Antagonistic Evolution and Grotesque Modernity

a draft by Lanny Quarles

(Zizek's reading of Hegelian Concrete Universality
and the monstrous ontology of appearances)

[START OF DRAFT]


When I was in Junior High, and I don't want to go into this too deeply, I began writing by engaging in a kind of graffito upon the book-covers of my school text-books. I can still remember the first line I ever wrote. I wrote, and I don't remember what book it was on, "You live a meager existence, garbage man."
Now, every morning before school, those of us who played tennis would get to school early to play a game which was called "Around the World," in which groups of people lined up on the opposing baselines and began a rally, one person on each side, after the ball was put in play, the agent who put it into play would run to join the line on the opposing baseline. Whenever a conventional point was scored, whoever it was scored upon, was out of the rotation until only two players were left, who would then play a single point, or a single game. I think it was a single traditional 7 point game.

At any rate, one day, I had been put out, and another boy happened to see my bookcover, or he almost saw it correctly. He thought it had said, "You live a bigger existence, garbage man." We became friends, and eventually created a form of linguistic exchange we called scenarialism, which was tantamount to a form of surrealist parlor game in which any given terms were twisted into a new and absurd form, so as to achieve an "aesthetic rapture". We didn't call it that until sometime in highschool, but somewhere along the way, we came up with a theory we called "Antagonistic Evolution."

In Zizek's Parallax view, there is an early chapter called "The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the spirit of (Kantian) antinomies. Through an interesting comparative circuit, zizek advances Modernity itself as an antagonism based in the immanence of appearences.
Without quoting the entire chapter, it's difficult to characterize definitively the route, which is quite convincing, at least to this reader, which as you may surmise from the preceeding paragraph, was already predisposed to such a reading, removed as he was from the complexities of the particulars involved. The reason I would like to advance a reading of this chapter as an example of Grotesque Modernity, is because his theory matches in several succinct particulars to one or another of my own theory of the grotesque.

Already within the first paragraph of the chapter we come upon the statement, "

The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality, but that of appearance: not "Are we condemned to the interminable play of appearances, or can we penetrate their veil to the underlying reality?", but "How could -in the middle of the flat, stupid reality which is just there (would/could?) -something like appearance emerge?

He goes on to subsequently discuss an ontology of parallax as framing or in Alan Sondheim's terminology "worlding" in which every field of reality is always already enframed. In several poems, and in my thinking I have already connected appearence itself with the monstrous, through a form of indexical logic akin to Dali's "paranoid critical," but specifically utilizing the etymological root, "monstrado," which according to Barbara Maria Stafford in _Body Criticism_ is based in the displaying of biological anomalies:

In the 18th century biological anomalies still served as the paradigm for all deviant forms. In spite of the pressure applied to the enigma of monsters by an analytical philosophy, they resisted the collapse into simplicity. The demonic freak reigned not only in the high, or scientific study of malformations, but in animal husbandry, antiquarian research into Gnostic gems, folkloric caricatures, and polemical modern grylli. No matter whether the investigator was an ovist or animalculist, the appearence of abnormality was still described according to the hallowed Aristotelian terms of excess or defect."

The monstrum parodied emboitement.
the etymology of the word derived from monstrado,
"Shewing," and was thus connected to
"the box wherein relics were anciently kept,"
A sort of Vario or Zwerch-Kasten..

There are several ways this connects to Zizek's thesis, one of which is the curious statement, The monstrum parodied emboitement. Emboitement, is the hypothesis that all living things proceed from preëxisting germs, and that these encase the germs of all future living things, inclosed one within another. In other words, the monstrous IS that "uncanny appearance" irrupting into Zizek's flat, stupid reality, but whereas Zizek's statement itself does not delineate the "what" of his enframement until later in the chapter where he concludes provisionally that the "gap" of the transcendent (ie the spirit of Kantian Antinomy, from which Hegel's Concrete Universal arose, ironically much in the spirit of emboitment itself!) is itself a gap within immanence. What he does not say, missing the opportunity in my humble opinion is the notion of a refractive index of sui generis combination, which is precisely delineated by Badiou by replacing ontology with mathematics (which, incidentally, includes geometry).

This isn't to say this is anything which hasn't been said before. Let's look at Wallace Steven's poem

A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo

It says there is an absolute grotesque.
There is a nature that is grotesque within
The boulevards of the generals. Why should
We say that it is man's interior world

Or seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,
Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?
The grotesque is not a visitation. It is

Not apparition but appearance, part
Of that simplified geography, in which
The sun comes up like news from Africa.

Here we can "see" appearance explicitly connected with the grotesque, and the grotesque, is already explicitly connected with the monstrous. Here is my own poem reintroducing the term monstrado as the irreducible agent of that grotesque appearance as the enframing or "transcendent" gap within immanence itself, ie the refractive index of ontomathemic transduction as combination, which is not to say something purely definable by terms, but something closer to an unknown term identifiable by affect/effect, or in some sense what might be called a physiological cognate of the Lacanian Objet Petit a as viewed as the subject, ie, what Zizek calls the "ticklish subject" which is both objectionable to and subjected to presence, or as in "Modernity," the present as antagonism:

4 Each An Dove

each belle letter
a monstrado
a self-contained presence
or contamination

each weird word
a monstrado
composed of ringing bodies
bade by line to air

each fierce phrase
a monstrado
a snake or emblem
in the umwelt of the wave

each moist meaning
a monstrado
caught between the vortex
of the body

and the scopic regime
of construction's drive
vario-variopteryx
zwerch-kasten quarrel

And here in this final stanza is where we find something of a set of clues to the connection between all of this, especially in terms of trying to "write" through the gapped immanence of appearance.

scopic regime
construction's "drive"
vario-variopteryx
zwerch-kasten quarrel

A Quick way to explain this is to look at a web article explaining the term here,
http://www.photherel.net/notes/relationships/idea/rel9aiii

I may insert a few terms here and there, but this is essentially the article untouched:

The term "scopic regime" was coined by French film critic Christian Metz and has now been widely adopted in visual studies to connote culturally specific ways of seeing that replace the traditional definition of "vision" as a universal and natural phenomenon. The advantage of the concept of "scopic regime" is that it supersedes the traditional discussion between technological determinism (in this view, the cultural meaning of a technique or an artefact is determined by technology) and social construction (in this view, it is culture that gives meaning to technology). In the case of scopic regimes, culture and technology interact, [ie, to complicate one another, or in other terms, to create hybridities, or worldings, or grotesques, or monsters of "shewing"..]

By foregrounding the notion of "scopic regime", one emphasizes the fact that ways of looking are not natural, but constructed; that they have a history; that they also vary synchronically.

A simple example of such a scopic regime is the difference between the way our culture constructs the difference between fiction and documentary (see Time, story and memory). Some elements "trigger" a fictional gaze (for instance the fact that the beholder is sitting in the dark: looking at a movie in a theatre is for this reason more "fictional" than looking at the same movie on television in our living-room), which in its turn determines specific ways of seeing (in fiction, for instance, we are more eager to construct stories in order to make sense of what we see, whereas a documentary gaze is less bothered by the possible fragmentation of what is displayed).
Other well-known examples of differences in scopic regimes follow for instance lines of class and gender:
In the case of gender, one opposes the "male" gaze (more interested in grasping the subject of a picture, in a "typically" voyeuristic and sadistic male gesture) and the "female" glance (more interested in browsing the materiality of the visual surface, in a "typically" female attitude of non-dominant behaviour)
In the case of class, one opposes the "formalist", aesthetic, and art-historical look of the bourgeois culture (critics and arts lovers), who thereby puts between brackets the historical context of the picture, and the "political" look of the dominated classes, more interested in questions of social meaning and relevance.


••• Photography and scopic regimes •••

As far as photography is concerned, the idea of a two-ways traffic between scopic regime and cultural background should be maintained (our ways of looking determine our culture and vice versa). It is obvious that photography is part of visual culture and thus influenced by the scopic regime(s) of the day (or the year, or the decade, or the era). Yet it does much more than simply reflecting the general characteristics of a given period with its own scopic regimes. As the "oldest" of the "new media", photography has often had and often still has a pioneering function in the definition of our scopic regimes.
In this regard, a minimal survey of some major shifts should retain at least the following elements:

• The almost museal display of photographs in this gallery of the best known photographer in New York in those years, demonstrates the encounter and the blurring of various scopic regimes
• Photography as an expression/instrument of power (see the illustration for an example): By documenting the world and by enabling comparisons between people, photography can be used to impose ideas on what is "normal" and what is "deviant". this new way of looking determines then a reading of photography as a way of disciplining the subject by treating it "objectively", i.e. by confronting it with external standards, with statistic norms, and by forcing it to adhere to these laws, under penalty of exclusion (a seminal and highly influential study in this regard is Crary 1991).
• Photography as expression/instrument of naturalism and positivism: This seems to be a stereotype, but the cultural underpinnings and consequences of such a stance are considerable: photography has increased our eagerness to see everything, also that what could not be seen before, hence a phenomenon called the "frenzy of seeing" beyond the already known (of which the explosion of pornography is only one of the aspects)
• Photography as an illustration of a "mechanical" way of seeing that is by definition "un-artistic": This stance has been at heart of the 19th century quarrel on photography as technology versus photography, as art versus photography.
• Photography as expression/instrument of a new type of "autonomous" art, during the period of "high-modernism" and its emphasizing of art's autotelism (one might consider this the encounter between photography and abstract art, but is probably more correct to see in it the influence of modernism's tendency towards "structural differentiation"). This autonomous scopic regime has also something to do with the post-romantic promotion of the autonomous artist, i.e. the idea that a photographer "sees" what others don't see (a basic element in this discussion is photography's institutionalization and musealization: in 1938, Walker Evans is the first photograph ever to have a one man exhibition at the MOMA);
• The current doxa of the photographer as able to select the "decisive moment": Cartier-Bresson, bears witness of the lasting influence of this "autonomous" artistic regime and reflects the post-romantic doxa of the photographer as being capable of catching at the surface an "unseen" truth.
• Photography as belonging to a passed era: Photography is split between "analogous" ("real", "indexical") photography and "digital" ("simulated", "non-indexical") photography (see Post-photography?). If most specialists tend to multiply and pluralize the notion of scopic regime, there exist also attempts to define photography as "one" specific type of scopic regime. A most interesting case here are the ideas by Sorlin (Sorlin 1997: 84 and passim), who tries to define what are the major distinctive features of the "photographic way of seeing" (i.e. of seeing through and with the help of photography, which Sorlin beliefs to be the characteristic way of seeing in Western culture between 1839 and the emergence of the moving image: film, television, video):

• The production of events (which are often "non-events"): Photography pushes us to "fix" moments, i.e. to give them a particular status, but it appears very often that these moments are "meaningless".
• The development of the portrait: More than other visual media photography has put this "genre" to the foreground.

• The representation of the body: The favourite subject of the photographic look is the body

It is furthermore of utter importance to stress that such scopic regimes are often paradoxical and in conflict with each other. The relationship between these ideas, regimes, convictions, preferences, prejudices, etc. is not one of successive but of overlapping and contradicting layers.
A good example of such a conflict is the way writers of the Victorian era used the modern technology of photography in order to reinforce their nostalgic, anti-modern program. Although they made an extensive use of photographic illustrations, these images were not intended to stress the "modernity" of their writings. Instead of that, photography was considered a tool to take fragments out of time and to insert them in a kind of supra-temporal, eternal world that escaped from the rapid and radical changes of the day.
Our contemporary ideas are obviously obeying two very different directions concerning the picture's indexicality: 19th century naturalism versus contemporary loss of faith in the photography's documentary values
Hence the importance to make always enquiries on authorship and readership.

There are always a certain number of global categories and stances that unavoidably colour our scopic regimes.

The author lists 2:

the oscillation between iconoclasm and idolatry

and

the shifting conceptions of time and space in the successive meanings
of the concept of "modernity" (for further details, see: Kwinter,
Architecture of Time, MIT Press, 2001):

Cartesian modernity: Time and space as objectively measurable parameter. This corresponds with the scopic regime of monocular perspectivism, which seems to be continued in the naturalist/positivist version of photography (this is one of the reasons why someone as Crary does not withold the official introduction of photography in 1839 as a landmark)

The high-modernist conception, in which time is being reduced in favour of space. This moment of spatialization has been erroneously analyzed by Fredric Jameson as "typically post-modern" (it is a manifest feature of much high-modernist realizations).

The more recent conception (influenced by a large set of phenomena: the redefinition of time and space by Einstein and others; the attack on metaphysics by Nietzsche-Deleuze and here too many others; the emergence of cybernetic and digital culture, and so on) that replaces the time-space opposition by a "field-event" continuum. This conception can be linked with:
a shift in our ideas on indexicality (from spatial to temporal indexicality, see Post-photography?);
the post-modern attack launched against romantic ideas on the photographer's "subject". The "field-event" paradigm puts an end to the doxa of "the decisive moment" ("all space, no time") and introduces the idea that photography is something that changes itself through time or, better, that "creates" or materializes time.

Now in my stanza I say the scopic regime of construction's drive, but what drive usually comes to mind when we hear "drive," the death drive, the life drive? In the sense of "worlding" as an enframing, I think we have to admit another grotesque hybrid, a paradoxical drive of "construction" which like the heidegerrian 'being toward death' in its movement from the universal of molecular constitution toward the particularity of existence as animal as subject, encloses (not as in the closure of death) but in the closure of life-death being toward construction which in the sense of scopic regimes would seem to mean that our representations are both shaped by monstrous drives (of cultures, of bodies?), but also minimally that they are simply elegant examples of recombinant terms of appearance whose enframement or power of worlding is contingent on the details of construction.

If we continue on to vario-variopteryx we see that, "construction's drive" is also just as likely to be at variance with construction either against or for or both as a specie of gapping, as a "special animal" or unique expression or number, a transitional number, vario connoting the stream of indexicality or Concrete Universal variance, enhyphened as by an umbilical into the particularity of that 'being toward death' much like the archaeopteryx, the classical traditional 'missing link' which was real and exists within the fossil record. Each of us and his body, and thoughts, are at least as real as any given archaeopteryx fossil even though we are still a kind of known or standard specie of Zwerch-kasten quarrel, a transverse/perverse box of arguments ie a "man" "woman" "democrat" "christian" etc..

Modernity in this sense is Grotesque precisely as it is the site of Antagonism par excellence, it is the burning question which flares into
all manner of conflict AND synthesis which both flare into further synthesis and conflict. It is the refractive and molten idol of the monstrous IS of becoming which though purely molecular participates in immanence of appearance and whose meaning is the both the battleground of ideology and the graveyard of causality, whose indexicality though monstrous in the best sense as monstrum, can also become an indexicality of inertia as emboitement, but these terms are purely situational or figurative, as the monstrum can itself become the inertial, and emboitement pick up as an unfolding understanding, but then there's that sense that people will believe anything they read, or won't believe anything. The sense that within the gap is a war, a real and horrible war being played with what amounts to a "musical" instrumentality.


Lanny Quarles