Endnotes for an AllocutionPeter Freund
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1 The apparently incorrect verb form in this sentence should be forgiven for forming the correct conceptual nuance.
2 Constructivist and perceptualist alike share the premise of a uniform a priori indeterminacy that is, mythology notwithstanding, retroactively unified as “nature,” “noise,” “chaos,” etc. The notion of “multiplicity” in Bergson and later in Deleuze endeavors to capture this irreducible quality of an indeterminate substrate.
3 “Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. This would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it would turn the incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis)” (Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”).
4 “()Hole complex attests to the confusion between solid and void. Every activity happening on the solid part increases the degree of convolution and entanglement on the holey side of the composition...” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials).
5 For Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. For Henri Bergson, the leftover of what memory cannot grasp is its burden.
6 The olfactory and other sensory triggers in the Proustian moment imply that the image cannot strictly be limited to the visual.
7 The past as lost object reminds us that the so-called withdrawn or withheld character of the speculative object in contemporary philosophy (OOO) appears to have no way to account for the dynamism of its beloved remainder.
8 The Proustian mémoire involontaire stresses the expansive, erotic dimension of this implosion that in traumatic memory stresses its erasive dimension.
9 A blended reference to Wilhelm Kühne, Joseph Beuys, and Rabih Mroué.
10 When ruminating on “mental imagery,” psychologists who aspire to philosophical rigor challenge the little master running the picture show inside, the humunculus. In psychoanalytic terms, this homunculus is the ego.
11 The triangulation at the heart of the Rorschach effect should not be underestimated. The subject faces the inkblot, the archive, and the solicitous prompter.
12 To grasp this absence, we need only consult the failed ambition of killing time. Such a death wish gives but vain hope to the prospect of warding off this absence. Even the so-called “couch potato,” allegedly stabilized before the television, yields a gap that inspires the consumption of another empty substance: popcorn.
13 The Bergsonian durée conflates the irreducible with the unmediated. The synthesis requires the production of an image of time that can transcend the discrete moments that make up succession. Just as the external course of serially juxtaposed pictures cannot explain the cinematic effect of a motion picture, so too the unfolding of lived experience cannot be reduced to the concatenation of discrete images that traverse time. Nonetheless the intensity of the unfolding present moment expresses the image par excellence. Translated into its spatial or extensive constituents, lived experience synthesizes the sensible image: pictures, words, sounds, smells, tastes, and so forth that become invisible, silent, proximate, vibrant and indifferent in the coalescence of the intensive present moment.
14 Further examples abound: The listener snaps her fingers to the pulse of the music, while choreography grafts movement onto the time of music. In the so-called “mirror stage” of psychoanalytic lore, the mirroring image that launches the human subject synchronizes the mimicry of the reflective doppelgänger and the ongoing drive to overcome its difference. The horological impulse is less chronometric than imagistic: In function, the clock first and foremost presents a motion picture of the diurnal passage. In prosody, rhyme and meter fold back on themselves the linear flow of words in order to synchronize language with itself.
15 Synchresis, a neologism coined by Michel Chion that merges the ideas of synthesis and synchronism, refers to the ensemble or montage effect of coupling moving image and sound. The use of the term here suggests an inclusive but broader application.
16 Fantasy presents the very condition of possibility for the factual.
17 I thank James Denison for an inspired variation of the anecdote.
18 While a distinction between psychoanalytic and artistic practice should be rigorously upheld, a distinct resonance can be found here. In describing the “traversal of fantasy” (aka “crossing of the phantasm”), which marks the end of analysis in Lacanian practice, Jacques-Alain Miller beautifully states: “...if Lacan talks about the ‘crossing of the fantasm,’ it is in order not to talk about the ‘lifting or disappearance of the fantasm.’ In the case of the fantasm, the question is rather, mostly, to see what is behind, which is difficult, because there is nothing behind. Nonetheless, this is a nothing that can take various guises, and the crossing of the fantasm amounts to taking a walk on the side of those nothings. There is nothing better, even for one’s health, than to take a walk on the side of nothing, but I should also confess that nothing forces one to do so.” (“Two Clinical Dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm” in The Symptom 11 [Spring 2011].)
2 Constructivist and perceptualist alike share the premise of a uniform a priori indeterminacy that is, mythology notwithstanding, retroactively unified as “nature,” “noise,” “chaos,” etc. The notion of “multiplicity” in Bergson and later in Deleuze endeavors to capture this irreducible quality of an indeterminate substrate.
3 “Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. This would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it would turn the incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis)” (Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”).
4 “()Hole complex attests to the confusion between solid and void. Every activity happening on the solid part increases the degree of convolution and entanglement on the holey side of the composition...” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials).
5 For Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. For Henri Bergson, the leftover of what memory cannot grasp is its burden.
6 The olfactory and other sensory triggers in the Proustian moment imply that the image cannot strictly be limited to the visual.
7 The past as lost object reminds us that the so-called withdrawn or withheld character of the speculative object in contemporary philosophy (OOO) appears to have no way to account for the dynamism of its beloved remainder.
8 The Proustian mémoire involontaire stresses the expansive, erotic dimension of this implosion that in traumatic memory stresses its erasive dimension.
9 A blended reference to Wilhelm Kühne, Joseph Beuys, and Rabih Mroué.
10 When ruminating on “mental imagery,” psychologists who aspire to philosophical rigor challenge the little master running the picture show inside, the humunculus. In psychoanalytic terms, this homunculus is the ego.
11 The triangulation at the heart of the Rorschach effect should not be underestimated. The subject faces the inkblot, the archive, and the solicitous prompter.
12 To grasp this absence, we need only consult the failed ambition of killing time. Such a death wish gives but vain hope to the prospect of warding off this absence. Even the so-called “couch potato,” allegedly stabilized before the television, yields a gap that inspires the consumption of another empty substance: popcorn.
13 The Bergsonian durée conflates the irreducible with the unmediated. The synthesis requires the production of an image of time that can transcend the discrete moments that make up succession. Just as the external course of serially juxtaposed pictures cannot explain the cinematic effect of a motion picture, so too the unfolding of lived experience cannot be reduced to the concatenation of discrete images that traverse time. Nonetheless the intensity of the unfolding present moment expresses the image par excellence. Translated into its spatial or extensive constituents, lived experience synthesizes the sensible image: pictures, words, sounds, smells, tastes, and so forth that become invisible, silent, proximate, vibrant and indifferent in the coalescence of the intensive present moment.
14 Further examples abound: The listener snaps her fingers to the pulse of the music, while choreography grafts movement onto the time of music. In the so-called “mirror stage” of psychoanalytic lore, the mirroring image that launches the human subject synchronizes the mimicry of the reflective doppelgänger and the ongoing drive to overcome its difference. The horological impulse is less chronometric than imagistic: In function, the clock first and foremost presents a motion picture of the diurnal passage. In prosody, rhyme and meter fold back on themselves the linear flow of words in order to synchronize language with itself.
15 Synchresis, a neologism coined by Michel Chion that merges the ideas of synthesis and synchronism, refers to the ensemble or montage effect of coupling moving image and sound. The use of the term here suggests an inclusive but broader application.
16 Fantasy presents the very condition of possibility for the factual.
17 I thank James Denison for an inspired variation of the anecdote.
18 While a distinction between psychoanalytic and artistic practice should be rigorously upheld, a distinct resonance can be found here. In describing the “traversal of fantasy” (aka “crossing of the phantasm”), which marks the end of analysis in Lacanian practice, Jacques-Alain Miller beautifully states: “...if Lacan talks about the ‘crossing of the fantasm,’ it is in order not to talk about the ‘lifting or disappearance of the fantasm.’ In the case of the fantasm, the question is rather, mostly, to see what is behind, which is difficult, because there is nothing behind. Nonetheless, this is a nothing that can take various guises, and the crossing of the fantasm amounts to taking a walk on the side of those nothings. There is nothing better, even for one’s health, than to take a walk on the side of nothing, but I should also confess that nothing forces one to do so.” (“Two Clinical Dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm” in The Symptom 11 [Spring 2011].)
Peter Freund is an artist and writer based in Barcelona, Spain. He works across several mediums, including text, experimental film, video installation, conceptual print- and book-making and performance art. His most recent work develops a conceptual use of digital code, investigating its logic of expediency and the parallax between surface and depth. His curatorial project Retracted Cinema, an Oulipo-inspired program of experimental film, screened at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB Xcèntric) in March 2020. Peter is currently on leave from his post as Professor of Art at Saint Mary’s College of California while collaborating with the University of Barcelona Faculty of Fine Arts and other Barcelona art, cultural, and educational institutions.
www.peterfreund.art