Revised New Introduction to the System of Transcendental Qabala
As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time
Revised New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala 2015 / 2022 24 x 30 x 5 in. Paint grid, decorative beads, custom printed scarf, mirror tray, melted wax, laser-etched birch panel board, gauze strip, decorative bells, metal leaf flakes, melt-adhesive glue, reclaimed wall ornament, tile adhesive, surgical glove, adhesive vinyl, broach, reclaimed plywood.
The centerpiece of this assemblage is a paint grid, which is an industrially manufactured implement used to strain excess paint from a paint roller during practical jobs like painting a wall. Behind it is a scarf featuring a diagram of an early formulation of my Transcendental Qabala system; above it, “LAET” is stenciled. The work is meant to convey the ongoing and polyvalent process of creation; the piece is not strictly speaking an object. It is intrinsically unfinished, it presents itself as an implement, comprised mostly of materials designed to be elements or tools in the construction and maintenance of living spaces.
In connecting it to my system of philosophy,1 I am seeking to convey something about how it feels to have a system of philosophy growing inside of me. From a very young age - my teenage years - I have considered myself to be an original philosopher. I never had any curiosity about any other system of or approach to philosophy, except as something to scrap for parts in the construction of my own system.2 “Having” a system of philosophy is something like having an art practice; it’s a style, there’s a consistency to it, an essence shared by works that it discharges, even as it (the essence) at the same time endures a transcendental temporality at the hands of these very works; the essence evolves, even though it’s immaterial and eternal, due to feedback from its reception, influence from materials used in its crystallization, the exhaustion of its noetic DNA overtime, a whole array of reasons. For an art practice this is obvious; for a philosophy system, it’s more difficult for others to detect, since philosophy is invisible, takes years to absorb, and so few people have real curiosity about it or know anything about its basic parameters or its history.
This piece is about my relationship to my philosophy system, to the shame I endured over years of misrecognition and chauvenism towards me and my work3 (because I didn’t look the part, or was a woman, or was queer, or a musician, or believed in God), the ecstatic experiences, beyond description, over insights that I was never able to share with anyone I knew (though I could share them in my parasocial relationships with the Nietzsche or Spinoza in my imagination). The faux naivete I choose to employ in my communication style due to my allergy to scholasticism and pretentiousness, the levels of fetal and embryonic development the system has passed through, especially during the second half of last decade.
I think that when the current regime of reactionary Christian (or nihilist posthumanist) thinkfluencer culture finally recoils in horror from the true meaning of the positions it’s discovering and adopting, the way that those who were absorbing those ideas back in 2017 (when it was all purely online and disconnected from prestige culture) did after a few years, more and more people will see that if you seek to honestly confront the present world squarely for what it is, and you refuse bad faith and ressentiment (and are careful to not be lured into Gerard’s scapegoat logic yourself in the midst of your own critique of that logic operating in political domains you disagree with) you have no choice but to adopt or build a philosophy that looks more or less like my own.
for those who don’t know I have an album called New Introductory Lectures on the System of Transcendental Qabala under the name Kel Valhaal, so this sculpture is an updated version of that album (the cover of which featured a diagram similar to the one displayed on the scarf)
Many people with a passion for philosophy don’t approach it in this way. They find a school, or even a single figure, and they make a decision (unconsciously) that this school or figure has the correct doctrine. Then they devote their efforts to better understanding this doctrine, defending it, applying it to new scenarios or refining it in various ways. I have no problem with this approach, it’s just different from mine; I invite anyone with this disposition to choose my own system for this.
I take for granted that this is still mostly the case, though it’s much less so now