making nothing happen

for Roxana:

How to represent that which cannot be represented (a black square: Malevich, an empty space?)?

The visible must always point to the invisible, just as music holds on to silence in its very heart....

How does the word become life? Is Revelation, a 'sending down' , not also a ladder back up? Creation, an image, is a separation and will therefore always point to transcendence, to what "is not", but it is also, at the very same time, not nothing, but precisely an image of that reality.

The modern is a search for a space that could contest, oppose, stand in complete alterity to bourgeois hegemony. But it is, itself, enmeshed in it via representation. ....a "preparing the ground for the ruthless incorporation of marginal and underdeveloped states." [the irrational, the rebel, become commoditised].

This is a colonisation of the marginal, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled...a way of disciplining fluidity, rage, of immobilizing energy; to domesticate the 'other', to bring all understanding back to one's own system of self-understanding.

The contradiction of capitalism:

capitalism requires an open space, a frontier, one that can supply raw materials and buy its goods; the modern is nothing but this setting up of hierarchies and distinctions.This is the first stage of colonialism, of 'solid modernity', of Protestant 'sobriety' and discipline...modernity as the control of space. But this gives way to the other dimension of capitalism: the need to transform labour into a proletariat and with this will come the most decisive changes: the incorporation of the 'other' into one's midst, the eradication of all boundaries (cultural, political, economic); late modernity is about transgression, equality, a constant making and re-making of oneself, 'liquid modernity'...the 'divine recklessness' of Protestantism.

The world in the image of New York:

when time has conquered space then only a singular undifferentiated space remains, a grid , a set of relations; power is diffuse, the centre does not hold and "periphery" and "centre" are interchangeable (this is an image of a religious concept: God is a centre that is everywhere and whose perimeter is nowhere..the modern world could only come on the back of a number of theological insurrections and inversions); the very concept of "limit" loses much of its meaning. In the Empire every man is 'King' and pushpin is as good as poetry...it is the empire of signs and universal equivalence.

More than anything: labour, life, process, are introduced into the public realm (where they will eventually devour it); all that is solid melts into air; from now on it will be time, and those who control her, that hold the power..."time is everything, Man is nothing" (Marx). Art must, in this sense, aspire to transience, to its own wilful destruction for how can art which is 'space' , flatness, the 'timeless', 'presence' , depict movement, life itself? How can it re-present that which eludes it? Is not all pictorial art a "freezing of the music"?

Klee:

The organizing powers have come to need a more convincing account of the bodily, the sensual, the liberated, in order to extend-maybe to perfect-their colonization of everyday life..."

Collective actions, ritual gestures, shared images of authority, a common symbolic order, jostle uneasily with the needs of individual spontaneity, freedom. How to abstract from the world-this world, any world? How to rekindle that divine spark in this cold universe? The modern turns inwards, the Kingdom lies within...the letter killeth...

But this "second turning inwards" that starts with Descartes is riddled with problems: can there be meaning or understanding that is not social? Can there be a private language?

The disruption of the collective world, 'the given', will allow the world to flow again. Modernity is nothing but the re-discovery of the infinite, of Nature not as 'essence' but as becoming; it is a turning away from the cosmos, a search for 'outer' space....modernity must construct itself as an endless series of images and who is to say if one image in the spectacle is any more real than another? All that matters is the process, the constant breaking up of images (this is the 'nomadic' element in late capitalism); velocity: to leave the social world behind...when one wants process and judgement.

Modernity, by losing 'the other,' loses the creative tension that has sustained it; appearance ceases to be appearance once the reality behind it is overthrown.

The Unhappy Consciousness.

Modernity: the tragic confrontation of self-sameness, the absolute, the unchangeable, the timeless, and the undivided self, order, light, harmony, proportion, "sight", the static with contingency, the fragmentary, music, transience, the dynamic, dissonance, aporia, the endless whirl of difference.One wants to see the stars and feel them, to discover a pattern to life, but also to disrupt uniformities, sameness. ....hide and seek, lost and found. We need mortal thoughts, a timely way of knowing, truth that is incarnated in the body and not just the mind...the word must become flesh....

The "unhappy consciousness" is unable to accept this two-foldedness in its unity; we strive for purity and eternity and detachment or for to be a thing amongst other things that come and pass (essence vs existence, realism vs nominalism); to be or no to be when to be and not to be is closer. Man is suspended between being and nothingness, a donkey with angel's wings said maulana; we can never reach either nothingness or the divine. Man, the barzakh, is this great amphibious being.

Because of this radical undecidedness he sides with, identifies himself, with the changeable consciousness but he cannot follow negation to its logical end; contingency only derives meaning against the background of an essential nature, difference against sameness, distinction against unity; time against the timeless; that we are finite, that we can think of ourselves as so, only has meaning if there is the infinite..it is the infinite that is placed in us that allows us to think in the first place (Descartes)..I am, therefore I think.

Jackson Pollock:

the line doesn't represent objects or delimit a space, not the "binding" of reality or structure but "pure, disembodied energy." This is modernism's worldlessness. Endless difference, American unbound, improvisation as the quintessential american art, Bergson's "pure duration", endless sensation and desire. This is not, perhaps, unrelated to teh growth of capitalism: man defined as having finite resources but infinite wants, happiness as the search for an end that has no end, that is always just out of reach: non-satiation.

Marks, traces that are not to be read as making a subject, but rather as texture of interruptions, gaps, zig-zags, a-rhythms, and incorrectnesses...the absence of a continuous psyche from start to finish.

Pollock: " a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion"...a way of divesting oneself of the "I", a form of escape, renunciation, to show something that has a likeness to nothing...a way of being "in" the world so that one does not know one is in it; to be musical, precisely: one is immersed in feeling and there is no confronting 'other' ...Malevich again: the desert.

The attempt, the paradoxical striving to realise the un-formed; to be unfounded, un-found...the desire for openness and a wilderness that is not constrained by forms but in the paintings, is not openness to like emptiness, and might not freedom be too much like confinement, a compulsion?

"something which cannot be recognized as part of the universe is made to represent the universe." Interlacement and intermingling negates "belonging of things in the picture to any one conceptual space- to any one part of the world or imagining of Nature.

Everything is connected to everything else.

But once we make a mark can we ever escape metaphor?

Discontinuity, aimlessness, abrupt reversals, dissonance,...do not lead to endlessness or their own dissolution; instead, dissonance is the truth of Harmony. Harmony is unattainable.

To cancel Totality by the criss-cross of meanings.

--taken from T.J. Clark's chapter in Farewell to Reason.