undo,

“economy of being”: ancient and ever controversial, foundational “ethical, thus/because aesthetical” principle of willfully not doing all you would — leaving just where you’d love to stay, making buttons on the back you can’t yourself reach, sticking to flat, monochrome, motionless in visual arts. “The Master angled, — but did not use a net. He shot, — but not at birds perching.” ■    Rooted in modernity’s preservationism (fighting pollution, excess, spam) and the later Change (eatfree, homeless), undo may be a new name for the timeless ascetic drive — the purity voter of live ethics: “a philosopher’s life,” vows and privations in lores, various self-constraining, minimization, mortification experiments — as perennially popular as bodily expansion; another inspiration has been panpractic fast-forwarding: don’t dwell on here-and-nice, “optimality is always local,” nod and move on. At the core, undo is not avoidance of evil (or of good-therefore-evil) but apophatic love — “the noblest variety”: let a therisity be by not working it, not distorting it with your perception, not even knowing it (unknow, the ultimate explay without filling in: leave precisely the understandings you thirst); hence a wave of restudying predecessors by what they could, and knew they could, but didn’t do. ■    Once a battleground in fadeout wars, undo may have ossified with them — by now made a bigger deal of by detractors (“temptation of nothingness,” “rationalizing terminal procrastination”: “un-excess, un-do, un-know… un-exist? where do you stop, and why?”) than by partisans (“mostly polite acknowledgers”); still, a conceptualization for not-doing is now essentialer than ever given what we — finally owning our bodies-if-any, no longer pressed for time — can do.

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