You spoke of the beginnings of a new metaphor with which we should look at our present condition, like living in Beijing, realistically. Our metaphors come from bicycle encounters and the emotional outcroppings of the everyday. at the time i could only see flesh as a gliding, swerving in and around vehicles, going without cutting corners. We laughed about the flows.
The flesh as meat——not as skin, as I had previously so imagined——is a space of tightness, of form and intimacy and movement as a squeezing of space. Skin as a gliding over and around, all options open except that one moves merely as a compatriot of gravity, touching, just going. Where do we look, realistically, while on our bicycles, in encounter? Nobody cares. Movement is a question of whomever may 让 first, usually predicated upon size. But let us enlarge our frame of view. To examine our reality here is a fleshy matter, full of scars and circumstance. Situationism could be given, rather, a form of agency. Adjacency. Victorious life proposes a next-to. If we were to give up subjectivity and objectivity, can movement presume, ex-stasis? Flow is always a making up of what came before, along the lines of a scar, reaction and healing. Let us make up for imperial autocracy, let us make up for capitalist pigs, let us make up for the sick yellow man! And so we are stuck in a striving or a being, reactionary.
But Vitanza’s scar is a middle place between flesh and skin, along surfaces and imbedded within. Realistically, we find ourselves covering over, working through, both as a form of being and of representation, as spectators and actors, as lifeforms headed inevitably towards death. Is such certainty a place of flesh or of skin? We fall asleep with the TV, we learn to love and hate our lovers. This affect is of flesh and skin, multidirectional, surfaces and interiors all at once.
Scar as both a place and temporality, a contextification. It is the grounding memory of affect, a node upon the flow of the body, or movement ex-stasis. Flashbacks of life in times of death should tear our bodies from such ecstasies; these are the groundings we can never break away from, realistically.
I slipped and hurt myself today, on or off cycles, wet pavement. In the midst of mutual shock, she snapped at me. I’m sorry, I said.
…in the sign of the scar—where foreground and background collapse—negotiating between life and death, skin and scar, public and private, I will hallucinate on a series of cultural objects that would provide us with exemplary ways of “living on” in the scar of the sign as Dasein. But as I do that, note that I do that semiotically across the images being unfolded over there. Da Sein. But. Of Sign. The episode of “Scar Tissue.” I am trying to situate myselves, through a series of interruptions, corruptions, eruptions, between over there and here. Becoming be-tween. Ec-static. Perhaps after a while you, too, will situate yourselves in between there and here.
–Victor Vitanza, “Design as Dasein”: Scar, … to be accompanied by video
“The threshold is not, in this sense, another thing with respect to the limit; it is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside. This ek-stasis is the gift that singularity gathers from the empty hands of humanity” (Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, p.68, emphasis in original).
do we presume the flesh has a material basis? the organic body, to be sure, but the flesh is waves of resonance, co-produced. it is both the generative force of the matrixial and that which is generated by it. the flesh flows through the skin, and also invests the skin at those tangential moments of touching. the flesh is the totality of mathematics, including the irrational numbers. and yes, the flesh has a material basis.
scar as archival moment. scar as cartography. scar as function of skin tectonics, a “contemporary zone of opportunity, of resistance, and of indifference”.
hmm yes yes yes. scars and bruises and open wounds. the inbetween, an opening, an interruption. can we please pick up the discussion on gaps again?
and how is flesh a space of form and intimacy? isn’t flesh just formless matter? doesn’t intimacy need the skin, an outside, in order for there to be a relation? which brings up again the question about the mass and the individual, or the mere acknowledging of the other, to go back to the first metaphor, from when we were riding bicycles..
sean, do you know many people or moments in which ex-stasis (or other spelling forms thereof) are written about? a point of interest of late, perhaps when unable to think any further about public/private, that became the natural next (a)position…
about form, it was meant in the sense of presence, which may take on less ‘shape’ per se, but yes, as resonating presence, takes upon a form… this intensity of presence i imagine as a form of intimacy, even further than the thought of skin, which may at a certain moment become barrier to the relation… skin holds us up against ourselves, hides and protects…
what are these “empty hands of humanity”? i could think of some self-glorifying understanding of this, but that’s perhaps too egotistical…
–jean-luc nancy, the inoperative community, page 6
“Look at this painting, at these parts in dialogue with each other. It is like listening to silence, which forces us to ask questions. Like a subversive murmur which emerges onto, or butts against a threshold where we are afraid, which emerges onto that very threshold which is the intimate’. It is a re-painting of the silence(d).” (Edmond Jabès, on the work of Bracha Ettinger)
ex-stasis: i do see it here and there, but am hesitant to point these directions gratuitously…let me consider some more.
in the meantime, towards an understanding of past(s)…
“[a metaphysics of process and becoming cannot do without some principle of unification, lest it drift off into atomized incoherence. but it also cannot allow such a principle to fix it into any sort of finality or closure.] this is what differentiates process thought from any form of the dialectic. for bergson, whitehead, and deleuze, and contrary to hegel, “the wounds of the Spirit” can never be made whole; and they always do leave scars behind. the past persists as past, in its entirety: an ‘objective immortality’ that cannot be subsumed or sublated. but this persistence is itself the condition for a radically open future, one that cannot be prefigured or contained by any sort of dialectical movement” (steven shaviro, without criteria, p.130).
amber scoon
skin series
2009
handmade and recycled paper, string, wax and varnish
a few pages later in nancy, lacerations:
–jean-luc nancy, the inoperative community, pages 30-31