peter nesteruk (home page:
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A Question of
Being Human (7)
(Between) Subject and
Object
And so we are left…
At
one with the object, at one with ourselves (apart from the one before…). At once
one and the other. The ‘subject’ (the rest after all is surmise). Whether we
are happy with this unique and non-returnable, non-exchangeable, utterly
inescapable oneness is another matter (we are talking here of our sense of the
‘here and now’, not of the many divisions of identity or loyalty). At once
subject and object in their inseparability (for the subject examined becomes
object, other, thing or person outside, figure in the discourse of science,
remembered material or encounter, the past). And neither: as both are also
inseparable as ‘outside’; therefore these terms are not useful from ‘our’ point
of view…
The
opening of a space in-between (between Subject and Object) taking the middle
line and finding all already within its orbit, so gradually opening out,
expanding till the realm of subject and object (out and in) appear just at or
as its rim, as two opposite poles, or sides, lips even, with the mouth as the
place of our experience of ourselves and everything else, with only the
rhetoric of eternity (and the ‘thing in itself’) as ‘outside’, an ‘outside’
itself produced by the inside as its own proper ‘fictional’ guarantor
(‘fictional’ because, fictional as outside, but ‘fictional’ as ‘outside’, so
real as part of us, albeit we ‘misremember’ its situation, an ‘outside’ inside,
our own little ‘Black Hole’). Identity, it seems, would rely on largely
imaginary entities, imagined communities and places…
Why
between subject and object; because the subject also is before it… (before
itself) so also an object, as outside the opening… So both between, what is
between as including, encompassing, both subject and object. As the middle
term, it swallows up its margins, includes its limits as its skin, its
frontiers.
(Before itself… or beside
itself, as imagined, and if again imagined, as together re-imagined, as
imagined together, as all previous relations together…. Infinite regress, or
infinite progress, and who can say, infinity in a hall of mirrors, horizon of
repetition which may -or may not- be telling us something about our own
internal architecture. Like the repetitions which give away the fact that
thinking we were, had moved, ‘outside’, indicate, with a fall of the spirit or
a sense of bitter righteousness, that we are still, very much ‘inside’ - which
may, on the other hand, be as far ‘outside’ as we can get…).
Otherwise subject and
object as, from inside anyway, objects before an unnamable un-examinable point
of view… the things that are opposite… (From outside, the perspective of the
sciences provides the apposite picture).
The
apposite picture… also the ‘opposite’ picture… the picture (image) of what is
‘opposite’ (but opposite what… a ‘what’ that magically becomes ‘opposite’ as
soon as we touch it…). From what an unnamable, un-examinable ‘point of view’
might this be, how to write it… a ghost story; in a tale told by ghosts… The
eye (‘I’) that views from out of the cut, watches though the crack in the wall,
fissure that is at once of, and in, the self, barrier between what is visible,
namable, the sensible and that which (we must assume) lies there, within…
attribute-less (from this point of view, from this our fundamental
experience…). Subject without predicates… (subject) without predicates. Two
paths from here; negations (often condemned as resulting in gibberish… ); and a
conscious experimenting with this ‘position’ of ours, and the many parallels
it, in fact, does have (coincidentally?) with matters physical and conceptual;
‘absent’ or ‘empty centre’, ‘bad infinity’, any logic without axioms or all
that is left unspeakable after any logic with axioms, the persistent
‘unfinishedness’ of the world of logic (after Gödel), ‘negative theology’,
‘wave/particle’ ambiguity, wavelengths or ‘orbits’, ‘dark matter’, ‘Black
Holes’, Deconstruction, recursion as such… self-reference and repetition (the
later the building block of ourselves in time). A contagion of
undecidabilities, of deferral to probabilities, of an unceasing flowering of
aporia as the self lends its form(lessness) to all it touches…. An epidemic of
viral mimesis. In the middle, the (self) holding all together – but empty. Like
a ‘room’ in the middle of which we find, or better, sense (our selves).
(Genius) Loci.
Our room, outside of which
we find (ourselves). In the middle of which…
Sensing something; like the
afterimage of an afterimage, echo of an echo… perpetually watching ghost, form
of ourselves; the form/space that is ourselves… frame, the imaginary content of
which is…
In
the middle (of which) there is only perception. Awareness (we like the idea of
‘behind the eyes’ but experience teaches us that this must be limited, from all
that is actually ‘behind’, to our head size). If all is ‘before’ us, a metaphor
(an experience!) which is primarily visual, ‘ahead’ of us (by contrast, we hear
in surround sound!): then all that is
behind us is ourselves- but strangely inaccessible; leaving us as if a film, a
film on a screen (a film on a subject which is ourselves), yes, but a film of
substance-less material, made of light or less… a film, translucent, but with
one way vision only, so no looking ‘back’, no behind the curtain – any glimpse
of the source of projection is always second hand (‘third person’ and ‘after’,
‘after all’). Leaving us again, (as) the barrier, dividing line, membrane (permeable)
between ‘before’ and ‘behind’. Film of the stories of others and ourselves.
Film on which is projected the story of others and ourselves. (All visual
culture, the world as image, with photography and film as its privileged forms
of physical memory, is but a logical extension of this experience or sense; the
visual object within, virtual, part of the fabric of the subject, from which
the illusion of separation is maintained…).
And what of sound alone;
music, conversation… (with their visual equivalents, visual notations, scripts)
and noise… Alone and with others (alongside the perception of others),
listening alone or in conversation with others… accompanied by images, not of
the present, but those called up by the words heard, or overheard, by music
listened to or accidentally overheard, images of or from the past, a kind of
ekphrasis or hypotyposis (image interrupting narrative) where the past is
returned by words or music (or other sound, a naturalistic ‘musique concrete’)
to erupt in the eternal present (accompanied perhaps with its own aural
memories, interrupting the sound flow of the music of the eternal
present).Husserl famously shows the present becoming the (recent) past as the
experience of listening to music and unifying the ‘moments’ into a melody
(which can then be recollected as from the past, as a memory proper).A further
fusion takes place when he demonstrates this example by representing music in a
visual figure.
A figure that, like the
unifying of the words that make up a sentence, takes place in the unity of
subject and object, if not on the side of the subject (and according the codes
it has learnt)…
The
alternative to this persistent process of fusing (as our way of understanding
ourselves) is the permanent contradiction of the subject/object division; along
with the permanent revolution of its putative overcoming (realism, materialism,
idealism and the variety of other ’solutions’) or its acceptance as the very
basis of being human, as part of the way we understand the world (along, or an
aspect of, other ‘fundamental’ divisions, set/element, in/out, self/other,
meta-language and object-language (sic)). And so (back) to all (historical)
dualisms…?
Or
do we move to a full-blown ‘monism’. But this too is the result of an exterior
point of view! All ‘wholes’ are the view from without, a visual conceit… (Or a
breach of the axiom that we do not refer to a meta-set, set of all sets (as an
element in a set – so to infinity…)). Either (logically) a contradiction or, at
best (phenomenologically), a thought-experiment – such as we perhaps can not do
without at this level of abstraction (or this level of embedded particularity).
Yet to a being in medias res only the
past can appear as finished; but then it is its interpretation of this
‘finished’ past that all too quickly becomes infinite (un-finishable,
incomplete… ); a ‘monism’, which is an eternal becoming (the ever-changing
content/time) and where the outside is also only available as a kind of
perpetual becoming, the suppositions generated by incoming experience and by
stored experiences, including those of thought, of ordering methods… their
unification in the (as the (experience of the)) eternal present.
The
Eternal Present.
Naming;
putting words to the experience… names to the objects… our endless word-play,
commentary on the eternal present (our experience of the Eternal Present) – not
really distinguishing the human, other animals also have, are in, language, to
what degree it is hard to tell, they can not yet tell us, we can not yet tell
them how to tell, telling for them we
have already done enough… But observing them we can tell, that language they do
have… and presumably like us, they communicate the state of themselves and the
world… their ‘room’. That much we can tell; and that is already a lot (given
the prejudices that militate against this telling).
Propositions
and sentences; back to objects; our inner objects… virtual replicas of the
objects (real) without (language). ‘Outside’. But born of interaction with
‘others’, as with the language we use to communicate the states of these same
objects, and for their persistent, near perpetual, use in our interaction with
‘others’. Including imaginary others; the imagination organ, like the language
organ, or the recognition organ, once formed will not go away. Henceforth we
are always in conversation with someone, with our(other)selves… representing
objects, of which, foremost… ourselves. In the middle of an eternal
conversation. Or so we perceive. Self-consciousness; perceiving self. Putting
into words. Perceiving self perceiving…
We
are what we perceive… the present, its objects (our ‘self’ and its words,
images and feelings included, the place of perception, which we somehow
perceive, included). The rest is memory, second order (or projection, fantasy)
the past (or future), and the unknowable (‘outside’, ‘Other’, ‘eternity’). But
in our actual life all jumbled up, entangled and mutually supporting. The flow
of current experience made comprehensible by our past experience and learning
(from the experience of others) and given value, justification and priority
from ‘outside’ - in turn informing choice, our attitude to what has not yet
arrived… but will arrive, preformed by what has gone before, by what has gone
through us, before…by what we have gone through, before… The recapture of which
is something we can only (dimly) perceive… in the present.
Whence
the ‘eternal present’; final unity of subject and object in time.
(With
the fading in sound and sight that gives time, gives the past and the future…
and the exorbitant generalization which extrapolates eternity from the eternal
present).
And our unending (once
begun) commentary upon this experience: the eternal conversation.
In
which instant we perceive… But which instant? ‘This’ rather than ‘that’
instant. That we cannot tell, the ‘instant in which’ can not … not directly
(required in the view from without; without which we cannot view as required…).
The un-measurable (but experiential) instant in which we perceive the relation
of things, their proximity to us, their spacing relative to themselves. (Rather
the blurring of the instant into an on-going experience – again beyond the
‘moment’ of origin to ‘in medias res’…
(from discreet particle to never-ending wavelength)). But which ‘after all’ we
can call… ‘this’.
(With
the fading in sound and sight that gives distance, gives space… the intervening
space…).
(
…with its organization into so many layers, binaries (or reducible to such):
up/down, top/bottom, left/right and margin/centre, figure/ground, open
/enclosed and subdivided by three grounds or interior frames… the rules of the
(in this case visual) game, are given… ‘this’ place without echoing that
within… ‘this’ within, that ‘that’ that constitutes us…).
Whence
the ‘room’ of our perception, final unity of subject and object in space.
Yet the hazard of a monist
conception is of a contingent, frail, ‘self’, present only as a site of
reception or a sense of self that rides on the flow of language, of ‘our’
thoughts… (and the delusion of ‘self’ as origin of action?) a notion that may
serve the worst in the world – and the best… The ultimate, consistent truth
about ourselves may be neither useful nor workable – even the opposite…
Copyright Peter Nesteruk,
2012