The Grounds are Gone and I am Hanging from this Sentence, Atelier 35, Bucharest, 2015
in Goodbye Language, curated by Larisa Crunteanu & Xandra Popescu
The Grounds are Gone and I am Hanging from this Sentence
-notes on a diagrammatic performance-
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The writing fully committed to reason and abstraction never begins. It removes, abstracts itself perpetually from every beginning.
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The writing fully committed to the imagination never stops. To trace my thoughts I would have to never lift the pen from the paper, or stick the keyboard to my fingers.
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Diagrams are a double-writing (dia-gram from dia “out, through” from the root duo “two” and graphein “write, mark draw”): written by power and powered by writing. Diagrams are written with one hand, unwritten with the other hand, they handle the world, and produce action - Handlung. Diagrams produce sovereign gestures (the power of statistics, planning, and probability, the environmental power as choreography of physical and affective circulation), but may as well emit lines of flight. Diagrams are cut with the straight line of mathematical thought (strong abstraction), superior diagrams are cut with the dotted line of the gesture (weak abstraction).
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A diagram, always double: behind thought, a gestural deformation of the space with the trail of thought, and ahead of thought, a deformation that has already deformed the thought that created it.
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When abstraction fades into sensuality, the line fades into dots, and dots into less. The weakest diagram becomes its own environment, and writes itself away.
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The diagram is a reduction and abstraction that infuses itself into the real and re-becomes material (real abstraction), and this is the marker of capital, of exterior violence. The superior diagram is the trace of an interior violence, of a sensual and sovereign abstraction, fictional and oblique towards its own preciseness. The latter shields space from becoming prescribed and stable. The flexibilization of space is also expressed in the morphic violence of the new economy, which flattens surfaces, straightens lines, optimizes circulation through invisible but pointed arrows that show one way - a way that aspires to the frictionless transfer of commodities, data, affects and labour. We need superior diagrams, a violence that introduces disturbances between the interior and exterior space, between the horizon that we carry, and the horizon that we will never catch.
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A diagram that unpacks an extraterrestrial horizon.
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The superior diagram is written with a dotted line, broken line, with a curved and tortuous line. It is drawn by the movements of its ground, of the paper or screen or stage, rather than with the mastery of the codes, pen or body. It is almost not written, not drawn, not there. A diagram that fully engages in the doubt of its own writing, dynamically reforming itself, taking ecstatic turns against itself.
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The superior diagram doubts its own arrows. Doubt is an affect of ramífications. To trace a vacillating and doubtful diagram, one requires arrows with bifurcated, multisensorial directions (heads). An arrow turned against itself, asymmetrically.
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The abstraction of the superior diagram embraces a negativity that refuses to rest on the ground of negation.
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A diagram that engages in the event of its own making. A self-referential diagram that maps itself in the impossibly straight lines drawn in tics and Turettian gestures (of discontinuity).
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A diagram that shouts in the pains of its own self-twist.
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A synaesthetic diagram.
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A diagram that shrinks the world (abstraction) and lays the ground for the world again (desire).
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A diagram that tracks the path of the mind (formal) and trips over its being in the world (material).
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A diagram that drills into the ground of its own making to touch what it will never comprehend.
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A diagram that writes the ground again and buries itself in it.
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A diagram that wastes itself away and decays into a truth that will always lie outside of it (paradiagrammatics).
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A diagram as incomplete synthesis between material imagination and formal imagination.
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A diagram that is too much for its own formalized space. A diagram that is more than the space it commands. A diagram that turns into (dia)drama.
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A choreographic diagram, a dance step that steps on the map. The field of the diagram steps on real political, epistemological, and geographical fields. A diagram steps on the paper, on the screen and on the stage, as a sensual excavator deforming the real, actual terrain. Every traced gesture deforms the terrain. Every deformation deforms the next gesture.
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A diagram that spatializes thinking, transforming concepts into topology, and topology into duration.
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A diagram made in subjective time but read in its material, thingly duration.
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A diagram whose tracing ends after the world ends.
*thanks to Larisa Crunteanu, Xandra Popescu, Nisaar Ulama, Matt Hare, Katrina Burch for all the conversations related to diagrams, formalization, abstraction and sensuality.
