the beautiful as hide and seek

heimlich, the nest

what do our preferences signal? let us trace it in signs: preference, pre – fer, to set before, give some thing more than others. so stand before me, and play here-> preference

some questions, why attempt to cultivate the uneven glades, are there not already differences in shade, why shy from naming them thusly, do we condition a worldview of warring estimations,

is our will misconstrued? who am i to use? to peruse? to prefer? to place before me one and not an other?

preference might be impelled by our connection to our uncanny. the unprobed places of and in us that lead us to worry. and these places are both particular and shared, as interpretation is both personal and part of a community of sound.

evaluation changes the objet/other observed and the subject observing. for example, evaluation presumes a staticity to otherness–as there is an objet under inspection–and to subjectivity–as there is a watch-position occupied. but neither these lives nor their characters are static. the evaluation ensues an illusion. that we control the frame leads us to imagine we control the life depicted in our picture. watching is never seeing every thing; it is viewing some thing through a relatively small window. what we glimpse–and fail to glimpse–is not simply related to my level of vigilance: what we see we see accidentally. hemmed by will and hawed by accident, these already tricky/tricked observations feed our judgments, which grow into formidable traditions. as we often tend to forget the radical void of otherness in face (literally) of our objet of inspection, we also forget the accident in favor of our will. this will, the story of mistake, becomes our divide.

but it can also be our harmonizing drive.

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if i am so resolutely sad is it that i prefer to be so? are emotions different from logos, such that my reason it bends, it is the most willing slave, but the passion depression love disdain these are sages with no yoke to enplace. passion makes agental mastery impossible. for example, the realization that your seduction by an image is reliant/related to some hidden source–some how out side of your logical mind–questions the ability of logo-mind to control our preferences. if our preferences as taste reflect our selves then we must also note how our preferences are out of control, as part of our selves is a quagmire impossible to be fully uncovered. when i say uncovered, i mean traced. that is, put back precisely in one place. we instead can succinctly only mis-place. what i prefer from one moment to the next is an accident. and you can convince me other wise…

there seems a process to the preferences of one. over time, the process attunes itself to each particular life. it is forming and formed out of the moments and mire of event, myth, mirth and madness wrought on and of one’s thought. the community of timing and happenstance on one is grown of shared seeds, and they fruit only within the limits of controllable thought. for the unconscious bears no fruit; it be the hydroponic chemical concoction that reacts to feed the stalk of man. we fruit in the language we can use to tell an other so. be with me and farm my possibilities.

of preference we establish our grounds of judgment. this is not the same as establishing our selves, even if preference in an other way reflects our selves. remember, the preference is a mirror not a mason. one judges–that is, decides by determining one as not an other, namely, you as not the world. in judgment we step out of time and claim vainly to be ahistorically set free from the continual unwoven weaving. one judges from a position–a position suspended in time and in space–that is nonetheless on some ground. it is a ground not terra firma, but a ground very particularly located, some times only in one’s own temples.

mind the madness in the temples

preference is accidental, preference is one’s process of telling the self, preference is a rocky island. but an island is only a mountain. we swim to cross.
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taste is notional beauty. but is beauty more universal? what is the nature of beauty, let us explore our aesthetics. with in mind the preference that signals an opening that is always present in all every thing.

the fleshing out of preference brings to mind an analogous example of determining how to drive a vehicle on a highway. in order to determine how to drive, one might look at the sign of the law to learn what is demanded from her; also, one might look at the ground–that is, the flow of traffic, the conditions of the road, the constraints on visibility and so on.

these consultations are not necessarily totally distinct (the law is part of the terrain). the judgment of beauty corralled by taste is a testimony to ones interaction with this objet out side and in side . the terrain. we are persuaded by the signs designating the beautiful in kind. but we can tell our relationship with the beautiful without such guidance. the interpretation of your heart and whims are yours not an outliers’. but this window lets in much light which conditions our vision of the spaces in side.

the uncanniness, the hiddenness of the hidden, is where the secret to the beautiful (our notion of the beautiful, our taste) is revealed. and this bespeaks the relation of beauty to a universalizable concept, as what is truly hidden is neither yours nor mine.

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the love i know is always limited. the love is my sense and so limited. by this form, love it is both limit and exceeding of limit. it is both, in between either/or.

and this is not the love that i know, but the love i believe.

but it is beautiful to know. this is a space of stirrings of the heart. passion. the muse, the spark.
the limit is beautiful. we must relish the limit. this knowing is part of love as it is BOTH LIMIT AND EXCEEDING ITS LIMIT. know me, knowing there is no me but the me that inhabits my body

why do we love the limit? because we must? because it hurts me when you do not wish to love mine? it is more…

who and how are these limits? i do not know who. i know never whom. the target is missed, misappropriated before i begin to strike at it. this is not in-itself, the target is mis-itself. how is the flesh and the form. the enplace-ment of space. how is the time that i see tick until i see it stop. (it can stop)

so then love is not based on the target. the strike will never reach it precisely. love forgives the hidden spaces where its objet hides.

we overflow the me-and-you we know

-the process of penetration-

in //critique of judgment// kant describes the sublime as “found in a formless object”, represented by a “boundlessness” (§ 23). ironically, the body is sublime. the body–configured as figure and thus limited–is in reality unending and beyond; and love–eternal and without bound–is bounded en frame (love is always political).

is ideology necessarily hidden? i don’t think so. but this is why i am skeptical that analysis helps. it indulges. it is a strip tease with your ideology. but the awareness that it conditions does not subvert it simply in its revelation.

is the body a fetish-objet? can one love the body, can the body be a part of love–is it necessarily an illusion, a fantasy. and what when we find fantasy as an indelible part of love.

if our social practice effects as, that is, we treat the body as holy, how do we know we are not tricking ourselves? in //the sublime object of ideology//, the nefarious thing for zizek, it seems, is the mistake that is willfully re-committed nonetheless. but zizek does not know love–he is worried about being tricked. and though fantasy is a part of love, the suspicion of the fantasy’s trick is not.

it is not that we are only concerned with the way that things are hidden, but more so wherefore this occurs in the first place. the beautiful is hiddenness becoming revealed. but revelation is a construction remade at each moment; it takes constant vigilance to realize its opening.

and this position, the hidden, is sacred. love protects our hidden spaces.

zizek reads an almost omnipresent ideological illusion, “which is structuring our real  effective relationship to reality” (322). and so we are always dreaming–in language, in dance, and in flesh. we are getting it wrong.

zizek writes “”reality” is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire.” (323…cfLacan’s //sem xi//). are we always to wear masks? if so we better start to like the masks. he continues, “an ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favor” ( 325). in this case, then, in faith and belief we are always relaxing in some cozy ideological blanket.

can we resist ideology? can we step outside of it? zizek notes an escheresque knot: two hands drawing each other. so if fundamentalism is ideology, and cynicism is ideology–these various comportments toward interpretation and analysis, and further zizek reminds us “there are no facts only ideology”…    does our search for the beautiful and the good then return humbly–and may be a bit too eagerly–simply to the play of preference? are we isolates in our accidental singularity, an immanence that renders judgments of any kind including beauty impossibly futile and naive toward universal application and, therefore in a sense, understanding. is this not selling out (like zizek does) our concept of the community of the beautiful to the caustic wasteland of the sublime? we find our selves then again with sartre, who, in //nausea// begins picking over his face to ask how it is that such a clod of clay is beautiful and not. does true immanence make all judgments of beauty untenable? may be instead of untenable, the designation of beauty describes a process of openness in unfolding. when we might see an other as always excess of its map, we are ready to behold the beautiful. further, we are best confronted by this excess en flesh a flesh.

how do get get out side of ideology? we do not side-step it, we en-body.” why do i do this” instead becomes, “i do this.”
but if it be all a praxis of illusion may it be a beautiful illusion that is me…

the de-horrorification, when taste is mass produced

-in the flesh we find the uncanny-

freud writes on //the uncanny// as being related to aesthetic judgment. he calls this uncanniness, heimlich, that is, what is hidden. he traces our resonance with art–the beautiful–with that which reminds us of our hidden spaces, e.g. oedipal drives and guilt, castration and our fear of it, the id–which is interestingly homologous to I. D. and etymologically linked to idea.

an example, even guy de maupassant’s, and later, magritte’s, is of a hu-man who sees the back of her body in a mirror. an eyeful of the back of the head! this vision is strange until it is contextualized as her own. it is uncanny; like the halloween sentiment. jarring.

now, in mass production culture–the logic of making the unseen, seen–we witness the widespread penetration and thus de-sacrilization of our hidden experiences. the louvre exhibition is a google images search. the bedroom fantasy is digitized and labeled via common search terms…the back of our heads are now visible by all manner of constant surveillance and imaging software. the vision loses its uncanniness as we are (empowered)–it is a power–by an omnipresent identification as…___

thus we lose sight of the beautiful.

magritte paints “not to be reproduced” and it is a warning. do not loose/lose our hidden frights and surprises that have us reevaluate what and how we know.

what if beauty is always a question of epistemology?

-a virtual conclusion-
we virtualize when we trick our self into thinking self as mediating preferences when it is just all phantasy. do we virtualize all?

since we construct the world (zizek’s kantianism) then the kernal of the world–the world that we can only know as illusion–is found inside the deconstruction of this phantasmic illusion. i make the world and the process of making it reveals my desire. but, does this not simply mistake the making of art–that is, genius at play? art creates a beauty not simply to aid the narcissistic goal of my desire. it is an expression of being with otherness. zizek instead thinks us to be scientists on behalf of our construction, of our desire…and not poets. but we are poets. the poet welcomes the accident without reducing it to the fold. in the scape of our poetry, the accident of articulation and audition remains a rim, a hole.

but, when we share a space, the ministrations of time and order melt away and at least join together in a rhythm that protext against their oft-debilitating noise. by noise i mean distraction. it is in sharing this space where we can confront the holes of our experiences. together.

happiness is not suspension, remaining hidden, detente. lacanian psychoanalysis misconstrues happiness as detente. upon revelation, i am elated. even as i know there will always be hiding. and the illusion of not hiding.

ready or not, here i come

the body is part of the love-process. being-with breaks the illusion. no, it toys with it

there is a catch 22 to enbodying. objetification is initially a mastery. let this move to its own dissolve.

is uncanniness related to ideology? if uncanniness is the hiddenness of hiding, and so too is the ideological fantasy at work (that in seeing the hiding, we out-step the hiddenness of the hidden)… what is left hiding is beautiful. and the most hidden thing is the me at the very point i am the me who inhabits this body.
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