Nothing left to confess

Given the mass of evidence, there is no plausible hypothesis but reality. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

The following is a story about the change in the role of the Body in forming Identity, providing Privacy and knowing the Truth, from the Spanish Inquisition to Minority Report - two time-symbols of body-reference. This is also the story of a rare footnote - one that stands apart in a book that owns it: footnote#3, p. 170, in Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics.

Paul Virilio

“In the Middle Ages, the question is put to a body under torture, one that “knows the truth” and must let it escape in spite of himself”.

The truth [of a person] is embedded in the body.

“In the 19^th century, torture is abolished but not out of humanitarianism, but because they realized that any act (every human movement) leaves external traces, an involuntary stamp. From then on, they scientifically make proofs talk“.

The truth [of a person] is manifested in the body’s deeds, an involuntary stamp.

“From identical sets of material proofs they could draw different coherent discourses, each canceling the other out, by simply changing the order of elements”.

You stay quiet, Mister, while these two gentlemen, the prosecutor and the defender, tell your story. We’ll see which version of the truth will win. Anyway, your story is no longer relevant.

“We could imagine that the gaps and hazards inherent in the ordering of materials should disappear, since with computers they could make the accusing discourse perfectly coherent”.

… and by that, removing any competing version of Truth. With the amount of parallel, simultaneous reports about any given event, syndicated and correlated from a mass of individuals, Reality becomes a statistically unified version of truth, Reality, as told by the machine, or as Baudrillard [probably] calls it: the Automatic Writing of Reality.

“At that point, they could do totally without the confession of the accused, who would be less informed about his own crime than the computer, and who, no longer being the one who knows “the truth”, would have nothing left to confess”.

Once Reality is told by the machine (as it is the case in Minority Report), another step forward is taken: Truth is no longer built out of the Past, but is rather projected into the Future. The computer is using statistics to build patterns of possible behavior out of a single, and somehow correlated event. When that happens, it will suffice to think Murder to be immediately arrested by the Reality Police.

Given the mass of evidence to the contrary, there is no solution but illusion. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

Hirst’ Shark and Perec’s Room

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Damien Hirst, 1991

Some banal questions before some even more banal ones:

Is it a shark or a work-of-art? It’s both, no? it’s “a shark placed inside a work”, and it’s “a work placed inside a museum” that makes this shark in a work in a museum a work-of-art. Like Duchamp’s fountain.

Major changes to the object’s native territory provoke shifts in meaning; it’s the re-territorialization into a different topology that reincarnates the object as a different semantic object.

But what about minor changes within the same territory - so minor we can hardly notice?

When, in a given bedroom, you change the position of the bed, can you say you are changing rooms, or else what? (cf. topological analysis)

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

Barton Fink’s room perpetual metamorphosis

Or in the case of Hirst’ Shark - The Shark began to disintegrate (poor preservation) and so Hirst was hired to replace it with a brand new shark, making sure this time the materials used in the preservation process will beat Time for a little longer.

A philosophical question was acknowledged by Hirst, as to whether the replacement shark meant that the result could still be considered the same artwork. He observed:

“It’s a big dilemma. Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.”

Let alone, our language.

The Book

Twenty years went by, and I never saw him again, until that night at the party, when he walked in, with his wife and kids, and I, still under the disbelief of seeing him, getting up, smiling, shaking his hand and saying, as if in a confession: “I still have that book of yours, the one I’ve borrowed from you”.

Not expecting this kind of a reunion speech, he remained confused, but then he shrugged and said: “after twenty years? forget it. I’m sure the book got used to its new place. don’t de-territorialize it again… keep it”.

We had a small talk for a little longer, then I went around to speak with the others. But it bothered me greatly. I caught him at one of the corners and said: “It sounds stupid, I know, but your book doesn’t feel at home in my place. He’s not happy”.

And I saw that beneath all the “keep it” words he felt the same, now that I’ve reminded him of a long-forgotten part of his soul.

Can you feel the yearning for these lost memories?

Our Lady of the Tombs

Nothomb’s novel Acide Sulfurique is trying hard to be as close as possible to abstraction, leaving almost any concrete description of events behind the curtain. The reader’s imagination is not supposed to complete the missing parts, for the abstraction is the essence here, a skeleton to be perceived and experienced in its bear form.

The story is, therefore, deliberately simple: a reality show named “Concentration”, representing a Nazi concentration camp. The Kapos are elected in an American Idol style of filtering, while the prisoners are randomly abducted from the streets. From this point on it’s a chain of almost pure concepts: animals’ wagons stuffed with people of all ages; numbers tattooed on the prisoners’ hands; dehumanization; starvation; rape; death. Added to these concepts are omni-present cameras that capture every possible audio-visual signals. Materials are edited, and then there’s the daily night show. In the society of the spectacle the rating is great, but when it starts to stagnate “interactivity” is introduced into the show, the audience being asked to participate in the daily “death selections” (performed so far by the Kapos) by means of sending SMSes with the prisoners’ alpha-numeric IDs whose life are to be taken. Remind you – anything in this camp, on this show, is real.

And although intuition warns that this kind of book is about to fall into the banality trap, the opposite happens. Because no description – but the evocation of the above concepts – is provided, banality is avoided. Moreover, the fact that the book is mainly structure, allows Nothomb to introduce a surprisingly powerful technique – an effectively shocking one – which turns you, the reader, into as hideous collaborator as those disgusting-yet-all-human audience of the concentration show.

Our lady of the tombs gives you, reader, a choice: you can restore your human simulacra by closing the book and not reading it further, the equivalent of shutting down the TV set. Or you could keep on reading and see yourself turning, in real-time, into a disgusting voyeur of a hideous reality. And as she’s aware of the weakness of the human nature, she gives not one but two chances for redemption.

Personally, I obeyed the 2nd call, closed the book and intended to not reading it further. Personally, I failed, the cheap curiosity taking over my previous act of honor. Just like anyone else in Nothomb’s book, I couldn’t resist watching.

Rest some of the questions raised by the form:

Can this really happen? (Of course it can – it already did!)

Yes, but can it really happen today? Well, ask yourself the following questions:

1. If such a show exist, how many people will watch it? ["unfortunately many will"]
2. In our “participation age”, with all its technological mediums of mass collaboration and of induced transparency - how many will actively participate in the executions by sending SMSes, or by Twittering their candidates for the daily death selections? [Many will. Some others will think about it, but will refrain from actively pushing the voting buttons]

But wait! There’s no need to actively push the buttons any longer! They no longer need your vote; they can do with your twittered thought! All you need is to think the alpha-numeric IDs of your candidates and your thought will be automatically encoded then transmitted into the show’s Twitter channel.

That’s a great solution, for after all even God blames no one for just thinking!

Acide sulfurique (Sulphuric Acid) by Amélie Nothomb

Each Fish Is a Unique Individual

 
 

I s o l a t e d   E l e m e n t s

Swimming in the Same Direction

for  the  Purpose  of  Understanding

Damien Hirst, 1991

[Twit Twit Robots, 2008]

 

Maybe writing will get you back your soul?

Otto Dix, Self Portrait of Mars, 1915

McLuhan said: “Every media work us out completely”

I’ve been (re)dragged into excessive conversations with all sorts of softwares, communicating in the inhuman medium called “machine language”, aka programming.

Observing the outside then became a function performed by the machine’s I: it’s seeing the world through a bipolar personality that operates in an acute dichotomy between zero and one, black and white, good and evil. Reality is made of procedures, modules, statements, debuggers, purifiers, validators – it’s rationality all over; it’s specialization all the way.

“SPECIALIZATION IS FOR INSECTS”²

I felt horrible, been growingly molded and worked out into the machine’s reality-tunnel, incapable of emitting any other signal but that acknowledged by “it”.

And then a Voice arrived from the Blogosphere. Hafeez asked me why I no longer write. I answered that “I can no longer write, for I have no soul”. He then replied with a vice-versa smile: “Maybe writing will get you back your soul?“

I feel it’s probably the most subtle and deep answer to the “Why do I write?” question. Writing is fighting, a battle to get back your soul.

The soul, so it seems, neither needs a body nor an avatar - some corresponding words will do.

I’m not sure, but does it matter what kind of corresponding words are sent over the wire?

(Can Twittering save my soul?)

Notes:

1. It has been noted, By Roland Barthes for instance, that sometimes it is the opposite action - that of cutting off all communications - which restores and/or preserves one’ soul. Barthes interprets Rimbaud’s total silence as an act similar to Abraham’s silence - under the Kierkegaardian perspective - when told to sacrifice Isaac.

2. “SPECIALIZATION IS FOR INSECTS”: a citation from Robert Anton Wilson’s “Prometheus Rising”, where RAW mentions the incredible diversity and versatility of the human race. We’re capable of anything as a race, and of doing many diverse things as individuals. Specialization is a plague of the modern market forces, aspiring at the creation of cost-efficient humanoids, i.e. robots. McLuhan, in war and peace in the global village says similar things.

3. Music piece from Aisha, Death In Vegas, The Contino Sessions ( a song that worth a separate post)

The Jump of Ks

On October 1960, Klein jumped. Deliberately, consciously, rationally even, he decided to totally give up on his precious grains of life. He didn’t do it to become immortal - he jumped, so says the title, into the void of the unknown, that which is behind the common; that which disobeys the ethical.

Nevertheless, Klein had the strangest certitude at his heart - a profound belief - that he would live. Maybe, I should be more clear here: Klein believed that he’d be able to come back from the void, and consequently to conquer death.

Death - certainly not what you’ve been thinking of - that end which awaits us all; No, I think that Deleuze’s definition of death, not as a state by its own right, but rather as a void returned by the terminated function of life, the function which performs, since birth, nothing but “dying” - that’s what Klein thought to be overcoming.

By his deep desire to live, Klein gave up on his life, reversing the act of dying, creating a new state of things in which his time capsules were not popping out and collapsing but regenerating themselves - the perpetual odor of birth - with every new grain of time. A complete pleasure.

It was not until two years later, that Klein hit the ground of the void beneath. He died, ceasing to regenerate himself, five months after marrying his beloved wife, Rotraut Uecker, for whom he died two years earlier; for it is said that Rotraut Uecker was present at the moment of the jump.

Remix, Solitude

 

There’s audience? no audience.

Voices in the head, Remix, Solitude

.

.

(photo of a DJ by kirstiecat )

Next Stop: Eddington

On two worlds narrates Eddington in the introduction to his book “The Nature of the Physical World” (1927): the first being the familiar world, on its colors, odors, forms – and probably more important than all these – the people inside, you and… me.
On the other side of the curtain exists this second, alienated world, immediately recognized by us, the Matrix Generation: endless spaces of dark emptiness, with sporadic sparks and lights crossing the skies – the guts of a huge machine.

“Welcome to the desert of the real”, says Eddington, pointing at the two tables in front of him, the first - a solid, “normal” table coming from “our” world, declared herewith a fake imagery, illegally imposed on us, upon our senses; the second, although completely invisible and insubstantial, being nevertheless a respectful representative of the real world - the shadows’ world of the modern physics.

“Welcome to the desert of the real”, echoes Morpheus, signaling Neo to sit on the armchair beside him.

Two worlds, two tables; Yet Eddington’s goal is not just to describe the world revealed through the measurements of modern physics; this, says Eddington, is not but a necessary preamble, a scratch on the surface of the new philosophy of science. The fake, delusional world we’re living in and the dark, empty, real world we’ve discovered – this, says Eddington is nothing but a teaser.

A teaser for what?

Eddington mentions two post-revelation issues: the first, which I’ll call “Science for Science”, redefines the relation of Science and Society; the second, that can be called “Ecce Homo” reassess human nature in light of the changes to our understanding of the nature of physical world, “the world of shadows” as Eddington calls it.

Science for Science

If once Science was in the service of man, now things have changed. The moment it became apparent that our World is a phony one, Physics turned its back on it and started looking entirely at World 2 – after all, it is the ambition of Physics to find out the immaterial substance of “it all”, and if this something is to be found somewhere, it is definitely not in world 1, which “contaminates” the scientific measurements taken in the pure, real world 2.

“Science has at last revolted against attaching the exact knowledge contained in these measurements to a traditional picture-gallery of conceptions which convey no authentic information of the background and obtrude irrelevancies into the scheme of knowledge”, declares Eddington.

And yet, although for a furtive moment, he hesitates: maybe, Science has prematurely thrown away the illusionary world 1; maybe reality [world 2, the world of shadows] needs our familiar world 1, if only as a nice costume; maybe, like in Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, Science hastened to get rid of its shadow…

Whatever. Eddington dismisses these doubts quickly enough, and goes on with determination to establish a total scientific independence from whatever world 1 constrains: politics, moral, sociology… briefly from whatever’s human.

“The path of science must be pursued for its own sake…; in this spirit we must follow the path whether it leads to the hill of vision or the tunnel of obscurity”.

Lyotard would have said that Eddington’ Science for Science is not less fictional than world 1: there’s no such thing as independence. Starting already with Descartes, explains Lyotard, science found itself tightly coupled with… money. Hading to overcome the innate limitations of the human body and to provide themselves with technical extensions in order to accurately generate and collect physical measurements, scientists have become entirely dependent on funding. And as science became the validator of truth, reality turned out to be a question of money.
Science for Science is, therefore, a delusion; Science, even more than any other thing, is enslaved to the economy of exchange.

Ecce Homo

The second issue mentioned by Eddington is the implications of the discoveries about the sunny yet falsified world 1 vs. the shadowy yet real world 2 on the nature of man. Certainly, says Eddington, there’re implications.

I can only imagine what kind of implications there are. McLuhan nicely describes it in his “Medium is the Massage”: Every media work us out completely. One day, Says Eddington, we will see the world as it is, without the mask enforced upon us by world 1. Indeed, one day there will be only darkness around us. And why? Because of the tools.

It’s a common understanding nowadays, that the observer changes, by the fact of being observing, the nature of the observed object; it is also commonly accepted that the tool used by the observer alters the outcome of the measurement. It is less accepted, though, and even so less discussed, maybe even oppressed, that the tool changes the observer himself/herself.

We’re living in an illusion that the tools are external to our body, obeying our will. Same for language – language is used by us, we believe, like any other tool. Yet with both tools and language, it appears that the situation is the opposite. Language controls us entirely, and the tools – they mold us to their own structure. Every media work us out completely. We translate our existence into the tool’s blueprints so it will be possible to transfer data using the tool. The Internet is a good example. Soon, if you would stay out of the virtual you would stay out of everything. Human life has been transformed into zeros and ones. The scientist observing the world of shadows is, thus, risking becoming a shadow of man.

If you can say it, I will open the door

One day Nansen shut the door of his room, scattered ashes around the threshold, and said to the monks:
“If you can say it, I will open the door.”

The monks said various things in reply, but non pleased Nansen.

Joshu said, “Alas!, Alas!”

Nansen immediately opened the door.

From Radical Zen, Yoel Hoffmann, 1978, Autumn Press

[and compare with A small Jewish tale about the Question]

A small Jewish tale about the Question

As told by my father

The famous Rabbi came to the village on his coach. Everyone was already waiting for him, the rumor had been spread that the Rabbi got a Question and that there was also a prize for whoever would solve it – marrying the Rabbi’s daughter.

All the brilliant sages sharpened their mind and polished their memory, eager to demonstrate their wit, to excel before the Rabbi.

The Rabbi arrived, and the Question was asked.

Two days passed and no one came forth with a successful answer.

The Rabbi left the village.

A young man ran after the Rabbi’s coach. “Rabbi!”, shouted the young man, “Rabbi, please wait”. The Rabbi signaled to the coachman, and the coach halted.

“What is it young man?” asked the Rabbi. “Do you know the answer?”

“No, no”, said the young man, “but please Rabbi, tell it to me, let me know the answer. The Question is so… wonderful”.

The Rabbi smiled at the boy. “Come on”, he said, “get into the coach”.

[ and compare with If you can say it, I will open the door]

A fantasy to hide our flesh

This post is about eating Knowledge and the creation of the first System. It discusses the moment in history in which man created the first, provisory sign, and that other moment which came right after.

“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed”, Genesis, 2, 25.

[6 verses later]

“she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;

One minute before, one minute after, and in between – the moment of revelation, produced through a method that even Hume couldn’t have but approved - and here they are, Adam & Eve, digesting the naked, shameful truth - the body.

Their eyes wide open, Adam and Eve realize that this truth is too painful to watch, maybe too banal, for sure too concrete. And so they create, on the spot, in the same verse, in the same time capsule - the first sign.

and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

This first sign, however, was too fragile. The fig leaves were sensible to the blowing winds, to brusque movements, and so most of the time they were failing to hide the flesh, to cover up on the naked truth. The sign was too unstable, the referent being visible here and there.

Borrowing from Lyotard (The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985), this instability of the sign evoked fear and trembling: the exposure of the referent and the failure to fixate the referencing sign, which is the other, creates a problem of identity. If the other’s identity is not fixed, neither is mine. It is the ability to rapidly identify and decipher the meaning of the sign – not its referent, which should be hidden for good - but the meaning arising from its contextual, structural entourage – that assists in the creation of self-consciousness, and of identity. The more rapid and stable this process of exchanging and recognizing signs is, the more stable are the effects of realism, the more solid is the Fantasy of the Real.

Surprisingly, this floating point of identity bothered God and made him react by providing Adam & Eve with some practical knowledge, that is - how to design and fabricate stable signs.

“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them”.

No, God didn’t provide us humans with light, or fire; nor did he provide us with arrows or scrolls. The only practical thing God has provided us with was the Fashion System, Le Système de la mode, an empire of signs: a fantasy to hide our flesh.

Franco Moschino, Stop the fashion system, february, 1990

Maybe a Monad (Phaedrus by the river)

My Alter Ecko has recently published two posts around Phaedrus - this beautiful dialogue between Socrates and his beloved one, with the impeccable scenery of a mythological river, an oak and a rock, an idyllic setup for discours amoureux.

Yet, while tapping into the conversation between the two, I felt a growing uneasiness. Maybe it was the merciless manner by which Socrates slaughtered Lysias’ speech, unwrapping it from its content (utilitarian love), from its style (rhetoric), from its medium (written on scroll) and [implicitly] from its audience (the crowds), leaving nothing behind, not even some grains of Lysiasian ashes for a hasty funeral.

But most probably it was the erotic love praised by Socrates through never ending parabolas [although beautifully narrated: the black horse, the white horse etc.] that evoked my discontent. For through the mists of heavenly passions I saw a stream, an oak and a rock. By the stream sat Narcissus; by the rock stood Echo [I was hiding behind the oak]. Narcissus-Socrates was looking at Phaedrus, through the watery reflection, remembering the lost heavens of his fallen soul; and Phaedrus, standing by the rock, his heart engulfed with emotions, was watching the figure that was Socrates, seeing nothing but his own image, Phaedrus holding a scroll, echoed back onto his eyes, again and again and again and again.

No, this was not a dream: I have it all well written.

The Lover is his mirror.

“And thus he [the beloved one] loves, but he knows not what; he does not understand and cannot explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infection of blindness from another; the lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding himself, but he is not aware of this”.

The Beloved is his clone.

The qualities of their god they attribute to the beloved, wherefore they love him all the more… wanting to make him as like as possible to their own god… for no feelings of envy or jealousy are entertained by them towards their beloved, but they do their utmost to create in him the greatest likeness of themselves and of the god whom they honour.

Oh boy! A mirror and a clone, a love for oaks and rocks.

I’m not sure about my above distribution of the Echo-Narcissus roles; I do feel, though, that this erotic love, although praising the other, is deeply ego-centric to the point that I am willing to concede that indeed each and every one of us is a self-contained monad, all the others being eventually nothing but reflections of one’s own self.

The Worst of Authors

“The worst of authors will say something which is to the point”. Socrates, Phaedrus

And see also Words, jamais portés, as well as in the margins of philosophy here (comment#4).

The question, therefore, is not “What did the Author want to tell us?”, but rather “What did the Author want to hide from us?”

Suffocation

It was then [at the age of eight, standing on the platform and being all surrounded by an oil painting – The Battle of Waterllo ] I first realised the difference between a painting and out of doors. I realised that a painting is always a flat surface and out of doors never is, and that out of doors is made up of air and a painting has no air, the air is replaced by a flat surface, and anything in painting that imitates air is illustration and not art.

Jean-François Millet - Man with a hoe

Gertrude Stein’s Paris France becomes more and more important for me as I go on reading it. Surrounded by a delightful literary style that renders many moments of pleasure are Stein’s observations about France as an alternative universe, a world apart, created to host the (different?) space, time and people needed for Art. These observations, I feel, are paths to the French philosophers I spend some time with.

[and see Condition for a postmodern Time travel for a similar experience of an air-less dimension]

“When I become death” according to Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas’ La Mort et Le Temps (English translation in God, Death and Time) opens with a reading of Heidegger´s Sein und Zeit, a reading that evolves around the themes of the carnival, the essence of time, the nature of death, the type of questions to which answers are not the right answer, and finally - literature as a masking process (rather than a revealing one).

[But maybe I'm wrong. It could well be that Levinas says nothing of the above themes, and that it is my own philosophical delusions, the consequences of my posts here on Foucault, Lyotard, Barthes, Deleuze, and Burroughs.]

The Carnival.

The carnival represents the absolute assimilation of a human being with the role assigned to him/her by the system. Yet by this assimilation the human being ceases to be a human being, for being a human is to continuously question “Being”, i.e. to be a critical being towards Being, constantly reassessing the possibilities of an always changing existence. This is when Levinas uses the term ek-sistence - existing from the outside (and it is also where the two reasons of the first Emmanuel - K. - are fully present).

The critical spectator stands behind the curtain, looking inside the theater, considering her options on stage. This cannot be done while on stage, while wearing the mask of the carnival.

And yet. “Behind the curtain there is nothing to see… nor beneath it”, says Deleuze, following Foucault. The critical being is therefore not to be imagined out of stage; s/he is not to be imagined as a passive spectator. Rather, the critical being is assimilated into the system’s role, while continuously challenging that role. Indeed, says Deleuze, behind the curtain there is nothing to see, “but it was all the more important each time to describe the curtain”. So we are in the carnival, but we don’t play wholeheartedly. We’re aware of the play, and we improvise whenever we see fit.

The Question.

The question of being is a question to which answers are not the right answer, the first trait of Being, being the mark of that Question. Barthes maintains that those questions of Being can only live within Literature, but he also maintains that Literature is a carnivalesque mask. The only way to cope with these contradictions is to follow Foucault’s advise: “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits.” (What is Enlightenment).

Cain: marked by the Question of Abel’s death – a bookmark on Cain’s Time axis.

Time.

Time, explains Levinas, is the Other. The infinite time is the antipode of the finite human, the Other remaining necessarily out of our reach. Time, therefore, represents all possible Otherness.

Time is the Other. What a strange sentence. The Rhizome of the nomadic others is a Rhizome of Time Capsules.

Ich und Du.

The Other, through his facial movements conveys a message to the spectator, who is consequently responsible for processing the message, and of providing an answer. We can therefore say that Communication creates responsibility which, in turn, creates individuality: “I” is responsible for this and that person, because there are communication links between us.

We’ll see next that communication is a mask; like literature it does not reveal [things from behind the curtain], but rather conceals [the true essence of being]. Facial movements are answers. But Being is being a Question.

What does the nomadic Rhizome mask? What does Time mask? Is Time the Curtain?

As for Death.

As for Death – death needs time for what it kills to grow in. Death needs the Other, just like “I” needs it. But why does Death need Time?

Think of Death as a bookmark, engraving a point on our time axis. This point, says Levinas, opens a gate to a communication-free world – the end of exchanging answers. Finally, we, the dead, can realize our human potential of being a pure question. The cover story of our life, the Literature told by our face, by our facial movements is finally completed. The End.

When we become death, death is the seed from which we grow – the seed of the pure Question.

Xploding Magix

May I recommend you a hell of a band? The music of Xploding Plastix is so fantastic that I find my inability to describe its form distressing.

Rest my associations:

My joy while listening to Saint-Germain when everything was still in the early stages;

Flashes of Amir Kusturica films, with gypsies dancing to the sound of their bacchanal music;

Jazzy tunes entering a smoky club;

Jame Bond drawing his gun.

Trading Time in InterZone

 

You hit Interzone with that grey anonymously ill-intentioned look all writers have.

“You crazy or something walk around alone? Me good guide. What you want Meester?”

“Well uh, I would like to write a bestseller that would be a good book, a book about real people and places…”

The Guide stopped me. “That’s enough Mister. I don’t want to read your stinking book. That’s a job for the White Reader.” The guide’s face was a grey screen, hustler faces moved across it. “Your case is difficult frankly. If we put it through channels they will want a big piece in advance. Now I happen to know the best continuity man in the industry, only handles boys he likes. He’ll want a piece of you too but he’s willing to take it on spec.”

“The Name is Burroughs”, from The adding machine by WS Burroughs.

The writer comes to Interzone looking for something that will help him create a world for his book, something that can be arranged by the Continuity Man. Interzone is not a normal place, and neither is that something wanted by the writer. Such deals smell Faust.

So what is it that the Continuity Man can offer?

Maybe it is this alien, yellowish parchment of continuous time on top of which the writer can engrave his space-less story?

In Condition for a postmodern Time travel I have offered an interpretation of a Lyotard’s paragraph, depicting stories as parallel worlds that have different time axis - not only because the story’s time does not correspond with our time axis, but also because it is architected differently, the time of the story being space-less and continuous, making the story incompatible with the process of memorization and accumulation [of facts], a feature that turns the story into a world whose relevance is always the pragmatic present.

[It's strange how Lyotard can explain Burroughs' Interzones and Continuity Men, and how all these posts eventually encounter each other...]

And see “When I become death” according to Levinas for more on Time.

Condition for a postmodern Time travel

I don’t think we want to live in a never ending carnival – that place where we all put masks on our faces and play the carnival’s roles; that place where the distinction between real and fantasy disappears; that place where reflection and auto-reflection are irrelevant; where the eye of the beholder is cut out; that place having its own, peculiar Time span; that place where we become signs.

Maybe Baudrillard thought that we have entered into a carnival and that then a lock-down has occurred, leaving us trapped inside, our masks on, for good.

Distribute in space, order in time – that’s the rule by which Control operates, and this operation, explains Lyotard in the Postmodern Condition, uses time as a parchment, continually engraving the memory of the things and their whereabouts on time. Control needs time, for time is the paper on top of which Control memorizes its territory, its subordinates.

There are, though, endless places where Control is helpless, where its engraving operation on time is blocked. Actually, I should rephrase and say that there’s only one place where Control operates and that is the everyday’s world – that which is the subject matter of science. But there are endless worlds in which Control malfunctions, in which it has no foot in the door. These are the worlds of the stories; the world of the carnival.

These worlds, written on invisible parchments, are architected to be forgotten. Memory cannot nail them down, says Lyotard, for they are having a unique distribution in space – a compact, condensed distribution that leaves no spaces between the things of those worlds. And memory needs space in time – a space for writing down orientation instructions, location coordinates, inventory lists and so forth. Yet, the space in the story’s world is fully occupied. One cannot order things in time, for there’s no time left in the story’s world.

Hurry up, than, for there’s no time. Go to the carnival – lose control; read a book – lose control; hear a podcast – lose control.

No matter which story the carnival tells – the story is always anchored in the present. The past and the future – these are scientific concerns; stories don’t bother with time. They are hosted inside a time capsule – a time machine.

If you want jumps in hyper-space; if you want to move along parallel worlds – all you need to do is to skip from one book to another. Place each book exactly near the other book, leaving no space between the two, thus making sure Control is incapable of writing on time.

[But I don't like losing control; I don't want to stay in the carnival. I'll have to give up than.]

For more on Time and books see Trading Time in InterZone

This book could reign

This morning, while preparing myself to leave home, I scanned the library shelves looking for a book that will call me. Finally I fetched one, thinking “What is it that you want to tell me?”

On the road, I had this silly thought that all those books in my library are equal: you can’t tell by their physical appearance or location which is “more important”, sacred, classic, Nobel Prize, Plato or Philip K. Dick; which is holy, which is profane. All the books, in the space of my library, are equal.

But my books are certainly not equal in time. For in this particular moment my attention is devoted to this particular book which I fetched from my library earlier this morning. One book for a Time capsule.

The poor book: a world opened up for only one person inside a specific time capsule - such a waste of book’s power. I wonder what would it be like if millions of us open up the same book inside the same time capsule? It’s sort of Flash mobs, only with a specific book.

This book could reign; this book could shine.

The Cyberpunk Paradox

It was not until Ecko has made his tribute to language that I finally understood what I used to call the Cyberpunk Paradox - that self-mutilation by cyberpunks incorporating electronically networked devices into their bodies. As cyberpunks revolt against Control in its digitally networked form, staying off the grid would appear to be a much more reasonable tactic than becoming part of it, let alone if this act requires any sort of self-mutilation.

(An excellent short explanation/definition of cyberpunk can be found here. The first characteristic is titled “Negative Impact of technology on humanity”).

I can think of two possible solutions to this paradox, the first being related to the Jujitsu of culture jammers:

“Jujitsu is the art of using the weight of the enemy against itself,” explains Filmmaker Craig Baldwin. “With corporations, sometimes the only way to beat them is not by brute force, but by symbolic agility” (citation taken from Culture Jamming 2.0). Personally, I’m not thrilled by this answer.

The second possible answer is what stands behind Ecko’s tribute to language: “I give myself up to language, anon, in a gift economy”. This total and unconditional [gift] surrender echoes Abraham’s binding of Isaac, echoes, I suppose, the symbolic sacrifice of Jesus. Ecko goes even further by cutting out his I and becoming anon, his sacrifice being a total gift through this erasure.

Cyberpunk Shootout 23, mitx maraude

Whoever witnesses those sacrifices, those surrenders and give ups, feels that by this act a great defying essence is created, the System becoming seriously threatened. I cannot put this process into words as it’s illogical. My admiration for the courage and determination of those intuitively illogically logicals who give themselves up to the System.

Rhizome [D&G]

The Rhizome is a contemporary concept: it is the scale-free architecture of the Internet; it is the topology of what we consume and of how we come to consume it: peer-to-peer; mashup of components; an information river that has no starting point; the entangled graph of the Blogosphere.

Although the Rhizome is an architecture aimed for human beings, it can easily absorb other types of creatures, such as machines, allowing for the creation of a virtual chaosmic sphere having men, machines, and men-machines as the nodes of its graph. For Guattari, man has always reflected this capability of absorbing other forms of life, being sometimes an animal, sometimes a machine.

Words, jamais portés

When Barthes learned about the death of his friend’s loved one, he spontaneously set down to write some words of compassion. Going through his memories, his feelings, he tried to figure out which words could be helpful in the current context. Finally, he realized that whatever he felt, whatever he thought, could be and should be said in one, simple word: Condolences.

Only that writing this single word was practically impossible: his friend would certainly think him for a cold heart man, seeing his deed as an act of obligation. He might even get offended. No, “Condolences” was out of question.

Many other words appeared then, each fighting for a place on that white paper. It was then that Barthes realized his second problem: those easy coming words were too obvious, too banal, too used; a bourgeois schmaltz.

And so he kept wandering further away from that simple, single and accurate word that had it all, in a search for some rarities – words jamais portés, at least not in this specific context consisting of Barthes, his friend and the deceased.

That, says Barthes, is the essence of Literature. Unlike what is commonly perceived, Literature does not reveal, disclose or illuminate the ineffable, that substance which no words can describe. Literature hides, erases, masks, distracts and deviates from what originally could have been said in a simple, single word.

And see also The Worst of Authors.

Knowledge Absolute

“I want to understand everything,” said Miro. “I want to know everything and put it all together to see what it means.”

“Excellent project,” said Jane. “It will look very good on your résumé”.

Speaker for the Dead, OSC

Cut out the I, Man

Click to see full size image

Man Ray’ story of the eye had two incarnations and three names: Object intended to be destroyed (1923); Object of destruction (1932); and Indestructible object (1957). The current story is different [as the unplanned typo in the full size  image suggests]; actually, I’m not even sure that it’s the same object.

I give myself up to language

 

“I give myself up to language, anon, in a gift economy”, ecko4inc

 

Erasure Heads, part#2

(Click to enlarge)

Language, a reversed panopticon. In the heart of the desert one stands circled with guardian Words. Their gaze. All it needs to see them is to take one step outside yourself; the whole path lasts no longer than one step.

x=f(human)

“To be is to be a value in a bound variable”

I might be misreading Quine - at least his aphorisms [taken out of context] - but I dislike it to the bones. “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough”, being another example. Variables and Science.

The Gaze of the Sign

(This post follows Gater’s role in Body/Language: Barthes-Foucault vs. Gater’s Taboo)

“The signs exist insofar as they are recognized, i.e. insofar as they are repeated”.

Through this simple definition Barthes introduces the concept of the other (used as a technique in the philosophical discourses of the past [the Greek friend, see D&G]; used as an existential condition in Buber, Barthes and others).

We’re all signs. Think about concepts. Each concept has a never ending trail of other concepts, and behind each concept there’s a human – that human who gave life to the concept in the first place; that human who revived the concept after it has long been forgotten. With every word we pronounce, and every sign we digest, it’s the history of humanity mashed between our teeth.

We’re all signs, and hence our existence is dependent on recognition and repetition – repeated recognition by other signs.

If God is the first Word and words are signs, then God needs repeated recognition just the same. This can probably explains why we, the other signs, have been originally created, and in his own image.

Sometimes, we like to create our own recognition signs – we can then play and replay them again and again – an endlessly repeating loop of recognition.

“I like to do it with my friends; sometimes we videotape it, then we watch it…”.

This is a cry for meaning – a desperate need for recognition. For whatever reason, a new sign is created for this purpose: a videotape in which the original sign is captured. Then, the original sign plays and replays the secondary sign, the videotape, gaining through this repetition the so wanted existential recognition.

But then, something else happens. While watching the secondary sign affirming our existence, we do it again. This time, the original sign is the one affirming and recognizing the existence of the secondary sign.

This is the potlatch: one affirms our existence and we reaffirm back his/her own existence, in a looped process that can potentially persist for a while. The more this process continues, the more respectful and ‘full of life’ the two signs become.

Only, the inhuman sign not only cannot become ‘more full of life’, but it is found to have very strange effects, when used as an affirming sign: the potlatch is canceled!

Here’s an example: you’re giving your friend a present. Your friend is very happy. She then wants to repay you for making her happy and so she gives you back a present: only, it is the same present you gave her in the first place. Evidently, this will not make you happy, for by that act, your friend has canceled your act. It is a canceling exchange, because it’s an echo.

Whatever echoes, mirrors, cannot be considered as an existential affirmation and recognition. Whatever echoes cannot be used as a potlatch, for the echo cancels the potlatch. Gater’s video should be seen as a cry for a meaningful existence. But the inhuman videotape gives no salvation: it’s a static dancing.

There’s no replacement for the human gaze.

Body/Language: Barthes-Foucault vs. Gater’s Taboo

Remixed by Methods & Black Squares 

(If there are problems with the player, click the image to download a 4 minutes mix of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Gater’s Taboo)

[Barthes]
Parler, et à plus forte raison discourir, ce n’est pas communiquer, comme on le répète trop souvent, c’est assujettir.

[Foucault]
À ce lieu là, dès que j’ai les yeux ouverts, je ne peux plus échapper.

[Barthes]
La langue, comme performance de tous langages, n’est ni réactionnaire ni progressiste, elle est tout simplement fasciste.

[Gater]
We do it every weekend,
I like to do it with my friends
Sometimes we videotape it,
Then we watch it and do it again.

[Barthes]
Fasciste

Fasciste

Les signes n’existent que pour autant qu’ils sont reconnus, c’est-à-dire pour autant qu’ils se répètent.

Qu’ils se répètent.

[Foucault]
Mon corps topie impitoyable.

[Barthes]
Malheureusement le langage humain est sans extérieur, c’est un huis clos.

Répète!

[Gater]
Some people don’t understand what we do,
They say its Saturday they go to the club,
They say it’s no fun, but we don’t care,
We sit here and we do it.

We do it every weekend,
I like to do it with my friends,
Sometimes we videotape it,
Then we watch it and do it again.

[Barthes]
Répète!

En chaque signe dort ce monstre, un stéréotype. Je ne puis jamais parler qu’en ramassant, en quelque sorte, ce qui traîne dans la langue.

En chaque signe dort ce monstre, un stéréotype.

En chaque signe dort ce monstre, un stéréotype.

[Foucault]
Tous les matins, même présence, même blessure. Sous mes yeux se dessine une inévitable image qu’impose le miroir, visage maigre, épaules voûtées, regard myope, plus de cheveux, vraiment pas beau.

[Gater]
Some people don’t understand what we do…

[Barthes]
Répète!

[Foucault]
Mon corps c’est le lieu sans recours auquel je suis condamné.

[Barthes]
C’est un huis clos.

Fasciste.

[And see The Gaze of the Sign - a follow up on Gater's role in this remix]

Erasure Heads, part#1

Writing under erasure, Painting under erasure, Being under erasure - this is not a humble take on life. Rather, this is what some consider to be the only way to fight back, from within, from under the skin. Fooling the system; but also, fooling around with the system. “Tricher la langue; tricher avec la langue”, Barthes.