THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF APPROACH : Alan Sondheim [BeeHive 05:01]

On Mon, 6 May 2002, Ryan Whyte wrote:

> > > These texts are impressive, and for me, strangely, there's a
> > > distorted resonance with German romantic science, of all things -- a
> > > deployment of science/knowledge to its limit, the sublime and the
> > > positioning/experience of the observer -- although certainly not the
> > > view from the mountaintop but rather the risk of drowning -- and I
> > > wonder if a phenomenology of drowning, if one can think such a
> > > thing, operates here also --
> > >
> > The risk of drowning is both metaphoric and real - there are signature
> > souvenirs from the Everglades - "I gave my blood in the Everglades" -
> > in some of my photography, I've teetered or approached
> > alligators/biting snakes/etc. at close range -
> >
> > But then drowning also connects with emergence/submergence - with
> > sublimation prior to the return of the repressed -
>
> It's interesting for the hermeneutics -- the risk of misinterpreting leads
> to real dangers, and the text follows along, or is already written across
> this structure, and the reader already reads 'into' it --
>
One falls into it: the text, the river, the Everglades, the alligator-maw.
It's productive, a kind of tacit/muscular intelligence at work, an
approach silencing language, in the guise of increasing (incipient)
structure. Gaining knowledge, gaining footholds, listening.

> > One of the rangers described Everglades visitors as down 30% since the
> > 70s - whereas every other park is growing fast. This is because there,
> > I think, there are no demarcations - drive around, focus on the larger
> > birds and alligators, leave. She described the park as "layered" -
> > identification in terms of the object increasingly magnifies; if we
> > had stayed, we would have gone to microscopy. There is also the
> > problematic of identity within the entanglement, which is also the
> > problematic of post-modern identities, looped, eviscerated in terms of
> > public/private, and caught in the matrices of what I called
> > "radiations" or (Cantor) dusts - computer, telephone, radio/tv
> > transmission, inter and intranettings, hackings, and so forth - not to
> > mention the problematic of _what_ is caught as such - after Lacan /
> > Foucault, we can't go back to the monolith of the unitary subject,
> > monad, etc. -
>
> You are part of the park, already; it's speaking of you....
>
No one speaking but myself, enunciated, as if from/of the park (as if/from
the position, say, of a woman), but it is a fictivity, an approach itself,
introjection/projection.

> It's also interesting in terms of differance; the layering will have
> 'made sense' or organized in a retrospective view of previous layers,
> scales, which have to begin, when one is in situ, between bodily
> relation, memory, and the always uncomfortable reading of the map... I
> suppose that everything is constantly misread/jury-read when one is in
> the park; on the other hand there are as you say technological
> inscriptions, resolving power of the microscope, scaling of the map....
>
Scales have neither beginning nor ending, pointsets and bandwidth; one
begins somewhere, after all. But the beginning is always occluded - always
this differance as you say, a deferring, not to the sign, but to its
absence - an absence spelled out only in the metapsychology of the
subject. ...

From ryan.whyte@UTORONTO.CA Sat May 11 22:31:23 2002

-Is it reductive to say that some of the texts you've produced operate
-across these kinds of formal structures, in which reading 'for plot'
-operates across this reading of the map of topographical/topological
-shifts, as it were? The metaphor strains, but it leads to an interesting
-situation of reading, in which 'formal' difficulties in reading apply
-pressure to a kind of tacit knowledge, "silencing language" -- arguably
-the situation of every reading, but 'more so' in this case; riskier --
-...

One might have a narratology without a reading, I think; the phenomenology
of approach implies the former to the extent that there is a noticing,
tending towards the intention to investigate, or at least approach - to
reorient the mind and body towards ( ) - no matter how suffused ( ) is
or appears to be. Even walking or a walk-around is a narration.

One might consider an inordinately rough terrain - and then what happens?
One's attention is consumed with keeping one's balance - almost nothing
else is occurring, and any other goals or destinations - the teleology
itself - may be put on hold, subsumed, reduced to a (default) tag in the
subject's fuzzy scheme of things...

-Agreed -- but I wonder also if the psychoanalytic models -- projection
-etc --- might also be too reductive of what one might call the ecology of
-ideas, both in your texts and in the reading of them? As if the site were
-not that of fantasy or the ego but something that radically takes apart
-the ego, but 'speaks' nonetheless....

I don't think of the site 'taking apart' or 'speaking' - no such book of
nature, etc. It's inert, real. Projection can be a diffusion or emission;
certainly what's occurring in the phenomenology of approach is occurring
within the subject, within the horizon of the subject - elsewhere, extern-
ally, there's instrumental reason, etc. So I'm thinking of a broader meta-
psychology, one of flows/flux/spew/emission as well (my notion of 'defuge'
is related to this). As far as 'taking apart,' it's not as if the ego were
assembled. In almost everything one does, it's absent (see Drew Leder); in
a sense, neither it (nor id) nor the body are present -

[scales]

-And here the psychoanalytic -- at least the Lacanian -- is compelling --
-what is being addressed, what is addressing the subject in or in relation
-to the site (these sentences are difficult to write -- qualification on
-qualification)? The place itself fluctuates with stains, the screen....
[...]

Again, is the subject ever addressed? In the addressing of the subject,
surely it's always the subject that's addressing, at least in the receiv-
ing, if nothing else? A dead subject can never be addressed, at least in
terms of interiority and horizon. The receptor is address.

I wrote a while ago about 'sm's - using sado-masochisms as a crude model
for couplings and linkages, out of which worlding occurs. One might think
of couplings and linkages in terms of the phenomenology of approach and
the skein, embedding, distancing, etc. But that would be another text...