Energy and the Object: Objects and Subjects

Forgione indirectly attacks the foundations of etiology, ontology, epistemology, political science, journalism, glue-making, dentistry, husbandry, egg-farming, biochemistry and ... well ... practically everything.

4.      Objects and Subjects

4.1.   Whether God (the inaccessible other), another human (the seemingly attainable other), one’s self (the omnipresently elusive other), or an artifact (the cheap other), the object has always circled around desire like an artificial horse around a carousel’s engine.

4.1.1.      The subject has traditionally been said to circle around the object; more recently, around itself by means of a mirror.

4.1.1.1.            Mirror?  Another word for doubt.

4.1.1.2.            The mirror still is necessary, but for what?

4.1.1.2.1.      The mirror transforms something to nothing.

4.1.1.2.2.      The mirror negates construction and negation.

4.1.1.2.3.      The mirror laughs at subject and object by means of silence.

4.1.1.2.4.      The mirror plays with shadows in Dream’s dim purgatory; we think we wake, thinking we’ve been played with; do we laugh?

4.1.1.2.5.      The mirror murders its devotees as dutifully as morning’s mawkish millions moan.

4.1.1.2.6.      The mirror resurrects flesh as spirit and sees this as routine.

4.1.1.2.7.      The mirror wanders in the halls of mirrors, not as trickster or priest, but as darkness peering through itself at light.

4.1.1.2.8.      The mirror beckons, but just to beckoning.

4.1.1.2.9.      The mirror mirrors mirroring and, mirrored, dies.

4.1.2.      Neither subject nor object has the power to center gravity; a more amorphous beast from another realm has done this, one whose tentacles mock proud conquests and flesh’s transient designs.

4.1.2.1.            What is this beast other than that we once thought centered gravity but now intuit is gravity itself?

4.1.2.2.            So desire is grave and wears play and laughter as its clothes.

4.1.3.      With energy, though, there is no center; the carousel continues, but each object and subject is horse, mirror and engine.  This multi-functionality and role-revolving is the source of our exuberance and confusion.

4.1.3.1.            To be centerless is to have everything as center.  But isn’t this a kind of centering?

4.1.3.2.            This contradiction is energy’s, but only we call it contradiction.

4.1.3.2.1.      I see a dancer who refuses to name, not from discipline, but from her love of movement.  She might be like something that we seek.

4.1.3.2.2.      I see the dawn gobbling up the dusk using dusk’s own laws.  This might be a methodology dreams dream of.

4.1.4.      Subject and object move in relation to each other like protons and electrons.  Is there a quark or are there quarks around which they spin?  There may be art and madness and God, but what are these other than subject and object questioning each other?

4.1.4.1.            I think the question is all that remains of nature.

4.1.4.2.            I think quarks are questions, and questions mindless Cronoses of the mind.

4.2.   Discourse about individuality, the ecstasy of communication about freedom, the perpetual tsunami of names - these are processes attendant with the appearance and rise of subjects.

4.2.1.      This appearance and rise, subjects’ dominance, is the bright face of the two-faced god.

4.2.1.1.            The other face is grief that we must bear ourselves on the carriage of our names.

4.2.1.2.            The other face communes with the one we see at interstices of injustice and incomprehension.

4.2.2.      Would we be human without the constant overwhelment?  If we were taken to the dawn of names, the gentle lapping of that distant sea, would we recognize ourselves?

4.2.3.      The present name-tsunami was caused by an undersoul tectonic shift, whereby newling plates of desire collapsed into ageless pits of energy.

4.2.3.1.            Normally I do not speak of causation and even here the cause behind the cause throws my speaking to the wind.

4.2.3.2.            Even now, the waves are diminishing and names return to their function as markers to guide us on death’s pitch path.

4.3.   While desire always makes its objects desirable, it does not necessarily make its subjects desirable; if the subjects produce, however, their products become more desirable than the objects of desire’s subjects.

4.4.   The more the subject of desire displaces desire onto desire’s objects, the more he moves away from desire’s center or circumference; this process is displacement and it is fatal to desire and the human.

4.5.   Males and females experience objects differently - the latter as diffused dances that momentarily coalesce into satellites, the former as extensions that blink.

4.5.1.      Male and female are not the embodiment of subject and object, but the dimensions of experience we have in relation to mirrors.

4.5.2.      If you think of male and female as solids, you might extend your name.  If you think of them as liquids, you might know love.  If you think of them as gases, you might see God.

4.5.3.      I cannot will myself to experience the world differently, but if I am receptive to the world, though I may die, I may experience the world the way it is.

4.6.   I see the object, but in a mist.  I hear it, but underwater.  I touch it, but sheathed in letters.

4.7.   The closer one gets to the center of energy, the more one loses oneself.  This is true equally for political and spiritual power, although we associate selflessness with the latter because of the paucity of our vision and the horror of our solitude.

4.7.1.      So politics and spirit were united once; so they are again.  So they have always been, but words have spun and pointed down any avenue that happened to be built.

4.7.2.      We each long to live in this center of loss.  Together we stand and love and kill to bring ourselves united to this space.

4.7.3.      Who though has oneself?  Do those moderately distant, far, from energy’s center?  No.  They have lost themselves less and seem to have even themselves less.

4.7.3.1.            So losing and having are most potent at energy’s center, though this center is itself lost by virtue of its omnipresence.

4.7.3.2.            That Galilean, being a precise articulation of energy in desire’s terms, provided a passable symbol for energy’s vision.

4.7.3.2.1.      If a subject had been his neighbor and observed him, as has been suggested by another of energy’s lovers, would time have lost two thousand years?  For are we not his neighbor, and are we not describing his psychoses now?  Was not Christ the Christ because we were lacking?

4.7.3.2.2.      That symbol, spanning two millennia of human suffering, has collapsed into energy’s hunger and itself been buried under a cross.  Yet its burial has produced energy equal to its life; those spiritual archaeologists and paleontologists who might have received training in these material times should be forewarned.  There is much to do, few hands, and many mines.

4.8.   Energy does not unite or dissolve subjects and objects.  Rather, it makes them interchangeable.  Energy is the code and era of mysticism.

4.8.1.      In the age of energy, everything becomes interchangeable.

4.8.1.1.            As mechanical parts became interchangeable with Taylorism, so spiritual parts are becoming interchangeable.  This is a natural consequence of the commoditization of energy.

4.8.1.2.            As interchangeability becomes the law, so humans object to the law through their proclamations of specialization, uniqueness, and dignity.

4.8.2.      The mirror is the agent of this interchangeability.

4.8.2.1.            While the mirror has not changed, what we see in the mirror has.

4.8.2.1.1.      We once saw trees and kobolds, divine designs etching awe on slaughtered towns.

4.8.2.1.2.      Now we look and see vague constellations of electrons.  Might these be us?

4.8.2.1.2.1.            We are the moon rising in the east, the sun’s death dance.  Will we be too frenzied to be silent in the confrontation of ourselves?

4.8.2.1.2.2.            We are the law that lies within itself, we are the mad transgression that denies.  Will we be too divine to remember awe, love’s last vision?

4.8.2.2.            Nature’s mirror offered the hot comforts of desire:  lust, blood, night, death.  We now see the cold comforts of energy, which are without the mediums of trees.  The priests of trees have died and what have we left between us and nothing?

4.8.2.2.1.      This is the portend of Protestantism, its iconoclastic rage.

4.8.2.2.2.      We could imagine trees were priests, but us?  We are no priests, but all wanderers before the god of night.

4.8.3.      Physics, mathematics, engineering - these are the codified articulation of the wordy intuitions made by sages intimate with dreams.  We live in the architecture of our visions.

4.8.3.1.            I am the wriggling worm below my eye, below my microscope.  I am the deadened claw.

4.8.3.2.            Miasma of sputum stare at us in what we call reverse through misoscope and eye and this is that again.

4.8.3.2.1.      What detours are made in the labyrinths of time to arrive at an acquaintance of words!

4.8.3.2.2.      How many tonnes of hate are necessary input to produce a gram of love!

4.8.4.      Hasn’t the human been created solely for cold vision on cold current, an eye of awe on death, a wordy tail on God’s random comet, silence struggling not to be itself?

4.8.4.1.            Those who deny teleology are as dense as those who deny chance.  If you know energy, you know we are plans, but blind plans, blind recurrent plans stabbing time’s thick back with tears.

4.8.4.2.            If you can play subject and object like a fugue, you can do the same with intent and consciousness.

4.8.4.2.1.      Too long, human, have you welded words to steel.

4.8.4.2.2.      Let them free to breathe.

4.8.4.3.            Don’t we wish above all else to be energy’s scribe?  Isn’t this what we are?

4.8.4.3.1.      The gap between our wish and our existence is language.

4.8.4.3.2.      The identification of our wish and our existence is vision.

4.8.4.3.3.      Who can speak with vision and who can see with words?  Wouldn’t such a one be God?

4.9.   What really cares if it is a subject or object?  Only the fool.

4.9.1.      Subject and object, like male and female, are ingredients on a recipe list; only an inexperienced cook follows a recipe like law.  Surprises and substitutions are the prerogative of the true chef.  The destruction and creation of recipes are the chef’s delight.

4.9.2.      Subject and object are eye and eye, left and right; who walks around with one eye shut?

4.9.3.      What would be a who, with amputated vision and fossilized name?  Only the one who spurns energy’s infinite mad love and seeks solace in the trade of body parts.

4.9.4.      I would be subject, object, fool, chef, who, what and recipe.  I would be I and thou and it and all and none.

Energy and the Object: Energy

Forgione continues his warped Spinozean geometric ontology with shards from the sphincters of his philosophical imagination.

3.      Energy

3.1.   Energy is the present and future name for desire.

3.1.1.      Renaming of core concepts indicates a regrinding of the lenses of human vision.

3.1.1.1.            It is not as if what there is to see changes, but that we are compelled to see what there always is through different words.

3.1.1.1.1.      These different words mean for us that things change.

3.1.1.1.2.      What compels us?  The seduction of words, the weariness of words.

3.1.1.1.2.1.            Words not the Word compel us.

3.1.1.1.2.2.            This shift from the definite to indefinite indicates energy’s omnipresence.

3.1.1.2.            Lens regrinding is the poetic task.

3.1.1.2.1.      The poet regrinds according to the dictates of his profession.

3.1.1.2.2.      The other professions fulfill the direction of his words, unpacking them into structures we inhabit until, again according to his profession’s dictates, the structures collapse and we move around the board again.

3.1.2.      Desire was too fleshy, primal, unevolved; energy is the chic metal jacket fashioned on desire’s rawness.

3.1.3.      By this renaming, desire becomes democratic and neutralized.  It becomes available for purchase (by anyone with money), mobile (as a virtual commodity), tradable (on the world’s exchanges), transmutable (into any currency or object) … the one value-free entity.

3.1.3.1.            This value-freeness is what gives energy its value.

3.1.3.2.            Once energy is transformed, it assumes specific value.

3.1.3.2.1.      This transformation itself is energy.

3.1.3.2.2.      Most human dilemmas and horrors are related to the transformation of energy into specific value and specific value into energy - which way to go, when, and the monstrous horror:  why.

3.1.3.3.            The fact that energy can be owned - and the fact that the ownership is a fact is itself a sign of energy’s ascendancy - spins God into the human orbit.  This re-cosmologization is akin to discovering the earth spun around the sun.

3.1.3.3.1.      As the revised relationship between earth and sun indicated the decline of theology and the rise of science, so the revised relationship between God and man (a function simply of shifting energy, not fact, though we call it fact from energy’s necessity) indicates the decline of science and the rise of energy.

3.1.3.3.2.      Science still hobbles on the crutches of nature, even as theology hobbled on God’s crutches.  But energy dances to the tingling tunes of atoms.

3.1.3.3.3.      Let us watch crumbling science in its geriatric droolings.  Let us feed it soft gruel and pat it on its back.  It has served us as well as any generation and we would not commit a patricide but lead it gently to the grave in certified and standard halls.

3.1.3.3.4.      But let us make love to energy; it is science’s wide-eyed wonder child, vulnerable and hard, a maelstrom of non sequiturs.  Let us coax from it taxonomies.  Let us chisel professions in the reflections of its eyes.   Energy is the great grand goddess gone, the grave undone.  It is our mantra and vision.  It is the self we never see.

3.1.4.      The renaming of desire, its subjugation to energy, indicates the body’s obeisance to technology.  Taxonomies are shifting, new terms are negotiated, flesh’s weariness begins to show.  A new master arises.  It is energy.  It reveals the body for what it is:  impersonal, nameless, commoditized, commoditizable, extendable, mutable, transmutable, masked, conducive, conduitive, dreamlike at its zenith, solidly sluggish at its nadir, as cold and hot as a wire, as valued as a NYSE listing.

3.1.4.1.            Whereas blood and skin were nature’s flesh (and so desire’s), technology is energy’s flesh.  Hence our fascination with it; it is as if we were able to crawl into energy’s body.  And perhaps we are.

3.1.4.2.            Technology is the male womb into which all enter and lose their gender in collective rebirth.  Not one by one, but our species whole and wholly is born again.  We have assumed Christ’s vision and made it our own, for his was only his and for that he died.

3.1.4.2.1.      For our collective vision, we too may die, for what is vision other than a cessation of life to see life, a subjugation of activity for observation.

3.1.4.2.2.      By inhabiting the regime of energy, however, we do not name observation death and so bypass death through the subterfuge of words.

3.1.4.3.            Our flesh sighs in geriatric pilled relief.  New skin.  These nylon gloves - tell me how to get them on.

3.1.4.4.            In the semantics of desire, the body is crucified on the cross of fate and resurrected in illusion; in energy, it is neither killed nor reborn - no hope or despair is permitted in technology’s kingdom; it cannot be described with the traditional adjectives of life - but electric, impulsed, constantly changing, tediously the same.  Hope and despair are ironic ions, binary code, pulsing meaninglessly across waves of nothingness.

3.1.4.4.1.      Are you a supplier, transmitter, consumer?  Where are you on the grid?  These are the questions of the once and future evangelist.

3.1.4.4.2.      You are part of the great electric body, which shakes and tries to sing.  You are produced, you move, you are consumed.

3.2.   Mysticism ceases to be the exploration of the God behind God and begins to be the description of the choreography of the atomic dance, its codification in letters, the activity of translating movement into words, or rather, one form of movement into another - an establishment of a parallel stage.

3.2.1.      Kabbalah becomes not esoteric art, but all language arts.

3.2.2.      Imagination assumes its rightful place as queen of the sciences, and words are her servants and lovers.

3.2.3.      We pile interpretations on interpretations and develop airy schematics of convoluted proofs.   We do this to honor energy and imitate what we wish were her mind.

3.3.   Energy still needs to do what desire did, but it no longer believes either its actions or desire.  Yet it remains compelled and this compulsion maintains movement on the network.

3.3.1.      Energy retains the motions of passion without passion’s environment.  This may be the first time in the universe this has happened.  Is our species alive in such conditions, or dead?  We are not alive according to classical definitions, yet we aren’t dead according to modern ones.  We require a new category.  Prosthetized?  This categoryless state is the root of all our confusion.  We wish to resolve it, but must wait for desire’s legacy to be recorded¾itself an interminable process.

3.3.1.1.            We emulate the memory of passion, which technology facilitates.

3.3.1.2.            Soon art may be not passion’s divine sigh, but memory’s scribe.  Already much of art is this.

3.3.2.      By virtue of energy, belief becomes a value-added service energy’s customers are offered on their monthly statements.

3.4.   The laws of the emerging kingdom of energy may very well permit the participant and the observer to access each other’s wardrobe without ever feeling a taboo is being broken.

3.4.1.      Energy takes a taboo, sticks an adapter in it, and calls it freedom.

3.4.2.      Taboos in energy’s kingdom are like adultery before Protestantism - so expected and institutionalized they rise above names.

3.5.   We are told by the consultants of nomenclature that we are living in the age of knowledge, but what is knowledge other than the name they give to a particular configuration of energy, or rather a particular feeling they have about particular configurations of energy?

3.5.1.      Knowledge is feeling, but energy is fact - this is the future’s law.

3.5.2.      Energy spawns all and subsumes all.  Energy is Shiva stripped of his anthropomorphizations.  Energy is godless God.  Energy should be it, but we feel that anything both divine and devoid of divinity must be female.  If this gender-play with energy be a convenience and projection, it is also an inconvenience and an autism; this is what the gender dogmatists miss.

3.6.   Energy forms an alliance with power, its brawny social sibling.  Whereas power is hierarchical, transient and passionate, energy is disrespectful, eternal and indifferent.

3.6.1.      This is not to say that all things are equally infused with energy; in some, energy is weak; in others, diffused or fragmented; in still others, concentrated.

3.6.2.      Power is the mask humans hang on energy to allow themselves to participate in energy; without it, their participation would be too cold; they require heat.

3.7.   Balance is advocated by certain humans in relation to energy, but energy is balanced only in a way that these same humans would call imbalanced.

3.7.1.      Energy’s balance is inclusive - from shimmer to seeming deadness to explosion; the human’s balance is the average of all energy; this average to energy is simply one of its manifestations.

3.7.1.1.            Energy’s average is non-existent; the average is invented by the human and there are as many averages as there are those afraid of energy.

3.7.1.2.            Energy’s average is non-existent because, while energy is the source of mathematics, it is not the manifestation; averages only deal with manifestations.

3.7.2.      The human who loves energy wants all of its manifestations, but inevitably seeks energy’s concentrations; while these concentrations seem more real to him than averages, they are to energy equally present and so legitimate forms of itself.  Value is not given more to some manifestations than others; value is the human word for a particular passion about a particular manifestation of energy.

3.7.2.1.            Due to mortality, the human who loves energy can love it only by plugging into a portion of the network and describing his experience.  While this feels at times to him like energy’s totality - and these times are what he lives for - he mostly knows that his experience is but one particular aspect of the network at one particular moment.  However, quality frequently overwhelms quantity.

3.7.2.2.            Only the network itself is energy in its totality, and humans, while they may be the strongest carriers of current, still are minor players on a minor stage.

3.8.   What I say doesn’t matter, nor does how I say it.  The only factor relevant to energy is that I say it.  Words encourage movement.  If I offend some through my manner of speech, if I should destroy others’ reputations or my own, if I do not conform to an important social code, what is this to energy?  I have spoken, and all words pulse across the grid in the indifferent ecstasy of space.

3.8.1.      As energy has become ascendant among the currencies of the universe, so words’ content has been emptied and words stand alone, empty circulating sets in cold space, pointing to nothing.

3.8.2.      We use more words more often to feel energy more often; though feelings are a tenuous guarantee, they serve to sufficiently validate existence for most, a necessary validation as existence has never been more tenuous.