On the Occult (Speculative Arts Research vol. 2)

Thanks to friend and artist-editor extraordinaire Max Razdow for including an essay of mine (on occult poetics) in the 2nd issue of his journal, Speculative Arts Research. "What, I wonder, becomes the sense of theory (or a theory of the senses) when one becomes synaesthesiac in the wake of the disaster; when what we see also makes us hear (or touch, or smell, or taste)? Where hearing in fact supersedes seeing, overcoming the hegemony of the ocular? [...] What, too, if our common sense involves a negation of the senses? A withdrawal into the eidetic, the subtle; into non-representational modes of meaning-making (such are sound and gesture and movement)? At what point does language, as that upon which our common sense largely depends, become non-meaningful, does it refuse the reduction of “nonmeaning” and “phonic substance” for a “universal grammar” [...]?"