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Cognitive Dissonance and Non-entropic Fields

“I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and what I could never be”¹
Fernando Pessoa

“I go on accumulating myself, accumulating myself, accumulating myself—until I no longer fit within me and burst into words”²
Clarice Lispector

“Then they will see the joints of stone steam, and arborescent bouquets of mental eyes will be crystallised in glossaries, then they will see stone meteors fall, then they will see ropes, then they will understand a geometry without space, they will learn what is meant by the configuration of the mind, and they will understand how I lost my mind”³
Antonin Artaud

I sense. Obsessively, I think about thinking; from the late ’80 I archive memory in storages not wide, insulated enough to retain a univocal sense of life, hopeful I am to be able to look one day from the outset, at the recorded figures of what I will be claiming it was, to be, my thought. The delusional attitude of the one missing out the fact that personal records are made, partly at least, because of a survival instinct, made in the living to forget one’s own projection into the domain of non-conscious inconsistent-multiplicity, what we call “death”. Thought cannot but preserve its biological persistence, the desire to be, to project itself beyond the time-bracket of one’s body. Memory fades with age as entropy takes over; feral instinct: the desire to create a personal archeology. I’m calm now. I sensed undisturbed once, just few years ago. I now must endure the decrepit state in which senses and desires have been casted during this existential curfew. I live through the light insomnia induced by having to cognise the hyper-production of my subjectivity, the constant, necessary manufacturing of my-self qua manufactured retentions. I design subconsciously a peculiar hyper-spectrality. <Since the inception of language, exteriorising knowing and sensing are constitutive of the project human, nevertheless one must register, planetary exo-somatic interconnectedness performs an actual systematic entrapment of concepts and subjects, locking and anaesthetising them down, holding them within interlocked series of non-hackable black-boxes.> I attempt to form spaces that allow my subjectivity to be momentarily settled; I’m negatively alienated and so I attempt to react by inserting  positive feedback loops, escaping series, perhaps I search for a non-negative form of alienation —iterating the alienation-of-alienation I search for a collective autonomy of my many selves and all the others that may be lingering in between, making us, queering both my and your cognition and somatic reactions at the same time. <Maybe information teratology more than data-archeology should emerge as a practice, may be; to index the power-defined deformities of the hard and soft infrastructure onto which data is clustered, grafted, concealed, sold. A field of study is necessary to survey how presence is manipulated by faceless elite-minorities —small in number albeit privileged due to gargantuan computing powers— how it is outputted by automatisms freezing the agility of any non-computationally literate actors to implement new schematism and viable frameworks. Clearly I welcome F.Jameson to inhabit this text> I’d say with a pinch of sadness that I’m generally resilient. I’m a quirky autodidact, a tightrope walker; physically balancing in the hope of grafting thought onto a point, a meditative state, to put IT to repose. To live a form of life avoiding to buy the bliss-less (financial) plans offered by self-entitled gurus. I code sometimes. As a subject, as any contemporary subject, I’m nothing but characters —literally, both fabricated personae and strings of digits— nailed on spectral stages where data-dramaturgy is the one knowledge to imperatively possess —to perform one’s presence, at best one hopes, to create inter-subjective domains of empathy. Subjects, what’s that? We are meta-subjects subjected to iterative mitosis, deracination due to splintered grammars engulfing networks, “we” “are" a-subjective traces made by drifting neurotic presences.

Here we are, mine, yours, and all other selves. An intense decade of struggles starting from 2010 has been lived as temporal impasse, a condition which seems to provoke a facile duality: survival transforms either in pitiful neo-primitivist, dogmatic self-removal or in its opposite, pressing forward and coupling with neural digital-networks; or maybe; there’s a third-fourth-fifth nature, a queer alliance to be made. I’m probably saying too much about the masks I’m actually using, the veil I’m wearing in order not to be frontally me. <Back to track: epistemological entropy increases immobilising agency, inhibiting the emergence of new critical practices, it increases due to the lack of material and digital coordination, the absence of an infrastructure able to choreograph and make co-exist a variety of fields of sense. “Fields” of existence, digital or otherwise, must be conceptualised to “[…] lead to a process of transvaluation, so that the economic values and moral devalorizations to which nihilism gives rise when it becomes unbridled capitalism can be ‘transvaluated’ by a new value of values, which is to say, by negentropy.”⁴ Non-entropic fields of sense, digital topologies built online as platform, and offline as multi-level conceptual landscapes, should be able to provoke a swerve, a rupture, a cognitive rapture, installing —by prototyping— the possibility of alternative forms of presence and domains of meaning, communal logics that resist consummation: information and chronic decay. Fields of sense linking hyper-spectral subjectivities must be designed in order to form a non-regressive resistance; to resist —not by withdrawal and not by direct opposition, but through both, the parasitical counter-exploitation of masters that must be followed by constructive projection— the dissipatory tendency of information loss, a loss happening due to information-industrialisation, its inaccessibility, its metamorphic over-abundance and unbalanced spread, due to the uneven surface of a hyper-spectral motherboard and of controlled circuits through which data is withhold, reprocessed, hygenised, mastered by elite-platforms —licked by all others. The web is a hyperwebster working through untamed hyper accumulation, enabling cyclical feedback-loops of hyper production-consumption, a-political semiosis made of entropic tendencies dissolving the possibility of co-ordinated, sustained and strategic collective actions. Molar fields authoritatively subjects molecular domains immobilising the future, creating impaired Lebensform and carcinogenic types of agencies. We speak and we create ad nauseam fanciful  solutions but we don’t truly know how to sustain collective vectors of emancipation.

I breath before existential anxiety kicks in again; oh wait I shouldn’t be concerned, it’s 10 AM. I’m typing breathlessly trying to complete a text that was lost due to a not so common hard-drive failure⁵. I’m trying to recall bits from a meta-theoretical essay that was drafted at first during the construction of an art-curatorial project, an exhibition and platform that me and others feverishly hallucinated first, designed afterwards⁶. As curators we tried to form spaces where alternative collaborative art practices could germinate, hoping to respond and find alternatives to some of the predicaments we sampled out of actuality at large. What does it mean to attempt at diverting from the actual framework of art, what does one need for rethinking agency, art’s engagement with the public and/or art embodiment as public, for grasping art first and foremost as critical communal construct for engaging with, and for the transformation of, actuality? Rephrasing Jameson in the famous “cognitive mapping” text, how to instate a form of decoherence of the actual system, at the same time as generating a society that having renounced the mechanism of the market, can cohere? One should start by defining the aim of such experiment: to design and envision forms of creations and modes of expression, of collaboration and of compensation, modes that map and generate alternatives forms of life within the inescapable real-ity of meta-capitalism. I’m trying in the following blocks to lay down some intuitive reflections on the world of art. “I am not even sure how to imagine the kind of art I want to propose here, let alone affirm its possibility, it may well be wondered what kind of an operation this will be, to produce the concept of something we cannot imagine”⁷, Jameson wrote. Perhaps I should start not by asking what is art, but where is it? I will follow hereafter an implicit exegesis, digging a cave without naming too many names, perhaps to imagine what we cannot fully imagine.

References

¹ Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet” (1998), ed and trans. Richard Zenith (London: The Penguin Press, 2001).

² Clarice Lispector, “A Breath of Life”, trans. Johnny Lorenz (New York: New Directions, 1978).

³ Antonin Artaud, “The Nerve Meter” (1925), in “Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. And trans. Susan Sontag (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p.86.

⁴ Bernard Stiegler, “The Neganthropocene”, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), p.38.

⁵ I remember to have jolted down notes taken from Endnotes (the group), Benjamin, Ranciere, Derrida, Stiegler, Warburg, Sekula, Brassier, Toscano and Bratton. I remember finding Malraux’s “museum without walls” (the “musée imaginaire”), Lyotard’s “Les Immaterioux”. I remember passages from Negarestani’s “Torture Concrete” (these are remnants transcribed and part of the actual quirky text). I bear witness to cryptic passages of Laruelle, which somehow swarm anonymously in my synoptic structures and keep returning in my writing.

⁶ See INFO and “Negentropic Fields” (negentropicfields.info, accessed 2021.01.05).

⁷ Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”, in Nelson, C. / Grossberg, L. ed., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p.347.

Links

︎  @remxbj ︎ formaxioms.com  ︎ remixstudio.org

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