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.