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NEW FORMS OF SECRECY
In response to this – https://www.facebook.com/owenjones84/videos/596744154004309/
Exploitations of national sentiment and exacerbations of xenophobic anxiety, using Margaret Thatcher’s market survey techniques put in the context of real-time algorithmic manipulation, continue to drive the contemporary political scene.
All these fictions of unease are produced by a calculus of crafty coercions, the simplifying mechanics of the mass image. What M John Harrison called “a thousand and one labyrinthine excursions beneath the political crust” (“Settling the World” (1975) M John Harrison), has now turned into hyper-visible spectacles of online confusion. It’s all there, easy to see, but vested interests, stupidity, and bigotry, are the new forms of obscurity, no secret services necessary.
Concerning Jeremy Corbyn’s restraint concerning Russia, the British public have to decide whether they appreciate the simplifying rhetoric of strong and stupid statements, or thoughtful and considerate ones. It’s nice to resolve situations quickly, but correctness is another essential attribute: anyone can do quick stupidity, even Boris Johnson, as has been noted.
Conmen usually use speed in order to facilitate their deceptions, global politics is certainly no different, in this respect.
Steve Bannon, setting up offices in Brussels, in order to influence European elections, is no different, really, to Russian interventions in the USA, through Facebook manipulations. The irony, of course, is the point and proponents of anti-globalist arguments, being undermined by their resorting to various right-wing, international alliances and techniques of manipulation, lol.
In the inordinate concern with frames, these days, it seems that pictures are entirely neglected, simply taken for granted. This is the typical, tunnel vision of instrumentalist thought, that narrative theories were questioning; but the fundamental mediocrity of political intellect never really changes, for its practitioners the framing becomes the positivist picture, and the picture is simply forgotten.
THE HIGHWAYS OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION
In response to this question –
“Do you think trans women are real women?”
From here – Two strangers, five minutes, eye to eye.
BBC Three 23 June at 17:02 ·
https://www.facebook.com/bbcthree/videos/10155896044135787/
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The question cannot be answered unless criteria for the category ‘real woman’ are stipulated?
As biology becomes increasingly susceptible to technological decision, the emergent birthing or even conceiving scenario of necessary parental decision with regard to offspring gender, arises. This creates the possibility of future discrepancy between that decision and subsequent offspring developments, and their decisions. Both are based on design decisions in which the contribution of nature, natural givenness or contribution, is increasingly displaced and problematised, on every vector of its traditional consideration, by technological decision.
When the forms of natural constraint are thus dispersed or dissolved, the cultural necessities and traditions based on those constraints disperse and dissolve along with them, giving rise to new cultural scenarios based on new sets of constraints, whatever those might be and however they might be produced.
If the scenario of such productions arises through social interaction and determination, it will be subject to the full spectrum of sociopolitical aesthetics prevailing at that time of production. That sociopolitical aesthetic, necessarily the ongoing developmental form or forms arising from the current and preceding ones, is subject to the resources and distribution necessities of the technological culture to which it belongs.
Increasingly, as this culture displaces that which it has categorised as ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’, it will be compelled to confront its own ‘nature’, previously considered as ‘artificiality’, in an aporia of questionable designs whose production it can no longer definitively determine, as the notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ are mobilised from their traditional sites-sights, onto highways of techno-economic distribution and techno-aesthetic, sociopolitical design.
Undoubtedly, on discovery of the weaponisation potential residing within possibilities of so-called ‘gender fluidity’, various state and corporate actors will engage and invest heavily in this area, converting it into militarised fluency of those possibilities. This is always the hypocritical mode of instrumentalisation by which traditional greed, the greed of traditions, transforms into that to which it might otherwise seem ostensibly opposed.
THE ‘TIMELESS’ PRESENCE OF LIGHT
The notion of a ‘present moment’ (nunc stans) requires a structure of presentation, at the very least, a minimal condition of reception.
In order for it to be a logically meaningful concept, negation is required, momentariness not present.
So, the concept has an implicit complexity, automatically calling on notions of ‘past’ and ‘future’, in its very articulation.
The notion of the present is thus an anticipatory conceptualisation directed towards the assumption of an event. An event is a distinct, or distinguishable, temporal object, or objectification, the multiplication of which suggest the sequences constitutive of temporality. Whether as ‘internal psychic states’ or ‘external transitions between events’, ‘temporality’ is supervenient on both of these factors.
Imagine a universe, in which nothing at all happens. Would it be at all reasonable to speak of temporality with regard to such a universe? Temporality, or at least temporal conventions as commonly understood, simply would not obtain in such a universe.
Therefore, temporality or time is intrinsically tied up with objectification, with the determinate objects known as ‘events’. Events, or eventuality, more generally, are/is bound up with general and localised determinations of process.
The notion of the ‘eternal now’, is a standpoint ‘apprehending’ eventuality, ‘as a whole’, but without any form of localised grasp. Therefore, such an infinite apprehension cannot be so easily communicated in the language of localised processes and their semantic conventions.
This is not merely a theoretical supposition.
At the speed of light, there is no time. So, for a bunch of photons whose journey begins with the hypothesised onset of the so-called universe, nothing at all has happened. Light is alleged to be a ‘physical’ property, but that property arises from its interactions with other processes and events, a subset of considerations of which constitute the concepts of physics. But those very concepts indicate a quite specific ‘timelessness’, that can be ‘seen’.
THE LITHOMANCY OF OCCIDENTAL ANXIETY
Has anyone written on contemporary dialogical conditions, any better than Adorno!? They’ve had decades to be able to do so.
The picture (Lee Ufan, Relatum – Discussion, 2003), is a great visual resonance, very apt.
It’s bringing to mind some of the themes I was working on, back in the early 1990s, one of which I’ve surreptitiously, ‘tactically’ even, continued on my blog.
The notion of calculation, of calculi or calculus; literally, pebbles; was one of the themes I explored back in the early 1990s, in various contexts. It links directly to the l.c.d. (‘Lowest Common Denominator’/ ‘liquid-crystal display’) theme, developed back then or earlier, but which I’ve used this century on my blog, though somewhat allusively, somewhat lucidly. The ‘allusive’ element arises due to the earlier, originating context, informing contemporary expressions conditioned by that origination, but not specifying or explicating it.
Similarly, with the concept of the ‘monument’, the monumental and the ‘micro-monumental’. The ‘micro-monumental’, of course, links up with the l.c.d. theme.
It’s interesting to note that writing on tablets of stone, or clay (baked stone?), characterises more strongly the cultural developments of the Occident, Mesopotamia and perhaps ancient Egypt. The Indus Valley did produce the ‘seal’, but it would be an easy speculation to suggest that as this artefact of endurance was used in trade; and if the bulk of that trade was for export; then the Indus Valley seal represents a hybrid concession to Occidental metaphysical need.
If the Occident is governed by this metaphysical need, by a temporal anxiety assuaged with the lithic mediations of mnemonic and recollective technologies; does it become a servant of such ‘stoned’ deferral? Does this organic anxiety transition the entire Occident into being a merely necessary function and expression, of a dialectics of the lithic and monumental?
In an effort to answer this, the Occident puts its hands in the pockets of its fashionable attire (another system of deferral), digitally manipulating pebbles, from pocket to pocket, round and round like rosary beads, in calculations and determinations, without end.
These are the manipulations of monumentation, so caught up in its binary contests and theatrick plays of self-encryption, that all vitality is reduced to a ‘factor’, directed towards asymptotic calculation of an alleged ‘freedom’ never actually lived, but always displaced by those very computations. The endlessly deferred lava of life, bearing its crystalline burdens of micro-monumentation, through channels of, and on, the l.c.d. screen, always according to a semantics of stone.
THE ONTOLOGICAL PRODUCTION OF EXISTENTIAL LIMITATION
[Saris Aurelius] “I believe meaning exists, this is why I have will. There is meaning in that I have a sense to engage.”
{AK (CJ)}: “If both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ are forms of ‘standing forth’, then to ask whether “meaning exists”, suggests a simple statement of tautology; ‘meaning means’, or, ‘existence exists’?”
If both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ are forms of ‘standing forth’, then they are both forms of distinction or difference; ‘standing forth’, necessarily implies ‘that which stands forth’, as a distinct difference, with regard to ‘that which it stands out from’. Thus both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ share this differential structuring of the distinct.
Obviously, for you, the order of ‘meaning’ is not the same as the order of ‘existence’, as you locate the order of ‘meaning’, first, in a statement of belief, concerning an existential claim, which seems to assume the separation of the ‘order of meaning’ from the ‘order of existence’. The assumption of this separation suggests a very particular and determinate concept of ‘existence’, for which the mere quality of ‘standing forth’, ‘distinction’, and ‘difference’, are not sufficiently qualifying attributes. However, you link the belief in existential meaning, to the concept of will, presumably granting the concept of will membership within this specifically determinate concept of ‘existence’, a specificity initially separate from the ‘order of meaning’.
Obviously, the concept of will, in your discursive arrangement, functions as immediately existential, in the specifically determinate sense previously implied; whilst the ‘order of meaning’ does not so function, having to traverse the detour of belief before arriving at such existential immediacy, as configured by the concept of will. An additional detour, the possession of a “sense to engage” is stated, as another condition for the specifically determinate ‘existence’ of the ‘order of meaning’.
An initial separation between two forms of ‘standing forth’; producing an ‘order of meaning’ without determinate ‘existence’, and a specifically determinate ‘order of existence’, but without determinate ‘meaning’.
Yet the common background for both orders is ‘standing forth’ – the differential structuring of the distinct.
So we then have to ask why it is that a specifically determinate ‘order of existence’ gets produced?
What are the reasons for the production of such an ‘existential’ determination?
And why is the ‘order of meaning’ existentially indeterminate in the absence of the detours of ‘belief’, ‘will’, and the ‘sense to engage’.
Not mentioned, but present as background assumption, is the metaphysics of subject/object.
>The concept of will, functioning as existential immediacy, is thus ‘objective’, an ‘objective feature’ belonging to the specifically determinate ‘order of existence’.
>The concept of belief, functions as a switching point, between the separated orders of ‘existentially indeterminate Meaning’ and ‘meaningfully indeterminate Existence’.
>This switching point oscillates between the ‘objectivity’ of the specifically determinate ‘order of existence’, and the presumably ‘subjectively’ accessed ‘order of meaning.
Given the background assumption and traditional conventions of the metaphysics of subject/object, the underlying rationale structuring the implicit presuppositions of your initial statement, become clear. The obvious resonances that might be suggested, are a metaphysics of the will, particularly as inflected by Friedrich Nietzsche, though earlier precursors might well be relevant, too. The structure is traditional, after all. There is a kind of metaphysical centring on psychological, perhaps sociological, motifs: ‘belief’; ‘will’; ‘sense to engage’; as anchoring points.
But one of the most important assumptions, the unanalysed assumption of separation, between subjectively accessed ‘meaning’ and objective ‘existence’; no clear criteria has been given for this separation; it is simply assumed, as a ‘given’; in this it follows a Cartesian route, the route of modernity.
The other, connected assumption, again taken as a ‘given’, is the production of a specifically determinate, concept of ‘existence’; again, offered without clear criteria, those criteria being largely social in origin, an unquestioned and shared habit of consensual inculcation.
The issue of existential legitimacy, of what counts as ‘objectively existent’ beyond the fluctuations of subjectivity; beyond the fluctuating subjective access to an ‘order of meaning’ characterised by existential indeterminacy; such existential legitimacy can only occur with respect to a concept of existence no longer bound only to the discernible difference of ‘standing forth’. In order for the concept of existential legitimacy to even arise, further criteria enabling such a legitimacy are required, these have to be invented and produced. What it is that does the inventing and producing, is an open question, and one can look perhaps to the ‘order of meaning’ for various entertainments, in this regard.
But equally, all the notions and habits constituting the metaphysical conventions issuing from the metaphysics of subject/object, are interpretative inventions produced out of the ‘order of meaning’, largely as a result of what can conventionally be called ‘social production’. Because social production is susceptible to the variousness of uses, the notion of shared consensuality arises and is enabled. This commonality, in systematic forms accounting for variousness of use, is the ‘metaphysics of objectivity’, said metaphysics being systematically linked to those forms as a mutually confirming corollary. Existential legitimacy, is a functioning protocol of metaphysical registration belonging to that systematic network.
But the limits of that network, are the limits of its ‘existential legitimacy’.
URBAN VERBAL PRODUCTION
Guðjón, sometimes one has to expand the notion of ‘following’ away from the usual, default protocols, of sense or meaning production, in order to make room for other kinds of expression.
Years ago, when playing in Oxford, there was a somewhat eccentric lady, often walking around the city centre, who would hold loud conversations with herself, whilst listening to music on headphones. I seen other similar characters, in London. Usually, these people are seen as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, constituting them as marginalised figures in urban life.
What was highly noticeable, was the preponderance of references to media circulation, within their verbal productions. References to celebrities, news topics, anything at all! The alleged craziness or madness was actually a mediation of media circulations, and this I found highly significant. Because there was a kind of ‘production’ going on, and that production was thoroughly determined by the encounter with mediated significances not marginalised as craziness or madness. There seemed to be a complicity at work, one which questioned the conventions of each of the elements constituting that complicity.
Apparently, there are quite a a lot of people who do talk to themselves, not in the sense of the people mentioned above, publicly and loudly, but to themselves, in private. This phenomenon, it seems to me, could suggest many things. Conventionally speaking, the obvious and sarcastically humorous implication, would be to talk about a sliding scale or slippery slope of sanity/insanity.
But I don’t think that that is what is going on.
Another anecdote: I remember being in the Marble Arch, KFC, in London. There was an Afro-Caribbean man, in his 30s or 40s, talking to himself; not loudly or too quietly, just normally. He was having quite a good self-conversation. After a while, I actually talked to him, and he instantly went into a normal mode, and we had a good conversation, though I don’t remember what it was about. I do remember that he was actually a very intelligent man, well balanced, by no means could he be classified as crazy.
The city is an urban machine, a semi-organic mechanism of intersecting forces, configured according to multiple conceptual images susceptible to topical presentation. Out of the profusion of those topical regulations, verbal production cannot help but express, at least partially, its conditions of production. It seems to me, that however such productions might be classified; whether marked as marginalised or privileged; significant or senseless; relevant or irrelevant; these markings, themselves, are merely the continuations of the productions that they attempt to categorise. I think that a lot more than this, is at play.
POLITICS IS OVER, NO MORE POLITICS
Politics is over, no more politics.
Politics requires a polity, citizenry with regards to a state.
The notion of a state is transforming. No longer does it conform only to geographical singularity of location, because the cultural markings of its former constitutions, its languages and laws, its people and their customs, all these have dispersed through various forms of technological osmosis into a global system, wherein, though they attempt to recover the localised flavour of their former connections, they are unable to do this without resorting to detours beyond the very traditional borders that they try to recuperate.
The nationstate as a geocultural form has broken loose from the moorings of locational experience, becoming so many fragments in an electro-globalised flow.
This flow has no borders, not even ‘global’ ones, and thus cannot produce sufficient geocultural delimitation to constitute a nationstate, even though such may continue on as repetitions, Doppler effects of geocultural memory within the overall information flow.
THE THEATRICS OF LIBIDINAL LIMITATION
Some quick thoughts, weaving their ways, after being invoked by a discussion on Facebook, between Mario Hierro and Daniel Calder; a discussion which I did not fully read, whose assumptions I did not fully engage with or accept, but one which could perhaps be said to help constitute a relation of ‘tangential evocation’ with the foundational revocation of it, that follows. An essay towards an escape of the habits of its epistemology, a veering away from the ‘world’ of those habits and their development, an avoidance no longer exclusively governed by its ‘objects’.
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Metaphysics, after ‘Nature’, or after the system of ‘Nature’, ‘Nature’ being the system of regularities or repetitions belonging to Kant’s notion of ‘Understanding’, or the ‘judgements of perception’; but this ‘Nature’ is still notional, a regulating ‘idea’, thus, as a totality, ‘metaphysical’. So the concept or idea, of ‘Nature’, is an ideologically circumscribed category whose interior determinations, that which it is said to encompass as its categorical domain, are an alleged ‘immanence’ whose very quality as ‘immanence’ is supported by a metaphysical or ‘rational’ idea.
If, on its other, originary meaning, the metaphysics are merely Aristotle’s books ‘after’ the ‘physics’, even here, with this bibliographic conception, the distinction between what is and what is not ‘physical’, is allied to a discursive separation perhaps or potentially itself reflecting the categories of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ constitutively residing at the root of metaphysics itself.
Mutual irreducibility necessarily implies mutual relation. When neither term of said relation is ever found as an incontestable purity; necessarily so, when the conditions of such foundation are preconditions always set and sought for from the location of the opposite term; then it is only left to speculative allegiance as to which term speaks.
The notion of a ‘universe’, is a guiding idea; and if the notion of what speaks is one linked to a metaphysics of ‘agency’; then the expansion of that notion of ‘agency’, looking for its epistemological and ontological ‘grounds’, so to speak, eventually coincides with this ‘universal’ notion. The coincidence is one of speculative totality, a movement in search of foundational objectification or reification. If that reification is merely the product of a search for epistemological-ontological reunification, a reunification itself produced out of fluctuating vacillations, or vacillating fluctuations, between the arbitrary terms of an alleged ‘mutual irreducibility’; then it is merely the case that this entire ‘metaphysical’ theatre of possibilities is one that arises as a result of objective desire, one dispensing the roles of reification according to this libidinal limitation.
CULTURAL IMAGES IN CYBERNETIC WINDS AT THE END OF HISTORY
Feudal nobility versus trading merchants who work with the world.
This falls into the classic pattern of the master/slave dialectic of Kojeve and Marx.
The slave overthrows the master through worldly power; in conventional terms, business, colonialism, et cetera, produced cash to pay armies and finance military rebellions.
The nobility then made concessions, lessening taxes, and so on, which rerouted resources from Royal appointed mercantilisms to the eventually enlightenment and modernist organisations of bourgeois capitalism.
If those mercantilisms were organised according to feudal or royalist hierarchy, the eventually modernist organisations required a different organising principle, not based on such hierarchy.
If royalist hierarchy had its origins in ability to provision efficient protection and provisioning of kingdoms, the new, eventually modernist, organisations were then obligated to function as a likewise or preferably better provisioning force, but one whose principles of organisation were more palatable to those that it organised; all this, if it was to effectively supersede feudal organisation.
Universality was the instrument used to garner the widest support, enabling bigger armies to be paid, more influence to be bought. This partial power grab from the ruling nobility was predicated on an ecumenical appeal, one that was articulated and deployed using the concentration of sociopolitical, military, and monetary forces at the command of merchantry.
Casting a universal net was always the best way of achieving quantitative force (the masses). Qualitative force (forms of activity concentration as nodes of network control), always had to rely on networks of relative, quantitative assent; or at least, not generate destabilising, quantitative dissent. If the qualitative forces, of ruling polarities, could not secure such more or less consensual networks, influence, power, and perhaps revenues, were considerably diminished. To the extent, that any conflicts between ruling polarities risked susceptibility to the question of whether or not such quantitative networks had been secured. It was out of this theatre of conflicting forces that the ideology of democratic universalism quite naturally emerged, as the simplest protocol of personalisation required for network efficiency. From a wider perspective, in no way could it seriously be considered an innovation, instead it was just a replay of a prior spiritual movement. The movement of ideological homogenisation had already been set by Christianity, itself a replay of anticolonial trauma, a replay conveying both imperial and colonised elements, a narrative pattern of irresolution itself perhaps eminently suitable as a therapeutic configuration applicable to all the travails of Occidental expansion, one calculated to appeal to all affected parties?
If the romanisation of the West familiarised the Occident with the experience of centralised administration and law, albeit from a polytheistic, spiritual base; Christianisation was that law as a universal projection, from a monotheistic, spiritual base, albeit, in Tridentine form.
The more sophisticated a network becomes, the more crucial does every node of its operation likewise become. Building in redundancy is costly enough; too much, is exorbitant.
Looking at the Earth as a site of global production, the immediate and interim task would be to generate as many exploratory tendencies as is possible. This is the injunction of variety, having a sufficiently wide spectrum of possibilities already inhabited and tested by experience, as a repository of future responses to unknown challenges. Under the sign of this injunction, no development can be underestimated, no culture can be dismissed. It is not the case, that there is any final arbiter of judgement or justification, in these matters; that it might be a case of either local or global appeal, whether in the political or any other sense. All of these categories are merely part of an ongoing process, one which requires further exploration before absolute, categorical fenceposts are dogmatically installed. From an operational outlook, such limitations of thought are a luxury that the alleged ‘species’ cannot yet afford.
Giving inordinate emphasis to anthropic culture of status and vanity wars, as an alleged driver of technological progress, is getting to seem ridiculous in an era where that culture obstructs said progress as much as it might be said to produce it. The reflex actions of ‘profitability’ have long been in counterintuitive excess of its usual, positivist, and hackneyed, justifications. Partisan rationales of all types continue to be trotted around as likely candidates of mass allegiance, so many would-be stallions of secure expediency in some hypothetical ‘race’ whose actual course no one has ever found.
Ideologies of progress require directions, about which there is mutual consent; the lack of which, given the absence of unquestionable, universal values; therein; resides the nub of the issue at stake.
Is survival enough, if that survival is hamstrung by an ingrained, genetic masochism, or cultural programming, whose parameters of a symbolic economy of ‘sweat’, ‘ground’, and ‘dust’, eventuate in the wrong kind of work ethic, one which actually obstructs free play, invention, and healthy innovation? If Baudrillard is right, that ‘work’, or ‘labour’, given its increasing dispensability to contemporary production scenarios, is actually a privilege that the worker could or should pay for, what fate for that Protestant work ethic, once so valued for its link to prosperity?
If qualitative force was once valorised for its ability to fend off competitors in the race of increasing provision for both itself and the quantitative masses, what value does it have when it can no longer do this, or when it elects to engage in partisan provision, in exclusive, non-universal ways? Is this backtracking from universal ambitions, exploitations, and responsibilities, a failure? Was the whole thing only ever a ‘Ponzi scheme’; a scam; a vast, historical heist? ‘Modernity’, merely a network aftereffect of the concentrated techno-compartmentalisations of such greed? One in which as much was lost, as gained? These questions accompany any and all historical change, and have no single answer; perspectives of evaluation multiply to the extent of producing potentially incommensurable narratives.
This is an age, perhaps like any other age, where nostalgias of all types make strong claims. But the danger of producing such nostalgias in ‘surround-sound’; in high-definition holography; and in the thematic repetitions of a gaming culture leaking its contrived ludicity beyond the borders of its productions into the wider, so-called ‘world’; all these developments are relatively new, the seeming reconfiguration of a historical womb or matrix, into which a culture that has perhaps lost its hubris seems to be retreating, perhaps unable to face the challenges it once so confidently faced.
Or it could simply be that the epistemological overflow resulting from what has been called ‘information overload’, exceeds traditional anthropic configurations, and modes of application, of knowledge? That a new episteme is necessary in order to effectively manage the unruly proliferation of data silos? This is not a new problem, neither is it entirely unanticipated:
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“Carmody essayed a feeble joke. is this any way to run a galaxy?’ he asked.
Well, how did you, expect us to run it? We’re only sentient, you know.’
‘I know,’ Carmody said. But I had expected that here, at Galactic Centre -‘
‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. Filled with impossible dreams
of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached maximum, his coefficient of control (considered as the product of intelligence and power, and expressed by the symbol ing) would approach minimum – due to the disastrous geometric progression of objects to be comprehended and controlled outstripping the arithmetic progression of Grasp.'”
Robert Sheckley, “Dimension Of Miracles” (1968)
In addition:
“These were the innocent days before the problem became acute. Later, Index runs were collected in Files, and Files in Catalogs – so that, for example, C3F5I4 meant that you wanted an Index to Indexes to Indexes to Indexes which was to be found in a certain File of Files of Files of Files of Files, which in turn was contained in a Catalog of Catalogs of Catalogs. Of course, actual numbers were much greater. This structure grew exponentially. The process of education consisted solely in learning how to tap the Rx for knowledge when needed. The position was well put indeed in a famous speech by Jzbl to the graduates of the Central Saturnian University, when he said that it was a source of great pride to him that although hardly anybody knew anything any longer, everybody knew how to find out everything.”
(Draper, Hal. “Ms fnd in a lbry.” Fantasy and science fiction, Dec (1961).)
My own, “The Administrations of The Infinite” (http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=686), further explores the predicament:
“However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. “
“As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict, at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.”
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The usual responses to information proliferation are various ideologies of necessity, and then ideologies of selective use and preference, in short, the specific and subjective question: “What do you want?”
Given that the notion of the subject is equally applicable, potentially, to any form of decision-making agency; whether a conventional ‘organic individual’, a ‘peoples’ (under whatever ‘collective’ rubric), a polity, corporation, or some other form of institution, to say nothing of possible ‘artificial intelligences’; the stage is effectively set for each and every one of those differentiated ‘subjects’ to engage in declarative interchange, according to network protocols they themselves propose.
Looking beyond the insularities of vision and perspective, the partisanship of purposes, all the ironies of global variety being compressed into electronic simultaneity. The resulting intermittent conditions of anthropic experience, oscillating between the parochiality of the local and the technological synthesis of the global, produces an abyss of possibilities no longer bound by the usual anthropic conventions of history.
The gates have been opened, for all insularities to disappear into each other and themselves, and perhaps even for insularity itself to disappear, leaving only a vast, global anxiety; one which no wishful plane of insularity can flatten; one which stretches in all directions; a multidimensional, epistemological environment surrounding each and every insularity attempting unilinear imperialism, in which every conquest or acquisition, is simultaneously a deprivation.
This is a new scenario, a world, if ‘world’ it be, where those who wish to lose themselves, find themselves; and those who wish to find themselves, lose themselves. A world where Socrates’s injunction to “Know Thyself!”, displaces every wishful and insular self-image, to reveal a fractal and fluctuating, processual core, stretching into the unknown. From this perspective, the earlier mentioned development of ‘surround-sound’, nostalgia-cocoons, is perhaps no surprise. The price paid by any insular ignorance with global ambitions, but unable to meet its global responsibilities. When imperial desire is not matched by imperial knowledge; when exploitation is the only epistemological relation; the ongoing production of horror, for which one’s own imperial allegiances are responsible; is quite naturally a scenario that the insular wish to block out and hide.