OUTSIDEIN

ON PERCEPTUAL HEDGING

I

As the basic social identity unit is us/them; cosmogony starts with a parting: of sky and earth, earth and sky, sky and waters, lips.

II

Chaos is inchoate, indiscrete, un(s)pooled.

Origin is not a point, but counterpuntal; every clinamen henceforth a fugue.

III

That great transfixer of meaning, Magritte, claimed "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves."

Perception—and its pathology—is the foundation on which all of our thresholds are grounded (or aired). In the immortal words of William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite." But "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

This is the way the world begins
This is the way the world begins
This is the way the world begins
Not with a bang but with a blinker.

IV

The ground is inter/mediate in/formation. The center cannot hold.

V

By mediation we mean: a synthetic-dialectic, an angelic faculty, a fence, a three-way hinge.

It is a process or technique of alternative or even indirect dispute resolution, in the most optical sense of the term.

[In this light, mediation is not (necessarily) conciliation. It aims to unsettle rather than to settle or resettle. It doesn't aim, but it hits.]

VI

Keep it makeshift, keep it safe.

Reality-testing, they call it.

VII

You could say there's a time and a place for this.

Its time is mythical: general time.
Its place is logical: general space.

VIII

Now, logic loves a torture garden. Here are some eccentric flints to keep that hedgerow sharp:

The Sheffer’s stroke of propositional logic, written "|," is also known as the NAND (“not and") or the “alternative denial," such that at least one of its operands is false.

Peirce’s arrow and Quine’s dagger, depicted as “↓" and “†", respectively, stand for NOR, the “negation" or “logical or" that are also NAND’s dual, inasmuch as NOR is only true if and only if all operands are false.

Both NAND and NOR operations can constitute logical formal systems of their own without the use of any other logical operators.

All logic gates can be assembled from either only binary NAND gates, or only binary NOR gates.

As the black boxes of data storage, NAND and NOR operations constitute the genome of our datascape. They underpin our information superhighways.

IX

Gates also have a mythic logic.

If, on a base, functional level, the gate shares the wall’s summons to separate, its calling is to tantalise rather than block or hinder.

Having—and forming—a sightline between inside and out, it renders their relationship ambiguous; a loom-like structure through which in-and-out can warp and weft into (and out of) each other.

"In whom is that ether woven, warp or woof?"—Upanishads

X

Where a wall is categorically divisive, the gate encloses the invitation to see-through, see-past and see-as. (But don't take it from me: "Don't look at things—look in between things," said John Baldessari.)

Be/hold, this see-through thing of impenetrable transparency.

XI

If a wall needs overcoming or destruction, a gate must be outfoxed or seen-through, revealed, as a cognitive structure.

A wall is a statement. A gate is a tease. It sets up a 'tricky' space as a trickle-down threshold, the negotiation of which benefits from Trickster wiles.

XII

A gate can be as unimpeded as a keyhole or a hole between two walls. It need not forbid as long as it provokes the mind’s propensity to latch. (Why they're conducive to such Protean manners of incorporation.)

The gate can colonise some of the most reactive recesses of the sensorimotor imagination—those involving, for example, object permanence—outside of physical manifestation; all whilst ret[r]aining the capacity to materialise (and dematerialise), almost impromptu, like the thief in the night it is meant to keep out—but made to draw.

XIII

A gate is stateful. Open or close, or both, it actualises—and, in time, accrues—potential.

The gate presents and represents itself as, simultaneously, a promise and a threat; 'divide and conquer' at the height of its seductive power.

[Why persuade when you can titillate? Why assault what you can subvert?]

Only the greatest walls attain—through size, force, and heft―what any paltry gate can with a gesture.

XIV

A gate is materially easy to re-move. Its place is not secured through matter but by spontaneous emergence or law: dynamics and systems.

Its substance isn't presence, but appearance.

XV

What's always charged will not hold still, though it may seem it.

Do you see a duck or a rabbit? Both? You see a gate (schematic).

XVI

As a foyer to hierophany, a gate insinuates disclosure. It has less in common with walls than with mountains or veils.

It is a subtype of the threshold; a limen's linen.

To see-through a gate [is to] build around it.

INSIDEOUT

INTERIORITY AS POLITY

I

The opening salvo to Musil's The Man Without Qualities is a clinical description of the forces and networks at play that account for "a fine day in [Vienna] August, 1913." It is the first overt example of consilience in novel form; marking the advent of an Age of Information where the Enlightenment lineaments of order would be overwhelmed by the exponentially increasing frequency and thickness of connection.

This is how a barometric low hanging over the Atlantic came to mark a breakwater of the long nineteenth-century.

II

Thousands of pages in, the book begins to haemorrhage and pullulate and bristle as it starts to pixelate into more and more discrete packets of paragraphs, sentences, data; in a recursive feat no less formidable than what Joyce did in Finnegans Wake, though—here's the catch—not as deliberate.

What we have is not exactly an "unfinished" novel, as per popular consensus, but something closer to a lifeform running—dare we say, perhaps, computing—through its theatre of iterations. It's a literary gateway of explosive percolation—the "instant shift in the nature of a system as it passes a threshold level of connectivity": as steadfast as physical phase changes, as fungible as social media.

III

With Musil, an epochal gate of perception was cleansed, and we could gaze, a little sunstruck but with sudden—if not lasting—clarity, upon the world becoming transfinite.

It isn't casual—nor, for that matter, causal—that Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities himself, is a well-connected mathematician.

IV

Musil's novel takes place in the year of completion of the Ringstrasse, which substituted a once heavily fortified city with a promenade conceived in a panoptic spirit not dissimilar to that of Second Empire Paris.

Hausmann's Paris and Musil's late-Hapsburg Vienna are serviceable, if early, examples of the modern societies described as having a "fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, systems".

In short, these were network[ed] cities that were having to rethink themselves at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. As some of them came to focus more on internal control and surveillance than external threats, they would develop large-scale, often dazzling, inner-courtyards.

Like gilded serpents coiled around their urban cores, the bouvelards replaced old city walls with new, city-sized fences.

—And how do you maintain a space like that?
—You sweep it.

V

More than a century later, the boulevardisation of the commons has accelerated in ways equally transparent and opaque—often at once.

When Joshua Cooper Ramo states "[t]he corollary of connection [...] is the creation of gates," he is describing a gate as a node or a neuron for the docking and redistribution of connecting tissue and synapses.

What follows from this is: the more and, arguably, the better connected we become; the more gates there will be for those connections to pool in, tangle with, and jump from.

Consider the double [slit] bind of how, though social mobility has stagnated in the 'free' world, individual—maybe even intersubjective—motility has never been greater.

Perhaps the atavistic us vs. them 'tribal' schema is evolving into something rather like a 'wave-particle' society.

You could say we're becoming more like gates.

VI

A gate is a placema[r]ker to the extent in which it's an emergent or designed point of convergence where a space that might have otherwise remained unchallenged or continuous is made different.

In short, it's indispensable to the construction of identity, with all the othering that may entail.

Re-member:

A gate is a(t) variance in sense of identity.

VII

A gate is not a firewall. Its strengths and weaknesses are see-through, just like yours.

Whichever sees the other first will have the upper hand in mirroring the other. Blink. You won't miss it.

VIII

With logic gates as their reductio ad functionem, a gate can easily acquire the suppleness of language-games.

You speak to them in shibboleths, the way you'd speak in riddles to a sphinx.

IX

You'll have to get a feeling for the rhythm of every gate's logic, though.

Those tools we spoke of earlier: the bar, the dagger and the arrow? Use them, as they use you.

Do not confront hierophanies unarmed. Disarm then not with violence, but guile.

Fallacies, glitches and construction defects are navigable paths for philosophical and practical wayfaring, spearheading, tracemaking and extraterritorial pissing.

X

At the level of nation-states, these may or may not opt to do away with their more obvious (de)fences—albeit the global tendency over the past decade has been not just to keep them, but to build more—.

—But if a day should come in which the borders were flung open and the checkpoints shuttered?

—When that day comes, be wise to read it as a sign that the gatekeeping has been perfected to a nearly impenetrable capacity, and that you aren't in on it.

XI

If we can hack entire networks, what makes you think we haven't compromised your institutions? Or your soul?

XII

The vision of an Empire so exuberant and self-sufficiently-devouring that the sun would never set on it is an ouroboros that's being politely parleyed underground (or roundabout), but never slain.

The business of Empire is cancer, and there's clearly a perverse adaptive mechanism at work there. At its own, egregoric pace, Empire has repeatedly displayed the ability to become what it needs must; with some of its recent displays involving quite sophisticated active camouflage.

As much as Empire still craves territory, it must still find the ways to get it, so its neoplasms will avoid detection through opacity, dispersion, speed. Overt imperial conquest is being substituted by imperial subversion.

Prepare for guerrilla imperialism.

XIII

The American frontier was officially closed in 1890, but it's been adding layers ever since. It is 400 years deep if we set our clocks to, say, the arrival of the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock.

Though usually left at a linear measurement, borders have a time signature. It isn't just their presence, but duration, that alters an environment.

Take, for instance, the famous 2014 study on red deer conducted in the Bohemian Forest once slashed by the Iron Curtain. It showed separate Czech and Bavarian deer populations refusing to cross the border—despite there not having been one in place there for the past quarter century.

Given their lifespans, none of the 300 animals tracked by the study would have had actual experience of the electric fences that comprised the border between West Germany and the Czech Republic.

Facile as it is take for granted wildlife remains free to roam where borders are set up for (and against) people, the fact is they can have profound environmental and genetic impacts.

A gate affects reality because of what it is, not what it does.

XIV

That said: a border wall may well deter some bodies, but it won't change many minds.

XV

After Dada's chaotic, formless scream, there was Surrealism: that is, Data. Let's not forget that it was Antonin Artaud who coined the term realité virtuelle, and he was Out of It, that is, As Far Inside As One Can Get before egoic spaghetiffication.

The avant-garde was c[r]aptured in the churn of information.

We will never again get ahead of ourselves. Not in the arts.

XVI

Not that it matters. Deleuze and Guattari envisioned "an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery [...] elaborated in [...] groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, anomic."

But for this, you must ponder on the differences between an Other and an Outsider.

One of them, you can recognize; the other, you may never know.

XVII

The day is nigh when policy will be the deep play of design.

If the 20th century belonged to architecture, urbanism and their intersection; the 21st will see the urban absorbed by the landscape arts and sciences; with the most important works of engineering taking place within the increasingly extreme realms of interface and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, megaprojects will give massing new layers of meaning. The boulevards of tomorrow will be invisible as they reach vanishingly small and large scales, like microbes or dragons.

XVIII

The future variant of all-hallowed modernist efficiency will be gatekeeping: access to worlds within worlds within worlds.

The World will be larger the deeper you are.

XIX

Given these depths of field, to focus on Trump or on Brexit is to miss the forest for the trees. It'll be something else in five years.

So what I'm asking is for you to focus on the gateways to that forest.

No, not the trees—or not the trees only—: the rhizomes! The cracks between canopies!

XX

The survival of states—that term, state, is so ontologically riven—will owe less to plurality than to plasticity. It will favour the agile, possibly at the revised scale of the city-state, above the lumbering hegemonic superpower; which as an entity will not, of course, become extinct anytime soon.

For centuries, we have been drifting into a world of gates out of a world of walls. It is conceivable, if not yet easy to envision, that its final form will be one where the doors of perception seem utterly cleansed, but are strategically locked; a simulacrum of Infinity, World Without Qualities, World Without End.