Hyperpresence

When the hierarchical organization of space that privileges the eye and vision, this perspective simulation - for it is merely a simulacrum - disintegrates, something else emerges; this we express as a kind of touch, for lack of a better term, a tactile hyperpresence of things, “as if we could grasp them.” But this tactile fantasy has nothing to do with our sense of touch: it is a metaphor for “seizure,” the annihilation of the scene and space of representation.

An orchestration of affect laces through the textual source, affects following one another or overlapping, integrating all the hyperpresences at the level of consciousness.

For while Strindberg seems to insist on his own hyperpresence when inviting a friend into a room full of Wunderkamera photographs of himself, the diverse images also serve to undermine photography’s referential function—rather than shoring up the body’s authority and presence, they suggest that the body has been something and somewhere else, is not a dependable continuity or singularity, cannot be counted upon.

Heine criticizes this lack of differentiation, this hyperpresence of the effect in its cause, in the following description of the early Liszt.

All the same, he should have taken her into the garden they both loved so much one sunny afternoon and talked to her about the kind of love for her that he was capable of and the kind he was not. He wouldn’t even have needed to speak about skies and angels, let alone hyperpresences.