Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A Key to the Tractations

My ongoing series of "tractations" follow a very simple model. They articulate a poetical and philosophical moment, centered, implicitly or explicitly on "the image" or "the body", which are ultimately the same thing since an image is a sensor-motor complex [installed in the very fibers of experience]. A "tractation", then, attempts to trace this body-image towards the world (through belief, intuition, and science) at one end and history (through desire, institution, and politics) at the other, with a terseness that is supposed to evoke Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (it is supposed to be the content of a Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus or Logico-Patheticus).

But I suppose all that is obvious. I just wanted to note that in some tractations (those with an odd number of lines) there's a line in the middle that marks the body, and in others (those with an even number of lines) the role of the body is left implicit.

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