So, what our previous post concluded was that aesthetic perception transcends narcissism, as indeed does the sexual unconscious, that there could be no sexuality without a priori relation, and that desire comes about because of the splitting of self/other into the conscious world of the self. The self is an aesthetic category, and not an archetype, and there might be a better word than archetype. A thought I keep coming back to is that of "peak experience," which of course expresses climax and orgasm. Orgasm is a being that is the outcome of becoming, puns intended. This is the importance of memory to our thinking on this blog, aside from the fact that causality as a conceptual intelligence is given by the comparison of memory to sensation, by the continuity that is created "conceptually" in our perception. This thinking here explains the tension between Kant and Schopenhauer. What puts causality and continuity before our perception, what indeed "is" temporal perception, other than this perception which composites two frames of the existence movie, the memory and the sensation? Reading Kant and Schopenhauer, it's an agony of terminology, such that you're not sure who you agree or disagree with, because the terms are so particularly defined. Does this imagination of the memory and the sensation together which creates temporal perception qualify as a concept? I think perhaps Schopenhauer is right, it's not very useful to refer to this as a concept, it really is the most elementary percept, since pure memory and pure sensation would not amount to a perception, and the perception that amounts is thereby "intellectual" as Schopenhauer says, having the intelligence of space, time, causality a priori.
Within memory though, we are reluctant to provide privilege to the "archai" of the arche-type, to sponsor priority bias as Jung does, which would seem just as arbitrary a locus of investigation, if due proper scholarly interest, as a recency bias. And again we're looking at the spatiotemporal perception and it being composited of both memory and sensation, a sort of principal dialectic, a "peak experience," in a sense, because there is nothing to compare it to, and because it is pure experience-as-being, negotiated out of a dialectic consciousness of priority and recency. Archetype, taken to the end of the Earth of explanation, amounts to pure memory, and maybe I'm disputing Jung in a sort of parallel with the way Schopenhauer disputes Kant, and I'm a bit of the breed of a pessimist revision to something I partially admire Arthur S. was. Perhaps if I formally outline these disputes I need to be as flattering to him-- or learn to be-- as Schopenhauer was of Kant. In the depths of a critique you see all the negatives, and forget the positives that got you on board, but I digress. Spacetime-consciousness occurs because of the negotiation of memory and sensation into an imaginal understanding, which we call perception. "Peak experience" would be the valuation of this elementary, but not "original," standpoint. It is the standpoint of originality to presence, being becoming being immanently, originality to currency. There is no Object without a subject, and no Object without a continuity it is experienced within. This leads us to favor the concept of continuity as expressive of "peak experience," over originality, or presence, which is a bit of a funny thing to say, the more I think about it.
We tend to think of time in terms of past, present, future. The future never attains existence such to form a triplet like that, or to put the present as the transcendent function. The power of now is not so powerful. The power of then is not so powerful, either-- though I must interrupt myself here-- within my psychology, often "then" contains peak experience that has been forgotten, and endless exploration into the now is just a forgetting, and some re-centering must occur. So this re-centering is what we're aiming at here with a new trinity of time: past, continuity, present. For we need continuity as a concept to connect past to present. Once again, a sexual association emerges a la peak experience (self-valuation/presence), for sexual procreation as a drive is very frequently linked with this defeat of death, this continuity wish. This urge to heighten the amplitude of a peak experience, a self-valuation at the hands of an inner/outer Other, is evidently evolutionary, a selection among competitors within our own memories. The archetype is a patriarchal concept, because it privileges origin in all cases. Though origin stories can be red herrings, and only peak experiences experienced during the running time contain the whole, or the superior, truth.
The same thinking would be wielded against stubborn music critics and literary critics, who force themselves to see an early work as the best work, or a late work as the best work, and apply a very dumb principle onto things in lieu of fashioning additional criteria of value. It's an approach, in music criticism, that would cause me great pain to apply to the music of David Berman/Silver Jews, since his final album Purple Mountains is a suicide note, and I have no choice but to reject it as the emblem of his life, as he had no choice in that moment but to embrace it as such. Same goes for Sylvia Plath, her life's work has to be assessed by its peak, not by its beginning or its ending, and by doing so and by doing the same even for artists who do not commit suicide, we can humanely evaluate people's careers without having minds that are either too closed (priority bias) or too open (recency bias), because we pay attention to our own criteria at the same time we pay attention to the work.
Contemporaneity, the zeitgeist, collective consciousness, would be that opponent of the archetype, the pathology of the ear-to-the-ground, sycophant of the popular, which in truth is just as annoying to me as traditionalism. Which reminds me of Schopenhauer's notion of the deferral of the representation of will into music, and then other art forms being secondary reflections of the ideas derived from the will. Just the sort of intellectual pattern there, of a dependence on a deferral rather than an "origin," but an origin which in this case is valuation, not memory. And so we get to a very obvious little zen koan about how any originality we can return to and perceive is in effect a continuity insomuch as it comes before perception, and even if there was a pure originality, when you gazed upon it, it would be the gazing on pure presence, pure sensation without memory, which would be unintelligible. Only continuity, the capacity to remember and sense at once, permits objects of space and time and their causal structures to be intelligible. So "archetype" -- I guess in the previous post we attacked the "type" with the more liberal "aesthetic category," and in this one, we attack the "archai-" not on the behalf of sensory contemporaneity, but on the behalf of the continuity between the archaic and the current. Speaking for such continuity, it's in the interest of neither the archaic or the current to attack us back.
So I hypothesize, that all such integral psychic material as I might consider the peak experiences of our past, the expressions of valuations, are refractions of the "continuity" of perception. These touchstones or totems of our past influences assert our being, which is the perception of continuity. Which of course, again and again, links consciousness with sexuality in a way Freud couldn't do, and asserts transcendental dialectic as continually coming-back-to this primary, not prior or posterior, phenomenological pattern. Every transcendence of supposed "opposites" is bound to end up in continuity, not the discontinuity Jung sees as contradiction. Jung gives this to contradiction because it's an impossible thing which permits us to continue integrating a God-self into self in individuation, becoming both part/whole. Shifting this to continuity, we get something better, and equally capable of endless generativity, in fact directly expressive of that generativity. We perceive continuity as the necessary predicate of the objectification of both self and world, and so what coheres with this imaginal percept, has the flavor of peak experience, of orgasm. Now I'm sounding like Wilhelm Reich, so, I suppose I'd better earn the right to say that outrageous thing a bit better. But what I'm saying is not "cosmic orgone energy," but an attempt to explain the aesthetic appeal of things and concepts along the lines of the nature of presence-as-continuity.
It does not seem an accident that continuity is an existential-sexual desire and also the nature of our spatiotemporal perception that resides between past and present. Our very perception, not just the sexual apparatus of our bodies, is wired into the maintenance of that "imaginal concept," that "pre-concept" of intellectual perception. Religions sell the continuity of the self, politics the continuity of the tribe. So what of the discontinuous? What of the appeal of a surrealist painting provided above that might be called "discontinuous"? Really, at the heart of things we perceive nothing discontinuously, even discontinuity is perceived as a continuity and a unity.
Let's approach discontinuity from another angle, that of conflict, and peripherally talk about Schopenhauer's painfully striving will, perhaps only will-negated by contemplation because it is contemplation which is the ultimate satisfaction of the will! Does intellectual sublimation cover up sexuality, or does sexuality always long for perception, the release of orgasm also the explosion of mental epiphany, dawning consciousness upon the relieved will? So we have two opposing viewpoints: the world is flat and the world is round. The one that is discontinuous is the one that will be rejected. Being must exist inside being, and so if we check out the world, and say that it's not flat, we've gone beyond the proposition to the world surrounding the proposition and discovered whether it is continuous or not. You could say "the world is flat" is like a false memory. We check in with the present: nope, it's not flat, and the discontinuity makes the supposition disappear.
Now, aesthetic discontinuity is a difficult thing to explain or identify. But it is easy to see that psychological or philosophical inconsistencies are unpleasant to deal with, in ourselves or in other people. The difficulty we enter in thinking about surrealist art is that then we are no longer talking about "sincere" discontinuities, but "playful" discontinuities, like those of jokes. To house these discontinuities in the form of art is actually potentially an extremely positive statement, because then they are carried within something that has access to the sense of humor. But, discontinuities in art can also be very disturbing, and in my opinion, it is where they are actually existent in a register that is other than surrealism, they do not exist in order to communicate surrealism, which exists in a playful register, but are actually emblematic of real schisms in a person's mind, rather than the critical perspective a humorist or surrealist might have behind their work of schisms in the nature of civilized reality or in the human temperament, the "jokes" of human life. Furthermore, what relation continuity has to surrealism is given by the name "surrealism," which like meta-physics, equates to over- or above- or augmentative to- realism. Thereby surrealism is a core doctrine of art-making because of the amplitude of realism, of continuity, it expresses, a hyper-continuity which is beyond usual limits, not a discontinuity. Surrealism depicts the over-determination of the possible to an extent that seems impossible, whereas many forms of so-called "realism" that are really "civilizationism" reflect psychologically ill perspectives that have attained a position of esteem and authority and so are equatable in a bullshit way with "realism."
A good example of what I speak is the Pere Ubu play we've all seen in the form of President Trump. Now there is nothing continuous about Trumpism, about the psychology and mentality of abhorrent and unreal views espoused by Trump's dog ears "intellectualizations," like the injection of light to treat COVID, or by his followers. These are evident discontinuities, schisms, like that between Trump's words and Trump's motives, or Trump's words and Trump's actions, or reality TV and reality. But if we look at "the injection of light" we have an intriguing, surrealist image, along with the image of this prescription being made by the President of the United States. We do not consider Trump's schismatic psychology or the schisms he allies himself with and encourages in his drones. That is a deeply tragic affair if it were looked at under the microscope, but we're not using a microscope. We're looking at the phenomenon of the idea Trump says, and the room he's in and the position he has. And this scene, these words, certainly are "the over-determination of the possible to an extent that seems impossible," because it is rationality, the epitome of civilization and bureaucracy, that has led us to this point where we witness this. We are not following the thread of Trump's pathetic psyche, but the thread of government, law, morality, cognition, realism, intellect, the social bond, et cetera, everything contingent on that room and that job. That has led us to "the injection of light." And in that most famous piece of advice, we must admit we have the most fascinatingly sublime kind of bad idea, something a comedian might have come up with, or a surrealist artist. "The injection of light" hits us as having something to it, but not as a COVID treatment, and I believe this can be most sensibly, least playfully explained as an example of Trump's own unconscious psyche rebelling against his stupidity, cruelty, and ignorance, and providing us the recommendation as to how to help someone such as himself be liberated from himself, for he will not take enlightenment through any other means other than an injection, a penetration, a subversion of the mind, the skin, a direct encounter with the subterranean blood stream. His eyes do not welcome light; he is in the dark; it must be injected into him, and others like him, independent of the vaccine. No rationalizations will be effective.
So in the surrealist aesthetic experience, we establish the continuity of discontinuities, because they are composited into aesthetic experience, in a manner which pushes the boundary of the negation of the inconceivable implicit in comedy and laughter, outwards to the full domain of art, with a larger, and distinctive praxis from that negation. For surrealism affirms the inconceivable, acknowledges the possibility that the joke may be more truthful than the science. The joke only goes so far as criticism, as rejection of a fallacy. Surrealism goes a step further and re-interprets the fallacy as truthful on a higher dimension of reality. In this way surrealism is not only the aesthetic doctrine of continuity, but the least discontinuous thing imaginable in the realm of aesthetic praxis. A hyper-continuity does not a discontinuity make, but a continuity which is capable of overcoming discontinuity, rather than being extinguished by it. Thus surrealism is the only response to fallacious civilizationism-as-realism, to the "false consciousness" Marxists love to talk about. "False consciousness" will forever be in an agon with "true consciousness" in which "no-consciousness" is the neutralized result. Only the hyper-consciousness of surrealism, the intense amplitude of continuity, can blaze away the discontinuous.
And so we must say, for all their crazy points of view, those Pere Ubus in the form of Freud and Jung are pioneering surrealists, much like Trump is in this example. The unconscious surrealist is the charlatan, who has yet to become a JOKE SCIENTIST, who has yet to be injected with light.
But we've gotten far afield, in a blog post that is principally devoted to "continuity," to demonstrating that hyper-signification, or amplitude, of continuity is the manner by which we can "overcome" the discontinuities we live with and are threatened by. And to this end, when we feel ourselves overwhelmed by the anxiety of discontinuity, the solution must be fixated within memory, since the discontinuity is a break between memory and presence. And, we may further speculate, the very cause for such an overwhelm of discontinuity is because there is a failure to centrally organize around a peak experience of valuation in a particular category. And so, in truth, it is within memory, within the past, under such a prohibitive encounter with the present, where the answer resides, but it is not at the point of origin of memory, at the point at which something was born, where we ought to look. This is incidental. Like a philosophical exercise, which looks at an object and seeks to understand its determination, the why, the what, which tracks its causality from its continuity, so it is true that within a certain register of experience, something is most important, something is peak experience. Consciousness is valuation and so it always orders these things by way of preference, though that makes no claim of hierarchy, for it is valuing a quality, not a quantity, an aesthetic peak, which cannot be scaled in this way. But it does de-select, negate the alternatives, or disperse them to peripheral, secondary importance.
What has seemed to happen in my experience is that one cycles between conscious contents of peripheral, secondary importance which become abstracted in the peak experience, which assesses everything that was seen in reflections in those secondary contents. So those secondary valuations were all ways in which the "aesthetic category-concept" is abstracted, divined into consciousness from unconsciousness. One cycles between things because they are not feeling the energy from them, and finally the selection occurs, when the energy experienced across all of them is expressed in one thing. The organization of peak experiences from a variety of strata build up a kind of self-perception (a word which in itself expresses the self/Other dichotomy as our previous post claimed), and reflects the pressure of being, presence, valuation, and continuity upon our mentality. This does-- appear to-- be a response to outer threat-- a kind of marshaling of forces and inner resources against an unsavory condition of life, which in the last analysis, is mortality-- but, actually, it comes about from a lack of organization in the first place. The outer threat only makes itself known because of the lack of organization. Carry that to the extent of "mortality" and you have a metaphysical interpretation of the purpose of life and trauma and so on, which is the sequential experience of peripheries during a process of becoming, engendering "being" as effect of the selection of one moment from within the sequence of peripheries as centrality. The over-determination, the amplitude, of this continuity, is what we may call centrality, what exceeds the equality of the periphery, what contains the sum of all peripheries within itself, as explained in this paragraph. And such psychic contents have this amplitude in themselves, a priori, with respect to our unconscious valuation, but their amplitude needs to express itself within our valuation such that it becomes conscious.
The psychic content becomes aesthetic category of the self, and the aesthetic perception must pick up on that amplitude, as the manifestation of the psychic Other. So while the amplitude of this psychic content to our Self is absolute, as a peak experience, frozen in memory and being, it must be acknowledged as such by the present-tense of perception and contemporaneity. And to this end there must be a continuity between self- and -perception, just as there is between past and present. And this continuity may only be thought of in this example as that of "sensitivity," which is really a better term than "intelligence" for what "understanding" perception has. It is the sensitivity of a perception that allows us to measure, for example, how far infrared stretches to ultraviolet, to what degree of amplitude is our perception and our inner Other, what emerges in self-consciousness to overhear ourselves. Our perception is like a "reed," a nerve-ending, a vibrating thing standing-on-end, an antenna. The subtlety, the depth, of its valuation depends on its intricacy and delicacy.
This might say something about depth psychology, about what kind of "consciousness" we need to have to pick up on "unconsciousness," or how things that have ostensibly nothing to do with our psyches nevertheless increase our relationship to our own psyches. A sophisticated physical interaction, in the end, sophisticates interaction which can then be solipsistic. The sensitivity of a purely conscious "technique," or "art," is always what may carry backwards that extent of continuity with the peak experience found in the past, what centralizes the peak past moment as the continuity between past and present. Sensitivity, continuity, peak experience are at one and the same central node between memory and sensation. From the perspective of the past, spatiotemporal perception is continuity; from the perspective of the present, spatiotemporal perception is sensitivity. The past sees things as time, as narratives, the present see things as space, as truths. But we see here that the more "intelligent" our perception is, the more sensitive it is thereby, the more self-conscious, the more aware of "surroundings," "conditions," the more continuous it is with our memory, as if each subtlety of nerve-function were another link, not just between body parts and the brain, but to the past, and yet not the kind of link that is an anchor, but the perceptive link, the refining of a link that is always there. We see the link as temporal continuity (just as well as spatial objectification as a whole concept) but also as the sensitivity of that spatial objectification, to what degree of detail it is taken. Yet the links do no grow further and further into the past, this is what we mean when we discourage this romantic notion of anchors to antiquity. Rather they go more and more subtly into the peak experiences of the past, their encounter with the past is not organized or increased in amplitude by way of chronology but by way of valuation. And the past is where the self-representation is manifested, the aesthetic container, and the present is where the other-perception is given. Sensitivity amplifies the continuity of the representation with our perception.
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