Solidity

Metropolis Series | Aluminium Wall Tiles by David Umemoto

Negativity. I want to think the movement of thought, movement within stillness; the movement of nothing within the negative. To think the immediacy of this active movement or flow; to think in the very middle of what is unthought within thinking. An impossible or recursive landscape. The psychic architecture underlying cognition is not contingently but necessarily in blindness and without-vision; alien, obscure and encrypted. This labor, of thinking itself; the first work of thought which is necessarily in darkness but radically pluripotent expresses an encrypted germinal flux of perceptions, affects, intellections. Thought begins in decrypting the architecture of the image on behalf of a concept-to-come. What is unleashed in the confluence of simple, dark and contingent affects at the birth of thinking (feelings, notions, and ephemeral images) are forces, powers, lives, blisses — that after long gestation may give birth to new ways of thinking and feeling, new creative disciplines or discourses. These contingent noogenetic involutions precede all that has come to be known as thought.

Glare/noise. The intensive criminality of universal historiography interpolates aerial roots at the outer limit of terrestrial vision. The idea expresses a critical social and psychic immunology: the simulacrum learning to infect and overcome its own genesis or simulate its archaeology; able to undermine the major arcs of its history, supplant its own table of laws. How to simulate the birth of simulation, to de-grow the program back to plasticity, before standardization? How to unleash the tranversality of the territorial assemblage, make new surveys of traps and escape-routes; on the edge of the terrain, the active contour, decode the old world, map territories-to-come?

Machines. A radically accelerated cartography of the virtual is perhaps in the last instance contingent upon the contemporary existence of general purpose computing and modern quantum theory; in other words: that extremely powerful and accurate sensing and mapping-machines enfold our relationships with the world in a unified technological vision-without-horizon. A similar involution of the quantum, the brain-body assemblage, the local group, etc., seems inevitable…

Abstract survey. The first work is exceeding the compositional and functional, to ascend from image to concept. The idea is merely a fluid artifact of this ascent, a halting-point for stratified feeling, or involuntary paroxysm denoting a new involution or infinite abyss. An idea decays; it reifies an ascent which it once refracted or dissolved into trans-ascendence, which it attempted to extend into absolute identification through abstract survey. An idea organizes, speciates, ennobles or valorizes this form or that essence, in order to encode a partial dimensional-reduction of a universal domain, of a layer or aspect of an assemblage. The idea opposes a variadic cartography of forces; it pro-poses, un-folds a synthesis of territorial features, as opposed to empirical dimensional-reductive analysis of lines of development/dissolution, exhuming lines of death, (or) of escape to a virtual whole (isolation-subtraction of time as independent variable). Ideationality relates foundationally to a double and cosmic betrayal of thinking and of time. An idea is always abstracted from a more fundamental de-imaging of the concept, from a meteoric or demonic involution, invasion by a radical exteriority or an upsurge of elementary interiority as though from the depths of an unfrozen sea.

Solidity. Clandestine flows of abstraction rupture the territory, decoding the substrate; the idea is a vector of infection by intensive lines of disruption and mixture, effectuating a generalized decryption of noisy relational assemblages, isolating the minimal critical vectors organizing development. The idea masks the gateway to the concept, obscures the door to a higher law. The singular or provisional boundary of the idea enfolds the image, halted in its immobile journey, arrested in its internal movement towards imperceptibility and crystallization in the concept. An idea is already the urge of logos, that wisdom of ideas which halts in the idea of ideas, circulates unto exhaustion in this gradual ‘disappearance’ of the image. The idea is a halting-problem, the impossibility of itinerating between (or iterating over) the image and the concept. The idea discovers solidity only through a structural obfuscation of its own oblivion.

Gravity and death. The theogony of philosophy, one key to its melancholy, to its metaphysical pessimism and generalized externality, is perhaps especially expressed in what seems to be an impossibility for it, in the critical immobilization around its own quantum, that is, regarding first philosophy. The initiatory and infinite-infinitesimal labor of thinking is entirely obscured by the clinical gaze of a long-standardized philosophy which sees only gravity and death. This impossibility of first philosophy resolves into the impossibility of a first philosopher, given that the philosopher is always-already a type…