Process rooted in the verbal and the disengagement of a teleological Weltanschauung (Verbal preface to a yet unwritten piece) A cautionary

note to those that would seek to understand what Ive set forth: I am afforded the opportunity to experiment, and an experiment I have attempted. This is not to say that Ive invented something unique or new, or that others have written as I write here, but more that I havent, and, furthermore, havent read anything comparable something that will hopefully be pertinent to the overall piece (Im not convinced that this could be called an essay). The guides I gave myself form part of the body of the piece or should quickly become self apparent and so there seems little point in my making them explicit or justifying them here. Essentially, I would only have the reader know that although the concept of purposefulness is up for question in what is to follow, it might be worth nothing that things are as I would have them be, whatever interpretations the reader wishes to superimpose.

I feel like we should start at something were going to call the beginning, though I should like that you thought that there is no beginning, nor end well, obviously there is! and that this that you are reading plays at in? what we might call the verbal. -------------------------- Straight away Im confronted with a paradoxical challenge in my efforts to make effable that which dances and is emotional a problem of authorship or maybe authenticity. I could present a dialogue, minds parrying and dancing between one another, yet surely a predetermined conversation, composed to convey an argument is little more than disingenuous prose. I had also considered transcribing an actual conversation, had with my friend Jesse who lectures in philosophy in Seoul, and we even had the conversation in which we gave some justice to my loose ideas. The problem is, although I want to consider conversation; and consider it as something of great

worth, conversations that take place between, two, even three or four interlocutors end up being a bland dialectic, bound to logical rules in which the parameters of accepted, established guides/rules/laws determine the vast majority of that which is said. And, to be honest, that doesnt sound like the thing Im looking for, if it can be said we are looking for something at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------- I keep coming back in my head to the idea of dancing. I think Ive already mentioned it a couple of times actually. It seems like conversation can be understood in terms of a dance. And to extend the metaphor, prose might be thought of as some kind of purposeful run like a salesman running a package to his customer. Its admittedly not the neatest of metaphors, but it might be worth sticking with a while longer. A dance can take on many qualities some are done really quite formally and learned, others like with your friends are controlled, but offer some room for free expression. Others are interpretive, considered and might have an esoteric nature. We might be able to anticipate the moves of, say, a ballerina, predicting her obligations to flow or adherence to a particular training school, say. Other dances might only be negatively defined, as we struggle to understand the jostles and jolting movements of someone were watching. And I think it might be something similar to this negative definition that might prove helpful in our understanding of conversation. So what kind of activity might we be talking about, then? Its very probably something wed find hard to index; something approaching the infinitive: to dance or dancing; and hence something essentially verbal or lived. It has a concern for the world around it. It parries like Mowitts city dwellers, beating their way through their environment as they vie and jockey the crowd around them. Yeah, I think this helps us, this idea of parrying. The contrast Im trying to evoke, then, can maybe be understood in terms how dancing responds to its environment. But surely the man delivering his package is even more responsive to his environment? He must negotiate the twists and turns of the road, dodge rocks and avoid bumping into people along the way. Yes, to be honest prose doesnt even seem to achieve even this. Its more like a dead beached whale, up for our dissection and consumption. But Im probably just being silly now. ----------

---------------- The attempt is to allow you to see what its like here should we understand this word ontologically? and hope that you find something useful to take away. Grammar, structure, schema can be given a backseat for now anyone whos ever tried DMT or been in a k-hole is going to have some empathy for this disregard. The choreographer attempts to explain his dance to the sympathetic runner --------------------------------------------The first piece I wrote contained no corrections an attempt at a flow of consciousness, I guess simply a stream of that which was as it was. But how disingenuous, no? Anyway, flow is misleading, even if such a trope runs in many directions, eddies, ripples and surges, it still is bound to Science so that they are one and same and I want to go much further than Science. A gesture toward faith, maybe. Our trope must start with us you, I, everyone else and dance us through our setting forth. --------------------------------------------- I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the Greek word Hodos in that way philosophy appropriates it as the path-like interconnectedness of ideas like our multiplicity forms furrows in the grass between water holes, carcasses, shady trees and even open savannahs and though the idea still appeals to me, its two-dimensionality would see us as flat, and worse, like features on a vast schematic, and not as the masters of beasts, savannahs, paths, cartography and all that may and may not present itself as I want us so much to see ourselves. No, this if it can be called anything though we are unlikely to find out if it can be titled in any meaningful way is not hodological. Paths lead us somewhere and the place we arrive at we call the end. They can rarely be said to move upward or downward and instead form a two-dimensional plateaux. At best this becomes multi-linear. What I want to explore is a very different kind of movement. One that explodes in gaseous clouds yet finds meaning in dances, love and disillusionment alike. ------------------------------- Maybe making a brief negative examination will help us explore. As weve said, a path like the ones we just talked about take us from somewhere, on a course to somewhere else. It is defined by boundaries to our (being us that use it) right and left and the assumption that we start on it with intent maybe to use it as a means to a yet another path or it maybe it

provides the means by which we are led where we want to go. What assumptions Im making! I mean, could we not just lie down on the path and stare at birds, flying overhead? I could stage a play on the path, paint it, demolish it or build a town along it if I really wanted. And maybe thats the point too often our initial assumptions and intentions of the path are of its purposefulness; its being toward an end. Our focus is not on the path at all but its linear, directional too often mono-directional! qualities. Does it lead me where I want to go? A question even the rambler inadvertently assumes in his purposing for the path. This is all starting to sound like Im championing the consideration of paths in and of themselves, but I dont think thats quite it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A Sunday afternoon we lie on BaDas bed slightly hungover; slightly dizzy. His thick Korean accent lays a veil over his meaning yet we find ourselves now watching a film he wants me to see. TED, Jill Bolte Taylor and A Stroke of Insight and I get what Ive come to recognise as a kind of fizz, that happens when something significant is taking place right in front of me. Her emotion cannot be separated from her message Rejoice! she tells me, your right brain is at one with the energies of the world; it doesnt recall the past, anticipate the future or anxiously analyse the world around it. I envy her stroke, and her loss of rationality, logic, even sanity. Suddenly, I want to explode inside that moment of loss and remain there, without reference to any schema or guided sense of selfhood; all barriers between exterior/interior sublimated like gasses, forever ephemeral and boundless. And in the same instant Im recalling the fear/joy/oneness of taking too many drugs; Ketamine assimilating and coursing through my own blood; logic evanescing; the structure of the world diffusing and feeling empathy with Jill Bolte Taylor. But its not enough the standing ovation give close to something left open in my mind. I barely notice the deterministic formalities of her bow and ceremonial acknowledgments to the audience. Instead, I feel the possibility of my existence in the world and the contingency of my feeling it, and the necessity of that contingency. ----------------And Im somehow reminded that if I had written all this yesterday in the clarity of that mornings mind how radically different things would have worked out

and how my truth my ontos embraces my contingency so closely that neither can be discerned. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------The paradox I mentioned at the beginning should hopefully be permeating a little deeper by now and my grasping the ether hopefully a little less well understood. This is the paradox simultaneously at its most and least comprehendible. Put simply, the question imperceptibly filling the space around me has been: How to realise the ineffable. There was clearly something I wanted to say, otherwise I wouldnt have started writing this. But as soon as one tries to give materiality to something as vague, evanescent and infinite as the inexplicable, it is gone. But like the ether that surrounds us all, maybe this question is best considered as the very mode in which we see at all, and the paradox is akin to the problem of trying to see oxygen. ----------------------------- Was there an ethics somewhere in that exploration? I kinda hope not. I guess I had wanted to recognise something, to re-engage with something that I never stopped holding as a possibility but maybe had misunderstood the mode in which it exists. I want that moment of authenticity to jump up and engulf me, even suffocate me at times, so it can remind me that Im free to chose it or reject it. But crucially I want for myself to recognise that this state of false consciousness we all find ourselves in is not to be understood in ethical terms authenticity good, false consciousness bad. But rather they are one and the same praxis. Like a piece of string tied round my finger; Dont forget!, I hear myself say. Hopefully, Im reminded that complexity is only the start of exploration - --------------------------------------------------- Should I feel reproach that the performative style Ive sporadically written in has given way to formal prose at times? Or that this whimsical, styleless approach inadequately communicates my exploration? Or even that I have gone to such few lengths to explain myself? If the reader or listener thinks so, or even has hung on to the should at all throughout this piece then there is a sense in which I have failed, though we might disagree on where my failure lies. I can still hear Jesse warning me: stick to the plan, he urges. But I think Ive always had a problem with plans and superimpositions they feel like globules of water lying on a surface, conjoining to form ever-bigger inverted, mini lakes so to avoid their evaporation.

And all I want is for the air to be filled with their vapour, and for me to breath; absorb it.

Bibliography, though Im sure its clear that its more in terms of inspiration than formal referencing. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology in Basic Writings Ed. David Krell (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1993) Jill Bolte Taylor, TED, http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html , Filmed February 2008, Posted March 2008. John Mowitt, Sound of the city: a musician is being beaten in Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (USA, Duke University Press Books, June 7, 2002) Henry David Thoreau Walden (USA, Empire Books, September 28, 2012) Yve Lomax A Twittering Noise in Sounding the Event:Escapes in Dialouge and Matters of Art Nature and Time (London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2005)

NB The few quotes used in this piece are not direct and resemble little more than a vague paraphrase.

0. Delivery 0.1. Should encourage active participation of the reader/ viewer. 0.2. Written submission 0.2.1. Della Pollack, Performing Writing 0.2.2. Written exactly as spoken without correction, proofreading (though with considerable planning) 0.2.2.1. 0.2.2.2. Stream of consciousness Circular, spider structure

0.2.3. Demonstrative metaphoric structure 0.2.3.1. 0.2.3.2. Running to get somewhere, dancing to re-engage. The young photographer scared of film

0.3. Video/audio submission 0.3.1. Interview?

0.3.2. Inclusive of mistakes and making process 1. Introduction 1.1. Why are we asking this on a visual cultures opening essay? 1.2. Is this a reaction against the sudden demands of the academic environment? 1.3. What is it we are exploring here? 1.3.1. If its a question that seeks and answer, we have already misunderstood the premise 1.4. Dyslexia as link to conversational learning 1.4.1. Nuclear and linear mind mapping. 1.5. Pre-ethical 1.5.1.1. Should implies a purpose, this examination will explore

alternatives to a teleological engagement with the world. 1.5.1.2. 2. Teleology 2.1. Frustrations of a teleological perspective with the world 3. Process 3.1. Conversation 3.1.1. lends itself to the play of lived experience, which prose restricts. 3.1.2. Conversation does not address, it lives and responds; jostles and shifts in meaning. 3.1.3. Pask and Conversation Theory1 3.1.3.1. Offering a framework for how conversation leads to How this might relate to the left/right brain

knowledge construction. 3.1.3.2. But this is too fixed, too objective.

3.1.4. Dialectic view of conversation 3.1.4.1. Does conversation ever truly achieve synthesis? 3.1.5. Conversation as synonymous with Daseins negotiation with the world

Gordon Pask, Conversation, cognition and learning. New York: Elsevier, 1975

3.1.6. Conversation as ephemeral and contingent (as opposed to prose as permanent and necessary assertions and informative of bad faith) 3.1.7. If the conversational essay is written, does it not act like prose? 3.1.7.1. 3.1.7.2. Certainly in its materiality it does. But maybe the record of dialogue is differs ontologically?

3.2. Michel Sorres and the untranslatability of the sonorous. Michel Sorres, a man himself considered untranslatable by many academics, those chatty people. 3.2.1. Anti- Adorno? 4. Conclusion - Where does this take us? 4.1. Conversation reminds us of the potentials of our existence and the falsehood (false consciousness) of essentialism in ontological assertions. 4.2. Left/right brain differentials 4.2.1. Engagement with the now point and energies that connect us with the world around us. 4.3. The Paradox 4.3.1. We are dependent on our finitude for meaning, a shared system of communication yet the world is presented as endless possibility and half of our mind has no engagement with language, future projections or reflections on the past. 4.3.1.1. By championing an engagement with the verbal

Heidegger (in)Authenticity, false consciousness Autopoiesis Nicholas luhamn Hermeneutics gadamer Paradox that exists here Technology is a means to an end Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and utilize the means to them is a human activity2 a means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained3
2

Martin Heidegger The question concerning technology in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1978, pp. 218

The telos is responsible for what as matter and what as aspect (eidos) are together co-responsible4

3 4

Martin Heidegger The question concerning technology in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1978, pp. 219 Martin Heidegger The question concerning technology in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1978, pp. 220