Poesis of Objecthood - Part Nine - continued fragments

9.6

Reality has a double because humans cannot bear the pain of their existence. All sorts of beliefs and metaphysical systems are propped up to remedy the infallible notion that it is simply indifferent to whatever one makes of it. Things just are. Brutish, short, or longer than expected with a leviathan around. Clément Rosset does not grant reality a concealed justification. No authentic version of eventuality awaits behind what is encountered, no underlying order redeems its accidents, and no necessary meaning explains why the chips fall the way they do. For Rosset, the Real is idiotic in its refusal to signify anything beyond itself, and the double provides an alternative to what is encountered, a supplementary existence in which the contingencies of the actual may be justified, corrected, or overcome. Reality is intolerable precisely because it does not comply with our demand that existence should account for itself. Thus, doppelganger versions of raw reality abound and collide with ready-made signs and models that increasingly precede, displace, or dispense with their referents. At the other end of the ping-pong table, keeping tabs on the coefficient of reality, Jean Baudrillard laments its hijacking by the rapid advance of simulation. Rosset is undeceived by these copycats with an agenda and has little reason to mourn what cannot disappear. Baudrillard’s repartee is that reality has already jumped over its own shadow. The Jeremiah of the simulacrum invokes an enigmatic world of symbolic exchange lost to the imperatives of total visibility and operational efficiency. Rosset returns the ball with a deceptive serve calibrated by considerably less theatricality. Tintin’s Thompson twins must have gotten to Jean’s head. His proliferating simulations offer an unconvincing cover for the utter absence of the constitutive enmeshment of seduction and reversibility sported in his discourse. After the topspin drive and forehand smash administered by the players, the ball curiously spins on the taut net before falling off the tennis table altogether. Rosset exclaims with joy that this little match with Baudrillard is living proof that, in the latter’s words, “the real has never interested anybody!” The ball, meanwhile, rolls off the scene and enters the cacophonous, contestation-saturated territory of the largely overlooked - metaphor intended - elephant in the room: the human subject's perspective on what reality is or ought to be.

The ping-pong ball bounces through the Musée d’Orsay and comes to a sudden halt midway through, underneath the ominous presence of Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans. In the painting’s meticulous arrangement, an extraordinary distribution of attention elevates ordinary villagers to the monumental scale formerly reserved for religious and historical figures. Assembled with remarkably little dramatic coordination, no heroic protagonist commands the scene, nor does the religious ritual, metonymized by the cross's vertical insistence against the scene's overwhelming horizontality, offer a passage toward transcendence. The grave interrupts this gathering with disconcerting literalness, reminding the inhabitants of Ornans that although they have acquired the dignity denied to them by conventions, the soil of a palpable earth awaits to engulf them all. In a diagonal recusation of the cross, a hunting dog partakes of the ritual without participating in its symbolic economy, unburdened by the obligation to interpret the proceedings according to their human significance. The hound looks away like many of the humans caught in a dispersed choreography of vacant, grieving, and distracted stares. Its wandering attention sets a tonal key among the assembled mourners, whose distracted gazes and disparate appearances betray a similar susceptibility to the occasion's contingency. In A Burial at Ornans, the ordinary individual acquires the dignity of historical representation amid the circumstances of mortality, while the social ritual unfolds within a geological and biological continuity indifferent to its symbolic authority. In this, Courbet’s realism occupies a peculiar threshold between the monumental affirmation of human existence and its material dissolution. Two of its constitutive tendencies are observational attentiveness and participatory engagement, which he kept in productive tension, no doubt anticipating modern art's divergent yet recurrent tendencies toward perceptual focus, formal reconstruction, and performative enactment. He practiced at once what would become modernism’s oscillations between Impressionism’s instability of observation, adopted by Monet, and Cézanne’s reconstruction of appearance through structural organization. Or between Abstract Expressionism’s intensification of engagement, where physical activity becomes conspicuous in the work’s formation, and Minimalism’s reconfiguration of the encounter, where formal restraints invite renewed attention to the physical object. Regarding the stylistic specificity of French Realism, Courbet pursued more than a faithful portrayal of his subject matter, challenging the conventions about what is worthy of appearance. Yet in its historical course, the aspirations of the aesthetic movement falter when all bets are placed on representational fidelity to the real. Representation presumes to speak truthfully for the other, but that may amount to little more than conformity to an accepted organization of appearances. In this sense, a Braque might be more realistic than a Rubens because it challenges the presumption that visual coherence is a sufficient measure of reality. Although representation harbors a mimetic susceptibility to influence, an amorous responsiveness to the encountered object that may produce difference through repetition, its duplicity arises from a simultaneous affirmation of identity and separation. Thus, representation can establish an identity across the difference it traverses toward its predicate and usually does. Realism’s core characteristic was the rejection of idealism, yet its subsequent submission to the photographic standard of representational fidelity brought this ambition full circle. As mechanical likeness surpassed its evidentiary value and acquired the authority of objective apprehension, becoming a privileged model of visual veracity, Realism spelled its failure by equating representational conformity with photography's alleged optical truth.

The wandering ball leaves the authority of aesthetic and philosophical disputation to err through other dioramas. Subject to gravity, friction, obstacles, and chance encounters, it becomes in turn the object of concern for a museum attendant, then an elusive plaything for an insistent dog. At some point, it slingshots into pop culture’s pinball machine and bumps its way down a glitzy playfield in a convulsive cascade of light and sound, to the twitching paddles, awaiting the kick that sends the steel ball back to a stellar constellation of kinetic activity. Suffice it to say that, throughout its existential peregrination, our ball has been scrutinized from different angles but was never rolled into a definitive putting hole. Perhaps because a long list of misprisions burdens our understanding of what constitutes reality, beginning with factors that are of the same order as subject-object duality. For example, claiming to be purged of idealism when it is an idealistic concatenation of observable facts, or when it acknowledges subjective realities but opposes them to an allegedly objective one, the latter being an integral part of the former. Everything changes when the object comes first, since such an apprehensive lens refutes both the idea that only subjective reality matters and the notion that objective reality is merely a convention to be either slighted or obeyed as the ultimate authority. Objecthood is the key to reality's multiple registries and defines it as the relational apprehension of an entity’s self and its contextual surroundings. Since an event is apprehended by a multitude of beings, no single agent can claim the sum of the perceptions afforded by their individual apertures, making reality a mosaic whose overview is unavailable to any overseer. Apprehending reality always involves betrayal because it is slighted until it hits us in the face. To run its marathon, one is handed a baton with treason on one end and anagnorisis on the other. Recognition arrives as betrayal because reality fulfills itself by frustrating our imagined version of it. It is no wonder that Clément Rosset came to his idiotic reality through Oedipal treachery and a sudden prise de conscience at its duplicity. Reality is both a given and what we make of it, a bitter pill to swallow, and an acentric arena where entities are prompted by the push and pull they exercise on each other. As a relational apprehension, it transcends the modalities of awareness, including sentience and sapience, and manifests through mutual human and nonhuman promptings in a dynamism difficult to capture in static terms, yet provides the basis for the distribution of a shared existential resource. Reality is weird because it has no central command post, but a long list of contending operators, although no one has truly occupied its driver’s seat. It remains overwhelming in its simplicity, a permanent mystery that cannot reside in its myriad interpretations. The expression “the Real” gives a singular designation to something whose manifestations are inexhaustibly multiple, and once nominalized, reality becomes susceptible to being treated as an overarching entity or an ultimate referent. What is generalized through relational investiture acquires the appearance of an entitative singularity, inviting successive interpretations to compete for possession of its meaning. Additionally, representation, reality’s faithful delegate, has disastrous effects when transposed to politics, concocting the very recipe of the oligarchic state. Lest the difference-producing potential of mimesis be put into effect, because the problem that needs addressing and which is of equal concern to anarchic governance is representation defaulting to identity. When it comes to multiplicity, the proliferation of alternative universes offers a serial arrangement less convincing than the unbounded simultaneity manifested through the coexistence of entities. Objecthood holds that each participant encounters reality through its capabilities. In contrast, every encounter generates consequences beyond the capacity of any of them to capture fully, let alone the authority to legislate. Reality is the relational investiture of entities, human and nonhuman, through their immanent and intentional exchanges. When not held up as a mirror one identifies with, it is negotiated among all its participants, and if it offers a ground for commonality, it makes itself only partially available to any given entity.

Ensuring the integrity of entities and their proper differentiation from the relations with which they engage, the patterning sequence referred to as the ritual field provides a way to investigate the relational investiture of reality through the contiguity of entitative objects and the immanent and intentional relational objects implicated in their encounters. Their co-produced behavioral patterns give rise to provisional configurations, asymmetries, and centers of influence whose existence and efficacy remain contingent. The field is anthropo-acentric, and more broadly apocentric, accommodating human and nonhuman participation without an appointed sovereign. Its dynamism includes the emergence of unforeseen relations, the transformation of established arrangements, and the persistence of possibilities exceeding their present expression. The ritual field belongs to reality and participates in its boundlessness. Its investigative reach concerns the behavioral configurations through which coexistence becomes consequential, while reality remains open to occurrences beyond their established patterns and beyond our capacity to anticipate them. The ritual field corrects the entitative condensation of the real, restoring the irreducible plurality of its participants and their relational investments, allowing reality to retain its singular occurrences, its multiple registers of apprehension, and its inexhaustible capacity for surprise.

9.7

When Pascal intuits that the trouble that befalls men comes from their inability to remain calm in a room, he describes a situation in which the entities involved are shoved into a narrow closet, expelling their corresponding relations outwards to collide in an endless brawl. Exposing the treachery from within this arrangement is like eavesdropping on the Virgin Mary chastising baby Jesus as witnessed by Max Ernst and his friends, Breton and Éluard. A sanctified configuration exposes the coercion that operates within it, allowing relations once revered to turn against the figures they are meant to sustain. The scandal might as well be a livestreamed genocide that cannot be brought to a halt lest Europe’s entire colonial history and its conquest of the New World be indicted. Manifest Destiny spelled the eradication of native American populations for the inexorable march of the crepuscular civilizational coalition known as the West. Its ambitions concretized through a cognitive parallax error, christened into a Renaissance whose deployment entailed the decimation of neighboring indigeneity and the abusive management of environmental resources. As current geopolitics, tainted by game-of-Risk intrigue, puts a bandit’s mask on terrestrial biodiversity, low-pitched, sustained, resonant wolf howls across contested lands suggest a more accurate version of events. A decisive catalyst, the wolf is either the ally of a savage in the wilderness or is hunted down along with bandits and suspicious outsiders. The time-honored differentiation between agrarian and hunter-gatherer cultures is the cornerstone of an ecological edifice in shambles, begging closer scrutiny. This distinction is invariably pronounced from a static, sedentary vantage point assumed to be preferential, and its observance is often treated as the fulfillment of a providential promise. Why is the hunter-gatherer always the backdrop of the agricultural farmer, the default primitive state conferred to those outside the archetypal polis? As if one is either inside its civilizing walls, being earnest and taking care of business, or out fussing about in the wilderness, that is when the barbarians are not tacitly awaiting at the gate. Fire tells a different story, as bushmen's sophisticated, controlled handling of it drove the tremendous biodiversity enmeshed in the entanglement of species. It is worlds apart from the ravaging megafires threatening to engulf habitat and the splitting atom that would send a transhuman anomaly wandering through space. The nomad is another case in point. Cast as roaming, peripatetic, or drifting when, in fact, it engages in implicit space-time management that crosses paths with other entities, knowing exactly where it is going and when. Is it any wonder that those sequestered in the comforts of their sedentary fortress have to sustain themselves with permanent wars and distant conquests? It is a perspectival clash when the wolf howls at excessive wool production, and the natives target the colonizer’s livestock for being a nuisance to their maize fields and oyster beds. Lupus in fabula has it that the indigenous and the wolves stood in the way of civilizational improvement and belonged together in the howling wilderness. Biodiversity is the primary economy in an open-ended farm, unbound by the dictates of monoculture. Take the revered buffalo for life’s commissary, a central bank of nourishment and resources, that will transmute eighteen of its hides into the mobile habitat of a tipi, twenty of which will take over three hundred buffalos roaming the landscape to provide a spatial anchor for the clustered clan. The wolves, bison, elk, horses, and countless other creatures that, along with humans, co-authored the entanglement of the American West were homegrown resources that formed a general economy of goods circulated through friction, reciprocal dependence, and continuing adjustment. Compared to the petrodollar and its dependence on an economy consuming buried time, the former arrangement is clearly far more sustainable. To drive the point home, a deep-time perspective immediately reveals the transience of an order whose perpetrators deem to be an effort at permanence. The indigenous peoples of the Americas can boast of a longevity unavailable to the reckless colonizers who came and left, in a transitoriness one is incapable of grasping when surrounded by the thick fog of time. The planet is not done digesting the recent crime perpetrated on an entire continent, nor is it done adjusting to the brunt of the human meteor, and the adjudications of its furtive memory. Two decades into the twenty-first century, it isn’t that the Zionists are intentionally overt about the genocide they are perpetrating on the Palestinians, nor that they are going to great lengths to cover it up either. Rather, they are subject to the temporal reflex that eventually releases a forced drowning to bob back up to the surface. And once social media spilled the beans, they turned it into an exercise of utter deniability, the other sinister pincer of suppression. The shock at their shamelessness might stem from the evaporation of the make-believe that things can change, when they already have in unexpected ways. With every Zionist settler who disembarked on the land of Palestine, before and after the Nakba, so many natives have been catapulted out to the far reaches of the world, including the writer of these pages, to land in the belly of the beast, or to follow what a spatiotemporal objecthood would reveal, on a terrain that has not finished digesting the beast.

The room turns into a slaughterhouse while the skeletons are condemned to hide in the closet. What has been perpetrated on the vastness of the American continent will no doubt go on having global repercussions. Civilization establishes its authority by making its own position appear stationary, central, and destined to endure. From that position, other ways of inhabiting the world become wandering, backwardness, and wild imaginings. But movement itself is a way of knowing and attending a place, and habitation can persist through an organized succession of encounters. News of remote wars and sinking Arabian sands are shuffled in between presidential elections that will consecrate new hegemonic stooges. Geopolitical carousels opine while biodiversity is at the barrel of a gun. Offices change hands, commentaries circulate, distant violence returns as news. Resistance travels in the persistent howl of the wolf, cast as an intruder in its own habitat, against the smokescreen of the backward and unevolved barbarian whose resources have been plundered and whose impoverishment has been turned into a threat. Comparable to the manufactured culpability embedded in the charge of terrorism, it is like starving somebody, only to blame them for causing famine. The civilizational forces, buttressed in their tower of state technicians and intellectual acrobats, believe they can administer the admission price of existence, while humanity’s quest for stellar predominance is sadly fulfilled by the toy figure of E. Musk. But deep time brings the temporal extension of objecthood into proximity and discloses that indigenous agriculture and mobility already belonged together before the polis traced roads with its armies. A place is inhabited through recurring movements of departure and return, grazing and hunting, planting and harvesting. Within this context, the wolf is the catalytic agent that brings the imbrication of species into dialogue with humans. Yet down the line, this inherited relation becomes legible chiefly through possession. As dog owners walk their pets, the leash stretching between them becomes a hyphenation in a language that has now become foreign. Although qualified as ownership, the relational object harks back to a symbiotic link, atrophied into the atavistic remnant of a once vital contract between human and lupine entities. Donna Haraway reminds us that difficult inheritances are part of what our contemporary affection for dogs must learn to acknowledge, thus complicating the suggestion of an innocent alliance. Herding canines have accompanied labor incentives, ranching, colonial expansion, and predator exclusion. But equally important is that humans, too, have been escorted, guided, and transformed. The hyphen remains active as the dog redirects the walk, interrupts the schedule, solicits attention, and introduces an unsuspected destination to the itinerary. As the civilizational fortress counterbalances its colonial footprint with its repressive dungeons, the distant yet still audible howl of the wolf intimates that reality is a theatre with no director, only actors, including the stage.

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