On sexual ambiguity, the creative process, the acceleration of knowledge, technological evolution, and its relationship to art, the future (and philosophy).
In response to the followiing:
“[Grosz’s interest in] exploring the peculiar relationships that art establishes between the living body, the forces of the universe and the creation of the future, the most abstract of questions, which, if they are abstract enough, may provide us with a new way of understanding the concrete and the lived” (Grosz 3).
“Darwin understands in terms of natural selection: these forms of sexual selection, sexual attraction, affirm the excessiveness of the body and the natural order, their capacity to bring out in each other what surprises, what is of no use but nevertheless attracts and repeals. Each affirms an overabundance of resources beyond the need for mere survival, which is to say, to the capacity of both matter and life to exchange with each other, to enter into becomings that transform each. They attest to the artistic impact of sexual attraction, the becoming-other that seduction entails… a fundamentally dynamic, awkward, mal-adaptation that enables the production of the frivolous, the unnecessary, the pleasing, the sensory for its own sake” (Grosz 7).
If I’m understanding this correctly, certain aspects of sexuality cannot be defined as, or exclusively determined by, either genetic predisposition or philosophical construct. Sexual attraction is instead, the resonance felt, physiologically, through this patterning of “sensory excess” which is already built into the natural world, and which we further (re)define by de/re/constructing ever increasing, infinitely varied, cultural (and subcultural, ad infinitum) worlds . In other words, attraction is not bound to a predetermined biological order (i.e. for the default purposes of reproduction) — it is fluid, subject to mutations and adaptations that arise from this blurring and re-patterning of our epistemological ideas and perceptions of how we are embodied and coupled with the natural and constructed cultural and social orders, and the potential sexualization of every weird thing those orders give rise to.
I can be attracted to a lot of people/things because my reality — the basis from which all possible universes can emerge — is constructed as much as it is inherited. What turns me on, then, results from the infinitely complex overlap and intersection of those worlds, mediated by the physiological response of “my body” to sensual experiences in those worlds. And this applies to art as much as it does to sex/life. The creative process gives rise to new “objects”/attractors, which give rise to new creative responses and categories of identity — “Art is the sexualization of survival or equally, sexuality is the rendering artistic, the exploration of the excessive, of nature” (Grosz 11). This process is infinitely recursive and transmutable. Evolution (biological and cultural), after all, emerges from chaos, and draws its options for diversity from chaos. The frame/ boundary > territory > object/expression, “framing/deframing”, “territorialization/deterritorialization”, “cutting”, “separating”, “unheaving”, “transforming” process, reaffirms that. — “Qualities are now loosened onto the world, no longer anchored in their ‘natural’ place but put into the play of sensations that departs from mere survival to celebrate it means and excess” (Grosz 13). In our current techno-culture, this is further multiplied at exponentially accelerating rates, through the fragmentation and dissemination of information compounded by the proliferation of technology, allowing for what McLuhan described as, “the instant and total rehearsal of all pasts and all processes, which enable us to perceive the function of such perpetual returns as one of purgation and purification, translating the entire world into a world of art”.
With regards to art’s relationship to the “creation of the future”, I am tempted to write about Kurzweil’s singularity and “law of accelerating returns” now, but I won’t — I only mention it to set myself up for what I’m sure will be a future conversation about the multiplicity of possibility that arises from our increasingly deepening relationship with machine/technology.
Other thoughts/tangents on the ontology of “becoming”, rather than “being”:
I’m thinking of Alfred Korzybski and the obscure netherworld of General Semantics (unrelated to semantics, though Korzybski is influenced by Charles Peirce), the basic idea of which is that we only come to know the world through abstractions or “semantic reactions” — limitations imposed by our nervous systems, sensory perceptions, and our linguistic structures. Language creates our reality as emphatically as biology. His main beef was with specific uses of the verb “to be”, particularly the “is” of identity, which has implicit limitations.
But perhaps a better example is Buckminster Fuller, whose ontological philosophy on “being” is also in “always becoming”, or in his words, “I seem to be a verb.” I thought of him last week too, when discussing this business of “3”s. His whole thing with synergetics (studying systems in transformation), non-Euclidean space, the tetrahedron and the 4th vector as the “energy event” / 4D, is about an always present enactment of the multiplicity of possibility:
“By tetrahedron, we mean the minimum thinkable set that would subdivide the universe and have the interconnectedness where it comes back upon itself… the tetrahedron as a basic vectorial model is the fundamental structural system of the universe. The open-ended triangular spiral as action, reaction, and resultant becomes half quantum” - Buckminster Fuller
Anyway, super tangent, but in my mind (the one that makes art), this is a very useful model for thinking about how things actually behave, and for breaking away from the static convention of the cartesian coordinate system (and all other flatten trinity systems).