The inadequate, a philosophical testament, part 2
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ii
In 1962, Ed Hirsch, if I remember correctly, introduced me to a
book he found at Hebrew University's bookstore - Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). He told me that it
reminded him of what I was talking about at the time. I had no
philosophical training, read it avidly, and it's stayed with me
ever since. I've had one technical article published on it, in a
Quebecois philosophy journal whose name I forget. I was most
fascinated by the use of the Sheffer stroke and the open-ended
"logical" descriptive phenomenology it embodied. I probably
misunderstood everything at the time, and even now. But the
concept of logical particles, which could be inserted into
active networks, has proved useful - as if these particles had
an abstract existence of their own. Negation seemed critical to
these; it was both a state of affairs and a potential operator.
Of course there are any number of logics and set theories for
that matter, and there are issues of totalization involved which
in a way leaves them in the state of the open vector or
devolution into chaotic states above. Nothing remains in reach
in the symbolic, I think; everything's messy. So early on I
considered 'immersive' and 'definable' hierarchies, the former
contaminated by time, temporality, and the latter assumed to
represent states of affairs that weren't process-oriented. I
believe I read something to that effect in Whitehead. All these
antiquities! A simple example - 2+2 = 4 can be a process - the
process of addition, sorting, etc., involving a phenomenology -
or it can be an abstract statement of quantity in which both
sides are equivalent. In the process, 2+2 do not equal 4, but
are counted or ascertained to be fore; the sides of the equation
represent different states of affairs. In the quantity, each
side can be substituted for the other; they're identical. Of
course all of this gets messy.
But if you begin with what I imagined as a throwing of dice of
Sheffer strokes or their dual, you have interesting modes of
description emphasizing that blooming buzzing confusion of the
real described in part i. I've always seen the world as rubble,
part of growing up in a town whose economy was based on
anthracite; slag piles and mines were everywhere; there were
strikes and terrible accidents; John L. Lewis was a household
name. The Pennsylvanian (upper Carboniferous) forests were also
everywhere; I remember seeing a 17 meter high fossil of a
tree-fern on the side of a cliff, which had fractured and
revealed. As a Jew, I was also aware of the tenuousness of life
and presence, a tenuousness which was manifest in these great
forests that had disappeared eons ago. I could never adapt to
their disappearance; at times the fossils not only carried the
imprints of plants (and occasionally other organisms), but also,
rarely, some compressed plant material itself. I was a neurotic,
ungainly, somewhat miserable youth, and for a long time the
fossils helped sustain me. So there was this realm of
annihilation that I bore with me, as well as my reading, when I
was far too young, into the Nuremberg medical trials, which were
published in full by the government printing office - another
form of annihilation and deep disturbance, coupled with the Cold
War fission and fusion bomb tests that brought terror into my
heart; I had a photograph of the first hydrogen test next to my
bed, as if it were reassuring that horror could be contained in
an image.
And all of this fed into neuroses I've never overcome, and a
strong sense that the destiny of the world is rubble, sinter,
that even fossils crumble. I've embraced failure, I've written
on it, and it infects my work. Writers like Blanchot and
Winograd have been critical to me in this regard, along with
Elaine Scarry, Jean Amery, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, all a
long time ago and a long time coming, and now for example, James
Bridle, Jean Stauffer, Hubert Acquin. I live in descent, in
collapse (as in mining), and I've lived long enough to know that
no project results in completion, capstone, encapsulation, even
anything more than temporary betterment. For me the notion of
inadequacy is paramount; there is no closure and formalizations
of closure are problematic, temporary, as well. We are brutal
primates bringing the fecundity of the planet down with us;
we're always already fossils, always already neoliberalists -
we're permeated with the Permian in a sense. I try to crawl out
of the muck, bringing the muck along with me. I emphasize the
body, coal strata, shale, peat, anything that places what
appears to be a relatively autonomous digital realm into the
context of what sort of microbiomic organisms we are and what we
are thinking we're doing with prostheses. So the body, always
and already invisible, the momentary loci of processes, awash in
a see of microplastics and radiations, dissolving in its
projects and tendencies, gives the truth to failure, to loss, to
inadequacy. This is not to say that one shouldn't try for a
better world or completion, but perhaps one should with the
foreknowledge of real failure in the long runnings of humanity.
Or perhaps finding a way to overcome such failure, or perhaps
not. This is the k-not or tangled negation or chaotic results
that we live among, within and without our body and bodies, as
if there were objects cohering to a real we can envision only in
our dreams and attempted projects, projections.
Or so we, somewhat here, are led to believe.
...
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