Phōtagōgia and the Dimensions of Attention

Whereas, in the empty space of attention, light follows its own law, contemporaneity is governed by an economy of attention in which informational light, structured by the logistics of perception, conditions consciousness in a spectacle of algorithmic mediation. Attention, as the site of the possibility of a clearing in which illumination appears of its own accord, is a space of vulnerability. Whereas phōtagōgia cultivated an open, receptive state of attention—precisely because it can be opened dimensionally—attention can also be flattened into a mono-dimensionality devoid of resonant interiority. 

The human, as filter and cave—as world splitter—mediates light at the interface of attention. The light that we mediate is dual-aspect: mental and physical, hence its pharmakological character both to blind and to reveal. The mesmeric screenification of perception and the large-scale optics that militarize the play of light foreclose light’s ontology, necessitating a return to the methods of phōtagōgia—not a redoubling of the programmatics of the digital spectacle. This return would be an intuitive ‘tuning’—beyond the geometrization of perspective, it would gesture toward an embodied, resonant encounter with luminosity in the open space of attention—one that dimensionalizes not according to the constraints of space-time, but toward that prior non-dual non-space at the heart of the psycho-physical.

Infinitising Space

At the origin of cosmology, Anaximander describes the earth suspended in a nothingness. This geometric inscription of a sphere in a void—this originary articulation of a luminous life-world suspended in a boundless abyss—is the ‘boundary giving boundary’ by which origin and end are drawn together: temporality is articulated against an absolute horizon in which it is eclipsed. 

Hegel, writing on Anaximander, affirms that the infinite abyss is thereby always-already the negative principle on which any articulation of difference is first posited. Bracketing history at both ends, the arche-inscription that enframes all subsequently differentiated space-time is articulated first against a horizon that is void—an “abyssal cosmology”, whereby finite differentiation is predicated on a boundless abyss, which thus implicates finitude as always-already effaced—because the abyss is the negation of that very conceptuality by which the threshold of the horizon is first articulated.

This tragic vision thus posits a “negative horizon” that is the unground of any and all inscription and therefore any memorialisation on which narrative identity may be poised. Thus the optico-geometric boundary of the perspectival cosmos—both the circle of origins and the entire program of cosmotechnics that follows—delimits the threshold of luminosity against this horizon of darkness. 

“In the firmament that we observe at night, the stars shine brightly, surrounded by a thick darkness. Since the number of galaxies and luminous bodies in the universe is almost infinite, the darkness we see in the sky is something that, according to scientists, demands an explanation […] the explanation that contemporary astrophysics gives for this darkness [is that] in an expanding universe, the most remote galaxies move away from us at a speed so great that their light is never able to reach us. What we perceive as the darkness of the heavens is this light […] moving away from us at a velocity greater than the speed of light.” (Agamben)

But what does it mean that this context in which being is suspended (in the bubble of a cosmotechnical life-world) consists, for consciousness, in relation to the limit-threshold of light-time? 

The cosmological horizon—being the horizon articulated by the totality of illumination that is the knowledge of space-time in so far as it is presented to consciousness—is demarcated in relation to the limits of informational transmission (light-speed). The instrumental inscriptions performed by cosmotechnical apparatuses thereby determine a logosphere qua light-time that is suspended within a boundless non-conceptuality that consists beyond this limit; in the indeterminacy of that of which consciousness knows no-thing. 

The limit-horizon therefore has two sides that are modulated through a kind of pharmakological flux, which is the perspectival work of cosmotechnical inscription (a play of limits; a play of the void): a relative, interior conceptual field of space-time and an absolute exterior, which negates conceptuality as such; an interior probability field and an exterior that maintains as the ‘beyond’ of the play of the determinate and indeterminate.

Our relation to this horizon, which is brought to bear by the pharmakological play of limits, infinitely calls logos into question because in knowing the universe we gaze towards that of which we know nothing. Penetrating every act of instrumentation as its unground and imminent prior (the prior of finite inscription; the immeasurability implied by any measure; the boundless field in which entities both arise and die back down) implies a surplus infinity that permeates the very core of matter. Hence why totality and separation appear equally phantasmic: meaning arises out of a contradictory relationship between presence and absence: that which appears harmonious at a certain level is paradoxical at another. Thus reality is presented to consciousness as like a multi-faceted crystal. 

This cosmotechnical play of infinities is not present to consciousness through any simple reflection (because simple reflectivity is primarily negated through this play), but moreover by a technique of gazing that would be as though through the negative prosthesis of a “clear mirror”. Through this gaze the crystalline interface of the temporal horizon may be brought to the light of consciousness fractured and spectralised in its reflectivity, apprehended, then, as an ‘imperfect tense that never becomes a present’: thus Nietzsche identifies contemporaneity with the crux of the matter on which one must stand in dys-chrony.

‘This light that strives to reach us but cannot - this is what it means to be contemporary’ (Agamben). The immediacy of the present is the coming face-to-face with the fixed stars in infinite regress: an in/determinacy, which is the tragedy of apeiron. Thus the revelation of contemporaneity is that ‘the limit is beyond the limit’: knowledge apprehends the limit such that the cosmological horizon converges with the simulation of a “black light” (Virilio). This is what it means for history to have hit a “cosmological limit”. Even as boundary-making cosmotechnical instrumentation may effectively ‘pour negentropy into the vessel’ (like Maxwell’s demon), any explanation of reality must include this black light of the non-conceptual void. 

And here, at this limit where light-time crystallises, meeting its shadow—de-void of conceptualisation, void of spatio-temporality; suspending the totality of that which stands-in as totality, as its excess—here the gaze of consciousness crosses the barriers of immanence in apprehending the spectral play of lights that overflows that very horizon. That is, the limit-horizon of the crystalline edge is dissapropriated by the surplus infinity that is present to consciousness in spectrality (just as ‘it is precisely the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the idea that this exceeding of limits is produced’ - Levinas). Thus the surplus infinity of our passion is revealed to consciousness via phantasmagoria spectralising at the limit. 

Moreover, through the paradoxical thought of this limit, which is the tragedy of space-time, the sensuous plane itself reaches its intensity with an-other. Such passion, which is insubordinate to any use value, is the subject of our care because what is at stake at this horizon is, precisely, the interface between one and an-other that implicates the infinitisation of the infinity of the cosmos itself. Through this care the rainbow edge of articulation is opened: a leakage of infinitisation into the cosmos that overflows, producing the sensual delirium that is both un-conditional and, as imminent surplus, is capable of generating anthropological altarity. Thereby escaping from necessity, consciousness assumes its cosmic character in passion (in the passion of care): ‘it plays with the universe and its laws as if they were toys’ (Bataille 1985; 82). In this way consciousness as such, emptied of conceptualisation, negates technological programmaticity through relationality with an-other. 

Thus, in pharmakologically tracing the limits of reality—construed according to the informational limit-horizon of light-time— consciousness delays the articulation of the limit, making a break at the threshold between embodied conceptuality and its emptiness. By tracing the play by which the clear mirror may be brought into view and made susceptible to this gaze, we open our passion onto that negative horizon of conceptualisation such that consciousness can pass-through the crystallisation of light-time de-void, spectralising at the interface of infinite space.

The Empty Aeon

Technologies of control reduce the singularities, of which processes of individuation are constituent, into calculabilities, to such an extent that they overdetermine the horizon of reality and can no longer be recognised as such. But to what extent is the human already technologically predisposed - to what extent is the human calculable in relation to itself and therefore predisposed to its technological overcoming?

A philosophical anthropology might maintain the relation between Anamnesis and Hyponomnesesis, showing that human life is constituted by tertiary retentions that are always-already technical determinations - a ‘default of origin’, as Bernard Stiegler puts it. Because of this (de)fault, Stiegler argues for a ‘pharmakology of spirit’, whereby technologies of control might themselves be turned into technologies of individuation. This position, when analysed according to the contemporary technological context, becomes a pharmakology of light-time because the screen has become the paradigmatic pharmakological space and the digital the form of informational light that is be brought to focus by the gaze of consciousness in this space. Examinations of the possibilities of pharmakological processes that operate at this interface would therefore constitute Stieglerian ‘new weapons’.

Acknowledging that these processes operate at the ‘end of philosophy’, Stiegler’s position can be problematised by returning to Heidegger: ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’. Heidegger argues that the ‘light’ which aletheia reveals is in fact the ‘lightness’ of a ‘clearing’ - lichtung. The onto-theological tradition comes to its end in a contemporary technics that controls Lux and lumen, but it misses the ‘possible radiance’ of lichtung.  Is Stiegler’s post-deconstructionist position (at the end of tradition) in fact origin-less, because it is still determined by this tradition and unable to dwell at the threshold of the openness of possibility itself.

This question is developed in relation to ‘Platos Pharmacy’ (Derrida) in terms of the relation of the ‘light’ of the tradition, which it deconstructs, and the enigma of a possible radiance that remains outside of its grasp. Pharmakological techniques (of ‘standing-in’, ‘substitution’ and so on) are demiurguc mediations, but they are always-already thresholds of unconceilment, always that of which the clearing is cleared (mediation as conceptuality such). The absolute metaphor of light pervades and evades language (as pharmakon) but if the pharmakon itself is that which may be cleared, is this why lichtung remains unthought in philosophy?

Practices that subject pharmakology itself to a clearing inherently only occur outside tradition. Outside history, they are occult. Can such practices be said to be individuating and what is their relation to technological apparatus? Such practices, which evade philosophical writing, can be unearthed through an archeology of meditative praxis. Such an archeology reveals examples of a performative, perceptual clearing that is achieved through a yoga of light, which considers embodiment as the spectral interface. Such techniques, which are theurgic arts, manipulate demiurgic instruments of control in their dual capacity as optic-dimensional and geometric. Here, pharmakological suspension is achieved through a perceptual interfacing where consciousness as such is opened to itself. Both technical-perceptual apparatus (prosthetic instrumentation) and apparition are already apprehended here - natural light already corresponds to that possible radiance revealed in the psycho-physicality of the practitioner.

The interface that concerns us, then, is that instrument by which instrumentation itself is suspended, performed in the light of the uniqueness of the extension of the body in space-time as the pivot of the world. Psycho-physical embodiment is the horizon of the clearing of self-concealment - it is the loci of potentiality for individuation in the sense of a messianic break which, following Benjamin, we can now read in terms of a crystallisation of light-time applied to our technological age - the empty aeon in which the ‘default of origin, becomes the ‘origin is now’.

Archemastrie

In his Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, John Dee describes Archemastrie as the “sovereign science.” Of the disciplines of Archemastrie, which bridge the emerging experimental sciences and the worldview of hermetic natural philosophy, Dee considered a kind of esoteric optics—whereby immanent experiential effects were brought about through experimentation with optical interfaces—to be central, making light itself the paradigmatic ontological intermediary of his methods.

Dee proposed that by using light as his primary medium, he could co-implicate Nature and Psyche through resonant reciprocity, thereby transforming ‘passive vision’ into ‘active vision’. The experimental methods of Archemastrie generated experiences that were simultaneously ‘natural’ and psycho-spiritual. Materiality, when apprehended through these experimental conditions, revealed its immanent potential for transfiguration. This syncretism merged the proto-scientific method of experimental observation (Baconian optics, after Alhazen and Alkindi) with the medieval metaphysics of light (Grosseteste) to creatively reconcile extramissionist and intramissionist theories of vision through a dual-aspect conception of light, considered as the principle mediator between realms.

Dee envisioned two ‘cones of vision’ to articulate the duality of Nature and Psyche: one governed by natural light, perceived by the physical eye, and the other by the inner light of imagination, corresponding to the ‘I’ of the psyche. Archemastrie sought to creatively intervene with this duality through a third principle: the optical interface. This interface functioned as a spectral mediator, corresponding to the psycho-physical embodiment of the practitioner. As light bridged the material and immaterial realms, the practitioner underwent a phenomenological transformation, experienced in the immanent transfiguration of light as consciousness.

Dee represented this interplay between dynamic psycho-physical thresholds and optical-dimensional effects using the symbol of the equilateral triangle, which he used as his signature, with the triangle often inscribed with radiating light. Such geometric ‘hieroglyphs’, which proliferate Dee’s private diaries, mapped the correspondences between the experimental processes and the immanent transformations and should be understood as talismans— underscoring the simultaneously poetic and cryptographic nature of the methods of correspondences.

Archemastrie, then, was a practice of resonance—an attunement to the spectral sonorities of light through an art of the interface, which generated correspondences that were cryptopoetically encoded. Through improvisational assemblages, experimental compositions of heterogeneous elements were entered into relation with the practitioner, through the interfacing of light. By bridging material content and immaterial expression, the transformation of perception was thereby an echoing co-transmutation, a reverberation.

“If, having fixed the original form in our mind’s eye, we ask ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe: reverberation (retentir). It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filled it with sonority… filling it to its limits, into a vibrating sonorous world… What is secondary [in this image], what makes [this image only an image], are the sonorous well-spring… the sealed vase, the echo, the reflection of sonorous waves against the sides—in a word, all that belongs to the material and palpable world.” (Minkowski)

Techniques employing optical devices to establish correspondences include scrying (catoptromancy, crystallomancy, cyclicomancy, hydromancy) and catoptrics. Scrying involves gazing into reflective, translucent, or luminescent substances—crystals, stones, glass, mirrors, water, fire, or smoke—to produce oracular or cryptesthetic visions; catoptrics, the study of reflected light and image-forming optical systems using materials like mirrors or glass.

“If you were skilled in catoptrics, you would be able, by art, to imprint the rays of any star much more strongly upon any matter subjected to it than nature does itself.” (Dee)

Dee theorised that the effects of Archemastrie would naturally transcend the laboratory with implications extending into the societal and macrocosmic spheres. Through this work, he articulated a transversal ontology, applying Archemastrie to cosmogonic Architecture. If matter arises through reverberations in a microcosmic-macrocosmic network of correspondences, then the Archemaster’s role was to harmonise these relations through optical experiment, orienting the co-transmutation of Nature and Psyche.

This progression—from personal immanent perception in laboratory practice to societal application and macrocosmic resonance—traces a passage through successive ontological planes, cryptopoetically extrapolated through the discipline’s immanent, transcendental function.

Horizons (of Day and Night)

In deep antiquity rhythms of the passage of light were marked by megalithic monuments or “pillars of light” across the globe that were intended to inscribe the experience of time. through codification of the human relation to seasonal temporality, the cardinal, horizonal directions of East and West and the vertical sky of celestial lights.

Referencing these perennial cosmographies, monumental glass geometries can replace the prototypical calendrical technologies of stone with optical interfaces. Glass monoliths or ‘glyphs’ are oriented as axial points towards the rising and setting of stellar lights on the horizon's circle and their relational azimuth. Of these lights the sun is chief, being the symbol of consciousness, governing the temporalities of astronomical and seasonal cycles and illuminating experience. The universal symbol of the sun is also a double symbol: the model of light is that of the diametrical relation; both seasonal passage to opposite and the shadow of eclipse. Light is always doubled. Vision is both the vision of the inner eye of the mind and of the eyes of perception. The sun’s illumination is blinding to the direct gaze. We can’t look directly at the sun just as we can’t look directly towards the subject of our gaze; the seat of consciousness is a blind spot. The sun is always-already mediated in our experience. It is the producer of difference and differentiation, just as light is diffracted and refracted by media into spectral rays of colour. Working through mediation, light creates openings for spectralisation. 

The work asks us to open ourselves to this passage of difference; to the opening of solar light in its spectrality. The ‘twilight language’ of optical patternation, which changes due to the individual’s orientation to the artwork, the sun, and to the flux of temporality, celebrates the opening of individual consciousness in relation to a cosmic time; a transformation of axial cycles through the multiplication of temporal experiences. In so doing the artwork provides an orientation in which the geographical and anthropological realities of contemporaneity are translated through the visionary dimension of a mandala in which the cardinal, horizontal directions are orientated to the vertical dimension of supra-sensory light. In a time of crisis exacerbated by mono-technological culture, we need to multiply cosmotechnics in support of a corresponding diversification of forms of coexistence: ‘what we really need is a concrete solidarity that allows differences and divergences before the falling of dusk’ - Yuk Hui.

The work seeks to present the site of a crossroads between traditions; a dialogue at the astral crux. The title ‘Horizon of Day and Night’ references both the experience of ‘clear light’ in the Tibetan tradition and the symbolism of the ‘man of light’ in the Sufi tradition (who attains transcendent apperception through an orientation to the ‘threshold of the beyond’, that is a horizon of light encompassing East and West). The meditative gazing that the work seeks to induce is a gaze through psycho-geographical differentiation onto the supra-sensory clear light that is reflected within the body of the individual. Following the tradition of sky-gazing in the meditative traditions, the gaze is transmuted into a form of vision that is reconnected to a cosmic temporality, in which the natural sun is realised as being also an interior element of the subtle, psycho-physical body—an interior body of light that is common to each of these traditions: ‘What then is the imagination if not the sun in man’ - Paracelsus.

Twilight Language

“Mankind has become astral. This astral era no longer belongs to the measures of history” - Blanchot

The geometric arche-inscription of a sphere in a void, a ‘boundary giving boundary’ where origin and end converge: temporality articulated against a boundless, abyssal horizon against which it is eclipsed. The negative horizon is the unground of all optico-geometric inscription, the negation of conceptuality against which the threshold of the cosmological horizon is first articulated. The luminous life-world suspended in no-thing-ness. 

The limits of informational transmission inscribed by the instrumentation of cosmotechnical apparatuses comprise a logosphere—that same mathmatico-linguistic matrix from which artificial intelligence is mined—suspended in the boundless non-conceptuality of which we know no-thing. Hence totality and separation appear equally phantasmic: a surplus infinity permeates the core of matter, penetrating every act of instrumentation. Reality is presented to consciousness as like a multi-faceted crystal.

Techniques of gazing through the crystalline interface of the temporal horizon, fractured and spectralised, reveal the immediacy of the present in dys-chrony. Contemporaneity is disorientation. This is the tragedy of apeiron, refracted through the negative prosthetics of cosmotechnicity: the fixed stars appear in infinite regress. Whereas the history of metaphysics was inscribed through routinised cycles—the passage of the sun, calendrical structures, programs that generate rhythm from repetitions, imprinting the character of being-in-the-world—these externalised cycles have accumulated across succeeding generations, converged and inverted through the programmaticity of the present: a ‘play of the void’. The stellar course that is the mystery of the ambiguous horizon coincides with a destining conducted by cybernetics (“steering”) that is a pharmakological play of limits. By following the telematic-stellar course we arrive at a spectral horizon that is barely distinguishable (barely to art, barely to philosophy), a haunted space in which calculation and play become indistinguishable.

Thus the revelation of contemporaneity: the limit is beyond the limit, revealed to consciousness as phantasmagoria that spectralise at the crystalline edge. A play of lights that overflow. A surplus infinity that disarticulates the instruments of knowing, projecting a sensual knowing-no-thing that escapes from necessity and in so doing enables consciousness to assume its cosmic character in a relational passion of care.

In this way consciousness, as such, emptied of conceptualisation, negates technological programmaticity. In pharmakologically tracing the limits of reality—construed according to its informational limit-state—it delays the articulation of all and any limit, making a break at the horizon between embodied conceptuality and its emptiness. By tracing the play by which this horizon is made susceptible to the gaze—through the spectralisation at the interface of infinite space—we open onto that negative space of conceptualisation such that consciousness can pass-through.

This is the site for the spectral poiesis of passage because it is the horizon of light-time (both as limit-state of informational transmission and signifier of cosmotechnical temporality insofar as it appears to phenomenal consciousness). Therefore the poiesis of this interface—that would open-up along this horizon—has a luminous resonance. Just as the reciprocal nature of light and sight qua chiasm constitutes the ontological event that comes to resonance not by the acting of ‘obscure forces’ but by their emptying, so the interface can be opened and emptied so as to allow it the free space in which to resonate. The resonance that occurs in this free space, devoid of those forces that hold the psycho-cosmic body in panicked tension, is an emergence consistent with a direct ontology that passes-through dependent causality. Through the empty space of the threshold of being, it is an opening towards the enstatic.

In consciousness, this luminous reverberation maintains relational correspondence with perceptual affectivity, such that the optical spectrality that plays out along this shattered threshold produces ‘active visioning’. Techniques of gazing qua crystallisation unite prophetic and enstatic visioning. This luminous diagrammatics traces that which surpasses the optico-geometric in haptic function, moving through ‘diagrammatic agency’ towards the radiance of the inter-world itself. That is, an art of this interface would move through aesthetics to directly engage the infra-space as such. 

Thereby might we apply those ‘uncanny powers’ so as to pass-through impotence, to find oneself capable of action in relation to psycho-cosmic embodiment. Through the gaze, the pharmakological medium of the interface in which opposites are opposed is opened—an opening that is imminent to the luminosities of the psycho-cosmic body (that embodiment of prior mediation; the potential space of reciprocal engendering). Thus one might impossibly consist as the being-towards that ‘strange relation’ signified by the performative utterance of a poiesis of passage, passible to the other through twilight language.