Adjacency, Pale Ontology http://www.alansondheim.org/adjacency1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/adjacency2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/adjacency3.jpg adjacency continuity contiguity neighborhood haptic compression fissure inscription (very rough draft, on the road) I'm working on two fundamental ideas - adjacency (one next to another, connected or unconnected; connected by touch, by space or time; thwarted, disconnected etc.); and the distinction, which I wrote about decades ago, between inscription and fissure: a fissure is a division of the same and the same, opening up as a result of weakness (split rock for example); an inscription is a qualitative cut implying code or alphabetics or transformations, catastrophe (re: catastrophe theory) and so forth. To inscribe is to make a mark (boundary, smear, etc.) that may even reference qualitatively different materials or figures/grounds - one doesn't "fissure" but fissures occur. If a diamond is cut, it's the creation of a distinction, as well as a break. The phenomenology of all of this is complex. On the other hand, the images here reference adjacency, and in particular, adjacency in time - plant material, debris, leaves, stems, interiors, earth, and so forth, that remain together - in this case as a result of fossilization, as if what was alive is now hardened into the image of that, an image invisible unless the matrix is broken open, in which case there is also damage that destroys the adjacent. Adjacency implies both sutured and sundered ontology - things next to each other, which seems almost trivial - not necessarily things in the ordinary sense - ideas, abstractions, breaths, molecules, the problematics of gluons, action-at-a-distance, and so forth. What is adjacent now might not be adjacent _now._ The deconstruction of the adjacent, the analysis, is both a sign of its weakness and universality. The Pennsylvanian is part of the Carboniferous, 300,000,000 to 329,000,000 or so, million years ago. Back in Wilkes-Barre yesterday collecting, not quite fossils, but matrices of plant material compressed into barely recognizable forms. Shale, coal, etc. plus what appear to be remnants of plant material. I pick up these pieces, which had remained connected, inviolate for this enormous length of time. Things that were buried and warped adjacent remained such. The earth held them. I pick up the pieces, examine them. You can see the patterns. Suddenly that history is distorted, destroyed, fragmented, permanently severed; what was adjacent is now part of human history, inconceivably fragile and murderous (if the metaphor might hold the slightest bit of truth). The connection can't be reassembled; what knowledge (and what is the ontology / epistemology of such knowledge?) is gained is at the expense of a loss of identity and coherence that existed as implicit inscription and structure for a fair fraction of the existence of the planet itself. This is what I see as a project now, the phenomenology of adjacency, along with the other terms above - continuity contiguity neighborhood haptic compression fissure inscription - thinking of these almost absent or evanescent concepts that might lead somewhere, at least for me - a slightly different understanding of the destructuring of unbearable circumstances we live in now. For life on the planet, its coherence and stability, seems destined for an annihilation close to, if not entirely, absolute; the world is increasingly described by exponential curves which cannot ascend forever. Their bounds are the bounds of resources on one hand, and radiations on the other - radiations of viruses and nuclear material in relation to the most fundamental necessities of our civilizations - the stability of supply chains, climate variations far from destructive ceilings, and so forth. The adjacent is neither destructive nor "kind" nor suturing, and, thinking through paleontology, it points to both connectivity and the almost aleatoric/random processes that wear things down. I'm not sure where this is going, yet, and it may go nowhere. I'm writing at a friends' home in McLean, Virginia, the night filled with astonishing buzzing confusion of insects, tree frogs, perhaps others and any other species. It's late, I'll stop now. I've been shooting images and videos, thinking how I'll be able to work on this when time and space open up for me. I don't expect this to happen, but I expect a detour which may or may not occur... Tue Aug 23 23:41:30 EDT 2022 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] Adjacency, Pale Ontology
Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour Tue, 23 Aug 2022 21:00:34 -0700