~~~

Text: Tractatus

Author: Róbert Gál

Translator: David Short

Publisher: Schism Press

Additional material: a guide to Wittgenstein/Tractatus that I got from the library as I know zero [atomic facts] about either.

Note: not a philosopher or academic so there will be reaching/misinterpretations.

Bigger Note: like all pieces in the De-Con-Struc series, this is not a review.

~

–

There’s no getting this, and I’ll go from there.

–

0.1 Logic must take care of itself.

1.1

I don’t remember the day I died, but it was obviously before I’d had time to be born. And nothing had mattered more to me than that very business of getting myself born. Ideally getting myself born into the me that had been born already, discretely, corpuscle by corpuscle. Born into the ready and waiting, hence painlessly. Not being born, though born already. But what into? Shall we imagine it? Might it not play havoc with the seeming need to have one’s own outer shell, for all that it just keeps on cracking?

–

Born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe at that time, W’s early life was punctuated by two sibling suicides.

–

The sense of dying in order to become capable of being born.

Coating for the self.

Beginning of it.

Is that right, R?

–

Bo    [d]    rn           [ie]       >>>

–

1.3

A better self and a worse self are fighting about which of them is the better. The better self’s defense is the distance it can cover in the blink of an eye. The worse self is consistently located at its own center, which it is sometimes apt to shift à la Machiavelli. Its essence remains unaltered, merely changing color. By contrast, it is of the better self’s essence not to reveal itself at all. But if it does need to change color, it enacts this necessity only on the surface, for its interior being is what it protects. In the words of the better self, its place is where the difference between innards and inner self lies.

–

R is skirting close to nonsense here…and [to me] the axiomatic [!].

I appreciate that.

Your better self is a construct, a ho mo liu hero suit, while your worse self is equally false.

Conversely, at the beginning of Hellraiser III, Pinhead claimed that the real better self lies within the Id, and it is the worse self, lodged in the preconscious, that walls it in.

–

Such show I delights you have to

Delights delights ddelighghts deligghtas

VVvvvvVV v

–

W attached himself to [Russell], and was something of a pest, pursuing Russell back to his room, and badgering him with questions, even while Russell was dressing.

–

W in R’s closet, asking him constant Q’s, screaming inside that one day he would be better, and on that day R had better understand and not understand him.

[R in this case being Bertrand Russell, not Róbert Gál]

–

1.4

If he wanted to be a master at something that has never been deemed worthy of mastery – for example not writing, or shouting – one thing sufficed: the coverage of the idea as made up. The more ingenious the coverage at the outset, the more exclusive the idea became with the passage of time. The snares he had to cope with at the draft stage kept gradually mutating into actual snares, recognizable by the fact that it was now not he who had set them. They upset his established habits. That enabled him to focus on that which was no longer in draft form, and eliminate, first the necessity, and then even the possibility of such snares’ being set. What as a coverage had been an example will have become, as an internal principle, a norm.

–

Only those who, at some point junction, wanted to be a master at something will understand the words that appear in this text.

I think I get it but can’t be sure. Can’t communicate it back. The word coverage is giving me trouble…a variation on create your own enemies then otherize them, say, wah, where did they come from, who would create such a thing?

Re-read it a few times and I think that’s right.

Did I get it though?

Do others?

When R reads it back to himself now, in Slovak, does he get it?

In English, does it appear alien to him?

–

1.32

Regularly launching balloons from one’s ivory tower with messages attached and making passersby first catch them and then decipher them.

–

Can relate heavily, without tower or ivory.

In LEGO tower.

Launching weirdo sci-fi novels instead of balloons.

To bots instead of passersby.

Who can really be bothered with the first page anymore?

–

Philosophy is warning and assault. Read it. You won’t understand a word. Read it. Words are deceit.

– Chattering Cenobite, Hellraiser

–

Despite moneyed background, W sent to frontlines in WW1, showed extraordinary courage [truth?]

Keen to be annihilated?

Without yet making his name?

–

This General, this madman, seemed to lack the conception of his own death.

– Céline, more or less

–

Prototractatus was an intermediate first draft, the final version typed up in the summer of 1918.

–

Written during wartime. A coping mechanism [is still a mechanism].

–

1.101

Life is too lively to be graspable. The wise know that very well. That is why they are so keen on relics of the afterlife: darkness and silence.

–

Life, language, thought, media, gaps between media, general surrounding fog, lies, beliefs, new-old-new philosophers, it’s all guilt, all playful.

Not guilt, dislocation.

Guilt in the preconscious, dislocation on top of that, beneath. Dislocation in all possible ways. In the sense that each location is deeply unconvincing and therefore instantly dis-

R places relics [past] with the afterlife [future], which suggests a teleology disheveled.

Afterlife as ancient construct?

In Hellraiser: Hell On Earth, Pinhead’s Id fails to recruit a sufficient number of cenobites as pain is one-note, without component parts.

–

2.12

Endpoints don’t have to come sneaking up – they’ve been there from the start. They accompany us by waiting in the wings and afford us an illusion of continuance. When their time comes, they abort continuance. And everything in our lives that has been subjective is consistently destroyed by them.

–

In Hellraiser V, Pinhead explains that the endpoint has been overtaken, and it is the cenobites who are forced to mill around and horrorize until the endpoint catches up to abort their continuance.

This goes against the explanation given in Hellraiser IV, which posits, just like R. does above, that endpoints are running parallel, latent from our perspective.

–

Russell penned an explanatory introduction to the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein disliked.

–

He relied on Russell to get it published.

Didn’t want it to get published that way.

–

3.1

The more we fill up a void, the more there is of it to fill.

followed by:

3.12

If a person’s aura begins to live a life of its own, is it still an aura and is it still that person’s property? And is there something that we might call the self-reflection of a person’s aura? What if the very aura is that self-reflection projected outwards within the possibility of the possibility of an objectivized view of this subjective reality? And can this reality then remain subjective?

–

Connective tissue between numbered entries?

Void + aura…abstract + abstract…personal vs unknowable…

[My] gut says contradiction, an impossible tautology that ends in nonsense no sense, laid out in direct relational text, mostly cos the Foundational Guide To W. and the Tractatus I’m clinging to uses the word tautology a lot. Everything is a tautology and only needs to be recognised as such? Except that which can only be thought, not communicated. Which is a lot of things. That cannot be things in the subjective sense…are not allowed to be.

How many times have you died when trying to describe your own work?

It is your thing and it is not.

Not the reader’s either.

More like an approximation of…that.

–

3.131331331331331

Looking for the half-man, half-monkey is a cute distraction, applauded by the half-granddad, half-toddler creature observing from the shadows…void…wings.

3.13

My abysses defy comprehension. Try looking into them for more than a minute – then you’ll comprehend. Maybe you’ll hit the bottom. When the boomerang of your impact comes back to the spot from which the threads on which you stand have been perfidiously spun, you may hit the living, jelly-like matter of a spider, your creator.

–

Another contradiction.

You will comprehend that you cannot comprehend it.

Hitting the bottom would be an endpoint, and therefore a passive act as the endpoint is the object-thing that will have aborted your continuance.

Yet you are the one who looked into the abyss to begin with.

An act that was permitted by the endpoint’s passivity.

From what little I know of him [which is not a lot], W. would be proud [from his shack in the Austrian wilderness] of R.

But probably wouldn’t show it.

–

4.3

To plan means to try to make real the core possibility of this or that actuality. An actuality that may well be substitutive in nature, though without it no possibility could be unconstrained. And a possibility – if it wishes not to be cramped by the actuality – has to be unconstrained. At the very least in terms of direction, just as an unconstrained straight line, which is simultaneously also constrained, only realizes its constraint if it occurs to it to try to change direction. And that won’t occur to it [because it would have had to have occurred to it to change into something that it isn’t]. Actuality only ever associates with possibility so as not to be out of sync with it. Thus it runs parallel to possibility: and it is like a second straight line that sees itself as a mirror image of the first.

–

Not easy to catch this [the text above].

–

–

There is a way to enter into your own future text-object blind and that’s with collage, yet it is still a directed act, parts shifted out of a void and set on canvas, or a WordPress blog [$17 a year to strip the wordpress bit from the site name, have to do it], and yet there is no clear blueprint for the collage that you have prepared beforehand, consciously, so it is a thing outside of the self, the aura, yet outside in an insular sense, in the psycho-external that perhaps you dip into now and then, yet whatever you bring out of there is instantly temporalized, rendered inside the self that at least tries to make sense out of that which cannot be communicated, the axe-point of W.s irritation towards most other philosophers, yet

…

I’ll read that back in a week and not understand it, guaranteed.

My own words.

–

5.1

Possibilities are not events, but states. They are movements in situ.

–

Deleuze was is will become here.

–

5.2

Simple errors lead to simple truths.

–

How to read this? Negative or positive?

Is 5.1 apposite linked to 5.2?

Seems axiomatic on the surface but is it?

Simple error = a complex, simple + error = two simples?

R. is playing here?

There are two states when reading philosophy, or something posing as such; hands off wheel, adventuring, and wheel glued to face, inspecting. One is a struggle and quickly becomes the other, which in turn becomes some other thing, not a struggle, but an anxiety that this should be more of a struggle, that the hidden parts are flaring neon far above your head and some others can see them, without effort, while you doubt and self-dislocate.

You as in me.

Am I really getting any of this?

Feels like a mode has been chosen to read R, but is it sustainable [when I cannot even communicate to myself what that mode is, or understand the proposition when I re-read my own words]?

If truth-communication is possible [truth-function? Still not exactly clear what this is], it is only fleeting, and analysis of it in retrospect would be like trying to pin down a muon.

Would W. comprehend his own work after a certain length of time, looking back on it?

What the hell was KRV about?

–

‘This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts.’

–

Ultimate briar patch [from criticism]. Tongue in cheek by W.? Note to future self?

Or genuine hope that someone out there could relate to him, his psyche. And be annihilated by W as soon as they announced themselves.

–

6.2

If untruths shatter against a heap of truths, so too do truths shatter against a heap of untruths. Which shattering should we go for?

–

coupled with:

–

6.3

In the event that evil is merely a shortcoming of good, this means that we can explain any human shortcoming as something evil. The moral viewpoint outweighs the factual viewpoint according to which this or that unit – for instance a man – is made up of this or that many parts and would be quite capable of being a unit even in the event that one of the parts goes missing, or hadn’t been there in the first place.

–

concluded with:

–

6.4

Good cannot be medicated because it is a medicament.

–

Medicament = substance used for medical treatment. Unfamiliar word for me. Had potentiality, now an atomic fact [in component form]. Medication concept itself still void-proximate [medicate how, to what end?], if you really wanna push that far. Seems like W., in order for logic to work as a total/unifying epistemological method, had to push, but R. appears more in tune with the poetics and the contradictions, plus less likely to hide away in rural Austria with pinched Worf face.

Feels like I’m slipping again…

Not sure what I’m writing as I read it back, can’t think of any good metaphors.

Component parts…against bulk unit totalities.

Seems blocky, non-interactive.

Can this logical atomism [think that’s the right term] still work nowadays within the paradigm of in-flux states of affairs, one thing becoming another, possibility vs actuality, the effect of one on the other…

Paradigm?

–

The Tractatus is, if anything, impatient.

–

That shaky line between implicit and invisible. Sometimes it is the reader’s fault, they’re just not trying hard enough.

Only one book published during his life, this one, Tractatus; the peak/nadir of abbreviation.

W. felt he was writing for an as-yet-unconstructed people, who would think a different way, breathe a different air.

We?

–

7.11

If the truth is meant to be a possibility, then by some means it has to be imposed upon reality.

–

7.2

He recalls his classmate at middle school chasing a limping rat around the yard, the lad himself limping and clutching a brick. The rat had taken refuge under a car. More classmates ran up to try to lure the rat to another spot. The rat wondered what to do. It poked its head out, then, slowly, its whole body. It has no inkling of the danger directly above it. And down came the brick – the rat’s entrails spurted out. Years later, his classmate bought a tortoise so that, having its own armor plating, it would be protected against the kind of which he, too, was one. When it went and died on him, he promptly decided that he, too, would depart this world, and he shot himself.

–

In the middle of this story, for one sentence, the tense switches to present – it has no inkling of the danger directly above it – which is either a simple error [leading to simple truth] or a simple truth exposed by intentional design. The apogee of the rats existence, even told in hindsight, can do no other thing except leap to the present.

Meaning of the story?

The original Tractatus ended at 7 [I triple-checked], with the line – whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

W. was, at that point, done.

R. is not.

[It has been 100 years, after all].

–

8.1

An impression stands and falls by an error, hence it is irrelevant. And it is at its most irrelevant when we are right, or, more precisely, when we have the impression of being right and, our sense of being right fed by that impression, we act as if the impression we have were, conversely, fed by our being right.

–

Impression is created and then creates its own ontology beyond the creator, who later believes that impression was the inevitable result of an earlier impression that they cannot recall the creation of, yet over time, it has come to be seen as right, normal.

Pinhead, in the final scene of Hellraiser: Revelations [right before having his dick yanked off], refers to this as vestigial tautology.

Conjecture:

R saying to W, you were right, but now we’re 100 years beyond you and you’re wrong.

And we are doomed to be wrong too.

Yet, until that time, we remain right.

We being whoever it is who is not wrong in this current paradigm set-up.

–

‘No-one here but us remainders.’

– Sisko, DS9, Season 3: episode 5

–

Total absence of Marx + socialist theory in work of W. What does this mean?

Logic is the bedrock and from there all other problems will be solved?

There is vast wealth behind this way of thinking.

–

W gave away his fortune.

To his family.

All of it?

Did he get it back later?

–

Apparently he loathed other people, all kinds, especially workers.

–

11.2

A question following any revolution: Can a society re-born also re-bear intimacy?

–

If you stare at a pornographic shot long enough, you go beyond the abject [which is no more or less abject than eating a burger or stabbing your own throat] and perhaps, at some point, all the way back around to the implicit, the intimate.

Relatively implicit.

Glimpses of dick and muff, not static, long-form documentary.

Might be off track here…what is intimacy to R, to others?

–

12.3

Infinity may indeed have no end, but it does keep beginning somewhere.

–

The Tractatus is meant to work poetically.

–

13.11

Anything is never anything. Anything is a sonorous option between nothing and something that carries weight.

–

‘He who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them.’

–

Zaum retreat:

Hkhdjkwbfcj dbviviecbincci acidddd heya OST bake who

////d///d///d//d/fffog

=

[works better in its original Cantonese]

–

‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’

–

A clever game? Does W find no one else capable?

/////has solved it in his own mind + is frustrated that it has to be filtered into text, words, a lesser form, when [one-third animal] men were blown to pieces on the front lines.

Deleuze would’ve eviscerated him.

Deleuze would’ve

They would’ve traded e-mails, met up at symposiums.

Winner at endpoint [aborted continuance] is…

–

14.3

Accumulation [of words, things, formulated knowledge] is a sign of distress.

–

Welcome to my Japanese study, R.

–

15.1

A communication is the reduction of the content that we are communicating to a content that is communicable. The means employed to this end is form. If its form becomes the content of a communication, communication is at an end.

–

Appears to be both on the side of W and firing metal balls at him.

R knows, by W’s own logic [that I have assumed], Tractatus was not what W wanted to communicate, but it was an act of communication.

It is hard.

The sci-fi novel in my head can go beyond what Baudrillard laid out, I know it can, but that is just an impression I have. New-old-new or old-new-old. One of the two phrases is correct, expresses in essence what I’m trying to communicate, more than the 200,000 words of story that follow.

–

15.2

‘Original’ means that any copy is in reality not possible. And that is grounds for amazement, not unlike our amazement that some particular thing is possible.

–

In Hellraiser: Deader, the cultist who puts pins in his head is amazed that people actually follow him, though soon recovers and turns things sexual.

Helllifter isn’t much better [3 consecutive Ls in title].

R is writing a thing called Tractatus, is it too a copy?

No.

It is the first Tractatus I have read, so no.

–

–

16.3

Intelligence, unlike memory, selects from time only those truths, instants and items of knowledge that it finds worthwhile. Which is why memory is the more truthful.

–

You with your memory are dead!

R drawing a distinction again between [atomic] truth and what is said/filtered, which from my reading of the idiot’s guide to W open on the table in front of me, as well as the original Tractatus, is a distinction that W drew too.

The irony is might be that memory is truthful so long as it remains untouched, like quantum particles, though they’re probably directors too, on some level.

You pull out the memory, it’s already altered and no longer the truth.

But was it not simply a contingent truth, at inception?

At what point does the filtering, the altering take place?

–

26.21

Pathos is the way to condense time into a single specific moment. If we wish to avoid pathos, suffice it to focus on the everyday in the regular iteration of its moments, avoiding any tendency to elevate one moment over another.

–

In Hellraiser XI, Pinhead-…

-+-

There is pathos and the imitation of it, which is what most film/literature is today. To show true pathos may be impossible as it is a component part of rhetoric, which is itself a component part of fraudulence, which is itself a component part of unconscious truth, which is itself contingent on constructed desires that may or may not have a base truth element somewhere in their design.

Have the feeling R is being playful again. If you want to avoid emotions, base or superficial, then live like a machine.

Is that a kind of must be truth or just unnecessary reduction?

–

Theses by W. to apply forward and retroactively [in this piece and all others]:

–

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions…
6. Maths.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
8. Silence leads inward, to mania + mania denial.
9. In what hazy part of the brain are you operating from today? Can you put a fraction to it? Draw it on a page?
10. W is lodged in Castle W, run by W, under permanent siege from W, weapons fireworks made, boxed and branded by R.
11. Was.
12. Experience presents us only with contingent truths.
13. Contingent on the densest of all fog, conjured by Wwwwxiiiiilasf+++=
14. Escapable?
15. I’m not equipped for this.
16. Can spell Hegel and that’s about it.
17. Objects, fixed forms, atomic facts, constituent parts…
18. Rhizomes, object-revenge, muons, hyper-real, whatever slides in next…
19. Your logic is has taken care of neglected itself
20. ++++++++++
21. Not just atomised but in bizarre storage.
22. If we get this
23. Climb through on over it then we can become just like that miserable
24. Cunt genius
25. W
26. Misanthrope, war hero, who somehow didn’t die despite heavy fire

–

27

The purpose of philosophy is not to give us ideas but to teach us to think.

–

R. ending on the explicit, non-poetic.

Methodology: dip in and out of philosophy books. Know when they veer into areas they know little about e.g. Bataille and political theory.

Spot superficiality.

Forgive it [cos it might be the [whole] case].

Logic cannot take care of itself.

It is a box in chamber that was already built, by designers who have forgotten that they did such a thing, who stare at the blueprints and interrogate endlessly the objectivity of the junctions connecting the lines, who mutter boks instead of box, who erode happily [at times].

–

Con conconconconcocnconconconc;nnoonconoisn;.,;”S’/

…>>>+

–

Not the best of the series but in Hellraiser VIII, the spectre specter of Pinhead argues that to read philosophy is to struggle closer to a thing you have already felt, processed outside the complex-real psyche inside of yourself the self.

Lance Henriksen had no real comeback.

–

27.1

Philosophy is aphorism is play is maybe is cowardice is

–

This text is beyond me and invigorating.

R taking the concept behind W, his Tractatus, and playing with it?

I think he’s playing with it.

Some of the aphorisms were stared at, re-read around ten, twenty times and the numbered sequences were analysed, counted out – did this one relate to that one, is there something being said – and

I don’t know.

Genuinely.

~~~

You can buy Tractatus at Schism Press