Missing pieces

Tempo was a real coup — by all appearances the greatest act of technical hang gliding I’ve been able to pull off under all these (cognitive, time-budget, loss of single-minded focus and major themes) constraints. Diegesis was an still is an interesting concept; but isn’t it in some kind of tradition from Plato’s cave onto Baudrillard and beyond? Of course, diegesis manages to satisfy quite a few of my secret axiomata: it’s non-essentialistic, takes place in a membrane-like surface (rather than in the cave or in the grand dehors, and appeals directly to a dizzying cloud of technical tools. That these tools are readily recognizable by almost anyone in touch with mass culture is a bonus: theory’s scope of communicability surely needs improvements.

At one point, and not at all in the same vein, the overloaded Daseinwolke that writes asemic horizon came up with a set of notions it liked to shkrelishly call physics. I had actually been working on a note-taking/mind-mapping app (really for personal uses) that arranged information in freeform graphs (as far as “physics” goes, really best identified as 1-simplicial complexes that admit a Hodge theory). This is a typical case of “once unseen, can’t be unseen”: the mysteries of math are such that boundary operators can be identified in graphs with the “incidence matrices” that show up in pipe flow/Kirchoff’s law problems; and, with some more “Hodge star” trickery I won’t pretend to understand, the matrix Laplacian L=I^TI corresponds to the Laplacian-as-in-sum-of-second-derivatives seen in potential theory. Then you can, given a graph that connects ideas, impose a graph-statistical “mass” concept and compute an “energy” function as simply as solving Lϕ=m. The bratty appellation of physics comes from the many actual physical problems (Gaussian gravity included) that are stated as Laplacian PDEs. Look, ma, technical stuff.

“Physics” actually worked — I use my own mind-mapping app, it’s really neat-o — but the mess of words that is asemic horizon jargon induced me to believe it a spatial counterpart to tempo — equally distributed, acentered (energy computations effectively destroying any semantics of global-ness in the use of graph statistics for “mass”), breakable in pieces. But it wasn’t. The relevant texts were retired as soon as I realized it — they were somewhat dreary with numerical examples and lacking in verve, anyway — and I’ve been acting like it didn’t happen at all since then. I mean, how many blind alleys is one supposed to meet while developing theory?

But as the anomie-fog of theory since the loss of Jairwave settles in, the wordmeaningcrash in “physics” becomes symptomatic of a lack — an incompleteness to the notion of clicky async tempo. Theory tells us that tempo clicks at an uneven discretized pace; that tempo at different sites also clicks to the beat of their own drums. The Situation is, therefore, identified the polyrhythmic pattern of clicking. Systemic constraints shaped like feedback signals weave their way through this chaotic symphony — death and sex themselves flowing as carried by packets of tempo, mounted on temporalities in such a way to giving way to the illusion of global time.

There’s more to this that has never been said: there must be a correlation between value systems and the sensitivity of this temps-supposé-global (found in your computer clock on the edge of your screen) to specific local temporalities. This is why the drums of war beat so loud, and why the game of “where were you when…” can’t be played with the death of Lisa “Left-eye” Lopez from commercial pop group “TLC”. The simple fact that people in serious low-level disagreement relate their temporalities to this ambient illusion tells us something empirical about axiology. In General Axiology we all know what’s going on

II.

I’ve been haunted lately by the word ambit. Etymologically it has to do with bodily movement, walking around, ambulating. It’s also a cousin word to “ambient”; both reach back to ambio — which does mean “going around”, but with particular tactical purpose: to walk around — to encircle. In current business parlance “ambit” means something similar to “scope”. The latter belong to the gaze (to scopophilia, not to ambulophilia); clearly some nuance is lost. Indeed, the ambit is as much related to marketing metrics as it is to mental partitions of the territory. Yes, yeeees, the incel scope and the Chad ambit, that’s how you do it.

There’s an implicit “spatiality” to tempo — but note the word, it’s not really there; at best it can be computed like we compute energy from mass; there’s also a temporality to the ambit (a matter of tactics before anything else), which is rather less (if at all) implicit. The ambit is real insofar it’s seen (scenarized as, etc.) as an implementation of tempo. The implicit spatiality of tempo is due to its polyphony: two things that click in unison must be the same. The polyphony is empirical evidence that at least two distinct things must exist; but to evince this distinction a strategic plan must be set in place. The fact that we perceive distinct things merely indicates that God or Natural Selection (or some joint-venture thereof) has already traced out the tactics of the ambit. Your pervert’s eyes encircle the world in saccades and circle around on body parts: yes, even scopes emerge from their ambit.

III.

We’ve seen that ambit, is at heart, a tactical notion. Can it ever “belong” to theory? Can we place ambit in our scopes? This problem catches me off guard. It’s likely what all the Lacan stuff had been building up to: theory can handle its scopic issues by conceptualizing them (scenarios, physique du role and so on), but the shortcomings of its ambit are not straightforward at all. If ambit is admitted into the diegesis of theory (in this mess of words you’re reading right now), will asemic-horizon.com’s traffic statistics come into play? If, in my capacity as a theory-maker, I have been a subpar tactician, does this put theory in question?

We’ve also seen that correlations in how the effect of temporality (not tempo, but the illusion that we ambulate in shared time) evince axiologies at degrees higher than our perceived value systems. This, too, has to do with the tactical dimension, and with the encircling motion that erects conceptual frameworks rather than declaring them. This is why theory, distanced as it is from any particular issue, often seems to bear on politics: there’s more than loose threads linking axiologies, diegesis, tempo to the large ambits of politics and ideology. Indeed, it often circles around them by deliberating on ambient conditions — quability conditions for the largest possible ambits.

This having become clear, it does feel that the credibility of theory becomes somewhat contingent on its own tactical success.