https://ongoingness.space Arieh Frosh Thu, 23 May 2019 19:19:10 +0000 https://ongoingness.space en https://ongoingness.space/Overview Thu, 23 May 2019 19:12:03 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Overview https://ongoingness.space/Leg-1 Thu, 23 May 2019 19:15:04 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Leg-1 <img width="700" height="556" width_o="700" height_o="556" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/761c429455b5a7b5536968e399cfe12495fda963b20c9f6aed854ea80fbf5a91/louse-leg-1-redo.jpg" data-mid="44818514" border="0" data-scale="60" data-no-zoom alt="Hello" data-caption="Hello" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/700/i/761c429455b5a7b5536968e399cfe12495fda963b20c9f6aed854ea80fbf5a91/louse-leg-1-redo.jpg" /> The tracing of ongoingness in a networked, transversing way11 – See thorax gives a sense of its non-linear dimension, for to go across in plurality is to disrupt a causal reading, that courageous attempt at achieving a long life. It is not that these sideways movements have opened up multi-temporal possibilities, rather that ongoing is inevitably multitemporal or atemporal, depending which layer of time is under consideration.22 – “Many discussions of the concept of time are confused because they simply do not recognize its complex and multi-layered aspect. They make the mistake of not seeing that the different layers are independent.” Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (London: Penguin books, 2017), p.171 What is made distinct is the time as perceived by humans and the time of ‘quantum’ and ‘loop theory’; here I am loosely using ‘multitemporal’ in relation to the former and ‘atemporal’ in relation to the latter. Here I intend to discuss ongoingness and time in a twofold approach, in a way that relates to potential: the first looks at a conception of time in materiality, one of element, and the second as temporality, as one experienced and lived in, which is heavy with history. On a macro scale, we know of the relationship of time in the gravitational field, of curved spacetime, its relativity to mass and speed; that rather than singular time we have multitudes of local times that evolve relative to each other.33 – Ibid, p.15 in discussion of Einstein’s General Relativity Ongoingness is inherently multitemporal as it exists in this conception of multitude times, where interaction occurs across numerous times and adapts them, a responsive, ever-curving field.44 – “A field in physics is something that has a physical quantity associated with every point in space- time. Or you can think of it as a pattern of energy distributed across space and time.” Karen Barad ‘TransMaterialities’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), p.394 Though of course this is not enough - this is just a confirmation of the states of things as they interact; it points to occurrences rather than outlines potentials. Potential happens on a smaller scale, in time’s diminution into quantized exchanges and movements of energy. Karen Barad turns to the notion of indeterminacy of matter as part of a questioning of ‘nothingness’ and ‘naturalness’ (among other questionings) in ‘TransMaterialities’, in which the void is determined to not be vacuous but rather “a living, breathing indeterminacy of non/being”.55 – Ipid, p.396 This is in opposition to the classical conception of the void as a “vacuum of complete emptiness”,66 – Ipid, p.394 which Barad rejects by instead turning to Quantum Field Theory (QFT) in which fields (or patterns of energy) are quantized into discrete rather than continuous forms;77 – This distinction also separates the ongoing from the continuous, as the ongoing embraces discrete values/forms as well as continuous ones - see bulbs the void therefore being comprised of virtual particles rather than these existing of the void, an empty space. These virtual particles are potentials of energy to be/become, charges that dis/appear, or materialise; the void is a lively place.88 – “The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The void is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what might yet (have) be(en). That is, virtuality is the material wanderings/wonderings of nothingness; virtuality is the ongoing thought experiment the world performs with itself.” Karen Barad, ‘TransMaterialities’, p.396 “Time” in such a conception, is a continuous energy exchange, moving in no specific direction - it is actively atemporal. “The quantum vacuum is more like an ongoing questioning of the nature of emptiness than anything like a lack. The ongoing questioning of itself… is what generates, or rather is, the structure of nothingness. The vacuum is no doubt doing its own experiments with non/being. In/determinacy is not the state of a thing but an unending dynamism.”99 – Ibid, p.396. A large part of ‘TransMaterialities’ is devoted to explain macro phenomena that show quantum effects, or demonstrate quantum theory macroscopically. One of these is lightning, which tests out a multitude of paths to the ground before the typical ‘lightning bolt’: “a lightning bolt does not simply proceed from storm cloud to the earth along a unidirectional (if somewhat erratic) path; rather, flirtations alight here and there and now and again as stepped leaders and positive streamers gesture toward possible forms of connection to come.” This is seen as a “quantum form of communication” Karen Barad, ‘TransMaterialities’, p.398 The comparison of lightning to matter comes together in George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury, 2017), where an event known as the “matterlightblooming phenomena” transfers inhabitants out of the Bardo to the beyond - perhaps to be thought of as a quantum event that transcends realms. For the materlightblooming phenoma in relation to endings, see abdomen Barad’s emphasis of ‘ongoing’ is particularly interesting here. A shift in this statement, which positions this ‘ongoing questioning of itself’ as the very structure of nothingness, leads to the conception that nothingness is able to carry on (as nothingness) through questioning: questioning is essential to the structure of nothingness, but it is a continual, non-stop, ongoing form of this questioning that enables a persistence, or even a non/existence. It is an ‘over and over and over’ that is dynamic. This is more than just simple continuance, this is an ongoing as the determination of non/being. There is a slight risk in this line of thought that purports ongoingness as abstract materiality, to belong singularly to ‘nothingness’ in a certain form (as questioning), when perhaps it is Barad’s turn to multiple occurring potentials that should be embraced. Barad describes matter as ongoing inter-activity, one of response-ability, a reconfiguring - it is “not mere being, but its ongoing un/doing”.1010 – Karen Barad, ‘TransMaterialities’, p.411 A continual playing of matter amongst and with itself. This leads to a significant figuring that nature, which for Barad is material, is an “ongoing question of itself - of what constitutes naturalness...nature itself is an ongoing deconstruction of naturalness”.1111 – Ibid, p.412 The ongoing in Barad is in material forces, of energetic throbbing, becomings &amp; unbecomings, configurings &amp; reconfigurings; the ongoing is not just fluctuations but dynamic movements, that are exercised from nothingness itself all the way to a deconstruction of naturalness - of what is - from quantum levels to the macro-scale, an opening up to possibilities. It is ongoingness in this conception that enables deconstructions, potentials, possibilities. The ongoing is a constituent of matter, the ongoing fundamental to matter’s ongoingness.1212 – Perhaps it is worth reinforcing the relationship to time here: on the quantum level, it is the movement and exchange of energy that is at play, no longer the perceived idea of successive time/s (and these quantum plays are occuring in the spacetime field) &nbsp; &nbsp; A shift to a different layer of time, away from quanta, and a change of tone. To look at an example of ongoingness as temporality, experienced, where potential can lie and be sought there... Christina Sharpe uses the term ‘the wake’ in its numerous definitions, such as the “track left on the water’s surface by a ship”1313 – Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p.3 and “a watch or vigil held beside the body of someone who has died”,1414 – Ibid, p.10 in order to piece together a description and conceptual framework of and for living blackness in “the precarities of the ongoing disaster of the ruptures of chattel slavery”.1515 – Ibid, p.5. n.b. My inclusion of Christina Sharpe here is particular to the structuring of ongoingness in her work, which I aim to work alongside to build on a wider examination of ongoingness. I of course make no claim to expand upon her ideas specific to black experience. The afterlives of slavery condition the present, they texture ways of being in and of the world.1616 – Ibid, p.5 In reference to the temporality of ‘disaster’, Sharpe quotes Maurice Blanchot who, referring to the Holocaust, states: “The disaster is its immanence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always withdrawn or dissuaded it; there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment.”1717 – Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, quoted in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, p.5 - for Sharpe “Transatlantic slavery was and is the disaster.” In other words, the future is already preconditioned by the disaster: it does not formulate outside of it, and it cannot go beyond, escape, and by no means settle it. Ongoingness here is a weighted thing; one that is centuries old across all modes of non/being in that it continually conditions being’s possibilities, or their lack.1818 – “slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as Black modes of resistance”, Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, p.14 In this framework there is a suggested impossibility of any form of coming-to-terms-with, as an ongoingness constantly provides new formulations of disaster. As Sharpe writes: “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”, “How does one…”come to terms with” (which usually means move past) ongoing and quotidian atrocity?”1919 – Ibid, p.20 What Sharpe proposes is a way of working in the wake that relies on a knowledge of it - it is in knowing this very ongoing, quotidian atrocity that accounts for the possibilities of resistance, for “particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, re/imagining the world”.2020 – Ibid, p.22 Sharpe terms this as ‘wake work’, which is made distinct from melancholia and mourning due to the complex ongoingness of disaster that resists memorialization. Although I am unable to fully explore the means and possibilities of wake work here, I want to highlight its particular position within the ongoing. Wake work becomes a necessity set against an ongoingness of disaster, one that figures the future, and is conditioned through multiple means that are both event and reporting. This is the orthography of the wake, and for Sharpe is the ‘weather’2121 – Sharpe’s four categories are ‘the wake’, the ship’, ‘the hold’, ‘the weather’ - the wider climate that normalises and produces Black death. The manifold disasters arrive “by way of the rapid, deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death.”2222 – Ibid, pp.20-21 In this way the conventions of antiblackness are produced both in the present and are kept in motion into the future; they become part of the reporting mechanism, continually replenishing through groundwork that they themselves have laid, constructing the conditions for their recurrence.2323 – A similar point was briefly touched on in head, in relation to the louse who weasels their way into things and sticks in the mind for nights afterwards, about the media’s relation to continuing racist, Anti-semitic and Islamophobic beliefs They are ongoing through time by constructing their own momentum - whilst establishing their own archive and precedent - managing to articulate amongst developing media channels and varying forms of presentation. Once again, it is amongst and under the strain of this weather that ‘wake work’ can be undertaken - it is only with the knowledge and awareness of the weather system that it can be re/seen and a potential for working amongst/against it formed. Although these two considerations of ongoingness and time differ greatly, I have focused on Barad and Sharpe in order to express ongoingness not solely in relation to time, but also in relation to potentiality. Both Barad’s use of QFT to articulate the ongoing-interactivity of matter, and Sharpe’s conception of being in the wake and of ‘wake work’, relate to ongoingness in a way that enables alternatives, that sets up potentials. However, they do so in radically oppositional ways. In Barad, ongoingness can be seen as a positive agent - it is a constituent quality of matter, and through recognising this as fundamental, the very nature of ‘naturalness’ (and indeed ‘nothingness’) are opened up to reconsideration. For naturalness consists of constant reconfigurings, and it is in its continually deconstructing itself that it is defined. This sets up all manner of potentials, for if this ongoing deconstruction is naturalness, then the possible imaginings, reconfigurings, queerings, recalibrations (all as material) feel freed from limitations. Conversely, ongoingness in Sharpe is part of the formulation of the wake - it is that ongoing and quotidian atrocity or disaster that constitutes non/being. Ongoingness is no longer a positive agent, but instead is an oppositional constant, one that, in having an awareness of it, potentials are opened up against it. The re/seeing, re/inhabiting and re/imagining that follow from ‘wake work’ are not produced by possibilities enabled by ongoingness, but instead are brought about by an informed departure. Working against ongoingness’ constant motion, whilst inevitably contained within it. *louse* https://ongoingness.space/Leg-2 Thu, 23 May 2019 19:17:23 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Leg-2 <img width="600" height="410" width_o="600" height_o="410" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/00ed93bf2d02af873cf0797818988d5e85a792422a50fc6d6d949567cacde5b3/louse-leg-redo-2.jpg" data-mid="44820616" border="0" data-scale="60" data-no-zoom alt="Head" data-caption="Head" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/00ed93bf2d02af873cf0797818988d5e85a792422a50fc6d6d949567cacde5b3/louse-leg-redo-2.jpg" /> The World Loanword Database (WOLD)11 – see head describes a loanword as “a word that was copied from another language, either by adoption or by retention, at some point in the history of the language. Even if a loanword is fully integrated, it is still a loanword, and a loanword never ceases to be a loanword.”22 – Martin Haspelmath &amp; Uri Tadmor (eds.) World Loanword Database (Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2009). Available online at https://wold.clld.org/terms (Accessed 11 June 2019) The loanword is always tracked, always gesturing to a somewhere else. Even within complex sociolinguistic networks, systems that transform through multiplicitous ways, including vertical shifts within and horizontal involvements from outside;33 – “The study of contact between languages is important in historical linguistics because it brings to light the different forms of horizontal flow between dialects, as opposed to the vertical flow of norms through generations. In addition to the flow of linguistic materials between neighboring dialects in a continuum, language may be affected by flows of non linguistic materials, such as the migration of a population of speakers who are the organic substratum of a dialect.” Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 1997), pp.193-4. a loanword drags around its history. This definition is fertile in that it adds a certain depth: movements are no longer along a never-ending surface, as there is an essential inclusion of a history of word use that resists being flattened,44 – There are perhaps analogies here with blockchain technology, however these differ from loanwords in that as they are separated into distinct parts, they continue to be tracked, whereas loanwords relinquish a tracking of neologisms, even if inclusive of a loanword root. Blockchain has more links to the 'data set', which is discussed in leg 4 but it also raises questions of limits, of integrations. Ongoingness embraced, but kept-an-eye-on, kept-in-check. To trace their effect and relation to ongoing, it seems necessary to take a more detailed look at loanwords, which louse refuses to be, and borrowing patterns, which louse ignores. A more technical definition of the loanword55 – at least as defined in the Loanword Typology Project (which lead to the creation of WOLD) describes a loanword as “a lexeme that has been transferred from one lect into another and is used as a word (rather than an affix, for example) in the recipient language.”66 – Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (eds.) Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), p.13 - words from substate languages were also included, as were ones that moved between one regional dialect of a language to another, and between a more prestigious and less prestigious dialect A loanword can enter a language in three ways, it “can enter into a lexicon where no earlier word for that meaning existed, can replace an earlier word, or may coexist with an earlier word of roughly the same meaning.”77 – Ibid, p.16 These ways are distinct88 – Albeit in a way that gets muddied by differences in lexical meanings covered by the words, “of course lexical meanings do not have to fit into predefined slots.” Ibid, p.49. from each other in that the term ‘cultural borrowings’ designates a new concept that has come from outside, as the first mode of entry displays, whilst ‘core borrowings’ are duplications of meanings that already exist in a native language. The type of borrowing suggests the type of cultural interaction - or contact situation - that lead to the borrowing: for example, cultural borrowings might indicate non-native speakers imposing properties of their language onto a recipient language (which might be part of and follow from colonization), or core borrowings might imply native speakers adopting elements from other languages, often due to ideas of ‘prestige’. Borrowing types forge an entry into examining intricate historic (and continuing) cultural relationships, as through tracking loanwords and borrowing, the movements, interactions, networks of peoples can be followed historically. These borrowing relationships display as web-like movements across linguistic groups.99 – Although there is a certain temporal linearity to the sociolinguistic approach, movements seem to be omnidirectional and simultaneous; what if words were seen as matter, indeterminate, jittering around as quanta, only giving account of themselves at the point of use? (see leg 1 on Karen Barad’s ‘TransMaterialities’) One distinction worth clarifying here is that between ‘lexical borrowing’, which is the transfer of words along with their meaning, as is our focus with louse, and ‘semantic borrowing’, which is the transfer of meanings without the words. Semantic borrowing includes calques - complex word-to-word translations, such as the phrase ‘flea market’, which is argued to come from the French ‘marché aux puces’; a phrase that has lent itself to languages too numerous to mention here, the flea intact throughout. Regardless of the borrowing type, the loanword waves and calls loudly, draws attention to itself. This never ceasing of a loanword asks a question of limits; whether if in the constant reaffirming of what it once was, there is a restriction as to what it can become. A constant reminder of an earlier form, its parents arriving with childhood photos, deflating moments of possibility. What might provide a line of escape for the loanword is in an exclusionary aspect of its definition: “Excluded from the class of loanwords are neologisms (= productively created lexemes) which consist partly or entirely of foreign material, because they are created in the recipient language, and not transferred from a donor language”.1010 – Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (eds.) Loanwords in the World’s Languages, p.13. Even if the main root of a neologism is a loanword, its mode as never-ceasing definition is escaped - adapted by manipulated use, it has slipped off radar (onto another one). This getaway from confinement is undoubtedly a technique of ongoingness, an interaction with other forms to become something else, a making-with; the loanword may continue as is, whilst its variants scatter elsewhere. In Anne Carson’s translation of Paul Celan’s poem Tübingen, Jänner, in which he praises Holderlein’s private language toward the end of his life, she brilliantly chooses to translate ‘mowenumschwirrt’ as ‘gull-whirredaround’.1111 – Anne Carson and Lanfranco Quadrio, Nay rather (Lewes: Sylph, 2014), pp. 28 - 30. Michael Hamburger translates the same part of the poem as ‘circled by whirring gulls’, which doesn’t have quite the same effect. Paul Celan, Selected Poems with translation by Michael Hamburger (England: Penguin Books, 1996), pp.180-181 Gullwhirredaround! That taking of borrowed units and the mutating of them, an inventiveness to form something else entirely, something unwordly. Louseremain. The neologism-turn holds similarities with Roger Caillois’ notion of ‘mimicry’ not being simply a defence mechanism, but instead having the actual goal to “become assimilated into the environment”,1212 – Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, edited by Claudine Frank (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p.98 into “a veritable lure of space”,1313 – Ibid, p.99 in which an instinct d’abandon attracts “towards a kind of diminished existence”,1414 – Ibid, p.102 a “depersonalization through assimilation into space”.1515 – Ibid, p.100. The loanword could also be seen as diagrammatic, with this move into space only a reading of some cartographic points - see hair The space here would be seen as the space opened up by the recipient language, where loanwords can depersonalise by adapting their traits, sometimes in mimetic ways to be accepted in the first place,1616 – “Borrowing a word often entails a certain modification of the source word, required for the integration of the word into the recipient language” Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (eds.) Loanwords in the World’s Languages, p.16 and then diminish their existence as loanword (and simultaneously strengthen their continuing) through an obscuring via neologism. Of course, this hints at a linguistic agency that has little to do with the speaker’s intent, or their word-ing - a ‘magic’ in the Caillois sense. The neologism brings a focus on dispersal within a language, which, in dispersing, achieves an ongoingness as various forms, of multiple directions. Lexical borrowing is a too complex picture to be able to describe such movements as just ‘effects’ of loanwords - historical borrowing is a blurring of cause/effect - but there’s something to be said of the havoc loanwords can invoke, changes as chains across various systems. The notion of ‘prestige’ plays a part here. In his examination of the way French words flowed into Middle English, Manuel De Landa explains how these words tended to exist as ‘core borrowings’, as synonyms to pre-existing words. The abundance of synonyms created a hierarchical structure in English, in which words belonged to different registers, with each register being used for a particular purpose, from casual to formal.1717 – This is termed “stylistic stratification”: casual - between friends and family; formal - institutional, with strangers, superiors; and technical - workplace, communicating with other professionals. De Landa does point out that the vocabularies needn’t come from different languages, but are instead impacted by the ‘care’ in their use. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, pp. 204-5. Prestige here displays the heterogeneity within language, the situational determination of its use. De Landa describes how “middleclass speakers, in their anxious usage of the high-prestige variant in their now more impersonal and fragmented social networks, tended to "hypercorrect" their dialectal speech, adding an additional source of variation and heterogeneity”.1818 – Ibid, p.212 Hypercorrection - a use of an erroneous word form or pronunciation that is based on a correct, perhaps a more prestigious, form - leading to increased linguistic change, a higher degree of entropy. <img width="2000" height="1617" width_o="2000" height_o="1617" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c85a6b921132b92a954ead59a0bae18c9cf217e1cbbb6bb3575812c6675d72d/great-vowel-shift-diagram-for-web-crop.jpg" data-mid="44913811" border="0" data-scale="80" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0c85a6b921132b92a954ead59a0bae18c9cf217e1cbbb6bb3575812c6675d72d/great-vowel-shift-diagram-for-web-crop.jpg" />fig.2 Great Vowel Shift diagram/caravan. Arieh Frosh, 2019 Hypercorrection is one possible instigator for the Great Vowel Shift, which primarily occurred between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which “the long vowel sounds of English changed their values in a fundamental and seemingly systematic way, each of them moving forward and upward in the mouth.”1919 – “The "o" sound of spot became the "a" sound of spat, while spat became speet, speet became spate, and so on. The "aw" sound of law became the "oh" sound of close, which in turn became the "oo" sound of food. Chaucer's Iyf, pronounced "Ieef," became Shakespeare's life, pronounced "Iafe," became our "life." Bill Bryson quoted in Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, pp.209-210 As a sound moves towards another and becomes more similar to it, this other sound moves as well (push chain), and simultaneously the empty spaces left by the movement of certain sounds are filled by other sounds (drag chain), therefore producing a major shift in the sounding of the language.2020 – These dynamics are explained on p.210 of Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History These are impacts that can’t necessarily be traced to specific loanwords, but they nevertheless lurk behind, pulling the occasional string. Impacts that can be centuries long-lasting: the way we sound Robert Hooke’s microscopic observations is more or less as it was sounded when published in 1665; the same applies for English poetry of the time, such as the works of John Donne.2121 – Writing, too, has its effects. In John Donne's The Flea - as Aviva Dauch points out - Donne took advantage of how the customary writing of “the letter ‘s’ when written at the beginning of a word became longer typographically, looking more like the letter ‘f’, the visual pun of line three, ‘Me it suck'd first, and now sucks thee’, could explicitly allude to exactly what the narrator thought the flea was doing and he himself wished to be doing…” https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/a-close-reading-of-the-flea (accessed 11 June 2019) One of the major ideas that this particular mechanism points to is how hidden influencers might impact the continual, intensely collective, evolution of languages. Heterogeneous language systems meet and hybridise in parts, often in unseen forms, and impact indefinitely, to points beyond our ability to trace them. These are the ways languages continue; amongst each other, with countless minor dialects2222 – and related minor literatures within them, with personal language use at the smallest scale. Ongoing as a many-limbed, taking, absorbing, decanting, cross-fertilizing mass of momentums. Even louse, who remains where it is, on all sides, amongst linguistic exchange, gets taken in by certain collective endeavours. During the Great Vowel Shift the sounding of the word louse moved from ‘u:’ &nbsp;- a high back vowel mouth positioning - lous / lu:s (which sounds a bit like ‘loose’, before it tightens up) to a ‘əu’ sound in one stage, before shifting again to the ‘au’ sounds that we know of today as louse.2323 – https://youtu.be/zyhZ8NQOZeo?t=216 (accessed 11 June 2019) - louse sounds different in English dialects in the north of England as certain sounds deepened less, and in Canadian English due to Canadian raising&nbsp;Louse, as figural ongoingness, seemingly unafraid of taking part in momentous shifts, for if ongoing is stablest elsewhere, then elsewhere it shall go. *louse* https://ongoingness.space/Leg-3 Thu, 23 May 2019 19:17:22 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Leg-3 chawa&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;ʔisqaye&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;kwàr̃kwátàa&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;kə̀ngə́sə̀&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;infā&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; lipou &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;păduche&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;pišum&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;weš&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; luis&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; tɨhk’ &nbsp; &nbsp; naco&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;nac’&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;2ʃe&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;ə̀ɣ&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; bɨt&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;kuŋkə:&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;koromojirami&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;shirami&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;ti3shi1&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;len&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;rận&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;tuv&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;marɨɲ &nbsp;&nbsp; kutu &nbsp;&nbsp; hào&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;`uku &nbsp;&nbsp; wawuyany&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;ete&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; 7uch’&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;uk'&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;t'o&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;t'o'ni&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;lósu&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;pilis&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;omɨ (1)&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;næ̌m&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;lha’&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;pütrar https://ongoingness.space/Leg-4 Thu, 23 May 2019 19:17:20 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Leg-4 <img width="466" height="367" width_o="466" height_o="367" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/439f8e8ab417444927ab565560be86c47cef59b4d11c50e47a2da540e5c9b7c4/louse-leg-rough-4.jpg" data-mid="44724969" border="0" data-scale="50" data-no-zoom alt="leg" data-caption="leg" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/466/i/439f8e8ab417444927ab565560be86c47cef59b4d11c50e47a2da540e5c9b7c4/louse-leg-rough-4.jpg" />Ongoingness is relational; it builds across, be it species or time, taking its relations, or arising from those very relations, in a way that might appear considered, but not exclusionary.11 – see thorax What needs to be examined - louse belly-up - is the mode in which these relations operate, how they can proceed in a manner that might be generative. I will focus here on one choice mode of relating that seems to hold positive potential in the functionings of ongoingness - this is the ontological mode of the ‘categorized’ that enables a form of resistance, and is a tactic for ongoingness as well as a relational structure: I am referencing the potentials of opacity. The connection between opacity and ongoingness is worth drawing out in order to fully understand how opacity can influence the way ongoing relations operate. In order to do so, I will first explore the uses and particularities of opacity. Zach Blas has employed the theory of opacity in relation to various modes of data collection and tracking, pointing out that “the world’s people are increasingly reduced to aggregates of parsable data”22 – http://www.zachblas.info/writings/informatic-opacity-2/ (Accessed 11 June 2019) - this can be through Big Data, Government Surveillance, or the “growing popularity of the Quantified Self”. Opacity is employed as resistance to infomatic standardisation and quantification. It is a stating that the self cannot be made fully transparent through data, that it retains an impenetrable materiality, or is perhaps in a continual state of change.33 – That may be closely predicted by aggregates, but still remains a probability, a prediction&nbsp; Blas’ use of Opacity stems from the writings of Édouard Glissant, who formulated ‘transparency’ as the basis in Western thought of understanding people: transparency is a measurement against an ideal scale, a reduction. Glissant calls for opacity against this Imperial scaling, to “displace all reduction”.44 – Édouard Glissant, ‘For Opacity’ in Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), p.190 Identity, for Glissant, should not be “cornered in any essence”, and he is undisturbed by the acceptance of there being places in which the individual’s identity is obscure to that same individual.55 - Ibid, p.192 It is this opacity of the self that determines relations, allowing a network to express an ethics: “I am thus able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to “make” him my image.”66 – Ibid, p.193 The recognition of the opacity of the self is therefore a necessary step in determining a relation with others that enables solidarity, coexistence, kinship, but without a dominating and consuming aspect.77 – Judith Butler expands on the opacity of the self and its relational effects, that “precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves.” Judith Butler, ‘Against Ethical Violence’ in Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p.41 The opacity of the self implies a depth that is in danger of a kind of mysticism; there being something that can never be known seems close to essentialist ideas, and yet Glissant is clearly against any notion of essence.88 – For Judith Butler recognition builds on opacity, one that is always changing with the subject, rather than something constant or surface level, and, in a turn to Lacan and Hegel, to understand this or give an account for recognition, we must also look at ‘desire’. Recognition is underwritten by a “certain desire to persist”, so forms of recognition that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, undercut the very preconditions of recognition. Ibid, pp.42-44 This is perhaps rectified in an acknowledgement that, in a relation with another, the self changes - it is in a constant mutation, so is never at the point where the whole could be fully known. The self is in flux within a network. Opacity can be built on change rather than essence.99 – Further, the acknowledgement of opacity of the self or of another is not a transformation into transparency. Ibid, p.42 Framed in this way, opacity determines how relations occur, and can be seen as built on a self that is in flux, changeable, responding to relations. Ongoingness operates through relations, relations that can transverse, beyond singular species, atemporally. The approach of opacity - in which there is no need to ‘grasp’ the other, to become them, or to encompass them - is a way of being, of relating, without the construction of harmful, imperialist, power dynamics. Opacity therefore presents potential for a generative ongoingness; an ongoingness that operates through modes of opacity, one that resists and simultaneously constructs in ways that are mutual, agreeable, aware. There is no limit to how ongoing relations can occur - the possibility of the multispecies, atemporal, transversing aspect is preserved, they simply embrace their states of opacity at all points. This is not a suggestion that opacity is the only approach to ongoingness, but it is a highlighting that opacity lends to an ongoingness that is generative, or even ethical.1010 – That is to say that there is a possibility for the deployment of opacity even in the myriad of relations that make up, for instance, Donna Haraway's multispecies interminglings. I see no reason for opacity and multispecies thinking to be mutually disagreeable. See thorax The ethics of ongoingness are sometimes hinted at in these writings, but cannot be fully explored in this dissertation, which mostly aims at some sort of picture of ongoingness, a tracing of it. Returning to data, opacity here is similarly based on change and relations, in a way that denies data ever achieving a complete detailing of the self, or even of wider, human-engaged patterns, such as language use.1111 – A data set such as the World Loanword Database (WOLD) classifies into categories or values, in ways that might assist a certain representation or goals, but also might disrupt a necessary connectedness to do so. This kind of data set can be a numerical or graphical expression of the abstract diagram - see hair - but only within certain limits. WOLD runs into such issues in its use of a set vocabulary of meanings, as not all languages have the same lexical meanings that have are expressed by words - instead variations are dealt with by finding the closest relation, if one exists. A slight glossing over. Moreover, WOLD also uses the pictorial world map to display the approximate locations of language, an obvious cartographic approximation. For example https://wold.clld.org/meaning/3-8112#2/24.3/-7.8 (Accessed 11 June 2019) For an introduction to WOLD see head, for loanwords see leg 2 An ongoingness that not only utilizes opacity as a tactic, a compartmentalising away from surveillance, but as a way to determine all relations, does so within the age of data. This can be taken alongside and amongst a continued use of data - it is not a luddite turn, one that resists data’s many forms altogether, but one that establishes a maximum position of relation within that use. In such a way, a networked ongoing is preserved without barbarism. For to fully capture via data - to be made to be transparent - is louse on its back, six legs in the air, a pin straight through the belly.i <img width="1172" height="500" width_o="1172" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5434e4bc5a7e9c6861648dd3d186bc6819255f4ec64c8b83481e43466c6b052/wold-screenshot-map.jpg" data-mid="44908175" border="0" data-scale="90" data-no-zoom alt="map" data-caption="map" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e5434e4bc5a7e9c6861648dd3d186bc6819255f4ec64c8b83481e43466c6b052/wold-screenshot-map.jpg" />fig.3 Counterpart words map of the body louse. Source: World Loanword Database (Accessed 17 June 2019) One further consideration of opacity in relation to data (and non-human ongoingness) is a speculative reversal, in which it is data that embraces opacity, itself finding a means to escape. This is a question of data that might be allowed to develop autonomously, or develop some form of agency. An example would be the way AI1212 – Which are of course distinct from data sets, but might utilise them in construction or chatbots can derive a shorthand language when interacting with another, perhaps other form, of AI; a shorthand language that uses a relational approach in order to hasten communication, to simplify as signs, to achieve effective negotiations.1313 – Such as in the case of Facebook’s experiment of two semi-intelligent bots negotiating, in which “the programmers realized they had made an error by not incentivizing the chatbots to communicate according to human-comprehensible rules of the English language. In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand” https://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922 (Accessed 11 June 2019) Or a using of initially provided tools in an autonomous, unprogrammed way, such as the “intelligent maneuvers” recorded where, in the well documented case of two chatbots negotiating with each other for items, “agents initially feigned interest in a valueless item, only to later “compromise” by conceding it”1414 – https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate/ (Accessed 11 June 2019) - a behaviour that was not programmed by researchers but discovered by the bots in the negotiation process. Data can build in a way that, although it can be analysed and understood later, uses the possibility for its own changeable self in a relational way, and through doing so achieves development beyond human planning. This use of ever-changing relations likens it to opacity, rather than simply opaqueness; the chatbot without realising increasingly becomes a blurred outcome of its relations.1515 – Although AI does not take the opacity of itself as a mode going into relations, the concept of change following relations is still present, which can bring about a thinking in terms of opacity. The relation of AI to opacity, and to ongoingness, is a much larger and nuanced topic than I’m able to truly interrogate here, but I intend this to nod to some of the relevant issues&nbsp;There are therefore potentially numerous embraces of opacity in relation to ongoingness and the data set: the human embrace away from aggregation, an ongoing in avoidance of a pinning down completely, and a computer embrace that might increasingly simplify via shorthand or develop in an unplanned manner through relations. A simultaneous simplification of communication alongside an increasing complexity of the self (programme), an ongoing that is both reduction and compounding.&nbsp;The engagement with the the data set for the sea louse, at least, is an increasing concern. Facial recognition on farmed salmon allows individual, infected, fish to be recognised and assessed, to then be extracted and treated - deloused.1616 – iFarm - Individualized aquaculture - youtube (Accessed 11 June 2019)" Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest / The bedded fish in banks out-wrest, / Or curious traitors, sleavesilke flies / Bewitch poore fishes wandring eyes. " John Donne, 'The Baite' in Herbert J.C.Grierson (ed.) Donne: Poetical Works (Oxford University Press, 1971), p.42 Sea louse, too, must find a means to escape the data set, which develops itself in its attempts to eradicate a relational continuing. Louse looks to its water-dwelling relative, assumes nothing, and carries on.↩ *louse* https://ongoingness.space/Leg-5-inactive Thu, 23 May 2019 19:17:21 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Leg-5-inactive Leg 5 https://ongoingness.space/Head Thu, 23 May 2019 19:17:18 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Head <img width="631" height="471" width_o="631" height_o="471" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a7a1ed9566cb3d0e52069fe854908a173db573d87b8662b7025a8348d8187bc/louse-head-rough.jpg" data-mid="44314559" border="0" data-scale="50" data-no-zoom alt="Head" data-caption="Head" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/631/i/2a7a1ed9566cb3d0e52069fe854908a173db573d87b8662b7025a8348d8187bc/louse-head-rough.jpg" /> The World Loanword Database (WOLD) provides vocabularies of 41 languages with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word.11 – Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (eds.) World Loanword Database (Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2009). Available online at http://wold.clld.org (Accessed 11 June 2019) WOLD allows a consideration of the genealogical similarities between languages, as well as the dating of when certain languages diverged from one another; loanwords, source words and donor languages can be found, along with the possibility of comparing loanwords across languages.22 – Of a vocabulary size of 1505 words for English, 42% are loanwords, the sixth highest percentage of the 41 languages. Ibid, Author for English vocabulary: Anthony Grant. For a discussion of loanwords, see leg 2 WOLD is an evolution of a comparative linguistic practice that tends to culminate in lists that allow a quantification of the interconnectedness of the languages included: the Swadesh lists (1970s) are widely used lists of 100 words chosen intuitively for their universality across languages, and from an analysis of WOLD arose the Leipzig-Jakarta list (2009), which provided a 100 word list of those words most resistant to borrowing, where words are adopted from one language to another without modification. Those words most stable, those stubborn things, least likely to be loaned out. What struck me was a recurrence in all these lists, not of the expected table-toppers, such as ‘I’ and ‘you’, but, sitting so comfortably, calm amongst the mess that’s built up over the years, that “Creature so officious, that ‘twill be known to every one at one time or other, so busie, and so impudent, that it will be intruding it self in every ones company, and so proud and aspiring withall, that it fears not to trample on the best, and affects nothing so much as a Crown”33 – Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Royal Society, 1666), p.211. Also available via this link (Accessed 11 June 2019) as Robert Hooke summarised in Micrographia in 1665: Louse. Louse places joint 15th on the Leipzig-Jakarta list; the body louse and the head louse each having a borrowed score of 0.05 – the lowest in the Semantic field of Animals, alongside the nit and the fly.44 – https://wold.clld.org/semanticfield/3 (Accessed 11 June 2019) The body louse and the head louse have been averaged to make one combinatory value - louse - for the Leipzig-Jakarta list I intend to use louse as a certain contemplation on ongoingness, throughout pluralist, multiplicitous, multiversal lunges,55 – To take one example, Barthes’ notion that in a plural text there is “no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a final ensemble, to an ultimate structure” Roland Barthes, S/Z (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p.12. where meaning seems to slip away or to the side when you look for it, giving a sense of itself when things corrupt.66 – Anne Carson, when reflecting on untranslatable words, writes “In the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.” Anne Carson and Lanfranco Quadrio, Nay rather (Lewes: Sylph, 2014), p.26. Of course, I’m under no impression of louse as stable or singular in meaning that can be revealed, and don’t intend to prove as such; no notion of distinct essence on some unclickable underside. In Manuel De Landa’s objection to Gottlob Frege's theory of naming, where “the connection between a given name and its referent in the real world is effected through a mental entity (or psychological state) that we call "the meaning" of the name”,77 – Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 1997), p.189. De Landa argues that tigers and zebras (for example) don’t have an essence in common, but are instead “historical constructions, mere agglomerations of adaptive traits…”, and, due to the varying external appearances of the animals, they “like dialects, …form a continuum of overlapping forms”. It is claimed that names refer to objects directly, instead of via a mental process (so have an “indexical component”), and the historical and social aspects of language are stressed: “one's current usage of a term is "correct" only to the extent that it is connected to the whole history of uses of a name.” De Landa is useful here in his emphasis of historical networks, how migratory movements along with other vertical and horizontal politics generate contact situations; the existence of words entangled socio-historically, where languages meet, loanwords transfer, meaning and all. Louse, as character, figure88 – For figural thinking, see thorax who in every contact situation stayed where they were (on all sides), has a clear demonstrable ability to hold its own, and is our way in to ongoingness throughout historical intermingling. In order to slip in and out and around this character – louse-figure – it is worth delving into its standard definitions in all its noun and verb forms,99 – I recognize here that this is a departure from WOLD or the Leipzig Jakarta list, which consider louse as meaning solely regarding the animal and through doing so I hope to develop a number of strands of linguistic looking that allow for mediations on the varying methods and trickery that constitute ongoingness (across multiple times).1010 – “Deep microbes are often quite different to seemingly related species that thrive at the surface, with life cycles that operate on near-geologic timescales.”https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46502570 (Accessed 11 June 2019). For a discussion of ongoingness and time see leg 1 The first being louse as creature, the wingless parasite; the close-up, microscopic way in, a shell-like bulbousness, one to be followed as to “become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity… to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone”.1111 – Gilles Delouse and Félix Getoffme, Kafka - Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p.13. This movement through pure intensity being one of speed, in which ongoingness is achieved through constantly being on the move, speed being “to be caught in a becoming that is not a development or an evolution”1212 – Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammerion, Collection Dialogues, 1977), pp.40-41. – that animal dragging.1313 – “And he ran, cheered by the sound of his foot and its echo / And by the watch on his wrist / One-legged, gutless and brainless, the rag of himself” Ted Hughes, ‘Oedipus Crow’ in Crow (London: Faber and Faber Ltd. 1995), p.35.Crow has a borrowed score of 0.14, indicating little evidence for borrowing. Source: https://wold.clld.org/meaning/3-593#2/24.3/-4.8 The second louse being a contemptible or unpleasant person, one that we have all encountered, who weasels their way into things and then seems to stick in the mind for nights afterwards. Who touches and leaves grease marks, as will be our way of tracing them. This form of ongoingness can be on the haunted, personal level – a ‘tapping, tapping’,1414 – Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven (Accessed 11 June 2019)Raven does not feature on the World Loanword Database or a collective one, a perceived continual threat to cultural stability, constructing its own actuality, the media-entertained lingering of racist/antisemitic beliefs.1515 – For example, https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/dec/09/raheem-sterling-newspapers-fuelling-racism-alleged-abuse-chelsea (Accessed 11 June 2019) Then to louse being to spoil or ruin something (an Americanism!), which can come from the same altogether contemptible person – louse – or be partial, a one-off act of disruption. To louse in this sense I consider as a dynamic verb, one of action, rather than a stative one, a state of being, which is best left with the contemptible louse, ideally alone, lousing. One off, revealed actions, whose actions can be seen as distinct, as discrete lumpings of quanta. Keeping in mind that these re/appearances of disruption only allow us into the study of ongoingness at momentary points, but ultimately do not claim to pacify them, for “after the Empress had seen the shapes of these monstrous Creatures, she desir’d to know, Whether their Microscopes could hinder their biting, or at least shew some means how to avoid them? To which they answered, That such Arts were mechanical and below the study of Microscopial observations.”1616 – Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666): https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/cavendish/margaret/blazing_world/chapter1.html (Accessed 11 June 2019) *louse* https://ongoingness.space/Hair Thu, 23 May 2019 19:17:09 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Hair <img width="1090" height="890" width_o="1090" height_o="890" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6352107814ac391e33a480b47c30269116c1e5cb0ec17697d57dbb6b898799b6/louse-hair-redo.jpg" data-mid="44819548" border="0" data-scale="60" data-no-zoom alt="Head" data-caption="Head" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6352107814ac391e33a480b47c30269116c1e5cb0ec17697d57dbb6b898799b6/louse-hair-redo.jpg" /> Louse turns into its smallness, and adjusts irreparably. Its attempted articulation has been spoilt by minor change; it has, in some form, found a way out. Louse is deft, a skillful maneuverer, but it’s the ant that troubles Robert Hooke in his attempt to render it: “I could not, for a good while, think of a way to make it suffer its body to ly quiet in a natural posture; but whil’st it was alive, if its feet were setter’d in Wax or Glew, it would so twist and wind its body, that I could not any wayes get a good view of it; and if I killed it, its body was so little, that I did often spoile the shape of it, before I could thoroughly view it: for this is the nature of these minute Bodies, that as soon, almost, as ever their life is destroy’d, their parts immediately shrivel, and lose their beauty”11 – Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Royal Society, 1666), p.203Ant has a borrowed score of 0.12, indicating very little evidence for borrowing. Source: https://wold.clld.org/meaning/3-817#2/24.3/-4.8 The ant, partially contained, twists and winds in an attempt to escape physically - which, though we know this to be a hopeless pursuit, enables it an escape in virtuality. It avoids a stifling, representational form. The fragility of the ant and its other minute accomplices even prepares for an escape post-life, a smudged protest against a pinning down. Louse leans in, and welcomes the worst. Robert Hooke’s tussle with the depiction of the ant points to a far larger issue: that of the diagram. The diagrams in Micrographia of the minute bodies are anatomical; they aim to disclose a body-functioning in the microscopic realm, and do so mechanically, rigidly. So it is with louse, whose diagram, or drawing, as the holder &amp; homepage of these texts displays it belly-up, legs in the air, its middle section unmoving and inanimate. The diagram gives a sense of one condition of louse but falls short of a true expression of it - it is not the multiple twistings and windings of the body that are captured, but one moment of this moving spectrum. Louse-drawing is an indicator of singular positioning, not of overlaid function. Even if it did manage to achieve a wider expression, such as in the ‘exploded-view drawing’, which is “meant to clarify some complex physical system for the benefit of a human constructor, operator, or designer” - a diagram that dissects even further into parts in order to indicate the effects of their comings-together - it would simultaneously offer up “as much intrigue as it does value”, enabling the uninformed reader “to fathom a small aspect of its murky otherworldliness”.22 – All quotes Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What it's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p.52 There is a double scurrying away: louse escapes in its manifold movements and undisclosed functions, and there is the lapse of the louse-viewer, who is inevitably drawn into otherworldliness of the microscopal realm rather than comprehending supposed instructional elements. This form of the diagram does not capture wholly. <img width="800" height="1295" width_o="800" height_o="1295" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/45c2aef3ff00577b86eee6f68b3c8df0c45ee4491e1abe6a8ae83b443664ae14/Hooke-microscope.jpg" data-mid="44909793" border="0" data-scale="60" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/45c2aef3ff00577b86eee6f68b3c8df0c45ee4491e1abe6a8ae83b443664ae14/Hooke-microscope.jpg" />fig.1 Robert Hooke's microscope in Micrographia, 1665 A reason for this impossibility of capture is perhaps because we are mistakenly focusing on a specific expression as a tying down of an abstract concept. Instead, it is the abstract or conceptual form that is the diagram, with Hooke’s drawings providing a cartographic realisation that points to it. This is in line with the Deleuzian concept of the diagram, which “marks a zone of abstraction in which concrete systems shed their specificity and interact on the level of pure function”33 – Jakub Zdebik, Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), p. 23 - the diagram displays such functions of a system, but does not resemble it in its particularities or as imitations. Instead of a previously supposed representational element, the diagram “maps out possibilities prior to their appearance, their representation”.44 – Ibid, p.1 - Jakub Zdebik explains that the concept of the diagram, and its mapping out of possibilities prior to appearance, is defined in two ways: first is an informal dimension, and then a display of relations as pure functions. The informal dimension involves a splitting into two heterogeneous forms: ‘discursive’ (which involve statements, such as ‘penal law’) and ‘non-discursive’ formations (environment, e.g. prisons) - the abstract function is what links the two incongruous systems together, and in doing so points to an informal dimension of intermingling functions. The diagram as display of relations as pure functions operates within this informal dimension, and can transfer from one system to the next, for example as a diagram of surveillance that operates in heterogeneous systems (school, prison etc), without physical transfer but instead through a transfer of relationship, of function. (pp. 1 - 23) The diagram is an informal dimension that exists of abstract functions linking incongruous systems together, and the way in which these abstract functions can transfer between heterogeneous systems - it is the very abstraction of the diagram that allows its application into heterogeneous situations. A diagram is therefore not specific. Its passing from one form to another and the intermingling with other functions leads to the diagram not simply being a model that traces similarities between things, but instead acts as a “generative device”.55 – Ibid, p.5 This brings a complex relationship between this abstract, generative, diagram and the image. As the diagram is non-representational, and due to its elusive nature, “it needs to be embodied in some kind of image so that it can be grasped”.66 – Ibid, p.23. A resistance to grasping can be found in leg 4 Two of the embodying ways that Jakub Zdebik discusses are architectural and cartographic representations, which help give some form of approximate image: “These two spatial markers are important because they are an attempt to capture the fluid and unstable dimension of the diagram”.77 – Ibid, pp.7-8 Yet the attempt always falls short - abstraction, as expected, is not fully capturable; something leaks. The drawing stalls somewhere between the lines - it is not wholly representational, as it cannot capture the abstract in full and, for practical reasons, it needs to be kept comprehensible to a viewer; it is not completely abstract, so that it can communicate some actual information. Louse as depicted - louse-drawing - functions at an inbetween. The twisting and winding is an embodiment of a resisting abstract function - louse-diagram - the complex machinery of microscopic function on minute bodies, the power relation of observation, the parasitic habits and motions. Louse-drawing, as in Micrographia, exists as momentary cartographic attempt. Yet louse-drawing as homepage, holder to these writings, indicates a change in function, a display of an altogether different diagram. This is the diagram of ongoingness; an expansive, generative diagram, of which the collection of writings altogether are perhaps only a cartographic, or at moments architectural, rendering. Ongoingness-diagram is the abstract function/s that encompass and pertain to ongoing, those that these essays seek to express. That which louse-drawing, in all its dissections, only points to, anxious of a shrivelling up, a loss of beauty. *louse* https://ongoingness.space/Bulbs Thu, 23 May 2019 19:18:57 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Bulbs <img width="764" height="890" width_o="764" height_o="890" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a6b93b5734e0d1e672df9a4f613e05bac2f50703c71cb691c99e230e4963c35f/louse-bulbs-rough.jpg" data-mid="44628216" border="0" data-scale="50" data-no-zoom alt="Head" data-caption="Head" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/764/i/a6b93b5734e0d1e672df9a4f613e05bac2f50703c71cb691c99e230e4963c35f/louse-bulbs-rough.jpg" /> In order to gain a more complete sense of ongoingness, this section focuses on differentiating between it and similar terms. Although an objective comparison of these as abstract terms is a stretch, particularly as not every definition can be considered in its entirety, and certain terms can’t be mentioned altogether,11 – Some terms I’ve not managed to fit in this section include: homeostasis, hysteresis, steadiness, evolution, inertia, élan vital... it’s at least worth outlining an authorial intention. What follows is predominantly an argument of perceived semantics. Many of the following terms are inextricably linked, yet operate slightly differently to each other, which is one contributor to their continued use. Ongoingness lends itself to certain terms, and uses others as tactics. This is louse as microscopic way in. Stubbornness seems to be a quality in which no change is accepted, so although through being stubborn an ongoing is achieved, a not-shifting-no-matter-what, it lacks the nimbleness that ongoingness operates with – an ability to accept and embrace minor changes throughout. The stubborn stays put, or goes in a single chosen direction. Persistence and perseverance seem similar to each other – in both there is a will to continue despite challenges that are faced, a continuing through confrontation, a pushing, with perseverance perhaps requiring more active mental strength.22 – “Perseverance, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1911), p.250 It is this ‘despite of’ that separates these terms from ongoingness, which can operate through an embrace of intersections with challenges, and proceeds in all directions - acknowledging that, after an interaction, all sides come away altered. Related are words such as resoluteness and steadfastness once again imply an unwavering aspect, a ploughing through, a closedness that doesn’t seem to be willing to engage with multiple networks. The word most-defined through dialectics is resistance, which is employed as the oppositional to a norm, a difference, or a change - it is categorized in its oppositionality. Resistance is often a necessary condition, one that might lead to some form of emancipation, or proceeds ideologically even without this as real potential. Ongoingness only uses this oppositional approach in part. It is in general a re-thinking in terms of a working with or through rather than against, in order to escape separatist thought that can prove destructive,33 – Primarily in relation to ecological destruction, or anthropocentric thinking. See thorax though the choice of what the with is might imply an exclusionary, resistant aspect. There are close ties with resilience, which is somewhere between resistance and the previous words, in that it is a continued resistance through multiple challenges, and a quick recovery from them.44 – Both resilience and resistance have specific meanings in relation to ecology, relating to a how a community or ecosystem responds and recovers from a perturbation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_resilience (Accessed 11 June 2019) The understanding of multiples suggests an anticipation of a continued struggle, that another will come once the former is dealt with. This anticipatory element links to ongoingness, which also might act in expectation, shift registers, but once again it is not necessarily an oppositional that makes it do so. Instead there are possibilities of expectancy, an excitement brought upon by a generative aspect of working across. The notion of working against multiple, recurrent, continued, evolving challenges is one that relates to maintenance; a term Marina Vishmidt initially describes as a form of “reproduction”, which is seen as diminutive in relation to production – “making sure this object or entity or relation is enabled to continue existing over time, despite time’s ravages on its existence and persistence.”55 – Vishmidt, Marina. ‘Management and Maintenance’ in Look at Hazards, Look at Losses, edited by Anthony Iles, Danny Hayward, and Marina Vishmidt (Mute, 2017), p.12 However, Vishmidt later shifts maintenance, in comparison with management, to a notion of resistance rather than reproduction. In ecological terms, the “uncontrollable eventualities of ecological damage” provide a context of alienation that cannot be managed away, but instead forces a reliance on maintenance: “planetarity refigures management as maintenance in and of (the conditions for) resistance, once the known quantities of ‘resources’ comprising management's field of action can no longer be counted on, while maintenance, with its dogged orientation to survival can emerge as a creative encounter with the truly eco-systemic unknown, necessitating newer (or older) co-operative social forms.”66 – Ibid, p.21 It is this dogged orientation to survival that enables maintenance to re/think, to provide creative potential through an alienation,77 – This shift following alienation can challenge the configuration of power, but Vishmidt argues that this is not in the form of ‘care’, as the reconfiguration of power as care is a kind of ‘reproductive realism’, which “appears to affirm the invisible labour of maintenance and survival, but for decisively conservative ends. In its crude dissociation of maintenance and resistance, it ends up with management. This entails the suppression of any disruption or discomfort as an unjustified exercise of power and privilege – those who want to resist are pitted against those who just want to persist, as if these were not implicated.” Ibid, p.27. Vishmidt argues that what is really necessary for a proper re-evaluation of maintenance and management is a displacement of agency from human subjects to technical objects “as part of a larger transvaluation of abjected forms of labour” Ibid, p.28 - a re-assessing of “the means-ends relationships of capitalist techno-science that are driving towards ecosystemic annihilation” that rejects “the social relationships that perpetuate their mythologised versions as simple realism.” Ibid, p.28 one that will perhaps facilitate an ongoing through and despite of increasing ecological instability. Maintenance here is a political actor for and of ongoingness. The initial, disavowed, definition of maintenance in relation to reproduction is consistent with preservation; the holding of something in its original or current state, whose ongoing is limited to its singularity, though the efforts to preserve might scatter elsewhere.88 – As labour, to take one example. A different type of scattering could be through neologism, see leg 2 The stillness of the preservation, whilst all else continues around it, is one form of ongoing, but against a much larger tide of ongoingness; it is an attempt to become constant. Yet the nature of the constant is in itself a networked idea, as exemplified by the 2019 actioning of the redefinition of the kilogram. The definition has shifted from a standard set by a physical prototype kilogram, Le Grand K - “a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy housed under nested bell jars in a vault at the BIPM in Paris”,99 – https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/11/17/the-kilogram-and-three-other-metric-units-are-about-to-be-revamped (Accessed 11 June 2019) in part due to an unexplained drifting in mass of the six official copies of the kilogram compared to the initial prototype.1010 – Implying a drift in Le Grand K itself - Ibid. The kilogram is now defined in relation to the Planck constant, h, and is determined on a Kibble Balance. The resulting definition means that the kilogram is in relation to the metre and the second, a web of realised abstractions relying on each other. Even the constants, those assumed unflinching continuants, only continue through their relations, and are therefore close to modes of ongoingness. When an oppositional is needed - as measuring against the standards of a constant might imply - a necessary entry is made into the complexities of the measuring network. <img width="1800" height="1272" width_o="1800" height_o="1272" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c676b9bb916c5f494e70d323f4be3731ad4f549a52e8b1fe2de281dd886e69a/Kibble-balance-Arieh.jpg" data-mid="44905324" border="0" data-scale="90" data-no-zoom alt="kibble" data-caption="kibble" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c676b9bb916c5f494e70d323f4be3731ad4f549a52e8b1fe2de281dd886e69a/Kibble-balance-Arieh.jpg" />fig.4&nbsp;a whole lot slower (Kibble Balance). Arieh Frosh, 2019 Originally published in Le Grand K, Royal College of Art, 2019 Closer to the unveiled resisting potential of maintenance is that of regeneration, which is a quality shared across living creatures and ecosystems1111 – See Karen Barad ‘TransMaterialities’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), p.403 - a renewal or restoration of what has once been, often what has been damaged. In Karen Barad’s discussion of regeneration, particularly in relation to Galvinism and the growth of limbs initiated by outside electrical sources, regeneration is seen not only as a reconstruction, but also an establishing of “what never was but might have been”; an opening up of possibilities, with the potential promise of a whole regenerative politics, one that has the potential to “empower and galvanise the disenfranchised”.1212 – Ibid, p.411 A politics that underlies monstrosity or the monstrous: “The promise of monsters is a regenerative politics, an invitation to explore new ways of being in touch, new forms of becoming, new possibilities for kinship, alliance, and change.”1313 – Ibid, p.410&nbsp;Monstering provides an elsewhere, a rendering of productive combinatorial possibilities, an offering of other semiotic prospects.1414 – Donna Haraway creates a quadrant based on A.J. Greimas’ semiotic square, with sections ‘Real Space: Earth’, ‘Out Space: The Extraterrestrial’, ‘Inner Space: The Biomedical Body’, and ‘Virtual Space: SF’ that are journeyed through in order to “show in each quadrant, and in the passage through the machine that generates them, metamorphoses and boundary shifts that give grounds for a scholarship and politics of hope in truly monstrous times.” Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’ in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 295-337 (quoted pp.305-306) The monstrous and its regenerative undercurrents are methods of ongoing that construct their own alternative routes as they develop, though they might do so through a breaking down or a destruction prior to a building up, a temporary non-existence (to return/arrive in altered and strengthened forms). This is one tactic of ongoingness: an embrace of a momentary stoppage, but one that falls within an ever-increasing movement that ir/regularly builds elsewhere. It is the possibility for stoppage that marks ongoingness as distinct from its close ally continuousness; ongoing from continuing and the continuous, although their proximity has allowed some interchange of use throughout these writings. This is the realm of ‘quanta’: “the discretization of physical observables”1515 – Karen Barad, ‘TransMaterialities’, p.395 in which physical quantities which were assumed to be continuous by classical physics are quantized or made discrete.1616 – “The quantum of the electromagnetic field is a photon — a quantum of light. And electrons are understood to be the quanta of an electron field.” Karen Barad, ‘TransMaterialities’ p.395 Continuous is the antithesis of discrete; the minor units that form a larger substance do not exist in a connected state of continuousness but remain their smallest discrete, even indeterminate, form. There is no such disjuncture with ongoingness and quantizing, and, as regeneration hints at, at times there is even an embrace or an employment of it. A further preference for ongoingness is a trick of sound – the long ‘on’ and ‘o’ sounds giving it a rolling feel, a greater sense of longevity and malleability compared to continuousness, which slithers in its carrying-on; a decision based on affect. Finally, the suffix -ness is necessary in its standard use to denote a state or condition – and can even point to an awareness – that ongoingness can be an ongoing state of ongoing. *louse* https://ongoingness.space/Body-upper Thu, 23 May 2019 19:19:10 +0000 Arieh Frosh https://ongoingness.space/Body-upper <img width="759" height="697" width_o="759" height_o="697" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6d89caa77d1715531189f559dbe168600105037f25eb0bb7dc74656e3a33f88/louse-body-upper-redo.jpg" data-mid="44818169" border="0" data-scale="60" data-no-zoom alt="Thorax" data-caption="Thorax" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/759/i/d6d89caa77d1715531189f559dbe168600105037f25eb0bb7dc74656e3a33f88/louse-body-upper-redo.jpg" /> “Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire in our times are at stake.” Donna Haraway, Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.11 – Donna Haraway, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’ in e-flux journal #75, (September 2016), p.4. The total finality of fire is discussed in abdomen “The myth system associated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story, but not the whole story.” Ibid.22 – Ibid, p.7&nbsp; “Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen  –  yet.” Ibid.33 – Ibid, p.11 Ever-present and murmuring under the surface of Donna Haraway’s interspecies rethinking of era is a certain notion of ‘ongoingness’, which arises as an essential quality when demonstrating the fatally damaging nature of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, both of which are ultimately rejected in favour of the newly termed ‘Chthulucene’. In short, the current eras (and thinking of eras) are a constant threat to the ongoing of more or less everything, and, being the subject of threat, it becomes clear that ongoingness is the quality to be strived for, for in its ending is a real finality. Haraway does not define ongoingness directly, but lets it give a sense of itself. Ongoingness seems to be both a property – some thing’s ongoingness – as well as a larger movement that builds beyond the thing itself, in which minor changes are always ongoing, but something bigger nevertheless persists. Rather than pointing to some kind of essence, the ongoing is a webbed and tentacular movement; it traverses across species, combines and mutates with them. This ongoing is a multispecies one, situated in the specifics of place, navigating a constant present. It stresses the reliance aspect of being; that individuals - of whatever species - do not precede their relatings.44 – Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2016), p.59 Haraway emphasises growth through ‘making kin’, along with a number of other strategies such as “sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, development, webbed ecologies…”55 – Donna Haraway, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, p.8 (‘sympoiesis’ means a making-together; ‘symbiogenesis’ is when two organisms combine genetically to be less than two but more than one, a partial digestion66 – Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’ in Art in the Anthropocene, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), p.262 ) – interactions that are complex, and seemingly always on the move, strategically omnidirectional.77 – It is interesting to revisit John Donne’s 1633 poem The Flea in this way, where instead of seeing the flea as a conceit, a mingling of the two lovers’ bloods; “Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, / Where we almost, nay more than married are. / This flea is you and I, and this / Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is”, to instead see it really as this material combination, a new thing that hints at symbiogenesis, the lovers’ blood remaining there undigested – a more than one but a less than three. John Donne, The Flea. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46467/the-flea (accessed 11 June 2019). Donne's The Flea also appears in leg 2 These are the possibilities of the Chthulucene, in which end of world thinking (and real threat) can be countered, a generative space of multispecies assemblages that includes people.88 – Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, p.101 Ongoingness seems only a possibility when these sorts of ever-evolving networks are allowed, or encouraged to occur – the ongoing is necessarily centreless. Like Haraway, Rosi Braidotti shares this anti-humanist shift away from the “grain of the European master-narrative of rational progress”99 – Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions (Cambridge, UK and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006), p.99 to one of mixity and intercontaminations, an outlook that rejects a distinction between human and non-human and looks to the kinship system as opposed to conventional ways of continuing. Braidotti’s concept of ‘transpositions’ indicates “an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities”;1010 – Ibid, p.5 they are non-linear, weblike, centreless, non-dogmatic, and therefore, being unbound from dogma, are capable of multiple strategies of resistance. Read this way, Haraway’s multispecies thinking is a transpositional enactment, and hopefully it is clear that this collection of writings (mine), aims to operate as such – distrustful of distinction and boundary, but in favour of the complexity that is a networked coming-together of/on/with ongoingness. Louse is not a metaphor or allegory, nor simply (as word) a stand-in for movements of language, but better thought as a characterisation, an is as much as the rest of this. For Haraway, the tentacular is figural, avoiding the “deadly fantasy of the literal”1111 – Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, p.257 that holds onto ideas of “one true meaning”. Figures are visual, mathematical, sensual; louse as multi-genre figure. In a breakdown of the human and non-human distinction, Braidotti, as “post-industrial subject of so-called advanced capitalism” sees a closer familiarity as female human to the Oncomouse – a genetically modified mouse that is more susceptible to cancer – “than with humanistic ideals of the uniqueness of my species”.1212 – Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions, p.100 As well as a distancing from certain philosophies, and a closeness to the genetically and technologically changeable, this suggests that, in the contemporary climate, there is a link in actuality rather than along the metaphor. This for Braidotti takes the form of embodiment: “Something less sophisticated and more material is occurring in the contemporary, processes of becoming-animal, which has nothing to do with metaphors of animality. Nor does it proceed as an argument by analogy. It is rather the case that it requires a shift of the ontological grounds of embodiment.”1313 – Ibid, p.102 Though I share this dismissal of metaphors of animality and arguments by analogy, it is with hesitancy that I approach louse in terms of embodiment: for one it seems that louse and myself are individually disjointed across various interconnected planes such as parasite, language, historical reference; in multiversal, multispecies thinking, how does embodiment occur whilst trying to do away with the body? It seems that there is an option of the partial, moments of embodiment where the material of body and place meets the figural in as much as it is a horizontal (non-dogmatised) engagement, with awareness of the multiplicitous mutations that inevitably occur out of sight. A total embodiment would be a claim to wholeness that ultimately falls short, the louse and the self escaping as bit-parts elsewhere, avoiding a blanket muffling that would stifle ongoingness. &nbsp; *louse*