In an infinity pool.

There is an excellent architecture playing on a very many notions, both practicle and theoretical, for understanding our concerns. It may in fact be most sensible for us to consider the infinity pool as our concern. As to ask of a ‘purpose’ or ‘point’ to this text further than that is an extremely difficult question to answer.
An infinity Pool is
immersive and extensive. the bather in the infinity pool is not looking for an openness. there exists an evocation of the vast - excessive - infinity - but the horizon between reasons is crucial – for beyond it we find excellent unreason and a happening that is beauty.


The haptic immersion in the waters and visuals of the infinity pool plays at the lush. and later a discussion of beauty and then the sublime but for now we don't talk about beauty and we can't talk about the sublime.
Our concerns are an infinity pool. How to know through all its possible manifestations.  Beauty will be a route to the absolute. an infinity pool offers mechanisms for understanding it.
Please take what you will from the following text. It is an exercise in aesthetic theory as a start but further than that it looks to embody what it discovers in the exercises of its production. It is serious and it is real. It replaces truth with speculation and it has aspirations greater than itself.

Infinity Pools;

Infinity Pools;

The Sublime, Bound Beauty, Absolutes


“One of the distinctions often made between beauty and the sublime is between boundlessness and boundedness. For Kant, Beauty and Sublimity are opposed along the semantic axes quality-quantity, shaped-shapeless, bounded-boundless. And many a champion of the sublime have used the boundedness of beauty as a critique to ground advocacies of the sublime.

Beauty is a quality bound to form, but rather than following a metaphysical position on form – we deal with what we have gained from Meillassoux - "an absolute without an absolute entity”, form as the radical contingency of all things, bound in a virtual outside all infinities, in the end of order, in the certainty that we could at any moment fall off the edge of the world.




Beauty since the Sublime


If we consider beauty since postmodernism, it has seemed as though it has become far less of interest to our aesthetic discussions than that of the sublime. The sublime, as Kant proposes it in his critique of judgement, is abundant in contemporary aesthetic cultures as Shaviro mentions in his re-investigation of the Beautiful - “The sublime seems more appropriate to contemporary taste because it is an aesthetic of immensity, excess and disproportion, whereas the Beautiful is one of harmony and proportion. It is as if Beauty were somehow old-fashioned, whereas the sublime is considered more radical.” (Shaviro 1997)


The sublime revels in the openness of the unpresentable, in the anxiety between the immense power of large-scale and impotence of understanding. It yields excellent open reason - that in the 80s and 90s vanquished all sorts of societal injustices and is, no doubt, still doing so. The sublime takes place in a site is away from its form, like that shift the site of artwork made by Duchamp etc. Since modernisms such as Duchamp’s the sublime has just seemed more appropriate to art and the avant-gardes tastes and as we have already mentioned has become something of a posterboy for much of post-modern aesthetics.


Yet the sublime is limited despite its ability to seize “upon what is received, it seeks to reflect and overcome. It seeks to determine what has already been thought, written, painted, or socialised in order to determine what hasn’t already been.” (Lyotard, 1984). Sadly it is exactly the limits of its open site in an order that allows it to think this way, to grasp the expansive becoming of within the correlation. Yet as Kant describes it faced with the immensity of such an endeavour the imagination involved in the sublime pales as “its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself’ (Kant, 1987, p.252). The sublime is an appearance of boundlessness without being free.




Beauty


What of any kind of bound aesthetic experience, it is certainly the boundedness of beauty which has led to co-options by many an aesthetic politic of high taste and the meta-narratives all the sublime was doing away with. What of a bounded concept that were not to fall victim to any of these ails. What of a beauty that were bound and were more interesting than some tool of social exclusion?


Kant himself offers some tools to think beauty outside of criticisms such as Lyotards. Lyotard even quotes Kant saying that the “consensus as to what is beautiful must remain free; in other words, that it is not regulated a priori by laws (Lyotard, 1982, p.4). Here we find a clear springboard into Meillassoux’s project. We have learnt that for Meillassoux that we can only understand the absolute as the radical contingency of all things, the annihilation of any claims to a truthful founding of any statement about an a priori.


Beauty appears in the entity of the thing or event not in the here-and-now of the sublime but in an-any-moment-whatever of a node of subjectification that lets us past order and through to the absolute.


Bound Infinity

"'Cantor's theorem', as it is known, can be intuitively glossed as follows: take

any set, count its elements, then compare this number to the number of possible groupings of these elements (by two, by three - but there are also groupings 'by one', or 'by all', which is identical with the whole set). You will always obtain the same result: the set B of possible groupings (or parts) of a set A is always bigger than A - even if A is infinite." (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.157)


This is the transfinite, a devise that Meillassoux uses to create a distinction between chance and contingency. This distinction is the removal of Kant's probabilistic reasoning. For example, chance - when considering the role of a dice, chance is a totally fixed schema that deals in stakes of what is likely to happen between certain parameters (degreees of predictability), Like – randomness. In Meillassoux's hyper-chaotic contingency randomness can only exist as a quotation, just as the infinite ends up being quoted within the transfinite. “Hyperchaos simply denotes that everything either could or could not change without reason; it could remain in perpetual flux or could remain in the same state for an indefinite duration.” (Meillassoux, 2008a) It is totally conceivable that in Hyperchaos a world could end up completely made up of fixed objects, without any becoming whatsoever. From the vantage of hyperchaos, everything is contingent – even disorder and becoming themselves. And it is in this extension beyond necessity that we find beauty in any entity.


Lyotard's texts on the sublime deal with an infinity that he associates with the vanishing point of perspective and traditional pictorial aesthetics, as well as the reach of science, technology and economics “making concrete the infinity of ideas”. He sees perspective of this kind registering "well-ordered universe” that extends “all the way to the vanishing point” (Lyotard, 1982). His critique is formulated on the politic that classic aesthetic sensibilities of beauty are reproduced in the mechanical image production that came with the invention of the camera its mass production, and he sees this as part of the an ‘infinite’ extension of the technoscientific and economic reason of capitalism which makes pictures of order unproductive.


In an infinity pool the key mechanism one discovers is not Infinity, but several infinities. They function not just in the doubled horizon of the image but also precisely in its role as a commodity. Each horizon, be it the lip of the pool, the frame of an image, edge of your material desires, each is a limit of the infinity of order, and what lays beyond is exactly the hyperchaos of Meillassoux’s radical contingency.


It is here in beauties long reach to the end of order where we find its access to Meillassoux’s Absolute. All one need do is follow the perspective of Lyotard’s critique to its limit and one finds this radical contingency.


This beyond seems to be similar to that which Lyotard is concerned with while he is discussing presenting the unpresentable. For Lyotard though the unpresentable one gets access to the unmediated temporality of the ‘Here-and-Now’ that exists as an ‘openness’ it is in an order already constructed through some a priori logic, be it one of becoming, fixity or probability. It is a gap in infinity, (or capitalism) that resists the prescribed order that surrounds it. This gap can be considered to be the site of much of the differentiation of post-structuralism or the deterritorialisation of Deleuze’s project. The Sublime with an expansion of imagination when it is not bound by understanding however it reaches a limit it cannot go beyond. As Deleuze says, “In the sublime, Imagination surrenders itself to an activity quite distinct from that of formal reflection.” It is concerned with the formless gap made for imagination in the correlation, but it is unable to go beyond, for the Sublime hovers with the becoming of reason and all its assumed limits, in the openness in creates in a supposed infinite.


Given our concern with Meillassoux’s project this quality of the Sublime leaves it unable to have any access to anything other than the schema that it is formulated within. It is similar to the openness of artworks concerned with chance.


Within this conception of beauty really we would have to consider all correlationist conceptions of beauty to actually be examples of the sublime. Perhaps even further the whole philosophical project hovering in the openness of the sublime caught in a never ending productive loop which may as well be the correlationist circle.


This beauty we have described can go beyond novelty, and beyond taste. It is a material point through which we may have access to outdoors of it.

Kant read as Meillassoux

Let us return to Kant’s description of beauty and discuss the four characteristics in respect of Meillassoux’s project.

The first movement shows us that beauty is based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure or displeasure, and a specific disinterested kind of pleasure. Given that our project is based on a property of beauty that we claim is connected to Meilassoux’s absolute we have to understant that something must happen for this to be the case. As Meillassoux says of his radical contingency.

“the term ‘contingency’ refers back to the Latin contingere, meaning ‘to touch, to befall.’ Which is to say, that which happened, but which happens enough to happen to us. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens – something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable. When something happens to us, when novelty grabs us by the throat, then no more calculation and no more play – it is time to be serious.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.108)

This is what we shall understand as feeling. And this is to say that it can be understanding, sensation, imagination or otherwise. Just so long as it ‘happens enough to happen to us’

With regard to Pleasure or Displeasure, it is not hard for us to understand that pleasure could mean something other than a subjects autonomous satisfaction. For example it has been argued, such as by Henry Allison, that one must included negative judgements of beauty into the conception of beauty in order for their to be a satisfactory interpretation of Kant's theory of taste. (Alison, 2001, p.72). What we learn, is that pleasure is sited clearly in a relationship between the subjective experience the object. Yet beauty is referred to by Kant as being without category. It's aesthetic delight eclipsing the classic subjective position, such as Meillassoux says of death, "what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and of elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of all things, traversing us continually and instantaneously" (Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory, p. 104)

When considering the disinterested quality to this pleasure. In view of our understanding that Meillassoux’s absolute is outside of the realm of predictability, outside of any possible conseption of causality, or any conception based on empirical experience at all, it is not hard for us to argue that disinterested describes our dealing with what may be beyond what we can conceive of. This could be similar to the immanent production of Deleuze’s deterritorialisation - that which is disinterested is beyond what we could be interested in, since that before our experience of beauty happens we could have no conception of it having anything to do with our interest. Really what could also be the case and is more significant in regard to Meillassoux’s project is that interest itself wouldn’t be what it is now, it could change a little or it could be entirely other, perhaps this is what disinterested refers to that which as the moment is not interest, as opposed to being not interested.

The second movement of Kant’s judgments of beauty is that of a universal without concept. As we have said, the ‘without concept’ of this universal is what removes it from being any kind of scientifically describable material property of the object. Meillassoux describes the ‘correlationist cogito’, (that which, encloses thought in a reciprical relation to being, one which is merely the mask for thoughts underlying relationship to itself) relationship to universalisation as follows,

“it is not strictly speaking a solipsistic cogito, but rather a 'cogitamus', since it founds science's objective truth upon an intersubjective consensus among consciousnesses. Yet the correlationist cogito also institutes a certain kind of solipsism, which could be called a 'species solipsism', or a 'solipsism of the community', since it ratifies the impossibility of thinking any reality that would be anterior or posterior to the community of thinking beings. This community only has dealings with itself, and with the world with which it is contemporaneous.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.84)

We will take this critique to be referring to the potential of a universalisation that in being without concept reaches outside of the ‘solipsism of the community’ and is directly referring to factiality, (Deleuze, 1984)to the universal “absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.” (Meillassoux, 2008b, p.8)

The third movement proposes that judgments of beauty do not presuppose an end or a purpose, however they do involve the representation of ‘purposiveness’. This purposiveness functions very differently from any utility of an actual purpose or end would do. As we have noted the representation of purposiveness works with an injection of logic into the a priori to produce the representation of a purposive causation in the experience of beauty.

Given that this purposiveness does not involve the ascription of an end, Kant calls it a “merely formal purposiveness”. It could be this formal purposiveness that Meillassoux is talking about when dealing with the question of why, if there is no necessity to the continutity of physical laws, do things not change all the time. Meillassoux’s response is that Kant’s probabilistic reasoning cannot be applied to laws themselves only to the physical objects already subject to those laws. Perhaps it is here in contained in representations of purposiveness that we find a mechanism in what happens to us that can account for the application of such reasoning to objects already subject to physical laws not change all the time.

The forth movement proposes that judgments of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity. Far from most readings of this necessity functioning as a normalising aspect of the judgment of beauty. As we have learnt from Meillassoux the only necessity is the necessity of contingency. From this perspective the forth movement gives us the ability to put back in thought that which was considered its limit.

As Meillassoux says, “we are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.” In other words, “instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.88) This is the only necessity for Meillassoux, the necessity of contingency and It is in these characteristics that Beauty finds access to the absolute property of an entity.

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Beauty’s Past

Beauty’s Past

We find clear reference for a lot of our more familiar dealings with Beauty in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. For the purposes of this writing we will use’s Kant’s conception of Beauty as a starting point as it both provides opportunity to mention both the ‘empiricist’ tradition of beauty proposed by the likes of Hume and Burke and the ‘rationalist’ tradition represented by Baumgarten and Meier, as well as holding a significant place in the projects of Whitehead, Deleuze and Meillassoux. Kant’s discussion of beauty is not without some significant quirks that often seem over looked in more contemporary dealings with beauty and will be important in reconciliation with Meillassoux. To start our discussion we shall work through some of the key aspects of Kant’s characterisation of Beauty.

Kant starts his study of aesthetic with an analysis of judgements of beauty (or taste).  To consider the term judgement itself, ‘Judgment’ can be wrongfully believed to require a position on whether a judgement is true or false. In Alfred North Whitehead’s project he offers the term propositions instead, as Shaviro says,

“the notion of judgment tends to imply, wrongly, that “the one function” of propositions and theories “is to be judged as to their truth or falsehood”. Whitehead insists, rather, that “at some point” in the entertainment of a proposition “judgment is eclipsed by aesthetic delight.” (Shaviro, 2009, p.3)

We will continue with Kant’s term of judgements as the causal journey evoked by the term Judgement is surely the journey that one must start before the path is "eclipsed by aesthetic delight". This initiation of a movement to be met with a new order is an important chart for us to reference when evaluating our pleasures all the while not escaping the space in our minds that remembers the reframing of Whiteheads speculative propositions.

In dealing with judgements of taste, Kant lays out four movements that are characteristic. The first movement proposes that judgements of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure (and displeasure). This feeling of pleasure is however more peculiar than a general pleasure. Kant refers to a distinctive kind of pleasure; one that is disinterested. With this kind of pleasure I experience an object as beautiful if I like it without interest. As Christian Helmut Wenzel says,

“I should be free from any kind of desire, aim, or purpose, or any social, moral, or intellectual considerations. (Kant wants to exclude personal as well as non-personal interests – which correspond to the agreeable and the good, as we shall see later.) Only then can my contemplation of the object be “pure,” as Kant says.” (Helmut Wenzel, 2005)

Shaviro proposes we consider passion when trying to understand Kant's disinterestedness. "The scandal of passion is that it is utterly gratuitous: it has no grounding, and no proper occasion. In this sense, it is entirely free (though I am not free with regard to it)." (Shaviro - Without Criteria)

Kant uses this disinterested character to distinguish judgements of beauty from other judgements such as judgements of the good expressed when one simply finds something pleasing, and judgements of the good, which include judgements about the moral goodness and the non-moral aspects of an experience. These distinctions seem useful when considering many of the reorganisations of artistic production since beauty became less of a concern. The Marxian agenda for the social intervention of arts practice seems to wish the arts to be predominantly concerned with judgements of the good. Whereas compositional strategies like Jonathan Burrows’ and Mattio Fargion’s investment in Information Theory seem to be the continual employment of judgements of the agreeable in order that the audience stay present and attentive with the work.

The second movement proposes that, judgments of beauty have, or make claim to, ‘universality’ or ‘universal validity’. Though the case of beauty’s universality is peculiar, it is a universal that is not based on concept. As Kant says, “The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal liking.” (Kant, 1987, p.53)

This makes the universality involved in judgments of taste to be somewhat problematised when compared to Kant’s previous legitimizing and universalizing projects. Kant says further, a judgment of taste “does not allow us to cognize and prove anything concerning the object because it is intrinsically indeterminable and inadequate for cognition” (Kant 1987, 213).

This characteristic of Kant’s beauty means that there could be no scientific or intersubjectively objective way to determine whether an object is beautiful, and if it is beautiful how it could be explained. It is the status of a judgment of beauty, that it must be subjective, as Kant says; aesthetic judgment is “a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective.” (Kant, 1987, p.44). Yet these subjective judgments make claim to universality, they are not merely subjective. Nor are they universally subjective, as Shaviro says, “for, in contrast to an empirical judgment of understanding, a judgment of taste does not involve the mind’s active impressing of its own Categories upon a passive external world.” (Shaviro, 2009, p.19).
It is not merely something that I project onto or inject into my experience, ‘judgments of beauty’ produce the response of an appearance of an objective quality in the thing that I behold and as far as Kant is concerned this universality does not exist until I have made this judgment of beauty.

Following Shavrio’s project it makes sense if we here compare any claim to an objective quality away from (for now) any material objectivity and towards the potentials and virtuals of Deleuzian or Whiteheadian thought. Whitehead in particular has one concept, that of eternal objects that could serve to help elaborate this proposal.

Eternal objects are “Pure Potentials”, or “potentials for the process of becoming” (Whitehead, 1978, pp.21, 29). For Whitehead everything is made up of actual entities. These are singular “occasions” or events of becoming, similar to the Deleuzian Singularities that, for Whitehead, are the most fundamental constituents of everything. In relation to actual entities, these Eternal objects provide “the ‘qualities’ and ‘relations’ ” that enter into, and help to define, these occasions of actual entities. Whitehead says, when “the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity,” it “contributes to the definiteness of that actual entity” (Whitehead, 1978, p.23). It gives it a particular character. Eternal objects thus take on something of the role that universals, predicates, Platonic forms, and ideas played in older metaphysical systems. But we have already seen that, for Whitehead, “concrete particular fact” cannot simply “be built up out of universals”; it is more the other way around. Universals, or “things which are eternal,” can and must be abstracted from “things which are temporal” (Whitehead, 1978, p.40) yet they cannot be conceived in the absence of the subject experience of actual entities. Whitehead defines eternal objects as the following, “any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an ‘eternal object’ ” (Whitehead, 1978, p.44)
This seems in ways similar to the mechanisms of universality in Kant’s discussion of Beauty, they make a proposal similar to that of Kant’s transcendentalism, and help us think how it might be possible for such a universality to manifest itself. It may also be worth briefly mentioning a further Whitehead proposition in regard to this point. Whitehead does not privilege subject-hood to human subjects, to some degree or other he ascribes subject-hood to all things. In Whitehead we must understand that the world is made out of various events, actual entities, becomings and he does not privilege the affect of these events to the human. The potential subjectivity of non-human subjects such as objects found in Whitehead can help us consider the possibilities of how the universalising quality of beauty may function as both a secondary property and the appearance of a primary quality of an object or event.

In the third movement Kant shows that unlike judgements of the good, judgements of the beautiful do not presuppose an end or a purpose. They do however involve the representation of what Kant calls “purposiveness”. Kant insists, “we cannot even think [a being]… without also thinking that they were produced intentionally.” (Kant, 1987, p.269). This third movement seems to function with a similar mechanism to the function of universality and this section of Kant’s aesthetics can be linked to his transcendental solution to causation in physical laws.

This representation of purposiveness injects an a priori causation (at least the appearance of one) into the experience of beauty. Heidegger highlights this as an issue, specifically in relation to an artwork, in his critique of the aesthetic approach, he understands aesthetics to be “that kind of meditation on art in which humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful represented in art is the point of departure and the goal that sets the standard for all its definitions and explanations” (Heidegger, 1979, p.78)
His point in relationship to our discussion of purposiveness is as follows, “the artwork becomes an object of lived experience and in this way art comes to count as an expression of human life.” (Heidegger, 1977, p.116). Heidegger is making two points with this statement. Firstly that the thing that is experienced becomes an object for human subjects to experience in meaningful ways following the object/subject relationship that Heidegger looks to find an other option than. The second point is that through these objects of meaningful experience the artwork itself becomes understood as a meaningful expression of the artistic subject of the artist. This is so familiar to our understanding of art that it is surprising that this be Heidegger’s critique of Aesthetics. Even considering Roland Barthes Death of the Author this aesthetic approach is still symptomatic of what Heidegger calls ‘subjectivism’, contemporary humanity's ongoing effort to establish “our unlimited power for calculating, planning, and moulding all things”. (Heidegger, 1977, p.135). This subjectivism, seems to function on the same representation of purpose or ‘purposiveness that Kant is ascribing to judgements of Beauty.

Meillassoux recognises something similar in Fancis Wolff’s notion of ‘object-worlds’. Meillassoux says, “During the twentieth century, the two principal 'media' of the correlation or subjectivism were consciousness and language, the former bearing phenomenology, the latter the various currents of analytic philosophy.” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p.15) Francis Wolff describes both language and consciousness as “object-worlds”. As objects they are unique in that they both ‘make the world’, this is because from their perspective ‘everything is inside’ but at the same time ‘everything is outside’.

As Wolff says,

“Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to 'be able to be conscious of it', it is necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But in another sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the world's window: for to be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to speak about something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree itself, and not the idea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word but to speak about the thing. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose the world within themselves only insofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained by it. We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out.” (Wolff, 1997, p.11)

Let us think to the infinity pool for a moment.

As we shall discuss later the necessity of presuming any order or law to that which is a priori to experience, such as is given in Kant’s third movement, is challenged rigorously by Meillassoux in his conception of the Absolute. But for Kant this purposiveness is ‘merely’ the form of purposiveness. As Ginsborg says, it is “perceived both in the object itself and in the activity of imagination and understanding in their engagement with the object.” (Ginsborg, 2008) Purposiveness is then key for this relationship between imagination and the ‘in-itself’ of the object. Something, which Kant elaborates with the notion of the ‘Free Play‘ of the faculties, which we will refer more to later.

The fourth movement of Kant’s judgements of beauty pertains to the idea of necessity. This is a characterisation of beauty, which has, in relationship to a lot of contemporary thought caused the concept of beauty to be considered in bad light. When I take my judgement of beauty to be universally valid, as the second movement has described, I take it not in so much that everyone who perceives the object will share my pleasure and agree with my judgement but that everyone ought to do so. This necessity of Kant’s beauty can be described as normative; in seeing my pleasure stand in a ‘necessary’ relation to the object that produces it begs why shouldn’t everybody feel this way? Kant elaborates this point by saying,

“Many things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about that. But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. That is why he says: The thing is beautiful, and does not count on other people to agree with his judgment of liking on the ground that he has repeatedly found them agreeing with him; rather he demands that they agree. He reproaches them if they judge differently, and denies that they have taste, which he nevertheless demands of them, as something they ought to have.” (Kant, 1987, p.212)

Underneath the obvious mechanism of a demand that everyone agree with the judgment of beauty and the question of what puts the subject in the position to think that everyone should agree with them (which is not without problems), there is another theme at work in this statement. Despite the normalising result the statement there is the production of a purely imminent universality. This kind of phenomenon is what Deleuze is so significantly interested in with the immanent production of notions such as individuation, which as opposed to being concerned with the constitution of an individual within a pre-established concept of an individuality, it is instead concerned with producing the potentials of what an individual could be.

Here we find mechanisms of both normalisation and differentiation in the same characteristic of judgments of beauty.

What is most striking in our brief journey through the most basic constitution of Kant’s judgments of beauty is how reconcilable it is with both Whitehead and Deleuze’s projects. Both philosopher having considered themselves critics of Kant.

What is fundamentally characteristic to Kant’s conception of beauty is that Beauty may seem as though it were property of the object or event in question however he insists that there is no objective property of a thing to make it Beautiful and that it is in fact a product of the human mind. This thinking is characteristic of Kant’s whole project and is incredibly familiar to discussions of subjectivity in the contemporary art experience.

Meillassoux summarises this line of thought in his analysis of the correlationist, a tradition in philosophy that started, for Meillassoux, with Kant’s Transcendentalism. The correlationist, such as Kant, argues that it is impossible to know anything in-itself (or absolutely) as it will always be in relationship to my having thought it. Meillassoux seeks to re-find access to the beyond the correlation without dogmatism, and what we are looking for is a way to write an other account of beauty that through the Speculative Realism of Quentin Meillassoux which provides another point of access with the beyond of the correlation. That finds a harmonic between sensation and reason that happens upon the great out doors.

BEAUTY (withdraws and) extents into a place which we do not talk of.

we don't talk about beauty

and we can't talk about the sublime.

Angels

The sublime is a gap in an order through which reason does not pass, it hovers in the here-and-now, doing justice but blocked by imagination.

Beauty, on the other hand, is the extension of reason to its limits. In beauty we reach beyond reason to where it combines with imagination and we run through infinity into where we find absolute in the hyper-chaos of any-where-any-time and the radical contingency of all.

There is a possibility of encounter where every possible point of subjectification leads to the beyond. Takes its own route through infinity to the absolute, to where "all that is, has no reason to be as it is rather than otherwise.’ (Urbanomic, 2010)

These angels will speak to us through anything we can imagine. These angels are beautiful.

“It could have been otherwise. And it can be otherwise. No, even stronger, it will be otherwise.” (Ennis, 2010)

BEAUTY BECAUSE NATURE IS CONTINGENT

If we follow Meillassoux the Nature of things is a radical contingency .

**
some writing about the role of nature in the conception of the sublime and the beautiful.

In an infinity pool.

There is an excellent architecture playing on a very many notions, both practicle and theoretical, for understanding some of our endeavour in this writing. Minor descriptions of Infinity pools will occur often and they are key to our speculative attempts.

An infinity pool initially struggles with beauty.

One of Kant's criteria for beauty is Disinterestedness

This will be difficult for the infinity pool - there is scarcely a commodity out there that doesn't proclaim its beauty to be a selling point and where more than in that particular aspect found in so many holiday brochures - the one where the sky, the sea and the pool, are one but for haze and the slip of its two horizons.

The infinity pool becomes an object of some collective holidaying desire. whether or not we actively seek to find ourselves in an infinity pool is not the point, we have to deal with our interest (found in our desire or not - or found in our consumer identity).

For Kant - I experience a something as beautiful when I like it without any interest. I should be free from any kind of desire, aim, or purpose, or any social, moral, or intel- lectual considerations. My faculties should be in free play. Steven Shaviro proposes we consider passion when trying to understand Kant's disinterestedness. "The scandal of passion is that it is utterly gratuitous: it has no grounding, and no proper occasion. In this sense, it is entirely free (though I am not free with regard to it)." (Shaviro - without criteria)

**More on Disinterestedness**

It may be a similar need of ours to find a synonym for Kant's "pleasing". Kant proposes both beauty and the sublime as pleasing. but i feel a need not to settle for the obvious meanings of "pleasing". Since Kant the post-structuralist have worked extremely well to show us the performativity of any such signifier, and not only this Meillassoux goes further and has proposed a hyperchaos in which everything either could or could not change at any moment without need of reason.

(1) However i am fearful to apply this thinking to our dealings with Kant's notion's of beauty as I am initially not sure if i will break the careful parameters of Meillassoux's project doing so, as well of the dangers of summoning a performative contradiction or absurdity in trying to follow Kant's logic after undermining it (only so i don't get confused though).

What we can at least do is grab the imaginative imperitive of Meillassoux's thinking and run with it.

Pleasing, wether through the performativitiy of post structuralism, or the Hyperchaos of meillassoux can definitely be other than something that is - > Nice



***MORE CONTENT TO COME

NOTES

With our reading through Quentin Meillassoux's project we will perhaps have to come to an understanding of pleasing which is not founded on empirical, "collective solipsism" of the correlationist but can however factor experience into its maybe-function in the world.








perhaps it is here that we will have to start elaborating on Kant and look to those who have followed him and played a role in the development of contemporary thought. Lyotard - Whitehead - Deleuze - Meilassoux
The postmodern - the end of Meta-Narratives - Lyotard.
Pleasing - being able to be individuated - Deleuze
Pleasing being able to be immanently produced in the becoming of the subject - Whitehead
or Pleasing being a may-being of meillassoux's radical contingency.

Pleasing is not an issue for Meta-Narratives, it is an aspect of the sublime which Lyotard, one of the key thinkers of

The Apparent Horizon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon

the haptic and to the eviscerated genius

Viscera

Who was it that eviscerated the geniuses and just got it over everything. I went on the internet this morning and got completely covered.

Beauty since the Sublime

{ there is a universal beauty, which we don't speak of } { it is away in a - we can only know it as a total contingency of all things - but it is a part of the world which everything shares }

Beauty since the Sublime
If we consider beauty since postmodernism, it has seemed as though it has become far less of interest to our aesthetic discussions than that of the sublime. The sublime, as Kant proposes it in his critique of judgement, is abundant in contemporary aesthetic cultures as Shaviro mentions in his re-investigation of the Beautiful - “The sublime seems more appropriate to contemporary taste because it is an aesthetic of immensity, excess and disproportion. Where as the Beautiful is one of harmony and proportion. It is as if Beauty were somehow old-fashioned, whereas the sublime is considered more radical.” (Shaviro 1997)

In respect of my resent practise and study of Quentin Meillassoux's work on the absolute I feel an investigation of Beauty would be a useful route to take in elaborating some of my concerns.

I have no anxiety about the mechanisms of representation. This is pure simulation. why bother with nostalgia. we have immanence in abundance. bring on paradise.

More Content.

MORE CONTENT...

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{there is a universal beauty which we don't speak of} { it is away in a part of the world we can only know as a total contingency of all things but is a part of the world which everything shares}

WET TEENAGERS ON WET TEENAGERS ON SUNBEDS

[contingency – an introduction]

Meillassoux’s task after elaborating a sort of “scientific materialism” based on his concept of ancestrality is to find another grounding for the absolute in the “principle of factiality”. He moves on from this materialist critique of correlationism to focus on establishing another rebuff to the correlationist refusal of the absolute.

Meillassoux calls factiality “the absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 8) Meillassoux claims factiality to be the “very principle that allows correlationism to disqualify absolutizing thought”, as absolute.(Meillassoux, The Immanence of the World Beyond, 2008b, p. 52)

He does this by developing the subjectivists’ charge of the correlationist circle as absolute in-itself (nothing can be thought external to the relationship to the world exactly because it is thought). The subjectivists propose an idealist absolute which consist in the absolutisation of the correlation itself. The subjectivist claims, “these relations… are determinations not only of humans or of the living, but of Being itself.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 7) The argument the correlationist will produce to defend itself is that of factiality, which Meillassoux claims is the “weak-spot in the circle-fortress.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 7)

In maintaining factiality, that which we can conceive as the contingency of the correlation, i.e. its possible disappearance (the destruction of mankind), Meillassoux claims that “the correlationist must admit that we can positively think of a possibility which is essentially independent of the correlation, since this is precisely the possibility of the non-being of the correlation.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, pp. 8-9) He then expands on this using the analogy of death: “to think of myself as a mortal, I must admit that death doesn’t depend on my own thinking about death. Otherwise, I would be able to disappear only on one condition: that I remain alive to think of my disappearance, and turn this event into a correlate of my access to it.”

Meillassoux argues that it is not the correlation that is absolute but the factiality of the correlation that constitutes the absolute. Facticity “will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are going to put back into the thought itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a) In other words the:

“absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. We must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as 'unreason', is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 54)

It is through this that Meillassoux claims to have revealed the condition for thinking the great outdoors of the correlation. Meillassoux has discovered a “performative contradiction” in the correlationist’s claim, in order words the epistemic position of the correlation can’t be claimed without having its conclusions undermine the assumptions they require for their articulation. The Principle of factuality reveals the irredeemable ontological truth hidden in modern philosophy “to be is not to be a correlate, but to be a fact: to be is to be factual – and this is not a fact” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 10)

Meillassoux now has the issue of dealing with factiality as absolute and not as limit. His answer is to propose it as time - “very special time.” (Meillassoux, 2008c, p. 10) This very special time is called “hyper-chaos”. This time is not a physical time and not an ordinary chaos. Chaos usually denotes randomness and disorder, hyper-chaos or surchaoses “contingency is so radical that even becoming, disorder, or randomness can be destroyed by it, and replaced by order, determinism, and fixity.” (Meillassoux, 2008c, p. 11)

Hyperchaos simply denotes that everything either could or could not change without reason; it could remain in perpetual flux or could remain in the same state for an indefinite duration. It is totally conceivable that in Hyperchaos a world could end up completely made up of fixed objects, without any becoming whatsoever.
Hyperchaos denotes a time whereby everything could be abolished just as readily as everything could persist in an eternal becoming. From the vantage of hyperchaos, everything is contingent – even disorder and becoming themselves.
Here the charge to the philosopher is to think the ‘may-being’ of this hyperchaos rather than the being, the correlation or the becoming being of past schools of thought.

Now we are ready to start to re-approach the concepts of the laws of nature. We have stated that all laws are contingent, because all laws are just facts, you can’t prove their necessity so there is no reason why they endure as they do. They do not govern time but are themselves governed by a “mad time” and the principle of sufficient reason has been completely abandoned. (Meillassoux, 2008c, p. 11)
When faced with the question why is it that we don’t experience these laws changing at every instant, that on the contrary they remain remarkably stable. Meillassoux’s response is that one cannot propose probabilistic logic to laws themselves, but only to the physical objects already subject to those laws.

**Hume's Problem

? distinction between the infinity and the pool.

immersive rather than extensive. the bather in the infinity pool is not looking for an extensive openness. there exists an evocation of the vast - excessive - infinity but the cut between the orders of extension and experience is crucial. Not so that one order may become preference but so that in exchange we can find harmony.

The haptic immersion in the waters and visuals of the infinity pool plays at the lush. and later a discussion of beauty and sublime but for now we don't talk about beauty and we can't talk about the sublime.

In an infinity pool.

There is an excellent architecture playing on a very many notions, both practicle and theoretical, for understanding our experiences.

Richard Long ()


Longs work makes obvious breaks with traditional concepts of the artwork. Longs walking practise in particular occupies an ambiguous site between, event, idea, and documentation.
We will start our discussion of the ‘artwork’ of his walking practise with a discussion of Idea. The walking practises often contain a clear idea; an a priori, often near mathematically/ideological cut of the landscape through which Long will walk, for example, a 10-mile walk in a straight line. The role of such a cut can seem to have some function as a tool to some postmodern paradox - creating a gap between the representational idea and the organic everything of the ‘nature’ through which he will be travelling. Some gesture towards a break between thought and experience.
My experience of this aspect of his work is, however, far from characterised by this kind of mechanism - the introduction of a second order -- that of an extensive ‘nature’ -- to undermine the first -- thought. This is no ironic sublime. Long’s work while potentially encompassing aspects that insinuate the feeling that something is unpresentable does not lose itself to only this mechanism of excess and disproportion.
The ‘Idea’ as discussed by Spinoza and Deleuze, functions as both, a mode of representational thought, its objective reality and as the idea of an idea, “the reality of the idea insofar as it is itself something” – Its formal reality (Deleuze n.d.). This formal reality is undoubtedly connected to the object the idea represents - but, as Deleuze points out,
“it is not to be confused with the object: that is, the formal reality of the idea, the thing the idea is or the degree of reality or perfection it possesses in itself, is its intrinsic character.” (Deleuze n.d.)

Here we are in the territory of a post-structuralist difference. We deal with the idea in the performance of an utterance or the event of Long’s walking practise.
We establish the idea and add a something else - a man, the artist, walking the 10 miles in a straight line – with all of the possibility of his subjecthood. The aspect of his subjectivity made by the walk and those acting on the walk and its environment.

The Idea performed enters a process of variation, the space of its performance shifting into that of a smooth affective space - the objective reality of the idea is continually given as other in the event of its performance than it was a priori as idea, though in this process its formal reality will remain in its relative perfection unaffected by any process of actualisation.
Within the performance we talk of we find the 'affect' in relation to the idea. If we are to oppose idea and affect as Deleuze has we, on an initial level discover that as an opposition to our first understanding of idea – being representational modes of thought we can consider affect to be all non-representational modes of thought. At our second level of understanding - where we also consider the formal reality of the idea we have to take our understanding further.
We will refer to Deleuze's discussion of the subject in his lectures on Spinoza and affect and idea. He introduces an aspect of time to the discussion and the succession of ideas,
"our ideas succeed each other constantly: one idea chases another, one idea replaces another idea for example, in an instant." (Deleuze, 1978) He claims that in the succession of ideas is not the only thing that is happening.
Here he refers to Spinoza's notion of humans as spiritual automata. This spiritual automata is less one who has the ideas than a subject within which ideas are confirmed. There is another realm that functions as well as that of the change or the succession between ideas; "there is a regime of variation which is not the same thing as the succession of ideas themselves". (Deleuze 1978)
Variation is a concept primary to much of Deleuze’s philiosophical project. Deleuze champions a philosophy and a world full of flow, movement and flux. He gives various examples for the concept of variation, music for example is traditionally based on the idea of scales and counts – fixed orders of pitch and meter. Though for Deleuze these structure are considered secondary in relationship to the flow, the variation of sound itself which for Deleuze is fundamental – a pure movement of difference without identity. Another example of variation from Deleuze’s thought that could serve us well in our discussion of long is that of Smooth Space. **what is Smooth Space
In Long’s work it is the manifestations of both an abstract formal reality continually given as such and the regime of variation and non-representation that interests me. As I have mentioned my experience of the doubling of realm in longs work is not that of the post modern sublime where one order trumps and undermines the other and itself. This post-modern mechanism only function in one direction, it needs the logic to function in one order for it to be able to cut itself away from it. For Lyotard, the sublime “would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia in for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in, but to better produce, the feeling that there is something unpresentable.”
**a little on Lyotard and the sublime.
It is the harmony of the co-existance of these two realms which I am moved by in Long’s work. The gap between the eternal re-capitulated of the abstract and formal reality of idea and the perpetual differentiation of the performance. This exchange, this accord can been seen given our already opposition to the notion of the sublime in term of the beautiful.
**some on beauty

Meillassoux's Absolute

Meillassoux on Ancestrality, Qualities and Correlationism
[The Absolute – Introduction]

One of the key theses of Meillassoux’s work focuses on a return to thinking the Absolute. Meillassoux’s goal is as simple as it is complicated, he attempts to “refute every form of correlationism” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 2) In After Finitude he sets this project of rethinking the thing ‘in-itself’ against what he sees as a philosophical culture that has become dominated by ‘Correlationism’. Meillassoux traces the philosophical turn to this correlationist tendency back to Kant’s Transcendentalism. As Meillassoux says,

“Prior to the advent of transcendentalism, one of the questions that divided rival philosophers most decisively was 'Who grasps the true nature of substance? He who thinks the Idea, the individual, the atom, God? Which God?' But ever since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather to ask who has grasped the more originary correlation: is it the thinker of the subject-object correlation, the noetico-noematic correlation, or the language-referent correlation?”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a)

Meillassoux’s use of term correlationism refers to the philosophical charge to think the relationship between things rather than the substance in-itself and he see’s this to be “the contemporary opponent of any realism” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c).

Correlationism is built on the refutation of the divide between the concepts of primary and secondary qualities. These concepts of qualities create a distinction between the properties of my encountering an object and those that are maintained when the object is considered ‘in itself’. If I burn my hand on a flame I do not sense the burning to be a property of the flame ‘in itself’ but located in my finger. The same must be said of sensations – the flavour of food does not exist in the food itself prior to its ingestion. These are considered secondary qualities. Nothing sensible – whether it be an affective or perceptual quality – can exist in the way it is given to me in the thing by itself when it is not related to me or to any other living creature. When one thinks about this thing ‘in itself’ i.e. independently of its relation to me it seems that none of these qualities can subsist.“ (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 1)

The correlationist argument does not dispute the idea that things may posses qualities that bring about sensation. If there were nothing giving rise to the sensation of the colour red, then there would be no perception of a red thing.

“One cannot maintain that the sensible is injected by me into things like some sort of perpetual and arbitrary hallucination…The sensible is neither simply ‘in me’ in the manner of a dream, nor simply ‘in the thing’ in the manner of an intrinsic property: it is the very relation between the thing and I” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a)

The correlationist’s issue is with the distinction itself and here Kant’s Transcendentalism breaks with the preceding schools of thought. The issue for Kantian thought is with the assumption that the ‘subjectivation’ of sensible properties could be restricted to the object’s sensible properties, rather than extended to all conceivable properties of an object.

Meillassoux looks to return to this point in the development of modern philosophy and the Correlationist commitment, in order to readdress issues of the absolute, he looks to do so with a re-evaluation and defence of primary qualities through his concept of ‘Ancestrality’. The thesis he is proposing is as follows:

“On the one hand, we acknowledge that the sensible only exists as a subjects relation to the world; but on the other hand we maintain that the mathematizable properties of the object are exempt from the constraint of such a relation, and that they are effectively in the object in the way in which I conceive them, whether I am in relation with this object or not.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 3)

He does this by presenting correlationism with a problem of ‘ancestrality’. Ancestrality, as he defines it, is the issue rising from statements made by certain branches of natural science with regard to a world prior to consciousness. Meillassoux presents us with techniques used in determining the age of materials. These measurements were once considered relative but with the perfection of the techniques they are now considered to be complete. The substances, radioactive isotopes in dating techniques, that give rise to the statements are termed arche-fossils. The techniques of measuring arche-fossils are capable of supplying the scientist with statements about a thing or event prior to the existence of terrestrial life and it is this issue upon which Meillassoux bases his concept of Ancestrality. Meillassoux asks:

“How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life -posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 21)

An important aspect of this statement is that Meillassoux asks how are we to think it’s meaning rather than how are we to think the truth. This is an important distinction which allows him to both maintain correlationism as a discreet possibility in his later arguments while continuing his attempt to think outside of the relation.
The Correlationist has no initial problem with such a statement only the charge to add an appendage of ‘for-humans’ to the scientists statement in order that both the realist (science) and the antirealist (philosophy) statements may co-exist without refuting each other; proposing that there are at least two regimes of meaning which are able to address these statements. Meillassoux however proposes that with a literal interpretation of these ancestral statements, the scientific statement must be its ultimate meaning and that the “philosopher’s is irrelevant when it comes to analyzing the signification of the statement.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 14)
He states that for both the scientific statement to be true as well as the philosophers statement then the correlationist would have to maintain a “tissue of absurdities”. Most importantly to his discussion that the fossil-matter is “the givenness in the present of a being that is anterior to givenness; that is to say, that an arche-fossil manifests an entity’s anteriority vis-à-vis manifestation,”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a) How is it possible for the object to give givenness anterior to the existence of givenness?
When faced with this proposition the Correlationist proposes the arche-fossil as a thing that creates knowledge from the standpoint of the present and is then read back into the past, but as Meillassoux points out “This means that we have to carry out a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 16).
This issue here is givenness. Givenness is the condition for the universalizing potentiality of any given statement. Meillassoux tells us that since Kant “objectivity is no longer defined with reference to the object in itself (in terms of the statement’s adequation or resemblance to what it designates), but rather with reference to the possible universality of an objective statement.”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 15) This intersubjectivity of the scientific ancestral statement is what guarantees its objectivity to the correlationist.
However what is given to us is not something that is anterior to givenness but merely something that is given in the present but gives itself as anterior to givenness. In order to give meaning to the scientific statement about the arche-fossil one has to follow the chronological succession from past to present, rather than following a logical succession from present to past. The correlationist has still failed to give any meaning to this chronological succession.
Meillassoux asks one more question of the correlationist to prove that this interpretation of ancestrality is insupportable. “ What is it that happened 4.56 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 16) The correlationist will answer, yes sciences proves it is intersubjectively verifiable, but in another sense, no, the referent of the statement cannot have existed as it is described as non-correlated with a consciousness.
“the ancestral statement is a true statement in that it is objective, but one whose referent cannot possibly have actually existed in the way this truth describes it. It is a true statement, but it has no conceivable object. Or to put it another way it is a non-sense.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a)

The problem of Ancestrality concludes with this - If we are able to consider the scientific ancestral statement to have any meaning, as the correlationist will propose we can, we must view the referent of its statement to be meaningful or else it can only be considered as ‘non-sense’.

FOR THE KIDS

For the Kids

For the bored kids. For the kids who don’t want to go home. For the kids not interested. For the lonely kids. For the kid that’s being bullied. For the kids dirty. For my empty nephew. For the kids who think you’re a fuckwit. For kids who want body kits. For the kids who can’t pretend. For the kids who don’t understand. For your kids you’re bound to fuck up.

Where are these kids.

The ones that make mess? The ones that die. The ones who don’t do their homework.

For the[lot] so well Behaved

Boredom, distracted by subtle touch ups.

Participant; whose story is about their ever further availability, their acceptance into, and humongous un-understood hard-on for, circle jerks with those guys.

So ingratiating. For the lot so ingratiated. IS THIS LOVE? Tender passion for a mutual identity? {plz comment below}

Except that kid who got touched up by his uncle

[do you remember Hijikata Tatsumi]

The kid well confused by it all. Victim to the full force of holistic schizophrenia.
Its all like totally political anywayz, right? U knowz it. fuck off with freedoms

FOR THE KIDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD HANGING AROUND WITH KEVIN KOSNER ALL WET IN THE WATER. Stand and be counted children.
Live the life of yours

the musical model

Haptic visuality and optical visuality are not completely opposed, but exist on opposite ends of the same spectrum. For Marks, as for Deleuze and Guattari these forms slide into each other, occupying a range of relations depending on the media object. Marks further describes haptic images (those which invite a haptic look) are often grainy, distorted and highlight our inability to see. Because we cannot identify an Other space and Other figures, our haptic look rests on the surface of the image rather than penetrating into it. We sense it with our bodies, treating this other surface as another skin. Optical images, on the other hand, portray a figures for a viewer to identify with, a space to exist in. Few media works are ever completely haptic, but rather depend on the oscillation between haptic and optical visuality. This oscillation is one between visual mastery and loss of reference and control; for Marks this is what makes haptic media erotic.
http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/post/research-project/research-clearinghouse-individual/research-reports/haptic-visuality-2