holding/s:
working notes on consciousness and art (2005)
by Igor Santizo

“To those who believe that to have is a most natural category of human existence it may come as a surprise to learn that many languages have no word for ‘to have’. [… It evolves] in connection with the development of private property, while it is absent in societies with predominantly functional property, that is, possession for use activity.”
_Eric Fromm, To Have or to Be? p.10

“Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.”
_Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, p.61

Manifold

At once the universe of form is a relative process of emergence and change: an unfurling from none, a sustaining of forms, a death-decay and a rebirth of the life-stuff once again. Such ontological phenomena or life-process, is a kind of a cosmic simmering where the manifold of reality through its intelligence is: unfolding whole.

The universe on micro and macro dimensions is compelled to its patterning, emerging and dissolving. This is also the case on the human scale, experience is intrinsically subject to these temporal processes: physical reality, the body and sense perception have this dynamic signature within them. The body is animated in its ruminations and movements; while perceptions, are also life, in their direction and wavering. However, it is through culture or ultimately via our methods of attention or Consciousness, that we may find meaning in or realize different aspects of the sputtering totality.

Thinking of this whole patterned expression and drive I am reminded of Kazuo Shiraga’s 1955 action piece: ‘Doro ni idomu’ (challenging the mud). The documentation shows, from above, the artist contorting in and remodeling a heap of mud with his immersed body.

This Japanese-expressionist action shows a full engagement, as a grappling and wrestling of body and form, where the subject and object conjoin in a dynamic hold. This hold and writhing, abstractly suggests to me: the human as the intersection of manifest form and formlessness itself in self-enveloping. With this illustration in mind I am led to the questions motivating this writing:

How does ideology and culture act as a bridge or influence our hold onto form and formlessness; that is how does the ideal relate to the material? And further still, can embracing the flux and dissolution of form (impermanence and death), as Eastern philosophy suggests, allow for us a renewed view of self and contemporary culture?

No holds barred

On the socio-cultural dimension there is a kin type of multiple process, part of this larger phenomenal reality. This global impetus is that of the capitalist universe.

Here perhaps the photo-work of artist Andreas Gursky might serve as a reflective illustration of the mass cultural process. His photo images of global capitalism show the apogee of a ‘material’ culture by framing density and complexity through high resolution. The images and framed perspectives have a vertiginous quality that reveals the form and patterning of economic structures and forces. How are these collective processes subset of the larger simmering I am alluding to? (It is interesting to foot-note how these images of systems suggest and verge on the sublime.) The mechanism of capitalism, acts to continually reproduce its way of seeing and relating onto the world. The mechanics of this narrative, with us playing various part-roles, aims to reduce and control at any cost all phenomena to: one of capturable ‘things’. Therefore in its inclusion, the world and subjectivity are ranked as merchandise that is in extremis: a ‘materialist reduction’. This view values a ‘bottom line’ universe that I see as an incomplete ossification and dehumanizing.

Cultural capital, or ideas and experiences, play an interesting dimension and counterpoint to this view because they form part of an experiencing self and selves. Human necessity and even manufactured desire are the personal and collective impulses that are exploited for the experience of consumerism, for subjects. Consequently the requirements of the market by necessity pivot on a collection of inner dimensions, on the soft stuff of bodies and minds.

It is Being itself; that is an enlivened nature, culture and awareness that qualitatively expand and complement any market beyond a “flat” and mere objecthood.

Amidst the world flux, inner features like: feelings, the complex of ideas, the psyche and spiritual impulses, exist and function as phenomenological layers that exist beyond the inertia of a simplistic materiality and ethic. Due to this territory pivoting on an inner liminal realm, these dimensions can be located as: meta-forms.

For reductive materialism, such experiences and culture push and challenge the categorical boundaries of mind/matter. This soft and ephemeral territory spills and requires a negotiation that is one of capitalism’s uncertain grips.

If a thought is a thing

Ideas experienced, that is mind with body as ground, posses an ungraspable quality which is ethereal. Today, I find something still of interest in the example of 1960’s conceptual art. Its desire was to ‘dematerialize’ the object through immaterial ideas as a counter-capital force. In part a project of locating what cannot be capitalistically bound.

However with this early conceptual art, a very adaptable cooptation process as well as trends and time itself, in part made the project inept and expired. This was evidenced when documentation necessarily became an object and the ephemeral was gotten-hold-of as: subtle-capital.

This note is made while recognizing that contemporary market economies in their sophistication are successful on framing and capturing all kinds of subtleties. This is what makes the mechanism so effective. Yet to capture and commodify the subtle implies a hold, and an abstract one at that. There are plenty of examples to show this at work: knowledge realms, information, ideologies, fantasies, stories and mythologies are all content that has been packaged and sold to consumers as objects and experiences. In turn the question needs asking:

How is the drive towards the subtle and immaterial characterized vis a vis capitalist desires for fixity? And considering this machine’s vast appetite for commodification, what are possible limits or meta-figurations that may occur from integrating the ephemeral and by extension consciousness today? As an artist I have asked myself: how is the dematerialization project still of value? While globally on an ethical front, if ideas and ultimately our sentience ride this elusive line: how is our intrinsic condition capitalistically bound or unattainably not?

Slippage

By first recognizing that phenomenal reality, and mercantilism as subset, have an intrinsic patterning that is subject to natural as well as social processes; it is by looking at their ephemerality, limits and ends thereafter, that we may value their presence anew. If a variation on the aphorism may still serve: can you know what you have before it’s gone? A loss or a slippery object is a challenge to capitalist fixity and value.

In the market (here simply put), it is through the phases of: production, sale and use value, that material goods are validated and of any worth. Partly, it is through this perpetuation of the consumption cycle that the capitalistic machine intends to subsist. (Although very questionably so, since it has been widely shown, that current economic ethics are neither: sustainable nor environmentally sound.) Beyond use though, it is via an on-setting devaluation process that goods (ideas or things) ultimately reveal the must of their inevitable impermanence. Whether resulting from functional use, wear and tear, built-in obsolescence or social trends, it is culture and time itself that eventually dematerialize the object. Phenomenologically, the procession of time is made possible by the slipperiness of form and space, as change in the world. It is just so, that time will also reveal our own conditional impermanence. The hold of matter and self are under the constant manner of Death.

Consequently, could a personal recognition of culture and consciousness faced before death, change the relationship to capitalism? Flux, formlessness and impermanence are made sense of by our buffers and ideas about the world and its finitude. It is this inner map that consciously or unconsciously orients us variously both: to hold or to let go.

How is materialism engendered by death? To consider and digest death may indeed be a radical stimulus towards value while exposing what really matters to one. Beside responses that vary on fatalism and miopic base-survivalism (and this is key), a possible dimension to emerge is the genuine human need for deeper significance and the heart of qualitative priorities. Quantitative achievements alone do not supply for a whole-person’s gratification (something not always obvious), much less that of cultural health. Therefore, the drive for meaningfulness can indeed emerge, from the ‘soft’ inner and existential core when a genuine memento mori is reaped. No?

Huge sale! everything must go!

This short metaphysical consideration on commerce points to a ‘whole’ perspective, where objecthood, subjecthood and sentience are under the sway and signature of a greater integrated Whole.

At a fundamental phenomenal level, the manifest world of both gross and subtle forms reveals the amazing pliability of life, culture and inner states. (ie.: simmering analogy.) This multiplex process that is All, with its persistent emergence, change, dissolution and rebirth, can be a matrix for the congruent possibility of its subset: capital forms. (what is sustainability then?)

Yet still, there can be an attitude while existing amidst the buzzing world, where value-creative responses to our ceasing and our time-boundedness define our Prescence. Death encourages a different way to be/hold. The implications for objecthood & culture that I suggest are not the impossible graspings of a complete dematerialization or deculturation, because that would betray our embodiment and the necessary facts of worldliness, but instead a hold without the hubris of tight-assed fixity or the over-determined attachment to Mammon. I am interested in the immaterial not as antithesis to the material but as another simultaneous dimension with it. This lighter hold does not eliminate nor overemphasize the material, but would as Ken Wilber states: “include and transcend”, it via a deep recognition of human quality and value. This view is intrinsically part of a Consciousness project that in its drive and outlook acts expansively upon reductive-materialisms, so that cultures, relationships and inner spheres all make up the qualitative figure(s) balancing the books whole.

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Igor Santizo can be reached at :

lucidprojects [at] gmail [dot] com

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ART by Igor Santizo

Alchemy Set - ink drawings with respect to the ancient transformative art

Putter - found-object multiples, material ideas

Private Stock - treasured personal collection of BMO ordinateur SWC

ART by Igor Santizo

TEXT by Igor Santizo

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Igor Santizo 2007 - Photo Jackie Connelly; Effects Soren Evecter