A Few Words to You (The User):
In your hands, or at least in your sight, is a volume which contains a collection of text and compact disc. This is the byproduct of a process oriented project in two parts. Thematically speaking, each part is working through ideas of fear, depression, memory, spatiality, mortality, the fantastical, and (to an extent) the future of humanity. Both parts are fragmentary in form and structure, relying strongly on my own personal observations and experiences. The text and the sound will repeatedly serve to strengthen and hinder each other to varying degrees, depending largely on the user’s own interactions with the work. The project is open to interpretation, yet I have included, at the end, a suggested user’s guide—you should feel free to proceed there directly at any time—which will inevitably alter the user’s predisposition towards the work. The text itself is brief, both as a function of time constraints on my part and as an intentional convenience, provided for the reader who desires to interact with the text multiple times. Along with the aforementioned themes, I have attempted, symbolically if nothing else, to expand upon the limitations of my chosen media. Extensive efforts were made to utilize language (and analogy) of an aural or visual nature within the text. Conversely, the sound pieces strive, through repetition, to create a sense of inhabitable space within which to create a concrete model of theoretical expression. In both the text and the sound, textures, tones, moods, flows, and intensities were given priority over, or despite, the use of melody and narrative, in order to emphasize spaciousness and timelessness.
I have titled the project Process/Production. My intention is to posit the body of work itself as an assemblage/collage of previous ideas and works and thus including it in both the canons of “Art” and “Philosophy”; recognizing that in this inclusion I have effectively changed the nature of such “canons,” as any new work forces one to reconsider previous works in a new context. Also, I am inviting the user to view this work as the catalyst for a new open-source 1 project. My hope is that the reader will decide to explore the project from a multiplicity of perspectives and contexts. Noting the many loose ends left untied, the user will surely desire to develop a reinterpretation of this work, if only to serve as a critique.
***
In-betweenness:
When I go to see a movie, I am thoroughly consumed by it. My mind is barely my own as the perfectly structured narrative dictates my every emotion. I find myself not only tearing up and laughing, but actually feeling nostalgic, sad, happy, and excited. Strongly driven by our sensory intake and perception, film is a particularly potent type of media for manipulation. Not only does it cater to our eyes and ears but it does so through time, allowing for any idea to gradually bury itself into our minds, but, perhaps this is also the result of a predisposed condition. Roland Barthes refers to a pre-hypnotic state of cinematic experience: “It’s as if, even before he went into the theater, the classic conditions of hypnosis were in force: vacancy, want of occupation, lethargy; it’s not in front of the film and because of the film that he dreams off—it’s without knowing it, even before he becomes a spectator” (Barthes, 419). While Barthes claims this hypnosis “...means only one thing to him: the most venerable of powers: healing” (Barthes, 418), I would argue that such a state of vacancy, in conjunction with the manipulative nature of the narrative, especially a filmic one, can lead to far more insidious consequences. When the credits begin to roll, I wipe the moisture from my eyes, stretch, to ease the tensions that built up inside me during the film, and walk out of the theater. My entire existence for the previous two hours had been about these characters, and now they are gone. Watching the film again would not change anything; I want more of their lives, not simply a repeat of the same portion that I’ve already seen. This manipulation leaves me first feeling empty, then lonely, and finally angry. Angry, not only that one particular film could manipulate me in that manner, but because of the new sense of emptiness that it created. I want to be filled with it again and I’ll surely return to see the next one, for to be in the presence of a film is to be in the presence of radiation. Over time I am left with malignant-tumors, which cultivate themselves deep in my consciousness. Not simply memories—not lodged in the past—they are planted in my mind, transmitted mimetically, and insistent upon directing my future. Telling me what to wear, which objects to purchase, they taint my thoughts, and even affect how I behave, what I fear, hate, and love.
Here I am attempting to deprioritize the narrative, and present a text which can perhaps inspire without manipulation. This is not to say that there is anything intrinsically wrong with narrative, but the format is fundamentally manipulative. Narrative pulls us through time, dictating that this time be spent dedicated to a story that aims to get inside of you, and move you to think, feel, and respond in a very particular way. Having an understanding of narrative’s limitations doesn’t necessitate that we discard it entirely. In fact, we are now free to conceive of such formalism as a technology to be re-appropriated and as a result reconceived and re-contextualized.
***
I imagine that I have sent out a sort of omnipresent recording device which almost arbitrarily captures an image, a thought, a moment, a sound, an object, a text, or a feeling, each just a fragment, and then returns to me with recorded information to translate. These translations will not only serve as a mode of expression, but will also serve to transform the fragments from autonomous and self-contained points into interconnected and relative vectors. They will each become their own universe, though they will not be alone; they will expand, contract, pulse, flow, overlap, and attempt to consume their own tails.
***
Right now, and now, and now again, we are all in a state of in-betweenness. Now is a vector, a point in time and space. Like a photograph of such a state, left out in the sun and weather, it will fade from its original state, be reinterpreted, deteriorate and possibly be so entirely deconstructed that it will become something else entirely. To be in-between is to be transient. We are both the subjects, a series of mechanisms, in which energy passes through leaving “a trace of intensity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 4), as well as transient composites of molecules, particles, energies (both potential and kinetic) and matter making up constructs which we call bodies. We are interbeings. According to the Buddhist philosophy of Shakyamunis, all things physical make up a “...complex of phenomena instead of...an ultimate reality with a permanent, unalterable nature” (Mizuno, 44). This is similar to the anatman, the shunyata, and wu; names for the de-centered idea of the self in Indian and Chinese Buddhist culture. These are all our state of being, not with a concrete sense of self, but absence of self, our consciousness which defines to us who and what we are.2 To present a cliché, it may be easier to envision the subject as a wave. You can see it appear on the horizon. As it moves closer it gains definition, until the point where it is the cause of your movement, or your action, then it disappears behind you, though you can follow it with your eye until it again reaches the horizon. While we can conceive of the wave as being a unified and consistently visible object, its composition, or those particles of water which comprise the body of the wave are ever being interchanged for others. Perhaps I am too blunt, perhaps I am sincere, perhaps I am transient, an anatman, I am surely, as much as sureness can exist without truth, all of these, and an infinitude of things.
***
To live in depression is to travel on the most direct path towards death. It is an artificial nothingness, an attempt to prepare for the inevitable, where every bit of consciousness will cease to exist. It is a desire to return to complete ignorance, that which existed before consciousness, and that which will exist after consciousness is gone. It is perhaps true that life is without meaning; that we have no overarching goals, that we were born simply to live and then to die; that our only real job is procreation, sending our offspring into the world merely to come to this very conclusion. But we are born with wonder. Still, when we make new connections for the first time, we are apt to respond with a youthful excitement. Whether we imbue things with meaning because we use language, or because language is the result of a desire to do so, “I love you” is still a potent quotation. What exactly the concept of meaning means is beside the point. It is that very sense of meaning—the sense that things, people, places, memories, events, etc., mean something to us—which drives our daily existence, which consumes our consciousness. One does not say something that is meaningless. Words may be nonsensical, gibberish, out of context, or confusing, but never meaningless. One does not go to the same job each day out of a sense of meaninglessness. Perhaps we allocate meaning, and for some, society at large helps to formulate this sense of meaning more than for others, but it is this jungle of meaning that overwhelms us, drives us to madness, to passion, to solitude, and to depression.
Depression seems to be the expression of the overwhelmed, desiring nothing but to return fully to the meaninglessness that prefigured consciousness: The state which was lost to us as soon as our consciousness was born, and a state which we may not return to until death. Perhaps this is why so many of our depressed and tortured are taken by their own hands, and many more die as a result of a reckless lifestyle, often mistaken for decadence. But this depression, though at times seems inescapable, is a foolish path. There is no solace in that artifice; only the constant nagging of meaning surrounding you. The flimsy structure is porous, and while we are spending time and energy trying to keep the meaning out, dark parasitical thoughts, which until then had been forgotten or gone unnoticed, begin to ooze and creep into our minds. We are rendered useless against all of the other meaning which we have been trying so hard to fend off: come fear, come sadness, come lost love, come everything, come collapse. Perhaps we cannot handle all of this meaning, but we will surely survive it, poised and ready to return to the comforts of our depression. But if the chronically depressed are willing to live with meaning, and all that comes with it, in hopes of avoiding such a fate, there is another option. While everything is given meaning, no thing possesses a singular meaning, and no meaning is concrete. We all have the power to allocate meaning. Perhaps it is easier to think of meaning as a tool, or more appropriately, a technology, which we can utilize in new ways as we see fit. We may then control the way in which we see those things which the world shows us.
***
I once strived towards an impossible ideal; one which aimed to create a sense of connectivity despite constant impressions of solitude: I was looking for the perfect moment, that in which all of the perceivable elements culminated into the now. Eva Hoffman remembers and reinvents the act of striving for the present, as she realizes that it is already gone, locked forever in memory:
I am walking home from school slowly.... Nothing happens. There is nothing but this moment, in which I am walking toward home, walking in time. But suddenly, time pierces me with its sadness. This moment will not last. With every step I take, a sliver of time vanishes. Soon, I’ll be home, and then this, this nowness will be the past, I think, and time seems to escape behind me, like an invisible current being sucked into an invisible vortex. How can this be, that this fullness, this me on the street, this moment which is perfectly abundant, will be gone?...I can’t do anything about this backward tug either. How many moments do I have in life? I hear my own breathing: with every breath, I am closer to death. I slow down my steps: I’m not home yet, but soon I will be, now I am that much closer, but not yet...not yet...not yet...Remember this, I command myself, as if that way I could make some of it stay (Hoffman, 16-17).
Throughout this scene she clings to the idea of being in a moment, but the second she gives the moment a name, recognizes it, she has stepped back, she is no longer there. She is left to remember the feelings that she had, as it all slips through her fingers. The moment is lost forever, lost in thought, lost in language. I too was looking to live in the moment. To hold onto the now, keeping it with me always. What I found was that I could find these moments only when I was not looking for them, and the nanosecond that I realized this, the moment would already be gone, leaving only remnants and trails as evidence that it had ever been.
***
In a certain past that I have constructed, I would regularly dream about Nazis. They were generic to the point of artifice. My fear of them was immense and while awake, during that same memory, I would spend hours finding and fitting myself into the most discrete spaces, so that I would know of their location when the Nazis barged into my dreams. These dreams, which evoked an intense and visceral fear, actually threatened my bodily sense of security. It is no wonder then, that while awake I would try and find ways to avoid or at least to lessen the fear in future dreams. Normally we are forced to be passive observers, susceptible to the rambling will of our subconscious desires, but by virtue of the repetitive nature of this particular dream I was able to be a conscious participant in the process, and as a result was able to change the linearity of the dream. For the more obscure the hiding place, the lesser the chance of being discovered by the Nazis, and I was able to move more freely within the space of the dream.
***
In Raleigh, North Carolina there is a pool. I spent quite a good number of my early summers in that pool. I was drawn to the water. Like everyone else I saw it as a good place to keep cool, but more than that, I wanted to be consumed by it. I remember submerging myself entirely, and then releasing all of the oxygen from my lungs until I was able to lay down on the bottom of the pool. There I noticed a deep hum and the sounds of activity blurred beyond recognition. When I opened my eyes, the sun was refracting and reflecting along the edges of the water’s surface. I felt totally alone. Not lonely, just alone. I wanted to breathe. I thought that if I inhaled, my lungs would fill with water, and I would be able to stay in that moment forever. I knew that I would die, and at that moment I was capable of making that decision. I was capable of allowing myself to be totally consumed. At that moment I chose not to. More then a decision to choose life over death, this was a decision to accept difference. Even if I could preserve that moment eternally, forever experiencing the now in time, I would soon become disenchanted and long to return to the surface, having eventually forgotten what it was like not to be under the water in such a state. The beauty in repetition lies in the subtle change and constant flow, this sort of preserved sameness would lack distinction, and I would never be able to enjoy it as I experienced it.
***
Our bodies are also vectors. As the result of an infinite number of circumstances (not only those specific to our biological parents’ lives, but also to genealogical chains of events, DNA, traffic patterns, and anything and everything else) a certain sort of cell combination and growth occurred in our mothers’ wombs. Those cells then began to multiply, our bodies have changed dramatically since then, and are now quite similar to what they were just a moment ago; they will continue to change, and then to decompose allowing for our cells (matter) to become food (energy) for the bodies of other microorganisms. During that time millions upon millions of our cells have already died or changed shape and will continue to do so. Our bodies are a veritable planet for a microscopic ecosystem. We have grown, shrunk, but inevitably taken on an entirely different form. In fact every moment our blood is somewhere else in our arteries, capillaries, and veins, we breathe and we are shaped differently. Constant movement assures constant change. This process assures us of our eternal state of in-betweenness. George Bataille notes that at times this is difficult to see, and an image which confronts one’s own mortality is necessary in order to understand, positing the reader within a site of human sacrifice:
The victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one (Bataille, 22).
Here Bataille illustrates the body’s transient state of in-betweenness. If we could speed up time and watch ourselves, someone else or simply humanity, we would see a series of waves and pulses, a constant flow. It would be prudent to take this idea several steps further. First we should conceive of the body as an assemblage of numerous parts: head, arms, legs, chest, etc., each of which is also an assemblage, for instance the head is made up of a skull, a brain, eyes, ears, hairs, etc. Each of these parts is also an assemblage on the cellular level. We can work deeper from there to the level of the particle and the quark, possibly further. On the other hand a relationship, or a society of two, is an assemblage of two bodies. A social gathering is an assemblage of numerous relationships. One could continue outwards in numerous directions from there. Let us call these assemblages Interbeings, the transient and de-centered temporary culmination of cells, bodies, matter, energy, thought, or ideas. In “How Do You Make Music a Body without Organs?,” a Deleuzian reading of experimental electronic music, Christoph Cox notes: “Viewed on the scale of millennia, bodies, species, states, cities, and languages are like waves on an ocean, evanescent forms that dissolve back into Nature’s fluid mass” (Cox, 16).
***
Things didn’t work out between us. It had been more or less settled that way for over a month. At the same time we had loved each other; at the time she may have still loved me. The whole idea was foolish, but we had agreed that she should come in on the train. I’d pick her up and we would spend the day together. We started by taking the kite, which was a birthday gift displaying the silhouette of a cowboy playing guitar on a crescent moon, to an open field. The wind seemed strong enough, but try as we might, we could not seem to get the kite flying. We laughed and sat close to one another on the grass. The sun, floating low behind her, was warm and orange, outlining her entire body, and her smile glowed as though the light was shining through her. The wind blew strands of wavy hair across her face; I was beginning to convince myself that I was still in love with her. She put her hand on my leg, and I leaned over to kiss her. She smiled, may have let out a small laugh, but pushed me away. We stared at each other for a while, competing to keep quiet the longest. I lost. From there it was a bit of a blur. We held hands, charged with a longing so overwhelming, it was as though we had been waiting to touch our entire lives. I leaned to kiss her. She pushed me away. We smiled, staring into each other’s eyes. I leaned to kiss. She pushed away. Leaning to kiss. Pushing away. Lean, push. Lean. Push. As we left she received a call, and by the tone of her voice I knew who it was. I was rapidly swelling up with jealousy as she giggled at each one of his indiscernible comments. By the time she hung up the phone I couldn’t help but blurt out a curt line of rejection. And I’m sure that I said those words with a cold and reserved spite which immediately conjured up every hateful and hurtful thing I’d ever said to her. And I’m sure, after what we’d been through, it was finally too much for her; so she cried. She bawled, sobbed, screamed, cursed, and swore that I could not ever do that to her again. Usually that would be the point at which I retreat into a place where I am separate from what is going on in front of me. But I knew what I had done to her and at that moment felt like I owed her something, so I too began to cry. I played the part. Through my tears, I told her that during the time we spent apart I had realized that I did really love her, that I wanted to be with her. I told her that the whole time I wanted to tell her, but didn’t know how. I told her these things and they became true. My expression became my reality. She told me that I couldn’t hurt her like that anymore. She was playing her part too. We drove back to the train station, in the agonizing noise of the space around us. I pulled into a spot, pulled up the emergency brake and let out my breath. I turned to look at her, and with what I imagined to be purely melancholic eyes, I smiled warmly. She returned the smile. I heard the train approaching in the distance. Then she grabbed me by the back of my head, and faced me eye to eye. With unbridled passion she kissed me in a manner that spoke of the heyday of Hollywood. We both knew that was the end. Everything was in that kiss. Just like that she was gone, out of the car and out of my life. Shaken up, I laughed as I drove away. How cinematic it all was.
***
While I find the pre-hypnotic and hypnotic aspects of cinema (and the narrative form at large) to be somewhat contentious, it seems that there is something to be said for a certain brand of hypnosis: that trancelike state which is derived through repetition. Such a state happens over time: the larger and more complex the object of repetition, the greater the amount of time it takes to fall into the trance-state. Repeat the word “lemon” a hundred times and it loses its sour edge, it becomes the soft, “leh” and “mohn.” It ceases to be the bright sour fruit and simply becomes pulses of sound; rather than rendering it meaningless, this process opens the word up to new meaning. It allows us to hear the word in a new light without the weight of concrete definition, allowing us to move beyond the overriding structure, and seek out the details. It also clearly displays to us that no word (no thing for that matter) can ever be the same, even if it is similar. Strangely this does not dilute the potency of the repetition, in fact difference is arguably repetition’s greatest ally; for it is because of this microscopic inconsonance that a piano is given its timbre, and even that our very existences feel rich. Most of our lives we spend doing essentially the same thing. We create schedules for ourselves, or we are given schedules to follow. This redundancy however is the essence of our excitement and our bliss, for without this distinction we would have no way of deciphering one from the other. If all we saw was the same red, we could never understand the vibrance and power of such a color. It suffices to say that if our vision was all the same drab gray, anytime we saw red we would boil over with excitement and remember it throughout our lives, though all other times would be so redundant, as to almost not be worth waiting through. Luckily our existence lies somewhere in-between the two, giving us the ability to relax in our repetition and revel in our difference.
***
Process/Production:
In the European classical tradition, there was written a Grand Narrative: It was a tale of Truth and Lies, Good and Evil, Art and Nature, Subject and Object, Man and the World, which by the eighteenth century, had reached perfection. Mankind had crafted the perfect Beauty, the perfect Truth, a singular and transcending pivot, which ideological polarities rested upon in the eternal balance of pure opposition. This was the world where every educated and cultured Western European man—the Platonic Citizen or the Philosopher King—was free to wander lonely as a cloud, amongst a host of golden daffodils.3 Then a force of enraged Modernists, foaming at the mouth, descended upon the West. God was brutally slaughtered, truths shattered, and formal structures raised.
Though the Modernists fetishized the chaotic nature of this now desolate landscape, a nomadic and free-floating existence seemed unsettling, and thus new structures were erected. These structures reflected the chaos, but they were structures none the less; while free from the dialectical pivot of the world, they were constructed with absolute centers around which all other elements were contained in orbit. Deleuze and Guattari explain this phenomena as a simultaneous rejection of the linear singularity coupled with a cyclical unity:
Most modern methods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of combination (Deleuze & Guattari, 6).
It was not long before the Post-Structuralists emerged from the ether in order to publish an exposé on the misconceptions of the Modernists. They wrote off the classical as absurd, critiqued the Modernists as simply reorienting the center, and asserted a need for decentralization, différance, deterritorialization, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. Terry Eagleton perhaps better sums up this transition from modernism to postmodernism:
Modernism, or so it imagined, was old enough to remember a time when there were firm foundations to human existence, and was still reeling from the shock of their being kicked rudely away. This is one reason why so much modernism is of a tragic temper [. . . .] It refuses to turn its gaze from the intolerableness of things, even if there is no transcendent consolation at hand. After a while, however, you can ease the strain of this by portraying a world in which there is indeed no salvation, but on the other hand nothing to be saved. This is the post-tragic realm of postmodernism. Postmodernism is too young to remember a time when there was (so it was rumoured) truth, identity and reality, and so feels no dizzying abyss beneath its feel. It is used to treading clear air, and has no sense of giddiness (Eagleton, 57-58).
Is this the end of the philosophical journey? We have reached the pinnacle of transcendental truth, and floated freely in pure open-endedness, and yet with all of our thorough investigations, why is it that something still seems to be amiss? Perhaps there is more to come, though perhaps it is all behind us now. As a species are we to simply sit back and watch a reality television program, featuring man-made technological creations which can replicate, procreate, alter, and re-appropriate themselves with such proficiency and at such a rate that we can bear witness—with the same sort of distance and disbelief with which we first viewed the September 11th footage—as robots take over all of humanity via reality television programing? As absurd as that sounds, there are some who would argue something along those lines to be true. And isn’t there something appealing about going there with them? To an extent, but what if we desire to be pro-active as we wait for our inevitable demise?
Consider then the re-appropriation of what is already behind us. This is not simply a process of nostalgic rehashing, rather, this is a reconsideration of present and antiquated modes of discourse and production as technologies to be used and reorganized in order to create new assemblages for new modes of discourse and production. Take for example John Cale, who glanced over at his record player and in a moment was able to see beyond the “intended” purpose of the technology. The result: a new implementation of the record player as a musical instrument in its own right. This simple re-appropriation has resulted in a series of new musical practices, both in terms of scratch and sample based musical production. Conceiving only of the record’s designed purpose, the technology has become antiquated. Between the cassette tape, the CD and finally the pure digital sound file (mp3, etc.) there is no use (aesthetic snobbery aside) for such a cumbersome and stationary sound-capturing format. But what has survived and is thriving is the record’s use in terms of scratch-based music. This sort of re-appropriative technique can be used for a multitude of purposes from questioning higherarchical and institutional norms to the expansion of aesthetically acceptable elements in artistic production. With Marcel Duchamp’s piece Fountain (1917), for example, he re-appropriated a utilitarian object (the urinal), signed it “R.Mutt,” and attempted to include it in an exhibition sponsored by the Society for Independent artists in New York. Although this exhibition claimed that it was open to all works of art, Fountain was rejected, yet Duchamp had succeeded. He had, with this simple act, put into question the very definition of art. Oval, the legendary German electronic act, is known for defacing the surface of compact discs. By scratching and marking up what they refer to as “prepared compact discs,” when replayed the music is riddled with digital artifacts such as clicks, skips, and glitches which are then recorded and reassembled. In this case, while this technical practice has seen marginal amounts of appropriation, the very aesthetic qualities of the digital artifact has been utilized extensively from obscure electronic sound art to world renown artists such as Radiohead and Björk.
Perhaps more importantly, is the way that these sorts of practices highlight the re-appropriative practice itself, allowing for more and more individuals to participate in the process. Nicolas Bourriaud refers to this sort of practice and phenomenon in the art world as Post-Production. This title seems apt as it accentuates the importance of previously existing materials and products, but also exhibits the in-between nature of both the source material and the post-produced material. In fact Post-Production as a practice is the ultimate model for a practical actualization of In-betweenness, creating a constant flow of changing intensities to travel through an endless series of assemblages.
Bringing us back to questions concerning the future of philosophical practice, we should first look to question its predominant mode of representation: language and the text. As a species, we have failed on numerous accounts to allocate intent upon technologies which allow for the greatest amount of efficiency, effectiveness, or potential. The vinyl record, as noted earlier, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Also, nuclear technology, first presented to the world as a “weapon of mass destruction” during the second World War, has proven to be far more efficient and ecologically sound as an alternative to coal and petroleum-fueled power sources. Suddenly perhaps, other modes of representation—sounds, visuals, maybe even flavors and scents—don’t seem entirely out of the question when one thinks about philosophical expression. Isn’t it entirely possible that pure sound could more effectively express an idea then a linguistic explanation? From there let us incorporate the ideas of In-Betweenness, interbeing, and Post-Production; what do we have? We have a decentralized multiplicity of mechanic assemblages, interacting with one another and as thus continually changing their very functions. The expression of ideas within this structure are flowing seamlessly from thought, to text, to film, to sound, to light, to flavor, to scent, and in any order, and we are free to interject and re-appropriate as we see fit altering the very nature of the machine. Let us give this philosophical practice a name; one that will start us off on a new trajectory of multiplicity: Process/Production.
***
User’s Guide (Suggested Modes of Reading, Listening, and Participation):
Process/Production is a system of philosophical inquiry, representation, and production, aiming to de-prioritize the written text as the preeminent mode for philosophical expression and to create an inter-media schema of theoretical representation: an amalgam hybrid of In-Betweenness, the interbeing, and Post-Production. The title itself implies a certain collapse in terminology between process and production, and by definition I intend to include a similar and intrinsic collapse between art and philosophy/theory. My own goal with this project is to present a threefold application of the Process/Production system: The first is simply an introduction and explanation of the new philosophical practice. The second is the present body of work imbued with the necessary elements to accentuate the functionality of the work under this system. Here, both the product and myself, as practitioner, are implicated within the process. Hopefully, these have both been sufficiently explained and exemplified, as the remainder of this text will be dedicated solely to the final, and perhaps most important, extended-application of the Process/Production system:
Before you continue any further, it is important that I emphasize the suggestive within this portion of the project. That is to say that the following guidelines are simply the best angle at which to approach this work from my present vantage point, and are by no means the “proper” steps towards an “ideal” comprehension of the project.
I have already noted my effort to emphasize spatiality over narrative trajectory. With this in mind, I will begin to narrate one possible pathway within and throughout this space. First, I will close the door to my room, place the CD in the stereo, double check to make sure that my most comfortable chair is cleared off, press play and sit down to read the text. Though the sound is turned fairly low (as I have trouble reading with an abundance of sonic distractions), I begin to notice the manner in which the text, or at least my reading of the text, is playing off the sounds. Some of the pieces are more conducive to the background than others, so I repeat one of those longer tracks in order to focus. Just to keep things interesting, I try reading the text, still in order, along with the CD on shuffle, or perhaps along to another record entirely. In fact, I will try several other records. Now, putting the music aside entirely, I think about reorganizing the fragments in the text, decide on some changes, and attempt to construct a narrative or a chronology with the disparate pieces. The more I read it over, the more certain ideas appeal to me, and the more holes I see in the arguments being made: philosophical and textual incongruities. I decide to put down the reading and focus entirely on the sound. I can recognize overarching structures, which are repetitive and definitively not the most engaging aspect of the pieces. I then decide to lie down on my bed and focus in on the details. Overtones resonate strangely with each other and then fade back into the body of the piece. I am drawn in by the constant and repeating pulse, but the engaging elements between the cracks of the structure—a jarring series of clicks and screeches or a note outside the tonic’s boundaries—are often times the source of my expulsion. I try re-sequencing the tracks, and notice a change in the overall sense of intensity. I test out the sound pieces on headphones, a car stereo, and low in the background while I’m preoccupied with a variety of daily activities. Following an indeterminate amount of time the act of exploration will seem tiresome. At this juncture lies a multitude of options, and a chance for the user to raise the stakes, and implement his/herself in the Process/Production system. One could quickly decide that there is nothing of importance in this project, and dismiss it; noting what little effect it had on one’s lives. For others it could be the impetus for a more rigorous explication of some of the vague ideas presented in the text. One could write a scathing critique, a new chapter, produce a cinematic adaptation, or even prepare a project-inspired meal. Not only a philosophical production-practice, Process/Production is also a manifesto; calling for a continuous open-source philosophy. You are cordially invited to intervene.
***
Notes:
1. E.g. Linux and Pure Data, a PC operating system and a sound-production program, respectively, both free, on which the only programmers are the users themselves, allowing for the program to evolve and change as the users exchange information. Most often there is some other sort of virtual location where the various users can advertise the different codes and tools they’ve designed, which are also free.
2. I should clarify that while Buddhist thought is quite closely related, in numerous ways, to my philosophical beliefs, I conceive of these ideas in a manner completely void of the metaphysical strains often linked with Buddhism. In fact, I see these ideas more as useful tools with which to explain my ideas as well as a means for me to connect my ideas of the past with my present ones.
3. Paraphrased from William Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1807).
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