diego sanchez

diego sanchez kicked

“art is the semblance of what is beyond death’s reach.” —theodor adorno

…whatever tangible effect the sight of fresh blood has on an audience transforms depending on the circumstances & the way a fighter’s been hit or kicked. when we see blood there’s a visceral reaction that’s isolated to the instance that it happened. a hard kick to the head is something most wouldn’t bear with any steady composure—it’s a blunt trauma to the head, a quick opening of flesh & a drastic corporeal event. anyone who’s like sanchez has his reputation as a competitor to uphold & in this case he has to maintain the loss of the fight & the loss of blood. it’s easy know why he appears to be so calm, this is a way to carry himself as if he can handle anything his opponent hits him with, including the real possibility of losing consciousness that can be sustained & factored as what might unfold in the controlled chaos of the ring. it’s anyone’s guess what he tells penn after the blow, this pressured whispering could be be about anything, from a possible admission of forgiveness, to a declaration of vengeance. the adrenaline sustains his power, as does his will to overcome what would crush & humiliate the unpracticed. but he’s not anyone-else, he’s fought through this way of working, this hard-won occupation of his hazards this outcome & he must move on from here with an everyday situational reflection. the way he’ll recall this event will be an anecdotal way of recalling, aided by the media & absorbed into his healing body. his presence there was to get hit, kicked, compete & to fight, with the very open potential to win or lose. the fan packed arena tacitly asks for this, it’s a way of knowing that an acceptable brutality happened, a demarcation of the event, a brief marker of one night of fighting. the audience may not readily comprehend (nor care) why the red blood reflects their barbarity, but it also reflects the simple fact that he’s a living creature that’s been injured & the heroic struggle is mediated by the caprice, commerce & culture of this entertainment. at the very least, any entertainment on the border of vulgarity is to be questioned. it’s the recognition of a potential taboo that’s nothing to marvel at, yet we should at least recognize & respect his skill in the face of such pain. a way that violence is controlled here has to be noticed with the admission that it’s barely new, indeed it’s an ancient art, a gladiatorial sport that displays the fundamentals of conflict to rise above & to have that faith that one might win, without the death the romans called for, at least not in this instance. it too is held up in a slightly valiant light, but without any frill of poetic language—again he simply wins or loses, accumulates stats & earns what he can. the announcer flatly says “he’s as tough as nails, he’s one tough kid.” the support staff run to quickly mend him. first, the fighters maneuver to voluntarily create the trauma, then the team close in to fix it. the opponents break open the flesh, the others clean him & the wound. diego’s called ‘the nightmare’ yet, this isn’t a nightmare, it’s all expected, it’s planned for & it’s relished by the observers, this is the ‘money-shot’ to be sure. maybe it isn’t anticipated that he’ll lose, but it’s planned that he could lose. although he lost the fight, he still won his pride, he didn’t fall apart & god forbid that he should’ve lost his composure. none of this is unusual. the head bleeds profusely when it’s cut open. we observe the ease of trauma to expand on that which wasn’t meant to be opened up non-specifically.  what matters, of course, is the event (a kick to the head), but also the transcendence into an idealized other-than-trauma.

aurelio madrid / 2011-12 / diego sanchez / oil on masonary saw blade, steel frame, grosgrain ribbon, wood, fabric & fasteners. 16” x 16” x 2 3/4” (click to enlarge).

an honorific object & a memorial to more than it was. we already know that wim delvoye created what looked like delft-ware onto saw blades before this. if handled correctly, a saw blade cuts into things (stone, wood, concrete &c.) in a controlled way—it’s a controlled violence. a way of slicing apart pieces that were once together & from there the job can continue. this violence is measured & it too can be weaponized. when the tool is dormant, it relies on its symbolic value to cut, it’s always still a potential, or a past fact that this was manufactured to perform up until it’s actually put to task. to methodically paint on the blade is to mark it in a way that isn’t typical & for this reason it changes what it was made for. its job becomes latent while retaining its identity as a blade to cut things. diego’s neck, head & shoulders depicted on this blade become a moment that was captured by a camera & now in oil. as in life his uncut face had to be there first before the blood violated it. this was captured in a way so as not to forget that meaning is manifold, circumstantial, & sometimes irrational. if we didn’t see (or don’t care) about the illogical parts of this unfolding, generous segments of thinking would be lost. our genuine loss is to assume a single fixed understanding about one thing &/or another. we throw ourselves in a disadvantaged place when we’re only looking for one way to narrow it all down. when we make this mistake, we whittle away prospective venues of exploration. the inscribed star polygon represents this kind of transcendence of form, all the way from the cut-open-flesh of the body, to the multiple idealizations one makes to ponder such matters. floating there above his head as thoughts run away with our indignation & our gratification. if it’s nothing more than a pure idealization, then it’s nothing more than the injured body. because this fighting match has passed, its breathless transience is universal. all must pass. if all must pass, this art eases into a memorial that’s a passage into the minds & eyes of its audience. a created memorial need not be an anodyne glorification, therefore it can be a studied recognition of things we can’t resolve. the end point is its desire to push beyond from what has been broken up, moving into what can’t be fixed. this brutal physical trauma has come to life in the lives of sanchez & penn, now the moment’s dead only to be revitalized in our minds. this recognized idealization itself is funereal. an after-the-fact composure of mourning for the steady loss of moments as they have washed away. gathered around these thoughts is the idea of overcoming what’s been taken from our lives in this & the simple un/changing rushing of time. this biting & voracious temporal consequence is something to mourn for & it reminds us of our own potential for growth. none of this is about reactionary closure. the closure of truth resides in its stillness as it’s sliced open. we mend the wounds & clean up the blood all the while knowing that we can’t overcome without strife. …& this art contains my suffering. luctor et emergo.

aurelio madrid

…& thanks to dave mandel (from sherdog) for his permission to use his photo of diego sanchez for this art-work.

intro. to adorno’s alternative aesthetics by/for reinaert de v.

donald lipski – “dangerous husband”

…as the books pile up, we are required to make a decision: whether or not to work through what was important a month ago, or to add another weighty tome to the stacks. With this decision there’s always the added requirement to actually read & to go through the work that’s essential for any actual comprehension. While the initial reading is underway, one has to then turn to other texts for a paragraph, a definition & a maybe another nuance to fill in the unknowns. Sometimes this referencing helps & at other times there is nothing to be found. This continual effort has to be held with a notion that one will never entirely know the object/idea of enquiry in the totalizing way that was once wished for. An idealistic goal of reading rarely matches the result, because your mind has simply changed—if you’re actually learning—& what mattered in the beginning of the pursuit isn’t always the end vantage. Consider with all this, that any subject matter will never completely unfurl to a precise, neat & rational definition. The resulting thoughts spread out & divide, becoming much more than an identifiable end, over again, outside of thinking, more than before, back then to innumerable unturned pages, into a manifold reading, through to continuing thought & finally given over to dozens of multiplied meanings. …& so, here’s to introducing another such book that now sits on the top of the piles, ready as it were, to be entangled with the rest.

This post is unique in that it’s a very short inconclusive introduction to the aesthetics of the philosopher & musicologist Theodor W. Adorno & it’s looking forward to a long promised essay from a good friend: Reinaert de V., who hails from half-a-world-away in the Netherlands.  When we are presented with the rigorous philosophical aesthetics of Adorno, we are in the unusual circumstance of an artist as a philosopher & a philosopher as an artist. Adorno’s artistry has been inextricably linked to a mid-twentieth century stylistic phenomena known as ‘atonal music.’ He maintained relationships with two of the style’s main proponents Alban Berg & Arnold Schoenberg. In the 1940’s the author Thomas Mann lived in Los Angeles where he, Schoenberg & Adorno would meet to discuss ideas while all of them were in exile from Germany during the devastating excesses of Hitler’s dictatorship. As Adorno was influential in multiple creative circles, he was also intensely involved with the mid-century philosophical intelligentsia of Europe & the Untied States. The Frankfurt School of ‘critical theory’ counted him as a founding member, along with the likes of Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, Erich Fromm & others.

Let’s now for a moment, lay down a few thoughts, without getting too much in the way of Reinaert de V.’s brilliant exploration of Adorno’s (posthumously published) magnum opus: “Aesthetic Theory” (1970). These preliminary notes should not be confused with any of Reinaert de V.’s conclusions, but a reader might find a relatable confluence.  If any ‘constellation’ of ideas are attributed to Adorno, it would have to be what we’ll call here his post-enlightenment-critique-of-rationality. That any rational claims exist are real enough to be contended with & are not to be wholly denied by Adorno. But, that all this extant & excessive rationality gets in our way of coming to terms with the ‘non-identity’ of an art object, is certainly an issue to be examined, critiqued & theorized about. Critique & theorization are really the only tools left to the philosopher to manage through the social/cultural/historical ways that art is comprehended, judged, talked about & created. Standing within these theorizations that resist any overt systemization, Adorno pays half-allegiance to our philosophical father of German idealism: G.W.F. Hegel (he also speaks of Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, &c, but we won’t look those thinkers in this short into.). With this said, Adorno shouldn’t be mistaken for an idealist. Let’s recall Karl Marx, who came after (to then use & abuse) Hegel with his own transformation & downgrading of Hegel’s idealism, re: dialectical materialism. Adorno’s thought is classified as Marxist, in that it’s openly materialist with regard to the autonomy of the art/object as a distinguished material reality, & as a monad. His Marxism, is difficult to pin down wholeheartedly, yet, the overtures to the unavoidable socio-historical role of art in his aesthetics bear the unmistakable fingerprints of Marx.

The best avant-garde artwork (yes, the concern here is primarily with the avant-garde & not the casual regard for an art that’s designed to please, like that of an over-commodified public easement &/or privately owned mass-produced commodity) cannot & should not escape its hard won position as a provocateur, as socially antagonistic & as the rebellious object currently classified under the title: contemporary art (& for Adorno’s sake, think high Modernity). Art in its very rebelliousness—whether it be modern or contemporary—has to suffer through the very rationalist paradigms it operates within & against. It is in this discomforting tension, between that which often cannot be put into words, as it’s entirely submerged in a consumerist culture with its stubbornly insistent demands on the art object to provide a logical answer for its validity. This all contributes to art’s avowed unwillingness be what it is. Art then is often a glaring enigma & in this problematic way it belies definition & so this (now traditional) resistance can be where its elusive beauty is sought after. It cannot be avoided that although this relationship between art & society/culture/history is often antagonistic, the relationship itself is never to be thought of as mutually exclusive. All the elements must be considered together in their relationships, no matter how infuriatingly strained the couplings seem to be.

marlie mul – “cigarette ends here” 2011

Adorno’s indebtedness to Hegel partially had to do with a recasting of the dialectic as ‘negative.’  Hegel spoke to Enlightenment’s reason, therefore it’s been our reason. That is, if we recognize Hegel’s dialectical telos as continually rushing toward rationality. It is this reason that drove enlightenment, modern & contemporary society to privilege rationality over the body, the sensual, the irrational. If it doesn’t make ‘sense’, if it’s not reasonable, it’s not worthwhile, this is/was the prevailing attitude. Positivist thinking is, more or less, all there is in this enduringly-logical paradigm. This is the very kind of calcified schema Adorno wishes to critique. Keep in mind that this overt rationalizing had to do with many of the infamous problems of the 20th century—including Marxism.  It’s Adorno’s wish to take the dialectic & turn its rational telos around & back to the contradiction. Where Hegel’s dialectic implied a negative contradiction to be overcome to get to reason’s advancement, Adorno’s negative dialectic repositions this to re/cognize the division, instead of the unification. Hegel’s dialectical unification implicated an identity onto disparate entities that are brought together dialectically. When we choose to see these elements (artworks vs. society vs. culture vs. history vs. the subject) as originally separate & un-identical, we can pay respect to their ‘truth-value’ as not having to entirely belong to the whole, the absolute & to not always be part of a reasonable framework. That the artwork/object still operates in a rational society/culture/history is a feature that it violates & hence, bears the unsightly scars of. Art continually suffers through the misunderstandings of reason & in turn we suffer through our misguided efforts to insist on the dictatorship of reason at any cost. We cannot remove these intricacies, but we can with observe them as a way to gain a newfound critical stance, until this utopia is challenged again.

…& what meaning is there (for art) after the injustice of identity, the debasement of definition & the banal reduction of the rational?

Here’s a diagram to roughly illustrate three interconnected ideas from Adorno’s aesthetics (click for a closer view).

Please enjoy Reinaert de V.’s upcoming text as it reaches for Adorno’s aesthetic beauty in all its gratifying rigor & its thoughtful mystery.

Aurelio Madrid

john scottus eriugena

…buried in words & entombed in hard-to-find books, we still look for you Eriugena. Obscure as you are, we find you in all those concealed places. This contemplative circumstance is yours, it’s under your tutelage that we’ve toiled to comprehend you. Legend has it that you were stabbed to death by your students with their pens & although we have no viable proof of this, we prosper little from the knowledge that such a man as yourself would die from these the tools of scholarly labor, knowing that the only way to find you is in the many paragraphs that feature your name written by so many other pens. Eriugena, you are kept alive & breathing by the written word. Eriugena, you are our nutritor (teacher) & we are your alumni (students). Eriugena you are nothing as you are super-essential.

Nathan Coley – “Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens.”  2008

John Scottus Erigena (ca. 810–887) was an early medieval Christian philosopher. He worked under Charles the Bald (823-877) as a liberal arts teacher while writing philosophy in the only form he knew: Christian theology. The separation between theology & philosophy was not an issue for him, both were held together as one practice. For him, (philosophical) theology was the only way to heaven. He is known for his rare ability to translate Greek to Latin. This unusual skill shouldn’t obscure the fact that he was Irish. His name: Eriugena, essentially means he who originates from Ireland. His talent to translate Greek to Latin wasn’t only a linguistic skill, it also had to do with the philosophical nexus he helped to bring about from the Greek east (then Byzantium) to the Latin west (western Europe), where he called home. The Viking invasions of Ireland at the time, are what forced him to work in France. He was commissioned by Charles the Bald to translate what was then thought to be the work of Dionysius the Areopagite (unknown birth/death dates: probably 5-6th centuries), now known as Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, not to be mistaken for St. Paul’s 1st century convert. His Greek to Latin translating extended to works by Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335-394), Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662) & others from the east. These Christian works from Byzantium are marked by strong neo-platonic overtones & some might say this thinking was itself influenced by explicit pagan ideals (re: Plotinus (ca. 205-270)). We’ll caution anyone led into imagining Erigena’s thought to have a purely eastern affection, since he made generous use of St Augustine’s (354-430) writings, who was also influenced by neo-platonic ideas, among other Christian leanings.

Joseph Kosuth – “Nothing” 1968

Early on, Eriugena was distinguished by his remarkable ideas, beginning with his involvement & refutation in the 9th century Predestination controversy started by Gottschalk of Orbais (ca. 808-867). This theological imbroglio had Gottschalk whipped, embarrassed & divested of his priestly duties, ending up in a monastery in Hautvillers (northeastern France). Gottshcalk’s position was that God was fully aware of & involved in man’s destiny from birth to death (a common ‘misconception’ even to this day). This position was officially refuted by Eriugena to be the opposite, whereby god is simple & unchanging, he doesn’t, as was presumed, predestine man’s will. Man’s will is his own. This is part of Eriugena’s radical claim to fame, as it centers man as the driver of his own destiny. (This & the nexus of Eastern & Western philosophies, brings Eriugena even closer to the brilliant (neo-platonic) syncretism of Pico della Mirandola (1463-94)). For Eriugena, man already severed his intimate relationship to god after the fall. After the fall, Adam & Eve were sexualized, ashamed of their bodies & fallen from grace. It was then put to man’s own responsibility to re-establish his ties to god, back the word of god & into his ultimate innate reason that was ultimately part of god to begin with. This is the return to god & this movement of the falling away of man’s reason, to be rejuvenated via rationality, logic, wisdom & this is dialectical (note: these are three of Eriugena’s so-called primary causes that reside in man, nature & god). Man is fallen away from wisdom & the return is his desired unification with god using wisdom & knowledge. Evil then, is simply the absence of the good in man. Philosophy (theology) is the way man finds this way back to the divine, this is his return. This exitus & reditus, exit & return, procession & return, runs throughout neo-platonism, thereby exposing the history of the dialectic to originate much earlier than G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), (in fact, suggesting where Hegel found the dialectic’s already established roots). Speculative dialectics are not to be wholly confused with Aristotelian logical dialectics. This differentiation is what we find with Hegel (although it’s further confused by the fact that Hegel wrote extensively on Logic. But, as we know this isn’t a mere re-emergence, or re-instatement of the Aristotelian formal logic (that we are so attached to nowadays) it regarded more as a metaphysical, transcendental logic).

Felix Gonzales-Torres – “Untitled (The End)” 1990

Speculative philosophy is born from the urge to bring it all together, in spite of the corporeal & fallible body. This is high idealism with a penchant for systematizing & unifying disparate parts. Hegel’s philosophy follows this speculative paradigm & is emblematic of this way of thinking. In this universal manner everything tends toward the absolute through the dialectical process that’s ideated through reason’s eventualities. We conceptualize this holistic union & can practice knowledge to become philosophically attuned as we (now with Eriugena) reach for the ecstasy of transcendence that’s nearer to god. According to Dermont Moran, Hegel considered Eriugena to be the father of German Idealism. As Hegel’s great ideology of the absolute tended away from the incidentals of everyday life, so did Erigena’s complex cosmology return us to the ‘super-essential’ realms of god & nature—away from the pleasures & pressures of the flesh.

The dialectic, as it is for our reading of Eriugena, has significance in the the way we view man’s place in the cosmic order, this to be centered & pivotal due to man’s intellectual ability to want to return to god’s goodness via his independent will & his wise reasoning. This, again, is the return & going back to god as extending from the fall. But, it’s also about regarding god as expressed in everything, suggesting god’s immanence, & this immanence eventually led to the conflation of Eriugena’s thought with pantheism. This immanence—or better named: theophany—is manifested in our very desire to quest for ultimate transcendence to god’s order. In other words, this theophany is one way god shows himself through us. Philosophy is a theophany of god. it’s how he appears to us, for Eriugena.

The theophany of god extends outward in a circular motion till we find theology in its outermost expression (or non-expression, as the case may be) taking us into another critical (non) component to Eriugena’s cosmology & that is: nothingness. This way of considering what god is not, is known as Eriugena’s negative theology, his apophatic theology. This is a definition of god in all that he is not. This gives full credit to the notion that god is nothing. This nothingness of god thereby positions god as super-essential, meaning that he’s beyond any nothingness we can conceive of. And this means god had to create all the known universe, earth, nature, mankind, creatures &c. out of nothing, that this nothing is included in all things. Yet, this nothing should never be defined as simply another element co-existing with god & the rest. The nothing is to be looked at as a privation of essence, before being & as non-being. Nothing is an essential lack of that which precedes being & since god is the creator of all as made manifest by his ‘word,’ the nothing includes that with cannot be defined by us & so it’s ultimately un-knowable by definition. Nothing is considered to be non-being. We can’t give Eriugena’s full argument for the nothing in this short space, but we’ll at the very least acknowledge it’s constancy throughout neo-platonism & throughout recent philosophy with its notable (at least for our usage) attention given by Hegel & Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

Timur Si-Qin – “Legend” 2011

Since we didn’t mention it earlier, all of this talk of nothing, non-being, privation &c. is found in Eriugena’s masterpiece the “Periphyseon,” or “The Division of Nature.” Indeed, this is his very cosmology where he attempts the ominous task of classifying nature as god’s creation, from his creation to nothingness itself. For Hegel, the abstract nothing is given primacy in his work on logic, as much as negation is given prominence in the dialectical movement itself. The basis of abstract thought determination as identified by Hegel is dialectically resolved by the recognition of the mind’s ‘restless’ becoming of thought by means of its very conceptualizing against & with the nothing. Thought becomes thought determination as being itself is confronted with the very nothingness of being. Hegel states in his “Encyclopedia Logic”:

All that really matters here is consciousness about these beginnings: that they are nothing but these empty abstractions, & that each of them is as empty as the other; the drive to find in being or in both [being & nothing] a stable meaning is this very necessity, which leads being & nothing further along & endows them with a true, i.e., concrete meaning. (EL/139-40)

Hegel softly echoes Eriugena’s epistemology as god is understood by man to be super-essential being, a.k.a. nothing, so should man understand his own mind & his own perception as having these qualities dialectically—being & nothing in tandem—becoming universal knowing. In the Periphyseon Eriugena writes, paraphrasing Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite:

Everything understood & sensed is merely the appearance of the non-appearing, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the denied, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the expression of the ineffable, the approach of the inaccessible, the understanding of the unintelligible, the body of the incorporeal…” (P/140)

Then even closer to Hegel’s concept of thought apprehension—by means of this dialectical movement of the mind from the emptiness of nothing with being becoming universal meaning—we find Eriugena’s medieval elaboration of man’s mind coming to know itself, the world & god (through reason & negative theology).

…for the human mind both knows itself & does not know itself. It knows that it is, but it does not know what it is. […] It is more praiseworthy for the mind not to know what it is than to know that it is; just as negation is more closely & fittingly related than affirmation to the praise of divine nature, & it is wiser to be ignorant of it than to know it; for ignorance of it is true wisdom since it is known better by not knowing. (P/244)

Just as man can conceive of god by understanding what he is & better, by what he’s not, so can man use this apophatic way to his own mind. Man is a microcosm of the universe, therefore his own mind, his own epistemology characteristically shares in the ontology of his known & unknown world. This way of knowing the mind is not only dialectical, but it’s simultaneously metaphysical.

Mark Mumford – “Nothing Ever Happened Here.” 2002

Once the moment of metaphysics is brought to the fore, we are drawn from the 8th & 18th centuries to Heidegger’s 20th century involvement with the nothing. In his destabilizing essay “What is Metaphysics?” This assuredly after god & after the absolute, instead we are looking through the nothing as it’s in contrast to being (Dasein) phenomenologically—through the anxious experience of our being. This confrontation is with the very question of what is there as being, or what being is not. This isn’t a negation of being, rather, nothing is repellent to being & is transcendent as it can only be, since we are being & not nothing. It’s almost as if this repellence is what confirms being in the existential anxiety of being. Our being can only confirm itself against nothing to become nothing less than being. Heidegger poetically writes of this:

Being held out into the nothing—as Dasien is—on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole. It is transcendence.

Our inquiry concerning the nothing is to bring us face to face with metaphysics itself. (WM/106)

These considerations are metaphysical (briefly think of how this concept relates to religious practice in general) & this nothingness proposition is fundamental in our way of contemplating an idealistic way of knowing. We’ll have to admit that Heidegger’s nothing, Hegel’s nothing & Eriugena’s nothing vary in their subtleties. Heidegger’s nothing is in contrast to a simple negation of something (being) & it’s very close to Hegel’s in that Hegel thought of being as essentially co-defined with the nothing. Oddly, for Hegel at the very basis of an abstraction of being we can barely distinguish it from nothing, yet we have no choice but to choose being from the two, since it’s the only primary abstraction of thought that is manifestly there for us & this is where meaning arises in its becoming—as it becomes self-determined thought, as it knows itself, as it’ll self-consciously know the world & as the world is reflected in this movement back to knowing objectively.

For Erigena, as we’ve alluded to already, nothing is also as complicated as the others, in that it’s non-essential, non-being, & privative. This still continues to define god as super-essential, so that if god is everything & nothing, he’s only that as far as our comprehension can conclude. If we were to then draw our own conclusions about all three views, we’ll have to transcendentalize a point of refuge with these thoughts, into the realm of that which cannot be comprehended. If we have an answer for everything, then we know nothing about our limitations. If we can see our limitations, then we can then imagine our possibilities.

Certainly, Eriugena was radical for his controversial views on predestination. Popular Christian opinion makes constant use of god’s active participation in the lives of men. We rarely (never) hear talk of god as letting man to his own devices. Man thus, in Eriugena’s context has to activate his own free-will to realize god’s theophany as reason toward a higher good. Aside from this, we’ll have to embrace Eriugena’s apophatic, neo-platonic ideas as vital for the basic philosophical issues they help to uncover. Common thought is normally concerned with what is, rather that what is not. If we cut off our ability to conceive of that which is mysterious & unknown, then what possibility is there? Positivist thinking destroys the nothing because thought ‘must always be about something.’ Although both Eriugena & Hegel had the dialectic as teleological & headed into reason, god & the absolute, we can see the break from this in the very conception of having to regard that which isn’t, in order to grasp the basic structure of metaphysical thought that’s so maligned in the scientific way of limiting the world—as Heidegger helps us to see. What are we without metaphysics?—a dry materialism only that proffers tangible facts, thereby cutting its imagination off from the dream of the unknown. That which we cannot know has everything to do with what we know, this is a universal way of opening the movement of thought into itself, throughout the world & into the void of the future.

Aurelio Madrid

Ad Reinhardt – “Abstract Painting” 1963

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Works Cited / Bibliography

Carabine, Deirdre. John Scottus Eriugena. New York: Oxford U. Press. 2000.

Eriugena, John Scottus. (P) Periphyseon – On the Divison of Nature. Trans. Myra L. Uhlfelder. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill Co. Inc. 1976.

Hegel, G.W.F. (EL) The Encyclopedia Logic. Trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Pubs. Co. Inc. 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. (WM) Basic Writings, What is Metaphysics? Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Perennial – Modern Thought. 2008.

Moran, Dermot. The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. New York: Cambridge U. Press. 1989.

letter to bugada & cargnel about gaillard & golia

Madame Cargnel and Monsieur Bugada:

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m Aurelio Madrid from the United States and I have discovered your gallery online while searching for the artists Cyprien Gaillard & Piero Golia. I write a blog www.aureliomadrid.wordpress.com that features my philosophical research as much as it’s devoted to art criticism and art theory. I’m also an artist and a philosophy student. I’ve always wanted to know more about either Gaillard and/or Golia, and I’m writing to ask if you can help me get in touch with both (or one) of the artists for an online blog interview.

As professional gallerists you are active fans and promoters of the artists you represent. Let it be known that I share your enthusiasm for Gaillard and Golia’s avant-garde work. I’ve always considered writing about aesthetics and philosophy to be an extension of my artistic practice. As you know, conversing with artists about their practice is an ideal way to manifest ideas, talk about projects, and to cover issues that a purely visual language cannot communicate. Gaillard and Golia challenge aesthetic boundaries against the omnipresent taste for the over-polished and easy-to-understand. If their art is anything it’s about breaking rules. Getting rid of prevailing assumptions about art requires an artist to challenge the merely acceptable. The artist has to create a constant radicalizing of the complacent viewer. The task for an artist is to present work that speaks to the universal, as with Gaillard and Koudlam’s street battle video that simulates war, to Golia’s stolen Mercedes hood ornaments. I love both artists’ casual insouciance. Gaillard and Golia each demonstrate the ability of art to be jokingly conceptual.

It is for the above reasons that I’d wish to question the artist/s. An interview is a created situation where an artist can talk about his particular means of expression and the processes of making art. Basically, I’d want to ask them about their ideas, practice and whatever else they would want to share. The overall length of the interview/s will be up to each artist’s discretion.

As art connoisseurs you understand that audience participation is an essential part of an aesthetic experience. Without the audience any art is not complete, nor effective. The effects art has on an audience illustrates the idea that art is a conversation. What is unique about an interview is that it positions the viewer behind the scenes. We already know that this behind the scenes view can only help us to understand the art better, but more importantly, the conversation becomes an artifact and a document of coming together, the coming together of the audience with the artist. In this case it’ll be about bridging territorial boundaries, from one artist to another.

In a video series from YouTube titled: “Conatus – Azteca 1,” Gaillard presented his enigmatic take on the philosophical concept: conatus. The philosophical term conatus can mean life force, will, force itself, etc. This life force surely can be connected to the creative drive that’s abundant in both artists’ work. Art is a force of will. Art is often confused with a commercially mundane enforcement of the beautiful and alluring—yet, both artists make it clear that art is about much more. When we observe Golia and Gaillard’s art we are often unaware that this willful drive, this powerful and deeply personal/universal conatus is what we really admire about their work.

Gaillard lives in Berlin and Golia lives in Los Angeles, this might mean that they are also represented by galleries in each of their home cities. Can you let me know if this is in fact the case? If this is true, then I’d contact their galleries directly to ask for Golia and Gaillard’s contact info. Another difficulty has to do with the restriction that the interview would have to be conducted in a written format. This would mean that the artists would have to be willing to write their responses via e-mail. I’d love to travel to visit each artist and have the interview/s face to face, but that’s simply not possible at this time. I’d want to ask my questions via e-mail, so I’d only need their e-mail addresses. If the interview/s were to happen, I’d then post the interview/s on my blog along with videos and pictures of their work.

Of course, if I could talk to one or both of the artists, I’d give adequate mention of your fine gallery as the liaison from me to the artists. It is worth mentioning that if both artists are willing to be interviewed pro-bono this would be an ideal arrangement. I could offer to draw their portraits to accompany the interview/s, but I’d wait to ask them personally about this idea once they have been contacted.

Merci,

Aurelio Madrid

renge / 蓮華

Tonight we’re seeking to understand Nichiren Daishonin’s gosho: “King Rinda”[1] Specifically we’ll be concentrating on the first part of the gosho & in this paper we will not address the legend of King Rinda.

The initial point to recognize about this gosho—as with many other goshos—is the simple progression of the mentor disciple relationship. This pattern is fundamental to how knowledge & wisdom is passed down from generation to generation, from mentor to disciple, then as the disciple becomes the mentor & foreword, as the cycle continues with the teachings that become practice in the daily lives of everyday people like ourselves. In this particular context, in this reading, we have a discernable lineage: from Shakyamuni Buddha, to T’ien-t’ai, to Miao-lo, to Nichiren Daishonin, onward to Daisaku Ikeda[2] & then into our hands here today (there are many other mentors that can be included in this progression, but for our use we’ll start with these). This primary structure is, in our context, a religious one; however, it does have a secular relevance. Any learning & knowledge transmission follows this pattern. This is the way others help us to know & to help us progress wisdom within the world. As this is a form of paying respect to the mentor, it is also about maintaining our own individuality, since so much of learning is about self-determination & self-direction.

With all this foregoing said, let us turn to the gosho itself. Nichiren talks about some vital points that Miao-lo[3] elucidated & Nichiren opens with the metaphor of the transformation from milk to ghee. The ‘Agama’ sutras are better known to us as the Hiniyana sutras & the others that he mentions (including the Lotus Sutra) can be classified as Mahayana sutras. We are shown that apart from even the precious taste of milk we can classify the Mahayana sutras according to the refinements of milk: e.g. cream, curdled milk, butter & then to the Nirvana Sutras that are the clarification of butter into ghee.[4] The Lotus Sutra is therefore named: “The true lord of the ghee,” as it is then further distinguished from the Nirvana Sutra. On this hierarchy Nichiren writes: “The main point of these passages is that the five flavors serve to nourish life, but life itself is lord over all the five flavors.”[5] The reason it is named as such is because it is the only teaching that Miao-lo gives the distinction of “opening the provisional & revealing the distant”[6] We’ll explain the subtleties of this quote in a bit. Meanwhile, we’ll make the observation that even as we as position the Lotus Sutra as the ‘true lord of the ghee,’ let us not forget that the milk is still the base of the ghee & that ghee can’t be what it is without being milk first. Just as we can’t have the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin without the provisional teachings of Shakyamuni’s, & we can’t have our own enlightenment without the sufferings of the nine worlds, which are included in the world of enlightenment.

With these observations, along with Miao-lo’s quote, we’ll see that the above reasoning is a key to understanding why the word myo is used in the title of the Lotus Sutra.[7] Myo means wonderful, mystic, it means to open & it also means beyond conception.[8] Because the word myo (mystic, mysterious) is given, also designates that this wisdom will not be readily known & that parts of it (& certainly with life in general) will remain mysterious. Above all, we must see this word as a designation of the Sutra’s superiority & that the wisdom that preceded & following it, is included within it—thereby stating that all wisdom is considered to be an aspect of the wonderful Lotus Sutra.

“Opening the provisional & revealing the distant” signifies the core teaching of this gosho. We are told by Nichiren that Miao-lo defines the two parts of the Chinese word renge (ren: 蓮 ge: 華) as the ge of ren/ge corresponds to the provisional teachings mentioned earlier & the ren corresponds to the distant. Ikeda then takes us to see[9] that, not only does the “opening the provisional & revealing the distant” refer to the word renge, it additionally signifies a division of the twenty-eight chapters of the Lotus Sutra, whereby “opening the provisional…” is related predominantly to the “Expedient Means” chapter.[10] We must continue to draw out that this fist part of the Lotus Sutra is to be known as the ‘theoretical teachings’ & the latter half (the last half of the Lotus Sutra) is to be known as the ‘essential teachings.’ The provisional teachings are what open up & lead to the true (distant[11]) teachings. Aside from the Lotus Sutra the provisional teachings are said to be those that regard the ten worlds as separate & that certain people, including evil people & women, are not capable of attaining Buddhahood.

Before we leave the first half of the phrase: “opening the provisional…” we’ll be sure to notice that Ikeda wants us to take notice of the way the word renge brings the phrase together with its other half: “revealing the distant.” We can see for ourselves that a way renge represents this has to do with seeing that ren means lotus flower & that ge means flower; most importantly, ren is the effect & ge is the cause. Ikeda writes: “In Buddhism, our lives in the nine worlds are viewed as the cause [ge] for attaining the effect [ren] of Buddhahood.”[12] Renge represents the simultaneity of cause & effect because as we know, the word means lotus flower & the lotus blossoms & seeds at the same time. The lotus flower as a symbol is also of relevant to this quote (& our lives) for yet another reason; the lotus grows in the muddy swamp & its ugly roots enable it to grow & glean nutrients from the muddy water, it is in this crucial synthesis that the lotus can reveal its beautiful truth as a flower & as symbol for the enlightenment we all seek. Suffering is intrinsic to our enlightenment—we can’t cut off our sufferings & expect to be enlightened. We can’t have the lotus flower without its roots in the muddy swamp. We can’t have the clarified ghee without milk. We can’t have the Lotus Sutra without the provisional teachings. In order to overcome our sufferings, the sufferings have to be there to begin with. Fundamental darkness isn’t named fundamental because it’s dispensable. The nine worlds we know & live in are the only way to the enlightenment of Buddhahood.

We’ll now turn to the second half of Miao-lo’s phrase: “…revealing the distant” &/or “…revealing the true” The first half of the Lotus Sutra (the theoretical teachings) & the provisional teachings reveal that the Buddha attained enlightenment in his lifetime, in India. In the latter half of the Lotus Sutra (the essential teachings), specifically the “Lifespan” chapter, we have the distinction that the Buddha actually attained enlightenment in the far distant past, hence revealing the fruit, the ren of renge. This is revealed when we consider the concept we know of as “the mutual possession of the ten worlds.”[13] Remember that we pointed out earlier that the provisional teachings taught that the nine worlds as separate & only a select few made it to the tenth world of enlightenment, but this concept of mutual possession includes all the ten worlds enclosed & comingled within each of the others. This underscores the idea that in spite of any of the worlds we are manifesting, Buddhism is contained in each, meaning that we all have the potential to manifest enlightenment no matter how incapable we think we are—this is the essential teaching.

Ikeda tells us that as Nichiren was quoting Miao-lo where he speaks of the “doctrines taught…” & this refers to the doctrines we’ve been looking at here, having everything to do with the daimoku Nam-myho-renge-kyo as it is the title of the Lotus Sutra & that it contains the theoretical (the first fourteen chapters) & the essential teachings (the latter fourteen chapters). This is given the honorific distinction known as myo, which places it as including all wisdom known & unknown. We were also shown that anyone in the lower nine worlds can attain the enlightenment of the tenth world of Buddhahood. Renge represents the law of the simultaneity of cause & effect, so the causes we make now will affect the enlightenment we seek while here in this saha world.[14]

—Aurelio Madrid / October 26, 2011

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[1] Daishonin, Nichiren. The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin. Eds. & Trans. The Gosho Translation Committee. Tokyo: Soka Gakkai. 1999. pp. 983-992. print. See online PDF: http://www.sgilibrary.org/pdf/136_0983.pdf

[2] Shakyamuni Buddha (est. ca. 563-483 b.c.), T’ien-t’ai (538-597 c.e.), Miao-lo (711-782 c.e.), Nichiren Daishonon (1222-1282), Daisaku Ikeda (1928- ).

[3] Miao-lo was an important ‘ninth patriarch’ in the T’ien-t’ai school.

[4] Ghee: clarified butter.

[5] Daishonin, Nichiren. Op. cit.: p. 983.

[6] This is part of the whole quote of Miao-lo’s given by Nichiren from Miao-lo’s work “Annotation on ‘Great Concentration & Insight’”.

[7] The title of the Lotus Sutra is: Nam Myoho Rnge Kyo. To chant this phrase is known as daimoku & daimoku is also the name for the title of the Lotus Sutra.

[8] A Dictionary of Buddhist Terms & Concepts. Tokyo: Nichiren Shoshu Int. 1983. p. 270.

[9] Ikeda, Daisaku. Learning form the Writings of Nichiren Daishonin: King Runda. Living Buddhism Sept.-Oct. 2011. pp. 64-80.

[10] …this also includes the all first fourteen chapters. The “Expedient Means”is the first part of Gongyo.

[11] …keep in mind that Miao-lo’s quote can also be translated as “opening the provisional & revealing the true.”

[12] Ikeda, Daisaku. Op. cit. p. 72.

[13] …see link for definition: http://www.sgilibrary.org/search_dict.php?id=1468

[14] Saha world: the world that must be endured.

on g.w.f. hegel’s aesthetics (reply to reinaert de v.’s the rise of modernity, part 1)

Dear Reinaert de V.,

…it’s been so long reading a post from you (The Rise of Modernity, Part 1) & now together we’re back continuing to think & write about philosophy again. I feel that your philosophical interests are akin to my own, with obvious variance here & there. Yet, as our ideas have converged before, we’ve overcome our differences & now I’m struggling to recall who brought up G.W.F. Hegel first. I think it was you who about a year ago spoke of writing on his aesthetics & that inspired me to read & then write on his Phenomenology of Spirit—followed by looking & writing a little on his Aesthetics. Part of my interest also came to the fore while researching, reading & writing about Althusser’s ideology. Althusser openly rejected Hegel, since whole aspects of Hegel’s metaphysical ‘excesses’ were sloughed-off by late Marxist materialism. Let it be known that the more I found Hegel’s thought to be reviled by nineteenth & twentieth century thinkers, the more I wanted to embrace him. With this said, I’m not of the mind to simultaneously let go of Althusser & the others, as I see that this impulse is too narrow-minded & not inclusive, nor wide ranging enough to adequately engage philosophers that are of opposing views.

I needed to know what Hegel was all about & I wanted to try to grasp this imposing figure, who has always represented a special kind of insurmountable thinking. The only obstruction I discovered had to be overcome in my own mind. The resolve had to do with the work it takes to climb the rocks & to prepare for the inevitable confrontation with a failure to comprehend & to then re-read & to then strive for his kind of knowing that always includes the discomfort of not knowing. This continual task of re-reading is itself a kind of knowing. The conscious acquisition of knowledge has to confront what it doesn’t know in order to learn & then know better then it did before. Our eventual goals to know can be held alongside Hegel’s rushing toward absolute knowledge, absolute idea & absolute spirit, all of this is with the knowledge that philosophy should help us to be more capable of getting set on this journey of knowing & with the admission that this philosophical path is also Hegel’s way to absolute knowledge, that will include self-knowing & as a way to know the world as without the typical constraints that divide subject & object—as a pure unified knowing, that we’ll never truly know altogether.

Of course, we’ll be forced to see this drive to know & to know Hegel as fraught with many frustrations & these frustrations are often mistaken as flaws with Hegel’s un/intended obscurity. I’ve decided to think of the pain felt with these obscurities as a way of confronting & comprehending the dialectic & more specifically coming to terms with the central pivot of the dialectic, known as the sublation, the aufheben. This is noticed after the very beginning of any presuppositionless sense apprehension that is being & nothing sublated, then becoming thought & that could become a moment of conceptual thinking—this process of spirit coming to know is sometimes lovingly referred to by Hegel as a way to science (we’d be good to think of this too as thinking that’s onward to philosophical conceptualization & idea). Aufheben is a unique German word that roughly means to bring up, as well as to preserve & also to cancel out, to do away with, perhaps to bring back again. I like to think of the word as a reconciliation. This strange self-contradicting word: aufheben—which for Fichte & our usual understanding of Hegel’s dialectic—is defined as the contradiction &/or the antithesis. It can then be thought of as related to the fundamental negation within Hegel’s dialectic. Another word we can’t ignore here is speculation, or the speculative, which is certainly linked to the above mentioned word as a reconciliation that happens within the aufheben. The speculative is a reconciling of oppositions that thereby brings things, concepts, ideas, problems, philosophy &c. into the whole of the absolute, all in the name of the Hegelian dialectic. I’m sure Hegel thought of the whole of his philosophy as speculative, which again underscores the word aufheben. In short, we have to pass through, push down, bring up, & preserve the aufheben to really know Hegel.

From this initial confrontation of mine & back to the actual point of simply thanking you for your interest in Hegel, we’re drawn to a conclusion that when we sit down to study Hegel, to think about Hegel & then to sometimes reject Hegel, we’d be amiss to not take notice of the dialectical & speculative logic he laid for out us. This urges us to take notice of how he could’ve predicted his own negations, his potential demise, whereby the absolute spirit of our contemporary way of knowing has included & possibly grown out of this foreboding presence known as Hegel’s philosophy. This way of thinking about the dialectic includes his own speculative end, but never an end absolutely, as any ending has to include Hegel coming before us. We must not confuse this with the potential to lead us nowhere, since we can remember that his telos leads us to a transformation of the whole that once was, to the whole that can be & that won’t be overlooked as brought forward by Hegel.

It’s with friendly admiration that I’m happy to say you’ve done fine work to continue Hegel’s concepts into a fresh now. It’s worth noting that whenever we focus on a specific idea of Hegel’s ideal, we must not lose sight of how this transfers to the bigger picture of his entire oeuvre (the absolute). You have looked at the aesthetics of Hegel, citing passages form his Lectures on Aesthetics & I couldn’t help but thinking that your selections sound very much like his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. For example you write: “Thus the enlightened individual is able to move about freely & realize himself fully by partaking of the substantiality that is the state & thereby becoming more than what was his own.” When we compare this statement of yours to one found in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, we are reminded that the individual is fully actualized (as you indicated) in the state: “The worth of individuals is measured by the extent to which they reflect & represent the national spirit…” But, perhaps this is not in a totalitarian way, as the individual is realized within the a state of mutual freedom with other individuals. These other individuals are allowed their differences & particularities as features of their freedom, since this freedom is not really about the impulsive free reign of desires. When we continue moving from this idea that the individual is actualized in a state—a state of freedom with others—we come to the thought that you point to that directly echoes Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” … reading this next Hegel’s statement from the Philosophy of History shows  a distinct similarity: “The individual can certainly make the state into a means of attaining this or that end. But the truth is realized only insofar as each individual wills the universal cause itself and has discarded all that is inessential.”

As you already know, what we’re talking about is spirit, absolute spirit. The realization of reason is universal & it is spirit as the realization of the idea. The spirit is a determination of the self as it is also a determination of science, religion, knowledge & art. The goals of history, its telos is reason & it is the idea as it’s manifested via the spirit of man as an individual & as a collective. All of this can be thought as the expression of freedom. The objects of thought are what spirit contemplates as consciousness. Freedom is not something that the spirit merely strives for, it is also contained in the basic structure of thought as it knows itself in a self-determined way & not in a pre-ordained, deterministic way. The limitations of the world are what cause our own determinations to become what we are. It is the idea that becomes a goal for the knowing subject, the idea where the concepts of subject & object become sublated, a kind of pure knowing to eventually be without the subjective/objective distinction, the two are conflated as a free idea. There are seeming contradictions that arise from the idea that man is free, while he’s also confined to the rules of the state. Hegel addresses this in the Philosophy of History: “The concept of freedom is such that justice & ethical life are inseparable from it…” & later in the same paragraph we find the conclusion: “…such restrictions [of the state, laws, government &c.] are the indispensible conditions of liberation; society & the state are the only situations in which freedom can be realized.”  It has become evident that Hegel’s thought was consistent throughout the Aesthetics, the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Right & many other places. What I find intriguing is that while you outline the details of how you read his Aesthetics, absolute spirit emerges, in the way it manifests itself through the individual & how it includes the expression of man’s spirit, freedom & idea that are communicated into art & also into world history.

We already know that Hegel designates in the Aesthetics that philosophy supersedes the arts & just about everything else. Thus creating a kind of philosophical bird’s-eye-view where Hegel can then look to the pattern of how art has expressed itself in a religious context & that this religious context for art has passed. The apogee of art as a religious expression has been superseded by ‘lesser’ ideals. In the introduction of Hegel’s Aesthetics we find this put in Hegel’s words: “We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine & worshipping them.” & in a couple of sentences later we find: “…art, considered in its highest vocation, is & remains a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth & life & it has been rather transferred into our ideas…”  What’s of note here is that “art’s imminent demise” (as you put it) is also due to this observation of Hegel’s that’s brought together with an implication that the individual is sublimated into the apparatus of the state & that this is a condition of art’s demise as it stand today. I believe that this can be maintained, while at the same time retaining & integrating an idea of an art that values thought, conceptualization & reflection.

Little did Hegel know that this would hold true & we’ll be sure to include the all-important ‘concept/idea’ as the driving force behind much of art created recently. As vital as concept is for Hegel’s philosophy, it is also just as intrinsic for a comprehension of artistic practice today. Once religion took ultimate precedence & now it’s thought, reflection, idea & concept. Hegel wasn’t too far off, especially if we consider this within the dialectic, whereby we can see that the self-negation of art has been happening over & over, throughout most of the 20th century (continuing into the 21st). The so-called death of art as a practice & theory has been a (now stale) recurring theme for decades now, yet artistic practice continues to negate itself & to push man’s spirit onward. Art occupies a curious place in today’s world & in that bizarre presentation we’ll see it as a glaring reflection of our own thought, questioning, pain & suffering. Our own pain is addressed in ways that make art appear to be too honest, too brutal. These confrontations are certainly the aufheben for us to bring a fresh re-reading into the world as a free expression of where we’re at in our world, in our spirit, in our minds & universally. We are called upon to conceptualize ourselves thinking about an art that struggles a great deal to let it self be known, as much as we are placed with the responsibility of knowing ourselves how to comprehend just a bit more of it than we did yesterday, till tomorrow places us within a new challenge to think of art again & to not know what we’ll eventually never know absolutely. Hegel leaves us with known & unknown pieces of his wisdom to carry on with the work of thinking that will observe the beauty of striving to know something/someone once more.

Aurelio Madrid

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bibliography/works cited:

Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art Vol. 1. Trans. T.M. Knox. New York: Oxford U. Press. 1975. print.

Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction. Trans H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press. 1975. print.

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals 3rd ed.. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1993. print.

Magee, Glen Alexander. The Hegel Dictionary. New York: Continuum Pubs. 2010. print.

aesthetics of rhetorical thisness

Jeffery Strayer: Haecceity 12.0.0 (circular language detail)

“But this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely
negative, which when taken immediately, is nothing.” —G.W.F. Hegel

Over the years the artist/philosopher Jeffery Strayer has been working on an ongoing series of artworks titled “Haecceities.” In addition to considering the philosophical and aesthetical propositions he employs, we’ll be attending to a basic tripartite rhetorical schema, utilizing a specific work in the series titled: “Haecceity 12.0.0”

If we were to ask ourselves, without any prior knowledge of this rhetorical artwork, who will be the audience for Strayer’s work?—we’ll have to admit that it’ll be limited to a philosophical and artistic crowd. Within that group, it’ll then be narrowed down to those who are familiar with conceptual, theoretical and/or language based art. Presuming that this art has a limited audience will position it into a rarified area of specialization and intellectual connoisseurship. Speaking of all of who it’ll appeal to will implicate (and thereby exclude) those who choose to not appreciate its intellectual rigor and subtlety. We’ll be keen to mention that one need not engage art that doesn’t appeal to one’s own taste, to do so would just be a labor that’s without the requisite aesthetic fulfillment one might have in considering another choice of conceptual art, a painting, a sculpture etc. Because one doesn’t prefer a particular work of art only reflects personal taste and does not necessarily speak to the work’s intrinsic value, that’s qualified by experts and those who will acknowledge, judge and value its aesthetic and philosophical worth.

“[←] CONCEIVING OF THAT OF WHICH ONE CANNOT FORM A CONCEPTION [→]” This is our base statement of Strayer’s that we’re calling his persuasive rhetoric. This “essential specification” (we’ll look at this term later) is using language and aesthetics as a means of conveyance concerning his concepts on the “limits of abstraction.” As we’ve indicated in a previous essay, Aristotle writes that the art of rhetoric is not akin to a scientific way of understanding and that we must not make the mistake to think that rhetoric is be examined scientifically, or that it’ll concern itself with absolute facts and figures—this is not a positivist science.

All of this forwarding is unsaid within the circular language. “[←] CONCEIVING OF THAT OF WHICH ONE CANNOT FORM A CONCEPTION [→]” The actual stated appeal is for the subject (audience) to conceive of that with cannot be a conception. This is about thought that’s prior to conceiving. This is about pre-apophantic thought, thought that’s pre-predicated, prior to logic, concepts, language, judgments and the like. The circular rhetoric is persuading the viewer to consider a thought apprehension which is prior to conceiving of a thought, before a conception of it can be named or put forth into an idea, and before the thought can be predicated into a statement about the thought. It is presented in the first person i.e. ‘[I’m] conceiving of…” Because it’s in the first person, the subject is implicated to think of this un-conceivable thought along with Strayer as a way to aesthetically complete, and to conceive the limitations of an understanding having to do with his aesthetic entreaty. The fact that the circular appeal is repeated four times (twice in black text and twice in grey text) adds a rhythmic and filmic quality to the language. The repetitions suggest that each side is intended for each eye, right and left, and perhaps, the left and right hemispheres of the brain (rational and intuitive respectively). The liminal specifications are in focus (black text) and out of focus (grey text) only to be conceptualized at this threshold of pre-thinking.

Jeffery Strayer: Haecceity 12.0.0  / 20 1/4″ x 22 7/16″.
Transparent print, screws, contact print, and paper mounted to Gatorfoam.
Maple wood frame.

When we continue to examine the artwork, asking about its rhetorical appeals, we’ll have to get to the one that doesn’t apply out of the way. This artwork is not emotional, so it has no pathos. If we were to strain to find its pathos, it might be found in the pleasure induced by the intellectual pursuit of Strayer’s ideas and concepts. With this said, this lack might be its inherent flaw. However, this is a flaw only if we insist that all rhetoric contain all of the three appeals, and on this score we’ll have to say that all rhetoric need not fulfill all three appeals to be effective. For instance, there are plenty of examples of salient rhetoric that’s anonymous, therefore without an ethos (a discernable character by which to judge the persuasiveness of a given argument).

Looking for Strayer’s ethos we’re able to find plenty of obvious examples in his work. Jeffrey Strayer is an artist and philosopher and is the author of two books: Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction and Haecceities: Essentialism and the Limits of Abstraction. Strayer is also a lecturer in philosophy at Indiana University—Purdue University Fort Wayne. Due to these credentials his arguments are to be taken seriously enough to be regarded as a specialist in the areas of art making and philosophy. It should be said that an ethos is evident in the objects themselves, since the objects are of excellent quality, and have been executed with high production standards, this adds to the aforementioned credibility as it offers a distinct professionalism to his art.

Logos is the appeal that this work exhibits in great detail. Logos can concern logic as much as it can be about rational thinking. We’re safe to say the artwork appeals to both in full measure. As for the logical, we’ll suggest that the artwork uses simple deductive logic. We can plainly deduce that the artwork is being presented in such a way as to rationally conceive of a thought that’s to be un-conceivable, thus persuading the subject to face an abstract limitation of thought. This is brought to us (the subject) under the title “Haecceity” a philosophical term meaning thisness, or better yet, the specificity of a given object that differs from any other given object, no matter how similar the two might appear. Nothing is exactly the same, everything is essentially different, is the idea behind the word. On Strayer’s website he has a couple of videos were he speaks of his intentions with the series. His predominate logical thesis has to do with an aesthetic that seeks the limits of abstraction, to this goal he names his style: essentialist abstraction. What catches our attention will have to be an idea that he names the series and each work in the series haecceities. The language he uses in each haecceity is said to be a specification, specifically naming a means to ideate a limit of abstraction. When we examine this conceptual method we find a curious logos. A haecceity is a specific object that can also be a specific idea, essentialism names things that are universal qualities of an object that are essential to make that object what it is, abstraction is also about the non-specific qualities of a particular idea or thing. When we bring all of this together in Strayer’s specification: “[←] CONCEIVING OF THAT OF WHICH ONE CANNOT FORM A CONCEPTION [→]” we are left with a non-specific object of thought that’s ultra-specific in its physical presence, coupled with universal ideations that are essential for thinking about the object, and all this is without attributable meaning, since pre-conception is thoughtless. Therefore, the lack of meaning is our logical goal, and as we’ve been taught by Hegel in his work on logic, thought before conception is nothing that’s intrinsically combined with being, together becoming thought, becoming determinate thought, and henceforth illustrating a process of our consciousness becoming capable of conceiving of a concept. Strayer does a fine job taking us from specificity to nothing at all in one artwork that’s presented in the form of rhetorically delineated language, while pushing the limits of aesthetic consideration into our over habituated minds.

Aurelio Madrid

Works Cited / Bibliography:

Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Trans. J.H. Freese. Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1967. 1357b 12-13. Print.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Part 1. Trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, H.S.

Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1991. pp. 135 – 145. Print.

Strayer, Jeffrey. Haecceities: Essentialism and the Limits of Abstraction. Unpublished.

____________. Jeffrey Strayer: Art and Philosophy. Jeffery Strayer, 2008. Web. 5 -12

Oct. 2011. http://www.jeffreystrayer.com/index.html

____________. Subjects and Objects: Art, Essentialism, and Abstraction. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Print.

want more than less

Aristotle wrote extensively on the art of persuasion. He easily makes the distinction that rhetoric is not the same as science. Rhetoric is not a scientific demonstration, and rhetoric typically does not try to persuade facts, since facts are understood without any persuasion needed. Aristotle definitively writes: “The function of Rhetoric, then, is to deal with things about which we deliberate, but for which we have no systematic rules […] we only deliberate about things which seem to admit of issuing in two ways […].” [1] He also named three appeals employed to persuade an audience to a particular point of view: pathos: emotion, ethos: character, and logos: logic.

Let’s briefly look to an example of low-brow rhetoric in use today, a bumper sticker. The message is: WANT LESS. The rhetoric is logically [2] implied as: one should curb spending, quell your hunger for material goods, get rid of your over consumption, etc. The assumed rational message targets a consumer, as it also suggests an ascetic ideal, implying that it’s better to be less desirous than to be overindulgent.

Want is a part of our lives. To ‘want less’ is to tacitly suggest that all wants are to be harnessed. Therefore, to be better people, we essentially need less wanting in our lives. A mixed message arises when we logically inquire about the quality vs. quantity of our wants. All wants are not worth reducing. For instance, should we want less out of our lives? Should we want less well being? These questions are answered with an emphatic NO! This quickly leads us the other side of the argument with worthwhile questions about our over/consumption. We can then look at how intrusive these basic wants of ours affect the lives of others we cannot see or know—e.g. how our purchasing power indirectly affects (potentially) exploited third-world laborers.

Logically speaking, want is not something we can get rid of, nor should it be lessened—in and of itself. What’s at stake here is for us to try to better understand our wants and desires, more than less. Only then can we begin to educate ourselves to continually prefer a broad range of wiser choices that progress rather than regress our basic fundamental urge to want more. Our new bumper sticker should then read: WANT MORE, a logical step from having less wisdom to wanting more wisdom.

Aurelio Madrid

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[1] Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric (ΤΕΧΝΗ ΡΗΤΟΡΙΚΗ),trans. J.H. Freese, Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1967, 1357b 12-13.

[2] The basic logic used for our rhetorical example is identified as an enthymeme. An enthymeme is closely related to a formal syllogism, with a part of its premises missing. The missing premise is to be assumed by the audience. Aristotle names an enthymeme as being closely related to the syllogism rhetorically rather than in a strict scientific logic—re: a ‘rhetorical syllogism’ persuades more with commonly held beliefs, rather than with scientific proofs.

deleuze & nietzsche on death mountain

Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs / Reflexman, C-Print, 75 x 95 cm

Deleuze and Nietzsche on Death Mountain

“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.” —Heidegger

The following dream report is a fictional account of the 20^th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The dream is narrated by Deleuze and is concerning the 19^th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It is well known that Deleuze wrote extensively about other philosophers: Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, Leibniz, and of course Nietzsche. Deleuze was famously contra Hegel, so his exploration of other thinkers noticeably positioned his thought far away from the absolutions of Hegel. This moving away from Hegel for Deleuze, is detectible with Nietzsche’s death of god. The death of god began to alleviate the philosophical need to ‘bring it all together.’ Philosophy was taking this radical turn with Nietzsche, to then be steadfastly affirmed with Deleuze. Importantly, Nietzsche’s ideas on force and forces (the will to power) are fundamental to his notion of affirmation. Affirmation is a life force, whereas ressentiment (reactionary force) is life-denying. This is what the dream transformations are all about. The reason a dream report is used here as a backdrop, is to reference the creative side of philosophy that both thinkers continually ascribed to. This creative force is to be countered by the notion that philosophy need only to be preoccupied with defining truth, bringing things together, or unifying a systematic way of thought. All of that was Hegel’s job, as it was Plato’s work too. When we actually read Deleuze and find the words: affirmation, difference, and multiplicity, these (with many others) all stem from his close re-reading of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche offered a way out of the old ways and Deleuze takes this seriously enough to be heavily influenced by his self appointed teacher/s. With this said, bear in mind that Deleuze’s way of implementing ideas still follows a great tradition in philosophy, which is to return those who have come before us. Yet, this is a radical return to find the new in the ideas of the old. It is a way of passing through knowledge to find less of an identity and more of what is unfamiliar, thus creating another frontier for anyone to look for an alternate way of seeing things—over and over, never to be the same again.  —Aurelio Madrid

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These days working in Vincennes exhaust me like a sedative taken when one cannot sleep, and precious sleep itself becomes work to find fresh again. The last few weeks have seen me becoming listless enough to begrudge what I can’t have. All this has been reminding me of what’ll never be the same and is always lost. To be sure, we share in what’s gone. The best of these dark days have been sleep worthy. I’ve been dreaming again, entering that valued space where a waking fantasy cannot recreate what the dreaming mind will manifest on its own.

I’ll write of a specific dream that causes me considerable worry, but not enough to become frightened off by the powerful images that are to be remembered as I make note of them here.

Shivering, I found myself near Heidegger’s hut on Todtnauberg (Death-Mountain), located in the Black Forest somewhere in obscure southern Germany. This tiny place is the famous retreat of Heidegger’s, where he’d eventually put together Being and Time. He found his peace here, away from them, the crowds he hated so much. In this setting I was expecting to find the old woodcutter busy at his typewriter, instead I found a dirty white-haired Nietzsche wrapped in a sleeping-bag as if he were homeless. I could safely say he was homeless here on Death Mountain, as summer was wearing off and a withering fire was put in motion to affect a little warmth for the now run down place. I instantly knew this was an older Nietzsche, a man who was here after death. Here we were together in my dream, Mr. Deleuze and Mr Nietzsche looking through each other for the first time.

While my mind’s eye pieced the scene together, he pulled out an insistent translucent arm and pointed near to where I stood, “See, this is the tarantula’s hole! Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web: touch it so that it trembles.”[1] I immediately knew to what he was referring to, and I was a little put off by the idea that he could be referencing himself as the tarantula. I had to quickly dismiss this because I detected that characteristic ironic sneer. The tarantulas in his Zarathustra were there to represent the poisonous people who sit around and wait self-righteously to attack those who are living freely, as he saw it. The life-affirmers live instead of contemptuously waiting to react and bite like the spider. He wasn’t here waiting for anyone, let alone me.

Although I shuddered at his macabre reference, I had to agree with him, to barely mutter under my breath, “Everywhere we see victory of NO over Yes, of reaction over action.”[2] His blurry crossed eyes glared towards me, he then stared out to the single window, and then Nietzsche became fixed on an odd photo of an overburdened camel on its fore-knees. The camel carries the heavy load of past morality, those tired values that are not yet gone and weigh the poor animal down, just like we are weighed down. No one had to tell me what this symbolized once I recognized it in the picture, tossed there on that greasy floor.

Surely, I had been toying with all these ideas of his lately, which could explain why he was performing as he was, without so much as an obligatory hello. It is unfortunate that philosophy should have ever become a condemnation of life. Thought over life is not worth living.

“Of all these heaviest things the carrying spirit takes upon itself, like a loaded camel that hurries into the desert…”[3] His outsized yellow-white mustache looked to be a burden as he said this. The legendary facial hair was a part of the mask he couldn’t do without. We want put these burdens upon ourselves as the ancients did when they privileged lofty thought over the fallible body. His mask was faded, yet couldn’t ever be an equivalent to these age old restrictions.

“We are always asked to submit ourselves, to burden ourselves, to recognize only the reactive forms of life…,”[4] I half said this aloud and to myself. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was still there. He was still listlessly looking out the window. I walked over to look out too. To my amazement, I could see a bright golden lion wandering around a clearing in the forest some hundred feet away, his fur was more radiant than blond. The animal’s presence over there assured me that I was in the company of my god-less hero, the master of allegory, a man of health and of suffering, this was a man of foreword looking visions.

His cracking voice then lightened and became youthful as he talked about the lion, “Once it loved ‘thou shalt’ as its most sacred, now it must find delusion and despotism even it what is most sacred to it in order to wrest freedom from its love by preying.”[5] This was the golden lion of my homeless visionary, the critic and destroyer of stagnancy that was tirelessly represented by the old ways. Nietzsche had to proclaim the death of god as a way to solidify his place in the transvaluation of Christian nihilism, as he was also the harshest critic of the requisite nihilism that resulted with god’s absence. Man could be empty without a god, getting rid of the divine solved only a fraction of man’s problems. We had to look for answers from within ourselves, and we had to crawl out of those arcane devotions to those ascetic religious and secular illusions with the new-found courage of a lion.

I had to leave the hut to get a closer look at the precious lion. I’d never see it again, this was my last chance to say goodbye to that myth of his. Walking out into the clear air only revived my fear that this beautiful scene would be ending soon. Everything is to return only as difference, a repetition of movement becoming a force of will. Becoming is a force of life immanent in our lives moving forward, changing us always. This will never be the same, and it’ll never be the self-same drama of our dreams again. I walked out and found no lion, and I easily cried, thinking that these tears would somehow replace that which once was. Acceptance of our pain only brings about a minor comfort. Life requires creative and experimental force to keep us from devaluing it any more than we should.

I held my head down to return to the hut, as night was encroaching. I opened the door and didn’t find my Nietzsche. I had to rub the tears from my face to believe what I saw there inside the warming room. There on the bed, where the old man once was convalescing, a calm baby sat upright reading a book. He noticed me right off, and with his delicate infant hand turned a page and waved to me to come nearer to read from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying.”[6]

I awoke with these last words and all I could say, as strange as it sounded on my lips, was ‘YES to life! YES to life!’ Only a child that once was the now dead Nietzsche in my dream could help me see this as I never have before. This was all I needed to move on, to think ahead and to live my life as never before.

Aurelio Madrid

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[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippen, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, p. 76.

[2] Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche / Pure Immanence – Essays on a Life, intro. John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman, New York: Zone Books, p. 75.

[3] Nietzsche, Friedrich, op. cit.: p. 16.

[4] Deleuze, Gilles, op. cit.: p. 71.

[5] Nietzsche, Friedrich, op. cit.: p. 17.

[6] Ibid.: p. 17.

maze & mr. diamond on dialogue

Papirus Oxyrhynchus, with fragment of Plato’s Republic.

“…okay, we’re back at the library as you asked, it’s always an interesting challenge to see if I can keep my voice down to library volume. I’ll jump into it right away to simply ask you about the dialogue form and how that relates to philosophy.” A little out of breath Maze looks to Mr. Diamond who, of course, has been reading the whole time Maze was talking. It’s not clear if he heard him. The stack of books Mr. Diamond has is on Plato and the Greeks—this puts Maze a little more at ease.

“You’ll have to excuse me Maze, I’ve become transfixed with a passage from the Republic, because I had already predicted that you would want to talk about dialogue, and there is no better place to start than with Plato, the master of writing Socratic dialogue. Let’s remember that the dialogue form was important because it offered a way for philosophy to be tested in a real world context. What’s of primary importance is the mind or specifically the soul as it acquires knowledge and wisdom apart from the senses. How the soul of a person who has knowledge can express himself through reasoned dialogue through the spoken word onto the pure intellect, is just as important if he can express himself with good recollection, eloquence & confidence.”

Maze thought about this and remembered that the dialectic could be a refinement of this way of exchanging and receiving ideas to get to higher knowledge through dialogue. The acquisition of knowledge is not something to be attained by the senses, but by the intellect.

Back to his reading, Mr. Diamond seemed distracted as Maze asked him, “So, what about the dialectic? How does this work with dialogue?”

Mr. Diamond looks up and quickly answers, “Well, we could think of the so-called ‘Socratic method’, where Socrates works to argue, question and refute commonly held beliefs, and in this case we’ll call them opinions. As we know opinions are not the same as knowledge, the real effort becomes the goal to work this out through dialogue. For Plato the art of dialogue is where knowledge is found. This doesn’t mean that every dialogue produces truth. Truth, the access of truth really has more to do with how it’s arrived at, and it’s about the method of inquiry by which it’s examined. Truth is discursive and is brought about via philosophical conversation.”

Maze nods in agreement, “that’s wonderful, this runs counter to our everyday notion of truth as definitive and static, looking at truth in this way positions it as always changing, opening and transforming—an education of the soul.”

Mr. Diamond pulls out the Republic, flips through to his bookmarked place and reads, “As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and understanding to perception of shadows.” (VII 534a)

Aurelio Madrid

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Plato, The Republic, Intro. and notes Elisabeth Watson Scharffenberger, Trans. Benjamin Jowett, New York: Barnes and Noble Classics 2004, p. 247.