Note: heavily pixelated latitude and longitude. Google Earth “inhibited” on the West Bank of the dried up Jordan River, probably suppressed to conceal the illegitimate activity that Israel is undertaking. Up until lately street names have been absent and the massively inferior pixel quality in the Occupied Territories is palpable. You can see the disparity to the neighbours- even from a high altitude- the evergreen, the suburban, the maximum security, the loaned up the hilt, the after-the-event-archaeology-as-tourism; many sites of which rested in the rubble before the Nakbah and some of which ended up in the rubble as a result of the Nakbah. A shifting sea of rubble. Looking at Palestine in Google is an insult to the eyes, as this is a piece of franchised software that has been politicized way before the idea. Again, you can clearly see the disparity in the colour of the land between Israel and Palestine, the thirsty, insatiable occupier who is draining the Jordan and Golan Heights, as well as other basins, which it has done from day one. You can see the pathetic impotence of UN Boundaries, International Boundaries, Oslo Accords, Armistice Boundaries and anti-social historic walls of archaeological importance- but not the massive long concrete walls that encircle most of the country like a grey carbon seeping reptile- as David Icke would put it.
Imagery Date: 3/30/2011 (First causal time-lapse)
31º 54' 17.18" N 35° 11' 46.18" E
Elevation: 855m
Eye alt: 1.62 km (synthetic displacement)
© Gisrael
Most people know where Google Earth comes from. What it was originally used for, the satellites military uses, the beautiful idealism of NASA exploration, we know who developed it and why and people happily accept the satellites functionality and ironic un-functionality, such as an orbiting scrap heap that probably now protects the planet from asteroids. The strange ontological relationship to really useful products is often an interdependence frequently marred by the presence of a figurehead (CEO’s) and their socio-political activities; which are often dealt with as a separate entity by marketing departments or advertising agencies. I find myself thinking about invisible products that have no branding and morally un-corrupted, whatever that means and as ridiculous and naïve as it sounds, the desire remains the same- that exhausted end-point where utopias are spawned. A place where the question doesn’t have to be addressed or avoided or boycotted and we can talk about use function and improving it, distributing it to an audience who really needs it. Obviously love works in those contexts, where it moves into free labour and internships and our relationship to the world re-commences its descent.
Imagine Zizek’s Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality as a stage for the Israel/ Palestine conflict/ illegal expansion. Imagine what Zizek describes as an “effect of sense”, which is an imaginary meaning (the experience of meaning- or collective experience of meaning) where Israel’s "inherent constituent" is the mis-recognition of its determining cause: the formal mechanism of signifying structure itself. Nakbah deniers refusing to acknowledge the body count of Palestinians in the on-going formation of the State; the impossibility of acknowledging the Nakbah because it falls on Israeli independence day and would undermine people’s desire for nationhood: the wedge being the birth of the State, the wedge being the State. Imagine how that is applicable to other cultures where people are unable to step outside of history sufficiently enough to prevent what Zizek refers to as our subjective attitudes, these "existential projects" which have grown out of the subject's concrete inter-subjective situation and for which the subject, in his [sic] freedom, is ultimately responsible. Most of us are familiar with the pretext of those situations but are unable to catch up with the progression, scope and intensity of the series of infinite pretexts, hegemonies and subjects. The violence and displacement easily reaches into our own personal spheres and it becomes disingenuous talking about it, which is another opportunity for expansion. In the formation of the Israeli state- and via it’s day-to-day existence- there is memoricide, politicide, historicide, schismogenesis, shock therapy, wars of attrition and numerous other forms of social violence that has been generically termed ethnic cleansing.
Imagine these existential projects as hermeneutics, in a quite basic sense. Firstly, say, when hermeneutics is defined as hermeneutics such as in a parallel world that is slightly unfortunately ontologically text-oriented and imbibed into historic and religious texts. Secondly, contemporaneously; in the abandonment of religion and history and for the text itself to be dissolved in such a way that it can travel further and faster and becomes applicable, where the ideas are given a responsibility in acknowledging the text’s and the reader's inherent ambiguities/ limitations and how that permanently affects the re-reading of things, thus also making ourselves and hermeneutics more dissoluble. Art can be inter-subjectivity and I have always loved that aspect of it in Modernist literature, where I felt like I was often falling or swimming when it was really good; Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts into Air, Kafka’s horror, Camus’ listlessness, Nin or Miller’s sexual appetites, or the desperate effort of Sartre's auto-didact, trying to read an entire library alphabetically and dying at J. There seems to be a mutual consent about the limitations of arts activity amongst authors, whether it is humanistic or political, that precipitates this type of dissolution.
Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude; that hundred years being the gap from Magical Realism to Speculative Realism, which could be an amusing narrative or where time and history are assembled, textually, in an un-linear, heterogeneous and super-subjective manner; where subjective interpretations[1] of morality and immorality are addressed in an abstract and fluid fashion that is seemingly more elusive when read factually/ analytically, where the politics is pushed back. The writer calls for an abandonment of reason to create an overwhelmingly despondent situation and now is calling for reason to return, as the world has gone mad and is barking with subjective creative positions on all and everything.
Jose Arcadio Buendia’s geography appears to be fixed, from a general point of view, and his fixedness enables everything to fall around him, it may even facilitate it or precipitate its demise, like a prophecy or a call to arms to the world, the reader starts to question the shifting nature of the geography/ topography and its relation to history and its timeframe. Maybe it is the reader who is falling. Jose and his family exist, like all of us, as something liminally condemned, subjugate to an occasional magical effect of cause and the law, where humanity is at its most violent and shocking, traumatising people lucky enough to survive- where humanity’s optimism has a strange role, where it doesn’t matter if the individual is positive or not and the arbitrariness and indifference of nature is also mirrored in humanity advancing at different rates and pulling the world back towards ourselves- like some terrifying threat of pending homogeneity. These things and this way of thinking becomes a super-sensorial assault for the reader, while still acting as a signifier of a very colonial type of attitude and practice. It cannot be anything but an initial conflict with spaces on a very basic primeval, survival level- and desire- and time move through us and around us. Consider the modern idea of obesity, its social manifestation, stemming from an inbuilt [sic] ancient hunter/gatherer urge to store food that has been indelibly stamped or entrenched into our genetic makeup over thousands of years, which cannot, psychologically, be switched off. The gene that part propels us into a natural cycle that conflicts with a very common traumatised modern sensibility, whether it is obesity or ethnic cleansing. Jose’s genetic destiny moves continually from the corporeal to the ethereal in a series of continual and unsurprising flow of causal and legal colonial crimes, existential aberrations and drug-like ruptures. I actually abstained from reading fiction for 10 years for various reasons and this was the first venture back into fiction and it completely consumed me in the most beautifully helpless way.
Displacement as a locus- and the subjective attitude is designed for escape and cathartic revenge and all sorts of other survival strategies that are genetically encoded into us; collectivization follows afterwards, people revel in the strange flickering conscious act of being. Today, it is a political complaint of Google Earth or Google syncing with my Apple products, the hegemony of the Gregorian calendar, the prosthetic phone and laptop or taking pictures on my phone purely for the GPS location- not the image. Hermeneutics in a dissolved topography explains the continual presence of Derrida in many contemporary forms of examining different landscapes, which is present in things like Object Oriented Ontology and Subjectless Subjects, Objectless Objects- and the prevalence of the "Un" and the "Non". I think of them as a conscientious form of entropy, that is specifically asking the reader to hold back and reminding them of not just the beautiful ambiguity of the situation they are in but also the darker effects of a certain limitism that can take hold of phenomena. But Derrida is also not there and he is also irrelevant, just like every person who ever picked up a pen or started to type, we are being asked to reject classical forms of entropy and realist pessimism- and we are being challenged to explode our minds and to see how long we can embark on psychological exercises that place other potential objects- or potential things- in a vast inter-subjective epistemological set up; an exploded world of object based empathy.
The Imaginary Meaning/ Effect of Sense has a ring of defeatism about it. I think there is a realistic and pessimistic origin that is suggested by Zizek's exhausted tone, along with the rest of the un-governing world that is not just endemic to texts. So the Derridean notion of the violence in words, this idea of cultural assault, also resonates with the Batesonian notion of Schismogenesis and its violent psychological accompaniments- it is difficult positing "the other" and defending values against larger, more powerful, established and stable forms: the various hegemonies that implicate a certain resistance, from money, to authority, to time, to oxygen. The saddening reality is, that a motive is not always present or true, or constant, especially in nature and infrequently so in humans. Values, unfortunately, can always be manipulated and motives, allegedly, can be concealed.
Suicidal State. A4 Ink 2011
…This inherent non-symbolizable reef maintains the gap between the symbolic and the real, that it prevents the symbolic falling into the real and, ultimately, what is at stake is a decentrement of the real with regards to the symbolic is the cause: the real is the absent cause of the symbolic…”
The "signifying structure" is culturally imbibed through various hegemonic and historical pretexts that have been transported/ transcribed throughout contested periods of time. I don't why it is, it just is, just like I don't know why I have started to have camera tracking shots in my dreams, or that they look like they are shot on a dolly. Why is there a mis-recognition of the formal mechanism of the signifying structure? Besides the fact that we are not to know when a thing is realised (in a non-intersubjective sense), that if the things were realised, what manner are they recognized? Are we really expected to be able to examine everything everywhere consistently, all the time?
The disparity in the potential of things relies on the individual to be partially incorrect- or vice versa- or in situations where an individual sense of responsibility is un-measurable due its inherent realism, or where the notion that the end-products of meanings are inevitably inhibited, restricted or removed from us. It is hard to separate looking at these disparities as a form of animism on objects/ possible things and, again, a revenge towards hegemonies that implicate us in such an emotionally exhausting mental activity, however the latter could be perceived as a classical form of political nihilism that I am supposed to be escaping from.
A perpetual state of dissatisfaction, inevitable relinquishment and consolation of facts that become stranger and stranger, as we become more consumed by the threat of becoming a more distorted version of a seemingly already distorted self.
…As we move from signification to its cause, signification is conceived as the effect of sense… This shift from signification to the signifying cause (correlative to the notion of signification as an effect) does not reduce signification to a product of positive determinism… What forestalls this reduction is the gap that separates the symbolic from the real…”
That gap that separates the symbolic from the real, the product of signification and signifying cause as an ontological aberration of desire? As well as being a depressing but frank admission where the effects-of-sense are not productive enough and catharsis being used as a crutch for maintaining some kind of momentum. The collective experiences of meaning are compromised by the mis-recognition of “effects of senses” and especially the shift from signification to the signifying cause, which is a highly developed sense of self-awareness that includes material wealth, power, and a more disparate and sadistic approach to realising its fictitious cause/ aberrant desire. That Israel has claimed to have waited a long time for this fictitious return from exile has given the fictitious state sufficient time to develop its own vernacularized type of self-awareness (x millennia) that has a super-realised effect-of-sense.
The disparity is more horrific; people don’t need to be there, our restricted Effect-of-Sense or restricted technology enables that (and I am not talking about just a blurry over-pixelated image on another nameless part of Palestine in Google Earth). People in the gap are less inclined to sympathise with any form of collective symbolic desire from the other and although the positive determinism is plain to see, whether it is in the form of UN resolutions, or further definitions of the Protection Gap- or simply in the everyday malcontent and despair. There is always some kind of emotion that anticipates us, a culmination of ontological facts and for me it is a pervasive and detached state sponsored cynicism that awaits me, fuels my anxiety. These things do not end, that the idea that this behaviour is endemic to us is almost a green light to some, or that the awareness of what can be got away with in this hopeless un-human international realm. In that sense the signification and the signifying cause are catalysts and green lights, catharsis as a confirmed reality merely by saying so (A schismatic trait and Derridean notion), maybe this is why we have to be dealt with as objectless objects, or subjectless subjects, or subjectless objects or objectless subjects. Maybe power is a vacuum and we are the contemptible dirt that cannot resist. Zizek highlights these depressing occurrences:
…The gaps functions as inherent limitations of this order... The Symbolic order is ‘barred’… The “non-all” are structured around a hole…”
The latter is especially appealing, as is the author’s assertion is that it is more of a topographical feature than metaphysical; it is another delimited, non-specific space/ terrain that anticipates these various un-forms of humanism or non-all types- a liminal state, or an umbra, or some kind of plane where again inhabitants are subjugate to various laws, many of which are immutable. That immutability defines the hole or the gap, for me those fissures perpetuate permanent boundaries and recurring stumbling blocks, personal inabilities, my own stupidity and numerous faults as well as numerous socio-political everyday impositions and physical restrictions.
This inherent non-symbolizable reef maintains the gap between the symbolic and the real, that is it prevents the symbolic from falling into the real and ultimately what is at stake is a decentrement of the real with regard to the symbolic is the cause: the real is the absent cause of the symbolic…"
The Freudian and Lacanian name for this is trauma. It can be reduced by the simple act of not practising religion, or not claiming ownership of anything, especially countries and patriotism, even sexuality, where the pressure of having to make some kind of sexual choice is generally deemed a point of no return. It maybe a culturally repugnant idea to many but the onus is assuming self-responsibility and governance and working with shared, common values that are non-divisive. Lack of ownership inhibits market forces and it doesn't have to be as drastic as Diogenes throwing away his drinking bowl or Michael Landy destroying everything he ever owned. Basically adopting the same microscopic amoral objectivity, functionality, pragmatism of any hegemony that one disputes would also be a positive way to ensure a modicum of sanity and self-respect. Also leaving things, not just geographically, is also a sane inducing and emotionally economical practice. There is a topological political tradition of that: abandonment.
…The relationship between Cause and the Law- the law of causality, of symbolic determinism, is therefore an antagonistic one; ‘Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in chain, in other words the law… there is Cause only in something that doesn’t work…’[2]
I would say there is also a definite historical pretext based on the symbolic that pertains to Cause and the Law that is appears both artistic and political. The ‘real being the absent cause’ is an emotional signifier, a trigger, or a pervasive spectral force that subjugates people into various forms of action and submission. The UN specified Protection Gap is the term used to describe the disparity between what is claimed by the illegal occupying Israeli power and the scar of the term: “the real being the absent cause” on the ground in occupied Palestine. The pervasive nature of these ideas cannot fail to instil some kind of moral response, yet morality is un-accessible to pretty much everybody; either an exotic product of choice or a useless ineffectual emotion against titans like Cause and [contested] Law.
…In short, the real is the absent Cause, which perturbs the causality of the symbolic law. On that account the structure of over-determination is irreducible. On that account, the structure of over-determination is also irreducible; the Cause exercises its influence only as redoubled [or exploded], through a certain discrepancy or time-lag- that is, if the ‘original’ trauma of the real is to become effective, it must hook onto, find an echo in, some present deadlock…”
Freud: ‘A normal train of thought’- expressing a present deadlock- ‘is only submitted to the abnormal psychological treatment of the sort we have been describing’- to the dream-work-‘if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and [/or] in a state of repression’, that is, a desire concomitant to the original trauma ‘has been transferred onto it.’
Zizek: ‘Over-determination means that this statement must [?] also read in the opposite direction: an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression, can only exert its influence if it is transferred onto a normal train of thought.’
The latter transference onto that normal train of thought could also be considered as a topological way of thinking, in order to consider how it moves and how it may be considered. I like to think of it as an active influence over things like non-linear dromology or unconsciousness- not in symbolic terms, either but in a literally transferable way: an un-synthetic bridge between dissolute thoughts and a dissolute world in tandem. The topology as something viciously malevolent, where the conceits compound the trauma, which inhibits or oppresses such things like nostalgia, or romanticism- and names of places are consumed, aberrated, destroyed.
Notes
[1] This now resonates as being something inter-subjective and that Magical Realism being a beautiful precursor to Speculative Realism as a means of confirming various limited aspects of art that can be discussed semi-factually, as best as possible, in what Zizek calls an inter-subjective manner- and that explodes in/ links with other disciplines trying to make sense out of an innately violent and seemingly unfair everyday misery as a starting point and make some kind of epistemological effort in attempting to explore things analytically and balanced by being dissolute with objectivity and factuality. There is an overwhelming sea of contempt for the political man with this approach, where we simply leave him behind and ignore him. He can be condemned but rarely affected and I think the preference of analyzing the lives of objects and un-places is far more preferable than laboring on the conceit that art has any chance of changing anything politically.
[2] Jacques Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press 1977 p.22.
