The exact feeling is an impossibility. It’s something to shoot for but at the same time entirely a delusion. Yet we keep chasing the impossibility. Of the entirety of the pack, each cigarette promises the secret pleasures you’ve come to associate with opening the box and the smell of its contents. And in the first instance, when you thought you were stoking the flames of the exact feeling, you were just lighting a cigarette. And therein lay the hints that the exact feeling can’t be had, it can’t be known, it can’t be felt. What we do have are approximations, and they will do just fine so long as they are close enough to push us forward, in our pursuit of happiness. The exact feeling, in this parlance, is an individuated affect, as all our feelings appear to be. We own our own feelings and our own capacities to chase after those exact feelings. The exact feeling is a private experience oddly nestled up to ownership and the idea of the self. But what is to be said for a more universal experience? When the feelings of ownership related to self lose its ballast? Feelings of loss or alienation? Can we claim that we have the exact feeling as another? Maybe this kind of exact feeling approximates what we think of as a kind of human condition. remember when we were together forever proposes to approximate the exact feeling of this variety. And as the exhibition stands as a proposal it presents our empirical understanding of self, as situated through the idea of the universal, against a history of possessive individualism.
For Andy
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