A RESPONSE TO ARISTOTLE’S TECHNÊ: OF POETICS AS THE GENERIC MODEL OF ALL ARTIFICIAL

C. BAIN

i’m in a VR headset moving through animated constellations. I look down at my body and it isn’t there. Losing you quickly became a physical problem. Necrotic growth, the living tissue fighting blindly against the part that’s died. i’m being dramatic. If we understand tragedy, as Kolozova via Aristotle frames it, not as a catharsis of feelings, but as a series of inevitabilities, technology, automata, we understand extremes of feeling (which also constitute the highest form of art) as adjacent to computational language: inevitable. The moment when things had to be this way initiated when?

I take off the headset and you’re walking across the other end of the hall, your shoulders already turning away, a performance of not having seen me, a technique of not having seen me, my stomach lurching like a kicked dog. i look on google maps for a body of water, to get away from you, because you want me to get away from you, but there’s nowhere for me, really, to go.

i drive to the lake to cry and it’s horrible. A man-made water feature in a shopping center. Kolozova explains the need for Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a resistance to philosophy’s attempts to make the real into a thought that becomes a unified fabric enclosing what it represents, interchangeable with the thing itself. This is the action of philosophy; setting up dollhouse models of the real, claiming the real’s reproducibility. Families feeding geese. Geese puffing and hissing at each other. There is a kind of bridge or deck built over the artificial lake, brown plastic molded to look like woodgrain. Smooth jazz pumps through a series of speakers sticking out of the deck’s supports, like hold music. The vegetation, the turtles; they are all, technically, real, but so aggressively engineered through human vision that it does not seem to matter anymore. There are a few tall, triangular structures coming out of the water that i guess are art, and are supposed to make one think of ships, as well as a cast metal sculpture representing a fleet of gulls in flight. Tragedy as structure would mean that the unthinkable is also immanence, that i created this through my terror of it. i’m deflating. White light oozing out of my abdomen, the fake petrochemical wood absorbing it like a leech. Anywhere you sit to look at the water, you also see the traffic. Of course i destroyed the relation that was most meaningful to me. Of course a child provokes a goose and the father needs to intervene. Of course there are both signs that interdict against feeding geese and dispensers of “fish food,” shaped like cheerios that the geese snuffle after in the water. Pain cascades up from my coccyx. Reality created through terror, or prohibition, as certainly as it’s created through any positive reasoning. It was of course the fact that i needed to talk to you that made it impossible for you to talk to me. Structural, unreasoning. Do i mean to call it unreasoning, because it’s unpersuadable, unspeakable, or is that reason at it’s truest, its most machinic, that you’re already gone? On google maps the lake has many positive reviews.