Stillstellung
PoE 2: SEIZURE | RECIPROCITY | HYPERSTITION | SEMIOTIC WANDERING
SOME NEWS
Over the holidays, I released a four-part series called Three Magi (Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Baudelaire) with a coda, On Falsity.
This year, COM-POSIT will come out more frequently: 3 posts one month, 2 (often longer) posts the next month, 3, 2, 3 and so on, in alternating fashion. This will stagger the newsletter so that I can release more writing while still giving you time to stay caught up.
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With more to come,
—Zane Perdue
Part 1 of Point of Entry (PoE) can be read here.
Insight becomes less clear; one comes to the end of one’s conceptions; you are in the deep end.1
This rare coin, only a boring phrase, has cut all ties to any possibility of a minted past. It represents only itself. It is value collapsed into itself, into a valueless singularity.
Seizure
There are phrases that, every so often, occur to me not in the way that a quotation or a line of poetry might—these seem to be called forth out of the past—but in the way that something as yet unreal might suggest itself out of the fragmentary unconsciousness of a future. Not the future, but only a future: a single set of possibles, frayed at the edges, uncoagulated, unbalanced, half-woven and unanchored.
In this case, the phrase is “point of entry,” connected with nothing identifiable in my past, no memory or greater linguistic construction. It is not a very poetic or striking phrase. I am not even sure where I was standing when, stopping briefly in one of those simultaneously comfortable and disconcerting moments when one’s eyes become nailed to a spot and yet unfocused on any depth (the opposite of Nystagmus, where one’s eyes shake or vibrate in one’s head uncontrollably), these three words surfaced.
But did they “surface”? Or did they simply walk into the world through a door? I said the words of the phrase to myself, if only in a laryngeal twitch, something below a whisper and beyond a notion. (Can one say a word with one’s eyebrows?)
(No image attended this personally, contingently “autological” phrase, point of entry.)
The way this phrase occurred to me, seemingly out of nowhere, makes me think of two things:
The first (1) thing
is a line from Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, about reciprocity.
Because I don’t have access to all of my books where I am currently writing this, I frequently find myself looking for Project Gutenberg versions of books, or Internet Archive PDFs, and when one searches a book in this way, by ctrl + f-ing through the vast plane of a document with a few relevant keywords, one does not have the same gradual, visual, tactile and thoughtful experience of coming across a passage in an old but familiar book—one is simply confronted by the passage, and usually a few others of which one was not thinking but which contained the keywords in a flash that makes the vaguely remembered image of the text appear so quickly and in so harsh a manner that, for a moment, it is almost unrecognizable.
Here is the paragraph I was looking for, on reciprocal causality. I have emphasized some lines in bold. Schopenhauer says:
From this essential connection between causality and succession it follows, that the conception of reciprocity, strictly speaking, has no meaning; for it presumes the effect to be again the cause of its cause: that is, that what follows is at the same time what precedes. In a "Critique of Kantian Philosophy," which I have added to my chief work, and to which I refer my readers, I have shown at length that this favourite conception is inadmissible. It may be remarked, that authors usually have recourse to it just when their insight is becoming less clear, and this accounts for the frequency of its use. Nay, it is precisely when a writer comes to the end of his conceptions, that the word “reciprocity” presents itself more readily than any other; it may, in fact, be looked upon as a kind of alarm-gun, denoting that the author has got out of his depth. It is also worthy of remark, that the word Wechselwirkung, literally reciprocal action—or, as we have preferred translating it, reciprocity—is only found in the German language, and that there is no precise equivalent for it in daily use in any other tongue.2
Be that as it may. One can either accept this position, that reciprocal action is an empty term, or one can accept that one’s insight is indeed becoming less clear (“I am out of my depth”) and keep going, to eventually get clear about things, or about oneself. This passage is one of the frequent indicators of Schopenhauer’s break with Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Hölderlin and speculative thought in general.
But speculative reversal—bleary-eyed reciprocity treading the dark waters of paradox—has revealed itself, in the course of 20th-century particle physics, e.g., to reside in things rather than in their mere understanding or apprehension. Contradiction and paradox are also in the firmament, not merely in the telescope.
The second (2) thing
that this hovering phrase makes me think of is the notion of hyperstition.
One of the books that I do have on hand is my Dictionary of Critical Theory. I’ve had this copy for years, and it’s a great little resource. I flip to the H section, thinking that I will certainly find
hyperstition, n. A speculative term often associated with the CCRU (CYBERNETIC CULTURE RESEARCH UNIT) [—] and so on, and so on,
—and etc. But it’s not there. Instead, a third of the page has been cut out, exactly where the entry for hyperstition should be.
With recourse to other sources, hyperstition is plainly defined as
A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction [which, as Lacan says, is the form that the truth itself takes]) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes.3
It seems that both (1) and (2) can be collapsed into each other. The former (reciprocal action in speculative thought) is merely the marker of the possibility of the latter (hyperstition).
What is an autological phrase that comes to you out of nothing?
Below is my personal, working definition of the term, admittedly based on the conception that, as above, Schopenhauer would call “inadmissible.”
A speculative definition
Hyperstition: the forward-reaching negative of memory. An irreal x is posited with all the power of a fiction and with such valence that it actually appears, as if out of a possible (reciprocally acting) future. Hyperstition falls into itself; the posited x becomes real, remembering itself through us.
CAVEAT: I understand this kind of hyperstition not in its Landian sense. Hyperstition is just a name for what arises (or comes down) within the paradigmatic moment of standstill—what Walter Benjamin, in his “On the Concept of History”, calls Stillstellung.
Hyperstition is the corollary to Mark Fisher’s (reading of) hauntology. It is the Golem of the ideal.
Semiotic wandering
With Benjamin’s conception of the diary or Agamben’s distinction between the historian and the chronicler—the diary and the chronicle being aspects of each other—time is abrogated, simultaneously canceled and opened. And when time is canceled by way of the interval, marked off by the space between entries, vertically opened, this creates the window for something like intellectual hyperstition, a real Wechselwirkung: the speculative–creative.
It is worth including these remarks on reflective vs speculative thought from Glenn Alexander Magee’s Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition:
Hegel in the Encyclopedia Logic states that "the term 'reflection' is primarily used of light, when, propagated rectilinearly, it strikes a mirrored surface and is thrown back by it" [—]. Reflection or understanding thinks within a straitjacket of false dichotomies, thus it receives back from its contemplation only what it has put into it: its "rays of thought" are merely reflected back to it. By contrast, dialectical thinking does not involve projections from the thinker: instead, it allows the medium within which the thinker thinks to itself "shine forth" truth.4
A word, a phrase, a verse, a declamation, an injunction, a sentence shines itself forth through the window opened up by the chronicle, the book of days or the diary, like a ray of pink light, and “time is overcome, and overcome, too, is the self that acts in time: I am entirely transposed into time; it irradiates me.”5
A diaristic work posits a point of entry through which language streams freely.
Walking through the late-November streets of a small town, groups of leaves still clustered together in vibrant yellow against a blue sky like salvaged cross-sections of October—this month nearest in space and furthest in time from November—I go up over grassy hills, looking through the openings of black branches already framing a cold December world, and I turn this phrase over like a coin given to me by a stranger, already gone: “point of entry.” I turn it over. It means nothing, this phrase, this obsolete currency from a never-existing country. Nor is it worth anything. And yet, because of its worthlessness—its seeming to have come truly out of nowhere—it takes on a promising futurity. This rare coin, only a boring phrase, has cut all ties to any possibility of a minted past. It represents only itself. It is value collapsed into itself, into a valueless singularity. It becomes very heavy in my hand, this dense coin etched with open time. Wonderful nonsense. A semiotic wandering.
A coin like this can’t be spent. It can only be kept or gotten rid of for nothing. In the latter case, you give it up to the future. In the former case, you put it into your pocket. All it can do is collect impressions, however infinitesimal, on its soft, fool’s-gold surface, a weird personal moon recording time’s meteorite strikes; tachyons irradiating the solid formations of the aether.6 △
A quilt-quotation of Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, section 20.
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. From section 20.
Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. 120.
Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926. 12.
Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition:
“For Hegel the aether is metaphysical bedrock. It is an ultimate plastic medium that is nothing in particular, but has the potentiality to become everything” (197).
[ . . .]
“As Böhme claims, ‘the world's existence is nothing else than coagulated smoke from the eternal aether, which thus has a fulfillment like the eternal’” (198n).