The Feeling for the Image

         Where does influence come from? How are we influenced by the world? I have thought, and possibly wrongly, that it comes down to two main sources: the pressures of contemporaneity, a la the appearance of relevance to mainstream and populist culture, and secondly, from the most positive associations in memory, what has been referred to earlier on this blog as "valuation." I believe if anything new is to come that is positively valued, it establishes continuity with what was earlier judged positive, because we would not even approach it to begin with. However it strikes me that it is very possible that one can value something at the expense of something else, from the past, which begins to be repressed as a consequence. I am undecided, a bit, as to whether this conflict is possible, or if it is the same conflict as that which exists between memory and contemporaneity. Memory has nothing to do with tradition, it is a personal memory. And it's much like the argument made earlier about the perception of time, that it is constituted as the continuity between memory and sensation. Also, curiously, a "sensation" is a popular splash in contemporary culture. And I might as well plug ideas I constructed for a paper in this blog, the distinction between focus and amplitude, basically vision and sound, the choice of perspective as the focal point of the mind and amplitude as the disruption of perspective, the widening for that narrowing. "Focus" is linked to the mind, "amplitude" to music, and emergence. Music shifts our focus, reading shuts out our surroundings. In other considerations I already contemplated how psychic amplitude is memory, how the only thing that disrupts our consciousness, our mental focal point, is the intrusions of memory-associations. We think and think and are going somewhere, and then we get distracted by our own mind, our own memory of something which throws us way off of that focus. And basically what I'm trying to describe is how reasoning is never really pure reasoning, it's always working in conjunction with remembering, which sometimes "amplifies" on a given focus and sometimes deflates what you're saying, as when you have an argument you're making and you remember something that contradicts it. The memory works like amplitude, like the re-orienting force of music, it takes you off your lead, and I suppose the assessment there is that it will take you off your lead only when what you're thinking is not true to your memory, but this is not necessarily so, since gaps in our memory can emerge and beg questions that turn out to be pointless, or we can remember things that are merely emotionally resonant, really not pushing one way or another on what we're thinking, or doing so in a purely aesthetic way that burns itself out like an unpleasant daydream of anxiety. Our memory is a psychic amplitude, it is not objective amplitude, which is provided by the world and by music. 

        Thus memory can drive us crazy, no matter how well we are trained to think rationally, because it throws us off with a projection of "attitudes" rather than any real assertion. Much like an opponent who dismisses us with a gesture, not an argument, our memory spits up something that is just a nasty association with what we're thinking, not a true evaluation of it. On the other hand, I really don't wish to idealize rationality any further than I did earlier on this blog-- culminating in my "Fuck Your Ideas" crestfallen apologia-- for rationality as the thing that is being positioned (sort of unconsciously in this writing) towards the vanguard, towards the sensory reality without any memory, is its own quite dehumanizing thing, much as it is dehumanizing to look at the world around you and say, I have no life before this, before these surroundings. This almost totally steals from you yourself and your experience, your autonomy, and places you totally inside contemporaneity, inside the image of social reality. But basically logic and rationality do something equivalent, which is the evil of analysis, the tyranny of analysis, which is this dissection experience, this will-to-death which is dissection. And in the dissection you create this thing called "knowledge" which is this formula which corresponds to the experience. And what you've done is destroyed experience in the process of "individuating" into component parts, as well as failed to destroy experience for anything but your own mind, because the whole, the relation of the summing will always be more than whatever components you divide experience into. There is nothing to compare experience to, therefore the scientific impulse is to dissect it to try to get to know it through these means, the idea being: this thing I have nothing to compare with and cannot objectify is mysterious, so if I am able to root down into each of its constituent parts I will be able to discern what the experience is from comprehending how it works like a machine. And this produces a pantheistic atheism, in which the world is defined by the totality of observations about it, by a conceptualization based on this individualized perception that has dissected either the natural world, in philosophy, or the personal world, in psychology. 

        Rationality can do little else than this taking-apart of things, this narrowing focus which zeroes in from the whole to the part to the part of the part and so on, so the only real thing to problematize is the taking of this seriously enough to make a philosophy of the world, which includes these awful psychologists. We can't help that we all think like philosophers and psychologists, cranks that they are, however interesting, in our being rational and having a dissecting mind. But what makes it a dissection is the naive, romantic assumption that you are able to assemble an entire picture of experience from within experience, the claim-to-authority that any philosopher or psychologist makes. The only ones that charm me right now are the artistic or the con-artistic ones, like Reich, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida. You won't get any wisdom from these people so you might as well get entertainment and intriguing writing. What I'm trying to say is this-- you go from one category of thought to a particular within that category, and perhaps you go further into a particular of that particular, or you switch gears to an alternative particular with the original category. What you see is a continuous form of conceptualization, of definition, which looks at an object, and discerns a sub-object, and alter-sub-object, and sub-sub-objects, and so on. Relationships: of categorical peers and authors. This is located inside this, this is located next to this, this is where this is located. "This" is located in hierarchy, which may be infinite, and comparison, which also may be infinite. Higher (containing), lower (within), adjacent (contained-together). Basically a compass rose, where, similar to work I did in the past on a Psychic Compass which is coming to my mind, up and down express a more drastic, hierarchical change, whereas left and right express a more arbitrary, unified change. (Anyway you go rationally, my point is, you're dealing with a "thing" you're defining in terms of its relationships: this is next to this, equal to this, this is above this, this is below this. My point is that you try to dissect something and you just end up dealing with the same "thing" of your own observation and the relationships you ascribe to it with other things; you cut into the cat and find another cat inside.)

        And this Psychic Compass of mine is also resonant with the way I have been conceiving of time, of the memory/sensation continuity of time. Because when I've talked about that on this blog, I have always visualized memory to my left, like W: Imagination in my Psychic Compass from 2018, and sensation to my right, like E: Sensation. I have visualized time-perception as the continuity between the present and past, like a point between East and West.  And we can see how rationality enters you into a sterile world of purely logical relationships between concepts, and we can see how memory fucks you up, by heaving unpleasant attitudes at you, things that have been said to you or imagined, or your own misanthropic and pessimistic moments intruding on you, something you say making you feel hypocritical because of such and such thing you did or said. And so this to me is the real tension of consciousness, of mental life, between focus and psychic amplitude, in which we attempt to figure out the world with our mind and on the other hand we keep being drawn back to our personal memories, and our thoughts keep trying to negotiate with those memories. It is memory and logic, except unlike a computer, our logic has to adapt to our memory. So it's kind of a pretense of analysis, of the externalization of analysis, that your thoughts concern "patients" or "the world," when anything you say or think has this liability to your own memory, and no matter how many credentials you get appended to your name that say you can help someone else, the only help comes from one who can remember your own life for you, and by that I mean nothing "sensational," just one who can relate to what you've been through, what you're motivated by, et cetera. And the preposterous idea that a doctor can do this for you on the basis of training is a lunacy of the highest order, because basically, whatever assistance they do provide for you is only the result of their having a common well of experience, which was certainly true of my best therapist; we were both liberal intellectuals who went to Ivy League schools, highly cultured and educated spiritual humanists, and thereby that therapeutic relationship offered me nothing as the result of a praxis, and everything as the result of personal similitude, of her providing some reflection sorely missing in the rest of my psychological world. A therapist didn't have to provide that; if my social/familial group provided that, I wouldn't have needed that. The therapist I had only augmented an absence in my social world, which concealed the fact that I never really believed in therapy or showed any improvement aside from having the refuge a friend would provide during a dark time of alienation and isolation. But as for conjuring archetypes or transferences or dream-developments, I see none of it. What I see is that I got validation in exchange for the validation I gave to Jungian therapy, and eventually things must reach a point where that bond starts to fray, and snap, because either I will become a Jungian analyst myself or they will become a intellectual musician and a filmmaker, and the latter is not going to happen. If my attachment and intellectual belief in the arts were weaker it might have been possible that a dilettantism would be thrown over for that career and vocation. However I have a fundamental resentment towards it, and now it seems like the last narcotic to grow stronger than. But in America, where intellectualism is a scandal, this is the kind of situation that develops, this is the kind of ad hoccery you will submit to to survive. But I got way off base on a simple idea-- that everyone's "analysis" concerns their own memories, the restless workings of a mind to perceive the world as they know it and decide what to do, being "thrown off" by the emergence of memory-association, in a kind of call-and-response. 

        And there's no real way to worship logic or analysis as an ideal therefore, because it is psychologically liable itself to the memories it relates to. It is only so good as it is able to respond to memories, as it can adapt to the personal memory, which makes every psychologist's work seem rather self-absorbed and self-propagative and conceited. So too the philosopher who cannot but try to adapt to his or her own life with their thoughts, and then makes a proclamation on the behalf of everybody's world. The point I'm making here-- which may be rather Derridean, in a way-- is that like Derrida's crossed-out being he got from Heidegger, every philosophical text has nothing outside the text, it begins from dehumanization and this engenders argument. You can be cute about it, which is fun, and which I totally approve of, but to realize this is like saying all authority is a joke, the emperor wears no clothes, that it is impossible to establish yourself as a philosopher or as a psychologist, or a scientist, for the very agnostic reason that nobody really knows shit, and everyone is liable to the widening of amplitude, of emergence, no one's focus is entire. You can write biography, and that's a difficult thing to do, because then you realize how much you prefer making abstract arguments that compel a sense of authority to yourself without yourself necessarily wanting that, to talking about the unpleasant episodes of your life. Probably the only legitimate "scene" of intellectual work is the critical mode, which is a valuation rather than a statement. And this brings up the earlier temptation to do music criticism and cultural criticism-- well, in a way this is cultural criticism, but it's just rather generally a criticism of psychology and philosophy. I suppose there's aesthetics, which would be a more affirmative stance, in that then the arguments strive towards what is beautiful, what is good. 

        How can your thoughts about the world-- as in science-- exist over here on the right, in Sensation-- how can they claim that authority to themselves in depersonalizing themselves of their psychological origin, of what passions motivate the pursuit of truth. This is an aesthetic evaluation. Our perception of time is constituted between memory and sensation, each 2D moment composed in 3D by virtue of the comparisons with memory. So aesthetically, like on the Psychic Compass, this places us too far to the East, to be scientific and depersonalized. If we abandon that pole entirely, which we can't do really, but, when some memory attitude swings on us and we feel fatalistic and like crap, why wouldn't we start up our word processor and try to chew through it? Yet the point here is that this process is very personal, all these philosophical considerations, so-called, are personal considerations, the logical mind's adaptation to memory, the focus on amplitude. It's pretentious and insane to present whatever thoughts come of that personal process as being a doctrine for the world, as coming from expertise and authority. This just goes for any -logy, any logic, is this pure sensation of the world, and it's like a madhouse of rationality in here, of people with great theories and observations who are all clearly motivated by the same survival motives that affect us all in making them. They are no more than journalists, who are presenting their story of what they reported as if they didn't just so happen to be in a certain place at a certain time of their own volition. 

        I suppose "memoir" is the opposite, is the "here's what happened to me" side. And it's funny how these two authenticities de-authenticate the other. The philosopher seems so austere by contrast with the autobiographer's self-indulgence, or the philosopher seems so pretentious by contrast with the autobiographer's homely honesty.  Two forms of egoism: subjective and objective egoism, memory and sensation. I fixate on myself; or I tell you your business. And this is the analysand-analyst relationship, the person who tells their autobiography and the person who listens and provides dogmatic advice, speaks for the whole world. And a real human being, how they perceive time, is between those poles, is neither analysand or analyst. The analysand and analyst are both personas, both segmentations of the perception of time, the memory and the sensation. I was saying a while ago that I wondered how therapeutic therapy was because it enforced a certain narrative onto your ego. It forces you to identify with the narrative of your life as the therapist is inclined to see the life of a patient. So the trauma episodes, they tend to become your life, even more than they may actually do identify you, or just to overrule a great deal of other things about you that are important to keep in mind next to that ... it's like go to therapy if you want to identify with your traumas, and begin to see your social good times as transparent illusions even when they aren't. Eventually there is no social world other than you and the therapist, and if you want to make money you become the person listening to someone else. The cure to trauma is to become a therapist, is to surrender autobiography to philosophy. Autobiography is sick.

        And yet-- autobiography is sick, but the doctor is sick too-- and the doctor's sickness pushes you into a sick position, of autobiography, claiming this is helpful. Autobiography is sick for this different reason, that by telling your story you stand outside of it, as if it has all come and gone and can be digested, and a final meaning ascribed to it. The analyst-analysand relationship establishes this illusion. You are no longer looking at the world, or your own life, when you tell your story, as you are no longer seeing a cat when you try to dissect it. You have left the world for the "tenemos" of the containing vessel of therapy, and you are sharing your memories as if time were not pressing on. "Adieu! Adieu! Remember me." And thereby Horatio is the analyst, the last product of tragedy, without any circumvention of therapy. 

        I look at the world, and the image is meaningful for its continuity. It presses forward, it comes from origins. My understanding of this image is based on the impact of the present being interpreted in light of the past. The image is a text; and only music is a priori, for music requires no context. Sad music is sad, happy music is happy, but forms are given meaning by relationship to memory. So you stay in memory and you pull away from this interpretation of the present ... which is contradictory, maybe, with the emphasis I've recently placed on a "focus on amplitude." But the way I appraise images, the things I see, the perspectives I take, this seems to embody my entire memory inside it. My "angle" on what I see, how I stage the action with my body, under the surface is the emotional and intellectual meaning the image has with respect to everything I've been through. And so as analysand we get into the "everything I've been through," when that is already present in the act of seeing. We feel it, we know it, we see the image of the world as a signifier relative to our memory, a "harmonic relation." And in explicating the past, we flee from that place we are, that thing we are seeing, and do not react to it, or interpret it, but expand upon, and possibly distort through intellectualization, what is there in the picture right away, as a musical experience. For insomuch as the image is aesthetically evaluated, it is musical. When the image is intellectualized in a philosophical sense, it loses that, and when the image is explained in terms of what preceded it, in a historical sense, it loses that too. We dissect the image of the world in analysis, and then we alternatively dissect it, as autobiography, showing all its causal chains. We emphasize the causal chains when the importance is what's happening now and how it's evaluated. It is between history and science where consciousness lives. What happens as analyst is that we become better philosophers, better reasoners, and what happens as analysand is that we become better historians, better rememberers. And we are left with a fragmented reality, a reality that no longer has an immediate aesthetic impact, an immediate perception, but a reality that is deconstructed into a history that may be irrelevant, may be a MacGuffin, and deconstructed into a philosophical system which inventories a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

        I see the image of the world-- here is everything that brought it into being, its memory. Here is every mathematical formula of all of its geometries and forms. I cannot exist in my memory anymore than I can exist in my logic, I must exist between them. Who I am is given me by the response I have to the world surrounding me, a feeling-response which is aesthetic feeling, evaluative feeling. Feeling is broad and can be condemned with 19th century prescriptions about the "passions." The aesthetic feeling is not disinterested contemplation or some such raving nonsense, but our evaluation of the present moment, our evaluation of right here, right now. It is not a matter of "be here now," or some horseshit transcendence of sitting in a Panera bread as I am and seeing myself connected to the cosmic consciousness, infinity in a fake plastic flower, in some bourgeois faux-Eastern joke of a spirituality. It is the spirituality of "what does this mean to me." And what it means to me is a fake plastic flower. Humorous, sardonic, pathetic, human, my feeling for the image. The longing for escape, for a different world, for a different society. For freedom, for wildness, for rebellion.  The world keeps inflicting violence on the unhinged imaginations of a fantasist, who would superimpose the charms they are able to glean from their memory upon the world. The world keeps flinching with its force against the scalpels of memory and sensation, against logic, against personal and public myth. It is far more charming than I, far more scary than I, far more artistic, far more of a filmmaker than I can ever hope to be. It is the influence, the amplitude. A focus on amplitude has to transcend the psychic amplitude of memory in this way, our own inward fake plastic flower.  

        So full circle -- not contemporaneity, not happy memories. These two do influence us, and they do interlock in the image of the world. Happy memories charge the image of the world as a signifier to which it is liable emotionally, but it is enough to feel the image rather than to remember what came before it, to remember what came before it within it. We do not forsake either logic or memory in the feeling for the image, we include them both. Because we see-- we have "aesthetic"-- and we feel. Psyche feels for the image, interprets the image as a signifier within the text of its own life, and aesthetic sees. In seeing the image we both know what we are seeing and what it means for our interactivity with it, we are logical. In feeling the image we understand what it means for us, what it says to us, whether it amplifies or conceals the happiness within us. We have happiness within us that is a priori, that looks for something to express itself within. 

        So how, in intellectual terms, can we avoid this pitfall, to focus on amplitude, to see the image of the world, to see the world, to feel the world. To both see and evaluate the world, how do we do that? Where does our restless mind roam such that it is stationed in this continuity, that it does not analyze, nor historicize? What formal discipline targets us to this sense? What is beyond/between autobiography and philosophy, such that the philosophy and the autobiography are implicit? It is a very particular thing we are saying which is the subjective looking-at the objective world, which both expresses the memory constitutive of the subject, as well as the objective analysis of the world. That is a total experience, and I believe it is most reflected in poetry, as in, poetry is to live, and fiction is to tell a joke. And jokes are fun, but our life is still our life. It cannot be playful for us, but must be will, and I think this is why I always get pushed away from fiction and film in some way, as beautiful as I find them, and as much as they have given to me. We stand in between autobiography and philosophy, and we have two alternatives, poetry and fiction, the seeing of the image of the world, or the creating of an image of the world. And the appeal of creating an image of the world is very plain; out of our memory, our logic, we can design something, something which reflects our aesthetic values, which amounts to the what we want as opposed to the what we have. Or so it seems to me. So we construct a mythology out of our feeling for the world, a judgment, in the form of a joke or a story. Weeks ago, I was demolishing "comedy" on the grounds of its being negating, merely part of a process of elimination, for its denoting the psychologically inconceivable. Our true essence is affirmative, and so it is more intrinsically positive to express the psychologically valuable. Which of course we do-- in giving a feeling for the image-- even if that feeling is quite bad-- we seem to get closer to real knowledge in that interpretation. The feeling for the image of the world is the true interpretation of reality, which is non-analytic, which is aesthetic. 

        This leaves us to decide between the projective aesthetic (fiction) and the subjective aesthetic (poetry.)