In Search of Method

We will call first thinking

the ‘thought-there’

Sylvain Lazarus.

The value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.

Adorno

whereas now prey is scarce –

Lévy

Flight

still applies

 Back in 2020 I wrote about the challenge we faced in Poetry as Thoughtcrime, to summarize:

I was wrong. I didn’t see far enough into the darkness.

 I thought “The final systemic replacement of humanity will be the AI breakthrough into creativity. When machine intelligence conquers this uniquely human realm, the march to monetarise your consciousness is complete. Companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook aim to automate creation and reception. The hegemonic colonisation of consciousness manipulates the authentic reader to irrelevance and makes the writer redundant; what space is left? How will resistance be possible? Only the declaration of poetry as thoughtcrime offers a resistant literary space. We are we to create a praxis that can only be tamped down after its facticity has manifest a change of moment unpredictable to digital simulation. The poem has to become uniquely outside the poet’s own data set, the poem becomes the thoughtcrime. Art has always laid claim to a capacity to change perception, but now rather than Poetry ‘making it new’, the imperative is to first make the writer new.”

Though I said my theoretical solution would soon follow, I realised that that was me still thinking like a curator, facilitating/appropriating other creativities, and so my answer was held back to allow time and space for me to apply it to my own practice. So now, I find myself at the explanation of the Search for Method phase of thought:

In Search of Method is a lie.

In Search of Method is the conceit of sequential philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1957 precursor to the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’: ‘Search for a Method’. The Rules of Rene Descartes’ ‘Discourse on Method’ contain the most detailed description of his method but, magically for the Search for Method, he never completed it, and never refers to it in his subsequent published writings or correspondence. Alain Badiou’s ‘Logics of Worlds’ similarly pauses before the launch, with the first step - “Once we are in possession of a Greater Logic, of a completed theory of worlds and objects, it is possible to examine on its own terms the question of change, especially the question of radical change, or of the event”.

This then that. The working out.

But they already knowing where it will end: “we will adopt a method of maximal interiority to show from the outset that which is only fully intelligible at the end” 

– they/we are writing backwards:

Peripheral like a traditional refugee,

Contrary to Lettre à un otage - the catalyst is here not there.

In the original Base people came, ate and went.

Some left Four Temperaments but not Balanchine’s winter coat, So here:

“in geosocial space that may assume many forms,”

The problem is clearly stated and urgente:

You:             the sum of all your vinculum data.

 “The issue – the construction of something unconstructible – arises as much for a Leninist revolutionary party as for an early Cubist painting, Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone works, Galois’ theory, or Aeschylus’ invention of tragedy. In all of these examples – actually, in every creation of a new truth – something is produced that, precisely from the point of view of the established order, is not constructible.”

Alain Badiou – The Immanence of Truths

(more of which later)

 

'peut-etre le Messie' by Marton Koppany