"The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement play a very complicated rôle, but a very definite rôle, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture. What we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn't exist in the Middle Ages. An entirely different game is played in different ages."
~ Wittgenstein (Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (25). Ed. Cyril Barrett.)
"Speech, as an object of outer experience, is obviously nothing more than a very complete telegraph which communicates arbitrary signs with the greatest rapidity and the finest distinctions of difference. . . . The meaning of a speech is, as a rule, immediately grasped, accurately and distinctly taken in, without the imagination being brought into play. It is reason which speaks to reason, keeping within its own province."
~ Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea. Trs. R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp.)
Nine Abstractions Of Will (Service Pack 2, Version 1.1.8)
1. Concinnity
My words chill in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire. I sat strange enough to alone-start the lens. Moreover the getting had heart, was a complete and perfect survival. We made love. We climbed exploring the packed-in backbone of the books. Seduction of birthmark an inch from the lens. From my eye transfixion calls for skills in the hands of those who have gladness. I read settled in stake chapter. Coffee is my friend. My audience was blood, thirst slaked to tap. Returning to some otherwise virtual space that no one else could claim.
2. Dissonance
Empty signs, signs to learn the calculus I fed on so the street's parallels wouldn't rage violence as figures of speech compromised past-picture perfect. A post-anti only depicted the signal lights blinking yellow. The mind shed its ions, traced the way an age is told to gauge the rebuilding facade. In other words, imagine my word-worlds.
3. Concentus
I spoke the hypnotic "listen" — a link to cluster the contour maps terratory. To feed apart the sense points, the line, its silhouettes. Grasping and chasm; wings fleet foot and the poem. What saves us he said is no vision, no visible control systems. The isolations know the facts and complex neurons made synthetic. Hearing choirs, I loop back, the hearing choirs of angels.
4. Diapason
My "Words" are artifice, memory leaks, system faults. Crucify the tall consonants to build an alpine fire and trace the shapes of the trees with your fingers and hands. Make the audience rise to a standing ovation. My crystal house was invention itself, these ovals your birthright — their tridents like dandelions as choir of angels, voices raised in symphonic triumph.
5. Euphonic
The dire wind dies. brass clasp, glass lines and dusty linens. Women paint their eyes open on the street of middle ciphers. Decibel levels of squall undress the deaf pistils and itinerant sun dates your actions from the pages of a done book. Dark hazel eyes, horizons, advancing to cityscapes of revelation visible beyond the ruckus.
6. Attunement
Racing thoughts in trains, on acela trains, landscapes pulled away. I owned more than one narrative able to live in a person. Could do the invention stories. Could seduce juries hung on fascination. Appearance inside the single aesthetic could chance there and it was ripe. Audience of artificial intelligentsia brimming with ironic disdain. Pronouncements clashing at the console. By nightfall the permissions gave way to unstructured cobalt rules engines. Internal spheres out for a spin. Moving my lips along the middle range carried the tunes above her ramparts.
7. Accedence
You slip along pasting the narrative to each [p]age as if knowledge is social tapestry of concurrance. More knowledge against bumping up against contradictions. Ravaged where anonymity hangs like summer heat in Kenmore Square. Bogged down by cigarette object an oral shape recites dark sonnets. The elements emit consent. I liked that and bathed in its glow. Toasted bytes torched by licking blue flames cloaked in vapor and regret.
8. Concurrence
Periodic indian summer the cozier lines meeting in single point. Fried, frazzled, to pull; connive, to push me over. Hinged legs spread open and tool kit, locksmith for the host. Coercions shaped a place for the re-mix. Comlink meant mapping, bound the wholes in their synapsed delusions. Notes on personal convention in lieu of smashing through but in so much feedback a motor motions caution.
9. Perorate
Your kiss seeping you into my thoughts love, I suppose the transformations lacking your dynamism. Simulated desires burning out the connections over instant messenger. This is my instantiation, my beginning, my relativity. Reading smoke signals and hopes trailing whispered winds.
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 12
Schopenhauer thought that knowledge only applies to ideas, which constitute the world of phenomena, and not to Will. However, manifest acts of will require knowledge. Therefore the will creates for itself an abstraction of intellect so as to serve it and to allow it to achieve its aims; the magnitude of that intellect is proportional to the needs of the Will. This was a rather brilliant insight into the reason why intellectual development and attainments differ in people. The world as idea can have no existence at all outside the realm of knowledge. Therefore it cannot be ultimately "real," although S did a piss-poor job of defining the topology of the real. He considered the will itself to be free. However, all the manifestations of it have to conform to causality. So he believed that in the world as idea there was no freedom, except one: the freedom to deny the will. The basis of the individual's own will is the impersonal will, which creates endless conflict and struggle. The individual is ruled by determinism and sorrow, and the only way of escape is to turn to asceticism. He considered asceticism to be a higher stage than morality (which I completely disagree with, but whatever), and he tried to practice in his life the denial of the impersonal will.
Will, I find this fascinating - a real mix of abstraction and vivid imagery. I assume that the subtitle, (Service Pack 2, Version 1.1.8) is to nail your piece to the present pre-simulationist period. On the other hand, you might be away with the fairies due to overdosing on caffeine. Or me. LOL!
I think Wittgenstein could be hard pressed to defend his: "What we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn't exist in the Middle Ages." To my mind, that is just to much of a sweeping generalization begging to be shot down.
I don't agree at all with Schopenhauer's contentions. To my mind, words - whether written or spoken - are symbols, to convey thoughts, which are analytical symbols of experience, and such is subjective, differing with each person. That's why a group of people can listen to (or witness) something said (or done) by an individual, yet each one in the group can hear (or experience) something totally different from everyone else. Everything is an interpretation - there is no such thing as objectivity. Reason is not immune from this.
But putting my rant aside, I enjoyed what you've done - 10 stars from me.
Post Script. For the sheer fun of it, I'll disagree with the observation that: "Therefore the will creates for itself an abstraction of intellect so as to serve it and to allow it to achieve its aims ..." Abstractions are not created - it is specifics which are created, and these are formed by definitions of whatever. Nor do I agree with:"The world as idea can have no existence at all outside the realm of knowledge." To the contrary, it is the realm of imagination that gives the world as an idea it's only existence - everything is subjective interpretation, without exception. Thus there is total freedom - what you believe is true for you, and it is your belief that makes it so. You are your universe and you can populate it with whatever you like. As I can with my universe. And what is true in your universe may be totally false or absent in mine. Our universes can be mutually exclusive, total contradictions of each other ....
I could go on, but this fun has to stop before my comments are longer than your article, and that will never do. Now I'm going to overdose on more coffee.
I hope this discourse has many more contributors - it's both fun and intellectually stimulating. Now, I'll go and make my coffee. With power restored, the kettle is boiling - as I hope your article will.
I don't want to leave out your abstractions here either, Will, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. A wonderful interweaving of your pre-sim and the real world.
Perhaps, Will, you should consider republishing this to a lot more groups.
This work of yours begs to be read and discussed - perhaps a provocative title might draw more readers. It'd be a dreadful shame if this just sinks into the ever deepening quagmire of fluff.
1. con·cin·ni·ty [kən sínnətee] (plural con·cin·ni·ties) noun
1. LITERATURE pleasing stylistic artistic harmony: a balanced, graceful, polished quality, particularly in a literary work
2. generally harmonious structure: a harmonious structuring of all parts of something in terms of the whole
[Mid-16th century. Formed from Latin concinnitas, from concinnus "skillfully put together."]
The first person speaker has an interlocutor, and she has a mind of sufficient capacity as to understand his words--"cold polished stones"--enough so they can "chill" her consciousness. "The getting had heart": Emotions run under the surface of the words, somatically marking them, and the subtext is the "merging" of the two communicants--yes, in a sacral and profane sense--"we made love" is a euphemism that points to intimacy and away from the rawness of sex itself. And yet there is a camera involved, a lens recording and capturing all: a futile immortality project of the will, trying to wrest a personal time from the impersonal "world as will" in the Shopenhauerian sense? The speaker explores ideas with his lover, regards himself self-referentially in her as a recorded act, longs for "gladness", reads, drinks coffee, thinks of his readership in sacramentally consanguineous terms,and then finds refuge in an elsewhere--"some otherwise virtual space"--where he is both velocity and vector, poised in quantum superposition outside of some Newtonian deterministic causality (the limiting factor of all previous metaphysical studies.) The word 'concinnity' clearly refers to the parts of the whole that constitute the speaker's life as a complex of relevant puzzle pieces, each with their own unique value--"Coffee is my friend--"that can be reproduced in words, that as a transparent act of free will illusion can be considered a balanced, graceful, polished literary work, whether the speaker's words spoken chill or not.
2. dis·so·nance [díssənəns] (plural dis·so·nanc·es) noun
1. unpleasant noise: a combination of sounds that is unpleasant to listen to
2. inconsistency: lack of consistency or compatibility between actions or beliefs
3. MUSIC unstable combination of musical notes: a combination of notes that, when played simultaneously, sounds displeasing and needs to be resolved to a consonance.
"This is the tune but there are no words, the words are only speculation (from the Latin speculum."
John Ashbery, SELF PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR, Selected Poems.
The speaker finds himself out of sorts with the "cultural taste" he finds expressed around himself--he himself is the dissonant note, since he hears so much badly constructed "noise" about himself that has forgotten "the tune but there are no words", so he must invent "empty signs, signs to learn the calculus that I fed on so the street's parallels wouldn't rage violence as figures of speech...." He knew he had to change the language he spoke and thought in, so as to in both an act of will as well as a move out of quantum entanglement, find new ways to express novel nonverbal concepts and expressions. It didn't serve to criticize the "post" (that is to say, the past) but instead try to understand what "pre" was, an infinity of possiblities. That is why "the mind shed ions." The poet is busy bilocating out of an exhausted present into a set of knowable imaginal "word worlds."
3.concentus--Accentus Ecclesiasticus is a Church music term, the counterpart of concentus. The terms were probably introduced by Ornithoparchus in his Musicae activae micrologus, 1517. (Apel, 4)
In the medieval church, all that portion of the liturgical song which was performed by the entire choir, or by sections of it, was called concentus; thus hymns, psalms, mass ordinary, and alleluias were, generally speaking, included under this term, as well as anything with more complex or distinctive melodic contours. On the other hand, such parts of the liturgy which the priest, the deacon, the subdeacon, or the acolyte sang alone were called accentus; such were the collects, the epistle and gospel, the preface, or anything which was recited chiefly on one tone, rather than sung, by the priest or one of his assistants. The accentus should never be accompanied by harmonies, whether of voices or of instruments, although the concentus may receive such accompaniment. The intoning words Gloria in excelsis Deo and Credo in Unum Deum, being assigned to the celebrant alone, should not be repeated by the choir or accompanied by the organ or other musical instrument.
To speak the "listen" is to focus attention of another, in this case on the "territory" for which a map is necessary: Consciousness extended into poetry from the neural substrate, polyphonic neural response in intricate palimpsest like maps that instantly sample and "approximate" experience of 'reality, a concentus of speaking (prayer) and listening (meditation) that results in a pre-Simulationist liturgical cartography of the cosmos.
4. Diapason
1. pipe organ's main stop: either of the two main stops on a pipe organ that control the organ's tone and give the instrument its characteristic sound
2. range of singer or musical instrument: the complete range of a musical instrument or a person's singing voice (technical)
3. tuning device: a tuning fork or pitch pipe (technical)
[14th century. Via Latin from, ultimately, Greek dia pasōn khordōn, literally "across all the notes of the scale."]
The speaker appraises his own use of language as performance, especially since his words are third order representations (or maps) of the world--"artifice, memory leaks, system faults." He sees the nature of the sound of words and recognizes he can consecrate meaning for an audience, as well as "rise to a standing ovation." His use of words is that of an instrument, a secondary quality of his magnificent extended consciousness, regardless if the self that emerges from it in pulses is both organismically stable in its involuntary systems but also a patchwork of redrafted engram-based versions of conscious activity. Imagination--the bane of Hume--becomes the salvation of a pre-Simulationist Evans, since he realizes its place in the reflexive monist mind, "as choir of angels, voices raised in symphonic triumph.
eu·pho·ny(plural eu·pho·nies) noun
pleasant sound: a pleasant sound, especially in speech or pronunciation
[15th century. From French euphonie, from, ultimately, Greek euphōnos "sweet-voiced," from phōnē "sound."]
Reading this surreal passage of a sim landscape and conurbations extant I remember my first perusal of the opening section of Carlos Fuentes 800 page meta-historical opus novel TERRA NOSTRA (1975), a phantasmagoric reversal of reality in a transmogrified fictional Paris that was inspired by a similiar revolution challenging political and intellectual orders, Fuentes' stay in the French capital during the student riots and civil disturbances with barricades in 1968, that coincided with the publication of Derrida's On Grammatology, Foucault's Madness and Civilization, and Lacan's book of essays. Although that moment of change turned out to be as false and hollow as the counter-culture it critiqued, then enthroned with marginalia substituting for meaning, the similarity is striking because Evans' has found the language of derangement (as Fuentes did) for the exact moment of paradigm shift: He has caught pre-Simulation seeding itself in thought and redressing language like William Gass metaphor bubbles multiplying faster than Andy Warhol Marilyns, simulating the dynamic creations of possible VRML women marching into Chirico-like horizons toward the sim cities of the future. This ain't cyberpunk lowlife strip culture as Gibson saw it, but a different sort of imagined future opening up, "beyond the ruckus."
After dissonance with the inadequate linguistic model comes polyphonic response in the choirs of the nerves, then the controlled performance of the genetic code unraveling as universal patterns in language, thought, consciousness (a universalism that the constructivists who built on the behaviourist tabula rasa model of no interior self--the black box approach of ignoring phenomenology--could only denounce, since it prevented their politically correct templates that start with progressive ideas of gender and race but end with Robespierres and Stalins and reigns of terror and gulags, because they ignore the essentially human bio-patten, the spiral of life). Finally there is a sweet sound, ready for attunement.
6. Attunement at·tune (past at·tuned, past participle at·tuned, present participle at·tun·ing, 3rd person present singular at·tunes) transitive verb
adjust something to something else: to adjust or accustom something to become receptive or responsive to something else.
This is a wonderful pre-Sim concept in the making, I can already see from Will's use of it here, in the midst of his assemblage of musical notation to conduct a tempest to the score of the stormy self.
The speaker envisions himself in accelerated circumstances, with shifting frames of reference--thoughts racing forward in trains, "landscapes pulled away." The virtual world permits multiple narratives, not merely double lives, but multiple sprawling strands of self messily played out with as many avatars as possible: The postmodern cream dream. The speaker ponders the consequences: "Could do the invention stories." Now a re-enactment of Camus' The Fall: "Could seduce juries hung on fascination. " The possibilities lead to cybernetic functionalism where subjectivity is absent or one note: "Audience of artificial intelligentsia brimming with ironic disdain." It's almost an image of Daniel Dennett's Harvard populated with very bright zombies. The speaker continues in his sim odyssey to learn more about the "brave new world" he's entering. He's definitely 'willed' himself into a future vision, but now he has to decide where it branches, divides, forks and bifurcates.
There is a sense of losing control in the last few lines, "The permissions gave way to unstructured cobalt rules engines'" of the humans losing control over their simulations. Who is being attuned. And for what purpose? Is it human evolution if we replicate memes in thought engines that lack consciousness as embodied glog selves? And if that is a future, how do we steer the accelerated memes away from its event horizon?
7. Accedence consent or agreement to something
2. come to power: to attain an important and powerful position
3. sign treaty: to become a party to an international agreement or treaty
[15th century. From Latin accedere, literally "to come to," from cedere "to come" (source of English cease and ancestor ).]
—ac·ced·ence, noun
Another great word in the way Will is using it: He sees self-organizing thought "pasting the narrative to each page" (we think of Burroughs and Gysin, of magickal techniques of editing the world by cutting and pasting your own memories, which are rich recollections of sensory experience but also inferences, hearsay, news stories, a compilation of sources) "as if knowledg is social tapestry of concurrence" (that is to say, if there is no current language game in the Wittgensteinan sense, and the public coin of language's meanings guaranteed a sort of naive consensus on the knowledge extracted from words.
But the Chomsky breakthrough of universal structures of syntax (and linguistic acquisition) doesn't imply universal understanding of the same concepts behind different signifiers, this is based on "learnings" that are social and "approximations" of awareness that are conditional to the given context. So, there are limits to language, as well as individual will, in any world we created: "More knowledge against bumping up against contradictions." The speaker retreats to a personal image revealing his subjectivity is lost in the crowd of other minds, "ravaged where anonymity hangs like summer heat in Kenmore Square." He smokes, he cathects on orality, and finds poetry in a fetish. He 'accedes' to his own limitations self-described, feels the regret in a virtual nicotinized Boston of "toasted bytes torched by licking blue flames cloaked in vapor and regret."
8. Concurrence
adjective
1. happening together: taking place or existing at the same time, or running parallel
2. GEOMETRY See convergent
Deep in the sim world building (his imagination instantly throwing up new thought worlds translated into word worlds then rendered by rastoring programs (very similiar to how one's own brain creates first-order neural maps of objects for the proto-self, that in turn generates second-order maps for core consciousness to respond to by triggering third order language maps for the extended awareness to finally understand its own reaction--"we are sad because we cry" William James--and respond with memory, will to a new action, or inaction as a choice) Now we are in the realm of convergent realities, where the extended sexual metaphor of the couple dovetails into the elaborate simulated fantasy of self in images like these--"Hinged legs spread open and tool kit, locksmith for the host."
We are back to the 'instantiation' of lovemaking, though removed from the sigil production and release by the speakers resorting to cybernetic descriptions to aesthetically abstract the intensity of the encounter, though the BDSM imagery heightens the power of the interaction--"bound the wholes in their synapsed delusions" , "smashing through" gives way to the safe sign--"a motor motions caution." Clearly we are talking consensual partners reaching extreme states beyond language for a supreme concurrence, that elicits "so much feedback."
9. Perorate 1. end speech: to finish a speech by summarizing its main points
2. give speech: to speak at length, especially in a formal or pompous way
[Early 17th century. From Latin perorare, literally "to speak all the way through," from orare "to speak" (source of English oration ).]
We are at the end of the poem as well as the erotic session, and so we get "your kiss seeping you intol my thoughts love...." No subjective idealism here, the speaker is wrenched from his paradigm-shifting reverie back into the body awareness (for isn't sex a form of forgetting in the merging with the other, and so as we melt as animal forms where does the mind go, particularly a mind as dissipative in energy structure as this genius poet's?) forgoing therefore any accusations of solipsism, and yet, "I suppose the transformations lacking your dynamism."
We are back in a virtual world with "simulated desires" and we ask ourselves if this ostensible erotic merging was not just a super-sigilizing through optical fiber from one router-modem to another---"burning out the connections over instant messenger." What is the literal world, and what is the metaphorical one, at this point in the poem? "This is my instantiation, my beginnning, relativity." Self merging with self after the mind meld, the Einsteinan frames shifted once again, where love is objectively reduces in a quantum state in the mind and the lover experienced as an afterthought, an evaluation of the sharing--"reading smoke signals and hopes trailing whispered winds--" and the personal narrative of the speaker becomes one with his awareness of a fundamental shift in his thinking, into a pre-Sim world where he can envisage "immersion" in the sim worlds while still in the real world with growing mastery.
I might add, as well, that like Alexander Leverenze's iconoclastic poem Re: Will Evans IV ambitious attempt here to characterize his own morphing of consciousness must be tackled on several levels of awareness, and even so at the end of the day another prescient reader may feel as I do: Not that they have misread this remarkable text, nor that they have read too much into it, but rather, they haven't glimpsed the fullness of the poem's insight literally because it 'seems' to be a future object embedded in a present not quite ready to accept what it is proposing.
Needless to say, I rather fancy this sort of world-breaking literary effort, in spite of its difficulty and 'seeming' reconditeness at first, because I am tasting now the world I will live out later.
Ole! poeta de las tinieblas que deslumbran con chispas una oscuridad aun mas caido, mas ennegrecido, mas infernal....esperando la luz que viene palabra por palabra como imagenes entrando el ojo en un instante.
JFW