Postscript: The ‘X-File’ (Notes on Extended Thought)

Summary

The image of the black is ubiquitous.

—Anthony P. Farley, ‘The Poetics of Colorlined Space’

What if this is the beginning? Or is there an end to speak of in the realm of thought?

Since thought is infinite, what is presented is that file, a specific kind of file whose form and content will be generated as part of an investigation into the concept of thought itself. The propensity to think, from the extended disposition that takes the black point of view as a critical discursive site, means the beginning unfolds in figurative and literal forms.

Here is the file. The X-File is the X, of X, written and compiled by X, and from X's disposition. This, of course, is not a mediated form. In a sense, it is X's thought, composition and expression – a black point of view contra conquest.

The X-File contains what should be disclosed. It has nothing to do with secrecy. In the face of what renders secrecy, the idea of the sacred, the X-File is the unsealing of that.

This file contains side or marginal notes that sprang forth in the unfolding of thought. The tenor of this file is theoretical in form. It is the file which, in loose terms, can be declared to mean extended thought. This is its content in the context of having to think against conquest.

The X-File is an ongoing investigation, that radical opening which comes in the form of rupture. This gives way to interstices. The pressure point intensifies to rupture at the interstice where thought emerges against the despotic order of meaning, to produce other meanings. The interstices, according to Roland Barthes (1982), signify a perforation of the surface. X, then, is this perforation. As Barthes (1982, 24) articulates it, this is ‘a purely interstitial object’ which he links with emptiness. But when X is thrown into the fold, there is a whole reconfiguration taking place in that X is not that interstitial object, but the force that makes that interstitial object exist. In other words, the inscription of X denotes that force which causes the interstitial marks to be seen on the surface, and these become cracks that are pushed further until rupture continually unfolds.