Critical Theory

Process Post. /  by Justin Harrison

Nothing too deep or revelatory. More me just making sure I’m writing about my process.

Yet something feels right about this, somethings I make and am unsure, but this I’m ok with.

Materials lead me again and there is something provocative and pleasing about the natural canvas.

I’m making a large icing bag basically, but for clay. I’m making my own tools to work with and that to is satisfying. I’m tempted to get ealborate, but I should have learnt from previous lessons that it will slow me down, but it’s hard - I want to make pretty!

The plan is to locate naturally occurring clay and use it as a medium to draw with, although I am now having to research and figure where I might find it. This could involve a number of exploratory walks and scrambling but then I like that kinda thing.

I feel drawn to the process of engaging with the land, gently moving an element and decontextualising it into a medium and meaning - a form of translation.

This too I’ve been looking at ‘Translation’ what does it really mean to translate language and other things? What and how does it happen? It’s connected to the Liminal.

Also please note it took me a ridiculously long time to figure the pattern out, when it shouldn’t.

 

Negative Lever II /  by Justin Harrison

Exploring the Negative Lever in the studio, using the card frame as a template I took the outline and had begun to explore it looking at the boundaries and boards it makes.

It gives me the opportunity to work inside and outside, across positive and negative. I was tempted to fill the entire frame in black but something stopped me, something about the quality of the line - the fading and incompleteness…

…and there’s that word again incompleteness, I’m beginning to look at Homi Bhabha again: ‘Translation and Displacement’ and ‘How newness enters the world’. Engaging with boundaries and boarders.

 

Notes on das ding /  by Justin Harrison

Been having a little root around the work of Rick Boothby and Das Ding. Another research rabbit hole courtesy of Jonathan K.

I need to get my head around this but I have the sneaky suspicion that there are some juicy connections to be found amongst, Das Ding (The Unkowable) and Differance. The Abyss, the void, the sacred and anxiety.

Sometimes I land upon certain words or the relationship between words - ‘points of intersection’. I guess that’s why I also write poetry within my work. And ‘anxiety’ has caught my attention. Boothby touches upon this and the Abyssal, the unknown

“What is unknown in the fellow human being”.

“At bottom anxiety is not without an object. It is directly related to the most profound object - das ding. The object that has no exactly known content. The Abyssal object. The primordial stimulant of anxiety.” Boothby reporting Lacan.

“The object potentially being the unrecognisable facet of another human or human object”

Subtracted space.

Uncertainty, Incompleteness. - What we cannot know. Das Ding. Unknowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmBOWQOrH7g

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Inadvertently I also found a lecture by Stuart Hall on race as a floating signifier. which I need to explore. The notion of a sliding signifier feels like it has a relation to Differance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PodKki9g2Pw

 

All Changes /  by Justin Harrison

I’m trying to pull everything together, I have various notes and ideas, there feels to be strong relationships between the elements I am discovering. So below are my latest notes and thoughts, for my research paper, which may need to change altogether from what I have submitted as a second draft….

Same not the same

"Strategy without finality" Derrida Differance - in Royale Nicholas Jacques Derrida p 153

There is no answer no unifying theory of everything

Change is constant

Territories and the liminal. Liminal Territories.

The liminal is constant change. The passage to transformation.

There will always be change - difference, differance. It brings creativity - progression - Transormation

Theory of incompleteness.

To accept change as a cleansing agent that protects us from structural stagnation.

"The question of difference within any society or culture is always conjunctural, ever-changing, and conditional. “Race” is not a permanent social category, but a historical product of slavery and human exploitation, an unequal relationship between social groups." Manning Marable Essay: https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/black-studies-multiculturalism-and-the-future-of-american-education/

We cannot fill the void

We are incomplete

We will remain incomplete

The Liminal can never be resolved,

located in time

or space

or concept

The passage facilitates change

Movement

Accepting continuous change

Progressive generation.

"As he puts it in an essay entitled 'Ellipsis' (1967): 'Why would one mourn for the centre? Is not the centre, the absence of play and differance, another name for death?" Derrida in - Royale Jacques Derrida p 16

"For, always incomplete, of an incompletion which is not the negativity of lack, [deconstruction] is interminable, an' interminable analysis', ('theoretical and practical', as we used to say). As it is never closed into a system, as it is the deconstruction of the systemic totality, it needs some supplementary afterword each time it runs the risk of stabilising or saturating into formalised discourse (doctrine, method, delimitable and canonised corpus, teachable knowledge etc.)...[Deconstruction would be] afterword to the presence or presentation of the present itself." Derrida in - Royale Jacques Derrida p 145

The paddle as an agent of change/ movement

The presence and nature of change in UVR/artists work. Passage and Transformation.

UVR's Little nothings complete in their incompleteness.

Are her little nothings incomplete?

UVR Haunting of materials - age, presence agency, repetition

"After Derrida, one has to reckon with 'presences' that are neither simply inside nor categorically outside the text" Royal Nicholas, Jacques Derrida P149

Hauntings an 'incomplete presence' in the art, in the materials physicality, treatment and in the movement of the artist 'passaging'.

Neither inside or outside of the art. The meaning neither inside or outside the artwork

See below also 'Included Middle" as key connection, regarding the position of a thing as neither inside or outside.

The First Incompleteness Theorem provides a counterexample to completeness by exhibiting an arithmetic statement which is neither provable nor refutable in Peano arithmetic, though true in the standard model. The Second Incompleteness Theorem shows that the consistency of arithmetic cannot be proved in arithmetic itself. Thus Gödel’s theorems demonstrated the infeasibility of the Hilbert program, if it is to be characterized by those particular desiderata, consistency and completeness.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/

Heisenberg noticed that there are cases where the straightforward classical logic of A and not-A does not hold. He pointed out how the traditional law of Excluded Middle has to be modified in Quantum Mechanics. In general cases at the macro scale, the law of Excluded Middle would seem to hold. Either there is a table here, or there is not a table here. There is no third position. But in the Quantum Mechanical realm, there are the ideas of superposition and possibility, where both states could be true. 

The Included Middle is a conceptual model that overcomes dualism and opens a frame that is complex and multi-dimensional, not merely one of binary elements and simple linear causality. We have now come to comprehend and address our world as one that is complex as opposed to basic, and formal tools that support this investigation are crucial. The Included Middle helps to expose how our thinking process unfolds. When attempting to grasp anything new, a basic “A, not-A” logic could be the first step in understanding the situation. However, the idea is then to progress to the next step which is another level of thinking that holds both A and not-A. The Included Middle is a more robust model that has properties of both determinacy and indeterminacy, the universal and the particular, the part and the whole, and actuality and possibility. The Included Middle is a position of greater complexity and possibility for addressing any situation. Conceiving of a third space that holds two apparent contradictions of a problem is what the Included Middle might bring to contemporary challenges in consciousness, artificial intelligence, disease pathologies, and unified theories in physics and cosmology.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27155

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Draw on paddle with clay?

UVR Transformation of materials in form and concept?

What is this deep love of materials for her?

A strong sense of history and of time passed.

"I always have a specific vision of what I want in my head, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to start. Other than that, I rely on instinct. I honestly don’t understand it, but I also know something else so clearly. Earlier today, I was working on a required legal document and I felt like a child. I felt so stupid in regard to my lack of understanding and the fact that I don’t want to understand them, but I have to because I’m grown-up, or whatever. I feel completely different in the world where I make my art… it’s so clear to me that this is what I was born to do. And it’s not as though anything is absolute, or definite, or defined." UVR

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ursula-von-rydingsvard-on-how-your-career-evolves-over-time/

"Titles do have a meaning for me, but I don’t want them to have that meaning for anybody else. For this reason, many of the titles I give my works are in Polish and are often not translated. I refer to my sculptures as “bowls” but hate it because they are not bowls. They are an excuse to do all these things that can conceptually feel like fabric, or like the ocean waves. I cannot compete with actual waves, but I can make forms in an entirely new way. Trying my hand at these wave-like structures, I like when there is unexpected movement, or where it does something that it shouldn’t or is not supposed to. It’s as if they misbehave." UVR

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ursula-von-rydingsvard-on-how-your-career-evolves-over-time/

When you attended Columbia in the early ’80s, Minimalism was all the rage. Did you ever connect to that movement?

If you made work with a figure, you’d be dead in the water without any hope to show in a gallery. The minimalists were really in power for many years and they had a haughty idea of what was right and what was wrong in art. The minimal look is minus feelings and full of philosophy and erudite high-end talk. It’s so not me, although it’s not that I didn’t borrow from them either. I borrowed the grid from Sol LeWitt, and their use of repetition. UVR

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ursula-von-rydingsvard-on-how-your-career-evolves-over-time/

"The grid is my guardian." UVR

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ursula-von-rydingsvard-on-how-your-career-evolves-over-time/

"That’s the best thing about art, you can’t label it. You won’t find an answer, ever." UVR

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ursula-von-rydingsvard-on-how-your-career-evolves-over-time/

"I come from generations of Polish peasant farmers. I’ve always been inspired by their tools and wood piles. There is nothing that is superfluous." UVR

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ursula-von-rydingsvard-on-how-your-career-evolves-over-time/

 

Movement and Passage /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Notes whilst cycling home...I've found my processing happens at interesting moments and not always the most convenient! I've learnt to record messages to myself to scribe later.

An aperture opens up through/by the interstices, and can connect to any number of possible apertures, the rhyzomic, with no guarantee where it will end. This is the 'Unknown' the 'fluid', the 'frustration' of 'being in passage'.

To pass through requires movement, and this is fundamental, movement must always occur, because to not move is stasis, a 'little death' and that is the structure, the structure does not move, it cannot take passage through the Liminal, for it is an aberration.

The structure has an 'illusion' of movement because it has a centre (((Derrida Structure sign play)))and everything (((WHAT? All that is termed/defined by the binary of the structures definition))) is tethered to the centre, and it can only circumscribe a circle of a given diameter, territory. A false moment, an ersatz movement, a 'performative'.

Where as once displacement has occurred for an agent, then there is a' line of flight' as Deleuze describes in Minor Literatures. This displacement can come through two sources, either structural violence where somebody is ejected - removed form the structure for failing to fullfill binary demands, or violence to the structure where somebody rejects the structure and remove themselves. Rejection and Ejection - this trajectory requires 'movement' through new boundaries new borders new apertures, new interstices.

Other thoughts

The trouble with the Binary is that it is a 2 dimensional in it's approach. It lacks holistic thinking and fails to acknowledge the differance, the movement, the third dimension, or third space as Homi Bhabha describes.

AK makes work that sets up perameters that manifest the void. It messes with the binary logic, rational. Making the untenable - the untouchable

UVR makes work that stands in defiance of ejection the weigh and size, the oversized. Defiance of authority. (Often self elected authority)

 

ZARINA HASHMI /  by Justin Harrison

ZARINA HASHMI - I notice her work has similar motifs to the ‘Bundle’ drawings, in addition her work focuses a lot on displacement. I discovered her trying to wade through a lecture I found by Homi Bhabha. He’s messing with me in a wonderful way. He hits all the notes that connect. I think I’m actually starting to really enjoy researching. Language, displacement, translation, liminal. And I didn’t realise that he was so closely connected to the arts.

I need to investigate her work more.

57:30 These material practices that I have termed the poses of facture are more than mere surfaces of inscription or materials submitted to transformation. They're as active in their signification of cultural translation as any other discursive or semiotic system.

And I have often thought that we have been so trapped in the idea of face-to-faceness or in the idea of binaries or polarities, things that I have resisted thinking about, forms a foreignness or otherness or alterity that there are other ways in which the making of work is also the translation too, the making of work is the encounter with alterity and I find that very much in her(Zarina Hashmi) case.

Bhabha Homi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQcdbSV6OI

 

Minor Literature in a Major Culture Language - Deleuze /  by Justin Harrison

Minor Literature in a Major Culture Language

Cathedral Machine

Cathedral of Capitalism

Vectors of resistance

Deterritorialisation - Deleuze

Naustalgia

Does no the digital world lend itself to control and observation

Art might be absurd but is the status quo any less?

If Kafka's work is a rhizome, then its expression does not crystalize into a unifying form; instead the expression is a proliferation of different lines of growth. The work resembles crabgrass, a bewildering multiplicity of stems and roots which can cross at any point to form a variety of possible connections. Reading can participate in these connections; a reader makes connections as he reads. He need not interpret and say what the text means; he can discover where passages in the text lead, with what they can be connected. The result is not an interpretation but a map,a tool with which to find a way. The map is the production of an experimental reading, the word experiment being used here as John Cage uses it, "not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown."I The reader becomes a nomad; to borrow a phrase from Lyotard, reading becomes "a nomadic of intensities."7 As such it does not threaten minor perspectives; instead it entertains them, and minor literature works to produce a reading which will constitute its own affirmation.

Deleuze and Guattari - What is a minor Literature

In Kafka: pour une litterature mineure, Deleuze and Guattari enter Kafka's work by considering his mode of expression. What they discover is that expression in Kafka evades the linguistic models that might interpret it-in particular Hjelmslev's distinction between the form of the content and the form of the expression.' Kafka works toward an "unformed expressive material" which, on the one hand, leads to "less and less formalized contents" and, on the other hand, turns the most resistant formalizations into unformed contents as well. Kafka works toward a deterritorialization which cannot be reterritorialized by an interpreter: what he expresses are "states of desire independent of all interpretation," and he expresses these states not in a universal way but as a Jew in Prague, as the writer of a minor literature who finds that if expression provides an escape, it does so in connection with a specific cultural context

Deleuze and Guattari - What is a minor Literature

So Deleuze speaks of territoiralisation and interpretation, Bhabha also speaks at length on interpretation and then Derrida writes to a Japanese friend. In regards to language and it's codification - interpretation is a significant machine who's output is...dubious. How then do we approach the minor literature of art making? Interpreting Art?

Kapoor repeatedly presents us with an ambiguity of locating the self in space and time. The void is cast before us in multiple iterations, refusing to abate.

The liminal and void are the same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

The liminal and the void are the same, not the same. They share qualities essences sensibilities and lacking. Yet the void by its nature must be empty. The liminal is thick and soupy,. In both locations references become null, maps Undraw themselves and time frays.

In both codes and coordinates unravel, like nets cast upon the world to create order. To locate the self.

But to exit the void leaves what?

To exit the liminal leaves the old behind and ushers forth the new, change, transformation.

There are a number of references which need to be kept apart and should not be used interchangeably. The liminal, the void, the in-between. The non place. The Third Space. The middle.

Specifically the liminal has a vectorality of the passage.

The liminal is full.

The void empty

Maybe in Kapoors work the void correctly identifies what is generated by imperialism, a consuming absence. Where as UvR’s work identifies the marginal liminal experience - not so removed. Not empty but ambiguous.

With my artwork things are the same not the same. I use an objects history to locate a vector, but replace it in time establishing another vector. In the materiality I am using its history. It’s Hauntology. With the fence panels I have in my work I am engaging in the history of a friend who’s now passed.  It’s  purpose haunts. A fence a boundary a margin. The materials history , purpose and materiality become part of the minor literature.

Same, not the same /  by Justin Harrison

In the introduction to Foucault’s book ‘The order of Things’ the author references an old encyclopedia with various classifications, in which is a category of ‘Things that from far away look like flies’.

Whilst it is tempting to make comparisons, we must remember our positionality, not just spatially but temporally, conceptually, socially and critically.

Homi Bhabha describes that there are differing scalar effects of different angles of view through the intersticies. And perhaps I wonder - that one can be so far off that perception is skewed and really comparisons cannot be made.

Perhaps imagine a toy cow 🐄, go to a field of cows hold it up and they might even look the same, in colour, form and scale. However one is not a cow, you won’t get milk out of it. They are the same but not the same.

 

Rabbit Holes /  by Justin Harrison

In thinking and researching about ‘Belonging’, ‘Boundaries’, ‘Transformation’ ‘Formation’

I have been looking at Derrida a lot, his exploration of ‘Differance’ ‘Trace’ Deconstruction’, ‘Spectres’ and ‘Hauntology’. I have now discovered Homi Bhabha. I see similarities of thought and approach, descriptions and models. I don’t know either work well enough to specifically state what exact differences or similarities they share. However I do feel the readings I have already made around Derrida - help me to being to approach Bhaba’s work.

I am also aware that Bhaba criticises Derrida’s work in falling short and failing to address Ethnocentricity and yet…

I do find the exploration of Space more specifically the third space and linguistics very interesting and return to my own enquiries to the language of art, navigation of change and the liminal.

Translation, Afterlife, Ghosts.

It’s a Rabbit hole I fear to go down, the depth of both authors work feels beyond me.

Translating transformation by documenting change. Looking back at the afterlife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVQcdbSV6OI

 

On the floor /  by Justin Harrison

I’m sat in the library, although I might as well be sat on the floor. It feels a more comfortable place. I’m dizzy. In researching for my paper I’ve journeyed a lot with Ursula von Rydingsvard and her making from marginality. This is all in concern to the liminal and transformation. Derrida haunts me all the time with notions of difference and Hauntology, the phenomena or not of spectres. And now I’ve taken a sharp left and have started looking at Homi Bhabha. He speaks of the ‘Third space’ and ties it to creativity and making in concern to Anish Kapoor.

Kapoor repeatedly presents us with an ambiguity of locating the self in space and time. The void is cast before us in multiple iterations, refusing to abate. But I haven’t studied Kapoor so much and some days I find him pompous. Yet I do see the significance of his work.

So now I have books surrounding me on Kapoor, Bhabha, Derrida oh and Deleuze I’ve been avoiding him but it was unavoidable. I keep on finding connections with "‘Terrain’ and ‘Territory’ ‘Translation’ - the connections make me wonder if everyone is all speaking about the same thing, or are they nuance or completely different and deserve the nomenclature, and dense books assigned to them?

I feel like I’m on to something but I can’t quiet pull it all in. This formlessness that is the generative. The Difference that permits us to create, be, not be. Make some sort of meaning.

It’s 14:55 I need to write more - write an intelligible draft. But then there’s my work too. I see more threads between my making and preoccupations. I’d draw a map yet I fear it will be of no use the moment I finish it.

Deleuze says;


The map is the production of an experimental reading, the word experiment being used here as John Cage uses it, "not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown."
Deleuze and Guattari - What is a minor Literature

There is a thread at least, of time and space and thought. That in the fluidity there is movement, a freedom to create. In creativity there is the power to imagineer and realise the new. Ownership is hard in the liminal.

 

Bhabha, Kapoor, Space and the diagonal /  by Justin Harrison

I’m excited to have discovered a relationship between the sculpture Anish Kapoor and the Critical Theorist Homi Bhabha, There have been a few key conversations between the two and especially around the Liminal, they are using phrases like the ‘In-between’,’Third space’, looking at the way meaning is and isn’t made, how boundaries and identities are influenced, constructed, negotiated. This has interesting parallels with Derrida and ‘time being out of joint, hauntology and difference. I can’t quiet put my finger on the key connections but I feel like there are important resonances with my research, von Rydingsvard and my art work.

However I am also aware that Bhabha is talking about issues of identity forged against a white colonial background, and I want to be careful of my positionally and not to dilute or hijack the dialogue.

HB This in-between space is something that, for a moment, I want to bring back to our particular locations as artists or writers linked with a certain history. A history of migration, a history of coming from India, a history of cultural hybridity in our own lives. I think we constitute a particular genre of the producers of meanings and symbols and arguments. We have a trajectory that has been produced by the often unacknowledged cosmopolitanism of colonial cultures. I think there is something about the mixture of cultural traditions and ethnic boundaries, so that what actually happens in the interstices, in the in-between, is neither a simple interaction, consensual or disensual, of two given traditions, but the opening up of a space of “thirdness”, that reveals the “doubleness” of the self or one’s cultural provenance. I would like to ally that space to the occurrence of the not-there or the void. It’s not a space of inversions or reversals of previously given polarities or values or hierarchies. I think it is space where we are much more aware about how boundaries or identities are complex negotiations.

https://anishkapoor.com/976/homi-bhaba-and-anish-kapoor-a-conversation

On another note with the jointed paddle - adding a universal joint to the paddle then alters it's planes, lateral vertical and or other? Liminal navigation in the diagonal.

Also the importance of surface Bhabha and Kapoor discuss surface and it’s roll, which could connect to von Rydingsvard who so heavily investigates surface in her work.

Submerging on the other hand would do ...a deferral of surface? Secondry removal?

HB Would it be a simplification to say, first of all, that the strategy of this space, to put it in concrete terms, is not dissimilar from the strategy of the space when we actually see it physically in the work. It is not just darkness versus light; or the smoothness of the black versus the wrinkling of the stone; or the frangible surface of the pigment versus the hard shape inside. It is much more the way in which the void is unavoidably present in all the surfaces of presence. To look for a positive statement of this shape, of the void, we will not be able to find it in the way in which other positive presences and positive forms of naming are found. There is a sense in which it is thought that clarity of thought lies in making statements in the affirmative, not in the negative. Don’t tell us what a thing is not, tell us what it is – but that is so complicit, with a certain historical and cultural notion of knowledge. I often say to people, why? Why can’t I say things as a gathering of negatives, and why can you not accept that it is somehow rhetorically, and even formally, in-between the saying of the one thing and the re-saying of it that something may exist? There is a particular philosophical tradition of putting things in the positive, so I think we should try, but I don’t think we should be overly hung up on that..

https://anishkapoor.com/976/homi-bhaba-and-anish-kapoor-a-conversation

The diaganol///

In voicing the void, Kapoor returns us to the discourse of the diagonal. How does the transitional nature of true making – spatially out of balance, temporally in between – relate to the myth of 'originality'? I have argued that the shape of the void and the sign of emptiness must be conceived of in a logic of doubling; like the transitional object, they are unified at the point in space and time of their separation and differentiation. Such a mode of representation does not contain, deep within its being, an 'object' that unfolds, in its own time, to reveal its unitary presence. Kapoor's elision of the 'first instance' or the 'very first moment' does not lead to a final reckoning in which all will be revealed. In this instance, presentness is not grace, to take liberties with Michael Friedes's striking modernist dictum, for there is no promise in the work of 'a continuous and entire presentness… a kind of instantaneousness… [because] at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest'.33 The 'delay' in the presence of the work discloses faces, aspects, elements or media that do not metonymically signify some immanent whole, or some complete, though repressed, narrative.

https://anishkapoor.com/185/making-emptiness-by-homi-k-bhabha

 

Translation /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

Translation can be more than just. language:

Objects, people, time, thoughts, feelings, beliefs

Many things can be translated, their location and nature moved.

Categories are a important but not essential structure and often articles can 'bleed' through into another. Poetry can become a film, a book can become a painting. Death can become life.

In the moment of translation, something new and generative can happen. Through the interstices - Homi Bhabha.

There is a poetic sense that can be felt around the phenomena of translation, in addition it almost feels divine. That as an act it is the will of a deity becoming manifest.

 

Zombies: "The real power of the many is the many" /  by Justin Harrison

So this guy is my new favourite discovery. Maybe I’ll move on quickly but. art of points are resonating, and seem to fall into a useful place. I’m not sure this will go towards my research paper but it’s certainly interesting.

"History is made by bodies, armies, mass movements, hordes. Historie's great men and women always stood on mobs of bodies that changed history. unlike heroes journeies history is about masses of peple doing stuff, lots of work lots of war, lots of building systems and sometimes dismantelling systems. ANd ususally all of this is done without knowledge of what they are doing, unconscious of history, just like the zombie.

The problem is ideology refracts and distracts and temps us away from a mutalistic or communal historical consciousness and it temps us away from the consciousness of being a mass". 14:20 Plastic Pills

"The real power of the many as many. As an organism driven by a singular purpose. And even if the only leverage left avaialable to you is to take up space - that's still leverage. You've got more agency as a zombie than as a cowboy regardless of what the films say". 17:30 Plastic Pills

 

Coding of Space /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

In thinking about the Summer school - ‘Rivers the Jugular veins of Empire’:
The coded language used in the past and now is key. E.g ‘Exploring party’ or ‘Civilising Mission’- this is not correct or transparent, but something else - more sinister, treacherous and obfuscating. Perhaps more accurate would be ‘Murderous pillaging of assets’ and ‘A mission to aggressively encode a people in preparation to enter the financial machine of empire’.

Then the concept of space: Ownership, occupation and outworking.

Can Space be described as occupying 3/ possibly more realms:

1.Physical space
2.Temporal space
3.Conceptual space.

How can/should this space be occupied in light of what we know and what has been learnt from history. (All history)

Other unorganised thoughts:
Space: giving/using space in film - temporal, spatial, conceptual?

Relationship of belonging to/in space. 

Again the idea of belonging is one that I find challenging and multifaceted.

Historical ref of Belonging: set against empire and obstacles overcome to this point.

Cultures erased by colonialism in name of ‘civilisation’ were/are subject to an aggressive recoding to financial production.

An aggressive re-coding to financial production.

 

Initiating a pact with the impossible /  by Justin Harrison

 

There is a place. 

Outside. 

Impossible to find but always here.

Formless.

Where from nothing, comes something. 

Birthed.

I thought I was alone.

Mistaken.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

“Sans savior, sans avoir, sans voir”

“Initiating a pact with the impossible”

Caputo J - The tears and prayers of Jacques Derrida - p xx

 

Khôra and the Impossible /  by Justin Harrison

Khôra - Ink and acrylic on paper

“Sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir.”
Caputo J : Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Introduction p20

“Without knowing, without having, without seeing”

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Vertical forms suspended in space

A host.

Khôra - the liminal - the place of transformation 

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Khôra (also chora; Ancient Greek: χώρα) was the territory of the Ancient Greek polis outside the city proper. The term has been used in philosophy by Plato to designate a receptacle (as a "third kind" [triton genos]; Timaeus 48e4), a space, a material substratum, or an interval. In Plato's account, khôrais described as a formless interval, alike to a non-being, in between which the "Forms" were received from the intelligible realm (where they were originally held) and were "copied", shaping into the transitory forms of the sensible realm; it "gives space" and has maternal overtones (a womb, matrix)
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khôra

Also:

“So likewise it is right that the substance which is to be fitted to receive frequently over its whole extent the copies of all things intelligible and eternal should itself, of its own nature, be void of all the forms. Wherefore, let us not speak of her that is the Mother and Receptacle of this generated world, which is perceptible by sight and all the senses, by the name of earth or air or fire or water, or any aggregates or constituents thereof: rather, if we describe her as a Kind invisible and unshaped, all-receptive, and in some most perplexing and most baffling partaking of the intelligible, we shall describe her truly.”
— Plato, Timaeus, 51a[1]

“As we will see, Derrida easily made the "no" stick. He dispatched this accusation, or deferred this congratulation, effectively and effI ciently, persuasively arguing that whatever their "syntactical" similarities there is a deep "semantic" divide between God and différance, that "it," différance, is not the God of negative theology. (We cannot fail to notice that "God" here is not exactly Yahweh, not the God of prophets like Amos or Isaiah, a God who wants justice, but the God of Christian Neoplatonism.) However highly it is esteemed, différance is not God. Negative theology is always on the track of a "hyper essentiality," of something hyper-present, hyper-real or sur-real, so really real that we are never satisfied simply to say that it is merely real. Différance, on the other hand, is less than real, not quite real, never gets as far as being or entity or presence, which is why it is emblematized by insubstantial quasi-beings like ashes and ghosts which flutter between existence and nonexistence, or with humble khöra, say, rather than with the prestigious Platonic Sun. Differance is but a quasi-transcendental anteriority, not a supereminent, transcendent ulteriority.

Caputo J : Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida p2

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In a previous blog I had commented on-

So in light of the nature of Derrida's approach to deconstructions and undecidability - where in his thinking does he reference a constructive approach? What if anything isn’t left undone -  Reinscription? Somewhere I read about a part of his work that touched on this but cannot remember which book it was.

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Caputo goes on from the quote about to discuss that the direction of deconstruction ultimately points up - ‘a passion for the impossible’ p3, whilst also contextualising difference, in a contructive/ generative way.

'"Translating" in deconstruction is nothing reductionistic, and that is because différance opens things up rather than barring the door closed.” P4

There is a place for generation rather than reduction. Reduction being the popular misnomer of Deconstruction.

Useful phrases from p2-4

“Initiating a pact with the impossible”

“Tout autre est tout autre” - every other is wholly other

Think about essence becoming real. Emerging from the Khôra. Extensia.

Do I emerge from the Khôra every day. Transformed by renewing my mind? Is the Khôra a limiting phrase? Just another addressing of the same thing? And how does this impact my research and art?

What I do like is this addressing of the’ impossible’, and a possible/impossible place of transformation across many manifestations, from major to minor. And then there is the inverted value system. Cultrally we like the dramatic the demostratable, the evidential. Yet these texts allude to the small the innocuous, being key. That maybe transformation is effected by the granular. The macro. The mustard seed.

God resides in and out of the impossible. Which is impossible.

 

Dislocated /  by Justin Harrison

Transformation at my shoulder. (Image my own)

Reading Derrida’s ‘Structure Sign and Play’ is hard work. But then I didn’t expect it to be easy. I’m looking for something in his writing that I don’t even know if it’s there. I will push into some other peoples writing on him but I also wanted to look at his work firsthand.

There are some interesting phrases and I’m not sure that I properly grasp what he is investigating however I find it’s slow burn with him, that fragments gradually become more apparent and useful as I mulch over them.

Some key points/quotes for now:

  • The impossibility of the centre of a structure being inside the structure. (Paraphrase)

  • “The centre had no natural locus” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2

  • “We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon - which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped the from, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p2

  • Evasion of the binary. Ideas and articles occupying more than one position at the same time.

  • “without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self identity of a signified reducing into itself it’s signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself”

  • “had been dislocated, driven from it’s locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p3

  • “language bears within itself the necessity of it’s own critique” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p5

  • “The superabundance of the signifier, it’s supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.” Derrida ‘Structure sign and Play’ p11

  • There is something about when reduction occurs, that it cannot but help be generative. Distillation seems impossible because that the act of it, creates the new. Similar to the decomposition of a body. The reduction is infinitely more generative. Death as a creative force.

 

Held In Tension /  by Justin Harrison

Spent some time considering the construction of Iranian Dome Tents. The role that tension plays in holding and creating form and structure. Strapping and Poles, Rope and Pegs. Inside the tent there are straps that don’t just hold the frame in tension, but also hold meaning unique to each clan through the design woven into it.

I wonder if there is a link to the tension in binary definitions of writing and the potential for there to be ‘Undecidability’

It makes me want to create straps that hold a pole in constant tension. A form of restraint or connecting ‘a’ to ‘b’ - which might also link to Godel’s theorem of the included middle. How something can be a and b and not a or b at the same time. Some form of interdependent relationship of ‘a’ and ‘b’ and ‘not a or b’

Possibly leather straps and white stripped or black charred, green wood poles. These could increase in complexity to describe more complex relationships that use tension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzipuvXULg

 

Notes from Presentation /  by Justin Harrison

 

Having already given the presentation on ‘Jacques Derrida’ By Nicolas Royle. This is more an ‘aid de memoire’ to remind me of the points I spoke about in the hope that I’ll remember.

Book: Jacques Derrida By Nicolas Royle

Why oh why did I choose Derrida?

Derrida is a French linguist, writer and literary Critical Analysts, philosopher and political commentator and much more.
Written many books especially on textual analysis.
He’s notoriously dense and complex.
Just when I think I have understood I realise I don’t.

Maddening is a phrase I’ve read somewhere...

Famous for:
Deconstruction 
Literary analysis
Semiotics
Grammar the difference
Political


I’ve come back to this book as I find Royle’s writing more accessible. He articulates well the unique challenges that come with Derrida’s thinking and writing.

Specifically I’ve been thinking/looking at deconstruction. 

What it is not and ways to approaching what it could be.

But even that is optimistic as Derrida’s thinking and writing resists simple or reductionalist summisations of ‘This is this and means this’. Royle explores this not offering neat answers. In the chapter it even states how Derrida dislikes even the word deconstruction, and that he feels that it’s wrong to use it as a ‘ism’ or practice.

Rather Royle gives a useful if fragmented overview, he describes how Derrida likes to explore at a phorensic level. He explains how Derrida evades, is elusive in what is meant for him, by deconstruction.

Royle demonstrates examples of what Deconstructuon is not - throughout most of the book we are shown what Derrida is not, but not told what it and he is. Rather we are shown where he/it might be at work. Where a ‘trace’ or a ‘Ghost’ might be, and it’s this approach that leaves space to work in.

It’s not an answer it’s a deep approach. A constant undoing of ones own beliefs

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I keep returning to Derrida, to this book. A starter. A basic introduction. (Sigh)

Although I am currently liking this uncomfortable wrestling. I have been looking for answers and Derrida won’t give them. Only a way of approaching. And I think that's the thing with Derrida, the moment you look for a neat of final answer - things vaporise - it doesn't work.

Royle frequently in this chapter talks of the unravelling that seems to happen often.

And then for me the language of my work is very important, from the thinking to the language of the symbols and materials. Unravelling of my materials, my practice, my thinking.

Specifically in my practice

Royles chapter has given me specifically some very engaging thoughts that I am exploring as I make.

“Every thing is Divisable” - this phrase alone has me.

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I am interested in belief, it’s nature and how it manifests. 

In the liminal, the threshold, transforming spaces.

And something of Derrida's work touches on these thin and elusive environments.

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The more I read, the more I realised I didn’t understand, now I suspect that’s the point.

Royles description of Derrida and his practice in this chapter leads us to a constant questioning of our thinking, our beliefs. And this could be a kind of Deconstruction>>>

>>>A constant examining, undoing and again examining of ones own beliefs. Including my beliefs about beliefs.