Modern Art. Ungrockable. What’s that square? what are those medicine bottles in a closet? and that pipe?
But then, what’s poetry? what are aphorisms? what are Zen stories all about?
if you want to shoot – shoot, don’t hide behind concise riddles and sparse words. DESCRIBE AT LENGTH! SHOW IT! SHOOT IT!
That’s it – Modern Art doesn’t shoot at anything. It makes you re-think, because you have been habituated to automatically respond to imposed categories. Even the fact that Art – that noble form of human expression – has manifestly become a simple object of commerce, auctions, and, god forbid, markets, is manifestly part of the essence of what modern art is, part of this re-thinking.
What is it all, a joke? an art nobody understands, being bought for millions of dollars by cracked, eccentric billionaires that got too much money to spend… those damn black squares, you paint one and… better than buying a lottery ticket.
Nevertheless, the following 4 minutes vid of anti damien-modern-art criticism is a real pl/tr/easure.
Robert Hughes: The Business of Art. Damien Hirst is all hype
It’s been some days now, that I took the farewell from Stella Maris, Mavis, Lady “are you a turtle?” Velkor, the midget, Hagbard Celine, Malaclypse and, the best of them all, Chips, and went on with my hempless routine. Departure wasn’t easy, for these people have made me really happy.
Never mind, their presence is everywhere: the books I read, the movies I see, the Game, the media, mediums and the coincidences I’m part of – they are everywhere.
So what is The Illuminatus Trilogy?
Don’t believe a word from that book’s cover – it’s one big rubbish aimed to be “attractive” to some people, as this book is, in its essence, resistible to any categorization. It’s not a sci-fi book, and it’s not a “conspiracy” book, it’s simply an irrational book, which you will find clear and shiny as Lucily diamonds.
R.A.W and Shea rationally destroy all rational thought. Here are some notes on that remarkable process:
Space
“It’s like a split-screen movie, but split a thousand ways, and with a thousand soundtracks.”
This is how the Book describes itself, and indeed, that’s what you are about to experience.
Think of it this way: a film viewed through a thousand-squares’ monitor, like an eye of a fly, each square presenting part of the film. As this is a book, not a film, the way to achieve this sub-framing of narratives is via the Cut-Up Technique – that which Brion Gysin invented and Burroughs adopted.
So there’s a story, but it was cut into endless pieces, and the book is the pasting of them all, not in a rational-linear order, but rather in chaotic one. It takes time to get used to it, to tame our attention to those jumps in Space.
Time
“This tomorrow-today-yesterday time is beginning to get under my skin. It’s happening more and more often”
The Book’s Time’s a liquid, pouring in any direction. There’s no past, present, future in the sequencing of events; it’s the tomorrow-today-yesterday world. So hold tight, for you are just about to begin a trip.
Personalities
The world of a Book: space, time, people.
Forget what you know about Personalities & Characters. Here, anyone is anyone. There are always more personalities in what is supposed to be a single character, and often characters are seeing the world through the heads of other characters. You will find no salvation in trying to nail your cognition to a single personality – they are all constantly shifting around.
The I
Oh, the I, the Narrator, the one in charge. Who’s, indeed, the one in charge here?! I wish I knew that answer. The I is nothing but an Illusion. Most of the time, if there’s a multiple-parties’ conversation, the I is allocated to the one who speaks currently. So you tap into that conversation where everybody’s I. Fuck it, get loose, you got nothing to lose.
Fog
There is a thick fog of hemp’ smoke to the ceiling of the Book. This book is meant to be INHALED!
Surprise, Surprise!
And yet, it all makes sense and the reading streams smoothly, and it is funny and intriguing!
I seriously think it’s a mystery. Those guys, Shea & Wilson, have deciphered something about the human brain, i.e. that it can see clearly through Chaos! The Book itself is constantly smoking good, quality dope, so its Characters can clear their mind and open their eyes; same effect is achieved for the Reader (800 pages of top quality hemp) – you’re tripping all the way to the end, and the trip is lucid and crystal-clear.
The Story
Like any great work of art, the medium & the message, the structure & the narrative, are synchronized. So, similarly to the free structure, space, time, the I and the Characters of the book, so is the story telling us about people breaking space, time, the I, and anything else of an ordinary order.
House of Flying Daggers is the closest film to an abstract painting, the narrative being no more than a shadowy frame, holding divine colors, sounds and movements. A Painting Masterpiece, a miraculous medium glitch.
We’re all conditioned to react to symbols. The reaction can be emotional or rational, conscious or unconscious, triggering an implicit response or an explicit one.
And that is not new.
But somehow, although we’re living in a world of symbols, representations, masks and words, where nothing is the real self of anything, but only a symbol of – somehow the pragmatic (i.e. instrumental, operational) essence of even the most innocent-looking symbols have eluded us. Take, for instance, the following painting by Piet Mondrian, an abstract painter, symbolizing something to someone. Is our conditioning to paintings as non-utiliteriancarriers of meaning, i.e. as symbols remote from the practical, tool-type instrumentation, is misleading? (I exclude, of course, overtly socio-political imagery).
Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. 1921, Piet Mondrian.
David Morgan-Mar, invented Piet, a programming language represented by cubes and lines of different size and colors, each combination symbolizing one statement or more, “Hello, World”, the program any newbie to a given language starts with, looking like this:
Piet’s “Hello, World”
Piet is more than a gimmick; it’s an eye-opener, in the sense of “Now I can see the Fnord” (“Fnords” are like tags, appearing before & after certain messages. Children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word “fnord”, but to react to it physiologically, so that the appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, and prevents rational consideration of the subject. This results in a perpetual low-grade state of fear in the populace. This in turn perpetuates the need for Government, because without fear, people don’t need Government. Newspapers, naturally, have Fnords all over them. My adaptation toFnord, Wikipedia). It shows us, simply, that any symbol can be a carrier of a program, activated through an interaction.
Inspired by Piet, and taking it to another dimension, one can see the possibility for a musical convention to represent a programming language, having a “Hello, World” concerto, each note or combination of, representing one or more statements. This musical convention is another eye-opener, issued from the broadcasting, one-to-many nature of music, unlike the one-to-one interaction model of a painting. One can broadcast a tune (or an image) over Twitter that will be deciphered by programs all across the backbone, and consequently whatever thing(s) will happen (I called this kind of tweet, a Twigger).
But are these programs, embedded in work of arts and tunes are only aimed for other programs? What about us? Especially now that millions of us are plugged into that global broadcasting network called Twitter. Can a tune trigger some unconscious mechanical orange in the global audience?
The wise and skeptical will certainly udnerstand that no matter what s/he knows about her conditioning to symbols, there are or there might be some conditionings that elude our consciousness. Keep your eyes, therefore, open, especially when visiting the museum…
i consider the universe to be a clever fake with streets and houses and shops and cars and people all standing in the center of a stage surrounded by props by furniture to sit on kitchens to cook in cars to drive food to fix and then behind the props the flat painted scenery painted houses set farther back painted people painted streets everything not real only a series of tapes been played for us
“The only method I used was to obey no method at all”.
[Deconstruction:] Gifted with a strange ability to deconstruct the unseen, the “non-event”, the “on-going” banality of a daily life, [Exposure:] and to expose those tiny particles which make life so miserable, [Boom:] and then to throw in an extra element, a routine-breaker, that blows it all up, leaving behind a mutilated reality, incapable of restoring its previously false state – is Simenon.
Baudrillard must have deplored the stories of this great author, who tirelessly (365 stories, one for each day of the year, organized in 25 volumes) tore the illusion which is reality, leaving us in a void.
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 19th 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 involuntarystamp.
“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 versions 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 an illusion 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
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.”
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?
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
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)
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.
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.
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”.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...]
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
In an interview titled “Les Choses signifient-elles quelque chose?” (1962) Barthes gave, en passant, an interesting definition of literature as the art of presenting questions, not answers, nor solutions.
These literary questions, says Barthes, are powerful, disturbing and long-lasting. More importantly, it is only literature that can ask this kind of long-lasting questions. Kafka and Balzac, adds Barthes, have become canonic because they have left us with such long-lasting and disturbing questions.
Rephrasing Barthes: Literature produces and presents questions to which answers are not the right answer.
We’re habituated to input-output production lines: question-in, answer-out; problem-in, solution-out. But some questions and some problems are simply different. So what is the “right answer” to those long-lasting literary questions? How should we refer to them?
Probably, living the question, in each and every Time Capsule, is what we should do?
I think that these informal observations can be used to clarify the way a group of French philosophers, such as Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and, of course, Barthes, understand the relation between literature and philosophy. After all, what has been described so far is commonly perceived as the realm of Philosophy, and yet Barthes ignores Philosophy altogether, charging Literature with the burden of asking those questions, insisting that it is the only place where such questions can (be asked? live? survive?).
My feeling is that western philosophers have never considered philosophy as the art of presenting long-lasting questions. Rather they have used questions as a pretext, an excuse, a platform for their… answers, for their irrefutable ontological or epistemological solutions, constructs and architectures.
In fact, it is western philosophers who have tried, along centuries, to kill, eradicate and annihilate those disturbing questions. Too often they have resurrected some murdered questions but only to try and kill those poor bastards once more. The dead body of metaphysics is an example. So the Problem of Philosophy, if by philosophy we mean those long-lasting questions, is that Philosophy refuses to die!
Lyotard et al. think that indeed some questions must die – but that their executionshould be carried out by Science, not Philosophy. Other questions, on the other hand, must live – that was the role of Philosophy – to give birth and a living place for this kind of questions – but Philosophy has fallen from grace.
Long-lasting questions live now only in Literature.
Reading Something Wicked This Way Comes is like participating in a magical mystery tour, where the omnipresent Bradbury plays the role of the ultimate magician. And it’s a special kind of magic that works both on the inside and on the outside, with Bradbury operating in an almost explicit two-tracks style: a meta-track, where he converses with the Reader, showing the tricks, the syntax, by which each consequent scene is about to be created; and an internal track, where the Reader is a passive observer, watching Bradbury working inside his magical world, manipulating his characters.
But that’s exactly the illusion – that which is part of any magical show. Suddenly, there’s this strange sensation that Bradbury actually tells a story about… you, Reader. Doubts creep in: could the unexpected friendship with the narrator be nothing but a honey trap? Could it be that Bradbury showed you some tricks, made you an associate in a complot against his characters, only to blind you from the biggest trick of them all, that which turns you, the Reader, into his one and only protagonist?
“Since Bradbury was eight years old, he wanted to become a magician. And that’s what he is”.
I’m always very happy with ecko4inc’s comments, as they form a very special continuation of a dialogue. By “very special” I mean that they cannot be seen as a common feedback in which the interlocutor feeds back her reactions or her anti-thesis or her bifurcated, parallel thesis (as it is too often the case) into the fireplace of the dialogue; rather ecko’s comments should be seen as a genre, having probably the margins of philosophy as its lieu of happening.
[ The margins of philosophy
Following my thoughts on the word “minor” – that word used by Kant to signify an immature human being not using his reason; that word used by Poe and {jump through hyperspace} Foucault to signify the only possible, or valuable, spatio-temporal frame of reference; that word practiced by Deleuze in his way of teaching the different philosophies, the different philosophers - I got an official feedback to the above minor associations by a Philosophy professor [Philosophy with a capital P], who laconically said that Derrida made a career out of analyzing footnotes (This Professor doesn’t like Derrida in particular and post-modernism in general, because, he says, they don’t offer any hope. Indeed, Deleuze and many others maintained that “there’s nothing behind the curtain”, if hope is to be associated with the discovery of a hidden reality. Surprisingly, this Professor, who dismisses Derrida for he brings no hope, happened to devote his entire life to Leibniz, being the first official “Leibniz Professor”. What puzzles me here is my intuitive association between “there’s nothing behind the curtain” and the Monadology – I don’t remember anything substantial behind the Monad’s curtain…)
]
So ecko4inc is not feeding back; ecko feeds on, feeds further. He joins the flow of thoughts, expressed in the post’s words and images, and uses them as ad-hoc rafts, on top of which he jumps and flows-on in that great {collective [but private (but collective)]} stream of consciousness, showing where else those ideas could have streamed, are streaming. I become a hidden interlocutor for ecko, my stream of consciousness finds itself included in his stream of consciousness in a most natural way, an echo for ecko, an echo for inclusion.
The only real thing is the interaction among people; all the rest is an illusion. Any monad includes and relates to all other monads – and this inclusion and that interaction is the only real thing in a monad’s life.
I had a conversation recently with a sociology professor who doesn’t like Foucault. “Clearly”, claimed the professor, “Foucault was reusing Weber’s theories, to name just one evident theft, never mentioning Weber as a source, pretending to be original”.
This is a well-known accusation against Foucault: “C’est un simulateur qui ne peut s’appuyer sur aucun texte sacré, et qui ne cite guère les grands philosophes”, is among a long list of “Against Foucault” with which Deleuze opens his book “Foucault”.
Forget Foucault; let’s deal with the underlying question: does an Author have the right to keep his sources private?
Journalists, who see themselves obliged to reveal and tell the truth, fight for their right to keep their sources private. And philosophers – can they reveal the truth without disclosing their sources?
Since the Author is Dead (or rather, has been dead since the very beginning (or rather, has existed only as a fiction, as a function)), then why bother quoting at all? No one is the Author of an idea.
What about using known concepts – is that as good as quoting? In “Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” Deleuze & Guattari describe philosophy as the art of creating concepts (“la philosophie est l’art de former, d’inventer, de fabriquer des concepts”), and that a philosopher is recognized by the concepts she has created. Indeed, philosophical concepts are easily exchangeable with the philosophers who coined them: Idea, Cogito, Monad, Noumenon, Dasein, and Rhizome easily resurrect their dead authors.
But don’t get confused by this romantic description of the philosophical work: if someone is recognized as a philosopher only by the new concepts that he has introduced into the philosophical discourse [D&G], and if new and original are nothing but an illusion [Barthes], then philosophy is not the art of creating concepts but rather the art of rebranding preexisting concepts. The philosopher doesn’t have much choice but to refurbish and rebrand old concepts and present them as original ones.
This is a tough situation: if you don’t quote you are accused of plagiarism and of the hubris of being original; if you quote (explicitly – by referring to philosophers; implicitly – by reusing known concepts) you’re accused of not being original, hence – not a philosopher. The game is, therefore, to quote all along your thesis until that point where you bring up your own rebranded (yet necessarily preexisting) concept – that which you present and pretend to be your own.
Foucault, probably, refused to play this political Homo Academicus game. After all, it is not the concept that matters, but rather how it is told, to whom, and when. Nevertheless, Foucault acknowledged the rules of the game by tagging his work Fiction. He embraced the position of an outsider, accepting being labeled as a non-philosopher, non-historian, non-sociologist. A Fiction writer is free from disclosing his sources; moreover, he is free to refer to any known figure while asserting a clear disconnect between the signifier and the signified, between the Kant in his story and the Kant we all know.
“Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in”, William S. Burroughs, Dead City Radio, Ah Pook.
I’ve been thinking for a while now about this phrase “death needs time for what it kills to grow in” trying to figure it out. Interpretation-wise, this is a dangerous game, as Burroughs is known for using cut & paste techniques, trying to destroy any rational thought. And yet, from a modern perspective, the potential randomness behind the order of the words shouldn’t and even must not persuade us in the futility of giving it a sense. After all, that’s exactly what life is – random events to which we try to give some meaning.
Time
There are several possible viewpoints about Time: Time as a continuity and unity; Time as a collection of independent Time Capsules, a label aggregating all those capsules together.
Time as a continuity and unity allows for better Control - there’s time to order things in Space. It may also lead to either an indifferent position in the spirit of what has been will be again, or to a satisfied one, in the spirit of the problem is solved; there’s nothing more that can be done.
Time as a fragment of Time, as an endless recursive fractal, is what I read in Foucault’s Modernism, which prefers seeing Time in its particularity, in its decomposition. A Time Capsule: just born, already dead.
The Time Capsule
What’s inside the Time Capsule?
Everything, I suppose. I’m thinking of any Time Capsule as a cosmic Monad where the fight takes place, where a human tries to redefine… Space. Modernism tries to redefine Space within a single, ephemeral, insignificant, derisory Time Capsule. And Space is us. And so Deleuze can righteously call Foucault “the historian of the present”, for there’s an Entire Life inside the Time Capsule.
Or am I wrong? Maybe it’s not Life inside the Time Capsule, but rather…
Death?
See my previous post on the death of Baudrillard, where I quote Deleuze from his lecture on Leibniz and the nature of the Monad (I’m rephrasing [remixing] everything):
To be born is to start dying. To live is to be dying. To die is to complete living.
And so to die is to complete to be dying.
Again:
Birth=to start dying;
Life=to be dying;
Death=to finish being dying.
Our mission here, in this Space, is to die.
But, wait! Beware! all this happens inside a single Time Capsule. Don’t get depressed – you’ll be restarting the whole process of dying in just about a moment.
Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in. Death grows inside the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule is the container of Life. Death grows in Life.
Via Jahsonic I have learned about the death of Jean Baudrillard. It was a strange sensation, watching the image of this man, knowing that now indeed the image communicates absence, an absolute void. RIP.
I thought what could be said more, and remembered a short Deleuzean reference to “La Mort”, or Death as it is called.
(free style English trans. follows)
“Ce que vous appelez mourir, c’est achever de vivre, et ce que vous appelez naître c’est commencer à mourir, comme aussi ce que vous appelez vivre, c’est mourir en vivant. Vous n’attendez pas la mort, mais vous l’accompagnez perpétuellement”.
English:
“What you call to die is completing the act of living, and what you call to be born is to start dying, just as what you call to live is to die while living. You don’t wait for death to come; rather you are its perpetual companion”.
(Taken from Deleuze’s lecture La Taverne [on Leibniz])
A mashup between Yves Klein, the Blue painter, and Sean Connery, the one and only James Bond, 007, yielded Blond - a series of ten juxtapositions of faces, women, guns, jumps, colors – briefly – a whole life, side by side. I have already published this annotated visual mashup in my alter-blog, but I think that Blond would have felt at home with you readers. So if you’d like to visit the exposition, it would be my pleasure to host you there.
Michel Foucault sees all humans as a mashup of what has always existed, and the great human endeavor being the rediscovery, then the analysis of those tracks from which we have become the remix that we are. It’s only when one is in front of and confronted with those rediscovered tracks, that s/he can start being the DJ of his/her own Self. The praxis herewith described is called the Genealogy of the Mashup.
Mashed is a mis en abîme, a recursion of mashups, an explicit work of Genealogy, presenting fourteen Vs.kind of tracks (The Doors vs. Blondie; Iggy Pop vs. Peggy Lee..).
The first layer in our genealogical process is that which we see first: “Mashed” the CD, and the assertion “This is a collection” which is an overt awareness to the impossibility of being original – content-wise; “these 14 tracks of which I am made of are not mine”, thus spoke the 1st layer.
The 2nd layer, any of the fourteen tracks, is again a special kind of a remix, i.e a remix with a sense of History, each track bearing a Vs. kind of title, explicitly stating its genealogy – “I consist of these two voices in the minute of their meeting”. And you can experience the magic of the remix, the phantasmagoric world of the unoriginal for yourself: you can hear The Doors - they are there, fully present, and you can hear Blondie, and you can hear a third voice, that omnipresent voice which reappears only in the minute of their meeting: the voice of the dead author.
Of course, nothing is sacred; from those rediscovered voices, only the poetic moments have been remixed into the 2nd layer, the meeting layer. And that’s the work each DJ should be doing on his/her self.
On the 3rd layer there’s this rediscovered, separated track, or the leftovers of what used to be a glamorous song by The Doors: Riders on the Storm. We know today that the genealogy goes further into the past, till the dawn of mankind. Riders on the Storm belongs to the history of implicit mashups. There’s a work of genealogy to do here too.
Mashups are poetics. If you need another proof, please help yourself with Cathrine Vs. ?.
I was happy and surprised to reread Poe’s The Poetic Principle, for I unexpectedly met there, right on the first page, some recently acquired friends, namely the 2nd and the 3rd, paragraphs.
Two paragraphs, 20 lines, that few words, and still – the impact is that of a tactical nuke.
Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida – to name just the recent French figures – were, I feel, regulars over this textual place. I’m talking about the revulsion of the epic, “the best epic under the sun, is a nullity: – and this is precisely the fact”, says Poe. But this concluding sentence does not, in any manner, preclude epic oeuvres. Rather, it’s the reader who should slice and dice the oeuvre: “Follow the Poetic Principle”.
The reader may rely on the author’s suggested division – like chapters, numbering, or any other structural indices (starting, as Poe suggests, from Paradise Lost Book II); or the author’s thematic division – here I am reading Foucault, who is always suggesting several possible starting points to his essays (at least those I’ve read) by constructing as many in-world landing fields (“Wait… wait! Time, a landing field”, but that’s another borrowed poem already).
“Minor Poems”: If there’s something I’ve noticed, although Tabula Rasa, while reading Foucault, is his lovely insistence on adding the minor tag to almost everything. A precaution, I thought; a necessity, I reckon now. So when Foucault starts his formidable lecture of Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung by stating “a minor text, perhaps” [3rd paragraph...] – well, that’s a great sign of admiration and respect.
In my post DJ Spooky’s Remix Simulacrum I questioned the concept of an “authentic voice” in general, and the concept of a “remix” in particular:
“Given that the human history of ideas, progress, art, etc. is the history of remix, i.e. the unexpected association of different, seemingly unrelated memes, should “remix” be classified as an authentic voice or an unauthentic one?”
That post ended with only questions. I might have now a sort of an answer, which will be based on literary criticism, specifically on Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author”, as well as on our memory, or rather on our capacity to… forget.
In “The Death of the Author” (1967) Barthes states that “the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original”. Any text, therefore, be it an “original” or a “remix” is deemed to be the reincarnation of older texts. Let’s forget, than, the illusion of authenticity [, or of truth, or of reality etc.] – there’s no such thing.
Here’s an excerpt from Barthes:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original”.
Yet I’d like to suggest a distinction between the authenticity of the text and the authenticity of the voice (leaving aside concepts of author, writer, speaker etc.). Indeed, the text is essentially unauthentic; the author is being dead, and the reader is, righteously, the new meaning-provider. Yet from all this destruction, I think that something new is born: the voice.
The Voice
Barthes continues the above quoted text with what can be understood as a minor observation on his part, but a one that I think is key to understanding the essence and the role of the authentic voice – that which tells an essentially unauthentic story:
“his [the writer, the dead author, the layman speaker] only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them”.
I’d like to interpret this last sentence as suggesting that authentic voices are those associating old texts in a certain way in a certain time for a certain society. And even if the last sentence from Barthes doesn’t say that, I’d still like to stick to this idea, and to maintain that this role of the authentic voice is of an extreme importance.
The authentic voice is that which reminds us of old, forgotten texts. What I’ll say now is not original, but it’s important: the past contains many answers for us, mostly in the form of unanswered questions (yes, I noticed the paradox). Faulkner has this saying that the past is never dead and that it is not even past. This insight, I think, is critical for our survival, for our progress. The right old question [or text in its broadest meaning] brought up in the right moment in the right context can change things. What Barthes cannot take from the dead author is his choice of the texts and of the moment and context of their reincarnation.
In other words, the role of the authentic voice is to bring up, to remind, in a certain point in time, some old texts so that the “reader” will start his/her process of creating meaning – actual, relevant meaning – around them. The authentic voice is the catalyst, the trigger of the whole process.
Remember (for future use): a society that cannot forget is a society that cannot remember.
The more I dwell into the Foucault/Deleuze worlds the more they get interconnected, interlaced. There’s love in the way one prepares the terrain for the other; one realtes to and interprets the other.
In “Postscripts on the Societies of Control” (1990) Deleuze starts with Foucault’s description of “enclosures” – those closed places (closed=mapped=borders) created by the western society since the 18th century. Family-School-Army-Factory-Grave (with bifurcations into Hospitals, Prisons etc.).
They move you from one enclosure to another, telling you: “You are no longer in your family”; “You are no longer in school”; “You are no longer in the Army”; and finally – “You are no longer”.
Deleuze’s Office View
To distribute in Space; to order in Time
“Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces.”
In his “Image-Movement”, Deleuze refers to Bergson’s idea of image – the image as [real] matter. Anything is image, including ourselves. And film-making starts by arranging images on a Plan. This is the distribution in Space. Next comes Image-Temps – the ordering in Time.
Remember – we are images (images are not representation of something). This is the door knob turned, afterwards, by Jean Baudrillard.
“Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own”, DJ Spooky
I thought this sentence was clear. But then, after thinking about it for a while, I concluded that it eludes me. I have several possible meanings with much more unanswered questions about its potential semantics.
Meanings
It can refer to the pessimistic Baudrillardian Integral Reality theory, in which anything is a simulacrum, a fake, including our “self”, our voice.
[OR]
It can be understood as an optimistic, web2.0 share-all style, in which the right to remix and to appropriate others’ voices goes mainstream.
Questions
- What is “My” voice? What guarantees the authenticity of a certain “Voice”?
- Remix: Given that the human history of ideas, progress, art, etc. is the history of Remix, i.e. the unexpected association of different, seemingly unrelated memes, should “remix” be classified as an authentic voice or an unauthentic one?
- What is different “Today”? Until Today, what kind of voice have we used – our own or others’?
- What is “Today” – where does it point to?
Sometimes there’s an inexplicable match between a state-of-mind and a sensory input.
This is what happened to me while listening to this fragment by Gilles Deleuze about the Duration – La durée (Click the player to listen).
What happened is that I processed the whole piece as a potential DJ Spooky track: a musical intro; Deleuze’s voice full with fluctuations, insistence, repetitions; a chaotic background noise; and finally phrases that can be cut from the entire piece and still survive – this entire Spooky complex placed me in a different emotional state.
The Deleuze piece is in French, I hope, though, that non-French speakers can enjoy it too. You can listen to the following piece several times, and each time get something else out of it. What I heard was a poem, much like the following:
Gilles Deleuze – La durée
La durée c’est ce qui se
décompose
Ha!
La durée c’est une
défection . La durée c’est,
tomber en poussierrrrrrrrrrr.
Oui, oui.
C’est Flaubert. C’est Flaubert.
Et. Et.
Si ça dure, ça se décompose.
[silence]
Ce n’est pas du tout Bergsonien.
“Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera Deleuzien”, Michel Foucault
I was listening this morning to a fragmented lecture by JF Lyotard on post-modernism. I liked what I heard, although I’m not convinced that I understood anything. Yet using my right to freely interpret, here is my understanding of this fragment, which elusively explains what’s post-modernism through an observation of what has happened to philosophy and what is the role of story telling in our culture.
Since Kant, Philosophy has gradually lost its status as a meta-science, a science that provides the knowledge-of-the-self for all other sciences, and even – defines all other sciences. From this omniscient perspective, Philosophy has crashed down.
Why did it crash?
Lyotard doesn’t explain, but I could understand, and I might be just as wrong here, that Philosophy crashed because rational, linear discourse is always limited. Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and many others, always got to the point where they needed another medium in order to proceed.
What is this other medium?
Rising up again, the Philosophy returned to what has preceded it and to what has been its subject of negation and fighting for a thousand years – the stories, the legends, the myths. I’m not talking about their content, but rather about their form, the story telling as an explanatory medium.
The story telling, le recit, was that tool used when all other tools have failed. And so, post-Kant continental philosophy has started to develop a new brand of Philosophers, who excelled not [or not only] in mathematics, science and analytics, but rather in… story telling. And stories themselves have been repositioned as containers of philosophical value. And all this is Modernism.
So what is post-modernism?
Clearly, this modern phenomenon met the resistance of the utilitarian philosophers, implicitly labeled by Lyotrard as the Input/Output philosophers who, like any other cost-oriented scientists, are measuring philosophical narratives by their outcome: this is what went in, this is what came out – did we gain something out of it?
Those I/O philosophers, says Lyotard, can find themselves and did find themselves helping out hideous regimes to justify their acts, and its because of that, I think, that Lyotard defines post-modernism as a preference for short stories and limited narratives over never-ending epical narratives, which tend to provide a total framework.
Foucault, audaciously defined his writings as fiction, stating that his books are “experience books, as opposed to truth books or demonstration books”. And in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” he speaks about his preference to short fiction. Naturally, I’m doing an analogy here, but you will be able to see it in the following excerpt:
[...] the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions
It’s never too late to discover a classic writer. Thanks again to my shadow friend Amir Vardi who introduced me to the Apocryphal Stories of Čapek, and through them to this wonderful person. And, of course, it’s impossible to conclude any story without that grain of coincidence that Amir likes so much, so: Čapek and his brother Josef (who has illustrated Karel’s works) invented the term Robot in the play Rossum´s Universal Robots.
My friend, Muriel, who’s a rebel in her own right and an artist whose work I love so much, hinted me that TAZing all day long is pretty depressing. I agree. I think that philosophical praxis (regardless of how one defines this praxis) is highly challenging and naturally sometimes very depressing, unless, of course, one enjoys passing his/her life head-banging against the wall. So I thought that at least this time “Les structures” should “descendent dans la rue” and so I unplugged myself from my 4-wheels shield, walking to work by foot and leaving my Apple’s memes-injector at home. Once in the street I opened my eyes, my ears, my nose. I inhaled deeply.
Next thing I saw was this image of Gargantua, emerging from Gargamelle’s uterus crying his instinctive, primordial cry “À boire! À boire!”. Then I saw that never ending line of roasted animals and rolling wine barrels, doing their way into Gargantua’s mouth. Fabulous Empiricism.
The Grotesque is so much the opposite of traditional Philosophy, so much the opposite that they must have something in common. At least, I think, that Paradoxes are close to the Grotesque, because the philosophers treat Paradoxes in much the same way we treat monsters or any possible hideous creature.
The Layman’s Grotesque is the Philosopher’s Paradox.
p.s.
Hmm, yes, I noticed that too: once again, I didn’t look at the real world…
So now we got Foucault, linked to Bey, who’s linked to Laswell and also to Burroughs, who’s linked to DJ Spooky, who’s remixing Laswell as well as Burroughs, and not any text of Burroughs, but rather a next-step-text, an how-to text that goes with the spirit of them all.
Emma: We can break into this man’s synapses. Imagine the wonder of it all. And if we wear our VR helmets we will live for hours at a time in the real past, the authentic past – and and – (Her voice, her expression change; a small shadow falls) and perhaps escape.
Fyodor (Quietly): Escape from what, Emma?
.
Dennis Potter, Cold Lazarus
Cold Lazarus is the second part of Karaoke/Cold Lazarus, both being the last TV drama done by the late and formidable Dennis Potter (The singing detective and many other masterpieces).
I find Karaoke & Cold Lazarus to be Potter’s best achievement.
Karaoke is the story of an author, who is writing his last script; last – because at the end of Karaoke, he’ll be dead, just like Potter. While walking around in the city, the author encounters, or thinks he encounters, the characters he invented for that last script, an impossible event that drives him crazy, in particular because he is deeply in love with his heroine.
This is a most poetic, sensitive, imaginative, adorable, and definitely one of a kind TV piece. When I saw it, some ten years ago, j’etais époustouflé.
Cold Lazarus happens in the future. Somehow, the head of this author has been frozen, and now scientists, financially supported by the biggest media mogul (or goggul) at the time, are trying to replay the memories buried in this head. The media mogul dreams about the rating of that TV show.
Personally, I think that our digitization, our turning into real-time, digital objects, especially via web2.0 technologies and concepts, bares the dangers, the potential, of becoming the head of cold Lazarus, and it will not take long before media moguls will start to exploit our virtual selves for entertainment purposes.
But of course, this is shallow. Potter takes the story further, by questioning reality itself, presenting multiple layers of possible realities: the script, the head of the author, physical reality, virtual reality etc.
In Cold Lazarus, there’s a group of rebels who’d like to destroy the lab, the head, the virtuality and go back to physical reality. They are called RON (Reality or Nothing). Of course, they are as clueless as anybody else about what reality is.
In a most common coincidence, two posts after Laswell’s pure content, I encounter an opposite phenomena – that of the pure form. But before that, a very short intro to Structuralism.
A simple definition for Structuralism would be a meaning acquired from the geometrical relations among the different elements of the system. Speaking of languages, words acquire their meaning not because they refer to an external thing, but from their political position in the overall linguistic structure – and open a dictionary to see what I mean.
Now, Structuralism can be very cruel. You are defined – not by what you are – but by what others say about you. It’s pure form, pure structure – no content.
Wordie - a new web2.0 service – allows you to experience structuralism, playing with words – pure words, without any context. As their tagline suggests: Like Flickr, but without the photos.
Wordie – playing with Structuralism. I feel an unexplained uneasiness here.
DJ Spooky that subliminal kid, was the first musician I encountered (over the virtualosphere) whose music is derived from deep philosophical strucutres. I first read DJ Spooky’s essays, then I listened to his music. DJ Spooky is a great philosophical mediator.
This is to say that I had my initiation. While searching for Hakim Bey, I stumbled upon a joint venture between Bey and Laswell (Chaos from T.A.Z). Then I checked out Laswell to whom I listened in those great acne days but not in the last decade or so, and I found this artwork named undocument.
Now, if you follow my other blogs, you know my sympathy to Dave Winer’s language tweaks, i.e. uncoference. The un- prefix has become, through Winer, a way to describe the matter and its anti-matter in a single word: it is a conference, but it is not what you would expect from a conference (it is a deconstructioned word).
And here’s what Laswell is saying about the music in undocument:
Realizations achieved in Bill Laswell’s domain are decontextualized and prepared for release into the world of chaos and chance. [...]
These are source materials for the creation of modern music. Assimilate them, reprocess them, recombine them – the original intent of the sounds on this CD-ROM will disintegrate, as new meanings – your meanings – emerge intact.
It is fantastic: a form-less music; pure content kept in autonomous zones, to which anyone can apply a meaning. And still, like most of the paradoxial truisms, this formless matter is packed (i.e. subject to a form) in an undocument, which is and at the same time is not a documentation of all those matters. Probably, the meaning of undocument is that the packaging nevertheless keeps the autonomic nature of its embeddded content.
You can listen to a great sample, named dance at the bottom of this page.
I got to that point in Hakim Bey’s TAZ where he describes the concept of Psychotopology.
State’s control is space-oriented.
It doesn’t matter if this space represents inches (RL) or bits (SL).
Every State has a border line. Every State is a Borderline.
Whoever is inside the border line is under the State’s control.
Temporary Autonomous Zones exist.
TAZ is a physical space, although it gives place to a metaphysical space.
Maps are never accurate. A map can never be accurate. Coastlines, for instance, are never accurate because of their fractal nature.
Because of the fractalic, chaotic nature of complex systems, there will always be a place outside of the map.
TAZ uses the fractal leftovers as temporary bases. Using Web2.0 lingua franca, we would say that TAZ is using the long tail of the coastline.
200km, 100km, 50km:
Conceptual TAZeswill always exist
TAZ occupies those fractal spaces not yet mapped.
The topographic map is an alegory.
The State (and the Society) has many other maps: moral map, ideological map, sociological map, economical map and so forth.
No map is accurate. TAZ encampments are always possible.
Attacks on ideological maps are the most painful. Foucault pointed out that niether the army nor the police are as strong as ideologies whenever the subject is the taming of the shrew.
The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the “strike” and the “defense” should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability”–an “occult” art within the martial arts. The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future–Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori–the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.
The name of the other book, Behemoth, makes you understand that he did know it means whale. From here, it is a short way to the result of choosing a leader that has total leading powers and chooses a wrong path. Nature prooves the faults of Hobbes’s plan
“Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney, all these science fiction writers were engaging with trying to figure out how to think outside the box. The tragedy is that there is no outside the box. You’re just in another box, in another box…”, DJ Spooky’s Remixing the Matrix
You’re just in another box, in another box.
You’re just in another box, in another box.
You’re just in another box, in another box.
You’re just in another box, in another box.
Click the image to get to DJ Spooky’s collected Essays
Also, I find the following DJ Spooky’s observation a sort of an answer to those worries raised in earlier posts:
“Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together”
Memex – memory extension – is a device conceptualized by Vannevar Bush around 1945. Microsoft has launched My Lifebits project accroding to Bush’ specs. In this recent project, a man records every single event that occurs: audio & video capture of his meetings, images taken by his camera, documents he writes – even his blood pressure and biometric data are constantly gathered and recorded for good inside the personal memex.
This leads to a world where memories never fade out. This leads to a world where human beings are turned into a stream of well-organized and searchable bits.
“The being of a subject is a unity which cannot be analyzed as an object. When a subject is analyzed as an object, the subject is no longer a subject, but becomes an object. When a subject is analyzed as an object, the subject is no longer a Thou, but becomes an It.”
In some eras human neglected his soul; in others – his mind; nowadays – it’s the body. It is of no wonder that in an era that exalts the aesthetics of the body, the body would be the thing finally neglected and abandoned in favor of a cloned image, a virtual avatar that will look so perfect – “a real more real than the real”. We are post-modern “AND” type of creatures and we should be modern in cultivating both of our Gardens.
Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, whilst Plato gestures to the heavens, representing his belief in The Forms. from Wikipedia.
Aristotle determines what an organic living object is using the following criteria:
a. Growth, nutrition, (reproduction)
b. Autonomous Locomotion (i.e. auto-generated movement in space)
c. Perception
d. Intellect (= thought)
This gives us three corresponding degrees of soul:
a. Nutritive soul (plants)
b. Sensitive soul (all animals)
c. Rational soul (human beings)
Now, many are speaking about the Internet becoming, sooner or later, an organic creature, and so what I’d like to show is why the Aristotelian criteria reinforce and probably explain these feelings, given the advent of utility computing and the architecture titled – scale-out.
Scale-Out Architecture
Scale-out is an architecture used more and more in those cases where computer systems are required to scale ad-infinitum in order to sustain an unknown yet massive amount of online users. Amazon, eBay, Google etc. are all companies specializing in both the deployment and the optimization of scale-out architecture.
This architecture has the following conceptual components and processes:
The Brain (or mind, or manager, or controller)
The brain constantly senses (or monitors) the system’s environment: how many users are currently on-line? What is the overall CPU consumption of the system? What is the status of each of the hardware/software components that makes the system? and so forth.
The Brain performs real-time compilation of all this sensual data and meditates about the current state of things. In case a faulty situation is either identified or anticipated, the Brain reacts by adapting itself to the newly created situation. To better visualize this adaptation, I will use the following scenario:
A system consists of 4 servers. The Brain identifies a dangerous increase in users’ load – something that can be solved by adding a fifth server. The brain then launches dynamic, self-healing/self-nutrition processes that take a bare metal – a hardware-only box – attaches it to storage and network devices, installs the required operating system and applications and finally makes the server fully operational.
We have just witnessed two Aristotelian criteria in motion:
Nutrition, Self-feeding and reproduction
The system just “ate” a bare metal, digested it and turned it into something it needs. In many cases, what the system is actually doing is cloning itself into the new server – a reproduction process.
Self-induced locomotion – movement in space
The system now occupies five servers. It occupies more physical space than it has occupied a minute before.
Needless to say, all these operations occur without any human intervention. They are completely autonomous.
“To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.” Malevich, The Non-Objective World
Malevich’s feelings are not to be confused with sensual perception, which he defines as meaningless. Meaning comes from the soul, from feelings.
This is a Platonic concept, of course. The unpermutable soul holding the truth. And as we (now) know, the truth is the pure form.
Hence, Black Square.
At least this gives some philosophical depth to the incomprehensible paintings of modern art.
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
or an explicit one. 
![Rhizome [D&G]](http://digitalphilosophy.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/dg-rhizome.jpg)
