Second Highway II
The Unique Zero Manifesto (2007)
Arriere la muse academique! - Baudelaire
Welcome to Unique Zero – the negation of everything.
Creativity is a value-neutral process independent of all forms of
expression.
Vigorously reject any notion of a generalised or theoretical ‘poetic’.
The creative process is not ‘theoretical’.
The specific technicalities of any art form – poetry, painting, music,
sculpture, installation or assemblage – are of secondary interest, even a
distraction, when trying to understand the nature of the creative process.
From the perspective of the primal creative
processes there are no significant factors associated with specialised
techniques derived from different artistic 'disciplines' or methods, including
poetry. This is always the case, even though some media/modes/genres/forms are,
in the context of overall function, or with regard to the individual
temperament of the artist, more suited to purpose than others, depending upon
viewpoint. Furthermore, distinctions between 'non representation' and
'abstraction' are invalid: all artworks are, in the first instance, symbolic
representations or constructed reifications, even 'found objects',
‘ready-mades’ or 'conceptual' artefacts. Nevertheless, a ‘symbol’ can also be
non-figurative (non-objective) and can be described, loosely, as ‘abstract’.
All artworks derive from the personality, the mentality, of the auteur. They are polysemic/polyvalent, symbolic
objects having as their primary raison d'être the externalisation, via
signification, of the psychological-ontological, infinitely evolving
presence/existence of the auteur
(author/artist/poet) without whom the 'work' (opus) would not exist and without
whom language is meaningless.
The Cultural Milieu
This process of externalisation (trace or trail) takes place
within a specific socio-cultural context (or Zeitgeist) that partially shapes the final outcome. It is possible
to 'transcend' the socio-cultural context, although it very difficult to do so.
The chronotope in the cultural ‘ecosystem’ locates the auteur (poet/artist) in a socio-cultural milieu or contextual mise-en-scene, based on the enforcement
of norms within specific social structures such as the class system, caste
systems and the means of economic production.
Normative structures, sustained
by ideology and belief (participation
mystique) are usually experienced as hegemonic and repressive to some
degree. Such normative structures are Blake’s 'mind-forg'd manacles' of
cultural oppression and structural evil and must be psychologically
accommodated through sublimation, the discharge of instinctual energies into
non-instinctual, ideologically sanctioned forms of behaviour. A form of false
consciousness tending toward narcosis is a by-product of this sublimation
mechanism.
On the other hand, the normative
ideology (‘culture’) of any social system is also capable of the infinite
assimilation of any artefact, however innovative, progressive, recondite,
radical, marginal, outrageous or avant-garde. In advanced economies any
artefact will also be the inevitable subject of homogenised commodification by
the forces of The Market (the Mondrian dress, the Edvard Munch screaming
pillow). Cultural oppression works through all those inhibiting, regressive,
ideological normalisation effects persistently degrading the chronotope, both
locally and globally (law of entropy) in the interest of various authoritarian
cultural-spiritual power elites. Such high caste power elites may declare war
upon ‘false gods’ and each other, but they are all united by an imperative to
criminalize the imagination; alongside dope-fiends, loose women, idolaters and
apostates, free thinkers and artists – makers of ‘graven images’ – are the real
enemy. The ‘Open Realism’ (realisme ouvert) of the unrestrained imagination,
a mode of extreme naturalism encompassing the antinomian syzygy phenomenon of
complementarity, works against this perpetual state of dispossession, and works
for the nullification of everything; a Unique Zero opposed to the wretched
standing joke of rigidified ‘culture’. The unreality of the chronotope ensnares
the subject in an infinitely receding hall of distorting mirrors where the
conflict between utilitarian austerity and indulgent individualism cannot be
recognised as a smoke screen. In this context, artworks can be either
transgressive or conformist, although the poetic process is innately
transgressive (non-conformist) because all art can induce a de-familiarisation
(disclosure) effect perturbing, however weakly, the hegemony of the mainstream
and disrupting the inauthentic discourse of ‘idle chatter’ (they call it
'metaphysics').
Even if ultimately
inconsequential, even if only an imperceptible ‘shudder’ (frisson nouveau), a perturbation of the chronotope and its
normative, cultural signifying systems is a transgression – and all such
perturbations or disturbances are taboo. But the ‘purpose’ of the poem/work is
exploration and discovery at the edge of zone; to explore the experience of
limits, to explore experience off-limits; to discover or probe the borders of
the human event horizon; to actualise singularity, the aporetic neither-nor
and/or both.
However, the transgressive or
conformist nature of any given artwork will also depend upon the worldview (Weltenschauung) of the auteur/poet. The dynamic, dialectical
interplay of Weltenschauung and Zeitgeist at a singular point of
intersection (auteur-nexus) within
the chronotope influences the subject’s sense of identity, even though the
chronotope may exist in a perpetual state of flux or emergence (the rigidity of
cultural norms notwithstanding). The poetic process itself is a problematic
factor with regard to the question of identity and can enter into a state of
conflict with the ideological basis of the prevailing Zeitgeist. The subject’s personal Weltenschauung may, in reality, be a form of false consciousness –
bad faith, ‘structural evil', meconnaissance
or avidya. Interpellation, the
mechanism of economic and cultural assimilation, may create an unstable
atmospheric ‘I’ (a ‘they-self’ or mirage persona) that is not the same as the
subject’s ‘true (real or empirical) self’. Most artefacts are determined by the
phantom signature of this ‘mirage persona’, rather than the authentic signature
of the artist’s true will, Sontag’s ‘principle of decision’.
These factors impact upon
attempts to define an individual style, poetic or authorial ‘voice’ or maniera. Assertions of authorship per se can be compromised if it appears
that personal identity is ‘nothing but’ a projection, an
ideological/socio-economic ‘construct’ of mass consumer culture, the product of
an all-pervasive theocratic hegemony like so-called ‘higher’ culture bedevilled
by the self-serving Aristotelian humbug of ‘virtue’ and ‘magnificence’.
Alternatively, the mirage persona is often confused with, or can masquerade as,
the vulnerable and immature empirical self. Yet, the inauthentic, fragmentary
they-self can never be the ‘real’ auteur.
Inwardness and Poeisis
‘Inspiration’ and ‘talent’ are conventional terms denoting
certain mental capabilities and imaginative capacities. Imaginative activity
(active imagination) is 'driven' by innate obsessions or fixations with
atavistic affinities, possibly of genetic origin. This compulsion, or impulse,
finds 'expression' in an exploratory immersion process of 'inwardness' or
descent (the dangerous passage, the voyage to the interior, the night sea
journey, the quest or anti-quest).
The ‘descent’ or ‘inverse
pilgrimage’ (katabasis) is fraught
with anxiety, obstacles and difficulties. This experience assumes the character
of an ordeal – an ascesis, even – realised through ‘rites of passage’
comprising three known stages: separation – initiation – return. During this
process the subject will encounter or confront uncanny horrors and paranoid
connections. These terrors may include resurgent atavisms (the phylogenetic
inheritance), pathological forces, every form of self-violation (mortificatio) and shadowy, chthonic
‘elementals’ – all characterised by a ubiquitous undertow of archaic nostalgia.
The subject is exposed to all the underworld horrors of personal and collective
unconscious contents (the 'inferno') and other phantasmagoria – such as
tutelary ‘threshold guardians’ – derived, in the final analysis, from psychic
formations known as ‘archetypes’.
These ‘archetypes’ (collective
representations or 'categories') can be either structures or paradigmatic
processes, not just primordial images. Archetypes are not immutable, and
naturally-occurring changes at the archetypal level (creation, evolution,
decay, extinction) are reflected by corresponding changes in the prevailing Zeitgeist or world order. Phenomena such
as cultural implosion, drift, lag, paradigm-mutation and belief-system burn-out
(the death of god, the death of art) manifest themselves through collective
time/'deep' history (Geschichte) just
as pain is ‘referred’ away from an injured site to various other parts of the
body. Thus, ‘archetypes’ can, and do, mutate over time. The archetypal level
is, naturally, inherently unstable and without foundation.
Phantasmal figures and motifs
(the inchoate raw material or massa
confusa) arise from a dynamic, unconscious process driven by libido or
unbound psychic energy. This inwardness or immersion process discloses the
centre of desire (the heart of darkness, the end of the night, the final
frontier), a duplicitous ‘inner world’ (inner space) of cosmic cruelty,
proto-animistic fetishism, polymorphous perversity, illicit propensities,
unrestrained fantasy, iambic scurrility, and primal narcissism, pathological
fixations, retrogression and antinomian 'otherness'. Creativity involves both
assimilation of this dark-side (the mutant spectres of desire) and psychic
de-conditioning (deconstruction) from the effects of cultural-ideological
interpellation (belief, ‘spirituality’ and 'metaphysics'). Deconditioning is
achieved by immersion in darkness (blackening or noircissement) or, alternatively, by passage through the dark,
haunted depths of the ‘enchanted forest’, the legendary wild-wood.
The ‘heart of darkness’, the
capricious, macabre and sinister ‘dark-side’, and its shadowy, subconscious
strata of involuntary memory (personal/collective) is the first level of the
subject’s inner core, an emergent feature of mutable, fluidic, psychic
topography derived from the semiotic, proto-symbolic chora (la chora semiotique). However, the
phantasmal ‘contents’ of the dark-side derive from both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’
experience: the products of indefinite feedback, everything but the soul.
Characterised by the paradoxical, perceptual complementarity of syzygy
phenomena (chaos/cosmos, causal/a-causal, subject/object, latent/manifest,
light/dark, positive/negative, life/death, psyche/soma, masculine/feminine,
self/not-self, fact/fiction, true/false, love/hate, demotic/hieratic,
signifier/signified, wave/particle, etc.) the ‘contents’ reflect the
indeterminate, bipolar, existential structure of the ‘real’. This is the case,
even if there can be no such ‘thing’ as Reality, realism being a quality of
understanding.
A primal phenomenon, not sensible
or intelligible in itself, the chora
semiotique is the universal pre-linguistic precursor ‘matrix realm' (the
Platonic ‘receptacle of becoming’, the unus
mundus, the quantum vacuum, the anima
mundi, the abyssal depths) which underpins all symbolism, language and
meaning. It is beyond rational understanding, merging with the ‘sympathetic’
autonomic nervous system and the primeval (visceral) sphere of the ‘old brain’,
that proto-sentient, pre-logical ‘reptilian’ and limbic armature of the
unconscious anatomy. Creativity consists of a non-verbal, irrational,
intuitive, instinctual procedure of imaginative ‘shaping/forming’ or ‘making’ (poeisis) utilising the subject’s entire
psyche – although internal incoherence and psychic division always inhibits
optimal creative functioning and free plasticity. Phantasmal contents are
subjected to a pre-logical transmutation process (khemeia) comprising condensation (metaphor) and displacement
(metonymy), articulated through the osmotic interchange of free association
(automatism), energised by libido (vis
creativa), predicated by differentiation and conditioned by ‘objective
chance’.
This process generates a first
phase 'work', opus, or artefact,
shaped by the gratuitous laws of organic form (deep form) showing how
reification becomes representation through metamorphosis. These representations
generate, at the level of reader or audience response, an inter-subjective
experience, effect or simulation, of ‘significance’, 'meaning' and aesthetic
‘value’ and, almost instantaneously, are co-opted or annexed as vectors of
cultural interpellation.
Invention and Aesthetic Effects
Primal poeisis
functions independently of all self-conscious artifice, taste, thematic
concerns, genre conventions and artistic method, although form and technique
can be conventionalised at the socio-cultural level and always are. Naturally
the auteur (poet/artist) will also
work self-consciously, simultaneously exercising intellectual ability (ingegno), wit, erudition, virtuosity and
acquired capability in the utilisation of all facets of creative technique both
ancient and modern, formal and informal: style, structure, and content. Yet,
the fortuitous automatism, the non-verbal visuality of primal poeisis will, at all times, suffuse
every aspect of the work in hand, including the objective technical factors
mentioned.
However the faculty of invention
(invenzione), comprising discovery,
representation and all modes of reification and transformation (inflections,
modifications, recapitulations, transpositions, modulations and permutations),
is rooted in the automatic mechanism of the libidinous process.
In its pure state (l'art pour l'art), poetic invention
operates surrealistically (sans sujet
preconcu) upon, and within, the psyche. It draws an intuitive, elemental
‘spark’ (scintilla) from the
encounter between, and/or juxtaposition of, mutually exclusive or distant
realities: ‘kitchen-cynic’ naturalism colliding with mythic symbolism, for
example, or a weird fusion of pastoral Arcadia and urban inferno.
Invention can draw the same
elemental spark from the off-beat, marvellous-uncanny ‘inbetweenness’
properties of ‘alien’, interstitial phenomena; from an erratic oscillation
between the trite and original, or historicism and futurism; from an
incongruous synthesis of low-tone and grand manner or from an irregular union
of preciosity and brutalism. Often tragicomic, sometimes bitter-sweet,
invention can endow the ephemeral with gravitas, transmuting the despised and
the neglected into high art or high camp, into an underground freak-out (ufo)
precipitating a mind-warp (dereglement de
tous les sens).
The process may manifest in
different rhapsodic ‘poetic’ lyrical, or, alternatively, ‘anti-poetic’,
passionless non-lyrical, modalities. Modalities such as melopoeia (‘phonetic’ or ‘musical’) or phanopoeia
(‘visual’ or ‘pictorial’) commingle with complimentary modes of functioning
such as pathopoeia (working with
affective elements such as feeling, mood and emotion, even with estrangement,
irony and alienation) or mythopoeia (Euhemerism/mythologisation/mythic
parallelism).
The epistemological element of
‘meaning’ (semantic relations, etymology, associations, nuance, denotation and
connotation) endows the artefact with communicative properties and linguistic
capacities that engage with consciousness and psychosomatic exteriority,
acquiring in the process a patina of ‘cultural value’.
Meanwhile, at the level of the
chronotope, the subject interacts impressionistically with 'the world ' via an
interface conditioned by the multidimensional, dialectical interaction of
sensation, Zeitgeist and Weltenschauung. Here, through a
dialectical interplay of material forces, events and subjective perceptions
(e.g. synchronicity and coincidence), inspirational feedback
(friction/irritability) continues to fuel and inform the poetic process on a
mundane day-to-day basis. This magic-circumstantial aesthetic redemption of
banality enhances intensity of perception and poetic intuition, even if it does
not necessarily effect a diminution of existential unease, anxiety or ‘angst’.
To some degree this entire
procedure is 'convulsive' (explosive-fixed) insofar as it arises from an
energetic spasm, a surreal analogue to geological seismic activity, triggered
by ritualistic intercession, in alliance with the pleasure principle. This
‘nervous spasm’ is the climax or consummation (Chymische Hochzeit) of
the initial impulse. The degree of convulsive intensity generated by the
primary processes is conditioned by the level of intensity inherent in any
given creative act or event and also depends on the neurological or mental
state and personality of the auteur.
This intensity is manifest as an
emotional spark or charge comprising energy quanta of attraction/repulsion
energising the artefact at an extremely deep level within its infrastructure.
In a specifically poetic context the affective/emotional charge, or cathexis, invests the imagistic, lexical
and other structural elements of a work with a quantum of aesthetic 'power',
either weak or strong.
The charge will have an enigmatic
'effect' (la sorcellerie evocatoire),
even, perhaps, an absurd effect of hilarity – provoked, for instance, by
cynicism, burlesque, iambic parody, black humour or the vitriol of corrosive
satire – upon both the reader and the writer. This outcome can be heightened in
certain cases to the level of a paranormal 'numinous effect' (uncanny intensity
of feeling) that is often misrepresented in mystical terms by both poets and
readers. This problem arises, for example, in apocalyptic or ‘vatic’
(visionary) art and is often associated with the transcendental view that all
art aspires to ‘the condition of music’.
The degree of charge/intensity
also determines the transgressive potential of the work on the socio-cultural
plane. Furthermore, the exact nature of the ‘uncanny’ effect (das Unheimlich) and/or response in
specific instances is infinitely variable, multi-factorial, unpredictable,
hallucinatory and indeterminate in conformance with The Uncertainty Principle.
Audience or reader-response will be conditioned by, among other factors, individual
predisposition, immediate circumstances, state of health, degree of
socio-cultural alienation, collective expectations or inhibiting horizons
demarcating the phobic, ideological miasma of false consciousness.
Parapraxis
The open-real ‘lifted horizon’ (epiphany) of
de-familiarisation is a consequence of disruption (perturbation or infraction)
of the auteur-nexus within the
chronotope and, correspondingly, within the psyche. This inter-penetration of
the inner and outer worlds of the reader-writer causes a parapraxis or
subversive breakdown of normality; a shamanistic ‘break-though in plane’ (a
vector, rupture, tear, wound or gateway) disclosing ‘alterity’ (aporia,
otherness, surreality, hyper-reality, super-reality, the dis-placed and the
dis-located) warping contingent historicity, displacing the distorting mirrors
of the hyper-culture. Alterity, in this context, may be defined as the
bizarre (or ‘convulsive’) antithesis of false consciousness that embodies the
manifest unreality of the prevailing socio-cultural hegemony.
De-familiarisation may generate a heterodox mode of ‘open realism’ (disclosure,
desacralization) in contradiction to the oppressive unreality (narcosis) of the
phenomena of false consciousness and specious ‘identity’ (national identity,
social identity, cultural identity). Such phantasmal, collective, consensual
mirages of interpellation maintain social and psychological control through
denial of the self, ultimately inducing ideological de-realisation
(etherealization or dissolution) in the vapours of mystical unreality
euphemistically called The Cloud of Unknowing.
Yet, faced with the impossibility
of ‘saying’ anything ‘new’, creativity takes its revenge, ruthlessly recycling,
plundering or pillaging the phenomenal, theatrical, kaleidoscopic ‘spectacle’
of the world for ‘raw material’. From a position of ‘absolute divergence’, (absolute nonconformism) creativity enhances the autonomous potential of the spontaneous, singular,
side-real imagination in a perverse, even tawdry, spirit of panache; a spirit
of intransigent opposition, a 'negative dialectic' of contradiction and reverse
exegesis, working, always, against the grain, subversively ‘against nature’ (contra naturam). To reduce the eternal
to the transient, to transform substance into style, the ‘signature of the
artist’s will’ – that is the essence of modernity with its ‘art-house’
experimentalism, with its ‘cool’ cosmopolitan, radical chic, is it not?
Within the chronotope, the
falsehood of the subject’s specular mirage persona may be compromised or exposed
by aesthetic manipulation of double images, wordplay, rhetorical devices and
figures of all kinds including ‘multiple personalities’, alter egos, authorial
‘voices’, poetic ‘masks’ and heteronyms. Similarly the integrity of the poetic
process can be jeopardised by self-division and psychic fragmentation. From
this perspective ‘impersonality’, or aesthetic distance, is simply one mask
among many, just one survival strategy among others equally valid or invalid.
No strategy can be guaranteed,
not even Nihilism, Stoicism or Epicureanism. Not even the decadent, dandified
insouciance of cultivated dilettantism. Not even the daunting complexities of
Post-modern theory – not even the ironies of high camp; not even the mass media
glitzkrieg. No, not even the free-floating
aestheticism of marginal dispossessed ‘outsiders’ inhabiting ‘unseen’ paraxial,
liminal regions of cultural and sub-cultural life.
The creative process has two
outcomes: first, an impact at the socio-cultural level, and second, a
psychoactive (psychotropic) effect within the psyche of the individual subject.
This 'psycho-activity', this
psychedelic epiphany, is an end in itself and the motive for the original
creative fixation-compulsion (impetus/impulse). Through feedback this
fixation-compulsion evolves into a process of developmental integration, a
process of growth-change through ‘altered states’ of lucidity or ‘systematic
derangement’ (raisonne deregelement),
defined as ‘individuation’.
Often misrepresented in
‘spiritual’ terms and thus neutralised, or blocked, by false consciousness and
the devious contents of the mystical mirror-world menagerie or cultural
hothouse, individuation is simply the human manifestation of a general drive to
entelechy (autarchic self-realisation) common to all living organisms, one
aspect of the parabolic arc of the evolutionary process. Artistic activity, as
a mode of ontogenic-phylogenic self-actualisation, has an evolutionary function
(survival value, realisation of singularity) at the biological, species level.
Enrichment of the anguished
existential spectacle; enhanced adaptive capacities; the ‘pataphysical
subversion of interpellation in the name of an ‘impossible’, absurd freedom (la liberte absurde); intensification of the contemporaneous, perceptual ‘now’
(the inadvertent lucidity of the ‘sublime moment’, the gem-like flames of
synaesthesia); the infinite, ambivalent reinvention of modernity. These are
some possible benefits derived from creativity. Others might include the
cathartic purgation of ‘spiritual’ accretions, blockages and restrictions
impeding psychic integration. However the autonomous imagination is indifferent
to such ‘benefits’ and, being neither benign nor malign, its ultimate effect
may well be ‘off-centre’, may well induce disarray and further confusion: a
sardonic ‘debacle of the intellect’.
The reification and
externalisation of the artwork, its conformance to expectations within
objective, historical parameters of social exchange, art or anti-art fashions,
styles, schools, genres and movements in the fragmentary world of the mirage
persona or they-self, is a by-product of this natural process. Nevertheless the
opus or ‘work’ may have important,
quasi-autonomous cultural effects and implications. These implications are
acute when viewed against the background of inevitable, infinite and eternal
psycho-aesthetic warfare occurring within the social theatre of the chronotope
– the perpetual sectarian conflict and generational revolt between successive
schools of thought and ideological movements within the hegemonic domain of
cultural oppression. These conflicts, transfigured and intensified by the
underlying struggle (agon) between
the palliative unreality of false consciousness (inauthenticity) and the
paradoxical symbolic-naturalistic ‘Open Realism’ of disclosure, will never end. Expanding and transforming the shared
cognitive-epistemological-ontological framework, testing the cultural event
horizon, in accord with the arbitrary and ‘uncanny’ principle of ‘strangeness’
and the characteristic ‘charm’ of the unexpected, The Work creates its own
tremors and aftershocks, its own future – and the nullification of everything.
Frisson nouveau – Hugo
Noircissement – Celine
Sans sujet preconcu – Breton
Dereglement de tous les sens/raisonne dereglement – Rimbaud
La sorcellerie evocatoire – Baudelaire
La liberte absurde – Camus
Finis
