3.
âBut,â he said, what does A Beaumont le Vicomte remind you of?â
âI have no idea,â she replied
âOf, âA beau cont le vit monteââ.
As the first relation between difference and pure differance, transcendental 5memory isnât some jewel in the heart of atlantis, but the very bridge between the principal I-Thou, which is a less tentative polarity its more material, shallower cousin âmaster/slaveâ. The reason I-Thou is preferable is a kind of Hanlonâs Razor, whereas marxist dialectical implies the causal consequences only on relationships of materiality, Buber goes further and shaves off the very moral fiber of relationship itself. Daseinâs relationships constitute most of its life, but the objective of all relationships (including those circumscribed by scientific materialism) is to reach the self.
Dasein as self is a relation that is a product of difference that differentiates, divides perception into innumerable categories and discerns among them inside the absolute pluripotentiality of pure difference - one of whose image is transcendental memory.
It is not an injunction of its environment making being appropriate its time as divided into diurnal, weekly, monthly, or yearly cycles - or for that matter into childhood, teenage, adulthood, and old age, rather it is its very constitution down to the nth fraction of a second - this constitution, a slice of the whole of memory, is but an image abstracted towards the generality of dasein.
The reason perception, memory, and time are rent asunder in images because being itself is an expression of difference. In a few billion years, even the sun will have been, leaving behind a few photographs of the glory that was day except it will be difficult to procure enough light to make said image visible, and if one did purchase some old battery to see the extinguished ball, immediate tragedy shall ensue eliminating the remaining population. For the same reason, raiding tombs of cursed mummies is a risky adventure.
Dasein as an image is a featureless plateau colored only incidentally by the parallax of its relationships, the very basis of which is its relationship with itself as particular. The only crests and troughs on this plateau are movements in memory - remembering and forgetting - more generally image is a field in a flux of potential and actual rememberances.
Forgetting then, is not a failure of memory but a sight catalysed or conditioned oversight. There are no lapses in memory, there is either the remembering of something else, or a sliding into fantasy or past. One may recall with great discernment and in great detail even mundane details from oneâs history with the same precision with which one can predict oneâs location at a date some time in the future, but both predictions and recalls require the fuel of determination in the present.
What is âforgottenâ is never lost for forgetting is paradox, the anguish of being is such that had it the power to forget, it would use it to forget everything and anything, but like the fabled pink elephant, the repressed returns with renewed vigor. Schrödingerâs cat is like the keychain you misplaced last time until you found it, between the time you lost and found it, it was an artifact in transcendental memory - regardless of how many people saw it lying on the mantle, it was not there until you recalled its coordinates or somehow otherwise chanced upon it - including having someone else find it for you.
Difference emergent from a self-alienated pure difference becomes a stable, self-sufficient stream of negation.
This stream is completely virtual and hyperreal in the sense that what was real in pure difference is now extended and continues from it - a disembodied narcissus is born and gazes back from the reflection that defines it and into the entity that is reflected, all cognition is a reminiscence of this original gaze.
The dense indeterminate singular subject optatively brings forth a sparse object, a shallow and determinate mutation thus creating a bi-directional system of causal inference in what is now a potent gradient of information.
Since there is nothing perceivable or perceptive about this system yet, any descriptive analysis of subject-object juxtaposition can only be binary-linguistic.
Although the system is primarily dual, difference between the two necessitates a boundary or border, or in terms of deconstruction, a âframeâ.
A near-symbolic object and a near-imaginary subject cannot transact (virtually or othwerwise) without the presence of a mediator of some sort, they are entities as disparate as a signal broadcasted for radio and a switched off receiver.
A kind of lemmata thus is apparent, whether seen as Derridaâs complicated notion of frame, or more simply, any one of the members of Buberâs trinity of I-It-Thou. An agency at the border that turns on the radio and tunes it into a frequency.
In the time it has taken for the simple duality to fract-ure into a trinity all of time has come to pass.
This mediating agency is the positive synthesis between two systemic negations, an interface shared over two parts of a single duality, similar to a day between two nights or an afternoon between two twilights.
It is a plane of similarity existence stretching across two faces of difference, allowing one to be interpreted as a recall of the other - linguistically the connecting thread between signifier and signified. More concretely, image itself.
In everyday life, we see the interface at work when we recognize a spelling mistake or identify the original brand from a cheap knock-off. Even more obviously, when we identify heads from tails on a coin or differentiate between the obverse and reverse sides of a physical photograph. To be even more incredulous, image is what allows difference to be recognized. Without image no systems of difference may be related, no network of meaning may emerge, no gaze may be formed.
Certainly, image here does not refer to the phenomenology of vision alone âimageâ is just an apt signifier for the interface because vision is common and easier to understand than other sense data. Indeed, for a sentience that did not have eyesight but only aural senses, a bone would be a sound alone and for two-dimensional âflatlandersâ, the image would be a two-dimensional record. Like echolocation in bats.
Thus, facilitating the relationship between narcissus and his reflection is the surface of the water that affords an infinite recall.
An interface is a potential image, whereas an image is the representation of actuated potential. Without narcissusâ reflection, the surface of water is a negation not too dissimilar from the negative used in photographic film. Similarly, narcissusâ face is a negation without recall of its features and the recall itself, the impression or memory of the reflection - is also a negation until the water surface activates it. Through the mediation of the interface the dialectical completes its work in image formation. The featureless platueau of self is exactly such a potential image, the tabula rasa inscribed on the underside.
Being imagines itself a fire extinguisher waiting for an entity to break glass and put out the memories burning as if without - but the way out of difference and into pure difference is a recall of something so dutifully ignored it seems to be long forgetten, except the thing forgotten is forgetfulness itself.
In birth the mother that is body divides and in death consciousness is factored out of the biological isness or reification of the body that is mother. What is sought in each case is an emancipatory movement âoutwardâ, away from the chaos of dense difference and into the balmier shores of memory where difference is sparse.
The engine of this movement, or in fruedian terms, this âdeath driveâ of the being is in itself a simulation of the first relationship - that of pure difference with difference - and is thus an expression of the relationship of dasein with itself.
For how does one come to create the âselfâ one is all too familiar with when one looks in the morning mirror except through a system of differences - an infintely complex scaffolding of masks borrowed first from âdas manâ and then made malleable, refactored until they resonate with memory.
The engine of the âdeath driveâ is the same ancient I-Thou relationship difference has with pure difference.
The being thus is its own master and its own slave, and it is not the case that being sometimes dons a mask of its own master and sometimes that of its own slave but every mask it puts on is permeated with this duality. For example smoking, outwardly an act of masterly definace and rebellion, inwardly a slavish addiction to nicotine.
The duality of the mask and the duality contained in the âdeath driveâ are actually identical. Following our well-established logic of the recursively constituted absolute, it is safe to conclude that death is also a mask of difference.
The universality of the I-Thou relationship stems from the very basic fact of the first separation of pure difference and difference. In this childless divorce, the completely exhausted pure differnce birthed its only offspring and tasked it to divide further.
âGo forth and divideâ seems an oddly satanic instruction to give but we must remember that pure difference is the essence of negation. The locus of our discussion being the flow of power, or authority from the higher to the lower thus creating the first order or transmission. The flow of power from grassroots is the second order which completes nature in all its dualistic glory.
From there onwards, all relationships come to categorize a self-contained hierarchy and every duality came retrofitted with a gradient across which power can flow.
Consider the double tragedy of poor difference, ejected from the kingdom of its father who died during the very act of banishing its only child. Now consider that we are still living through it.
Thus is the twice-excommunicated, thrice-dead dasein âgeworfenâ, first into the difference of reality and then into the difference of irreality. First divided out of the imaginary, then divided out of the symbolic and the real.
But not only in birth and death, the being follows this pattern of division through each moment, ceaselessly exhaling and inhaling difference, swallowing and excreting entropy - which is a measure of distance from the original event.
It would be illogical to assume that first fracturing and the eventual mitosis of pure difference occured without a mediating agency. For without agency, even a purely chaotic, negatively constitued whole neither could nor would have self-destructed so flamboyantly. That agency is memory - in rememberance is God animated and dasein reanimated.
The greatest impact of psychoanalysis has been in the realm of the subconscious or the unconscious - in highlighting the presence of the lemmata i.e. the duality of the âunknown knownsâ and the âunknown unknownsâ of the mind - it has been instrumental in proving the existence of a unobserved mediating agency in the observer/observed duality, which hitherto the spiritual literature had summarily dismissed as a thinly disguised identity or âprojectionsâ of the experienced self.
The idea is not to admit a summation of the two as a unity in a resigned zen posture but to question how an apparently clear-and-present duality could be a singularity. Through the sliver of that unknown, unobserved spot in consciousness that always already seems to hint towards a greater synthesis not just in math and science but also in daily experiences of the divine and in the faith it takes to go through everyday life.
There is a need to take pin-hole theories with a grain of salt, but that is not enough, we must also then allow the symbolism of next valid explanation to fill in the vacuum left.
The unobserved becomes observed via the observer in three phases, the symbolic, imaginary, and real aspects are phenomenologically emergent regardless of order, and while science is great at conducting a post-mortem of what has emerged, it is clueless as to how. There is of course, a fourth movement, that of transcendence into which is unspooled that which is bound in the former three phases.
The manner in which imaginary twists symbolic and real into a cohesive whole is perhaps best explained by the dictum âNec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodusâ. It is a habitus going back all the way to the original fold of the first difference.
Scientific theories of spontaneous origin are near-sighted in that they fail to account for the sublation of time, palpable in every moment. The manner in which time quietly kills itself before oneâs eyes from one moment to the next is apparent to anyone with even a rudimentary experience of meditation.
A lifetime seen as a series of discrete continuations of the present (âa quick succession of busy nothingsâ) in which memory unfolds into a structure of meaningful information that is observed and recorded by the senses in a theological, mechanically rythmic process - revealing to the observer at once, constellations of meaning that can only be corroborated against a history of similarly deigned meanings.
The rythm of this process is a desiring-production, which itself is a machine or at least follows mechanistic routines.
The unobserved is as emergent as the observed, and just as determined as the persistence of the observed such that both desiring production and its production are fused in a chimera pronounced as the will to power. On the other side, the will to vulnerability or Fruedâs âdeath driveâ is just as much a part of this desiring production and is in fact, a more primary and richer and clearer source rationalisations for action than its psychoanalytic counterpart for the lived experience is an entropic enterprise forever hurtling towards a definitive disintigration, and away from a definitive integration.
In so much as this desiring production does not stop with disintegration (or loss of consciousness in dreams etc) or fulfilment in the form of progeny, photographs, works of art or records of life, it harvests itself through memory, revealing in the movement a hitherto unobserved, spiral and conch-like stucture of living memory flattened into the symbol Ï.
Thus, if image is a desiring production, so is the image of movement, and by extension movement itself - and the cause of this movement in the otherwise placid chaos of pure differnce is also desiring production. The creation of difference, which is clearly an isotope of pure difference is precisely due to this rythm of the unseen.
The emergence of order resembles the emergence of a fantasy, where a fantasy is simply an unadorned desire substituing lack for lack, reality is desire followed-up to a surplus. It is surplus desire that brings forth the pyramid from the desire of a pyramid, the nuclear submarine from the dream of one etc. It is desiring production responsible for both the âdeusâ and the âmachinaâ, albeit this combo seldom makes an appearance as a singularity in memory - in psychoanalytic terms transcendental memory is one such combination, produced only when a âdignus vindice nodusâ appears.
Desiring production is the process of stacking differences as desire at every step, where each difference is a representation of pure difference aspiring towards the infinite malleability in every direction and across all its dimensions.
There is no better example of this process and its production than language itself, no wonder there are strong parallels for it in computing wherein computer languages are nowadays created using multiple levels of intermediate representations.
This âstackingâ is how difference as an intermediate representation of pure difference causes the text but also the subtext and on occasions, a supertext. It is also how software produces and reproduces itself.
Desire thus infinitely stacked against itself turning chaos to order producing first language then the music of time and pressure which ends up turning coal to diamonds at which point the desiring production starts desiring itself again. This isnât to say of course, that coal isnât desirable, but there the logic of desire more utilitarian and thus inexpensive. Whereas a diamond represents a hard finality of the desiring process - a more luxurious bend of logic.
In so far as transcendental memory is an instance of memory desiring memory, it is an aspect of this self-refrential attribute of desiring production as well a finality - transmutation of language into image, the end of all memory.
This stack of desire (which stands against itself and against all odds) and the rythm therein implies furthermore a âloweringâ onto the stack - a quintessentially isolated movement in the armature of desiring production. This armature forms both the structure and function of desire in both senses of the word. In the electrical sense, it is precisely a coiling of symbolic, real, and imaginary as reflected at the very basic level in, among other things, the doublehelix structure of DNA. In the sense of sculpting, the armature is the very frame upon which the fruits of desire, including the will to power hang.
This âloweringâ seems to be a kind of quantum printing wherein impressions made in time-symmetry indulge space and matter into existence. Intermediate representations are lowered onto one another ceaselessly in a criticality and at a speed that makes it impossible to discern whether they are being lowered or lifted. This speed - the tempo of time - is scaled relative to each observer/observation such that the seed appears to be lowered into the earth but the shoot appears to be lifted, or how history lowers itself continually on a single word but meaning âarisesâ.
Just like fallen dominos, history repeats before dasein reflected in, among other things each rotation of a rosary. Although there is an overemphasis in current spiritual literature and poetry about repetition, whereas our emphasis is on the singular here, and the linearity thereof, while asserting the entirely symbolic role of the recursive structure of difference.
Difference, not time is the more accurate unit for memory because of not only apriori concerns but also as there is no absolute measure of time.
This can also be illustrated in other ways, such as with the phrase âa trip down memory laneâ, unfortunately, the lane appears clogged usually since recall for dasein is hardly as granular as it is for a machine. In that, few can recall what they had for breakfast on a particular date the previous month.
Biological memory is a frail system, relegated to the back-office of science that is more concerned with what happens in the pre-frontal part of the brain. It is highly selective and with enough of a filter for evolutionary âwasteâ such as trauma, violence and other objectively sour slices of memory.
Memory is a frequency in that what we remember often is what we remember more often, which are âthe highlightsâ, the outliers and the Ï.
Both the overall trajectory of human life and the present moment in the journey so far can be communicated with mediums, the primus-inter-pares of which is language.
In the socio-political sphere, the concept of âinstitutional memoryâ is indicative of a more descriptive way to refer to recorded history. Superstructures recognize it as a passive record, memory is very much at play in the here-and-now, memory is the catalyst in most situations, often a trigger or an immediate cause for movement or action.
It would be an overgeneralisation of pre-socratic proportions to claim that everything is a memory, it would be akin to saying only narcissus and not the environment was reflected in broad daylight. Consciousness is greater than the sum of its parts, each of which are available for reflection, and memory forms a significant part of the blend. Moreover, one can stop a reverie by waking up, or going for a walk. Memory is simply content without channel or medium.
In as much as memory is a thought, it can be recalled as language but not with the same immediacy of emotion each time. Outside of philology or some kind of symbology, memory also appears as records of debt such as money and credit, but it is always a subject of a context it was created in. All news is local to some place.
Like pure difference, there is a particular kind of memory that is context-free, because it has transcended the limitations of context. We find traces of this type of memory in its seemingly chaotic associativity, and in misfirings of normal memory such as during a deja vu.
If pure difference is analogous to Aneximanderâs apeiron, transcendental memory is an example of Parmenidesâ chariot, and though the two seem disparate, there is a hefty connection beyond the above stated and that is structural. Indeed, transcendental memory is the structure for apeiron, it is the lane in down memory lane, the it in Buberâs âI-It-Thouâ triumvirate.
The observer and the observed are tumbling (geworfen) down the same invisible channel, a receptacle or virtual insulation that allows for little determined action beyond the largesse of a parasymapthetic nervous system, with limited clarity of vision over past or future and thin control over the present.
Access to time is only through thought dressed up in language - whether normative (facts) or prescriptive (value judgements) - thought that is largely a result of conditioning and context. Thought is a system of finite state machines operating over a generally reduced number of states over the course of daseinâs life. There can be no ânew thoughtâ in difference, just as a ânew memoryâ is a paradox, everything is a rehashing of pure difference and originality is a function of context alone, hence the Kuhnian structures of scientific revoltuions.
The image of thought is static, remembered thought is visually a still impression that sets in motion a reverie or a conscious exercise in recall, in which case it is usually a series of stills playing over in the mind in polynomial time. Regardless of the objective of this mental jogging, whether stepping in the past or in the future, the chariot of memory always tends towards its source, pure difference, however there are biological and psychological limitations, not to mention limitations of language as an interface in itself.
The reason there is so much emphasis in spiritual teachings on disabusing oneself of the idea of control, of the closeness of nirvana to a âchoiceless consciousnessâ, or a âsurrenderâ to God suggested is precisely because language cannot will itself through memory beyond a point. No wonder even Freud preferred the meta-linguistic states of consciousness such as dreaming for a clearer analysis of the psyche.
Upon the dawning of transcendental memory, one is made aware of the fact that it is not Krishna who is a character in oneâs story, rather the other way around. If transcendental memory is context-free, that context includes language - for the rare being with transcendental memory is like a synaesthete, a seer who can relay across time as a whole, using nothing except the present moment.
The arrow of time is by and large a thermodynamic illusion and if one follows previously established distinction between continuity and causality, it is possible to see time as deterministically static, the reason memory appears as stills is because motion occurs within time but time itself is motionless. Biological and social time also aid to the narrative of entropy, but fail to explain the immortal subject, the attendant consciousness or even the torch-bearer of evolution.
It is not simply the case that newtonian physics is but one small part of daseinâs memory, but scientific progress itself follows the mould of apeiron and through Kuhnian, localised revolutions uncovers the contents of the age in memory. the same is also applicable for all socio-economic activity outside science.
Substance and time are the grammar of difference contextualised by inherent structure, whereas pure difference is a context-free grammar or pure structure of an absence.
This flat universe is a part of this mediating, contextualising agency enabling difference to peer into pure difference and vice-versa. It is, at the same time, both the recall of one of the faces of pure difference and an interface inviting that precise face to look and be recalled into existence.
It is now possible to question the singularity of causal events such as the âbig bangâ, for to give time a singular point of origin implies a corporeality of pure difference/difference binary except the corporeality of a grammar is extant only in the structures of its expression.
Expression, in so far as it implies or necessitates a medium cannot be decoupled from the difference that grounds it into its medium without fundamentally altering or disfiguring its import. The word cannot be separated from the spelling, the image from the representation, the colour from the qualia, the digital image from its binary sequence and so on.
Creation thus seems to be in the act of externalising of situated memory, in the projection of âremembrance of things pastâ onto an opaque field of pure determination giving rise to âtime out of mindâ.
Historically, this field of pure determination appears to be undergoing a diffusion or decentralisation with the proliferation of new mediums, thus, in a Platonic universe, it is only the wall in the cave from the famous allegory, today it is anything from newspapers, radio, or the superlative medium of the digital screen.
The political economy of the observable universe is thus likened to a medium between two negatives of an insatiable consumer and an insatiable producer. With the content of the medium likened to an image of a producer producing and a consumer consuming.