negative space

Kara Walker, "Cut"

"So our writing, as much as our living, becomes extensive, opening out pursuant to filmy trails of the unsayable, not closing down on the secret quivering in fear of imminent exposure. So our writing becomes an exercise in life itself, at one with life and within life as lived in social affairs, not transcendent or even a means to such, but contiguous with action and reaction in the great chain of storytelling telling the one always before the last. Yet how can you be contiguous with the not merely empty, but negative, space?"

Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

The need here to think about the negative space of form, what cuts off and cuts into form as an idea of wholeness (of 'holiness'); defacement and decay and exposure. Taussig's distinction between "empty" and "negative" space, recognition that the negative space is never itself empty but contiguous, formative and trans-formative and pointing always to the de-formed nature of form itself. Here is a theory of writing and living, he says: open secrets, exposed borders, extensions, piece-meal, contiguity.

the action of lightning

Bataille on the festival:

"The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and this this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.

[...]

The divine world is contagious and its contagion is dangerous. In theory, what is started in the operation of sacrifice is like the action of lightning: in theory there is no limit to the conflagration."

In relation to Durkheim on effervescence and the deification of society:

Deification of society (pursues ends beyond the individual), dominion over consciences: moral authority. Worked out in common, intensity of acceptance in individual mind: echoes reciprocally in all other minds. Psychic properties. Collective force not entirely external, integral to our being (made up in and by individual consciences).

“Invigorating influence” of society, especially at certain moments, e.g. August 4th, 1789: debate over feudal rights, “legal form given to the resolution of a principles made in a moment of collective enthusiasm,” later called night of the Dupes, St. Bartholomew’s night massacre of the estates (August Decree).

Refurbishing of common faith by manifesting it in common, *attitude particular to man addressing the crowd…form of grandiloquence absurd elsewhere, effective in context. “Even his ideas lose all sense of proportion and easily fall into every kind of excess.” “Abnormal plethora of forces,” oratorical inspiration: forces derive from the group, rebounded, amplified feeling, reverberation, the group “incarnate and personified.”

"[...] general effervescence characteristic of revolutionary or creative periods."

Forces: each form in our conscience two circles of mental states, two sorts of reality (sacred, profane things).

Early years of French Revolution, under influence of general enthusiasm, things secular transformed by public opinion (The Motherland, Liberty, Reason) become religion established with dogma, holy days, altars, symbols, etc. Patriotic enthusiasm. Collective action: sensation of the sacred.