Weave, video, transit, butterfly

While written at a remove from the work of Filipino Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang, my meanderings here were triggered by the overlapping appearance of the words “weave," “video,” “transit,” and “butterfly” in her oeuvre. I’m taking this quartet of words where she didn’t. I take this liberty, initially for no reason, except to mimic Comilang’s will to perform a word-combine. The mimicry severs me from Comilang almost immediately but also allows me to return to her work before I leave this essay.

I’m instead taking this quartet in the direction of Surrealism’s “Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.”¹ Written in a peculiar essay by a French count in 1868—and taken up in the early twentieth century by André Breton as Surrealist provocation—random, improbable juxtaposition slid to the core of the high modern ethos. Some time later, in 1948, Jorge Luis Borges was to include a Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge in an essay that upended Euro-American lexicographic order for his readers.

Borges’s fantastic Chinese encyclopedia—an incomprehensible taxonomy— categories like “those drawn with a fine camel’s-hair brush,” “stray dogs,” “embalmed ones,” or (my favorite) “those that have just broken the flower vase,” among others equally bewildering.² In the 1960s, Michel Foucault would elaborate “archaeologically” on the “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things.”³ Weave, video, transit, butterfly (not all have shift-to-verb forms) may as well be cat embryo, thing that burrows into concrete, bioluminescent pig, dancing elementals. 

Weave conjures, for me, minuscular abrasions on thirty-three-thousand-year-old flaked stones found in an awesome Philippine cave, urging archaeologists to suppose basket or even hut wall weaving in the Neolithic period. Weave also returns me to the Jacquard loom, which facilitated conceptualization of the first computers. The word is always in transit.⁴

My video—and here I surprise myself—is data. In transit. At the micro scale of its pixel units, I transit (shift, jump, bleed, jerk, skip) from quirky color to color. The collective movement that is visually composed behind the retina coheres as some kind of story. Only, the story is “told” in video’s intrinsic character as, precisely, pixelated. The coherence of each gathering of pixels stays thus composed for much less than a second, before transit changes the composition for another quickly dissolving composition. A perfect instance, each micro bit of time and space, which to my mind demonstrates philosopher Bruno Latour’s notion that,

human and non-human actors [forming] shifting networks of relationships that define situations and determine outcomes…

which he said in relation to his argument that “we have never been modern.”⁵ Which argument pivots me to one book that set me to thinking—simultaneously, like Latour’s networks of networks igniting multidirectionally—my butterfly, my video, my transit, my weave in ways that privileges Critical Theory. (Critical Theory allowed me entrée into the pleasurable synapse firings that jettison me into activism.) The book is Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, written in Serbo-Croatian by the Serbian writer Milorad Pavić. He says in his introduction:

No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards, and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it, for you…cannot get more out of the truth than what you put into it.⁶

The words are as though pixels—words from partially fictitious bodies of knowledge purloined from the three Abrahamic religions. The oddly organized book obliges readers to create coherence from the words/entries/bits, depending on what pixel webs they bring to the reading. I bring to this book my obdurate curiosity about postmodern reweavings of ancient yarn from strands that are fabulation and verified data at once. Which drives the urge to refigure inherited bodies of knowledge and naturalized memories of experience. 

Pavić’s Dictionary encourages the devotee of Borges and Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia, to try and discern surprises in the breaks on the surfaces of familiar order. And to therefore expect to sustain an activist life by detecting emerging patterns the shards make in the abyss. And to furthermore understand that the detective (as it were) must make out how and how much the self as complex subjectivity pre-creates patterns. Humans import familiarity into the alien webs, which are showing now in greater definition—as construction is ongoing as digital architecture.

Autocritical awareness drives me to retreats into the comforts of surrealism, when accosted, for example, by slippery-slidey strings between digital and physical experience. This happens often where I nest while not flying about, in Manila, Philippines. Recently, a Manila-based game developer and activist contra disinformation was helping me with a digital timeline of a full-scale war in the Islamic City of Marawi, carried out between elements with Daesh connections and ambitions, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines. In five months, Marawi’s center was transformed into today’s Gaza ruinscape. The game developer was among the majority of Filipinos who have never been to the southern Philippines, much less to a war-destroyed city. 

Barely containing himself when he recognized how closely the digital war game animations (his daily fare) resembled an actual postwar site, he was on a high. In his first real experience of a battlefield, he saw telling detail, down to the spread of mortar landings on concrete. Real and digital conflated in his soul. As in mine, seeing the simultaneity of alien and familiar. And by my view from the Philippine Muslim South, which also conflates with violated spaces in the Middle East, themselves mediated in transit to me by video streams. The mediation also transpires in meetings with Muslim Filipino economic migrants and Mujahedin transiting their lives, each an actor in this Middle East and island Southeast Asia. The butterfly effect weaves about polyvalently.

All of which appeals to me and the traditional textile specialist I was several lifetimes ago, when I learned about 0-1 binary math from the ikat-dyers’ colored/uncolored, positive/negative—uniplanar—bilateral system of making. And while no representations of butterflies appear in traditional island Southeast Asian textiles, the old ikats themselves are as though butterflies whose ancient flutterings may have something to do with the ongoing shift from organic to machine intelligence. Surrealism excites and calms this imagination—including both the mashups and actual technology-building with quantum mechanics.  

Finally circling back to Stephanie Comilang’s body of work: hers is a sinewy quartet of weave, video, transit, butterfly. The four words that she strenuously engaged are by no means floating signifiers beyond the particularities of her concerns, intentions, and passions. They are indeed packed nodes that are both hers and others’ and will make (still-unknown) sense in multiple reassemblies. That is, when they take up spaces when/if arranged in Borgesian compilations. Subject positions other than mine, or Comilang’s, will recognize and construct versions of early twenty-first–century activisms, spinning off these words/nodes, playing out as both art and affect—out there, where the shards of broken surfaces will offer quantum possibility.

^NOTES
1 Lautréamont, Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), Canto VI, Verse 3, trans. Guy Wernham (New York: New Directions, 1943). First published in 1868.
² Jorge Luis Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,” in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), 231. The essay was originally published as “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” in La Nación (Argentina), February 8, 1942, and republished in Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1953).
³ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xvi. First published in French in 1966.
⁴ Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” Colliers Magazine, June 28, 1952.
⁵ Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Oress, 1993).
⁶ Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, female ed. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988). Originally published in Serbo-Croatian in 1984. I read the female of the two editions, the other being the male edition.