Notes on the Artifact-Body-Consciousness

I want to give some relaxed reflections about baseball history and the artifact consciousness; the idea of the charnel house of baseball history and the power of the esoteric artifact lineage.

The artifact itself is veiled. It is a hidden history only marked by time. We went over this in the Cuban baseball photography lecture — but I want to peel deeper into this midst. It is this idea and notion that time itself is that which marks the object but the actual event or ecological circumstance of time is veiled to vision. The artifact itself absorbs this repercussion. Gravity, weather, water, air. Earth, dirt, soil. These are the incidents that mark the epigenealogy of the artifact.

What do I mean by this? That the artifact itself is a body in space time and has a formal memory which is elucidated not unlike mankind. This is a primary physics of the markmaking of time in which histories are submerged and elucidated epigenetically in the body; in and as the lineage as in an ancestry which itself is the formal genetic construction, memory, marker, and assembly of the blood and neural system which constitutes the individual.

We can think of artifacts in much of the same way. I examine the artifact and what the body of the artifact reveals is a primary experience that cannot be recovered but by a lucky provenance; perhaps a level of social, public, or private record. But the history of the body of the object and the mark of time is submerged in the actual fashion or the weather or the wear of the artifact itself.

I want us to consider the artifact itself not so much as being just a sole body in space; in this way subject to appraisals in a historical vacuum. The artifact rarely is ever itself… insofar as it is in actuality an amalgam of historical circumstances, conditions, and forces. There is no real institutional or protective privacy of time; time is rarely if ever fortuitous to know to preserve meaning.

And these are the precise conditions in which meaning is fulmigated, cultivated, and fermented. In and through the passage of time which marks the artifact. The circumstances and conditions which the artifact influences and adorns. Therein, there is no mere substance or object primacy. But the object itself, much like the real human condition beneath the costume and mask of presumed subjectivity and solid state — is a force at and in interaction in space-time as in a ecosystem. This is the weather that the artifact carries with and within and as itself into the perennial present.

When we are looking at historical artifacts, the body itself is a form of deception. It is the that which contains or holds the whole breadth of history from incarnation to the present moment apparition of the form in space and time; the minor miracle of preservation — in human hands or within the earth — that the artifact undertakes and undergoes as a strange form of sentience… perhaps akin to the human without respect to the specific complexities of the neural register… but that it retains its body and its compound elemental form and figuration in space.

The artifact is necessarily condition impacted by time; the impulse to preservation is always post historical. This meaning that the artifact first must move through time to acquire time and the necessary historical distance to become and achieve a level of importance. Present history is, in this way and sense — profoundly so — always already without meaning in the eye of the curator, archivist, or historian.

And this perhaps at first appears to be nonsensical. That the present itself is devoid of meaning. That the past itself; in the act of looking back — that the past itself acquires then this hue and tincture which we associate with historical permanence, human meaning, and cultural fluency. The past becomes the linguistic hinge of the present; the present is not yet formed as in cemented into the historical register as in a way of being and seeing; as such cannot yet be reflected upon. It has a status of unmooredness… a status of and in that which… that it can only dream itself forward using the language of the past. The present is an amalgam of acquired and thus remembered and brought forward cultural and historical attributes. The present is then a methodology of inquiry to synthesize, simulate, dream, and imagine futurity.

This, again, is the unity of the historical and the genomic body. This principle is cross-spectrum; cross-valent, cross-scalar. The body itself is a process in utero, synthesizing the entire history of the genome into a perilous future of epigenetic and reproductive recombination — unto a new future synthesis which is always already arriving and being impacted by the viral load of the historical… from the linguistic to the ecological.

In this way, the body and the artifact is being codified by process based consciousness — necessarily enjambed by history; wedged between the outmoded language impacted in and by the artifact body — and the future dreamed by the modality which is dragged in and by the body. It must necessarily use the language of the past to become something utterly new. All of the materials of time are recombined in and unto the fulcrum of the present moment — which is the jettison of history into the future. This principle is self same with precious elements and the creation of industrial computational devices and technology.

The artifact is utterly meaningless but for the shifting face of the present. It cannot be but that which it was constructed within — the context of its birth — perennially interfacing with the dynamic conditions of the present; the disjecta of the futurities which perennially occur and emerge between these two states of historical development in the most significant cosmological sense. It is held as if suspended in an amoeba or a womb of contradiction — the futurities which unfold before it shift its present face and indelibly impact its body… in the change of hands, raids, weather, glass, attics, and sea and earth which hold it.

It is precisely in and by this way and method that the artifact acquires the indelible strangeness and estrangement which we register when we hold it or behold it. It is identified as an alien craft, a vehicle of strange and transcendent survival. The artifact in this way and sum is the human body proper, without disjunction or differentiation. It is a shifting face in the river of time — not what it was when it was first made and forged; through the epigenetic shifts and shocks of futurity as manifest in the real time movement and fulcrum of history — quite actually linguistically shifts in and as the register of the time and the face which reads it. The artifact not only shifts temporally, as in the register and wear of its appearance, but it shifts relationally; relatively — in regard to how it is perceived; oriented to, towards — as itself an ecosystemic phenomenon of recognition, organization, and identification.

As it is well understood cosmologically, this force of ordering attention by way of the development of neural faculties and sensate faculties of perception; then orienting and reorienting the chemical and molecular device of the body and the elemental and chemical primary fluidity of the apparent material cosmos is a first order principle of mind, or the energetic force of change which is the first property at hand, under which all object and objectivity as in the relative forces at work naturally organize; shift, and reorganize according to perception, recognition; chemical identification and reconfiguration at the source and root of character.

As such, the artifact and the human body are as in a state of emergent recognition; this process of reordering is as apparent in the journey from the forgotten cellar or albumen buried within the earth to the recovery projects of earth’s core archives of human recognition of possibility, potentiality, and historiography of emergence of the very faculties of consciousness which are always already examining its own emergent past — the past of both time, the universal, the cosmos, and the body — all at once, at one, and in ecological sum.

This perfect unity is the sea in which both the artifact and the body swim as a shifting face — epigenetic transformation, transfiguration, and alteration of the body in the stream of the force and forces of relative space and time as a field at, of, and in play — but also, simultaneously and in perfect synchrony — reordering the very facial recognition of that which the essence of the artifact is in character… in accord with the alightment of history, time, and the unfolding of the neural faculties of consciousness which indelibly recognize it as such; as such move and shift the ordered magnitudes of an unconscious gravity of history toward a conscious meaning making project of remembering; the memory of history; the re-assembly of the lost body of time.