Monday, September 05, 2005

The Uncanny Baroque – the Personal and Impersonal

The uncanny thing about the Bergson/Deleuze complex is, like all true spirituality, its baroque impersonality. A strange platonic reversal is at work in the Bergson/Deleuze matrix, by the fact that it is the objective (i.e. matter) that is personal, whilst the impersonal is the subjective. Bizarrely, the objective: our limits, aging, bodies, loss, self/ego psychology, language and social states of mind etc…are personal to the very core of our being, while paradoxically, the subjective is impersonal: it is not subject to the same temporal durations or rhythms. The psychic beats and dances to a different fugue…

The subjective and all its impersonal affects (life, the unconscious, libido, sensations, love, ecstasy, etc…) do not lose, limit, degrade, age, etc…with time, since they are not objective objects (i.e. not “located” “in” the space of matter/brain) rather, such affects have infinite disappearances and process as their ideal tempo. In short, the subjective ideal does not “age” or is subject, despite (the current) material inevitability of death, to bodily meta/physical finitudes (Heidegger drop dead!). This is why for Emmanuel Levinas, the subjective is the locus of, and is, the (actual) infinite. Uncannily enough, we personally inhabit or partake (in the mix of the banality and repetition of the everyday) a life that is far cosmically bigger than bigger:…a spiralling vertigo, a vortex sundering subjective life “into” the objective depths of the banality of being and matter…

The purity is clear: spiritual subjective “affects” vs. objective “effects” (the causal causality of matter). What is more objective and personal than the language we speak (or is spoken, “it” speaks us) our limits, our psychological weakness, our neuroses and our social quarks and quirks etc…What is more subjective and impersonal than the bubblings of the unconscious, dreams, libido and love etc...

….neither a philosophy of idealism or realism…the subjective is “real” because it does not technically exist, there is no “proof” or yard stick to measure impersonal awareness or “affective” contents…the objective is “false” because it exists, “it” can never be anything but itself, hence “it” can be mathematically/scientifically measured and effected…

The subjective is in disjunction with the objective and its statistical entropy mediated relations (although of course, the subjective is dependent on the objective/matter, but dependence does not entail identity and finitude). As such, for Bergson/Deleuze, the subjective is the locus, and is, the Virtual (equivalent to Levinas’ infinity)…

The Virtual, has nothing to do with the sad effects of virtual reality, on the contrary, the Virtual is the realm of the surface and the simulacrum: pure undiluted life itself, pure impersonal subjectivity - life in its pure negentropic potential…

For Deleuze, the Virtual is the “primordial soup” of life’s subjective impersonals: pre-individual singularities, multiplicities…difference-in-itself…and other madnesses and diseases of life that, from time to time, bubble up to the healthy equilibrated surface - in short, the Virtual is time and infinity all in one chaos, the chaosmos…

…chaosmatic bubbles exploding through the superficial membrane of objective life…