Grayspread Ontology

Relic and Gesture was an action performed by the author in 2014 as an assignment during a Visual and Critical Studies class led by Joseph Grigely. The action consisted in asking class mates to bring an object close to their affections into the class on a specified day. The object would be placed on a table and photographed with a pinhole camera. The film would be then developed and frames of the film containing each object would be given to their owners, with the request that they would send the author a digital reproduction (photograph, scan, etc.) of their film fragment later.

The spectacle, considered as the reigning society's method for paralysing history and memory and for suppressing any history based on historical time, represents a false consciousness of time.

A thoroughly indigestible marxist.

A document is the relic of a relic, one degree further removed from the reality that generated an artifact or action.

Notebook.

And the person or thing photographed is the target, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to "spectacle" and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.

A college throwback.

[…] personal recollections, exactly localized, the series of which represents the course of our past existence, make up, all together, the last and largest enclosure of our memory. Essentially fugitive, they become materialized only by chance, either when an accidentally precise determination of our bodily attitude attracts them or when the very indetermination of that attitude leaves a clear field to the caprices of their manifestation. […]

Past images, reproduced exactly as they were, with all their details and even with their affective coloring, are the images of idle fancy or of dream: to act is just to induce this memory to shrink, or rather become thinned and sharpened, so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to actual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate.

A glimpse of pathos in an otherwise very dry book.

The body is an image of the mind,
which like an effulgent light scattering forth
its rays, is diffused through its members and senses,
shining through in action, discourse, appearance, movement—
even in laughter, if it is completely sincere and tinged with gravity.

Big-shot quote on the last page of a book, which I almost missed.

What is, for me, the present moment? The essence of time is that it goes by; time already gone by is the past, and we call the present the instant in which it goes by. No doubt there is a real present — a pure conception, the invisible limit which separates past from the future. But the real, concrete, live present — that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception — that presence necessarily occupies a duration. […] The physical state, then, that I call "my present", must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future.

I actually was proud of myself to get this far in this book

Psychologists who have studied infancy are well aware that our representation is at first impersonal. Only little by little, and as a result of experience, does it adopt our body as a center and become our representation. The mechanism of this process is, moreover, easy to understand. As my body moves in space, all the other images vary, while that image, my body, remains invariable. I must, therefore, make it a center, to which I refer all the other images.

An instinct purchase at a used book website

Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. All these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and, as a perfect knowledge of these laws would probably allow us to calculate and to foresee what will happen in each of these images, the future of the images must be contained in their present and will add to them nothing new.

“Very simply,” replied the Mayor. “You haven't once up to now come into contact with our real authorities. All those contacts of yours have been illusory, but because of your ignorance of the circumstances you take them to be real. And as for the telephone: in my place, as you see, though I've certainly enough to do with the authorities, there's no telephone. In inns and such places it may be of real use—as much use, you would say, as a penny in the music-box slot—but it's nothing more than that. Have you ever telephoned here? Yes? Well, then perhaps you'll understand what I say. In the Castle the telephone works beautifully of course; I've been told it's being used there all the time; that naturally speeds up the work a great deal. We can hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it too. Now, this humming and singing transmitted by our telephones is the only real and reliable thing you'll ever hear, everything else is deceptive. There's no fixed connection with the Castle, no central exchange that transmits our calls farther. When anybody calls up the Castle from here, the instruments in all the subordinate departments ring, or rather they would all ring if practically all the departments—I know it for a certainty—didn't leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a little distraction, especially in the evenings and at night, and may hang the receiver up. Then we get an answer, but an answer of course that's merely a practical joke.”

Kafka to the rescue.

[…] even in the animal it is possible that vague images of the past overflow into the present perception; […] but this past does not interest the animal enough to detach it from the fascinating present, and its recognition must be rather lived than thought. To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such effort. But even in him the past to which he returns is fugitive, ever on the point of escaping him, as though his backward turning memory were thwarted by the other, more natural memory, of which the forwawrd movement bears him on to action and to life.

A book that I started reading 4 times.

[…] the aim of Judo is to catch and demonstrate quickly the ‘living laws of motion’ occurring in not-yet-anticipated movement of the opponent's body.

A technical manual.