visible and invisible fragments of experiences

– ABOUT BOGOTRAX FESTIVAL –

“Every possible of the individuals is then
a shadow that gives a sound.”
Kierkegaard – in Repetition.

Incipit comoedia

In between a cancerous tumor and the form of a new life, the echo of the city is reproduced through the name of the festival: Bogotá, cold and warm, nasty but full of life and colours. Wasn’t it Allen Ginsberg who that said, “Bogotá was a cancer of the soul”? No, no, it was a Colombian poet, Gonzalo Arango, the founder of Nadaism. Ginsberg would have probably said it was simply a cancer… Unsatisfied with the impressions the ‘’Sud Lands’’ gave to the North American poet, one can be puzzled by what has to be the curse of a soul to be touch by this malefic and material form of biological immortality, i.e cancer1. Sounds like Gnosticism: an immortality against another, immortal dead cells against spiritual life: blessing and curse being deeply mixed.

2000-2003 – First take, just before…

In France, hanging with techno people (in those years free-party, squats and club scenes were still quite mixed). Playing break-beats, drum’n’bass, techno, hardtek and hardcore mainly. Different collectives, some individuals. Then someone simply asked why, if we could do 3- or 4-day parties couldn’t we do a 10-day festival? With a lot of energy, some problems and fights in between, in about 6 months we were heading back to Bogotá to throw that first Bogotrax. Some would say energetic, “pure” friendship was the foundational myth (but who knew back then myths can also support reality?).

Every edition got a specific name, a motto, a subtitle, or a subtle and formal manifestation of acomplex ‘’magnetic field’’. In the next lines I’m just going to follow some of the paths of these visible and invisible fields.

2004 -Bgtrx -”Distrito electrónico” –
(“Electronic district” – the city of Bogotá being in Colombia is often referred to as “Distrito Capital” – which is first just a geo-political description).
District. From lat. “districtus”, from “distringere”, to take apart, from “stríngere”, in spanish ‘estrechar’, to narrow together; v. “estrig-, estreñir”, to constipate.

It was already then 10 days of street-sound-system commando-actions (during the day), live radio programs, “show cases” in some universities, lots of parties, and 3 big illegal free-raves, which was kinda what I was specialized in at the time, (with some of the other members of our former sound system of the epoch – “ultrabass” – an important ingredient of the explosive mixture we were handling with Nietzschean naïveté…) Economically, it was supported through parties we threw before in Paris and in Bogotá (soon Berlin and later London where add to that network), some deals with the bars we were playing in, and some “collaborations” at the raves, mostly with the people of the upper/upper-middle classes that attended our parties. This last point is part of a never ending fight with that well-know paralogism: “if it is not expensive it means ‘it is not worth paying for’, then if I give nothing I get what I deserve”. Change the expression “not expensive” for free or on donation, etc. And then, if you’re also trying to translate “free”, in spanish, as “libre” – “freedom” being the equivalent of “libertad” -, it is possible you end up having a lot of people looking for ‘free’ toothbrushes handed out by the underground masters of entertainment.

– 2005 -Bgtrx -”Muros sonoros” (“Sound walls”) –

The second year we followed the same basic lines of the first one: 10 days of music, radio programs, day and night, in all the possible areas of the city for free, etc. – The image of the wall, non-metaphorical, that “we” took out of teknivals and underground techno parties in Europe pin-pointed already though not necessarily in a very reflexive or articulated way – an ambiguous concern for a certain form of the “political question”. The wall of speakers, as a symbolic barricade: the essential seems to lay in it being alien to those ‘’rational’’ uses – the warning, the exclusion, the order, the threat – essentials for those other concrete walls built in dispassionate silence (Mexico – or U.S.A?-, Palestine – or Israel?, Spain, Melilla – Spain? Africa? Europe?) A silence that would be, once again, the silence of science and reason, the silence of politics that noise barricades were meant at least for a moment to disturb.
This interpretation, however, supposes a complex theoretical background, a double lecture on techno-culture in a general sense that I would like to make precise as a complement at the end of this account.

2006 “Red Sonante” – (Sounding network) –

For that year, the third edition of our enfant terrible, besides a strong quota of fresh video propositions, a whole section of workshops were incorporated. Mainly directed to vj-ing techniques and sound production, there were also some talks and theoretical-practical encounters around different kinds of networks (radio, web-radio, streaming, etc). The motif of the network appears also retrospectively as the necessary counterpart of the ‘wall’ – or barricade motif. It already gives some sense to the motto “strengthen the network,” although a question then seems to arise: which network or which ones and for what? This question supposes a number of things that could easily lead us to a main strategic and conceptual mistake. In its form, it compel us to identify a community, it presupposes the existence of such a community, which would mean putting a form of it, a program, etc. The point is not in using some classical – I should probably say “metaphysical” concepts (id. ‘community’, the community as subject of an ‘identity’, an identifiable identity, which means a form of it, a reason, a purpose, a whole “political” program, etc.) – but in articulating an essential inadequacy of this conceptuality with a “radical” “social experiment”. Does an experiment in this sense have to be lead by a clear theoretical or conceptual view? Shouldn’t its radicality lay in the possibility of an immanent transformation of the process – the experiment itself – by the “activities” (i.e. also theoretical practices) that compose it? These questions, we know, are huge.
The form and content of this composition, the Bogotrax festival, has more or less responded every year to different criteria, to different concerns, some more continuous than others… One main general concern was to achieve a basic economic and artistic independence. One main general idea would also be: the transformation of static and alienated social conditions into creative ones. And one main strategy, expressed in a general way through the criteria that informs it, has been the inhabitation of these conditions, the exploration through the action and activities mention above. The aim being, of course, the living transcription of its codes into an open multiplicity of mutant televisionary decoders.

2007 “Laboratorio Urbano” (“Urban laboratory”) –

The reflection about the experiment we were in, and, as argued before, the sense of “experience” and “experiment” already present in the 2006 edition, lead us to insist on a more explicit way to engage this topic. How to go deeper into this alchemy is one main question today. The practical interrogation of the difference between public and private, and the different possibilities of the public space are already engaged in this question. At least two different concepts of the public are at stake here. To say it fast and schematically, public space can be thought of as a transit area in between private or “semi-private” spaces. Going from the house to the office we cross into that public space. Propose different timings in this transit change, examine our relation with that space, and therefore the sense of the “public-ness” of the space we cross.
Against public space as pure transit and circulation, it seems possible to think about space that is not inhabited by ourselves (what would be simply the contrary and inverse re-constitution of the public/private opposition) that could nonetheless be a space inhabited with desires and symbols of a deeper social life; that which we keep on denying through the fantastic nightmare of fastness and immediacy: total stagnation as total movement, death as eternal life, etc.
In this sense Bogotrax was – and maybe still could be – a bet for a ghost as the central side-effect of the barricade, some neither dead nor living spirit of the hood: an area of resistance that could allow individual and social creativity, encounters, discussions, and ways of transit with a different timing than everyday circulation. Of course, a real change in this timing requires a totally different timing of the work-rest opposition, as it functions in our alienated production/consumption societies. It is not about suggesting a consciousness of these possibilities, but about recreating some of the conditions in order to open the possibility for an un-alienated experience. (I’d rather said: for another sense of possession. What’s a conscious possession? Isn’t the possibility of an experience beyond automatism and autonomy? Once we’ve recognized autonomy as another mythic form, though more differentiated in its structure, of automatism…) A good part of the actions of the festival, i claim, were trying to operate in this sense, presenting themselves as an “allegory” of a creative public space, of a dis-appropriation and “re-appropriation” (ex-des-appropriation) of areas: parks, neighborhoods, public universities, parking lots, streets. In this sense the showcases of the last two years (2007, 2008) in two different jails of the city deserve a special mention. In 2007, the first showcase was in the jail of the district (Carcel Distrital), and in 2008 in the women’s jail of Bogotá (El buen pastor), where Ixi (network 23/Audiotrix), Hecate (Zhark International), Dr.Fly (r.i.p) and some others created a memorable experience that they shared with the audience.

(The question of the relation of Bogotrax, as a festival occurring in the city (urban lab), with the countryside remains unresolved. That’s where we could meet and engage with the complexity of the Colombian context, and more specifically with socio-political questions. Colombia is a country that has been engaged in guerrilla warfare for more than 48 years (FARC was founded in 1964)2, and at the same time typified by an intense but marginalized – and also, for sure, auto-marginalized – cultural production. Etc.)

2008 “Do. But do.” –

In February 2008, just two weeks after I started writing this text, the last edition in which I still was wholly involved took place. We choose for it the basic “old school” motto, “Do it yourself” – “Hágalo usted mismo”. In the first draft of the poster the main motif was a hand manipulating a remote control and the explanation of the designer was that the ‘use of the control’ was a kind of allegory of something we could all do by ourselves. Well, that for sure was a good example of the kind of autonomous decisions in present conditions we can take and which ones not. You are not supposed to stop watching, reality is being re-edited for your own consumption. You can choose the format! Talk show, soap opera, culture, music, news, environment, etc. Nevertheless, the good example of D.I.Y was supposed to be the festival itself… its graphic translation wasn’t really that obvious.
After we all told our friend that the design was more likely suggesting the contrary of what we were getting at, suggesting remote control manipulation instead of “inter-action” and creativity, he came up with another motif for the poster. The chimpanze who instead of grasping Stanley Kubrick’s femur is modestly holding a plumber’s key. He is looking directly ahead, viewing the viewer, in a rather non-questioning attitude (which has the advantage of not being excessively affirmative).
Right now I’m trying to retranslate the design as a commentary, which already by itself is a difficult translation of an unclear example, into a pretty clear and rich design (the second one). There, in these limitations, I found a few words whose sense is enigmatic. « Do. But do ». Does the first sentence, in this quotation, have the same sense as the second? Does the first ‘’Do’’ connote the same meaning as the second one? How could the difference be created in almost the same breath by that adverse correlative conjunction (but) ?
In a way then, the beginning of an answer comes from an Ohrwurm, the reminiscence of a non-question that Bloom in Joyce’s “Ulysses” remembers for himself: “One life is all. One body. Do. But do.”3

Complement

This complement is about the form of a general ‘’paradox’’ that operates in all the different “techno-cultures”4 as an internal limit: an ‘’ambiguous’’ relation to discourse that socially gives them their strength, and signals also, from the same perspective, their weakness. If the link to the question outlined above (sound barricades, silence, etc.) will not necessarily be evident some further reflexion from the interested reader would easily unconceal it. After five years trying to work out an ‘’alternative’’, and in any case, independent festival, its relevance and inner necessity seems total to me.
I’ll now propose a thesis, by what I mean here the general principle of an interpretation, given or supposed in different forms by different authors. Of course, as a very general exposition of an enough diversified interpretation, it is also a simplification. In this sense, our critique – as a general critique directed to a thesis grounded first just in some few examples – will need, in another time, some further confirmation. What could then also show the extend to which this examples aren’t fortuitous.
The aim here is just to indicate some general concepts whose radical critique should be implied in any subversive praxis of music. This will be done in the movement of the thesis to his critique, in a combination that has for sure some dialectical elements but that seeks to stay still in a juxtaposition of levels, it’s strategy still not being clear enough (for example in the necessity of implying a critique of dialectics itself. And further, which one or in which form).
What i’m going expose next appears to me slowly and first just schematically while i was working at very different levels in the organization of the Bogotrax festival. At the same time it became, after a couple of years, the center of a discussion I tried to develop from inside the festival and through it (through the project itself and also through some public lectures and discussions during the festival). The form in which I presented now, as some new certainties, could make it not immediately recognizable to those who took part in that process. Schematism has probably not still be sufficiently overcome.

Recuperating participation

First, I’ll present (I) the main lines of a critical discourse I consider partially right. It is a discourse that needs to be radicalized precisely through the ‘’political’’ critique of the basic opposition that informs it: the opposition between representation and participation. Then, I’ll articulate a draft of a critique (II) through a more radical critical reading of I.

I.Thesis

1.“ Techno ” as an inherently critical practice.

A. “ Techno ” does not seem to define or carry any articulated discourse. It has no obvious “content” or “message”.
B. An intention to blur the supposed essential difference in between content an his socio-aesthetic representation will be more specific of this “sub-culture” than of any other.

And some further articulations:

1.1 In a way analogous to what hippyism and punk did in their day, the “culture of electronic music” set itself against the codes and mediations of “democratic” representation, and promote a certain type of direct action. But “techno” and its effigy, the “Rave Party”, attack the very nucleus of the logic of representation: discourse.

1.2 In its communicative vocation, discourse could be understood as the ultimate bastion of the logic of spectacularization.
2. His representative structure reflects an specific social order.
2.1. Representativity in society suppose a radical difference in between message and answer : the answer should not produced any essential changes.
3. Language and discourse as the possibility of communication in social representative structures suppose a radical difference in between form and content, presence and representation, sense and the expression of sense, etc.
4. Answers that could produce changes will create participatory relations rather than representational or spectacular relations.
4.1 “Techno-culture”, in its difference with other ‘’sub-cultures’’, will be an “avant-garde” in this sense: its practices will represent a subversion of expired social, aesthetic and epistemological structures.

Commentary

One main presupposition in this thesis, on which we’re going to focus, is the distinction between representation and participation. Let’s say we don’t trust this distinction. Isn’t representation – in the sense something (or somebody) taking the place of somebody (or something) else – a form of participation? (Or the other way around: participation as a form of representation, like when I say: “I represent myself”, etc). But this simple question suppose some entanglement.
At an specific moment some found in what they suddenly recognize as a “new” “subculture” – i.e. “techno” – a radical affirmation of the collective experience as practice, and an affirmation of collectivity or of what society itself is capable of generating through the actions of its members beyond or before any discourse critical or simply ideological.
Some basic but clear lines for such an interpretation were already to be found in Michel Maffesoli’s L’Ombre de Dionysos [The shadow of Dionysius] (1982)5, as well and mainly in Jean-Luc Nancy’s La communauté désoeuvrée [The inoperative community] (also 1982)6. Though at that time neither of them were dealing with “rave culture” (later Maffesoli will explicitly do it) an interesting simultaneity was later to be confirmed. In 1998, appears another book, Sens multiple, la techno – un laboratoire artistique et politique du présent7 where both, the sociologist Maffesoli and the philosopher Nancy were interviewed by the author. The schema of the double critical reading that I’m trying to expose can be considered, on critical purposes, mainly directed to this book8. His analysis are all oriented by the opposition between representation and participation. I’ll take here just one example that the interested reader could easily confirm all along this otherwise interesting book :
« In those participative experiences [the rave is a main one], and in the requierement that impel them to give the word or voice to each singular [et dans l’exigence qui les anime de donner voix ou parole aux singuliers] – not anymore of representing them but once again of presenting them/non plus de les représenter, mais encore une fois de les présenter/ –, on assite à un véritable/ we come along a true upheaval of what is given as common in art /bouleversement des données habituelles de l’art,/ of its exposition and reception/ de son exposition et de sa réception/, because the spectators become themselves actors/car les spectateurs y deviennent eux-mêmes des acteurs,/ the same way artists also transform themselves in spectators/ tout comme les artistes s’y transforment aussi en spectateurs. As a result, what makes a work be at work and give sense to the work/ ce qui fait oeuvre et sens dans l’oeuvre/ doesn’t depend anymore on what it communicates or directs /ne dépend plus de ce qu’elle communique ou adresse,/but on itself as long as it invites to an experience that doesn’t rest anymore in isolation and separation but, on the contrary in the share and the participation. mais d’elle-même en tant qu’elle invite à une expérience qui ne répose plus sur l’isolement et la séparation, mais au contraire sur le partage et la participation »9. (The underlined is mine).
The use of this opposition between participation and representation to characterize an experience of art (of “what is at work in a work of art”, etc.) seems first to suggest a re-definition of the realm of art itself. Of course that’s by no way an original idea but the intention of applying it to “techno-culture” could seem at first unusual. It’s true, nonetheless, that this supposition creates first a fiction of unity, the unity of something that could further be call a “movement”, a “culture” – call it “sub-culture” or whatever you want – in the center of which you’ll find “electronic music”, i.e. “techno”. Hence, the illusion of “techno-culture” itself (that we share just to the point we’re able to start describing it’s fictional structure) and the possibility of specifying, from a theoretical point of view, what the rave experience, or at least the good rave experience is. But still more important is the fact that on the ground of this fiction (the unity of a movement) another deeper one is produced : the fiction of a critical discourse able to operate as an affirmative and apologetic tool in the field of pseudo-antagonism: of theory as a separated activity. This means, in this sense, a practice that corresponds to the average media- discourse. Paradoxically grounded on separation rather that participation, he intends, nevertheless an apology of art as a participative experience. Because participation, in order to account for the non-unity of reality, should assume in within its most inner self the distance of separation: the possibility of immanent critic as a simultaneously theorico-practical “activity”.
But the uncritical use of this opposition, as a fundamental difference rather than an unstable articulation end up blocking not just a radical critique on different experiences of “alienation”. It had particularly block the possibility to account for that more rare flower: the experience of consciousness and rationality as forms and effects of possession10. Hence of rave as a possible space for critical practices and strategic subversion.

The quoted book of Michel Gaillot happens to be contemporary to the moment “free-partying” was becoming visible – in France – and acknowledged not just by journalistic and media- discourses but also by sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, and political ones. I suggest already, on the one hand, that there could be some general presuppositions that could implicate together these apparently different kinds of discourses. On the another hand I don’t think this perspective could, or should, just be applied to France or to the development of these phenomenona in France. That again is a delimitation done on critical purposes (so the examen and confrontation of further material could be done, in some order, following some criteria that are not simply empirical or geographical but that correspond also to discursive and semantic delimitations).

Critique

Another important element for the previous perspective on the question and for its critique is without any doubt the development of an hypercritical “theory” that became worldwide known, after one of his many strategic structures, as deconstruction11. The principles of the previous interpretation could just have being developed after the critique and (the beginning of the) deconstruction of logocentrism and phonocentrism. Both, logocentrism – the organization of discourse and discursive practices after the pure possibility of logic, as logic of sense, rationality, consciousness, clear and ideal communication, etc. – and phonocentrism were then describe and recognize as main structures of occidental philosophy (“metaphysic”).12 For all that was suppose to be external to sense or meaning became suddenly possible to be eventually consider as constitutive and essential in the production of history. Some decades later then, through a process of shifts that deserve to be consider and analyze in another occasion, the “practice of rave” – organize around a “music without meaning intentions” – could become the popular mediatic image of a fracture in occidental thought. Deconstruction was as fashionable as techno. Becoming image and spectacular reflection of a reality that it didn’t necessarily grasp, “techno-culture” could then be understood, in a large but not total measure, as an incapacity of understanding some basic historical conditions of his production. In this sense, the exhibition of the moments in which an unconditional but lucid affirmation of radical desires for total freedom should be linked to aesthetic and socio-political subversive practices will already constitute a critique of the spectacle of electronic musics.

“Today” – which means from the perspective of the previous years – the manifestation of this “annulling” of discourse – of which we talked before – supposed to be part of the “essence” of “techno”, appears clearly as what it already was: a displacement of discourse, and particularly of the voice, the distance of the machine at the heart of proximity. In this sense, it is the restructuring and reconfiguring that seems no longer to hold a discourse – in terms of content or a message – as the leading center. The presence of a singer or a band – the fantasy of the evangelical in the proximity to the articulated song that will decipher our emotions – is not required anymore. The discourse appears simply as one more element in a series of articulations. However – and this is the fundamental point here -, before according any legitimacy to this critical schema one should be aware of the possibility of its reproduction in what was suppose to transgress it: the “aura” of the dj. who is in a closer relation to the public, and the closer presence to a more immediate message: a “togetherness” that will mystically manifest itself in the rave, etc.
Further it should also be said that is, in a way, the same that seems to make of “techno-culture” an alternative for “aesthetic” and “social” experimentation, the proximity of a closer participation, as a partial critique of representation and spectacularization, that also makes its recuperation so simple. It becomes simply another category, another possible moment in the ‘’liberal’’ social system, one more sub-culture whose aim is simply to produce social identity, proximity between its members, and finally structure new markets.
It is because of its negation of discourse, of the “message”, or of ‘’reflexive practice’’ that “techno” and “rave culture” are so easily recuperated by any discourse, and primarily by the dominant discourse, which does not need to articulate itself in order to end up directing and dictating the general form of its practices. Consumption and leisure, without necessarily being the center become determining factors. Experimentation and creativity take second place or simply disappear: the “rave” becomes just another example in the social dynamic of work and leisure time; of production and consumption according to the fundamental rules of free circulation of goods and services (“entertainment” in our capitalist societies).
My analytical hypothesis here is that recuperation in this sense – in a background of strong aesthetic, cultural and social ruptures – is also made possible because of an insufficient critique of representation and representative structures presupposed in the process of spectacularization. Something particularly evident in the assumption of an uncritical opposition between representation and participation, but also in the fundamental difference between theory and its articulation in social practices. Clearly this critique, just schematically anticipated here, should continue to be practically and theoretically interrogated.

1 As known, cancer is a general name for all the diseases in which certain cells of an animal body divide themselves in an uncontrolled way and instead of dying through this process (technically call ”apoptose”) they keep on dividing… without dying, indefinitely reproducing abnormal cells whose genetic code, normally programmed for a natural dead is precisely distort in this point: cancerous cells are theorically and technically immortal. Immortal dead cells…
2 I permit myself a note on the Farc subject, feeling hostage of this new media phenomenon that came suddenly to double this old reality of rural colombian guerrilla warfare. Farc, as everyone with a minimun of critical conscience know, is not the problem of Colombia. Is rather first an effect of several critical social problems. The question, as with so many other ”subjects” should first be: what economical reasons, doubled of political interests, have made of them, in the last years, that huge media-phenomenon, that could even replace the international interest of so many big clients for the always increasing cocaïne traficking. One icon for another: the answer doesn’t seems that enigmatic. The result is, as always, an extreme poverty of analysis, discussion, opinion…
3 Joyce, J. Ulysses, Vintage International, 1990, USA. P. 275. Bloom repeat it somewhere else in his journey… i couldn’t fine the locus for the time this text was suppose to be finished. Could – or should – this sequence be read in parallel with the final, unconditional, triple affirmation: «[…] and yes I said yes I will Yes. »?
4 There’s something slack in the expression “techno-culture” in the sense culture itself can just be thought as the possibility of technology. This, also in the sens “nature” means already the possibility of culture and human being is the exact measure of this monstrosity (c.f. Sophocle’s Antigona) that cannot be said simply the one or the other. Culture then being techno-culture in an strict sense the question of the meaning of this expression applied to specific collectivities that gathered around “electronic musics” (another slack expression) is also here at stake.
5 Poche, reed. Paris, 1991.
6 Christian Bourgois, Strasbourg, 1982.
7 Michel Gaillot; Dis voir, Paris, 1998. So far, it seems this curious work hasn’t being translated into English.
8 I don’t even want to suggest that the following critique could simply be extended to M. Maffesoli or J.L.Nancy. Their names function here merely as indicators of some fundamental historical and conceptual (historico-conceptual) conditions that certainly are more differenciated and articulated that this or that specific theory or interpretation of “techno-culture”.
9 Op. Cit. P. 56. The theoretical perspective exposed in this book (participation against representation) seems to me being at the base of other ”relevant”, less theoretical, works on the subject. Like the mediatic though not totally unuseful book of Etienne Racine, Le phénomène techno, Paris, Imago, 2002.
10 And being already in this point, a joker question: could class-consciousness also derive from an experience of possession? This are maybe the firsts drafts for a “theory” of televisionarism. In greek the theôrós was the emissary send from a city to take part in a party or in the celebration of some mysteries. As known, nobody was supposed to be simply an spectator of mysteries like the Eleusian ones. The theôros in this case was for sure also compel to drop some soma.
11 The question of the mediatic and fashionable success of deconstruction can here be left aside. Let’s just say that largely it can be also understood as a resistance to his most “revolutionary” “elements”.
12 One major issue of Derrida’s thought that was first formulated, in a very academic fashion in 1967 in his first published study, The voice and the phenomenon. It was immediately enlarged and sharpened in Of Grammatologie published in 1968. This seems to me an indisputable intellectual and theoretical background of the appreciations and discussions in France about “techno” or “electronic music”. It could seem interesting to notice that Derrida himself, till the point i know, never pronounced himself explicitly about such things. Phonocentrism could here elliptically be define as the “effect of consciousness” produced by the experience of the voice in the “earing one-self its own voice”. The critic of this experience, his form and his presuppositions, as well as the description of his system, implies already a critic of some mayor concepts as consciousness, subjectivity, experience, etc. If the experience of consciousness itself, as an immediate and immanent experience is acknowledged as a fiction – the fiction of immediacy itself – then all the values organized around oppositions like conscious/unconscious or rational/irrational have to be re-evaluated. Starting with the experience of logos itself, of the logicity or categoriality of reality. The critic of logocentrism, of the primacy of logos in occidental philosophy (and culture, and society, and, and…), starts then with the recognition of the unexplained primacy of the experience of the voice, of the proximity of sens and the transparency of the message in the inwardness of the internal monologue (the possibility of consciousness). Cf. The voice and the phenomenon. The possibility of this pure presence (as when you ear yourself talking to yourself without even moving your lips) is of course at the center of something like participation: dividing my own presence to myself before any kind of schizophrenia (in a clinical or in a non-clinical sense). A transcendental schizophrenia as condition of “normality” and its other.

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