Zigmatics

Whenever we try to stake and delimit the everyday against specialized and less-everyday spheres, difficulties arise. If we take the everyday merely as “whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized activities,” as Henri Lefebvre once phrased it, nothing’s left but air and ashes. Anything, any activity, can be isolated unto itself, studied, made into a specialized field or discipline. The science of untangling electrical cords. The phenomenology of sneezing. The history of hailing taxis and rickshaws.

Likewise, even within the airtightest specialized activities, the everyday persists, as Debord notes in “Perspectives de modifications conscientes dans la vie quotidienne.” There is a lived time that runs through doing number theory; even through sleeping.

Zigmatic axiom: you cannot strictly or successfully delimit the quotidian from the unquotidian. Fortunately, you also should not delimit the quotidian from the unquotidian. The isolation never needs to happen. The everyday— the transformative everyday, the zigmatic everyday— is precisely the kind of hectic, brainstormy totality that overwhelms this delimitation.

Not a totality that circumscribes everything, but the lived totalization in which the quotidian and the unquotidian nourish and transform each another episodically. A micro-totality. This is key concept number three and four in zigmatic studies. The everyday is never the bare everyday. The just everyday. In the same way that Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, warns us about trying to isolate the immediate, we have to begin in media res and work towards a greater unity of sorts. Otherwise, what is there? On the left, icy and isolated discipline without import or vitality, without the taste of blood and salt; forms of espace and escapism. And on the right, a daily life that just floats along the given contours of its time and space; unbent, unguided, and unilluminated by any otherly disciplines.

One thing that distinguishes the second, free-wheeling sense of totality from the first and circumscribing totality, is our emphasis on time— on lived time, a mode in which, as Debord notes, “the present dominates the past;” dominates, or better said, sublates the past. This, he adds, puts a new spin on Lefebvre’s “critique of everyday life,” as critique by everyday life; when finally the once “colonized” everyday turns the tables and plunders the specialized. Revenge. The everyday as a totality then becomes a field or table in which everything— every science, specialty, discipline, desire, belief, and action— promiscuously commingles in space and time. Zigmatics works in lived time with what appears in our lives.

This lays out one of the principle instincts or reflexes of the zigmatist: swiping the methods, metaphors, vocabularies, dynamics, shapes, and histories of “specialized activities” and putting them into practice in shaping the medium of experience. Everything is plundered; poetics/literature, philosophy, linguistics, auto repair, empirical science, history, visual art, music, pick-up artistry, myth, theology, technology, politics, business, gardening, olympic sport, unolympic sport— the point being also that no master discipline can assume a kingly or queenly position— zigmatics least of all.

Zigmatics is always, as Lefebvre would tell us, a dialectic between the quotidian and the specialized, in which the everyday is given equal— or in our case, greater— weight.

Here’s the hitch: we zigmatists are the weirdos. And zigmatics is not a way of living that makes for smooth relations and easy afternoons. Its hyper-experimentalism and “transcendental narcissism” will force  the majority of its real practitioners to end up living near but outside the city limits— or roaming the streets unable to concede to “institutional realism.”

A bit more on weirdo methodology; on zigmatics as a pseudo-science of the concrete. In order to share ideas, we need some fixity of vocabulary: among a bunch of highly idiosyncratic twilight language-users, communication suffers. In non-zigmatic philosophy, this synchronization of vocabulary employs common abstractions: time, space, truth, beauty, justice, normativity, transcendental, and, as bywords, the names of other philosophers. All well and good, but what zigmatics proposes is to make the topics, the topoi, of ideating common phenomena, things, people, situations, events— using the considerable overlap of human experience and praxes as the beginning and the shared vocabulary. This was the programme of the Philosophical Research Group; to start off from housepets, NASCAR, and cellphones and revolve around those topics— not as mere instantiations of some higher plane of thinking, but allowing them to engage with thought in their own micrototal complexity. So that after hours of ideating about housepets, it would change our ways of “doing and making and thinking” with regards to housepets— or things “like them.”

To make “life-relevance” the cardinal criterion means, in some ways, to take aim at what appears before us most in the zigfield, in time and space, in experience— or what could appear before us soon— since anything that life gives us can be made to mean. No vocabulary is given ultimate priority. This rhymes nicely with what Levi-Strauss says of bricolage in La Pensée Sauvage: “The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purposes of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules  of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say  with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogenous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”(p.17). When we read this, we’re supposed to be imagining a people of Tyukyu archipelago or something, but really, these conditions of finitude, heterogeneity, contingency, haphazard stock are, broadly speaking, the conditions of all embodied humans engaged in projects and obsessions.

The zigmatic bricoleur— versus the philosophical engineer— then ideally chooses the things that already matter for them as starting points and works from there; not by wholly prioritizing or fetishizing the concrete or particular, but by allowing ideas, things, events, people, feelings, and everything mix freely and equally— without a holy orientation; since none of them are any simpler, stronger, or weightier than the others. Zigmatics generates very sharp things from the complexity of this interplay of all things and operatively chooses to aim its energies at everyday life; it’s not for everybody. Its bricolage does not try to  circumscribe or retain forever, but rather works according to a principled essayism; and is a form of training rather than a kind of acquisition. So instead of a speculative “anything contains everything” we get a “we can always do something with anything.”

Documentation can compromise, in some ways, what Bakhtin called the “once-occurrent event of Being.”  It alters our sense of once-occurrence. I won’t say pervert— makes perversion sound like a bad thing. For better or worse, it can however flatten, rigidify, overly align and distort the Bold Moment; handing over the timespan, blip, and slippery minutes to something outside of it that is too fixed; to an audience that is not as here, in the complexity of the circumstance, able to sweat and fully share in the loss, wager, and gain. And risk— having a stake in things— is essential.

At the same time, we know that record, capture, and documentation can greatly aid in our meaning-making. Necessary for surmisal, reflection, extrapolation, and the whole poetics of being. Even the imagined presumption of infinite repetition gives our silliest actions a weightiness. Just think of the Eternal Return. We can work ourselves into a programme of invisibility, and chase after a form of bare life— this is one possible programme— but for me, it goes against my striving for what D.T. Suzuki called the “unification of expression and experience.” That is, as meaning-making, as Life-Narrativizing, as expressive experience, I’m after something dialogical, communicative, and memorial— even if only unto the Lord, as it were. Just as when Pierre Schaeffer says of music that it is “made to be heard,” zigmatics is for me greatly communicative.

Photography is the classic case. While photography is very often transformative— in aiding and supplementing the eye, in bending social space around it, in desire-production, meaning-making, metaphorizing life-as-tableaux/vision-as-frame— some moments will be over-reduced by the camera. We often want them reduced, to trim the excess circumstance from the final image. But even unintentionally, something escapes— no, most of it escapes.

The unseen, the uncapturable— not in a metaphysical sense but in a common sense— are demoted for their inability to enter the symbolic economy. Likewise, when the photographic dynamic becomes overly dominant, we clearly see how the camera captures, not its object, but the scenario of photography itself. And the non-photographic moment escapes. Can we live with the unlasting? With the once-occurrent? What is the best way to approach Record and Memory?  To spy, even on ourselves.

One method would be the model of fieldwork and fieldnotes, in anthropology. Only fieldwork in the “field” of everyday life, where all the field/object/participant/observer distinctions have caved in on one another in an interesting way. Ideally, we could avoid the indulgences of the “confessional” mode in two ways. One, by a partial dissolving of the subject into the field, but partially enough so that the subject/observer/participant is not, by itself, the object. Two, by a constant struggle towards a truthfulness and an incorporation of other perspectives, where possible. Fieldwork even suggests an aesthetic— an aesthetic in which the slippage between record and event is obvious, and finality is the least of our worries.

This also blends in, in weird ways, with a conception of the sublime. The sublime that escapes or overwhelms representation, as in Kant and others. There is a sublime to the complexity of circumstance. There’s a zigmatic sublime: sublimity as the momentary grasp of infinite possibility. Zigmatics cannot stalk and freeze-dry the moment; it can only act as a kind of training; a way of learning to lyricize.

Domain and range: mathematical  terms that mark a useful distinction here. The quotidian is used and useful in both ways. The before and the after. As found, the everyday— even in its lowliest form— makes for a domain. The phenomenologically presupposed. The lifeworld. The background. The sociological everyday. The little things. What is done. What’s around us. We find the range by envisioning and enacting the possible; by what Lefebvre calls a process of transduction. Is there a measurable, or at least meaningful, distance between the domain and range? That’s the key. There are strategies. We call this— this dialectical combo of domain and range— the zigfield. This delimits our field and frame.

Ben Highmore points out the strategy of making-strange— or more accurately the revelation of the alltäglich already-strangeness— in weird-makers like Freud and the Surrealists. In this, strange-making is a perceptual shift. A seeing of the sleeping weirdness. If I want it to be more— more than perceptual defamiliarization, or a kind of goggles— it must impose on something more common; interrupt. Ideally, we want both. Seen and made. The thing hinges on the marvelous as the unknown or the uncommon. For me, there is in the quotidian a sense of something not necessarily public, but accessible and residual. Something that can be shared among friends.

To insist on the Life-Narrative is to borrow from literature, rhetoric, and myth-making— from the more literal senses of narrative-writing— in order to shape experience; not for retrospective effect, but as it happens or will happen in the first place— and for the same reasons that narrative are nourishing and meaningful in the first place. Put another way: if meaning— the semiological— does not belong solely to language, how are to we borrow meaning-making and meaning-shaping devices from language, from poetics, for crafting the Life-Narrative; for creating things and events?

Turn first to the classics: to Aristotle’s Poetics, to Longinus, to any book on rhetorical tropes, to contemporary pop how-tos on mystery writing— how do I create suspense or marvel or zest or whatever within experience— is this not as essential in daily life as in our fictions? The weekend should be approached like a first novel. The attempt to surpass fiction.

However, in the turn from transcendental to immanent meaning, something changes from the classics to now: what is called in rhetoric, inventio: the subject matter. As Rancière tells me, in the classical narrative— or representative “mimetic regime”— the inventio necessarily dictated the dispositio (the arrangement of actions) as well as the elocutio (the ornamentation, the trope, and so forth). Rancière goes on to tell us that in the aesthetic regime— or what other might call the rise of modernism— the dictates of inventio dissolve. Any inventio is possible in any style or arrangement. The old order is shattered and emphasis shifts to dispositio and, more noticeably, toward elocutio. The zigmatic concern is how we might— we zigmatists— recover the weight of actions, broadly conceived, in the Aristotelian sense, without a return to its attendant order— only in lived rather than written narratives— precisely because it is lived rather recalled or documented.

Zigmatics handles the Life-Narrative in smaller chunks; what De Certeau had even called micronarratives. That is, not over a Life-Span, but over minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Narrativizing on a scale that is readily susceptible to sudden human agency— or best, moments in which boredom and meaninglessness are prevalent and easy to overturn by narrativizing… At the gas station, waiting for the tank to fill… An hour free between classes… Time susceptible to lifegames and microplans.

At this level, actions and their meanings can be shaped using rhetorical tropes. Epizeuxis. Aposiopesis. Metanoia. These can describe actions and objects rather than just turns of language; language is a form of action as well.

With the Life-Narrative, there is a strange merging of the classical Aristotelian model with the modernist model. The Aristotelian model of poetics or narrative is based or structured upon the idea of actions; configurations of action. The modernist model, or more specifically what Rancière would call the “aesthetic regime,”  is based upon the expressivities of the author, for example in Flaubert’s “absolute way of seeing things,” or in a primacy of style, for instance. In the Life-Narrative, the difference between the authoring and the action has collapsed, or greatly blurred. The Life-Narrative has no distinction between the author’s doing and the protagonist’s doing.