02/10/2018
Consciousness is a collective problem
Part 2 – On the reintroduction of watching
works by
Martin Vesely
opening: 05.10.2018 / 18:00
06.10. - 16.11.2018
The principle.
A
Watching creates foundations and is the premise for any further, subsequent modelling.
Form is a process-linked phenomenon in relation to production (technology).
Forming corresponds to our peculiar way of grasping the perceptible as a world and describing it in models.
Natural and cultural.
The natural fun of the underlying discovery precedes the modelling.
For discovery and comprehension – and thus the ability to make something comprehensible, by means of models, perhaps even of ordering, of relegating, grouping, discarding, at very least of examining and comparing – are inherent in man in the way that this discovery from time to time is passed on with the reproduction of the species, without every new generation having to start again virtually from scratch. (Precisely because the models exist. They are intergenerational and being constantly updated, that is, they are current; which says nothing about their qualitative variability.)
This is one typical motivation of human beings to start the day.
The other is fear. Discovery is fun (biochemically).
In a conversation recently overheard between two individuals of the same species, it was said that dogs could be left alone when you go on holiday because they have no sense of time, or something to that effect. (This meant that a dog was as happy about the return of its master after ten days absence as after three.)
But how can another individual of the same species that knows it has no sense of time, that is, no sense for the perception of time, verify whether another species (dog) has such a thing, especially since he himself (a human being) knows that he cannot know what other members of the same species, that of human beings, are then talking about?*
Evolution! Post-human.
Development of culture is also possible unaffiliated, beyond primary material formation (techique) and detached from experience (origin).
That is perplexing. But imaginable. A reciprocally conditioning relationship between originality and error; perhaps as necessary as any other error with the claim to correctability (“... ideas do not necessarily develop a real relationship to the world [at most the relationship to other ideas and ideological constructions]; they are therefore usually more daring and more generous [...]; the beat of their wings is bold, visionary. If they disagree with the facts, all the worse for the facts. It is precisely this ignorance, however, that bumps into ideas, over whose head the Damocles sword of strict verification in relation to the world does not incessantly hang, in the most treacherous form of delusion, to wit the uncritical conviction that only what is self-sufficient is best suited to the world.”)**
Or
An albatross will almost certainly perish if it breaks its legs; but when it flies, it is technological perfection.
Evolution here means that, in spite of its special ability for gliding and virtuoso manoeuvres, it must try to survive.
Is watching a necessity? What goal would it have? Watching is hardly a process? Something is going on, is running, developing; without anyone being needed?
Although someone must be there who watches, watching is not bound to his valuation. Watching means not valuating. In fact, you can do either one or the other. Not both. Although in terms of experience every generation does not need to start from scratch, the experience of watching is always only that of your own watching.
This is not so much about that every experience which you have gone through yourself is better understood than that which is only the traditional and accepted, confirmed second or third hand, by hearsay. But rather that the state of watching, which leaves us still in the dark as to what is to be done, could be done, furnishes no theoretical knowledge.
Watching is pure uncertainty; for which, however, there are or will be some sort of resonances in the consciousness (stable connections of nerve cells in the brain). This imprint is an individual stamp that each individual himself impresses (on the basis of the singular presuppositions and possibilities; it comes to a significance of an experienceable watching and subsequently to an identity).
The uncertainty of watching evokes “I am” as the congruence of “I am the one who watches” and “what is watched” as reality (which thus becomes reality per se); as a state of mind that seems to be much older than the epoch of the accomplishment of understanding, of man as the rational being endowed with “free will” as a consequence of this rationality.
The systematic production of reality as a representation of accomplished understanding and valuations (of experience, cause and effect) bears dogmatic, religious traits.
Practically speaking, watching is the freer state, the pragmatically freest state of consciousness, from which nothing need follow. You pause before taking any steps, forgetting thereby that you will take some step. Watching is the respect you pay to the defectiveness of your own machine.
The surrounding models (not diseases of civilization but rather errors of civilization or originalities of civilization) cradle us in the light of the security of a won world through civilizational means, which is irrevocable. There is hardly any incentive to watch here. And a necessity beyond this can be discovered only outside these comfort zones.
They are collective formulas of acclamation. The collective catch 22 – “the smarter, the dumber: *** – is a consequence of the individual lack of watching. Only the individual can watch, only the individual can still step aside.
Now, the understanding moves, moves us, only in a meaningful manner (and according to the requirements of necessities: safely) within models based on sensory experiences.
Religion is rather a “self-help group” that culturally dreads the fun of discovery as it does (and because of) the frustration of disappointment that inevitably goes hand in hand with it. All modelling is an attempt. Instruction, that is, the recognizing of something better, is a procedural necessity in relation to technique.
(Watching alone holds us under the spell of that which the powerless universality of something still new, and which for the time being can only be watched, imposes on us. It is constantly watched “anew.“)
Religion always has a specifically lower tolerance of frustration than do other possible simultaneous cultural models surrounding it (as to the state of the world).
Conclusion: the dominant world models are predominantly religious (in the literal sense: the pedantic observance of commandments; from the experience exPerior comes the decree, the command imPerio) and the world of intellectual descriptions (decisions, classifications and principles such as cause and effect) is not art. It is language; more precisely: writing.
B
God and time are cultural accomplishments. Perhaps not the earliest, but very early attempts to help the still young loops of conscious being (to help them help themselves).
Watching is a self-experiment, whose result is heuristic and is determined only afterwards.
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* It “helps” in its dealings with time that a model has specific religious traits. The model of time is also not originally bound up in human beings with the senses. Nobody “has” a sense of time. Time can only be “translated” into a quantity of watchings of other and perceptible events. A cultural accomplishment.
** Josef Muhovic, “Über das Geistige in der Kunst – zum zweiten Mal“ (“On the spiritual in art – for the second time”), LIT 2010
*** W. Gombrowicz
