of sensual self-expression orbiting an exclusive center-point of universal presence, but one is not an infintismally small point within a serperate event, this experience is the direct result of being the entire evental domain itslef – infintismally small in relation to the enveloping infinitude of static space. The field’s presence in spacetime is the only medium through which existence can process ontologically out of the static configuration preceding its event. If you aren’t the only experience of the universe then the universe is inconsistent with itself – the unified spacetime field could not experience everyone in simultaneous exclusion if it were a truly unified presence.
The existential domain is an infinite expanse of static negativity/space (potential energy?) enveloping a nuclei of manifest finitude. Since any point in a beginningless event would signify an impossible endpoint to an infinite sequence, the necessarily originative finitude of spacetime cannot always-already contain an infinite expanse of uniquely distinguishible elements – at some point the spacetime continuum must reach an event-horizon beyond which is the infinitely pristine static of being. So although the universe is infinite, the finite spacetime continuum can never exhaust its enveloping infinitude.
The unified duality principle permeates existence from the sub-atomic through the pysche to the domainof existential totality. Finitude is the necessary product of infinity’s inability to escape its being, infinity’s inability to escape itself is a result of there being spacetime rather than void – existence must be to exist, and being is presence, which is space and time, which is the onto-logical result of the spacetime-sequence requiring an originative point of activation.
From the instant your infinite being gazed into itself your experience has been a seamlessly singular thought since its manifestation.
Your phenomenal presentation is our, reality’s, situation – an exclusive expression containing this infinite sensual-plane of purely potential points/spaces comprising an omni-dimensional proportion occupied by some neccesarily contingent form of evental expression-in-presence. Nothing occuring within the phenomenal bounds of your seamless sequence as spacetime’s psyche is inherently seperate from, nor alien to, the uni-verse/existential domain. No matter how large the evental boundry of spacetime en toto expands, it will forever remain the infintismally smallest possible quantity (any finite proportion) relative to it’s enveloping infinitude of static space (& potential plennum). So although this kernal of evental finitude will reflect it’s spectral infinitude ad infinitum, it will always be of the smallest possible proportion – one of the multiple reasons as to why the event can only contain an exclusive identity.
The contradictory concept of ‘no existence’ (ignoring the obvious fact that a concept proves existence) is already describing an existence which theoretically doesn’t exist. The ‘no existence’ concept fails simply because reality cannot ignore the inherent possibilities which are always-already there in the ‘uncarved’, infinitely negative lexicon of latent possibility/potential. A slightly more ontologically sound theoretical non-existence would be ‘nothing exists’ within the existential domain which is obviously even easier to disprove.
This is directed at Taylor Adkins: I apologize but I can’t locate your email. I do have a comment however. In “The Hero and the Kingly Function: Starkadr in Dumezil’s Stakes of the Warrior”, you state that Odin is the god of giants. Now, I realize that this site is not devoted to the presentation of Norse mythology, but that statement is inaccurate, and I feel you should be aware of that. Odin is not descended from Ymir as you say, but rather from Borr son of Buri, niether of whom are giants. He is definitively against giants; though he does work with them occasionally, and is blood brothers with Loki, this is due to his quest for magical skill and knowledge, not because of any notable fondness (that last statement is somewhat debatable-not all giants are pure evil). Odin and his brothers are the killers of Ymir the first frost giant, and Odins offspring and allies (the Aesir) battle the frost giants and fire giants at Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods.
That is actually fascinating. I did not mean to misstate that fact; I’m note sure the point I would have been making at the time. It is probably either a mistake or a casual misreading of Dumezil’s text…Having said that, I appreciate the correction.