Yes/And
Thinking According to And
I have recently become rather obsessed with the ampersand, that strange and lovely typographical knot, the &. This is the only ligature that is still currently found on modern keyboards. A ligature is the combination of two letters that form one typographical unit. In the case of the ampersand these letters are e and t, or et, the Latin word for and, as in “et tu, Brute?” Julius Caeser can well imagine that his political opponents would murder him, but his political opponents and his good friend Brutus? That is too much. It is as if the et kills him.
This fascination with the ampersand is likewise a fascination with and. To state this fascination in the most abstract philosophical manner possible, thinking according to and replaces Kierkegaard’s dialectical binary either/or with the non-binary yes/and. As in, yes we are modern, and we are pretty medieval, and primitive too. Yes, you are determined in the last instance by a whole host of unfathomable contingencies, and yet you are free to act, and, what’s more, you are responsible for your actions!
A = A
The curious word ampersand derives allegedly from a latin name for this ligature meaning originally “and by itself and.” This makes me think of that tautological algebraic equation for the immutable identity of the One that we find in the mystical visions of Zeno, Plotinus and Laruelle; the equation is simple: A = A. Or as Plotinus put it: the mystical journey is the flight from the alone to the Alone. One travels along the path of the ampersand. Or the ampersand is the path.
Alien Psychosis
And of course, these days the letters E T stand for extra-terrestrial. I find it rather amusing that my Christian parents were just as wary of aliens as they were of witchcraft; they frowned upon the E.T. movie as if it were blasphemy, for E.T. functions as Spielberg’s Christ, and likewise, such notions as other worlds threatens the heliocentric cosmos, as Giordano Bruno discovered the hard way when, in the late 14th century, he proposed that each star had its own world and then was promptly burned at the stake for it—condemned in the name of Christ, I might add.
Here we can see again how that simple and, just the thought of other worlds, upends binary reasoning itself. Gods and devils are perfectly reasonable, they complement one another, dialectically, but gods, devils and aliens? That’s too much to think about. A dialectical statement is, for example: god is the devil; a yes/and statement would be: yes, god is the devil, and the aliens don’t care.
On a related note, I’ve recently noticed the rise of a contemporary affliction that we will provisionally call alien psychosis, in which the alien or UFO becomes the transcendental signified of a paranoid fixation: I witnessed an acquaintance succumb to this malady last year, and I see it periodically on the subway; and now James Franco is (maybe) a victim? Clearly Spielberg exercises his own alien psychosis by making so many movies about aliens.
In my entirely biased viewpoint the real alien in Spielberg’s E.T. are the misty pine forests the E.T.s land in. Trees are the supra-terrestrial aliens among us, producing and maintaining the livable habitat, if we only knew it, or cared.
Body of the Ampersand
Anyways, I’d always been calligraphically curious, but now with my new-found ampersand obsession, I’ve become calligraphically active, drawing an early medieval version of the ampersand over and over again; it’s very satisfying and I recommend it. The trick to calligraphy is all about posture and using your whole body. Letter forms are forms of the body; the ampersand is a sweep and a loop de loop made by your whole arm.
The Eschaton
Terrence McKenna mysteriously referred to the ampersand as the eschaton. Here we might think of the and as the split atom, and the logic of the yes/and is a chain reaction whose end is incalculable. The other way to think about this is that the so called “end of the world” is no end at all but rather a continuation into something that is heretofore unimaginable. The ands never complete, but merely continue on, indefinitely. Yes, it really is the end of the world, and the planet will keep on going on! As McKenna liked to remind us, reality is not only stranger than you suppose, it is far stranger than you can suppose. This perhaps is the most radical form of and, the and as an inevitable advance into an unimaginable future, to which we are each of us all rapidly accelerating (and from which we all proceeded). So you can see how the yes/and series is rather terrifying and tantamount to psychosis; true reality is not reasonable, by definition.
Parataxis
But not only does the and possess its own non-logic, it has its own prose style! This is known as parataxis, the most famous examples of which can be found in the Pentateuch, and, in that most preeminent of modern stylists, Gertrude Stein (Earnest Hemingway stole her paratactic style and the world called it his own). Here clauses are strung together on a thread of ands, forming a continuous present without logical sequence, leaving it up to the reader to divine the occluded causal chain.
Continuous Psyche
But parataxis expands beyond mere prose style. Aside from the sheer never-ending intensity of modern life, one might not find a more perfect example of true parataxis than the random commercials that interrupt your streaming media; or, should you find yourself in a hotel with one of those old-style cable televisions, one can practice parataxis by channel surfing: going from one random image to the next, where every skip to the next channel constitutes the and. I don’t really use the term postmodern very often, or at all (because clearly modernity has not ended) but were I too sum up postmodernism as an aesthetic phenomena I would say that it is made entirely out of ands, random images on an infinitive series. No wonder Frederic Jameson called this the fragmentation of the psyche—only, I would revise that to the psyche made continuous; the stream of psyche.
And lastly, but by no means conclusively, we can see then how the movement of the and, this skipping and jumping, is the very movement of the unconscious, for as we all know, the unconscious only says yes; it’s the movement of the free-associative method—one that might be encouraged by your psychoanalyst with the intervention of a simple “… yes, and?”
